“We sat and talked for an hour in a relaxed way, much of it about films: Auden’s most memorable remark, though we didn’t know how to take it, was that the films he liked most were the ones where animals talk with human voices. He mentioned ‘Francis the Talking Mule’ as an example.”
Paul McQuail, the undergraduate host to W. H. Auden at the Cambridge English Club in 1957, quoted by David Collard in Literary Review.
“He promised he’d get me out of this one,
That mean old cartoonist, but just look what he’s
Done to me now! I scarce dare approach me mug’s attenuated
Reflection in yon hubcap, so jaundiced, so déconfit
Are its lineaments—fun, no doubt, for some quack phrenologist’s
Fern-clogged waiting room, but hardly what you’d call
Companionable. But everything is getting choked to the point of
Silence. Just now a magnetic storm hung in the swatch of the sky
Over the Fudd’s garage, reducing it—drastically—
To the aura of a plumbago-blue log cabin on
A Gadsen Purchase commemorative cover. Suddenly all is
Loathing. I don’t want to go back inside any more. You meet
Enough vague people on this emerald traffic-island—no,
Not people, comings and goings, more: mutterings, splatterings,
The bizarrely but effectively equipped infantries of
happy-go-nutty
Vegetal jacqueries, plumed, pointed at the little
White cardboard castle over the mill run. ‘Up
The lazy river, how happy we could be?’
How will it end?”
Excerpt from ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’ by John Ashbery
“Since 1963, when Pynchon’s first novel, ‘V.’, came out, the writer—widely considered America’s most important novelist since World War II—has become an almost mythical figure, a kind of cross between the Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis’s) and Caine in ‘Kung Fu’. There has never been a confirmed Pynchon sighting published before this one, but there have been plenty of wild theories about his whereabouts, advanced by gonzo fans and serious scholars. People have said that Thomas Pynchon is ‘really’ J. D. Salinger; that he travels around by bus, crisscrossing the country and leaving little clues as to his identity; that he’s posed as a literary-minded bag lady who writes letters to an obscure Northern California newspaper (there’s a new book out about that, ‘The Letters of Wanda Tinasky’). There was even a rumor, hotly debated on the Pynchon Websites on the Internet, that Thomas Pynchon was the Unabomber. Pynchon showed up at an apple-picking fest in Northern California, calling himself Tom Pinecone; Pynchon was walking the Mason-Dixon line, researching his next book, said to be a ‘big one’ (it’s coming out, finally, in the spring of 1997, according to Pynchon’s editor at Henry Holt). Sal Ivone, managing editor of Weekly World News—the tabloid that told the world that ‘Elvis is alive’ —reports, ‘In the first week of October, Weekly World News recorded three Elvis sightings, two Bat Boy sightings, one Bigfoot encounter, and, amazingly, one for Thomas Pynchon. We haven’t checked it out because it sounds too far-fetched to us.’”
From an article in the November 11th, 1996 issue of New York magazine.

In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself by Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Stanislav Baraczak and Clare Cavanagh.

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they’re right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton.
In every other sense they’re light.

On this third planet from the sun
Among the signs of bestiality
A clear conscience is Number One.

A fascinating interview with Evelyn Waugh from the BBC TV archives. Introduced by Joan Bakewell.

NB: Despite what the video info seems to say, this is not the same as the famous Frankly Speaking radio interview (‘the most ill-natured interview ever broadcast’), an excerpt from which can be found here.

“A startling thing in [C. S.] Lewis’s letters to other believers is how much energy and practical advice is dispensed about how to keep your belief going: they are constantly writing to each other about the state of their beliefs, as chronic sinus sufferers might write to each other about the state of their noses. Keep your belief going, no matter what it takes — the thought not occurring that a belief that needs this much work to believe in isn’t really a belief but a very strong desire to believe. In his extended essay ‘The Problem of Pain’, which appeared, propitiously, in 1940, and in his novel ‘The Screwtape Letters’, two years later — these are written to a younger devil by an older one — Lewis takes as his presumed opponent a naïve materialist who believes in progress and in the realm of common sense and the factual and verifiable, and who relegates imagination and myth and ritual to a doomy past. Lewis has an easy time showing that progress is dubious, that evil persists, that imagination has a crucial role to play in life, that life without a shared ritual and some kind of sacred myth is hardly worth living. But, trying to explain why God makes good people suffer, Lewis can answer only that God doesn’t, bad people do, and God gave bad people free will to be bad because a world in which people could only be good would be a world peopled by robots. Anyway, God never gives people pain that isn’t good for them in the long run. This kind of apologetic is better at explaining colic than cancer, let alone concentration camps”
Adam Gopnik, ‘Prisoner of Narnia’, The New Yorker (Nov 21, 2005)
“I still haven’t forgiven CS Lewis for going on all those long walks with JRR Tolkien and failing to strangle him, thus to save us from hundreds of pages dripping with the wizardly wisdom of Gandalf and from the kind of movie in which Orlando Bloom defiantly flexes his delicate jaw at thousands of computer-generated orcs.

In fact it would have been even better if CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien could have strangled each other, so that we could also have been saved from the Chronicles of Narnia.”
Clive James, ‘Harry Potter Envy’

Rushdie on Censorship

Salman-Rushdie-wins-the-1-001.jpg

Salman Rushdie writes ‘On Censorship’ in The New Yorker:

The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom. If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. If he is afraid of the consequences of his choice of subject or of his manner of treatment of it, then his choices will not be determined by his talent, but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free.

And, even worse than that, when censorship intrudes on art, it becomes the subject; the art becomes ‘censored art’, and that is how the world sees and understands it. The censor labels the work immoral, or blasphemous, or pornographic, or controversial, and those words are forever hung like albatrosses around the necks of those cursed mariners, the censored works. The attack on the work does more than define the work; in a sense, for the general public, it becomes the work. For every reader of Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Tropic of Capricorn, every viewer of Last Tango in Paris or A Clockwork Orange, there will be ten, a hundred, a thousand people who ‘know’ those works as excessively filthy, or excessively violent, or both.

The assumption of guilt replaces the assumption of innocence. Why did that Indian Muslim artist have to paint that Hindu goddess in the nude? Couldn’t he have respected her modesty? Why did that Russian writer have his hero fall in love with a nymphet? Couldn’t he have chosen a legally acceptable age? Why did that British playwright depict a sexual assault in a Sikh temple, a gurdwara? Couldn’t the same assault have been removed from holy ground? Why are artists so troublesome? Can’t they just offer us beauty, morality, and a damn good story? Why do artists think, if they behave in this way, that we should be on their side? ‘And the people all said sit down, sit down you’re rocking the boat / And the devil will drag you under, with a soul so heavy you’ll never float / Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down / You’re rocking the boat.’

Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz

“In the remainder of his life, however, Nietzsche seems to have caught an early dose of syphilis, very probably during his first-ever sexual encounter, which gave him crushing migraine headaches and attacks of blindness and metastasized into dementia and paralysis. This, while it did not kill him right away, certainly contributed to his death and cannot possibly, in the meanwhile, be said to have made him stronger. In the course of his mental decline, he became convinced that the most important possible cultural feat would be to prove that the plays of Shakespeare had been written by Bacon. This is an unfailing sign of advanced intellectual and mental prostration.”
Christopher Hitchens on Nietzsche
“In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb is the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.”
W. H. Auden, “The Joker in the Pack” (in The Dyer’s Hand)
“Cliché hunting is a cruel and mischievous hobby—the badger digging of the literary blood sports.”
Evelyn Waugh, in The Tablet (3 December 1938)

(Source: criminalsofpurpose)

“When reporters speak so easily of the great influence exerted on politicians by Murdoch’s papers, what they really mean is by Murdoch’s readers. His only real knack lies in knowing what they want. And what they want are invasions of privacy—and plenty of them. (In Michael Frayn’s Fleet Street novel ‘The Tin Men’, which is the only rival to ‘Scoop’, focus groups of consumers were set up to answer questions about their tabloid needs. In the case of an air crash, would they prefer to read about children’s toys being found in the wreckage? If a woman had been assaulted, should she be best described as having been found with or without her underwear? Yes, dear reader, you are a hypocrite, too.)”
Christopher Hitchens, ‘News of the World’, Slate (2011)
“For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man; no ‘aboriginal calamity’. His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled. The chef Anatole prepares the ambrosia for the immortals of high Olympus. Mr. Wodehouse’s world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.”
Evelyn Waugh, ‘An Act of Homage and Reparation’ (1961)

Updating Shakespeare

Simon Hoggart in The Specator:

The notion of updating Shakespeare always strikes me as a curious one. For a start it assumes that the audience is stupid. Do we say, ‘I hadn’t realised that Julius Caesar contains universal themes of ambition and betrayal until I saw it set on the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade’? Or, ‘It never occurred to me that Macbeth might have significance for our time until they played it in a Birmingham Starbucks’? And why doesn’t it work the other way round? You never see The Caretaker set in imperial Rome, or Abigail’s Party at an 11th-century Scottish castle.