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Strandelion, and Other News
By
Dan Piepenbring
April 2, 2015
On the Shelf
From a 1960 German postage stamp.
The politics of genre fiction
: “the current preoccupations of the crime novel, the
roman noir
, the
krimi
lean to the left. It’s critical of the status quo, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly. It often gives a voice to characters who are not comfortably established in the world … The thriller, on the other hand, tends towards the conservative, probably because the threat implicit in the thriller is the world turned upside down.”
Mark Strand’s final interview takes a fittingly existentialist turn
: “I don’t know why I was born … here I am: a sentient being, talking about life. I had the luck to be born a human being who can speak. I might have been a dandelion or a goldfinch. I might have been a buffalo in the zoo. A fly! I don’t know why I’m here.”
Philip Pullman has
a transcendently simple (and hyperrealist) way of working through writer’s block
: “If you’re stuck, if you’re really desperate—dialogue: ‘Hello.’ ‘Oh hello.’ ‘How are you?’ ‘Not too bad, thanks. How are you?’ ‘Not too bad.’ Half a page already.”
Anita Loos’s
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
“was one of the only books that James Joyce, his eyesight fading, allowed himself to read while taking breaks from
Finnegans Wake
.” (Other admirers: Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, E. B. White, Sherwood Anderson, William Empson, and Rose Macaulay.)
Before he decamped for England and a lifetime of Anglophilia, T. S. Eliot “spent his formative childhood summers in
a wood-shingled, seven-bedroom seaside house on Gloucester’s Eastern Point
, built for his family in 1896.” The T. S. Eliot Foundation plans to turn the house into a writers’ retreat.
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