The answer is "no."

I finally got back to work this week (haven't I said this here before?) after weeks of relocation. This week I finished interviews with photographer Taryn Simon and sculptor Michael Rea, reviewed The End of Europe, and updated The Foghorn.

I'm also catching up on a wonderful backlog of emails and tips from Grant, including these from a "treasure trove" of Evelyn Waugh anecdotes:

From Evelyn Waugh, Portrait of a Country Neighbour, Frances Donaldson, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967.
He entertained himself with grandiose projects [at Piers Court]. He built what became known as The Edifice —a semi-circular stone wall about ten feet in height, surmounted by battlements and with a paved area beneath it. When this was finished he advertised for human skulls to adorn the battlements. He received a surprising number of replies, which I doubt if he had expected, and he had to refuse most of the offerings. The Edifice was not a great success. Many people thought it hideous and Evelyn himself was not satisfied with it, although he got pleasure out of the building. [pg. 23]

From Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, Selina Hastings, Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1994.
For Evelyn, it [a trip to the US in Nov 1948] was a joyless experience, the unbeautiful campuses, the characterless hotels — in New Orleans he smashed open the window of his air-conditioned room with his stick ... [pg. 536]

From To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell: Volume Two, Messengers of Day, Heinemann, London, 1978.
One night [at W's family home on North End road] Waugh asked if I would like to hear the opening chapters of a novel he was writing. ... Waugh's embryonic novel — then called Picaresque, or the Making of an Englishman — was the first ten thousand words, scarcely altered at all later, of Decline and Fall. The manuscript was written with a pen on double-sheets of blue lined-foolscape, the cipher EW printed at the top of the first page of each double-sheet. There were hardly any alterations in the text. ... Some months after the reading aloud of these chapters — probably a moment towards the end of the same year [1927] — I asked Waugh how the novel was progressing. He replied: 'I've burnt it.' [pp. 21-2]

And, while we're on the topic of Mr. Waugh, Allan Massie of the Spectator asks, "Can a novelist write too well?"

Excerpt from "The Magical Chorus"

One more from the NYT, an excerpt from Solomon Volkov's The Magical Chorus, a new book on 20th century Russian literature.

The best sentence I've read this week, from Hilton Als' review of a new production of "The Seagulls" in The New Yorker: " . . . she deserves better than the show’s costume designer, Suzy Benzinger, has given her. (Her dresses are like something Bob Mackie might have whipped up for a “Seagull” parody starring Carol Burnett.)"

From Grant, A Conversation with Jorge Luis Borges:

"For me death is a hope, the irrational certitude of being abolished, erased and forgotten. When I’m sad, I think, what does it matter what happens to a twentieth-century South American writer; what do I have to do with all of this? You think it matters what happens to me now, if tomorrow I will have disappeared? I hope to be totally forgotten, I believe that this is death. But perhaps I’m wrong and what follows is another life on another plane, with distinct conditions, no less interesting than this one, and I will accept that life, too, just as I have accepted this one. But I would prefer not to remember this one in the other, being younger."

More from Grant - see Cavett for more. This is an excerpt from Mailer's (third-person) written account of the show, including a run-in with Gore Vidal before the airing:

At this moment, alone in the green room, he felt a tender and caressing hand on the back of his neck. It was Gore. Vidal had never touched him before, but now had the tender smile of a man who would claim, "It doesn't matter, old sport, what we say about each other — it's just pleasant to see an old friend."

Mailer answered with an openhanded tap across the cheek. It was not a slap; neither was it a punch. Just a stiff tap.

To his amazement, Vidal gave him a stiff tap back.

Norman smiled. He leaned forward and looked pleasantly at Gore. He put his hand to the back of Gore's neck. Then he butted him in the head.

Thanks again to Grant for sending me this from the new Paris Review Interviews, Vol. II., now on my Christmas list - from an interview with Harold Bloom. The interviewer narrates within the brackets...

(Midway through the interview...)

BLOOM

....But the early books of Wilson Knight are very fine indeed--certainly one of the most considerable figures of twentieth-century criticism, though he's mostly forgotten now.

[At this point we wander into the kitchen, where Mrs. Bloom is watching the evening news.]

BLOOM

Now let's wait for the news about this comeback for the wretched Yankees. I've been denouncing them. They haven't won since 1979. That's ten years and they're not going to win this year. They're terrible.... What's this?

[TV: The Yankees with their most dramatic win of the year this afternoon.... And the Tigers lost again.]

BLOOM

Oh my God! That means we're just four games out! How very upcheering.

MRS. BLOOM

Jessica Hahn.

BLOOM

Jessica Hahn is back!

[TV: ...hired on as an on-air personality at a Top 40 radio station in Phoenix... ]

BLOOM

How marvelous!

[TV: Playboy magazine had counted on Hahn to come through. She appeared nude in a recent issue.]

BLOOM

Splendid. ...But oh, let us start again, Antonio. What were we talking about?

[We return to the living room.]

Awesome fact of the day, courtesy of the excellent Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, by Orlando Figes:

"Serfs were essential to the Sheremetev palaces and their arts . . . Many of these serfs were sent abroad or assigned to the court to learn their craft. But where skill was lacking, much could be achieved through sheer numbers. At Kuskovo there was a horn band in which, to save time on the training of players, each musician was taught to play just one note. The number of players depended on the number of different notes in a tune; their sole skill lay in playing their note at the appropriate moment."

From Grant, my favorite provider of literary anecdotes, scintillating links, and a recent agonizing/amusing personal history regarding a Taco Bell uniform.

As told by George Plympton:

"I remember Norman Mailer at one of our July fireworks parties in the Hamptons. He wanted to fire a shell. He had his bourbon drink in a blue glass, really more a vase, the sort of receptacle one usually finds in the back of a kitchen cabinet when everything else in the house, even the plastic cups, has been commandeered. He held the drink in one hand, safe out behind him, and he approached the fuse with the railroad flare in the other. The mortar held a six-inch Japanese shell. I watched him—struck again by the grotesque attitudes that people get into when faced with igniting a shell. In his case, he seemed not unlike a scientist intent on catching a lizard by the back of the neck. The shell came out almost instantaneously. His surprise at the shock of its emergence—a six-inch shell of that type weighs about eight pounds—toppled Norman into a complete backward somersault through the sawgrass. Astonishingly the blue vase remained upright as he pinwheeled around it; not a drop of bourbon splashed out. He got up and took a sip and asked if he could do another. 'Do you have anything slightly larger?'"

I'm just now finishing up a review of Alan Bennett's Untold Stories - highly recommended.

From Bennett's diaries, discussing a biography of Ted Hughes:

“I hadn’t known about Hughes’s homophobia – though I’m not sure antipathy to Truman Capote can be so subsumed, Capote really deserving a phobia to himself.”

Alex also passed on this lovely Capote story:

Truman Capote and Gore Vidal were at a New York cocktail party (alternate versions place them at a television studio, though Alex heard his version from Mr. Vidal himself) when they got into an argument that ended with Capote decking Vidal in the face, toppling him onto the carpet, his face a bloody mess. Mr. Vidal looked up at Capote leaning over him and responded with, "Words fail Truman Capote yet again."

(Further research also suggests it might have been Norman Mailer and not Truman Capote, but I'm sticking with my Capote theme.)

Thanks to Grant for this wonderful selection from a Paris Review interview with Nabokov.

Nabokov: I detest Punnigan's Wake in which a cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory.
Interviewer: What have you learned from Joyce?
Nabokov: Nothing.
Interviewer: Oh, come.

From Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, in his discussion of Bleak House. The scholar is discussing the three types of narrator: the moving pillar, the sifting agent, and the perry.

"The third type is the so-called perry, possibly derived from periscope, despite the double r, or perhaps from parry in vague connection with foil as in fencing. But this does not matter much since anyway I invented the term myself many years ago."

The Anatomy of Melancholy: Quote of the Day

"For particular professions, I hold as of the rest, there's no content or security in any. On what course will you pitch, how resolve? To be a divine, 'tis contemptible in the world's esteem; to be a lawyer, 'tis to be a wrangler; to be a physician, pudet lotii, 'tis loathed; a philosopher, a madman; an alchymist, a beggar; a poet, esurit, an hungry jack; a musician, a player; a schoolmaster, a drudge; an husbandman, an emmet; a merchant, his gains are uncertain; a mechanician, base; a chirurgeon, fulsome; a tradesman, a liar; a tailor, a thief; a serving-man, a slave; a soldier, a butcher; a smith, or a metalman, the pot's never from the nose; a courtier, a parasite..."

The Anatomy of Melancholy: Quote of the Day

"Rhasis and Magninus discommend all fish, and say they breed viscosities, slimy nutriment, little and humorous nourishment. Savonarola adds cold; moist and phlegmatic, Isaac; and therefore unwholesome for all cold and melancholy complexions: others make a difference, rejecting only, amongst freshwater fish, eel, tench, lamprey, crawfish (which Bright approves), and such as are bred in muddy and standing waters, and have a taste of mud . . . Lampreys, Paulus Jovius, highly magnifies and saith, none speak against them, but inepti and scrupulosi; but eels, "he abhorreth in all places, at all times, all physicians detest them, especially about the solstice." Gomesius doth immoderately extol sea-fish, which others as much vilify, and above the rest, dried, soused, indurate fish, as ling, fumadoes, red-herrings, sprats, stock-fish, haberdine, poor-john, all shell-fish. Tim. Bright excepts lobster and crab. Messarius commends salmon, which Bruerinus contradicts. Magninus rejects conger, sturgeon, turbot, mackerel, skate.

Carp is a fish of which I know not what to determine."

Common Unhappiness

From my dad, via email:

"When early patients of Freud's complained to him that nothing could change the original circumstances which made them unhappy, he agreed—with a caveat: 'Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.'"