BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THE JOYS OF READING

WHAT DID VIRGINIA WOOLF THINK? or READING THE DIARIES
 OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

"...I haven't often read writers' diaries, but I
like the entries. I like knowing what Woolf was 
thinking about her books as she wrote them and their
reception after they came out, and what she thinks of
the other writers of her time. It is satisfying to be
in her mind: "What is the right attitudev toward
criticism? What I ought I to feel and say when Miss B.
devotes an article in Scrutiny to attacking me? She is
young, Cambridge, ardent. And she says I'm a very bad
writer.'"

Amina Cain. A Horse at Night: On Writing (St. Louis,
MO, 2022)
**


FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH A FAMOUS WRITER

“’What do you read now?’ the hungry interviewer asked 
the famous writer, a woman of commercial success in 
the theater whose autobiography has defined a 
character of considerable literary sophistication. 
And the famous author answered: ‘I don’t read novels 
any more. I’m sorry to say. A writer should read novels. 
When I do, I go back to the  ones I’ve read before. 
Dickens, Balzac…I find now when I go to get a book 
off the shelf. I pick something I read before, as 
if I didn’t dare try anything new.’”

Richard Howard. “A Note on Roland Barthes’s S/Z” in
Paper Trail: selected prose, 1965-2003 (New York. Farrar, 
Straus and Giroux, 2004)
**
ON VOICES, PLACES

"...how are voices like places? They move through us
as we move through them. The voices of great writers
guide us without telling us where we are going --
except, of course, to the most obvious destinatiion 
of all. We are guided by ambiguity -- that's the way
literature works. And the way travel works as well.
We understand it only when we stop moving, sit still
and begin to listen back."

David Mason. Voices, Places (Philadelphia: Paul
Dry Books, 2018)
**
A BOOK MEL BROOKS COULD EASILY PUT DOWN

In the New York Times Book Review “By the Book” 
(November 13, 2022) film director Mel Brooks was asked
“Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book 
did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? 
Do you remember the last book you put down without 
finishing?”

Mel Brooks replied: “If truth be told, for some reason 
I never did get around to finishing ‘Mein Kampf.’”

**
ROBERT SOUTHEY & WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

“The difference between the two men is well illustrated 
by their several attitudes to books: Southey loved them
 as objects, whereas Wordsworth had no feeling whatever
 for them, apart from their contents. De Quincy reports 
 his own and Southey’s horror at the sight of Wordsworth
 cutting the leaves of De Quincey’s own copy of Burke 
with a knife that had just been used to butter bread. “

Edward Sackville West. A Flame in Sunlight: The Life &
Work of Thomas De Quincey (London: The Bodley Head,
1974)

ROBERT SOUTHEY AND HIS WIFE

“…Southey ‘lived in his library, which Coleridge 
used to call his wife’…


Edward Sackville West. A Flame in Sunlight: The Life &
Work of Thomas De Quincey (London: The Bodley Head,
1974)


**

TREVOR NOAH AS A YOUNG BOY GROWING UP UNDER 
APARTHEID IN SOUTH AFRICA

“My books  were my prized possessions. I had a 
bookshelf where I put them, and I was so proud 
of it, I loved my books and kept them in pristine 
condition.  I read them over and over, but I did 
not bend the pages or the spines. I treasured 
every single one. As I grew older I started buying
 my own books. I loved fantasy,loved to 
get lost in worlds that didn’t exist.”

Trevor Noah. Born a Crime. New York: One World, 2016)
**

“He understands at a glance what he reads, reads only 
what he can understand at a glance.”

Bergan Evans. The Spoor of Spooks and other nonsense
(NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).
** 

ON CHOOSING THE CORRECT PEN NAME

The creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs sold
 his first story  -- Under the Moon of Mars (1912)
 –under the name of Normal Bean. He chose the
 pseudonym Norman because he thought of himself 
at the time “the average mind in search of average 
readers.”

**
IT IS NOT PEOPLE WHO DIE BUT WORLDS
ON READING

“There are no uninteresting people in the world,
says Yevtushenko in one of his best lyrics; everyone
carries around with him his first snow and his first
kiss it is not people who die but worlds.”
Edward Thomas. London Magazine (November 1967)

I read those words over & over.
They deliver me,
If only for awhile, from myself,

My thoughts, my feelings,
The shifting ground of my being.
I become someone else

&,  like some licensed physician,
Hold out my hand
To take the fragile pulse of the world.

LJP