Shared - they possess a thank you note from Happy Rockerfeller to the general manager of a hotel in their Loo that was left in the flat they bought somewhere in Central Europe
That's fascinating. I'm afraid you didn't get the LRB. I tossed a coin between you and Marguerite/Flea, who also shared, and it came up heads for her. Thanks for entering.
I performed Her Last Chance a couple of years ago and came to really appreciate the writing on a technical level - it is so easy to learn because of the way he structures it (even at a word level). I love Alan Bennett too and all those unapologetically British writers. I have an MA in Creative Writing but if you did a curriculum based around British short stories I’d be sorely tempted to do another one. I’m going to share this but no LRB for me, thanks
Toby, have your read Caroline Lucas’ Another England? What the stories we do - or don’t but could- tell shape how we see the country. (She has a PhD in English Literature).* Think you’d enjoy it. A short story curriculum of just English/British writers could be very interesting, I’d think, especially if you explore influences. Who - other than Bennett (who you won’t be surprised to know I adore) - are writers who couldn’t be from anywhere else?
The entry: shared! The obscure fact: their ninth birthday was spent in the American Girl Doll store in New York. Is that obscure enough? They’ve watched Finding Nemo about 600 times.
Congratulations. When I tossed the coin between you and Tommy, above, the coin chose you. If you DM me, we can sort out how to get your subscription going. Otherwise, email to my university address t dot litt at soton dot ac dot uk.
"You can read the fiction of Raymond Carver, and find plenty of equivalents to Alan Bennett’s drabber moments of life, but they still take place ringed by a bright a horizon of greater expectations.
"Lazily, I could call it The American Dream. More exactly, I’d call it a more complete diminishment, in the face of a far vaster expanse.
"This is the American sense of space I mentioned in the different contexts of Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac.
"How do the drabber moments fit with this? Isn’t their own local drabness one of the things any writer needs to discover?
I don't think I recognize that America anymore, if I ever did. If it once existed it no longer exists, not even as a fiction, not since 2016 and the election that took place that year, and the reactions and counterreactions and countercounterreactionreactions that started then and have not since abated.
Living here, having been born here, and having always identified as "American" in some fashion, it feels like there are three Americas, and none of them have that allure of greater expectations on their horizon: one that performatively hates Otherness, one that performatively hates the performative hate of Otherness, and then a long tail of non-performers who would much rather live a life characterized by anonymous drabness punctuated by occasional horizon-allure, but instead all there is is this life of performed virtue which the rest of us mimic to the minimum viable degree that will keep us from getting misfiled and mischaracterized by the social algorithms, in digital space and in meat space. It's suffocating, the extent to which there is so little time to revel in Drab.
Sometimes I think a Celebration of Drab is the cure for this ailment. A reminder that the lowest common denominator exists: the shit (literally) that we take care of when the spotlight powers off and the performance ends.
Enter the brazenness of quoting from one's own unpublished fictional work:
“[My grandfather] used to say that the best approach to love someone the way Christ loves them---“ he pauses before correcting the verb tense, “the way Christ loved them---was to imagine them taking a monstrous shit. Vulnerable and humbled, but on a throne. Zen-like preoccupation with minutiae. Non-violent. No one ever committed a murder while taking a shit.”
“Speak for yourself,” Mackenzie says, sipping coffee.
“No one ever performed a miracle while taking a shit, either. Accessible, democratic. A narrow activity with infinite variety. We shit alone, but we shit together.”
Shared - they possess a thank you note from Happy Rockerfeller to the general manager of a hotel in their Loo that was left in the flat they bought somewhere in Central Europe
That's fascinating. I'm afraid you didn't get the LRB. I tossed a coin between you and Marguerite/Flea, who also shared, and it came up heads for her. Thanks for entering.
I would love to have the list of British authors who you would feature on this course.
I performed Her Last Chance a couple of years ago and came to really appreciate the writing on a technical level - it is so easy to learn because of the way he structures it (even at a word level). I love Alan Bennett too and all those unapologetically British writers. I have an MA in Creative Writing but if you did a curriculum based around British short stories I’d be sorely tempted to do another one. I’m going to share this but no LRB for me, thanks
Toby, have your read Caroline Lucas’ Another England? What the stories we do - or don’t but could- tell shape how we see the country. (She has a PhD in English Literature).* Think you’d enjoy it. A short story curriculum of just English/British writers could be very interesting, I’d think, especially if you explore influences. Who - other than Bennett (who you won’t be surprised to know I adore) - are writers who couldn’t be from anywhere else?
* by the way, you can listen/watch her talking about the book - and answering audience questions - on 24 Sept Info: http://bit.ly/mklfcalu
I haven't read this, but must. Sounds great.
I adore Alan Bennett and A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, told by Thora Hird, is wonderful. Thank you for a delightful Sunday morning read.
The entry: shared! The obscure fact: their ninth birthday was spent in the American Girl Doll store in New York. Is that obscure enough? They’ve watched Finding Nemo about 600 times.
Congratulations. When I tossed the coin between you and Tommy, above, the coin chose you. If you DM me, we can sort out how to get your subscription going. Otherwise, email to my university address t dot litt at soton dot ac dot uk.
You write:
"You can read the fiction of Raymond Carver, and find plenty of equivalents to Alan Bennett’s drabber moments of life, but they still take place ringed by a bright a horizon of greater expectations.
"Lazily, I could call it The American Dream. More exactly, I’d call it a more complete diminishment, in the face of a far vaster expanse.
"This is the American sense of space I mentioned in the different contexts of Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac.
"How do the drabber moments fit with this? Isn’t their own local drabness one of the things any writer needs to discover?
I don't think I recognize that America anymore, if I ever did. If it once existed it no longer exists, not even as a fiction, not since 2016 and the election that took place that year, and the reactions and counterreactions and countercounterreactionreactions that started then and have not since abated.
Living here, having been born here, and having always identified as "American" in some fashion, it feels like there are three Americas, and none of them have that allure of greater expectations on their horizon: one that performatively hates Otherness, one that performatively hates the performative hate of Otherness, and then a long tail of non-performers who would much rather live a life characterized by anonymous drabness punctuated by occasional horizon-allure, but instead all there is is this life of performed virtue which the rest of us mimic to the minimum viable degree that will keep us from getting misfiled and mischaracterized by the social algorithms, in digital space and in meat space. It's suffocating, the extent to which there is so little time to revel in Drab.
Sometimes I think a Celebration of Drab is the cure for this ailment. A reminder that the lowest common denominator exists: the shit (literally) that we take care of when the spotlight powers off and the performance ends.
Enter the brazenness of quoting from one's own unpublished fictional work:
“[My grandfather] used to say that the best approach to love someone the way Christ loves them---“ he pauses before correcting the verb tense, “the way Christ loved them---was to imagine them taking a monstrous shit. Vulnerable and humbled, but on a throne. Zen-like preoccupation with minutiae. Non-violent. No one ever committed a murder while taking a shit.”
“Speak for yourself,” Mackenzie says, sipping coffee.
“No one ever performed a miracle while taking a shit, either. Accessible, democratic. A narrow activity with infinite variety. We shit alone, but we shit together.”