Charles Jackson to Philip Rahv

"'The story kills me to write it,' [Charles Jackson] confessed to Philip Rahv: 'I've never done anything that takes so much out of me; and during the past month it's gotten me down so that I've become neurotic as hell, nervous, depressed, and even at times have thought the only solution is suicide.'"

~~ from Blake Bailey's Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson 

breakthrough covid breaks into this blog

"Breakthough covid" is typically a mild case that one can get after being fully vaccinated. Masha Gessen wrote about getting such a case for The New Yorker, and others have described it as well. It sounds like vaccination is not at all perfect immunity although it seems to be a reason that cases and deaths have declined in the United States and United Kingdom. In better news, vaccines are also showing an ability to improve the lives of those with "long covid"—enduring symptoms that have been known to stretch the illness out over months.

Richard Yates and Charles Jackson

Richard Yates and Charles Jackson can't possibly be to blame for whatever Philip Roth and Blake Bailey said, thought, or did, and Bailey certainly did the literary world a great service by getting Yates's Revolutionary Road and Jackson's The Lost Weekend back in print or in public view. Both writers knew significant adversity well after their acclaimed debut novels were published. Indeed, the writing life rarely gets easier for any of us. When the accusations against Bailey went public, I was past page 100 of his Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson. I'm at peace with my decision to continue reading the Jackson biography; more or less, I'm too overwhelmed with day-to-day stressors during a pandemic to quit an engrossing book. 

East Goes West

Read Alexander Chee's introduction to a Penguin edition of Younghill Kang's East Goes West.

derchee/this-novel-was-radical-in-its-time-and-is-radical-now#:~:text=The%20novel%20East%20Goes%20West%20was%20the%20first,said%20that%20Kang%E2%80%99s%20success%20embolde

Paul Theroux on Samuel Beckett

"Biographies of [Samuel] Beckett suggest not. You would not know from his work that Beckett was an excellent athlete—cricketer, golfer, swimmer, with a strong forehand in tennis. He loved watching rugby. In his twenties, he was intensively psychoanalyzed. For years, he lived on a stipend from his mother. He took holidays in Tunisia and Morocco. He romanced a number of lovely women—in fact, he had an affair on the go with a young English rose when, at the age of fifty-five, he married his French fiancée. (The love triangle in his later drama Play does not do this situation justice.) He loved to gamble, he played billiards, and, though his work is full of Descartes and Dante, he was a dedicated reader of detective novels—Agatha Christie and many others. Yes, there is a detective in Molloy, and Camier, in Mercier and Camier, is a private investigator, but he solves no crimes.

"Beckett’s essence is in his work, and it is bleak. His life was even grimmer at times—deprivation, the war, his courage in the French resistance, being stabbed by a pimp on a Paris street. But, in many respects, he was more Irish bloke than existentialist, his life much happier and more various and satisfying than you’d guess from his writing, which, by the way (and to his sorrow), his mother denounced as trash."

~~ from The New Yorker's "Facing Ka'ena Point: On Turning Eighty" by Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux at 80

"Volodin, the hero of Solzhenitsyn’s 'In the First Circle,' says, 'A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.'"

~~ from "Facing Ka'ena Point: On Turning Eighty" by Paul Theroux

"Night Shift": An Excerpt from Spark Park

I was excited to see Sheldon Lee Compton's Revolution John publish "Night Shift": An Excerpt from Spark Park.

neither disgusting, nor apocalyptic be

"Neither disgusting, nor apocalyptic be," said Auggie's father-figure Jonny November as he echoed Polonius to young Laertes.

Asian American literature

 Consider two recent lists on Asian American experience: here and here.