James Atlas on books

"Several times I've bought a second copy of a book that I couldn't find on my haphazard shelves even though I know it's there."

and

"Like the drinker who trusts his hangover with 'the hair of the dog,' I assuage the anxiety about all the books I've bought and not read by purchasing more. Somehow I imagine that if I buy a book I'll read it,"

~~ from My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale by James Atlas

LOA Live

It's pleasant to listen to an older version of Paul Auster express such sincere excitement for Stephen Crane, a writer who wrote thousands of pages yet was dead at 28. Auster's City of Glass didn't appear in print until Paul was 38.

urban education during the pandemic

"The gap in grades that existed before the pandemic between Black and Latino students and white and Asian counterparts widened to as much as 21 percentage points.

"Elementary school reading scores dropped 7 percentage points overall, while gaps between Black and Latino students and white and Asian classmates grew to 26 percentage points or more.

"More than 200,000 students are not meeting grade-level goals in math and reading."

an inquiry

"Consider the middle-aged male reader of literary fiction. Previous iterations purportedly read Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Cheever, Roth. Today, I suspect that middle-aged male readers of literary fiction may not even exist?"

Bad Art Friend

 I've read and considered Robert Kolker's "Who Is the Bad Art Friend?" I remain curious.

Borrowed Jews

Booker finalist Brandon Taylor alerted us by tweet to this item on one of Europe's most respected writers:

"Jordan didn’t foresee that Sebald would pass Gebhardt’s memoir off as his own writing without attribution. That upset him. Sebald 'should not have used it so closely without crediting it,' he tells Angier. Weighing the evidence, Angier decides that most of Sebald’s purloined histories amount to run-of-the-mill authorial borrowing, but in extreme cases like Bechhofer’s, she wonders: 'Can there be any defense of Sebald here, with his special empathy for Jewish victims, and his special awareness of the moral dangers of a German writing about them?' Her answer is no. She thinks he should have attached a short note at the beginning or end. 'It wouldn’t destroy the effect of his story to let us know that it is a fiction, and that real people stand behind it,' she writes. 'He is no longer here to make the decision. But his publishers could.'"

The Portrait Gallery

It's not as developed as her masterful "These Precious Days," but Ann Patchett's "The Portrait Gallery" is at least somewhat touching even as she unintentionally depicts John Updike as a bit of a creeper in his fixation on whether or not each prizewinner would get a kiss. Fitting that I tweeted a mention to his late seventies PA Rabbit is Rich yesterday without knowing I'd be reading about Updike toward his end this evening. Read "These Precious Days" if you have time for a longer piece of writing.