V.S. Naipaul, Rest In Peace

Nobel-prize-winning novelist V.S. Naipaul passed through this life not without a "controversial" remark or two. A Bend in the River is the only novel of his I finished, but I did fancy teaching it when I first transitioned from teaching introduction to literature over ten weeks to contemporary literature (after 1945) for traditional fifteen-week semesters. Alas, it never did make it onto the syllabus.

Terracotta Warriors

At this point, the Terracotta Warriors get a fair amount of publicity, but it's not so common that you see them at a literary website.

Antwerp

"Tell that stupid Arnold Bennet[t] that all his rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels."

~~ from Antwerp by Roberto Bolano

Atlas notes critics of biography

We biographers have always done our work amid a loud chorus of negativity. Oscar Wilde famously observed that biography "lends to death a new terror." Joyce feared "biografiends." Nabokov, too, derided the biographer's efforts: "I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tom-peeping over the fence of those lives--I hate the vulgarity of human interest." Then there was George Eliot, who asked, "Is it not odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk is raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for the public is printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to read his book?"

Even members of the profession disparage it. Edmund White, the biographer of Jean Genet, called biography the revenge of the little people on the big people. And Michael Holroyd, after a lifetime of helping to elevate the form, has decided that biographers are "parasites. . . intent on reducing all that is imaginative, all that is creative in literature, to pedestrian autobiography." We compete with our subjects, he contends in "Two Cheers for Biography," writing big bulky books that overshadow their beautifully crafted masterpieces. We trade on their fame.

more from the Atlas

I had been twenty-four when I embarked on Delmore; I was forty when I began Bellow. The young biographer had been thrilled to interview the distinguished Partisan Review intellectuals Irving Howe and Clement Greenberg. But on my second tour. . . I felt a little sheepish. Not him again, they must have thought. The slight, eager youth with his oblong reporter's notebook had metamorphosed into a weary middle-aged writer. Not them again.

We interrupt this literature for memories of Don "Sauce" Cain

Only a few days ago, Ultimate college champion, Maximum Time Aloft record-holder, and all-around great guy Donald "Sauce" Cain passed on too young at age 62. Here's a ten-minute clip of Don talking about his Ultimate Frisbee past, including a detailed account of his world-setting MTA throw. On Facebook, I'd reminisced earlier:

I've barely touched a disc in over ten years, but early in this decade, I ran into Sauce, out of the blue, in a restaurant on Folly Beach or another beach near Charleston in South Carolina. That was great. . . [to see] a friendly face 500 miles from Edgely Field. Another fun memory I have is getting destroyed by this "It's a Nimeo" team when I was in college. We were playing in a club tournament, and a "Nimeo" was when a hammer or blade went right over our heads; this was years before those were more common throws. It wasn't until years after college, talking with Don fifteen years later at Edgely that we figured out he must have been on that team. 62 is too young. R.I.P.

PADA has an obituary, and Facebook also has wonderful memories on Don's wall as well as classic photographs from his early teammate and local legend Chris O'Connor.