Dostoevsky v pornography (Afghanistan edition)

Porn is prevalent, more prevalent than Dostoevsky.

- Dan Clements, in The Times

Zaftig vs Sidebottom

Extraordinary interview with Erica Jong in last Saturday`s Times. According to Jong a lot of the 'bad boy' writers who gave her books bad reviews had more than literary criteria on their minds. "I was too zaftig [curvy] to get a good review. Look at all the women who are praised. They`re either very, very skinny or very, very fat. Some of them are hunchback, and some of them enormously fat" - offensive remark about Hilary Mantel omitted [LOLZ] - "Not one of them is a woman you would want to f***." 

Some years ago I gave Jong`s Sappho`s Leap a very bad review in the TLS. At the time I thought I did this because it was a very bad book. Now I know differently. 

Glad she cleared all that up.

- Harry Sidebottom, on Facebook

In other news, I've just looked up a boozy interview I did with Dr Sidebottom. 1) I note Ms Jong was referenced; and 2) I can vouch his books have since also made it to Afghanistan.

Big, hairy, and in your house

[photo by Patrick Belton]

'Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times'

it declaims in his Spectator byline.

I wonder what it says in The Times.

Attention, please!

[T]his is important. Or rather, and to be precise, this is not important but the manner in which it is not important is important.

- Hugo Rifkind, The Times

Joyce: yes and no (but not necessarily in that order)

A lot of spurious guff has sprung up around Ulysses, about it being easy to read, and how it was intended to be spoken aloud by the poor and the uneducated - Joyce himself started this clunker by claiming that it was a book for servants, maids and porters. And yet, elsewhere, he also confessed that it was a highly sophisticated novel designed to "keep professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant".

- Kevin Maher, The Times

Pokey poetry

I went to a maximum security level four and ran into some poets who had a poetry class every Wednesday. I felt I had found home.

- Kosal Khiev, poet, in The Times

Ulysses

I spent three years reading Ulysses incessantly at university, and then applied to do a five-year PhD on Joyce at the State University of New York... but dropped out in panic at the eleventh hour when I realised that it was just a book...

- Kevin Maher, The Times

Article of faith

I'm a true believer in the separation of Church and baser instincts like hypocrisy, power, exploitation of innocence.

- Ken Russell, on The Devils (in his final article for The Times)

Less impressive, admittedly, is when he describes the friction between Cardinal Richelieu (yes, The) and 'French King Louis III', a man who had predeceased Richelieu by some 750 years.

So this is why we pay Erica Wagner...

Poetry isn't found only between the covers of books, however wonderful those books may be. The poets make it from the stuff they find all around them - cups of coffee included.

- Erica Wagner, The Times

Duh.

Glad tidings from Nicholas Clee at The Times

1) In the 'Waterstones [sic.] 11 [sic.]' class of 2012, 'only two of the authors' biographies mention creative writing courses.'*

2) and last year 'sales of celebrity memoirs declined 50 per cent.'

--
* I suppose the key word is 'mention'.

Book of the year?

I am indebted to what appears to be a blooper in the Times Christmas Books round-up for pointing me in the direction of something I feel I ought to have read. Joe Dunthorne's 'book of the year' is Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist. Alas for quality journalism, this book - I now discover - did not come out this year, or even last - not in hardback, anyway. And there was not legitimate reason for the plug to be in the middle of the 'sports' section. Still, it looks, as Dunthorne avers, like a cracker.

[On a doubly-related note, time was if you looked up either of my articles on the Spectator website you got a note saying 'No further articles by Joe Dunthorne.' This unexplained mystery has since been rectified.]

Also in The Times (and speaking of stars)...

Kate Muir kicks seven shades out of Paul WS Anderson's not-even-laughable Three Musketeers remake. Gallingly, she - or her sub - came up with the title I'd sort of wanted for my own review

All for one and one for awful

except I wasn't prepared to concede one for anything. (My second choice was 'All for nothing', but theartsdesk's platform, tragically, wouldn't allow me to award no stars.)

Less wittily, The Times goes on to award the film not one but TWO stars, and begins its subheading: 'Lots of stars, lots of effects...' Double-clannnnggg.

Signs of The Times

In today's Times2, Richard Morrison reports on Maurice Sendak calling 'the novelist Salman Rushdie' (not the Salman Rushdie who stacks shelves down the ASDA) a 'flaccid fuckhead'.

At least, I assume that's what Sendak called him. What it says in the Times is 'f***head'. Which is only right and proper, because one wouldn't want decent Times-reading folk coughing up their porridge because someone called someone else a fuckhead. Perish the thought.

Morrison's own headline, though, reads: 'I can take criticism, but not from a flaccid $*!?%*&# like you.' Which mal mot is he talking about now? And do the two asterisks stand for the same letter?

Classic English understatement

As you probably gathered, the whole film is not high art.

- Rowan Atkinson, on Johnny English Reborn, in The Times

Confession!

mea culpa from the Times' literary editors for a classic incorrect:

Correction
An error was introduced last week into Ian Brunskill's review of Anna Funder's novel All That I Am, erroneously describing her first book, Stasiland, as a novel: it is not, as Brunskill originally stated. 

The mother of all spoilers

Jane Eyre is still a tale of its time... it is moving, at the film's end, to see Jane reunited with the blinded Rochester.

- Erica Wagner, The Times

Like every other literary critic, Ms Wagner assumes that everyone has read Jane Eyre. I find this curious. Still, she's saved me a tenner down the Odeon. 

Matthew Parris enters the 5th dementia

The crushing gloom startled me because if bipolar disorder is at one end of a scale, I'm at the other.

- The Times

Groan...!

[A.S.] Byatt's younger sister is the write Margaret Drabble (who is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd).

- The Times