Inattendance

TOBY ZIEGLER: Was there any press there tonight?
ACADEMIC: For a poetry lecture...?

- The West Wing, 3;17

Paradise moist

Why no-one seems to like the word 'moist'...

and lots of other words you've probably already thought about not liking.

(Un)Intentional symbolism

Answers to some light anecdotal research, undertaken by 16-year-old Bruce McAllister.*

Featuring - surprise, surprise - some pretty good examples of bad writing along with the sort of I'm-much-too-busy-for-this dickishness you get more often than you ought from big literary figures.

There are, of course,** one or two good remarks about symbolism.

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* Fuller answers (along with interesting typed originals) available from the Paris Review Daily blog section.
** ...

On the ongoing American obsession with the (American) short story

Moreover, I teach stories as well as telling them, and like most writing coaches I find the short story most useful for seminar purposes. You can hold a short story in your hand, like a lyric poem; see it whole; examine the function of individual sentences, even individual words, as you can't readily do with Bleak House or War and Peace. (This pedagogical convenience, together with the proliferation of creative writing programs in the U.S.A., must be largely responsible for the happy resurgence of the American short story - at a time when, paradoxically, the popular audience has never been smaller.)

- John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

Books I've actually finished lately: 11

(Includes the excellent 'High Table', a long poem about how dons spent the most part of their careers staring at the serving wenches' arses.)

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

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

Parks vs Dyer (vs the academy)

Borderline personal (and misleading) piece on criticism and its discontents, by Tim Parks. Couple of viable comments from the voice-of-the-dog, though, of which my favourites are:

If every one in America with a Ph.D. in physics suddenly died, what would happen to physics in this country? Now consider what would happen to literature in this country if everyone with a Ph.D. in literature died?

and

Accepted into a Ph.D. program in literature many years, I decided to find a life outside the academy, thinking then, as I do now, I had no wish to write more and more about less and less for fewer and fewer.

and (brilliantly)

I was unable to comprehend at least half of the writing in the recent inaugural issue of the journal "Translation"

Literary realities: 1

[We are a] couple of long-time English profs, both of whom routinely included bits of the Bard in their undergrad lit-survey courses (George mainly the plays, Amanda the sonnets, neither of us with scholarly authority, but both with the appreciative awe of fellow language-fiddlers).

- John Barth, Every Third Thought