Author: Caleb Crain

Mostly links.

Feet in venom

“We are like trapped flies with our feet not in honey but in venom.” —Eudora Welty, “Must the Novelist Crusade?”

Why are you so married to realism? my husband asked. Not my real husband, but the one I have in fiction.

Is there a word for the pale nimbus around the shadow of one’s head in the dew on the grass in the morning? Not an aureole so much as an argentiole.

Over an alcoholic lunch, one of the heroines of Isabel Bolton’s novel Do I Wake or Sleep (1947) wonders whether she likes what novel-reading has done to her perception:

From this experience she’d emerged with all manner of extensions, reinforcements, renewals of her entire nervous system—indeed she might say that she’d been endowed with a perfectly new apparatus for apprehending the vibrations of other people’s souls. She was saying all this most awkwardly, she knew, but she often wondered if we sufficiently realized the effect that Proust had had upon our awareness of one another, for whether we liked it or not, we were forced to take about with us wherever we went this extraordinary apparatus, recording accurately a thousand little matters of which we had not formerly been aware, and whether she was glad or sorry to be in possession of so delicate and precise an instrument, she had never been able to determine.

News: I wrote a review of Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer for the New York Times Book Review.

Recommendations: Christine Smallwood on Laura Dern (“She loves how, when Lynch comes up to her after a take and inhales in a certain way, she knows exactly what to try next”). Damon Krukowski’s podcast Ways of Hearing, which is now also a book. N+1’s Intellectual Situation on podcasts (“They create more culture by attending to culture, but without ever lapsing into criticism”). Anne Diebel on kidnapping as a business (“a corpse is not worth much, except in the Iliad”). Thomas Meaney on George Packer’s Richard Holbrooke bio (“Packer alternates between Fremdscham for Holbrooke’s lower gambits—such as offering at least one Wall Street banker ennoblement at the Council on Foreign Relations in return for business—and awe at the man’s sheer capacity to climb”). Andrew Kay’s good-bye to academia (“Hey, I’m not just some schmuck. I did a Ph.D. in English.” / “That might actually make you a schmuck”). Jacob Silverman’s good-bye to criticism (“Freelance journalism, as a career, is mostly an anachronism”).

Overthrow is coming from Viking in August 2019.