Spunge or sieve? Types of readers

"I like the idea of the Diagram Prize" began the comment from Moocho, who read up on it after my Kafka post in which I made a quip about this award for Oddest Title of the Year. He went on, "My favourite was How to avoid huge ships, something that keeps me up at night." At first glance, the lack of formatting made it seem as though the entire sentence was the title, a very good one at that. Or maybe "How to avoid huge ships, something that keeps me up at night" is really better for a song title, along the lines of "I've got the you don't know the half of it, dearie blues" (the great Gershwin).

"Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers" is the metaphysical-sounding winner of last year's The Diagram of Diagrams, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the prize and inspired by the Booker of Bookers. Or was that the Best of Booker? Anyway, more people voted for the Diagram of Diagrams than the Booker maxima, as it turns out, 8000 something to 7000 something.

I also liked last year's shortlisted "The large sieve and its applications", described as a 350 pg book with many tables and exercises. It's already a Google book (they work fast!) so you can further enjoy such gems among its chapters as "Explicit bounds" and "Random Walks in Discrete Groups".

Among applications for the sieve, we might remember Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was not only the great romantic poet of the dreamy, druggy "Kubla Khan" and the demented and terrifying "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" but an astute social and political commentator as well, who applied it to reading, or rather, to a type of reader. In all he identified four kinds of readers, beginning with the spunge, which I'm pretty sure would be me:

"1. Spunges that suck up every thing and, when pressed give it out in the same state, only perhaps somewhat dirtier.
2. Sand Glasses -- or rather the upper Half of the Sand Glass which in a brief hour assurdely lets out what it has received -- & whose reading is only a profitless measurement and dozeing away of Time.
3. Straining Bags, who get rid of whatever is good & pure, and retain the Dregs
4. and lastly, the Great-Moguls Diamond Sieve -- which is perhaps going farther for a Simile than its superior Dignity can repay, inasmuch as a common Cullender whould have ben equally symbolic. But Imperial or culinary, these are the only good, & I fear the least numerous, who assuredly retain the good while the superfluous or impure passes away and leaves no trace." 
(From his 1808 lecture series on Poetry and the principles of taste)

Try Coleridge's Biographia Literaria or Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions in two volumes from the Central City Library basement stacks.

The unexpected Kafka

Or, looking forward to reading TS Eliot’s currency trading records from his time at Lloyd’s Bank.
 
How did I only hear about it now? The library doesn’t have it but hey, put in a request: Princeton University Press has published Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, a 400 pg. collection of the reports Franz Kafka wrote for his day job (his night job being writing The Castle, America, Metamorphosis etc.) as a lawyer at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague.

I looked it up on the publishers’ website and it made for a most Kafka-esque read – particularly as regards the hilarity, which many people forget about (I think it was Max Brod who reported Kafka laughing so hard he couldn’t go on when reading the first chapter of The Trial aloud). I actually had some serious doubts about whether it was all just a joke:

1. Their blurb:

“Franz Kafka is commonly recognized as the greatest German prose writer of the twentieth century. It is less well known that he had an established legal career. Kafka's briefs reveal him to be a canny bureaucrat, sharp litigator, and innovative thinker on the social, political, and legal issues of his time. His official preoccupations inspired many of the themes and strategies of the novels and stories he wrote at night.”

2. Are they talking about these? Believe it or not, yes!

Fixed-Rate Insurance Premiums for Small Farms Using Machinery

Inclusion of Private Automobile "Firms" in the Compulsory Insurance Program

Appeal against Risk Classification of Christian Geipel & Sohn, Mechanical Weaving Mill in Asch

Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines

On the Examination of Firms by Trade Inspectors

Workmen's Insurance and Employers: Two Articles in the Tetschen Bodenbacher Zeitung

Petition of the Toy Producers' Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge

Risk Classification Appeal by Norbert Hochsieder, Boarding House Owner in Marienbad

Letters to the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague

Criminal Charge against Josef Renelt for the Illegal Withholding of Insurance Fees

3. Also on the website, a sample of peer reviews:

"Kafka himself complained constantly that his day job at the Prague Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute oppressed his artistic calling; this volume's editors beg to differ. In the hands of Kafka scholars Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner and the legal scholar Jack Greenberg, the 18 briefs collected here comprise more than a record of the author's years in the insurance business. By reading between his legal writings and his fiction, the editors argue that Kafka's dual identities are inextricable: the writer is informed by the lawyer, the lawyer by the writer. Franz Kafka is the Franz Kafka we know not in spite of his day job, but rather because of it."--Rachel Sugar, The National (Abu Dhabi)

Hard to top this guileless “the editors beg to differ with Kafka” but I think the next one does:

"[T]he texts have impressive sociological merit: They provide a compelling picture of what life was like for an early twentieth-century bureaucrat who took his work seriously, believed in it, and did it well. . . . But ultimately, the value of The Office Writings lies less in the potential connections to Kafka's fiction than in the fundamental disconnect."--Ben Kafka, Bookforum
 
"Fundamental disconnect"! Ben Kafka! This professor who studies "the powers and failures of paperwork” has to have been invented by Woody Allen. Have a look at him and see if you don’t agree: Prof. Ben Kafka, conveniently "on leave until 2010 and unable to respond to queries".

If Princeton University had just thought to call the book On the Examination of Firms by Trade Inspectors and other writings I feel sure that it could have been a strong contender for the famed Diagram Prize for oddest book title, which in March of this year was won by The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais. I find that On the Examination of Firms has that unintentional hint of fun which Horace Bent, the man behind the award, has always appreciated, while disdaining both self-conscious titles and those in which the double-entendre is too rude.

By the way, the person who spots the title gets a prize too. I've been keeping my eyes open but haven't had any luck spotting something among our new acquisitions. However, I did enjoy encountering a book called Cavemen old and new the other day when I was down in the basement stacks. Not sure why, but it reminds me a bit of a past Diagram contender All dogs have ADHD.

Oh, and if you did want an interesting book on Franz Kafka there’s a new book called The tremendous world I have inside my head : Franz Kafka - a biographical essay, by Louis Begley (the author of About Schmidt and, like Kafka, a lawyer as well as an author) which the library does have.

Napoleon the novelist

One of my best memories of my first trip through Europe is how whenever our canary-green Caravelle sports car with us three little girls crammed in the back -- I have since learned it was considered a two-seater -- turned onto a tree-lined road my father, enthusiastic in his bucket seat, would wave his cigarette expansively at the trees and say “Look, girls! Napoleon was here!" because of course all those trees along the highways of Europe had been planted by Napoleon to make shade for his soldiers on the march.

It was my first taste of the Napoleon mystique. After that came Napoleon saying “Soldiers, from the height of those pyramids, forty centuries contemplate us!”; Napoleon taking the crown at his coronation and placing it on his own head and Beethoven, betrayed, scratching out his name on the dedication of the Eroica symphony; Josephine; exile; the folly of the 100 days, all of that. When years later I learned about the Napoleonic Code (the first to give every accused the right to a lawyer) from living under it in one of the many countries where he planted it, like his trees, it seemed a not-contradictory facet of his revolutionary, romantic energy.

But in England Napoleon is seen above all as a pragmatic, or so I gather from the buzz engendered by the announcement a few weeks ago that the surviving fragments of Clisson et Eugenie, a novella which Napoleon wrote at age 26, are about to be published in English for the first time. According to Jane Aitken, who is publishing the 40 pages at Gallic, "Although the piece of writing is short, it does cast an extraordinary light on Napoleon, who is someone we all think we know. We in Britain think of him as a military man, but here we see the romantic side to him." The Guardian thought she was talking red stilettos more than satin breeches, not sure why, perhaps the confusion of using four hands: “The emperor of chick-lit” was the title of the rather smug article by a certain Maev Kennedy and Catherine Neilan.

Sorry, Maev and Catherine. Clisson et Eugenie is a romance, but in the old sense of a novel filled with passion, drama and adventure. Napoleon wrote it in a Left Bank hotel, with his army career in the doldrums, pining away with love for Eugenie Clary, called Desiree, who later married his marshal Bernadotte and became Queen of Sweden. His choice of name for the hero is revealing too, the original Clisson having been Commander in Chief of the Royal Armies. I also like the way it suggests “frisson”, a thrill.

“Clisson was born for war," the story begins. "Although a mere youth, he had reached the highest rank in the army… And yet, his soul was not satisfied.” Where would a chick-lit author (who are not allowed to be men, as far as I know) take the plot at this point? Perhaps Clisson would learn to – gulp-- commit to a relationship? Pas de tout! Napoleon loved the tragic form; on St. Helena he read aloud every evening from the plays of Corneille and Racine -- no, not to goats and hens, he actually had a group of faithful officers who had decided to share his exile -- and his story has a tragic ending: Clisson dies in battle, pierced by a thousand blows.

The prose is not stirring like Dumas, whose father by the way was one of Napoleon’s generals on the Egyptian campaign, or sharp like Balzac, the story is not as complex as Stendhal’s, you know I suspect Aitken of a bit of hype when she says Napoleon stands revealed as “an accomplished author of fiction.” Surely the thing is instead that Napoleon was an accomplished author of himself. Just as he turned an anonymous Belgian town into a symbol used by everyone from Abba to the unknown poet, perhaps a suitor, whose verses we found pasted into an old album of my grandmother’s:

But to my sad heart the music-- 
my soul is of sombrer hue 
Was like waltzes played at Brussels 
the night before Waterloo. 

so Napoleon turned himself into, and I quote no less than the BBC, “arguably (aarggh) the most fascinating man in history”.

From Eugenie and Clisson: ‘Like all men, he was still looking for happiness and all he had found was glory’.

Go to Napoleon.org to view some of the manuscript pages of Eugenie and Clisson.

One of the last things Napoleon did was to plant two rows of trees in front of his windows at St. Helena. I just found this out today reading about his death. You can experience Napoleon’s tree-lined highways on “Arbres et routes”, a website dedicated to stopping French towns from chopping down the trees to save the lives of people who crash their cars into them when driving home “inebriated” from nightclubs (could be a scene in a Houellebecq novel?)

For more about Desiree, try Desiree by Anne-Marie Selinko. She also has a website devoted to her– “Desiree”.

From Norman Mailer's typewriter

I find author relics almost always entertaining. An example of an exception could be John Ruskin’s umbrella, sorry, that's John Ruskin's last umbrella, which I saw at a little museum in the Lake District where we had gone looking for the original Amazon from Swallows and Amazons, which was supposed to be there but was not.

But I'm enthusiastic about a trip to Duchcov Castle in Bohemia, where Casanova lived out his final years. There were local boys in period costumes sword-fighting in the courtyard and, inside, a somewhat dusty dignitary in mufti who, when he heard that my sister was a Casanova scholar, insisted he must show us the very chair Casanova had died in. He then led us carefully into a room where, bowing from the waist, with a sweeping gesture he indicated one of four absolutely identical chairs.

Now the TLS reports that the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, the Emerald City of literary archives, has just acquired an Ezra Pound collection which contains, besides mere unpublished poems, a walking stick (but no umbrella) and a lock of Pound’s baby hair. From the “Personal effects” page of the HRC website where I went looking to find out more, I learned that the HRC holds lots of author relics, including such gems as George Bernard Shaw’s letter opener, which may have opened 100 letters a day, and a pair of Arthur Conan Doyle’s underwear, special characteristics unknown.

It also houses a perfect replica of Perry Mason author Erle Stanley Gardner’s workroom where “one can view the desk, chairs, cabinets, artifacts, and slightly suspicious decorations from Gardner's 1960s study”. I’d love to have any suggestions as to what those might have been.

And Norman Mailer’s typewriter. Yes, Mailer fans, typewriter fans, Norman Mailer’s archive at the HRC, a huge collection initially begun by Mailer’s “friend and biographer” Dr. Lucid (I kid you not), contains the typewriter Norman Mailer used to type his novel The naked and the dead, my favourite, the one that starts out at night (how many books do that, think about it), throbbing with tension, soldiers trying to sleep who the next day will climb onto assault craft to be landed on a Pacific atoll, and never lets up. War is hell.

Could Mailer have used that same typewriter four years later to write the letter to Lillian Ross, published earlier this year by the New York Review of Books in a three-part selection of Mailer letters (at the Central City Library or online), which contains these lines about The old man and the sea, which had just come out:
“I thought it was good and would have been better if it hadn’t been so full of shit. I thought the best thing about it was the conception of the story, but I just can’t bear his prose. It sets my teeth on edge. At least Hemingway’s prose of 1952 which has lost all of the simplicity it used to have. I think if he had written the story twenty years ago it would have been half as long and twice as good.”

Alongside this intrepid opinion which I regret wasn't available to me when they made me read The old man and the sea in school, Mailer retained a great respect for Hemingway at his best, the person who made us see "as no one else ever has, what the potential strength of the English sentence could be". Mailer said that in an interview in the Paris Review in 2007, the year his last book, The castle in the forest, was published and the year he died. (You can read it online, or get Paris Review Interviews Vol 3 from the library and you can read interviews, too, with John Cheever, Jean Rhys, etc. We have all three volumes and I highly recommend them.) The 84 year old Mailer also says, then, “I almost wouldn’t trust a young novelist who doesn’t imitate Hemingway in his youth”.

I once read an article about insects in the old Encyclopedia Britannica which said that from an evolutionary point of view, men have an excess of energy compared to male insects whose purpose is done once they have mated, which they use for making war, betting on horses, and writing literature. Hemingway and Mailer both. Oh, and don't forget boxing. They both loved boxing, too.


I recommend: Norman Mailer's great novel about World War II The naked and the dead and his account of the Ali-Foreman Heavyweight Championship fight in Zaire, The Fight.

AWRF 2009: Christos talking

Campbell from the readers services team was at "An hour with Christos Tsiolkas", chaired by Charlotte Grimshaw. Here is his dispatch from the front (third row from):

I turn up late and the woman at the door takes my ticket, says I can get it back after the talk. I was planning to use it as a bookmark. I take my seat third row from the front to the right of the podium. Somebody left a handbag under the seat next to me, possibly the woman who is doing the introduction. I forgot to wear my glasses but my blurry impression is that she has a nice haircut and facial structure. Christos is wearing matching black shirt and jeans, which have faded to an almost identical degree. They sit and Christos is asked questions about the new book ('The Slap'). He speaks of the effect of wealth on the Australian people and an incident involving offensive youths in public. I think about a similar incident I witnessed last time I was in Australia. He has anger in his voice, includes many umms, and errs but there is urgency to the way he speaks which I like. His jeans are loose fitting and bunch up around his shoes. I think about my own jeans, how I have folded up the bottoms of the legs because they are too long. He stands at the podium and reads from ‘The Slap’. I try to remember watching ‘Head On’ when I was younger but the memory is cloudy. He sits down and answers more questions. He is complimented on his ability to write about sex from the female perspective. The audience giggles. He reads from an older book called 'Dead Europe'. He seems to be more passionate about this book. The talk ends with questions from the audience. Two questions are asked; the first he answers with ease but the second is more difficult and is cut short due to time issues. This is disappointing. I leave the talk and struggle through the crowd of people waiting. There is a long line of people within the crowd waiting to have their books signed.

AWRF 2009: Meeting Tsiolkas

Saturday afternoon I was driving lackadaisically down New North Rd. when a dangling sign caught my eye. “Mt. Albert Veterinary Centre”.  I pictured Aisha on duty inside, looking Michelle Obama-style gorgeous in a white lab coat. And Connie was there too, sitting on a bench, detachedly wiggling her toes in dirty pink shoes. A second later, as the sign jumped to my rear-view mirror, I realized that Aisha and Connie live in Melbourne, and also, they are characters in a novel.

A quote that’s gotten a lot of publicity about The Slap, the book in which they appear, is that it’s a satanic “Neighbours”. I haven’t seen "Neighbours"; still, I’ve done a fair amount of TV in my life and my intuition is that it is far more correct to say that "Neighbours" is a vapidThe Slap.

For this book about modern Australia, after he wrote about old Europe in Dead Europe, Christos Tsiolkas used what he calls a Rashomon structure, after the classic Japanese movie which tells the story of a rape from many points of view. Here the rape is a slap, although the turmoil it creates among these Australian suburbanite twenties-thirties-somethings implies the inverse. The fact is, they don’t have an awful lot of other things going on to distract them. They aren’t very perceptive. They are greedy. They aren’t very likable. But I loved seeing inside their heads. It became impossible to put the book down: I was rushing downstream on the current of its revelations.

“I like the teenagers and the old man.” Christos Tsiolkas says to me when I get to talk to him. The ‘s’ sound is the particularity of the Greek language, there are lots of them, and they are softer than ours, sliding almost into ‘sh’ . Christos Tsiolkas has that ‘s’ when he speaks English. He speaks quickly, and he laughs easily and he says “Manolis-sh” for Manolis, who is that old man. He explains that he put Manolis-sh in because he wanted a character who would bring gravity into his story. I was reminded of the sweeping judgment a famous Italian architect delivered when they asked him why there were so few great women architects. “Women have no sense of the grave.” he said. The Greek words for ‘grave’ are sovaros – severe, austeros -- austere, and agrios – cruel, fierce and proud. 

Christos Tsiolkas is not grave but -- to use a Gertrude-Steinian turn of phrase -- I sense he has a sense of the grave. His literary love is Philip Roth, that author famed for being witty about sex, but also about death. The day after talking to CT, I came across a shiny new copy of Exit Ghost at the library, and I thought of him and opened it to have a look.

“You’re writing about the family business, are you?”

He nodded and he shrugged and he sighed. “And the family. I’m trying to, anyway. I more or less grew up in the store.  I’ve heard a thousand stories from my grandfather. Every time I go to see him I fill another notebook. I’ve got stories enough to last a lifetime. But it’s all a matter of how, isn’t it? I mean, how you tell them.”

Read the interview with Christos Tsiolkas.

AWRF 2009: Stefan Aust

To hear Der Spiegel editor Stefan Aust would be interesting anyway, but when I found out that he had written the ‘seminal work’ on the Baader-Meinhof gang, that was when I knew I had to be there. This man quit his job and spent three years researching and writing The Baader-Meinhof Complex, so determined was he to get the story on this band of radical left-wing terrorists who for ten years splattered Germany with violent deaths, finally including, for the leaders, their own.

At their own hands or not? This was the question. An attempt to spring them from prison by hijacking a Lufthansa flight and using the passengers as ransom had failed when German commandos stormed the plane in Mogadishu and freed the passengers. The next morning, all over Europe the papers screamed “Baader, Ensslin and Raspe dead!” The verdict of the authorities: they had committed suicide in their cells in the ultra-security wing of Stammheim Prison, the two men by shooting themselves, Ensslin by hanging herself with electrical wire.

All the time I lived in Europe, I and everyone I knew took it for granted that this had been an execution decided by the Germans to obviate further death-seminating attempts to free them. We laughed: how could the inmates, strip-searched each day after their appearances in court or visits with lawyers, have gotten guns? How could they, in isolation in sound-proof cells, have arranged a collective suicide? “Can you believe those Germans?” we’d say. “They know the whole world knows they killed them and they just don’t care.”

Now I finally had the chance to hear from a German about it. I was on a high as I headed through the doors into the darkened ASB and down the aisle to my usual close-up seat. I listened to Aust describe these “very special people”: Andreas Baader, “Brando in The Wild One, he could have been any kind of outlaw”, Gudrun Ensslin, the "hypermoral" pastor’s daughter, and Ulrike Meinhof, the celebrity journalist and “intolerant individual who thought she knew things better than others” who made the choice to go underground with them. “They became famous because she was so famous.”  To put it in a New Zealand context, Kim Hill with a SIG P210 pistol next to her typewriter.

Their credo “We are marching towards a fascist state and we need to act now" led to dozens of kidnappings, robberies, bombings, murders, and eventually their capture and imprisonment. During the trial, there were signs that Meinhof may have been thinking of disassociating; to the judges she hinted “if one wanted to speak” but it was ignored. Would it have gone differently if it hadn’t been, asked Aust, who had worked with her at konkret, the voice of the New Left in Germany. Depressed, bullied by the others – “If you’ve read Dostoevsky's The Demons, you can see the parallels, how they behaved to each other” -- one night she ripped up her towel and hanged herself.  In the margin of a notebook, a phrase about suicide as the final revolutionary act.

A year later, after the life sentences, after the third attempt to free them had failed, came the deaths of the other three founding members. To my amazement, Aust declares himself convinced that theirs really were suicides after all. He has the investigative details: how the guns were smuggled in, how they communicated; he has his intuition of what they would have done when they lost hope. He convinces me. Driving home after, it felt strange, like losing a ring you’ve worn for so long you don’t even think about it, except now your finger looks odd without it. But the three Italians I am out to dinner with the next night keep their rings and laugh. They don’t buy a word of it.

“Today,” Aust reflects, “the sympathy for the group which you could feel in the late 1970's has vanished – that idea people had that ‘They died for our ideas.’” A poll of Germans back then showed that 1 in 10 would have sheltered them if asked. It was only 30 years from the end of World War II. Old Nazis -- why do people say "ex", they hadn't resigned or anything -- were everywhere in prominent positions. Hanns Martin Schleyer, the president of the industrialists’ association whom the gang kidnapped in another attempt to spring Baader and Ensslin had been in the SS. Within hours of the collective suicide, he was driven to a wooded area, made to kneel, and shot through the head not once but three times.

Unlike the snotty reviewer from the Washington Post I came across inthe Guardian (why?), who calls it  “a simple tale of thugs in love with violence”, I see it as a tawdry and tragic tale of Shakespearean dimensions.  On a German website I found an interview with Irmgard Moller, found in her cell at Stammheim the morning of the collective suicide with four stab wounds to her chest and a bread knife beside her, in which she recalls the night’s events. I consulted that  Delphic oracle which they call internet translation, and read in awe the Macbethian hallucination that flashed onto the screen.

Before kidnapping in the evening someone went
of the attendants rum and the bulbs collected,
during the contact barrier it off simply the river turned.
I needed thus candles. I operated the record player
with batteries, that could be done. I wanted
to be somehow awake in any case, in order to hear
the first morning messages at six o'clock. In addition,
I was already completely overtired. I went then
in the cell a little back and forth, in order
not to fall asleep. But then I am sometime
nevertheless away-dawned...

AWRF 2009: Marcus Chown

Marcus Chown is the author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You and the only guest at the Festival whose media release doesn’t contain his picture.  He wears a t-shirt, jeans and trainers and is neither nerdy nor scary. He is able to speak very rapidly and keep a quizzical tone at the same time. If he were a particle, this superimposition of states would make him a schizophrenic entities quantum bit, or qubit. I learned this from reading his book.

My favourite piece was about why the night sky is black. It's not because the sun is on the other side of the earth. Think about it. On all sides of us the universe contains quadrillions of stars as bright or brighter than the sun. The reason the night sky is black is because the universe was only born 13.7 billion years ago, so the light from stars more than 13.7 billion light years away (the majority of them) simply hasn't reached us yet.

"Ever since the dawn of human history," Chown writes, "the fact that the Universe had a beginning has been staring us in the face in the darkness of the night sky. We have simply been too stupid to realise it."

That our Universe was born has always been impossible for me to comprehend even though I know it is so. I remember as a kid, lying in bed at night, trying to realise it, concentrating hard in a semi-pleasurable, semi-tormenting sort of tickling bout of the brain. The same thing with reading these books. Atoms can be in two places at the same time.  Nothing can catch up with light, even though its speed is not infinite. Maybe there is only one electron in the whole universe, just moving incredibly fast.

What I really like about Marcus Chown, in his book and even more so when I got to speak to him in person, is the way he is sincerely happy about all those things out there which we cannot explain because we simply lack the language to do so.  "I find it exciting”, he says to me. “The universe we’ve discovered is far stranger than anything we could have invented or imagined."

Will we ever know the answer to the question, where did our Universe came from? Not only is Marcus Chown absolutely sure we will, but you won’t believe what he says about when.

Read the whole conversation at the top of the Crowne Plaza Hotel (from which we descended a little less old than had we been down with the festival-goers at the ASB).

AWRF 2009: The Next 100 Years

When I'd see the name Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker writing about American politics, I always pictured a somewhat plump and owlish fellow, sort of a Pierre from War and Peace. I had a lineage imagined for him too; he would have moved to the United States as a boy with his family when his father became US correspondent for a Dutch newspaper, grown up in New York, decided to stay on. His mother would have been named Monique.

Imagine my surprise then when not only did he turn out to be known as "Rick" but ambled out for his "Hour with" wearing -- not just, but most noticeably -- a blue blazer, a yellow silk tie with tiny blue dots, and cowboy boots. His hair was longish and grayish and worn in an unstyled-look style, and he was very American and cheeky in that great American tradition of Mark Twain a hundred years ago, continuing through to Bill Maher today -- both with longish gray hair, come to think of it.

"What perils of his nature do you think Pres. Obama is susceptible to?" a member of the audience asked him. "I guess his rationality," he replied. "He's been compared a lot to Dr. Spock. I don't know. Do you have a few suggestions?" 
                  
I was right that his father was a journalist, with a respected career which actually did include a stint as a "special correspondent" for a foreign newspaper, but he was an American -- a child of immigrant Jews who worked in Manhattan's garment district --and the paper was the Hindustan Times. The appointment grew out of a personal friendship with Gandhi, forged when he visited India as part of the American Famine Mission. His son points to the figure of Gandhi as "a part of my mental apparatus since childhood" and his first story for The New Yorker was on the 100th anniversary of Gandhi's birth. He ventures at a certain point "If the Palestinians had embraced Gandhi's non-violence, they would have a thriving state right now."

For the AWRF 2009 finale, a panel of writers gave us readers their predictions for "The next 100 years". Marcus Chown foretold that we'd find life on Mars, Mohammed Hanif requested that we remember about water supply on Earth, and so on. The one I enjoyed the most was Rick Hertzberg, funny, thought-provoking, going for the imaginative risk. Here they are, what Hendrik Hertzberg thinks will happen in the next 100 years:

1. There will be wars
2. Someone will set off a nuclear device somewhere in the world, probably in a populated area
3. America will throw off the Westminster parliamentary system in a peaceful revolution and follow New Zealand in experimenting with new kinds of elections (in particular this means proportional representation, which Hertzberg is a big fan of)
4. I don't think it will be another American century. It will be a Chinese century
5. Revealed religion will decline and religion will distill into something more dangerous and it will probably involve a fight.

AWRF 2009: Judith Thurman

Robin is Community Librarian at Mt. Albert Community Library, a person of great style both in her apparel and her reading, and perhaps a bit of a perfectionist. Who better than she to report on “An Hour with Judith Thurman"?
Biographer and New Yorker columnist Judith Thurman delivered the Michael King Memorial Lecture. She stood at the lectern and mostly read from her notes, in contrast with the usual Writers and Readers relaxed format of Q and A with an interlocutor. In my experience, biographers feed their audience’s curiosity for the lowdown on their subject, but Thurman vouchsafed not a jot of tittle tattle. Or perhaps she just assumed we had all read her books on Colette and Isak Dinesen, since they were published some time ago. Instead, she spoke about the search to capture the true essence of her subjects, which she said seemed more difficult the more documentation existed. She found Colette particularly elusive.

Very much a perfectionist, Thurman took seven years to research both her biographies, and expressed no plans to tackle another. As an illustration of her perfectionism, she read out each of her seven attempts to get just the right tone for an opening paragraph of an article on tofu that she was commissioned to write for The New Yorker.

AWRF 2009: New Yorker night

Nick from the readers services team at Central Library has been a New Yorker if not a New Yorker. He reports on the night.
Rick Hertzberg wore a classy outfit, linen suit with a skinny tie and cowboy boots. When Rhonda Sherman asked each of the three panellists (others being Judith Thurman and James Surowiecki) about their favourite New Yorker stories of all time I’m glad Hertzberg mentioned Joseph Mitchell because his stuff is cool. When I first readJoe Gould’s secret I thought it was fiction. It is about an old-style boho named Joe Gould, transcriber of a mythical oral history of the city, and the efforts of the writer to locate it. It is a whole book made up of just two of the magazine’s ‘profiles’, one from the 1940s and one from the 1960s. That is how it used to be, writers wrote articles as long as they wanted, or needed. It is sort of what defined the magazine, which is now 85 years old. As a New Yorker writer you just couldn’t get what you got, in a week. Sometimes it took years. It is not like that now but they still think the New Yorker will be around for ages, maybe thanks to all the subscriptions Surowiecki sold on the podium on Saturday night.

The New Yorker is different from the city itself. It is its own place and this explains, said Hertzberg, why people miles away like to read it.

The night started with a slideshow of cartoons and next time I want to hear from a panel of New Yorker cartoonists.

AWRF 2009: Lloyd Jones's authors

I went to hear Lloyd Jones too and I appreciate that Ana covered it for Books in the CIty because she reminded me of some good points that I had already forgotten, events overload perhaps, or maybe the distraction Finlay McDonald was causing me whenever he would start fiddling with his ear. For the rest I think he did fine; I especially liked when Lloyd Jones confided punchily  "Reading kind of completes the book." I've always liked and remember, probably because I work in a library, the lines in Borges's famous lecture on poetry where he said that poetry is not in the books in the library, it is in the encounter of the reader with the books.

One last Lloyd Jones moment to savour:

Q: What books are magic for you?

A: I like Raymond Carver - his book Cathedral, Richard Ford, Chekhov, Mario Vargas Llosa, oh, and Calvino - The Baron in the Trees - an excellent example of imaginative risk. At a certain point the Baron slips out into the tree- you expect he's going to come back down and then he doesn't, ever! I imagine Calvino weeing himself with excitement: "I'm going to keep him in the tree!"