Song of a Reformed Headhunter

from TLS May 27 2011 One of my favorite authors, Julian Barnes wrote in a Commentary piece in the TLS: It is bad for a writer to become either the sole property of the general reader, or the private fiefdom of scholars. A writer is most usefully kept alive after death by a mixed diet of attention: from the "ordinary" reader, the living writer, the professional critic, the academic theorist, and the amateur scholar. Paradoxically, the greatest writers are often less intimidating to the outsider and the freelance. After hearing in the past two weekends how academic theorists deal with authors, I agree wholeheartedly with Barnes. I would like to kept alive after death by a mixed diet too.

TNY Feb 9 & 16, 2009 from Claudia Roth Pierpont's article "Another Country" on James Baldwin: Feeling more than usually restless, James Baldwin flew from New York to Paris in the late late summer of 1961, and from there to Israel. Then, rather than proceed as he had planned to Africa--a part of the world he was not ready to confront--he decided to visit a friend in Istanbul. * It is an incongruous image, the black American writer in Istanbul, but Baldwin returned to the city many time during the next ten years, making it a second or third not-quite-home. . . . Istanbul was unlike any place Baldwin had been before and, more to the point, unlike the places that had defined both the color of his skin and his sexuality as shameful problems. Whatever Turkey's history of prejudice, divisions there did not have an automatic black/white racial cast. . . . In fact, during his first days in the city, he was nearly giddy at the sight of men in the street openly holding hands...

Spanish Composition 3: Me gustan los libros de Julian Barnes. Escribe muy bien para los lectores en Inglaterra y por todas partes, pero a los lectores en Francia les gusta más. ¿Por que los lectores francéses lo quieren mucho? El tiene una sensibilidad francésa. Es gracioso cuando escribe sobre las cosas serias y serio cuando escribe sobre las cosas graciosas. Su mejor libro es “El papagayo de Flaubert.” En este libro, una hombre enamorado con la escritura de Flaubert quiere encontrar el papagayo que se sentó en el escritoria de Flaubert por los dias último de su vida. El hombre se preocupa por la sobrevivencia de la papagayo aunque el pájaro es un criatura disecada. Le importa que el papagayo no cae en el olvido. Por suerte, porque es fan de Flaubert no pierde las esperanzas, el papagayo disecado vive.

I have a deep affection for Julian Barnes, generally because I always enjoy his intellectually stimulating novels, more particularly because he taught me how to look at a painting. One chapter in The History of the World in 10½ Chapters muses on Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa.” I remember Barnes’s careful marshalling of evidence in the painting to decide whether the tiny ship in the horizon is approaching the desperate survivors of the shipwreck, or leaving them. I don’t remember the conclusion, but the approach has stuck with me: seeing is also interpreting. His new novel Arthur and George begins with the desire to take a look: A child wants to see. It always begins like this, and it began like this then. A child wanted to see. This particular child who wanted to see is Arthur, who is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the professional ophthalmologist, the champion of the weak, and, finally, the evangelist of Spiritualism. What the child Arthur saw was...