If someone decides not to read Munro because she enabled an abuser, or Tolstoy because he was an aristocrat and a patriarch, I would understand. What doesn’t make sense is the idea that, because one has denounced Munro or Tolstoy, others must agree that it would be wrong to read them. When writers confront me in these situations, I tend to shrug them off: some people have a natural tendency to police other people’s thinking. But I admit that I worry when the younger generations use language that they have taken from public circulation without thinking it through first. Phrases like “dismantle the canon” may sound fabulous, but if you were to press the students to elaborate, you would get a string of grandiose and empty words.
Thinking through—rather than just thinking—is important. A thought or an idea is never that precious. People have thoughts and ideas all the time, many of them preliminary. Sometimes people mistake their feelings for thoughts and ideas, which are in turn mistaken for absolute truths. The point of writing and reading fiction is not to stay with the first thought or idea, nor the third or the fourth, but to push further until one says to oneself, Even though I haven’t thought through everything, I have brought myself as far as I can within my limited capacity. Without thinking through, thoughts are no more than slogans.
Reading a bad novel when you are approaching pensionable age, however, is like taking the time left available to you and setting it on fire. (I am also getting the impression that most books by young novelists are about sexual abuse. I know, I know—I shouldn’t be so squeamish. But I’m in the middle of an English winter, there’s no daylight after about eleven o’clock in the morning, I’ve quite often watched my football team play out a dismal, goalless draw…Give me a break until the spring, at least.)
The big secret of Western gardening is that it’s easy to grow things here. My garden is on a fearsome north-facing hill, surrounded by tall trees (the tallest—redwoods), but the back yard gets sun. It’s a cottage-style garden, which is to say that it’s motley and crowded. There are a few dozen rose bushes, various other perennial flowers, and a brace of fruit trees: the six apples, two plums (Santa Rosa and European prune), a persimmon (Hachiya), and a multi-graft Asian pear whose branches the local raccoons keep breaking in their nightly revelry. Living in the woods as I do, the border between the cultivated areas and the rest of the forest understory is porous. My garden is home to many birds, bugs, rodents, and other forest critters. In the giant redwood and oak trees that surround it, a family of acorn woodpeckers make their nests. Their red plumage looks like little fascinator hats, and their calls sound like a cackle. When I do my dawn patrol of the beds each morning, I imagine they’re laughing at me and my barren apple trees. I’ve made this garden a major part of my life, my personality, and my career. I even cast the apple trees as major characters in my memoir. And yet the fruits do not fall.
Sure, it’s still a passive activity, but listening to baseball on the radio requires a patience—and provides a catharsis—that evades us when we are scrolling our feeds for another dopamine hit between pitches on the big screen. So, as the Dodgers and Yankees resume one of the more exciting World Series in recent memory tonight in New York, make Vin Scully proud: flip on the radio, and take a game in that way. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
The push and pull between structure and its disassembly preoccupies the poems in this book.
“Masquerade” is a meandering, surreal, and unsettling search for identity as Meadow examines the masks he’s worn throughout his adult life.
For a while, of course, Beryl’s Instant Mince was pretty much lost to posterity; cook books go out of print, and with them the culinary outrages of the past (“spoon the instant mince on to [buttered, white] bread and cover with HP sauce, also raw onion rings”). But now, like some horrible alien in a movie, it’s back, for another editor has seen fit to gather it into a new collection of author’s recipes titled Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake, where it lurks next to several other equally unappetising confections: Robert Graves’s Mock Anchovy Pate, Norman Mailer’s Stuffed Mushrooms, Rebecca West’s Dutch Onion Crisps. As you may tell, this is not a book for the easily-made-queasy, and though I am usually implacably opposed to trigger warnings, I think it should have come with one: This Book Includes Scenes Featuring Large Quantities of Margarine and Fillet of Beef Served With Bananas. Some Readers May Find It Distressing.