I’m getting a start on my critical edition of Auden’s Nones, and reflecting that one of the chief pleasures of doing this work is the requirement that I own and consult the original Random House and Faber editions of the volumes. I’m amassing an interesting collection.
“Influencers” and “content creators”: People who want to affect others in unspecified ways for unspecified reasons by unspecified means.
Currently reading: A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from The Readers’ Subscription and Mid-century Book Clubs. It’s odd to think that Auden and Barzun were born in the same year, two years after Trilling — and Barzun lived until 2012. 📚
I am reminded by the appearance of this delightful magazine that my own desultory education happened in large measure in the pages of periodicals. Many were the hours I sat at coffeeshops and bars, or in my little apartment over cheap dinners, reading the Times Literary Supplement, First Things, Commentary, the New Criterion, National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Atlantic and, in its latter days, Partisan Review. In those pages I learned how little I knew and what I might read to remedy my situation. There I also found lessons in putting words in the right order.
For every thousand pieces bemoaning the decline of book reading, there may be one (like this one) bemoaning the decline of the print periodical. For me too certain magazines that I subscribed to in my youth — the most important being the New Republic and the New York Review of Books — were foundational to the shaping of my intellectual sensibilities. Going straight to the URL of a single review or essay I’m interested in is great; but even better, I think, was reading a magazine from cover to cover and finding new interests, new matter for reflection.
I owe a special debt to the New Republic. In 1977 a young woman in Birmingham, Alabama read a review in those pages of Pablo Neruda’s Song of Protest, and was prompted to order that book. I worked at the bookstore from which she ordered it. Reader, I married her.
This announcement of Delays Ahead on Cosmos Malick — complete with an Albertina Walker shout-out — is relevant to readers of my other blogs also.