[gallery] Alexander Gorlin Architects’ Boston Road Supportive Housing (2013-2016), Bronx, New York; Martin Filler writes about this building here
I think Lewis is also the most beautiful writer. The clarity is so fine. And the intimacy. If you’re suffering from grief, to read his book on grief—it’s so direct, so lacking in cant and pomposity and bluster. He’s very clear, and he also has that kind of writerly instinct for knowing your doubts or suspicions. He really has them covered. That’s what Screwtape is, basically; it’s just a series of pre-emptive descriptions of your objections, articulating them before you can yourself and in this manner neutralizing them. But I guess even from the Narnia books, I always thought that—it sounds ridiculous—that to make good on the kind of belief expressed in them—not to be in bad faith—would be to be enormously lost to joy, so that you wouldn’t be able to go about your daily life. I think maybe that’s one of the frightening things about faith for me, that it would be an obstruction of my daily life, and I like my everyday sinful life.
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The Bible Design Blog with first thoughts on the 6-volume ESV Reader’s Bible. Crossway continues to experiment, very intelligently and artfully, with different modes of presentation — but I don’t know thast any other Bible publishers are following their lead. We can at least hope that the Bibliotheca project eventually comes to fulfillment.
imagining history
A lot of the lure for me in peeling away the skyscrapers was the way this ancient New York I was imagining, only just on the doorstep of modernity, reversed so many of the qualities the later city would be famous for. I like irony. I’m a glutton for it. But Manhattan’s later self would not be so easily banished. It wasn’t just that the 21st-century city put up visual resistance as I walked it – that the site on what used to be called Golden Hill Street where I planned that Mr Smith would receive the greatest shocks to his heart and his pocket-book, was actually occupied by a tanning salon; that in fact, I couldn’t quite scrub the skyscrapers out of my imagined sky, and lingering afterimages of them, pale as ghosts, stained the air above the tiled roofs and church steeples of my Manhattan. It wasn’t just that. Instead, I realised, it was that the memory of what hadn’t happened yet inevitably informed almost every aspect of the story I wanted to tell. Unnamed, never looked at directly, the Manhattan that was to come loomed over the whole thing. Because it had to: because a historical novel is never ever simple time travel, no matter how vivid it might manage to be, but always and every time a conversation between then and now. And a good historical novel introduces the strangeness of then to the familiarity of now, and entangles them, to the shock and captivation of both.— In Video and Words: The New York of Francis Spufford | Waterstones.com Blog. A lovely brief meditation by Francis on thinking, and seeing, and writing history.
If you haven’t yet read Golden Hill, please do. It’s wonderful.
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
Doris Lessing, 1971 introduction to The Golden Notebook (via austinkleon)
I had never seen this passage before, but it certainly chimes with a section of my book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction:
I was twenty years old before I failed to finish a book I had started: it was The Recognitions, a novel by William Gaddis, and I gave up, after an extended period of moral paralysis, at page 666. That day I grieved, feeling that I had been forced from some noble pedestal; but I woke up the next morning with my soul singing. After all, though I would never get back the hours I had devoted to those 666 pages, the hours I would have spent ploughing through the remaining 400 were mine to spend as I would. I had been granted time as a pure and sweet gift.Of course, once you have abandoned a book after more than six hundred pages, abandoning one after fifty seems trivial. But for me that wasn’t a bad thing. I needed to overcome the sense of duty that had marched me through so many books before the ultimately liberating, if at the time miserable, experience of The Recognitions; and I needed to learn, as I eventually did, that if I set a book aside today I am not thereby forbidding myself to return to it later — nor am I promising to do so. To everything there is a season, and, by corollary, everything is sometimes out of season. Perhaps there will even come a time for me to read The Recognitions. But no one will be able to tell me when that season comes; I will have to discern that for myself, with the aid of many years of reflecting on the kind of reader I am.
It seems a category error to expose a pseudonymous novelist as if you were acting in the public interest; to adopt the tools and language of investigative journalism, go through someone’s financial records and harass their family in order to ruin an authorial position that has been almost as interesting as the author’s novels themselves. There’s no value in revealing Elena Ferrante’s ‘true identity’ (as Claudio Gatti claimed to have done yesterday). What’s interesting about her anonymity depends on its being sustained; it’s a creation, as well as a political proposition, that has engendered a conversation about literary making rather than dismantlement and confession. In an age of autofiction, when so many protagonists take their authors’ names, the idea that the author, too, is a literary creation extends the fictiveness out of the books and into the world. Why ruin the fun?
