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W.H. Auden on banking
Auden wrote the following praise to Cyril Connolly about his recently published book:
As both Eliot and Edmund Wilson are Americans, I think Enemies of Promise is the best English book of criticism since the war, and more than Eliot or Wilson you really write about writing in the only way which is interesting to anyone except academics, as a real occupation like banking or fucking, with all its attendant boredom, excitement, and terror.
That is from Stefan Collini's often quite interesting Common Reading: Critics, Historians, and Public.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 21, 2008 at 09:04 PM in Books | Permalink
Comments
Entertainment Weekly just came out with its list of the best 10 books of the last 25 years:
1. “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy
2. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” J. K. Rowling
3. “Beloved,” Toni Morrison
4. “The Liars’ Club,” Mary Karr
5. “American Pastoral,” Philip Roth
6. “Mystic River,” Dennis Lehane
7. “Maus,” Art Spiegelman
8. “Selected Stories,” Alice Munro
9. “Cold Mountain,” Charles Frazier
10. “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” Haruki Murakami
Let' see: you say you now appreciate Beloved, you like Philip Roth, Alice Munro is one of your favorite fiction writers...
When are you going to admit that you earned a rotten tomato for that post about avoiding any book that EW likes. You do NOT avoid all of the books that books they like; in fact, you like some of the very same books!
Posted by: Inconvenient Facts at Jun 21, 2008 9:39:49 PM
Great Auden quote. He is spot om about "writing to other academics". That's why I really disagreed with an earlier post about advice to grad students, the essence of which was: write like crazy. While this is good advice from a selfish or individual point of view (the more you write, the better your chances of career advancement), it leads to a kind of "tragedy of the commons" collectively: the situation we have today of too many mediocre or bad papers. Ideally, we should all write less and think more...
Posted by: Enrique at Jun 22, 2008 12:10:00 AM
thanks for all
Posted by: seks shop at May 20, 2009 5:37:37 AM
