(no subject)

Happy birthday, aella_irene, arabellaxo and sherlockian!

Category error?

Okay, I do not think my thorts upon Big Meaningful Books will ever entirely mesh with the thorts of Robert McCrum:

How I chose my list of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time.

(And, may I remark upon the overwheening arrogance of 'for all time', because, really, what constitutes 'the best' is going to be so historically contingent, and he actually cops to the fact that he's had to think about writers who would have been entirely off the radar of Dead White Males compiling such lists not so very long ago, for reasons of gender and race.)

But I rather chortled over the image of McCrum trying to read The Egg and I, and wondering if he was expecting a harrowing account of trying to run a small chicken-farm just about the time the Great Depression began to hit.

I suspect that McCrum is not well-acquainted with what I think of as the 'making lemonade' genre, in which a woman (I think it is pretty much always a woman) makes amusing reading out of the quotidien tribulations of her life. In which class I suspect that The Egg and I does count as a classic.

(I might possibly cross-reference here to Hadley Freeman's contrast between the male-authored and female-authored comic novel in this column.)

Let it go - take it away, W Empson!

Let it go
It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can’t
Tell or remember even what they were.

The contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.

Empson reading it here.

***

And in rather different mood, 70s psychedelia: The Temptations, Ball of Confusion

Watch on YouTube