Feel much more settled now that I am back at home with my little cat, who was flatteringly happy to see me last night. I do not know why feline company should be so soothing, but there is no doubt that I am on a more even keel when there is a cat around.
Read two good books on my travels: Johan Theorin's The Darkest Room (this guy is an awe-inspiringly good popular storyteller - the book gave me a yen to watch Hitchcock movies obsessively and see whether I couldn't craft such a formally perfect and atmospherically chilling narrative of suspense); and Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers. The amount and quality of reporting that went into this book is staggering: it is really a feat of human achievement like few other things! It is not a criticism, but I am struck by the oddity of the fact that the style of narration really recognizably is still like what the cluster of mid-19th-century novelists that include Hugo and Dickens and Eliot and Balzac developed - ditto for The Wire - it is a powerful form of narration that, once discovered, has had considerable longevity.
Closing tabs:
Brent's friend Larry Thompson has printed a beautiful edition of "Tintern Abbey."
The National Eagle Repository.
This is the kind of writing I should really be doing.
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About Me
- Jenny Davidson
- I have published four novels and four books of literary criticism; I'm currently at work on a book called FOR THE LOVE OF BROKEN THINGS: MY FATHER, EDWARD GIBBON AND THE RUINS OF ROME. I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
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