Archives for September 15, 2005

Don’t let the placid website fool you. For the last two months, like industrious shoe-stitching elves, the members of the Litblog Co-op have been busy behind the scenes nominating, reading, and voting on books. Today we unveil the outcome of our labors, the novel we’ve selected to throw our collective promotional prowess behind this fall. Watch this space for the big scoop. And keep watching as the four runners-up are revealed, one a day, into next week.

Don’t let the placid website fool you. For the last two months, like industrious shoe-stitching elves, the members of the Litblog Co-op have been busy behind the scenes nominating, reading, and voting on books. Today we unveil the outcome of our labors, the novel we’ve selected to throw our collective promotional prowess behind this fall. Watch this space for the big scoop. And keep watching as the four runners-up are revealed, one a day, into next week.

(Pardon my Mary McCarthy kick, the latest in a series…)

“The arts have aged too, and it is impossible for them to ‘go back,’ just as it is impossible to recapture the youth or reinstitute a handicraft economy, like the one Ruskin dreamed of. These things are beyond our control and independent of our will. I, for instance, would like, more than anything else, to write like Tolstoy; I imagine that I still see something resembling the world Tolstoy saw. But my pen or my typewriter simply balks; it ‘sees’ differently from me and records what to me, as a person, are distortions and angularities. Anyone who has read my work will be at a loss to find any connection with Tolstoy; to Tolstoy himself both I and my work wold be anathema. I myself might reform, but my work never could; it could never ‘go straight,’ even if I were much more gifted than I am. Most novelists today, I suspect, would like to ‘go straight’; we are conscious of being twisted when we write. This is the self-consciousness, the squirming, of the form we work in; we are stuck in the phylogenesis of the novel.”

Mary McCarthy, “Characters in Fiction”

(Pardon my Mary McCarthy kick, the latest in a series…)

“The arts have aged too, and it is impossible for them to ‘go back,’ just as it is impossible to recapture the youth or reinstitute a handicraft economy, like the one Ruskin dreamed of. These things are beyond our control and independent of our will. I, for instance, would like, more than anything else, to write like Tolstoy; I imagine that I still see something resembling the world Tolstoy saw. But my pen or my typewriter simply balks; it ‘sees’ differently from me and records what to me, as a person, are distortions and angularities. Anyone who has read my work will be at a loss to find any connection with Tolstoy; to Tolstoy himself both I and my work wold be anathema. I myself might reform, but my work never could; it could never ‘go straight,’ even if I were much more gifted than I am. Most novelists today, I suspect, would like to ‘go straight’; we are conscious of being twisted when we write. This is the self-consciousness, the squirming, of the form we work in; we are stuck in the phylogenesis of the novel.”

Mary McCarthy, “Characters in Fiction”