Archives for February 13, 2008

• Two early stories by Nabokov at The Atlantic: “Cloud, Castle, Lake” and “The Aurelian.”
• Kathryn Hughes writes an entertaining account of her attempts to “knock off” a Mills & Boon romance novel in the ’80s:

This ambition to write a Mills & Boon ran round the magazine like a craze, the kind of thing that used to happen at school when everyone suddenly decided to dab their pulse points with musk oil or carry their books in a BOAC bag. And, just as at school, we all pretended that we were hardly aware that other people might have had the same idea. I’m pretty certain that there was a briefing pack we all sent off for: Mills & Boon has always been democratically alert to the ambition of its readers to become writers.

See also.

“Therefore, if we built splendid castles (phalansteries, perhaps, they might be more fitly called,) and pictured beautiful scenes, among the fervid coals of the hearth around which we were clustering — and if all went to rack with the crumbling embers, and have never since arisen out of the ashes — let us take to ourselves no shame. In my own behalf, I rejoice that I could once think better of the world’s improvability than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice, in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can thus magnanimously persist in error.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“California is a tragic country–like Palestine, like every Promised Land.”
Christopher Isherwood, Exhumations