Zutroy, I think "Animal Farm" goes beyond the Russian Revolution. It can apply to almost any era of modern politics. It seemed like a universal piece. I liked it a lot.

Talking about books on historical fiction here's a few I love:
Persian Boy by Mary Renault, it is a book written in the perspective of a slave-boy of Alexander the Great. The book was very interesting and I enjoyed it a lot.
Roscoe by William Kennedy, it is a book about the early 20th century and the political machine. It is very well written (I like the books by this author a lot) and paints the history of the US.
The Egyptian by Mika Waltari, this book follows an Egyptian doctor in the era of the pharaoh Akhenaten, a very interesting historical figure. I really enjoyed reading the book, I think I'll read it again sometime soon.
Julian by Gore Vidal, this book follows Julian an emperor of Rome (nephew of Constantine), Julian was an intellectual and a Hellenist, he was against Christianity. He tried to bring Rome back to being Hellenistic. One of my favorite books.

Yeah, I often like to read the biographies of writers I am interested in. I just try not to get carried away by being too clever as a result and infecting the stories with my own psychologizing. Some of that psychologizing I've seen is so weird, and so poor ... and seems to try so hard to tie itself into the stories and take too much priority over them. They can seem inherently disrespectful, anti-artistic, derivative, and beside the point. I dread the critic's desire to supplant the writer in importance, honest effort, and simple centrality to the work itself. I can enjoy the constructs people build around the work, but I reserve to anyone, anywhere, ever, the uncluttered, despicably democratic opportunity to experience the work first-hand, without caring about its political correctness or all the detritus acquired around it that only something worth thinking about in the first place would have accrued.

That's what I was thinking too. At this point, fop is perfectly fine because it conveys a lot of color and idea of what life was about at that time. It becomes a very entertaining and illuminating term.

"metrosexual"

Chekov is incredible. My favorite play of all time is most likely Uncle Vanya. It's perfect. And if you've never had a chance to see it performed, check out Louise Malle's last film: Vanya on 42nd Street, an amazing, bare stage performance captured on film.

I agree. To delve too much into the author's life limits the work somehow. In the Introduction to Proust's "In Search of Time" volume 1 Richard Howard quotes Proust as saying this about the major French literary critic Saint Beuve: that he "fails to recognize that the book is a product of a different self".

A book can be about an authors dreams, imagination, perception and conjecture or speculation as well as his life experiences. So many are told to write about their personal experiences because that is where the well of details are that we draw from, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other things besides autobiography that an author is trying to accompish.

Starring the amazing Wally Shawn and Julianne Moore. My favorite film version of a play ever.

Just got finished re-reading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses.

Wow.

That's all I've got right. Just...wow. If there's a more interesting protagonist in American Literature than John Grady Cole, I don't know who it is. Some of the passages, especially near the end, remind me of Joyce's The Dead. As I've always considered that work to be the best-written English Language story ever, that's high praise indeed.

I loved All the Pretty Horses back when I read it. I never read another Cormac McCarthy novel until No Country came out. I just finished The Road and it was awesome. Such a different writing style. So harrowing. The guy is an unbelievable storyteller. In less deft hands, The Road would have been horrible, but it was a masterpiece. And the ending was what I'm now going to call a Cormac McCarthy ending.

Well, he sure knows how to pick names, but if he had the panache to select "Wheaton" for a middle name, he would have nailed it.

Fine for some readers, but many students these days won't have a clue about the word's meaning. I'm not convince that "dandy" is much better; in fact, it may be worse.

Well, telling them so is what teachers are for. That's where I heard the word first, anyway.

I just google defined: fop.

I definitely had no idea what a fop was. It sounds like something sexual.

It still sounds pretty sexual even after you know what it means, doesn't it?

I think it's the sound of an unused flacid penis on impact.

During the nineties the red tops would refer to Steve McManaman as a fop I don’t think it’s that uncommon or fallen from use in the last decade.

Wow, I'm shocked to hear positive things in this thread about this book.

I thought it was horrible.

Have you read Positively 5th Street, The Biggest Game in Town, or Poker Nation? All poker books that are far superior to this.

Ken

I read the first two but not the second. So far, those are both clearly superior to this one.

Anthony Holden's first book was also very fun and very good, despite his kind of silly ideas about how to make money in poker(including spending crippling sums on travel).

yeah, the first book was good. The second book I gave up on after a few chapters.

Kinda like Anthony Robbins. Maybe they're the same guy?

Blarg,

I'm intrigued about your statement on biography. Do you think that the work of a poet is better enlightened by a study of his biography than the work of an author? I admit that it may just be because I've only recently begun to really study the lives and influences of the poets I read, but there are some intricacies to their work which seem to me much more understandable as a result of examining the biography of the poet in question.

We can take writers as disparate in theme and time as Chaucer and Keats to demonstrate this point I think. Reading Chaucer's portraits of the pilgrims in the GP of the Canterbury tales is aided immeasurably, for instance, by considering the physiognomies he would have had access to; his statement that The Miller's Tale took place on a Monday becomes relevant when you consider the way in which Mondays were thought about by medieval people...there are many more examples. With Keats there are many influences throughout his life which occur in his poetry; his school life at Enfield, his inclusion in the Blackwood's magazine articles on 'The Cockney School'; moreover we can ask whether his assertion that Wordsworth's 'egotistical sublime' was a poorer sort of poetry than his 'negative capability' is borne out of the fact that Wordsworth, on one occasion on which they met, was hugely derisive of Keats' poetry rather than that it was a truly held opinion...and so forth.

While these are somewhat potted and extremely limited biographies of both figures, I still think that they offer a good deal of insight into their works.

However, I also take your point about over-elaborate psychological investigation: my professor, who is currently working on a biography of Keats, today shared with the group a putative theory about the presence of Keats' dead parents in 'The Fall of Hyperion' based on the word 'pavement'.

I agree that any ancillary materials, biographical or not, might possibly lend some insight into a work. But I also feel that some reading about an author's life is used not just as a supplement to but as a replacement for either insight into the author's works or the simple chore of reading them.

At any rate I believe that reading is often much too much these days "about" materials rather than of the original materials themselves. It can be very intellectually lazy.

Relying too much, or too early in one's reading of an author or his particular texts, on the opinions of others can also leave one fairly defenseless against being hoodwinked by another's agenda, limited or incorrect understanding, or well-presented mere personal quirks. Marxists, feminists, reactionaries, ethno-centrists, overly-religious types, and adherents to all sorts of schools of thought can all have a stake in training a reader to read wrong. Careers and great social status have been built on it. Many of those people are quite good at what they do, and certainly a match for an as yet ignorant new reader. It is easy to find a slant on something; finding a view with depth and balance is much harder.

Acquiring a balanced view of an author, I believe, is best and most easily done by simply reading a lot of him, and reading some of his work a few times. Until a reader has thoroughly explored an author's writing itself, outside speculations, criticism, and stories and polemics about the author will be of very limited value. How can a reader know the worth of a critic's take on a thing when he doesn't yet know the thing himself anyway? What is there to compare and judge against? Nothing. He is in danger of merely regurgitating someone else's ideas and, worse, mistaking them for his own. That would be taking an opportunity for intellectual -- and who knows, maybe spiritual? emotional? creative? whatever -- growth and turning it into a dead end. What a terrific waste.

I'm sure the original author has often done his very best to give us something to prompt some sort of growth in understanding or spirit, or that he feels is of such great value that the work was worth the bother of what may have been months or years of effort. At any rate, I feel we owe him the benefit of the doubt when we set out to read him, and that the best way to find out is to go straight to the source. There will plenty of time for the cacaphony of the world and all its misbalanced needs to pull us back and try to slap us about with its thoughts on the matter.

A few objections. First, though, I believe we can learn much of what a work is about simply by reading the work itself. Many writers, however, haven't left all that much. In fact, even Shakespeare only wrote thirty seven plays, a little over a hundred sonnets, and a couple other poems. Yet the field of Shakespeare studies continues to be rich and vibrant. What makes it so? I think, in part, it's the new approaches various trained critics and readers bring to the study of Shakespeare. Why not bring in Freud and Marx? These are the two key influences for much of 20th century thought, and they have conditioned our reading of the plays. (As have, say, the performances staged by various directors, themselves influenced by these key figures.) I think it's impossible to read, for example, Jan Kott's Shakespeare, Our Contemporary without giving some credence to his readings of Shakespeare based on his own experience. Even far-ranging critics such as Frank Kermode return to studies of Shakespeare that simply look at Shakespeare's language in the plays.

Also, most teachers and critics have read far more of both the primary and secondary works than any of us will ever read in a lifetime. In one bookcase at home, I have much of Ezra Pound's poetry, a couple volumes of translations, another five or six books of his criticism, and perhaps forty secondary studies, including biographies and critical studies. Although that sounds like a lot, it's not even a dent in all the work by and about Pound. But I know my understanding of the work has been enlarged considerably by teachers and critics.

I will concede that I have spent time reading and rereading the original work of many authors, but, for the most part, I have found that criticism of all kinds--from the purely textual to the most recondite--has been a benefit over the years, enabling me to become a better reader of the original work.

Of course, I'm pretty good at resisting dogma too.

Definitely an important quality.

I am not objecting to the use of ancillary materials so much as the timing. I think the timing of many people's turning to outside materials is in some ways immodest, in that it supposes one has a grounding in the materials that would enable one to fairly judge critical slants and supplementary materials that one often simply doesn't have. Worse, that one may have little interest in having. This can't help but do a disservice to both text and reader..

I guess I'm in a way reacting here against the sort of idle pseudo-intellectual chatter I have been exposed to by barely-educated and barely-interested smarty-pants over the years in casual conversation, as well as those critics shooting an angle and making cheap shots in pursuit of their own easy scores against dead men despite often not being able to hold a candle to their talent and commitment. If I never hear another knowing culture vulture proclaiming that Freud is worthless because he didn't understand women, Hemingway is worthless because he was either a) obsessed with being macho or b) committed suicide, that Celine was worthless because he supported the Nazis, or that Nietzsche was worthless because he supported the Nazis, was nationalist, or anti-semitic (OMFG triple groan), it will be too soon.

We are speaking to a certain extent of different audiences. By the time one is teaching material, one would hope to be fully grounded in it and the surrounding critical theory and biographical aspects. By the time one is talking about it, only an overheard snatch of conversation from a friend one respects, a tendentious article, and a trumpet affixed to one's arse is required.

I do have a certain reverence for a work of art that it seems to me only someone who has a bit of the artist at heart has which I don't think is at all necessarily present in the critic. Creation and evaluation and historicism are different tendencies. Sometimes they manifest in the same person, but sometimes they don't. And I think there may be the occasional fierce jealousy involved when they don't.

At any rate, most of all, I am objecting to the lazy reader, not the lazy critic or the well-intentioned and perhaps quite legitimate one.

FWIW, I very much enjoy some Marxist and Freudian analysis. Roland Barthes is one of my favorite authors.

A question a bit off topic but -

John Cole - do you recommend Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era as a thorough and balanced treatment of Pound and his poetry?

"Pseudo-intellectual chatter" I think this is more seductive than we think especially in literature. A few days ago I was chatting with someone who had just written an English literature paper on "The Glass Menagerie".

I was a little surprised when he told me the psychological extrapolation that he made about the character Amanda in that play and put into his homework essay. Essentially he had drawn the conclusion that one of Amanda's children (I can't remember if he said Laura or Tom) was an illegitimate child of hers. He based it on her 17 gentleman callers. He just assumed because she was popular with men that she had played fast and loose with her beaus and had an illegitimate child.

I read the play twice and never drew that conclusion but he let me read his paper and it actually with the exception of the illegitimate children thing was rather well thought out. He had Amanda pegged as a control freak in competition with her own daughter for attention and a few other psychological insights that he explained rather plausibly.