Midweek Miscellany

Killing Her Softly — Joseph O’Neil reviews Martin Stannard’s biography of Muriel Spark for The Atlantic (thx Ben):

In one of her memoirs, [Doris] Lessing suggests: “Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.” This sounds like an understatement, particularly in relation to the last pre-feminist generation, to which she belonged. Dipping into it, we see that Penelope Fitzgerald, a mother of three, did not publish until the age of 58, that Iris Murdoch and Flannery O’Connor and Patricia Highsmith were childless. Spark may not have been alone in associating motherhood with artistic and personal annihilation. (Other patterns emerge. Highsmith, Lessing, and Spark all loved cats, and in fact Spark received a cat from Highsmith, with whom she also shared itinerancy and a gleefully vicious imagination. If you took scoops of the temperaments of Doris Lessing and Patricia Highsmith and added a dollop of Flannery O’Connor—for the cold Catholicism—the resulting gelato would taste a lot like Muriel Spark.)

Sensory Deprivation — The ubiquitous Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom,  interviewed at the A.V. Club:

Where does this stuff come from? It comes from sensory deprivation. It comes from turning down all the volume knobs to the one setting—or somewhere between zero and one—on everything, so I can actually hear myself think and I can actually poke around inside myself. We’re all so used to cultural noise being played at full volume. It can come as a surprise, even to myself, how much you can know about what’s going on by listening to almost nothing. It’s important, because if you have it up at full volume, you can’t hear yourself think, and all you want to do is chase after the stuff that’s going on.

And if you think Mr Franzen might have got a little too big for his boots, then following Emperor Franzen on Twitter might be for you (“I was on the cover of TIME. That’s TIME magazine, bitches…”).

Fighting the Last War — John Le Carré talks to the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme about his new novel Our Kind of Traitor (released next month):

“I was laughed at, in a way, when the Cold War ended and the wall came down… ‘Poor old Le Carre, what will become of him? Nobody’s spying anymore.’ The reality is, the budgets have never been bigger, the recruitment has never been more wholesale.”

Boredom — Lee Rourke, author of The Canal, interviewed for 100th issue Bookslut:

We’re in constant thrall, either waiting to be used by technology or desperately trying to catch up with it. Boredom is the realization of an acute emptiness caused by this widening void… There’s nowhere for us to go now. We are stranded. We have been marooned. My novel, The Canal, is a summation of this sense of dread: this slow realization that things, everything, is speeding up and moving away from us. We have been left with the inability to deal with what this distance creates within us…

And finally…

Living in Conservative Times — Tom McCarthy reviews What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici for The Guardian:

In cultural terms, we live in deeply conservative times… We shouldn’t imagine, though, that things were that different in the golden age of modernism. Ulysses was printed, in 1922, on a small, private press in Paris, in a run of 1,000; Kafka’s Metamorphosis, on its small-press publication in 1915, sold 11 copies – of which 10 were bought by Kafka. Yet can anyone, now, name the successful middlebrow writers of 1922 or 1915? Of course not.

(And, as this is a blog for people who like to live under rocks, Tom’s novel C was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize yesterday.)