Happy day: The Paris Review’s Art of Fiction interview with Borges is online. I could have pulled out almost any paragraph and set it on its own, but (surprise) here’s Borges on Twain. Also, writing with conviction. I’m talking to an American: there’s a book I must speak about — nothing unexpected about it — that book is Huckleberry Finn. . . .
Dana closing up shop is like Freaks & Geeks going off the air — but sadder, because I devoured the show in one epic DVD marathon a few years ago, while I’ve hung onto every word of Number One Hit Song, week after week, since before it was called that. The woman’s got more talent than all the trick dolphins . . .
My stepdaughter, A., is visiting for ten days. This weekend Max and I took her to French Book Art/Livres d’Artistes: Artists and Poets in Dialogue, an NYPL exhibition that runs through August 19. Magritte’s giraffe in a wine glass impressed us all. And Paul Eluard’s accompanying Dadaist poem, “Musicien,” was weirdly intelligible even to our French-illiterate party. (A. is the . . .
I finally got out to the Pierpont Morgan Library on Sunday. It’s a weird jumble of ancient and modern texts and artifacts collected by J.P. Morgan’s tycoon father and displayed under glass in airy rooms or inside locked cabinets in musty ones. Mary Shelley’s own annotated copy of Frankenstein (at right; larger version here) sits alongside the only intact Caxton . . .
When I started to run out of Mark Twain’s nonfiction earlier this year, I turned to a fellow Twain maniac* for help. He sent me off in search of Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday (1981). The book opens with some hilarious rants on censorship — “There is never any shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though . . .