fieldus

Interesting enough shoptalk with the former barrister:
Mark Sarvas interviews Joseph O’Neill (via Nigel Beale).

Simon Schama in surprisingly good form wriiting in The FT about Updike and more specifically his last collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears.

An Appraisal - John Updike, Intuitive and Precise, Mapped America’s Mysteries - NYTimes.com
In one of these collections, Mr. Updike summed up his love of his vocation: “From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense [...]

Part way through Zadie’s NYRB article, Two Paths for the Novel, looking at Netherland (next up) and Remainder.
Ambitious and serious, even pretentious.
I may be wrong, but I think I saw ZS in Bloomsbury: walking a small pooch.
For more discussion see RSB.

Review: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon | Books | The Guardian
Dostoevsky sees France as under the sway of its smug, hypocritical bourgeoisie, while England is massive, industrial, infernal, apocalyptic. Its crowds fascinate him, as in this striking portrayal of binge drinking, Victorian-style: “On Saturday nights working men and [...]

from a review of of Judith Thurmans’ New Yorker essay on Leni Riefenstahl:
Time, that is intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons [...]

Zbigniew Herbert
Spinoza’s Bed
IT IS AN amazing thing that our memory best retains images of great philosophers when their lives were coming to an end. Socrates raising the chalice with hemlock to his mouth, Seneca whose veins were opened by a slave (there is a painting of this by Rubens), Descartes roaming cold palace rooms with [...]

This fellow had quite a life:

Lived on a houseboat on the Seine.

Has bad philosophy killed the Booker prize? | Books | guardian.co.uk
Recently, the British philosopher Simon Critchley gave a lecture at the inaugural Speakers’ Corner held at the Paradise Row gallery in East London. There’s something a little out of the ordinary right there. It’s that juxtaposition of the words “British” and “philosopher”.
It sits uncomfortably with [...]

Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy express outrage at being ridiculed and victimised by their nation | Books | The Guardian
Houellebecq also talks for the first time in detail about his parents, answering his mother, who recently published her own book calling him a “stupid little bastard”.
In a literary scandal that gripped France, she took to [...]