Reading Time: 1 Min.
Proust lover Trevor Cribben Merrill How do authors get away with shallow, shabby, venal, morally deficient characters who appall us … but nevertheless, we read on? Trevor Cribben Merrill , author of Minor Indignities , explains: “the ‘spirit of the author’ shields the reader from the characters, ‘drawing the poison’ from their negative qualities of arrogant stupidity, shallowness, and triviality.” He writes about it on Genealogies of Modernity , a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities to explain “how we became modern.” Trevor writes: “ This essay is about as close as I have come to articulating an artistic credo.” Excerpt from “Three Lessons in Beauty” below: We would not want to spend time with Proust ’s snobs. In their most honest moments, even his characters describe the fancy dinner parties they attend as boring and stifling. But to read about these soirées, and the people at them, is another matter. Similarly, if we were to encounter him in real life, Jane Austen ’s Mr. Collins would be a bore; on the page, he is at once a bore, and, with his absurd boasts about the size of the chimney-piece at Rosings Park, a pure delight. In both cases the authors make us enjoy the sort of people we would try to flee at a cocktail party. It is not only that Proust’s prose and metaphors are exquisite, but that he turns the wretched maneuverings and deceit of his snobs into poetry. Out of pretense, dullness, and even malice, Austen, too, makes art. “ The formal innovations of the great masters always have a certain discreetness about them ,” he writes. [italics his] His characters disgust us, and yet… Recently while sick in bed I listened to Beethoven ’s Piano Sonata 31, Op. 110 performed first by Rudolf Serkin and then by Glenn Gould . Composed in 1821, Op. 110 is the next to last of the composer’s piano sonatas, and falls squarely in his “late” period, during which he created many of his most beautiful and formally adventurous works. Beethoven is known for bridging classical […]
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Reading Time: 1 Min. Fantasy and science fiction readers are naturally open to the unexpected, and they like new takes
Reading Time: 1 Min. The first thing that strikes you about Mia Farrow in Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” now at
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