Pulitzer-winning book critic Michael Dirda joins us to talk about the role of negative reviews, the value of book reviews in the internet age, breaking out of the genre ghetto, his path into Book World, and more! [This one is a re-mastered edition of the Oct. 2012 episode.]
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 2, Episode 13 - The Correction of Taste
[music] Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm Gil Roth and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show and find all our past episodes at the iTunes store. You can also find those episodes, get on our email list and make a donation to the show at either of our websites, VMSPod.com or chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can find us on Twitter @VMSPod at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. This episode originally posted in October of 2012. The audio was so bad that I went back to the original files and remastered and re-edited everything. I recorded this one on older equipment before I had much of an idea of what I was doing with audio processing and also I didn't have the nerve to ask the guest to talk a little closer to the mic. The original file has a lot of hiss on it, makes it very difficult to listen to and that comes from my primitive attempt at amplifying his voice and trying to make him more legible. This one should sound a lot clearer and I'm thrilled to have a new edition of this episode for you because it's one of the most downloaded ones in the show's history and I've been embarrassed all this time by the sound quality of the old one. You might still need to listen closely at a few stretches when he kind of drifts away from the mic but overall I think you'll be a lot happier with this version. The guest for this episode is Michael Derta, the Pulitzer Prize winning book critic and I've been a fan of Michael's work since I lived in Maryland in the early 1990s and in the early days of this show I was thrilled that he gave me the opportunity to come to his house and sit down and record a conversation. I don't think it gets mentioned in the show itself but he was only the second guest whom I'd never met previously. Until then it was family members, friends, people I knew from college and one author. So he sort of helped start the trend of by getting real guests I suppose you'd put it. We met up again just a few weeks ago in Massachusetts at ReaderCon to do a follow up talk and discuss that show and banter about books because that's who we are. And I figured on the occasion of that follow up podcast I would go back and give you guys a clean version of this one. Now Michael Derta is a weekly book columnist for the Washington Post and he received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism while working there. He's the author of the memoir, an open book as well as four collections of essays, readings, bound to please, book by book and classics for pleasure. His most recent book, On Conan Doyle, received a 2012 Edgar Award for Best Critical Biographical Work of the Year. Mr. Derta graduated with highest honors in English from Oberlin College and earned a PhD in Comparative Literature, medieval studies in European Romanticism, from Cornell University. He's a contributor to the New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Online Barns and Noble Review, The American Spectator and a lot of other periodicals. He's also a frequent lecturer and occasional college teacher. And now the remastered virtual memories conversation with Michael Derta. The main thrust of what I'd like to do is far too simplistic, it's simply the questions, who are you and how did you get that way? I like to think of it in terms of the books that influence us the most. I had a great number of yours and your memoir. I haven't read your reviews and your memoir recently. It's an interesting path. But you know, let me just. Well, maybe we should start with the autobiographical and then segue into the other stuff. I don't know. Sure. These ones pop up. Those are the main ones again. There's also, I don't know if you're, if you have an opinion you want to share, the question of that recent kerf level about the significant, the lack of negative reviews in the book world. I don't know if you want to go into that or what role you see. Given that your writeups, I don't know what to describe them as, as you mentioned, bound to please introduction, they weren't exactly book reviews so much as appreciations, at least with those. Yeah, appreciations of fans notes. Yeah. I was just looking over the top at the, the X-ray over there. I have to read the second and third because the first one I always adore. The first one is the fabulous book, the second and third are. I didn't like them in college. They, they, they go downhill. So the first half of the pages from the Cole, Cole Island is pretty good. Then it. At the Edmund Wilson one? And there, and there are bits and pieces in all of them. He said he's a good writer. But they don't hold together in the way that fans notes does, which is just an age book, I think. Yeah. You're one of the few people who picked up on that reference to this book. You know, I do think of myself as a rather old fashioned sort of critic, a bookman. And because I've been around long enough with The Washington Post at least, I'm able to pretty much choose the books I've reviewed. But at least perhaps three quarters of them. And that means that most of the reviews I'm going to write tend to be fairly positive, maybe with some reservations or Cavels. But that's because I'm, I'm picking and choosing. In the old days when I was both an editor and a writer, if I started a book and didn't like it, I would put on my editor's hat and assign it to somebody else and do it another shot. And my view being that if I was going to spend my time reading something, I would prefer to spend it on books that matter, that were important or that I thought were good. In my mid 30s, I did hit upon the maxim that life really is too short for crappy novels. And I've kind of, you know, learned to just put something down if it's not working. Yeah. You do have that. But there are times, of course, when you're, you know, part of the job, part of the job, you do write negative reviews and the problem from, the issue for me for negative reviews is they're so easy to write and they're, they become, they're easy to become self-indulgent. I think it's hard, much harder to write an enthusiastic appreciation and to make it entertaining than to write a negative review because you can be, you can be funny, you can be snarky. I can remember, I was, I was doing a fair number of hybrid books and I tend to have a lot of interest in fairly academic and scholarly subjects. And my colleague said, you know, dirty, you've been doing all these, these, these, these were Cheyenne volumes. Why don't you do a popular novel for a change? I said, sure. Okay. And they said, this one, Judith Krantz's new novel Dazzle, Judith Krantz is a probably remember that much anymore, but she was an incredibly popular back in the 80s, scruples, Princess Daisy, they were made in miniseries. Well this book was just about the worst novel I'd ever read, it was incredibly maritricious. Even the sex was boilerplate. And I remember starting the review with something like, I read Judith Krantz's Dazzle in one sitting. I had to. I was afraid I couldn't face picking it up again. And then I went through the review and destroyed it, destroyed the book as well as I could. And I ended with something like, sometimes critics lament that good trees were felled in order to produce such and such a book. In the case of Judith Krantz's Dazzle, I feel, I even feel bad for the ink and the gloom. And I mean, that, that sort of thing is easy to do, and it's fun to do. But odd and all he said, writing negative reviews is bad for your character. And I think there's something to that. On the other hand, if you continually write just positive reviews, particularly the kind that I'd certainly avoid, where people say, this is the greatest novel since War and Peace. Sure. You know, this is unput down a bowl, this, you know, all the sort of. Every sentence is alive or not a dead sentence in the case. It's like, you know, this is such a brave poet, you know, somebody who, you know, once Jay walked or something, you know, it's not like they were working coal mines or in Afghanistan. But those sorts of exaggerations diminish and demean book review. I try to write reviews where there are no sentences that you can pull out easily for dust jacket. As a former publisher, I used to hate those. A village boy stood one about the Paul Wesson book. I said, I'm not sure if they liked it, and I have nothing from this that I can use for a blurb. Well, I mean, a friend of mine who was a quite famous reviewer in her day, she always wrote one sentence in a review, which was the Paul quote basically, she advised that. But I've avoided that. Just feeling that I want the reader to experience the review, the essay is, you know, a source of pleasure and enlightenment, whatever, in its own way. And I'm not there just to be cheerleader. I mean, the overall intent of my writing and talk about books is to encourage people to read, but also to read more widely, to read beyond bestsellerists, to not just look at the books of the moment, but to look at the books that may be easily passed over because of different smaller houses or more specialized places or the books of the past that they often will speak to us more vitally than the latest James Patterson. So that goal of expanding reader horizons has always been important to me, partly because I grew up as an omnivorous kind of book kid, love mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, serious books of those aren't serious books too. But quote unquote, literary fiction, yeah, I mean, I think of all of it as literary fiction if it's well written. And, you know, I want people, I want to, when I first started a book, all I wanted to break down those barriers, I read a piece in 1980 for the nation called the genre ghetto, which I promulgated that coming generation of novelists over the next 25 or 30 years would be drawing their energies from the genre books of the time that they'd been at that time much disparaged and dismissed. And that science fiction, fantasy, westerns, crime novels would be central to this generation finally based on the notion that literary history doesn't move, as you know, from father to son, mother to daughter, but it moves from aunt and niece to uncle to nephew. And so that they would look to the size, they would look away from modern domestic realism to other forms of literature for models and inspiration. And that has in fact happened to some degree. We have a much more fantastic streak of accepted mainstream literature, you know, people like Michael Shaben and what is Cormac McCryse's art thing, right, but westerns. What do you make of Shaben, because I just don't get him at all. Here's my line about Cavaller and Clay, as I put it, if you write a novel about Jews, immigration around World War II, escape artists and comic books, and you manage to lose me, you haven't written a good book. And I've never made it more than 100 pages through that without just flinging across the room in anger. But I just read slightly, I reviewed Cavaller and Clay, and I got to know Michael afterwards. So we are, you know, we're friendly. There should be a word between acquaintance and friend. Friendly works, because it's not friend. That's, you know. We are friendly. We've been on panels and things together, but my take on Cavaller and Clayse, I actually quite like the first three quarters. I thought it lost in the last quarter. And I think a number of people have felt that the last part of the book, he lost something, some control or some persuasiveness. I have, almost everything I write, you have to read me in some ways carefully. I will always tend to say very positive and descriptive. Well, first of all, I have two views on the book review. I think the essence of book reviewing is descriptive rather than valued. You tell people what is there, first of all, and you can then, they can judge sometimes whether it's something they're going to like or not like. And in the way you tell it, you insert something of your view of how well it's done. And I use generally the Cavallers, as I would call them, the little tweaks of criticism usually come at the penultimate paragraph or somewhere lower down in the column. So one that you do want to, you don't want to start a review saying, you know, this is the worst book I ever read and the people will stop. I kind of, you know, sometimes people will sort of scan the first part and say, "Oh yeah, I love this book." But if you look carefully in the, you know, that seventh or eighth paragraph, you'll see I will point out things where I think the book is less successful than it might be or where there are little flaws. I tend not to emphasize them if I think the overall book is good and it's worth reading. And, you know, this was around what Joel said, a novel, is a narrative of some length with something wrong with it. And that's true of almost all books. There are very few perfect novels, perhaps, you know, Beyond Mad and Bovary and The Good Soldier. It's hard to think of any. I have not touched Ford, Maddox Ford, by the way, I've never started him and after reading Bound to Please and going, "I really need to put him on my list and finally give him a general." A good soldier is just a terrific book. Yeah. This is the saddest story I've ever heard. I mean, very intricate telling and plotting. I'm very fond of plotting, and there's one thing I'm always going on about that somebody who's a great plotter, so he's an ace in my book. But not only for the sake of carrying the action along, necessarily. Well, you know, they tell an intricate story with, from many points of view, bring it together. In the case of The Good Soldier there, it's a very subtle and ironic book. It's not as like Wilkey Collins, where you literally have multiple viewpoints. I mean, the woman in white is just astonishing book. Or a book like Ian Pears, an instance of The Finger Post, which is a huge, fat mystery. Yeah, I recall that. I haven't read it, though. I have a history in the 17th century, and it's a brilliant piece of plotting. Or even Agatha Christie, I've once wrote a mess around, these young writers, they spend all their time learning to emote, and tell about their dysfunctional childhoods. And they should really read Agatha Christie and learn how to put together a story. So everything fits perfectly. You can then disregard it. I think, as an artist, you probably should, just cusp and draw perfectly well. Beautifully. You can draw as well as Angra, but most of the time he wasn't interested in doing a lot of that. This was the nature of my education. It went to Hampshire College for my undergraduate years, where you have no curriculum, and everything is self-guided. And I found that, for me, at that point, worthless, and that was a problem. I went to St. John's College after that for two years for the graduate degree, where we're all studying the same history of the great works of Western Civ. And that was the, oh, if I had this before, I went to the guide your own education that this may have worked out, but, yeah, I tried to make up for it just two years. I thought about St. John. If you read my memoir, I'd have an episode there where I persuade my parents to buy the great books of the Western world. Yeah, so that was a great passage. Yeah. That's right. And so as a result, I became aware around that time of St. John's School. So the Mortimer Adler sort of edited it, and I read how to read a block, and I've written about that wonderful essay he wrote that was much reprinted back in the '40s or '50s, how to mark a book. But then I decided that it was perhaps, I don't know what, maybe it was too great book-y, and I felt a little uncertain about where I would, if I would be able to go on to graduate school easily from such a background, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I went off to college. '18 is far too young for college, I've largely concluded that we did something that we are. I mean, I went to Oberlin largely because it was the only college I'd heard of, and I wrote to them and said, "You know, it can be some money and I'll work hard, do well." But I started as a biology major and switched to economics, and like James Dobro, I could only see my eyebrows, my eyelashes in microscopes, and I could never find anything which microscopes. And then my econ teachers would say, "You actually write pretty well, but you don't understand economics at all, and so I knew I was doomed to be an English major." But even then I took the bare minimum English courses to as much French in history as English. It's handed from an open book, it's handed as though you ended up in the wrong end of the pool early on with English also and managed to. I don't know English, but with the French literature. The wrong end, because I went back to the French. I thought you were in the high level classes at a point of which you were not aware that it was a high level class? Oh, that was the English class, yeah, it was Andrew Bonjourno's class, retiring guys. I've been in Oberlin since 1918 when he came there as an undergraduate. Wonderful teacher. Years later, he lived in his 90s. He's a brother-in-law of Maynard Mack of Yale, and I'm called Maynard Mack, Jr., here at University of Maryland. I was just looking at a book by Robert Lowell, about Robert Lowell, a memoir by Kathleen Katherine Spivak. And she was at Oberlin, and she talks in the opening pages about going to see the chairman of the department, Andrew Bonjourno, asking if she could get a year off to the stadium of Robert Lowell. I'm going to see he granted you the two of you. Anyway, he was, yeah, English was kind of a fallback for me. I've always had this sense that, I mean, it was too easy in some ways, and almost all of the classes I took in English were early. I didn't take any virtually no modern classes, and only one, I think only one class in the 19th century literature. No, two classes. I took a class in American realism that went up to 20 to 20, and I took a class in Yates and Stevens. But everything else was pretty much early, and of course I went to graduate school in and medieval studies initially, and such European romanticism, and they ended up taking four years of courses in Cornell, which tended to make me look rather unfocused, which I suppose I was. I just wanted to go to graduate school, because I wanted to read a lot more books, and that's what you did. And I was surprised when I got there to learn that all these people were all, you know, already knew exactly what they wanted to study, write their dissertations on it, and come there to study with particular professors. And, you know, it's just a lie to die. It swears a library. That's all you want to know. Found your way around. You found yourself. No, you found yourself in the process of that. Well, yeah, I sometimes wonder about where it's not taken. So I've been teaching nothing on the last few years. It's been not the accordion. This is another reference to an open book. Sorry. Oh, yeah. No, the accordion. No, it's just the accordion. It's up in the attic. I have one in my, I have one in my storage room that I bought off an old girlfriend and I keep thinking I need to teach myself how to play. You know, it's a stand. You're in good stead. Yeah. Although it's, you know, a flute would be a little more. Yeah, I was going to say not something. You were going to become a busker in France. I never knew I was going to be a book with you. I just knew I was going to be involved with writing books in some way. I thought I would be a college teacher. And I had aspirations to become a writer. But the kind of creative writing is a normal course for people who are interested in becoming an author. For me, it was interesting. But I, because I'd like to read so much because reading had been so important to my life, that I always trumped just writing. I always, there were always more things I wanted to learn, more books I wanted to read, that I would experience of. And those seemed to me more vital in my own case than writing stories of my own. I wanted to read the great stories of the world, the great books of the world. And not to, you know, not to go to my death with, you know, having missed out on the tale of Genji or any number of famous books that it's easy not to read. And so that mattered to me. And so I needed to find a way that I could do a lot of reading and get paid for. Of course, there's people to say, you know, well, you're a booker who you get paid to read. I said, actually, I don't get paid to read. I get paid to write about what I read. If I just read them, they would do no good whatsoever. There are times that people will ask me and what are you reading for pleasure? And I said, I haven't read it for pleasure in 30 years. Yeah, I was going to ask, but I thought better myself when I came in. No, I mean, everything I read, I'm planning to write about in one way or another, even if it's not immediate. You know, for years, I read, you know, at Christmastime, John Dickson Carr locked room mysteries every one a year, Christmastime. You know, and after I'd written about a dozen, I wrote a six, seven thousand word essay for a book on a John Dickson Carr. So even that pleasure stuff ultimately was corrupted, co-opted. How do you think your approach has changed to reviewing over the decades? Um, I think, I think when I started off writing reviewing, I think was, you know, I started relatively late. I didn't write a book review till I was 28 or 29. First review I did was for the Chronicle of Higher Education, this book called the Last of the Novelists. That's Scott Fitzgerald and the last tycoon by Matthew Buckley. The letter got to meet Buckley down in New Orleans, in fact, when he's words of music festivals, and tell him that he's the one who got me started down this, Primrose path. But, um, I initially felt very strongly about being, and I think it's natural for young people in those days, at least, be sort of impersonal, austere, olympian, almost. Not the sound that I was smarter than I was or I'd read more than I was, but I was very leery of ever using the first person single, saying, "I" or getting too personal. And as the years rolled by, I loosing, loosened up. So that now I do, I write a lot of different kinds of bookish essays from different places, I read a weekly blog of sorts for the American scholar, where they're very personal pieces about books and writing in my life. It's called "Browsings," and I do these freelance columns from the times that are a supplement, some regularity, and they're similar. And, um, and I've allowed myself to be a little looser in the, in the, in the, in the, the personal. I think that's, in some ways, it's an aspect of late style from, you know, artists, particularly painters. And when they get older, they start just sort of throwing the pain on, you know, and they just, they, they, they're, they're just very much more nashalot in a way that they weren't when they were young, when they were very attentive to, to structure, manner, and they become, I guess it gets a question of partly of confidence over time, partly the fact that most of your audience, at least for the post and many of the places, know you already so you can, you can risk, be a little more risky than if you're an unknown. When I write from the New York Review of Books, it's much more formal in a way than when I write for other places. So that has changed. And I have a good friend named John Clute, who is a leading science fiction critic, probably ever, who's read everything. And who has now, he's, no, no, he had nine years old as an I am. Maybe not that much now. He's certainly 70, 71 at this point. And he's very, he's perennially youthful. He's as eager now to read the newest science fiction novel from some 22-year-old as he was when he was 22 himself. I can't say that's true for me. It's one reason why I stepped down from being an editor about eight years ago and became, took a buyout and just started writing more of my own stuff. I realized that I was still certainly interested in young writers, but not with the same passion and with the same connectedness that I had when I was their age. I had followed a certain generation up, admired a generation older than mine. And the younger people, I would, I would sort of dip into, you know, write about their books and try to appreciate them, try to keep up. But there had been, there wasn't the sense of identification that this is, these are my people as well. These, these are my sons' people. And when I realized that, I recognized that I should step down as an editor. And editor needs to be vitally concerned with the writers who are just emerging and who are young people in their 20s. It's interesting. I asked Paul de Filippo back at June the same, "How do you generate enthusiasm at this point?" And he said, "There's still books that spark him, but yeah, I can imagine that it's, it's easier for him in as much as they're assigned, you know, he doesn't have to stay on top of the entire scene." But this weekend we're in Bethesda for this small press comics expo. And there is a clear generation gap. There are men in their 40s and 50s who are essentially the Mount Rushmore of, of non mainstream comics. And there are kids 25, 26 walking right by, having no idea who these guys are. And it's, Friday night we're sitting at a table at the bar with Chris Ware and Charles Burns and the Hernandez brothers and Danny Klaus. And a bunch of kids just went walking right by us right out out of the terrace. And my thought was that they all should have been looking over and stumbling over each other and falling out of it. See, I mean, I'm, I'm enough out of it that, you know, I reviewed some of these people. I mean, Dan Wilson, I reviewed Wilson, for example. And I think of he, well, I know he's an established major few, but obviously his, his, the theme of that book is a very one about, about middle-aged life. Yeah. So he's not going to appeal to you. But I think of him as a hot, younger artist. That's the funny thing. It's another generation gap now. There's a split between him and that's what I'm saying in terms of your generational passage and not, you know, against stepping down as editor. It's the same thing. And I don't know if it grows more hyper accelerated now. If it's, you know, smaller and smaller sets that we just can't keep up with and stay on time. Well, it could be. I mean, the world is, I think, you know, in my view, the, one of the great danger always, they're not, not so much danger. Young people need to make their own way. They're going to find their own masters and models. But I've always urged that the source of innovation really is in, in, in, in some ways, in tradition, in the past, you do, you use these as springboards. If you don't know what's already been done, how do you know that what you're doing is new and original and fresh? You'll find out you're repeating something that somebody actually did, you know, 150 years ago. And I think that this, this, this narrowness, one of the things I've regretted in the last, during my lifetime is, is a changeover in the English curriculum and universities in that people will go through and become English majors. And they will really only know the literature of their time. They will know the same 40 or 50 authors and, you know, the same, you know, that many books or maybe a few more. But, you know, you mentioned anybody off the obvious track of the times. They'll, you know, they'll, they'll say, oh, they'll know Gary Steingart, but they won't know Mikhail Bogokov, you know, who would be somewhat sort of similar. But, you know, that would be and they might know Bogokov. But there are other figures, they might not go go for that matter. You know, we go back further. And it's that narrowness, that, that feeling that anything that is not of the moment is irrelevant or not somehow vitally concerned, that worries me. I mean, I think about the, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a what I'm about the computer. I can hardly write anymore without a computer. But the whole essence of screen living tends to be speed. You, you know, I've seen kids, you know, when they do research papers, they go, boom, boom, boom, boom. They're not, they're not interested in reading the whole paper. They want to just find that the relevant sentence, maybe the relevant paragraph, and your computer's great for retrieving information, retrieving facts, but putting it all together, viewing it with a form, a structure, the kind of context that, you know, theory produces insight and wisdom. That, that doesn't really foster that, but, you know, inherently, you can do it. But the, the impulse is always to move right along, just as the way, you know, the way the people text with abbreviations and even blips and things. It creates a certain kind of mindset, certain kind of approach to the world that is different from those, you know, old farts who grew up on print, where you think of reading as an act of sustained attention, involvement with another, another person's vision that requires, you know, focus and, and sometimes argument, you know, you, you know, you, you know, you write with a pencil in your hand, you read with a pencil in your hand, you want to remark up the margins, you think about what's being said, what's important to you. So that, I mean, I'm somebody who reads, I move my lips while I read, takes me forever to read a novel, and I read Agatha Christie was a pencil, I mean, I can't read any. I think, I think George Steiner said in the election, was somebody who couldn't read, you know, vacation books without a pencil in sand. But the, you know, graphic novels, I mean, I, I think it's, you know, any, any, I do think it's important that the literature be shaken up, that people always be trying new things. You know, you know, you know, we were still writing novels about, well, some people probably are, you know, novels about adultery and Connecticut. You know, you can only read so many of those books, and you want someone to do weird things. Certainly in my early days as a, as a reviewer, the post, I was a great champion. So far as one can be a champion at a newspaper, a small presses, experimentally, which are innovative books. Love the Uleepo, read a lot about George Perak. Looks like, who now rios is, larva, a very complicated book, somewhat like David Mitchell books. I can footnote some levels, and you couldn't get a book that was too complicated for me. I, well, I liked it because it was a challenge, and I'd like to find ways of talking about it, and that would make it appealing. And one thing I've always noticed is that the great experimental novels tend to be comic novels, and that, um. And Sorrentino, Pinchon. Pinchon, I mean, Morgan Stu, Pinchon, as the books I've just mentioned, there, there, there are a lot of, I mean, even go back to classics, Ulysses, Prusst, Prusst. Prusst is incredibly funny, different kind of humor than the others, but I think they do that partly because if you're going to make people work hard, so humorless. There were beautiful passages, beautiful sentences, but it was just unbelieving sands of rhetoric and nothing happening. It was such a, you know, it's interesting to contrast that with William Gass also spending 30 years to work on a book, but coming up with a tunnel, which despite being ugly and, and I mean, I was also so hysterically funny. Very funny, wonderful book. I mean, you know, whenever you take a character, it's going to be, you know, reprehensible, at least in many ways, that all. You're going to have that issue. It's a real, you know, it's something I've often thought I should examine. So, you know, what do you do when you write, when you have writing a book about a character you really, the reader can't identify with or finds awful, and let's, you have to find something in some ways. You can ask Martin Amos. He seems to trade in that. True enough. Yeah, I love the tunnel. I mean, on, but of course, gas is somebody I written a number, a couple of times, several of the essays as well, and I, you know, love that prose, because it's true to also Paul's wests, but in case of gas, sometimes you want to say, you know, this is just gorgeous. But let's get on with it a little bit. It's a little bit self-adulgent. The essay has tended to get a bit, I don't want to say precious, but there's a certain level of, yeah. The, the, the, the flourishes become, uh, ends in themselves. Sure. Still, when you read those first couple of pages, say, God, this is great, but you have to, you have to space it out. Um, by, in my own case, you know, I have always been, been troubled because I'm a, I, I have no gift for similarly. Nothing ever reminds me of anything else. And so I, I write very, you know, you know, sentences that are very austere in some ways, and I have to, I have to get the personal effects and, uh, it's conveying information. By, by, by the choice of detail, by the certain, the choice of nouns and verbs sometimes, by the quotes, and by certain kind of liveliness, because I just, um, I just, I just can't come up with those comparisons. This is also why I, you know, revere people like Woodhouse, who can, can do that like that. He drank coffee with the air of a man who regretted it. It was not M. Walk. You know, he just, he just throws them out. It's just like that, you know, they're three or four on a page. Uh, what, what, you know, going back to your larger question about reviewing today, um, it's troubling for me. I mean, I, I, I sometimes think I may be the last generation of people who review books, who gets paid for it. There's so much free viewing going around. That's my next question is, how does the online, what impact is that had on, on what you do or, you know, the greater world around it, the free reviewing, uh, well, I, you know, I'm lucky enough that I was already established in a small way, at least, as a, as a writer of reviews and essays, who could be relied on to produce good copy that editors at magazines have been willing to employ me. I mean, I were, I live by my pen. I still don't have kids in school. I have a kid in college still to have gone through. And I've, you know, I hustle. I work harder now than when I took the post buyout. I was the youngest person eligible for the buyout and it was not obliged to take it. I took it because I wanted to write more. Um, it's been seven or eight years, but I work all the time now. Um, but I have, you know, I write for, have you anyone practically who paid me a dime, and to TLS, you know, to use books and also write for the weekly standards as well as New York Review books and New Criterion sometimes. But, but I write about poetry. I was going to say not doing any sort of political angle on either sides. I write about poetry when I, when I read a couple of times I written for the New Criterion, although I think it's a wonderful literary magazine. I, I, you know, problems with the politics and, but I admire, I admire it because it's, it stands up for its beliefs and sometimes it's a little, um, excessive for my really old SDS views, but, um, but anybody who cares about books, who cares about our cultures, still faces in my book. Um, anyway, and I would, I'd start writing for the Virginia Quarterly Review and in the case of before, um, any number of other places. I write this weekly piece for the, like a scholar, a monthly piece for Barnes and Noble Review, and all these places will, will pay me money. And I write for money. I mean, you know, I mean, I write for my own pleasure. I write, I write reviews that I hope an author will read and say, yes, he got, got, he got my book and I liked it, but he got it. All right, for readers too, but, but, um, I, I do think of myself as a professional and I need to be paid so that when people occasionally will ask me to write for something, I, or you have talks and I'm going to talk to my local library or local schools for nothing, but anybody else, you got to pay me. It's my, I mean, I live, I know, if I don't, you know, I'm not getting a salary. So if I, if I can't afford to spend a lot of time on doing things for nothing. Um, and how does that work in an ecosystem where there's so much? So, but, but so, you know, it's, you know, it's Gresham's law. I know bad money drives out good. Uh, the thing is, there's a lot of really good writing for free online and a lot of blogs and a lot of the, um, pieces even in Amazon are extremely well done and persuasive and cogent. But the thing is you, it's, it's, it's, you don't have what they call, I guess, is the gatekeeping. The curation is now, the term. Curation, is that the term now? Yes, that's where I'll keep using something. You don't have any, you don't have an editor. I mean, everything I write goes through an editor who will either, you know, take me to task or, you know, have to, things will be fact checked or question my judgment. Uh, I will argue with who, as I tell my occasional students when I teach writing, you know, your editor is always right. Even, even if you think he's wrong or she's wrong, he's always right. Because it's his or her magazine and they're paying you. And if they, you know, if you're going to be too much trouble for them, they're not going to employ you after that, that particular piece. So you, you best learn to swallow your pride and say, well, you know, I'll do a better or a different job next time or for someone else. So, sometimes you get things wrong and you guess wrong. I mean, I, I still guess wrong with occasional magazines and I write something that isn't what they wanted. And, you know, sometimes I, you know, just take it elsewhere. But it's harder to find things that pay online. For me, for me, for me, it's a lot of, a lot of what I write basically is I have to persuade you through my writing and the authority that it might convey when you read it, that you can believe me or that you can trust my judgment. But, but then too, I also think that what I, what I want, I want my pieces not, well, like the first book of essays, it's called readings and subtitles, essays and literary entertainments. Some of the ones are obviously literary entertainments. But I want all the things I write to be entertaining. If you never read the book, I want you to be entertained by my review. I want, and I, I, I do make, I do aim to make them fun and, and this may lead to the impression at times that I'm writing always, you know, write a lot of positive reviews. But, in fact, it's because I do love the books and because I've chosen them myself for a lot of places. They're my choices. I'm able to pick ones that I do, in fact, want you to be feel enthusiastic about. So, I don't, I, I mean, I wonder in the future whether things will become so narrow in a sense or so. If you're interested in ghost stories, you'll go to all hallows, or one of the other sites that deal with supernatural fiction. And you'll rely on your friends who have read books to be your gods rather than on any particular critic. So, it'll be a kind of collective wisdom on these, these chat groups, these listservs, the sites, and say, you know, we all, you know, basically, yeah, this, this latest book by whoever, Terry Pratchett, or something is, is a letdown, or is, is, is, is magnum opus. And you'll, you'll get a collective sense, I'm always good. The Mao would probably love love, love, love, you know, you get sort of red, red Chinese view on all these things. I don't, I don't, that the collective wisdom of, of a genre of aficionados will guide new readers into the field. That also means that the common received body of literature will be broken out. And the people who like one sort of book, for at least for, you know, may might switch from period to period, may might go through phases of mysteries, romance novels, or historical novels, or fantasy, or whatever. But, you know, the whole purpose of, you know, being, you know, learning about past, literature of the past, and its history, so that you can have conversations with people that are, are rich, and filled with little jokes, and you could expect them to pick up on things. So that, you know, just as, you know, I'd say a fan's notes, you know, you know, there's this little, little, little tweak of Frederick Exley there. Whereas now you can expect that. Of course, when you're in journalism, you're always going on about what level, what can you count on your reader knowing so that we're, you know, I have to say, you know, 16th century Elizabethan dramatist William Shakespeare. I only slightly exaggerate. And there's nothing wrong with that, because there are always going to be new readers. But the certain sense of, but, but, but, but kind of conversation, writing with a certain elevation, so to speak, certain kind of wit. Or a certain assumption on the part of the reader. We require, you know, the people to know what you're talking about if you allude to. Or pale fire reference a can boat. Yeah, I mentioned can boat, you know, who that is, or, or I was reading a book the other day, and there was a mention of Proteus, and there was a footnote identifying who Proteus was. And, you know, anyone who studied the classical mythology would know, or you would, you would know to look it up for yourself. But now people don't seem to count on any, any kind of understanding of the past, of the great artistic accomplishments of the past. And just as you were saying, the young comics writers today don't even know their own field. One of the things I always loved about science fiction, I'm a big science fiction fan and involved with the field for a number, often offered a long time, is that, at least until recently, science fiction had a kind of living past. Many of the great writers were still alive until about 20 years, 25, 30 years ago. I mean, I wrote the, the, the obit for Robert Highline for the post. And you, there was, there was still, you could still meet them at conventions. And when you got into science fiction, you weren't expected just to read, you know, today, you might be Charles Stross, or, you know, you know, Gaiman, or any other... - And China Mievo. - China Mievo. - But you would, you know, you would, you know, China Mievo was telling you, you should beat M. John Harrison. And people may not even know who M. John Harrison is, but now they might not even know who Robert Highline is, except as a name, or if they even know, you know, that, but in the past, you would expect people to be familiar with Jack Williamson, or all statehood, or to have read Clifford C. Mack, and the classics like City, and Slan, or, or, part and parcel of your, your, your, your passion for SF. There's now people who will go into it. They've, you know, they've got a couple of books by, by Neil, and they've, you know, they've, they've seen the Batman movies, and they're now science fiction fans. That wasn't the way it was. And they're still just like reader comics, which is a very reader. - That's going to say it's also a very fan interactive area, SF, in a way that maybe, again, they use a horrible term, literary fiction, isn't. But SF and comics, it's very much the creator and the reader. - Well, they're, they're together, and you meet a lot, you interact a lot of conventions, the fans and the pros, and, and essentially, at least in fantasy and science fiction, basically, everyone starts off as a fan and they become pros. - Yeah. - You know, everywhere, you know, all the major writers, they wrote fanzines when they were kids, and they, they, you know, they corresponded in the, you know, the magazines with other fans and writers, and they, and they gradually made the leap to first writing for semi-prosines, as they used to be called, and getting published, and then becoming the pros themselves. That, that, that kind of thing kept the field vital and alive and it set a sense of a living tradition, which I always admired. - And it involved more effort to, to get in touch with those pros to, to make that fancy, whereas now it's just, right of blogs, ended up, and there's 10 million other ones floating around. - Yeah, I mean, that's the other thing about the internet. I mean, I, I don't understand, I don't, you know, I understand how certain kinds of online sites and blogs become popular. Take somebody, well, I mentioned Neil gaming. And Neil is somebody who, who is a terrific writer, an imagined writer in multiple genres, but he's also somebody who was very focused on, on building his brands to speak, and he's somebody, he managed to do that incredibly well. I don't know whether it was just by, you know, he had the target and he just aimed at it for 20 years and got it. Whereas other people don't seem to, he just doesn't seem to catch fire, may only, may only, because he does have the talent to back it up. But people used to always ask, you know, why don't you have a web site or do your own blog or something? And I just don't think that'd get many readers. You know, I might get, I'd get certain people who already like, like me. But there's such a, you could have the, something I mentioned before we started running though, that online book club through the Washington Post used to do those weekly chats. Yeah, I still do chats with the Post. They changed about five years ago, for being live chats, which I like to be these blogs, which are static. I mean, I write threads and people respond, I sometimes respond to it. It just doesn't, doesn't have any kind of spark. I mean, that's too cruel. I mean, I've been involved with it, I've done it for a while. I better counterpunching. I better conversations with people ask questions or talk and back and forth. But you know, they're, they're, they're mysteries to social networks that are beyond me. But then I'm just not involved. They don't tweet. I don't have a website. I don't do Facebook. I partly, it's partly because I have a bill of feelings about my personal life. I mean, I write personal essays, but I don't feel that if I not, if they're personal essays and I shape them and I make them into something that is amusing or entertaining or a little tiny, sort of semi work of art, that's one thing. But I don't want to just blab about, you know, about my day. You can create separate ones. You can do a Michael Durda pro page and keep a separate family thing on the side. People are my friends that can email me and I write them back. I mean, I could, this might change. You know, my middle son is in public relations in New York company called Edelman. He does all his social networks. He's, he's where public relations is going. That's part of the job. Yeah. What's canonical now? And we're talking about this in terms of that fragmentation of fiction and novels and how everybody has their own genre that they're into. Do you think 50 years from now, there's going to be books from say 1985 onwards, the people are still rapidly devoted to outside of, you know, a small fan base when we're all living in adiocracy. But I tried bringing it up with David Gates once and I told him before hand will take Philip Roth off the table because everybody's, everybody has differences of opinions about Roth. They tend to split shoes versus Gentiles. He mentioned Jeffrey Eugenides and the Virgin Suicides is one that he thought would last in the future. But people ask me that question about, you know, what books says the mark on the last? Yeah, I should have asked that would be read 50 years. Yeah. And I said, practically none of them. And the ones that will last, I will guess, I would guess wrong. Yeah. You were in the 1920s. Certainly that. And you said, who are the great writers of our time? You know, you might have said, you know, it's not Edna Ferber. You might have said, Joseph Hurdishheimer, who was the number one bestseller and most critically esteemed writer of the 1920s. And Hurdishheimer is virtually on read today. What makes you think of Orwell and inside the whale where he talks about housing and beyond and how whatever the literary moment is at the time, the literary magazines are at least 15 to 20 years behind that. They have no idea what's what's taking place. You will be wrong. And this is one reason why I was young, particularly interested in innovative writing. I think the, you know, the, it was that old catchphrase about the uniting for works of art have some, some strangeness to them, some oddness and their beauty. And I think the books that we find hard to categorize, that we find unsettling, those that knock us off kilter, rather than those that we immediately respond to, the ones we love, that really seem, seem just marvelous books. Those books are books that tend to be books the latter, be books of the moment. They're, they're, they're connected with me now, with the times. They're perfect for right now. That usually means they're going to be time bound. Whereas those weird books, those odd books, these are the ones that might, might, might book. You know, in some ways, some more familiar examples, what I think about weird books are odd or peculiar or off-putting books. Marilyn Robinson's housekeeping, such a strange book and a beautiful book. And it's a book that you read it once and you read it, you say, well, is that, you know, halftime, what it was about? And you know, it was an amazing experience and beautifully written and it's haunting and it's unsettling and peculiar. And you feel this book, there's something, this is something really new here that will last. Cormac McCarthy's blood meridian, so beautifully written, so glory and so powerful in the image of the judge and the, you know, the darkness of this book, that it overwhelms you and people throw it away, as you were talking earlier, and they can't, you know, they guess they find it just too unsettling. You know, that's another book that might, might, might, might. I'm extremely fond of a book that I think is, again, like this, it's almost been forgotten. Riddly Walker, Russell Hoban's book, said in the post-holocaust England after some kind of bomb, where it's written in a broken English that looks almost like gobbledygook. And you have to read it carefully, you realize it is English, you can't understand it. And where myth and science, members of all birds, so you know, the main character, it was in this tribe, talks about one big one, or the little shining man, the atom. You realize the little shining man, the atom, it's not just atom of atom neve, it's also the atom of atomic bomb, and things are working on multiple levels, and the language is full of puns, and it's, and yet the book is, it's like Huckleberry Finn, and it's a portrait of a young man coming of age and learning about his world, and it's just an astonishing book. You should have won the book, or I'll show it. Of course, they never do. And you know, writers like that, I think, have a chance. But you know, you look at someone like, you know, they're, you know, wonderfully wonderful, vibrant prose, and a lot of fun, look at Thomas novels, you know, who would read the bonfire of the vanities now? You know, you know, it was a book, it was vital and important and interesting, and it's not that fun to read still, but it's, you know, it's completely time-bound. It doesn't matter anymore. We'll read the new Tom Wolf now, maybe, and it'll speak to us or not, and there's no reason to go back to the earlier ones. There might be reason to go back to Tom Wolf's journalism, which was new, and did something that had not been done before. So I think that element, you want the strangeness as a definition, but for the larger question, what's canonical? That's the dual advantage. It's breaking down. There is, there is fragmentation, but you can't expect people to have read much beyond the books that seem important for college courses, you know, modern English, and most of those are going to be writers since the Second World War, and writers of a certain sort. Some people will read Invisible Man, they won't necessarily read the recognitions. I mean, and so that there's, there's just, there's just not enough width, so to speak, a breath in what people are aware of. Of course, you know, you can't expect people to spend all their lives time reading books, so you have to have selection. Yeah, I'm not sure why not. I'm just kidding. Go on. Only a few people. Few of the sicker people. The guy building a library in 2012, that's, you know, it's, you have to have a certain relationship to the printed word. And I don't know if that relationship is the same anymore. I mean, I grew up, I revered these things to have a book on a shelf was, was the summit of my ambitions. For a long time, I thought that was the summit of all your literary people's ambitions, and I felt that every blogger really wanted to have a book from Knopf, if they could, the one that, you know, their blog turned into a, you know, non-fiction masterpiece for the bestseller list. And they probably still do, but some ways that may be declining. I don't know that that, that, that, that improvisator of finished book is, is necessarily as important as just being, you know, having lots of hits and being, being the place to go online. The number of likes and, yeah. And the people who just linked to you and that, that may be the sign of success. And it will be incredibly ephemeral. You know, people will, will, will last for, for, you know, six months or about six years, and somebody else will do that. But no, I mean, writers, I mean, art is usually artists really, at least till now, they all want, you know, what they, what's their secret dream of all artists, immortality. You want your book to be read after you're gone. You ideally like your book to be read, you know, as long as people read books or look at pictures or listen to music. And it comes to time when you realize that your chances of that are very slim, not, not existent, except for a few. And no one really knows which ones are going to make it. Some, some very self-confident writers feel they are, they're among the chosen, but that's like some of the more deluded Calvinists, they were saved. You can't know, you just can't know. Malcolm Cowley hadn't, you know, bothered about William Faulkner. Could we have overlooked William Faulkner? We have Melville the same way. Oh, Melville, if a few people haven't, you know, told us about this book. You know, right now there, you know, there are books as great as, as we dig that. We already know about that. Who reads them? Who reads, who reads Roble anymore? Yeah, she went off the curriculum at St. John's and the tutors I interviewed back in June for that they were crushed. Roble and Flannery O'Connor had been dropped in favor of Heidegger, which they were very, that's where the the knives come out at St. John's is the really, you took what off the curriculum? They, they, I mean, the books do come and go. I mean, and I turned to the idea that for my own, my own crusade has always been, as I've said, to urge people to read books. They might not otherwise think of reading, to go yawn bestseller list, to read drawer books, to look into fantasy and client fiction in children's books. My, my, my ambition right now for a book, which I haven't been able to interest any trade publisher in, and I'm hesitant about going to a university pass with it, is to write a book on what I think of as the great age of storytelling, roughly about 1870 to about 1930. This is a period when you finally had essentially mass literacy, you had the means of mass produced production for magazines and books and made them cheap enough, and you had during this one lifetime, basically, the creation of most of our modern myths, iconic figures, and modern genres, both of science fiction, birth of really the ghost story of children's literature, figures like Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, Peter Pan, Scarlet Pimpernel, the establishment of all the, all the kinds of genres that Hollywood has drawn on and we use, and because, because this was a time when we didn't really have copy competing media, we didn't have radio, we didn't have television, and only at the end of motion pictures start to come along, and as a result, I was just this, this final great flourishing sheer storytelling of narrative, people who could get you excited about a plot or character, and thrilling writers in some ways have become great comfort writers for a lot of time, let me go back to reading Holmes and children's books when we get old, and Noel Coward at the end of his life would spend his last days, his last weeks, you know, we read it right, we could bear to read was Inesbik, the great children's book author, five children in it, and the basketballs and all that, partly because it reminded him of the Edwardian era, and the world is better, safely, before and childhood, but that period, I think, is was the last great flowering of narrative fiction, we've been coast, everything else has been essentially post-modern to this nature, but I don't know what I'll ever write this book, but I've taught classes at the University of Maryland on the adventure novel, last two springs, one on the classic adventure novel, one on the modern adventure novel, it was a children's book editor for a long time, years past at the post, ten years ago, and a lot of that showed these books, and I've done a lot of reading in fantasy and science fiction and supernatural fiction in this period, so I've got the, I've got bits and pieces of it already, and to bear, but just finding a couple of years to put it together, and I need money to do that, and nobody said that quite, the University Presses would do it, but they don't have a lot to offer in the way of the Ganses, so I don't know whether they'll do it, but my point is, these are, in fact, wonderful books that people have forgotten about, there are a lot better books that have been forgotten than are being published today, and one I think function of a critic is to help rediscover them. The other, of course, going back to the long ago question about, at the beginning of all this, about positive reviews, too many positive reviews, there is that other function usually called the correction of taste, in which, you know, you point out, well, you know, that if you don't correct bad books, people will not be able to recognize good books. I'm not sure that's true. I think most people will know whether a book works or not. You just, you know, you read it, that every book's work on different levels, though, if you're, if you're reading, you know, the story of, oh, it's telling a certain kind of story that's going to be different if you're, you know, reading the magic mountain. And, you know, they can both be effective in their own ways. So we recognize that. They work. But, I've never been entirely persuaded that if I were to say, say this, you know, about a book while this book, and I do, I mean, obviously I do, but I say where I think it doesn't work, or, you know, things go on too long, or then something's unpersuasive. Whether it does much good for the author, or for the book, or for the reading audience, you need to alert people to these things. But I find that authors never, you know, they figure critics don't know anything. They're not going to paint them any attention, for the most part, sometimes they might, or they don't read them at all. I mean, I, I've had, I had this book, this last book of mine, I've come in Doyle, had very wonderful reviews, studying with one by Larry McPurchin, Harper's, and a lot of places. And, when the Edgar Award for the best critical biographical word book from Mr. Eisenhower, but I haven't read any of the reviews. I tend not to review, in the past I've read the reviews when a book was going in the paperback. If this book were to go in the paperback, and it's not in a series that tends to do that, I may not, never, you know, I may only get around looking at them years from now. And my view is, well, I wrote the best book I could. There's nothing I can do about it now. If I, if they don't like my book, I'll just feel bad. And if they do like my book, I'll just feel puffed up and I don't need that. It's, you do, you know, that's a, I think it come from a unique perspective, though, as a book reviewer. I can dish it out, but I can't take it. Let's say I take the only bit of erudition that I have over you. There's a two book reviewers at Anthony Poll's Dance of the Music of Time. And there's a couple of people speculating as to whether the one with the worst taste, but the better circulation has more of an impact than the one who writes for the highbrow audience and they're trying to court one versus the other. But ultimately, it turns out neither one of them affects a book sales. They discover later in the the world. Well, I mean, it's, there's mysteries about how these things happen one, but certain books do well, you sort of don't. And what does, what do we mean really by doing well? Is it just? In this country, it just means sales. Does it just mean sales? I mean, plus the other validation courses, are they going to make a movie of it? In some ways, you figure, in the past, people said, well, I'm, you know, I'm writing for, was it, was it Richard Stein writing for myself and friends? What is this? There's some saying like that. You write for, for us, for a group of people that might be five or 10,000 people who are really interested in the kinds of things you might be, and that's your audience and you have to accept it. And to write a different kind of book would might get you a different audience, but it wouldn't be the kind of book necessarily that you care about or, or can write. I mean, I respect people could write bestsellers. And sometimes I thought, well, could I cold-bloodedly do it? And if I could, I'm putting past dishes, I could write good past dishes. But sustaining them for. Yeah, but I believe that you have to believe in what you're doing in order to be convincing as though even as a best seller. I think that everyone who writes a bestseller with few exceptions truly believes they're writing a really good book. I rambled on. I don't know if I've said anything of you. I think lots of good stuff. I've, you know, big little notes throughout, but I think we're, we're good. I think we got a lot of nice commentary. So who else have you talked to me? I am. Let's see. There was Paul de Philipo. Do you know Paul? Yeah. Well, I knew Paul because I would use to publish Samuel Delaney and Chip's collection of letters came out. What we published is collection 1984 and Paul wrote asking for a review copy. I remember reading a story of Paul's in the late 80s, early 90s in the Marichades anthology by Sterling. And so we hit it off from there. And in fact, when I went to visit him the first time in Providence, my girlfriend at the time thought it was going to be some dull, awful, oh God, a skill and some science fiction writer going to hang out all the time. Maybe his girlfriend slash wife will be interesting to talk to you. And much like the story you told about going to Providence recently, my girlfriend was a big knitter and yoga person, she's like, oh my God, you're deaf. And she realized that Paul's mate was in fact her icon and goddess, the two of them hit it off wonderfully. And so Paul and I stayed close for years, even after I got out of publishing after the Paul West debacle. Him, Diana Ren, a girl I went to college with who's now a YA novelist, a couple of tutors at St. John's. I have a few others lined up. John Crowley, I'm hoping to, once I reread Little Big, is it Crowley? I hope to get to once I reread Little Big, just because I'd love to have that back under my belt before saying that. I've read a long essay on Egypt's secrets was in the American scholar. So you could read that, get it, you can get the whole book good. I couldn't understand the fourth book at all. I mean, I love the first three. I read that final one. I think that the final one is problematic. I think it was some ways from the structure he had established early on. It had to be four books, but then he really had told the story in the first three. And he had to give it another twist in the last one, but it does, it's not a piece. It really wasn't of a piece with the others. The tone, the tone of the book even changes. But that said, there are enough connections or enough elements that you need to read it. And there are some fine parts of it. And at the same time, when you finish a book like that, my initial response is, if I'm not sure about it, have I missed something? People who are so ready to blast books and attack them. My inclination has always been famous phrase of all the Cromwell. He said, consider in the bowels of Christ that you might be wrong. You might be mistaken, because what he said. And I think that's my initial response. Have I just failed? I used to keep on my dasket book world, that famous phrase of Pena James, "be one on whom nothing is lost." And this is something we aspire to. And I think, well, you know, I have to think about it some more. I mean, it's just, it's like that famous exchange of Tony Morris in Oprah, you know, some people said, well, what do you tell people who don't understand your book? Well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I tell them to read it again. And I sympathize with that. So it's only after I, you know, I thought, well, I might have missed something. Maybe the book is subtler than I think or realize that there are things going on that I maybe I read too fast, I was in bad mood. And I think about it. And sometimes I'll think, well, if it was subtler than this or something, and it still didn't work on me, you know, then, then maybe it's too subtle. Maybe there's something that the judgment wasn't quite as good, particularly if I say I had no problem with the first, in the case, it was probably the first three. And I have questions about the fourth. I think it's likely that there is something, something, something is probably there in the book rather than me. But my initial response is, you know, Crowley's a great artist. He's thought about this for a long time. And if I don't get it, it's probably my fault. I'm willing to give it another shot largely because I loved the first book, the first 70 pages of the second book would be the West Virginia Childhood is just one of the most magical passages in the world. You know, and of course, it's true that most most sequences they tend to. You have your ups and downs. They start out, usually the first book is the best. In a lot of ways, probably because it's all new, we're being introduced to the world. And in traditional enthrallages, you know, this metal one is is really a hard one to do really, really well. And creating the world is more fun than, than executing, I guess. But Crowley, Crowley will enjoy talking to you. It's an interesting call. And that was Michael Durda from September 2012. He still does not have a web page, Facebook presence, Twitter handle or anything else you can use to find him online for as a clearing house. But look him up on Google. You can find his reviews and essays linked there or search engine of your choice. Durda is D-I-R-D-A. First name is Michael, like, you know, Michael. You should also read his memoir, an open book. It's, it's pretty illuminating and get his collections of reviews and essays. I keep copies of readings and bound to please on my nightstand. I've got spare copies down in my library. It's always a joy just to open those up and find what he has to write about. Usually an author I don't know or someone I haven't had enough experience with. They really are wonderful appreciations of literature. I did pick up on Conan Doyle a few weeks ago, but haven't had a chance to check it out. Still, looks really good. Thank you for listening to this re-released episode of The Virtual Memories Show. There is a new episode available with Michael Durda. You can find that on iTunes or at our websites VMSPod.com or chimera obscura.com/vm. From either of the sites, you can make a donation to this ad-free podcast and I'd appreciate any financial support you can offer. I promise to get better and occasionally revisit the old and embarrassing episodes and try and make them sound a little nicer. Until next time, I am Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]