“On closer inspection, however, the book comes off as something more complicated than a flowering of one eccentric and filthy man’s erotic imagination. Its elaborate descriptions of pleasure given and taken start to seem like scrims for a moral argument about what sorts of sexual behaviors should be ‘forbid’ and which should be encouraged—an argument refined in prison by an author deeply occupied with thoughts of punishment, dissipation, and sin.” On John Cleland’s (very erotic) novel Fanny Hill and the importance of its having been written in prison.
What Should Be ‘Forbid’
Posthumous Hitch
Christopher Hitchens’ final piece of writing has been published by Vanity Fair. It’s about Charles Dickens, and in particular the author’s “willingness to atone for his mistakes.”
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A Filmmaker’s Compendium
Recommended Viewing: A complete collection of Wes Anderson video essays. If it’s Anderson you’re after, here’s a piece of short fiction he wrote during his time in college.
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On “Unpacking My Library”
There’s a lot of (justified) talk about the power of reading, but simply owning a book can be meaningful. Mabel Rosenheck considers Walter Benjamin‘s perspective on book ownership – “[it] is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” – and her own experiences with book collecting in San Francisco in an essay for The Toast. Pair with Anne Fadiman‘s essay on relationships, books, and relationships with books, “Marrying Libraries.”
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Happy Birthday, W.C.W.
William Carlos Williams‘s birthday was this last week, and Adam Kirsch writes about the poet for New York Review of Books. Though he argues that “today it would be hard to find a reader of poetry who would not acknowledge William Carlos Williams as one of the major American modernists” Kirsch still has to face the question, “why is it, then, that almost fifty years after his death, the reputation of [Williams] still seems to be haunted by a ghost of uncertainty?”
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Obscene and Digitized at Last
Need a giggle? You can now access the British Library’s collection of obscene writing online, which have previously been locked up for over a century. The newly digitized collection includes the works of the Marquis de Sade, Thomas Stretzer, and more.
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Updated Advice Classics
Two advice classics, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Emily Post’s Etiquette, have been updated for the era of Facebook and Google Plus.
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Exploring the 92nd Street Y’s Digital Archive
Audio for over 10,000 events – including concerts, poetry readings, and public interviews – is being made available on the 92nd Street Y’s new digital archive. Among the treasures in the trove are readings by Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, and Susan Sontag. (Thanks Andrew.)
Conquest of Panic
Irving Howe asks how Hemingway commanded the attention of a generation. Howe writes, “His great subject, I think, was panic.” Our own Michael Bourne recently answered this question, recognizing Hemingway as a middlebrow revolutionary.
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