Sarah Wrote That

The Professor’s Wife

I found Tony Judt’s January NYRB piece on nights alone with ALS profoundly moving, his October NYU speech a clear, vital statement about the health care fight and the state of things between the American right and left.  He is profiled this week in New York magazine.  If you read about him, it is likely to be as “feisty,” brave, insightful, magisterial, brilliant.

Yesterday the NYRB Blog posted his reflection on gender relations, specifically in universities:

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“The Decade We Had”

Ten writers.  Eight Men.  Two Women. Really, Times?

Colum McCann, however, rocks 2008:

Fiction deals elegantly with issues that politics eventually wrestles with, corrupts, destroys, but nothing specific had been written to prepare me for President Obama. I wasn’t able to align him with any fiction, and yet it seemed that so much of literature has worked toward the moment. From Vladimir Nabokov to Aleksandar Hemon to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, American literature has always been prepared to take in the “other.” It has also allowed writers to hold onto their own country, so that they can have their hands in the warmth — or bitter cold — of both places.

Woolf, Austen, Palin, Abrams, Gaga And Me

Champagne Candy posted this page from the manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway.  Woolf’s handwriting is thin, tight and slanty, somewhat as I imagine the “spidery hand” Tolkien gives to Bilbo Baggins.

The page is one of several in the British Library’s marvelous online manuscript exhibition, which includes drafts by Pope, Blake, Dickens, Wilfred Owens, and this delightful History of England by a sixteen-year-old Jane Austen:

‘The History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st. By a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian.’

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Which brings me to the hopefully subsiding hubbub over Sarah Palin’s memoir.  A number of people whose writing and judgment I respect have questioned paying her any attention—shouldn’t we be close-reading the healthcare bill instead; aren’t we only enabling her; and so on.  I think we should be close-reading Palin and the healthcare bill. She came within seven million votes of being vice-president, and while it’s unlikely that she’ll gain high national office, inasmuch as her fameball book and tour is a calculated effort—in collusion with the mainstream media she derides—to channel the beliefs of a substantial minority, I’d rather understand what I oppose, and be able to say precisely why she elicits such strong reactions.

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