Fidelity

• Joe Queenan confesses all about the number of books he reads simultaneously in The New York Times.

With books (and other such relationships in my life), I am a serial monogamist. I'm loath to read more than one at a time, and rarely have; if I'm liking what I'm reading, I finish it. It's also rare for me to bail out on a book before I finish it, although it does happen, because some books just don't ring my bell at all. (I tried to get into One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich a little while back and quit about halfway through; short as it was, it was still like watching paint dry.) Someone was looking at my bookshelf recently and asked me if I'd read all of it, and my breakdown went about like this: 60% I've read the entirety of, 20% I've read enough of to get the gist, and 20% I've yet to dive into. I collect 'em faster than I can read 'em, but that probably makes me just like every other book lover out there.

• Joseph Epstein examines the friendships between intellectuals in Commentary.

I've always been fascinated by the relationships between artists, in particular; it's like watching rival gang leaders of equal power playing a cagey chess match. Friendships between creative/intellectual types tend to be short and intense, and Epstein gets into some interesting territory:

How many intellectual friendships dissolve over conflicts of opinion and ideas cannot be known, but the number is probably at least as great as those that fall apart through such normal perils as insults (intended or not) or wounds resulting from pride, ingratitude, feelings of abandonment, or misunderstanding. Nor are intellectuals immune from the riskiest of all maneuvers in a friendship: the effort to reshape the ideas and even the character of one’s friend in one’s own image.

...With intellectuals as with anybody else, jealousy is one of the ways that friendship can sadly resemble love. It is not uncommon for two close friends to resent a third person who may seem to be coming between them—or for that third party to resent a close friendship that appears to shut him out, and to seek means of retribution. The novelist Paul Theroux, for example, blamed the breakup of his friendship with V.S. Naipaul on the latter’s marriage to a woman regarded by Theroux as aggressive and interfering. Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998) was the vengeful and vitriolic result—a risible and finally unsuccessful attempt to reduce Naipaul by mocking his pretensions and highlighting his cold-bloodedness.

Theroux may possibly fall into another category—that of the person who, having no real talent for friendship himself, looks to others as ostensible friends in order to be let down by them. “He was inordinately vain and and cantankerous,” wrote Max Beerbohm about the painter James Whistler. “Enemies, as he had wittily implied, were a necessity to his nature; and he seems to have valued friendship . . . as just the needful foundation for future enmity. Quarreling and picking quarrels, he went his way through life blithely."

After 2005, the only way to go is up

• Archaeologists have discovered the earliest known form of Mayan writing.

Too bad “the writing is mostly indecipherable.” But it does make you wonder what strange, wonderful combination of circumstances compelled humans to start writing. Some strange new desire to create, to make your mark... that, or to scrawl angrily, “For a good time, stop by Kukulcan’s tent.”

• Chapters from 1970s-era novels are rejected by 21st century publishers.

This is just hilarious:

Submitted to 20 publishers and agents, the typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of two books were assumed to be the work of aspiring novelists. Of 21 replies, all but one were rejections. Sent by The Sunday Times of London, the manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970's. One was "Holiday," by Stanley Middleton; the other was "In a Free State," by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Middleton said he wasn't surprised. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," he said. Mr. Naipaul said: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."

Like I always say, the only constant in the world is change, but there’s still no accounting for taste. Book buyers aren’t looking for, you know, writing; they’re looking for a multimillion-dollar cash cow they can turn into a movie, a record album and a theme park.

• Lit-crit is turning to science for new ideas.

An interesting read, from a different perspective. Author Nick Gillespie’s most intriguing point follows:

Both cognitive and evolutionary approaches to lit-crit have been gaining recognition and adherents over the past decade or so. Cognitive critics are less interested in recurring plots or specific themes in literature, but they share with the Darwinists an interest in using scientific advances to help explore the universally observed human tendency toward creative expression, or what the fascinating anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake called in Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, “making special.” This unironic -- though hardly uncritical -- interest in science represents a clear break with much of what might be called the postmodern orthodoxy, which views science less as a pure source of knowledge and more as a means of controlling and regulating discourse and power. The postmodern view has contributed to a keener appreciation of how appeals to science are often self-interested and obfuscating.

Criticism being the exploration of a personal reaction, it follows that the self-examination that it entails would lead some down a more scientific path, ostensibly to find data with the cold hardness of fact to support their own feelings and interpretations. But it figures just as much that those very “facts” are actually quite specious -- any statistician will tell you that you can find any amount of data to “prove” your “theory,” no matter how insane. Simple old willpower can bring any nutty notion to light but the ideas that strike a deeper, more logical and rational chord within us -- theories like evolution, for example -- tend to take on lives of their own, far beyond what their discoverer ever intended or even understood themselves. I remember a bit from Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy where he talked about how a philosopher in ancient Greece -- Anaxagoras, I believe -- came up with a version of heliocentrism, long before 17th-century scientists like Copernicus and Kepler proved it so; the point being, sometimes the answer sits right in front of people for a long time before anyone notices. Lit-crit might come up with some fancy new terms but unless they’re really, really challenging the status quo, it’s just gonna be old wine, new bottle.