On Proust

Around 20 years ago, I went to the Carnavalet Museum in Paris to see Marcel Proust’s bed. The mission was less frivolous than it sounds. Proust’s bed isn’t any old bed. He didn’t just sleep in it. He wrote millions of words while lying in it. It was his office, his workstation. 

In 1909, at the age of 38, he hit the sack more or less permanently to write the great novel he’d always believed was in him. He lined the walls of his Paris apartment with cork to keep out the street noise. He wrote by night and slept by day. The novel would be called A la recherche du temps perdu: In Search of Lost Time. It took him 13 years to complete. The finished work ran to 3000 pages, or 1.25 million words ... [read more]

She Did Not Change

In 1977, the English poet Philip Larkin was commissioned to write a short poem to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee. Larkin wrote:

In times when nothing stood

But worsened, or grew strange,

There was one constant good: 

She did not change.

The penultimate line was the result of a late alteration. Originally Larkin had written, “We had one constant good.” At the last moment he crossed out “We had” and wrote “There was" ... [read more] 

Steve Martin's Last Bow

When the magicians Penn and Teller toured Australia in June, I had the privilege of catching one of their shows at the Opera House. Here were two supreme masters of their art performing at the height of their powers. Watching them work was an unmitigated treat – a chance to sit back and revel in what the great Aussie critic Robert Hughes called “the spectacle of skill.”

Penn and Teller are no longer young. Penn is 67 and Teller 74. But at no point in their show did they seem past their prime. When rock stars of that age go on tour, you can’t help wishing you’d seen them forty years ago. In Penn and Teller’s field, advanced age is irrelevant. Or rather, it’s relevant in a good way. You can’t be as technically assured as they are without having plenty of years under your belt. Making things look that effortless takes a lifetime of effort. 

Similar levels of maturity and craft are on display in Only Murders in the Building, the second series of which is currently rolling out on Disney+ ... [read more]

Now a Minor Motion Picture

“Now a major motion picture,” says the cover of the new edition of Where the Crawdads Sing, the Delia Owens novel that has sold 12 million copies since its publication in 2018. Has anyone ever admitted to turning a book into a minor motion picture? Or just a motion picture full stop, leaving it to the public to supply the appropriate adjective?

Anyway, what is “major” supposed to mean in these cases? Is it just another word for costly? Or is it meant to assure us that the picture in question is a substantial artistic event? Alas, the word is now out that Crawdads isn’t that kind of major movie ... [read more]