Literary stuff

In the flurry to buy flour noticed at reference 1, I fell for a TLS for once in a while, this being a magazine which Waitrose includes among its newspapers. The first time since March. See reference 2.

But another poor edition, with the lead item, illustrated left and noticed at reference 3 setting the tone. A scholarly edition of everything that Evelyn Waugh ever did, at least thirty volumes of the stuff at prices rising to at least £100 a volume. I continue to puzzle about how a university press can think it worth its while to publish this sort of stuff. Who on earth is going to read it? Or more to the point, who on earth is going to buy it?

I grant that I have read four volumes of memoirs from Osbert Sitwell, a contemporary of Waugh, inhabiting (I dare say) much the same milieu, but there is no way that I am going to plough through a scholarly edition of same. The point is to read the memoirs, not all the stuff which went into their construction, all that scholarly comment about whether this or that semi-colon was here or there. In the same way I don't particularly need to see behind the scenes of plays and television programmes; the whole point is to see them from the front, not to poke around around the back. Or to put it another way, the whole point of being obscene (from the ancient Greek) is that is off-scene and un-seen. And I rather doubt if I will ever again get around to reading a book by Evelyn Waugh in a common or garden Penguin edition, so never mind this one.

I paused on a book about a slave who remembered his youth in Africa, memoirs collected by Zora Neale Hurston, and may yet fall for it.

I paused on a book about a pair of Siamese twins who stayed together for the whole of their sixty years or so. Siamese twins from Thailand from whom the name is presumably taken. Twins about whom I first read many years ago - but I don't think I need this updated and politically corrected account.

Otherwise fodder for literary and intellectual types.

The only real upside is a new word 'parerga', apparently all the literary detritus which accumulates around a work of literature. By analogy to all the chunks and chips of marble which accumulate around the base of the emerging Pietà. With the singular form 'parergon' getting just about three column inches in OED. A word which has been around since the 17th century, possibly what the Bard would have called an ink-horn word, a word smelling of the scholar or the pedant.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/side-effect.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/03/tls.html.

Reference 3: https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/c/the-complete-works-of-evelyn-waugh-cwew/?cc=gb&lang=en&.

Reference 4: Barracoon - Zora Neale Hurston - 2018. Although actually written back in 1927 or so.

Reference 5: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=ax+kavakos. What appears to be the only notice of Hurston.