Before the pandemic, I spent most of graduate school contriving to avoid attending or delivering talks. I had no desire to hear the scholars I admired speaking. After all, why should I? It’s not that academics are necessarily clumsy orators — though I myself happen to be a particularly wretched one — it’s just that facility for writing and facility for talking have virtually nothing to do with each other. The author of an astute paper or an elegant monograph is, if anything, apt to prove worse at talking than an ordinary, uninhibited person, given that she is almost certainly in the habit of laboring over obstinate sentences for weeks. Read more here.

OTHER PEOPLE’S LOVES ARE LIKE other people’s dreams—boring and incomprehensible to observers.
Or so I thought when I first navigated to Rachel’s profile, knowing that she was the person for whom Adam had left me. I clicked through beaches she’d visited and lumpy cakes she’d baked, passages she’d underlined and toddlers she’d tickled. Her bookshelf jutted into the background of a few photos, and when I zoomed in and squinted, I could make out a row of mint-­colored Penguin Classics. An earlier, non-­Adam boyfriend still liked some of her photos, which I knew because I clicked not only through her pictures but also through the profiles of the all people who had liked them, through their photos, through the profiles of the people who had liked those, and so on, until at last I found myself hunched over my phone at five in the morning, staring at pictures of Rachel’s ex-­boyfriend’s third-­grade teacher’s tomato garden. Read more here.

By all accounts, Maurice Schérer led an oppressively virtuous life. He never cheated on his wife. He was sober, refusing both drugs and alcohol, and he attended Mass each Sunday. Though he could have afforded a car, he never bought one, and he considered even occasional taxi trips an undue extravagance. In his old age, when he was suffering from painful scoliosis, he continued taking two buses to work in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris each morning, then the same two buses back home each night. He cherished quiet enjoyments: classical music, visits to museums, nights at home with his family. He was born in 1920 and died in 2010, but he never owned a telephone.
What does this self-effacing ascetic have to do with Éric Rohmer, the elusive yet glamorous filmmaker who has been called “the father of French New Wave”? Perhaps it is only incidental that they were, in fact, the same person, for the two of them led remarkably discrete lives. Schérer was a teacher of high school Greek and Latin when he started publishing film criticism, first in magazines run by others, then in a short-lived journal he founded himself, and finally as the editor of the legendary Cahiers du Cinéma. Soon after he began writing, he adopted the pseudonym “Éric Rohmer,” a nod to mystery writer Sax Rohmer and director Erich von Stroheim, to prevent his touchy mother from discovering his true vocation. Yet even when the old woman died, oblivious, in 1970, he remained fanatical about keeping his private life sealed apart from his art. His wife and two sons sometimes accompanied him on filming trips, but they were never permitted on set; they did not meet his colleagues until he was lying on his deathbed. Read more here.

THE CLOSEST THING I HAVE TO AN INVIOLABLE PRINCIPLE is that it is a sacrilege to read a good book on a screen. Setting aside paper’s many sentimental attractions (gluey smell, physical heft, ample space for scribbling), to which I will admit I am susceptible, to read on what is so hideously called an “e-reader” is to concede that literature is continuous with the internet, that non-place where people go to look up one word, only to resurface lifetimes later, dazed and dead-eyed, twenty minutes into a video of someone popping pimples with a special implement. The internet scoops out the mind and mashes it into wet pulp, which is to say that it is the opposite of a novel, at least when the novel is working.
But the task of literature is to reflect (if never just replicate) even unliterary or anti-literary realities, on pain of irrelevance. Contemporary fiction full of telegrams and analog phones would smack of contrivance and cutesy nostalgia, like TV shows in which the characters show up at each other’s houses to stage confrontations in person, instead of just texting angry emojis as actual people increasingly do. The internet is real life now. The question is not whether to fictionalize it but how to incorporate its distractions and derangements into a novel that is not hellish to read. Read more here.