A Dismal Literary Weather Report this Saturday

Poet Stanley Kunitz cautioned to “live in the layers, not the litter.”  Today I will write about the latter, while trying to remember the layered joy I felt last Saturday with Puccini’s La Bohème, transmitted to movie theatres everywhere from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. (Thanks to the Neubauer family, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Rolex for this.)

La Bohème

This Saturday, November 15^th, I’m listening to Puccini, his beautiful arias in my ears as I dissect a book recently given to me. A book for writers, supposedly: Opacities, with a plural form of the noun. The book has 174 pages, but only 45 of them are full pages (and those with wide upper and lower margins). And believe it or not, 58 pages have only one to four lines and then white space to the bottom of each page. But 45 pages have words on a fourth of the page or a third.  Within the book, ten pages are blank. I mean to say, “a whiter shade of pale,” they are.  Then at the end of Opacities are pages 159 to 179. These cite all the material borrowed from famous writers and others apparently known to the author. That’s twenty pages of words belonging to someone else.  This could be AI, its thieving vectors without heart or soul, gathering data for the writer.                 

The back book cover of Opacities claims the book is about “the necessary opacity to identity.” I flew to my unabridged two-volume OED for a good definition of opacity: “an insistence on being in shady dimness, not reflecting light, a lack of transparency.”  Or as George Orwell quipped, “being a cuttlefish with words, squirting ink for camouflage.”  Orwell is one of my literary mentors, along with E.B. White and William Zinsser, all three alive and well in my library. I sit here imagining what they would think of this concept held up as a truth for writers, a purposeful opacity. This book of 179 dubious pages is from Soft Skull in New York and sells for US $15.95 and &21.00 in Canada. Soft Skull, indeed. Is it all a joke on the reader?

The other dismal literary weather report?  A friend told me her grandson is having to read in his English class, Mrs. Dalloway. What a choice in 2025!  Absolutely brilliant for not promoting literacy among high school students. Dear Virginia, jealously borrowing ‘stream of consciousness’ from James Joyce but not the flesh and sex. The students should be reading 1984 and Brave New World, not have to struggle with poor Septimus and wander the streets of London while his wife frets about flowers. Post World War One in Woolf.  Meanwhile, over 100 years later, weapons being sharpened for a war against Venezuela. Que mundo, as the Spanish say.

Yet I had the good luck right now to open an old green ledger and find in it, “Joshua Bell and his priceless violin one morning in a D.C. Metro station.”  Layers and litter to be continued next week….