Alexander Waugh
Paperback Blighters
AS A BIBLIOPHILE I have come to detest bookshops. Our high-street chains are staffed by ignorami - young goofs who look blank or injured when asked to perform simple tasks involving words like 'Solzhenitsyn', 'Loeb' or 'trilogy'. Par for the course? A cousin of mine who is studying English at A level had never heard of Byron. When I complained about this to a secondary school Head of ~ng:iish she was not in the least survrised. Half the candidates who had recently applied to after for an English teaching job had never studied Shakespeare, nor had they, during their three years at university, been required to read anything: written before the nineteenth century.
Most bookshops assistants do not read books, or even bother to go through reviews. There was a time when booksellers could recommend good reads by being well-read themselves, by getting to know their customers personally and by understanding a wide range of individual tastes. In the modern age this is
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Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art.
@StephenSmithWDS asks if Gauguin is still worth looking at.
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‘I have fond memories of discussing Lorca and the state of Andalusian theatre with Antonio Banderas as Lauren Bacall sat on the dressing-room couch.’
@henryhitchings on Simon Russell Beale.
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We are saddened to hear of the death of Fredric Jameson.
Here, from 1983, is Terry Eagleton’s review of The Political Unconscious.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
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