Tuesday, December 16, 2014

rereading Scribes and Scholars

Have been rereading Scribes & Scholars, by L.D. Reynolds and N.R. Wilson, largely for the civilised tone and dry wit of Leighton Reynolds.

S&S says of Politian that he had the following response to those who criticised him for being insufficiently Ciceronian:

'Non exprimis,' inquit aliquis, 'Ciceronem.' Quid tum? Non enim sum Cicero, me tamen (ut opinor) exprimo. (Epistle 8.16)

It's the 'ut opinor' that's so lovely. 


Sunday, December 7, 2014

LR and We Second That

Lightning Rods has been selected for We Second That, the Slate/Whiting list of great second novels (the 5 best in the last 5 years); Dan Kois has written about it on Slate, here.

The other novels on the list are Eileen Myles' Inferno, Daniel Alarcón's At Night We Walk in Circles, Marlon James' The Women of the Night, and Akhil Sharma's Family Life. (Click on links for reviews.)

I am a little leery of saying much about the plight of the second novel, or LR in particular, since LR was so frequently a casualty of behind-the-scenes machinations; talking about this sort of thing never seems to do much good.