'How Anybody Ever Thought of It'

On Saturday I rendezvoused with a reader who lives in the Texas Hill Country at Kaboom Books here in Houston. It was his first visit to the shop and he told the owner, John Dillman, how impressed he was. Gary reads French and found a nice Baudelaire. I’ve always relied on a library copy of Nabokov’s Selected Letters 1940-1977 (1989) and now I have my own. I found an English edition of The Meaning of Recognition: New Essays 2001-2005 (Picador, 2005) by the late Clive James.

We had lunch afterwards in a nearby Mexican place and, inevitably, I asked Gary what he had been reading lately. His answer might have been mine, with one exception: Shakespeare’s sonnets, Chekhov stories, Montaigne’s “On some verses of Virgil” (“which isn’t much about Virgil”) and his Travel Journal, and some of Camus’ journals. I haven’t read Camus since high school. We agreed, with Simon Leys, that most French intellectuals are insufferable, beginning with Sartre. James writes on his acknowledgments page:

 

“A multimedia website is a marvelous thing to see. The book, however, not much changed since Gutenberg, is still the breakthrough in communications technology that leaves me wondering how anybody ever thought of it.”