Briefly

On value:

"Sentences matter, perhaps more than anything else, so I shall end with a contemporary application. As I write, the British government is imposing a duty on academics to show that their work has “impact,” which is to be a provable occurrence of social, economic, or political benefit, signed and witnessed within the last five years. This insanity could only have come about because not a single one of its perpetrators had read or understood one of Fish’s favorites, the final sentence of Middlemarch, contrasting Dorothea’s quiet future with the idealistic visions of doing good with which she started life: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”..."

Simon Blackburn in a review of Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, here.

...and....

"more broadly, I think what is going on in these indictments of the mediocrity of contemporary fiction is a kind of unacknowledged mourning. What is mourned is not good new novels, of which there are still plenty—of which there may be more than ever—but the passing of a culture in which the novel was more central than it is now, when it has to compete for our attention with so many other forms of storytelling, with movies and television, and now also with that great engulfing time-suck, the internet. It may be that these new media, in sync with the advance of technology on all fronts, are better equipped (literally) to bear witness to the essential qualities of our point in history..."

Mark McGurl defends creative writing programs (and himself from Elif Batuman), here.

(It's been too long since the last real post. Work. Travel. Spending spare time reading reviews of Bridesmaids. One book leaves me with not much and another has me in its thick bind. But I plan on posting. Soon).