Certain writers cast shadows of incredible length and darkness, and Yeats is one of them. His poetry has a way of crowding out the sun. As a teenager I fell for that poem of his that begins, “When you are old and grey and full of sleep,” and reminds its object that “one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.” It was the most romantic thing I’d ever read; how anyone could refuse this man was a mystery to me. …more

A few links to get you started reading this Saturday morning. (I know it’s nice out, but I took my coffee out to my little backyard and am ignoring my cat’s mournful stares from the window, and encourage you to do so as well.)

At the Guardian, Tom Shone takes on the auteur theory — and its distinctly “male gaze.” “The carving up of the movies, a collaborative medium, into a series of solo acts, each bearing the unmistakeable imprint of an all-controlling “master”, most often male, is basically the great man theory of history transplanted into movie theatres – the swinging dick of film theories.” I hate balls metaphors but I hereby grant myself an exception to say that I respect the brass ones it takes to point this out. The way we talk about movies does have a self-reinforcing qualities. If the highest accolade we accord directors is that they have a “distinct worldview” and their “ambition,” then the James Camerons of this world are going to follow that garden path straight down into palm fronds and blue cat-people. No one, I think, wants more of that.

There’s a new musical at The Public about a literary roommates arrangement from (what else) Brooklyn. Called February House, the musical is set at 7 Middagh Street, which in the early 1940s was the home address of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright, and others. Gypsy Rose Lee dropped by for awhile too. The name “February House” came, allegedly, from Anaïs Nin. I haven’t seen the musical — it’s still in previews — but maybe I will, and report back. For now, read this lovely little bit at the London Review of Books blog about all the other 7 addresses Auden occupied, which may not have been an accident of chance, Jim Holt speculates.

This is an old one but a friend tweeted this Believer interview with Rebecca Solnit this week and I want it to be one of those things everyone reads and clasps to their chest and sighs with pleasure — a bit harder to do in the age of the laptop but you know, improvise. One good quote, and there are so many, is, “Public life enlarges you, gives you purpose and context, saves you from drowning in the purely personal, as so many Americans seem to. I still think that walking down the middle of the street with several thousand people who share your deepest beliefs is one of the best ways to take a walk.” Also: “That term public intellectual: all I know is that I stayed home alone for almost two decades, writing, before it became oddly visible and audible.”

I saw this Paris Review piece about “walking while reading” go up and got all excited. A kindred spirit, I thought. Someone else who knows that the best way to relax is to pick up a book and start walking. But it’s only inviting you to read about the subject of walking, not to read while walking. Which is what I do, that latter, I mean.

I think the habit began because I grew getting to the “good” library was actually a complicated undertaking. It involved a thirty-minute bus ride, preceded by a twenty-minute walk to the relevant stop. You could take another bus to the stop but it was a bit indulgent to do that. The streets were wide and green and pleasant in the carefully calibrated way that wholesome Canadian suburbs just are. Another kind of child might have become intoxicated, and chosen to stay outside. But I’d barely notice the weather. I had taught myself to read while walking there, and usually would barely look up from the moment I stepped off our driveway until the bus pulled to the curb. You memorize a route; I feel certain I could walk it this minute, blindfolded, if I had to. …more

This essaylet by Jill Lepore at The New Yorker about this week’s “scandalous” TIME cover gives the history of people losing their minds over the depiction of breasts and breastfeeding and birth and all that stuff in — trigger warning for those afraid of female body — public. When I was flipping through all the commentary this week, I kept thinking about this Lidia Yuknavitch essay on a related subject. Doesn’t this lovely Saturday seem like a good time to (re)read it?

In the kind of defeated sigh about the future of books that is increasingly commonplace, Sarah Weinman, the news editor at Publisher’s Marketplace, argues that in the digital age there’s no room for “serious nonfiction.” The gist of her argument is familiar, the kind of thing we’ve been hearing for years: without “traditional” publishers there will be no large book advances for what she calls “prestige” work, like Robert Caro’s multi-volume LBJ biography.

Her argument might have been a little more persuasive had she considered the fact that Caro actually went broke writing the first of his biographies, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Caro had to sell his house, and take a job teaching, to support himself and his family in the seven years it took him to finish the book. Plus: his wife worked. When I saw Caro speak at an event in Tribeca, recently, he was asked what kind of advice he’d give to aspiring biographers. “Become independently wealthy,” he said.  And that’s from one of the biggest names in the “serious” business, who grew up as a writer in publishing’s alleged golden years.

It’ll always cost a writer more to do serious work of any kind than it will to just dash off some crap-on-delivery thing. And that goes for fiction, too. And it is, much of the time, thankless, as far as the rest of the world is concerned. That’s just how writing like a motherfucker goes.

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The best thing I read this week was James Wood’s review of Hilary Mantel’s new novel, Bring Up the Bodies, a sequel to her last novel, Wolf Hall. Caveat emptor: Though I have not read Bring Up the Bodies yet, I am really into Hilary Mantel, creepily so (though I like to think she’d like that). Wolf Hall is the kind of thing I hope I’ll be able to write one day,* all serious and intellectual but also from the gut, touchable, even though she’s reaching across centuries to inhabit the mind of Henry VIII’s advisor Thomas Cromwell. Wood, it seems, concurs, even though he finds it goes slower in midsection. What he likes about Mantel, he says, is something he calls “novelistic intelligence”:

Mantel knows what to select, how to make her scenes vivid, how to kindle her characters. She seems almost incapable of abstraction or fraudulence; she instinctively grabs for the reachably real.

I think this applies further than Mantel, and further than historical fiction, and further than fiction itself. I’ve spent this year studying how to write long-form nonfiction. (I have probably not mentioned this yet, because I am sometimes ambivalent about Being In School at my age, but I’m enrolled in the Literary Reportage concentration at NYU’s journalism school.) And all that I can say about it, after nine months of my nose held to the stuff, is that the only thing that seems to matter is selection. The world is so much. The only way to slice it is to actually slice some of it off. It’s what distinguishes, to borrow someone else’s phrase, the true from the verbatim. …more

I was sniffing around a rumor I’d heard about Saul Bellow and happened to come across this wonderful piece Bellow wrote about the time he and Ralph Ellison were roommates in a big old rambling mansion in upstate New York. To wit:

Ralph drove into Tivoli in his huge old Chrysler. He himself serviced it, coddled it, tuned it, and it ran as smoothly as it had when it came off the assembly line. The trunk, when it was opened, gave me my first hint of Ralph’s powers of organization. For hunting there were guns, there were decoy ducks; for fishing, rods, lures and a wicker-work creel; there were tools of every description. Ralph was able to repair radios and hi-fi equipment. I envied him his esoteric technical skills. Where I saw a frightening jumble of tubes, dials, condensers (I can’t even name the parts), he saw order. In my trunk I carried the spare wheel, the jack, a few rusty tire irons, rags and brown paper bags from the market. His trunk with its tools and weapons announced that he was prepared for any emergency, could meet every challenge to his autonomy.

Bellow gives the household’s daily routine, which began with carefully-brewed drip coffee and ended with strong martinis before dinner.

It all sounds very literary and elegant and far from my current low-ceilinged studio in Queens. I really think we in the modern era underrate the potential usefulness of literary communes in big, old, rambling, drafty houses in the middle of nowhere. Sort of like Lauren Groff’s Arcadia, but with more books and better food. And a reserve of big warm wooly socks and tea and a stockpile of everyone’s favorite variety of notebooks.

Today I am posting regretfully little because I am on deadline. The deadline is not my own; it’s someone else’s. I’ve been helping with a book for a while. Some day, when I’m allowed to, I might tell you which one. You’ll just have to trust me for now when I say you might be jealous.

Here, for today, are some shorter thoughts on items that caught my eye this week:

1. Before I knew very many writers I assumed that most of the true artists among them held themselves above the fray of publicly insulting each other. I thought of writers as all writing away in romantic, if rather ill-equipped, little garrets, and never having time to read their contemporaries, let alone have opinions on them. I thought writing would appeal to everyone’s better qualities, lifting them above petty jealousies. I am, as you may have guessed, a wonderfully naive person. In related news, here’s John Irving hating on Hemingway, via Melville House.

2. In a totally odd pairing I hadn’t known about before, apparently Joan Didion once came to Bret Easton Ellis’ defense, back when Simon & Schuster dropped American Psycho for being too controversial. She herself was annoyed with Simon & Schuster for letting several of her books lapse out of print, and objected to their refusal to publish Ellis. Which is why, apparently, her collection After Henry is dedicated, in part, to Ellis. The other dedicatee is the titular Henry Robbins himself, who was Didion’s editor at S&S for many years.

3. Letters of Note posted a letter from Hemingway to Fitzgerald. Hemingway (I refuse to call him Papa) instructs Fitzgerald that he has been insufficiently transformative in his depictions of Nicole and Dick Diver (based on Gerald and Sara Murphy) in Tender is the Night:

I liked it and I didn’t. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald (goddamn it Dos took it with him so I can’t refer to it. So if I make any mistakes—). Then you started fooling with them, making them come from things they didn’t come from, changing them into other people and you can’t do that, Scott. If you take real people and write about them you cannot give them other parents than they have (they are made by their parents and what happens to them) you cannot make them do anything they would not do. You can take you or me or Zelda or Pauline or Hadley or Sara or Gerald but you have to keep them the same and you can only make them do what they would do. You can’t make one be another. Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen.

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I thought I’d write an essay for you today but naturally it’s not done because my allergies are clogging the old brain-machine. Besides you all probably want to read subjects that are not simply my inner monologue.

A couple of weeks ago the National Magazine Award nominees were announced, with few women included. The screed about that is for someone else to write; I just want to point out that when these things come up someone always loudly declares, as though it were a new argument, that maybe women “just aren’t interested” in writing “serious reported nonfiction,” because there is no female tradition of it. It’s never clear to me why simply chanting, Joan Didion, Joan Didion, Joan Didion three times at midnight is not enough to dispel the evil spirits who make this argument. But there’s more than Didion that could shed light on the silliness of presuming that women don’t report beyond the comfort of the kitchen table. …more

I saw David Rees read once. The event was about politics; it was to introduce a political book whose title I have regrettably forgotten. (I went to support another friend.) I’d never heard of Rees before but he made an impression. His advice, if I’m remembering it correctly, is that we all ought to delete our liberal blogs, and stop wasting so much time arguing online. After a week in which I have devoted far more hours than one ought to to the consideration of a certain-unnamed HBO show, I’m inclined to believe him. In fact I think what I’d like to do is find some kind of hobby that would exhaust my nervous energy in some more fruitful direction than “critiquing” people who, to borrow a phrase from a friend, are not even pausing, mid-backstroke, in their champagne pools to consider what I think.

Rees’ own solution was to take up the art of pencil sharpening. He said this, at that reading, and I thought: really? And then, it was clear, that really, yes, David Rees enjoyed his pencil sharpening business. I went home and googled the matter, and there the website was. For only fifteen dollars he would sharpen a pencil and return it to you by mail, shavings included. I can’t say I’ve taken him up on the offer yet but I admire that he found something small and manageable. In the interview with the Millions which I link to above, Rees mentions that he actually took up pencil sharpening during the collapse of his marriage:

Because part of the point of the book is that when your whole life is collapsing, you might very well become obsessed with pencils. Or just any kind of weird, random thing that you can lose yourself in that’s just completely removed from all the emotional concerns that are whirling around your head.

I really want to find a craft that does this sort of thing for me. And often, I mean one other than writing, one that doesn’t involve words. I keep thinking of all the writers I know who are consistently blocked by their own perfectionism. They need to set down sentences that are no less than the perfect word of God (or a God-like thing) or else it’s all blank screens and looming deadlines for them. But the “craft” of writing is not a skill you can practice in quite the same way as another one – at least, in my life, it isn’t. There’s no simple standard for the good paragraph. There is, however, one for a pencil that’s been properly sharpened. Or a house that’s been properly built. Being able to comfort yourself with that feeling of actual accomplishment somewhere in your life, knowing a thing is finished and that you did it well — well, it sounds like a lifeline.

Anyway, I will buy David Rees’ book, and see if pencil-sharpening might be the thing for me.

The 92nd St Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, an institution of which I have never taken nearly enough advantage, occasionally posts recordings of its old readings. A couple of days ago, they posted this one, of Allen Ginsberg reading a number of poems (and singing a little). Somewhere around the 5:50 mark you will hear someone start to heckle Ginsberg. It’s his fellow beat poet Gregory Corso, who offers with characteristic directness the observation that what Ginsberg is reading is all “poesy bullshit.” The two were friends. I love the note of dry amusement in Ginsberg’s voice, as he incorporates Corso’s name into his poem. (Corso, later, indignantly: “You don’t have my name there!”) And Ginsberg improvises a sort of riff: “Goodbye, to my brothers who write poetry, and play the violin, and drink Smirnoff, too much!”

By the time Ginsberg picks up his harmonium to sing for the crowd his father Louis, who is onstage with him, is muttering bitterly, loud enough to provide an undertone to the music. He heckles Corso right back, telling him in : “We have a dense crowd here, but where you are it’s most dense.” The crowd laughs.

The effect of the whole thing is delightfully, cheerfully anarchic. Be sure to stay tuned to the end, where Ginsberg sings a sort of lullaby to his intransigent friend.  …more

Most people writing to their favorite authors do not, I’d guess, think they will get an answer back, and perhaps Betty Hester didn’t either. She was not a scholar and she was not a writer, herself. She was a 32-year-old clerk at a credit bureau in Atlanta the first time she wrote to Flannery O’Connor, in the middle of July 1955. Hester read a great deal, and she had been taken by A Good Man is Hard to Find. Hester had been surprised to see that The New Yorker hated the collection — “all we have, in the end, is a series of tales about creatures who collide and drown, or survive to float passively in the isolated sea of the author’s compassion, which accepts them without reflecting anything.”

Hester wrote to O’Connor to object. “These are stories about God, aren’t they?”

O’Connor was so thrilled by this letter from a person who “understands my stories” that she immediately wrote back. “The stories are hard,” she told Hester, “but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching towards Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.” …more

I’m pretty sure my favourite part about this interview with David Sedaris is the writer he’d most like to meet: “[I]f I could go back in time, I’d love to collect kindling or iron a few shirts for Flannery O’Connor. After I’d finished, she’d offer to pay me, and I’d say, awe-struck, my voice high and quivering, that it was on me.” That’s not just because I like O’Connor too; it’s because having a humorist point to someone who writes black and bleak and maybe even depressing (if often mordantly funny) things makes me feel like there is some hope that I might one day actually be funny.

This week the Persephone Post has been putting up little scraps of signatures and letters from one of its staff member’s grandmothers-in-law. One of those scraps is a letter from George Eliot declining an invitation to collaborate on a stage adaptation of her work. It’s signed “ME Lewes,” which was the name Eliot adopted to acknowledge her scandalous relationship with the already-married critic George Lewes. They called it a marriage though legally it wasn’t. (It was all a bit complicated, Eliot’s love life was.) Actually Lewes had died a couple of years before she wrote this letter, and it never was Eliot’s legal name, but there she was, still using it. Just three months after writing, as Persephone notes, she’d marry her last husband, and be dead by the end of the same year.

Setting aside the strangeness, in the current material constraints of the publishing world, of any author declining adaptation for her work (think of all the money the BBC has made off of their wonderful Daniel Deronda miniseries), the very existence of the note made me sort of sad, and worried. No one writes this sort of thing anymore, and of course there are wonderful projects like Letters in the Mail that revive the tradition of writing letters to each other but it won’t ever be quite the same. …more

The actress Vera Farmiga, whom you may know from Up in the Air or, possibly, the great guilty-pleasure of 2009, The Orphan, directed a movie called Higher Ground, which came out last year. It may or may not have pinged your radar; there was a decent press push, because actress-turned-director is a nice hook for journalists. But I don’t know anyone but I who saw the thing. You can join my tiny sister-and-brotherhood by renting it on iTunes or the like. You won’t be sorry.

Higher Ground is an adaptation of a memoir by Carolyn S. Briggs, entitled, rather less sunnily, This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost. The memoir recounts how Briggs, as a young mother, became a member of a radical Christian sect known as Fountains of Joy. In the movie, as in the book, the members of Fountains of Joy read more hippie than anything else. They are not the kind of brightly-dressed, McMansion-authoritarian proselytizers you see depicted on Big Love or in Saved! and Citizen Ruth. Most of the members of Corinne Walker’s (Farmiga) immediate congregation are there because they yearn to be a part of something larger. That longing is written all over the face of her husband, Ethan (Joshua Leonard), even as he allows his newfound faith to interfere with his relationship with his wife. Their conflict, in large part, is about the strict gender hierarchy the sect maintains. But that’s not as simple a dramatization as you might think. In one scene the men of the sect find themselves in a room alone, listening to a tape that instructs on the use of the clitoris. The disembodied voice affirms the centrality of female pleasure to proper Christian sex.

“Not as simple as you might think” might well be this movie’s tagline. What I found remarkable about it was the willingness to engage seriously with the subject of evangelical Christianity. Perhaps I’m alone in this but I often feel there’s a void, right now, in writing and art, when it comes to the subject of religion. Too many of us are atheists, I suppose. …more

One February night in T.S. Eliot’s mid-twenties, he went his aunt’s house in Boston. It was 1913, and the occasion was one of those delightful-sounding “evenings of amateur theatricals” that no one bothers with anymore. (It’s a tradition that really ought to be revived, if anyone’s asking me.) Eliot performed as Mr. Woodhouse in scenes drawn from Jane Austen’s Emma. One of the actresses performing opposite him, as the imperious Mrs. Elton, was a young woman named Emily Hale.

Hale was the daughter of an architect-turned-Unitarian-minister, but she lived with her aunt and uncle because her mother was mentally ill, and thus deemed unable to care for her daughter. The aunt and uncle were Unitarians, too. That was how Hale’s circle crossed with Eliot’s, according to his biographer, Lyndall Gordon, who quotes Eliot as joking “that his family’s relation to Boston Unitarianism was like that of the Borgias to the papacy.” Unlike the heavily-educated Eliot, who was by then a graduate student studying Sanskrit, Hale never went to college. She had always wanted to be an actress, but her aunt and uncle thought it improper for her to appear on a public stage. Boston society was terribly high on propriety. So for awhile, Hale was forced to only do only the kind of semi-private performances like the one she gave that evening. …more

I spent my 20s dilly-dallying, not-publishing, so sure of rejection by MFA programs that I never applied. So I am always happy to find new examples of people who did not start publishing until later in life. Until after, say, the age of 35. The Millions has a good series on Late Bloomers, but I am a woman who prefers to comfort herself with a collection of cold, hard facts. So, in Harper’s Index style, here are a number of writers I love who got started late in life:.

Age at which Wallace Stevens published Harmonium, his first book of poetry: 44.

Age at which George Saunders published CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: 38.

Age at which Janet Malcolm published her first book of essays, Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography : 46. …more

One of the more curious themes of the coverage of Adrienne Rich’s death this week is that people seem to want to rescue her from her political beliefs. David Orr’s piece in the New York Times today is representative of that, with the (in my view) unfortunate headline of “The Poet Beyond the Anger.” You could argue that Orr did not choose that title, but then he forges on with this:

But for Ms. Rich, as for any real poet, the question is always: How do we read her work not as social history, but as poetry?

Was this question was asked of, say, Allen Ginsberg, when he died? I am drawing a blank. But even if someone did ask, isn’t it fundamentally absurd to divorce someone’s writing from their circumstances? Particularly when that someone was as clear as Rich that she did not consider there to be a stark line between the two? …more

Somehow I’d never heard of Sylvia Townsend Warner until the New Yorker posted its fiction podcast this week, which is Colm Toìbìn reading one of Warner’s stories. In my life, the consequence of discovering a forgotten writer like Warner is an immediate Google-spiral. Who was this person? Why is she forgotten? What’s available for free online that I could read? Can I justify an e-book purchase right this second even though I have forty other books to read and access to a good library? (Because I am the kind of woman who despairs not of finding an outfit in her overstuffed closet but rather of finding the right book to read at 3 am., the ability to impulse-buy ebooks has proven a sad development for my pocketbook.)

Naturally, I’ve now acquired all the novels of hers that my favourite publishing house, the New York Review Books, have recently reprinted.

I’ve been thinking about what draws me to this type of thing. I guess you could say I like an aura of mystery but really what I think I like is the idea of reclaiming these writers from dusty shelves. As the amazing British novelist Sarah Waters (who never gets enough love on American lit-sites) wrote recently, Warner’s obscurity “baffles, frustrates and, I think, secretly pleases her admirers, for she’s the kind of novelist who inspires an intense sense of ownership in her fans.” I suspect all kinds of novelists — good ones, anyway — share this quality. But on the secret pleasure thing Waters is right on. Pursuing all these long-dead, forgotten people down their bibliographies feels like picking a lock, like I’m a child, enjoying being somewhere she isn’t supposed to be. I’m supposed to stay in the living room where everyone can see me, dutifully reading DeLillo because That’s What’s Good. …more

Truth be told I don’t like macho posturing in literary feuds — or rather, the only thing I like about it is the opportunity it provides me to practice the fine art of eye-rolling. Oh, and the particular thrill to the female camaraderie that can arise in the audience of these things when and where they amount to two guys having a pissing contest over effectively nothing. (Which is, er, often.)

Maybe what I’m saying is that I enjoy the macho posturing, but in, you know, a subversive way.

One example: in 1936, Stevens was in Key West visiting a business friend, as he often did in the 1930s. Evidently he and Hemingway had not been getting along. “He came again sort of pleasant like the cholera,” was the latter’s remark in a letter to Sara Murphy (a wealthy American who would later be immortalized by Fitzgerald as Tender is the Night‘s Nicole Diver),

and first I knew of it my nice sister Ura (Ursula) was coming into the house crying because she had been at a cocktail party at which Mr. Stevens had made her cry by telling her forcefully what a sap I was, no man, etc. So I said, this was a week ago, ”All right, that’s the third time we’ve had enough of Mr. Stevens.” So headed out into the rainy past twilight and met Mr. Stevens who was just issuing from the door haveing [sic] just said, I learned later, ”By God I wish I had that Hemingway here now I’d knock him out with a single punch.’ …more

So look, Ann Patchett’s writing is great and the Sexual Revolution is great and I think everyone should be in favour of birth control because really, why not? But I’m just going to come right out and say it: it’s completely depressing that one of America’s greatest living novelists has to spend her time writing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal to state the painfully obvious:

Let us so empower the young women in our communities with the excellent education that is available to them, the love and support of their families, and the abundance of positive role models, that they are strong enough within themselves to wait until they feel fully ready to have sex with a person they trust, a person who values them. And let the young men of our communities benefit from that same education, that same love. To make things easier, let’s remove several million degrading images of women that can give a boy the wrong ideas about the value of other people.

When everyone is good and ready, let’s supply them with birth control that allows them to decide when and if they want to have children together and, as an extra bonus, protects them from sexually transmitted diseases. We all have our utopian ideals and that’s mine.

“I Can’t Believe We Still Have to Protest This Shit,” indeed.

My point is that Ann Patchett could be out there writing us another book like Bel Canto or my actual personal favourite, her first book The Patron Saint of Liars (which is set at a home for unwed mothers), but instead she is doing yeoman’s pundit work because that is where the public conversation is at, at the moment. Because the fact is you have to yell just as loud and as long to be heard. Roxane Gay does a lot of the yelling for us, around here, and I love it. But I still wish we lived in a world where she didn’t have to.

I’m going to break the Rumpus rule against pop culture here for a minute. (Hell, it’s Saturday.) It’s only to note Gwyneth Paltrow’s complaint, this week, that the New York Times was incorrect in its report that Paltrow used a ghostwriter on her cookbook. I do not care too much about Paltrow’s case, though I suspect that the (alleged!) ghostwriter in question — a woman named Julia Turshen — is having a no-good, very-bad week. I can’t seem to find a comment from her anywhere. In my mind’s eye, she’s sitting in a room twitching somewhere, her contract with Paltrow taped over her mouth.

More than a few Rumpus readers make their living by ghostwriting, I’d guess. It’s not something I’ve done myself, but knowing so many wonderful writers who do it activates my latent mama bear tendencies. Step off, Paltrow. You’re like the boss at the company claiming your underlings don’t exist, all those titanic CEOs claiming they deserve those salaries because they’ve steered the ship well, as though there were no engineers in the boiler room.

Big Important People’s anxiety about ghostwriting is interesting in only a limited way. Paltrow’s skittish need to run all over the media this week declaring sole authorship is not based in legitimate concern, as far as I can see. There may be a few fans out there in the world who believe these big book products to be little vials of captured sweat, drawn direct from the source’s brow. But they are few. For the rest of us, these products are something we can put on an e-reader and read, and/or use to whip up a little gluten-free macrobiotic lime-rosemary focaccia, before we have to dive back into To the Lighthouse. So the culprit here is ego, a celebrity who worries that any chip in her varnish will bring the whole house down. How exhausting it must be to be that kind of person. …more