When I started this column, I lamented the deluge of text and reading in my daily life. This subscription of course brings with it hundreds of pages a week of additional stuff: news, interviews, essays, ideas. I brought that upon myself, but reading the Sunday paper with breakfast fills me with a petty bourgeois satisfaction that I have quickly come to value.

This is trite, but true: it enriches my life. A brief description in the Sunday Review a few weeks back, sent me to The Paris Review website to read the interview with Janet Malcolm. Though I’d read her reportage in the New Yorker, I wasn’t very familiar with her work. The piece about her interview opened up the world of this enigmatic journalist and her craft of the interview. Conducted via email with the precision of the written word, rather than the spoken, the lengthy interview reveals Malcolm’s perspective on non-fiction versus fiction, her attitude towards editors, and other insights. She says of being sued for libel, “It took me out of a sheltered place and threw me into bracingly icy water. What more could a writer want?”

Unlike the blogs I choose to visit or even the narrowly edited magazines to which I subscribe, the newspaper casts a wide net that leads me to other prey. I read the Business section now. Turns out, it’s not all about the Dow Jones. Okay, it’s mainly about the Dow Jones. Even when the articles don’t directly mention the stock market, their topic may influence the stock market: “HSBC to Cut 30,000 Jobs,” “Ticket Sales Start-Up Aims at Smaller Box Offices,” “Airline Alliance Puts Air India on Standby.” These are coded messages about how to manage your portfolio. I don’t have a portfolio, nor do I plan on having one.

This may come as a surprise to you, as it did to me: publishing is a business. So the business writers talk about it. Like a slap on the wrist, an article about self-publishing (in the Business Section) reminded me why I will continue my subscription. In “Options for Self-Publishing Proliferate,” Alina Tugend discussed how self-publishing works, what’s good about it, and what’s not. She clearly broke down how certain sites help authors (Lulu.com versus AuthorHouse), while cautioning about the trouble of marketing a self-published book. A couple of months back, Neal Pollack explained in the Book Review why he chose to self-publish, but he didn’t explain the logistics. I am beginning to see the B section as a necessary evil to round out the magazine, Arts and Leisure, and the Sunday Review.

Occasionally, I am annoyed: it seems, certain articles are there solely to prop up the myth of New York as the economic and cultural center of the universe. Don’t get me wrong–I believe that myth. It behooves the paper to perpetuate that myth, but I don’t really care about hipsters going to the beach or the newest frozen desserts in Brooklyn.

Of course, I still visit the Times online, and often when the paper arrives, I have already seen the cover story and the lead image. The paper lags behind its online corollary, but this odd dissonance actually makes the news more pertinent and interesting. I don’t know what your online reading habits are like, but I typically read a headline and then move on, as if the headline were all I needed: “Carmakers Back Strict New Rules for Gas Mileage,” “Two Generals Quit in Group, Stunning Turkey,” “Britain Debates Riots and Fears They Set a Pattern.” Or I read an article while doing other things. I read Warren Buffet’s op-ed piece about taxing billionaires while checking my e-mail, grabbing book cover images offline, and fruitlessly searching Craiglist for a dark, round rug. Last weekend when the paper arrived I saw a story about the economic protests in Israel, and I realized that just because I had already glimpsed the article online that did not somehow make the news not happen, disappearing behind the veil of yesterday. The protests happened twenty-four hours ago instead of two hours ago, but they still occurred and the reporting of them still matters. By playing with time, my newspaper subscription makes the rest of the world real again.

But how has the rest of my reading fared? Have I forsaken timeless books for ephemeral news? Certainly, a portion of my time is zapped by the morning paper, but in the past few months I’ve still found time for Orlando, Freedom, About a Mountain, among others. I also bought–though haven’t yet read–A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell. Specifically, I bought the first two of nine volumes. Rick Moody’s interview with Nick Delany last December inspired my purchase. Delany has been reading A Dance to the Music of Time for the past ten years, over and over again; backwards, forwards, and in between. I, on the other hand, haven’t really started it. I have it now, which makes it easier to start reading, when I decide to.

As for next month, currently on my shelf sit Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru (an pseudo-academic study on sixteen pseudonymous authors and their real lives), From the Observatory by Julio Cortázar (an odd short story by one of my favorite writers), and David Copperfield (a classic I embarrassingly missed). I’ll see how the reading does.

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The illustration for A Modern Reader was created by Brianne Farley.

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Nick Delany turned up at a reading I gave at the Brooklyn Museum in November of 2010. He remarked, during the question and answer portion of the event, that he had mostly been reading just one book for the last ten years. By coincidence, this book turned out to be the very work I was reading on the day in question, namely Anthony Powell’s

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The Rumpus: Can you talk about getting into restaurant management?

Nick Delany: I’d been working as a waiter in Manhattan restaurants for a few years, and as a waiter you’d see these managers swanning about in their suits (and, ergo, not having to wear an accursed uniform), ordering their dinners off the menu, and ordering you (the waiter) around. . . so I thought I’d like to break into that occupation. I doctored my résumé a bit, and obtained a (short) interview with the current owner of the Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street.  I guess he was adequately impressed, because I was hired as a maitre d’. This happened in the early-fall of 2009.

Rumpus: Russian Tea Room! I guess you saw a lot of editors in chief at lunch time.

Delany: The only literary type I saw there was Richard Price, and he was having dinner, not a business lunch.  It’s strictly a tourist-trap now. However, Rufus Wainwright (after a Carnegie Hall performance) did show up at the Russian Tea Room one night last year around closing time (and so I quite willingly held the restaurant open a bit later for him) with his entourage of six or seven, ordered a lot of caviar.

Rumpus: What were your specific duties? And how long did you last there?

Delany: Well, as a maitre d’ I was mostly a greeter, a seater, a shmoozer, and sometimes a seller of souvenirs (the Russian Tea Room did quite a lot of souvenir business, the place was full of glass cases displaying tchotchkes for sale).  I lasted about three months, I think. I ran afoul of the hot-tempered Albanian owner over the matter of the restaurant’s closing time.

Rumpus: Your next professional destination?

Delany: The Oyster Bar, where I started working in March of this year (2010). I had been a waiter at the Oyster Bar for a few weeks during 2007.  I’d found working conditions there to be very trying, and in fact I quit. Indeed, I quit in the middle of a shift, during a busy lunch-time. So, when I went back to the Oyster Bar in March for an interview (for the manager job), I was quite worried that I’d be recognized from my previous time there as a waiter, and that my quitting would disqualify me.  As it happened, I wasn’t recognized at my March interview, and so I was hired. Still, I somewhat dreaded work there, as I knew it to be place with rather harsh working conditions (not to mention that it’s underground, no windows, no sunlight).

Rumpus: And during all this professional maneuvering there has never been even one week in which you have not dipped into Dance to the Music of Time, the masterpiece of Anthony Powell, correct? For ten years?

Delany: Yes, I’ve reread the series over and over during the past dozen years, every week picking up one or another of the volumes in the series.  The world depicted in the novels is one that I like to escape into.

Rumpus: What is it about that world that attracts you?

Delany: I like the settings: England, Eton, Oxford, London literary scene, etc. — concerning all of which the reader can have confidence that Powell knows whereof he speaks. And most of the volumes have at least a few good laughs in them. And probably most enticing, the characters — just consider the first volume, A Question of Upbringing, where we get superb ones such as Stringham, Templer, Le Bas, Uncle Giles, Sillery (although I’ve never been able to much enjoy the section of “Upbringing” that takes place at the French cramming-school, perhaps I should try harder to re-read that section).

Rumpus: How did you first come upon Powell? And are you similarly afflicted with other British writers of the same period?

Anthony Powell

Delany: I first came upon Powell via one my other writer-afflictions.  I was reading an essay by Evelyn Waugh (in a volume called U and Non-U, a compendium of essays on the subject of class markers and divisions in England), and therein he referred, praisingly, to Powell — whom I’d never heard of before. So, that got me started.  As I recall, Waugh made some point to the effect that the “Angry Young Men” devotees of the 1950s/1960s would be baffled by the rich stylings of Tony Powell.

Rumpus: How many times have you read the whole of Dance to the Music of Time now?

Delany: It might add up to five or six times. It’s hard to estimate, because I no longer read it in sequence.  I’ll just pick up any volume that lies to hand and open it to a random page, then start reading.

Rumpus: I estimate you have devoted somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 pages of reading time to Powell. Favorite section or sections?

Delany: Well, in Volume III (The Acceptance World), the one that you are reading, the Old Boy Dinner at the Ritz — with Widmerpool rising after dinner to talk economic gobbledy-gook –  is a fine passage; and in the same book I really like the dinner at Foppa’s restaurant where Nick and Jean encounter Dicky Umfraville.  The Umfraville character is very endearing throughout the books. The early pages of Volume X (Books Do Furnish a Room) has an amusing passage where Nick makes a post-war visit to his Oxford college and revisits Sillery’s rooms, where the two men plus another former student (“Short,” now a civil servant) discuss Widmerpool’s current fortunes in the political world.

Rumpus: How does all this consumption of Powell and his work, for ten years now, relate to your professional life, if at all?

Delany: In a way my heavy consumption of Powell has quite possibly contributed to my not taking the restaurant business (where I’ve worked as both waiter and manager) very seriously. That is to say, when you read A Dance to the Music of Time, many kinds of occupations are depicted therein — you have politicians, soldiers, artists of all kinds (painters, ballet-dancers, actors, composers), writers and journalists, civil servants, museum and gallery personnel, et cetera. But nobody in the Dance world works in the food industry.  And not only that, food is not even given much attention in Dance. I mean not a great deal is said about the food eaten by the characters. There is some comment, a little, but not much.  Perhaps this has to do with the proverbial insipidity of English food.  But I think it has more to do with, what is probably the case, that in the middle and upper classes of England during the period 1920 – 1970, food and cuisine and the “catering trade” just weren’t taken very seriously, merely as a prosaic necessity of life.  So as I say, absorbing this viewpoint from “Dance” may have been a corrective during the time I’ve worked in the restaurant biz here in New York.  Because when you’re in the restaurant biz in New York during the last decade or so, you’re exposed to a lot of hype meant to persuade you that Chef So-and-So is a great world-historical artist and genius who is revolutionizing modern civilization and culture.

Rumpus: Do you write yourself, or have ambitions in the literary direction? Or are you an actor? Or do want to direct?

Delany:: In the past I had ambitions to write (perhaps those ambitions haven’t left me entirely). Back when I still lived in my hometown of Vancouver, BC, in the mid-1990s, I wrote a rather long (400 pages, tightly spaced) manuscript. As for acting, I can only say that when one is moldering is restaurant work, one thinks about the cliché (I mean it’s a good cliché, really… a good ‘trope’) of spending one’s non-working hours in going on auditions, attempting to escape restaurant-work for the better world of the stage.  And one thinks that if actors resort to restaurant work, why can’t a restaurant worker resort to acting?

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