Book by Book by Michael Dirda Read Free Book Online

like where you do it?
    Pinned to a bulletin board above where I usually write is an index card inscribed with a depressing quote from Henry James: “The practice of ‘reviewing’ has nothing in common with the art of criticism.” To the right of this card, and perhaps even more disheartening, is a photocopy of “How to Convert a RoadRunner Document to Quark-Readable Format.” (Such, my friends, is modern journalism.) Here too is an advertising flyer for a memoir about dogsledding:
My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian.
Then a photograph of a bombed-out London library. Next to it another scrap of paper, this one sporting a quotation from Jack Green, an early champion of the novelist William Gaddis: “Recognizing masterpieces is the job of the critic, not writing competent reviews of the unimportant.”
    If I glance at the wall to the right of my monitor, I can study a 1996 calendar from the Lorain Admiral King High School Marching Band, with a handsome pictureof the assembled musicians taken by Fazio’s Starlight Studio. Nearby cluster the following: a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, seated on some playground equipment, reading James Joyce’s
Ulysses;
portraits of several favorite writers, among them Vladimir Nabokov, M.F.K. Fisher, Jorge Luis Borges, Anton Chekhov, Stendhal; a caricature of Robertson Davies and a poster of William Joyce’s
Dinosaur Bob.
This last abuts a reproduction of a Roy Lichtenstein painting, nothing but a pair of staring eyes and these words: “Why did you say that? What do you know about my image duplicator?” In the upper-right corner of an adjacent bulletin board looms a picture of the robot Gort clutching a red-gowned Patricia Neal: an advertisement for
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(“From out of space .. . A warning and an ultimatum!”). Close at hand are several other postcards: the Château d’lf near Marseille, where Edmond Dantès was imprisoned before he escaped to become the Count of Monte Cristo; the steel plant in which my father toiled for forty-odd years; Wilder Hall at Oberlin College.
    Even the least observant visitor to this “office” could hardly miss the paperback cover that glorifies a stern Conan the Barbarian standing atop a mound of dead enemies while a voluptuous lovely caresses his mighty thigh (I call it “the book critic’s dream”); or the button that says “I am a committed radical. I am against nearly everything”; or the color Xerox of the 1926 issue of
Amazing Stories
showing the Martian tripods of H. G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds
, or the small poster of Douglas Fairbanks riding a winged horse in
The Thief of Baghdad
, or the photocopy of my late friend Susan Davis’s drawing of an owl reading in a library. Also prominent are John Tenniel’s illustration of Alice passing through the looking glass, the cover for Martin Rowson’s comic-book version of
The Waste Land
, spotlighting a truly sinister T. S. Eliot holding out a handful of dust, and, not least, a bumper sticker that proclaims, “You can afford to be a connoisseur and a rebel” (long my secret wish). I am particularly fond of one other postcard, sent to me by the literary journalist Daphne Merkin, picturing the sorrowful donkey Eeyore bent over a piece of paper with a caption reading: “This writing business, pencils and what-not. Overrated if you ask me.”
    On my desk itself are—in addition to a phone, Rolodex, and a caddy of pencils and pens—several coffee mugs, a half-dozen padsof paper, no visible work surface whatsoever, and, at this point in time, nearly a dozen books:
The American Heritage Dictionary, The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus
, a small King James Version of the Bible, a pocket Shakespeare, H.W. Fowler’s
Modern English Usage
, the little
Annals of English Literature
(showing the dates of important literary publications from 1475 to 1950), a French dictionary,