"[Theo] Von introduced C.K. to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, where he began working to address his addiction..."

"... to masturbation. He practiced abstinence—it was, he said, a 'crazy idea to me. . . . Don’t have sexual release for several months in a row'—but, eventually, he 'got out of the cycle.' His emotions started coming back. 'I saw everything really differently,' he said. 'I saw that everything that had happened with me was because of me. And, by the way, that’s great news, because that means you could do something about it.'... [And] this is what enabled him to write his book. He recently finished a second one. 'I’m writing novels because I don’t jerk off every fifteen minutes,' he said. 'It’s really all it is.'"

Writes Tyler Foggatt in "Louis C.K.’s Next Chapter/In a new standup special, and a début novel, the comedian navigates murky, post-#MeToo terrain: not quite exiled, not quite welcomed back" (The New Yorker).

That reminded me of the old after-sex punchline. Attributed to Balzac: « Là… encore un roman de perdu ! » (“There… another novel lost!”). There's a line in "Annie Hall": “I read a thing about Balzac. He used to, uh, after he’d have sex he’d go, ‘Oh, there goes another novel.’”

"Occasionally [Balzac] took a boiled egg at about nine o’clock in the morning or sardines mashed with butter if he was hungry; then a chicken wing or a slice of roast lamb..."

"... in the evening, and he ended his meal with a cup or two of excellent black coffee without sugar."

That was while writing a book. When he was done, “he sped to a restaurant, downed a hundred oysters as a starter, washing them down with four bottles of white wine, then ordered the rest of the meal: twelve salt meadow lamb cutlets with no sauce, a duckling with turnips, a brace of roast partridge, a Normandy sole, not to mention extravagances like dessert and special fruit such as Comice pears, which he ate by the dozen. Once sated, he usually sent the bill to his publishers.”

From "A Hungry Little Boy/Pears had a special appeal for Balzac; he often kept bushels of them at home and could eat as many as forty or fifty in a day (one February he had 1,500 pears in his cellar)" (NYRB).

How tedious to find J.D. Vance in an article titled "The Secret to Tom Wolfe’s Irresistible Snap, Crackle and Pop."

This is a David Brooks essay in the NYT that starts out with some good insight into Wolfe's writing:

Wolfe was known for his style, but it was his worldview that made him. He read Max Weber at Yale and it all clicked: Life is a contest for status. Some people think humans are driven by money, or love, or to heal the wounds they suffered in childhood, but Wolfe put the relentless scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It gave him his brilliant eye for surfaces, for the care with which people put on their social displays. He had the ability to name the status rules that envelop us in ways we are hardly aware of. He had a knack for capturing what it feels like to be caught up in a certain sort of social dilemma.

There's a great photograph of Wolfe positioned in his living space, but look at the caption: "Wolfe’s goal was to be like Balzac, not JD Vance...." Oh, no. Why is Vance here (even in the negative ("not JD Vance"))? I search the page for "Vance" so I can zero in on it (rather than actually read this essay, as I'd planned):

Wolfe’s goal was to be like Balzac, not JD Vance.

"You studied semiotics in college. I’m curious if that also shapes the way you think of narrative...."

Sarah Larson asks Ira Glass, in "Ira Glass Hears It All/Three decades into 'This American Life,' the host thinks the show is doing some of its best work yet—even if he’s still jealous of 'The Daily'" (The New. Yorker).

Glass answers:

For me, the most important book was “S/Z,” by Roland Barthes, where he takes apart a short story by Balzac phrase by phrase, paragraph by paragraph. What he’s interested in is, How does this story get its hooks into you? Why do you read to the next paragraph? Why do you care? And that feeling that you get at the end of a really good story, where you just feel, like, Ahh!—what produces that? And he names a bunch of mechanisms that, once you know them, you can create yourself.

"She likes jokes. She likes the one David Hockney told her once. It goes: 'The trouble with Van Gogh is if you tell him something it goes in one ear and stays there.'"

"She laughs again.... Maggi, I exclaim, you are smoking again! Didn't you give up five years ago? She says she did but last year, on her birthday, her large bronze sculpture of a rising wave was being erected, and it was fraught, and 'I thought: fuck it. It's my birthday. I'll smoke.'... She smokes with sensational gusto... I can't stand namby-pamby, take-it-or-leave-it smokers. I call them 'crap smokers' and Maggi is not a crap smoker.... 'I think I was once put forward to paint the Queen Mother but the word came back saying I was a bit risky, so it didn't happen.' Perhaps they thought you'd seduce her. 'She was very fond of gentlemen.' She could have painted Margaret Thatcher but didn't bother. Some big Conservative association wanted her to do it but she refused.... As a sculptor, Maggi's public works include her Charing Cross memorial to Oscar Wilde – it shows him rising from a sarcophagus.... Critics seem to loathe Oscar.... Would you have liked to have been a mother, Maggi? 'The thing of actually giving birth to this thing that's been inside you for nine months must be quite an event,' she says. 'And I've always said that if ever a painting was crying out in one room and a baby was crying out in another, I'm animal enough to go to the baby... it sounds corny but it's true... my works are my babies... '... Did your parents accept you being gay? 'My mother had a great problem with it... she hated saying the word lesbian, and I don't like it either. I prefer lesbionic or dyke....'" 

I'm reading "Maggi Hambling: 'I was put forward to paint the Queen Mother but the word came back saying I was a bit risky'/As a painter and sculptor, she’s an art-world legend – but as our intrepid interviewer discovers, Maggi Hambling's private life is every bit as colourful as her work" (The Independent). 

That's from 2010. I got there from Wikipedia, where I went because Hambling — whom I'd never heard of — is trending on Twitter this morning because....

"People Are Furious Over This New Statue of Pioneering Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in London/The internet wishes she were a bit less nude" (ArtNetNew).

Genuine question: Why present Mary Wollstonecraft as naked?
I’ve seen many statues of male writers, rights activists and philosophers and I can’t remember any of them being bare-assed. https://t.co/CNUmBgzldD

— Aunty Malorie Blackman (@malorieblackman) November 10, 2020

Was Hambling's tribute to Oscar Wilde more respectful? He's rising out of a tomb.

"There’s an idea in every cup, and you need a lot of ideas to get one good one...."

"People have criticized me for years — family, friends, doctors. I get messages from people saying it’s physically impossible to drink 25 a day.... People are constantly telling me that it isn’t healthy or it’s bad for my stomach or it can kill me.... But my blood pressure is always perfect. I work for myself and I get seven to eight hours of sleep a night, not a problem. I might go to the bathroom a little more than the average person. That’s it.... If I ever do decide to expand beyond 25 cups, my dream is to outdo Balzac’s reputed 50 cups a day, I’ll likely have to be more scientific about things, to prevent overdosing. But so far so good. I’m going to make another cup right now."

Said Charles Anderson, quoted in "A Brief Chat With a Guy Who Drinks 25 Cups of Coffee Per Day" (Grub Street/NY Magazine).

Here's his Twitter feed. Examples:

Coffee 21. Having fun. ☕️ pic.twitter.com/cz41kObiuv

— Rolli (@rolliwrites) May 17, 2020

Coffee 13. Where have you been? ☕️ pic.twitter.com/slAIboKOyf

— Rolli (@rolliwrites) May 14, 2020

ADDED: I made a "Balzac" tag for this post and then went back to add it to posts in the archive. I found 2. In one, I'm quoting something in an article about a great writer retiring:

There have always been writers, like Thomas Hardy and Saul Bellow, who kept at it until the very end, but there are many more, like Proust, Dickens and Balzac, who died prematurely, worn out by writing itself.

The other is in my account of Chapter 2 of Bob Dylan's book "Chronicles." I quote Bob:

You can learn a lot from Mr. B. It's funny to have him as a companion. He wears a monk's robe and drinks endless cups of coffee. Too much sleep clogs up his mind. One of his teeth falls out, and he says, "What does this mean?" He questions everything. His clothes catch fire on a candle. He wonders if fire is a good sign. Balzac is hilarious.

"For great writers, retirement is a fairly recent career option."

"There have always been writers, like Thomas Hardy and Saul Bellow, who kept at it until the very end, but there are many more, like Proust, Dickens and Balzac, who died prematurely, worn out by writing itself. Margaret Drabble may have started a trend when, in 2009, at the age of 69, she announced that she was calling it quits. [Alice] Munro said she was encouraged by the example of Philip Roth, who declared that he was done last fall, as he was getting ready to turn 80. 'I put great faith in Philip Roth,' she said, adding, 'He seems so happy now.'"

Dylan's "Chronicles": Chapter 2.

Continuing my reading of the new Dylan autobiography from yesterday.

Dylan describes the characters he met in New York and the books that he read in the well-stocked library in one of the places where he crashed in those early days. You sense the material is being gathered for songs like "Desolation Row," where arty New Yorkers mingle with historical and literary figures. He seems to learn to do the mingling from Chloe Kiel (pp. 26-27) who wore black fingernail polish and said wild things like "Dracula ruled the world and he's the son of Gutenberg."

He tells of growing up during and just after WWII. I cringe at the passage that clumps "Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt" together and describes them in undifferentiated language. I write "Masters of War" in the margin. Yet at one point he pictured himself going to West Point: "I wanted to be a general with my own battalion." P. 41. His father said he lacked the connections to get in, and his uncle told him "A soldier is a housewife, a guinea pig. Go to work in the mines." P. 42. Later, he became very engrossed in studying the Civil War. Pp. 84-86.

His only childhood confidante was his grandmother, p. 42, a one-legged seamstress who had immigrated from Turkey, p. 93. She had darker skin than the rest of his family, and she smoked a pipe. P. 92.

Cliché that should have been edited out, p. 100: "March was coming in like a lion ..."
Musical artists he writes about admiringly:

• Roy Orbison. Pp. 32-33. "Next to Roy the [radio] playlist was strictly dullsville ... gutless and flabby."

• Johnny Rivers. Pp. 60-61. "Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite." Rivers, in his version of "Positively 4th Street," understood the attitude, Dylan writes. Immediately after reading this, I go to Amazon and find and order "Rewind/Realization." The double album not only has "Positively 4th Street," it begins with "The Tracks of My Tears," the song that inspired Dylan to call Smokey Robinson "the greatest American living poet."

• Bobby Vee. Pp. 79-81. "I'd always thought of him as a brother."

• Hank Williams. Pp. 95-96. "When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems a sacrilege." He tried to follow rules for songwriting that he perceived in Williams's songs.

An author he loved: Balzac! P. 46:

You can learn a lot from Mr. B. It's funny to have him as a companion. He wears a monk's robe and drinks endless cups of coffee. Too much sleep clogs up his mind. One of his teeth falls out, and he says, "What does this mean?" He questions everything. His clothes catch fire on a candle. He wonders if fire is a good sign. Balzac is hilarious.

He makes Balzac sound like a guy in a Dylan song: "And you say, 'What does this mean?'"

Dylan repeatedly expresses the instinctive feeling he had that music was about to change and that he knew where to take it:

The On the Road, Howl and Gasoline street ideologies that were signaling a new type of human existence weren't there [on the radio]. P. 34.

I just thought mainstream culture was lame as hell and a big trick. P. 35.

I knew what I was doing ... and wasn't going to take a step back or retreat for anybody. P. 67.

I had a vivid idea of where everything was. The future was nothing to worry about. It was awfully close. P. 104.