"He read 'Moby-Dick' at 9. He could devour 400-page books in an hour. He had a photographic memory."

"As an after-dinner party game, he liked to recite 'Paradise Lost,' starting from any line a tipsy guest chose."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "Inside the Mind of the ‘Man Who Read Everything’/A collection of Harold Bloom’s letters details the working life of one of America’s most influential intellects" (NYT).

"So, buy books at an estate sale, remove the dust jackets, then organize by color? Fire the podcaster and rehire your book reviewers."

Says a commenter at the WaPo article "The multiuse home space trend is coming for your dining room/A DIY dining library can create the perfect space for reading, crafting, work or dining with friends. Here’s how to get one."

The article is verbiage about putting bookshelves in the dining room. The author is Jolie Kerr. Was she a podcaster? I look it up. Wikipedia says:

Jolie Kerr (born 1976) is an American writer and podcast host. Her book, My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag... and Other Things You Can't Ask Martha, was a New York Times best-seller.... Writing for The New York Times, Dwight Garner called My Boyfriend Barfed 'the Lorrie Moore short story, or the Tina Fey memoir, of cleaning tutorials...[a] wise and funny new book.' At NPR Linda Holmes praised Kerr as 'at her most irresistible when she's handling the kinds of awkward questions that do traditionally go unanswered in your women's magazines and your perky home-maintenance shows.... Kerr now hosts a podcast... called Ask A Clean Person.

I can see why WaPo wants a writer like that, but this books-in-the-dining room thing is pretty ridiculous, and it is upsetting that WaPo canned the book review.

"Walz only seemed like a football coach to voters with no preexisting relationship to football. His image embodied the liberal conception of nontoxic masculinity, a reverse Margaret Thatcher."

Writes Chuck Klosterman in his new book "Football," reviewed in "Is Football Doomed? Chuck Klosterman Thinks So. In his new book, the writer goes deep on a sport that dominates American cultural life — but possibly not for long." The review is by Dwight Garner in the NYT.

Garner says: "I like reading Klosterman. He’s a dorm-room philosopher and, on pop topics, the overthinker’s overthinker." Despite the headline for the review, Garner is less interested in the prediction of doom — which "takes up a relatively small portion of his book, mostly at the beginning and at the end" — and more interested in what else is in there: "The 'football is doomed' material is like a pancake that arrives alongside an order of Peking duck. The tastiest stuff is mostly tucked inside." Like that Walz material.

I've read a few Chuck Klosterman books. Click my Chuck Klosterman tag. I like the writing style. Here's an example from the NYT review: "[Football] will never completely disappear, in the same way you can still hear jazz on NPR and you can still smoke Lucky Strikes inside a casino."

"In his nonfiction book 'A Swim in a Pond in the Rain”' (2021), about reading the Russian masters, he described 'people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people.'"

"This is pleasant to imagine, and I suppose it’s true up to a point, but who doesn’t know a lot of big readers who are jackasses from head to toe? One thing’s certain: The writers who insist on the morally improving nature of fiction, and who robe themselves in the folds of wisdom or beneficence, tend to be the ones to avoid. 'If there is any test that can be applied to movies,' Pauline Kael wrote — her test applies to books, too — 'it’s that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.' Saunders’s new novel, 'Vigil,' is slim, about the size of Mitch Albom’s memoir 'Tuesdays with Morrie' or Richard Bach’s novella 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull.' It’s not as soft and shallow and saccharine and strenuously earnest as those books, but it’s not impossibly far off. It’s a hot-water bottle in print form. It’s going to be an enormous best seller for depressing reasons.... [I]t’s about an angel named Jill who presides at the deathbed of an oil tycoon and determined planet despoiler named K.J. Boone...."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "George Saunders Serves a Heavy Helping of Virtue in a New Novel/In 'Vigil,' an oil tycoon on his deathbed receives a visit from an angel" (NYT).

"Life is an excruciating phase in the life of everyone."

Wrote Nell Zink, in "Sister Europe,” quoted in the Dwight Garner section of the NYT piece "Our Book Critics on Their Year in Reading," and that's a free link to the NYT because Garner does such a fine job of finding sentences to quote.

Here's his book — which I've bought for myself and others — collecting quotes in the same manner you'll find in that "Year in Reading" piece: "Garner's Quotations/A Modern Miscellany" (commission earned). 

And here's the commission-earned link for "Sister Europe," which I bought on the strength of that one sentence.

Here's one more quote from that "Year in Reading" (this one's by Mariel Franklin): "There was something about air travel that made me think of Swiss euthanasia clinics."

"She works as a cocktail waitress, a go-go dancer, a racetrack stable hand and, for a long stint in Phoenix, a sex worker..."

"... sometimes out of a trailer. Drink and drugs soften life’s jagged edges and get her through the day: 'I found the perfect formula to work on was a mixture of Spañada wine, Cold Duck and Squirt poured over crushed ice. That and bennies, or as Jenny called them, whaaat crawses. The drink, though quite potent, went down like cherry soda, and when coupled with the speed, produced a loose capable vigor just made to order for the job. During a normal day I would make about three trips across the lot through the quivering airwaves to the Circle K in my pink halter to hoard ingredients for the precious punch.'"

From "Her Father Wrote ‘On the Road.’ She Lived Her Own Version. Jan Kerouac’s 1981 novel 'Baby Driver' chronicles a fearless and windblown life entirely distinct from her famous parent’s" (NYT).

That's a review, by Dwight Garner, of "Baby Driver" — which is getting reissued.

"Kids: They’re pint-size spies. They’re little data processors, soaking things up and spitting them back, until one day they’ve grokked enough to knock you into the gutter."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "The Future Looks Dark, but Familiar, in Gary Shteyngart’s New Book/'Vera, or Faith' follows a 10-year-old girl navigating family drama and a dystopian America" (NYT).

1. Garner, the name, is not a "garner (the word!)" spotting, within the logic of the Althouse blog.

2. "One day they’ve grokked enough" might be one of the last appearances of "grok," the verb, in this Musk-permeated word.

3. I just finished reading "Vera, or Faith" last night. That's why I'm reading a review of it this morning. The quote I pulled from the review was chosen because of that "grokked."

4. About that dystopia — to quote the book — "[T]he states are having their constitutional conventions. And these conventions will decide whether to give an 'enhanced vote'... counting for five-thirds of a regular vote to so-called 'exceptional Americans,' those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains."

5. Lots of novels use that child as pint-size spy idea, don't they? I think of "What Maisie Knew" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." You can think of more. Or ask Grok. But whether the character is a child or not, many novels make their plot out a character gradually putting clues together and figuring something out. The thing to be figured out may not be an interesting story at all — who killed X, who is X's father/mother, why did X leave town all these many years ago. The story is the unlocking of the mystery. But to make the central character a child is to blend this mystery-solving with the mystery-solving that is every child's life: What do words mean? What are adults doing? Where do I fit into all this?

6. "Vera, or Faith" (commission earned).

"Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain is enormous, bland and remote — it squats over Twain’s career like a McMansion."

That's the crushing first sentence of Dwight Garner's book review, "A New Biography of Mark Twain Doesn’t Have Much of What Made Him Great/Ron Chernow traces the life of a profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty writer" (NYT).

[Chernow's] book is an endurance test, one that skimps on the things that formed Twain and made him the most lucid, profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty American of his time. Hardy will be the souls who tour this air-conditioned edifice all the way through and glimpse the exit sign.

Chernow is the author, most famously, of “Alexander Hamilton” (2004), which Lin-Manuel Miranda devoured while on a vacation

"What was poetry? That’s the question John Koethe asked in 'Beyond Belief,' his 2022 collection of verse."

"He was speaking about how poems come and go but none seem to make an impression. Lucy Sante framed this somewhat differently when she asked, 'Was "Howl" the last poem to hit the world with the impact of news and grip it with the tenacity of a pop song?'"

Writes Dwight Garner in the first paragraph of a NYT review of a new poetry book... which I, tellingly, failed to become interested in. The first sentence of the last paragraph of the review is: "This is a young person’s book." Well, then. Who was "Howl" for?

"Mondrian didn’t believe in ice cubes because cold food was bad for the health. He stood ramrod straight..."

"... and never had a hair out of place, refusing to take off his jacket in company even on hot nights. He was given to incomprehensible monologues and Garbo-like utterances such as 'You don’t seem to understand that I want to be alone.'... He once entered a room, wrinkled his nose, and commented to his host, 'It smells old in here.' Mondrian was known for planting bizarre, forceful and one-sided kisses, some lasting 30 minutes, on women. Yet he mostly felt women got in men’s way; the feminine was 'hostile to the spirit.' He once remarked, 'Every bit of semen expended is a masterpiece lost.'"

Writes Dwight Garner, in "Piet Mondrian: An Orderly Painter, a Deeply Eccentric Man/A new biography of one of the quintessential artists of the 20th century" (NYT).

"The black-clad man, stabbing wildly, had 27 seconds alone with him. That is long enough, Rushdie points out, to read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets..."

"... including his favorite, No. 130.... Rushdie is initially held together by staples. His ruined eye bulged out of its socket and hung down his face 'like a large soft-boiled egg.' He spends time on ventilators.... No one will permit him to look in a mirror. Mentally, he tortures himself. Why had he not defended himself? Was it that he was 75 and his attacker 24? 'On some days I’m embarrassed, even ashamed, by my failure to try to fight back,' he writes. 'On other days I tell myself not to be stupid, what do I imagine I could have done? This is as close to understanding my inaction as I’ve been able to get: The targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real.'..."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "Salman Rushdie Reflects on His Stabbing in a New Memoir/'Knife' is an account of the writer’s brush with death in 2022, and the long recovery that followed" (NYT).

"He is, for sure, the world’s most grandiloquent crash-test dummy."

"He’s fallen off a barn and broken both arms. He’s had 14 stitches in his chin, a soccer injury, and a tooth pulled after declining anesthesia because the pain was synonymous with 'the way I expected the world to be.' His collarbone was detached from his breastbone while ski jumping. He has been lifted off his feet by random explosions. He fell 40 feet on an opera stage and sprained his neck. He was hit so hard by a stuntman while filming a scene for a movie that two crowns popped loose from his molars. He has intentionally leaped into a cactus field and has eaten his shoe (which he cooked at Chez Panisse). He missed an airplane that crashed, and came close to being beheaded in Peru by the Shining Path. He was shot, and 'slightly wounded,' while being interviewed by the BBC in Los Angeles."

From "The Cosmic, Outrageous, Ecstatic Truths of Werner Herzog/The filmmaker’s new memoir, 'Every Man for Himself and God Against All,' prompts a critic’s incredulity'" (NYT).

He = Werner Herzog.

The incredulous critic = Dwight Garner.

"Fiction matters more now, in a world increasingly deracinated by technology. A.I. will never pose a threat to the real thing..."

"... to writing with convictions, honest doubts, riddling wit, a personal vision of the world, rawness and originality. Another word for these qualities is soul, which is exactly what ChatGPT lacks. Left wholly naked in front of the A.I. onslaught may be the writers of certain formulaic best sellers, but that’s a matter for their agents."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "A Human Wrote This Book Review. A.I. Wrote the Book. 'Death of an Author' is a murder mystery coaxed from artificial-intelligence tools like ChatGPT" (NYT).

"Martin Heidegger was recorded to have laughed only once.... It happened at a picnic in the Harz Mountains with Ernst Jünger, who 'leaned over...'"

"... to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack.' Like Heidegger, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was not known for his lightness of spirit.... In the spirit of [that] anecdote about Heidegger, I’ve often recalled that, in his diaries, Kafka reports sitting in a bar in Prague with his friend Max Brod after they’d left an opera. Brod accidentally sprayed soda water all over Kafka, who laughed so hard that seltzer and grenadine shot out of his nose."

Writes Dwight Garner in "The Kafka You Never Knew/An unabridged volume of Franz Kafka’s diaries restores the rough edges and impulses that were buffed out of past editions" (NYT).

If that — or anything else — makes you want to read Kafka's diaries, here's the new edition (at Amazon). I bought it.

Is there a category of intellect that only gets humor in slapstick form? Is their world so dark because they're waiting to see 3-Stooges-level high jinks in real life? 

"There’s no philosophy, not really, in 'The Philosophy of Modern Song.'"

Writes Dwight Garner in "Bob Dylan Breaks Down 66 Classic Tunes in His New Book/'The Philosophy of Modern Song' offers commentaries on a range of music, written in the singer’s unmistakable lyrical style" (NYT)

I'm reading the book, and I've been asking myself, as I go, where's the philosophy? My working answer is the reader has to put together the philosophy. Dylan is providing a lot of raw material, but can't you see what he's saying?

You know there's a philosophy, but you don't know what it is, do you?

Mr. Garner writes:

These riffs, which he flicks like tarot cards through a distant cactus, sound a lot like his own song lyrics....

Much of the book is Dylan paraphrasing lyrics from songs, and it's only subtly obvious that Dylan's words are better, deeper, more mysterious. What I'm seeing is that for every song — or almost every song — he heightens the inward emotional structure of the main character in the song.

But Garner gets weary (book reviewers do get weary):

"I’d have loved it if I were 17. The author goes all in on Bourdain’s angst, his instinctive distrust of authority, his hero-worship of talented outsiders like..."

"... Hunter S. Thompson and Iggy Pop and William S. Burroughs. The older me, the one who prefers wine to fizz, wishes [the author] had more to say about things like: a) the elite and vernacular food worlds pre- and post-Bourdain; b) how Bourdain walked a moral tightrope across the conventions of travel writing and reporting, no mean feat for a wealthy white man in skinny jeans; and c) the sense that he was at the vanguard, more so than even the most scrutinized actors, of a new type of American masculinity. Here was an outdoor, rather than an indoor, cat... "

Writes Dwight Garner in "Anthony Bourdain’s New Biography: Light on Subtlety, Heavy on Grit 'Down and Out in Paradise,' by Charles Leerhsen, is an unvarnished account of a turbulent life" (NYT). 

Garner walks a moral tightrope reviewing a book that is not the book that he would like to read. To what extent is a reviewer obliged stick to whether an author did a good job of what he decided to do?

There's also this: "Bourdain grew into his looks; his was the kind of face that inspired Talmudic levels of study among women." And: "We learn he Googled the name Asia Argento — the Italian actress with whom he had a torrid, messy affair — several hundred times in the last three days of his life, after she rattled him by appearing in public with another man. Their text messages are printed in the book. 'You were reckless with my heart,' Bourdain wrote, before he hanged himself." 

Rattled. Indeed. It sounds as though he had become an obsessive stalker.

By the way, I like the book title — "Down and Out in Paradise" — if it is a play — it must be — on the Orwell title "Down and Out in Paris and London."

"Kurt Vonnegut and Nicholson Baker embraced good television. Vonnegut said he’d rather have written 'Cheers'..."

"... than any of his books. In Baker’s novel 'The Anthologist' (2009), the poet-narrator comments, tongue only partially in cheek, that 'any random episode of "Friends" is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than 99 percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published.'"

Writes Dwight Garner in "David Milch Made Remarkable TV. His Own Life Was a Drama, Too. 'Life’s Work' is a memoir of outrageous youth, creative obsessions and ruinous habits" (NYT).

Milch's shows include  “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and “Deadwood.”

"'Breaking History' is an earnest and soulless — Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one — and peculiarly selective appraisal..."

"... of Donald J. Trump’s term in office. Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership, and so on, ad infinitum, to speak about his boyish tinkering... with issues he was interested in. This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes: the two singed bathtubs, the gravel driveway and the mailbox. Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo."

Meow! It's Dwight Garner, in "Jared Kushner’s ‘Breaking History’ Is a Soulless and Very Selective Memoir/In this lengthy book, Kushner recounts the time he spent in the White House during his father-in-law’s term" (NYT).

"The tone is college admissions essay. Typical sentence: 'In an environment of maximum pressure, I learned to ignore the noise and distractions and instead to push for results that would improve lives.' ... You finish 'Breaking History' wondering: Who is this book for? There’s not enough red meat for the MAGA crowd, and Kushner has never appealed to them anyway. Political wonks will be interested — maybe, to a limited degree — but this material is more thoroughly and reliably covered elsewhere. He’s a pair of dimples without a demographic."

"He talks a bit about famous customers he’s served, including Patti Smith, who shares his fondness for Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays."

"Philip Larkin would come in, looking for first editions of his own books. He sold a copy of 'Finnegans Wake' to Johnny Depp, who was 'trying incredibly hard not to be recognized and with predictably comic results.'"

From "Love the Smell of Old Books? This Bookseller Would Like You to Leave./In his grouchy, funny memoir, 'A Factotum in the Book Trade,' Marius Kociejowski writes about what a good bookstore should feel like, famous customers he’s served and more" (NYT).

The review is by Dwight Garner — note: "garner" is fine as a name! — and the reason Kociejowski would like you to leave — if you walk into his store and say "I love the smell of old books" — is that a thousand people have walked into the store and said the same damned thing.

The Robert Louis Stevenson essays Patti Smith might have bought is "An Apology for Idlers," which I've blogged about many times, including:

"The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the 'Field of Dreams' thing, gives me a pain. I hated that movie."

"It's mostly fake. You look back into the meaning of old-time baseball, and really in the early days it was full of roughnecks and drunks. They beat up the umpires and played near saloons. In 'Fields of Dreams' [sic] there's a line at the end that says the game of baseball was good when America was good, and they're talking about the time of the biggest race riots in the country and Prohibition. What is that? That dreaminess, I really hated that." 

Said Roger Angell, quoted in this August 2000 Salon article, which I'm seeing today because it's partially quoted "Roger Angell, Who Wrote About Baseball With Passion, Dies at 101/In elegantly winding articles for The New Yorker loaded with inventive imagery, he wrote more like a fan than a sports journalist" (NYT). That obituary, by Dwight Garner, was published 3 days ago, but it's linked in a new "Conversation" between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens. Stephens calls Garner a "magnificent writer" writing about another magnificent writer.

Among the Angell quotes that Garner cherry-picked for the obituary: