John Cole: Well, good afternoon. Welcome to the Library of Congress. I'm John Cole. I'm the director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, and I'm pleased to welcome you to a talk by Michael Dirda in our "Books and Beyond" series. It's a series that features new books by authors who have a special connection to the Library of Congress either having worked with us in various projects, or in fact have used the Library of Congress's collections in developing a book. And since we're in charge of reading a book promotion, there's nothing better than being able to show the result of research by being able to hold up a real book that has been published, and through which, of course, the author is sharing his or her ideas and thoughts. All of our talks in this series are filmed and are available on the Center for the Book's website, and with that in mind, I ask you to please turn off all things electronic, all beepers. We will have a question-and-answer session after Michael's presentation, and we hope that you will participate, but if you have a question and Michael calls on you and you choose to ask the question, you are giving the Library of Congress permission to use your image and your words on our website production. "Classics are classics not because they are educational, but because people have found them worth reading generation after generation, century after century. More than anything else, great books speak to us of our own all-too-real feelings, confusions and daydreams." This is how Michael introduces his new book, and you will learn -- we will learn together -- the motivation behind the book, perhaps the selection criteria he used, and perhaps a little bit more about why he came to pick this book, because in fact he has, as many of you know, a series of books, many of them essays from articles that he's written or reprints, but also a lot of new material in his series of books about books. He's the author of the memoir "An Open Book," which he actually spoke about at the Library of Congress in 2003, which was the same year Michael appeared at the National Book Festival, for which the Center for the Book is at least partially responsible and in which we play a major role. His other book collections include "Bound to Please," published by Norton in 2005, "Book by Book" published by Holt - "Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life," published by Holt in 2006. As I said, he also has figured and worked at the Library of Congress programs and been part of our programs for a number of years. He also, as he and I were discussing earlier, is an essayist, and he just has a new essay in "The Chronicle of Higher Education's" ["Chronicle] Review," which is about a writer's conference in New York. It's called "Bright Lights, Big Conference," and it's a reflection on the big city and writing. I'm pleased to introduce to you Pulitzer prize-winning critic from the "Washington Post," Michael Dirda. Michael? [applause] Michael Dirda: Okay, thank you. Well, thank you, John for those very kind words. I know there are people standing. If you want to come down and sit here, there's a lot of room on the floor, there's a little table you can lean on, whatever you feel most comfortable with, but there is space down here. You could pretend you're five years old again and this is story hour at your elementary school, [laughter] because it really will be kind of like story hour. As some of you may know, I'm really a very rambling, digressive, conversational kind of speaker, not a very formal one at all, and so I'm just going to talk a little about the genesis of this book, and describe a little bit of what I did here or hoped to do, and then probably read one of the pieces. Anyway, that's my ostensible program. But I do love questions, and I love the interaction with an audience after the more formal part of a talk, so if you do have questions about books or reading or the "Post" or "Book World" or me or any of my essays or what have you, please feel free to ask them, and I look forward to that part. Again, here's your chance now if anybody wants to come down front. I recommend it. There, there you go, okay; stalwart figures up there. We'll wait a moment. First of all, can everyone hear me okay? Is this good, or am I too close or too far? Is there weird echoes? My experience is that microphones never work right. Okay, "Classics for Pleasure." How did this book come about, and how does it differ from my other books? Well, as John said, I have written a number of books about books, and they all are somewhat different. "Readings" is a collection of familiar essays about what reading has meant to me, and it's got lists, and some of the pieces are wistful and comic. It's a real potpourri. "An Open Book" was a memoir about how I grew up in a very working class steel town, Lorain, Ohio, and discovered books and how they consequently shaped my life at least up to the age of 19. That's as far as I go with the story. The big collection "Bound to Please" has I guess as serious a collection of my pieces as you're likely to find. It's somewhat similar to "Classics for Pleasure." And "Book by Book" is based on my commonplace book. Most of you probably know what a commonplace book is, but it's basically a notebook where you copy passages and quotations from your reading that you particularly like and want to keep close at hand as a kind of little bedside breviary or just as a repository of favorite quotations, passages. I've kept on for a long time. And I thought, well maybe I could use this to turn it into a book. And so what I did in "Book by Book" was select some of the shorter passages and categorize them in chapters like life or love or work and leisure, spiritual things and interspersed some little mini essays of reflections of my own and book lists. I think it's a, I think it's a cute book. This book, however, goes back to my childhood, really. Some of you may know, from my having spoken about or having read "An Open Book," that when I was a kid, I once was left a depart -- there were no bookshops in Lorain. There was a library, but a lot of the books I was interested in as a boy weren't available in bookshops. So I used to, you know, go to Whelan's Drug Store and read paperbacks. But sometimes I would be forced to go with my mother shopping to the department stores, and one of them had a little section of books, mostly Bibles and sort of uplifting books of that sort, but also they would have a run of the Hardy Boys or some Tarzans. It was my practice to go there and, not being able to afford hardbound books, at least not very often, I would just stand there all afternoon and read the whole book. So one afternoon I had finished whatever I was reading, and another 15 minutes or something before my mother was due to pick me up outside the doorways at this particular department store, and I noticed there was a rack of paperbacks off in a corner that I had not really noticed before, but it was a little unusual. So I went over there and I discovered these paperbacks didn't have any covers on them, and there were three of them in each plastic bag on this rack. And they were cheap. They were like three for 50 cents. I couldn't understand what this was all about. I do understand now. The department store had torn off the covers of the paperbacks, sent them back for full credit to the publishers, and then were supposed to shred the books, throw them away, but certainly not sell them. [laughter] Michael Dirda: But they decided they would make a few extra pennies this way. Well, of course, looking at these various little packages of books, I realized that no, no three books that had interesting sounding titles were in the same bag. In those days, I always carried a pocket knife, and carried one -- [laughter] Michael Dirda: -- up until the security at the Library of Congress started confiscating them when I would come there, and I don't carry them as often as I once did. But in those days I did, and I got out my knife and slit open some of these bags and mixed and matched attractive looking titles. Again, if you'd like to come down front, please. There's plenty of room here on the floor. If you get tired of standing, don't hesitate. I decided to put together one little package of these books. Of course I realized, you know, that this is sort of like stealing. It didn't seem quite ethical, but I wanted these books by this time. So I clamped my fingers really tightly over the slit in the plastic bags, and, well you know, sweating profusely like Peter Lorre in "M" if you've ever seen that old movie. [laughter] I give my 50 cents to the cashier then race out where my mother is driving the getaway car. She doesn't realize it's the getaway car, and off we go to another store, probably to buy stuff for my sisters. I stay in the car at this point to look at my new treasures. One of them was a book called, "Which Way to Mecca, Jack?" And it was by a writer I had never heard of, but it was supposed to be a laugh fest, it was supposed to - and in fact was very funny, by an author not known now for being particularly funny, in fact for being extremely scary. It was by William Peter Blatty, who later went on the write "The Exorcist." It was a memoir about growing up. The second book I picked up was a series, a Sam Durell thriller. Sam Durell was an American spy, somewhat like James Bond but without all the cosmopolitan suavity of Bond, and the books weren't even all that very well written, I mean, Matt Helm was much superior to Sam Durell. But I loved them because they all had the same titles. They were all called "Assignment blank," you know, "Assignment -- Shanghai," "Assignment Sulu Sea." The one I happened to buy was "Assignment Ankara. " And so that was great fun. But the last book was the one that matters in this case, because I put it in as kind of a last minute lark. I'd already started to get interested in reading more seriously. I was 12 or 13 when this all happened, and it was a book called "The Lifetime Reading Plan" by Clifton Fadiman. And I took this book home and I started reading the introductory essay by Fadiman, which is very winning. And he made reading, you know, classics sound as if they would be as much fun as reading Tarzan or the Hardy Boys. And I then gradually read a couple of the essay in the book. It is basically -- it still exists, there've been revisions. It exists as a kind of guide to a 'hundred great books that you should read,' and each book or author has an ingratiating essay attempting to make the book sound as inviting and entertaining as possible. Well, I used this book to guide my reading, 'cause I didn't have any guidance to speak of otherwise for a long time. And by the time I graduated from high school, I had probably read 60 or 70 of these great books. "Read" in the sense of my eyes passed across the page. But, you know, what I got out of Kant's "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics of Morals" at the age of 15 is difficult to determine at this point in time. [laughter] However, we now zip across the intervening decades and we come closer to the present, where a man named Andre Bernard is the editor-in-chief of Harcourt. Andre Bernard is now the vice president of the Guggenheim Foundation; he left Harcourt. But he was a guy known in publishing for a good many years, and he knew this story about Fadiman, and he had known my essays and the kind of pieces I write, which are, in fact, rather similar in character to Fadiman's. We now look back on and look down on Clifton Fadiman as the very symbol of middlebrow America. I mean this was a man who was the bastion of the Book of the Month Club's readers' circle for 50 years maybe? I don't know how long. He was a man who started reviewing books in the 1920s. He reviewed the early Faulkners and said they were terrible and just disgusting books. But he was also a great wit, ran "Information Please, Quiz Show," and was a power at Simon & Schuster; and now he's probably best remembered because he's the father of Anne Fadiman, who is herself a fine essayist and book lover. Anyway, Andre, when he was a young man first starting off in publishing, had a job at the Book of the Month Club as Clifton Fadiman's assistant. Andre revered the memory of Fadiman. They had, in fact, done a couple of books together, books of quotations and I think children's books. He was interested in children's books until the end of this life. And he came to me and he said, "You know, I've always wanted you to do an updated version of "The Lifetime Reading Plan." And at first I jumped at this idea. I thought that would be great. You know, I love these sort of ways life having come full circle, and like you know buckles being buckled, and I thought you know, this would be great. But the more I thought about it, I decided that it wasn't really what I wanted to do. For one reason, there have been revisions of "The Lifetime Reading Plan" that have added books from Asia and Africa and Latin America. The original hundred books were heavily Anglo-American/ European in their focus, but the last revision by a guy named John Major had added 33 books from elsewhere in the world, and they were very good choices. And I had no argument with any of this. And then I realized to do an updated version for the 21st century, whatever, you'd still have to cover a lot of the same writers, and it seemed to me pointless to write another little essay inviting people to read Shakespeare or Homer or any of the obvious classics. So that didn't seem at all interesting to me. So what I proposed to Andre was instead a kind of beyond "The Lifetime Reading Plan," the next hundred books you might read, where I would have a chance to write about slightly different sorts of classics. The actual contents of the book and its character morphed slightly after Andre left Harcourt to go to the Guggenheim and I inherited another editor, a woman named Ann Patty who is a very interesting woman in her own right. She's both a very literary editor -- Steven Millhauser one of the most literary and wonderful writers around was her author for many years -- but she also edited V.C. Andrews, "Petals in the Wind," "Flowers in the Attic" whatever, all those Southern Gothic incest novels. [laughter] Anyway, the way the book evolved was this. I decided I liked the idea of extending "The Lifetime Reading Plan" to neglected classics. So I wanted to write about classics that we had now decided were interesting and important that might not have been thought of as interesting or important 50 years ago, but have become so. Then I also wanted to do -- I didn't want to repeat any of the books I had written about in any of my other books. I wrote about a lot of obvious world classics in "Bound to Please" particularly, people like Isaac Babel, and I wrote about Murasaki Shikubu in Readings, and just a great many of them. Still, there were a lot left that I hadn't written about and I wanted to write about. Still, the last category that I wanted to include were what I would call classics of genre literature, popular literature, books like Georgette Heyer's Regency romances, "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," "Frankenstein," "Dracula," Rider Haggard's "She," H. G. Wells' science fiction, Phillip K. Dick's books, Edward Gorey; people who were not thought of as typical classics, but were classics within their field, who had started foundational texts within horror or romance or fantasy or science fiction, and thus had shaped our imaginations the way we think about literature and ourselves as much as any of the more obvious classics. Then I wanted to mix all these books together, to say that what matters is good writing, good books regardless of genre. As many of you may know from my work at the "Post" over the years, I've always argued against this artificial barrier that exists between certain kinds of high literature and what's thought to be popular literature. [It's] that books are well written or not, that's really what it all comes down to and these genres are often just marketing devices. And I've also argued against the best-seller list, which is something I dislike intensely. Restraint of trade: people just go and buy what's on the best-seller list. They don't go and look at the books on the shelves, read a page or two, talk to their friends, and thus discover books that might speak to them much more powerfully and more immediately than anything on the best-seller list. Anyway, what kind of books do I have in this collection? I'll read you the contents, and then I'll read one of the essays, and then we'll open for questions. And I'll put on my reading glasses because age has begun to catch up with me, I'm sorry to say. Probably should get bifocals and no one would know. So originally I was going to do chronological order, and I said no, that would be hard on people because you'd start with all the more difficult and demanding books from antiquity, and you might lose your readers before you get them hooked. So I mixed them up into categories, but they're kind of chronological within categories. So here are just the authors. "Playful Imaginations": and I won't describe any of them, maybe one or two: Lucian; Denis Diderot; Thomas Love Peacock; Max Beerbohm; Jaroslav Ha_ek, who wrote "The Good Soldier _vejk," sort of the "Catch-22" of World War I; Ivy Compton-Burnett; S. J. Perelman; Italo Calvino; Edward Gorey. "Heroes of Their Time": "Beowulf"; Ferdowsi who wrote the Persian epic the :Sh_hn_meh": the Icelandic Sagas; Christopher Marlowe -- instead of writing about Shakespeare, I write about Webster and Marlowe; mile Zola; Ernst Jnger, Ernst Jnger wrote "Storm of Steel," which is a memoir of Jnger's fighting for the Germans during World War I. I think I can manage without these. He enlisted when he was 18, fought throughout the war, won the Iron Cross first class, and was eventually awarded the Pour le Mrite, which despite its French name is the highest award for valor in Germany and was the youngest man ever to win it. But this is an incredible memoir of battle, seen from the German side. It's like Homer. There's almost no political sense at all to it; it's just men going into battle and dying. And it is just a very powerful book. Interesting things, Jnger lived to be 102. He only died about 15-20 years ago. I could've talked to him. It's incredible when people live that long. He was also a man of the right although he later wrote a book critical of Hitler called "On the Marble Cliffs," kind of an allegory critical of the Nazis. He was such a hero in Germany as a young man that Hitler sent him an inscribed copy of "Mein Kampf." James Agee, that's the last of heroes of their time. "Love's Mysteries": Sappho; Arthurian romances; Madame de La Fayette; Sren Kierkegaard, I write about "The Diary of a Seducer," just a chilling text. George Meredith, I love his sonnet sequence "Modern Love," about the breakup of a marriage. 16-line sonnets, it's sort of his own thing. There's just wonderful stuff. Gosh, I could read you the last -- the poems. He's sort of a forgotten poet. He's remembered as a novelist, but the last, one of the last one, after the divorce has gone through finally: Lovers beneath the singing sky of May, They wandered once; clear as the dew on flowers: But they fed not on the advancing hours: Their hearts held cravings for the buried day. Then each applied to each that fatal knife, Deep-questioning, which probes to endless dole. Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life! It goes on from there. It's just wonderful stuff. Cavafy, the great Greek Alexandrian poet; Georgette Heyer, I love her Regency romances. They're incredibly witty. They're like Jane Austen. Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet. Daphne de Maurier, I write about "Rebecca" as both a romance and an anti-romance. "Words from the Wise": Lao-tse, the Tao; Heraclitus; Cicero; Erasmus; the English religious tradition; Spinoza; Samuel Johnson. "Everyday Magic": "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"; the classic fairy tales; E. T. A. Hoffmann, tales from Hoffmann, "The Sandman" is famous. Freud wrote about it in his essay on the uncanny. Mrime wrote "The Vnus d'Ille" probably the most famous French short story, well fantasy short story, of the 19th century about the guy who puts the ring on the statue of Venus' finger, Frances Hodgson Burnett, "The Secret Garden"; E. Nesbit -- I love "The Five Children" books; John Masefield and Walter de la Mare. E. Nesbit, I've always charmed by her children's books. She really established modern children's writing with these adventures of kids meeting fantastic creatures like the Psammead or the Phoenix. And people often put down children's literature, as they think that you can't read it as an adult. Great children's books are really appealing of any age. They're talking about fundamental qualities in our lives. Nol Coward, the most consummate sophisticate of our time, when he was dying in the last months of his life, he spent all his time reading E. Nesbit. "Lives of Consequence": Plutarch; Cardano; John Aubrey, Aubrey's "Brief Lives" are gossip about the Renaissance, figures about the early 17th century and late 16th century, they're wonderful fun; Pope; Rousseau; Frederick Douglass; Jacob Burckhardt; Henry James; W. H. Auden. "The Dark Side": John Webster; Mary Shelley; James Hogg, James Hogg, or perhaps Hogg, I'm not even sure. Any of you know a book called "Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner?" It's just one of the great dark psychological suspense novels of the 19th century. Somewhat like "Dr. Jekyll and Mr." Hyde, but with religious hypocrisy and lots of other stuff thrown in. It's just a wonderful book; Sheridan Le Fanu, the great Irish ghost storywriter and sensational novels -- "Uncle Silas," as good as "The Woman in White" or "Moonstone." His novel, "The House by the Churchyard" was really an important source for "Finnegan's Wake." It's often referred to in the buried way that "Finnegan's Wake" works. Bram Stoker; M. R. James; William Roughead, who wrote true crime reports about all the murders in Scotland and England between the late 19th century and the early 20th century. They really established that genre. H. P. Lovecraft. I love H. P. Lovecraft [laughs]. "Traveler's Tales": Thomas More; Daniel Defoe; Xavier de Maistre. De Maistre was a soldier who was confined to his quarters for dueling during the Napoleonic wars, and he decided to imagine that his room was the world, and he would journey around his room. So he wrote a whole book called "Journey around My Room," where all the objects in the room recall aspects of his past and he journeys. It takes him, you know, pages and pages to get from his bed to the bureau next door to it. Jules Verne. Jules Verne. Brian doesn't work here, Brian Tavis, who's a great Jules Verne expert. He's out in Virginia now, I know; J. K. Huysmans, who wrote " Rebours" "Against the Grain" about the guy who retreats to his house who creates a world of his own; Isak Dinesen; Robert Byron. Robert Byron wrote the travel book "The Road to Oxiana," which Paul Fussell famously acclaimed to be the equivalent of the "Wasteland" for travel books. "The Way We Live Now": Petronius; Elizabeth Gaskell; Ivan Goncharov; Jos Maria de Ea de Queirs; Chekhov; Jean Toomer; Willa Cather; Cline; Zora Neale Hurston; Eudora Welty. "Realms of Adventure": Rider Haggard; Arthur Conan Doyle; Rudyard Kipling; H. G. Wells; G. K. Chesterton; Agatha Christie; Dashiell Hammett. "Encyclopedic Visions": Ovid; Robert Burton; Edward Gibbon; J. G. Frazer; H. W. Fowler; Ezra Pound; Andr Malraux; Philip K. Dick. So those are the writers. So it is a broad range, potpourri. I write about them all, I hope, in an invitational way, not as a critic. I've not really ever thought of myself as a critic in the sort of serious scholarly academic critic. I write for other readers. I love a lot of books, and I want to tell you why I love them, and I want you to love them too. Anyway, that's my intent. Now, how're we doing on time? Okay. I presume this is for an hour, right? John Cole: Correct. Michael Dirda: Okay, so, I've got about 12:25 or 12:30. I'm going to read one of the entries, which will take probably about 10 minutes. Then we'll have some questions, okay? Let's see. And I don't know what to read exactly. I like them all. [laughter] You know, it's like, you know, the story of Swift when he was old, and he went back and reread "The Tale of a Tub" and said, "Ah, what genius I had then!" [laughter] But, you know, this seems a scary group, so I thought we'd read M. R. James' collected ghost stories. Ready? Female Speaker: Yep! Michael Dirda: Get cozy. Get comfortable. Put on your slippers, you know, Glass of wine, cup of tea. What Sherlock Holmes's adventures are to the mystery, M. R. James' thirty or so "ghost stories of an antiquary" are to horror and the supernatural. In his lifetime, James was the greatest English authority on the New Testament apocrypha, a bibliographer of medieval manuscripts, an amateur expert on early church architecture and decoration, a Cambridge don, and eventually the provost of Eton. All these contribute their part to what are widely regarded as the finest ghostly tale in English. Originally, James' stories of revenants, demons, black magic, were intended to be enjoyed as shivery Christmas treats. After the seasonal feast and good cheer, Monty (that's his name, Montague Rhodes James) would read one or two aloud to his friends at Cambridge or his students at Eton. By a single candle, after all other lights had been extinguished the bespectacled scholar would gradually create a sense of unease, of growing eeriness and expectation. Many of the stories begin quite casually, often when a middle-aged bachelor, typically a don, visits an old church or country house or takes a holiday in Denmark or France, and there stumbles across something from the past: an old diary, an enigmatic inscription on a tomb, puzzling symbols in stained glass, or even an 18th-century maze in which one never feels quite alone. In "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book," Mr. Deniston spends an afternoon of his holiday abroad sketching the interior of a decaying French cathedral. Toward evening, he notices that, "The church began to fill with shadows, while the curious noises, the muffled footfalls and distant talking voices that had been perceptible all day, seemed, no doubt because of the fading light and the consequently quickened sense of hearing, to become more frequent and insistent. Ironically, James' heroes shrug off what at first seemed only "curious. " Who wouldn't? Those muffled sounds must be some odd echo or sympathetic vibration from the thick stone walls, that shadow a trick of the light, and the unexpected nervousness of the locals a normal response to a stranger in their midst. Could it, though, just possibly be something else? There is that old legend ... No matter what the exact circumstance, the past eventually reaches out into the present, and the most seemingly ordinary object or discovery may serve to summon up the horror. In "The Mezzotint," Mr. Williams orders a print of an English manor house, one that seems disappointingly unexceptional, aside from the hideous skeletal figure crawling on all fours across the front lawn [laughter].Taking a vacation at Barnstow, Professor Parkins strolls along the beach, and almost literally stumbles upon the ruins of a Templar preceptory. There among its crumbling tombstones, he unfortunately makes a small discovery: It was a bronze he now saw, and was shaped very much after the manner of the modern dog whistle. In fact it was, yes certainly it was, actually no more, no less than a whistle. He put it to his lips. He blew, tentatively, and stopped suddenly, startled, and yet pleased at the note he had elicited. It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and soft as it was, he somehow felt it must be audible for miles 'round. Quite a nice little archaeological find, but Parkins can make out only part of the Latin inscription, something about somebody coming. [laughter] Back in his hotel quarters, he decides to blow the whistle again. "Goodness! What force the wind can get up in a few minutes! ... It's enough to tear the room to pieces." The story-- one of James's supreme achievements-- takes its deliciously ominous title from a slightly modified line of Robert Burns: "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad." James's scholars and antiquaries generally bring their fates upon themselves, sometimes inadvertently or through simple bad luck, but often because they give into a form of passion. Not sexual, of course-- heaven forefend-- but rather the passions typical of the academic life: the allure of an arcane discovery, perhaps the spiteful desire for revenge on a colleague, sometimes just the thrill of figuring out a riddle or solving a historical mystery. Anyone, of course, might wish to go after "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas," some, "ten thousand piece of gold laid up in the well in the court of the Abbot's house of Steinfeld." Clever Mr. Somerson learns of their location by deciphering an elaborate cryptogram. Mistakenly, however, he fails to pay sufficient attention to the full coded text, which ends with an enigmatic phrase: The abbot, a dabbler in the dark arts, warns that he has, "set a guardian over this wealth." Atmosphere-- James himself called it mood-- is all-important to the cozy style of the English ghost story. Indeed, that nostalgia-laden period flavor's what we now value most in fiction from the late Victorian and Edwardian era. So it may sound less than heretical to say that James' supernatural tales aren't really all that frightening to a modern reader. To begin with, they are elaborately framed, often set in the past, and laced with a dry humor. Moreover the main characters are lightly sketched, and James never makes us care greatly about their fates. In this regard, he's rather like Agatha Christie. In truth, what we most deeply enjoy is the storytelling itself, starting with the titles: "Casting the Runes," "A Warning to the Curious," "Count Magnus." Reading along, we do more than suspend our incredulity, we surrender to the spirit of the game. As James deftly creates an atmosphere of suggestion and anticipation, we wonder just how and when his various hobgoblins will appear. He is in fact a great master of reticence, a quality he much admired in life as in narrative art. Nothing gross or gruesome is described, it is only hinted at. James will usually deliver a single, memorable shock. Let me quote an example, without giving away the story's title: A scholar has gone home. He's had some strange things happen to him, but he's gone home. He's gone up to his study. Then he dozed, and then he woke, and bethought himself that his brown spaniel, which ordinarily slept in his room, had not come upstairs with him. Then he thought he was mistaken, for happening to move his hand, which hung down over the arm of the chair within a few inches of the floor, he felt on the back of it just the slightest touch of a surface of hair. And stretching it out in that direction, he stroked and patted a rounded something. But the feel of it, and still more the fact that instead of a responsive movement, absolute stillness greeted the touch, made him look over his arm. What he had been touching rose to meet him. James' other gift is a flair for pastiche. In life, he was noted as a mimic, adept at replicating the mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of his colleagues. His stories abound with fabricated antiquarian documents. In "Mr. Humphries and His Inheritance," James recreates a 17th century religious tract, one that tells of a man who ventured into a certain maze in search of a great treasure. " He went merrily on and without any Difficulty there's lots of capitals and italics in what I'm reading He went merrily on and without any Difficulty reached the heart of the Labyrinth and got the Jewel, and so set out on his way back rejoicing: but as the Night fell, wherein all the Beasts of the Forest do move, he begun to be sensible of some Creature keeping Pace with him, and as thought, peering and looking upon him from the next Alley to that he was in; and that when he should stop, this Companion should stop also, which put him in some Disorder of his Spirits. And indeed, as the Darkness increas'd, it seemed to him . . In all his stories, M. R. James aimed to create what he called a pleasing terror, and this oxymoron hints at his artistry. More precisely, he remains unrivaled in evoking ominous foreboding, and of how easy it is to awaken the unwanted attention of things that should sleep quietly in their tombs or hiding places. So. Anyway, I would say that's typical, but -- [applause] It's obviously geared to make you want to read these ghost stories, and others emphasize the wit or the power of the story, or the language or what have you, but I've tried to make each of the pieces as I say, homages to the these writers to demonstrate my affection for them and to urge you to give them a try. Well, I've talked a bunch, let me open the floor to questions, and I'd be happy to answer anything at all, if I can. Okay. Yes, ma'am? Female Speaker: After you were done, and you had it all published, did you think, "Oh, I should have put him in?" Michael Dirda: I actually -- John Cole: Michael, would you repeat the question? Michael Dirda: The question is, when I was done, did I think, "Oh, I should've put this writer or that in?" I actually wrote twenty more than are in this book. My editor said they wanted to keep the book at 25 dollars at a certain length, and so I cut out 20 of them. There are a lot of good ones, you know. I put them aside. Who knows? Some day I may do another book, that way I could use them. But I left out -- writers are very dear to me. The piece on Stendhal for example, not the novels of Stendhal, but Stendhal's wonderful treatise on love, and his terrific memoir, "The Life of Henry Brulard," which takes him up to the age of 19, and is, I'll tell you privately, the secret model for my own, which also takes me up to the age of 19. I left that out. And I wrote my dissertation on Stendhal, so I knew a lot about it, but I figured, well, you know, I didn't need to do that. I could do it another time. But I hope there may be at least I may have one more book. I have a lot of really good essays I realize still that I've written since this book was planned that I've been writing for other places beside the "Post." I wrote a long piece about Dante for the "New York Review of Books," on Casanova's memoirs which I love, written a piece on Nabokov for the reissue of one of his novels. I mean, these occasions where I can cannibalize things I've written and give them more permanent form are always to be welcome. A lot of times, you know, I can't. The books are not that kind of book. But there's plenty more. I should maybe have a website. I've never understood it. I could put this stuff up. Every time people tell me, "You should have a blog," or "You should have a website," I keep saying, "What's in it for me? Where's the money?" [laughter] Other questions. Yes, ma'am. Female Speaker: You mentioned Ovid, what I think you said Ovid's "Vision?" Michael Dirda: I said Ovid, "The Metamorphoses." Female Speaker: Exactly. I was wondering can you elaborate a little on what you mean by it? Michael Dirda: Well, I wrote a piece about Ovid's "Metamorphoses." I mean it's an essay, similar to the one I read and talking about it's important in the western imagination for storytellers, for opera, for the murals on the walls of courtesans, you know, I mean, everyone drew on Ovid's stories for a thousand years. Female Speaker: Well, especially for illustrations, I think. Michael Dirda: For illustrations, but also, you know, for poetry. Something like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a very Ovidian Shakespeare play. But I make a number of different points, and I quote some bits of Ovid. Another question? In the back. Male Speaker: Yes, I've noticed over the years as I've read your reviews and enjoyed them very much, you often comment on how your children don't love to read as much as you do. And I was wondering, because they're hypnotized by electronic technology or whatever, if you could say something about the future of reading. Michael Dirda: The question is about whether my children read enough or if they're hypnotized by electronic media, and can I say something about the future of reading. My kids all do read and they've actually read more at different times in their lives. My two younger sons particularly read quite a bit. My middle son's in fact a junior at my old college and majoring in English. I tried to discourage this. [laughter] And my younger son has got a science turn, but he's read all of H. P. Lovecraft, all of Arthur Conan Doyle, all of Jack Vance who's a science fiction/fantasy writer I love for his wonderful style. So, they do read in that sense, but they also are caught in up in the world of computers. I worry about -- well, I'm two minds on all of these things. The world will advance whatever I think, and clearly the motor here is the computer. It has become more central to our lives than any of us would have thought 25 years ago. I mean, I can remember when computer geeks used to carry around big trays of cards, and if they spilled their cards, they went into epileptic suicidal fits. [laughter] But I don't like to sound too old fogey-ish. I grew up with print, so I value print. But art and literature will survive no matter how it's delivered to people. I sometimes said that, you know, people probably complained when the codex book came along, and they said, you know, "What was wrong with scrolls? Scrolls were great! What do we need the books like this for? We did okay." So we have to be wary of being too resistant to change. That said, what troubles me about the rise of computer literacy is the way it's used by kids. Kids use computers to search for answers to questions, and they go real fast. You ever see kids? You know, they just go from screen to screen, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And they're looking for the answer in their mind. They're not reading around an author's work. They're getting no sense of the context often of what they're searching for, and more importantly and not, you don't really gain what grandiosely would call the kind of wisdom that books can deliver, unless you give them a sustained, focused active attention. You have to interact with them. You have to think about them, you have to mark up the page -- if they're not a library book. You make them your own that way. The computer is in the business of delivering facts and information as fast as possible. It's a slightly different system. That may change. We now have this Kindle. I've looked at it. The pages are pretty readable. They go dark and they irritate me because they're black for a second before they, you know, when they turn the page. But I also like books to be different. I don't all my books to look exactly the same. I like some to be big, some to be fat, some to be small, some to have illustrations, you know. I remember objecting to the Library of America when Raymond Chandler was included, not that Chandler doesn't belong in the Library of America because he is an important writer, a wonderful writer, but somehow it seemed wrong to read him on this Bible paper in the same way you're reading Henry James's "The Golden Ball." You're supposed to read Raymond Chandler in 35-cent paperbacks with leggy blondes on the cover and gumshoes in trench coats, you know? That's what it should look like. It's somehow wrong this other way. So I like the variety that you get when you have a library of books as opposed to a kind of just collection of text available electronically. Question there? Male Speaker: Do you have any recommendations or favorites of literature from Spain? I noticed there wasn't a huge selection of Spanish literature in your list of books [inaudible.] Michael Dirda: I was going to say, I don't think there are any in this book. I have several in the earlier books I've done. I've written about a lot of the Latin American writers and about some of the Spanish writers as well. I'm trying to think whom I would suggest on the tip of my tongue. Well, I do have figures, but exactly which ones are in which books escape me right now. I will add, though, that I do have a kind of prejudice against Spanish literature. I have a long essay on "Don Quixote," and I've read "Don Quixote" two times all the way through and dipped in it, and I don't like it as much as I think I ought to. I don't think it's very funny, for one thing, I think Don Quixote's incredibly cruel. And I don't think the jokes work. I think it is a wonderful resource for lots of narrative techniques. It and "Tristram Shandy" will teach you everything you ever could possibly need to know about postmodernism. But there's a lot of Spanish literature that doesn't interest me. Between Don Quixote and Miguel de Unamuno, I mean, there's not a whole lot for me. I'm a Francophile by inclination, and somewhat of an Anglophile and lots of world literature, but my motto is the old one, [laughter] Yes. Female Speaker: Do you read books in other languages? Michael Dirda: French, I can read German haltingly. I can read Latin with a trot, and I'm trying to learn Italian. It's so hard -- unless I were in Europe, it's hard to carry on with these thing. But I lived in France. I taught in Marseille in France, and there was a time I knew French very well. I even had a Marseilles accent. I could pass for French for maybe 90 seconds with French people. [laughter] I think it was quite an achievement myself. Other questions? Yes? Male Speaker: Is there any difference in your mind between listening to books on tape and reading them? You seem to encourage the proactive reading as opposed to listening. Michael Dirda: I love books on tape. My memoir's in fact going to be a book on tape. Recorded Books is doing it. The problem with books on tape -- first of all, there're wonderful advantages and benefits, you know. You get a good narrator, and they are just enchanting. It is like being a kid again listening to your mother read fairy tales when you're in bed. They just are mesmerizing. I have lots of favorites. Naxos, which is the cheap classical music line also has an audio book line. The guy who does Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is just wonderful, and the guy who does Proust is wonderful. One is Phillip [Neville] Jason and one is James Maduke [spelled phonetically], and they're just terrific. Jeremy Irons reading "Lolita." Ah, to die for! Really just wonderful. I mean, you can't believe that he does all of the voices so well. So I love those things. But the problem is sometimes books are abridged, so you might lose something there. Sometimes you'll get a bad reader. But the only real difficulty I see is that you can't really make a note, or people don't tend to go back. It's harder to have a kind of argument with a text in the way of an active reading. You more or less enjoy the story, you enjoy the performance of the narrator, and that's enough for most of us for most of the time, but sometimes you need to hunker down with a pencil and compare things in notes and flip back and forth, and audio books don't lend themselves to that. Other questions? Way in the back. Male Speaker: What kind of distinction do you make, if any, between the books you read for work and the books you read because Michael wants to read them? Michael Dirda: What distinction do I need the books I read for work and the books I read for pleasure. Well, as I say when I've been asked that question before, I don't read for pleasure. [laughter] I get pleasure from what I read, but the one problem, the one drawback of becoming a professional book reviewer or literary journalist is that everything becomes grist for the mill basically, and it's time to make the donuts. I have to write a book review every week for the "Post." Sometimes I have to do background reading for it. And I'm usually writing for other places as well. I write for the "New York Review of Books" from time to time, and now the "Chronicle [of Higher Education], the "American Scholar." So I've always got something I have to read, and my only hope is that I will have chosen wisely enough that I will be reading books that I would want to read anyway and that do give me pleasure. That said, it even wrecks you for the few times you have vacation and you sit on the beach, you know, I mean, I sit on the beach and I read "The ABC Murders" by Agatha Christie, and I'll start using a pencil and marking things here, "Go back. Check this, I think she's saying-." It's terrible! You lose the ability to read for pleasure, and in fact, as I've gotten older, I now have begun to daydream as we all do when we reach a certain age, about well, if I just stop doing this kind of work. I have this huge pile of books I would like to just read for pleasure or books I would like to go back and reread again. And someday if I'm lucky, I'll get a chance. Of course I won't, I mean, I'll never. You know, finally free at least, finally bought the farm, it's like the FBI -- you always get killed before you get to enjoy it. So how about one or two more questions, then we'll stop. If there are one or two more questions. Yes. Yes? Female Speaker: You don't find that criticizing the book is the actual pleasure, like finding the themes, you know? Michael Dirda: Do I find that criticizing the book is the actual pleasure? Well. I understand what you mean and yes, I would say there is a pleasure in it. People often complain about writing, that they don't like to write. I actually like to write. Sometimes there's an initial barrier to settle down to do it, but once I start, I lose myself, and complete tunnel vision, hours go by. I like to write most of my pieces start to finish within one period of time, however long it takes. And sometimes it takes quite a while for me, because I'm -- as I say, I'm not particularly gifted, but I am dogged. And I'll work hard on the sentences, and I have an idea of what I want them to sound like. For me, the most important part of writing is the establishment of the right sound, the right tone, a certain pitch, quality of the voice. That will vary somewhat from piece to piece. So I get pleasure from that, and there is a kind of aesthetic pleasure. More often than not too, there is a flip side where I hit my head and say like, well, I could quote exactly how it is, because I actually quote this in this book. Some of you may know that Edward Gorey's little albums, It was called, "The Unstrung Harp" came out in 1953, a portrait of a writer working on a novel of the same name, "The Unstrung Harp," and there are these two quotes from it: "Mr. Earbrass" -- it's all in the present tense -- "has been rashly skimming through the early chapters" -- of his new novel -- "which he has not looked at for months, and now sees The Unstrung Harp for what it is. 'Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful!' He must be mad to go enduring the un-exquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel. Mad. Why didn't he become a spy? How does one become one? He will burn the manuscript." You feel that way, you know. My phrases I usually say, "Whatever gave me the idea I ever could write?" But I'll give you another Earbrass quote later on. This is also the literary life. He goes to a book party in London, an author's party. "The talk deals with disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews, others' declining talent, and the unspeakable horror of the literary life." John Cole: One more question. This gentleman maybe? Michael Dirda: Where was it? Yes, okay? John Cole: Two more questions. Female Speaker: I was wondering how contemporary you felt you could choose for your book. I was thinking of somebody like the Japanese author Murakami, or -- Michael Dirda: I decided early on that I would have no living authors. It would lead to too many problems. I have some writers I deeply admire, and I've written about them. There are some of them in "Bound to Please." I think "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy is a wonderful, amazing, if terribly gruesome book. I love the writing of Steven Milhauser, Russell Hoban, a good many writers. And I thought well, if I started picking one or others, they would all, you know, say, "Why wasn't I in your book?" But the dead, you know, they travel fast, as Dracula tells us, but they don't usually come back to haunt us, at least when we don't include them in our books. John Cole: I think this gentleman had maybe the last question here. Michael Dirda: The last question? Yes. Okay? Male Speaker: Okay. Is there any particular type of book that you like to review best? Michael Dirda: Is there any particular type of book that I like to review best? If I'm given my druthers, what I like to review are what I think of are neglected classics, do rediscoveries, books from the past, that I think are wonderful and that people should be more aware of. That's my preference. Although if it has to be sort of contemporary book, I probably like biographies best because they give me a chance to write about an author's work as a whole rather than focus on a single book, although sometimes you can build a single book into a consideration of an oeuvre. Well again, thank you all for coming. [applause] I hope you'll pick up a copy of this book or any of my other books, if not today, some time. Birthdays are coming, Christmas. Holidays of various sorts all require gifts, and what better gifts? [laughter] [end of transcript]