Reader's Digest: February 16, 2023
From New York to London: topical news in a recent LRB.
First, Andrew O’Hagan on the book of the moment: Harry Mountbatten-Windsor’s Spare:
Harry’s truth is a cartoon strip of saucy entertainments and shouty jeremiads masquerading as a critique of the establishment, and it simply couldn’t be more riveting.
O’Hagan finds more than whinging and lurid gossip in Spare; he scents the allure of intellectual depth.
It’s quite thrilling, Harry as existentialist philosopher … I was especially pleased with his Heidegger-like handling of the principal problems of time. ‘Could there really be Nothing after this?’ the homework-shy scrum-half writes. ‘Does consciousness, like time, have a stop?’
But the problems of one family don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Later in the LRB, Anne Carson reports on the weather—but why an acrostic?—and the world itself becomes conscious of time’s lapse:
Remembering that day now, that day you went to Stykkishólmur, it seems as if the weather had writer’s block. Or, really, these days, doesn’t the whole world have writer’s block—alternately finding nothing to say and pouring out rainstorms, windstorms, snowstorms, glacier-melt, mudslides and volcanoes of self-exaggerated memoir? The weather remembers itself—its old forms and dignity—but it can’t believe in all that anymore.
A bit like British royalty.