Sammy and Beckett’s Book Blog

Sometimes the New Yorker humor is just too perfect.

The New Yorker recently launched Back Issues, a new blog that posts excerpts and links from the magazine’s rich archives. Recent posts included past examinations of Dorthy Parker, Roma Polanski and bed bugs.

I recently posted a link to Alain de Botton article that lamented the absence of the information economy’s workplace from modern literature. In the article and his recent book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, de Botton calls attention to this neglected part of life in the 21st Century.

However, as Kelefa Sanneh pointed out in a recent New Yorker article, not everyone is excited about the office of tomorrow. In reviewing Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work Sanneh finds a good amount of malcontent with the modern world in Mathew Crawford’s polemic on craftsmanship, pointing out that, “the call to craft is in some ways a conservative call: it asks workers to seek fulfillment through personal diligence, not politics.”

Despite the discontent that Crawford taps into, de Botton may get his literature of the office. As Sanneh rightfully recognizes, “hard jobs get much easier to love as soon as they start to disappear.” If the financial industry and all of its legal, technical, and clerical support don’t reappear there maybe a new literature coming out of New York and other white collar strongholds — a literature that captures the “highly networked semi-autonomous refuge, where turn-of-the-century workers spent their pleasant days solving problems, exploring the limits of cooperation, and wasting valuable company time on the Internet.”

In last week’s New Yorker James Wood profiled the late George Orwell in the Life and Letters section (only abstract available without registration). I’ve been a fan of Orwell’s nonfiction and Wood’s analysis vocalized many of my own thoughts on his writings, like this acute observation:

Orwell worked at his journalism like a good novelist, the strange thing is that he could not work at his novels like a good novelist. The details that pucker the journalism are rolled flat in his fiction. Orwell needed the prompt of the real to speak as a writer.

Like Wood, I’ve always felt that the humanist truth found in Orwell’s essays has never been equalled in his two popular novels. This imbalance may account for his reputation as a revolutionary  and social critic first and a writer second.

My last rummaging session took place in a very out of the way used bookstore and yielded a nice surprise — a reissue of The Outermost Dream: Literary Sketches, a collection of criticism by William Maxwell. Maxwell was a longtime editor for the New Yorker and writes with magazines signature style as he introduces the reader to a number of unknown literary gems.

The New Yorker’s “A Critic at Large” section tackles the letters of Samuel Beckett in depth.