Waste 120 seconds

Michael Dirda writes a nice review of Javier Marias's Written Lives, a collection of vignettes of our literary betters. Money quote:

The one thing that leaps out when you read about these authors," writes the acclaimed Spanish novelist Javier Marías, "is that they were all fairly disastrous individuals..."

Again, the moral is that genius is best appreciated from a distance. The prosecution would like to introduce the following pieces of evidence:

ITEM A: Mari­as reminds us that William Faulkner, who once worked for the University of Mississippi post office, hated to be interrupted in his reading by "any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp."

ITEM B: "Any writer who leaves behind him sealed envelopes not to be opened until long after his death is clearly convinced of his own immense importance, as tends to be confirmed when, after all that patient waiting, the wretched, disappointing envelopes are finally opened. In the case of Mann and his diaries, what strikes one most is that he obviously felt that absolutely everything that happened to him was worthy of being recorded. . . . [The diaries] give the impression that Mann was thinking ahead to a studious future which would exclaim after each entry: 'Good heavens, so that was the day when the Great Man wrote such and such a page of The Holy Sinner and then, the following night, read some verses by Heine, that is so revealing!'

and

"Most of these pages, adds Mari­as, chronicle the state of Mann's stomach and bowels or include plaintive entries like: "Sexual disturbance and disturbance in my activities when faced by the impossibility of refusing to write an obituary for Eduard Keyserling."

Cough, blogging, cough... [via Arts & Letters] BTW, my anti-procrastination efforts are proving ineffectual. Nothing wrong with my stomach, though.