Saturday Links
Writers’ gardens, Silicon Valley calls on poets, J.M. Coetzee’s late style, in praise of whist, and more.
Good morning! I hope everyone’s Saturday is off to an excellent start. First up this morning, we have Ruth Scurr’s review of a new book on writers’ gardens: “When Henry James moved to Lamb House in the Sussex coastal town of Rye, he admitted that he could hardly tell a dahlia from a mignonette: ‘I am hopeless about the garden, which I don’t know what to do with and shall never, never know – I am densely ignorant.’ He sought advice from the artist and designer Alfred Parsons and fortunately Lamb House already had a gardener, George Gammon, to do all the work. When Gammon won prizes at local horticultural shows, James was delighted: he was a vicarious gardener, more comfortable at his desk in the Garden Room than with his hands in the soil. Thomas Hardy was at the other end of the gardening spectrum.”
Paul Dean takes stock of Oscar Wilde’s critical work: “I have long maintained that the view of Wilde as an idle dilettante is a scandalous misrepresentation, but I must admit that, until I compared Frankel’s selection with the relevant volumes of Oxford University Press’s Complete Works, I never fully realized what a hard-working professional he was.”
Several companies in Silicon Valley are hiring poets: “Silicon Valley’s biggest generative artificial intelligence developers are looking for a new kind of data worker: poets. A string of job postings from high-profile training data companies, such as Scale AI and Appen, are recruiting poets, novelists, playwrights, or writers with a PhD or master’s degree.”
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