Saturday Links

Literary parties, reading charred ancient scrolls, Stephen Rodefer’s “Four Lectures,” Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of William F. Buckley, the case for cars, and more.

A Paris Review party chez George Plimpton (Source: New York Times)

Good morning! Researchers have deciphered the author and title of a charred ancient scroll: “Researchers discovered the title and author on the Herculaneum scroll after X-raying the carbonised papyrus and virtually unwrapping it on a computer, the first time such crucial details have been gleaned from the approach. Traces of ink lettering visible in the X-ray images revealed the text to be part of a multi-volume work, On Vices, written by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus in the first century BC.”

Frances Wilson on literary parties: “Poets tend not to enjoy parties. W H Auden recalled that when T S Eliot was asked at a party if he was having fun, he replied, ‘Yes, if you see the essential horror of it all.’ ‘My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps/To come and waste their time and ours,’ writes Warlock-Williams in Philip Larkin’s ‘Vers de Société’. ‘Perhaps/You’d care to join us?’ ‘In a pig’s arse, friend,’ the speaker thinks. Why waste an evening holding a glass of ‘washing sherry’, catching ‘the drivel of some bitch/Who’s read nothing but Which’ and ‘Asking that ass about his fool research’? Small talk is usually the problem. Auden, in ‘At the Party’, moans how ‘Unrhymed, unrhythmical, the chatter goes:/Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.’”