Brian Boyd is a professor of English at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand. His new book, Stalking Nabokov, is just out from Columbia University Press.
Q. What’s the first thing you read in the morning?
A. Do I really have to tell the truth? Ouch! If it’s not a snatched glance at my e-mail, while my wife is showering, then it’s reading, over breakfast, the Auckland newspaper, The New Zealand Herald. It’s the country’s best but a limp rag by world standards, although now with many feeds from the international press. I can’t do without this atavistic ritual. For a time I would read The New York Times on my iPad, vastly more nutritious for an informavore, but since I’m a slow morning starter, my motor memory compels me to turn some large pages every morning to activate my upper limbs and eyeballs. Proust wrote of all the time we waste by reading newspapers, when we could be reading something lasting—and he was no doubt thinking of much better newspapers than mine.
Q. What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print versus online versus mobile?
A. I subscribe to and read regularly the Guardian Weekly, the Times Literary Supplement, New Scientist, the New Zealand Listener. I want to return to reading The New York Times. In bookstores or via e-marketing I browse The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books and others and buy an issue if it has something of particular fascination or an author I cannot resist. I don’t like sustained reading on my computer but happily read on my iPad. Still, I like flicking through real paper pages: there’s a satisfaction in scanning a large page and either dismissing what it holds or zooming in to what catches your eye.
Q. What books have you recently read? Do they stand out?
A. I’m in the middle of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus, just out, a joy, like all his work. In the acknowledgments to On the Origin of Stories, I thanked him for being an indirect catalyst to my book, for prompting me, before I was halfway through reading Maus, to devise a graduate course in narrative from Genesis and Homer to the present that has led in many directions, including Origin. Now I’m already seeing how in one of my next essays I will link MetaMaus’s reflections on autobiography, biography, and testimony with my own.
Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010). I love everything about the book except its title. It manages to be wise and hip, pacy and reflective, formally searching and humanly probing, intensely local and resonantly global at once.
Emily Perkins’s Novel About My Wife (2008), winner of the Believer Award and more, has revelatory gifts of observation and phrasing, in terms not just of local color, but of quirks of thought, speech, behavior, daily routine, and life stages.
For teaching I’ve just had to reread Machado de Assis’ Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881). It’s a shame that one of the greatest, and the most modern, of 19th-century novelists is so little known outside the Lusophone world. Dom Casmurro may be even better than Posthumous Memoirs.
I have also, for teaching Anna Karenina and Ulysses, read Gary Saul Morson’s Anna Karenina in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely (2007) and Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us (2009). Both, like William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter (2011), suggest that these novels are guides for life. Now that’s a refreshing change from the recent dominance of Theory or Cultural Critique in academic literary studies. As its name suggests, Cultural Critique has tended to point out that “so-called ‘great’ authors” do little more than reflect the cultural limitations of their time. Morson, Kiberd, and Deresiewicz, by contrast, insist in these books on the present and enduring relevance of unique insights in the literature of the past. I may not agree with their every claim, but this attitude if it spreads would help restore the appeal of literary studies for new generations—that, and joining the arts not only to the humanities but to the social and natural sciences, to psychology and biology.
I read widely in evolution and cognition, most recently, Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (2011), by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams Jr. My hunch is that the oddest features of minds, like humor and dreams, will offer the richest insights into the normal workings of the mind, and I love some of their ideas (like JITSA, just-in-time spreading activation in the brain), but I must admit I’m not sure how much more I understand about the mind after reading this.
Q. Has your reading of professional journals changed in the past 10 years? How so?
A. I would have had to be not just a Luddite but an embalmed Luddite for my reading not to have changed. Google, aggregator sites like Arts and Letters Daily, e-mails from colleagues and readers around the world, listservs, and the like provide new ways of being alerted to new material. I’ll go straight to my university library online and search for and download articles, or Google individuals who have come to my notice and download material from their Web sites.
We have all become much more accessible to one another: It’s easy to Google and e-mail a stranger. I have colleagues around the world who send draft material to critique, as they critique mine, and readers of my books or articles may send me—it happened again this morning—some of their work they think most relevant to my interests.
Q. Do you read blogs? If so, what blogs do you like best?
A. I read blogs very rarely (although I have my graduate students write them). The University of Chicago Press approached David Bordwell asking for selections from the marvelous blog he runs with his wife Kristin Thompson at www.davidbordwell.net. Can you imagine asking people to pay for black-and-white versions of a free blog in color and bursting with hyperlinks? But if any blogs are worth paying for, Bordwell’s are: searching reflections on film that also have implications for literature and other arts and humanities. On Fiction, run by psychologist and prize-winning novelist Keith Oatley and his former students, including Raymond Mar and Maja Djikic, abounds with treasures on the psychology of fiction. But even these high-level blogs in areas of professional interest don’t compel me to follow regularly.
Q. Do you use Twitter? If so, whom do you follow?
A. No. I’m writing a biography of philosopher Karl Popper. He wrote on politics in ways influential enough to have made a major impact on the late 20th century, but for much of his life he did not listen to the radio, watch television, or read newspapers. If something new was important enough, he thought, it would reach him. I’m much less extreme, but I do agree that surfing the wave of whatever happens to be occurring at present, anywhere in the world, will often dump you in a wash of triviality. Time is a great filter.
Q. What are the guilty pleasures in your media diet?
A. I remember interviewing the wise and warm Ernst Gombrich years ago for my Popper project (about to be revived after a decade in cryogenic suspension) and feeling a shock of delighted recognition when he said: “I’m too busy writing to read.” Among those whose every new piece I want to read, and usually manage to, are Art Spiegelman, Orhan Pamuk, Colm Tóibín, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Emily Perkins, Kwame Anthony Appiah. Gombrich was on that list until his death; I’ve just added Jennifer Egan. The New York Times science and book pages.
Sketch by Ted Benson
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