Nick Richardson, a former editor at the LRB, is a software engineer working in the cosmetics industry.
‘You watch your mother slice up a lengthy white radish and boil it over an open fire. The sun has banished the dew, and even unwell as you are, you no longer feel cold.’ The following day, despite your illness – you have hepatitis E; ‘its typical mode of transmission is fecal-oral’ – your parents take you and your older brother and sister from your village...
In September 2011, the LRB published a Diary by James Lasdun about learning to fire a gun. A few weeks later we received an email from his stalker. It read: ‘His writing is boring and doesn’t sell. Stop publishing that hairy-nosed Jewish wanna-be-Protestant bore of a boar . . . His girlfriends are the most hideous.’ It goes without saying that its author hates Lasdun. But it’s pretty clear that she’s in love with him too: the abuse she levels at him seems tame, even cheeky – ‘bore of a boar’ – next to the insults she reserves for his wife and ‘girlfriends’.
Jakob Wassermann, who published nearly a book a year for the last thirty years of his life but died broke and exhausted, soon to be forgotten, on 1 January 1934 at the age of sixty, was well acquainted with the dangers of literature. My First Wife, which first appeared a few months after his death, is a cautionary tale. Belloc might have called it ‘Ganna Mevis, who read too much and...
When I was a kid the Beano and the Dandy were like cats and dogs: you liked one or the other and your preference reflected your personality. I was a Beano fan. The difference between Dandy and Beano fans, I imagined, was the same as the difference between the comics’ two lead characters, Desperate Dan and Dennis the Menace. The Beano’s Menace was a mischievous – in retrospect, borderline psychotic – schoolboy with knobbly knees, a soot-coloured mongrel called Gnasher and a catapult, which he’d use against his wispy arch-enemy, Walter the Softie. He was cunning, cool and funny. Dan was an oaf: a portly cowboy with a square jaw and an indefatigable appetite for ‘cow pie’ – whole cows, baked in pies, with the tails dangling over the edge of the crust. He didn’t want to menace, he wanted to help, but kept causing disaster by misjudging his strength. Here’s a typical Dan storyline: a group of boys are trying to sail model boats on a lake, but there’s not enough wind. Dan comes along and blows into the sails, but blows too hard and wrecks the boats. By way of apology, he turns his body into a boat by wrenching the paddle wheel off a steamer, tearing up a streetlamp to use as a mast, and attaching them to his corpulent figure.
Chris Ware’s new book, Building Stories, isn’t a book at all. It’s a cardboard box, about the size of a board game, covered in bright, blocky illustrations and stuffed with comics. A couple of these are hardbound: one in plain charcoal grey; one with a picture of a girl on the cover, drawing. The rest are paper: some the size of the Beano, some as big as old broadsheets...
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