A new biography of Muriel Spark, astounding novelist

[malignd at aol.com]

All very interesting, but Muriel could write.


-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thu, Apr 22, 2010 11:59 pm
Subject: Re: A new biography of Muriel Spark, astounding novelist


Oedipa Maas with a good wind behind her. 
 
   "They were breezes that the old women, the mourning-ones, of 
   Montesilvano knew by names. 
 
   "Dino—Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams" 
    Nick Tosches. 
 
   "Many men" (saith he) "come to this malady by continual study,  and 
night-waking, and of all other men, scholars are most       subject to 
it"; and such, Rhasis adds, "that have commonly the     finest wits" 
(Cont. lib. I, tract. 9). Marsilius Ficinus, de sanit. 
   tuenda, lib. I, cap. 7, puts melancholy amongst one of those five   
principal plagues of students, 'tis a common moll unto them all, 
   and almost in some measure an inseparable companion. Varro 
   belike for that cause calls tristes philosophos et severos 
   [philosophers sad and austere]; severe, sad, dry, tetric, are 
   common epithets to scholars: and Patricius therefore,' in the 
   institution of princes, would not have them to be great students. 
   For (as Machiavel holds) study weakens their bodies, dulls the 
   spirits, abates their strength and courage; and good scholars 
   are never good soldiers, which a certain Goth well perceived, 
   for when his countrymen came into Greece, and would have 
   burned all their books, he cried out against it, by all means they 
   should not do it; "Leave them that plague, which in time will 
   consume all their vigour, and martial spirits." The Turks 
   abdicated Corcutus, the next heir, from the empire, because he 
   was so much given to his book: and 'tis the common tenent of 
   the world, that learning dulls and diminisheth the spirits, and so 
   per consequens produceth melancholy. 
 
   "The Anatomy of Melancholy" — 
   "Among Causes Of Melancholy, Overmuch Study" 
    Robert Burton 
 
On Apr 22, 2010, at 7:14 AM, Heikki Raudaskoski wrote: 
 
> 
> 
> 
http://www.salon.com/books/biography/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/04/20/muriel_spark 
> 
> "After her Observer winnings dwindled, she took Dexedrine diet pills 
> not 
> only to stay slim but to keep her food costs down. The hallucinatory, 
> paranoiac effects of amphetamine poisoning were unknown at the time, 
> and 
> Spark had always been given to intense literary passions, so friends 
> saw 
> nothing amiss in her fixation on T. S. Eliot's Christian play "The 
> Confidential Clerk" until she began to speak of threatening codes > 
that she 
> believed were embedded in the text and directed at her. "Obsessively 
> she 
> began to seek them out, covering sheet after sheet of paper with > 
anagrams 
> and cryptographic experiments." As her delusions intensified, she > 
became 
> convinced that Eliot had taken a job with some of her acquaintances > 
as a 
> window-washer in order to rifle through their papers." 
> 
> 
> Heikki