Sorta P and definitely Oakley Hall

[Mark Kohut]

Did we know that Pynchon fave Oakley Hall wrote a book called *How Fiction
Works?*
*(*I think I do remember he taught writing for a long while so...) Can we
bet our young writer
read it? Here, if you read it, is a part of a page on Tolstoy's "shading'
of character from
*War & Peace*. I think I really like this observation but I'm still
confused by the word 'shading' to describe it.
Now I may have to get THIS book too.

BTW, if you like Group Reads of great books, A Public Space rag is holding
an open invitation
group reading of *War & Peace, *lightly led by Yiyun Li but full of
readers; many other writers.
12-15 pages a day (but they are beating that pace, unfortunately to me).

The things Tolstoy saw.

My post that has been well-liked is by Edmund Wilson, I laugh. This memory
came to me--proving Proust
so deeply right. I remember from Edmund Wilson's* Upstate*, read long
before my first reading of *War & Peace*, back-asswords
has been my reading life, as I"ve confessed. He said reading *W & P *in his
old family home in Talcottville , alone and no longer young,
he could hear the voices ring out in the solitude, everyone's talking all
the time.
Which we all can experience unless we have children sequestered with us.
Just a reminder that he learned Russian to read the great Russian writers.

https://twitter.com/rhoadsstevens/status/1243614938855116800?s=20