Here’s some prose you need: this is some good, good prose. It doesn’t really matter what it’s about: it is about the writer’s ability to write good prose. But read this:

On a sodden Saturday afternoon in January, the three-mile trip from the South London suburb of Stockwell to Clapham Junction is a dispiriting proposition. I had to go and get some paint from the aptly named Paint House on Northcote Road, and decided to take the tube to Clapham Common then walk across it, thereby exercising both myself and the dog, a two-year-old Jack Russell called Maglorian, whose puppyish manner complements his diminutive stature. When he actually was a puppy he was so winsome that small crowds used to gather round him in the street; nowadays, thankfully, it is only the occasional passerby who screws up his or her face and starts going ‘Oooh’ as he trots towards them.

Prose! (Don’t call me Prose.) It’s actually Will Self (can that really be his name? Yes!) in the LRB-to-which-you-should-probably-subscribe. It is taken from an essay about a British radio program to which you probably don’t listen, which will make you maddeningly jealous of the British, Radio 4, the BBC, arts funding, and literary culture in England. So why should you read the essay? You should read the essay, the whole thing, right now (what are you doing? Writing? C’mon.) because, if you do, there will be something so funny at the end that it will make you either forget about what it is you need to forget or else be reconciled to its unforgettability.

Hey, check this. So here I am, pleasantly nowhere. And what if I don’t go home? What if I stay at wherever it is I am, or importune these kind laptopped strangers? What if everything changes, now? (I am supposed to teach tomorrow.) But what if I don’t? What if I pull a Brownlee? What if this is the last SOS blog post, ever, and neither you nor anyone ever hears from me again? Hmmm? Wouldn’t that be kind of awesome?

I will have a last post, one day! That’s awesome, too! Some day I will have written the last thing I will ever write, and what an interesting day that will be. I will not know when that day is, or what those words will be. I hope it is something crotchety and inappropriate. I hope it’s something whiny. I hope it’s “grievance, not grief.”* I hope that it is trivial. I hope the last thing I do is kick myself in the head on the dive down, with something like a Lord of the Rings reference. Like, for example, “but that day is not today,” Viggo.

* Before I even knew that this was the trope it is (it’s, like, bigger than “show, not tell,” except in Europe, where “show, not tell” still has lots of fans and can make a decent living off touring) or had been cited for violating it, I was thinking of forming a bluegrass band called The Grievance Committee.

It is amazing what freedom can be achieved with a bus. I was on the way to where-no-one-knows-where-I-am, on the aforementioned bus, and the moment I got off it and onto the snowblocked streets I thought, exhilarated, “No one can find me! No one!” In order to write, it is necessary to place oneself somewhere a little bit precarious. It’s staging. It’s like moving the chair to what is clearly the wrong place. Gets your attention.

Auden more than once explained that his business was poetry and that he wrote prose to earn his keep while pursuing that ill-paid vocation. Luckily he had another powerful reason for writing prose: ‘unless I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day,’ he told his friend James Stern, ‘I feel ill.’

– Frank Kermode on Auden in the LRB (from 2007)

Ian McEwan has a new short story in the New Yorker called “The Use of Poetry.” Here’s his scientist protagonist, after discovering Milton is not beyond him:

He and his lot were at lectures and lab work nine till five every day, attempting to grasp some of the hardest things ever thought. The arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week. He suspected that there was nothing they talked about at those meetings that anyone with half a brain could fail to understand. He had read four of the best essays on Milton. He knew. And yet they passed themselves off as his superiors, these lie-abeds, and he had let them intimidate him. No longer. From the moment he won Maisie, he was intellectually free.

here, that experience had to change to enter into poems. I am finding, now, that the problem in most of the things I’ve written this semester is that I was not true enough to the experience. It’s just that true is something other than I thought it was.

I suspect that there is some part of my process, now, that is as useless and perverse as the way I used to write out blocking, step by step, the night before, and read it to actors until they had memorized it. I don’t know what part it is.