It is a truism to note that we are drowning in information these days. Twenty-four TV channels and internet portals blast news and consumer information at us constantly; hundreds of thousands of new blogs are started each month, along with at least equal numbers of non-blog web sites. Cable TV seems to breed new channels like rabbits, all with 24-hour programming schedules. There is so much stuff that there is no hope, ever, of seeing it all. And that means it is inevitable that we will miss or indeed never know about stuff that we would like, perhaps stuff that could change our lives, make us smile, make a difference.
I am prompted to this meditation by my daily reading of the New York Times obituary section, and especially by the reported death this week of 97-year old author Miss Hortense Calisher.
I consider myself reasonably well read in 20th century literature, and yet I had never heard of Hortense Calisher before today, let alone read any of her two dozen novels and short story collections. But she sounds like a writer I would enjoy, with her “unpredictable turns of phrase, intellectually challenging fictional situations and complex plots”.
[H]er peers seemed most intrigued by her distinctive way of telling a story, her filigreed sentences and bold stylistic excursions. “Hortense Calisher has never been a writer who masked her thinking self or disappeared into her subject,” the critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The Times, commenting on her Jamesian fascination with the authorial intellect … Throughout her career as a novelist, opinion tended to split evenly among critics who found her prose style and approach to narrative better suited to short stories. “Hortense Calisher is a creator of voices, moods, states of mind, but not of worlds,” Robert Kiely wrote in a review of her novel “Standard Dreaming” for The Times. Other critics were mesmerized by her idiosyncratic language and imaginative daring.
Still writing in her 90s, she published her last novel in 2002. Miss Calisher was president of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters from 1987 to 1990 and president of PEN in 1986 and 1987.
Her work sounds fascinating to me and yet, with all the other pressures, I may never get around to reading anything of hers. That will be a shame, but just one of so many.
Posted by jakking 
