| In
Neatness Counts, Kevin
Kopelson reflects on the poetics of the desk — rolltop or
bureau-plat,
cluttered or bare, the nestlike desk, the schematic desk, the dramatic
desk, the dramatic lack of any such furniture. Exploring the topography
of literary creation by way of the topography of work space, Kopelson,
one of today’s most important critics, offers a series of
meditations on
how orderliness, chaos, and other physical states correspond with both
the exhilaration of production and the desperation of writer's block.
Focusing
on the poet Elizabeth Bishop,
the novelist Marcel Proust, the critic Roland Barthes, the playwright
Tom
Stoppard, and the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Neatness Counts
is
at once critical and creative, examining how various writers' work
habits
relate to their published work. Kopelson also considers desks of his
own
— one that had belonged to an older brother, one he borrowed
from a messy
friend, one now shared with a partner. And by pursuing these two lines
of inquiry to their unlikely but enlightening conclusions, Kopelson
both
fabricates a virtual library of literary insight and commemorates an
era
in which the term “desktop” didn’t denote
one’s computer screen..
|
Neatness Counts
Essays on the Writer's
Desk
by Kevin Kopelson
PublicAffairs, 2002
Order
a copy.
|
