Yesterday my friend Hermione sent me this great photo of a fox that was published on the Telegraph website, to which the title of this blog could not be more relevant, and then today I happened to come across this passage in The Life of Lenin by Louis Fischer:

Once Lenin and Krilenko went fox hunting. The Russian method in this aristocratic sport consists in forcing the fox into a very large circle marked by red flags from which there is only one exist and, by handclapping and yells, to impel the fox to that exit where the hunter waits. The fox came straight at Lenin, who did not notice him because the animal's bright red fur was covered with snow fallen from the spruce trees. When Lenin became aware of the fox's presence he was transfixed and "stared... and stared... and did not shoot." The fox looked at Lenin as he slowly raised his gun, then lifting his tail, made off like lightning.

"Why didn't you shoot?" Krilenko exclaimed.

"He was so beautiful and pretty," Lenin apologized. "I'm not a hunter but a shoemaker."

A little book to which I contributed has just come out in the UK. It's called Dear Old Love, compiled by Andy Selsberg, and it's a paper version of the terrific blog of the same name. I interviewed Andy last year for Jess Holland's Hustle, London! zine, so perhaps this is a good opportunity to put that Q&A online for the first time.

Who are you?
I'm a freelance writer, and I teach freshman composition part time. I'm originally from Wisconsin, now living in Brooklyn.

What was the inspiration for the site?
I had a personal, aphoristic blog for a years. I love the openness of the web, mixed with a disciplined concision - looking for those perfect lines. My focus on the original blog started to dip. I got married this summer, and briefly considered writing a book-length fictionalized letter to an ex (along the lines of Home Land by Sam Lipsyte). But I can't seem to write much more than a few sentences at a time now. All that somehow pointed to Dear Old Love.

Are you on the site yourself?
I'm definitely on the site, definitely more than once. I wanted to set a tone. And I don't think you need to have had a lot of relationships to have a lot of DOL notes in you. It's more a way of looking at the world, sussing out the right details. You could get dozens out of childhood crush on a sweetie down the block. I'm reading the Charles Schulz/Peanuts biography right now, and it's amazing how much "little red-haired girl" mileage he got out of very little raw relationship material.

Do you ever get any submissions that are simply too sad to include?
Most submissions don't get posted, but not due to excess sadness. I'm looking for freshness, humour, poignancy - an old feeling expressed a new way. The site exists for the pleasure of readers more than the therapy of writers. In the midst of heartbreak, it can be tough to come up with original, resonant ideas on the topic. I worry that one boring entry or two will turn readers off. The web is tough like that.

What’s your favourite break-up song?
Favourite break-up song is "Missing You" by your countryman John Waite. Love the way the proclamation "I ain't missing you" contradicts itself. Plus I was born in the early 70's and think pop culture peaked in 1984.

Last week I went to the Epstein/Gaudier-Brzeska/Gill exhibition at the Royal Academy, which was excellent, except in that I was hoping it basically would all be modernist robot sentries like the one on the poster, and it wasn't. (More my fault than the exhibition's.) Anyway, one thing I noticed is that several of the sculptures first entered the public museum system through donations by Josephine Porter Boardman Crane, aka Mrs. Murray Crane. The Crane family made their fortune from the Crane & Co. paper company, which was founded as the Liberty Paper Mill by the novelist and war correspondent Stephen Crane (Red Badge of Courage), and then in 1879 won a contract to supply paper to the US mint. In other words, every time Josephine Crane spent a dollar of her inheritance on a newspaper or a toffee apple, she was making use of the very product from which that inheritance derived. What a beautifully self-reflexive basis for a trust fund! She also founded the Dalton School in New York, where some of the minor characters in Gossip Girl go, and her daughter Louise was a friend of Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Bishop.

I've started a weekly column for the relaunched Another Magazine website. As my esteemed editor describes it there: "Ned Beauman’s Epitaph is a weekly tribute to pioneers and heavyweights who died on this day in history, and the unexpected coincidences that bind them together." Three installments up so far: Ada Lovelace and Abraham de Moivre; Jay Gould, John Nicholas Ringling and Pablo Escobar; and Antonio Stradivari and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

On how the Cambridge spies became "traitors to their class":

"The obvious yet rarely understood stroke of secret service genius behind all such operations was the simple recognition of an essential bond between the so-called 'establishment' (by which is meant little more than the elite of a given society), and what Lionel Trilling called the 'adversary culture' – that part of society which, by virtue of its superior education and critical equipment, develops for itself a leveraged position within the middle class, based in ambiguity and the perspectives of criticism and argument, insight and protest. The adversary culture is a branch of the middle class; usually its most vigorous intellectual and artistic wing. It is drawn, albeit ambivalently, to radicalism; radicalism is part of its vision of freedom and truth. The radical solution, it imagines, would tear aside the bourgeois facade; radical insight, it suspects, reaches the deepest truth. In fact the ability really to grasp, if not embrace, radical insight is what the adversary culture believes sets it apart from the vast hypocritical and second-rate middle class to which it belongs but also wishes – understandably, properly – to distinguish itself."

from Double Lives by Stephen Koch

Notes from Los Angeles, part two:

On the Raymond Chandler bus tour, we are taken into the Mayfair Hotel in downtown, where Chandler briefly lived. The proprietor comes out to inform us that the very first Oscars were held there. (This turns out to be a lie.) He also tells us that the hotel is booked up because of a convention for something called Nu Skin. A fellow Chandler fan whispers that Nu Skin is a pyramid selling scheme for cosmetics. Later, I go to In'N'Out Burger in Hollywood, and find myself in the queue behind 30 or 40 Japanese women in Nu Skin T-shirts. The burger is good, but I can't believe it does much for my complexion.

***

On Hollywood Boulevard, I pass a quiet group of demonstrators from The Church of God. They all wear close-fitting white shirts with the top button done up but no tie, which makes them look weirdly Dalston 2009.

***

Also on the Raymond Chandler tour, we stop at the Musso & Frank Grill, where Chandler, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and many other writers once drank. Faulkner used to go behind the bar to mix his own mint juleps. There is a bartender there who still remembers serving Bukowski. Again, we meet the proprietor, who says that he wants to turn it back into a literary destination. When I return later for a beer, I am inititally disappointed to find myself sitting next to two men who talk about nothing but "crazy" ex-girlfriends and bad films. But then it occurs to me that Hemingway and Fitzgerald must have been exactly the same.

***

Katsu-Ya in Studio City, widely regarded as the best sushi in town - and it is indeed very good - is tucked between a Domino's Pizza and Randy's Pet Discount Center in an anonymous strip mall. Apparently that is standard in Los Angeles.

***

I'm surprised the sunsets here don't cause more car accidents.

***

Venice Beach is full of legal cannabis dispensaries. I go there with a girl who used to carry a medical marijuana permit. She had no particular desire to get cannabis on prescription, it was just useful in case she ever got pulled over by the police when she happened to have a joint in her car - literally a get-out-of-jail-free card.

***

At a karaoke bar in Los Feliz, one table along from a nice-looking girl with "EVIL CUNT" tattooed across the backs of her thighs, I find out from a friend that he has now slept with at least two women in LA who have had their pubic hair lasered off. As in, so that it will never grow back. I had never even heard of this procedure. I have no specific objection, but I do think it's a useful signal that it might finally be time to move to rural Nepal.

***

Going to see Abe Vigoda at The Smell in downtown, I discover that the venue doesn't serve alcohol because it's all-ages. Apparently most of the kids who go there get wasted before they arrive. But the bands don't finish until 1:30am, by which time everyone has sobered up. It's like a London gig in reverse.

***

In fact, Californians, for the most part, don't seem to get drunk at all. Which makes you wonder, how does casual sex ever happen here? The answer, I assume, is that sometimes it's just the only way to get a lift home.

Notes from Los Angeles, part one:



It's unnatural for a city to smell so good. The entire place feels like a house for sale in which the estate agent has lit an aromatherapy candle just prior to a viewing. Meanwhile, you stay locked in a staring contest with the daylight, waiting for it to blink, but it never does.

***



There is a white guard dog on the roof of Frank Lloyd Wright's Sturges House in Brentwood. There is also a white guard dog on the balcony of the colonial-style house opposite. They bark at each other hour after hour, staunch canine proxies for the architectural debates of the 20th century.

***

The serious young women at MOCA who discuss minimalism and Robert Frank with visiting groups of Latino grade school kids may be the closest thing I've ever seen to angels.

***

In the middle of the day, three deer saunter through the car park of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. They are friendly but visitors are told not to stroke or feed them. The previous night I saw a coyote crossing the street up on Griffith Park. It was only the size of a medium dog. I had honestly thought that coyotes were as big as werewolves.

***

Later, in the space exploration museum at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we are shown a full-size replica of the Voyager spacecraft that was launched in 1977. It was wrapped in “black thermal blankets” to keep the electronics from freezing. As a result, it looks like something assembled in the back room of a biker bar.

***

Silverlake is now world famous as LA's Williamsburg/Hoxton; when in fact it comprises about five nice cafes, three vintage shops, and a comic shop.

***

My last meal would be albacore rolls from Yoshi's Sushi in West Hollywood followed by strawberry pancakes from Fred 62 in Los Feliz. Or maybe a few pounds of the spicy shrimp and clams from the Boathouse in Alhambra, which are dumped on the table in a big clear plastic sack full of blood-red sauce, like something from an organ transplant facility.

***

As it turns out, house parties in West Hollywood are not really any different from house parties in Camberwell, except that you are apparently allowed to dance to Maroon 5 and Matchbox 20 without irony.

Today I was biked an annotated photocopy of Boxer, Beetle from Sceptre's excellent copy editor, whom I have never met and whose name I don't know but who has made lots of useful suggestions about word usage and commas and so on. I confess the experience of having a novel copy-edited reminds me a bit of the experience of realising that someone has fallen in love with you. In both cases it is alarming, almost sickening, but ultimately exhilarating to have another person pay such close attention to your most insignificant modes of operation. You find yourself not just willing but eager to make little changes, as a way of thanking them for caring so much.

Only little changes, though.

Theory: when Katherine Hepburn pretends to be an eccentric posho in the first of The Philadelphia Story she is actually parodying Irene Dunn's performance in previous Cary Grant screwball comedy The Awful Truth.

The Carnival in 18th century Venice:

"The Carnival mask was not, as elsewhere, a simple affair covering mouth and eyes. In Venice it was a sort of enfolding cape or mantle with a black hood over the head and shoulders, the whole surmounted by a little tricorne hat. The actual mask is described as being 'closely modelled on the white mask of classical times, its beaked outline altering the face into that of some strange bird cut in chalk.'

Perfect for its purpose, the bautta became almost a uniform for Carnival. From Doge to kitchenmaid, everybody wore it, man, woman and child of every age and station. Servant-girls went masked to market, mothers carried babies in masks in their arms, the lawyer wore a mask to plead in court.

The long domino-cloak or tabarro so widely used in Venice was generally adopted at Carnival time. In the tabarro, unless a skirt should happen to show beneath the hem, it was impossible to tell the sexes apart, and so the women took care to lengthen their dominoes until they swept the ground. In the whole packed Piazza di San Marco no one could be known or recognised again, unless perhaps it were Casanova and those who, like him, affected the display of a gold-braided velvet coat under the half-open tabarro.

But he and his friends were eccentrics and all the rest were agreed and determined on concealment. If a woman knew whose chatter she was listening to, whether he were a senator or her own shoe-maker, it would ill become her to give any sign of recognition. A man would never hint that he recognised a woman; she would have broken off the encounter at once. It was just not done to indicate that you had pierced a disguise, and when someone spotted the Papal Nuncio in bautta and tabarro and besought immediate blessing everybody, as Montesquieu recalls, was dreadfully shocked.

Watertight anonymity was in fact the great lure of the Carnival, the relish that made it what it was. Goldoni calls the mask 'the most advantageous thing in the world', and there was nothing a masker dared not do. Before him difficulties melted away. Whoever he might be, he could join any company, go into any salon, sit down to cards, take part in the conversation, pay women extravagant compliments. Women, for their part, could walk about as they fancied, enter the cafes or the lowest haunts there were, and have unmentionable adventures. Maskers could even get into the convents whenever they wanted to. Who was to forbid them, when nobody could possibly tell whether they were male, female, rogues and vagabonds or authority personified. There were neither rich nor poor, police nor facchini. There was only Sior Maschera, and who was to set limits for that faceless personage? Noble and commoner were confounded as Casanova says, 'prince with subject, the ordinary with the remarkable man, lovely and hideous together. There were no longer valid laws, nor law-makers.' Difference was obliterated, the social structure cancelled out. Dissembling was suddenly good behaviour and deviousness a merit, as the elite of the underworld rubbed shoulders were the worthier multitude."

from Daily Life in Venice in the Time of Casanova by Maurice Andrieux

Two interesting passages from Designing and Making Stage Scenery by Michael Ware:

"The historian Pollux, writing in the second century AD, tells us of some of the machinery used in the Greek theatres. He mentions trap-doors, hoists, cranes, lightning and thunder machines, devices for revealing dead bodies – rolled or swung out on what today we would call 'trucks' or 'wagons'. He also describe the Piraktoi which were revolving prisms painted differently on each facet, and the Mechane for lowering a god at the appropriate moment. Whether all these devices were used by the Greeks in the fifth century BC is doubtful, though we do know that dead bodies had to be revealed mechanically as slaughter was not allowed on the stage; and we know that Euripides lowered the occasional god from above to round off the action of the play."

"In Italy and France the enthusiasm for the theatre of illusion and of spectacle had led to a diminished interest in the drama and an increase of interest in the proliferation of design for opera and ballet. Architects began to specialise in designing scenery. It was very profitable. Vast opera houses were being constructed by princes all over Europe to keep up with the other princes. It is an arguable point whether the building of opera houses is more conducive to the harmony of humanity than the making of nuclear bombs, but in the seventeenth century rivalry was confined the explosion of new scenic devices. Giacomo Torelli was the first artist to specialise in designing scenery; some of his effects were so astute that it was rumoured in Venice that he was in league with the devil, which shows the power of the dedicated designer."

From Nabokov's introduction to his second novel King, Queen, Knave:

"One might readily conjecture that a Russian writer in choosing a set of exclusively German characters (the appearances of my wife and me in the last two chapters are merely visits of inspection) was creating for himself insurmountable difficulties. I spoke no German, had no German friends, had not read a single German novel either in the original, or in translation. But in art, as in nature, a glaring disadvantage may turn out to be a subtle protective device... I felt no inclination to persevere in a technique assignable to the French "human document" type, with a hermetic community faithfully described by one of its members - something not unsimilar, in a small way, to the impassioned and boring ethnopsychics which depress one so often in modern novels. At a stage of gradual inner disentanglement, when I had not yet found, or did not yet dare apply, the very special methods of re-creating a historical situation that I used ten years later in The Gift, the lack of any emotional involvement and the fairytale freedom inherent in an unknown milieu answered my dream of pure invention."

"De Moivre wrote a book on probability theory, The Doctrine of Chances, said to have been prized by gamblers. It is reported in all seriousness that de Moivre correctly predicted the day of his own death. Noting that he was sleeping 15 minutes longer each day, De Moivre surmised that he would die on the day he would sleep for 24 hours. A simple mathematical calculation quickly yielded the date, 27 November 1754. He did indeed die on that day."