Interview with a new blogger (and happy birthday me)

On 10th April 2007, Stuck-in-a-Book was launched... I don't know whether or not I thought I'd still be blogging six years later, I hadn't really thought about it, but I certainly hadn't imagined that I'd meet so many wonderful people (online and offline) or have such fun.  Thank you for making my first six years so lovely!

I've done a few retrospectives, or thanking posts, at various anniversaries - so I'll do something a bit different today.  It seems appropriate, on a blog birthday of a longstanding blog (six years feels very longstanding in the blogosphere!) to welcome the recent arrival of another beautiful baby blog.  Also, although this is far from a unique-to-me quality, I hope that one of the dominant characteristics of Stuck-in-a-Book is an encouragement of community, and a celebration of other bloggers.  With that in mind, I have interviewed a new blogger - Washington Wife.

Washington Wife is one of my very dearest friends, and I'm thrilled that she has entered the blogging world.   Hers is not a book blog, but she loves books about as much as I do, so I'd be surprised if they don't make an appearance now and then.  Her reasons for starting blogging are below, so I shan't explain them for her.  (And, because she is a journalist, she is keeping herself anonymous on her blog - I will have to work hard to remember not to include her real name, and shall refer to her as Washington Wife, or WW.  In the interview below, I am ST - you can decide for yourself whether it's short for Stuck-in-a-Book or Simon Thomas.)  Oh, and do, of course, check out her blog and say hello - it's really brilliant so far, and I'm not just saying that as a close friend!

ST: So, what made you decide to start blogging, huh? HUH?


WW: Well, at the beginning of February, my husband got a job in Washington D.C, and we've just (at the end of March) moved there from Paris, where we've both spent three years as journalists. I'm sure there are innumerable 'new to the US' and even 'new to Washington' blogs (there were certainly lots of 'Brits abroad' ones in France) but I thought mine would be an interesting viewpoint given I'm comparing the US not only to my native land, the UK, but also my adopted homeland for the last three years, France.

I think it was also a combination of my wanting to record how I felt about living in such a talked-about country, about which everyone has an opinion, and the fact that it was a lot easier than sending dozens of separate emails to all the people who would want to know said thoughts. I was a bit scared to start though because I'm not always very good at seeing projects through... but I'm really enjoying it so far!

ST: What are your first impressions of living in America?

WW: Well - you'll have to look at my blog ;) Mainly though, everyone really is helpful and friendly (compared to Paris, where I was living before!) and everything is bigger. The roads are wider, the buildings are taller, the portions are larger, the billboards are higher, the packets in the supermarket are heavier... Paris, and even London, will feel miniature in comparison!

ST: Anything super-amazing-exciting happened to you yet?  Just a question out of the BLUE, not something I know about already, obvs.

WW: Well it's funny you should mention... but (again, see my blog for full account!) on Easter Sunday, my husband and I decided to try a little church not too far from our new flat in downtown D.C. The church is opposite the White House and the website said it has a pew reserved for the President. We thought that was rather sweet...but we arrived to find the whole building sealed off, secret service everywhere and the First Family on the way there! Amazingly, we managed to get in for the service, and, sitting in the gallery, had a wonderful view of Barack Obama, Michelle and the two girls. We even got within a foot of them when we went up to communion. Not bad for our first week in D.C!

ST: Do you have any thoughts about the direction in which you'd like your blog to go?

WW: Well, as I said, I was a bit nervous about beginning as I'm rather feeling the pressure to continue, but I keep finding, as I wend my merry and very uncertain way around Washington, that new ideas and thoughts for blogging keep occurring to me. I think it's made me a slightly better observer, so that's a positive thing I'd like to continue. I think eventually it may have to stop being about my perspective as a 'newcomer' (I don't know when you stop being one of those though - in English country villages, I think it takes about half a century) and be more about the city itself and - hopefully - the more unusual, off the beaten track things I'm discovering (if I do!) One thing I don't want it to be about is work - it's nice to do something separate from journalism!

ST: Could you pick one thing you miss about England, one thing you miss about France, and one thing you're loving about America?

WW: Hmmm... one thing in each category is difficult! I think I most miss English understatement and sarcasm (I missed it in France too!), because here everyone is very sincere and a bit earnest and sometimes I just long for a little putdown or self-mockery.

I rather miss the Paris metro - it smelt of wee, but it was very efficient and there was a train every 3 minutes most of the time. The other day here I had to wait 10 minutes for a metro train, and it took a bus I was on over an HOUR to get from downtown to the National Cathedral, a distance of about four miles, because of the ridiculous amount of traffic and lack of public transport options.

But one thing I am really enjoying about America is how convenient everything is (apart from public transport!) Everything's open all the time, the customer service people really do attempt to help you, the roads are easy to cross... everything is designed to make your life a little bit better. And that is refreshing.

ST: And, since Stuck-in-a-Book is a book blog, cards on the table: what are the best English novel, French novel, and American novel?

WW: Ooooh. Toughie. Best French and American novels are hard because I'm woefully under-read in those categories, and English because there are too many to choose from. I'd say that the novel that had me most gripped at a young age, and I always love re-reading, is Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca. Stylistically, it might not be Middlemarch, but the plot is superb and the narrator compelling.

Regarding French novels, can I cheat? It's not really a novel, but when I was a child, my Godmother gave me one copy of Antoine de Saint Exupéry's book Le Petit Prince in French, and another in English. I loved the English version at the time, but, later on, was doubly delighted by its whimsy in French. But it's definitely not just for children!

As for American novels, although I loved The Great Gatsby and Lolita, and Little Women will always remain one of my favourite children's books (I especially remember my childish British puzzlement at some of the quaint American words and traditions!) I might have to pick one I know Simon hates... The Catcher in the Rye. It had a real effect on my writing style for a while after I read it - not necessarily for the better! - and Holden Caulfield continued to intrigue me long after I put the book down. But I also loved The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.

ST: Now choose one English author, one French author, and one American author that you're looking forward to trying out.

WW: Now this is easier! My 'to be read' list is huge.

In French, I always meant to try out Michel Houllebecq, in translation OR in the original... I just never got round to it. So I'd probably start with Les Particules Elémentaires (or Atomized, in English), which won several international awards.

As for American authors, there are so many! I have joined the local library here and browsing the shelves made me realise just how much I have to catch up on... For starters, I borrowed one Anne Tyler (Digging to America) and one Gore Vidal (appropriately enough, Washington, D.C  - I didn't realise he'd written a series of historical novels.) But also keen to start reading more Philip Roth (only ever read Portnoy's Complaint!) and Jonathan Franzen.

And an English author I don't yet know... Well, my policy when trying to cut down the number of books for shipping over here was mainly to bring ones I hadn't yet read. So there are plenty to choose from! Including A House and Its Head by Ivy Compton Burnett, an author much recommended by a certain friend who's always StuckInABook. So I'm hoping to start enjoying that one soon. Another book I'm really excited about - and this is cheating a bit - is by an author I already know and deeply love, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Apparently, the fifth volume in her series The Cazalets is coming out in the autumn; I can't wait!

ST: And the question I ask everyone - what are you reading at the moment?

WW: Well, slightly naughtily, given everything I wrote above, I'm reading an author who's neither French, nor English, nor yet American, but Israeli. It's a book I borrowed from the library near our new flat, called The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, by Shani Boianjiu, and it's about three Israeli girls who are conscripted into the army, and how they get on. Given that for much of the time, they are very bored, the book itself is quite a page turner, and very strangely and beautifully written. It certainly gives you an insight into the lives of Israeli teenagers.

The photo, by the way, shows the ONLY books we currently have on our new living room bookshelf (The People of Forever Are Not Afraid being upstairs!) This state of affairs won't last, once all our worldly goods arrive by ship from Paris via Bristol via New York City... I thought Simon would be pleased to note the stack of OUP Very Short Introductions as well... on offer in W.H Smith on the rue de Rivoli...

Innocent cat grabbed in garden

Those of you who are friends with me on Facebook will have seen these already, but I thought I'd share some pictures of me playing with Sherpa when I went home for Easter...  My hair, incidentally, is much shorter now.  I think Sherpy's is the same length.  (Photos taken by my brother Colin.  I deleted the ones he took of his feet.)

Sherpa 'runs into my arms'.

HUGS!

Revenge of the cat...

 

"I claim this land for cats!"

  

She's looking a wee bit drunken in this pic...
but I reckon it's just happiness :)
That's certainly what's lighting up my silly face!

I was going to write a film review tonight.  You got cat photos instead.  Who's to say which is better?  (Spoiler alert: you'll probably get the film review soon, too.)

Some recent books...

I thought I'd do a little round-up of various books that I've bought and been given, because... well, why not?  You usually have something fun to say about them.

That Sweet City: Visions of Oxford - John Elinger and Katherine Shock
Kathy Shock is Our Vicar's Wife's dear friend from school days, and also lives in Oxford (my experience of Oxford for the first 18 years of my life was chiefly visiting Kathy and her family) - she is also a brilliant artist, and sent me a copy of That Sweet City.  It has poems by John Elinger and illustrations by Kathy (one of which you see in the photo above) - I'll write more about it in due course.

Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm
Continuing the Oxford them - so many people have told me that I must read this (and been rather outraged when they discover that I haven't) that I'd better snap up this Penguin edition when I saw it.

The Teleportation Accident - Ned Beauman
I loved his first novel Boxer, Beetle (even though I didn't expect to at all), so I was excited to receive the paperback edition of this Booker-longlisted second novel.  And isn't it a fantastic cover? Thanks, Sceptre!

The Secrets of Bredon Hill - Fred Archer
I had to bring this home, when I saw it in a Headington charity shop, since it's about the year 1900 in Aston-under-Hill - which is the village in Worcestershire where I went to Bredon Hill Middle School for three years.  Quite a curious coincidence to find this in Oxford...

The Crack in the Teacup - Joan Bodger
When I wrote about Bodger's brilliant account of touring literary sites in England, How The Heather Looks, the blogger at Leaves and Pages (sorry, can't find your real name, I feel bad about that) recommended that I try Bodger's autobiography - and I immediately ordered a copy.

C.S. Lewis: A Life - Alister McGrath
When Sophie at Hodder offered me a copy of a new C.S. Lewis and mentioned that she'd found my review of Lewis's beautiful book A Grief Observed, then I couldn't say no, could I?  I've seen Shadowlands, but I've never actually read a biography or autobiography of Lewis, some I'm excited to get my teeth into this one.

Any comments on any of these very welcome!  What is the latest book you've bought?

Song for a Sunday

A band I'm fond of, Texas, have come back with a new song I can't stop listening to - The Conversation:

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Happy weekend, everyone.  It's finally starting to look a bit sunnier and - dare I say it - a touch less freezing here, so I'll be spending my Saturday... at work.  Oh well, it'll be nice to say hello to Bodleian people, and then I'm off to spend Saturday evening at my friend's house, watching The Voice.  Very classy, me.  You can treat yourself better, by reading a weekend miscellany.

1.) The blog post - check out Hayley's response to my recent On Not Knowing Art post, entitled On Knowing Art.

2.) The book - came courtesy of lovely Folio books, and is a beautiful copy of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque - which I've been intending to read for ages.  Has anyone read it? (Follow that link to see the details of the Folio edition I was kindly sent.)

3.) The link - is silly. It just is silly. But I love it. Click here to ask one of nature's great questions.

Alberto Manguel on.... Reading Aloud

The Library of the Palais Lanckoronski, Vienna (1881) - Rudolph von Alt

"The humanist teacher Battista Guarino, son of the celebrated humanist Guarino Veronese, insisted that readers should not peruse the page silently "or mumble under their breath, for it so often happens that someone who can't hear himself will skip over numerous verses as though he were something else.  Reading out loud is of no small benefit to the understanding, since of course what sounds like a voice from outside makes our ears spur the mind sharply to attention."  According to Guarino, uttering the words even helps the reader's digestion, because it "increases heat and thins the blood, clean out all the veins and opens the arteries, and allows no unnecessary moisture to stand motionless in those vessels which take in and digest food."  Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine."

--- Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, p.179

Leaves in the Wind - 'Alpha of the Plough'

Leticia gave me the very best kind of recommendation earlier in 2013, on this post - a recommendation for a book which I already owned, and was keen to read.  Perfect!  The book was Leaves in the Wind (1918), the author was 'Alpha of the Plough'.  Not, as you may imagine, the author's real name.  Alpha is, in fact, A.G. Gardiner (not E.V. Knox, as I thought at one point) - who chose the name when writing for The Star, as several contributors were named after stars. What a serendipitous recommendation, seeing as I'd bought the book out of (a) curiosity and (b) frustration at the lack of decent books in Dorchester's charity shops.  And I ended up doing rather well.

It's that variety of gem which doesn't really exist any more (and how many times have I lamented its demise in my posts here!) - the personal essay.  All sorts of wonderful people wrote them, from Rose Macaulay to J.B. Priestley, and there seemed to be no lack of audience for them in the first half of the 20th century - even (maybe especially) during the First World War.

Gardiner covers a great number of jovial topics - from his companions of a bus to giving up tobacco, from smiling in the mirror to famous conversationalists - but there is also a hefty portion of the book given over to soldiers and war.  Difficult to avoid during wartime, and perhaps it is only to the 21st-century reader that the combination of the frivolous and fatal seems incongruous.  Gardiner was nearly 50 when the First World War began, and did not see active service in it - but he is a kind, insightful observer of soldiers, blinded neither by patriotism nor cynicism:

A dozen youths march, two by two, on to the "up" platform.  They are in civilian dress, but behind them walks a sergeant who ejaculates "left - left - left" like the flick of a whip.  They are the latest trickle from this countryside to the great whirlpool, most of them mere boys.  They have the self-consciousness of obscure country youths who have suddenly been thrust into the public eye and are aware that all glances are turned critically upon their awkward movements.  They shamble along with a grotesque caricature of a dare-devil swagger, and laugh loud and vacantly to show how much they are at ease with themselves and the world.  It is hollow gaiety and suggests the animation of a trout with a hook in its throat.

A central thread of Leaves in the Wind is humanity in the midst of war - the minutiae amongst the vast and awful.  The collection would be worth hunting down for that alone.  But I don't want to give the wrong impression of Gardiner's tone - because Leaves in the Wind is very often an amusing book too, and wanders onto the sorts of topics in which A.A. Milne would have delighted in his pre-war sketch writing days.  Such as gentlemen's fashion:

I am not speaking with disrespect of the well-dressed man (I do not mean the over-dressed man:  he is an offence).  I would be well-dressed myself if I knew how, but I have no gift that way.  Like Squire Shallow, I am always in the rearward of the fashion.  I find that with rare exceptions I dislike new fashions.  They disturb my tranquillity.  They give me a nasty jolt.  I suspect that the explanation is that beneath my intellectual radicalism there lurks a temperamental conservatism, a love of sleepy hollows and quiet havens and the old grass-grown turnpikes of habit.

Quite frankly, I adore the idea of calling someone 'an offence', and will be putting it into practice asap.

This has been a speedy overview of a book which, though slim, is very varied - and, like almost all collections of personal essays, covers so many topics that an exhaustive review would be impossible, unless it was almost as long as the book.  Gardiner proves himself, in Leaves in the Wind, to have an impressive range of tone - from funny to solemn, and (more impressive still) sometimes both at once.

Thanks, Leticia, for pushing this to the top of my tbr pile - I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for any more furrows ploughed by this particular author.

Penguin Bloggers' Night

I love an event for bloggers - always wonderful to see friends old and new - and was delighted when Lija emailed to invite me to the third annual Penguin Bloggers' Night.  I am a veteran of all three, as were several of the other bloggers there, and hopefully I'll be able to attend more in the future.

Candid snap of Polly, Simon, and Kim... :)

This wasn't just put on for us to hobnob with other bloggers - although it was fantastic to see friends like Simon S (Savidge Reads, Hayley (Desperate Reader), Annabel (Gaskella), Sakura (Chasing Bawa), Kim (Reading Matters), Polly (the erstwhile Novel Insights), David (Follow The Thread) and doubtless others whom I've forgotten right now.  It was lovely to meet Rachael aka @FlossieTeacake. Also in attendance, the primary purpose of the extravaganza, were various authors with forthcoming books.  Indeed, with my crib sheet to hand, I can tell you that we saw Catherine O'Flynn, Joanna Rossiter, James Robertson, Mohsin Hamid, Rhidian Brook, Bernadine Evaristo, Alicia Foster, and Jonathan Coe.

All the authors read excerpts from their books, and were introduced by pieces of music (of their choosing) played energetically by the real-live-pianist.  Very classy, Penguin, very classy.  There are too many to talk about all of them, so I'll just pick out a few.

The one which really grabbed me was Alicia Foster's reading from Warpaint - a novel set in 1942, telling the war from the perspective of various women artists.  It sounds like a new and interesting angle on a much-described period, and I went home clutching a copy.

The excerpt from Joanna Rossiter's The Sea Change made it very obvious that she's a product of a creative writing MA, but that's no bad thing if one is in the mood for that sort of thing - very poetic, very imagery-driven, and possibly very brilliant.  Difficult to tell from a short excerpt.

Jonathan Coe, mid-reading

I'd only come across two of the authors in attendance, and one of those was Jonathan Coe.  I have to admit that I haven't read anything by him, but have The Rain Before It Falls on my bookshelf. Well, I did have his new one, Expo 58, in my hands until I heard his excerpt... it was basically all about toilets.  I have a big sense of humour deficiency when it comes to toilet humour (in the literal and figurative senses), so passed my copy on to Polly immediately.  Sorry, Jonathan.  I'll still read The Rain Before It Falls, especially since it's apparently inspired by Rosamond Lehmann.

Whilst catching-up with various bloggers of long-standing, I was intrigued to see the emergence of the vlogger.  Someone at Penguin whispered to me "We don't really know what they are!" when she mentioned that quite a few vloggers were dotted around the room.  They weren't difficult to spot; they were the young women with striking hair or make-up, making those of us who keep determinedly hidden by pages of text and pictures (rather than video) look rather... bookish, shall we say?  I felt like a member of a family folk band might feel, when encountering Chuck Berry.

"I don't know much about book vloggers," said I to the Penguin lady, "but there is one I watch - Sanne at booksandquills."  And, while walking to my seat, I happened to walk straight past her.  I felt - believe it or not - a little starstruck.  I've made friends with at least 50 people from blogs and online book discussion, and feel like book bloggers are my kindred souls, rather than deities (and I think my readers feel the same about me) - but Sanne felt a little bit like a celebrity to me.  Maybe it's that whole thing about seeing the person on the screen?

Sanne is filming on the left; Lija from Penguin is on stage.

I went and said hello to Sanne, and she gamely pretended to know who I was, while I probably babbled away too much.  She asked me to take a couple of photos with her very fancy camera, which I completely messed up, and we parted ways.  It was fun to chat about bookish gatherings in general, and it was nice to meet someone from the new generation of bibliophiles - I watch quite a few vloggers and Youtube comedians, but she is the only book blogger I watch.  (Our taste in books isn't at all similar, although she did talk about Three Men in a Boat a while ago, which I recommend watching if you'd like to try out a vlogger - here.)  The audience is different, and the style is different, but the love of books is the same.

This has turned from a post about Penguin's event into musings on vloggers!  Maybe that will come another day - maybe a book blogger will turn their hand to vlogging? - but for now, thank you Penguin for inviting me and putting on a fun and interesting night, thank you Foyles for hosting so well, and thank you authors for writing and not being unnerved by speaking to those internet types.

Q's Legacy - Helene Hanff

Amongst those of us who write or read book blogs, there are two varieties: those who love Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road, and those who have yet to read it.  In case you have yet to have that pleasure, it's the (true) letters between Hanff in America and Frank Doel, who worked in a London bookshop.  It's charming and bookish, and a slightly can't-believe-how-stereotypical-they're-being encounter between brash American and restrained Brit.  I've bought a few Hanff books since I read 84, Charing Cross Road (and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, published together) eight or so years ago, but the first I've read was Q's Legacy (1985) on the train home to Somerset.  And it was fab.

For some reason, I had believed that Q's Legacy was Hanff's first book, and settled down to it for that reason.  I was, at it turns out, wrong - most of this book is about the writing, success, and aftermath of 84, Charing Cross Road - but before I get to that, I'll address the title.  You might, or might not, know that 'Q' is the author, essayist, poet, and anthologist Arthur Quiller-Couch (which rhymes with pooch).  I believe 'Q' dates from the time when writers in periodicals, particularly Punch, appeared under initials (hence A.A. Milne being known as AAM for some of his publications) - but Arthur Quiller-Couch could get by with just 'Q'.  Although he pops up quite a lot in biographies I've read about other people, the only work I've read by Q is his poem 'Upon Eckington Bridge, River Avon' - because I grew up in the small Worcestershire village which boasts this bridge.  Barbara recently visited in on her travels, so you can see it here.

His legacy to Hanff came about by writing On The Art of Writing, which she stumbles across while trying to educate herself in literature.  In his five-volume collection of lectures, he covers the grand scope of literature, and inspires Hanff to go off hunting:

In the first chapter of On The Art of Writing he threw so many marvellous quotes at me - from Walton's Angler, Newman's Idea of a University, and Milton's Paradise Lost - that I rushed back to the library and brought home all three, determined to read them all before going on to Q's second lecture.  Which would have been perfectly possible if I hadn't included Paradise Lost.  In Paradise Lost I ran into Satan, Lucifer, the Infernal Serpent, and a Fiend, all of whom seemed to be lurking around the Garden of Eden and none of whom my teachers at Rodeph Shalom Sunday School had ever mentioned to me.  I consulted my Confirmation Bible, but I couldn't find Milton's fearsome personages in Genesis.  I concluded that Lucifer and the Fiend weren't Jewish and I would have to look in the New Testament for them, and since this was an entirely new book to me, Q had to wait while I read that one, too.

When she wants to source some out of print books mentioned by Q, can you guess where she goes for help?  Yes, that's right - Marks & Co. Bookshop, at 84, Charing Cross Road - that's how their acquaintance starts.

Alongside this autodidacticism, Hanff is trying to make it by writing.  She manages to eke out a non-lucrative career, slowly writing poorly paid history books for children.  She tries her hand at various other types of writing, with very little success - a lovely publisher called Genevieve encourages her along the way, with a mixture of blunt honesty and unrealistic optimism.

And eventually, while going through old boxes of letters, Hanff stumbles across the letters she received from Frank Doel, some twenty years later.  She thinks that they might, if edited, make a fun magazine article - and sends them to Genevieve.  She loves them, and passes them onto a niche publisher - and, without ever having intended to make a book out of them, Hanff finds that she will be published.  (She entirely glosses over how she got her half of the correspondence - perhaps she kept carbon copies, or perhaps Frank Doel's then-widow sent them to her.)  Either way - a book was made.

For those of us who love 84, Charing Cross Road, this book is the equivalent of a Behind The Scenes clip on a DVD.  We get to see the creation, but we also get to see the aftermath.  Hanff writes self-deprecatingly and amusingly about being catapulted to fame (albeit the sort of fame a literary author gets; she's no Lady Gaga) and having fans.  As she points out, including her current address in a book probably wasn't the wisest move for anybody who wants any privacy - and, sure enough, many strangers phone or write, although none seem to turn up in the middle of the night with a horse's head, so... that's something.

But things do not finish there!  Hanff continues to document her experiences as 84, Charing Cross Road is turned into a 1975 TV programme and a 1981 stage play.  Had Hanff waited a couple of years to publish Q's Legacy, she might have been able to include the film adaptation (which is very good, and even has a small role for Judi Dench, back when she didn't really do films.)  Seeing the TV and stage adaptations behind the scenes, from someone tangentially involved but still wowed by the whole process, was a real treat.  I much enjoyed a lot of it very, very much - although when Q's Legacy turned into diary entries, for Hanff's trip to London, it lost some of its charm and momentum, in my eyes.)

Hanff admits that she struggles to create memorable or apt titles, and I can't imagine there are many souls who leapt at the title Q's Legacy (although some certainly do - like me), but I am glad that she chose it.  It's fun to trace one's literary tastes and career successes to a single decision - and generous of her to dedicate her writing, as it were, to a man who could never know anything about it.  Although Hanff is really only known for 84, Charing Cross Road, Q's Legacy suggests that she should be known for rather more - and anybody who wishes that 84, Charing Cross Road were much longer will be happy to discover, in Q's Legacy, that, if the correspondence cannot be extended, at least the tale of Hanff and Doel is.