More than the Quotes Are Inverted, She Suggests

I'm not sure that you can really call something that's only updated two days a week a "blog" in the classical sense, but Scott McLemee's new "Intellectual Affairs" column is good reading, at any rate, and worth bracketing a little time on Tuesday and Thursday morning to peruse. And from his links, I discovered this imagined Henry James interview which Cynthia Ozick contributed to the Threepenny Review:

Interviewer: Well, true, they haven't stopped us from speculating that you're gay and always have been.

James: Indeed, there has been a frequency of jolly corners...delightful hours with Turgenev in Paris...the soliloquizing intimacy of one's London hearth in winter, or the socially convenient pleasures of the ever so felicitous Reform Club...going in to dinner with a gracious lady on one's arm in some grand country house...all rewardingly gay at times, to be sure; but neither have I been spared sojourns upon the bench of desolation. Despair, I own, dogged me in particular in the year 1895, when at the opening of my play, Guy Domville--

Interviewer (breaking in hurriedly): I mean you've loved men.

It's not quite Colm Tóibin or David Lodge, but it'll do for a moment's pleasure.