Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer's Desk [Hardcover]

Kevin Kopelson Kopelson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2004

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. Kevin Kopelson is professor of English at the University of Iowa. His books include, most recently, The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 182 pages
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (September 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816644012
• ISBN-13: 978-0816644018
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,050,261 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Captivating Read, November 13, 2005

By 

Read 4 Fun (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer's Desk (Hardcover)

If you're interested in an account of the writing process as it relates to a variety of different writers and contexts, I couldn't recommend a better book. Kopelson is himself a great writer, with a good sense of humor and an excellent command of detail. The Bishop chapter was my favorite, along with the section on Proust. This is a learned book but also a fun read. I couldn't put it down.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chaos Counts, October 8, 2005

By 

C.K. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer's Desk (Hardcover)

The title is ironic. Part critical theory, part psychological analysis, part philosophical exploration, part personal journey, Neatness Counts is anything but "neat." On the contrary, this brilliant collection of five "impressionistic, idiosyncratic" essays is so packed with footnotes, digressions, and parenthetical remarks that the reader feels, at times, as though he were on a roller coaster ride. To his credit, moreover, Kopelson does not insist on drawing one-to-one correlations between writers and their desks. Rather, he pushes his exploration towards deeper, "messier" questions that seek to understand the writers themselves. But even these questions are pit-stops en route to the book's ultimate exploration: the relationship between order and chaos, madness and genius, life and art.