Working – finally – on a new project, I’ve been engrossed in a collection of cultural critic Edward Said’s writings about music. Released earlier this year, Music at the Limits spans 30 years of his reviews and articles about music. It turns out that not only was Professor Said one of the 20th century’s most influential public intellectuals, with around 20 books to his name, but also a prodigiously well informed consumer of “classical music” who wrote about it for publications including the New Yorker, the Nation, the London Review of Books and even Vanity Fair.

Among multiple topics of interest in this collection is Said’s assertion that despite a great deal of musical works written for and about women, there is – apart from the occasional resuscitation of a forgotten or overlooked female composer with a distinctive voice – a significant absence in critical attention paid to the role of women in music history:

It is an interesting fact about feminism, and about the place of music in contemporary culture, that very little has been done to map the female role in the production and performance of music.

This comment, which dates from 1985, bodes well for my project. But my favourite line in the book is Said’s throwaway description of encores, which he finds appalling – “like foodstains on a handsome suit.”

Milan Kundera poses this question in his 2007 book, The Curtain (reviewed here by Michael Dirda):

Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produced books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional — thus non-useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious — is contemptible. This is the novelist’s curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania.

Anyone who has worked in book publishing will see immediately that Kundera can only be referring to a tiny sliver of the industry’s annual output, and that he is rather dismissive of a whole sub-set of professional writers who have the ability to keep producing books that people keep buying. That’s business. It doesn’t have to be art. The revenue demands of publishers must necessarily be satisfied by writers who can churn out books as regularly as new wine. Charles Dickens, whose serialised novels appeared weekly in London newspapers, is one bright exception to the rule of dismissing as “contemptible” every author who can “write on demand”. Perhaps Kundera’s form of passion is unsustainable. I enjoy a fast-paced thriller now and again, even though my own projects tend towards the esoteric. But I don’t think Kundera’s challenge is limited to the writers of fiction. I’m just getting started on another project (towards which I have recently received the unexpected and generous support of the Literature Board of the Australia Council), which, though not a novel, sets challenges for myself that will make myself nervous of a comparison to a plumber’s usefulness for some time to come.