Saturday

I finished McEwan’s Saturday last week and loved it.

That’s saying a lot. I have been quite peeved with him for consistently discounting any connection to Virginia Woolf—even to the point of fabricating a quotation (something about character being dead in modern fiction) on the Op-Ed page of the Times in his appreciation of Saul Bellow.

Still, I felt like the biggest lesson I learned from Woolf about reading was the lesson she imbibed from her father, from her discipline of reviewing: to read widely and generously, judging works on their own terms. This does not mean being only a gentle reader; it does mean reading without prejudice. I felt that, whatever wrong McEwan may have done to Woolf’s generosity (not that she—or her legacy—cannot bear it), I owed it to myself and to Woolf to read Saturday with an open mind.

True enough, it owes much on the thematic level to Mrs. Dalloway: as I surmised, as Katie Roiphe (who read it before me and wrote about it on Salon indicated, this novel about an upper-middle class doctor who spends a day planning a party only to be interrupted by war must call Clarissa Dalloway to mind.

However, in the end, reading it is not at all like reading Mrs. Dalloway. It’s its own book, full of medical arcana and with the surprising reliance on genre fiction for the climax (here, crime) that surprised last time in Atonement. The way McEwan turns to genre fiction seems an interesting and very promising, rich development out of a long British tradition of writers switching from high- to middlebrow works. (Woolf did it when she wrote Orlando but Graham Greene, with his “entertainments” is the most celebrated of many examples.) There were things, however, that I loved. For example, I found myself remembering my own confusion through his daring descriptions of the political confusion of the mainstream liberal in the days before this horrible Iraq war. His protagonist has treated a victim of Saddam Hussein’s torturing goons and, on the strength of that, is more willing than he wants to be to listen to Tony Blair; yet, as a neurologist, he finds himself checking Blair’s face for signs of deception. And, in a very different vein, I found it incredibly moving and interesting to read a novel about the professionally successful husband of a professionally successful woman in which the disintegration of their marriage is not a plot point. Instead, we see them happy together in many different registers over the course of the day—passionate, tender, interested in each other, proud of their children, worried about their children, turning to each other for comfort. (And this, of course, is a loud revision of the functioning but basically celibate Dalloway marriage.)

I am still unsettled by his desire to distance himself from Woolf and interested in his desire to connect himself to Bellow and other Americans. Is it as simple as the fear of being perceived as an effete Brit? Is there any more to it than that?

Ta-Da

My article, though still listed as “forthcoming” is out from Feminist Studies. It’s a look at how Woolf’s journalism, particularly her contributions to the TLS, was informed by her understanding of the eighteenth-century, particularly Joseph Addison’s The Spectator (a periodical that, I think, is a precursor to blogs). Incidentally, Feminist Studies is a cool journal, really doing all the promising interdisicplinary things that one hoped feminism would do: please do support this independent enterprise by encouraging your library to subscribe.

Now you can see it.

Overheard at my Local, Part 3

Dolores and Ann

I was, as ever, at my local on Monday morning. Dolores came early for her coffee date with Ann (not me) and ordered the same sandwich I was having. She’s hard of hearing and 73, she told me. Ann showed up, but I didn’t pay much heed until I heard Ann say, “I said, ‘I was in a coma. How could I call? He asks me why don’t I call. I just says to him, I was in a coma. How could I call? How can you call if you’re in a coma?’” That made me tune my ear to their frequency (which, believe me, was not hard: deaf women with thick Jersey accents broadcast well):

Do you know that woman, Shirley? She’s a diabetic.
Shirley?
Yeah, Shirley. Did you know she’s a diabetic? I didn’t know she was a diabetic.
Yeah. I know Shirley’s diabetic.
Anyway, Shirley came to BINGO on Tuesday and she had these (rustling in her purse for a cellophane wrapper). They’re Tast-E-Kakes.
Yeah, those are good. I got them at the Second Street Bakery
She says you can’t get them here.
I got them at Second Street Bakery
She got them at the Shoprite in Hoboken. You can’t get them here. They’re lite. For diabetics. I thought I’d try them.

There were many significant glances my way when a young woman, all tattooed and punked out came in, “Looks dirty, right?” I shrugged. (I don’t like tattoos, too, but my loyalty here is both indifferent and divided.) As the tattooed young woman was leaving, Dolores begins extolling the virtues of FOX news—they give you news on the hour! You get so much news—“But there was a kid on Reilly. Oooh. I wish you could see this. He had a mohair—a Mohawk—a Mohawk, it was fiery red…”

Essays: a request for advice

A friend has given me to read a fine, interesting, moving personal essay. He would like to publish it somewhere. If you were a personal essay about finding a vocation, with references to William James and Shelley where would you want to be published?

Two new operas

Matt Greenfield’s review of Julie Taymor (she of The Lion King)’s new production of The Magic Flute got me thinking about opera again. And then, sure enough, on Monday’s Soundcheck, John Schaefer featured previews of two new operas premiering this week. If you’re in London, you might want to see Loren Maazel’s version of 1984 with a libretto written in part by poet, critic, and editor (The Yale Review J. D. McClatchy. Apparently, the seventy-five year old conductor has underwritten much of the production costs, causing skeptics to wonder if it is a vanity production. I’m less inclined to be so cynical: if you can afford to be your own patron, why not?

The second opera, however, really sounds exciting and the websites offer a lot of information (including a fancy video preview). The Michigan Opera Theater in Detroit is mounting Margaret Garner, with a libretto by Toni Morrison. It’s based on the true story of a fugitive slave who killed her children to prevent their living in slavery—a return to the material of Beloved, in other words. The majestic and fantastic Jessye Norman will make a brief appearance but the title role is played by the lovely and much-beloved Denyce Graves, best known in our household for serenading Elmo to sleep with her opera lullaby (to a tune from Carmen). It will be traveling to Cincinnati and then Philadelphia soon. Perhaps a road trip is in store.

In the meantime, and in preparation for a few weeks upstate this summer, I’m checking out the Glimmerglass schedule. Since we last saw Dialogue of the Carmelites, ending, as you may recall, with the dramatic and grim ritual suicide of a long line of protesting nuns, I’m thinking Cosi Fan Tutte or at least Lucia de Lammermoor--the latter features Edgardo, one of my father’s favorite names. It’s lovely and comic, that Scots-turned-Italian, isn’t it?

Monday links

I’m surprised this news—that Apple stores are banning all books published by the company that’s publishing an unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs--hasn’t provoked more comment. I dislike unauthorized biographies; they strike me as cheap and intrusive. And surely Apple has the right to not stock any title it wants. But to ban everything by the publisher seems hysterical and wrongheaded. (It also seems to bode well for sales of iCon. (Number 131 and rising...)

Here’s a lovely little (belated) Arbor Day gift for you: a Brooklyn artist made necklaces for some lucky trees. Aww.

Frederic Beigbeder’s Windows on the World has won The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (via House of Mirth).

Jenny Davidson, who reads very fast, has a terrific, sparkling quote on reading—and the fear of running out of stuff to read--from (the often terrific & sparkling) Randall Jarrell.

I don’t have high hopes for Arianna Huffington’s blog, though I like—or am amused by?—her. I did, however, like what Nora Ephron said, somewhat dismissively but not entirely inaccurately, about the appeal of blogging (from the Times):

Ms. Ephron, the writer, who is one of the bloggers, said it was this casual aspect of the venture that appealed to her. "The idea that one might occasionally be able to have a small thought and a place to send it, without having to write a whole essay, seems like a very good idea," she said.

Edith Grossman on Don Quixote

[Cross-posted from 400 Windmills]

Last night’s lecture was the 49th Annual Fordham University Cervantes Lecture, the first such lecture by a translator and a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Don Quixote. It was, in short, an evening laden with significance of a symbolic kind. Much of what I have to say will mirror Danielle’s post, but it seems only fitting, in light of the post-modernity of our early modern text, to indulge in such games of mirroring, doubling, reflection, and alteration.

In spite of all the anniversaries we weren’t overwhelmed with pomp. Fifty or sixty people gathered on the twelfth (top) floor of Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus to hear Edith Grossman talk. It was engaging, interesting, smart, warm, and, at the same time, fierce. In the end, the most interesting subject that emerged from the evening was the beautiful, utopian paradox of translation. She believes, at one and the same time, that a translator’s job is fidelity to the literary text and that a translation is, in itself, an original work of art.

In the question period, someone (Danielle, as it turns out!) pressed her to explain how both of these things could be true and she began by saying that part of being human was being able to dwell in contradiction, but, in fact, this question and her not being troubled by it, pulled the whole evening together for me. She began her talk with an epigraph from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: “It is impossible to say a thing exactly as it was…Too many flavors in the air and on the tongue. Half colors. Too many.” And throughout she spoke eloquently, plead, really, on behalf of translation as an art, as an endeavor worthy of respect.

She spoke, too, of the special anxieties of translating Cervantes—of the overwhelming amount of scholarship on the text, the many existing English translations, the huge gap in time—the special aids she used, not being able to call upon a native speaker of 17th century Spanish, including a photocopy of a friend’s English-Spanish dictionary from 1623. She decided that, famous as the first line of the novel is (as famous among Spanish speakers, she said, as the opening of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy), if she could translate it to her satisfaction, she would be all right. She read the line in Spanish and then how she’d done it and it seemed clear, even to this sorry ear, that she’d done it just right.

The question and answer session was lively, friendly, and informative. I occasionally thought that she was worried that a Cervantes scholar might attack but, in fact, that never happened: the questions were civil and engaged. I asked her what her desk looks like and that seemed to be as alarming as anything. “Are you from the neatness police?” Au contraire! So, she described a huge surface with two pull out shelves, one for each of her two most trusted dictionaries. For me, that was one of the treats of the evening, to be able to imagine the translator at work. Again and again, she demonstrated the fierce love of literature that drove her to create this utterly original, totally faithful text that we’re so enjoying. She reminded me of a lion, maybe the lions at the Public Library: noble, brilliant, proud, and lethal if wronged. I came away with a newfound respect for her and hunger to catch up on my reading.

More Dangarembga: Mother's Day

One week after meeting Tsitsi Dangarembga at the PEN lunch, I snuck away and went to her film at the African Film Festival this afternoon. It was shown with “Keepers of Memory,” a documentary commemorating the Rwandan genocide of 1994. (You can find the program, with synopses of both films at the link above--scroll down.)

At lunch, Dangarembga called herself a storyteller more than a writer and this is her third film. (Nervous Conditions is her only novel, though she has written poetry and is at work on a second novel.) It is also her directorial debut (she wrote the story for the other two). She spoke of the ways in which the collaboration of films balances with the intense solitude of writing. She said that film can do things that writing can’t. When pressed, she told a devastating anecdote: filming a story about land reform in Zimbabwe, she sent a New Zealander friend (presumably white) to film a white farmer talking about his experiences. With camera rolling, he gestured to an elderly, stooped black woman: “See her? She’s really funny. Watch!” Then, to the woman, “Dance, Ma, dance!” Of course, the poor woman does. Dangarembga laughed bitterly at the gruesome display of a white man’s power and domination, performed happily for the camera, without shame. She spoke about how, writing something like this down, one—she—is likely to be accused of reverse racism; filming it takes away that possibility. We see the situation for what it is.

Having heard this, even having read the program notes saying that “you have never seen anything like” Dangarembga’s Mother’s Day/Kare Kare Zvako, I wasn’t prepared for the intense, emotionally dazzling short (twenty-five minute) film I saw today. You can stop reading here if you don’t want it spoiled, but frankly, I cannot do it justice and, worse than that, I fear that prints of Zimbabwean short films are not easy to come by even in these rich days.



The film, in Shona with English and French subtitles (one right above the other) is a beautiful, devastating fable about motherhood and hunger. It opens with a young mother listlessly feeding live termites to her baby. The father arrives, impatiently jostling the child. “The baby cries because it is hungry,” she tells him, and we know this is an old fight, a fight brought on by the parched earth around them. She tells him she has no milk because she, too is starving, and they part in anger. She gathers more termites and roasts them. We next see her portioning out small handfuls of the insects to each of her three older children and then offering to tell them a story about how the ancestors once survived an even greater drought.

What follows is the fable, but that’s deliberately unclear until the very end. What we see is the father returning home, demanding food, demanding the children’s food as his right. The mother snatches the food back from him, returning it to her children—a bold and untraditional move, an angry and desperate one. She tells him to be a man and bring food home. He leaves. Later, he comes, wakes her and tells her she won’t believe his good fortune, for truly he has found something beyond belief.

Night has fallen and, at the termite hill, a group of dancers in beautiful termite masks emerge and dance an incantatory dance. They reappear from time to time to mark some of the more fantastic moments in this fable. Now, the mother follows the father and we, like her, disbelieve. There is nothing but bleak dryness in the landscape, all shot very close. No vistas relieve our sight. The most impressive thing we see, besides the isolated rock formation in which the family has nestled their mud hut and outdoor hearth, is the six-foot tall termite hill where the family gets its food. This is not a landscape to sustain a rabbit or antelope or frog let alone a lion or a human being.

It is a trap. He tells her to look just over the rise and she falls to her death, impaled by the stakes he's placed in a hole. He takes her home to make her into a stew; the children looking on in numb, hungry horror. This cowardly, selfish man, afraid of death, is unequal to the tasks of gathering up his wife’s body and cooking it. Each time he must do something and cannot, he turns to the children. They sweetly sing something more or less like this:

Mother, mother, we are your children.
We love you and sing to you.
Please do our father’s bidding.
Help him do this thing.

The actress then rises and sings of love and cooperation, dancing sweetly, sexily, joyously with her husband, seeming to cook or skip home. Then, she collapses, dead. Again and again we are tormented with the vision of this beautiful mother—what she could have been with just a little food, just a little more help, what she wanted to be for her children. Each time she dies, the children’s skin is a little duller, their lips a bit drier, their frowns a bit deeper. But, once again, the father turns to them and says, “Children, do it again, bring your mother back.” When he butchers her, she sings a mournful song about how the blows of the axe hurt less than the knowledge of who wields it, we see each swing and then we cut to the actress on bloody stumps, buried to her chest, to her neck, finally, the head kicked aside. The gothic low-budget special effects work because the acting is so sweetly amazing.

When he eats her, his stomach swells and swells and we hear the mother’s sweet singing, mournfully, sacredly reminding her children that she should not be blamed for having loved a bad man, that she would never abandon them. He lies back, plagued with terrible pains. His stomach bursts and the mother emerges from his dust to embrace her shocked and delighted children.

The camera then closes in on the mother’s tear-stained face and we hear, “Mama, mama, tell us again how that story about the famine ends.” Credits roll. The end.

Blushing Furiously

Emma ... produced the portfolio containing her various attempts at portraits, for not one of them had ever been finished … Her many beginnings were displayed. Miniatures, half-lengths, pencil, crayon, and water-colours had been all tried in turn. She had always wanted to do everything ... She played and sang;--and drew in almost every style; but steadiness had always been wanting; and in nothing had she approached the degree of excellence which she would have been glad to command, and ought not to have failed of. She was not much deceived as to her own skill either as an artist or a musician, but she was not unwilling to have others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for accomplishment often higher than it deserved.

Reading Jane Austen’s Emma, propped up in my bed at home, the summer before college, is one of my most intense reading memories. It was not a pleasure: to want to be Elizabeth Bennett and find that one is, after all, Emma Woodhouse, is not a welcome realization; it is, however, a useful one.

Twenty years later, I read it with different eyes. I’m more patient with her; her faults are clearer and more charming. But, alas, they are also still mine.

Amardeep Singh at the Valve, links to a great story about how one woman tracked down one footnote in another Austen novel: her story is a really riveting and fun story of academic detective work. I will say, too, that the Valve is moving in a more promising, rich, direction these days: more correspondents and merrier, too.

Remedy for Maladies

Since the election—or perhaps the war, or perhaps September 11--I’ve let go of my Pollyannish ways. It just no longer seemed, as it so long did, that the world was getting better for the most part; things seemed quite clearly to be getting worse, at every level, every day. (I am amused to see that I share this preoccupation of trying to gauge a barometric reading of the state of the world—Improving? Worsening?—with the protagonist of Saturday.)

As ever, though, the state of the world at my local seems to buck the trend. My local revives the Pollyanna in me. Crushed under the weight of grading, I planted myself there for a full four hours today. Deep into a set of papers, I suddenly realized that I was grading a set of papers on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, almost all of which optimistically plot a multicultural future, one in which young people cheerfully choose which bits of their tradition to follow, which to reject. These papers, mostly very smart, are also more optimistic than either the wonderful stories or the bits of theory we read together as a class. As I was grading, I was sitting next to a white civil engineer for the state of New Jersey talking to an Indian-American contractor about how they were going to repave my street. Their merry joshing of each other, their happy assurances, even, eventually, their interest in what I was doing, where I taught, seemed to confirm my students’ optimism.

Why is grading so painful?

Why is the prospect of thirty-five papers to correct so deeply depressing? Why does it move me to file my nails, clean the bathroom, anything? Partly, it’s that it’s required reading: no one likes that. Though I visit Conversational Reading, Light Reading, and the Reading Experience, and though I own the Best American Non-Required Reading (one volume, anyway), I don’t go to Required Reading. Who would? Partly, it’s the painful lurch into someone else’s mind, the suspicion that that someone may not have spent much time trying to articulate her thoughts, that her thoughts may consist largely in a pale parody of my own (under that sad misapprehension that this will please me most).

In fact, once I get reading, the papers (mostly produced by freshmen for a required course in writing or, this semester, literature) are charming, interesting, even, occasionally, good. But then there’s the problem of grading them: not assigning the grade. I know how to do that now and don’t waiver as much as I once did. What troubles me is that sense that now, at this last possible moment of teaching, I cannot write the comment that will help the student move forward and, if I could, she would not read it.

I think grading is so painful because it makes us confront the painful mystery of what it means to teach.

But the brevity of this entry (relatively speaking) is its own kind of victory: back to the stack.

Tsitsi Dangarembga

I was not sorry when my brother died.

That is the first line of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s brilliant 1988 novel, Nervous Conditions. It tells the story of a younger sister in a poor Rhodesian family (just before Zimbabwean Independence) who gets the education promised her brother upon his death. It’s a brilliant coming of age story about the quest for education in a late colonial/postcolonial context. I adore it. So I leapt at the chance to go to a lunchtime conversation with her as part of the PEN festival.

It was an almost sacred, moving experience for me: so great, so rapturous, so thrilling that it’s hard to write about.

Lunch was at India House, just off Wall Street. About forty people were there—five tables of eight. The host, Yvette Christianse, teaches with me, so she was kind enough to introduce me not only to Tsitsi but also to both Achmat Dangor, the other interviewee, and Anne Landsman, who was there as a guest. Typical of me, I was too star-struck and shy to sit at the empty spot at Dangarembga’s table—so great is she, that perhaps I didn’t deserve the chair—but did get to sit at Dangor’s and that was it’s own treat. He is working in Geneva for UN AIDs relief and was with his wife and editor. We talked about many, many things and had a lovely time.

We ate, Yvette interviewed the writers, they each read, and then I went up with my copy of the book. I was really wobbly. I told her that I was embarrassed to admit how very much it meant to me to meet her, not only for myself as an admirer of her great book but also on behalf of the hundred or so students to whom I’d taught it. Those students, I told her, were in college in a village in Indiana; for them, Africa was a blank. Then, they read this wonderful book about a girl from a village in Africa who’s hungry for education and all kinds of things became real to them. My eyes were full of tears. She was lovely and circumspect and polite and thanked me and said, you see, we really can connect, can’t we?

Yes, we can, I said. And you did it.

Wow.

(Next Wed: Her film at Walter Reade, Lincoln Center, NYC. She’s one of the only African women making movies. Go!)

David Copperfield?! My Dad will be so proud...

You're David Copperfield!

by Charles Dickens

Coming up from a childhood that felt abusive, you have risen through hard work to gain a place of stature in your life. You've spent altogether too much time in factories and end up misspelling a fair number of words. But in general you are seen as a beacon of hope for others who might not be as fortunate. Lots of people keep mistaking you for a magician and are waiting for you to disappear.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Cervantes' Marcela

[Cross-posted from 400 Windmills]

Read this as a comment on Jason Pettus’s inspiring and wonderfully rich post from 400 Windmills, because it builds on my sense, too, of what he calls “Marcela's wonderfully candid and surprisingly feminist monologue at Grisostomo's funeral.” Marcela tempts us with an answer a perennial question of any literature from another place or time: would there have been a spot for me in this world? What might it have looked like? In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf comments on the vast gulf between the women in fiction and those whose lives appear in history:

Certainly, if we consider it, Cleopatra must have had a way with her; Lady Macbeth, one wouldsuppose, had a will of her own; Rosalind, one might conclude, was an attractive girl….But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

Where Woolf contrasts history with literature, Cervantes crams an analogous contrast into this one episode.

Grisostomo, a nobleman turned shepherd, has died of unrequited love; men from all over, including Don Quixote, attend his funeral, which becomes an occasion to contemplate and reaffirm the values of courtly love. Then she appears, a noblewoman turned shepherdess (and the source of this sudden pastoral vogue among the local gentry), more radiant than ever, with a starkly logical speech:

For if his impatience and rash desire killed Grisostomo, why should my virtuous behavior and reserve be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the company of trees, why should a man want me to lose it if he wants me to keep it in the company of men? As you know, I have wealth of my own and do not desire anyone else’s; I am free and do not care to submit to another. (Grossman 100)

Hers is a moving bit of eloquence. She certainly belongs to a recognizable type of woman—a chaste Diana for whom choosing virtue means renouncing society. Such characters, when they speak, do not become any less idealized, they merely shift the grounds of our idealization: seeming to confirm her own perfection, she dashes all hope of possession; initially idealized for beauty and virtue, she is subsequently idealized for right reason and a kind of weird secular cloistral nature. Moved, the men present still desire to follow her,

Seeing this, Don Quixote thought it an appropriate time to put his chivalry into practice by coming to the aid of a maiden in distress. (101)

This is a wonderful comic deflation of Marcela’s feminist triumph. The text lets her get away into a less confining genre than romance—she disappears into the woods. Nonetheless, no matter how eloquently she show herself unwilling to be cast as “maiden in distress,” for Quixote and the others, there is no other role.

Questionable Charity

I remember being taught in graduate school to see sentimentalism as unethical: we read 18th century accounts of gentlemen traveling to see mad people, tramps, and unfortunate rustics (leech-gatherers, solitary herdsmen, the whole Wordsworthian crew) and then learned the anti-sentimental critique. Surely my professors were right to teach me of the innate hypocrisy and condescension in people who seek out sights (and sites) of misery on which to exercise their sympathy. Such people are not working for social change but only angling to make themselves feel better. (I once heard an activist recount his dismay at the student who said her work at a local soup kitchen had transformed her. “I just hope it’s still here when my children come to college, so they can have the same opportunity,” she gushed.) This questionable charity is even the subject of my husband’s brilliant and thoughtful book about how Americans, at the turn of the last century, dealt with the tangles of charity and complicity.

Knowing all this, then, why is it that each Sunday night finds me eagerly awaiting ABC’s Extreme Home: Makeover Edition? Have you seen it? It’s a reality show in which a picturesquely troubled family gets their ramshackle home completely renovated in a week. (ABC sends them on vacation.) The families have autistic children or are expecting triplets or have lost a parent (or both parents) to violent or tragic deaths or have adopted children with special needs. These are all very good people on the margins of the middle class and the cute carpentry team swoops in and gives them indoor plumbing and makes sure each child has a nauseating theme bedroom (if the boy wants to be an architect, he will end up with a protractor footboard for sure).

I’m unsettled by the ethics of this. I have come to think the anti-sentimental view too harsh—individual stories of how charity touches lives do matter. Habitat for Humanity and Heifer and Save the Children and other legitimate, worthy charities operate on just this principle. And there is something undeniably moving about seeing people’s worries lifted: “We’ve paid off your mortgage! And that’s not all, Sears [the whole show is an ad for Sears] has put thousands of dollars into your daughter’s college fund! But wait, moved by your work with AIDs orphans, Sir Elton John donated this new GRAND PIANO!!! Now you can play again!!” In the end, I guess this is merely reality t.v. and complicit with all the evils of the genre, only less so. (And I am not one to say that being less complicit makes something worse; I can’t stand all the cicada-eating in Fear Factor and have never watched more than a few seconds.) It is not taxing to watch and lets me be an 18th century sentimental tourist without having to even visit an unpleasant spot.

In other news:

• Genevieve has a new home for You Cried for Night. Check it out. (I’ve finally fixed the link at right, too.)
  
• The Times reviewed Windows on the World on Sunday, coming to similar conclusions to the ones I posted here a few weeks ago.
  
• More on Don Quixote tomorrow, but in the meantime, don’t neglect 400 Windmills!

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

I discovered Persephone Books last summer in London and fell in love. This small publishing house, run by Nicola Beauman, reprints forgotten works by twentieth-century women writers (there are a few titles by men in the collection). The books are gloriously gorgeous and the shop, in Bloomsbury, is housed in the storefront that used to be Virginia Woolf’s grocer’s. What’s not to love? Serena Trowbridge’s May 2004 review includes some images of the books: you have to see how truly gorgeous they are (scroll down). The series has also been reviewed at Chicklit and Bookslut. You can see more images by hunting around Persephone’s site.

The dove grey paperbacks all have grey jackets and vivid endpapers based on vintage textiles. At ten pounds a piece, they’re expensive (especially these days), but I went for the deal: three books for twenty-seven. I finally read my first one, the very slim Julia Strachey novella, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding this week.

What a lovely little discovery! This 1932 book, a cross between Mansfield and Stella Gibbons, is darkly comment and closely observed. It tells the story of a chilly country wedding on one of those clear, surprisingly brisk English days. While the mother bustles around noting the cheerful weather of the title and an ex-boyfriend sulks in the front hall, the bride clumsily prepares for her nuptials. It is a wedding that should not be, but I won’t spoil it: this little book can be read in an afternoon & the foreword by Strachey’s lifelong friend Frances Partridge is a gem in itself.

But the writing:

• When Joseph threatens to talk anthropology, the bride’s mother casts about, frantically, “Bring me that lamp-shade lying on the window-seat there! I’d like to show everybody! It is a wedding present from Dodo Potts-Griffiths, just sent over by the chauffeur. She made the whole thing entirely by herself, painted it, put it together, and everything, and it really is so cheerful and pretty!”[Dodo Potts-Griffiths! That takes guts—perfect!]
• Dolly knew, as she looked round at the long wedding-veil stretching away forever, and at the women, too, so busy all around her, that something remarkable and upsetting in her life was steadily going forward.
• He was a tiny little boy. As for his features, they were so small they could hardly be seen, bunched up together as they were in the middle of his face, like the currants in a penny bun when they all run into the centre together for some reason. [Great and gutsy and hilarious, too: this is a baking problem that I’ve wondered about and it seems to almost derail the simile, going on and on about the problem of imperfectly spread currants…]

So wonderful to find this gorgeous prose meet the promise of the wrapper.

Taxes

That's all I have to say. I'm in their grip.

Choose Your Own Genre

cross-posted from 400 Windmills

Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books from years ago? “You,” the protagonist, would come upon a cave. What do you do? Enter it: turn to page thirty. Keep climbing the rocky path: turn to page forty-five. In those books, it all ended up being adventure. For this post, I’m interested in a similar theme with Don Quixote but a more profound question: what genre are you in? If Don Quixote were a character in, say a Shakespeare play, he might be a wise-fool or a Duke in exile but not a knight errant. But really, he is more an ordinary reader living in a small town: he would have to wait centuries for his genre’s flowering in, say, Madame Bovary.

Knowing what genre your life is in is a tricky problem for other characters, too. I used to teach my students style using a passage from Forster’s Howards End. In it, the working class autodidact, Leonard Bast, sits in his basement apartment reading Ruskin, wondering if it is possible to adapt Ruskin’s elevated Victorian style to his reduced modern circumstances. I stopped teaching the lesson because I realized I was unsure of the object of the satire. Was Forster mocking social praise of Ruskin or Bast for not knowing his place? I still don’t know: I find Leonard heroic, but I’m not always sure Forster does. There is something a little bit uncomfortable in the portrayal.

Strangely—and perhaps because his delusion is so much greater—I’m much more struck by the heroism of Don Quixote’s error than its inappropriateness. There is something magnificently brave (perhaps we should cue “The Impossible Dream” here and let is swell over my natterings) about insisting on the right to choose your own genre.

Dora at CMoM

When I was growing up in Seattle, I felt the kind of ache for New York that Garrison Keillor regularly describes as his own. True, I was not in rural Minnesota, glued to a radio. In fact, I had a happy, rich childhood with wonderful friends and a smart, supportive family. Still, melodramatically, I imagined myself barred from culture by a couple major mountain ranges and the Great Plains beyond. Seattle in the seventies and early eighties was different: there was a single Starbucks, a tiny computer company, a big airplane company: no Red Hook or Amazon; Kurt Cobain was an unknown from the unimaginable burbs; and I had a crush on a boy who played soccer with a boy named Stone. I hung out with Dave Munger and dreamed of making it big, somehow. I read the cartoons in The New Yorker (I won’t pretend to more) until I understood most of them and devoured each new issue of Andy Warhol’s Interview.

Now, a billion years later, I’m here, more or less, and with a salary, more or less. I imagined this as a moment of endless dinner parties with the cool, intellectual, NPR kind of celebrities (ones who are glamorous and surprisingly intelligent or smart and surprisingly kind), of gallery openings, (so tedious, darling!), and readings. Or at least, of a few plays and some trips to the museum. I’m more confident than I was as a visitor in my teens and twenties, more independent, and have more resources (capital and otherwise). So, imagine my surprise when I found myself setting off on Sunday morning for the sole cultural event of the week: The Dora the Explorer Exhibit at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan.

Mention Spanish explorers to adults, and they'll probably recall old history lessons about Cortez and Ponce de Leon. But to preschoolers, only one Hispanic explorer matters, and she's not even grown up: Dora, the 7-year-old star of Nickelodeon's animated series "Dora the Explorer." Dora is no imperialist, but she has conquered vast numbers of young hearts. And now she's taken over the second floor of the Children's Museum of Manhattan.

Laurel Graeber wrote that in the Times of 12/10/04. I can attest that it’s a delightful, walk-through advertisement for a very sweet television show. I’m not very clear on how it belongs in a museum, however. And the Dr. Seuss exhibit on the first floor did little more to clarify my sense of the place. It is a very odd playground for toddlers. Still, my beloved toddler was happy, happy, happy for nearly two hours. “What shall we do next, Mama?”

I thought about the girl I was, poring over New York magazines, dying to see Tom Stoppard’s latest play, as I watched my beloved toddler dancing, over and over again, to a tinny recording of Dora and her best friend, Boots the monkey, singing “We did it! We did it!” Aww.

Then I went home and began lobbying for a babysitter for next weekend.

"Dora the Explorer," at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, the Tisch Building, 212 West 83rd Street, (212) 721-1223. Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission: $8; 65+, $5.

Recklessness

Since the brouhaha in the Guardian lamenting the abundance timid, domestic women writers and the lack of (manly?) risk-taking ones, I’ve been thinking a lot about recklessness in writing. If great writing is writing without a net, writing that surprises and shocks, then how can we encourage more great writing—to be read, to be written?

Some, mostly in the New York Times, it seems, have been saying that the lightness, the self-referentiality, the parasitic journalism, and the ubiquity of litblogs feeds into a culture of mediocrity. But this (what I write here at Fernham, what my virtual friends, colleagues, and blogging heroes write) is a different kind of writing than great writing. Somewhere between reviewing and a salon, I would say that litblogs form a deep backdrop from which genius and greatness can emerge: we can look for it, tell each other about it, and, in the face of goofiness and mediocrity (which we’ll gleefully tease and expose), continue to encourage each other to read. Developments like 400 Windmills, The Valve (in spite of my reservations about it) and the LitBlog Coop bode well for continuing a conversation that, too often, doesn’t happen in our newspapers or elsewhere.

As for my own writing, I think that blogging has encourages a kind of recklessness: revising my chapter for my writing group, I felt free to move huge chunks around, felt able to bang out long readings of passages, felt less afraid of the blank page not only because I’m in practice but because I’m in practice in public (small but public still) a few days a week. But then, I’m not sure of the relationship between recklessness, craft, and genius. Great writing takes risks, but, do great writers, in taking them, feel reckless or painstaking? Sometimes recklessness is sloppy.

Thus, I was really attracted to this quotation from an interview with Dave Eggers, whose work I like:

I think the Jon Stewart book is really funny, partly because it's totally reckless. I had no idea it'd be that reckless! That and the Onion -- they're funny because they're unbridled; you just don't know when they're going to say "motherfucker" or just jump the rails in some way.

But now, when I read it, it seems to repeat what’s always a little disappointing about Eggers: it’s ultimately immature and unsatisfying. Merry as it is to read his commendations for Jon Stewart (not that he needs more), and nice—better than nice—as it is to laugh, this is a shallow take on a cool idea. Saying “motherfucker” isn’t reckless in 2005; it’s not even shocking. “Jumping the rails” is a cliché, not a rich description of what writing can do. Still, as I said, I like Eggers, and I’d rather read something that jumps the rails than, to mix clichés, something that colors within the lines.

Not reckless but cool: some Friday linkage
Mark Sarvas has pulled together an amazing Literary Blog Coop: bloggers will be recommending one book a quarter for us to pick up, read and consider. Get ready.

I found this on Oprah’s site (via Literary Mama). After a lot of writers talk dutifully about guilt and making time, and setting alarm clocks for 4 am, Toni Morrison writes: "While I was writing, he spit up orange juice on the tablet that I was writing on, and I distinctly remember writing around it, because I thought I had this really perfect sentence that might not come back if I stopped and wiped up his puke."

But all my best links are from Chekhov’s Mistress: first, mark your calendars for this celebration of those odd wonderful NYRB classics and then, while you wait, check out this stunningly moving collection of portraits of writers, the kind of portraits to make one welcome each gray hair, each wrinkle.

Writing Group

I couldn’t post last night because I was with my writing group. There are three of us and we meet once a month to talk about what we’ve written. So far—and this was only our third meeting--we’ve been sharing fairly polished stuff, so the gloves are still on. Gloves or no, this is rapidly becoming one of the best things in my life and you can imagine why.

There are three of us, all about the same age, all teaching lots and lots of writing and literature classes, all women, all working hard to keep writing even during the semester. We like each other a lot and we love being in New York. But after that, there are lots of differences, enough to keep us happily entertained with the living of vicarious lives through one another.

We’re from the West Coast, the Midwest, and the Upper East Side. One of us lives alone and has a great boyfriend, one is married with a beloved toddler, and one lives with a longterm partner. One of us is writing, fiction one, criticism, the third, essays. One of us is reserved, the other two garrulous.

We meet in the elegant and dinky apartment of the single woman and drink lots of wine and eat wonderful food, including, this week, as a treat, a miniature quiche from Payard that restored my faith in both quiche and convenience food as a delicacy. We drink and gossip and eat and then, taking turns, go through one another’s pieces. We begin at 6. By 10:30, it’s time to head home, tipsy, delighted, inspired, exhausted. Never has the incredible slog from the Upper East Side to Jersey City seemed so fine.

A couple links worth checking out: I found this “Talking To” site (from the Times of London. It’s not active anymore, but it’s fascinating. Back in 2000, you could write in with your question for one of a handful of famous writers (Shakespeare, Woolf, Austen, Dickens) and a scholar would answer it in that writer’s voice, with quotations from his or her life. The questions are sweet and absurd and the answers seem pretty accurate.

Then, via the beloved (and especially hilarious lately somehow) Gawker, this from the Observer: a mock masthead for the masthead-averse New Yorker.

The worst truth about the engine

(that's what the valve knows)

I was interested to read, via Amardeep Singh, about the new group blog, The Valve. Surprised, too, to find some friends and acquaintances there. I think it’s promising, but somehow it makes me feel flat, too and I’m not quite sure why.

By contrast, I was really excited to read the Bloggers Interview on the Emerging Writers Forum (via Chekhov’s Mistress). What’s the difference?

The Valve is a group of people pondering (in individual entries) how to do literary criticism; the individual bloggers are just doing it. None of these people are theoryheads, though many of them are well-versed in literary theory and have a lot of respect for the best that theory has to offer a critic (guidance, perspective, an idea or standard against which to judge a work of art). In the case of all these writers, what attracts me is the clear love of reading that remains their central motivation. Part of my skepticism about the Valve comes from its sponsorship by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. But why the skepticism? With an epigraph from the great iconoclast Empson and Christopher Ricks (the Tennyson scholar who loves Dylan) and Rosanna Warren (the translator and also daughter of Robert Penn Warren). In short, these are my kind of people, but I don’t want to be part of their club.

Partly I hesitate because I fear that their loud proclamations of loving literature come from too narrow an aesthetic: there’s a kind of young fogeyism about them that I don’t find in the bloggers. Also because I remember they began in protest over the evils of the MLA: that's an inbred political origin and seems at odds with the anti-political readings of literature they advocate. Knowing all the dangers and limitations of identity criticism, I still want to know that there is a place for women, for feminists, for writers of color, for writers from other social classes. And I mistrust myself and others enough to find that it can be helpful just to run a quick check: are we being as diverse as we hope to be?

Moreover, I fear the ALSC folks are institutionalizing idiosyncrasy where the bloggers are just exhibiting it. Nonetheless, it may be the case that the Valve transcends the limitations of its sponsoring organization. The recent post on the relative neglect of Charles Chesnutt (on account, it’s suggested, of his gentility), however, is as much about the sad state of academic politics and political correctness as it is about teaching us what’s ultimately really cool and rich about The Marrow of Tradition (a great book).

In Three Guineas, Woolf proposed an Outsider’s Society and then, upon the publication of the pamphlet was somewhat alarmed to receive letters from folks seeking to join. I think much of my hesitation comes from a reluctance to join. The Bloggers interview asks us to join nothing, just to read. That, I find inspiring.

One more round of Byron

Stories about being drunk are usually better than being drunk. I have some favorite stories of my own, but don’t hope to be that drunk ever again. I remember asking what “bed spins” were, one college Thanksgiving, and then, later that night, experiencing them all too vividly. Horrible! Even so, this one, from Byron, is good enough to make me want to pick up the bottle. It has all the elements of a great undergraduate drinking anecdote: the pleading friends, the stubborn drunk, the fear of danger, and then, the happy ending.

One night Scope Davies at a Gaming house—(before I was of age) being tipsy as he mostly was that the Midnight hour--& having lost monies—was in vain intreated by his friends one degress less intoxicated than himself to come or go home.--In despair—he was left to himself and to the demons of the dice-box.—Next day—being visited about two of the Clock by some friends just risen with a severe headache and empty pockets—(who had left him losing at four or five in the morning) he was found in a sound sleep—without a nightcap--& not particularly encumbered with bed-cloathes—a Chamber-pot stood by the bedside--brim-full of--Bank Notes!—all won—God knows how—and crammed—Scrope knew not where—but there they were—all good legitimate notes—and to the amount of some thousand pounds.--

Glorious, hilarious victory. Very nice indeed.

In the end, however, it was hard to read the final years of Byron’s Selected Letters and Journals. I had wondered how Byron scholars so confidently announced that part of his decision to volunteer to fight for Greece came out of his deep disaffection with his life in Italy as a cavalier servente (the acknowledged, serving lover of a married woman). His Detached Thoughts of 1821-22 make that disaffection painfully clear. Even the above anecdote is not as rollicking as it would be in a letter. The spirit is all drained out of him and the writing really suffers.

Then, the letters from Greece (where he died of a blood infection in 1824 at the age of 37) are very odd: officious, hasty, full of orders and requests (for money, loans, information) all to finance the Greek independence movement. It all seems a rather pathetic tumble into accidental martyrdom. I prefer Byron in Venice: pointless and more pointed.

McEwan and Cervantes

Today, I have two small things about big books, old & new.

Over at Slate, Katie Roiphe offers an informed and extended version of the speculations about McEwan’s Saturday and its debt to Mrs. Dalloway that I floated earlier this week. (I was just guessing; Roiphe's read the book & confirms.)

Bud Parr has invited me to join the crew over at 400 Windmills (where they’re [we’re!] reading Don Quixote together). I’m very excited and will let you know when I add something over there.

UPDATE: I dipped my toes into the water at 400 Windmills with a tiny factual post: Edith Grossman is giving a lecture in New York on 4/28. She's the acclaimed translator of Cervantes. And a small post on not reading Cervantes, too.

Book clubs and reading in common

Although such things often fail, I love the idea of book clubs, reading groups, and reading projects. Having spent too much of my life already with A Frolic of One’s Own, I didn’t dare join the Gaddis Drinking Club: there’s not enough sauvingnon blank in the world for that. Still, my copy of Don Quixote arrived over the weekend and I’m ready to read along with the folks at 400 Windmills.

Other reading groups have had mixed results. Right after grad school, some friends enlisted me to join their group. We read Far from the Madding Crowd together and, on that first meeting (a month later than we’d hoped it would be; it’s a long book), my friend said she found Bathsheba an incredibly liberated person for that time period, the 1600s. Or was it the 1700s? Or… Confused and nervous, she looked to me. I flipped my Penguin over to the back: ”Far from the Madding Crowd was first published in 1874…” Suddenly, I became the professor of our group. We disbanded shortly thereafter.

In my little town in Indiana, I was an enthusiastic and regular participant in our Jane Austen Book Club. The motley group of women, professors, wives, and administrators all stuck in a tiny town would have been easy to mock; the comments of some were naïve in the extreme. But it was wonderful and welcoming to be in a room of twelve women from 25 to 80. Plus, we had champagne and cheesecake without fail. Very Oprah but very pleasant, too.

My best book club though was one I crashed: two of my very most beloved friends, a couple, were spending the summer apart and decided to read contemporary fiction in common as a way of having more to write to each other about. The next year, I added myself on as a third wheel. It was divine. We went to the bookstore and picked nine newish paperback novels to read, in any order. We were only to write to each other from time to time with our opinions of the books. No pressure; no rules. I was far from reading all the books (the Gaddis did me in, to be honest!), but what a lovely pleasure. I wrote up my thoughts in book reviews and then, as an unexpected benefit, found that I had learned how to review—something I began doing for real the next year.

We’ll see how the Quixote goes, but my experience of the virtual book group bodes well.

Productivity, lack thereof

Julia Briggs’ new biography of Woolf is out and reviewed in the Times of London (via The Elegant Variation). Another one! Christine Froula’s monograph, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde just came out in January and is supposed to be the best Woolf monograph. So, two huge tomes to read now, both very promising, both of which I remember knowing about from before their conception. I feel like one of those irritating aunts at holiday time: "I remember your mama before you were even born!"

Now, Jane Dunn, in the Times does not go so far as to say that Briggs supersedes the outstanding Hermione Lee biography, but she finds a lot to admire in Briggs and seems to find the book a worthy read. I bet it is but I also thought it was going to be more than a biography--a kind of intellectual history, a story of a life in books. Dunn makes it sound like less than what Julia told me it would be, but I cannot yet tell if that's a fault of the publisher, the author, or the reviewer. I have met all three women and admire them immensely. Especially Julia, who is so great—and has been so great to me—that I want to be her as much as anything. So I welcome these books wholeheartedly and with a pang, a terrible recognition that to be them, to continue even to be welcomed at their table at conferences, I need to complete my own. All I can think is that my own is far from done. Close, but not that close.

Four Stars

My parents were in town this weekend and so we were treated to a few meals at truly great New York restaurants (Otto with the beloved toddler, Le Bernardin without). The food at Le Bernardin was so good as to transcend the category of nourishment and enter the realm of art. How I love these amazing meals. But why?

Years ago, when I was a teenager, a family friend asked the same question of my dad. We were out to eat in a fancy inn along the Thames: my family of four and another, English, family of four. The other father, staggered at the prospect of the bill facing my dad (eight lunches!), asked him why he did such things. Because, he answered, whatever he did—reading, listening, looking, walking, eating—he wanted, at least once, to know what the best was like. Seeking the best is worthwhile.

Most food lacks mystery. Even a really great roast chicken bears some resemblance to what I often make on Sunday nights. I can imagine, for example, buying a better bird, rubbing it with fresh rosemary or putting thyme between skin and breast, roasting it in a more reliable oven for just the right amount of time and coming closer to perfection. However, like the best literature and the best paintings, the best food cannot be approached or imitated by an amateur, only wondered at. How did David Bouley’s kitchen create that citrusy-green apple foam in the amuse-bouche at lunch? How did Eric Ripert’s kitchen make the perfect foursome of fluke, two chile, two coconut, all distinct, all divine? How delicious to wonder through four courses!

Time

There’s a nice story in The Guardian about Michael Holroyd, who has just won a big prize for biography. He says “He will spend much of his winnings ‘buying myself time to write. That's what I need at the moment, time.’” If he, with all of his successes, needs time, where does that leave the rest of us plebians?

Buying time: the big trick of the writer’s life. This week is spring break. The papers are not yet graded, my entries here have been massively long, and, still, writing my book proceeds glacially. But, I’ve read most of Sula today and will finish it now. Strange to come so late to a great book: one wants to say, “Toni Morrison’s really good. Boy! That Sula sure is a novel. Mm-hmm.” But to whom?

Guardian's Domesticity, Saturday

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

I seldom read the excellent Alas, A Blog because I like to maintain my equanimity against what Alas calls “anti-feminist zaniness.” But, when this story from the Guardian crossed my desk twice today (first via the Vwoolf listserv), I felt like, idiotic though it was, I had to bite. It seems the editors of 13, a new collection of writing by young writers, the editors take women to task, writing:

On the whole the submissions from women were disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk-taking - as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell.

To underline their point, the folks at the Guardian have helpfully reproduced that famous portrait of Woolf, aged 20, with the caption: “Did Virginia Woolf's efforts fail to alter negative views of women writers?” Never mind that the photograph predates her writing life by two years and her first novel by eight. Such perpetuation of the image of Woolf as a delicate failure is disheartening indeed. As Brenda Silver has argued, even the picture we choose as the picture of our author affects readers’ impressions. It is time, I think for an older, bolder, and more authoritative Woolf to capture our imaginations.

Woolf wrote in 1929 of how, in a patriarchy, men get to decide what’s important—for example, sport—and what’s not— perhaps fashion, and she mocked the arbitrariness of this even as she railed against its injustice. The comments in the Guardian are silly and beneath contempt and it is, frankly a relief to skim through the letters from the many, many eminent women who say just that (including one from one of the editors, who feels misrepresented), and to see, too, that they’ve reprinted the whole introduction so we can decide for ourselves. Still, I found myself thinking about how to begin a rebuttal.

One might list great counter-examples—anti-domestic novels by women and domestic novels by men—I thought. Then I remembered this weekend's spate of reviews of Ian McEwan’s Saturday. A day in the life of an upper-middle class, middle-aged doctor in contemporary post-9/11 London surely sounds insular. McEwan himself acknowledges the tradition in which he is working: the novel focused on a single day in the life of an ordinary protagonist was the great twentieth-century innovation. But, in his interview with NPR, he quickly moves past Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses to identify himself with Saul Bellow. I think this is disingenuous in the extreme and may perhaps be gender anxiety.

Surely a novel about a man who sets out from his insulated Fitzrovia home to make the fish stew himself for a party he is to throw that night and finds, in doing so, that he must confront the ugly urban aftermath of war has some resonances with Mrs. Dalloway...

Elsewhere: If you want to help the Feminist Press, here's how. (Via Chekhov's Mistress's revamped headlines page.)

Sophisticated Lady

Terry Gross, host of “Fressh Air” (you have to kind of hiss that fresh like Terry does) on NPR rarely asks a dumb question, so I was surprised when I heard her ask Bobby Short if he ever thought it ironic that a middle class black boy (he was nine when he left) from Danville, Illinois became an authority on New York sophistication. Without missing a beat, Short mentioned Cole Porter (Peru, Indiana) and several other Hoosier cabaret greats. An Illini cabaret great is not so odd. Abashed, Gross let him go on. Short reminded her that his is an American dream: the small town kid makes it big in New York.

Short died on Monday at 80 and tributes from “Fresh Air” (which replayed a recent interview) as well as the Times follow on the heels of a Saturday spent listening to “Wall to Wall Sondheim” broadcast live from Symphony Space. Ultimately, I grew weary of the twelve-hour marathon, failing to be buoyed by the ever-indefatigable Jonathan Schwartz. But, I was moved to tears when Elaine Strich got up and delivered that great grande dame excuse about having a cold and being out of voice and, still, determined to come and pay tribute to “Steve.” (It was Sondheim’s 75th birthday.) She wound up her anecdote by seamlessly moving into her song, “I’d like to propose a toast. Here’s to the ladies who lunch…” She barked her way through that wonderful talk-song. Then, after much applause, David Green came out and said, “When I learned that I had to follow Elaine Strich, everybody said ‘Don’t!’” He proceeded to sing “Everybody Says Don’t.” Hurrah!

These show tunes and cabaret standards, in French and English, were my passport to sophistication when I was a little girl in Seattle and Seattle was a lumber town hoping that the latest Boeing strike wouldn’t force the city under. Listening to Bobby Short’s crisply articulated lyrics brought me back to my girlhood days when I would put a stack of records on the turntable and memorize not just the words but the situations. Listening, I prepared for all kinds of life experiences that I now know I will never have: saying goodbye to my lover in a small café, hanging myself after shooting my lover, mourning my loneliness from a penthouse apartment, mourning my loneliness while charging ten cents a dance. I also learned things that still come in handy, such as the relative locations of the Bronx and Battery (up and down respectively), the glamour of Broadway, the quickest way to Harlem, or the charms of the subway in summer.

When I first visited New York City twenty years ago this month, my friends and I walked by the Carlyle. I knew enough and was callow enough to scoff at the card in the window, “Bobby Short is still playing here!” (He had, after all, been playing there since 1968—most of my lifetime.) I didn’t know anything about him but I had decided that one of the first rules of sophistication is to scorn what you’ve heard of: if you’re from Seattle and you’ve heard of it, it must be passé. That lesson turned out to be a false friend. How I wish now that I had gone.

Windows on the World

When my friend in London gave me a copy of Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World last summer, I didn’t think too much about it. I thought the (English) cover was ugly and I didn’t understand the title. What a willful forgetting! It sat in a stack in my office and, eventually, I saw the cover and understood the title: two black columns, very close up, with a thin slice of sky between them.

Beigbeder, a handsome decadent, born in September 1965, is a novelist (this is his fourth or fifth), t.v., presenter, and minor (it’s hard to tell how minor from a quick Google search) celebrity in France. His book borrows liberally from the stark aesthetics of the nouvel roman of Robbe-Grillet (whom he visits at NYU in one of the chapters) and the self-indulgent self-referentiality of, well, the French.

The book is an excruciating read. I forced myself through it as a kind of penance for not having lived here in 2001 and for getting so much pleasure now out of taking the PATH into the World Trade Center site. Now, when the train pulls into that open-air station, I feel the exhilaration of arriving in New York City and have to remind myself that I am also in a graveyard. The PATH station today is full of huge mesh screens, windbreaks, I imagine, that have been printed with inspirational slogans and, for me, they work: Gene Kelly tells me that he walks faster in New York than anywhere and I feel, each morning I read that quote, that I could dance.

I know I’m not the only one who tried to make the tragedy manageable by zeroing in on a class of victims to identify with—the heroes of Shanksville, PA, the firefighters and rescue workers, the many lost of Cantor Fitzgerald—for me, the most poignant were the workers at Windows on the World. Beigbeder shares both my sentimentality—the waitress, Lourdes, is not his most successful character because she’s such a stereotype: the noble Latina martyr—and my skepticism about the restaurant, its wonderful cheesiness. It is just the place you might take your children once.

Windows on the World operates, in fiction, on similar principles to 102 Minutes the New York Times journalists’ nonfiction reconstruction of the time between the first airplane strike and the second tower’s collapse. Beigbeder’s novel begins with an apology: we know how it ends and we know the ending will not be happy. Nonetheless, he focuses in on a divorced father playing hooky with his two young sons, in New York City from Texas on a guilt-fueled extravagant vacation. The children are ordinary and rotten--pushing all the buttons in the elevator, hitting each other, spilling syrup, yelling--the father is hollow and sex-obsessed: they are not likeable characters.

Chapters about Carthew and his sons alternate with essayistic chapters about Beigbeder’s decision to write the novel; each chapter has the time for its title and the Beigbeder chapters purport to have been written at 8:37 AM, at 9:12 AM (or, occasionally, PM). These chapters are essential for emotional relief and occasionally rise to the brilliant essayist observation of Roland Barthes. The conceit of the first half of the book is that it’s written atop the Tour Montparnasse, Paris’ truly hideous skyscraper with restaurant/observation deck and it’s the source for some truly moving and interesting observation about the hopefulness of the seventies, skyscrapers and airplanes, the Franco-American playboy as icon and the lounge as his habitat, the generations of 1968 (his parents’,), 1989 (his) and 2001, and the stress of bringing a child to a fancy restaurant (he brings his beloved toddler one morning). As the novel progresses, Carthew and his sons grow more and more aware of the hopelessness of their situation and Beigbeder travels to New York. At the same time, the shallow Carthew rises to heroism while Beigbeder’s persona sinks into drunken self-indulgence. The chapters in which one of Carthew’s sons begs him to change into his superhero costume and use his top-secret special superpowers are achingly moving and make a lovely foil to Beigbeder’s own wistful what-ifs about helicopter rescues. By the end of the book, I liked the author less and admired his character more.

It took me weeks to read this book: I could only manage a few chapters at a time at first. Then, once the first tower collapsed, I had to get it over with. It’s a painful read. In the end, it’s a fascinating version of the story from a perspective that is neither entirely outside nor entirely in. (Beigbeder the narrator reveals, toward the novel’s close, that he has an ancestor named Carthew, making his persona a kind of cousin of his character.) It reminds us of all the reasons that the United States and France have been locked in a tense courtship and it does something that an American novel could not easily do (and, perhaps, no great work of French art could fail to do): it proceeds cynically to its soaring conclusion.

[The Times mentioned Beigbeder's book in a recent essay, but it's over a week old so you'll have to pay...]

Bella Anderson

My mother reminded me that it is twenty years ago today that my grandmother died. That means that twenty years ago tonight I was a college first-year coming home from a boring date with a German guy to have my roommate (she whom I just visited, in fact) tell me the news. My grandmother, Clara Bella Donna Matilda Wold Anderson, was a missionary’s daughter who spent most of her first eighteen years in China. As her father was the president of a seminary and her mother busy with ten children (and then ill, and then dead), she grew up with three mother tongues, Norwegian, English, and Chinese, which she spoke fluently, though with a peasant accent from the nannies and servants with whom she spent so much time. At eighteen, she boarded a ship to the U.S. and her step-mother said, “One less mouth to feed, one less pair of shoes to buy.” She graduated from college and was the only woman in her class in pharmacy school. She married my grandfather, moved to Iowa, and raised my uncle and mother working as a pharmacist for several neighboring towns all the while.

I can trace most of the things I like about myself back to her as well as many of my quirks and flaws—over-confidence, impatience, stubbornness. She, who once sawed a sofa in half and reupholstered it in order to have a sectional, might well have found herself in the predicament I am in tonight. I have a lovely new desk but the drawers came without handles attached. “Complain!” urged my mother, “Beware! Those are very hard to do. If you’re even a little off, they don’t work.” Undeterred, I drilled away. When I discovered the screws that came with it were too short, I went out and bought longer ones. Now, I have drawers with holes in the front. In them, I can keep a growing collection of handles, short screws, and longer screws with threads that don’t quite match the handle. How I can hear my grandmother’s loud, hearty laugh! Tomorrow, I’ll go to Target and get some sturdy twine and make rope handles and be done with it. Rope handles are very trendy, I hear.

The bass or the words?

I have two nephews on my side of the family (one on the other—all, of course, beloved). I hear from their father that one boy bounces to the bass while his brother cocks his ears for the lyrics. I don’t know if our beloved toddler is a bass or a lyric girl, but watching a child hear a great song for the first time only reconfirms the wonder of music. The Greatest Hits of the Clash had been on the stereo for a while, but when “London Calling” came on, our beloved toddler went straight to 1979, head banging and all. Last weekend, she practically sobbed when, trying to be considerate, a friend turned down Stevie Wonder’s groovy “I was made to love her” on his car stereo. “That’s my other favorite song,” she said, never having heard it before.

Much as I love a funky bass, the lyrics are the clincher for me. I became fanatical about lyrics at summer camp. With a bad singing voice, I found that I was allowed to sing only if I knew the lyrics—I could help carry the song through the hard parts and then would be tolerated (and glared at to pipe down) during the chorus. As I write this, Jacques Brel is on in the background. My French is just good enough for me to know how much I must be missing, but the songs are unbelievably fantastic: each one creates a small, melancholy world, all fog, concrete, and Gitanes burning down to the butt end. I particularly love “Au Suivant” (Next) in which memories of being humiliated at his army physical are equated with a new girlfriend, who, like that impatient army nurse seems to be appraising him skeptically, “au suivant!” I love the exotic sense of a life of many lovers but, more than that, the fear that one is always vaguely disappointing, not quite what was hoped for.

This sense of inadequacy is a major theme in Terry Castle’s moving, amazing tribute to Susan Sontag from the London Review of Books: "In my own case, Sontag’s death brings with it mixed emotions. God, she could be insulting to people. At the end – as I enjoy blubbering to friends – she was weally weally mean to me!" (Via The Page).

More Regency Romance

The Believer has a section called idea share: it’s a place to post ideas which seem good but, for whatever reason, you have no intent to bring to fruition. Here’s mine:

3. Byron’s frustrated childhood love for Mary Chaworth lingered long in his memory, but now that she was married and separated from her husband, she wanted to see him. He, however, was reluctant to risk the disillusionment of a meeting and postponed and never made the visit.

If that’s not the germ of a smashing novel, I don’t know what is. Only one small alteration is needed: “and postponed the visit until the following March. Whereupon…”

House-hunting

My husband is a William Dean Howells scholar and so, by osmosis, I know as much about Howells as one can know without ever having read a word. Now, as we embark on what our second experience of house-hunting together, it seems it may be time to read A Hazard of New Fortunes at last:

The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely aesthetic view of the facts as they glimpsed them in this street of tenement houses, when they would have contented themselves with saying that it was as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence and with wondering why nobody came to paint it…It was to their nose that the street made one of its strongest appeals, and Mrs. March pulled up her window of the coupé. “Why does he take us through such a disgusting street?”

Mrs. March, c’est moi!

We went on a family househunting walk on Saturday: four hours exploring outer Jersey City by foot (and stroller for the lucky and beloved toddler). Up Montgomery Street and through the projects on Saturday morning, I was content and optimistic. Through the first house, still decorated with an unnerving combination of gay man and grandma kitsch, I kept my hopes up (there is, after all, a convent across the street). Kennedy Boulevard, which had intimidated in August, seemed grand, peaceful, and enviable. The second house, with a fantastic Tiffany-era mantelpiece bolted to the chimney with picture wire mostly charmed, only depressed a little. Then, we set off for the third house, just past Communipaw.

No sooner does my husband say “Communipaw is kind of a line” than it hits me and I want to swoon: a muffler shop, several gas stations with tattered flags flying in the wind; cars, struggling to make the light end up stuck in the crosswalk; trying to cross, five teens pass through the narrow spot between cars, only the sixth, with a gracious look of apology, thinks that perhaps a child in a stroller might have precedence; enormous fat people; music blaring. That’s the line. I don’t hope to cross it soon but I fear that the house we can afford is just over it.

UPDATE: Alas, this sad news story of a murder (a botched bodega robbery leaves a widow with four children) on Communipaw from a mile or so down the same road confirms my sense of "the line."

Cool Beans

Is it because I’m teaching The Waste Land this week or is it actual cruelty of our March (60 degrees on Monday and now, frigid and snowy)? Could it perhaps be the mountain of midterm grading? Or the plague that has felled my colleagues. Whatever the case may be, I have been feeling uninspired. In desperation, I turned from my blue books (which, this semester, were an appropriately sickly shade of pale green) to the web. Instead of my usual stops, I dug a little deeper (thanks to the extensive blogrolls of Michael Berube and Alas, A Blog) and found some places where I plan to spend more time:

Black Looks: this is a great African feminist blog that I can’t believe I haven’t found before. I’m enthusiastic and excited.
Cool Beans: Alas praised a post here and it was moving and led me to Yeah, but Houdini didn't have these hips which I fell in love with. It’s a funny phrase, but a terrible title. That said, it’s a great blog on being a feminist mom: another one I can’t believe I haven’t found before.
You Cried for Night and Out of the Woods Now: these are becoming more regular stops for reading about books and everything else.

So, some new stops and some online companionship. It’s amazing to me how the blogs I like best have really mastered something about voice: some of them make me immediately want to befriend their writers and I become, in my imagination, a gushing fan.

Your Wicked Ways

I have never read what we usually call harlequin romances before (well, not since Judy Bloom's Forever anyway)—in spite of my ongoing fascination with Byron—but I suspect this, my first one, will not be my last. Your Wicked Ways, by Eloisa James made me happy.

Back in January, I came upon the news, via Maud, that Eloisa James is the penname of Mary Bly. Who knew? She’s an old, though not close, friend, and she gave me a copy of one of her books. I have just devoured it and what a happy read: I see why people love these things. There is just enough familiarity (in, say the scenes of young wives talking to each other about the latest gossip interrupted by beloved toddlers) and strangeness (in, say, the fact that these same wives have servants instead of daycare and are heading off to balls) for it to be pleasant. You recognize the type and then get the pleasure of translating it to a richer and more glamorous place. I’m overcome with admiration for her imagination. There’s a great scene—really a sentence—of a huge carriage insisting on its right of way over that of pedestrians that seems utterly right: those horrible SUV roadhogs were around two hundred years ago and she’s captured how they drove. The writing is great—just what one wants genre fiction to be—that is, you almost never think of it as writing, you just float along with story as the plot leaps from one episode to the next.

I trust her historical sense and know that she researched her work. I assume most such novelists do. And I know from experience that many of my better students in British Literature had a jump the social context of Romanticism from their reading of Regency romance—Jane Austen has done the same for me. Nonetheless, how deliciously addle-brained of me to be sitting on the B-train thinking “Oh, so that’s how such-and-such was arranged in London in the 1810s,” as if I were reading Lawrence Stone or Davidoff and Hall. Still, I'd rather read this.

Rivals

When Katherine Mansfield died, Virginia Woolf thought, among other things, “a rival the less?” She knew—the question mark shows it—she was being nasty, but she did record in her diary the sense that her competition had thinned. This was both welcome and painful.

Why do we have rivals and what do they do for us? A friend recently wrote to me about our blogs and noted, with some pique, that a rival blogger barely deigns to notice him. Because they went to college together he cares; because my loyalty is all with him, I don’t care at all. When I in graduate school, I chose a rival and the thought of her can still make me tremble with unkind thoughts. I chose her because she was my better: I sought her friendship in the hopes of learning how to be more like her, to be smarter, a better teacher, more learned. I was ruthless. When she was ill, I stopped by her apartment, unannounced, with lovely soaps and coffee. That—and my sycophancy—was enough: I had purchased the right to be in her circle.

All along, I knew this to be hollow and instrumental. This was not simply the savvy or genuine interest we have in getting to know someone who might one day prove useful (an expert, an editor, a genius, or simply a generous and sympathetic mind), this was a campaign and it still amazes me that I waged it. It was not without cost to me. She could be cruel. She would toss out tiny specks of gossip like crumbs, but these crumbs were poison: upon further examination, the message of each was “I am more connected than you; I learn the important information faster.” But I still learned it faster than my more ethical friends and, in so doing, I learned some ways to compensate for the “gee whiz!” in my personality. Something was missing in my mind, in my training, in those days: she had it; I have it now. Making her into a rival helped me acquire it quickly.

A rival is poisonous but, in work as in love, a rival sharpens our swords. Without rivals, we might sink too quickly into complacency. Though the pleasure of work for its own sake, the sake of a loved one, or a small, appreciative circle is soothing and essential, sometimes we need a rival’s challenge.

***

Have you seen this lovely little parody? A mock-interview with an early witness of the printing press (Gutenberg is mad! No one wants a machine-printed book!).

Cabinet War Rooms

When I was in London last summer, I visited the Cabinet War Rooms for the first time. They were Churchill’s underground headquarters during WWII and have been turned into a breathtaking museum. I was reading Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day about a love affair conducted under the pressure of the blitz at the time and the novel combined with the museum—and in particular a woman secretary’s recorded reminiscence of what it was like to have to spend the night in the war rooms, walking down the corridor in a dressing gown, past sentries, early in the morning, to brush one’s teeth before work—to foster in me a nascent version of respect for those who worked in the government during the war, the first twinkle of admiration and curiosity for those in the military in many years. When I was little, my dad told me about visiting London in the fifties and finding it still bombed out; I remember him showing us around the Barbican where he had walked thirty years earlier. I was also a huge fan of “Danger UXB” on Masterpiece Theater, sighing each week as the devastating Anthony Andrews tried to detonate yet another unexploded bomb (or UXB). But, more recently, memories of Churchill and “the war effort” have been displaced by others. As a Woolf scholar, I’d been imagining the blitz from the perspective of a pacifist, not really thinking about the very different terror of those who were in the midst of conducting the war while bombs were falling.

This weekend, I was in Washington D.C. for the first time since September 11 and it made me think again about capitol cities in wartime. I visited my college roommates: one lives just ten blocks from the Capitol Building, the other is a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. On Sunday, we (my one roommate, her husband, her beloved toddler and infant, my beloved toddler and I) all walked down to the Capitol. The barricades are intense--much more so than anything I’ve seen in New York—and depressing. There are soldiers and police around, but the presence is not what I’ve seen in London or Paris in moments of heightened tension. We are at war, it is true, and these precautions make some sense but there is something weirdly virtual about them, too. D.C. is not under attack now as London was in 1941, though it looks from all the concrete barriers as though some think it is—or might be. These barricades and fences make the city seem far less majestic and the country seem less like a democracy. I’m not sure if they made it seem like something else: I wondered if, decades from now, I would be dragging the beloved toddler through some new version of the Cabinet War Rooms—an exhibit detailing how, back in 2001, precautions were taken against a terrorist threat that, in retrospect, marked a terrifying hour and one of our finest or if, as I fear, that is no more the case than Bush is Churchill, let alone a great man of peace.

New Haven in the Vacation

One of my professors once told me that the only people who feel confident that they belong at Yale are those buried in the Grove Street Cemetery. She said that every time you start to savor the thrill of belonging, you learn that there is a yet more exclusive club to which you have not been admitted. Charles Lamb’s imagination took a happier turn, when thinking about a visit to Oxford:

I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To such a one as myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a few idle weeks, as at one or other of the Universities….Here I can take my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree or standing I please.

I had lunch in New Haven yesterday. It’s still true that an envelope from Yale makes my heart skip a beat--they’ve come to take back my degree at last, I think. Nonetheless, those were great years and just walking from the station to the campus, I could feel my brain buzz with the intensity of all those smarties gathered together—until, just a block from my old department, I saw a dozen young undergraduates walking in a pack. One popped a balloon that was advertising an open house at the Cambridge Arms and they all guffawed. Their Yale has a lot more in common with the ethos of our current president than mine. But how lovely to be there again, even for just a few hours. Sadly, I think, New Haven may be my arcadia.

Arcadia

There is a moment in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia where, Septimus Hodge, a math tutor in 1816 (the play takes place both then and in the present day), sets fire to an unopened letter he’s just received from Byron: Now there’s something, he says to his shocked hostess, a letter from Byron that no one will ever read. Septimus is one of my favorite characters: witty and sweet, and fascinatingly reckless, he carries on an affair with a married woman while flattering her husband to his face and panning his (horrible) writing in print. It’s a powerful moment in a play that has a lot of fun with letters: as in bedroom farces and Regency romances, letters in Stoppard's play misfire constantly: challenges to duel reach the wrong person as do assignations and declarations of love.

As amusing as I find these conventions, I had a special jolt of pleasure coming upon this in Byron’s letters, a description of his flirtation with the married Frances Webster in a letter to his confidante, Lady Melbourne (October 8, 1813):

It was a risk--& all had been lost by failure—but then recollect—how much more I had to gain by the reception—if not declined--& how much one always hazards to obtain anything worth having.—My billet prospered—it did more—it even (I am this moment interrupted by the Marito--& write this before him—he has brought me a political pamphlet in M.S. to decypher & applaud—I shall content myself with the last—Oh—he is gone again)

Strangely, for all the affectation here, I had this sudden vision of how realistic all these romances are. It is really thrilling to read the letter of someone in the midst of this kind of romantic and sexual high-wire act. And Marito is genius: the little husband, so cruel. And such pleasure he takes in being consulted for advice by a man whom, for so many reasons, he does not respect. And then, what a high-wire act Stoppard is running, for isn’t this whole situation a major bit of the plot of his play?

I know, I know, Byron was a very bad man. I know he slept with his sister, etc. Still, I find him, at this distance, really electric to read. How fun it must have been to be Lady Melbourne (much better than poor Frances Webster who keeps bursting into tears, is only twenty, has a husband who thinks she is without passion when clearly she, poor girl, has plenty but not for the proper man—when she crosses the page, I do feel very sorry), but how fun to get such a letter. The right-now-ness of it is sparkling even two centuries later.

Overheard

Here’s what happened in my local yesterday. At 11:15 or so, a man, in his forties, came in with his mother. “Do you want coffee?” the man asks and, as he does, his cell phone rings, loudly. “Hello? Yes. Look, we’ve got a closing in the hour. If this storm comes, I can’t make it this afternoon. I’m going to have to call you back.”

They were a beefy pair, friendly, very stressed, and loud. Soon enough, both were on and off cell phones; the son was in and out the door, loudly negotiating the final details on the closing of this real estate deal. The mother, threatening to close all her accounts with her brokerage, got even a little louder and the son turned to me, “Sorry about this.”

In came two ditzy bohemian college girls, grungy, and hung-over, with a suitcase and carry on bag. As they dithered over what to order, they began debating whether or not it was worth it for the sweet-faced one to change her flight. Mom chimes in, “Where are you going, hon? I’m not being nosy. I’m in the airline business and I have information.” From behind the counter: “she’s being nosy.”

The two girls quickly start in with a story, sweetface dominating, about whether or not it was possible to change her destination city of Portland, Oregon. “Why do you want to change, honey?” It turns out, they had met a couple of really cool Australian guys the night before who had invited them to lunch today at Peter Luger’s steakhouse. “It would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” The Goth friend is feeling a bit skeptical, “Don’t you have to, like, call months in advance to go there?” Sweetface is undeterred, “They had a reservation.” “And they made it for four because they just knew they were going to meet you two last night?” asks Mom, hand on hip, eyebrow cocked. “It’s for six. They’re, like, millionaires, and it was really interesting to talk to them because they were explaining how, in Australia, you don’t have to go to college…”

“WHEN DID THEY CHANGE THE RULES IN AUSTRALIA?” asks Mom. “Well…I mean…” “Don’t argue,” says the son, looking down and shaking his head, “don’t argue. You won’t win. Don’t argue. Mom, we gotta go.” He goes out for a cigarette.

The girls’ pay for their breakfast burritos and get ready to go. “What time is it?” Noon. “What time is your flight?” One-thirty, out of LaGuardia. Mom throws up her hands, “you’re not going to make it, hon,” and leaves. The Goth girl admits she doesn’t really know where LaGuardia is. “I’m going to hit you!” says sweetface, grabbing her burrito, her suitcase and all three other purse-type items.

The Goth friend gets directions—from downtown Jersey City, across Manhattan, and into Queens to LaGuardia airport—from the café guy and, slightly shaky and near tears, sets out the door to face her friend who is sure to miss a flight to the West Coast just hours before a snow storm.

“Did you get that for your novel?” asked the café guy when they’d gone. I did.