I like making lists. I like keeping track. I like having too many things on my plate. I read Dr. Crazy’s lists of accomplishments and hoped-for accomplishments avidly and I’ve been reading Sandra’s slog through The Artist’s Way with equal interest. I have my own lists--of deadlines and of dreams--and then, too, there are the lists of prizes, the volumes of bests that, perhaps, some day, I might find my own name in. (A girl can dream, can’t she?)
Those annual volumes of The Best American Essays edited by the essayist of the moment under Robert Atwan’s direction have been floating around the house a lot lately. My husband’s reading essays for a couple of his projects, so these books keep showing up wherever he’s been reading. Each time I see them, self-flagellating narcissist that I am, I remember with some pain, that I’m not in there.
Well, of course, Anne, because you didn’t publish an essay…or write one…
I’d really like to write essays. I plan to. But that’s the problem--I plan to every day. Do I? Can I? A year ago, a friend asked me to contribute an essay to his journal. Sure. And, though I’ve written a couple thousand words, it’s awful and needs to be scrapped.
I have some hope that I can start over during my travels to family over the next five weeks.
I’m not upset about this. Just interested.
So many of us want to write. So much of the challenge lies in actually setting pen to paper, and then, once that’s done, in crafting it into something worthy.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
James Baldwin’s Another Country
When I read Another Country in high school, it changed my life. I had never read a book before that depicted the world I wanted to live in, hoped to live in, thought I lived in. It’s a vast soap opera set in New York--mostly the Village--in the late-50s. The characters are mostly artists, black and white, gay and straight, and they love each other, hate each other, sleep with each other, and try to write books and make music. For all the--many--failings they exhibit, they are all trying desperately to live authentically and to figure out how to cross barriers in order to make connections.
When I read it a second time and a third time, I was disappointed in the prose. I remembered the books emotional impact but all I could see were the moments of laziness, sloppiness. I was disappointed.
But I remembered that it was a book that changed my life, so I kept believing in its power without feeling it.
Summer school ends tomorrow and we finished with Baldwin. I felt, once again, the book’s amazing power. Why?
It’s partly the power of reading a New York novel in New York, of knowing the city better than I did the first few times through. It’s partly being older and having a fuller perspective on the failings of art and love. It’s partly watching my students’ engagement with the book. And, most of all, it’s largely having the Woolf book behind me.
In the midst of writing on Woolf, it’s hard not to insist that every sentence be as crafted as a Woolfian sentence. But that’s not the only way to write. And it’s a relief to be enough out of her thrall to see the passion of Baldwin.
And he’s been in the news all week: Maud links to the TLS plea to release Baldwin’s letters; Dwight Garner joins his voice to the plea; Randall Kenan, author of The Fire This Time is on WNYC. And, if you can, check out the DVD, The Fire Next Time for amazing archival footage of Baldwin and moving tributes by Baraka, Styron, Angelou and more--we watched it in class and I was fighting back tears.
When I read it a second time and a third time, I was disappointed in the prose. I remembered the books emotional impact but all I could see were the moments of laziness, sloppiness. I was disappointed.
But I remembered that it was a book that changed my life, so I kept believing in its power without feeling it.
Summer school ends tomorrow and we finished with Baldwin. I felt, once again, the book’s amazing power. Why?
It’s partly the power of reading a New York novel in New York, of knowing the city better than I did the first few times through. It’s partly being older and having a fuller perspective on the failings of art and love. It’s partly watching my students’ engagement with the book. And, most of all, it’s largely having the Woolf book behind me.
In the midst of writing on Woolf, it’s hard not to insist that every sentence be as crafted as a Woolfian sentence. But that’s not the only way to write. And it’s a relief to be enough out of her thrall to see the passion of Baldwin.
And he’s been in the news all week: Maud links to the TLS plea to release Baldwin’s letters; Dwight Garner joins his voice to the plea; Randall Kenan, author of The Fire This Time is on WNYC. And, if you can, check out the DVD, The Fire Next Time for amazing archival footage of Baldwin and moving tributes by Baraka, Styron, Angelou and more--we watched it in class and I was fighting back tears.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Alice Sebold Interview
I interviewed Alice Sebold author of The Lovely Bones, Lucky and the forthcoming The Almost Moon (October 2007). She was in New York for BookExpo America in early June and I met her in the lobby of her hotel. The chance to interview her just fell into my lap. I seized it immediately. She was lovely, polite, and smart--very generous with her time. Somehow, while I got the chance to interview her, I didn’t get an advance copy of the book. Afterwards and since BEA, I learned that the galleys to The Almost Moon were one of the conventions hot giveaways. I didn’t get one--though mine is in the mail, I think--so, in retrospect, I feel sorry that I must have seemed unprepared. Still, looking back on our conversation three weeks ago, that immediate pang of self-criticism has waned and what emerges most vividly to me, in writing this up is her generosity and her intelligence.
Fernham: Tell me about your new book.
Alice Sebold: Well, it’s about a woman who kills her mother.
She paused to let that sink in and continued.
AS: It’s about mental illness and it’s about how you always have your mother. How she’s always with you even when she’s gone. It’s something the character has to figure out. I was interested in strained relationships with mothers. You can let it pass or work it out, but it’s there. I just took a dramatic leap and wrote about someone who kills her mother. Of course, she doesn’t escape her. You never escape your mother even in death. My mother was kind of owned by her mother until my grandmother died at 96. My mother was 70. And I watched a certain part of her spirit unable to be free while her mother was alive. And now, it can be. My mother is an amazing being--I mean, I have my side of the story about my mother, too--but she’s an amazing being and it’s been amazing to have her feel that freedom for herself.
F: Has your mom read the new book?
AS: Yes. I just sent it to her last week. I wanted her to read it before BEA. Then, I could go to BEA knowing--well, either it was going to be o.k. or… She called and told me “You’ve written a wonderful book. And, unlike some people, I am able to identify the difference between fiction and fact.”
F: That’s a grand reply.
AS: Oh, my mother is quite grand. She’s wonderful. You know, she’s always had an idea of herself as a writer. That’s was a burden to me when I was younger, but now it’s a gift. My father read it, too. He left me the longest phone message I’ve ever gotten from him about it. He’s retired now; he was a professor and I think he read it as a kind of assignment. Anyway, he took it very seriously and had a lot--for him--to say about it. I think that I came into existence for my father after attention from the world.
F: Tell me about your teachers--what they’ve meant to you and what you learned from your teachers. I particularly want to hear about Tess Gallagher--I so vividly remember seeing her give a poetry reading when I was in high school.
AS: Well, I feel so lucky to have intersected with so many great teachers who inspired me with their work, their teaching, their person. Along the way, I’ve had the chance to meet certain people. I mean, watching Ray Carver at a party and seeing that he was not so great at a party and recognizing that that doesn’t have to do with writing, that was a gift.
I remember Toby Wolff said that the former students you hear from are never the ones you hope to hear from. And I worked myself up for years and years to ask for a recommendation from him and when I finally did, he said of course he would write for me.
But with Tess, it was her work, her teaching, and her person.
F: I remember at that reading, sitting myself behind William Stafford on purpose in hopes of overhearing the elder statesman of Washington State poetry make an aside about Tess Gallagher. She walked in and Stafford said, “That Tess, she always wears such funny hats.” I was so disappointed: I thought it was a terrible, dumb thing to overhear. But now I think it’s kind of great.
AS: Maybe my noncompetitive clause on dress dates from Tess.
F: Tell me about yourself as a teacher.
AS: Well, I’m not teaching full-time now, but when I do workshops--a week here or there. I’m tough. I never lie. A lot of people find different ways of lying when they teach. But I’m not about being tough and mean. I try to suss out what writing means to people at the very beginning. People usually telegraph that pretty quickly. The goal for the old man who just wants to write the story of his life and bind it in leather for his grandchildren is different from that of the woman with six hair colors who’s written three pages in six months and frenetically insists that “it sucks and doesn’t have a plot.” With her, you want to find the four good images in those pages and show them to her and get her to work with that.
I taught at Hunter College for ten years when I lived in New York and toward the end, I got to teach a few fiction workshops. Who knows why they let me do that. I hadn’t published anything yet. But one of the things that was really frustrating then, that I had to learn to just let go of, was what to do with the occasional student who’s a fabulous writer but doesn’t want to do anything with it. You have to overcome the impulse to push him into writing and recognize that he’s fine; he’s a happy person; he’s going to go on and get a good job designing video games or whatever and maybe that’s better.
F: Tell me about the reading you do. Does your reading change when you’re deeply immersed in writing from when you’re between projects?
AS: Well, when I’m really really writing, I read poetry the way you pick up a pretty piece of stone on the beach. For something beautiful, specific and hard. For this last book, there were two poets. Philip Larkin. There’s a sadness in him. So many poems that seem hostile to the world also describe a desire to belong, to be a part of things. That was a real touchstone for me. You know, it’s funny, somehow two collections of his work came out at about the same time--one is chronological and one is by themes. You should get the Penguin one. That’s the one I used, that’s the one. And--I’m embarrassed to try to pronounce her name--the Polish woman. Szymborska. She was the other poet for me.
I have a thing about pronunciation. It’s because I’m so poorly educated.
F: (I protested this fervently, but she was on a roll and persisted.)
AS: I just finished doing the audio of The Lovely Bones and there’s a character in that book named Hamish. I’d been pronouncing it hammish in my head [with a soft a] and the recording engineer pointed out to me that it’s usually pronounced hame-ish [with a long a]. I was so embarrassed. And so disappointed. Why can’t it be hammish? I want his name to be hammish. And for years I mispronounced Simone de Bouvier because I think my mom must have had de Beauvoir in the house but we talked about Jackie de Bouvier so I just thought Beauvoir was pronounced that way.
F: I still stumble over “sword” and “monastery” from reading historical novels as a girl.
AS: I never really bonded with well-educated writers because of that kind of one-upsmanship. Now, I’m happy to have avoided that and that moment of theory, deconstruction and all that. It was intimidating. Years after the fact, I bonded with my father over that, about our both missing that heavily theorized deconstructionist boat. It’s funny, because we never spoke about it to each other at the time, but I was in college and he was a Spanish professor and we were both really alienated from the prevailing theoretical mood. Then, he retired at 70 from teaching and we had this conversation about how we had both felt out of sync.
F: Do you read memoirs?
AS: Not lately. There’s a biography of Colette that came out ten years ago. You should read that. You know, I was just talking about her with the woman who photographed me for this new book. She was wonderful! Anyway, we talked about how Cheri and The Last of Cheri are the Colette novels for young women, but My Mother’s House and Sido, that’s what to read now. That’s Colette for middle-aged women. [Sebold and I are both in our early 40s; though it goes against the grain of common parlance, we are, I think, technically middle-aged.]
F: I’ve never read Colette. But so many of the people I like most who write about Woolf also love her, so I know I would love her.
AS: I think I avoided Colette for a long time because I was put off by the very things in her that drew me to Woolf. That is, Colette had a make-up line, she wrote all about sex, she was frightening.
F: Tell me about what you like about Woolf.
AS: I was assigned Woolf in college and I didn’t like it. I came to her late. After liking Henry James and Edith Wharton, then I could come to Woolf and like her. But the thing that made me a Woolf fanatic was A Writer’s Diary. Before I was published, I would read an entry every morning as a way to get me started writing. I did that again this time reading bits of Woolf to get started. I remember when I was starting out, reading her sniping and complaining and wanting to say, “But don’t you see, you’re Virginia Woolf!” But it sounds different now. I understand her better.
F: So much of your memoir Lucky is about before and after--before and after the rape and the way the rape ended an era of your life. But it seems to me like, since The Lovely Bones, you’ve been living in a new after. Does it feel that way to you, too?
AS: You know, I think life is lived in eras and I’ve had a lot of them. Some eras are the result of marriage or a job. But with this one, it’s weird to create an era by the result of work you’ve done.
F: Thank you so much for your time!
AS: Thank you.
Fernham: Tell me about your new book.
Alice Sebold: Well, it’s about a woman who kills her mother.
She paused to let that sink in and continued.
AS: It’s about mental illness and it’s about how you always have your mother. How she’s always with you even when she’s gone. It’s something the character has to figure out. I was interested in strained relationships with mothers. You can let it pass or work it out, but it’s there. I just took a dramatic leap and wrote about someone who kills her mother. Of course, she doesn’t escape her. You never escape your mother even in death. My mother was kind of owned by her mother until my grandmother died at 96. My mother was 70. And I watched a certain part of her spirit unable to be free while her mother was alive. And now, it can be. My mother is an amazing being--I mean, I have my side of the story about my mother, too--but she’s an amazing being and it’s been amazing to have her feel that freedom for herself.
F: Has your mom read the new book?
AS: Yes. I just sent it to her last week. I wanted her to read it before BEA. Then, I could go to BEA knowing--well, either it was going to be o.k. or… She called and told me “You’ve written a wonderful book. And, unlike some people, I am able to identify the difference between fiction and fact.”
F: That’s a grand reply.
AS: Oh, my mother is quite grand. She’s wonderful. You know, she’s always had an idea of herself as a writer. That’s was a burden to me when I was younger, but now it’s a gift. My father read it, too. He left me the longest phone message I’ve ever gotten from him about it. He’s retired now; he was a professor and I think he read it as a kind of assignment. Anyway, he took it very seriously and had a lot--for him--to say about it. I think that I came into existence for my father after attention from the world.
F: Tell me about your teachers--what they’ve meant to you and what you learned from your teachers. I particularly want to hear about Tess Gallagher--I so vividly remember seeing her give a poetry reading when I was in high school.
AS: Well, I feel so lucky to have intersected with so many great teachers who inspired me with their work, their teaching, their person. Along the way, I’ve had the chance to meet certain people. I mean, watching Ray Carver at a party and seeing that he was not so great at a party and recognizing that that doesn’t have to do with writing, that was a gift.
I remember Toby Wolff said that the former students you hear from are never the ones you hope to hear from. And I worked myself up for years and years to ask for a recommendation from him and when I finally did, he said of course he would write for me.
But with Tess, it was her work, her teaching, and her person.
F: I remember at that reading, sitting myself behind William Stafford on purpose in hopes of overhearing the elder statesman of Washington State poetry make an aside about Tess Gallagher. She walked in and Stafford said, “That Tess, she always wears such funny hats.” I was so disappointed: I thought it was a terrible, dumb thing to overhear. But now I think it’s kind of great.
AS: Maybe my noncompetitive clause on dress dates from Tess.
F: Tell me about yourself as a teacher.
AS: Well, I’m not teaching full-time now, but when I do workshops--a week here or there. I’m tough. I never lie. A lot of people find different ways of lying when they teach. But I’m not about being tough and mean. I try to suss out what writing means to people at the very beginning. People usually telegraph that pretty quickly. The goal for the old man who just wants to write the story of his life and bind it in leather for his grandchildren is different from that of the woman with six hair colors who’s written three pages in six months and frenetically insists that “it sucks and doesn’t have a plot.” With her, you want to find the four good images in those pages and show them to her and get her to work with that.
I taught at Hunter College for ten years when I lived in New York and toward the end, I got to teach a few fiction workshops. Who knows why they let me do that. I hadn’t published anything yet. But one of the things that was really frustrating then, that I had to learn to just let go of, was what to do with the occasional student who’s a fabulous writer but doesn’t want to do anything with it. You have to overcome the impulse to push him into writing and recognize that he’s fine; he’s a happy person; he’s going to go on and get a good job designing video games or whatever and maybe that’s better.
F: Tell me about the reading you do. Does your reading change when you’re deeply immersed in writing from when you’re between projects?
AS: Well, when I’m really really writing, I read poetry the way you pick up a pretty piece of stone on the beach. For something beautiful, specific and hard. For this last book, there were two poets. Philip Larkin. There’s a sadness in him. So many poems that seem hostile to the world also describe a desire to belong, to be a part of things. That was a real touchstone for me. You know, it’s funny, somehow two collections of his work came out at about the same time--one is chronological and one is by themes. You should get the Penguin one. That’s the one I used, that’s the one. And--I’m embarrassed to try to pronounce her name--the Polish woman. Szymborska. She was the other poet for me.
I have a thing about pronunciation. It’s because I’m so poorly educated.
F: (I protested this fervently, but she was on a roll and persisted.)
AS: I just finished doing the audio of The Lovely Bones and there’s a character in that book named Hamish. I’d been pronouncing it hammish in my head [with a soft a] and the recording engineer pointed out to me that it’s usually pronounced hame-ish [with a long a]. I was so embarrassed. And so disappointed. Why can’t it be hammish? I want his name to be hammish. And for years I mispronounced Simone de Bouvier because I think my mom must have had de Beauvoir in the house but we talked about Jackie de Bouvier so I just thought Beauvoir was pronounced that way.
F: I still stumble over “sword” and “monastery” from reading historical novels as a girl.
AS: I never really bonded with well-educated writers because of that kind of one-upsmanship. Now, I’m happy to have avoided that and that moment of theory, deconstruction and all that. It was intimidating. Years after the fact, I bonded with my father over that, about our both missing that heavily theorized deconstructionist boat. It’s funny, because we never spoke about it to each other at the time, but I was in college and he was a Spanish professor and we were both really alienated from the prevailing theoretical mood. Then, he retired at 70 from teaching and we had this conversation about how we had both felt out of sync.
F: Do you read memoirs?
AS: Not lately. There’s a biography of Colette that came out ten years ago. You should read that. You know, I was just talking about her with the woman who photographed me for this new book. She was wonderful! Anyway, we talked about how Cheri and The Last of Cheri are the Colette novels for young women, but My Mother’s House and Sido, that’s what to read now. That’s Colette for middle-aged women. [Sebold and I are both in our early 40s; though it goes against the grain of common parlance, we are, I think, technically middle-aged.]
F: I’ve never read Colette. But so many of the people I like most who write about Woolf also love her, so I know I would love her.
AS: I think I avoided Colette for a long time because I was put off by the very things in her that drew me to Woolf. That is, Colette had a make-up line, she wrote all about sex, she was frightening.
F: Tell me about what you like about Woolf.
AS: I was assigned Woolf in college and I didn’t like it. I came to her late. After liking Henry James and Edith Wharton, then I could come to Woolf and like her. But the thing that made me a Woolf fanatic was A Writer’s Diary. Before I was published, I would read an entry every morning as a way to get me started writing. I did that again this time reading bits of Woolf to get started. I remember when I was starting out, reading her sniping and complaining and wanting to say, “But don’t you see, you’re Virginia Woolf!” But it sounds different now. I understand her better.
F: So much of your memoir Lucky is about before and after--before and after the rape and the way the rape ended an era of your life. But it seems to me like, since The Lovely Bones, you’ve been living in a new after. Does it feel that way to you, too?
AS: You know, I think life is lived in eras and I’ve had a lot of them. Some eras are the result of marriage or a job. But with this one, it’s weird to create an era by the result of work you’ve done.
F: Thank you so much for your time!
AS: Thank you.
Friday, June 22, 2007
O-P-I-E, Opie
I was reading Mother Goose to the older daughter (4 1/2) last night. I closed the book and was picking up her room when she said “O-PEE-AH…O-PEE-AH…That has some of the letters of my name.”
“What?”
She showed me the spine of her book: Opie/Wells, the editor and illustrator of this collection, and pointed at Opie: “See, mama, o-pee-ah.”
“You just read that. You read a word!”
She jumped up, her arms shot in the air, fists clenched, like Stallone in Rocky. “I did it! I read a word!” It’s funny--she didn’t even notice she had read it until I told her--she just sounded it out and the word made sense to her. But when I told her, her sense of thrill was electric. I picked her up and gave her a big hug. We went and told her father. When I tucked her in a few minutes later, she looked up at me and said, “Oh Mama, I read a word. I’m going to remember this day for the rest of my life. Are you going to remember it for the rest of your life?”
“What?”
She showed me the spine of her book: Opie/Wells, the editor and illustrator of this collection, and pointed at Opie: “See, mama, o-pee-ah.”
“You just read that. You read a word!”
She jumped up, her arms shot in the air, fists clenched, like Stallone in Rocky. “I did it! I read a word!” It’s funny--she didn’t even notice she had read it until I told her--she just sounded it out and the word made sense to her. But when I told her, her sense of thrill was electric. I picked her up and gave her a big hug. We went and told her father. When I tucked her in a few minutes later, she looked up at me and said, “Oh Mama, I read a word. I’m going to remember this day for the rest of my life. Are you going to remember it for the rest of your life?”
Monday, June 18, 2007
NYC Event: Kenny Fries Reading, 6/20
I'll be there...
My friend and former colleague Kenny Fries will read from and sign his new book, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, on Wednesday, June 20, 7pm, at Barnes and Noble, 675 Sixth Avenue at W. 22nd Street in New York City.
Kenny is really smart and very, very funny: a wicked sense of humor and a great laugh. Oh, woe to me when Kenny would stop by my office--no work would get done for an hour--and woe to me when Kenny would not stop by--for where would the fun of the day be then? So, I haven't seen Kenny in a million years (Japan, and now Calgary, have been between us) so I'm excited for Wednesday. The babysitter is secured. I'm good to go.
Here's some stuff from the press release:
My friend and former colleague Kenny Fries will read from and sign his new book, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, on Wednesday, June 20, 7pm, at Barnes and Noble, 675 Sixth Avenue at W. 22nd Street in New York City.
Kenny is really smart and very, very funny: a wicked sense of humor and a great laugh. Oh, woe to me when Kenny would stop by my office--no work would get done for an hour--and woe to me when Kenny would not stop by--for where would the fun of the day be then? So, I haven't seen Kenny in a million years (Japan, and now Calgary, have been between us) so I'm excited for Wednesday. The babysitter is secured. I'm good to go.
Here's some stuff from the press release:
Booklist has called Kenny Fries "an unusual historian, wearing the story of his life on his feet in specially constructed orthopedic shoes....Few are the writers who can so deftly weave science into personal reflections, compellingly reminding readers ofthe still unfathomable mystery of one terrestrial species." National Book Award winning-author Andrea Barrett was "delighted by the perfectly apt conjunctions, by the grace and economy of which the episodes from Darwin's life and key concepts of his work are transposed into a 'natural history' of the self with a poet's sense of telling detail." And best-selling author and anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas finds the book "beautifully written, fascinating, incredibly original...it says saomething about the human race that is truly profound. I don't know when I have read anything more pertinent or exciting."
In The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory Kenny Fries tells two stories: the development of the theory of “survival of the fittest," as articulated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace; and the history of his ever-changing, made-to-order, orthopedic shoes. The famously important first story, as told by Kenny Fries, is a condensed and colorful account of the race between Darwin and Wallace to formulate their groundbreaking theories. At the same time, Fries tells a deeply personal story of the evolving consciousness of his own "adaptations," represented by his shoes.
Although only the “fittest” may survive, Fries learns that adaptation and variation are critical to survival. What is deemed normal, or even perfect, are passing phases of the ever-changing embodiment of nature in our world. In the end, Darwin and Wallace’s discoveries resonate with Fries' own story, inextricably leading us into a new world where variety and difference are not only “normal,” but the ingenious origins of survival itself.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
BEA Treasure Trove
The stack has been on my desk for a couple weeks. It’s getting to be time to put the books away. But there is something so luxurious in a nice list. These are the books (advance copies and already published) that I snagged at BEA, in ascending order of size:
- an NYC moleskine for being a speaker
- a bunch of brochures from the PEN Center
- Lara Santoro’s Mercy about a European journalist based in Kenya came in the mail, as promised, from Other Press
- The Fire This Time, Randall Kenan’s homage to James Baldwin and attack on the Katrina aftermath and, following it, also from Hoboken’s own Melville House, my longed for copy of Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog
- Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader a novella about what might happen if Queen Elizabeth II became an avid reader
- Two Lives, a joint biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas by Janet Malcolm
- Robert Bolano’s Amulet which, I’m told, is the best one…
- David Leavitt’s forthcoming The Indian Clerk which I sought on Mark Sarvas’ recommendation and then, having snagged it, ran into Mark at the Bloomsbury booth,
- and, finally, out of character with the rest but very exciting in its own way America’s Best Lost Recipes from the Cook’s Magazine people.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Intelligence and Navel-Gazing
I really want to feel, when I’m reading a book, that I’m in the company of an intelligent person. I do get a kick out of books with literary allusions in them. But it’s so very, very dull to read books about self-conscious English majors who are fond of making literary allusions. The occasional tumble into some postmodern rabbit hole is fine, but I like my novels to inhabit a more diverse world.
All of which is a preamble to praise for Gayle Brandeis’ compulsively readable, moving, and intelligent book, Self Storage. She gives her main character a genuine love of Walt Whitman--a love inherited from her beloved and dead mother--and not much else. We believe in her love of Whitman in spite of everything because she’s a smart young woman who still hungers for more education; we believe in her love of Whitman because the Whitman she quotes is always just exactly right for the moment. She doesn’t just quote the high points, the old chestnuts, the anthology pieces. She gets deep into Leaves of Grass and pulls out tiny little nuggets.
This is the first time I’ve really regretted not spending more time with Whitman. I loved the Whitman she led me to.
I grabbed the book off my shelf for some light reading on the plane to L.A. a couple weeks back. It’s got a picture of a red bra in a jar on the cover. Lauren sent it to me. I expected to be diverted. I was not entirely prepared for such a happy, happy read: it’s just a great combination of a fun, fun, happy book and a smart one that makes you think and care. It goes down easy--which is nice--but it doesn’t disappear.
So. Self Storage is about a young mother, trapped in a depressing faculty housing ghetto in Riverside. She has two grimy, sweet, demanding little kids and her husband is depressed and is so stalled on his dissertation that the topic has become off limits. To relieve all of this, she begins going to the auctions of abandoned self-storage units and selling the junk on eBay and at garage sales. At the same time, she becomes obsessed with (and then, entangled with) the Afghani woman down the block (who doesn’t speak to her and wears a full burkha). Scenes of her in a hospital when a child is ailing cut me to the quick: like the protagonist I, too, failed my daughter in her hour of need (a broken arm only) and it’s a humbling feeling.
It’s a fun premise. She manages the plot--which is compelling and apt--really well and the ending is redemptive and cool. I really liked this book: it seemed to me to solve that problem with which I began. Brandeis is book-smart in ways her characters are not, but some literature matters to some of them and she is never condescending to any of her characters, even that lout of a husband!
All of which is a preamble to praise for Gayle Brandeis’ compulsively readable, moving, and intelligent book, Self Storage. She gives her main character a genuine love of Walt Whitman--a love inherited from her beloved and dead mother--and not much else. We believe in her love of Whitman in spite of everything because she’s a smart young woman who still hungers for more education; we believe in her love of Whitman because the Whitman she quotes is always just exactly right for the moment. She doesn’t just quote the high points, the old chestnuts, the anthology pieces. She gets deep into Leaves of Grass and pulls out tiny little nuggets.
This is the first time I’ve really regretted not spending more time with Whitman. I loved the Whitman she led me to.
I grabbed the book off my shelf for some light reading on the plane to L.A. a couple weeks back. It’s got a picture of a red bra in a jar on the cover. Lauren sent it to me. I expected to be diverted. I was not entirely prepared for such a happy, happy read: it’s just a great combination of a fun, fun, happy book and a smart one that makes you think and care. It goes down easy--which is nice--but it doesn’t disappear.
So. Self Storage is about a young mother, trapped in a depressing faculty housing ghetto in Riverside. She has two grimy, sweet, demanding little kids and her husband is depressed and is so stalled on his dissertation that the topic has become off limits. To relieve all of this, she begins going to the auctions of abandoned self-storage units and selling the junk on eBay and at garage sales. At the same time, she becomes obsessed with (and then, entangled with) the Afghani woman down the block (who doesn’t speak to her and wears a full burkha). Scenes of her in a hospital when a child is ailing cut me to the quick: like the protagonist I, too, failed my daughter in her hour of need (a broken arm only) and it’s a humbling feeling.
It’s a fun premise. She manages the plot--which is compelling and apt--really well and the ending is redemptive and cool. I really liked this book: it seemed to me to solve that problem with which I began. Brandeis is book-smart in ways her characters are not, but some literature matters to some of them and she is never condescending to any of her characters, even that lout of a husband!
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Cecil Woolf and Memory
Post-BEA life has been a whirlwind. I flew into Dayton on Thursday for the 17th annual Virginia Woolf Conference. As I’ve written here before, I’ve attended most of these--12 of the 17 (although two of those I only attended briefly).
One of the highlights this year was a pre-banquet speech by Cecil Woolf, the 80 year-old nephew of Leonard. He would have been 13 or 14 when Virginia Woolf died, so most of his talk was not so much about her as about his uncle. It was moving and charming and very long. Slated to talk for twenty minutes before dinner, he charmed us for nearly an hour. We were hungry and a little soused by the time the little paillettes of banquet chicken emerged. And those undergraduates at the Miami U. pour a generous glass…
I had heard a version of this talk three years ago in London but it was still a treat. He remembered Woolf as always being in hat and gloves (!); the Woolves as the only aunt and uncle whom he was allowed to call simply Leonard and Virginia, no uncle or aunt. (That made me, Auntie Anne to three boys, feel a little stiff.) He remembered showing Virginia Woolf an ancient ruin near his Lincolnshire home, holding her hand down to the spot, and demonstrating the echo with her by calling out each others’ names.
His resemblance to Leonard Woolf is so uncanny and that makes the experience of listening all the more riveting. I referred to him as Leonard throughout the weekend.
He told me, when I spoke to him one on one, that he was particularly delighted at this invitation because, though he’d been to the States many times, he’d never been to the country and he was “a countryman.”
But he didn’t tell my favorite story from London. Hearing him, and hearing him talk about his uncle’s “overdeveloped sense of economy” (Leonard discovered a London shop that sold pajama bottoms and tops separately so that if one wore out, you could simply replace it.) reminded me.
When Cecil was in the army, he went to visit his Uncle Lenny (Little Uncle Lenny was the family name, apparently) on a leave. Leonard had a housekeeper who, at the end of the day, left dinner for him to warm. When Cecil arrived, Leonard generously divided his very small, old-man’s dinner in two. Starving, Cecil crept to the pub in Rodmell for sustenance afterwards. He asked the publican if the kitchen was still open.
“Staying with Mr. Woolf, are you?”
One of the highlights this year was a pre-banquet speech by Cecil Woolf, the 80 year-old nephew of Leonard. He would have been 13 or 14 when Virginia Woolf died, so most of his talk was not so much about her as about his uncle. It was moving and charming and very long. Slated to talk for twenty minutes before dinner, he charmed us for nearly an hour. We were hungry and a little soused by the time the little paillettes of banquet chicken emerged. And those undergraduates at the Miami U. pour a generous glass…
I had heard a version of this talk three years ago in London but it was still a treat. He remembered Woolf as always being in hat and gloves (!); the Woolves as the only aunt and uncle whom he was allowed to call simply Leonard and Virginia, no uncle or aunt. (That made me, Auntie Anne to three boys, feel a little stiff.) He remembered showing Virginia Woolf an ancient ruin near his Lincolnshire home, holding her hand down to the spot, and demonstrating the echo with her by calling out each others’ names.
His resemblance to Leonard Woolf is so uncanny and that makes the experience of listening all the more riveting. I referred to him as Leonard throughout the weekend.
He told me, when I spoke to him one on one, that he was particularly delighted at this invitation because, though he’d been to the States many times, he’d never been to the country and he was “a countryman.”
But he didn’t tell my favorite story from London. Hearing him, and hearing him talk about his uncle’s “overdeveloped sense of economy” (Leonard discovered a London shop that sold pajama bottoms and tops separately so that if one wore out, you could simply replace it.) reminded me.
When Cecil was in the army, he went to visit his Uncle Lenny (Little Uncle Lenny was the family name, apparently) on a leave. Leonard had a housekeeper who, at the end of the day, left dinner for him to warm. When Cecil arrived, Leonard generously divided his very small, old-man’s dinner in two. Starving, Cecil crept to the pub in Rodmell for sustenance afterwards. He asked the publican if the kitchen was still open.
“Staying with Mr. Woolf, are you?”
Monday, June 04, 2007
BEA: The Blogging Panel, 2
Well, people are talking about that standing-room only panel that Bud organized. It was very exciting to talk blogs in such a spot: about 80 people and about a dozen serious cameras. It’s been fun--in a Rashomon kind of way--to read the reports from hither and yon about what was said and who was wittiest (that seems to be of great interest).
As I noted earlier, I typed out my remarks (and you can read them her-just scroll down). When appearing on a panel with Dwight Garner (of the Times--and the delicious and witty “TBR: Inside the List” column), Lizzie Skurnick (the Old Hag herself), and James Marcus (who put in his time at amazon and now presides in the House of Mirth), one must be prepared. I thought a lot about what I might have to offer. I am not a regular freelancer or an editor of any repute, but I do know about the history of it, so I focused there.
You can read a lovely, fair, generous, and thorough account of the panel at Ed’s place (with pictures!). Dan mentions it. And Bud has his own diffident take on the proceedings he hosted, too. Carrie has some nice thoughts to add (plus a bonus picture of a bear!) and Tara, whom I met after my panel, adds her two cents.
The print media continues its skepticism. So, over at library journal there is a curmudgeonly wish that the bloggers had been scrappier, that the journalist (Garner) had been more hostile to blogs. And New York magazine opines that Garner had all the best zingers.
I won’t dispute that. I loved what Garner said about imagining the blogs of various beloved critics down through the years. It is amusing to imagine Orwell’s blog--or Mencken’s--or Pauline Kael’s (I miss her!). And I thought that Lizzie was utterly spot on about the blessings of looseness in blogs and how that differs from the tone one puts on in writing for a broader audience, for an audience that is reading a review in The Atlantic, say, rather than coming to The Old Hag to hear something funny. But Lizzie Skurnick is very, very funny. By the end of the hour, I had an uncomfortable professorial feeling. During Q&A, Dwight Garner would get a big laugh, we’d turn to Lizzie, who’d get another. I’d pipe in with a nerdy bit of context--well, in the twenties…well, in London…--and then James Marcus would use what I’d said to gain the last laugh of all. Talk about straight man--that was totally me!
Bud was a terrific moderator. It’s no small task in a roomful of egos to keep folks on track and on task, but he did it with grace and aplomb. Still, it’s a touchy subject that none of us panelists was particularly spoiling to fight about. Bud tried to re-engage us on the free books controversy (are reviewers’ opinions swayed by free books?) but no one bit. Instead, we groused about the deeply small fees freelancers get. Tara invoked the chick lit debate; Lizzie pronounced boredom. Jessica asked who the real enemy was--a good and interesting question--but no one could really get mad at corporate publishing.
In fact, all I could think at Jessica’s question was something Dwight Garner said from the start: wouldn’t it be great if the Sunday Times Book Review was but one of six or seven full-fledged weekly book magazines with national distribution, as in London?
I am not a complainer by nature. I think that if we’re going to improve the quality of the conversation, we have to stop talking about the conversation itself and start talking about books in a way that makes it clear to others how deeply engaging such talk can be.
More on BEA to come…for now, enjoy Lauren's pics of the LBC fete!
As I noted earlier, I typed out my remarks (and you can read them her-just scroll down). When appearing on a panel with Dwight Garner (of the Times--and the delicious and witty “TBR: Inside the List” column), Lizzie Skurnick (the Old Hag herself), and James Marcus (who put in his time at amazon and now presides in the House of Mirth), one must be prepared. I thought a lot about what I might have to offer. I am not a regular freelancer or an editor of any repute, but I do know about the history of it, so I focused there.
You can read a lovely, fair, generous, and thorough account of the panel at Ed’s place (with pictures!). Dan mentions it. And Bud has his own diffident take on the proceedings he hosted, too. Carrie has some nice thoughts to add (plus a bonus picture of a bear!) and Tara, whom I met after my panel, adds her two cents.
The print media continues its skepticism. So, over at library journal there is a curmudgeonly wish that the bloggers had been scrappier, that the journalist (Garner) had been more hostile to blogs. And New York magazine opines that Garner had all the best zingers.
I won’t dispute that. I loved what Garner said about imagining the blogs of various beloved critics down through the years. It is amusing to imagine Orwell’s blog--or Mencken’s--or Pauline Kael’s (I miss her!). And I thought that Lizzie was utterly spot on about the blessings of looseness in blogs and how that differs from the tone one puts on in writing for a broader audience, for an audience that is reading a review in The Atlantic, say, rather than coming to The Old Hag to hear something funny. But Lizzie Skurnick is very, very funny. By the end of the hour, I had an uncomfortable professorial feeling. During Q&A, Dwight Garner would get a big laugh, we’d turn to Lizzie, who’d get another. I’d pipe in with a nerdy bit of context--well, in the twenties…well, in London…--and then James Marcus would use what I’d said to gain the last laugh of all. Talk about straight man--that was totally me!
Bud was a terrific moderator. It’s no small task in a roomful of egos to keep folks on track and on task, but he did it with grace and aplomb. Still, it’s a touchy subject that none of us panelists was particularly spoiling to fight about. Bud tried to re-engage us on the free books controversy (are reviewers’ opinions swayed by free books?) but no one bit. Instead, we groused about the deeply small fees freelancers get. Tara invoked the chick lit debate; Lizzie pronounced boredom. Jessica asked who the real enemy was--a good and interesting question--but no one could really get mad at corporate publishing.
In fact, all I could think at Jessica’s question was something Dwight Garner said from the start: wouldn’t it be great if the Sunday Times Book Review was but one of six or seven full-fledged weekly book magazines with national distribution, as in London?
I am not a complainer by nature. I think that if we’re going to improve the quality of the conversation, we have to stop talking about the conversation itself and start talking about books in a way that makes it clear to others how deeply engaging such talk can be.
More on BEA to come…for now, enjoy Lauren's pics of the LBC fete!
BEA: Blogging Panel--What I said
I was nervous. I'm a teacher. I overprepared. As a result, I have my remarks written out. This is what I said at Friday's panel at BEA:
Where the conversation has been: money
The conversation about blogging and print book reviews has been pretty nasty and pretty limited until recently. It’s also been largely about money. But money is really somewhat lazy shorthand for the broader problem of interest. In short, we hope that a book reviewer is intellectually interested in the book she reviews but we expect that she has no financial interest in the book’s success. But there is no one channel that guarantees ethical writerly behavior.
There’s a long history to this: English aristocrats once argued that only they could write freely for they did not need the profits that publication might bring; in the eighteenth-century, women--often widows or abandoned and abused wives with children to support--began writing best-sellers and their financial success led some men to link writing with prostitution. When Virginia Woolf began publishing, a century ago, anonymous reviewing was thought to be the best guarantee of a disinterested review. So, even though her lead reviews for the TLS were paid double the usual fee (she was the only contributor with this privilege), they were all anonymous publications. At the same time, her real greatness as a novelist began when she left the publishing house run by her half-brother and, with her husband, started her own press. Yet no one would call Woolf an amateur or Mrs. Dalloway a vanity publication.
No reviewer--salaried, freelance, or unpaid--is immune from the accusation that her opinion has been swayed. Each writer’s position--salaried, freelance, or unpaid--is subject to influence. Each responsible one of us works in our own way to guard against unethical reviewing. That means that, in the Times and The New Yorker, notices of books by staff members are treated differently from notices of books by others. And most of us note how a book came to our attention when we blog about it. But that does not mean that there is a level playing field. It helps to be a staff writer at The New Yorker or to be the good friend of an influential blogger. It should help. Don’t get me wrong: I like it when I earn money from my writing. I am not averse to money. And I think that we should try to find ways to make money from what we love to do. This, for me, is partly a feminist issue: as Woolf said, “money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”
Still, I’d like to shift the conversation from money, interest, and ethics to something else: what can blogging do that is different from other media?
I have a list of six things that I think blogging is particularly well-suited for:
Book reviewing and talk about books is not a zero-sum game: I want more of it even as I cannot keep up with what I already know about, have bookmarked, and subscribe to. Bud is the visionary on this issue and you should really ask him for more of his thoughts. Where I want the conversation to go is this: What else might blogging do? How can blogs and newspapers work together to make our talk about books richer and more exciting?
Where the conversation has been: money
The conversation about blogging and print book reviews has been pretty nasty and pretty limited until recently. It’s also been largely about money. But money is really somewhat lazy shorthand for the broader problem of interest. In short, we hope that a book reviewer is intellectually interested in the book she reviews but we expect that she has no financial interest in the book’s success. But there is no one channel that guarantees ethical writerly behavior.
There’s a long history to this: English aristocrats once argued that only they could write freely for they did not need the profits that publication might bring; in the eighteenth-century, women--often widows or abandoned and abused wives with children to support--began writing best-sellers and their financial success led some men to link writing with prostitution. When Virginia Woolf began publishing, a century ago, anonymous reviewing was thought to be the best guarantee of a disinterested review. So, even though her lead reviews for the TLS were paid double the usual fee (she was the only contributor with this privilege), they were all anonymous publications. At the same time, her real greatness as a novelist began when she left the publishing house run by her half-brother and, with her husband, started her own press. Yet no one would call Woolf an amateur or Mrs. Dalloway a vanity publication.
No reviewer--salaried, freelance, or unpaid--is immune from the accusation that her opinion has been swayed. Each writer’s position--salaried, freelance, or unpaid--is subject to influence. Each responsible one of us works in our own way to guard against unethical reviewing. That means that, in the Times and The New Yorker, notices of books by staff members are treated differently from notices of books by others. And most of us note how a book came to our attention when we blog about it. But that does not mean that there is a level playing field. It helps to be a staff writer at The New Yorker or to be the good friend of an influential blogger. It should help. Don’t get me wrong: I like it when I earn money from my writing. I am not averse to money. And I think that we should try to find ways to make money from what we love to do. This, for me, is partly a feminist issue: as Woolf said, “money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”
Still, I’d like to shift the conversation from money, interest, and ethics to something else: what can blogging do that is different from other media?
I have a list of six things that I think blogging is particularly well-suited for:
- Bloggers can cultivate a niche audience in a way that a newspaper cannot and should not. We can disparage, ignore, or boom whole segments of the book market at will.
- Passionate readers are always in search of new voices. There is a very high bar to publishing a book; there is no bar at all to setting up a blog. The bar to journalism lies somewhere in between. Blogging brings us immediate access to new voices before they have to work their way through the fraught path to publication. And blogging can even help persuade a skittish publisher that an unfamiliar voice is, in fact, one that people want to hear.
- Blogging adds to the tipping point effect. Partly because the blogs I like have such distinctive voices, a recommendation from a favorite blog carries the weight of a recommendation from a friend. Furthermore, blogging is a new channel for this kind of information. A book that’s been blogged about, reviewed in a paper, noted in a magazine, featured on NPR, and then has a little hand-written tag hanging off it in my local bookstore is one that I just might remember and buy.
- Overcoming the problem of time: This is something blogging has not entirely solved. Nonetheless, blogs can return to a novel, can write about something that was published years or centuries ago, and can group novels together. In short, bloggers are not bound by journalistic definitions of news.
Finally, I’ll mention the two things that blogging most does for me: - Blogs work as notebooks with feedback. As I think about what my next book will be, I use my blog to test out miniature versions of my ideas. Unlike a notebook, where the ideas might remain inchoate for years, blogging forces me to cast notions for an audience from the beginning. Plus, I can judge, by the comments I get--or don’t get--something of what the reaction of future readers might be.
- Blogging builds community. I started blogging when I moved to New York three years ago. I’d often regretted not coming to New York and doing the publishing thing in my twenties; I’d often regretted never having lived in New York. Suddenly, in my late-thirties, my husband and I had two jobs in Manhattan. We also had a big dog and a small child. My life, commuting to Columbus Circle from a dingy apartment in Jersey City, just didn’t have that glamour that I had dreamed about. But, somehow, writing a couple entries a week on my blog and trying to include there some notes on the literary world I was in made up for that. Then, too, Projects like 400 Windmills--in which Bud gathered a small group of us to read Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote--or The LitBlog Co-op, have brought me into conversation with dozens of other bloggers and common readers.
Book reviewing and talk about books is not a zero-sum game: I want more of it even as I cannot keep up with what I already know about, have bookmarked, and subscribe to. Bud is the visionary on this issue and you should really ask him for more of his thoughts. Where I want the conversation to go is this: What else might blogging do? How can blogs and newspapers work together to make our talk about books richer and more exciting?
Saturday, June 02, 2007
BEA: My first one!
So, that was a whirlwind day and a half for me. I went to my first BookExpo America Conference. And how could I not? Bud asked me to be on a panel so I even had my credentials all set.
In the next few days, I'll give you posts on the LBC Party, our panel of blogging & the book reviews (plus my comments), walking the floor in search of freebies (and what I ended up taking with me), plus, as a Fernham first, an author interview.
This last--the interview--will be a good one, I promise, with a great writer you've all heard of.
For now, the babe is on the floor with the phone, dialing Moscow no doubt, and the house is all topsy-turvy. While the rest of you continue to enjoy BEA, I'm back in my lovely little world of PlayhouseDisney and a street fair to go to over in Bergen-Lafayette this afternoon....
Stay tuned....
In the next few days, I'll give you posts on the LBC Party, our panel of blogging & the book reviews (plus my comments), walking the floor in search of freebies (and what I ended up taking with me), plus, as a Fernham first, an author interview.
This last--the interview--will be a good one, I promise, with a great writer you've all heard of.
For now, the babe is on the floor with the phone, dialing Moscow no doubt, and the house is all topsy-turvy. While the rest of you continue to enjoy BEA, I'm back in my lovely little world of PlayhouseDisney and a street fair to go to over in Bergen-Lafayette this afternoon....
Stay tuned....
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Last Rites
I finished Atul Gawande’s Better on the plane to L.A. There is something so soothing about these collections of essays by doctors and this one, though a bit uneven in the opening chapters, wound up being really rewarding and pleasurable. Gawande is a New Yorker writer and thanks Malcolm Gladwell as a friend. He shares a style of thinking, a kind of brilliant pragmatism, with Gladwell and the Freakonomics guys. The question of Better is about performance. How can doctors be better doctors without waiting for technological and scientific breakthroughs?
One of the chapters concerns the moral dilemmas of capital punishment and, specifically, the problems for doctors who work at executions. In all of this fascinating and troubling piece, something stood out for me, as it clearly did for Gawande. One of the doctors who, by a chance chain of events, finds himself putting a central line into an inmate about to be killed, tells Gawande that he had simply cleaned the site with antiseptic and inserted the line. Why the antiseptic? Gawande asks. “Habit, I guess.”
These habits are amazing and a really important clue, I think, to our attachment to life. Here, a doctor humanizes the condemned man by treating him as a patient until the very end. But sometimes it’s the condemned who humanizes himself. In “A Hanging,” George Orwell notices how the condemned man sidesteps a puddle on his way to the gallows. And, in Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus frantically scans the room for a quick escape: “he considered Mrs Filmer’s nice clean bread knife with ‘Bread’ carved on the handle. Ah, but one mustn’t spoil that.”
The humanity of these moments--the last moments of life--their mundanity, their strange thoughtfulness is one of the great mysteries of life and death. Septimus thinks about Mrs. Filmer, his landlady. She likes that bread knife. It would be wrong to spoil it. There’s a clarity to that thought that puts the troubling facts of his suicide, his illness, into sharper relief.
When people die of old age or from long illness, there is often a gradual fading out. Travel ceases to interest. Then, the news. Books. Finally, even family loosens its hold. But these people, condemned to die by the state or driven to death by their own demons, are fully and completely alive until the very last moment.
One of the chapters concerns the moral dilemmas of capital punishment and, specifically, the problems for doctors who work at executions. In all of this fascinating and troubling piece, something stood out for me, as it clearly did for Gawande. One of the doctors who, by a chance chain of events, finds himself putting a central line into an inmate about to be killed, tells Gawande that he had simply cleaned the site with antiseptic and inserted the line. Why the antiseptic? Gawande asks. “Habit, I guess.”
These habits are amazing and a really important clue, I think, to our attachment to life. Here, a doctor humanizes the condemned man by treating him as a patient until the very end. But sometimes it’s the condemned who humanizes himself. In “A Hanging,” George Orwell notices how the condemned man sidesteps a puddle on his way to the gallows. And, in Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus frantically scans the room for a quick escape: “he considered Mrs Filmer’s nice clean bread knife with ‘Bread’ carved on the handle. Ah, but one mustn’t spoil that.”
The humanity of these moments--the last moments of life--their mundanity, their strange thoughtfulness is one of the great mysteries of life and death. Septimus thinks about Mrs. Filmer, his landlady. She likes that bread knife. It would be wrong to spoil it. There’s a clarity to that thought that puts the troubling facts of his suicide, his illness, into sharper relief.
When people die of old age or from long illness, there is often a gradual fading out. Travel ceases to interest. Then, the news. Books. Finally, even family loosens its hold. But these people, condemned to die by the state or driven to death by their own demons, are fully and completely alive until the very last moment.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Lonely French Men, 2: Red White and Pink
It’s always a little silly when people want to make too much of color. I think that’s part of why I’ve been struggling to write this post for far too long now. And overwrought color symbolism can be insidious--racist and sexist, too. Still, even if we know that a color does not mean a thing, that a white dress does not equal virginity, we are still affected by the symbolic weight of seeing a young, fresh girl in a white dress. However sophisticated we might be, a white dress is different from a pink dress or a red one.
I had heard that The Mystery Guest had a Woolfian connection, but I hadn’t guessed how strong it was or that it was specifically a connection to Mrs. Dalloway. It’s a book about a confident, successful woman who gives a party. A man is an unexpected guest at that party. Flowers play a major role. The party is and is not a success.
The connection to Woolf is explicit: the novel is very involved in thinking about both Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses. But the loveliest moment is one in which the protagonist comes upon a glorious and enormous bouquet of red and white roses. Praising them, his ex says, “the only flowers I could ever bear to see cut,” an allusion to Mrs. Dalloway that it takes him a moment to place. When he does, all sorts of illusions come crashing to the ground.
The flowers are red and white in Bouillier’s novel and that’s important and right, too. They are red and white in Mrs. Dalloway, colors that connote passion and purity, that seem to echo the novel’s double-vision throughout. For Clarissa’s most passionate time--her youth--was also the time when she was most in white. But the night when she meets Richard Dalloway, Peter remembers her in “something floating, white, crimson.” And now, at 52, she wears not white or red, but the cool and sexless green a mermaid’s dress, a dress for a woman who retains “a virginity preserved through childbirth.” Clarissa was in white as a young woman. Sally, in pink. And, at the party that evening, the young Elizabeth (she’s 18), who is both more and less than her mother, wears a dress that is sometimes described as red, sometimes pink. In fact--I went back and checked--the maid, an old woman, and her father perceive it as pink while Sally, who was so daring as a girl, is the one who perceives it to be red.
Some editors have wanted to correct the error--it’s confusing & Woolf was sometimes careless about such things. I am going to leave it. I don’t know what to make of it, quite, but it seems lovely and nice that Elizabeth gets to be both red and pink at once--a sign of the promise with which Woolf endows her.
I had heard that The Mystery Guest had a Woolfian connection, but I hadn’t guessed how strong it was or that it was specifically a connection to Mrs. Dalloway. It’s a book about a confident, successful woman who gives a party. A man is an unexpected guest at that party. Flowers play a major role. The party is and is not a success.
The connection to Woolf is explicit: the novel is very involved in thinking about both Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses. But the loveliest moment is one in which the protagonist comes upon a glorious and enormous bouquet of red and white roses. Praising them, his ex says, “the only flowers I could ever bear to see cut,” an allusion to Mrs. Dalloway that it takes him a moment to place. When he does, all sorts of illusions come crashing to the ground.
The flowers are red and white in Bouillier’s novel and that’s important and right, too. They are red and white in Mrs. Dalloway, colors that connote passion and purity, that seem to echo the novel’s double-vision throughout. For Clarissa’s most passionate time--her youth--was also the time when she was most in white. But the night when she meets Richard Dalloway, Peter remembers her in “something floating, white, crimson.” And now, at 52, she wears not white or red, but the cool and sexless green a mermaid’s dress, a dress for a woman who retains “a virginity preserved through childbirth.” Clarissa was in white as a young woman. Sally, in pink. And, at the party that evening, the young Elizabeth (she’s 18), who is both more and less than her mother, wears a dress that is sometimes described as red, sometimes pink. In fact--I went back and checked--the maid, an old woman, and her father perceive it as pink while Sally, who was so daring as a girl, is the one who perceives it to be red.
Some editors have wanted to correct the error--it’s confusing & Woolf was sometimes careless about such things. I am going to leave it. I don’t know what to make of it, quite, but it seems lovely and nice that Elizabeth gets to be both red and pink at once--a sign of the promise with which Woolf endows her.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Lonely French Men
I figured that I would like Gregoire Bouiller’s The Mystery Guest but I was surprised by how much I liked it. I read the whole thing--it’s a short book--on the short flight from New York to Indiana a couple weeks ago.
To my surprise, I’ve read a nice little chunk of contemporary French fiction (in translation) in the past few years--Beigbeder’s Windows on the World, Toussaint’s Television, Constant’s White Spirit (these last two were LBC picks)--and The Mystery Guest shares with each of these texts an absurdist perspective on a very lonely narcissist. (And here, Constant’s book, by a woman and set in Africa, seems to separate itself from the pack a bit.)
This interest in the intensely self-absorbed and desperately lonely man put me in mind of Beckett, especially the Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (also known as The Unreadable). And I wonder if Beckett made this trend or, as I suspect and Montaigne and Moliere would seem to confirm, simply found a spiritual home in a certain train--or rut--of French thought.
It is a rut, but a very comfortable and happy one to rumble along in for a while.
I suspected I’d like it since Mark Sarvas was featuring it and I tend to like the books he likes. But when a student told me that I could read it in a flash and that it had a big Woolfian connection, I grabbed it off the pile.
The book’s premise is absurd and, apparently, true. (This is as much memoir as novel.): a performance artist throws herself a birthday party every year. She invites one person for each year she’s lived and then appoints one friend to invite a mystery guest who symbolizes the year to come.
Our hero is that guest.
He fields the call from the woman who left him heartbroken years ago. When she calls, on the very day that French historian and anthropologist Michel Leiris dies, he feels that fate has handed him a golden sign.
The narcissism and absurdity of finding significance in this random coincidence--a coincidence that, he later discovers, has no meaning at all for his ex--captures the sense of humor here and makes this my favorite of the Beigbeder-Toussaint-Bouillier trio. But how close to the center of contemporary French literature have my travels taken me? How eccentric is my sample?
To my surprise, I’ve read a nice little chunk of contemporary French fiction (in translation) in the past few years--Beigbeder’s Windows on the World, Toussaint’s Television, Constant’s White Spirit (these last two were LBC picks)--and The Mystery Guest shares with each of these texts an absurdist perspective on a very lonely narcissist. (And here, Constant’s book, by a woman and set in Africa, seems to separate itself from the pack a bit.)
This interest in the intensely self-absorbed and desperately lonely man put me in mind of Beckett, especially the Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (also known as The Unreadable). And I wonder if Beckett made this trend or, as I suspect and Montaigne and Moliere would seem to confirm, simply found a spiritual home in a certain train--or rut--of French thought.
It is a rut, but a very comfortable and happy one to rumble along in for a while.
I suspected I’d like it since Mark Sarvas was featuring it and I tend to like the books he likes. But when a student told me that I could read it in a flash and that it had a big Woolfian connection, I grabbed it off the pile.
The book’s premise is absurd and, apparently, true. (This is as much memoir as novel.): a performance artist throws herself a birthday party every year. She invites one person for each year she’s lived and then appoints one friend to invite a mystery guest who symbolizes the year to come.
Our hero is that guest.
He fields the call from the woman who left him heartbroken years ago. When she calls, on the very day that French historian and anthropologist Michel Leiris dies, he feels that fate has handed him a golden sign.
The narcissism and absurdity of finding significance in this random coincidence--a coincidence that, he later discovers, has no meaning at all for his ex--captures the sense of humor here and makes this my favorite of the Beigbeder-Toussaint-Bouillier trio. But how close to the center of contemporary French literature have my travels taken me? How eccentric is my sample?
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Clock-Watching
As I sit in the handsomely appointed reading room of UCLA’s Special Collections Department in the Research Library, it is comforting (if perhaps too flattering to myself) to know that Woolf found the process of correcting proofs tedious. As my eyes glaze over, I do little calculations in the margins: I have ten more hours in the archive and 238 pages to check, nine hours and 222 pages. With each passing hour, I fall a little further behind.
Then, suddenly, I see something I haven’t seen before--another instance in which her revision falls into a pattern. I hear a resonance and now have a phrase to check--is it an allusion to something?
Today it was birds. What about all the birds? I figured I could do something with the flowers in the books--roses and carnations, hyacinths and lilies--but, until today, I hadn’t thought about the symbolic weight of the birds. Swallows and nightingales I can do (going back to Ovid and the story of Procne and Philomel), but what about sparrows and thrushes?
Then, suddenly, I see something I haven’t seen before--another instance in which her revision falls into a pattern. I hear a resonance and now have a phrase to check--is it an allusion to something?
Today it was birds. What about all the birds? I figured I could do something with the flowers in the books--roses and carnations, hyacinths and lilies--but, until today, I hadn’t thought about the symbolic weight of the birds. Swallows and nightingales I can do (going back to Ovid and the story of Procne and Philomel), but what about sparrows and thrushes?
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
The Raverat Proofs
This is for Ana Maria who seems to enjoy this stuff as much as I do: I’m in L.A. on the second of three trips (I’ll go to London in August) to look at material surrounding the writing and publication of Mrs. Dalloway. This time, as at the Lilly in Bloomington, I’m looking at proofs. But these proofs were Woolf’s personal set. She sent them to her friend, the French artist Jacques Raverat, who was dying of an m.s.-like disease. (He did, in fact, die, before the novel was published but his wife, who was a Darwin, read the proofs to him.)
Woolf bound the proofs herself in Japanese block-printed paper with a stylized gingko-leaf motif. She pasted this paper on a thin cardboard, slightly sturdier than a manila folder. Sewed the pages together with red thread. The paper is a pale tan, the leaves are olive brown with eye-shaped cutouts in them that are filled, imperfectly and artistically, with red “eyes.” Woolf put the paper on sideways, to my eye, so the bulbous tops of the leaves point East, the stems, West. There is a small rectangle of the same paper, from the marking, pasted on the front cover (with the leaves running the opposite direction). Woolf has used the ¾ inch of margin to write “Mrs Dalloway” in her usual purple ink.
The title page is inscribed “Jacques/with love/from Virginia/6th Feb 1925.”
Woolf bound the proofs herself in Japanese block-printed paper with a stylized gingko-leaf motif. She pasted this paper on a thin cardboard, slightly sturdier than a manila folder. Sewed the pages together with red thread. The paper is a pale tan, the leaves are olive brown with eye-shaped cutouts in them that are filled, imperfectly and artistically, with red “eyes.” Woolf put the paper on sideways, to my eye, so the bulbous tops of the leaves point East, the stems, West. There is a small rectangle of the same paper, from the marking, pasted on the front cover (with the leaves running the opposite direction). Woolf has used the ¾ inch of margin to write “Mrs Dalloway” in her usual purple ink.
The title page is inscribed “Jacques/with love/from Virginia/6th Feb 1925.”
Monday, May 21, 2007
A Riot of Color: Flowers at the Getty
It’s little wonder Los Angeles became such a city of glamour. The flowers here call out for their close-ups. In the taxi from LAX to UCLA, a little poem ran through my head,
My plane landed at noon and by 1:30 I was at the Getty Museum. It was more breathtaking than I’d expected. I was pleasantly surprised to see Tim Hawkinson’s crazy giant organ, an odd, silly, and happy piece that I’d seen at MassMoCA last year. There was a lovely small exhibit of paintings of animals by Oudry, including a haunting life-sized portrait of Clara the rhinoceros and an even more glorious and smaller show of illuminated manuscripts depicting animals. The decorative arts collection was incredible but, when I got there, fatigue and jetlag had set in. And, finally, for all that was moving about the art, it was, as I had been told to expect, the architecture, the garden, and the views that really dazzled. What a lovely, grand welcome! Hurrah!
bougainvillea, jacaranda, Clytemnestra, penicillin. Somehow, these double spondees (BOUgainVILLea) with their lovely assertive melodies seem right for the plump, fleshy, swollen flowers that create little pops of color in the beige and sage coastal desert landscape. The flowers are loud here. The purples are neon bright; the yellows are canaries; the oranges scream danger. Everything is either prickly or tuberous. This is not a subtle seduction. It’s a sexy and glamourous floralscape.
My plane landed at noon and by 1:30 I was at the Getty Museum. It was more breathtaking than I’d expected. I was pleasantly surprised to see Tim Hawkinson’s crazy giant organ, an odd, silly, and happy piece that I’d seen at MassMoCA last year. There was a lovely small exhibit of paintings of animals by Oudry, including a haunting life-sized portrait of Clara the rhinoceros and an even more glorious and smaller show of illuminated manuscripts depicting animals. The decorative arts collection was incredible but, when I got there, fatigue and jetlag had set in. And, finally, for all that was moving about the art, it was, as I had been told to expect, the architecture, the garden, and the views that really dazzled. What a lovely, grand welcome! Hurrah!
Back Home Again
I’m in Los Angeles for the first time in my life, but it feels like coming home again. Here I am in a gray coastal city, misty and a little cold for the time of year, going on a hilly jog through a lovely neighborhood full of gorgeous homes with even prettier gardens. Rhododendrons and roses are in bloom everywhere and the trees, even on the planting strips of the neighborhood across Hilgard from the UCLA campus, seem primeval in their height and girth.
How is this not the Seattle of my girlhood?
True, I don’t ever remember seeing Variety lying in the driveways of the upper middle class. But I’m surprised at how much is familiar. And, after years of feeling intimidated to visit this other great city, all that anxiety about how I probably wouldn’t like L.A., how I was not pretty enough to be in L.A., how L.A. was not for me, seems pretty silly.
Strangest of all is this: the art in my hotel (the lovely and affordable UCLA Guest House), was done by a family friend. It may have even been done, in part by me!
That’s right. In college I worked in the art studio of our neighbor hand-coloring silk-screened prints with chalk. The artist, Susan Singleton, sold these prints in bulk to a gallery in a Design Center. The large editions were often purchased by hotels. The UCLA Guest House clearly purchased some and the lithograph outside my door is by Sue. Further down the hall is a triptych from her Clouds series, a series I vividly remember coloring. I would sit at a drafting table in her loft South of Pioneer Square, and color with pastels alongside 3 or 4 other artists. We listened to the Talking Heads, took breaks to dance, and practiced chalking and smearing. Only Sue and Nani, her best assistant, were allowed to make the trademark red squiggle at the end.
Uncanny. And very welcoming.
How is this not the Seattle of my girlhood?
True, I don’t ever remember seeing Variety lying in the driveways of the upper middle class. But I’m surprised at how much is familiar. And, after years of feeling intimidated to visit this other great city, all that anxiety about how I probably wouldn’t like L.A., how I was not pretty enough to be in L.A., how L.A. was not for me, seems pretty silly.
Strangest of all is this: the art in my hotel (the lovely and affordable UCLA Guest House), was done by a family friend. It may have even been done, in part by me!
That’s right. In college I worked in the art studio of our neighbor hand-coloring silk-screened prints with chalk. The artist, Susan Singleton, sold these prints in bulk to a gallery in a Design Center. The large editions were often purchased by hotels. The UCLA Guest House clearly purchased some and the lithograph outside my door is by Sue. Further down the hall is a triptych from her Clouds series, a series I vividly remember coloring. I would sit at a drafting table in her loft South of Pioneer Square, and color with pastels alongside 3 or 4 other artists. We listened to the Talking Heads, took breaks to dance, and practiced chalking and smearing. Only Sue and Nani, her best assistant, were allowed to make the trademark red squiggle at the end.
Uncanny. And very welcoming.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
456 out of 474
In an attempt to get in shape for the upcoming Boilermaker--the real, 15K version, not the 5K I did two years ago--I ran the Newport 10K on Saturday. It was a little intimidating to have 4-time Boston Marathon winner Catherine Ndereba’s name called at the start--especially since it’s a small race and the elite runners were only, at that point, about 20 feet ahead of me.
Within moments of the starting gun, however, I was toast.
Ndereba finished 18th overall; she was the second-fastest woman.
For my part, I finished 456th in a field of 474 (scroll way down). Go Anne, go!!!
Well, that’s running six miles at a pace of 11:20. I’d like to do the Boilermaker’s 9 plus miles at about a 10-minute pace. Let the training continue…
I’m still sore, but it felt good. I do love running road races from time to time. Nonetheless, by the time I was passing, the natives were getting restive. Instead of cheers, I mostly heard people confronting the crossing guards: “I just want to get to my *&!?# car!!!” A woman in jodhpurs with a latte in one hand and a Great Dane on a leash was really, really inconvenienced. I heard a cop say to her “Is this a life-threatening emergency?”
Within moments of the starting gun, however, I was toast.
Ndereba finished 18th overall; she was the second-fastest woman.
For my part, I finished 456th in a field of 474 (scroll way down). Go Anne, go!!!
Well, that’s running six miles at a pace of 11:20. I’d like to do the Boilermaker’s 9 plus miles at about a 10-minute pace. Let the training continue…
I’m still sore, but it felt good. I do love running road races from time to time. Nonetheless, by the time I was passing, the natives were getting restive. Instead of cheers, I mostly heard people confronting the crossing guards: “I just want to get to my *&!?# car!!!” A woman in jodhpurs with a latte in one hand and a Great Dane on a leash was really, really inconvenienced. I heard a cop say to her “Is this a life-threatening emergency?”
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Writing Editorials & Letters to the Editor
I got galvanized by an article in the Times way back on March 15, 2007 by Patricia Cohen describes classes that Catherine Orenstein offers women on how to write editorials. This struck me as a practical answer to the ongoing plaint that women are underrepresented on the editorial pages of the Times and other major papers. (You can read a feisty piece from 2005 by Katha Pollitt who is, as usual, overlooked in this discussion, over at The Nation.)
I wanted to take the class, to teach the class, to weigh in. But wait! I’m a professor--and I teach writing, for goodness sake!--perhaps I could figure this out on my own…
So, with that rattling on in the back of my head, I read my alumni magazine from Yale and got exercised by an article about gender equity and tenure. I fired off a letter on March 19th and, this week, it showed up in the new issue.
Here, then, is my letter, from March 19 and published in the current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine. (The website is still a month behind.) it’s probably the publication with the widest circulation I’ll ever have!
(The editors note two things: Yale already offers maternity leave “off the clock” and the faculty voted to approve the recommendations listed in the magazine. So, my fiery mood is quickly co-opted into an opportunity for Yale to assert its virtues. Oh well.)
Still, for all the assignments I have on my desk--self-concocted and external--it feels nice to have just rattled off a little piece of writing, a little drop of practical feminism, and launched it into the world.
I wanted to take the class, to teach the class, to weigh in. But wait! I’m a professor--and I teach writing, for goodness sake!--perhaps I could figure this out on my own…
So, with that rattling on in the back of my head, I read my alumni magazine from Yale and got exercised by an article about gender equity and tenure. I fired off a letter on March 19th and, this week, it showed up in the new issue.
Here, then, is my letter, from March 19 and published in the current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine. (The website is still a month behind.) it’s probably the publication with the widest circulation I’ll ever have!
To the editors:
I applaud Yale’s stated interest in reassessing its tenure system. Calling “quirky” a system in which only 11% of Humanities faculty receive promotion to tenure seems charitable, even comic. I hope that in its reassessment of junior faculty mentoring and promotion policies, Yale will make provision for mentoring and retaining women. In particular, I hope that Yale will offer maternity leave off the tenure clock to junior faculty who choose to have children.
There is a false and mean-spirited perception among some that young mothers might use this off the clock time to “get ahead.” Anyone with young children (mine are 4 years and 10 months old) knows that even the most diligent and ambitious scholar, with a supportive partner and good childcare, gets very little substantive work done in those first months of a new baby’s life.
I believe in working mothers. Working mothers make wonderful models of balance and commitment for Yale undergraduates. In reconsidering how it treats its junior faculty, Yale has an opportunity to step forward as an example of how an institution can work with young families to combine family life with an energetic and ambitious career.
Thank you,
(The editors note two things: Yale already offers maternity leave “off the clock” and the faculty voted to approve the recommendations listed in the magazine. So, my fiery mood is quickly co-opted into an opportunity for Yale to assert its virtues. Oh well.)
Still, for all the assignments I have on my desk--self-concocted and external--it feels nice to have just rattled off a little piece of writing, a little drop of practical feminism, and launched it into the world.
Monday, May 14, 2007
More on Textual Editing, More from the Lilly
One of the articles I read last week in Indiana was Morris Beja’s account of his experience preparing a textual edition of Mrs. Dalloway. It’s a witty, dapper piece about coming to textual editing as an outsider and finding himself seduced by the interest of working so closely with such a great book. It certainly accords with my experience.
Beja is skeptical. At one point he wonders how much textual editing matters. Can textual editing be made to matter to general readers? Can it matter even to scholars of the novel? Or does it really just matter to other textual editors?
This has been my question from the beginning. And my quest has been to figure out a way to do an excellent editing job and also to explain to common readers why it matters that scholars have access to such texts. (After all, if you’re sitting down to read Mrs. Dalloway, you’re probably going to opt for the paperback, not an expensive and big hardback full of appendices such as the one I’m working on.)
I was surprised, then, to find a headline--a real headline--in my work in the archives.
In all of the proofs, there is only one page where Woolf crosses out a whole paragraph and substitutes a (significantly longer) typed page. That single instance is the paragraph in which Septimus kills himself. Seventeen lines in proofs have been crossed out and two typed pages have been added, making the paragraph now twenty-eight lines long. In addition to many small changes, the chief addition here comes toward the beginning of the paragraph, with the addition of Septimus scanning the room for possible means of suicide before deciding to throw himself out the window.
That, it seems to me, gives everyone a lot to think about. To know that, at the very last minute, Woolf was rethinking the book’s climax, giving it greater depth and a slower pace, is to know something about the centrality of Septimus to the novel.
Beja is skeptical. At one point he wonders how much textual editing matters. Can textual editing be made to matter to general readers? Can it matter even to scholars of the novel? Or does it really just matter to other textual editors?
This has been my question from the beginning. And my quest has been to figure out a way to do an excellent editing job and also to explain to common readers why it matters that scholars have access to such texts. (After all, if you’re sitting down to read Mrs. Dalloway, you’re probably going to opt for the paperback, not an expensive and big hardback full of appendices such as the one I’m working on.)
I was surprised, then, to find a headline--a real headline--in my work in the archives.
In all of the proofs, there is only one page where Woolf crosses out a whole paragraph and substitutes a (significantly longer) typed page. That single instance is the paragraph in which Septimus kills himself. Seventeen lines in proofs have been crossed out and two typed pages have been added, making the paragraph now twenty-eight lines long. In addition to many small changes, the chief addition here comes toward the beginning of the paragraph, with the addition of Septimus scanning the room for possible means of suicide before deciding to throw himself out the window.
That, it seems to me, gives everyone a lot to think about. To know that, at the very last minute, Woolf was rethinking the book’s climax, giving it greater depth and a slower pace, is to know something about the centrality of Septimus to the novel.
Friday, May 11, 2007
What counts as a Minor Difference?
Reading around amongst articles on textual editing, most of them include some sentence along the lines of “there are twenty differences between the first and second British editions, most of them minor.” A minor difference is taken to be a change in capitalization, an added comma, a semi-colon that becomes a period. But are these differences always minor? In comparing the American proofs of Mrs. Dalloway against the first British edition, I found some instances in which an apparently minor change is part of a significant and interesting pattern.
Thus, for example, Woolf made the following corrections to the American proofs on page 96 (The ~ symbol indicates a repeated word.):
All of which looks dull as a list until you look at the actual paragraphs side by side. Look at the 4 changes to “she”: each time, Woolf is changing from a capital “S” to a lower case one. Thus, what were five separate sentences in the proofs become, in the novel, one long clause linked by semi-colons. Then, she erases a phrase modifying the island and one modifying the hen.
So, what might this mean in the larger context of the novel? Well, this is a paragraph in which Peter Walsh is thinking back to the night when he watched, to his great distress, Clarissa fall in love with Richard Dalloway. “She” is the focus of this paragraph: he thinks this is the night that changed his life forever. This is certainly the night when Clarissa was finally lost to him forever.
And, in the end, this is one of three times in the novel when Peter is thinking about a woman--Clarissa, Daisy (his child-fiancee), and finally, Sally, and Woolf changes sentences to clauses. So, a long string of seemingly insignificant changes (period to semi-colon, upper- to lower-case) actually indicates an overall significant change to the pacing of the paragraph.
Thus, for example, Woolf made the following corrections to the American proofs on page 96 (The ~ symbol indicates a repeated word.):
96.6 she] She UP ]
96.7 island; ] ~... UP ]
96.7 she] She UP ]
96.8 hen;] ~... UP ]
96.8 she] She UP ]
96.8 laughed;] ~. UP ]
96.8 she ] She UP ]
All of which looks dull as a list until you look at the actual paragraphs side by side. Look at the 4 changes to “she”: each time, Woolf is changing from a capital “S” to a lower case one. Thus, what were five separate sentences in the proofs become, in the novel, one long clause linked by semi-colons. Then, she erases a phrase modifying the island and one modifying the hen.
So, what might this mean in the larger context of the novel? Well, this is a paragraph in which Peter Walsh is thinking back to the night when he watched, to his great distress, Clarissa fall in love with Richard Dalloway. “She” is the focus of this paragraph: he thinks this is the night that changed his life forever. This is certainly the night when Clarissa was finally lost to him forever.
And, in the end, this is one of three times in the novel when Peter is thinking about a woman--Clarissa, Daisy (his child-fiancee), and finally, Sally, and Woolf changes sentences to clauses. So, a long string of seemingly insignificant changes (period to semi-colon, upper- to lower-case) actually indicates an overall significant change to the pacing of the paragraph.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Our Byzantium
It's Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead week over at the LBC (say that three times fast) and this is cross-posted from there. Alan DeNiro's collection is amazing and fun--full of powerful, clever fantasy and emotion. There is a lot of activity there--many of us are posting on one of the stories from the collection--so hop on over and check it out...
I’ve always loved--loved--the Ron Carlson story “What We Were Trying To Do. You may have heard it on NPR, too. It’s about the first people under siege who tried to pour oil on the invading forces: they don’t heat the oil, everyone gets slippery and messy but the invasion continues. The lesson: next time, we’ll use boiling oil…
Alan DeNiro’s “Our Byzantium” is not purely silly the way Carlson’s story is, but it has that perfect pitch deadpan. I was hooked from the first line: “In your absence, the Byzantines infiltrate our city.”
The story goes on with a double plot-line: one plot trying to figure out how it came to be that the Byzantines are invading at all (did they escape the fall of Constantinople [in 1453, DeNiro helpfully “reminds” us] and lie dormant in the hills of Eastern Pennsylvania for centuries?) and one plot about how “you” left Eastern Pennsylvania, driving all the way out west to Pittsburgh to visit “Todd.”
Alone, either plot might be fine. The Byzantium plot could be a good, funny story, akin to Carlson’s. The story about how the narrator tries to figure out why he is more attracted to the elusive and unavailable “you” than to the present, kind, and pretty Jerilynn (who has her own unavailable object of desire) might have been a sweet tale about our fickle hearts.
Together, they are magical, poignant, and, because of the constant threat of violence from marauding Byzantines, not too sentimental.
And then, there is this lovely moment near the end. “Yeats had it wrong,” DeNiro writes. “This is a country for old men.” I love a nice allusion and when a buried one emerges and enriches, well, then I’m doubly pleased.
I’ve always loved--loved--the Ron Carlson story “What We Were Trying To Do. You may have heard it on NPR, too. It’s about the first people under siege who tried to pour oil on the invading forces: they don’t heat the oil, everyone gets slippery and messy but the invasion continues. The lesson: next time, we’ll use boiling oil…
Alan DeNiro’s “Our Byzantium” is not purely silly the way Carlson’s story is, but it has that perfect pitch deadpan. I was hooked from the first line: “In your absence, the Byzantines infiltrate our city.”
The story goes on with a double plot-line: one plot trying to figure out how it came to be that the Byzantines are invading at all (did they escape the fall of Constantinople [in 1453, DeNiro helpfully “reminds” us] and lie dormant in the hills of Eastern Pennsylvania for centuries?) and one plot about how “you” left Eastern Pennsylvania, driving all the way out west to Pittsburgh to visit “Todd.”
Alone, either plot might be fine. The Byzantium plot could be a good, funny story, akin to Carlson’s. The story about how the narrator tries to figure out why he is more attracted to the elusive and unavailable “you” than to the present, kind, and pretty Jerilynn (who has her own unavailable object of desire) might have been a sweet tale about our fickle hearts.
Together, they are magical, poignant, and, because of the constant threat of violence from marauding Byzantines, not too sentimental.
And then, there is this lovely moment near the end. “Yeats had it wrong,” DeNiro writes. “This is a country for old men.” I love a nice allusion and when a buried one emerges and enriches, well, then I’m doubly pleased.
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees--
Those dying generations -- at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Thursday, May 03, 2007
More from the Lilly
It’s very exciting to work with these proofs to Mrs. Dalloway. The only marks on them are a few pencil marks by Harcourt--and these are mostly notations of where each new galley begins--, stamps from R. & R. Clark (date stamps scattered throughout the proofs, from 13-19 Jan., presumably the number of days it took from them to create the proofs), and Woolf’s many corrections.
So there is something incredibly intimate in poring over these pages with care. It feels very, very lucky.
And wonderful that anyone with a picture i-d who comes to Bloomington can do the same.
As I’ve confessed here before, this textual editing--the painstaking combing and comparing of one edition, one version, against another--is new to me. Now, I have a notebook full of dozens of annotations like this:
Madness, right?
Except that, like lots of things when you do them intensely, it grows riveting and meaningful, so, by 4:00 in the afternoon, I’m like a crazy person, muttering “Oh! that’s interesting!” upon finding an em-dash changed to a parentheses.
Well, it is interesting. I’ll try to explain some other time.
So there is something incredibly intimate in poring over these pages with care. It feels very, very lucky.
And wonderful that anyone with a picture i-d who comes to Bloomington can do the same.
As I’ve confessed here before, this textual editing--the painstaking combing and comparing of one edition, one version, against another--is new to me. Now, I have a notebook full of dozens of annotations like this:
- 147.11 to Septimus; ] to Om.
- 147.12 mankind, ] ~;
Madness, right?
Except that, like lots of things when you do them intensely, it grows riveting and meaningful, so, by 4:00 in the afternoon, I’m like a crazy person, muttering “Oh! that’s interesting!” upon finding an em-dash changed to a parentheses.
Well, it is interesting. I’ll try to explain some other time.
Notes from the Archive, Lilly Library Edition
I’ve been at I.U. in Bloomington all week, looking at the American proofs of Mrs. Dalloway. On my first day here, Tuesday, I sailed through the first forty pages in an hour, but then I needed a break, so I looked around to get my bearings. There are all these nice looking graduate students walking around, feeling happy and proud to be working here. The two men who are working the desk were English grad students, I think. One was reading Shakespeare in a big one-volume edition and the other was studying for his Old Irish exam.
The proofs came out of the vault magnificently wrapped, in a gold or bright orange slipcase--fabric covering hard boards--with a red spine. From this, the archivist extracted a folder of the same golden cardboard. Within that folder, a cream-colored box made of thin paper, like a file folder. Finally, within that, the proofs themselves.
They are modest. Small. They are on yellowing but sturdy book-quality paper and look just like unbound pages of a book--which is, of course, what proofs are. But in this computer-driven age, proofs don’t look this way.
On the first page, stamped in purple is FIRST PROOF. At the bottom of the page, also in purple ink, is a stamp reading R. & R. CLARK at the top, EDIN---(it fades out to the bottom & right) within the double lines of the oval. In the middle, it reads 13 JAN 1925.
The proofs came out of the vault magnificently wrapped, in a gold or bright orange slipcase--fabric covering hard boards--with a red spine. From this, the archivist extracted a folder of the same golden cardboard. Within that folder, a cream-colored box made of thin paper, like a file folder. Finally, within that, the proofs themselves.
They are modest. Small. They are on yellowing but sturdy book-quality paper and look just like unbound pages of a book--which is, of course, what proofs are. But in this computer-driven age, proofs don’t look this way.
On the first page, stamped in purple is FIRST PROOF. At the bottom of the page, also in purple ink, is a stamp reading R. & R. CLARK at the top, EDIN---(it fades out to the bottom & right) within the double lines of the oval. In the middle, it reads 13 JAN 1925.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Where Dan Wickett Ledes...
Today's New York Times has yet another entrant into the blogs vs. book reviews conversations--but what a lovely surprise: Dan Wickett is the lede!!!
And, it seems (to me anyway) that the worm has turned--Mark, Ed, & Maud are quoted with respect, other blogs are mentioned, too.
Don't get me wrong--I want MORE book coverage and I lament the shrinkage of newspaper book reviews. I'd sign the petition for Atlanta's reviewer in a minute. And I'd hand Dan a salary while we're at it. For me, conversations about books are not a zero sum game. We could have more and more and more of it as far as I'm concerned. And different kinds of talk adds new notes to the conversations: even those irritating spammers who keep making banal comments here and then linking to their video review site may add something somewhere. But we learn one kind of thing from a quick mention in a mass circulation magazine, something else from the handwritten card at our local independent, or from Mark or Maud or Bud or Laila, or from the New York Times.
Still, we have this from Richard Ford to close things out:
Sigh.
And, it seems (to me anyway) that the worm has turned--Mark, Ed, & Maud are quoted with respect, other blogs are mentioned, too.
Don't get me wrong--I want MORE book coverage and I lament the shrinkage of newspaper book reviews. I'd sign the petition for Atlanta's reviewer in a minute. And I'd hand Dan a salary while we're at it. For me, conversations about books are not a zero sum game. We could have more and more and more of it as far as I'm concerned. And different kinds of talk adds new notes to the conversations: even those irritating spammers who keep making banal comments here and then linking to their video review site may add something somewhere. But we learn one kind of thing from a quick mention in a mass circulation magazine, something else from the handwritten card at our local independent, or from Mark or Maud or Bud or Laila, or from the New York Times.
Still, we have this from Richard Ford to close things out:
Mr. Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide. "Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership," Mr. Ford said, "in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn't."
Sigh.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
The Cottagers, Sacco & Vanzetti Must Die
So, last week was all about Mark Binelli's romp of an historical novel, Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die--life intervened and so only belatedly am I urging you to hop over there and check out the discussion.
This week is for The Cottagers a chilling suspense and murder tale about unhappy young academics on vacation on Vancouver Island. It's a brutal, gorgeously written and stressful book. I found myself savoring the first half and then gorging on the second--partly the pleasure of suspense and partly, I'll confess, the need to leave the company of these yucky people--nightmare versions of myself and other academics I've known...
Our fearless nominator, C. Max Magee, is emceeing the festivities. He posted--and inspired a second post--on suspense yesterday and he kicks off today's posts with an elegant description of bad vacations--how soon things go awry, how fun they are to read about. I contributed a post of my own--all true--too.
(And, as I'm posting from away from home today--but this is a research trip, not a vacation--I'm hoping this isn't a jinx....)
This week is for The Cottagers a chilling suspense and murder tale about unhappy young academics on vacation on Vancouver Island. It's a brutal, gorgeously written and stressful book. I found myself savoring the first half and then gorging on the second--partly the pleasure of suspense and partly, I'll confess, the need to leave the company of these yucky people--nightmare versions of myself and other academics I've known...
Our fearless nominator, C. Max Magee, is emceeing the festivities. He posted--and inspired a second post--on suspense yesterday and he kicks off today's posts with an elegant description of bad vacations--how soon things go awry, how fun they are to read about. I contributed a post of my own--all true--too.
(And, as I'm posting from away from home today--but this is a research trip, not a vacation--I'm hoping this isn't a jinx....)
Friday, April 27, 2007
Uh-oh
The baby is one today. She has two words: "hi" and "uh-oh."
"Uh-oh" is my favorite for it signifies result (I just did something naughty), ongoing action (I'm doing something naughty) and, best of all, intention (I'm thinking about doing something naughty).
This third, I'm thinking about doing something naughty, is supremely useful. I can turn my head or leave the room, hear an "uh-oh!" and rush to prevent the next small disaster.
"Uh-oh" is my favorite for it signifies result (I just did something naughty), ongoing action (I'm doing something naughty) and, best of all, intention (I'm thinking about doing something naughty).
This third, I'm thinking about doing something naughty, is supremely useful. I can turn my head or leave the room, hear an "uh-oh!" and rush to prevent the next small disaster.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Fear No More
Shakespeare was born on this day in 1564. WQXR was celebrating with songs from Shakespeare and speeches read by Julliard students. Caller number twelve who correctly identified the source won a little parcel of plays. I was one for three only: Othello.
But I’ve been thinking about Cymbeline today, since that’s the play that’s quoted in Mrs. Dalloway. WQXR played a really gorgeous setting of the song “Fear no more,” the very song that links Clarissa and Septimus in the novel. I found a folksy version of it on iTunes to download. Then, with the play on my mind, a postcard arrived from BAM. They’re doing Cymbeline the first two weeks of May…Oh, how I long to go. Here, then, is the gorgeous dirge, sung over what the singers believe to be a dead body. He need fear the sun’s heat no more, for he is dead:
I saw a gorgeous production of Cymbeline in Oxford when I was twenty-four. When I was twenty-three and taking my orals, John Hollander examined me on Shakespeare. He asked me if I could talk for a minute about how plays-within-plays worked. Somehow, thanks to Woolf, I had already grown fond of Cymbeline and I was canny enough to guess that a vaguely competent answer on that play would stand me in better stead than a pedestrian answer on Hamlet. So, I said, “Well, the play-within-a-play in Hamlet is the obvious place to go, but what I find really interesting is the one in Cymbeline as it takes the form of a Jacobean masque within a romance…”
I think that was the moment in the ninety-minute exam where I passed. The subsequent hour was just confirmation. So I always feel grateful to Shakespeare, to Tennyson for loving the play and teaching Woolf to love it, and to Woolf who taught me to love it and helped me pass my exams to become a professor.
Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!
But I’ve been thinking about Cymbeline today, since that’s the play that’s quoted in Mrs. Dalloway. WQXR played a really gorgeous setting of the song “Fear no more,” the very song that links Clarissa and Septimus in the novel. I found a folksy version of it on iTunes to download. Then, with the play on my mind, a postcard arrived from BAM. They’re doing Cymbeline the first two weeks of May…Oh, how I long to go. Here, then, is the gorgeous dirge, sung over what the singers believe to be a dead body. He need fear the sun’s heat no more, for he is dead:
Fear no more the heat o' the sun,And that final couplet is so glorious, so poignant. Yes, chimney-sweepers, covered in dust, remind us that we are made of dust and to dust must return but, the song reminds us, even golden lads and girls share that fate.
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
I saw a gorgeous production of Cymbeline in Oxford when I was twenty-four. When I was twenty-three and taking my orals, John Hollander examined me on Shakespeare. He asked me if I could talk for a minute about how plays-within-plays worked. Somehow, thanks to Woolf, I had already grown fond of Cymbeline and I was canny enough to guess that a vaguely competent answer on that play would stand me in better stead than a pedestrian answer on Hamlet. So, I said, “Well, the play-within-a-play in Hamlet is the obvious place to go, but what I find really interesting is the one in Cymbeline as it takes the form of a Jacobean masque within a romance…”
I think that was the moment in the ninety-minute exam where I passed. The subsequent hour was just confirmation. So I always feel grateful to Shakespeare, to Tennyson for loving the play and teaching Woolf to love it, and to Woolf who taught me to love it and helped me pass my exams to become a professor.
Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Eat me! Drink me!
The baby turns one on Friday--the reason that, once again, I won’t be attending the dazzling-sounding PEN World Writers Festival. Can it be two years since I heard Tsitsi Dangarembga speak? Sigh. Now, Tsitsi has a second novel out, The Book of Not only in England. I’ll try to get my hands on it in August when I’m in London. And Richard Nash kindly sent me the relaunched Transition which includes a story of hers and an interview, too. I read the interview--wonderful and moving about the struggles of writing in Zimbabwe, film school in Germany, and how the success of her first novel came when she’d already moved to film. This explains, in part, the years its taken for her to write the second, but, more generally, it’s a reminder of how contingent and random literary success can be. For Dangarembga, her success took just that much too long that she had embarked on a wholly new project before the waves of success washed back to her.
This year’s PEN festival looks as wonderful as ever. And Bud Parr has gathered a storied group of correspondents to party and cover events over at Metaxu Café. I’ll be watching from the sidelines in between slices of cake. Next year, when the baby is two, I anticipate a less action-packed celebration and may be able to fit in some PEN events alongside the familial festivities.
But turning one is a big. And, so, too, will be our celebrations. Grammy and Papa will be flying in from Seattle for a weekend full of fun. (Quiet and very local, but involving lots of very good food and bubbly, no doubt.) But, what to get the little girl who has everything?
I found her the best present ever!
Don’t tell the baby, but she’s got some very, very nice Alice in Wonderland dishes awaiting her on Friday. They’re from the British Library but I picked mine up in the New York Public Library gift shop, a great place for literary gifts. They have the original manuscript drawings and handwriting. The cup says “DRINK ME”; the plate says “The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts…” and the bowl says “The Marchioness! The Marchioness!...” They’ll go nicely with big sister’s Winnie the Pooh and Peter Rabbit china.
(My sister points out the Virginia Woolf tea towel and asks if purchasing it might not mark a setback for global feminism. Hmm. Still, I'll probably pick one up when I'm in London. I'm a sucker for Woolf kitsch.)
This year’s PEN festival looks as wonderful as ever. And Bud Parr has gathered a storied group of correspondents to party and cover events over at Metaxu Café. I’ll be watching from the sidelines in between slices of cake. Next year, when the baby is two, I anticipate a less action-packed celebration and may be able to fit in some PEN events alongside the familial festivities.
But turning one is a big. And, so, too, will be our celebrations. Grammy and Papa will be flying in from Seattle for a weekend full of fun. (Quiet and very local, but involving lots of very good food and bubbly, no doubt.) But, what to get the little girl who has everything?
I found her the best present ever!
Don’t tell the baby, but she’s got some very, very nice Alice in Wonderland dishes awaiting her on Friday. They’re from the British Library but I picked mine up in the New York Public Library gift shop, a great place for literary gifts. They have the original manuscript drawings and handwriting. The cup says “DRINK ME”; the plate says “The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts…” and the bowl says “The Marchioness! The Marchioness!...” They’ll go nicely with big sister’s Winnie the Pooh and Peter Rabbit china.
(My sister points out the Virginia Woolf tea towel and asks if purchasing it might not mark a setback for global feminism. Hmm. Still, I'll probably pick one up when I'm in London. I'm a sucker for Woolf kitsch.)
Thursday, April 19, 2007
READ THIS: Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead
Well, spring quarter festivities have begun over at the LitBlog Co-op. This quarter's pick is the dreamy and moving Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead by Alan DeNiro. It's a jolly, rich Borgesian ride.
Take this tidbit, for instance, the opening lines to the story "A Keeper": "Tonight the woman who always calls, calls. This time she asks me how to divid a beggar and an arctangent. What could I have possibly said to her? I think she is a keeper. 'Stop trying to mix the humanities and the sciences. And go to be.'"
Take this tidbit, for instance, the opening lines to the story "A Keeper": "Tonight the woman who always calls, calls. This time she asks me how to divid a beggar and an arctangent. What could I have possibly said to her? I think she is a keeper. 'Stop trying to mix the humanities and the sciences. And go to be.'"
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Woolf’s Diary
I’m working my way through Woolf’s diary, with large stacks of post-its in hand, noting everything that might pertain to Mrs. Dalloway and everything that delights, too.
In that latter category, then, comes this reflection from April 18, 1918 on her habit of writing during tea-time:
“There is a grave defect in the scheme of this book which decrees that it must be written after tea. When people come to tea I cant say to them ‘Now wait a minute while I write an account of you’. They go, & its too late to begin.”
In that latter category, then, comes this reflection from April 18, 1918 on her habit of writing during tea-time:
“There is a grave defect in the scheme of this book which decrees that it must be written after tea. When people come to tea I cant say to them ‘Now wait a minute while I write an account of you’. They go, & its too late to begin.”
Friday, April 13, 2007
Sillier than Benjamin
Michael Chabon is not the only fan of Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire. As much as I loved the Greek and Norse myths they collected, retold, and illustrated, I loved their biographies. I still have my beautiful versions of them from childhood: large, lavishly illustrated hardback books, with vivid full-color lithographs on every page and lots text. I have George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Pocahontas, and Abraham Lincoln. I remember reading them over and over to myself when I was six or seven. Although she is only four, I have occasionally read them to my daughter.
When I do, I wonder what she makes of them. She’s so very little, what of these stories captures her imagination?
Well, I got a glimpse the other day when she saw a dollar bill lying next to her piggy bank on the changing table shelf.
“Mama, is that Benjamin Franklin?”
“No, honey, it’s not but that’s a very good guess. It’s George Washington and he was a friend of Benjamin Franklin.” (I wince inwardly at that “friend”, but how else to put it to a four-year-old? “Colleague” seems pretentious and equally inaccurate. “Ally”? “Compatriot”? How, really, to be articulate with her whilst changing her sister’s diaper?) “George Washington,” I add, “was the first President of the United States.”
“What was Benjamin President of?”
“Well, nothing, honey. He worked hard to make the United States into a country.”
“Well, I know someone who’s even sillier than Benjamin.”
?
“ABRAHAM LINCOLN! Can we read that book tonight?”
So we did. As I read along (it takes a good half hour to read the whole book aloud--and that is surely part of the appeal of these books for any child eager to stave off bedtime), I found the “silly” part: it seems that when Lincoln was a rapidly growing young man, his stepmother joked that she was perfectly able to mop the floors of his muddy footprints but he’d best keep his head clean as she was not tall enough to wipe the ceiling. So, to tease her, he took a muddy-footed young friend, held him upside down and had him make footprints across the ceiling. “Abraham, I ought to thrash you!” his stepmother said with a laugh. And then, good boy that he was, he got a bucket of whitewash and cleaned the ceiling for her.
Definitely sillier than Benjamin.
When I do, I wonder what she makes of them. She’s so very little, what of these stories captures her imagination?
Well, I got a glimpse the other day when she saw a dollar bill lying next to her piggy bank on the changing table shelf.
“Mama, is that Benjamin Franklin?”
“No, honey, it’s not but that’s a very good guess. It’s George Washington and he was a friend of Benjamin Franklin.” (I wince inwardly at that “friend”, but how else to put it to a four-year-old? “Colleague” seems pretentious and equally inaccurate. “Ally”? “Compatriot”? How, really, to be articulate with her whilst changing her sister’s diaper?) “George Washington,” I add, “was the first President of the United States.”
“What was Benjamin President of?”
“Well, nothing, honey. He worked hard to make the United States into a country.”
“Well, I know someone who’s even sillier than Benjamin.”
?
“ABRAHAM LINCOLN! Can we read that book tonight?”
So we did. As I read along (it takes a good half hour to read the whole book aloud--and that is surely part of the appeal of these books for any child eager to stave off bedtime), I found the “silly” part: it seems that when Lincoln was a rapidly growing young man, his stepmother joked that she was perfectly able to mop the floors of his muddy footprints but he’d best keep his head clean as she was not tall enough to wipe the ceiling. So, to tease her, he took a muddy-footed young friend, held him upside down and had him make footprints across the ceiling. “Abraham, I ought to thrash you!” his stepmother said with a laugh. And then, good boy that he was, he got a bucket of whitewash and cleaned the ceiling for her.
Definitely sillier than Benjamin.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Mr. Bentley
One of the effects of working on this edition of Mrs. Dalloway has been the discovery of wondrous little details in the text, such as this gem, the appearance of Mr. Bentley, and his thoughts about science and the soul as he watches an airplane fly overhead:
Mr. Bentley, whose cameo ends with this quotation, is a classic Englishman. He’s obsessed with his lawn. Following in the footsteps of Darwin, he sensibly thinks out how “man” thinks through problems of the soul through science, and, in doing so, he hits upon little bits of poetry (“a bright spark,” “sweeping round the cedar tree”). Lovely.
Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory--away the aeroplane shot.The airplane as aspiration is lovely--and it makes me nostalgic for 1925 when a plane could seem so. (Though to most of the central Londoners in the novel, the plane [which is a skywriter, advertising toffee or soap] recalls WWI.)
Mr. Bentley, whose cameo ends with this quotation, is a classic Englishman. He’s obsessed with his lawn. Following in the footsteps of Darwin, he sensibly thinks out how “man” thinks through problems of the soul through science, and, in doing so, he hits upon little bits of poetry (“a bright spark,” “sweeping round the cedar tree”). Lovely.
Books Unblogged
So, the other books (besides Twins) I’ve read but not written about turn out to have something in common: they’re nonfiction.
I enjoyed all three but I think I know why I don’t have much to say about them here: they were best-sellers and easy reads. What’s to say? It’s like offering up an English-to-English translation. I can see, however, why nonfiction so far outsells fiction: decent nonfiction just skips right along. You get a ripping good story, a pleasant sense of the author’s voice, and lots of information, but, really, very little thinking is involved. The point of view doesn’t shift, the metaphors are deliberately pedestrian--making the unusual common rather than the other way around, and the pacing intends to just pull you right along.
So, yes, I liked the book-length Freakonomics as devoutly as I’d enjoyed the article in the Sunday Times. And though I found Julie Powell annoying at times, I got a lot of pleasure out of Julie and Julia. Finally, Simon Winchester’s great tale of the origins of the OED, The Professor and the Madman, did not disappoint.
None of these books disappointed, in fact.
I do want more, however. Deep in Woolf’s diaries, behind in my reading for the LitBlog Co-op, and otherwise feeling the pressure of looming Woolf deadlines, I am pondering, somewhat abstractly and abstractedly, where to turn next…
I enjoyed all three but I think I know why I don’t have much to say about them here: they were best-sellers and easy reads. What’s to say? It’s like offering up an English-to-English translation. I can see, however, why nonfiction so far outsells fiction: decent nonfiction just skips right along. You get a ripping good story, a pleasant sense of the author’s voice, and lots of information, but, really, very little thinking is involved. The point of view doesn’t shift, the metaphors are deliberately pedestrian--making the unusual common rather than the other way around, and the pacing intends to just pull you right along.
So, yes, I liked the book-length Freakonomics as devoutly as I’d enjoyed the article in the Sunday Times. And though I found Julie Powell annoying at times, I got a lot of pleasure out of Julie and Julia. Finally, Simon Winchester’s great tale of the origins of the OED, The Professor and the Madman, did not disappoint.
None of these books disappointed, in fact.
I do want more, however. Deep in Woolf’s diaries, behind in my reading for the LitBlog Co-op, and otherwise feeling the pressure of looming Woolf deadlines, I am pondering, somewhat abstractly and abstractedly, where to turn next…
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Marcy Dermansky’s Twins: Reviewing Late
Heaven only knows why it took me three months to tell you what a fun, hilarious, and touching read Marcy Dermansky’s Twins is. It’s a young adult novel that you can read quickly and with great pleasure and one to give to any of your young reader friends.
Besides, maybe it can give some weight to my recommendation that I’m writing about this book a few months later and there are some things in it that I remember so vividly and with such pleasure. The opening conceit, in which the needier twin convinces her sister that they should celebrate their birthday with lower back tattoos--each will carry her sister’s name forever--is brilliant and immediately raises the stakes for their bond. The novel is all about that desire to brand your beloved forever and all the ways such bonds go awry even as they never go away.
I loved, too, the depiction, late in the book, of life at Hampshire College. The easy, happy, intellectual bohemianism--a carefree, careless atmosphere of sex and drugs and ideas--is perfectly rendered. I was--and am--a very uptight person, but oh! those weekends at Hampshire when I was in college. I used to take the Peter Pan bus from Boston out to the Happy Valley for forty-eight hours of play. Best was when my friend was dating the already dashing Liev Schreiber. I saw them in a production of “The Cherry Orchard” and then we went to a raucous cast party. Dermansky’s version doesn’t have Liev Schreiber, but it matches my memory perfectly.
And it is otherwise a heart-wrenching, wild and sweet story of sisterhood. I want it to be a movie right away.
So, of the books on my desk that I’ve read but haven’t told you about, there’s no excuse for the delay on this one. Grab it and enjoy.
Besides, maybe it can give some weight to my recommendation that I’m writing about this book a few months later and there are some things in it that I remember so vividly and with such pleasure. The opening conceit, in which the needier twin convinces her sister that they should celebrate their birthday with lower back tattoos--each will carry her sister’s name forever--is brilliant and immediately raises the stakes for their bond. The novel is all about that desire to brand your beloved forever and all the ways such bonds go awry even as they never go away.
I loved, too, the depiction, late in the book, of life at Hampshire College. The easy, happy, intellectual bohemianism--a carefree, careless atmosphere of sex and drugs and ideas--is perfectly rendered. I was--and am--a very uptight person, but oh! those weekends at Hampshire when I was in college. I used to take the Peter Pan bus from Boston out to the Happy Valley for forty-eight hours of play. Best was when my friend was dating the already dashing Liev Schreiber. I saw them in a production of “The Cherry Orchard” and then we went to a raucous cast party. Dermansky’s version doesn’t have Liev Schreiber, but it matches my memory perfectly.
And it is otherwise a heart-wrenching, wild and sweet story of sisterhood. I want it to be a movie right away.
So, of the books on my desk that I’ve read but haven’t told you about, there’s no excuse for the delay on this one. Grab it and enjoy.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Mrs. Filmer’s Married Daughter’s Hat
In Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), right before Septimus commits suicide, he helps his wife, an Italian hat-maker, make a hat for “Mrs. Filmer’s married daughter.” I love that name--the complexity and formality of it, the reminder of the name changes for married women, in a novel in which the protagonist, Mrs. Dalloway, thinks about how she’s not Clarrisa anymore (let alone still a Parry). Mrs. Filmer once had a Christian name, a maiden name; her daughter, once a Miss Filmer, is now married with a new surname. Who is she? Who are these women?
Here, then is a bit of the scene for your weekend pleasure--a delightful and happy scene of hat-making just in time for you to don your Easter bonnet, a scene made poignant--perhaps melodramatic--by the impending suicide of a good, shell-shocked man. The scene makes me as happy as Rezia is in the moment--perhaps it will you, too:
It’s the end of this scene that’s so devastating and poignant. The long-suffering Rezia, in her happiness, knows to expect hard times to come and so she saves up the memory of the hat as a memory of what it was like to be a normal married couple with Septimus.
Moments later, he kills himself.
I wonder what she thinks of the hat then.
But in the midst of the scene, none of that is prefigures. Instead, without heavy-handedness, Woolf gives us a joyous glimpse of what we’ve only seen in memory up to now: two people who love each other working together, sharing private jokes and appreciating each other’s strengths. It’s a gorgeous portrait easy marital harmony.
Here, then is a bit of the scene for your weekend pleasure--a delightful and happy scene of hat-making just in time for you to don your Easter bonnet, a scene made poignant--perhaps melodramatic--by the impending suicide of a good, shell-shocked man. The scene makes me as happy as Rezia is in the moment--perhaps it will you, too:
He took it out of her hands. He said it was an organ grinder's monkey's hat.
How it rejoiced her that! Not for weeks had they laughed like this together, poking fun privately like married people. What she meant was that if Mrs. Filmer had come in, or Mrs. Peters or anybody, they would not have understood what she and Septimus were laughing at.
"There," she said, pinning a rose to one side of the hat. Never had she felt so happy! Never in her life!
But that was still more ridiculous, Septimus said. Now the poor woman looked like a pig at a fair. (Nobody ever made her laugh as Septimus did.) What had she got in her work-box? She had ribbons and beads, tassels, artificial flowers. She tumbled them out on the table. He began putting odd colours together--for though he had no fingers, could not even do up a parcel, he had a wonderful eye, and often he was right, sometimes absurd, of course, but sometimes wonderfully right.
"She shall have a beautiful hat! " he murmured, taking up this and that, … But she must be very, very careful, he said, to keep it just as he had made it.
….
It was wonderful. Never had he done anything which made him feel so proud. It was so real, it was so substantial, Mrs. Peters' hat.
“Just look at it," he said.
Yes, it would always make her happy to see that hat.
It’s the end of this scene that’s so devastating and poignant. The long-suffering Rezia, in her happiness, knows to expect hard times to come and so she saves up the memory of the hat as a memory of what it was like to be a normal married couple with Septimus.
Moments later, he kills himself.
I wonder what she thinks of the hat then.
But in the midst of the scene, none of that is prefigures. Instead, without heavy-handedness, Woolf gives us a joyous glimpse of what we’ve only seen in memory up to now: two people who love each other working together, sharing private jokes and appreciating each other’s strengths. It’s a gorgeous portrait easy marital harmony.
Monday, April 02, 2007
How to Write a Negative Review
I love reading negative reviews but I have a hard time writing them. And I wonder about their usefulness, too. A book’s author is often the most attentive reader and I always think of her--of Virginia Woolf’s eloquent and pained responses to reviews, of the reviews I hope and fear to read of my own work one day. (One does exist, by the way, in the new issue of Woolf Studies Annual, but I haven’t seen it yet.) It seems churlish, knowing how hard it is to write a book, to be mean about someone else’s.
But not all books are good, and every book, even a great one, has limitations.
It seems to me that Emily Nussbaum’s review of Deborah Garrison’s new collection of poems in Sunday’s NYTBR offers a great model of a kind of negative review. This is a second collection, a follow-up to a popular and successful first. Nussbaum establishes that with generosity and this pads us against feeling too bad for Garrison (after all, the implication is, she is going to be just fine--as the picture of her, smart, good-looking, and, apparently thriving in a backyard in New Jersey, seems to attest). Nussbaum is careful, too, to note that Garrison’s “Sex in the City”-type poems appealed to her; she found them light but pleasant; she likes “Sex in the City.”
Then, in the last three paragraphs of the review, she zooms out to take a look at the bigger picture.
Garrison is writing about motherhood now. Of poets on that topic, how does her work stack up?
Well, not as well as one might hope. Nussbaum puts Garrison in a large constellation dominated by the stars of late-twentieth century women’s poetry: Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, and, finally, Sylvia Plath:
Nussbaum continues, comparing Garrison to Sylvia Plath. It’s an unfair fight--and Nussbaum acknowledges that--but the point here is to remind ourselves as readers what it feels like not to want more, to read poems about something common--being a mother--and be left feeling stunned, amazed, transported.
But not all books are good, and every book, even a great one, has limitations.
It seems to me that Emily Nussbaum’s review of Deborah Garrison’s new collection of poems in Sunday’s NYTBR offers a great model of a kind of negative review. This is a second collection, a follow-up to a popular and successful first. Nussbaum establishes that with generosity and this pads us against feeling too bad for Garrison (after all, the implication is, she is going to be just fine--as the picture of her, smart, good-looking, and, apparently thriving in a backyard in New Jersey, seems to attest). Nussbaum is careful, too, to note that Garrison’s “Sex in the City”-type poems appealed to her; she found them light but pleasant; she likes “Sex in the City.”
Then, in the last three paragraphs of the review, she zooms out to take a look at the bigger picture.
Garrison is writing about motherhood now. Of poets on that topic, how does her work stack up?
Well, not as well as one might hope. Nussbaum puts Garrison in a large constellation dominated by the stars of late-twentieth century women’s poetry: Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, and, finally, Sylvia Plath:
But is it wrong to want more? Since …midcentury, … there has been a flood of smart, morbid, searching, sometimes outrageous writing on maternity. The best such poems burn off the pink sentimentality of motherhood in favor of something wilder and more surprising. …This, “is it wrong to want more?” is, I think, a key question of reviewing. I’ve just finished a book that didn’t do it for me and that wanting more was the whole problem: the author built a world for me and then didn’t really do much with his creations. All the lovely sentences built towards predictability, beauty without momentum, cruelty. I wanted more.
Nussbaum continues, comparing Garrison to Sylvia Plath. It’s an unfair fight--and Nussbaum acknowledges that--but the point here is to remind ourselves as readers what it feels like not to want more, to read poems about something common--being a mother--and be left feeling stunned, amazed, transported.
To my mind, the great unsung poet of motherhood is Sylvia Plath. She may have a reputation as the ultimate misery chick, but in fact, her writing overflows with talk of birth, of breastfeeding and motherhood, much of it, despite sad undercurrents, loving and celebratory. In the gorgeous “Nick and the Candlestick,” for instance, Plath writes “O love, how did you get here? / O embryo / Remembering, even in sleep, / Your crossed position. / The blood blooms clean / In you, ruby.” The poem ends with one of her most moving images: “You are the one / Solid the spaces lean on, envious. / You are the baby in the barn.” In poems like this, and in her finest descriptions (as when a newborn’s “clear vowels rise like balloons”), Plath makes strange what should be familiar — which is, after all, a central task of poetry.
It’s unfair, of course, to expect Garrison to be like Plath. She has her own gifts and an audience sure to appreciate them. In real life, I’d rather have a likable next-door neighbor than a bipolar goddess as a confidante. But in writing? Give me the strange mother over the sweet one any day.
Where Have I Been?
My desk at home, where I work only at night when my husband is home and upstairs, is in our bedroom. When we set up this desk, we imagined the always overflowing shelf above my workspace as a convenient spot for a few books currently essential to my work. We wanted to keep the bedroom a sanctuary, in spite of the space restrictions of apartment living.
Well, here we are, ten months later, and the stack here includes, among many other things, all the books I’ve read but not yet told you about. Plus a few leftovers from the LitBlog Co-op last quarter--things that I haven’t yet filed elsewhere or about which I’m still thinking. Every time, for example, I see Demon Theory, I’m paralyzed about what to do with it. I didn’t like it, but my dislike turned to fascination as I thought more about the book. I don’t really want to give it away, nor do I want it on display. So there it sits.
And the other week was, well, stressful. Things at work were a little intense--good, but intense. And then I went to the CCCC’s conference at the end of the week (two weeks ago now): that’s the big conference on teaching writing (composition, not creative writing) at the college level. I had all sorts of split motives all the time. I considered attending a joint presentation by Joy Harjo and Lee Marmon (a photographer and the father of Leslie Marmon Silko) but decided that I would do better to go to a smaller, wonkier presentation.
At the wonk-fest, I was bored (as I’d expected to be) but imagine my double disappointment upon arriving at the book exhibit to find Joy Harjo kitted out entirely in red satin, signing books.
I meant, then, to make up for that by going to hear Dorothy Allison, but I ran into a bunch of old friends and our conversation was so fun and good that I missed her, too: I had to run off to a department meeting. And so it goes.
Well, here we are, ten months later, and the stack here includes, among many other things, all the books I’ve read but not yet told you about. Plus a few leftovers from the LitBlog Co-op last quarter--things that I haven’t yet filed elsewhere or about which I’m still thinking. Every time, for example, I see Demon Theory, I’m paralyzed about what to do with it. I didn’t like it, but my dislike turned to fascination as I thought more about the book. I don’t really want to give it away, nor do I want it on display. So there it sits.
And the other week was, well, stressful. Things at work were a little intense--good, but intense. And then I went to the CCCC’s conference at the end of the week (two weeks ago now): that’s the big conference on teaching writing (composition, not creative writing) at the college level. I had all sorts of split motives all the time. I considered attending a joint presentation by Joy Harjo and Lee Marmon (a photographer and the father of Leslie Marmon Silko) but decided that I would do better to go to a smaller, wonkier presentation.
At the wonk-fest, I was bored (as I’d expected to be) but imagine my double disappointment upon arriving at the book exhibit to find Joy Harjo kitted out entirely in red satin, signing books.
I meant, then, to make up for that by going to hear Dorothy Allison, but I ran into a bunch of old friends and our conversation was so fun and good that I missed her, too: I had to run off to a department meeting. And so it goes.
Friday, March 30, 2007
A more familiar problem of time
I'm still here--barely. Swamped by bureaucracy and hoping to re-emerge refreshed from the weekend.
The baby fell off the bed yesterday. She is fine, but will be sporting quite a shiner for her baptism on Sunday.
Back to the memos and meetings for now.
Back to books on Monday, d.v.
The baby fell off the bed yesterday. She is fine, but will be sporting quite a shiner for her baptism on Sunday.
Back to the memos and meetings for now.
Back to books on Monday, d.v.
Monday, March 19, 2007
New DeLillo--Falling Man and the Problem of Time
When Bud and I had lunch, we talked about blogging and the future of book blogging and the reasons why it can be hard to get a conversation going on a book blog.
The problem, it seems to me, is the problem of time.
While we all follow the news on the same day, we aren’t--thank God--reading the same books at the same time. That’s why, for lively discussion and a change of pace, I love the success of some of the great reading group blogs like 400 Windmills (Quixote), A Curious Singularity (short fiction), and the LitBlog Co-op (contemporary literature).
More fiercely than that, though, I love the ability to choose to read whatever in the world I want to read next, regardless of what is being talked about.
And the forthcoming DeLillo is a great example of that.
My upstairs neighbor is in the book business. She came by the new DeLillo and passed it on to me. I read it and gave it to a student who’s a huge fan. (JRG: If you read this, maybe you could put the first paragraph into the comments to satisfy the commenters?) So now, a couple months before it’ll start showing up everywhere else, I’ve read it.
And, oddly enough, it’s the only DeLillo I’ve read. So, what can I tell you about it?
It’s a 9/11 novel. It’s wonderful. My guess--confirmed by my student--is that it’s excellent but not the very, very best of his work.
It opens on the morning of September 11, 2001, after the collapse of the first tower, with a dust-covered and bleeding man walking uptown, briefcase in hand. In shock, he steers himself to his ex-wife’s apartment.
From there, we follow him, his wife and son, his wife’s mother & her boyfriend, and the owner of the briefcase, in those dark, confusing weeks after September 11. There are also several interpolated chapters--stunning and moving and deeply upsetting--following the life (and death) of one of the suicide bombers. DeLillo captures the uncertain mood of those days perfectly but this is not a novel about that strange grief-stricken elation, that “we are all Americans now” mood that the war so effectively killed. Instead, it’s a novel about mounting anger, anxiety, and nervousness. Maybe it’s a novel about the mood that led to the war. The children--the son and his friends--are incredibly wonderful, creepily watching the skies with binoculars.
Best, for me, was the brittle anger of the ex-wife, lying next to her husband in bed, wondering if they would ever make love again, washing his clothes separately, and, most chillingly, letting herself think racist thoughts--doesn’t that music sound Arabic? Is that blouse Morroccan? Why is she wearing that blouse in these difficult times? Why is she listening to that music in these sensitive times?
Oh, those poisonous thoughts. Oh, the marvel of watching DeLillo reveal the poisonous thoughts of an ordinary unhappy woman to us.
There is neither hand-wringing nor kumbaya here. Just carefully observed, horrible, limited, and ordinary upper-middle class white Americans burrowing back into the Upper East Side.
So, months from now, when the book comes out, when people start talking about it, perhaps you’ll remember reading this little meditation-cum-review and think to pick up the book. But, by then, where will the comments thread on this post be? You’ll post your reaction on your own blog and our imperfect, ill-timed conversation will carry on imperfectly, at its own lugubrious and erratic pace.
The problem, it seems to me, is the problem of time.
While we all follow the news on the same day, we aren’t--thank God--reading the same books at the same time. That’s why, for lively discussion and a change of pace, I love the success of some of the great reading group blogs like 400 Windmills (Quixote), A Curious Singularity (short fiction), and the LitBlog Co-op (contemporary literature).
More fiercely than that, though, I love the ability to choose to read whatever in the world I want to read next, regardless of what is being talked about.
And the forthcoming DeLillo is a great example of that.
My upstairs neighbor is in the book business. She came by the new DeLillo and passed it on to me. I read it and gave it to a student who’s a huge fan. (JRG: If you read this, maybe you could put the first paragraph into the comments to satisfy the commenters?) So now, a couple months before it’ll start showing up everywhere else, I’ve read it.
And, oddly enough, it’s the only DeLillo I’ve read. So, what can I tell you about it?
It’s a 9/11 novel. It’s wonderful. My guess--confirmed by my student--is that it’s excellent but not the very, very best of his work.
It opens on the morning of September 11, 2001, after the collapse of the first tower, with a dust-covered and bleeding man walking uptown, briefcase in hand. In shock, he steers himself to his ex-wife’s apartment.
From there, we follow him, his wife and son, his wife’s mother & her boyfriend, and the owner of the briefcase, in those dark, confusing weeks after September 11. There are also several interpolated chapters--stunning and moving and deeply upsetting--following the life (and death) of one of the suicide bombers. DeLillo captures the uncertain mood of those days perfectly but this is not a novel about that strange grief-stricken elation, that “we are all Americans now” mood that the war so effectively killed. Instead, it’s a novel about mounting anger, anxiety, and nervousness. Maybe it’s a novel about the mood that led to the war. The children--the son and his friends--are incredibly wonderful, creepily watching the skies with binoculars.
Best, for me, was the brittle anger of the ex-wife, lying next to her husband in bed, wondering if they would ever make love again, washing his clothes separately, and, most chillingly, letting herself think racist thoughts--doesn’t that music sound Arabic? Is that blouse Morroccan? Why is she wearing that blouse in these difficult times? Why is she listening to that music in these sensitive times?
Oh, those poisonous thoughts. Oh, the marvel of watching DeLillo reveal the poisonous thoughts of an ordinary unhappy woman to us.
There is neither hand-wringing nor kumbaya here. Just carefully observed, horrible, limited, and ordinary upper-middle class white Americans burrowing back into the Upper East Side.
So, months from now, when the book comes out, when people start talking about it, perhaps you’ll remember reading this little meditation-cum-review and think to pick up the book. But, by then, where will the comments thread on this post be? You’ll post your reaction on your own blog and our imperfect, ill-timed conversation will carry on imperfectly, at its own lugubrious and erratic pace.
Friday, March 09, 2007
Spring Break
I'm off to Florida with my family for a week.
I'm sure you'll find plenty to read in my absence...
I'm sure you'll find plenty to read in my absence...
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Those Dry & Witty Stracheys
One of the great, great pleasures of editing--gleaning great quotations from the reviews one edits. My favorite in a long time is this, from my friend Jay's review of a biography of the Strachey family (Lytton was the most famous brother, a great friend of Woolf and author of the terrific Eminent Victorians). Lytton's sister Pernel describes to her elder sister Pippa of a typical Newnham College nightly ritual:
I have got to go to a hideous entertainment called a cocoa; you are given one spoonful of powdery cocoa and one spoonful of ‘cow’ that is condensed milk. These you mix together in a cup of milk till they look like mud; boiling water is then poured on, the next process being to try and drink it. Weird cakes are also passed around. At 10 o’clock at night this depresses me somewhat.
Monday, March 05, 2007
Delta Zeta at DePauw: Sisterhood is Global?
I’m still chewing over the horrific, tragicomic events at DePauw’s chapter of Delta Zeta sorority. You may have read the article in the Times last weekend: representatives from the national headquarters of the sorority had been unhappy with the house for some time. It was not full and had a reputation for attracting members who were a little too smart and not quite pretty enough… I could stop right there and be justified in my outrage.
Anyway, representatives from national swooped in and summarily evicted 23 members--including all (or, according to some reports, all but one) minorities and everyone who was a little overweight. Of the twelve remaining “sisters,” six resigned in protest over the action.
The heartless women from national evicted these women on December 2, just before finals, as has been widely reported. In an eloquent letter of protest to Delta Zeta’s headquarters from DePauw’s president, Robert Bottoms, he notes that the timing of the notices created “an unacceptable disruption in the academic lives of our students.” I can only imagine the distress of these young women, most of whom care about their grades and their education, upon learning this news just as they were gearing up to study for exams.
This action--and the DZ officials’ lame, double-talking justifications of it on CNN and elsewhere--has only reconfirmed my very worst suspicions of what is wrong with sororities and the Greek system in general. I am outraged at the evictions themselves--so antithetical to sisterhood--and the timing of them--so hostile to education. Susie Bright, so clever and so much brasher than I, writes about how the “Greek system is founded on discriminations of race, class, and family— sugar-coated over the years as a ‘way to make friends.’” Then she gets to the heart of what is so sickening about this action--and so heartening about the admirable, brave behavior of the young DePauw women since. She reminds us how sororities “prey on every freshman's fear of being lonely and miserable.” Furthermore, she says, let us not forget what it means that DZ national so prizes pretty women who are good at “recruiting”:
I taught at DePauw for four years and I remember Delta Zeta as an all right sorority. On a campus where the vast majority of students belong to a sorority, it was difficult to maintain my natural suspicion of the Greek system. And, as you might imagine, when three quarters of the students are “Greek,” some of the sororities and fraternities turn out to be all right--not as horrific and exclusionary as the usual run of such organizations. Newsweek quotes DePauw’s Dean of Students as praising the old DZ for filling "a great, eclectic niche." That’s not, as Newsweek notes, typical of sororities. Still, the model of houses (maybe) being like special interest dormitories was the one that prevailed when I was at DePauw. And, judging by the school’s memo of its recommitment to Greek Life, it continues to be the hope of the DePauw administration.
I do not see how anyone can continue to countenance that hope in the face of these events. It’s time for the sororities and fraternities to go. It’s time to find a better way to help college students find friends and overcome the social terror of moving from home into the world.
There was a lot of talk all over the web about this last week. MommyPhD does some eloquent hand-wringing over this--she is a DZ alum; BitchPhD praised the sisterhood of the resigning six--everyone’s heroes, for sure; some well-meaning but naïve mothers and boyfriends are quoted over at mothertalkers; Jennifer Weiner is mad, too. And you can find more at the university website and the very good student newspaper.
Anyway, representatives from national swooped in and summarily evicted 23 members--including all (or, according to some reports, all but one) minorities and everyone who was a little overweight. Of the twelve remaining “sisters,” six resigned in protest over the action.
The heartless women from national evicted these women on December 2, just before finals, as has been widely reported. In an eloquent letter of protest to Delta Zeta’s headquarters from DePauw’s president, Robert Bottoms, he notes that the timing of the notices created “an unacceptable disruption in the academic lives of our students.” I can only imagine the distress of these young women, most of whom care about their grades and their education, upon learning this news just as they were gearing up to study for exams.
This action--and the DZ officials’ lame, double-talking justifications of it on CNN and elsewhere--has only reconfirmed my very worst suspicions of what is wrong with sororities and the Greek system in general. I am outraged at the evictions themselves--so antithetical to sisterhood--and the timing of them--so hostile to education. Susie Bright, so clever and so much brasher than I, writes about how the “Greek system is founded on discriminations of race, class, and family— sugar-coated over the years as a ‘way to make friends.’” Then she gets to the heart of what is so sickening about this action--and so heartening about the admirable, brave behavior of the young DePauw women since. She reminds us how sororities “prey on every freshman's fear of being lonely and miserable.” Furthermore, she says, let us not forget what it means that DZ national so prizes pretty women who are good at “recruiting”:
It's the heightened heterosexual regime of trophy wife assembly. These young women must learn to project the promise of Virgin WASP Money while getting sloshed and performing merit-based blow jobs on a calculated ladder of potential husbands, i.e., frat-brats. Plenty of the De Pauw ‘undesirables’ had boyfriends and sex lives— they just weren't ‘partying’ hard enough. Yep, their booze and tease stats were too low to qualify.Disgustingly put--and deservedly so. Bright’s vulgarity lays bare the vulgarity of how the Greek system continues an old-fashioned middle-class marriage market in which women attend college to secure their class position not through career but through marriage.
I taught at DePauw for four years and I remember Delta Zeta as an all right sorority. On a campus where the vast majority of students belong to a sorority, it was difficult to maintain my natural suspicion of the Greek system. And, as you might imagine, when three quarters of the students are “Greek,” some of the sororities and fraternities turn out to be all right--not as horrific and exclusionary as the usual run of such organizations. Newsweek quotes DePauw’s Dean of Students as praising the old DZ for filling "a great, eclectic niche." That’s not, as Newsweek notes, typical of sororities. Still, the model of houses (maybe) being like special interest dormitories was the one that prevailed when I was at DePauw. And, judging by the school’s memo of its recommitment to Greek Life, it continues to be the hope of the DePauw administration.
I do not see how anyone can continue to countenance that hope in the face of these events. It’s time for the sororities and fraternities to go. It’s time to find a better way to help college students find friends and overcome the social terror of moving from home into the world.
There was a lot of talk all over the web about this last week. MommyPhD does some eloquent hand-wringing over this--she is a DZ alum; BitchPhD praised the sisterhood of the resigning six--everyone’s heroes, for sure; some well-meaning but naïve mothers and boyfriends are quoted over at mothertalkers; Jennifer Weiner is mad, too. And you can find more at the university website and the very good student newspaper.
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