Fernham

Two Boxes

2008-07-03T12:00:00.000-04:00

I love reading others’ lists of the books taken on vacation and I have begun to learn the folly of thinking that a lot is going to get read.

But.

This is the closest I can get to a writer’s retreat—and maybe better, for the children are here, but happy in another’s care all morning, under the eyes of a beloved grandmother and great-grandmother all day long—so, I did have to bring some books with me. Two boxes worth, it turns out.

The big project for this month is the continuing saga of the edition of Mrs. Dalloway so there are binders, folders, and files for that: I have a photocopy of the first British and American editions, a copy of the Hogarth Press Universal edition, my lovely graph paper spiral binder of notes, three other notebooks (one full, one empty, one half full) for notes and thoughts. I also have the transcription of The Hours, the manuscript version of MD, as I have come to call her; two volumes of Woolf’s diaries; three volumes of her letters; seven monographs on Woolf; each of Woolf’s pre-MD novels to re-read for earlier anticipations of Dalloway-ish themes; The Norton Anthology of Poetry to peruse for allusions, and Ovid, Aristotle, and Aeschylus (all in translation, I must add) to shame me into intelligence and peruse for allusions, too.

Also on hand, of course are a couple Woolfish books for pleasure reading when I want a break but don’t want to stray too far: Ruth Gruber’s Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman, a dissertation by a young Jewish-American girl who studied in Germany in the 30s and corresponded with Woolf. (In her 90s, Gruber now lives in Manhattan.), and Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece.

And then, for pleasure, I brought the following:

The Ha Ha Bonk Book (English jokes for children—it might rain and my older daughter and I need more jokes to tell each other),
Out Stealing Horses,
I was told there’d be cake (finished already!),
The Wartime Journals of Molly Painter-Downes, the only Persephone book thin enough for me to bring (though I seem not to have exercised restraint elsewhere, that somehow became an issue when looking at the three or four unread Persephones on my shelf),
Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (also brought last summer—and perhaps, in fact, pilfered from my mother-in-law’s considerable library—but still unread),
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time—poems! Purchased at Three Lives because there was a poem from that book featured during National Poetry Month that really moved me and, not reading enough poetry, I figured that if a poem moves me, I should seize that feeling;
I’d Like, by Amanda Michalapolou, whom I heard read and speak at the PEN festival. I’ve read the first few and loved them but the book somehow got abandoned midway through;
Three Cups of Tea, a sentimental-looking book about building schools in Afghanistan. I got it for Christmas and want to read it, know I should scorn it to be cool, don’t want to be cool, expect to enjoy it;
The Untelling;
Drown (still haven’t read Diaz!);
Say You’re One of Them; and
Agent Zigzag about a British double agent in WWII—I’m six pages in and already having nightmares about Nazis.

Do you think that’s going to be enough?

A Useful Life

2008-07-02T14:18:00.000-04:00

Not sure how I feel about this diary entry from August 1920:

“I raise my head from making a patchwork quilt. This is the day of month when I dispatch darning & other needle work, & do in truth more useful work than on days of free intelligence. How shifting & vacillating one’s mind is! Yesterday broody & drowsy all day long, writing easily, & yet without strict consciousness, as though fluent under drugs: today apparently clear headed, yet unable to put one sentence after another—sat for an hour, scratching out, putting in, scratching out; & then read [Sophocles’] Trachiniae with comparative ease—always comparative—oh dear me! (D 2.59; 19 August 1920)

That Woolf sometimes felt her household chores mattered more than her writing is disorienting. It’s kind of comforting, but it’s also unnerving. Does no one ever settle in to satisfaction? Besides, I’ve never heard of Trachiniae, let alone attempted to read it in Greek—with ease or difficulty. I have trouble feeling confident of the letters on those stupid sorority sweatshirts.

En Vacance

2008-07-02T12:00:00.000-04:00

For the past few years, our Julys have been a complicated dance: weeks spent in my mother-in-law’s house in Utica; weekends in her idyllic but tiny cabin on the shore of the St. Lawrence River. Because the River is seven hours from Jersey City, we cannot make the trip in a weekend; because the River house is so small, we cannot all stay there for a week. So, I packed and unpacked, did laundry, forgot teddy in one place and the Tevas in another.

This year, suddenly, a new plan: how about renting a house on the River, just down the road?

(Cue the sound of heavenly angels, a choir of Thoreauvian sages.)

So, we have rented a charming, plain vanilla cottage and hired a babysitter for the mornings. The girls wander down the road at 8:30 and play till lunch. We read and write till one or two. I sit at the dining room table overlooking the River, trees framing the view, Wolfe Island in the distance, the muffled sound of children playing at Cedar Point State Park off to the side. My husband sits at the other end of the house, doing his work.

What could be better?

Blogging in Absentia

2008-07-01T20:37:00.000-04:00

I’m up on the St. Lawrence River for the month with only occasional internet access. Blogger finally has a feature to make posts in one’s absence, so I’ll roll out what I’ve written day by day, but won’t be here to tend to things.

Still, I think mainly what you’ll notice is not my absence but my presence. Away from the city and the Google and Keith Olbermann and NPR, I’m writing more than I’ve done in ages.

Those chain stores

2008-06-25T20:40:00.001-04:00

So, I was going to leave work early and head over to spend my giftcard at Bloomingdale’s. The truth is, though, that I really dread shopping for clothes, especially solo, so I frittered my time away until I really couldn’t justify the cross-town excursion.

Still, I wanted a small diversion on the way home.

A book. I was talking books with my father this morning and we agreed that The Kite Runner which I gobbled is very diverting. He’s enjoying the new one now and said that another one I might like is A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian.

Well, when I was browsing around The Tattered Cover in Denver last weekend, I had seen Strawberry Fields recommended, had considered it, having heard good things about the first, but ultimately didn’t buy it.

My father said that he enjoyed the story of feuding sisters and a father slowly descending into senility. He said that it rang bells for him. (Did I mention he is a Yankee? A very dry one.)

So, I popped into the Time Warner Center (ugh—but between work and the subway) and up to Borders. But what was the book called? I got on their information computer: a search of “tractor” yielded board books on farming for children. “Ukraine” got me to guide books. A combination got nothing. I asked a clerk. He was using the same exact computer as I (shouldn’t employees be connected to a better database—an industry one, or books in print, or WorldCat?), had never heard of the book, and assured me that he knew a lot about contemporary fiction and that this book just didn’t exist.

I whipped out my iPhone and got trapped in the evil welcome message from T-Mobile.

I left the store.

On the escalator down, I googled “tractor ukraine” and the first hit was to an amazon page about Marina Lewycka’s novel. (The Complete Review’s coverage is here; an interview with the Guardian, here.) I rode the train down to West Fourth, walked through the Village (all abuzz for the coming of Pride Week, rainbows everywhere), walked into Three Lives (Best. Bookstore. Ever.) where the clerks were deep into heated discussions of a) alternative cold remedies and b) the Mets, found the book, bought it, an essay collection for my husband, and I was told there would be cake for me.

Hooray!

Do you always look for the longest day of the year...

2008-06-23T22:11:00.002-04:00

...and then miss it? I always look for the longest day of the year and then miss it.--misquoting Daisy Buchanan.

Like Cam, I have been happy, busy (tenure, a conference in Seattle--where I saw my family & played with my daughters & their cousins, a summer school course on Woolf, another conference in Denver) and wholly unmotivated to blog.

On Saturday, we head to upstate New York for the annual five weeks of messing about in boats. Will there be writing? Yes! Blogging? I think so!

In the meantime, well, I am still here, hale and hearty, training for the Boilermaker (15K!), using all my "points" on Weightwatchers for white wine...

Woolf & Spies

2008-06-11T10:28:00.002-04:00

Via the vwoolf listserv, from a week or so back.

Seems I'm not the only one obsessed with Woolf and James Bond....

If I could bring an author back to life...

In the week that Sebastian Faulks revived the work of Ian Fleming, we asked five writers to do the same for their favourite novelists

Katy Guest chooses Virginia Woolf

A plausible charmer once told me that my email style reminded him of Virginia Woolf's obscurer essays. He later said that I looked like her, which spoiled the compliment, but of course I wish I could write like that. Who else could be so thrilling in a story in which hardly anything happens? Sebastian Faulks says that Bond was difficult to write because he has "almost no internal life". Then Woolf's novels are the anti-Bond: her characters have interior life – to the exclusion of much else. In fact, Bond would be about the same age as the six year-old James in To the Lighthouse. Which could explain a lot...

To the Spy Who Loved Me

"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs Bond. "But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled that the target practice were bound to take place, and the karate lesson to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a quick fumble on the beach with the lighthouse keeper's crippled daughter, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan of English public schoolboys who cannot express any emotion at all, and must let future prospects, of mutilating mackerel and throwing them back into the sea, foreshadow what is actually at hand, since to such people any expression of suffocating motherly compassion or paternal disapproval has the power to crystallise and fix the moment somewhere only the best-paid Harley Street shrink could ever find it, James Bond, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of Italian-made Beretta 418s, endowed that picture of cold steel with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The Aston Martin DB5, the Rolex submariner, the sound of heavy breathing, a naked girl softly singing on a beach – all these were so coloured and distinguished in the mind of this image of handsome British manhood unformed, though there was something a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors with deadly skill around the pictures, imagined that it might take only the slightest disappointment to this childish sensibility, the smallest snub from a figure of authority, to turn this sweet, rumple-haired child into a ruthless killer.

"But," said his father, stopping in front of the drawing room window, "it won't be fine."

More Woolf

2008-06-10T12:00:00.001-04:00

Elisa Sparks is working on a Second Life Woolf project and blogging about her progress here. (I’ll confess, I had no idea what Second Life even was, but Elisa’s site is informative: it’s a virtual world, like video gaming sites or Webkinz, but without all the ads, presumably. You can see more here.

And the Woolf Society of Great Britain is sponsoring an essay contest in memory of the late, great, and much missed Julia Briggs: 3,000 words on Woolf as a common reader. The prize is £250.

My copy of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany arrived at last and with it, my review of the Glendenning biography of Leonard. Opposite that, Suzette Henke’s review of me. It’s positive and eloquent, so I am really, really pleased. But most stirring of all—these first two are not stirring at all, just a little exciting—were the remembrances of Julia. They were so moving that I could not finish them. I have gone for months without thinking of her often or with much emotion, but then to read remembrances of her kindness by friends and Woolf scholars whom I admire brought it all back. It is amazing how many lives a good person can touch.

Jolie Woolf: Passing Glances

2008-06-09T13:55:00.000-04:00

So, I bought the June Vanity Fair in order to read Todd Purdum’s article on the end of Bill Clinton (scary, good). As a bonus, Angelina Jolie is on the cover and there’s a nice interview with her about how happy she is to be pregnant, how much she loves motherhood, blah, blah, blah. It’s embarrassingly riveting. For all my education, I still do love reading celebrity profiles and there is something especially fascinating to me these days in reading those of the “I’m a working mom, too” variety. Shame!

But there, in tiny six-point font on the magazine’s cover, on Jolie’s left upper arm, is this quotation: “As a woman I have no country. My country is the whole world.”—Virginia Woolf.

You have to smile.

The quotation is from Woolf’s 1938 pacifist pamphlet, Three Guineas. It was wildly unpopular when published for it linked patriarchy to fascism, forcing the English to look inward at their complicity with the rise of Hitler precisely when it was most convenient and expedient to demonize the fascists. Women have no country, in Woolf’s argument, because a country offers benefits in exchange for loyalty and women have gotten nothing from their country—no citizenship rights, no legal standing as individuals, no inheritance, no right even to serve.

So it’s askew of the original context, but not completely perverse, to apply it to Jolie, the current poster child for UN Refugees and international adoption. It’s very weird—and non-Woolfian—to make this quotation so earth-mother-y, but it’s right and very Woolfian to recall us to global connections beyond politics, to remind us of the real lives of people who are at once utterly without a voice in politics and, at the same time, grossly affected by—made homeless by—politics.

Closer to Fine

2008-06-06T15:01:00.002-04:00

My friend and former colleague Meri Weiss’ novel, Closer to Fine is about to come out. If you’re looking for a take on contemporary bohemian New York, this is one to check out: it’s the kind of book that might once have gotten the nod from the Lit Blog Co-op, the kind of book that deserves to find readers. If you know anyone just graduating from college, get a copy for them. The book is deliciously, astutely in touch with the kind of relationship angst that sets in in the early twenties: not just about lovers, but about questioning sexuality, figuring out how to get along with siblings, sorting friends who can stand in for family from those who are just fun to have a beer with. I read it in manuscript and you can find my blurb buried deep on Meri’s website. It’s a quick, fun read though I think I’m probably a little old for it. Still, it is a really sincere, moving look at the life of a smart/dumb young woman trying to figure it out. At her best, Meri channels a Bloomsbury ethos, a James Baldwin in Another Country vibe.

Curious? She’ll be reading at McNally Robinson on June 24th. And you can befriend her on facebook, too…

Editor! Editor!

2008-06-04T18:03:00.003-04:00

My father remains my best line-editor. Others--my husband, my writing group, my colleagues around the world--are wonderful for helping me with the big ideas, the implications of theory, the allusions and notions that I've missed or wrongly emphasized, but for elegant styling, my father remains the best.

So, when I sent him a copy of my paper on Kim Philby's memoir, I was not surprised to receive, in response, a brief nod of praise followed by five or six instances where he noted an inconsistency, a moment of confusion. This one, in particular, however, continues to amaze me. My paper has a long meditation on the ironies of Kim Philby taking his name from the Kipling novel, Kim. My father thought it might be worth a footnote to add:

Of course, the fictional Kim spies for crown and Empire, while Philby successfully did the reverse.

When I went to add that lovely small observation in my paper, I grew self-conscious about lifting his language entire, so I momentarily put:

Of course, the fictional Kim spies for crown and Empire, while Philby worked against it.

Not nearly as good, is it? My flat-footed pairing of for vs. against lacks the elegance of "did the reverse."

I can't quite figure out why his is so much better. Can you?

Needless to say, his phrasing now stands.

Where I've been, etc...

2008-06-02T10:26:00.002-04:00

So...it's been a little while and, with summer school underway and a Woolf conference coming up, things are still pretty busy around here. But I haven't forgotten about this poor little neglected blog.

I was in Seattle for a week, visiting family and giving a conference paper. And, just before leaving, I got the official word: I have tenure. Hooray. And phew.

It wasn't ever really in doubt, I guess, but I must say, I haven't enjoyed the process of awaiting the official word.

Five-Paragraph Essays

2008-05-14T12:23:00.001-04:00

I don’t usually blog about teaching and I have no intention of starting. Nonetheless, in honor of the end of spring term, I wanted to share this lovely little parody from the current issue of College Composition and Communication. The whole piece, five paragraphs long, is worth a look if you can get yourself to a research library database (CCC 59.3, Feb. 08, 524-5). Xerox it. Paste it on your door. Distribute it widely amongst all the young writers you know.

My Five-Paragraph-Theme Theme
Ed White
Since the beginning of time, some college teachers have mocked the five-paragraph theme. But I intend to show that they have been mistaken. There are three reasons why I always write five-paragraph themes…”

Ah! Music to my ears.

Years ago, an undergraduate humor magazine at Harvard published a parody of the compare/contrast essay by “Duffy Sasser.” Now that was choice satire. It compared Hamlet to Romeo and Juliet contending that they were similar in that they were both plays, with characters, in five acts, by Shakespeare, that ended with characters dying, and had the theme of time and death but that they were different in that one was set in Denmark the other in Italy…

Sadly, I lost my copy of that, but if any one can dig it up for me, I’ll be very grateful!

In the meantime, happy essay writing….!

I love Lynda Barry

2008-05-13T13:38:00.003-04:00

Oh, she makes me so happy! She was the main reason to read The Rocket back in the day before The Stranger overtook it as Seattle's best free weekly.

Once, I was visiting a friend. I was 20; my friend, 30ish. A woman came across the street and they started an urgent chat about husbands, babies, pregnancy--all very intimate and fascinating and beyond me. The woman, the neighbor, apologized for interrupting our tea, and left.

It was Lynda Barry.

I still rue my shyness, my uncertainty that it really was her.

Anyway, the NYT slideshow, showcasing her new writing book is very exciting: just the kind of writing workbook to inspire. And she sounds very kind.

Cloak and dagger

2008-05-08T20:46:00.001-04:00

When I sought to build a literary life, I imagined fame. What’s come to pass is smaller but maybe more delightful. This weekend, surrounding the PEN Festival, I learned three secrets. That is, I learned that three semi-anonymous or pseudonymous people with cool jobs are actually friends of mine: 1) I know the pseudonymous blogger over at “Of Books and Bicycles”--we chatted at the Eco-Rushdie-Vargas Llosa event and she revealed her blogging identity to me!, 2) not PEN-related but very cool, an old friend and former teacher emailed this morning, apologizing for not having gotten in touch when she was briefly in New York--to testify as an expert witness on J. K. Rowling’s behalf in this month’s Harry Potter trial, and 3) I have been good friends for decades with the translator of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, an exposé on the mafia.

Who knew my friends were leading such cool double lives?

As for me, when I’m not blogging here, I tend to be negotiating t.v. privileges with beloved but demanding daughters--“No, honey, you got to watch Dora all morning. It’s your sister’s turn to pick a show.”

PEN Projections: Translation and Original

2008-05-07T20:44:00.001-04:00

I want to underscore my support for this new(ish) plan of having writers read in their native language whilst a screen projects the English words. I am totally with Garth on this one:

In what I believe is a new twist, writers read in their first language, with a translation projected onto a screen behind them. I applaud this, in theory; in a festival that prides itself on a global outlook, it seems questionable to force readers into English. That said, the projectionist's manic-depressive speeding-up and slowing-down of the scrolling text added a rather surreal dimension to the evening.

This would have been such an asset for Francesc Seres, the Catalan writer whose work I wish I understood better. And, much as I enjoyed Eco’s reading, I was really bothered by the fact that the projectionist scrolled through the English at such a breakneck pace that we reached the end of our text a full five minutes before Eco had done reading. If PEN can get this system to really work, with projectionists who speak the language, can follow along, and scroll without making our stomachs lurch, then I think the festival will really stand a chance to become a much richer celebration of World Voices. There is something deeply moving about hearing the writer speak in her own tongue: you get an intuitive connection to them that makes trekking off to auditoriums in parts of Manhattan unknown worthwhile.

From the PEN blog

2008-05-06T20:36:00.001-04:00

There are many wonderful accounts of PEN events I’ve described here, both at MetaxuCafe and the PEN blog. You can read them for yourself, of course, but I wanted to highlight a couple entries on events that I, too, attended if only to document for myself the resonances between their reaction and my own:

Thus, Joshua Shenk seems to share my sence that the Crisis Darfur event was a big success:

it was Farrow’s attitude toward it that was my big lesson for the night. On the one hand, she was resolute clear, and specific. She made a very plain and concrete case, for example, for using the Olympic moment to pressure China, which pumps the Khartoum government full of cash and arms. After the event, she was on her way today to Hong Kong to for an Olympic torch protest.) But her indignity was accompanied throughout by a palpable humility before the vastness of the subject. That’s precisely what I feared would be missing from the event, and it was refreshing to get it.

More surprising and delightful to me was Laban Carrick Hill on Hub/Witness.org event: he, like me, seems to feel that we witnessed something truly remarkable:

As author Kashmira Sheth, a native of India, spoke of her grandmother being forced to marry at age eleven, I was reminded of my own grandmother marrying at fourteen in the rural South. I can remember when my oldest daughter turned fourteen and my realizing with sorrow and horror that she had reached the age my grandmother had married. Like Sheth’s grandmother, mine was denied education and made sure her children graduated from college. My father was the first in the family to graduate from high school, let alone college. I mention this story because as Americans we think that human rights abuses occur only the Third World. The testimony of the high school students in the room brought home just how close to our daily lives human rights abuses can be.

And Joshua Shenk agrees:

There were two distinct highlights on this morning's program. The first was learning a little about the Hub , which is a community video site (like YouTube) for human rights and which co-sponsored the panel. The second was watching Uzodinma Iweala turn a polite but lethargic field-trip crowd of high schoolers into living illustrations of the Hub’s abstract potential — to energize a community with self-respect and empathy.

I hear from my translator friend that Roberto Saviano’s events were smash hits and you can read about them in Italian here.

PEN World Voices: 3 Musketeers, Again

2008-05-05T20:13:00.002-04:00

Others have posted their reports, so I’m indulging myself with impressions. There was a time when I might have scoffed at the false glamour of going to hear three literary giants read and talk. This year, I jumped at the chance.

After all, when Mario Vargas Llosa came to Yale when he was running for President of Peru, my Peruvian ESL students (dishwashers, new immigrants) went, but I stayed home and read.

And what do I remember of Umberto Eco’s visit? Only that his accent was hard to understand and, more vividly, that a fellow graduate student with a flamboyant style of dress and a Cantonese accent thicker than Eco’s Italian one, pushed herself to the head of the line of admirers, chatted with Eco, and returned, triumphant, to announce that she had secured the right to publish his talk in The Yale Journal of Law & Humanities. We--the other student editors and I--were amazed and impressed.

But in the spring of 1989, my professor for Anglo-Indian Narrative announced that, when we got to Shame, Salman Rushdie himself would be joining us to talk about his book.

The fatwa was declared a week later and I had never been in the same room with him until Friday. So, while Rushdie-spotting has become old hat to many, it was a really big deal to me.

His best work may be behind him, but I must say that I was really excited by what he read: not the rock stars and modernity of recent books but a turn back to the court of the great Mughal Emperor, Akbar. This is the kind of mythography that Rushdie excels at, and this fairy tale of the glory days of Muslim India seems really promising. He read a passage in which Akbar discourses with a young princeling who poses some interesting philosophical questions on kingship and what it means to rule--the kind of questions one’s philosophy professor might ask in a class on Plato. Akbar beheads him for his impertinence but then strokes his chin and wonders, hmm…, what if we did permit free speech?

I thought this was poltically pertinent and hilarious, moving and exciting. What more do you want in a novel?

And I thought the event overall was great: lots of fun to watch those giant egos on display, to hear the readings, to see them talk with each other. Like Dorothea, over at Books and Bicycles, I felt like the vibe was good from the get-go. My press pass worked magic and I got into the hall, the second attendee! I had a great seat on the aisle, Dorothea spotted me, we chatted, and I got to watch the anxious literary ladies of the 92nd St.. Y power-walk down to the front rows only to discover the seats were reserved. Eventually, a really handsome woman sat next to me and we fell into conversation: she is a high school English teacher in Madrid, visiting the city for a few months and drinking in the culture. We had a great chat about being a working mom and working to balance doing stuff for yourself and caring for your kids. (At 16, her daughter’s cool with her being away for two months; my daughters accept one late night a week, two max.)

Then, the reading began, and unlike almost every other event, the introductions were blessedly minimal. As in, the interim director of the Poetry Series thanked us, made some announcements, and then said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Umberto Eco.”

He read, walked off stage. Rushdie walked on. When Rushdie finished, out came Vargas Llosa. No baloney. Just great, professional, funny, and beautiful readings.

At dinner with other bloggers afterwards, some expressed disappointment in the degree of narcissism on display. They were shocked--shocked!--to find that three male literary lions, coasting on the crest of their careers, still virile but no longer striving, had big egos.

Indeed.

I noted that not one woman writer was mentioned all night long, but Mary Reagan rightly corrected me: one was: J. K. Rowling (!), whom Rushdie mentioned with humorous, ironic approval as a good-bad writer who seems to have learned from Dumas how to fill up pages with delightful nothings. So we learned something else: Rushdie is a Harry Potter fan.

So is Keith Olbermann. So am I.

In any case, I think my point still stands: these are great big male egos. Woolf, Stein, Sarraute, Arendt, Morrison, Sor Juana, de Pisan, etc., do not loom--large or small--in their imaginations. Still, they are unabashedly liberal, cosmpolitan, educated, historicist and forward-looking. I admire them.

As Levi notes,

The three eminences then gathered for a loose and lively chat about why they liked to call themselves the “Three Musketeers” (Rushdie even mulled over “The Three Tenors”, which I had suggested in a blog post on Thursday, and I was also starting to think up other alternatives including “The Traveling Wilburys” and “Velvet Revolver”). With Alexandre Dumas pere now in play, Rushdie, Eco and Vargas Llosa now began batting The Count of Monte Cristo back and forth, debating whether or not such “bad writing” as this can also be great writing. All three seemed to agree that bad writing could be great writing and that this often happens (it’s not hard to guess that all three authors were thinking of their own excesses here, as well as those of Dumas pere).

The panel was great fun to listen to because the writers were loose and rambunctious, eagerly speaking over each other at times, fully devoid of the stiff politeness that too often mars these gatherings.

The only downside, alas, was the usually intellectually agile Leonard Lopate kept trying to get a word in edgewise. I’m with Dorothea:

I would have preferred that he just let the writers keep up their debate and their jokes because the minute he asked a serious question the energy fell and the mood changed.

The Dumas conversation was a highlight: if you’re going to watch anything online, I’d watch the first fifteen minutes of the roundtable. But later, when they talked about the role of the writer in public life, many interesting things were said, too. That was where a lot of my dining companions heard too much ego, but I’m inclined to be forgiving towards great novelists who are also political commentators or presidential candidates or objects of a global fatwa. They have achieved greatness in more than one arena and it would be strange if they didn’t know it. Looking past that, and past the fact that in their world women still mainly exist as muses, gorgeous fleeting visions of Selma Hayek or Scarlett Johansson or…, I heard some interesting things: most interesting to me was Eco’s point that the US lacks public intellectuals in part because our universities tend to be cordoned off from the city itself. I certainly have found that the change in my life from teaching in rural Indiana to teaching in midtown on a campus that is really just a single building has made me a more engaged citizen.

You can see Mary’s gorgeous photos here.

And see the whole event at the PEN site.

PEN World Voices: Reading the World, again

2008-05-04T21:25:00.000-04:00

If Resonances rambled like an old jalopy, Reading the World clicked along with all the professionalism and friendliness of a Volvo.

I don’t have much of an ethnicity nor a lot of ethnic pride, but what little I have lies in being half Scandinavian by heritage. And the sleek, modern room, the friendly manner of the staff (the first of four events where I just entered, got smiled at by volunteers, and sat down), and the handsomely friendly old lion in charge of Scandinavia House who welcomed us reminded me of why it’s not nuts to take some tiny pride in having ancestors from Norway and Denmark.

In any case, the readings were a delight: three powerful, professional readings of intense familial stress, ably and cheerfully introduced by NYT Book Review editor Rachel Donadio (wearing a really cool Mondrian-y skirt, appropriate to the Scandinavian design ethos).

I haven’t read Peter Carey, but I was so interested in what he said about His Illegal Self on WNYC a couple months ago, that I gave it to my mother-in-law for her birthday. She returned with a positive report. And Carey got up, joked about the intimidating podium (with only a slender stalk, there was no place to hide one’s legs), and said “All right. I’ll just start at the beginning and read for twelve minutes.” And so he did. He read from this story of a boy whose hippie mom is on the run, being raised not on the Upper East Side, where his grandma feels most at home, but, for safety’s sake, in “ a town of 400 people where no one lived.”

A brilliant phrase, “ a town of 400 people where no one lived,” capturing the anger, fear, and isolation of that woman, so at home in Bloomingdale’s and Zabar’s and luncheons with the ladies who give to the Met.

Hafdan Freihof’s reading from Dear Gabriel was an excruciatingly patient account of a dinner party interrupted by the temper tantrum (is that even a fair term) of an autistic son. Like Geoff, whose experience of the event seems to have been markedly similar to mine, I was under the very strong impression that this is memoir. For me, the great moment in this riveting story was of the father, wandering the rural neighborhood, in the dark, looking for his hiding son, “wherever you are you want to be found like a treasure,” he wrote.

That brought all the desires and pains of girlhood running away flooding back: wanting to be found “like a treasure” and reconciled with mommy and daddy, needing to be reassured that you are treasure, even when naughty. Gorgeous.

Like Geoff, Janet Malcolm’s reading from Two Lives was the highlight for me--for just the reasons he states.

It was nice to end with the reading from the hunky Catalan author Francesc Seres, but I longed to hear him read in Catalan and to have the chance to read a screen or handout in English: his accent was so strong, that too much passed me by.

PEN World Voices: Resonances

2008-05-04T20:36:00.000-04:00

Well, 2 out of 3 isn’t bad.

I thought the Crisis Darfur event was informative and worthwhile: as enjoyable as being lectured at on genocide can rightly be. And the Witness event was a model of how to engage students in reading and activism: I was moved and amazed.

The Resonances Event at Baruch, by contrast, was dull, dull, dull.

I was so disappointed.

I arrived a little early and sat down in the middle of a row only to have a professor come up, stand right before me, ostentatiously count the empty seats to my right and left and ask if I was bringing my class. (Do I look that much like a teacher?)

No. I just thought it was a good seat and, if I sat in the middle, I wouldn’t have to keep getting up as people file in.

Ok, she said skeptically, but you’re going to be surrounded by my students.

Oh, sorry. So I got up and moved. She seemed confused as to why I didn’t want to stay and insisted that she hadn’t meant me to move….

Things went downhill from there: the moderator had gathered an impressive group of writers from all over the globe--Charles Simic, Antonio Munoz Molina, Fatou Diome, and Ma Jian--to speak about canonical works that continued to resonate for them. Of these writers, I know and admire Simic’s work quite a lot and was looking forward to learning more about the others. But they got up and rambled and rambled; the mic didn’t work well; Simic read his remarks on the eroticism of Ovid with all the panache of John McCain; the next two writers’ choices were predictable and nationalistic (Molina chose Cervantes; Diome, Cesaire and Senghor); each writer lectured us about basic facts and then rambled.

In short, the event was really disappointing and I was not sorry that mild illness gave me an excuse to cut out early.

I hear from others that Ma Jian was great on Kafka, but even that would have been too little, too late for me.

It’s so disappointing because, as a reader of old and new books, a scholar, and a professor, I welcome the notion of this event: I was excited to hear what these writers made of their precursors and excited to have contemporary writers speaking about reading. It should have been an event to inspire. Alas, it was not.

Pen World Voices: Witness: A Special Program for High School Students

2008-04-30T22:31:00.002-04:00

I thought that the Crisis Darfur event was moving, interesting, and ideal. Nonetheless, as I hovered, famished, near the food table, scarfing down puff-pastry cheese straws (from Murray’s!), I could see why the whole scene reminded Levi to ask me if I’d yet read the new Keith Gessen (I have not; he liked it; it’s All the Sad Young Literary Men): as amazing as it was, it would be possible, without a lot of effort, to turn it into satire. (The Brit showing off by pronouncing Lévy as they do in the UK [BER-nerd HEN-ry LEAVE-ee], the girls worrying about whether or not MediaBistro ads for CondéNast jobs are going to lead to anything, the gray-haired German in his red-framed specs, the 80ish former actress at the reception noting that, really, Dianne Wiest was better in “Hannah and Her Sisters”…)

The Witness Event this morning, however, was moving and funny and inspiring in a different way and it’d take a more skilled satirist and a more cynical writer than I satirize it.

Again, the house was packed at a lush downstairs auditorium, this one smaller and further East, at the Instituto Cervantes on East 49th. About 150 people were there, mostly high school students and their teachers. The students were about 70% black, I’d guess and came from the Manhattan (especially the High School of Hospitality Management), Queens, and West Orange, NJ.

The event was primarily to publicize a new venture from the nonprofit organization Witness: The Hub. It’s a video-sharing site and online community for human rights and the goal of this PEN event was to get high school students informed about the site and empowered to watch, share, and make videos documenting the injustice and human rights issues touching their own lives.

What was so genius about this event is that everything about it was designed to emphasize that Witness really is interested in young people’s participation. It wasn’t just friendly, it was actually engaging and almost all the students were engaged for the full two hours (!). The organizer started by asking two or three students to share what mattered to them in the area of human rights. (One student talked about her ongoing project to make country report cards, another mentioned a civil rights book she’d read last year in 9th grade, a third mentioned his distress at the current oppression in Tibet).

From there, she turned to the panel: five writers who write for young adults. Each had been invited to share a video from the Hub, speak about it, and then read a very brief selection from her work.

Kashmira Sheth chose a really moving but, I expect, strange to NYC high school students Bollywood-style video of a woman who escapes an abusive marriage. I loved it and, as it ended I heard a few “Oh! I get it. Wow!”s from the audience. She read from her novel about a child widow in search of an education—based on her great aunt’s life in India.
Patty McCormick spoke about her sister adopting a Haitian boy and showed a video on indentured servitude in Haiti before reading from Sold, a novel about child prostitutes in South Asia.
Jutta Richter, who writes in German, explained that she did not choose a video because she wanted to focus on the things we need to do right in our own neighborhood and then she read an amazingly funny and brilliant passage about a girl so enraged by a rumor-mongering “friend” that she pokes her in the face with an ice cream cone. I loved it!
Then, the moderator opened it up to some more comments and questions. Students asked about the prevalence of spousal abuse in India today, about the inspiration for Richter’s fiction, about the centrality of education, about how McCormick became interested in Haiti through her sister and nephew.
Amanda Michalopoulou spoke movingly about the importance of knowing about the past, of thinking about past suffering, before showing a video about comfort women. She writes adult fiction and children’s books and read from I’d Like (which I bought and started reading on the train: it’s amazingly great!), a book of interconnected short stories.
Finally, the only man on the panel and by far the youngest writer, Uzodinma Iweala spoke. He totally held the day for the students. He really seemed to know how to treat them with respect and connect with them.

He is the most famous of the group: certainly the only writer I’d heard of among them; his Beasts of No Nation, the other book I bought, was a big title last year. Uzo, as everyone called him, was also the only one not to read from his own works. Instead, he worked the crowd, asking students to raise their hands if they were seniors, juniors, sophomores… He then quizzed them on ages--to drink, to enlist, to vote, to be tried as an adult (typically 16 but sometimes 13).

His video was about youth in prison in the US, from BooksNotBars.org, and, like Kashmira Seth’s music video, it was catchy, professional, and youth-oriented in ways that inspired. He then gave them a big homework assignment: go to this web address (he made them write it down, amidst much jocularity): http://ojjdp.ncjrs.gov/ojstatbb/nr2006/downloads/nr2006.pdf, read the report from the Department of Justice on how our government treats young people, and write a report. The first person to email him their paper would get a prize.
Money?
No, guys. Something like a book.
You got to tell us the prize, man.
How long?
Can we write on really tiny paper?
Big font?
Do we have to read the whole report?
Uzo laughed but stood firm: If it’s cool with your parents and your teacher, I’ll take you out to lunch with a friend of mine who’s a human rights lawyer. 5 pages, double-spaced, 12 point type, Times New Roman. Ok?

He went on to ask if any of the students had been harassed by the police. More than half had and we heard three sad stories of misunderstandings (we were waiting for a friend from another neighborhood on the corner and the cops told us to move on; we stayed there waiting and we all got tickets) that blemished these kids’ records. “I think the police just need to RE-LAX!” concluded one young woman.

At last, it was time for some final thoughts. A couple students mentioned other books that had meant a lot to them. A couple panelists urged students to keep wishing, pushing, fighting. And then there was time for one last question. A young black man from the back raised his hand and said that he was from Queens and he felt that it was really important that we all pay attention to this project, speak out, and work in our communities because he was from Queens and he was thinking about Sean Bell and the police department and if we didn’t speak up, one of us could be the next Sean Bell.

And that was the end. We clapped, I bought some books, got Amanda to sign mine, didn’t dare interrupt the circle of adulation around Uzo, and headed back to the office.

PEN World Voices: Crisis Darfur

2008-04-30T15:52:00.002-04:00

I got to the Florence Gould Auditorium at fi:af a bit before 8:00 to find a peculiarly French combination of confusion and bureaucracy. To those of us seeking entry, there was lots of barking: “Stay in line!” “Hang on!”; amongst those in charge, there was much confusion. I wasn’t on the list (imagine my little moment of panic), but the magic words “blogging…Bud Parr” brought a smile to her face and the doors opened for me.

Levi, who was on the list and with whom I munched on olives and pate (Oh the irony!) afterwards, has already written up his views here, but let me add mine, too.

This was a very moving and impressively organized event. I left feeling better informed about Darfur and both sadder and more hopeful for change.

Joel Whitney, a founding editor of the online literary magazine Guernica, started the evening off, forgetting to introduce himself (I’ve known him for a while now), but introducing the event and moderator Dinaw Mengestu with aplomb.

I was particularly curious and skeptical about Bernard-Henri Lévy’s presentation, remembering Garrison Keillor’s hilarious skewering of his book on America in the Times book review. Although his slides tended to feature pictures of him standing alone amidst the rubble, looking rugged and dashing and although he slightly mischaracterized Let us now praise famous men, I was impressed with him overall: sure, he has a big ego, but he also put it on the line to go to Darfur.

He was extremely clear and really showed his mettle as a popular philosopher, bringing us a range of conclusions:

The crisis in Darfur is a war AGAINST civilians, not a civil war.
We need to suspend the myth of the Janjaweed: We need to recognize that the attacks on villages are largely carried out by airstrikes from above, supported on the ground by Janjaweed.
Debates on whether on not this is genocide have all the relevance of the medieval debates about the sex of angels. This reference provided a welcome chance to laugh and provided Lévy with the opportunity to make one of his most important points of the night, one that Farrow’s presentation took as its theme: that these lives, these tiny, anonymous lives, have been lost and remain uncountable to us.
Why are we so passive? Our passivity, he thinks, is the perverse effect of the combination of three good modern ideas: 1) anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism. That is, being anti-racist, it’s hard for us to fathom non-white perpetrators of genocide; being anti-colonial, we hesitate to intervene in former colonies, recognizing our culpability in their current political dilemmas; and being anti-imperial, we struggle to grasp the relevance of the plight of oppressed people who are not part of the vast story of power in the globe.

I think that this fourth point was the most philosophically impressive and interesting. I suspect that it is part of his forthcoming book, the very cleverly titled Left in Dark Times.

Still, for me, the most impressive moment was his very careful and respectful discussion of the problem of knowing how many have died in Darfur.

He spoke about the huge range of estimates—from 200,000 to over half a million killed—and he made sure we knew that, with entire villages wiped off the map, we will never know how many people have been killed. Village after village is cone with, as he eloquently said, “no memory, no inscription, no grave, no face, no name, no number,” and talked about these tiny lives, lives wiped off the earth.

He spoke about tiny lives, but I thought of our tiny lives: the 300 or so of us sitting in a packed underground auditorium, comfie seats, dressed in black, wearing rakish scarves and dutifully silencing our smartphones. I felt important to be there, to have a press pass, to know the editor of the magazine that sponsored the event. And tiny, too. And so far from Darfur or being able to help.

But he made sure that we thought about that: about the importance of bearing testimony, of asking for real sanctions against Sudan, and, most importantly, of pressuring China to cease buying the oil that provides the cash for the Sudanese government.

Phew.

So, after this talk, I felt saddened and informed.

Then Mia Farrow came out: tiny and thin, as I expected. Looking small and a bit afraid and way more like Joyce Carol Oates than I ever, ever, ever would have guessed.

If Lévy offered us the philosophy and history, she offered the politics and the emotions. She presented the slideshow that you can find on her website: devastating, heartbreaking pictures not of her standing looking good but of burnt villages, women seeking firewood, scars of raped women (often raped on their ten-mile walk to find firewood), dying children, and grief, grief, grief, grief.

Farrow has made eight trips to Darfur and she spoke with passion about the plight of the internally displaced Darfurians whom she’s come to know. She showed a picture of a 27-year-old mother (looking 40) who’d walked for 20 days to find safety, burying 2 of her 4 children on the way, because, “Someone said there was a country called Chad.”

This was but one of dozens of such tales, each typical, each heartbreaking.

I was impressed, deeply impressed, with her commitment and with the way in which she’s put her power as an actress to manipulate our emotions to such good service: over and over again, she brought us nearly to tears of despair and then pulled back so that, as with the first talk, she could remind us that the point is not catharsis but action.

Again, China was singled out as the best leverage against the Sudanese government.

This has gone on much too long, for sure, but I must say that I thought this was a smashing, moving, and informative event: a real model of how to get people to learn and to care about a distant crisis.

PEN world voices

2008-04-28T10:36:00.003-04:00

Bud Parr has gathered a bunch of bloggers to cover the PEN WorldVoices festival. I'm one of them.

I'll be posting my reports here and cross-posting over at MetaxuCafe. If you haven't been going there lately, you might re-set your blog feeds and update your bookmarks: it looks like it's going to be a great festival and some of my favorite bloggers will be writing all about it...

Where to Begin, 2

2008-04-21T22:08:00.002-04:00

One consequence of this generally junky winter has been a near utter lack of nights out. Finally, the other weekend, we hired a sitter, determined to do something--anything.

Now, a sitter is a luxury, but the knowledge that we’re in New York and any given night has a multitude of fun things on offer is a luxury, too. After a courtship in Boston, we spent six years in rural Indiana where we were pretty dependent on the occasional traveling act. If some troupe came through town, you went or you waited till what came by next month.

So, anyway, we got a sitter. Now, what to do? I passed the buck to my spouse and he found a write up of Pistolera, a New York-based band combining mariachi with rock and left wing politics. The write-up was great:

The local group Pistolera, which is led by the guitarist and singer Sandra Lilia Velásquez, includes a propulsive accordionist named Maria Elena, a drummer named Ani Cordero (who is Velásquez’s cousin, and was once in the colorful rock band Man or Astro-man?), and one guy, the bassist Inca B. Satz. The foot-stomping band favors the fashions of the Mexican Revolution and has a winning sound that’s equal parts ranchera and indie pop.

They were playing at the Knitting Factory, where we’d never been. At $15 a pop, the price was right, too. We were in.

We went to Walker’s for a burger beforehand. It’s an ancient Tribeca Tavern, a lot like the White Horse (the Dylan Thomas bar in the West Village), and the evening was off to a promising start. The burgers were delicious and the beer hit the spot.

We found the Knitting Factory, got past the velvet ropes without any guff, picked up our tickets, and went in. The club is in a big iron building with multiple stages on different floors (nothing, even a big thing, is all that wide in New York), wide hallways, and not merely as messy as most clubs. Very Tribeca. So far, we felt pretty o.k.--we’d even arrived a full 45 minutes after the night’s start time. But then--cue the sound of a needle scratching across a record--we learned from the bartender that Pistoler was not slated to go on stage till 11:30.

11:30?

The requests for Dora screenings start up around here at 6:30 on Sunday morning. An 11:30 start time just doesn’t cut it.

Fortunately, the opening act, Rana Santacruz, was great--incredible. I’ve downloaded all his songs from his website and they are in heavy rotation. (Perhaps equally fortunate, the second act, Uli and the Gringos was abysmal. So we went home by 11, got home around midnight, and were prepared to pop Dora in the DVD player the next morning). I got the Pistolera album on iTunes, too. It’s good, but I must say, the Rana Santacruz combo of punk rock (he’s a Pogues fan) and ranchero music is catchy and amazing and his voice is so very sweet. We love “El Ranchero Punk” but “No Puedo Mas” is in very heavy rotation.

A lucky catch and my tip to you: Rana Santacruz. Amazing.

Where to Begin?

2008-04-16T21:18:00.000-04:00

Finally, it’s spring. Phew.

It’s been a horrible winter. A long slog. Lots and lots of stresses, large and small, mine and those of my loved ones, crowding in on a life already crowded with incident.

You know that feeling when you go on a hike up a mountain, a hike that’s a little longer than you want and you’re not enjoying it anymore? You know that part where the trail doesn’t seem to be rising anymore and yet, somehow, you also don’t seem to be at the end of the hike either? That’s where I am.

So, I’m no longer breathlessly climbing, wondering when the pain will stop and wondering if I’ll make it at all.

Clearly, I’ll make it, but sheesh, I want to get to that big flat rock at the top of the mountain, the one with the view, and unpack my picnic.