Maitresse

This site has moved

And right quickly too!

Please officially change your RSS feeds and bookmarks to www.laurenelkin.com.

I'm still toying with the format on the new site (it's in beta, if you will) but that's where you will find me henceforth.

Go there now.

Thank you!

LE

Impending move

Just a heads up that I'll be moving this blog soon to a website of my very own... the URL here has for quite some time been www.laurenelkin.com, but the blog has also been accessible via maitresse.typepad.com. That URL-- the typepad one-- will no longer be in use. Please adjust your bookmarks accordingly!

This will be happening in early February. I'll continue to post here until then.

Thanks!

LE

 

Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy

When I was in London in October, I ran into Stefan Tobler of And Other Stories Press at a White Review reading. He put a book in my hand called Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy, and promised I would love it. It had a blurb from Jeanette Winterson on the back, an endorsement which even in these cynical times I take seriously. Unable to get to it right away, I put it aside and took it home to New York with me for the holidays, and finally had a chance to read it on a plane ride to Seattle just after the New Year.

I drank it down with the kind of concentration you can only attain on a long plane ride, where being anonymous and surrounded by strangers as you all breathe recycled air creates a kind of atemporal reality buffer, so you fall deeper into a book than you might have in the comfort of your own home. Very short-- pushing the boundaries of the novella-- Swimming Home depicts a group of English people who are enjoying a perfectly banal holiday in France until a naked girl called Kitty Finch shows up in their midst. She has a well-crafted story and, apparently, no place to go. The characters take her in, and allow her to stay in the bungalow they are renting.   

Kitty’s a slippery character, the kind of slightly older girl who seems, to a young teenager (as indeed she seems to fourteen-year-old Nina), to be extraordinarily exotic, knowing, and wise, but who just as quickly can slip into extreme flakiness or outright lunacy. Predictably, she gets involved with Nina’s father, the renowned poet Joe Jacobs. It becomes clear that Kitty has gone there on purpose in order to show her poetry to Joe-- believing that he alone can understand it, and even more weirdly, claiming that only she can understand his.

But the point isn’t the plot, or Levy’s language, or the deliberate yet casual strokes drawn between the characters that delineate their relationships and needs. What Swimming Home points to is the insufficiencies and failures of language and storytelling to get across what we really mean: our urgencies, our worries, our fears. Laura, the close friend and holiday companion of Nina’s mother, Isabel, can’t understand why Isabel has allowed Kitty to remain on the premises.

Laura changed the subject and wanted to know if she thought Kitty Finch might be a little… she searched for the word… ‘touched’? The word stuck in her mouth and she wished she had another language to translate what she meant, because the only words stored inside her were from the school playground of her generation, a lexicon that in no particular order started with barmy, bonkers, barking, and went on to loopy, nuts, off with the fairies and then danced up the alphabet again to end with cuckoo.  

We compose our own stories to understand the world, as Nina does to make sense of her parents’ relationship, only to find she has completely misjudged it, or as Joe does in order to minimize the effect Kitty has on him, typing her as a particular kind of person he has encountered many times before:

‘I can’t stand THE DEPRESSED. It’s like a job, it’s the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. THE DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems.’

But try as he might, Kitty gets in. Funny, irreverent, and deeply unsettling, Swimming Home charts an unusual path through what might otherwise seem to be territory as familiar and knowable as a backyard swimming pool. But Levy’s storytelling method leaves much hinted at under the surface, unspecified and troubling.

I don't usually make a plug for publishers when I talk about their books, but I'll make an exception here. Recently, in The London Review of Books, Jenny Diski referred to And Other Stories as the future and best hope of publishing:

And Other Stories, the publisher of Deborah Levy’s novel, is a more interesting response to the commodification of writing. For £20 or £35 you can subscribe to two or all four of the new novels they will publish in the next year. You don’t choose the authors or the books; in fact, you don’t have any idea what they will be publishing. Stefan Tobler started And Other Stories in order to publish an international list of the kind of fiction, both translated and in the original English, which he believes is being rejected by mainstream corporations. The books or manuscripts are suggested by agents, interested members of the public, friends or colleagues, writers themselves; a shortlist is sent out for discussion to reading groups that have been set up around the world. Their thoughts are relayed back to an acquisitions meeting comprising what Tobler calls ‘the core team’, although people on the mailing list are welcome to attend. In the end, Tobler and his colleagues retain editorial choice, and are prepared, after broader consultation, to take a decision based on their own judgments. In much the same way as the old independent publishers.

Subscribers are welcome to participate in the process, but they aren’t putting their money on their favourite. They are staying curious and trusting Tobler and his small team to come up with four books that will engage and surprise them, even perhaps not please them, or maybe, as it was for me with Levy’s book, give them great satisfaction and a sense of relief that the book is there, handsomely designed and well produced, in the world for others to discover.

For more information, go to their website at www.andotherstories.org.

Ellis Avery, The Footsore Flâneuse

Ellis Avery, author of The Last Nude, out this week from Riverhead and set in Paris in the 1920s, went to Paris earlier this year on a sabbatical with her partner (Sharon Marcus, who has also written brilliantly on Paris) to do some research. Unfortunately, a foot injury prevented Ellis from flâner-ing around the city the way she'd hoped. Then she found she could get around just fine on a bus and a bicycle! Here, her tale of flânerie aboard public transport.

 

 

 The Footsore Flâneuse: Claiming One’s Own Paris on Public Transportation
 
The glamorous Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka had the good fortune to live in Paris in the 1920s.  While writing about her, I had the good fortune to live in Paris in 2008.  My partner and I had the further good fortune, that sabbatical season, to be working on projects we loved.  Sharon was researching Sarah Bernhardt; I was finishing the first draft of my Tamara de Lempicka novel, THE LAST NUDE.  I was unlucky in only one area: my right foot.  I would later discover my Parisian foot trouble was just one manifestation of a literally bone-breaking but ultimately treatable form of arthritis, but at the time, I thought I had an injury that simply refused to heal.  In any case, they were scotched, my plans for long walks in my favorite walking city.

The foot injury made it easy for me to stay home and write my thousand words a day, five days a week.  Sure, but what’s Owen Wilson doing in that Midnight in Paris poster?  He’s walking through Paris.  Ever since the first gimlet-eyed flâneur strolled out of the pages of Baudelaire, cane in hand, this is what writers have done.  Bad enough, as scholars who work on the female city-stroller, the flâneuse, have pointed out, that a woman idly walking the streets is apt to be taken for a streetwalker.  (I have, even dyked out in my old-man shoes).   Far worse for my flâneurial ambitions, however, was the fact that I could not stroll.  I could gimp along, sure, the way a moth can, but every step cost me.   I could not cross the Palais Royal, change trains at the Place d’Italie métro stop, or even stand long enough to chop, sweat, and sautée an eggplant at home without needing an Advil.

But I was optimistic.  At home, in New York, where I make a discipline of distilling my urban observations into a haiku a day, the raw material is often just out the window.  (Night.  The drag queen at/the corner pauses, wonders:/ Walk home, or cab it?)  Surely this would be the case in Paris, too?

Our SabbaticalHomes.com sublet, the least expensive of a few palatable options, and, revealingly, the only one for which the owners had posted no pictures, did not offer much to see out the window.  Oh-so-Parisian windowbox geraniums, yes, but the rooftops of the postwar Thirteenth arrondissement are not known for their charm, and the drizzling sky remained the color of vichyssoise for days.  The interior of the apartment was even less inspiring: in addition to the living-room/dining-room, dominated by a couch we dubbed The Silent Killer for reasons that would become clear to each guest who attempted to find comfort in its maw, the apartment featured two tiny windowless closets—one for the shower, one for the WC—and an extremely dark bedroom, home to an aging bed whose sagging mattress was propped up, in places, with sofa cushions.  A narrow L-shaped hallway lined in cabinets and rustic-tiled counters promised to open up onto the kitchen, until we realized it was the kitchen: when we cooked, we swiftly learned, food crusted between those rustic tiles.  The day I noticed, from my spot on the floor by the Silent Killer, that the wallpaper print in the hallway matched the woven-straw wallpaper, no doubt tasteful and expensive in the Seventies, that adorned the living-room/dining-room, was the day I knew I had been staring at those wallpapers for too long.

I owe the pleasure I was able to take in Paris, despite these unpromising circumstances, to three things:

One: the elevator.  The hollow spines around which the central staircase of many an old Parisian apartment building once spiraled have since been filled with tiny, tiny elevator shafts, such as the one that housed the lift to our sublet.  One person with one large suitcase filled it completely.  “Its merit,” as a neighbor would wryly tell us in elegant French, “is in existing.”  Vive l’existence!
 
Two: Vélib.  Although the ball of my right foot hurt after just a few steps, my heels worked fine, and so did my legs.  Research revealed that my American Express card just happened to contain the chip that permitted me to use my Parisian all-you-can-ride transit pass, Navigo Découverte, to unlock Vélib, the city-wide free-bike system: I couldn't contain my glee.  “You are Vélibérée!” Sharon cried.  I could borrow a bike from the rack by the bus stop, pedal it uphill to the métro stop, and leave it behind while I took the subway, and then I could pick up another bike when I got out of my train.   Or I could just ride a bike the whole way: there’s no cure like exercise for injury-related depression.

The chunky public bicycles took me to Shakespeare and Company bookstore in the Fifth arrondissement, where I joined David Barnes’s writing group, and up to Culture Rapide in the Twentieth, where I could hear my fellow English-speaking poets read alongside French and Francophone freestylers.  Culture Rapide sat beside the truly gritty Place Fréhel, a vacant lot littered with beer bottles named for a chanteuse who died in 1951.

I was glad the bicycle system could connect me with my fellow living writers, but even more grateful that Vélib could take me into the heart of my novel.  I visited Lynn Jeffress, a novelist from my writing group, at 27, rue de Fleurus, who took my picture in front of the courtyard pavilion Gertrude Stein had used as her dining room.  I found Le Sentier, the seedy garment district where a key scene in my novel is set, and slid down an alley as narrow as a drain, quixotically named Street of the Moon.  Men passed me in either direction, wheeling garment racks.  I whirred past the sullen little fortress of a columned church—Our Lady of Good News—and found myself face-to-face with a massive arch featuring mythological naked men beneath suits of empty armor: how weirdly fitting, for the garment district.  My ride through Le Sentier allowed me to describe the neighborhood without gilding it with sentimentality or tarring it with melodrama.

Vélib also brought me to the Place de la Contrescarpe, steps from Hemingway’s first Paris apartment and home to a Hemingwayesque character in my novel.  In one of the bakeries that fronted the place, I bought a flaky Breton kouign aman, asked for them to heat it up on the spot, and ate it at one of the cafés on the place while the waiter’s back was turned.  As I ate and drank, the brazier beside me rendered the evening chill decorative rather than sinister; the cup of coffee warmed my hands.  The trees and fountain at the center of the place—in the Middle Ages, a village square—lent a gracious look to the student quarter, but Hemingway’s rummies and poivrottes still collapsed here and there amid the clusters of kids in the cafés.  A yellow dog with a torn ear trotted over to beg the flaky crumbs off my fingers.  It was the best pastry I ever ate in Paris.
 
Three: the bus.  Sometimes it hurt too much even to ride a bicycle.  As the autumn deepened, it began to grow too cold and wet to ride.  My nearest métro stop, Place d’Italie, was unwalkably far, but it wasn’t long before I could spot the insignia of the boxy mint-green bus that stopped near our apartment building from several blocks away: a black 67 emblazoned on a pink square.  In order to announce their alternate, nighttime schedule, many Parisian buses bore spooky, Halloweeny lettering, proclaiming, Le soir, cet autobus devient noctilien!  In the evening, this bus becomes nocturnal!  I savored the reptilian word noctilien, so much more sinister than its English counterpart, as I watched the wrong 67, not mine, approach from the wrong direction, stop, disgorge passengers, and swish away in a wash of pneumatic hiss and prerecorded chime.

The “wrong direction,” for me, was out toward the stadia that lay between the city and its beltway, the Périphérique: the 67 terminated at the Stade Charléty.  The “right direction” brought me closer to the city center, first uphill to the charming Butte aux Cailles, where thickly-planted chestnut trees lobbed their buckeyes at passers-by.  I could follow the example of the old ladies in the neighborhood and fill a plastic bottle with water from the artesian spring at the heart of Place Paul Verlaine.  Or I could buy a delicate, buttery quiche Lorraine from my favorite bakery, Legendre, and limp it down the street to check out stark, tile-lined Place André Masson, named for a painter who had died in 1987.  “That place was like the drain of an abattoir,” I reported to Sharon that night.

“Once you see his work, you’ll know why,” she deadpanned.  I realized that even if you’re worthy of commemoration by Parisian city planners, the more recently you’ve died, the more remote and crummy your place will be.  Poor Masson.  Poor Fréhel.
 
Farther north, and deeper into the heart of the old city, the bus let me off at the end of the linden-lined Île Saint-Louis.  I could stand at the easternmost tip of the island and look down to where, just feet below, the seventeenth-century breakwater split the river like the prow of a ship.  The bus route turned west from the Pont de Sully, traversed the rue du Rivoli, and brushed past the Louvre, where I could either pick up another bus or limp my way west toward the Palais Royal.  I could rest at Le Nemours and nurse a café crème while surveying the expanse of paving-stone outside the Comédie Française.  This is where I developed my Principle of Perfect Parisian Places: I’m sitting outside with my coffee, and I’m looking out at people, not cars.

Well, that just about covers most of Paris, huh?  Au contraire, this experience is harder to come by than it sounds.  To offer a few clarifying corollaries to this simple expression of pleasure:

1)    Cars aren’t driving past me.
2)    My sightline isn’t blocked by a parked car.
3)    Nor is it blocked by a plastic hedge.  (Why, Les Deux Magots?  Why?)
4)    I’m at a café, not a restaurant: no one is bullying me to order food I don’t want.

Place Saint-André-des-Arts hits all these marks gracefully, as do Place Stravinsky and Place de la Sorbonne.  From my café perch overlooking Place Colette, I could watch well-dressed Parisians cross under the plane trees, pause to listen to an open-air chamber orchestra, gape at the acrobatic skateboarders, or pass through the fanciful spun-glass arch marking the Palais Royal métro entrance.  I grinned.  I was a cane-chair flâneuse.

If I stayed on the 67 bus, it headed north from the center of Paris, out past the old city walls and into the Pigalle, home to the Moulin Rouge and other schlocky monuments to the skin trade.  From there, I could take the squat little Montmartrobus up absurdly charming streets, coiling past an unlikely vineyard and windmill before reaching the foot of the massive Sacré Coeur, that domed white-wedding-cake folly of the Belle Epoque.  From there I could drink in some of the best views of the city before taking a funicular back down the hill to Place Saint-Pierre.  I could curl up with another crème at one of the brazier-heated cafés and listen to an all-girl brass band on Place Suzanne Valadon beat the air into a giddy Cajun froth.  It hurt to dance, but I felt so grateful to Paris, and so blessed: my Navigo pass had brought me this far. --Ellis Avery
 

An advance look at 2012

The Millions has a great round-up of their most anticipated books of 2012, and since they're all from US publishers I won't complain that they didn't include mine, which is coming out in April but in France and in French, so, ok.

Here are the books I'm looking forward to myself, or which I've already read and loved:

I'm particularly looking forward to Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet (Knopf), and not just because his mom was my dissertation advisor. Here's what The Millions had to say:

In Ben Marcus’s Flame Alphabet, language is the poison that youth inflict on adult ears. Utterances ushered from children’s mouths have toxic effects on adults, while the underage remain immune to the assault. The effects are so harmful that The Flame Alphabet’s narrator, Sam, and his wife must separate themselves from their daughter to preserve their health. Sam sets off to the lab to examine language and its properties in an attempt to discover an antidote and reunite his family. Marcus’s uncharacteristically conventional narrative makes way for him to explore the uncanny eccentricities of language and life. (Anne) 

 

The Last Nude, by Ellis Avery (Riverhead). I reviewed it for The Daily Beast and will let you know when that runs. Set in Paris in the 20s, and featuring a cast of characters from Tamara de Lempicka to Sylvia Beach, with a Hemingway double to boot, The Last Nude owes more to Jean Rhys than to Hemingway.  Like Rhys, Avery draws her characters with a sharp wit and a strong sense of empathy. Look for an essay on Paris from Ellis on this blog later this week. Here's what The Millions said:

With starred reviews from both Booklist and Library Journal, Ellis Avery’s second novel The Last Nude imagines the brief love affair between the glamorous Art-Deco Painter Tamara de Lempicka and the young muse for her most iconic painting The Beautiful Rafaela.  Set in 1920s Paris, among the likes of Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and a fictional American journalist named Anson Hall (a sort of Ernest Hemingway type), Avery explores the costs of ambition, the erotics of sexual awakening, and the devastation that ensues when these two converge.  Critics have praised The Last Nude as riveting, elegant, seductive, and breathtaking. (Sonya)

 

Smut, by Alan Bennett (Picador). What The Millions had to say:

  Given the existence of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, a new book entitled Smut would seem to have a lot to live up to—at minimum, it should descend into dimensions so filthy and moist that they would cause Baker’s own thunderstick to droop in disgusted admiration. Instead, the absurdly prolific, versatile, and esteemed writer of The History Boys and The Madness of King George provides a pair of very English stories about the sexual adventures of two middle-aged, middle-class British women. So, rather than a lightspeed journey smack into a rigid “Malcolm Gladwell,” Smut is, in the words of the Guardian, a “comedy of false appearances.” And that’s probably not such a bad thing. (Jacob)

 

Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down, by Rosencrans Baldwin (FSG, April). Because I don't know how many times I've tweeted that exact sentence. Based on Bladwin's essays for The Morning News. Here's The Millions's take:

In the grand expatriate tradition, Baldwin went to Paris looking for la vie en rose and found himself in a McDonald’s. The editor of The Morning News and author of You Lost Me There moved his family to Paris for a copywriting job and soon learned that it’s not all croissants and cathedrals. Learning to live with constant construction, the oddities of a French office, the omnipresence of American culture, and his own inability to speak French, Baldwin loses his dream of Paris but finds a whole new reality to fall in love with. (Janet)

 

Equally excited for the sequel to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, for the next volume of Sontag's essays (which I'm slated to review for the QC) and for Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? to be published in the US (I reviewed the Canadian edition for The Quarterly Conversation).

But I say enough, enough, enough of books with titles like Nobody Here Loves You More Than Me/Nobody Here is More Sad Than You/Nobody Here But Us Chickens.

Read the rest here.

 

 

Sexy, Gender-y Oulipo

Happy 2012! I hope you all had a lovely New Year's; I celebrated in the utmost style (tea roses, candles, little ebony elephant placecard-holders) in downtown Manhattan with a lovely group of friends old and new, discussing everything from "silent courtship" to Marie Calloway to Michelle Tea to the way Daphne Guinness is trying to turn herself into a shoe. Since then I have done something weird to my neck and have spent the last 24 hours trying not to move it.

This inexplicably has given me permission to do nothing productive all day, and so I'm trying to squeeze in a little work tonight. My latest project is a collaboration with Scott Esposito of The Quarterly Conversation-- I'll tell you more as it gets closer. All I can say now is: I'm writing a long essay about Oulipo, and Edouard Levé, and Hervé Le Tellier. And where there is Le Tellier, there is sex.

Thing is, a brief search of Project Muse (nice redesign! Still a little buggy though) and JSTOR have not turned up much in the way of "Oulipo and gender" or "Oulipo and sex." I'm not saying the articles don't exist. I'm just saying in my lazy, torticular state I can't find them. Anyone have any leads? Or thoughts?

 

 

Made In Britain

I recently interviewed the English writer Gavin James Bower for Her Royal Majesty, and asked him about his new book, Made in Britain, as well as the study of Claude Cahun he's working on for Zero Books.

An excerpt:

Can you tell me about your affinity for writing in the first person? What does it do for your work that the third person doesn’t?
There’s an obvious immediacy to it that appeals to me, because I want urgency and prejudice and paranoia and alienation to infuse the writing – and the character’s narrative to be taken as is. I don’t feel comfortable writing from the perspective of an omniscient character that’s only partially revealed to the reader, even though there are clear opportunities for landscaping denied, on one level, to a first person narrative. With the latter there’s a vulnerability available, but also the chance to get under the skin of characters – to become them. It’s draining and demanding, but rewarding too. Which is why I write that way.

Read the rest here.

Holiday Donkey Wishes

Tis the season to read Jeanette Winterson's instant classic Christmas tale, "The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me": the birth of Jesus told from the point of view of a donkey:

Sometimes, when the sky is very cold and clear, and I have done my day’s journey, and stand half-asleep, half-awake in the warmth of my stall, I think I see the bowl of a trumpet, and its long funnel, and a foot, clean and white, dangling over the ridge-line of the stars, and I lift up my voice and I bray and I bray, for memory, for celebration, for warning, for chance, for everything that is here below and all that is hidden elsewhere. Hay and dung and another world.

Best wishes for the holiday season!

...where there never was a hat

My day is getting off to a good start afte reading this review of Look I Made a Hat, Volume 2 of Sondheim's annotated collected lyrics at the New York Times Book Review:

...I can’t imagine how serious craftsmen in any field wouldn’t find both books inspiring. The quilt maker fussing over which shade of red to employ as a highlight; the cook experimenting on how most appetizingly to glaze a plate of scallops; the automobile designer sketching a streamlined new speedometer — all such people should experience a sense of kinship when reading Sondheim debating whether, when seeking a rhyme, he might fairly use “wood” rather than “woods”:

“What justification was there to use ‘wood’ here (and in the ‘Finale’) and ‘woods’ everywhere else? I finally hit on an explanation: ‘wood’ sounded statelier and therefore suited a lyric sung by someone outside the action.”

And there's a truly excellent, revelatory interview with Sondheim at the Daily Beast:

You write in Look, I Made a Hat about how your teacher, composer Milton Babbitt, taught you about structure, about how whole works are made from tiny increments.

From Milton I learned about the structuring of themes, what he or someone called one-line composition, which is that there is a guiding principle to the whole arc of either a symphony or a song, which is itself reflected in many ways—just like the way King Lear’s themes are reflected in its characters and subplots. So, we’d analyze, say, the Jupiter Symphony to see what Mozart was doing with structure, what Milton called the architectonic of the piece, the larger structure, and how it’s reflected in the smaller structure so it all holds together and doesn’t sound like something made of bits and pieces.

The whole idea is, how do you organize something that lasts over a period of time, so it seems like one piece instead of 20 pieces? And that period of time can be three minutes or it can be an hour; the principle remains the same. And that—using leitmotifs that develop out of smaller motifs—is something I’ve been doing for a long time, because in writing a score, you have music interrupted by dialogue, so what is it that holds the evening together? If you want to hold the score together—Cole Porter wasn’t interested in holding a whole score together. He just wrote a lot of songs.

(...)

A lot of times when I listen to cast recordings of your shows, I’m struck by how Broadway singers don’t hear the structure that’s in your stuff.

It’s absolutely true. It’s also because they’re not used to it. They’re not trained in opera. They’re not trained to hear scores. They’re trained to hear songs, and that’s what they hear—self-encapsulated pieces. When Mandy Patinkin gave his last performance in Sunday in the Park, there was a little party for him in the basement of the theater, and I can’t remember how it came up, but I mentioned that “Putting It Together,” in the second act, was a variation on “The Day Off” sequence, which occurs in the middle of the first act. And his eyes widened. He’d been singing it for a year and a half, and it had never occurred to him that the two pieces were related. Most singers on Broadway are just not trained to hear that sort of thing. They hear songs, they don’t hear scores.

I've yet to write the Sondheim memoir-essay that's been brewing for years, but I'll get there. This was an early gesture at generating one.

 

 

On George Whitman, 1913-2011

George Whitman, the founder of Shakespeare and Company bookshop (in its current incarnation), has died. He was 98 years old. For those close to the shop, it was no surprise, as George had suffered a stroke two months ago. Even for those not close to the shop, to die at 98 is no surprise. But none of that mitigates how heartbreaking it is to see him go.

I will skip the personal reminiscences because they’re not that interesting, and other people will do that better; I met first met George in 1999 and met him again over the years, but my more profound relationship was with his shop, and with the literary legacy he carried out. I’ve used different words at different stages to describe my interest in Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company: first I was seduced by the myth of the Lost Generation; later, as a scholar of transatlantic modernism, I came to see the shop in sociological terms as an important nexus in the sustaining of an epoch-defining literary hub. The present-day shop borrows from both categories: it gestures at this illustrious history and extends it through the 1950s and the Beat Generation on to the present moment, when it has once again, under the guidance of George’s daughter Sylvia Whitman, assisted by Jemma Birrell, David Delannet, Hilary Drummond, Thomas Collard, Terry Craven, and Linda Fallon (my apologies to the others I’m probably leaving out, not to mention the volunteers, interns, and Tumbleweeds), become a meeting-point for a group of expatriate writers, as well as an impressive array of Anglophone literary luminaries as they pass through town.

Though-- let’s be honest-- none of us who hang around it can claim to be a Stein or a Hemingway, our Shakespeare and Company does play a similar role in the Anglophone community. No, they don’t lend out their books, you must buy them, but they will buy your old ones, or let you trade them in for something of equal value. You can attend readings, and have a glass of wine on the house; and you can sit in the upstairs library (The Sylvia Beach Memorial Library) and treat it as your own reading room. On a recent visit to the shop for a reading, I sat, antisocially, in the upstairs room, where the speakers’ voices are piped in via the sound system. My mind wandering from the reading, I made a catalog of the books on the wall next to me. Here they are:

The Pig in the Barber Shop
The Bishop’s Jaegers
I Capture the Castle
Herrold’s Leap
Topper Takes a Trip
Rain in the Doorway
Shelter Bay
The Stray Lamb
Peregrine Pickle (volume 1)
Humphrey Clinker
The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
The Conscience of the Rich
The Mandelbaum Gate
These Lovers Fled Away
Wolf Solnet

This list, for me, testifies to George Whitman’s most salient qualities: he was a generous and eccentric hoarder. Judging from the contents of the library, no books are turned away (expect, perhaps, for books about the shop, of which I can think of at least one that was banned when it first came out). George’s Shakespeare and Company goes beyond the standards of a “good bookshop,” the defining aspects of which, for me, include being well-curated, able to surprise me with the right book at the right moment; reliable, with a solid backlist; and not outrageously expensive. George’s vision for Shakespeare and Company was to make all of this readily available in his "rag and bone shop of the heart." But because of his particular genius, he created a space that was so much more than just a shop: it was an experience. Many people today are quoting the lines that are prominently displayed in the shop: “Be not inhospitable to strangers, for they may be angels in disguise.” A self-proclaimed “tramp,” George Whitman welcomed all those who tramped through his doorway. He presided over a community, and we are sad to see him go.

And what has gone with him is another connection to our literary heritage.  It is not through nostalgia or sentimentality that I say that I sometimes have a difficult time moving forward, leaving people trapped in the fabric of the past. This is as much an intellectual difficulty as a personal one.  George is said to have met Sylvia Beach after the war, to procure her blessing on borrowing the name of her shop, and is even said to have taken some of her stock with him to the new shop. (I have never really tried to verify this. NB: I have been told in the comments that apparently George was too shy to actually ask for permission to use the name, in case Sylvia Beach said no. And then Jeanette Winterson claims that Sylvia Beach came to the shop with Lawrence Durrell in 1958 and formally bequeathed George the name. Who knows what's true? George would often embellish for effect.) By virtue of having met Beach, and Anais Nin, and Henry Miller, and many others, he symbolized a link with this storied past, when even if the plumbing was sketchy, the exchange rate was favorable, you couldn’t cross the Boulevard Montparnasse without tripping over a Russian painter, and the Left Bank was cheap enough for artists. It was meaningful to have, upstairs at Shakespeare and Company, the living link to that period. The literary modernist era is said to have ended in 1941, with the deaths of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. But in fact, it ends today, with the passing of George Whitman. I'm sure I speak for all of us when I wish Sylvia and David and everyone at the shop my deepest sympathies.

Helen DeWitt at the American University of Paris

Helen DeWitt is in town from Berlin this week at the invitation of the Center for Writers & Translators, the Department of Comparative Literature and English, and the Masters in Cultural Translation at AUP.

The event will take place Thursday, December 1st, at 6:30 pm at 147 rue de Grenelle, 75007, ground floor.

DeWitt's most recent novel, Lightning Rods, was published by New Directions this fall and is receiving glowing reviews. Her first novel, The Last Samurai, has been translated into twenty languages, and is not to be confused with the Tom Cruise film of the same name.

The Los Angeles Review of Books has a panoply of coverage of Lightning Rods, including a review by Scott Esposito, here.

DeWitt will discuss the topic of translation in the context of a range of phenomena that are only partly linguistic, among them bidding conventions in bridge and the aesthetics of programming languages.

The general public is welcome. Please RSVP to Daniel Medin (dmedin@aup.edu).

Locked Room Scenario

When I was in London in October I went to see a curious art installation in a warehouse in Hoxton... and I wrote this piece about it for Her Royal Majesty, about getting lost and finding art.

In the very best of circumstances, I have an atrociously bad sense of direction. Send me to a notoriously difficult-to-find temporary exhibit in a somewhat gritty neighborhood I don’t know at all, and depending on my mood I’ll either cry or give up. And yet here I am, on an unseasonably warm October day, wandering through Hoxton. I’ve come to see Locked Room Scenario, an art installation in a warehouse, sponsored by Artangel, a London-based art group with a penchant for outside-of-the-cube installations in unexpected locations. A friend of a friend works there. This show is meant to be really interesting, but no one will tell me anything specific about it – not my friend, and not the friend of my friend. Deciphering the website takes too much concentration. “Please tell me what is the point of the show,” I asked my friend in advance. “Just give me some idea of what I’m in for.” “Just go,” my friend said, so I’m going, despite the fact that I’ve been getting lost in London all week – taking the wrong trains, making the wrong turns, ending up quite far from where I meant to go. But as I’m contemplating moving to London, I’ve resolved to Keep Calm and Carry On. One day I will navigate the Big Smoke with ease. Or at least with less difficulty.

I start off with a half-pint at a pub called The Eagle. Thus fortified, I begin the task of looking for the Londonewcastle Depot, 1-3 Wenlock Rd. I wander up the street and pass building after building but see no numbers on either side until number 7. Maybe the numbers go the other way? I keep walking and soon I’m at number 19. Then I call my friend.

“You know I am easily lost. Why have you sent me here?”

She describes the entrance, and I seem to remember having passed something that matched her description. “Enjoy the show,” she says. “If you get yourself out of there without having your head collapse it will be amazing.”

Read the rest.

Her Royal Majesty, issue 11

... publishes today! And I'm proud to have a short story in this issue, called "A Naturalist in the Family," which is about technology and humanity, success and failure, and ends with a duel in Les Halles. Ordering information here.  

The rocking cover (all queens!) was drawn by Badaude.

The issue also features art and reflections on art by James Franco. (Because he's everywhere else-- why shouldn't he be in Her Royal Majesty?) 

For those of you here in Paris, you're warmly invited to the launch party tonight at Le Carmen. No word on whether James will show up.

On Photography and truth

Recently I reviewed the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris's new book, Believing is Seeing, for Bookforum.  An excerpt: 

In Errol Morris's new collection of essays on photography, he details the controversy over the New York Times's misidentification of a torture victim in a notorious Abu Ghraib photograph. In the image, a hooded man draped in a poncho stands on a box, arms out, wires connected to his fingertips in an accidentally Christ-like pose. On March 11, 2006, the Times identified the man as Ali Shalal Qaissi—nicknamed "Clawman" because of his deformed left hand—and ran a photograph of Qaissi holding the by-then iconic photograph. Within a week, the paper printed a retraction explaining that Qaissi was not, in fact, the man in that particular photograph—the real hooded man is named Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh. As it happened, on May 22, 2005 the Times had correctly identified the man as Faleh; but when fact-checkers were trying to confirm the 2006 story, they missed the earlier article due to a faulty set of search terms. Morris suggests that this error occurred because of our willingness to believe what we think we see, regardless of available data. Had post-liberation photographs of Qaissi depicted his deformed hand, it would have been immediately apparent that the Hooded Man was someone else. "It is easy to confuse photographs with reality," Morris writes, arguing that we look at this photograph and believe it to depict a moment of torture being carried out on a person we have since identified. "Our beliefs about the picture are confirmed" when we look at it, he adds, "except that we know nothing more than when we started." "It is often said that seeing is believing," Morris continues. "But we do not form our beliefs on the basis of what we see; rather, what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Believing is seeing, not the other way around."

 Morris's single-minded drive to figure out the "real" stories behind a series of photographs may lean too heavily on the idea of a single truth that can be gotten at through research, but the questions he raises along the way, as well as the glimpse we get at his sleuthing techniques, makes this a compelling read.

Save St Mark's Bookshop

[UPDATE: They worked out an agreement. Hooray!]

This just in, from the Cooper Square Committee, who are fighting to save St Mark's Bookshop:

A Board committee is meeting on Monday to decide if they will reduce St Mark's Bookshop's $20,000/month rent by $5,000.  Thousands of emails or calls will influence the decision.  

Tell the President to reduce the bookshop rent to $15,000 a month until the economy improves. 

Every little bit helps! Here is the email I just sent off; feel free to copy or modify it:

from	lauren elkin xxx.com
to		President@cooper.edu
date		Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 3:37 PM
subject		Please reduce St Mark's Bookshop's rent to $15,000...

...at least until the economy improves!

I'm a native New Yorker who moved to Paris at a time when very few American bookshops were managing to survive the onslaught of the big chains and the homogenization of reading habits (when people still read at all). It means a lot to me to know that there are still a few shops left in New York for whom books are not a product like any other, but the repository of what we know about the world and ourselves. Books that are written, published, and sold with the idea of exploring the human condition, not promoting someone's bottom line, need to be supported.

Here in France, a fixed-price book law was implemented in 1981 that prevents bookstores from underselling one another, competing for the lowest price. In 2007, the French government implemented subsidies to help independent bookstores which met certain criteria.

In the US, we have no fixed-price book law, and the idea of the government subsidizing bookstores is laughable. It's up to local businesses and landowners to do the subsidizing. Please do your part.

Thank you,
LE

And here's the piece I published in Five Dials on bookselling in France, and how those subsidies I mentioned actually work.