Maitresse

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.

 

 

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).

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.

vendredi, poésie

"Fate Playing," Ted Hughes (from Birthday Letters)

Because the message somehow met a goblin
Because precedents tripped your expectations
Because your London was still a kaleidoscope
Of names and places any jolt could scramble,
You waited mistaken. The bus from the North
Came in and emptied and I was not on it.
No matter how much you insisted,
And begged the driver, probably with tears,
To produce me or to remember seeing me
Just miss getting on. I wasn't on it.
Eight in the evening and I was lost and at large
Somewhere in England. You restrained
Your confident inspiration
And did not dash out into the traffic
Milling around Victoria, utterly certain
Of bumping into me where I would have to be walking.
I was not walking anywhere. I was sitting
Unperturbed, in my seat on the train
Rocking towards King's Cross. Somebody,
Calmer than you, had a suggestion. So,
When I got off the train, expecting to find you
Somewhere down at the root of the platform,
I saw that surge and agitation, a figure
Breasting the flow of released passengers,
Then your molten face, your molten eyes,
And your exclamations, your flinging arms,
Your scattering tears
As if I had come back from the dead
Against every possibility, against
Every negative but your own prayer
To your own God. There I knew what it was
To be a miracle. And behind you
Your jolly taxi-driver, laughing, like a small god,
To see an American girl being so American,
And to see your frenzied chariot ride-
Sobbing and goading him, and pleading him
To make happen what you needed to happen-
Succeed so completely, thanks to him.
Well, it was a wonder
That my train wasn't earlier, even much earlier,
That it pulled up, late, the very moment
You irrupted onto the platform. It was
Natural and miraculous and an omen
Confirming everything
You wanted confirmed. So your huge despair,
Your cross London panic dash
And now your triumph, splashed over me
Like love forty-nine times magnified,
Like the first thunder cloudburst engulfing
The drought in August
When the whole cracked earth seems to quake
And every leaf trembles
And everything holds up its arms weeping.

On mantras

    My leg had gone to sleep, but I did not stand up; unspecific tensions seemed to be rendering everyone in the room catatonic. The producer played back the rhythm track. The engineer said that he wanted to do his deep-breathing exercises. Manzarek ate a hard-boiled egg. "Tennyson made a mantra out of his own name," he said to the engineer. "I don’t know if he said 'Tennyson Tennyson Tennyson' or 'Alfred Alfred Alfred' or 'Alfred Lord Tennyson,' but anyway, he did it. Maybe he just said 'Lord Lord Lord.'"
    "Groovy," the Clear Light bass player said.

--Joan Didion, The White Album, p. 23-24

Goncourt longlist announced

Shortlist and even shorter list to come on October 4th and then 25th, with the winner announced on November 2.

- Stéphane Audeguy Rom@ (Gallimard)

- Emmanuel Carrère Limonov (P.O.L)

- Sorj Chalandon Retour à Killybegs (Grasset)

- Charles Dantzig Dans un avion pour Caracas (Grasset)

- David Foenkinos Les souvenirs (Gallimard)

- Alexis Jenni L’Art français de la guerre (Gallimard)

- Simon Libérati Jayne Mansfield 1967 (Grasset)

- Ali Magoudi Un sujet français (Albin Michel)

- Carole Martinez Du Domaine des Murmures (Gallimard)

- Véronique Ovaldé Des vies d’oiseaux (L’Olivier)

- Eric Reinhardt Le Système Victoria (Stock)

- Romain Slocombe Monsieur le Commandant (Nil)

- Morgan Sportès Tout, tout de suite (Fayard)

Full listing of prize longlists here.

- Lyonel Trouillot La belle amour humaine (Actes Sud)

- Delphine de Vigan Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit (JC Lattès)

Andre Breton to Jacqueline Lamba

Photograph of Lamba and Breton by Claude Cahun, 1935-36

 

My lovely Demon … this to show you that I am still in the good graces of the demon. My beautiful liquid Element, I drown in you. Will there be heaths grey enough, rocks tormented enough, forests hollow enough for our flight together tonight? One more word, but let it be at least carried by my voice: I love you.

André

The Surrealist scholar and translator* Mary Ann Caws shares a letter from the leonine Pope of Surrealism to his second wife, Jacqueline Lamba, which Lamba gave to her one evening in the South of France. In this week's London Review of Books (subscription unfortunately required to see the full article, including the letter). The letter is being gifted to the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris.

*(and my dear friend & advisor)

Le blurb

France is getting blurbs! Lire Magazine reports. Never before has such a sneaky marketing concept sullied the covers of French books. And the blurbs still won't be on the cover, but restricted to the red bandeaux (like a skinnier version of a dust jacket) that are wrapped around new publications, sometimes to announce prizes the author has won, or that the book has been nominated for, but sometimes to reproduce the name of the author in larger letters. 

Did you know that the blurb was invented in 1907, and was named after the heroine (Miss Belinda Blurb) of Gelett Burgess's novel Are You A Bromide? (Subtitle: The Sulphitic Theory Expounded And Exemplified According To The Most Recent Researches Into The Psychology Of Boredom Including Many Well-Known Bromidioms Now In Use.) 

The "act of blurbing" is an unattractive woman vulgarly cupping her hand around her mouth to call something out to the reader!

Lire Magazine looks into the "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" aspect of blurbing (Hmm, Jonathan Coe will blurb any book whose author shares his agent!) and is astonished at the number of Anglo-American writers who do it regularly. "Even Thomas Pynchon, the great recluse of American lettres-- the most recent photo we have of him dates from 1960!-- is an inveterate 'blurber'!"

Francis Geffard, editor of American literature at Albin Michel, points out why the "blurb" system hadn't taken on in the past (and why he's wary about it going forward): in France, authors are identified as belonging to a particular publishing house, and for a Gallimard author to blurb an Albin Michel author would be unthinkable. "Whereas on the other hand," he said, "in the US the blurb is a tradition which comes out of a mentoring relationship, or from the collegiality of the university system [NDLR: in the US many writers teach in MFA programs, whereas France doesn't offer a degree for creative writing, at least not as far as I know] (....) For some writers, it's like accompanying a young writer who they believe in to the baptismal font."

The incessant Catholic metaphors are part of the charm of living in France. And now, so is le blurbing!

The Ferocious Manifesto

The poet Saeed Jones has called for the word "fierce" to be reclaimed from the likes of Tyra Banks (who "throw[s] it around like used fake eyelashes") and reinvested with queer, "menacingly wild" energy:

Fierce is Helene Cixous demanding in The School of The Dead that, as we write, we ask ourselves honestly “Am I writing? Am I burning? Or am I pretending?” Fierce is the urgency in Essex Hemphill’s voice in “For My Own Protection” as he declares “All I want to know / for my own protection / is are we capable / of whatever, whenever?” Fierce is the look I imagine Zora Neale Hurston had on her face when she said “I love myself when I am laughing and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.” It is Audre Lorde taking her seat for her panel at the Second Sex Conference in 1979, adjusting the microphone in front of her and calmly stating “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Fierce is the work of bloggers like Rod McCollum, Pam Spaulding, and Andres Duque whose coverage of LGBT news relevant to queer people of color is absolutely brilliant and crucial. Fierce is Sarah Schulman’s Ties That Bind. Fierce is Kai Wright’s Drifting Toward Love. Fierce is Jericho Brown’s Please. Fierce is Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw. Fierce is the first queer Latino winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

Fierce. Read more here.

Anne Marsella at Her Royal Majesty

Her Royal Majesty has just published a wonderful interview with the Paris-based writer Anne Marsella, author of Remedy and The Baby of Belleville.  An excerpt:

Both of your novels are set in Paris. What about Paris interests you as a writer? Is your Paris different from the “written Paris” you have inherited?
Remedy, Patsy Boone and The Baby of Belleville comprise my Parisian trilogy with Remedy and Patsy Boone working as mirror narratives, the first written in English, the latter in French. All three novels depict Paris as a city of overlapping, multiple worlds where Muslim matriarchs, French aristocrats, immigrant plumbers, Catholic nuns, American expats and a host of others entwine destinies in unexpected ways, and this fictive world, as strange and “whimsical” as it may seem to some, does in fact reflect the “real” Paris where I’ve resided for many years.  In Remedy I play with stereotypes of the American in Paris and displace them, so that they are no longer quite recognizable. The romanticized Paris played up in books like Adam Gopnik’s beautifully penned Paris to the Moon, simply does not seem real to me. I often think the myth of Paris is held too dear and to the detriment of seeing what is really going on here. I wonder how one can write a book about Paris and France in general without exploring its colonial past or lending an ear to its immigrant populations which have largely brought the country to its current prosperity. My imagination has been naturally drawn to these immigrant communities in the north-east of Paris, perhaps because I am an immigrant as well, and the question of exile and how it places one at the crux of myriad contradictions interest me: how can one make a home where one is not at home (and constantly harassed as with the sans papiers)?; what does it mean to be oneself, when one is perceived as other, particularly as an unwanted Other?; but also because in a city so groomed and polished, it is through the cracks and fissures of these more neglected neighbourhoods that my imagination has been able to make its entry. Right now France struggles to uphold its ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité against the winds of a growing xenophobia. My novels are not political in any obvious way, but they touch upon these current realities of French life.

This, to me, is the kind of writing about Paris that I can get behind. Read the full interview here. And you can read my 2008 interview with Anne here.

Port Eliot: part 3 of 3

Last in a series! Up now at Her Royal Majesty. Turtle and lobster races and Situationist hijinks galore! Countryside flânerie! Book recommendations! And inadvertant magic tricks! To wit:

Joanna has bought a pack of cards at the Hermès wagon which each feature a variation on how to tie an Hermès scarf. I splay the cards and offer them to her facedown. “Pick a card!” She does. “Don’t show it to me; put it back in the deck. Now shuffle.” She does. I take back the deck and choose a card at random. “This is not your card,” I say. “Yes it is,” she says. I have performed magic without meaning to. That, or I’ve beaten the odds.

Read more.

Back to Port Eliot, part 2

In which we do yoga, listen to nasty little poets, hang out with Caitlin Moran, have epiphanies, and fall collectively in love with Bellowhead. At Her Royal Majesty.

 

A hidden bookstore in New York?

Top of the to-do list.

 

Via The New Inquiry.

More on festivals

So Latitude might have been a total washout, but Port Eliot, which I attended for the second time, was wonderful. Last year I wrote about being a festival neophyte for Bomb; this year I'm blogging about Port Eliot for Her Royal Majesty. An excerpt:

This year, I’m back for more, ready to try to understand a bit more about England, festivals, and the new sincerity: this Zeitgeist which embraces grammar classes, 1940s tea dresses, cream teas, and the medieval Crumhorn. I’ve come once again as the guest of my friend Joanna, who will be giving a talk on how to be a tourist at the Idler Academy on Sunday afternoon. (After camping together at Port Eliot last year, and at Latitude the previous weekend, we’ve gone through so much as tentmates that it’s as if we’ve been through the trenches together.) I’m particularly excited to see some of the writers who are here this year: Caitlin Moran, James Attlee, Matthew de Abaitua, Hari Kunzru, and Hanif Kureishi, among others. British Sea Power are playing. Some of our favorite acts from last year are returning. I’m just hoping I can fit it all in.

Continue reading

Wake in Progress

At the reading last week to celebrate Shakespeare & Company's inaugural Paris Literary Prize I found my attention wandering repeatedly to a pair of prints hanging over the till. Riverrun, I read, past Eve and Adam's, why does this sound so famil--

Although any self-respecting modernist would have made the connection as soon as they read the word "Riverrun," I blame my delayed reaction on the fact that I was simultaneously listening to one of the three short-listed authors reading from their work.  I was, of course, looking at the first sentence of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which is also a continuation of the last sentence of Finnegans Wake ("A way a lone a last a loved a long the").  

As it turns out, the prints I was looking at were part of Stephen Crowe's project "Wake in Progress," in which the artist is illustrating every page of Joyce's late masterpiece. In honor of Bloomsday, they were on display the previous night at the party where the winners were announced, but I had apparently had too much champagne to notice what was on the walls of the Société des gens de lettres.

According to Crowe, "Joyce’s final work is a giddy, disorienting dream that dramatises the internal conflicts of a sleeper's unconscious through a wild, satirical mash-up of history, myth and tall tale-telling." Crowe honors "the book's playful miscellany by plundering the history of the visual arts, from Medieval illuminations to cartoon strips."

The prints will be up at Shakespeare and Co until June 30th. For more information on the project, visit Crowe's website. And don't miss this short reflection on "Why Finnegans Wake is Better than Ulysses."

 

And the winner is

Shakespeare & Company announced the winners of their first ever Paris Literary Prize last Thursday.

Awarded for a novella (the perfect form, some say-- more room to develop than a short story but leaner and trimmer than a novel*), the judges included Erica Wagner, Breyten Breytenbach, Darrin Strauss, and Denis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who will be publishing the winner.

Rosa Rankin-Gee (she of Le Carmen Book Swap and A Tale of Three Cities) took top honors for "The Last Kings of Sark," while Adam Biles and Agustin Maes were the runners-up. (Bios here)

Shakespeare & Company held a reading the next day where we got to hear the three of them read a sample of their work. Here's Adam Biles reading from his novella, "Grey Cats."**

 

 

*Novella fever is everywhere-- my second novel is actually two long novellas which take place in the same apartment 30 years apart.

**The cafe Biles mentions is Le Select, where I'm often to be found, and yes, the cat is still there.