Maitresse

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!

On Winterson and criticism

I spent my thirtieth birthday with Jeanette Winterson.

She didn’t know it was my thirtieth birthday.  I mean-- I think she was told it was somebody’s birthday, because she showed up that day with champagne, and a cake from Boulangerie Eric Kayser magically appeared.  I was on the inaugural Faber Writer’s Workshop at Shakespeare & Co; in the morning, we worked with Tobias Hill; in the afternoon, Jeanette came in and dazzled pixie dust on us. The workshop happened to coincide with my birthday, and so we celebrated, that October evening, out on the patio in front of the bookstore, across the river from Notre Dame, which obliged us with an hourly carillon of bells to mark the passing time. 

Something Jeanette said to us that day stuck with me. 

She said she doesn’t much care for literary critics, or academics. Only those who have accomplished a serious work of art, does she trust.  Critics, she has written, “ plant more obstacles than they remove” (Art Objects, 191).

So when Scott Esposito, the editor of The Quarterly Conversation, asked me to write an essay on Winterson, I balked. I hemmed, hawed, missed deadlines, etc. I was terrified. Not that she would read it-- god no. No risk of that. But I was still afraid that somehow she would know, when next I saw her, that I had written about her and that she would not approve if she happened to read what I wrote. (Classic anxiety of influence: the writer may correct her foremothers but she also craves their approval.)

She said something else that day that stayed with me: “You have to turn up for work.” You can’t wait around to be visited by the Muse-- you have to show up for work whether the Muse is there or not.

Winterson shows up for work and she creates new worlds. 

The literary critic shows up for work and mediates those worlds. 

You want to look at it up close, to appreciate each delicate meeting of gears: the balance wheel, the pivot, the click. You want to tell what you saw.  You’re not studying it to learn how to make a watch.  You’re not a watchmaker.  The point is to be able to point to that watch and say-- look what a wonderful watch that is.  It is of a quality you don’t find every day.  You ought to try it on.

Winterson’s work seems absolutely to beg for a literary critic to come along and work on it, and maybe that’s why she’s so mistrustful of us. She doesn't think of literature as something that should be taken apart. It would be like unweaving a tapestry: “The fabric of a book is more than its material; it is the weave of the words” (AO 174):

It is redundant to try to analyze a poem, or a piece of fiction that undertakes poetic principles, by separating out the parts, meaning on one side, words on the other.  When a thing is perfectly made it has no fastenings or seams.  It will not come apart in your hands. What you do manage to pull to pieces is a construct of your own. (AO 171)

Exactly.  What a challenge. Watches or tapestries?

If I may, the work may look like a tapestry to its writer, but a critic knows it’s a watch. And with all due respect, I want to take hers apart.  I put it off long enough, and now here I am.  Turning up for work.   

You can read what I came up with here.

around the internet on a tuesday

It's Fashion Week in Paris (since last Wednesday), and I even got to go to a show, thanks to my wonderful friend Elisabeth (who got the fashion scoop of the century: some models take the metro!).  I wore red tights and a grey coat and super high heels and a Japanese magazine took my picture.  Then after the show I put on my flats and turned back into a graduate student.  But oh! the flash and click of it all.  J'adore.

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My dog is at the vet right now getting his teeth cleaned, but they have to use a general anaesthetic for that, and that is apparently not without risks, and so I am very much on edge and having a hard time focusing on this post. I am going to be a very nervous mother, one day.

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You may have seen this already, as it's several days old, but Jeanette Winterson has a great article about Shakespeare & Co in the Guardian.  It's true that it is a wonderful bookshop, but I think all the attention it gets unjustly takes attention away from some really fantastic Anglophone bookshops, like the Village Voice (where every major writer passing through Paris stops and reads), or the San Francisco Book Co, which is a real pleasure to browse in.  But, of course, Shakespeare has the history, and the upstairs library, and Sylvia and Jeanette and Colette (the dog). The library, however, is not really that comfortable; the benches, despite the cushions, are not very welcoming.  You know where is a really good place to curl up with a book in Paris? Sir Winston's.  They have these enormous leather club chairs that are great for hiding out in.  Unfortunately, it's over by the Arc de Triomphe, and so is a bit out of the everyday orbit of othe average Parisian.  Also, they play their music a bit too loudly, in an attempt to chic the place up.

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The Salon du Livre (Paris Book Fair) gets underway on Friday; Mexico is the guest of honor.  Carlos Fuentes, Jordi Soler, and Jorge Volpi will be there, among others.  I, sadly, will not.  But please tell us about it if you do go!

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The Nouvel Observateur has Philippe Sollers on Claude Lanzmann's autobiography [FR]

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Writing: a joy or a chore? Nine authors tell the Guardian how much they love and hate the drudgery of writing.

Jeanette Winterson, Paris, and magical thinking

Is Jeanette Winterson writing about Paris a lot more frequently in her journalism, or is it just me? Her latest column for the Times is a bit of fairy dust about her love for Paris and Shakespeare and Co and how when we think we're speaking French we may be saying something altogether different. This is followed by her search for a book about, ahem, Holland.

On a recent visit to Paris, Jeanette read from The Passion at S & Co in memory of Pat Kavanagh.  I think I mentioned that I went.  What I didn't mention is that I was talked into telling Jeanette-- wait for it-- that she came to me in a dream. "Stop telling yourself your stories, and do your work," she said, I clearly recall, in her Northern accent.

I recounted this, imitating her plummy tones, and she crowed. "And? Well?" she wrote in my copy of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.  And, well, you know. 

No excuses.

[NDLR: Subsequent to the writing of this post, JW wrote on her own website that her father died at the end of 2008.  We were sorrowful to hear this and send Jeanette our deepest condolences.]

tonight in Paris

At the risk of making this blog sound like a Jeanette Winterson fansite (zomg u guyz i luv oranges!!), I'll just point out that she will be reading at Shakespeare & Co this evening at 7.  In a very rare appearance-- apparently she won't be doing this in London or anywhere else-- she'll read from The Passion, in honor of the recently deceased literary agent Pat Kavanagh.  If you can't be there tonight, you might want to at least read the December column on her website.

On a happier note, the dynamic podcasting duo Katia & KylieMac are celebrating their 200th episode tonight with a live recording and blow-out party at the Canadian pub on the Quai des Grands Augustins.  They're raffling off signed copies of books by these Paris-based authors (including David Sedaris. I wonder if he'll show up?). They'll also be streaming live, somehow via Internet. These girls are not only funny and creative but more tech-savvy than the rest of us could ever hope to be... Congrats to K&K and here's to 200 more!

money makes the ___ go around

Anyone who works creatively feels discomfort around the myth of economic progress as the route to human self-realisation, because emphatically, that is not where it happens for us.

You really must read Jeanette Winterson's latest column for the Times, on the role of art in an economic recession.

my maybe best birthday ever

Saturday was my 30th birthday, and Paris cooked up the most wonderful surprises for me.  Beshert, you say in Yiddish when something is meant to be.  Generally people are referring to your spouse when they say this.  But for me, I think it might be Paris. Paris and I are beshert. (Don't tell N. We're beshert too. But in a more human sense of the term.)

Since Thursday I had been doing the Faber Academy writing seminar with Tobias Hill and Jeanette Winterson at Shakespeare & Company. My new friend and colleague Elizabeth blogged all about it here and here (with photos. Loads more photos here).  By Saturday, we were all fast friends, and when I arrived in the morning I was greeted with flowers, a gift, a card-- and everyone's good wishes. Somehow I had assumed a birthday would be a minor event, to be passed over in favor of the main event: writing.  But I forgot that writers are often large-hearted, sensitive people, and for the entire day, I was showered with attention. It was as if I had made my bat mitzvah. (Which I never did. So this was nice.)

By evening, following a rousing session with Jeanette on verbs, we retired from the upstairs library to the front porch of the bookshop.  A cake from Eric Kayser emerged and Jeanette Winterson popped open five bottles of champagne and started pouring. On cue, the bells of Notre Dame, directly across the river from the shop, began to ring. It was my birthday, so I rambled to Jeanette about my dissertation.  Because it was my birthday, she listened politely.

After champagne and cake it was off to an group dinner at La Coupole, where thirty of us (writers, teachers, spouses, & friends) gorged ourselves on chevre, oysters, pavé, and quenelle de brochet. I had to leave before dessert as I had organized a party at Au Rendez-vous des amis in Montmartre at 9 pm and it was 9:30 when I looked up from my pavé to my watch-- let's just say I ran out at full tilt leaving a lot of confused people behind me.*

It was a straight shot on the 12, so I sat and tried not to stress as we ticked off stop after stop, Madeleine, St Lazare, St Georges... When we stopped at Notre Dame de Lorette I caught the eye of a young guy on the platform. He darted up to me, jumped into the car, blew me a kiss, and ran off.  I blushed and consulted my iPod, trying to avoid the stares of the other passengers. "It's my birthday," I wanted to explain. "That's why I'm glowing and that's why I'm wearing red lipstick and that's why that guy just blew me a kiss. Ca se voit."

I made it to the bar and rounded up the gang.  It was too hot in the bar, so we stood out on the sidewalk, enjoying the balmy October weather.  People arrived a few at a time. Anna brought cookies. Sophie took pictures. Rob was in from the Southwest. Meg brought her mystery man. Jacques came and proved he's not only N's friend. The mommies came too: Cath let the hubby watch the Tadpole. Abby got a babysitter.  Alice parted from Emma for her first evening out. And because we're beshert, Paris arranged for a spectacular round of fireworks, just for me.

Ok, and for 104. But for me too.

So merci, merci, et encore merci. Je n'aurais jamais su attendre à tout ça et vous êtes tous des anges. Merci et bon anniversaire à tout le monde!

*Many of whom were not confused at all about why I couldn't make it to the last day of class on Sunday. I can party like a rock star, but I get hung over like... a lightweight.

the alchemy of reading, part I

"It is part of the alchemy of books that the written word rewrites itself on the reader and that one thing becomes another as it passes through various states of change while remaining itself. Don’t tell me that books are not mysterious – they are." --Jeanette Winterson

Last night, I settled into bed around eleven o'clock with the novel I started reading over the weekend.  It wasn't long before I realized my apartment had a curious sense of presence-- as if something were in the apartment apart from me and my dog.  On cue, Baxter started to bark in the other room.  Starting to get a little freaked, I got out of bed, put on my slippers, and cautiously opened the bedroom door.  I caught a glimpse of movement across the room and jumped out of my skin, then realized I was seeing my own reflection in the mirror hanging on the bathroom door, which I had left open.  Baxter barked again.  I told him to calm down and go to sleep (trying to convince myself of the same thing).  I went back to my bedroom, shut the door firmly behind me, climbed into bed, and slipped back into my book.  I read for another half hour or so and then, putting the closed book on my nightstand, quickly turned out the light and pulled the covers over my head.  If they can't see me, I thought, the same thought I've had since childhood, falling asleep under similar circumstances, they can't get me.

All that because I'm reading a book about vampires! The opening chapters of The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, lay the groundwork for the plot in teasing, thrilling chapters that so far include mysterious appearances and disappearances, and a father who is too terrified to recount the story of his encounters with Dracula to his daughter and so can only do it in short increments. The text is aware of its place in the scaffolding of the Dracula myth, from the fifteenth century to the present day, but it is no less unsettling for this acknowledgment.

This kind of terror is what Jeanette Winterson alludes to in her recent article in the Times.  In this essay, she observes that there are far too many books being published these days for anyone to read all of them, and indeed, quite few that are worth reading.  How is one to cut a swathe through the literary bracken?  The only real way to read, Winterson writes, is to "follow [your] eccentricities," wherever they may take you.  For example, here's where Winterson says her own eccentricities have recently led:

I have just been reading Captain Cook’s Journals, which made me read Robinson Crusoe again, which made me think about island narratives, and has run me towards Boswell and Johnson in the Hebrides, Marianne Wiggins’s wonderful novel John Dollar and to Diana Souhami’s award-winning Selkirk’s Island, which made me order Coconut Chaos, her new book on Pitcairn.

Isn't reading fun?

However, I have to disagree with her on one point: her outright dismissal of books on how or what to read, likening them to the "menu turistico beloved of nervous holidaymakers in foreign parts."  I take issue with this statement on several levels.

In the first place, my eccentricities have led me to the work of Alberto Manguel.  Here's how: While perusing in my local Barnes and Noble years ago, I came upon a paperback with an alluring name: The Mark of the Angel. I read the back cover and found it took place in Paris.  Sold.  An intellectual fascination (and something more, something more personal) with Nancy Huston was born. Last fall, hearing Huston would be on a panel at Festival America with Margaret Atwood and Edmund White (whose book on Paris I decidedly did not appreciate), I took my little self out to Vincennes to hear her.  And there beside her was a deeply philosophical Argentinian-Canadian, whose comments and works mark him as the heir to Borges and Benjamin.  "Je ne construis pas la vie sans lecture," he said; when we read, the book becomes part of our "bibliothèque intérieure."

It's true: if you want to know who someone is, you can tell a lot from the books they own.  And I don't mean this as an elitist judgment-- it's not to say that people who don't keep books aren't interesting people, or that people who buy and read chick lit aren't intelligent, but that much can be gleaned about that person's relationship to their mind and to ideas from their bookshelves. 

After the panel, I went to the book tent, where I bought Une histoire de la lecture(1996) and La Bibliothèque, la nuit (2006) as well as a short work on Borges and added them to my "to read" pile at home. (Manguel also has a book called A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflection on a Year of Books(2004) that I'm hoping to add to my library.)

A few months later, they're still in my "to read" pile; I'm thinking I may get to them in April or perhaps over the summer. Because I'm so interested in Manguel's understanding of literature, and the alchemical process of reading, this provides a good reason for me to read his reading diary.  If I respect a writer, such as Manguel, Winterson, Huston, then I will be interested to know what I can learn from their reading habits and journals that could in turn help my own reading and enlarge my understanding of literature and the world we inhabit.  And I'm sure that Manguel will lead me other places, to writers I haven't read, or to consider those I have in a different light. [Speaking of world we inhabit, Manguel now lives in a farmhouse in Poitou-Charentes.  I wonder how I might angle for an invitation...]

I suspect, however, that Winterson was not alluding to works like those of Manguel, but perhaps to something like How to Read a Poem, by Terry Eagleton (2006), Catching Life by the Throat: How to Read Poetry and Why, by Josephine Hart (2006) , How to Read and Why, by Harold Bloom (2001), or So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading, by Sara Nelson (2004), which best seems to prove Winterson's point: if there are so many books to read and not enough time to read them, why spend time reading about Nelson reading?

Which brings me to my second point, which will consider why we should in fact read Eagleton and Nelson on reading.  But I've gone on long enough for now; that's a post for another day.  To be continued...