Maitresse

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.

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.

On festivals

A couple of weeks ago, in a forest, a woman wandered over to me and asked “Is this Narnia?”
 
Anywhere else, this would have been a really strange question. But we were at a festival, one of those summer gatherings that resembles a collective psychotic break.  We were in a forest the festival had dubbed “the faraway forest,” and I was there ostensibly to “perform” alongside my friend J, who writes a column about fashion for the Times.* Concretely, this meant helping her create dresses made of cellophane that she then attempted to spray with fake snow. I was sporting an Edwardian-style cape. J dubbed me "the Snow Queen of Latitude."

"No," I told the woman, who maybe got the Snow Queen reference. "Narnia is down the hill." There was apparently an actual Narnia-themed event taking place not so far away from us in the faraway forest, which I heard involved a wardrobe and some dress-up. (It was unclear if you could actually walk through the wardrobe, and whether there would be talking animals on the other side if you did.)

We were not in the best of moods for this level of whimsy, having arrived at Latitude at around noon that day in the middle of a torrential downpour.  (It was "pissing down" as the locals say.) J's agent had our tent. We had no cell phone reception and could not reach said agent.  Carrying all our crap, we walked for what felt like hours from the production tent to the performers' camping area. The mud was already about 5 inches deep and it was everywhere. Not a dry spot to stop and sit.  Finally we were found, and fed, and our tent was pitched, and we could throw our stuff down in it. Finally we could head back to the Faraway forest and do J's event.

As the Snow Queen of Latitude, I felt slightly miffed at the lack of information about the festival and what it had to offer. The production office tied performer’s badges around our wrists, but did not equip us with a programme.  We kept trying to find one, until finally we were told they came in the form of a weighty paperback novel, and cost 9 pounds. “9 pounds!” We resigned ourselves to not knowing what was going on.

The festival, then, took place in a kind of haze. There were multicolored sheep, why I don’t know, and that night a woman dangled above a bridge, attached to a giant glowing purple moon, as the crowd below gawked and gasped.  I don’t know who she was either. We were taken to hear a singer called Steve Mason, who was a bit emo when we first got there but stepped it up a bit by the end, and concluded his set by calling out to the crowd: “Don’t let those cunts get you down!”

“What cunts?” I asked, as I had just come back from the loo, and was feeling a bit lost. “Which cunts?”

“Oh, you know,” our friend said. “Just, like, The Man.”

We were in our sleeping bags by 12:30, after an ill-advised late night stop at a food stand, where I had some kind of chicken kebab. It was about 5 am when I was woken up by stomach convulsions so painful and so deep they could easily have been confused with labor pains. Then the migraine set in. Sunday, then, could be summarized thusly: nausea, dizziness, chills, projectile vomiting, ambulance, first aid tent, more puking, dizziness, chills, napping, and then a really cute medic called Michael, who stuck his head under the covers where I was hiding and gave me the good drugs. We ended up missing our train back to Oxford and spent the night in Southwold, where my APC sunglasses were stolen the next day, but where I found a Barbour that suited me half-price.

The following weekend, we camped again, at Port Eliot. On which, more to come, with more literature and less puking.

*For the record, J has only good things to say about Latitude. All views expressed here are wholly my own and are not to be confused with hers, which she has recorded here. For her take on Southwold, see here.

On being friends with girls

Recently I reviewed Sheila Heti's latest book, How Should a Person Be?, for The Quarterly Conversation.

One of the most important aspects of that book is the life-altering friendship between the narrator (also named Sheila), a writer, and Margaux, a painter (also the name of Heti's real-life friend).  Here's an excerpt from the review:

The plot, if there can be said to be one, hinges on Sheila’s inability to write a play for a feminist theatre company. It doesn’t have to be a feminist play, they tell her, but it has to be about women. “I didn’t know anything about women! And yet I hoped I could do it, being a woman myself.” At the same time, Sheila is living in the aftermath of a failed marriage, trying to figure out how to befriend an artist called Margaux, and experiencing all-consuming lust for a painter named Israel. But the play just won’t come together, and, wanting desperately to be a genius, Sheila is terrified of failure.

In order, then, to write the play, Sheila begins her recordings, hoping to learn from her friends a bit more about how a person, and more specifically an artist, should be. Along the way she inadvertently ends up alienating Margaux, the one person who is as “serious” as Sheila. After the two girls travel to Miami together to attend Art Basel, Sheila writes an article about their trip. Margaux reads it and is so hurt she can no longer paint, Sheila feels responsible, and—well, I won’t tell you how it ends. Suffice it to say, the path to enlightenment is more of a Dantean journey. Do people change? Can we learn things? Through her friendship with Margaux, Sheila goes from “stupidly living” to living with consciousness, intention, awareness. This trajectory would seem to be at odds with the self-awareness and anti-conventional aspect of the rest of the text. (full review here)

I'm thinking quite a bit about artistic friendships between women these days, for a project I'm putting together, and probably that is in no little part due to the fact that over the past year or so, my friends have become incredibly important to me. They always were, but I think I took that for granted until fairly recently. I've leaned on them to get me through all the crap this last year has involved, the big disappointments and small triumphs (and small disapointments and big triumphs), but most importantly, they talk to me about my work and are helpful and brilliant and generous. (I hope I am as good a friend to them in return.)

So having just returned home from a lovely evening out with one of my excellent friends, I was so glad to read this interview with her. Harriet is (as I just observed to her tonight) the kind of person who has an idea and the next day it's a thing you can touch and leaf through and love. She founded a pretty awesome literary magazine called Her Royal Majesty. Read the interview and you'll see why I'm so glad she's my friend, and you'll want her to be your friend too, and I'm sure she'd be happy to be. 

Also, check out the new website and blog for HRM, crafted with care by my new Scottish friend Grant, who generously put me up in Edinburgh earlier this week.

Dr Maîtresse

As some of you may know, I defended my dissertation on Thursday and earned an upgrade in my honorific. (Not bad for someone who failed gym so many times she almost didn't graduate from high school.) Here, in case you're interested, is an excerpt from the statement I made at the beginning of the defense. It outlines why I chose the texts I chose to analyze and how I see these texts (and my readings of them) working together to form a coherent statement on an important and overlooked aspect of late modernist women’s writing in Britain. I'd be happy to hear any responses you might have, as I begin thinking about how to revise the dissertation to book form.

***

Elizabeth Bowen’s novels The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938) indicate that something in Britain was broken long before David Cameron came on the scene. “Tradition is broken,” Bowen wrote in 1937. The social mores of the past-- the means of organizing the unruliness of everyday life-- have been eroded, and superseded by a movement toward a more open society. Social exchange has become a potential minefield, and the consequences of these new freedoms must be dealt with. But how, when (as Noel Coward notes in his play “Private Lives”) the situation is-- or at least feels-- entirely without precedent?

Elyot, the anti-hero of “Private Lives,” remarks that in light of this, “I shall continue to be flippant.” But Coward himself did not operate exclusively in this frivolous vein. Songs like “Twentieth Century Blues,” which was a hit song in 1931, indicate that Coward felt a more serious urge to bear witness to the confusion and pessimism of the period.

Why is it that civilized humanity
Can make the world so wrong ?
In this hurly-burly of insanity
Our dreams cannot last long

Blues —
Twentieth century blues.
They’re getting me down.
Blues —
Escape those weary
Twentieth century blues.

In Coward’s more serious moments, “humanity” rhymes with “insanity.” The song, Coward said later, “struck the right note of harsh discordance and typified...the curious hectic desperation [he] wished to convey” (177). The 1930s will continue in this “musical” vein: the rhythm is stylized, ironic, but the melody’s in a minor key, and the lyrics are laced with wariness and uncertainty.

Having read the scholarship on 1930s British women’s writing,  I knew that I didn’t want to look at texts that were explicitly political, as these had received ample attention, but rather texts that characterized what seemed to me most important to highlight about British women’s late modernism: a sense of uncertainty and belatedness. I wanted to concentrate on texts that seemed to hesitate before any final resolution, that were still interested in the potential of modernist form while aware of the limitations of what high modernism had achieved.

I tried to imagine what the aims of this late modernism could be-- what all these revisions were tending towards. I tested out idea of authenticity, or impersonality, or more feminist ideas that would read these texts as “coming into their own” narratives.  In chapter five I do come close to this last idea, offering the thesis that Bowen appropriates masculine spaces as spaces for female “becomings.” but even this term “becoming” implies a forestalled arrival. “Becoming” is an ongoing state.

This refusal of totalities, the suspicion of concepts like “marriage,” “civilization,” “humanity,” came to be a crucial aspect of late modernism for me. Throughout the dissertation I build upon this idea, and finally explore it in my final chapter on Woolf, where I look at the tension in Woolf’s poetics between embodiment and suspension, between sensation and the written word. I find that her reading of DH Lawrence is a key component to understanding her insistence on indeterminacy.   That Woolf herself participated in high modernism and late modernism places her work in a position to provide a solid conclusion to my exploration of these ideas of belatedness and uncertainty that I am claiming as characterizations of the era.

Let me contrast a novel I didn’t write about with one that I did, to make clear the difference between late modernism and 1930s women’s writing. Winifred Holtby’s 1936 novel South Riding similarly explores this feeling of incertitude, in the battered optimism of the young headmistress Sarah Burton, the impending bankruptcy of gentleman farmer Robert Carne, the fortunes of the brilliant young student Lydia Holley, born and raised in the Kingsport slums and charged with looking after her brood of brothers and sisters after her mother dies in childbirth, and the foibles and tragedies of the different members of the community of South Riding.

Holtby’s novel is about the difference that local government can make in people’s lives: each book of the novel is named after a sub-committee of the local council (which include Education, Public Health, and Highways and Bridges) and the events of the novel are filtered through these nexuses of social concern. Although the general tone of the novel is hopeful, its final lessons are ambiguous. Sarah Burton, the energetic young headmistress who is the novel’s heroine, quotes to her students at the 1935 Silver Julibee celebration the following lines from the nationalistic hymn by Cecil Spring Rice, “I vow to thee, my country”:

‘The love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best...’

“Don’t take that literally,” Sarah tells her students.

Don’t let me catch any of you at any time loving anything without asking questions. Question everything-- even what I’m saying now. (510) 

This in an apt ending to an extremely moving and stirring novel, one that ends on an embrace of death and yet finds in the abyss a necessary outline for the life before us. (Woolf makes a similar  point, though in a more modernist mode, in The Waves.)  To question, always, is the political duty of these young women: not to subscribe to the doxa of patriarchal nationalism contained in sentimental patriotic solemnities. 
 
Although it seems most everyone in the town is having a difficult time of it, Holtby reserves most of her sympathy for the town’s women, who are fated by their sex to take jobs below their capacities and training, serve as “household drudges,” and bear not only the physical agony of childbirth, but the burden of raising the child.  “I’m going to have another child,” Nancy Mitchell wails. “And how are we going to live? Oh God! How are we going to live!” (246)

This question provides one of the most productive intersections between South Riding and The Death of the Heart. Bowen’s novel takes up this question in a mannered, elegant, ironic conversation between the sophisticated Anna Quayne and her friend St Quentin: “Also you know, you do always seem to think there must be some obvious way for other people to live.  In this case there really is not, I'm afraid” (16). Where in some cases the accepted social code may be “obvious,” in this case, Anna remarks, it is inapplicable.  Whereas the characters of South Riding ask “How are we to live?” and call on the local council for help, the disillusioned characters of The Death of the Heart, deserted by country, religion, or upbringing, can turn only to each other, glancing at their neighbors to see how they’re doing it, hiding from the neighbors their breaches of conduct. “We must live how we can,” the narrator concludes.

There are a number of differences, superficial and profound, between South Riding and The Death of the Heart: differences in each novel’s attitudes towards feminism and conservatism, the range of social classes of the characters they feature, as well as the contrast between the northern provinces of England and the southern metropolitan center. But the differences I want to highlight between the ambiguities and uncertainties of South Riding versus those of The Death of the Heart have to do with the blending of social concerns with issues of style and of form. Although the novels share many of the same concerns, this is the basis of my decision to include texts such as those by Lehmann, Rhys, and Woolf alongside those of Bowen: all four women are engaged in a similar project of social and formal revision.

It would be a stretch to classify South Riding within the category of modernism.  Although they share thematic concerns, Bowen seems more interested in the possibilities of form, whereas Holtby seems more interested in the possibilities of message. “We are members of one another,” Holtby writes in her prefatory letter to her mother, quoting Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 12:3-8). She is not only referring to members of the same community, of course, but to the community of humanity. Bowen’s citydwellers, on the other hand, feel more alienated than ever, and have an awareness of themselves as estranged from anything as conventional as a community. Communities, for Bowen, are in the process of being dissolved, and there is not much that can be done about it. Bowen’s novels and essays constantly interrogate and ironize concepts like “community,” and “humanity.”  Her novels interpret themselves for the reader, her sentences twist in syntax to avoid banality, her young heroines are intensely aware of themselves as young heroines, her novelistic forms double back on themselves. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle call this aspect of Bowen’s work the “dissolution of the modern novel.”

So how is one to live, when the very ideals Holtby turns to no longer seem coherent? I suggest that in order to answer this question, Bowen-- and the other writers I consider-- operates in a constant state of attunement: to the reader’s expectations, to her literary forebears, to high modernism, to the social context her novels describe. As I read and thought about these issues in the work of Rhys, Woolf, and Lehmann, it became clear to me that answering Nancy Mitchell’s question-- how are we to live-- requires a certain social literacy, requiring the pairing of visual perception with an informed sense-experience, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms. In Bowen’s novels, social expectations hang in the air as a vague presence to which all parties refer without knowing to what they are referring.  Bowen makes clear the extent to which these social norms are unarticulated; because of this they produce a generalized anxiety, both for those who can’t negotiate the rules, and for those who think they can. Rosamund Lehmann articulates social know-how as a question of “fit,” and her novel Invitation to the Waltz (1931) is accordingly preoccupied with clothing and fashion sense. Bowen articulates the breakdown of social norms through the dislocations, ruptures, deferrals, and elsewheres that mark her early novels. Storytelling, spectacle, and uncertainty are all associated in Rhys’s work. And in The Waves (1931), Woolf’s characters are all asking variants of this question, looking to each other to learn how to be, turning around an invisible center, their questionings punctuated by the cycles of nature.

There is, then, a coincidence of perception and late modernism, a function of the thoroughgoing  ambiguity or hesitation of the 1930s. (...)

 

I'm elsewhere

Poor languishing blog. The thing is I write so damn much (60,000 words since October) for my dissertation that I just have nothing left to give, blog-wise. 

I can manage to keep up with Twitter, though. And I post photos and videos and what have you on my Tumblr.

So maybe let's hang out there for awhile. I'm not saying I'm done blogging. I'm just saying I tend to communicate in 140 characters or less these days.

flânons

Classes begin tomorrow and I've spent the whole weekend prepping my lessons for the next two weeks. It's been nothing but Gilgamesh and Genesis for my Cultural Foundations class, and Simmel and Baudelaire for my Paris class. Non-stop flânerie, all without leaving my spot on the couch.

If you're interested in flâner-ing along with us this semester, I encourage you again to follow the class blog I've set up; between my teaching and dissertation deadlines I doubt I'll be doing much here at Maîtresse. I'll be back in this space eventually, but things will no doubt be a bit quiet here for awhile.

Meanwhile, please enjoy the Arcades Project Project and here, have some Poe.

Tanglewood

Isn't that the nicest name for a place? That's where we're heading today, where we've headed more summers than not, up to the Berkshires for a weekend of music and theatre and art.

So for today's Friday poetry, something tree-ish and musical, by my dear friend Charlotte's husband, the poet Robert Kelly. This is taken from Fire Exit.

70.

Tree in the window of the particular

what kind? sycamore she thought

its white bark blamed with ivy

broken syntax trying to tell you

an orchestra is always ending something

you leap onto the bare stage

and everyone can see you but me

because I was born blind in a bible

only words fit my teeth

nothing to see

but the dissolving alphabet

whose residue is everything I touch.

Is James Franco for real?

asks Sam Anderson in New York Magazine:

Take, for instance, graduate school. As soon as Franco finished at UCLA, he moved to New York and enrolled in four of them: NYU for filmmaking, Columbia for fiction writing, Brooklyn College for fiction writing, and—just for good measure—a low-residency poetry program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. This fall, at 32, before he’s even done with all of these, he’ll be starting at Yale, for a Ph.D. in English, and also at the Rhode Island School of Design. After which, obviously, he will become president of the United Nations, train a flock of African gray parrots to perform free colonoscopies in the developing world, and launch himself into space in order to explain the human heart to aliens living at the pulsing core of interstellar quasars.

I believe he's for real-- what I want to know is what he's on. I'm piddling about on my one measly dissertation for my one measly PhD and having a f*** of a time getting it done. I want to know where James gets his energy. And if he can hook me up with an "epically weird stint on 'General Hospital.'"

You haven't lived until you've seen an English field full of teepees at twilight

illustration: Badaude

Like I said, I went camping at the Port Eliot festival in Cornwall a couple of weeks ago. And I have written about it for Bomb. And everything-- camping and article-- seems to have turned out ok. I might even do it again next year!

Originally known as the Elephant Fayre, and host, in the ’80s, to groups like The Cure and Siouxie and the Banshees, Port Eliot was relaunched in 2003 by Lord and Lady St. Germans, Rick Worthy, and Simon Prosser, editorial director of Hamish Hamilton.  As the story goes, “This passionate and creative team believed there was room for a new kind of literary event, with the craic of a music festival.” From what I can gather, it sounds like Woodstock meets the New Yorker festival meets Sesame Street, with the ghosts of Vita Sackville-West and Samuel Johnson looking on.  After a few days on the grounds, I realize my inkling was correct— but that I hadn’t accounted for the amount of— for lack of a better term— pixie dust the festival seems to have scattered over it. Everything seems coated not with a veneer of irony, but with the kind of English magic that makes secret gardens bloom and children fly off to Neverland. This is not accidental— everyone seems hard at work to promote this English feeling of comfort and inspiration. Before I arrived, I worried I would find the vibe distinctly fey. But by day two— let’s just say you haven’t lived until you’ve seen an English field full of teepees at twilight.

Read more here.

Low- vs high-maintenance book collecting

I enjoy reading about other peoples' finicky relationships to books. Why? Because it makes me feel better about myself. Like, I might spend all of my money on books (buying them and shipping them from place to place as I move across the globe) but at least I'm not finicky about the books themselves.*  It's enough just to have copies of the books I want/need/can't live without in my present physical location. I don't feel I have much of a right, beyond that, to pay extra money for them to look a certain way.

Take this guy.  I would feel an unbearable amount of guilt if I were this fussy about my books:

Things I like:

• hardcovers!
• first editions, first printings
• clean, white pages without remainder marks (remainder marks are when unsold books get returned to the publisher, and are then re-sold later at a discount, often resulting in a black marker line across the pages, or sometimes a stamp)
• unclipped dust jackets (and the nicer the condition, the better)* [FN: a PLEA: stop clipping the price off the dust jacket! it's not like the person you're giving the book to as a birthday present doesn't know how much a book costs]
• American editions—I don’t pursue foreign editions of anything, but will buy a UK hardcover if the book wasn’t issued in hardcover in America (e.g., Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land)
• books signed by the author
• bookstores that wrap all their hardcovers in mylar dust jacket covers and don’t carry trashed books
• knowing how many copies of a book were printed—I own bibliographies of some of my favorite writers—Gilbert Sorrentino, Donald Barthelme, etc., in which scholars will often go through old publishing house records to determine print runs on books; sometimes in a book (particularly with small presses) the number of copies published in the edition will be printed somewhere
• dust jackets that feature art different from any other edition that came after it

Things I don’t like:

• ex-library copies
• books with the owner’s name written in it, unless the owner is a writer I like
• bookplates
• books inscribed to a friend from the gift-giver
• books inscribed by an author to someone who isn’t me (though I own a couple)
• paperbacks
• ugly books—you know the ones—books that look out of place in a nicely-arranged bookcase—I find the Penguin paperbacks with the lower half colored that nauseatingly bright orange to be pretty repellent
• WHEN BOOKSTORES STICK THOSE GOLD “AUTOGRAPHED COPY!” STICKERS ON DUST JACKETS, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE DUST JACKETS ARE MATTE

So. Here's a list from a low maintenance bibliophile:

I like

• paperbacks

I really like

• Gallimard Folio paperbacks
• those Penguin paperbacks with the bright orange spines
• shelving my Persephone and Virago books all in a line (and Seuil, Flammarion, NRF, etc)
• books in a series with a picture across their spines

I'm sort of ambivalent about

• getting books signed by their authors
• first editions, early editions, old books in general (I won't ever read them, and isn't that the point?)

I don't really like

• anything fussy (hello, Alain de Botton)
• hardcover books (they are heavy, cost more, are expensive to ship, and impractical to tote around in my bag)
• being made to feel bad about scribbling all over the margins, underlining, dog-earing, etc.

...And I write my last name in capital letters in the upper right-hand corner of the title page of all of my books as I read them. So there. 

*It should go without saying that they must be actual physical books. No silly e-readers for me.

Free the hikers

On July 31st 2009, Sarah Shourd, her fiance Shane Bauer and friend Josh Fattal were abducted by Iranian security guards while holidaying in Iraqi Kurdistan. Sarah has been held in solitary confinement ever since.

Why are there three American hikers in prison in Iran? Why have they been there for nearly a year? Why are they not allowed to see their lawyer? Why can't the American government get them out?

So many questions and really, no satisfactory answers.

Whether you're in New York or Paris this weekend, there's a protest you can attend.

New York

Friday, July 30, 12:30 pm, 3rd Ave & 40th St.

Paris

Saturday, July 31st, 12 pm, Place d'Iéna

If you're not in New York or Paris, you can sign the petition.

More on the hikers:

Free the Hikers

Liberation

The New York Times

BBC

A Safe World for Women

Port Eliot

...I'm off to Cornwall for the Port Eliot festival.  I agreed to go (Badaude is the artist in residence!) before I realized that the 2.5 hour train ride to London would be followed by another 3.5 hour long train journey to St Germans. And I'm not bringing my computer (for festival mud-related reasons). Um.

In the bag:

Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

Claudie Gallay, Les déferlantes

J.M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K.

Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being

...but will that be enough to last the whole trip? I'm not worried.... I'm sure they'll be selling books at the festival!

The funniest part of the whole thing is that I'll be camping.

My mother wants to know who is this new outdoorsy person and what have I done with her daughter.

This is either going to be very liberating or very uncomfortable. Or both.

Croatia here I come!

After a year of really, really hard work I am taking a well-deserved vacation to the Dalmatian Coast. I plan to lie on a beach and read for a week.

Oh, and write that piece I have due on July 12th. And work on this other essay. And revise my Rhys chapter. And...

Yeah. But I will only have occasional internet access, so that is what makes this a vacation!

Here's what I'm packing:

Charlotte Mandell's translation of Mathias Enard's Zone (ok that's a Word doc, since it won't appear in book form til September)

Courtney Angela Brkic, Stillness and The Stone Fields

Saša Stanišić, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Sonya Chung, Long For this World

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence

Simone de Beauvoir, La force de l'age

Emmanuel Carrère, Un roman russe

Karin Albou, La grande fete

Peter Carey, Wrong About Japan

...should be enough to keep me busy!

Anyone have any other books about Croatia I should read? It'll have to wait til after I get back, but tell me anyway!

undergrad, redux

When I was an undergrad I remember having difficulty scheduling time to shower, much less to do all of the reading and writing for all of my classes.  Then things calmed down and I forgot what that was like. Then when I started graduate school I remembered again. Then grad school calmed down and I forgot again.

And now, because I took on extra teaching hours for a few weeks, I am teaching so many hours a week that I barely have time to prepare my lessons, much less eat/sleep/shower. I am not kidding. It's a good thing my man is all the way in Hong Kong! Like a PC perilously close to crashing, I am running in safety mode.  Last week I taught the Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and the Odyssey-- none of which I had read in their entirety, much less taught, until very recently. This week it's been the Odyssey, the Canterbury Tales, and a lecture, with slides, on Greek Art.  When a student complained the other day about the amount of reading they have to balance with going on trips to the ballet and Burgundy, you can imagine how wryly I smiled.  I never imaged, when I was in college, that my professors were as overloaded as I was.

Next week it's the Ramayana and Shakespeare's Sonnets.  And then, finally, finally, my teaching schedule will revert to usual, I can go back to eating (cooking even!), sleeping (more than 6 hours a night!) and showering (might even wash my hair!).  And next year, if I teach this class again, the prep will already be done, and I'll breeze through on my notes from this year. But next year is so far away...

Scenes from a Paris night, in the key of A

Badaude has outdone herself.  Here, she has immortalized the Five Dials launch party in one of her trademark sketches-- shunning all vowels except the letter A.  Why do such a thing? Because the reading included a brilliant almost-Oulipian poem by the not-Oulipian Joe Dunthorne, in which he used only the vowel I. On which, more later. For now, enjoy the drawing, and check out Badaude's account of the evening.

Can you spot me and Coquette? And Badaude? (hint: she's wearing Isabel Marant) And Sylvia and George Whitman?

On Cromwell

ARGH. Is it Snow Leopard's fault that all my applications are freezing today? I don't know. But I just wrote a whole post about historical fiction and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and-- you guessed it-- Safari decided to freeze and I lost the damn thing. Typepad is supposed to autosave drafts.  HA. That's a good one.

Anyway.  Here's what I said, in a nutshell: I like historical fiction.  Went through a phase in my teen years where I was obsessed with pre-modern English history, mostly thanks to Sharon Kay Penman.  This caused me to mostly hate the Tudors.  Now, however, I like to watch "The Tudors," so I guess I'm over it.  I'm psyched that Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is on the Booker list because it means I get to read historical fiction and feel like it's not just a guilty pleasure.  So far, 50 pages in, it's really good, except I keep picturing James Frain as Thomas Cromwell.  

I would say it might be interesting for Frain to read Mantel's book before filming next season, but if you watched last season's finale, well, you know how that turned out.  

I do wonder if Mantel watched "The Tudors" while she was writing this, and to what extent Frain could have influenced her image of Cromwell...

Here's how Mantel sees him:

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old.  He is a man of strong build, not tall.  Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement.  His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanish ambassador will tell us, quite soon.  It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt--ready with a text if abbots flounder.  His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard.  He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.  He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again.  He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed.  He makes money and he spends it.  He will take a bet on anything. (p. 31)

In case you too would like to learn how to train a falcon, here are some instructions.  

playing at trains

Emily Gould posted a video with the view from the subway train as it goes over the Manhattan Bridge and it made me all nostalgic for New York:

Almost every day I get to look out the window at the water and the sky and the advancing skyline from the window of the Q or B train as it crosses the Manhattan bridge.  I have heard more than one person say that “The moment I stop noticing this view is the moment I know I should just leave New York,” and when they’ve said this I have fervently nodded my agreement.  But of course I don’t always look up and have a magical transformative moment or even a tranquil reflective moment every day.*

So I thought I'd reply in kind. This is the view from the 6 train as it crosses the Seine from Passy to Bir Hakeim, which I used to take when I taught at Nanterre, and which I will take now that I'm teaching at NYU. (Except I go in the other direction, Left Bank to Right.)

 

(I love the dour-looking woman sitting in the strapontin who's like "mais qu'est-ce que vous foutez avec ce caméra, putain")

*Emily doesn't mention what used to anchor the city at its base, that is now missing from that video, but she posted on September 10th, so I think the connection is clear, if unconscious.

hong kong you're nice but paris je t'aime

Toy Soldiers from Alta Media Productions on Vimeo.

I'm going home in less than a week and I can't wait.

sorry so quiet

...we were in Thailand for 10 days, and have now been preoccupied with moving into our new apartment. No internet as of yet so I have to hang out in a nearby cafe to get my fix. Still in Hong Kong for another two weeks but getting revved up for la rentrée...