Saturday, December 25, 2010

The Sense of Relief

Well, at this point in the social calendar, when anyone invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dine--with great urgency, in case she was already engaged--she would turn down the invitation with the one excuse that no society person would ever have thought of: she was about to set off on a cruise--"Quite fascinating, my dear!"--of the Norwegian fjords. Society people were thunderstruck by this, and, without any notion of following the Duchesse's example, nevertheless derived from her project the sense of relief you get when you read Kant, and when, after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism, it transpires that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom. (from The Guermantes Way

I remember the sense of relief I felt several months ago when I realized that I wasn't bound to live the life I was supposed to live. I needn't worry about the ruler of life and being within the exact centimeter of where society dictates one should be (in a menacing way at times) when it comes to studies, career, marriage, children, etc. Even in these liberated times, even in Lower Manhattan, there is constant pressure to conform.

When I was in high school, I assumed I would have four children and home school them all while my carpenter/poet husband fed the fireplace each evening in our renovated farmhouse in Vermont. I'm not sure where this fantasy came from, yet my life veered off the tracks by the time I started college. I've spent years trying to catch up, yet I've also abandoned false expectations. At this point, I may never have children. And 40 isn't a death knell.

I remember sitting in the back of a church on a wooden pew several years ago. I was attending a 12-step meeting. (I won't say which one.) One distraught woman was sharing and she had a catch in her voice. At the end of a litany of complaints and miserable happenings in her life, she finished with a sob. "And I'm thirty-seven!" she said. That was code for: "And I'm not living the life I was supposed to live! Feel sorry for me!"

I love unconventional women such as Heloise (the learned Parisian woman from the Middle Ages who loved and lost her beloved Abelard and ended up a nun with embers of passion still burning in her loins and in her letters) and Frieda Kahlo (the Mexican painter who expressed herself and her narrative of physical suffering in graphic terms and lived life without worrying how people would peg her).

Who knows where I'll be in ten years? I may be in Paris; I may be in Rome. I may be meditating in a small town in India. I may be happily married; I may enjoy my solitude. I may have a second act that will make up for everything before it.

Wherever I am and whatever I am doing, I will try to abandon the ruler. Because, according to the ruler, I'll never measure up.

I hope I have plenty of friends and lovers and dogs and cats. I'll shred my college newsletters that bring glorious tidings of what everyone has been up to and use them as mulch for my garden. Isn't it a relief to finally understand that you have and are everything you need to have and be?   

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Down and Out

Madam Monce: "Salope! Salope! How many times have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why can't you throw them out the window like everyone else?"

...the walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. (Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell) 

I thought that in honor of the holiday season and the news that the chasm between the rich and the poor is larger than its been in decades, I would take a break from Proust's drawing room dramas in The Guermantes Way, and focus on those who are prey to creepy crawlies. (Though, I must admit, Orwell awakens a certain pleasure in the grotesque.)

Last Saturday, while so many were going hungry, I joined a luncheon at the Scandinavia House, with an open buffet table creaking under the weight of a variety of Nordic delicacies, from herring to pork meatballs to gingerbread, and then plenty of steaming glogg to go around. (Of course, I'm a fun-loving teetotaling vegan, so I focussed on the mashed potatoes.)

Yesterday, I attended Meet Me at MOMA with my mother and, as we were looking at the controlled chaos of an early Jackson Pollack and talking about the postwar art world, one woman said she couldn't bear to read the front page of the newspaper anymore. "I know," the young guide replied, "I was an activist when Bush was in office and now I just don't want to pay attention to politics at all." That numbness can be felt everywhere.

The holiday season lends itself to gloomy reminiscences along with its good tidings.

In the "search of lost time" corner--I realize that often we must act (feel the fear and do it anyway!) when an opportunity presents itself. That moment only lasts a split second before it's lost forever.

It's been an entire decade since I missed a chance to have a relationship with someone I still have feelings for and, I'm afraid to admit, someone I google from time to time. Talk about a phantom in the machine...he is so close, yet so far. To cultivate this thorny regret is unnatural but strangely satisfying in a compulsive way, like emptying the lint filter in the dryer or reading US magazine.

But enough of that! This is the season of birth and beginnings. It's been so cold. I fear for those with empty stomachs and nothing to protect them from the elements. I'm grateful for everything in my life--even that black L.L. Bean coat I wear that looks like a burqa and the gloves I bought yesterday on a street corner.

In spite of all the fear and all the lack, there's a certain solemn magic to the season as in this spiritual by Jay Althouse:

Whisper! Whisper! Tiny baby in a manger lay.
Whisper! Whisper! Baby born today!
Whisper! Whisper! Tiny baby, he sleep in the hay.
Whisper! Whisper! Baby born today.  

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Men Who Write About Women

Can male novelists portray female protagonists convincingly?

This is the question I had in mind when reading Proust and Larsson side by side for the past couple of weeks. To compare Larsson's Lisbeth Salander to Proust's character the Duchesse de Guermantes is to compare an alienated, fiercely boyish outcast to a voluptuous social insider, privy to the upper echelons of Parisian high society.

Lisbeth, with her piercings and tattoos, has odd looks compared to the more conventionally beautiful Duchesse de Guermantes, whose eyes "captured like a picture the blue sky of an afternoon in the French countryside, broad and expansive, drenched in light even when there was no sun." Instead of old t-shirts with quirky statements printed across them and leather pants, the Duchesse wears a "ballooning skirt of painted blue silk."

Yet, Salander has a strong moral code that leaves the petty-minded Duchesse in the dirt. "I thought at least that, when she spoke, her conversation would be profound and mysterious, strange as a medieval tapestry or a Gothic window," Proust writes. Instead, "'What a bird-brained woman!' I thought to myself, still smarting from the icy greeting she had given me. 'So this is the woman I walk miles to see every morning, and out of the kindness of my heart!'"

Does the male author's sexual orientation help or hinder him when conjuring up his female characters?

Proust, as a homosexual, is often accused of having created female characters by simply prettifying the men in his life. In fact the (heterosexual) English critic Cyril Connolly wrote in his 1938 book Enemies of Promise that "homosexual novelists who are able to create mother-types and social mother-types (hostesses) and occasionally sister-types (heroines) have trouble with normal women and may often make them out worse or better than they are."

Hogwash! Think of Henry James' Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady or Michael Cunningham's Clarissa Vaughn in The Hours--the first two examples that come to mind. They may be heroines, not "normal women," but they are characters I've lived in.

As Edmund White wrote, "It would be a mistake to see all of Proust's women as disguised men...some of the female characters are unquestionably, quintessentially womanly, such as Odette...or the Duchesse de Guermantes or the actress Berma."

Is Larsson's Lisbeth Salander a man disguised as a woman?

Luisita Lopez Torregrosa writes for Politics Daily, "She's set a new standard: a lesbian/bisexual geeky girl with a bad attitude, a knack for violence, a steel-trap mind, and best of all, she's not a vampire. Could it be that androgynous, industrial-strength macho girls will become role models for women in the second decade of the 21st century?"

And what does it mean that it took a man to create a 21st century feminist icon?

Maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that a Swedish man created Lisbeth, as Nordic countries like Sweden are the most egalitarian when it comes to gender roles. You wouldn't have a character like Lisbeth spring from a more traditional society like Nigeria or Pakistan or India.

That brings me to a question from Gender Studies 101: What does it mean to be a woman? Does womanhood=motherhood? Pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding...these are foreign territories for me. Am I any less a woman?

At forty, I am "unmarried and childless," which sounds like a wail of misery, but really suits me for the moment. Am I a spinster or a bachelorette? The origins of the word "spinster" go back to the Middle Ages when women who spun wool were able to support themselves on a decent wage. "Bachelorette" brings up images of reality television shows with ten women piled high in a hot tub vying for the attention of the alpha male.

Neither am I Eleanor Rigby who "picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been" and "waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door...who is it for?"

Still, I yearn to find...someone. The tenderness of a long partnership.

In sum, I don't identify fully with either character. I am neither an aggressive loner like Lisbeth nor conventionally "womanly" in conduct or appearance like the Duchesse. Yet I find these female characters compelling enough to keep reading, no matter that they leapt out fully formed from the minds of men.          

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Can Proust Compete with Larsson? Part One

The telephone was not so commonly used as it is today...I found it too slow for my liking, with its abrupt transformations, this admirable magic that needs only  a few seconds to bring before us, unseen but present, the person to whom we wish to speak...suddenly transported hundreds of miles (he and all the surroundings in which he remains immersed) to within reach of our hearing, at a particular moment dictated by our whim. And we are like the character in the fairy tale at whose wish an enchantress conjures up, in a supernatural light, his grandmother or his betrothed as they turn the pages of a book, shed tears, gather flowers, very close to the spectator and yet very far away, in the place where they really are. (The Guermantes Way)

I've seen it everywhere, its florescent cover bobbing all over the subway system like bait on a hook, rocketing to the top of the bestseller lists, even for sale at my neighborhood Duane Reade. I'm talking about Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. During the short time it took to read it, I was zoned out on an adrenaline rush that made me feel keenly alive--over caffeinated, really--and focused outwards as if on autopilot. It was closer to the experience of watching a movie than reading Proust. Its simple, uncluttered prose meant that nothing distracted me from the thrill of surging forward, pedal to the floor--so far from the experience of savoring Proust's dizzying verbosity.

And there's nothing wrong with enjoying a Larsson novel. I remember a former writing teacher quoting Kurt Vonnegut as saying, "All writers are in the entertainment business." But why can't I find Proust at my local Duane Reade, sandwiched between the deodorant and the plastic containers of caramel popcorn?

Proust wrote about a time in which the telephone seemed fantastical. Larsson's protagonist, Lisbeth Salander--an expert computer hacker and shit-kicking Goth gamine--experiences life with a technological immediacy that would be absolutely foreign to Proust. In fact, I think that if Proust had picked up a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it would be a full-on assault on his senses.

Not that the accelerated pleasures of reading a thriller only date from the invention of the internet. Certainly there was tabloid journalism and many other "low brow" sensationalist entertainments a century ago.

But can Proust compete today with an opponent who speaks the language of the 21st century?

There are certain authors who know us better than we know ourselves. Technology may have changed, the average person has the attention span of a gnat on crack, but Proust relates to the stories we tell ourselves about life and love, our innermost secrets, in a way that Larsson, with his appealing tattooed heroine, doesn't come close to.

Today, a friend (an extremely well-read friend, by the way) compared reading Proust to drinking molasses. I think this verison of Proust as stuffed in mothballs is dangerous. My life is so much richer with Proust in it. (And I probably only retain 10 percent of it my first time through!) He may be a difficult pleasure, you wonder why he carries on about one topic or another, but then there is a dazzling moment when everything is laid bare--the stunning beauty of life when one accepts it as it is, and then transcends it, into a dreamlike state. It's a different kind of pleasure than reading Larsson, but no less contemporary and immediate.   

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Franzen and Moore

I attended a reading at the 92nd Street Y last night. Jonathan Franzen (Freedom) and Lorrie Moore (A Gate at the Stairs) took the stage.

Moore's editor introduced her in ravishing terms as the literary "it girl." "Only a fool would take the stage after that kind of introduction," Moore opened. "I am the warm-up act for the lovely and brilliant Jonathan Franzen." She performed a short ditty on this topic (that I imagine she had scribbled on a damp cocktail napkin on her flight from Wisconson), ending with a few rounds of "We Shall Overcome." Like the voice of her novels and short stories, Moore was both nutty and sophistocated in her keen love of the absurd. Then she read aloud dreamily, giving a refreshing, ironic lilt to every line she read.

In his introduction, the visibly nervous Jonathan Galassi (an editor I admire for his translations of Eugenio Montale's poems) stressed the theme of marriage throughout Franzen's work. He remarked that Franzen had started his career wanting to change the world, and has ended up trying to capture it, represent it.

Franzen bounced on the stage with his satchel like a tardy schoolboy. Murmuring that he should have marked his place earlier, he finally opened to a fresh scene at the middle of his novel. He read this excerpt while punching the air with obvious relish. For the record, there wasn't anything smug about him.

It was in hearing them read aloud that I could see the sheer beauty of their words, suspended in the air like poetry. It made me want to go back and reread their novels more slowly (three pages a day) instead of the binge-like way I had plowed through them initially. In fact, I wish I could do all my reading this way, hovering over each phrase like a shuddering butterfly.

When answering questions from the audience, Franzen would stutter a bit at first as he organized his thoughts. Both seemed flummoxed by the inanity of the questions. At the announcement of each question, they both rolled their eyes  and gave a hollow chuckle.

Q: How do you know how to end your books? Moore was eloquent on this topic. The end of a short story arcs back towards the beginning like a radiant light, she said, while the end of a novel looks forward to a future continuation of its events.

Q: Is it a challenge to write about contemporary society? Both books take place around 9/11. Writing about contemporary events was not a challenge, they both concluded, but a necessity. "It would be harder to write about the 18th century," Moore said. What's more, it's a challenge to write, period.

Q: Why are Midwesterners so funny? Apparently, all of the late night talk show hosts are from the Midwest.

Then the reading was over and they both disappeared from the stage to thunderous applause, presumably to marinate briefly in these celebratory juices before returning to their lairs as ordinary scribes, back to page one.  

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

New York, I Love You (Or, Hello to All That)

And since the district to which we had moved appeared to be as quiet as the boulevard we had previously looked out upon was noisy, the sound of a man singing as he passed (as feeble perhaps as an orchestral motif, yet quite clear even from a distance) brought tears to the eyes of the exiled Francoise. (from The Guermantes Way)

Proust's third volume, The Guermantes Way, begins with a move. Marcel's grandmother needs a cleaner, quieter arrondissement for the sake of her health. This is pure torture to their old servant, Francoise, who is loyal to their former abode where they had been "'so well thought of by everybody.'" In exchange, she is now in a place where "the concierge, who had not yet made our acquaintance, had not shown her the tokens of respect necessary to the nourishment of her good spirits."

Neighborhoods in New York are in a constant state of flux, as if a painter were applying layer after layer of paint to the map, obliterating what came before.

I grew up in that section of Lower Manhattan called TriBeCa (short for "Triangle Below Canal Street"). At that time, the neighborhood was a ghost town full of empty lofts. The only restaurant was the Delphi, where we ate moussaka and backlava. As there was no supermarket, my mother took me on errands to Morgan's, a butcher shop with sawdust on the floor, and Bell Bates, a crowded corner store full of exotic spices.

Today, my mother is my charge in the Saturday morning procession of parents and strollers at the farmer's market outside the park I remember as a vacant dirt lot. "Mama, stick with me, kid!" I say. We pick up loaves of bread dusted with flour, seven varieties of apples, bulbous avocado squash. No shortage of playmates here, as in the late seventies. In fact there must be something in the water--every woman in the neighborhood is a mother or on her way to becoming one. There are so many people here now that the neighborhood houses a Whole Foods and a Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and scores of restaurants at every turn.

In Joan Didion's 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That," she concludes that "All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not young anymore." She is sick of the incessant parade of "new faces" at parties in a city only for the very poor and the very rich and the very young. For her, New York is an experiment one soon tires of. But what about the quiet pleasures?

Quiet pleasures: the room of Degas pastels at the Met, any production of a Eugene O'Neill play, long walks along the bridal path in Central Park, low-key classes at Integral Yoga, lining up at the Film Forum, avocado rolls at Zutto.

I love the scene with Wallace Shawn at the end of My Dinner with Andre in which he treats himself to a taxi ride home and every building he passes is connected to a memory from his childhood. The city by night has become more beautiful than it was before he sat down to dinner, its lights blurred by nostalgia.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

On Friendship (with an Apology)

"But it really is time to join the others, and I've mentioned only one of the two things that I meant to ask you, the least important one. The other is more important to me, but I'm afriad you will say no. Would you mind if we were to call each other tu?"

"Mind? I'd be delighted. 'Joy! Tears of joy! Undreamed-of happiness!'"

"Oh, thank you...thank you...After you! It's such a pleasure to me that you needn't bother about Mme de Guermantes if you'd prefer--calling each other tu is enough." (from The Guermantes Way

Here, the fictional Marcel is making a formal declaration that his friendship with Robert de Saint-Loup has reached a more intimate stage. They'd been close buddies for months. Marcel (initially motivated to drop in on his friend so that he could somehow break into the honeycombed world of Saint-Loup's aunt, the Duchesse de Guermantes) has found the perfect friend. Saint-Loup caters to the sickly Marcel's every need with remarkable sincerity and understanding. Marcel, in turn, seems divided between the love he has for the Duchesse and the intense affection he has for Saint-Loup.

I sometimes wish that we had a formal mode of address in English with this little stepping stone of the informal "you." How you come about this decision to eliminate the distance between yourself and another person and how you choose to communicate this without getting the cold shoulder has something in common with a marriage proposal. It's an elaborate social ritual that puts friendship on the same level as romantic love. And why not? Why shouldn't friendships be cultivated with the same delicacy as one's love interests?

Mon dieu! I have an apology to make. I confused the Princesse de Guermantes with the Duchesse de Guermantes in my last blog entry. The description of the woman in her loge at the theater was that of the Princesse de Guermantes, not to be confused with the Duchesse who is Marcel's ideal love interest. She's the one he saw as a young boy in the cathedral at Combray. And the Duchesse is also the one who is deliciously jolie laide as you can see in the following description: 

...I caught sight of the profile, beneath a navy-blue toque, of a beaklike nose against a red cheek, barred across by a piercing eye like some Egyptian deity...Mme de Guermantes was dressed in fur to the tip of her toque...Amid this natural plumage, her tiny head curved out its beak, and the prominent eyes were piercing and blue.     

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

On French Women

Like a great goddess who presides from afar over the sport of lesser deities, the Princesse had deliberately remained somewhat to the back of her box, on a side-facing sofa, red as a coral rock...The beauty that set her far above the other mythical daughters of the semidarkness was not altogether materially and inclusively inscribed in the nape of her neck, in her shoulders, in her arms, or in her waist. But the exquisite, unfinished line of this last was the exact starting point, the inevitable origin of invisible lines into which the eye could not help extending them, marvelous lines, engendered around the woman like the specter of an ideal figure projected against the darkness. (from The Guermantes Way)  

It's no accident that Proust is often quoted for saying, "Let's leave the obviously pretty women to men with no imagination." The Princesse de Guermantes, described above, would make a good example of jolie laide ("unconventionally good-looking woman: a woman whose facial features are not pretty in conventional terms, but nevertheless have a distinctive harmony or charm.")

We first meet the mysterious Princesse de Guermantes in Combray, when the young Marcel spies her in the town's Gothic cathedral, as the light spilling through the stained glass windows illuminates "the little pimple flaring up at the corner of her nose." Courtly love is very much alive and well two volumes later in The Guermantes Way, as the protagonist, now a man in his early twenties, continues to worship her to the point of stalking her by visiting her favorite Parisian haunts every day.

I thought of the topic of French women when I saw an article in the New York Times on October 11th ("Where Having It All Doesn't Mean Having Equality"), in which the editor-in-chief of French Elle says: "We have the right to do what men do--as long as we also take care of the children, cook a delicious dinner and look immaculate. We have to be superwoman."

Debra Ollivier, author of the scholarly tome (okay, guilty pleasure) What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind, adds her own interpretation when she writes, "Readers, let us bite into the Big Camembert with this: In France men and women actually like one another. A lot. There is no American-style war of the sexes going on. French men and women actually want to be together. They enjoy their mutual company. They spar. They debate. They flirt. They seek out one another's company in a multiplicity of social settings." (Unlike American women who are sex-starved and prickly, I assume.)

What is it about French women, besides their scarves and their thinness (attributed on alternate days to cigarettes, delighting in small portions of foie gras, and peer pressure), that makes them so unique?

I think Jeanne Moreau summed it up when she said, "One thing you have to give up is attaching importance to what people see in you." This is a tall order when you grow up in a "haveaniceday" culture in which it is not only important to be liked, but well liked. French women (at least in Eric Rohmer films) share a blend of self-possession, self-knowledge, and poise. These women are as intelligent and acutely emotional as they are individual. The American woman in popular culture is childlike, doughy and half-formed in comparison. Superwoman or not, the French woman shoots out at sharp angles, like the Princesse de Guermantes and her "marvelous lines." 

Thursday, September 30, 2010

On Flow

The metaphor of "flow" is one that many have used to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as "being in the zone," religious mystics as being in "ecstasy," artists and musicians as aesthetic rapture. Athletes, mystics and artists do very different things when they reach flow, yet their descriptions of the experience are remarkably similar.--Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 

Here, Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-SENT-me-high") has written a self-help book that is truly helpful. He shows how people are often in flow when playing at games and sports, which have clear goals and immediate feedback, and much less so when watching television, which, obviously enough, requires much less ability and isn't intrinsically rewarding. The aim is to maximize the amount of flow you get out of every day.

Clearly, Proust was in flow when he wrote In Search of Lost Time. He needed quiet and solitude in order to concentrate, so he worked night after night in a cork-lined room. In a letter to a friend, he describes his writing regimen: "Never have I lived like this, eating once every forty-eight hours, never before three in the morning, etc., etc." (Notice the telltale mark of "flow" in a lack of awareness of bodily needs.)

In turn, in reading Proust, I am in a state of flow. The last one hundred pages of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower passed as if a dream of a dream. A cloud of Lolita-like nymphs of summer frolicked on the grassy knolls of the fictional seaside resort, Balbec. In my concentration, I lost track of time and self...

Csikszentmihalyi cites "love of fate" as necessary for a good life. He quotes Nietzsche, who wrote: "My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity...Not merely bear what is necessary...but love it."

Proust's character Marcel might writhe in pain over a troublesome love affair or express disappointment at some long-anticipated event or encounter, yet he sees beauty in everything.

In the last lines of the second volume, the summer at Balbec doesn't simply end, but becomes a relic in itself. Marcel recalls his maid, Francoise, unpinning the blinds in his windows after he has taken a nap:
"the summer's day that she uncovered seemed as dead and immemorial as a mummy, magnificent and millennial, carefully divested by our old servant of all its wrappings and laid bare, embalmed in its vestments of gold."

As Allen Ginsberg would say: holy, holy, holy...    

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Franzenfreude

"...a well-read man hearing of the latest 'great book,' can give a jaded yawn, assuming the work to be a sort of composite derived from all the fine works he has ever read. But the fact is that a great book is not just the sum of existing masterpieces; it is particular and unforeseeable, being made out of something which, because it lies somewhere beyond that existing sum, cannot be deduced simply from acquaintance with it, however close. No sooner has the well-read man discovered the new work than he forgets his earlier indifference and takes an interest in the reality it sets before him." (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)

This is a great example of how we make books our own. When we finally read a book thought of as a masterpiece--such as Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary--it sheds that generic quality and becomes part of our private universe. It's like getting to know someone well you have only seen from afar or going from a vague sketch to sharp focus. From then on, the book belongs to us, to the most private place within us.

Speaking of masterpieces, Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom is already hailed as the novel of the decade. The Observer calls it "the novel of the century" and Sam Tanenhaus in the New York Times declares it "a masterpiece of American fiction." Even Michiko Kakutani, whom Franzen once called "the stupidest person in New York," has conceded that it is "an indelible portrait of our times."

On the cover of Time (next to the words "Great American Novelist" printed in bold), Franzen stares off into the distance with a certain unease, while the windswept hair, English professor glasses and face peppered with stubble cry out "boyish charm."

I've had two Franzen sightings since he published The Corrections nine years ago. Once in that fall of 2001 on a subway platform at 96th Street waiting for the 1 train, where he stood in a raincoat and carried a briefcase, cloaked in anonymity. The second time was at a Citibank on the Upper East Side. I can report that he is surprisingly tall and wore faded black jeans.

I suspect his discomfort in public is to a certain extent misinterpreted as self-satisfaction or conceit. If you Google "Jonathan Franzen smug," you get 7, 250 results. "Jonathan Franzen is a great writer," Newsweek declares. "Should it matter if he's not a great guy?"

Bestselling author Jennifer Weiner defines "Franzenfreude" as "taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen." (Even though it was quickly pointed out that "freude" means joy, not displeasure.) The Herald Scotland rallies against those women authors who feel unfairly overlooked: "They may be justified in ranting against the cliche of the white male darling, but they are in danger of being seen as that even worse creature, the shrew."

This entry has the unfortunate second-hand quality of being about book reviews instead of books. I'm looking forward to the pleasure of reading Freedom. I remember the evening in 2001 when I went to three different bookstores where The Corrections was sold out. I finally ordered a copy from my favorite bookstore, Three Lives, and read it compulsively for most of a day and a half.

I also have a sinking feeling. I end with one final quote, this one from Virginia Woolf on Proust: "Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry...One has to put the book down and gasp."       

 

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

On Beauty

     The fact was, he could still see her as a Botticelli. Odette herself, who always tried to conceal things she did not like about her own person, or at least to compensate for them rather than bring them out, things that a painter might have seen as her "type," but which as a woman she saw as defects, had no time for Botticelli. Swann owned a wonderful Oriental stole, in blue and pink, which he had bought because it was exactly the one worn by the virgin in the Magnificat. Mme Swann would not wear it. Once only, she relented and let him give her an outfit based on La Primavera's garlands of daisies, bellwort, cornflowers, and forget-me-nots. In the evenings, Swann would sometimes murmur to me to look at her pensive hands as she gave to them unawares the graceful, rather agitated movement of the Virgin dipping her quill in the angel's inkwell, before writing in the holy book where Magnificat is already inscribed. Then he would add, "Be sure not to mention it to her! One word--and she'd make sure it wouldn't happen again!"

      Here, Swann ponders the beauty of his wife (and former mistress/courtesan) Odette. Throughout In Search of Lost Time so far, Swann has a habit of comparing women to famous works of art. We talk about "types." ("She's not my type.") It's both charming and a little creepy to see Swann compare Odette to a Botticelli right down to her fingertips. (At least he doesn't find his inspiration in Victoria's Secret catalogues!)
     Today's equivalent might be to reference movie stars. For example, I am convinced that my dog Phoebe looks like Elizabeth Taylor. (She has a glossy coat of black and tan, white gloves, soft pointy ears and big worried eyes.)
     I saw the beginning of the Farelly brothers' Shallow Hal on television the other day. Possibly one of the worst movies ever made, it stars Jack Black as someone who suddenly sees women for their inner beauty. He doesn't realize that the woman he finds gorgeous (played by the very blonde and very svelte Gwyneth Paltrow) is actually overweight and ordinary looking. I assume he gets his comeuppance in the end and learns not to judge women by their measurements. Yet every frame the model-thin Gwyneth Paltrow is in contradicts such a lesson.

     Walk through any museum and you can see that there are few universal standards for beauty.

     My mother is enrolled at the Meet Me at MOMA program. Once a month, groups of Alzheimer's patients convene at the Museum of Modern Art to look at, and talk about, art. In front of a Klimt painting called "Hope, II," my mother recently described the oval shapes embedded on the gown of the pregnant woman who is the focus of the piece as "donuts," and added, "They're making me hungry!" She is clearly excited about the art, even if what she is able to express doesn't live up to her emotional impressions.
     Like Rita Hayworth, someone else with early onset Alzheimer's, my mother was a great beauty. Growing up, that's all I ever heard: your mother is gorgeous! Though she is still pretty, people now look at her as if she were a fossil and say, "I can see from her bone structure that she must have been quite beautiful." Yet my mother transcends age and time. She still has mad crushes on people such as Amir, a striking group leader at the Meet Me at MOMA program. "There he is!" she said to me conspiratorially at our last tour. "Let's get him!"
     And why not? After all, he kind of looks like someone I saw in a film once...   

Sunday, August 29, 2010

On Not Writing

If I had not been so determined to set seriously to work, I might have made an effort to start at once. But given that my resolve was unbreakable, given that within twenty-four hours, inside the empty frame of tomorrow, where everything fitted so perfectly because it was not today, my best intentions would easily take material shape, it was really preferable not to think of beginning things on an evening when I was not quite ready--and of course the following days were to be no better suited to beginning things. However, I was a reasonable person. When one has waited for years, it would be childish not to tolerate a delay of a couple of days...Unfortunately, tomorrow turned out not to be that broad, bright, outward-looking day that I had feverishly looked forward to. When it had ended, my idleness and hard struggle against my inner obstacles had just lasted for another twenty-four hours. (from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

     How easy it is to justify not beginning to write. My favorite method of stalling is to read books on writing. I confess to having read The Courage to Write twice already. This is symbolic writing. It's a little like reading a book on weight loss with a pastrami sandwich in one hand, telling oneself the diet will start on Monday.
     A great way of procrastinating is to read about the rituals of famous authors. Kent Haruf, for example, sits in front of a typewriter blindfolded and types as quickly as possible. As in an Catholic church service, there are a lot of smells and bells.
     Some authors, like Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron, are better known for their books on how to write than for their other works. My favorite guide is Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer. These books can be as helpful as they are seductive, yet in the end nothing but putting pen to paper will suffice.
     It seems that a great many people feel they have a book in them (as opposed to a painting or a song or a dance) and they are just yearning for a stretch of free time to kick back and set to work. The novel is almost complete--it just hasn't been written yet.
     Part of the problem is having such high standards: "I must wake up at 4 am to work on my novel" or "I must sit in front of my computer for 5 hours a day." Everyone at least marginally interested in writing has heard the advice to write at the same time each day, everyday, for at least an hour. Why is this simple prescription so hard at times?
     I think many people are unknowingly afraid of what the act of writing will stir up. It's a form of perfectionism. If they abandon themselves and lose a minimum of control, they may end up broke, drunk, or crazy.
     In the end, not writing is quite difficult. Once you plunge in, even for a few minutes, there is a great sense of relief.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Celebrity Crushes

     My mother is in love with Paul McCartney. "Oh, Paulie!" she says. In her youthful sixty-nine-year-old face is the first flush of adolescence, the breathless "I would die for him!" swoon. This is my mother, the seventies disco queen, the eighties jogger, and the nineties horseback rider, the former school psychologist who now cannot shower or dress by herself.
     Alzheimer's crept up on my mother unexpectedly and damaged her orbito-frontal cortex and thalamus and hippocampus, making it difficult for her to control her impulses. Maybe this can explain the sort of Beatles fan she is today, the boy-crazy alter ego who would like to tear her hair out, stomp her feet, and scream the way lovesick girls do, in a horrific frenzy.
     I'm a little embarassed by this woman who says, "I hope Paul visits today" and carries around old CD liners with his picture on them. "Look at Paul," she says in doctors' waiting rooms and in the supermarket line. All she has to do is fish into her purse or coat pockets and Paul appears as unexpected as if he had just made a fresh entrance into her life. Paul is more real to her than her husband or her daughter. To her, we are rude, nonsensical creatures who help her dress and undress in a tug of war over arm holes and buttons and the subtle differences between right and left.
     It reminds me of my first celebrity crush. I was a young girl at summer camp and my cousin in another cabin had a poster of Tommy Howell (the centerfold in Teen Beat) taped to the wall of her bunk. I had to have one just like that and I kissed my glossy flat poster boy with quick, shy pecks on the mouth. He was my practice boyfriend.
     The adolescent Marcel experiences something similar with the actress La Berma. He yearns for "the unique and ungraspable object of so many thousands of dreams." While Tommy Howell doesn't necessarily compete with La Berma as a masterwork of dramatic art, there is still that unfulfilled desire for a well-known actor.
     At its absolute best, my relationship with my mother is a form of "karma yoga" or selfless service. I try to perform some small kindness. Sometimes that means offering her a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Sometimes that means talking about Paul as if he were a dinner guest. And sometimes all that means is putting on a Beatles CD and watching her sway back and forth like a fish swimming upstream, mouthing all the lyrics. For a moment, she is a boy-crazy teenager, biting her knuckles and screaming through her tears. And then the moment passes and we have to navigate the rest of the day as mother and daughter. 

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Proust for Pleasure

     I would stop by the table, where the kitchen maid had just shelled them, to see the peas lined up and tallied like green marbles in a game; but what delighted me were the asparagus, steeped in ultramarine and pink, whose tips, delicately painted with little strokes of mauve and azure, shade off imperceptibly down to their feet--still soiled though they are from the dirt of their garden bed--with an iridescence that is not of this earth. It seemed to me that these celestial hues revealed the delicious creatures who had merrily metamorphosed themselves into vegetables and who, through the disguise of their firm, edible flesh, disclosed in these early tints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in this extinction of blue evenings, the precious essence that I recognized again when, all night long following a dinner at which I had eaten them, they played, in farces as crude and poetic as a fairy play by Shakespeare, at changing my chamber pot into a jar of perfume.

     I was first attracted to this passage found in the first section of In Search of Lost Time because it appeared to be a still life for vegetarians, not a routine carnivorous description of bifteck aux pommes. This is truly Proust for pleasure: the voluptuous passages ignite all the senses. Certainly no one reads Proust for plot, yet his detail and description can be so flowery at times that his words border on purple prose. Not so here--every bit of paint applies itself to the canvas.
     In this passage, we get a sense of what it feels like to be asparagus. You could say he masters asparagus psychology. They are "creatures" with "feet" and "firm, edible flesh." Yet, at the same time, they are not what they appear; they are not of this world.
     He depicts more than a pretty picture. There is a certain sexual undercurrent to his fascination with asparagus. What's more, his vegetables have undergone an Ovidian metamorphosis.
     He begins with what seems calm and collected in English ("what delighted me were the asparagus"), yet sounds more emotionally charged in French ("mais mon ravissement etait devant les asperges"). Besides "delight," "ravissement" can mean "ecstasy," "rapture," and even "rape." And in his ecstasy (almost drug-induced in its intensity), he sees it all for the first time as in a case of jamais vu--as if he had never seen a countertop of raw asparagus before.
     And his ecstasy in seeing the asparagus has something to do with young Marcel's first stirrings of sexual pleasure. A little further on, we see the secret life of asparagus exposed "in those early hints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in the extinction of blue evenings" ("en ces couleurs naissantes d'aurore, en ces ebauches d'arc-en-ciel, en cette extinction de soirs bleus"). This is the climactic phrase in the passage: we go from dawn to evening, from birth to death.
     What is this build up to a beautiful death? I suggest it has to do with la petite mort ("the little death," a metaphor for orgasm). Looking the term up in my trusted Wiki, a more far-reaching definition of la petite mort refers to "the spiritual release that comes with orgasm, or a short period of melancholy or transcendence, as a result of the expenditure of the 'life force.'"
     Roland Barthes, the literary critic, spoke of la petite mort as the main goal of reading literature. When I began writing, I wanted to show Proust as hearty and vital, not as stodgy and quaint. Presumably, we all experience a little death in reading Proust through the portal of his attention to detail and description.
     And this is truly Proust for pleasure. 
 

Sunday, August 8, 2010

My Year of Turning 40: In Search of Lost Time (Introduction)

     To my surprise, I turned 40 one month ago. Where did the time go? In this youth-obsessed culture, 40 feels like a turning point. The grim reaper appears, licking the tip of his pencil. Married? No. Children? No. Successful career as a bestselling author? No comment. Live boldly or else.
     Two years ago, I moved back home to help take care of my parents. My mother has Alzheimer's. Just dressing in the morning is an exercise in frustration: putting her arms through the right holes in her shirt, pullling up underwear facing the correct way, lacing up shoes that match on the proper feet. At night, she is confused about why her daughter and husband are telling her to take her clothes off and put on a nightgown. It just doesn't make sense.
     As my mother loses her memory, I am reading Proust. Finally. The last time I was in Paris, I bought a knapsack to smuggle all of Proust's masterpiece (in a dozen paperbacks) out of the country. They remained untouched until a year ago. I read the first section--"Combray"--twice in French before I read it in English. To my dismay, I realized that because I had missed so many nuances, I needed a translation. Now I'm just past the "At Madame Swann's" section of the second volume (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower).
     My task: to read 50 pages in English (and then in French) each week and write two pages that will provide a taste of Proust as seen through my own warped lens.
     Proust turned 40 in 1911. In January of that year, he wrote in a letter that he existed "suspended between caffeine, aspirin, asthma, angina pectoris, and in six...days out of seven (between) life and death." He had just started a book. "God knows if I shall ever finish it."
     And what do I have to show for myself? Two short plays, some poems, an unfinished (yet not abandoned) novel, and a memoir I'm in the middle of completing. Mere lines in the sand. (Disclaimer: not to compare myself in any way with the budding master novelist.)
     How will my blog differ from two recent popular books on Proust? Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life is clever and makes for a fun read, but it doesn't focus on the language. And Phyllis Rose's The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time left me stranded by chapter two, in which she devotes many pages to a blow-by-blow account of channel surfing that has little or nothing to do with Proust.
     I pledge to keep on topic, to share what it is I love about Proust without being doctrinaire. I pledge to illuminate the crosshatching where my life and Proust's words intersect without too many sentences like, "Of course, what Proust is trying to say here has everything to do with what happened to my cousin three years ago on the A train." I pledge to make this blog accessible to everyone, whether they've never read a word of Proust or if they read him every year. I pledge to find my way lit by the headlights two feet in front of me as I drive through the night, seeing where this experiment takes me.
     The year I turn 40 will be the most bold yet. I won't sit safely by the hearth, remembering things past, but I will go in hungry pursuit of lost time. So as I type this, I am dipping a madeline in my tea and mumbling a prayer I used to hear at Unitarian services: Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.