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.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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