January 16, 2013 At Work Tender Spirits: A Conversation with Marie-Helene Bertino By Jessica Gross In October, Marie-Helene Bertino published her debut collection of short stories, Safe as Houses. Her writing often involves fantastical elements—an embodied idea of an ex-boyfriend, an alien who faxes observations about human beings to her home planet, a woman who brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving dinner—that advance painful story lines. Her language is spare, direct, and hilarious, which makes the characters’ losses that much more deeply felt. Bertino is now at work on a novel centering on a jazz club in Philadelphia called the Cat’s Pajamas. We spoke for two hours in a Brooklyn coffee shop, which was flooded with girls on their lunch break from school. Reading Safe as Houses, I was struck by the number of characters who aren’t really seen by others. By the last few stories, the characters start to become more visible. Does that theme ring true to you? I would totally agree with that, though I was not conscious of it. I was aware that a lot of characters were on the outskirts of something—of their towns, their groups of friends, their families, their societies. And at the risk of sounding cliché, I think that’s a metaphor for being a writer. I mean literally and figuratively—you have to stand on the outside to watch a group of people and then be able to write about them, but in practice, it’s also a solitary art, as they say. And I think that those characters definitely are a reflection of that kind of observer quality in me. Read More
January 16, 2013 On the Shelf Writing in Jewish, and Other News By Sadie Stein The literature of Washington, D. C.? Ah, the old “I let an author stay in my house and he published ridiculous things about me” conundrum. Children, it seems, like real books. Philip Roth: “I don’t write in Jewish, I write in American.” Here is a house constructed around an enormous bookshelf.
January 15, 2013 Arts & Culture On The Road Again By Robert Moor A dirt road scrolls beneath a pair of huarache sandals. In a flash, it turns from moonlit to sunlit, and the pebbly dirt smoothes to bleached, cracked concrete. The shot lingers three or four beats longer than it should, the camera gliding over the road as the sandals flop and their owner huffs. Cue title card. This sequence—the opening shots of Walter Salles’s wildly uneven, flickeringly vivid new film adaptation of On The Road—foregrounds the oft-overlooked double entendre nested in the novel’s title: it is both a romantic portrait of life “on the road” and a ruminative discourse on roads. Later in the film occurs a similar shot, this time of the highway’s surface streaking by like a meteor shower, as Sal Paradise intones: “The purity of the road. The white line in the middle of the highway unrolled and hugged our left front tire as if glued to our groove. And zoom went the car, and we were off again, to California.” Throughout the book, Kerouac expresses awe at the vast interconnectedness that the American road system allows—an epiphany so common it barely registers for modern readers. But half a century ago, it still struck with a bright clang. Read More
January 15, 2013 Arts & Culture The Joys of Reading By Sadie Stein The anniversary of the British Museum led me to spend a few hours wandering their extensive online collections. This print, made by Marcel Jules Gingembre d’Aubépine around 1886, is called Les joies du bibliophile.
January 15, 2013 At Work A Visit with Evan S. Connell By Gemma Sieff Evan S. Connell, who died last week, was eighty-six when I interviewed him at Ponce de Leon, a nursing home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he had moved after selling his condominium at Fort Marcy. He had lived an incredibly solitary life. One of his caretakers mentioned that some of the other residents assumed at first that he was mute. I wish that the transcribed text that follows better reflected Mr. Connell’s timbre, because you’d be able to hear the way his inarticulacy was equal parts reticence and modesty. He had a wonderful laugh, a huh-huh-huh, gentle and self-deprecating. You could tell he was accustomed to downplaying his erudition. But he clearly wanted to communicate what he considered important. Read More
January 15, 2013 On the Shelf Conspiracy Theories, and Other News By Sadie Stein Literary conspiracy theories, anyone? Paragraph is a new app that curates great short stories. (Yes, we are represented!) And, inevitably, iambic pentameter bots. What would Jesus eat? The subgenre of Christian cookbooks. And … the National Book Critics Circle finalists are announced.