April 5, 2013 On the Shelf Moist, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Other books I can’t throw away because—well, they’re books, and you can’t throw away a book, can you?” In memory of the late Roger Ebert, an essay on libraries and love. Amazon is in the process of testing an automated cover generator. Well, of course they are, silly. Why do so many people hate the word moist, anyway? On word aversion. Lizzie Skurnick, the Boswell of the world of YA literature, is launching Lizzie Skurnick Books, an imprint that will “bring back the very best in young adult literature, from the classics of the 1930s and 1940s, to the thrillers and social novels of the 1970s and 1980s.” Short version: Scotland is giving back some of George Washington’s books.
April 4, 2013 Poetry Lady Liberty By Sadie Stein Alexandra Socarides of The Los Angeles Review of Books’s has a lovely and informative piece on “New Colossus,” the Petrarchan Emma Lazarus sonnet that famously adorns the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. We learn about the poet and the poem’s formal and political import; Socarides frames “New Colossus” as a bold statement for immigrant reform and tolerance, Lazarus herself as an engaging figure worthy of study. My own history with the iconic poem is less exalted. I remember distinctly the first time I heard it: I was three years old, in bed with one of the migraines that had arrived with the news of my mother’s pregnancy with a new brother. My father read me the poem, his voice choked with emotion, explaining that it had heralded my great-grandparents’ arrival in New York. Then he left me to sleep, drugged with pain and the red liquid children’s Tylenol that always stained the sheets. When I woke up a few hours later, cautiously better, the words were still in my head. “Yearning to breathe free …” I thought. I wandered into the other room, where my parents were sitting on the bed with my new baby brother, hideous and red-haired. My father was making a videotape with his Betamax camera, not that the baby was doing anything interesting. I casually stripped off my cotton underpants, lay down on the bed, and began kicking my legs in the air. “Look at me!” I said. “Look at me!” “Sadie, put on your underpants,” said my mother. “But, Mama!” I cried. “I’m yearning to breathe free!” The baby rolled or something. “MY VAGINA IS YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE!” I shouted, in case they’d missed it. “Today, Charlie is four months old,” my dad was narrating. “We are on Seventy-Sixth Street. Sadie, would you like to say something to the camera?” “Camera!” I screamed. “MY VAGINA IS YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE!” I waved my legs in the air vigorously. “Anything else?” “MY VAGINA—” “Enough with the vagina, Sades,” said my dad. This is all on videotape. I recently saw it when I took a bunch of Beta tapes to be digitized. I apologize to Emma Lazarus. * Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
April 4, 2013 First Person Master Class By Katherine Hill The packet came in the mail. My first MFA workshop would be led by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. So I did what any good writing student does: I bought and read one of her books. I remember humming along through Disturbances in the Field, deeply engaged with Lydia, a Manhattan pianist who understands her life through the lessons of the great philosophers. “Heraclitus was right,” she says. “No sooner is a position established than it erodes. The solid earth under our feet melts into water, evaporates into air, and is consumed in fire. I moved from one family to another.” The mood is heady, the details exquisite. Here, I thought, is a novel unhampered by plot: a capacious, intelligent book about the endless trouble of being smart and a woman, of being with other people and alive. A book that showed me how to write sentences, and how to live a life of the mind. Twenty-three in Brooklyn, I took constant, exuberant notes. But then, halfway through, like a guillotine, the plot falls into place. Something irreversible occurs in Lydia’s life, something devastating. And despite the book’s description, despite the many, many narrative clues, I was shocked. Suddenly, I had in my hands an entirely different book. The armor of ideas Lydia had been forging no longer fit the shape of the world; somehow, she’d have to recast it. Schwartz was even more masterful than I’d thought. Mildly daunted, I made my way to Bennington, where I met the author herself: a small, dignified woman who clearly didn’t suffer fools. Somehow, I managed to call her Lynne. As a teacher, she turned out to be quite compatible with her book: broad-minded yet blunt, rigorous yet humane. Unsurprisingly, she’d read everything—because, as she often insisted, the only way to become a writer was to read and live and write. Like Lydia, she could always call up just the right book for any situation. Lynne wasn’t the first writer I’d known, but she may have been the first with whom I kept up a regular correspondence. I learned recklessly from her recommendations, and from her own books, too. In her memoir of bibliophilia, Ruined By Reading, she cautions that “the writer is born of our fantasies. Reading her book, we fashion her image, which has a sort of existence, but never in the flesh of the person bearing her name.” And yet, I really did know this person, which had to count for something. We traded childhood stories, discovered a mutual affection for Daniel Deronda and Natalia Ginzburg, shared news of births and deaths. She was known as one of the bad cops at Bennington, famous for being tough on her students. Well, if this was bad, I wouldn’t waste my time with good. Read More
April 4, 2013 Look They Don’t Love You Like I Love You By Sadie Stein In seventh grade, we read The Catcher in the Rye. One day, Ms. C. handed out xeroxed maps of New York City and asked us to trace Holden Caulfield’s path through New York. We did. “Do you see the pattern?” she kept asking excitedly. “Do you see what it’s all pointing to?” No one did. “He’s heading home! He’s circling around home!” she finally shouted, exasperated. We were collectively underwhelmed. I suspect Holden Caulfield might have been, too. Maybe our teacher was onto something, though: in a sense, she was urging us to do the same thing Becky Cooper conceived of in her collaborative art project Mapping Manhattan, now collected in a book. A range of New Yorkers—artists, writers, thinkers, kooks—present maps colored (in some cases literally) by their personal experiences. The results are as wide-ranging and fascinating as one might expect. None, that I can see, are leading to the author’s childhood home—but then, if memory serves, I only got a B+ in that class. Malcolm Gladwell’s map.
April 4, 2013 On the Shelf Good Little Girls, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Good little girls ought not to make mouths at their teachers for every trifling offense. This retaliation should only be resorted to under peculiarly aggravated circumstances.” Mark Twain’s advice to little girls, illustrated by Vladimir Radunsky. Speaking of: the always fun Wodehouse Prize shortlist is posted. “British writing will be far less incisive and fun when he stops.” Tim Martin pays tribute to Iain Banks, who just revealed his terminal illness. “Banks manages to be both popular and profound,” says Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman.
April 3, 2013 In Memoriam Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 1927–2013 By Thessaly La Force It was announced this morning that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala died today at her home in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-five. Jhabvala is best known as an award-winning screenwriter for Merchant Ivory Productions. Together, with the late producer Ismail Merchant and the director James Ivory, she helped make twenty-two films. Perhaps, like me, you have watched her adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View dozens of times, which garnered her an Academy Award for screenwriting in 1986. Or perhaps you, too, lusted after a Kelly bag after watching her adaptation of Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce. Over the course of three decades, she helped project the stories of writers such as Forster, Henry James, Evan S. Connell, Jean Rhys, and others onto the screen. Often, though not always, these films captured a lost era. One where women were chaperoned to Italy, where a stolen kiss on a hilltop could cause scandal, where class was never directly discussed, and fortune was hunted like prey. And today we must mourn the loss of a kind of filmmaking that took care to not appear superficial in obsessing over the past. (Much as Merchant Ivory always got the look right, one never said that the best part of the movie was the costumes. Look, for example, at Hollywood’s latest adaptation of Anna Karenina.) As Jhabvala explained to Philip Horne around 2001: “The main purpose is that I have such a good time. I mean, think of all that marvelous material. Just think of spending all that time in The Golden Bowl and the other James and Forster books we have done. But especially Henry James because he has such marvelous characters and he has such strong dramatic scenes. You just put your hand in and pull them out.” This is because Jhabvala read as a writer. Despite—or perhaps because of—her many successes, she called herself a novelist first and foremost. And with reason. Heat and Dust was awarded the Booker Prize in 1975. She was given a MacArthur in 1984, and her short stories were published in The New Yorker throughout her career. “I was never interested in adapting classics at all,” she told Horne. “I’d written four novels. I was never interested in film. Never. I never even thought of it. I never thought of it until Merchant and Ivory came to India and filmed one of my books—they said: ‘Why don’t you write the screenplay?’ I said I’d never written a screenplay and I hadn’t seen many films because I was in India by that time and hadn’t really had any opportunity to see new films or art films or classic films or anything. So they said, ‘Well, try. We haven’t made a feature film before.’ So that was really my introduction into film.” Thessaly La Force is a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and coauthor of My Ideal Bookshelf.