{"id":10915,"date":"2011-02-03T10:33:27","date_gmt":"2011-02-03T15:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=10915"},"modified":"2013-01-09T11:55:42","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T16:55:42","slug":"a-week-in-culture-jane-ciabattari-writer-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/03\/a-week-in-culture-jane-ciabattari-writer-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in Culture: Jane Ciabattari, Writer, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Ciabattari\u2019s culture diary. Click here<\/a> to read part 1. <\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

Photograph by Panya Phongsavan.<\/p><\/div>\n

DAY FOUR<\/h3>\n

11:00 A.M.<\/strong> Go out to a caf\u00e9 to read a first novel I\u2019m reviewing. Karen Russell\u2019s Swamplandia!<\/a><\/em> is about a family of alligator wrestlers. Talk about Southern Gothic. I\u2019m finding the language fresh and original. Describing a deserted house in the swamp: \u201cA huge hole in the middle of the ceiling opened onto a clear night sky; it looked as if some great predator had peeled the thatched roof back, sniffed once and lost interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

6:30 P.M.<\/strong> The panelists for tonight\u2019s National Book Critics Circle discussion I\u2019m moderating, \u201cBook Reviews, Revamped,\u201d are all sitting in the office of Noreen Tomassi, the executive director of the Center for Fiction<\/a>. I love this place. Floors of books, collections dating back to the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

Once the audience has gathered, we head downstairs to the second floor, where we have a discussion<\/a> of the ways in which four publications are headed into the new decade. <\/p>\n

Jennifer MacDonald, who is involved with revamping The New York Times Book Review<\/em>, breaks news: in February Paper Cuts is merging into the ArtsBeat blog<\/a>, and they have hired a new children\u2019s book editor, Pamela Paul. <\/p>\n

Robert Messenger, who launched the Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u2019s stand-alone print book section this fall, says he\u2019s not reinventing a book-review section, he\u2019s preserving an old form, and Rupert Murdoch wants him to edit for the reader, not for advertisers. <\/p>\n

Craig Teicher talks about Publishers Weekly<\/em>\u2019s revival under a new owner, the poetry coverage, and the news blog<\/a> he\u2019s started. <\/p>\n

Barbara Hoffert talks about writing the weekly prepub alert<\/a> for Library Journal, and mentions the new opportunities for small presses and work in translation to be reviewed.<\/p>\n

DAY FIVE<\/h3>\n

\"\"10:00 A.M.<\/strong> I post a series of appreciations<\/a> of writer Wilfrid Sheed, critic\u2019s critic and former Sag Harbor neighbor, who died on Wednesday morning in the Berkshires. Bill Sheed was fun to read, unless you were the author he was reviewing. Here he is on the dangers of premature literary success: \u201cThe first extravagant praise kills writers like frost. Whom the gods would destroy, they first oversell.\u201d<\/p>\n

And on reading Hemingway: \u201cIt\u2019s like being trapped in an endless exhibit of primitive paintings. Why, one wonders again and again, did so gifted a man chain himself to so narrow a method?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"6:00 P.M.<\/strong> Stacy Schiff talks about her best-selling biography of Cleopatra<\/a> to a crowd of three hundred in midtown. She describes the complexities of writing about a historic figure whose life has little documentation other than references from Plutarch and Cicero (whose own biases were obvious). At one point she says, \u201cThe great age of biography began with the typewriter and ended with e-mail.\u201d <\/p>\n

DAY SIX<\/h3>\n

8:30 A.M.<\/strong> I\u2019m on deadline all day, with coffee and lunch breaks and a few minutes to make lists of my favorites for the NBCC short-list voting tomorrow. <\/p>\n

\"\"7:15 P.M.<\/strong> Greenlight Books<\/a> is invitingly bright on a winter night; it\u2019s easy to browse, there\u2019s a 15 percent\u2013off section up front. I could stay here for hours. But I\u2019m here to introduce an NBCC-sponsored reading with editors and authors from Akashic Books\u2019s Noir series<\/a>\u2014Philly, Brooklyn, the Bronx.<\/p>\n

By the time we start, the chairs are filled, despite the icy streets. Carlin Romano, NBCC board member, critic-at-large for the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em>, longtime literary critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, and editor of Philadelphia Noir<\/em>, orchestrates a conversation and brief readings, all in a well-timed hour. From his introduction<\/a>: \u201cI thank my contributors for their very limited references to hoagies, cheesesteaks, water ice, soft pretzels, and waitresses who call their customers \u2018Hon.\u2019 There\u2019s no glimpse of Claes Oldenburg\u2019s Clothespin<\/em> or the rowers by the Waterworks, and only one passing mention of Rocky. Truth is, we don’t talk much about those things. We just live our lives.” <\/p>\n

\"\"I head home to the stack of NBCC fiction contenders. I take another glance through the 101-year-old German psychoanalyst Hans Keilson\u2019s Kafkaesque novella Comedy in a Minor Key<\/a><\/em>, published in 1947 and newly translated into English. It\u2019s set in Nazi-occupied Holland and deals with a Dutch couple that harbors a Jewish stranger who dies of pneumonia. They have to decide what to do with his body. <\/p>\n

Then it\u2019s on to Jennifer Egan\u2019s A Visit from the Goon Squad<\/a><\/em>, which I find intelligent, psychologically acute, seriously playful, attuned to cutting-edge technology (one chapter is in PowerPoint). She follows a punk rocker\u2013turned\u2013music producer named Bennie Salazar, his sticky-fingered assistant Sasha, and an assortment of has-beens, wannabes, faded big shots, and hangers-on through various points in time, including the future. Who\u2019s the goon? Time. (She and her reading group spent seven years reading Proust\u2019s In Search of Lost Time<\/a><\/em>.) <\/p>\n

DAY SEVEN<\/h3>\n

\"\"7:00 A.M.<\/strong> Today is the NBCC board meeting where we vote on awards finalists. I\u2019m up early, rereading Hiroshima in the Morning<\/a><\/em> by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. Rizzuto traveled to Hiroshima in June 2001 to interview survivors of the atomic bomb. I\u2019m particularly taken by her visit to the peace museum there. \u201cThere are people around me now, crying; they\u2019re turning away from the unbearable, and all I feel is anger. I know what they do not: Hiroshima has been erased.\u201d And later, after 9\/11 unlocks memories and the Hiroshima survivors retrieve more emotion and detail, she writes, \u201cThe function of memory is not to record history, but to tell stories. It is never fact we want. It is understanding.\u201d <\/p>\n

Her book evokes those eerie and wrenching hours and days after the attack on the Twin Towers, the sound of F-16s droning overhead around the clock, video images of the planes and of the smoldering site, playing for weeks afterward. I saw an uniformed fireman covered in soot walking down the aisle at St. John the Divine, tears streaming down his face. He took a seat and bent over, his face in his hands. Several of us walked across the aisle and put comforting hands on his shoulders. <\/p>\n

10:15 A.M.<\/strong> Twenty-three of the twenty-four NBCC board members<\/a> are in town for the January board meeting. The day passes in a blur; we\u2019re engaged in intense awards discussion, debate, and voting<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\"\"5:45 P.M.<\/strong> At WNYC\u2019s high-tech Greene Performance Space, the guest announcers, all past winners of or finalists for NBCC awards, gather: Joan Acocella, Jason Epstein, Blake Bailey, Stephen Burt, Carolyn Forche, Annette Gordon-Reed, Honor Moore, and Zadie Smith. The announcement goes off smoothly: thirty-one finalists and two award winners (Dalkey Archive Press has won the Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement, announced by Jason Epstein; Paroul Sehgal has won the Nona Balakian prize for excellence in reviewing, announced by Joan Acocella). The NBCC\u2019s finalists are all public now<\/a>. The party lasts for several hours, emitting a gentle buzz like the hum of a beehive. <\/p>\n

\"\"8:00 P.M.<\/strong> Mark and I head to Fanelli\u2019s for cheeseburgers with fellow board member Eric Banks<\/a> and John Freeman, my predecessor and now editor of Granta<\/em>. <\/p>\n

Eric gives the tout of the night, for Uncle Mo to win the Derby. Spring is not that far away. Later he sends me a link to Uncle Mo\u2019s Saratoga debut<\/a>, in which he wins by fifteen-plus lengths. He also touts the \u201cPainters and Poets\u201d exhibit<\/a> at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery (\u201cI\u2019m going up there with the original Uncle Mo, Albert Mobilio\u201d).<\/p>\n

John says Granta<\/em>\u2019s upcoming Aliens issue has a lengthy excerpt from the new novel by Aravind Adiga, author of the sardonic first novel, The White Tiger<\/a><\/em>, which takes on India\u2019s caste system. He and Eric, the former editor of Bookforum<\/em>, talk about the joys of publishing pieces in the ten-thousand-word range. <\/p>\n

\"\"Mark asks us, When did you first read Tropic of Cancer<\/a><\/em>? John describes listening to an audiotape of Tropic<\/em> while driving through the woods of puritanical New England. Mark riffs on the days of buying books in brown paper wrappers, from behind the counter. I can\u2019t remember when I first read it. In graduate school? No, earlier. At Stanford? Yes, of course. I read Mark\u2019s copy. <\/p>\n

When we get home in the wee hours, Mario Vargas Llosa has the last word: <\/p>\n

\n

I remember very clearly how I read Tropic of Cancer<\/em> for the first time, thirty years ago: very quickly, overexcited, in the course of just one night. A Spanish friend had got hold of a French version of this maudit<\/em> book about which so many stories were circulating in Lima, and when he saw how anxious I was to read it, he lent it to me for a few hours. It was a strange experience, completely different to what I had imagined, because the book was not scandalous, as was being said, because of its erotic scenes, but rather because of its vulgarity and its cheerful nihilism.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Jane Ciabattari<\/a> is a fiction writer, book reviewer, and president of the National Book Critics Circle<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Ciabattari\u2019s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:00 A.M. Go out to a caf\u00e9 to read a first novel I\u2019m reviewing. Karen Russell\u2019s Swamplandia! is about a family of alligator wrestlers. Talk about Southern Gothic. I\u2019m finding the language fresh and original. Describing a deserted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[478,16,1790,479,125,53,477],"class_list":["post-10915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-culture-diaries","tag-criticism","tag-culture","tag-jane-ciabattari","tag-national-book-critics-circle","tag-new-york-city","tag-reading","tag-reviews"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Week in Culture: Jane Ciabattari, Writer, Part 2 by Jane Ciabattari<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 3, 2011 \u2013 This is the second installment of Ciabattari\u2019s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:00 A.M. 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