{"id":9573,"date":"2011-01-06T10:56:37","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T15:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=9573"},"modified":"2013-01-09T11:57:04","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T16:57:04","slug":"a-week-in-culture-gemma-sieff-editor-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/01\/06\/a-week-in-culture-gemma-sieff-editor-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in Culture: Gemma Sieff, Editor, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

DAY FOUR<\/h3>\n

11:00 A.M.<\/strong> This copy of Innocence<\/em> comes from Adam\u2019s Books, a used bookstore on Bergen Street in Brooklyn that has since closed. The volume was, in a previous incarnation, a gift and carries an inscription:<\/p>\n

\n

DINA\u2014<\/p>\n

I hope you enjoy this gift. But I must tell you now, while everyone\u2019s watching, that I have a gift to give you when we are alone that will lead to something even grander and more sublime than this novel, or any work of art for that matter. I am thinking of touching you now, watching you while you read this inscription.
\nYour hulking, sometimes brilliant and temperamental, boyfriend. You are my only baby.<\/p>\n

I love you<\/p>\n

Paul<\/p>\n

X-mas 1992<\/p>\n

By the way\u2014this title is appropriate given the theme of the fall in our relationship.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This couple actually seems kind of sweet. One wonders why she chucked the book\u2014but it doesn\u2019t mean they didn\u2019t get married. She could have been having an Archer moment. \u201cThe message inside the envelope \u2026 ran as follows: \u2018Parents consent wedding Tuesday after Easter at twelve Grace Church eight bridesmaids please see Rector so happy love May.\u2019 Archer crumpled up the yellow sheet as if the gesture could annihilate the news it contained.\u201d Yet there he is on his wedding day with the old ladies in their \u201cfaded sables and yellowing ermines,\u201d observing every ritual and \u201cformality \u2026 which made of a nineteenth-century New York wedding a rite that seemed to belong to the dawn of history.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"8:00 P.M.<\/strong> I watch Public Speaking<\/a><\/em>, Scorsese\u2019s documentary about Fran Lebowitz. Fran is funny and fascinating. New York, it occurs to me, is (still!) a thrilling city because of its conversationalists. My late boss Barbara Epstein, superlative in every way (Hilton and I agree on this one<\/a>), really knew how to talk on the phone.<\/p>\n

Fran is a force not only when she\u2019s storytelling\/Not Writing but also when she’s stalking the streets of New York and driving her marvelous car. She has wonderful bone structure. (I think she looks like Israel Rosenfield.) I notice how she uses the word like<\/em>. I like when older people use it in a slangy way that\u2019s different from my generation\u2019s tic of imprecision. Fran treats it as a beat, and it lets her wit, which is so very keen and a million miles ahead of us all, unfold more slowly, so that it almost seems a bit extemporized and like she might be riffing.<\/p>\n

\"\"Fran observes that men and women react to parenthood very differently, men going about their work and daily life with their concentration mainly intact, women constantly distracted by their children, not so much by their demands as by their existence. A curdled version of this occurs in P\u00e9ter N\u00e1das’s story <\/a>in this magazine\u2019s latest issue. A profoundly weird and sexy tale. I would characterize the prose as slippery, though as a friend points out it\u2019s difficult to tell how much of that, stylistically, is N\u00e1das and how much his fine translator, Imr\u00e9 Goldstein. \u201cThe feeling that even when we were alone together, I wasn\u2019t there by myself, as he was, that is what he wanted to extinguish in me,\u201d Geerte says to Erna, of her husband. \u201cAs if he wanted us to be just the two of us again.\u201d Geerte\u2019s cleft lip, which N\u00e1das says makes her less than whole, seems somehow relevant.<\/p>\n

Her mouth was indeed a surgical masterpiece, but her flesh lacked the usual tripartite division on the rim of the upper lip. Even now, her lips did not close completely, making them especially round looking\u2014at once fascinating and repulsive, as are all injuries that affect the body\u2019s wholeness or hint at any threat to it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

DAY FIVE<\/h3>\n

11:00 A.M.<\/strong> Christmas. We cook a duck.<\/p>\n

DAY SIX<\/h3>\n

\"\"9:30 P.M.<\/strong> I watch Tiny Furniture<\/a><\/em>, for the third time, with my parents. This, along with the thought that Lena Dunham is a touch overcozy with her folks (i.e., tropes of bed-sharing in the film and that wry rumoring<\/a> in Rebecca Mead\u2019s revealing profile), makes me feel a bit self-conscious. I, too, was a teenager always hanging out with my parents.<\/p>\n

Dunham has a brilliant ear. I find this so surpassingly rare in writing of any kind that I\u2019m willing to forgive her some slipups as she figures things out. (\u201c\u2018I\u2019m figuring it out, Mom,\u2019\u201d parrots Siri sarcastically. \u201cI am so sick of your words!\u201d) I\u2019m interested by the allergic reactions some people have had to the movie, which is provocatively autobiographical. Dunham plays the lead and casts her mother, sister, friends, and Tribeca loft as themselves. The overlap didn\u2019t obsess me because the film felt so written<\/em>, so aesthetically determined, and porousness between fiction and non is, to me, not problematic (or necessarily even interesting) if the work is good. \u201cIs the character Aura actually Ms. Dunham (the unique woman who lived in that loft) or is the director playing a copy of herself?\u201d asks Manohla Dargis, in the Times<\/em><\/a>. It\u2019s a reasonable (and inevitable) question, but the supposition that follows seems kind of snide. \u201cOne hint,\u201d she writes, \u201cmight be the character\u2019s unusual first name, which suggests that Ms. Dunham, at the age of 24 and herself a recent graduate, has read the social theorist Walter Benjamin\u2019s 1930s essay \u2018The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,\u2019 one of the most influential (and commonly classroom-assigned) inquiries into aesthetic production and the mass reproduction of art \u2026 Cinema, in other words, might spark critical thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

I like Dunham\u2019s irreverence and fear of pretentiousness mixed in with her literary ambition. Little sister Nadine has won \u201cthe biggest prize in America,\u201d announces Siri, which turns out to be a pretty big-deal poetry award for high-school students; only Nadine, like an embittered adjunct, declares poetry \u201ca very stupid thing to be good at\u201d and \u201ca failure of an intellectual community.\u201d The next scene finds the sisters in the bathroom. Aura shaves in the shower as Nadine shyly reads one of her poems aloud. You can hear her nervousness and also her pride. She protects herself with scare quotes (\u201cWhenever I write a poem, I feel like I have all these \u2018feelings\u2019\u201d), and Aura, understanding the bid for big sisterly approval, is sweetly, not falsely, self-deprecating, recalling her Oberlin \u201cSlam\u2013po-e-try\u2013voice\u201d full of portent and angst. Aura gets that this is her sister\u2019s thing.<\/p>\n

\"\"Aura is extremely sensitive to language, especially others\u2019. We don\u2019t see her reading much, though the boys around her read lots, and preeningly. Jed, a romantic interest and intellectual rival, reads Woody Allen\u2019s Without Feathers<\/em>. The chef with whom Aura briefly works (and whom she finds pretty dishy\u2014the actor David Call having just the right type of good looks, blond, Fedora\u2019d, with a mustache), reads Austerlitz<\/em> and The Road<\/em>, he tells her, \u201cby Cormac McCarthy.\u201d Aura tells him it\u2019s an Oprah pick, the tease sweet-natured.<\/p>\n

When he slights her, which happens twice, the lust that has fogged her awareness of his stupidity evaporates just long enough for her to notice his awful clich\u00e9s. \u201cSame shit, different day,\u201d he tells her day after day, the final instance occurring as a lame excuse for having stood her up, and she says icily, \u201cYou know I thought that was something you made up, but it turns out it\u2019s just something people say.\u201d Later [SPOILER ALERT] after they\u2019ve fucked in a pipe in an abandoned lot and are walking through Brooklyn fully clothed if slightly smeared and he lunges suddenly right, hissing, \u201cOh shit, that\u2019s my boy,\u201d and forcing her to crouch behind a red hatchback because he thinks he sees a guy who works with his girlfriend\u2019s sister, Aura remarks that he has uttered the phrase \u201cno harm, no foul\u201d \u201clike seven times tonight.\u201d We recall the other banalities to which he has treated her: \u201cWhen I get a big enough nut, I\u2019m gonna quit.\u201d He and his girlfriend are having problems so he\u2019s \u201cgotta put the time in.\u201d His taste in pornography runs toward \u201csome Japanese shit.\u201d He can\u2019t kiss her, he claims, minutes before the pipe tryst, because until he and Jessica are \u201cformally broken up I should keep it in my pants.\u201d Do you know what Vicodin feels like? \u201cLike lying naked on a bearskin rug next to a fire.\u201d (That one makes Aura laugh.) At the end of the film, the actor who plays the guy dimly espied and feared to be an acquaintance of Jessica\u2019s sister is credited as KEITH\u2019S \u201cBOY.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Jed, the weather is \u201cnippy\u201d and the blowup mattress is \u201cdefective. It\u2019s devastating.\u201d He gets an \u201ce-mail from this terrible girl I used to know\u201d whom he met in a \u201chorrible trendy coffee shop in Wicker Park.\u201d \u201cOr some fuckin\u2019 nonsense.\u201d Of the chef: \u201cDude sounds like a real meatball.\u201d He\u2019s a man in the house and a cowboy at dusk and it\u2019s no big whoop. Aura doesn\u2019t comment on his misspelling of Nietzsche when she watches his \u201cNietschian [sic] Cowboy\u201d schtick on YouTube with her mom. Jed\u2019s mouth is actually very Geerte-like: too-round, fascinating, and repulsive.
\nThe film is also visually astute. Antonioni shots through doors and steady shots of bookcases, slender vases, tiny furniture, and Siri in the tub, red hair and red-wine dark spots against the blinding tile.<\/p>\n

\"\"Aura\u2019s best friend Charlotte, impudent English minx, is luscious; and so for that matter is Aura. For me that\u2019s one of the main pleasures of the movie: to feel ever fonder of this young girl with unwashed hair and the body of a Teletubby as she pads pantsless around the apartment, wiggles into a body stocking, puts on her cowboy boots. It was her mom who (long ago) logged in her (actual) diary her daily morsels (\u201czucchini bread, cheese, crackers, wine\u201d) and the wish \u201cto weigh 128\u2013125, and be happy.\u201d It\u2019s not that Aura doesn\u2019t<\/em> think about this stuff; it\u2019s that it seems, maybe, like a bit less of a tyranny. I wouldn\u2019t say this is a feminist film (that film would have been Siri\u2019s), but it is unquestionably a female<\/em> film about female things made on female time, with female funniness.<\/p>\n

Of course \u201cIt does<\/em> hurt,\u201d Aura says, as Charlotte pricks her with ink, giving her a new tattoo. The movie made me appreciate women: those I love and being one. And I felt sisterly toward this talented young person. Precocity is exciting, and produces impatience for what Dunham does next.<\/p>\n

My parents also liked the movie.<\/p>\n

DAY SEVEN<\/h3>\n

\"\"10:00 A.M.<\/strong> NYT <\/em>Sunday Styles. <\/p>\n

He\u2019s no Lorin Stein<\/a>, but Philip Galanes wisely advises us<\/a> not to ask a woman whether she is pregnant before offering her your seat on the subway. <\/p>\n

Vows: Mina & Jesse<\/a>. Friend of the bride Poopak Banky says Jesse gives Mina a feeling of \u201cghili vili,\u201d i.e., he has created a revolution in her.<\/p>\n

Straight razors are back<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gemma Sieff edits Reviews & Criticism at <\/em>Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Sieff\u2019s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:00 A.M. This copy of Innocence comes from Adam\u2019s Books, a used bookstore on Bergen Street in Brooklyn that has since closed. The volume was, in a previous incarnation, a gift and carries an inscription: DINA\u2014 I hope […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[1618,1442,1617,1614,1615,1619,1620],"class_list":["post-9573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-culture-diaries","tag-age-of-innocence","tag-christmas","tag-culture-diary","tag-gemma-sieff","tag-harpers-magazine","tag-lena-dunham","tag-tiny-furniture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Week in Culture: Gemma Sieff, Editor, Part 2 by Gemma Sieff<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 6, 2011 \u2013 This is the second installment of Sieff\u2019s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:00 A.M. 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