Monthly Archives: October 2007

around the internet on a tuesday

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So as I mentioned in my last post, I attended a conference at Columbia last weekend, which was very exciting on many levels, the most basic of which is that it was a chance to go hang out at my alma mater for awhile.  I stayed with a friend who is a third-year at Columbia Law on Thursday and Friday nights, which meant I could roll out of bed Friday and Saturday mornings as if almost eight years hadn’t rushed on by since I graduated! Friday I spent conferencing, but by Saturday I had had enough of French academics (they are such a different breed from we Anglo-Saxons) and decided my time would be better spent in the stacks at Butler all day.  First, though, I made an obligatory visit to the Hungarian Pastry Shop (truly my favorite café in the world) and to Labyrinth Books, which was something else before it was Labyrinth but I’ve forgotten, and which is now no longer Labyrinth but something called Book Culture.   Seems to be exactly the same place, just with a name change.   I was in heaven– piled onto tables, stacked onto stairs, laid out on shelves, were books you just don’t see at Borders or Barnes and Noble or even at McNally’s or (the New York version of) Shakespeare and Co.  Mixed in with books I’m impatient to read, like Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise and Janet Malcom’s Gertrude and Alice were Franco Moretti’s two-volume study of the novel and a remainder copy of The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier.  So many books tempting me,  so many books I couldn’t take with me, not only because of their cost but because of their weight! I limited myself to one.  (The Monnier, if you’re curious to know, came home with me. It was $6.  And directly relevant to my thesis.  I couldn’t resist.) They had Irène Nemirovsky in the Gallimard poche versions.  They even had Le Canard Enchaîné. American bookstores don’t get much better than this.   

And on that note, some links…

Charles McGrath thinks publishers think America is a nation of graduate students.  I think anyone who really thinks that hasn’t been to America.  Or maybe I haven’t been to their America.

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This is a really old article (from 1996!) but I just discovered it (don’t ask how) and it’s worth looking at now, 11 years on: Edward Mendelson’s article "The Word and the Web," an early attempt to think about textuality and the web, where relentless hyperlinking "suggests a world where connections are everywhere but are mostly meaningless, transient, fragile and unstable." 

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A charming link via Delphine (merci!!): this Guardian article asks "What do Parisians read on the metro?" and introduces the game "Sartre." Don’t worry, you don’t need to have read any of his works to play. All you need is a strong sense of Gallic cliché.

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These two go nicely as a pair: In Boston, parents congratulate themselves on having oddly intelligent children. In San Francisco, they worry that this generation of kids is dumber than ever. Where do your kids fit on this wacky hyperbolized scale?

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And finally, here is my weekly shameless plug for Gridskipper: this week I wrote about the Viaduc des Arts and the Promenade Plantée in the 12th.

around the internet on a tuesday

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…Do people still call it the "Internet"? it sounds so Web 1.0. It’s no longer a separate entity that we refer to from time to time– it’s the constitutive fabric of my daily existence! In any case, on with it:

I would like to draw your attention to a project that began earlier this month, initiated by Matthew Tiffany of Condalmo: it’s a collective reading of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, a modernist masterpiece that Pessoa worked on for years but left unpublished when he died in 1935. Pessoa’s book is actually a collection of fragmented texts that may bear little or no relation to each other and are written by Pessoa and at least two of his alter egos; they’ve asked me to contribute to this project and so I began reading the book this week.  So far I’m hooked, particularly since it fits in so well with my interest in modernism as a transnational (though unofficial) movement, and the different forms that spirit took on as it evolved from early, to high, to late modernism. Right now, the discussion is fragmented, like the work under consideration; I’m looking forward to seeing how the conversation develops.

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Le Figaro notes that French literature is getting more international attention than before. (FR)

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Reese Kwon has an exceptional article on James Wood at Small Spiral Notebook.

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Pierre Assouline takes another look at Irène Nemirovsky, via a newly published biography. (FR)

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In what part of Paris can you shop for the largest selection of sardines, the material you need to set up your own apiary, live baby octupi, and Comptoir des Cotonniers? The 13th Arrondissement, of course. Check out my latest piece for Gridskipper for the details.

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A couple of events are coming up this weekend that I thought I’d mention:

IN NEW YORK: A conference called Histoires littéraires (bafflingly titled, in English, "Literary Histories of Literatures") This Friday and Saturday, October 26th and 27th, sponsored by the Maison Française at Columbia University. Speakers include Edmund White, Assia Djebar, Antoine Compagnon, and Michel Murat, who served as my directeur during my masters year at the Sorbonne.

IN PARIS: "Gender Studies and Art History: Questions of masculine and feminine identity": a talk with Griselda Pollock and Jacqueline Lichtenstein, at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA). Friday, October 26th, 18h-20h.  Luckily for those of us who can’t make it, the talk will be transcribed and published in the journal Perspective at the end of 2007.

eating, praying, loving

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Transatlantic_2
Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin Books, $15

I loved this book and I am not ashamed.  Sure, it’s part of the gestalt of academe to affect a blasé
or a faux-concerned tone about anything the masses have got between
their paws.  But I think it is equally important to be able, from time
to time, to turn off one’s critical apparatus, stop questioning or
contextualizing the assumptions underpinning a text, stop sizing up the
writing, and just be what the French call bon public.  Sometimes a girl just wants to relax with her cultural consumption. Seriously! 

So it’s a New York Times bestseller.  So you’ve probably already been told to read it by Oprah, your best
friend’s sister, some gushing lady at Barnes & Noble, and your yoga
instructor, and you still haven’t picked it up. So what? When a good friend of mine told me to read it, I
believed her, because she is a smart and no-nonsense kind of girl.

I bought it at JFK and read it on the plane ride to Paris, and somewhere in the middle of the book I looked out the window at the light rimming the horizon, took a deep breath that connected me right down to the core of the earth thousands of miles below, and thought– I want everyone I love to read this book.

True, I was a weepy mess of hormones; filled with fatigue, relief at leaving behind my New York stress, and the keen need for N after six weeks of  being away from him. But I feel more balanced now, and I just gave it to my mom to enjoy. And now I’m telling you nice people about it.

Here’s the story: After living through a difficult divorce followed hard-upon by depression and a co-dependent relationship, Elizabeth Gilbert sat down and tried to imagine what would make her happy. The first things that came to mind? Learning Italian and meditating on an ashram. Then a Balinese medicine man invited her to come live with him for awhile.  And off she goes to spend four months in Rome, four months in India, and four months in Bali (lucky her: her publisher gave her an advance to write a memoir about it).

Gilbert is a highly likable writer– you want this woman to be your best friend by page 2. (She wants to be your best friend, too, and if I momentarily reach for my critic hat, I would say this is perhaps one of the flaws of the book– its almost hysterical desire to please. But I’m not putting that hat on because really, that’s a minor flaw, and we forgive our friends their flaws.) I dog-eared the thing in so many places I don’t even know where to start to give you a flavor of the writing, so I’ll just open a page at random. Ok, here we go… page 132.  Cool: here she is on her inability, at first, to sit still and meditate:

When I ask my mind to rest in stillness, it is astonishing how quickly it will turn (1) bored, (2) angry, (3), depressed, (4) anxious or (5) all of the above. 

Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the ‘monkey mind’– the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.  From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined.  This in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking.  Happy thoughts make me happy, but–whoop!– how quickly I swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then it’s the remembrance of an angry moment and I start to get hot and pissed off all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly.  You are, after all, what you think.  Your emptions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

The other problem with all this swinging through the vines of thought is that you are never where you are.  You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you rest in this moment. 

It is a relief to know that you do not have to be a particularly zen or enlightened kind of person to learn to meditate or to find calm within yourself; Gilbert’s story is a reassuring exercise in letting go of all that. This is a book about confronting yourself honestly and sustainedly, without turning away from what you find there or trying to manipulate it into something you’d rather see, or something you think other people would rather see.  If I say it’s a book about loving yourself I can see already the eyeballs beginning to roll– but when was the last time you told yourself "I love you, self!" I’m guessing– never. Or not in a long time.

So read the book, and if you don’t like it you can call me hippy-dippy, I don’t care. I’ll be practicing a zen indifference to judgment. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Etc.

 

around the internet on a tuesday on a friday

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I thought for sure I had hit "post" on this but in my haste I think I only saved it as a draft… ah well. Forgive my tardiness!

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Back in the States and back to the grind…

A couple of years ago, N got tickets to a play.  I listened to Noir Désir on my iPod on my way to the theatre.  When I arrived, I found that the play starred Jean-Louis Trintignant, and my stomach flopped over a little bit at the irony.  I mean, what do you do when the singer of one of your favorite bands accidentally beats his girlfriend (the actress Marie Trintignant, daughter of Jean-Louis) to death? Do you go on liking and listening to the band, now that the angst in their songs suddenly seems a little creepy? It’s a tough question, but I’ve chosen to go on loving Noir Désir and not to think about anything except the music.  Now, Cantat is out of prison.  Will Noir Désir go on making music?

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In case you didn’t hear, it was announced last week that Doris Lessing has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, and in celebration, the Guardian has compiled some of her interviews and criticism here. (I guess now I finally do have to read The Golden Notebook)

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My most recent Gridskipper post: Gentry Lane’s fabulous guide to Paris.

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In The New York Review of Books, Michael Kimmelman looks at Janet Malcom’s recent biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. From the very beginning of Kimmelman’s review, I’m interested, not only in the book, but in Malcolm’s preoccupations as a critic.

Toklas recalls how she and Stein hid in an area of provincial eastern
France called Bugey, where they kept a house in the town of Bilignin,
discovered one summer day in 1924 on the way to visit Picasso. When the
war broke out, they wheedled a military pass and drove to Paris,
fetched winter clothes, then settled back in the countryside for the
duration. Toklas’s tone is cheerful. Malcolm, who has made a career of
not taking writers at their word, asks herself what Toklas must be
hiding. Two Jewish Americans in occupied France, and she is reminiscing
about "Restricted Veal Loaf"? Why no mention of their Jewishness,
"never mind [their] lesbianism," she asks.

Malcolm’s book sounds like a necessary corrective to Stein’s and Toklas’s evasiveness, but may still only be the swing of the pendulum. The real work of the critic is of course to question the evasiveness of one’s subject but also to be aware of certain cues to which the critic himself is sensitive; in the case of Malcolm and other critics like her, those markers of marginality, such as Judaism or lesbianism, which critics have recently found to be sources of subversive power, and which those same critics have celebrated in other modernist writers. We all want Toklas to talk about her Jewishness, her lesbianism. But if she does not, we cannot blame her for it– we have to earnestly wonder why she does not. We can’t assume that her opinion of Jewishness or homosexuality resembles ours in the least.

But it sounds like Malcolm makes some good points, and it is on the strength of this observation that I plan to take a good look at the book:

For Malcolm, Stein’s writing [...] struggles constantly with the anxiety of disclosure. Wars I Have Seen,
her engrossing wartime memoir, "is a work of realism struggling against
itself," Malcolm believes. Reality has become so unreal during the war
that the experimental language of modernism suddenly fails Stein.

My own reading of modernism does not see it as a neatly separate category from realism– quite the opposite, in fact; I believe modernist experimentation to be an attempt to take reality to a whole new level– truly, modernism is sur-realism.  And Wars I Have Seen belongs to a very specific, late moment of modernism,  where form is no longer experimental for its own, aesthetic sake, but reflects back on previous experiments, and is left in a void, where everything, and nothing, is possible.

On turning 29: Bonjour, 30

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Entrez, entrez. Faites comme chez vous. Je vous attendais. Je vous ai vu à l’approche.  Et maintenant que j’ai terminé mon 29e tour du soleil, que je commence le 30e, que je vous laisse vous installer chez moi, je vous regarde au visage. Je ne l’avais pas imaginé auparavant mais je ne suis pas surprise qu’il me ressemble tellement.

Vous avez pris votre temps– merci pour cela. Et savez-vous ce qu’ils disent de vous ces jours? On dit que vous êtes le nouveau 20. Thirty is the new twenty. Imaginez! Vous avez un sens différent selon l’époque! À l’époque de mon arrière-grand-mère, vous signifiez l’age de la fileuse– de spinsterhood. À celui de ma grand-mère, vous indiquiez le troisième enfant. À celui de ma mère, l’heure de penser à un premier enfant. Et pour moi: vous êtes la jeunesse  incarnée. Si je pense à un enfant ce n’est que le grondement de mon flanc, ce qui peut être ignoré et remis à plus tard. Vous ne me dites pas "Dépêchez-vous." Vous me dites "Prenez votre temps. Il y en a." J’espère que vous avez raison. J’ai confiance en vous, 30.

Une amie m’a demandée l’autre soir si j’avais des voeux pour cette année. Je bégayais, je ne savais quoi dire. Mais aujourd’hui je me rends compte que oui. J’en ai plein. Certains sont des buts professionnels, bien sûr. Certains sont des buts linguistiques et même culinaires. Mais surtout, ce sont personnels. Je veux que les êtres que j’aime continuent d’être heureux et en bonne santé, et que moi aussi je reste aussi heureuse et saine pour profiter de leur compagnie, qu’elle soit occasionnelle ou constante. Et voilà. Vous pouvez rester, 30. Je ne vous refuserai rien.

Around the internet on a Tuesday so late it’s almost a Wednesday

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Hello and happy Tuesday! This is a particularly happy Tuesday for me, as I am now 48 hours away from Thursday, which is the day I board a plane bound for Paris.  Hurrah!

I’ve just discovered the Book Depository (I know, where have I been?).  "All books available to all" is the motto of this Britain-based site, which offers free shipping to Western Europe and North America.  They promise they can track down any book you want, even those you can’t find on Amazon or Alibiris.  For those of us working on obscure early 20th century authors, this sounds like quite a boon (yes, there’s an unfunny HG Wells joke buried in there).  There are all sorts of cool features on the site– an Editor’s Corner blog, interviews, reviews, and lots of other goodies for the bookishly inclined.

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Julian Barnes in the London Review of Books on Luc Sante’s translations of Félix Fénélon’s three-line novels. Have I blogged about this before? It seems to me as if I have.  Sorry if I’m being redundant, but they really are very funny. Try this one:

"In the military zone, in the course of a duel over scrawny Adeline,
basket-weaver Capello stabbed bear-baiter Monari in the abdomen."

Or this one:

"This time the crucifix is solidly bolted to the wall of the school at Bouillé. So much for the prefect of Maine-et-Loire."

Trop bon.

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Mike Duff is a graduate student at Princeton, and he has blogged here about Blanchot and Hegel.

All those blowhards who are going around saying viable literary criticism can’t be done on the internet can suck it.

Oh, but this probably doesn’t count as viable literary criticism, I hear them sigh, because it seems more appropriate to a philosophy department, smacks of jargon, and understanding it demands being able to grasp the difference between nullity and negation. And people reading literary criticism online don’t have time for subtlety now, do they?

Prove them wrong, people! Show them you’re smarter than they think you are. [via ReadySteadyBook]

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I just heard about this resource: it’s called BookTour.com, and the goal is pretty self-evident: to connect readers with authors on book tours. For those of us who live in large metropolises, it can be hard to keep track of who’s reading where and when– this may go some ways toward helping us keep it all straight. 

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Phew! That’s all I’ve got.  Sorry, I’m a bit tired and have to go read some Melville for class tomorrow.  Signing off…

Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West: the mini-series

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I’ve been researching and writing a short paper on Violet Trefusis over the last few weeks– and since this is a paper about Trefusis as an eccentric figure, I’ve had to do a lot of reading about her affair with Vita Sackville-West. I’ve thoroughly immersed myself in the literature, reading Nigel Nicholson’s Portrait of a Marriage, Victoria Glendinning’s Vita, Philippe Jullian’s Violet Trefusis, as well as Trefusis’s own memoir, Don’t Look Round, her letters to and from Vita, her novels Broderie Anglaise and Echo, and Vita’s novel Challenge.  It really is a fascinating story, their affair– it culminated in the two women eloping to France together with their husbands in hot pursuit by two-seater airplane, and all this has made for great reading.

However, I’ve been having so much fun researching that I haven’t wanted to stop long enough to write the paper. So I was overjoyed today to find the perfect way to procrastinate, one which allowed me to forestall writing under the guise of conducting additional research: while trolling YouTube I found the 1992 BBC mini-series "Portrait of a Marriage," based on Vita’s son Nigel’s book, which stars Janet McTeer (who sounds incredibly, and appropriately so, like Tilda Swinton in the film adaptation of Orlando) and Cathryn Harrison.

I’m up to Part 3 but I’ve taken a break because I do have to finish this paper, mini-series or not.  Here is Part 1, to get you started– let me know if you end up watching it! Truly, this is just about the dorkiest way for a Woolf fan to geek out– I kept getting excited when I recognized settings like Vita’s tower at Sissinghurst or the "cartoon gallery" at Knole– and it even features cross-dressing lesbians dancing the Charleston in Paris. What more could you want?

Incidentally, in case you’re interested, Violet comes from a long line of famous mistresses, being the daughter of Alice Keppel, the mistress of Edward VII (who put the "Edward" in Edwardian), and the great-aunt of Camilla Parker Bowles.