Monthly Archives: February 2009

Sante on Sontag: Books Are People, Too

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Out of all the same-samey coverage of the recently published volume of Susan Sontag’s early journals, Reborn, this characterization by Luc Sante stands out to me: ” ‘Reborn’ is in some ways less like a normal book and more like a person.” He continues:

….it is consistent in its deepest reaches, but subject to enormous mood swings. Some very large matters are barely glimpsed, whizzing by at terrific speed, while sundry smaller ones are examined in exhaustive detail. Motives often have to be guessed, and important players enter and exit summarily, without introduction. Various opinions and exhortations—or crotchets or tics—are repeated to the point where it takes a great deal of good will or simple affection to tolerate them. But Sontag does successfully elicit the reader’s good will and affection.

By the way, Sante’s 2008 collection Kill All Your Darlings contains a Talk of the Town piece he contributed in 1988 about the Tompkins Square Park riots, complete with amusing footnotes about how it was changed by the editors.

Gawande for Secretary of Health and Human Services?

Martin Schneider writes:
Obama’s nomination for HHS Secretary, Tom Daschle, is withdrawing his name from consideration. Not good news for supporters of comprehensive health care reform. But who will replace him? The name of Howard Dean, a medical doctor, has been mentioned. Ezra Klein is supporting Atul Gawande. I’d support that too. I’m totally starting that rumor, based on no information at all.
Not for nothing, but a few years ago, I reviewed Gawande’s book Better in Publishers Weekly, and I wrote that “one suspects that once we cure the ills of the health care system, we’ll look back and see that Gawande’s writings were part of the story.” And nothing would make that prediction more likely than his joining the Obama administration.

The Big Till’: Eustace Tilley Contest 2009 Winners

_Pollux writes_:
Eustace as “Rorschach”:http://classic-comics.suite101.com/article.cfm/watchmen_character_profiles_rorschach, Eustace as a Rorschach test, Eustace in bed with a butterfly, Eustace rendered in “De Stijl”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Stijl (my personal favorite), Eustace as a Banksy piece (another great one)… these are some of the 2009 winners of the “second annual Eustace Tilley contest.”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/2009/02/09/slideshow_090209_eustacetilley?slide=12#showHeader
It is always fun to “participate “:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/more-good-news-because-we-need.php (I did!), and the winners’ entries were really strong this year. Tilley is alive and well, and Rea Irvin, looking down from that big art director’s office in the sky, would be happy to see so many different manifestations of his original creation. Loyal Emdashes readers and Tilley fans, which entries did you like?

Lore Segal at ‘How Far Was Vienna?’ in NYC This Thursday

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Lore Segal, whose Other People’s Houses was serialized by The New Yorker in the 1960s, and whose Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2007) also grew out of a series of related New Yorker stories, will be among five writers of Austrian Jewish origin reading this Thursday from “memoirs and fiction on growing up and older away from their homeland,” at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York. Their website is a bit problematic, so I’ll paste the info below the fold:
THURSDAY FEB 5, 6:30 PM
HOW FAR WAS VIENNA?
Five accomplished authors with Austrian-Jewish roots will read from newly published memoirs and fiction on growing up and older away from their homeland. The participants will also discuss the different experiences of those who settled outside the metropolis and in New York, and nostalgia and memory among refugees, compared to immigrants.
With authors Carol Asher, Eva Kollisch, Bruno Schwebel, Lore Segal and Leo Spitzer.
Carol Ascher’s new memoir, “Afterimages”, as well as her novel, “The Flood”, describe her childhood in a community of refugee pyschoanalysts in Topeka, Kansas. She is also an anthropologist who studies equity issues in public schools. Her essays and stories have been published widely, and she is the recipient of numerous literary awards.
Eva Kollisch’s most recent book, “The Ground Under My Feet”, describes her youth in Baden, amidst growing Nazism and her escape on the Kindertransport. She is also the author of “Girl in Movement”, a memoir of her early years in the United States. She taught German, Comparative Literature, and Women’s Studies at Sarah Lawrence College for over 30 years and is professor emerita.
Bruno Schwebel fled from Vienna to Paris with his family in 1938 at the age of ten. After sojourns in Lisbon and Casablanca, Schwebel came to Mexico City, where he serverd, among other things, as technical director of Mexico’s largest TV network. In 1976 he began publishing stories in Spanish and then in German translations. His book “As Luck would have It: My Exile in France and Mexico. Recollections and Stories” was published by Ariadne Press.
Lore Segal’s new collection, “Shakespeare’s Kitchen”, evokes the comic melancholy of the outsider. Two previous books, “Other People’s Houses” and “Her First American”, describe her life in England after escaping on the Kindertransport, the experiences of a young refugee in America. She is the recipient of several literary awards and has contributed to The New Yorker, among other publications.
Leo Spitzer, who was born in a refugee community in La Paz, is the author of “Hotel Bolivia”, “Lives In Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa”, among others. He is Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History at Dartmouth College, and has taught at Columbia University. he is the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards in social history.
VENUE
Austrian Cultural Forum NY, 11 East 52nd Street, New York, NY 10022
RESERVATIONS
Free Admission. Reservations necessary. Call (212) 319 5300 ext. 222 or e-mail reservations@acfny.org

Hortense Calisher, 1911-2009

Benjamin Chambers writes:
Hortense Calisher, who published nine stories in The New Yorker between 1948 and 1956, died last month at 97. The AP wire story about her death describes her, rather unfairly, as being “known for her dense, unskimmable prose,” and then goes on—obscurely—to say that she “composed in the thick, quantum rhythms of the mind.”
A former president of PEN, and guest editor of Best American Short Stories, Calisher started her writing life late, and she was past 90 when her most recent book was published. Some links:
* Calisher’s amusing short story, hardly dense or unskimmable (though who would want to?), “Il Ploe:r Da Mo Koetr,” from the September 8, 1956 issue of The New Yorker, in which the narrator, who learned a perfect French accent via phonetics in school, discovers years later that she cannot understand the language at all. (Features a classic scene in which Frenchmen solemnly toast each other with cries of “Pearl Buck!”)
* A fragment from her interview with the Paris Review.
* Roger Angell’s amusing anecdote involving Calisher’s hairdo at the opera.
* Joyce Carol Oates’ thoughts on Calisher. Scroll down for in-depth reviews of two of Calisher’s novels, which sound quite fascinating.

To Mark Ten Years of the New Yorker Festival, a Mega-Festival

Martin Schneider writes:
Earlier today The New Yorker posted the following item on its Festival blog:
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the New Yorker Festival, and so, to celebrate, we’re expanding the programming to ten days: October 9-18.
The first seven days will feature an event a night, including:
* “Tales Out of School: New Yorker Writers on The New Yorker,” an evening of recollections by our contributors, presented with the storytelling group the Moth
* “Brooklyn Playlist,” a Festival concert featuring the bands of Brooklyn
* And “Tailing Tilley,” a live urban scavenger hunt drawing on New Yorker trivia.
Then, the weekend of October 16-18 will have the full Festival lineup—panels, interviews, excursions, et cetera. Find out more at the New Yorker Festival Web site. And sign up for Festival Wire to receive official announcements and updates.
As they say in California, this is the Big One!
Well, well! The Moth, Brooklyn bands, and a scavenger hunt. It looks like a lot of fun!

Aravind Adiga and George Saunders: Two Peas in the Same Depressing Pod

Benjamin Chambers writes:
Normally, when people complain about fiction in The New Yorker being “depressing,” I jump to the magazine’s defense. “You need to read more than one issue,” I say, or—even less convincingly for my debaters—”Nonsense! It frequently publishes light fiction outside of ‘Shouts & Murmurs.’ Like, er, Woody Allen or, um, Donald Barthelme …” If I try a different tack, and argue that fiction has many pleasures to offer besides good cheer, I end up in a worse muddle. I know this to be true, but I can’t prove it to readers deaf to these charms. Still, I try: I won’t hear my beloved New Yorker maligned.
But sometimes I think that great institution doesn’t care. It’s like that moment in the movies when the hero’s scrappy, pint-sized sidekick stands at his back, fearful but resolved, before the crowd of muscle-bound heavies armed with pool cues and broken beer bottles, and then the hero somehow wanders elsewhere, oblivious to his sidekick’s peril.
Case in point: “The Elephant,” by Aravind Adiga, from the January 26, 2009 issue, centered around Chenayya, a man roughly 30, who delivers furniture via bicycle for a pittance and a squalid life he cannot seem to better. The story’s firmly in the reveal-social-injustice school; the point is the injustice of Chenayya’s poverty, which is clear from the outset. The problem with this sort of story is that there’s no reason why it should be any particular length, once the basics are established: there’s no dramatic reason to continue cataloging the character’s abasement or shortcomings, which makes one question the whole enterprise. (Place where I checked out: when Chenayya, frustrated and angry with all that he cannot have, throws cow dung at a prostitute and then jams his dung-covered fingers in her mouth.)
The following week, in the February 2nd issue, George Saunders weighed in with “Al Roosten.” Though “Al” is much funnier than “The Elephant,” the laughter palls quickly, once it becomes clear that the main character’s pathetic, and Saunders has been laughing at him and made you do the same.
Both stories have the same narrative arc—best drawn as a flat line—and are intended only to evoke the hopelessness of their main characters’ situations. Worse, they’re both aggressively medicinal, in an eat-your-literature-it’s-good-for-you sort of way.
Sorry, but I’ll stick with dessert for now, and wait, rosy with optimism, for the next issue.