Roy Miller's Blog, page 259

Failure and Patience: Lessons from the Garden for Writers

The first time I tried to grow vegetables from seed, I was in the second grade. I remember they were carrot seeds and that my younger brother and I crouched in our small, scrubby backyard that overlooked the roaring traffic of Route 80 to tap them into the dirt. There were loose bricks in our backyard, and I used four of them to build a border around what I was sure would become a lush carrot plant. I had seen the film adaptation of The Secret Garden and knew that it was important to clear away leaves and other debris. I had absolute faith in these seeds. I couldn’t wait to eat my first carrot. It would probably take a few days, I thought, maybe a couple of weeks at most. I could be patient.

Knowing a little more about gardening now, I can appreciate how doomed this project was from the start. Carrots are not an entry-level vegetable. The seeds are tiny, even smaller than poppy seeds, and hard to space correctly so that the seedlings don’t crowd each other out. They are picky about germination and growing conditions: Seeds should be started either in early spring or fall, and they need loose, deep soil without rocks or other obstacles that can result in stunted or knotty growth. The hard-packed dirt in my childhood backyard would never have grown a carrot. Despite my diligent checking every day before and after school, the seeds never sprouted. Within my carefully laid perimeter remained a square of barren dirt.

*

Twenty years passed before I turned my interest to seeds again. It might not have happened if not for a novelty gift from a friend for my birthday: a ceramic egg filled with growing medium, a tiny package of basil seeds included in a box made from 100 percent recycled cardboard and printed with soy ink. The kind of thing you might see at Urban Outfitters, next to a display of silver-glitter fishnet stockings and David Bowie-themed adult coloring books. Secretly, I thought it was a waste of money. Even if I decided to grow this thing, what was I going to do with one tiny basil plant growing out of a ceramic egg? I was someone who liked to cook for an army or not at all. A single, over-coddled hipster herb like the rose in Le Petit Prince was not my style.

Article continues after advertisement

It was January, typically bleak and not exactly the most inspiring time of year for horticultural beginnings. But I planted the seed and put it under my sunniest window, expecting to have to throw it out in a week when nothing happened. For days I kicked myself, thinking I should have returned the thing and gotten myself a sparkly pair of tights.

And then the seed sprouted. It was a perfect bright green seedling that smelled, intensely, of basil, even at this infant stage. And it grew taller and put out true leaves. And more leaves, glossy and pertly furled like the corner of a lady’s silk neckerchief, an emerald green Hermes. It seemed nothing short of a miracle, this vibrant, living thing rising out of a mass-produced fake egg. Despite my initial skepticism, I was utterly charmed.

That spring, I dug ambitiously large flower and veggie beds in my backyard, which I was determined to fill with abundant flora. It was my first spring back in the suburbs after years in the city, the first anniversary of my wedding. I was so ignorant about gardening that it didn’t occur to me that I was making every mistake in the book. Any problems, I would power through with hard work and enthusiasm, the way I always did. This strategy had never failed me before—why should it fail now?

°

In retrospect, the miracle of that basil plant was a gift that sustained me for the next near-decade, years that were characterized by repetitive failure and loss. The winter of my first seedling, I was four years deep into a decision that baffled my family and friends. I’d abandoned a full scholarship to a prestigious Ph.D. program in English at the University of California, Berkeley, only one year after I’d begun coursework. That summer, I moved back East, picked up some editing work and a waitressing job in the Meatpacking District, and tried to teach myself how to write without scholarly footnotes. It didn’t occur to me to get a “real job”—what skills did I have? Instead I learned how to carry a tray of martinis without spilling a drop. I filled journals with cramped notes on character, setting, bits of dialogue and backstory. I wrote no actual narrative, too terrified and self-conscious to commit to a story or voice. Looking back, I realize it was the carrot seeds all over again. My ignorance was surpassed only by my faith that my actions would eventually be rewarded. Only this time, I was 23 years old and had built up more stubbornness. Seven-year-old me quickly abandoned my secret garden project when it didn’t work out, but now I had a big mouth and had told everyone I was writing a novel. So I had no choice. I had to keep going.

When those first precious basil leaves sprouted, my first novel—which I had written in a prolonged state of panic, knowing I had absolutely no idea what I was doing—was in the process of being rejected by every agent and editor in New York whose contact information I could wrangle from the internet. I received literally hundreds of rejections. Mostly, they were form letters that I still read carefully for clues, as if upon the 35th reading I would discover some new information beyond what they plainly stated. None of the notes shape-shifted.

While my writing career failed to launch, my personal life also seemed stalled. I had married my best friend and knew I wanted children, but in the fall of 2009, I had my first miscarriage, followed by two more losses in 2010 and 2011. Each time, I had worked so hard to get pregnant—taking my temperature every morning to track my cycle, peeing on innumerable sticks, having what seemed like gallons of blood taken out of my veins in doctors’ offices before submitting to invasive and embarrassing procedures in freezing cold rooms, giving up alcohol and caffeine, being poked with thousands of acupuncture needles, and imbibing hanyak, a Korean herbal potion, the monthly cost of which rivaled the rent of my first post-college apartment—and experienced the same outcome.

Each loss broke my heart in a different way. I had always processed emotions verbally, but I couldn’t talk about why being unable to get and stay pregnant hurt me so much. I felt ashamed that I kept failing at something that seemed so easy for other women, ashamed that I couldn’t “bounce back” from the feelings of grief and despair, which I thought self-indulgent. I considered myself a feminist, not afraid to say the things I wanted and needed to say, but I blamed myself for feeling ashamed, since rationally, I knew I had done nothing to deserve it. It seemed unmodern, somehow, to feel so distraught over my inability to have a child. As if my self-worth were defined by my uterus, and a dysfunctional one at that. This wasn’t what I believed—I would have fought anyone who tried to make any other woman feel that way—but my emotions refused to fall in line. I wanted to feel empowered and strong, like the person I always hoped to be. Resilient, ready to try again. Instead I felt silenced and alone. It seemed stupid to keep trying when all it brought me was more failure and pain.

“I am sucking at life,” I told the few friends and family members I could bear to be vulnerable with. “I am not contributing to society and I am sad all the time.”

“At least you’re a nice person,” a friend told me, trying to cheer me up. It was snobby of me to feel so offended by that well-intentioned comment. But the memory of it stung for years. I was a failed writer and a failed mother. But at least I was a nice person. A warm body with a smile on her face, the human equivalent of a stuffed panda.

*

In the years that I was sucking at life, I learned how to garden. For someone with an obsessive personality, a garden is a godsend. There is no end to the amount you can care about a garden. No limit to the work you can pour into plants and dirt. As an added bonus, humans have been writing about gardens and plants for as long as they’ve been writing about anything. The literature is boundless and colorful, both historical and contemporary. And the names! For every plant, there is a Latin botanical name and at least one common or whimsical name: foxglove, botanical name Digitalis. Solomon’s Seal, Polygonatum. And every plant has subspecies and cultivars—Digitalis grandiflora, Digitalis lutea, Digitalis purpurea—words upon words one can stuff into a stressed-out brain and feel incrementally calm, like being surrounded by clever and useful friends who arrive well-dressed, bearing fun recipes.

I grew flowers and vegetables, perennials and annuals, things that thrived and things that floundered no matter how determined I was to make them grow. I grew daisies from seed, which colonized an entire bed until I dug them out in 30-pound clumps to divide and transplant all over my mother’s backyard. I grew Rose of Sharon bushes, the national flower of my native South Korea, which threw so many volunteer seedlings that I had to yank dozens of them each spring, mentally apologizing to my ancestors for the unpatriotic massacre. I planted exotic tulips, which did not come back the following spring, and common daffodils, which did. I became someone who thought in terms of growing cycles and harvest seasons. After decades of living with the modus operandi that I would impose my schedule, my willpower to make things happen in this world, I began to accept the notion that the natural world had its own rhythms and timeline that I could not change no matter how hard I pushed.

I learned to think of myself, my body, as part of an ecosystem, the way I came to view the flora and fauna in my garden. Living things exist in cycles of growth and rest. I learned that fallen leaves nourish the ground beneath as they rot. I learned that deep snowfall—which mutes human activities and creates punishing delays we try to master—blankets dormant plants, providing the necessary insulation to get them through to spring. These are ecological facts, but ripe for poetry and metaphor, if you’re the type who looks for metaphor.

*

So I learned how to rest, to respect periods of dormancy as a natural prerequisite and hope for growth. After my third miscarriage, the worst one for various reasons, I accepted that I was too depleted and too fragile to try again. That the kind, wise thing to do for myself, a living thing, was to stop.

*

By pure coincidence, five weeks after that miscarriage, I started my MFA at NYU—a step I had resisted for years, intimidated by the idea of paying for a fancy fine art degree when my art earned no money. Before applying, I had taken some classes at Gotham Writers Workshop and written a few short stories. I had drastically adjusted my life expectations. At 23, I was sure I could write a sellable novel even though I had never even tried to write a short story. (Carrot seeds, so many carrot seeds.) At 31, I only wanted to learn how to write a good sentence, to form narratives fueled by honest passion rather than panic that I would not succeed.

I graduated in the spring of 2013 with half of a novel manuscript, which I continued to work on into the next year. In the fall of 2014, I sold that novel to Random House. A month later I discovered I was pregnant, a pregnancy that lasted 39 weeks and actually became a child.

It had taken eleven years from the time I left grad school to “become a writer” to sell my first book. Overlapping that: seven years of infertility and pregnancy loss before I held my son in my arms. All of it seemed miraculous. All of it was miraculous, seeing the sprouting of these dreams I had planted so long ago.

Source link

The post Failure and Patience: Lessons from the Garden for Writers appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Last Day to Vote In One Book, One New York Program

New York City’s One Book, One New York program, which will encourage residents in all of the city’s five boroughs to read the same book, will close its online polls on March 1. The winning titles will be announced later that month.

The list of five finalists include: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

The Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME), which is leading the initiative, has called the program “the largest community read program in the country.” The program was launched in partnership with Buzzfeed, which helped recruit five celebrity advocates—actors Bebe Neuwirth, William H. Macy, Giancarlo Esposito, and Danielle Brooks, along with comedian Larry Wilmore—to work on promotional efforts.

In addition to voting online, voting is available at digital kiosks located throughout the city’s subway system.

Source link

The post Last Day to Vote In One Book, One New York Program appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Review: Elif Batuman’s ‘The Idiot’ Sets a Romantic Crush on Simmer

Email is new, and Selin intuits its power. “Each message contained the one that had come before, and so your own words came back to you — all the words you threw out, they came back,” Batuman writes. “It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated and you could check it at any time.”

Anyone who has followed Batuman’s work will not be surprised to learn that Selin first falls for Ivan, the Hungarian student, because she adores his email messages. Batuman is a language freak and geek. You can imagine one of her characters becoming attracted to someone, as did a woman in Norman Rush’s last novel, “Subtle Bodies,” because he was “verbal looking.”

Herself the daughter of Turkish immigrants and a graduate of Harvard, Batuman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them” (2010). That book was a witty and melancholy tour de force about reading and love and the pleasures of travel as against tourism.

Photo


Elif Batuman



Credit

Beowulf Sheehan

That same voice is poured into “The Idiot.” It’s memorable to witness Selin, via Batuman, absorb the world around her. Each paragraph is a small anthology of well-made observations.

Continue reading the main story

Only Batuman would send a character in search of new clothes and have her think, “what was ‘Cinderella,’ if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?”

Continue reading the main story

Selin notes the “death roar” of an institutional toilet. She observes how, lighting a cigarette, “when the flame came into contact with the paper, it made a sound like the needle coming down on a record player.”

Continue reading the main story

Small pleasures will have to sustain you over the long haul of this novel. “The Idiot” builds little narrative or emotional force. It is like a beautiful neon sign made without a plug. No glow is cast.

We’re told why Selin falls for Ivan. He gives good email. He is also, as one of her friends puts it, “a seven-foot-tall Hungarian guy who stares at everyone like he’s trying to see through their souls.” He’s Ivan the enfant terrible.

Selin tells us about the force of her longing. “Every sound, every syllable that reached me,” she says, “I wanted to filter through his consciousness.” But we never feel this longing in our bones.

Continue reading the main story

I’m reminded of the acting coach’s dictum that it’s not important that the actor cry; it’s important that the audience does. After 100 pages, I was done with Ivan and wanted Selin to be done, too. I wished, as if she were an avatar in a video game, to point her in a different direction.

Selin is not done with him. The summer after her freshman year, she travels to the Hungarian countryside to teach English and perhaps to see him on weekends. She consumes a lot of food with sour cream in it. She judges a contest to see which students have the best legs. She frets.

Continue reading the main story

Sexual heat is at a minimum. This is too bad, because Batuman has a rich sense of the details of human attachment and lust. Watching Ivan dig into his pockets for coins, for example, Selin thinks: “An amazing sight, someone you’re infatuated with trying to fish something out of a jeans pocket.” That line beamed me back to my own freshman year at college.

“The Idiot” — at the rate Batuman is burning through the titles of Dostoyevsky novels, her next one will be called “Netochka Nezvanova” — reminded me of Martin Amis’s complaint about “Pride and Prejudice.” That novel’s only flaw, he said, “is the absence of a 30-page sex scene between Elizabeth and Darcy.”

Continue reading the main story

There are two things I admire about this novel. One is the touching sense, here as in everything Batuman writes, that books are life. Selin is, convincingly and only slightly pretentiously, the sort of person who buys an overcoat because it reminds her of Gogol’s.

She likes learning Spanish because “the donkey had a place in the national literature.” She delivers this writing advice, after hearing a story about a host placing an unsettling stuffed weasel in a guest room to keep someone company: “If you really wanted to be a writer, you didn’t send away the weasel.”

Continue reading the main story

I also liked Selin’s determination to be “someone trying to live a life unmarred by laziness, cowardice, and conformity.” She’s an interesting human who, very much like this wry but distant novel, never becomes an enveloping one. Fiction, like love, is strange.

Continue reading the main story

Source link

The post Review: Elif Batuman’s ‘The Idiot’ Sets a Romantic Crush on Simmer appeared first on Art of Conversation.

B&N Education Buys MBS for $174 Million

In another move that consolidates the college retail and wholesale market, Barnes & Noble Education has acquired MBS Textbook Exchange for $174.2 million in cash.

MBS was privately held and majority owned by affiliates of Len Riggio (founder of Barnes & Noble Inc.), which had owned B&N Education. The company services more than 700 virtual bookstores with an e-commerce experience and a suite of new, used and digital course materials. It also sells new and used textbooks to over 3,700 physical college bookstores, including B&N Education’s 770 campus bookstores. Additionally, MBS provides inventory management, hardware and point-of-sale software to approximately 485 college bookstores, and operates textbooks.com, an e-commerce site for new and used textbooks.

In the fiscal year ended August 31, 2016, MBS had revenue of $499.8 million and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) of $54.7 million.

B&N Education CEO Max Roberts noted that the two companies have worked together for more than 30 years, adding that “we are thrilled to bring our two complementary companies together.”

Among the benefits that Roberts sees from the purchase are inventory and procurement synergies that will allow B&N Education to offer students a variety of ways to buy a range of different course materials. In addition, the acquisitions expand B&N Education’s customer base for its courseware and analytical products. The purchase will also give a bump to B&N Education sales.

Accompanying news of the MBS purchase, B&N Education released its third quarter financial results for the period ended January 31, 2017. Revenue was up 0.6% over the prior third quarter due entirely to sales from new stores. Comparable store sales dropped 4.9%. Despite the sales decline, the company had net income of $3.8 million in the quarter, compared to a loss of $3.6 million in the third period of fiscal 2016

Roberts attributed the decline in comp store sales to lower college enrollments, a “competitive market” for textbook sales and a soft retail environment.

Source link

The post B&N Education Buys MBS for $174 Million appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Obamas Make Book Deal With Penguin Random House

Photo


Former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama in Washington last year. They plan to donate a portion of the advances for their books to charity.



Credit

Drew Angerer for The New York Times

Penguin Random House will publish coming books by former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama, the publishing company announced Tuesday night, concluding a heated auction among multiple publishers.

The terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but publishing industry executives with knowledge of the bidding process said it probably stretched well into eight figures. Robert B. Barnett and Deneen C. Howell of Williams & Connolly represented the Obamas.

Penguin Random House acquired world rights to the books, and worldwide sales could be substantial. No decision has been made yet as to which of the company’s major imprints — which include Random House, Doubleday, Alfred A. Knopf and Crown — will publish the books. Mr. Obama’s previous books were published by Crown, which also published Mrs. Obama’s book “American Green,” about the White House garden.

A spokeswoman for Penguin Random House would not say whether the books would be memoirs and referred questions to representatives of the Obamas.

Speculation about the Obamas’ books and how much they would sell for have been circulating in the industry in recent weeks, as executives at the top publishing houses met separately with the former president and first lady. Some publishing executives who followed the bidding process said that the opening offers for Mr. Obama’s book alone were in the $18 million to $20 million range.

Continue reading the main story

The publisher plans to donate one million books in the Obama family’s name to First Book, a nonprofit organization that provides books to disadvantaged children, and Open eBooks, the Washington-based partner for the 2016 White House digital education initiative. The Obamas also plan to donate part of their advances to charity, including the Obama Foundation.

“We are absolutely thrilled to continue our publishing partnership with President and Mrs. Obama,” Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, said in a statement. “With their words and their leadership, they changed the world, and every day, with the books we publish at Penguin Random House, we strive to do the same. Now, we are very much looking forward to working together with President and Mrs. Obama to make each of their books global publishing events of unprecedented scope and significance.”

The Obamas’ advance is likely to exceed even the stratospheric figures that other recent presidents and first ladies have received. Former president Bill Clinton sold his memoir “My Life” for more than $10 million, and Hillary Clinton reportedly received an $8 million advance from Simon & Schuster for her memoir “Living History.” George W. Bush’s memoir “Decision Points,” became a hit, selling about two million copies and earning him an estimated $10 million. (Mr. Barnett, a Washington-based lawyer, has handled many of these lucrative deals and represents some of the capital’s most powerful players, including the Clintons; Mr. Bush and his wife, Laura Bush; Speaker Paul D. Ryan and former Vice President Dick Cheney.)

It is unusual, however, for a former president and first lady to make a collective deal for their memoirs, and some publishing industry insiders said that early on the process, it appeared that the books were going to be auctioned separately. (It is possible, and perhaps likely, that the books will be published by different imprints in the Penguin Random House conglomerate, which could also help the company absorb the cost of a large advance, by sharing it between imprints.)

Continue reading the main story

Mr. Obama has a proven track record in publishing as an author of multiple best sellers. His three books — “Dreams From My Father,” “The Audacity of Hope” and “Of Thee I Sing” — have sold more than four million copies. According to financial disclosures, he earned more than $10 million from those titles. Reviews have praised him as a gifted prose stylist.

But a postpresidential memoir has even greater potential to be a critical and commercial hit. Mr. Obama kept a journal during his time in office, which suggests his memoir could include behind-the-scenes moments that were captured as major events unfolded.

A frank discussion of his time in the White House, and of issues like race relations in America, could reach an even wider audience, becoming a worldwide blockbuster. Penguin Random House, a global publishing house with more than 250 imprints, has worldwide rights to the books, which means the company can make a good deal of money overseas and in translation.

Continue reading the main story

For the Obamas, the books may be valuable beyond the multimillion-dollar advances. The deal was announced, probably coincidentally but somewhat awkwardly, on the night that President Trump gave his first address before Congress. These books could provide a chance to reframe and highlight the former president’s legacy, at a moment when a new Republican administration is making an effort to dismantle some of his signature legislation.

Continue reading the main story

Source link

The post Obamas Make Book Deal With Penguin Random House appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Barack and Michelle Obama sign record book deals with Penguin Random House | Books

Barack and Michelle Obama have signed book deals with Penguin Random House, the publisher announced on Tuesday.

Financial terms were not disclosed for the books, for which several publishers had competed, although it was reported by the Financial Times that bidding reached more than $60m, a record sum for US presidential memoirs.

By comparison, fellow Democrat and former President Bill Clinton earned $15m for rights to his 2004 memoir “My Life” after he left office, while Obama’s immediate predecessor, Republican George W Bush, reaped some $10m from his book “Decision Points”.

The former president and first lady have previously published through Crown, a Penguin Random House imprint. But Penguin Random House declined comment on which imprint or imprints the books would be released through.

“We are absolutely thrilled to continue our publishing partnership with President and Mrs Obama,” Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle said in a statement.

“With their words and their leadership, they changed the world, and every day, with the books we publish at Penguin Random House, we strive to do the same. Now, we are very much looking forward to working together with President and Mrs Obama to make each of their books global publishing events of unprecedented scope and significance.”

The Obamas were represented in negotiations by Robert Barnett and Deneen Howell of Williams & Connolly. Barnett has worked on deals with Barack Obama’s two immediate predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W Bush, and with Michelle Obama’s predecessors Hillary Rodham Clinton and Laura Bush.

The Obamas plans to donate a “significant portion” of their author proceeds to charity, including to the Obama Foundation. Barack Obama’s book is a strong contender to attract the largest advance for any ex-president; the previous record is believed to be $15m for Bill Clinton’s My Life.

The unique dual arrangement announced on Tuesday is for books that are among the most anticipated in memory from a former president and first lady.

Barack Obama is widely regarded as one of the finest prose stylists among modern presidents, and his million-selling Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope are considered essential to his rise to the White House.

Michelle Obama has given few details about her time as first lady: her only book is about food and gardening, American Grown, released in 2012.

Titles and release dates were not immediately available. The books will reflect on the Obamas’ White House years, although Penguin Random House declined to give further details. A publishing official with knowledge of the negotiations told Associated Press Barack Obama’s book will be a straightforward memoir about his presidency, while Michelle Obama plans to write an inspirational work for young people that will draw upon her life story.

Presidential memoirs have contributed little to the literary canon, a tradition many believe Barack Obama will change. But recent books have found large audiences with Bill Clinton’s George W Bush’s becoming million-sellers.

Books by first ladies, including Hillary Clinton’s Living History, have been dependable best-sellers.

Michelle Obama and Barack Obama read Where the Wild Things Are for children at the annual White House Easter egg roll in 2016. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Source link

The post Barack and Michelle Obama sign record book deals with Penguin Random House | Books appeared first on Art of Conversation.

10 Great Works of New Orleans Lit to Read This Fat Tuesday

Happy Fat Tuesday, everyone—I hope you enjoy this day of dancing, pancakes, and bright colors. If you’re aren’t lucky enough to be spending this Mardi Gras in New Orleans (though to be fair, in New Orleans, Mardi Gras has been going on since early January—but today is the official holiday, and tomorrow is the beginning of Lent, so it’s the last chance for revelry for a little while) but still want to celebrate a little, or at least experience the city from the comfort of your couch, why not immerse yourself in some New Orleans literature? To that effect, below you will find a selection of plays, poems, novels and stories set in New Orleans for you to consume. And hey, why not get some fried food into your belly while you read. That’s right, order extra. The repenting starts tomorrow.

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

In this iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning play—which led in part to the streetcar becoming a national symbol for New Orleans—a young woman, evicted from her home in Mississippi under a number of questionable circumstances, comes to stay with her sister in the French Quarter. She and her sister’s husband, however, clash repeatedly, and things only get worse. Stella! etc. Of particular note are Williams’s detailed and poetic stage directions, including his early description of the French Quarter: “The section is poor but, unlike corresponding sections in other American cities, it has a raffish charm… The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay. You can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river beyond the river warehouses with their faint redolences of bananas and coffee… In this part of New Orleans you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers.”

Article continues after advertisement

[image error]

Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (and sequels)

The famed Queen of Vampire lit (yes, sorry everyone else) is herself a New Orleans native, and her fanged creations lurk moodily in her home city when they’re not swanning around in Europe. For a time, when her books first became popular, her home in the Garden District was its own tourist attraction—something she encouraged with parties and appearances. Though she’s now moved away, there are a number of locations in the books that are based on—or literally are—actual places both the Garden District and the French Quarter, and fans can still take Anne Rice tours through the city and its graveyards.

[image error]

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Percy’s novel is essentially an existential crisis novel—the soul in crisis being that of (nearly) 30-year-old stock broker and owner of one of the most ludicrous names in literature, Binx Bolling, who sets out one Mardi Gras to find—well, something. It’s a classic novel now, but at the time of its publication it wasn’t much discussed—until it won the 1962 National Book Award in Fiction, beating out Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, among others. There has been some discussion as to how could have this happened.

[image error]

James Lee Burke, Tin Roof Blowdown

Crime novelists love New Orleans—it’s sticky, it’s sultry, it’s mysterious, it’s filled with magic and danger. Or at least that’s how us laypeople think of it, anyway. In this book, his 16th featuring New Orleans detective Dave Robicheaux, Burke takes on New Orleans post-Katrina, setting a complex and ever-darkening series of crimes against the disastrous effects of the storm.

[image error]

Poppy Z. Brite, Liquor

I for one can’t think of New Orleans without thinking of great food and great liquor—two things that line chefs Rickey and G-man, partners in love and scheming, seek to combine in this novel (the first in a series) in order to make their fortunes. A restaurant where all the food is based on alcohol! Sounds like nothing could go wrong…

[image error]

Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

For a different lens on the region, pick up Butler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, in which each story is told from the perspective of a different Vietnamese immigrant living in the Louisiana bayou or in New Orleans itself. As George Packer put it, in this book “the Americans have become foils; it’s the Vietnamese who are now at the center, haunted by the past, ambivalent about their hosts, suffering sexual torments, seeking a truce in their various wars.”

[image error]

Julie Kane and Grace Bauer, eds., Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox

Attention insiders (or insider-wannabes): Everette Maddox is a New Orleans legend, a poet, teacher, and beloved local figure who founded the longest-running reading series in the South, at the Maple Leaf Bar in uptown New Orleans. If you are from New Orleans, you probably know about him. This collection of responses to his work was edited in part by poet Julie Kane, Louisiana Poet Laureate Emerita.

[image error]

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

I always forget that this is a New Orleans novel—Chopin’s New Orleans is much colder (and less cool) than many of the other interpretations on this list. But it is a New Orleans novel, of course, if an early one, as well as being one of the earliest feminist texts, verging on modernism. It also taught a generation of schoolchildren what “Creole” meant, for whatever that’s worth.

[image error]

Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

This experimental, fragmented novel tells the fictionalized story of Buddy Bolden, one of the earliest jazz musicians, crowned by some as its inventor, but known by all as a genius of jazz who eventually went mad. Ondaatje patterns his work after the music itself, bringing in patterns, rhythms, and a host of elements, from photography to interviews to history to fiction, in order to tell his story.

[image error]

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Oh yes, I haven’t forgotten. Possibly the most beloved work of New Orleans-related literature of all time, Toole’s riotous, revolting novel (and its riotous, revolting main character), has become part of the Southern lit canon, and is frequently cited as one of the funniest books you’ll ever read. And it is funny, and absurd, and captivating in its fatness (much like you know who, again). But it’s also very much a novel about the city itself, and is rich with description and dialect, including Yat, the English specific to New Orleans. Plus, New Orleans loves this novel back—there’s even a statue of Ignatius J. Reilly on Canal street.

Source link

The post 10 Great Works of New Orleans Lit to Read This Fat Tuesday appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Penguin Random House Acquires Obama Books

Penguin Random House has won the auction for books from former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama. PRH CEO Markus Dohle announced Tuesday evening that the company had acquired world publication rights for two books, to be written by President and Mrs. Obama respectively.

Proposals for both books have been making the rounds of New York publishers over the last few weeks and executives had met with both Obamas to discuss a possible deal. PRH was not disclosing terms of the agreement, but a report in the Financial Times had the package going for $60 million. That figure is substantially higher than rumored figures last week. One high-ranking publishing executive who had been in on the negotiations said last week he thought the combined package for both books would sell for around $30 million.

The authors were represented by Robert Barnett and Deneen Howell of Williams & Connolly.

While many publication details have yet to be released—rumored publication date was for fall 2018—PRH said that it will donate one million books in the Obama name to First Book, a PRH nonprofit partner and the Washington, DC-based partner for the 2016 White House digital education initiative, Open eBooks. The Obamas also plan to donate a significant portion of their author proceeds to charity, including the Obama Foundation.

Markus Dohle said: "We are absolutely thrilled to continue our publishing partnership with President and Mrs. Obama. With their words and their leadership, they changed the world, and every day, with the books we publish at Penguin Random House, we strive to do the same. Now, we are very much looking forward to working together with President and Mrs. Obama to make each of their books global publishing events of unprecedented scope and significance."

Source link

The post Penguin Random House Acquires Obama Books appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Lessons From Parisian Protest Culture

Living in Paris, I’m always aware of the people’s ability to explode into rebellion, given the right circumstances. Writing about the May 1968 uprising for the New Yorker, the Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant describes her ambivalence towards the events of May, her admiration for the bravery of the students tempered by impatience for the “false siege psychosis” the population indulges in, creating a crisis situation that does not abate for months. It’s true anywhere—any social demonstration will be equal parts sincere and self-mythologizing. But the Parisian readiness to stand up and march, to speak truth to power, and to make visible one’s dissent, has always impressed me; it’s part of why I wanted to live here. I can’t claim to be exempt from the desire to mythologize it. But I’m aware that this is a dangerous thing to do.

“Streets are the dwelling place of the collective,” Walter Benjamin wrote in his Arcades Project.[1] Whether we acknowledge it or not, in the street we can stand together in favor of an idea. Marching is an instinctive response to feeling wronged, or desperate, or compelled to make a statement, or have an impact. It makes us feel stronger to be part of a group. It feels good. Marching is a political act, but it’s a social one as well. We have so few occasions for doing the same thing at the same time, and when we do it we feel we belong to something bigger than us.

As far as mythologized collective uprisings go, you can’t do much better than 1968 in Paris. It all began at Nanterre University, where I used to teach, a modern campus in the western suburbs of Paris, built in the mid-1960s. In March 1968, a group formed called Les enragés (“the angry ones”) to protest the fact that male students weren’t allowed to stay the night in the female dorms. The minister of sport was visiting the campus to inaugurate a new swimming pool, and a feisty student called Daniel Cohn-Bendit interrupted his speech to hassle him about a recent report published by the minister of youth: “400 pages on the young and not a word about sexuality!”[2] Cohn-Bendit was almost expelled and became a folk hero to the students; they protested in his defense until the university was shut down, and then they went to protest in the Latin Quarter, in the heart of Paris (“Latin Quarter meeting place, Latin Quarter vicarious myth,” writes Antonio Quattrocchi in his iconic account of the events) and got themselves arrested while other students occupied the Sorbonne. The rector of the university closed it down, and allowed the police to come in and disperse the students. After several days of marching and skirmishing with police, the students’ leader, with Daniel Cohn-Bendit at his side, articulating their demands in a voice hoarse from shouting: Amnesty for all demonstrators. Reopening of the universities. And the disappearance of all police from the Sorbonne.

A week after the students’ protests began, the unions declared a general strike for Monday the 13th of May. One by one, that week, the factories went on strike. On Thursday, at the Renault factory just outside Paris, one young worker (this is Quattrocchi’s account) said “I have had enough,” and gets up from his machine. One by one his colleagues joined him, and within half an hour their workshop was empty.[3]

Article continues after advertisement

That’s all it takes: one person to stand up and say I’ve had enough. Revolutions are made by individuals. Pass the pavé.

But of everything I’ve read and seen about them—from academic studies to popular films—it’s Mavis Gallant who best captures Paris during that eventful time, not only because her descriptions are so vivid, but because she refuses to romanticize what’s happening around her. Gallant observes 1968 from an ironic distance, which is, I think, the only real way for a writer to respond. The barricades, for instance—they are not the spontaneous expressions of resistance thrown up by students, she and a friend realize through investigation; the rocks are too big to have been dug up from the pavement, they must have been carried by truck.[4] She sees through the pose everyone is frenetically trying to maintain: the high school students who don’t really know why they’re marching but beg to stay out late; the well-meaning marchers who talk to Gallant, a foreigner, “as if I were a plucky child recovering from brain fever in a Russian novel. Turned out she thought I was an Algerian, and that was her way of showing she wasn’t racist.” There are the people in the neighborhood who create a false siege mentality, claiming there is no bread and milk in the Sorbonne neighborhood, which a quick call to a friend proves isn’t true, and the violence of the counter-protestors, the wealthy bourgeois out on the Champs-Elysées shouting “France for the French!” Gallant writes that the Place Maubert is like “one of those dumps that smolder all the time, with a low fire that you can smell for miles. Blackened garbage, singed trees, a burned car. Don’t want to see more. Walk down the Seine. Keep turning my ankles—so many holes in the ground, and so many stray wood, stone, and iron things. Nothing has a shape or a name.”[5] With the piles of garbage everywhere, the whole city looks like it’s been knocked over, like a giant overturned garbage can.

 

As far as mythologized collective uprisings go, you can’t do much better than 1968 in Paris.

 

Even still, in the black-and-white footage you can find on the internet, it looks amazing. People clustered on balconies. Students up on the Lion de Belfort with 30,000 people massed around in the Place Denfert-Rochereau. You watch the video and hear what it sounded like, and it sounds just like a march today. The din of far-off traffic and voices. Someone beating on a drum like the regular chugging of a train. Someone blowing a whistle with an insistent staccato beat. The increasing roar of the crowd as it gets closer. The sing-song cry of the sirens. The chant: lib-ér-ez! nos! ca-ma-rades! People silhouetted against the smoke, in balletic leaps as they hurled paving stones, running away from the police, getting into fistfights. Masses and masses of people, walking together with arms linked. A shot of hands waving in the air, punctuating their demands, like something out of Fosse, here and there a cigarette between the fingers. Imagine that. A revolutionary gesture with your smoking hand.[6] People on the balconies up and down the Boulevard Saint Michel, excited without understanding why. Gallant recognizes that this kind of civil disobedience so easily becomes a form of entertainment. In the early days of the student uprising, Gallant describes the atmosphere as “Electric, uneasy, but oddly gay. Yes, it is like a holiday in a village, with the whole town out on the square”; as the crisis dragged on through the month of May, “Everyone enjoyed the general strike so much that no one has gone back to work, from the sound of it.”[7] Flaubert noticed this feeling as well: “There was a carnival gaiety in the air, a sort of camp-fire mood,” he wrote of the revolution in February 1848; “nothing could have been more enchanting than Paris in those first days.”[8] He captures the performance of certain values that such an uprising makes necessary, certain words to pronounce, like a Shibboleth, to prove your stripes: “it was necessary to criticize the lawyers all the time, and to use the following expressions as often as possible: ‘Contribute one’s stone to the building . . . social problem . . . workshop.'”[9] The same in 1968, the same in 2011, all that changes is the vocabulary. Gallant laments the inauthenticity of her era: “Everything tatty, a folklore now—China, Cuba, Godard’s films. Our tatty era.”[10]

There are two elements of the protest: the march and the barricade. The forward movement and the resistance. A demonstration can’t become a protest without the forces of order saying no to their no. Both play their part. The barricade is a symbol of revolution, but the police kettle is just another kind of barricade. The very things that stir our heart in a revolution may be co-opted by the forces of order—or the other way around. Gallant sees a man beating with a stick “the three-plus-two rhythm that used to mean ‘Al-gé-rie fran-çaise’ but now stands for ‘CRS S-S'”: “Algeria for the French” or “CRS = SS”; the blind imperialism of the French in Algeria, or resistance to authority: same catchy beat.[11]

Napoleon III tried to learn the lessons of the 1830 and 1848 revolutions, recognizing that whoever owned the streets of Paris would own the battles that took place there. To this end, he asked his personal urban planner, Baron Haussmann, to take these mass uprisings into account in his redesign of the city. Walter Benjamin describes the way he did this in the Arcades Project: “Widening the streets is designed to make the erection of barricades impossible, and new streets are to furnish the shortest route between the barracks and the workers’ districts. Contemporaries christen the operation ‘strategic embellishment.’”[12]

But wider boulevards just call for larger barricades.

Barriers never do their job; there is always someone willing to go the long way around. Which, I am convinced, is the only reasonable way past them: steam right through, by all means, but that is the way toward violence and armed conflict. In 2003 I thought I was being pragmatic, siding with Sontag against Woolf, but maybe Woolf had it right after all. Find a way around. (Unless you’re dealing with a genocidal maniac. There’s always an unless.) “On s’en fout des frontières,” they chanted in 1968. We don’t give a shit about borders.

There has to be an element of surprise, if the doings of many people are to put paid to apathy, to burst through their everyday habits and worries, and reroute thought. There has to be a feeling of pushing against boundaries. In 1968, reading the accounts, you can see them—students, workers, everyday people—searching out that tipping point, where it all turns over. Something in the city, the charged energy between the people marching, pushing everything forward. Tip-tip-tip—There it goes—or almost—

What Gallant does find heartening in 1968 is the students’ defense of Cohn-Bendit. By mid-May the government was calling for his expulsion not only from Nanterre, but from France. Having been born stateless, the child of German Jews who had fled the Nazis, despite having lived in France nearly all his life his “Frenchness” was up for debate. “I hear them chanting, ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs-allemands,'” Gallant writes—We are all German Jews. She can’t believe her ears. “This is France, they are French, I am not dreaming. . .  It is the most important event, I think, since the beginning of this fantastic month of May, because it means a mutation in the French character: a generosity. For the first time, I hear a French voice go outside the boundaries of being French.”[13] That they are able to identify to this point with the Other, a people so recently expelled from France, handed over to be exterminated, is an incredible leap of empathy. Could this empathy be the real legacy of 1968? Whatever their motivations—whether they were caught up in the joy of it, or in the cult of personality around Daniel Cohn-Bendit, or just trying to piss off their parents, or the police, or call them for not standing up 20 years earlier, the youth of 1968 walked up the Boulevard Saint-Michel shouting We are all German Jews.

Perhaps in another ten years they’ll shout: We are from the banlieue, too.

*

I thought of that after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, when I stood alongside one and a half million people in the streets near République, in mourning, solidarity, and defiance, in the biggest manifestation in Paris since the Liberation in 1944. How much fracturing and dissent was covered over that day? A few people talked about how they wouldn’t go, that they refused to march behind Sarkozy, or Netanyahu, or Ben Ali, that they rejected the binary invented by the media, pitting freedom against extremism, “us” against the terrorists, calling it a “superficial consensus” that willfully tried to forget “the fractures, the profound divisions in France.”[14] And yet none of us on the ground that day would have claimed that the group was unified in anything other than a desire to speak up and shout back, as we walked with our children, and our dogs, and our signs reading Je suis Charlie, Je ne suis pas Charlie, Je suis Ahmed, Je suis les frères Kouachi, Je suis manipulé, Je suis Charlie Juif Musulman Policier. We were everybody, we were everything. We were an entire city of opinions. We argued with each other along the route, and in the cafés, and when we went home that night. The key is to keep arguing.

We stood for an hour on Boulevard du Temple. We shuffled forward a few inches at a time, the crowd chanting Char-lie and li-ber-té, occasionally bursting into the Marseillaise, repaving the ground with our good intentions while singing the bloodiest of national anthems. Marchons, marchons, until impure blood waters the furrows of our land. If you’re going to sing the song, you have to face what it’s saying. The fractures are right there in its lyrics, its xenophobia, its violence. Can we reroute it, remake it, in the way we receive it from those who left it to us? There’s a children’s verse to the French national anthem, about how they will rise up once the adults are dead and gone: we will have the sublime pride of avenging them or following them. Who knows what the children are learning as they march with us today, but nothing would have been better had we all stayed at home. What if everybody had stayed home? Who inherits the city then?

Here there was once a prison. Here there were once theatres. Here lived Gustave Flaubert. Here they tried to kill a king. Here Daguerre took a photograph, and it is thought to be the earliest surviving picture of a person. I took a picture of a woman standing on a balcony in a long black dress, in a black hat, covered with netting, standing on her balcony motionlessly, looking at the crowd. She looked like an apparition from another century.

A few days earlier, I went to the Place de la République to see the impromptu shrine that the statue of Marianne, symbol of the Republic, had become. People had drawn pictures and scrawled slogans in French and English on the marble base of the statue, Criéz fort, L’engagement, ce mot qui donne un sens à la liberté, Liberté de penser et aussi d’écrire, C’est l’encre qui doit couler et pas le sang, What kind of society are we building. They had left drawings, pens galore, piles of flowers, tea-lights that never seemed to go out. That first night all these people climbed the statue and hung from it defiantly, as if it were a barricade.

One day this will all be a memory.

And one day beyond that it will be a plaque.

And one day they’ll all walk past it, with something else to protest, or prove, and maybe they will think of us.

 

____________________________________

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. New York: Belknap Press, 2002, p 243.

The minister retorted something along the lines of “Well with your face, you probably don’t have to worry about things like that.”

Quattrocchi, p. 46.

Gallant, Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews. New York: Random House, 1988, p. 41.

Paris Notebooks, p. 41.

But where are the young women? The accounts of the time are always male, and our fantasies of it are male as well. Olivier Assayas’s Après mai (2012). Philippe Garrel’s Les amants réguliers (2005). (There’s Louis Garrel again.) Bertolucci has gorgeous Eva Green chaining herself to the gates of the Cinémathèque in The Dreamers (2003), cigarette dangling from red lips, chest heaving. But the film is solidly from Michael Pitt’s perspective; Eva’s there as temptation, as problem. What about the girls? What were they doing, thinking, hoping? The only female account I can find – besides Gallant’s – is Jill Neville’s The Love Germ.

PN p. 12.

PN p. 293.

Sentimental Education, p. 300.

PN, p. 22.

Gallant p. 42.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, p. 12

Gallant, p. 33.

Bilger, Philippe. “Philippe Bilger : pourquoi je ne participe pas à «la marche républicaine.” Le Figaro, 11 January 2015. http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/2015/01/11/31003-20150111ARTFIG00045-philippe-bilger-pourquoi-je-ne-parcipe-pas-a-la-marche-republicaine.php

 

Excerpted from FLÂNEUSE: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2016 by Lauren Elkin. All rights reserved.

 

Source link

The post Lessons From Parisian Protest Culture appeared first on Art of Conversation.

Finish This Sentence #3 – Superhero

I didn’t plan to be a superhero, but all of that changed when I got bit by a __________. (And then write a story that follows it.)

Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.

Download from our shop right now!

You might also like:

CATEGORIES
Creative Writing Prompts

Source link

The post Finish This Sentence #3 – Superhero appeared first on Art of Conversation.