Amanda Vaill's Blog, page 3

On the Other Hand

[image error] The news was pretty bad this morning. Most days it's pretty bad. Today, fraud in China, burning oil trucks in Pakistan, yesterday, toxic -- excuse me, caustic -- sludge in Hungary, an epidemic of gay suicide, not to mention an attack on a gay man at the Stonewall Inn. Almost every day, election-season name calling (and worse) in virtually every state, internet bullying, climate-change-related disasters, and really ugly clothes at the fall collections.

Some days I wonder if we're coming to the end of civilization as we know it.

I was wondering that when I took refuge in a novel by Barbara Pym that I had never read, despite my great admiration (actually, it;s more like affection) for this deliciously acute English writer. Pym's method, if such a charming writer can be said to have something that sounds so mechanical, is the stiletto (knife, not high-heel) hidden under the tea-cozy. And No Fond Return of Love, the story of a selfless spinster whose curiosity about the lives of others leads her into unexpected paths, is a perfect exemplar of her work.

Here's what one of the characters says when she is told by a vicarage housekeeper of the strange behavior of a visiting clergyman:

"That seems to point to some dreadful kind of frustration --eating cold brussels sprouts and tampering with the heating."

And this is how Pym describes dinner in the dining room of a charmless seaside "family" hotel: "The silence in the room was broken only by the sound of water being poured into glasses -- perhaps the most dismal sound heard on an English holiday."

I think I feel better already.

Writer at Work: 2

I've never been good about outlining things. Back in school, when they taught me how to do outlines with roman numerals and letters and arabic numerals, with all the points arranged neatly and hierarchically, I quickly saw how to do it and as quickly decided it was a waste of time. If I knew what I was going to write, I thought, why not just write it?

By the time I was in high school, and even more so in college, I had perfected a system for writing long papers: I'd do my research, taking note...

Writer at Work

I've been spending the past few weeks getting started on the manuscript of my new book, Hotel Florida, which explores three different love stories against the background (or sometimes in the background) of the Spanish Civil War. I was trying to describe this process to someone who isn't a writer, and I told this person that I'd been circling my subject, looking for a place to sink my teeth in -- a description that isn't too far from the way I felt: hungry, wary, and ready to strike.

I finally ...

The Argument of Time

A shepherd's daughter,
And what to her adheres, which follows after,
Is the argument of Time. Of this allow,
If ever you have spent time worse ere now;
If never, yet that Time himself doth say
He wishes earnestly you never may.
Shakespeare, Winter's Tale, Act IV, scene 1

The border of the Great Lawn in Central Park, just north of the Delacorte Theatre, isn't a bad place to spend a few hours of a summer day -- that is, if the air is clear and the temperature and humidity less than what one ex...

Last Licks?

Nothing lasts forever, but sometimes I feel it should. And last week was one of those times.

On Thursday, Paige Rense Noland, the longtime editor of Architectural Digest, announced she would retire at the end of August. This is an event no one ever thought would happen -- even though, when I interviewed her for New York Magazine in 1994 (six years before I began writing for AD), she said, "I worked for years on the basis that I might retire the next day." Paige and the magazine she molded over...

Life Imitates Art

So yesterday I was in the subway, on my way to the International Center of Photography to look at vintage prints and other archives of Robert Capa, the legendary war photographer who is one of the central characters in my new book, Hotel Florida. The train was halted, for the usual inscrutable reasons, in the 59th Street station; and apparently it had stopped so that my seat was in some tiny cellphone-signal hotspot. The phone rang. Surprised, I picked it up: on the line was Judy Kinberg, di...

Gift-giver

I never met Jeanne-Claude, the saffron-haired visionary artist who died Thursday in New York, and who with her husband Christo wrapped the Reichstag and surrounded islands with festoons of fabric. But along with thousands of others I revelled in her and Christo's great installation, "The Gates," which was unveiled in Central Park in February of 2005.

Newspaper accounts (and Jeanne-Claude's obituaries) say that "The Gates" was in place for only two weeks, but in retrospect the event -- for it w...

Big D

A week ago Friday I was in Dallas, Texas, to give a talk about Jerome Robbins, and screen Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About, at the Dallas Museum of Art, in conjunction with an intriguing exhibit called "All the World's A Stage: Celebrating Performance in the Visual Arts." The DMA was celebrating the inauguration of its new neighbors, the Winspear Opera House and the Wyly Theater, the latest constituents of the Dallas Performing Arts Center -- an ambitious, $337-million attempt to brea...

Days of Wine and Locusts

I've just returned from Los Angeles, where I was attending the Emmy Awards as a first-time nominee -- for writing the screenplay for Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About. It was a slightly surreal experience. Because I was going on my own nickel and knew I didn't want to pay for the compulsory limousine (or even the all-purpose Town Car) to bring me from the city's western precincts to downtown L.A., where the awards ceremony was being held, I opted for a hotel that was also downtown, abo...