Stephen Greco's Blog: Over a Cocktail or Two, page 2

Finding the Time to Read

Maybe I should be calling this blog entry “Making the Time to Read.” What with the hulking mass of social media and multi-platform entertainment bullying for our attention, it seems harder than ever to set aside the time simply to open a book and enter its world, doesn’t it? I so empathize with friends who, after being kind enough to pick up my book Such Good Friends: A Novel of Truman Capote & Lee Radziwill, confess that they find it a challenge to spend time with any book, because of things like “the crazy pace of life today.” Even the dedicated book fiends I know sometimes complain that their stamina for reading—their ability to sit still physically and focus mentally--is under threat.

Grimly, some conclude that human consciousness itself is devolving in some ghastly, new-media-driven process of natural selection—though such an alarmist conclusion is probably unfounded. In fact, some recent statistics say that the average pleasure-reading time of Americans over the age of fifteen rose a bit during the pandemic, to almost 17 minutes per day, which reverses (according to Wordsrated.com) an established downward trend in reading time per day. This is good news, and I plan to watch this figure. We can only hope that as the discussion about addiction to social media grows louder, more folks will try and make the time to re-cultivate their stamina for reading books and reclaim what Stephen King calls books’ “uniquely portable magic"....

Hacking Away

“If you’re writing a novel, I would say it’s cutting a pass through the jungle. You’ve got a machete and you don’t know where you’re going, except you’re heading east.” – James Salter

This quote made me chuckle. When I worked summers during high school as low guy on the totem pole in a field survey crew, I was often the one out front on some overgrown parcel of land, hacking the way forward for our team with a machete that I sharpened every morning. Really helpful experience, as Salter suggests, even in writing frothy fiction about trans-Atlantic socialites of the twentieth century, many of whom I'd read about in Suzy's gossip column during dusty roadside tailgate lunches...

The Dress Lee Wore to the Ball

Did you realize that the snazzy, white-and-silver Mila Schön evening ensemble that Lee Radziwill wore to Truman Capote's 1966 Black and White Ball is now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London?

(A fictional account of the ball is in Chapter 13, "The Ball of the Century," of Such Good Friends: A Novel of Truman Capote & Lee Radziwill...)

Audiophilic

I feel lucky that it was voice and stage actor Erin Bennett who was selected to narrate the audiobook edition of Such Good Friends: A Novel of Truman Capote & Lee Radziwill. Winner of several Earphones awards and Audie nominated, Erin has recorded over 250 books in multiple categories, for a wide range of major publishers. I am thrilled to say that Erin’s version of Such Good Friends brings the characters so engagingly to life--her performance sweeps the story along with such exciting energy! Impressed by Erin’s work now, I am eager to experience her readings of other authors’ books.

Are audiobooks part of your literary practice? I love ‘em. They can reveal such an authentic dimension of a book’s message and nature. At any one moment, I am in the middle of one or two audiobooks, at the same time as two or three titles in paper editions. Just now I am in the middle of Anthony Burgess’s Ulysses-like 1980 novel Earthly Powers, narrated by the English actor, coach, and singer Gordon Griffin. The experience is delightful. Griffin’s precise inflections and pacing seem a perfect match for the sophisticated voice and waggish social observations of Burgess’s protagonist. (One critic called the book “outrageously provocative”—which means that a wise narrator might be well advised to understate the wit, as Griffin does.)

In a previous technological era I tried books on tape in the car, for long drives, but I never found the cassettes and players particularly wieldy. My first audiobook of the current digital era was Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests, which I bought purposefully both in hardcover and audiobook editions, the latter narrated by British actor Juliet Stevenson; and the comparison was enlightening. Reading the book was marvelous, and listening to it was marvelous, too, though in another way. The only experience I can compare this experiment to is watching Balanchine ballets at first from the third ring of Lincoln Center’s former New York State Theater, then later, in subsequent seasons, seeing them from the orchestra. The brilliance of Balanchine and his dancers was excitingly apparent in both instances, if from different angles....

My Poor Library

Since I moved to a new apartment, a few years ago, my library has shambled into such disarray! A casual visitor to the place might only see lots of nice books in the wooden bookcases stained “Golden Oak” that I’ve had replicated over the years, but the actual order of the books is imprecise. And as someone who came of age as a kid by sneaking into the adult section of the local village library, and who later found literary sustenance in a multi-branch university library, I find this lack of precision spiritually unsettling, let alone inconvenient. True, nowadays I can do a lot more of my research online, but still, in the course of my day-to-day writing, I do actually consult a lot of the books that are sitting on my shelves, and most of them are usually easy to find. When I can’t find something specific and have to buy a replacement—rather, a duplicate—I somehow feel a failure.

The collection, use, display, and preservation of books has always felt kind of sacred to me. (I have always treasured that quote from John Waters: “If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em.”) I still have many of the art and decorative arts books I collected in college, in the late ‘60s, when I was studying architecture, as well as many of the history-of-English-literature standards that my partner then, an English major, encouraged me to read. I also have scores of the basic history-of books that I plowed through, one or two per week, when I came to New York in the ‘70s and realized that the study of architecture doesn’t necessarily tell you as much about Aristotle, Augustine, Darwin, Descartes, Freud, Kant and the rest that you really need to know, if you expect to have an engaged and happy life. At the same time, I tried to keep up with all the most interesting novels of the moment—essentially, anything The New York Review of Books said that I had to read. Then, as a magazine editor, covering the arts and culture, I was sent tons and tons of non-fiction books, about everything--art, theater, film, music, architecture, antiques, etc. And in that way my library, such as it was, just sort of accumulated.

Of course, now and then I got rid of a few things—had to get rid of. There were times when I was so poor—young magazine editors work for peanuts, you know-- that I routinely sold lavish art books at the Strand bookstore in order to have enough money to go down to Astor Place for a cheap haircut. (Luckily, there were enough lavish books produced about artists and movements I didn’t care much about.) Yet most of my library is still intact, except for three books that I lent friends over the course of the last forty years, that have not been returned. Yes, I do remember titles, and yes, I do remember the individuals who borrowed them (and their innocent promises to return the books), but no, I will not name names here.

The most significant reason why my library is in relative disarray is my move, a few years ago, from Brooklyn Heights, my home for some forty-five years, to Sunset Park. During the move I was writing on deadline, so I had scant time to get all my books properly unpacked and up onto shelves. Rushed, I threw categories of books into roughly cohesive sections—fiction, poetry, dance, decorative arts, etc.—but could not reproduce the precise, carefully executed shelving system that I had been using in the Heights: the standard Library of Congress system that I learned while working my way through Cornell in the university’s Olin Library. As you may know, the Library of Congress system divides all knowledge into twenty-one basic classes and numerous sub-classes; books are catalogued alphabetically by author, subject, and/or title, and shelved with oversize books down below and ephemera in specially-designated spots at the end of sections or sub-sections. Maintaining bookcase order based on that system was a small, subtle joy, all those years in Brooklyn Heights. And adding to today’s disarray is the lamentable number of book piles that are sprouting up in my apartment, since the bookcases are full, and the lamentably stupid system for organizing these piles: chronological. There’s the newest pile over there, and the formerly newest pile over there, and there’s the new pile that is now at least a year old…, and so on.

My dream--my golden, glowing dream—for when I move into my next home (which is likely to be my last, since I am 72), is to be able to really take the time, perhaps with the assistance of a young library specialist, to put my books back into the correct order, and to re-establish spots for the rotating display of suitably decorative, or rare, or special books, as I had in my old place. With my next home I will re-establish this display practice with the two books I had out when the packing for the move began: a massive, oversize offering from Taschen featuring Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, and a well-worn volume of Milton’s Paradise Lost, from the Library of Poetical Literature in Thirty-Two Volumes, published in 1902 by The American Home Library Company. The latter is from my grandmother’s library—a book that I tried to read again and again as a child, always surprised that this time the poetry was still not making sense, that I did finally read and understand in college, with the patient help of that English major….

And Then Your Copies Arrive

Along with the bloodshed and tears involved in the life cycle of your book, you’re given some lovely moments: conversations with your trusted editor and agent, about the quality of your work; moments of inspiration that don’t even seem to have come from your own mind, which neatly solve dilemmas of story logic, character arc, or narrative voice; the discovery that some rich, yet long-neglected memory happens to work really well in a passage you're struggling with; the appearance of advance-sale pages on Amazon and Goodreads, and discussions with the publisher about promotional programs.... And then, a few weeks before pub date, your copies arrive, and the cover is even more splendid than that of the ARC, the printing crisper, the pages more opaque--and you feel you may be holding an object that will last longer than you do….

How I Became a Writer

When I was a kid, my artistic endeavors centered more on visual art—making oil-on-canvas copies of scenic photographs I found in travel books—and classical music—taking weekly lessons in piano, music theory and composition, and ear training. I tried creative writing a few times, when prompted to by teachers, but I found it slightly terrifying to make up my own stories. If anything could happen on the page, dear lord, then what should happen? It was the writing of poetry that overtook me in college, when during the study of architecture I was clobbered by the usual discoveries in personal identity—this was 1968, after all. And then, after college, I fell into editing and feature-writing for arts and style magazines, which occupied me for the next thirty years. Eagerly, I took to covering the work of musicians, filmmakers, painters, writers, dancers, fashion designers, architects, and the like—even as many of my friends were novelists and some were editors and agents who took me to lunch now and then, to ask what kind of novels I might want to write. But I had no idea what I might want to write. Rather passively, I assumed that that kind of writing was just not for me.

Then, in the mid-‘90s, magazine editing led to a partnership in an internet company I helped found, Platform.net, which created the first “urban youth culture portal.” (Remember portals?)
We aggregated content from various hip-hop and skate publications, offered original content from a talented young team of reviewers and bloggers, and even got into e-commerce by offering a curated selection of streetwear and urban gear brands—in the midst of which we decided to introduce an original, illustrated serial drama set in the late-‘90s world of branding for youth-culture audiences. When the writer we’d hired for the serial drama dropped out, I gamely stepped in to “storyboard” the thing—and then, during the dot-com valuation bubble-burst event of 2001, Platform.net went out of business. Yet I loved the world and characters I was creating for my storyboard. For the first time in my creative life I felt something really necessary surging out of me and suddenly understood what a novelist friend, Andrew Holleran, had once told me, that the only thing we should be writing was the world we were dying to hop into every day.

With some literary development, the serial drama became “The Demographer,” the anchor story of my first novel, Dreadnought, which took the form of seven interconnected stories in a dark world of branding-gone-mad. The stories, individually and then as a group, actually sold rather well in a then-new Amazon program that another author friend got me into, Amazon Shorts. And since then, that enticing feeling of dying to hop into a certain world every day has only gotten stronger—especially when I am writing historical fiction, when the pleasure extends from describing small but fascinating design details of the period to conjuring the texture of lived experience itself, inflected by some of the peersonal, period-specific manias that don’t quite get captured in news reports and historical accounts.

At Home in the Go-Go Decade

The Sixties were nowhere more go-go than in New York. For a century, of course, the city had been a financial powerhouse, and for decades it had been an international cultural hub. But at the time when Lee and Truman started getting closer to each other, in the early 1960s, New York was the American city best poised to assume the title won for it in World War II: Capital of the World, the seat of Pax Americana. Not long before, Lee had married Prince Stanislaw Radziwill and started a family; her sister Jackie was First Lady of the United States and had created so much fairy tale glamour around the presidential administration that the era was being called “Camelot.” Truman had just scored a hit with his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the movie of which, starring Audrey Hepburn, was also a big hit. New York in those years was just a better base for Lee and Truman’s hopes and dreams than anywhere else in the world.

By mid-decade, just before the appearance of Truman’s blockbuster best-seller In Cold Blood, which made him a superstar, the material evidence of New York’s imperial prominence was right there in front of everyone’s noses, in new building projects. A new New York was popping up everywhere, in projects like Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the New York Coliseum, the General Motors building, and FDR Drive, Robert Moses’s express highway running along the East River at Manhattan’s eastern edge, partly elevated, partly cantilevered. (Many of these projects were supported, of course, by the dubious assumptions underlying the era's "urban renewal" thinking.) And some of the most intoxicating architectural forms and suggestions for “modern living” were on view at the hugely popular New York World’s Fair, which ran in the summers of both 1964 and 1965, where America’s mania for looking—at new buildings, at new cars, at the newest fashions, at the latest mass media expressions of life right now—was amped to unprecedented heights. Which may be why in 1965 Truman, flush with his In Cold Blood earnings and looking to move from Brooklyn Heights into Manhattan, chose to buy an apartment at the city’s newest “it” address, United Nations Plaza, instead of a place on one of the venerable avenues where many of his swans lived, Park and Fifth. This was definitely a place for the newly heightened condition of looking-and-being-looked-at.

From Such Good Friends:

A pair of thirty-nine-story, modernist bronze-and-glass towers, directly north of the United Nations campus, UN Plaza was designed by Wallace K. Harrison and Max Abramovitz, the architects responsible for the United Nations itself, as well as the Time-Life Building and the Metropolitan Opera House, the latter then nearing completion at Lincoln Center. UN Plaza offered an alternative to the Park-and-Fifth Avenue limestone-façade lifestyle, which was growing a little fusty around the edges. A few buyers in the new complex decided to drape or even panel over their floor-to-ceiling glass walls, but most embraced the complex’s exhilarating brightness and transparency. The place was edgy at a time when the rich were beginning to discover it was fun to be edgy. That feeling of cool grandeur clobbered you quietly when you entered the vast lobby of UN Plaza, like the Met would do the following year, with icons of modern art, contemporary crystal lighting, and acres of red carpet.

It was chiefly well-to-do business and entertainment types who bought into UN Plaza—news anchor Walter Cronkite and movie star Yul Brynner, philanthropist Mary Lasker and television host Johnny Carson, Truman’s friends producer David Susskind and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Truman’s apartment on the twenty-second floor offered spectacular views of the United Nations, the skyline of midtown and lower Manhattan, the East River and its bridges, and the borough of Queens, which at night was a tapestry of glitter laid out to the horizon. The apartment was as bright and exposed, Truman said, as his Brooklyn basement had been gloomy and secluded; and it was considerably larger, so to fill it, Truman wasted no time adding to his collection of furniture, artworks, and bibelots with new items purchased in East Side antique shops…

A Place to Do the Writing

Nobody asked, but in case you were wondering, I wrote Such Good Friends at a small, elegant 19th-century Danish farmhouse table that I purchased in the mid-1980s in a now-disappeared antiques shop in SoHo. It worked perfectly in the Brooklyn Heights apartment I occupied for forty years, where I could sit at the back windows in the morning and gaze at the shady garden with the New York Times and a cup of coffee in front of me. But in my “new” place in Sunset Park--where I've lived already for six years...!--the table is perfect for writing in the south-facing living room, where the sun is bright all day.

I do have a proper desk of walnut, a massive, seven-drawered thing that weighs a ton, that’s now in the bedroom, which I use look over the current issue of The Economist and The New York Review of Books. Because the light was so good in its spot in the Brooklyn Heights place, that desk was where used to write everything. It's a battered-but-noble piece of business furniture that my partner and I bought in the 1970s, right off the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan, after a furrier had gone out of business and was being moved out of the building. At the moment, that desk is piled high with books and features a host of little nothings I find interesting, like ticket stubs, post cards, curiously shaped stones, an antique oil can, a little celedon dish from Gump’s containing a chip of molding I knocked off the bottom of the armoire with the vacuum cleaner, and the bisque torso of an old Kewpie doll that I found in a field one summer, long ago, when I had a summer job as a surveyor’s assistant. Actually, among the books piled up there are several I used in my research for Such Good Friends, including Gerald Clarke's excellent biography Capote and Diana Dubois' fascinating In Her Sister's Shadow: An Intimate Biography of Lee Radziwill…

Who Doesn't Love a Sale?

If you haven’t preordered your copy of Such Good Friends, now might be the time! The nice folks at @BNBuzz are offering 25% off ALL preorders today (4/26) through Friday (4/28). Please use code “PREORDER25” when you order here: Such Good Friends.

I don’t know about you, but for me, 25% off is where sales get good! Lord knows, Lee wouldn’t turn her nose up at a good bargain either. In fact, Chapter 20 of Such Good Friends includes a scene from the 1970s set in a design showroom in New York’s D&D building, with Lee ordering tile for an interior design project she was working on. She wasn’t just a glamorous socialite with a European title, after all. For important periods of her life, she was a hard-working girl:

“I found this for you, Ms. Bouvier,” said the salesperson, placing another sample on the table.

“Oh, no, no,” said Lee immediately, declining even to touch the sample. “That’s quite wrong. You said ‘variegated,’ but that looks positively striped to me. A bit too garish, I’m afraid. But thank you. I think it’s between these two, for the moment.”

Lee had selected “Kimaada,” by Lattitude, a 1" x 3" glass subway tile in celery, and “Quartz,” by Kellani, a 0.75" x 0.75" glass mosaic tile in aqua.

“The Lattitude is a floor tile, but it should work beautifully on a wall,” said the salesperson. “It’s just made for heavier wear.”

“Right,” said Lee, “and that’s priced by the box.”

“Yes.”

“And the Kellani is by the square foot? So can you work up a price comparison for me?”

“Of course. I can do that right here,” said the salesperson, producing a pocket calculator. “Let’s see, now, the Lattitude is thirteen dollars and forty-five cents per box, and that covers four-point-eight-four square feet, so that works out to . . . three dollars and thirty-five cents per square foot. That actually includes a nineteen percent discount. And the Kellani is two dollars and seventy-eight cents per square foot, so that’s a bit cheaper.”

“And my discount is on top of either,” said Lee.

“That’s right.”

“Okay,” said Lee. “Truman, these are better than what we’ve already seen today, aren’t they?”

“They’re beautiful,” said Truman.

“But better?”

“Yes, better.”

“Alright,” said Lee, pulling out a spec sheet she’d prepared and giving it to the salesperson. “I have five rooms in Florida and five in Mexico. Here are the measurements and the dates. May I ask you to price out both jobs, including shipping and delivery, and phone me tomorrow by noon?”

“Of course. Thank you, Ms. Bouvier.”