Stay this moment

"If one does not lie back & sum up & say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay this moment. No one ever says that enough. Always hurry. I am now going in, to see L. & say stay this moment."
—from Virginia Woolf's diary, 31 December 1932

"Mom! Mom. I just realized we only live once. I mean, we only have one life. That's a problem for me with my plans."
—from the backseat, yesterday

Dear NYRB

On Patrick Leigh Fermor’s time at a Benedictine abbey near Rouen:

“Then he started to sleep. He slept until a few meals and church services a day were his only lucid moments. Then the pattern changed again. His lassitude dwindled away and was succeeded by a ‘limpid freshness.’ He now slept only five hours in twenty-four. It was as if a profound tiredness, rooted in the outside world with its demands on nervous libido and instant response, had overswept him, then receded in this quietude to release a flood of unimpeded energy. ‘Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away.’”
—from Colin Thubron’s review of Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence (and four other of his travel books)

As I was falling asleep, and thinking that perhaps I should get all five—in lieu of the abbey, which is clearly actually what I need—I suddenly thought, Wait. Isn’t this some kind of racket? Wonderful absorbing review in the NYRB of five books published by NYRB.

Or does the excellence of both the books and the review absolve them?

Oh, perhaps it does.

The Future of the Book

While I was in New York a couple months ago, I visited the home office of Archipelago Books in their lair in the American Can Factory, down by the Gowanus Canal. Jill Schoolman has put together the most tantalizing operation. Long shelves on either side of the big room are filled with the four-year-old press’s offerings of translated literature, which taken together or singly, are unspeakably beautiful. That’s a physical fact. As for the words—the variety, the challenges and poetry and particular articulations from faraway places—I will want to say more, here and elsewhere: about Magdalena Tulli’s Moving Parts and Dreams and Stones and this season’s Flaw; about Marguerite Duras’s Yann Andréa Steiner; about Elias Khoury’s much celebrated Gate of the Sun and his recent Yalo. (It occurs to me that the blurb from Edward Said about Khoury makes an apt description of Archipelago itself—it is a press giving voice to “dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages.”)

Oh, and I want the two previously untranslated Cortázar books and A Mind at Peace, by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, which Orhan Pamuk calls “the greatest novel ever written about Istanbul.”

Yes: I covet them. Even their paperbacks I want to hold and go on holding, and this makes the Archipelago books one answer to the questions raised at the panel and lecture I went to a few weeks ago on the future of the book. When Amazon released their Kindle the next Monday, it felt a bit like a continuation of the conference, at which Joseph Epstein regaled us with his idea of the book ATM; Terry Belanger raised his mischievous brow over the edge of his laptop to talk about how books might be like horses (we may not use them to plow the fields anymore, but people still live with them); Lisa Gitelman performed a neat and energizing debunking of the “moral outrage” and questionable logic at work in the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report; and Sven Birkerts gave in measured tones a talk about “the hive life” and a promising yelp of discovery at one point in the very brief discussion after.

About Birkerts’ personal revelation, I know nothing. Soon after the very interesting trio of mini-talks, questions were abruptly cut off, discussion ended.

The panel was moderated by Corey Flintoff and the NPR gloss he provided for the Mt. Holyoke/Five College/Museums10 event perhaps perfectly coincided with my colleague’s comment about the quantity of gray hair in the audience and her friend’s grumbling about how no students had actually shown up.

As I drove home, thinking about facing the work that had been on my plate at the day’s start, and was still there because I’d gone to the conference, I got grumpier. I was thinking about the amount of time and money that had gone into the conference—the museum meetings, the devoted independent bookstore owner schlepping the piles of books for people to peruse (buy?), the academics who were paid to present, and arrangements that must have been made to acquire the voice of Flintoff. All the human effort. And it was over. Like that. No real discussion.

And who comes to such things—who from the community, who of working people, who of young people—who comes to discuss the future of the book?

And, indeed, why should we?

Why would anyone who is on the outside of that conversation want to enter it? And how could they?

This passes for intellectual life? I was fuming by the time I reached the Coolidge Bridge. This is public discussion?

As Larry Kramer’s teeshirt says: Where is the outrage?

And yes, over even this: That so much arranging and organizing and spending and politesse and human capital goes into a simulation of intellectual engagement whose very structure dampens its possiblity. And that this is taken as a matter of course.

Why talk about the future of the book, how bleak the year 2007 in publishing as though it’s separate from the bleakness of these times?

So the Congress voted this week to devote $70 billion to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s about $233 per US citizen.

For much less than my war share, I could get a subscription to the entire spring list from Archipelago.

Three Months Later

At some point this summer I must have thought: A blog will be the perfect recovery from the long sickness of writing a novel. You will be brief; you will slip thoughts in between unreasonably taxing editing tasks and school pick-ups; you will be easy and light.

But I don’t have high-speed access.

Every Past Thing

My novel Every Past Thing is just out.

Help me celebrate at a reading at the excellent Amherst Books this Friday, October 5, at 8 pm (where I can promise wine, Cathy Ciepiela, and a surprise guest from Jerusalem).

Come to the panel and reception at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York next Thursday, October 11, from 6 to 8 pm (“Feminist New York” with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Deborah Siegel)

Read my editor Fred Ramey’s blog, in which he makes my day, week, year.

Go ask for it at your favorite bookstore.

Write a review.

Forward this.

Thank you. Thank you.

The behavior of women

Today I had the great pleasure of finding this book inside my mailbox. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a historian at Harvard who is best known for her biography of the New England midwife, Martha Ballard, The Midwife’s Tale, is also the author of this bumper-sticker sentence.

Who knew? Ulrich herself could never have guessed her sentence’s fate when she wrote the article “Virtuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735,” which appeared in American Quarterly in the spring of 1976. Here’s the original context:

Cotton Mather called them “the hidden ones.” They never preached or sat in a deacon’s bench. Nor did they vote or attend Harvard. Neither, because they were virtuous women, did they question God or the magistrates. They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history.

I’m to appear on a panel with Ulrich on October 11 at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York to talk about women making their own rules and changing their lives and the world around them. I love the prospect of hearing what Ulrich has to say about the subject and thinking about Mary of Every Past Thing in this context.

There was an interesting story by Megan Marshall on Ulrich’s book last week in Slate.

(Megan Marshall herself is the author of the splendid hat-trick of a biography The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.
Talk about women changing the world around them. Anyone who’s thinking anything about the history of that period or Transcendentalists and their contribution to our culture should read this book.)

“The sound my country makes”

Reviewing Marianne Wiggins's latest novel, The Shadow Catcher, has sent me back to reading Sebald, and both of them, and Grace Paley too, oh, and the fact of my own novel out in bookstores, and my reaction last week to the commuting of Kenneth Foster's sentence (Something good actually happened? Something good actually happened?) has me thinking about my own uneasy relationship to the culture I live in. More on that later, no doubt.

In the meantime, a little Sebald. From Vertigo:

"How I wished during those sleepless nights that I belonged to a different nation, or, better still, to none at all."

And this idea of his that has long interested me, from an interview with Arthur Lubow:

“There is so often about the standard novel something terribly contrived, which somewhere along the line tends to falter,” he said. “The business of having to have bits of dialogue to move the plot along, that’s fine for an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel, but that becomes in our day a bit trying, where you always see the wheels of the novel grinding and going on. Very often you don’t know who the narrator is, which I find unacceptable. The story comes through someone’s mind. I feel I have the right to know who that person is and what his credentials are. This has been known in science for a long time. The field of vision changes according to the observer, so I think this has to be part of the equation.”

Sacco, Vanzetti, Foster

Last week was the 80th anniversary of the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who, as
Emma Goldman put it, “died, as the entire world knows today, because they were Anarchists. That is to say, because they believed and preached human brotherhood and freedom. As such, they could expect neither justice nor humanity.”

Tomorrow, Kenneth Foster is scheduled to die in Texas. Will the protests and appeals to the governor (and visit his website to see how: www.freekenneth.com) save this man, who even the state of Texas knows is innocent of actually committing any murder?

Foster, like Vanzetti, has been writing in prison:

“What do I define a political prisoner as today? While the term still retains its original definition let it now encompass (any) who have been falsely and unjustly incarcerated and are being held captive under frivolous sentences with bias politics affirming them. No matter if these brothers and sisters are Activists, Communists, Muslims or Panthers—they are OUR people and worthy of defense and the opportunity to have a just life and treatment. When we face a system that subjugates, oppresses and murders by politics justifying that regimen (in society or jail) we are political prisoners.

Prisons have become a morbid design to punish and conform people to a regimen far worse than society realizes. It has been purposely made a breeding ground for violence, ignorance and death. But what about those that have not given in? What about those of us who have decided to utilize our time and consciously build our mind and soul? Are we being neglected because we have no revolutionary background or did not come to prison for a political cause? As a people I think we are forgetting to cultivate each other and that we can’t give up on each other. Gwendolyn Brooks said it best: We are each other’s bonds, business and magnitude.”

That quote is from a poem in honor of Paul Robeson, and more fully concludes:

We are each other’s harvest;
we are each other’s business;
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

"A summary with some knowledge"

Go past the blinking pitch for books by NPR correspondents to hear the aforementioned Kamila Shamsie (she of the obituaries dream) and her fellow novelist Mohsin Hamid gamely and beautifully invest in their few minutes of airtime a richer view of Pakistan than we otherwise get. More novelists on NPR, I say.

Grace Paley

Last night I dreamed that Grace Paley and Howard Zinn had died. My friends Kamila and Elizabeth and I found a news kiosk that stayed opened all night and bought the obituaries: columns and columns of a single day’s dead from every place in the world, one line per person, describing the immediate cause in the simplest possible terms.

Paley, Grace: Woke at 5 am, drove straight east.

She drove into the sun.

After the last time I saw her read, in Amherst—it was late and cold: might it snow?— someone was trying to persuade her to stay over, not to drive so far north at that hour. No, no, she said. Don’t worry—I drive sitting down. And then she shrugged her shoulders, hands up, as if she was admitting her terrible weakness: I love it at home.

And off she went: indefatigable, herself.

Earlier that night, when it had been time to wrap up the questions, she’d said, “No, there’s one more,” and gestured to me. I shook my head, she looked at me a little harder, and then said, “Oh, all right then. That’s all.” While everyone clapped, I thought: What question was so naked on my face that she saw it in a crowd without my hand raised?

Of course, she might’ve been eyeing the person behind me. All of us had more questions for her.

How do you do it?
Would you talk just a little longer?

She dedicated her Collected Stories to her friend Sybil Claiborne, who’d asked her a few days before she died: “Grace, the real question is—how are we to live our lives?”

Grace Paley showed us. In every word, every story, every essay, every admonition, every action, every good hard look. The fact of her existence gave me hope.

Herewith, in its entirety, “Wants.”

I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.

Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.

He said, What? What life? No life of mine.

I said, O.K. I don’t argue when there’s real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.

The librarian said $32 even and you’ve owed it for eighteen years. I didn’t deny anything. Because I don’t understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.

My ex-husband followed me to the Books Returned desk. He interrupted the libarian, who had more to tell. In many ways, he said, as I look back, I attribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never invited the Bertrams to dinner.

That’s possible, I said. But really, if you remember: first, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday-night meetings, then the war began. Then we didn’t seem to know them anymore. But you’re right. I should have had them to dinner.

I gave the librarian a check for $32. Immediately she trusted me, put my past behind her, wiped the record clean, which is just what most other municipal and/or state bureaucracies will not do.

I checked out the two Edith Wharton books I had just returned because I’d read them so long ago and they are more apropos now than ever. They were The House of Mirth and The Children, which is about how life in the United States in New York changed in twenty-seven years fifty years ago.

A nice thing I do remember is breakfast, my ex-husband said. I was surprised. All we ever had was coffee. Then I remembered there was a hole in the back of the kitchen closet which opened into the apartment next door. There, they always ate sugar-cured smoked bacon. It gave us a very grand feeling about breakfast, but we never got stuffed and sluggish.

That was when we were poor, I said.

When were we ever rich? he asked.

Oh, as time went on, as our responsibilities increased, we didn’t go in need. You took adequate financial care, I reminded him. The children went to camp four weeks a year and in decent ponchos with sleeping bags and boots, just like everyone else. They looked very nice. Our place was warm in winter, and we had nice red pillows and things.

I wanted a sailboat, he said. But you didn’t want anything.

Don’t be bitter, I said. It’s never too late.

No, he said with a great deal of bitterness. I may get a sailboat. As a matter of fact I have money down on an eighteen-foot two-rigger. I’m doing well this year and can look forward to better. But as for you, it’s too late. You’ll always want nothing.

He had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away.

I looked through The House of Mirth, but lost interest. I felt extremely accused. Now, it’s true, I’m short of requests and absolute requirements. But I do want something.

I want, for instance, to be a different person. I want to be the woman who brings these two books back in two weeks. I want to be the effective citizen who changes the school system and addresses the Board of Estimate on the troubles of this dear urban center.

I had promised my children to end the war before they grew up.

I wanted to have been married forever to one person, my ex-husband or my present one. Either has enough character for a whole life, which as it turns out is really not such a long time. You couldn’t exhaust either man’s qualities or get under the rock of his reasons in one short life.

Just this morning I looked out the window to watch the street for a while and saw that the little sycamores the city had dreamily planted a couple years before the kids were born had come that day to the prime of their lives.

Well! I decided to bring those two books back to the library. Which proves that when a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me I can take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks.

—the opening story of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974)