Man With the Golden Arm
Catch 22
Magister Ludi
V
Howl
Trout Fishing In America
Soul On Ice
The Self and Others
The Raymond Chandler Omnibus
Things Fall Apart
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
Slaughterhouse Five
\
Dune
Naked Lunch
a Fan’s Notes
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Wretched of the Earth
Hall of Mirrors
So,
Many of these confabulations were first published in Stuff magazine before 1998. In 2000, I found a regular niche at the nascent literary magazine (of sorts) Identitytheory. And, over the fullness of time, I found myself contributing to cultural news venues such as The Morning News, The Millions, The Virginia Quarterly Review on -line, The Daily Beast, and the LA Review of Books among others.
Along the way, some of these countless ( have lost count on how many I have participated in) dialogues have been anthologized (mostly regularly )in the University Press of Mississippi’s “Conversations with…’ series. These I am proud to list below (click on the name to go to Publisher’s page for each book):
Some ten years ago, as happens occasionally, I chanced upon A Chance Meeting that, to this day, remains one of my favorite books. And which was sufficient motivation to arrange to speak with its author, Rachel Cohen (you can find that conversation here
![Rachel Cohen [photo by Robert Birnbaum]](https://ourmaninboston.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/img_0010.jpg?w=490&h=653)
Rachel Cohen [photo by Robert Birnbaum]
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Robert Birnbaum: What do you want to talk about?
Rachel Cohen: (laughter)
Robert Birnbaum: I put you on the spot, sorry. That was a serious question, though. I do want to know what you wanted to talk about.
Rachel Cohen: Probably about painting. In a way, the thing that I’m doing now is spending a lot of time going to look at paintings. That’s one of the things that is connected to this book, but then it kind of goes on.
Robert Birnbaum: You live in a good place for that. There’s a lot of museums and galleries here.
Rachel Cohen: It’s wonderful.
Robert Birnbaum: Are there many contemporary collections of paintings here? People still paint, right?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah, people do, although less and with less attention given to it. Yeah, there’s some, and there are a lot good galleries here and the Institute of Contemporary Art. There is contemporary stuff, but a lot of what I’m looking at is historical. This is a great place for that. It’s fantastic.
Robert Birnbaum: What period?
Rachel Cohen: I’m especially looking at impressionist painting. That makes everybody feel like, “Oh, I stopped looking at those when I was thirteen, and there was a reason.”
Robert Birnbaum: It’s passe isn’t it?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. They are. They’re too sweet.
Robert Birnbaum: But, they’re always really popular.Every couple of years a major museum will have a major Impressionist exhibition.
Rachel Cohen: Exactly. Lines going around the block. Everybody who never goes to museums goes, and everybody who does go to museums disdains those shows.
Robert Birnbaum: You’re interested in paintings meaning that you want to write about paintings?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. That’s what I’m doing now. It’s something I’ve always done. When I first moved to New York, when I got a job, the first thing I did was buy a membership to the Metropolitan Museum, which was largely symbolic. You don’t actually have to pay for the museum. (laughter)
Robert Birnbaum: Did they give you a membership card? That’s a good thing.
Rachel Cohen: I have a card.
Robert Birnbaum: When I traveled abroad I would go to the press office to get a press credential even though I never used them there [I more often used them locally].
Rachel Cohen: It’s that kind of thing. I do want to feel part of the painting world. When I lived in New York I went to the Met basically every week for almost seventeen years. It was a longstanding kind of a thing to really be looking at paintings in a very serious way.
Robert Birnbaum: Let me refresh my memory of you— you took a ten thousand mile trip around the country?
Rachel Cohen: It was actually closer to twenty thousand, but yeah that’s right.
Robert Birnbaum: You were very modest. (laughter) That trip preceded your first book .
A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. A Chance Meeting. That’s right.[ 1]
Robert Birnbaum: We met about ten years ago, twelve years ago? It was to talk about that book.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Ten years ago, nine years ago.
Robert Birnbaum:What are your memories and impressions of that trip, ten years later now that you’re married and you have a child Do you have flashbacks of the trip? Do you think about that trip?
Rachel Cohen: All the way back. Yeah, I do. For me the trip is now actually twenty years ago because it took me ten years to write that book. It’s been so long. Things get farther and farther back. Yes, I do think about that trip. I took some subsequent book trips too. I used to do that, go for several months and kind of get away. Those trips were very helpful and informative, just to get immersed in your own mind, another way of thinking, to get away once a year.
Robert Birnbaum: A gutsy thing for…
Rachel Cohen: A single woman…
Robert Birnbaum: Yeah.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah.
Robert Birnbaum: I would worry about driving through certain rural areas.
Rachel Cohen: Yes. When I did that trip my mother gave me a —
Robert Birnbaum: —Your mother? (laughs)
Rachel Cohen: My mother worried.
Robert Birnbaum: She gave you her shotgun? (laughter)
Rachel Cohen: That’s a good idea. No, she gave me a cell phone. It was twenty years ago so it was one of those giant things that basically took up the passenger seat of the car for… (laughter)
Robert Birnbaum: Don’t make me laugh when I’m drinking coffee, alright?
Rachel Cohen: It never worked all that well but it was some security for me to have it and for her.
Robert Birnbaum: Did you find that you were in places where you were fearful?
Rachel Cohen: I was, at the time, nervous. I was nervous. I developed some habits as I went, that were things that I learned to do that made it more comfortable. One was that I stopped staying in Motel 6s and started staying in family run motels because those felt like safer places and there were people who felt ownership who were running them.
Robert Birnbaum: You’ve got to write a traveler’s guide.
Rachel Cohen: (laughs) When I would check in I would ask for a room next to the night desk. The closest room because often those places would be empty but then I would know there was somebody there within shouting distance. Those things made me feel more safe.
Robert Birnbaum: What is the most prominent memory of this? What is thing that you always think about when you think about
Rachel Cohen: That trip?
Robert Birnbaum: Is there one thing?
Rachel Cohen: I don’t know. I have different memories of…
Robert Birnbaum: Do they suddenly appear out of nowhere sometimes? All of sudden something triggers a thought about a particular
Rachel Cohen: About a place or something?
Robert Birnbaum: Yeah.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. They do come to me at different moments. Especially landscapes because it’s very hard to write about landscape and I took these very inadequate snapshots as I was going through this huge western spaces.
Robert Birnbaum: Yeah.
Rachel Cohen: I was having these incredible experiences of being immersed in the horizon.
Robert Birnbaum: That’s why [Ansel]Adams [2] used an eight by ten [large format]camera.
Ansel Adams, Jeffrey Pine, 1940
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Exactly. Much bigger and kind of a plain. Or video or something, like David Hockney compilations, but recently I was talking to a friend of mine who’s writing a book that’s set in the West. It’s a book of history.
Robert Birnbaum: About what?
Rachel Cohen: It’s about a man who was part of reconstruction after the Civil War and left that job and ended up in the army fighting the Indian War in the west. So he was part of these two terrible things that were happening right after the Civil War. As we were talking about this I suddenly remembered going to the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho, what that was like and the museum there and what I had seen and what I had learned about that place. It turned out that he had just spent several weeks on the Nez Perce reservation and was surprised to discover that there was somebody else that he knew who had been there. It seems remote.
Robert Birnbaum: A White person?
Rachel Cohen: No the place not something that people study, but it was a really interesting place and while I was there I bought a book that was in the museum gift shop there called With the Nez Perce, which I think is, fantastically, out-of-print at this point. May be get-able.
Robert Birnbaum: Right.
Rachel Cohen: It was a book about two women who had been trying to administer the land grants for the Nez Perce as they were force-ably converted from a roving people to what was supposed to be agricultural in a land that was wildly unsuited for agriculture.
Robert Birnbaum: You know what General Philip Sheridan said about Indian reservations?
Rachel Cohen: No.
Robert Birnbaum: “Worthless pieces of land surrounded by scoundrels.”
Rachel Cohen: Yeah,exactly. You still have that feeling when you’re there.
Robert Birnbaum: Amazing. We’re still screwing those people.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. It’s a hideous … It’s terrible. Yeah. It’s really astonishing that it goes on. Those were the kinds of things that it was very good for me to drive around the country and run into them. I grew up in a college town, went to school out here. East coast life, and one can easily stay in a metropolitan corridor and not really encounter things.
Robert Birnbaum: How do think this notion of the “fly over zone “originated? Where did that originate? (laughter) Had to originate on the east coast from people who never leave the east coast?
Rachel Cohen:Like a Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover.
Saul Steinberg, detail from New Yorker cover
Robert Birnbaum: Did you see paintings when you…? You said you were interested in painting from a very young age, so was that something that you also had a chance to partake in
Rachel Cohen: I didn’t do so much of that during that trip.
Robert Birnbaum: You were focused on?
Rachel Cohen: I was more looking at landscape and going to small museums, but tending to be museums of personality and museums about particular people. Billy the Kid, or else the Native American museums. I remember seeing some good paintings in Austin, and seeing some good things in Los Angeles when I went through those cities. Mostly I was in rural places.
Robert Birnbaum: I’m fascinated by these quirky museums that exist around the country. There’s a Lucille Ball Museum in Jamestown, New York. Also there’s a guy, years ago, who contacted me who had a 1968 museum up in New Hampshire. He just would accumulate all sorts of things contemporaneous to 1968,
Rachel Cohen: These are different ways of collecting our past. Also, part of my interest is in the more regular painting museum. It’s a strange thing, a museum. It’s really an invention of the last couple hundred years. Previously there were palaces. With lots of paintings in them, but the idea of a public museum that was open…
Robert Birnbaum: What was the first museum do you think?
Rachel Cohen: Let’s see, the Louvre became public at the time of Napoleon because his idea was to return the collections to the people a little bit. That was circa 1800.
Robert Birnbaum: Were the people in charge of the Louvre, were they actually curators? Or were they something else?
Rachel Cohen: The people under Napoleon are hilarious, actually. They’re connoisseurs and a lot of them knew really a lot about painting, but they were also bandits… (laughter)
Robert Birnbaum: Do you ever see yourself writing another book that’s as unique and original as A Chance Meeting?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah.That’s what I’m working on. I’m working on these two books. One is a novel and the other is a book about paintings.
Robert Birnbaum: Your dust jacket bio states you are a creative writing teacher, but I only know you to write non-fiction. But now you’re writing a novel?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah, I’ve been writing it for seven years, so I’m seriously about it. It’s a ways from being done yet. Both of these new projects are creative. This Berenson book, which I really enjoyed writing, was a commission. I was happy to have some work. It was a nice thing to do and I ended up learning a lot of things that are valuable to me. It certainly was a book with a traditional form prescribed by the series[Yale University Press Jewish Lives series. It wasn’t possible to be too flexible with this one.
Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade
by Rachel Cohen
Robert Birnbaum: I have to confess, Berenson is an interesting figure and seems like he’s a decent person but I find it hard to get interested in a guy sitting around an Italian villa and living the good life . Tell me , do you think the book’s cover photo is posed ?
Rachel Cohen: I think it’s posed. Yeah.
Robert Birnbaum: It’s a perfect little picture, but it’s just, uncanny.
Rachel Cohen: There’s artifice in everything that he does. That’s correct.
Robert Birnbaum: I did think it was interesting that he said late in his life, something about making himself a work of art. That’s what he was working on?
Rachel Cohen: He came of age in an aesthetic generation where that was a project. An Oscar Wilde sort of project to have an aesthetic of yourself. I found that interesting too. I think in the end what I stayed interested in thinking about him was two things. One was that all of that elaborate fancy material was, for him, a compensation for the lack of his early life. That’s actually a common story. Many people have deprivation early on and are then making up for it in their later life. I also thought there was something about the experiences of prejudice in his story. He ended up on the far end of the elite, that’s definitely true, but it was interesting to me that his fierce ambition to have all of that stuff came from the absence of it.
Robert Birnbaum: Somebody at Harvard said he had more ambition than he had ability.
Rachel Cohen: Charles Eliot Norton,who was born in the elite and happily ensconced there.
Robert Birnbaum: It reminded me of something, that Justice Felix Frankfurter said about Roosevelt—” he was a first class personality and a second class mind.” That’s giving with one hand and then taking with the other
Rachel Cohen: Then you take hard. I think of what H.L. Mencken said about Baltimore— City of Southern Efficiency and Northern Charm.
Robert Birnbaum: How old’s your daughter?
Rachel Cohen: She’s eighteen months.She’s a year and a half. She’s a sweet one.
Robert Birnbaum: What’s her name?
Rachel Cohen: Sylvia.
Robert Birnbaum: Needless to say, that changes things for you.
Rachel Cohen: This changes your life pretty fundamentally.Beautifully. It’s very nice. I’ve been going to museums with her too. Which has been a very sweet thing. You can learn a lot by doing that. We had a nice experience the other day. We went to the Children’s Museum and we had actually mostly been going to the MFA. I’d been taking her there , letting her see stuff and then play outside.
Robert Birnbaum: Did she look at the walls? Did she look at the paintings on the walls? Did she actually look at them?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. She will look at them and find stuff in them. Especially statues, she likes because you can see them in the round and it’s easy to understand, but actually paintings— she likes a lot. She like the colors. She has a good eye for color and she likes to say all the colors that she can see.
Robert Birnbaum: What do you think she sees?
Rachel Cohen: She sees the things assembling into forms. She sees color assemble into forms.
Robert Birnbaum: What does she describe? Given she has an eighteen month old vocabulary, so what does she describe?
Rachel Cohen: She actually has a huge vocabulary. (laughter)
Robert Birnbaum: Put a dictionary under her pillow… In the Dominican Republic they put baseball mitts in the babies’ cribs.
Rachel Cohen: A dictionary —something like that. She says, “Boat. Cloud. Momma. Baby.” Things that she sees.
Robert Birnbaum: So from the very first you didn’t baby talk her. You pretty much talk sentences to her.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah.
Robert Birnbaum: Are you capable of baby talking? (laughter)
Rachel Cohen: Maybe not. Maybe not. Might not be. I might be one of those people without that ability.
Robert Birnbaum: You learn what your limitations are at some point. Even though it seems like a common thing. I didn’t do it either. Now I sometimes do it with my dog. He’s such a child. You’re going to view paintings, do you paint yourself?
Rachel Cohen: No, I don’t. I draw a little bit, just to understand.
Robert Birnbaum: Did you aspire to paint? Never even tried it?
Rachel Cohen: No.
Robert Birnbaum: You knew right away?
Rachel Cohen: I guess so. I never really tried it but drawing I like and I’ve taken a few drawing classes.
Robert Birnbaum: You take photographs?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. That’s been a strange thing about going, recently. I’m keeping this notebook online about looking at paintings, which I hadn’t done before. I’m making these sketches and writing online—which I love doing and I hadn’t expected to love it as much as I do. It’s really nice writing online. I see why you do it.
Robert Birnbaum: I hate the word ‘blog’.There’s something essentially ugly about the word
Rachel Cohen: I think so too. I think that’s right. I’ve been calling it a notebook because I never liked that word[blog]. ‘Notebook’ has a long tradition and there are reasons for keeping notebooks. Artists kept them and people going to look at paintings have always kept notes.
Robert Birnbaum: Do you have people who respond to the things you write?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Usually by writing to me directly. Not so much by commenting on the site. I get responses, sometimes from strangers, and also sometimes I get letters from friends or students who I haven’t been in touch with in a long time. Often about something they’ve seen. That’s really wonderful. I didn’t expect that to be part of it. I’m writing these little essays, basically. They write me one back. It’s really nice. My notebook entries end up being letters from Cambridge or something, and I get letters back. It’s very nice.
Robert Birnbaum: It’s hard to figure out what one’s expectations are . Of course, you want people to read your stuff and to interact with you about it. That’s a wish— in reality, when you write this online, you don’t know. It’s hard to say where it enters the public conversation.
Rachel Cohen: I’m curious what you think about that. You’ve been doing it for a while and you’ve shifted forms a little bit too. You’ve gotten more compact over time.
Robert Birnbaum: I found my… I don’t want to say my concentration is limited, because it’s not. I only can do the same kind of thing for ten or fifteen hours a week. I have distinct moments where I want to spend thinking and writing, I like to think. It’s an indulgence. I also use my online journal to publish interviews that I don’t want to justify to an editor…I love that we’re talking about me.
.Rachel Cohen: I noticed that you don’t do it that much but it’s a chance for me.
Robert Birnbaum: Actually, I try to excise my part of a conversation because readers might think, “I thought this was an interview?”
Rachel Cohen: It’s nice. It s eccentric what you do and there used to be more places for it. Many of the kinds of writing that we are fans of, there were more places for them.
Robert Birnbaum: I think there still are a lot. I really do. At least more than I can keep up with. I look at places like the LA Review of Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Baffler, N + 1, McSweeney’s and TomDispatch.
Rachel Cohen: I also think that people make mistakes about circulation in retrospect. They miss X,Y,Z, magazine, the old New Yorker or something like that. They think, “Oh, everybody read that.” In fact, it had a circulation of ten thousand. Not so many people read it. The current literary magazines are also reaching that kind of range of people.
Robert Birnbaum:There is also the importance of archiving the past on the Internet. Both the Atlantic and Harper’s have archived their past, from the nineteenth century, on line?
Rachel Cohen: It’s really wonderful. It used to be you published something in a fairly obscure place and if people didn’t buy that issue, that was that. Now it’s online, or you can put it up yourself and then it’s there forever. These small magazine can have a lot of influence and wonderful writing can be found in those places and come into the world. I’m really liking writing for the web. I’m an old fashioned person. I live mostly in the nineteenth century. I’m often out of the technological world. But I’ve found that I really love it. This is what I started to say, that when I go to look at paintings now, because I know I’m going to post about them, I take my iPhone and I take lots of little pictures. Not just of the whole painting but lots of the details of the painting.
Robert Birnbaum: It’s produces more what your eye is seeing
Rachel Cohen: Exactly.
Robert Birnbaum: It’s one thing to show the whole painting. I can look that up. Is that right?
Rachel Cohen: I can show the process of how I’m looking at it, what I’m seeing. How the details are in relation to one another. That’s a much closer communication. It’s more like actually going to a museum with my reader than what I’m able to do in print.
Robert Birnbaum: You just called yourself a nineteenth century person. I know what you’re saying, but I always wonder, and I especially wonder about people who are literate is what’s your cultural diet? Do you know who Sarah Silverman is?
Rachel Cohen: Yes.
Robert Birnbaum: You know who Rhianna is?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Thank you for giving me a couple that I can get.
Robert Birnbaum: Tupac?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Definitely. Definitely.
Robert Birnbaum: To me all these things are floating around, and I do partake. Netflix. It’s a bane and it’s a benefit. Itunes, no, Spotify. Where you can almost any piece of recorded music. You have available to you, if you wanted, all this information. I wonder if generations behind them avail themselves of this stuff or if they just stay focused on certain fractured windows of genre?
Rachel Cohen: It’s true, in part, what I mean when I say I’m a nineteenth century person is that I value certain kinds of continuity. I like the long history of things. That comes up to the present. It’s not that I’m missing the present, it’s that I’m not forgetting the past or something.
![Robert Stone [photo: Robert Birnbaum]](https://ourmaninboston.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/stone_front.jpg?w=490)
Robert Stone [photo: Robert Birnbaum]
Robert Birnbaum: I was impressed by Robert Stone’s [4] latest novel Death of the Black Haired Girl in that, here’s a guy in his late seventies. His book takes place a little bit after September eleventh. Maybe within two or three years, but there was no temporal references that were wrong. There were enough citations of contemporary life that he referenced. His cultural antennae were acute— that may become more rare.
Rachel Cohen: I think great fiction writers are very alert to the world around them and if they’re not experiencing it directly, they’re still watching how other people are experiencing it so that they’re not- What somebody in their twenties feels is not of no interest to them now that they’re seventy. They still care about how people are taking the world in. I hope, aspire, to be that kind of person.
Robert Birnbaum: To what kind of music do you listen ?
Rachel Cohen: I mostly listen to classical music and I do listen to contemporary classical music, but
Robert Birnbaum: You listen to lots of contemporary music?
Rachel Cohen: No. I listen to a lot of Bach, but I do
Robert Birnbaum: I always wonder when I see a biography of a world historical person —hasn’t anybody written enough?
Rachel Cohen: And everything about them?
Robert Birnbaum: One of the things I think is useful about your book and the series is that it’s obviates not having to read these six or seven hundred page tomes filled with endless details. I don’t find them helpful.
Rachel Cohen: That was one of the interesting things about writing this book was thinking, “How do you make a biography interesting?” As a form, this thing that we accept about biography are pretty dull. (laughter)
Robert Birnbaum: What the subject ate when he was five years old…
Rachel Cohen: There’s the grandparents and jobs that the parents had, and the education. It’s so tedious. There’s the train they took to Geneva and what time the train got there. Then there’s the death scene, and then there’s the legacy.
Robert Birnbaum: There is one major biography of Berenson [editor:subsequently I discovered there are two].
Rachel Cohen: I used it religiously.
Robert Birnbaum: You had to read it.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Over and over. With hundreds of little sticky notes and all that stuff because you’re reducing that and reinterpreting it.
Robert Birnbaum: Giving it a narrative as opposed to—
Rachel Cohen: Exactly. You want to make it the story of a life. And the other thing is that lives don’t really make stories. When fiction writers make stories, they’re deliberately making lots of choices about what they’re including. Great narrative is not soup to nuts. It doesn’t really go from birth to death.
Robert Birnbaum: We barely can connect the things in our own lives as we’re living them.
Rachel Cohen: Exactly.You try to make a narrative. We’re desperately trying to make narratives of our lives. That’s the interesting thing in biography. You think, “How do you relate the different things?”, so that you come out with something thats propulsive so you want to keep finding out what happens and that the things at the beginning seem connected to the things at the end. because they may not, in a life, feel that connected.
Robert Birnbaum: I thought you did a splendid job of concising how he managed to survive Italy and the War. I was surprised that he had champions that slowed the bureaucratic process down.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah.
Robert Birnbaum: That was interesting to me. There is a rough connection in my recent interest in Stefan Zweig [6] Two people who were exiles…
Rachel Cohen: That’s right. They were similar also in their commitment to a European culture that was, especially a Jewish internationalist position, after the first war. They were of the same milieu in that period between wars.
Robert Birnbaum: Did they ever meet, do you think? Both of them met everybody.
Rachel Cohen: Everybody.
Robert Birnbaum: They were the hubs of culture.
Rachel Cohen: I think that they did meet, although I couldn’t swear to that. I have a way of checking, but I know that Berenson read Zweig.
Robert Birnbaum: Do you find it interesting that he’s not read today?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. I do. Although I think he’s coming back a little bit.
Robert Birnbaum: Pushkin Press is publishing a lot of his writing.
Rachel Cohen: The New York Review of Books also has done several things.
Robert Birnbaum: There was a biography that came out last year called Three Lives.
Rachel Cohen: I wrote a review [7]of the one that Joan Acocella wrote a forward for, for The Chess Game.
Robert Birnbaum: It had a different title though didn’t it, for a long time? The Royal Game?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. That’s right. It was called The Royal Game but I think they returned it to The Chess Game and that edition, which is a spectacular book. That was a pleasurable project. I read a lot of his correspondence.
Robert Birnbaum: Where is it?
Rachel Cohen: It was in Bookforum. I think it’s online too, as we were saying. Everything is there. I really enjoyed trying to think about how his fiction works. It has a very particular kind of shape to it.
Robert Birnbaum: A French physician, who was also a novelist, wrote a splendid little novel called The Last Days. [8]Which covers the last five or six months of his life in Brazil.
The Last Days by Laurent Sesek
Rachel Cohen: Oh really?
Robert Birnbaum: It’s a novel, but it really seems like the writer had a very good sense of his harrowing ending… he was a tortured soul… as was his wife.
Rachel Cohen: You can really see it in those last works.
Rachel Cohen: If you really understood what was happening [in the world]then you went out of your mind.
Robert Birnbaum: You would have thought being in Petropolis, Brazil that he would have felt safe.
Rachel Cohen: You couldn’t get away from that.
Robert Birnbaum: There were German immigrants. There was life there.
Rachel Cohen: That’s right. I think it’s also hard now. German culture is so irrevocably marked for us by that war, but if you really grew up before that Germany was the fountain head of a lot of artistic and cultural life.
Robert Birnbaum: I think more so of Vienna. Vienna was a whole different thing.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah, for Zweig especially, that was a source for him. I guess I’m thinking of those things together. The musical and literary heritage and to feel that that was somehow being destroyed, or coming apart, or that maybe it had contributed to this horrible thing in some way. It’s very hard to get back to before. To think what it was to be somebody like Zweig.
Robert Birnbaum: Do I get the sense that you’re not in a hurry? You just write at a comfortable pace for the things that you do?
Rachel Cohen: That’s a nice way of saying it—”not in a hurry”. (laughter). I’m a very slow writer.
Robert Birnbaum: Your agents is still Eric Simonoff?
Rachel Cohen: He is, yeah.
Edward Jones, author of the Known World [photo : Robert Birnbaum
Rachel Cohen: He’s terrific.
Robert Birnbaum: Book agents for writers like you need to be like a member of your family.
Rachel Cohen: (laughs)He’s very patient. He never asks me anything. We go and we have coffee and if I say it’s going well, he says good. I think he’s got all different scales.
Robert Birnbaum He moved to a different, more powerful agency.
Rachel Cohen: He went to William Morris, and he’s the co-head of literary at William Morris.
Robert Birnbaum: Which means he must have money making authors, probably who are his money making writers.
Rachel Cohen: He has some very literary writers who sell, like Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Lethem, and people like that. He also does non-fiction. He does very well. He does really well. He’s really a wonderful combination of business and insight. He really understands the business and he’s very far sighted about it. He thinks in a long way about how to make places for literature in the world.
Robert Birnbaum: The long game’s always important.
Rachel Cohen: He really is good at that. At the end, he has wonderful taste. He took, not that in taking me he showed he had wonderful taste, but when he took me, I had written a few essays. He said , I’d like to represent you. I was put in touch by somebody who was already represented. I said I really didn’t know what I was doing.
Robert Birnbaum: You were looking for an agent.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah, I was, but I had an idea for that eventually became a book that you liked [A Chance Meeting ]
Robert Birnbaum: Did anyone else like that book? I’m thinking about a list of tragically overlooked books.
Rachel Cohen: No, people love that book actually. It’s still in print. People still write to me about it. It got wonderful reviews. Yeah. It was loved. Thank you.
Robert Birnbaum: Is it the case that one of the benefits of having someone like Eric is that you don’t think much about the business?
Rachel Cohen: I think it is. It’s also the case that having a steady teaching job has allowed me to have more flexibility about the kinds of things I write. I tried a little bit to make more of a living as a freelance writer, and that’s hard. It really is hard. I was writing about one piece a year for The New Yorker and I really liked doing it but I was spending six months researching the pieces. It was taking pretty much all my time to do that one piece a year. Which was maybe worth it but I couldn’t do it forever.
Robert Birnbaum: Do you have enough essays, criticisms, etc. that you could anthologize?
Rachel Cohen: Almost. The thing I’m proudest of, actually, that I wrote in conjunction with the Berenson book was an essay that was in The Believer. It was called Gold, Golden Gilded Glittery. [10]It was about four ages of artistic and financial invention and how financial invention and artistic invention often would have very similar structures in different periods of history. There was one part comparing double entry book keeping and perspective painting and another part comparing abstract expressionism and basically what got us into the Lehmann brothers. (laughter) .These amazing mathematical models that are ways of mapping the future into the present.
Robert Birnbaum: Algorithms.
Rachel Cohen: Exactly. That’s, in some sense, what abstract expressionism does is take future time and zap it into the present.
Hari Kunzru [photo: Robert Birnbaum
Rachel Cohen: Not so far fetched, yeah.
Robert Birnbaum: Right.
Rachel Cohen: I haven’t read that book but I guess maybe this is connected to things that we were talking about earlier. I’m interested in finding strange forms for the unbelievable knowledge streams that are available to us. In some sense, that’s what those formulas are obviously trying to do.
Robert Birnbaum: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but we’re talking about looking at old things in new ways…somehow seeing them from a more oblique angle.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. In conjunction with things with which they were never juxtaposed before so that you’re then just taking into account huge new things.
Robert Birnbaum: And that’s at the base of A Chance Meeting?
Rachel Cohen: Yes.
Robert Birnbaum: About two individuals that most people wouldn’t see connecting.
Rachel Cohen: Through a landscape in some sense, yeah.
XXRobert Birnbaum: Speaking of landscape, do you know Simon Schama’s book Landscape and Memory[12]?
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. I do know that book. Thank you for reminding me of it, because I haven’t looked at in a while. You asked before, am I going to do something formally innovative again. Both of my current projects are that. To me, if you’re really trying to reflect the way we see now, it requires some kind of formal innovation. You want something that…
Robert Birnbaum: Like Jennifer Egan [13]writing a novel in PowerPoint?
Rachel Cohen: That’s a possibility?
Robert Birnbaum: She did it.
Rachel Cohen: I know. I know. I know. I don’t know if that’s it, but I do think is in some sense, yes. In some sense, I like that she just goes for it. She thinks, “Okay. Maybe there’s a way to do this. Let me see what I can do.” I feel that too about these little essays that I’m writing online that are about paintings. Part of the reason I’m interested in the impressionists is because they’ve had to respond to photography. They were the first group of painters who had grown up with photography and had to think about the painted image with the print image always in their mind. They responded brilliantly. They really, in some sense, they seemed to be very stimulated. They both used photographs themselves in order to paint and worked to distinguish painting from photography. That seems the variety and possibility of invention that come with new technology. It was an interesting thing that they were able to do. And formally, they were brilliantly inventive.
Robert Birnbaum: Impressionists are seemingly dismissed by a lot of people. Because, we’re over saturated with them? You see them so often,
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. Ironically, they’re still reproduced. They were of a world where that stuff, … There was an exhibition last year at the Met that was called “Impressionism and Fashion.’ There’s some way in which they’re very close to apparel. They already look like fashion.
Robert Birnbaum: There’s always books being issued on the Impressionists. This year I got a book about Impressionists’s images of water.
Rachel Cohen: They’re incredibly specific. So many books about Monet and Cézanne, but I do think they’ve become very easy for us to love, but that in itself is very interesting because they were not. They were wild when they were made. People thought they were slap dash and vulgar, and ugly, and that the colors they chose were ugly. That the combinations of colors, but the started to do something that became the way we see things. Now everything looks like a Monet, or even Van Gogh.
Robert Birnbaum: You can make photographs that look like Monet’s with certain filters. There’s a photographer named Abelardo Morell who lives around here and one of the projects he’s going to embark on is he wants to go to Giverny. He wants to go there and take photographs just because things were painted there. I think he uses tents to, he has a very specific process where he uses the inside and outside of something. As a photography, he’s impressed by painting. He said something to me about it and I didn’t even realize people still painted.
Rachel Cohen: For me, I was going to tell you this story at the beginning actually with my little girl, Sylvia, that after many times going to the MFA to see paintings, I thought we should go to the children’s museum. I took her to the children’s museum. The things she loved there was the bubbles. They have bubbles for kids, big vats of bubble stuff and you can blow bubbles and move stuff around with bubbles and bubbles float in the air. She couldn’t get enough of the bubbles. We came home and she has a little plastic horse called Lagoo and she was sending Magoo to the museum. Magoo was going to the museum and I said, “Some museums have paintings, and some museums have bubbles, and which kind is Magoo going to? She said, “Bubbles.” (laughter) Don’t be stupid. Of course bubbles. Afterwards, I was thinking, “That’s what paintings are like for me.” It’s like bubbles, like you’re really physically in them in a way that’s totally different than any other visual experience or museum experience. No photograph gives me that experience of entering and being part of a world, breathing the air, feeling the weather. I was pleased about that in a way. I think she’s getting the right idea of museums, that they are collectors of direct experience.
Robert Birnbaum: For me the museum experience is always difficult because there’s so much. It’s hard to sit in front of one thing even though one thing seems to draw you.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah.
Robert Birnbaum: Even if I end up spending more time on one thing you’re distracted. It’s like reading.
Rachel Cohen: You feel like, “Oh, but there are fifteen thing under my bedside table.” Maybe somehow getting patient with that is a significant part of enjoying museums. For me, feeling that I go often makes me feel like, “Well, I’ll be here again.” It doesn’t matter if I go past all of these things. Today, I’m just going to look at this thing. I tend to only look at one or two things. Maybe walk past a few things to get a sense of what I might like to look at next. Being patient with that is helpful.
Robert Birnbaum: I’ve relied on museums to send me the monographs of the exhibitions.
Rachel Cohen: If you’re fundamentally a reader, that’s a way into the images.
Guernica by Pablo PIcasso
Robert Birnbaum: I don’t think a reproduction of Guernica is going to do it for me, but I understand and I’m not sure how I would look at it anyway. Guernica always reminds of the opening of that film on Basquiat.[14] Have you see the film by Julian Schnabel
Rachel Cohen: Yeah.
Robert Birnbaum: Which opens with a kid staring at Guernica.[15] Forever that’s the way I see the painting now. (laughter)
Rachel Cohen: I think it’s somehow a medium that’s hard to get into relation with or something. That is also part of what interests me and it used to part of everybody’s life, or more regularly part of people’s lives. Not so much anymore.
Robert Birnbaum: I own one painting. The painting I have is of a man with short hair, dressed in a slip on the edge of a cliff. His hands seem to be scrunched up, expressing a kind of anger or tension, or something like that. It got to me.
Rachel Cohen: That is the thing about paintings. The way you described that, it was the way somebody would describe a dream or something. The images in a dream and they’re condensed in the way that dreams are. They’re powerful and they allow you to imaging different directions out of them. All of that can be true of photographs, or of films, certainly.
Robert Birnbaum: I like Fernando Botero [16]too. They’re sort of silly, but not. I don’t know, his cartoonish way of looking at painting but a lot of it has to do with colors and the odd people you put in paintings.
Botero “Picasso” 1999
Rachel Cohen: Which, in a way, can be a lot like fiction. You’re making a world, inhabited by people. It’s not the real world but it’s close to the real world and considering it
Robert Birnbaum: Writer’s today, who I think are very conscious of putting some kind of artwork in their narratives. Not necessarily novels. There is a writer, [17],who has these hybrid illustrated novels. Anyway, have you written other fiction besides the novel you’re working on. Its a
Rachel Cohen: Not really.I’ve written a few stories.
Robert Birnbaum: Brave place to start.
Rachel Cohen: (laughter) I guess so.
Robert Birnbaum: Pretty ambitious.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. I know. I know. I guess I love to read novels. I’m not such a short story reader. I admire the craft of them, but they’re not where my own attention gravitates. I have always loved novels, so somehow that was where I headed. I had tried to write a novel once before and failed.
Robert Birnbaum: Where is it?
Rachel Cohen: What?
Robert Birnbaum: You trashed it or did you…?
Rachel Cohen: Trashed it. It exists on some obsolete computer that would hard to access now but it wasn’t worth keeping.
Robert Birnbaum: I’m always fascinated with people’s, what they do with their failed first efforts. Some people keep them, somewhere.
Rachel Cohen: It’s somewhere.
Robert Birnbaum: They’re closer to them than you’ve described.And some people just can throw them away. That’s it, forget it.
Rachel Cohen: This was so bad that I could let go of it. I really could. I failed several times in trying to write the thing I’m writing now and I kept all of those failures.
Robert Birnbaum: You’re going to get it right.
Rachel Cohen: I am. I hope so. I hope so. Yeah. I like to go live in a world for a long time, so to me the working on a novel was a lot at the beginning, which is actually an unbelievable effort is getting the world up and running. Getting it so that it has it’s own principles of functions and it’s own kind of characters and it’s own language. Now that that’s all there
Robert Birnbaum: Do you know what the ending is?
Rachel Cohen: I do now, although only recently. I worked on it for six years before I started to have the sense of how it might finish. All of that development, once you’re far enough along that it is a place, then going there is…
Robert Birnbaum: Do you get the same feeling in writing fiction as you do from writing other forms
Rachel Cohen: It’s a different internal experience, I think. My feeling is they’re related things. You still need a lot of imagination to write non-fiction. You still need openness and sensitivity.
Robert Birnbaum: A certain kind of excitement or uplift.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah. It’s different. I get excited from both things but the feeling of one is different. Maybe more internal for the fiction and non-fiction I have a little more sense of, “This is an idea that has purchase. This is a thought that has stuff that’s worth some consideration.”
Robert Birnbaum: You may not have to work as hard because you have a grasp of what it involves?
Rachel Cohen: The stages of work are different. In non-fiction, for me there’s a huge amount of research before there starts to be a feeling of what the thoughts are that are interesting. There’s one period of wandering and reading and not knowing and then the gears turn. In fiction, the preparatory work is more imagination. Wondering also, but not accumulating facts. Then when things start to get going it’s because the world is alive. It’s a little bit different thing than a non-fiction where it’s in line].
Robert Birnbaum: What do you like reading? You said you like to read novels. What novels have stood out to you, let’s say this past year?
Rachel Cohen: Past year? I haven’t been reading that much because of the baby and the various projects. One thing I’ve been reading over and over is Jane Austen’s Persuasion because that is a really fantastic book. That’s a wonderful thing to read. I’ve read some things which have been pleasure to me. I read Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, and that was fun to read, go through and have the exhilaration of story. I read Margot Livesey’s Jane Eyre book, The Flight of Gemma Hardy and really enjoyed the pulse of that. Actually, now that I think of it, those are both novels well-plotted novels where you move through. That’s actually not the kind of book I’m writing. (laughs) Anyway, those are the ones I like.
Robert Birnbaum: What’s a formative book for you in your life? What’s a book that when you read it you had some sort of “a-ha” moment?
Rachel Cohen: The Brother’s Karamazov is a book that I read over and over.
Robert Birnbaum: I have a problem with Russian novels. I can’t remember the names. I can’t pronounce the names. I can’t remember the names. It’s hard for me to
Rachel Cohen: Hold them. Yeah. They sprawl. They really do sprawl. It’s true.
Robert Birnbaum: I’m fascinated by people who say War and Peace is the greatest novel ever. I wish I read it. I wonder if somebody would actually anglicize all the names.
Rachel Cohen: So you could read it, or give you some visual diagram that you can see and that would keep your
Robert Birnbaum: They must be on audio, right? War and Peace? Although a length audio.
Rachel Cohen: Yeah.
Robert Birnbaum: Maybe that’s what I should do.
Rachel Cohen: If somebody was saying it for you then…
Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres
Robert Birnbaum: Actually, there was a novel that Louis de Bernières [18]wrote, it was the one after Corelli’s Mandolin. Birds Without Wings —the one about Anatolia. It was a vivid novel about the life in in the Eastern Mediterranean around the turn of the 20th century , and there was an audio version that makes all these, there are eight or nine different nationalities in this book and all manner of tongue twisting kinds of names, so after reading it, hearing it was illuminating.
Rachel Cohen:I’m really good at names. Proper names correlate and make sense to me. I’m definitely the person who’ll leaf through the index of a book first to see who’s in it. Then I remember all the places where they are. Those books map for me. I can see all the people in them in an almost visual way.
Robert Birnbaum: You were teaching at Sarah Lawrence?
Rachel Cohen: I’m not teaching right now. I’m on leave. I’m on this super extended leave that they’re kindly making available to me.
Robert Birnbaum: What’s Sarah Lawrence look like these days?
Rachel Cohen: Sarah Lawrence is great. I love Sarah Lawrence. I’ve had seven or eight years of teaching there. I have tenure there. It’s been a wonderful place to be. The student body is extremely creative. They went a different route than a lot of the schools. They didn’t take test scores. They didn’t make that the main thing about admission. As a consequence they got all kinds of terrific students who are not necessarily good at taking standardized tests. Those are actually wonderful people to teach in creative writing. Those are the students you want.
Robert Birnbaum: That’s pretty bold.
Rachel Cohen: It was bold and really good. They have great students.
Robert Birnbaum: What are the aspirations of these great students?
Rachel Cohen: Many of them want to work in the arts somehow. There are other kinds of students too. There are scientists and other things, but there’s a strong arts community.
Robert Birnbaum: Affluent backgrounds?
Rachel Cohen: A mixture. It’s an extremely expensive school. Some of the students have a lot of money. Some of the students are scholarship students without much money. That is a challenge.
Robert Birnbaum:In James Galdofini’s last movie Enough Said ,[19]with Julia Dreyfus. There’s a short scene where Galdofini’s really snotty daughter, who’s very hip, meets Dreyfus and they’re talking about colleges. Dreyfus’ daughter is off going to Sarah Lawrence in the fall, and the snotty little girl said, “Oh, it’s going downhill.” (laughter) Like this eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old girl knows anything.
Rachel Cohen: They say it’s going downhill. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s going downhill. The other thing I liked at Sarah Lawrence is the graduate program. I taught a lot in the graduate non-fiction program. They’re wonderful students there, many of them returning after having working in various ways in the world. Those are great.
Robert Birnbaum: Who are your peers there? In writing?
Rachel Cohen: The person who I work with most closely is Vijay Seshadri, who’s a wonderful poet, and who is the director of the non-fiction program. That’s been really nice. Our other close colleague in non-fiction is Jo Ann Beard, who also writes fiction. That group has been really wonderful. There are other people who come through and teach. Nicky Dawidoff [20]has taught.
Robert Birnbaum: I’m talking to him next week.
Rachel Cohen: Oh really? He’s going to be in town I think.
Robert Birnbaum: I talked to him years ago. He wrote a book about his grandfather, but he’s also edited an anthology on baseball for The Library of America.
Rachel Cohen: Yes. Does he writes a lot on sports.
Robert Birnbaum: His new book is about football, a sport that I hate. I hate football. My son plays football. But I hate it especially the upper levels—college and the pros.
To Be Continued
######
1 Rachel Cohen’s website
2 Ansel Adams photographs
3 Saul Steinberg’s art
4 One of my 5 or 6 conversations with Robert Stone
5 Biographies of Bernard Berenson
6 On Stefan Zweig
7 Rachel Cohen’s review of The Chess Game by Stefan Zweig
8 The Last Days by Laurent Seksik
9 One of my conversations (2004)with Edward Jones
10 Golden Gilded Glittery by Rachel Cohen
11 My LA Review of Books chat with Hari Kunzru,
12 Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama
13 My most recent conversation with Jennifer Egan
14 Basquit by Julian Schnabel
15 Guernica by Pablo Picasso
16 Columbian painter Fernando Botero
17 Writer Mark Z. Danielewski ‘s website
18 My last conversation with Louis de Bernières
19 Trailer for Enough Said
20 Talking with Nicholas Dawidoff
From my vantage point up here in tight-sphincteral New England, New Orleans has always looked like the most interesting city in the USA. Which is why the great natural(and then some) disaster known, like a super model, as Katrina, is exponentially fascinating. Firstly, because of the callous disregard exhibited by a regime busy embroiling this country in a disastrous military adventure as effects of Katrina unfolded and then allowing incompetence (remember FEMA head ‘Brownie’?) and mean-spiritedness to triumph. As the 10th anniversary of Katrina draws nigh let’s revisit and reflect.
There is a rich bibliography of fiction connected to the Big Easy (Robert Stone’s Hall of Mirrors comes to mind) and there have been some creditable recent additions
City of Refuge byTom Piazza
City of Refuge byTom Piazza
In City of Refuge, a heart-wrenching novel from Tom Piazza, the author of the award-winning Why New Orleans Matters, two New Orleans families—one black and one white—confront Hurricane Katrina, a storm that will change the course of their lives. Reaching across America—from the neighborhoods ofNew Orleans to Texas, Chicago, and elsewhere—City of Refuge explores this turning point in American culture, one whose reverberations are only beginning to be underst
Secessia by Kent Wascom
Secessia by Kent Wascom
New Orleans, May 1862. The largest city in the ill-starred confederacy has fallen to Union troops under the soon-to-be-infamous General Benjamin “the Beast” Butler. The city is rife with madness and rage. When twelve-year-old Joseph Woolsack disappears from his home, he draws into the unrest his mother, Elise, a mixed-race woman passing for white, and his father, Angel, whose long and wicked life is drawing to a close. What follows forces mother and son into a dark new world: Joseph must come to grips with his father’s legacy of violence and his growing sentiment for Cuban exile Marina Fandal, the only survivor of a shipwreck that claimed the lives of her parents. Elise must struggle to maintain a hold on her sanity, her son and her own precarious station, but is threatened by the resurgence of a troubling figure from her past, Dr. Emile Sabatier, a fanatical physician who adores disease and is deeply mired in the conspiracy and intrigue surrounding the occupation of the city. Their paths all intersect with General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, a man who history will call a beast, but whose avarice and brutal acumen are ideally suited to the task of governing an “ungovernable city.” Alternating between the perspectives of the five characters of Elise, Dr. Sabatier, Joseph, Marina, and Butler, Secessia weaves a tapestry of ravenous greed and malformed love, of slavery and desperation, set within the baroque melting-pot that is New Orleans. A Gothic tableaux vivant of epic scope and intimate horror, Secessia is the netherworld reflection of the conflict between north and south.
The Lower Quarter by Elise Blackwell
The Lower Quarter by Elise Blackwell
A man murdered during Katrina in a hotel room two blocks from her art-restoration studio was closely tied to a part of Johanna’s past that she would like kept secret. But missing from the crime scene is a valuable artwork painted in 1926 by a renowned Belgian artist that might bring it all back.An acquaintance, Clay Fontenot, who has enabled a wide variety of personal violations in his life, some of which he has enjoyed, is the scion of a powerful New Orleans family.And Marion is an artist and masseuse from the Quarter who has returned after Katrina to rebuild her life.When Eli, a convicted art thief, is sent to find the missing painting, all of their stories weave together in the slightly deranged halls of the Quarter.
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge is a portrait of a city under siege.Cartoonist Josh Neufeld depicts seven extraordinary true stories of survival in the days leading up to and following Hurricane Katrina. Here we meet Denise, a counselor and social worker, and a sixth-generation New Orleanian; “The Doctor,” a proud fixture of the French Quarter; Abbas and Darnell, two friends who face the storm from Abbas’ s family-run market; Kwame, a pastor’s son just entering his senior year of high school; and the young couple Leo and Michelle, who both grew up in the city. Each is forced to confront the same wrenching decision–whether to stay or to flee. … A.D. presents a city in chaos and shines a bright, profoundly human light on the tragedies and triumphs that took place within it.
ANOTHER KIND OF HURRICANE By Tamara Ellis Smith
ANOTHER KIND OF HURRICANE By Tamara Ellis Smith
…two very different characters—a black boy who loses his home in Hurricane Katrina and a white boy in Vermont who loses his best friend in a tragic accident—come together to find healing. A hurricane, a tragic death, two boys, one marble. How they intertwine is at the heart of this beautiful, poignant book. When ten-year-old Zavion loses his home in Hurricane Katrina, he and his father are forced to flee to Baton Rouge. And when Henry, a ten-year-old boy in northern Vermont, tragically loses his best friend, Wayne, he flees to ravaged New Orleans to help with hurricane relief efforts—and to search for a marble that was in the pocket of a pair of jeans donated to the Red Cross.
Drowned City by Don Brown
Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans
… Hurricane Katrina’s monstrous winds and surging water overwhelmed the protective levees around low-lying New Orleans, Louisiana. Eighty percent of the city flooded, in some places under twenty feet of water. Property damages across the Gulf Coast topped $100 billion. One thousand eight hundred and thirty-three people lost their lives. The riveting tale of this historic storm and the drowning of an American city is one of selflessness, heroism, and courage—and also of incompetence, racism, and criminality.Don Brown’s kinetic art and as-it-happens narrative capture both the tragedy and triumph of one of the worst natural disasters in American history. A portion of the proceeds from this book has been donated to Habitat for Humanity New Orleans.
Why New Orleans Matters
by Tom Piazza
Why New Orleans Matters Paperback by Tom Piazza (
In the aftermath of Katrina and the disaster that followed, promises were made, forgotten, and renewed. Now what will become of New Orleans in the years ahead? What do this proud, battered city and its people mean to America and the world? Tom Piazza illuminates the storied culture and uncertain future of this great and neglected American metropolis by evoking the sensuous rapture of the city that gave us jazz music and Creole cooking; examining its deep undercurrents of corruption, racism, and injustice; and explaining how its people endure and transcend those conditions. And, perhaps most important, he asks us all to consider the spirit of this place and all the things it has shared with the world: its grace and beauty, resilience and soul.
Dr John aka mac Rebeneck makes New Orleans musical gumbo
The Katrina Decade: Images of an Altered City by
David G. Spielman
The Katrina Decade: Images of an Altered City by David G. Spielman
In the 10 years since, David G. Spielman embraced the traditions of photographers from the Works Progress Administration and Farm Security Administration and documented subtle changes throughout his beloved city.’New Orleans has a melancholy beauty that defies logic and transcends time,’says Spielman. Vines creep up the side of a home that could be vacant or occupied. Graffiti mars or beautifies? the walls of an abandoned building. Readers must draw their own conclusions from his haunting black-and-white images.
When Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans, Spielman decided to stay and weather the storm, assisting his Uptown neighbors, the sisters of the order of Poor Clare. Katrina passed, and as the flood waters filled the city, the scope of the devastation only gradually dawned on Spielman, who was cut off from outside communication. Faced with the greatest personal and professional challenge of his life, he determined to document the scene unfolding around him. He managed to secure a generator to power his laptop computer, and in the days, weeks, and months after August 29, 2005, he transmitted emails to hundreds of friends and clients and cautiously traversed the city taking photographs. In Katrinaville Chronicles: Images and Observations from a New Orleans Photographer Spielman’s gathered images and observations, relating his unique perspective on and experience of a historic catastrophe. He never expected his emails to survive beyond the day he sent them. But his descriptions of what he was seeing, hearing, smelling, thinking, feeling, and fearing in post Katrina New Orleans were forwarded again and again, even around the globe. They reveal the best and worst in Spielman: a Samaritan who becomes caretaker of the sisters’ monastery, as well as a stressed gent who frets about the lack of starched shirts and a decent cup of coffee. He rants about political leaders and voices a deep concern for his city’s future. He tells of feeling overwhelmed, at a loss for words, unable to capture on film the individual tragedies manifested in home after destroyed home, many marked by death. His arresting black and white photographs record the details of the disaster on both a grand and an intimate scale, at times recalling works by Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. What emerges above all is Spielman’s buoyant spirit. Living without electricity or running water and existing on peanut butter sandwiches, he nonetheless is able to appreciate the complete quiet and unadulterated starlight in a surreal city without power. He encourages his fellow citizens to see Katrina as an opportunity for improving upon the past and making a better tomorrow.
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink
Five Days at Memorial,the culmination of six years of reporting, is Sheri Fink’s landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina – and her portrayal of the quest for truth and justice.Physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs 5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amid chaos.fter Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in America for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better.
Here’s a sample of Spike Lee’s (wacked)four part documentary When The Levees Broke:
Katrina: After the Flood by Gary Rivlin
Katrina: After the Flood by Gary Rivlin (
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana—on August 29, 2005—journalist Gary Rivlin traces the storm’s immediate damage, the city of New Orleans’s efforts to rebuild itself, and the storm’s lasting affects not just on the city’s geography and infrastructure—but on the psychic, racial, and social fabric of one of this nation’s great cities.Much of New Orleans still sat under water the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the city after Hurricane Katrina. Then a staff reporter for The New York Times, he was heading into the city to survey the damage. The Interstate was eerily empty. Soldiers in uniform and armed with assault rifles stopped him. Water reached the eaves of houses for as far as the eye could see.Four out of every five houses—eighty percent of the city’s housing stock—had been flooded. Around that same proportion of schools and businesses were wrecked. The weight of all that water on the streets cracked gas and water and sewer pipes all around town and the deluge had drowned almost every power substation and rendered unusable most of the city’s water and sewer system.
People living in flooded areas of the city could not be expected to pay their property taxes for the foreseeable future. Nor would all those boarded-up businesses—21,000 of the city’s 22,000 businesses were still shuttered six months after the storm—be contributing their share of sales taxes and other fees to the city’s coffers. Six weeks after the storm, the city laid off half its workforce—precisely when so many people were turning to its government for help. Meanwhile, cynics both in and out of the Beltway were questioning the use of taxpayer dollars to rebuild a city that sat mostly below sea level. How could the city possibly come back?
Katrina traces the stories of New Orleanians of all stripes—politicians and business owners, teachers and bus drivers, poor and wealthy, black and white—as they confront the aftermath of one of the great tragedies of our age and reconstruct, change, and in some cases abandon a city that’s the soul of this nation.
We’re Still Here Ya Bastards by Roberta Brandes Gratz
We’re Still Here Ya Bastards by Roberta Brandes Gratz
Gratz presents a panoramic look at New Orleans’s revival in the years following the hurricane.sharing the stories of people who returned to their homes and have taken the rebuilding of their city into their own hands. It shows how the city—from the Lower Ninth Ward to the storied French Quarter to Bayou Bienvenue—is recovering despite flawed governmental policies that promote disaster capitalism rather than the public good. While tracing positive trends, Gratz also investigates the most fiercely debated issues and challenges facing the city: a violent and corrupt prison system, the tragic closing of Charity Hospital, the future of public education, and the rise of gentrification.
Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas by Rebecca Solnit, Rebecca Snedeker
Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas by Rebecca Solnit, Rebecca Snedeker
This book is a reinvention of the traditional atlas, one that provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. More than twenty essays assemble a chorus of vibrant voices, including geographers, scholars of sugar and bananas, the city’s remarkable musicians, prison activists, environmentalists, Arab and Native voices, and local experts, as well as the coauthors’ compelling contributions. Featuring 22 full-color two-page-spread maps, Unfathomable City plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. The innovative maps’ precision and specificity shift our notions of the Mississippi, the Caribbean, Mardi Gras, jazz, soils and trees, generational roots, and many other subjects, and expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced. Together with the inspired texts, they show New Orleans as both an imperiled city—by erosion, crime, corruption, and sea level rise—and an ageless city that lives in music as a form of cultural resistance. Compact, lively, and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place.
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit
Natural and man-made disasters can be utopias that showcase human solidarity and point the way to a freer society, according this stimulating contrarian study. Solnit reproves civil defense planners, media alarmists and Hollywood directors who insist that disasters produce terrified mobs prone to looting, murder and cannibalism unless controlled by armed force and government expertise. Surveying disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, she shows that the typical response to calamity is spontaneous altruism, self-organization and mutual aid, with neighbors and strangers calmly rescuing, feeding and housing each other. Indeed, the main problem in such emergencies, she contends, is the elite panic of officials who clamp down with National Guardsmen and stifling regulations. Solnit makes a compelling—and timely—case for the ability of ordinary people to collectively surmount the direst of challenges
And of course David Simon’s love song to New Orleans, Treme.
* Due to lack of time (or as one friend insists, indolence)book descriptions are taken from publishers websites.
![Robert Stone [photo:Robert Birnbaum]](https://ourmaninboston.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/robertstone.jpg)
Robert Stone [photo:Robert Birnbaum]
In my career (for lack of a better word— ‘preoccupation’ won’t cut it) as a journalist I was privileged to have five or 6 conversations with Robert Stone. A couple of them are on line, here and here.
News of his passing was occasion for me recalling what Stone’s work and conversations meant to me (I last saw him in December 2013, a chat I have yet to make public). I did recall that when I met with Robert at the time of Damascus Gate‘s publication, we touched on music he was listening to currently — which happened to be the Shostakovich’s String Quartets.
Quartet #8 is the most popular of the composers’ fifteen string quartets and reportedly ‘autobiographical:
Currently reading Irene by Pierre Lemaitre (MacLehose Press)
The last time (September 2011) I interviewed novelist, literary critic, Agni editor, Boston University mentor ,father of two boys, Billy Giraldi at the Keltic Krust ,was the first time we met. Three years later, Giraldi has published his second novel, Hold The Dark (WW Norton/Liveright) and written innumerable literary critiques for The Daily Beast, Oxford American, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review and the New York Times and most recently a review of James Franco’s latest directorial effort,Child of God>And my favorite local coffee shoppe, The Keltic Krust, has closed.
Giraldi and I have become friends such that the occasionally glib gabfest that follows might give the impression that he is not a serious literatus. He is. Below he and I address a number of artistic and existential issues as well as his second novel,set in a remote Alaskan lanscape, characters transversing a fierce and foreboding terrain. People die. Wolves howl. So read on, dear reader, read on:
RB: Let’s do a little play acting, a little role playing. We’re at a party— play along. Hi, what do you do?
WG: I chase after my kids in Cambridge and try to make sure they aren’t maimed on the way to becoming upstanding citizens.
RB: I mean what do you do for work?
WG: That is work, Red [‘Red’ being my nom de guerre].
RB: What do you do for money?
WG: Boston University pays me to entertain their many colorful customers.
![William Giraldi [photo: Robert Birnbaum]](https://ourmaninboston.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/2014-09-23-15-28-28-1.jpg)
William Giraldi [photo: Robert Birnbaum]
RB: Can you just tell me what you do?
WG: I teach them essay writing and the proper ways of reading.
RB: That’s how you would answer? That’s your first answer? You would not say,” I am a writer?”
WG: You asked what I do for money, Red. Samuel Johnson’s infamous quip notwithstanding, who writes for money?
RB: Okay, let’s go real here, enough role playing. You do several kinds of writing—novels, essays, literary criticism. Is there one that gives you more pleasure than the others?
WG: Yes, the criticism.
RB: Then why bother with the fiction?
WG: Because no one wants to pay me for criticism.
RB: So you do write for money!
WG: We’re talking pittances here. No publisher wants essays, but magazines need them, and I can use the pittance to help feed the ravenous little monsters who live in my house. You wouldn’t believe how they eat.
RB: What does the New Republic pay you? They do pay you?
WG: All the venues I write for pay me, yes, but I mean my editor at Norton isn’t interested in a book of criticism because he wouldn’t be able to sell it.
RB: Are you a regular contributor now at the New Republic?
WG: I’ve done a bunch of pieces for them, on Orwell, on Kafka, on Primo Levi. I’m not sure how regular that is.
RB: Primo Levi. You’re not qualified, are you? You’re not Jewish.
WG: I’m even less qualified to do Orwell and Kafka, but one fakes it as well as one can.
RB: So why do you gravitate to literary criticism as opposed to other forms?
WG: It allows me to engage in what most compels me—
RB: And impress people with your vocabulary.
WG: Let’s not underestimate that, okay. But it allows me to use what I know, and let’s me comprehend authors and books in a way that I couldn’t without writing about them. I understand Kafka better after writing about him. That’s my only mission.
RB: So you want to work out your own understanding of literature. But you must begin with a certain understanding, so you refine that understanding—is that what’s going on?
WG: That has to happen, yes, and certainly with someone such as Kafka. Everyone begins with certain popular conceptions of Kafka. People know the basics—about The Metamorphoses, some of the stories such as “In the Penal Colony”—but the trick is to transcend those popular conceptions and arrive at a more complex or nuanced place. Reading all of Kafka, delving into his body of work—which is what I do every time I write about an important author—you come away with a view very different from general conceptions.
RB: Do you know Jay Cantor’s book of stories about Kafka [Forgiving the Angel: Four Stories for Franz Kafka]? He objects to the overuse of the word “Kafkaesque.”
Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor
WG: I say the same in my piece. Not only do I object to it, but I’m certain that it’s a meaningless term. Kafka won’t be reduced to an adjective.
RB: People are using words they don’t have an understanding of and referring to a writer whom they probably haven’t read.
WG: Shocking, I know. In my piece, I speak about the occasion when I knew we’d entered the point of no return with the word “Kafkaesque.” It was in a movie theater, looking at an abomination called Congo, adapted from an equal abomination vomited by Michael Crichton. Don’t ask why I went to see this: I was young and I believe a beautiful girl was involved. But one character uses the word “Kafkaesque” so egregiously and erroneously—referring to a murderous band of apes, I believe—that I knew the word would never recover any meaning. Harold Bloom prefers “Kafkan.” That’s an improvement, though perhaps the difference between nothing and nothing much.
RB: How about “Kafkoid”? I mean, language is a living thing. How about the now great overuse of the word “epic”? You have to hang around with some teenagers, because “epic” is a big word now. It’s like saying “awesome.” This is what I’m hearing.
WG: Language is a living thing only in the hands of potent writers. But, you know, about “epic,” that’s not good, Red, because—
RB: Will you stop looking at your own book . . .
WG: Well, I’m just looking at what Dennis Lehane said about Hold the Dark: “A taut, muscular, and often unforgettable journey into the heart of darkness. Epic, relentless, and beautifully realized.”
RB: And Kafkaesque. You wanna read all the blurbs now?
WG: I’ve got to say, Red, that use of “epic” sounds not bad there, referring to my little tale.
RB: Well, I guess we might as well talk about your book.
Hold the Dark by William Giraldi
WG: Can I jar a memory in you? When we first met, when Busy Monsters came out, you told me you didn’t really like the novel but it still made you want to talk to me. Now, now let’s hear what the guy has to say about Hold the Dark.
Busy Monsters by William Giraldi
RB: I’ll always want to talk to you because you use the word “raven” as a verb. But they’re very different books, and frankly, I never thought of you as the writer of Busy Monsters, and it wasn’t the kind of novel I’d usually read. I don’t know why I read it, but I did, and I wasn’t even paid to do it. But Hold the Dark is the kind of novel I’d read, and not just because of the other novelists some reviewers are referencing. Actually, I can think of some women writers who come close to Hold the Dark: Bonnie Jo Campbell is great, and the Australian Courtney Collins. They set their stories in remote regions where nature intrudes upon the narrative, where people are outsiders. I think of them as anti New York novels, surroundings you aren’t familiar with, no brand names, no career strivings and divorces. Hard to be original with shit like that.
Once Upon A River by Bonnie Jo Campbell
WG: A bored writer of letters-to-the-editor wrote in to the New York Times to complain about the favorable review of Hold the Dark. This was some unstrung fella in the wilds of Colorado, and his complaint was that I was an “urban elite” who had no business writing about the wilderness.
RB: Right. What do you know about Alaska?
WG: Anyone who’s lived through a New England winter knows enough about snow and ice to imagine what kind of cold breathes in other corners of America. But that was sweet of this person who never learned to read fiction, to call me an “urban elite”—the first word is technically accurate and the second word is always a compliment to my ears. What’s the opposite of elite?
RB: Right, and he was really recognizing the novelist’s chore, wasn’t he. You’re only allowed to write about traffic patterns in Cambridge and picking up your kids from school. That’s what you should be limited to. I guess I have to ask you: did you write the book you set out to write? Or did it change as you went along?
WG: It is, yes. To the degree that any novelist understands what lies beneath, I wrote the book I had envisioned.
RB: What drove it? Character, setting, plot?
WG: No, language. It’s always language—language as it relates to character. This is the difference between commercial fiction and fiction that aims for something more: the former is a mere public service message and the latter is an investigation into the durability and limits of language. Hold the Dark has been characterized as a literary thriller, and someone called it “action literature,” which defies meaning, I think. I’m not sure where they’re coming from because the novel is very much about the enigma of evil and the majesty of nature; it’s about a spiritual crisis that morphs into a spiritual quest. I’ve been lucky in my reviewers because almost all of them have spoken to the pitch of the language, to the tenor of the prose—without some cognizance of that, the novel loses its significance.
RB: It is sort of surprising to take a very raw landscape and terrain, with very nonurban or unsophisticated people, and apply a sophisticated, descriptive, specific language to them. You’re intricate in your descriptions of everything that takes place in this story.
WG: The landscape dictates its own language. Every novel demands its own style. As for the intricate descriptions, my editor pushed me in that direction—
RB: Robert Weil?
WG: The great Robert Weil. He pushed me to bring to life the village of Keelut in a more detailed way. I had the wilderness down, but he wanted that village to pop, and he was right, as usual.
RB: Hey, you live in Cambridge!
WG: Read enough Jack London and all of sudden you live on the edge of the Yukon.
RB: He didn’t have to deal with climate change.
WG: What a coincidence. We aren’t really dealing with it either.
RB: But you’ve never been to Alaska. So few people have.
WG: So it then becomes a question of audacity. Goethe says this, that a writer must have “a touch of audacity” if he wishes to make a work of art. In my wishes for this novel, I needed much more than a touch—I needed a kick of audacity to imagine that terrain, a terrain I deliberately did not visit for fear of turning this novel into loyal reportage, another fact-filled dispatch. For the longest time, the novel had no specific setting at all. Remoteness, ice and snow—that was it. The story could have been taking place on the moon, for all anybody could have known.
RB: Where would the wolves have come from?
WG: Imaginative literature doesn’t or shouldn’t care about those questions. I was fine with the namelessness of the locale, but my publisher wouldn’t have been. The Alaskan wild is an inherently mysterious place—a domain that keeps its secrets well and has a complete separation from the normal rules of existence. Behavior is different there, an outlaw spirit that pervades that territory. If somebody would say that I’m taking a rather big risk in writing about a place only from imagination—
RB: Who would say that?
WG: Somebody with a conviction against the freedom of imagination. A philistine, in other words.
RB: When you critique a book, do you talk about an author risking something?
WG: I have, yes. No risks, no rewards—isn’t that the cliché? But one’s heroes give one the bravery to take big risks in fiction. Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage without ever having taken part in the Civil War—he was born six years after the end of the war. Saul Bellow wrote Henderson the Rain King before he had ever step foot in Africa. Kurt Vonnegut obviously never rocketed to Mars or a moon of Saturn. I won’t adhere to that fallow idea that says fiction should be reportage. I could have spent a year in Alaska and turned this novel into a demographical study, a meteorological report, but that wouldn’t have satisfied the demands of literature. Novels are a product of the imagination or else they are gussied-up newspaper articles, another useless simulacrum of reality.
RB: Right, that’s the key task. You just reminded me of Edward P. Jones’s second novel, The Known World, the one that took him a long time to write. Sections of the book have amazing verisimilitude to various legal functions and court transactions, taking place around the time of the Civil War, and he simply made it all up. I had a history professor write me once to say that she was offended that a novelist was having his way with history, and I told her, It says on the book “novel.” Why do people have these expectation of fiction? And they’re not half as critical of nonfiction.
WG: I’d guess they suffer from a bankruptcy of imagination.
RB: How about poor education? Poor training?
WG: I’ve met entire gangs of über educated people with PhDs in English who were the most imaginatively deprived souls in a hundred-mile radius, the sort who would read a novel and report that it didn’t “feel” real to them, as if their feelings have anything at all to do with the novel.
RB: Isn’t the key internal coherence, that a book is obliged only to be sensible within its own setting?
WG: Within its own architecture, yes. The bolts and the beams of the narrative need to fit only within the novel’s own structure and shouldn’t be worried about corresponding to any outside formula of comprehension. Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and countless others would be inconceivable any other way.
RB: Is your main character in Hold the Dark evil? Is Vernon Slone evil?
WG: That depends on the guidelines by which you’re judging him. By the standards of civilization, he can be called evil, yes, though let me say that he would have hurt no one if only he could have been left alone, left to his own course. By the standards of the wilderness, which are the only standards that hold sway in this story, he is not evil, no. That’s one of the chief conflicts of Hold the Dark: the agon between the rules of the wild and the proprieties of society. By Slone’s DNA, by the precepts of his own land, he behaves precisely as he needs to behave in order to achieve his ends. Slone and Cheeon both—Cheeon, his best friend in the novel—both are sociopathic and would never last a day in Boston, true, but they abide by an ancient code of devotion, a code of blood and bond and myth and bone. They are loyal to one another and that’s dignity of a kind. We’ve forgotten about the bonds of blood, the fidelity of tribe. Their devotion is wordless. Remember, they don’t speak one word to each other throughout the entire novel.
RB: Are we to understand what the moral firmament is in the wilderness? For instance, what justifies those first two murders?
WG: The protection of kin. The punishment of outsiders for meddling with a people and place better left alone. Those two detectives are killed because they are close to finding Medora Slone and Vernon Slone won’t allow that. Medora is Vernon’s to find. Those murders results from an intrusion into territory, which is exactly what I expect would happen if you barged into a bear’s den. This Alaskan territory is a bear’s den—Vernon Slone and Cheeon are the bears.
RB: I wondered about the path that Cheeon took because I think implicit in it is his belief that Slone is going to get caught.
WG: Why do you say that?
RB: Because if he doesn’t believe that Slone is going to get caught, is he aiding Slone’s getaway in mowing down ten or twelve men? And not only doing that, but essentially doing suicide by police.
WG: What’s in Cheeon’s mind during that rampage? Perhaps that the more of these cops he can kill, the fewer will be around to capture Slone. But also, and this is important: they came knocking. They came to him. There wouldn’t have been a rampage if he had been left alone, and that was what I really liked about John Wilwol’s review in the New York Times. He understood that. Don’t come knocking where you don’t belong because you’ll find something fatal. The cops from town and the Feds from the city, they come to this remote place and they attempt to assert their business where it doesn’t fit. Cheeon’s rampage is a retribution and a warning: stay where you belong or there will be these cataclysmic consequences.
RB: À la Ruby Ridge.
WG: I can see the connection. Cheeon’s massacre is a message in extremis. The suicide by cop is really the only outcome for him. His little girl is dead, taken by a wolf; his wife has fled never to return; he knows he’ll never be able to see Slone again. After what’s happened, Slone will be on the run always. Cheeon says to Donald Marium, the detective, he says: The wolf has come for you and me today. The raven follows the wolf, he says, and he points up into a tree and there’s the raven, death’s omen, peering down at them. Remember, he booby-traps his cabin: he’s been waiting for this. From the beginning he’s known they would come for him.
RB: Minor thing, but both Slone and Cheeon, when they’re talking to others, they use the word “guy” where most men who use the word “man” or “dude.” Is that an Alaskanism?
WG: I’m not sure. I’ve heard some Canadians use “guy” in place of “man” or “dude.” It sounds slightly wrong to our ear, and I like that about it, that quality of otherness.
RB: Another illegitimate step in your fabrication. I was thinking, today I harkened back to your controversial review in the New York Times two years ago, that negative review you seemed to draw so much fire for. One particular piece was on the website HTML Giant, in which the writer actually thought to instruct you on what a review should be and how you had failed miserably, and I thought, God, on the face of it, how fucking pretentious to think that he could instruct you. Because one of the things he said is that you have to deal with a book on its own terms, but don’t you also have to deal with a review on its own terms? Was that kerfuffle ever resolved intelligently?
WG: Are internetting nobodies capable of intelligence or resolution? No, the fracas you speak of happened among those internetting nobodies, the synthetically social on social media, so I wasn’t party to it. I don’t partake of social media and I’m not on the internet that much. I’ve never heard of that web site you mentioned but it sounds to me like a haven for the mentally miniscule. I wrote a piece called “Letter to a Young Critic,” my ars poetica, because my editor at the Daily Beast asked for it, but other than that, and receiving a thousand emails of support, I didn’t experience the fracas as others did. My son Aiden was a few months old at the time and nothing focuses the mind like diapers and a screaming newborn.
RB: Do you care? Once having established what you were confident was a well presented argument, did you want to hear counter arguments?
WG: A prepared critic knows there are no counter arguments.
RB: Do you care about being nice as a critic?
WG: Naughty or nice is irrelevant. The question doesn’t exist. The critic’s only concern is right or wrong, true or false. The emphasis on delivery is a dodge, a way of not dealing with the argument. Unpopular causes often rely on the aesthetics of delivery because their foes wear the face of gruesome banality. Let me point out also, for the record, that of the scores and scores of books I’ve written about, only two reviews have been negative, and one was mixed.
RB: All of the top venues you write for, not just the New Republic but the Oxford American and VQR and numerous others, is a recognition of your legitimacy as a critic—you’re guilty by association with some good minds. You must write 5000 words a week for these various magazines. Don’t you set aside other things to do that?
WG: I do, and I need to stop, or this next book will never get done.
RB: Another novel? You have a contract?
WG: The contract I have is for a memoir, believe it or not, and I’m very conflicted about this, Red.
RB: Make it all up.
WG: I’m very conflicted. Speaking of the Oxford American, I just filed a piece about this, about autobiography, as it pertains to the Southern documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee, the great director who did Sherman’s March.
RB: I used to live near McElwee. Do you like Errol Morris’s films?
WG: I’m not a big film guy. I became interested in McElwee because his nephew is a pal of mine. But I’m spottily educated on film.
RB: I don’t want to bring up that you just reviewed the film Child of God at the New Republic.
WG: That was a rather rare exception; I know that novel like a prayer.
RB: You didn’t mention The Counselor in that piece. Do you know that movie?
WG: No. It’s not based on one of the novels. Did you like it?
RB: Sucked, but had some great parts. Cameron Diaz masturbating on the windshield of a car.
WG: That’s so sweet of her.
RB: She might have been the most interesting character in the film.
WG: When you look like Cameron Diaz that’s not hard. Someone once tried to talk to me about the movie There’s Something About Mary—remember that one?—and I asked this person if he ever considered that the something in question about Mary was that she looked just like Cameron Diaz.
RB: Something else I’ve been thinking about lately, because I’ve been trying to reconcile a view I have of serious versus genre literature. When I was a kid it wasn’t like you either did sports or you read, either one or the other. You just read, it was like breathing. Now there’s this whole genre in which people write about reading. I don’t know why they do that. Like that book you reviewed recently in the New York Times, by Wendy Lesser.
WG: Lesser’s book in particular is a deft analysis of certain works of literature and how they function, how they cast their spell. It’s criticism, in other words, not a memoir about reading, which, you’re right, strikes me as a rather yawnful undertaking. The answer to the question why do you read is actually pretty straightforward: I read for pleasure and for intimations of wisdom. Dryden says this, right, that poesy instructs as it delights, but not one without the other.
RB: I.B. Singer said the same thing.
WG: The notion predates both Singer and Dryden. Horace called it dulce et utile: sweet and useful.
RB: Oh boy, I knew you would do this, get all classical on me. Didn’t Horace play for the Pirates, Horace Wagner?
WG: Focus, Red, stay with me. The Horatian prescription of dulce et utile was codified throughout the Renaissance and endured mostly in tact until the contagion of French theory, sneezed by Derrida and de Man, infected American academics in the middle of the last century. But maybe that’s too highfalutin an answer to your Pittsburgh Pirates question.
RB: No shit, Sherlock.
WG: Can we use profanity in this conversation?
RB: Oh yeah, and especially because you need to be more of a hard guy, given Hold the Dark and your author photo, wearing that hat.
WG: I don’t use profanity because—
RB: You’re Catholic.
WG: I was gonna say sophisticated, but you’re right. Lapsed Catholic, actually, but it amounts to the same thing.
RB: Well, your vocabulary far outstrips mine, but remember I grew up in Chicago.
WG: I grew up in New Jersey, Red. That state ain’t exactly a bastion of intellectualism.
RB: But it was the suburbs. But here’s the thing—
WG: I suppose. It was really just a tiny greaser town full of Polish car mechanics and Italian carpenters. Here’s the thing what?
RB: Right, here’s the thing: in my reading, I certainly don’t adhere to any literary theory, have never even read half of the people you mention, whatever their names are. Today, I value John le Carré as much as Robert Stone—
WG: Didn’t you and I have a fight about le Carré, over his stance relating to Rushdie in the 80s?
RB: I think if you go back and read his stance it wasn’t as obnoxious as it might have seemed at the time. Let’s say he fucked up, everybody fucks up, but the thing of it is, I don’t have a benchmark I check off and say, Oh yeah, this is a great book and this is a terrible book. It’s all flying by the seat. And less and less do I remember content. I was talking to David Mitchell* last week. I remember loving Cloud Atlas and I can’t tell you a thing about it.
WG: Then what in God’s name did you love in it?
RB: At the time I read it, I found it to be entertaining and instructive. Like in his new book: he’s a reminder that what’s in front of you isn’t necessarily all that’s going on. He writes stuff, fantasy elements, that I don’t think I’d ever read by somebody else. He does it very deftly. You haven’t managed to read him?
WG: I’ve managed not to read lots of writers.
RB: That’s understandable. I’ve never read Updike and I didn’t read Roth until recently.
WG: Have you still never read Updike?
RB: Never.
WG: I should leave now.
RB: Oh, that’s the way it’s gonna be, huh. We’re gonna judge each other.
WG: Critics judge, that’s there job. It’s extraordinary that you’ve never read Updike.
RB: Listen, when I was in Chicago, I associated Updike with pipe-smoking, tweedy types.
WG: That’s a very wrong association.
RB: Remember, I come from the town of Nelson Algren.
WG: Oh, tough guy, Algren. You remember Hemingway’s blurb about Algren? He said Algren was the second best writer in America.
RB: That’s right, I do know that.
WG: So, yes, we can judge one another by the books we read, and I don’t necessarily mean in that Leavisite manner of turning literature into an ethical audit by which we assert our puritanical values—all you had to do was tell F. R. Leavis what books you read and then he told you your moral coordinates.
RB: We certainly judge people by their friends and the teams they root for. Modern commerce and the Internet does the same thing: give me fifteen metrics and I’ll tell you all these things about you. Amazon does that: buy a book and they’ll tell you what other books you like. Frequently there’s commonality there. When bookstores hand-sell stuff they do the same thing. Music, the same thing. Speaking of which, you never review music, do you?
WG: I just did a piece on Jack White for the Oxford American. But mostly I’m not qualified to review music. The Jack White piece is more about artistic obsession. After the White Stripes it was difficult for me to listen to other music, just as Bellow’s Augie March ruined other books for me for several years.
RB: What would qualify you to write about music?
WG: Some knowledge of musicality, of music history, of melody and tone, a wider range of listening than I have. This applies to literary criticism, as well. Some seem to think that if they can read and are able to have an emotion and an opinion that they are qualified for literary comment. That’s not correct at all. One’s feelings do not translate into criticism. Edmund Wilson said this in the 40s, that our culture of literary comment was puerile and overcome by critics who mistake their emotions for analysis. One’s feelings matter not at all where criticism is concerned.
RB: Really?
WG: Really. One sees this all the time. This book feels contrived to me. This plot feels unfinished. This character doesn’t feel likable. It’s nonsense. Demonstrate what you think and how you think it and you’ll be on to something.
![William Giraldi [photo: Robert Birnbaum]](https://ourmaninboston.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/dsc_0002.jpg)
William Giraldi [photo: Robert Birnbaum]
WG: Not only that, and not primarily that.
RB: The failure of such a review would be saying that’s the irreducible statement you’re making, about feelings. Whereas the obligation is, for a critic, if you feel something, you have to unpack and explicate what that’s about.
WG: We partly agree.
RB: I think I can write about music, that I’m qualified, in that I have a wide swath of familiarity with lots of music. So even though I don’t know music theory I think by association and by a sense of definition I can talk skillfully about music.
WG: And how it’s arranged and composed. I thought I could do the same, on a minimal level, with Jack White, and get away with it: the way Jack plays guitar, the difference between his playing style and that of others. I agree that art needs to aim for the chest but if it’s not also aiming for the head then the artist has done only half his task. Otherwise criticism becomes only a matter of opinion informed by emotion, and not knowledge or insight earned through expertise. Some opinions are more valid than others, are they not?
RB: I think yes, I would agree with that. But the thing about art is the high ratio of subjectivity that permissible. I don’t think there are theories and generalities that cover the arts.
WG: But one can prove how one book is better than another.
RB: Prove it to me. Prove to me that As I Lay Dying is a better book than Catch-22.
WG: Two masterpieces, equal in what they do, although they do it in different ways. The distinction I mean is the one that must be made between the first-rate and the second-rate. Look at the pitch, the modulations, the reach of the prose. Word by word, sentence by sentence, the superior book proves itself.
RB: The Times review of Hold the Dark repeated that idea of yours, or quoted you, saying that somewhere. And now? Any obsessions?
WG: And now I have no obsessions, which is as it should be for a man about to be clobbered by middle age.
RB: Have you done any readings in Boston, from the Hold the Dark?
WG: No.
RB: No one will have you?
WG: I’m tired. I don’t want to perform. It doesn’t sell books anyway. It’s just a lot of pressure on the writer and pressure on the bookstore, too.
RB: So what’s the next thing?
WG: That memoir I was telling you about, God help me.
RB: Which you’ve started, or not?
WG: Yes. God, I don’t want to think about it.
RB: Am I gonna have to go through the next two or three years listening to you piss and moan about this every time we get together? Why don’t you just give up these book-length projects and stick to essays?
WG: You know what I’d like to give up?
RB: What?
WG: Writing.
RB: And become a bounty hunter?
WG: Farmer maybe. I don’t know anything about it, but I like the way it looks.
RB: Why do you want to give up writing?
WG: Because it’s work and it’s hard and I don’t like work and especially not hard work.
RB: Oh stop about how tough it is. You wanna go pick strawberries in the fields?
WG: That sounds lovely. Walter Benjamin said that a writer must proceed as a man digging a ditch. Ever dig a ditch?
RB: How many fucking ditches have you dug?
WG: My fair share. Need I remind you I come from a working-class family of builders? I’ve dug many a ditch. My point is: writing is difficult and if it’s not difficult then you’re not doing it right.
RB: Okay so you’re a novelist, a critic, an essayist, a teacher, an editor. Anything we’re not knowing about you? You have aspirations?
WG: Wilde said ambition is the last refuge of the failure, so my aspirations are skimpy. I want to raise my boys with as little psychic trauma as possible.
RB: Good luck with that, as they say.
WG: It’s my goal.
RB: And you’re going to do that because you’re a picture of mental health? Why are you qualified to do that?
WG: One must try, Red.
RB: I know. Everybody wants to be a better parent than their parents.
WG: And so we’ve come full circle. This little chat of ours began with my kids and now ends with my kids.
RB: Commendable, I know, but bullshit, too, because if you were at a party holding a glass of wine you wouldn’t answer that question by saying you’re a father.
WG: Well, that’s easy, Red, because I’d never be at that party.
* David Mitchell Conversation 2005
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Francisco Goya
Literary journalism must, I suppose by definition, appeal to a marginal and as it is often claimed, shrinking audience. Thus it apparently behooves its practitioners to offer up a variety ofarguable and contestable theories so as to attract an audience and whatever follows from that. Recently, I came across a reference to an article by Salon senior editor and literary eminence gris’ Laura Miller claiming that “today’s most exciting crime novelists are women.” A stance, it can not go unsaid, I found so silly that I had to try to read the offending column for both its reasoning and to double check that a critic as eminent as MS Miller actually claimed its byline.
Firstly, the writers she singles out are certainly a talented gaggle (she did leave out at least two very talented women (Laura McHugh and Attica Locke, who are at least the peers of Miller’s anointed.)On the other hand, perhaps Miller felt that naming four writers made her case.
Secondly, MS Miller is a savvy and experienced and no doubt intelligent commentator who one would expect would understand the dangers of using superlatives like ‘best’, ‘greatest’, ‘hottest’ in literary conversations (except when preceded by a personal possessive). What then is one to make of the phrase ‘most exciting crime novelists are women’? It is the case that women writers of all stripes are given short shrift in the main organs of the literary arena (every once in a while a diligent and enterprising writer will spend time breaking down the percentage of reviews by gender at the The New York Times and the New Yorker>.So if MS Miller is trying to level the playing fields in some way I suppose one ought to commend her. On the other hand her claim does do a disservice to the other writers who are doing fine work in the disrespected category of genre literature (genre seems to be synonym for ‘non literary’).Now I will stipulate that often the crime series like John D MacDonald’s Travis Magee, Robert Parker’s Spenser novels or even Micheal Connelly’s Harry Bosch’s novels (Parker is among the deceased writers now undergoing a kind of reductio ad absurdum by being written by living writers)are seem formulaic and predictable. It should be noted that Baltimore’s gift to story telling Laura Lippman, does her best work not with her series but with her stand alone novels
![Attica Locke [photo: Robert Birnbaum]](https://ourmaninboston.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/atica-lockejpg.jpg)
Attica Locke [photo: Robert Birnbaum]
So in the name of all that is fair and decent in the world, here’s a short list of fine crime story writers: John Lawton(Sweet Sunday, Then We Take Berlin),George Pelacanos, Benjamin Black, Edward Delaney(Broken Irish), Stuart Neville, Jo Nesbo, James Lee Burke,Tom ROB SMITH, Elmore Leonard(Out of Sight),Charlie Huston(The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, Sleepless), Thomas Perry(Butcher’s Boy, Sleeping Dogs), Philip Kerr
(A Philosophical Investigation), Olen Stenhauser, Ace Atkins, Charles McCarry (The Miernik Dossier Shelley’s Heart), Attica Locke (Black Water Rising), Charles Smith(Men in Miami Hotels), James Ellroy (Underworld USA trilogy), Tom Bouman(Dry Bones in the Valley), John Fusco(Dog Beach),Robert Stone(Death of the Black-Haired Girl)and Don Winslow(The Power of the Dog).
![Robert Stone circa 2013 [photo Robert Birnbaum]](https://ourmaninboston.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/robert-stonejpg.jpg)
Robert Stone circa 2013 [photo Robert Birnbaum]
Currently reading Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury)
Norman Mailer @ Grant Park Bandshell, Chicago, 1968 Democratic Convention (photo: Robert Birnbaum)
I have no doubt come late to the party—the beach/ summer reading lists having been proffered by the usual experts on beach/summer reading. I am not versed in this genre (though I can recall reading Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost and Foster Wallace’s magnum opus at a beach in Rincon Puerto Rico).Late, but not empty handed. Here’s a list (scroll to the bottom of this article if the name of the list confuses you):
The Light We Can’t See -Anthony Doerr
The Light We Can’t See –Anthony Doerr (Scribner)
Excellent narrative, riveting characters and the use of WWII Europe and Nazi depredations are not cliched.
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Everything I Never told You -Celeste Ng(Penguin Press)
Ng’s debut novel about a teenager’s death and its reverberations in the family and community is nimbly told (no small feat with such a weighty subject.
The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura
The Man Who Loved Dogs-Leonardo Padura(FSG)
Trotsky, his assassin, The Spanish Civil War, Stalin and the Moscow show trials, an aging Cuban writer, two wolfhounds— its a far flung story (times and places) written with Carribbean alacrity.Don’t believe me? Here’s Ann Louise Bardach take:
A global epic set mostly in Havana, Barcelona, Moscow and Mexico City, Padura’s novel is grounded in a trifecta of storylines: We have the grim saga of Trotsky’s 11-year flight from Stalin; the recruitment and creation of an assassin in the form of Catalonian communist Ramón Mercader; and the marginalization of Iván Cárdenas Maturell, a Cuban novelist who learns early in his career the hazards of writing in his homeland.
The Exile’s Return by Elizabeth De Waal
The Exile’s Return-Elizabeth De Waal (Picador)
Adam Kirsch’s paean to Ms De Waal should move you. Or not:
…appearing now, as a historical document, it gains an additional interest, as Elisabeth de Waal’s imaginative response to her own exile…This is not, perhaps, a new story, but in The Exiles Return it is told with sharpness and authenticity.
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson
Fourth of July Creek– Smith Henderson (Ecco)
I am partial to American novels set outside urban cultures and with a minimum of consumer activities. Like this one, set in the Fly over zone.
The Cairo Affair by Olen Steinhauer
The Cairo Affair- Olen Steinhauer (St Martin’s
As sure-handed as Le Carre reporting on the activities of spooks and various secret police. A world normally Byzantine in its alliances and
fluidity of loyalties, this plot set in Cairo seems especially volatile
Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons- edited by Robin Levi and Ayalet Waldman
Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons (Voice of Witness)by Ayelet Waldman , Robin Levi (Editor)
In case you were charmed into seeing incarceration as a vacation by the Netflix series Orange is the New Black here’s a corrective. Or Christina Rathbone’s A World Apart Women,Prison and the World Behind Bars
They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full by Mark Bibbins
They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full by Mark Bibbins (Copper Canyon)
Fishermen on Sea of Galilee
A citizen said, Every action
born out of pure spontaneity
is correct. It’s possible
he said corrupt but I was
eavesdropping. Correction:
minding my business: he was
performing, saying, also,
to his fellow citizens, I know
you agree with me on this.
Look, it’s autumn in our
hairlines and some smear
on the pavement’s been run
over so many times we can’t
tell whether or not it started
out as an animal.
My heaven is populated
with conures, llamas,
and adolescent bears
but is otherwise
fairly quiet. I’m done
looking for approbation
from people for whom I have
no respect and would respect
less if I met them.
Was this the sea they parted.
Understatement, so rarely
biblical: there is no quill pen
half as sinister as the lone
piece of penne in a dish
of farfalle. Today we rock
anonymity and tomorrow find
further evidence of same
dying in the comment fields.
Wake me when you can
tell me whether every taxi
must engage in a dialogue
with all previous taxis,
when you do something
impossible, when you leave
the party, when you take
my worst advice. This is,
friends, this was the sea.
Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst
Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst (Random House)
Since I discovered Furst I have continued to read his regularly published and dependably entertaining and instructive war time “thrillers” I confess that was a brief period when I wasn’t entertained or instructed but the probability is high that was a shift in my attention or something even more subjective. But his latest opus, I can report is up to (my) snuff. Paris,1938 and the Spanish Civil War goings-on make for a great setting. And that infamous place where the Bulgarian waiter is shot is per Furst’s practice, cleverly insinuated into the plot.
Natchez Burning- Greg Iiles
Natchez Burning– Greg Iiles (William Morrow)
A densely plotted post racial novel set in Natchez—that’s in Mississippi for all you Yankees that is thick on Civil Rights Movement era history as well lots of things you didn’t know about Natchez. Frankly I thought it was about 200 pages too long (800 pages). Reportedly, this is the first volume of a trilogy
Death of The Black Haired Girl by Robert Stone
Death of The Black Haired Girl– Robert Stone (houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Robert Stone is the gold standard of American fiction. That’s it.
The Last Date by Laurent Seksik
The Last Date by Laurent Seksik (Pushkin Press)
Writer Stefan Zweig has garnered lots of attention recently not the least because of Wes Anderson’s film Grand Hotel which in turn reportedly owes something to The Impossible Exile by George Prochnick (Other Press). I like this novel about Zweig’s last few months of life very much
A Permanent Member of The Family by Russell Banks
A Permanent Member go there Family by Russell Banks (Ecco)
Russell Banks is also the gold standard of American Fiction.
Kill Anything that Moves- Nick Turse
Kill Anything that Moves– Nick Turse (Picador)
Sorry to saddle this book under the rubric of Important book but if you are in doubt about whether the perpetrators of the Indochinese Debacle were/are war criminals a few chapters of Turse’s exhaustively researched
account should shake up your belief in American moral superiority.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee JR
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee JR (Little Brown)
See my chat with Ben Bradlee
Euphoria by Lily King
Euphoria by Lily King (Grove Atlantic)
Author Alice Greenway expiates
Euphoria is a love story set against the scramble by anthropologists in 1930s New Guinea to record or map the traditions and beliefs of societies coming apart under the brutal onslaught of miners, traders, missionaries and colonialists. Lily King writes with astonishing insight and authority about a number of New Guinea tribes and particularly about their distinct gender relations. At the same time, she delves into the intellectual flights and passions of three anthropologists – as complex, rivalrous and brutal as any of the cultures they study. Euphoria is a brilliantly written book and entirely fascinating from start to finish. The character of Nell Stone, slight, wracked with fever and insect bites, with a slight limp from a fall in the jungle and large cuscus-like eyes, capable of joy and huge intellect, is extraordinary.
American Romantic by Ward Just
American Romantic by Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Ward Just is a dependable novelist who chronicles both remote and familiar pockets of American Life, in this case the life of an American foreign service officer who’s brief tryst with a German nurse in Vietnam seems to haunt him through his years of world wide diplomatic postings to his pleasant but solitary retirement in France
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich
Living With A Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich (Twelve)
Who doesn’t love Barbara Ehrenreich‘s smart and compassionate views on the world? This,Living with a Wild God, would be her most personal book and reaches into an area that many people who spend time thinking, think many hours about. To quote one review
The questions in the world may be infinite, but perhaps the answers are few. And however we define that mystery, there’s no escaping our essential obligation to it, for it may, as Ehrenreich writes, “be seeking us out.”
“When I am asked what’s on my summer reading list… I read the all year long” Norman Mailer
Adult onset solipsism can be distinguished from the youth version of self centeredness by the admission that,as Van Morrison croons in The Meaning of Loneliness, “it takes a lifetime just to know yourself.” Thus the one is beset with constant instances of self doubt and self interrogation. One coping mechanism or technique I have employed to gain a foothold on serenity and enlightenment is to regulate or gate-keep my intake of information, allowing my intuition to guide me. For example I am prepared to make decisions on what to investigate further past a snappy headline or synopsis. As in my immediate disinterest for going any further in the text when I encountered this fatuous mandate at Arts and Letters Daily—”Undergraduates should be kept away from theory at all costs,” says —— ———-. They should read Kael, not Derrida….” Immediately sensing its syllogistic unsoundness, I saw this bit of grandiloquence as the kind of Tourette’s outburst one might encounter at faculty meeting or party. Of course, one of the joys of engaging this form of short form journalism (web journalizing) is the opportunity to engage in such orotund pronouncements.
Some Ignored Titles (photo: Robert Birnbaum
Ok, for the longest time I had an aversion to lists, viewing them as a lazy journalistic ploy to contribute to the ongoing dumbing down of everything (uh, I still think I am correct about that). On the other hand I can see some creative usefulness in lists— Umberto Eco creates some that interesting. And then there is Paul Zimmer’s poem Zimmer Imagines Heaven where in his recording of it introduces it as a “list” and encourages people to make their own lists:
I sit with Joseph Conrad in Monet’s garden,
We are listening to Yeats chant his poems,
A breeze stirs through Thomas Hardy’s moustache,
John Skelton has gone to the house for beer,
Wanda Landowska lightly fingers a clavichord,
Along the spruce tree walk Roberto Clemente and
Thurman Munson whistle a baseball back and forth.
Mozart chats with Ellington in the roses.
Monet smokes and dabs his canvas in the sun,
Brueghel and Turner set easels behind the wisteria.
the band is warming up in the Big Studio:
Bean, Brute, Bird and Serge on saxes,
Kai, Bill Harris, Lawrence Brown, trombones,
Klook plays drums, Mingus bass, Bud the piano.
Later Madam Schumann-Heink will sing Schubert,
The monks of bendictine Abbey will chant.
There will be more poems from Emily Dickinson,
James Wright, John Clare, Walt Whitman.
Shakespeare rehearses players for King Lear.
At dusk Alice Toklas brings out platters
Of Sweetbreads à la Napolitaine, Salad Livonière,
And a tureen of Gaspacho of Malaga.
After the meal Brahms passes fine cigars.
God comes then, radiant with a bottle of cognac,
She pours generously into the snifters,
I tell Her I have begun to learn what
Heaven is about. She wants to hear.
It is, I say, being thankful for eternity.
Her smile is the best part of the day.
So, here’s a list (of sorts) I created. I thought to offer reasons for my choices but I decidedto rely on your good opinion of me and your curiosity. Additionally, I asked some bookish acquaintances for their recommendations of overlooked books that come to mind( they are pretty much reprinted as I received them). Onward:
Dog Boy by Eva Hornung
Dog Boy by Eve Hornung
Burning Marguerite by Elizabeth Inness-Brown
Burning Marguerite by Elizabeth Inness-Brown
BULLET HEART by MICHEAL DOANE
Bullet Heart by Micheal Doane
MRS IVES’S XMAS by OSCAR HIJUELOS
Mrs Ives Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos
MORNING BY WALT WETHERALL
Morning by Walt Wetherall
COUNTRY OF WOLFES by James Carlos BLAKE
Country of Bad Wolves by James Carlos Blake
Once Upon The River by Bonnie Campbell
Once Upon A River by Bonnie Campbell
Redemption Falls by Joseph O Connor
Redemption Falls by Joseph O’Connor
The Dog of War by Don Winslow
The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow
Darkest Jungle by Tod Balf
Darkest Jungle by Tod Balf
Valley of Bones by Micheal Gruber
Valley of Bones by Micheal Gruber
Elizabeth Cox</strong> novelist, Night Talk (Random House)
Hey
One overlooked novel I would like to add to the list is The Iguana Tree by Michel Stone. My husband (Mike Curtis) edited that novel and it is a good story…
The Iguana Tree by Michel Stone
David Rieff, author, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (Simon & Schuster)
Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution
Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell
Robert Stone, novelist, The Death of the Black Haired Girl(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt):
Off the top of my head, I recall only one, and I’ve forgotten the author’s name. There was a novel about a man in Maine published some years ago, called HARBOR LIGHTS. It was reviewed in IN BRIEF in the NY Times Book Review. A short, excellent novel…
HARBOR LIGHTS
By Theodore Weesner.
Katherine Powers, literary personage, author, Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life (FSG)
So, I don’t know about “tragically,” and by “overlooked” I would mean that most people haven’t heard of these–and they are all A+:
“20,000 Streets Under the Sun” – Patrick Hamilton
The Armstrong Trilogy – Roy Heath
“in Hazard” – Richard Hughes
“The Golovlyov Family” – Shchedrin
20,000 Streets Under the Sun by Patrick Hamilton
Richard Russo,award winning novelist Elsewhere (Knopf), screenwriter (Ice Harvest)
But for my bookseller daughter Emily’s recommendation, I doubt I’d have come across A Marker to Measure Drift . You might want to check to see if it did better than I imagine, but sense is that it slipped into oblivion, and the last scene in the novel is as brutal and breathtaking as anything I’ve read in a long time.
A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik
Ron Rash , novelist, The Cove (ECCO)
With by Donald Harington –Harington is America’s Chaucer.
With by Donald Harington
Edwidge Danticat novelist, Claire of the Sea Light (Knopf), humanitarian
I’d say many of Percival Everett‘s novels including Erasure. Everett is as a brilliant at creating narratives as he is at bending genres. He has one of the least classifiable careers, but one of the most brilliant, in American letters.Everett’s 2001 masterpiece, “Erasure”–a parody of the African-American urban novel, offers a lyrical critique of a publishing establishment which continues to pigeon hole writers, particular African-American writers. Everett is also a respected poet and painter. His previous honors include: ThemPEN Center USA Award for Fiction, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction and the Dos Pasos Prize.
Erasure by Percival Everett
Joseph O’Connor ,overlooked Irish novelist, Where Have You Been? (Harvill Secker)
Tragically Overlooked Novels? Well, all of mine, for a start. But: do you mean Tragically Overlooked Novels from 2013 or in general? …In my view, DEATH AND NIGHTINGALES by Eugene McCabe is one of the great novels of the late 20th Century. It’s a story of thwarted love set in 1883 in rural County Fermanagh, on the border of Ulster and what is now as the Republic of Ireland. The events of a single day in the life of Elizabeth Winters provide the plot, which is so utterly gripping that you can’t stop reading. But McCabe smuggles in all sorts of darkness and depth. This is a truly brilliant book about racism, gender politics, and political rage, but the subtle (and supple) language weaves you into the story with such fierce and clever grace that you never feel you’re attending a lecture. It’s got touches of Coatzee and Faulkner but a mesmerizing smolder all its own. If you’ve ever doubted the novel’s power to express realities that politics can’t reach, you need to read this magnificent thing.
DEATH AND NIGHTINGALES by Eugene McCabe
Stuart Dybek ,author, Northwestern University mentor,(forthcoming)Paper Lantern: Love Stories (FSG)
I don’t know how “overlooked” Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga is but i saw it on no lists whatsoever when the millennium nonsense was going on & i don’t think there’s been a change since.
Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen
David Thomson, cultural encyclopedia,author
Moments That Made the Movies (Thames & Hudson)
Troubles by J.G Farrell. If you don’t think it’s overlooked then The Purchase by Linda Spalding.
The Purchase by Linda Spalding.
Darin Strauss ,author,Half a Life: A Memoir (McSweeney’s), NYU mentor
i don’t know what counts as forgotten anymore. THE FIXER, by–which is tough and beautiful and unsentimental in its treatment of something awful? MOMENTO MORI, which I just read, and which taught me about the consoling half-thoughts and cruelties, the passing cruelties of stupid people. (In other words, most dumbasses will act dumb and assy and never feel bad about it—will come up with reasons, in fact, to feel good about the immoral way they act.) Or maybe THE STATEMENT by Brian Moore, which is a perfect thriller, a smart philosophical treatment of evil and racism, a fun read, and about an afternoon’s read?
THE FIXER by Bernard Malamud
All of the above?
BRIAN DOYLE ,novelist, Mink River (University of Oregon Press) editor of Portland magazine
Hmmm. Maybe THE HORSE’S MOUTH by Joyce Cary. Best novel I ever read, period, but not one that many people have on their shelves. Also made into a terrific movie, which is a rare case of a glorious novel being made into a glorious movie. The few others I know: LITTLE BIG MAN, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, LORD OF THE RINGS, THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, maybe THE ENGLISH PATIENT, maybe MASTER AND COMMANDER.
Daniel OLIVAS, novelist The Book of Want (University of Arizona Press)
The Old Man’s Love Story by Rudolfo Anaya
I interviewed him for the first print. Enjoy the list-making edition of the Los Angeles Angeles Review of Books regarding this novel. It’s quite beautiful but did not receive the kind of coverage it should have.
The Old Man’s Love Story by Rudolfo Anaya
Micheal ORTHOFER ,editor, eminence gris The Complete Review
Way too much gets way too overlooked, but I guess I’d suggest: “Where Tigers are at Home” by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès (which seems to have gotten almost no review- and little reader-attention). Runner-up: “Tirza” by Arnon Grunberg, which got a bit more attention but nowhere what it deserves (it’s a best-of-year-contender) — perhaps overshadowed by Herman Koch’s somewhat similar (and considerably inferior) “The Dinner”.Still: that’s just the tip of the overlooked iceberg.
Where Tigers are at Home by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès
BEN FOUNTAIN, award winning author, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco)
…Several come to mind:
Little Big Man by Thomas Berger. I don’t know if it could be called tragically overlooked, given that it was made into a blockbuster movie in the late 60s, but nobody talks about it much these days. I think it’s one of the great American novels. Top ten for sure, maybe top five.
We Agreed to Meet Just Here by Scott Blackwood. A lovely, short novel that came out about 7-8 years ago. It won the AWP award, and Scott subsequently got a Whiting Award on the strength of it. It’s just about perfect. His forthcoming novel from Knopf is even better.
The Gay Place by Billy Brammer. A novel of Texas politics, published 1961 or ’62….
“We Agreed to Meet Just Here” by Scott Blackwood
Robert Mccrum , editor, The Observer, author, Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language (WW Norton)
Hadrian the seventh by Frederick Rolfe
Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe
ALLAN Gurganus ,novella-ist, Local Souls
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page By G.B. Edwards—this is the single novel by a bureaucrat who spent his life on the Isle of Guernsey. G.B. Edwards imagined a trilogy of such works but he died in a mainland boarding house with this manuscript under his bed. The landlady got it published in 1981. The work is erotic, tumultuous and heroic as a Beethoven symphony. We get the twisted history of incestuous island families. We get the German occupation of the island during World War II. Love stories are offset by men battling the ocean and its creatures. This novel, a rare instance of Folk Art in narrative, deserves a larger readership, a secure place in our literature.
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page By G.B. Edwards
Gary Fisketjon ,veteran editor at Knopf
Indeed, I could fill a volume in that category with many new additions every fucking year. But given that we’re in 2013, I’d say that Steve Yarbrough’s THE REALM OF LAST CHANCES has been overlooked most tragically. That’s one reason my only lingering resolution – to quit smoking – always fails to get any real traction. …
The Realm of Last Chances by Steve Yarbrough
Billy Giraldi ,novelist, Busy Monsters (WW Norton) critic , essayist, long form journalist editor, Agni
Indeed. Caleb Williams by William Godwin and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Neglected masterworks of suspense both of them. Divinely written.
Caleb Williams by William Godwin
Hari Kunzru ,novelist, Men Without Gods (Knopf)
I’ll nominate Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell To Earth. Bowie fans have seen the movie, but the book is beautiful, poised. As if Richard Yates wrote SF.
The Man Who Fell To Earth by Walter Tevis
Joseph Epstein ,short fiction writer,The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff: And Other Stories (HMH), essayist, former editor, American Scholar
1. Lampedusa’s The Leopard 2. Sandor Marai’s Embers. I’m not sure if these are tragically overlooked or merely insufficiently well known, but both are swell novels.
Embers by Sandor Marai
Sven Birkerts, Literary Man for All Seasons, editor, Agni memoirist, writing program administrator (Bennington),
I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch
The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz
The Death of a Beekeeper Lars Gustafsson
I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch
Tom Piazza ,novelist, City of Refuge (Ecco) screenwriter (Treme), musical connosieur
I’d have to vote for Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann, in the H.T. Lowe-Porter translation. Mann is underread in general these days, but Buddenbrooks was a masterpiece. People tend to think it’s just a 19th-Century family saga, but it’s really a book that combines 19th-Century techniques and sonorities with startlingly modern technical strategies that get missed because they work wholly in the service of the narrative. It’s almost like a Mahler symphony — one foot in the 19th Century and one stepping off the cliff into the unspooling chaos of the 20th. Very important to get the old Lowe-Porter translation. Random House made the mistake of letting somebody “update” the translation and they ruined it, sort of the way Pevear and Volokhonsky ruin the Russians.
Among contemporary books, Lives of the Monster Dogs should have made Kirsten Bakis a big literary star.
Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis
Susan Bergholz, non-pareil and sage literary agent (Eduardo Galeano et al)
Here you go; can’t do just one!LOG OF THE S.S. THE MRS. UNGUENTINE by Stanley Crawford, simply the best book about marriage ever written in the US by a living treasure POWER OF THE DOG by Thomas Savage/dead now, extraordinary workAN IMAGINARY LIFE by David Malouf–a pitch perfect novel, except for the Afterword.THE TIME OF OUR SINGING by Richard Powers, our most brilliant and amazing male novelist; makes Franzen and company sound as though they are writing soap operas. Prepare for his novel out in January, ORFEO/stunning!!!
I forgot one very impt novel: CARAMELO by Sandra Cisneros
And another one: IN THE PALM OF DARKNESS by Mayra Montero
And: AND THEIR DOGS CAME WITH THEM by Helena Maria Viramontes.
Ok–I’ll stop now!!!!!!!
LOG OF THE S.S. THE MRS. UNGUENTINE by Stanley Crawford
href=”http://www.identitytheory.com/blake-bailey/”>,literary biographer Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (Knopf)
THE LOST WEEKEND, of course, and Anthony Powell’s first novel, AFTERNOON MEN<a.
The movie Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place occasions much reminiscence as Kesey and his affiliation with merry making Merry Pranksters and other cultural deviants were significant models to the young undergraduate dissident role that I affected when it risked little to do so.
Robert Stone who I have spoken with a handful of times and who ranks high in my pantheon of literary paragons spent some time with Kesey and the rest of the crazies depicted in Magic Trip, published Prime Green a Memoir of the Sixties, in 2007. NPR, in paying homage to Kesey and his time, reprised an interview with Stone in which he, among other observations, says of Kesey
Kesey was a remarkable character. You didn’t have to be much of a psychologist to see that this was an extraordinary individual, with an enormous amount of energy and drive and imagination and he was simply a lot of fun
Power to the Peaceful!
ourmaninboston 