Until soon
Some scary news this morning: my father-in-law’s multiple myeloma has rather suddenly mutated into plasma cell leukemia. Rather than sitting on our terrace this weekend, Max and I (and The Magic Mountain) will be flying south for a trip of uncertain duration.
Have a good holiday. I’ll be back when I’m back.
The lives — and books — of teenage girls
Today at The Second Pass, Emma Garman returns to Françoise Mallet-Joris’ The Illusionist and Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, two compelling and remarkably amoral novels narrated — and written — by teenage girls in the middle of the last century.
The Illusionist centers on the protagonist’s affair with her father’s mistress, while Bonjour Tristesse involves the heroine’s “plan of sexual deception that ingeniously exploits the vanity, jealousy and desires of everyone around her.” “What resonates,” according to Garman, is the “shared mood of irresponsibility, in which the wider consequences, moral or otherwise, of one’s actions are scarcely of concern.”
“Fantasies of weddings and babies and maybe even a career, so omnipresent in contemporary chick lit, are conspicuously and pleasingly absent.” Although The Illusionist was published sixty years ago, Garman says its author “could have given Gossip Girl’s arch villainess Blair Waldorf lessons in amorality.”
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled and posted by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30 pm, and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to Ms. Cerand at lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication. Due to the volume of submissions, events cannot be considered unless the date appears in the subject line of your message.
The “Summer Lovin’” Edition
MON, JUN 29: New Yorker editor Ben Greenman wraps up his tour for Please Step Back, with a talk on indie publishing and creative collaborations — include his recent limited editions for Jack Spade and Hotel St. George — with Opium’s Todd Zuniga. Afterwards, we’ll all go out for a drink, and I’ll be free from professional obligations requiring me to appear in public for six weeks. Cheers to that [Full disclosure, as always: I am Ben’s publicist]. At Barnes & Noble, Tribeca (corner of Warren and Greenwich). 7PM, FREE.
TUE, JUN 30: Join Suketu Mehta, Simon Winchester and Lewis Lapham for short readings and a wine reception to celebrate the launch of the Travel issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, at Idlewild Books. 7PM, FREE; rsvp to events@idlewildbooks.com. In Brooklyn, ” Afghanistan Stories, a fundraiser for war orphans in Kabul, at Belleville Lounge, 332 5th St (at 5th Ave) in Park Slope. Introduction by David Ellis Dickerson, who has opened for David Sedaris and appeared on NPR’s ‘This American Life.’ Hosted by Veterans for Afghanistan founder and director, Kristen L. Rouse. Includes Masha Hamilton, author and founder of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, and Marco Reininger, whom you might have seen in Newsweek along with Stephen Colbert.” 8PM, “$10 suggested donation, + 1 drink/food item minimum.”
And then…
JULY 5: “Cumbia became popular in Colombia in the 1950’s – a mix of African and indigenous rhythms, it quickly spread to the rest of Latin America and became especially popular in Mexico, Peru and Argentina where it was adapted to fit the local taste… From Monterey’s rebajada to Buenos Aires’ digital cumbia, young musicians are recycling their grandparents’ music and launching a global musical wave reminiscent of the late 1970’s Ska movement. WFMU and Barbès Records are joining forces to present two of North America’s pre-eminent cumbia bands. Very Be Careful from LA and Chicha Libre from Brooklyn – as well as DJs (tba) representing old school and digital cumbia.” At The Bell House. 8PM, $10.
JULY 8: Amanda Stern’s Happy Ending Reading & Music Series at Joe’s Pub explores “CONFESSION & JEALOUSY, STARRING: Nick Laird, Binnie Kirshenbaum and Kevin Canty. MUSICAL GUEST: Elvis Perkins.” 7PM, $15 tickets.
JULY 11: “The Museum of Arts and Design and Museum of the Moving Image have announced the launch of a new film series celebrating the 50th anniversary of the French New Wave. The series, entitled French New Wave Essentials, will present the best and most influential films of this period, many being shown in recently restored 35mm prints. Ranging from timeless masterpieces such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows to rarely seen works including Agnès Varda’s films Cleo from 5 to 7 and Le Bonheur, screenings will be held at the Museum of Arts and Design at 2pm and 4pm each Saturday and Sunday from July 11 through August 30.”
JULY 12: The maverick hipster indie pranksters behind Featherproof bring “The Dollar Store Show Super Summer Tour” to The Slipper Room. Essential. 8PM, $1.
JULY 15: Samuel Delany reads at KGB. 7PM, FREE. At jen bekman, “Summer Reading” opens. 6-8PM, FREE.
JULY 20: “Little House on the Bowery Event: Bluestockings, 7pm, Derek McCormack reads from The Show That Smells (w/ Edmund White)” (via Dennis Cooper).
JULY 22: Jessica Hopper presents The Girls Guide to Rocking at Barnes & Noble, Greenwich Village. Related: Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker wonders what it’s like to be a girl in a band and compares the new Sonic Youth single to Hopper’s infomercial. 7:30PM, FREE.
JULY 31: “Sean Dorsey, winner of two Isadora Duncan Dance Awards and the Goldie Award for Performance, and a stellar cast of dancers chase the naked truth in Uncovered: The Diary Project. Using text from actual, real-life diaries, Uncovered’s powerful dances reveal lives and stories that history has tried to erase. Out spill diary secrets, bathhouse antics, outrageous love, pop idols, misadventures, impossible courage and the importance of documenting and sharing our history.” At Dixon Place as part of the HOT! Festival Queer Performance and Culture. 8PM, $20 tickets.
AUGUST 6: At Revolution Books, Melvin Van Peebles’ book release party for Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchyfooted Mutha, the new graphic novel by the legendary filmmaker, playwright, actor and artist. 7PM, FREE.
AUGUST 18: “Upstairs at the Square” presents Regina Spektor (Far) and Kurt Andersen (Reset), with host Katherine Lanpher at the Union Square Barnes & Noble [Full disclosure as always: I am very involved with this series]. 6PM doors, 7PM show, FREE.
ONGOING: Lover, at On Stellar Rays through July 23 (when there will be a closing party from 6-8), Iran Inside Out at the Chelsea Art Museum, and of course, if you haven’t seen Japanther live, your life isn’t fun yet, but there’s a remedy for that; catch the duo at an upcoming show.
Go somewhere new, make mistakes worth repeating, take a chance or two. The Smart Set returns after Labor Day.
Pulling Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain off the shelf
My father-in-law — a warm, funny, and brilliant man of idiosyncratic passions, the only person I know who’s read Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead? and enjoys it as much as I do — was diagnosed with multiple myeloma last fall.
It’s a terrible disease (and rare, except for those who, like him, were exposed to Agent Orange), but treatments have improved and it was caught at an early stage. We are all crossing our fingers.
While in the hospital last week, he told me that he’s reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
I’ve started and abandoned the novel several times over the years, but I pulled it off the bookshelf a few days ago and am determined to read along with him, this time being mindful of A.S. Byatt’s experience:
my own early readings of The Magic Mountain, impeded by scholarly earnestness … and baffled by an inadequate translation, quite failed to see how funny, as well as ironic and subtle, much of the argumentation and debate is.
Byatt concedes that “an enormous proportion of the novel consists of bravura descriptions of battling ideas, and it is fashionable now to dismiss Mann as a ‘dry’ (even dessicated) ‘novelist of ideas,’ as though that description meant that he did not understand human feeling, or passion, or tragedy.”
Yet she wonders if “novelists in general give proportionately less space to intellectual passions than their power in society warrants.” After all, she says, “[p]eople do think, and they do live and die for thoughts, as well as for jealousy or sex, or erotic or parental love.”
You can read (most of) Byatt’s introduction to The Magic Mountain here. The image above is of the Schatzalp — originally an art nouveau luxury sanitorium, and now a hotel — where the novel is set. (Petya writes to say that it’s pretty affordable — around $100 per night, possibly including breakfast and dinner — in the off-season.)
‘Llectuals: Summer reading you can watch
From the creators of The Hipster Olympics, here’s ‘Llectuals: Girls Gone Wilde at PBS. (Thanks, Javier — and IFC.)
I should create a new category: satirical videos I missed last summer.
After the Ford-Rhys affair: a correspondence
Today Granta posts my exchange with Alexander Chee about Jean Rhys’ and Ford Maddox Ford’s affair and the vengeful novels they wrote afterward.
The level of acrimony packed into Quartet and When the Wicked Man is comparable to that of the Philip Roth-Claire Bloom book-off, if the Bloom character in I Married a Communist had not only been cast as a hopeless drunk but been called a “devil,” a “malignity,” a “blackamoor,” and a tramp.
The beginning of each of our four letters:
The affair actually spawned four competing accounts — not just Rhys’ and Ford’s novels, but another by Rhys’ husband, John Lenglet, and a section in the memoir of the painter Stella Bowen, Ford’s long-time partner and the mother of his daughter. Read the rest here.
See also: my review of Lilian Pizzichini’s new Rhys biography; Alex on discovering Rhys “when I was tired of what I was”; Rhys and the melding of fact and invention in fiction; Rhys on changing a novel’s “morbid” ending; the writing, burning, and rewriting of Wide Sargasso Sea; and Marlon James on Rhys. Addendum: Victoria Mixon compares Rhys’ and Ford’s affair with the relationship between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West.
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled and posted by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30 pm, and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to Ms. Cerand at lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication. Due to the volume of submissions, events cannot be considered unless the date appears in the subject line of your message.
MON, JUN 22: Sez Jonny Diamond: “I will be hosting the last semifinal round of the L Magazine’s Search for Pocket Fiction: Literary Upstart. That’s right, very short fiction on the longest night of the year: TOO MUCH FUN… As further enticement, I propose that you chase away the Monday blues with dollar beers provided by Connecticut’s own brewery, Thomas Hooker.” At the Slipper Room. 7PM, FREE. At The Tank, “‘Just Working On My Novel’ aims to achieve different goals from the traditional ‘open mic’ model, with crowd interaction, community, and self-lacerating, raucous, drunken fun placed at the forefront. The night’s few rules specify that reading from previous published pieces is strictly forbidden, and each night will feature an author as guest of honor, such as Monday evening’s Atlanta-based Zachary Steele, whose debut speculative fiction/fantasy novel Anointed (Mercury Retrograde Press, 2009) has been called ‘a mix of raucous fun and deep questions’ by Publishers Weekly. Most importantly, admission is free and drinks are cheap.” Later on, Spinnerette, Brody Dalle’s (ex-Distillers) new outfit, plays Bowery Ballroom with Band of Skulls.
TUE, JUN 23: Galapagos Art Space (now in DUMBO) hosts the BOMB Magazine party: “Come party with the BOMB staff and contributors to Issue 108 and celebrate 28 years of legendary interviews between artists, writers, filmmakers & musicians. Cabaret performances and aerialists, compliments of Galapagos Art Space!” 8PM, FREE. (On Thursday, return to Galapagos to write your fondest wish on a balloon with young Polish artist Agnes Janich.) Also, the U.S. Poets in Mexico Series presents David Wojciechowski & Bob Holman, hosted by Sheila Lanham, in the M’Finda Kalunga Community Garden on Rivington Street (Christie/Forsythe Streets). 7PM, FREE.
WED, JUN 24: Contributors to Ariel Gore’s Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City gather at Bluestockings to celebrate its publication. 7PM, FREE. (Return on Friday for a discussion of Masha Tupitsyn’s new City Lights anthology, Life as We Show It, which asks the question: “Movies have become a primary experience for viewing the world, but what kind of movies are our lives?”)
THU, JUN 25: Contributors to Delhi Noir fete the latest edition in Akashic’s hit series at Idlewild Books. 7PM, FREE: rsvp to events@idlewildbooks.com. Additionally, Yanira Castro & Company and PS 122 present an ongoing series of dance performances at the Gershwin Hotel: “DARK HORSE/BLACK FOREST is an intense love story presented in the most intimate space: a bathroom. The lobby bathroom of The Gershwin Hotel will be transformed by an installation of flourescents, mirrors, and video screens for this exclusive boutique performance. The audience is privy to an emotional and private exchange between a couple that evolves into a formal, sensual dance.” The piece also has a companion Twitter component scripted by writer Rozalia Jovanovic. Through June 28.
FRI, JUN 26: “Sounds Like PAPER 2009 at the South Street Seaport with Kid Cudi, Chester French, and DJ sets by Les Savy Fav and more!” 5:30pm-9:30pm, FREE. And celebrated auteur Werner Herzog will appear at McNally Jackson. 7PM, FREE. Plus, ABC No Rio hosts COMMON SPACES 09, an open house highlighting its various programs. 7PM, FREE.
SAT, JUN 27: Small’s Jazz Club hosts an open-mic poetry series. 5PM, $6. “Brooklyn avant-doom juggernaut” Bloody Panda plays Santo’s Party House. 7PM, $15.
SUN, JUN 28: I really, really wanna see “Leandro Erlich: Swimming Pool” at PS1: “When approached from the first floor, visitors are confronted with a surreal scene: people, fully clothed, can be seen standing, walking, and breathing beneath the surface of the water. It is only when visitors enter the Duplex gallery from the basement that they recognize that the pool is empty…”
AN APPEAL TO READERS: I just finished Rob Walker’s Buying In, and then immediately read Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture after that, and I’m looking for another conceptual overview of DIY or counterculture topics that speaks to evolving patterns of communication and cultural distribution now. Any recommendations? Please let me know! Not into: “social media,” business or Malcolm Gladwell-type books, more like Dance of Days.
Pity the minimalist: The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys
It’s going to be a Jean Rhystravaganza around here for a little while.
Next week Granta online will publish some correspondence between novelist Alexander Chee and me about Rhys’ affair with Ford Madox Ford, and the novels they wrote afterward.
And today at The Second Pass, I review Lilian Pizzichini’s new biography, The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys.
Jean Rhys’ final novel and masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, bestows a life on Jane Eyre’s offstage villain, the Creole madwoman in the attic. Although the book appeared to wide acclaim, Rhys held a grudge against editor Diana Athill for, she believed, publishing it prematurely. “‘It was not finished,’ she said coldly. She then pointed out the existence in the book of two unnecessary words. One was ‘then,’ the other ‘quite.’”Rhys, who toiled on the book for many years, was always known for her economy. She learned early on to pare down her prose, shaping it until her stories seemed to echo the elusive emotional truths of her own experience. It was Ford Madox Ford, one of her lovers and her very first editor, who encouraged her in this cutting, but she took to the art so immediately and so zealously that he later urged her to emphasize geographical concreteness and include physical detail. Rhys only pruned further. The four slender, deceptively straightforward novels that resulted evoke, like nothing before and very little since, the anguish of pretty young women, living hand to mouth in seedy hotels and boarding houses, who are kept, used and finally abandoned by wealthy older men.
Restraint is as essential to Rhys as the depression and fear she excavates. The intensity of her work is counterbalanced by a steely precision that serves to stave off melodrama.
The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys, a brief biography by Lilian Pizzichini, reads more like a novel than a nonfiction study, and this is no accident. A foreword characterizes the book as “an attempt to recapture her life.” Passages from Rhys’ unfinished autobiography, Smile, Please, are liberally quoted and paraphrased. Conjecture as to her emotional state abounds. At times the clumsy armchair psychoanalysis weighs down the story, giving it the exaggerated sentimentality and cheap pathos of a romance novel, but the material itself is inherently fascinating.
The rest is here.
Bierut on the modern banknote
Michael Bierut’s brief but fascinating currency design slideshow includes this ¥5000 note, which features 19th century Japanese novelist Ichiyo Higuchi on the front, and a field of irises on the reverse. (Via.)
Talking with Kate Christensen about Trouble tonight
It’ll be raining for the next week anyway, so why not brave the G train and the weather tonight, and come out to celebrate the publication of the amazing Kate Christensen’s Trouble, with some sangria and salsa at WORD?
She’ll read, and I’ll interview her briefly, and it might even be more fun than our last night out — barbecue followed by rock & twang (live-band) karaoke, all in the company of one D.E. Rasso. If so, you don’t want to miss it. (You can read our prior conversation, about her last novel, The Great Man, here.)
Meanwhile, Amy Benfer has a Christensen Q&A at Salon today. “No one ever uses the term ‘limited first-person,’” Kate says. “But that’s the voice I’m most comfortable in.” More:
In your first novel, “In the Drink,” the protagonist, Claudia, was a young New York woman around the same age you were when you wrote it. Whereas the characters in your last three novels were very obviously different from you: The title character in “Jeremy Thrane” was a gay man, Hugo in “The Epicure’s Lament” was a middle-aged misanthrope, and Teddy was in her 70s. Josie, once again, is your current age, 46. She is a therapist on the Upper West Side, and you are a writer in Brooklyn, but it seems the two of you could easily run in similar circles. Was it scary to have a character whom readers might mistake for you?It was totally scary. She’s so not me. Because we’re the same age, and because people confuse fact and fiction, inevitably they will think it must be autobiographical, and that Josie must be some version of me. I felt about Josie much the same way I felt about Hugo and Jeremy and Claudia, who also is and is not me: a feeling of identification with them but also a sense of detachment. Jeremy Thrane is the most like me and that is the most autobiographical of all my novels.
And he’s the one least likely to ever be confused with you.
Exactly. Because he’s a gay man. I find Josie to be kind of annoying sometimes — annoyingly opaque and clueless and kind of self-involved. I wanted to make her flawed and not heroic. Those are the kind of people I find most interesting. If she’s a part of me, it’s not my best self. Often I choose characters who express not my best self, but the sides of me I haven’t developed or haven’t expressed.
Local library branches, hours, jobs safe for now
Good news: massive proposed budget cuts for all three area library systems have been taken off the table, at least for the moment. A friend writes:
Expect to see some smiling librarians today. You will notice a gleeful glint in our cateye glasses, and some cardigans may be thrown open in celebration.Due to a $46.5 million budget restoration, there will not be layoffs in our city libraries. Thank you to everyone who got involved in the fight and helped to keep us working. Because you have been so nice, we will answer any and all questions you pose to us and provide you with free computer access, and lots of books, videos, and training. If you didn’t support the libraries, we will still give you all of that, but secretly hope that you choke on it.
It’s a great day for New York City libraries. Thank you, our patrons, for making it possible.
Greene, Waugh, and the force of warmth
Among the highlights of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters are the author’s Catholicism squabbles with Evelyn Waugh.
Here — to follow up on some recent thoughts about the melding of fact and invention in fiction — is an excerpt from a January 4, 1961, letter from Greene to Waugh. This missive was prompted by Waugh’s excoriation of A Burnt-Out Case, which he dismissed as technically deficient, absurdly melodramatic, and a sign that Greene’s skills were fading. Also, he believed the book caricatured Greene’s Catholic admirers, including himself. Wrote Greene:
With a writer of your genius and insight I certainly would not attempt to hide behind the time-old gag that an author can never be identified with his characters. Of course in some of Querry’s reactions there are reactions of mine, just as in some of Fowler’s reactions in The Quiet American there were reactions of mine. I suppose the points where an author is in agreement with his character lend what force of warmth there is to the expression. At the same time I think one can say that the parallel must not be drawn all down the line and not necessarily to the conclusion of the line. Fowler, I hope, was a more jealous man than I am, and Querry, I fear, was a better man than I am. I wanted to give expression to various states or moods of belief and unbelieve. The doctor, whom I like best as a realized character, represents a settled and easy atheism; the Father Superior a settled and easy belief (I use ‘easy’ as a term of praise and not as a term of reproach); Father Thomas an unsettled form of believe and Querry an unsettled form of disbelief. One could probably dig a little of the author also out of the doctor and father Thomas!
Talking Damages with Jenny Diski
When I mentioned at Facebook this spring that that I was gearing up to start into Damages, writer and LRB critic Jenny Diski urged me to stockpile food beforehand. It was good advice. The Maud household barely stirred from the couch for two consecutive weekends.
Normally we’d be well into Season Two by now, but the DVDs aren’t out yet, and I’m left mulling over what I’ve seen of the show and wanting to talk about it. Diski indulges me below.
Facebook is good for a few things, most notably alerting me to your fondness for Damages. Why is this show so addictive?
It’s almost pantomime. Or classic drama. Not about being original, but about the inevitable. There’s a real understanding of how drama works, not so much by surprise and shock, as by setting up the unstoppable and making the audience know what it coming, unstoppably. It does what the other good TV shows do and uses cliché and stereotype thoughtfully. Not so much turning it on its head, as turning it inside and out, examining it through a lens. The Wire is like this. It takes an obvious notion, almost too obvious of the similarity of the cops and the dealers’ worlds and plays them in parallel. Very schematic. It only just works. So does the resurrection of Cruella de Vil as lady lawyer in tight skirts and high heels manipulating the world. It sort of intensifies what you expect. Hitchcock did that, too. It also examines the great problem of ends and means — a particularly American problem, perhaps, currently. Like The Shield it plays on being mesmerised by the good guy being the bad guy and dragging us along with him/her.
Oh, The Wire! While in the midst of Season Four, I seriously thought I’d be happy to spend the rest of my life doing nothing but sitting in my apartment, living through those characters. At times I actually felt kind of angry that this wasn’t an option. And when the show ended, I experienced the same kind of bewildered disappointment that you do as a child when you reach the end of the book you love and are forced to realize that there really, truly, will never be any more pages, no matter how hard you wish for them.
As for Damages, racing through the first season with you on my mind, I couldn’t help thinking of that scathing London Review of Books piece you wrote ages ago about Laura Flanders’ Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species. As you said then, “We can’t get it into our heads that, barring some anatomy, women are very like men. Being able to write their name in the snow when they pee doesn’t entitle men to rule the world, but shaving under their arms doesn’t stop women being self-serving…”
I’m pretty sure Patty Hewes would sign her name to this statement. Or am I reaching?
A case of when she was bad she was very, very good? Patty Hewes is Lady Macbeth in teetering heels. Except that she holds it together as no Elizabethan bad woman was allowed to. Really bad women are wonderful when done well — a bit of a feminist conflict, no?
Mythic mother monsters are in our genes, clearly Glenn Close is rejoicing in playing one of them, a wicked stepmother, Clytemnestra, Medea, the Snow Queen. Wily, clever, foxy and very very dangerous. Patty Hewes is the bad mother we can’t take our eyes off — because she is too dangerous, and because bad is fascinating. Partly, of course, there’s the simple pleasure of not watching women as victims (I can’t tell you how much I loved Teeth!), but also the gathering battle between Hewes and whatshername, the young woman, has a very pleasing samurai quality about it. More »
Trouble in Greenpoint on Thursday, the 18th
Next Thursday night I’ll be drinking sangria, eating sorbet, and interviewing Kate Christensen — first idol, now friend — about Trouble, at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, at 7:30 p.m. She calls this novel, her fifth, her beach book. I devoured it over the winter almost as quickly as I did the others, except I stopped in the middle to meet her for dinner.
That’s not Kate’s photo on the cover, by the way, although if you’ve met her you can see why even her own mother was confused.
In other Christensen news: last night she appeared on All Things Considered to discuss her guilty reading pleasures.
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled and posted by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30 pm, and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to Ms. Cerand at lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication. Due to the volume of submissions, events cannot be considered unless the date appears in the subject line of your message.
The Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Edition
MON, JUN 8: Work on your Beach Party Attitude (that’s an actual house cocktail at Diner in Williamsburg) via “Praia Piquinia: Photographs by Christian Chaize” at Jen Bekman Gallery, through July 11. And, “Dan Graham: Beyond,” opening at the Whitney later this month, offers a full and deeply intriguing schedule of complementary programming. If I were in San Francisco, I’d be making time for Robert Frank’s “The Americans” at SF MOMA. Through August 23.
TUE, JUN 9: In Fort Greene, FalconWorks is a presenter of “Riot Act! The Police-Teen Theater Project’s Spring 2009 Performance. Young people from throughout Brooklyn combine forces with officers from four NYPD units to create a night of hilarious, moving, and totally unpredictable improvisational theater.” 7PM, FREE. Downtown, “Belladonna* Celebrates the Elders (& our last event of the season!) with readings and events guest-hosted by some of our favorite writers who’ve invited writers who influence and inspire them,” featuring Jane Sprague, Tina Darragh & Diane Ward, at Dixon Place (at that same venue, Martha Wainwright sings the songs of Edith Piaf for a limited engagement of three shows, June 14-15). 7:30PM, $6.
WED, JUN 10: Sunday Salon co-founder Nita Noveno says, “As many of you know I work for the Student Press Initiative and this year had the honor of collaborating with a dynamic team of educators and their 11th graders at Brooklyn Community Arts & Media High School (aka BCAM). I’m excited to have been part of this project and would like to invite you to a special student reading of ‘Take a Position, Create a Vision: Persuasive Speeches & Campaign Posters’ by BCAM’s 11th Grade.‘” At Barnes & Noble, 106 Court Street in Brooklyn. 5:45PM, FREE. And, the Beatrice Series returns to the Slipper Room with the Bushwick Book Club for a night of words and music focused on teenage tales, starring Judy Blundell, National Book Award Winner for What I Saw and How I Lied, easily one of my favorite books, ever. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. 7:30PM, FREE.
THU, JUN 11: Ben Greenman, your favorite authority on the heartrending and only somewhat ironic emotional complexity of PDX strippers, the Gowanus Canal, and “lit-roiding,” reads from Please Step Back at Bookcourt. 7PM, FREE [Full disclosure, as always: I am Ben’s publicist].
FRI, JUN 12: Stay in and watch L’Avventura online for free.
WEEKEND: What could be gleefully sharper than the mind of a teenage girl? Imagine an afternoon with the best of them on Sunday, as Girls Write Now’s Annual Spring Reading at the New School features high school students in the program, along with TODAY’s Amy Robach and National Book Award nominee (and Sedaris fave) Jean Thompson, author of Do Not Deny Me [Full disclosure, as always: I am the chair of the board of Girls Write Now, and Jean’s publicist]. 4PM, FREE.
JUN 15: Idlewild Books hosts a launch party for Jean Thompson and Do Not Deny Me, the new story collection earning comparisons to Alice Munro. 7PM, FREE, RSVP: events@idlewildbooks.com.
JUN 16: “Upstairs at the Square” celebrates three years of innovative and eclectic programming with Carlos Ruiz Zafon & Las Rubias del Norte, discussing and performing their work with host Katherine Lanpher. 7PM, FREE [Full dislosure, as always: I am very involved with this series].
JUN 20: Special note for Los Angeles readers… Mark Sarvas gives a reading of his darkly shimmering debut novel, Harry, Revised at Book Soup, with Damion Searls, whose new story collection What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, is just out from Dalkey Archive Press (I recently read — and found wildly entertaining — their French gangster anti-love story, Do Not Touch). 7PM, FREE.
Meanwhile, I’m off to do the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, and will be speaking at the Center for Fiction Writers Conference in New York later this month. The Smart Set returns June 22.
Cuts looming for NYC libraries
The recession is already overwhelming the city libraries. Patrons are searching for jobs and borrowing vastly more books and videos. Sometimes, now that they’re out of work and no prospective employers are calling, they’re just looking for a place to hang out.
At the Mid-Manhattan branch a couple weeks ago, the check-out line was three times as long as I’ve ever seen it, and every chair was filled.
Something like a quarter of the city’s librarians — some of them friends of mine — are going to lose their jobs in the next few months unless the budget is restored. Service hours will be cut way back; vastly fewer books will be purchased; after-school programs for kids may be in jeopardy.
I know the city is strapped, but these are the kind of funding decisions that really affect neighborhoods. When desperate people can’t be in the libraries, they’ll be on the streets. For details about the proposed cuts and the overwhelming uptick in library usage, see the Open Letter from a New York City Librarian I posted last month.
It’ll be another week before the numbers are set in stone. If you haven’t yet, please contact your City Council members and the Mayor — follow the directions here and here, and sign here.
Inside the paperback book launch
“If you’ve ever had the misfortune of writing a book, or knowing someone who has, you’ll relate to this,” says Matthew Yglesias. (Via.)
The video made the rounds ages ago, but it’s new to me. Have a great weekend, everybody.
Haunting of Hundreds Hill: on Sarah Waters’ latest
My appreciation of Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger is up at NPR. Here’s an excerpt:
For a writer so gifted at conjuring worlds in which unspoken longings seem to manifest themselves as otherworldly phenomena, British novelist Sarah Waters is surprisingly dismissive of her own superstitions, which she sees as symptomatic of her lower-middle-class origins. Her grandparents worked as servants, her parents were the first in the family to attend grammar school, and the Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith author learned early on to touch wood, cherish the Catholic saints, and worry that it would be bad luck to try to move too far beyond the station to which she was born.Class anxiety is the animating force behind Waters’ fifth book, The Little Stranger, a suspenseful and psychologically layered haunted-house story set in the aftermath of World War II, when the fading gentry collided with the emerging professional class that would once have been the help. The novel opens as its narrator, Dr. Faraday, arrives at Hundreds Hall, the Ayers family manor, to treat the maid. Faraday quickly realizes the girl is fine; her real affliction is not a stomachache but an ignorant and, to a medical man, wholly frustrating terror of ghosts. It’s the condition of the house itself, now a grim structure crumbling in a thicket of weeds, that worries him. His late mother had once been a servant there, and when Faraday was a boy the majesty of the place had filled him with such yearning that he’d sawed away at a decorative acorn with his penknife and slid it into his pocket.
For background on the author and her work, try Robert McCrum’s glowing Guardian profile. Elsewhere, Waters explains that The Little Stranger was inspired by Josephine Tey’s 1948 detective novel, The Franchise Affair, which in turn had its origins in a real-life scandal. (Via and via, respectively.)
See also Laura Miller’s thoughtful review for Salon, Scarlett Thomas’ for the New York Times Book Review, and Ron Charles’ for The Washington Post
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim turns fifty
The Frank Lloyd Wright show celebrating the Guggenheim’s 50th anniversary is more hagiography than critical evaluation, but it does offer a strong sense of the best and worst of his architecture, from the space-age hilltop homes and awesome corkscrew museum itself, to his sprawling and weirdly laid out suburban landscapes. To be fair, they’d be far easier to traverse in his futuristic taxi-copters (pictured at upper right in the drawing above).
Wright didn’t care much for cities. He believed they’d disappear of their own accord. So imagine how he felt knowing that New York “master builder” (and reviled expressways architect) Robert Moses, his cousin by marriage, was the one who saw to it that Wright’s single New York landmark was built. (Via.)
I never get tired of visiting the Guggenheim. If you haven’t, try sitting at the top of the spiral sometime.
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled and posted by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30 pm, and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to Ms. Cerand at lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication. Due to the volume of submissions, events cannot be considered unless the date appears in the subject line of your message.
“The Coast-to-Coast Edition”
JUNE 1: Contributors to Because I Love Her, a new anthology with the most charming trailer I’ve seen yet, convene at Bookcourt. Afterparty with drinks and bocce to follow. 7PM, FREE. Brooklyn Independent’s line-up includes “a revealing documentary portrait of filmmaker Harmony Korine during the production of his third feature film, Mister Lonely. Shot on location in Scotland, Paris, and Panama.” At Barbes. 7PM, FREE.
JUNE 2: Chic-chic indie Idlewild Books hosts a launch party for the new paperback of Roxana Robinson’s acclaimed novel, Cost, which tells the story of a Brooklyn musican descent into heroin addiction and how it all falls apart for his family one summer in Maine. Here’s her Largehearted Boy playlist for the book, which she made with the help of this dude [Full disclosure, as always: I have done PR for both Roxana and Idlewild]. 7PM, FREE. And, “The Australian Consulate General invites you to celebrate the publishing of David Francis’ second novel Stray Dog Winter, published in the US by MacAdam/Cage. The novel has received a Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary award Commendation and is a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist. 6-8PM, FREE, RSVP essential (212) 351-6550.” Ben Greenman, who has of late discussed strippers in Portland and recommended the Gowanus Canal, continues his winning streak with an appearance in conjunction with his new novel, Please Step Back, at Community Bookstore in Park Slope [Full disclosure, as always: I am Ben’s publicist]. 7PM, FREE.
JUNE 3: This Wednesday marks the first edition of Amanda Stern’s Happy Ending series at Joe’s Pub that I know of where there are tickets available the week of the show, which means, you can go. “Ideas & Inventions Night” features Tristan Perich, Samantha Hunt and Dan Rollman. Highly recommended. 7PM, $15 advanced tickets essential.
JUNE 4: At Nublu, a party for an important cause: Ghana Health and Education Initiative’s Program For Girls’ Empowerment. “Awesome drink specials, amazing DJ Matt Lament and live music!” 8-11PM, $12 donation goes directly to the program.
Thursday evening IN LOS ANGELES, the ALOUD LA at Central Library series hosts Philip Lopate and David Ulin in conversation on Susan Sontag. 7PM, FREE. Wish I could make that one! If I were in LA, I would also be saving the date for the next Vermin on the Mount on June 14.
JUNE 5: Friday, new geography, as, I’m going to CHICAGO for Jean Thompson’s Do Not Deny Me launch party (hot show poster and all!), hosted by my friends at Featherproof at the Book Cellar. Please join us if you’re in town as I barely know a soul! Do not deny me! [Full disclosure, as always: I am Jean’s publicist.] 7:30PM, FREE.
JUNE 6: Saturday night, also IN CHICAGO, Ben Greenman hosts a special edition of the Happy Ending Reading Series, with Arthur Phillips, Nami Mun & Joe Meno. Musical guest Daniel Knox, at the Charleston. 7PM, FREE.
All weekend long in New York: the 2009 Woolf and the City conference, which includes a Friday night performance by the West Coast Bloomsbury-influenced indie pop outfit, Princeton. Don’t miss it!
JUNE 7: A good day to chillax.
