Monday, August 25, 2008

"Good writing is like a windowpane."

"Orwell would be rolling in his grave." "This policy is Orwellian." "I don't like this, so I'm going to call it Orwellian."

George Orwell's name is pretty broadly abused in the punditry world, thanks to 1984. So we can safely assume that Orwell, if he had a blog today, would be a political blogger, right?

Wrong! He's a navel-gazing minutiae blogger, just like the rest of us. The University of Westminster is converting Orwell's old diaries into blog form. Most of it is boring English countryside stuff so far. But overall, it's kinda charming. It's bound to get more interesting (unless those English scholars are just big teases). And I'm all for getting the non-political aspects of Orwell out there.

He was a brilliant observer, and the blog thing actually kinda fits. After all, he totes perfected the "look what I'm doing, give me a book deal" thing in Down and Out in Paris and London. (I kid, I kid, love the book.)

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Hemingwayapalooza

One day you're in college, reading The Sun Also Rises and thinking, "Hey, Brett Ashley's got a pretty sweet deal." Then, suddenly you're 27, reading The Sun Also Rises again, and realizing that somehow, instead of breaking expat hearts from Paris to Barcelona, you've become Jake Barnes instead. *sigh*

Anyway, I picked up The Sun Also Rises again in anticipation of hanging out in Key West, Hemingway's old stomping grounds. The vacation didn't work out, but I'm happy to have had a reason to revisit the book--it's definitely one of those novels that clicks a little deeper with age.

Hemingway's bunch of obnoxious, wasteful drinking buddies doesn't seem quite so glamorous anymore. It's clearer now how impotent they all are (not just poor Jake with his unnamed WWI casualty), and how hollow the relationships are. The main "love" relationship, Jake and Brett's codependent talkfest, has even less reality in it than Gatsby's infatuation with Daisy Buchanan. What's clearer to me now too is that Hemingway never took the crew seriously, either. They're a collection of "almosts." Almost a novelist, almost a real journalist, almost a Lady, almost a civilized group traveling in sophisticated circles.

But they're not without charm--and that's probably the best thing Hemingway does. He takes a deeply unlikeable group of people, and makes their petty squabbles and one night stands seem like Important Plot Points. And his attention to the machoness of Spain and bullfighting has been caricatured and become oversimplified--but what people seem to lose is how well he does it. Like so many male writers, he (or Jake, anyway) can't talk about sex directly...but the same sensuous care comes out in the details.

[Random Sun Also Rises note: my copy is a battered one I bought used at the UConn CoOp way back when. The previous owner wrote all over it. She or he starts off the first few pages with a few valid points about Jake Barnes's sexual issues. Then the comments get rarer, and rarer. Eventually, there's a tiny, final note in the bottom corner of a page: "I *heart* Chris." Ah, UConn. Turning out the great literary minds. There are also a few comments in my own handwriting that I don't remember making, proving that I wasn't always the book jotting prude that I seem to be these days.]

To follow up the novel, I went with the man himself. Or the Lillian Ross version, anyway, which is just as good to me. In the early 1950s, Ross befriended Hemingway and his wife, and ended up with Portrait of Hemingway, which ran as a (controversial) article in the New Yorker. Apparently people didn't like Ross's impressionistic presentation of the writer, including his odd personal habits and weird syntax. 1950s America might not have liked it much, but I did. So much of the Hemingway discussion today is filtered through the way he died (see also Plath, Sylvia). I'd much rather see the vaguely inappropriate portrait of a flawed man than the death mask of a tragic man. Hemingway was clearly kind of annoying, but also a gregarious and generous friend.

The book (extremely short, since nothing is added from the magazine piece except a couple of brief intros/analyses from Ross) is also a reflection on Ross's unique journalistic ability. She seems to have the talent of being the kid sister and the authority figure at the same time--something that was evident even when I saw her a couple years ago (at a surprisingly spry eighty years old) interviewing Robin Williams. When she goes, she'll take the last link to the spunky, pre-Tina Brown New Yorker with her, and it'll be incredibly sad. But she's still with us, so I'll save the pouring of the 40 for my homie for when the time is right.

Hemingway, as we all know, is not with us, so the least I can do is dig up his stuff every few years and pay my respects by looking at it with whatever small amounts of wisdom I've picked up in the meantime.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Joyce Carol Oates at Lincoln Triangle B&N

Joyce Carol Oates is the Law & Order of the literary world.

"But," you protest (why must you always protest?), "she's one of our most accomplished writers. She writes ridiculously academic reviews in NYROB. She's the Vegas favorite to win the National Book Award every year. How could she possibly be like the sensationalistic Law & Order?" Because beneath the fancy prose, the deft storytelling, the academic laurels, she's a true crime junkie who watches Nancy Grace to get book ideas.

Tonight at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble, Oates talked about her new book, My Sister, My Love. The book is the story of Skyler Rampike, whose family becomes a tabloid target when his six-year-old sister is murdered under sketchy household circumstances. The sister happens to be a budding competitive ice skater manipulated and sexualized by her parents. Sound familiar? It should. Then there's Oates's past work, including a fake autobiography about Marilyn Monroe's rise, fall, and death. And even my favorite Oates work, the creepy "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is based on a real murder. So yeah. Ripped from the headlines(tm)!

But let's forgive her, because she does it so darn well. Anyway, the talk was entertaining. Oates was chatty, and I like chatty writers. They don't make you feel guilty for forcing them to get up there and plug their own book. And the event space was amazing: big and closed off from the rest of the store. I'll definitely be attending more events there. It beats the three-stories-and-still-too-small space in the Union Square B&N. Good times!