writers

Tuesday various

Paris, je t’aime

Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik A few weeks ago, I read Adam Gopnik’s collection of personal essays, Paris to the Moon. Over my winter break, I’d read a couple of articles by Gopnik in The New Yorker, something I had probably done on several occasions beforehand, given his long history with the magazine, but I had never really been aware of his name or byline before this. I liked the writing in the articles enough to go in search of something more.

Before I go any further, however, a word about writing in books.

In the past, and in general, I have been emphatically against it, although never for any specific reasons that I could adequately articulate. I knew it offended my aesthetic sensibilities, that although I had, on rare occasion, underlined a passage here and there, I had largely cured myself of the practice; I had come to see the intrusion of my own inked lines as a terrible affront to the writer, a devaluing of my hard-bought property, and the sort of crass vandalism best left to ignorant children and only half-literate philistines.
When I dug a little deeper, however, and actually questioned my reasoning, I discovered that this feeling was just that — a feeling — and as such it didn’t really have a leg to stand on. Writing in books wasn’t good or bad; there was no moral component to it, only an aesthetic choice, and it was largely an arbitrary choice at that. If I owned the book, I was free to do with it what I liked. If I wasn’t planning to resell it later on, or hoard the book in its pristine original condition like one might with a rare first edition or signed copy, then there was no reason I couldn’t take my own pen to its pages.

All of this came up with Gopnik’s book for the simple reason that I was finding a lot in it that I wanted to underline. Maybe it’s that the collection was born out of his New Yorker dispatches, and I’ve never had a similar compunction about writing in magazines, which are often by their nature more disposable. Of course, once I’d allowed myself the freedom to underline, I discovered a tendency to underline perhaps too much, to see everything as relevant. And of course the natural response to that is to underline less, to question the relevancy of everything, which can end up going too far in the other extreme. I tried to find a happy middle, underlining just the passages I genuinely wanted to remember.

So, anyway, here are those passages. Overall, I enjoyed Gopnik’s book, even if all these years later — he and his family went to Paris in 1995 — it can’t help but feel occasionally, oddly dated. It doesn’t fill me with any great (or at least increased) desire to see Paris, but I’m glad I read it.

Here’s Gopnik on the allure of Paris, the French who live there:

Americans, Henry James wrote, “are too apt to think that Paris is the celestial city,” and even if we don’t quite think that, some of us do think of it as the place where tickets are sold for the train to get you there….If this notion is pretty obviously unreal, and even hair-raisingly naïve, it has at least the excuse of not being original. When they die, Wilde wrote, all good Americans go to Paris. Some of us have always tried to get there early and beat the crowds.

What truly makes Paris beautiful is the intermingling of the monumental and the personal, the abstract and the footsore particular, it and you.

French civilization is all the more a miracle, given the obstacles the French put in its way.

French identity is not that hard to achieve; if you speak French, you feel French.

On technology, history, progress:

Popular memory may be short, but it is nothing compared with the amnesia of experts.

It is not so much that the phone transformed France and the car transformed America as that both fitted right in, as I suppose technologies must, with what people had wanted all along. Not new desires made by new machines but new machines matching the same old needs.

It was not just that you could not see the trees for the forest. It was that you could not see the forest because it was covered by a map.

We knew that our attempt to insist on a particular set of pleasures for our kid — to impose a childhood on our child — might be silly or inappropriate or even doomed. We couldn’t help it, entirely. The romance of your child’s childhood may be the last romance you can give up.

The presence of so much history ought to be unmanning or even just embarrassing. In Paris it isn’t, not because the past is so hallowed but because it doesn’t seem to be there. The unsentimental efficiency of French commonplace civilization, of which the French café is the highest embodiment, is so brisk that it disarms nostalgia. History keeps wiping the table off and asking you, a little impatiently, what you’ll have now.

On relationships, love, emotion:

Yet life is mostly lived by timid bodies at home, and since we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains, we see the differences in lives as deeply there too.

For all the complaints about a new puritanism, the truth is that feminism in America has, by restoring the edge of unpredictability and danger to the way women behave and the way men react to that behavior, added to the total of tension on which desire depends. The edgy, complicated, reverse-spin coding of New York life — this skintight dress is not a come-on but its opposite, a declaration of independence meant not for you but for me — is unknown here.

We make our monsters according to the armature of our fears.

Loss, like distance, gives permission for romance. In a better-ordered Verona, Romeo and Juliet would have grown up to be just another couple at dinner.

On fashion:

“The fashionable exists only in relation to something that is not that way,” he went on. “The relationship between the modishness of the Flore and the unmodishness of the Deux Margots isn’t just possibly arbitrary. It’s necessarily arbitrary. If you place any two things side by side, one will become fashionable and the other will not. It’s a necessity determined by the entire idea of fashion. A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it’s in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely. That’s the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful — they are goddesses — and yet a man must choose. And what was the chooser’s name? Paris. C’est normal.”

Haute couture, everyone says, no longer has much to do with what normal women normally wear. The besetting sin of haute couture, though, is not unreality but corniness: not that it looks like things no woman would actually wear but that it looks exactly like what your aunt Ida always wears “for best” — that shiny black thing, say, covered with sequins and accompanied by a little shoulder-hugging jacket.

The clothes are extravagant and unreal, but they don’t seem camp. They don’t seem artificial or out of this world, just symbolic of a common human hope that the world could be something other than it is — younger and more musical and less exhausting and better lit. It proposes that the little moments of seduction on which, when we look back, so much of out life depends could unfold as formally as they deserve to, and all dressed up. It is as if we were wishing that the rituals of sex, those moments of painful sizing up, which begin with the thought That’s a nice dress, could pass by more consequentially, slowly — love walking down a runway instead of just meeting you outside the movie theater.

The line between art and kitsch is largely measured in ruin.

On writing:

If there is a fault in reporting, after all, it is not that it is too ephemeral but that it is not ephemeral enough, too quickly concerned with what seems big at the time to see what is small and more likely to linger. It is, I think, the journalist’s vice to believe that all history can instantly be reduced to experience…just as it is the scholar’s vice to believe that all experience can be reduced to history…

The essayist dreams of being a prism, though which other light passes, and fears ending up merely as a mirror, showing the same old face. He has only his Self to show and only himself to blame if it doesn’t show up well.

Writing is a business of saying things about stuff and saying things about things and then pretending that you have cooked one into the other.

I had spent my adult life believing that storytelling depends on the credibility of its details, and now, finally, I had made up a story that someone liked, and the details had no credibility at all, not existence except as sounds.

There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn’t. Sometimes the words fly right over the fence and all the way out to the feelings. Make them do it one time out of three in private, and you’ve got a reputation as someone who can play a little, a dad who can tell a decent bedtime story. Do it three times out of three in public, and you’re Mark McGwire or Dickens.

Oh, and it’s good to know I’m in good company when it comes to writing in other people’s books.

Never the Twain shall meet

I keep wanting to say something — just something — about that forthcoming new edition of Huckleberry Finn that you may have heard about recently, the one that replaces Mark Twain’s some two hundred uses of the word “nigger” — and let’s just get that right out there at the start — with the word “slave.” But beyond saying, well, I don’t think they should do that, I don’t have a whole lot to say about it. Frankly, lots of other people have already said it better than me.

For instance, Petter David writes:

To me, the bottomline [sic] is this: I have little doubt that fifty years from now the NewSouth edition will be forgotten, seen as a quaint relic of attempted censorship in the same manner that the Bowdler versions of Shakespeare plays are. In the meantime, Huck Finn’s realization that a man should be judged–if he is to be judged at all–by the quality of his soul rather than the color of his skin–will continue to shine as a clarion call for racial tolerance in a way that all the censored versions of classic works will not.

I heard an interview with the new edition’s editor, Alan Gribben, on a recent episode of Studio 360, and his intentions seem to be good, his heart in the right place. Many students, and not just African Americans, he argues, have a very difficult time engaging with the novel because of that word; it’s simply too loaded a word for them to read past it. In his introduction, he writes:

Through a succession of firsthand experiences, this editor gradually concluded that an epithet-free edition of Twain’s books is necessary today. For nearly forty years I have led college classes, bookstore forums, and library reading groups in detailed discussions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in California, Texas, New York, and Alabama, and I always recoiled from uttering the racial slurs spoken by numerous characters, including Tom and Huck. I invariably substituted the word “slave” for Twain’s ubiquitous n-word whenever I read any passages aloud. Students and audience members seemed to prefer this expedient, and I could detect a visible sense of relief each time, as though a nagging problem with the text had been addressed. Indeed, numerous communities currently ban Huckleberry Finn as required reading in public schools owing to its offensive racial language and have quietly moved the title to voluntary reading lists. The American Library Association lists the novel as one of the most frequently challenged books across the nation.

And yet, while his intention is not censorship, it is at the very least sugarcoating, and one of a distinctly odd variety: his substitution may not have the hateful power of Twain’s original, the same slap-in-the-face quality that the n-word has since acquired, but it is, in the end, arguably more offensive.

That’s debatable, of course, and obviously my reaction to either word isn’t going to be the same as a young African American high school or college student’s. It may indeed be incredibly difficult for such a student to work past the n-word, to see past the centuries of racism and hate that have often divided us and made teaching the book so contentious. But isn’t that, to a very large extent, what teaching is for?

Matt Cheney writes about this in great detail, and his post, along with the links he shares, are worth reading in full. In part, he says:

I think teachers have a responsibility to raise and work through difficult, discomforting topics with students, because those topics are not going to disappear if they’re not talked about. Students will encounter racism and sexism and homophobia and all sorts of other privileges, entitlements, and entanglements — they will even, in all likelihood, perpetrate some of those things themselves (I have; haven’t we all?). Education shouldn’t be about memorizing lots of facts and figures, or about reading pleasant and uncontroversial books. There’s a place, certainly, for facts, figures, and pleasant reading. But educators need to have some spark of idealism. We should want to make the world better, and to help empower our students in whatever small ways we can to go forth and help make the world a more beautiful, less painful place. Otherwise, why bother teaching?

Perhaps replacing the word “nigger” with “slave” throughout Huck Finn makes the book better; it certainly doesn’t make the world better.

So, in the end, yeah, I don’t have a lot to say myself beyond, well, I wish they wouldn’t do that. But they’re going to do it, and no doubt the altered edition will be taught in a number of schools going forward. I just think, for however easier it will make the teaching and reading experience, those students and their instructors are getting cheated.

Thursday various

Thursday various

  • A fascinating story about a young writer who disappeared. Although it’s arguably a story that has precious little to do with her having been a child prodigy and more the difficult circumstances of her life following her parents’ divorce. [via]
  • With New York bracing for more snow tomorrow, I think it needs to be said again: Bloomberg and the rest of the city really botched it two weeks ago. [via]
  • Meanwhile, New Jersey wants to seize your unused gift cards. I honestly don’t know enough about how gift cards work to know whether or not this is a terrible idea, but they’ve already been struck down in court. I’ve always been led to believe that stores view unused gift cards as essentially free money — they get the giver’s cash, but then never have to part with merchandise in exchange — but again, the bare-bones economics might be different. [via]
  • Meanwhile, Virginia revokes what may be the greatest license plate ever. Won’t somebody think of not eating the children? [via]
  • And finally, Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness. A fascinating article — and I think not just to folks like me who happen to work in the field of mental health publishing — about the battles being fought over the forthcoming DSM-5.This exchange is particularly revealing:

    I recently asked a former president of the APA how he used the DSM in his daily work. He told me his secretary had just asked him for a diagnosis on a patient he’d been seeing for a couple of months so that she could bill the insurance company. “I hadn’t really formulated it,” he told me. He consulted the DSM-IV and concluded that the patient had obsessive-compulsive disorder.

    “Did it change the way you treated her?” I asked, noting that he’d worked with her for quite a while without naming what she had.

    “No.”

    “So what would you say was the value of the diagnosis?”

    “I got paid.” [via]