New York Mag on New York's Greatest Book

New York Magazine is running a feature this week on the 'Greatest New York Ever'. Staff writer, Sam Anderson, tackles best novel. Sifton forgoes 'the city's proud tradition of mega-books' (Bonfire of the Vanities, Underworld, Winter's Tale) to nominate Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence as Manhattan's primo ode.

"It builds itself, obsessively, out of all the essential New York themes. The necessary (but often terrifying) seesawing between change and stasis. The constant drama of taste and class; the connoisseurship of gossip...The shiny lure of fanticiy versus the sharp hook of reality. The giant shell game of phoniness and authenticity. The existential strain of distinction vs. assimilation"

Book Club Book Suggestions

Kids,

What should we read for our next book club? We need some suggestions! Anything you'd like to hear a discussion on? We're taking submissions! xx A & E

And now for a game of "match that celebrity to his or her library"

A)

B)

C)

D)

E)

F)

G)

H)

I)

1. Oprah

2. Greta Garbo

3. Joan Rivers

4. Michael Jackson

5. Woody Allen

6. Diane Keaton

7. Rod Stewart

8. Karl Lagerfeld

9. Frank Sinatra

Key: A=8; B=1; C=4; D=5; E=3; F=2; G=9 (it was a giveaway);H=6; and, saving the clear winner for last, I=8.

Info and images via Flavorwire

James Franco Gets Literary Hollywood Stylez

Picture from TMZ

" James Franco, who is directing a forthcoming film version of Stephen Elliott’s memoir The Adderall Diaries, is carving out an impressive chunk of literary cinema in the near future. He’s directing Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (from his own screenplay), and is working on a deal with producer Scott Rudin to do Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian."
-From the NYTimes Book Review

Grace Paley

At the recommendation of our brother-in-law, I've been reading a short story collection by Grace Paley called Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and they are so fresh and hilarious (and sad, duh). The stories are interconnected vignettes from the lives of working class New Yorkers in the 1950s. I wanted to share this excerpt from the story "Distance," which is one of the most surprising things I've read in a long time. It moves so fast you almost miss it, but I laughed so hard when I realized what had actually happened here (it was a dark laugh, duh). The scene is breakfast, and an overprotective mother (named Dolly) disapproves of the girl (named Ginny) her son (named John) has been dating.

"Mother," he said, "I am going to ask Virginia to marry me"

"I told you so," said my husband and dropped the funnies on his bacon.

"You are?" I said.

"I am, and if God is good, she'll have me."

"No blasphemy intended," I said, "but He'll have to be off in the old country fishing if she says yes."

"Mother!" said John. He is a nice boy, loyal to his friends and good.

"She'll go out with anyone at all," I said.

"Oh, Mother!" said John, meaning they weren't engaged, and she could do what she wanted.

"Go out is nothing," I said. "I seen her only last Friday night with Pete, his arm around her, going to Phelan's."

"Pete's like that, Mother," meaning it was no fault of hers.

"Then what of last Saturday night, you had to go to the show yourself as if there wasn't no one else in the Borough of Manhattan to take to a movie, and when you was gone I seen her buy two Cokes at Carlo's and head straight to the third floor to John Kameron's"

"So? So?"

"...and come out at 11 p.m. and his arm was around her."

"So?"

"...and his hand was well under her sweater."

"That's not so, Mother."

"It is so, and ell me, young man, how you'll feel married to a girl that every wild boy on the block has been leaning his thumbs on her little titties like she was a Carvel dairy counter, tell me that?"

"Dolly!" says Jack. "You went too far."

...[here she launches into a litany of Ginny's other transgressions]...

"Oh Dolly," says my husband, and plops his head into his hands.

"I'm going, Mother, that's libel, I'll have her sue you for libel," dopey John starts to holler out of his tomato-red face. "I'm going and I'll ask her and I love her and I don't care what you say. Truth or lies, I don't care."

"And if you go, Johnny," I said, calm as a dead fish, my eyes rolling up to pray and be heeded, "this is what I must do," and I took a kitchen knife, a bit bluny, and plunged it at least an eighth of an inch in the fat of my heart. I guess that the heart of a middle-aged lady is jammed in deeper that an eighth of an inch, for I am here to tell the tale. But some blood did come soon, to my son's staring; it touched my nighty and spread out on my bathrobe, and it was as red on my apron as a picture in an Italian church. John fell down on his knees and hid his head in my lap."

Then the story moves on. I keep being struck by Grace Paley's rhythm in these stories (not a quality I tend to notice in stories, for the record). But between the jerky, jumpy way her characters speak slang, and the peculiar way the action moves, coming on quickly and receiving little consequence or attention, and then slowing without the reader noticing, the book of interconnected stories has reminded me of some of my favorite albums. It's entirely unlike anything I've read. Highly recommended!

First book club getaway: a huge success!

We just spent a wonderful weekend discussing Bronte in a secluded house deep within the moors of New York, a.k.a. the Hamptons. Ok, so in this case it wasn't exactly the dark and mysterious wild land that is Wuthering Heights, but far away from uptight social mores of the city we did indulge our passionate sides: debating, loving, hating, and relating, to the iconic romantic novel.

After a night of celebrating, and some pre-group skimming and cramming, it was to our credit that we pulled of a fascinating discussion. We all agreed that the novel was an impressive feat for the young and isolated Emily Bronte and a dark study of the effects of isolation and bad parenting. Maybe it was because we pre-gamed with a viewing of the movie Twilight, but many of us argued that Wuthering Heights was also a juvenile picture of the shallowest kind of love between basically despicable characters. Interestingly, the first Twilight book (so Wikipedia tells me...I swear) makes allusions to Wuthering Heights, via the star-crossed lovers connection. But they have a lot else in common, namely the stamp of an adolescent love. Like the perpetually angry Kristin Stewart in the Twilight movies, Cathy is pretty unredeemably unlikeable. But she has the love of two admirers to her name, and so, in some audiences' eyes, she is enviable and de-facto redeemed. We of the jaded book club set were all rolling our eyes a little bit with a montage of images swimming in our brains that looked a little too much like this:

It's like, enough already!

!!!!

We were yearning for some serious relationship insight...something a little more like, I don't know, Jane Austen? But it was also an interesting reminder that Jane Austen, who pre-dates the Brontes, was as thoroughly indoctrinated by the humanist faith in the Enlightenment as Emily Bronte was in the romantic, gothic appeal of her time, a time which accepted all that was dark and irrational in nature. Like, a time that wouldn't be perplexed by the popularity of these guys:

In my honest opinion, the first Twilight movie was a Jane Austen-esque masterpiece. I stand by it! But, alas, what the deuce (!), that time has passed.

Merchant of Venice & Some Continued Thoughts on the Mark Twain Debate

“The Holocaust made and makes ‘The Merchant of Venice’ unplayable, at least in what appear to be its own terms.” Pretty much every major staging of “Merchant” during the past 60 years has been ruled by “the Shylock problem,” forcing the romantic comedy around him to seem both secondary and sour.-Harold Bloom

 My boyfriend and I went to the Daniel Sullivan production of The Merchant Of Venice last night. We enjoyed every minute of it. Al Pacino as Shylock was perfection. But as we left the theater, the Mark Twain/NewSouth publishing debacle was on both of our minds.

The Merchant of Venice arguably contains the most famously provocative Jewish personage in the whole of the literary canon. Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock is an inherently uncomfortable one. Throughout the play, Shylock, the money lender and narrative cog, is bombarded with anti-semitic remarks.

That said, what seems base and one dimensional to us now, would have been revelatory in 1596 when the play was written. In the Elizabethan age, the depiction of the archetypal 'Jewish villain' was an established meme. The Jewish were the characters that audiences 'loved to hate'. So that when Shakespeare wrote the part of Shylock, he was aiming to create not a stereotype but a nuanced portrayal of a character.

"While he perpetuated received notions of Jews, Shakespeare also did an extraordinary thing for an Elizabethan playwright: He created a Jewish character who was flawed, and human, and oppressed by the Christians surrounding him."- Masterpiece Theatre

The production we saw staged last night definitely does not shy away from the anti-semitic, incendiary content of the original text. As audience, we were forced to consider the context of the writing--  although we squirmed in the court room scene for Portia and for Shylock.

My boyfriend worries that if NewSouth begins to simply take out troubling material from an author's original text, it opens the proverbial floodgates. Who's to decide what is too controversial and where do you lay down the line. For sure, the religious persecution of Shylock at the hands of Antonio made his character complex and added texture to the viewing of the production.

That said, I'm not sure my experience reading Huckleberry Finn would be altered by merely taking out one word and trading it for a less derogatory one. It's impossible to read Huckleberry Finn without talking about racial persecution at the time of Twain's writing.

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is No. 4 on the list of most banned books in schools, according to Banned in the USA by Herbert Foerstal. Surely, it's better to read the book, and have those issues raised, than to go without the book and simply ignore them.

No one's suggesting that every edition be altered. But, Twain originally meant for Tom Sawyer and Hucklberry Finn to be read as one work. Surely, denying readers the opportunity to read the works in tandem is just as much of a creative affront.

Tom Sawyer without Huckleberry Finn is simply a kid-hero. Huckleberry Finn brings nuance to Tom's character, I would argue, just as Shakespeare brought to his Shylock. Think about it peoples.

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