MeyerBros

Wow. I feel totally honored to join y’all here as an official contributor. Hopefully you won’t downgrade my privileges anytime soon. Here’s my first post:

What I’ve Been Reading
(and would like to share with you)

1) “Holy Skirts” by Rene Steinke, a novel about the Baroness Elsa van Freytag-Lorenghoven. Subtitled “A novel of a flamboyant woman who risked all for art.”

This woman was courageous, outrageous, and true to herself even when it hurt. She didn’t just make art, she lived it. A close friend and would-be lover of Marcel Duchamp. She wore taillights, bird cages (avec bird), and postage stamps, among other things, and a Time writer wrote of her: “She was New York’s first punk persona 60 years before their time.” Everyone thought she was crazy by the end of her life, perhaps from syphillis, but perhaps, as Ezra Pound wrote of her in a poem:

“Well, of course, there was a certain strain
On the gal in them days in Manhattan
the principle of non-acquiescence
laid a burden.”

I think I want to write a play about her.

2) “On Love” (a novel) by Alain de Botton
A book that muses on love through philosophy, diagrams, and a quirky sense of humor while following the romance of one couple from the time they meet on an airplane (chapter 1: “Romantic Fatalism”) through… well, I’ll let you read it to find out.

3) The five page (online) New York Times essay about the “best American fiction” from the last 25 years. Toni Morrison’s Beloved won overall, other top nominees were Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, John Updike… lots of people I haven’t read but have felt I should.

The accompanying essay is more interesting to me than the list itself. It talks about what seems to be important to the people who voted (historical perspective, personal stories set against large cultural events…), the vagueness of the contest rules (can authors vote for themselves? can a book that was written before 1980 but published after 1980 be a contender? what is considered fiction, exactly? etc.), and how the contest would have been different during different times in history. One of my favorite quotes is where the essayist writes of “the deplorable modern mania for ranking, list-making and fabricated competition.” (Notice my list here. Now I just need to fabricate some competition somehow…)

And at the end, a comment that all the winners were born within just a few years of each other, and are well over 50. For all of us aspiring writers, he reminds us: “2030 is just around the corner. Get to work.”

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 3:50 pm by michelle and is filed under books, friends, the arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.