#60 in 2023
Pity a woman always remembered for being spurned. The surrealist photographer and painter Dora Maar spent ten turbulent years with Pablo Picasso and once he left her, never got over it — or so the lore goes. (There’s a movie called Surviving Picasso with Julianne Moore as Maar, an unlikely casting for someone who resembles a young Marina Abramovic, knife practice and all.)
French author Brigitte Benkemoun is married to a guy enthralled with his leather address books. When he loses one, she finds a vintage replacement which still contains addresses, with names that are abuzz with relevance — names like Cocteau, Breton, Lacan. Eventually, she figures out the book belonged to Dora Maar.
Finding Dora Maar is not a biography and yet it feels like one. Benkemoun strives to puzzle out who Dora was in a non-linear, nearly-Dada way, by hunting down these addresses, including that of Dora’s veterinarian and her plumber.
A person who keeps the telephone number of a plumber in her address book is not totally cut off from reality.
How cut off from reality was Dora Maar is one of the big questions of the book. She spent time in an asylum and endured electroshock. Her anti-Semitism is at issue as well. And, of course, her relations with Picasso. If you don’t know anything about the Surrealists, Guernica, or what happened in France during World War II, this haphazard story will not be the place to start. But if you have a glancing knowledge of this period, then Benkemoun’s sleuthing becomes extremely enjoyable. It’s like you’re hanging out late at night with a carafe of local rosé, waiting for your order of lapin.
#61 in 2023
I’m full of gratitude to Dora Maar and to the Texan philanthropist who loved her, because it led to my month-long writers’ retreat in the village of Ménerbes. I also lucked out because one of the other fellows was Anna Badkhen and I got to talk to her every day. There was always a lot to say. Anna was born in Leningrad, and was taken on a childhood trip to Rīga when Latvia was the Europe of the Soviet Union. She said she was agape at the city’s beauty, which, obviously, I found instantly endearing. Anna the adult is fierce and chic, a former war correspondent turned writer-poet-philosopher.
Why do we find unbearable to acknowledge what truly is? What kind of reality are we creating, that we cannot bear it?
A poet I know ( you, Zoe Imani Sharpe) taught me that essays and poetry have a lot in common: distilled reflections, with little interest in narrative arcs, both a form of non-fiction. Anna’s book Bright Unbearable Reality: Essays sits in that place. I heard her say more than once that writing is all about the gap in reality that people rely on us writers to fill. Maybe that’s not a direct quote: she would be lightning quick to correct me: but as I read her essays, I could see Anna with her giant sewing box, sitting next to the globe, trying to stitch all our fissures back together.
These essays explore what separates and binds us at a time when one in seven people has left their birthplace. Anna walks into deserts and refugee towns, she talks to warlords and the bereft; she discusses aerial photography and pronghorns. Once, she vomits spectacularly. Other times she’s quoting Anne Carson or Zbigniew Herbert. She takes you to Tbilisi; to Afghanistan; to Azerbaijan; to the tomb of Geronimo; to Tulsa. She is stuck in Ethiopia when COVID hits and almost doesn’t get out. She studies the two experiences that pinnacle our humanness, violence and astonishment. She demands contemplation. She searches for transcendence. I want to read her book again. And then, maybe, again.
The world speaks to us in symbols: bluebirds, nopal plants, pronghorns, zombies. There are no bad symbols just as there are no bad words, there are merely the billion hurts we inflict upon one another, the billion comforts we bestow.
#62 in 2023
Overheard in Provence, at the foot of a ruined village where St-Exupery’s wife and other French artists hid during the Nazi occupation.
“I shouldn’t have voted for Macron. Next I’m voting for LePen.”
“But she’s a fascist.”
“Yes, but that’s better for business.”
(Maybe mass incarceration is better for business, too…)
I sat curled up in a soft armchair across a gigantic mirror, swearing above the gurgle of the fountain in the garden outdoors, muttering Oh my God Oh my God as I read America on Fire: the untold history of police violence and Black rebellion since the 1960s, written by Elizabeth Hinton, published in 2021.
Hinton’s argument is that Black “riots” were, in fact rebellions: political acts carried out in response to an unjust and repressive society. She documents the years between 1968 and 1972, and if you wanted to prove that for Black people, America is a police state, you could just flip to the 25-page timeline of dates and locations of nearly 2,000 urban conflagrations in response to the racially biased policing of housing projects, public schools, parks, neighbourhoods and street corners.
There’s story after story that demonstrates the resistance of young Black people against hopelessness and the over-reaction and increasing weaponization of the police. But the one that really got me was the story of Greensboro where everything spirals out of control because of a seventeen-year old kid running for student council president at a nearly all-Black school. Trying to stop his activism leads to high school students being tear-gassed, rocks being thrown at cars, and a Black university student called Willie Grimes being shot in the head as he walks across campus. This is a year before four white students are shot by the National Guard at Kent State University, a case that received national attention, while Greensboro did not.
Hinton believes there will be more fire in the streets before any real change comes into being, and if that man gets elected, things will be even worse.
#63 in 2023
It was 33 degrees and more in Provence, and for reasons only the God of Books can know, I read two books about the North while I was there. The first was about Everest; the second about Alaska. I’d close the heavy shutters of my windows against the sun, and turn on a lamp to read John McPhee’s classic, Coming into the Country. Everything was fine until a writer friend said that McPhee was boring. From that point on, I portaged through the book, wondering if I should keep going from one page to the next. The first part of the book is about hiking through the wilderness; the second one is about how they chose the capital; the third is a minute inspection of the cantankerous inhabitants of the bush, one of whom is found murdered at the age of 80. Though I wasn’t that interested in the best kayak you could buy, anytime my attention flagged, a 600 pound grizzly bear showed up, or a swooping bush pilot, or a crusty gold miner called Pete the Pig or Pistolgrip Jim. In other words despite the tinnitus of ‘it’s boring’, I stayed amused and wondering all the way to the end. Well, nearly.
I will confess that in one instant I asked myself, “What the hell am I doing here?”
Pourchot said he had brought along a ten-dollar first aid kit, but it had no sutures and no prescription drugs, and “a doctor would laugh at it.”
To a palate without bias — the palate of an open-minded Berber, the palate of a travelling Martian — which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye?
Everyone aboard was white but Wille (William Igiagruq Hensley), of Arctic Alaska, and he said again, “Denali. What the hell did McKinley ever do?”
In the end it was Snow’s women, and not his appendix, that was inflamed.
There came a point when I started to feel like Amundsen, who found the Northwest Passage. As he travelled southward on his skis, he longed to see the beginnings of forest, having not seen a tree in two and a half years. There were fifty pages left, but I too wanted to see a tree, and it was called The End.
#64 in 2023
My friend Martha suggested this book with a warning uptick in her voice: I wonder what you’ll think, she said. (Her memoir is coming out with Coach Books tout de suite; I highly recommend it. Martha Baillie, There is No Blue.)
I tried reading W ou le souvenir d’enfance by Georges Perec in French in order to practice the language while I was learning the right way to order a baguette. (Always order une tradition.) I’d work through five pages at a time. The language was simple enough, but the story was gnarly. On the plane home, I ran out of things to read and switched to the English version on Kindle, W, or the Memory of Childhood.
Had I not made that switch I might have learned the words for shackles, ball and chain, rape, heaps of gold teeth.
W is a personal memoir and also not, Perec being an experimenter who wrote an entire novel without the letter ‘E’. He doesn’t dwell on the anguish of his childhood, though both parents were dead before he was nine, and his mother perished in Auschwitz. Instead he picks out happy obsessions, whether it’s skiing or the Three Musketeers, all the while intercutting with sinister tales of the imaginary island of W, somewhere near Tierra del Fuego. No, really, there are pages and pages with skiing tips, length and stance and wax and how to get up slopes, and then in the next chapter, whoosh, down you slide into the unbearable torments of W. Everything there gets worse and worse and you really don’t need an explanation, though Perec can’t resist giving it to you at the very end.
I do not know whether I have anything to say, I know that I am saying nothing; I do not know if what I might have to say is unsaid because it is unsayable (the unsayable is not buried inside writing, it is what prompted it in the first place); I know that what I say is blank, is neutral, is a sign, once and for all, of a once-and-for-all annihilation.
I am not writing in order to say that I shall say nothing. I am not writing to say that I have nothing to say. I write: I write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.
*
And so, my bookish friends, au revoir to Dora Maar.
Let me hold on to the glow for one more tale. Thirty-one years ago I was in Paris with Nic on our honeymoon. We made a pilgrimage to the storied café called La Coupole where we couldn’t afford to eat by day, but at night they had a deal which consisted of a glass of wine, an appetizer, and dessert. ‘Dévorer la nuit’ started at 10 pm, and so there we were, lounging on the red banquettes among the glamour. The people next to us had ordered a proper dinner; alas, the waiter tripped and spilled a deep brown stew all over a woman’s white jacket. The maitre d’ appeared instantly, like a djinn rising from a lamp, and murmuring apologies, whisked the blighted jacket away. Half an hour later, from way back of the restaurant, we could see him marching back towards us, with that white jacket on a hanger, freshly dry cleaned, as if nothing had happened.
**
What I’m reading now: John Ghazvinian, America and Iran: a history, 1720 to the present, 2020
With all due respect, I could not stick to Aleksander Wat, My Century; Peter Ho Davies, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself; Percival Everett, American Desert (which is strike one for Everett)
Coming up: Here are the new titles generated by my aleatoric system. Bingo, this time eight out of ten books are written by women!
Featured Author: Percival Everett with Jamaica Kincaid, A history of the African-American people (proposed) by Strom Thurmond, 2004
Tija my bookish friend commented that I seem to be reading a lot of Everett. Yes, I am. I loved Telephone and decided to read all of him. I’ve read at least ten of his books by now, and skipped out only on the last one. I will continue unless he annoys me too much. This happened to Iris Murdoch. I was going to read all of her and found it such hard going that when a knowledgable friend asked why on earth would anyone read all of Murdoch, I felt absolved. Everett is incredibly prolific and I may never finish reading him unless I bail. Not yet, though! I want to get to The Trees.
Second Latest Saved: Sanghera Sathnam, The boy with the topknot, a memoir of love, secrets and lies in Wolverhampton, 2009 (I heard him speak on the podcast Empire and also my favourite Maggie O’Farrell recommends it)
And here come the women:
Reader Recommended: Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, 2019 (because my bookish friend Maureen said I have to give it a second chance)
Oldest Title on the List: Jessica Anthony, Enter the Aaardvark, 2020 (looks whimsical)
The Random List: Nicole Krauss, Great House, 2010 (know nothing)
Katie M. Kitamura, Intimacies, 2021 (can’t wait)
Plum Johnson, They Left us Everything: a memoir, 2014 (intriguing Canadian story)
Emily St. John Mandel, Last Night in Montreal, 2009 (an early work by the brilliant author of Station Eleven, also Canadian)
Jennifer Steil, Exile Music, 2020 (WWII novel-memoir)
Edna O'Brien, A Scandalous Woman, and Other Stories, 1976 (a writer new to me)
Great curation! And great La Coupole story. I would like to have that stew spilled on me.
I enjoy the idea of having the 'tinnitus of boredom" underlining your reading of McPhee. I have to agree.