Life Imitating Art
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
This past weekend, while in Rome, we wandered into a small, nearly empty church not far from the Piazza Navona to see a Caravaggio. The streets of Rome are teeming with crowds, motor bikes, tiny bumper-car-like vehicles, suicidal cyclists--all moving at rapid speed down narrow alleys--but the churches are empty. We wandered along the aisles and marveled at the Caravaggio. I found myself musing about whether the gory crucifixion images might be too much for my seven year old, whose whole idea of religion at the moment boils down to making Hamentaschen at Hebrew School. Then, Michael pointed me to a shrine near the tall front doors of the church. Apparently, pregnant women come to pray at this particular shrine, and then--after their healthy babies are born--return with offerings: pink knitted booties, small plastic toys, and photos, taped up to the cold stone walls of the church. As I started moving to look closer, I was thinking of my various superstitions, both during my easy pregnancy with Jacob and then later--when achieving and holding onto several pregnancies wasn't so easy, as I wrote about in my egg donation story in February's Elle. When I was trying to conceive, I wore a gold and jade Abyssinian Lizard--a fertility symbol--on a chain around my neck, even though it was heavy and not remotely my style. It had been my mother's, and she had worn it when she was pregnant with me. I borrowed a small, round fertility totem from my friend and hair colorist, Kathleen. I also kept another totem, meant to be the god of lost pregnancies, given to me by a friend after one of my miscarriages. I believed and didn't believe in these symbols. I kept them around, on my bedroom vanity, scattered among the lipsticks and perfumes, where I could see them each day, but I never gave them a special spot, because that seemed too...well, too weird and desperate.
All of this was going through my mind as I began to walk toward the knitted booties and baby pictures on the church wall. Michael was standing next to me, when suddenly I tripped over one of those low benches they have for kneeling in churches--Jew that I am, I hadn't been looking out for such a thing--and WHAM slammed down on my knee. And even as I was falling, in the less-than-a-second it took, I thought: what a perfect metaphor. An almost too perfect metaphor, actually. One that in a short story might feel heavy-handed but in life, a woman who once longed-for and has now given up on the idea of a second child can trip over a kneeling bench while looking at a shrine to healthy babies in a Roman church. In life, these things happen.
Stop the Madness
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
In the past couple of weeks, two very different op-eds have appeared in The New York Times that speak to the same issue. The first, titled "Mosh Pit Meets Sandbox", appeared on the Op-Ed page two Sundays ago. It was written by David Brooks, whose columns usually annoy me no end. This time, I've got to say, I found myself reading Brooks and nodding, chuckling softly to myself. (This is rare, the soft chuckle upon reading.) He takes on hipster parents, in particular the Park Slope, Brooklyn version of hipster parents. (I have no doubt a similar breed exists in Seattle, Silver Lake, Portland and even perhaps Montclair.) He writes in a howl of conservative outrage about toddlers wearing the same ponchos and black skull slippers, sporting the same bed-head haircuts as their mommies and daddies. His point is that we parents are turning our children into little, narcissistically-driven mini-me's. And I don't think he's at all wrong--but the problem is larger than the bummer of infants wearing "My Mom's Blog is Better than Your Mom's Blog" tee-shirts.
The second piece, "Early Admissions", by a young novelist named Karin Cook, came out earlier this week. On the surface of things, Brooks and Cook have nothing in common as writers or as thinkers, and are making very different arguments. Cook's piece is a hilarious faux-letter to a private pre-school, exhorting, pleading, wheedling with the school to consider admitting the child in question. Pegged to this week in March when all the pre-schools send out their letters of acceptance/wait list/rejection--a week when all the New York City moms of pre-school children I know are popping xanax and not even pretending to maintain their cool--Cook's letter pokes fun, but the reason it made it onto the op-ed page is because there is truth simmering beneath every jibe, every absurdity. I know of at least three children--precocious, beautiful, bright and gifted (99th percentile! how is it that every single New York City child I know is in the 99th percentile?)--who were shut out of kindergarten this year. Shut out! The parents are wealthy, hugely successful, even, in one case, famous. And the kids didn't get in.
How can this be? Because we're living in an insane culture. That's how. Because this generation of parents, and perhaps the one preceeding it-- the one whose kids are being tutored and coached within an inch of their lives by companies such as IvyWise so that they have a prayer of getting into a good college--have lost our minds completely. We have lost sight of the whole idea of the happiness of children. The idea that children will find their own way, with gentle parental guidance. That our children are neither our possessions, nor our reflections. (See the recent Tiffany's ad on the back of Cookie magazine: a soft-focus mother, her head not in the picture, holding a chubby naked cherub of a baby in her bejeweled arms.)
The point Brooks makes -- that we're turning our children into replicas of ourselves, and ourselves into replicas of our children -- is true not only of hipster parents, but of Ralph Lauren polo-playing parents, soccer moms who have stickers of soccer balls all over the backs of their SUV's, and the list goes on. And as our dopplegangers rather than individual, idiosyncratic creatures, our children simply must get into the best pre-schools, because pre-school leads to Harvard, or wherever floats your boat, and everything is riding on it. Our egos, our children's futures as we imagine them, our whole selves.
Drinking: A Love Story
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
In last night's class at Wesleyan, I taught two books I've never taught before. Jonathan Rosen's brilliant meditation, The Talmud and the Internet, and Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story. Both are books I know well, and I thought would be interesting additions to the syllabus for my course, which is called The Autobiographical Impulse. I like to mix it up when I teach, and bring in new works (new to my teaching them, that is) so that I continue to keep it fresh for myself. It was a pleasure to re-read Jonathan Rosen's book, which is even better the second time around. It's a moving and intellectually rigorous exploration of the ways in which a young man grapples with his own history--specifically, his two grandmothers: one who perished in the holocaust, and the other who lived a comfortable American life and whose dying wish was for a pastrami sandwich. Rosen's thoughtful consideration of the talmud and the internet -- the ancient and the modern, expansive, circular, with no periphery --acts as a perfect metaphor for the two parts of his family's past he's attempting (impossibly, of course) to reconcile.
The Caroline Knapp did not stand up to re-reading, sorry to say. Published in 1996, it was the first of the spate of addition-and-recovery memoirs, ushering in a decade of books like Running with Scissors, A Million Little Pieces, Smashed, and a dozen others that didn't make it onto the radar. I remember, when I first read Drinking: A Love Story, that it felt original to me, and brave. What changed in this decade? The book, obviously, hadn't changed. I suppose that I had--and that the fact of all those other look-at-me recovery stories makes me read the Knapp in a slightly (okay, more than slightly) jaundiced light. It has its moments of poetry, but ultimately it now seems self-indulgent. As a memoirist myself, I don't feel good leveling that criticism at another writer's memoir, particularly one that required a certain measure of courage to write, and to put out there in the world. I remember, when Slow Motion was first published, the way every bit of criticism felt incredibly personal. But here I am, doing it. Why does it even matter? Knapp died tragically young, at the age of 42, of lung cancer. (If she were alive I might not be blogging about this.) I suppose that re-reading the book made me think about what makes a memoir good: a measure of irony, of distance. The ability to make oneself a character in one's own life, one's own story. The knowledge that it is a story, above all. Perhaps Knapp, who had only stopped drinking a year before writing her memoir, had not developed enough distance to write out of what Frank O'Hara referred to in one of his poems as "the memory of my feelings". An emotion--when experience in real time--whether rage, panic, grief, joy, you name it--is incoherent. But that emotion, observed, with distance, can become coherent.
Overload
Friday, March 2, 2007
If I were to take a picture of my desk today it would be a scary sight. Actually, maybe I will do just that, to prove my point. I am usually one of those annoying people who have a completely clean desk. (My drawers, however, are another matter entirely.) My personal style tends to be neat-on-the-surface-but-messy-on-the-inside, which may be a metaphor for my whole life. I mean, even my house is like this. The front of the house is manicured and lovely, with perfect boxwoods by the front door, and tulips dutifully pushing their heads up from the sides of stone walls each spring. The back of the house? As I said, another matter. Let's put it this way: the friend who helps with landscaping (why can't I just bring myself to say: our landscape designer?) actively makes sure that people know that the way our backyard looks is Not Her Fault.
But I digress. My point is that my desk is teetering and threatening to fall over. I attribute this to a few things. First, I'm getting ready to leave on a big trip -- big for me, at least. Some people I know hop on planes to Europe all the time. A friend who I saw in yoga class yesterday was leaving for London that night. I marveled at her ability to breathe five breaths in downward-facing dog even as she would be on a flight within hours. For me, a big trip means I need to clear my desk off before I leave. This is quickly becoming an impossibility. Yesterday, I made a "before leaving list". I wrote it in big block letters, as if for a five-year-old. I drew small boxes next to each item on the list, so I could have the satisfaction of checking off each box as I went along. So far, one item has been checked off: pathetically, it involved sending a single email. The second reason my desk is a disaster is that my book is about to come out and this involves a motley assortment of daily tasks. A few weeks ago, I found myself riding the elevator to a high floor in the Conde Nast building in New York, delivering a shopping bag (Prada) full of family photos to Vogue, to illustrate an upcoming essay. Yesterday found me taking pictures of the inside of my house for a magazine that may or may not want to do a piece on me, and wanted to see the way I live. It can be strange, this writing business.
A week from today I will be on a plane to Rome. Michael, Jacob and I will spend a few days there, then fly to Prague, where we will meet our good friends and their kids. Our friends are Czech, and will no doubt show us a good Czech time. Then we'll fly back to Rome, take a train to Naples, then a car to Positano, where for just shy of a week I will teach at a writers' conference we're starting -- Sirenland, at the beautiful five-star hotel, Le Sirenuse. I say this as if I'm someone who travels easily. Who flies without fear. Who leaves home with no worries. Who settles into her seat with a perfect pashmina (does anyone still wear pashminas?) and a long, involving novel, say, Swann's Way -- which, in fact, I do have to re-read before I teach it at Wesleyan in May. But I cannot read anything more involving than Us Weekly on an airplane, and I don't own a pashmina.
