Carol Bergman

I had read about Canadian artist Judith Cardiff’s “Forty Part Motet,” a polyphonic sound installation in an apse at The Cloisters, and finally had a chance to get there on Saturday. I hadn’t been to The Cloisters for a long time and had forgotten its grandeur and beauty. There is much to contemplate and admire in the collection of illuminated manuscripts, for example, and an herb garden with espaliered pear trees and poison plants. But the highlight of my visit was the Motet, a captivating non-verbal experience. It closes on December 8th and if you are anywhere in the vicinity, don’t miss it. It brought several participants to tears, including me. And when the Tudor “song” ended, a mere eleven minutes after it began, I was stopped by a “Studio 360” reporter. “How would you describe your response to this work?” he asked. Good question.

At first, I could hardly speak, and then I realized I didn’t want to speak; I had climbed into the music or it had climbed into me. This is a metaphor Judith Cardiff uses to describe the work she records and then installs/performs. “It poses the question of how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and express how a viewer may choose a path through the simultaneously physical and virtual environment,” she writes in her artist’s statement. But all those words are inadequate to describe the kinesthetic bodily sensation of the forty choir voices she has individually recorded in Salisbury Cathedral, and then recombined into the Motet, one voice for each loudspeaker.

She instructs the viewer/listener to move around the room, which I did, despite the crowd. (Most people seemed to be too mesmerized to move.) And every time I moved, there was a new and different point of view, until I moved again. The sound reverberated inside me, amplified by the accumulation of voices. This is both a technological and a conceptual achievement. “Does it matter that it’s not the real choir, that it’s electronic?” the Studio 360 reporter asked.

“No, not at all. And this is Tudor music, incredible how we can hear it and feel it in 2013,” I said, already attempting to intellectualize the experience. Having been a radio reporter, I knew that he was pleased I’d agreed to the interview, and that I was articulate. He kept asking questions but I wanted to get away.

Walking back in a daze through the Heather Garden, another treasure, I wondered what analogies there are in writing to the sensation of climbing into the music, or the music climbing into me. When we read or write and are carried away—blissed out—entirely absorbed by the work, perhaps that would be an analogy. Or when we are reading a good book and don’t know what page we are on, or care, and when that book evokes sensations and feelings and transforms us, perhaps that would be another. I think, as writers, that is what we strive for always, though getting there is the challenge.  Read More 

I watched David Mamet’s “Phil Spector” on HBO the other night. I knew next to nothing about Phil Spector, the record producer—the Ronettes, the Beatles—now serving a 19 year sentence for the second degree murder of Lana Clarkson. In the hype surrounding Mamet’s brilliant, irresponsible screenplay, and the equally brilliant performances of Helen Mirren, as Spector’s attorney, and Al Pacino, as Spector, few remember Lana Clarkson or her grisly murder. She was found shot in the mouth in Spector’s hallway with one of Spector’s numerous guns. Yet Mamet chose to channel the prosecution’s argument that there was a reasonable doubt and that her death was an “accidental suicide.”

“I don’t give a shit about the facts,” Mamet said to Mick Brown, a UK journalist who writes for the Telegraph and is the author of a well-researched biography of Spector, “Tearing Down the Wall of Sound; The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector.” There were numerous insulting Mamet expletives in his answers to Brown’s questions. I was admiring of this well regarded, sober journalist; he didn’t lose his cool. “The colorful invented drama became the historical version,” Brown wrote in The Telegraph on June 29, 2013 just before Mamet’s film was released in the UK on Sky Atlantic.

Where is David Mamet’s ethical compass? Like most of the facts, it is swirling in a vortex of ambition, egomania, and celebrity entitlement, if not altogether absent. In a conversation I had last week with a record producer who knew Spector during his glory days, I learned about Spector’s alcoholism and cocaine addiction, barely mentioned in the screenplay. “He must have been on blow when he killed Lana Clarkson,” this young man said. “That generation wrecked themselves on drugs. Spector had started drinking again big time two days before Clarkson’s murder and everyone in LA knew it.”

Now 73, Spector will end his life in jail, an irrefutable fact. As for Mamet, one can only hope that his fame will not destroy him, or his talent, as it has so many others.
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I was walking down my favorite road in upstate New York enjoying the migrating birds on the electrical wires and the woodpecker pecking in the distance when I came to the turn in the road that led to my favorite farmhouse. Everything from then on looked different and I was disoriented. There was a new electric fence and a man-made sculpted topography on the other side of it that signaled a new owner, or venture of some sort—a horse ranch, I later learned. The mountain had been carved at one time into a quarry and the steep road, which I have climbed often in all seasons, led into the woods where there was a stream and a still-standing hut with a pot-bellied stove that had been home to indentured laborers. This farmland, acres of it, had been parceled off in the early 20th century and, with the advent of the motor-car, was sliced in two by a tarmac road. Descendants of the original farmers still live on one of the parcels and I occasionally can spot a tractor in the distance and bales of hay but, mostly, the farm is gone, the main farmhouse has been sold to weekenders from Brooklyn, and now the abandoned quarry has become a horse ranch. Is this renewal, or obliteration of the past, or both?

I thought of the essay I have been laboring over for several weeks and why it is not working. It’s gone out to several readers and to my agent who thinks it might be expanded into a book. But I’m feeling discouraged and unable to move forward. I think I need new doors. In computer-speak, I need a different portal into the story. Maybe I’ll write a play, I thought, as I continued my walk past the ranch to the farmhouse, past my favorite barn. Lo and behold, my very thought, it had new doors. That old barn is like a Mondrian painting, perfectly balanced, sitting on the edge of the road, rich in color, and it smells wonderful because it is a hay barn, not an animal barn. Like my essay, it had been a bit rickety and listing to one side, though still beautiful even then. Now it was firmly grounded and it had the most magnificent new doors, an unexpected aesthetic pleasure which I have written about on my Home page here. And I am so pleased that the doors remain unpainted, for the moment, at least, as I stand in front of it and contemplate its beauty: old wooden planks and new planks, but still solid, still standing.  Read More 

In my protected, American naivety, I am always shocked to hear about a writer from another country thrown into jail for writing a column, or blogging, or simply speaking out about a government action or inaction, a dictatorial regime, anything. And this is one reason, among many, that I belong to American PEN which advocates for incarcerated and persecuted writers around the world, often with great success, often not. I write letters, sign petitions, try to write directly to a jailed writer in prison from time to time. I will probably do that with Eskinder Nega, if it is possible, because there is something about this picture of him in his baseball cap that is endearing. A young man, writing about the Arab spring, who dared to suggest that it might also happen in Ethiopia. His sentence: 18 years.

Here is a quote from the recent PEN newsletter:

He [Eskinder Nega] wrote to PEN and was honored with the 2012 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. In it, he called for action from the United States—the country he lived in for years and loved—to pressure the government of Ethiopia to lift restrictions on free expression and remedy other human rights abuses. We shared Eskinder’s piece with The New York Times, and on July 25 his "Letter from Ethiopia's Gulag" ran as a prominent op-ed:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/opinion/letter-from-ethiopias-gulag.html



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Misplacing my iphone is not the best way to start the day. The ringer was silenced, that I knew, so no way to call and track it, and I had no memory of turning off the phone entirely after a last check of email, the weather, a last round of electronic Scrabble, or putting it back into my purse. Encased in purple plastic, it is camouflaged in a variety of locations in my apartment. I have misplaced it before—who hasn’t—and called it, heard it vibrate, and still couldn’t find it. Finally, I understood why so many people have zinger covers—zebra patterns, neon. I’ll have to think about this.

The phone was gone, for more than an hour. The sense of loss was complete. In fact, I was so distraught I could not write in my journal, or read, or plan the rest of my day, or eat breakfast, or get to work. It occurred to me that I have become co-dependent with my very smart phone which, as we all know, is a mini-computer. Is this a good or a bad thing? Both, I’d say, not the co-dependent part—not that—but the practicality of the phone, the use we make of it as a tool. It really is a splendid invention.

Here are the free apps particularly valuable for writers:

1. Dictionaries, including a translation dictionary from any language you can imagine into and out of English. I gave away all my hard cover dictionaries. If the system ever crashes—in an emergency say—I’ll have to head to the library.

2. The Kindle app. Best use, a movie theater during the endless commercials before the show begins.

3. Notes. Writers write anywhere on any—thing all day long.

4. Safari and Chrome. Writers can find out anything, anywhere, at any time.

And these are just four. Please feel free to add your suggestions in the comments. And if you still have a flip phone, I commiserate.  Read More 

Walking into the station every day was making me ill. The paint was peeling off the deco facade and the waiting area by the elevators smelled like a pissoir. No one else seemed to mind, on the way from here to there, rushing, eager to get onto the air conditioned train, what did it matter? But I minded—a lot. I wasn’t in Paris and the odor wasn’t charming because of the Parisian pissoir flavor. And, in Paris, the deco Metro signs and facades are protected works of art.

Something is very wrong in a city—a country—where whatever historic landmarks we have are left to decay. At the very least, why doesn’t the community get together to find a makeshift solution, I thought. Budget restraints? Please.

Maybe it was because I was new to the neighborhood and the move had been a hard one. A filthy, neglected station entry: not to be tolerated. So I asked around: Anyone doing anything about this? It’s a friendly neighborhood and easy to talk to people on the corners, in the stores, in the park. A renovation was scheduled for the platforms sometime around 2016, I learned. As for the entrance, nobody knew anything. Smell bother you? Hadn’t noticed.

So I went online to find out who was in charge and wrote a letter cc’ing it to this person and that, as well as the Mayor and the Straphangers Campaign. The Mayor is a wealthy fellow who collects art-the city is a work of art, or can be, no?-and he rides the subway.

Such letters—of complaint and concern—are not easy for me to write. I get twisted up trying to remain polite, respectful, and positive. Years ago I studied mediation and conflict resolution and have never written an insulting word to a civil servant since. So I began with thank yous for keeping the trains running well, for all the repairs, for working underground when the sun is shining, and for speaking clearly into the microphones. A pleasant by-product of post 9/11 surveillance has been improved audio systems on the trains and in the stations. I thanked the MTA and the Mayor for that. And then I got down to business: Anything you can do about the peeling paint and smell of urine at my station? I know it’s just one station, and I am just one traveler, and so on.

Dear Reader, I received a phone call from the station manager two days later. And we had a very personable chat. And a week after that, the peeling paint and smell of urine were gone.

A local friend said: “That must have been some letter.” I didn’t think so. No, it was a polite, quite ordinary letter. I just had taken the time to write it. Read More 

I went into a Barnes & Noble yesterday for the first time in a while searching for a new copy of “The Great Gatsby,” which I re-read every summer. My copy—an old Penguin—has disintegrated into brittle brown dust. Of course, I have Gatsby on my Kindle, but as I have explained already several times in this blog, I started to miss the sensory experience of holding a paper book and flipping its pages. And, of course, while I was in the store, I looked around. The smell of the books was delicious; it’s a candy store. And, I noticed, that many novels are now a different, longer shape. I liked the look and feel of that. But I left without buying anything. I’m going to be traveling in a week and the Kindle will have to do.

As for my report on the re-reading project I began after my recent move, it is coming along well. It’s instructive to return to books long stored on the shelf that seemed brilliant at the time, keepers, never to be abandoned. Some are and some aren’t. The Maxwells have stood the test well though I’ll only keep “They Came Like Swallows.” Every sentence in that book is a gem. But Paul Bowles’ “Up Above the World” is dated and the sentences are overwritten. I wonder, of course, how my work will be judged in one hundred years, if it is at all. But I know it’s best not to think about posterity when one is writing. I learn as I go and try to get better with every effort. It’s the effort that is important, and the practice. Some writing hits the zone, some doesn’t.

I think it was Stanley Kunitz who said that as he evolved as a writer, he chose simplicity and rigor over excess in the language he used in his poetry. I find myself doing the same. I remember the first writer’s group I belonged to: three poets and three prose writers. My goal was to impress everyone with my vocabulary and erudition. I didn’t succeed and I didn’t publish anything until I stopped trying to impress everyone with my vocabulary and erudition. My vocabulary has grown since then, I hope, but I am not trying to use it to wow anyone. Words are tools for precision and insight, or for precision of insight. And that’s my criteria for the books I am re-reading: What do they have to say? Are they saying it well?  Read More 

I traveled upstate last Monday hoping for a respite from the city heat. I planned to finish the final revision of my new novel, “What Returns to Us,” and had a meeting scheduled with my book designer. The book is finished, the cover design was discussed, thankfully, but most of my plans for the week were abandoned. It was hot. Very hot. So hot, in fact, that it was hard to breathe much less think. AC was never a thought before so far into the mountains, but climate change is serious, it is real and, it seems, even the mountains will not be spared. I had been there during Hurricane Irene. Ulster County was hit hard and it is very far inland, a big surprise to everyone, including scientists.

I don’t think writers, or anyone else, can be insouciant about these changes, how they effect our lives, and what adaptations we have to make. Will we have to forgo fresh air upstate as well as in the city? Stay indoors in AC on the worst days? This has never been true before and I dread the prospect of being stuck inside for days and weeks at a time. Walking loosens my imagination and I couldn’t walk outside—safely—all week. In fact, I tried to take a walk early yesterday morning and returned to the house with heat prostration. I was unable to move off the couch all day. At least I got some reading done, but I felt so lousy I could hardly concentrate.

How do the Chinese do it? They live in choked, polluted cities. There was an item on the news the other night about a mother of a newborn who monitors the air from her apartment before she ventures outside. What has become of them? Of us?

I think, for starters, if we haven’t gone green and sustainable already, now is the time to start. This very instant, right now. And if we have gone green, we have to proselytize like crazy, as I am attempting to do here.

I traveled back to the city early this morning and enjoyed the ride in my fully air conditioned car. 99 degrees in the city with a heat index of 110 degrees, hot enough to melt rubber tires and gold, the radio announcer said with a giggle. I wasn’t laughing. Luckily, I found a parking spot close to my apartment building. That’s because everyone—with means and/or a place to go—has fled the city.  Read More 

After packing, moving, and unpacking (nearly done), I vowed to myself not to buy another book, but I went to the exhibition of Hopper’s drawings at the Whitney yesterday and was so taken with his process—observing, sketching, drafting—and the beautiful paintings, that I bought a HUGE HARDBACK EDITION of Gail Levin’s biography of Hopper. It was only $15 and should have been $50. How could I resist? Fortunately, I had my backpack on wheels filled with swimming gear and a pack lunch, plenty of space for the TOME. And I love tomes. Lugging the bag up and down the subway stairs was a challenge—I carried the tome in my arms—but the book is safely home now and I’ve started it: well-written and deliciously thick, with vivid plates of Hopper’s work. (The postcards were all washed out.) When I’m done, the book will be donated to a reference shelf upstate where my artist-daughter lives and where I can always find it.

Books that have been packed, unpacked and now remain on my shelves are another matter. I had thought I’d given many away—donated, gifted, pulped—but there are still so many. So I’ve made another promise to myself: to reread every book I have carried with me. I’ve started with two slim volumes by William Maxwell who was the New Yorker fiction editor for forty years and a fine writer himself. I’d forgotten how fine, in fact. Now I am reminded. What a pleasurable experience that is.

As for the books on my Kindle, they are carried, too, of course--always and forever-- and there is a TBR list there also, but it will have to wait.  Read More 

I moved into a new neighborhood which feels like a community, not a city. The realtors now call it Hudson Heights though—in the day—it was simply Washington Heights. George hung out here during the Revolutionary War, the highest point on Manhattan Island; it was a fortress. The footprints of that war are in the names of many streets. Now “The (Lower) Heights” and the (Upper) Heights, known as Inwood, are largely Dominican and Hudson Heights—artists, young families—is squeezed between them, contiguous peaceful neighborhoods. And because all the streets are narrow and there are no high rises, the hood has a human-sized village feel. It reminds me of London and, with its hilly terrain and a view of the GW bridge at night, San Francisco.

Still unpacking boxes and boxes of books and belongings, I took a break on Sunday morning to walk the neighborhood and pick up a few groceries. A hot humid summer morning, dog walkers, runners, and Kelly Evans Ruby in the “Children’s Garden” at Bennett Park working the soil. City gardening has been a favorite antidote to the sedentary writing life. I chatted to Kelly for a while, told her about my experience with the Central Park Conservancy and Riverside Park Fund, and volunteered.

At the west entrance to the small park, a structure that looked like a bird house was painted artfully with portraits of community dogs by local artist Gareth Hinds. The post was donated and constructed by Kevin Orzechowski, also a local resident. The Little Library even has a Local Little Librarian: Oshrat Silberbusch. A community project indeed. Inside the Little Library: books for adults and children. This was a book exchange, a national initiative known as “The Little Free Library.” It’s adorable: http://www.littlefreelibrary.org/ and anyone can do it! This is their mission statement: "To promote literacy and the love of reading by building free book exchanges worldwide. To build a sense of community as we share skills, creativity and wisdom across generations."


That’s impressive.  Read More