Carol Bergman

I'm been re-reading the Marilyn French introduction to my frayed edition of Edith Wharton’s "The Custom of the Country," and that has set me straight on Jonathan Franzen’s odd review in The New Yorker of her work on the occasion of her 150th birthday:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/13/120213fa_fact_franzen

Franzen begins by complaining that because she was born into privilege it is difficult to feel any sympathy for Edith Wharton or her writing. That’s odd as I have found Franzen’s writing cold and unsympathetic. And this brings me back to Marilyn French's observation that it is very interesting what men writers make of the women in their lives. I suppose one could also say the opposite: It’s very interesting what women writers make of the men in their lives. But Franzen's decision to attack Wharton for her "privilege" on her 150th birthday seems chauvinistic and cruel—chauvinism is cruel—small-minded, perhaps even envious of her great gifts.

For years, Edith Wharton’s work was relegated to the dusty shelves of libraries and she was mentioned only in passing as a contemporary of Henry James. We now know better. She was better, richer and truer in many ways than James as a writer. And Franzen is far from her class as a writer; I use class differently here, of course, though the word has some relevance.

Shame on The New Yorker for not honoring Edith Wharton and publishing one of her stories in celebration. Instead, they published Franzen's odd review. What an introduction for a new generation of readers who have never read Wharton. How are they to know that Franzen is utterly wrong about her? She wrote with empathy about many other people less fortunate than herself. She was an aid worker during World War I. Her generosity, both material and emotional, were legend. Three of her novels are masterpieces: “The Custom of the Country,” “The House of Mirth,” and “The Age of Innocence.” She wrote in bed, and that was a luxury, but she also had a serious nervous breakdown and much sadness and struggle in her life. She never had children yet she adored children and wrote tenderly about them. One could go on and on. Franzen has no such empathy or vision. He is a cold writer caught in the web of his own narcissistic middle-American origins, and blinkered by them.  Read More 

I am so unhappy with Amazon today. After three years as a Kindle aficionado, enjoying the etchings of authors—Joyce, Austen, others—on the screen saver, my new Kindle Touch has an advertisement for some sort of health spa. And not only when it’s shut down; advertising banners appear at the bottom of the Home screen which I have to look at when I am selecting a book to read from my library.

I knew nothing about this before I made my purchase. And I have just looked at the Kindle site again and see no mention of advertising in the description of the Kindle Touch. Why did they omit this tidbit of information, or is it in such small print that I missed it?

Amazon has been in the news of late because of lending library practices for their “prime” customers, bypassing authors and publishers consent, and what else? I can hardly keep up with all the issues in discussion and litigation in the emails I get from The Authors Guild regarding Amazon and Google these days. Have these two innovative, sometimes socially conscious companies succumbed to corporate greed?

These were my thoughts when I called customer support this morning, initially to get a helping hand on managing the tablet, but I also hoped that the advertising could be eliminated. Not a chance. I was told, politely, that if I had decided to spend $49 more, I’d have the benefit of no advertising. In other words, Kindle Touch customers who economize are also penalized: we have to endure advertising. Yet the price we pay for Amazon books is the same for everyone. So, frankly, I don’t get this.

Is it the same situation as Pandora? For $36 a year you can subscribe and bypass advertising for their music genome project. It doesn’t seem comparable. And the terms of the contract with Pandora are clear.

I’ve written a letter to Amazon corporate headquarters and I’ll send this blog posting to Kindle Feedback which has always been helpful in the past. A cc will go to the staff at The Authors Guild.
I’ll keep my readers posted on what everyone has to say.  Read More 

Two days before the start of the NYU teaching term and I have finished an essay that has been in my head for weeks. It’s 2,000 words, written in the third person, all on the page but still inside me. I wrote it for myself, no audience in mind, a respite from what must be written. It was fun, relaxing, absorbing, just the tonic for the hiatus between one long project and another.

The essay is still in my mind, I cannot let it go. I must get up from this desk and go for a swim to break this post-partum mood and begin some other work this afternoon or tomorrow morning, the beginnings of a second murder mystery, the third if I count the rewritten first murder mystery, “Say Nothing,” which is now called “Collateral Damage.” My agent is getting some good feedback on the revision—a new, younger protagonist, an Iraq war veteran—is gaining interest, even excitement, so we are hopeful. Some editors are finding the writing too literary, others not literary enough. It’s impossible to write to please this particular audience, always with their eyes on the marketplace. My mind drifts back to the essay. I will let it sit for a while, then show it to a reader or two, revise, and send it out. My agent won’t have time or inclination to read it. There’s no money for her in one essay. Perhaps, one day, a collection might interest her. It’s important just to keep writing every day even if it’s only in my journals, I tell myself when my optimism flags. Every viable idea begins in the journals and after a while, if I persevere, the projects line up like airplanes on a crowded runway.  Read More 

My husband bought me an iPhone for my birthday nearly a year ago. I fell in love immediately. As Hemingway once famously said, “writing is a moveable feast,” and to be able to send texts, answer emails, check the weather, listen to music, upload pictures to Facebook, all while I lead my nomadic writer’s existence has made my personal life and my working life much, much easier. Anyone who owns a smart phone knows what I mean. It’s a magnificent invention.

So I was heart struck Sunday and then again today after reading two investigative articles in the New York Times by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?scp=1&sq=How%20US%20Lost%20Out%20on%20iPhone%20work&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?ref=todayspaper

Upon finishing these articles, my immediate thought was this: Had I known about Apple’s egregious behavior, its callous disregard, I probably would not have accepted the gift of an iPhone. Although most electronics are manufactured and assembled overseas these days, other companies are better than Apple at complying with International Labor Law.

I am sure that as a consequence of these articles, there will be more changes. At least I hope so because my second thought is this: Apple is one of China’s best customers. Certainly, they can exert some pressure.

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I went to the New York Historical Society on Friday to check out the recent renovation and the current installations. The centerpiece of the new lobby is a large vitrine holding two small notebooks once owned by John Lansing, a lawyer from Albany, who was a delegate to the 1787 Philadelphia Convention. Written in a delicate, nearly illegible hand, these rare notebooks will soon be digitized by the Society and added to its significant collection. The library on the second floor has always been home to visiting scholars and writers. I have spent many hours there researching articles and books. Once endangered with closure, this American treasure trove has survived a reorganization. The Lansing notebook acquisition is typical of the Society's interest and foresight, a Historical Society extending from the past into the future of our still young nation.

To my surprise, Lansing's Constitutional Convention notebooks were written secretly against the express orders of George Washington. Washington had asked for a vow by the delegates not to take any notes, an off-the-record debate. Though probably intended to encourage everyone to speak freely, it can also be read as an attempt to silence and/or censor the historical record. Fortunately, our first President did not succeed and the evolution of our freedoms continued.

Lansing and others—such as Rufus King and James Madison—were courageous enough to defy these orders. Without them we would never have eyewitness documentation of this seminal event in our early history. According to the Society press release, Lansing's notes are the most detailed and unedited. He recorded speeches and debates, assigning names to the speakers and their locations in the chamber. He was distressed that the delegates were seeking to establish an entirely new government rather than simply amending the Articles of Confederation, as charged. Lansing and his fellow New Yorker Richard Yates left the Convention early, but not before he had participated actively and created this illuminating record. Quill pen in hand, he managed to fill these two notebooks, probably on his lap, and to secret them away when he left. No security guards at the door, no sensors, only censors.

The following year, Lansing went to the New York State ratification convention where he insisted that the new Constitution be enlarged by a Bill of Rights.

If you go the Historical Society, be sure to go up to the Luce Collection on the Fourth Floor where glass fronted storage vitrines of Tiffany lamps, furniture, silver, porcelain, a rare stage-coach, weaponry, and much more, await a writer’s curiosity and imagination. The curators’ narratives here are limited to computer descriptions of individual items, but we remain free to create our own narratives in our free society.  Read More 

Because one year after he won the Pulitzer, Liu Xiaboa is still in jail and his writing banned. "We will stick to our writing," he says in a video on the PEN American Center site:
http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/3029/prmID/172

Slow death by humiliation and imprisonment. This must stop.

I have told my 99 year old mother about Liu Xiaboa and other persecuted Chinese writers and she said, immediately, "It reminds me of the Nazi regime," a euphemism to describe the destruction of a culture, of a people, of books and ideas, of freedom itself.

My mother grew up in Vienna surrounded by books, immersed in books. Her father was on the PTA of her elementary school and distributed books to the children as gifts. A local bookseller gave out free books to children. She read all the time and the saddest moment in her recent life was the day she realized she'd outlived her sight. I read to her as much as I can--the newspaper, poetry, books her book club is reading. Needless to say, she's the oldest member. We've tried to transition her to audio, but it's been difficult.

She is still telling stories, rushing to tell them as they surface in her memory. I'm writing them all down, then posting them in emails to those near and dear for the historical record. Yesterday, a new story surfaced about a bookstore near her home in Vienna's Second District. She remembers the name of the owner--Mr. Tuchner--and a day in the late fall of 1938 he disappeared and the store was trashed and shuttered. She didn't witness his arrest, but those that dared to stand and watch spread the story of the SS officer pronouncing the store a treasure trove of Filthy Jewish Bolshevist Free Thinking Pornography. No such literature would be permitted to be saved much less published in Hitler's Reich.

The lists of books to be destroyed included all Jewish authors except for those in the sciences. These collections were spared as they were considered irreplaceable.

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They've become a cultural phenomena and they are ubiquitous. Publishers encourage them and add talking points to the back of the book targeted at reading groups. These pages often include interviews with the author, biographical information, and advertisements for other books by the same author, or other authors. This is all good news: people are reading, people are interested in how writers work, how the work began, what a writing day is like. And, when they get together, they like to talk about their experience of the book: characters, plot, the story itself, how they relate to the story and characters. If the book is nonfiction, the discussion can be equally engaging and informative.

I have belonged to more than one reading group and, like writing groups, they seem to have a lifespan, some longer than others. I have found that they work best when discussion is orderly, when they are mixed male and female, when they are ethnically and age diverse, when they have both writers and devoted readers who are not writers, and when people stop talking and listen to one another.

Recently, I left one group because it had become too social, focused more on food and drink, and less on discussion about the books. Three of the ten or so members were writers, the others well read readers, but the shift from discussing the book in-depth to the food and drink would not abate. So I left.

Then I was invited into another group, none of whom are writers. They had met each other in the laundry room, elevators and foyer of the condo where they live, and had started the group on a whim. They all lived in the same line, so they were fated, one of the members told me. Meetings rotated from one floor to another, all with beautiful views of downtown Manhattan and distinctive décor. They were mostly book club "virgins" and, when I arrived, they solicited suggestions: Should there be food? A presenter? Who selects the book? And so on. About half the group was high-brow, the other half low-brow never having read any literary fiction; one or two were able to toggle between the two. The first book I read as a member of this group was the second of the Stieg Laarsen trilogy-- "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest," not a book I would have ever chosen to read on my own. No matter: I was curious. My doctor had recommended "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" in the midst of my annual exam, not a moment I take any such recommendations seriously. I had ignored him, and then seen all the movies. Mostly, I was interested in Lisbeth Salander, Laarsen's vigilante, his alter ego, the woman who gets the bad guys when he--in his too short life-- could not. And this is what I wanted to discuss with the group: the phenomena of the Laarsen trilogy. Anyone who knows anything about writing agrees that the books are not well written plus they are in translation. So I was astounded when the group was so swept away by the story and the characters that they could not stand back and discuss the book as a piece of writing. Why should I have been surprised? They were ordinary readers. They read the way most people read. Only the writer toils month after month, year after year, to make a book that works. Genre fiction, literary fiction, or nonfiction, it makes no difference. Writers toil and readers who are not writers read mostly for pleasure. The book is read, it's done, they liked it or didn't, and they move on. For some reason, I found this realization wounding. I don't know why, but I did. This new group didn't care one whit about the writing per se or about my writerly comments. One woman even told me that she already had her education and she didn't want to learn any more about writing or anything else (from me). Obviously, I was in the wrong group. So I left again.

If I do decide to join or form another reading group--and it won't be anytime soon-- I'm almost certain all the members will be writers, that there won't be any food, that the view won't matter, that we'll live in diverse neighborhoods all over the city, that we'll be good listeners and articulate commentators, and that all of us will have a curiosity about good literature--genre or literary, fiction or nonfiction--the society in which it is born, and how it is made.  Read More 

How does a writer refuel? How does a writer rest? Is there ever a time when I am not writing, not thinking of a project in progress, or what I will work on next? These are questions I have asked myself for years because I much prefer writing and working to resting, or what passes for resting in my lexicon. As you can imagine, the languorous post-holiday days are a challenge. Two days after Christmas, a week when most people are allegedly resting, and here I am at the computer writing this blog, getting up early to swim or work out, jotting in my jotting journal about a film I saw last night ("Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy"--outstanding) and enjoying all of it. In fact, I never relinquish the routine or discipline of the artist/writer. Never. Is it possible, therefore, that I am resting as I write? I think the answer must be yes as I carry my moleskin everywhere every day no matter where I am going and what I am doing. I am always writing something down, even if it is just a list of observations and disparate thoughts. Thus does my mind clear--and rest. Thus am I able to refuel. And I read a lot; reading and contemplation, walking and meditation. It's all necessary for me.

And I wander in museums and book stores, yes, real book stores. And I even buy some paper books when I begin to miss the sensory experience of holding a book, flipping back and forth, inhaling the often subtle aroma of the paper and ink. I bought two this week: Julian Barnes "The Sense of an Ending," and Erik Larson, "The Devil in the White City." I got half-way through the Barnes and gave it to friend who is a Barnes fan. I thought to myself, and wrote in my moleskin, that it was fascinating to be inside the male protagonist's brain, but also boring. And why did this book get the Man Booker prize? I have no idea. As for the Larson, recommended by many people, it is my first Larson, a page turner, an inspiration. Already I am thinking that I'd like to get back to a nonfiction project. But what will it be? I have no idea just now. Having just finished two books, I'm supposed to be resting.  Read More 

Home late from Brooklyn--near 1 a.m.-- on Friday night on the 3 train, escorted to the station by a recently returned soldier from Iraq, the deserted streets opposite the monumental Brooklyn Museum felt oddly safe. On the train in our still de facto segregated city we were the only light-skinned folk and there were about ten men sleeping in their hooded sweatshirts--a homeless underground riding the trains at night for shelter--a New York most of us never see or acknowledge.

We'd been to a gallery opening in Crown Heights, the gentrified side of Crown Heights, and when we'd arrived and surfaced from the train, we'd crossed Eastern Parkway, walked in the wrong direction, and found ourselves in the 'hood, far away from the gallery. There were three of us-- a burly man, two tall women--but we could have gotten rolled, for sure. We went into a store to ask directions and everyone was helpful and kind. We were two journalists and a photographer, had been to more dangerous places, and always survived, more than survived, we'd been invulnerable. We were not afraid. We were on the street, but not of the street.

I remember talking to war reporters in London at one party at another, returned from one war or another. They partied hard and recounted their exploits without reference to the dead bodies they had photographed, or the near-dead moments they had experienced. I thought them callous. I did not want such callous disregard to ever happen to me. But a numbness set in after 9/11 and then when I worked on "Another Day in Paradise," my two-year project with humanitarian workers, and, then again, when I worked on a revision of my family's war story, "Searching for Fritzi." To be numb or callous is not good for the writing, or anything else.

It is true, of course, that a certain distancing is required as we work and that we develop a narrative persona, or journalist's persona, to get the story and retain our own sanity. This must happen no matter what we are writing about--small stories and big ones. But we must guard against becoming numb or callous.

These days, a broadcast reporter can often be seen tearing up during an interview. S/he is not ashamed to show the audience an emotional reaction. Even war reporters and photographers--Jon Lee Anderson, James Nachtwey, Nicolas Kristoff, Scott Pelley, many others-- have achieved the tender balance between sensitivity and distance. They seem to take shelter in the work itself, the value of their reporting, and their humanity and integrity.
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I've been reading my cousin Cameron's blog this morning: http://cameronkopf.blogspot.com/. He's a French horn player who toured with the Phantom road show for many years and has now settled into rural living in Northern California with his partner, James. Cameron is a loquacious, dynamic story-teller --very active on Facebook when he's not writing a novel in thirty days. On November 1, he wrote this email: "Today was Day #1 of the http://NaNoWriMo.org novel writing contest which goes on all through the month of November (50,000 words to win), and I surpassed the daily minimum word output (1660) and managed to write 2727 words today! Not that I'm counting or anything."

Needless to say, he went a bit quiet during the month of November and I've missed him. So I checked his blog this morning. I'd always thought the blog was special and not only because I'm crazy about Cameron. He writes from an awareness of the beauty of his surroundings and the interconnections of his physical presence in the world and his interior life. It has not been a life without struggle, a struggle transformed into art and an artful rendering of his days. Musicians are disciplined creatures and even Cameron's blog inspires discipline. It's regular, devoted, and careful while, at the same time, engaging to read.

Cameron is also a collector: old typewriters, a rather quaint hobby these days. And his blog is written on a typewriter--he alternates--and then scanned into the computer, a perfect combination of old and new technologies.

Day after day, the blog is written, and accumulates into a body of work, a collection of gestures and experiences. Always, it begins modestly, tentatively, and then it grows exponentially and becomes a project. Some become books or columns in online magazines, such as readallday.com by Nina Sankovich. She writes: "From October 2008 through October 2009, I read a book a day and wrote a review of each book here on Read All Day. I began my year in an effort to come to terms with the tragic death of my oldest sister, Anne-Marie, and to find purpose and meaning in my life. I called my year of reading The 365 Project."

Nina's blog was picked up by the Huffington Post and then it became a book: "Tolstoy and the Purple Chair." Both the blog and the book are must-reads.

That all said, some blogs just remain blogs and that's fine, too. It's good writing practice. It's writing. Read More