Carol Bergman

My mother turned 99 on October 21 and there is much I want to continue to do and say to honor her long and eventful life before she dies. When we are together, I read her the newspaper. We discuss the world’s events: the economic crisis, Qaddafi’s end, the opera. Unable to see very well or to hear very much, we take our time and try to remain patient—both of us—when there are misunderstandings. Mostly, my mother enjoys being read to and then to discuss what I have read to her. And I will usually end our visits with some poetry which leads us easily into thoughts about love, death and the next generation. My mother still cares a lot about her children and grandchildren, how they are doing, what the future holds for them.

In 1999, I published a small memoir about our Viennese family which began with an oral history and ended, more or less, with an addendum to the book in 2008 when Michael Ramsey, an officer in General MacArthur’s occupation army in Japan, contacted me to let me know that he’d met our cousin, Fritzi Burger, an Olympic ice skating champion, in Tokyo in 1945. She had married a son of the Mikimoto family and had spent the war years in Japan. As the book was already published, I wrote up the addendum as an article and sent it out. Eventually, it was published—in English—in a small Austrian publication and I also put it up on my website as a locked PDF file. In my once-monthly Google myself session the other day, I found that locked file on the internet for all to see. I called Mike Ramsey in Abilene, Texas and we agreed that such availability is for the best; the information in that article should be disseminated as part of the historical record. Mike is in his mid-80’s now and our lives are as different as eggs and cheese. But we are well bonded over the Fritzi story. Mike sent it out to a friend who works for Julia Roberts and he’s hopeful it will one day be a movie. And so, as I spoke to him, I knew that my search for Fritzi, metaphorically speaking, was not over. It had just entered a new phase.

With the relative ease and success of my first e-book, “Water Baby; Five Novellas,” I have decided to revise and update “Searching for Fritzi” and release it as an e-book with the addeundum as a final chapter or epilogue. I was frustrated at first because all the files for the book are on floppies and I have no floppy drive. No matter, I decided to type it into a new file and this re-working, looping backwards to move forwards, has enabled me to massage the prose and make it better. I’ve learned a lot about writing a strong memoir since 1999 and I have also learned more about the subject and about myself in relation to the subject: genocide.

And so I began, tentatively, at first, and then with a great sense of freedom and purpose. I’m up to Chapter 7 and am pleased at how it’s going. Stay tuned. Read More 

I’m reading David McCullough’s new book, “A Greater Journey,” about Americans in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. http://www.amazon.com/Greater-Journey-Americans-Paris/dp/1416571760. It’s charming, informative, well written, but the book could not have been done without a treasure trove of correspondence and journals. These are all quoted at length. And that set me to wondering, yet again, about what we are leaving behind for historians to plumb when they begin their search for our times.
How many of us still correspond, at length, with friends and family? How many of us still print out our photographs?

Even among my writer friends, the art and practice of corresponding—at leisure and at length—has stopped, nearly entirely. Two journalist friends in London, devoted letter writers just a decade ago, now only send much shorter, less contemplative, far less descriptive emails. Like mine, they are mostly hurriedly written, between other obligations. Only a cousin, who lives a relatively secluded writer’s life on Gabriola Island in Canada, still writes me long, descriptive narratives which he writes off-line and then pastes into an email. They seem generic, catch up emails, personalized in a paragraph or two at the beginning or end. They are still pleasurable to read, of course, but who will save them for posterity?

I have written in this blog about postcards and this practice has also nearly ended. Why not just dash off an email or post, together with photographs, to Facebook while traveling? And what, then, will happen to that record? Eventually? It all becomes ephemera. It already is ephemera.

I was reminded this week of how rapidly technology changes, frustrating attempts to access what we wrote just a few years ago. With the success of my new e-book, “Water Baby; Five Novellas,” http://www.amazon.com/Water-Baby-Five-Novellas-ebook/dp/B005RFUYB8, I have decided to update and revise “Searching for Fritzi,” and to re-release it as an e-book. I contacted the designer to find out if he still had a file of the text and the cover. He found the cover, excellent, now for the text. No such luck. I rummaged through my boxes and found my stored floppies but, of course, have no floppy drive in my new computer and, even if I could get the floppy read somewhere—and I am sure I could—how would I convert it from Ami Pro to Word?

All for the best, of course, in the end. I opened a new file and set to work, revising and updating, as promised. It’s been a very interesting and challenging exercise. And once online as an e-book, “Searching for Frtizi” will live in the cloud for all eternity, solace indeed. Read More 

I remember Vice President Al Gore talking about the “information highway,” but when was that exactly? And when did we start blogging and what is the etymology of the word “blog?” (According to the instantaneous online dictionary, it’s a conflation of web and log, a weblog, first known use, 1999.) I have a blog: I am writing on my blog as I write. My blog, hosted by the Authors Guild, is a public/private space where I can ruminate about writing and the writing life. When I ask my students if they have a blog, usually about a half dozen hands go up. Everyone and anyone can blog; a great leveling. And excellent writing practice, too. Journalists adore their blogs because they now have ample space to say what they had wanted to say in the first place in print. This blog upon which, or within which, I write is capacious enough to accommodate all my meandering thoughts with no one to censor, limit, or edit, alas. I exert a writer’s discipline: these are small essays in which I can keep the writing muscle supple.

Now that my first e-book, “Water Baby; Five Novellas,” has been published, however, this blog has become a sales tool. It feeds to my Amazon Author’s Page. And my Facebook Carol Bergman: Writer page feeds to my Twitter account, which I am advised to update regularly. So much feeding; I am sated. What happened to the cozy launch readings at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village? They now seem quaint.  Read More 

My favorite fictional form is the novella, popular in Europe, but not in the US. My agent likes/admires my novellas, but can’t sell them. I’ve placed a couple in literary magazines and even won a prize for “Water Baby,” but none of that makes any (marketing) difference. My first collection, “Sitting for Klimt,” did well as an iUniverse/Barnes & Noble co-publishing print-on-demand venture and is permanently on the shelf at the Neue Galerie where, so long as Klimt’s portrait of my protagonist, Adele Bloch-Bauer, is on display, my book will live with her in the same building. I hope. Of course, it might get pulled off the shelf, but it will never go out of print.

I have just published my second collection of novellas, “Water Baby” as an e-book, an experiment. My daughter designed the cover and my cousin donated the cover image. It takes a village. I’m pleased with the collection as a literary endeavor and enjoying the congratulations and praise from other writers who understand the effort it takes to draft and polish a work before publication. The technical challenges of getting the book online have been daunting for me, however. They are similar, I’ve decided, to launching a website, as opposed to preparing a manuscript for print publication. I’ve uploaded, there are numerous formatting errors, and now I can go back in and tweak if only I could figure out how to do that. Truly, I wish my daughter, a graphic designer, would have had time to help me out, but she didn’t, so I did it all on my own. It was—and still is—thrilling as well as frustrating. All so fast, a friend in the UK wrote, even though the book took me five years to compile, send out to readers, revise. Many long hours of work. Yet, it took only minutes to get it “published,” and went “live” before I understood what I’d done wrong with the upload. I had dreams about correcting/editing and thought about nothing else during my lap swim this morning, but when I went back onto the site, it wasn’t available for editing. And it was only when I was swimming that I realized why the cover hadn’t appeared in front of the text: It’s all one document and though I’d uploaded the cover, that was just for the data base, and I’d left it out of the text, and so on.

You can see, dear reader, how the publishing an e-book process might become obsessive and obliterate all creative thought. Luckily I am taking a play writing workshop this term to relax and my NYU class meets on Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be flying to California for a few days on family business. I’ll take my Kindle, of course, and leave Hayden Herrera’s large, hardcover biography of Arshile Gorky by my bedside.  Read More 

I was walking on 110th Street last Friday on my way to the Hungarian Pastry Shop to read a tutorial student’s manuscript over an ice coffee and poppy seed strudel, and looking forward to that strudel, when a voice behind me—“teacher, teacher”—interrupted my guilty reverie. How could I not turn around? A young, buff man, carrying a small backpack in his hands, said, “Don’t you work for NYU? Aren’t you a teacher? Do you remember me?”

“Yes, yes, no, please remind me,” I said.

I have been teaching writing at NYU since 1997, and at Gotham Writer’s Workshop before that. I’ve had a lot of students and, when I bump into them, I always remember they have been my student, and I usually remember what they were writing about. Though a name might have slipped, that comes back to me eventually, also. But this young man, I couldn’t place him. So, I stood quietly and let him talk. He was shy and stood some distance away, not a normal distance for a conversation between people who know one another. And, for an instant, I thought he had seen my briefcase and thus assumed I was a professor--we were near Columbia after all-- and, in fact, he didn’t know me, he was a con man, and I’d better be on my way. But how on earth would a stranger know I worked at NYU?

All these thoughts were racing around in my head while I was trying to figure out when this young man took my class or, if he didn’t take my class, how I was going to get away.

“I was the security guard at MAVA,” he said. “Bentley. Remember?”

MAVA is Manhattan Village Academy, a charter school that NYU uses as a satellite location. They subcontract to a security firm and Bentley worked for them. He was a friendly security guard and I always chatted to him as I entered and left the building. I didn’t get to know him well, but apparently our conversations had made an impression because, he now told me, he had been longing to be upstairs in a classroom. Then and now, his earnestness touched me because, I believe, the desire to learn, the ability to learn, is hard-wired in us and it is only the privileged, these days, who can continue their education. I am far from sentimental, but when I watch movies about young people and their teachers, or documentaries about schools being built in impoverished countries, young children bent over their scrappy books or slates, I want to get out there and start teaching. I stood there and thought to myself: This young man is talking to me because I am a teacher. I must encourage him.

“I’m a bus driver now,” he continued, “and the MTA offers to pay for courses at CUNY. I want to take classes but am worried about how I will manage my time.”

“I am sure you will manage,” I said. “That is a wonderful opportunity. I am so pleased you have such a good job now with such a wonderful benefit. You can do it slowly, one class at a time.”

“I’ve always been a good student. I read the MTA manual in one sitting. I know I have to go beyond my high school diploma," he said.

“You will get there,” I said. “I took my time getting my Master’s Degree. I needed it to be able to teach at NYU. I am so glad we stopped to talk, Bentley. I know you will do well.”
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I took a break yesterday morning from formatting my new collection of novellas and went to the press opening of the De Kooning Retrospective at MOMA. I enjoy going to exhibitions on my own, but I also enjoy going with an artist. Though our experience of the work is always different, I learn a lot about the work itself, and the visual artist’s process. Artists are often quite verbal—they keep notebooks and sketchbooks and they read a lot—and have a poetic way of talking about their work. My cousin, Peggy Weis, an accomplished print maker, is always a joy to be with at an exhibition for this very reason. When we arrived at the room of De Kooning’s late work, she gasped and said, “Look at what happened to him. These huge canvases of sweeping brush strokes. He’s no longer painting bodies, he is using his own body to express himself.” Then a young woman arrived to tell us that it was time for the Director of the Museum and the Curators to speak. We decided to skip it and walked back through the exhibition. This seemed to be okay; no one stopped us. What a treat to have the galleries nearly to ourselves. We took our time. I was hypnotized by De Kooning's skill as a draftsman and also the way he worked the canvas month after month, adding layer upon layer of paint. I thought of my own struggle to layer work, to build texture, to stay with it in revision. And I’m pleased that I finished the last novella of my current collection because I’ve had a disrupted summer. I decided the story did not have to be as long as the others, that less was enough, that I could work—with humility—on a smaller canvas and restrain my ambition to create a master work.  Read More 

I dedicate this blog entry to the residents of Ulster County who survived Hurricane Irene and are working hard to repair their property and their lives. I was there, cat, dog and chicken sitting for my daughter and son-in-law while they went up to a wedding in Maine. My husband had returned to the city and, once he was gone, my plan had been (and notice the tense) to enjoy some end of summer fresh air, take long walks, read, relax, and write. But first the kitten jumped onto the keyboard and chewed on the wires, then there was a minor earthquake, then a bear attacked the chicken coop, foxes arrived, and my son-in-law’s deterrent—a spray and motion sensor light—went off continually, disturbing my sleep. Of course, the dog barked and barked and barked. I thought of my artist-cousin who recently went up to her home in Martha’s Vineyard for a week of solitude to think and work. She was so distracted by the obligations of house maintenance she couldn’t get started and ended up painting the stairwell a robin egg blue. Ever since, she’s been dreaming of Matisse.

My daughter and son-in-law drove through the night after the wedding ceremony and arrived at 4 a.m. The power had gone out around 2 a.m. and, to say the least, I was glad to see them. The rain was sheeting and smelled like the sea where it had been born. I was curled up on the bed with the dog and the cat reading the first of the Trollope Palliser novels on my Kindle with a micro-light. Cozy, but I was still uneasy until my family returned safely. And they drove into the storm so I wouldn't be alone in the house.

It was the tail of the Hurricane, a tornado-strength wind—that caused the most damage just as the power line crews were beginning to get to work the following afternoon. Of course, we knew this wind was coming but it was hard to imagine how strong it would be so far inland.

Fortunately, the damage on the property was minimal, and no one got hurt. Only one chicken died when a large branch fell onto one of the coops. Others in the area were not as lucky.

I am now back in the city after a six hour journey in a convoy—two SUV’s and two excellent GPS’s--with two savvy self-confident Canadian women. I left my small Honda upstate knowing I wouldn’t be able to get through water or over downed branches. I was also feeling skittish and did not want to travel alone. One of the by-products of natural and man-made disasters, I find, is that community coheres instantly.

I think we crossed the Hudson River three times in search of clear roads though we eventually lost track. Towards the end, we passed through Bear Mountain State Park which looked untouched, as did the city.  Read More 

I have moved into my (second) childhood neighborhood. I have not thought about it very much because I have been so busy, but Sunday morning, on the way to the gym, I walked down West End Avenue and saw the apartment building—895—where I lived from the age of 4 until I entered junior high school. We lived in the high-ceilinged first floor apartment where my mother, an obstetrician-gynecologist, also had her office. We occupied the back bedrooms and the living/dining area. Our maid had a small room off the kitchen. Of course there were several such maids/housekeepers/nannies to look after us while my mother and step-father worked. It was unusual in those days; most moms were stay-at-home moms. My refugee parents never had the luxury. Nor do parents today.

I walked slowly and then snapped an iphone picture which I immediately posted onto Facebook with a short caption. But, unexpectedly, there was more to say, more to write about: This is where I lived when I was a child. This is where I played handball, roller skated, jumped rope and played jacks. My friend, Diana, lived next door at 885. Her mother did not work and she lived in an extended family—grandmother, aunt, cousins—while her father worked. I thought the set-up sublime and ate lunch there whenever I could. And so on.

So this may be the beginning of another memoir. It certainly feels as though it is. And though I have writing plans for the next month—the fifth novella in a new collection—I may take a detour, it’s hard to say. It is very pleasant to let the mind drift, to allow the images and ideas to surface, pen and paper (or computer) at the ready.

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I moved last Friday and, though today is only Wednesday, I am at my desk, in my new atelier, eager to write a blog or anything else that will elevate my brain out of boxes into other, more creative thoughts. In search of a café to sit and read, I missed my old, familiar neighborhood and retreated back to my apartment which is so high and bright and cool that I don’t really need to sit in a café to read. Except that when I am here, there is always something to do: a box to unpack, a picture to hang. Getting back to a project after an enforced hiatus is, therefore, a matter of discipline. So I went to a yoga class this morning at my new gym, picked up some lunch, ate the lunch with my husband, discussed the dimensions of a kitchen table we need to buy, and got to work, sort of.

First things first, email. Then more gadgets for my iGoogle. Then I hung another painting, lay down on the bed to read, and fell asleep. Now I am back at the computer writing this blog, a warm up, I suppose. I added the New York Review of Books to my gadgets and read an article about postcards which was well written and interesting. I have tossed away every postcard I have ever received except for one which I have in front of me now. It’s hand painted, a detailed, delicate color drawing of Sarajevo circa 1908, before bombs shattered the city. It was sent to me by a relief worker friend after the most recent war had come to an end, and two mutual relief worker friends returned to the city to get married. Carefully written in a steady hand, it tells a story in twelve succinct lines about the occasion and the city itself, quite different than when the writer was last there. I cannot remember the last time I wrote a postcard. Oh, yes, I can. It was two years ago when I traveled to Alaska. I will not be traveling this summer and I have not, as yet, received a postcard from other travelers. Of course, I have received emails and Facebook postings. In their distillations, they are similar to postcards, and environmentally correct, no? Please advise.

For anyone interested, here’s the New York Review article by Charles Simic, a fine poet:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/aug/02/what-ever-happened-summer-postcards/

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There is always noise in New York, even on a holiday weekend. But today the noise is mostly in my head. I’m in the city, having just been upstate—a respite—for three days, and returning next week for a short visit, probably the last before my move at the end of July. I’ve been reading a lot, but not writing anything except for the occasional entry into my notebook, and this blog. At least there’s that. Still, I’m uneasy. My head is full of dimensions and lists. What to give away, what to sell, what to buy, when to begin the change of address emails. And the only activity that seems to shift the “moving” thoughts is swimming and poetry. I recite what I have already memorized—I just finished “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats—and am casting around for a new poem. My mother asked me the other day why I am memorizing poems and my answer was: for the pleasure of it and, more specifically, a writer’s pleasure. It’s like tracing. You get to know the poem well, and to study the poet’s choices. Why this word and not another? Why the line break here and not there? What is this poem about?

My private students are on hiatus also, although I’ve had one long manuscript to read for a rendezvous next week. Another former student called yesterday about an academic paper he’s writing that’s been rejected twice. Would I work with him privately? The more manuscripts, the happier I am. Like everyone else, I have to keep the cash flow going, but, as important, studying a manuscript closely keeps my writing muscle supple. While reading, I am also writing. I know exactly what I’ll be working on as soon as I move, and then for months afterward. The only interruption once I’m settled into my new apartment will be the sale of my revised literary murder mystery. Then there will be more “to do” lists—editing, publicity— more poems to memorize, and more laps to swim.

What do writers do when they are not writing? They live their lives, garden, fall in and out of love, swim, memorize poems, have dinner parties, move.  Read More