I’m in Paris: it’s pretty much exactly like this.
That’s Awfully Nice of You
It took me a while, but I finally managed to download the anniversary issue of the New Yorker and read the Jonathan Franzen essay about Edith Wharton. I’ve been reading her short stories and novellas recently: all these limited and limiting choices. Like Hardy, with more money and less dairy farming. Franzen writes:
“No major American novelist has led a more privileged life than Wharton did … To be rich like Wharton may be what all of us secretly or not so secretly want, but privilege like hers isn’t easy to like; it puts her at a moral disadvantage … She was deeply conservative, opposed to socialism, unions, and woman suffrage … [Wharton] did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty.”Really? This is why I read 200 pages of Freedom and then threw Mumma’s hardcover copy across the room. The reason Wharton writes books worth reading is that she extends empathy to her characters; the reason Franzen writes books I keep trying and failing to read is that he doesn’t. Wharton isn’t nice to her characters, she details their flaws and vanities without reserve or apology, but she is generous, which is better. Reading Wharton probably presents a lot of the same problems as watching period dramas: are you secretly nourishing a desire to return to a world of white privilege sustained by colonial and class exploitation? Looking for love in all the wrong places? If you’re reading Wharton’s descriptions of traipsing about the Continent or summering in Newport, and pining for them, you might want to reread the text: Wharton knows it’s all about to topple. The party’s already over for most of her key players — they’re living off their loans, defined by debt, financial or moral, chimeral but close, just like so many of us. There are bigger, badder problems to write books about, but Wharton’s poor little almost-rich girl or guy stories aren’t less moving for not addressing them. They could have been, but Wharton isn’t Franzen.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
My father and one of his friends from medical school, covering “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say” from Jesus Christ Superstar at a music festival in Delhi, early 80s.
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It had fallen at last—this blow in which she now saw that she had never really believed! And yet she had imagined she was prepared for it, had expected it, was already planning her future life in view of it…when, in reality, under that thin surface of abnegation and acceptance, all the old hopes had been smouldering red-hot in their ashes! What was the use of any self-discipline, any philosophy, any experience, if the lawless self underneath could in an instant consume them like tinder?
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…I began to feel I loved the land and to know I would never forget it. There I would go for long walks alone. It’s strange growing up in a very beautiful place and seeing that it is beautiful. It was alive, I was sure of it…There was something austere, sad, lost, all these things. I wanted to identify myself with it, to lose myself in it. (But it turned its head away, indifferent, and that broke my heart).
Post-op reading at home. Love and blindness.
Big Daddy Kane - Ain’t No Half Steppin’
Sample is from “Blind Alley” by the Emotions.
Sounds like springtime. Get psyched!
