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Talks and Events

Joan Didion with Sloane Crosley at NYPL Live

I’m hesitant to post about the NYPL Live conversation between Joan Didion and Sloane Crosley, because I was pretty disappointed with it. I really love these NYPL events, but the thing I love most about them–the chemistry in the interview–was missing this particular night. I don’t know Crosley’s work and haven’t heard her interview anyone before, so I don’t know if perhaps she hasn’t had a lot of experience with it yet, or if she was nervous, but she seemed a little overprepared yet unable to listen. It was disappointing, because I would have loved it if she could have drawn Didion out a little more.

The interview did get me thinking about style and subject matter, though, and how readers engage with them. Didion clearly had no interest in talking about mourning, loss, or (especially) catharsis–or even the genre of memoir, really. And yet, the subject matter of her two most recent books, Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking is so intimate and emotionally charged that people can’t seem to see anything else. Didion said tonight that for her, style was everything; that she wrote about these things because they were things that happened to her, and because that’s the way she tries to understand things, but that the main difficulty (of Blue Nights in particular) was getting the style right.

People don’t seem to want to hear this message. Didion responded bluntly to questions about the emotionally difficult subject matter of her latest books, event complaining gently of readers who approached her to discuss their personal tragedies. While I suspect part of her reticence may be a way of conserving some privacy over her quite public mourning process, I wish people had listened for openings and asked questions along lines that Didion was more open to discussing. Didion’s remarks tended towards sharp, understated wit, and it felt like riches were waiting just behind her stubbornly brief replies–if someone could just open up the dialogue in the right way.

Oh, well. Not every event can be a hit. NYPL Live’s season is winding down, but BAM’s Eat, Drink and Be Literary is just beginning, so I hope there will be another good interview or two in the not-too-distant future.

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Talks and Events

Umberto Eco with Paul Holdengräber at NYPL Live

When I’m missing the mountains and open skies of Colorado, there are two bookish things that always make me appreciate being in New York: BAM’s “Eat, Drink, and Be Literary” series, and the New York Public Library’s Live series. (Good food will usually do the trick, too.) BAM has the advantage of food, drink, and a more intimate venue, while NYPL has the upper hand on interviewing excellence–I simply love the way Paul Holdengräber engages his guests. A few days ago I went to hear him interview Umberto Eco, and from the moment they kicked things off by talking about books they haven’t read (à la Pierre Bayard), I remembered why I love being in a big city. The conversation was full of gems, and I particularly enjoyed thinking about the idea that hatred and stupidity are boundless, whereas love and truth are limited and predictable. (Love is exclusive, after all, and two plus two always equals four; whereas hatred can be shared and multiplied among any number of people, and the number of wrong answers to two plus two is limitless…)

Somewhere between declaring that the ability to lie sets humanity apart from animals, and avowing that “discombobulated” and “flabbergasted” are his two favorite words in English, Eco asserted the importance of contraints–rather than freedom–in the creative process. This is the essential idea of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle); while Eco is not a part of OuLiPo, he does have strong affinities with the group, as is evident from this event at the Louvre. The OuLiPo project has fascinated me since my first (or second?) year as a grad student, when my advisor, Warren Motte, introduced me to some of the group’s work. Deeply playful and rigorous, writers of OuLiPo embrace the role of form in the creative process to an unusual degree, setting arbitrary limits and rules on their work to see what comes out of it. One of my favorite examples is Jacques Jouet’s Poèmes du métro, in which each line was written between metro stops as he traveled along a pre-determined route that he had carefully mapped to maximize the metro stops that he visited while minimizing backtracking and repeats. Other writers, like Jacques Roubaud, rely on mathematical formulations to set constraints. Georges Perec famously wrote a novel without using the letter “e” (La disparition, 1990), then followed it up with a novel that used no vowels other than “e” (Les revenentes, 1997). Not all the works that are born of these constraints are fun to read, but the successes are truly magical.

I like the argument for limits quite a lot. I’ve seen it to be true personally with regards to my photography. I have a good camera and live in a photogenic city, but the times that I get the most interesting shots are when I have really specific assignments (like one, from a recent class, to capture blurry motion, silhouette, and deep depth of field in the same frame. This was one result of that task; here is another.) Freedom is not so useful in sparking creativity; set limits, though, and the creative mind comes to life. This is one reason I was interested in silence and the “unsayable” in my dissertation–what can more sharply limit language than silence? When writers work through and around silence, the results can be remarkable.

Returning to Eco after this OuLiPo rabbithole, I’ll mention that the only disappointment of the evening was nonetheless a substantial one. Closing out the interview, Holdengräber asked Eco, who professes to own 50,000 books, whether libraries have a role to play in the increasingly digital future. Eco responded that of course they do! They will be the museums for the lone copies of printed books; they will be like the tombs that preserve the mummified pharaohs.

Having spent a great deal of time lately thinking about this very question, I am convinced that the future role of libraries has far less to do with the physical form of the book (much as I love my real books), and far more to do with the careful and dynamic curation of works in all their forms. I think libraries have the potential to become even more living and vibrant as the expertise of librarians comes to the forefront. Museums, tombs, dusty archives–I think these are absolutely the wrong images to have in mind as libraries adapt to a quickly changing environment. I wish there had been a bit more time for discussion after Eco made these remarks, because I would love to know Holdengräber’s reaction. His usual opening remarks reflect a desire to bring lightness and liveliness to a sometimes heavy institution, so I’d like to think that he would agree with me on this one.

This post touches on some topics related to my work at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, so I will note that all views are my own and should not be taken to represent the organization.