December 29, 2016--The Year In Reading

At the end of each year, the New York Times asks an assortment of creative people what they have been reading.

They get interesting responses from a cross-section of avid readers and writers from Junot Diaz to Margaret Atwood to Joseph Ellis. But also from a mix of non-literary types such as Bryan Cranston, Paul Simon, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Though maybe with Bob Dylan having won a Nobel, Paul Simon is not so easily categorizable.

Depending on one's own literary aspirations and pretensions you can peruse in wonder Salman Rushdie's top dozen of the cool and exotic or sneak a peek at what Kareem has on his bedside table.

I can't wait to pick up Abdul-Jabbar's recommended poems by Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. But I'm not racing to get Valeria Luiselli's, The Story of My Teeth, listed by Rushdie.

I know Salman, he's a friend, but really?

Writers can be very competitive. I should rephrase that--writers are very competitive and I am certain that all who were invited to participate took hours coming up with a list that would not only be (sort of) true but would interest--let me rephrase that--impress readers and even trump their colleagues' picks.

No one, for example, would consider listing All the Light We Cannot See, even though it won a Pulitzer and has lingered on the Times best sellers list for 131 weeks, or maybe All the Light would be actively ignored because of these achievements.

Nor would any writer wanting to show off his or her esoteric side or the global reach of their readings even hint at mentioning anything escapist from the likes of John Grisham, though it would be more honest to list some guilty-pleasure reading, which we know everyone occasionally engages in, as that would make strivers such as me feel better about sneaking off with something from James Patterson, which to limit judgmental looks I read with the dust jacket slipped off.

Instead in the Times' Year In Reading we have Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk listing Halldor Laxness' Independent People, set among Icelandic farmers, and essayist Mary Oliver taking note of the work of Patricia Fargnoli, New Hampshire's poet laureate.

Competitive myself, and something of a compulsive reader, if the Times as an inclusive gesture to its average readers was ever to ask me for my list, I already have it ready--

Moby Dick
Don Quixote
The Brothers Karamazov
The Iliad
Finnegan's Wake
Madame Bovary (in the original)
And Peter Balakian's poems, Ozone Journal, which, sorry, did win the Pulitzer.

Salman Rushdie

                               

May 7, 2014--NY, NY: A Mirror to Nature

He came at us from out of the shadows behind Cooper Union where we had just been at a public discussion between Colm Toibin, Francine Prose, and Salman Rushdie. About literature and freedom and art and truth and rebellion. And worry about the shrinking audience for serious literature. "Only old farts like me will remain," Salman said with an ironic smile.

So we weren't prepared for what felt like an imminent assault, or at least pressure to give him street money, while still with our minds on Toibin and Yates, Lady Gregory and Easter 1916 in Dublin.

From the shadows he seemed darker and more muscular than at first. And taller, towering above my six-foot-three. Even as racist as it may have been to stereotype him, I shivered with fear.

I moved the three of us along, hoping to merge with the crowd ahead bunched up waiting for the light to change. Safety in a crowd, I thought.

Before we could get to safety, he reached toward us. We recoiled, trying to avoid eye contact. But I stepped ahead, toward him, feeling I would try to take whatever brunt might come. We were getting, thankfully, closer to the corner where it was lighter and where there was a cluster of young people.

"Do you know how to kill . . ."

Trembling, I was unable to hear the rest.

"What did he say?" our friend whispered.

"Something about killing," Rona said.

"This is getting very scary," I said. Our friend cringed.

"Do you know how," he repeated, "to kill . . . a mockingbird."

By his pausing I felt relieved--he was playing with, not threatening us. Perhaps knowing where we had just been.

So I took a chance and, trying a smile, said, "I think I do."

He laughed and speed ahead.

"What was that about," our friend said, equally relieved.

"It's a New York story," Rona said. "Maybe he's a street artist."

"I hate those," our friend said, "I like my art in theaters and museums, not on the street."

When we reached the corner, with the light still red, he was waiting for us.

"As Shakespeare wondered," he asked, "when you hold a mirror to nature, what do you see?"

"What?" our friend said now full-voiced. More her old cantankerous self.

"What Shakespeare said about the Mirror of Nature."

"From Romeo and Juliet?"

"Think more," he said. "It's something you need to know the answer to." And with that he darted to the other side of Lafayette Street, avoiding the stream of cars and taxis.

"I think it's from Hamlet," I said, after a moment to think about what had just happened. "I can't remember the context, but we should look it up."

Which, later that night, I did.

In fact, it is from Hamlet. From Hamlet's instructions to the players. He advises--

. . . suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special overstep not
the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of
the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone,
or come tardy off, though it make unskilful
laugh, cannot make the judicious grieve  . . .

Overstep not, indeed, I thought.