“Let’s make litter out of these literati!”

Lenny: “That’s too clever, you’re one of THEM!” –The Simpsons

As you may (or very well may NOT) have noticed, Minneapolis was recently named America’s Most Literate City. Yet another reason why the lakey city is so great: laudable reading habits. (Note: Whereas most publications say something like Minneapolis “bumped” or “ousted” Seattle for the number 1 bookworm city, the Minneapolis Star Tribune says supplanted. Why “supplanted?” ‘Cause we so literate.)

On a related note, my parents and I went to Garrison Keillor‘s bookstore (Common Good Books) during my visit home. It’s a charming enough place but I found the vanity relics (“This is the desk at which Garrison Keillor wrote [some books], in his New York City apartment”) a little off-putting. Also, the Javier Marias selection was woefully slim.

I give them points, though, for prominently displaying books from local publishers, like Milkweed’s Cracking India and Coffee House’s Firmin. Also, there’s a very reading-and-writing-conducive coffee shop upstairs where they hold readings with local writers. My mom and I totally slayed a New York Times crossword puzzle there.

While on the subject of Minnesota and books: I miss Minnesota Public Radio’s Talking Volumes. I know that I could listen on the web, but that’s not as good as actually attending the tapings at the Fitzgerald Theatre. Watching a writer speak in that antique little gem of a theatre is a fun night out. (Rumor has it that Isabel Allende was enchanting.) And while I know that famous writers are easy to come by in New York, it is so much more special in small, unassuming St. Paul.

Illuminations

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine. –Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Reading that this summer, I realized that it must have been from Kundera that Jonathan Safran Foer lifted the title Everything is Illuminated. Bricoleuse that I am, I love discovering these correspondences–I am, like most people, an intertextuality-fiend. Roland Barthes wrote that every new text is “a tissue of past citations.” I feel that metaphor so much: text as textile.I’ve made a habit of collecting quotation-titles. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

*Both Joan Didion (Slouching Toward Bethlehem) and Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) drew their book titles from Yeats’s The Second Coming.

*Tender is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald) is a quotation from Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale.

*All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Marshall Berman) comes from The Communist Manifesto.

*Lady MacBeth named my favorite contemporary novel with this line: “My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white.”

*Faulkner also borrows from MacBeth (though I can’t claim any special relationship with his work–Faulkner is a literary lacuna of mine):

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

In accordance with my citation-fixation, my blog posts often have intertextual titles: “Unpacking My Library” is a nod to Walter Benjamin; “On Going Home,” an allusion to Didion; this post, “Illuminations,” refers both to Benjamin and Rimbaud. Even the title of this blog, Besotted Gleaner, is a dual reference to Susan Sontag’s “besotted aesthete” and good ol’ 19th century social realism:

My own use of intertextuality stems from a deep mistrust of my own thoughts–better to patch together the thoughts of other people than to come up with my own; my appreciation of it comes from intellectual vanity, that flush of pride you feel when you recognize an allusion. (I give myself a mental gold star every time…)

I so rarely get to luxuriate in knowingness.

Internal Wunderkammers

“The dark, frigid sky was like a symbol of his soul. An impalpable drizzle was falling, driven before that wind from the southeast that (Bruno used to say) makes a person who lives in Buenos Aires even more melancholy, so that he looks out at the street through the rain-blurred windows and murmurs what shitty weather, while a more reflective sort thinks what infinite sadness.”

–Ernesto Sábato from On Heroes and Tombs

I just recently finished Sábato’s On Heroes and Tombs and was completely absorbed by it–not since A Heart So White have I read a novel so studiously. Sábato’s metaphors are unbelievably imaginative: at one point he describes a fat woman as “a giant, quivering custard: but a custard with intestines.” (A proto-Tom Wolfe!)

Like A Heart So White, On Heroes and Tombs was a recommendation that took me five years to act on–I am so glad that I did. This book is very much for me–the way New York City, yoga and the fiction of Javier Marias are for me. Some things seem to suit me so perfectly that I am astonished to think that they sprung up independent of–and indifferent to–myself.

Uncovering these identity-fragments is inordinately pleasurable. This, I suppose, is what makes me a gleaner–I tend to see life as a scavenger hunt, each year adding new treasures to my ever-accruing internal wunderkammer. (I have an expertly curated inner world, although you might never guess it from my constant external disorder.) This year, for instance, I’ve added Pan’s Labyrinth, the Mexican muralists, ceviche, Roberto Bolaño and Ernesto Sábato. Every year I’m a little richer.

My romantic world-view explains why I feel destined to visit certain places–why Colombia was necessary for “my personhood” and why I feel like there is something for me in Mexico and Buenos Aires. It thrills me to know that there are scores of other “destined” places that haven’t even registered on my radar yet.

I am, admittedly, a ridiculous human being.

The Savage Detectives

Francisco Goldman on Bolaño‘s infrarrealista manifesto in the New York Review of Books:

“Rather than prescribing any particular aesthetic principles or commitments, it urges infrarrealistas to leave their narrow bookish circles, to see the world, and find their rebel poetry in their own uncompromising lives.”

That is a seductive slice of manifesto to read right now, when the dialectical tension between stability and vagrancy that characterizes a (interesting) person’s 20s has become, for me, insufferable: Part of me wants to travel around Mexico for an extended period of time, acquire some scrapes, complicate my biography and live to tell the tale; the other part wants to stay in New York, sustain conversations and drink a little too much wine in “narrow bookish circles.” (This is a dilemma I rehash with Thomas almost every time we go to the Yaffa Cafe to write.)

In A Heart So White Marias describes a character in the following manner:

“He always gave the impression that he was missing out on something and was painfully aware of it, he was one of those individuals who want to live several lives at once, to be many, not limited only to being themselves: people who are horrified at the idea of unity.”

Next to that passage (I underlined the bold part with a squiggley line, which normally indicates a personal rather than readerly reaction to the text) I wrote: “me!” Indeed, that is me–I wish that I could cram a couple of different lives into my 20s; I love the vigor of this age and would like to use it several times over.

Another salient tension for me in New York: private vs. public life. I am astonished by how much of my life is unfurling in public space. As an introvert with a rich heritage of quietude and introspection, this is mildly unsettling. I used to joke that “Megan happens” in solitary moments, I need to sit still for ideas to crystallize. Now, I can’t seem to get a moment to myself–or when I do, they feel a little too luxurious: milk baths of solitude.

I still haven’t mastered life here.

Cafe Pick-Me-Up

I was puttering at Cafe Pick-Me-Up last weekend (I’ve FINALLY found a coffeeshop in Manhattan that approximates the shabby/boho chic of Minneapolis’ best) when a gentleman at the table next to me asked me to watch his books while he went to the restroom. This struck me as odd. As I see it, the world is made up of two kinds of people:

1. Those who recognize the value of books and whose ethics forbid their abduction.

2. Those who *don’t* value books–who can’t be bothered to read–and to whom it would never occur to steal a book.

I actually use my books to save myself cafe tables–I just don’t think that Kundera is in any danger out there. (I’m also pretty trusting of people who gather to drink coffee together…)

Requiem for Vonnegut

I know that this is a little late–it’s been over a week since he passed–but I thought that I ought to write a short tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, given how important he’s been to me.

It’s been years since I’ve picked up one of his books, but Vonnegut occupies a special place in my heart. He is in many ways THE writer for me: the writer who got me into writers, the man who made a bibliophile of me. I was a late-bloomer in that regard, which must have distressed my mother greatly. All through middle school I was pretty indifferent to books, but picking up Breakfast of Champions at 14 was a revelation. (Thank you, Sarah.) Here was someone who wrote more or less like I thought. He made feeling askew a little more tolerable, a little more noble.

In high school I was plagued by two very particular fears:
1. that Paris would explode before I could visit it.
2. that Kurt Vonegut would die before I could meet him.
Fortunately, I got to see Vonnegut read at a Presbyterian Church in St. Paul when I was still in high school. (And I’ve since been to Paris, which remains standing.)

The following (in bold) is a Vonnegut quote that I carry around in my head–it’s from a Paris Review interview that I first read in Palm Sunday. This is largely why I was never an English major:

VONNEGUT

I’m on the New York State Council for the Arts now, and every so often some other member talks about sending notices to college English departments about some literary opportunity, and I say, Send them to the chemistry departments, send them to the zoology departments, send them to the anthropology departments and the astronomy departments and physics departments, and all the medical and law schools. That’s where the writers are most likely to be.

INTERVIEWER

You believe that?

VONNEGUT

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Megan de Medici

Reading about the Rockefellers in my Latin American Art in U.S. Museums course has made me think about what *my* patronage legacy would be, were I obscenely weathly. It’s an important question, I think. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far…

I would:
-finish Sagrada Familia and Crazy Horse (I go nuts just thinking about that thing–I mean, it would be SO COOL … hurry up!!).

-commission a book that examines the history and politics of the MoMA: I want someone to do for the MoMA what Gay Talese did for the Times in The Kingdom and the Power. What say you, Schjeldahl?
-finance Latin American cinema.
-sponsor Maren Lange. (I maintain that she deserves a scholarship to life.)

Does anyone have any brilliant additions? Commissions? Revivals? Cenotaphs?

Book Report

I’m reading (when I can) Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City right now. It’s pretty terrific, you should check it out.

A sample: Kazin on leaving the movies as a boy:

“[T]he gritty light on Bristol Street would break up the images on the screen with a meanness that made me shudder. I always feared that light for the same reason: it seemed to mock imagination. I could never finally leave the movies, while the light of Saturday afternoon still filled the streets, without feeling the sadness that Spinoza describes as coming after lust…”

Unpacking My Library

“There is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.” -Walter Benjamin

I am back in Minnesota, where the first things I see every morning, in any direction, are books. My bed is flanked by bookshelves, so whether I am facing the left or right, I’m taking in books. I keep my little Milkweed collection on my headboard, and the top shelf of my closet is likewise lined with books. I used to try to have an order to them: my closet-books start with English literature, then bleed into American authors that I don’t feel strongly about, then Goethe and Kafka and Camus … In Benjamin’s dialectic, I perhaps lean toward “disorder.”

I don’t see my compulsion as materialistic: I rarely purchase a book for its formal qualities, but rather for its spiritual promise. I thus absolve myself from any guilt that I might feel when buying books. It’s a funny, pious attitude that I adopt.

I can measure my life in books; collectively, they are my biography. Gazing to the right side of my bed this morning, I could see my 15 year-old Vonnegut phase and my early-undergraduate Zola period. I know, I talk like I’m Picasso, but perhaps the reader ought to be more valorized.

Every book is its own madeleine, scented with readers’ associations. (The madeleine frustrates me so much: I feel like you need to trudge through at least one of Proust’s novels in order to be entitled to that reference. Some pretentions need to be earned, damn it. Proust should have buried that nugget a little deeper in his massive oeuvre, rather than dropping it in the first 50 pages. He clearly wasn’t thinking like a TV producer…) Each book in my collection is an unintentional memento of the time and place where I read it. Catcher in the Rye: Central Park, summer 2003; Bel-Ami: New York’s subways, Teany, same summer; Crime and Punishment: started in New York, 2003, finished in Guadeloupe, 2005 (I have NO idea how that happened…); Tomorrow in Battle Think On Me: Bogota, cappuccino, June 2006. These powerful associations are partially what make me such a curmudgeonly lender.

Also what makes me a grudging lender: my sometimes-embarassing personal engagement with a book. I tend to swoon or sass in the margins.

Twice-read books acquire a special patina. I remember my first piecemeal reading of Tender is the Night when I was 16 years old, sprawled out in the sun on my trampoline. I read it again only two years later, when traveling through Western Europe and, oh, how luminous it became. I recall tearing through One Hundred Years of Solitude one summer in Northern Minnesota when I was 17. It was too cold to swim, so I just read, and much too quickly. I revisited that book five years later, when I was living in Guadeloupe, shortly before my first trip to Colombia. Magical realism made more sense in the Caribbean than by Minnesota’s lakes. (Although Russian literature also seemed appropriate in Guadeloupe, so go figure…)

And then there are my Good Intention books, cobblestones on my proverbial path to hell, books that I’ve owned for years but somehow haven’t gotten around to: Don Quixote, The Decameron, Paradise Lost… For shame, Megan, for shame. I can scarcely bear to make eye contact with these books.

My move to New York has cleaved my library in two, but the division is uneven: most of my books remain in Minnesota; art history, critical theory and reference books came to New York. I wonder if I’ll ever have one, unified library again. Sadly, books ARE things, and heavy things, that are not conducive to a gypsy-lifestyle.

Street Books

Why are the books that they sell on the streets of Manhattan so much better than the ones in the airport? New York has some classy street-books…

TK: A thorough semester-in-review entry, in which I effervesce over my classmates, the celestial city, and even the Library of Death.

This is a view from Astor Place; I see it on my walk to school. You can see two Starbucks at once from here. It’s so wrong… There are, however, classy street-books (& a nag champa stand) right in front of one of the Starbucks, which bohemes-it-up a bit.