Cultured Expectations

Two weeks ago, Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for NPR's cultural program Fresh Air, released her review of a Korean novel, Please Look After Mom, by Kyung-Sook Shin, upon its publication in the United States. Corrigan is usually extremely balanced in her reviews, even when she doesn't love the book, and so it was a real shock that her review of Shin's novel turned out to be a full-on condemnation. Her criticisms were not just of the writer's style, or of specific plot details, but of the novel's entire premise. " I was stranded in a Korean soap opera decked out as serious literary fiction," she said, "If there's a literary genre in Korean that translates into 'manipulative sob sister melodrama, Please Look After Mom is surely its reigning queen." Corrigan concludes her review by urging American readers to seek out other literary options "rather than knocking back the wine and reaching for the cheap consolations of kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction."

My opinions are not those of the publisher, and I have not read the book, but Corrigan's review, and the dozens of comments she received afterwards, prompted the same questions that arose as I read my book for TK last month, a piece of historical fiction about post-war Vietnam--what kinds of cultural baggage do we bring to the books we read? As a reviewer, how well-informed am I supposed to be, not just about literature, but all forms of cultural expression? And if I don't understand the cultural context of a book, does that make it anathema to me?

Corrigan's review undoubtedly reeks of ethnocentricism--she admits that she writes from a Western perspective "indoctrinated in resolute messages about 'boundaries' and 'taking responsibility'; I kept waiting for irony; a comic twist in the plot; a reprieve." Corrigan is right in that the vast majority of American fiction, especially those tearjerkers destined for embrace by the best-seller lists and book clubs, is resolved with happy endings, rarely with a closing spoonful of doubt and blame and unending guilt. But this owes a great deal to a literary tradition rooted in stories of Christian redemption--so of course we've come to expect the happy endings. But ideas of redemption express themselves differently across different cultures--a novel written from a Buddhist perspective might let characters find redemption when they give up their personal desires; a story rooted in Greek mythology might only resolve a character's conflict once they have returned to their place of origin. But if you're reading like Corrigan did, the expectations for conventional narrative get in the way of exploring something new.

This brings me to something that I think many readers have discovered, and appreciate: fiction is the easiest and cheapest form of travel. We read fiction for a lot of reasons--entertainment pleasure, intellectual challenges, emotional growth--but we also read to expose ourselves to something unknown. Your passport may lack stamps, but if you build your library across many traditions, you can easily travel the world. I can go to India with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, to Japan with Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, to Mexico with Roberto Bolaño's 2666, and yes, to Pakistan and Afghanistan with Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea. Methinks part of the popularity of Eat, Pray, Love was not in its self-help feel-good ending, but in its geographic scope of Italy, India, and Indonesia. If you read literature in translation, the writer becomes a guide not just to a landscape, but to a whole set of cultural expectations, and you leave the work exposed to an entirely new series of ideas and possibilities. Reviewers can't be always be cultural authorities--if so, book review editors would have to provide big travel budgets--but they should be cultural omnivores. If Corrigan was turned off because the subject of motherhood from the Korean perspective proved too strangely foreign for her exploration, then one has to wonder what exactly she bothered to pick up the book at all. If you don't want to travel, then please, stay at home and leave the journey for the enthusiastic.

But of course, even if you do agree to take the journey, you may not like what you find...You can't force a book to be pleasurable if you can't make an emotional connection to it. But there, of course, is what I find one of the greatest potentialities in any book I pick up: I may really, really hate it. Not everyone reads to skate placidly across a narrative, and sometimes, you really want the experience of a rollercoaster, the narrative throwing you into wildly polarized opinions and emotions. For all the books I've loved, I learned just as much from the ones I hated--I gritted my teeth with disgust at American Psycho and Less Than Zero, groaned with annoyance at The Devil Wears Prada, and openly yelled at the characters in Freedom. But none of these reads were at any point a waste of time, and I never once put them down because I disagreed with them. And this was the point where I really fought with Corrigan's perspective: she recommends that the American readers go for Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids instead of Shin's novel. This is fine--Just Kids is a great read, one that many people have loved--but to suggest that reading is an either/or experience, that somehow one book should be substituted for another, misses the whole point of why we read. The sad, beautiful fact that we're going to miss almost everything is somewhat inevitable, but being "well-read" isn't about reading everything. It's about reading widely, generously, and with an open mind.

It's been a week full of literary highs and lows: first the potential falsehoods (and excuses) of Greg Mortenson's best-selling memoir Three Cups of Tea, then the glorious one-two punch of Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer win and HBO development deal, then today's release of the Time 100 that includes all kinds of literary tastemakers from the past year (Egan, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Chua, George R.R. Martin, and Patti Smith, among many others). All of these serve as reminders that, while we may gnash our teeth over the impending publishing apocalypse, every day writers and their work make news, incite conversation, and create reasons for the reading public to participate in a dialogue about what makes good literature. I'm happy to know that books can stimulate an exchange of ideas...it'd be nice if Corrigan could've felt the same way.

Brooklyn, The Beacon of Literature's Future

If you're in the New York area and literarily-minded, you've probably set aside part of your Sunday afternoon to attend part of the Brooklyn Book Festival, an all-day event celebrating authors, literature, and the new writing culture that has sprung up in the outer boroughs. This is far bigger than just a regional event: authors of national renown, best-sellers and critical darlings--Rosanne Cash, Michael Connelly, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gaitskill, Sam Lipsyte, to name just a few--will all be making appearances. To be brief, there's a lot of interest in this festival that goes way beyond the borough. And it’s especially worth noting if, like me, you’re not sure which neighborhood to turn to find the quintessential New York literary scene.

It seemed like all writers used to congregate on the island—prior to moving here, all the iconic images I consumed of New York had to do with the writers that lived here: Lillian Hellman, Woody Allen, Nora Ephron, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Edith Wharton, Henry James, ...even the presence of Hans Christian Andersen and the Alice in Wonderland/Romeo and Juliet/Prospero and Miranda sculptures on the literary walk in Central Park gave me the sense that all writers lived above the Bowery. Beyond that, the major long-form reporters made their mark here: sure, The New Yorker was never called The Manhattanite, but you’d never know it based on the coverage of its hey-day. There was, of course, a great deal of writing going on in Brooklyn at that time as well, but you couldn’t really call it a movement.

Then suddenly, in the past 10-15 years, the literary population of Brooklyn exploded. Famous writers brought their families to Brooklyn. Beautiful independent bookstores threw their doors open. Bars and restaurants started hosting open mike nights, sometimes to the point of incorporating libraries into their interior design. I had been warned away from Brooklyn by parents who remembered it back in the late-70s, who remembered crack vials and used condoms on the stone stoops of Park Slope. But looking into the charming windows off of Flatbush Avenue and seeing overflowing floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, it was hard to imagine what could be so scary about a borough that read so much.

In his ode to the old neighborhood, The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem waxed nostalgic about the changes around him, saying “There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around.” But that’s what New Yorkers have always been good at: bemoaning the thing that’s new for the thing that they remember as “good”. And it’s hard not to think that Lethem is privately pleased by the wave of gentrification that brought a wave of new people into his old neighborhood. (As a byproduct of that gentrification, he gets to be crowned the poet laureate of Brooklyn.)

Did I make a mistake when I relocated to Morningside Heights? Sure, I’ve got Book Culture nearby, but did moving away from Greenlight, Freebird, and BookCourt take away some of my cultural credibility? My apartment's not far from the literary haunts of James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Jean Toomer, but what're the chances that I'll bump into one of them buying groceries with their kids? Sure, Manhattan carries an incredible and unparalleled literary history, but Brooklyn is where new authors are coming from, where independent publishers are trying new methods of dispersing content, where designers and artists congregate at promotional events that feel like flash mobs compared to the cocktail launch parties of yesteryear. This goes back to the eternal conundrum of cultural consumption: do you go with the classics, or with the current? Brooklyn is definitely where it’s happening, and there’s something to be said for being just around the corner from the hot literary event of the weekend. Case in point: a fantastic kick-off party at Greenlight Bookstore tomorrow in Fort Greene, celebrating the boom of indie publishers, many of whom are based in Brooklyn. So many major names will be there, yet I hesitated ever so slightly to RSVP yes because the commute will take over half an hour. Wimpy? Yes, clearly—why bother living in New York if you’re not going to explore all that all the boroughs have to offer? And when a community emerges that proves culturally vibrant, shouldn’t we get over the problem of crossing the bridge?

So here I am, an Upper West Sider at heart, making the trek to Brooklyn to hang with all of you...after picking up five or six new lit-crushes this weekend, come join us for food, drinks, and general merriment to celebrate the FIFTH ISSUE of [tk] reviews!

To that end, please join us to celebrate our small but mighty milestone at Park Slope's High Dive bar on Thursday, September 16th. For those that speak the password--[tk]reviews-- there will be $2 High Life drafts, $3 Yuengling drafts, and a dollar off all other drinks from 7 p.m. 'til 10 p.m. We'll have reserved tables, and the more culinarily adept among us will even be bringing food.

We really hope you'll stop by, if only for a cheap drink and some witty banter. Reply to our Facebook page here, or email us at: reviews.tk@gmail.com. Hope to see you there, no matter what borough you're from...

New York's Literary Failing

We’re down to the last summer Fridays, and this past weekend, my boyfriend and I were eager to take advantage of the free afternoon. We thought about going to the Met’s Big Bambú exhibit, but thanks to its wacky hours—we would have had to have picked up tickets at noon—we missed out.

(For some reason the Met thought it would be a good idea to release tickets twice a day, in person, at the museum. Dear Met: you are not Shakespeare in the Park. If you have an ongoing exhibit, why not let people reserve their free tickets online for a fixed date in the future? Hm?)

Anyway, so there we were, looking for something to do. We were both in a museum-going mood, so I scoured a list of museums in New York, looking for an exhibit we’d missed or simply a museum we’d never been to. And I put together a few options: the American Folk Art Museum in Midtown; Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx (to see Herman Melville’s grave, of course); or the Queens Museum of Art in Corona Park, with a stop in Flushing for Vietnamese food. The last possibility won.

To anyone who hasn’t been, I would recommend a visit to the Queens Museum of Art. First reason, for literature lovers: when it was first constructed, Corona Park replaced the valley of ashes (remember T. J. Eckleburg?) in The Great Gatsby. Another reason, for those of you who grew up in the mid-nineties: you’ll recognize the unisphere near the museum from the final scenes of Men in Black. In addition: the museum is largely a tribute to the World’s Fairs of 1939 and 1964—the building was the New York City pavilion in ’39—and some of the information on the Fairs is amazing. Easily the best thing about the museum, however, is the Panorama.

Behold:



All five boroughs of New York, scaled down to fit inside one large room, with models of every building in the city built before 1992 (including, eerily, the World Trade Center towers). I was able to find my current apartment building, my old one, my boyfriend’s parents’ building, and on, and on. It’s an incredible thing to see. You should go. Now.

But to go back earlier that day: looking at the list of museums in the city, I was struck by how few literary museums there are here. In fact, there’s only one one that comes to mind—the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage in the Bronx—and even then, it pales next to many of the literary museums in the country.

Why is this the case? My boyfriend noted that there are gestures to memorializing the literary all around the city—the plaques, the bars where your favorite poets drank, and the the landscape of the city itself, preserved, as Corona Park’s ashy past was, in its literature. We considered the constant destruction and reinvention that New York passes through, sometimes depriving us of the buildings that might otherwise house these museums. (On this walking tour of Melville’s New York, for example, the best you can do in many cases is to see “how the boarding house in which Herman Melville was born probably looked” or to stare at the place where Melville’s house once stood, at 103 Fourth Avenue.) When apartments and buildings do survive, my boyfriend noted, they’re often occupied by new tenants.

It’s still surprising, though. Compare us to Moscow or St. Petersburg, where it seems that every building in which Pushkin ever took tea has been converted to a museum, and where statues of him dot many street corners. Or even just hold us next to Concord, Massachusetts. While certainly a hotbed of literary production, does it really make sense that Concord should outnumber us four to one in literary museums? (That’s not counting the reconstruction of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond.) Or that Lenox and Pittsfield, in the Berkshires, should boast both Arrowhead (Melville’s house) and the Mount (Edith Wharton’s home), with the Homestead (Emily Dickinson’s house) just a short distance away?

New York has managed to restore some wonderful historical buildings (the Dyckman Farmhouse and the Morris-Jumel Mansion, for example), sustains incredible museums in many different areas, and is one of the most vibrantly literary cities in the world. So why have we failed so spectacularly to unite these three strengths? The Queens Museum of Art’s Panorama preserves the New York of 1992, but what will preserve—beyond their books themselves—the New York of Melville, Walt Whitman, Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Ralph Ellison?

My Literary Home

Last October, as the end of our second year in our apartment approached, we—my boyfriend, my roommate, and I—decided not to renew our lease. The roommate wanted to “live in a place [he] didn’t hate” (I’ll keep the neighborhood anonymous) for the rest of his time in New York, before he left for grad school, and off he went to Brooklyn. My boyfriend and I moved north, to Inwood, home to a plethora of delightful things: the only road in Manhattan with “Road” actually in its name (Indian Road), the only remaining natural forest and the only remaining salt marsh in Manhattan, the Columbia stadium, two great parks (Fort Tryon, bridging Inwood and Washington Heights, the location of the Cloisters, and Inwood Park, unlit and possibly full of the ghosts of unhappy teenagers) and one okay one (Isham Park). It’s where we play trivia and go to the greenmarket and eat delicious burgers, and there was no doubt it was where we wanted to live.

Anyway, speaking of possibly being full of the ghosts of unhappy teenagers—when we looked for our new home (a whirlwind tours of approximately fifteen apartments in two weeks), we had dangled in front of us one odd piece of information about one of the last apartments at which we looked (and the one we finally decided to take). It had its original hardwood floors, bedroom windows that looked out into the park, a fairly big kitchen with a sealed dumbwaiter—and hey, Jim Carroll lived there! (Other features of the apartment that we discovered one at a time, and which still left it an improvement over our old place: poor paint and grout jobs, an upstairs neighbor who moves with all the blitheness of a dumptruck, and roaches.)

The broker told us that Jim Carroll grew up in this apartment. In The Basketball Diaries, he expresses some dislike of the apartment and the neighborhood, but—she said—he returned to the owner of this building in recent years and asked to live there again. The apartment he’d grown up in was taken, but another apartment was available, and that was where he died in September.

She showed us the caution-taped front door of his last home.

After we moved in, I asked her to confirm that he lived there while growing up, but she never responded to my email. But I found it strange, strange, that we were getting email addressed to Carroll. Tax forms, even, which I returned to the IRS. Had he in fact died in our apartment? Some searching online turned up the closest approximation to the truth: I believe he lived in the building next door as a youth, lived in our apartment for some chunk of the 80s and 90s, and died in the building next door.

In the last five years or so, I’ve visited a number of literary residences: Arrowhead (Herman Melville, the Berkshires, twice, once by candleight); the Mount (Edith Wharton, also in the Berkshires); the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage (the Bronx); the Homestead (Emily Dickinson, Amherst); Rowan Oak (William Faulkner, Oxford); the Vladimir Nabokov House (Saint Petersburg); the Alexander Pushkin Museum and Memorial Apartment (a rather morbid one, Saint Petersburg); the Jane Austen House Museum (as well as Chawton House, where her brother lived, Chawton); the Keats-Shelley House (Rome). Museums too, including the Jane Austen Centre in Bath and the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow. And there are places that I’ve just seen from the outside—the house where Austen died, in Winchester; the house where Nabokov lived when he was teaching at Stanford; the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum (this when I was 14, actually, and we didn’t have enough money for admission, Key West); the reconstruction of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s house near Tanglewood; the Jack London Yukon Cabin (Oakland). This fall I’ll hopefully make my first trip to Boston, where I’ll have a full schedule of sights to see in Concord, and I'll hopefully blog about some of these museums in the future.

Now I live in one of these literary homes myself. And when I saw today that one of Carroll’s novels is being published posthumously, it seemed as though my apartment was home to unseen commerce, as though a ghostly manuscript had made its way from one of our desks to the publisher, and I was just hearing about it now. It was thrilling and a little unsettling—the price one pays, I suppose, for the story behind your shelter.