Carol Bergman

I have just re-read the “Online Scrabble” blog entry I wrote back in May. To reiterate here, I stopped playing with the daughter of a friend who lives in Italy because she was scoring 400 points plus each game and, though she is smart, no one is that smart. So I asked her if she was using tools of some sort to find words and she replied that she was. It was no fun to be beaten in this way, especially as she hadn’t disclaimed her reliance on these tools, which I considered dishonest.

But now I have a different problem. I am still playing with my old high school friend and, for the most part, enjoying our games. But every once in a while, she puts down a word that I can’t find in any dictionary, or an abbreviation, or a slang word, and she beats me consistently with these small non-words. As a writer, I am always searching for an interesting word, one that means something, the longer the better.

“What is ZA?” I asked her on the phone one day.
“As in piz-za.”
“So slang is now permitted? Abbreviations?”
“Yes.”
“I guess I am a Scrabble purist. It doesn’t bother you to put down a slice of a word?”
“No. I put down a word and if the electronic dictionary accepts it, fine. If not, not, I’ll find something else. I never spend more than a minute or two as I am playing with several people.”

This surprised me. My friend is an avid, thoughtful reader. In fact, she is one of my readers. What explains her game strategy?

“Do you think she is playing only for points?” I asked my husband, a very competitive Scrabble player.
“She’s probably playing just to relax,” he said.
“Well so do I. But I am not going to change my game.”
“You’ll keep losing,” he said.
“So be it. I’m a writer. Words matter.”
“Consider a small word or two once in a while,” he said. “It will give you an edge.”
“I don’t want an edge,” I said.

Then one night, late at night, tired and frustrated, my resistance faltered. I used ZA, and won. It didn’t make me happy. The word “downy” made me happy.  Read More 

We went to a gala fundraiser for the United Palace of Cultural Arts on 175th Street and Broadway. This is one of the last movie “palaces,” built before the Great Depression ended the indulgence of such vast “wonder theaters”—pure Hollywood. The palace, serving upper Manhattan, was owned by the Loew’s Corporation. Faux Abyssinian in design, filtered through the kitsch sensibility of a well-paid architect, it seats more than 3,000. It’s hard to imagine what the cost of heating or cooling the place might be today. Yet it still stands, a neighborhood landmark. Derelict for a long time, the building was saved from demolition in 1969 by the Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II. Better known as Reverend Ike, Eikerenkoetter bought the building for more than a half-million dollars and used it as the headquarters for his United Church Science of Living Institute. It now also houses the Cultural Arts Center which is outreaching to the community and presenting concerts, programs for kids, and films. Sunday night was “Casablanca” night screened on a spiffed- up gigantic screen. What a treat! What a script! The audience was asked to dress up for the occasion, dance to 1940’s music, and pose next to a cardboard cut-out of Bogey. It was a festive evening, attended by over 1000, not quite a theater-full, but full enough. After opening remarks and a rendition of "As Time Goes By," by Reverend Ike's son, the screen lit up with "Casablana." For the next 90 minutes, cinematic rapture.

Years ago, I took Robert McKee’s one-day intensive screenwriting course . The last two hours of the seminar were devoted to “Casablanca,” analyzed frame by frame. Why does this film work? How is the story made? And though I have seen the film several times on my large flat-screen TV, I had never seen it on the big screen, as it was intended. Shot in black and white, without special effects, the story, the script, and the acting are in high relief.

Unlike narrative prose, a screen writer is forced to relinquish his or her work to a director and actors. The film takes on a life apart from the writer’s control, and is often re-written by a team of new writers. I am sure this is not easy for the writer. In the case of “Casablanca,” two writers wrote the original stage play, and two more worked on the film script. Yet, the film became a classic. And though no one expected such success, it’s obvious that the acting and the script had something to do with it. The script is available online for study:

http://www.weeklyscript.com/Casablanca.txt.

It’s a “Wonder Script."

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I met a 100-worder at a birthday party for an old friend who is now, literally, old or older—an octogenarian, but still vibrant, funny, alive, a person who encourages all her artist, writer and musician friends, of all ages. She is not an artist, but there is something about her uninhibited persona and challenging political riffs that attracts and inspires artists. All art is acknowledged and celebrated at her parties: a new book, a new canvas, a handmade scarf, an unusual appetizer, a photograph. Whether the work succeeds or fails is not important. It may be good, or brilliant, or good enough, marketable or unmarketable, a work-in-progress, a work revised, a work discarded on the pathway to another work.

The party itself is a creative event as it unfolds. And it becomes a story, as this one here. It was during a lull—after the food and wine had settled—that the conversations slowed and hummed. The 100-worder was listening to me talk to a visual artist who lives in Westbeth, a utopian community of artists on the lower West Side of Manhattan. I was commenting on her 1940’s dress/costume, when I remembered that I’d worn something similar to a reading from my book of novellas, “Sitting for Klimt,” based on the lives of five artists. She had invited me to Westbeth to read, though I knew that painters, in particular, might object to my fictionalized rendering of Klimt. I was not mistaken: the Q & A was heated. I had been inspired by a great artist and his work, it was as simple as that, and my audience that day was offended by my “distortions.” I reminded them that I am not an art historian, I am writer. But we couldn’t understand one another at all. Impasse.

“Ah, you are a writer," the 100-worder said as I was finishing my reminiscence about the frustrations of reading at Westbeth.

“Yes, I am. Are you?”

“I write a hundred words every Monday,” he said.

“That qualifies you for attendance at this party,” I said facetiously.

I was bristling at the thought of a dilettante attending my friend’s party. Was he a pretender to the throne of artistry? No he was not; he was deadly earnest. He pulled out his phone and called up his email to show me a thread of 100-word mini-stories. “Most of us are businessmen. We enjoy the freedom of writing about anything we want. We have to stay in the word count," he said.

Well, this was very intriguing. How did this get started? I asked.

“By invitation only,” he said. “We’ve never even met. We’re planning a party, though. It will be interesting.”

“Indeed,” I said. “But I don’t think it will make any difference. It’s the work that’s important.”

“Are 100-word stories considered a ‘work’?” he asked as I disengaged from my writer-pedestal. I was suddenly moved to welcome my new 100-worder friend into the pantheon of writers.

“Of course,” I said. “Remember Hemingway’s five-word memoir: FOR SALE, BABY SHOES, NEVER WORN.”

“Oh, I’ll have to try that,” he said. And he took out his little notebook and began to write.  Read More 

Is there any artist, writer or performer who does not want to create a masterwork? Who does not hope that sometime in our lifetime, such a masterwork will emerge, Medusa-like, from the painstaking disciplined years of artistic toil? Will any of our efforts remain in print, become part of a canon, be remembered even slightly as a good read, a fine landscape, a well-crafted performance? Chances are slim for most of us. Yet, in the struggle, the artist finds joy and purpose most of the time.

Such were my thoughts at the reconstruction of the 1913 Armory Show at the NY Historical Society. There were a few highlights—Matisse, Redon, Duchamp, John Sloan and Robert Henri, a Whistler—artists whose reputations have survived the decades. But for the rest: flawed and unimpressive work.

This realization-- that the Armory Show today would be no big deal-- made me self-conscious about my own work. How good is it? How will it be judged fifty, one-hundred years from now, assuming that it would be judged or enjoyed at all?

I don’t often suffer from such self-doubts; no matter what is going on in my personal and professional life, I keep writing. Day after day, I journal, devise new projects, revise old ones, teach and encourage.

I have a big birthday approaching, perhaps that is why I am having a meltdown today. How much time do I have left to improve? To get it right? How much time do any of us have?

“Stories,” Richard Ford has said, “should point toward what’s important in life.” For a serious artist, no matter how famous or infamous, “time spent on earth is not wasted.”  Read More 

Luis works in a laundry in my neighborhood, a laundry where the machines work well and there are comfortable chairs to sit on. Short, with long hair, caramel skin and a ready smile, Luis saw me reading my students’ papers one day and, in his elementary English, tried to start a conversation. Was I a teacher?

“Yes,” I said, “I teach writing at a university.”
“I would like a book,” he said.
“What kind of book?”
“To help my English,” he said.

Luis is forty-four and once had been a good student with ambitions to become a teacher himself, but there was no money in his large Mexican family to continue his schooling. He married, had two children, and migrated to America to earn money for his family. I didn’t dare ask when he last saw them. If he is illegal, he can’t leave the US and get back in. So many complications.

“This is my life,” he said, sadly.

Then I returned to his request for a book. Had he ever taken ESL classes? Yes. Would he consider trying to improve his English as a first step to more education? Yes. And I told him about other immigrants and refugees I knew who had to restart their lives late in their lives. It’s difficult, but not impossible. “Go back to the ESL class,” I said. “Study hard. Make effort.”

Luis smiled. Then Elena, his co-worker, came over and smiled. And we cooked up a plan. I would talk to them and correct their English every time I came to do my laundry and, in the interim, Luis would be a teacher of English, correcting Elena, using his dictionary, and talking to customers whenever possible—in English. No Spanish language soap operas on the TV as they folded laundry. Only English language soap operas. Okay? They agreed.

I found this encounter very touching. The impulse to learn, to improve, to study, is universal, even among migrant workers. To deliver some hope—that made my day.  Read More 

A student—I shall call her L here—arrived about forty-five minutes late to my first Wednesday NYU class. She hadn’t received my emails with attached documents and went to the wrong building, a good mile away from where we were meeting. I had left text and voice messages for everyone on my roster telling them to check their emails, but there were blank spaces next to L’s name, and all my efforts to track her down before class had failed. Now here she was, our mystery guest I was already calling her, exhausted, frustrated, and embarrassed. When we talked during the break she told me that she had only recently bought a computer and a cell phone. “I know I am far behind,” she said. “But I want to write so badly.” She had bought an Apple laptop and an iPhone and was taking every class offered at the Apple store, but she was still learning how to negotiate email and the internet. Oh dear, I thought, I don’t hand out anything, I’ve gone completely virtual. And then the thought: If a student is not electronically connected, are we discriminating?

I believe the answer is yes. After all, if a student enrolls, it is our job to make sure that the class works for them even if that means printing out materials to hand them in class. Which is what I offered to do. I called my student at home over the weekend to reassure her again but, unfortunately, and to my great dismay, she had already withdrawn. Then another student wrote to ask if I could start a class Facebook page so that work could be posted and shared with ease. Most assuredly, the answer to that question is no, for all the discriminatory reasons stated above.

As a mentor, I have to protect and serve every member of my workshop, to make them and their writing efforts welcome and valued, whether they have gone virtual, or not. In the past, I have had students submit manuscripts etched in longhand on lined paper and then photocopied for everyone to read. It didn’t matter. Only the writing matters. Read More 

I had read about Canadian artist Judith Cardiff’s “Forty Part Motet,” a polyphonic sound installation in an apse at The Cloisters, and finally had a chance to get there on Saturday. I hadn’t been to The Cloisters for a long time and had forgotten its grandeur and beauty. There is much to contemplate and admire in the collection of illuminated manuscripts, for example, and an herb garden with espaliered pear trees and poison plants. But the highlight of my visit was the Motet, a captivating non-verbal experience. It closes on December 8th and if you are anywhere in the vicinity, don’t miss it. It brought several participants to tears, including me. And when the Tudor “song” ended, a mere eleven minutes after it began, I was stopped by a “Studio 360” reporter. “How would you describe your response to this work?” he asked. Good question.

At first, I could hardly speak, and then I realized I didn’t want to speak; I had climbed into the music or it had climbed into me. This is a metaphor Judith Cardiff uses to describe the work she records and then installs/performs. “It poses the question of how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and express how a viewer may choose a path through the simultaneously physical and virtual environment,” she writes in her artist’s statement. But all those words are inadequate to describe the kinesthetic bodily sensation of the forty choir voices she has individually recorded in Salisbury Cathedral, and then recombined into the Motet, one voice for each loudspeaker.

She instructs the viewer/listener to move around the room, which I did, despite the crowd. (Most people seemed to be too mesmerized to move.) And every time I moved, there was a new and different point of view, until I moved again. The sound reverberated inside me, amplified by the accumulation of voices. This is both a technological and a conceptual achievement. “Does it matter that it’s not the real choir, that it’s electronic?” the Studio 360 reporter asked.

“No, not at all. And this is Tudor music, incredible how we can hear it and feel it in 2013,” I said, already attempting to intellectualize the experience. Having been a radio reporter, I knew that he was pleased I’d agreed to the interview, and that I was articulate. He kept asking questions but I wanted to get away.

Walking back in a daze through the Heather Garden, another treasure, I wondered what analogies there are in writing to the sensation of climbing into the music, or the music climbing into me. When we read or write and are carried away—blissed out—entirely absorbed by the work, perhaps that would be an analogy. Or when we are reading a good book and don’t know what page we are on, or care, and when that book evokes sensations and feelings and transforms us, perhaps that would be another. I think, as writers, that is what we strive for always, though getting there is the challenge.  Read More 

I watched David Mamet’s “Phil Spector” on HBO the other night. I knew next to nothing about Phil Spector, the record producer—the Ronettes, the Beatles—now serving a 19 year sentence for the second degree murder of Lana Clarkson. In the hype surrounding Mamet’s brilliant, irresponsible screenplay, and the equally brilliant performances of Helen Mirren, as Spector’s attorney, and Al Pacino, as Spector, few remember Lana Clarkson or her grisly murder. She was found shot in the mouth in Spector’s hallway with one of Spector’s numerous guns. Yet Mamet chose to channel the prosecution’s argument that there was a reasonable doubt and that her death was an “accidental suicide.”

“I don’t give a shit about the facts,” Mamet said to Mick Brown, a UK journalist who writes for the Telegraph and is the author of a well-researched biography of Spector, “Tearing Down the Wall of Sound; The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector.” There were numerous insulting Mamet expletives in his answers to Brown’s questions. I was admiring of this well regarded, sober journalist; he didn’t lose his cool. “The colorful invented drama became the historical version,” Brown wrote in The Telegraph on June 29, 2013 just before Mamet’s film was released in the UK on Sky Atlantic.

Where is David Mamet’s ethical compass? Like most of the facts, it is swirling in a vortex of ambition, egomania, and celebrity entitlement, if not altogether absent. In a conversation I had last week with a record producer who knew Spector during his glory days, I learned about Spector’s alcoholism and cocaine addiction, barely mentioned in the screenplay. “He must have been on blow when he killed Lana Clarkson,” this young man said. “That generation wrecked themselves on drugs. Spector had started drinking again big time two days before Clarkson’s murder and everyone in LA knew it.”

Now 73, Spector will end his life in jail, an irrefutable fact. As for Mamet, one can only hope that his fame will not destroy him, or his talent, as it has so many others.
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I was walking down my favorite road in upstate New York enjoying the migrating birds on the electrical wires and the woodpecker pecking in the distance when I came to the turn in the road that led to my favorite farmhouse. Everything from then on looked different and I was disoriented. There was a new electric fence and a man-made sculpted topography on the other side of it that signaled a new owner, or venture of some sort—a horse ranch, I later learned. The mountain had been carved at one time into a quarry and the steep road, which I have climbed often in all seasons, led into the woods where there was a stream and a still-standing hut with a pot-bellied stove that had been home to indentured laborers. This farmland, acres of it, had been parceled off in the early 20th century and, with the advent of the motor-car, was sliced in two by a tarmac road. Descendants of the original farmers still live on one of the parcels and I occasionally can spot a tractor in the distance and bales of hay but, mostly, the farm is gone, the main farmhouse has been sold to weekenders from Brooklyn, and now the abandoned quarry has become a horse ranch. Is this renewal, or obliteration of the past, or both?

I thought of the essay I have been laboring over for several weeks and why it is not working. It’s gone out to several readers and to my agent who thinks it might be expanded into a book. But I’m feeling discouraged and unable to move forward. I think I need new doors. In computer-speak, I need a different portal into the story. Maybe I’ll write a play, I thought, as I continued my walk past the ranch to the farmhouse, past my favorite barn. Lo and behold, my very thought, it had new doors. That old barn is like a Mondrian painting, perfectly balanced, sitting on the edge of the road, rich in color, and it smells wonderful because it is a hay barn, not an animal barn. Like my essay, it had been a bit rickety and listing to one side, though still beautiful even then. Now it was firmly grounded and it had the most magnificent new doors, an unexpected aesthetic pleasure which I have written about on my Home page here. And I am so pleased that the doors remain unpainted, for the moment, at least, as I stand in front of it and contemplate its beauty: old wooden planks and new planks, but still solid, still standing.  Read More 

In my protected, American naivety, I am always shocked to hear about a writer from another country thrown into jail for writing a column, or blogging, or simply speaking out about a government action or inaction, a dictatorial regime, anything. And this is one reason, among many, that I belong to American PEN which advocates for incarcerated and persecuted writers around the world, often with great success, often not. I write letters, sign petitions, try to write directly to a jailed writer in prison from time to time. I will probably do that with Eskinder Nega, if it is possible, because there is something about this picture of him in his baseball cap that is endearing. A young man, writing about the Arab spring, who dared to suggest that it might also happen in Ethiopia. His sentence: 18 years.

Here is a quote from the recent PEN newsletter:

He [Eskinder Nega] wrote to PEN and was honored with the 2012 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. In it, he called for action from the United States—the country he lived in for years and loved—to pressure the government of Ethiopia to lift restrictions on free expression and remedy other human rights abuses. We shared Eskinder’s piece with The New York Times, and on July 25 his "Letter from Ethiopia's Gulag" ran as a prominent op-ed:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/opinion/letter-from-ethiopias-gulag.html



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