Carol Bergman

I recently read an article by Julian Bell in the New York Review of Books about Damien Hirst, the enfant terrible of the British art establishment compared, at times, to the American artist, Jeff Koons. Both men share the gift of self-promotion—both have become very rich—though artistically Hirst is more interesting to me because of his particular brooding audacity, what critics in the UK call “sheer cheek.” Like all successful artists, he is repeating himself, but his innovations remain startling: the carcass of a cow’s head dripping blood in a vitrine, a decomposing shark. Are these installations only meant to shock? Or stop the viewer in her tracks? What am I meant to think about? What am I meant to see? What is of interest here?

One could and should ask the same question of contemporary fiction, if indeed we dare. Or narrative nonfiction for that matter. How many writers explore new forms beyond the expected or iconic? Not many. Yet there are two Asian-American writers I’d like to mention here whose innovations in form may not be as disquieting as Hirst’s, but are just as compelling. Neither are self-promoting; they have arrived on their talent.

First Katherine Boo who received the Pulitzer for “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” a piece of enterprising immersion journalism told with respectful rectitude. And second, Julia Otsuka. In her first book, “When The Emperor Was Divine,” Ms. Otsuka finds a way into the story of the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans through the eyes of a child. The book is so poignant that is difficult to read in one sitting. And in her most recent book, “The Buddha in the Attic,” the point of view is even more unusual as there is no central character; the protagonist is the entire community and its troubled history on the American continent. Based on extensive research, it is almost a book of lists and is closer to documentary nonfiction than fiction.

Like Damien Hirst, Julia Otsuka and Katherine Boo are not risk averse. But whether an American publisher would have published their unusual books if they were raw newcomers and had not already been successful, we will never know.  Read More 

I went to get fingerprinted for a teaching gig in upstate New York this coming fall. Because Ulster County Community College is part of the state system, Homeland Security takes an interest in its employees. A great interest. I reluctantly filled out several forms and made an appointment for finger printing. I want to teach, after all, and if Homeland Security finds me interesting, so be it. I had long ago—after 9/11—decided not to worry about surveillance or loss of privacy. I take it as a fait accompli and remind myself that, fundamentally, we live in a free society and it is my mandate to remain free in mind and spirit. Let’s say, for example, that this blog is being scanned. That won’t stop me from writing what I want to write. That said, unlike artists and writers in China, I am not in danger of being incarcerated or persecuted.

More than a decade ago, I had been called for Grand Jury and was ink- rolled fingerprinted. Years later, the prints arrived in the mail. They were mine again, so to speak. I still have the manila card with those prints in a file somewhere in my memorabilia trunk. I didn’t want to throw them away; they seemed precious.

A writer doesn’t necessarily write with her hands; she can dictate or, if disabled, even hold a pen or pencil with her mouth or feet. Remember the movie “My Left Foot?” with Daniel Day Lewis based on the book by Christy Brown. Born with cerebral palsy, Brown learned to paint and write with his left foot. Or consider “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” a beautiful book by Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffered a stroke in his 40’s. That book was written by “pointing” to letters on a board by blinking. Both stories are more than inspirational to a writer sound in mind and body. Whatever should I be complaining about? Yet, the electronic fingerprinting process at a firm in mid-town Manhattan became an ordeal for me. It somehow threatened my identity as a writer who uses her hands to write. Straight from the machine into the computer, or something like that, never to be returned and stored in my memorabilia trunk.

The tech, Michelle Prado, trained in forensics, worked on my fingers for nearly an hour trying to get a “pass” scan. Four were rejected, one finger more than necessary for a “pass” grade to Homeland Security.

Dear reader, my fingerprints have faded. According to Michelle, this is very common among writers who type away at keyboards every day, people who use chemicals, and/or very old people. Would it make a difference to use the old ink method? Probably not, Michelle said.

She brought in another tech to help out, someone with a light touch, she explained. Had Michelle tried a special oil? No, not yet. So we tried the oil. No luck. Both women were very kind; they didn’t want me to have to come back. Why would it make any difference? I asked. Surely my fingerprints are gone, faded, never to surface again, stolen by use and time. What happens if too many fingers are “rejected” the second time?

“They’ll order a criminal background check,” Michelle said.

I wrote to the Director of the department I’ll be working for to explain what had happened and to suggest that the cash-strapped college save their money on a second round of fingerprinting and run a background check right away. She thanked me for the heads-up and suggested that my experience might make for an interesting plot of a detective novel.  Read More 

I went onto my website yesterday and my Facebook Carol Bergman: Writer page to announce that “Sitting for Klimt,” my first book of novellas, originally published in 2006, is now available as an ebook. I then realized that my website was peppered with the word ebook and that I had spelled it differently each time. I didn’t even realize that I had no idea how to spell ebook, that there are no stylistic guidelines, and that the word—it is now a word, after all—has so recently entered our lexicon that there is no definitive spelling. Not even my Word spell check can decide; it gives me all the choices.

Dear reader, you can see here which spelling I have settled on—for the moment. I suppose it reminds me of email. The origin of this truncated word blend—electronic mail—has already been lost and the word email itself has become the symbolic embodiment of this now pervasive form of communication. And though the advent of electronic books is more recent, we are already calling them by their affectionate nickname. No one says or writes electronic books any more.

I know that this discussion is not very important and that whatever I say or do won’t make any difference. Eventually simple usage will determine the final form of the spelling, or we will accept a variety of spellings. The sudden appearance of new words is minor compared to the significant shifts in the publishing landscape itself. By next year, or next month, what I have written here will be old news.  Read More 

I have not written much since my mother's death on April 21. I covered the World Voices Festival because I had committed to do so, but it was difficult. I kept my journal going. Now I am working on a long essay and writing for several hours every day. A writer makes something of every experience, including death. The essay is about my mother's will and wills in general, what they say to us, how they are written, often in legalese without any feeling. I’ve looked at holographic wills—written by hand—and studied Ben Franklin’s will and others. In other words, I’m into a project again and this feels good, it feels right.

I took a break last weekend, Mother’s Day weekend, the first one without my own mother, and I went upstate to spend time with my family there. My son-in-law is building a permaculture forest in a pasture surrounded by mountains. My daughter and I drove up there prepared to be put to work. We helped plant strawberries for several hours. I took rests to stretch my back, the dogs lying beside me or romping in one of the three newly dug irrigation pools. The sun was already strong though it was windy and deceptively cool. Mother’s Day brunch the next day was communal, friends and their children, French toast and fruit salad, and warm enough to sit on the porch or meander outside. We left after the brunch to get back to the city and our computers. But I could have stayed on that mountaintop forever.  Read More 

I arrived at the dialogue session without any expectations as—dare I admit it—I have not read any of Jennifer Egan’s books. I think she would have approved of my open spirit as I listened to her answer questions about craft and non-linear musical structure. Unlike Dickens, Irving, and others, she has no idea where she is going when she begins and doesn’t much care about classical form. One story in her new book, “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” is written in power point.

Is she supremely self-confident? A renegade? Having won prizes—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award—Egan’s apparent self-confidence might be understandable if it were not an illusion even to herself. “I have a catastrophic imagination,” she said. That woke me up and also sounded familiar. So, too, her decision to dedicate “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” to her therapist.

Goon Squad came together as a consequence of avoiding another book that was not going well. Suddenly, she said, disconnected stories felt connected, as though a large land mass was sitting under them and keeping them together. So she began to fool around with other stories, evolving characters, and obsessions that might work in a sequence. Often they didn’t and she put them away. “When do you stop working on a story?” she was asked. “When it no longer interests me,” Egan replied.

She relies on her writer’s group—it has been meeting for twenty years—to let her know if a story is alive or not. But even if they say it is, she may not agree, especially if she feels exhausted by revision. That means something has gone wrong.

I found Egan honest and inspiring and came home eager to begin writing some fiction again myself, but I also wondered if the PEN World Voices Festival will ever include writers in a discussion who have not won important prizes—which is most of us—thus liberating the event from the power of celebrity and the market driven universe in which we all work. Read More 

It makes sense that an established prize-winning author might view social media, new platforms, and the complicated challenges of contemporary publishing with indifference if not disdain. Jonathan Franzen, for example, claims that social media leaves nothing to the imagination. So it was a pleasant surprise to hear Margaret Atwood talk about new technologies with wit, irreverence, curiosity and respect. The new technologies are, after all, human artifacts. We have created them and whether we put them to good use (the light side) or abuse them (the dark side) is entirely up to us

In conversation with Amy Grace Loyd, Executive Editor of Byliner, the two women seemed to be friends in casual conversation at a café. Loyd, in fact, is one of Atwood's editors—there were quips about commas—and Byliner is a relatively new online publication, another testament to Atwood's innovative approach to her own career. She has a strong business sense and clearly believes that writers should be able to earn a living.

Atwood admitted that she has 319,000 followers on Twitter, that she tweets about fifteen minutes a day, but is often tempted to return, especially if she is ensconced in a hotel room.

Atwood has had a long, productive career. Her first short story was published in a Canadian literary magazine; she then moved into radio. The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) had an anthology radio program. The books came later. And, yes, she still owns books, lots of them, and is loathe to give them away. They are piled all over her house. She has to remember where they are so as not to trip on them.

The most telling moment of the evening was during the Q& A at the end. A woman came up to the mike with print-outs of a news article about amazon removing small literary presses from their data base. She was incensed and her question was more like a screed. Atwood interrupted her with politeness and aplomb: "Do you know that in China the character for crisis is the same as the character for opportunity? Why don't these small publishers get together as a collective, design a website, and sell their books?"

Despite this sage advice, the woman continued and Atwood interrupted her again. "What are these publishers and their authors waiting for?"  Read More 

My mother died just over a week ago. I lit a memorial candle when I came home from the funeral and it was still burning yesterday morning, beyond its time. My mother was a complicated, forceful, intelligent, challenging woman. Psychically damaged by her experiences during World War II and the murder of her family—our family—she was not particularly loving or sweet. Memorable, yes. Remarkable, certainly, but not sweet. Yet many condolence notes have said she was “sweet.” I do realize that these notes are meant to console and am grateful for them. And I do realize that not everyone is a writer who searches for the right words to say. Stock phrases surface that have been used by others: “I am sorry for your loss,” for example.

Equally, I have always been disturbed by the way in which survivors soften loss with exaggerations, untruths and omissions. Are we afraid that if we speak the truth to ourselves and one another at a funeral or memorial we will be cursed?

As she lay dying in the hospital—and even that phrase sounds familiar, the title of a book by William Faulkner—we talked to my mother, stroked her, and played her Beethoven and Mozart. I read her Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils. We told her how much we loved her for hours and hours, suppressing our ambivalent feelings. We wanted her to have a peaceful end and we all wanted to feel peaceful at her end.

My mother was gone for me as soon as she drew her last breath and, as a scientist, she would have maintained that all that was left of her on earth was her cadaver. Yet, unbeknownst to us, she had directed the funeral home to bury her in a shroud, an ancient practice still prevalent among Muslims and Orthodox Jews. The image of a shrouded corpse slipping into the desert sand is a powerful one charged with history in the land of my family’s origins. I carried it with me into the synagogue for the service and our honest words of praise known as eulogies.  Read More 

I arrived at Westbeth around mid-day to find Sophia Michahelles, the Co-Artistic Director of The Processional Arts Workshop, explaining the concepts behind the group’s first collaboration with PEN to a couple of volunteers. “We are losing our physical connection with books. Literature and our literary culture floats or we are floating in it,” she said.

Michaehelles and her colleagues have designed a Parade of Illumination that will open the Festival on the Highline on Monday night, April 30th, at 8:30. All the puppets will be made out of wood and paper. Puppet characters include the New York Public Library lions, Bookman with fingers like typewriter keys, Sweepers, a Cursive Ballerina who writes with her feet, and Biblio Bats. “to honor PEN’s work in support of writers working in the darkness of persecution or incarceration,” Michaehelles said.

Planning began with a request to participating authors to send a 140 character “tweet.” These texts inspired the characters and the vision of the Parade that will proceed slowly, walking North to South along the Highline, with volunteers holding the puppets.

Because the Highline is an intimate, communal space, the evening is certain to be magical and, somehow, sacred. Sweepers will sweep away pages of browned text, commemorating what we have lost, and what still is to be gained in our literary culture. Lanterns will illuminate the procession.

Observing the volunteers at work, I was most touched by their concentration as they pasted and molded browned paper torn from old books and dictionaries onto the wooden forms. It was as labor intensive and reflective as writing itself.

For more information:
http://www.superiorconcept.org/PEN/index.html  Read More 

I went to the Bank Street Bookstore on 112th Street and Broadway late yesterday to collect a box of donated books to give away on Monday, April 23rd, designated “World Book Night,” an event that began in the UK and Ireland: http://www.us.worldbooknight.org/about-world-book-night/what-is-world-book-night .

I was greeted by Beth Puffer, the manager and buyer at the Bank Street Bookstore since 1986 and an active member of the American Booksellers Association. Beth is a small, slender, genteel woman with a warm face and a salt and pepper page boy cut. We fell into conversation immediately about the event and all the publishers, book sellers and “givers” who had volunteered. She asked my name, and pointed to a box containing my giveaway choice: twenty copies of “Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers printed by Vintage in a special World Book Night commemorative edition. I can’t wait to give them out to people who don’t ordinarily read or read very much. As per instructions, I’ll have to wait until April 23rd, which is also UNESCO’s World Book Day, the anniversary of Cervantes’ birth, and Shakespeare’s birth and death.

Other book givers came and went as I stood talking to Beth: a Barnard comparative literature student who has kept a book blog since she was thirteen, and three editors from Random House. One was disappointed that she had not been chosen as a giver. “There were so many volunteers,” Beth explained, a good thing we all agreed.

We then got into the murky waters of the electronic book landscape, the fate of the paper book, and the fate of independent book sellers. Everyone seemed aggrieved at the recent court ruling in favor of Amazon except for me, an author, who had recently put up her first e-book on Kindle.

I put my carton of books into the shopping cart, said goodbye to Beth, and headed home. I stopped in Straus park and sat on a bench for a while to relax and think. A large woman on the other side of the flower bed had settled in. She had a big bag and a paper cup of steaming tea or coffee which were laid out next to her; the bench was her coffee table. In fact, she took up most of the bench, more so as she pulled out a portable wooden foot rest and a thick paperback book. Off came her shoes as she reclined at a forty-five degree angle on the bench, moved her bag and coffee further to the right, and propped her bare feet onto the foot rest. She was still there when I left, deeply immersed in her very large book. Though it was already past 7 p.m., it was still light enough to read.  Read More 

I have been drafting and revising my mother’s eulogy since she almost died a few years ago. These eulogies were all written in my head as I swam laps in the pool; I never wrote them down. I soon realized that creating a narrative was a writer’s way—my way—of preparing for primal loss.

This week, as I was enjoying some R&R upstate and hoping to do some reading and writing, my mother had a fall and broke two ribs and the femur just above her knee. She is now in the hospital recovering from a small procedure to make her more comfortable and will probably not be able to walk again. In such an old person, immobility is ultimately fatal, and we don’t expect her to live very long though, knowing my mother, she may surprise us.

That said, I feel my mother’s end nearing as I have not before and woke very sad this morning. Being able to communicate this sadness in my journal was helpful. I then put a mini narrative—known as a “status”—up on Facebook and was immediately consoled by comments, prayers and good wishes.

The day moved on. I went for a swim and wrote another eulogy in my head. I was already missing my mother’s phone calls—sometimes three or four a day. Over these past few months we have talked of many things: the opera, the violence in Syria, the upcoming election, her grandchildren. Occasionally, a story would surface that I had never heard before about her childhood and young adulthood in Vienna before the Nazi genocide. Thankfully, these have been mostly happy stories.

During my recent visits I have read my mother poetry, or the newspaper, or chapters from the book her book club is reading. She hasn’t been able to attend for a while, but has kept up in her own way.

My mother had hoped to receive a letter from the President congratulating her on the centennial of her birth on October 21 and even to vote in November by absentee ballot. I know that would mean a lot to her as would a visit from the President, she told me emphatically a week or so ago, if he happens to be in the neighborhood while he is campaigning.
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