Carol Bergman

I went to the New York Historical Society on Friday to check out the recent renovation and the current installations. The centerpiece of the new lobby is a large vitrine holding two small notebooks once owned by John Lansing, a lawyer from Albany, who was a delegate to the 1787 Philadelphia Convention. Written in a delicate, nearly illegible hand, these rare notebooks will soon be digitized by the Society and added to its significant collection. The library on the second floor has always been home to visiting scholars and writers. I have spent many hours there researching articles and books. Once endangered with closure, this American treasure trove has survived a reorganization. The Lansing notebook acquisition is typical of the Society's interest and foresight, a Historical Society extending from the past into the future of our still young nation.

To my surprise, Lansing's Constitutional Convention notebooks were written secretly against the express orders of George Washington. Washington had asked for a vow by the delegates not to take any notes, an off-the-record debate. Though probably intended to encourage everyone to speak freely, it can also be read as an attempt to silence and/or censor the historical record. Fortunately, our first President did not succeed and the evolution of our freedoms continued.

Lansing and others—such as Rufus King and James Madison—were courageous enough to defy these orders. Without them we would never have eyewitness documentation of this seminal event in our early history. According to the Society press release, Lansing's notes are the most detailed and unedited. He recorded speeches and debates, assigning names to the speakers and their locations in the chamber. He was distressed that the delegates were seeking to establish an entirely new government rather than simply amending the Articles of Confederation, as charged. Lansing and his fellow New Yorker Richard Yates left the Convention early, but not before he had participated actively and created this illuminating record. Quill pen in hand, he managed to fill these two notebooks, probably on his lap, and to secret them away when he left. No security guards at the door, no sensors, only censors.

The following year, Lansing went to the New York State ratification convention where he insisted that the new Constitution be enlarged by a Bill of Rights.

If you go the Historical Society, be sure to go up to the Luce Collection on the Fourth Floor where glass fronted storage vitrines of Tiffany lamps, furniture, silver, porcelain, a rare stage-coach, weaponry, and much more, await a writer’s curiosity and imagination. The curators’ narratives here are limited to computer descriptions of individual items, but we remain free to create our own narratives in our free society.  Read More 

Because one year after he won the Pulitzer, Liu Xiaboa is still in jail and his writing banned. "We will stick to our writing," he says in a video on the PEN American Center site:
http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/3029/prmID/172

Slow death by humiliation and imprisonment. This must stop.

I have told my 99 year old mother about Liu Xiaboa and other persecuted Chinese writers and she said, immediately, "It reminds me of the Nazi regime," a euphemism to describe the destruction of a culture, of a people, of books and ideas, of freedom itself.

My mother grew up in Vienna surrounded by books, immersed in books. Her father was on the PTA of her elementary school and distributed books to the children as gifts. A local bookseller gave out free books to children. She read all the time and the saddest moment in her recent life was the day she realized she'd outlived her sight. I read to her as much as I can--the newspaper, poetry, books her book club is reading. Needless to say, she's the oldest member. We've tried to transition her to audio, but it's been difficult.

She is still telling stories, rushing to tell them as they surface in her memory. I'm writing them all down, then posting them in emails to those near and dear for the historical record. Yesterday, a new story surfaced about a bookstore near her home in Vienna's Second District. She remembers the name of the owner--Mr. Tuchner--and a day in the late fall of 1938 he disappeared and the store was trashed and shuttered. She didn't witness his arrest, but those that dared to stand and watch spread the story of the SS officer pronouncing the store a treasure trove of Filthy Jewish Bolshevist Free Thinking Pornography. No such literature would be permitted to be saved much less published in Hitler's Reich.

The lists of books to be destroyed included all Jewish authors except for those in the sciences. These collections were spared as they were considered irreplaceable.

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They've become a cultural phenomena and they are ubiquitous. Publishers encourage them and add talking points to the back of the book targeted at reading groups. These pages often include interviews with the author, biographical information, and advertisements for other books by the same author, or other authors. This is all good news: people are reading, people are interested in how writers work, how the work began, what a writing day is like. And, when they get together, they like to talk about their experience of the book: characters, plot, the story itself, how they relate to the story and characters. If the book is nonfiction, the discussion can be equally engaging and informative.

I have belonged to more than one reading group and, like writing groups, they seem to have a lifespan, some longer than others. I have found that they work best when discussion is orderly, when they are mixed male and female, when they are ethnically and age diverse, when they have both writers and devoted readers who are not writers, and when people stop talking and listen to one another.

Recently, I left one group because it had become too social, focused more on food and drink, and less on discussion about the books. Three of the ten or so members were writers, the others well read readers, but the shift from discussing the book in-depth to the food and drink would not abate. So I left.

Then I was invited into another group, none of whom are writers. They had met each other in the laundry room, elevators and foyer of the condo where they live, and had started the group on a whim. They all lived in the same line, so they were fated, one of the members told me. Meetings rotated from one floor to another, all with beautiful views of downtown Manhattan and distinctive décor. They were mostly book club "virgins" and, when I arrived, they solicited suggestions: Should there be food? A presenter? Who selects the book? And so on. About half the group was high-brow, the other half low-brow never having read any literary fiction; one or two were able to toggle between the two. The first book I read as a member of this group was the second of the Stieg Laarsen trilogy-- "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest," not a book I would have ever chosen to read on my own. No matter: I was curious. My doctor had recommended "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" in the midst of my annual exam, not a moment I take any such recommendations seriously. I had ignored him, and then seen all the movies. Mostly, I was interested in Lisbeth Salander, Laarsen's vigilante, his alter ego, the woman who gets the bad guys when he--in his too short life-- could not. And this is what I wanted to discuss with the group: the phenomena of the Laarsen trilogy. Anyone who knows anything about writing agrees that the books are not well written plus they are in translation. So I was astounded when the group was so swept away by the story and the characters that they could not stand back and discuss the book as a piece of writing. Why should I have been surprised? They were ordinary readers. They read the way most people read. Only the writer toils month after month, year after year, to make a book that works. Genre fiction, literary fiction, or nonfiction, it makes no difference. Writers toil and readers who are not writers read mostly for pleasure. The book is read, it's done, they liked it or didn't, and they move on. For some reason, I found this realization wounding. I don't know why, but I did. This new group didn't care one whit about the writing per se or about my writerly comments. One woman even told me that she already had her education and she didn't want to learn any more about writing or anything else (from me). Obviously, I was in the wrong group. So I left again.

If I do decide to join or form another reading group--and it won't be anytime soon-- I'm almost certain all the members will be writers, that there won't be any food, that the view won't matter, that we'll live in diverse neighborhoods all over the city, that we'll be good listeners and articulate commentators, and that all of us will have a curiosity about good literature--genre or literary, fiction or nonfiction--the society in which it is born, and how it is made.  Read More 

How does a writer refuel? How does a writer rest? Is there ever a time when I am not writing, not thinking of a project in progress, or what I will work on next? These are questions I have asked myself for years because I much prefer writing and working to resting, or what passes for resting in my lexicon. As you can imagine, the languorous post-holiday days are a challenge. Two days after Christmas, a week when most people are allegedly resting, and here I am at the computer writing this blog, getting up early to swim or work out, jotting in my jotting journal about a film I saw last night ("Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy"--outstanding) and enjoying all of it. In fact, I never relinquish the routine or discipline of the artist/writer. Never. Is it possible, therefore, that I am resting as I write? I think the answer must be yes as I carry my moleskin everywhere every day no matter where I am going and what I am doing. I am always writing something down, even if it is just a list of observations and disparate thoughts. Thus does my mind clear--and rest. Thus am I able to refuel. And I read a lot; reading and contemplation, walking and meditation. It's all necessary for me.

And I wander in museums and book stores, yes, real book stores. And I even buy some paper books when I begin to miss the sensory experience of holding a book, flipping back and forth, inhaling the often subtle aroma of the paper and ink. I bought two this week: Julian Barnes "The Sense of an Ending," and Erik Larson, "The Devil in the White City." I got half-way through the Barnes and gave it to friend who is a Barnes fan. I thought to myself, and wrote in my moleskin, that it was fascinating to be inside the male protagonist's brain, but also boring. And why did this book get the Man Booker prize? I have no idea. As for the Larson, recommended by many people, it is my first Larson, a page turner, an inspiration. Already I am thinking that I'd like to get back to a nonfiction project. But what will it be? I have no idea just now. Having just finished two books, I'm supposed to be resting.  Read More 

Home late from Brooklyn--near 1 a.m.-- on Friday night on the 3 train, escorted to the station by a recently returned soldier from Iraq, the deserted streets opposite the monumental Brooklyn Museum felt oddly safe. On the train in our still de facto segregated city we were the only light-skinned folk and there were about ten men sleeping in their hooded sweatshirts--a homeless underground riding the trains at night for shelter--a New York most of us never see or acknowledge.

We'd been to a gallery opening in Crown Heights, the gentrified side of Crown Heights, and when we'd arrived and surfaced from the train, we'd crossed Eastern Parkway, walked in the wrong direction, and found ourselves in the 'hood, far away from the gallery. There were three of us-- a burly man, two tall women--but we could have gotten rolled, for sure. We went into a store to ask directions and everyone was helpful and kind. We were two journalists and a photographer, had been to more dangerous places, and always survived, more than survived, we'd been invulnerable. We were not afraid. We were on the street, but not of the street.

I remember talking to war reporters in London at one party at another, returned from one war or another. They partied hard and recounted their exploits without reference to the dead bodies they had photographed, or the near-dead moments they had experienced. I thought them callous. I did not want such callous disregard to ever happen to me. But a numbness set in after 9/11 and then when I worked on "Another Day in Paradise," my two-year project with humanitarian workers, and, then again, when I worked on a revision of my family's war story, "Searching for Fritzi." To be numb or callous is not good for the writing, or anything else.

It is true, of course, that a certain distancing is required as we work and that we develop a narrative persona, or journalist's persona, to get the story and retain our own sanity. This must happen no matter what we are writing about--small stories and big ones. But we must guard against becoming numb or callous.

These days, a broadcast reporter can often be seen tearing up during an interview. S/he is not ashamed to show the audience an emotional reaction. Even war reporters and photographers--Jon Lee Anderson, James Nachtwey, Nicolas Kristoff, Scott Pelley, many others-- have achieved the tender balance between sensitivity and distance. They seem to take shelter in the work itself, the value of their reporting, and their humanity and integrity.
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I've been reading my cousin Cameron's blog this morning: http://cameronkopf.blogspot.com/. He's a French horn player who toured with the Phantom road show for many years and has now settled into rural living in Northern California with his partner, James. Cameron is a loquacious, dynamic story-teller --very active on Facebook when he's not writing a novel in thirty days. On November 1, he wrote this email: "Today was Day #1 of the http://NaNoWriMo.org novel writing contest which goes on all through the month of November (50,000 words to win), and I surpassed the daily minimum word output (1660) and managed to write 2727 words today! Not that I'm counting or anything."

Needless to say, he went a bit quiet during the month of November and I've missed him. So I checked his blog this morning. I'd always thought the blog was special and not only because I'm crazy about Cameron. He writes from an awareness of the beauty of his surroundings and the interconnections of his physical presence in the world and his interior life. It has not been a life without struggle, a struggle transformed into art and an artful rendering of his days. Musicians are disciplined creatures and even Cameron's blog inspires discipline. It's regular, devoted, and careful while, at the same time, engaging to read.

Cameron is also a collector: old typewriters, a rather quaint hobby these days. And his blog is written on a typewriter--he alternates--and then scanned into the computer, a perfect combination of old and new technologies.

Day after day, the blog is written, and accumulates into a body of work, a collection of gestures and experiences. Always, it begins modestly, tentatively, and then it grows exponentially and becomes a project. Some become books or columns in online magazines, such as readallday.com by Nina Sankovich. She writes: "From October 2008 through October 2009, I read a book a day and wrote a review of each book here on Read All Day. I began my year in an effort to come to terms with the tragic death of my oldest sister, Anne-Marie, and to find purpose and meaning in my life. I called my year of reading The 365 Project."

Nina's blog was picked up by the Huffington Post and then it became a book: "Tolstoy and the Purple Chair." Both the blog and the book are must-reads.

That all said, some blogs just remain blogs and that's fine, too. It's good writing practice. It's writing. Read More 

My mother turned 99 on October 21 and there is much I want to continue to do and say to honor her long and eventful life before she dies. When we are together, I read her the newspaper. We discuss the world’s events: the economic crisis, Qaddafi’s end, the opera. Unable to see very well or to hear very much, we take our time and try to remain patient—both of us—when there are misunderstandings. Mostly, my mother enjoys being read to and then to discuss what I have read to her. And I will usually end our visits with some poetry which leads us easily into thoughts about love, death and the next generation. My mother still cares a lot about her children and grandchildren, how they are doing, what the future holds for them.

In 1999, I published a small memoir about our Viennese family which began with an oral history and ended, more or less, with an addendum to the book in 2008 when Michael Ramsey, an officer in General MacArthur’s occupation army in Japan, contacted me to let me know that he’d met our cousin, Fritzi Burger, an Olympic ice skating champion, in Tokyo in 1945. She had married a son of the Mikimoto family and had spent the war years in Japan. As the book was already published, I wrote up the addendum as an article and sent it out. Eventually, it was published—in English—in a small Austrian publication and I also put it up on my website as a locked PDF file. In my once-monthly Google myself session the other day, I found that locked file on the internet for all to see. I called Mike Ramsey in Abilene, Texas and we agreed that such availability is for the best; the information in that article should be disseminated as part of the historical record. Mike is in his mid-80’s now and our lives are as different as eggs and cheese. But we are well bonded over the Fritzi story. Mike sent it out to a friend who works for Julia Roberts and he’s hopeful it will one day be a movie. And so, as I spoke to him, I knew that my search for Fritzi, metaphorically speaking, was not over. It had just entered a new phase.

With the relative ease and success of my first e-book, “Water Baby; Five Novellas,” I have decided to revise and update “Searching for Fritzi” and release it as an e-book with the addeundum as a final chapter or epilogue. I was frustrated at first because all the files for the book are on floppies and I have no floppy drive. No matter, I decided to type it into a new file and this re-working, looping backwards to move forwards, has enabled me to massage the prose and make it better. I’ve learned a lot about writing a strong memoir since 1999 and I have also learned more about the subject and about myself in relation to the subject: genocide.

And so I began, tentatively, at first, and then with a great sense of freedom and purpose. I’m up to Chapter 7 and am pleased at how it’s going. Stay tuned. Read More 

I’m reading David McCullough’s new book, “A Greater Journey,” about Americans in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. http://www.amazon.com/Greater-Journey-Americans-Paris/dp/1416571760. It’s charming, informative, well written, but the book could not have been done without a treasure trove of correspondence and journals. These are all quoted at length. And that set me to wondering, yet again, about what we are leaving behind for historians to plumb when they begin their search for our times.
How many of us still correspond, at length, with friends and family? How many of us still print out our photographs?

Even among my writer friends, the art and practice of corresponding—at leisure and at length—has stopped, nearly entirely. Two journalist friends in London, devoted letter writers just a decade ago, now only send much shorter, less contemplative, far less descriptive emails. Like mine, they are mostly hurriedly written, between other obligations. Only a cousin, who lives a relatively secluded writer’s life on Gabriola Island in Canada, still writes me long, descriptive narratives which he writes off-line and then pastes into an email. They seem generic, catch up emails, personalized in a paragraph or two at the beginning or end. They are still pleasurable to read, of course, but who will save them for posterity?

I have written in this blog about postcards and this practice has also nearly ended. Why not just dash off an email or post, together with photographs, to Facebook while traveling? And what, then, will happen to that record? Eventually? It all becomes ephemera. It already is ephemera.

I was reminded this week of how rapidly technology changes, frustrating attempts to access what we wrote just a few years ago. With the success of my new e-book, “Water Baby; Five Novellas,” http://www.amazon.com/Water-Baby-Five-Novellas-ebook/dp/B005RFUYB8, I have decided to update and revise “Searching for Fritzi,” and to re-release it as an e-book. I contacted the designer to find out if he still had a file of the text and the cover. He found the cover, excellent, now for the text. No such luck. I rummaged through my boxes and found my stored floppies but, of course, have no floppy drive in my new computer and, even if I could get the floppy read somewhere—and I am sure I could—how would I convert it from Ami Pro to Word?

All for the best, of course, in the end. I opened a new file and set to work, revising and updating, as promised. It’s been a very interesting and challenging exercise. And once online as an e-book, “Searching for Frtizi” will live in the cloud for all eternity, solace indeed. Read More 

I remember Vice President Al Gore talking about the “information highway,” but when was that exactly? And when did we start blogging and what is the etymology of the word “blog?” (According to the instantaneous online dictionary, it’s a conflation of web and log, a weblog, first known use, 1999.) I have a blog: I am writing on my blog as I write. My blog, hosted by the Authors Guild, is a public/private space where I can ruminate about writing and the writing life. When I ask my students if they have a blog, usually about a half dozen hands go up. Everyone and anyone can blog; a great leveling. And excellent writing practice, too. Journalists adore their blogs because they now have ample space to say what they had wanted to say in the first place in print. This blog upon which, or within which, I write is capacious enough to accommodate all my meandering thoughts with no one to censor, limit, or edit, alas. I exert a writer’s discipline: these are small essays in which I can keep the writing muscle supple.

Now that my first e-book, “Water Baby; Five Novellas,” has been published, however, this blog has become a sales tool. It feeds to my Amazon Author’s Page. And my Facebook Carol Bergman: Writer page feeds to my Twitter account, which I am advised to update regularly. So much feeding; I am sated. What happened to the cozy launch readings at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village? They now seem quaint.  Read More 

My favorite fictional form is the novella, popular in Europe, but not in the US. My agent likes/admires my novellas, but can’t sell them. I’ve placed a couple in literary magazines and even won a prize for “Water Baby,” but none of that makes any (marketing) difference. My first collection, “Sitting for Klimt,” did well as an iUniverse/Barnes & Noble co-publishing print-on-demand venture and is permanently on the shelf at the Neue Galerie where, so long as Klimt’s portrait of my protagonist, Adele Bloch-Bauer, is on display, my book will live with her in the same building. I hope. Of course, it might get pulled off the shelf, but it will never go out of print.

I have just published my second collection of novellas, “Water Baby” as an e-book, an experiment. My daughter designed the cover and my cousin donated the cover image. It takes a village. I’m pleased with the collection as a literary endeavor and enjoying the congratulations and praise from other writers who understand the effort it takes to draft and polish a work before publication. The technical challenges of getting the book online have been daunting for me, however. They are similar, I’ve decided, to launching a website, as opposed to preparing a manuscript for print publication. I’ve uploaded, there are numerous formatting errors, and now I can go back in and tweak if only I could figure out how to do that. Truly, I wish my daughter, a graphic designer, would have had time to help me out, but she didn’t, so I did it all on my own. It was—and still is—thrilling as well as frustrating. All so fast, a friend in the UK wrote, even though the book took me five years to compile, send out to readers, revise. Many long hours of work. Yet, it took only minutes to get it “published,” and went “live” before I understood what I’d done wrong with the upload. I had dreams about correcting/editing and thought about nothing else during my lap swim this morning, but when I went back onto the site, it wasn’t available for editing. And it was only when I was swimming that I realized why the cover hadn’t appeared in front of the text: It’s all one document and though I’d uploaded the cover, that was just for the data base, and I’d left it out of the text, and so on.

You can see, dear reader, how the publishing an e-book process might become obsessive and obliterate all creative thought. Luckily I am taking a play writing workshop this term to relax and my NYU class meets on Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be flying to California for a few days on family business. I’ll take my Kindle, of course, and leave Hayden Herrera’s large, hardcover biography of Arshile Gorky by my bedside.  Read More