Carol Bergman

Clarification is required: Just because I am a proud and devoted owner of a Kindle2 does not mean I am abandoning books or bookstores. I belong to a two-person Kindle Klub wherein I share articles and updates on digital downloading for avid readers. Last week, my Kindle Klub compadre passed along an article by Ann Kirschner, “Reading Dickens Four Ways”: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39b01601.htm which I agree with wholeheartedly. Reading is important, literature is important, however it is delivered.

If my students are using their iPods to read as well as to text and talk, I am happy. Why? Because they are reading. If my students cannot remember the last book they have read, I am concerned.

Here’s an excerpt from my curriculum: "Reading and writing fuel each other. If you want to develop fluidity in your writing and generate viable story ideas, you must become a voracious reader. I guarantee that all the books on this list are well written. By definition, however, this list is personal. I follow my interests as I read but I also try to stretch myself. I urge you to do the same."

 Read More 

A man was murdered yesterday in the building next to mine. I’d been writing all morning, deeply immersed in a fictional murder mystery, when I decided to get some air and light, take a walk in the park. As soon as I exited the building, I knew something was wrong: my neighbors were gathered in a close circle on the sidewalk, talking, gesticulating, speculating, and weaving stories. No one had any facts other than, “A man has been killed.” In one telling, there’d been an intruder—hard economic times, burglaries on the rise. In another, the death was accidental, a lover’s quarrel. One person said the man was 50, another said he was 60. A swat team had arrived, a crime scene unit van, officers, detectives and, soon after, the media.

Of course, I participated in all of this. It was a drama. There was even a sense of camaraderie and fun. New Yorkers, usually so much in a hurry, had stopped to talk, to tell stories about other murders, deaths and investigations they had experienced near or far. Stories abounded. Stories fell out of us, most of them more fictional than journalistic which is why journalism is such a discipline and ethical challenge. It doesn’t take much to skew a story one way or another, to confabulate or to conflate.

Recent brain research confirms that speech and storytelling are contiguous, intertwined; one does not exist without the other. (See, Norman Doidge, “The Brain That Changes Itself,” a fascinating and well-written account of the “new” neuroscience.)

But to return to my story about the murder, or the particular murder on my street. I left my neighbors and went back up to my apartment to double-check the lock on my fire escape window. Then I went to the park and then to the Guggenheim Museum. By the time I returned home, the news reporters had filed their stories. The man who was killed was in his fifties. His room-mate had stabbed him to death and been arrested. Despite this "resolution," the crime scene unit van was still parked in front of the building. It was hours later. Were they still gathering evidence? My imagination clicked over. Why was it still there? I asked some neighbors. Every one had a different story.  Read More 

I’ve been using the Kindle for about two months and enjoying it. About the weight of two books, it travels easily in my backpack and my briefcase. Instead of taking the subway—too fast—I ride the bus so I have more time to read. I sit in parks and coffee shops before appointments and classes and read. I toggle between one book and another—nonfiction, poetry, contemporary and classic fiction—which is the way I prefer to read. I am not certain but I think I am reading faster though I don't know why this should be. My hypothesis: The screen is small, more concentrated than a page, fewer words. I "flip" them quickly.

I have accepted that it will take a while for the Kindle library to deepen and expand. Every time I want a book that isn’t in the Kindle bookstore, I click the little “request” box on the amazon.com site. I am hoping/assuming that negotiations with publishers in the English speaking world continue apace. I have noted that there is no Graham Greene available at all. Greene is surely a classic but the rights seem to be held by Penguin. I hope they release them for electronic download soon.

My Algonquin book club is reading Naipaul’s “Guerrillas” this month. Not only was this book not available in the Kindle store, it was also out of print in the US. That said, other members of the group who use the LIBRARY—how quaint—found copies there. I ordered a paperback copy; it was mailed from England. And I’ve been carrying it around and writing marginalia in it. I’m not unhappy. I’ll continue to buy “real” books, savor their heft and scent, their design. Which brings me to a serious caveat: Kindle is not good for book designers: there is no book cover, no page layout, no font to admire. Perhaps the next generation of the Kindle will find a remedy: a screen in full color.

 Read More 

Jim Holt began memorizing poetry by heart a few years ago. In an essay, “Got Poetry,”published in The New York Times Book Review in April (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/books/review/Holt-t.html), he says that memorizing is a “physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one.”

I began writing poetry myself some years ago and have even had a few poems published. But I have never studied it or memorized it. I haven’t even memorized my own poems. That’s strange.

What would I discover about language if I added the dimension of memorization and recitation? What would I discover about my mind and how it encodes and decodes language? What would I discover about a well-known poet’s mind and use of language?

I am at the very earliest stages of this very pleasurable experiment. I chose a very short rhymed poem—fourteen lines—to get me started and have taken Holt’s advice to learn it incrementally, a couple of lines a day. I have a goal of memorizing one poem a month but if I don’t, I don’t. The point is to have some fun, immerse in the language, and exercise weak neural pathways in my aging brain. What the spillover effects will be I have no idea but last night I was at a restaurant with my husband and said I’d like to recite ten lines of a poem to him, if he didn’t mind. He didn’t. First I wrote the ten lines out on the paper tablecloth stopping the busboy in his tracks. He looked over my shoulder and sighed. And then I looked away from the poem into my husband’s eyes and recited the lines I’ve learned thus far. He sighed, too, and so did I. In the midst of the din of the restaurant and our busy urban lives, we’d found a moment of peace.

 Read More 

It’s been a busy week and impossible, logistically, to get to all the events I had circled in my program. I worked at three of them and attended others at four different venues. The opening night, as described in my previous entry, remains unsurpassed. Personally, I prefer to hear a writer speak about his or her work/process before a reading or, if the author does not speak English, to hear a brief introduction by someone on the PEN staff, as in previous years. Unfortunately, the introductions were eliminated this year, possibly in the interests of time. Context is essential for understanding brief excerpts and appreciating the author’s effort and standing. I found myself referring to the program too much rather than following the on-screen translations at the 92nd Street Y and Cooper Union events, both with several readers entering and exiting the stage one after the other. Oddly monotonous despite the vividness of the works themselves.

Highlights: On Wednesday, April 29 at Cooper Union, Edwidge Danticat made a choice not to read her own work. Instead, she read two poems in Haitian Creole by Félix Morisseau-Leroy, “Tourist” and “Boat People.” You can find his poems in translation online. Powerful work.

On Thursday, April 30, at a panel discussion at the Institute Cervantes, co-sponsored by Peter Gabriel’s human rights organization, “Witness,” Iraqi-American performance artist Wafaa Bilal, who lost both his brother and his father in bombings and spent his childhood years in a refugee camp, spoke eloquently about the transformation of traumatic life experience into art. Emmanuel Guibert, a graphic artist from France, also spoke eloquently about his new work, “The Photographer,” soon to be released in the US, and how the work began for him-- with a friendship. In a long discussion about the uses of new technologies to tell stories—he said that if the internet brings us closer together, that’s fine. If we remain in our isolated, virtual worlds, the new technologies are useless. The philosopher, Josep-Maria Terricabras added a deeper ethical dimension: Does merely witnessing and recording bring change?

There was much to think about during the presentations, but little opportunity for questions or dialogue among the participants, or with the audience. PEN might want to consider training the facilitators of the panels, who may not be educators. The logistics of such preparation might be as daunting as the festival itself, as facilitators arrive in NY for one week from faraway places. But some preparatory work via email might be possible.

The Saturday night Cabaret was more satisfying with readings introduced by the authors themselves, extemporaneous comments, and yet another opportunity to hear writers from overseas as yet unknown or little known in the US. Nick Laird, the Irish poet and fiction writer (married to Zadie Smith who he met at Cambridge) was wonderfully funny and personable with the large audience as was Walter Mosley who reads his own work beautifully. That’s rare and perhaps one of the drawbacks of authors reading their own work; not all writers are good readers. Then onto the stage bounced Slam poetry artist Sekou with his collaborator Steve Connell, a high energy performance with plenty of stimulating content about love and free speech. The dramatic reading of a short play by Jonathan Franzen was a wash despite formidable actors such as Parker Posey and James Franco. The audience of writers, it seemed, was disappointed by this mediocre work and unimpressed with the celebrity of the actors; the work did not stand on its own. Laurie Anderson and her husband, Lou Reed, concluded the evening with a challenging, strange half-hour of music and words. I had never seen Ms. Anderson in performance before. I think one needs a flotation device though what this might be I don’t know. The last piece in particular was haunting. It was about problems and how we create them when they are not there or transform them into commodities. At least I think that’s what it was about. It was a pleasure to see a couple of older-timers still so active and innovative.

Despite some disappointments this year, I look forward to next year’s event. PEN is a formidable organization dedicated to “defending writers and promoting the free exchange of literature for more than 85 years,” according to their brochure. For more information go to: www.pen.org where you'll also find some recordings of the events.

 Read More 

The Pen World Voices Festival began last Friday night at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan with Jean-Marie Gustave Clėzio, the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. Le Clėzio had agreed to appear after the schedule was printed and announcement of the bonus evening—to great excitement—went out electronically just days before the event. Nonetheless, the house was full.

I worked with other Pen volunteers at the ticket table where I exercised patience as well as my rusty French. The French Consulate was well represented as well as French media and linguistic purists from the Alliance Française. One diplomat said he had never read Le Clėzio which I thought strange since the laureate’s first book was published in France in 1963. I confessed I had never read his work either but for an American such an oversight, even ignorance, would not be unusual; so few books are translated into English and most of Le Clezio’s oeuvre can still only be found in every language but English. I had not noticed this fascinating man before and was embarrassed when he received the Nobel. Who was he? Now that Le Clėzio had won the prize, I was certain more of his work would be translated and planned to download as many of his books as possible onto my Kindle2 as soon as I got home. But when I went into the Kindle Store, I was disappointed that none of his translated books were available. (There’s a box on the Amazon book sites where one can ask the publisher to release the books for scan. I am clicking on it often these days.) Horace Engdahl, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, fears that translations into English are not seen as necessary in a dominant Anglo-Saxon market driven culture where thousands of English-language books are published every year. I am not satisfied with this explanation of American literary isolationism. We do not even hear about books from Canada, our nearest neighbor to the north. As Kindle2 readers such as myself are voracious, I urge Le Clézio’s publishers to make his books available pronto pronto. Meanwhile, I have ordered two paperbacks. Alas.

But to continue with the story of the evening: The diplomat grabbed his ticket, straightened his pink tie, and set off into the auditorium. He was petulant and had obviously arrived with a grievance. But what was it? I took a swig of my water bottle and vowed to expand my French vocabulary and get back to my French workbook. Then the line thinned, the rush was over, and all the volunteers were seated in neighborly proximity to other writers, avid readers, author autograph hounds—who arrived with bags of Le Clėzio’s books to sign—as the evening began.

Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker writer, had agreed to conduct the interview, the perfect choice. He is a perspicacious interviewer who has lived in France and speaks and writes French fluently. Le Clėzio grew up in Nice and the island of Mauritius (formerly a French colony, conquered by the British in 1810) speaking French and English. The Creole culture has also influenced his life and his work. In the late 1970’s, so disgruntled and bored was he by the autobiographical content of his early writing, that he went to live in a forest in Panama for three years with a group of Amerindian Indians where he absorbed ancient myths and became nearly fluent in their spoken language. He didn’t write at all during this time but when he surfaced from his self-imposed exile, he had decided to write about other people and other cultures. Eventually, he went to live in Mexico where he learned Spanish. He has also lived in Nigeria and the United States where he has taught at the University of New Mexico for the past ten years.

It became clear, almost at once, why the chauvinistic French diplomat was so upset. Le Clėzio is a transnational writer who challenges the concepts of sovereignty, borders, French and English linguistic purity, and colonialism. He writes in French sitting in a room in America where, he told Adam Gopnik, he feels at much at home as he does in Mauritius, Nice, Paris and Mexico. Though he is “domiciled,” in the French literary tradition and his favorite writers in English are the “New York Jewish” writers such as Bellow and Malamud, he is accustomed to shifting languages and making journeys, both literal and figurative.

“And now, in this era following decolonization, literature has become a way for the men and women in our time to express their identity, to claim their right to speak, and to be heard in all their diversity. Without their voices, their call, we would live in a world of silence,” the Nobel laureate said in his lecture to the Academy on December 7, 2008.

I look forward to reading his work and to reporting on it here. In the meantime, please enjoy an interview with M. Le Clézio at this site: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2008/clezio-interview.html

 Read More 

I first heard about the doorknob effect from a student who worked in a state hospital as a forensic psychiatrist. All day long she listened to the accused tell stories about their afflicted childhoods or confess their crimes. She wrote up her findings for the court. Every detail was on the record including the psychiatrist's hypothesis about the alleged perpetrator's conscious and unconscious motivations and his or her sanity. She conducted interviews using a recording device and taking careful notes. Questions were prepared beforehand but often the most useful and/or incriminating evidence surfaced during unscripted answers to questions or when the interviewee/patient/suspect thought the session was over and started to head out the door. Experienced psychiatrists keep the recorder running, my student said, as the words "oh by the way..." often signal a revelation. This is known as the "doorknob effect." Sound familiar? If so, it's because reporters experience the same phenomena.

How many times have I put on my coat and said goodbye when my "subject" begins the most telling anecdote I've heard in more than two hours? There's something about the informality and gentle patter of leave-taking that puts a person at ease. I usually stop, take out my notebook again, and write down what the person has just said. Or I make a follow-up phone call.

But what I've been thinking about today (after reading my students last submissions of the term) is a variation on this theme: We often inflict the doorknob effect on ourselves. How does this happen? I'm not a forensic psychiatrist much less a psychologist, so my best guess, based on my own experience, is that our unconscious fears reign us in. This can be a serious obstacle to our writing and leaves an ellipsis in the story the reader can't forget. Or, as Arthur Miller, said in 1953 after seeing a play by James Merrill, "You know, this guy's got a secret, and he's gonna keep it."

Tenacious reporters don't give up until they've got the story. And writers who use the material of their own lives as a story or in a story shouldn't either.



 Read More 

My mother went to see “The Reader,” a David Hare adaptation of Bernard Schlink’s best-selling novel. She had loved the book but was disturbed by the film. She didn’t know what was different so I offered to see the film, read the screenplay, and then reread the book to find out how David Hare had changed the story either by omitting scenes, adding them, or changing what the characters say or don’t say. My mother was certain there had been changes but couldn’t articulate them. From her point of view—that of a Jewish Holocaust refugee—she didn’t feel the changes were for the better. The author’s quest for understanding in the book through an intelligent, humble narrative persona, had been distorted in the film, she thought.

”The Reader” reads well in English probably because its author, a constitutional judge and author of several crime novels, had studied in England and the United States and speaks English well. A translator will often work in collaboration with an author, more so if the author speaks, reads and writes the language. But I have read nothing to suggest that Bernard Schlink was invited to work with David Hare—a well known, knighted British playwright—during the process of adaptation. Typically, film companies buy the rights to a novel and send the novelist back into his cave. Usually, they hope he’ll stay there.

The adaptation of “The Reader” from book to film took a long time. Anthony Minghella had originally optioned the book with his co-producer, Sydney Pollack, soon after the book was published in English. Bernard Schlink must have been pleased; Anthony Minghella had a reputation for collaboration with authors. Michael Ondatjee had worked closely with him during the script development of “The English Patient.”

Time passed, the project remained dormant and then, finally, Minghella and Pollack –who felt they were letting Schlinck down with all the delays—granted the rights to David Hare and the director, Stephen Daldry. The two original producers returned to help out and then both died within weeks of each other, leaving the screenwriter without the mentors he badly needed. “Time and again, Sydney would draw us back to the question: What exactly is the metaphor of reading in the film? What is the function of literature?” Hare writes in the introduction to the screenplay. Sadly, it seems as though he could not answer these seminal questions without Sydney Pollack’s guidance.

Where does the film adaptation fail? Most obviously, in the choice of Kate Winslet as leading lady. Her husband, Sam Mendes, became the producer of the film, so obviously this led to her casting after another actress backed out because of pregnancy. It’s intriguing to wonder who this woman might have been. Someone a bit rougher? A bit less sweet? Kate Winslet is beautiful and her luminous presence on the screen—her innocence—is never shattered. We believe in the love affair because she is so attractive. Where is the scene from the book where Hanna strikes Michael with a belt? Where is Hanna’s dark cruelty? Absent. The leading lady has become a sympathetic Romantic Heroine.

Returning to the book after seeing the movie, I was struck by Schlink’s ability to work on several levels, beyond the love story and Hanna’s “illiteracy,” a complexity the film does not achieve. If Hanna is the old Germany and Michael the new Germany, the story becomes more interesting, deeper. And if her illiteracy is a metaphor for “not knowing,” the primary rationale the ordinary citizens of Germany have always voiced for their complicity and silence, then Schlink has succeeded where the film has not in condemning, not forgiving, his father’s generation. As the metaphors in the book are consistent, I am certain this was the author’s intent. Michael’s voice as a questioning narrator and interlocutor is obliterated in the film. The narration becomes casual, matter-of-fact. What remains is a story about a young man’s sexual initiation at a certain time in history. But that certain time in history is never fully examined.

Should a subject such as genocide ever be presented casually, as entertainment? Yes and no, or it depends on how well it’s done. Sometimes a new approach pierces the iconic imagery of the event and illuminates unexpectedly. Roberto Benigni ‘s “Life is Beautiful” is one such cinematic example. Although most of my family was murdered in the camps, that particular film made me laugh and cry at the same time. It was the first time in years I’d felt anything beyond numbness and resignation about “life” in the death camps.

When I finished the arduous task I’d set myself of comparing and contrasting the book, the screenplay and the film, I returned to my mother’s kitchen for a long conversation. My disappointment in the film was profound, my mother’s intuition correct, I had decided. The filmmakers had not honored the book’s message. During the Oscar night hoopla, Bernard Schlink, “The Reader’s” brave author, and the work he had created, was nearly forgotten.
 Read More 

By the time I returned to the United States from a ten-year expatriate sojourn in England, I was in love with the English language, its provenance in the Old World and evolution in the New World along a different path, all the extant words, all the extinct words, the Latin and Greek roots, dialects and colloquialisms. As an American living in England, my New York accent was considered “quaint.” At parties I was often asked to do “Brooklyn” or “Bronx,” though I had grown up in Manhattan and spoke a more neutral New Yorkese. Eventually, I learned to speak British English so well that late in my stay few people appreciated that I had learned another language and was now bi-lingual.

Anyone with a good ear for language will pick up the cadences, stresses and expressions of the region where they live. I forgot to switch back into American English when my American friends called. They would comment on my strange way of speaking and not always in a complimentary way. I was leaving America behind and had become European, they said. This was a betrayal. Their comments echoed the chauvinism I experienced in Britain, in reverse.

I returned to America with a devotion to English though I was also weighed down by the cruelties of colonial history, the insistence that the English language was an Imperial Tool. Now that English has become a global language by force of internet rather than by arms, and the days of Empire are—hopefully—over, these worries have become moot. But the etymologies of the language, its history, is still of great interest to me.

I returned to America with several old dictionaries I’d picked up at flea markets and soon landed a job writing etymologies for a language arts textbook company. It was the perfect transition back to New York and the language of my childhood and young adulthood, which had already mutated into something else, as it does constantly. My dispatches to the Times Educational Supplement of London began to sound more and more American by the day. My editors weren’t happy and I eventually gave up writing for British publications. But I still am an Anglophile and read Trollope for relaxation. On my new Kindle2 I can look up quaint Victorian words such as quod and bespoke. One is extinct, the other is extant.

 Read More 

I spent much of Sunday spring cleaning my computer; the files were a mess. I have seven completed manuscripts circulating—three essays, three short stories, two very long short stories—and before I start revising the stripped down murder mystery, I have to take a breather, assess the submissions I’ve already made, and send more manuscripts out before the summer hiatus. This is labor intensive work.

I’m trying to be more methodical about my submissions and keep careful notes and spread sheets with the names of editors, even if they have rejected my work. If they say they want to see more, I send them something else immediately. I want my byline and my writing to remain fresh in their mind.

Even after a long career as a writer, any word of encouragement from an editor, much less an acceptance, elevates my mood. That’s only natural, but it’s not necessary. I don’t rely on any admiring response of readers, editors, family or friends to keep working. And I let negative responses roll away. A negative response is not the same as a helpful comment or a deep critique. Once a friend told me she didn't think I was novelist. She may be right--I have never had a novel published--yet. But it was mean of her to speak to me in this way in the midst of my effort to make a novel work. Writers have to ignore such undermining remarks. We have no choice.

Taking an inventory of where we are with our work is comforting as the season changes. The work accumulates and some of it is publishable. We look back and realize we’ve done well over the winter. Our writing life is disciplined, constant. We have learned to ask ourselves the right questions: Is a revision working or should we set it aside for a while? Who is the audience for this piece? Am I working on a book or a short form essay? Is a piece ready to be sent out? Have I considered a recent critique? Why doesn’t my significant other or my best friend like what I’ve written? Does it matter? Am I building my strength as a writer? Attending to elements of craft? Reading and writing every day?

 Read More