Mourning Roundup: June 11, 2010, Weekend Edition
by Krishna Andavolu
JUNE 11, 2010 TAGS:
Harper's Gaggle of Death-Tellers
When Paul Ford, a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, stepped onto the stage of the Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo last night, he had the unenviable task of warming up a sizeable crowd of 20 and 30-somethings for an evening of death-talk.
Luckily they were a plucky group (not a gray hair in sight), eager to hear writers Joseph O’Neill, Diane Williams and Elif Batuman read from works that appeared in Harper's over the last few years and that addressed, however obliquely, the ever-looming but seldom-mentioned terminus of the human condition, the big D.
Arranged in folding chairs, snugly nestled into the corners, steps and balconies of the store, the crowd leaned on bookshelves and blithely sipped Brooklyn Lagers, not realizing that a backward-counting ticker marking the precious heartbeats they had left until they would shuffle off this mortal coil appeared metaphorically above each of their heads. Or at least that’s how Ford put it, capping a trenchant string of observations about the ineluctable nature of mortality.
After Ford himself shuffled off stage, O’Neill, most recently the author of the novel Netherland, took to the microphone in a washed out gray t-shirt and jeans and liltingly transported the audience to a wedding in the countryside of Northern Italy. He read part of his story, “The Goose,” which commented on the following:
- The banality of putting down a cat,
- The oddities of conversing with other wedding guests,
- How the wedding of a widower has a deathly subtext,
- Why being buried in a foreign land is a strange co-mingling (a theme explored in Netherland, which is an excellent novel)
- Why pregnancy always seems to portend death
- And how a mysterious goose can function as a transcendent signifier.
Diane Williams was next, but not before a young Harper’s staffer read from an ad placed in Variety magazine after the death of the actor River Phoenix in 1993. Titled “A River Runs through Him,” it was an epistolary eulogy written by an unknown actor mourning Phoenix’s untimely death. Its lesson was immediate to the tortoise-shelled and topsidered crowd. There is something far worse than death: maudlin sentiment and bad taste.
Williams, sporting Sambas and flowing black pants, appeared something like an agile reaper. Her lively prose landed oddly flat, until she read her last story, “To Die,” a first-person meditation of an oversexed, over-accomplished boob. Death, comically, is this loathsome character's next inheritance:
“There should be so much more for me that I could not conceive of…” he finishes.
Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed, Adventures with Russian Books and People who Read Them, brought the dead to life, as it were. Hers was the story of being bound and being freed from the crusty antiquarian circles of Tolstoy scholars that she followed to a conference at Tolstoy’s country estate Yasnaya Polyana. Batuman posits an unlikely thesis, Tolstoy was murdered, and attends to unpacking that academic provocation by way of Arthur Conan Doyle, her own wits, and, oddly, another goose--this one roaming the grounds of Checkov’s country estate.
Were it not for a book titled Cats in Love that sat directly in my site line (and landed in the shopping bag of one of my esteemed fellow attendees), the goose would have been a lock for spirit animal of the evening.
But between O’Neill’s mention of burying a cat and the coffee table book that the Atlantic Monthly once called “The finest pictures ever taken of cats,” a feline influence matched the anserine persuasion of the gathering.
In matters of the intellect, it is said that you are either a hedgehog or a fox, burrowing deeply into one subject or scampering lithely over many. Perhaps in matters of the ever-after you are either a cat or a goose, playfully batting it with a paw or heading south in avoidance of its short days and cold nights.
[thanks to Sadie for the heads up]
When Paul Ford, a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, stepped onto the stage of the Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo last night, he had the unenviable task of warming up a sizeable crowd of 20 and 30-somethings for an evening of death-talk.
Luckily they were a plucky group (not a gray hair in sight), eager to hear writers Joseph O’Neill, Diane Williams and Elif Batuman read from works that appeared in Harper's over the last few years and that addressed, however obliquely, the ever-looming but seldom-mentioned terminus of the human condition, the big D. Arranged in folding chairs, snugly nestled into the corners, steps and balconies of the store, the crowd leaned on bookshelves and blithely sipped Brooklyn Lagers, not realizing that a backward-counting ticker marking the precious heartbeats they had left until they would shuffle off this mortal coil appeared metaphorically above each of their heads. Or at least that’s how Ford put it, capping a trenchant string of observations about the ineluctable nature of mortality.
After Ford himself shuffled off stage, O’Neill, most recently the author of the novel Netherland, took to the microphone in a washed out gray t-shirt and jeans and liltingly transported the audience to a wedding in the countryside of Northern Italy. He read part of his story, “The Goose,” which commented on the following:
- The banality of putting down a cat,
- The oddities of conversing with other wedding guests,
- How the wedding of a widower has a deathly subtext,
- Why being buried in a foreign land is a strange co-mingling (a theme explored in Netherland, which is an excellent novel)
- Why pregnancy always seems to portend death
- And how a mysterious goose can function as a transcendent signifier.
Diane Williams was next, but not before a young Harper’s staffer read from an ad placed in Variety magazine after the death of the actor River Phoenix in 1993. Titled “A River Runs through Him,” it was an epistolary eulogy written by an unknown actor mourning Phoenix’s untimely death. Its lesson was immediate to the tortoise-shelled and topsidered crowd. There is something far worse than death: maudlin sentiment and bad taste.
Williams, sporting Sambas and flowing black pants, appeared something like an agile reaper. Her lively prose landed oddly flat, until she read her last story, “To Die,” a first-person meditation of an oversexed, over-accomplished boob. Death, comically, is this loathsome character's next inheritance:
“There should be so much more for me that I could not conceive of…” he finishes.
Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed, Adventures with Russian Books and People who Read Them, brought the dead to life, as it were. Hers was the story of being bound and being freed from the crusty antiquarian circles of Tolstoy scholars that she followed to a conference at Tolstoy’s country estate Yasnaya Polyana. Batuman posits an unlikely thesis, Tolstoy was murdered, and attends to unpacking that academic provocation by way of Arthur Conan Doyle, her own wits, and, oddly, another goose--this one roaming the grounds of Checkov’s country estate.
Were it not for a book titled Cats in Love that sat directly in my site line (and landed in the shopping bag of one of my esteemed fellow attendees), the goose would have been a lock for spirit animal of the evening.
But between O’Neill’s mention of burying a cat and the coffee table book that the Atlantic Monthly once called “The finest pictures ever taken of cats,” a feline influence matched the anserine persuasion of the gathering.
In matters of the intellect, it is said that you are either a hedgehog or a fox, burrowing deeply into one subject or scampering lithely over many. Perhaps in matters of the ever-after you are either a cat or a goose, playfully batting it with a paw or heading south in avoidance of its short days and cold nights.
[thanks to Sadie for the heads up]
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