Jean-Simeon Chardin, The Governess, 1739.
- Most writers need day jobs. I recommend the Charlotte Brontë approach: become a governess. It’s your destiny. Yes, it will leave you feeling lonely and downtrodden, and it will nurse a sense of righteous indignation in your soul. But it’ll furnish all the “material” you need for your sensational debut, and isn’t that what really matters? John Pfordresher, who has a new book out about the writing of Jane Eyre, notes that Brontë’s various stints as a governess brought her nothing but heartache, even as they informed her work: “Charlotte’s first ‘situation’ as a temporary governess began in May 1839, at an estate named Stonegappe, a large house of three stories set on a hillside surrounded by woods, enjoying a vista in the distance of the valley of the River Aire. Charlotte was to care for a young girl and her brother—the stone-throwing son of the Sidgwick family we have seen as a model for John Reed. For the socially awkward and impoverished Brontë, at age twenty-three, the inferior position of governess in a wealthy family was an almost intolerable position, far worse than teaching at Roe Head. She was ignored by adult family members, charged with insolent and rebellious children, and denied respect by all, though she considered herself not only more than their equal in terms of intelligence and ability but also a potential writer of genius … Winifred Gérin, in her beautifully written biography of Brontë, pictures Charlotte in the Sidgwick’s handsome country home during a ‘long summer evening when she sat alone, her lap filled with Mrs. Sidgwick’s “oceans of needlework” … no one from the noisy self-absorbed house-party below to share her solitude.’ ”
- Speaking of writers on the job: Laura Dassow Walls’s new biography of Thoreau highlights the indignities of his career as a surveyor. Jay Parini writes, “Despite Thoreau’s achievements as a writer, environmentalist and social activist (he was, among other things, a passionate abolitionist and supporter of John Brown), many of his contemporaries considered him little more than a crank, a self-involved Pied Piper for the children of Concord, MA, whom he led in search of huckleberries on hot summer days … Walls does not miss the irony that Thoreau’s profession made him ‘complicit in destroying the forest he loved.’ In 1850, for instance, he ‘walked over land he had surveyed the year before, which the owner had clear-cut and subdivided into fifty-two house lots.’ Not surprisingly, he expresses guilt over this work in his journal: ‘Today I was aware that I walked in a pitch pine wood which erelong, perchance, I may survey and lot off for a wood auction and see the choppers at their work.’ In 1851, he completed a substantial commissioned survey of Concord’s boundaries and recalled that the task had left him feeling as if he had ‘committed suicide.’ He says darkly: ‘Trade curses everything it handles.’ ”
- Porter Fox remembers the late Larry Fagin, a poet who taught him at the New School—not just about poetry, but about the art of being a weirdo: “Fagin transmitted lessons he’d learned from Jack Spicer, Ginsberg, and others, mixed with his own: use ego as a ‘cutting tool’; create simple ideas in complex relationships; use ellipses; beware of airplane poems and writing about dreams; beauty gets in the way; keep the reader off balance; kill modifiers and metaphors (unless they’re really good); strive for ‘strangeness.’ He told us to write every day, but only a little bit; to ‘be more in the world’; to look up when we walk down the street; to avoid distraction; to never talk about real estate … If a piece was particularly bad, he folded it into an airplane and sailed it across the room. After a lesson, he assigned personal reading lists from his nine-hundred-and-thirty-five-title ‘Mandatory Prose List’ according to what he thought a student needed. He opened lessons with short lectures on art, music, dance, film, and a list of ‘bests’ he had compiled: Best Soap: Little Dutch Girl; Best Sonny Rollins Album: Way Out West; Best Cheeseburger: Silver Spurs; Best Worst Composer: Johannes Brahms; Best de Kooning Quote: ‘Content is a glimpse.’ ”
- Moira Donegan celebrates the twentieth anniversary of The Watermelon Woman, the first feature film ever directed by a black lesbian. Funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, Cheryl Dunye’s movie caused such a stir that a Republican Congressman singled it out as “patently offensive”—though by today’s standards it’s tame, Donegan writes: “The movie follows Cheryl, played by Dunye, as she attempts to make a documentary about Faye Richards, better known as the Watermelon Woman: a gay, black 1930s actress whose roles as mammies and housemaids did not do justice to her elusive and complex life … Dunye came up with the story of the Watermelon Woman when she was in graduate school: She was travelling back and forth between the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York and the Library of Congress in D.C., trying to learn about black women in early cinema, only to find that many of the actors were credited by racist monikers or not at all. She began to feel frustrated by the lack of documentation, by the lost lives and unacknowledged gifts of actors and filmmakers whose stories she couldn’t access. In the film, the Watermelon Woman becomes a stand in for all these people, for the talent, humor, and courage that our culture misses out on when we determine that some people aren’t worth paying attention to.”
- The cabaret tradition is alive and well—most notably in Cole Escola, a performer with a vast wig collection and a penchant for unhinged characters. Elisabeth Vincentelli writes, “In just under ten years, the lithe Mr. Escola, who is thirty but looks much younger, has become a ubiquitous presence on the downtown alt-cabaret circuit, often sporting little besides briefs and a boyish smile … ‘All of his characterizations are both demented and affectionate,’ the comedian and actor Billy Eichner said. ‘He has a bone-deep knowledge of who these people are’ … A large part of what makes him so subversive is the way he looks utterly innocent while perpetrating assaults on propriety … One of the wigs he bought was for yet another character, whom he described as ‘an author who had one book in the eighties that was really big, about eating right for your star sign.’ ”
from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2sWgocg
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