A new version of Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm by the great Philip Pullman is about to come out in November — reviewed here with a preview, The Frog King.
If all the frogs in the marsh at the Cabin became princes we’d have quite a party.
Category Archives: Writing
Cake Walk
Guested at a book club today, one of two I’ve been invited to this week. Book groups are great — you get to talk about literature, and they feed you good chocolate cake.
Cakes by Wayne Thiebaud
There were about 20 members gathered in a living room overlooking the Long Island Sound. Beautiful, though my chair had its back to the view. I tried to appear scholarly, as this was a group that had actually read Anna Karenina in a month (last time I partook it was a 12 month commitment).
I find that people like The Orphanmaster a lot, but they love the idea that it’s been optioned for Hollywood.
I spoke about all the research I’d done for The Orphanmaster, how most of the details and textures of the time were as accurate as I could make them. Oh, so it was faction, one member said. Well, historical fiction, I said.
But faction is a pretty good description after all, when you’re under the spell of that chocolate cake.
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman, The Orphanmaster, Writing
James in Siena
I’m off to the countryside near Siena, Italy, and I will attempt to post from there.
I am psyched.
Henry James went to Siena and imagined the interior monologue of the houses there, “silvered by moonlight”: “We are very old and a trifle weary, but we were built strong and piled high, and we shall last for many an age. The present is cold and heedless, but we keep ourselves in heart by brooding over our store of memories and traditions. We are haunted houses in every creaking timber and aching stone.”
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Writers, Writing
University Settlement Celebrates
On October 11th I’ll take part in an interesting event, at the University Settlement in Manhattan. This is the organization’s 125th birthday; it has worked for over a century to help integrate and educate immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. My involvement? I.N. Phelps Stokes designed the brick-and-limestone University Settlement building at 184 Eldridge Street. It was his first architectural commission, when he returned to the States with Edith Minturn after their extended honeymoon in Paris.
Newton and Edith
A clean and classical creation, still extant, the building at 184 Eldridge rose grandly, and improbably, above the swirl of street life below. On the Lower East Side at the time, Russian and Polish pedestrians jostled speakers of Italian and Yiddish; narrow, cobbled streets teemed with horse-drawn wagons, electric cars and horse cars; and pushcarts hawked everything from tomatoes to tin cups.
In this dingy neighborhood, among jumbled, decrepit tenements, there now stood a fresh, elegant new structure, Newton’s debut architectural contribution. What made it even more amazing than its appearance, though, was its function. It had been commissioned by people who intended to improve, if not revolutionize, the conditions all around it. —Love, Fiercely, p. 165
It was a different era. While local denizens streamed into the building to use the baths or take English lessons, well-heeled volunteers resided in elegant top-floor digs — it was a badge of honor among certain young aristocratic idealists to put in time at University Settlement.
University Settlement Building
To celebrate the birthday, the group is getting together descendants of the original donors to the cause, with names like Rockefeller, Warburg and Huntington, for a portrait and champagne. Here is the original document listing names and amounts.
University Settlement Building Donors 1899
If you want to know more about the event, go to the New York Social Diary for September 26 and scroll down. If you are a descendant or know one, let me know and I’ll pass the name along!
For a review of Love, Fiercely, in which I describe the story of building the Settlement House, click on the Social Diary for Monday, September 24 and scroll down.
Rich philanthropists putting their hearts into fixing the slums. Now there’s an idea.
Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, Publishing, Writers, Writing
Got You Covered
I’ve just heard that The Orphanmaster is to be published in Hungary … now along with Italy, France, Holland and Taiwan.
The cover for the French edition really spooks me:
But wait until you see the cover for the U.S. softcover, due out in May! That is some scary artwork. I’ll share it when it’s finalized.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing
Gertrude Stein’s Apology
Look outside. The hot sun, the flawless sky. Other than the season, today is like another day.
“It was a very lovely spring day, Gertrude Stein had been going to the opera every night and going also to the opera in the afternoon and had been otherwise engrossed and it was the period of the final examinations, and there was the examination in William James’ course. She sat down with the examination paper before her and she just could not. Dear Professor James, she wrote at the top of her paper. I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy to-day, and left.
“The next day she had a postal card from William James saying, Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel I often feel like that myself. And underneath it he gave her work the highest mark in his course.”
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Writers, Writing
Web of Facts
A wolf spider facing off against a honeybee. Now those are two worthy opponents, currently tussling in a cozy corner of the porch rail against a curtain of cicada racket.
A lot like me today confronting my article for the Times T Magazine, scrambling around within my web in an attempt to provide facts for the checkers in the research department. No, the metaphor is not perfect. But it is amazing that for this breezy story of 1,000 words (really an excuse for a lavish design pictorial) I can dish up 48 annotations. A far cry from book publishing, when it is hoped you know your stuff but no one has the interest/time? to challenge you.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Writing
Word Game
A fill in the blanks poetry writing game: the “adjective–concrete noun-of-abstract noun.” Gil suggests the “fat phonograph of lust.”
I suggest the “twinkling morning glories of bliss.” What can you come up with?
The Garden Today
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Poetry, Writing
Wilde Child
Late summer: sunflowers hanging their tiger cub heads, cicadas in full throat, ripe tomatoes slumping to the ground. And I just finished the article I’ve been working on for the Times, so I’m happy. It’s about a brownstone on the upper east side whose owners worked for seven years to restore it to its high Aesthetic era appearance — that’s the 1880s to those of you who are not Oscar Wilde devotees. Wilde himself toured the U.S. in 1882 promoting the Aesthetic Movement and shocked people with his sunflower-boutonniere. The interior of the house I wrote about is actually pretty shocking as well, so stuffed with an elegant chaos of wallpapers and gothic furniture, portieres and floor urns that it is hard for the eye to even take in. I’ve never seen a house like it. But wonderful in its own way. I’ll give a link when the article runs.
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Filed under Art, Fashion, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Photography, Writing
House of Mirth
Spicy chocolate ice cream wasn’t my only reward for visiting with the folks at Ventfort Hall in Lenox, Massachusetts (50 people attended, and they seemed enthusiastic about my picture-talk on Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance).
Today I visited The Mount, Edith Wharton’s gem of a home nearby. I’ve been there before but it has been seriously spruced up in the meantime and most of her library has been reclaimed at auction (at grave financial risk to the organization that owned the house, but it all turned out okay), so the experience wowed me all the more. Gil and Maud fell under the place’s spell as well. The house is all clean lines and airiness and balance, designed by Wharton in conjunction with two different architects, and there is nary a Victorian wallpaper in the joint. It is as if all that 19th century fustiness simply blew away when the dial hit 1900 (The Mount went up in 1902).
Fans of The House of Mirth (like me) will foam at the mouth when they see the early pages of the novel spread out over the bed in Wharton’s sunlit bedroom.
House of Mirth Draft
Yes, Wharton wrote propped up in bed every morning, casually casting aside her finished pages as she went. She actually had photos posed with her sitting at a desk with inkwell and paper, thinking it more dignified, but the truth is she stayed prone, warmed by the little dogs she loved.
The Wharton Dogs
To enter her room and be able to get that close to genius! People were looking so I couldn’t lie down on the bed.
Ghosts have been glimpsed in the house. The only sign I saw of one was in the bathroom adjoining the bedroom where Wharton’s single houseguests found accommodation. Henry James, who occupies the apex of literary achievement, for me, visited frequently when he came over from Europe. Here is the bathtub into which the Master would have lowered his robust, aristocratic frame. I think I saw a wisp of something ghostly, but maybe it was some stray moisture from the faucet…
The Henry James Honorary Bathtub
The veranda offers an exquisite view of the grounds (as well as iced tea and salad), and might well have been the location for James’ comment as remembered by Wharton: “Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
And while that is one of the most beautiful statements ever made, James was so full of wordly wisdom I might as well offer another:
“We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, Writers, Writing
PW Reviews Orphanmaster Audio
I go away for a few days and come back to this lovely review of The Orphanmaster on cd, as performed by George Guidall. George is a total pro and deserving of every accolade. I listened to the whole set through and it sounded so fresh it was as if I hadn’t even written the thing!
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing
Write the Book
A link to a radio interview I did recently on a Vermont show called “Write the Book.” I liked Shelagh Shapiro, she was a perceptive host.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing
Love, Fiercely Chocolate
Lake Mahkeenac, aka Stockbridge Bowl, lies down a long slope of woods from the Kripalu Institute, aka the site of the fabled Shadowbrook, the 100 room Stokes mansion completed here in Lenox in 1893. On the Lake, the Mahkeenac Boat Club is basically unchanged since that earlier era and reached only via a discreet driveway and a walk through pine-fragranced woods. The little sailboats have names like Moth, Hermes and Sprite.
Another relic of the Gilded Age offered me a podium and a slide projector this afternoon for what they call a talk and tea. Ventfort Hall, ever more shored up and scrubbed, held a crowd with a very serious interest in the Stokes clan and whatever local associations with the Minturn family could be dug up. There were even some Stokes descendants who could proudly say Well, when great grandfather built that house…
There were cucumber sandwiches out on the sweeping veranda. I was glad we had decided not to invite Oliver on this jaunt. He detests cucumber.
I ended the evening at the ice cream parlor with an experience that would have caused the Victorians to keel over. Chocolate ice cream with a kick of cayenne, causing my tongue to melt just a bit as I gobbled it down. Hot and icy, sweet and savory at once, that’s a prescription for poetry.
Tomorrow, toes in the Stockbridge Bowl– then another bowl of some surprising ice cream. Lavendar and honey? Parfumiers would approve.
Filed under Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, Publishing, Writing
Under Construction
Swimming in Lake Michigan is like swimming in the Atlantic and taking a shower at the same time. And drinking a glass of water as you go. We had a chance to stretch out on the sand this morning after the Original Pancake House and before Interstate 94.
Last night at The Book Stall in Winnetka was cozy and great, a few people I knew — including a woman I hadn’t seen since we were girls shovel-scraping together on a summer archaeological dig so many years ago! — and a bunch who were new to me. (The store was ranked #1 indie book store by Publishers Weekly for 2012.)
I like talking to a combination of people who had read The Orphanmaster or had not, taking them by the hand and showing them some of the oddities of European culture in Dutch New Amsterdam in the old days, New York before it was called New York. And I’m finding that quite a few people have read not only the novel but Love, Fiercely. Tonight in my talk at Boswell’s, in Milwaukee, I’ll be talking about both books and the differences between writing fiction and nonfiction. The event’s at 7pm if you happen to be in the neighborhood.
Our hotel in Milwaukee is the only thing in the neighborhood not being rebuilt; we’re surrounded by dirt and earth moving machinery and jack hammers. Restful if you’re in a certain mood.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing
Marrow Bones
“I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms. If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world. Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.”
(Henry David Thoreau, 1817 – 1862)
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Writers, Writing
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