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February 28, 2005

LORRIE MOORE READING - A REPORT

We were unable to attend Lorrie Moore's Friday night reading at the Hammer, but fellow Zoe-er Alicia Gifford was on hand and left a detailed account in the comments section.  She was kind enough to send us along this slightly more detailed version, which we promote to full post herewith.

The UCLA Hammer Museum was packed for Lorrie Moore. She read two selections: the first from a novel-in-progress, which was funny and very Lorrie. The working title of the novel is The Gate at the Top of the Stairs, or something close, she's not sure.

The second selection was "The Juniper Tree", the story that appeared in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, one of her shorter (shortest?) stories at nine pages. It's a ghost story based on a vivid dream she had when a friend of hers died, Nietzchka Keene, who directed a 1987 film entitled "The Juniper Tree" (aha!) starring a 19 year old Bjork, filmed in Iceland, and based on a grim (I’m not kidding) Brothers Grimm fairy tale (although, from the Go Figure Department, the synopsis of the film and the text of the story have nothing to do with one another. More research needed but not by this girlfriend).

Lorrie's story, "The Juniper Tree" is dream-based; not fairy tale or friend's-film-based, but she said what they all had in common was a theme of sexual jealousy. A juniper tree makes an appearance in the story in the dead friend's fairy-tale-esque garden, and juniper berries are evoked in the lust for gin the characters in the story have.

After the reading, moderator Mona Simpson, (who had introduced Lorrie as an old Yaddo buddy) and Lorrie sat down in easy chairs for the post-reading chat. Mona asked Lorrie about her "process", to which Lorrie said that she really has no "process". She said she never learned to be disciplined because in the early days of her writing, she was consumed with it; she wrote obsessively, morning, noon and night, so she never developed a disciplined "process". She said in her earlier years she produced 3 to 4 short stories per year; now, she produces about 1 per year, and she’s been "working on a novel" for an unspecified long time. She also said she prints out many, many drafts of her stories in an environmentally unconscious way, and when asked about humor, she said humor is an "ear" thing; that with humor, rhythm and timing are everything. Lorrie also mentioned "teacher burn out" when talking about her 24 years of teaching, but added she's very fond of her students.

I’m grateful Mona Simpson didn’t ask whether "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" was autobiographical. I wince to think how annoying that question must be.

Lorrie Moore is an icon of mine, her work inspired me to earnestly start plucking at a keyboard myself after being introduced to it by Tod Goldberg who assigned "Your Ugly, Too" in the first fiction class I ever took, Fiction I at UCLA Extension (Tod is a GREAT teacher). I've unabashedly adored her since (what else could plunge me into Friday night L.A. traffic?), but, alas, "The Juniper Tree" is my least favorite story. It feels dream-based, all right, stiff, contrived and loony in a not-good way, and ends with a Soupy Sales pie in the face. But it was great to hear Lorrie again, and I like her hair (she's let it grow since I saw her at the first Tin House Summer Workshop), and I'm picking up my tattered Birds of America to immerse myself once again into her story worlds.

Thanks, Alicia!

Posted at 12:29 AM |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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