Gotham Diary:
TK
20 June 2013
Having done everything that I had to do, with plenty of time before dressing for the evening, I sat and listened to the end of Fiona Shaw’s reading of Emma, which had beguiled an hour or two of housework. Then it hit me that I’d neglected to write my daily entry.
There is a good deal on my mind, but it is rippled by preparations for another Friday-night picnic. This isn’t so much a matter of making dishes as it is one of doing so without breaking a sweat (given the season, I speak figuratively). I am determined not to hustle. I am also determined to have a picnic almost every Friday night in the summer, even if Kathleen and I are the only picnickers. We are reveling in the balcony. Today, a cushion arrived for one of the benches, and two boxes of papyrus plants from White Flower Farm. Why papyrus? Then I’d have to kill you.
So I can’t decide whether to write about James Salter here, or at the old blog. I hate disliking a good writer’s work, but that is what it has come to with Salter, and James Meek’s encomia in the LRB go a long way to explaining why. I’ll get to that eventually, because it really is on my mind. But my thoughts are also rippled by the evening’s prospect: a members’ preview at the Museum, and for two shows, the roof garden and the punk. I have no interest in the punk, none whatever; the very idea of punk revolts me. It’s nothing but rudeness, and the look of it makes me wince with pain. (Surely the pose is uncomfortable?) No, I’d much rather spend the evening at the Roof Garden. I don’t know what I think of Imran Qureshi’s installation (the painted floor), but it has the welcome side effect of opening up the space for a change, with unimpeded vistas from almost every spot. (What a change from Big Bambú!) I’d head over to the Museum right now, but I’m waiting for Kathleen to pick me up in a taxi, so that we can go together, with our one invitation to get in the door.
I linked (at the old blog) to an interview that Rachel Kushner gave The Millions, but I didn’t call attention to her interesting comment about Flaubert (to whom critic James Wood compared her). “I am still mulling the fact,” she said, “that Flaubert created a seminal mode of realism (emulated by most writers since), in order to skewer bourgeois values (a topic only taken up by some).” I will never understand skewering bourgeois values, except as a childishness, because in order to do the skewering you have to be pretty bourgeois yourself, however desperately you attempt, as Flaubert did, to set yourself up as an aristocrat of art — quite as ridiculous as Emma Bovary’s pretensions. Every time somebody talks about Flaubert’s “seminal” achievements, I am very glad that I got over the idea of writing a novel myself.
Fiona Shaw’s reading of Emma is delightful, as you might expect, but it’s very curious that her impersonations of Miss Bates and Mrs Elton are so close, at least to my ears, to those of Sophie Thompson and Juliet Stevenson in the Douglas McGrath adaptation, the one starring Gwyneth Paltrow — whom Ms Shaw does not call to mind. Which reminds me: Juliet Stevenson still holds the cup for Most Diverting reading: if you’re looking for a good time, let her tell you Lady Audley’s Secret. It’s as exciting as a circus!
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