Alexandra Bowie – Brooklyn Bugle

Downton Abbey and Books

January 12, 2012

As someone who grew up reading classics after watching the Masterpiece Theatre versions (“Cousin Bette,” in particular, got me started on Balzac) I was very taken by today’s article in the New York Times about publishers efforts to tie new releases into the series. Naturally, I was looking for my own favorite World War I novels. The best one not listed is “Birdsong” by Sebastian Faulks, about a British soldier’s affair with a French woman but highly memorable for its description of a sapper‘s life in the trenches.

What’s your favorite? Let us know in the comments. Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “This Beautiful Life” by Helen Schulman

December 30, 2011

In “This Beautiful Life” Helen Schulman takes on a story of youthful illusion and treachery. The Bergamots, mother, father, teenaged son and kindergarten daughter, move to New York City from Ithaca, New York. Richard, the father, has taken on a high-profile job overseeing the development of an area of Harlem by a near-by world-class university. Jake, 15 ½ and Coco, 6, attend the Upper and Lower Divisions, respectively, of the Wildwood School. Liz, the mother, manages everyone’s lives. One night, Jake stays up in Riverdale, where the Upper School is located, to attend a party. The party is unchaperoned, and Jake hooks up with a girl a couple of years younger than he is. After the party, she sends him an explicit video that, because of Jake, goes viral. The many ensuing complications put the marriage and all the relationships in the family to the test.

Schulman does a tremendous job of showing the variety of ways the family’s relationships are found wanting. Liz realizes over and over the different ways in which she may have failed her kids, while Richard, the father, retreats into a hearty but increasingly fragile vision of success. Liz, a latecomer to the rarefied world of New York City private schools, often fails to understand the ambiguous cues for parental behavior. Schulman also suggests, early on, that there was a moment when Liz could have prevented the calamity, but, distracted by a hangover and Coco’s needs, does not.

Another motif is the wide gap between New York City’s haves and its have-mores. The Bergamots are not themselves in the 1%; Liz is a stay-at-home mom (albeit one with a Ph.D. in art history) and Richard works for a not-for-profit university. Through the children’s school, they meet and mingle with the 1%. Late in the book, Richard has a chance to move to an investment banking firm. Schulman explicitly evokes “The Great Gatsby” (among other ironies, the 13-year-old is named Daisy), perhaps best when Liz stands on an East Side block waiting for Coco to be released from kindergarten for the day. The book is a telling illustration of one of “Gatsby’s” great lessons, that a moment of carelessness can change several people’s lives forever.

“This Beautiful Life” offers a persuasive view of a particular swath of New York City life. Is it too close for comfort? Too far away to be credible? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life” by Ann Beattie

December 16, 2011

What to make of this curious book, Ann Beattie’s beautifully written new release? There’s clearly a lot of imagination at work here, and the work is based on significant research. But, Beattie points out, “[B]ooks are always about the author, however well or badly hidden, as well as being about the books’ subject.” Beattie uses her various motifs–nicknames, dialogue, character, description–as jumping-off points for writerly exegeses. The book carries as its epigraph an anecdote about the 1960 Nixon campaign bus leaving Mrs. Nixon behind, and then raises questions. Did the need to collect Mrs. Nixon irritate the candidate? Were there repercussions for the staffer who told the driver to move out? What did Mrs. Nixon have to say about it? Whether Beattie answers the questions she raises, or even intended to answer them, is another story.

There’s no plot to summarize. Beattie first lists “Mrs. Nixon’s Nicknames, Including her Code Name as First Lady,” then goes on to tell a story about her uncommunicativeness during the 1968 presidential campaign, but suggests several possible lines of what she might have been thinking. The next chapter is an extended discussion on the importance of stories in conveying a character, as if Beattie were synthesizing several of her best lectures. Other scenes—Mrs. Nixon’s mother’s early death, Pat Nixon’s community theatre experiences—are jumping off points for further discussions of writers and writing. When you think about it, the arrangement makes sense. It’s just that it tells us more about Beattie than about Mrs. Nixon. And that, ultimately, is the point.

So the book is a little bit of memoir, a lot of reflections on writers and writing, and some fictional interpolations. In her introduction, Beattie says, “I imagine dialogue to which I had no access . . .In some cases, factual events are used only as points of departure, which should become clear; those times I write fiction will be recognizable as such.” Well, not quite. In my favorite episode, My Meeting with Mrs. Nixon, Beattie describes a perfectly plausible chance meeting in the shoe department of Woodward & Lothrop.

The Vietnam War was going on and on and on. That totally left my mind, that day. There seemed no larger context than Mrs. Nixon and Tricia and their coats and bags and . . . the fact that she was trying on the same shoes I was! These were not Mrs. Nixon shoes . . .
“No?” she said, turning her foot sideways.
She was speaking to me. And I was sitting there with the same shoes on both feet, not standing to try them out because I was so mesmerized by her.
“We wore these in the forties, didn’t we?” she said to my mother.
. . .
A Secret Service agent picked up Tricia’s bag. Tricia looked at him briefly, wondering if he was hinting that they should leave. He stood there with the bag. Then Mrs. Nixon noticed what Tricia was noticing while at the same time noticing that we, too, looked at him, puzzled. And then all four of us smiled, understanding that this was a man who’d had enough of shopping. He just wanted to go.

It’s plausible, two women shopping with their daughters. It’s set just long enough ago that even though you think that the Secret Service would shut down the entire store now, then they might not have. There are a lot of details. And the bonding of the four women over the impatience of the male Secret Service agent is brilliant.

Except that the next chapter is headed “I Didn’t Meet Her.” And begins: “But you wanted me to have met her, didn’t you?” And she’s right, I did. That playful, feminine story humanized the silent Mrs. Nixon in a way that nothing else I’ve read or remember really has. It’s a useful lesson in critical reading and successful writing.

Mrs. Nixon remains an enigma at the end of the book; Ann Beattie less so. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. And check out my metrics blog.

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Events, Music

Bach in the Heights, December 11

December 12, 2011

It’s not easy to assemble a group of professional musicians, rehearse, and perform a complex musical work like Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio,” and it’s even harder to do it during the holiday season, but that’s precisely what Edward Houser managed on Sunday, December 11. The concert, held appropriately enough in the supple acoustics of the Zion German Evangelical Lutheran Church on Henry Street, was a splendid neighborhood treat.

The chamber chorus and orchestra (17 singers, 20 instruments) produced a rich, full sound. Mechanical issues made the ensemble a little shaky at first, but as the performers relaxed the ensemble grew stronger. The lovely chorale “Ehre sei dir, Gott, gesungen” best illustrated the group’s ability to display the technical intricacies of the music. Arias went to different singers; the variety of soloists meant a variety of sounds and styles, and each was interesting. Several soloists, in particular the bass James Ioelu and the mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis, were outstanding. Among the musicians, Peter Velikonja, the first oboeist, James Grasek, violin, and Paul Dwyer, cello and continuo were stalwarts.

Edward Houser has promised to make Bach in the Heights a regular event. Sign up for the mailing list at bachintheheights@yahoo.com, or follow Bach in the Heights on Facebook and Twitter (@BachinBrooklyn) for more information.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club, “A Meaningful Life,” by L.J. Davis

December 9, 2011

Lowell Lake, just graduated from Stanford University in the early 1960s, gets married right after college graduation. On a whim, he turns down a graduate scholarship to Berkeley, and moves with his new wife to New York City. He tries writing a novel; when that doesn’t work out, he becomes the managing editor of a plumbing trade publication. He drifts apart from his wife, but saves his money for several years.

And in about 1970 he buys a house in Brooklyn. The house, a crumbling mansion on the Fort Greene section of Washington Avenue, is home to any number of poor tenants: drug users, illegal immigrants, and more. Despite his discomfort as the rare white man walking the streets of Fort Greene, Lowell single-handedly takes on the decay of New York. He throws out the many tenants. He demolishes partitions, and hires contractors to strip and restore the house. Obsessed with his house, Lowell tries to protect it from squatters. Disasters, only some of them predictable to homeowners, ensue.

Reading the book now, 40 years after its publication, when Brooklyn is hip and New York City has rebounded, is revelatory. Davis enmeshes the reader in Lowell’s pioneering efforts at gentrification. He describes but doesn’t comment on Lowell’s casual displacement of poor black and Hispanic tenants. Davis paints a lovely portrait of a mid-century New York woman, Lowell’s mother-in-law (to be, when we meet her). It’s clear to us she’s Jewish, but Lowell misses that entirely. It’s as good a portrait of a member of an oblivious majority culture as I’ve read. In his introduction, Jonathan Lethem, who grew up down the street from Davis, says that the early Brownstoners “set the groundwork for the disaster and triumph of Brooklyn’s slow-motion gentrification, so full of social implications and ethical paradoxes.” We’re still living with the ramifications.

No matter how or where we develop—Atlantic Yards, downtown Brooklyn, Fourth Avenue—someone is going to be displaced. On the other hand, we get to live here. Please read the book first. Then discuss in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. And check out my other blog about metrics.

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Arts and Entertainment, Events

Patrick Madden show opening December 15 at Make a Frame

December 4, 2011

Patrick Madden, a New York City and Staatsburg, New York based painter, will have his first Brooklyn show starting December 15 at Make a Frame, 180 Atlantic Avenue. Madden has previously had one-man shows in San Francisco, Istanbul, and New York City. Madden says, about his work, ““My aim is to make an emotionally accurate depiction of a moment. What did that moment feel like? When I paint the Brooklyn Bridge, I think of all the things I feel about her — what I feel about Brooklyn, the men who built that bridge, my cab rides home, the walk that night. I want a physically accurate jumping off point–something recognizable, something that Roebling would agree with–and then motion. A representation in the paint and the colors of how I feel–all the things I feel–about that bridge.”

The show will remain up until December 20. Make a Frame and Gates-Anderson Company are hosting an opening reception on December 15 from 6-8 pm. RSVP to Caroline Anderson at caroline@gates-anderson.com.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson

December 1, 2011

Charismatic, volatile, mercurial. Genius. These are just some of the adjectives Walter Isaacson applies to Steve Jobs in his lively and entertaining biography. In Isaacson’s description, Jobs was driven to seek perfection in his company’s products through simplicity, and ease of use through elegant design both inside and out. Jobs managed to project an aura of countercultural rebellion while building what became, just before his death in October, the most valuable company in the world. Apple product launches, and Isaacson describes them vividly, were cultural events, to the extent that Occupy Wall Street’s communications center had many Macs and the occupiers didn’t see the products of the world’s most valuable corporation as part of the same system they were protesting.

The general outlines of the story are well known. Jobs’ mother gave him up for adoption almost immediately after he was born; he was brought up outside of San Francisco by Paul and Clara Jobs. He dropped out of Reed College after a year, then, with Steve Wozniak, founded Apple Computer in his parents’ garage in 1976. Kicked out of the company in 1985, he returned 12 years later with the Pixar hit “Toy Story” under his belt, and moved from triumph to triumph: iTunes and the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, and the iPad in 2010. Not to mention the iMacs (yes, I’m using one to write this review).

Jobs was clearly not an easy man, and Isaacson documents over and over again what he calls in the introduction Jobs’ “reality distortion field”—an ability to bend situations to his very strong will. Jobs yelled, screamed, threw tantrums, told people their work sucked. He was not nice in the least. He shut down emotionally, and he perfected a stare that intimidated. “Remove and focus. Simplify.” Running the company this way served Jobs well in many circumstances—the products are the best example—but at other times may have hurt him, as he tended to ignore facts he couldn’t control, like bad news about his health.

Jobs’ insistence on making a closed product—Apple’s from top to bottom—meant that Jobs could exist happily at what Isaacson calls the nexus of technology and creativity. Jobs also controlled Apple’s board of directors. Isaacson is able to describe Jobs’ bad behavior sympathetically, making a request for an airplane instead of stock options look graceful, until Jobs asked for stock options also (he got them). Isaacson explains without justifying the backdated stock options in 2001-02. Isaacson sums up Job’s ambivalence: “Jangling within him were the contradictions of a counterculture rebel turned business entrepreneur, someone who wanted to believe that he had turned on and tuned in without having sold out and cashed in.”

Isaacson does not go into great technical detail about the development of the various electronics; he’s much more interested in the person. Jobs cooperated with, but did not try to control, this biography. Isaacson mostly stays away from the complex family life. But there’s still some romantic history. Before he was married, Jobs had a romance with Joan Baez, and another with the novelist Jennifer Egan while she was still an undergraduate. (Coincidentally, I read “The Invisible Circus” at the same time I read the biography. I kept looking for the Jobs character and eventually found him on page 332:

Barry’s office building was . . . sprawling and flat, full of glass and light and dozens of the sleek, unapproachable computers, which Barry and his colleagues handled with the same rough ease they might use to operate a sink. There was a grand piano, plus two massive refrigerators stocked with exotic juices. . . Barry’s authority seemed effortless.

Exotic juices figure in several of Isaacson’s Apple descriptions.) And a great rivalry gets its due: Bill Gates appears over and over in the book, the well-behaved older brother to Jobs’ creative and rebellious younger one. They alternately competed and cooperated, and Isaacson movingly describes a final visit between them last summer. I suspect there’s more to the Gates/Jobs story than has yet been told, but this is an intriguing beginning.

Generally following a chronology, Isaacson moves deftly to thematic discussions when necessary. “Steve Jobs” is an eminently readable biography that ably captures an era and one of its key figures.

Which Apple product would you take to a desert island (assume you can recharge it)? Discuss in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: Books for Kids

November 25, 2011

If you are not out shopping today, and are looking for something to do, why not spend a little time clearing out your bookcases? Books for Kids, a project of the Legal Aid Society’s Juvenile Rights Practice is looking for books for teen-aged and young adult clients.

Books for Kids is an innovative project designed to promote literacy for children involved in Family Court cases in New York city. . . Books for Kids provides some of New York’s most vulnerable children and families with opportunities to read and own their own books. Books for Kids is the only literacy program specifically targeting children who are involved in the New York City Family Court system.

To arrange your donation, contact:

Brooklyn: Lisa Podemski, lpodemski@legal-aid.org, (718) 237-3100 or (718) 250-4505

Manhattan: (646) 597-4402 or (646) 597-4428

Queens: (718) 298-8910 or (718) 298-8944

Bronx: (718) 578-7950

Staten Island: (347) 422-5317 or (347) 422-5316

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “A Visit from the Goon Squad” and “The Invisible Circus” by Jennifer Egan

November 18, 2011

I admit to letting “A Visit from the Goon Squad” sit on my night table for several months after I bought it. “Look at Me” is a terrific book, but “The Keep” is less successful, though I admired Egan’s experiments with form. What I’d heard about “Goon Squad” was that some people loved it and some people hated it. There was no middle ground, it seemed.

Once I started it, I found “A Visit from the Goon Squad” to be a fascinating book with an expertly achieved structure. “Goon Squad” tells the story of Sasha, assistant to an aging record producer, Bennie, the record producer, and his friends. A few other people, like Bennie’s ex-wife, a publicist, and Sasha’s daughter Alison figure in it too. Told from shifting perspectives, sometimes in first person, sometimes in third, once in the second, every chapter layers what we’ve learned from earlier chapters, or colors that knowledge with depth and nuance. Sometimes the next chapter provides the adjacent narrative but other times it moves forward or back in time, or to another place entirely. One chapter is set in the future when school children are taught to write power points only. (Alison is able to convey plenty of meaning with her pauses.) The book is more complex to describe than to read, though reading it does take some concentration. It’s a good book for a plane or a convalescent (someone who’s in the second or third week after surgery).

When I finished it, I decided to read “The Invisible Circus,” Egan’s first novel, published in 1995. That book tells the story of 18-year-old Phoebe, who goes to Europe as soon as she is done with high school, hoping to find out the truth of her older sister Faith’s death. Unlike the subsequent novels, it’s a straightforward narrative, so accomplished it’s hard to believe it’s a first novel. It’s prescient, too—Egan describes the 1960s as “all about watching ourselves happen. . . This incredible feeling, standing outside, seeing the thing unfold. Like tripping. I remember thinking, Shit, this is going to be huge. Whatever it is.” It turned out to be is the publicly lived life, with social media Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare keeping everyone in the loop. (Though now that I have learned that Jennifer Egan dated Steve Jobs while she was in college, maybe she had a peek at the future. More about that next week, when I review Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs.)

What did you think of “A Visit From the Goon Squad”? Love it or hate it, or feel somewhere in between about it? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics.

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