Authors Lounging

posted by Pearl Abraham

My friend Patricia (author of the very sexy and musical Mambo Peligroso) and I were overdue for one of our regular lounge sessions, and although the timing wasn’t right–we usually meet at 3 in the afternoon since we’re both writers without regular jobs (also without regular salaries) and this should be one of the perks–because Patricia didn’t get out of work until 6 and was tired after a long day, we met anyway. This time we went to the lounge of The Hudson Hotel, located precisely at the halfway point between us, and caught up on books, bags, boyfriends, then went straight from the b’s to p, for psychics, because Patricia had not only had a reading done, she was also advised to become a psychic herself and finance the writing of her next project with the proceeds.

Here’s what we could have been, but weren’t, doing: We could have attended the “Lolita at 50” event at the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, or heard Neil Gaiman talk about Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange… at the Thalia. This brought up the question of whether writers should attend readings, read the NYTBR, Amazon rankings and customer reviews. One ICM agent’s advice to his client, a young Hollywood actress, goes something like this:

Racehorses wear blinkers. They don’t look to the left or right at the other horses. They’re focused only on their own singular path to glory.

Of course, writers are not racehorses, or Hollywood actresses.

I was happier when I published Monkey King (1997), Patricia said, since I didn’t yet know about Amazon rankings and reviews. I could still focus, not on sales, but on the goodness of having the book published, of having completed a project.

The Amazon customer reviews, we both agree, should be abolished since they’re rigged either way. The positive reviews are written by family and friends (and some writers have more than others), the negative ones by the School of Resentment made up of ex-boyfriends, ex-students, writers who couldn’t finish or publish their manuscripts. In my case, the reviewers are also resentful young women who have either found religion or can’t get away from it, and much of the writing is confused and misinformed. The good reader reading for the right reasons is not desperate for the public forum that Amazon provides, and, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, Amazon does not screen for inappropriate comments, plot details revealed, etc.

On the NYTBR, Brian Morton (A Window Across the River) wrote that everyone is happier when he doesn’t read it. I read the book reviews, Patricia says, when I am about to or have just published. But the NYTBR has changed. It used to be worthy reading. I used to think of it as a weekend treat and read it cover to cover and came away feeling that I had learned something about literature.

I agree. Given what it has become, the Book Review is now merely a “book announcer” and should be referred to as the NYTBA.

The New Yorker’s Books in Brief section is still okay, Patricia says, but I can no longer read John Updike on other writers. He’s gotten so strange.

He’s gone off the rails, I agree. Last year, in his review of Alter’s translation of the Five Books of Moses, Updike ridiculed the Bible for its archaisms (as if the New Testament is free of them) and criticized the Jews for the Israel-Palestine conflict, neither of which had anything to do with the translation at hand. Perhaps he was on his third margarita and tipsy, as we are just now, but the piece had, dare I say it, a generous dollop of old-fashioned wasp anti-Semitism. Astonishingly, this went unremarked.

This morning, Patricia wrote: It did my heart good. A little lounging is better than none. I think of our time together as one long lounge, and last night was a small piece of it.

20 September 2005 | uncategorized |

Celebrating the Reader

posted by Pearl Abraham

It’s the beginning of my week as Beatrice.com co-host, and with the paperback of The Seventh Beggar just out, I’ll begin with this letter from a reader (with her permission):

Dear Pearl Abraham,

Aside from learning from, and loving, your latest novel, “The Seventh Beggar,” I have to tell you how startlingly weird it was for me to reach the part on the “Winterfox” Festival in the Berkshires, including the reproduced schedule with Sugar Hill Records’ artists featured on the main stage. I understand your inclusion of a music festival, the seven-day creation myth recreated in this way, using fantasy and reality, side by side. What a strange collision of cultures, indeed.

However, my personal interest has to do with Sugar Hill Records, itself, which is based in Durham, North Carolina, my hometown. The founder/owner of Sugar Hill Records is an old friend of mine, and I actually worked for him briefly some years back. How could I resist alerting him to the mention of Sugar Hill in your new novel, which he found to be a “chasidic shocker”! He immediately went out & bought your book, and says all your information is accurate about the former Berkshire Mountain Bluegrass Festival. He then got in touch with the director of the Festival, who is a friend of his, to see if she knew about this citation in your book. He just emailed me that he heard back from the director, who says she doesn’t know you.

So, I’m just writing to tell you that we’re all curious about your choice of this Festival, and your interest in Sugar Hill Records. Needless to say, we’re delighted, but would like to know if you’ve been to the Festival; if you know any of the performers. I loved “The Romance Reader,” too.

Thanks for your time.

Susan Naumoff
(of Latvian & Belarus Jewish heritage)

Pearl Abraham’s response:

I have a farmhouse in Ancramdale, NY (Columbia County) and every summer, in the third week of July, the Rothvoss hilltop several miles north of me becomes a temporary village, with tents and teepees and parked campers just visible over the treeline. For days leading up to the festival, the not-altogether-welcome traffic on my rural road (which normally gets about a car an hour) comes in an assortment of RVs, SUVs, campers, old cadillacs, Vanagons, etc. I was writing The Seventh Beggar, with its themes of creation, origin myths, originality, and storytelling, one July, when once again the festival got going and I was thinking about the attraction to such events, the way it harks back to Mircea Eliade’s (Myth and Reality) ideas about the human need for re-enactment rituals of our shared origin myths. One thing led to another, and the local bluegrass festival made its way into my novel. Since the Hasidic characters of the book aren’t bluegrass musicians they take the idea and run with it, in other words, they transform the bluegrass festival into a Hasidic storytelling festival.

The first summer I spent in Ancramdale, I won a free pass to the festival from Oblong Books in Millerton, and got to see and hear Alison Krauss, among others. I now have a CD collection of bluegrass music, and a favorite, Dolly Parton’s Halos and Horns, is from Sugar Hill Records. I love her bluegrass rendition of “Stairway to Heaven,” and play it, according to Stephen (my Mr. Beatrice), much too often.

I will be reading from The Seventh Beggar on Wednesday, September 21st, 7:30pm, at B&N, 8th Street at 6th Aveneue. Introducing me will be Charles Honart, another reader (now a friend) who contacted me, rather than the usual editor or novelist/friend.

18 September 2005 | uncategorized |