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Francine Prose
Jul. 7th, 2018 10:28 amBB sent me a note about a reading at Oblong Books. A writer named Francine Prose.
I’d never heard of her, but who can resist a writer named Francine Prose? She’s a goddamn Dickens heroine, right? Like Scrooge (“screw” being English Victorian slang for “miser”) or Miss Havisham (“have-is-sham”) or Mr. Merdle (the financier in Little Dorrit whose name is an obvious wordplay on the French word for shit.)
The morning’s rain had resolved itself into a lovely afternoon, but I was holed up inside the house because (1) Scut Factory and (2) maternal frustration.
I had to force myself to go to Francine Prose’s reading.
Robin will do what Robin will do, I lectured myself.
And:
If a road trip falls through, just accept the fact that the Universe is nudging you toward a different road trip. Maybe Newport Beach at the end of July?
###
Rhinebeck on a late summer afternoon is just lovely. Like a little Swiss town.
One of the peculiar ways that anxiety and frustration manifest in me is that I always end up feeling overly large. Positively Brobdingnagian. So that if I so much as move, I’ll break everything in front of me.
Big and ugly, I seated myself amongst the rows of chairs in the bookstore.
Judging from the other audience members, Francine Prose’s chief appeal was to elderly Vestal virgins.
(That thought precipitated a moment of panic: Am I an elderly Vestal virgin?)
Francine Prose herself is a woman of indeterminate age with that Susan Sontag look: long dark hair parted in the middle; impassive face; very trendy glasses, which she took off when she spoke directly to the audience. Nerves, I guess.
She read this passage from her new book, What to Read and Why:
In the spring of 2001, on the final night of a German book tour during which I had become convinced that, evening after evening, in city after city, I was reading to a group of catatonics who had been bussed from the local mental hospital, I was staying at an appropriately eccentric hotel on a hilltop high above Zurich. The hotel—founded (or so I was told) in the previous century by a group of Swiss women’s-temperance health nuts who had arranged matters so that twenty-first-century guests still couldn’t get a drink—seemed like the perfect culmination of a Kafkaesque travel experience.
It was late. My husband and I were flying home the next morning, and we couldn’t sleep. We flipped through the TV channels, past the badly dubbed Steven Seagal action films and the ultra-boring, deliciously pompous French talk shows, until at last we found an “adult” station broadcasting from Bavaria that seemed to offer some promise.
First came a slide show of blonde women, built like Wagnerian heroines, with escort service phone numbers bannered across their prodigious breasts.
This menu of local beauties was followed by a film clip. In the film, two go-go girls were dancing in a bar, both blonde and shirtless, both with a zombie-like affect, both wearing tiny leather miniskirts, which they kept lifting up as they danced, and under which they were naked. This went on for quite a while, skirts up, skirts down, until it became as tedious as the French talk shows, only seedier and more depressing.
Except that there was one interesting… detail, you might say, an element that riveted our insomniac attention.
In the background, behind the dancing girls, was a recording playing over and over, of Martin Luther King delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Was the film erotic or pornographic? I would have to say: neither. It certainly didn’t seem to reflect some sexy, sensual welling up of the life force, and quite frankly—though you’ll need to take my word for it—after seeing the film, the last thing in the world that anyone (excepting, I suppose, a few Bavarian maniacs) would want to do was have sex.
###
Read aloud, this passage made me laugh so hard, I cried.
Combination of the subject matter and the prose style, I suppose: the weird little experience—the type of weirdness that only takes place very late at night when, for some reason, we are pumped and primed to consider Cosmic Implications—transposed against the didactic dissection of a fancy prose style.
She kinda writes like me, I thought; and this little thought gave me… well… hope. See? There are other people who speak my ridiculously obscure dialect!
I should have been a English major.
I should have built a writing career like Francine Prose did. One poorly received novel followed by another slightly better received novel until finally—after 20 novels—I’d made a little name for myself, taught English at Bard—the portal to Fillory!—gave readings to Vestal virgins at independent bookstores in quasi-European villages on luminous summer afternoons.
Oh, well.
Maybe in my next lifetime.
###
Anyway, I ended up buying What to Read and Why as well as Reading Like a Writer as well as a promising-looking horror novel called Broken Monsters, not by Francine Prose. Other people’s retail therapy is clothes they'll never wear, or sheets and towels they'll never use, or Taiwanese knockoffs of Louis Vuitton luggage; mine is books. No inherent virtue in that although, of course, I’d like to believe otherwise.
I'm gonna try to finish the Neversink story this weekend.
I’d never heard of her, but who can resist a writer named Francine Prose? She’s a goddamn Dickens heroine, right? Like Scrooge (“screw” being English Victorian slang for “miser”) or Miss Havisham (“have-is-sham”) or Mr. Merdle (the financier in Little Dorrit whose name is an obvious wordplay on the French word for shit.)
The morning’s rain had resolved itself into a lovely afternoon, but I was holed up inside the house because (1) Scut Factory and (2) maternal frustration.
I had to force myself to go to Francine Prose’s reading.
Robin will do what Robin will do, I lectured myself.
And:
If a road trip falls through, just accept the fact that the Universe is nudging you toward a different road trip. Maybe Newport Beach at the end of July?
###
Rhinebeck on a late summer afternoon is just lovely. Like a little Swiss town.
One of the peculiar ways that anxiety and frustration manifest in me is that I always end up feeling overly large. Positively Brobdingnagian. So that if I so much as move, I’ll break everything in front of me.
Big and ugly, I seated myself amongst the rows of chairs in the bookstore.
Judging from the other audience members, Francine Prose’s chief appeal was to elderly Vestal virgins.
(That thought precipitated a moment of panic: Am I an elderly Vestal virgin?)
Francine Prose herself is a woman of indeterminate age with that Susan Sontag look: long dark hair parted in the middle; impassive face; very trendy glasses, which she took off when she spoke directly to the audience. Nerves, I guess.
She read this passage from her new book, What to Read and Why:
In the spring of 2001, on the final night of a German book tour during which I had become convinced that, evening after evening, in city after city, I was reading to a group of catatonics who had been bussed from the local mental hospital, I was staying at an appropriately eccentric hotel on a hilltop high above Zurich. The hotel—founded (or so I was told) in the previous century by a group of Swiss women’s-temperance health nuts who had arranged matters so that twenty-first-century guests still couldn’t get a drink—seemed like the perfect culmination of a Kafkaesque travel experience.
It was late. My husband and I were flying home the next morning, and we couldn’t sleep. We flipped through the TV channels, past the badly dubbed Steven Seagal action films and the ultra-boring, deliciously pompous French talk shows, until at last we found an “adult” station broadcasting from Bavaria that seemed to offer some promise.
First came a slide show of blonde women, built like Wagnerian heroines, with escort service phone numbers bannered across their prodigious breasts.
This menu of local beauties was followed by a film clip. In the film, two go-go girls were dancing in a bar, both blonde and shirtless, both with a zombie-like affect, both wearing tiny leather miniskirts, which they kept lifting up as they danced, and under which they were naked. This went on for quite a while, skirts up, skirts down, until it became as tedious as the French talk shows, only seedier and more depressing.
Except that there was one interesting… detail, you might say, an element that riveted our insomniac attention.
In the background, behind the dancing girls, was a recording playing over and over, of Martin Luther King delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Was the film erotic or pornographic? I would have to say: neither. It certainly didn’t seem to reflect some sexy, sensual welling up of the life force, and quite frankly—though you’ll need to take my word for it—after seeing the film, the last thing in the world that anyone (excepting, I suppose, a few Bavarian maniacs) would want to do was have sex.
###
Read aloud, this passage made me laugh so hard, I cried.
Combination of the subject matter and the prose style, I suppose: the weird little experience—the type of weirdness that only takes place very late at night when, for some reason, we are pumped and primed to consider Cosmic Implications—transposed against the didactic dissection of a fancy prose style.
She kinda writes like me, I thought; and this little thought gave me… well… hope. See? There are other people who speak my ridiculously obscure dialect!
I should have been a English major.
I should have built a writing career like Francine Prose did. One poorly received novel followed by another slightly better received novel until finally—after 20 novels—I’d made a little name for myself, taught English at Bard—the portal to Fillory!—gave readings to Vestal virgins at independent bookstores in quasi-European villages on luminous summer afternoons.
Oh, well.
Maybe in my next lifetime.
###
Anyway, I ended up buying What to Read and Why as well as Reading Like a Writer as well as a promising-looking horror novel called Broken Monsters, not by Francine Prose. Other people’s retail therapy is clothes they'll never wear, or sheets and towels they'll never use, or Taiwanese knockoffs of Louis Vuitton luggage; mine is books. No inherent virtue in that although, of course, I’d like to believe otherwise.
I'm gonna try to finish the Neversink story this weekend.
