Warm Afghans

Today I went to the Met to see the exhibit Art and Love in Renaissance Italy. It exceeded my expectations, fusing art, history, and literature; visually, it was even more stimulating than I had expected. Plus, it had an unexpected sense of humor—who knew that fifteenth-century lovers found fruits and veggies so erotically humorous?

One of the most interesting items was a comb (part of a bride’s trousseau) painted with birds and a flaming heart—interesting to me, if only because poets of the time reportedly used the comb as a metaphor for desired intimacy. The exhibit was full of little literary tidbits like this, often referencing that famous sonnet-spinner Petrarch and his Triumphs. In fact, the gorgeous and allegorical “Combat of Love and Chastity” was inspired by the latter.

I somehow had never seen (or just didn’t remember) Pollaiuolo’s gorgeous “Apollo and Daphne,” pictured. (Daphne, of course, was transformed into a laurel tree after she begged to be freed from Apollo’s unwanted advances.) There’s something so smug, so complacent in her face—because she knows he can’t have her now, or because she doesn’t have to run anymore? This piece isn’t representative of the collection necessarily, but you can see other pieces on the Met’s site. Petrarch, too, was inspired by the myth of Apollo and Daphne and used a laurel tree as a symbol for unattainable love. (Totally random side note: Petrarch loved someone named Laura, which makes me think more of an ’80s mall rat, not a Renaissance muse. Regardless, I’m sure she was lovely. And hopefully didn’t have hairsprayed bangs.)

One room in the exhibit was devoted to widows. Apparently it was commonplace to have one’s portrait painted as a widow—clothed in black and looking somber, of course. I couldn’t decide what the modern equivalent for this might be, or if there is one. It seemed to be done out of respect. In fact, something about it overwhelmed me with the idea that widows were not only expected to grieve, but they had a responsibility to grieve. I assumed, then, that remarriage was frowned upon, but a quick Google book search says that it was actually quite common.

And, so, an excellent and highly recommended exhibit! See it. It’ll also teach you how to say in Italian: “I give you my hand/Give me the ring.” Not exactly useful, but if you like saying bossy things in foreign languages, totally for you.

I love Carrie Fisher for two reasons. First, she was in Star Wars, one of the greatest films of all time, and—even better—she got to play Princess Leia. Lucky gal.

Second, as she ages, she’s taken on this crazy-fun-old-aunt persona, which I absolutely adore. She’s funny and wise, and that’s why I asked for (and received!) her new book, Wishful Drinking, for Christmas. The cover, by the way, is genius.

The book itself is only slightly longer than a really long magazine article, and it’s pretty evident that it blossomed from her one-woman show. As many reviewers have criticized, it’s more a collection of one-liners than an in-depth memoir. That didn’t bother me so much in this instance, and I rather enjoyed the book. Fisher is witty and revealing and self-deprecating and everything else we expect her to be.

However (total dork alert), the copy errors troubled me! As I was reading it (on vacation in south Florida), I took notes on errors I found. (Shame, Simon & Schuster!) Of course, I lost that napkin somewhere between Fort Myers and New York. So here are two sentences that bothered me.

• Page 104, misuse of em dashes: “The first use of the word was in 1382—so I suppose prior to that there was either no way to put a name to one’s difficulties—or everyone lived in a world of different levels of inconvenience.”
• Page 121, first comma should be deleted: “Without the substances, I had used to distort and mask my symptoms, it was now all too clear that I was a bona fide, wild-ride manic-depressive.”

I had written down a few more examples, of course, but what do they matter? I’m probably the type of person who is preoccupied with these trivial details and would do better in life to overlook such things (except at work, for obvious reasons). If Ms. Fisher were here, she’d probably just say, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Marti,” and roll her eyes. I don’t blame her.

Sunday was the Brooklyn Book Festival, and I had Joan Didion on the brain. She was speaking on a political panel at 5 p.m., and since I’d never seen her speak before, I made sure to get in line early for the free tickets, which went quite fast. Then of course there was the line to get into the actual event, below, which turned out not to be so bad either.

Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, was somewhat funny because he insisted that the four panelists—Didion, Mark Danner, Ronald Dworkin, and Darryl Pinckney—issue a response regarding the presidential election alphabetically. I had expected more of a heated debate format among the four, but I enjoyed it anyway. Didion read a brief essay about story or narrative and how we, as a culture, delight in the “story” of Sarah Palin or the “story” of Barack Obama or John McCain, while suggesting that stories do nothing but “downplay the potential for trouble.” In other words, it’s easy to go on about narratives, but what are the real issues at stake? What do stories conceal? Stories, too, contribute to our amnesia, or (I rather enjoy the term) “national coma,” and Didion offered the example that 70 percent of eighth graders in America cannot read at an eighth-grade level.

But this stat, too, is clouded by stories—like Sarah Palin’s rags-to-riches tall tale. She succeeded by working hard, and so can you! Even if you go to a shitty school where no one can read! Anyone who still believes that America is a meritocracy is completely deluded. But perhaps I digress.

I also attended a conversation between A.M. Homes, who wrote one of my favorite short stories, “Adults Alone,” and Richard Price, a novelist who also writes for TV and film. They digressed—like a lot—but it was nonetheless an entertaining chat, and it made me want to read some of Price’s work. I learned that David Foster Wallace had passed away a couple of days before—sad, sad, sad—when Nathaniel Rich attempted an apologetic eulogy before his reading. And I finished the evening, waiting in yet another line, for Joan Didion to sign my hardcover of The White Album. I was pretty nervous, so I didn’t say anything except the usual pleasantries—Hi there! Thank you so much!—but I suppose those words were sufficient. She probably just wanted to get out of there at that point. Hell, I did too.

Jennifer Traig’s Well Enough Alone is not the kind of book I would have picked up on first sight. I am, quite frankly, kinda bored with memoirs. But as a lifelong hypochondriac, its lovely cover—a portrait in the form of a pill mosaic, if you will—piqued my interest. I turned to the back sections first, and was delighted to find a clever appendix consisting of: Diseases That Would Make Nice Names If They Meant Something Else*, Fables for Hypochondriacs, Ten Horrible Diseases and the Chances You Already Have One of Them, Hypochondriac Haiku, and more!

The appendix alone sold me on the book, and the meat of the memoir is just as inventive and funny as the add-ons. It’s a lightning-quick read, too. And did I mention hilarious? The humor was a nice surprise—I’d expected the majority of the book to be drier, “a cultural history,” as the cover promises. There are some interesting factual tidbits—a short history of eczema, for example—intertwined with the personal narrative. But it’s all a hoot. Yes, even the parts about eczema. Highly recommended, especially for fellow hypochondriacs. (You can read an excerpt here.)

*While Traig does list some good ones (Roseola! Porphyria!), I feel that she misses one of the most obvious answers. Anyone who has ever been unemployed and forced to sit at home all afternoon watching courtroom TV has surely seen the lawyers’ commercials for Mesothelioma. It sounds so pretty sliding off the tongue, and yet, it’s a horrible disease that will kill you dead.

Over at Good, Anne Trubek does a poor job convincing people that Catcher in the Rye has no place on high-school assigned reading lists. Also, she would be OK replacing it with a TV show.

Me Cheeta, a chimp’s autobiography “in his own words,” is up for the Guardian’s first-book award. “Previous winners have included Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer,” according to the UK newspaper. I’m sure they’re pleased. Especially hard-to-please Zadie.

In other, um, animal-lit news, the Times Online has a piece on the animal as protagonist. I recently finished and liked Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, in which a dead bird figures prominently, but that doesn’t count, I suppose. I’m talking primarily about an animal’s POV in literature, and I have to admit that I used to hate it. And I love animals dearly. I remember struggling with The Incredibly Journey as a child (it was assigned reading), about three lost animals trying to find their way back home. I was an avid reader, but I put it off until the last minute and stayed up all night, miserable; the story just seemed so implausible to me. Paul Auster’s Timbuktu was the book that changed my mind about featuring an animal’s POV in a story. He proved that it can be done brilliantly.

I’m also looking forward to reading Virginia Woolf’s Flush, which the Times describes as “the first feminist animal story.”

Both the NYTimes and Budget Travel have recent profiles of Asilah, Morocco. But personally, I’ve been jonesing for a one-way ticket to Essaouira (above) ever since I read this article eight years ago.

I’m all for ambiguous, murky endings that fail to wrap the story up nicely; I think they offer a nice dose of real life, a pinch of reality. These endings work in a variety of circumstances, but not when your novel is essentially a mystery that the reader has been trying to solve since page 1!

As you probably have read everywhere, Rivka Galchen’s debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, begins when the protagonist tells us that a doppelganger has taken the place of his wife. I love this premise—it’s smart and offbeat and completely fresh. And a lovely metaphor for what happens when someone you love changes over time, and they look the same, but you definitely know that you are no longer dealing with the same person. Anyhow.

The explanation to this doppelganger mystery? Why did his real wife leave, where did she go, etc.? I still don’t know—and even worse, I don’t really care anymore. I stopped caring about halfway through the novel, but I put my faith in the author, and kept hoping for a payoff that never arrived. Or did it? Bits of meteorology are strewn throughout the novel—is there something scientific I didn’t understand that explains why the doppelganger showed up, and why someone else is dead but appears to be alive, and why the protagonist seems to follow a chain of events that make sense to him but not to this reader? Galchen writes well, no doubt, but if you’re looking for modern fiction with a science slant, I’d recommend Samantha Hunt’s excellent The Invention of Everything Else.

The Believer says that Atmospheric Disturbances “brilliantly raises more questions than it answers. If anything, we know even less when it’s all over than we did when we started.” But that puzzles me: It “brilliantly” leaves us in the dark? Are we so in love with quirk nowadays that filling in the story doesn’t matter?

Since I don’t live in Chicago anymore and can’t bring myself to read Gawker anymore, I missed John Cusack’s journalistic debut for Huffington Post Chicago. Luckily, I got the scoop from The Beachwood Reporter. Cusack, it seems, spelled the names of some athletes wrong, including some guy named Michael Jordan. As TBR put it: “John Cusack’s debut post for Huffington Post Chicago was riddled with more errors than the 2006 Cubs.” Ouch.

And yet, people say that copyediting is a dying profession. I think we need more of us. A fact-checker would’ve come in handy here too.

Also, Diane Court, one of my childhood fictional heroes because she had looked up like every word in her dictionary in Say Anything, clearly hated spelling errors. I only point this out because it is difficult to mention John Cusack but not Lloyd Dobler.