What an international mecca New York was last week, with Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda arriving for the premiere of “Still Walking,” for example, or the Irish playwright Conor McPherson in town-(his play “the Seafarer was all the rage on Broadway last season)-- showing “The Eclipse,” both films part of the Tribeca Film Festival. Dovetailing with the film fest, novelists and poets were celebrated at the fifth annual PEN World Voices Festival. The party started on Monday night when the Cultural Services of the French Embassy hosted cocktails and a photo exhibition by Parisian Gerard Rondeau. An extraordinary portrait of Paul Bowles in his last years of life, hit you first as you entered the elegant Fifth Avenue townhouse. Pictures of Susan Sontag, Louise Bourgeoise, Carla Bruni. Joan Mitchell, Gore Vidal were among those gracing the walls. Salman Rushdie was on hand greeting the likes of Mary McFadden (before she sped off across the park to honor Tom Hanks at Lincoln Center). Daniel Menaker spoke about the Israeli writer Meir Shalev he would interview later in the week. We had not heard of him, but that was the point: to meet the writers and discover something new. And that's the way it went: under the title “Evolution/ Revolution,” a group program featured Edwidge Danticat reading from the Haitian poet Felix Moresseur-Leroy, to Quebecoise poet Nicole Brossard, to French Muriel Barbery, to Palestinian Raja Shehadeh imagining smoking a joint with an Israeli border guard; an appreciation of Kafka's “Amerika” with Colm Toibin (he has a new book called “Brooklyn”), Louis Begley, and Lynne Tillman.
As to great writers: everyone is talking about New Yorker Daphne Merkin's article on her own depression in Sunday's “New York Times Magazine.” In my darkest moments, thoughts of suicide can easily be dispelled by a slice of cheesecake or some healthy retail therapy. Not so Merkin; even the love of her daughter could not rid her of suicidal episodes. Easy enough to distance oneself from Plath's bell jar. Merkin, a child of wealth and privilege, seemed to have it all. But following “Enchantment,” a novel revelatory on her relationship with her mother, and her many articles riffing on the taboo-on the secret pleasures of being spanked, for example, or the sexual implications of the purse in a piece about the accessory of choice. These mark the writer in risky territory-not a mere journalist of our time, as I had thought-but an artist.
I like Taylor,I just bought you look good
Posted by: thomas sabo | January 20, 2011 at 05:57 PM