Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
What a conversation! Yesterday at the NYPL, authors Toni Morrison and Fran Lebowitz discussed the role history played in Morrison’s new novel, A Mercy.
Here’s the entire talk, including Morrison reading excerpts from her new novel:
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Both Toni Morrison and Fran Lebowitz will be answering your questions here on the Art.Cult Blog. You can post your comments and questions below, and we will let you know when their answers are available.
November 13th, 2008 at 9:21 am
What a gift Toni Morrison is. Does anyone know where she’ll be appearing next? I couldn’t go last night, so please post the NYPL discussion soon. Thank you.
November 13th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Hey BrooklynGardener - we just posted the audio. In it, you’ll hear Morrison reading two excerpts from the novel. There’s one at the start, and one towards the end. Enjoy!
November 13th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Toni Morrison and Fran Lebowitz had a great dynamic going at yesterday’s NYPL event. Morrison’s soulful, eloquent comments were interspersed with Lebowitz’s witty remarks and lively banter. It was a truly entertaining and thought provoking discussion, and the audience ate up every single word - thanks NYPL for bringing together this unexpected duo!
November 13th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Toni, do you have a favorite book? What book are you reading right now?
November 13th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
This question is for Toni Morrison: Do you think Barack Obama would make a good character in a story? Do you ever base your characters on real people?
November 13th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
in “playing in the dark” you discuss the pervasiveness of the white/black–bad/good idiom in literature. How does this consistent symbolism (white=good, black=evil) influence your writing? Do you ever feel constrained by this set of symbols? How, as a writer, do you work outside them or try to subvert them?
November 13th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Ms. Morrison,
I’m curious about your routine. Are you a disciplined writer? A night-owl? Do you type directly onto a laptop, or first handwrite things?
November 13th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
How much does personality have to do with style? For Fran.
November 13th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
[For Toni] You recently won a Spoken Word Grammy for your reading of “Who’s Got Game….” To what extent has folklore informed your work? What of African and African-American folkloric traditions have been lost that you’d like to see reintroduced into American culture?
November 13th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
For Toni: I don’t intend for this to be a trick question, but it may be just that: I definitely connect your academic work on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner with the strain of high modernism in your own work. I mean to say that I see the influence of those authors at work in the way that you write about/around/in/of atrocities that are both intimate and unassimilable. When you conceive of a book, do you think of an image first, and use exposition to explore the uncanny zone it opens up? I’m thinking of the genesis of The Sound and the Fury in Faulkner’s being the image of Caddy climbing the pear tree — does this resonate with your own approach to constructing a novel?
November 13th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
I am a blog-virgin. This is my first posting. Toni Morrison’s reading was at times luminescent. Hard as she tried, Fran Lebowitz did not convince Toni Morrison that the age of the common reader was bygone. A crowd of over 500 attended the LIVE from the NYPL reading and conversation last night; they were eminently attentive and engaged–proof enough that the bygone age of the common reader is not upon us. Reader, take comfort: you are here and hungry. The recent election has put a dent, if perhaps only for a time, to anti-intellectualism in America.
Paul Holdengraber, Director of Public Programs, “LIVE from the NYPL.”
November 13th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
For Fran: Who are some of your favorite African American writers?…Also, will there be anymore excerpts from Progress in Vanity Fair?
Whomever came up with the idea of putting Toni & Fran together in conversation must be commended…
November 13th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
For me, the interview disappointed. Lebowitz came off as unable to listen to Morrison. I feel as though Morrison requires deep listening, whereas this evening was about Lebowitz’s cynicism. Lebowitz revealed a distrust on one side and a boastfulness on the other side (which she seemed to want to pass off in puns). I wanted Lebowitz to listen to Morrison and get her to go deeper into the comments she was making. But with that said, I’m perhaps too harsh. I might underestimate the difficulty of interviewing someone like Morrison. I sort of thought Holdengraber could have pulled it off. Morrison had threads that, pursued astutely, could have led the audience to her insight. Not about obvious connections like Faulkner, but about violence, anger, and what happens when there is no place to put those things (her latest book investigates this).
November 14th, 2008 at 3:10 am
Fran Lebowitz made two great comments I found very interactive to the comments from Morrison. Lebowitz said “women today have ‘dreams’ because they’re not supposed to call it ‘ambition’ when that’s actually what it is.” She said this in response to the idea people’s hopes and dreams call to them as readers to step out of their every day reality. Libowitz also said “there is no common reader now, there’s the common writer,” which I thought was both a right-of-passage WWF smack down trash talk as well as a barbed gauntlet thrown at the next generation (somewhere in the head region) for taking the task of authorship lightly. As the trendiness of the blog has taken a lot of the burden away from writing - everyone blogs and so everyone fancies themselves a writer - the assumption is that the people who blog = people who are aspiring writers. Almost never the case.
I took Liebowitz’s attack on the common reader / writer as a call to arms. True, it was masked as sour grapes to antagonize the faint of heart into suddenly discovering they have ovaries. A speaking slight of hand. But then I don’t agree there could ever be too many aspiring writers at any level, so it doesn’t make me particularly riled. A new blog is started every eight seconds with the average readership of one. That says to me, we’re not a nation of coddled debutantes, that one percent has stayed where it is. No, we’re a generation desperate to course correct against the increasingly seamless, windowless, overstimulating and numbing existence of a prefab culture that’s drifted out of context - and we want to change things not because we’re saintly or understand the what the “right” thing is, but because we want to experience just a small piece of the fabled sensuality that older women speak so wistfully and mysteriously about.
The great thing about diehards like Liebowitz is that a rebuttal finally pleases them. They’re looking for flint. I took her whole commentary as very dry satire and I think it worked well if it got people questioning themselves - whether she meant them or didn’t. She’s the sparring partner provided for the grown-ups, not there to flatten the kids, who should learn to be spry anyhow.
I found Morrison totally apt to present life. I also found her suggestion to “trust her” completely convincing, the first completely convincing sermon I’ve ever heard, even while her previous warning “to give yourself into slavery to someone else is the most wicked deed of all” still minutes old. Morrison has a dry sense of humor as well, I’d bet. True, for those of us unafraid to be attentive readers, it would have been great to hear her in as high a resolution as we can get, but there’s something to be said for trying to keep the pace brisk to give something entertaining and encourage those with stoppered ears to maybe open the shudders a bit.
Sadly, the free wine in the book line was deceptively strong, and by the time I got to the front of the table it hit, so I wasn’t able to beguilingly persuade a Dear Lisa for my poor friend stuck at work. We all just tottered out like good little common readers. Da*mn, those Knopf people are sneaky.
November 14th, 2008 at 11:43 am
What’s been whirring in my mind is a story that got both a laugh of recognition and incredulity from the audience. Fran Lebowitz recounted how she’d sorely disappointed Toni when she’d seen no real difference in her reading of the manuscript of Morrison’s latest book, A Mercy, and the published work. At Toni’s insistence Fran had reread the final version because, according to Toni, she’d “ totally re-written it.” The punch line: the sum total of Toni’s efforts amounted to nothing more than changing 17 words.
But as Mark Twain famously points out, “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.” I always “got” the caution. But Wednesday night I really “got it” –how to a fastidious writer like Toni Morrison finding 17 opportunities to swap out the almost right word for the right one would feel like a genuine overhaul. My question? What in heaven’s name were the 17 words??