by Paul Auster
* * *
Battered and obsolete, a relic from an age that is quickly passing from memory, the damn thing has never given out on me. Even as I recall the nine thousand four hundred days we have spent together, it is sitting in front of me now, stuttering forth its old familiar music. We are in Connecticut for the weekend. It is summer, and the morning outside the window is hot and green and beautiful. The typewriter is on the kitchen table, and my hands are on the typewriter. Letter by letter, I have watched it write these words.
July 2, 2000
ODD JOBS
Answer to a Question from New York Magazine
Whenever I hear the words New York, the first thing that comes to mind is looking out the window of my grandparents’ sixth-floor apartment at the corner of Central Park South and Columbus Circle. The window is open, and I’m standing there with a penny in my hand, about to let go of it so I can watch it fall to the street. I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old at the time. Just as I started to open my hand, my grandmother looked over at me and shouted, “Don’t do that! If that penny hits someone, it will go straight through his head!”
1995
Twenty-Five Sentences Containing the Words Charles Bernstein
Introduction to a poetry reading at Princeton University
Charles Bernstein is a poet. Charles Bernstein is a critic. Charles Bernstein is a man who talks. And whether he is writing or talking, Charles Bernstein is a troublemaker. Being fond of troublemakers myself, I am particularly fond of the troublemaker designated by the words Charles Bernstein.
Charles Bernstein has reintroduced a spirit of polemic into the world of American poetry. In the exhausted atmosphere in which so much of our writing takes place, Charles Bernstein has battled long and hard to make both writers and readers aware of the implications embedded in each and every language act we partake of as citizens of this vast, troubled country. Whether or not you agree with what Charles Bernstein has to say is less important than the fact that it has become more and more important to listen to what he is saying.
At times, Charles Bernstein reminds me of a Talmudic rabbi. At times, Charles Bernstein reminds me of a stand-up comic performing for the late-night crowd at a Borscht Belt hotel—booked in for a two-week run and never using the same material twice. At times, Charles Bernstein reminds me of the city slicker who walks into a Wild West saloon, orders a glass of milk, and then proceeds to outpunch, outshoot, and outwit all the roughnecks who laugh at him.
What I mean to say is that Charles Bernstein is unpredictable. Charles Bernstein is everywhere. Charles Bernstein is relentless—and wholly committed to speaking and writing the truth as he sees it and hears it and lives it.
For a long time not many people were interested in what Charles Bernstein was thinking. Now people are paying good money to allow their children to listen to Charles Bernstein’s thoughts. For the moment, Charles Bernstein is dispensing those thoughts here at Princeton, but next year he will begin to do so on a more permanent basis in Buffalo, New York, where he has been named to the Gray Chair of Poetry and Literature. I think this is very good for Charles Bernstein. I also think it will be very good for Charles Bernstein’s students—who, one hopes, will grow up to become troublemakers themselves.
I should add that Charles Bernstein has published numerous books, including The Sophist, Resistance, Islets/Irritations, Content’s Dream, Stigma, Controlling Interests, Senses of Responsibility, and Poetic Justice. I believe it was poetic justice when Charles Bernstein was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship a number of years ago. I also believe it is poetic justice that Charles Bernstein should be here to read his poetry to us today. Because Charles Bernstein is one of the few poets who knows that there is far more poetry in the world than justice.
Now that we have settled into our seats and are ready to begin, I will repeat the words Charles Bernstein only once more. But this last time is the best time of all, for it allows me to experience the pleasure of saying: Here is Charles Bernstein.
March 14, 1990
From Double Game by Sophie Calle
THE RULES OF THE GAME
In his novel Leviathan, Paul Auster thanks me for having authorized him to mingle fact with fiction. And indeed, on pages 60 to 67 of his book, he uses a number of episodes from my life to create a fictive character named Maria. Intrigued by this double, I decided to turn Paul Auster’s novel into a game and to make my own particular mixture of reality and fiction.
I
The life of Maria and how it influenced the life of Sophie.
In Leviathan, Maria puts herself through the same rituals as I did. But Paul Auster has slipped some rules of his own inventing into his portrait of Maria. In order to bring Maria and myself closer together, I decided to go by the book.
II
The life of Sophie and how it influenced the life of Maria.
The rituals that Auster “borrowed” from me to shape Maria are: The Wardrobe, The Striptease, To Follow…, Suite vénitienne, The Detective, The Hotel, The Address Book, and The Birthday Ceremony. Leviathan gives me the opportunity to present these artistic projects that inspired the author and which Maria and I now share.
III
One of the many ways of mingling fact with fiction, or how to try to become a character out of a novel.
Since, in Leviathan, Auster has taken me as a subject, I imagined swapping roles and taking him as the author of my actions. I asked him to invent a fictive character which I would attempt to resemble. Instead, Auster preferred to send me “Personal Instructions for SC on How to Improve Life in New York City (Because she asked…).” I followed his directives. This project is entitled Gotham Handbook.
Gotham Handbook
Personal Instructions for S.C. on How to Improve Life in New York City (Because she asked…)
SMILING
Smile when the situation doesn’t call for it. Smile when you’re feeling angry, when you’re feeling miserable, when you’re feeling most crushed by the world—and see if it makes any difference.
Smile at strangers in the street. New York can be dangerous, so you must be careful. If you prefer, smile only at female strangers. (Men are beasts, and they must not be given the wrong idea.)
Nevertheless, smile as often as possible at people you don’t know. Smile at the bank teller who gives you your money, at the waitress who gives you your food, at the person sitting across from you on the IRT.
See if anyone smiles back at you.
Keep track of the number of smiles you are given each day.
Don’t be disappointed when people don’t smile back at you.
Consider each smile you receive a precious gift.
TALKING TO STRANGERS
There will be people who talk to you after you smile at them. You must be prepared with flattering comments.
Some of these people will talk to you because they feel confused or threatened or insulted by your show of friendliness. (“You got a problem, lady?”) Plunge in immediately with a disarming compliment. “No, I was just admiring your beautiful tie.” Or: “I love your dress.”
Others will talk to you because they are friendly souls, happy to respond to the human overtures that come their way. Try to keep these conversations going as long as you can. It doesn’t matter what you talk about. The important thing is to give of yourself and see to it that some form of genuine contact is made.
If you find yourself running out of things to say, bring up the subject of the weather. Cynics regard this as a banal topic, but the fact is that no subject gets people talking faster. Stop and think about it for a moment, and you’ll begin to see a metaphysical, even religious quality to this preoccupation with wind-chill factors and Central Park snowfall accumulations. Weather is the great equalizer. There is nothing anyone can do about it, and it affects us all in the same way—rich and poor, black and white, healthy and sick. The weather makes no distinctions. When it rains on me, it also rains on you. Unlike most of the problems w
e face, it is not a condition created by man. It comes from nature, or God, or whatever else you want to call the forces in the universe we cannot control. To discuss the weather with a stranger is to shake hands and put aside your weapons. It is a sign of goodwill, an acknowledgment of your common humanity with the person you are talking to.
With so many things driving us apart, with so much hatred and discord in the air, it is good to remember the things that bring us together. The more we insist on them in our dealings with strangers, the better morale in the city will be.
BEGGARS AND HOMELESS PEOPLE
I’m not asking you to reinvent the world. I just want you to pay attention to it, to think about the things around you more than you think about yourself. At least while you’re outside, walking down the street on your way from here to there.
Don’t ignore the miserable ones. They are everywhere, and a person can grow so accustomed to seeing them that he begins to forget they are there. Don’t forget.
I’m not asking you to give all your money to the poor. Even if you did, poverty would still exist (and have one more member among its ranks).
At the same time, it’s our responsibility as human beings not to harden our hearts. Action is necessary, no matter how small or hopeless our gestures might seem to be.
Stock up on bread and cheese. Every time you leave the house, make three or four sandwiches and put them in your pocket. Every time you see a hungry person, give him a sandwich.
Stock up on cigarettes as well. Common wisdom says that cigarettes are bad for your health, but what common wisdom neglects to say is that they also give great comfort to the people who smoke them.
Don’t just give one or two. Give away whole packs.
If you find your pockets can’t hold enough sandwiches, go to the nearest McDonald’s and buy as many meal coupons as you can afford. Give these coupons away when you’re out of cheese sandwiches. You might not like the food at McDonald’s, but most people do. Considering the alternatives, they give pretty good value for the money.
These coupons will be especially helpful on cold days. Not only will the hungry person be able to fill his stomach, he’ll be able to go inside somewhere and get warm.
If you can’t think of anything to say when you give the coupon to the hungry person, talk about the weather.
CULTIVATING A SPOT
People are not the only ones neglected in New York. Things are neglected as well. I don’t just mean big things like bridges and subway tracks, I mean the small, barely noticeable things standing right in front of our eyes: patches of sidewalk, walls, park benches. Look closely at the things around you and you’ll see that nearly everything is falling apart.
Pick one spot in the city and begin to think of it as yours. It doesn’t matter where, and it doesn’t matter what. A street corner, a subway entrance, a tree in the park. Take on this place as your responsibility. Keep it clean. Beautify it. Think of it as an extension of who you are, as a part of your identity. Take as much pride in it as you would in your own home.
Go to your spot every day at the same time. Spend an hour watching everything that happens to it, keeping track of everyone who passes by or stops or does anything there. Take notes, take photographs. Make a record of these daily observations and see if you learn anything about the people or the place or yourself.
Smile at the people who come there. Whenever possible, talk to them. If you can’t think of anything to say, begin by talking about the weather.
March 5, 1994
Postcards for Georges Perec
1
Whenever I think about Georges Perec, the first word that comes to mind is pleasure. I know of no other contemporary writer whose work so fully captures the sense of amazement and happiness that washes over us the first time we read a book that changes the world for us, that exposes us to the infinite possibilities of what a book can be. Every passionate reader has had that experience. It usually occurs when we are quite young, and once we have lived through that moment, we understand that books are a world unto themselves—and that that world is better and richer than any one we have traveled in before. That is why we become readers. That is why we turn away from the vanities of the material world and begin to love books above all other things.
2
What I admire most about Perec is the rare combination in his work of innocence and plenitude. These qualities are almost never found together in the same writer. Cervantes had them; Swift and Poe had them; one sees flashes of them in Dickens and Kafka, perhaps in certain pages of Hawthorne and Borges. By innocence I mean absolute purity of purpose. By plenitude I mean absolute faith in the imagination. It is a literature characterized by effervescence, demonic laughter, joy. This is not the only experience we can have with books, but it is the fundamental experience, the one that makes all the others possible.
3
All critics mention the dazzling ingeniousness of Perec’s writing, his cleverness. Much as I am awed by that cleverness, by the exuberant complexities of his brilliant mind, that is not what draws me to his work. What I am attracted to is his engagement with the world, his need to tell stories, his tenderness. Underneath every trick and Oulipian puzzle to be found in Perec’s books there is a reservoir of human feeling, a swell of compassion, a wink of humor, an unspoken conviction that, in spite of everything, we are lucky to be alive. Restraint should never be confused with a lack of feeling. The agonizing meticulousness of W or The Memory of Childhood, for example, is the expression of a soul so wounded, a heart so shattered that anything beyond a dry recitation of the facts would have been morally impossible. And yet, for all that, I consider it to be one of the most intimate and moving books I have read in the past twenty years.
4
In David Bellos’s biography Georges Perec: A Life in Words (an excellent book in its own right), there are several extended passages that describe Perec’s life at the Moulin d’Andé, an artists’ retreat to the north of Paris. In one of them, Bellos mentions the fact that the last scene of Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim was shot there. If one looks closely at the house in the background as the car plunges into the water, he writes, you can see “the window of the room that Georges Perec would come to live and write in for most of his weekends throughout the second half of the 1960s.” I was astounded to learn this. Truffaut and Perec were almost exact contemporaries. The filmmaker, born in 1932, died in 1984, at the age of fifty-two. Perec, born in 1936, died in 1982, at the age of forty-six. Between them, they managed to live only as long as one old man. Of all French storytellers from that generation, the generation of men and women who were children during the war, they are the two who have meant the most to me, the ones whose work I have continued to go back to and from whom I will never stop learning. It moves me to know that they intersected in that singular and altogether improbable way. Six years before Perec entered that room (in which he wrote a book without once using the letter e), Truffaut captured it on film. Wherever they are now, I can only hope that they are talking about it.
2001
Remembering Beckett
On his one hundredth birthday
I moved to Paris in February 1971, a few weeks after my twenty-fourth birthday. I had been writing poetry for some time by then, and the road to my initial meeting with Beckett began with Jacques Dupin, a poet whose work I had been translating since my undergraduate days in New York. He and I became close friends in Paris, and because Jacques worked as director of publications at the Galerie Maeght, I met Jean-Paul Riopelle, the French-Canadian painter who was one of the artists of the gallery. Because of Jean-Paul, I met Joan Mitchell, the American painter he lived with in a house once owned by Monet in the town of Vétheuil. Years earlier, Joan had been married to Barney Rosset, the founder and publisher of Grove Press, and she and Beckett knew each other well. One evening, she and I happened to be discussing his work, and when she found out how important it was to me, she looked up and said, “Would you like to meet him?” “Yes,” I
answered. “Of course I would.” “Well, just write him a letter,” she announced, “and tell him I said so.”
I went home and wrote the letter, and three days later I received a reply from Beckett informing me to meet him at La Closerie des Lilas the following week.
I can’t remember what year it was. It might have been as early as 1972 or as late as 1974. Let’s split the difference and call it 1973.
I saw him only once after that—on a subsequent visit to Paris in 1979—and over the years we exchanged a couple of dozen notes and letters. It could hardly be classified as a friendship, but given my admiration for his work (which bordered on idolatry when I was young), our personal encounters and fitful correspondence were exceedingly precious to me. Among a horde of memories, I would cite the generous help he gave me while I was putting together my Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (to which he contributed translations of Apollinaire, Breton, and Éluard); the moving speech he delivered one afternoon in a Paris café about his love for France and how lucky he felt to have spent his adult life there; the kind and encouraging letters he wrote whenever I sent him something I had published: books, translations, articles about his work. There were funny moments as well: a deadpan account of his one and only stay in New York (“It was so damn hot, I was hanging onto the rails”), not to speak of the unforgettable line from our first meeting when, gesturing with his arm and failing to attract the waiter’s attention, he turned to me and said, in that soft Irish brogue of his, “There are no eyes in the world harder to catch than a barman’s.”
