Interviewed a new intern today. A college junior. Jesus, those were the worst years of my life. I never thought I’d make it to 50 and I never thought I’d like it. But damn if doesn’t beat walking around Washington Square Park in a quasi-suicidal state without a clue as to the nature of my depression, or how to get treatment, all to a Bob Dylan soundtrack that played endlessly in my head while watching the human parade. Henry James’ Portrait of Lady was assigned for one of my English classes. I went to St. Mark’s Book Store to find a copy and in my usual daze bought a copy of Heinrich Boll’s Group Portrait with Lady. It was probably the best book I read that year and it was by accident. All I remember from it, all these years later, is the nun investigating the students’ bowels. It’s definitely one of the books I’ll reread in the nursing home, you know, when I’m not playing Banagrams or sneaking out back to blaze.
What’s on your reread list?
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Fantastic responses to the HBO movie of the week contest. Thank you. A winner will be announced on Monday. Thanks to everyone who wrote in. An embarrassment of riches.
Anybody watching Hemingway and Gellhorn on HBO, when writers were writers and all they had to do was drink and fuck and fight, in addition to typing? It’s so great to see writers’ lives on the small screen. I think Clive Owen should play Picasso instead of Papa. I’m liking Nicole as Martha, but the aged Martha is too Benjamin Buttony for my blood. Jesus, I just read on Cheat-o-pedia that she killed herself at 89. Whoa. Oh my, Hemingway going down on Gellhorm. Kidman breast. This is just way too steamy. Plus cats.
While I was in graduate school, I worked at a literary agency in Gramercy Park. I sat at a desk piled high with slush and every week, after I did the typing and filing, I studiously combed the pile even though it never yielded any gems. One day, as I was leaving, I said to one of the senior agents, “I’d just like to find something once.” “Yeah,” she said, “tell me about it.” I couldn’t understand her world weariness. After all, she had a roster of clients, surely she knew something about discovering talented writers.
I was never very good at weekends, and long weekends could be my undoing. When I read in William Todd Schultz’s biography of Diane Arbus that she killed herself on the Monday of a long weekend, I felt deeply sick and sad. Those Mondays in the city over a holiday weekend can be so grim. The city hissing quiet. Things folded up. Movie theaters barely filled, the air conditioning rumbling like dawn’s garbage trucks. And everyone away at some fabulous place with friends and capris and some asshole in a kiss the chef apron grilling swordfish steaks and asparagus. For a while, to combat loneliness, I joined a hiking club on that met on Sundays. It turned out to be a tight knit group of Holocaust survivors taking 3 mile hikes in a thirty mile radius outside the city. Then, we would take two tables at Bagel Nosh on the upper west side and eat. I don’t know why other people are workaholics, but for me work was my great escape from myself. It still is. This is a post for weekend writers. For every little bit of time that you can steal, that you can protect, that you can work.
We call them pull quotes. Quotes you can pull from reviews for the back of the book. Here are a few from today’s NYT for the poet Michael Robbins. “This man can write.” “It’s a declaration that feels nearly as fresh as anything in Elvis Costello’s first LP or Quentin Tarantino’s first film…this is a linguistic booty call.” “What puts these poems over is their sheer joy and dizzy command.” “Here’s a book to hand the (as yet) nonpoetry reader in your life.” Praise the lord. Dwight Garner has a major bone for Michael Robbins. And Garner is the only critic I read and admire 98% of the time. This review is a love song. And the lines he quotes make you want to run out and buy the book or 
Vintage has sold a combined total of ten million trade paperback, eBook and audiobook copies of E.L. James‘ Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy in the last six weeks.
I can’t sleep. It’s like this most nights. I wake at four. Then the games begin. Who did I forget to call, who pissed me off, what email set me off, how I long for the days of one ringy dingy. I’ve heard of a powerful entertainment lawyer who doesn’t use mail, enthralled as he must be by the sound of his booming voice so loud it shakes the gold out of pockets. I would like to sit behind a slab of granite and smoke Camels or Gitanes or pink Nat Sherman’s. I would like , just once, to sleep through the night, not wake up screaming or thirsty beyond measure. I would like not to think about rewriting catalog copy or coming up with a blurb list or dear famous author will you stop your own important work and shit on my small self? Will you remember what it was like to a fly on the ass of a horse? How about a blow job? A bag of blow? I am not thinking about this submission. I am not thinking about money. I am not thinking about food. I did not forget to reschedule the dermatologist. I am not thinking about that email I sent maybe too impulsively. The scariest new word in the English language: Send. I am not thinking about death.
So I’m flipping through the New Yorker while enjoying a frozen Amy’s lasagna for dinner when I come upon a picture of the late Maurice Sendak standing in the woods dressed in a black robe and holding a cane that could double as wizard’s staff looking like a little Jewish wizard or a scary cult leader. Beside him his German Shepherd, Herman. The dog, he says, is of “unknowable age, because I refused to ever find out. I don’t want to know. I wish I didn’t know how old I was.” I wonder what that would be like not knowing your age. I mean you’d have clues, for instance hot flashes, grey hair at the temple, and constant irritability might suggest a women in her early fifties. Just saying. Still, I thought only the brilliant creator of Where The Wild Things Are would imagine a better life without the definitions and expectations of age.
Betsy Lerner 