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There is, in fact, no master plan, but this is what is happening: I'm growing.

No, I'm not referring to the physiological impact of the morning oatmeal cookie (butterscotch!). I'm referring to my spheres of interest, the books I'm reading, the ways I'm paying attention to the news, the bravado I displayed when I buckled down to learn how to throw a clay pot on a wheel (to learn, not to master; hardly master), the expanding repertoire in the kitchen. Hisham Matar's The Return has taught me some of the history, geography, and politics of Libya (and disappeared dissidents). Rebecca Mead has taught me Middlemarch and George Eliot. Katie Roiphe has taught me John Updike, Maurice Sendak, Dylan Thomas, and James Salter (among others). Scott Anderson, with his glorious New York Times Magazine essay, has taught me the antecedents of contemporary Middle East. Viet Thanh Nguyen is teaching me, with his Pulitzer winning The Sympathizer, the Vietnamese experience of war.


The world is complex. The news requires perspective. Life is once. I'm going deeper.

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I spent the morning revising a book I'm writing—finding all those places that cry out for more and developing (so happily) that more. I spent the afternoon reading the last three chapters (Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, James Salter) of Katie Roiphe's magnificent reflections on writers facing their finalities (The Violet Hour). I spent time in between responding to all those really kind people who wrote to thank me for my essay on building a new life as I leave (for good now) corporate America, in this weekend's Philadelphia Inquirer. I watched my husband bring his wet clay things to the deck to dry. Physical work. Good work. I got a text from my son.

I walked, and as I walked, I talked to my great, great friend, Debbie Levy, whose I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark, is about to make a mega splash in this world.

I spend so much of my life worrying the global news and the private uncertainties. Pondering silences and outrage.

But today I lived as people should. Engaged with my world. Happy in the making. Grateful for the people I love.

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In a series of tweets last night, novelist Ayelet Waldman bashed author Katie Roiphe–defending her husband, Michael Chabon in the Twittersphere.

Here is the complete set of tweets: “I am so BORED with Katie Roiphe’s ‘I like the sexist drunk writers’ bull****. She happily trashes my husband, but guess what b****? … He not only writes rings and rings and rings around you, but the same rings around your drunken literary love objects … Really Roiphe? You seek ‘slightly greater obsession w/ the sublime sentence.’ My husband’s sentences are INFINITELY more sublime than yours.”

She ended the Twitter tirade with this note: “I do not like it when people insult those I love.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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A few weeks ago, as readers of this blog know, I sat down to read James Wood's How Fiction Works and reveled in its elucidations and provocations, its lusty, kinetic, uncompromising language, its call to writerly action:

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness:  life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry. 

I got the same charge early this morning reading "Why Criticism Matters," the cover story of this weekend's The New York Times Book Review, which yields the floor to literary critics Stephen Burn, Katie Roiphe, Pankaj Mishra, Adam Kirsch, Sam Anderson, and Elif Batuman, all of whom have been invited to report on "what it is they do, why they do it and why it is important."  Alas.

There is much value in the whole, much in the way of substance and fine thinking, a little necessary historicism, not too many bricks thrown at the obvious.  I am particularly fond, in this sequence of essays, of the emphasis that both Katie Roiphe and Adam Kirsch place on the essential eloquence of the literary critic—on the responsibility the critic bears to write well and meaningfully.  Here, for example, is Roiphe:

Now, maybe more than ever, in a cultural desert characterized by the vast, glimmering territory of the Internet, it is important for the critic to write gracefully. If she is going to separate excellent books from those merely posing as excellent, the brilliant from the flashy, the real talent from the hyped — if she is going to ferret out what is lazy and merely fashionable, if she is going to hold writers to the standards they have set for themselves in their best work, if she is going to be the ideal reader and in so doing prove that the ideal reader exists — then the critic has one important function: to write well.

By this I mean that critics must strive to write stylishly, to concentrate on the excellent sentence. There is so much noise and screen clutter, there are so many Amazon reviewers and bloggers clamoring for attention, so many opinions and bitter misspelled rages, so much fawning ungrammatical love spewed into the ether, that the role of the true critic is actually quite simple: to write on a different level, to pay attention to the elements of style. 

Kirsch concludes his essay like this:

Whether I am writing verse or prose, I try to believe that what matters is not exercising influence or force, but writing well — that is, truthfully and beautifully; and that maybe, if you seek truth and beauty, all the rest will be added unto you.

Perhaps I focused most intently on these passages because I keep discovering, at the age I have become, how little good writing is starting to matter to an alarming number of people—to those holding to the notion that grammatical errors (not witty errors, mind you, just plain mistakes) make writing more "hip," to the celebrants of books that are plied with all manner of (unintended) language abuses, to those who declaim against masterful books with sentences riddled by prepositional failures and astonishing noun-verb mismatches. We need standard bearers in times like this, intelligence on the page (and screen),

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