Drawing and Remembering Paul Auster, Implacably Incarnating Yourself, and “Life Is a Bit”
Drawing Paul Auster at the Brooklyn Book Festival and remembering one of my literary favorites; as well as Seen and Overheard around New York
I heard yesterday that Paul Auster died.
He was one of my favorite minds.
I devoured a lot of his work in my twenties, delighting in his reverence for English prose (and language itself: one of his gigs was translating French poetry) and his sense of the uncanny. Like a lot of the best writing, his work is not easily definable. It often had this sense of being tossed into a warped world, where the only appropriate approach is pure curiosity, some detachment. There was a quiet murmuring humor underneath.
Because I’ve always been curious about the personal lives of creators I admire, I know that he and his wife, Siri Hustvedt, met at Columbia over four decades ago (he was maybe a TA; she was an undergrad?). I think they met at a bookstore or the library. They talked the whole weekend through, mostly about literature, and knew they were each other’s “ones” right away. They were married for forty years.
(As someone whose first love was books, this always struck me as the Platonic ideal of meet-cutes).
I know that he often said that Siri is the smartest person he knows. He went to her for everything.
I know that Siri said that he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen.
Indeed — I saw him at about age 75 and he was still gorgeous.
I saw him at Brooklyn Book Festival a few years ago — actually, I pretty much attended the festival just to see him.
While I’ve felt pang of regret, hearing of other writers’ deaths, that I never got to tell them what their work meant for me — I started a letter to Milan Kundera almost twenty years ago, intending to send it — at least I got to tell Paul Auster. Of course, since I was a nameless stranger I imagine it meant little to him, but I had a euphoric twenty seconds talking to him and (if the video another person on the book-signing line is to believed) gesticulating wildly about my love for his work.
What was distinct about him was how purely present he was, a kind of watchful but generous humility he had.
I offered to email him my drawings of the day, and he told me he doesn’t have email. I think he even said he doesn’t have a computer — he let his agent handle whatever business needed to be handled, while he tended to books.
Another Paul Auster thought I think about often: he shared once that he was driving his wife and daughter home. They’d just been away for a while, maybe a summer vacation. He would have been in his sixties or thereabouts. He was hungry, and irritable, and it was late afternoon or so. He wouldn’t stop to rest.
When he took a hasty, ill-advised left turn, they were almost hit by a car he hadn’t seen in time. He and his beloved family were spared from death by inches, moments.
He told this story in disbelief and deep shame, that he could have been so dictated by a bad mood that he put his wife and daughter, whom he loved more than anything, in danger.
I am used to seeing recklessness in men — in driving, sure, but in many other things; my candor may surprise you — and am unused to hearing this kind of pure humility voiced. It moved me to hear him talk about how lacking humility in that moment almost cost everyone their lives.
I recently made this video on aging, and referred to some of Auster’s words:
I later found the quote I was thinking about:
"...She was one of those rare people in whom mind ultimately wins out over matter. Age doesn't diminish these people. It makes them old, but it doesn't alter who they are, and the longer they go on living, the more fully and implacably they incarnate themselves."
-Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions, page 228
Here’s a somewhat recent interview with Siri Hustvedt — apparently we are preoccupied with the same frustrations, by and large!
Seen and overheard:
1 On a call with my boss, he says: “Look, the way I think of things these days is: Life is a bit!”
Within the next hour, I meet my friend Andrew for lunch. He says: “Life is a bit. So, how’s your bit going?”
I should have answered: “Uncannily, thank you!”
2 Walking up Broadway, I pass Jessica Chastain, who’s petite, looking somewhat serene, and so flawless it’s almost unnerving, steering her young daughter along the sidewalk. I turn as she passes, and the women behind me (who look like midwestern tourists) ALSO turn, and smile and exclaim amongst themselves.
3 At one of my favorite Chinese restaurants, Real Kung Fu Little Buns Ramen — yes, its food is as great as its name — on W 48th St., the maitre d’ seats a man and woman next to me (often people share tables at this place).
The man and woman are Latino and speaking in Spanish, mostly about the menu. I gather that she’s visiting from Texas; he lives here. He spent some time in China.
She asks him where that side dish, radish pancakes, is. He says that unfortunately you can’t find that dish at this restaurant.
The woman is complaining about how she doesn’t want to drink the water in metal cups that they’ve served us customers. Who would drink that water? It’s gross.
But, she says to the man while staring at him, “esta gringa” (THIS white lady, not a nice way of putting it, and she’s referring to me) “is drinking it, I guess it’s fine for her.” And she laughs.
I snort into my wonton soup, to make sure she knows I understand her.
“Oh…uh, sounds like you speak Spanish?” the woman asks me, with a mixture of mostly apology and some defensiveness.
“I don’t speak it well, but yes, I generally understand it,” I say.
“Sorry… I was just trying to say that the water is always overchlorinated at these places, I hate the taste and never drink it…”
“It’s fine, don’t worry,” I say.
We chat a little and then they go back to their conversation. But I think to myself: in New York, you’d better assume that a lot of people around you speak decent Spanish. And people definitely know the words “gringo” and “gringa!”
I tell this story to a New Yorker friend, who tells me that she knew someone who “looked super Irish, reddish hair, a pale, pudgy man,” whose Latino colleagues in [construction] once assumed he didn’t speak Spanish, so they spoke about him the whole time while sharing a van with him. He never let on that he understood.
4 Seen in a pizza parlor window in Queens:
IFF Boston:
I am at the Independent Film Festival (IFF) Boston, making live drawings of the Q and As with filmmakers. I first attended this festival in 2012, and pretty much every film I’ve ever caught (40-50 of them?) has been fantastic, thanks to the keen eye of Program Director Nancy Campbell. I mostly took this picture because I will NOT look this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed next week after constant Q and As and subsisting on popcorn. Maybe I’ll do before-and-after shots.
I also just remembered that my first time getting a photo in front of this banner was when the film I’d made a book for, The Incredible Jessica James, screened here with director Jim Strouse in attendance, in 2017. I felt very cool then. And I remember the audience laughed a lot.
Some scenes from Astoria lately, before I came up to Boston:
Spring has sprung!
Spot the two pieces of religious iconography in this residence:
On a particularly Greek block north of Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria, I was looking at this front-yard curiosity when a man standing nearby explained to me that in Greece, these are common structures “for memorials.”
Almost every house on that block had one.
Other sidewalk #detritus discoveries:
And that’s it for today. Thanks, as ever, for sharing this post if you enjoyed it, and helping new readers discover this newsletter!
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