Dear Sarah,
Oh, I like Eudora Welty’s nervous agitation. It is a jaunty agitation. Charlie Parker plays in darting nervous phrases that seem to move quicker than the underlying tune, and Welty writes dialogue that moves quicker than the underlying story, and a lot of energy goes into those rhythms. The 20th century will be remembered as the age of amphetamine. That’s what it was like.
About two New York writers passing notes back and forth, I don’t think it’s so bad. A substantial percentage of America’s writers and especially certain kinds of journalists live in New York, and I think that is natural. Cars are made in Detroit, edicts in Washington, movies in Los Angeles, Northern California invents cuisine and makes wine, Mississippi has its Eudora Weltys, Chicago its theaters and blues musicians and whatnot, Nashville has its music scene, and so forth around the country. Why feel bad about that? Why not be happy and content that, in New York, America has something of a literary capital, just as other countries do? A concentration of people makes for a concentration of energy. Nashville’s musicians wouldn’t be as good if you spread them around the country. In my opinion, we’d be better off if more writers, not fewer, settled in New York.
I don’t think I agree with you about the relative merits of Kahlo and Rivera. Does our disagreement stem from the fact that we wander the same streets? That wouldn’t make sense. The great French literary critic of the 19th century, Hypollite Taine, had a marvelous theory about geography as a determining factor in literature. I say it was marvelous because it is fun to read. But I don’t believe a word of it.
Might it be that the mere fact of discussing a topic like Kahlo and Rivera somehow reflects our New York locale? But Kahlo and Rivera were Mexicans, and New York has nothing to do with it. Sarah, you and I have ended up discussing Mexican themes because we both happen to have written about Mexico in the past, and magazines (New York magazines, I might add) have sent us to report on events there and published our articles precisely because the editors, in their non-provinciality, took an interest in the wider world.
Our great error, Sarah, was, I fear, to discuss the D train and the Q train. Here our critics may have a point. I hang my head in shame. One of my own critics has even awarded me a sort of dunce’s prize, which he calls the Streisand prize or award or something, for what I have said about the D train and the Q train in the course of our “Breakfast Table” discussion. You can see my mortification on Andrewsullivan.com. On the other hand, what’s wrong with Streisand? Better a Streisand prize than a Charlton Heston prize. So I accept the Streisand prize and feel honored by it. “The Way We Were” is a wonderful song, don’t you agree?
And on that vibrato note of nostalgia, I thank you, Sarah, and the editors of Slate, and the irritated letter writers of “The Fray,” for the pleasure of our weeklong amble through the fields of civility, bile, taxation, Bush, Fox, Welty, Kahlo, Stalin, New York provincialism, and the postal service’s new stamp.
Yours,
Paul
