Lux Lotus

Salter on Lampedusa

"The Leopard was published posthumously. His wife didn't care about literature, she liked smoking and clothes. He was an aristocrat. They lived in Palermo. That's everything in the world right there."

––James Salter, in conversation last night at the Center for Fiction, with executive director Noreen Tomassi (in response to a question about which books he might have like to have written himself, or would regard as great novels of the world in history)

On Portraits (New Painting of Me)

Yes, Lauren Will Have Those Oysters. 9"x12", oil on canvas, by Lisa Ferber, 2013. For sale by artist.

On Letters

I wrote about love, literature and letters for Dempsey & Carroll.

On Culture

Flavorwire named me one of "50 Up-and-Coming New York Culture Makers to Watch in 2013" today. An interview is here.

On Adaptation

I have contributed a guest post to Romancing the Tome today, about James Salter's elusive directorial debut. 

On Work in Progress

I've been asked to write two guest posts on correspondence and entertaining for Eighteen-Seventy-Eight, the house publication of Dempsey & Carroll, and a special holiday column, as a follow-up to my concluded summer series, for the Weeklings. Soon.

Windowlicker

Cold Comfort Farm has lots of lovely associations for me, not least of which is the fact that it's an immensely charming comedic novel of what it means to be essentially human. I plucked it off the shelf at a genteel old club in London in the spring (on the kind of trip where the missives began, "Today it rained..."), and read it in one furious gulp curled up in front of a roaring fire in the library, my favorite cucumber sandwich and tea laid out on a tray before me and disappearing in bits and bites with whatever distraction I could muster for my free hand. When I returned to New York, I think I was swanning around after midnight with one of the proprietors of a truly beloved vintage jewelry shop in Fort Greene when he said he'd have to send it to me (I'd read it because I remembered he'd once mentioned it in passing. Say something once to me and it's etched in granite, evermore). A little while later, a gorgeous old edition of the sequel showed up in the post, followed by a crisp new edition of the original. More recently, I was traveling around the country a few weeks ago with a dear friend who I think of as a twin flame to mine, when he told me about his partner's exquisite ceramic artistry. No surprise there.

[Milk Bottle Vase, around 40 dollars from 229 Ceramics]

Windowlicker is from the French for browsing: faire du lèche-vitrine.

On the Art of Living

Friday night, I planned to host an informal dinner at home, as I often do (and much prefer it to going out). It was raining in New York and quickly became one of those days –– one friend packing for a long-delayed honeymoon the next morning, another stuck at the office, a third in her newsroom on deadline, so much so that by the time one showed up a bit breathless, I cheerily informed her that it was to be a table for two, and a nice little chance for us to enjoy a tete-a-tete. We opened a bottle of bubbly, took the slow road, rang up the afore-mentioned office, just as the editor, now a neighbor, turned up, and a friend from Maryland arrived at eleven. In the end, a full table, dazzling in charm, and much more than I'd hoped, in the nicest of ways. Last night, I went to Christen Clifford's Abreactions performance at Dixon Place, and it was electrifying, especially when she staged her response to Yoko Ono's Cut Piece and I was invited up with other members of the audience to cut her hair. There was a moment of utter silence at the culmination of the act that was powerful and profound. Also, nudity is an exquisite and beautiful thing. Today I woke up at 9, jumped in a cab with a friend and sped off to the Whitney where we experienced Yayoi Kusama's Fireflies on the Water, an extraordinarily moving study of infinity and consciousness that does more with lights, mirrors and water than one might think possible. Each person is permitted to spend one minute inside the structure due to space constraints, which seem to disappear as soon as the door shuts. I'm thinking about the week ahead, which culminates in a wedding in Chicago, where I'm flying just for the night. I changed my ticket in order to attend a dinner the previous day here at home, and did a little research for it this evening. Presidents of most republics are called "Mr. President," for life.

Lux Loves: Caroline Blackwood

Today at Storyville, the digital magazine that publishes a story of note every Tuesday: Caroline Blackwood. I've done Storyville's publicity and acted as an adviser since its inception, and sent my first recommendation for Blackwood's work on 1/1/11. She was an aristocratic heiress to the Guinness brewery fortune, who chose to chart her bohemian course by eloping with Lucien Freud, whose haunting portraits of her outlasted their marriage, and went on to have an artful if messy life, chronicled in an achingly beautiful manner by her daughter Ivana Lowell in her own memoir, Why Not Say What Happened? Of course, the stories Blackwood lived, while fascinating, can't compare with those she wrote. Here's "The Shopping Spree," from Never Breathe a Word.

On Firsts

Strawberry Fields Whatever asked me for the song that I identify with the first time that I fell in love; Baltimore, 1995, and it was this. I remember it so sharply it could have happened tonight.