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Episode 23: "Being Here is Everything" by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston, w/ special guest Tara Cheesman
72 Plays7 months ago
Kicking off 2024 we welcome Tara Cheesman to the podcast with her recommendation, Being Here Is Everything: The Life and Times of Paula Modersohn-Becker by Marie Darriussecq, translated by Penny Hueston. Tara is a freelance critic, former judge of the Best Translated Book Award, and she brings us our first work of nonfiction. We have an absolutely fascinating conversation on art, motherhood, representations of women, and a lot more. And recommend a small syllabus of titles to dig into.
Titles/authors mentioned:
Imperium by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles
Nathalie Léger: Suite for Barbara Loden, Exposition, The White Dress
Éric Plamondon: Apple S and Mayonnaise
Jean Echenoz’s biographical novels: Running, Lightning, Ravel
Sharks, Death, Surfers by Melissa McCarthy
Kate Zambreno: Book of Mutter and To Write As If Already Dead
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
Jazmina Barrera: On Lighthouses and Linea Nigra
Georges Perec: Ellis Island, I Remember, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
To hear more from Tara follow her on Instagram: @taracheesman or subscribe (and you should!) to her Substack: Ex Libris.
Click here to subscribe to our Substack and find us on the socials: @lostinredonda just about everywhere.
Music: “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction of 'Lost in Redonda'
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. And I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda.
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Lost in Redonda. Um, this is our first episode of 2024. And, uh, hello Lori, it's been weeks since we last spoke, which is bizarre, but here we are. I know. I kind of felt like I was going through Tom withdrawal. It's like, uh, what do I have to read and what, you know, what I need to get ready for, for the podcast. But, um, I'm really looking forward to kicking off the year and continuing our
00:00:46
Speaker
Muriel Spark Adventure, which has been super fun, and talking about Backlist with some really great guests.
Guest Tara Cheeseman's Background
00:00:55
Speaker
Yes, today we are joined by Tara Cheeseman, who's recommended for us, Being Here is Everything, The Life of Paula Moderson Becker by Marie, and God, I hope I'm nailing this pronunciation right, Marie Duryasek, translated by Penny Houston and published by Semia Text. Hi, Tara. Thanks for the great recommendation and thanks for coming on the podcast. Hi, Tom and Laurie. Thank you so much for having me.
00:01:23
Speaker
why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, Tara? Laurie suggested that we reach out to you and bring you on, which is fantastic. But yeah, what's going on in your neck of the woods? You're in Allentown, I think you said, right? Yes, Pennsylvania. And I guess Laurie and I met through the National Book Critic Circle. So I'm a freelance critic. I've been doing book reviews and book criticism since about 2008.
00:01:50
Speaker
I started out as a blogger like everyone else. Yeah, and I specialize in translated lit, which I think is where Lori and I kind of bonded. We both had a love for that.
00:02:00
Speaker
that's also rather where Lori and I connected as well. It's not a small group, but it's a definitely very fervent group of admirers, a translated lit, especially in the US, I think. So I'm very, very happy to talk to you today and talk to you about this fascinating
00:02:21
Speaker
I mean, this is actually, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, Laurie, but this is the first work of nonfiction that we've done on the podcast. Though given the style of, I mean, it certainly is a biography, but there's, I don't know, there's something very novelistic about the approach that Darjosek, Darjosek, I'm going to struggle with that entire time, takes to the subject matter.
00:02:44
Speaker
Yeah, it is really a beautiful book. And I think it's going to be fun to talk to you guys about some of the prisms that the author has us look at this character from. Because it's not just a straight up, Paula was born on, and she grew up. And these were her parents, and these were her siblings, and just like a progression through her life.
Themes of 'Being Here is Everything'
00:03:14
Speaker
It talks about a lot of interesting themes, I think, what it was like at the turn of the 20th century to be a female artist, what it was like to be friends and lovers with some of these just super famous people and how that maybe propelled her career or hindered her career in some cases, I guess,
00:03:41
Speaker
I guess maybe a little bit of both. And just also the way I think that the author gets into the psychological, I think kind of artistic sensibilities that she had and some of the things that her art
00:03:58
Speaker
portrays and that she wanted it to portray. And unfortunately, as well, a lot of discussion about the men who kind of poo-pooed her art, which is not unfortunately a news story. But Tara, where do you think we should get started with this really wonderful book? Well, I think, and I agree with everything you said, and I just wanted to add too, one of the things I think is special about this book is how the author herself is in the story.
00:04:28
Speaker
You know, it's a very voicey book, but it's also, it's not like a straight, a traditional biography in that we're just following the timeline of Paula's life, but what's happening is the author is being very subjective in the fact that she is in the future. So she knows the past, she knows things that, what's gonna happen to these people, things they don't know about, and also what's gonna happen to the world after they're gone.
00:04:58
Speaker
And I think that's, I think that's not something you see every day. And I think that's one of, I mean, it's one of, it's my favorite thing about the whole book. But I guess maybe we should introduce, cause she isn't, she isn't one of the better known female artists. And I don't think, I don't know, to be honest, I didn't know about her. I go to museums and I'm interested in female visual artists. And so I think maybe we should start there. Yeah, please go ahead. Oh, okay.
00:05:28
Speaker
So Paula Moderson Becker, she's a German artist. She started working in the early 1900s. She unfortunately, spoiler alert, only lived to, I think was 31 years old. So she was here for a very brief time. And one of the things that I find very interesting about her is she started out in the German school, but she went to Paris and she went to Paris right when the Impressionists
00:05:56
Speaker
were really getting their foothold. And it's very interesting, very, well, I'm using interesting a lot, but one of the things I enjoy is if you have any knowledge of that period, you'll recognize the different, the different characters. I mean, I think Manet puts in an appearance. They talk about, I believe his, I'm probably, I'm going to have to look it up, but basically the dealer.
00:06:21
Speaker
who sold the Impressionists. I wanna say his name is Boyard, but I could be wrong about that. But he had a gallery in Paris and he sold Degas. He actually wrote a very nice memoir about Degas, if anyone's interested in that. And he sold Manet. Sometimes I think we forget how revolutionary these artists were at that period of time. So for her to go there as a very young woman on her own,
00:06:50
Speaker
study art in the Paris academies and then be influenced by these impressionist artists who were very cutting edge at that time. It's just amazing at every level. It seems to me that she probably had amazing parents too.
Paula Moderson Becker's Life Challenges
00:07:16
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I can't imagine, you know, she's kind of flitting all over the place, going to Paris, sometimes alone. She's studying art, you know, my goodness, and she's not only studying art, but she's interested in very experimental for the times are one of my favorite parts of the book was the discussion about nudes and painting nudes. And it wasn't really something that I had
00:07:45
Speaker
thought about before, but it's so stupid why it didn't die, but that for the longest time, only male artists could paint nudes. Even when she was allowed to, they had to basically wear some type of underwear or loincloth so that the women weren't shocked. Right. And then I think the first opening for women to paint nudes was, of course, painting other females.
00:08:15
Speaker
And the fact that they had, you know, these segregated art studios, male and female, and the male students were able to like paint the male nudes, but the women weren't. And then all of the work with cadavers as well. Yeah, and how they learned anatomy.
00:08:41
Speaker
Yeah, and building on that, Daria Seck makes a really interesting point that Paula does a good number of self-portraits. And in more than a few of these, she is typically nude from like a
00:08:56
Speaker
the waist up. But Darjosek makes the point that this is the first time that she's aware of, and it sounds about right, that a woman has done a self-portrait in the nude. And while pregnant. And while pregnant. So it's this really sort of radical, revelatory moment in art that at the time
00:09:19
Speaker
it seemed a lot of folks weren't clocking, weren't paying attention to. I mean, on top of the general appreciation or understanding of her art, that situation, that position in the history of art, in the art of the time, not going noticed is kind of fascinating to me, especially as we're talking about these major movements in the visual arts, that there is so much happening, there is so much at stake, there is so much being contested over. And this fairly
00:09:49
Speaker
Radical it quite radical very interesting artist is doing her work and Somehow so a lot of the major artists at the time are not even remotely Catching on to to what she's up to and I mean another thing with using the term radical one of the things that struck me when we were reading was the fact that she could pretty much Even though she was you know, she was in the very early
00:10:15
Speaker
20th century. I mean she died before, I mean I think it's worth saying she died before World War I. In terms of her being an artist and also her relationship to her art and motherhood and marriage, you could really place her in any decade of the 20th century and see very very similar struggles. And I know we're jumping around a lot here but there's
00:10:38
Speaker
towards the end there's the scene where she's pregnant and she's writing to her sister and She's telling her sister, you know, please don't talk to me about nappies. It's you know, I'm not someone who's gonna you know, it's bad enough I'm gonna have to deal with it comes time and it's I've had those conversations with friends of mine who you know who have children who are pregnant and just didn't you know all anyone wants to talk to me is about this so I thought that was um, I mean she just she just was an amazing amazing person I think
00:11:09
Speaker
She also, in another letter with, I think it's the same sister, Millie, this book has encouraged me to seek out more of Dario's sex work, because it's gorgeous writing. But she scolds her for wishing for a baby boy when the two of them were born female and fabulous. And just like that, that just popped. I mean, this is in the last like 15, 20 pages of the book,
00:11:36
Speaker
When we are, we know that we are rapidly approaching the end of her life. She dies as a result of an embolism post pregnancy. She gives birth. It's a awful, awful birth, uh, two days, four steps, uh, just the whole bit. And she's forced to lay down for 19 days to recover. And she stands up and suffers a pulmonary embolism and just basically
00:11:58
Speaker
drops dead. But that female and fabulous is just such a, in many respects, it kind of sums up a lot of Paula's approach to a good chunk of her life. Building on top of her parents being very supportive and that she was an artist at the time, but also
00:12:19
Speaker
She did not conform to pretty much any of the norms of her middle class upbringing. She refuses to be married for quite some time. She marries a man who was recently widowed. She then refuses to get pregnant for as long, seemingly as long as possible.
00:12:39
Speaker
She takes takes to being married in her own way. But part of it is that she decamps from Northern Germany to Paris every winter during her marriage because she doesn't get every and then and then every chance she gets and eventually she tries to end her marriage. She is.
00:12:58
Speaker
She's living a life that frankly does not comport with any of her social circumstances. And a lot of the people in her life are supporting it, or at the very least, permissive of it. And I don't really think
00:13:17
Speaker
that this book dives into that, and I'm not sure that you can entirely.
Paula's Artistic and Personal Relationships
00:13:21
Speaker
I mean, Darjosek has clearly read all the letters, all the journals, as much exchange as possible, and certainly has her, seems to have her opinions on something. So she doesn't outright say a lot of things. There's definitely some hinting at what relationships may or may not be. And it's also worth noting that Darjosek is a trained psychoanalyst. So there's a little bit of that going on here too, perhaps.
00:13:45
Speaker
But I guess the point I'm trying to get to is certainly people in her life understood how gifted she was. Her husband Otto, who's also a painter and one who does quite well in terms of selling his work during her lifetime, consistently remarks on Paula's use of color, that there's just something completely different and transformational taking place there. He has criticisms about some other aspects, but he is stunned
00:14:13
Speaker
at certain points when she really starts to come into her own as to what she's doing. And I think that might play a part in her taking off and also his trying to get her back constantly. I have some mixed feelings about Otto myself. Very, very much. I was not attempting to to be an Otto as a saint by any means. I think there's
00:14:35
Speaker
In contrast to what Paul wants out of life, he will simultaneously praise her skill as a painter and then in his journals comment on where she's deficient as a wife. This is also what's kind of fascinating about what's taking place here. And we talked about the nudes earlier. They also participate in nudism. They really start to fall into the physical culture of the journey of the times. Does Otto, I thought that's much later.
00:14:59
Speaker
much towards the end. Um, but, um, I was just thinking maybe we should, we're jumping around a little bit. Should we try to like, kind of give a little bit more of the, give people a sense of what the story of this woman is? That would be good. And especially, um, I'm very anxious to talk to you guys about her relationship with, uh, Rilke. And, and I think that was, that was fascinating as well when he,
00:15:27
Speaker
kind of enters her life. And they're, I guess, a decade, 15 years, 18 year relationship, really. So basically when she was, and please interrupt, because I'm going to really be skimming through this. So basically when she was very young, she was left some money by a relative and she decided she wanted to learn to paint and she went to a artist column
00:15:51
Speaker
and the name, it's its worst warp suite, my apology to Germany, but the warp speed suite colony. And it was actually founded by Otto Moterson, who would become her husband and a few other people. And so she started working there and it was there, she met a German sculptor named Clara. Her last name began with a W and I think I- Westhoff.
00:16:20
Speaker
And I actually thought that was the one thing that made me sad about this book, because if you look up Westhoff's work, she studied with Rodin. She is the reason why Rilke had a relationship with Rodin. We'll get to that later. But she was very, very talented.
00:16:36
Speaker
And they kind of mentioned their relationship, but I don't think they give it as much attention as they give her relationship to Rilke and to her husband, which I think is a little bit of a neglect there. But she joins a colony. They become very, very good friends. They study. I think at this point she goes to Paris for the first time. No, no. Then Rilke comes and visits the colony. And that's how she meets him and forms a relationship with him. And then she, um,
00:17:04
Speaker
She goes to Paris for the first time and her parents, um, the parents help her with that. And she studies. And what we haven't mentioned yet is that Otto was married when she met him and they had a very close relationship, but she was also friendly with his wife. I mean, their whole relationship, I mean, it was, I found that especially they married quickly after the wife passed away. There was something a little odd about that or something was going on there, but, um, I believe so she went to Paris. She studied in Paris, which we talked about earlier.
00:17:34
Speaker
And then when his wife passed away, he was actually visiting her in Paris to go to an exhibition and had to rush back. Within weeks, Paula returns to the colony to marry him. And through all this, I mean, do you want to talk about her relationship with Rilke after she met him? Well, I think it's interesting, kind of the insight that the author says
00:18:00
Speaker
Um, maybe of, I guess maybe this is actual from the letters, but maybe it's also a little bit of just some imagined insight that the author has about Rilke and how he couldn't really, he couldn't really choose. He was kind of in love with, with both of them with Paula and with her friend Clara. And he, he wanted both of them and it even says pretty
00:18:30
Speaker
explicitly that he thought threesomes were like, you know, the best thing ever. So, you know, I think they had kind of like a very flirtatious triangle going on for a while. And then it just seemed like suddenly Roke decides to
00:18:47
Speaker
to marry Clara, and then, as you said, Otto's wife dies, and then she marries him very quickly thereafter and becomes the mother to Otto's daughter, I think, who's four years old at the time, too. I thought that she married Otto before he married Clara. Not sure about the sequence. I could be mistaken.
00:19:13
Speaker
My memory from the book is that it's in very quick succession, but that Paula also does not tell Rilke that she is about to marry Otto. She gets married and then Rilke and Clara get married, but Paula loses it in a letter on Rilke over that, that even though she's now married, she still feels on some level betrayed by Rilke's choice of Clara. It's also probably worth noting that neither marriage goes
00:19:43
Speaker
Great. Roka and Clara do have a child together, but then after about two years, they pretty much just spend a few weeks together each year moving forward, like basically summer holidays together. Not unlike, well, I mean,
00:20:00
Speaker
you know, Paula doesn't live past getting birth really. But given how poorly in all of regards the marriage is going up to that point with Otto, I don't know really how how much time they would have spent together post having their child. I think it's worth saying that because it's something that it's interesting because when I was in my 20s, and I think most people when they were in their 20s, loved real gay.
00:20:26
Speaker
you know, read the letters to the young poet and Mautlery Briggs, which I'm probably butchering. But and it's interesting to find out. I mean, because one of the things when he was when he was courting both Clara and Paula, he had another woman, Salome.
00:20:44
Speaker
who I got this sense was sort of a little bit of a patron, though I could be wrong about that. And part of the reason why his marriage was so horrible to Clara was he was being supported entirely by his family.
00:21:00
Speaker
He had no money. Here they were married with a child and he had no means to support them and apparently no interest in doing so. It was really interesting to get that kind of insight into his character, which I found kind of hilarious. He was just this young player type proto-hipster.
00:21:21
Speaker
I mean, the proto hipster thing I think is really apropos of what we're talking about because I mean, there is this sort of libertine attitude that's running through a lot of this and a lot of their relationships and a lot of how they're interacting with one another. And it seems that Paula enjoyed the
00:21:44
Speaker
three-some nature of the relationship with Rilke and Clara, even though she then, I mean, she seemed to be interested in and on some level pursuing Otto from very early on, even while he was married. And I think this is one of those things that Darjosek
00:21:59
Speaker
hints at. I don't think she outright states anything because there's nothing in the historical record that she can actually point to to state. But she's a more than good enough writer and clearly a keen observer of how people interact and what they're saying without actually saying it, that a lot of those things are going on there and that
00:22:19
Speaker
even if there was nothing physical between Paula and Rilke, there was clearly a romance and a very intensely charged one. But Paula herself was enjoying the nature of that relationship, but then also chooses to enter into a more traditional arrangement via marriage with Otto, much like Rilke chooses the same thing with Clara. And both view the others' actions seemingly as a betrayal, even though they themselves are committing those betrayals. So, I mean, it's
00:22:49
Speaker
It's wrapped up into a lot of different really interesting complications within this group of people. I think it's really interesting how Paula seems so ill-equipped and almost kind of obstinate about a standard domesticity. She doesn't want to be the typical wife. She gets
00:23:18
Speaker
her arm twisted by her mother to go to cooking classes and to learn to cook for Otto and does it for a little while, but then gives it up and quits because she can't stand it anymore. And then as Tara was explaining early on in our discussion, the whole nappy thing and don't talk to me about kids, she, of course, at the very end of her life, has a child.
00:23:47
Speaker
So many of her paintings, and I could tell from the descriptions of the paintings before I went online and looked at them, are scenes of domesticity. You know, she paints Otto's daughter a lot. She paints very kind of tranquil, kind of at home in the garden kind of scenes. And I thought that the author was particularly good in talking about
00:24:11
Speaker
this kind of nuance about how she painted women breastfeeding. I don't know if you guys remember that, but just kind of a very natural way that perhaps is the first time that someone painted a depiction of just like a woman and her child both laying on a bed side by side and how
00:24:32
Speaker
you know, and how that is like a pretty natural and comfortable way of breastfeeding, but rather it seems like throughout history, we had this very, you know, oh, you're holding the child at your breast, which yeah, obviously does happen sometimes, but I don't know. I thought it was, it was just an interesting contrast to think about where her mind was and where her personality seemed to be very strong.
Radical Aspects of Paula's Art
00:24:56
Speaker
And yet she seemed drawn to these very homey scenes.
00:25:00
Speaker
You know, it's interesting to talk about her work. I don't know if you guys were looking it up as you were reading, but it's very obvious. I think Duryacek mentions this. It's very obvious she's been influenced by Cezanne, by Gogon. There's definitely, I would
00:25:19
Speaker
see some Manet in there. But one person she doesn't mention, which I thought would because she would have been working at it roughly around that time is Mary Cassatt. And I don't know if you're familiar with her work, but not sure if she may have been the first one to do a woman breast
00:25:35
Speaker
but that I'm not sure, but she, and you could see that kind of domesticity and the same type of themes and subject matter. And that could impart, I mean, that could impart could be access, what she had available to her to paint and the timeframe she had, you know, she's watching her daughter, so at this, or her stepdaughter, so at the same time she's painting. But I just thought it was very interesting that Cassatt didn't come up at all in the book, again, just because she was working and she was showing.
00:26:05
Speaker
That is an interesting point. My education in art history is idiosyncratic to say the least. So it wasn't until you said Cassatt that I'm like, well, shit, yeah, of course she was working at the same time. I think the point of Axis is really well taken. But I think it's also part of this project for DarioSec is to make an argument for
00:26:30
Speaker
She lays her cards out relatively early, but then is very, very flatly states towards the end of the book, how shocked she was the first time she saw one of Paula's works, what an impression it made on her. And suggested that as a result of this book and while she was writing this book that she was putting together an exhibit of Paula's work in Paris, which hadn't hadn't happened yet.
00:26:56
Speaker
And so she's, I think, in some ways, very much trying to not embellish, but really place Paula and what she perceives to be the radical nature of Paula's work within art history. I mean, so this isn't a biography, but it's also an argument, I think, in terms of relevance, heft, all those things.
00:27:17
Speaker
You mentioned whether or not we looked at the work during. I didn't. I'd usually try and very much avoid that when I'm reading something. I actually said, I think I sent an email that it's helpful when the book's 150 pages, so I don't have to wait too long to start checking it out. But I mean, I want to let
00:27:36
Speaker
the writer's descriptions and effects kind of do their job before my eye starts to do its job. That's just kind of how I approach it in general. And Darjosek is
00:27:50
Speaker
shockingly good and evocative on the point of the breastfeeding. And also in line with the idea of this as an argument, she talks about how previous representations of breastfeeding almost mutilate the baby's body, give them these like a rat neck and
00:28:08
Speaker
And she's just really describing like the tradition of the, like you were saying, the woman sitting upright with the baby, not even really cradled, but almost held in, and I even held what's called football style now, but held almost upright so that the baby's face can like be near the breast, but then facing out at you, which is not remotely how babies breastfeed. But one of the ways that Daryasek describes is like, you know, how the baby's wrist is only a line. And that is just, that crushes. That's such a,
00:28:38
Speaker
It's accurate, but it's also so evocative. And it's evocative of what a lot of Paula's work is doing. She is representing her world and the world
00:28:51
Speaker
the world of the women of the time and the place that she lives in. She is a shockingly good painter as recognized by her husband, yet she's also expected to be a good cook and to keep house and all these things. So I think Darjosek is trying to make an argument and succeeding largely towards the radical nature of Paula's work. But also, yeah, I think that's also there. I don't think she's
00:29:20
Speaker
I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't think she's forcing anything there. The radical qualities are there. They are taking place. I guess I would just note, Tom, that and maybe maybe Darisuk raises this point, but I would be willing to wager that a lot of the reasons why we get this contorted image of mother and child is because
00:29:45
Speaker
that's the way to cover up the breast, is to have the baby like right there, rather than the painting that Darjosek is describing to us where, you know, the mother is naked from the waist up and she's lying on the bed and, you know, the baby is lying right beside her and kind of has full access to the breast and in a way that's kind of like much more natural. So yeah, it is interesting.
00:30:13
Speaker
And I'd just like to add to that, I wouldn't, and this is total speculation on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised that most of those earlier depictions of nursing would be a Madonna child. You know what I mean? I don't think that was happening very much.
00:30:31
Speaker
Yeah, and Daria Sick lays that out at one point, especially with regards to how women, the two camps that women must be portrayed as in earlier artworks, Madonna and Child, or Venus and Cupid. Oh, that's right, I forgot about that. Yeah, she explicitly says, you know,
00:30:51
Speaker
wife versus whore, as it were, in terms of that dichotomy. Which is, after reading this, I'd be very interested in reading any number of essays on art by Daria Seck. I very much enjoyed her insights and her approach to it. Yeah, and what you had said earlier, I just was thinking about how this is an argument.
00:31:10
Speaker
I mean, I think that's really important because, again, this isn't your standard biography. She is coming to it with a very specific perspective, and she's also curating.
00:31:25
Speaker
a lot of what she, you know, she's really shaping what she's telling us, which isn't a, you know, it's, it's a, it's a choice. And I mean, I love the book. I'm not trying to be, but like, I was thinking of, um, we were talking, you mentioned the, um, the classes, the cooking classes.
00:31:41
Speaker
What I found interesting, so interesting about that was the fact that, you know, these are admittedly very supportive parents. They let her go to Paris. They, you know, supported her to everything she did. But, and I think Duryacek makes the point, they weren't too crazy about her marrying Otto.
00:32:01
Speaker
And I kind of, part of me wonders, because they had to know their kid. You know your kid. Part of me, kind of in the back of my head wonders, were they trying to stall? Because the way they were going to accept the marriage is if she went away, I believe, to Berlin for two months to take cooking classes while living with her aunt.
00:32:20
Speaker
And it kind of, that to me seems, there was no one closer to cooking classes. You know, it just, there's a lot happening there. And what I like about the book is the awareness that there's a lot happening, but it's always through Drieska's eyes. Everything is filtered through her very specific personal lens. Should we, should we talk a bit? And I'm asking this, and at the same time thinking, well, I'm not quite sure.
00:32:47
Speaker
how to talk about it. But I'm going to ask anyway, should we talk about the fragmentary style of the book? Because it is very much told in basically paragraph size fragments throughout. And maybe that is the way that one can best convey kind of this prismatic, impressionistic view of Paula's life.
00:33:16
Speaker
But I'd be interested in your thoughts or ideas about that. You know, the paragraphs are so short. Could we each pick one? Would you be interested in doing that? Sure. And then people get kind of a sense of what's going on. I know there was
00:33:37
Speaker
I have one here that I can read really quickly. I think it gives a sense of it. There was a great one about the talk. Oh, I can read the Mississippi one, which I think it gives an idea of how the author is so present in the narration. We could reproach Rilke for having left Paula out of his monograph on the Warp Swede art painters. Or we could say that Paula was not really part of the group. In Warp Swede, she paints the black and white bark of the birch trees.
00:34:07
Speaker
the peat on the marshes. In Paris, she does battle with the gray light, the high walls above the chestnut trees. In the Mississippi, she would have painted this huge Spanish moss, the rootless air plants, green old man's beard on the massive oaks.
00:34:24
Speaker
And I just, I love that paragraph because she just, the insertion of the Mississippi, I feel like it just comes out of nowhere. But it reminds us that, oh, that's right. We're not there. We're here now. And we have a bigger view of the world than really that Paula ever had a chance to. Yeah. Tom, do you want to go or should I go next? Why don't you go next? Okay. The passage I'm going to read is on page 126. The gesture of taking her clothes off.
00:34:53
Speaker
and setting up in front of her canvas and going ahead and doing it. Here is my skin. I'm going to show my belly and the shape of my breasts and my navel. The nude self-portrait of a woman one-on-one with herself and the history of art. Is it because models are expensive? Is it deliberate?
00:35:13
Speaker
This healthy, sporty, pretty, well-rounded nudist German woman loved her body. The act of painting herself naked has nothing to do with the narcissism. It is work. It is all there for her to do. Using either a mirror or a photograph. All there for her to discover. I don't know if she is aware of it, of being the first one to do it. In any case, she always looks happy naked. That's a great one.
00:35:40
Speaker
on page 102. The paintings exist. They are sufficient unto themselves. She does not say much about them. She rarely speaks about her art. After the death of her friend, Clara alludes to this silence. Perhaps it was impossible for her to articulate those things clearly. The experience was perhaps so incommunicable that her only way to express it was to transform it into her work. And anyway, how do you write paintings?
00:36:06
Speaker
You can describe their features, their shapes, the contrasting colors. You can express an opinion, criticize them. You can provide a historical perspective and put them in context, but write them. There's a huge gap between the words and the images. Dreams and projections arise from the fault line. These are the years when Monet and Giverny begins his Nymphaeus series. Bridges over water and floating plants, light.
00:36:28
Speaker
Yeah, she's just so good. Could I read another one really quick and then you can edit it out if you want to? I think it kind of leads into something else. It's on page 26. Do you like Monet?
00:36:42
Speaker
No, Otto Moderson does not like him at all. He much prefers Pouvistes Chavans. Monet is only interested in the angle and fluctuation of light. Those sorts of painters who paint outdoors with their watches in their hands leave him completely cold. Otto prefers to spend hours painting in the marshes. Of course he likes French art, but what he prefers is to go back tirelessly to his own work. For it is a great pleasure to be a German, to feel German, to think German.
00:37:12
Speaker
And I mean, I love that just because of the way it uses it uses the court, you know, the letters, but doesn't just block quote them. But the other thing that comes back to again and again is that Paula is German. And this is this is we are about to.
00:37:31
Speaker
come into arguably one of the most important points of the 20th century, which is World War I and World War II. The Holocaust hasn't happened yet. Towards the end, when you had mentioned how
00:37:43
Speaker
they moved to another artist colony and they nudist, nudism. That was part of like the German physical fitness regime that became a really big part of the Nazi government. You know what I mean? It's just, it's interesting because she, I think at one point they referred to it as a bubble. She would, she didn't see any of that, but she was also leading into that, that part, that German nationalism. I just found that fascinating how she incorporated all that.
00:38:13
Speaker
When the Newsom bit came up, it jumped out at me especially because of one of our other episodes on Imperium by Christian Cracht, which features a lot of a lot of nudism and also like a lot of what's coming out of that like intellectual social milieu of Germany at the time.
00:38:32
Speaker
It's also worth noting, as Darysek notes a few times, that under the Nazis, her work is condemned as degenerate and is pointed to as completely contravening the German ideal. I'm going to butcher it, but it's, what is it? Children, kitchen, motherhood or something like that, that the ideal German woman should be living that style of life and that obviously these paintings represent something other than that.
00:39:00
Speaker
Actually, Tom, I think it's Children Kitchen Church. That's right. Children Kitchen Church. I knew I wanted to repeat in motherhood that that was wrong. That's completely accurate, Laurie. Yeah, and she does a good job, the author does, of pointing out just how nationalist Otto is.
00:39:21
Speaker
He doesn't understand why she keeps running off to Paris. You know, what's so great about Paris? And then Dariasek, our author, is pretty interesting because she points out that oftentimes when Paula goes off on one of these three, four months plus long
00:39:40
Speaker
trips to Paris to study anatomy or to paint. She's often complaining the whole time. She doesn't like the flat she's in. It's uncomfortable. She doesn't have a good view. She's kind of in the letters, which I'm assuming is where some of this information is coming from, back home to Otto, the letters that she's writing him from Paris. It doesn't sound like
00:40:08
Speaker
a 100% fantastic time, although she does mention
Artistic Influences and Environment
00:40:12
Speaker
to him over and over again, some of the artists and the artists, the work that she's encountering, you know, she's getting exposure to all this great art in Paris. And I guess really probably that's the real draw for her, maybe why why Paris keeps kind of yanking her back because she doesn't have that kind of exposure to those kind of
00:40:38
Speaker
ideas and different art styles and just artistic innovations in Germany that she gets in Paris. Yeah, I think you're right. I think that's very true. And some of those letters are so great that she's like, send more money. Send me more money. She continues to do that even after she said like, I don't want to be married to you, we're separated, but I need money.
00:41:05
Speaker
When Otto decides to visit Paris to try and get her back, and she sends him a telegram, I believe, basically saying, there's no reason for you to come. We're done. You really need to let this go. And I will ask you for the last time, please send me 500 more. It's like, OK. If you're trying to convince the guy not just, there's a lot going on there. There's a lot to unpack that.
00:41:32
Speaker
I think this is also, I mean, going back to the style of the book, I liked your use of Prismatic Lori, because I think that really is, especially with how much she moves back and forth through time, that it really is kind of what Dariasak is trying to create. She's trying to create an image, frankly, a portrait of this time and place and this person. And breaking it up like that allows a lot of room
00:42:01
Speaker
for the reader to fill in the gaps, to get an idea of what was the emotional life taking place behind this? What were the arguments behind closed doors that then led to Paula ticking off for every winter, her seeming refusal to get pregnant? Even suggestions that the marriage may or may not have been consummated up until a certain point.
00:42:26
Speaker
I think this style, the approach really encourages and welcomes in the reader to this process and to this interaction with this artist and her life and the world in which she lived. And it's one of the reasons I chose the book, this style book also. And I love the term prismatic. I think that's absolutely perfect. But it also acknowledges who the reader is.
00:42:56
Speaker
the time period the reader lives in and the way the way the information is dropped in and the fragmentary nature of the information kind of I guess understands that many of us now read with our phones in hand and
00:43:14
Speaker
and the short attention span that you see now. And that, oh, because I know, like the reason I asked if you looked it up, I know I was looking, oh, well, what did her work look like? Oh, they're describing the painting. Which painting is that? What did Clara's sculpture look like? Being shocked that I had, again, I said I used to love her okay.
00:43:35
Speaker
And I knew nothing about this portion of his life. I knew his writing, but I knew nothing about this. And to go back and look up that information, or even one of the things she brings up is other people that we haven't even really touched on is other members of the colony, of the artist colony. One of them was Vogler, and he actually eventually was in concentration camps, I believe. And the book is a rabbit hole, or multiple rabbit holes.
00:44:04
Speaker
that you could fall down into happily. And I think she's very much aware of that as she's writing it. In preparation for this episode, Tara very kindly wrote up some notes and some thoughts on the book. And it was incredibly useful. Well, one of the terms you use is describing this as a Wikipedia novel. And I think also your point of that, we mostly read on her phones now.
Marie Daryasek's Narrative Style
00:44:28
Speaker
The way this novel is written and literally like the actual structure of the words on the page would make it ideal for reading on a phone. Like it's just short bursts of information. It would also be a perfect novel for hyperlinking, right? Like you could be reading it and be like, okay, I wonder what this one looks like. Click or...
00:44:49
Speaker
You also reference the idea of the commonplace book, which are books that basically bring lots of information into, in some ways, an easily digestible format that is then easily dispersed and disseminated to people. And that's really, in some ways, what Darjasek is doing. She's putting her brain, her thoughts, her interaction with this work, and her interaction with this
00:45:15
Speaker
Incredible amount of information in the form of journals and letters and not just not just Paula's letters but Clara's letters and real cuz letters onto the page and
00:45:26
Speaker
Yeah, making that invitation. But yeah, just the idea of this book as as just an actual like electronic object and what's possible within that is really is really interesting, really fascinating. And I also I loved Wikipedia novel as a description. And I wanted to make sure we got it into the episode because Tara, that's such a that's fantastic. I loved it. You know, one of the rabbit holes that that I just kind of got a few inches into
00:45:56
Speaker
I'm really looking forward to falling into really deeply is Marie Daresco. I've never heard of this French author before. I love this book. I love the way she writes. I did look her up on Wikipedia. She's got other books, including, I think,
00:46:18
Speaker
perhaps more traditional in some ways, novels, maybe not so traditional though. And Tara, I think that you said that you might currently be reading another, a more recent work of hers, Insomnia. I'm just wondering what you know of the author. I know very little and it's interesting because I, well, I actually, the way I found this book was I went, I was looking for Insomnia, which the American, the US title is I'm Sleepless.
00:46:47
Speaker
And I went into a bookstore, and you have to love your booksellers. They did not have that book, but he found me this wonderful book. And I just started Sleepless. The fact that you brought a commonplace book,
00:47:02
Speaker
I think when I had put that in the notes, what I was thinking of was sleepless because basically she suffered from insomnia and she wrote about it. And that reads quite a, that reads more so than this. There's less of, I'm not very far in, but as far as I am in, there's not as much shaping of a narrative as pulling information. And it reads very much like a commonplace book so far. I'm not sure what's going to happen later on. I did a little research on her.
00:47:31
Speaker
From what I could tell, she doesn't have many books translated into English, but I feel like this was a transition for her. It seemed like that her earlier stuff were more traditional novels.
00:47:45
Speaker
more traditional writing. And again, not being able to read French, I can't guarantee that, but the descriptions I found online, that was the feeling I got. And I just want to correct the record really quick. I just looked it up. Roebler did not go to a concentration camp. He actually, he fights against Nazism and he ends up having to leave for the USR. He dies in a Gulag, Germany. So I just wanted to correct the record.
00:48:11
Speaker
Another writer who writes a similar style of book, Natalie Leger. Again, I'm so sorry for all my terrible pronunciations. Do not feel bad. I specifically have butchered so many names. Lori's nodding her head in quiet resignation.
00:48:32
Speaker
Every time I get to one of these words, I'm like, I am so American. Every time I saw the word warp Swede or warp Swedish, how are you pronouncing it in German? I immediately in my head turned it into warp speed. I mean, that is not that's not helpful in the flow of a book to all of a sudden be thinking of the card often, you know, interacting with a Klingon. But this is a tall segment. But you know what's funny about that? I can do this when you're reading. When I get to a word that I know I can't pronounce.
00:49:02
Speaker
I see it, but I don't sound it out in my head. I see the letters, I see the order of the letters, but there's no phonetic recognition whatsoever, and I just keep going for the rest. Yeah. I often do that, and there's an old Peanuts cartoon where Linus is reading the Brothers K, and Charlie Brown asks him, well, what do you do with all those Russian names? And Linus' response is, oh, I just skip over them. He just moves on with his day.
00:49:32
Speaker
My thing is that I usually just recognize it's that, oh, it's that place that starts with a W and then like, I'll recognize it. But yeah, I guess our Americanism and the fact that we really don't have to learn foreign languages or just don't learn foreign languages as much as the rest of the world can be pretty conspicuous sometimes. Any other kind of comparable titles to this one that you
00:50:00
Speaker
you've read and would recommend just in terms of, well, any kind of comparison you want to make, really.
00:50:07
Speaker
There is one I would like to because I always feel that I am I Really enjoyed it and I never bring it up and I and I don't think I ever reviewed it and it really deserves it I'm a French Canadian author Eric Plamadin Plamadin trilogy similar to what I'm Natalie Liger did And they're based on the 20th century. The first one was called hot hungry Hollywood Express and
00:50:32
Speaker
And it's, let me just grab it real quick because I forget his name. Do you remember back when we were young, they used to play the old black and white Tarzan movies on TV? Of course, yeah. It's basically a story of Johnny Weissmuller.
00:50:47
Speaker
similar to how Duryasek tells the story of Paula. And then the second book is called Mayonnaise and it's about the American poet Richard Brodigan. And then the third one is called Apple Ass and it's about Steve Jobs. And together the trilogy is dealing with masculinity.
00:51:16
Speaker
And it's been in a very similar style I would compare it a little bit more to the Natalie Leger books just because of the trilogy aspect and what she's what her themes in it it's very but it's it's almost it's like It's it's really really wonderfully written. It's a little bit more. It's more fragmentary fragmentary like the Duryacek book But I would really recommend it and I you know, I don't understand I've never heard anyone talk about these books
00:51:46
Speaker
The planet in books. I don't know why not because they're really really really excellent reading it and also when you think about the discussions we're having about Masculinity, you know and how we how we raise boys and toxic masculinity.
Comparison with Other Works
00:52:02
Speaker
It's int it's President because he basically wrote these back in 2011
00:52:10
Speaker
which doesn't seem like that that's long ago, but when you think about over a decade ago, before we were having those conversations, so. Do you have any idea why the second one is called Manet's? I believe it has to do with a, and I had not known about him. So do you know who Richard? Richard Brannigan?
00:52:35
Speaker
Yeah, he was kind of a counterculture poet, and I believe it relates, it's called Mayonnaise in relationship to a poem of his, but there's also, I thought there was a quote in the beginning of the book that relates one to the other, almost like the on the dedication page, and I thought there was one, oh, Rodigan said, thus expressing a human need. I have always wanted to write a book ending with the world
00:53:06
Speaker
What's fun is the book about Brogan is called Mayonnaise, but that quote is at the beginning of the Apple S book. Okay. Very cool. Who's the publisher for this? They came out from Esplanade, which is, I've read quite a few of their books. They published, they're sort of like a semiotex kind of publisher. You know, they consistently publish great, great books.
00:53:37
Speaker
Um, but they, um, they're also very niche. Um, a couple of books that were a few books that came to mind for me, and I've mentioned these before, um, but, uh, Jean Echenez's, um, uh, biographical novels, uh, Ravel, Running and Lightning. Um, they're,
00:53:57
Speaker
Those are more traditionally, they're much more of a novel. They don't have the sort of cultural criticism component to them. But there is sort of an evocative quality to them. And in particular, running is about a Hungarian Olympic runner, or Hungarian runner who's an Olympian, and his life under communism.
00:54:26
Speaker
Yeah, maybe it's just because it's two French writers, but there's some sort of resonance there. The other one that came to mind, also from a smaller press, Sternberg Press, is Shark's Death Surfers by Melissa McCarthy.
00:54:42
Speaker
I mean, that is a cultural study of humankind's interaction with sharks over a few centuries. And using the surfboard to represent that plane separating humans from what lies beneath. And it spends a lot of time on Captain Cook, a lot of time in the Hawaiian Islands. It's fun. It moves a lot.
00:55:12
Speaker
I found a really propulsive quality to being here is everything. And certainly Shark's death surfer has that as well alongside of kind of taking this expansive and to use Laurie's word, prismatic view of a subject to really let the reader fill in the gaps, get a
00:55:33
Speaker
Yeah, kind of a bird's eye view of a thing. And then the nice thing about a bird's eye view, I guess, is that you can see a lot, but then you can also really zoom in and see the particular incredibly well. So, yeah. And I think another quality, and I can't speak to sharks that surfer, but I think another quality is there's a probing sense in these books that the writer is searching something out just as much as the reader is, that the writer's on their own journey.
00:56:03
Speaker
And I know that sounds, to be honest, when I say it, it sounds a little cheesy, but you do get the sense that the writer is trying to, is working something out through the book along with the reader. Do you have any books you would suggest, Laurie? Yeah, I feel like mine are a little bit of a cheat though. So the first two books I'm tipped off by the inside
00:56:33
Speaker
cover with the blurbs to being here is everything. And the first one is Kate Zimbreno. And so I'm thinking Book of Mudder. I'm thinking her more recent book, To Write as if Already Dead. And then my third is also kind of a cheat.
00:56:55
Speaker
Tara because you mentioned the Natalie Ledger books and of course that trilogy is if you call it they call it a trilogy I'm not sure but it's published by Dorothy a publishing project and That of course is a publisher that's run by husband and wife team Martin Riker and Danielle Dutton and Danielle Dutton's Brief novel Margaret the first I think
00:57:26
Speaker
has some of these qualities too. Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good call, Lori. Also timely because there's that biography of Margaret Cavendish that just came out.
Final Thoughts and Recommendations
00:57:38
Speaker
That looks interesting. And I feel we'd be remiss if we didn't mention Two Lines Press puts out Jasmina Barrera.
00:57:50
Speaker
And Herlinia Negra and also on lighthouses are very much in the same wheelhouse of this type of book. I think we just gave someone a curriculum. Yeah. But books in conversation with another on stylistically dissimilar, heading the same things, the kind of curriculum that you put in front of students and then say, OK, you tell me why all these books go together.
00:58:21
Speaker
It's given me some suggestions about what to pick up next, so thank you both.
00:58:37
Speaker
I'm trying to, I'm a little obsessed with this style of book and I'm trying to figure out where it came from and, you know, I'm trying to find more like it. And I realized as I was going through it, they remind me a little of Parek's work. You know, his, I remember also his Ellis Island and an attempt to exhausting a space, a place in Paris. They do have that cataloging feel about them.
00:59:05
Speaker
that I think a catalog the information, which I think these books do as well. The only program I've ever read is life of users manual. Oh, you have to read the shorter stuff.
00:59:20
Speaker
Oh, it's such a long title. An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris is, I actually, I told someone the other day that, you know, if I were to be, if I were to be buried, that would be the book I bought in the coffin with me. It's very, it's very, he basically sits in a cafe and writes down everything he sees as it goes by. And eventually he, and he does it and it develops a rhythm.
00:59:49
Speaker
And it becomes visual poetry is the best way I can. It's beautiful, beautiful book. Highly recommend it. You should really end very quick, very quick. Okay, there's another one. Yeah, this is gonna be the longest list of books mentioned. No, it's fantastic. It's great.
01:00:09
Speaker
I think we're wrapping up. So, Tara, are there places that people can and should follow you? I'll also throw these in the show notes, but socials, Substack, any of that good stuff? I'm on Instagram, at Tara Cheeseman. And I also have a Substack, like everyone. Mine is called Ex Libras, where I talk about the books I've been reading, a little bit short reviews.
01:00:37
Speaker
um and kind of try to connect them to what's going on in the world and what's going on around me um and that's pretty much it i'm no longer on twitter or x i don't know if you guys are but i still have a um i still have a presence i still have an account there but if anyone's trying to find me there your best bet is notes or um i'm sorry threads or instagram um because i'm no longer really using it that much yeah i'm keeping as far away from
01:01:05
Speaker
Twitter as I mean, I feel like I check on it like once a month and then within two swipes of my thumb remember why I don't ever go on there anymore. So yeah, it sucks because there used to be a really great book. Wasn't it? It was the best. It was absolutely the best. And it's, you know, some of those people, some of those people are still on there, but it's very difficult to find them anymore in your feet. Yeah.
01:01:28
Speaker
Everyone else, the ads just suck. I might even see a tweet that's annoying or offensive. It's just like, I'll come across an ad that just depresses the hell out of me. Why does this exist?
01:01:41
Speaker
All right, well, thank you so much, Tara. This is, I mean, this is often, I mean, always the case that we could spend hours more, you know, digging in and going through, but this has been a fantastic conversation. It's a absolutely wonderful book. Being Here is Everything, The Life of Paula Moderson Becker by Marie Doresek and translated by Penny Houston. I just want to give all the information because
01:02:07
Speaker
Yeah, y'all really do need to find this and check it out. So thank you. Thank you for joining us, Tara. Oh, thank you so much for having me. This has been so much fun. I really enjoyed myself. Thank you. Thanks, Tara. Thank you.