Lorrie Moore: “Watching Television”
October 25, 2013
LIVE from the New York Public Library
Celeste Bartos Forum
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening. My name is Paul Holdengräber, and I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library, known as LIVE from the New York Public Library. As all of you know, my goal here at the Library is to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and when successful to make it levitate. It’s my great pleasure also to acknowledge Tony Marx, our President here at the Library. He’s with us tonight.
It is a pleasure to welcome Lorrie Moore tonight. As it is customary once a year we host a lecture to celebrate the extraordinary work and lifetime achievement of Robert Silvers. Tonight, Lorrie Moore’s lecture is concisely entitled Watching Television.
Next week on Tuesday, Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, will join Nico Muhly, the precocious and endlessly talented composer and musician, to discuss among other things, with a piano onstage, on this stage, Nico’s opera now on at the Met, Two Boys. Please go and see it. On November 5th at the Morgan Library, I will be speaking with Lou Reed about Edgar Allan Poe, and on November 12th, on this stage, I will be interviewing Mike Tyson. His memoir, Undisputed Truth, is coming out on that very day. Exactly one month later, on December 12th, we close our fall LIVE from the New York Public Library season with a conversation between Junot Díaz and Toni Morrison.
It is my great pleasure to announce and welcome LIVE from the New York Public Library’s first-ever season-long presenting sponsor, Morgan Stanley. We are thrilled to have them on board for the entire fall season and are grateful for their support of LIVE and the Library. We are also live tweeting our events this season and invite you to follow us using—I really have to understand what I’m saying here—the hashtag #LIVENYPL. So make sure to use that precious hashtag. (laughter)
For the last few years, about seven years, I’ve been asking my guests to give me a biography of themselves in seven words, a haiku of sorts or if we’re very modern, a tweet. Lorrie Moore has given me these seven words: “Making it up as she goes along.” Finally, it is my pleasure to welcome Robert Silvers, a distinguished and much-loved trustee of the New York Public Library and the editor of the glorious New York Review of Books, celebrating this year its fiftieth birthday. On the way out you’ll be getting the fiftieth year’s birthday issue. Please welcome Robert Silvers as he properly introduces Lorrie Moore, who will deliver tonight’s annual Robert B. Silvers lecture, which Max Palevsky so generously and propitiously endowed.
(applause)
ROBERT SILVERS: Thank you, Paul. Before these lectures happened, I had felt editors like myself should on the whole work with writers, stay out of sight, somewhere back in the middle distance, you might say, but when the late Max Palevsky, a great philanthropist, a scientist, an inventor, a builder, made the truly startling suggestion to do something in my name, I was not only touched by his generosity but I felt an editor’s impulse to honor the writers I greatly admire, and to do so in a way that would involve the two institutions that have meant the most to me—the New York Review and the New York Public Library, which seems to me one of the most admirable institutions we have, a truly democratic source of the mind of the city, and so I must say thanks to Tony, Tony Marx and Paul Holdengräber and to the Library for making this possible and thanks to Max.
Now, after our lectures by Joan Didion and John Coetzee, Ian Buruma, Nick Kristof, Daniel Mendelsohn, Michael Kimmelman, Zadie Smith, Derek Walcott, Mary Beard, Oliver Sacks, Darryl Pinckney, I was particularly happy when Lorrie Moore said she would give this year’s lecture. For nearly thirty years, critics at the Review and elsewhere have been trying to find words for her brilliant short stories and her novels, which, as our very first review put it, “are distinguished by her psychological acuity and the deadly accuracy of her social observation.”
Jonathan Lethem wrote that “her diagnostics of social class are so exact she can make us feel the uneasiness not only between town and country but between different types of farmers on neighboring plots in the country,” and I would add different kinds of bureaucrats and politicians, as when—as she showed in her reports for the Review on the Wisconsin elections to recall the governor and different kinds of librarians and psychologists and other college people. Although she said that when she first arrived at the University of Wisconsin, and I quote, “I had such a reaction to the academic culture that I used to ask myself, ‘What would Goldie Hawn do?’” (laughter)
She’s been wonderfully generous in her writing for the Review. She’s taken up an astonishing range of subjects, not only Joyce Carol Oates and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Alice Munro, John Updike, the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, but also the films of Werner Herzog and some of the most original television series of recent years: The Wire, Friday Night Lights, Homeland, and here we found she’s caught on as no one else I know has to the ways these series enfold viewers into peculiar and revealing worlds in which time as she once put it becomes a medium and not a constraint. And so she could show how The Wire exposed, and I quote her, “The nerves, the fallout, the sealed fates caused by a remorseless brand of capitalism and its writing off of whole swatches of a particular populace.”
Lorrie Moore is one of those rare and great writers who creates an intense desire in her readers for her to go further and further and fly higher with her avian insight. And so it’s been an excitement for us that she will be talking about the connections and the disconnections between the page and the stage and the screen and, yes, the small screen. Lorrie Moore.
(applause)
LORRIE MOORE: Thank you so much. That was just so beautiful and I’ve brought several pairs of glasses up here, I don’t know quite what I’m doing. This is the thing, standing in a library, talking out loud, that I would have to have done when I was five years old but I was always shushed. After that age, this was pretty much the thing I was hoping steadfastly to avoid, especially as I pursued a life of writing, and “pursue” with its connotation of constant nonarrival is certainly the right word for it, as you writers in the audience will know. But here I am.
I’m going to switch glasses now. I have eye issues. These are for seeing far, and the prompter’s not there. So now I have some bifocals I’m going to try.
The only reason I’m here is that I was so honored to be asked by the lovely Bob Silvers, I said yes. When later he asked me what I might speak on, I went into some incoherent description of the theater’s relationship to literature, that Shakespeare, Dickens, and Chekhov were all theater, that the stage and the page are far more than just rhymes but cultural fraternal twins and that playwrights always had the ensemble in mind and that that concern forms an intersection with the novel, ensuring a vitality, blah blah blah, and then there was a sweet silence, or perhaps it was a worried silence. Maybe it was a terrified one or an alarmed one. “Lorrie,” said Bob in his beautiful voice, which is how I read even his e-mails, a baritone medley of kindness, erudition, and directness. “You write well about television. Perhaps you should speak about that. (laughter) See what can be done.”
And that is how this topic was arrived at and that is another irony hovering over this talk, which by the way you’ll notice has no PowerPoint, a magic trick I’ve noticed others rely on to obscure low-level nonsense, hairline fractures of logic, and madness of every sort. Darkness and bright blasts of various slides will take care of anything. Well, alas, not tonight.
Television is a subject about which I am the opposite of an expert. I probably don’t even qualify as an amateur or a layperson or a Mary Jo on the street, but I believe this is why my opinion is sometimes once in a while requested—maybe not requested, maybe just invited. My complete know-nothingness, when it does not produce the strange, disconcerting Martian quality of discovering something for the first time that everyone else already knows, can sometimes produce the good Martian quality of discovering something for the first time that everybody already knows, which is what I’m hoping for—something from the Martian aesthetic playbook, something that I hope has been advertised less as a lecture to be delivered—which conjures gestation and months-long labor and a fully formed creature grabbed at by forceps—than as freewheeling, freewheeling which means to move independently, even heedlessly and irresponsible without need of a gear or even a fear of consequences, all of which may suggest a thrilling ride of abandon and reckless acceleration, though lest you be misled, there is a meaning of freewheeling that originated in Baltimore, land of The Wire, but in the early 1900s, and it basically meant not going over 6.18 miles per hour and not proceeding along a track. There are no seat belts attached to your seat, but I’ve brought my checkbook with me and at the end will personally refund you your money if you would like.
To begin, I was not really allowed to watch television when I was growing up, and it makes me feel sad and lonely even now just saying that out loud. (laughter) We were a family that went to church every Sunday and read the Bible every night at dinner, at which we also said grace, grace being a practice that seems to have been widely replaced with toasting the chef, which is not entirely dissimilar, just somewhat more local. (laughter) In our house, we kids were not allowed to watch television on school nights or really any day that was not declared “special.” This TV policy had evolved from stories of preschoolers maiming one another by mimicking the Three Stooges and bonking their siblings on the heads with hammers. But it then evolved into a more general parental feeling that the whole enterprise of CBS, NBC, and ABC was unsound, even bad for you.
When I say this to my students they ask, “What century did you grow up in?” But it indeed had a whiff of the nineteenth and was marked throughout with suspicions of the twentieth and terror of the twenty-first. My father read to us, the New Testament during the week between the main course and dessert, which presented a sort of torture for children devoted to ice cream and which resulted in some footsie under the table and some slumping in the chairs, and he read the Old Testament in the living room on Sunday evenings, sometimes accompanied by a Sherlock Holmes story. Both these texts—the Bible and the Sherlock Holmes, seemed equally arcane, violent, talky, and entertaining in their whodunit-ness, antique diction, hot babes who said little, mysterious strangers who said nothing, an arduous search for justice and retribution, the slaughter of animals, and the clever use of weapons.
There was no television in our living room, a little unusual for American households of the fifties and sixties, and even more so now when Marshall McLuhan’s electronic hearth has thoroughly claimed the living room, with so many people placing their flat-screens right above the fireplace mantel like an ancestral portrait, though perhaps McLuhan is indeed being declared the family patriarch. Treated not just as an idiot box, but as an ominous one, as in Pandora’s idiot box, our Magnavox television in our house resided in the unfinished five-and-a-half-foot-high concrete cellar in the Upstate New York bungalow where I grew up. We did not call it a basement and perhaps it wasn’t a basement, it was just a cellar. We referred to going “down cellar,” the same way we said down street or downtown. The only room in the house that did not have wallpaper on it, the cellar was dank and gray while our black-and-white TV was bright, dry, and olivey, encased in a wooden cabinet with some mesh where the sound came out, an interesting version of figure and ground as well as the dialectic between figure and ground, though surely not the kind McLuhan meant in his discussions of media theory.
Our television, to quote the poet Max Garland, didn’t work quite well enough to ruin our lives. What I supposed we hoped to gain from watching were lines, we thought, instead of the little we knew how to say. Our washing machine was also in that cellar, as was the furnace, and the dryer, the sump pump and a freezer that held wholesale meat and the aforementioned ice cream, which after cholesterol was invented became ice milk. When we were allowed to watch TV, something special such as the annual airing of The Wizard of Oz, we sat in the old aluminum and plastic slatted lawn furniture which in summertime was then all brought back upstairs and put on our lawn.
But sometimes when we came home from school, my father still at his office, my mother was not there, and sometimes we would sneak down into the cool musty cellar to sit on the lawn furniture and watch. There were no after-school specials then. There were just three channels, mostly full of reruns of F Troop and Gilligan’s Island. Did we as children feel these shows represented the world, the real world that had been withheld from us? Yes and no. These shows were mostly spun from the aesthetics of light theater and vaudevillian antic skits, and because they involved trapped people, they were called situation comedies and it was probably hoped American viewers of the fifties and sixties would “identify” at least with the caring pipe-smoking dads and competent, even-tempered aproned moms as well as their various subversions—I Love Lucy, I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, all of which were intended to be hilarious and not frightening, which they sometimes were.
All the trapped moms and trapped dads TV had to offer, although those domestic cages were often being unraveled in the soap operas programmed earlier in the afternoon, and the trapped moms and dads were busy getting untrapped. The idea of the providing father as Walter White in the richly premised Breaking Bad—different pipes, different aprons, different kitchens, different cooking altogether—was still decades away.
Did we buy these old shows as a window thrown open on the world? Well, we knew that women were not all that perky or silly or addled and that women were often complicated and not divided up into Mary Ann, Ginger, and the Carol-Channing-like Mrs. Howell, but these became gender types and references for the boys of our peer group for many decades to come, like Betty versus Veronica, or to a lesser extent Betty versus Wilma, names no one is even named anymore. Jonathan Franzen, who has written in his most recent book that the actual substance of our lives is total electronic distraction, also announced on a New Yorker panel earlier this month that he was “a Mary Ann guy.” That the Professor, the Skipper, Gilligan, and Mr. Howell did not become workable categories of masculinity for the female imagination of our day shows how much more optimistic we were as girls. (laughter)
These shows were one of the many things that caused our parents to think our generation was as hopeless as we thought theirs was. I do believe we have may been the last generation, rightly or wrongly, to look back and want to run as fast as we could in the opposite direction from our folks. We knew TV was supposed to entertain us, whatever that really was, and although the thrills weren’t really thrills, we did get to see grownups wear strange clothes and behave idiotically. This was supposed to be funny, although to children it was mostly just mildly interesting and sometimes mildly puzzling or even mildly disturbing.
Danger! From our basement windows we could see my mother’s car pull up into the driveway, and we would quickly turn off the TV set and dash back upstairs and slam the cellar door. As my mother got savvier to our illicit viewing, she would enter the house more swiftly, and while we pretended to peruse magazines in the living room, she would head straight down into the cellar and press her hand against the glass TV screen to see if it was warm. This was long before flat-screens, and the magical tube inside a TV could really heat up, a TV or a radio. If the screen was warm, she would come upstairs and confront us. We would look up from our magazines attempting expressions of “Who, me?” “Not me!” Which was so much more possible then in the age of larger families. More possible subjects.