great well um i am elizabeth holton i'm the
head of communications at the institute of museum and library
services again i want to thank you so much for joining us today
in what is now our fourth event in the conversations with crosby series
featuring our imls director crosby kemper and some very special guests
and today we're very fortunate to have with us a
novelist writer and one of many uh credentials this crossbow will share
francine pros for what promises to be a really
exciting discussion and uh before i turn it over
to crosby to do uh to say a few more words uh just
a couple housekeeping items um this event is being recorded and we
will share it on the imls website and youtube channel so uh on those
pages that you have on the imls website you can go back and we'll
post the youtube recording on that page so you can see it
re-watch it and share it and we welcome you to ask any questions you like
via the question box there's also the the chat box that we can see if you have
any um technical issues or you want to just
shoot us a note um but for the questions there's that special questions box you
can submit them at any point during this hour of
conversation we'll keep an eye on them and pose them
to crosby and francine for a q a and discussion near the end of the
hour so with that i'll hand it over to crosby
to introduce francine and what they'll be talking about thank you
great thank you very very much elizabeth and francine thank you so much for doing
this i think the the world the world knows that you've written 30
plus books um novels novellas
short stories critic criticism biography you're an essayist an advocate you're
the former president of penn and writer in residence at bard college
not too far away from where you you are located in upstate new york
doing your gardening candide like in this festival
possible worlds at the best of all possible times
so thanks for leaving the garden and and and joining the conversations
you've one of the things i love about your writing
is that you you have characters protagonists and
and and the folks that they encounter swenson the professor in blue angel or
vincent nolan that converted we hope converted neo-nazi um
who are self-contradictory self-questioning
ambiguous and very humorous sometimes self-humorous
um humorous about themselves rather um complicated and tragic
sometimes characters and now you've published the vixen
and and vixen's about the rosenbergs um and
and yet it's also a funny um witty uh uh look at the at the mid 50s
early 50s mid 50s with the cia and the rosenbergs and roy
cohn wandering through how do you get away with that how do you
do that what's that all about the humor in particular
well uh i've been thinking a lot about that i
in the class that i'm teaching at bard in the fall and the
i taught a class in the prison uh in eastern correctional facilities
last spring and and both classes were kind of wound up being
about sympathy about how a writer creates sympathy
for character and and one of the things that the students
were talking about was the way in which in some of the
texts i was teaching uh humor made you sympathetic to characters
in a way you might not normally be now i mean i'm only speaking
to myself for myself i mean that is i find
humor to be very sympathetic quality i mean i i'm sure that people
there are people who think it's it's the quality of the devil
and they have a completely different attitude but
but that's my own feeling so so when i'm writing characters who i want us to
who are complicated who are complicated but i want us to feel a certain kind of
uh interesting and sympathy for humor is the
is one of the ways that i that i try to kind of
you know create that that aura around the character
so it seems to me that uh i mean a word that
that occurs uh in a couple of places in your essays in particular is the word
forgiveness and it seems to be one of the things
that you do brilliantly with these characters
is they're they're either self-aware or they're becoming self-aware
and it's sometimes it's the humor their sense their sense of of humor about not
only themselves but other people and the mistakes
that they or these folks that they're they're they're gathering with uh
uh mistakes that they they all make their sense of humor about it allows
them to become more self-aware and and maybe that's the you know in the
german the german term buildings roma that
that's how they build their lives it's by recognizing uh themselves and
they can only do that because they have a sense of humor about it
you could do that as an author because you have a sense of humor about them
yeah i mean exactly there i mean there's scenes there's a
there's a scene in the vixen where our hero goes to have
uh lunch with this very sort of sad disappointed
poet uh who's whose book is not gonna do well
yeah and uh and i like to write scenes which are so excruciating that
they're funny they're just so awful that they're funny
because i think i don't know i just think it's a good
idea to acknowledge that things like that happen
you know that i mean because basically i just think
we're flawed creatures we're just flawed creatures they're we're not perfectable
and and once you once we learn to live with that
uh i can't help but think it will make us nicer to each other
so i thought you were going to talk about the lunch that uh simon our
our hero uh has with his uncle maddie who's a literary critic and
and uh you know sort of a sort of a sellout but who also
has some witty things to say he's very condescending to everybody else but he
has some witty things to say and and he's your character simon and
you the author are making fun of uncle maddie during the whole lunch
but then slowly but surely it also it becomes very humorous about simon
because he's getting drunk uh while while while he you know he's
he's trying to distance himself from or he's discovering the the
the not uh the not very nice things which he already knew
uh about about his uncle and it's a i mean it's a wonderful scene
in which simon can barely stand up at the end the waiter has to help him
uh out yeah no it's no the uncle's a monster
the uncle's a monster and the uncle is is i mean
we've all met these guys they're just they're all about knowing everybody in
the room and then and then trash talking the
person that they've just been friendly to
i mean just horrible people but and then and then the but the
and i you know that my first editor who who at least that restaurant is
based on was nothing like that he was a wonderful
person but but at the end the scene where simon falls over because he isn't
used to drinking and what's that happened to me i mean
that was my first lunch with my first editor
this was in the 70s and i hadn't been a drinker in college i just didn't and i
didn't i didn't know what to order i just
didn't know what to call you know so i ordered i mean
the way it happens in the novel i ordered a whiskey sour
and my editor was just horrified that anyone would and then we split a bottle
of wine and i fell over but but i was trying to write about the
70s which was like the 50s in a way which was you know
people were men in particular were judged by what they drank by what
they drank and didn't drink and and to order a whiskey sour was like
the worst thing you could possibly do right right um so i one one of the
things i i wanted to to talk about and and uh
is the arts and humanities and the library in the
life of museums and libraries and and the nation
and uh you wrote a piece uh four years ago in the guardian
uh about the humanities um and and what was happening
particularly focused on the university world in in which
universities were dismantling philosophy departments humanities majors were
floating away administrators were getting uh big
salaries to administrate god knows what um and uh and you particularly defended
the humanities based on the idea that the humanities
teach critical thinking and the question i want to ask you about
that is it seems to me that the phrase critical thinking is probably the single
most misused phrase in our intellectual world
it frequently is is anything but critical it's almost never
self-critical and that that's one of the things that has affected the humanities
is that we we don't we don't use the humanities to
to truly open our minds up to uh to to to real to real criticism which
is always an an expansion of the mind and
what did you mean by critical thinking what what constitutes critical thinking
well it's so interesting you're saying that because because as you say it i
realize there are many many ways in which you
can understand that phrase in a way i just mean
thinking i mean that is i mean i you know
the humanities philosophy history all of it
so complicates your sense of the world that it gives you
a way of or of human beings or human nature
it gives you a way of what i want to say of processing information that you're
getting or figuring out what might be true of and
what you're hearing which is you know has never been more
important i mean it just gives you a way of of
sorting through the unlikely or unders or you know even
paying attention to language i mean you know i mean one
[Music] for several years it borrowed one of my
my students out of class assignment was to read the same story in three
different newspapers and to write about the way language was
used just to spin a very simple story so uh so even you
know even the way in which humanities makes
us more thoughtful attentive to the world
is is incredibly useful well i mean there are two things here that i think
are interesting number one you use the phrase in the guardian piece
tolerating ambiguity which is kind of i think what you do
with your characters is you don't talk not really tolerate
ambiguity you you embrace it and you analyze it and you
and you use it and use it for humor but you also use it for
for understanding and and and then the second
thing in in that and and you have so much
fun with this in in in your writing figuring your criticism
um is that the notion of in foreign languages are a discipline
and study of anything in depth that is in the humanities can be a discipline
and and there are rules in a discipline and you have a lot of fun with rules
which we which we really like and need at the same time you talk about check
often more more than once obviously you're a chekovian um yeah and
you talk about teaching a class and telling them about the rules of
of writing and then each step along the way you read
a another check off story in which he violates
those rules um that the rules are out there but they're
we need to violate them regularly or or at the best you know
if you're check off you get to violate them
yeah well sure although you know checkup really is
is a deep well i mean you can keep going back because there's so much there and
i mean for example speaking of again just returning to sympathy
i mean he has this famous uh he has this famous
uh quote in one of his letters where he says you know it's not
our it's not the writer's job to judge our characters but just to
portray what kind of people they are he says
and he's because he's written a story about these horse thieves
and whoever he's writing to suvarn says you know you didn't say that they were
how horrible they were and jacob says oh i just have to show
you what kind of people they are and what their tastes are
and what their passions are etc etc okay i've been
quoting this for years it's you know seems like such a great quote blah blah
blah and it occurred to me like a couple of
months ago and i'd never read the chekhov story
about the horse thieves i've been like blah blah about what he says about the
story but i haven't read the story so i go and
read the story and the story there isn't nothing
redeeming about these characters i mean they are completely
theirs is they are so judged they are so there's nothing decent about these
people so so i don't know it just made it all the more interesting i mean here
he was saying there are no rules of a certain
kind but he was making another kind of rule and then
breaking even that one in the story because that was the way
he saw the characters right right so you know
one of the things you you say in light of check offer you
have an essay on clarity and um you know the thing that chekhov does
with clarity he's the most lucid of all all
writers is it reveals character um and and so in
essence the the judgment's there in the reporting if
you will he he's he makes the the judgment uh
of not by telling you but by showing you the character
yeah i mean sure i mean maybe this sounds simple-minded but i think it's
i think it's important to be understood and i don't understa
you know on the other hand i mean there are writers who are very
like beckett for example i mean understanding in our joys it's
rea it takes a lot more work than it does or improves it takes a lot more
work but but i think you know the main thing
when i'm when i'm dealing with students i don't
teach writing but i teach they have to write an essay every week
i'm just saying look at this sentence and see if someone could understand
what you're saying which seems to me so basic
about about writing and uh so often ignored yeah understanding i think
is a is is a word that's that's frequently
missing and uh in our dialogue uh the critical dialogue uh in in the
humanities we're all always looking for some kind of silver
silver belt silver bullet variable in the
in the world that will teach us everything we need to know and
uh understanding is a little more complex than that
so i you know i i want to talk um about museums of course museums play a
major role in in your characters lives and a lot of
stories and novels um they're constantly visiting museums encountering
encountering paintings but you've also written
eloquently about a couple of museums in particular i'm thinking of your book
about anne frank and the anne frank museum and and your
book about peggy guggenheim and and and her creation of a series of
art galleries and then finally the the museum uh in in venice
and you you have uh in in your uh in your book um uh what to read and
why you have 10 reasons that uh the arts are
important you have an essay 10 reasons that the arts are important
um and and and all those relate it seems to me
to uh to the to the museum world um in in your book about anne frank
there's a section about the museum and uh and you described the museum and
one of the interesting things to me is the
the sort of portal effect uh that uh the recreation of the museum
they they reestablished the bookcase that had to be moved
for them to get into the the space the annex
uh the attic space where the franks lived
um and you describe that and then you describe the annex to the annex which is
the foundation and you describe all the things that they're doing
and then you describe your um disagreement with cynthia ozek on
the importance of the outreach efforts of the museum
and
talk a little bit about the importance of that
that museum what it what it means and uh and and and and whether or not it it
is in any way cheapened by the the activities you talk also about the
movie and the play and and all of that what's the meaning of of
the museum why should we go see it well it's it's it's physical proof that
a certain thing happened well it's physical proof i mean what
happened in that house happened in that house and it happened for
a reason it happened because the family had to hide for their lives there and
and to save their lives and it it's important to see it
and also it's you know it's it's it's it's kind of reasonable on its
portrayal i mean i've seen holocaust memorials
that are so over the top and uh and off-putting for that reason
but it's but it's not elaborate and it's it's
it's faith it's in as far as it's possible
with zillions of people walking through all the time
faithful to the events that transpired there
so and and you know cynthia ozig says that the
divorce of the uh the museum divorces uh anne frank and the movie and the uh
and the play too i guess you mean but this is the museum and all the
things that they're doing you write about her sense that otto
frank you know uh her sense that
otto frank indulged the uh people's identification with anne frank
too too much but then it divorces her from the tr from the not merely tragedy
but the horror of the holocaust it becomes uh a teenage
uh a romance uh story in in essence and but you don't have that
you you don't by by that reaction no
i mean only a very stupid teenager would not ask
how she died so young or why she died so young
or why she was in that attic in the first place i mean it's not
you can't really reduce it to a love story and also
you can't hold an institution or a book responsible for the
for the use that's been made of it i mean if you were gonna
if you were going to hold the bible responsible for every
horrible biblical film that had been made you know you'd have to
it's not it's not the diary's fault and it's not the museum's fault
i mean it's and also you know i mean i know what she's talking about but i'm
i think so what you know i mean one of the things i don't know if they're still
doing it but one of the things they were doing was they were taking
they had these traveling exhibits uh of you know with aunt frank starry with
with placards and quotes and so forth and they take it to various places in
the world so they did it they took it to argentina
and the and the victims of the dirty war and the
perpetrators of the dirty war both came together to look at the
exhibit and to talk which is a good thing
i mean whether or not this made any lasting change i don't know
i don't you know but i don't i can't see how that's harmful
and i can't see how that's uh betraying the horror
of the holocaust to use it to possibly make one situation slightly better and
and i agree with you and you it in and what i was really good at getting at is
in in your your 10 reasons that the arts are are
important you talk to two of the reasons one is they move
us and there's no question the story event frank the
the diary the story the museum i've been there too it it's a moving
experience there's a traveling auschwitz exhibit
right now happens to be in kansas city and
i went through that and she's there and uh
and it isn't moving it's a moving experience but then the other
the other question you you you make the statement as a question
uh does it make us better the arts and humanities
make us better and and and and so that there's this question in in in the anne
frank uh book about her statement
about finding the in her diary the goodness
in human beings even as she's going through this incredible
experience of course is before she goes to auschwitz but um
and and and of course that's actually taken out of context a little bit she
doesn't actually she goes she she talks about the the
horrors uh before and after that's that
statement um but but you do feel that there's a
potential for uh for appeal to to the best in human
nature that comes out of experiences like this you know
experiences yes i mean art i don't know you know i think
i mean my own experience has been that that
there are certain things you read that you actually think i'm going to be a
better person but i've also noticed that it doesn't
last for very long i mean it's good for it's good for like
45 minutes you know it's good until somebody cuts in line in
the supermarket and you know whether or not you've read
dostoevsky's father's awesomeness speech the night before forgetting you
know doesn't make you less irritated so you know later later in your list of
10 there's another that's almost this kind
of the same question but it's but it's really it's a little subtler
it's uh i'm going to paraphrase i think now um
does it help you understand uh human beings
uh goodness and and maybe evil and that and that it seems to me the
the clear question the clear answer to that is is yes
yeah yeah may not help us act better but it helps us it it helps us
analyze it better i know it exists or know certain things exist
or no you know know the way know the way certain things have been happening
all the way through history and they have it and
you know there's there's certain recurrent patterns in
human behavior that you can go back and i maybe i said this but i've been
i was reading a lot of plutarch this winter and reading at his lives about
you know why i continue to teach the classics because
shockingly people's relationships to to take just one thing power
were as complex and twisted and noble whatever complicated back in first
century a.d bc as they are now i mean it's just the
same things repeat themselves so and i just think that's it's
useful to know it's useful to know i mean whether it makes you learn it
it helps us it is so it now shifting gears and
entirely to peggy guggenheim so you you wrote a biography of of peggy guggenheim
and and and it's she's led a fascinating life and she
was directly engaged and responsible for the promotion of a lot of
modern art um her galleries in new york and
uh elsewhere uh and then eventually the museum in venice which
of course you spend a lot of a lot of time she's kind of
you make her into you know we we're we're really interested in all her
lovers and her sex life and all that but you make her into a kind of heroic
figure uh going through through her life and
you know persisting in this um in in understanding promoting
uh modern art and uh and i i i
that it really came through to me that that she that
uh she and the museum were were an important thing in the history
of modern art and the one thing i want to ask you about is
her relationship to beauty it seems to me that i was relatively
recently in the museum and one of the things i was startled by is i felt
there was a peggy guggenheim aesthetic in the museum
something that the nature of the things that she collected
the the lines were very important to her strong lines and and and the mixture of
the lines with color and and and the portal uh to the museum
and the garden and the sense that it's it's got a certain
scale which is much smaller than most modern art museums that which which
would surprise me my previous memory was not was that it
was larger than it was and i and and that beauty was important
to her um you know she comes across as in in
telling the life as this hard heroic character
um and and maybe maybe sad and some of her emotional
complexity right well you know i've always thought i always thought
that her favorite piece i mean she doesn't say
this but the way she was uh was brancusi brancusi's bird in flight you know which
is just pure line pure line i mean no you know i i kind of
in a way when i was finishing the book i thought i'd written it backwards because
i'd been to the guggenheim collection years ago
and then i wrote most of the book and then i went to the collection again and
i was so blown away by what she collected and also she
saved this stuff you know she it was like because she
got it out of europe on the right before the nazis who hated that
kind of art invaded france so she was just buying up
all this stuff and putting it in crates with her laundry and sending it
back to new york or it just would have disappeared somewhere
so i mean her collection's amazing and she had this incredible eye i mean
you know people i don't know i mean i've heard people say people who know
her s talk about well a very famous art critic said to me
oh she was so stupid but i don't think she was stupid i think
she was really smart and and then people say uh
oh she just had a very good sense for advisers you know because duchamp told
her what to buy and you know a series of
investors blah blah but i i just think she was
she had a real eye she had a real eye and she just
and she that was her life i mean that was her passion
and plus she was funny i mean her speaking of humor
her her uh memoirs are hilarious i mean she has this kind of weirdo drawl
tone and even when things are just horrible it's
she is i mean she's very very good she's a very good writer
so to talk a little i'd like you to talk a little bit about the experience
of a museum of and you know not any in all museums but the
particularly important experiences that that we sometimes have and many of your
characters have there's a uh a moment at the uh end of
golden grove where nico the the heroine are our teenage heroin goes with her
father who she's had a very rocky relationship
with uh on on their pilgrimage to um see uh garlandio's uh
sorry i'm getting this backwards to frangelico's last judgment
um and uh uh it it's you know it's it's a wonderful scene
because it's sort of the the uh it's the moment she grows up in a way
in what what she sees that there's so many things in
uh in in in this painting uh and and
somehow you know it unites her with her her
father their experiences like that throughout your
uh your your writing well i've been to a lot of museums
crosby i mean i've been to i'm married to a painter i write about
art i love looking at paintings and i love museums i mean i just love
museums there's some obviously i love better than others
but uh but when we would travel a lot we would never not go to the museum
independent and sometimes it didn't matter i mean of
course the great museums you know the prado and the lure and blah blah
but then also some little french provincial museum where they had like a
hundred dutch flower paintings in the same room
i didn't care i mean it's just it's just interesting and
you know i love the smell of museums and the furniture polish or whatever and so
forth so and then they're great museums i mean
there are two museums in sicily that uh scarpa designed which is just
the i don't know the best that a modern museum could be i think
so you did an interview with an author dune
arbus um a little while ago in event last
last fall about her uh novel the caretaker with in which there
there's a it's a sort of similar thing to uh
uh barn albert barnes and the barnes collection that
her character is uh in involved in um but you in in this you you you quote
philip gustin there's a great uh quote from phil gustin which you
relate to writing she relates to uh to writing but it seems to me it's is
about the the ultimate museum experience um uh in in which you
as a writer painter he's obviously talking about about painting
you know when he gets going he he eliminates the
um sense of the outside world and then he eliminates the sense of character
ultimately he eliminates the sense of himself um
and that's when he knows he's really engaged and it seems to me that that
that's the great museum experience and some of your characters have museum
experiences like that there's a short story called garlandi
owen which are our heroine uh and again with father
um uh has a deep experience with the garlando painting
um and it seems to me that that you know that we've all had that experience
anybody who loves museums anybody who who loves art has had the experience of
having some something that takes you out of yourself so far that you you don't
even know you're there you're in the painting or you're in the
in the sculpture or or the exhibit is taking you away yeah when i was a kid i
really believed and we had art books around the house
i mean we had some art books around the house and i really believe that if you
that i semi believe let me put it that way that if you looked at a painting
long enough you could get in it and in fact there were some
there was you know get inside it i mean there was some uh one of these
omnibus british sort of semi-ghost film you know
they made films in the 30s and 40s that had several british short stories
and one was about horror stories and one was about a guy that goes into a
painting in a museum that was like my favorite thing
so i think part of me has has always you know i understand that doesn't
happen now but part of me feels that way i mean you can just look
at a painting and keep seeing more and more things in it
and uh that's not a bad way to pass time well and and and you do what one of your
other 10 um reasons for the for the
for the arts is it it's time travel um and it's a little bit like that the
experience you've just described the 30s british movie with it you know going
into a painting um we're we're we're in in somebody else's
story um and the story can be gripping and can
take us away i mean uh we were talking earlier about
uh thomas cole paintings i mean if you know there's
uh his you know his history of empire uh series of paintings and they're all
engrossing paintings and you feel like you're
you're there with them at just as civilization rises and civilization
falls all in the same place and you recognize the landscape
and you begin to think about our own times and
where are we in the decline and fall um but it it it it seems to me that
it is time travel that that we go to a museum
for the same reason that we read we read a great book or
or even a good book that's just engrossing is to take us away from
ourselves take us into another place to visit
somewhere else somewhere else it seems to me
is the the great thing about museum going and
and reading reading a great book and writing a great book or writing a book
period i mean it's just you're not yourself
i mean that was that's as i said that's the point of the philip gustin quote
where he says finally if you're lucky you leave the room so you're just not
you're not a present and you're just uh you're something else is
is kind of pouring through you in some i don't know what mysterious interesting
way you you you also talk about the power of
shock um that's one of your 10 reasons for the
for the arts and humanities what it what
what's the good you know there's a lot that's shocking in our world today
i mean we've we've been we've been given a whole series of
of shocks over the last couple of years the political shocks the racial shocks
uh the pandemic shock uh uh and you know our concern
uh about uh inequality thing things like that all
all shocks to our to our system what what can the arts do with shock that can
that can help us through this well it can get better i mean it's
always shocking when it gets you know when art itself gets better and
it can make you it can make you see things in a new way
or see art in a way i mean you know one of my favorite
art exhibits i ever went to is being in museums was the guggenheim had a
uh 1900 show curated by robert rosenberg and uh the it started with all these
like it was all 1900 right so it started with all these
kitschy genre scenes i mean these horrible
you know 1900 sentimental realist and then you went up and went up
and at the end there's cezanne and gauguin and van gogh and
and all done at the same time and it makes you re and it's shocking
and this and it can kind of restore your sense of like something
[Music] really different happen something really
different happened and and i think it changed how people saw
the world around them or color or light or plans or so forth so
uh it's good every so often and um it seems to me that
one of the powers of the traveling exhibit
uh the the famous painting whether it's a
mona lisa or whatever going to visit the egyptian exhibit uh
the permanent egyptian hall in the in the matter
whatever it might be is that it it provides uh an opportunity
for conversation conversation with the person you may go
with you've got you've you have some funny uh uh comments about
guided tours and the you know the the the uh
the promotion of the the uh recorded tour
and that sort of thing you've got one guided tour of hell which is
an actual guided tour and you're one of your novellas uh
to uh to auschwitz um yeah you know speaking of which that maybe it
was the auschwitz uh exhibit you mentioned earlier but
there were there at some point there was an ad there was some outfits
exhibit in a museum downtown i'm not sure exactly
and and there was an ad for it on the sides of buses in the city
and you'd be crossing the street and the bus would go by the city australia it's
like oh oh my god you know no i i really
i hate guided tours i just hate guided tours i hate them more and more i mean
there are i've been on many many interesting ones
but there's so many that aren't interesting to
um the last few i've been on i just like had to flee
in the middle so so that anxiety is you know it seems to me that one of the
great things about going to a museum is going to museum and exhibit work or
you know the permanent exhibit or just going to see one painting or or
one one thing that you love going with someone going
going with your your spouse or going with your your best friend
and talking about it and and experiencing it and
experiencing somebody else's experience of it
yeah when i was writing when i was writing art criticism for the wall
street journal i would go with howie my husband and i would just write down
everything you said and that would be i know it would be of course how he's an
artist
with the guided tour the you know the thrusting that upon you not to mention
you know sort of the you know the met pioneered and everybody
else has joined in with the blockbuster exhibit and you know the
store at the end is you know everybody's goal
uh you know by related to to the exhibit that that you know the
the and the leisurely stroll which is hard
to do now that you've got ten thousand people in the
same room with you but the leisurely stroll and the conversation
uh the sort of pristian uh aspects of museum going are are are difficult to
come by these days um i know it's different well i don't
like honestly i don't like the time time ticket thing because it just
changes the whole experience i mean you can't
you know if you're in a city you can't say oh
let's go to the blah blah museum of art and look at i mean now you have to know
in advance and do a thing on your computer and so forth and it just
it's different i mean i understand the reasons for it i get it but
uh but uh you know that that alone changes the experience and
also i'm not you know i think in a lot of places
the museum shut down because of covet and now
i mean there's certain things that i noticed it just seemed like
they were done by people who had too much time on their hands and now
it's going to revert back to some other but you know just
unnecessary uh you know fiddling with collections in ways that
don't seem inspired especially well of course
you know every every new curator has to come in and do something
something new that's the that's the nature of the of the game and the
museum of modern art i know you know about every decade they have to
you know redo everything completely um and
and they're and they're not alone and feeling the necessity of
uh of doing that but whether or not they they improve things and obviously over
the years there is lots of disagreement about
about that um so um one one notion uh that i that i
i i get from reading uh uh forensic and prose is the notion of
a kind of pilgrimage to certain paintings
uh certain places um and what we're if you if you were
the pandemic is over and you you you're you can go anywhere you want
is there is there a place that you would want to go a
museum you'd want to go to a place that a place of art uh that you would want to
go to that that that speaks to you over over
your over your lifetime now that i haven't
been or that i would well you know i not do
you necessarily have the one you haven't been too sure but i'm just
i'm just wondering if they're you know you reach a certain
certain stage where you want to revisit some things too
just as rereading you talk about rereading um
and you know uh the the things that you reread
uh are become important are there do you have the same experience with
with museums or an artwork i want to go i if i could go anywhere i
want to see the monasteries in georgia i mean i i'm i'm really into fresco
painting medieval fresco painting and a friend of mine just did this and i've
been reading about it and they have these incredible monasteries with still
paintings from the 13th century i mean i saw some of them and
i don't i've been i've been really into byzantine art for
quite a while now so like i went to um to uh northern greece just to look at
the byzantine art museum
remember what i saw but there i i was looking at some of these in turkey
that that are essentially monasteries in caves
um
yeah in georgia too i don't know those places those places appeal to me more
and more uh i mean there are plenty of museums i
love but but i don't know what the museums you can't
the uh that the the thing of the crowd i mean i twice went to go see the alice
neil museum and show what they met yeah and they were
like huge lions it was like a camp i just can't you know but that does tell
you something about the pen the end of the the pandemic that
i mean alice neil i think is a wonderful a wonderful painter uh but um
she you know that she would be that popular at this stage is really
interesting i know from from a lot of different
points of view but you know it does tell you the pandemic is in many
people's minds is uh uh i'm knocking on wood crosby i
just knocked on it so um
so uh uh is there
at the you know you talk about the garlandio painting in one story
you talk about uh frangelico and and uh uh hieronymus bosch and uh
uh at various moments is there is there one painting in the
in the world that that speaks to you or or does this change over time now you
want to go and and visit the georgian uh the monasteries yeah i mean there's
some you know all sorts of things i mean
they're very they're speaking churches i mean there are a lot
of mosaics that i would go back to again and again
just because because they were designed and such like santa maria interest ever
or and sit in various parts of sicily
because they're designed in a way that the light hits them in a certain
times of day and various parts of the mosaic of the
golden example and that's like you could watch it for
24 straight hours you know because it's so big
so they're places like that i mean and and i'd like to go to uh
you know my taste in art or what i love most has changed from time to time but
but for a long time i've loved cnn's painting
i mean speaking of not being someplace else
so uh so be nice to go to sienna and just
spend a day is whole day is looking at cna's art um
with uh i i noticed in in your book on caravaggio
you uh you you you were able to make a link that i'd
never seen in caravaggio before mainly because i haven't seen that much of
caravaggio the nelson here in kansas city has got a really great
uh uh caravaggio but um with naples and rome and
malta and sicily with the various places that he lived
frequently for very short short periods of time with the
with the street life and and also with the
with the time of his life that the the various ways he he plays with uh
with light and and darkness um and
i i it seems to me that that one of the great things that you
are able to pull out of a painter and a painting
is their ability which is your ability as a writer
as well to pay attention the art of paying attention
and and so much of our museum going is walking quickly to get through the
exhibit to say you've been through the exhibit just
instead of standing in front of that one painting or that one
whatever the the whatever the medium is that that that work um and and absorbing
it and and paying attention and it's a
problem i think in the contemporary world with everything that's going on
the media the social media the the internet etc we have lost the
ability to to pay attention okay well i
you know the only reason i can write about art at all
is because i can describe what i see and that seems to me
pretty basic and and that that was the only reason i thought i could write the
caravaggio book because there was a great biography
of him of caravaggio by helen langdon that had already been written
but she wasn't that wasn't her principal interest was describing the paintings i
mean it was more about what happened so uh
and that's a that just takes a long period of looking
at the painting you know uh my my model for writing about art you
know because so much of writing about art is completely jargon
written and unintelligible when you can't even begin
my model was sister wendy remember this strange nun that lived in a little
airstream and she wrote these books or you know
she had a tv show and she just described what was in the painting she
described what was in the painting and it was
i mean this was especially in the 90s and the 2000s given how much
writing about art was completely unintelligible
it was a revelation to me that that you you could just do that
so that's you know that's always been the way i've begun writing about art
so you uh you you uh um at one point yeah in uh golden grove
you've got uh nico standing in front of
frangelico's last judgment and you have her thinking um
[Music] she's standing there with her father how
astonishing that one painting could tell so many
stories that seems to me to be a great
description of you i i feel how astonishing it is that francine pros
can can tell all these stories you know and
in so many different ways and so many different
modes you think of yourself as a as a as a storyteller in the in the
fiction and the non-fiction and the criticism
i guess so i mean i'm pretty surprised myself crosby so
so i you know the evidence would suggest that
yes the answer is yes yeah exactly there's plenty of evidence out there
that's true i mean you refer to yourself as you're
talking about teaching writing and and describing writing as a as a
reporter and it's what you talk when you talk about check off
you you there's a there's an aspect of this where you
uh uh seem to me to diminish the the creativity of the imagination
of what you do which is also true true of chekhov
he's not really just a reporter he's he's he's
he's crafted it you uh you know that you quote the i think it's the lady with
the dog the end of the lady with the dog where
um uh there's a his his his statement that it's
basically the ultimate ultimate statement about whether or not
there are happy endings is is is that they've decided to get
married that is that lady with a dog where they
decided to get married and and it's the beginning of the
complications uh and the struggles yeah they really
they realized that the hardest part was still before them
that's how it is right the hardest part you realize that the hardest part was so
good
you know creating the the ability uh uh for for us to to
uh to understand that um that the life beyond the the story
um is is an extraordinary thing that chekhov is able to
able to do and that you do just to sense that so i um
i thought uh we might have some questions
uh elizabeth we have any any questions from uh from the audience that if
you've picked we do we have a question from sophia she's interested
in learning more about uh granting your fulbright
experience and if you had any culture shocks that had an impact on
your writing
oh yeah i'm not so so odd because because before we began crosby said
we're going to talk about yugoslavia well actually that was my fulbright
experience it was in the former yugoslavia
excuse me in the late uh the late 80s just a few years before the war began
yeah it was shocking i mean it was the whole experience it was fascinating and
then later shocking although well really not
so much because uh because why because i traveled all
over the country and it was i mean it didn't take a genius to pick
up on the various tensions that were going on
between different groups in the country different uh nationalist groups so um
so yeah and then you know i mean the the relation of shock i mean we would
we all went to the bridge over mostar the 12th
century bridge you know we went our kids were there
and then the shock of watching the news and there was across the river and then
it wasn't there it had gotten blown up in the war so uh
so was one of those um
i was glad my kids saw that and understood what that what had happened
yeah and you have a list um uh at uh at the end of uh uh reading
like a writer uh of books you have to read uh
immediately and two two of those books are rebecca
west's books words fall down which i i agree with you
i think it's why it's one of the underrated uh novels and i think it's a
wonderful wonderful book the black lamb and gray
falcon which is of course about what what you're talking about or
about the the uh the the world that that you're
talking about uh which which is i think a great but
problematic book um well it's weird it's weird but
because there's things going on that she doesn't tell you but
but again she was a great describer i mean i
carried that book all around for me yugoslavia the book is like 800 pages
long ways a ton but but speaking of uh speaking of um
of medieval monasteries and churches she would describe
the um the uh the churches and and on the albanian near the
albanian border and this was after 60 years her
description was dead accurate i mean the way you know
the scaffolding that was set up so i would
just read her description of a place before i got to the place and
and it was startling you know after half a century
how how bright on the mark she was there there's another writer who writes
about the same part of the world patrick lee firmer um who i i also think
is is wonderful and and
and again the descript the description of particularly the
the religious but both the sites and and the people um their devotion
in various ways uh uh is is pretty extraordinary
another amazing you know christ stopped at abilene that's another one about
southern italy that's just beautiful
right are there any any more questions elizabeth
yes we have one um about escapism you spoke about the great
feeling of escaping into a book or painting
do you see elements of escapism on the rise due to current events or is this
something you think has always attracted us to museums and
libraries i don't know why that question makes me
laugh it's a really good question i well of course i mean what you know
there's so many pressures and there's so many
frightening to be perfectly honest frightening things going on
the uh the urge to escape i mean of course it's always been you
know frightening things have always gone on but
but but the pleasure of just getting away from it if even
just in your head for a certain period of time is
would naturally be attractive did it change
did the pandemic change your reading habits at all
i read changed my sleeping habits which in turn
changed my reading camp so i read more in the middle of the night
i mean it kept changing i mean for a while i was so upset that all i could
read was were like uh sort of domestic novels
written by women in the 1930s taking place in the countries i mean complete
it was like eating cream of wheat but a little better than that for
and then you know then i would read biographies and so on but
uh but finally now finally no i mean they've it's always been the same like
there are times when i just read all the time and then at times
for some reason i can't read for a while and then i'll start reading
so mine changed a little bit i used it as an excuse to to go back and
and and re read things that i had always considered
were were frivolous and i decided they weren't really frivolous
like pg woodhouse um who i think is a great
novelist of manners at the end at the end of the day
um but i also tried tried reading anthony trollope um he knew he was right
i've started i've started three or four times and i
finally gotten into the middle of it that i have
i can't read it i can't read trollo everyone's told me it's so great
and it has to be the people lots of people i respect have told me it's great
but i just but i just keep bouncing out of it and i
don't know why i'm still stuck in the middle if you knew
who was right i got that far anyway uh it's sitting on my bedside table
to uh to pick it up again again so elizabeth any more questions
we do uh we're nearing the top of the hour and we have one last question for
you uh though i think you may want to spend
a few more minutes on it but it's related to the last one and it says
in this age of information when we are increasingly overwhelmed by
digital content and misinformation what role do books
or stories and storytelling play in the future
of american culture and society wowie
any other big questions out there i don't know i don't know
i mean i just think i what do i think i mean they're not
here's what i think they're not called humanities for nothing
you know they're i mean humanity actually means something it means
our our species and what it is that makes us
the beings that we are and i think you know i i think you can't i think
that books can help remind us of that i mean it's it's something else
i mean i understand the way in which our phones and news
addiction is telling a certain kind of story and
books are still telling a different kind of story but
but it's a story that's it's a kind of story that's been told
for a very long time and we hope is going to continue to be because that's
who we are as as again a species and um i don't know
it's a comfort a little bit
yeah that's your i think is reason number
number ten number nine and your your ten reasons for the arts and humanities that
is comfort or refuge and we certainly all
needed needed that and and and can you could use some more of
it so you know my my my advice is is keep reading francine
pros and friends and pros keep writing i'll try
and do that and everybody should thank you crosby
thank you so much see thank you this has been a great
conversation as always and thanks everyone for listening and
watching thanks so much and as a reminder this
conversation will be recorded and posted on
imls.gov to close this out we actually had one more
uh late question um um would love to know more about francine's
frivolous reading to uh end on a light note uh francine if
you want to share um a couple things oh yeah well i i mean
for example there's an uh a writer named dorothy whipple who uh
wrote in the 30s and 40s and she writes these domestic novels of
and they're sort of like watching really good masterpiece
theater tv but a little but better than that so i read everything she wrote and
then for other reasons i read i had to go and i
reread molly keane it was an irish novelist from the 50s and so forth
it was very very funny and very dark actually but very funny so i
don't know i just i i mean maybe frivolous was the wrong
word but it was just they they were just they were amusing
and distracting and to be honest all i could handle at that point
although mollyking is i i could handle at any point yeah she
she's a wonderful writer i think she's being republished now oh yeah new york
review books is published is uh publishing good behavior which is
her great great novel super fun being a funny i mean
no kidding damn family breakdown uh well thank you i guess is that is
that elizabeth where are we that's it thanks
so much everyone for attending and francine thank you thank you thanks
so much thanks thank all of you take care
everyone thanks