A messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battle cry.

It's wonderful ain't it when two obsessions coincide?  Admittedly I've let the purse thread drop from this blog, but I've been writing about purses in my current novel and constantly thinking about them.  And well, the typing thing.  The sound of the typewriter is in my head a fair bit, shall we say.  I can tell you that I plotzed when I saw the above here.  Which led me to the Kate Spade site where I saw her book clutch.  Swoon!  Meanwhile, a friend pointed out Willow Rector's site to me.  She has a very lovely collection of handbags designed after women writers.

There have also been some purse references in some of the novels I've been reading lately and I thought I'd note them here.  Blog as notebook?  Why not.

From Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar:

Her college was so fashion-conscious, she said, that all the girls had pocket-book covers made out of the same material as their dresses, so each time they changed their clothes they had a matching pocket-book.  This kind of detail impressed me.  It suggested a whole life of marvellous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet.


From Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf:

This bag was no bag, this purse no purse, flowers no flowers, the fan no fan.  All were the plastic material of love, of magic and delight.  Each was a messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battle cry.


From Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies:

A more conscientious guidebook, the one sequestered at the bottom of her capacious bag - passport, notepad, camera, tissues, aspirin, and so on - was not jaunty.



The purse as acute social marker - one that may suggest a whole life.  The bag as the material of love, the bag as smuggler.  And the bag as concealment device, capacious mode of sequestering.


More purse thoughts on the way.  Soon.

Purse Portraits

It goes without saying, the writing life is pretty odd.  The novel I'm writing (it seems odd to call it a novel, but maybe at 80 pages of prose and counting it's safe to say that it won't turn into poetry or transmogrify into a collection of essays) is the portrait of a young woman obsessed with handbags and purses. That's really all I feel like giving away at this stage. Wouldn't want to jinx anything.  Although in truth, it's all likely to change anyway. 

Writing a novel about a person obsessed, means that you get to follow their obsessions around a bit, try them on.  I've got a whole shelf of books by now on purses and handbags.  Books on vintage handbags, the history of handbags, how to divine a woman by her handbag, and my favorite book: Bags which is the catalogue for The Museum of Bags and Purses.  Possibly it goes without saying that my character will at some point end up there.  With some luck, this means that in the next year or so, I also will end up there.  Wish me luck....bags of it, yes?

In the meantime, I'm mixing my obsession with taking photos, with my character's obsession with purses.  The photos here are the result of a shoot this afternoon - a series I'm calling, "Purse Portraits."  I mean, I'm just doing this to amuse myself, but also to think about purses, to really see them, these things that we just sling over our shoulder usually, casually draping a large part of pretty important and revealing stuff, and dashing out the door. 

I'll leave you to them. 

What are you going through? (Clutching a big white purse in her left hand)

from Simone Weil's book Waiting for God:

In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail (the miraculous vessel that satisfies all hunger by virtue of the consecrated Host) belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralyzed by the most painful wound, "What are you going through?"

This is a question I try to ask, that I've been working through, around, that the characters in the novel I'm writing at the moment, ask or refrain to ask each other. A simple question that is most difficult to ask, to arrive at. I'm re-reading the really brilliant, god-send of a book, Why This World: A Biograpy of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser.  To write what she wrote, what did she go through?  This is the question that seems to permeate the biography. 

Near the end of the book Moser talks about an interview conducted near the end of her life, February 1977.  From Moser, "The footage is difficult to watch.  With her famously penetrating gaze, Clarice stares straight at the interviewer, her face an almost immobile mask.  She sits in a drab leather chair, clutching a big white purse in her left hand and a Hollywood cigarette in her right, burned hand.  Smoking incessantly in the middle of a giant gray studio, punctuating the interview with long, pregnant silences, she answers the question in her strange and unmistakable voice." 

I wish I could speak Portuguese, but it's magical to hear her voice, that alone.  Moser, thankfully, includes quotations from the interviews in his book, in translation.  In talking about the reception of The Passion According to G.H. she notes the discrepancies in understanding.  She says, "It either touches people, or it doesn't.  I mean, I guess the question of understanding isn't about intelligence, it's about feeling, about entering into contact."   

It all comes down to this, I think, to the question of understanding.  To feeling.  And as for one's writing, it either touches people, or it doesn't.