Transcripts For CSPAN2 Katie Roiphe The Power Notebooks 2024

CSPAN2 Katie Roiphe The Power Notebooks July 12, 2024

Seattleites. Id like to thank katie for helping us keep the conversation going tonight. Our program can be viewed on our facebook and youtube pages. For viewers who want to watch with closed captioning, click the cc button in the bottom right corner of the video player. The video will be available for rewatching immediately following tonights broadcast. Tonights presentation will last around 3540 minutes. Afterwards, katie will take your questions. Please use the ask a question button on crowd cast, and ill pop back on to run the q and a. Well try to get to as many as possible. Upcoming programs include neil shubin as well as michael shermer, gillian andrews, kurt bloodsworth, sister Helen Prejean and two ongoing series in our annual engage science series featuring reports and our earshot jazz live from the forum. Wered aing new events every adding events every day, and many are available in podcast form on our Digital Media library. So in short, look around the media tab on our home page, and well continue to provide not only ways to stay plugged into the present, but many more rabbit holes to chime down from our distant climb down from our distant past. Supported by for culture, arts fund, seattles office of arts and culture. But as many of you know, town hall is a membersupported organization, and i want to thank all of our members watching tonight. Its truly our 5,000 or so members who make this program of a 450500 events in a typical year possible for everybody else. If you like town hall, consider joining us as a member. As you likely also know, all those rumors about the vulnerability of nonprofits right now are absolutely true. Town hall is under significant strain, like others, so we hope youll consider a gift by becoming a member yourself to our web site as i mentioned already or by making a donation in the comments of your respective feeds if tonight. One final economic datapoint before the program, i promise, is the fact that other independent businesses are feeling the squeeze as well, and if you are interested in deepening your understanding of tonights subject and supporting our wonderful partners, may if i politely suggest that you use the buy the book button on our event page or the url in the comment threads rather than, say, relying on the local behemoth that sells you, i dont know, corn and muffins or whatever. At any rate, we hope you will consider buying your book from them. Katie roiphe is an author and journalist whose work has a appeared across the spectrum from the New York Times and the Washington Post to harvard, esquire, the paris review and vogue. An essay featured in the anthology, 30 ways of looking at [inaudible] by women writers, and her books the morning after, 1997s last night in paradise, two books exploring the lives of writers, 2007s [audio difficulty] her own essay collection from 2012. Shes a professor at nyu [audio difficulty] thank you so much. I am thrilled to be here. Im very sad not to come to seattle in person but happy to be sort of in seattle. And im going to talk a little bit and read a little bit about my if new book, the power note books. Its a very strange book, and when people ask me what its about, its almost hard for me to answer that question. Its about addiction, its about angry men, its about not knowing how to drive, its about edith wharton, its about falling holding a newborn baby wearing very high heels. Its about asking for more money in a job. Its about being a single mother and being on your own. And its about do you read and simone de beauvoir. Its very hard to pin it down. And i actually feel, i called it the power notebooks, but i honestly feel act this book, its a little bit pathological, i honestly feel that the book that my if publisher kind of broke into my house in the middle of the night and stole my if actual notebooks and published them. I sometimes feel that way. Even though thats not exactly what happened. And the notebooks were very hard to write, and it was so hard to write for various reasons thatll probably become clear to you in the course of my talking about them. They were so hard to write that i would only be able to work on them at 4 30 in the morning. So you would wake up every day at 4 30 in the morning when the world was quiet and no one was up, and i could kind of trick myself into thinking that i was, like, alone on planet earth. And it was only in those hours that i was able to write them, for whatever reason. And theyre written in a very different way than anything ive ever done before. Ive always written things that kind of take a strong argument or feel more polished, kind of more scholarly work or essays that are, take a sort of confident form. And so publishing the notebooks was a kind of perverse act, i think, in certain ways. And the heart of them, they were inspired by two things. I was going to show you both those two things. One of them the, i dont know if you can see it here. Okay. So this is a photograph of suh moan de de beauvoir, very famous photograph taken in 1950 by the photographer art shea. As you can see, shes in her 40s. Shes getting ready, and shes in a bathroom. Shes wearing very high heels. I dont know if you can quite see those. Shes cutting off her hair. And somehow this photograph has always obsessed me. Its the contradictions of it. The fact that shes wearing heels, but shes naked. She wasnt really she didnt technically give her permission for this photograph, but she did leave the door open with this strange man who was the photographer kind of sitting right there. And he said, you know, he heard the clicking, he was kind of like, naughty boy, she didnt really care. But what you see in the photo is sort of her not caring that the world is seeing her in this intimate moment. And thats what sort of projected there. And i guess the two things that i said inspired this book from that photograph are both the idea that maybe its okay to, at a certain point in your life, to sort of show yourself in that kind of intimate, unguarded moment. Like the real self, the real you. And that was one thing about the photograph. And the other thing about the photograph that interests me is something that simone de beauvoir herself was really interested in which is kind of showing women in all their contradictions. The kind of weird, jarring fact that shes putting her hair up, shes wearing heels but shes naked. All the contradictions of who she is in that moment. Shes, like, a brilliant feminist intellectual. Shes just a woman getting ready in the mirror. And all of that kind of contradiction that goes into being a self, kind of interested me in this book. And so the second thing that inspired the book, also related to simone de beauvoir, is manager she said. So one of her biographers asked her, was talking about her relationship with jean paul sartre. She was very they had an open relationship, it was very tormented. She was extremely obsessed with him her whole life, but they, you know, they sort of mutually had this open relationship, but she basically wanted more of him than he wanted of her. It was sort of an unequal relationship. She would write him letters saying, like, without you i am mutilated. She felt that her relationship famously with him was her greatest achievement which irked a lot of people because she was such a Brilliant Writer and floss ifer if. Philosopher. So she said, you know, what do you say to feminists who say that your relationship was at odd with your feminist theories, and simone de beauvoir looked at her and said, well, im sorry to disappoint feminists, but i just dont give a damn. I lived how i wanted, and its too bad so many of them live in theory and not in real life. And i just, i found that quote so interesting. Maybe that cop sent of dis concept of disappointing the feminist partly because i myself have disappointed the feminists for many decades. But also the idea that, of that gap between theory and life, that you could be somebody who lived sort of subjugated yourself in your relationship the a man, but youre also this incredibly powerful person in your work and in your life and in your intellectual achievements. And that paradox, i think, is at the heart of this book which really obsesses a lot over the questions of how and i look at my own life very frankly in this book how sometimes you are strong and successful and sometimes youre not. And simone de beauvoir in her work, he says at one point, you know, i wanted to write about women as they really are, as divided human beings. Not as they ought to be. And i kind of am interested in that deof was in that question of just those contradictions or those paradoxes in our relation to power. And so that was kind of, those were the sort of nexus of intellectual ideas at the heart of this very strange project i embarked on. And maybe ill just read a little bit now to give kind of a sense of it. So, and its written as notebooks, and some of them are shorter than others, but theyre all as if theyre kind of notebook entries or im sort of working out these the issues for myself. First ones called catastrophe. Talking to a friend at the gunning of her beginning of her relationship by cat sew, youre headed for a catastrophe, she said. I told her she was probably right, but i felt it was the kind of catastrophe i didnt want to avoid. This ones called emily. My sister emily once said to me, there is no man anywhere so psychotic, so drunk, so helpless, so brutal, so indifferent even just so annoying that some woman somewhere isnt dying to take care of him. And this ones called the fall. And it is about me, this is one of the ones about single motherhood. My daughter violate is 6, and violet is 6, and i had my son on his own, and hes very tiny in this story, maybe a few weeks old. One morning im walking violet to school. Shes pushing the stroller, but im carrying the baby because hes fussing. Im wearing pink suede three and a half inch platforms. I have a work meeting afterwards. My heel gets caught in the sidewalk, and i lose my balance, and i fall forward. Somehow managing to put both my hands up and cup my babys head. Hes crying but only out of outrange at such a sudden and undignified changing of position. Of course a crowd gathers. A woman carrying a new born has fallen and is bleeding. Violet is beyond mortified. She actually tries to stand a little away from us so that she wont be associated with us, but being 6 with only limited success. I try to respond politely to the concern while also trying to get away from the people so violet can stop dying of embarrassment. She likes to be angry. Ing she i wore the heels the same way i wore stilettos to parties nine months pregnant, and this time it endangered the baby who she sort of only thinks of as mine and mostly thinks of as hers. Later i will tell this as a funny story which is a way of hiding or a magical instincts of motherhood story which is another way of hiding. I never tell it as a story about how reckless or selfish i am and how these various roles i am trying to play are fundamentally not conducive to staying upright on earth. I see myself suddenly from the perspective of one of the women rushing to work who stops on the street; vain, anxious, overcaffeinated, narcissistic, unable to give up men looking at her on the street for even the first few months of her babys life, trying too hard, trying too flagrantly, clinging to the most hackneyeded and unsettled indicator of female sexual power. I think, not for the first time, why am i allowed to have this baby . I would not at this point be entirely surprised if someone in a uniform came and took him away. A couple months earlier one of my nowcolleagues swung by my office noticing that i was visibly pregnant with no man in my life, he said, wow, you really do whatever you want. I laughed, of course, but the comment stayed with me. The admiration but also the warning undertone. I was getting away with something that you usually cant get away with. Being a sexual free agent and having a baby. As if i were shoplifting the baby, getting him for free. Violet goes right to the heart of it. Why are you wearing those shoes . At 6 he wears exclusively sports clothes, soccer jerseys and sneakers. She has not missed the sea of brooklyn mothers in sneakers and silver berkeen stocks which seemed to telegraph some sort of shimmering vortex of female serenity i will never obtain. And im not, at 8 20 a. M. , trying to impress anyone. Women do not see their emancipation from the duty of sexual attraction as death and life. Doris lessing, quote you only begin to discover the difference between what you really are, your real self and your appearance, when you get a bit older. A whole dimension of life suddenly slides away and you realize what, in fact, youve been using to get attention is what you look like. It really is a fascinating thing to go through, shedding it all. The true power must be in not caring how you look when youve slept maybe three hours. But i do it by habit, by the mysteriously lingering imperative to be recognized as me. The baby is fine, thank god, but he wont always be. Or could so easily not have been. The bruises declare themselves in festive yells lows, greens yellows, green, mauves. This next section is about violet again. Shes now in this section 14, so its many years later. And this section is called how to ride the subway. My daughter is taller now than i am. Shes 59. She wears cutoff shorts and white sneakers with gold stars all over them. Even though shes 14, men start to follow her down the street, talk to her as shes coming up the steps to our house. She writes an assignment for a class, quote put your earphones in and be aware of surroundings. Stand alone but not but close enough to people that you are not totally isolate ared. Move away from those creepy men who watch and talk about you and make sure to adjust your shirt so it doesnt show any skin. Put your sweatshirt on, that will help. And, youre fine, just dont make eye contact. Remember when the drunk man asked you to come over and sit next to him and how when you didnt, he cursed until you could leave the car, and think to yourself that it could be worse. Dont tell your mom about these men. When she gets around to showing me this, the obvious comes as a shock. The dawning of her power over men is simultaneous with her growing vulnerability. She experiences both so violently at once. She discovers her power to attract men as a burden, a danger. It arrives already fraught. Simone de beauvoir describing this stage, quote mens gazes flatter and hurt her at the same time. She feels herself at risk in her alienated flesh. Her power is itself a threat, so much of a threat that shes already writing howto guides on protecting yourself from it. The line for girls is razor thin. You have to be confident but not too confident. Ive noticed girls her age say shes really feeling herself about a girl who seems too exuberantly confident, too into herself. Quote she is really gassing herself. The irony of these phrases is a cover for an elaborate and variously articulated contempt. They are delineating a taboo for each other. At times at that age, it almost feels like the secret police will come in the middle of the night and take you away if you are standing out in this way. If you are feeling yourself. In the lonely crowd, david reeseman quotes an interview with a 12yearold girl. A, i like superman better than the others because they cant do everything superman can do. Batman cant fly, and that is very important. Q, would you like to be able to fly . A, i would like to be able to fly if everyone else did, but otherwise it would be kind of conspicuous. So before i read the last entry of the notebook that im going to read, i just want to talk a little bit about the form of the notebooks and why i chose it because, well, i guess because its so strange to kind of write in these little pieces and fragments and try to work things out in that way. And the reason i chose it is partly because ive always written notebooks. Ive written notebooks since i was 12 years old. And so for me, its kind of a common way of processing the world. And in my scholarship, i have a ph. D. In literature, and ive written some books that, you know, very researched, kind of bioif graphical books biographical books, ive always loved reading peoples notebooks. For me, theres a thrill to sit in a library and read through someones notebook. And ive always liked the intimacy of them. But what i really wanted to get across in these notebooks was the unfinishedness, the idea of the rawness of them, of somebodys thoughts where they havent actually put them together into a polished thing. And for me its very hard not to try to, i have like a kind of orderly are mind, so i want to resolve contradictions, or i want to work things out, and i want to, i want everything to be, like, neat and linear, basically. And so this book is much more like the way the notebooks work because if its fragments. Its more like a jigsaw puzzle. Its like i start with this mystery or these bewildering questions, and i lay out all the pieces and, hopefully, like, at the end you can see the picture. Its a much different way of thinking, and i wanted to kind of force myself into this very, for me, very uncomfortable territory of letting myself have these contradictions and kind of choosing a form, the notebook form which embodies because its notes. You can go off on a tangent, you can go in one direction, you can explore one thing and then at another point in the notebook in another mood, you explore it in a very different way. So for me, the form itself was an effort to do that, to kind of encompass the way that we really think about these questions which is so much more complicated than the sort of easier political ways we like to think about them. And so the form itself was meant to create that sense of, like, my mind working through these contradictions or these strange vignettes or moments or little, tiny power struggles. Or, you know, as in the section i just read, that question of why do we resent powerful women, how do girls kind of grow up, like, learning to hide their power in various ways. So these are the kind of questions that i wanted to write about, but i didnt want to write in big generalizations like all women are this. If i wanted to really stay in these little pieces. And so thats why i chose the notebook form. And incorporating the boyle if my of these biography of these women, im about to read this section on sylvia plath which ill read now. Sylvia plath. Quote i am aware of the power thats in myself, a wanting to give up. If i could, read, enjoy people on my own, head leaving would be hard but manageable. Quote how can i live without him . I mean, if i could write and garden and be happy with my babies, i could survive. But i am so sick is and sleepless and jumpy, always a mess. In years before he leaves her, the letters obsess over her dream of a perfect, artistic domesticity, how tantalizingly close she is to it. When you send me two pairs of tights, when we paint the floors, when we borrow a proper heater, when you send me toll house chocolate morsels because they dont have them here, when i get a sewing machine, when we get a white house in the countrn we get a flat in london. He rules over all of this, brilliant, vir reel, dangerous, the sexual happiness, the only man she cannot [inaudible] he takes her steak and mushrooms and a glasses of red wine in bed when she is recovering from the strain of [inaudible] the letter he writes to an am

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