Catherine Texier
Manhattan
TRANSLATES: French/English
CATHERINE TEXIER is the author of four novels, Chloé l'Atlantique, Panic Blood, Love Me Tender, and Victorine, and a memoir, Breakup. She was coeditor of the groundbreaking literary magazine Between C and D and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award and two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships. Her latest novel Victorine won ELLE Magazine’s 2004 Readers’ Prize for Fiction. Her short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in such places as The New York Times, Newsday, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie-Claire, More, Cosmopolitan, Bookforum, and nerve.com. She has recently completed her fifth novel, Russian Lessons, excerpts from which are included in the anthology Mr. Wrong (Ballantine, 2007) and on nerve.com. She is at work on a new memoir. Her work has been translated into ten languages. She is French and lives in New York City.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Victorine, novel (Pantheon, New York, 2004) Breakup, memoir (Doubleday, New Yorl, 1998) Panic Blood, novel (Viking, New York, 1990) Love Me Tender, novel (Penguin, New York, 1987) Chloé l'Atlantique, novel, written in French (Ramsay, Paris, 1984)
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Monday, May 5, 2008 7:54PM
No moral turpitude at Pen Cabaret
Cabaret is coming back. Not only the Pen Cabaret, the highlight of the Pen World Voices Festival, but cabaret is coming back all over town. Cabaret is not pretentious, cabaret is fun, cabaret is sophisticated, and the line-up at this year Pen Cabaret was impressive – half of them had won McArthur genius grants! One of the participants, Sebastian Horsley couldn’t even make it to New York, as the US immigration services refused him a visa on ground of “moral turpitude” on account of his dandyish and debauched life. So we didn’t get to see and hear him “recount his personal crucifixion or other hilarious episodes from his new memoir Dandy in the Underworld.” The other European performers who did make it to Webster Hall apparently didn’t show enough moral turpitude to be turned down at JFK, but at least had enough talent (two of them won McArthur grants, after all) and wit to entertain us for two hours in the cavernous grand ballroom of Webster Hall.
The evening opened up with Bill T Jones flashing his six packs and fabulous musculature in a solo piece while reciting a poem by Dylan Thomas that I had trouble following because I was so mesmerized by his muscles and the subtle, panther-like movements of his spine and arms. But Bill T. Jones being, after all, a dancer and a choreographer, it makes sense that his body would be the center of attraction. He was also the only American artist in the line-up, and there was a subtle, but clear difference between his rigorous avant-garde approach and the freer, more ironic style of the Europeans.
We missed Sebastian Horsley, but at least we got another Brit, who goes by two names, one for his novelist persona Wesley Stace, his real name, and one for his singer/guitarist avatar, John Wesley Harding, which is, incidentally, and perhaps not accidentally, the name of a Bob Dylan album. Wesley Stace/Harding is a powerful and very witty performer – he cracked up the audience with a hilarious reinterpretation of Hamlet. And his duet with Rick Moody was sweetly funny.
Aleksandar Hemon (another recipient of the McArthur “genius” grant), emigrated from Bosnia in 1992 and started to write in English within a few years of his arrival in Chicago. He is the author of the highly praised story collection The Question of Bruno, and he read from his new novel The Lazarus Project. His portrait of an aspiring writer in Chicago at a party for the Bosnian Independence Day was priceless.
The two women singers were both strikingly original. Hungarian singer Bea Palya kicked off her amazing performance with a high-pitched scream. With no back up band or any instrumentation, she sung Hungarian and Bulgarian folk songs in a sultry voice and invited the audience to sing with her as a kind of Byzantine choir. Her energy and rhythm seemed to evoke at times gypsy or middle-eastern music. Swiss singer-songwriter Erika Stucky ended the evening with her mournful yodels accompanied on the accordion, and, occasionally a spade. Who knew Swiss Valais yodels had so much soul?
Too bad the Webster Hall staff started sweeping the floor and stacking the chairs immediately after Erika Stucky uttered her last yodel…
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