Sweet, Elusive

January 4, 2009

I’ve always been a fan of writer Thomas Beller.  His website, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, is terrific (if you’ve never checked it out, go there now!); i’ve had several friends publish their writing on it and others ended up in his Sept. 11th anthology, Before and After: Stories from New York, or in the lit journal he founded, Open City.

When I was in grad school in New York I would see him often at readings and book parties. I remember him as being extremely tall and broad shouldered, but utterly appealing at the same time. (not that you can’t be both, but sometimes height makes people seem either aloof or imposing).

And he conveys that appeal beautifully in the article published today in The New York Times, Home Sweet Elusive Home, where he describes the connection and history of an old apartment (“I love things that hold their own history — places, objects, apartments, most of all people”).

Here he describes his temporary return to the bachelor apartment:

The winter light in that place was remarkable: three long rectangles of sun appearing at 9 a.m. against the bookshelf on one wall, then slowly dancing across the wood floor until sometime after 3 p.m., when they would flash briefly against the far wall in a final pirouette and finally bow out.

Thomas Beller is one of the (relatively speaking) newer male writers of the last decade. Those manly-man writers such as David Schickler (read his excellent collection: Kissing in Manhattan) or Steve Almond (read ANYTHING by him–i’m serious, he’s great and he publishes so @#$% much). But i’ve always found Beller’s writing to be more sensitive, more compassionate.

One example is the essay, Mother Goes To Hollywood, from his book How To Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood.

In April, 1992, I was in Los Angeles preparing to go to the Academy awards as the date of someone who had been nominated for an Oscar–my mother. The Oscars are about Hollywood, about bright, ephemeral glamour, about surfaces that reflect. My mother is not about these things. Yet there we were, an unlikely pair, preparing for our big night.

I’m looking forward to his forthcoming book, an anthology of writing about New York– Lost and Found: Stories from New York.