 Hello and welcome. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events here at the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco. We'd like to thank you for joining our online program, a left-handed woman essays with author Judith Thurman, who is in conversation with writer and journalist Julia Flynn Seiler. We're very pleased to welcome Judith back after her jubilant spectacolette celebration last January, and also we welcome back Julia, longtime friend and member of Mechanics Institute. If you are new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854, and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature our General Interest Library, an international chess club, our ongoing author and literary programs, and on Friday our Cinema Lit Film Series. Please visit us at milibrary.org. Also, if you're here in town, come on Wednesday at noon for a free tour of the Mechanics Institute and our beautiful library and chess club. Our talk today will be followed by a Q&A with you, our audience, and we invite you to put your questions in the chat. Also, if you would like to purchase a copy of a left-handed woman essays, please go to your nearest independent bookstore and purchase your book. A left-handed woman is Judith's first book in 15 years, which gathers together many of her most beloved essays and profiles from the New Yorker, ranging in a variety of topics from fashion, literature, and music to history, gender, and art. Her essays and these gorgeously written portraits capture persona, history, philosophy, time, and place so brilliantly. I'd like to introduce our two guests. Judith Thurman is author of Cleopatra's Nose, 39 Varieties of Desire. Isak Denison, The Life of a Storyteller, winner of the 1983 National Book Award for Autobiography, Biography, and Secrets of the Flesh, A Life of Colette, 1999, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography, and the Salon Book Award for Biography. Also, the Denison biography served as the basis for Sidney Pollock's movie Out of Africa. Since 2000, she has been a staff writer at the New Yorker and she's here from the Big Apple. What moderator and host today Julia Flynn Seiler is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist. Her most recent book, The White Devil's Daughters, the women who fought slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown, was published in 2019, and was a New York Times editor's choice and a nonfiction finalist for the California Book Award. Her other books include The House of Mandavi, The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, a finalist for the James Beard Award, and the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Reporting, and Lost Kingdom, Hawaii's Last Queen, The Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure. So I'd like to turn this program over to Julia and away we go. Thank you so much for that gracious introduction, Laura, and Julia, this is so fun to talk with you. I know I want to hear all about your work, I really. Well, before, before I actually met you I fretted a little bit about what to wear because you write so brilliantly about fashion and the New York art scene and I thought, oh, but now that I met you you're so warm I didn't worry about it. Well, that's so sweet. That's lovely. No clothes sir. I sent me retired from writing about fashion. I sort of it's it's a subject now for which you have to be on social media you kind of have to follow the in very difficult to follow migrations of designers from this place to that place but it's also the fashion world used to be a very hierarchical place with in which authority was passed on from down from high to to the masses to the consumers, and it's not anymore so it's, it's, it's very decentralized and it's much harder to to to understand. Well, I was so fascinated by a statement you made I think it was maybe to an interviewer that your, your specialty are lost women, and I was wondering if you could tell us what you meant by that. I guess that was sort of a theme of my first collection of essays Cleopatra's nose. And, and I, I started my career really writing about loss women how are they lost. They were exceptional artists writers, who most of them were not English language writers and so America doesn't translate as many books as it should in translation in Europe is tremendous amount of translation especially from the English here that's not so. So I started writing publishing in Miss magazine at the really the very beginning of the second wave feminism and there was an audience ravenous to hear about women's lives. And so I, because I speak a kind of a linguist and I speak three foreign languages for actually, I could read these poets and writers in their, in their mother tongues. And that's how I started so the notion of lost women of bringing, bringing a women back ignored by history or slighted by history or just forgotten or, or that's sort of how I started and then, as I was thinking and writing about the subject. I realized that it's very deeply personal because my mother was someone she taught English and Latin but she then was very depressed and she sort of withdrew from the world in many ways. And I realized that she was lost to herself and in a way, writing was my ideal as a writer is to give my subjects a reality, my subjects a reality and in some cases a reality that they didn't have for themselves. It's really directly related to my experience as a daughter. Would you consider reading us the passages you wrote about your mother but also your aunts who were extraordinary women. Yes, my mother's sister my parents died I had a very late child only child 42. My mother, my father died when I was six months pregnant and my mother died when my son was two weeks old. When I old out my mother's sister who had been living with them for the last 15 years of their lives, moved to New York to help me take care of my son. And she was what used to be called a spinster. Her name was Charlotte but I called her archie. And she was so grateful for this reason to be. And, and she came to Paris with me when I was writing doing research for the collect book. I really figured in my in my life she's my co-parent. I was a single mom. And this is from Judith's beautiful introduction to her collection. The part she's going to meet. Wait, I have to find I was I was looking I had tagged another passage. Let me just find the passage with my aunts. Oh, start with your mom. This is this is good. Good. I'm happy to be this. My mother's demons are abiding terror of some imminent catastrophe still haunt me. By the time I could see her with the attachment she was a sedated reckless who were designated the task of living to her only child. In that sense, our roles were reversed. I attuned my behavior to her fragility. I don't know what her own aspirations might have might have been, except that she revered language and her gift to me was insisting that I should. During the depression she taught Latin and English in a Boston high school, but on her wedding day she forfeited the job. It went to a man she was told by the principal, who had a family to support. She skipped a little bit. I write next about my two maiden aunts my father also had a quote maiden and was very important to me. Unlike Eva who was a spinster also spinster but woman of the world in many ways who worked in a bookstore and Harvard Square. Unlike even my maternal aunt Charlotte wasn't a romantic, though unlike her sister she inhabited a body that gave her pleasure. When I called her was built like an otter and could swim two miles in the ocean. She taught me to ride a bike and to build a campfire. She had spent her youth as an activist in the settlement house movement. Later she ran a state employment bureau staffed mostly by closeted socialists like herself. In view of patriarchal institutions, religion capitalism marriage. She liked to quote one of her professors at a woman's college. He has got to be a very good husband to be better than no husband at all. Both my aunts got stuck caring for their elderly parents, well into middle age, but then they moved into their own bachelor digs, not far apart in Cambridge. They often traveled together, and venturously, and they've been born in a later era. They might have been lesbians, and perhaps they were covertly. I hope so, though we never spoke of intimate things. Of course she was a lesbian Alison Bechtel said to me of Archie. I was visiting her in Vermont reporting the profile and his volume. The woman didn't dress up as Jean Autry. He was a singing cowboy of the 1950s. When I stayed with my grandparents as I did every summer. Archie sang me to sleep in a Stetson chaps and six shooter. Oh, what a character Archie and here's to here's to all of our feisty aunts who have helped us along. Thank you so much that was just great. And let's start and we're going to talk about about four of your essays there's so many. It was very hard to choose which ones to discuss because they're extraordinary. But let's start with the woman, the lost woman who made Jackie Kennedy's wedding dress. Her name was and low. Could you tell her, tell us a little bit about her. Despite my years covering fashion this is a, this is a story about racism. Despite my years covering fashion I had never heard of and low even though she was a very eminent. I would associate for Americans, the highest American society that Mrs Vanderbilt's 400 and for and Jacqueline Kennedy stepmother, Janet all can cost. She designed Jackie's and Lee's debutant dresses. And when it came time for Jackie to get married. Her mother wanted and low to design the dress. This is Mrs low and summer for work. I heard about her through a real turn during the pandemic. I rented a shack in the Hamptons to try to just get away and work and be near the sea. The realtor's mother had, had helped and low out in one of her frequent periods of financial distress. She was a genius, who was born was the, the granddaughter of an enslaved woman in Alabama, and her mother and grandmother had been successful dressmakers in Birmingham for the, for the sort of governor's wife and various other society communities there. And she, she started out her career, helping helping she learned her trade from her, her mother and her grandmother and she. She made her way in the world with it was Jim Crow south and she had a, she was married and she had a son and they, they lived in they moved to Florida to work for very wealthy that white family of course who owned a sugar plantation so they, they, they recognized the society of the Florida society recognized her talents, but all along she was that she knew, she knew her worth. She knew that she had something that was something special. She eventually moved to New York and always with financial difficulties had a quite brilliant career there, but she was exploited by these ladies who proudly wore her clothes in some case she received notice for the clothes and newspapers. And she would, she would die really nearly destitute at a very old age she her age is uncertain because she she sort of she was great storyteller including about herself. So it's not clear when she was, when she was really born, but she embroidered truth a bit didn't she. Yeah, she embroidered the truth. But it was extremely difficult to establish the facts of her biography that's another aspect of American racism, because there were very few public records about black Americans in the south. Maybe not even a birth certificate or divorce certificate was really only the census that you could draw upon and it was sort of a shocking a shocking gap which sort of a shocking avoid. And then I sort of did very deep dives into the archives of black on newspapers in New York around in the in the years of her, of her work in the city and I found sort of wonderful and illuminating articles that that even though she was written about by it by by fashion magazines and in her later years. The black press was very important and she was revered in that. So it was, it was hard to find and establish. And she didn't. There were a few letters, including an indignant letter to Mrs Kennedy that was in the Kennedy library. She had, yes, she had been described. Someone asked Mrs Kennedy about her wedding dress and she said oh it was made by a colored dressmaker and and low was deeply hurt by that reference and she Of course because if she had used her name the commercial potential that would have been enormous to her easy gift. What an easy gift. And I one thinks that Mrs Kennedy tried to make up for it later by paying her debts at a, at a very difficult moment but that's, but she, if she did so and she probably did. It was done anonymously. So, and in a way, it was a exceptionally moving story for me and it's written in a, in a way in a more spare straightforward way than some of my other pieces and in that I found some family members surviving family members of person they were, they were thrilled that she was finally getting some notice and especially in the New Yorker and, and we're trying to have a plaque. So I said here installed on building in Harlem. Oh, that's marvelous. I was so moved by that story and also very taken by your diligent efforts to find this lost woman and recreate your life to the extent that you could it really was a marvelous piece of scholarship as well as writing. She's really a lost woman she's the lostest. I think the lostest. Well, not entirely you brought her back. Yeah. And then there was a lot of there was, there was some, some attention that was paid afterwards. Now, another woman that captivated my imagination was Lee Miller, and she was a model she started off as an American model and then a photographer and then a war correspondent. And you write about her and rolling eye. And in that story you say that you suggest that, quote, beauty can also be a form of camouflage, one that successfully deceives the holder without offering much protection to the wearer. This is probably the image that most people associate with Lee Miller, to the extent that she hasn't been forgotten and this is this extraordinary photograph of her in Hitler's bathtub, shortly after troops and war correspondents were able to get into the inner sanctum. And I was just wondering, Judith, could you, I mean, there's a story, a story about of hurt behind the beauty. And I was wondering if you could tell us about Lee Miller. Yes, it's the beauty is camouflage. Lee Miller was, Lee Miller was spectacularly beautiful. And, and so she, she experienced the power of that beauty and she experienced the vulnerability of it since, since people couldn't see past the beauty to the woman and neither could she in some ways. She was abused as a little girl, probably by a family friend it was never determined who had, who had sexual she sexually abused and and the trauma was needless to say not dealt with her parents were her father was in sort of an eccentric. And she also is a very dubious character who is obsessed with photographing her and did so in ways that would now be considered extremely inappropriate and and and borderline abusive. So, but she was also a while a woman of tremendous libido and drive and curiosity and adventures that she was kind of a bad girl in the old sense of that, that world and she, she wanted a life of adventure and she really made one for herself. She moved to Europe and she became she introduced herself to Man Ray at a great photographer and a, at a cafe and announced him that she was, she was his new student to which he said I don't accept students, and they left the next day on a car trip to this other friends and worked together for years thereafter. And as Man Ray's apprentice and student and lab assistant and go for, she did master the art of she was a very important and original modernist photographer. But this the her beauty was such that it was easy to sensationalize and that's what that photograph does it was taken by she was a war. She was covering the war, oddly, for British folk because she she had a very bad drinking problem and so she was unreliable and people didn't want to hire her, but they saw her pictures of the blitz, her striking pictures of the blitz and they said okay if you want to go, go to the front go and her pictures from from the front in Europe or extraordinary. It was that picture was taken by her friend and colleague and lover she she pretty much made lovers of many of the men she worked with and encountered and and people were falling over head over heels and love with her all the time. But it rather than it's, it objectifies her I think in, in a way that does her a great disservice and and probably and it sensationalizes the the risking of her life and the endurance of danger and the political, the anti Nazi fervor of that work. And the courage and professional accomplishment system as a photographer. You wrote this piece, as I recall, because there was retrospectively Miller's work. Yes, there was a big retrospective in England. And, and, and by chance on the way to the show at the victory at the Victorian opera museum. There was a show of camouflage nearby in another, another venue. And, and, and then there's there's another famous picture of Lee Miller, her partner at the time was developing camouflage for the British army, and wanted to try it out and so Lee Miller pose nude under netting camouflage netting on the lawn of their country has. And so she lent herself, you know, consent she consented she lent herself to, to the, to, to the male gaze I think is it's a good way to put it. And, and that's where the notion of beauty is camouflage also, and it struck me. I wish we had this photograph to share right now. I remember us digging out of the netting and she was covered with leaves and. Yeah. Yeah. Ooh, and how did her life end. Well, her. She, she. Years of alcoholism, of course, took a terrible toll. Her marriage, her husband stayed with her but was very unfaithful. And, and at the end of her life she, she became a chef. She, she, she got fat and didn't care and, and she had a country house that was a bohemian bohemian grow for all kinds of visitors. And she, at the end of her life she became Lady Penrose who's her husband. Penrose was, was knighted. And one important thing to say is that she had an affair with Picasso, who painted her and who really left I think the most telling image of her that there is and it's still life and it's a golden face with green hair and a per profile I'm reading from the, from the description and inverted eyeball leaking a tear and caged by red lips lids, a blue ear lobe with a corkscrew earring, a clenched fist teeth with a smile or a grimace bulging shoulders, white gloves with a brown crust, each bigger than the head, which might be the breasts displaced or a bursting heart. So, I think that's kind of a good, a good way to describe the end of her life. Thanks for sharing that with us. Now, a profile subject that I'm guessing many people in the Bay Area may be familiar with because of a recent show at the Palace of the Legion of Honor is of the Chinese designer, Guo Pei, and you describe her as she she's the extraordinary and probably best known for designing the brilliantly yellow gown that Rihanna wore to a recent Met Gala. There it is. Yeah. And anyways, in your wonderful essay called the Emperor, Empire's New Clothes, you describe her, the designers having two sides, well, well, a and won't be. What do you mean by that, what are those two sides of this Chinese designer. Well, she was always in love with the movies. And in China, the most popular genre is the historical epics, in which there's usually a poor girl or a slighted princess who's who said it's, it's, it's some version of succession, not this succession but some, some, you know, version of a fairy tale in which she is in love with the enemies and the jealous wives and concubines of the prince and, and she, she got her start designing fabulous costumes for these, for these films. And she's a storyteller with, in essence, as a customer for the movies you become a storyteller and the costumes are actually characters in these epics. It's not very well paid and she. So on the one hand she makes her money, designing beautiful tour for Chinese oligarchs and new, the newly rich class of Chinese business people and and some of them self made women, but many of them the wives of, of, of rich men. And she, her runway shows and her, the runway is really her theater. So those are the, those are really the two sides of will pay. That's excellent. I mean, it was very clear in the show that was in San Francisco those two sides. And you would describe it so beautifully, you know the oligarchs versus the theater, and, and thank you for that and she certainly is not a lost woman these days is a she's very, very prominent. Yeah, very prominent and she's successful she joined the Sandica de la Couture in France and shows shows and parachutes the couture, the couture collection she. So the first Chinese woman to be invited into this very elite group. Yeah. Yes, yes, she, she is not true actually there was a there's a wonderful interesting the opposite of go pay from the point of view of design woman name marker, who dress has dressed Chinese first lady, but who's, who's takes her inspiration from the proletarian in a way, in a way, sort of in the way that Ray Calcougo or company Garcon takes her inspiration from Japanese work wearing fishermen's wearing farmers where market us to and, and for for go pay her inspiration is the old imperial past and the Chinese court and the tradition of artisan ship and embroidery and China, China meaning the porcelain. So they are, they are pulls apart but I haven't seen much work new work of marker. I thought I thought of maybe pursuing that but they, the New Yorker doesn't like to send you on trips as long as China, you know, especially. Well, I also love that piece so much because I'd seen that show and then I had this overwhelming question that was not answered by the catalog or any of the copy which is how in the world. It's impossible to possibly pencil out this fine way or who is financing, you know, this extraordinary work that she's doing and in your piece beautifully explains it so it's a great system. So her husband to her husband who's her manager and he was a rich, he is a rich textile manufacturer from Taiwan. And he, when China opened up the sort of Chinese capitalism socialist socialist capitalism year began, he went to China looking for talent and he found her and so he, he, he funded her, her business initially, and then he said you know Chinese people aren't reliable. You make something for them, you have to then, they don't always pay you so they have a club, and you, it's a yearly basis as our most clubs is the membership fee. And then you have to according to the tiers of membership, you pay 50,000 100,000 200,000 a million dollars a year for a certain number and quality of her of her tour. So, jaw dropping jaw drop. Is there any, is there anything similar in Europe, a club in that, in that sense, I don't believe I think it's no I don't think there's anything in the West it's. I think it's probably easier to the good tour houses know their clients and they know that they're there. If you if you order something they, I think they have much more confidence that they'll actually be paid. Of course, of course. So let's, let's, let's move on to the continent and let's, most of us are familiar with the Milanese designer Prada, which I'm not very well first in fashion and so I had always thought Prada was someone who designed for aristocrats or the class or for, but in fact what I learned in reading your essay, which is titled radical chic Prada herself was a communist in her past, and you talk about radical chic and also ugly chic in connection with her work the idea that you know women dressed to please themselves, you know, with their tongues for firmly in their cheeks. A bit and that's that's her genius to, to express that. So I was wondering if you talk about Prada a little bit. Well, she's, she's, she's kind of intellectual she was, first of all, communist. There's. Okay. You know, this is a woman of worth about $4 billion, maybe 10, I don't know. But it's a 123 boys. It's like a 12 she's a 12-figure fortune, 12-digit fortune, at least. And in, of course, in the 70s when she was young and in university, the students were just routinely left wing they were they had revolutionary fervor however they live themselves, where their parents live whatever country houses they escape to, they were on the side of the revolution. And so supposedly she, you know, marched in protests in her. She, people said that she wore clothes to the protest, but she didn't because she loved thrifting, she loved putting together athletes from thrift stores and, and she sort of did it brilliantly. So they're, they're again, these, these won't pay one and two and there's mutual one and two and mutual one is the child of the, the old bourgeoisie of Milan, unbelievably conservative class of people. With very well regulated gender assignments, including sartorial gender assignments. And she takes, and so she, she takes those conventions, the little cardigan and the pleaded skirt, and the little black dress and she she, she sort of adds a radical or subversive she subverts them. It's really simple. It's not, it's not, she doesn't, she doesn't. She doesn't vandalize them some some categories, they break out Google something of a bundle, but she subverts them and her clothes are also. There's, there's an edge of malice to her clothes, if you, which is, is interesting, it's a challenge. They are often, they can be extremely unflattering, you can look like a governess in them, an old fashioned prim governess with a button, and your little buttoned up things. So what she's challenging women to do is to bring their own subversive energy their own impishness or their own rebelliousness as she has brought hers to the wearing of these clothes, and you know what a product dress or suit or is going to look like until you're in the dressing. She, she sizes her clothes low so you have to get a size larger than you would like to see and it's it's an interesting dance. And she, it's she's been, she's also understood the one of the greatest successes in fashion history is the is the product backpack, this light nylon backpack that you can. That doesn't, that doesn't, that gives you great freedom of movement you can carry, you know, everywhere you can stuff it full of of your, your, your high heels and where you're walking shoes to get around with so she's, she's also. She sort of also understood that about about design, and, and for me the great designers the people I really am interested in writing that are the ones who really try to imagine a woman's real life and she, she does that. Do you wear a product. You know, I, I, I have certain, yes, I buy all my clothes in thrift stores and resale stores. But I told this to an interviewer sister, you're a sister to me. I do the same thing. Just exactly I just, and now online there are these wonderful sites online. But for my 75th birthday. I walked past the product store on Madison Avenue, and in the window was the dress of my dreams. And I walked in, and I went upstairs and I tried on the dress, and the sales person said well it needs to be taken in. Shall I call the Taylor said yes. I pinned I hadn't asked the price. They pinned it. And I thought you're going to, you're going to go through this now. And so I went up to the cash register and I gave them my credit card, like this. So that's my product dress. Well, you have to tell us what it looked like though you haven't described the dress to us. It's a beautiful black sort of it's it's sheer but there's a slip under it and it has long and it's pleated in the back so that it flows. And it has a placket a woollen knitted placket that goes all the way down the front and and mother of pearl buttons. Oh, it sounds really great. I'm glad you can wear it over jeans you can wear it over drops as you can wear it. You can you can subvert it. It was all the best part of stuff. Lovely. Your piece on paleolithic art, it's titled First Impressions is so wonderful kind of like shopping and finding your dream dress in that essay, we get to follow your adventures into caves and to this extraordinary place. Could you please read to us from the beginning of that essay and this image is from, from one of the caves that you yes it's from chauvet it's from the. It just made some discoveries of slightly older of parietal art, but this was the oldest for this is the oldest discovered K for a very long time it's 35,000 years old, 37 maybe. I just want to say before I read this. It was one of the great gifts to me from the New Yorker of this assignment because I got to, I got to go into, not to show them but into the cave at Neil I got to experience cave art firsthand I got to live with the researchers in the camp and, and I got to in a way to consort with our, our ancestors, the artists who painted this during the old stone age between 37,000 and 11,000 years ago, some of the most remarkable art ever conceived was edged or painted on the walls of caves in southern northern Spain. After a visit to lasco in the Daldonia which was discovered in 1940 Picasso reportedly said to his guide, they've invented everything. What those first artists invented was a language of signs, for which there will never be a Rosetta stone perspective, a technique that was not rediscovered until the Athenian golden age. It was a mystery of such vitality and finesse that by the flicker of torchlight, the animal seemed to surge from the walls and move across them like figures in a magic lantern show. In that sense the artists invented animation. They thought up the grease lamp a lump of fat with the plant with placed in a hollow stone to light their workplace scaffolds to reach high places, the principles of stenciling and pointillism powdered colors brushes and stomping cloths, and more to the point of Picasso's insight, the very concept of an image, a true artist reimagines that concept with every blank canvas, but not from a void. So, if you think about 37,000 years ago. We sort of take the notion of art and representation for granted but it began somewhere and that's where it began. Extraordinary. I just love that essay was, it was really, really beautiful. I was proud of it. I, it meant so much to me the, the paleolithic artists meant so much to me, the scientists meant so much to me. The, and I was, I couldn't go into show that it's off limits to anybody but the, but the scientists and then they could only be there, two or three at a time, and for one week here. But as a sort of consolation prize that they sent me to another cave, vast, wonderful cave works, very small groups with guided can can enter it and I was there alone with my guide. And I just wanted to read the end of it, because that was almost, I knew I had to describe it, but it was an almost indescribable experience. Every encounter with a cave animal takes it and you by surprise. Your light has to rouse it, and your eye has to recognize it because you tend to see creatures that aren't there, while missing ones that are halfway home to the mortal world. I was asked aloud, he was my guide, if we could pause and turn off our flashlights. The acoustics magnify every sound and it takes the brain, a few minutes to accept the totality of the darkness, your site keeps grasping for a hold. Whatever the art means, you understand at that moment that its vessel is both a womb and a sepulchre. So that I did, I did that was my great revelation. What a beautiful. Now, you, you ended the collection with the essay asylum seeker, and you wrote that during the pandemic. I wonder if you could read to us from the beginning of that. This, this reading Dante during the pandemic was a blessing. It was 50 years ago. I was a, I'll tell you at the end to the guest is when I, when I finished 50 years ago. I was a guest at the baptism of a friend son in the ancient church of a Tuscan hamlet. The Easter and lambing season, a Sardinian shepherd who tended the flux of a local landowner came to pay his respects to the new parents. He was a wild looking man with matted hair whose harsh dialect was hard to understand. Among our party was a beauty of 15, an artist's daughter and the shepherd took such a fancy to her that he asked for her hand. The girl's father politely declined and the shepherd to show that he had no hard feelings offered us a lamb for our pascal dinner. The kids were penniless bohemian, so the gift was welcome. It came, however, with a condition. We had to watch the land being slaughtered. The blood sacrifice took place after the baptism. That morning the baby's godfather and expatriate writer had caused a stir in the church, since none of the villagers most of them farmers had ever seen a black man in person. The man tried to touch his hands to see if the color would rub off. There was a sense of awe among them, as if one of the major I had come to visit. Towards the end of the ceremony the moment came for the sponsors to renounce Satan and all his seductions of sin and evil. Godfather had been raised in a pious community and he entered the spirit of this one. His own experience of malevolence had taught him as he wrote that life is quote not moral, that he stood gravely at the font and vowed renuncio. I thought of those scenes last spring when I began reading three new translations of purgatory being published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante's death at 56 in September of 1321. The speech of the Hamlet had primed my ear with the poet's tongue. The capote and Savieni, an old farmer had asked the godfather, from what power dost thou come? Purgatory, like the other two canticles of what Dante called his sacred epic, Inferno and Paradise, takes place during Easter week in 1300. In canto one the pilgrim and his chichero ne Virgil emerge from hell and arrive at the mountain of quote that second kingdom where the human spirit purges itself to become worthy of heaven. Dante's body still clad in its flesh inspires marvel among the shades because it casts a shadow. They mob him with questions from where has he come? So that's the godfather. Godfather was James Baldwin. And at the very end of the piece I come back and without saying that James Baldwin was the godfather in the first paragraph. I'm talking about purgatory and the necessity to become conscious, to take responsibility for and to become conscious of your sins as a way before you can expiate them. It's a wonderful Baldwin quote, people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction. And anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence, long after that innocence is dead, turns himself into a monster. And in a way, that's so much of what Dante is writing about. And the great insight for me of this piece was that in Dante, Dante has understood that every sin is a syndicant's love. And love of others, love of self, love of the environment, love of the planet, love of nature, love of love. So it was during the pandemic, when we were so aware, both of our connection and our disconnection from other human beings, reading Dante was a real blessing. Judith, were you in Manhattan during the pandemic? I was in this room. No, actually I had a terrible flood in the house in July of 2020. And so I was, I moved around to friends' apartments when the work was being done to patch it up. But I was in New York the whole time. Yeah. So you were hearing the ambulances and seeing the images and working on this essay about Dante. I was listening every day in the park because you know, that was, I would walk through the park and at one point there was a field hospital in Central Park across the, across the avenue from Mount Sinai. It was, it was hallucinatory. My route, you know, went past Mount Excel, past Mount Sinai, there was, there were refrigerator trucks outside of the hospitals for the bodies. It was, it was grand or something. Do you think that pandemic has permanently changed your city? I mean, you're a lifelong New Yorker. I've been in New York for very long. I'm born New Yorker. Yes and no, I think it depends on your age. I think the young people, my stepchildren and my God children and the children of my friends, they're back to their, they're back to their pre-pandemic lives. I think those of us who are old and we were sort of bludgeoned with the notion of our mortality and I think that fragility is, that fragility lives on. There's still all these nice outdoor, you know, sort of extensions of New York restaurants that sort of enlivened the street scene I think they'll be with us for a while. And I think everybody is conscious of and grateful to the frontline workers of every description who risk their lives every day. But the mortality rate here was really, really terrifying. Laura is here. Laura, did you have a question or should we kick off questions at this point? Yeah, I want to thank you so much for this wonderful inspiring conversation. And I want to jump off from Dante, because what I understand, Judith, is that you also began your earlier career as a poet and that your publisher had met you as a poet. And I'd like to know about your writing at that time and the style of work and if you have anything offhand that you'd like to read for us. And also to talk about some of your favorite poets or poems. Well, that's so sweet of you. I did start Life as a Poet. I supported, I was living in England. I supported myself as a private chef for a painter and his wife and worked at the Poetry Society. And I was, I was, I was very, I was reading Women Poets. I was reading Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich and then I discovered and Sappho and Emily Dickinson, Mike Great, whom I've written about numerous times now. So they were terrific influences in Louise Glick and Woman of a Prize recently. So those were some of my early influences and I don't have, I don't have the Book of Poems handy, but I translated Louise LaBe the Great French 17th, 16th century poet and sword-hunting as a Mexican nun, great woman, a great great poet. I began my career as a translator of poetry, women's poetry. Those translations were in the Penguin Book of Women Poets. So I was, I, and I did the translations of Dante, except for a couple in the piece on Dante because there's so many translations into Identify Them, and I love doing that. I loved that part of the work. Have you done any translation of any of the Italian Renaissance, perhaps Renaissance poets? Gaspera Stampa, Gaspera Stampa. Gaspera Stampa, yes. And, and of course you know, sort of reading and writing by Elina Ferrante was also, and reading her in Italian was sort of eye-opening too. I just opened your book to that exact chapter, which is the one I'm going to read next for the Ferrante one. I also have a question about because, you know, you've had one experience, at least from what I know on the Isak Denison film, you know, of your many essays, do you see any of your other essays and featured persona as a film? I mean, what would what would be your choice to have a film made of an essay or a character or person featured? As it happens, Bernard Herzog bought the film rights to First Impressions and made a wonderful documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I was supposed to go back to France with him, but I got sick. I had got very sick and I couldn't travel when he was making the film. So I missed that shoot. And I told Bernard, I said, you have to take someone who speaks French because they all think they speak English really well enough, but you're going to get so much, such a richer account if you're speaking in their own language. He didn't listen to me, but it was a wonderful documentary anyway. And we now have that precious record of Chauvet, because I think in time, they're not going to let anybody else back into, certainly not to films. So that was that was kind of great. I think Anne Lowe's life would be a wonderful film. I really wish somebody would would do that. And I wish somebody would write her biography. There's a young fashion historian who I worked with on on the piece and maybe she will. She's she's she's interested in it. So maybe that will happen. Great. Also, what I'd love to hear, what both of you are reading now for your inspiration. Where did you go to me? Oh, well, I have. I have been reading a lot of nonfiction by California authors over the last few months. We're the California Book Awards and my head is spinning with them, but I am a huge fan of Adam Hulkshield's work, of course, who's the Berkeley based writer. And he writes occasionally for the New Yorker. I think like you, Judith, he's just got he's a master stylist. He's a wonderful writer. He's a one sense of very important. His dog. Who was that? Adam Hulkshield. Oh, Adam Hulkshield from Berkeley. We know him well and he's come on programs many times and and also Arlie as well. So, you know, we're we're very fond of them. Speaking of California writers, I got my first fan letter, the one that still throws me the most from Lawrence for Lingeddy. It was for the dinnison piece in Miss in 1974, I think I remember. And Lawrence and I couldn't believe it. I thought someone was playing a prank, but it was from the station. It was this bookstore stationery and he wrote to say how much you'd like that piece. So, you know, he was he was also the beats. I love the beats. I was sort of too young to be one, but I love them. And I'm doing a profile for the New Yorker on Emily Wilson, the translator of Alma. She published her translation of the Odyssey a few years ago, and her Iliate comes out in the fall. So that's that's what I've been reading. And once you start, you know, first of all, you have to read every word of the Iliate, which is 1000 pages. And then I've read the Odyssey her Odyssey before and then her other books on Seneca and on on death and and and all around the subject of translation. And so that's what I'm up to. Right. I noticed that in the catalogs, you know, maybe we're going to try to get Emily for a program. And maybe you could interview her. Yeah, that would be great. That would be great. She's basically I'll pursue that. Also, what are your next projects that you're working on? I'm working on a what I hope will be a book about an Arctic explorer, kind of a lost woman in the 20th century. And I spent about, you know, I've been digging through the archives and having some good adventures, trying to track her down and the traces of her life. So fingers crossed. I'm not sure what I'll do after Emily Wilson. There's a bunch of, there's a lot of choice. There's another story about caves. There's a story about the oldest story. I sort of staying with the far the distant past that sort of I seem to be the immediate present is so stressing for all kinds of reasons that the distant past is sort of becoming my refuge. But I'm going to where the I the clear a left handed woman won the pen prize for the art of the essay and I'm going to be wearing my product dress to the pen gala. Oh, wonderful. Yeah, so I'm very happy about having it because I don't have to worry now. Right. When is that coming up next weekend, the 13th or 14th? Yeah, wonderful. That's that's that's fantastic. Well, we'll be we'll be cheering you on. Are there any other questions from our audience out there? Julia, any other questions for Judith that you'd like to share? Well, the Met Gala Judith, did you go and or any thoughts? Have you ever been invited? Even the year I wrote the catalog essay for the really? Yeah, no. And that's because I had to go to my book club that night across the park. And it was it was closed. Everything was closed down as if the St. Patrick's Day parade. And I wrote about there's a piece about Lagerfeld in the book. It's an obituary for a lot of people. I think he was an extraordinary virtue, virtuoso. But he wasn't he to me, he wasn't one of those couturiers or designers who really tries to rethink women's experience. So he doesn't interest me as much as Chanel does, or, or mutual, or and Lowe doesn't think and Lowe was, she was, she didn't have the freedom, her economic and the, you know, the racism and the economy of her life and the lack of her privileges that she had to endure didn't really give her the kind of freedom to rethink what it means to be a woman. She was also working for white women. She wasn't, she did have a couple of Black clients, but, but, but she's exceptional in all kinds of ways. But, but yeah, so fine. It's, it's, it's sort of Mardi Gras. It's a one day New York Mardi Gras. We do have one question in the chat. Why is the book called A Left-Handed Woman? It's true. We never talked about that. I'm left-handed. I'll read you the first sentence just quickly of the introduction tells you why. I write with my left hand. Left-handedness used to be considered a malign aberration. Sinister is Latin for left. And then I go on to say how children were routinely changed. And I also go on to talk about left-handedness as a predicament that you don't have to be left-handed to experience, which is that there's something not right with you. And I take that notion and I examine how it relates to my subjects in a, in a, in a world in which women were deprived of self-expression. So that's why. Also, this is a, this is, this is a woman's left hand. It was a drawing that a very dear friend gave to me, a late, late 18th century English drawing. And it was, it has been sitting on opposite my writing desk for many years until I looked up and I thought, oh, left hand, a left-handed woman. So that's how the title came to be. And also I was taken by what, what your mother said, don't, don't say that you're left-handed or anything about left, because being a lefty in that era and I went to kindergarten. My mother said, don't tell anybody you're a lefty. I had no idea what she, I was five years old. It was the height of the McCarthy era. And I, she couldn't explain. So, so, yeah. But that stuck with me. It stuck with me that there was something you could reveal about yourself that would be, would be, would cause you trouble and cause your family trouble and, and be looked upon as shameful. Well, I want to thank Judith Thurman and Julia Flynn-Seiler for a wonderful conversation and all that you've revealed of yourselves, yourselves, and also these incredible people in, in past history and current history. I want to thank you, Lauren. I want to thank the Mechanics Institute for the second wonderful encounter. I really want to thank Julia, Julia, who says that her nickname is Julie, to her friends for being of, but not just diligent and searching, but such a warm and, and curious, generous interview. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you both. And thank you audience out there. Please join us for our upcoming programs and visit our website. We have events here on site at the Mechanics Institute, 57 Post Street. Come down for a tour on Wednesday free tour and visit us online for all that we offer. And we will see you very soon. Thank you so much. Oh, that was fun. I think it was fun.