Dryer than the dust

The fact that America’s most blasphemous columnist was able to live to be 70 years old without the Germans seeing a single line of hers, where otherwise a sample chapter of meager creative writing prose often crosses the pond for the highest bidder, hits her back at least partly to blame. Fran Lebowitz has now spoken far more than he has written – and thus made most of her living.

In public appearances, the Writer’s Block, which looms dangerously in front of her again and again, is even a fruitful topic. As a self-defense artist who reliably conjures up her actual failure in the expectation of her own failure, her fans have been waiting for a new publication for a full 38 years – especially the long-promised novel.

“New York and the rest of the world”, as the German edition of the “Fran Lebowitz Reader” is called, which also includes almost her entire work between two book covers in the USA, is therefore old hat. It is composed of two even older volumes that collect her columns for Andy Warhol’s “Interview” and “Mademoiselle”: “Metropolitan Life” (1978) and “Social Studies” (1981).

Unfortunately, the German edition is silent on this – just as it does not contribute to the classification of the character Lebowitz in the form of a foreword or afterword.

The sarcastic sociology of everyday life that Lebowitz pursues nevertheless seems surprisingly fresh, not least because even then she resisted the times and their circumstances with a vehemence that gives her a defiant greatness today. Their mockery of what was once state-of-the-art CB radio reads like early preparation for a wired world in which only a sane technophobia allows one to see clearly the eternal inadequacies of the human and all-too-human.

With all that, until recently, it was a purely national event. With her dust-dry humor, she teased with a mischievous smile, but with deadly serious concerns through the talk shows. Just look at the compilation of their performances with David Letterman on YouTube: What a mixture of queryable repertoire and quick-wittedness.

world star with the help of Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorcese, who had already shot the HBO documentary “Public Speaking” with her in 2010, made her a world star last year. In the seven-part Netflix series Pretend It’s a City, he portrayed her as a survivor of a lost New York, ranting with Jewish mother-wit about the city’s decay and the hostile West Coast, while he almost wet his pants at her side because he couldn’t get out of the snorts and thigh slaps.

All of this has qualities that are recognizable on paper. They are carefully written texts that are not only aimed at firing off densely set punch lines again in front of an audience. Nonetheless, the staccato that catches the attention live quickly becomes tiring to read.

And that’s not all: the repetitive forms into which she pours her evil observations about science, literature and art, people, places and ideas level the care she takes on the single, often accurate sentence.

One can see all too clearly the engine of these texts, which is laboriously kept running, which are structured by numbered enumerations, alphabets, lists, chains of aphorisms and days of the week: whoever says Monday must also say Tuesday.

For a well-read woman who spent four decades on the phone almost every day with her closest friend, the Nobel Prize winner for literature, Toni Morrison, and who was repeatedly declared to be a new Dorothy Parker, that shows a certain shortness of breath.

But who knows how much she suffers when she writes: “I didn’t paint – a trifle. I didn’t grow wheat – easy. I was unemployed – no feat either. And as for not writing, well, when it comes to not writing, I’m a master at that, absolutely top notch, an old hand.”