Come the High Holidays, as previously mentioned, I re-read certain books; the cycle is repeated around Passover. This year’s High Holiday season gave me more time than usual to contemplate my personal canon of Jewish literature. My thinking was further prodded by reading in the New York Times of the death of Paul Rudnick’s mother. Rudnick wrote one of the books high on my list, a novel called I’ll Take It, which is about a young man traveling through New England one October with his mother and her two sisters. They’re ostensibly leaf-peepers, but Joe and his mother have an agenda, which is to rob L.L. Bean so that she can get the money to redecorate the living room. I love this book but feel like no one’s ever read it except me and my mother.

The voracious reader’s canon of Jewish literature apparently always has on it Serious Major Works by Serious Writers. I did a casual survey via Facebook (that tells you a lot right there) asking “What Jewish writers or books make up your personal Jewish canon?” Oddly, more Gentiles than Jews responded. But overwhelmingly the names were just what you’d expect to see on a college syllabus for a course entitled “Survey of 20th Century Jewish Literature.” Potok; Singer; Roth; Bellow. I was bored thinking about this. One young woman, the brilliant Bekah Dickstein, posted a response immediately that warmed my heart, though: S.J. Perelman. Oh, yes.

To Bekah’s eminently sensible suggestion, let me tack on my own list, a short list that came to me with shocking speed once I started thinking about it.

Sydney Taylor’s All of a Kind Family books, which are the best way I know to introduce anyone to the Jewish calendar, to Jewish rites and rituals, and to the world of immigrant Jewish life in the early 20th century. The books are written with humor and love and the illustrations (in three of the books by Mary Stevens, in one by Beth and Joe Krush) are imprinted in my head. The Stevens illustrations have a delicacy that I particularly love.

Paul Rudnick’s I’ll Take It. There will, I’m sure, be someone out there’s who’s read this and who will be offended by my putting this on my list, saying, “It perpetuates negative Jewish stereotypes” or something like that. Well, it does. On the other hand, it’s incredibly funny. Rudnick wrote this before he got big as a screenwriter and the number of genius throwaway lines in here is just astounding.

E.L. Konigsburg’s About the B’nai Bagels: a Young Adult novel about little league, being bar mitzvah’d, and stuffed cabbage. Illustrated by Konigsburg, this is one of her earlier titles, and one which I feel gets short shrift, possibly because most people feel its appeal is too specific. That may be. But I don’t give a crap about baseball and I read this book all the time.

Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem. I admit I haven’t read this in quite a few years but I’ve always really liked this book. I enjoyed it a lot more than her other novels, which got a little too brainy for me, and I freely admit I’ve never read any of her non-fiction (what, like I’m going to read a book about Spinoza?).

A recent addition to the Eva Geertz canon of Jewish literature is Elinor Lipman’s The Inn at Lake Devine, another light comic novel, about anti-Semitism in America in the 1960s and 1970s. Somehow that sentence strikes me as sounding absurd and heavy-handed, but really, that’s what it is.

The essays of Fran Lebowitz are on my list. Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself would make the cut.

Someone pointed out to me that my list is essentially bigoted, that I’ve got a bad attitude about people like Roth and Bellow, etc. etc. “Just because they’re on everyone else’s list doesn’t mean they’re not worth reading,” he said, more or less accusing me of being a snot and a whiner. I’m not saying they’re not worth reading though; what I’m saying is that I don’t personally want to curl up with a little Saul Bellow when I’m looking for a comforting read. This is not material I’d read for fun, entertainment, relaxation, or escapism. I don’t want books that try to ask or answer Big Questions. If anything, clearly, I’m interested in books that will say, “Ok, so, there are Big Questions. Very nice, all well and good but — do you want another slide of babka? A cup of coffee? I can heat up the milk for you if you want.”

Henrik Ibsen’s dramas are classics of the theater, and his best-known plays lay bare the stultifying social mores of the late 19th century: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler.  The later Ibsen, while still based in the naturalism of his main period, moves toward drama that is more symbolic, perhaps even allegorical — dramas where the astute student of theater might see possibilities opening up for a new age of stagecraft.

The Yale Repertory’s production of The Master Builder is gloriously evocative of the fresh face of contemporary theater.  If the name of Ibsen brings to mind over-stuffed drawing-rooms with imperious stage-directions where neurasthentic types pine with Norwegian yearning, banish those thoughts at once.  The set design by Timothy Brown is wide open, expressionistic — the characters stand on a stage that seems to be the side of a house climbing into the heavens upstage — and allows the actors to make full use of space as they ricochet off one another in an urgent ballet of feeling.

Given the theme of the rapturous climb to great heights — both literal and figurative — in the play, the set alerts us at once to the possibility for soaring above the quotidian that master builder Halvard Solness finds in Hilda Wangel, a young visitor from his past.  Swept off her feet as a girl of thirteen when the mighty master builder climbed to the top of a high tower he designed to plant a victory wreath, she also insists he kissed her ‘many times’ when he found her alone later, and claimed he would come carry her off ‘like a troll’ to a kingdom in ten years’ time.  The ten years are up, and Hilda wants her kingdom.

The Halvard Hilda finds is a driven man, but one who is also desperate — worried about ‘the young’ who will make him step aside (particularly in the form of Ragnar Brovnik, an apprentice architect who Halvard ‘keeps down’ by not giving him any projects of his own), and preying upon youth by beguiling Brovnik’s fiancée, Kaia, so that she will remain in Halvard’s employ, thus giving Ragnar reason to stay.  It’s an untenable situation that is beginning to fray and Halvard knows it, not least because Ragnar’s father, once Halvard’s superior, is near death and wants to see his son amount to something on his own before he dies.

Into this dense situation, Hilda arrives with the force of visionary destiny, suddenly inspiring Halvard with her muse-like presence and youthful attachment to his former grand figure, but also sharing in the confidences of past tragedy and loss in the Solness marriage, as well as learning of Halvard’s great burden of guilt.  Can the master builder put all this aside and rise again to the glory he finds in her eyes?

As Halvard, David Chandler is as mercurial as the part demands — at times, forthright and earnest, at times cold, unyielding and almost diabolical.  He is tender about his wife, in her absence, but uncomfortable in her presence.  He is direct with the doctor who tries to sound him out on his relation to Kaia, but is also arrogantly superstitious about his ability to control others through his own mind.  Coiled with the exasperation of the man of talent beset by the demands of others, Mr. Chandler flings his expressive body all about the stage with the passion that Hilda brings to the surface.  We see a man struggling, in almost every movement, to determine if his desires can overcome his misgivings.

And as Hilda, Susan Heyward is a thrilling delight.  Girlish, willful, and remarkably quick on the uptake, Hilda, as written, could easily seem more sprite than person, a creature of Halvard’s Id suddenly incarnated in the flesh.  As incorporated in Ms. Heyward, Hilda is nearly ecstatic with the force of her effect on her revered master builder, and plays with him through an intuitive grasp of what they might mean for each other.  And though, as Ibsen not doubt intended, Hilda’s actual psychology remains a mystery, Ms. Heyward gives us every reason to believe in the spell that Halvard falls under in her presence — a spell predicated on her unshakeable conviction of his greatness.

In the supporting cast, Felicity Jones’ Aline Solness is regal in a gorgeous black gown, displaying, with her mere presence, the sad memories that cling to the marriage, but also giving the dialogue a comic edge as the long-suffering wife all-too-knowing about her husband’s need for young, female devotees.  And Slate Holmgren, as Ragnar, does much with a part that’s easy to overlook, particularly in his scene late in the play with Hilda, where, though she mocks him as a mere upstart, we can see in his self-possession possibly another master builder in the making.

Credit for this version’s success rests most securely, no doubt, on director Evan Yionoulis.  In the “Talk Back” with the audience after the Saturday matinee performance, several in the cast spoke of her ability to ‘calibrate’ their performances to the right nuance — and much of that nuance itself depends on the translation by Paul Walsh.  The dialogue seems unforced and direct — even when Solness and Hilda extemporize on Vikings and trolls (figures of baleful power Ibsen felt himself at times to be in league with) — and sounds modern without straying into contemporary locutions.

And what does the play say to us now, more than a century and a decade after it was written?  Ibsen’s strong presentations — of a man of power abusing that power, of a man of talent seeking some new inspiration, of a man of years trying to revitalize himself, of a marriage that persists without ever freeing itself of its past, where tragedy, rather than ending the couple, made them what they are, and of a young woman’s seeming power to see the future and be the future — never become dated.  So, what do you see when the still striving, but slipping, figure climbs that tower in the end — hubris? inspiration? despair? need?  A struggle against time, against mediocrity, against God?  Or a deluded effort to assert something whose day is done?  Then ask yourself: what does Hilda see?

The Master Builder, by Henrik Ibsen. Translated by PAUL WALSH. Directed by EVAN YIONOULIS. Yale Repertory Theatre: September 18-October 10, 2009. Set design by Timothy Brown, costume design by Katherine Akiko Day, lighting design by Paul Whitaker, with sound design and original music by Scott L. Nielsen.  Photograph© T Charles Erickson

The young gentleman might think he has made a capital move by purposely taking his date to see that film about the tubercular Romantic poet whose muse enjoys sewing and butterflies. Quite. But the young gentleman also should be advised to proceed with caution, for the tubercular Romantic poet in question, John Keats, was among the finest of his kind. It is not merely Keats’ series of influentially sensuous odes that this film exists to commemorate, but also his exceptional gift for the art of the love letter — with which the young gentleman, Heaven help him, may yet be invited by his date to compete. Keats died broke and obscure and devoted at 25, by the way; it will be no contest.

The beneficiary of those letters, Bright Star reminds us, is Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), literally the girl next door. A skeptic according to her somehow arousingly impassive disposition, she knows fashion — and indeed even makes her own clothes, with taste and visionary flamboyance — but does not know poetry. Yet she registers the immortal lines, such as Keats’ “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” and finds herself intrigued. Eventually, she’ll be called upon to erupt with sorrow at his death, and the power of that moment will be bracing for its forbearance of movie convention. A woman so gorgeous as Cornish in a performance so gorgeous as this is certain to leave the young gentleman feeling beguiled. It is important that he not defeat his own purpose by neglecting his date — most certainly a young lady of sensitivity and intelligence and independence of thought herself, as he would be wise to remember.

Similarly, the young gentleman is cautioned not to fall in love with Keats either. This important ancestor of all wispy tousled emo darlings is well cast with Ben Whishaw, who also recently has portrayed movie versions of Brideshead Revisited’s scandalously self-debauching Sebastian Flyte, plus Bob Dylan and Keith Richards. Here, it is entirely understandable that Keats’ smugly protective friend and Hampstead flat-mate Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider, also terrific) should consider Fanny a rival for the poet’s affection. “Your writing is the finest thing in my life,” Charles tells him once, with such naked, disarming awe that the young gentleman had better prepare himself for a flush of embarrassment.

The writer and director of Bright Star is Jane Campion, whom the young gentleman possibly will recall as the maker of The Piano, a film he may have glimpsed accidentally when much younger and not yet a gentleman, and before that An Angel at My Table, which he shan’t be expected ever to have seen but which did establish that no other living filmmaker better understands how to photograph such romantic atmospherics as cherubic red-headed little girls and moss. Such details, along with blooming flower fields and the aforementioned butterflies, abound in Bright Star — the rare 19th-century period piece that’s ultimately too airy to be stuffy. The young gentleman needn’t even fully comprehend how these things can move him so. He need only have faith in what Keats called “the holiness of the heart’s affections,” without which surely he will remain a bachelor forever.

I have to confess I’m not a great admirer of the short story.  The form is too anecdotal for me, I guess.  My lack of enthusiasm seems due to the fact that my acquaintance with the characters in the story will be too brief to be worth my attention.  And I usually just find myself waiting for the story to be done — like when someone starts telling you a long-winded personal anecdote and you’re just waiting for the punch-line or the inherent query, or whatever.

With novels, there are a variety of situations, or else the permutations of a particular situation.  In stories, it’s all situation.  The characters often seem to be no more than the ‘types’ who have been recruited to fill that situation.  So it seems to me that those with a knack for short story writing are simply skilled at populating situations with types of people.  When I find the same thing happening in a novel, I tend to set it aside.

I say all this simply to show that I’m not a push-over when it comes to stories.  But at the recent “Listen Here!” event I attended at Koffee? I witnessed another aspect of stories: they are short enough to be read publically, in one sitting, and everyone present can have a collective experience of ‘watching’ the story unfold.  It’s a bit like watching a movie (in your head) but you can actually see the other people listening.  It’s much more participatory, for the audience.  Maybe it’s a bit more like stand-up comedy where the comedian is a good storyteller.  Though with the kinds of stories chosen, it’s not going to be the case that the audience will always be laughing or simply amused.

It’s also a bit like drama — particularly the one-person show or dramatic monologue.  Except most dramatic monologues are written in a more ‘stagey’ way than short stories are.  That can certainly help for memorization purposes and to help the actor stay in character.  What the reader of a short story has to do is a bit more subtle: dramatize the voice of the narrator so that we feel he (at the reading I attended both actors were male) is, in a sense, speaking for himself.

That I think is the difference between unskilled and skilled reading aloud.  In the former the person is clearly just reading words already on the page; in the latter, the person delivers those words with a bit of the illusion that they are just now coming to him.

This was particularly successful with the first story, J. D. Salinger’s “The Laughing Man” because the voice of Salinger’s narrator is so personable, giving us the persona of an older, but still somewhat child-like, speaker who is able to completely inhabit his somewhat precocious earlier self.  And the story doubly worked because the situation of the story — in which a group of kids in a day-camp are regaled by their “Chief” with stories of the Laughing Man — doubled the act of listening.  We, the audience, listened to hear, as the kids did, how the story of the Laughing Man would come out, and also listened to how the framing tale, of the boy’s relation to the Chief and that phase of his life, would come out.  The fact that Salinger dovetails these two situations so effectively made the experience of listening — even if you already knew that outcome as I did — a true tour de force.

The second story, Ray Bradbury’s “Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You,” was somewhat less successful; maybe because we’d already listened to a great story, it had more work to do, but I also felt that the story groped for its ending.  Or rather: that Bradbury had decided what the ending would be — the idea of a chocolate bar blessed by the pope and given to a priest in thanks — and then had to get there.  It seemed a bit strained by the end.  But what made the story quite enjoyable as a listening experience was the actor’s ability to render the speaking voice of the priest — gruff, at times impatient, but compassionate — and the voice of the young boy — which was very winning, and articulate, even if somewhat abashed.

So what made for good stories in dramatic presentation: either a great narrating voice, as in Salinger’s; or good back-and-forth dialogue, as in Bradbury’s.

There’s another reading this week, Thursday, 7 p.m., at Lulu’s on Cottage Street.  Hope to see you there.

My wife works for the New Haven Public Library system, and several years ago she asked me if I would please lead an after-hours book club once a month at the Mitchell branch in Westville. There had been several requests from patrons for such a book club, but she had not yet found anyone willing to run it.

I grumbled since I generally don’t like being pulled into volunteer ventures that I didn’t express an interest in on my own. Still, I am of the bookish sort, so I agreed on one condition: I choose all the books.

Now such a request might strike you as not being properly within the spirit of the “book club” as practiced in the United States. My wife had been in book clubs where the next book was selected either by the group as a whole or individually by the participants on a rotating basis. This was the same process adopted for the mother-daughter book club that she and my daughter had attended for nearly six years. As far as I could tell, selection by the collective mind or individual members of the group appeared to be the norm, and yet, from my wife’s reports on the level of group satisfaction, results seemed hit or miss, at best.

I, too, had tried book clubs — twice, in fact — but with no success whatsoever. The first time was in New York City. It was, by and large, a classics-only reading list organized by local alumni of the University of Chicago, my undergraduate alma mater. All I recall from that was a knockdown argument about Austen’s Mansfield Park, a less-than-inspiring novel that my fellow readers defended vigorously because, as far as I could tell, it was a “classic.” And yet despite how much I enjoyed the next selection, Joseph Conrad’s Victory, I just didn’t have the heart or energy to re-engage. Chalk it up to lethargy and cowardice.

Years later, I tried to beat that one-night stand by forming another club in New Haven with two friends, giving us a grand total of three attendees. The gods did not smile on this effort either. The first book was a poorly written academic treatise on the black experience in America. That first meeting bogged down in the selector defending the book from my undisguised disdain for what struck me as weak argument masquerading behind social scientific prose modeled on the Talcott Parsons school of bad writing. (If you’ve never read Parsons, you’d be in for a treat, on par with activities like self-flagellation and dumpster diving.)

So, after hearing some of my wife’s complaints and considering my own wretched experiences, I was pretty firm in my decision that any book group I moderated would feature only books I picked. Selfish? Absolutely. But I was being asked to run it, so I felt completely at liberty to set the rules. Moreover, I had been apprised that in order for the library to order enough copies for participants to read ahead of time, titles had to be chosen two to three months in advance. So I decided to work out a reading list for the whole year. Still, I had to sell my selecting everything to the participants.

Here’s how I did it. When the group of six or so individuals showed up that first day, I introduced myself and then, after explaining my wife’s request of me to run this group, I audaciously proclaimed: “I will be selecting all of the books. This will not be a democracy. If you don’t wish to participate, I will understand entirely. If you’re willing to come along for the ride, I will explain the method behind the madness.” Then after the self-aggrandizing declaration that I held a doctorate in English, I got down to the brass tacks of laying out how the literary wheat would be separated from the prosaic chaff.

I would choose only prose fiction. Nonfiction, poetry, and plays were out. I wasn’t interested in venturing into other genres and wrestling with the problems inherent to those genres: lack of subject expertise for nonfiction; no real training in meter, rhythm, syntax and the rhetorical gimmickry of poetry (do you know what a zeugma is?); an ignorance of stagecraft for plays. Of course, I was probably blowing the size of these problems out of proportion, but let’s face facts: as book groups go, many of us are more comfortable with and find it easier making connections to prose fiction.

Next, all my fiction selection were to have been published in the last year or two, reducing the likelihood of anyone having read the work (myself included), a rule that ended up holding true for the group. More selfishly, I was dreadfully under-read in the latest literary fiction, so I was looking to explore: I had grown sick of classical literature and, as defined by academic standards, “contemporary fiction.”

All of the book titles were either to have been the recipients of or shortlisted for a major literary award. It could be one of the “generalist” prizes, such as the Booker or Pulitzer, or genre-specific, such as the Edgar for mystery or the Hugo or Nebula for science fiction.

Even after I had built my own short list of titles worthy of consideration for the twelve precious monthly slots in my book club reading list, I then took the extra step of dipping into Amazon and skimming the Publishers Weekly review of each work. However—and this was a big however—I was not checking to see how much or how little the reviewer cared for the title at hand. Frankly, I couldn’t care less about that. (I had once been a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer, so I know of what I speak.) What I was really after was a summary of the plot, since I most wanted books that featured unusual or downright quirky story lines or points of view. I was after more than mere competence; I was on the hunt for novelty. It wasn’t enough that the book be a “finely wrought” or “artfully cast” tale of growing up abused in the South. Growing up abused in the South was a cottage industry at the time of this club, so who needed more of that? But growing up abused in the south, say, in a parallel universe where the Confederacy had won the Civil War, or in a house that doubled as the novel’s narrator—now, that was perhaps worth reading.

In the end, there were no guarantees that the results would be universally acclaimed…and they weren’t. Even I was disappointed by some of my selections! But I would say, overall, the batting average was pretty high, which gave me hope that my Pinochet-like approach to book clubbing had some merit.

This book club lasted two years, and it was a good club. In the end it dissolved largely because of me. Work had become hectic with an intense travel schedule that regularly interfered with my ability to meet the book club’s most basic obligation—showing up! But had I to do all over again, I honestly think I would do it no other way, unless all of the participants themselves were willing to select books according to the rules I had set for myself. Is that too selfish? Perhaps. But it worked, and that was good enough for me.

So what were your book club experiences like?

We all have a lot of questions about what happened to Annie Le, the Yale graduate student who went missing a few days before her wedding and whose body was found stuffed in the ceiling of a Yale laboratory. Now that her killer has been apprehended and will be brought to trial, one question that lingers for media pundits is, why did her story garner so much press? What was it about her story that called for it to be splashed across The New York Times, Google News and Bloomberg, not to mention all the tabloids?

One can only conjecture.

Was it that she was a Yalie? On Thursday, 9/17, Slate columnist, Jack Shafer, noted:

“If you plan to be murdered and expect decent press coverage, please have the good sense to be a Harvard or Yale student or professor. America’s top dailies and the cable networks will rush to the scene of the crime and sniff the vicinity for clues to your demise. They’ll scrape your personal history and publish enough information to serve as a foundation for a made-for-TV movie about you.”

Apparently the media elite comes from either Harvard or Yale, so almost any news emanating from these places is considered newsworthy. Furthermore, a violent crime at a place as seemingly powerful and invulnerable as Yale, the institution associated with George and George W., Bill, Hilary and the last 3 Supreme Court justices, is a sensation.

Was it that she was a bride-to-be? Annie went missing only days before her wedding, and her body was discovered on the day that she was to be married. As if to highlight the tragedy of a young woman snuffed out at the height of her promise, many stories focused on Annie’s upcoming nuptials. We know that Annie embroidered her own veil and gushed about marrying her “best friend” in her Facebook pages. The New York Times even went so far as to interview Ms. Kiley, Annie’s hairdresser, who was quoted in the paper as saying: “I was going to be part of a beautiful day, which is the most important day of a girl’s life other than the day she gives birth.”
Has anybody heard this much attention being paid to a guy getting married before?

Was it because she was, pick one, young, female, pretty, Asian? Pretty young faces, as we know, sell newspapers. And what a novelty it was to see an Asian face on a tabloid cover. Asian immigrants are generally taught to work hard and fly under the radar. When Raymond Clark III emerged as Annie’s killer, it was as if two sides of the socio-economic and racial spectrum that makes up America’s workplace was laid bare.

We may never know the motives behind Raymond Clark’s killing of Annie Le, but it makes sensational news.

By April Bernard (Norton)

To last as a Romantic, April Bernard says in a recent interview, “You have to be wise and passionate.” In her fourth book of poems passion and wisdom contend for the soul of Art.

Her Romantic suffers, feeling more, about more:

… it was the tree that caused an uproar,
it was the tree that shook and shed,
aureate as a shaken soul, I remembered
I was supposed to have one—for convenience

I placed it in my chest, the heart being away,
and now it seems the soul has lodged there, shaking,
golden-orange, half spent… . [from “Beagle or Something”]

Her Romantic pretends what s/he’s asking for doesn’t add up to all that much:

… Hands with mine in the sink, washing dishes,
the smell of wool, feet tangling mine in bed. [in “Romance”]

Ha! returns The Voice, the Force the Romantic was trying to bargain with: “What lies you tell, and call them love” (the end of “Unloved”). You think you’re the only one who’s ever gone through what you’re going through?

In Romanticism, the untrammeled Romantic in us struggles for expression in Art. The winner—no question—is the reader. April Bernard can do what she chooses in a poem, and what she chooses, here, is to remind us how Romanticism—which, she says, involves “the primacy of feeling; an embrace of the irrational”—enters our lives as it sneaks into our reading and listening and thinking, with glory and agony.

Romanticism has three sections. In the first you encounter Romantic states of being and feeling; in the second, among other wonders, a whole Romantic novel created in five short poems. The third breaks into song, lyrics with no music, including arias from operas that exist only in these pages.

Bernard doesn’t hesitate to say she wants to encourage a reader “to be an individual and be in society, … to have strong feelings.”

This extraordinarily artful book uses intense pain as one of its colors. We luxuriate in sumptuous surfaces that mask pain:

That trinket of bulbous Baja pearl,
hanging from a coin-purse latch, a gift from her dear Mama.
The letters sheaved in a lavender ribbon (the ribbon edged
with tiny loops of silk)… .
… no harm she has done comes close
to what has stabbed at her, what now stabs—
these cheap losses. [from “Last Glimpse”]

Here we can delight in invented forms, imported forms (a ghazal, “Paler Hands,” in memory of a famous ghazal-maker), and familiar forms reworked to dazzling new purposes (the unrhymed sonnet, “Heart or Head Canard”), all shifting the pain around, finding joys within it, offering pleasures liberally. Grief for a poet-friend who loved old movies turns into a sinuous dance of words circling Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in “Notorious” (“To the Knife”). We’re surprised by humor and tickled by connections that draw each poem into a larger body of feeling.

“I am a hopeless romantic,“ Bernard wrote last fall (in an essay in Lapham’s Quarterly)—the kind of “hopeless” that means “wholehearted” rather than “without hope”—the kind of hopeless that wrestles with hope in poem after poem throughout this marvelous book, which is so good it may change your mind, and then your life.

Susan Holahan is a writer and an editor of New Haven Review.

A number of threads in my life wove themselves together in recent days and it was all about shopping downtown.

The New Yorker ran an article by Patricia Marx that name-checked the old punk boutique Bonnie and Clyde—it was on Chapel Street, I think in the space where Wave Gallery is now. The article was talking about a boutique in Chicago that’s named after the store (which they said was in Stamford, but really I think they meant New Haven, unless there was a sister store in Stamford I’m not remembering) and I thought, “Man, Bonnie and Clyde. I’ve got stuff from there.” And I do—I have a dress I still wear, and a military-issue shoulder bag that I last used two weeks ago. Bonnie and Clyde was, I think the first place I bought Manic Panic at—hair dye—a habit I found very hard to break.

Then the other weekend I was at Fashionista. If you don’t know about Fashionista—well, maybe you don’t care, if you’re someone who isn’t interested in buying other people’s old clothes, shoes, jewelry, or cigarette cases—well, ok, but: Fashionista is just something to behold. It’s a vintage clothing store run by Nancy Shea and Todd Lyon and it’s a more spacious and better lit version of the Ritz, which was a vintage clothing store on Broadway once upon a time. Need an old tuxedo? They’re there for you. Ball gown? Not a problem. Kicky little sheath dress? Purple suede elbow-length gloves to go with the sheath dress (or the tuxedo, for that matter)?

You simply never know.

I bought a dress at Fashionista few years ago. I get compliments on it all the time. But it’s the damnedest article of clothing I own: it is made out of an old leopard print bathrobe. I love it. It’s frumpy and amazing at the same time. When it falls apart—which it will, one of these days; how long can a bathrobe really last?—I will be heartbroken.

So I was at Fashionista a few days ago talking with Nancy and Todd about Bonnie and Clyde, which they remembered, and suddenly Todd said, “Wait, I’ve gotta show you something.” She ran to a rack of men’s overcoats and pulled out a coat that had an interesting label on it. I wish I could remember now exactly what it said, but it said that it was made for the Edward Malley Company, a department store that used to be right across the street from where Fashionista is now located (on lower Church). The line of clothing was something like “The Churchstreeter.” I guess it was a particular line of men’s outerwear or something. Todd cradled the coat and said, “Look: it came home.”

For some years I’ve been acquiring clothes at second hand shops in part because I liked the clothes but also because I liked the labels, which told their own version of the history of retail in downtown New Haven. I have a dress (I wore it to a prom in 1985 I think) from Kramer’s—I bought it at a second hand shop State Street. If you ask nicely maybe I’ll show you a picture of me wearing it—high necked, but slit to here, head to toe paisley and head to toe sequins. It’s a nightmare. I’m never going to sell it. I’d like to be buried in it, if possible. It’s a great dress made all the more dear by the Kramer’s label.

I’ve got a shirt from the Arthur Rosenberg company; they used to give J. Press a run for their money. I’ve got an overcoat from Gentree’s, from before Gentree’s was a restaurant—it was a men’s clothing store. (Now, of course, it is nothing; Yale tore down the building and it’s, I don’t know, part of the new art building or something.) I have a hatbox from the Edward Malley company, as well as a very lovely cotton button down shirt from them.

Small shops no longer have products with their own labels in them. You don’t buy a dress from Hello Boutique that has a label sewn in saying “Hello Boutique - New Haven.” But it used to be clothes were marked that way. You can find very fine quality jackets with labels that seem improbable now: “Manufactured for … in Derby, Connecticut.” Derby, Connecticut?

I hope someone in Derby is collecting clothing labels, too.

By Joseph Epstein (Yale University Press, 2008)

One doesn’t read Joseph Epstein’s most recent book, Fred Astaire, to learn new things about Fred Astaire. One reads it to see what the former editor of The American Scholar and author of Snobbery: The American Version, the wittiest essayist alive according to William F. Buckley, might do with a self-described “slender disquisition” on this question: “Whence derived Fred Astaire’s sublimity, his magic?”

One reads for sport, in other words, and at one’s leisure. Published almost a year ago with no apparent occasion other than the luxury of intellectual indulgence, Fred Astaire today remains as fresh as a book that puts on such airs possibly can be. It is timelessly unhip.

That’s not to say the book lacks charm. In fact, it has an entire excellent chapter on charm. And it has eleven other chapters, or “acts,” as Epstein calls them, all of which just breeze right along. With mature appreciation and lucid verve, Epstein stays mostly on the surface, studying the face, the clothes, the moves, and the cultural context in which the dancer became iconic.

He makes short work of establishing Astaire and Gene Kelly as the Apollo (“classic and understatedly calm”) and Dionysus (“romantic with high-banked fires”) of movie dancers, although Kelly’s own comparison—he called them the Cary Grant and Marlon Brando—made even shorter work of it. Epstein also supplies a nimble cross-referencing of Astaire’s and Ginger Rogers’ respective autobiographies, and a rather reproving survey of the other literature on his subject. “The amount of penetrating writing about Fred Astaire is less than overwhelming,” he writes. Too bad that line might also be used against him, to describe the contents of his own book.

The emerging answer to Epstein’s operating question has a lot to do with discipline, and one starts to wonder if removing all instances of the word “perfectionist” would render Fred Astaire only a few paragraphs long. But the point is well taken: Astaire, in Epstein’s estimation, was not a genius, necessarily, but rather a hardworking “unconscious artist” of exacting high standards, who brought transcendent joy to popular entertainment.

To prove it, one could do worse than spend an afternoon with a comfy chair, a stack of DVDs and a couple hundred pages of slender disquisition.

I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival yesterday; as that festival invited the organizers of Comic-Con to join then, I was lucky enough to be on a panel—along with fellow authors Peter V. Brett, Anton Strout, S.C. Butler, and Dave Roman—about New York, science fiction, and fantasy. As any good panel should, the session quickly became more of a casual conversation about how we write our books, balance day job and writing, and other related topics, guided eventually by questions from the audience. It was easygoing; it was fun. And after the panel, I had a short but really interesting conversation about the future of books. As it turned out, YA author Ned Vizzini had seen our panel and another one before it about the future of literary fiction, and he was struck by the severe difference in tone between our panel and the previous one. Apparently, for the people on the previous panel, the future of fiction was full of gloom and doom, declining book sales, declining readership. As a YA author, he said, this seemed at odds with his own experience. Young people are reading more books than ever, he said. About our own panel, he then said—and I’m paraphrasing here, so, Ned, if you come across this post, feel free to correct me (about this or anything else I’ve ascribed to you)—that it was just nice to see people talking about books in an optimistic way.

Ned’s comment particularly struck me because, walking around the festival before and after my panel, I saw that the optimism he felt, and that we had at our panel, was true of the festival at large. The festival was cheerful. The conversations I eavesdropped on weren’t about how everyone should just close up shop and go home; they were about the latest books people were excited about, wanted other readers to buy. It was hard to square the energy and enthusiasm I saw there with the reports in the newspapers of the imminent demise of print. There were lots of vendors, selling lots of interesting books. More important, the festival itself was crowded. By writers, editors, publishers, sure—but also fans coming to see their favorite authors, avid readers, and enthusiasts for their particular flavor of literature. It was lively and engaging. It made me buy books, and it made me want to read even more than I already do.

Now, I’m not saying that the newspapers are full of crap. I can easily believe that the days when a single publisher could make tons of money selling books may be ending. If I were a large publishing conglomerate, I would probably be as depressed as they seem to be. But I think we should be careful not to confuse this with the demise of books themselves. Books, after all, aren’t that expensive to make. They’re not chump change, but they’re also not remotely as expensive as even a low-budget movie. You can do a pretty nice small book run for the same price as buying a used car. And I don’t think I’m being too naive in saying that there will always be people who write books, and there will always be people who want to read them. Books survived the Dark Ages and the Spanish Inquisition; as venerable publishing veteran Jason Epstein has pointed out, they survived the Soviet era. They are the cockroaches of global popular culture. Look at your own bookshelf, right now: Someday, when you are rotting in your grave, some of those very books will almost certainly be sitting on someone else’s bookshelf. And that’s a wonderful thing.

In a Where We Live episode on Connecticut Public Broadcasting a few months back—which featured NHR editor Mark Oppenheimer, Lev Grossman, and Jason Epstein—Mr. Epstein envisioned a publishing industry that was less a collection of large conglomerates and more a swarm of squabbling small presses, perhaps more like what it had been a few centuries ago, when publishers hawked their books on street corners and had local wars with each other for the attention of a voracious yet fickle readership. Looking at the Brooklyn Book Festival, it was easy to imagine that Epstein might be right, and even easier to be excited about the prospect. There might not be as much money in books as there was. But it might be a lot more fun.