This posting is a courtesy notice for local writers.
In brief, a new grant for writers has been established by the Greater Hartford Arts Council, and though Hartford is not New Haven and never shall the twain be mistaken for one another, greater New Haven area writers can apply.
Entitled the 2010 Solo Writers Fellowship (as opposed to the 2010 Dynamic Duo Writers or 2010 Kingston Trio Writers Fellowship?), the Solo Writers Fellowship provides a limited number of awards to writers of various genres who live or work in Connecticut.
Four fellowships of $2,375 each will be awarded based on a panel’s review of writer’s application, work samples and professional work history. The purpose of this grant program is to reinforce the importance and value of writers within our community by supporting activities related to the artistic process, such as, but not limited to, rental fees, travel costs and/or living expenses while creating new work. We envision this grant program to support several weeks’ worth of living and working in a temporary space that fosters imagination, focus and creativity.
Applications are due March 1, 2010. For more information, including Guidelines and Application forms, please click: http://www.letsgoarts.org/writersfellowship.
This grant is made possible through the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, and administered by the Greater Hartford Arts Council.
For more information, contact:
Greater Hartford Arts Council
45 Pratt Street P.O. Box 231436
Hartford, CT 06123-1436
860-525-8629 info@LetsGoArts.org
I noticed in the New York Times an obituary for Jack Litman, an attorney who defended a lot of people who weren’t such nice people. He handled a few notorious murder trials, and the Times named two in particular: one, the Robert Chambers/Jennifer Levin trial, “the Preppy Murder,” which I actually remember, dimly (I was a teenager when it happened), and also a murder trial that was called “the Yale Murder.”
It was interesting to me that the Times made a point of referring to the Yale Murder, because, what with the latest big Yale murder, the Annie Le case, in all the coverage of that case I kept looking in the media for a reference to the earlier murder, and never saw it. I would have thought that someone would have brought it up, but, no, it never happened.
The only reason I know about the Yale Murder is that someone once asked me to locate a copy of the true crime book that it inspired. I located a copy for the customer, and then, because I like reading true crime, I got another copy for myself (finding it by chance at a junk shop, ironically, after putting actual effort into finding the customer his copy). I still have it. It’s a bright magenta mass market paperback. Presumably for legal reasons the publisher was prevented from using Yale blue…
Now out of print, the book tells the story of the people involved in the case — Richard Herrin and Bonnie Garland, two Yale undergrads who were involved in a relationship that had a bad ending (when Herrin killed Garland in her parents’ Westchester house). This happened in the 1970s, and while I was here at the time, I was too young to have been aware of it.
I find it sort of weird that the “original” Yale Murder has become such an obscure historical fact, even here in New Haven, where I feel like we all have such long memories for things like this. People talk about Penny Serra like it happened yesterday. But the “Yale Murder”? Nope.
Maybe it’s because Bonnie Garland wasn’t actually murdered in New Haven. But even so. Even so. It’s a Yale crime. Where did it go in our collective memories? Bonnie Garland is now, it seems, just a little note in Jack Litman’s obituary.
Terry Gilliam’s latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, is currently playing at the Criterion Cinema in New Haven, but I haven’t seen it yet. However, two unique films directed by Gilliam (which I consider his best, or are at least the ones I remember best), Brazil (1985) and 12 Monkeys (1995), are showing tonight and tomorrow night, respectively, at the Whitney Humanities Center on Wall Street, at 7 p.m., courtesy of The Yale Film Society and Films at the Whitney.
Not wanting to give anything away, if you haven’t seen these films, I’d say they’re well worth your attention if you like fables of the future with a quirky relation to the present. Do I mean the present when the films appeared or the current present? Both, I think.
Brazil is set in a kind of Orwellian future that knows itself to be Orwellian — the way that Orwell’s 1984, ostensibly set in 1984 but written in 1948, has a relentless feel of the immediate post-WWII world. Brazil is like that too: it looks like a future that dates back to Orwell’s 1984 as homage (the film appeared in 1985, note) and as comment on the datedness of the kind of dystopia it re-imagines for us. A Ministry of Information “sometime in the 21st century” that uses pneumatic tubes for interoffice communication? Computer consoles that look like ham-radios with screens? Warrens of nameless workers who are only male and wearing suits that look like the ‘40s?
But there are elements that make it feel ‘80ish too: fashion statements such as a stunning hat that actually appears to be a ladies’ leopard-print high heel inverted on the wearer’s head; increasingly disastrous cosmetic surgery interventions; a female heroine with short spiky hair who is more butch than the willowy male hero (a twitchy, sadsack Jonathan Pryce); add to this the vast sets that recall, deliberately, Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and you have something like a retro-chic version of how the police state might morph before the millenium.
There’s plenty of Gilliam’s characteristic wide-angle and fish-eye camera work, lots of visual distortion, evocative uses of lighting and scale and, as usual with the former Monty Python animator, endless visual fun, including a Battleship Potemkin reference (in “the director’s cut,” at least) to give filmbuffs a laugh. And the story — with threats of sabotage and terrorism against the state fleetingly evoked, and the Orwellian catchphrases posted in the background: “Truth is Information”; “Trust in Security” — stills holds up and maybe resonates as much now, post-W., as it did shortly after Reagan’s re-election.
12 Monkeys is set in the future, but not so distantly. James Cole (Bruce Willis) was about 8 in 1997, the year when a viral plague wiped out most of the human race. Now he’s about 40, sent back to 1996 to try to gather information that will help scientists in the present day (when everyone is living underground) find an antidote to the plague. The basic situation of the film – time travel to the past to counteract the post-apocalyptic present, and the dramatic detail of the killing in the airport — derives from Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1962). But Gilliam brings to the material lots of fun, whacked-out stuff.
And keeps it interesting and mysterious. A first viewing really plays with your head, much as the various “endings” of Brazil do. And the visual palette is ramped up with chatter and crosstalk from TV sets (broadcasting the Marx Bros.’ Monkey Business, for instance), films (hiding out in a cinema while Vertigo is onscreen), music (one of my favorite moments is the look on Willis’ face when he hears, on his first trip back to‘96, Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” on the radio), and the kind of beat futurisitic clutter held over from Brazil.
Other pleasures include a desolate, post-apocalyptic Philadelphia (and a not-so pleasurable version of that city, c. mid ‘90s, that looks truly distressed); also, Brad Pitt, as a psychotic scion of a rich magnate of biochemical products, is all quirks, trippy chuckles and frenetic hand gestures and mismatched eyes, heading the political group 12 Monkeys, dedicated to animal and environmental rights, but which might be moving toward terrorist or guerilla acts — again, a timeliness all-too-apparent for today’s viewers.
The apocalypse in Marker’s film was nuclear-based; in Gilliam’s it’s viral, but there’s enough environmental sentiment present, together with dismay at the human race — and stunning shots of an array of African animals loose in the streets of Center City — to fuel whatever global-warming apocalypse scenarios might be circulating in the brain of the 21st-century viewer.
Federman died last October, shortly after BlazeVox published his novella, The Carcasses, which, for this reader, brought to mind The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or my personal preference, Book of Natural Salvation) and Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes as well as some of his other short work.
In The Carcasses, Federman’s narrator has the “FNACS” (the afterlife’s revolutionary forces) taking up what has traditionally been Satan’s rebellious role in Heaven by calling for a democratic transmutation of the dead—politicizing metamorphosis, the apparent essence of nature itself.
The Carcasses is not a human-centered fable. It’s not even biocentric, since there’s just as great a likelihood that at some point in one’s eternity those who’ve passed on will come back to this dimension as a piss pot. The novella’s flexible topology, its permeability of self, the apparent possibility of its imaginary carcass narrator’s future enlightenment (or is it escape?) from karma, its wheel of life, make Federman’s novel a pleasure to read. And in the end, when facing transmutation, these feelings about civil rights among the dead seem irrelevant. Too much freedom and freedom becomes meaningless, an emptiness that seems a death itself. A carcass with too much freedom is, perhaps, too much a carcass. One who’s free of one’s self is without self.
We laugh at all this death because we’re dying ourselves, which means we’re alive. It’s seems grief can tickle our funny bone. Why? What does it say about us that we can laugh at death?
In The Carcasses, one sees mind, matter and energy seeking to sustain their interrelated disequilibria for as long as possible, creating an unsentimental journey with a dash of Calvino’s “lightness,” a bit of Laurence Sterne the Psychonaut resisting his uncarcassization…forever digressing because the novella’s ending is the carcass’s ending…
Unlike The Carcasses,Federman’s last story, Shhh: A Story of Childhood, seems from the brief yet tantalizing excerpt as posted an ever-playful, ever-youthful spirit looking back, planning ahead despite the fact…despite the unspeakable…laughing…
I was one of Raymond’s students at SUNY Buffalo in the mid-1990s and was quite surprised when, in one of our last email exchanges before he died, he offered that Proust had influenced him more than Beckett. He’d barely mentioned Proust in the fifteen years we’d known each other. He said I should read Proust if I wanted to know what he meant. I recently began following that advice, and one of the first things I came across, while doing some preliminary reading, was Proust’s alleged statement that “An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.”
The excerpt of Shhh is a list of things to do, an imperative litany fleshing out memory before it slips forever into the past tense, beginning with his Uncle Leon’s planting a tree, his digging in the yard, a metaphor for Federman’s digging through memory, planting and dispersing seeds in the mind evolving into word-beings that populate a living text…a family tree…and in less than an hour Federman makes a universe of memories that never were, memories of senses left un-sensed…in a vase, or urn.
Federman’s list of things to do is a list of things never done, the outline of some unspeakable undone, knowing that if not for the Holocaust, these word-beings would have been people who would have, like us, had sex with themselves and others, congregated for various reasons, become excited over political ideas and whatnot, etc. & so forth. They would have lived messy lives, like us…no better, no worse…mois…nous.
This list of 33 imperatives perhaps signifies “Solomon’s Seal” or the “Star of David,” a mature family tree that never bloomed except in these stories, and in Federman’s mind where his imagination lived for them and words became beings. The ninth item is, perhaps, the most poignant if the reader’s aware of Federman’s actual biography and the myth Federman created through fifty years of critifiction, surfiction, and laughtrature. It’s here where his family leaves Paris, rather than staying as they actually did, when the Nazis invaded.
Then, three points later: “Scene demonstrating how verisimilitude often becomes improbable when one tells a story.”
Feel the fiction of the fiction to your bones.
I have a feeling that Shhh: A Story of Childhood might be my favorite of all Federman’s books, but I’ll have to wait and see like everyone else.
Reading Charlotte Garrett Currier’s Shadow and Light: A Retrospective left me conflicted: Had Ijust finished a book of poetry or listened to a Charles Auguste De Beriot movement? Currier incontestably has a vigilant ear for the metrical line unit, creating impeccable rhythms, balancing the traditional formalities of meter and rhyme scheme. Her work is a unique, eye-pleasing integration of extant linguistic idiosyncrasies with avant-garde typography. Perhaps it is fortuitous that I do not have to answer my question of whether Currier writes poetry or composes music. As Dylan Thomas once offered, “Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing.” At heart, the intent of poetry is to make the audience feel, and feel deeply, and Currier, through this highly metrical almost-memoir, certainly reminds us what it is to wholly feel—whether we wish to be so reminded or not.
Shadow and Light is divided into four sections (although an argument could be made that its “New York City Suite” qualifies as a fifth). Each section—more emotionally brazen and yet more private than its last—captures the shadow and light of wending through those most basic realities of life: contingency, stability, stagnancy. Even so, Currier concludes the book with a lightheartedness that supplies a welcome break from occasionally opaque verse, paying homage to former students, converging both the obscurity and the lucidity of memory. With each section, the audience is bound to poetic persona ever more tightly—sometimes, too tightly.
Shadow and Light is also visually poetic. The New York City Suite pages shift in layout to white print on black paper with short lyrical, witty poems staggered about the page and framed by reverse-image photo brackets. Pages come to resemble a personal photo board, adding an extra emotive power that forces the audience to engage at an altogether graphic level with the the ravages of memory. The black-and-white formatting throughout offers a tangible reflection of the title, immersing readers within remnants of “occasions forgotten or indistinguishable.” Solidifying the connections among memory, verbal artifacts (the poems), and relational reality, Currier shows no shame supplying personal dedications to several of the pieces. Both the layout and the poems offer each page a transparent physicality.
Following the arrangement by section, the poetry—like life itself—in Shadow and Light follows a series of phases, all organized under the unitary motif of relationship and memory. Embodied in poetic form, Currier pairs loss with humor, darkness with lightness, embracing memory within the corporeality of emotion. Her collection offers euphoric poems expressive of empathy and reflective in their proclivity to quip. In the end, her dexterous and sometime even volatile use of meter, held together with her voracious (at times wry) voice, provides readers with a look back at a life lived with the kind of honesty that oftentimes only poetry can deliver, or as Currier suggests: “These poems, like a long train journey, end at a place not yet home, yet not unknown.”
Directed by Tom Ford, from a script by Ford and David Scearce and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood
It’s hard not to notice that A Single Man’s timing seems a little awkward. For starters, there’s that inevitable confusion with the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, and the fact of both movies having to do with horn-rimmed sad sacks who feel trapped in the peculiar quicksand of 1960s Americana.
What’s more, maybe it’s just too late now to get a great film from Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel of one day in a closeted man’s suddenly lonely life. Certainly director Tom Ford and co-writer David Scearce seem to take that seminal gay-lib text for granted. An established fashion designer who made his name peddling erotically flamboyant luxury, Ford sees A Single Man as sedulous diversion: just one long and lovely and carefully struck pose.
In 1962, as Soviet missiles are piling up in Cuba and college kids are giving up in Los Angeles, Colin Firth is George Falconer, quite clearly the best dressed professor of English ever to have walked the Earth (although in that regard he is not without competition). Having just learned of his lover’s death, George has taken to radiating sartorially magnificent grief, thinking suicidal thoughts and trudging around in his splendid home. He has a support system of sorts, cobbled together from a fetchingly boozy best friend (Julianne Moore), a flirty student in a fuzzy sweater (Nicholas Hoult), and a full-on come-hither hustler (Jon Kortajarena), but nothing quite lights George up like the memory of his soulmate, who’s played in flashbacks by Matthew Goode.
In fact, Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau take that lighting up very literally, setting it off as a periodic efflorescence from their meticulously pallid status quo. As if Firth’s face, here a marvel of emotive subtlety and control, somehow weren’t enough to get the point across. That’s really the best and most confounding thing going on in here: an extraordinary central performance without which the whole movie, flan-like confection that it is, might completely collapse. It’s astonishing to see how nimbly Firth navigates the simultaneous numbness and volatility that mourning can bring. And it’s frustrating to see him, along with every other shrewdly self-possessed performer in his supporting cast, not so much directed as tastefully arranged within the frame.
Given the milieu of a hazy, uneasy neverland somewhere between conservative cultural nostalgia and foundational progressive mythology, it’s no surprise that Ford should want to reduce all of A Single Man’s feeling to a languid fashion-mag swoon. (Is that moment set in front of a billboard for Hitchcock’s Psycho actually meaningful, or just something the filmmaker saw in another movie once?) But his characterization of the dapper, depressive George risks reinforcing a mopey and preening stereotype — the core of queer vanity behind a veil of hollow flair — that Isherwood sought preemptively to peel away. Funny, and sad, how times have changed.
I was delighted to come across the utterly appropriately titled blog White Readers Meet Black Authors, “your official invitation into the African American section of the bookstore,” maintained by novelist Carleen Brice. There is little I can say about this blog that Brice hasn’t said already, from the video she has on the blog itself to the piece she wrote in December 2008 for the Washington Post. When she started the blog, New York Magazine viewed it as a publicity stunt, and it is that. But Brice is also getting at something very real about the book market; just read the blog and see if you don’t agree with her. But more importantly, read the blog for the books she champions.
Thanks to White Readers Meet Black Authors, I’ve been devouring Victor LaValle’s The Ecstatic, and his latest book, the very well-reviewed Big Machine, just might be next. I bought both at the same time at McNally Jackson, and the woman behind the cash register smiled.
“Going on a LaValle bender?” she said.
“It looks that way,” I said.
She nodded. “You won’t be disappointed.” I believe her.
Over the holiday, I read Michael Chabon’s new book, which has in it a very poignant essay about (among other things) oldies radio — how one day the songs you grew up with are now oldies, while meanwhile the the songs that used to be your oldies, like Elvis and doo-wop, are falling away from radio forever. In today’s radio culture, a song like Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” a baby-boomer favorite that had resonance for the generation of two after the boomers because of of the movie Stand by Me and, moreover, because it’s a great song, is now lumped together with all the way old crooner stuff, the Como and Sinatra, the Rosemary Clooney, which, while it has its own merits, is for the boomers and all the rest of us basically grandmom’s music. Even early Beatles don’t really make it onto FM radio much any more — if you remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, then you almost sixty or even older, which is to say a small percentage of the radio listening audience. And not a demographic advertisers care about (unless they are advertising prescription drugs).
What does this all mean for me? Only that today, driving back from New York City with my 3-year-old fast asleep in the back seat, I flipped through the radio until it landed on the sublime “Super Freak,” the 1981 hit by Rick James.
I grooved through the last minute or two of that song, it faded out, and then I was hit with “Ventura Highway,” the 1972 bit of lite Americana by the band America.
Now, I love both “Super Freak” and “Ventura Highway,” truly. They are both catchy and lyrically memorable, and they both have the power to evoke a certain time in one’s life. Now, the times they evoke in my life never really happened, but rather seem as if they must have happened — but it’s a special kind of song that has the power to do that, too. BUT, and this is the point, they are two songs with nothing in common artistically, thematically, or culturally. They have been yoked together by some radio programmer out in ClearChannelLand only because they figure some guy in his forties (or maybe in his mid-thirties, but with an affinity for both music of his own time and the lite fare of his father’s time) will remember and enjoy them both.
In other words, if one thinks that a radio station ought to have a character, then this is a purely cynical programming move, putting “Super Freak” and “Ventura Highway” together. Which is another way of saying that nobody really expects radio stations to have a character any more. DJs don’t get to make playlists, and radio stations don’t serve meaningful communities of listeners.
To that latter point: there used to be a New Haven DJ named Vinnie Penn, who worked the morning show on WKCI (“KC-101”), a Top 40 station broadcasting out of Hamden, one town to the north of New Haven. Vinnie — who also had the honor of working with Glenn Beck when Beck was a crappy New Haven–based morning jock — wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but he was beloved by others. He could be crude and juvenile, to say the least, and at times could be quite smart. Anyway, what I liked about him was that he was a New Havener. His show was peppered with references to real New Haven hangouts, to what New Haven was like in his 1980s childhood, to stereotypes of surrounding towns in Connecticut, etc. In other words, he was our neighbor: Our Neighbor Vinnie.
After he resigned/was fired/was forced out, he was replaced by this dude with the fake name Mike Maze. (To be fair, Vinnie Penn was a shortened, so fake, name too. If I ever stalk the airwaves, it will be as Mark Oppenheimer, as in “Oppenheimer,” the song by the Old 97s.) From what I can tell, Maze isn’t the biggest moron on the air, but he is no New Havener, nor do his ClearChannelBosses seem to have any expectation that he be. His show could come from anywhere, and it seems to go nowhere. It has no grounding, except in the pop-culture reality-TV ether. For some reason, the idea behind a lot of morning shows now is to re-hash the TV of the night before.
I miss the way radio used to be. I came along way after the heyday of free-form. I never knew a time when DJs had any real power over what they played. But at least they weren’t playing “Ventura Highway” after “Super Freak.”
Kevin Daniels’ oneman show, El Hablador: the Storyteller keeps butterflies, ending its 3-day run tonight at the Yale Cabaret, involves several conceits that blend together to create a unique theatrical experience.
First of all, “el hablador” (the storyteller) features the notion that the main character — Daniels, a young black man in a suit, barefoot — is stranded on an island where his need to tell stories is fulfilled by messages in bottles. These hang from the ceiling, and the storyteller selects one or another, seemingly at random, and offers it with friendly gestures to an audience member who then reads aloud the message inside. Addressed to the storyteller, the messages present occasions for a story.
Another conceit comes into play through the storyteller’s name: Dante, an illusion to the famous poet who catalogued the inhabitants of hell in its various circles. Indeed, the stories El Hablador tells dramatize social hells of our contemporary world for four protagonists in interrelated stories.
Yet another conceit could be said to be the form of the stories themselves: delivered in highly rhythmical, allusive, visceral raps, the stories are offered as spoken both by and about the character in question. The most effective, to my mind, was the tale of an African-American father trying to flee the crisis of Hurricane Katrina with his family; the story provided a convincing sense of other characters in the man’s life, as voices or ghosts pursuing him from the disaster. The story of a young man trying to articulate his relation to his own sexuality was deft in its use of dramatic, confrontational soliloquy. The other stories, of an Hispanic drug-dealer victimized by the ‘no exit’ like space of his ghetto upbringing, and of his white former girlfriend who moved to Vegas to become a stripper, while full, like all four monologues, of wonderful verbal riffing and expressive outbursts that were almost show-stopping in their brilliance, seemed to trade more on certain cliches of ‘the life’ than the other two monologues did.
Still another conceit that was perhaps the most striking was that the storyteller — who was a childlike, ingratiating mime-figure when speaking in his native language — ‘became’ the character in the monologue as if possessed by the voice, or as if he were a machine into which the ‘track’ had been inserted. This was signaled by the breakdowns into repetitions and slowing speed as monologues drew to an end. It was an effective transition device which, because of Daniel’s precise sense of rhythm — matching physical and verbal contortions in expressive combination — never seemed forced. Rather it was unnerving each time, as if watching a puppet with Tourette’s Syndrome crash under the calamitous force of having to articulate such passionate, victimized lives.
Not being someone for whom rap has had much allure, I have to say that Daniels’ monologues impressed me with the scale to which the form can be stretched, combining the strengths of spoken word poetry, with allusions and metaphors piling up quickly, of dramatic monologue, in which a true self is revealed by choice of expression, and of oral storytelling, in which choice of incident and detail gives reality to scenes we “see” only in words.
El Hablador provides a commanding performance and gripping theater. The space of the Cabaret was very effectively used through placement of the action, lighting the space to include the audience readers, and the scenic quality of hanging bottles like stars in the sky, each a story.
Katharine Weber’s True Confections takes the form of an affidavit by Alice Ziplinsky, née Tatnall, aka Arson Girl, a New Haven resident who has become the de facto head of Zip’s Candies, through a series of events — both mishaps and good fortune — that make for a sprawling, juicy tale in a relatively small compass.
Weber’s fifth novel is Alice’s first person account, offered for legal reasons, of her employment at Zip’s Candies, of her marriage to Howard “Howdy” Ziplinsky, and of her involvement in the family business, and, like the candies Little Sammies, Tigermelts, and Mumbo Jumbos that are the legacy of founder Eli Czaplinsky, Alice’s narrative creates textures that tantalize, tastes that surprise, and a memorable “mouthfeel.” Alice is intelligent, humorous, informative, but also slightly askew, perhaps even actionably unreliable.
Along the way, Weber furnishes engagingly deft sketches of New Haven and environs — she has a feel for the city in its town and gown dichotomy, and provides glimpses of the city that used to be through evocation of the fortunes of the fictional, but highly realistic, Zip’s Candies. In the tale of a little, local company that must compete with the big name, real companies — like Hershey and Mars — Weber finds an apt figure for the fortunes of small businesses and small cities in the 21st century. We often find ourselves in a detailed subculture — the world of candy manufacture and marketing — that Weber, in the voice of Alice for whom every aspect of the business fascinates and who has “perfect pitch for the candy business,” delivers with great gusto.
Weber also provides a lot of fun by, as it were, peeking through Alice’s narrative with material that the narrator seems not too comfortable with, or perhaps may even be distorting for her own purposes. What is the true story of the fire, blamed on Alice, that burned down a schoolmate’s home in 1975? What exactly were the problems with her marriage to Howdy and why did he run off to Madagascar? And what of the alleged intrigues against Alice by her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law Irene? How sympathetic do we find Alice, the gentile in the Jewish family business, who becomes, by her own insistence, the one most concerned with the family legacy and her fond, deceased father-in-law’s wishes?
Loyalty is the key. The successful candy bar is supported by a consumer belief that he or she is honoring family traditions, so that loyalty is all bound up with nostalgia for childhood experiences either actual or longed-for. Ideally, too, the consumer has a sense of entitlement to self-indulgence driven by an ambivalence toward guilty pleasure. I mention all these things because my knowledge and experience in the candy manufacturing business in general, and with Zip’s Candies in particular, should be above question, but they have been questioned …
The questions Weber raises through Alice aren’t all simply personal either. Should we, today, consider a candy line founded on characters in Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo racist? Is Alice painfully naive when she doesn’t think of the ramifications of packaging two chocolate Sammies on either side of a white chocolate Susie? Or is it the world — Weber gives a quick glimpse of the blogosphere and its ability to create urban legend at will — that has gone askew?
The book is at its best when Alice is delineating, with story-within-story spirals, her relations with the Ziplinskys — particularly revealing are her dealings with Sam, her father-in-law, and the way she brings her and Howdy’s children into the business. The story of Eli’s brother Julius and the Nazi plan to ship Jews to Madagascar is fascinating but somewhat intrusive into the narrative, as Julius is a character who is never “real” to Alice, since she never meets him, and the story, ostensibly told to explain why the Ziplinskys have holdings in Madagascar where their cacao and other ingredients come from, seems material that could have been worked into a gripping novel in its own right, but which seems a bit outside the range of Alice’s voice, despite her admission that she is largely inventing what she can’t reconcile with those few facts she knows.
It’s largely the voice and direct experience of Alice that are the winning ingredients here, for she is the one who makes of her immersion in the candy business the basis for all there is to know about life, a way to take charge of the past, the family, the business, and, ultimately, the future. As Weber’s inscription from Anne Sexton would have it: “Even crazy, I’m as nice / as a chocolate bar.”
Katharine Weber will be appearing at Mitchell Public Library in Westville at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 13th, and at RJ Julia Booksellers, in Madison, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, January 21st.
