The reality is that not everyone can be a doctor, not everyone can be a professional athlete, and not everyone can be a writer. You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can’t express your individuality in sterling prose, I don’t want to read about it.
–Ted Genoways, “The Death of Fiction?” in Mother Jones Jan/Feb 2010

Here Ted Genoways, editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, expresses his mission statement, so to speak,  a way of turning aside submissions he simply doesn’t want or have time to read.  We might ask ourselves if  this, in itself, is  “sterling prose,” and wonder why we should read it if it’s not.  Two matters make this less than “sterling,” in my view, and I’d like to point them out as a means to talk about what we  talk about when we talk about writing.

One problem is the speciousness of the analogies: a doctor becomes a doctor by going through considerable training and vetting; an athlete — which is something “anyone” can be — only becomes a professional athlete by getting paid, and continuing to get paid, to play a sport.  The “anyone” here, to be an athlete, is anyone who puts in the time to train, has talent, drive, and what is generically called  “athletic ability.”  Granted, some may wish they had it, but really don’t.  It’s assumed that everyone who is a professional athlete has some ability — though their detractors and anti-fans may deny it vehemently.

Is writing really like either of these things?  Not really, and here’s why.  Anyone, literally, can be a writer, so long as he or she is literate.  Children are encouraged to be athletic but they don’t fail school if they aren’t (I know whereof I speak on this one).  But they really aren’t supposed to graduate without being able to write.  Therefore, they are writers, potentially.

Genoways doesn’t say “professional writer” because he knows that wouldn’t help his argument.  The pay scale for poetry and much literary writing is so low that people who are professional writers — journalists, mostly, but also celebrities who write books, or who become celebrities by writing books — would hesitate to call them professionals.  And everyone who considers him or herself a literary writer knows this.   Many, possibly most, are not trying to become  “professional writers” in that sense.  Certainly,  most want to be published writers and most would like to be paid for their writing, and would like to sell their books, but many of the people submitting to literary journals are “amateurs” if we define “professional” as “getting paid to write.”   Many literary figures, some quite respected, make their livings by something other than writing.

Genoways is well aware of this and so the “professional athlete” analogy really doesn’t work, but he wants to differentiate between sheer ability or doing it for love of the game, and being an athlete paid to compete.  But pay isn’t really the issue when it comes to writing, even if VQR pays.  If it were they’d only accept submissions from agents, who are getting paid to make sure their authors make money.

The doctor analogy doesn’t work at all, not even really for academic writers, who also don’t get paid (much or always) for their writing, though they are expected to produce it.  Not everyone can become a Ph.D.,we might say, but, if you do become one, you now have a credential that gives you authority to conduct research and comment on research in that field.  You may or may not get paid for that; as with many writers, your real pay, what makes you professional, comes from teaching.  A doctor, generally, gets paid for practicing medicine, making him, maybe, a bit like the freelance writer, but one rarely hears of someone being a doctor “on the side.”

Getting paid for writing may be difficult, in part, because anyone can be a writer.  And though Genoways might like to think that being an editor for a respected journal is comparable to those who hand out degrees in medicine or those who hire athletes, it isn’t really.  An editor of such a journal is given the task of deciding, from all that it is submitted and solicited, what suits the journal, what fits with what.  Some of that may come from people with credentials, some of it not.   Some from students in MFA programs, some from their teachers, some from people who wouldn’t go near such a thing.  Or it may come only from whomever the editor knows and is in contact with.

If not published by VQR, the writing might still find a home somewhere, and if published somewhere, it may claim some at least minimal credit as published.  And that’s really the only point in Genoways’ prose that stands: his statement of his own tastes as an editor.  If  it’s not sterling prose, don’t send it, he’s not interested.  Someone else may be.  And so, while the person Genoways rejects is, in his scheme of things, not a writer, it may be that the person really is, and maybe even a professional one.

So what of Genoways’ prose?  Do you not find that bit about the “precious snowflake” cloying?  Does anyone really want to read writers who are considered or consider themselves precious snowflakes?  Genoways goes for the cheap laugh — oh, yes, Ted, we know that type, how rough it must be to read such poseurs.

But then he doesn’t say (which would make me be with him more): if you cannot write sterling prose, I don’t want to read you.  Fine.  But no, he says “if you cannot express your individuality in sterling prose,” which gives the game away: “express your individuality” is not sterling prose (at this point, I think “sterling prose” is rather less than sterling), but seems a concession to the language of that “precious snowflake.”   But why?  To say that the “sterling” expression of individuality will trump the “precious” expression of individuality?  If so, it leads us to believe that the expression of individuality is what Genoways is after, when the point he seems most passionate about is decrying the protracted navel-gazing of American fiction writers who don’t seem to know or care that there’s a war or a world or a world war going on.

If Genoways, as editor, were reading Genoways’ essay, well, let’s just say it might not make the cut.

It’s Valentine’s Day (aka VD).  Maybe you’ve got it covered with your favorite mating personage, your significant other(s), your steady, your squeeze, your spouse (or the person who would be that if the laws of the land permitted), but … maybe not, maybe you’re looking to connect, somehow, someway.

Maybe you turn to craigslist, home of the online hookup, or maybe you’re not quite ready to go virtual yet, so you look at “Missed Connections” hoping against hope that someone out there, someone whose path you’ve already crossed — in line at Subway, at the bank, on that same path you walk every day to class, on the subway — is desperately seeking you again, to get your digits, your screenname, the key to your city . . .

Chad Raines, of the local band The Simple Pleasure, has concocted the music, lyrics and book for Missed Connections, a guilty pleasure based on online personals, up for its final showing today at Yale Cabaret, and it’s a blast of sound, movement, and cagey, collective jeering at the pathetic losers we all risk being when we’re lookin’ for love, or, if not love exactly, then at least that special someone who will let you massage his or her feet …

Pick your favorite moment: the phys ed girl, suffering from diarrhea, pining for the guy who will examine her stool (how much more intimate does it get?), or the guy at the Subway, intoning, in a hilarious Barry White take-off, how he noticed that girl in line with him, but was scared off when she ordered for two; or the gent with binoculars who likes to watch his neighbor take out her trash; or the pissed-off, stood-up woman who gives us a lesson in etiquette: if you’re married and seeking discreet connection on the side, it’s just not cool to be a no-show to someone else who’s married and seeking same … there might even be a sitter’s fee involved!

The songs are high volume and extremely active.  Jennifer Harrison Newman once again choreographs the impossibly small “stage”at the Cabaret — including a line dance, led by Raines, that’s so close you might catch a spray of sweat.  Director Christopher Mirto keeps the show loose and juicy, but also cheerily inviting — it feels at times like we’re at “dating camp” and the cast are our counselors, trying to get us out of our shells.

There’s never a dull moment because you never know what’s coming next — erotic tableaus, condoms flung to the crowd, a get-up and boogie number with lyrics shouting “woman for woman, man for man” rather than “celebrate good times, c’mon!”

And who knows, when it’s over there might even be a line on craigslist for you: You were at Yale Cab last weekend with some bozo and/or bimbo you clearly weren’t that into. I was the ____ with the ______.  Hope to see you there in two weeks (Feb 25-27) when the Yale Cab will feature Radio Station, inspired by the work of Shogo Ohta and the Pacific Performance Project/East.   Come alone, if you dare…

Missed Connections
a new musical by Chad Aaron Raines
directed by Christopher Mirto

How you gonna meet your missed connection?

Meyer Levin, a writer best-known for his novel Compulsion, the story of the Leopold-Loeb murder and trial, wanted to be known as the man who wrote a play based on the diary of Anne Frank.  He met with Otto Frank to discuss that possibility before Anne’s book had even been published in the U.S.

But the task of writing a play from the diary went to the Hollywood screenwriting team of Hackett/Goodrich, and their play won a Pulitzer Prize.  In Levin’s view, their play succeeded by downplaying the overt Jewish elements in Anne Frank’s story, universalizing it into a tale of unjust suffering and a young girl’s moral insight.  Levin himself called his effort to present a more authentic theatrical version of Anne Frank an obsession.

Rinne Groff’s new play, Compulsion, opened Thursday in its debut at the Yale Repertory, directed by Oskar Eustis, artistic director of The Public Theater, which, along with Berkeley Repertory, commissioned the play.  The play recreates Levin’s struggle — fictionalized in the person of Sid Silver and incarnated on stage by a bristling, touchy, sincere, sarcastic, soulfully suffering, and at one memorable moment, light-heartedly soft-shoeing Mandy Patinkin.

But the title, in opting for Levin’s word “compulsion,” used to characterize what drove Leopold and Loeb to murder, rather than Levin’s word “obsession,” chosen for his autobiographical account of his struggle with the Anne Frank material, indicates the problem the play presents us with.  It suggests that Silver is not righteously obsessed — as one might be with an injustice, trying to alter a situation that nags at one — but rather under a compulsion, as one might be when neurotically driven to certain behavior, such as having to repeat the same lesson over and over.

Both things might be true, and it’s up to the audience how far they go along with Silver in his crusade, first, to be the one who makes a play of the diary, and, when that hope must finally be relinquished, to get recognition that the Hackett/Goodrich play stole from his, then to mount a staging of his play (though he had signed away any right to do so) to show that his play is, as a friend says, “the more important play.”

Groff’s play is fast-moving, enough, in these arguments over Silver’s play — though they rely on an interest in show biz that all viewers may not share.  Silver’s character is further fleshed out by his life with his French wife (Hannah Cabell), a writer herself, who offers a few erotically charged moments and also provides moral support, until driven to almost suicidal despair by her husband’s obsession.  At that point, just before intermission, the drama between the two becomes the greater focus of the play, though the figure of Anne stills presents its fascination.

In what may be the play’s  most memorable scene,  Anne, rendered as a marionette, appears in bed beside Mrs. Silver to discuss  her husband.   The scene stages the triangulation among Silver, his wife, and Anne, and further complicates the relation via Silver’s identification with Otto Frank.  Anne, voiced in this scene by Patinkin, expresses the pathos of her father, a man Silver excoriated for betraying their beloved Anne after her death.

Compulsion’s use of marionettes — not only for Anne, but also for scenes from the two different plays based on her book — is a brilliant idea that occurred to Groff when she learned that Levin had once worked in puppet theater.  The marionette of Anne allows the play to convey Anne’s indeterminate age in the present — is she the age she was when she died, or the age she would be had she lived?  The marionette also registers the extent to which Anne Frank has become “a puppet” of her representations, and, thus, no longer a flesh and blood entity.

Ultimately the play’s theme is the question of whether Silver’s cause is important for Jewish identity, as he insists, or whether it is simply a personal matter involving his obsession with Anne and what she suffered.  (In real life, Levin was a war correspondent who did see firsthand the horror of the Nazi camps, and it was his review of The Diary of a Young Girl in the New York Times that was pivotal in catapulting it to bestseller status — both attributes are retained for Silver, so we do see him as a man to be taken seriously.)

The script makes Silver more of a wordsmith than he perhaps has a right to be — using coinages such as “cash cow” and “in the loop” in the Fifties, a decade or two before they had become common currency.  Though it has more than a few entertaining exchanges, the play offers little in the way of dramatic reversals, recognitions, or romantic complications to add entertainment to what is essentially a hard-luck show biz tale.

At yet the play is more compelling than a tale of someone passed over on the road to fame and glory, and that’s because of the figure of Anne Frank.  But we have to be willing to see the meaning of the Holocaust as implicated in her cultural status, and, as Silver insists, in the fate of his play.  But again it seems more fitting to highlight Silver’s obsession with Anne and what she represents, rather than his compulsion to insist on that relation.

COMPULSION
By RINNE GROFF
Directed by OSKAR EUSTIS
Featuring HANNAH CABELL, MANDY PATINKIN, STEPHEN BARKER TURNER
January 29 to February 28, 2010
Yale Repertory Theatre
1120 Chapel Street
A co-production with The Public Theater and Berkeley Repertory Theatre

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.

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.

Saturday, Jan 16 @ 8 and 11pm:

http://www.yalecabaret.org/home.php

Katharine Weber, True Confections, Shaye Areheart Books, 274 pp, $22

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.

Paul Auster, Invisible, Henry Holt and Co., 308 pp., $25.00

It seems like someone writes in every Paul Auster novel I’ve read.  Writing is often as much a part of the story as the story itself.  And there’s often a doubling of situations: characters recreate each other in some fashion, sometimes finding themselves to be fulfillments of each other’s imagination or even the authors of each other’s existence.

Then there’s the prose itself: Auster writes a prose that is rather austere; he doesn’t fill his novels with the particulars of general experience, nor does he spend much effort on description; he lets brief references to the larger world serve the purpose of instant recognition that other novelists take to great lengths.  Even though his books are set in specific places and times, there’s often a streamlined approach to setting that makes his work seem minimalist.  And there’s almost no one in his novels other than his main characters — few extras, no crowd scenes.

With this, his fifteenth novel, Auster works his limited palette to great effect: the ‘instability of the narrative’ — often a much-touted feature of postmodern fiction — is blended easily with steady evocation of dramatic situations: a triangular relationship between a young poet and an older couple; a self-defence killing or murder; the death of a brother as a child; an incestuous sexual relationship; an elaborate effort at vengeance; a sinister meeting in a remote locale after many years; a writer who is constructing a memoir that might also be fiction and who is dying while writing it.

Part One is a swiftly-moving narrative in which Adam Walker, a student at Columbia in 1967, recounts his encounter with the somewhat unsettling but generous Rudolph Born and enters into an affair with Born’s companion, a Frenchwoman called Margot.  The story ends with an act of violence and a gripping self-examination on Walker’s part.  In Part Two we find that the story was a manuscript sent to a writer named Jim (the “Auster character” — there is often in Auster’s fiction an authorial presence in the story, who in some ways is “like” Auster himself).  Jim tells us quickly of his friendship with Walker back in their Columbia days.  We learn that Walker, in the present, has leukemia, is dying, and is trying to write a three-part memoir based on his life in 1967.  Part One of Invisible is, in Walker’s ms., called “Spring.”

Soon Jim is reading “Summer,” in which Walker and his slightly older sister Gwyn become lovers.  But Walker, stymied by the rigors of writing, had asked Jim for advice before writing this segment; Jim’s advice was to move from first person to third.  Instead, Walker settles for an in-between: he uses second person for the story of Adam and Gwyn.

What’s in a pronoun?  Does the shift in pronoun make the story more believable or less?  And what about later, when Walker’s illness gets the best of him, so that the final portion of Walker’s narrative, chronicling “Fall,” his time in Paris reconnecting with Born and Margot, is told in the third person because Jim creates the narrative from Walker’s notes and drafts?  This kind of distancing from the narrative through different acts of narration seems almost automatic on Auster’s part, as if simply telling the story would be to fall into the trap of authority, rather than Austerity, of presenting events as simply occurring rather than necessarily narrated.

Finally, we return to the first person for the novel’s dénouement, a diary written by Cécile Juin and given to Jim. Cécile, in 1967, nearly became Born’s stepdaughter; she was a young student, a would-be translator, and developed a crush on Walker.  Her diary recounts her final meeting with Born, on an island in the Caribbean in 2002.

The novel, like most Auster, is deftly imagined, and told with no wasted motion.  There’s sex, food, interesting conversation, talk about books and writing, and through it all the figure of Born, a mercurial, malevolent character whose actual intentions, occupation, and thoughts are never quite certain.  A provocation to Walker, but also a sort of idée fixe that gets passed on to Jim and to Cécile and to the reader as well.

An extremely subtle novelist, Auster’s true intentions often arrive almost indirectly.  Because he’s able to interest us in almost anything he chooses to write about, one reads his novels sometimes a bit frustrated that he doesn’t devote more attention to some of the very interesting situations and ideas that surface.  His novels, at their best, follow an inexorable logic or narrative necessity, but at other times it’s rather like being shown a series of sketches which the reader’s own imagination must flesh out and inhabit, much as Gwyn and Adam do for their dead brother Andy, holding a birthday party for him every year at which they discuss him in the past, present, and future:

For ten years now, he has been living this shadow existence inside you, a phantom being who has grown up in another dimension, invisible yet breathing, breathing and thinking, thinking and feeling, and you have followed him since the age of eight, for more years after death than he ever managed to live …

Auster’s characters are like this dead boy: shadow existences that inhabit each other’s minds, often via writing, and who inhabit the reader’s mind, “invisible yet breathing,” haunting and quizzical, never quite exhausted by the stories their author tells of them, a part of Auster’s ongoing shadow existence and ours.

Pop!, the new musical now playing in its world premiere at the Yale Rep, could have been a camp classic: staging a song-and-dance extravaganza on the shooting of famed pop artist, provocateur, and blasé icon Andy Warhol at the hands of a disaffected feminist revolutionary, Valerie Solanis, in 1968.  The silver Factory, Warhol’s headquarters at 231 East 47th street in NY, was famed for its stable of hangers-on, including “poor little rich girl” Edie Sedgwick, pre-op transexual Candy Darling, and other would-be geniuses.  From this remove, it would be possible to play these characters for laughs, as a collective disgorging of whatever is stored in the closet marked “NYC Underground c. 1967.”  Along the way, we might be amused (or not) by the fact that one of these “superstars” had the wherewithal to shoot and critically wound The Master.

But Maggie-Kate Coleman, author of the book and lyrics of Pop!, her collaborator, Anna K. Jacobs, composer, and director Mark Brokow are after something else: the play, staged as a kind of dream inquisition into the shooting, occuring in Andy’s mind moments afterwards, eventually becomes an inquisition on Andy himself, as both the shaman and charlatan who created the forces of resentment that would lead to the attempted murder.  Not so much: who shot Andy Warhol, and why?, but rather: who wouldn’t shoot Andy Warhol, and why not?

The humor of the piece is wry and ironic in its treatment of Warhol, a coolness that the artist himself might well have appreciated.  Randy Harrison is dead-on in his Andy-mimicry, recreating the artist as a likeable apotheosis of a dilettante, always ready to give an empty paper bag to anyone who really needs it.  And by giving voice to Andy’s underlings — most notably in the powerful, engaging, crowd-pleasing performance of Leslie Kritzer as Valerie — the songs, such as “Up Your Ass” and “Money” and “Big Gun,” chip away at or send up any sympathy we might have for Andy, converting these characters from the ciphers of grime-glam they were in real life, given status by their roles at the Factory and in Andy’s homemade arthouse B movies, into articulate spokespersons for the needs of the uncelebrated, the passed-over, the assistants and groupies, the would-bes of all stripes, and finally, of women as the formerly disenfranchised but now up-and-coming demographic for all things cultural.

Thus, we get the replacement of the Oedipal struggle with artistic “fathers,” that the Abstract Expressionists understood, with the anti-partriarchal struggle of the likes of Valerie, whose S.C.U.M. manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) envisions a world rid of men in which women will finally achieve their greatness.  But as Andy sings at one point “I’m not your father,” and casting him in the role of the evil daddy, or even the fetish-loving gay daddy-substitute, sends out ripples of satire.

The play is entertainingly artful in its mocking of all sides: treating the Ab-Exs Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell as macho cowboys, much as Warhol and his crowd perceived them, but at the same time mocking Andy as the working-class mama’s boy from Pittsburgh who recreated himself as the holy avatar of making art the mirror in which consumerism can read its own features, fascinated and narcissistic (and Warhol would not see those as negative characteristics), but who, it seems, never really gave of himself.  That he attracted a crew of narcissists is another point the play sends up, by never letting us forget that the great talents supposedly possessed by the likes of Viva, Edie, Candy, and Valerie were largely wishful thinking.

It’s also the case that Warhol himself was fallible to just such wishful thinking.  He really wanted his movies to be appreciated by Hollywood, to earn him status and a real budget, so that he could really make stars of his “superstars.”  But it never happened, and the disappointment, as an aspect of Warhol’s own story — as, eventually, the hanger-on of all hanger-ons, even to his own magazine and art production, and in his flattered attendance on the beautiful people — is missing here.  Perhaps the play could use a poignant aria by Andy on the pressures of being famous, to offset the sentiments of “15 Minutes” in which the company seems to accept as a mantra Warhol’s observation that “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”  He didn’t say it as a promise, but rather as a prediction — that the search for fame would become the driving feature of life.

The musical, which began life last summer in the Yale Institute for Music Theatre, is still finding its feet.  It’s a lot of fun and could become a hit in New York.  If it gets the Broadway treatment it could use some real dance routines to flesh out the Factory — the cast of seven are all quite good as singers, but display rhythmic movement more than actual dance numbers.  The stage and cast are small, but if both expand, more could be done with some of the songs as production numbers.

Special mention should be made of Brian Charles Rooney as Candy, who sings at times like a woman, at times like a man, and at times like a man singing like a woman, depending on what is required; as our Mistress of Ceremonies, Candy’s role is pivotal and, it seems to me, could benefit from more play as a glamour queen — the bridge between Judy Garland and David Bowie, as it were, a new Sally Bowles for a different time.

For me, the weak links are the guys — Ondine (Doug Kreeger) and Gerard (Danny Binstock), two Factory workers who are given roles as stoned sleuths — whose songs never quite come alive.  Unlike the girls, each of whom gets a song outlining her particular status.  But even there, Edie’s songs were largely lacking in the bite and wit given to Valerie and Viva (Emily Swallow); Edie (Cristen Paige), in the Factory mythology, was more than simply a victim of wealth or a would-be starlet looking to be cast in a major role — her own life — by Andy.  For a time she was a sort of androgynous double for Warhol in those early days when her name opened more doors than his did.

One has the sense that the musical could expand too in its cameo roles — where’s Billy Name?  Why not a bit for Lou Reed (“I have some resentments that can never be unmade”) as potential assassin?  More, more, more.  As Andy himself said, “always leave them wanting less.”

POP!
Book and lyrics by MAGGIE-KATE COLEMAN
Music by ANNA K. JACOBS
Directed by MARK BROKAW
November 27-December 19, 2009
Yale Repertory Theatre

Strange Love in Outer Space, the final show by the Yale Cabaret this semester (two shows tonight; three on Sat, including an early show for kids), was written by Janyia Antrum, a twelve-year-old student who participated in the Dwight/Edgewood Project last summer.  The program gives local 6th and 7th graders from Augusta Lewis Troup and Wexler-Grant Community Schools an opportunity to work with Yale School of Drama theater people. Janyia was mentored by Brian Valencia, a dramaturg.

The one-act that Janyia wrote in two days at the D/EP’s weekend retreat got a second act after she went home and dreamed about the characters’ further adventures.  The Yale Cab commissioned a third act to find out where the characters were going, and the full trilogy, produced by Jorge Rodriguez and directed by Christopher Mirto, has now had its debut.

What kind of characters?  The main figure is Splontusia (Alex Hendrikson), a four-eyed, one-armed creature who gets transformed into being mean and evil by an injection from the mean and evil Dr. Roswald Tuscanium (Dr. T, for short; Valencia), a worm-like creature with a slit for eyes, truncated arms, and a long trailing body.  By end of act one, however, these two would-be antagonists have admitted that, yes, there’s something charming about that slit and something bewitching about the gleam in that fourth eye…

Romantic complications ensue with the addition, in act two, of Grumis (Mirto), an aquatic creature with a rather dim-witted if likeable delivery who has always loved Splontusia, and, in act three, of the outrageously named Bonegettagettaquisha Star Jones (Dipika Guha), a pirate woman who happens to be part dog, and who has kinda had a crush on Dr T ever since science class back in high school.

And, yes, there are songs.  In fact, be prepared to get on your feet for the rousing “the way love moves in outer space” finale.

I don’t know if Janyia has ever seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but I assume that her cast and mentors have, and they maintain a similiar level of zany engagement and campy silliness that made that film such a hit.  Dr T laughs diabolically and snivels pathetically; Grumis sings like an insecure kid on Sesame Street and then belts out his beloved’s name, “Splon-tuuu-syaaaaa,” like Stanley Kowalski with fins (and how he does those fish-hops I’ll never know).  And once Splontusia starts vacillating (Dr. T did chain her to a toilet, after all), B.S. J. arrives as a possible new match for Dr T; she growls and howls yet still manages to exude the charm of a funky Puss In Boots; and Splontusia herself, all in white, at a regal height, towering above the rest of the cast, veers in a mercurial manner from ditzy to heart-felt to aggressive to, finally, someone ready to be her own person.

See it to support young talent!  See it to meet creatures you won’t find anywhere else!  See it for the toilet bowl song!

Strange Love in Outer Space
What does it take to make a relationship work?
by Janyia Antrum (2009 Dwight/Edgewood Playwright) Directed by Christopher Mirto
December 4 @ 8 and 11PM
December 5 @ 4, 8 and 11PM
Love just got a whole lot stranger. A trilogy of plays begun in the Dwight/Edgewood Project.

Philip Roth, The Humbling, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 140 pp, $22.00

In The Humbling, Philip Roth has created a three-act tragedy for famed stage actor Simon Axler, now in his mid-sixties.  In act one, “Into Thin Air,” Axler mysteriously loses his ability to act, his wife leaves him to his misery, and he finally checks himself into a psychiatric clinic.  In act two, “The Transformation,” in his seclusion in rural NY, he begins an affair with Pegeen Mike Stapleford, the forty-year-old daughter of old acting friends.  Pegeen has been a lesbian since college, and the affair with Axler, which occurs after her lover had decided, with no input from Pegeen, to undergo an operation to become a man, surprises them both.  Finally, in act three, “The Last Act,” Axler must cope with Pegeen’s termination of the affair, an event he had more or less expected but which he had convinced himself wouldn’t occur.

Laid out thus schematically, it’s easy to see the trajectory of the novel, but it takes a bit more delving to see what’s at stake in such a tale.  Roth brings to the story a serious and powerful grasp of final things that has driven his other recent short, emphatically focused novels Everyman (2006) and Exit Ghost (2007); all evoke the rueful feeling of aging and of no longer being able to take for granted one’s gifts and one’s ability to fulfill one’s desires.  An actor unable to act makes the predicament of age become not only an artistic problem, but allows Roth to push at the basis of social interaction.  For the idea of self that keeps us coherent is a role, or a series of roles, we have learned to play.

The notion that how we play our social and sexual roles is amenable to change, and that we can create all sorts of new frissons by opting for other possibilities, is the theme signaled by Pegeen Mike’s sudden change of sexuality.  In exploring “the transformation,” Roth, whose fiction is firmly planted in the contested realms of sexual politics, has fun with the notion that gender is a role, and that a lesbian, as a phallic woman, creates new sexual possibilities with other women and with men, if she so chooses. The fluidity of desire becomes very heady for Axler, but also, because of his vulnerability in losing his metier, emotionally dangerous.

But Roth is enough of an ironist to avoid the simple reading of Axler as castrated male (loss of acting ability) who finds recovered potency as clinging, aging “sugar daddy” to a woman-loving love object who allows herself briefly to become his “make-over,” from tomboy to Prada-wearing femme fatale, only to abandon him.  It’s not that that reading isn’t present, it’s just that it’s too apparent to the characters themselves.

What is more telling is that the break-up occurs after Axler helps fulfill Pegeen’s fantasy of a threesome with Axler and another girl, Tracy, a drunken pickup.  Axler gets to witness Pegeen wield a strap-on dildo to fuck Tracy, and become “a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal.”  The scene takes place to underscore that Axler, formerly the hero in the world of sexuality, is no longer “the god Pan,” and that that role has been taken, in our time, by the polymorphously perverse women of the world.  As an ironist who sees that the surest way to misery is to let a man get what he wants, Roth makes Pegeen’s sexual virility a blow to Axler rather than a turn-on.

For Axler there is no irony in his situation with Pegeen, even though he knew she was playing against type from the beginning.  But for Roth, who sees that, for men of Axler’s generation, losing the comforting roles constitutes the loss of their magical selfhood, the irony is that Axler ends up where he started.   Pegeen, as the new god Pan, giveth and taketh away — and who would base his well-being on such fleeting transformations is, as they say, in for a world of pain.

But Axler was already in a world of pain, contemplating suicide, due to the loss of his gift.  The transformation of Pegeen he engineered merely lets him play at being a director, casting her as the object of desire he most needs.  The fact that she involves her parents in her life when she begins her affair with him indicates the extent to which Pegeen really isn’t playing the character Axler has cast her as, but is in fact playing with some oedipal urges of her own.  All of this is plain to him, as Roth’s narrator, wonderfully attuned to Axler’s inner voice, makes clear.  And yet Axler persists.  If only to forestall death with one last manifestation of the pleasure principle.

In this, his thirtieth book, Roth, whose first book was published fifty years ago this year, demonstrates again his astonishing ability to delineate the prickly realities of desire.  Few authors come close to his ability to chart evenly, with comic touches and gripping pathos, the ups and downs of women’s effect upon men.  If that means his women are primarily occasions for male reflection, and that his fiction is generally a one-sided dissection of libido, it’s still true that nobody does it better.