With Life During Wartime, a quasi-sequel, as he has called it, to his 1998 film Happiness (i.e. “the one about the pedophile”), Solondz revisits the variously troubled characters from that earlier film, and even recasts them. Instead of Philip Seymour Hoffman, we get Michael Kenneth Williams (who played Omar on The Wire). Instead of Jon Lovitz, we get Paul Reubens. And so on.

What remains is an arresting affinity for suburban disfunction. You might call it the Solondz touch. You might call it an inappropriate touch. Here’s what the filmmaker has to say for himself.

Do people stop you in the street and say, “What’s wrong with you?”

I mean, people have been nice…to my face. I don’t quiz people. I don’t interrogate them. When people say nice things I say thank you. So no. I have to say it says something good about human nature that many people do stop and say nice things to me, actually. On the street, in the subway, what have you. But I know there are just as many people who hate everything I do. And they have the good discretion and good tact never to assault me.

I mean this as a compliment to you both: If Paul Reubens deserves to be in anyone’s films, it’s yours.

I’ve always loved him. He read for me years ago. So I had a sense of what he could do, and we both took a leap of faith in each other here. With Paul of course there’s an extra layer of pathos or poignancy because of the whole history that the audience is aware of with him. And also, no one has any idea that he’s even capable of such a performance. And that’s all very exciting. And I’m very playful; in my head the character probably even has his own Pee Wee Herman doll.

That’s something to think about. How did you first discover cinema?

I went to Yale, and they didn’t have a film major. But that’s where I first thought of the idea. I think because I was socially shy or awkward and felt intimidated. When I went, we had VHS tapes, they had film societies. It could be a Howard Hawks double-bill, followed by Maya Deren, followed by Bergman, Garbo. Every night, many options. And I went out all the time. In part to escape the pressures, the social pressures, and in the process I fell in love with movies in a way that I hadn’t taken seriously as a child. I mean, I can remember I was 16 and my mom came home, and she said, “I saw a movie, Todd. What a movie. It was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” I said, “Oh, I want to see that.” And she said, “No, no, you’re too young.” So I was very protected, in what I saw growing up. It had to be rated G. And then things changed in college. I didn’t have to understand a movie. I just let it all wash over me.

So at what age would the younger you be old enough to see the movies you now make?

I have a different viewpoint from my mom. I think children have built-in censors. I think parents are always worried about, “Oh my god, the sex, the violence.” But I can remember, as a kid, anytime they started kissing, I went for the Jujubes at the concession. I took a break. No interest. And I think usually the more anxious the parents are about that stuff, probably they don’t realize they themselves are the main source of whatever nightmares these kids are having.

What will be your next movie?

The title is Dark Horse. And I can tell you there’s no child molestation, rape or masturbation in it. But I’m afraid those are the only details I can share at this point.

Those are useful details.

It’s an abstraction, really, until it’s made. You have all sorts of plans; nothing ever turns out the way you plan it. If I were maybe smarter, wiser, I would maybe have a real career. But I’m not interested in that. I just make movies that interest me in my own way. I don’t pay attention — I can’t — to what I maybe should do. A lot of times I think, “Oh this could make a lot of money, I have a very marketable idea.” But then I end up writing something unmarketable. I listen to whatever compels me to put pen to paper. I don’t have a strategy. I’m very fortunate. When I look back, I say, “Oh my god, someone gave me money to make these movies.” It’s amazing. But I never presume that I will get money again. I have to be zen about all of this. I mean, you can just get depressed and jump out the window. But I have a sense of humor about it all.

Brenna Palughi conceived the idea, scripted it in collaboration with her production team, Danny Binstock, Walter Chon, and Adina Verson, directs and choreographed the show, and stars as Zelda.  She finds in the story of these literary icons the kind of vivid fascination that, these days, attaches to the likes of Brangelina.  Scott and Zelda lived lives that were not only passionate and artistic, but were also emblems of their era, the Roaring Twenties, forever associated with them, both because of Scott’s works, such as The Great Gatsby (1925), and the couple’s lifestyle.

To present the reality of the couple, Palughi’s script uses only the duo’s actual words — mainly from their considerably articulate correspondence.  But rather than try to recreate the events of the couple’s life, Palughi cannily creates a retrospective fantasy, a kind of Satrean “no exit” space where the couple have to face eternity by trying to make sense of what they were to each other and why it went so wrong.

One of the most unforgettable moments, as a glimpse into the abyss the public couple tried to skirt, derives from a transcript of a session at the Fitzgeralds’ home with a  psychologist (voice of Joby Earle) in attendance to act as arbitrator.  Zelda, who had wanted to be a dancer, published a novel, thus treading on her husband’s territory.  Worse, she was now working on a novel based on events Scott was trying for years to draft as material for what would eventually become Tender is the Night (1934).  To hear Scott baldly declare the conditions under which his wife must live, in order to continue being his wife, is rather appalling to anyone who expects something closer to mutuality in marriage.  On the other hand, the position Scott speaks from is not really one of bullying strength, no matter how his words sound.  He is in need of Zelda, hence the title of the piece: muse.  Without Zelda’s participation in his life, Scott seems to fear a loss of his bearings, but at the same time, any act she might take in her own interest would be considered a complete betrayal.

As Scott, Binstock enacts vividly Scott’s nature via dance and dialogue.  He displays graceful self-control in a lengthy dance piece with Palughi that narrates the couple’s entire story with considerable economy and aplomb, but we see the pressures he faces take actual physical toll on his movements.  And in his spoken protests and pleas Binstock shows us a Scott verging on a loss of control that, if it were to occur, might have been a saving grace.  Instead, we always feel Scott’s grasp of himself, so thoroughly buttoned up in his lovely suits, no less tenacious for being tentative and vulnerable.  Only when he dances do we see some of the “light fantastic” that makes the prose so golden, so self-assured.

In a segment where word and movement are particularly well matched and powerful, Zelda kneels on the stage reading a letter from Scott comprised of nothing but hurtful, insistent, resentful, relentless questions while behind her Scott performs a marionette’s series of jerks, slaps, and contortions.  Here we see the perfect visual realization of something almost inhumanly mechanical — the way his concept of himself as a writer controlled Scott just as fiercely as his need to control Zelda.

As Zelda, Palughi’s dancing is able to express an openness and abandon that seems, from all accounts, to have been part of Zelda’s fascination.  But it’s also fascinating to hear how lucid she could be, even when threatened with an asylum.  Palughi’s voice at times gets strident but never veers into the kind of hysteria we might expect.  Her Zelda is verbally in control, even if her expression at times becomes a doll-like fixity, the mournful gaze of a spirit trapped forever in her husband’s vision of her.

For all the tensions and darkness of this marriage, Palughi’s sense of the material highlights its romantic potential.  Elizabeth Groth’s costumes are lovely; her set is a world literally papered with words; the music — Gershwin for instance — breathes with rapture and jaunty melancholy; Sarah Lasley’s newsreel-like projections add the necessary touch of the mediated reality that encroached on these lives, making them famous and a part of our nation’s permanent record.

In the afterlife, “hell is other people,” but if the people were truly a couple — overriding even “til death do us part” — it may be possible to see that the feeling “to be young then was very heaven” might also override all-too-human failings with the heady thrill of being “beautiful and damned” for all time.

muse;  conceived and directed by Brenna Palughi

July 29-August 14, 8 p.m.; August 7, 2 p.m.

Yale Summer Cabaret: 203.432.1567; SummerCabaret.org

The Dwight/Edgewood Project is held every July under the auspices of Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theater.  It’s a four week program that introduces New Haven area kids to the elements of theater, from playwrighting and design to acting and directing, with classes staffed by Yale School of Drama students.  For the last two years, August Lewis Troup Middle School and Wexler-Grant Community School have been partners in the project.

Janyia wrote the first part of Strange Love in summer 2009, at the age of twelve.  When she got home after the project ended, she felt the urge to continue the story and wrote a second part.  The Yale Cabaret commissioned a third act and then produced the play.  Jorge Rodriguez, who has worked with Janyia as a producer from the beginning, comments: Janyia “wrote a play that was incredibly well structured, with outstanding character development and incredibly funny.”  The play impressed her fellow students at D/EP and the staff “was stunned by her sense of comedic timing.  The zany, campy humor that distinguishes this play were of her own creation and a result, as she often joked about, of years of watching TV sitcoms like The Nanny.”

Christopher Mirto, who directed the D/EP production and the Yale Cab production, is at the helm again for the Fringe production.  He also plays the memorable role of Mr. Grumis, a fish-like alien who courts the statuesque Splontusia.  For Mirto, the play works for a lot of reasons:

“Janyia’s story is actually really moving and has a strong leading female character. It’s campy fun but very serious and imaginative and comes from such a genuine place. It’s surprisingly smart, has great comic timing, [and] the songs move the plot forward; the characters are crazy, but have very clear desires. The Fringe is a good fit because it’s an unusual show in style, form, characters, design. It doesn’t have a big or complicated design, so it’s easy to transfer. Kind of like Pixar films, it appeals to adults and children.”

The Fringe version features some of the same cast as the Cabaret version — Mirto, and his longtime associate Brian Valencia, who also mentored Janyia in D/EP, as the dastardly Dr. Tuscanunin — but also presents some changes, with Caitlin Clouthier, from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, in the central role of multi-eyed Splontusia, and recent YSD graduate Aja Naomi King as B’Quisha Star Jones, the dog/pirate queen.  The new production also boasts a new song.

The Fringe is a huge, sprawling drama festival that Mirto calls “a total crapshoot.”  The sublime and the ridiculous rub shoulders and you go in not quite knowing what you’re going to get.  Strange Love has already proven itself capable of mixing it up with the challenging and off-the-wall offerings of the Cab, and now it will run side-by-side with the off-off-Broadway shows of the West Village.

Mirto’s excited by the challenge and comments, “There is this really nice non-jaded aspect of Janyia that is refreshing for me: she reminds me that it should be fun, it should entertain, and it should be simple; and that imagination goes a long way!”

It’s an imagination that has created a play that’s out of this world, a play that has already gone a long way from an afterschool project to a New York city debut.

Strange Love in Outer Space, A Musical Traumedy

Book and Lyrics by Janyia Antrum; Music by Nick Morgan; Directed by Christopher Mirto

The Cherry Pit (venue #14), 155 Bank Street, New York, NY (West & Washington Street)

Sat. Aug. 14, 2:15 p.m.; Tues. Aug. 17, 10:30 p.m.; Thurs. Aug. 19, 8 p.m.; Sat. Aug. 21, 5:30 p.m.; Mon. Aug. 23, 4 p.m; Tickets $15-$18; for tickets: www.FringeNYC.org

Presented by The New York International Fringe Festival; A Production of The Present Company

Which is why when Matthew Cheney—an NHR contributor, among many, many other things—asked me if I’d contribute to a series of reviews on VanderMeer’s new short-story collection, The Third Bear, I was all over it.

I said before that one of the things I like so much about VanderMeer’s writing is his deft mixture of the social, political, and personal. “The Goat Variations,” which Kevin Brockmeier singled out for praise in his blurb of The Third Bear, accomplishes this to great effect, as the leaders of a nation falling apart at the seams catch wind that a calamity is coming, but don’t know how to stop it. Oh, right—this story also involves alternate realities and time travel, which makes for a really heady mixture. Conceptually, VanderMeer sets up a very difficult task, that of writing directly about George W. Bush without hitting us over the head, and yet still giving the story teeth. He might not quite get away with it; there’s still a sense that VanderMeer’s too close, that there hasn’t been quite enough time to digest it all. I say this with humility, though: I would have been a bit frightened to even attempt to write a short story like this, and certainly wouldn’t have done as well. And the story still has plenty of teeth, as I find myself returning in my mind to VanderMeer’s vivid image of George W. at the beginning of his administration, bludgeoned by catastrophe, the world as he knows it ending all around him, and him just not knowing what to do.

And then there’s “Three Days in a Border Town,” which is one of the best pieces of short fiction I’ve read in years; it’s no wonder it showed up on awards and best-of lists when it was published in 2004. In it, a sharpshooter moves through a dusty border town in the middle of a desert, looking for her husband, but it’s about so much more than that. It’s about devastating loss, hovering just beyond the horizon; it’s about figuring out how to move on. Matthew Cheney has said why this story is amazing as well as anyone, and he’s right. It’s Beckett, it’s the better end of Dennis Lehane (particularly the short story “Until Gwen,” with which it shares a narration written, with wild success, in the second person), and it’s VanderMeer at his best, precise and luminous, transporting and transfiguring. “Three Days in a Border Town” is the kind of story that seems to take in the whole world, to be about everything at once, and it shows that when VanderMeer’s writing at the top of his game—which is pretty much all the time—it’s foolish to talk about beating him, because you can’t.

This is a little paperback that I remember my parents having a copy of in the late 1980s. I don’t think I ever looked at it then but I do remember throwing it out when they moved out of their apartment downtown. The edition I remember — and which is now sitting on the desk next to me — is from 1989 and was published by Sledge and Fayen as East Rock Press, Ltd., and it is a fine little guide to the city with some really lovely prints. I found a copy of it a couple of Saturdays ago. I had spent the day at the Institute Library, a wonderful quiet place to go when you need a place that’s wonderful and quiet, and on leaving, I went into the English Building Market, which is a couple of doors down. I cruise the place fairly regularly but hardly ever do I look at the books; however, this book caught my eye: I thought, “Oh, what the hell,” and bought it.

So let me tell you: reading a guide to New Haven from 1989 is a trip. It’s really a strange experience. I found myself remembering shops that I had really and truly forgotten about, though they were once landmarks of downtown New Haven. Scribbles, a shop on Chapel Street, beneath the Yale Center for British Art: you went there for stupid doodads, stickers, obscene greeting cards, and other things no sane person would spend money on. I’d forgotten all about that place. And what makes that awful is, I actually worked there briefly. For about two days. The job was so deplorable that, at the age of 16, I phoned them and said, “Yeah, hi, I won’t be coming in. No, I don’t need to pick up the paycheck. Keep it.” I never wanted to set foot in there again.

How could I have forgotten about Scribbles? And yet I did.

The guide mentions Gentree’s, a fairly dignified restaurant that used to be on York Street, in a building that no longer exists because Yale tore it down. It was on York near Chapel, a site now housing the new part of the Art and Architecture school. Gentree’s was originally a men’s clothing store; I own an overcoat from there, which I acquired at a tag sale on Orange Street simply because I wanted an article of clothing with the Gentree’s label. The men’s shop closed, and somehow Gentree’s was re-conceived as a restaurant, the kind of place where you could get decent burgers and serious drinks. Plants; dark wood; 80s yuppie heaven. Gentree’s closed, and I was sad; it wasn’t that it was such a great restaurant, but it was reliable. Fitzwilly’s, which was on the corner of Park and Elm Streets, was a similar establishment, but much larger, and I was very sorry when they closed, too.

And the Old Heidelberg! Which is now a Thai restaurant! How can it be that the Old Heidelberg is a Thai restaurant? Well, it is the case, my friends. Been that way since 1991. Which means that the Old Heidelberg has been gone for almost twenty years. Which means that there’s at least one generation of people to whom that space has “always” been a Thai restaurant.

A sobering thought.

New Haven is, I suspect, no different from any other small city, or even town, in this regard: any business establishment that opens and then lasts longer than three to five years becomes, simply out of its survival, an institution. Some institutions are more entrenched than others: Rudy’s may thrive in its new spot, but it won’t be Rudy’s, really; it’ll be something else — but even so, you know that for the next ten years, there will be people sitting around bars around town going, “Man, remember Rudy’s, that night when….” I know that’s how it is with the Grotto, a club on lower Crown Street that closed in I think 1988 or maybe it was 1989. New Haven is filled with sentimental chumps like me who remember every club, every restaurant they ever ate at, every store where they ever bought shoes, and lament their closings. If you don’t believe me, there is proof on Facebook, even about the shoe store: Cheryl Andresen’s shop Solemate, which started on State Street and moved to York Street, is much missed by many. I still wear shoes I bought from Cheryl and her shop closed in 2000. Are people more sentimental in New Haven than in other places? I have no idea. But when I meet someone who has been here a long time, inevitably our first conversation includes a litany of “do you remembers”: the Daily Caffe; the Willoughby’s on Chapel Street; The Moon on Whalley; the Third World International Cafe… it’s always sort of romantic, actually, these conversations. We woo each other with our memory banks of the Nine Squares and the streets that radiate from it. Tight friendships are born out of these shared memories of places long gone.

Mamoun’s is still here. Mysteriously, Clarie’s Corner Copia is still here. Ashley’s is here. All true.

But I miss Thomas Sweet. I miss the pancake restaurant that used to be on York Street. (Not the crepe place; I mean the pancake place; it was where Bangkok Gardens is.) And don’t even get me started on the bookstores.

When I was a child I thought myself bright. Many of us at one time probably thought the same of ourselves. It was the euphoria of youth, the deeply felt conviction that with a little application, one’s quick-to-understand-anything mental prowess could master any subject placed before it.

So when did the realization arrive that being some sort of prodigy was not my destiny? Indeed, when one reads about prodigies, would such a destiny even have been desirable?

Oh, but the power! That sense of infinite capacity powered by youth and hormones. It is something I sorely miss.

Like many who write for or read this site, I was a reader, too, and a precocious one at that. (But weren’t we all?) The transition for me from the Mighty Thor to the Mighty Shakespeare was sudden, taking my father as much by surprise as me. He was kind enough to make the switch from bringing home issues of Iron Man to leaving Signet editions of Dickens on my rolltop desk. He was a good father, and he unwittingly encouraged me in my adolescent hubris.

I read voraciously (didn’t we all?) and performed reasonably well in school—except for those classes that I had consciously decided not to succeed in. The world seemed my oyster, easily pried with the knife of my intellect.  In short, I felt really, really smart. I was sharper, I was funnier, I was livelier, I was wittier.

Or was I? Sometimes I think I was these things because now there are so many days as a mid-40s, mid-career, midlife so-and-so that I just feel plain exhausted. Tired. Weak. Pooped. I should exercise, but it bores me. I should eat well, but I get hungry. I should read more and watch less television, but my eyes hurt and besides, my attention wanders: I think I hear my children calling…or is that my wife? And don’t let me forget that I need to: bring the car in for a repair, pay the Visa bill, renew my license, send a Bar Mitzvah card (with check, of course)…

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet, when Dr. John Watson first meets the great Sherlock Holmes, he utterly flabbergasted to learn:
 

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

Ignorant of Copernican theory?  This is detective fiction as farce. But even more interesting is the explanation:

“You see,” Holmes explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

Yeah, the italics are mine.  Honestly, I have no idea if Doyle is toying with readers or metaphorizing late Victorian views of memory and forgetfulness. It doesn’t really matter. Holmes purposely unloads any accumulation of “useless facts.” For me, the act of disposal is thrust upon me, willy-nilly. The space I once reserved for the minutiae that made me a living room whiz during Jeopardy or reasonably competitive in a game of Trivial Pursuit is now taken up with doctors’ appointments and trips to the supermarket, worries about my 401k (or what’s left of it) and making sure the gas tank is full.

I used to be smarter, or so I would like to think. And yet, I know this is not entirely true. Separate from the reams of data that literally wrinkle my face like pen strokes gone awry, signs of knowledge dearly bought by experience, I do know more about some things than I once did, I am more capable at some mental tasks than I once was.

For example, I know more about the history of literature than I ever did upon my graduation from college. I’m also far better at crossword puzzles. I suspect I may even be a better chess player, which isn’t saying much since I always sucked at the game. (Remember, youth had inspired me with the belief that with enough application I could be great at chess, not that I was.) I definitely know more about politics and how it works—daily blog reading has trained me well in that regard. I am definitely a better writer.

But has my writing all this made me feel any better? Not necessarily. In some ways, it has suggested how wrong-headed the sentiment is. I used to be smarter doesn’t seem like much nowadays when the smartest guys in the room so successfully melted down the economy of the United States. Suddenly I’m not so inclined to take stock in this type of nostalgia. Already it has begun to pale. Maybe I used to be smarter. But I think I was also more callow, more selfish, more spoiled, and hard knocks have made me smarter in the ways that count.

Or so I’d like to think.

The Reader is one of the most successful and longest-lived alt-weeklies in America. Alison started there in 1984, just out of college – her first job was in the mail room – and she was named editor in 1995. She’s spent her entire career staying out of the limelight. If you Google her – or anyway if you did up until a couple of weeks ago – the only hits are in generic articles called things like “Fifty Women in Chicago Publishing.” No controversial interviews, no grand pronouncements on the future of journalism. Her byline has rarely appeared in the Reader itself; in most issues, the only place her name turns up is on the masthead. But the paper has been, week after week, a continual demonstration of her skill and taste as an editor. Many people who’ve worked there over the years have thought of it as Alison’s high-pressure boot camp in old-school journalism.

Mostly the Reader has specialized in local affairs – which given that the locality is Chicago has meant a certain preoccupation with the corrupt and the bizarrely violent, the sorts of hot-button issues that the local mainstream papers are too complacent to touch (there were two decades of stories about police torturing confessions from suspects – the ringleader was recently convicted in a federal court). But Alison has also encouraged writers to wander and experiment. I spent many years, with Alison’s encouragement, pushing at the boundaries of long-form journalism. 30,000 words about American memories of World War 2. 35,000 words about my father-in-law, a Russian émigré who grew up in China. 45,000 words about the history of my family house in small-town Illinois. Each time I’d tell Alison that I’d finally come up with an idea for a story she’d never be able to use. “Try it anyway,” she’d say. “I love a challenge.”

Alison has also put her pervasive but unobtrusive stamp on the Reader’s internal culture. Its original crew of editors practiced a management style I’d call “hippie machismo.” They weren’t a touchy-feely crowd, those guys (and they were all guys). I told one of them that I’d been writing for the Reader for years and still had no idea whether they even liked my work, because they’d never said a word to me about it. “We publish you,” he answered. “That ought to be praise enough.” Alison changed all that. She’s regularly complimented people on good work (the first time she did it with me, I thought she was being sarcastic). The Reader’s copy editors became unfailingly nice, even when they were persecuting your first draft with mosquito-swarms of nitpicks. Alison got to be an adept at the dark art of coaxing writers into revisions. One time when I was dawdling over a story, she called me near midnight and said she couldn’t go home until I turned in the revised copy. I parried by suggesting that we both get some sleep and I’d send it to her first thing in the morning. She sighed. “That’s okay, I understand,” she said. “You get some sleep. I’ll just stay here and catch up on my paperwork.”

I knew she was bluffing. But I capitulated anyway – because I also knew (and she knew I knew) that she was eight and a half months pregnant.

Alison cajoled, and nagged, and bribed, and badgered; she put up with all kinds of tantrums (my wife says she once passed by my study and heard me yelling into the phone, “I am speechless with rage!”); I ultimately wrote around a quarter of a million words for her – and I wasn’t even one of the Reader’s most prolific contributors. Some of it is among the best writing I ever expect to do. But the highest compliment I can pay to Alison as an editor is that I think the Reader got better after I stopped writing for it.

The Reader was a comfortably profitable business for three decades, and then almost overnight began hemorrhaging money (the advent of Craig’s List wiped out its gigantic weekly section of classified ads). Since then, there’s been wave after wave of budget cuts, staff firings and layoffs, and the inexorable shrinking of editorial space down to almost nothing. My long-form stories were among the first casualties. There were no hard feelings (I’ve gone on to an even longer form known as “books”) and Alison has still tried to get in a couple of little pieces of mine into the paper every year or so. But meanwhile, with a ghost-town office and a skeleton staff, she’s rallied and been printing some of the finest journalism in the Reader’s history. The Reader has been running stories about Chicago’s hidden world of financial chicanery that in a just world would have earned a Pulitzer. But then, if there really was any justice, people would be talking about Alison’s run at the Reader as the alt-weekly equivalent of William Shawn’s glory days at The New Yorker.

In the last few weeks, as the news spread that Alison was suddenly gone from the Reader, I’ve been getting emails from some of the old crew asking me how she’s doing and what the real story of her departure is. I love gossip as much as anybody, but the answers are disappointing. She’s not bad, considering; and there isn’t much of a real story. The Reader’s newest owners have a new business plan (it involves “pushing at” the firewall between editorial and advertising) and Alison doesn’t fit in. Nothing personal. There’s just for a lot of us around town the soundless gut-punch awareness of her absence. It’s a strange, even extraordinary feeling. I keep thinking I should write it up for her. It’ll take me a while to get used to the idea that I can’t.

Lee Sandlin is the author of Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, to be published in October by Pantheon.

……..

The Westport Arts Center, in partnership with Ina Chadwick’s MouseMuse Productions, is seeking well-crafted memoirs of up to 1500 words for its upcoming writing competition.

As a multi-disciplinary arts organization, WAC is committed to integrating the literary and visual arts within its regular programming. Building on the success of our two previous writing initiatives, the Writers Artists Collaborative will rely on the Arts Center’s visual arts exhibitions as a starting point for literary exploration.

This writing contest will culminate with professional actors reading the winning works at a festive reception and award ceremony in the WAC gallery on Sunday, October 17, 2010.

Top winners will also receive:

1. $175 from the WAC Writer’s Endowment

2. Online publication on the WAC web literary archive

3. Memoir read live on radio

4. Publication in Weston Magazine and its affiliate magazines

Entries are due September 7, 2010.

Download the entry form here.

When we saw each other at the most recent New Haven Review gala, we talked briefly, as we have before, of the ol’ “U of C.” She had recently visited the campus, where Amy Kass was being honored. Our conversation turned, as per usual, to the topic of faculty we had known.

For me, Amy Kass, and her equally eminent husband and fellow faculty member, Leon, were not among those with whom I had the honor of taking a class (notwithstanding their conservative credentials). But Lisa and I were able to share fond remembrances of David Bevington, the U of C’s premiere Shakespeare scholar. (Bevington’s edition of the Shakespeare’s complete works remarks for me a touchstone of quality in editing and exposition of the Bard’s work.)

Our conversation then took a curious turn. She knew that the greatest influence on my early development as a reader and critic had been literary scholar William Veeder. But that influence, as I’ve written elsewhere, affected less the shape or quality of my criticism than the confidence—sometimes reckless—that underwrites it. In brief, Veeder trained me in the attitude a literary critic must take to the object of his attention rather than in the actual tools of analysis that should be brought to bear. For a critic to do his work well, one simply cannot tread a path of undue reverence to authors or their work.

And while this was a necessary first step to the art of reading well, the tools he offered at the time did not, as I suspected then but know now, deliver much substance in the way of interpretation or criticism. This is seemingly harsh, but it is without doubt the case that Veeder’s passion then for psychoanalytic criticism offered readings that, in my humble view, were seemingly complex but terribly hollow. While the article on him in Wikipedia conveys the strengths of his basic positions as a literary pragmatist (that meaning is engendered by the intersection of text and reader in a given context), his in-class instruction often dwelled to absurd lengths on intricate variants to the Oedipus complex and other Freudian and post-Freudian phenomena.

Veeder supplied the starting blocks. But my “literary regret,” small and speculative though it may be, was the opportunity I missed to have a baton passed to me by U of C’s best-known literary critic then: Wayne Booth.

Part of the reason for the missed opportunity was simple timing. Somehow I managed to graduate from U of C in three years (an achievement not to be mistaken for any act of genius or even above average intelligence on my part: I sweated seven years on a doctorate that wasn’t all that great when I finished.) My junior year was thus also my senior year, which gave me the privilege of shouldering my way into any class I wished but did not bestow the magical property of compelling professors to return to the classroom early from sabbaticals. The academic year after, I bridled with jealousy when a peer and friend regaled me with tales of Booth’s erudition and kindness during classes he took the year after my graduation.

At the time, there was no doubt in my mind that the star who shined brightest in U of C’s English department then was Booth. True, by the mid-1980s, my undergraduate years, his star had begun to fade under the glare of deconstruction and a cadre of poststructural reworkings of feminist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist literary theory. Booth’s theories seem quaint by comparison, but with the receding of the Continental tide of theory, the artfulness and articulateness of his struggle with issues subsequently advanced by narratology and reader response criticism seem to have worn well, or at least, better than some other theories.

This, of course, is just one reader’s opinion, and Booth was not necessarily my favorite or even the most convincing critical theorist. But I do think he was, at the time, the best U of C had to offer. But I’ll never really know. It is always possible that he as an instructor and I as a student would have been less than compatible. But such is the nature of regrets, even literary ones, which exist in some other universe with its own history.