The missing lung and The Resurrection Trade

The other day, I woke to the radio reporting, “Lung stolen from Peru exhibition of human cadavers.” And then later that morning, I read Leslie Adrienne Miller’s fifth collection of poems, The Resurrection Trade and the missing lung in Peru began to make more sense. The collection of poems knocked my socks off. It left me quite gasping after a few particularly brilliant poems. The impetus driving The Resurrection Trade is Miller’s exhaustive study of the ancient practice of “trafficking corpses.” For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, the study of anatomy and medicine heightened a need for bodies. Scientists paid and so people robbed graves, and some made art of the science and the dead.

Miller’s scientific and poignant craft provides a sort-of answer to the question of why humans are so interested in dead bodies. She writes about her own life as a mother and poet and the 18th century sketches intermittently, and in doing so, there is a certain stitching together of these two worlds.

The title poem is a mediation on the illustrations in an 18th century French text entitled, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration. In this text, Miller focuses on the particularly striking portraits: a woman, a pregnant woman, and a woman in labor-all dead and rendered as study, sketched as figures in various stages of flayed and grotesque beauty. (The cover of the book is one of the mezzotint illustrations, and as Miller points out, the woman was left with her “ rococo face.” Apparently, these women often were depicted in medical books with still, quizzical and romantically flushed faces.)

The back of the book is rife with mini history lessons as addenda to many of the poems. Her poem “Rough Music, Edinburgh, 1829” was written about a rush of 17 women in Edinburgh who were murdered, and whose bodies were sold (at a good price) to anatomist Robert Knox. One of the women whose cadaver was portrayed was named Mary Paterson,“too fresh/for legitimate death” and delivered to Surgeons Square “still warm.” She was a:

gift to men of science, and so also to me, woman of the new world digging through old books to resurrect her murdered parts, to offer her my own rough music, the strange collusion of imaginary science and real art.

She draws with her words, not just the lives of the sketched the flesh, but of those sketching and cutting, like Knox himself. In “’The Flayed Angel’” I began to wonder who was the artist portraying whom:

If she were a photograph or simple lines less art or more science, what we’d miss is the man who had to be there in the flesh with a tray of graving tools and pair of living eyes, who had to read her with a knife and scrape the burr from every rib, who had to know the permanence of every cut.

And there is the sense in here of archeology: that in order to discover more about a place, people, or body, the layers of dirt or skin must be destroyed. To “read with a knife” is a phrase that comes up a few other times in the collection. This idea that in order to learn more, we have to uncover and wreck is a wonderful paradox that floats through the book.

Maybe this is the same idea that makes the stolen body parts from The Bodies Exhibit seem so compelling. It is the missing piece that calls attention to the meaning behind the exhibit-why we’d want to go. The lung, gone missing, sheds light on the human need or want to see the body, to understand it. We learn, too, by making art. Did the thief need to touch or sketch, or photograph the lung? If so, why?

Think of the thief’s hands hovering over the cold organs before sliding a lung into a knapsack; such a stunning portrait that would make! A portrait of a basic human trait: uncontrollable curiosity- or so I’d like to think. But, This is exactly what makes The Resurrection Trade work. It is uncontrollably curious and surprising and honest. It makes art of the grotesque-made-art. It’s honest as an open heart and mind would be.

The lung has since been returned to the exhibit in Peru. No questions asked. Maybe the whole thing was just a dare.

Dirty Pond Issue 1 Out!

The Dirty Pond, New Haven's newest art and literary journal, has published its first issue, and you are mightily encouraged to check it out here. It contains contributions from the Dirty Pond editors—Anelise Chen, Philip Lique, and Alexis Zanghi—as well as art and poetry from David Larsen, Paul Panamarenko, Katie Yates, and the NHR's own Donald Brown. Congratulations to all involved! In a mission that is near and dear to our hearts, The Dirty Pond is dedicated to creating, in their own words, "a home for work by New Haven-affiliated writers and artists, with an eye towards curated gatherings in the near future." One of these days, we'll have to party together. And in the meantime, Greater New Haveners of the writerly and artistic persuasions, submit to these fine people. Show them what you've got. And keep an eye out for Issue 2.

I miss my clotheslines.

When we moved to this house in 2002 one of the things I liked about it was that it came with two clotheslines attached to it, stretching from the back porches (first and second floors) to a very tall maple tree in the backyard. I'm not someone who uses a clothesline because I think it's environmentally correct, though I'm sure it is. I'm someone who likes a clothesline because of two things: one, sometimes I am seized by fits of cheapness and don't want to pay for the electricity to run the dryer; and two (much more important to me, really), I own things that get laundered regularly that cannot be put in the dryer. Namely, I own a lot of old linens and tablecloths and these things would suffer horrible indignities if tumble-dried. What they need is a clothesline. A drying rack will do for smaller things like tea towels or handkerchiefs or pillowcases, but when we're talking hand-embroidered sheets and and tablecloths, what you want is a long, long clothesline you can spread the fabric across just so, so that you can then hear the fabric snapping neatly in the breeze. No wrinkles. Nice. Ideally, all of these articles are spread artfully down the line, a little of this, a little of that.

Some weeks ago we realized that the maple tree behind our house was rotting and a hazard -- not in an immediate sense, probably, but we were alarmed sufficiently that we called an arborist and arranged to have the thing hacked down. I am now without a clothesline. My husband claims to feel bad for me, but I know he doesn't; he hated my clotheslines. (I hadn't installed them, mind you, but of all the residents in this house, I was the only one who used the lines, so they're "mine.") I am told that some day, when we get a new fence, we'll have a post installed that's tall enough that I'll be able to have my clotheslines again.

I'm not holding my breath.

In the meantime, I'm looking out the window and thinking about how I need to do laundry, and how, if I had my clotheslines, it would be a perfect day for it: it's sunny, the air is crisp, and there's a nice breeze going -- just enough to make my pretty tea towels and tablecloths flap around, but not so much to knock them off the lines.

I know some people are offended by the sight of clotheslines, and I suppose I could understand it if I were hanging out the family's unmentionables, but -- is anyone offended by the sight of tea towels and tablecloths waving in the breeze? The occasional handkerchief that's embroidered with violets or "Edna"? I just can't imagine it. The linens are so pretty to look at on the clothesline. Walking around the neighborhood this morning I saw other people's things on their clotheslines -- not vintage linens, either, just t-shirts and jeans and towels. It made me jealous. I miss my clotheslines.

A Serious Man

Written and directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

As an exercise in futility (a Coen-brothers-appreciation primer if ever there was one), let’s imagine what might have happened had A Serious Man been made by gentiles, or, Hashem forbid, by Arabs.

Under those circumstances, it might be called the most anti-Semitic film of the year.

Hashem, by the way, is the name that characters in A Serious Man say instead of God, because they are serious Jews. They are funny too, the film suggests, but only because they’re so serious. As in not laughing with, laughing at.

Not that religious seriousness ever was the Coens’ first priority. It has been reported that Ethan wrote a philosophy thesis at Princeton in which he described belief in God as “the height of stupidity.” Later, he and Joel wrote Blood Simple and Barton Fink and Fargo and The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? and all the rest. Earlier, they endured suburban dullness and spiritual desperation in mid-’60s Minnesota--or so A Serious Man, set there, suggests. It’s the story of a schlemiel who hopes to be a mensch, but only suffers for his efforts. Is the suffering his own fault? His family’s? His neighbors? Hashem’s?

No, it’s the Coen brothers’. They’re pitiless. They’re like children torturing a small animal. For an audience. Of unpleasant Jews.

Timidly put-upon middle-class assimilate Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of physics, lately has begun to observe the allegorical implications of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Larry seems to have become derailed from his tenure track. His wife (Sari Lennick) plans to leave him for a sanctimonious goon (Fred Melamed). His daughter (Jessica McManus) is stealing his cash to save up for a nose job. His son (Aaron Wolf) just wants to get high and watch F-Troop or listen to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school. And his mopey, unemployed, cyst-afflicted gambler brother (Richard Kind) lives on the couch and monopolizes the bathroom. Also, Larry has been fielding increasingly irritated calls from a collections officer of the Columbia Record Club. It goes on like this. Eventually, the stoned nude-sunbather next door (Amy Landecker) asks, “Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?” Larry doesn’t really know what to say.

Mostly he hoists his eyebrows, yanks down the corners of his mouth and diminishes his voice with a grating quaver. He does turn for guidance to a series of three rabbis, each less helpful and more monstrous than the last. The middle rabbi tells Larry a (brilliantly edited, Jimi Hendrix-enhanced) tale of a Jewish dentist who discovered a coded Hebrew message engraved inside a goy patient’s teeth. But the tale leaves Larry unfulfilled and well within his rights to reply, “It sounds like you don’t know anything. Why even tell me the story?” Once the delight of an expectation-defying punchline has abated, the same might be said to the filmmakers by their audience.

What seems to matter most is the suffering, and the spectacle. A Serious Man makes room for characters both sebaceous and phlegmatic. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is as skillful as always, but the way the camera looks at these people is like leering and also like staring them down.

It’s illuminating to have A Serious Man in theaters at the same time as Where the Wild Things Are, whose own menagerie of hairy, enormous, personal-space-invading grotesques derives from Maurice Sendak’s child’s-eye view of his old-world Jewish relatives. That view could be glaring at times, but would not now be so familiar to so many of us were it not also so fundamentally humane.

The Coens’ gargoyles, on the other hand, are universally loathsome. Not just ugly, they all tend to be morally or at the very least temperamentally repellent too. It’s fair to say they seem rather less likely than Sendak’s and Spike Jonze’s Wild Things to cement parent-child bonds and inspire several generations worth of proprietary affection. Not that the Coens even care about that.

What do they care about? What had they hoped to extract from this particular plot of personal history? Maybe they did intend a satirically affectionate commemoration, or even a Voltairean denunciation of faith-based optimism, but in any case what they’ve made seems more like some sort of long-deferred, highly disciplined tantrum.

So, phew, it’s a good thing they’re not gentiles or Arabs.

How is Loneliness Pure? And why?

I was hankering for a good adventure movie the other night- something 18th century and swashbuckling. I stumbled upon The Red Tent, on the cover: a tattered crew huddled in a wreck in the middle of an Arctic landscape-and a headshot of Sean Connery. I was sold. What Andy and I settled down to watch that night was not just a fun and harrowing adventure movie, but an artfully shot, psychedelic and psychological mediation on Loneliness and its close relation to the extremes of Nature.

The movie was about Umberto Nobile’s famed and follied trip to the North Pole in 1928. He piloted the Italia, an ill-fated blimp that crashed and ripped apart leaving six crewmen trapped in the ice floe in the Arctic circle. There the men waited for 48 days while a rescue mission of 20 ships, 23 planes, and numerous dog sleds tired to reach them in time. It’s a true story of a frozen zeppelin, Fascism, international aid, and snow-blindness.

The narrative was told as a flashback, in a dream sequence. Past characters from the adventure convene in the middle of the night in Nobile’s apartment to rehash the technical and logistical details of the expedition. They were in search of blame and justice, and to some extent forgiveness. It was your typical ‘play within a play’ set up, and there was something Star Treky to it-the characters in a Modern Italian apartment walking around in bearskins and with disheveled hair.

The most most striking concept in the movie though, (aside from the anomalous scene of the Swedish meteorologist Finn Malmgren and his nurse girlfriend laughing on the back of a reindeer pulled sled and then rolling down a snowy hillside together,) was Malmgren’s monologue in the bar before embarking on the Italia. In reply to the question about why he was going out on the blimp across the North Pole, he said that it had “something to do with Loneliness. With Purity.”

How is Loneliness pure? And why?

The Norwegians call it Polarhulle: “a yearning forever to return to the far, dark, cold places.” Is that what made General Nobile want to fly a dirigible to the North Pole? The accounts for longing in Polar explorations, the polarhulle, seem to have something to do with a human need for a Loneliness that emulates, or is at least well acquainted with, death. Then, there is a relation of that feeling to Purity.

Shakleton wrote after one expedition to the South Pole, “After months of want and hunger, we suddenly found ourselves able to have meals fit for the gods, and with appetites the gods might have envied.” It is as if going to the brink of death, (and of the planet) Shakleton discovered a need, so as to stimulate a sublime sense of his appetite for life.

Funny.

I’ve been reading Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? and in this memoir too, is this inexplicable hunger for loneliness as a sort of frontier to charter. Nuala lived a most uncharacteristic life for an Irish woman of the mid-20th century. She never married, was frank in her hunger for passion; she was an intellect and a bisexual. Arguably, her most famous quotation is that of when she rejected chemotherapy as a form of prolonging her life, when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She said “It isn't time I want. Because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life."

Here is a portrait of an internal exploration, and the stakes are different. It was as if in being told that she was going to die, an axis or a Pole was crossed internally for Nuala. There was then no need for a vigorous life. She said “there is an absolute difference between knowing that you are likely to die, let's say within the next year, and not knowing when you are going to die -- an absolute difference.” The absolute difference seems absolute, and relative in light of The Red Tent.

Nuala said of her passion at the end of her life, “passion can go and take a running jump at itself, that's what it can take.” And that’s what Finn Malmgren was talking about in boarding the Italia. Abandon, and Passion taking a leap at itself. But why? The surviving men from the Italia painted their tent-on the center of an ice floe- bright red so they could be seen through the snow. And in their need for survival, perhaps they became the North Pole of Nobile’s dreams- they were a new sort of axis upon which their world would continue to turn.

I am curious about Abandon and how it seems to be in the business of Life, Loneliness, and Purity. I don’t understand it. I think it has to do with each person’s own self.

The other night, I was driving back from my tutoring job at Johnson State college, a small state college on the edge of the North East Kingdom of Vermont. I found a new way home that took me across open fields and paralleled a backbone of the Green Mountains. The Green Mountains are now every color but green. They were alight in the dark. I knew that as my headlights lit up the curvy road ahead. It was freezing outside. There was no one else on the road. Many of the houses had not a light on inside.

That was enough of a feat for me. I sped the whole way home.

A post-holiday musing on Jewish literature: Paul Rudnick is my Isaac Bashevis Singer

Come the High Holidays, as previously mentioned, I re-read certain books; the cycle is repeated around Passover. This year's High Holiday season gave me more time than usual to contemplate my personal canon of Jewish literature. My thinking was further prodded by reading in the New York Times of the death of Paul Rudnick's mother. Rudnick wrote one of the books high on my list, a novel called I'll Take It, which is about a young man traveling through New England one October with his mother and her two sisters. They're ostensibly leaf-peepers, but Joe and his mother have an agenda, which is to rob L.L. Bean so that she can get the money to redecorate the living room. I love this book but feel like no one's ever read it except me and my mother. The voracious reader's canon of Jewish literature apparently always has on it Serious Major Works by Serious Writers. I did a casual survey via Facebook (that tells you a lot right there) asking "What Jewish writers or books make up your personal Jewish canon?" Oddly, more Gentiles than Jews responded. But overwhelmingly the names were just what you'd expect to see on a college syllabus for a course entitled "Survey of 20th Century Jewish Literature." Potok; Singer; Roth; Bellow. I was bored thinking about this. One young woman, the brilliant Bekah Dickstein, posted a response immediately that warmed my heart, though: S.J. Perelman. Oh, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Masterful "Master Builder"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the Young Gentleman’s Information: A Bachelor’s Guide to 'Bright Star'

The young gentleman might think he has made a capital move by purposely taking his date to see that film about the tubercular Romantic poet whose muse enjoys sewing and butterflies. Quite. But the young gentleman also should be advised to proceed with caution, for the tubercular Romantic poet in question, John Keats, was among the finest of his kind. It is not merely Keats’ series of influentially sensuous odes that this film exists to commemorate, but also his exceptional gift for the art of the love letter--with which the young gentleman, Heaven help him, may yet be invited by his date to compete. Keats died broke and obscure and devoted at 25, by the way; it will be no contest. The beneficiary of those letters, Bright Star reminds us, is Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), literally the girl next door. A skeptic according to her somehow arousingly impassive disposition, she knows fashion--and indeed even makes her own clothes, with taste and visionary flamboyance--but does not know poetry. Yet she registers the immortal lines, such as Keats’ “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” and finds herself intrigued. Eventually, she’ll be called upon to erupt with sorrow at his death, and the power of that moment will be bracing for its forbearance of movie convention. A woman so gorgeous as Cornish in a performance so gorgeous as this is certain to leave the young gentleman feeling beguiled. It is important that he not defeat his own purpose by neglecting his date--most certainly a young lady of sensitivity and intelligence and independence of thought herself, as he would be wise to remember.

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

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

Storytime

I have to confess I’m not a great admirer of the short story.  The form is too anecdotal for me, I guess.  My lack of enthusiasm seems due to the fact that my acquaintance with the characters in the story will be too brief to be worth my attention.  And I usually just find myself waiting for the story to be done -- like when someone starts telling you a long-winded personal anecdote and you’re just waiting for the punch-line or the inherent query, or whatever. With novels, there are a variety of situations, or else the permutations of a particular situation.  In stories, it’s all situation.  The characters often seem to be no more than the ‘types’ who have been recruited to fill that situation.  So it seems to me that those with a knack for short story writing are simply skilled at populating situations with types of people.  When I find the same thing happening in a novel, I tend to set it aside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam

Written and directed by Max Mayer, Fox Searchlight Pictures

Adam is a new movie about a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome. The guy’s name is Adam.

Before we continue, I would like to say that except maybe in the case of Aladdin or Hamlet or Gandhi, it’s automatically lame when a movie’s title is just its main character’s name. In the case of Adam, all we get from the title, aside from a little bit of Biblical confusion, is a dispiriting premonition of writer-director Max Mayer’s laziness.

I would also like to say that in the case of Adam, Asperger’s Syndrome seems an awful lot like just another way of saying wish fulfillment for callow, sensitive dudes who can’t be bothered to get better at relationships. Or maybe for the girlfriends who can’t resist mothering them? I’m sure we all can agree that it is more enjoyable to watch such things on the big screen than on Lifetime.

By day, Adam is an electronics engineer living in Manhattan. By night, he’s still an engineer, but with elaborate interests in astronomy and Central Park raccoons. Other important Adam facts: His father has just died; he subsists on a diminishing supply of neatly stacked boxes of mac-and-cheese; and he is more than just a neurological disorder, thank you very much. In fact, he’s a token non-threatening movie version of one. It helps a lot that Adam is very well played by Hugh Dancy, last seen as an altogether different kind of boyfriend material -- namely, the ideal -- in Confessions of a Shopaholic.

Adam’s new neighbor, Beth, is played by Rose Byrne, and she's lovely -- all sassy boots and cheekbones. More importantly, she’s tolerant. Beth teaches kindergarteners, and aspires to write books for them. “My favorite children’s book is about a little prince who came to Earth,” she says very early in the film, invoking Antoine de St. Exupery’s classic and possibly striking a cautionary note about unrealistic expectations. Beth’s other boyfriends, and her father (Peter Gallagher), have proven unreliable. How so doesn’t really matter, except to establish the emotional circumstances by which Adam’s literalism and tendency to stare into the middle distance might appeal to her. If nothing else, she could be his life coach. Beth is pretty much the movie-poster girl for neuro-typicality.

And that’s about all there is to it. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the tonally characteristic scene in which Beth asks Adam if he can give her a hug and he doesn’t understand that she means right now. In another scene, Beth brings Adam a box of chocolates, and he says, “I’m not Forrest Gump, you know.” That’s true. Forrest Gump got out more. Also, Forrest Gump didn’t have an autism spectrum disorder. But if Beth had brought him a box of toothpicks and spilled them on the floor and expected Adam to count them, and he’d said, “I’m not Rain Man, you know,” that just wouldn't have the same magic. Such as it is. Anyway, it takes Beth a moment to figure out that he’s making a joke. Now who has trouble reading emotional cues, eh? Well, yes, that would still be Adam, who also has trouble making jokes, but we’ve got to hand it to him for trying.

We may not be able to save ourselves, but at least we won’t be bored

Recently, my consumption of fiction has dropped off to within an epsilon of zero. I try to stumble through a New Yorker story now and then, and I've been known to stop what I’m doing to read Jhumpa Lahiri, even though I didn’t dig The Namesake. All in all, there's very little fiction passing in front of my face. Instead, to test my imagination these days, I've been looking toward geoengineering. You know, the idea that in order to save ourselves from the devastating effects of climate change, we need to act fast. We need to do something drastic and dramatic that will fine-tune our atmosphere and keep human beings alive a little bit longer; we need to build a great big something to save ourselves. Country by country, the climatologists are getting on board.

This is not an advocacy editorial. Or an anti-advocacy editorial. I’m not well-read, smart or scientific enough to advocate. Or anti-advocate. On one level, it does seem paradoxical. How do we know that if we do artificially adjust the global thermostat, we’re not causing bigger mal-adjustments down the road? Could it be true that the way to remedy the dire consequences wrought by human activity on the planet is to step-up human activity on the planet?

Many geoengineering ideas don’t seem strange: carbon sequestration, for example, seems fairly benign and, dare I say it, like a reasonable way to buy some time. But for the purposes of this blurb, I’m not interested in the reasonable ideas. I just want to point out a handful of the wildest papers, the ones that suggest thrilling and secret stories in a manner akin to one of my favorite children's books, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. I’d like to think that these ideas will feature prominently in high-quality science fiction one day. There are other far-flung proposals out there: sulfur cannonballs that blow up in the stratosphere; dropping lots of lime or iron into the ocean; variations on an aerosols-increase-albedo theme; etc.. Here are my top four.

Idea 1: Inflatable mountains. I'd like to think that if either Ridley Scott or Philip K. Dick had thought of this, the last scene of Blade Runner would feature Harrison Ford and Sean Young riding away, dotting in and out of the shadows cast by an enormous floating peaks... Excerpt from the paper:

In this paper is presented the idea of cheap artificial inflatable mountains, which may cardinally change the climate of a large region or country. Additional benefits: The potential of tapping large amounts of fresh water and energy. The mountains are inflatable semi-cylindrical constructions from thin film (gas bags) having heights of up to 3 - 5 km. They are located perpendicular to the main wind direction. Encountering these artificial mountains, humid air (wind) rises to crest altitude, is cooled and produces rain (or rain clouds).

Idea 2: Use cloud-seeding ships to spray salt water into the atmosphere. The additional salt water would, in theory, increase the reflectivity of clouds above the oceans. Excerpt from an article in Physics World:

The 300-tonne unmanned ships used to seed the clouds would be powered by the wind, but would not use conventional sails. Instead they would be fitted with a number of 20 m-high, 2.5 m-diameter cylinders known as “Flettner rotors” that would be made to spin continuously. This spinning would generate a force perpendicular to the wind direction, propelling the ship forward if it is oriented at right angles to the wind.

Idea 3: (Similar to #2) Send tiny mirrors into space to reflect sunlight into space, thereby reducing the amount of sunlight that makes it to our planet. Surely these could be tuned to make an intergalactic lighthouse? From a press release:

The plan would be to launch a constellation of trillions of small free-flying spacecraft a million miles above Earth into an orbit aligned with the sun, called the L-1 orbit. The spacecraft would form a long, cylindrical cloud with a diameter about half that of Earth, and about 10 times longer. About 10 percent of the sunlight passing through the 60,000-mile length of the cloud, pointing lengthwise between the Earth and the sun, would be diverted away from our planet. The effect would be to uniformly reduce sunlight by about 2 percent over the entire planet, enough to balance the heating of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.

Idea 4: Hydromancy! Pump seawater out of the ocean onto the world’s sand dunes, thereby mitigating the harmful effects of a rising sea level. (By the same wild mind behind idea #1.) An excerpt from the paper:

Seawater extraction from the ocean, and its deposition on deserted sand dune fields in Mauritania and elsewhere via a Solar-powered Seawater Textile Pipeline (SSTP) can thwart the postulated future global sea level. We propose Macro-engineering use tactical technologies that sculpt and vegetate barren near-coast sand dune fields with seawater, seawater that would otherwise, as commonly postulated, enlarge Earth’s seascape area! Our Macro-engineering speculation blends eremology with hydrogeology and some hydromancy.

Supreme Fiction, or Calvino Revisited

Just for fun I recently re-read Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979; trans. 1981), which I first read around 1983 and was enchanted by.  My memory of the novel has always been a reference point whenever anyone discusses fictional sleight-of-hand, as with Borges, or Cortázar, or Barth, or what-have-you.  Calvino’s version of fictions that fold in on themselves provides a send-up of the reader’s dependence on a text -- a text that is never simply a story -- while at the same time conjuring the extent to which people become the texts they read or write. One could say it’s a novel that treats the status of being 'a reader' as a certain kind of identity, as a defining characteristic, and Calvino is charming in his evocation of the oddly personal communality of that status.  What’s more, he’s willing to put that very relation -- his relation to his own readers -- at stake by treating us as hopelessly hooked on whatever he chooses to do with his narrative, which involves several tales within the tale, stories that actually comprise the opening pages of the novel we (or rather, 'you,' dear reader) are attempting to read, a novel initially called If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

In other words, we read with a second-person character who is reading a series of openings to novels we (and he) never get to finish because something always happens to the text.  These proferred novels are of a variety of types and are almost equally interesting, as far as they go, but they are also meant to be page-turners, things we won’t put down till we see how it all comes out.  And we won’t ever know.  The story of what keeps happening to interrupt our reading of this succession of novels is the story that 'you' are engaged in: involving the Other Reader (an attractive and arguably more knowledgeable female counterpart to the masculine 'you' of the story); the Other Reader’s sister; an Ian Fleming-like novelist; and a novelistic forger. It all ends with our happy couple -- you, the reader, and your female counterpart, the Other Reader -- settled in bed together as you finish If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.

The closure of reading is where real life begins -- we step from the page to our own imaginative version of our lives.  Calvino perpetrates his fiction on the premise that the reader of fictions merely wants fictions to go on and on, if not one kind of story then another, if only to keep the mind engaged in play rather than in 'reality.'  And Calvino wisely brings his novel to a close before the proliferation of openings becomes tiring, and before the characters, who never become 'real' characters, begin to bore us with their lack of particularity.

Why I enjoyed the novel is because Calvino maintains its pace so well and builds up its comedy through a readerly frustration he expects us to enjoy, even as he takes us on a tour of various literary genres.  But I value the novel because it seems to me that at its heart is a clear-eyed appraisal of the ruse of fiction (or, if you will, 'creative writing'), of how it applies conventions to give us 'the reality effect' it aims for, and how, mutatis mutandis, all such details can easily be something else, if only we are reading a different kind of story with different conventions.

The reality is all in the mind's eye, so to speak, or, even more to the point, all in the terms, the language, the conventions of depiction that we trust to render what we find ourselves in the midst of.  Without an acceptance of artifice, we have only opposing subjective 'takes' -- otherwise known as opinions or anecdotes -- on what we suppose to be 'reality,' and Calvino archly sees that, ultimately, editorializing is a blow against the art, or artifice, itself; such literalism is a refusal to suspend disbelief in any world other than the one one knows to be the case.  A world that can only exist, in print, through the subterfuge of writing.

Calvino’s approach is a great joke -- but without malice -- on all those who want to 'lose' reality in a fiction (thus all the interruptions), but also on all those who can’t abide a fiction that doesn’t correspond to ‘reality’ (thus the infinite regress of stories which come to include the story of the readers themselves).  Bravo, Calvino!

Please Step Back

A new novel by Ben Greenman, published by Melville House

Rock-and-roll fiction tends to take easy outs, playing up the obvious excesses of the lifestyle so that we get big splashy works resembling tell-all accounts like Stephen Davis’ Hammer of the Gods or Peter Brown and Stephen Gaines’ The Love You Make. Groupies queue up, bottles are smashed, TVs are tossed, and it’s Satyricon, 1960s-style.

Ben Greenman, though, has hit upon something far more dexterous with Please Step Back, which features a protagonist—the protean Rock Foxx—who has fused rock’s free-styling id-component with a poet’s soul. The two halves wear away at each other, and Foxx’s saga becomes less a march on the Billboard charts than a quiet, personal quest for lucidity—in his marriage, his music, his past, and his quotidian thoughts as he tries to decode everything from the motives of bandmates to the very source of songs.

He’s a funkster, set in the black musical culture of the iconic genre-blenders, musicians like James Brown, Sly Stone, and post-In a Silent Way Miles Davis. In short, a hoodoo artist. Greenman’s prose renders Foxx the personification of a walking, scamming, ever-playing record collection, a patois of rhyming couplets and jerking syncopations. There’s a coming-of-age quality to the novel—Foxx does indeed take the journey from unknown to cover-boy—but this is a frail heroism, if it’s heroism at all. Drama originates not in Foxx’s rock and roll conquests, but rather from his marriage, a union that Greenman dissects with the careful, shot-by-shot imagery—and context setting—of a Godard film.

Bands are roiled with creative difference, people get on the junk, and opportunities are missed (Foxx’s band ditches Woodstock—a clever fictional tweak of history), but it’s the dissolution of relationships and what that reveals about one’s own failings that’ll do you in. Foxx’s music starts to navigate away from soul and funk over the course of the book, and soon it’s loaded up with the blues, albeit a rocking, Fillmore-friendly blues. Lyrics and references tap the back catalogues of Little Walter, Memphis Minnie, and Slim Harpo. Identities—and archetypes—blur, and meaning begins to emanate from states of relative confusion, as if a song had emerged from what had been a noodling, band practice jam. Like when Foxx quotes Shakespeare to his wife:

“You ever heard of him? Tall cat, good with a knife. I think he’s from Denver.”

“You’re a strange person,” she said.

“Please,” he said. “Mercurial.”

And that he is. He’s also almost Macbethian by the end; everything’s blown up on him, and now the forest is marching on the castle. It’s at this point that Greenman introduces an inspector tandem that could have strayed from a Flann O’Brien novel, with absurdity now pressed into service to help Foxx find his meaning. His explorations—and attempted extrapolations—become ritualistic, like an endgame that cycles over and over again, or a series of encores played to an empty room.

Colin Fleming writes for Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Criterion, and many other publications. His fiction appears in Boulevard, The Hopkins Review, TriQuarterly, and The Republic of Letters.

Gitlitz's Bakery on Whalley Avenue

A conversation I was having with someone recently got me to thinking again about Gitlitz's Bakery, which used to be up on Whalley Avenue. It was the opening of Manjares, a new cafe in Westville, that started it again. I think about Gitlitz's all the time, at least once every three weeks, I estimate, but Manjares got me thinking about it again because I suspect it'll be one of those neighborhood bakeries people get all territorial about (if it succeeds, which I ardently hope it will). There's an article in the Independent about it, if you want to read about Ana and her bakery; better yet, go, because Ana is one of the nicest people I've met in recent years....

But anyhow. Gitlitz's. I remember it was on Whalley Avenue in a building that got torn down a few years ago, a sort of art-deco era strip mall. I could be wrong, but I remember a grocery store/produce shop called Paramount one or two doors down from it. The stores all had neon signs that must have been really glitzy when they were first put up. By the time I was a kid, it was kind of seedy looking over there. But my family adored Gitlitz's. My parents still wax rhapsodic over the chocolate birthday cakes they bought there for my older brother. They remember ordering one cake that was decorated to look like a football field. (This is hilarious in retrospect; my brother is not exactly what you'd call a jock, and I don't think my father could name a football team if you asked him, but I guess that's what it's like if you have a little boy -- you get birthday cakes that look like football fields.) There were little football player figurines on the cake and everything. A few years back I vowed to try to replicate this cake for my father's birthday, which we always celebrate at Thanksgiving, and at the (now defunct) Goatville Trading Company I found vintage football player cake decorations. They were all different sizes, so my cake looked a little weird. And I don't know how to draw a football field anyhow (I'm my father's daughter). But, you know, the point was made; everyone understood this cake was a tribute to Gitlitz's, and it was pretty good, too.

So just now I Googled Gitlitz's Bakery and found that someone on Chowhound.com laments the passing of their coconut layer cake, of which I have no memory (I hated coconut when I was a kid), and that Emily Bazelon has an article on Slate.com where she talks about the babka at Edge of the Woods, which she misses now that she lives in DC, and which apparently is made using the old Gitlitz recipe.

Now, the Gitlitz babka was legendary to me growing up. It was perfect. Chocolatey with no annoying distractions like fruit or nuts. Why have I never gotten a babka at Edge of the Woods? Possibly because I only go there twice a year or something (it's not convenient for me; I have recurring dreams about them opening a branch on Willow Street or State Street); however, I have now determined that I will get my ass up there and buy a chocolate babka soon.

But this was it, for online referenes to Gitlitz's. I felt this was a shame -- a shanda, really -- and determined to put my own voice out there in praise of Gitlitz's. Because if I'm doing a Google search for them, there must be thousands of others doing the same thing. (Ok, maybe not thousands. Maybe six people a year do a search for Gitlitz's Bakery. But they're a demographic, too, and I am catering to them, my fellow Gitlitz devotees.)

The other thing that was so important to me at Gitlitz's was something that we always called a pull-apart cake. I have no idea what the bakery itself called this cake. And I've baked cakes that are similar to it. But I've yet to make one that was as perfect as theirs. It was, I suppose, a Jewish variant of what Midwesterners call Monkey Bread. This was an eggy yeast dough, I'm sure, somewhat dry, that was placed in a tube pan in slabs that had been thoroughly coated with some kind of shortening (butter? maybe, but maybe not) and lots of cinnamon sugar. The cake rose in the pan again before baking, and what resulted when you removed the cake from the pan was a cake that didn't require slicing. Each section of cake came away neatly by hand. Grownups ate this with a cup of hot coffee; I remember eating piece after piece while downing glasses of very cold milk. We had this on weekend mornings. (My mother hated to cook but believed that all meals, should come with dessert, not just dinner. I'm not sure how many parenting magazines would advocate this but my brother and I thought it was just fine.) Pull-apart cake was excellent stuff, and you could eat a lot of it because it wasn't cloying and didn't have frosting to distract you from how good the cake was.

I didn't hear about Monkey Bread until I was in college, and when I tasted it I realized that it was a cousin of my lost Pull-apart cake. I started comparing recipes, and making them when I was home, and while they were all pretty good, none of them were quite what I was looking for. Most importantly, the method of piling all the butter-and-sugar-coated dough balls in the pan was so time consuming, and it meant that the shape of the finished cake was never the same as what I had in mind. And the dough wasn't ever quite the same.

I now wonder if maybe it wasn't just challah dough they used in the Pull-apart cake. I will have to investigate this. If anyone has insight or, even better, recipes....

Beach Town

People don't necessarily think of the greater New Haven are as a beach town—I imagine the label university town is much more widely used—but in the summer, it is. And I don't mean beach town in a snooty, country-club way. New Haven is a beach town the way that many of the towns on the Jersey Shore and Long Island are beach towns: In the summer, the place cranes its neck toward the Long Island Sound, and the skinny stretch of sand in front of the water becomes wonderfully overpopulated. I should admit right here that I am a huge beach person, a trait I inherited from my mother. I am one of those people who could—and does—sit on the beach all day, alternating between reading, napping, taking walks, and watching the water. I've told my parents that staring at and swimming in the ocean is one of the closest things I have to a religion, and I'm only half joking. So after living in New York for years (too far from Brighton Beach and Coney Island to go as often as I wanted to), learning that New Haven had beaches was a revelation. In the seven years that we've lived here, my family and I have split our allegiance between two beaches: the shore of West Haven and Lighthouse Point, in New Haven proper. They are right across the harbor from each other; you can see one very clearly from the other.

Parts of the shore of West Haven are surprisingly untouched for a town beach. A lot of smart things happened in the course of its development, the biggest one being that they kept large areas of the dune intact. (Oceanography 101: If you keep your dune, the beach can replenish itself. Take away the dune and, even worse, build a seawall, and the ocean starts to take away the beach. Which is why so many beach towns end up building a line of jetties along the coast and still have to get the Army Corps of Engineers to dump tons of sand on the shore at the beginning of every summer. Also, the dunes protect the inland from all but the big storms. Build your house behind the dune, and you're reasonably secure. Build your house on it or in front of it, and hey, you take your chances.)

Aside from being smart, the dunes in West Haven give the beach there a real sense of wildness, making the houses huddling along the beach road and the stacks of the water treatment facility rising in the middle distance almost surreal. But in front of Chick's, my favorite fish fry place—because of their lobster rolls, vats of mustard for the french fries, and also their free beach parking—West Haven's beach is a town beach, complete with dozing lifeguards, rioting children, casual swearing, loud reggaeton coming out of tinny speakers, and guys trying to catch blues off the pier and coming up mostly with sea robins. It's great.

Lighthouse Point is in some ways a more civilized place than West Haven's beach. It's a well-maintained park, complete with playground, water park, concession stand, ranger station, multiple bathrooms, a gorgeous old pavilion with an even more gorgeous old carousel inside (people looking to get married in the summer, take note: That pavilion would be a truly awesome place for a party), and, of course, the lighthouse itself. But in other ways, Lighthouse Point is crazier. No matter how crowded West Haven's beach gets—and on Saturday afternoon, it's pretty crowded—it never manages to kick off that sleepy vibe that all great town beaches have. Lighthouse Point isn't a town beach; it's a city beach, bursting with summer camps and the children of multiple extended families running amok, on the sand, in the water, on the swings, across the lawns, all over the rocks. A dozen big barbecues scent the air while multiple large sound systems compete with each other for dominance of the park's groove—hip hop, merengue, reggaeton (again), bachata—and combine in the air. Charles Ives (who studied composition at Yale) would be proud.

Both West Haven and Lighthouse Point have their quiet times. People who like their beaches cold, on the off season, will find what they want at either place. And I'm lucky enough to be able to go on weekdays. But even on the busiest weekend, both parks have their secluded coves and stretches of shore with only a few people, or none at all. The days when I get both are when the religion hits me hardest. One minute there's just the sand and rocks, sea and sky. The next, it's people at their best, playing, relaxing, having fun, just being with each other. It's bliss.

At Fifty

I’m turning 50 next week, and I have to say it's one of those milestones of aging that actually feels like one. Of course, one of the interesting things about being born in a year that ends in ‘9,’ is that you always hit a round number as a decade comes to its end. It was particularly notable to be turning 40 in 1999, as the twentieth century ended; if one lives to be 80, one will have lived 40 years in each century, a neat divide that is appealing for some reason. But, as a milestone age, turning 50 immediately caused me to wonder what works were also hitting that half-century mark. Here are a few notables I don’t mind sharing the milestone with:

The 400 Blows (Les quatre cent coups): François Truffaut’s debut film which helped to establish “Nouvelle Vague” cinema, following on the heels of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless of the previous year. When I finally got around to seeing this film, in my 30s, I was delighted by the character of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), to some extent Truffaut’s alter-ego, in his hapless efforts to get along in a school system and in a family situation where he feels alienated for no particular reason. Or rather the reasons could be many, but none are needed; the film simply gets right the feeling of youth in the post-war world having to make its own way because so much is changing. Particularly memorable, to me, was the scene when Antoine becomes enamored of Balzac and writes a homage that is essentially plagiarism, and is treated as such, but which is also a naive effort to emulate a master. The effort to pawn the bulky typewriter is also a classic bit of bathetic comedy. And that final shot against the sea lives on long after the film is over: Antoine looks equal to whatever life has in store for him, but also seems conscious of himself for the first time.

'Mack the Knife,' by Bobby Darrin. This song happened to be #1 on Billboard the week I was born, won the Grammy for Record of the Year, and by coincidence has long been one of my favorite songs of the pre-Beatles era. Darrin’s performance is so definitive, I’ve never been able to take seriously any other recording of the song. The horns kick and his delivery is so full of infectious energy while singing about such dastardly doings, or what my sister likes to call ‘murder and mayhem.’ Just listen to how he sings ‘spends just like a sailor.’ Five’ll getcha ten...

Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis (released the day I was born). This is an album I didn’t get to know till my 40s, but it’s one of those quintessential albums in the sense that it’s how I always thought a jazz album should sound. Bluesy, lyrical, melancholy, but with such brightness in the horns and grandeur in the piano, and with improvisatory playing that, no matter how often you play it (and I’ve put it on repeat play through a long night here and there), never quite becomes familiar. It’s simply a gorgeous record.

Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs. In fact, the version that was published in 1959, by the Olympia Press, is different from the version published by Grove in 1962, the latter being the version I read for the first time in 1980. What this novel does to the novel is unforgettable: it simply overruns notions of plot and characterization with bizarre scenes and hallucinatory prose. It’s as if all those expectations that there should arrive a fiction capable of entertaining readers who had spent time with Rimbaud and Lautréamont and Artaud, as well as Westerns and sci-fi movies, not to mention porn and sensational tales of gays, hookers, junkies and derelicts, were finally fulfilled by a writer who understood that, after Beckett, the purpose of prose was consciousness laid bare, bereft of any intellectual or moral solace. And yet funny as well, with the ghastly, mordant humor of the eternal outsider able, in the end and for no easily discernible reason, to address you, hypocrite lecteur, companionably. Wouldn’t you?

'The Small Rain,' Thomas Pynchon’s first published story, in a college mag The Cornell Writer. It’s not a very good story, but it is included in Slow Learner. As the work of a college student, it makes us reflect on how vulnerable all beginnings are. I mention it because TP released his seventh novel this month, fifty years after it all began. Cheers!

Near Famous

About three weeks ago, while attending the annual convention of the American Library Association in Chicago, I was passing through the HarperCollins exhibit when, lo and behold, who should be sitting behind one of those fake little barstool-high white tables signing books but one of my favorite science fiction-fantasy authors Neil Gaiman. Gaiman was signing copies of his most recent novel, the young adult fantasy The Graveyard Book. I didn’t bother getting in the long line that had grown in response to his presence since I already had a copy at home and wasn’t inclined to shell out more money for a second. Let’s just say autographs and celebrity-chasing never did all that much for me, something I learned through an unusual set of circumstances.

When I was in high school, my father had become very close friends with Isaac Asimov. Now you may be asking: what did a garment district salesman and an internationally famous author of science fiction, mystery stories and a slew of nonfiction titles have in common? I certainly asked. But I was quickly set straight. Apparently both had been yeshiva bochers in Brooklyn in the 1930s, who shared a deep-seated love of Borscht Belt-style joke telling.

Ironically as a high school student I was a committed science fiction reader who had swiftly worked his way through Asimov’s remarkable “robot” stories and his then equally fascinating Foundation series. While by no means the greatest of writers within the genre, he was still one of its major figures, so I was more than happy to take up my father’s invitation to join him and Asimov at Sardi’s one autumn or winter afternoon or evening—I no longer recall.

In the end, the meal was memorable for how disappointing the whole affair was. Unbeknownst to me, Asimov was famous for his lecherous sensibility, which was on full display for this less than fateful encounter. Dining with this giant of science fiction proved one of the more painful experiences of my so-called high school life. Truly the scales fell from this pair of eyes. For while I love crude irreverence as much as the next native New Yorker, there is a difference between that and boorish behavior—and Asimov was all boorishness.

I turned down the next invitation to dine with my father and Mr. Asimov and the one after that. Once the pattern of polite refusal became apparent, my father inquired as to why I was so coyly avoiding “Isaac.” My father had, after all, kept me mindful of Mel Brooks’ quip that there are two types of people in the world: the famous and the near famous. The “famous” are your typical celebrities; the “near famous” are all the rest who want to sit next to the famous. Alas, lunch (or dinner?) with Asimov had put me in that great unwashed third group. Why I was avoiding ol’ Isaac? As I put it to my father in the form of my newfound credo regarding celebrity: “Forgive me if I prefer the creation to the creator.”

Of course, this does not apply universally to the many talented actors and directors, writers and poets, painters and musicians out there. In general, I’d like to think that most celebrities are actually okay folk, irrespective of their achievements. But whether they are or aren’t doesn’t really matter if what I’ve invested myself in is their work and not their social selves.

…which is just the long of way bringing me back to Neil Gaiman’s presence at that conference. I was not particularly interested in his autograph or even in meeting him, except maybe to bring back evidence of the encounter to my teenage daughter, who still believes in the magic of these things. I’d be more than happy if he just manages to keep producing work of reasonable quality and to my taste. It’s all we ought ask of our artists.

I Had Post

I was reading somewhere (was it in the New Haven Independent? cannot for the life of me remember) that the U.S. Postal Service is suffering financial woes and considering dropping Saturday mail delivery as a cost-cutting measure. Some tiny percentage of the local populace is up in arms about this. I would be one of them, but I frankly don't see that losing Saturday mail delivery would really be the end of the world. Slightly inconvenient, yes; but on the other hand, it would reinforce the idea of a weekend for most people, which might be a good thing, in a small way. I found myself lamenting my own letter-writing habits, or lack thereof in recent years. Ask anyone who knew me from, say, 1983 to 2000 and they will tell you that I wrote more letters than anyone in their right mind would ever wright. Anyone with a life would not have written so many letters. But I wrote letters. Boy howdy did I write letters. Long letters, handwritten, often with fountain pens; long letters, single-spaced, on a typewriter (and later on a computer). I typed on postcards, I typed on onion skin to friends overseas, I typed on anything I could wrap around the cartridge thingy on my typewriter (which I still own). I remember writing a letter on a barf bag, once, when I was on an airplane, though I have no recollection now of to whom I was writing.

And I saved all the letters I received back. I have boxes of these things, and while I can imagine throwing out some memorabilia from my life I cannot imagine throwing out those letters.

So I'm an incurable romantic on the subject of written correspondence. But at the same time -- when was the last time I wrote a letter? Well, actually (and I write this a little sheepishly, because it takes away from my argument a little), it was in the last ten days; I wrote a letter to a woman in Vermont. I had fun picking out a card that had an illustration on it I knew she'd like, and when I filled up all the space in the card I got out some loose notepaper and continued on that. And I am confident that she was happy to unlock her PO box and find that handwritten letter waiting for her.

We're all made so happy by real letters and postcards. We were twenty years ago, when they were pretty much normal; now we're made even more so because they're so unusual. So how come we're all so lazy and can't be bothered to write real letters? If a diehard like me is too lazy to write a letter, what hope is there for anyone else?

I am reminded of a phenomenon from my bookseller days when I would mail books to customers; I always made a point of including a handwritten note with the book, just to acknowledge the customer, to be friendly. I was always surprised by how happy this made people -- who knew that a little three sentence note could make someone so happy? One shop I worked at mailed catalogues periodically, and I was in the habit of writing out all the addresses on the envelopes, and people even commented to us on the handwritten mailing addresses. It was something we'd done because we were too cheap or too disorganized to set up for computer-printed mailing labels, but it turned out to be a piece of really good marketing.

I could try to make a vow to start writing one letter a week to someone from now on, but let's not fool ourselves: I wouldn't be able to keep that vow. Still, I feel bad that I'm not the letter writer I once was.

Having lost her job teaching music at Yale, she quit drinking and adopted a psychopath...

Last week, for duty’s sake, I caught a matinee of Orphan, the disposable but not entirely deplorable new horror flick in which a troublemaking tween adoptee seems strangely wise beyond her years and psychopathic beyond her means. Some people have suggested that Orphan perpetuates the baseless stigmatization of orphans. Maybe. I have an adopted sibling myself, and he too was sort of a disinformation specialist in his day. But never was there any bludgeoning of nuns at the side of the frozen road, thank goodness.

So I would like to ask, instead, if Orphan perpetuates the baseless stigmatization of Connecticut. Maybe. I had a treehouse myself, and it too concealed some evidence of mischief in its day. But never was it quite so treacherously high off the ground, thank goodness.

Maybe I’m overreacting, or just feeling homesick, but I can’t help but wonder what the movies of recent years have been trying to tell me about my birthplace. I know this much: It’s not good.

And I know that before it was in the movies, it was in the books--influential ones, like Revolutionary Road, The Stepford Wives and The Ice Storm. None of which have happy endings. Or beginnings or middles. But--lately, anyway--the Connecticut-set movies really seem to be piling on.

Although it’s already rather a grim exercise, I’ve begun cataloging common elements, and correlating them with recent films in which they occur. I’m sure there are more. Help me out here.

A) Aggressive upper-middle-class anomie B) A disillusioned professor C) An architect living in a fancy but gloomy house D) Actor Martin Donovan living in gloomy house E) A well-heeled but quite solemn story with the word ‘road’ in its title F) Implications of incest, deleterious self-medication and the misuse of a family piano G) At least one injured, dead or dead-inside child H) At least one very troubled marriage I) At least one shattered family J) A graphic miscarriage K) No point, really

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009): F, H, I The Ice Storm (1997): A, G, H, I The Life Before Her Eyes (2007): A, G, H, I Orphan (2009): A, C, F, G, H, I, J The Quiet (2005): A, C, D, F, G, H, I, K Rachel Getting Married (2008): A, G, H, I, Reservation Road (2007): A, E, G, H, I, Revolutionary Road (2008): A, E, G, H, I, J The Stepford Wives (1975, 2004): A, H, I The Visitor (2007): A, B The Women (remake, 2008): A, K

Having lost her job teaching music at Yale, she quit drinking and adopted a psychopath...

Last week, for duty’s sake, I caught a matinee of Orphan, the disposable but not entirely deplorable new horror flick in which a troublemaking tween adoptee seems strangely wise beyond her years and psychopathic beyond her means. Some people have suggested that Orphan perpetuates the baseless stigmatization of orphans. Maybe. I have an adopted sibling myself, and he too was sort of a disinformation specialist in his day. But never was there any bludgeoning of nuns at the side of the frozen road, thank goodness.

So I would like to ask, instead, if Orphan perpetuates the baseless stigmatization of Connecticut. Maybe. I had a treehouse myself, and it too concealed some evidence of mischief in its day. But never was it quite so treacherously high off the ground, thank goodness.

Maybe I’m overreacting, or just feeling homesick, but I can’t help but wonder what the movies of recent years have been trying to tell me about my birthplace. I know this much: It’s not good.

And I know that before it was in the movies, it was in the books--influential ones, like Revolutionary Road, The Stepford Wives and The Ice Storm. None of which have happy endings. Or beginnings or middles. But--lately, anyway--the Connecticut-set movies really seem to be piling on.

Although it’s already rather a grim exercise, I’ve begun cataloging common elements, and correlating them with recent films in which they occur. I’m sure there are more. Help me out here.

A) Aggressive upper-middle-class anomie B) A disillusioned professor C) An architect living in a fancy but gloomy house D) Actor Martin Donovan living in gloomy house E) A well-heeled but quite solemn story with the word ‘road’ in its title F) Implications of incest, deleterious self-medication and the misuse of a family piano G) At least one injured, dead or dead-inside child H) At least one very troubled marriage I) At least one shattered family J) A graphic miscarriage K) No point, really

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009): F, H, I The Ice Storm (1997): A, G, H, I The Life Before Her Eyes (2007): A, G, H, I Orphan (2009): A, C, F, G, H, I, J The Quiet (2005): A, C, D, F, G, H, I, K Rachel Getting Married (2008): A, G, H, I, Reservation Road (2007): A, E, G, H, I, Revolutionary Road (2008): A, E, G, H, I, J The Stepford Wives (1975, 2004): A, H, I The Visitor (2007): A, B The Women (remake, 2008): A, K