An Arresting "Orestes"

The Yale Cabaret states its mission to be “a gauntlet thrown in the face of our future, a scar in the memory of our audience, a ballerina dancing with a stick of dynamite.”  If this sounds a bit in your face, can that be a bad thing?  Theater can’t cuddle its audience, that’s what TV is for.  And unlike an audience watching a film in a moviehouse, a theater-going audience shouldn’t be allowed to hide in their darkened seats, secure in the fact that whatever they’re watching is already in the past. At Yale Cabaret, the audience sits at tables at the same level as the performers.  There’s nowhere to hide.  And for the first show of the 2009-10 Season, the audience had to sit or stand outside along two of the four sides of a courtyard in the middle of which Euripedes’ blood-thirsty and manic Orestes was enacted by a small ensemble cast of seven players.  In fact, we were gestured to a few times as an ugly mob, and Elektra even demanded we keep alert and pay attention.

The play is a good choice for the Cab’s stated goal.  For if any classical author lives up to that mission statement, it’s Euripedes.  Brechtian “alienation effect,” Artaudian “theater of cruelty,” Beckettian “theater of the absurd” -- none of them have anything on Euripedes.  Reading his plays, one is never sure whose side we’re supposed to be on.  It’s not that everyone is equally bad, it’s just that no one is really good, or noble, or virtuous, or even tragically misunderstood.  It’s as if his characters suffer from the hubris of believing the gods give a shit; worse, they sometimes think they understand what the gods want and try to act accordingly.

Orestes, in Devin Brain’s production, was even more than usual denuded of the voice of reason.  By cutting the figure of Tyndareos, who counsels his young grandson to give into what the polis decides, and by removing a speech which describes the arguments in the agora, this Orestes knocked away the prop supporting the contention that the play is about the need to replace blood-vengeance with civil proceeding -- which should have been used against Orestes’ husband-murdering mother and her paramour in the first place.

Instead of such city-state thematics, we have a tale of two siblings, Orestes and Elektra, wrapped together in a rather sensual folie à deux: they plotted the killing of their mother and now are pariahs who have only each other.  The pair becomes a trio with the introduction of Pylades, a stalwart friend of Orestes to whom Elektra is promised, should they live.  But one can’t help feeling, after the trio exchange full kisses with one another, that, if they live, they should all live together happily ever after in a ménage à trois.  Does that make us less sympathetic to them or more?

Hard to say, but when they try to murder Helen (whom they hate and whom Euripedes seems really to enjoy pillorying), and grab her unsuspecting daughter Hermione as hostage, running up a fire escape above the courtyard  to hurl taunts at Menelaos while insisting on negotiating a way out of their death sentence, they become gleeful would-be killers, a kind of mini Baader Meinhof cell, asserting their rights, but more than anything their detestation of the likes of Menelaos and Helen, the bourgeois beginners of battles that others must die to fight (Elektra -- played with suitable heart-wrenched woe by Emily Trask -- even gives a very affecting speech to that effect, mourning all those fallen Greek heroes at Troy).

Indeed, with Elektra so distraught, and Orestes, as played by Babak Gharaei-Tafti as somewhat of a maunderer, so clearly in need of her (and so happy he can call her a man in a woman’s body), and Helen so vain, and Menelaus so bureaucratic, it’s hard not taking the side of the kids, blood-lust, sex-lust, and all.

Then Apollo steps in.  As played by Kevin Daniels -- hairless bare chest, hairless bare head, black, in white flannel -- he steps in like the guy from upper management who has to put the peons in their place.  He’s scathing, indifferent, and incontestable.  Hermione and Orestes will marry!  We can imagine the wonderful get-togethers they’ll have at Menelaos’ place, or maybe Hermione will one day complain that her hubby never holds a knife to her throat any more like when they first met.  It matters not to Apollo -- or to Euripedes either.  We get the gods we deserve, and seeing the imperious shrug of the Sun god as he doled out just deserts put a big smile on my face.

It’s hard to say who Euripedes has more contempt for: these mythic figures whose messy lives have to be rehearsed again and again, or the audience that expects theater somehow to make sense of what makes no sense.  For a modern audience, that level of absurdity is always to some extent comforting, for it shows us that someone else has noted, and determined how to enact, mirth in passion, doubt in belief, randomness in justice, death in sex.

A great start to the season!

In Griot Time: An American Guitarist in Mali

By Banning Eyre (Temple University Press, 2000)

Journalist Banning Eyre is one of Connecticut's great unsung musical treasures; he and Sean Barlow are the driving forces behind Afropop.org, one of the best sources I've come across to learn more about Africa's various styles of music, as diverse as they are infectious. But Eyre is also a stellar guitarist in his own right. He has recorded with Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited, perhaps the biggest band to ever come out of Zimbabwe and certainly one of its coolest (and Zimbabwe has a lot of cool bands). And he has performed with the Super Rail Band, one of Mali's greatest acts. The latter, however, is for a more direct reason: Several years ago, Eyre effectively apprenticed himself to Djelimady Tounkara, the lead guitarist in the Super Rail Band. He spent the better part of a year in Bamako, learning as much as he could from Djelimady about Mali's musical traditions, and venturing out to meet—and hopefully play with—as many other musicians as he could find.

The written result of his exploits is In Griot Time, a book that's part travelogue, part character study (of Djelimady and the many other musicians Eyre meets), and part love letter to the music that Eyre went to Mali to learn how to play. In the course of the book, Eyre freely acknowledges his debt to John Miller Chernoff's African Rhythms and African Sensibilities, perhaps one of the best books ever written about African music for a Western audience. The parallels between Eyre's experiences and Chernoff's are many. Both went to Africa—Eyre to Mali and Chernoff to Ghana—to learn to play music. Both knew that playing the music well required them to understand something about the culture and history that created the style in the first place, and both strove hard to immerse themselves as much as they could. Chernoff's immersion was perhaps more successful: He emerged from his experience with a book that reads in parts like a Rosetta Stone to understanding Ghanian drumming in particular and African music generally. As a musician myself, I am still learning from Chernoff's book, and it's been ten years since I read it.

Eyre's book, by design, doesn't have that kind of insight. Unlike Chernoff, he doesn't dwell on how the music is put together so much as what it was like for him to learn how to play it. While it seems clear that he played music for at least a couple hours a day, most of the book is about what happens to him when he's not playing music—the conversations he has with people, the things he sees and does, the other musicians he hears—all written with a clear eye, an astonishing sensitivity, and a willingness to wrestle with some difficult questions about cultural frictions and the legacy of colonialism. The result, I believe, is a much more accessible book than Chernoff's. Where Chernoff's book is perfect for people who already love African music—particularly other musicians who are trying to figure out how to play it—Eyre's book is just the thing to make people who don't know much about African music want to learn more about it. Its own effect on me has already been profound. Chernoff's book in some ways scared me away from trying to play African music even as it made me want to all the more. But it was Eyre's book (and Eyre himself, who I finally took a lesson from) that finally made me pick up a guitar and try to play. I know that I'll never play like either Chernoff or Eyre—let alone the African musicians they have played with—but In Griot Time gave me the courage to play with the required humility, and evident joy.

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.

How to Run a Book Club

My wife works for the New Haven Public Library system, and several years ago she asked me if I would please lead an after-hours book club once a month at the Mitchell branch in Westville. There had been several requests from patrons for such a book club, but she had not yet found anyone willing to run it. I grumbled since I generally don't like being pulled into volunteer ventures that I didn't express an interest in on my own. Still, I am of the bookish sort, so I agreed on one condition: I choose all the books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what were your book club experiences like?

What Is It About Annie?

We all have a lot of questions about what happened to Annie Le, the Yale graduate student who went missing a few days before her wedding and whose body was found stuffed in the ceiling of a Yale laboratory. Now that her killer has been apprehended and will be brought to trial, one question that lingers for media pundits is, why did her story garner so much press? What was it about her story that called for it to be splashed across The New York Times, Google News and Bloomberg, not to mention all the tabloids? One can only conjecture. Was it that she was a Yalie? On Thursday, 9/17, Slate columnist, Jack Shafer, noted:

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

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

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

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

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

Romanticism

By April Bernard (Norton)

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

Her Romantic suffers, feeling more, about more:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Browsing the Shop Windows on Memory Lane

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

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

You simply never know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fred Astaire

By Joseph Epstein (Yale University Press, 2008)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book is Dead, Long Live Books

I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival yesterday; as that festival invited the organizers of Comic-Con to join then, I was lucky enough to be on a panel—along with fellow authors Peter V. Brett, Anton Strout, S.C. Butler, and Dave Roman—about New York, science fiction, and fantasy. As any good panel should, the session quickly became more of a casual conversation about how we write our books, balance day job and writing, and other related topics, guided eventually by questions from the audience. It was easygoing; it was fun. And after the panel, I had a short but really interesting conversation about the future of books. As it turned out, YA author Ned Vizzini had seen our panel and another one before it about the future of literary fiction, and he was struck by the severe difference in tone between our panel and the previous one. Apparently, for the people on the previous panel, the future of fiction was full of gloom and doom, declining book sales, declining readership. As a YA author, he said, this seemed at odds with his own experience. Young people are reading more books than ever, he said. About our own panel, he then said—and I'm paraphrasing here, so, Ned, if you come across this post, feel free to correct me (about this or anything else I've ascribed to you)—that it was just nice to see people talking about books in an optimistic way. Ned's comment particularly struck me because, walking around the festival before and after my panel, I saw that the optimism he felt, and that we had at our panel, was true of the festival at large. The festival was cheerful. The conversations I eavesdropped on weren't about how everyone should just close up shop and go home; they were about the latest books people were excited about, wanted other readers to buy. It was hard to square the energy and enthusiasm I saw there with the reports in the newspapers of the imminent demise of print. There were lots of vendors, selling lots of interesting books. More important, the festival itself was crowded. By writers, editors, publishers, sure—but also fans coming to see their favorite authors, avid readers, and enthusiasts for their particular flavor of literature. It was lively and engaging. It made me buy books, and it made me want to read even more than I already do.

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

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

Stranded

When I heard Mark Strand read at Yale the end of spring semester from his New Selected Poems (NY: Knopf, 2009), I resolved to get a copy and read through it. The impression I’d had that Strand’s work inhabits a certain constant place is sustained by this reading, and it’s fitting that the New Selected should appear after Man and Camel (2006). There is a wryness in the latter volume that, I realize now, inhabits much of Strand’s verse from the earliest, but which wasn’t quite so forcefully apparent before, to me, at least. His reading was so affable, jocose even, that the sense of the poems as austere imaginative landscapes into which one peers with metaphysical intent collapsed somewhat, leaving a stronger sense of playfulness. Strand’s poems have always been inflected by a sense of words as symbolic more than descriptive. He’s about as far from being a nature poet, who yet describes a natural world, as one could be. He’s also rather far removed from confessional verse, even though he does at times clearly write about himself, or as himself. Such poems are not meant to create a scene to contemplate, or to reveal the dramatic movement of events, but are aimed to make a statement. For Strand, to create a poem is to offer a kind of précis that renders the state of consciousness, that articulates a grasp of lyric presence, or rather articulates the lyric presence that we might spend our whole lives trying to grasp.

Sometimes, as with 'Man and Camel,' the sense of parabolic meaning is so deliberate its effect becomes quite funny. For Strand has a very dry sense of humor and he knows how to use it. He’s able to make us feel in on a joke that may very well be played on us nevertheless. The poems often seem quite solemn, and they are indeed ‘austere’ in the sense that they don’t seek out fun and music and sensuous detail, very little in the way of sound effects or vivid impressions.

'I walk / into what light / there is.' This, we can say, is so pared down as to be minimalist. To be so toneless is not easy, and the goal seems to be for the poem to be read as if the page itself speaks. There are a lot of imperative sentences, words that simply surface and command our hearing. And the actions are generally simple too: walking, looking, speaking, writing, sitting, thinking; sometimes there are dreams. Nothing very much happens, but everything is poised to happen because each poem is running a course, moving to an end that will clarify its intention, its statement. As with this poem, from Darker, way back in 1970, that in some ways defines Strand’s project:

The Remains

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets. I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road. At night I turn back the clocks; I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job. I say my own name. I say goodbye. The words follow each other downwind. I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing? Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same. I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

The nouns are so precise and yet so generic; we could almost say Strand seeks a poetry of the generic. If that were all he were doing, it might be interesting enough for a volume or two, but there is always more at stake because the generic can become the allegorical: 'The words follow each other downwind'; and the metaphysical: 'Time tells me what I am.' But there are other typical registers here too: the familial thread is alive in each stanza, from ‘family album’ to ‘my wife’ to ‘my parents,’ so that affective relations, the human community, is always ready to burst into Strand’s meditation. And the gesture toward nature or to metaphor, ‘the milky rooms of clouds,’ can bring a clear, unforced lyricism to bear at any moment.

So what is the poem’s statement? Much depends on whether you view the final verse as illustrating futility (‘What good does it do?’) or whether it has managed to slyly change the terms while we were looking. ‘How can I sing? / Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.’ We are bordering on ‘I am that I am’; could God sing a song of praise? Or, what would God praise other than himself? The parents off their thrones and in their clouds is a joke image; the wife is sent away from this paradise of self-knowing, self-perpetuating Godhead. All the other names are vacated. Only the one remains. The poem is stuck constantly in the groove of its own making, like a needle stuck on a record. Empty/remain; empty/remain, ad infinitum.

And that is Strand’s characteristic jest, to start singing just when about to be cut-off, to point the way out as he leads us back to the start. In 'The Monument,' a long poem, written in prose as responses to quotations primarily from other poets, Strand says: 'my voice is sufficient to make The Monument out of this moment.' To make a monument of any moment, one need only write a poem, but it will be a poem which conceives of each moment, any moment, as monumental.

Reading through the 267 pages of poetry in this volume, covering forty-two years of publication, one is struck again and again by Strand’s fidelity to that task. His ability to bring it off is based upon that keen sense of emptying and grasping what remains, but it’s also based on what I take to be the jest of originary utterance. God, the Hebrew scriptures tell us, spoke first and created everything. After that, there can be no originary utterance. The poet, in enunciating his poem, speaks in an ancillary manner that purports to begin things again, to empty, or to praise, but there is always the remainder of that pre-existing world. Strand is far too canny to take that as a point of despair or of futility if only because the mind allows words to happen to it, and when they do, there is no telling what possibilities for speech might also remain.

Story Time: Weekly Live Readings from the New Haven Review

Three months ago, I began to toy with an idea: Wouldn’t it be nice to find a place in New Haven where one could hear short stories read on a regular basis? Several sources contributed to this notion: author talks I had been booking at the Mitchell branch of the New Haven Public Library, reading to my children once upon a time (and sometimes still) before bedtime, catching once in a blue moon the Saturday radio program Selected Shorts, a “poetry crawl” that I organized in my neighborhood. By coincidence, I received a note from David Brensilver, author and director of communications for the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, asking if New Haven Review would be interested in organizing weekly or monthly readings by local authors of their work. I responded right away that I was interested in a weekly reading series, but not of authors and their work, first because there are already very successful monthly reading programs organized by local writers of just this nature in the basement of the Anchor Bar and Restaurant and at the Institute Library respectively, and second, there is no way to maintain a weekly flow of new work without a lot of legwork finding local writers with material ready to read—and that much legwork was something I could not afford.

Since my role with New Haven Review is voluntary—like the rest of the team's—I was looking for something that bridged efficacy and efficiency. Fortunately, in David, I found a soul perfectly amenable to the plan I was concocting, which went something like this. On a weekly basis, actors would read already published short stories at a rotating group of local coffeehouses. Here’s how I put it to him:

Why already published short stories?

Simple efficiency. With already published short stories, the New Haven Review team can build reading schedules far in advance. That meant, among other things, that when it was time to publicize the event, instead of dipping into the New Haven Independent’s Community Calendar each time the next reading was ready, we could load three or four months' worth in one fell swoop. Reading original works or works in progress would require a constant hunt for new material with no guarantee of successful booking.

Why have actors read?

I’ll grant that we New Haven Reviewers are reasonably good readers. We’ve already shown our mettle at public readings in which we’ve participated. But let’s face facts: when you want a great short story to really sing, there is no substitute for a good actor taking the stage—or podium. Having heard my share of writers serve as the readers for audiobook editions of their work, I can assure you ‘tis the better part of wisdom to let actors do well what writers often only do fairly, at best.

Why read at coffeehouses?

Coffeehouses provide space at no charge since they receive added business in exchange. Since this is not a money-making endeavor for us, renting halls and charging for tickets were non-starters. Moreover, since this is an after-hours affair—translation: not for kids—we especially needed coffeehouses that either stayed open at night regularly or were willing to do so for the readings. Finally, the decision to go with several coffeehouses rather than one was based on the idea of spreading the wealth among the neighborhoods of New Haven and coffeehouse schedules. (At present, each coffeehouse is responsible for roughly one reading a month.)

So, will it work?

Beats the shit out of me. I have no idea if New Haven is hungry enough for this kind of thing. I think it is, but it’s primarily a question of getting the word out as aggressively as possible. We figure that with food for thought and stomach in one place, how can you go wrong?

Laudo the Seas!

(Relatively) jobless as I am, I've decided to audit a Latin class at UVM. One week in, and there is no doubt that learning Latin is hard work. But it also feels like entering a Fairy Kingdom; the first verb we learn and conjugate is Laudare- To Praise! Lately, I’ve been snooping around 18th century whaling books for good Anglo-Saxon, consonant driven words for my poems. The other day, I read Remarkable Observations: The Whaling Journal of Peleg Folger 1751-1754, edited by Thomas and Nathaniel Philbrick, 2006. Hacklets, sprunyarn, tow iron. Scum, wist, and parbuckle.

Peleg (pronounced Pill-ick) was a teenager aboard various whaling ships out of the great whaling isle of Nantucket during the mid 18th century. What’s funny about reading his journal is that he starts every lengthy entry with “Nothing remarkable today...” and then he manages to philosophize about whales, life, and death, and “drinking flip” for a few, remarkable pages.

I came to love Peleg. His endearing piety (Peleg was a Quaker) in light of his massacring trade is the fulcrum of his entries, like a thoe-pin, (the strong, straight pin) that allows his oars to pivot along the waters of his writing. Peleg quotes contemporary poets, mostly English Quaker writers, practices his signature (there are pages and pages of his loopy scrawl in the original journal), and wrote his own verse:

Thou didst, O Lord, create the mighty whale That wondrous monster of a mighty length Vast is his head and body, vast his tail, Beyond the conception his unmeasured strength.

But, everlasting God, thou dost ordain That we, poor feeble mortals should engage (Ourselves, our wives and children maintain,) This dreadful monster with a martial rage.

Peleg also spends much of the journal writing in Latin, or translating English into Latin. Sprinkled throughout his remarkable observations are Latin phrases: Benedic Dominum, o anima mea, et omnia quae Sunt inter me. Benedicite Nomen ejus Sanctum. (Praise the Lord, o my soul, and all who are with me. Bless His holy name.). And nearly every passage ends with “Hujus dici operis peroratio, per P.F.”, (this concludes the day’s work.) “Laus Deo,” Praise God.

It is as if Peleg translates or writes in Latin as a sort of self-soothing ritual. It’s a way for him to begin and close the day. It’s a language that connects him to the shores of his home and community thousand of leagues away. Only just beginning to know, study and appreciate Latin, and certainly not in the 18th century religious way, I understand it’s magnetism as ritual. Latin is about structure and placement of words. It is a language of spirit, and culture, and democracy (okay, and of crucifixion...).

And the great dialectical pairing of seafaring words next to Latin expression is wonderful. Peleg writes, “to the Westward we found fine Black and White Sand and Whore Eggs (sea urchins). We hope to be at our Bar before Sunset. Deo Volente atque adjuvant.” In our Latin class, we conjugate Laudare, to praise, and a guy beside me asks if I can reach over and plug in his computer to the outlet on the wall.

Film Adaptations: Short Stories vs. Novels

I’ve had a hypothesis for awhile that short stories lend themselves better to film adaptations than novels do. Of course, as soon as I sat down to make the case in writing, I remembered dozens of novels made into good films. Still, looking at the different ways novels and short stories are treated seems to tell us a little bit about the nature of those literary forms. I came by the original theory through no particularly powerful powers of observation except noticing that whenever a movie is made out of a beloved novel (Beloved, for example, or Lord of the Rings) their fans get very territorial. Meanwhile, when a film is made from a short story nobody notices. For one thing, readers get very anxious about how “faithful” the filmmaker will be to a novel. Will Hollywood will transmogrify the elegiac qualities of the literature into exploding skyscrapers?

Usually, though, readers just say to themselves, “I hope they don’t cut out my favorite part,” often necessary for the obvious reason that novels are long and have too much material to cover in 100 minutes. But apart from length, novels are a form that begs for the sorts of experimentation that other written literature tolerates less: digression; superfluous minor characters and subplots; essays; and, most importantly since Madame Bovary, the dramatization of an evolving internal consciousness.

War and Peace, for example, can’t be faithfully adapted not just because of its impossible length but because of the impossibly novelistic nature of it. (I’m ignoring for now that Tolstoy claimed that it wasn’t a novel at all but some other new form he was inventing.) With all the time in the world – or at least control over the Masterpiece Theatre schedule – a film of that book wouldn’t feel too long but too much like a jumble of four different narratives, a how-to video on fox hunting, an essay on the methods of cultural history, a historical documentary and the director’s commentary all at once.

Another way of thinking about the challenge of adaptation is to consider Randall Jarrell’s famous definition of a novel: “A prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” Novels by their nature seem to have imperfections that are appreciated as beauty marks. They would perhaps look more like carcinomas on celluloid, so they get trimmed away.

When novels are faithfully adapted, they are usually shorter novels. But more tellingly they are novels that don’t indulge in all the woolly possibilities of the form. Film noir adaptations of Raymond Chandler are good examples. Besides being short, the books have minimal exposition, all of it focused on present action rather than background, and are packed with dialogue.

The novels of Tom Perrotta, which have prompted faithful adaptations, are similar in scope, prompting some critics to snootily characterize the books as “cinematic” precisely because of how ready-made for film they seem to be. But to me that’s like dismissing Frank Baum’s children’s classic The Wizard of Oz because it’s too cinematic.

“Faithfully adapted” and “successfully adapted” aren’t the same things, of course. Little Children is faithfully adapted to a fault. (Perrotta co-wrote the screenplay, too.) In that case, nothing is left out, not even a narrator’s voice that works in the book. It is imposed in the form of a movie voiceover that spoils otherwise emotionally powerful scenes. The voiceover undercuts the natural advantages of working with moving images by telling us what we can see for ourselves.

Given how attractive written literature is as a starting point for film and the challenges of adapting novels, I wonder why Hollywood doesn’t use short stories more. Probably it’s an outgrowth of our behavior as readers. For one thing, directors who are genuinely inspired by the literature they read are probably, like everyone else, not reading many short stories to get inspired by. Two, the novels have more of the name recognition that Hollywood requires for marketing and promotion.

This is why film adaptations of short stories either go by unnoticed or succeed despite their origins. I’m an attentive fan of Alice Munro, but somehow the film Away From Her, based on her story “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” came and went without me ever hearing about it. Approaching from the other direction, I remember the delight many years ago of stumbling on Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and recognizing one hilarious chapter as the original source of the movie A Christmas Story. I loved all the other chapters in the book, too, but I’m glad they didn’t try to jam them all into the movie.

I found an anthology of these kinds of forgotten stories called Adaptations: 35 Great Stories That Have Inspired Great Films. Apparently, the films Memento, All About Eve, Rear Window and The Wild One all started out as short stories. One not included is “Home For the Holidays,” which inspired the Holly Hunter movie by the same name, the viewing of which is a Thanksgiving tradition at our house. I can’t say if it’s a faithful adaptation or not, because it’s out of print and difficult to find. Every year, whenever the credits scroll by and I see “based on a story by Chris Adant,” I think to myself, “Man, I’d like to read that.”

The best-known recent example of a short story being adapted into film is Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.” After the success of the film, a curious little book was published that included the original story, the screenplay, and essays by Proulx and the screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. They touch on many of the same points I’m discussing here, but I especially like one telling metaphor of Ossana’s – that the story is an “excellent blueprint for a screenplay.”

In other words, short stories, with their economy of language balanced with a depth of emotional complexity, are not thickets that Hollywood has to hack through to salvage a movie from but something that a movie can be built up out of. Rather than existing as machines for churning out saleable product, short stories lend themselves to new creative exploration in film. That probably isn’t sexy enough to get much attention in a blockbuster economy, but once filmmakers give short stories a chance, they get the pleasure of engaging with an intensely felt work.

New Haven resident Robert McGuire is a freelance journalist, copywriter, college writing instructor, frequent traveler, and author of a new blog.

Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series Launches

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven and the New Haven Review, in partnership with the New Haven Theater Company and four area coffeehouses, are pleased to announce the launch of Listen Here!, a weekly series in which New Haven Theater Company actors read short stories selected by New Haven Review editors. Readings will take place on a rotating basis at Blue State Coffee, Koffee on Audubon, Lulu: A European Coffeehouse, and Manjares Fine Pastries in Westville. Readings are every Thursday at 7 p.m.! September 10: Childish Adults J.D. Salinger’s “The Laughing Man” Ray Bradbury’s “Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!” At Koffee on Audubon, 104 Audubon Street, (203) 562.5454, www.koffeenewhaven.com

September 17: The Impious of the Perverse: High Holidays Special Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” Melvin Jules Bukiet’s "The Golden Calf and the Red Heifer" At Blue State Coffee, 84 Wall Street, (203) 764-2632, www.bluestatecoffee.com

September 24: Great Expectations James Joyce’s “Araby” John Cheever’s “The Pot of Gold” At Lulu: A European Coffeehouse, 49 Cottage Street, (203) 785-9218, www.lulucoffee.com

October 1: In Loco Parentis Jim Shepard’s "Courtesy for Beginners" Amy Hempel’s "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue (in Westville), (203) 389-4489

October 8: Shock Treatment Marisa Silver’s "What I Saw from Where I Stood" Adam Haslett’s "The Good Doctor At Koffee on Audubon

October 15: Love Stories Woody Allen’s "The Kugelmass Episode" J.D. Salinger’s "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" At Blue State Coffee

October 22: Make Good Choices John Updike’s "A&P" Michael Byers’ "In Spain, One Thousand and Three" At Lulu: A European Coffeehouse

October 29: Something Wicked This Way Comes: Our Halloween Special Lynne Anderson's "A Dead Summer" Nancy Holder's "We Have Always Lived in the Forest" Manjares Fine Pastries

November 5: In the Blink of an Eye Ambrose Bierce’s "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" Dave Eggars’ "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Was Drowned" Koffee on Audubon

November 12: The Future of Our: Discontents Harlan Ellison’s "Along the Scenic Route" Ursula LeGuin’s "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" Blue State Coffee

November 19: Family Romance: Pre-Thanksgiving Special Steve Almond’s "The Soul Molecule" Julie Orringer’s "The Isabel Fish" Lulu A European Coffeehouse

The Cultural Dictionary of Punk

You wouldn't say that I was a punk rocker, but my record collection (yes, record collection) seems to have an awful lot of Ramones albums in it. For decades I wore a locket every day with a picture of Joey Ramone in it. I seem to have a weakness for some of the old CBGB's bands. When I need a little pick me up, I play "Atomic" (Blondie, I probably should explain). Really loudly. I feel it is good for my so-called soul. My close friends, and even some casual associates, know this about me, which is why I was surprised -- and then not surprised at all -- when a bookseller friend of mine, Kate H., appeared at my house recently with a book for me. "We got this in," she said, "and -- well -- Here!" Then she stood, waiting, waiting to see the expression on my face when I unwrapped the book (which she had, in excellent style, wrapped in old newsprint).

When I saw The Cultural Dictionary of Punk (recently published by Continuum, the folks who did those completely awesome 33 1/3 books), I think I smiled so big and so hard my cheeks hurt. Kate is a doll. I immediately began flipping through it and knew right away that this was gonna be one FUN book to read.

I read it from cover to cover. Every chance I had, I was sitting down with it: with my morning coffee; with a drink at the end of the day. I had my quibbles with it -- this is a highly subjective little book -- but in general I had to admire Rombes' book, which is passionate and filled with interesting details I didn't know.

I had two real issues with Rombes' work, both of which I had the opportunity to discuss in emails with the author. One is that several entries are really these personal discourses on some obviously serious problems that have arisen in Rombes' life. His family suffered horribly from a traumatic event beyond their control, and I wouldn't dream of trying to dismiss them or anything like that. But the sections relating to them did read sort of weirdly next to entries on the glories of the Ramones first three albums. The juxtaposition was jarring, and it detracted from the force of the book as a whole. I often thought, as I read, that Rombes should have just written The Cultural Dictionary of Punk and then done a shorter, tighter memoir about his family's tragedy, which Rombes admitted to me was probably true. So we'll see what his next project is like.

My second issue (which Rombes is trying to address as I type this) is that the book does not come with a CD (or a list of links to recordings online) of many of the songs Rombes discusses. Over and over again he has long discussions of songs that he describes as, you know, bloodcurdlingly perfect examples of this, that, or the other, and I said, "OH MAN I GOTTA HEAR THAT NOW!" and ran to the computer, only to discover that there was pretty much no way I was gonna hear those songs; they're not available on iTunes, and frankly, with stuff like this, it'd be easy to spend waaay too much time and money hunting down obscure 45s. When I expressed my wish for a CD (impossible) or streaming audio or something like that (more possible, though a lot of work), Rombes took it to heart (others had made the same remark to him), and at his website he has begun to post links to key songs. This is really useful, but it's also, just, you know, really fun.

I want to explain that I don't believe that every song he mentions should be included in this compilation; I mean, anyone can find the first Ramones album, or Marquee Moon (that's Television, people: Television). The average reader of this book doesn't need someone to provide a link to "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" or "Chinese Rocks" or "Venus de Milo"; we've got those internalized pretty well by now, thanks. But there must have been at least a dozen really out there songs by, you know, punk bands from Cleveland or Tulsa -- bands that existed for about three minutes -- that Rombes talked about so tantalizingly that I basically wanted to shoot myself when I wasn't able to listen to them RIGHT THEN.

Well, listen: don't let my griping deter you. If you've got any interest whatsoever in punk rock, punk culture, punk whatever, then this book deserves a half inch of space on your shelf. http://culturaldictionaryofpunk.blogspot.com/

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.