Upcoming Stuff in New Haven

Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, who is currently the James Weldon Johnson Fellow at the Beinecke, is reading at that august repository of valuable manuscripts, 121 Wall St., this Wednesday, Nov. 18th, at 4 p.m.  Read my discussion of her book Native Guard here. Local poet Don Barkin, author of That Dark Lake, will be reading his poems on Friday, Nov. 20th, 7 p.m. at the Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave.  The event is co-sponsored by the Kehler Liddell Gallery and the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance.  Check out my article on Don's book in this Thursday's Advocate, or online.

Both events are free and open to the public

And on Thursday night, Nov. 19th, The Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., is holding a fundraiser.  In this unique event, audience members will be hit up for suggestions, and the Yale School of Drama folks (students, faculty, staff) will have 60 minutes to bring the audience desiderata together in 15-20 minute pieces, to then be performed for the audience who will judge the best piece, according to announced criteria.  So if you've ever wanted to be in on a creative team, as well as a critical voice in awarding merit, here's your chance.  It's also a chance to support this very worthwhile theatrical endeavor.  Tickets are $20.  Doors open at 6 p.m. for seating and bar service.  6:30-7 p.m. is the time of the teams and planning; 7-8 p.m., dinner service is on; 8 p.m., the show begins.  Contact: 203.432.1566, or online at www.yalecabaret.org.

Dirty Pond Issue 2 up!

The Dirty Pond's second issue is now up, with work from Christina O'Connor, Greg Maurer, Patricia Dickson, Ryan Cyr, Derek Leka, and yours truly (though don't hold that against them). The Dirty Pond is New Haven's newest literary outlet, dedicated to showcasing the talent that New Haven harbors and creates. Submit to it, support it, but most of all, read it.

Loose Ends, Now Tied

In previous essays here at the New Haven Review, I've written about the death of letter writing and about my misty memories of flyers around downtown that proclaimed "New Haven is the Paris of the 80s." I wondered who it was that put up those flyers, and thanked them for their efforts, and expected nothing to follow. Yesterday I got quite shock when I received in the mail -- via the U.S. Postal Service -- an actual, real, hand-addressed letter from a man who tells me that he did it. He's the "New Haven is the Paris of the 80s" guy. Somehow he found my entry here from months ago, and he wrote me a letter to thank me for it.

Made my day. Hell: made my week.

The mystery is solved, my friends. I'm not going to reveal his identity, but I want you all to know, all is well, and the world is now, in my view, a slightly better place than it was twenty-four hours ago.

The tale of Roland Emmerich’s “2012,” as told in 10 lines of its own dialogue

“Nutrinos have mutated into a new kind of nuclear particle. They’re heating up the earth’s core.”

“It’s the biggest solar climax in recorded history.”

“Don’t you see the signs?”

“California’s going down!”

“All our scientific advances, our fancy machines! The Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago.”

“Daddy!”

“We’re gonna need a bigger plane.”

“It’s a brave new world you’re heading for, and the young scientists are gonna be worth 200 old politicians.”

“The director of the Louvre was an enemy of humanity?!”

“Everybody out there has died in vain if we start our future with an act of cruelty.”

Shirley Jackson Gets Hers

Some months ago, I wrote a little thing for the New Haven Review about my love for Shirley Jackson's book Life Among the Savages. I've just gone back and looked at the date on the piece (which can be found here on the website) and my word, it was almost a year ago I wrote that tribute. Goodness. I've lost track of time in precisely the same way that Shirley Jackson lost track of her blankets. Well, in a recent Wall Street Journal, John J. Miller wrote an article about Jackson which will get a lot more attention than anything I'd ever write about Shirley Jackson, and I wanted to thank him for writing the piece because from it I learned some really good news. The Library of America is going to publish a collection of Shirley Jackson's work. Though I see no mention of the book on the Library of America website or on Amazon.com, the book is apparently scheduled for a June 2010 release. I for one am looking forward to it.

Life During Wartime

OBIE Award winner Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, playing through Nov. 14 at the Yale Rep, is set in the camp of a rebel Liberian warlord in 2003.  There we meet three women: two are his ‘wives,’ which means: forced into service, sexual and otherwise, for the man they call the C.O.  The third woman, younger, has just arrived, and soon becomes #4 (the women refer to each other by number).  The absent wife, #2, we learn, has joined the rebel forces as a soldier.

The play’s plot mainly concerns what will become of #4, the youngest woman and the only one of the four able to read and write.

If this sounds grim, no doubt it is.  But the play, perhaps surprisingly, isn’t.  The four women are extremely lively company; their personalities make for considerable entertainment, and their situation creates a level of tension that never completely subsides.  Driven by dialogue more than action, Eclipsed demonstrates that interpersonal dynamics are the key to all drama, no matter where we find them.

Before the end of the first act Rita, an educated woman who is one of the “Peace Ladies” endeavoring to persuade warlords to lay down their arms and make peace, arrives, completing the cast.  Rita is also in search of a lost daughter, who may or may not be #4.

While the play can’t escape a certain didacticism, if only because the vast majority of its audience will need to be educated about the plight of Liberia, it is much to Gurira’s credit that the harshness of the situation is set very much in context.  First of all, in the tribal areas these women hail from, polygyny is not uncommon, even in the 21st century; thus the women, in their acquiescence to the situation, are not writing off their selfhood.  What they have dispensed with is having to fend for themselves in a war-torn land, ruled by men with guns, but also, as they are swift to tell #4, they are preserved from camps where women are shared among all the soldiers.  Being at the beck and call of one man is deemed both preferable and more traditional.

Indeed, Gurira establishes these women as types we might identify from tales of slavery in our own country, a fact that makes the play resonate beyond our sympathy for “those poor people over there.” #1, Helena (Stacey Sargeant) is much like the complicit “mammy” in many versions of plantation life in the south: she doesn’t really question the C. O.’s right to lord it over them and make what demands he will.  But this doesn’t make her servile so much as dependable and loyal.  She believes in a pact between herself and the C.O.

#3, Bessie (Pascale Armand) is more or less the comic relief; pregnant and somewhat vain and silly, she is also quick-witted.  Not only does she accept the harem-like conditions, she is determined to do everything to promote her standing in the pecking order. #4, known only as “The Girl” (Adepero Oduye), is the impressionable new-comer, but also, in a sense, the prize.  Will she accept her lot and bond with the mammy-like Helena, or will she seek a greater freedom and autonomy, like #2?

Gurira has said that it was a photograph of rebel women soldiers such as #2, Maima (Zainab Jah), “feminine, glamorous, intimidating, powerful, belligerent, and African,” that inspired her to learn about the conditions of their lives and write the play.  And indeed Maima, who takes the warrior name “Disgruntled,” becomes central to Act II as she tries to indoctrinate The Girl into the way of the warrior.  Tough, savvy, with no illusions, she is the voice of reality in wartime: to carry a gun means strength and autonomy, but, as becomes clear, it also means choosing to oppress rather than be oppressed.

And that is the moral dilemma of armed-insurrection that the play ultimately turns on, with The Girl as the test case.

Focused through the interactions of a group of women who must make do with a situation not of their making, the question of how to cope becomes a personal decision met by each woman individually.  And, though the women can be viewed as types, it is our strong belief in their reality, and in the personal significance of their actions, that drives the play.  One can’t help liking each of them, but for different reasons.

The cast is uniformly excellent.  Eclipsed is a true ensemble piece where no one is ever front and center with the others only offering support.  Speaking a dialect that will be foreign to most listeners, the cast deliver their lines with an emphatic poetry that charms the ears and is always intelligible.  They are so convincing in their roles, one would be stymied to hear the actresses suddenly speak in their normal accents.  The set is naturalistic, spare yet lovely. The lighting effects -- including rain, early morning sun, dappled forest -- very effective.

Perhaps the strongest impression the play leaves us with is not of the struggle for self-determination, but of the basically supportive and companionable aspects of human life, even in the most unpromising circumstances.  And on that front, it is perhaps #1, Helena, who emerges as the play’s key figure, for it is she who has the furthest to go to grasp the new world that comes with the end of the war.

ECLIPSED, directed by Liesl Tommy, features sets by Germán Cárdenas Alaminos, costumes by Elizabeth Barrett Groth, lighting by Marcus Doshi, sound by The Broken Chord Collective, dramaturgy by Walter Byongsok Chon, vocal and dialect coaching by Beth McGuire, and stage management by Karen Hashley

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The Economics of Improvised Music

This weekend's New York Times had a great article about the New Haven Improvisers Collective, an awesome—and extremely welcoming—group of musicians who gather on the last Monday of every month at Neverending Books on State Street to explore the range of possibilities that improvised music has to offer. As the NYT article rightly points out, improvised music is most closely associated with jazz, but that genre doesn't have a lock on improvisation; one of the real pleasures of playing improvised music, in fact, is to explore the ways in which musical genres can be bent, broken, combined, or, in some magic moments, superseded. (Those with a keen eye will notice that I'm on the list of members of the collective. In the interest of full disclosure, this is because I played with the group for a few weeks in 2005 to write a story for the New Haven Advocate about the collective and their encounter with improvisational conductor Butch Morris. I haven't been back, for a variety of reasons that will all sound like excuses now, but I've been wanting to return for a long time—now that I'm a better musician and almost have the right gear. I learned more about music in the weeks I spent with them and Morris than I had in a couple of years, and I'm still to this day drawing from those lessons.)

The NHIC and Firehouse 12, a terrific club and jaw-dropping studio that routinely puts on shows of non-mainstream jazz and other music that defies categorization, deserve every bit of praise that the article heaps on them. But they're also emblematic of a larger characteristic of New Haven that I've found myself repeating many times over to people who ask me what it's like to live here.

As just about everyone who's lived in this area for longer than a year or so knows, New Haven labors under a reputation that is probably about ten years out of date. Many people outside of New Haven think of the place and imagine a city in trouble. But we know that it is not so. New Haven has its share of struggles, of course—and I do not mean to belittle those troubles at all, or perhaps even worse, aetheticize them—but it is a positive thing as much as it's a problem. It energizes the place, makes it vital. It makes the people who live here give a damn about it. And right now, New Haven is that wonderfully unstable combination of interesting and affordable. It is ethnically and culturally rich, thanks to both the town and gown sides of things. It is economically diverse. And it's a place where something like Firehouse 12 and the New Haven Improvisers Collective can exist without having to fight, every single minute, for survival.

The month or so before CBGB closed, you may remember, was a great time to write an article about a) the death of New York City as a vital cultural force or b) the inability of American pop culture to replicate anything like the heady heyday of the late 1970s. Obviously both of these statements dramatically overstated things. But nestled within the hyperbole is a kernel of truth: It is difficult to innovate and take chances—artistically or otherwise—when the cost of simply living is too high. God help me, I can't find the interview, but if I remember right, a reporter asked Chris Frantz of the Talking Heads if New York could ever produce another CBGB. No, said Frantz, it was just too expensive to run a business in New York and book bands the way Hilly Kristal, its owner, did (Though Brooklyn club Barbes challenges that assertion). Then he said something really neat: The next influential club, he argued—the one that incubates the bands that go on to have a strong effect on pop music—was probably going to be in a strip mall someplace, away from a huge urban center. I saw what he was saying. I thought of The Space, nestled in an industrial park in Hamden; it helped build an audience for the Providence-based band The Low Anthem, which led to their signing to Nonesuch. And I thought of Firehouse 12, providing a home—and a gorgeous home at that—for music that has trouble finding a stage. Based on the consistent tastes of their owners, both clubs have managed to develop scenes, and audiences. They've created that crucial vibe whereby people will go to see a show of someone they've never heard of simply because they trust the club to book someone good. This speaks a lot to Steve Rodgers (of The Space) and Nick Lloyd (of Firehouse 12) as excellent club owners. But it's also the town that they're in, full of people who want to hear good music—and make good music—and don't have to go broke to do it.

New Haven Review Occasional Paper 2: Creepy Hollow

As the title of this post suggests, now and again we at the NHR get a piece that is perhaps too long for the blog, or too timely for our glacial twice-a-year publishing schedule, or just too much fun to keep to ourselves for long. Just in time for Halloween, greater New Haven-area novelist and critic Gregory Feeley regales us with a thoroughly original reread of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." I know, I know, you think you know everything there is to know about this shopworn piece of early American fiction. Think again. Feeley's first order of business: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" isn't even a Halloween story. Download the paper here. You'll never think about Ichabod Crane's nose the same way again.

Trial and Error

The Yale School of Drama has just completed its presentation of Phedre, penned by French master playwright Jean Racine in 1677. In this production, dramaturg Brian Valencia and director Christopher Mirto opted for the 1998 translation by Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath's widower, but in the end, there is no knowing if any other translation—such as those by John Cairncross or R.C. Knight or Robert Lowell—would have helped much in the mighty struggle that ensued to bring this tragedy to life. Back story is critical to grasping what's going on, and the playbill aids mightily in this regard. The tragic figure of this tale of lust and betrayal is not Phaedra (I'll be sticking to the anglicized spelling for this review), but her husband Theseus, famed slayer of the Cretan Minotaur. At this late stage in his career, his reputation lies largely in his womanizing, and by the time of the play's action, his reputation for selfish indulgence has begun to overtake that for heroics. Minotaur slaying notwithstanding, the play's cast of characters is already more than familiar with his abandonment of former lover and one-time savior, Ariadne, on the Greek isle of Naxos; his wooing and fathering of Hippolytus on the Amazon Antiope before his desertion of her; and finally his return to Crete, where, adding insult to injury, he takes Ariadne's sister, Phaedra, to wife. But poor Phaedra! In the noble tradition of ancient Greek bedroom drama, her heart belongs not to Theseus, but his son, Hippolytus, whom she persuades Theseus to banish, figuring out of sight, out of mind. Such reasoning works well enough until Theseus, Phaedra, and their two children are exiled in turn by Theseus' father, Aegeus, to Troezen, Hippolytus' current home. Poetic justice indeed!

Now Phaedra must confront the tabooed passion for her stepson, while, Hippolytus, frustrated by his years of exile, has fallen hard for another prisoner of Troezen, Aricia, descendant of Pallas and his line, the sworn enemies of Theseus, who originally placed her there. Who knew Troezen was such a hothouse of intemperate decisions and mad passions! Telenovelas clearly have nothing on Greek mythology, which renders all the more difficult the performative challenges of this particular play.

To put it bluntly, the drama school students simply bit off more than they could chew. This production illuminated only too well the hurdles presented to any modern theatre company by a play featuring an overwrought story of ancient Greece told by a 17^th-century French playwright translated by a 20^th-century literary patrician for a 21^st-century audience. The connective tissue of problems in this production stems from variety of sources: set design, body language, line delivery, plotting. Untangling the web is no small matter, but it is, without doubt, educative.

Let's start with set design. It is notably at variance with the fairly traditional presentation. This version of Phaedra is not some gussied up modernization—although Racine's script could easily support, in artful hands, a campy soap opera. No, this is a straight shot, through and through, so why the set design effect of doors that open in all parts of the stage (lower story and, upper story doors, ceiling hatches and trap doors)? Perhaps the arrangement is intended to convey a certain lack of privacy—everybody seems to know everybody's business, or will eventually, which is the nature of tragedy. Perhaps it is to bring to the fore a certain dynamism that the play lacks because of its Racinian stiffness. One can't be sure, however, the net effect hurts the entire production for one very critical reason: the upper doors require stairways—in this case metal rail versions—that take up stage space, specifically back stage right and front stage left (the latter of which has the equally deleterious effect of "screening" off back stage left), and end up forcing the actors to crowd the corner of front stage right or work the stairs themselves, considerably limiting their ability to move about and gesture freely.

Consequently, too many characters stand block still during their recitations or when ostensibly listening, no doubt to avoid falling off the stairs. One notable exception stands out: Shannon Sullivan's Ismene, who quite literally writhes like a pole dancer during an exchange over her mistress Aricia's yearnings for the seemingly disdainful Hippolytus. Overplayed perhaps, it is still one of the few instances that the stairs as props aid instead of hinder the play's emotional dynamic. Otherwise, this "stairway" effect of tableau-like posing not only impedes much of the play's potential dynamism, but comes to infect the floor action as well. Too often body language is so minimal that there is sometimes none at all. In other instances, it's just too modern. Andrew Kelsey's Hippolytus' line work is not bad, but the military swagger is just a little too New York City. The military stiffness we expect of ancient Greek military bearing—even if that expectation is itself a modern fiction—was just not there.

The stiffening character of this stairway effect also enters too much of the dialogue itself. A great deal of this can be directly attributed to the difficulties of performing "high drama" of this sort. Our modern sensibilities, heavily shaped by dialogue as rapid-fire exchange and not as declamation or soliloquy, present one of the greatest challenges to the modern actor. How the hell does anyone today deliver Shakespeare or Racine, Corneille or Ben Jonson, and actually connect with their audiences instead of putting them to sleep or evoking laughter? I don't envy the actors who face this challenge. But as audience members, we know when actors pull it off, and we know when they don't. Indeed, when it works, we admire that much more the thespians who seem to make it seem so artless. So, yes, I have more respect for Emma Thompson than Julia Roberts because Thompson can do Shakespeare and do it well. Roberts? Your guess is as good as mine.

In this production, they don't pull it off. Far more attention and training needed to be given to line work, to beats and pauses, slow downs and speed ups, to muttered asides and changes in pitch and volume. Christina Maria Acosta's Aricia gives a rather good show at this level, but there was too much stillness of body for a character so potentially riven by passion. On the other hand, there is absolutely no doubt that the show belonged entirely to Austin Durant's Theseus. He growls and howls; speaks low only to erupt in shouted imprecations; he holds his arms up high to rain down curses upon his falsely accused son; he kneels, head in hands, to bemoan his foolish actions. Durant's Theseus moves, both verbally and physically, literally bestriding the stage like a giant. Cannily, Durant stays off the ladders, using what space is available liberally, letting gesture of body match, and then magnify, inflections of speech. It was easily a professional performance and ought be studied by fellow actors, dramaturg, and director alike for how period plays of this sort must be performed if they are to work at all in a day and age as jaded as our own.

Without a Hurt the Heart is Hollow

The FantasticksLong Wharf Theatre, October 7 to November 1

I was first introduced to The Fantasticks, of all places, by the Guinness Book of World Records.  Even then, some thirty years ago, it held the record as the longest continuously performing play amid the less effulgent lights of New York's off-Broadway Sullivan Street Theatre.  A few years later, my father did me the courtesy of taking me to see this old standby and, what is perhaps strangest of all in the microhistory that exists between The Fantasticks and myself is my not having had the pleasure of seeing it again since then.

This is no small matter when considering a play with this kind of pedigree.  Any proper New Yorker knows that up until The Fantasticks' closing on January 13, 2002, some 17,000 performances later, a trip down to the Sullivan Theatre, adolescent in hand, was a rite of passage for parents seeking to bestow upon their kinder the kind of cosmopolitanism that Broadway show attendance bequeaths.  Unlike today's overproduced albeit entertaining extravaganzas for children and teens—from The Lion King to Wicked—The Fantasticks recalls a quieter time, a more intimate encounter, and, yes, a far, far more sophisticated experience than any childhood viewing can properly take in.

Long Wharf's current production of The Fantasticks' recognizes this all-too-literary quality of the play.  This production features a distinct set of innovations in the dramatic interpretation: the play's narrator El Gallo is recast as an illusionist; the environ is Rocky Point, an actual amusement park in Warwick, Rhode Island, that has been closed for over a decade; the thematic thrust is the carny atmosphere  (recalling weirdly enough Carousel, of all things!).  But all seems almost superfluous for a play that is so obviously about theatre and its illusions.  This is not a criticism of director Amanda Dehnart's decision to relocate the play's traditional pair of homes with gardens separated by a wall through which the separated lovers whisper their sweet nothings to one another.  The conceit of moving the action into Rocky Point is a sound one, , despite the strange geographic dynamic of the self-same wall and gardens  sitting somewhere within or nearby the lonely amusement park. Indeed, one feels the abandonment of the park in the play's set design.

But it is a strange location for other reasons because the very weirdness of the arrangement underscores what is so fascinating about The Fantasticks as a play.  When it first opened on May 3, 1960, reviews were mixed at best and despite poor initial attendance, the production stayed on eventually building itself up into—what exactly?  This is the question that couldn't help but nag as I compared my middle-aged experience of the more than solid performance delivered by cast and musicians, director and set designer, with that of my dimly remembered early teen years.  In watching, I recalled the frankly disturbing character of the play, its illusion-shattering comparison between the happy ending of the first act and the far more hardened sentiments of its second act, musically expressed with alliterative harshness: "Without a hurt the heart is hollow."

But watching The Fantasticks this time around opened up an entirely new vista for me, one leavened not only by personal experiences of pain and disillusionment, but a much expanded knowledge of arts traditions.  The Fantasticks is notable for how much it turns to classical Western literature for its moorings: there are references to Greek and Roman mythology and history, Dante Alighieri, Washington Irving, and James Barrie.  But the stage belongs to Shakespeare, and not just any stage.  No, notwithstanding references to Othello, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, the play that really stands behind The Fantasticks—but receives nary a mention--is The Tempest, which delivered the now hackneyed but in the case of The Fantasticks all-too-applicable revelation "that all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Tom Jones' libretto, as a consequence, is really part of another strand of Western culture.  While it makes pretense, perhaps a little too presumptuously, to be a part of the tradition of great playwriting—The Fantasticks is, in fact, far more than another Kiss Me Kate—there is no arguing that, as musicals go, the philosophical sights it sets are enormously high.  By stripping down as musical from the Broadway marquee hits it was trying in some ways to emulate—the Long Wharf production features eight actors, one piano, and one harp, and a simple set design, making it one of the easiest plays to stage regionally –Jones' libretto can focus on the very theatricality of theatre.  The experience is distinctly of a piece with Brecht's alienation effects, from the narrator's proleptic announcements to the highly stylized acting ("See, see, we're acting!" this production, like every other version of it, screams).

As a result of this minimalism, The Fantasticks can't help but be a distinctly postmodern play, a label I assign in the most intense and complimentary of senses.  Behind El Gallo's sleights of hand and the washed-up Arthur's comic manglings of Shakespeare, young Matt's sunny effusions and even younger Louisa's starry-eyed exclamations, and their fathers' soft-shoe, shuffling duets (excellently rendered in this production), the worm of literary deconstruction eats away at the play's philosophical foundations.  The easy reading is that the pretend happy ending of the first half is an illusion of moonlight and our penchant for story-telling, an illusion that the harsh glare of the sun and life itself dissolves.  But this thesis is so theatrically presented, and The Fantasticks is, if anything, utterly self-conscious of it play-ness, that it is impossible to see how life can be anything other than actors strutting the stage.  It is in that sense a remarkable play, a Worm Ouroboros, that eats its own tail endlessly  The Fantasticks strives to escape its own theatricalism through philosophy—that there is such a thing as "real life," which delivers real hurts from which we gain an "true" education and deeper understanding of love—but never really can, offering us either empty slogans about real life or, dare I suggest, a more "Matrix"-like understanding of the epistemological nut that Kant and his phenomenological successors have still failed to crack.  Namely, what we perceive is life and it may all be an illusion, but swim on we must.  And that reason alone is enough to see The Fantasticks.

Strength in What Remains

By Tracy Kidder (Random House, 2009)

I almost didn’t read the new book by the great journalist Tracy Kidder, and I’m not proud of either of the reasons why.

First, I didn’t like the title. Tracy Kidder has had some memorably evocative titles (Among Schoolchildren, an allusion to a Yeats poem, whether he knew it or not; Home Town; and one of the best titles ever, The Soul of a New Machine, which among other virtues always reminds me of the Police album Ghost in the Machine). But he now has two terrible titles to his name. First, there was Mountains Beyond Mountains, a portrait of the saint on earth Paul Farmer. And now comes Strength in What Remains, about Farmer's also quite saintly Burundian colleague Deogratias Niyizonkiza. There's something about good people that, for Kidder, makes for bad, treacly titles.

I also didn’t want to read a book about genocide. Having skipped Philip Gourevitch’s book about the Rwandan genocide, avoided David Rieff’s writings on genocide and intervention, and missed every book about death and destruction in Iraq (except Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s, which I correctly suspected would be fun to read because it’s all about what incompetent boobs the Bush administration were), I thought I might as well keep up my streak: no books that threaten to convince me that mankind is irredeemably evil and God, if he exists, doesn’t care.

But I read a review of Kidder’s new book on the day in August that my annual birthday gift from my in-laws, an Amazon gift certificate, arrived in my e-mail inbox. So I bought it. And in the last week I have finally read it.

And it’s warm, and humane, and at times funny. There’s no shortage of intense misery, described all too well. Of the frequent flashback scenes that take us from Deogratias’s more comfortable life in the United States back to the hell he endured less than ten years ago in his native Burundi, where as a Tutsi he was hunted by Hutu génocidaires, the most haunting involves an orphaned infant whom Deogratias could not save. I won’t tell you any more than that—partly because I don’t want to give away too much, partly because I just don’t want to re-live it in the typing.

For me, the book’s most unusual achievement is to show us a big American city, New York, through the eyes of a penniless refugee. Before Deogratias was taken in by generous Americans, before he enrolled at Columbia, before his graduate work at Harvard and then Dartmouth, he was delivering groceries for below minimum wage and sleeping in Central Park, hoping to one day figure out that subway system. No matter how impressive the accomplishments that bracket this period—surviving, on foot, and evading his would-be killers; becoming an educated American and building a hospital back in Burundi, a hospital which opened in 2007—it’s Deogratias’s early days as a nameless, faceless, dark black man in a city where he knew nobody that I will always remember best.

'How can we know the dancer from the dance?'

Yeats’ famous rhetorical question at the end of his poem, ‘Among School Children’ suggests that the dancer and the dance are fused into one, as an actor should be in his role, as a musician might be in the music she plays or sings.  The power of that symbiosis is always striking when it occurs, making the audience also lose a part of themselves in what is transpiring before their eyes and ears. Such, we are told, was the effect of seeing Vaslav Nijinsky dance.  Here was a being who seemed to live to dance, for whom performing was the only life.  The fact that the great, innovative, legendary dancer and choreographer succumbed to schizophrenia, a condition that ended his career, means that he has become not only a figure for greatness in performance, but also for madness in the arts.

Norman Allen’s play, Nijinsky’s Last Dance, which is ending its three night run tonight at the Yale Cabaret (shows at 8 and 11 p.m.), seizes on both aspects of Nijinsky -- the inspired genius, the struggling schizophrenic -- to present a monologue in which the dancer regales the audience with his view of his life and accomplishments.

It is a life that is now all in the past, except to the extent that every moment is still intensely alive in the character’s telling: his loss of his father in childhood; his meeting with and affair with the infamous impresario Sergei Pavlovitch Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes; modelling nude for Rodin; the scandalous shows -- Le Sacre du printemps and L’après midi d’un faune; his marriage, the birth of his daughter; his sojourn in popular music hall entertainment in London; his tour of America; his final dance at the St. Moritz in Switzerland during World War I.

It’s a role that requires amazing physical stamina, notable comic and dramatic gifts, a dancer’s body, and a grab-you-by-the-lapels urgency.  Danny Binstock, in the Yale Cab production, has all that.  His Nijinsky is simply rivetting from first to last.  Taking us into his confidence from within his cell in an asylum, Binstock delivers Nijinsky’s lines with a feverish sense of need -- he must try to make his world intelligible because -- as he shouts, sighs, pleads, again and again -- ‘I am Nijinsky!’

Few sights can offer more gripping pathos than a major innovator, past his glory, having to insist upon his triumphs -- which only exist, now, as memories in the minds of those who saw them or participated in them.

And so we are presented with the mind of Nijinsky, the only place we can turn to try to grasp what this extraordinary life was like.  We hear at times the voices of people from Nijinsky’s life, to which Nijinsky reacts in various ways, sometimes mouthing their lines, sometimes seeming to argue back in distracted muttering, sometimes taking refuge in movement.  Director Charlotte Braithwaite departs from the script in these voice-overs, since they are written to be spoken by the actor playing Nijinsky, but the innovation works well.  Rather than watching Nijinksy become Diaghilev or his own wife, sister, or mother, we see instead the effect these voices in his head has upon the dancer.

Further, the play calls for quite a bit of physical movement.  Not abounding in space, the Yale Cab is a risky place to put on such a show -- if the actor goes a little off his mark, he could find himself in a spectator’s lap or amid the remnants of someone’s dinner.  So one can only marvel at how precisely Binstock uses the space available to him, while suggesting a whirlwind of movement.  Brathwaite, Binstock, and producer/choreographer Jennifer Harrison Newman very inventively mime the ballet routines that were part of Nijinsky’s repertoire.

When at one point Binstock sits upon a chair to eye his audience in a pause prolonged to become uncomfortable, we see how the director has adapted the play to its space with great bravura.  That moment, and the final segment in which Nijinsky upbraids the audience for allowing the war to happen, brings the play suddenly from the past, c. World War I, and the mind of a long-dead dancer, into our time-frame, where the voice of a genius -- who hears God say ‘enough!’ at the end of his last dance -- speaks to us fully in the moment.

The most intense and spirited production at Yale Cab so far this season.

Like a Jolly Elf

Bob Dylan, Christmas in the Heart (Columbia) When I first heard that Bob Dylan was releasing a Christmas album, I immediately began to wonder what form it might take.  This spawned a series of possible carols, using take-offs of Dylan song titles: “Like a Jolly Elf,” “Just Like a Reindeer,” “A Big Sleigh’s a-Gonna Call,” “Sleddin’ in the Wind,” and, my favorite, “Stuck Inside of Macy’s in the Santa Suit Again” (I even went so far as to compose lyrics for that last one, in case Bob might be having trouble).

Of course, Dylan’s Christmas album, like anyone’s Christmas album, would not be comprised of new compositions, but would trot out old familar chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and so forth.  The question really was: would they be done in some bluesy or folky style familiar to Dylan’s listeners, or would he take some other tact, full of Christmas kitsch, with choirs or orchestras, or even a brass band?

The answer is: a bit of Dylan’s recently signature style -- involving his usual studio musicians -- is discernible in some of the songs, sorta: “Do You Hear What I Hear?” is as scruffy as that song could ever be imagined, though it has some nice guitar licks and he does manage to get fairly high and clear at the close; “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” -- well, forget Dino’s sentimental delivery -- Dylan sounds like a guy permanently ostracized by his clean-living relatives at Christmas (the video should have him huddled around a sterno can); “The Christmas Blues” matches a song to Dylan’s strengths and he owns it by the end.  And David Hidalgo’s accordian makes a polka out of “Must Be Santa,” and that can’t be bad, especially when Dylan and company reel off those reindeer names: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon / Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.

But most of the album pretty much features straight-forward arrangements, with back-up harmonizers who also fill in with peppy, glee-club voices, that would be perfect for Bing or whatever mellow-voiced crooner popular c. 1945.  “Winter Wonderland” is so completely a throwback, one imagines little Bobby Zimmerman, back home in Minnesota, happily entoning “when it snows, ain’t it thrillin’ how your nose gets a chillin’?”  It’s kinda cute.  “Silver Bells”’s arrangement is a bit country, but Dylan plays it too straight.  A little twang would’ve helped.  I’ve never liked “Little Drummer Boy” because it’s often given a big production that drowns the simplicity of the song in schmaltz.  I gotta say: Bob’s version is now my favorite, even with those singers.

Then there are the religious hymns.  It brings to mind what Johnson said about a dog walking on its hind legs (or a woman preaching): “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”  Did you ever wonder how Bob would deliver “Hark the Here-rrrr-ald Angels Sing”?  Now you know.  How about a run-through of the Latin version of “O Come All Ye Faithful” -- “Adeste Fideles”?  Personally, I’m happy that Dylan’s recorded output now includes him singing in Latin.  Take that all you people who feel he’s insufficiently lettered to be a national poet!  But you can’t help feeling like the guy next to him in choir, trying not to laugh as he sounds it out.

But isn’t that what Christmas songs are about anyway?  In my childhood we had those “Sing Along with Mitch” records and everyone was supposed to chime in, regardless of whether they could carry the tune.  “First Noel,” for instance, is like letting the worst rasper in the room take the lead.  You can imagine the twinkle in his eyes at actually getting through it.  But you gotta ask yourself: does he hear what we hear?

The lyrics of the secular songs are mostly sentimental, the lyrics of the religious ones fairly solemn, but, either way, they stay in the mind.  And I can’t get past a certain surreal feeling: I know more Dylan songs off by heart than by any other songwriter -- and to hear him sing a group of songs that everyone knows the words to, is ... like some alternate reality, but it’s also about as “folk” as you can get.  And when he gets through, at his own pacing, “someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow, so hang a shining star upon the highest bough,” almost choking on the final word, well, it does make that star feel kind of fragile against whatever the fates allow, so, yeah, have yourself a Merry Little Christmas now.

All proceeds from the album are being donated to “Feed America,” and other charities in other countries, so only a thorough Scrooge could completely denigrate the effort.  Who ever suspected the “jingle jangle morning” would become the “jingle jangle” of Santa’s sleigh bells?

What I Don't Like about Blogs

I am not a blogger. That sounds defensive, but what I really mean is that I don't have the mind for it, the same way I don't have the mind to be a beat reporter: I don't see a story wherever I go; I don't see something every day that makes me want to write five to six hundred words about it. Now that sounds condescending, but I don't mean it that way. There are people who have proven to be outstanding bloggers—people whom the form suits almost perfectly, which suggests, to me at least, that blogs really are a new kind of literature, even if its conventions haven't been fully defined. It is thrilling to be alive at its creation, to see humans find another way of expressing themselves, and I'm a little envious that I don't have the mind for it. But there are certain aspects of blogs that I don't like. Yes, there's all the yelling, but hey, that's part of the fun. I'm actually more annoyed at the sort of blog post espousing a shaky yet strongly held opinion that seems designed solely to piss people off in order to get them talking, because for a website looking at its hit count, I guess there's no such thing as bad publicity. There are lots of egregious examples out there, but I'm more interested in talking about the phenomenon in its moderate form. My example: Jody Rosen's October 12 post on Slate's Brow Beat about NPR's supposed DORF matrix, i.e., its assumed taste in black music. (Yes, I'm aware that I'm about a week late to this party. See above re: not having the head for blogging. I'm also aware that I'm totally falling for it by talking about it. I'm trying here, folks.)

For those of you who don't want to read the original post, Rosen argues that NPR, and All Songs Considered in particular, "maintains a strict preference for black music that few actual living African-Americans listen to." Instead, it seems to like its black musicians dead, old, retro, or foreign. Hence, the cute acronym. Rosen uses the DORF matrix to mock NPR listeners for being too white, but also throws in a little political angle. "Who are the progressives again—the public radio crowd or the Top 40 great unwashed?" he asks.

Here's what I don't like about Rosen's post. First, as a surface-level comment, he's basically pointing out the obvious. Why comment on it at all, except to piss off NPR listeners who consider themselves to be progressive? (Full disclosure: My musical taste could easily be described as DORF, except that it would apply equally to musicians across racial and ethnic lines. I suppose this makes me ultra-conservative. Or whatever.)

Second, given how obvious Rosen's premise is, it's a surprisingly shaky one. Rosen himself points out a few exceptions to NPR's taste in his own post—Mos Def, Danger Mouse—that he writes off as the exceptions that prove the rule. Has that argument ever really worked? But the shakiness runs way deeper than that, especially given the political angle Rosen throws in.

Assuming something about someone's politics based on their music taste is a dangerous game. In suggesting that Top 40 listeners are perhaps more progressive than NPR listeners, does Rosen really mean to suggest that being a big Lil' Wayne fan indicates that you're liberal? I'll just let that question lie. More oddly, Rosen essentially argues that NPR's taste in black music simply reflects its white, college-educated listeners' taste in music. (Again, full disclosure: I donate money to NPR, and am both white and college-educated. Too much, really.) But there's another explanation for it that has not that much to do with politics, and as much to do with creating taste as reflecting it: As one of the only nonprofit forces on the radio dial, NPR has the opportunity to play music that isn't popular, and it takes that opportunity to play artists that otherwise don't get radio play—like many college radio stations do, or other forms of radio, like Bridgeport's own WPKN. Would Rosen—who, as a music critic, I assume is a big fan of lots of different kinds of music—prefer that NPR cover the same small set of artists that commercial radio covers? I'm guessing not. But then what is the point of the post? Aside from making fun of NPR? (I know, I know: generating hits for the website. But isn't there another way?)

In truth, I have no idea how NPR determines which black musicians it decides to pay attention to. But here's my point: it doesn't seem like Rosen does, either. Now, I know that blogging and journalism are two different things, but Rosen could have added a bit of substance to his post—the kind of substance that, say, a twenty-minute conversation with someone at All Songs Considered would have provided—and still made his point that contemporary African-American musicians are woefully underrepresented in NPR's music programming. Perhaps Rosen did have this conversation. If he did, though, it doesn't show. Which means that the argument never gets past whether NPR's taste in black music is lame or not. Which is, in a nutshell, one of the things I don't like about blogs. Even when I've been guilty of it myself.

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.

2nd Town Meets Gown Read In

Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. New Haven Review and Yale University’s McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life will host its 2nd Town Meets Gown Read In, where writers from New Haven and the Yale communities come together to share original works of poetry and prose. The “Read In” features five writers from each community and is approximately two hours long, with discussion afterwards. Refreshments will be served for this event, which is free of charge.  The New Haven Review (www.newhavenreview.com) is the literary arts journal of the Elm City; the Yale University McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life hosts events by and for graduate students on a regular basis.

Admission is free.  Readings are at McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life, 320 York Street, New Haven

Smoke & Mirrors

SmokeBy Chuck Richardson 236 pp. BlazeVOX $16.00

Truisms are called truisms for a reason. They’re not exactly the same as truthiness, as promulgated by right-wing demagogues. Truisms, by their nature, are hackneyed. But they contain more than just the traditional “element of truth.” They do not sin by omission. Rather they bespeak the obvious and are often useful by bringing our attention back to what is obvious.

I have a truism in mind: where there is smoke there is fire. This expression exercises and belies David Hume’s deconstruction of causation. As Hume noted, how do we know that particular effects follow from certain causes? How do we infer specific causes from quantifiable effects? Hume’s radically pedestrian assertion was instead of nature, God, or the Devil, we hold to causation from force of habit. We associate causes and effects within our minds through repetition and imaginative thinking that is predicated on experience. We believe the sun will rise the next day not merely from an abstract understanding of earthly rotation (which we never really feel) but from having seen it occur day after day. How do we know the wine glass I’m about to drop will fall to the ground and not float upwards, will shatter and not merely bounce? Of course either of these less likely outcomes is possible. But no, it will fall and it will shatter. This I know from my experience of other falling objects and the witnessing of bursting light bulbs and beer bottles on kitchen floors and street corners. True, there is an extension of imagination within this assumption, but it is imagination grounded in experience, expectation, some trauma (I’m always shocked by shattering glass), and the brute force of a lifetime of habit-formed association between actions and reactions.

So where there’s smoke, surely there’s fire? The beauty of literature done well is when truisms fail miserably. And in Chuck Richardson’s Smoke there is smoke, but it’s not clear there is any fire. Mind you, this is not intended as some sort of backhanded figuratively-cast literary criticism. (All smoke no fire signifying some failing of literary imagination.) Quite literally, there is no fire in Smoke because smoke is what it’s all about.

Smoke is a classic example of what troubles genre of literary fiction as a business proposition—troubled, that is, not by any lack of quality but lack of market. Personally, I thought Smoke a great read and thus deserving of a hell-of-a-larger audience. First it appealed directly to my penchant for science fiction and background as an erstwhile scholar of dystopian fiction. (If Margaret Atwood can get away with it, why can't Chuck Richardson?) Second, it is, like any work of dystopian fiction done right, told through the fish-eye lens of multiple characters, not all of whom fully understand what is happening or why, who struggle to assay the truth of their situation but only see parts of it, as if wading through smoke themselves. After all, isn't what makes fiction fiction its smokiness, its insubstantiality, the penumbra it offers only of reality, of life seen through a glass darkly?

I’ll be blunt and a little lazy and not even dig into the details of the story’s plot line—which is fuzzy anyway. Enough to say that the setting is a future America where there is an “Agency” that takes in individuals for questionings that amount to all-orifice, sodium pentathol-like, half-pain, half-ecstasy torture sessions. It is also an America where your loyalty is to the never properly defined “Tribe” and where the aforementioned entire Agency is after the mysterious and much too earnest Zbigniew “Ziggy” Fumar and his rebel supporters—who may not even know that they are supporters.

Although Ziggy is not necessarily the protagonist—whatever that may mean in this particular work—he is the voice of the author, authority, and perhaps the ultimate lack of it, which all authors experience once their work graduates into the hands of readers. As Ziggy offers in the letter? manifesto? confession? that the Agency's agents, the novel’s “authorities,” study for clues as to what Ziggy's movement is about:

So let me start by saying that I don’t get you. It’s easy when a writer writes something and he knows his reader; because it makes it easy to leave out things the two of you already know. But I don’t know what you know, and don’t know what I know, and nobody knows what they don’t know. And that’s the truth. Honest. The truth always wraps itself in a dynamic paradox. In this case, it’s the writer’s paradox: All writers are liars; I am a writer. Or, all writing is lying; I am writing. Or, all reading is sucking; I am reading, and so on, etc….You’re not against fiction; you’re against my fiction. You oppose my make-believe. And you believe your make-believe is real. I’m sure it is, but so is mine. You dream up your stuff and I’ll dream up mine. This is fiction, and that you are reading anything and believe it’s not fiction, well that’s a fiction, albeit a non-literate one. It’s me who should be torturing you…

We are Smoke’s readers and Mr. Richardson, like any author, cannot know what we do or don’t know in fine detail. As such the novel has and takes the liberties of literary expressionism, steeped in equal parts George Orwell and Robert Coover, compelling its readers to find their way through the haze: What is this world? What is the Agency really after? What is the Tribe? Why do some characters seem little more than the ghosts of Pirandello’s players in search of an author? Why do they change form or divine the future or see their stories merge, split and merge again in some macabre waltz of unsettled identities, an unsettled future, and an unsettled literature.

If this review itself seems hazy, don’t let that obscure the fact that Smoke is actually a pleasure to read. OK, so every question is not answered; so truisms and false-isms are liberally mixed producing a powerful concoction of literary speculation on our modern politics, authorial deceit, and epistemological yearning, but I’d be more than happy to order another round. Smoke is more than “speculative” fiction in the traditional senses as applied to highbrow literature and science fiction respectively. It’s a fine read that compels even as it disturbs, compels because it disturbs, which, in a sense, is how life is, if not ought be, ultimately lived.