Artful Comedy

01

Now sing!
Let’s all be jolly
Banish melancholy
Life is but a party
A never-ending ball
And if you will or if you won’t
And if you do or if you don’t
‘Tis a choice of folly
La la la la
For nitwits are we all.

Thus the opening song, sung by the raucous cast of Carlo Goldoni’s commedia dell’arte masterpiece, The Servant of Two Masters, adapted by Constance Congdon, now playing at the Yale Rep.  The song is an invitation to a celebration of silliness, slapstick, stupidity, and, yes, sincerity -- for true love carries the day on all levels.  En route to betrothed bliss are mistaken identities, disguises, love-lorn histrionics, jealousies, subterfuge, foolery involving food and letters and trunks, banter and sexual innuendo, lovely tableaux, and graceful, lyrical song.

What’s not to like?  It’s a play anyone can enjoy, bursting with vitality and love of stagecraft in all its crowd-pleasing showiness.  The costumes (by Valérie Thérèse Bart) are gorgeous, the use of space, backdrops, and props playful, the timing precise, the comic bits keep coming, and the gears keep shifting.  Just when you think the play is about to settle into a predictable series of convolutions to keep the right innamorati from getting together, something unexpected comes along -- like fish and pots being flung toward the audience to be doggedly snatched from the air by the intrepid Truffaldino, a buffoon in motley, who tries to serve two masters in hopes of doubling his meal ticket.

And when you think, by Intermission, you’ve seen all Steve Epp has to offer in the role, guess again. In the second half, his dialogue with one master -- the preening, effete Florindo (Jesse J. Perez in a role that takes playing ‘broad’ to new lengths and heights) -- becomes an astounding series of non sequiturs and verbal pratfalls. And it’s then that Truffaldino, who has been winking at the audience throughout in asides, seems to become the naively inspired master of ceremonies in a plot that exposes the foolishness undergone in the name of love, pride, hunger, but that also lets us all off the hook. Nitwits we may be, but we know a happy ending when it’s coming.

Particularly memorable, besides Epp and Perez, are Allen Gilmore as Pantalone, father of the bride, a cartoon come to life, with a voice modulating all over the scale, from full-throated rage to unctuous glissandos; and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, of the Yale School of Drama, as his daughter -- petulant, heart-felt, sassy, with but a heartbeat separating her moods. Her duet of longing with her maid Smeraldina (Liz Wisan, also of YSD), smitten by Truffaldino, offers lyric relief from all the comedy, and the sensible Smeraldina gets to deliver with gusto the somewhat dated imprecations about a sexual double standard: how women are held up to scorn for infidelity, while no one says a word about male trespasses (sure, sure, tell that to Tiger Woods).

But, lest you think this show has nothing to say to our modern sensibilities, check out the menu duet -- in which Truffaldino and the master cook Brighella (Liam Craig) ponder a five course dinner with evocative gestures and sound effects for each creature slaughtered for the feast.

In many such moments, director Chris Bayes, Head of Physical Acting at YSD, demonstrates what is meant by that term: the choreography of repetitive gestures, reactions, and vocal registers create a comic thread that runs through the play’s various encounters, making the characters themselves, ably abetted by the trio of musicians on stage, seem part of a vast musical composition, a comic folk opera that recalls the antics of the Marx Brothers, the early Woody Allen, and any good comedy duo or troupe you’d care to name.

For a good time . . .

The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni Adapted by Constance Congdon From a translation by Christina Sibul Directed by Christopher Bayes March 12 to April 3, 2010 Yale Repertory Theatre Photographs: © 2010 Richard Termine

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Listen Here This Week: Bobbie Ann Mason and Bernard Malamud

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 3rd week with readings at Bru Cafe, 141 Orange, Street, this Tuesday, March 23, at 7 p.m. Our theme? “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”

Our stories? Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh" and Bernard Malamud's "The Jewbird"

Why these?

Two great writers, masters, in particular, of the short story: what could go wrong?

For those who don't know Bobbie Ann Mason...shame on you!  One of America's best short story writers, she offers in "Shiloh" a quietly moving meditation on what breaking up is really like: that onerous sense that not all is right in the world, often sneaking up on us before we know it.  Two lovers look at one another and, lo and behold, they're strangers.  And then there's the story title.  Wikipedia describes the Civil War battle at Shiloh as follows: "The Confederates achieved considerable success on the first day but were ultimately defeated on the second day."  If that's not a good description of breaking up, then I don't know what is.

Malamud's "The Jewbird" was one of my favorite stories as a kid and remains so to this day.  It's Malamud at his magic realist best, taking the "Jewish problem" and realizing its substance in a way that few works of "straight" fiction do. In many ways, it reminds one of the trickster tales of Native American legend, of coyote who knows things all too well, and yet all of this with a distinctly Jewish twist, featuring equal parts cynicism leavened by wisdom and  hope threatened byour failure to understand, really understand.

Enter, If Ye Dare

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming GeeksEthan Gilsdorf Lyons Press, 2009 $24.95

If we’ve learned anything from Sigmund Freud and J.K. Rowling, it’s that we members of the species homo sapiens sapiens exhibit a strong fantasy life.  From the family romance to  wingardium leviosa—frame it however you like—our predilection to imagine ourselves as something other than what we are is as old as the first storyteller regaling listeners around a campfire with tales of thrilling hunts, noble deeds or, indeed, anything that takes us out of ourselves and puts us elsewhere.

Ethan Gilsdorf’s Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks is a meditation on this all-too-human fact of life.  [Full disclosure: the acquiring editor for Lyons Press, Keith Wallman, is a subscriber to New Haven Review.] Gilsdorf's starting point is personal and, at times, painfully confessional, a saga that prompts his grand tour of the Anglo-American obsession with medieval fantasy and faerie.  That obsession ranges from beer-bellied, bearded role play gamers gathered in Geneva, Wisconsin, to relive the pre-corporate glory days of Dungeons & Dragons to middle-aged housewives whacking orcs and ogres in the virtual realms of World of Warcraft. There are middle-class couples who don wings and tunics on weekends to swing Styrofoam swords and fling confetti-filled fireballs at one another, as well as “Tolkien tourists” who descend en masse on the New Zealand of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings to walk the grassy plains of Rohan and sniff the cindery ash of Mordor.

Gilsdorf's survey, however, is more than an act of journalism.  It is an inner odyssey that gets its first push with the devastating stroke that transforms his mother from a bright, ebullient woman, for whom the world was her middle-class oyster, into the “Monster”: a shambling, chain-smoking, emotionally explosive terror whose son finds solace in a regularly scheduled Dungeons & Dragons game with high school friends.  This, at least, is the personal motivation behind Gilsdorf's re-entry into geekdom.  Like so many others—myself included—when Gilsdorf left for college, he had put childish things away, supplanting the joys of casting sleep spells and slaying giants with the more mundane adult pursuit of grades, sex, money, work, family.  In Fantasy Freaks, Gilsdorf takes the opportunity proffered by authorship and a book contract to revisit this phase of his life and indulge himself. But this indulgence is hardly a shameless one since Gilsdorf is clearly unsettled by the passion with which he returns to his teenage roots.

Mostly it’s a question of image. Anxieties about how he looks to his peers resonate throughout. This explains in part his not infrequent mention of how normal his respective guides through the subcultures of Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, live action role playing, and DragonCon are.  And then there is his own baldly stated yearning for adult things he is without at the time of writing—a long-term relationship, marriage, children.  The underlying story of cultural anxiety combines elements of projection (“What’s so weird about pretending I’m a half-elf warrior? The guy who plays the dwarf wizard is an assistant VP of finance at the local bank!”) with reaffirmations of normal urges (“OK, so I’m dressed in a funny costume at this DragonCon, but everyone’s doing it and maybe I’ll meet a girl and have real rather than role play sex”).  But Gilsdorf's projections are no different from those of every guy or gal who lives, in one way or another, a Clark Kent-Superman double life; while his reaffirmations  have their merits inasmuch as fantasy play can serve as a conduit to culturally normative goals, such as networking for love or money.  Looked at squarely, who can argue with either of these?  Four guys huddling over funny-shaped dice and stacks of rulebooks, which may end in a shared beer or job lead, is no stranger than watching four guys huddling in a green field over a dimpled white ball that rests on a little piece of wood, which they will spend some three to five hours swatting with one of ten differently shaped, club-footed poles.

Gilsdorf does make several pop psychology efforts to explain the penchant of a certain class of Americans (and Englishmen and Australians and Frenchmen, etc.) for these types of recreations.  Much of this pop psy 101 stuff comes from his own intuition. Nor do I think him that far off the mark.  These various forms of role play, whether table-top, digital, or “live action,” do reflect our collective need to escape the dullness of our daily reality, supply ourselves with the illusion of control over the chaos of modern life, feed that never absent desire for child-like, consequence-free play, and give release to our pent-up stores of aggression. It is all of these, and more. Indeed, if I had but one criticism to make, it would have been a fond wish for Gilsdorf to have shed some of the habits of personal journalism and donned more academic vestments.  (He certainly is capable, as a former Harvard graduate.)   In brief, I and, I suspect, any of his readers would have liked to have seen more of the academic literature—assuming there is any—on these various behaviors.  Otherwise, Fantasy Freaks is an eye-opening romp through what continues to strike me as a culturally specific juncture in our collective psychology.

Niels Lyhne

by Jens Peter Jacobsen (trans. Tiina Nunnelly; Penguin, 2006)

Niels Lyhne is one of those forgotten masterpieces that, when he finds it, a reader cannot believe he or the rest of humanity has gotten along without. I found Jacobsen through Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters, not knowing that the nineteenth-century Danish writer had also found admirers in Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, August Strindberg, T.E. Lawrence—the list goes on. This small novel influenced a whole generation of European thinkers and writers to an extraordinary extent. And rightfully so. Here is a book in which, as Rilke says, “there is nothing that does not seem to have been understood, held, lived, and known in memory’s wavering echo.”

Niels Lyhne is also a book about belief, about a poetic soul feeling its way through an ordinary life. The eponymous protagonist falls deeply in love, only to disagree with his lifelong love on the subject of faith. He struggles with these questions, right up to the point of death, when his friend tells him, “Opinions are only to live by—in life they can do some good, but what does it matter whether you die with one opinion or another?” Yet, to Niels it does matter, and he dies what Jacobsen calls “the difficult death.”

One apprehends in this book the seeds of the great works of the early twentieth century: Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and all of Hesse’s earlier works to name only a few. In a way, these books seem less original, more reflections of Jacobsen’s effort, after reading it. Of course, these later novels may be greater and more developed in some ways.  But after reading this lost classic, it becomes clear that they could not have existed without the brilliant, haunting Niels Lyhne.

Eric D. Lehman is an English professor at the University of Bridgeport.

Listen Here! This Week: Raymond Carver and F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series gets off the ground this week with its first readings at Willoughby's Coffee & Tea at 194 York Street, at 7 p.m. Our theme? "What Did She See in Him?"

Our stories? Raymond Carver's "Fat" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Jelly-Bean"

Why these? "Why not" would be too glib an answer. First and foremost, they're really good.

Second, did I mention that they're good?

"Fat" is one of Raymond Carver's finest tales. In the tradition of Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Cafe, it takes what would otherwise be a classic sideshow freak and turns one customer's gastronomic compulsion into a story of salvation for the waitress who must serve that compulsion. It's a tale marked by the quiet bittersweetness and powerful subtextual currents that typify all of Carver's stories.

Fitzgerald's "The Jelly-Bean" was published in the October 1920 issue of Metropolitan Magazine and was later collected in Six Tales of the Jazz Age. This classic short story wonderful captures a generation's embrace of the imminent freedoms promised by the Roaring Twenties, but not without pain and wasted possibility. Sympathy and pathos mix liberally in a story about a time when both were so deeply needed after the terribleness of the Great War.

Literary Curmudgeonism

While schmoozing in the home ofNew Haven Review editor Mark Oppenheimer, we started speaking of our respective experiences as college instructors. He noted how much he preferred teaching nonfiction writing to literature because he neither wrote nor knew all that much about literary criticism—a gross understatement on his part, really. I chimed in, stupidly perhaps, "I don't really understand why we teach students how to write literary criticism at all."

But is such a sentiment all that stupid?  In spirit of making a go of this bit of devil's advocacy, I boldly ask: why do we teach students how to write literary criticism? Make no mistake, it is a type of writing that can approach the status of art in the right hands. But even for experts it is a far more difficult form of nonfiction to produce—in my humble view—than those ol' classroom chestnuts: narration, description, and argumentation.

Now, technically, literary criticism is a subdivision of the last, but it remains one of the hardest to do well. I attribute this difficulty not only to the inability of students to read and write well but to the inherent complexity of trying to formulate an argument about something as slippery as a well-wrought story or poem.

In my experience, the slipperiness of the literary artifact comes directly from the story-like nature of this species of discourse. So when I taught the art of lit crit—and probably not all that well, to be honest—my students continuously wrestled with the Herculean (or rather Sisyphean) task of unwinding authors from their characters, storytellers from their stories, the telling from the showing. Even I still have difficulty with the boxes-within-boxes or hall-of-mirrors (pick your metaphor) nature of this discursive mode. And, mind you, I have a doctorate in literature.

I'm currently convinced that high school teachers and college professors teach students how to write literary criticism not because it instructs them in how to "think critically" or "formulate an argument" better. These can be done just as easily—actually more easily—focusing on more concrete topics, like reproductive rights or drunk-driving laws. Instead, I hold that many teachers, in their heart of hearts, would rather not teach students how to write literary criticism at all. What they'd prefer is reading works of literary quality and talking about them intelligently—like a book club but with the teacher's authority intact for guiding novitiates. That certainly was my experience as a college instructor.

I loved selecting, teaching, and discussing (or more appropriately discoursing on) the work at hand. What I despised to no end was marking my students' papers, which were poorly written, generally incoherent, and pretty pedestrian in their analyses. And most literary instructors I speak with echo this sentiment—although I'm happy to be flamed to the contrary.

Marking papers probably explains why I became a professional editor: I grew tired of commenting on people's dry runs. If someone is going to write poorly, and I'm going to have to redline it into readable prose, I might as well make sure the fruits of my labor see light of day in published form.

On occasion, I do yearn for those halcyon days teaching a great short story, a fine novel, or shockingly brilliant poem. I even sometimes miss the stress and strain of writing literary criticism—no easy task, even for me. But the idea of teaching students to write literary criticism, as if that constituted training for something other than, well, writing literary criticism—heck, lit crit isn't even a solid basis for the art of book reviewing—is a misbegotten notion that serves no one other than the instructors who recognize this chore as the price they must pay for the pleasures of reading and discussing literature worth talking about.

Adventures in the Word Trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slow Mail, the Letter Writers Alliance, and My Cousin Down the Street

One of my favorite people in New Haven is my second cousin Andy, who happens to live two blocks away from us, down the street, with his wife, Karen. Lest you think this is all about how wonderfully tight-knit my family is, and how great it is we live so near to one another, blah blah blah, let me jump right in and say that it sounds that way, but in fact, it's not true, and the reality is weirder. Andy grew up in Chicago and I never even met him until I was 25 years old. He moved to New Haven about four years ago because of Karen, who, it turns out, grew up just outside of New Haven. But they met in Ann Arbor and courted there, and as for their winding up living two blocks away, that was a total fluke. Karen landed a job in Westport, and rents there were so high that they chose to live in New Haven instead. And the nicest apartment they saw, when they were looking around, was on my street. So heigh-ho, here's my cousin Andy and his wife Karen, and we see them all the time, and believe you me, our parents are all thrilled. It's very cozy. Andy and Karen are completely brilliant and wonderful people and they prove it to me on a fairly frequent basis, the most recent of which was when Andy suggested that there be created a Slow Mail movement, akin to the Slow Food movement. As someone who has pontificated at some length about the glory of letter writing, and how sad it is we don't do it more, I glommed onto this right away, of course. (I'm sure Mark Oppenheimer would too -- I seem to recall hearing his NPR-friendly voice over NPR airwaves recently talking about this very subject.) Andy posted a status line on Facebook saying something along the lines of "Hey: Slow Mail. Anyone else think this is a great idea?" And he generated more than a few comments, among them someone's suggesting that he do a Google search for something called the Letter Writers Alliance.

Well, I don't know if Andy ever did that Google search, but I sure as hell did, and within an hour I'd convinced myself to join the organization. If you go to http://www.16sparrows.com/shop/Letter-Writers-Alliance.html then you too can join the LWA. It doesn't cost a lot of money, which is good, because it's kind of a silly thing to do, but boy, when I got my packet in the mail from them, I thought, "This is worth every penny."

The LWA was founded by some stationers who make what they describe as "greetings cards for sarcastic, quirky folks." (That phrase along made me desperately wish that I was still the buyer for Atticus; how I would have loved to put these cards on display.) So they've got a lot of snarky cards, which are way fun (if, all right, not for everybody), and clever stationery designs, and then they've got the LWA, which has a mission statement as follows:

"In this era of instantaneous communication, a handwritten letter is a rare and wondrous item. The Letter Writers Alliance is dedicated to preserving this art form; neither long lines, nor late deliveries, nor increasing postal rates will keep us from our mission.

As a member of the Letter Writers Alliance, you will carry on the glorious cultural tradition of letter writing. You will take advantage of every opportunity to send tangible correspondence. Prepare your pen and paper, moisten your tongue, and get ready to write more letters!"

I have several friends who gave up Facebook for Lent. One of them, a guy who lives in Idaho, sent me a Facebook message about two weeks before Lent began, asking if I would write to him, on paper, during Lent. I said, "Of course!" I did, using LWA stationery. I admit that I didn't use a fountain pen, but even so, it was a pleasure.

Connect at the Cabaret, Old Chum

It’s Valentine’s Day (aka VD).  Maybe you’ve got it covered with your favorite mating personage, your significant other(s), your steady, your squeeze, your spouse (or the person who would be that if the laws of the land permitted), but ... maybe not, maybe you’re looking to connect, somehow, someway. Maybe you turn to craigslist, home of the online hookup, or maybe you’re not quite ready to go virtual yet, so you look at “Missed Connections” hoping against hope that someone out there, someone whose path you’ve already crossed -- in line at Subway, at the bank, on that same path you walk every day to class, on the subway -- is desperately seeking you again, to get your digits, your screenname, the key to your city . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special Valentine's Performance! Sunday Feb 14 @ 8pm

How you gonna meet your missed connection?

John Thorne Doesn't Live in California

If you're not interested in food skip this piece. No, I take that back. You don't have to be interested in food as in Food. What I want is people who like to eat. Do you like to eat? Good, then keep reading.

Everyone talks about Alice Waters. Alice Waters this, Alice Waters that. Berkeley is Heaven (unless you're Caitlin Flanagan, in which case it seems to be a special circle of hell, and I don't know why she doesn't move to the East Coast, but there it is). Fa la la la la la. I'm tired of it, and I am really damned tired of reading proclamations on food and eating from someone who just can't seem to get it that most of the country does not live in Berkeley, California. I know I'm not the only person who's got serious Alice Waters Fatigue. So for those of you who like to eat, and to Eat, and who like food and Food, and who like reading about it, let me make a recommendation. I promise I'm not about to tell you to read Michael Pollan.

Please go read any book by John Thorne.

I know he gets reviewed sometimes Big Places and I'm always so thrilled for him. The food magazines have always sung his praises. But at the same time, not once in my life have I ever talked to someone who knew who he was. I've never had someone idly look at my bookshelves and see all the John Thorne and go, "Oh, you like him too?"

I had no idea who John Thorne was until I read Laurie Colwin (sorry to bring up her name again, but it's true); in one of her cookbooks she mentions a pumpkin tian that he wrote about. I have no interest in eating pumpkin so I didn't really think about John Thorne again until several years later when I was browsing in a bookstore (why do I remember this? it was Atticus) while coming down with a cold. On a whim I bought Thorne's Simple Cooking, and while nursing my cold at home I read the book from cover to cover and could not believe how incredibly good it was.

I mean not that it was an incredibly useful and informative cookbook -- which it is -- but that it was just so well written. John Thorne is, hands down, in my top five American writers writing today. But nobody reads him except diehard foodies (as far as I can tell). Even though he's smart and opinionated and reasonable and funny and wonderful. Even though the books are beautifully designed, about as appealing as books can be (all published, I think, by Farrar, Straus, Giroux, and designed by Jonathan Lippincott, who's from New Haven by the way; Lippincott has designed some of the most handsome books in my recent memory, and Thorne's are right up there)...

One of the great things -- the noble things -- about John Thorne is that he writes about food that is born out of and meant to be eaten in climates harsher than the Bay Area. Thorne currently lives in Maine, I believe (or maybe the Berkshires, I can't remember now); he's writing always about food for cold climates. Food in places that really do have four very distinct seasons, maybe even plus mud season. Which is a totally different thing from what Alice Waters is always pontificating about, which is food in what would be for most of us a seriously alternate reality. John Thorne's reality is much more like mine. It's sloppy. It's not really very virtuous. It's not about having truffles on hand at all times, or mincing about talking about the divine walnut oil I found in the South of France. It's about buying a bag of beans because it's cheap and then figuring out the best way to make the best damn meal out of it (his chapter on baked beans -- oh, how I love it, almost as much as I love baked beans). Foodies who are in New Haven ought to read John Thorne, for sure, but foodies everywhere who want an antidote for Alice Waters Fatigue (not recognized by the DSM-V, but maybe in future editions) should please go find his books.

Simple Cooking Outlaw Cook Serious Pig Pot on the Fire Mouth Wide Open

What's in a Word?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen Here, Spring 2010 Season

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven, New Haven Review, and New Haven Theater Company are pleased to announce the return of Listen Here, the weekly short story reading series in which actors from the New Haven Theater Company read short stories chosen by New Haven Review editors. The spring Listen Here series will take place on Tuesday evenings, from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m., with reading occurring on a rotating basis at Willoughby's Coffee & Tea (194 York Street), Lulu: A European Coffee House (49 Cottage Street), Bru Cafe (141 Orange Street), and Manjares Fine Pastries (838 Whalley Avenue, on the corner of West Rock Avenue).

Willoughby's Coffee & Tea March 9: What Did She See in Him? Raymond Carver, “Fat” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Jelly-Bean”

Lulu: A European Coffee House March 16: Short Cuts I.B. Singer, “Why the Geese Shrieked” Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” John Cheever, “Reunion” Annie Proulx, “The Blood Bay”

Bru Cafe March 23: Breaking Up is Hard to Do Bobbie Ann Mason, “Shiloh” Bernard Malamud, “The Jewbird”

Manjares Fine Pastries March 30: Straight Shooters Stephen Crane, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” Tobias Wolff, “Hunters in the Snow”

Willoughby's Coffee & Tea April 6: Take Me Out to the Ball Game James Thurber, “You Could Look it Up” James Farrell, “My Grandmother Goes to Comiskey Park”

Lulu: A European Coffee House April 13: Something’s Not Right T.C. Boyle, “Bloodfall” Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”

Bru Cafe April 20: L’Etranger Isidoro Blaistein, “Uncle Facundo” John Cheever, “The Swimmer”

Manjares Fine Pastries April 27: For Shame Lorrie Moore, “Control Group” Toni Cade Bambera, “The Lesson”

Willoughby's Coffee & Tea May 4: Lovesick Jhumpa Lahiri, “A Temporary Matter” Lydia Peele, “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing”

Lulu: A European Coffee House May 11: Animal Crackers Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat” Annie Proulx, “The Half-Skinned Steer”

Bru Cafe May 18: Brothers Louise Erdrich, “The Red Convertible” David Sedaris, “You Can’t Kill the Rooster”

Manjares Fine Pastries May 25: Romeos & Juliets Louise Erdrich, “The Plague of Doves” Wiliam Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”

The Publisher New Haven Review

Weasel Coffee Lovers

Followers of this site will have no doubt come across the occasional wonderful article we have had from New Haven journalist and writer Robert McGuire. Every so often Robert heads off with his wife to Vietnam, their sojourn to which he chronicle at www.weaselcoffeelovers.com. We like Robert, and his blog postings on Vietnam are thoughtful disquisitions on the daily life in this region of far East Asia where so much American treasure and blood was consumed. To that end, we think it more than worthwhile for our readers to take the trip over there and see, from the perspective of a New Haven writer, this remarkable region of the world.

The Publisher New Haven Review

Grant On!

This posting is a courtesy notice for local writers. In brief, a new grant for writers has been established by the Greater Hartford Arts Council, and though Hartford is not New Haven and never shall the twain be mistaken for one another, greater New Haven area writers can apply.

Entitled the 2010 Solo Writers Fellowship (as opposed to the 2010 Dynamic Duo Writers or 2010 Kingston Trio Writers Fellowship?), the Solo Writers Fellowship provides a limited number of awards to writers of various genres who live or work in Connecticut.

Four fellowships of $2,375 each will be awarded based on a panel's review of writer's application, work samples and professional work history. The purpose of this grant program is to reinforce the importance and value of writers within our community by supporting activities related to the artistic process, such as, but not limited to, rental fees, travel costs and/or living expenses while creating new work. We envision this grant program to support several weeks' worth of living and working in a temporary space that fosters imagination, focus and creativity.

Applications are due March 1, 2010. For more information, including Guidelines and Application forms, please click: http://www.letsgoarts.org/writersfellowship.

This grant is made possible through the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, and administered by the Greater Hartford Arts Council.

For more information, contact: Greater Hartford Arts Council 45 Pratt Street P.O. Box 231436 Hartford, CT 06123-1436 860-525-8629 info@LetsGoArts.org

The Yale Murder. Not that one. The other one.

I noticed in the New York Times an obituary for Jack Litman, an attorney who defended a lot of people who weren't such nice people. He handled a few notorious murder trials, and the Times named two in particular: one, the Robert Chambers/Jennifer Levin trial, "the Preppy Murder," which I actually remember, dimly (I was a teenager when it happened), and also a murder trial that was called "the Yale Murder." It was interesting to me that the Times made a point of referring to the Yale Murder, because, what with the latest big Yale murder, the Annie Le case, in all the coverage of that case I kept looking in the media for a reference to the earlier murder, and never saw it. I would have thought that someone would have brought it up, but, no, it never happened.

The only reason I know about the Yale Murder is that someone once asked me to locate a copy of the true crime book that it inspired. I located a copy for the customer, and then, because I like reading true crime, I got another copy for myself (finding it by chance at a junk shop, ironically, after putting actual effort into finding the customer his copy). I still have it. It's a bright magenta mass market paperback. Presumably for legal reasons the publisher was prevented from using Yale blue...

Now out of print, the book tells the story of the people involved in the case -- Richard Herrin and Bonnie Garland, two Yale undergrads who were involved in a relationship that had a bad ending (when Herrin killed Garland in her parents' Westchester house). This happened in the 1970s, and while I was here at the time, I was too young to have been aware of it.

I find it sort of weird that the "original" Yale Murder has become such an obscure historical fact, even here in New Haven, where I feel like we all have such long memories for things like this. People talk about Penny Serra like it happened yesterday. But the "Yale Murder"? Nope.

Maybe it's because Bonnie Garland wasn't actually murdered in New Haven. But even so. Even so. It's a Yale crime. Where did it go in our collective memories? Bonnie Garland is now, it seems, just a little note in Jack Litman's obituary.

Futures Past

Terry Gilliam’s latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, is currently playing at the Criterion Cinema in New Haven, but I haven’t seen it yet.  However, two unique films directed by Gilliam (which I consider his best, or are at least the ones I remember best), Brazil (1985) and 12 Monkeys (1995), are showing tonight and tomorrow night, respectively, at the Whitney Humanities Center on Wall Street, at 7 p.m., courtesy of  The Yale Film Society and Films at the Whitney. Not wanting to give anything away, if you haven’t seen these films, I’d say they’re well worth your attention if you like fables of the future with a quirky relation to the present.  Do I mean the present when the films appeared or the current present?  Both, I think.

Brazil is set in a kind of Orwellian future that knows itself to be Orwellian -- the way that Orwell’s 1984, ostensibly set in 1984 but written in 1948, has a relentless feel of the immediate post-WWII world.  Brazil is like that too: it looks like a future that dates back to Orwell’s 1984 as homage (the film appeared in 1985, note) and as comment on the datedness of the kind of dystopia it re-imagines for us.  A Ministry of Information “sometime in the 21st century” that uses pneumatic tubes for interoffice communication?  Computer consoles that look like ham-radios with screens?  Warrens of nameless workers who are only male and wearing suits that look like the ‘40s?

But there are elements that make it feel ‘80ish too: fashion statements such as a stunning hat that actually appears to be a ladies’ leopard-print high heel inverted on the wearer’s head; increasingly disastrous cosmetic surgery interventions; a female heroine with short spiky hair who is more butch than the willowy male hero (a twitchy, sadsack Jonathan Pryce); add to this the vast sets that recall, deliberately, Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and you have something like a retro-chic version of how the police state might morph before the millenium.

There’s plenty of Gilliam’s characteristic wide-angle and fish-eye camera work, lots of visual distortion, evocative uses of lighting and scale and, as usual with the former Monty Python animator, endless visual fun, including a Battleship Potemkin reference (in “the director’s cut,” at least) to give filmbuffs a laugh.  And the story -- with threats of sabotage and terrorism against the state fleetingly evoked, and the Orwellian catchphrases posted in the background: “Truth is Information”; “Trust in Security” -- stills holds up and maybe resonates as much now, post-W., as it did shortly after Reagan’s re-election.

12 Monkeys is set in the future, but not so distantly.  James Cole (Bruce Willis) was about 8 in 1997, the year when a viral plague wiped out most of the human race.  Now he’s about 40, sent back to 1996 to try to gather information that will help scientists in the present day (when everyone is living underground) find an antidote to the plague.  The basic situation of the film – time travel to the past to counteract the post-apocalyptic present, and the dramatic detail of the killing in the airport -- derives from Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1962).  But Gilliam brings to the material lots of fun, whacked-out stuff.

And keeps it interesting and mysterious.  A first viewing really plays with your head, much as the various “endings” of Brazil do.  And the visual palette is ramped up with chatter and crosstalk from TV sets (broadcasting the Marx Bros.’ Monkey Business, for instance), films (hiding out in a cinema while Vertigo is onscreen), music (one of my favorite moments is the look on Willis’ face when he hears, on his first trip back to‘96, Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” on the radio), and the kind of beat futurisitic clutter held over from Brazil.

Other pleasures include a desolate, post-apocalyptic Philadelphia (and a not-so pleasurable version of that city, c. mid ‘90s, that looks truly distressed); also, Brad Pitt, as a psychotic scion of a rich magnate of biochemical products, is all quirks, trippy chuckles and frenetic hand gestures and mismatched eyes, heading the political group 12 Monkeys, dedicated to animal and environmental rights, but which might be moving toward terrorist or guerilla acts -- again, a timeliness all-too-apparent for today’s viewers.

The apocalypse in Marker’s film was nuclear-based; in Gilliam’s it’s viral, but there’s enough environmental sentiment present, together with dismay at the human race -- and stunning shots of an array of African animals loose in the streets of Center City -- to fuel whatever global-warming apocalypse scenarios might be circulating in the brain of the 21st-century viewer.

Federman's Last Laugh

Raymond Federman’s last novel, Shhh: A Story of Childhood, forthcoming from Starcherone Books, is excerpted here with a piece called “List of Scenes of My Childhood To Be Written.” Federman died last October, shortly after BlazeVox published his novella, The Carcasses, which, for this reader, brought to mind The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or my personal preference, Book of Natural Salvation) and Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes as well as some of his other short work.

In The Carcasses, Federman’s narrator has the “FNACS” (the afterlife’s revolutionary forces) taking up what has traditionally been Satan’s rebellious role in Heaven by calling for a democratic transmutation of the dead—politicizing metamorphosis, the apparent essence of nature itself.

The Carcasses is not a human-centered fable. It’s not even biocentric, since there’s just as great a likelihood that at some point in one’s eternity those who’ve passed on will come back to this dimension as a piss pot. The novella’s flexible topology, its permeability of self, the apparent possibility of its imaginary carcass narrator’s future enlightenment (or is it escape?) from karma, its wheel of life, make Federman’s novel a pleasure to read. And in the end, when facing transmutation, these feelings about civil rights among the dead seem irrelevant. Too much freedom and freedom becomes meaningless, an emptiness that seems a death itself. A carcass with too much freedom is, perhaps, too much a carcass. One who’s free of one’s self is without self.

We laugh at all this death because we’re dying ourselves, which means we’re alive. It’s seems grief can tickle our funny bone. Why? What does it say about us that we can laugh at death?

In The Carcasses, one sees mind, matter and energy seeking to sustain their interrelated disequilibria for as long as possible, creating an unsentimental journey with a dash of Calvino’s “lightness,” a bit of Laurence Sterne the Psychonaut resisting his uncarcassization…forever digressing because the novella’s ending is the carcass's ending…

Unlike The Carcasses,Federman’s last story, Shhh: A Story of Childhood, seems from the brief yet tantalizing excerpt as posted an ever-playful, ever-youthful spirit looking back, planning ahead despite the fact…despite the unspeakable…laughing…

I was one of Raymond’s students at SUNY Buffalo in the mid-1990s and was quite surprised when, in one of our last email exchanges before he died, he offered that Proust had influenced him more than Beckett. He’d barely mentioned Proust in the fifteen years we’d known each other. He said I should read Proust if I wanted to know what he meant. I recently began following that advice, and one of the first things I came across, while doing some preliminary reading, was Proust’s alleged statement that "An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates."

The excerpt of Shhh is a list of things to do, an imperative litany fleshing out memory before it slips forever into the past tense, beginning with his Uncle Leon’s planting a tree, his digging in the yard, a metaphor for Federman’s digging through memory, planting and dispersing seeds in the mind evolving into word-beings that populate a living text…a family tree…and in less than an hour Federman makes a universe of memories that never were, memories of senses left un-sensed…in a vase, or urn.

Federman’s list of things to do is a list of things never done, the outline of some unspeakable undone, knowing that if not for the Holocaust, these word-beings would have been people who would have, like us, had sex with themselves and others, congregated for various reasons, become excited over political ideas and whatnot, etc. & so forth. They would have lived messy lives, like us…no better, no worse...mois…nous.

This list of 33 imperatives perhaps signifies "Solomon's Seal" or the "Star of David," a mature family tree that never bloomed except in these stories, and in Federman’s mind where his imagination lived for them and words became beings. The ninth item is, perhaps, the most poignant if the reader’s aware of Federman’s actual biography and the myth Federman created through fifty years of critifiction, surfiction, and laughtrature. It’s here where his family leaves Paris, rather than staying as they actually did, when the Nazis invaded.

Then, three points later: “Scene demonstrating how verisimilitude often becomes improbable when one tells a story.”

Feel the fiction of the fiction to your bones.

I have a feeling that Shhh: A Story of Childhood might be my favorite of all Federman’s books, but I’ll have to wait and see like everyone else.

And that’s hard.

Seeing in the Dark

Reading Charlotte Garrett Currier’s Shadow and Light: A Retrospective left me conflicted: Had Ijust finished a book of poetry or listened to a Charles Auguste De Beriot movement? Currier incontestably has a vigilant ear for the metrical line unit, creating impeccable rhythms, balancing the traditional formalities of meter and rhyme scheme. Her work is a unique, eye-pleasing  integration of extant linguistic idiosyncrasies with avant-garde typography. Perhaps it is fortuitous that I do not have to answer my question of whether Currier writes poetry or composes music. As Dylan Thomas once offered, “Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing.” At heart, the intent of poetry is to make the audience feel, and feel deeply, and Currier, through this highly metrical almost-memoir, certainly reminds us what it is to wholly feel—whether we wish to be so reminded or not.

Shadow and Light is divided into four sections (although an argument could be made that its "New York City Suite" qualifies as a fifth). Each section—more emotionally brazen and yet more private than its last—captures the shadow and light of wending through those most basic realities of life: contingency, stability, stagnancy. Even so, Currier concludes the book with a lightheartedness that supplies a welcome break from occasionally opaque verse, paying homage to former students, converging both the obscurity and the lucidity of memory. With each section, the audience is bound to poetic persona ever more tightly—sometimes, too tightly.

Shadow and Light is also visually poetic. The New York City Suite pages shift in layout to white print on black paper with short lyrical, witty poems staggered about the page and framed by reverse-image photo brackets. Pages come to resemble a personal photo board, adding an extra emotive power that forces the audience to engage at an altogether graphic level with the the ravages of memory. The black-and-white formatting throughout offers a tangible reflection of the title, immersing readers within remnants of “occasions forgotten or indistinguishable.” Solidifying the connections among memory, verbal artifacts (the poems), and relational reality, Currier shows no shame supplying personal dedications to several of the pieces. Both the layout and the poems offer each page a transparent physicality.

Following the arrangement by section, the poetry—like life itself—in Shadow and Light follows a series of phases, all organized under the unitary motif of relationship and memory. Embodied in poetic form, Currier pairs loss with humor, darkness with lightness, embracing memory within the corporeality of emotion. Her collection offers euphoric poems expressive of empathy and reflective in their proclivity to quip. In the end, her dexterous and sometime even volatile use of meter, held together with her voracious (at times wry) voice, provides readers with a look back at a life lived with the kind of honesty that oftentimes only poetry can deliver, or as Currier suggests: “These poems, like a long train journey, end at a place not yet home, yet not unknown.”

A Single Man

Directed by Tom Ford, from a script by Ford and David Scearce and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood

It's hard not to notice that A Single Man's timing seems a little awkward. For starters, there's that inevitable confusion with the Coen brothers' A Serious Man, and the fact of both movies having to do with horn-rimmed sad sacks who feel trapped in the peculiar quicksand of 1960s Americana.

What's more, maybe it's just too late now to get a great film from Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel of one day in a closeted man's suddenly lonely life. Certainly director Tom Ford and co-writer David Scearce seem to take that seminal gay-lib text for granted. An established fashion designer who made his name peddling erotically flamboyant luxury, Ford sees A Single Man as sedulous diversion: just one long and lovely and carefully struck pose.

In 1962, as Soviet missiles are piling up in Cuba and college kids are giving up in Los Angeles, Colin Firth is George Falconer, quite clearly the best dressed professor of English ever to have walked the Earth (although in that regard he is not without competition). Having just learned of his lover's death, George has taken to radiating sartorially magnificent grief, thinking suicidal thoughts and trudging around in his splendid home. He has a support system of sorts, cobbled together from a fetchingly boozy best friend (Julianne Moore), a flirty student in a fuzzy sweater (Nicholas Hoult), and a full-on come-hither hustler (Jon Kortajarena), but nothing quite lights George up like the memory of his soulmate, who's played in flashbacks by Matthew Goode.

In fact, Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau take that lighting up very literally, setting it off as a periodic efflorescence from their meticulously pallid status quo. As if Firth's face, here a marvel of emotive subtlety and control, somehow weren't enough to get the point across. That's really the best and most confounding thing going on in here: an extraordinary central performance without which the whole movie, flan-like confection that it is, might completely collapse. It's astonishing to see how nimbly Firth navigates the simultaneous numbness and volatility that mourning can bring. And it's frustrating to see him, along with every other shrewdly self-possessed performer in his supporting cast, not so much directed as tastefully arranged within the frame.

Given the milieu of a hazy, uneasy neverland somewhere between conservative cultural nostalgia and foundational progressive mythology, it's no surprise that Ford should want to reduce all of A Single Man's feeling to a languid fashion-mag swoon. (Is that moment set in front of a billboard for Hitchcock's Psycho actually meaningful, or just something the filmmaker saw in another movie once?) But his characterization of the dapper, depressive George risks reinforcing a mopey and preening stereotype -- the core of queer vanity behind a veil of hollow flair -- that Isherwood sought preemptively to peel away. Funny, and sad, how times have changed.

White Readers Meet Black Authors

I was delighted to come across the utterly appropriately titled blog White Readers Meet Black Authors, "your official invitation into the African American section of the bookstore," maintained by novelist Carleen Brice. There is little I can say about this blog that Brice hasn't said already, from the video she has on the blog itself to the piece she wrote in December 2008 for the Washington Post. When she started the blog, New York Magazine viewed it as a publicity stunt, and it is that. But Brice is also getting at something very real about the book market; just read the blog and see if you don't agree with her. But more importantly, read the blog for the books she champions. Thanks to White Readers Meet Black Authors, I've been devouring Victor LaValle's The Ecstatic, and his latest book, the very well-reviewed Big Machine, just might be next. I bought both at the same time at McNally Jackson, and the woman behind the cash register smiled.

"Going on a LaValle bender?" she said.

"It looks that way," I said.

She nodded. "You won't be disappointed." I believe her.