In the Sea's Grey Suit: The Poetry of Don Barkin

Review of That Dark Lake by Don Barkin Antrim House, $19

The misty mountains that grace the cover of Don Barkin’s That Dark Lake suggest what lies within this collection of poetry. It also bespeaks the atmosphere that pervades the sensibility of this New Haven poet. Barkin’s work is divided into four sections, each with its unique character, which at times creates a dissonance that can be either welcoming or off-putting by virtue of their congruity.

The energy that underwrites the collection, modified, as it were, by that darkness, is evident in poems like“Eighteen”:

In Springtime a young brook throws the whole mountain in an uproar.

It crashes through the rocks like a blind man in a hurry. Its froth leaps like a stallion’s spit in terror of the bridle.

Don’t get upset. Think of the day when you’ll smile a little sadly as the brook disappears in the sea’s grey suit.

At the age when in Western society, a child becomes an adult, Barkin captures the cusp of that transition through the liquid metaphors of “brook” and “froth” and “spit,” whose vigor dissipate into the grey stream of adulthood. In this respect, many of Barkin‘s poems bear the linguistic stamp of modernists like William Carlos Williams, who could capture and even subjugate readers’ hearts and minds with a few, simple words.

Sometimes Barkin constrains this rare prowess by letting stringent rhyme schemes tie down his lyrical, even chaste gems of insight. Fortunately this is not omnipresent, and many of the poems reflect the sincere, almost affable ambience, of That Dark Lake as a whole. The collection delves not just into human emotion but the everyday bustle of life. Experience serves as root and cause of all artistic experience in the world, that “lonely hour of the single light bulb,” as Barkin frames it. Consider such lines as

In the weight of the great trees on the lawn, In the timid, curving love Of the tree limbs on the bright grass, They can see that really Nothing ever goes anywhere

or

In middle age you smell the end The way you smell the snow …

Paradigms of innocence possibly lost suffuse Barkin’s voice. In the smallness of things lies the greatness of reality, of Being itself. And yet, the collection is domestically minded enough to grasp the solace offered--as this collections offers--mental creature comforts: a good book to pick up after a day of “rush[ing] off, then com[ing] back…walking in too fast” and listening to the “office women” gossip. It’s a book meant to slow you down, to remind you that “out there / water flows somewhere / and the quiet people rule.”

Listen Here This Week: Antonya Nelson and Toni Cade Bambera

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 8th week with readings at Manjares Fine Pastries, 838 Whalley Avenue (on West Rock Avenue), this Tuesday, April 27, 7 p.m. Our Theme?

“For Shame” Our Stories?

Antonya Nelson’s “Control Group” and Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson”

Why these?

We didn't know so much about Antonya Nelson, but we should have.   Nelson is a short story writer and novelist, and chair of creative writing at the University of Houston. , and has the laurels to prove it.  This story was brought to our attention by one of our assistant editors, who knew it from a classroom assignment while she was attending  Southern Connecticut State University.   “Control Group” nicely renders the confusions of childhood and the striving for acceptance—the ethical compromises we make for that acceptance—every child seeks. Like any tale of shame that involves children, it deftly illustrates the pains to which adults go—and the missteps they may make—in trying to break the young of the habits of a "flexible" morality that in the end only serves to break them in an adult world.

In “The Lesson,” by Toni Cade Bambara, one of our favorite writers, that breaking is vividly rendered in the protagonist’s tale of a visit to a toy store.  This story is told in the voice of a child whose own selfishness and cruelty have been clearly shaped by poverty and racism.  And, yet, Bambara is utterly merciless in her refusal to permit these twin demons to justify her protagonist's unexamined insolence.  The narrator’s creeping realization that there are possibilities of liberation beyond her “acting out” the stereotypes that circumstance has foisted upon her is what makes “The Lesson” a classic tale of the African-American experience.

Listen Here This Week: Isidoro Blaistein and John Cheever

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 7th week with readings at Bru Cafe, 141 Orange, Street, this Tuesday, April 20, at 7 p.m. Our Theme? “L’Etranger”

Our Stories? Isidoro Blaisten’s “Uncle Facundo” and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”

Why these? Let’s start with a more important question.  Who the hell is Isidoro Blaisten?!  According to Wikipedia, not much.  Just look at the article on him. He was from Argentina.  He wrote stories, essays, novels, and poetry. We discovered him in a lovely little book by editor extraordinaire Alberto Manguel, who included Blaisten’s "Uncle Facundo" in his edited collection Dark Arrows: Chronicles of Revenge.  Strangely enough, most of the stories collected ended up weak candidates for Listen Here (although there is a whopper of a tale in William Trevor’s “Torridge”), but Blaisten’s stood out not only for its darkly comic sensibility but for its thematic depth (most revenge tales tend to be slim pickings in the deep statement department) and originality in literary style and narrative mode (think magic realism). If his other tales are as good as this, Blaisten deserves better in the United States.

John Cheever always speaks for himself.  Perhaps one of the best short story writers in American letters—his prose is crystalline, his pacing is excellent, his diction is aptly nuanced, and his tales are often refreshingly original and insightful.  "The Swimmer" is perhaps best known for the movie that came of it, with Burt Lancaster in the starring role and cameos by Kim Hunter and Joan Rivers!  Like “The Enormous Radio,” it stays well within in Cheever’s comfort zone as criticism of America classism and serves as a fitting nod to the encroachment of literary surrealism in American writing.

Don Barkins Reads

A note from New Haven poet, Don Barkin:

This is to let you know I will be reading from my book of poems, That Dark Lake, at the Woodbridge Town Library on Wednesday, April 21, at 7 p.m. Many of you came to my reading at the Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville last November, which I appreciated. This reading and book-signing is sponsored by the library in honor of National Poetry Month. I'll be glad to see you there.

Lit Up

Earlier, I posted on the fruitlessness of teaching students how to write literary criticism. The argument was part tongue in cheek, part all business. In brief, I'm ambivalent about the value of this activity. This ambivalence lies in the fact that not teaching students how to write literary criticism is not the same as refusing to teach them how to do literary criticism. Perhaps this is a distinction without a difference. I don't think so. When it comes to the art of unraveling a literary work--or as students of literature pejoratively put it, of "dissecting" The Scarlet Letter or Death in Venice--we should instruct students in this activity. I'm just not convinced this is the most effective way of teaching students how to write better, and too often beginning literature courses are treated as an extension of one's training in academic writing. But, in my view, the experience of writing literary criticism comes too early in the trajectory of the typical student's college career. Unless the inability to write has burdened him with remedial composition courses--something of a norm on American college campuses--writing literary criticism within the first two years of study is just too soon to engage in the art of analyzing one of our most complex human artifacts.

A small digression: I've always been amused by the distinction in our culture between the "hard" and "soft" sciences. In academia, hard sciences, like physics and chemistry, are not uncommonly seen as more difficult, more challenging than the "soft" sciences of psychology and sociology. Hell, just look at the adjectives! But this bias is built on a strange notion. The soft sciences are soft not because they're easier but because they're the more complex of the two. And why? Because they have humanity as the object of their analysis, and human beings by nature deceive--if not the scientists who observe them then themselves. Our capacity for deception and delusion inevitably muddies the stream of reproducible results and controlled variables upon which "good" science depends. Pity the poor psychologist rather than the physicist. Grasping human behavior is enough to give even the keenest of minds a migraine. And narrative is, if anything, a demonstration of this seeming incomprehensibility, a neverending case study in the instability and unknowability of intention and response, human cause and effect. If human beings instantiate in every living moment the Heisenberg principle, stories are little more than exemplars of the principle at work. And yet we're sending in students to write coherently about them?

Perhaps I make mountains of molehills here, but I wonder if compelling nineteen-year-olds to intelligently and (one hopes) intelligibly interrogate a literary text is an episode in the kind of all-too-human irrationality we ask them to expound on. It is difficult enough to figure out, say, a character's ostensible motivation; to ask students to peer further beneath the literary veil and comment on the unstable source of that representation, which may range from the author's unconscious predilections to the ultimately unknowable historical milieu of the work, seems sheer madness. Here we blithely walk students into literature's hall of mirrors and ask them to look from reflection to reflection--the cascade of narrative ambiguities, which is generally agreed to be a good thing in a literary work done well--and then expect them to walk out loving the work and the craft of writing literary criticism.

Instructors of the art are inevitably disappointed by their charges, who leave the hall frustrated with results that are more pedestrian than not. At best, we hope for diamonds of insight in the rough. Some students who stick it out may even come to enjoy the ride--despite the results. In these are our first English majors born. But was the ride worth it for them?

In the end, frustrations aside, I have come to believe it was. Uncertainty and ambiguity in a work of literature is a good thing. I'm with the New Critics on that point. But try getting your typical first-year college student to accept that. Not so easy.

That is because eventually they will have to accept the fact that life as lived is rife with uncertainty, and making it through depends on learning how to navigate its shoals. Literature of any real quality demands suspending the Hollywood-driven Manichaeanism that childhood depends upon. Engaging students in the act (and if they're further interested, the art) of literary criticism is among their first steps in exploring and accommodating the not-so-black-and-whiteness of reality. Literary criticism is essentially a safe space to pick apart life through the vehicle of narrative. The more robust and thoughtful the picking apart, the better the training the student receives for handling the blows life will inevitably deal. Better to explore earlier in a textual work why a crime was committed than later in a courtroom as a witness, plaintiff or defendant. Literary criticism for this reason, among others, is a species--maybe a subspecies--of ethical training. It is the unexamined life being examined, through the lens of narrative.

But, mind you, this describes only the act of engaging in literary criticism. It is not the same as the act of writing it. For when you write literary criticism--not a bad thing in itself--you have now more heavy-handedly codified the flux of possibilities that circulated prior to committing ideas and arguments to paper. Granted, codification will sometimes have the ameliorative effect of pushing you to think through and state more clearly your views of the work at hand. For while uncertainty may characterize the nature of reality, so, too, does stability, if only for a while. Uncertainty, after all, is not the same as chaos. And the writing of literary criticism, while difficult in the extreme at times, is not a mission impossible. Indeed with time, maturity and the ability to walk the high wire of our quotidian existence, it is even something we may want to teach. But only when it really is worth the teaching and not before. A softening up that concentrates more on discussion and more imaginative forms of engagement would do far more till then.

Come All Writers and Would-Be Writers

Two upcoming conferences in the Nutmeg State drew our attention recently. The first is the Unicorn Writer's Conference in Stratford, Connecticut. If you don't know writing, you should. It's a bit of a writing Mecca, and the Unicorn Writer's Conference, now in its second season, takes full advantage of that fact.

The conference is organized by Jan Kardys, a literary agent with a long, long career in publishing.  The conference is a fascinating peek into the ins and outs of getting on board the writing train, with workshops on everything from Writing Character-Based Fiction to Down & Dirty Self-Promotion, an art as old as Walt Whitman's ebullient and anonymous review of his own poetry.

This conference runs from 8:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. at the Oronoque Country Club, 385 Oronoque Lane, Stratford, CT 06614 (203-375-4293, Fax: 203-375-1443).  You can register here.  The cost is $165.

The list of presenters is long and impressive.  It includes Gene Wilder as a keynoter and presentations by author Jodee Blanco, filmmaker Anthony Artis, Hearst Books publisher Jacqueline Deval, literary agent Gina Maccoby.  It is an ideal venue to meet those in the business and schmooze, one hopes, your way to new deals and success.

Now on to our next event: did you know that there is a Connecticut Chapter of the Romance Writers Association (CTRWA)?  Who knew we had so many writers in the genre?

But the CTRWA does more than just handle romance writing.  To find out what that more is, you'd need to check out its Connecticut Fiction Fest, which will be held on April 24 at the Four Points Sheraton in Meriden, Connecticut. Registration is a relatively modest at $95 ($75 for CTRWA members) for a program that will run from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

The focus of this conference seems to be on "pitching."  Since literary agents will be in attendance, it's an opportunity both to learn the trade and, hopefully, make a connection.  Workshops here include "Length Really Does Matter: Tips for a One-Page Pitch/Synopsis" and "How to Sell Your Book Fast," with presenters including fantasy romance novelist Jessica Anderson to Emily Beth Rappaport of Berkly Books.

So if the itch you need to scratch is a book looking for a publisher, this might be the conference for you.

Adventures in the Word Trade

On March 23rd, Terry Castle gave a talk in the Yale English department about academic writing and read from her new book The Professor and Other Writings; on March 25th, David Shields spoke at a Master’s Tea in Pierson College about his new book Reality Hunger; and on April 1st, James Longenbach gave a talk in the Yale English department on “the art of writing badly.” What linked these events for me, other than the fact that they occurred in less than a week and a half, was the attention to the question of writing -- who it’s for, what it’s for, and what we make of it.

Castle’s talk, in the end, seemed to be little more than a complaint about jargon in the academic profession.  Her handout, originally designed for a graduate course, gave students pointers on things to avoid in writing, the kinds of things editors will eventually take them to task for, but there was a bit of a polemical edge to it as well -- in picking on the use of terms such as “hegemony” and “interpellation,” she was targeting not so much the specific meaning of those words (as derived from Althusser), but rather their far too ubiquitous use (and possibly misuse) in the many theses that cross her desk.

Fine.  But there was another aspect to her talk that bothered me: the “this is the end of days” tone that one finds in many of the Baby Boomer generation coming up to retirement while recognizing that much of what constituted their glory days may not in fact stand the test of time.  Jargon has destroyed the profession, we learn.  Maybe so, but if so, it happened on their watch.

The sourness of this point, for me, was dramatized by Castle reading from a memoir in which, as a young would-be graduate student in the early ‘70s, she came into contact with a dope-smoking professor who may have intended to seduce her before learning she was a lesbian.  In recreating the hip jargon of that era -- not only in her reminiscence but also in far too many verbatim transcriptions of her journal of that time -- Castle made a point she didn’t seem to want to acknowledge: every generation has its way of speaking to others in that generation, but how seriously should we take such efforts to “talk the talk” of the time?  Current grad students may outgrow their jargon too, but might they not, when also silver-haired and fêted, choose to amuse the youngsters with the Althusserian, Derridean lingo of their day?  In Castle’s memoir, the old guard, all-male previous generation of academics seemed barely worth more than a dismissive glance.  But what will be the fate of the stoned, free love-seeking, in touch with their feelings generation Castle revisited?  Too early to say, but I was not encouraged by the prospect of “tell-all” memoirs rubbing our noses in Reichian drivel for the sake of verisimilitude.

David Shields is a critic and was a novelist, but the argument he presented to the audience in Pierson College was that the novel is not equipped to address the times we live in, for that a new form is needed: the lyric essay.  What that might require could perhaps be found in the direction Castle was taking: in her case, giving up stilted, depersonalized, overly abstract (supposedly “objective”) academic writing for something more personal, subjective, revealing.  In Shields case, giving up the deliberate creation of a fictional world for a first person rendering of one’s intellectual state in the world one actually inhabits.  My first thought was: if the novel is not adequate to these times we need better novelists -- the novel itself is whatever we make of it.   That said, I’m quite sympathetic to Shields’ idea of dropping the “traditional” novel in favor of something more experimental -- but then that was always the frisson of reading Beckett, Proust, Miller, and others who don’t really write “novels.”

Is Shields’ new book something along those lines?  Well, at least his talk made me want to read it.  The less interesting, to me, aspect of his presentation centered on the issue of appropriation. His book is a “mash up”: a tissue of quotations borrowed, edited, re-used as he sees fit.  Far from the work of academic citation, this method wants to treat the printed world as writers in the time of Montaigne could: whatever they read was grist for the mill and could be put to what service they liked -- of course, those texts were mostly in Latin and not protected by copyright.  So that part of Shields “defense” of his method became an argument, not about fiction vs. non-fiction, but about how writers should treat the writing of others, which might lead to the kind of “if it’s online its yours” cut-and-paste methods that too many students already use in the writing of their papers.

I’m willing to believe Shields may be enough of a stylist to get away with it, but I’ll have to read the book to see.

Finally, Longenbach, a critic of poetry and a poet, wanted to draw our attention to how often “bad writing” appears in the work of good writers.  What he meant by this was actually the art of what he called “dilation”: those passages that seem simply to pile up words, sometimes abstract terms, sometimes cursory details, in such a way that risks the reader’s boredom.  It’s always gutsy to talk about bad writing when reading to people from one’s own prose, as the tendency of any audience members to drift off might signal that one is reading an example of the problem one is addressing.  But the overall point of the presentation was to alert us to how often, in poems, one can't address the quality of a given line or passage without taking into account its context.  A memorable line may be that, but a limping line may limp for a reason.

Castle's writing may well have been an example of what Longenbach meant by "bad": plenty of longeurs meant to recall a by-gone idiom that bored the crap out of me.  Longenbach's prose escaped the faults Castle pilloried -- no jargony terms were used -- but the essay didn't offer the kind of engaged and personal address to the work that Castle called for and, for some, evinced, and seemed not to satisfy Shields' call for the lyric essay, what's more Longenbach dutifully provided a handout with his many quotations from poems duly noted.  Shields didn't read to us, but one suspects that it's easy to write well if one steals only from the best.

Reading Well

Some time ago, I joined friends in New Haven for a Friday night meal. Their daughter was in town, back from college. She was an English major, just as I had been when I attended the University of Chicago twenty years earlier.  During our dinner conversation, I asked if she had any professors who stood apart from the rest. She right away sung the accolades two instructors who were notable for their passion and commitment to teaching literary criticism in the classroom in a way that made it just plain enjoyable.

"Only two?" I asked.

"Yep, just two.  Why do you ask?"

Why did I ask? That was easy enough to answer.  I wanted to compare her experience with mine and see if I could isolate the link between what these special folks had done for her and what the one professor who stood head and shoulders above the rest had done for me. My mentor was famous for a kind of literary pyrotechnics that liberated me as a reader and has served me well ever since.

That person was William Veeder, who so many years later apparently produced enough of a pedagogical impact to earn himself a Wikipedia entry. The article there outlines his literary theories, but it is largely a tribute to his work as a teacher--and rightly so. (I'm especially tickled by the classroom quotes, or "Veederisms," as they're aptly described.)

While some of what appears in the entry echoes my recollection of classes with him, what I recall most is what fails to show up in it. The entry authors rightly record Veeder's emphasis on how we derive meaning from a literary work through the intersection of words submitted by an author and our response to that assemblage of words. This intersubjective take on the reading experience is not especially original.  If anything, it is an eminently practical approach to how writers, texts, and readers engage. But what the entry writers fail to capture is the degree to which Veeder's application of that idea in the classroom empowered us: no small thing for any first- or second-year college student seriously considering a major in English. That's because for Veeder, intersubjectivity was the cudgel he wielded for batting away the cringing deference we were all too ready to make to the authority of authors.

Now this isn't to say that Veeder took that much stock in some variant of Roland Barthes' "death of the author." Veeder did believe in authors and their authority, but it was an authority much limited. To make this point he would tell a wonderful story that, even if apocryphal, rings true in the way stories like these should.

The setting: a class in modernism that had come together to discuss a D.H. Lawrence novel. The classroom conversation had become lively and insightful. The classroom instructor then distributed a short essay on the work by a contemporary of Lawrence's and asked for the students' feedback. They all agreed that the critic had badly misconstrued the novel. The instructor then revealed that the critic was ... Lawrence himself. Most interesting of all? Not a single mind was changed: the class responded--rightly in Veeder's view--that Lawrence had simply failed to understand fully his own achievement. As slippery as this slope seems, Veeder held firmly to the view that literature is always first and foremost a literary experience, and that experience takes at least two to tango--a reader and a text--and sometimes three if the author insists on butting in and the reader lets him.

It was the follow-up question in my class, and Veeder’s answer, that sealed the deal for me. A classmate asked if an author's assertion about what a text is "about" should have any standing in our interpretations of a text. Veeder's response was artful: authors do not have the kind of authority that we (and sometimes authors) imagine. Once the text is born, it is like a child sent out into the world to fend for itself; the author may have brought the work to term but her relationship to it thereafter changes forever as she becomes just another reader.

OK, well maybe not just any other reader. Veeder's term of choice was a "privileged" reader, but a reader nonetheless. Privileged, in Veeder's construction, meant that the author had a special relationship to the text as its progenitor, not a definitive one. And on closer inspection, that makes good sense. Take any work with characters modeled on real persons. Wouldn’t those folks, too, also be something privileged readers, with their own special relationship to the text?  

But even this privileged relationship is problematized by the fact that we all have unique relationships to texts, not only because we are unique in relation to one another but because we are unique even to ourselves over time. In my mid-forties, I'm just not the same person reading Heart of Darkness that I was when I struggled with it at 18.

The net effect of Veeder's insight was to empower me as a reader by depriving authors of a mystical authority that not only don't have but sometimes don't want.  True, authors are bound to be frustrated by perceived misreadings of their work--think Salman Rushdie, certain Muslim readers, and his Satanic Verses--but there is no getting around the reality of the situation. When text meets reader at any point in time, it will always be a unique experience, similar to others' in so many ways and dramatically different from others' in unforeseeable ways, which is why I still find The Scarlet Letter a dreadful bore while my best friend thinks it a thrillingly tragic romance.

Let me add that this does not make all readings equal in value or cogency. But that is an entirely different issue. The first step in reading well that Veeder taught was not about being right but about being bold. And in order to be bold, undue deference to the opinions ofauthors is the first thing that should go out the window.

Sorry, Mr. Lawrence.

Travels With a Donkey

By Robert Louis Stevenson

I searched for this out-of-print travel classic for long time, combing used bookstores across Connecticut. Finally, I found a red, cloth-bound pocket edition. The cover was gorgeous and the print inside oozed adventure. There was only one problem: The copy was falling apart. So, I taped and glued and then took it out into the bush with me.

On a rock outcrop overlooking a hidden tarn, I read Stevenson’s twelve-day solitary journey through Gevaudan and the Cevennes Mountains in southern France. In the late nineteenth century, when the famous author took this path, adventure still lurked around every corner of these rocky hills, but this journey is really more pleasant ramble than arduous trek. The chapter “A Camp in the Dark” may be the most beautiful argument for camping alone in the woods ever written. “The wind sang to a different tune among these woods of Gevaudan," he writes. " I hearkened and hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and subdued my thoughts and senses.”

Stevenson’s only companion is a donkey named Modestine, acquired specifically for the occasion. His relationship with the unruly beast slowly changes from frustration to acceptance. And then, as he exits the mountains, leaving Modestine behind, suddenly the recalcitrant animal becomes a true friend, a nostalgic memory equal to the trip itself, in the way that the difficult journeys in life become the most meaningful. And that is the lesson for us in this charming travelogue—anything valuable is difficult, and afterward we love it that much more.

A missed opportunity

Here at NHR, we try to lean more heavily on good books, but every once in a while a book is such a missed opportunity that it's instructive to point out how. Hence my review of Daniel Menaker's A Good Talk, posted this morning to the New Republic's web site. Menaker is a major publishing macher (is there any other kind?), having worked at the New Yorker, Random House, and HarperCollins. And his editor, Jonathan Karp, is quite savvy. So one wonders how the stone and the flint failed to ignite. Or something like that. Menaker had a hand in a recent slight disappointment, Judith Shulevitz's book about the Sabbath, which I reviewed here. I don't know if he was the final editor; he acquired it and then left Random House some time later.

Both books — and Shulevitz's is by far the better book — seemed to need tougher editing. Having just gone through some tough editing for this forthcoming book, I know the process isn't always fun. But it's usually necessary, and it's the writer who loses out when the editor gives him or her too much of a pass. (Heck, if I were editing Shulevitz, I would probably be too ginger: she is very smart, and she knows her stuff.)

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