Lebanon (Film Review)

Lebanon is an Israeli film that played in U.S. theaters for a few weeks last summer.  For those who missed its initial release, it just came out on DVD and is worth catching.  While not the absolute masterpiece that some of my fellow critics have claimed, it is a very good film that boasts the ability to milk unbearable suspense out of war film cliches. Set during the First Lebanon War, it tells the story of an Israeli tank crew.  Shmulik (Yoav Donat) is the gunner and the new member of the crew.  Assi (Itay Tiran) is the ineffectual leader who fails to command the respect of his men.  Hertzel (Oshri Cohen) is the ammunition loader and the closest thing in the film to a live wire—his constant challenging of Assi’s authority quickly becomes a nuisance for everyone in the tank.  The final member of the crew is Yigal (Michael Moshonov), the quiet driver who tries to stay out of everyone’s way.

Accompanying a squad of paratroopers into enemy territory, the tank moves into an urban area where it’s hard to tell the difference between civilians and fighters.  Most of the film is seen through Shmulik’s scope as he scans the area for fighters.  But Shmulik is fresh from training where the only thing he was asked to shoot were barrels.  When he is faced with firing on a truck full of enemy fighters, he freezes, focusing on the panicked face of the driver which, through the scope, looks to be only inches away.  Despite repeated calls to shoot, he cannot do so and this action results in a firefight that finds not only the enemy dead but also one of the Israeli soldiers.  With no way to evacuate the body from the area, Jamil (Zohar Strauss), the major in charge of the operation, orders the body placed in the tank.  This is done as much as a punishment to Shmulik as it is for pragmatic reasons.  Inevitably, the next truck that comes along is not the enemy but still pays the price for Shmulik’s inability to fire on the first truck.

The story is one we’ve seen many times before.  It simply morphs from a film of “men on a mission” to one of “trapped behind enemy lines.”  But for the most part writer/director Samuel Maoz is not interested in plot.  He was a member of a tank crew in the First Lebanon War, and this experience informs every frame of the film as he focuses on the smallest of details.  From the myriad indignities of being stuffed inside a tank (the heat, dehydration, claustrophobia, choking fumes, and being forced to urinate in metal boxes) to the horrors of war (fear of the unknown, confusion of battle, grisly sight of mangled bodies), Maoz keeps the film uncomfortably intimate.  Taking cues from claustrophobic war film classics like Das Boot and Kanal, Lebanon isn’t a film you watch so much as smell and feel.  “Everyone knows war is hell,” Maoz seems to be saying, “but did you know it smells like smoke, blood, and shit?”

While it may be obvious, this intentional demythologizing of warfare is the only overarching message that Maoz seems intent on exploring.  He avoids any political statement about the situation in the Middle East that led to the war and, aside from one extremely heavy-handed shot (the only point that Maoz loses firm control of the tone), there is no reference to the numerous problems the region has seen since the war.  All that matters in the film is that war is a dehumanizing, horrible experience that no one should find entertaining.  This is reinforced by the constant use of seeing the war through Shmulik’s scope.  This perspective gives much of the film the same look as a first person shooter video game.  But unlike a video game, much of what is shown is horrific or mundane, never exciting or fun.

If this doesn’t exactly sound entertaining, that’s because it isn’t.  It’s a film that I find myself reluctantly recommending.  Despite the familiar genre tropes on display, it manages to carve out its own identity through Maoz’s stellar direction and solid work by the cast.  It’s effective at what it wants to do, but that’s also where it becomes difficult to watch.  It’s a film that deserves to be seen, just don’t expect a popcorn flick.

Matt Wedge is a film reviewer, New Haven resident, and co-founder of The Parallax Review, a totally awesome film criticism site.

The Eyes Have It

Bernard Berenson, the famous art connoisseur, made his name and reputation through a seemingly unfailing fidelity to his own cognizance of what constitutes the characteristic style of a master; his attributions made the fortune of the dealers and collectors who sold and owned the works he authenticated, or, likewise, could undermine a buyer or seller who tried to pass off as a masterpiece what was in fact an apprentice work. Simon Gray’s The Old Masters, now playing at the Long Wharf Theater, is set at a time when Berenson’s (Sam Waterston) expertise is not commanding the prices it had formerly; not only that, his beloved Italy, where he and his wife reside, is now being run by “the Duck” (aka Il Duce), and, not only that, the big buyers in the art world are no longer men who aim to acquire taste as well as prestige–such as Mellon or Frick—but rather men whose fortunes are made by, for instance, a string of five and dime stores.  In other words, the old verities are no longer quite so veracious, and perhaps even Berenson’s imprimatur can be had for the right price.

At least that’s what art dealer Joe Duveen (Brian Murray) hopes.  He wants to sell Mellon a Giorgione; unfortunately, Berenson insists the painting is an early Titian, a breakthrough in which the pupil comes close to the master, but not quite getting there.  The sparring between these two old masters, B.B. and Joe—as the latter tries to convince the former to concede that he might be mistaken—is the main dramatic substance of the play, the only scene where Gray’s mastery of his own medium is in evidence.  Early on, the proceedings are much slimmer, consisting of busywork aimed at dramatizing the ménage à trois of the Berenson home.  B.B.’s ailing but forceful and likeable wife Mary (Shirley Knight) suffers her husband’s amours with his private secretary, Nicky Mariano (Heidi Schreck), who must also suffer his amours with his Swedish masseuse, apparently, but all these references to B.B.’s erotic interests seem to be present primarily for the sake of running time and because Gray has obviously based much of this material on Mariano’s memoir.

The scenes between B.B. and the women add, arguably, a grasp of the great man’s character through knowledge of his domestic dealings, but Waterston’s truculence undermines any amorous interest.  And, though Schreck  is gamely graceful and Knight ruefully doting in their attitude to the man in their lives, Waterston’s irritable, blustering B.B. simply shines brightest with a male foil.  And that’s what Murray provides with delightful panache.  With a twinkle in his eye, a leonine head of hair, and an elegant moustache, his Duveen, ailing and driven, uses all his powers of persuasion, and the two men evince all the fascination of old counterparts perilously close to becoming enemies.

The sets are sumptuous, as befits a man of consummate taste, creating a sense of the style beyond means of the Villa I Tatti.  The pacing is too slow in the early going and the final scene seems a largely extraneous afterword.  In between, the best scenes are Waterston and Murray, then Waterston, Murray and Knight—her genuine affection for Joe as well as her sense of their need for his financial benefits add poignancy to the fact that the old friends cannot see eye to eye.

And it’s B.B.’s faith in his eye—not in art per se, nor in love, nor in loyalty—that is the driving force of the play because it’s what makes B. B. who he is, a factor of pride and authority that he can’t surrender without losing, no matter the financial gain.  But what the play ultimately dramatizes is how untenable are claims for art in an absolute sense.  What Gray wants to give us, it seems, is grounds for seeing the status of the art object, the very aspect that makes art Art, as inevitably up for grabs, nothing more than a gentleman’s agreement, quaintly doomed if gentlemen no longer call the shots with their accustomed integrity.

The Old Masters, by Simon Gray; directed by Michael Rudman

Long Wharf Theatre, January 19-February 13, 2011

The Ship of Death

Oh build your ship of death, your little arkand furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine for the dark flight down oblivion.--D. H. Lawrence, “The Ship of Death"

How do they do it?  How does the Yale Cabaret take a story of utter desperation—the doomed expedition of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, under the command of Sir John Franklin, in search of the Northwest Passage in the Arctic Ocean in 1845—and make an entertaining evening of it?

Maybe it’s because director Devin Brain heads to the dark side the way most kids go to their favorite playground, and because the ensemble cast are clearly having so much fun in this dire tale of dwindling hopes.  And maybe it’s because the many tunes in the show, sea shanties like “What do you do with a drunken sailor?” and jigs like “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” are so irrepressibly infectious.

Conceived by Alexandra Henrikson, who is luminous as Franklin’s indefatigable wife back home, resolutely refusing to consider herself his widow, Erebus and Terror is credited to the cast, and that could be why the parts seem so perfect for each actor: Max Gordon Moore, clipped and distinguished as Officer Downing; Ben Horner, swarthy and bawdy as Ferry (his eager pursuit of Lady Death is a high-point, to say nothing of dining upon the deceased Downing); Andrew Kelsey as Oxford, a sympathetic bloke who gives an effective delivery of the seductive speech of Titania to “translated” Bottom in the crew’s impromptu enactment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Stéphanie Hayes, skittish and fearful as Paddy, a young Irish lad (her shrieks of joy from the crow’s nest have a “top of the world, ma” feel); Dipika Guha, wide-eyed and mesmerized as Fin, a mate going “off his tit,” and Irene Sofia Lucio, as Timmy, or Kid, the youngest and most comical of the swabbies.  Add Pierre Bourgeois’s songs, richly evocative of the world of these seamen, all bound—in a string of distinctive endings—for Davey Jones’ Locker, and you’ve got the main elements for a successfully gripping show, supported by Ken Goodwin’s watery sound effects, by Lighting Designer Alan C. Edwards’ dramatic variations of light and dark that, playing on Aaron P. Mastin’s authentic costumes, put me in mind of Rockwell Kent’s nautical drawings, and, through the exit door that was opened a few times as part of Julia C. Lee’s set, by mounds of snow provided by Nature, making the effort to imagine the frozen wastes surrounding the ship that much easier.

Have you built your ship of death, O have you? O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

Erebus and Terror, Songs of Ghosts and Dreams Conceived by Alexandra Henrikson; Written and Created by the Ensemble January 13-15, 2011; Thurs, 8 p.m.; Fri. & Sat., 8 p.m. & 11 p.m. The Yale Cabaret

Our Friends in the New Haven Theater Company

New Haven Theater Company is hosting its first annual benefit Saturday, Feb. 5 at 8 p.m. the High Lane Club, located at 40 High Lane, North Haven. The event, called “Fall in Love with NHTC” will features songs and sketches with your favorite NHTC actors, comedy performed by the The Funny Stages, the group’s improv troupe, decadent desserts, and the musical stylings of the Keith and Mazer Trio. Tickets are $25. To purchase tickets, go to www.newhaventheatercompany.com.

The company is entering an exciting period of transition. T. Paul Lowry had set the NHTC’s direction for several years, creating children’s theatre, improv comedy and culturally relevant plays since 2005. However, Lowry moved out of state to pursue a job opportunity in the entertainment industry and the remaining company members were forced to make a decision: should the company fold or should it reconstitute and think of a slightly different way to move forward?

United by friendship, mutual respect and a common artistic ethos, a group of NHTC actors decided to soldier on. To fill Lowry’s role, the group voted to form a board comprised of Megan Keith Chenot (president), Hilary Brown (vice-president), Hallie Martenson (secretary) and Erich Greene (treasurer) to provide guidance and leadership. “It's thrilling to be working with people who all feel such joy at the prospect of creating theater together. We all share a love of storytelling as well as a love for the city of New Haven. There's a palpable sense that we are building something together that we can be proud to share with our city,” Megan Chenot said.

In addition to the board, the company is comprised of Ian Alderman, Rachel Shapiro Alderman, Peter Chenot, Jeremy Funke, George Kulp, Steve Scarpa, Jenny Schuck, Christian Shaboo, J. Kevin Smith, and Mike Smith. All of the company members have significant experience in a variety of capacities with NHTC, primarily in the company’s critically acclaimed productions of Glengarry Glen Ross, A Civil War Christmas and Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me.

New Haven Theater Company’s current mission is to celebrate the power of storytelling by providing New Haven with awesome theater experiences that are relevant and accessible to all members of our community. “We're excited to be working together to bring the city a fresh take on community theater,” Megan Chenot said.

The group is committed to continuing many of Lowry’s initiatives, including the Funny Stages improv comedy, the Listen Here short story reading series and Reel New Haven, the company’s yearly film festival. In addition, the company is currently in the midst of selecting its first play of 2011. An announcement will be made soon.

For more information about New Haven Theater Company, contact Megan Chenot via e-mail at NHTCpress@gmail.com.

Have a Happy New (Haven Review) Year

And here's what we're cookin' up for this year... New Haven Review is back for another year of merry. Our book publishing venture has so far garnered all sorts of fab publicity, like this here, and there have been successful parties in New Haven and New York. We have upcoming appearances at the New Haven Public Library (all of our authors, 6pm, Jan. 26), the Faith Middleton Show (Feb. 18, 3pm, Charles Douthat and Mark Oppenheimer), and Labyrinth Books (same crew, the next day, Feb. 19, at 4pm).

And our radio show, Paper Trails, featuring Mark Oppenheimer, Brian Slattery, Gregory Feeley, Binnie Klein, and others talking about books, debuts Feb. 13 on WNPR. Stay tuned for more on that.

Issue #7 is on the web here. (Have you subscribed? Are you a library or someone else with an expense account? Are you somebody who likes to support the arts? And likes to read good stuff? Will you please subscribe?)

Meanwhile, Susan Holahan's poems in issue #5 got honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize volume.

But best of all? Thanks to a generous donation, we can now pay our authors. So agents, publishers, authors--get the word out. Issue #8 is nearly full, but we are now accepting submissions for issue #9 and beyond. For more information, write to editor@newhavenreview.com

Winter Alert

Yeah, I know, everyone’s having a collective snowgasm in the snowpocalypse, but, should you decide to put your head outside your cave, there are some theatrical events happening this weekend that should make the snowjob of digging out worth your while. First of all, Thursday night, Jan. 13th, the Yale Cabaret, led by Andrew Kelsey and Tara Kayton, resumes its 2010-11 season with a play entitled Erebus and Terror, directed by Devin Brain, last year’s co-artistic director of the Cab.  Brain’s anticipated return to the Cab also marks a return to a work, conceived by Yale School of Drama acting major Alexandra Henrikson and written and created by the cast, that was originally scheduled to end the Cab’s 2009-10 season.  The wait was worth it, we suspect, especially as the play dramatizes events in the Arctic.  The current conditions in New Haven couldn’t be more propitious.  The title refers to the names of the steamships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, commanded by Sir John Franklin on his doomed search for the Northwest Passage in 1845.  Among the 2,3999 books aboard ship was a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare—a fact that may be significant for how the play dramatizes the snowbound experience of the 128 men on the expedition.  The play, the Cab website tells us, “is a journey north in search of songs and stories frozen in ice”—but you need only journey through the wintery wastes to 217 Park Street in New Haven to hear them.  Shows at 8 p.m, Thurs., Fri., Sat., late shows Fri. and Sat. at 11 p.m. Call: 203-432-1566; www.yalecabaret.org

And on Sunday, Jan. 16th, a special event takes place at the Long Wharf Stage II.  A dramatic reading of an adaptation of Torture Team by Philippe Sands, directed by Gordon Edelstein, and featuring the star power of Vanessa Redgrave, Lili Taylor, Jeff McCarthy, Jay O. Sanders, and Harris Yulin.  Taking attorney Sands’ book Torture Team, described as “an All the President’s Men for the 21st century,” as its starting point, the play investigates the degree of complicity on the part of the Bush administration in the tortures of Guantámo Bay, using a variety of media—clips of Judgment at Nuremberg, presidential statements, interviews, Murat Kumaz’s memoir of his incarceration at the U.S. detention facility—to dramatize the events and their context.  Sands’ book has been praised as a formidable work of investigative journalism that lays the basis for a charge of war crimes against the Bush administration.  Redgrave, known almost as well for her activism as for her acting, and Sands will both participate in discussion of the controversial claims of the work after the performance. 7 p.m. For information: www.longwharf.org

My Caitlin Flanagan Problem: or, Shouldn't I Be Reading Something Else, Really?

My daughter was napping, so the house was quiet, and I was eating lunch and staring at my computer. On a whim, I went to the website for The Atlantic, which I always forget about and then remember with a huge sense of relief -- there I know I'll find something I'll want to read. I scrolled through the list of current articles and noticed a piece by Caitlin Flanagan, and clicked on it eagerly. As I settled in to read it, fork in hand, I shook my head and asked "Why am I doing this to myself? It's just going to make me crazy." But I had to read it.

Caitlin Flanagan is on a mental list I have of writers who I read whenever I can, even though they make me crazy. I've got a little list of such writers. Half the time -- more than half the time -- what they write turns me into a raving loony, pissed about their lack of critical thinking, their shitty writing skills, or some other massive flaw in their work; and yet I read every word I can find by these people. Why is this? Why is this? Why do I do this to myself? It's a form of masochism, right? But why?

And am I the only person who does this?

Flanagan is a writer who seems to inspire this reaction in lots of people, so I can't be alone. I mean, she makes people crazy, but she's still earning a living as a writer. I don't think anyone disputes that she's entertaining; she's got lots of clever sentences, and she seldom sounds simply moronic. But nuanced thinking may not be her strong suit, shall we say. I read her and while I'm laughing at some zinger she's come up with, I often think, "Well, no, that's not really true." And I wind up frustrated with the piece as a whole, even as I agree with several points, or even the thrust of the article overall. Even if I think she's got a good idea, I inevitably feel it's not well argued (which is comical, coming from me, because I am probably the least lucid or organized thinker in my zip code). When someone like me thinks a piece isn't well thought out, you've got problems.

But this phenomenon of "I hate you/I love you/When's your next book coming out" happens to me with fiction writers as well. Over the years, based on my affection for one writer, I've been led to the works of other authors who I've been told, or who I suspect, will quench my never-to-be satisfied thirst for another book by my beloved (ok, it's Laurie Colwin, I admit it). So over time I have read numerous novels that I opened hopefully, but have left me just angry that I wasted my time. Books by Maemeve Medwed -- who are the people who really think these are great? Because I just can't get into them; novels by Cathleen Schine, who I ought to love, but who I just.... don't; Meghan Daum. Oh, Meghan Daum. Her first book of essays made me insane: it was so good, so good, and she was so likeable in so many ways, but I just wanted to smack her on the head and tell her to shape up. I approached her novel The Quality of Life Report with apprehension, knowing on the one hand that it would almost certainly suck, but positive that I would devour it in maybe one and a half sittings. I was right on the money. Why did I do this to myself? I could have been reading something I actually enjoyed; instead, I forced myself to read this novel that held no surprises, no phrase that stuck in my head forever after (not true with My Misspent Youth, a collection of pieces that rings in my head all the time). I received her book about house hunting for my birthday last year and was so excited to read it, even as I knew it would disappoint -- and my suspicions were fulfilled. I opened it immediately and couldn't stop reading but in the end I was left feeling like I hadn't read anything at all.

It's very frustrating.

There's a test I have, though, which is, Do you keep your copies of the books by these people, or do you get rid of them (or never even buy them in the first place, but just borrow them from the library).

Cathleen Schine, I've kept one novel (last year's The Three Weissmans of Westport). There are no Medwed books on my shelves.

I'm keeping all my Meghan Daum.

Why do I read writers whose works I know I won't like? It's not like I'm getting paid to read these things (usually). I keep hoping for the next Veronica Geng, Laurie Colwin, James Thurber, or Patrick Dennis. I'm not looking for cosmic enlightenment, folks; just some solid light entertainment. I guess I'll just have to let you know when I find it, and in the meantime, re-read some Betty MacDonald. She's good on a cold winter day.

The End of the Line: Literary TV and Showtime's 'Brotherhood'

As popular wisdom would have it, the end of TV’s Golden Age of Drama may already be upon us.  But while its possible deathblow is up for debate (the end of Lost? The rise of Glee?), bloggers and critics of all stripes agree on its birth. It is no coincidence that the form-defining triumph of The Sopranos marked a retraction from the over-hyped New York that we sipped in a trendy coffee shop through the 90s, to offer in its wake a macabre kind of success story from across the bridge. Wall Street and high fashion gave way, for the most part, to McMansions and the hot-pink thongs of a Jersey strip club, while Manhattan became just a place to take your wife out to dinner or to hawk a movie script. HBO’s crown jewel ushered in an era of self-consciously literary television, capitalizing on the shifting, ambivalent viewer involvement that long-form narrative demands. David Simon of The Wire compares his magnum opus to Greek tragedy and Shakespeare; hip college professors are inclined to agree. “David Chase is Dostoevsky for television,” Blake Masters once said of The Sopranos’ creator. This was a high bar for Masters’ own show to live up to.  But though Brotherhood—a little-known Showtime series that fuses elements of mob drama with the best of urban dejection—ran for only three seasons from 2006-2008, it is an indispensable stop on the line from the metropolis to a smaller, post-industrial enclave just an Amtrak ride away.

Brotherhood takes place in Providence, Rhode Island, a city more like our own New Haven than perhaps any of the other TV-drama settings. Its neighborhood of focus is a fictional, but insistently particular, place called The Hill, a working-class Irish Catholic stronghold struggling with lay-offs, new immigrants and gentrification. In terms of literary comparison, the show conjures up nothing so epic as The Brothers Karamazov or King Lear: the larger-than-life gangsters of The Wire’s “Bodymore, Murdaland” are replaced by the day-to-day headaches of low-level ambition. In its unrelenting interrogation of what it means to be from somewhere, Brotherhood is more like Saul Bellow’s Chicago novels: to be from a place means to “stick to your guns”—to know it before and against signification.

Brotherhood’s creator is from New England, and it is evident in the way he treats both the show’s financially beleaguered city—which he likened in an interview to the world’s biggest high school—and his two main characters. Michael and Tommy Caffee are at the top of their game, on opposing teams: one is a local mob boss, and one is a rising star in state politics. They both do some bad things and wind up in good places, and they both do some good things that don’t lead to much. It’s a narrative constructed as all means, no end, and major events seem to happen at random. Even Michael’s return from years of exile to kick off the series is oddly humdrum—he simply shows up one night for Sunday dinner and pulls up a chair around his mother’s dining room table.

The characters in Brotherhood develop, but the plot refuses to arc: when mobster Michael kills an FBI agent in one of the show’s most brutal scenes, he does it because he’s pissed off. He is not the victim of grand social injustice that we are privy to while he is not, and we shake our heads in dismay rather than bristle with indignation. There’s no symmetrical interweaving of anti-heroes on either side of a blurred ethical or institutional line, like in The Wire’s finely wrought structure. This leads to a show that is grim but convincing, and which commands admiration for its refusal to mythologize the condition it brings to life.

It may be this hermetic quality that kept Brotherhood from catching on, in spite of its strong acting and a soundtrack that had me rewinding just to sit and soak it up (one episode closes with a suicide and the Martin Sexton lyrics, “I’m tired, scared and wide open…to the rest of my life”). And while Meadow Soprano lands at Columbia to begin her climb into Manhattan’s good graces, the Ivy League university of Providence is as far off the Caffee family radar as the tri-state glitz of Mad Men. We know this city’s problems link it with others like it, but we don’t quite know how. It is a testament to the nuance of Masters’ writing that the stakes we do experience keep us focused on what he shows us.

For better or worse, then, Brotherhood is a peephole into life as it is, not life as it aspires to be. It’s about a city whose troubles define it from inside, because the people there aren’t trying to get out. It’s neither galvanizing, nor glamorized, nor likely all that eye-opening to the viewers it would probably appeal to most. But the show does satisfy, showing that small places have big stories to tell.  And even if that’s the whole point, right there, getting that story right makes Brotherhood worth a look.

A native of Meriden newly transplanted to Boston, Jeanne-Marie Jackson is a doctoral candidate at Yale, working in Russian and Afrikaans fiction.

Snu? What's new with you?

What's new with us? First, our next issue is out.  Subscribe and check it out.  We have essays on being a ski bum, on being mistaken for a celebrity, on being the new New Haven librarian, on being married happily... or not, on crossing the border, on loving our unloveable hometowns, on being sick and healthy again.

Then there's the poetry and the fiction--all good stuff.

By why stop there?  Our publicity machine has been going strong as well!  The Boston Globe recently had an article about The New Haven Review and its book publishing venture.

And then there are our authors and their books.  Rudy Delson, author of NHR Books' How to Win Her Love, was interviewed on WFMU (the interview can be heard here) and our own local WPKN (listen here).

Poet Charles Douthat recently read from his Blue for Oceans at the Poetry Institute at the Institute Library!

And as for Gregory Feeley's own recent Kentauros, we are looking forward to our first radio programs, courtesy of Connecticut NPR, where he sits down with New Haven Review editors to talk books and whatever else his fervid imagination has cooked up--but more on that later!

Palimpsest

By Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Books, 2009)

Through incredible energy and talent, Catherynne M. Valente has been steadily building a name for herself pretty much since the day she started publishing. Her two-book story cycle, The Orphan's Tales, was at one point perhaps her best-known work, nominated for several awards and winner of a few, too. That was until Palimpsest was nominated for a Hugo, while Amazon's editors deemed it the best science fiction and fantasy novel of 2009. All of this success, however, still doesn't quite prepare you for—and perhaps disarms you against—the fact that Palimpsest is kind of freaky.

As the gossip preceding its publication went—possibly lifting a phrase from the author herself—Palimpsest is about a sexually transmitted city; that is, you're only allowed to visit if you find someone who has already been there and have sex with them. When you fall asleep afterward, you go to the city in your dreams; and if you are so blessed—or so unlucky?—after you visit it once, the waking world seems much diminished, and you do everything you can to return. Aiding you is that everyone who has visited is marked with a tattoo—perhaps small, perhaps large—that is itself a piece of a map of, a part of, that dream place. So you spend your time moving away from the life you knew, looking for those other people, for those tattoos, to connect with them, just to stay, in your dreams, in Palimpsest, as long as you can. The plot of the book follows four people who arrive in Palimpsest at the same time, first relating what each of them are willing to do just to get back—and then what happens when they discover that they are connected in a deeper way than they first understood.

Those of you who aren't habitually science fiction or fantasy readers—and maybe some of you who are—may be turning away at this point. You should not. Because Palimpsest, to me, works best as an extended metaphor: for addiction, disease, and profound loss; for the ways disparate people build their own tribe based on a common need, a dissatisfaction that overrides their differences. It's a fantastical book about some very real things, and in its fantasy, comes perhaps closer to letting the reader touch the real than a more realistic portrayal of the same thing ever could.

Which is another way of saying that the best reason to read Palimpsest is because it's absolutely beautiful, heady, hopeful and sad. This isn't just because of Valente's muscular imagination, her seemingly inexhaustible ability to create image after arresting image; it's also because she writes as well as anyone out there. The idea that literary fiction has all the best writers is as false as it is shopworn—obviously, there are great (and lousy) writers in every genre of both fiction and nonfiction. But Valente is a particular feast for those who love language and literature. To me, her writing is folkloric, medieval, Romantic, and at the same time, startlingly modern. There aren't many people who can write sentences as eerie and gorgeous as hers. How gorgeous are they really? I can hear you asking. You'll just have to find the book and find out.

P.S. Here's the word palimpsest in Merriam-Webster:

1 : writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased. 2 : something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface.

Yes, I had to look it up. You're welcome.

Charles Douthat at the Poetry Institute

We, at New Haven Review, like the Poetry Institute, which holds an open mike reading every third Thursday at the Institute Library in downtown New Haven at 847 Chapel Street. This Thursday, December 16, at 6:30 p.m., they are featuring our personal favorite—because he’s one of our authors-- New Haven’s own Charles Douthat.

From the website:

New Haven celebrates the publication of Charles Douthat’s first collection, Blue for Oceans forthcoming from NHR Books.

Born in California, Charles graduated from Stanford University, raised a son and daughter in New Haven, Connecticut where he practices law. Charles began to read and write poetry during a long mid-life illness and today writes about the usual predicaments: family, love, time and memory.  Since then, his poems have been published in many journals and magazines.  A few have won prizes.  We’ve enjoyed his work at our open mic; Please join us to support Charles’ new venture: www.charlesdouthat.com.

About the potluck: Please feel free to bring an a small [room temperature] appetizer or dessert snack to share!

Art in Westville: Frank Bruckmann and Susan Clinard

Hey, we owe these guys!  Kehler Liddell Gallery was more than kind enough to play host to our book party on Tuesday, December 7.  At the party, attendees were actually privy to the art exhibit mentioned below prior to its official opening by about five days.  (See, there really are benefits to subscribing!) We're happy to return the favor!  Come see the show and get some of that culture thingey that Sarah Palin is sooo lacking in.

Bruckmann and Susan Clinard

December 9 – January 16, 2010

Kehler Liddell Gallery 873 Whalley Avenue New Haven, CT 06515 tel: (203) 389.9555 www.kehlerliddell.com

Gallery Hours: Thursday, 11-8pm; Friday, 11-4pm; Saturday and Sunday, 10-4pm; or by appointment.

Kehler Liddell Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of new paintings by Frank Bruckmann and new sculpture by Susan Clinard that revel in the spirit of antitechnology art to communicate emotion and allegory.

Before moving to New Haven, Frank Bruckmann studied at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he spent nearly a decade in France and Spain coping the masters in the great museums and painting landscapes in the cities and countryside. These years of intense study inform his rich palette and humanist depictions of contemporary America, which provide him with endless sources of inspiration. Both a plein air and studio painter, Bruckmann paints that which surrounds him. Past series depict local merchants in their shops, cityscapes of downtown New Haven, sublime views of West Rock, and landscapes of Monhegan Island, Maine, where he frequently travels.

For this show, Bruckmann will present new small and medium sized paintings of the volcanic Gabbro rocks in Monhegan that are more detailed and abstract than anything he has done before. The paintings investigate the mysterious surfaces and orifices of the purple-black rocks, delicately cut by white lines (quartz) and speckled with orange clusters (fungi). The paintings investigate new textures, shadows, colors, and reveal secret biological world that fights to live in places the human eye cannot see.

Susan Clinard is one of those rare artists who can work in wood, clay, bronze, stone and metal. Real people, experiences, and stories inspire and inform her work, which confront issues of inequality, fear, compassion and courage. Since giving birth to her first son in 2004, motherhood and life cycles have become major semi-autobiographical themes.

For this show, Clinard has treaded on radical new ground, and will present a series of mixed media wunderkammers, (“cabinets of curiosities”). Wunderkammers were popular toys of nobles in the late 1500ʼs, before the advent of public museums. These cabinets, ranging from small boxes to library-sized rooms included collections of oddities that belonged to a specific natural history—precious minerals, strange organisms, indigenous crafts, collected from civilizations and placed in a microcosmic memory theatre. Clinardʼs wunderkammers incorporate this idea of the biological unknown, and organize the various found elements in compartments that suggest an internal, psychological narrative. Each cabinet shelters its own landscapes, precious moments, and measurements of darkness and clarity.

Clinard will also present a new major installation titled “Procession,” which incorporates figurative elements that she is known for. Unlike her traditional clay busts, the line of male figures is roughly cut, minimal and distorted. Positioned on a wheeled platform, the men move in a unified direction with a clear purpose, lending to a strong compositional impact. The work responds to the ceremonial weight and cultural significance of processions in contemporary and ancient history-- their association with life, death and strength in unity.

We Like Parties...and So Do Our Writers

From the New Haven Independent:

Westville’s Kehler Liddell Gallery has long established itself as a place to view masterful paintings, prints and sculptures, but its use as a space for a variety of cultural and community events continues to evolve. Tuesday night the gallery was host to a book launch party by New Haven Review Books—“the world’s latest small press for high-quality fiction, nonfiction, and poetry” according to Review co-founder Mark Oppenheimer.

...The press celebrated Tuesday night the release of its first three trade paperbacks, featuring the work of Brooklyn-based novelist Rudolph Delson, New Haven area poet Charles Douthat, and Hamden novella master Gregory Feeley. Douthat and Feeley were on hand to sign their books, read selections and mingle with well-wishers, as guitar and fiddle musicians Craig Edwards and New Haven Review co-founder Brian Slattery (of The Root Farmers), provided musical accompaniment.

Platters of exotic cookies dotted the gallery space, comfortable among new artworks of painter Frank Bruckmann and sculptor Susan Clinard, whose opening reception will be held Sunday, Dec.12 from 3 to 6 p.m. The powerful two and three-dimensional works created a haunting synergy while the authors read from the pages of their newly published books.

And there's more.  Read the whole article here.

Oh, and thanks to David Sepulveda, journalist extraordinaire.

Community

In the past week, the New Haven Review celebrated the launch of its three books with two parties: one in Brooklyn, for Rudolph Delson's How to Win Her Love, and one here in New Haven, at the Kehler Liddell Gallery, for Charles Douthat's Blue for Oceans and Gregory Feeley's Kentauros. Sadly, I couldn't go to the Brooklyn party, but I did go to our party last night. The first reason to throw book parties, obviously, is to sell books. There's also the opportunity to involve the press (thank you, New Haven Independent!) and to generate the only thing that really sells books anyway: word of mouth. But that's just what it looks like on paper. When I was at the party last night, what struck me was none of the above, but that grand and elusive thing that parties, whether for books or not, are supposed to be about: community. From where I was sitting—playing for the event with fellow musician Craig Edwards—I watched as people came in groups of two or three, or by themselves. There is much to absorb the lone person at Kehler Liddell these days (you really should check out their current exhibition), but soon enough, those lone people and small groups turned into bigger groups, combining and recombining as people introduced themselves and their acquaintances, seemingly to people they'd just met. When Feeley and Douthat read from their work, we all turned off our cell phones (thanks to the amplification system not abiding such things) and listened. And when they were done, we got back to meeting each other.

Was it a good party? Yeah, we sold books. But it's more important that everyone came together to celebrate—not just the books, and not just the wonderful people who wrote them, but the fact that we've started something here that we're all a part of.

Thanks, everyone.

Whose Identity Is It, Anyway?

Kirsten Greenidge’s new play, Bossa Nova, now in its world premiere run at the Yale Repertory Theatre, addresses the notion of identity—particularly African-American cultural identity—as a theatrical experience, a matter of roles, costumes, lines, demeanor, comportment, and all the other aspects of theater that lend themselves as metaphors for social expectations.  The play gives us five distinctly mannered characters—four adults and one child—and a protagonist, Dee Paradis (twenty-seven, but seventeen in flashbacks), as the loose cannon, the figure who hasn’t quite accepted any manner as definitively her own. Dee’s mother, Lady Paradis, tries to help her daughter by training her.  As played by Ella Joyce, Lady is self-assured, definite, judgmental, a woman who, by her own admission, has scraped and clawed to escape the taint of her race, the aspects of being “colored” that she wouldn’t let mark her and determine her place.  She spends most of her scenes as an haute bourgeois matron at her dressing-table, putting on her face, choosing her wardrobe and accessories, and exhorting her daughter to find a face she can wear, to make the most of the privileges her parents have gained for her.

In flashbacks to Dee’s school days at a boarding school called St. Ursula’s, we hear of her outcast status among the daughters of the privileged.  The only people to befriend her are her equally misfit roommate Grace Mahoney (Libby Woodbridge) an Irish girl from Southey in Boston, eagerly attempting to discover her “talent,” so as to have a purpose, while sending school-girl crush vibes toward Dee, and Michael Cabot, a history teacher desperately trying to become hip by listening to jazz and by extolling black experience: naturally, he seduces Dee and that’s where the trouble really begins, not only because of the inevitable complications, but because Michael would place a costume on Dee supposedly authentic, as relics from tribal Africa, but as artificial to the girl as her mother’s painted face.

As Michael, Tommy Schrider gets all the comedy he can from the teacher’s gyrations as he rather anachronistically praises bebop jazz as “the future” (in the early Seventies!), and speaks a lingo that suggests Jack Kerouac is not only still alive (he died in 1969) but in his first flush of success.  Where’s this guy been, we wonder, and why the bossa nova (a “new trend” in the early Sixties)—when this should be the era of late Motown and Stevie Wonder?  In other words, either the time-frame of Dee’s school days are askew, partaking of the mid Sixties rather than the early Seventies in which they ostensibly occur, or Michael is a colossal throwback.  Either way, he’s the most fun character in the play.

The other fun thing is director Evan Yionoulis’ staging: very sparsely decorated, Ana M. Milosevic’s scenic design propels furniture and characters about the space for scene changes, and, with Laura J. Eckleman’s lighting design and Michael Vincent Skinner’s sound design, creates wonderfully integrated effects as we move through three different settings, two different periods, and a range of sounds, from old records to barking dogs to a busy paintbrush on canvas.

The other strengths of this production are its two main actresses: Ella Joyce wrings all the fait accompli dignity she can from Lady, with a weathered but musical voice that speaks its owner’s strong will, and, as the mercurial Dee, Francesca Choy-Kee has to act girlish for twenty-seven, and precocious for seventeen (its her essay that first gets Michael’s attention), straight-laced one minute and an Aretha-style “natural woman” the next, and, before the play’s over, call up an outcast’s heart-rending cries.  Hers is an intelligent, wary, and finally emotionally convincing performance in a play that could be, without her and her director’s grasp of the character, somewhat dubious.

Yale Repertory Theatre presents the world premiere of Bossa Nova by Kirsten Greenidge, directed by Evan Yionoulis

November 26 to December 18, 2010

Monsters Among Us

Whether he intended to or not, writer/director Gareth Edwards has crafted a movie in Monsters that is all about defying expectations.  It’s an alien invasion film that avoids the usual pitfalls of the alien invasion genre.  There are no massive scenes of aliens or spaceships laying waste to everything in their path.  The aliens are barely glimpsed until the final ten minutes of the film.  There are no scenes where people of different races, religions, or socio-economic classes put aside their differences to fight back in a rousing display of violence inflicted upon the invaders.  All of these choices about how not to approach the genre are refreshing.  What’s even more of a nice change-of-pace comes from what the film is: a quiet character study. Much like last year’s District 9, Monsters takes place in an alternate universe where aliens landed on Earth several years ago.  Here, they landed in northern Mexico, which has become known as the infected zone.  The aliens are gigantic, tentacled beasts that basically keep to themselves, only coming into contact with people when they migrate and their paths bring them into small towns.  These encounters usually end with devastation as large portions of the towns are destroyed and many people are killed.  Some of this damage and loss of life is the fault of the aliens, and some of it is collateral damage caused by joint Mexican-U.S. military troops assigned to fight the aliens.

Into this chaos goes Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), a photographer working for a huge media conglomerate.  He’s busy photographing the aftermath of the latest battle in a Mexican village when he’s ordered by the owner of the media conglomerate to find and accompany his daughter, Sam (Whitney Able) back to her home in Los Angeles.  When their tickets and passports to take a ferry to the Baja peninsula are stolen, they are forced to take a guided trek through the infected zone to reach the United States.

While that setup sounds like a survival thriller waiting to happen, the film is actually a road movie about two quietly desperate people running away from their real lives.  Kaulder has a son that he didn’t know about until the child was few years old.  The mother allows him to see the boy, but doesn’t want Kaulder to tell him the truth for fear of confusing him.  He goes along with the lie, but as the film progresses, it becomes obvious that the situation is eating him alive.  As a result, he spends his life skulking about the wreckage that has become the areas along the border of the infected zone, avoiding the situation that awaits him at home.  Sam is engaged to be married but doesn’t want to go through with the wedding.  Why she was in Mexico is never made clear, but it’s intimated that she may have run away.

As they make their way through the infected zone, Kaulder and Sam bond with each other as they survive the occasional harrowing attack by the aliens.  As they get closer, they draw out details from each other that fill in some of the blanks of their back stories, but thankfully, are allowed to keep just as much hidden.

This is the first feature from Gareth Edwards.  Prior to the film, he was a visual effects artist, a point worth the raising only because most effects artists that make the leap to directing do so through their taking the reins for some special effects extravaganza.  Often these films are hollow spectacles, devoid of an interesting story or characters.  Monsters is the exact opposite.  While he pulls off some impressive shots of the aliens in the third act climax, Edwards largely avoids using his effects background as a crutch.  He instead concentrates on his two leads, letting the impressive, sympathetic performances by McNairy and Able carry the story.  The film thus is leisurely paced, allowing the camera to linger on the people and destruction that Kaulder and Sam encounter on their journey.  This lends an apocalyptic mood to the film that is more effective than any of the big-budget destruction on display in films like Independence Day or Cloverfield because it keeps the action on a more intimate level.  It’s hard to believe in an entire city being destroyed by aliens, but a few buildings in a small village?  Despite the elemental ridiculousness of the alien invasion genre, that destruction is believable and all the more horrific.

Monsters isn’t a perfect film.  There is some forced material about the current illegal immigration situation (the U.S. government has built a wall along the border to keep out the aliens) that feels out of place with its lack of subtlety.  But it is a very good film.  By focusing on a believable world in the wake of an unbelievable event, Edwards has crafted a film that is as personal as it is ambitious.

Matt Wedge is a film reviewer, New Haven resident, and co-founder of The Parallax Review, a totally awesome film criticism site.

Isobelle Carmody at the Yale Cabaret

This Sunday, December 5, award-winning author Isobelle Carmody will be visiting New Haven. Carmody is an Australian writer of science fiction, fantasy, children's and juvenile literature. She began work on her highly acclaimed Obernewtyn Chronicles when she was just fourteen years old. Since then, she has written many award-winning short stories and books for young people, including Alyzon Whitestarr, The Gathering, and The Legend of Little Fur. Alyzon Whitestarr received both the Golden Aurealis Award for best novel and an award for best young adult novel. The Gathering was a joint winner of the 1993 CBC Book of the Year Award and the 1994 Children's Literature Peace Prize. Overall, she has written more than twenty books. Her most recent book for mid-level readers, Billy Thunder and the Night Gate, was shortlisted for the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature in the 2001 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. What brings this outstanding international writer to our local neighborhood? This past July, the Yale Summer Cabaret produced a play called The Phoenix, which was an adaptation of one of Carmody's early short stories. When the staff at the Summer Cabaret was having trouble getting the rights to adapt Carmody's work, they went to the internet and were shocked when it was very easy to contact the author herself on Facebook.

Since that initial online exchange, Isobelle has been very supportive of the Summer Cabaret, and she was very pleased when she received a DVD of the production at her home in Australia. So pleased, in fact, that Carmody has come to New Haven this weekend to meet the audiences and the creative team from The Phoenix. A discussion with Isobelle Carmody and Devin Brain, director of the Summer Cabaret production, will be hosted at the Cabaret at 217 Park Street at 2 PM in the afternoon on Sunday December 5. All are invited to join for this unique opportunity to talk with Carmody in person. We hope to see you there!

That n+1 piece was mighty good, but needed reporting

Slate has posted what I take to be all of Chad Harbach's n+1 piece about the two worlds of publishing, the MFA world and the New York world (these are his terms). A few comments: First, I admire the gutsiness of making such a big, bold, ridiculous generalization, one that can immediately be torn apart with lots of counter-examples, exceptions, alternative schemas and taxonomies, etc. Such grand generalizations are almost always intellectually flawed, but they can advance how we think about a topic, open up new insights, etc., and I think his does. I mean, I could nitpick him--OF COURSE the MFA students are interested in Gary Shteyngart, and plenty of MFA students are working on novels, and, well, you get the point--but I think his division is an interesting one. And he sure wrote the heck out of it. I mean, the essay is really fun to read, which is odd, since it is a topic with absolutely no consequences for anybody except the people talked about in it.

Second, here is a criticism: The essay does not really deal with nonfiction writing at all, which is a shame, and limits the conceptual reach of the essay. After all, David Foster Wallace's nonfiction was his really great stuff. I think J-Saf Foer's nonfiction boo, Eating Animals, is his best by a lot. And Zadie Smith may yet prove to be a more lasting essayist than novelist. You would not know that any fiction writers even write nonfiction, to read Harbach's essay.

Third, I envy how much Harbach's name is perfect for a Pac-10 quarterback.

Fourth, the piece could have benefited from some reporting. Reporting is when a person, often called a "reporter," makes phone calls, or knocks on people's doors, or sends emails, or even Google searches, so as to find supporting evidence. It would not have been hard, for example, to find actual syllabi of courses taught in MFA programs. Then we would know if in fact all these kiddoes are reading is Joy Williams and Ann Beattie, or if maybe they are reading classic works of literature from the 1880s or 1910s or 1950s. Maybe when these profs teach their classes, they assign "Araby," by Joyce. Maybe they read My Antonia in its entirety. Or early short stories by Philip Roth. Or excerpts from Trollope novels. Who knows? I don't. I don't have an MFA. I don't have an MBA either. But if I were writing an essay about MFA fiction, I would go find out first. I realize Harbach was in an MBA program, but that only makes it more puzzling he didn’t share what particular books he was assigned.

Finally, I wish Harbach had spent more time puzzling over his own assertion here:

And the NYC writer, because she lives in New York, has constant opportunity to intuit and internalize the demands of her industry. It could be objected that just because the NYC writer's editor, publisher, agent, and publicist all live in New York, that doesn't mean that she does, too. After all, it would be cheaper and calmer to live most anywhere else. This objection is sound in theory; in practice, it is false. NYC novelists live in New York—specifically, they live in a small area of west-central Brooklyn bounded by DUMBO and Prospect Heights. They partake of a social world defined by the selection (by agents), evaluation (by editors), purchase (by publishers), production, publication, publicization, and second evaluation (by reviewers) and purchase (by readers) of NYC novels. The NYC novelist gathers her news not from Poets & Writers but from the Observer and Gawker; not from the academic grapevine but from publishing parties, where she drinks with agents and editors and publicists. She writes reviews for Bookforum and the Sunday Times. She also tends to set her work in the city where she and her imagined reader reside: as in the most recent novels of Shteyngart, Ferris, Galchen, and Foer, to name just four prominent members of The New Yorker's 20-under-40 list.

I can't decide if this is anything more than a tautology: young NYC writers are young and live in NYC. Or a truism: a lot of hip young writers will tend to live in hip, young neighborhoods of major cultural centers. Whatever the case, the interesting question to ask is why, in a culture whose great writers have tended not to be New Yorkers — Cather, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Sinclair Lewis, Roth (NJ is not NY, and he lives in CT anyway), Bellow, and I could go on — so many writers now do live in New York. I attempted some musings on that question here.

But look, Harbach (9 TDs and 4 interceptions so far this season) did serious yeoman's labor getting these thoughts down on paper. I was turning his essay over in my head as I fell asleep last night. I think I kicked my dog beneath the covers as I cursed out one of Harbach’s conclusions. Good work, QB.

Also, could I have some money?

On the Trail of a Myth

Greg Berger’s Underneath the Lintel, the final show of the Yale Cabaret’s Fall 2010 semester, was a tour de force performance by Max Gordon Moore, directed by Blake Segal, of a monologue by turns comically amateurish, donnishly fussy, nervously awkward, passionately determined, and profoundly shaken. Moore plays “The Librarian,” a nebbishy Dutchman who works in a library in Holland and seems relatively content with his methodical life and work: his blustering pride in his date stamper—“it contains every date that ever was or will be”—gives a good indication of his fetishistic involvement with his trade. Thus when he comes across a Baedeker returned 113 years overdue, his professional curiosity is piqued.  Before long, he’s taking trips to London, then to Germany—while projecting slides of his travels, both generic and historically specific—and eventually to China, all in pursuit of a phantom who travels relentlessly, cannot sit, has lived an extremely long time, and is apparently Jewish.

The Wandering Jew, of course!  The Librarian, as librarians will, fills us in on the background of this mythic figure—traced back to Christ’s pre-crucifixion schlepping of the cross through the streets of Jerusalem when he paused to rest on the shopfront of a tradesman.  Provoked by soldiers, the latter tells the Savior to shove off, only to be told that he will never rest “till I come again.”  Thus is born a figure who cannot even recline—much to the dismay of the woman somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth century who wrote a love letter to the man known only as “A.” (for Ahasuerus, our pedantic sleuth presumes—the name traditionally associated with this legendary figure).

The fascination of the play—besides the non-stop monologue that creates a character fleshed out by his particular mannerisms and asides—derives from the leaps of imaginative and deductive insight that the Librarian undertakes and relays with the enthused conviction of a discoverer of a “believe it or not” fact, possibly even of a new faith, since, as he tells us dramatically, if the Wandering Jew exists, then God exists.

The play almost strays a bit too far into metaphysics to be simply good fun (which it undoubtedly is), but there is an undercurrent of serious thought compelling its Stoppardian interplay of the kinds of jokes fate plays: in following the Librarian’s monologue we come to questions about the nature and purpose of our time on earth and whether the satisfactions of any walk of life can calm the existential uncertainty of what life is for.

Moore, whose father, Todd Jefferson Moore, played The Librarian in the Seattle premiere in 2003, was, as ever, eminently watchable and vastly entertaining, attacking the role with astounding energy and verve.  Starring in an actor’s play, Moore showed the command of an actor’s actor, directed by Segal and produced by Danny Binstock, both actors in the Drama School.  Praise goes as well to Set Designer Meredith Ries whose set of boxes, file cabinets, chalkboard, slide projector, and other ephemera gave the Cab’s stage the kind of musty, underused air that one can only find in the dimmest reaches of Sterling’s stacks.

Underneath the Lintel, written by Glen Berger, directed by Blake Segal

Yale Cabaret, November 18-20, 2010

Review of Kentauros

Lois Tilton over at Locus magazine has posted a very nice review of Kentauros, our new book by Gregory Feeley. Here's just a little of what she has to say:

Every part of this work casts a light, provides a different insight. But these lights are all aimed in a single direction and not at the fantasy story told in the second and sixth chapters. They are aimed at illuminating the myth. A fantasy story is one way of doing this; a literary story is another, and the several essays cast separate lights of their own. Pindar’s ode, no more and no less, was doing the same thing, thousands of years ago (the Greek poets notoriously made stuff up as much as today's fantasy authors). This work is a set of floodlights, and it is the myth itself on the stage, wearing different costumes in each act.

Thank you, Ms. Tilton. And for those whose interests are officially piqued, please visit our store.