From the monthly archives: October 2009
As the title of this post suggests, now and again we at the NHR get a piece that is perhaps too long for the blog, or too timely for our glacial twice-a-year publishing schedule, or just too much fun to keep to ourselves for long. Just in time for Halloween, greater New Haven-area novelist and [...]
Continue Reading →The Yale School of Drama has just completed its presentation of Phedre, penned by French master playwright Jean Racine in 1677. In this production, dramaturg Brian Valencia and director Christopher Mirto opted for the 1998 translation by Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath's widower, but in the end, there is no knowing if any other translation—such as [...]
Continue Reading →The Fantasticks
Long Wharf Theatre, October 7 to November 1
I was first introduced to The Fantasticks, of all places, by the Guinness Book of World Records. Even then, some thirty years ago, it held the record as the longest continuously performing play amid the less effulgent lights of New York's off-Broadway Sullivan Street [...]
Continue Reading →By Tracy Kidder (Random House, 2009)
I almost didn’t read the new book by the great journalist Tracy Kidder, and I’m not proud of either of the reasons why.
First, I didn’t like the title. Tracy Kidder has had some memorably evocative titles (Among Schoolchildren, an allusion to a Yeats poem, whether he knew it [...]
Continue Reading →Yeats’ famous rhetorical question at the end of his poem, ‘Among School Children’ suggests that the dancer and the dance are fused into one, as an actor should be in his role, as a musician might be in the music she plays or sings. The power of that symbiosis is always striking when it occurs, [...]
Continue Reading →Bob Dylan, Christmas in the Heart (Columbia)
When I first heard that Bob Dylan was releasing a Christmas album, I immediately began to wonder what form it might take. This spawned a series of possible carols, using take-offs of Dylan song titles: “Like a Jolly Elf,” “Just Like a Reindeer,” “A Big Sleigh’s a-Gonna Call,” [...]
Continue Reading →I am not a blogger. That sounds defensive, but what I really mean is that I don't have the mind for it, the same way I don't have the mind to be a beat reporter: I don't see a story wherever I go; I don't see something every day that makes me want to write [...]
Continue Reading →The other day, I woke to the radio reporting, “Lung stolen from Peru exhibition of human cadavers.” And then later that morning, I read Leslie Adrienne Miller’s fifth collection of poems, The Resurrection Trade and the missing lung in Peru began to make more sense.
The collection of poems knocked my socks off. It left [...]
Continue Reading →The Dirty Pond, New Haven's newest art and literary journal, has published its first issue, and you are mightily encouraged to check it out here. It contains contributions from the Dirty Pond editors—Anelise Chen, Philip Lique, and Alexis Zanghi—as well as art and poetry from David Larsen, Paul Panamarenko, Katie Yates, and [...]
Continue Reading →When we moved to this house in 2002 one of the things I liked about it was that it came with two clotheslines attached to it, stretching from the back porches (first and second floors) to a very tall maple tree in the backyard. I'm not someone who uses a clothesline because I think it's [...]
Continue Reading →Archive
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