Hitch-22

By Christopher Hitchens (Twelve, 2010)

I just finished Christopher Hitchens’s magnificent new memoir, Hitch-22. I hated his last book, the one about God — or, as he would have it, god. Well, fair enough. I always thought the big-G god thing was an unfortunate bit of deck-stacking. But it was a truly ill-informed book, one written in bad faith (so to speak), one whose main use was to remind one of the utility of Cicero's dictum that we must state our opponent’s position in the strongest possible terms. When writing about religion, Hitchens never misses a chance to ridicule, or to understand. But this new book...

Well, it should have been obvious that the best book he could write about now would be a memoir. As he tacked from political left to right over the past ten years or so (although he makes a good argument in the book that the shift was much longer coming), his persona, and his writing, have increasingly been self-centered. Even when unintentionally so: whether or not he chose to foreground himself, we the readers certainly began to read him as much for the Him as for the ideas.

So it is a treat, now, to have a book that gives the whole Bildung. And it's just delectable, sassy fun to read about swinging London in the 1970s, when he was part of a set (he reluctantly uses the word) that included Martin Amis and James Fenton, and later Ian McEwan and many others. Their “Friday lunches” became the Algonquin on the Thames, full of wit and wordplay and political swordsmanship.

And those weren’t the only swords unsheathed. The man had sex with a lot of women — and, one is intrigued to learn, a lot of boys and men. Hitchens here makes a convincing and sympathetic case for the public-school incubation of the Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name as a rather beautiful thing, something one can develop a taste for. He is quite frank about his homosexual “relapses” that continued into his twenties, before he gynocentered himself for good.

My one complaint: that he never comes clean about his caddish end to his first marriage, and that he only briefly, economically confess what an absent father he has been, before moving on to more achievements and (wholly convincing) self-justifications about this, that, and the geopolitical other. He has suggested elsewhere that he doesn’t talk about his ugly disregard for his first wife and children because, well, it’s their story to tell, not his. I am not quite buying that. But one friend did make the very cogent case that his glaring omissions actually say something good about him: "Look,” she said to me, “he is open about sleeping with men, but obviously ashamed of the way he has treated those close to him. That actually shows he has a pretty good moral compass — he knows what is shameful and what isn’t.” That makes sense, I suppose. But I still wanted to watch him wear the hairshirt a bit more enthusiastically.

That said, this book is intelligent and humane, and it tells you more about Cypriot history than you thought you wanted to know. Hitch-22 reminded me why I love the author of The Missionary Position, his fervent slapping of Mother Teresa, and his book about the war crimes of Henry Kissinger. Hitchens takes no prisoners, not even himself.

Listen Here Thanks You!

We at the New Haven Review wanted to thank all of those who participated in the spring 2010 season of Listen Here! Among those to whom we are grateful:

The staff of the New Haven Review and its trustees: You helped pick the stories, you attended the readings, you cheered the series along. Thank you!

The staff of the New Haven Theater Company: T. Paul Lowry, director of the New Haven Theater Company, and Brooks Appelbaum, who cast and directed this series, you have been indefatigable in your efforts and support for this project. Thank you!

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven: Director of Communications, David Brensilver, and his colleagues at the Arts Council, you have been with us from the beginning, lending moral and marketing support to this project. Thank you!

Our Actors: There are too many to thank by name, but, we'll give it the college try: T.Paul and Brooks, Eric Nyquist, Jeremy Funke, Hilary Brown, Sharen McKay, Ian Alderman, Rachel Alderman, Steve Scarpa, George Kulp, Rebecka Jones and others, you stepped up to the plate to read on our behalf. Thank you!

Our Coffee House sponsors: Owners and staff of Koffee, Blue State Coffee, Manjares Fine Pastries, Willoughby's, Lulu, and Bru, you have been great hosts to this event. We raise a cup…of coffee…to you. Thank you!

Our Audience: Without you, there would be no Listen Here! We do this because all of the participating organizations believe in the value of performance, of literature, of community. We are grateful to have had you as our guests. We hope you'll continue to attend. Thank you!

For the next season, fall 2010, we continue to experiment with the idea of the "public reading." You can look forward to our exploring readings paired with musical interludes or background effects; ensemble readings of a single story; side-by-side readings in English and a foreign language; readings against slide show or video backgrounds; and whatever else our brains can cook up for the next season!

Le Grand Meaulnes

by Alain Fournier (multiple editions)

I had known for a long time that Le Grande Meaulnes was author John Fowles’ favorite book. Since he was one of my favorite authors, I half-heartedly searched for a copy of this lost French classic. But something always stopped me, until I read Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life and realized that Fournier’s tale was one of his favorites as well. I immediately bowed to the wisdom of my elders and found a good translation.

The title itself does not translate well into English. Our word "great" doesn’t really capture the subtleties of the French "grand." So, this title sometimes gets changed to The Wanderer or The Lost Domaine, which I prefer. It captures the essence of the novel’s heart, Meaulnes’ mystical journey to a bizarre masked world that he and his narrator friend can never find again.

Fournier died in World War I and never had the chance to develop into what he surely would have been—one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists. The delicate descriptions and marvelous evocations of youth have never been more real and bittersweet. This is a book that can be enjoyed for its magic by a child or for its nostalgia by an adult. Still, this is a novel of the in-between time, of adolescence, of growing from that child who wonders happily at the mysteries of the universe to the adult who must take sorrowful responsibility.

We all wish for a place like the lost domaine and a magical experience like Meaulnes has there. But these experiences can consume us until the rest of life seems dry and flat, just as it does for the French wanderer and his friends. Never have the transitions and compromises of life seemed more painful than when Fournier’s fragile characters face them. And this is the central message of the text, that growing up is painful and even the most rebellious of us must bow to the inevitable.

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

Listen Here This Week: William Faulkner and Louise Erdrich

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 12th week with readings at Manjares Fine Pastries, this Tuesday, 838 Whalley Avenue (on West Rock Avenue), May 25, 7 p.m. Our Theme? “Romeos & Juliets”

Our Stories? Louise Erdrich’s “The Plague of Doves” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”

Why these? Ah, Louise, again. We just couldn’t help ourselves, and besides, this story fits the theme so well. “A Plague of Doves” is a wonderfully touching story of young love, too young to grasp fully the story it finds itself engaged in. This, too, we discovered while waiting in an airport and perusing The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford. The story first appeared in The New Yorker.

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a classic of the southern Gothic tradition. Spinster, possibly wandering lover, gossipy townsfolk—it’s all there, and Faulkner manages to bring it together with the same Southern polish he gives much of his short fiction.

Our First Reading Experiment

Evelineby James Joyce read by Bennett Lovett-Graff [Click title to download]

Digital sound recorder in hand, we consider this the first of, we hope, several experiments in sound recordings of the written word by and from the New Haven Review.

In this case, attached as an MP3, and thus playable on your computer or downloadable to your iPod or the MP3 of your choosing is James Joyce's short short story, "Eveline," appreared in 1914 as part of his short story collection Dubliners. We think hardly more need be said.

My Baby just wrote me a letter.

Continuing a theme: on letter writing: I’ve written and mailed two handwritten cards in the last few days, and I’ve been a magnet, recently, for books about letters. One is a book that came out a couple of years ago, Other People’s Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant to See, edited by Bill Shapiro. The other was Ben Greenman’s forthcoming collection of short stories, What He’s Poised to Do.

Bill Shapiro’s book appeared before me, in perfect condition, at a tag sale. I’m not sure it had ever been read. It had almost certainly been given as a romantic gift to someone (the book lacked an inscription, so I can’t prove that; but experience as a bookseller tells me the odds are good). The book looked unread. Clearly the owner had decided, “All right: enough’s enough, I don’t need this anymore.” And the book was banished to the church tag sale donation pile, along with old children’s books, dogeared and chewed up, and bad cookbooks, bought with good intentions but never used.

I bought it because its appearance was, I felt, a Sign. A few days previous to this, an old friend of mine -- someone with whom I engaged in extensive written correspondence for years and years (we now communicate, sporadically, via email) sent me a copy of Ben Greenman’s forthcoming collection of short stories. My friend clearly thought, “Hm, stories about letters. Who would want to read this? Oh: Eva.” I’m not sure what this says about me, but I’ll take it. The book was sent, received, and read pretty much in the same little windows of time in which I acquired and read the Bill Shapiro book, and it’s been an interesting little experiment, continuing what seems to be an ongoing concern of mine: what it means to write letters to anyone these days.

I don’t have any hard and fast proclamations on the subject but one thing is clear to me: people can say all they want that letter writing is dead, but it clearly is not.

Shapiro’s book is fascinating in that voyeuristic way you’d expect. It’s fun to leaf through -- some of the letters are just beautiful to behold, some of them are really works of comic genius, and some of them are gut-wrenchingly sad; you remember every stage of your own roller-coaster ride through romantic life as you go through the book -- but it’s not a book I lingered over.

Greenman’s book, on the other hand, is more of a challenge. The book isn’t a collection of letters; it’s a book wherein letters are central characters in their own right. The fourteen stories in What He’s Poised to Do are set in different places and different times. Each story starts with its title and a postmark serving as a dateline (“Seventeen Different Ways to Get a Load of That,” Lunar City, 1989; “Against Samantha,” New York City, 1928), which is a nice touch.

I’m afraid that, the older I get, the less good I am with fiction. I read it less and less, and I have a harder time just enjoying it. So I balked, a little, but I found Greenman’s collection houses really delicately good pieces. This will not surprise Greenman’s fans. He is a nimble and clever writer. His essays are always a pleasure to read; I now would actually like to go take a look at the novel he recently published, Please Step Back.

In What He’s Poised to Do, there were several stories that left me uninterested, unintrigued, completely, in what the characters had to say. But then, others crawled into my head and wouldn’t leave. Greenman’s collection is noteworthy. To elaborate on that much would, I feel, crush the stories -- they’re kind of like butterflies that way -- but the last story in the book, “Her Hand,” really struck me particularly. I read it once and immediately read it again, though it was hardly heartwarming. It’s a four page long quiet sigh of resignation.

The personally-directed written word -- letter, postcard, email -- written to be read by one person and one person only, is alive and well. Even if reading it doesn’t always make you happy. I’m going to go listen to the Bay City Rollers’ “Rock and Roll Love Letter,” followed by the Box Top’s “The Letter,” and see if I can cheer myself up.

An Inspiring Read

Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets. Edited by Alexander Neubauer.  Knopf, 342 pp. This book is a perfect gift for any reader or writer of poetry.  It consists of transcripts excerpted from the amazing classes held by Pearl London at the New School in New York, from 1970 to the late '90s.  The class, Works in Progress, featured invited guests -- some of the major American poets of our day -- to speak with London and her students about poems the poets were working on, distributing drafts and commenting on the process of revision that goes into the making of a poem.

These exchanges should be of considerable value to anyone who writes, for it's safe to say that not even the most grizzled veteran of the poetry workshop circuit can lay claim to having been in the presence of such an array of literary notables.  From Maxine Kumin in 1973 to Eamon Grennan in 1996, twenty three poets in all, featuring the likes of Frank Bidart, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, June Jordan, Philip Levine, James Merrill, Robert Pinsky, Muriel Rukeyser, Derek Walcott.

Neubauer, who taught fiction at the New School, provides an informative introduction about London and the class, and a brief forward on each poet, focused on the stage of the career when he or she appeared in London's class, and often characterizing the mood of the exchange.  Neubauer had access to 90-minute tapes of each class that, transcribed, ran to over fifty pages apiece.  Distilling each exchange to about fifteen printed pages took considerable editorial skill, but it means there's rarely a dull moment.  In each case, Neubauer selects a substantive discussion that gives real insight into a poet's personality, frame of reference, and attitude toward a particular poem and to poetry in general.

Not surprisingly, all the guests take their work very seriously, but it's quite refreshing that they don't seem ponderous or self-serving.  The book demonstrates that a great public value of contemporary poets is their ability to speak engagingly about their craft and their motivations as writers.

The exchanges also make one marvel at how fully in her element a great teacher like London can be.  She leads the discussion but never dominates, nor is she timid or fawning.  Informed, relaxed, she easily inserts comments the featured poet has made on other occasions -- sometimes previous visits to the course -- and, like the poets, is quick to call to mind lines from poems to illustrate points about great poetry.

And that is the main issue under discussion: how to make a good poem better.  Each poet confronts this problem in an individual way, but each is clearly committed to a sense of poetry that does not permit being satisfied with anything less than the best effort.  And each is quite candid about the trials and errors that goal entails.  Neubauer helpfully provides a photostat of the poem under discussion, in most cases in both draft and published versions.

I could cite examples from every exchange that illuminate what choices poets consider in creating a poem.  In particular, I liked the way several poets pondered what they consider to be the main tasks of form, and of the relation of the sentence to the poetic line.  But to pick a favorite moment, it's this comment from Glück, in 1979: "Something can be marvelous and still need to be stopped.  Otherwise you don't change.  It's as simple as that.  And if you don't change, then you stop writing good poems."

This is a truly challenging formulation, not simply to student writers but to the most accomplished poet.  And it shows that teaching writing is not simply about improving the words on the page but should inspire constant exploration and discovery.  Poetry in Person does that.

Listen Here This Week: Louise Erdrich and David Sedaris

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 11th week with readings at Bru Cafe, 141 Orange, Street, this Tuesday, May 18, 7 p.m. Our Theme? “Brothers”

Our Stories? Louise Erdrich’s “The Red Convertible” and David Sedaris’s “You Can’t Kill the Rooster”

Why these?

Louis Erdrich is one of our best-known Native American writers (she is part Ojibwa on her mother’s side) and is a prolific novelist. She’s also a helluva a short story writer, and “The Red Convertible” nicely illustrates this aspect of her storytelling talent. This tale addresses the impact of the Vietnam War--and the then emergent understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder--on the American Indian community of the early 1970s. The story originally appeared in Mississippi Valley Review in 1981 and was collected in Love Medicine in 1984. Its blend of pathos and pain are a reminder of the terrible price of war paid by the families who stay behind.

David Sedaris became universally known for his display of caustic wit on This American Life with his reading of the “Santaland Diaries.” But “You Can’t Kill the Rooster” is equally one of the funniest stories he has ever written, with the added blessing of being probably the most vulgar that Listen Here! has presented to date. (In other words, you ain’t gonna ever hear this one on NPR!) We found this in the edited collection Brothers, put together by New Haven Review subscriber Andrew Blauner, a really wonderful collection of stories on just that topic.

A short consideration of romance in New Haven

Fellow New Haven Review contributor Nora Nahid Khan recently wrote an article for the New Haven Advocate about the futility of attempting to find romance in New Haven. (Link here: sorry, I can't seem to get the link function to work right now: http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/commentary/love-new-haven )

I know what she's talking about. I really and truly do. Romantic life in New Haven when you're in your twenties can be beyond frustrating. I assume it doesn't get any better or more fun when you're in your thirties or forties. But the fact that I am writing this from the perspective of a married person -- and, I might add, a pretty happily married person -- indicates that romance in New Haven is possible, does happen, and can even end in happy marriage. Don't despair, Nora.

That said, even with all my memories of romantic frustration (experienced primarily between 1993 and 1998), my own personal experience has left me littered with so many romantic memories of New Haven -- especially downtown New Haven -- that I can't help but say, "It's not that New Haven isn't romantic. It's that somehow people have lost their ability to notice romantic things when they're happening; because what matters isn't where you are, exactly, it's what's in your head, and what you are willing to do or say." The New Haven Nora finds so unromantic is the same New Haven where I had my first kiss (which was, I feel, a very romantic moment). Naples Pizza is where I had my (sort of) first date, which, okay, was not such a success (the guy showed up stoned, not exactly the way to win my heart). But matters did improve. Through my teens and twenties, romance was about walking around downtown aimlessly, looking into shop windows, stopping to sit and do nothing useful or noble on Beinecke Plaza or on the steps of a nearby secret society; going to Mamoun's at a ridiculous hour; sitting on the front stoop of my apartment on a sweltering August night, looking across the street to Rudy's, drinking a black cherry soda; sitting on the front porch of the apartment in East Rock reading and watching a massive rainstorm pass over us. And there were many public displays of affection. Many. I don't know where Nora's looking, but I see public displays of affection and romance all over the place. And I could tell you stories.

I will say that trying to find a viable mate in New Haven is difficult; this is a subject I've discussed ad nauseam with several people over the years. It is sometimes assumed that, since I am a local, I met my husband here in New Haven. My standard line on this is, "No, I had to import a husband." Though New Haven is filled with single people looking for mates, I apparently did not meet the elusive standards of the single men I chatted with, day in and day out, while working in a bookstore downtown. I suppose grad students are looking for more ambitious types than the type of girl who'd while away her time working at a bookstore the way I did. But it still stung, to be passed over, over and over again. I wonder if the people in their twenties looking for mates who Nora's looking at are people who are looking for mate, sure, but not (sorry) wholeheartedly, because they're putting more effort into looking for professional success.

It wasn't that long ago that I was, like Nora, bemoaning my singleness and wondering if I'd have to move across the country to find a boyfriend (I didn't). And I have lots of friends, male and female, who talk to me all the time about how it sucks to be dating in New Haven. I always say, "I know. I know." Because I do know. But I also think that things change; we change; and, New Haven being what it is, the available pool changes. Romantic life in New Haven is very, very possible, and can be more wonderful than you'd imagine. Give it time, and in the meantime, be grateful you're not paying New York rent while you suffer through your romantically-challenged years.

We’ve Just Been Registered!

Did you see New Haven Review on the front page of the Sunday edition of the New Haven Register? The occasion was our induction into the Community Media Lab (http://www.nhregister.com/bloghaven/). Oh, and by the way, if you haven't checked out the CML, then you should because right now it's becoming the best way to see who's blogging in the greater New Haven area.

Note that CML's list of bloggers don't just write about topics related to New Haven and its environs. Chris Bartlett writes about small business issues (http://chris.followcb.com); Ralph Purificato covers mixed martial arts (http://www.ctmmanews.com); Westville resident Tagan Engel offers foodie advice (http://taganskitchen.blogspot.com); and on and on.

The idea is simple: the Register is using its clout to turn bloggers into news and generate web traffic for its own site—win-win for bloggers and the Register—or so we hope.

We're happy now to be part of this family of local bloggers and for that reason alone, we hope you'll share in the pleasure we've taken in becoming part of that family.

New Haven Author Chandra Prasad Reads

We're big fans of Chandra Prasad at New Haven Review. She's an accomplished novelist and greater New Haven resident. What more could one ask?

When Chandra published Breathe the Sky: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Amelia Earhart, we were all quite excited! There's even a part in the novel when Amelia comes to New Haven!

So take advantage of seeing, listening, and breathing the same air as Ms. Prasad at Cheshire Public Library (104 Main Street, Cheshire, CT 06410-2406) this Thursday, May 13 at 7:00 p.m., where she'll be reading.

The program is free and open to the public. For more information about Chandra, check her out at www.chandraprasad.com.

Hello Dolly!

The Long Wharf Theatre production of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House managed a surprising feat: it made the play more entertaining without significantly altering it.  If you're a purist who wants to see Ibsen played straight, it does that; but if you think that a play like ADH, with its winsome wifey who gets into some hot water due to an "innocent" forgery, then gets out of it only to slam the door on her happy-ever-after home, is a bit dated and could use some kind of make-over, well, this show does that too.

And that's what I found surprising: first, that one could perch Ibsen on the terrain of a sitcom or a soap; second, that I found myself thinking, well, isn't ADH simply a more revered soap?  After all, the plot of the story is pure soap opera, and there's nothing in the dialogue that aims beyond the play's basic premise, which is something like: happiness is only skin deep.  Scratch it, and it bleeds.  So why not give us an A Doll's House (1879) that resonates in a world of McMansions where -- as is only too timely -- a bit of financial chicanery might bring the whole cloud castle down on a bank manager's ears.

Gordon Edelstein, who did the adaptation and directed, deserves great credit for mining the comic potential in the material.  It mainly seemed to be a matter of emphasis.  The dialogue, a bit modernized, was close to any version of the play we might already be familiar with, but this production included laughs that might be in Ibsen's script but which a less enterprising director might overlook.  There was a breeziness to it that kept it from taking itself too seriously, a breeziness derived from the giddy fun of looking into our neighbors' glass house.

What's important, for a modern production, is that we not be laughing at Nora, the little bluebird, squirrel, chipmunk, as though she were simply in over her airhead and deserving of a little domestic contretemps for our amusement.  Ana Reeder made the most of making Nora likeable, cannily dim rather than actually so.  She managed the protean shifts that are necessary -- the play makes us see -- to be the "perfect wife": temptress, adoring partner, household manager, confidante to friends both male and female, defender of the threatened nest, even sacrificial victim (the latter a melodramatic touch that can't help seeming a bit 19th century).  When, in the end, she does what she's got to do, the shifts from comically desperate to happily saved to proudly determined occur a bit too fast for realism, but Reeder "kept it real," as they say, helped by the change to casual jeans and sweatshirt after the hiked skirt, hose and low neckline of her belle of the ball costume as a dancing peasant girl.  The "street clothes" underscored that her role in the household had been a command performance all along, and it was time for a curtain call.

In the supporting cast, special mention goes to Tim Hopper as Dr. Peter Rank, the ailing best friend of Nora's husband Torvald who carries a torch for her himself.  Their scenes had enough heat to make up for the rather lukewarm affections of Torvald, and Hopper's doomed departure, in cowboy costume with a big cigar going, deserved an ovation.  As Torvald, Adam Trese kept a part that could easily be a caricature sympathetic, even up to his panicked outburst at Nora for exposing him to his enemies.  I liked him best at the end as he babbled about how he forgave her, sitting in his big papa chair, and his attempts to defeat her logic resonate so well, even 21st century males might easily hear Ibsen laughing at us.

As the villain in the piece, Mark Nelson's Nils Krogstad had a kind of shaky petulance that worked well enough in confronting Nora with her wrongdoings, and in his pleas to be reinstated at the bank, but made it hard to see what her friend Christine Linde (Linda Powell) could see in him.  He seemed more eager to end it all rather than able to blackmail a boss's wife or rekindle an old romance.

Michael Yeargan's set was a wonderfully detailed doll's house, its fakery part of its appeal, with plenty of floorspace for Ibsen's and Edelstein's playthings to move about and grope toward some satisfactory vision of the future.

And what of the kids?  It may be much easier for today's male to accept without much soul-searching Nora's claim that she needs to educate herself and find a place in the world; but does today's woman find it any easier to pursue that goal at the sacrifice of her ties to her children than women would in Ibsen's day?  "You've come a long way, baby," since Ibsen's Nora first walked out -- but, Edelstein's production seems to ask, "how far would you go?"

LONG WHARF THEATRE, Gordon Edelstein, Artistic Director; Ray Cullom, Managing Director

presents:

A DOLL'S HOUSE by Henrik Ibsen, Adapted and Directed by Gordon Edelstein, Set Design by Michael Yeargan

through May 23, 2010

Listen Here This Week: Jhumpa Lahiri and Lydia Peele

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 9th week with readings at Willoughby’s “Coffee & Tea, 194 York Street, this Tuesday, May 4, 7 p.m. Our Theme?

“Lovesick” Our Stories?

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” and Lydia Peele’s “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing”

Why these?

Jhumpa Lahiri is best known for her novel The Namesake (almost inevitable when these things make it to the silver screen.)  Before then, however, she was a highly regarded short story writer. In fact, her collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000. “A Temporary Matter” comes from this 1999 collection and, we will freely admit, upon first reading in the airport as we were scrounging around for stories, this one brought us to tears.  The tale really does manage one of those few amazing feats of a great short story: it delivers an O Henry-like twist ending—the bane of most modern short story writers who take the craft “seriously”—with a deeply moving tale that is rich in ideas and possibilities.  In brief, it is more than its ending, and yet its ending really is everything, begging an entire re-thinking of the story title itself.

Lydia Peele is not so well known.  Translation: there is no Wikipedia article on her.   She is, however, the winner of a 2009 Pushcart Prize, one  of our sources for  stories by lesser-known talents who deserve greater recognition.  “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing” is a quirky story: it’s about love, it’s about reptiles, it’s about evolution.  It asks questions without necessarily answering them, suggesting almost in its form (as you’ll hear) something textbook-ish about how the world is or could be and notwithstanding that textbook-ishness, meaning inheres in our experience of love and loss, parting and reuniting.

The Art of the Matter

  “Art” by Yasmina Reza first appeared in Paris in 1995.  Shortly afterwards it was translated into English for the British stage and turned up at the Royale Theatre (now the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre) on Broadway on March 1, 1998.  The cast was stellar for this three-person play, performed without intermission.  The six-month Broadway run included Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina, all well known film and theatre performers.

 The recent weekend performances of the play at the Kehler-Liddell Gallery in Westville this April were perhaps a little less glamorous but were easily just as powerful as its Broadway version—in some ways even more so. Where the Royale Theatre seats 1,100, Kehler-Liddell’s impromptu bleachers and 60 some chairs transformed what on Broadway can only have been an all-too-impersonal experience into an intimate tete-a-tete between audience and performers. Placing the play within a gallery reflected, if anything, the mutual trust exhibited by gallery staff and the Elm Shakespeare Company, which was responsible for this production.

This element of trust is no small matter in a play as powerful as Reza’s. The setting is simple enough: the living rooms of the three characters—Marc (James Andreassi), Serge (Tom Zingarelli), and Yvan (Raphael Massie)—which remains unchanged throughout the hour and twenty minute performance. The key conflict is unsettling, one that should worry any gallery owner in the business of selling art. In brief, Serge, a dermatologist and divorcee, has purchased for 200,000 francs a five-by-four-foot painting of white lines on a white background. This decision immediately upsets Marc, an engineer who condemns the work as trash, to the dismay and disdain of Serge. Their seeming arbiter is the hapless and “chaotic,” soon-to-be-married Yvan.

 While hardly a tale of war or woe, Reza’s play disturbs the universe of art and, as becomes shortly evident, human relations. The opening gambit in Reza’s backhanded criticism of postmodern art—and possibly of poststructuralism, a distinctly French phenomenon that Reza undoubtedly had to live through—is the all-white painting that is the object of Serge’s veneration, Marc’s rage, and Yvan’s confusion. But “Art” goes beyond the obvious conundrums formerly presented by Marcel Duchamp’s institutionalized snow shovels and urinals. (Does something become ‘art’ by virtue of hanging in a museum? What if you pay 200,000 francs for it?) It goes after the relationships among the characters, since it’s on the blank whiteness of the canvas that their relationships are ultimately inscribed, evoking a range of emotion that drives them through the convolutions of feeling that by play’s end leaves the audience near breathless with the verbal pyrotechnics of it all.

This is where mastery of the material makes all the difference, and the ensemble put together for this production really does have firm control of that material. The snugness of the venue and the simplicity of the set demand a conciseness of body language that is belied by the explosiveness of the characters’ pent-up feeling. The contrast of so much energy to be conveyed in so contained a setting ultimately creates a bond between players and spectators that only a great performance in the right environment can convey.

This simpatico between audience and ensemble seems exactly the intended goal of this experiment by Elm Shakespeare Company and Kehler Liddell Gallery to bring high art of high quality to New Haven’s neighborhoods. “Westville is something of an arts district already strong in the visual arts with its many galleries,” noted Elm Shakespeare founder and director James Andreassi. “Elm Shakespeare’s goal was not only to find an indoor space for performing smaller plays but also to take advantage of the artistic energy in Westville and deepen it by bringing the theatrical arts to the neighborhood.” In that regard, Elm Shakespeare both follows in the wake and leads along with works that have been aired by New Haven Theater Company, Broken Umbrella Theatre, and Theatre 4.

This article is cross-posted at the New Haven Independent.

Nature Boy: A Review of Edward Abbey

Review of Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside by Edward Abbey

Holt Publishing, 1984

Edward Abbey--who reflects not only a personal need for expatriation and that delicate hint of misanthropy in my demeanor --has subdued Bruce Springsteen’s place in my heart.  Abbey’s Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside seems, at first glance, easy to dispense with as another example of environmentalist earth-mother literature. But for one sufficiently sensitive to the nuances of writing in this genre done well, a reader is able to see like Abbey, feel like Abbey, and travel with Abbey through “Eden at the dawn of creation.”

In Abbey’s essay collection, notwithstanding its focus on the cascade  of nature's plethora, one can see signs Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan and their ideas on how the tools of technology have red-lined the natural tools of society: humanity’s own brain power and its ability to use that power having become dependent on a technology of effortlessness.

To be fair, Abbey had me harboring some guilt of my own as I took a distinctly indoor pleasure in this book of the outdoors.  Abbey travels natively and minimally, carrying only what is necessary to survive, not to live comfortably in a technologically-dictated world.  He brings water, careful observation, and a decisive love for a rough and unlovable desert region, reminding readers that nature is intended for all, not merely the affluent who purchase land only to destroy it by building million-dollar homes and strip malls.  As McLuhan says, “affluence creates poverty.”  Abbey’s desert wasteland exemplifies in its unique way that sad fact of modern civilization.

Much like Neil Postman’s Technopoly, Abbey’s Beyond the Wall illustrates in tender detail how we have quite literally given up everything that gives meaning and direction to this ephemeral, all-too-rapidly lived life, clawing, like kittens, at the conveniences technology dangles in front of us.  Abbey forces his readers to question their decisions, their comfy cubicle chairs, their guaranteed health insurance and to get up and let “the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse [their] reverie” and do something that does not leave them just emptier.  Emptiness--even in a barren desert--is not inevitable, and maybe readers need Abbey to remind them of this.  In Abbey’s desert, it is the fact of this isolation—expatriation, as he terms it--that leads the imagination along to affluence of mind instead of bank account.

Dare I say that I find myself envying Abbey?  How he is able to find perfection in nothingness, in what appears as miles piled upon miles of destitution.  Having emphatically placed himself in a location from which anyone else would willingly die to escape, he is happy.  He is at peace as a “desert rat.”  I find myself secretly desiring to hitchhike back to the farm between a cornfield and a horse ranch and to relish what I personally had forsaken for so long.

Moreover, his keen sense of specificity and willingness to violate his readers’ comfort zones let him write with wit, perceptiveness, peacefulness, and a surprisingly brusque sarcasm—quite the change from your typical earth-mother literature!  If not because his inspiration or his sincerity, then for his wit and wisdom, one must appreciate Edward Abbey and dare to trek “beyond the wall of the unreal city, beyond the security of fences . . . beyond the rage of lies that poisons the air . . . [to] another world waiting for you, . . . the old true world of deserts, mountains, forests, islands, shores, the open plains.  Go there.  Be there.  Walk gently and quietly deep within it.”

Out of Africa

Bernard-Marie Koltès' Battle of Black and Dogs (Combat de nègre et de chiens), translated by Michaël Attias, and directed by Robert Woodruff, is the second play this season at the Yale Rep to take us to vague environs in Africa to witness a drama among a small group of people cut off from the world at large.  Like Danai Gurira's Eclipsed, BBD places us in a compound, but this time it's a "construction site run by a foreign company in a West African country, anywhere from Senegal to Nigeria," where the main characters, white and French, are confronted by Alboury (Albert Jones), a member of a local Wolof tribe who wants to retrieve the body of a worker at the site who has recently died or been killed.

At the site, the boss, Horn (Andrew Robinson), primarily drinks and gambles with his underling Cal (Tommy Schrider), an engineer who should be higher on the ladder than Horn, but is not exactly what you'd call management material.  In fact, he killed the Wolof worker for almost hitting his shoe with a gob of spit, then insisted it was an accident, then tried to dispose of the body in various ways before finally flinging it in the sewer.

This interracial workplace drama is further complicated by the fact that Horn has recently returned from a trip to Paris and brought back a woman he hopes will become his wife.  Léone was a chambermaid at the hotel he stayed at who, as he puts it, always answers yes -- particularly to the offer to come with him to Africa, to see the fireworks display he's going to set off before leaving the country for good.

Cal will make a pass at her (or rather will paw her in an unsettling fashion while babbling inanities); she'll fall for Alboury (in an odd courtship in which she speaks German and he speaks Wolof, though he does understand French, her native language; the double estrangement is no doubt meaningful, but rather leaves the audience in the dark about what they are saying to each other -- does the fact that she's reciting the well-known poem "The Erlking" help?).  Things will not end well, though, all things considered, not as badly as they might have.

In such a stylized play, all the emphasis is on performance.  Robinson, resembling the aged Jon Voight and sounding at times like the aged Jack Lemmon, inspires a certain Everyman confidence as Horn, particularly as he's not that virulent a racist, and speaks for the most part sensibly to Alboury, even addressing him as "sir" initially, and though trying to buy him off may be crass, that too is sensible since the body of Nouofia is unrecoverable.

As Alboury, Jones is given a cipher rather than a character, a representation of elemental difference, perhaps; the "nègre" of the French title is no doubt infused with ideas of "négritude," which makes the whole feel a bit dated or at least resolutely Francophone.

But even harder, for me, was reading the character of Léone who, in the girlish, lost little lamb voice Middendorf used, might well have fallen from the moon rather than Paris, despite a remark about Saint-Laurent's Africa boutique.  Her ritual cum guilt cum scarification cum symbolic gesture of blood-letting late in the play was heavy with portent but light on sense or catharsis.

As Cal, Schrider is the live wire in this production and the play's most dynamic character: unpredictable, seething, at times funny in the way that those who speak in earnest rants can be -- at first, a bit of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now to Boss Kurtz, though way more unstable than Horn.  He also appears in one scene naked and coated in what is -- rather believably -- meant to be shit, and also showers in full view of the audience before donning his sacrificial whites.  It's a demanding part, to say the least.  Whether or not the nudity is gratuitous -- it's Woodruff and not Koltès who insists on it -- it did rather distract from the dialogue.

While there are problems with the play's plot and staging, it should be said that, to give Koltès his due, each character does get at least one fascinating monologue, and it's the talk that mainly sustains our interest.  My favorite speech was Horn's description of a city that would take up only half of France and could house the entire population of the world in 40-story apartment blocks.

The set, designed by Riccardo Hernandez, is interesting, with a big basement room with a cot and cage visible below -- and more naturalistically furnished than -- the spare stage above,the latter dominated by a kind of shack of corrugated slats, a table for the drinking/gambling, little spots of dirt, and some bougainvillea hanging in the cylindrical lights above.   It looks like nowhere on earth, and if we were told it was a construction site on a planet somewhere far, far away, that would be easy enough to believe.

BATTLE OF BLACK AND DOGS, Yale Repertory Theatre, April 16 to May 8, 2010, written by Bernard-Marie Koltès, translated by Michaël Attias, directed by Robert Woodruff; photograph, Joan Marcus

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.