It won’t always be like this, I know, but it’s all Woolf all the time around here these days. It’s strange, but I love it.
When my book came out, I thought I’d leave Woolf behind. I thought I’d quickly finish editing Mrs. Dalloway (ha!) and move on. But I wanted to host the Woolf conference, so then, perhaps, after the conference…
So, on Monday, I stayed home to prepare for the week’s teaching: 1) leading a reading group on Mrs. Dalloway at the Mercantile Library Monday night, 2) teaching the end of The Waves to my undergraduate class on Tuesday, and 3) leading the Modern British graduate students’ group on editing Mrs. Dalloway on Tuesday night. That’s a lot of Woolf.
I didn’t expect Woolf to continue to loom so large. I certainly never expected to continue to be so riveted. I half-fear that it may be some kind of mental flaw: a scar in my brain that makes this one writer continue to resonate so powerfully.
Sunday night, I was reading some urban theory. Specifically, I was reading a discussion of the links between city life and agoraphobia, of Freud’s interpretation of the tension between women’s desire to sit in a window, beckoning men, and the fear of their sexual feelings. Freud and his generation (Woolf’s generation) also linked such moods to male homosexuals. Suddenly, I could see the dim outlines of a footnote, something about Septimus’ method of suicide as deeply connected to the modern city.
I was so excited that I could read no further.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Monday, April 06, 2009
Anita Desai’s Diamond Dust
I first read Anita Desai in a graduate class on Anglo-Indian narrative, but I don’t think I finished the book. I remember simultaneously loving it, feeling it worthy of better attention than I had to give, and being impatient and bored.
A few years later, an elderly man fell in love with me, and, in an effort to impress me, invited me to a small luncheon at MIT where I had the chance to meet her in person. She was lovely: beautiful, kind, and interested in me. I squirmed from the attentions of this elderly man, whose intentions were gradually dawning on me (He was over 70! I thought he was going to introduce me to his son…). Desai gently telegraphed to me just the kind of sympathy I needed: she was not condescending, but she pitied me in a way that woke me up and helped me shed his irritating attentions.
I kept Desai in mind as an underrated writer, a writer of great skill and grace who, I thought, might owe a debt to Woolf. I was all the more impressed at her grace and delight for her daughter’s win of the Booker Prize a few years back: it made me realize the maternal care and kindness in her pity of me at that one sad lunch.
So, I read Diamond Dust in the hope of finding a story to share with my Woolf class, a story that would shed light on an Indian successor to part of Woolf’s legacy. I enjoyed the collection and my students enjoyed the story, “The Man Who Saw Himself Drown,” but I no longer see Desai as an inheritor of a Woolfian voice. And I still feel deeply ambivalent about exploiting the theme of drowning when another story, “The Artist’s Life,” was just as Woolfian. But, being set in South Haldley, MA, with all white characters, it didn’t do what I wanted it to do on the syllabus. Once again, Desai’s gracious craft and ability to imagine others keeps her best work off the syllabus: that seems really unfair and I’m sorry about it.
As I sit here, looking at the Table of Contents, I see more winners than losers for sure, but the experience of reading the collection overall was a bit of a slog: partly, I think, from the unfairness of my goal, my wrong hypothesis. The first story, “Royalty,” about a self-regarding friend, whose visit to India from the States delays his old friends escape to the cool hills, is wonderful. “The Rooftop Dwellers,” a long story about a young woman who finds an apartment in a tiny, tiny rooftop shack and, in so doing, carves out a bit of independence for herself, is stunning and beautiful: a little masterpiece of small feminist triumph.
I loved the story “Winterscape,” too. It begins as the story of a new mother, white, married to an Indian man, but the focus gradually shifts to that man’s mothers (the sister who bore him and the wealthier one who raised him). These elderly, provincial Indian women are coming for an extended visit. This open-ended visit is the source of anxiety for the new mother and her conversations about it with her own mother mark the only missteps in the whole volume. That older white woman, Doris’s voice isn’t quite right. She says to her daughter: “Looks as if he never told you who his mother was though, or his father, the real ones, I mean. I call that peculiar, Beth, pec-u-liar!”
Something in this exchange, in Doris overall, sounds like parody to me. And it strikes me, once again, how even gifted writers who are great at writing race and class, still struggle to write about interracial interactions. Desai’s white characters seem like real, whole people to me. So do her Indian characters. She can write men and lower class characters that convince me of their authenticity. And the interracial marriage in “Winterscape” works. But there is something about the casually racist white mother that eludes her.
It pains me to make this observation, given what I owe her as a person and a reader, but I think it helps us remember just how very, very hard it is to write about race.
A few years later, an elderly man fell in love with me, and, in an effort to impress me, invited me to a small luncheon at MIT where I had the chance to meet her in person. She was lovely: beautiful, kind, and interested in me. I squirmed from the attentions of this elderly man, whose intentions were gradually dawning on me (He was over 70! I thought he was going to introduce me to his son…). Desai gently telegraphed to me just the kind of sympathy I needed: she was not condescending, but she pitied me in a way that woke me up and helped me shed his irritating attentions.
I kept Desai in mind as an underrated writer, a writer of great skill and grace who, I thought, might owe a debt to Woolf. I was all the more impressed at her grace and delight for her daughter’s win of the Booker Prize a few years back: it made me realize the maternal care and kindness in her pity of me at that one sad lunch.
So, I read Diamond Dust in the hope of finding a story to share with my Woolf class, a story that would shed light on an Indian successor to part of Woolf’s legacy. I enjoyed the collection and my students enjoyed the story, “The Man Who Saw Himself Drown,” but I no longer see Desai as an inheritor of a Woolfian voice. And I still feel deeply ambivalent about exploiting the theme of drowning when another story, “The Artist’s Life,” was just as Woolfian. But, being set in South Haldley, MA, with all white characters, it didn’t do what I wanted it to do on the syllabus. Once again, Desai’s gracious craft and ability to imagine others keeps her best work off the syllabus: that seems really unfair and I’m sorry about it.
As I sit here, looking at the Table of Contents, I see more winners than losers for sure, but the experience of reading the collection overall was a bit of a slog: partly, I think, from the unfairness of my goal, my wrong hypothesis. The first story, “Royalty,” about a self-regarding friend, whose visit to India from the States delays his old friends escape to the cool hills, is wonderful. “The Rooftop Dwellers,” a long story about a young woman who finds an apartment in a tiny, tiny rooftop shack and, in so doing, carves out a bit of independence for herself, is stunning and beautiful: a little masterpiece of small feminist triumph.
I loved the story “Winterscape,” too. It begins as the story of a new mother, white, married to an Indian man, but the focus gradually shifts to that man’s mothers (the sister who bore him and the wealthier one who raised him). These elderly, provincial Indian women are coming for an extended visit. This open-ended visit is the source of anxiety for the new mother and her conversations about it with her own mother mark the only missteps in the whole volume. That older white woman, Doris’s voice isn’t quite right. She says to her daughter: “Looks as if he never told you who his mother was though, or his father, the real ones, I mean. I call that peculiar, Beth, pec-u-liar!”
Something in this exchange, in Doris overall, sounds like parody to me. And it strikes me, once again, how even gifted writers who are great at writing race and class, still struggle to write about interracial interactions. Desai’s white characters seem like real, whole people to me. So do her Indian characters. She can write men and lower class characters that convince me of their authenticity. And the interracial marriage in “Winterscape” works. But there is something about the casually racist white mother that eludes her.
It pains me to make this observation, given what I owe her as a person and a reader, but I think it helps us remember just how very, very hard it is to write about race.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Short Stories
Though I seem to have the time to tweet away, to post mobile phone pictures of Easter eggs to facebook, blogging has fallen by the wayside this late winter (I don’t yet dare call it spring).
But I’ve been reading more than ever and I’ve mostly been reading short stories. In the rush of the semester, of administrative work, of new and absorbing responsibilities in teaching teachers how to teach, of giving two conference papers in one week (a record, and one not to be repeated), these stories have been vastly absorbing and satisfying. I want to tell you about the ups and downs of all of them—and of the two lovely novels—one at a time, but for now, a little list:
But I’ve been reading more than ever and I’ve mostly been reading short stories. In the rush of the semester, of administrative work, of new and absorbing responsibilities in teaching teachers how to teach, of giving two conference papers in one week (a record, and one not to be repeated), these stories have been vastly absorbing and satisfying. I want to tell you about the ups and downs of all of them—and of the two lovely novels—one at a time, but for now, a little list:
- Sima’s Undergarments for Women a debut novel by Ilana Stanger-Ross and recommended by Sarah Weinman,
- Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
- Diamond Dust, Anita Desai’s short stories,
- Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe by Doreen Baingana, and recommended by Tayari Jones,
- and Do Not Deny Me by Jean Thompson.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Woolf and the City at the Merc
I'll be leading a Reading Group at the Mercantile Library in New York leading up to the Woolf Conference in June. We'll read four Woolf novels and talk about Woolf & the city:
Mondays: April 6, April 20, May 4 and May 18Click here to sign up!
6:00pm–7:30pm
Led by Anne Fernald
$50 for members; $65 for nonmembers
Virginia Woolf made a permanent mark on London when she left the staid neighborhood of her birth and moved to Bloomsbury in 1904. This group will focus on Woolf as a city writer: how the city inspired her imagination and how she chronicled its many aspects. This focus allows us to celebrate Woolf’s London, to explore how she turned her daily walks into adventures, and to discuss the place of the city in our imagination. For April 6, please read Mrs. Dalloway. We will read Orlando, Flush, and The Years in subsequent weeks.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
A Happy Story from Publishing 100 Years Ago
I’m attending bits and pieces of the Society for Textual Scholarship Conference at NYU this week (and giving a paper there tomorrow). Today’s plenary panel was terrific. Bob Scholes gave an engaging paper on advertising in modernist magazines. He compared Pound's injunctions for writing imagist poetry with advice for admen written at the same time: it would be hard to tell them apart. Full of lovely irony. My old friend Cliff Wulfman gave a really smart paper about all the technological challenges of digitizing literature.
But, in light of the dire news about publishing that’s been floating around these past months, I thought you might be especially interested in George Bornstein’s “The Colors of Modernism: Publishing Blacks, Jews, and Irish.” (Shouldn’t it be “the Irish?”) He offered a history of New York publishing houses in the early 20th century.
While we think of Viking and Knopf as powerhouses of publishing, these houses were founded by Jews who’d hit the glass ceiling in WASP-dominated Boston. These editors, according to Bornstein, moved to New York, but couldn’t afford to acquire the established texts. So, while Houghton Mifflin up in Boston was publishing new multi-volume sets of Longfellow and Emerson (this made me laugh out loud, but I was the only one), Ginsburg and Oppenheimer of Viking and the Knopfs set out to find avant-garde texts, texts by other Jews, by immigrants, and by African-Americans. Harcourt Brace was the only Gentile-run house to join this trend. They did so because they hired Joel Spingarn, a Jew, an early supporter of the NAACP and colleague there of DuBois, and a former professor of comp lit at Columbia. Professor Spingarn had been dismissed from his job at Columbia for defending a colleague’s dismissal (ah! academic freedom!) so, his former students hired him at Harcourt, eventually making him a full editorial partner.
First among these was B. W. Huebsch, the first American publisher of James Joyce. Bornstein showed us Huebsch’s device, a seven-branched menorah (it looked like a fancy Georgian candlestick to me, but I trust him), on the title page of Joyce's Exiles.
This paper was a really lovely cultural history. A rich celebration of how a group of artists, exiled from the mainstream, became the mainstream by banding together.
Harcourt’s big moneymaker was Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace and it’s through Keynes that they got their entrée to Bloomsbury. Harcourt remains Woolf’s American publisher to this day.
Bornstein’s story emerges, I think, out of a desire to counter a narrative, common in the 1990s, of high modernism as politically right wing, elitist, and narrow.
But it’s too easy to turn the cosmopolitan story into a dream sequence that overlooks the broader truths of anti-Semitism, race riots, lynchings, and anti-immigration legislation of the time. Or the facts of rifts within even the cosmopolitan circles of artists. I would like to have heard more nuance there, but it mostly flickered behind the paper. He told us that Harcourt is to be commended for publishing Sandburg’s essay on the Chicago race riots without pausing long enough over the fact of that unrest. He saluted Knopf’s courage in publishing Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven without pausing long enough (though pause he did) over the opportunism of that white promoter of Harlem.
He ended with T. S. Eliot, whose politics I don't admire (duh!) but whose "The Waste Land" I adore. Boni and Liveright, the house that made their name with Toomer's Cane were Eliot's American publishers. And, Bornstein argues, that Eliot's appearance on the Boni and Liveright list emphasizes the polyglot nature of the poem: something that was supported by the list itself. That is, every title on their list was jazz-influenced, so the jazz and pop elements of the poem, the parts of the poem that celebrate immigration and cosmpolitanism, and cultural hybridity, are all familiar to anyone who's familiar with that house. This, he argues, helps account for Ralph Ellison's somewhat surprising over-praise of Eliot. There is a lot more to say about that: about Eliot's racism, about whether or not people know books in the context of their publisher, about Ellison's snobbery, and about the greatness of both Ellison and Eliot.
I do think this is, in the main, a really really good story for us to know. As we think about Kindle and digital rights management (DRM to you) and the death of the newspaper, it’s really thrilling, I think, to remember, too, that 100 years ago, there were people in New York who loved great writing and didn’t pause over creed or race or ethnicity to publish it and, in so doing, were able to serve both art and commerce. So, though I have my questions about the emphasis of this paper, I mostly found it very, very interesting and inspiring. And though I've ignored the women here, Bornstein did not: he continually referenced Lilian Hellman, Nella Larsen, and more as crucial players in this story.
As we sit here, trying to earn a living with our tweets and our blogs, shaking our heads at the ginormous advances offered to another idiotic memoir by a celebrity, it’s moving and encouraging, I think, to imagine Knopf, Huebsch, Ginsburg & Oppenheimer, Boni & Liveright, gutting it out, making money, and bringing us great, great art.
Bornstein’s paper is part of a forthcoming book from Yale University Press. A chapter of it appeared in the September 2005 issue of Modernism/modernity (which may be behind a firewall for you). He has a very sweet pro-Obama op-ed here.
But, in light of the dire news about publishing that’s been floating around these past months, I thought you might be especially interested in George Bornstein’s “The Colors of Modernism: Publishing Blacks, Jews, and Irish.” (Shouldn’t it be “the Irish?”) He offered a history of New York publishing houses in the early 20th century.
While we think of Viking and Knopf as powerhouses of publishing, these houses were founded by Jews who’d hit the glass ceiling in WASP-dominated Boston. These editors, according to Bornstein, moved to New York, but couldn’t afford to acquire the established texts. So, while Houghton Mifflin up in Boston was publishing new multi-volume sets of Longfellow and Emerson (this made me laugh out loud, but I was the only one), Ginsburg and Oppenheimer of Viking and the Knopfs set out to find avant-garde texts, texts by other Jews, by immigrants, and by African-Americans. Harcourt Brace was the only Gentile-run house to join this trend. They did so because they hired Joel Spingarn, a Jew, an early supporter of the NAACP and colleague there of DuBois, and a former professor of comp lit at Columbia. Professor Spingarn had been dismissed from his job at Columbia for defending a colleague’s dismissal (ah! academic freedom!) so, his former students hired him at Harcourt, eventually making him a full editorial partner.
First among these was B. W. Huebsch, the first American publisher of James Joyce. Bornstein showed us Huebsch’s device, a seven-branched menorah (it looked like a fancy Georgian candlestick to me, but I trust him), on the title page of Joyce's Exiles.
This paper was a really lovely cultural history. A rich celebration of how a group of artists, exiled from the mainstream, became the mainstream by banding together.
Harcourt’s big moneymaker was Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace and it’s through Keynes that they got their entrée to Bloomsbury. Harcourt remains Woolf’s American publisher to this day.
Bornstein’s story emerges, I think, out of a desire to counter a narrative, common in the 1990s, of high modernism as politically right wing, elitist, and narrow.
But it’s too easy to turn the cosmopolitan story into a dream sequence that overlooks the broader truths of anti-Semitism, race riots, lynchings, and anti-immigration legislation of the time. Or the facts of rifts within even the cosmopolitan circles of artists. I would like to have heard more nuance there, but it mostly flickered behind the paper. He told us that Harcourt is to be commended for publishing Sandburg’s essay on the Chicago race riots without pausing long enough over the fact of that unrest. He saluted Knopf’s courage in publishing Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven without pausing long enough (though pause he did) over the opportunism of that white promoter of Harlem.
He ended with T. S. Eliot, whose politics I don't admire (duh!) but whose "The Waste Land" I adore. Boni and Liveright, the house that made their name with Toomer's Cane were Eliot's American publishers. And, Bornstein argues, that Eliot's appearance on the Boni and Liveright list emphasizes the polyglot nature of the poem: something that was supported by the list itself. That is, every title on their list was jazz-influenced, so the jazz and pop elements of the poem, the parts of the poem that celebrate immigration and cosmpolitanism, and cultural hybridity, are all familiar to anyone who's familiar with that house. This, he argues, helps account for Ralph Ellison's somewhat surprising over-praise of Eliot. There is a lot more to say about that: about Eliot's racism, about whether or not people know books in the context of their publisher, about Ellison's snobbery, and about the greatness of both Ellison and Eliot.
I do think this is, in the main, a really really good story for us to know. As we think about Kindle and digital rights management (DRM to you) and the death of the newspaper, it’s really thrilling, I think, to remember, too, that 100 years ago, there were people in New York who loved great writing and didn’t pause over creed or race or ethnicity to publish it and, in so doing, were able to serve both art and commerce. So, though I have my questions about the emphasis of this paper, I mostly found it very, very interesting and inspiring. And though I've ignored the women here, Bornstein did not: he continually referenced Lilian Hellman, Nella Larsen, and more as crucial players in this story.
As we sit here, trying to earn a living with our tweets and our blogs, shaking our heads at the ginormous advances offered to another idiotic memoir by a celebrity, it’s moving and encouraging, I think, to imagine Knopf, Huebsch, Ginsburg & Oppenheimer, Boni & Liveright, gutting it out, making money, and bringing us great, great art.
Bornstein’s paper is part of a forthcoming book from Yale University Press. A chapter of it appeared in the September 2005 issue of Modernism/modernity (which may be behind a firewall for you). He has a very sweet pro-Obama op-ed here.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
War and Fate
All the work I do on Mrs. Dalloway has had me thinking a lot about war, soldiers, and war writing. I have become convinced that the very minor character in that novel, Miss Isabel Pole, is a character of bad faith, urging Septimus to read Antony and Cleopatra and comparing him to Keats. No wonder he volunteered to fight; no wonder he returns traumatized.
I have been thinking a lot about returning soldiers. Worrying about them and listening intently whenever Paul Rieckoff is on t.v. talking about IAVA and veteran’s issues. He was the guest on one of the WNYC podcasts on my iPhone, so I listened on the plane out to San Francisco. I also checked my email, and there was a message from the academic vice president announcing the creation of a task force on welcoming returning veteran’s back to Fordham.
Then, just to continue the theme, once at the conference, I saw that San Franciscan Dave Eggers was speaking on a panel on war writing. I loved Heartbreaking Work, advised a thesis on McSweeneys. Though I know it’s fashionable to turn up my nose at Eggers, I actually think he’s amazingly cool. I’d love to be the one to have founded 826 Valencia, to have resisted all that rampant snark. At the panel, the moderator interviewed Eggers about What is the What and then six veterans read from the work they had done in Maxine Hong Kingston’s writing group. They spoke about their book, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. It was deeply moving.
They spoke about listening to difficult stories, telling them, and not asking stories to turn out to be inspirational or moving or redemptive. They read a wonderful Tim O’Brien quote to the effect that if you feel redeemed at the end of a war story, you have been lied to.
At the book exhibit, then, I bought A Soldier’s Heart, Elizabeth Samet’s account of teaching at West Point. So far, I find that she capitulates too much to the military perspective for my taste. But she is smart and I’m learning about military culture from it.
All of which to say that I think I’ve found my way in. Maybe nothing will come of it; maybe something will. But I’m going to write to my university’s committee and see if they will think about writing and reading as a piece of the veteran’s program. I don’t know what will come of this, but perhaps this can be a way for me to contribute… We’ll see.
I have been thinking a lot about returning soldiers. Worrying about them and listening intently whenever Paul Rieckoff is on t.v. talking about IAVA and veteran’s issues. He was the guest on one of the WNYC podcasts on my iPhone, so I listened on the plane out to San Francisco. I also checked my email, and there was a message from the academic vice president announcing the creation of a task force on welcoming returning veteran’s back to Fordham.
Then, just to continue the theme, once at the conference, I saw that San Franciscan Dave Eggers was speaking on a panel on war writing. I loved Heartbreaking Work, advised a thesis on McSweeneys. Though I know it’s fashionable to turn up my nose at Eggers, I actually think he’s amazingly cool. I’d love to be the one to have founded 826 Valencia, to have resisted all that rampant snark. At the panel, the moderator interviewed Eggers about What is the What and then six veterans read from the work they had done in Maxine Hong Kingston’s writing group. They spoke about their book, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. It was deeply moving.
They spoke about listening to difficult stories, telling them, and not asking stories to turn out to be inspirational or moving or redemptive. They read a wonderful Tim O’Brien quote to the effect that if you feel redeemed at the end of a war story, you have been lied to.
At the book exhibit, then, I bought A Soldier’s Heart, Elizabeth Samet’s account of teaching at West Point. So far, I find that she capitulates too much to the military perspective for my taste. But she is smart and I’m learning about military culture from it.
All of which to say that I think I’ve found my way in. Maybe nothing will come of it; maybe something will. But I’m going to write to my university’s committee and see if they will think about writing and reading as a piece of the veteran’s program. I don’t know what will come of this, but perhaps this can be a way for me to contribute… We’ll see.
Monday, March 16, 2009
When You Were Small
I was in San Francisco over the weekend at the CCCC (the National Council of Teachers of English’s big Conference on College Composition and Communication). It’s a HUGE conference, held this year at the downtown Hilton, much bigger than the MLA.
But of all the many books I read, bought, and acquired over the weekend, the one that’s haunting me is a children’s book that I didn’t buy: Sara O’Leary (text) and Julie Morstad (illustrations)’s enchanting When You Were Small. I ran across it at an amazing little store of letter press cards, books, and ephemera, Little Otsu, across Valencia from both 826 Valencia and Range where we had a GREAT dinner.
Little Henry asks about what it was like when he was small and his dad tells him a series of wonderful, fanciful lies: you had a pet ant, we used you as a chess piece, you used to take baths in the teapot... Don’t you remember?
The haunting and detailed illustrations and the dry humor make it a tender little Edward Gorey fable. There’s a second book, too, and Morstad has some ABCs as well.
I’m urging the Easter Bunny to fill the girls’ baskets with these books this year! You can see their titles at the lovely Simply Read Books website. Julie Morstad's drawings are at Canada's Atelier Gallery. And Sara O'Leary has a blog.
But of all the many books I read, bought, and acquired over the weekend, the one that’s haunting me is a children’s book that I didn’t buy: Sara O’Leary (text) and Julie Morstad (illustrations)’s enchanting When You Were Small. I ran across it at an amazing little store of letter press cards, books, and ephemera, Little Otsu, across Valencia from both 826 Valencia and Range where we had a GREAT dinner.
Little Henry asks about what it was like when he was small and his dad tells him a series of wonderful, fanciful lies: you had a pet ant, we used you as a chess piece, you used to take baths in the teapot... Don’t you remember?
The haunting and detailed illustrations and the dry humor make it a tender little Edward Gorey fable. There’s a second book, too, and Morstad has some ABCs as well.
I’m urging the Easter Bunny to fill the girls’ baskets with these books this year! You can see their titles at the lovely Simply Read Books website. Julie Morstad's drawings are at Canada's Atelier Gallery. And Sara O'Leary has a blog.
Monday, March 09, 2009
Frog and Toad Are Friends
I’d like to sing a little odeWe took the girls to “A Year with Frog and Toad” at the Atlantic on Saturday. It was so adorable—nearly as good as last year’s awesome “Really Rosie.” The Atlantic’s children’s theater is so great. First, it’s affordable ($50 for 4 tickets—that’s practically free in NYC terms). Then, the theater itself, an old brick church, is both grand and homey. It makes the matinee into an occasion. (Pics here.)
about my good friend Toad,
Toad with whom I frequently take tea.
He’s not so good at sports,
and of course he’s got those warts
but Toad has been a lovely friend to me.
But the songs are so charming. The opening song of friendship is all charm: admitting that one’s friend has warts but “has been a lovely friend to me” captures many deep and important ideas about friendship all in one: flaws, “loveliness”—that gentle, important, grounding quality, and then “to me,” because friendship is ours and special: it doesn’t matter if you don’t get it, he’s been my friend.
My kindergartener was delighted that some of the episodes she knows from her I Can Read books were featured in the show.
And the song, later in the show, about the pleasure of eating cookies is totally exuberant and joyous: Like the happiest love song ever, but song to the pleasure of gorging on cookies! Eating cookiesThe children were rapt.
Eating cookies
We’re so happy eating cookies
Cookies cookies cookies we adore….
I was interested to see Mark Linn-Baker thanked in the program. I always loved that silly sitcom, “Perfect Strangers,” and I liked him in it. It made me happy to think of him as a working actor, supporting this little venture.
But this morning, downloading the soundtrack for the kids on iTunes, I see that he originated the role of Toad on Broadway (the baby’s hands-down favorite character; the big girl just loved it all). What’s more, his wife Adrianne is the daughter of Arnold Lobel, the author of the Frog and Toad books. So three cheers for Mark Linn-Baker! And three cheers for great children’s theater in Chelsea.
Their run was extended for 2 weeks: this coming weekend is the last: call quick to reserve your seat!
PHOTO: Ahron R. Foster from the Playbill site.
Monday, March 02, 2009
Exasperation and Elevation
Ed Champion asked me to participate in a roundtable on Eric Kraft's new novel, Flying. (It's actually a trilogy, bound together into a very big book). I am a big fan of Ed's & I am, occasionally, nostalgic for the days of the Litblog Co-op, so I said YES.
The first installment of five is up at Ed's place.
It's a very weird book, one that I found exasperating and fascinating, as you'll see when I weigh in (at a late phase in the conversation). The conceit, however, is really interesting: a boy in the 50's builds an aerocycle, based on improbable plans from a mechanics magazine, and flies it from Long Island to New Mexico. As you might expect, the aerocycle doesn't fly, BUT many people want to believe that it does and the boy is simultaneously buoyed and ruined by keeping alive the fiction of himself as a pilot. The book we have in our hands purports to be the record of the much older man today, striving to write a memoir that sets the record straight.
There's a lot that's funny here, but the book is a spot too long for me. In any case, do pop over to Ed's blog throughout the week and listen in.
The first installment of five is up at Ed's place.
It's a very weird book, one that I found exasperating and fascinating, as you'll see when I weigh in (at a late phase in the conversation). The conceit, however, is really interesting: a boy in the 50's builds an aerocycle, based on improbable plans from a mechanics magazine, and flies it from Long Island to New Mexico. As you might expect, the aerocycle doesn't fly, BUT many people want to believe that it does and the boy is simultaneously buoyed and ruined by keeping alive the fiction of himself as a pilot. The book we have in our hands purports to be the record of the much older man today, striving to write a memoir that sets the record straight.
There's a lot that's funny here, but the book is a spot too long for me. In any case, do pop over to Ed's blog throughout the week and listen in.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Metaphor: Bad prose and inspiration
I'm growing weary of the abundance of post-its on my computer monitor, so I'm trying to take them down today. (Don't worry, it doesn't take long the for the clutter to reaccumulate...) And, while I don't often blog about my students or my teaching, two of the little scraps I'm tossing seem worthy of sharing. 
First, from a textbook, for the BLOCK THAT METAPHOR file:
Then, from an application, a wonderful moment of heroic rhetoric right here in the 21st century: "Like Leonidas at Thermopylae, my grandfather did not stop fighting..."
First, from a textbook, for the BLOCK THAT METAPHOR file:
"In reality personal and professional ethics share some common ground and this makes the perceived clash between the two easier to digest."All last year, I worked one-on-one with an ESL student. Mostly, we marched through readings from class. The textbooks were so badly written and so abstract that I could see where the struggles came. This sentence was so difficult to parse and it yielded so little meaning (ethical behavior at work overlaps with individual ethics? really? stop the presses!), that I couldn't stop laughing and I copied it down just to remind myself how not to write, how much were were asking of our students.
Then, from an application, a wonderful moment of heroic rhetoric right here in the 21st century: "Like Leonidas at Thermopylae, my grandfather did not stop fighting..."
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Rebecca Solnit inspires
I knew that I was onto something when I invited Rebecca Solnit to be the keynote speaker at the Woolf conference. I knew that her admiration for Woolf was enough: that all that is interesting about her writing would make her an inspiration to the 200 or so scholars and readers who are coming to New York in June.
Still, how exciting to read that Solnit's book on walking (that most Woolfian of topics) inspired director Astra Taylor's latest film. The 29-y.o. director of "Zizek!" wanted to make another film on philosophy, but:
Isn't this cool?
Still, how exciting to read that Solnit's book on walking (that most Woolfian of topics) inspired director Astra Taylor's latest film. The 29-y.o. director of "Zizek!" wanted to make another film on philosophy, but:
If people found talking-head films uncinematic, what would they make of a talking-egghead film? “Secretly I thought it was going to be disastrous,” Ms. Taylor said in a recent interview. “I might as well do an audio interview.” Then it occurred to her that her talking heads should walk and talk. She had just read “Wanderlust,” a discursive study of the history of walking by Rebecca Solnit, and was reminded of the figure of the peripatetic philosopher, from Aristotle (who paced the Lyceum while teaching) to Kierkegaard (a proponent of thinking while walking, which he frequently did in the Copenhagen streets) to Walter Benjamin (the embodiment of the Paris flâneur). She realized that putting her subjects in motion would elicit a different kind of interview than if they were seated behind their desks in offices. This conceit became a guiding principle for a film that would attempt to take philosophy out of the ivory tower and affirm its place in the flux of everyday life.I share this sense that walking is central to thinking. Had I more patience, I could regale you with smart reasons why, but let's leave it at:
Isn't this cool?
Monday, February 23, 2009
Beyond Suspicion by Tanguy Viel
In Three Lives back in December, my favorite clerk told me to slow down on the Bolano craze. She could see my fatigue, my lack of commitment to a new big book. Try this, she said, passing me a copy of Tanguy Viel’s Beyond Suspicion, it got me through a reading slump.
Reading slump: that is certainly where I was in December. No fool I, I knew that a single stylish French thriller couldn’t kick me back into gear, so I eased back into reading with the latest Eloisa James. She never disappoints. But, back to the Viel. What is it and what did I think?
It’s a slim little noir volume. The blurbs compare it to Patricia Highsmith, whom I have not read, but it does have that Talented Mr. Ripley perverse-Hitchcockian flavor. The story centers on two couples: an older pair of brothers and a brother and sister pair who target the older couple in a gold-digging scheme.
The brother and sister are also lovers. Or the lovers are pretending to be brother and sister. Part of the pleasure of the text is the coyness on that front: the frisson of incest. The incest taboo also insures that they will be beyond suspicion (the title) in their scheme to hook, marry, and murder the one brother.
I liked the book, but it’s not going to resonate with me long term. At the same time, I would read another of these little confections. It’s stylish, slick, and short. Even I, distracted and slow, consumed it in a couple days. It’s very cinematic for sure, without reading like a film treatment. And yet it really is just very very elegant candy: there isn’t much to it. The frisson of incest is important to the plot, sure, but it doesn’t lead to any insights, it doesn’t really lead anywhere. The book does have a thriller-climax, but it’s not thrilling: there’s a dead body, the murder hasn’t quite gone as planned, there is a witness…or is there? Isn’t that the way they all end?
Sarah, she who reads all, read it too.
Reading slump: that is certainly where I was in December. No fool I, I knew that a single stylish French thriller couldn’t kick me back into gear, so I eased back into reading with the latest Eloisa James. She never disappoints. But, back to the Viel. What is it and what did I think?
It’s a slim little noir volume. The blurbs compare it to Patricia Highsmith, whom I have not read, but it does have that Talented Mr. Ripley perverse-Hitchcockian flavor. The story centers on two couples: an older pair of brothers and a brother and sister pair who target the older couple in a gold-digging scheme.
The brother and sister are also lovers. Or the lovers are pretending to be brother and sister. Part of the pleasure of the text is the coyness on that front: the frisson of incest. The incest taboo also insures that they will be beyond suspicion (the title) in their scheme to hook, marry, and murder the one brother.
I liked the book, but it’s not going to resonate with me long term. At the same time, I would read another of these little confections. It’s stylish, slick, and short. Even I, distracted and slow, consumed it in a couple days. It’s very cinematic for sure, without reading like a film treatment. And yet it really is just very very elegant candy: there isn’t much to it. The frisson of incest is important to the plot, sure, but it doesn’t lead to any insights, it doesn’t really lead anywhere. The book does have a thriller-climax, but it’s not thrilling: there’s a dead body, the murder hasn’t quite gone as planned, there is a witness…or is there? Isn’t that the way they all end?
Sarah, she who reads all, read it too.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Cause and Effect
The toddler was in the highchair, wailing, when I came to pick her up yesterday after my day at the museum with the big girl. She was in time out.
She ran to me for comfort. I scooped her up, but then asked her why she was in trouble. I got some confused, panicked finger-pointed about how he did this and he did that and then she put me in chair and I cry. The teacher explained: she doesn't listen when the teacher says no. They've been working on this, but she still doesn't listen. So, she had a time out. Mommy approves.
So, later, we are reviewing the lesson:
Mommy's prompt: "So, when Miss Lizbeth says no...."
Baby's answer: "I get time out."
I love that naughty, unreconstructed baby. She cuts right to the chase.
She ran to me for comfort. I scooped her up, but then asked her why she was in trouble. I got some confused, panicked finger-pointed about how he did this and he did that and then she put me in chair and I cry. The teacher explained: she doesn't listen when the teacher says no. They've been working on this, but she still doesn't listen. So, she had a time out. Mommy approves.
So, later, we are reviewing the lesson:
Mommy's prompt: "So, when Miss Lizbeth says no...."
Baby's answer: "I get time out."
I love that naughty, unreconstructed baby. She cuts right to the chase.
Monday, February 16, 2009
The Met and the vet
Even when it’s a school holiday, I usually forge ahead. Especially since having kids, I feel all the more sure that time is slipping past, writing is not getting done, and every three-day weekend needs to be seized as a chance to write a bit more, to catch up (with what? sometimes I wonder).
I don’t quite know why I decided, against my workaholic ways, to take today off. It’s true that I am tired beyond tired, so tired that the tears were flowing down my cheeks the other day and I was powerless to stop them.
In any case, I did the supremely indulgent thing of sending the toddler off to daycare and taking the kindergartener into the Met. We had a spiral notebook and a mesh bag of colored pencils for her. We quickly suss each gallery for a place to draw. She chooses a work of art—preferring three- to two-dimensions—and begins sketching. I have time to read and study every work of art at great leisure before she’s done with a single sketch. We walk quickly through a few rooms and then it’s time to sketch again.
I haven’t had such a leisurely visit to the Met in years. We caught the last day of “Art and Love in the Renaissance,” lingering over cradles and birth bowls, moving more quickly through the room devoted to courtesans (although a majolica platter featuring a head made of a collage of penises did make us both giggle); some Impressionist paintings (including Degas’ sculpture of the 14-year-old dancer); the shark in a tank (which she found terrifying and puzzling “why would you want to make art that upsets people mommy?”); Egyptian art, including, of course, the Temple of Dendur.
By then, it was time for lunch. After all this sophistication, all our chat about the jubilant brushstrokes of Monet and how this or that painting looked slightly pointillist, she chose the taxicab: a dozen chicken nuggets, a bag of Lay’s, and a juice box served in a cardboard box that looks like a taxicab. She drove it around the table, making “stops” to pick up nuggets and chips, in spite of my pleas that the table might have germs on it. She is still six, after all.
We had a totally amazingly fun day. It is so immensely great to have such a companion: I feel overwhelmingly lucky and also sheepish to take such pleasure in my own child.
And lest I feel any pang of guilt over playing hooky, I remind myself that the day began cleaning up after a sick dog and ended at the vet’s office, getting medicine for same. She is fine. One of the most amazing and hard things about adulthood is the sheer relentlessness of life: even on a day dedicated to art and ease, there is a load of laundry to cycle through, ditto for the dishwasher, and a sick dog to clean up after.
Happy President’s Day!
I don’t quite know why I decided, against my workaholic ways, to take today off. It’s true that I am tired beyond tired, so tired that the tears were flowing down my cheeks the other day and I was powerless to stop them.
In any case, I did the supremely indulgent thing of sending the toddler off to daycare and taking the kindergartener into the Met. We had a spiral notebook and a mesh bag of colored pencils for her. We quickly suss each gallery for a place to draw. She chooses a work of art—preferring three- to two-dimensions—and begins sketching. I have time to read and study every work of art at great leisure before she’s done with a single sketch. We walk quickly through a few rooms and then it’s time to sketch again.
I haven’t had such a leisurely visit to the Met in years. We caught the last day of “Art and Love in the Renaissance,” lingering over cradles and birth bowls, moving more quickly through the room devoted to courtesans (although a majolica platter featuring a head made of a collage of penises did make us both giggle); some Impressionist paintings (including Degas’ sculpture of the 14-year-old dancer); the shark in a tank (which she found terrifying and puzzling “why would you want to make art that upsets people mommy?”); Egyptian art, including, of course, the Temple of Dendur.
By then, it was time for lunch. After all this sophistication, all our chat about the jubilant brushstrokes of Monet and how this or that painting looked slightly pointillist, she chose the taxicab: a dozen chicken nuggets, a bag of Lay’s, and a juice box served in a cardboard box that looks like a taxicab. She drove it around the table, making “stops” to pick up nuggets and chips, in spite of my pleas that the table might have germs on it. She is still six, after all.
We had a totally amazingly fun day. It is so immensely great to have such a companion: I feel overwhelmingly lucky and also sheepish to take such pleasure in my own child.
And lest I feel any pang of guilt over playing hooky, I remind myself that the day began cleaning up after a sick dog and ended at the vet’s office, getting medicine for same. She is fine. One of the most amazing and hard things about adulthood is the sheer relentlessness of life: even on a day dedicated to art and ease, there is a load of laundry to cycle through, ditto for the dishwasher, and a sick dog to clean up after.
Happy President’s Day!
Monday, February 09, 2009
We interrupt this litblog...
An occasional feature just to remind us that we live in a world that is...well, very, very scary.
(h/t Rachel Maddow for showing the graphic after Obama's masterful first presser.)
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Blossom Dearie
Blossom Dearie has died, of natural causes, at 82.
If you don't know her wonderful hip, very, very white jazz style, you owe it to yourself to check it out. She'll have your fingers snapping and have you feeling like a really happy, very posh beatnik in no time. Just the antidote to my February blues.
She is amazing. She takes a simple little song like "Tea for Two" and slows it WAY down, making it sultry and cool. Or "Surrey with a Fringe on Top," from Oklahoma of all things, suddenly is full of a sexy urban wink: something utterly different from the great but totally straight version by Shirley Jones and Gordon Macrae. I love her "Rhode Island is Famous for You," one of the great place name songs.
Verve Records has a nice compilation of her essential hits. I was collecting those at some point in the 90s and somehow this one made my list. I've never regretted it. Terry Teachouts much smarter and more informed remembrance is here--with a video clip of "Surrey with a Fringe on Top" as a bonus!
I am so grateful to her for her lovely songs. May she rest in peace.
If you don't know her wonderful hip, very, very white jazz style, you owe it to yourself to check it out. She'll have your fingers snapping and have you feeling like a really happy, very posh beatnik in no time. Just the antidote to my February blues.
She is amazing. She takes a simple little song like "Tea for Two" and slows it WAY down, making it sultry and cool. Or "Surrey with a Fringe on Top," from Oklahoma of all things, suddenly is full of a sexy urban wink: something utterly different from the great but totally straight version by Shirley Jones and Gordon Macrae. I love her "Rhode Island is Famous for You," one of the great place name songs.
Verve Records has a nice compilation of her essential hits. I was collecting those at some point in the 90s and somehow this one made my list. I've never regretted it. Terry Teachouts much smarter and more informed remembrance is here--with a video clip of "Surrey with a Fringe on Top" as a bonus!
I am so grateful to her for her lovely songs. May she rest in peace.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
February
We're deep in the semester all of a sudden and my inbox is burgeoning with all kinds of texts to read and review. The most literary of the lot: proofing my own prose. It's a lot of donkey work for the next few weeks and I'm finding it hard to leave it behind even in my dreams.
Last night? I was an apprentice in a sighted (i.e. not blind) John Milton's print shop, keeping him company as he composed an elegy for John Donne. Then, I fashioned an ear of corn out of straw: the sole decoration on the pinecone wreath. He saw this as a delightfully frivolous touch and wondered aloud at how beautiful the other mourners would find it. He felt that he was really pulling out all the stops.
No Puritan, I knew that others would be leaving gaudy wreaths of yellow and gold mums. Still, I saw how starkly beautiful it was and thought that it would be the most unusual and glorious wreath in the graveyard.
Yes, it’s February.
Last night? I was an apprentice in a sighted (i.e. not blind) John Milton's print shop, keeping him company as he composed an elegy for John Donne. Then, I fashioned an ear of corn out of straw: the sole decoration on the pinecone wreath. He saw this as a delightfully frivolous touch and wondered aloud at how beautiful the other mourners would find it. He felt that he was really pulling out all the stops.
No Puritan, I knew that others would be leaving gaudy wreaths of yellow and gold mums. Still, I saw how starkly beautiful it was and thought that it would be the most unusual and glorious wreath in the graveyard.
Yes, it’s February.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Three Cups of Tea
My sister-in-law gave me Three Cups of Tea for Christmas 2007. I was a snob about it: it looked so Oprah, so popular, that I was skeptical. But also curious. I finally read it. It is amazing that Greg Mortenson could manage, with a ghost-writer, to take such a gripping, thrilling story and write such a clunky book. It took me a very long time to get past the clumsy prose. I would read a page and come across an inadvertent pun, an odd Germanic neologism, a word that might be an adverb or a verb, rendering the sentence needlessly ambiguous and confusing.
And then, Mortenson is such a Western type. He reminds me of guys I used to date—or try to date—out in Seattle. Living in his car, dating a doctor, he grows angry at her desire for a meal. He is saving his pennies to build a school in Pakistan! She should be happy with ramen! Believe me, I’ve been there. I once made ramen and a tuna sandwich for a boyfriend who grew enraged that I had cooked two nights worth of food in one.
But I remembered that Nicholas Kristof (who shares the Western boy ethos but remains a hero) had written a glowing account of Mortenson’s work, founding schools in remote Pakistan and Afghanistan, focusing on girls education. I know, too, I need to know more about Pakistan and that when faced with a more serious article, I tend to skip or skim.
There is quite a bit of The Man Who Would Be King to this tale. There are definitely moments, especially early on, when Mortenson’s story made me uneasy. The son of missionaries (as I am the great-granddaughter of missionaries, so I cast no stones, only recognize the dangers of that drive to set off to elsewhere in the hopes of changing it), Mortenson failed to reach the summit of K2, got lost and disoriented, and, after a long recovery, promised his host village that he’d return to build them a school.
When a fellow American arrives at the construction site and Greg asks him to march around like a “Big Man,” I grew really worried. The account of his detention in Waziristan, too, reads like a scene from any recent Muslim-baiting Hollywood film. (This will be a film, mark my words.)
But there is a lot more here. The prose improves as the story chugs along and the adventures make the lousy prose less obtrusive in later chapters. (Still, if you read it, I counsel you to read fast and for the plot! It could have been so much better.)
Mortenson seems to have learned genuine lessons about cooperation and humility. So, although his charity now trades on his story as the cowboy who singlehandedly built over 60 schools (a major, major achievement, there is no doubt), what I love about the book is the way that he has the village elders cut the ribbon at a school’s inauguration.
I am most moved, however, by how this man grew to recognize the power of educating women. When he sets off to build that first school, the town surprises—and frustrates—him by asking for a bridge first. But that bridge suddenly permits women to walk home to their mothers every Friday. In a remote, craggy region where marriage often means saying goodbye forever, this is a huge gift to a community: young wives remain connected and, through this connection, are happier people. When he returns, years later, a young girl marches into a council of elders and demands tuition for a certificate program in maternal health. Now. Mortenson first puts her off, but then suddenly sees that she represents all he has been working for: a young woman, leapfrogging over centuries of patriarchy, to stand up for herself and the women of her village, proud, confident, and utterly unafraid of men. It is hard not to see the goodness—the greatness of this.
Education matters and it matters most among those who have so little access to it.
If, as Kristof argues, as Mortenson shows, we cared more about education and less about bombs, we might just remake the world. For all the posturing and purple prose, I came away impressed by the book.
If personality-driven charities make you more allergic, Kristof also recommends this one, Developments in Literacy, run by Pakistani-Americans. It’s all about the kids.
And then, Mortenson is such a Western type. He reminds me of guys I used to date—or try to date—out in Seattle. Living in his car, dating a doctor, he grows angry at her desire for a meal. He is saving his pennies to build a school in Pakistan! She should be happy with ramen! Believe me, I’ve been there. I once made ramen and a tuna sandwich for a boyfriend who grew enraged that I had cooked two nights worth of food in one.
But I remembered that Nicholas Kristof (who shares the Western boy ethos but remains a hero) had written a glowing account of Mortenson’s work, founding schools in remote Pakistan and Afghanistan, focusing on girls education. I know, too, I need to know more about Pakistan and that when faced with a more serious article, I tend to skip or skim.
There is quite a bit of The Man Who Would Be King to this tale. There are definitely moments, especially early on, when Mortenson’s story made me uneasy. The son of missionaries (as I am the great-granddaughter of missionaries, so I cast no stones, only recognize the dangers of that drive to set off to elsewhere in the hopes of changing it), Mortenson failed to reach the summit of K2, got lost and disoriented, and, after a long recovery, promised his host village that he’d return to build them a school.
When a fellow American arrives at the construction site and Greg asks him to march around like a “Big Man,” I grew really worried. The account of his detention in Waziristan, too, reads like a scene from any recent Muslim-baiting Hollywood film. (This will be a film, mark my words.)
But there is a lot more here. The prose improves as the story chugs along and the adventures make the lousy prose less obtrusive in later chapters. (Still, if you read it, I counsel you to read fast and for the plot! It could have been so much better.)
Mortenson seems to have learned genuine lessons about cooperation and humility. So, although his charity now trades on his story as the cowboy who singlehandedly built over 60 schools (a major, major achievement, there is no doubt), what I love about the book is the way that he has the village elders cut the ribbon at a school’s inauguration.
I am most moved, however, by how this man grew to recognize the power of educating women. When he sets off to build that first school, the town surprises—and frustrates—him by asking for a bridge first. But that bridge suddenly permits women to walk home to their mothers every Friday. In a remote, craggy region where marriage often means saying goodbye forever, this is a huge gift to a community: young wives remain connected and, through this connection, are happier people. When he returns, years later, a young girl marches into a council of elders and demands tuition for a certificate program in maternal health. Now. Mortenson first puts her off, but then suddenly sees that she represents all he has been working for: a young woman, leapfrogging over centuries of patriarchy, to stand up for herself and the women of her village, proud, confident, and utterly unafraid of men. It is hard not to see the goodness—the greatness of this.
Education matters and it matters most among those who have so little access to it.
If, as Kristof argues, as Mortenson shows, we cared more about education and less about bombs, we might just remake the world. For all the posturing and purple prose, I came away impressed by the book.
If personality-driven charities make you more allergic, Kristof also recommends this one, Developments in Literacy, run by Pakistani-Americans. It’s all about the kids.
Monday, February 02, 2009
The Women’s Project Presents Freshwater
When I first got word that there would be a first-ever professional production of Virginia Woolf’s only play, Freshwater, I was cautiously excited. It could be terrific; it could go so wrong in so many ways.
Freshwater is a farce, a little drawing room romp, that Woolf wrote for her niece Angelica’s birthday party. The inside jokes are thick and fast: Bloomsburies played on the roles of their Victorian elders. The characters are Julia Margaret Cameron, the great Victorian photographer (and Woolf’s great-aunt); her husband, Charles Hay Cameron; the painter George Frederick Watts; his child-bride Ellen Terry; Tennyson, and Lt. John Craig, the only character not based in history.
While Tennyson, the Camerons, and Watts expound on the purity and beauty of art (with Tennyson quoting himself often and at length), Ellen Terry chafes under the strictures of a life that is bohemian and strangely dull. She jumps at the chance to escape to Bloomsbury where she and her beau will dine on sausages and kippers, far from any nightingale’s song.
But allusions to “Maud” are just not hilarious to most people and there is little more tiresome than going to the theater to congratulate yourself on what a clever little English major you are. Director Anne Bogart, dramaturg Megan Carter (who came to talk to my class on Friday!! Thank you!), and the rest of the cast and crew have figured out ways to translate Woolf's highbrow farce for a 21st century audience. In doing so, they show us how funny Woolf can be, and, more importantly, have created a really fun, happy bon bon of a show.
This charming production begins with the glorious set: step off the frigid streets into the tiny, dark lobby of the Julia Miles Theater, and then, into the house itself to see James Schuette’s joyous set, lit like a summer’s day, festooned with a crazy amateurish patchwork curtain, sewn together from dozens of primary-colored pillowcases. The amazing Akiko Aizawa, playing the maid, sets the merry tone: she marches back and forth across the stage, military style, only to look out, sternly counting the audience and then, suddenly, girlishly, to break character, giggle and point, as if at friends and family. Meanwhile the actors backstage whisper and hush each other. It feels as much like being at a village pageant or a local theatrical as possible.
Then, out pops the daffy Gian Murray Gianino, in full Gilbert and Sullivan style military garb to sing “All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor.”
The show is funny and meant to be, but it also makes pointed fun of the self-absorption of artists. Woolf admired artistic dedication, but, as director Anne Bogart pointed out in the talk-back after the show, it’s also about not hurting others in the pursuit of art. For this, the youthful Ellen Terry is our guide: she is bored, posing for a painting, and no one cares. It’s one thing for Watts to dedicate his life to perfecting a painting, but quite another to demand his wife spend her days perfectly still. This is the comic version of Woolf’s critique of Milton and Carlyle.
I have a lot more to say, but other things in my day are calling. You can read reviews in Variety and the New York Times.
“Freshwater” is playing in limited run until February 15. There are discounts available, but even the full-priced tickets are an affordable $42. It’s a little dose of summer in midwinter. Do go!
Freshwater is a farce, a little drawing room romp, that Woolf wrote for her niece Angelica’s birthday party. The inside jokes are thick and fast: Bloomsburies played on the roles of their Victorian elders. The characters are Julia Margaret Cameron, the great Victorian photographer (and Woolf’s great-aunt); her husband, Charles Hay Cameron; the painter George Frederick Watts; his child-bride Ellen Terry; Tennyson, and Lt. John Craig, the only character not based in history.
While Tennyson, the Camerons, and Watts expound on the purity and beauty of art (with Tennyson quoting himself often and at length), Ellen Terry chafes under the strictures of a life that is bohemian and strangely dull. She jumps at the chance to escape to Bloomsbury where she and her beau will dine on sausages and kippers, far from any nightingale’s song.
But allusions to “Maud” are just not hilarious to most people and there is little more tiresome than going to the theater to congratulate yourself on what a clever little English major you are. Director Anne Bogart, dramaturg Megan Carter (who came to talk to my class on Friday!! Thank you!), and the rest of the cast and crew have figured out ways to translate Woolf's highbrow farce for a 21st century audience. In doing so, they show us how funny Woolf can be, and, more importantly, have created a really fun, happy bon bon of a show.
This charming production begins with the glorious set: step off the frigid streets into the tiny, dark lobby of the Julia Miles Theater, and then, into the house itself to see James Schuette’s joyous set, lit like a summer’s day, festooned with a crazy amateurish patchwork curtain, sewn together from dozens of primary-colored pillowcases. The amazing Akiko Aizawa, playing the maid, sets the merry tone: she marches back and forth across the stage, military style, only to look out, sternly counting the audience and then, suddenly, girlishly, to break character, giggle and point, as if at friends and family. Meanwhile the actors backstage whisper and hush each other. It feels as much like being at a village pageant or a local theatrical as possible.
Then, out pops the daffy Gian Murray Gianino, in full Gilbert and Sullivan style military garb to sing “All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor.”
All the nice girls love a sailorIt’s very hard not to smile. What a relief! Hilarious and delightful, the show continues, drawing from vaudeville, music hall and Monty Python to make sure that even long parodic speeches on the importance of art are full of pratfalls and laughter.
All the nice girls love a tar
For there's something about a sailor
(Well you know what sailors are!)
The show is funny and meant to be, but it also makes pointed fun of the self-absorption of artists. Woolf admired artistic dedication, but, as director Anne Bogart pointed out in the talk-back after the show, it’s also about not hurting others in the pursuit of art. For this, the youthful Ellen Terry is our guide: she is bored, posing for a painting, and no one cares. It’s one thing for Watts to dedicate his life to perfecting a painting, but quite another to demand his wife spend her days perfectly still. This is the comic version of Woolf’s critique of Milton and Carlyle.
I have a lot more to say, but other things in my day are calling. You can read reviews in Variety and the New York Times.
“Freshwater” is playing in limited run until February 15. There are discounts available, but even the full-priced tickets are an affordable $42. It’s a little dose of summer in midwinter. Do go!
Thursday, January 29, 2009
En mi pais…
Today was the Family Feast at kindergarten. It was the culmination of a month of studying “What Makes a House a Home.” All the mommies and daddies who could take time from work, brought in a dish representing their heritage and we had a huge buffet lunch. A feast of filled dough from around the world: empanadas, tamales, samosas, Indonesian pastel! There was also spiced rice from Puerto Rico, India, and the Dominican Republic. The potato pancakes, German-style, were fantastic. I made kringle, a very simple Danish figure-8-shaped cookie, not too sweet, with a pinch of nutmeg.
After lunch, the children treated us to a song, “Que Bonita Bandera” (What a pretty flag). Each child got up and said a sentence in Spanish about her country. After, eveyrone sang, "Que bonita bandera (x2) / es la bandera _____ [Colombiana/Dominicana/de Gales/de India]" It was so sweet to hear what they chose as the special thing about their nation. Of all the many nations we are from, my daughter picked Wales because it has the most bonita bandera, with that great dragon on it. She asked me about Wales: what makes it famous. I was cooking dinner and gave it a quick try: um, the Prince of Wales, coal mines, and dragons.
Well, the dragons aren’t real, she noted. They probably just used to have really fierce dinosaurs there. And coal mines? No romance there. Tell me about the Prince of Wales, Mama.
So, there she was, kicking off the song, with her little sentence about how in her country (!) lives the Prince of Wales who is the son of Queen Elizabeth.
She was far from the only child to pick royalty and parties: Trinidad has Carnevale and India has lots of palaces. Food figured large among the 5- and 6-year olds too, with Guatemala growing lots of rice, and a couple other children mentioning crops and dishes (between their mumbles and my very rudimentary Spanish, I missed a lot).
All the children joined together at the end to announce that in their country, the United States, there are fifty states and everyone is happy.
One wants to say “isn’t it pretty to think so?” But I wonder. It was such a touching day, with parents awkwardly circling around each other and one child, it seems, in tears, at all times. We are all so different; we all anxiously watch over our beloved little ones. All these years of theorizing and thinking and talking about racism and culture and multiculturalism and here it is, in action. It’s very sweet, but is this the best way to do it? I am not skeptical—it seems like a winner event to me—but I do wonder.
After lunch, the children treated us to a song, “Que Bonita Bandera” (What a pretty flag). Each child got up and said a sentence in Spanish about her country. After, eveyrone sang, "Que bonita bandera (x2) / es la bandera _____ [Colombiana/Dominicana/de Gales/de India]" It was so sweet to hear what they chose as the special thing about their nation. Of all the many nations we are from, my daughter picked Wales because it has the most bonita bandera, with that great dragon on it. She asked me about Wales: what makes it famous. I was cooking dinner and gave it a quick try: um, the Prince of Wales, coal mines, and dragons.Well, the dragons aren’t real, she noted. They probably just used to have really fierce dinosaurs there. And coal mines? No romance there. Tell me about the Prince of Wales, Mama.
So, there she was, kicking off the song, with her little sentence about how in her country (!) lives the Prince of Wales who is the son of Queen Elizabeth.
She was far from the only child to pick royalty and parties: Trinidad has Carnevale and India has lots of palaces. Food figured large among the 5- and 6-year olds too, with Guatemala growing lots of rice, and a couple other children mentioning crops and dishes (between their mumbles and my very rudimentary Spanish, I missed a lot).
All the children joined together at the end to announce that in their country, the United States, there are fifty states and everyone is happy.
One wants to say “isn’t it pretty to think so?” But I wonder. It was such a touching day, with parents awkwardly circling around each other and one child, it seems, in tears, at all times. We are all so different; we all anxiously watch over our beloved little ones. All these years of theorizing and thinking and talking about racism and culture and multiculturalism and here it is, in action. It’s very sweet, but is this the best way to do it? I am not skeptical—it seems like a winner event to me—but I do wonder.
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