Watching Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in Bryant Park two or three summers ago, sweltering with friends before the oversize screen, and when the camera came creeping in on Paul Newman’s giant face, his enormous eyes light and luminous in black-and-white, the whole crowd, thousands of people, stopped clattering and whispering and drew breath in unison.

In addition to being a busybody, one Countess Luann de Lesseps, apparently on television, is clearly kind of semantically scrambled. From Page Six:

“Men like women to be females,” de Lesseps advised, “to not be like workaholics, as that comes off as being uptight in the bedroom and control freaks.”

Awesome. The use of “females” in reference to, you know, female humans always strikes me as kind of strange and clinical. It also, of course, elides the difference between the biological and the social, which de Lesseps abuses here to hilarious effect.

Our conversation, which had degenerated into a cross-cultural comparison of methods for cooking udders among the English, Romans, Mexicans, and Yemenite Jews (who on top of everything else need to make them kosher), ceased as soon as we began to share the true Valencian paella. The rice lining the bottom of the pan was browned and crusty; the meat was tender and deeply flavored. Everything was imbued with the smoke of vines and fruitwood and the aroma of rosemary, and the Phaseoli lunati were, well, incomparable.

Max Lake, an Australian doctor turned wine maker, broke out a case of his best Australian red, and when no more than half of it had been drunk, one of the British writers among us revealed that, at the age of sixteen on a vacation in the south of Spain, she had been courted by El Cordobes, the greatest bullfighter who ever lived.

This is the end of a brief (four pages) essay, “Rosemary and Moon Beans,” anthologized in Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything. It is extra-special great because of the leap between the two paragraphs–they’re very good on their own (Steingarten, like my other favorite food writer, Ruth Reichl, is both lyrical and witty), but juxtaposed, they mimic and convey the mysticism of good food, especially good foreign food, crafted in foreign ways, which seems to make real the possibility of living very differently. In the interstice created by the food, the conversation, like the writing style, changes: it becomes quieter, more intimate. Because this is the end of the essay, the strangeness and possibility linger the way an aroma might in the air, or a taste in the mouth.

My review of the Hypothetical Theater Company’s “There or Here” is up at CurtainUp. Short version? I did not care for the play.

Why didn’t anyone tell me sooner that Jersey Boys is so good? I guess it did pick up its fair share of Tonys in ‘06 (including Best Musical), but I have a distinct bias against jukebox musicals, especially after having to sit through the execrable The Times They Are A-Changin’, and always dismissed the show as just another example of a genre I wouldn’t mind seeing chased out of town. So I went to Sunday’s Actors’ Fund benefit pretty reluctantly, but I’m really glad I did.

There’s something incredibly genuine about this show’s exuberance–possibly because it comes from the music itself, and not from whipping the book into a frenzy. The book scenes in Jersey Boys are actually pretty laid-back: one might even, every now and then, call them subtle. They do give notably short shrift to the female characters, but sort of in the same way that Martin Scorsese movies do, which is with a sense that the issues on the table are men’s issues. This is really a show about music, but second to that, it’s a show about men: much is made of how different the guys of the Four Seasons were, and how they came together because they (kind of) got along and because music was their shot to make it out of the Old Neighborhood–how they did it, as American men have done from time immemorial, to give their kids a better shot than they’d had and ended up living with strangers when they were home at all. Because the show works with a time-tested prefab score, it neatly sidesteps the maudlin, forgettable music that’s been bringing down new musicals left and right. Jersey Boys makes the disjunction between the music and the book an advantage by letting the book scenes run as a subtextual undercurrent through the continuous thread of the performances, which comes to seem, to the Four Seasons and their audience both, as the realest thing going (what’s realer to an audience than being performed to directly?). It’s a neat merging of form and function that helps to inculcate the audience into the mindset of the characters.

I saw understudy Cory Grant (Cory, not Cary) as Valli, and he struggled mightily with the Jersey accent (I tend to think that accents are overvalued, but you just can’t get past an obtrusive accent-attempt) and lost–the second act was a wee bit less enjoyable than the first because it rested so heavily on his shoulders, and he just wasn’t great in book scenes (not just because of the accent). The second act dips a little also because it spends more time than the first on that jukebox-musical technique of drafting kinda-relevant songs into the service of the plot, rather than just performing them, as it largely did in the first act. There’s a clever hedging technique of making the songs performances with plot resonance, as in “Beggin’” and “Let’s Hang On (To What We’ve Got),” but “Fallen Angel” is a big misstep: a lesser song appropriated into a sappy, unnecessary number. Still, this show works with its source material way better than any other jukebox musical I’ve ever seen (note: I’ve never felt the need to see Mamma Mia!). Other than Grant, the cast is very solid–the casting director deserves a medal for doing a tough job well–and it’s nice to see a musical with so many original cast members staying on this long. I was particularly taken by J. Robert Spencer (as Nick Massi), whose lanky lightness makes the Ed Sullivan-approved dancing fresh and compelling, but all three regular Seasons are fun to watch, and nicely differentiated, and a couple of supporting actors give satisfyingly plummy performances.

Perhaps the thing by which I was really so taken is the fact that these characters mostly aren’t fleshed out with a lot of talking–they’re fleshed out with the songs they sing and the way they sing them, their wildly divergent dance styles as they rattle through the same moves in unison. It’s just very enjoyable to watch, and you don’t feel like you’re being beaten around the head with character development, the way you do in many a musical. It’s lovely. Jersey Boys is very devoted to the ideal of entertaining an audience, and it’s nice to see that interpreted as a job to be done carefully and well, rather than just a lazy willingness to distract from a hollow core with the old razzle-dazzle.

While a great many theater critics seem able to forgive a musical anything because of its “joy,” my blackened little heart just can’t–and for that reason, I appreciated the unexpected subtlety of Jersey Boys. I could have done without the random pop-art scenes that descend from the flies periodically, but that’s small-potatoes quibbling, and the screens were also used for really effective archival video footage. But given how many of the musicals I’ve seen in recent years have been badly done from soup to nuts–badly conceived, written, produced, cast, designed, staged–the fact that the various members of the Jersey Boys team have identified their jobs and done them thoroughly comes to seem a blessing, and a nice complement to the themes of workmanlike artistry that are the show’s center. It’s a nice, compact package, and I’d see it again tomorrow.

P.S. It doesn’t have a plot, really, beyond the usual “what goes up must come down.” For unknown reasons, I didn’t mind so much, but if plotlessness is your pet peeve…look elsewhere.

I’m seeing six plays in seven days this week (yesterday was my day off), doing reviews of the Fringe Festival for CurtainUp. The Fringe reviews are here, and my first contribution is here. Writing that little paragraph led me to realize that above a certain threshold of competence with the English language, everyone’s writing sounds basically the same within the constraints of a short-form review.

Regular posting to resume next week, probably kicking off with The Emperor’s Children.

Update:
Review of The Alice Complex
Review of Becoming Britney
Review of Gargoyle Garden
Review of Salt Lake: A New Ballet
Review of That Dorothy Parker

I saw The Dark Knight nearly two weeks ago, and it’s taken me that long to figure out what I think of it and why. In a nutshell, what I think of it is this: the first chunk (not quite half) of the movie is completely brilliant; the rest is a very, very good action movie. The problem is that after the first part, the very-very-good-action-movie part doesn’t quite satisfy.

The movie’s first sequence is a great little microcosm of why its beginning is so profoundly unsettling. Bank robbery. Gang of thieves in Joker masks—bright, plasticky, like masks of previous Jokers sold to children for Halloween. The small fry go down like dominos, or a kind of brutal daisy chain, until only one is left: this one is real. Beneath his mask is another one, a dirty cartoon of smeared greasepaint. He wedges a grenade into the bank manager’s mouth. There is a long string around the pin, and his departure (in a broken-down school bus) pulls it free. It lands on the bank-floor marble with a tinkle. Close on the doomed man. Time elapses in very small increments, and as it does, you sit in the audience hoping that you will not have to watch the man’s head explode. More milliseconds, during which you grow more and more sure of what is coming and more and more sure you do not want to see it. More milliseconds. You realize it has been too long. The grenade hisses smoke, then sputters out. The screen holds the man’s face. This is not better than seeing the man’s head explode. It might be worse.

These long shots, in which you become increasingly convinced of the inevitability of something terrible (and terrible to watch) happening, are both characteristic of the first part of The Dark Knight and an enormous departure from the visual and intellectual conventions of the superhero genre. Also convention-defying is the nondescriptness of the setting, which has been stripped of the CGI Gothic grime it sported in Batman Begins. The city’s Chicago, as it happens, but those of us with a less than encyclopedic knowledge of its skyline and streets can forget that fact entirely. For the movie’s purposes, it’s Anycity, full of glass-and-steel office towers, penthouses for millionaires, people going to work, pervasive corruption, slightly shabby rowhouses, and the constant threat of chaos and violence–this works quite effectively to eliminate the sheen of stylization that can (sometimes) blunt the edge of scary movie images. The movie’s most important break with genre convention, though, is the Joker. He is inexplicable, almost autocthonic: he tells a different story of how came to be the way he is each time, and it feels like a weapon as potent as the array of knives he carries around with him. The somewhat florid script says, “Some men just want to see the world burn,” but that doesn’t quite capture the Joker, whose carefully-curated destructions form the core of the scariness of the first part of the movie.

It’s irritating to say, as David Denby and many inferior critics have done, that Heath Ledger “looked into the abyss” to play this role. I do think, though, that despite the fact that Ledger’s profoundly freaky performance makes him all but unrecognizable, the audience’s meta-awareness of the young actor’s early overdose death works to ground the movie in the reality of human suffering. People can suffer this much. It can hurt this bad. Death is real, and can materialize, like Batman or the Joker, from nowhere in the blink of an eye, and disappear again without explanation. The first part of the movie is a paean to the human capacity for pain, and watching it is like being beaten up. Every death—every single one, every petty criminal, every civilian—is devastating to watch, every threat is credible and scary. It’s a big achievement that the movie can make more of a single-digit number of casualties than most movies of this kind can do with the decimation of entire populations: after the grainy, jumpy, uncomfortably-but-subtly-evocative-of-Al-Qaida footage of the Joker toying with a Batman wannabe, there is a reference to the number of dead people, and it is, in action-movie terms, shockingly low to be responsible for the nuclear-winter mood on the screen and in the theater, and tells one something about how high The Dark Knight’s stakes are.

And then somewhere–I can’t put my finger on quite where, but perhaps at the point of the not-quite-sufficiently-contextualized death of a major character, or possibly as the plot fractures into many individually spinning pieces–the movie settles down into being a really good action movie. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a really good action movie for the back three-fifths or whatever, full of tension and speed. It gets the adrenaline pumping, but after the first chunk, it’s hard to find a really good action movie satisfying. We have been promised the poetry of despair. The pace becomes manic. The cutting accelerates to top speed (the kind where the car begins to shake). There were several sequences I stopped trying to follow–I just leaned back a little and let their flashing and noise and explosions work ambiently. The underground triple chase, for example. These are action-movie sequences, and they run on action-movie tropes, including the reintroduction of cannon fodder: the people whose sole job it is to die. That was a big deal for me, and really changed my reaction to the movie in midstream. You can’t sustain the incredibly minute focus of the first part, its elegiac attention to fear and suffering, while cop cars are exploding anonymously in the foreground: full of bodies, bursting into flame, flying at the screen, then gone.

Much is packed into the latter section of the movie, many quick cuts and action sequences, several new set pieces (mixed results: the hospital explosion sequence was arresting, but the prisoner’s-dilemma ferry setup felt forced and toothless), and a whole new plot thread. It seems to end in about three places, and some things that should be harrowing are merely exhausting. Two-Face’s face isn’t scary enough–it’s too easy to look at, too plastic and inhuman. It’s a nice reminder that even kind of gross things can be comforting if they are, like this face, kind of gross in a familiar way. But after the movie’s first terrifying, exhilarating surge, this comfort is cold comfort. Then again, if the end had come after the first hour, or if that tone had been sustained throughout, I might be having nightmares about this movie for the duration of my mortal life. So maybe it’s for the best.

…is that all authors google themselves. Hi, Sarah Manguso! I liked your book a great deal! I am sorry I read it in the bookstore! Alas, Keith Gessen, I have not read yours yet, but would be happy to accept any review copies you might like to provide in gestures of in-Brooklyn-they-saved-and-schemed solidarity.

Seriously, I think the reason that no one (read: me, and maybe other people) expects published authors to google themselves and their book titles (which, when you think about it, of course they do, and it’s not even pathetic. If you said something you cared about to the public at large, wouldn’t you want to know what they were saying in response?) is that we all still kind of think that the internet is fake, a hallucination you dream up alone in your house, while books are real, solid and money-costing and conversation-starting.

Two things, variations on a theme with other variations, to confront and subsequently integrate:

Theme: writing in the first person, especially on the internet, this very tricky series of tubes. Telling the truth in the first person (having a point, not getting bogged down in the rapid-response cycle, not ending up thinking it’s all about you). Young women who write, and the teeth of the New York media beast they (we?) court and flee.

When I first conceptualized this blog, the idea was to never, ever say I. My thought was (and is) that a self is as much, if not more, itself when it is inside looking out as when it is inside content to stare at the other parts of the inside (maybe in hopes of rearranging the furniture a little, cleaning things out a bit). I thought also that, given that much of my writing has been introspective and that I am trying to be a grown-up, it might be good for me to practice turning my gaze outwards.

I find the first person easy, I guess. Fact-checking, certainly, gets simpler, and organization, too: all you have to do is say what you’re thinking as you’re thinking it. It does not require, as does writing about a response to something, first figuring out what I think and want to say. It only requires opening the floodgates.

I write pretty well in the first person, because I don’t stop to think very much while I’m doing it and that, for whatever reason, works. When I write in the first person, I tend to write in rushed, tumbling sentences. Sometimes the sentences tumble and rush over each other, sometimes within themselves. Often, I like those sentences better than the stiff, overworked ones I can turn out while writing about, say, Hamlet. I’m not as good at this new form as I am at short-form self-examination (exposure?), and it’s hard to resist the urge to do only what you do well.

But it’s also tough to differentiate writing in the first person and making oneself the primary (if not exclusive) subject of one’s writing, and that’s somewhere I just don’t want to go. There are many writers who make careers of picking their scabs in public and fingerpainting with the blood. Once they are bled out—then what? Most of these writers are women, and I wonder why writers who are men don’t have to undergo this microscopic examination to find recognition, audience, career. I’m generalizing wildly here, but I think we have a higher tolerance for men who say, It is this way, rather than, This is how I feel. I have for nearly my entire life, adult and previous, put people off (people who already like me, even) by saying, It is this way. They ask me why I treat my opinion like it’s fact, and I say, Well, it’s my opinion. I think it’s true. I wonder why the disclaimer part, the “Well, this is just me,” the “I think” part, can’t be applied by the listener: isn’t it assumed that if I say things, they’re my opinion? Couldn’t you take that with a grain of salt without me having to provide the salt for you? The point here is that I think we are more insistent on seeing women’s insecurities than men’s. We forgive men their personal failings (the wives abandoned, the bottles fallen into) if they will give us interesting things to think about, but from women we want relentless, eternal self-scrutiny.

Anyway, because of how much less they tend to be their own subjects (there’s a difference between Keith Gessen’s thinly-veiled autobiographic writing, or Paul Auster naming characters “Paul Auster,” and the naked I of Emily Gould, et al.), men writers can be a lot less vulnerable to attack than women writers. For the women who memoirize, who write dominantly or exclusively in the first person, their product is inextricable from its producer: they are, in the least judgmental sense, self-dramatizing. The story they are writing is their own. This fact hides the craft of what they do, and makes ad-hominem attacking far easier, whereas Keith Gessen, say, can tell you to go fuck yourself (and has!) because he wrote a novel, asshole. Criticism of the novel doesn’t stick to the author as a human in the same way that criticism of a memoir (or a personal essay) does. A novel is less cramped: there isn’t a direct line, an intimate proximity, between author and novel and reader. A memoir (or a personal essay) is read in a self-helpier way than is a novel. You read to empathize, for insight about your own life via the author’s, to stimulate your own introspection. (Or you read because you need to know where the soft underbelly will yield to something sharp.) It’s sort of like the difference between Art and Craft before feminist art jumped in and started setting things straight.

So I don’t want to join this club of confessional women writers–it’s scary and maybe a little bit masochistic, and it doesn’t satisfy my preference for a kind of intellectual rigor (not to say that’s not inflected by the aforementioned arts-vs.-crafts trope). But there’s a place for the first person–a balance in which the producer can inform the product without overwhelming it–and I haven’t found it yet. Sarah Manguso has found it, mostly: in The Two Kinds of Decay, she does a really good job of drawing on her own experience without sacrificing aboutness, the sense that her point is more important than she is. I would hope to follow in her footsteps in this sense. I do have a hunch that the fact that I am a woman makes it harder, but in this particular case, I am more concerned with navigating this channel for myself than I am about figuring it out in a way that makes me capable of explaining it. The trick (a tricky one) is to bring personality to your writing without making the personality the point. It requires a certain confidence (both writerly and human) that’s tough to achieve.

So much of it is in the fine-tuning of tone–stylistically shutting the door between product and producer (again exemplified by Sarah Manguso, whose tone makes it so clear that she’s not just performing herself in an entertaining way)–but some of it isn’t. Some of it is about the market (Bridget Jones and all her successors continue to sell), and some of it is what we currently expect from young women, especially young women willing to expose themselves to criticism in a public sphere. There is something nasty about the way we continue to eat up these memoirs of self-immolation and essays of self-doubt. There is something about it like a virgin sacrifice (without the virginity), the way we expect young women (and James Frey, sort of) to keep on flinging themselves into the fire so that we may go on doing what we have been doing, which is building them up and tearing them down.

No one wants to be torn down, but it’s hard to resist the impulse to position oneself to be built up. And to come full circle, that’s what gave people pause about Jess the twenty-year-old partygoer’s remarks about her experience. They felt like she was just getting in on the game, lobbing a brick as a way of announcing her presence. I disagree; I think her posts on this subject are thoroughly sincere. I think she is trying to tell the truth. But the reason that some people reacted badly is that she speaks (writes) in the same idiom as the people whom she’s criticizing. And so it’s easy for people to think that what she wants is what those people already have.

I hope that in Paris, she will find a new idiom. I hope that through experimentation (or expatriation, if that proves effective), I will, too. There are role models, but not a lot of guideposts for those hoping to follow in their footsteps.

When I was just graduated from high school and in Iowa City doing a writing workshop, in the summer of 2002, I bought Sarah Manguso’s first book, The Captain Lands in Paradise, from Prairie Lights. I bought it because my poetry teacher told me to, and because I had never seen so many slim volumes lined up along shelves, like an alternate universe in which people read poetry (someone told me while I was there that Iowa City is one of two places in America in which you can walk into a bar, be asked what you do, respond that you are a poet, and not get beaten up. I forget what the other one was). I also bought my poetry teacher’s second book, which won the Colorado Prize. Other books of poems, too. (Also Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics.)

Anyway, the point is that I’m not sure I ever read the book. I read it the other day, after whipping through The Two Kinds of Decay; dug it up and read it cover to cover (poetry books are short). I don’t like it all that much, for the most part—the short line brings out a kind of disjointedness, a lack of connection, in Manguso’s style, especially when she sets up endstopped line after endstopped line. Compare:

The Deer Comes Down the Mountain

Now we gather worshipful.
The gears in his legs shine down.
He lifts his head.
Here he comes!
We’re erecting a maypole with green ribbons.
His legs are for probes.
And his back is a ship [*]
And his eyes are holes in the curtain.
We’re eating cookies in the shape of him.
The icing is gold and silver.
He’s shedding gears, here he comes tripping!
He is casting off the elastic bindings.
Now we’re hanging up giant flags.
The wind-up key sticks in his side like a blade.
The wind rocks him on his wheels.
Here he comes, crawling!
The bright obvious shines in his body.
Here comes the electric, the burning mystery!

* Note the only line that doesn’t end in a punctuation mark. I don’t know why; do you?

Short Essay On the Muse
The engineer catches an accidental in the seventh movement, flipping switches at it, waving tuning forks. Hearing one note sung can inspire the carefullest lie. I saw the same girl twice on the same corner—we were walking in opposite directions but the second time in reverse. She must come now, no one thinks, not me, not knowing which girl, and there she is. Hearing one note sung, hearing it bright and unthought before you expect it, comes before the wish. Usually it’s sounds or shapes in the grass. Yes, those are deer on the lawn, and the wish comes true before you make it. If only there were a doe! First, something pale and unnameable, and then the scurry to invent her.

Neither poem knocks my socks off, but the second reads way better to me—it sets a mood, gives a sense of texture and of looking at things. And its willingness to run right across the page is a part of that—it would be really different if it went like this:

The engineer catches an accidental in the seventh movement.
Flipping switches at it.
Waving tuning forks.
Hearing one note sung can inspire the carefullest lie.
I saw the same girl twice on the same corner.
We were walking in opposite directions.
But the second time in reverse.
She must come now, no one thinks.
Not me.
Not knowing which girl.
And there she is.
Hearing one note sung
Hearing it bright and unthought before you expect it
Comes before the wish.
Usually it’s sounds or shapes in the grass.
Yes, those are deer on the lawn.
And the wish comes true before you make it.
If only there were a doe!
First, something pale and unnameable.
And then the scurry to invent her.

(See? It’s not a perfect parallel, because the sentences in the second poem vary structurally far more than do the ones in the first, but they two versions still read quite differently.)

It does not surprise me that there is a kind of endstopped abruptness that comes from developing, one day in March during one’s junior year at Harvard, a killer brain/blood disease that takes over one’s life for nine years—the enjambed line, like tomorrow, representing a faith that the next line will rise to take on the overspill of its predecessor—but because we as readers don’t have all the information there, we don’t get what might otherwise have been a resonance of the style. It just seems flat, like all sense of the way things cause and connect to each other has been drained away. And in the same way that you can’t necessarily write about badness effectively by writing badly—well, you get the idea.

There is only one poem that deals with her illness, and if you read it without knowing about the circumstances, I doubt you’d ever pick it up. It’s on page 47, and it is, not coincidentally I think, a prose-poem, without imposed linebreaks. I like it quite a bit.