Meteor Shower, or Comedy Is Hard

Everyone old enough to have seen more than a couple of Steve Martin's movies or routines has a favorite joke of his. Mine are his line about being flabbergasted upon visiting France (“they have a different word for everything over there!”) and a line from L.A. Story, for which Martin wrote the script, that the lucky bastard Patrick Stewart gets to say as a beyond-snotty maître d’ at the ultra-exclusive restaurant L’Idiot, who thinks some of his clientele aren’t successful enough to order some of the items on the menu (“Ze duck? You can’t have ze duck. You can have ze chicken!”).

As Martin has moved further into writing, he has found a place as a playwright, and something of a champion in the Long Wharf Theater, which has produced The Underpants, which I didn’t see, and Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which I did see and thought was pretty funny.

So what happened with Meteor Shower?

To be fair, plenty of people thought Meteor Shower is also pretty funny. The night my wife and I went, half of the audience laughed at almost all the jokes. But the other half didn’t, and my wife and I—who have pretty divergent tastes in humor—were among them. She was ready to leave after intermission. I convinced her to stay, and felt that the second half was stronger than the first. But still, I thought, what happened?

Meteor Shower tells the story of Norm (Patrick Breen) and Corky (Arden Myrin), a wife and husband who seem to be getting along through a mixture of genuine, though possibly waning, affection, as well as a series of routines they’ve picked up from therapy. Social climbers, they’re getting ready for a dinner party with acquaintances Gerald (Josh Stamberg) and Laura (Sophina Brown), though a casual comment Corky drops about having to deal with your subconscious or it will deal with you suggests that possibly the guests aren’t quite what they seems.

In any case, Gerald and Laura turn out to be scenery chewers of the highest order—she’s so sexy it hurts, wriggling out of her dress with every casual move she makes, and he’s just the kind of leather jacket-clad New Age bro that gives Southern California a bad name. The new couple comes on to the old couple in a way that wants to seem like hip 1990s—the play is set in 1993—but comes across more douchey 1970s. That this couple is staggeringly unlikeable is intentional, of course, and the rest of the play involves Norm and Corky in some sense getting to do the whole party over in a couple different ways, first to figure out what is going on, and finally to get the upper hand of their dinner guests, and dodge an earthbound meteor in the process.

As usual, Long Wharf’s production of Meteor Shower is great. All four actors fully inhabit their characters, diving into them with gusto and working to make every joke count. The set is beautiful to look at and cleverly constructed, and the special effects are flawlessly executed.

Sounds fun, right? But here’s the problem, in a nutshell: The play doesn’t make much sense. If—spoilers ahead—Gerald and Laura are actually a real couple, then they’re kind of unbelievable as human beings, even in a sex farce like Meteor Shower is. If they’re instead subconscious manifestations of Norm and Corky—which, fine—then the rest of the play falls apart at the seams. If Norm and Corky aren’t having guests over, who did they put the hors d’oeuvres out for? And how is it that the catalyst for our protagonists getting the better of their subconscious selves is a phone call from the outside world? Meteor Shower doesn’t pass a test that plenty of writers get right (The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, and, most recently, Mr. Robot come to mind): If you want audiences to realize late in the game that one or more of the characters aren’t there, or that things aren’t what they seem, then you have to make sure that your plot holds up when the deception is revealed, that an audience can reconstruct what really happened while it was being treated to the full monty of a character’s distorted vision of reality. Meteor Shower leaves us with very little to grab onto in the end.

And more important in a minute-by-minute way, the humor in Meteor Shower seems to try to draw its power mostly from being shocking—and at least from where I was sitting (in row C), I wasn’t shocked. I don’t think of myself as particularly worldly. My youth wasn’t that wild. I live in a house in the suburbs. And yet, while the woman next to me exploded with laughter at turn after turn, I wasn’t shocked into much more than a chuckle by the over-the-top come-ons, whether woman on woman, man on man, or man on vegetable dip. I felt some cheap schadenfreude at watching Norm and Corky conquer their guests, though I just giggled mildly at the even more over-the-top way they did it. And I left the play wondering what the play was really trying to say about much of anything, and got nothing.

Is it fair to ask a comedy to mean something? Can’t we just relax and have a good time? Well, sure. But I’d argue that the best comedies are a kind of philosophy in themselves. They offer ways of looking at life, of moving through the world, and of dealing with what’s thrown at you with humor and grace that are as deep to me as the most despairing tragedy. You laugh until you cry. You laugh until your stomach hurts. And you aren’t quite the same afterward. You’re better.

Martin is more than capable of producing that kind of comedy. I can’t wait to see it.

The Mexican Fantastic

Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the FantasticEduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris N. Brown, eds. (Small Beer Press, 2011)

From where I'm standing, Latin American literature in the United States is still more or less defined by magical realism, and the more colorful, soap-opera edge of magical realism at that, even as—as should be pretty obvious after a couple seconds' thought—the literature itself is much more diverse than that, and even though the countermovements to magical realism are at least a decade old. (Part of the problem, I think, is that fewer non-magical realist works are translated into English, because somebody thinks that English-speaking North Americans don't want to read about Latin America unless it also involves a thousand butterflies flying out of someone's mouth. Are they right?)

As the title implies, Three Messages and a Warning doesn't break realist writers for a American audience. It does, however, show that, even within the realm of the fantastic, literature written in Spanish has more going on than just magical realism. It also makes a compelling case for considering the works to be distinctly Mexican. Writers of the fantastic from other Spanish-speaking countries aren't represented in the book—and I'm not well-read enough to make the comparison myself—but the volume, taken as a whole, points to an aesthetic that the writers seem to share. A certain tone is struck, a certain taste runs through everything; it isn't quite like anything else I've read before, and it's on every page, even as the stories themselves are remarkably diverse.

There are stories of personal anxiety, touched with both humor and horror. In Amparo Dávila's "The Guest"—a cousin of Julio Cortázar's famous story "House Taken Over"—a stranger moves into a house and terrorizes the women living there, while the man of the house doesn't seem to care. In Alberto Chimal's "Variations on a Theme of Coleridge," a man gets a cell phone call, and then a visit, from himself. Guillermo Samperio's "Mr. Strogoff" is constructed as a breathless excerpt of a much longer story, of crime, betrayal, love, and corruption. In Óscar de la Borbolla's "Wittgenstein's Umbrella," seemingly everything that is possible happens to you—the story is written in the second person—in an astonishing four pages. Then there are stories of societal disarray, or straight-up apocalypse, though unlike the usual American version of it—it's zombies! It's a nuclear war!—the causes are stranger, more complicated, more difficult to understand or sort out. A city is overrun by lions ("Lions," by Bernardo Fernández, perhaps my favorite story in the book); a village is overrun by wolves ("Wolves," by José Luis Zárate). In "The Hour of the Fireflies," the country has been plagued by terrorism and a "war among the corporations," which leads the government (or someone) to justify a series of Tuskeegee-like experiments in a certain city. In what can be read as a pretty biting commentary on foreigners' (i.e., us) appreciation of magical realism and not much else from Latin America, the experiments, as a by-product, produce a flood of electrically charged fireflies that swarm the city every evening. The fireflies become a tourist attraction—"visitors from all over the globe pay exorbitant premiums to rent views of the street"—though the fireflies themselves are deadly, the charge from one of them enough to kill three people, which means no one who lives there can go out. Mauricio Montiel Figuerias' "Photophobia" and Liliana V. Blum's "Pink Lemonade" are both much grittier versions of society in total collapse, again from a confluence of several factors, taken from today's headlines. Finally, there are the metastories, which feel most familiar to people who've read, say, Borges and Cortazar: Agustín Cadena's "Murillo Park," in which a man has a friendship with an old woman whom he may or may not have dreamed; Carmen Rioja's "The Nahual Offering," in which the narrator dreams a character who may be dreaming her; Gabriela Damián Miravete's "Future Nereid," in which a woman reading an obscure book discovers that she might a character in it.

See what I mean about diversity? There's more where that came from, too. But about the commonality: What each of the stories share with the other is the overwhelming feeling that there is a much, much bigger story out there, beyond the ability of the narrator or the characters to comprehend, and that story is tinged not just with wonder and tragedy, but with outright menace, toward the narrator, toward society, toward the reader. It's this uniquely eerie sense of threat, just around the corner, just out of sight, that's tempting to label as Mexican—what the editors in the introduction describe as "a multicultural, media-drunk, post-postmodern society" whose "literary culture still enjoys mass appreciation of the importance of verse, where large crowds gather in public plazas to hear poets read their work" while it's simultaneously "plugged into the mediated networks that dominate our global perceptions"—even though the editors also point out that the "stories come from a culture that itself would probably never collect these authors in a single volume."

The sense of threat has some resonance in contemporary current events in Mexico: the persistent questions regarding just how much control the government really has over the place; the constant allegations of corruption; the increasingly unsettling sense that large-scale drug traffickers operate with impunity; the wave of murders in Ciudad Juarez, in which hundreds of women have been killed and nobody still seems to know who's doing it or why. (Roberto Bolaño barely fictionalizes these killings in the fourth, and, in my and apparently most people's opinions, best part of 2666, "The Part About the Crimes.") But it also resonates here, in our own insecurities and sense that things are getting a little out of control. U.S. culture is seeing its own wave of popularity of weird and postapocalyptic stuff; if this strain of pop culture is here to stay in the United States, then these writers on the other side of the border offer a way for it to move forward.

Leaving Eden: Carolina Chocolate Drops remember weird America

ARTS & IDEAS: For the past few years, you could say there's been a bit of a resurgence in interest in traditional American musical styles, and with it, a move to do to American music again what Dylan did to it a generation ago: to combine the sounds of old, weird America and the music lots of people listen to today.

Buck 65 took a stab at it with Talkin' Honky Blues in 2003. The Low Anthem has been steadily rising since 2007 by using the sounds of old country, gospel, and blues in ever new ways. And, of course, there was Mumford and Sons' breakout performance with Dylan at the Grammys, turning the stage into a 1960s-style hootenanny, which hearkens back even further into the past.

One of the more interesting groups going after the ancient-modern alchemy is the Carolina Chocolate Drops—Grammy winners themselves for their 2010 album Genuine Negro Jig—and if you were to describe the various musical acts as a race to perfect the formula, to my ears, the Chocolate Drops might be in the lead.

The Chocolate Drops, then composed of Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons, and Justin Robinson, started off almost like historians. The band's first album, Dona Got a Ramblin' Mind, found them paying homage to the great black fiddle-banjo duo Joe and Odell Thompson (the title of the album is taken from one of the Thompsons' signature tunes) while also placing them in the context of other string band and jug band acts that were, more or less, the Thompsons' contemporaries. But even on that first album, there was a hint of what was coming: the Chocolate Drops weren't just recreating old recordings, but playing them like they wanted to, infusing the old music with their own spirit, energy, and sensibility.

They followed that up with years of relentless touring, during which they grew and developed their sound. A lot. A collaboration with the Luminescent Orchestrii, a band doing similar things with Eastern European music as the Chocolate Drops were doing with Americana, led to some of the most hip hop-inflected work for both groups. Giddens proceeded to work with Sxip Shirey, guitarist for the Lumiis and a composer in his own right, and appeared on Shirey's Sonic New York. The result of all this for the Chocolate Drops was Genuine Negro Jig, and the Grammy that followed.

Justin Robinson left the band after the Grammy win—he's currently heading up this fascinating project—and Flemons and Giddens took on Hubby Jenkins to round out the trio, with support from beat-boxer Adam Matta and Leyla McCalla on cello.

The project recorded with this lineup, Leaving Eden, is their strongest album to date. The sound still partakes heavily of the old American music the Chocolate Drops have been swimming in, but the modern elements are stronger and everything comes together even more seamlessly than before, in a more compelling way.

They're right to put "Country Girl" forward as a single. The unusual instrumentation—fiddle, banjo, mandolin, cello, and beat box—lays down an unmistakably modern groove, letting Giddens's beautiful voice slide and soar. But then the album's opener, "Riro's House," marries stringband music to a rolling snare that shows the connection between Appalachia and New Orleans while also rocking pretty damn hard. "West End Blues" delivers a spare slink. And the title track is a moody slice of gorgeous country.

Leaving Eden is another step forward in the band's evolution, another signpost in these musicians' pilgrimage across the American landscape, and New Haven should consider itself pretty lucky that we're one of the stops. Fittingly, opening for the Chocolate Drops will be Caravan of Thieves, one of New Haven's most successful musical exports in recent years.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbcqGjeNz7w[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQG3iP_wNRM[/youtube]

IF YOU GO: What: The Carolina Chocolate Drops with Caravan of Thieves When: 7 p.m., June 23 Where: The New Haven Green Tickets: Free Info: artidea.org

Why are we doing this? Click here to find out more.

Blossoms of Sound: Red Baraat and Noori bring the world to New Haven

ARTS & IDEAS: If the Arts & Ideas Festival is any indication, brass bands are having a moment. On Sunday, Asphalt Orchestra played two full sets of delightfully raucous horn and drums on the New Haven Green, including a bit where they left the stage and rioted through the audience; your correspondent's son had the honor of being chased by a saxophone player.

Asphalt Orchestra covered everyone from Thomas Mapfumo and Charles Mingus to Frank Zappa and David Byrne and St. Vincent, in addition to deploying several original compositions. It all felt of a piece, and it should have: Brass bands, after all, have a rich and astonishingly varied tradition to draw on. They can pull from Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, or Benny Moré, then turn around and dig deep in New Orleans, or Eastern Europe, or Mexico—really, just about anywhere in the world.

For Sunny Jain, the dhol player and MC of Red Baraat, a nine-piece brass band playing on June 24, the starting point was the brass bands he heard a lot of in India: "a baraat," he explains to me over the phone, "is a procession that happens for a wedding in North India—it’s something I’d seen since I’d been going back to visit, which I'd done since I was 5 years old."

As he grew as a musician in the United States, he played across multiple genres, as many professional musicians do, but that sound stayed in his head. "I wanted an acoustic band that was primarily horns and drums," he says, "drawing from the Punjabi and North Indian rhythms." But his idea quickly began to develop outward from there, since the horn players he knew had experience with jazz, funk, reggae, ska, R&B, and classical music, "more reflective of being Indian-American," Jain says, than of recreating an Indian marching band in Brooklyn.

Developing the band's material likewise has "always been a collaborative process"; some composition is involved, but the pieces really come into their own by being played in front of crowds, improvised on, pushed and pulled to let happy accidents happen and be used to make the compositions better.

"When you open yourself up to that, things really can blossom musically," Jain says.

Then he stops and laughs.

"You know, I can sit here and talk about the music in an intelligent and analytical way, but ultimately that’s not what it’s about. We’re here to deliver emotion, and that’s something that’s universal. We're to create a global dance party—it’s just music, and the only political message is to understand that the highest religion is humanity."

He talks just like I hoped he would when I was listening to Red Baraat before interviewing him, because all of that comes through in the music. You can hear North India in it, and jazz and funk and ska, too, and it's fun to nerd-out over it and figure out where it all comes from and how it fits together.

But in the end, the genre labels don't mean all that much; what matters is that big, propulsive groove, the energy that rolls off the band time and time again, whether they're playing in a club, at a big festival, or in a church.

"Brazilian people say it sounds like samba, Caribbean people say it sounds like soca, and D.C. people say it sounds like go-go," Jain says. That's how accessible the music is. People find what's familiar to their ear in it and let themselves be carried away by the rest.

In an intriguing scheduling turn, Arts & Ideas has paired Red Baraat with Noori, a Pakistani rock band formed by two brothers—one a trained lawyer and the other a business-school graduate—who left their professions behind to become one of Pakistan's most successful rock acts, putting out a slew of recordings, performing hundreds of shows, and winning a few awards. They're on their first-ever tour of the U.S., and Jain is excited to be splitting the bill with them.

"Maybe we'll get to jam a little together," he says.

That could be something to hear.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHjKPaCz5O0&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zek216Ur7EY[/youtube]

IF YOU GO: What: Red Baraat & Noori Where: New Haven Green When: 7 p.m., June 24 Tickets: Free Info: artidea.org

Why are we doing this? Click here to find out more.

NHR Library Event This Wednesday

Sure, the New Haven Review's books have been out for a while. But that doesn't mean we can't revel in their release a few months after the fact. In a dramatic rescheduling of an event that was snowed out in March (raise your hand if you're still glad this winter is over), the New Haven Review will be throwing a triple-decker reading from How to Win Her Love, Blue for Oceans, and Kentauros, by Rudolph Delson, Charles Douthat, and Gregory Feeley, respectively. The readings will be held at the main branch of the New Haven Free Public Library, at 133 Elm Street, this Wednesday, June 22, at 6 pm. Your correspondent, alas, cannot attend, but can say with reasonable certainty that participants will be prepared to celebrate afterward, so please stick around. And thanks again to Carol Brown at the library for graciously hosting the event.

Silent Movies and Live Music at Lyric Hall, Sunday, 7 pm

OK, so it's not, strictly speaking, literary. But neither, strictly speaking, are we. Ladies and gentlemen! The New Haven Review announces its first evening of silent movies, accompanied by live music, this Sunday evening at 7 pm. It will take place in the gorgeous old vaudeville theater inside Lyric Hall, at 827 Whalley Avenue—which, if you haven't seen it too recently, has been renovated so beautifully that it looks like something from czarist Russia. It is worth the $5 admission just to spend time inside that room.

The evening will consist of two short movies—each of them about 10 minutes long. The first one is a Georges Melies film called The Doctor's Secret; the second is an unbelievably collapsed version of Alice in Wonderland. You want to come just to see these movies. The music is provided by Dr. Caterwaul's Cadre of Clairvoyant Claptraps, which sounds like this. (Full disclosure: Your correspondent is a member of this band.)

But wait, there's more! In addition, there will be some live music performed by the Claptraps and Tyler Bussey, a quietly soulful CT singer who reinterprets old songs in a style reminiscent, to this correspondent, of Sam Amidon. It's great stuff. Probably there will be a brief intermission, making for a thoroughly pleasant evening's entertainment. And if we really get our act together, we may bring appropriate refreshments.

Hope to see you all there!

Palimpsest

By Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Books, 2009)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community

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

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

Thanks, everyone.

The Whole World

By Emily Winslow (Delacorte Press, 2010)

For a while, I've been obsessed with what you could call the line of plausibility in fiction, and how it differs from the line of plausibility in nonfiction—or, for that matter, real life. There are coincidences that we accept in real life that we don't accept in fiction; somewhat contradictorily, there are also ways that we expect a fictional story to come together at the end in ways that we don't expect real stories to. And everyone's lines of plausibility are in different places, aren't they? One person's exasperation is another person's thrill.

My own lines of plausibility lie across the source of both my difficulty and my admiration for Emily Winslow's The Whole World. See, I'm a reader who, generally speaking, likes his plots messy; I like them to resemble what I see as the chaos of real life to the greatest extent possible. I like them to make just enough sense. But The Whole World is not like that. Like Daniel Handler's The Basic Eight, which The Whole World reminded me of in a few places, Winslow's novel is a puzzle, a machine, working at several levels, and the fun of the book—as with most mysteries—is in trying to figure out how it all fits together before the book tells you. That the pieces fit together so neatly is almost a little dissatisfying; it requires a certain tolerance for coincidence that I'm not sure I possess. One could say it makes too much sense. But it's also what makes the book so elegant, and ultimately so affecting.

Because The Whole World is a mystery, I will tell you only that the plot revolves around two American exchange students at Cambridge, Polly and Liv, who are friends and like the same young man, Nick, who, in turn, has confused feelings for both of them as well. The students have been working on a research project with an older professor, Gretchen, who has been looking into writing a biography of a famous writer to whom she is related. Then Nick disappears, drawing in the authorities. The plot's machinations are further complicated by Winslow's excellent decision to reveal the truth of what happened—to everyone involved—by switching viewpoints from Polly to Nick to Morris (the cop put on Nick's case) to Gretchen to Liv, each of whom are observant and unreliable in their own way. All these moving parts make for a really absorbing read; even when the plot occasionally crossed my own line of plausibility, I didn't really care all that much.

What has kept the book in my thoughts since I finished it, however, is not its formal complexity, but the prose it's written in—like Handler's book, revealing just enough to chill and compel through the final pages. The Whole World also takes up what for me was a surprising theme in a mystery: parenthood. Many of the parents in Winslow's book are, well, kind of bad. But just when you think that The Whole World is an extended riff on Philip Larkin's famous statement on how "they fuck you up, your mum and dad," along comes Morris, who takes fatherhood so seriously that it turns heroism into stupidity. It's my favorite moment in the book, and one that, as a father myself, I'll carry for a long time.

Sound Hall This Monday

I'm flattered to have been asked to take part in an extremely interesting new series called Sound Hall. Rather than attempting to describe it (poorly) myself, I'll just steal from the effort's website, which reads:

Sound Hall is a curated speaker and performance series, presented by Championsound, cosponsored by the Public Humanities Initiative at Yale University, and Detritus Project.

The Sound Hall series gathers diverse audiences together in various public spaces throughout New Haven, with the aim of creating meaningful spaces for collective listening. Our speakers are fascinating figures in the worlds of music, film, journalism, literature, and beyond. As part of Sound Hall, they are given a stage to perform and discuss the music and sounds that have mattered most in their personal, intellectual, and professional lives. We believe music and sound collectors are also historians and that, to different degrees, we are all archivists. We collect music and sound in the forms of records, tapes, CDs, but also in different forms of personal memory and history. When we listen to a song, or a certain collection of sounds, we build particular stories around what we hear—about our pasts, our presents, and our futures. Sound Hall is where we will gather to think through and listen to some of those stories.

Sound Hall's first event features none other than Ian Svenonius, who, among several other things, has fronted several well-known D.C. bands, including Nation of Ulysses and Weird War. Apparently he's going to spin records—of what? I do not know—and talk about them, with me moderating the discussion between him and the audience, and possibly peppering him with questions myself. Like I said, I'm flattered. And psyched.

To prepare, I've been reading Svenonius's 2006 collection of essays, The Psychic Soviet. I plan to write more about this book when I'm done, but right now, suffice to say that its adorable exterior (it's so little! And hot pink! Yes, nod to the Little Red Book caught, thanks)—belies the hilarious, excoriating, brilliant/zany arguments lodged within.

I'm excited. And you should be, too. Come on down.

Ian Svenonius speaks at the first Sound Hall at Detritus, 71 Orange Street, New Haven, CT.

6 p.m. Free.

Annihilation

By Piotr Szewc, trans. Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough (Dalkey Archive Press, 1999)

In what is perhaps the best use of jacket copy I've ever seen, we learn from the back of the book that this novella is about a day in the life of a Polish town in 1934, a few years before it is completely destroyed during World War II. It's tempting to wonder if Szewc and his editor intended to use the jacket to divulge the single major plot point from the onset; maybe I just don't know enough about Polish history to catch the clues (very likely), or maybe something is lost in translation (very unlikely), but this sharp, beautiful book itself gives very, very little indication of the catastrophe to come. Certainly without the jacket copy, I would have missed it.

But the copy does divulge its single, overwhelming fact, and as a result, in Annihilation—which really is, no more and no less, a snapshot of a single day in the life of a town doomed to destruction, a single day in the lives of a handful of its inhabitants, who are not going to live much longer—every detail hums with urgency and, yes, meaning, carried along by some of the most exquisitely understated prose I've read in a while. The book is almost unutterably sad, because it doesn't succumb to the pretense that by documenting these characters, they've somehow been saved; that's a copout. It's the other way around: For all the calmness that the narrator describes, the narrator himself is frantic, running from street to street, from person to person. Look at this house, he says. Meet him. Meet her. Because they aren't going to be here when you come back.

Yet somehow, in all that frenzy and sadness, as the details mount and the day progresses and draws to an end, the mourning starts to feel like celebration, and at the same time, defiance. When I finished it, I didn't want to crawl into a grave, or ruminate on how lousy people are; I wanted to hug my wife and kid, to call my parents and my sister, to visit my friends. To walk around my neighborhood and fly around the world, to meet as many people as I could. Because if you believe that everything is temporary, this book opens your eyes again to how important it is, as Marvin Gaye once said, to love before it's too late.

A New Bookstore, A Different Approach

On Friday night, your correspondent went to the opening night of Detritus, a new bookstore at 71 Orange Street supported through the city of New Haven's Project Storefronts program and curated by Alexis Zanghi of The Dirty Pond. Detritus aims to be a bookstore that reflects both the local literary scene and the eclectic taste of its curator; it also aims to be a place where literary events of many, many kinds can occur, making the bookstore as much a performance space as a bookstore, a place where New Haven's writers and readers can go to not only read each other, but see each other, hear each other, meet each other. And if the energy of its first evening is any indication, it will succeed. For the opening was crowded, the wine flowing, people standing around the sidewalk outside laughing and smoking cigarettes, as if it were a club (hooray!). And inside, your correspondent, who is not a talkative man by nature, could not stop talking to people—writers, readers, critics. Zanghi declared that the opening would last from 6 pm to 8 pm and had to shoo people out the door. We should make sure she has to keep doing that, for Detritus appears both to be filling a niche that New Haven needs and offering a different, and highly intriguing, model of what a bookstore can be.

Jeff VanderMeer's "The Goat Variations" and "Three Days in a Border Town"

One of the abiding pleasures of writing books, and being lucky enough to have them published, is the way in which they have led me to discover parts of the literary world I may not have discovered otherwise. Among them is a brand of science fiction and fantasy that's been given all kinds of labels—my favorite is the New Weird—but basically boils down to books in which many strange and interesting things happen, and in which the writing is really, really good. My running favorite author in this group, which makes him one of my favorite living authors, period, is Jeff VanderMeer, a prolific and vastly talented writer perhaps best known for his books about a fantastical, decaying, and distinctly postcolonial city called Ambergris. In these books, VanderMeer displays not only an astonishingly rich imagination, but also a pretty ridiculous command of numerous fiction styles, from quasi-Borgesian to hard-boiled noir. His books are social, political, personal: everything I want in fiction. If I were the competitive type, I'd say he's the man to beat. Which is why when Matthew Cheney—an NHR contributor, among many, many other things—asked me if I'd contribute to a series of reviews on VanderMeer's new short-story collection, The Third Bear, I was all over it.

I said before that one of the things I like so much about VanderMeer's writing is his deft mixture of the social, political, and personal. "The Goat Variations," which Kevin Brockmeier singled out for praise in his blurb of The Third Bear, accomplishes this to great effect, as the leaders of a nation falling apart at the seams catch wind that a calamity is coming, but don't know how to stop it. Oh, right—this story also involves alternate realities and time travel, which makes for a really heady mixture. Conceptually, VanderMeer sets up a very difficult task, that of writing directly about George W. Bush without hitting us over the head, and yet still giving the story teeth. He might not quite get away with it; there's still a sense that VanderMeer's too close, that there hasn't been quite enough time to digest it all. I say this with humility, though: I would have been a bit frightened to even attempt to write a short story like this, and certainly wouldn't have done as well. And the story still has plenty of teeth, as I find myself returning in my mind to VanderMeer's vivid image of George W. at the beginning of his administration, bludgeoned by catastrophe, the world as he knows it ending all around him, and him just not knowing what to do.

And then there's "Three Days in a Border Town," which is one of the best pieces of short fiction I've read in years; it's no wonder it showed up on awards and best-of lists when it was published in 2004. In it, a sharpshooter moves through a dusty border town in the middle of a desert, looking for her husband, but it's about so much more than that. It's about devastating loss, hovering just beyond the horizon; it's about figuring out how to move on. Matthew Cheney has said why this story is amazing as well as anyone, and he's right. It's Beckett, it's the better end of Dennis Lehane (particularly the short story "Until Gwen," with which it shares a narration written, with wild success, in the second person), and it's VanderMeer at his best, precise and luminous, transporting and transfiguring. "Three Days in a Border Town" is the kind of story that seems to take in the whole world, to be about everything at once, and it shows that when VanderMeer's writing at the top of his game—which is pretty much all the time—it's foolish to talk about beating him, because you can't.

White Readers Meet Black Authors

I was delighted to come across the utterly appropriately titled blog White Readers Meet Black Authors, "your official invitation into the African American section of the bookstore," maintained by novelist Carleen Brice. There is little I can say about this blog that Brice hasn't said already, from the video she has on the blog itself to the piece she wrote in December 2008 for the Washington Post. When she started the blog, New York Magazine viewed it as a publicity stunt, and it is that. But Brice is also getting at something very real about the book market; just read the blog and see if you don't agree with her. But more importantly, read the blog for the books she champions. Thanks to White Readers Meet Black Authors, I've been devouring Victor LaValle's The Ecstatic, and his latest book, the very well-reviewed Big Machine, just might be next. I bought both at the same time at McNally Jackson, and the woman behind the cash register smiled.

"Going on a LaValle bender?" she said.

"It looks that way," I said.

She nodded. "You won't be disappointed." I believe her.

When Bad Sex is Fun

A response to Donald Brown

Donald Brown's comment on Philip Roth's nomination for the UK Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award got me thinking, about that award, about writing, and about what ever happened to all the fun in the world. See, every year prestigious literary prizes come and go—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Man Booker Prize—and I can't shake the feeling that they're, well, sort of boring. Not the books, mind you; the awards, for all the reasons that critics of those awards criticize them. I realize that they lead to great things for those who win them, and they draw attention to books in general, and these are both wonderful things. But somehow the race itself—that period of time between when the nominees are announced and the awards ceremony—doesn't really fire. It's more like a stately procession, like a parade without a band. There are plenty of spectators, obviously, but they're not making a lot of noise. The same cannot be said of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

The award was created in 1993, ostensibly "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it." I don't buy this for one second. This award is, first, a terrific publicity stunt, drawing coverage from several major UK outlets. Second, it routinely does the thing that you wish more major awards would do much more often: It pits newcomers against old pros, and sometimes, but only sometimes, the newcomers win. Third, the qualification for the award rests solely on the quality of the writing. Plot? Characters? Who cares? This award is about how well people can put sentences together, period.

And maybe it's just me, but the first thing that hits me when I read the excerpts is: This writing isn't bad. (Those of you who might think so have never laid your eyes on cheap pulp smut, such as that collected in the NYU Library—look at the titles under "Sexuality" and you'll see what I mean. And this isn't even getting at what the prose is like.) The worst that can be said about them is either that they're funny (which is not even remotely a bad thing, and in any case, it seems clear that the authors almost always intend it to be so) or that they're mildly appalling (which, again, often appears to be the author's intent). And in every case, you can judge for yourself: It is ironic to me that the runup to the award involves excerpts from the various texts that are longer than what appears in most serious outlets for book reviews. If I were drunk right now, I would argue that the judges of the Bad Sex Award actually care more about good writing than the people at the National Book Award do, but thankfully for you, it's 10:00 in the morning on a Friday.

Most of all, though, the Bad Sex Award is fun. It's noisy and alive. It reminds us how books can stay vital and real without sacrificing fantastic prose, great ideas, and all the things that avid readers feast on. It makes you wonder if there can be other awards like it—Best Fight Scene Award? Worst Funeral Award?—that pull us in, make us laugh, and then make us read.

Dirty Pond Issue 2 up!

The Dirty Pond's second issue is now up, with work from Christina O'Connor, Greg Maurer, Patricia Dickson, Ryan Cyr, Derek Leka, and yours truly (though don't hold that against them). The Dirty Pond is New Haven's newest literary outlet, dedicated to showcasing the talent that New Haven harbors and creates. Submit to it, support it, but most of all, read it.

The Economics of Improvised Music

This weekend's New York Times had a great article about the New Haven Improvisers Collective, an awesome—and extremely welcoming—group of musicians who gather on the last Monday of every month at Neverending Books on State Street to explore the range of possibilities that improvised music has to offer. As the NYT article rightly points out, improvised music is most closely associated with jazz, but that genre doesn't have a lock on improvisation; one of the real pleasures of playing improvised music, in fact, is to explore the ways in which musical genres can be bent, broken, combined, or, in some magic moments, superseded. (Those with a keen eye will notice that I'm on the list of members of the collective. In the interest of full disclosure, this is because I played with the group for a few weeks in 2005 to write a story for the New Haven Advocate about the collective and their encounter with improvisational conductor Butch Morris. I haven't been back, for a variety of reasons that will all sound like excuses now, but I've been wanting to return for a long time—now that I'm a better musician and almost have the right gear. I learned more about music in the weeks I spent with them and Morris than I had in a couple of years, and I'm still to this day drawing from those lessons.)

The NHIC and Firehouse 12, a terrific club and jaw-dropping studio that routinely puts on shows of non-mainstream jazz and other music that defies categorization, deserve every bit of praise that the article heaps on them. But they're also emblematic of a larger characteristic of New Haven that I've found myself repeating many times over to people who ask me what it's like to live here.

As just about everyone who's lived in this area for longer than a year or so knows, New Haven labors under a reputation that is probably about ten years out of date. Many people outside of New Haven think of the place and imagine a city in trouble. But we know that it is not so. New Haven has its share of struggles, of course—and I do not mean to belittle those troubles at all, or perhaps even worse, aetheticize them—but it is a positive thing as much as it's a problem. It energizes the place, makes it vital. It makes the people who live here give a damn about it. And right now, New Haven is that wonderfully unstable combination of interesting and affordable. It is ethnically and culturally rich, thanks to both the town and gown sides of things. It is economically diverse. And it's a place where something like Firehouse 12 and the New Haven Improvisers Collective can exist without having to fight, every single minute, for survival.

The month or so before CBGB closed, you may remember, was a great time to write an article about a) the death of New York City as a vital cultural force or b) the inability of American pop culture to replicate anything like the heady heyday of the late 1970s. Obviously both of these statements dramatically overstated things. But nestled within the hyperbole is a kernel of truth: It is difficult to innovate and take chances—artistically or otherwise—when the cost of simply living is too high. God help me, I can't find the interview, but if I remember right, a reporter asked Chris Frantz of the Talking Heads if New York could ever produce another CBGB. No, said Frantz, it was just too expensive to run a business in New York and book bands the way Hilly Kristal, its owner, did (Though Brooklyn club Barbes challenges that assertion). Then he said something really neat: The next influential club, he argued—the one that incubates the bands that go on to have a strong effect on pop music—was probably going to be in a strip mall someplace, away from a huge urban center. I saw what he was saying. I thought of The Space, nestled in an industrial park in Hamden; it helped build an audience for the Providence-based band The Low Anthem, which led to their signing to Nonesuch. And I thought of Firehouse 12, providing a home—and a gorgeous home at that—for music that has trouble finding a stage. Based on the consistent tastes of their owners, both clubs have managed to develop scenes, and audiences. They've created that crucial vibe whereby people will go to see a show of someone they've never heard of simply because they trust the club to book someone good. This speaks a lot to Steve Rodgers (of The Space) and Nick Lloyd (of Firehouse 12) as excellent club owners. But it's also the town that they're in, full of people who want to hear good music—and make good music—and don't have to go broke to do it.

New Haven Review Occasional Paper 2: Creepy Hollow

As the title of this post suggests, now and again we at the NHR get a piece that is perhaps too long for the blog, or too timely for our glacial twice-a-year publishing schedule, or just too much fun to keep to ourselves for long. Just in time for Halloween, greater New Haven-area novelist and critic Gregory Feeley regales us with a thoroughly original reread of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." I know, I know, you think you know everything there is to know about this shopworn piece of early American fiction. Think again. Feeley's first order of business: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" isn't even a Halloween story. Download the paper here. You'll never think about Ichabod Crane's nose the same way again.

What I Don't Like about Blogs

I am not a blogger. That sounds defensive, but what I really mean is that I don't have the mind for it, the same way I don't have the mind to be a beat reporter: I don't see a story wherever I go; I don't see something every day that makes me want to write five to six hundred words about it. Now that sounds condescending, but I don't mean it that way. There are people who have proven to be outstanding bloggers—people whom the form suits almost perfectly, which suggests, to me at least, that blogs really are a new kind of literature, even if its conventions haven't been fully defined. It is thrilling to be alive at its creation, to see humans find another way of expressing themselves, and I'm a little envious that I don't have the mind for it. But there are certain aspects of blogs that I don't like. Yes, there's all the yelling, but hey, that's part of the fun. I'm actually more annoyed at the sort of blog post espousing a shaky yet strongly held opinion that seems designed solely to piss people off in order to get them talking, because for a website looking at its hit count, I guess there's no such thing as bad publicity. There are lots of egregious examples out there, but I'm more interested in talking about the phenomenon in its moderate form. My example: Jody Rosen's October 12 post on Slate's Brow Beat about NPR's supposed DORF matrix, i.e., its assumed taste in black music. (Yes, I'm aware that I'm about a week late to this party. See above re: not having the head for blogging. I'm also aware that I'm totally falling for it by talking about it. I'm trying here, folks.)

For those of you who don't want to read the original post, Rosen argues that NPR, and All Songs Considered in particular, "maintains a strict preference for black music that few actual living African-Americans listen to." Instead, it seems to like its black musicians dead, old, retro, or foreign. Hence, the cute acronym. Rosen uses the DORF matrix to mock NPR listeners for being too white, but also throws in a little political angle. "Who are the progressives again—the public radio crowd or the Top 40 great unwashed?" he asks.

Here's what I don't like about Rosen's post. First, as a surface-level comment, he's basically pointing out the obvious. Why comment on it at all, except to piss off NPR listeners who consider themselves to be progressive? (Full disclosure: My musical taste could easily be described as DORF, except that it would apply equally to musicians across racial and ethnic lines. I suppose this makes me ultra-conservative. Or whatever.)

Second, given how obvious Rosen's premise is, it's a surprisingly shaky one. Rosen himself points out a few exceptions to NPR's taste in his own post—Mos Def, Danger Mouse—that he writes off as the exceptions that prove the rule. Has that argument ever really worked? But the shakiness runs way deeper than that, especially given the political angle Rosen throws in.

Assuming something about someone's politics based on their music taste is a dangerous game. In suggesting that Top 40 listeners are perhaps more progressive than NPR listeners, does Rosen really mean to suggest that being a big Lil' Wayne fan indicates that you're liberal? I'll just let that question lie. More oddly, Rosen essentially argues that NPR's taste in black music simply reflects its white, college-educated listeners' taste in music. (Again, full disclosure: I donate money to NPR, and am both white and college-educated. Too much, really.) But there's another explanation for it that has not that much to do with politics, and as much to do with creating taste as reflecting it: As one of the only nonprofit forces on the radio dial, NPR has the opportunity to play music that isn't popular, and it takes that opportunity to play artists that otherwise don't get radio play—like many college radio stations do, or other forms of radio, like Bridgeport's own WPKN. Would Rosen—who, as a music critic, I assume is a big fan of lots of different kinds of music—prefer that NPR cover the same small set of artists that commercial radio covers? I'm guessing not. But then what is the point of the post? Aside from making fun of NPR? (I know, I know: generating hits for the website. But isn't there another way?)

In truth, I have no idea how NPR determines which black musicians it decides to pay attention to. But here's my point: it doesn't seem like Rosen does, either. Now, I know that blogging and journalism are two different things, but Rosen could have added a bit of substance to his post—the kind of substance that, say, a twenty-minute conversation with someone at All Songs Considered would have provided—and still made his point that contemporary African-American musicians are woefully underrepresented in NPR's music programming. Perhaps Rosen did have this conversation. If he did, though, it doesn't show. Which means that the argument never gets past whether NPR's taste in black music is lame or not. Which is, in a nutshell, one of the things I don't like about blogs. Even when I've been guilty of it myself.

Dirty Pond Issue 1 Out!

The Dirty Pond, New Haven's newest art and literary journal, has published its first issue, and you are mightily encouraged to check it out here. It contains contributions from the Dirty Pond editors—Anelise Chen, Philip Lique, and Alexis Zanghi—as well as art and poetry from David Larsen, Paul Panamarenko, Katie Yates, and the NHR's own Donald Brown. Congratulations to all involved! In a mission that is near and dear to our hearts, The Dirty Pond is dedicated to creating, in their own words, "a home for work by New Haven-affiliated writers and artists, with an eye towards curated gatherings in the near future." One of these days, we'll have to party together. And in the meantime, Greater New Haveners of the writerly and artistic persuasions, submit to these fine people. Show them what you've got. And keep an eye out for Issue 2.