Winter Party 2015: New Haven Review at the Institute Library

New Haven Review Subscription Party 2015

Our annual winter party approaches -- and we're hoping to see you at the Institute Library, so save the date:

Saturday, February 7, 2015

7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

The Institute Library

847 Chapel Street

New Haven, CT 06510

Order Tickets!

There will be food, drink, story reading, music, and lots of interesting folks who love all things literary.

Three kinds of tickets are available:

$20, includes with a year-long subscription to the New Haven Review

$25, includes an annual Apprentice membership to the Institute Library

OR

$40, includes both a year-long subscription to the New Haven Review and an annual library Apprentice membership

This event sells out quickly, so please buy your tickets online here or in-person at the library today.

See you then!

Team New Haven Review

Summer 2014 Issue of New Haven Review Now In

An announcement to all who have so patiently waited.  The Summer 2014 issue of New Haven Review is now in and starting to ship.  Featured in this issue... “Meditation on the Shore (Ocean City, NJ)” by Benjamin Goodney  (poetry)

“The New Bag Men. How it is in New Haven when you don’t win the lottery” Alexis Zanghi (essay)

“What Happened, the Winter You Found the Deer” Genevieve Valentine  (fiction)

“And then house exploded” and “And then I played hooky from the apocalypse” Nick DePascal  (poetrys)

“Over at the Shiva Piano Lounge the Woman Who Was Sawn in Half Is Drinking a Hipster Variant (Green Chartreuse and Gin) of Lydia E. Pinkham’s 1876 Original Vegetable Compound” Sue D. Burton (poetry)

“The City Voiced. R.E.M.’s Überlin” Katarzyna Jerzak (essay)

“James Taylor vs. the King” Douglas W. Milliken (fiction)

“The Cup of Sun” Maxwell Clark (poetry)

“Reckoning with Athol Fugard. On the playwright, age eighty-one, and his work” Leon de Kock (essay)

“Vague You” Mark Gosztyla (poetry)

“Hooky” E.A. Neeves (fiction)

“Depending Upon Whose Side You’re On. Living with John Lennon’s most personal Beatles song” Colin Fleming (essay)

“The Death Row Dream” Rachel Hadas (poetry)

To subscribe, just visit us here.

Yours,

Bennett Graff Publisher

From an Editor’s Desk: It’s Not Who You Know…Really It Isn’t

As music editor for Rowman and Littlefield, I receive any number of proposals for memoirs from musicians that tell not so much their story as that of the musical luminaries with whom they worked. Unfortunately, the aura of fame often extends only as far as the actual celebrity. As I wrote one agent regarding a possible book by a temporary drummer for a once famous act:

I know the uphill battle you will be facing when pitching a book of this sort, which I commonly refer to as the “memoir of the greatest sideman you've never heard of.” It’s tough to place books about the near famous rather than the famous. As Mel Brooks once quipped: “There are two types of people in this world: the famous and the near famous. The famous are just what you’d expect—president, popes, Hollywood stars. The near famous are those who want to be near the famous.”

Not long before this proposal, I had received another from a prospective author that was to be brazenly titled Confessions of a Shameless Name-dropper. Unlike other memoirists who try to sneak this stuff by, this author was refreshingly open about the matter, and even though I had to credit him with his bravado, I had to school him in the realities of the market (which he took with remarkable grace). Here’s what I wrote:

Since I handle lots of music titles—and of all sorts, including memoirs of the type you’re proposing—I wanted to follow up. I tend toward the brutally honest, so, as I warn some of my authors, put on your elephant skin. Here we go…

You are not the first and not by any means the last author who has proposed a book about his adventures in the music business and the many great names with whom he may have worked. The problem is a simple one: names of note in a book do not translate into sales when the book itself is not written by one of those noted names. Even forewords and endorsements by “big” names are no substitute for the real deal. A book about one’s working relationship with Renee Fleming or Mick Jagger is simply not the same as a book by either one of them.

The net result is that these titles don’t ever do nearly as well as their authors predict. Sometimes they don’t even do as well as we predict—and we at least have access to good sales data about this kind of thing.

The bad news is that star-power-by-association is a bit of a myth, and unless you are one of those rare behind-the-scenes individuals who made those stars into stars rather than just someone who worked alongside them—think Russell Simmons of Def Jam Records or Motown producer Berry Gordy—a book documenting one’s musical career through the great artists whose paths crossed yours is a tough sell.

I should note that this isn’t to say there aren’t exceptions. But those exceptions are few and far between. If the story told is so compelling or uniquely wrought that the work shines almost in spite of the name-dropping, a book editor might sign on. But in that case the sign-on is not to the dropped names but the literary quality of the work itself.

Of course, another possible approach is if the book editor not only thinks the story compelling enough to publish but also believes that real marketing muscle (and real editorial attention) will overcome possible lack of interest. In this scenario the book is, you might say, forced upon the public by being oversold or sensationalized. A case in point is Chicago Review Press’s publication in 2005 of I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. Following in the wake of this sexual tell-all, which CRP managed to get behind well enough, author Pamela des Barres was able to write a follow-up and even publish an anthology of confessions from other groupies.

But, my, my, how quickly this kind of self-pumping confessional—groupies as muses…really?—ages when you look at how autobiographies of this ilk now clutter the world of the self-published. After Warren Zevon’s wife, Crystal, published her tell-all—since we now swim in a sea of spousal memoirs that are hardly better than shoulder-rubbing memoirs (or more than shoulders, if you opt to work from des Barres’ playbook)—it is not surprising that there should follow a self-published confessional, too, about Zevon’s illegitimate child with Rae Murphy or Anita Gevinson’s self-published expose of rock stars she bedded (most prominently…Warren Zevon).

A great deal more could be written about the sociocultural pressures to take advantage of celebrity. After all, there are any number of so-called celebrities whose only real talent is their ability to celebritize (yeah, I made that word up), from Paris Hilton to the Kardashians to the reality TV personalities who will then reappear on Dancing with the Stars. Because celebrity is now so cheaply bought on cable and online, it had created the illusion that there is, in fact, an audience of readers who want to know about the people who knew famous people. And there might be: for free. But a paying audience?  That’s a different matter, and it’s where I, as a book editor, often draw the line.

I Read Poetry to My Daughter

My daughter is a very talented poet.  She is also a first-year college student struggling--as, I think, many students must--to articulate a fully formed criticism of a poem that she had taken on for a term paper.  In her last year of high school, she and I sometimes sat together to iron out our thoughts on poems about which she had to write.   Recently she asked for my thoughts on a poem she had selected to explore.  "Fire Is Not a Nice Guest," written by the prose poet Russell Edson, was not an easy work.   (You can read it here for yourself.)  Since she is in college over 1,000 miles away, and I'm here in New Haven and her request came between classes, I decided to write my response.   After writing it, I realized it might, in turn, be worth sharing with those who wonder: "So how does one read a poem?"  Of course, there is no one way.  But what I offer here is one of the more common approaches--particularly if you are trying to gather ideas for writing about a poem.  So here it goes...  

Hey, kid,

Let me write for you something not only about the poem “Fire Is Not a Nice Thing,” but also about the toolbox needed in order to write poetry criticism.

A poem is a carefully shaped textual object. It emphasizes two things, in particular: form and economy. By form, I mean everything from the sound of the words to their order and rhythm to the line breaks; by economy I mean a certain dependence on concision—the saying of a lot in fewer words than might be said in a story or an essay.

When reading a poem, the first step in the process is to read it several times through and just let it soak in. As you read, and re-read, again and again, you should begin to pay attention not so much to the poem itself (that is, the poem on its own) as to the kinds of associations that light up in your head and the dark spots that show up by contrast and require more attention—with more re-reading or thinking about or even background research.

In analyzing a poem, you can first split it apart by its form and its content. This is never a neat split. For good poems, it’s not supposed to be. But it is a good starting point. By “content,” we refer to what the poem is “about”—most commonly the topic(s) discussed or suggested, the story being told (the narrative), and the images that are being used. By form, we refer to the literary devices employed that give the poem its distinctive shape.

The formal elements come in several major categories…

• Phonemic: This refers to the sounds of the words, either alone or in relation to one another. The devices commonly associated with this category are things like assonance, alliteration, sibilance, rhyme, onomatopoeia, etc.
• Rhythmic: In poetry this typically refers to the pattern of word stresses and line meter(s), the use of punctuation and line breaks (for creating longer and shorter pauses).
• Syntactic: This refers to word order and thus to devices like chiasmus, ellipsis, palindrome, and numerous others.
• Semantic: This refers to the meanings of words or phrases expressed or more often stretched or distorted through such devices as metaphors, similes, slang, and idioms, as well as portmanteau words and unusual word choices.

There are other types of formal aspects to poems—dramatic (apostrophe), poetic (couplets, Petrarchan sonnets, villanelles, haiku, free verse), and so on. But you get the idea about separating form from content.  With respect to form, it doesn’t hurt to think of devices through these categories. I should also note that many of these devices are not exclusive to any one category.  Ononmatopoeia—words that sound like the sound to which they refer, such “pow” or “woof”—is both a phonemic and semantic device.

But let’s move on. The point here is not to learn how to use these devices. That’s for the writing of poetry. What we want to learn here is how to recognize these devices when they’re being used, figure out why they are being used, and, even when we can’t figure out the why, then at least explain their effect on the reader--which brings us back to those associations that I mentioned earlier.

You know all of this already to a certain extent as a poet. But what we need now is to figure out how to use this knowledge as a reader and critic.

This is the view from 20,000 feet in the air. So let’s get down to earth.

A good way to write any analysis of a poem for a term paper is to first free associate and then record in bullet points your impressions.  This is essentially data gathering.  You may not be ready to make an argument until you’ve written a whole set of notes on the things you noticed first—your responses, your guesses, the links you see or think are being made.

Let’s take the title: “Fire Is Not a Nice Guest.”  Here are some of my associational bullet points.

• The sentence is very simple.  It uses the simple equational verb “is.” The construction is basic: subject (“fire”) verb (“is”) object (“guest”).
• This is a negative sentence.  That suggests to me negativity could become an element of the poem.
• Guest is used as a metaphor.  Guest suggests an invitation, friendliness.  Fire could be friendly, a “guest,” if it warms one.  But generally guest suggests a house visitor, and fires and houses don’t mix well at all.
• Nice is the adjective used to describe fire.  It’s a very simple word—too simple—almost  as if a child had named the poem, and that points to the dramatic aspect of the poem of who the poem’s speaker is supposed to be.  (As you and I have discussed, every poem has an implied speaker who is sometimes the same as the poet herself--but just as often not.)
• This title is also, in a funny way, kind of stupid—that is, it reveals the stupidity of who named it because it states the obvious.  Fire is, metaphorically speaking, no guest!  (If the poem were called “Fire Is a Nice Guest,” that would really have me wondering what the poem would have been about: I imagine it then in a hearth warming my feet and thus a rather mawkish poem to follow suit.)

Important note here: I haven’t made an argument yet.  I’m just recording impressions—ideas suggested by the arrangement of the words, the implied tone (and perhaps intelligence or lack thereof) of the persona, the image I thus draw of the persona (is this a child? Someone mentally challenged? A not-too-bright adult?  An arsonist telling a story from prison?).  Actually, the type of notes that I’m recording here are examples of "reader response criticism" in action: I’m making a series of assumptions about the poem without having read the poem all the way through—many of which may be right or wrong, but whose validity as impressions are personally valid, even if mistaken.  Eventually, after one reads a poem (preferably many times), these impressions may come together as an argument or undergo heavy revision or more than likely both!

Again, I’m giving you a process—a way of reading poems—that hopefully can help in your getting to the point of writing about them in the form we call “criticism.”

OK, now into the poem a little.  I won’t do a line-by-line analysis.  I’ll just pick out parts that got my attention.

“I had charge of an insane asylum, as I was insane.”

• For a first line, this is pretty bold.  Is it to be believed?  Is it just a metaphor? Is the speaker  really insane, or is he or she just exaggerating?    For now let’s take the assertion at face value.
• The line begins with a clear contradiction. Inmates generally don’t run the asylums in which they are placed.  However, this sentence implies that because he(?) is insane, he’s in charge.  That assertion is, in itself, insane because it is a paradox (semantic device alert!).  He runs the asylum because he’s insane?  That’s just nuts!  It makes no sense—and thus perhaps serves the poem’s purpose.
• Also the order of the phrases is interesting.  The first half is a reasonable assertion, until one gets to the second half. Suggestion: someone seemingly normal who, upon a second look, is clearly not?
• Why “as I was insane” instead of “because I was insane”?  Since this is a prose poem, it doesn’t appear to be a question of meter.  The comma is suggestive—a pause, an afterthought, a bit of information being added to the main clause.  The narrator holding back on us (and maybe a little on himself, too).  The “as I was” would support that comma.  “Because I was” would not have.

I could go on then, line after line, noting, for example, the use of personification (a subset of metaphor): the fire eats logs, curtains, beds, etc.  It is hungry and has no restraint. It has a family. It really isn’t a very nice guest.

Now the poem begins to assume shape at the level of a poem (rather than line by line). It could be read as the tale told by a madman (woman?) of the fire that consumes his (her?) house.   The mad narrator reconstructs the event (assuming there even was one) with fire as a guest who has overstepped polite bounds, taking over altogether the home.

But let’s say the poem’s not about an actual fire. Instead let’s treat the fire itself as a metaphor.  But of what then?  Perhaps of the house that is his mind.  Notice that there’s implied safety upstairs.  If we work from the idea that what’s being housed is the narrator’s mind, then upstairs would suggest physically the brain, the seat of the mind or soul or whatever that lives in the upstairs of our bodies.  This kind of reading is certainly viable.

Of course not everything in the poem fits neatly into this reading of it.  But then again, that, too, makes its own kind of sense: the narrator is not altogether coherent anyway. He’s crazy! Still, we would want to be careful with this idea: it can sound like an excuse for not explaining the difficult sections of the poem (I consider the line “Hey, that’s where the dusts have built their cities” one of those more challenging parts.)

There are strong suggestions that the narrator is the subject of his own discourse—he is insane, he is one of the lunatics, he is the maniac.  My attention was especially caught by the line the 2^nd line’s end: “…but do not go upstairs and eat a dementia praecox” Dementia praecox was an old psychiatric diagnosis for what we call today schizophrenia (easy enough to read up on in Wikipedia.)  What’s particularly strange about this line is that dementia praecox fell out of use as a formal term by the 1920s and Edson’s poem was written in the 1960s.  (Edson himself was born in 1935—thanks Wikipedia!).

Is the narrator an older individual?  Or did Edson use this older term mistakenly?  This is unclear.  But it is a most interesting word choice—medical and yet also, technically speaking, out of date, even for the time period of the poem (semantic device alert!).

Where does this leave us?  I won’t spell out what your reading/interpretation of the poem should be. I’m offering a series of ideas to rev the engine so you can construct your own reading of the poem, bringing together here what Edson is doing: mixing “crazy talk” with a broad array of poetic devices.  In fact, this type of poem—crazy man talks and it sounds like poetry!—resonates with some standard ideas about poetry:

• It taps into the traditional link between madness and poetry (poetry as an inspired kind of madness).  The idea itself originates with the Greek philosopher Plato and the dialog he wrote called Ion.
• Who says madness can’t create art?  Artists mad and great at the same time abound.  Could Edson be illustrating that in madness can be found art or that madness can be reshaped as art?
• It’s probably here worth discussing the fact that this is a prose poem, which was Edson’s métier, his specialty.  In some ways, the prose poem makes the most sense for a mad persona’s speechifying.  A more traditional poem—with rhyme schemes and well-defined meters—would come off as, well, pretty weak.  We know that people who are mad aren’t that coherent.  Such a poem—the words of a madman cast in iambic pentameter—might work for Shakespeare, but for a modern poet it would look highly contrived (artificial) and probably fall flat.

I’ll stop here.  I wrote a lot, but I wanted to give you something to work with, to absorb and most important of all, a way of reading.

Dad

From an Editor's Desk: The Crooked Path from Academia to Publishing

Here is a presentation I recently made to my alma mater, which—nearly two decades after my graduation—finally decided to take an active step forward in engaging speakers to help graduate students actually explore paths to employment beyond academia instead of letting them shift for themselves as I had to do upon my long-ago graduation, doctorate in hand. In 1988, I enrolled in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Ph.D. program in English one year after my graduation from the University of Chicago, where I had earned a BA in English.  Seven years later, in 1995, I received my doctorate.  My area of concentration was in 19^th-century American literature; my goal was to land a full-time, preferably tenure-track position.  During my time at the Graduate Center, I had spent three years as an adjunct instructor of courses in composition, introduction to literature, and even world literature at Baruch College. The year after that, I did the same in Connecticut at both a community college and at the University of Hartford.  My last year and half was spent completing my dissertation while I worked at Yale University, where I served as an assistant editor on the papers of the great 18^th-century Scottish biographer and diarist James Boswell.

Then, like now, the job market in academia was plagued by the presence of more qualified doctoral and post-doctoral applicants than there were job vacancies.  Then, like now, it was a buyer’s market.  Then, like now, budgetary constraints on schools and individual departments; shifts in monetary priorities at the federal, state, and institutional levels; changing trends in scholarship; and the contortions of academic politics affected the give and take of presenting papers, publishing your work, applying for jobs, landing interviews, and either getting offers or moving on.  What I saw then continues to be what I see now.  Pursuing an academic career to the exclusion of all else is not for the faint of heart.

During my undergraduate years at the University of Chicago, I worked as “reader” for its literary journal, The Chicago Review. When I started my graduate studies, in addition to the classes I took and the classes I taught, I also worked as an editor at various small publications on a part-time basis, sometimes for free, sometimes for pay.  My duties then included work as a copy editor on a few poorly funded progressive Jewish magazines, as a part-time publisher of a struggling literary journal, and as a “page trafficker” at a textbook packager.   Editing was apparently in the blood and it was emerging as a career plan B to academic career plan A.

Two questions arise at this point.  When did plan B become plan A?  And why?  The answer to both is a combination of circumstance with self-realization.  Plan B, in brief, became plan A when three things happened.

First, in my last year as a doctoral student, my wife and I had a daughter, at which point I decided that if I were to take any academic position, it would not be as “visiting” faculty, which necessitated moving—and in all likelihood moving more than once.   On my own or childless, not so great a burden.  But with a child, a line had to be drawn.  This decision dramatically reduced the number of jobs to which I applied.

Second, when I moved from New York to Connecticut, I switched my adjunct duties accordingly.  What seemed no problem at first—insurance coverage extended by my wife’s employer –suddenly became one when that job ended and I learned that the state of Connecticut provided no insurance support for its adjunct instructors.  Of necessity, I did the only thing I could do.  I became a full-time editor at Yale University while I struggled to complete my dissertation.

Third and last, there was no evading the grim reality that if and when my alternative career had reached or surpassed the salary range of a starting assistant professor, I’d have to give serious thought to cutting the cord of academia altogether.  That happened three years later when, after jumping from one job to another, I landed a position as a new media editor at a large reference publisher.

Those three factors comprise the circumstances.

Self-realization entered the picture when it became clear to me that not only did I enjoy working in publishing as an acquisitions editor, a job where I conceptualized, evaluated, reshaped, and brought into being all sorts of projects—from individual books and book series to large databases—but I was good at it, too.  In short, I had found my métier—my calling.  Moreover, while my graduate education had not directly contributed to this eventual career direction, it had not proven as grave a misstep as I had first thought.  The skills I honed as a researcher (particularly in archival work), as a critical thinker, as a teacher, and as a writer were certainly transferable. Even the knowledge base I had amassed as an Americanist, literary theorist, and expert in composition offered an unforeseen return on the investment whenever I worked on projects that asked me to draw on that background.

But did any of this give me an edge in landing a job in publishing?  Not really.  A fair amount of my formal training as a proofreader and copy editor had occurred outside of the classroom.  My education in typesetting and printing came from my part-time editing work. For example, does anyone here know the intricacies of the printing process?  Or the formal mark-up protocols for copy editing manuscripts or proofreading galleys?  Or the order of the front matter parts in a book manuscript?  How to index a book? Know anything about electronic publishing? To learn much of this, I remember during the last years of graduate school sitting down with the 14^th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style and actually reading large swaths of it—where much of this information was covered in gory but necessary detail as Plan B started becoming a more critical part of my life.

In the end, circumstance and self-realization caught up with one another.  Putting food on the table and enjoying my work as an editor had become one and the same and, yes, there was a point when I realized that walking away from academia was no longer to be treated as a regret, but as something I would not go back to if I could help it.  For some of you this may seem unthinkable.   I once thought that, too.  But the dictum know thyself was never more real for me than the day I looked at the education classifieds in The New York Times’ Week in Review section and realized: Now why would I apply for that?

There is life after graduate school—and it need not be lived as a professor on a campus.  The challenge during graduate school is recognizing, accepting, and—without regret—acting on that realization.

—Bennett Graff, Publisher, New Haven Review

Our Friends in the New Haven Theater Company

New Haven Theater Company is hosting its first annual benefit Saturday, Feb. 5 at 8 p.m. the High Lane Club, located at 40 High Lane, North Haven. The event, called “Fall in Love with NHTC” will features songs and sketches with your favorite NHTC actors, comedy performed by the The Funny Stages, the group’s improv troupe, decadent desserts, and the musical stylings of the Keith and Mazer Trio. Tickets are $25. To purchase tickets, go to www.newhaventheatercompany.com.

The company is entering an exciting period of transition. T. Paul Lowry had set the NHTC’s direction for several years, creating children’s theatre, improv comedy and culturally relevant plays since 2005. However, Lowry moved out of state to pursue a job opportunity in the entertainment industry and the remaining company members were forced to make a decision: should the company fold or should it reconstitute and think of a slightly different way to move forward?

United by friendship, mutual respect and a common artistic ethos, a group of NHTC actors decided to soldier on. To fill Lowry’s role, the group voted to form a board comprised of Megan Keith Chenot (president), Hilary Brown (vice-president), Hallie Martenson (secretary) and Erich Greene (treasurer) to provide guidance and leadership. “It's thrilling to be working with people who all feel such joy at the prospect of creating theater together. We all share a love of storytelling as well as a love for the city of New Haven. There's a palpable sense that we are building something together that we can be proud to share with our city,” Megan Chenot said.

In addition to the board, the company is comprised of Ian Alderman, Rachel Shapiro Alderman, Peter Chenot, Jeremy Funke, George Kulp, Steve Scarpa, Jenny Schuck, Christian Shaboo, J. Kevin Smith, and Mike Smith. All of the company members have significant experience in a variety of capacities with NHTC, primarily in the company’s critically acclaimed productions of Glengarry Glen Ross, A Civil War Christmas and Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me.

New Haven Theater Company’s current mission is to celebrate the power of storytelling by providing New Haven with awesome theater experiences that are relevant and accessible to all members of our community. “We're excited to be working together to bring the city a fresh take on community theater,” Megan Chenot said.

The group is committed to continuing many of Lowry’s initiatives, including the Funny Stages improv comedy, the Listen Here short story reading series and Reel New Haven, the company’s yearly film festival. In addition, the company is currently in the midst of selecting its first play of 2011. An announcement will be made soon.

For more information about New Haven Theater Company, contact Megan Chenot via e-mail at NHTCpress@gmail.com.

Have a Happy New (Haven Review) Year

And here's what we're cookin' up for this year... New Haven Review is back for another year of merry. Our book publishing venture has so far garnered all sorts of fab publicity, like this here, and there have been successful parties in New Haven and New York. We have upcoming appearances at the New Haven Public Library (all of our authors, 6pm, Jan. 26), the Faith Middleton Show (Feb. 18, 3pm, Charles Douthat and Mark Oppenheimer), and Labyrinth Books (same crew, the next day, Feb. 19, at 4pm).

And our radio show, Paper Trails, featuring Mark Oppenheimer, Brian Slattery, Gregory Feeley, Binnie Klein, and others talking about books, debuts Feb. 13 on WNPR. Stay tuned for more on that.

Issue #7 is on the web here. (Have you subscribed? Are you a library or someone else with an expense account? Are you somebody who likes to support the arts? And likes to read good stuff? Will you please subscribe?)

Meanwhile, Susan Holahan's poems in issue #5 got honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize volume.

But best of all? Thanks to a generous donation, we can now pay our authors. So agents, publishers, authors--get the word out. Issue #8 is nearly full, but we are now accepting submissions for issue #9 and beyond. For more information, write to editor@newhavenreview.com

Snu? What's new with you?

What's new with us? First, our next issue is out.  Subscribe and check it out.  We have essays on being a ski bum, on being mistaken for a celebrity, on being the new New Haven librarian, on being married happily... or not, on crossing the border, on loving our unloveable hometowns, on being sick and healthy again.

Then there's the poetry and the fiction--all good stuff.

By why stop there?  Our publicity machine has been going strong as well!  The Boston Globe recently had an article about The New Haven Review and its book publishing venture.

And then there are our authors and their books.  Rudy Delson, author of NHR Books' How to Win Her Love, was interviewed on WFMU (the interview can be heard here) and our own local WPKN (listen here).

Poet Charles Douthat recently read from his Blue for Oceans at the Poetry Institute at the Institute Library!

And as for Gregory Feeley's own recent Kentauros, we are looking forward to our first radio programs, courtesy of Connecticut NPR, where he sits down with New Haven Review editors to talk books and whatever else his fervid imagination has cooked up--but more on that later!

Picking Stories with a Little Help from Friends

One of the questions I am sometimes asked is how I go about selecting stories for the Listen Here Short Story reading series in New Haven. In an ideal world, I wish I could say, “Oh, that’s easy. I just read a bunch of short stories and pick what I think are the best of them.” If only it were that simple!

No, selecting stories for Listen Here is a far more complicated affair than first meets the eye. Like any “program,” Listen Here has a well-defined structure, and any object that is “structured” is, ontologically speaking, defined by limits. The limits of Listen Here are very real and are what ultimately shape the criteria upon which I depend for selecting stories

The most important criterion for selecting stories is quality, and while we all might agree that quality is a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient one. Selection depends heavily on the taste of the selector—that’s me—and I like to think that I have pretty good taste in stories. But I’m hardly infallible (papal authorities aside, who is?). Guidance from others is not only useful but efficient. Translation: weeding through the short story collections of individual authors can be an enormous time-waster. Each season of Listen Here requires approximately 24 stories, which means I’ll normally read at least twice that number.

But rest assured, I’d be running through many more if I didn’t depend in turn on other literary tastemakers. Lack of infinite reading time demands the pre-screening offered by short story anthology editors, and so to them I am often eternally grateful.

Short story anthologies come in several flavors. My preference runs to contemporary story collections. For these I commonly look to the latest annual collections of Pushcart Prize winners, O Henry Prize recipients, and Best American Short Stories selectees. What I like most about these collections is the opportunity to read short stories of merit by authors of no reputation…but more on that later. Another anthology type I place within this camp is that of the little magazine that has compiled its ostensible best, whether we’re talking Granta, Story, or McSweeney’s. Since both types tend to draw from the same well, I’ve not found much distinction between the two.

A less preferred but nonetheless useful type of anthology is that organized by subject, genre or geography. These can vary considerably. For example, my collection of 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories has yielded two or three really good reads while the rest founder under the conventions of the genre. On the other hand, Brad Morrow’s literary The New Gothic, with only 20 or so stories has been a real gold mine because the stories on average are just, well, better.

Unevenness aside, anthologies organized by a common theme or trait aid in organizing the each night’s reading, where stories are brought together in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes not. So Irving and Ilana Wiener Howe’s collection of classic collection Short Shorts provided everything I needed for the night we had devoted to extra short stories (ranging in reading length from 8 to 15 minutes). Or the aforementioned anthologies of tales of terror have taken care of our Halloween week readings.

The one type of anthology I rarely read is that devoted to a single author. Doing so can, in fact, lead to some mighty discouraging results. For example, my copy of the Complete Short Works of Mark Twain has made it pretty clear that Mark Twain was not much of a short story writer. (On the other hand, he is a master of the short sketch, which is not the same as a short story.) Others whom I’ve tried and failed include Arthur Conan Doyle (too long and and Ray Bradbury. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes’ tales are the only ones worth reading but these are often too long for the program and, upon re-reading, many of them just aren’t as good as they originally seemed when I first read them in high school; Ray Bradbury—another writer whose stories I read voraciously—presents different problems: at times, too stridently lyrical or downright cutesy, others too obvious in ending or lightweight in overall effect. Now don’t get me wrong: there are winners from these gents: Doyle’s “The Red Headed League” is still a great story, in part because its absurd premise manages to be so weirdly humorous, too; Bradbury’s “Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!” is still one of my favorite tales of humor (and don’t even get me started on The Martian Chronicles, which, even dated, is still one of the most powerful, thematically rich, best-written works of science fiction).

But I am not convinced that plowing through the nearly 30+ stories of the superhuman Holmes or the over 100+ stories of the bountiful Bradbury is an apt use of precious time when variety of author and topic at a constant level of quality is required—which is why in the end story selection ends up being a fundamentally communal endeavor. For nearly all of my selections depend upon the some editor who had the good sense to whittle down stories that he, she, or they (if a board did the selecting) thought worthy of republication. In brief, I couldn’t do it without them.

So here’s to those literary tastemakers. Without you, Listen Here would not have been possible.

Spymasters

One of the real pleasures in perusing writers’ meditations on the books they read is the occasional flash of real insight they offer because they have not hemmed themselves in by the standard views agreed upon by, say, literary scholars of a genre or literary tradition.  That at least was my experience reading P.D. James’ recent collection of essays on the mystery, Talking about Detective Fiction. What caught my eye were not so much her thoughts on Edgar Allan Poe or her fondness for Arthur Conan Doyle or even her views of Dame Agatha, but her almost off-the-cuff inclusion of John le Carre. Most know Le Carre as the most revered of spy novelists.  James suggests that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the first novel to feature spymaster George Smiley as a main character, is actually a mystery—an idea that got my attention, especially since the novel had been sitting on my bookshelf for a few years. In fact, it was one of several Le Carre novels in my possession that for years I had been meaning to get to but never set aside the time to actually read.  Now I was intrigued.

Although Le Carre’s earliest breakout novel was The Spy Who Came in the From the Cold, it is Tinker, Tailor that lets the curious peer at the clockwork of a British spy agency (referred to throughout as “the Circus”).  I let no cats out of bags by pointing out how this 400-pager has, at its center, the story of ferreting out a mole who has corrupted nearly every one of the Circus’ covert operations.  Like most locked-room mysteries, there are five suspects and Smiley, as Le Carre’s Hercule Poirot, has set himself to the task of uncovering the mole’s identity.

It all works as far as the tropes in spy novels and detective fiction go.  But there is something more to LeCarre—something with which his readers are already familiar and for me was a bit of a shock to discover, albeit a pleasurable one.  In brief, the life of a spy is a shabby one.  Not morally shabby…well, that, too, of course…but materially shabby.

Through Tinker, Tailor—and you see this repeated in Le Carre’s Looking Glass War—there are interminable complaints about lack of funds for necessary resources.  The spymasters are always looking over their shoulders to make sure that there is enough data to show their superiors, enough action to be had to justify next year’s budget.  Even as the mystery reader in me consumed pages in Tinker, Tailor to see who that damned mole was selling British assets (human ones, that is) up the river, the culture critic noted how the success of the mole and the support unknowingly granted by others in his artful mendacities were all the direct result to keep budgets intact by supplying higher ups with a steady flow of information (or “intel,” as today’s wonks call it).

There’s no getting around how much the novel’s actors are driven by the filthy lucre.  There are drafty rooms, unpainted walls, old file cabinets, dirty teacups, and never, never enough coal for the fireplace.  The offices of the Circus are not even close to the squeaky clean hallways and super-secure labs of Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible’s or the more mundane, but still nicely situated glass-walled offices of the Bourne Ultimatum.  For the staff of the Circus, piles of paper, undusted shelves, and peeling paint reflect the daily drudgery of the spy trade, which involves mostly a lot of bureaucratic wrangling for the spymasters and twiddle-your-thumbs waiting for the agents.

Still LeCarre manages to make it all work because of these quotidian realities.  To be blunt, it’s almost impossible nowadays—for me at least—to watch any of the spy shows and their now-ridiculous comic spoofs, from the newest James Bond flicks to Spy Kids, and not in the end be bored by the unreal and usually ridiculous exploits (Transporter 2 comes to mind, having done laundry through it a few days ago).

It’s rare to find books and movies clearly enmeshed in a genre (in this case, “spy thriller”) that are brave enough to deflate our culturally projected fantasies.  I like the Bourne movies (they’re actually better than the books) because they try, albeit feebly, to “humanize” Jason Bourne.  But they are still kung fu fighting fantasies, ones where we admire the Jackie Chan-like ingenuities of battle from the flung ashtrays to rolled-up magazines-turned-truncheons.

Perhaps the best cinematic equivalent to what Le Carre did to the spy novel—an essential defrocking of the genre—is Steven Spielberg’s Munich.  Here is a movie about spywork where everything that can go wrong does, without the film devolving into comedy.  In Tinker, Tailor, the same can be said for the participants of the Circus, who show themselves to be preening careerists with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge.  By the novel’s finish, you can’t help but feel that the true “spymasters” are not the agency’s directors—in Tinker, Tailor the former agency director brought down by the mole is ironically named “Control”—but the accountants who keep the books and have the power to dry up the resources that make possible the spy fantasies that we indulge in the act of reading books of this ilk.

Dicked Over and Over

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick, who for some reason, I skipped right over during my geeky high school years (with the bizarre exception of A Scanner Darkly).  I’ve since ploughed my way through Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner), The Game Players of Titan, The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and presently, We Can Build You. And yet what has come to fascinate me most respecting this reading binge is not the literary qualities of Dick’s prose (it’s pretty workmanlike, truth be told) or the depth of his philosophical insights (they run quite deep—scary deep, in fact), or the theater of the absurd plotlines.  These aspects of his work have their respective merits—and demerits—but I’ll leave those for others to ponder.

No, what has caught my attention is the fact that all of Dick’s writings are still in print!  We’re talking here, folks, about some 35 novels and short story collections.

This is no small matter for a science fiction author or indeed any author operating in a “pop” genre.  As a long-time reader of science fictions—coming up on 30 years, in fact—the observation over time of what manages to stay on the shelves or what gets pulped offers more than enough opportunity to comment on and complain about our economic, educational, an cultural tastes and inclinations.

Dick has become such an opportunity. It’s not that he’s bad.  It’s more a question of is he that good. But let me contextualize…

I first realized all of Dick’s work were in print when I headed into the Barnes & Noble on the north end of Union Square to pick up novels by a British contemporary of his, a writer whose own febrile imagination struck similar chords.  At the time, the only novel I owned by John Brunner was a chewed-up edition of Last Stand on Zanzibar.  Re-reading it, I noted how easily the passions that Dick poured into his works on the politics and technologies of mind control were matched by Brunner’s acid reflections on overpopulation and government bureaucracy.

Part of the “New Wave” movement in British science fiction, spearheaded by writers like Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss, Last Stand is a true sci-fi tour de force: chapter titles are “coded,” while multiple storylines are heavily interlarded with narrative experiments, from disjointed newsfeeds to floating conversations run together. Despite the distinctly 1960s-ish characters and their concerns, you can’t help but admire the sheer energy of the novel’s Herculean effort to immerse the reader in the—for lack of a better term—freneticism of the world Brunner imagines.

The world has been overrun by bodies—human ones, of course--precipitating explosive acts of mass violence by those gone over the edge who try literally to clear the physical space around them. Before there was going postal, there standing on Zanzibar.  In the hubbub of disembodied party banter and screaming news flashes that weave in and out of the more straightforward story of a dormant spy who, without warning, is “activated,” Brunner’s experiments in writing do more than describe lonely crowd effects: after all, why show you a world on edge when he can have you feel it?

Does it work?  Sometimes, and sometimes not, but Brunner is ambitious, which explains my decision not only to replace my ratty version of Last Stand but to see if I could also get hold of his other major novels, Shockwave Rider and The Sheep Look Up.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, where’s your science fiction section?”

“Top floor, on the far right wall as you come off the escalator.”

“Thanks. Ah, here we go.  Ok, let’s see: A…A…Anthony, Asimov, B…B… Bradbury, Brin…C…  What the hell?  No Brunner…?  Let me check again. Well, how do you like that? No Brunner.  I wonder what else is here.”

“Whoa…”

And that’s when I saw it. An entire shelf and a half given to books all  similarly trimmed, bound, and designed: apparently every novel published by Philip K. Dick.  Some I knew from reputation already: the ones I listed, as well as Ubik and VALIS.  But there were any number that I had not heard of.  But that didn’t seem to matter.  Someone at Vintage Press and the estate of Philip K. Dick saw gold in them thar hills and decided to put all of his novels—good and bad—in print.  Most, if not all, did not even have their type reset, but instead were little more than scanned pages from earlier printings, resized and newly covered to fit the collector’s edition effect.

Personally I can’t help but admire a good marketing tactic when I see one.  It certainly has kept all of Philip K. Dick’s novels in print (and me buying them). But I mourn for John Brunner, whose better novels deserve better fates.  So I guess it’s off to the American Book Exchange for me.

It’s a Glass Family Affair

High school reading is a curious thing. I'd like to think that the sudden burst of teen-appropriate fiction in the late 1990s was largely driven in by the rise of Scholastic as a business and Harry Potter as a phenomenon. This no doubt explains the many reader guides available on this wealth of writing—Amy Crawford's Great Books for High School Kids, Daniel Hahn's Ultimate Teen Book Guide, Nancy Keane's Big Book of Teen Reading Lists, John Gillespie and Catherine Barr's Best Books for High School Readers, and on and on. In this day and age, the heroes of writing for teens are Sherman Alexie, John Green, Nikki Grimes, Laurie Halse Anderson, and innumerable others—and finding these others is easy in an age of Amazon and "customers who bought this item also bought…"

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, teen reads were not so easy to find. High school reading for non-honors courses comprised Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton, and Paul Zindel. For more smart-alecky students, the diet consisted of traditional classics, ranging from Charles Dickens' seemingly interminable (then!) David Copperfield to John Steinbeck's overlong (then!) Grapes of Wrath. The geek crowd—among which I number myself—floated into Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and the newly arrived Orson Scott Card or William Gibson. But among the authors of slightly straighter fiction that had a special cachet for high school overachievers, none stood higher than J.D. Salinger (with Kurt Vonnegut and Herman Hesse often trailing in his wake).

Salinger was the Seinfeld of his day: ideally suited for the semi-cosmopolitan children of middle-class parents with more smarts than money. While Catcher in the Rye was as inevitable then as it is today—notwithstanding recent claims of its early death in the pages of the New Yorker—the aforementioned overachievers not uncommonly preferred the pleasures of Salinger's Nine Stories and his one other published novel, Franny and Zooey, to his paean to post-pubescent adolescence.

There are some awfully pleasant associations I still have with the Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey, making it impossible for any re-reading of these works not to be colored by feelings of high school smugness. (Look at me! See how smart I was reading these as a high school sophomore rather than the prescribed Catcher!)

But my continued fascination with re-reading as a 40-something books that so impressed me in my 'teens continues unabated, and while Pride and Prejudice, in my humble opinion, continues to ride high, my experience with other works has not withstood the tests of time as well. Salinger may be a case in point. For the Nine Stories, I have to confess that, by and large, these have held up well—certainly much better than many short stories of the same period. Franny and Zooey, however, does not.

It's not that it's a bad novel. It isn't. It's still pretty good. It's just, well, a little overdone, a little contrived, a bit pretentious, the kind of stuff likely to feed the ego of a precocious teen reader. One can't help but suck up the mysteries of the disturbed wunderkind, the elusive Seymour—eldest of the Glass children— whose shadow and genius hang over the novel, and particularly Franny, like a wet blanket woven from the threads of an existential angst born of reading too many Tolstoy novels and Zen maxims. Salinger is not so dumb as to ignore that fact when brother Zooey rails at sister Franny: "We're freaks, that's all. Those two bastards [eldest Seymour and next in line Buddy] got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards." The freakish standards at issue boil down to Franny's discontent with—how does one put it?—the petty qualities that in some way are exactly what make us human—which is, of course, Zooey's point.

Notwithstanding inevitable triteness of Zooey's moralizing about how to accept people for who they are, warts and all, the novel irresistibly draws us into it, turning us into the very freaks with freakish standards Zooey deplores. In fact, reading the book in high school inspired the same act of freakishness that Franny has taken on of hauling around a copy of the anonymously authored The Way of a Pilgrim, the first-person narration of a wanderer who devoutly recites the "Jesus Prayer" ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner"). In Franny's knapsack is The Way of a Pilgrim; and in ours then was Franny and Zooey—at least, until the end of sophomore year when SAT exams became more important.

In the 1970s and 1980s, at least, the greatest irony of Franny and Zooey was an entirely unintentional one: namely the postmodern trick of its transformation into an exemplar of what it condemns. Even as Zooey lectures Franny—and presumably readers—on the pretension of judging too harshly all the non-"whiz kids" out there, we can't help but nod our heads with the all-too-wise Zooey and sympathize with the well-meaning Franny. Hey, smart people like Franny—and ourselves—make these kinds of mistakes all the time, and it's good thing that we're smart enough to read books like this by J.D. Salinger to teach us better.

But let's be honest, how much would we have listened really if we weren't at the same time all jazzed up by the "beaverboard" nailed up on the back of the door to Seymour and Buddy's childhood room, on which "every inch of visible surface of the board had been decorated with four somewhat gorgeous-looking columns of quotations from a variety of the world's literatures"? And there you are: lengthy quotes from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Kafka for you Western traditionalists' pearls of wisdom from Issa, the "Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna," and Mu-Mon Kwan for you intellectual mystic types into Alan Watts and Thomas Merton. If this isn't the height of pretentiousness, I'm not sure what is. And yet let's all just admit that it's cool, too. I even remember how during summer camp as a counselor in training I and others had taken to the habit, in clear imitation of this bit of intellectual self-puffery, of tracking down suitable quotes and writing on the walls of our bathroom stalls bits of geinus from Dostoyevsky and I.L. Peretz. It all certainly made for more interesting reading that "Here I sit hear broken-hearted..."

I ought perhaps add at this juncture that in some ways I repeat the criticisms leveled at the novel by Mary McCarthy in her 1962 review of the novel ("J.D. Salinger's Closed Circuit"), a wonderfully smart reading of the novel and no doubt better written and more insightful than this.

But McCarthy's criticism bears repeating, albeit contextualized by two realities: first that Franny and Zooey is a pretentious novel because its appeal is built on precocity, and being precocious is hardly a bad thing in itself. I recommended the novel to my teen daughter, and I have no qualms doing just that when I consider some of the competition, from Stephanie Meyer's teen vampire soap operas to Cecily von Ziegesar teen sleaze (she's author of the just plain awful Gossip Girl novels). Second, McCarthy wrote before she would realize how strongly the novel would tap the need of smart kids to feel smart. This is a reality that cannot be batted away and Salinger's novel, in some sense, grasps that fact. Franny and Zooey is the Jesus Prayer of the smart and sensitive soul (not the nerd, who represents an entirely different type as smartness goes). Smart kids, in their way, need their Franny and Zooey's (today these tend to be Junot Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao): books that bespeak their intellectual curiosity and which, in their being carried about, signal to others that their search for other intellectually curious types. And that ain't a bad thing either.

I Used to Be Smarter

…or at least, that is the net effect of what aging, children, pets, mortgage payments have me sometimes believing.

When I was a child I thought myself bright. Many of us at one time probably thought the same of ourselves. It was the euphoria of youth, the deeply felt conviction that with a little application, one's quick-to-understand-anything mental prowess could master any subject placed before it.

So when did the realization arrive that being some sort of prodigy was not my destiny? Indeed, when one reads about prodigies, would such a destiny even have been desirable?

Oh, but the power! That sense of infinite capacity powered by youth and hormones. It is something I sorely miss.

Like many who write for or read this site, I was a reader, too, and a precocious one at that. (But weren't we all?) The transition for me from the Mighty Thor to the Mighty Shakespeare was sudden, taking my father as much by surprise as me. He was kind enough to make the switch from bringing home issues of Iron Man to leaving Signet editions of Dickens on my rolltop desk. He was a good father, and he unwittingly encouraged me in my adolescent hubris.

I read voraciously (didn't we all?) and performed reasonably well in school—except for those classes that I had consciously decided not to succeed in. The world seemed my oyster, easily pried with the knife of my intellect.  In short, I felt really, really smart. I was sharper, I was funnier, I was livelier, I was wittier.

Or was I? Sometimes I think I was these things because now there are so many days as a mid-40s, mid-career, midlife so-and-so that I just feel plain exhausted. Tired. Weak. Pooped. I should exercise, but it bores me. I should eat well, but I get hungry. I should read more and watch less television, but my eyes hurt and besides, my attention wanders: I think I hear my children calling…or is that my wife? And don't let me forget that I need to: bring the car in for a repair, pay the Visa bill, renew my license, send a Bar Mitzvah card (with check, of course)...

In Arthur Conan Doyle's Study in Scarlet, when Dr. John Watson first meets the great Sherlock Holmes, he is utterly flabbergasted to learn:

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

Ignorant of Copernican theory?  This is detective fiction as farce. But even more interesting is the explanation:

"You see," Holmes explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

Yeah, the italics are mine.  Honestly, I have no idea if Doyle is toying with readers or metaphorically treating late Victorian views of memory and forgetfulness. It doesn't really matter. Holmes purposely unloads any accumulation of "useless facts." For me, the act of disposal is thrust upon me, willy-nilly. The space I once reserved for the minutiae that made me a living room whiz during Jeopardy or reasonably competitive in a game of Trivial Pursuit is now taken up with doctors' appointments and trips to the supermarket, worries about my 401k (or what's left of it) and making sure the gas tank is full.

I used to be smarter, or so I would like to think. And yet, I know this is not entirely true. Separate from the reams of data that literally wrinkle my face like pen strokes gone awry, signs of knowledge dearly bought by experience, I do know more about some things than I once did, I am more capable at some mental tasks than I once was.

For example, I know more about the history of literature than I ever did upon my graduation from college. I'm also far better at crossword puzzles. I suspect I may even be a better chess player, which isn't saying much since I always sucked at the game. (Remember, youth had inspired me with the belief that with enough application I could be great at chess, not that I was.) I definitely know more about politics and how it works—daily blog reading has trained me well in that regard. I am definitely a better writer.

But has my writing all this made me feel any better? Not necessarily. In some ways, it has suggested how wrong-headed the sentiment is. I used to be smarter doesn't seem like much nowadays when the smartest guys in the room so successfully melted down the economy of the United States. Suddenly I'm not so inclined to take stock in this type of nostalgia. Already it has begun to pale. Maybe I used to be smarter. But I think I was also more callow, more selfish, more spoiled, and hard knocks have made me smarter in the ways that count.

Or so I'd like to think.

Literary Regrets

Lisa Dickler Awano is a scholar of Alice Munro and an alumna of the University of Chicago, which I attended as well. She is also a subscriber to New Haven Review and a forthcoming contributor.

When we saw each other at the most recent New Haven Review gala, we talked briefly, as we have before, of the ol' "U of C." She had recently visited the campus, where Amy Kass was being honored. Our conversation turned, as per usual, to the topic of faculty we had known.

For me, Amy Kass, and her equally eminent husband and fellow faculty member, Leon, were not among those with whom I had the honor of taking a class (notwithstanding their conservative credentials). But Lisa and I were able to share fond remembrances of David Bevington, the U of C's premiere Shakespeare scholar. (Bevington's edition of the Shakespeare's complete works remarks for me a touchstone of quality in editing and exposition of the Bard's work.)

Our conversation then took a curious turn. She knew that the greatest influence on my early development as a reader and critic had been literary scholar William Veeder. But that influence, as I've written elsewhere, affected less the shape or quality of my criticism than the confidence—sometimes reckless—that underwrites it. In brief, Veeder trained me in the attitude a literary critic must take to the object of his attention rather than in the actual tools of analysis that should be brought to bear. For a critic to do his work well, one simply cannot tread a path of undue reverence to authors or their work.

And while this was a necessary first step to the art of reading well, the tools he offered at the time did not, as I suspected then but know now, deliver much substance in the way of interpretation or criticism. This is seemingly harsh, but it is without doubt the case that Veeder's passion then for psychoanalytic criticism offered readings that, in my humble view, were seemingly complex but terribly hollow. While the article on him in Wikipedia conveys the strengths of his basic positions as a literary pragmatist (that meaning is engendered by the intersection of text and reader in a given context), his in-class instruction often dwelled to absurd lengths on intricate variants to the Oedipus complex and other Freudian and post-Freudian phenomena.

Veeder supplied the starting blocks. But my "literary regret," small and speculative though it may be, was the opportunity I missed to have a baton passed to me by U of C's best-known literary critic then: Wayne Booth.

Part of the reason for the missed opportunity was simple timing. Somehow I managed to graduate from U of C in three years (an achievement not to be mistaken for any act of genius or even above average intelligence on my part: I sweated seven years on a doctorate that wasn't all that great when I finished.) My junior year was thus also my senior year, which gave me the privilege of shouldering my way into any class I wished but did not bestow the magical property of compelling professors to return to the classroom early from sabbaticals. The academic year after, I bridled with jealousy when a peer and friend regaled me with tales of Booth's erudition and kindness during classes he took the year after my graduation.

At the time, there was no doubt in my mind that the star who shined brightest in U of C's English department then was Booth. True, by the mid-1980s, my undergraduate years, his star had begun to fade under the glare of deconstruction and a cadre of poststructural reworkings of feminist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist literary theory. Booth's theories seem quaint by comparison, but with the receding of the Continental tide of theory, the artfulness and articulateness of his struggle with issues subsequently advanced by narratology and reader response criticism seem to have worn well, or at least, better than some other theories.

This, of course, is just one reader's opinion, and Booth was not necessarily my favorite or even the most convincing critical theorist. But I do think he was, at the time, the best U of C had to offer. But I'll never really know. It is always possible that he as an instructor and I as a student would have been less than compatible. But such is the nature of regrets, even literary ones, which exist in some other universe with its own history.

BBC Blues

I have been watching a lot of BBC Television lately. This surge of anglophilia was occasioned by my wife's return from Walmart with two collections of "BBC Video Classics" tucked into a plastic shopping bag. The first, "The Charles Dickens Collection," contained dramatizations of Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Bleak House, Mrtin Chuzzelwit, and Oliver Twist; the second, "The Jane Austen Collection," featured—naturally enough—adaptations of her six complete novels.

Working my way through the latter, while folding laundry or stuffing envelopes, proved both illuminating and disappointing. The first thing you need to know is that both collections comprise BBC's first round of Masterpiece Theatre-like forays into high literature. All of the productions appeared in the 1970s and 1980s and were shot, to their detriment, as video.

Now let me be clear: I'm an unapologetically avid admirer of Austen. But no amount of avidity can forgive the woodenness of these productions. The stilted deliveries, passive blocking and not infrequent lack of dramatic subtext are fittingly complemented by the flaccid camera work, wan indoor lighting, and general absence of sound engineering. (Everybody speaks with a faint hallway echo).

While hardly distraught, I was, well, dismayed. Did Austen translate that badly? BBC productions clearly have the luxury of length, the lack of which in Hollywood productions was a continual source of frustration for me. In Emma Thompson's rendering of Sense and Senibility (1995), there is no midnight visit by the faithless but regretful John Willoughby, seeking forgiveness for his caddish behavior; in Keira Knightly's Pride and Prejudice (2005), scenes in Rosings Park and Pemberley are painfully abridged, while several characters were altogether eliminated.

Perhaps the faults I perceived lay in the dramatizations (the British term then for adaptation). I had started with Pride and Prejudice, a personal favorite. This BBC version had the distinct honor of being adapted for video by British writer Fay Weldon. Yet despite the seeming coup in selection of dramaturg, the execution was pale at best. It certainly did not compare favorably to BBC's 6-part reworking in 1995 with Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. And yet somehow, I did receive some modicum of pleasure, so I turned to my next favorite novel, which I had recently read: Persuasion.

Ack! It was unwatchable. The blind were surely leading the blind when someone cast 38-year-old Ann Firbank as the 27-year-old Anne Elliot. Even worse, that someone then set her against the much younger looking Valerie Gearon (who was 34 but looked 25!), who played Anne's elder sister, Elizabeth Elliot. The overall effect was creepy, with the younger sister, the romantic object of the novel, looking like the older sister's mother!

The real test ultimately proved to be Sense and Sensibility because here I could compare BBC and Hollywood productions and directly. (I owned the 1995 movie version.) Now I could assess more intelligently what worked and what did not. The differences were palpable. Despite the inevitable contractions that movies impose on their novelistic sources, both adaptations shared a number of identical lines, demonstrating by contrast what real talent can deliver. Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant, and Kate Winslet earn their reputations for subtlety and expressiveness when compared to the weirdly vapid and at times uninspired verbiage of the BBC production, which no doubt explains Masterpiece Theatre's reputation among some Americans in the '70s and '80s as a waste of cathode rays.

And yet…and yet, I can't seem to give up my commitment to Austen, even when done badly. To be blunt, as dramatizations of literary classics go, these BBC "video classics" suck—but not so much as not to be worth the watching. So is this what makes a "classic" a classic? Somehow the stories still compel even as the productions repel. There is a mystery here that I can't explain.

But forgive me. I see I have a load of laundry on the bed and Mansfield Park is in the DVD drive, so I best get back to work…

The Art of the Matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lit Up

Earlier, I posted on the fruitlessness of teaching students how to write literary criticism. The argument was part tongue in cheek, part all business. In brief, I'm ambivalent about the value of this activity. This ambivalence lies in the fact that not teaching students how to write literary criticism is not the same as refusing to teach them how to do literary criticism. Perhaps this is a distinction without a difference. I don't think so. When it comes to the art of unraveling a literary work--or as students of literature pejoratively put it, of "dissecting" The Scarlet Letter or Death in Venice--we should instruct students in this activity. I'm just not convinced this is the most effective way of teaching students how to write better, and too often beginning literature courses are treated as an extension of one's training in academic writing. But, in my view, the experience of writing literary criticism comes too early in the trajectory of the typical student's college career. Unless the inability to write has burdened him with remedial composition courses--something of a norm on American college campuses--writing literary criticism within the first two years of study is just too soon to engage in the art of analyzing one of our most complex human artifacts.

A small digression: I've always been amused by the distinction in our culture between the "hard" and "soft" sciences. In academia, hard sciences, like physics and chemistry, are not uncommonly seen as more difficult, more challenging than the "soft" sciences of psychology and sociology. Hell, just look at the adjectives! But this bias is built on a strange notion. The soft sciences are soft not because they're easier but because they're the more complex of the two. And why? Because they have humanity as the object of their analysis, and human beings by nature deceive--if not the scientists who observe them then themselves. Our capacity for deception and delusion inevitably muddies the stream of reproducible results and controlled variables upon which "good" science depends. Pity the poor psychologist rather than the physicist. Grasping human behavior is enough to give even the keenest of minds a migraine. And narrative is, if anything, a demonstration of this seeming incomprehensibility, a neverending case study in the instability and unknowability of intention and response, human cause and effect. If human beings instantiate in every living moment the Heisenberg principle, stories are little more than exemplars of the principle at work. And yet we're sending in students to write coherently about them?

Perhaps I make mountains of molehills here, but I wonder if compelling nineteen-year-olds to intelligently and (one hopes) intelligibly interrogate a literary text is an episode in the kind of all-too-human irrationality we ask them to expound on. It is difficult enough to figure out, say, a character's ostensible motivation; to ask students to peer further beneath the literary veil and comment on the unstable source of that representation, which may range from the author's unconscious predilections to the ultimately unknowable historical milieu of the work, seems sheer madness. Here we blithely walk students into literature's hall of mirrors and ask them to look from reflection to reflection--the cascade of narrative ambiguities, which is generally agreed to be a good thing in a literary work done well--and then expect them to walk out loving the work and the craft of writing literary criticism.

Instructors of the art are inevitably disappointed by their charges, who leave the hall frustrated with results that are more pedestrian than not. At best, we hope for diamonds of insight in the rough. Some students who stick it out may even come to enjoy the ride--despite the results. In these are our first English majors born. But was the ride worth it for them?

In the end, frustrations aside, I have come to believe it was. Uncertainty and ambiguity in a work of literature is a good thing. I'm with the New Critics on that point. But try getting your typical first-year college student to accept that. Not so easy.

That is because eventually they will have to accept the fact that life as lived is rife with uncertainty, and making it through depends on learning how to navigate its shoals. Literature of any real quality demands suspending the Hollywood-driven Manichaeanism that childhood depends upon. Engaging students in the act (and if they're further interested, the art) of literary criticism is among their first steps in exploring and accommodating the not-so-black-and-whiteness of reality. Literary criticism is essentially a safe space to pick apart life through the vehicle of narrative. The more robust and thoughtful the picking apart, the better the training the student receives for handling the blows life will inevitably deal. Better to explore earlier in a textual work why a crime was committed than later in a courtroom as a witness, plaintiff or defendant. Literary criticism for this reason, among others, is a species--maybe a subspecies--of ethical training. It is the unexamined life being examined, through the lens of narrative.

But, mind you, this describes only the act of engaging in literary criticism. It is not the same as the act of writing it. For when you write literary criticism--not a bad thing in itself--you have now more heavy-handedly codified the flux of possibilities that circulated prior to committing ideas and arguments to paper. Granted, codification will sometimes have the ameliorative effect of pushing you to think through and state more clearly your views of the work at hand. For while uncertainty may characterize the nature of reality, so, too, does stability, if only for a while. Uncertainty, after all, is not the same as chaos. And the writing of literary criticism, while difficult in the extreme at times, is not a mission impossible. Indeed with time, maturity and the ability to walk the high wire of our quotidian existence, it is even something we may want to teach. But only when it really is worth the teaching and not before. A softening up that concentrates more on discussion and more imaginative forms of engagement would do far more till then.

Reading Well

Some time ago, I joined friends in New Haven for a Friday night meal. Their daughter was in town, back from college. She was an English major, just as I had been when I attended the University of Chicago twenty years earlier.  During our dinner conversation, I asked if she had any professors who stood apart from the rest. She right away sung the accolades two instructors who were notable for their passion and commitment to teaching literary criticism in the classroom in a way that made it just plain enjoyable.

"Only two?" I asked.

"Yep, just two.  Why do you ask?"

Why did I ask? That was easy enough to answer.  I wanted to compare her experience with mine and see if I could isolate the link between what these special folks had done for her and what the one professor who stood head and shoulders above the rest had done for me. My mentor was famous for a kind of literary pyrotechnics that liberated me as a reader and has served me well ever since.

That person was William Veeder, who so many years later apparently produced enough of a pedagogical impact to earn himself a Wikipedia entry. The article there outlines his literary theories, but it is largely a tribute to his work as a teacher--and rightly so. (I'm especially tickled by the classroom quotes, or "Veederisms," as they're aptly described.)

While some of what appears in the entry echoes my recollection of classes with him, what I recall most is what fails to show up in it. The entry authors rightly record Veeder's emphasis on how we derive meaning from a literary work through the intersection of words submitted by an author and our response to that assemblage of words. This intersubjective take on the reading experience is not especially original.  If anything, it is an eminently practical approach to how writers, texts, and readers engage. But what the entry writers fail to capture is the degree to which Veeder's application of that idea in the classroom empowered us: no small thing for any first- or second-year college student seriously considering a major in English. That's because for Veeder, intersubjectivity was the cudgel he wielded for batting away the cringing deference we were all too ready to make to the authority of authors.

Now this isn't to say that Veeder took that much stock in some variant of Roland Barthes' "death of the author." Veeder did believe in authors and their authority, but it was an authority much limited. To make this point he would tell a wonderful story that, even if apocryphal, rings true in the way stories like these should.

The setting: a class in modernism that had come together to discuss a D.H. Lawrence novel. The classroom conversation had become lively and insightful. The classroom instructor then distributed a short essay on the work by a contemporary of Lawrence's and asked for the students' feedback. They all agreed that the critic had badly misconstrued the novel. The instructor then revealed that the critic was ... Lawrence himself. Most interesting of all? Not a single mind was changed: the class responded--rightly in Veeder's view--that Lawrence had simply failed to understand fully his own achievement. As slippery as this slope seems, Veeder held firmly to the view that literature is always first and foremost a literary experience, and that experience takes at least two to tango--a reader and a text--and sometimes three if the author insists on butting in and the reader lets him.

It was the follow-up question in my class, and Veeder’s answer, that sealed the deal for me. A classmate asked if an author's assertion about what a text is "about" should have any standing in our interpretations of a text. Veeder's response was artful: authors do not have the kind of authority that we (and sometimes authors) imagine. Once the text is born, it is like a child sent out into the world to fend for itself; the author may have brought the work to term but her relationship to it thereafter changes forever as she becomes just another reader.

OK, well maybe not just any other reader. Veeder's term of choice was a "privileged" reader, but a reader nonetheless. Privileged, in Veeder's construction, meant that the author had a special relationship to the text as its progenitor, not a definitive one. And on closer inspection, that makes good sense. Take any work with characters modeled on real persons. Wouldn’t those folks, too, also be something privileged readers, with their own special relationship to the text?  

But even this privileged relationship is problematized by the fact that we all have unique relationships to texts, not only because we are unique in relation to one another but because we are unique even to ourselves over time. In my mid-forties, I'm just not the same person reading Heart of Darkness that I was when I struggled with it at 18.

The net effect of Veeder's insight was to empower me as a reader by depriving authors of a mystical authority that not only don't have but sometimes don't want.  True, authors are bound to be frustrated by perceived misreadings of their work--think Salman Rushdie, certain Muslim readers, and his Satanic Verses--but there is no getting around the reality of the situation. When text meets reader at any point in time, it will always be a unique experience, similar to others' in so many ways and dramatically different from others' in unforeseeable ways, which is why I still find The Scarlet Letter a dreadful bore while my best friend thinks it a thrillingly tragic romance.

Let me add that this does not make all readings equal in value or cogency. But that is an entirely different issue. The first step in reading well that Veeder taught was not about being right but about being bold. And in order to be bold, undue deference to the opinions ofauthors is the first thing that should go out the window.

Sorry, Mr. Lawrence.

Listen Here This Week: Bobbie Ann Mason and Bernard Malamud

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 3rd week with readings at Bru Cafe, 141 Orange, Street, this Tuesday, March 23, at 7 p.m. Our theme? “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”

Our stories? Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh" and Bernard Malamud's "The Jewbird"

Why these?

Two great writers, masters, in particular, of the short story: what could go wrong?

For those who don't know Bobbie Ann Mason...shame on you!  One of America's best short story writers, she offers in "Shiloh" a quietly moving meditation on what breaking up is really like: that onerous sense that not all is right in the world, often sneaking up on us before we know it.  Two lovers look at one another and, lo and behold, they're strangers.  And then there's the story title.  Wikipedia describes the Civil War battle at Shiloh as follows: "The Confederates achieved considerable success on the first day but were ultimately defeated on the second day."  If that's not a good description of breaking up, then I don't know what is.

Malamud's "The Jewbird" was one of my favorite stories as a kid and remains so to this day.  It's Malamud at his magic realist best, taking the "Jewish problem" and realizing its substance in a way that few works of "straight" fiction do. In many ways, it reminds one of the trickster tales of Native American legend, of coyote who knows things all too well, and yet all of this with a distinctly Jewish twist, featuring equal parts cynicism leavened by wisdom and  hope threatened byour failure to understand, really understand.

Enter, If Ye Dare

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming GeeksEthan Gilsdorf Lyons Press, 2009 $24.95

If we’ve learned anything from Sigmund Freud and J.K. Rowling, it’s that we members of the species homo sapiens sapiens exhibit a strong fantasy life.  From the family romance to  wingardium leviosa—frame it however you like—our predilection to imagine ourselves as something other than what we are is as old as the first storyteller regaling listeners around a campfire with tales of thrilling hunts, noble deeds or, indeed, anything that takes us out of ourselves and puts us elsewhere.

Ethan Gilsdorf’s Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks is a meditation on this all-too-human fact of life.  [Full disclosure: the acquiring editor for Lyons Press, Keith Wallman, is a subscriber to New Haven Review.] Gilsdorf's starting point is personal and, at times, painfully confessional, a saga that prompts his grand tour of the Anglo-American obsession with medieval fantasy and faerie.  That obsession ranges from beer-bellied, bearded role play gamers gathered in Geneva, Wisconsin, to relive the pre-corporate glory days of Dungeons & Dragons to middle-aged housewives whacking orcs and ogres in the virtual realms of World of Warcraft. There are middle-class couples who don wings and tunics on weekends to swing Styrofoam swords and fling confetti-filled fireballs at one another, as well as “Tolkien tourists” who descend en masse on the New Zealand of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings to walk the grassy plains of Rohan and sniff the cindery ash of Mordor.

Gilsdorf's survey, however, is more than an act of journalism.  It is an inner odyssey that gets its first push with the devastating stroke that transforms his mother from a bright, ebullient woman, for whom the world was her middle-class oyster, into the “Monster”: a shambling, chain-smoking, emotionally explosive terror whose son finds solace in a regularly scheduled Dungeons & Dragons game with high school friends.  This, at least, is the personal motivation behind Gilsdorf's re-entry into geekdom.  Like so many others—myself included—when Gilsdorf left for college, he had put childish things away, supplanting the joys of casting sleep spells and slaying giants with the more mundane adult pursuit of grades, sex, money, work, family.  In Fantasy Freaks, Gilsdorf takes the opportunity proffered by authorship and a book contract to revisit this phase of his life and indulge himself. But this indulgence is hardly a shameless one since Gilsdorf is clearly unsettled by the passion with which he returns to his teenage roots.

Mostly it’s a question of image. Anxieties about how he looks to his peers resonate throughout. This explains in part his not infrequent mention of how normal his respective guides through the subcultures of Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, live action role playing, and DragonCon are.  And then there is his own baldly stated yearning for adult things he is without at the time of writing—a long-term relationship, marriage, children.  The underlying story of cultural anxiety combines elements of projection (“What’s so weird about pretending I’m a half-elf warrior? The guy who plays the dwarf wizard is an assistant VP of finance at the local bank!”) with reaffirmations of normal urges (“OK, so I’m dressed in a funny costume at this DragonCon, but everyone’s doing it and maybe I’ll meet a girl and have real rather than role play sex”).  But Gilsdorf's projections are no different from those of every guy or gal who lives, in one way or another, a Clark Kent-Superman double life; while his reaffirmations  have their merits inasmuch as fantasy play can serve as a conduit to culturally normative goals, such as networking for love or money.  Looked at squarely, who can argue with either of these?  Four guys huddling over funny-shaped dice and stacks of rulebooks, which may end in a shared beer or job lead, is no stranger than watching four guys huddling in a green field over a dimpled white ball that rests on a little piece of wood, which they will spend some three to five hours swatting with one of ten differently shaped, club-footed poles.

Gilsdorf does make several pop psychology efforts to explain the penchant of a certain class of Americans (and Englishmen and Australians and Frenchmen, etc.) for these types of recreations.  Much of this pop psy 101 stuff comes from his own intuition. Nor do I think him that far off the mark.  These various forms of role play, whether table-top, digital, or “live action,” do reflect our collective need to escape the dullness of our daily reality, supply ourselves with the illusion of control over the chaos of modern life, feed that never absent desire for child-like, consequence-free play, and give release to our pent-up stores of aggression. It is all of these, and more. Indeed, if I had but one criticism to make, it would have been a fond wish for Gilsdorf to have shed some of the habits of personal journalism and donned more academic vestments.  (He certainly is capable, as a former Harvard graduate.)   In brief, I and, I suspect, any of his readers would have liked to have seen more of the academic literature—assuming there is any—on these various behaviors.  Otherwise, Fantasy Freaks is an eye-opening romp through what continues to strike me as a culturally specific juncture in our collective psychology.