Archives for March 2009

The theme of today’s coffee break is “ideal readers.” It was occasioned by Flannery O’Connor’s quote about the “monstrous reader” who always sat beside her as she wrote muttering, “I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.” I would think most writers have a Monstrous Reader living in their home — tall and shambling with a ghastly complexion and seersucker pants, who sleeps on the couch and eats all the chips at night.
But Ideal Readers exist as well, and here’s proof!:
• Nicholas Spice’s review of Elfriede Jelinek’s Greed ran in the London Review of Books many, many moons ago — but it’s stayed with me as a great piece of criticism. Remember hearing that Jelinek had won the Nobel Prize in 2004? Remember the excitement? Your gasp of “?????” I’ve read a few essays and articles about her since, but none of them has done so much to help me understand her books and what about her work gets lost in translation, both literally and culturally. It’s an example to me of a writer finding an Ideal Reader out there — always nice to see, but even more heartening when it’s an author whose work is as unconventional and thorny as Jelinek’s.
I remember when the prize was announced, Jelinek gave several interviews that really delighted me with their dolefulness (a performance by a Nobel Prize winner unchallenged until Doris Lessing’s “Oh Christ, I couldn’t care less” in 2007). At the time I thought it’d be nice to start a line of coffee mugs with inspirational wisdom from Jelinek printed on them, my favorites being, “I feel more despair than happiness” and “I have a social phobia, an illness known to doctors.” You know, something nice for around the office. (This is why I’m not Elfriede Jelinek’s Ideal Reader.)
• In this profile, Dave Cole comes across as a writer’s Romantic Ideal of a copy editor. Such tender, gentle hands! (Via sarahw.)
By the way, enjoy the dream, writers, but you should probably know: This is what your copy editor is really thinking about you.

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to the Broadway premiere of Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations, starring Jane Fonda. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Fifty years ago, Jane Fonda was the most promising ingenue on Broadway. Then she went to Hollywood and became the most promising screen actress of the ’70s. Then she discovered radical politics, made a workout video, married Ted Turner, and metamorphosed into an all-purpose second-tier celebrity who occasionally acts on the side. It’s been a long, long time since she made a halfway serious film, and longer still since she set foot on a stage. So it was with astonishment and a certain amount of trepidation that I went to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre to see her perform in Moisés Kaufman’s “33 Variations.”
Mr. Kaufman’s play, alas, is a sudsy cross between “Amadeus” and “Terms of Endearment,” a sentimental, uplifting family drama in which none other than Ludwig van Beethoven (Zach Grenier) plays a major supporting role. It’s not at all the sort of play with which I would have expected the creator of “The Laramie Project” and “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde” to have made his Broadway debut, and I regret to say that it’s not very good. Nor does Ms. Fonda make a strong impression in it, though she gives a thoroughly competent performance as Katherine Brandt, a brisk, emotionally distant musicologist who comes down with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (the neurological disorder popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), ends up in a wheelchair and discovers en route to the grave that she really, truly loves her brisk, emotionally distant daughter (Samantha Mathis).
And where does Beethoven enter the picture? It seems that Dr. Brandt is obsessed with his “Diabelli” Variations, and has decided to spend her final days examining the composer’s sketchbooks in order to find out what inspired him to write an hour-long set of variations on an ordinary little waltz tune. Beethoven and Anton Diabelli (Don Amendolia), who wrote the waltz, thereupon materialize to supply comic relief, while yet another subplot is introduced when Dr. Brandt’s daughter falls for her male nurse (Colin Hanks).
What we have here, in short, is a good old-fashioned middlebrow play, the kind in which a high-culture icon is made accessible to the masses by turning him into a semiregular guy. I don’t mean for this description to sound quite so dismissive: Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” is that kind of show, more or less, but it is also a perfectly serious work of theatrical art that succeeds in illuminating the creative process and the nature of genius. I think that Mr. Kaufman probably meant to write a show not unlike “Amadeus” or “The Invention of Love,” Tom Stoppard’s play about A.E. Housman, but a funny thing happened on the way to the stage door, and what we got was a 12-hankie weeper with punch lines….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

“Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.”
John Guare (quoted in The Independent, Oct. 17, 1988)

Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson’s biography of Sylvia Plath, is often maligned, but it has its wonderful points. One of the best sections is on Plath’s residency at Yaddo (which she shared with Ted Hughes) — a period when Plath was reading a lot of Jung and Theodore Roethke and, under the latter’s influence, wrote “Poem for a Birthday” (representative line: I housekeep in Time’s gut-end / Among emmets and mollusks, / Duchess of Nothing, / Hairtusk’s bride.; the poem’s entire seven-part sequence can be read online here. It’s the last poem listed under “1959”).
In her own (excellent) biography of the Plath-Hughes marriage, Her Husband, Diane Middlebrook passes over “Poem for a Birthday” quickly, dismissing it as overly imitative of Roethke. But Stevenson spends a significant amount of time on the sequence, and her interpretation of the poem’s imagery is sensitive and stirring. She writes, “These are poems of nightmarish regression comparable to Roethke’s ‘mad sequences,’ attempting to reproduce in infantile images and language the mute appetites of babies and beasts.”
In college I’d been exposed to a few poems from Roethke’s “mad sequences,” but they never took — other people’s nightmares are sometimes too opaque — and up until recently the only poem of his I knew well was “My Pap’s Waltz.” But lately, I’ve been reading a lot of him. Here’s one of my favorite bits to re-visit. It’s the fourth part of “The Dying Man,” a poem in five sections written in memory of Yeats. This part is called “The Exulting”*:

Once I delighted in a single tree;
The loose air sent me running like a child–
I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after-image of the inner eye.
Flesh cries to flesh; and bone cries out to bone;
I die into this life, alone yet not alone.
Was it a god his suffering renewed?–
I saw my father shrinking in his skin;
He turned his face; there was another man
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.
Fish feed on fish according to their need:
My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.
I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed.
I think a bird, and it begins to fly.
By dying daily, I have come to be.
All exultation is a dangerous thing.
I see you, love, I see you in a dream;
I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum,
And that slow humming rises into song.
A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;
I shall undo all dying by my death.

*Taken from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.

• An excerpt from the title story of Mary Gaitskill’s new collection, Don’t Cry, which comes out in a couple weeks. Yay! The story appeared last June in the New Yorker; the magazine’s website is now registration required but if you’re a subscriber, you can read the full story here. (I can’t remember from whom I purloined that first link — if it was you, sorry.)
• Wikicuriosities: Book curses and fakelore. (Via Gwenda & The Millions.)
• The Cinetrix presents a compelling reason to re-watch All About Eve this weekend. As if you needed one.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, extended through May 17, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes Apr. 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Aristocrats (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)

• Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) (one-act plays, PG-13, vastly too complicated for children, closes Mar. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Cripple of Inishmaan (black comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

“The stuff of which tragedy and comedy are made is the same stuff. The foibles of mankind work up more easily into comedy than into tragedy, and this is the chief difference between the two.”
John Jay Chapman, Learning and Other Essays

Tom Lehrer sings “Wernher von Braun” in 1967:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)