Archives for January 2006

We who are

your closest friends

feel the time

has come to tell you

that every Thursday

we have been meeting,

as a group,

to devise ways

to keep you

in perpetual uncertainty

frustration

discontent and

torture

by neither loving you

as much as you want

nor cutting you adrift.

Your analyst is

in on it,

plus your boyfriend

and your ex-husband;

and we have pledged

to disappoint you

as long as you need us.

In announcing our

association

we realize we have

placed in your hands

a possible antidote

against uncertainty

indeed against ourselves.

But since our Thursday nights

have brought us

to a community

of purpose

rare in itself

with you as

the natural center,

we feel hopeful you

will continue to make unreasonable

demands for affection

if not as a consequence

of your disastrous personality

then for the good of the collective.

Philip Lopate, “We Who Are Your Closest Friends” (courtesy of Ms. Pratie Place)

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

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

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)

– Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)

– Sweeney Todd* (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

– The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)

– In the Continuum (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, extended through Feb. 18)

– Mrs. Warren’s Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

– The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Feb. 19)

“I don’t have an interesting enough life for a memoir–unless I get to fudge and exaggerate and lie. But then that’s fiction.”

Lorrie Moore, interviewed by Angela Pneuman (The Believer, October 2005, courtesy of Maud Newton)

“Though most of us would not write except for money we would not write any differently for more money.”

Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days

James Marcus, who writes with a veteran’s experience, has the best reflections I’ve seen on the recently released nominations for this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards. Glad to see Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica pick up another nomination. I actually received this novel for Christmas and had commenced reading it when it met with an awful fate that I won’t detail here except to fleetingly speculate that my cat is secretly in the employ of Pantheon Books. If I was hesitating to buy a second copy, this latest manifestation of apparent critical unanimity in Gaitskill’s favor is likely to nudge me off of the fence in the direction of the bookstore. Full disclosure: I worked for the publisher of Gaitskill’s first two books, the short story collection Bad Behavior and the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin (shame about the paperback edition’s terrible cover art, by the way), and admired both excessively. When Gaitskill’s second book of stories, Because They Wanted To, came along, I found the first few stories disappointing and put it aside, and wondered how partisan my embrace of the previous books had been. Subsequent rereadings proved it to be genuine and deserved, and I awaited the arrival of a second Gaitskill novel in a state of anticipation that is now trebled, at least.

Clearly I am going to replace the book.

But tonight I was placating myself with random snippets of Two Girls, and I found a passage to carry me back to the subject of my most recent post, Henry James, and the “idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment”:

The boundaries of my inner world did not extend out, but in, so that there was a large area of blank whiteness starting at my most external self and expanding inward until it reached the tiny inner province of dazzling color and activity that it safeguarded, like the force field of clouds and limitless night sky that surrounded the island of Never-Never Land.

Justine Shade, the speaker here, is a sad, solemn woman with a grim past. That she has an inner life so vibrant with “dazzling color and activity” but so deeply buried is an ambivalent wonder. I love Gaitskill’s subtle variation on a common way of representing the embattled self: we often imagine a troubled person swaddling herself in the padding of some false persona in order to guard a true, inner self that is breakable, but we–or at least I–almost never imagine that what such a person is foremost protecting is a kind of happiness. With prose that’s beautifully unpolished, Gaitskill has a way of showing you what you might already know without realizing it.

Moving along from one lit cabal to another, the entire slate of winter nominees is being revealed, one day at a time, at the Litblog Co-op this week. Entries from nominators Dan Wickett and Sam Golden Rule Jones are already up for your delectation.

“When the first of August came round, the Professor realized that he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week. But he had been doing a good deal besides–something he had never before been able to do.

“St. Peter had always laughed at people who talked about ‘day-dreams,’ just as he laughed at people who naively confessed that they had ‘an imagination.’ All his life his mind had behaved in a positive fashion. When he was not at work, or being actively amused, he went to sleep. He had no twilight stage. But now he enjoyed this half-awake loafing with his brain as if it were a new sense, arriving late, like wisdom teeth. He found he could lie on his sand-spit by the lake for hours and watch the seven motionless pines drink up the sun. In the evening, after dinner, he could sit idle and watch the stars, with the same immobility.”

Willa Cather, The Professor’s House

I’ve been missing “About Last Night,” which is why I blogged so much yesterday. It felt gooood. Alas, January is my time to travel, not for fun but for my Wall Street Journal drama column: Broadway openings dwindle to near-nonexistence, giving me the opportunity to cram in a few out-of-town shows before the rush resumes. I’ve already been to Washington, D.C. (about which more on Friday) and am headed for New Haven on Wednesday and Chicago on Saturday. All this notwithstanding, I remain determined to keep a lid on my lurking workaholism. I went to the Jazz Standard last night to hear Julia Dollison, but otherwise I’ve been sticking close to home in between trips.

No doubt you can guess the punchline: I don’t expect to be blogging very much until the middle of next week, though Our Girl and I will likely post a bit during my trip to Chicago. (As always, I’ll be her happy houseguest.) In addition, I plan to add several interesting-looking new blogs to “Sites to See” and update the Top Five list semi-regularly, and I’ll also continue to post almanac entries whenever I’m in town.

Please don’t forget about me while I’m gone! I shall return.

I went to Washington, D.C., last week to see the Kennedy Center’s revival of Frank Gilroy’s The Subject Was Roses, mainly because Bill Pullman, one of my favorite not-quite-movie-stars, was in the cast. Recalling his witty, sharply drawn performances in The Last Seduction and Zero Effect, I took for granted that Pullman would be playing the part of the young GI newly returned from World War II, and was surprised to find that he’d been cast as the boy’s father. That’s all wrong, I thought. He’s too young to play the father of a soldier. Then Pullman started talking about himself and I started counting on my fingers, and within a few minutes it hit me that the character he was playing had to be forty-eight or forty-nine years old–my age. No sooner did I return to New York than I looked Pullman up on the Internet Movie Database, where I learned that he was born in 1953.

The perception of age is a tricky business. Most people, for instance, think I’m a good deal younger than I am, and are astonished to learn that I’ve reached the eve of my fiftieth birthday. This is partly because I have a young-looking face, but I suspect it also has a good deal to do with the fact that I never quite got around to embracing adult life: I’m a childless singleton who spends most of his nights on the town and hasn’t held a nine-to-five job for years. You might mistake me for a wastrel if I didn’t work so hard, and you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know me fairly well.

It is, I suppose, an odd life, and it doesn’t always please me. Sometimes I wish I had a job that I could put behind me at day’s end, or that I were comfortably ensconced in a nice suburban ranch house with a loving wife and a child or two. This dissatisfaction has grown more marked in recent years, though never overwhelmingly so: I know how lucky I am, and how well my catch-as-catch-can lifestyle suits my temperament. The trouble is that it isn’t nearly so well suited to the diminished energies of old age, and more and more I wonder whether I may have doomed myself to the fearful fate of Aesop’s grasshopper, who fell on lean times when he finally outlived his good luck.

Robert Frost wrote a poem warning grasshoppers to change their heedless ways:

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

At least I’ve done one thing to prepare for later disregard: I have an abundance of young friends. Rereading Martin Stannard’s biography of Evelyn Waugh the other day, I came across a remark Waugh made to an interviewer in 1953:

One makes friends up to one’s thirties, quarrels with them between 45 and 55, and makes new ones in the sixties. Between 45 and 55 is an irritable time. In middle age one thinks of the young with distaste as a poor imitation of oneself. When one is older one realises that they are quite different people and they become interesting.

That isn’t quite how I feel–for one thing, it’s been years since I last quarrelled with a friend–but I do think Waugh was right about the nature of the fascination that the young exert on the old. I first started making younger friends around the time I turned forty, and their companionship turned out to be one of the happiest things about the decade that followed. Of course a friend isn’t the same thing as a child or a spouse (or a big fat pension, for that matter). Still, I have a feeling that my young friends will do even more to brighten the next chapter of my odd, interesting life.