Archives for October 4, 2007

• Read Roxana Robinson’s introduction to the NYRB collection of Edith Wharton’s New York stories.
• As research for a project I’ve been dipping now and again into this early 1900’s account of New York. It’s oddly charming, with chapters that start like this: “Three o’clock is the hour when the heaped-up people in the lower city begin to move outward again.”

• Limey critics continue their hegemonic reign over American letters: Christopher Hitchens’ (very sharp) review of the new Philip Roth for The Atlantic, and James Wood makes his staff-writer debut at the New Yorker with some talk about God. As Lee Ann Womack sings, there’s more where that came from.
• Jezebel revisits Candace Bushnell’s old Sex & The City columns to see how well they’ve held up. Raising the question, who doesn’t love a man in a nice trilby hat?

A fun writing class last night. I felt cruddy on the drive over — it’s my week to turn in pages, and I don’t like the creepy little story I’ve been working on — but class cheered me back up.
A lot of the discussion was generated by Andrew Furman’s piece on “the creative nonfiction crisis” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers (not available online), the article dovetailing with questions like, when describing a real-life event, where’s the line between artistic license versus the deliberately misleading: Recreated dialogue? Compression of events?
Several of my classmates are writing personal essays or memoir so these are real, worrying issues for them; for me, they’re happily abstract. When I got home I went looking for an old Mary Karr interview where she recounts giving the manuscript of The Liars’ Club to her mother to read. I haven’t found that particular interview yet but I did come across this snippet:

The task [of writing Liars’ Club] was searing: “When I started unpacking my memory and sitting in the middle of it all day, I had the most bizarre experiences–I’d write an hour and a half or two hours and then lie down on the floor of my study and sleep the sleep of the dead.” Taped above her computer was a letter from [Tobias] Wolff offering her this advice: “Take no care for your dignity. Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruits. Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed.” Karr’s mother, on the other hand, put it more bluntly. “Hell, get it off your chest,” she counseled.

I like Wolff’s advice, which seems equally applicable whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews 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:

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

• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:

• The Dining Room (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Oct. 20)

CLOSING SUNDAY:

• Iphigenia 2.0 (drama, R, adult subject matter and violence, reviewed here)

“‘Marriage’: this I call the will that moves two to create the one which is more than those who created it.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra