Liars and Saints

  My husband was drawn to the "Quad God"; he thought the Quad God's trajectory was really a parable about hubris. "You just don't name yourself the Quad God . That's asking for disaster." Of course we read that Ilia Malinin had chosen that nickname in a facetious way; he intended to be self-mocking. But I'm reminded of a lesson I learned in a creative writing class. Never, never choose an "ironic" title for your short story. This is just a gateway to confusion and misinterpretation. My own "Olympics journey" has led me to some shocking discoveries. For example: Kristi Yamaguchi is now a self-outed Conservative Republican. And--having lost the gold--Michelle Kwan once mounted a comeback by skating to the melody from the song "Fields of Gold." Was this meta-commentary--or just an athlete responding to a particular tune she liked? We'll never really know. In this house, we're still divided on the Ilia Malinin questi...

 Stefan Merrill Block had a hard time learning about sex. For a long while, he thought that "beating off" was a brass-tacks description of a process, so he would literally slap his own organ until he grew bored. He attempted to have an online relationship with a peer--"Skittles4U"--but he overlooked certain bits of subtext. When the "peer" sent a photo--a self-portrait of a man in his thirties--things fizzled. In college, hoping to create a dramatic rupture within his family, Block willed himself to become gay. He encouraged his own body to ignore its "programming." No dice. Not one of these stories is earning media attention; "Homeschooled" is buzzy because of its descriptions of Block's mentally ill mother. Block's mother--depressed and isolated in Plano, TX--kept her child home from school for something like five years. There was nothing like a curriculum. Block's mother physically assaulted her child, required him to cra...

  As "The Simpsons" celebrates its 800th episode, I've been thinking about my favorite, "I Love Lisa." This is a Valentine's Day special. Ralph Wiggum is upset to discover that no one has left a card for him. Lisa feels a surge of pity--she gives Ralph a drawing of a train. The message is this: "I Choo-Choo-Choose You." Ralph misinterprets the gesture; even after Lisa confesses that she is uninterested in romance, Ralph chooses to be persistent. He drags Lisa to a taping of The Krusty Show, where he announces that he plans to marry her; the announcement is caught on national TV. I like this because it reminds me so much of James Marshall--the pitfalls of "gift-giving" were among Marshall's major concerns. I also like the feeling of a "campus"; Bart watches and records Lisa's behavior (because Bart is a Krusty fan), and Chief Wiggum gets involved (having decided to give his son very bad advice). I think this show is a pro...

  I'm especially fond of the waiter at the village pub; things aren't going the way he wants, in life, and he has forgotten (perhaps willfully) to put on an act. In icy silence, he brings your food. When you offer thanks, he says, "No problem," and his tone conveys a different message. "This--all of this--is, emphatically, A PROBLEM." The young waiter has a colleague--and these two flirt inappropriately during the overlap in their work hours. Maybe they'll have a brighter future. *** A kid at the high school died via suicide; the teachers did not know how to respond, so they banned "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." There is a suicide in that novel...ergo.... Local critics complained. We don't discuss suicide when a suicide occurs? Do we also ban "Hamlet," "Les Miserables," "Anna Karenina," "Spring Awakening," "Mrs. Dalloway," "Oedipus," "Macbeth," "Fun Home,...

  Anne Fadiman has written about Coleridge, about a Hmong community in America, about "them" as a singular pronoun with unknown antecedent, and about the habit of annotating books. She understands that a writer needs to "seduce" a reader. So one of her essays begins in this way: It was a late afternoon in November, and I was hosting a college talk by Mark Helprin. During the Q&A, Helprin told the assembled students that making it as a writer today was virtually impossible. A student stood up. Thin. Beautiful. Long reddish-brown hair. Long legs. Flagrantly short skirt. Nimbus of angry energy. She asked Helprin if he really meant that. There was a collective intake of breath in the room. It was what everyone else had been thinking but no one had been brave or brazen enough to say... What follows is a twin portrait. Ostensibly, Fadiman is writing about an impressive student. But--really--she is writing about herself. It's clear that she is tied to her student (...

  An indictment of Reagan-era greed, "Little Shop of Horrors" is as close as any work gets to "perfect musical" status. I have really only two complaints. One: the staging of the climactic battle, at least in the current version, is not very convincing. Two: Howard Ashman is sometimes a bit lazy in his mockery of Audrey (particularly in Audrey's awed reference to a "twelve-inch screen," in her "I Want" number). What is especially chilling is the tension between the two main storylines. Seymour tells us that he wants "a way out of here." Audrey, meanwhile, wants domestic tranquility. These two wishes do not have to clash; Seymour could cash a check early in Act Two and leave the flower shop. But Seymour is rapacious. It's Audrey who gets top billing--and, certainly, the current Audrey (Joy Woods) deserves top billing. Audrey's journey is perverse and fascinating. She can't even articulate her wish until the homestretch of...