Liars and Saints

 "I Won't Mind" is a well-liked cabaret song from an unfinished musical. It's like a faux-Sondheim song. It's someone lying to herself--and that's a topic Sondheim handled well. But Sondheim didn't write this. The song plays with two meanings of the expression  I won't mind.  The first is this: "I won't protest." I won't complain if you spill porridge on me. The second is this:  I won't be mindful . I won't be the adult. If there is a dangerous blurring of boundaries, I will neglect my responsibility; I will look the other way. The fun of the song is seeing the slow change from meaning one to meaning two. What starts as something sweet gradually becomes something mildly sinister. Real pain is legible in an actor's eyes. It's not about "indicating": wringing one's hands, or shouting, or kneading the hem of one's skirt. It's the eyes. The actor has to decide (1) to "access" that pain and (...

 We went to a cat cafe and ordered from a "KitTea List." The shop was named--unfortunately--the "Alley Cat Cat Cafe." It doesn't trip off the tongue. It's like the record store that called itself "The Vinyl Solution." Giacometti once made a wonderful cat. It was on display--for a long while--next to the Temple of Dendur. It seemed to accompany a resting "Sphinx of Hatshepsut." And my family likes the cats at the zoo. Recently, the lions have hogged the spotlight; the lioness gave birth. But I'm equally fond of the cheetah and of the snow leopard, now starring in its own non-fiction book, "The Ghost of the Mountains." At the cat cafe, my husband played with a small stuffed kitty, which he then chose to buy "for our daughter." I studied the scene. You can't bring your purchase to the "cat area." A thick glass window-wall separates the cat-guests from the coffee-drinking guests. To fraternize with the ca...

  Elmore Leonard said that interesting writing is dialogue. If your book isn't mostly dialogue, then you're in trouble. The crime writer Janice Hallett has taken this advice to extremes; Hallett's novels are just transcripts from email exchanges, text exchanges, voice mail recordings. So--in a way--the writing is *all* dialogue. There are always two parts of a message: the content of the message *and* the style of delivery. Hallett has fun with passive aggression, terseness, crazy effusiveness, sloppiness, neediness. Hallett generally has two or three investigators working through a bundle of documents. The documents contain a mystery. We, the readers, see the documents, but we also see the exchanges between the investigators as they do their interpretive work. The documents need to support the investigators' conclusions. But the documents also need to seem to tell a different story--a *wrong* story--so we can understand why the investigators were needed in the first pl...

  Fran Kranz made an interesting debut with "Mass." It's a movie about language--groping for language. That's the entirety of the movie. Two couples meet at a church. Clearly, something terrible has occurred. The couples try to find words. They do a little dance involving a potted plant. It's a gift from Ann Dowd to Martha Plimpton. Does Martha have to accept it? Where should it sit in the room? Is it to be "interpreted," or is it just a potted plant? What emerges is that Ann Dowd's son has murdered Plimpton's son. Dowd's son was essentially Dylan Klebold; there is a "Columbine" story in Dowd's past. Kranz has done his research. Two offshoots of the Columbine story involved diagnoses and God. (1) Do we say Klebold was evil, or that he was in pain? Some people argue that the "psychopathy" diagnosis is meaningless--it encourages us to stop asking questions when we should keep asking questions. (2) What to make of the Chr...

  I went to the Spirit Halloween store and bought "Ghostface" socks. They feature the iconic killer from "Scream," one of my favorite movies. On certain pairs, Ghostface is bathed in blood. On others, he is more "stylized"; sometimes, less is more. My daughter purchased a witch's broom (which she then began to carry, nightly, to her bed). My son bought many yards of synthetic "spider web" fabric; the choice puzzles me because my son hates spiders. Or he *claims* to hate spiders. Spirit Halloween has an annual theme. Last year, we all were treated to "the haunted subway." This year, if you visit an outpost, you'll see a spooky summer camp, with a witch, a Michael Myers, and a talking scarecrow, among other inventions. I have to deduct points from East Hanover's store because certain animatronic creatures were "mute." In other words, you would step on the "activator," and nothing would happen. It's stra...

 Recently, the NYT named its top fifty thrillers of the century (thus far) -- one of the titles was "You" by Caroline Kepnes. This is like an update of "The Talented Mr. Ripley." Almost every character is insufferable but also cunning (and so the book is sort of entertaining). "You" unfolds in the present tense. A troubled business-owner, Joe, meets a damaged aspiring writer, Beck. Joe writes in the second person -- the book is like one long letter to Beck. This makes you feel like you're in the middle of a Taylor Swift song. Things become crazy right away. Joe murders Beck's lover, a purveyor of hipster seltzer water. Beck seems interested in Joe -- but she keeps cancelling plans so that she can be with her deranged frenemy "Peach" Salinger, a descendant of J.D. Salinger. Peach eventually tries to rape Beck. The "bad faith" complications multiply. Eventually, one of the two stars is confined to a subterranean cage -- and the ot...