Liars and Saints

Maeve sat in front of this window, at the head of the table. She wore a navy-blue dress with long, slim sleeves and a round neckline, and anyone in the room who had not thought it earlier thought now--perhaps inspired by the perfect simplicity of what she wore--that there was a kind of beauty in her ordinary looks, in her plainness. Or, if they didn't think to call it beauty, they said courage--more appropriate to the occasion and the day--not meaning necessarily her new-widow's courage (with its attendant new-widow's cliches: bearing up, holding on, doing well), but the courage to look out onto life from a face as plain as butter: pale, downy skin and bland blue eyes, faded brown hair cut short as a nun's and dimmed with gray. Only a touch of powder and of lipstick, only a wedding band and a small pearl ring for adornment. Of course, they'd thought her courageous all along (most of them, anyway, or--most likely--all but my father), living with Billy as she did; b...

It's Tuesday, and it's time to get very detailed about Stephen Schwartz and his obscure, failed musical, "Children of Eden." - A truth universally acknowledged. In Broadway musicals, the cream often does *not* rise to the top. There are many, many intuitive, charming actors with fabulous voices, and they are wandering around jobless. Meanwhile, who often gets roles in Broadway musicals? John Lithgow and Matthew Broderick. Does anyone want to hear either of these men sing? No. But--because of the laws of the marketplace, and because of some kind of tenacity/ego mix that other, more-gifted performers lack--Broderick and Lithgow tend to be your go-to performers for musicals. I'd like to call your attention to "Lost in the Wilderness," performed by Darius deHaas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpw5PRD9Ock   If you want to go right for the pay-dirt, fast-forward to 2:25. That's when Darius goes full-scale Whitney Houston on the word "lost."...

February 3 was a dark and dank day altogether: cold spitting rain in the morning and the low, steel-gray sky the rest of the afternoon. At four, Jim convinced his wife to go out to do her shopping before full darkness fell. He closed the door on her with a gentle wave. His hair was thinning and he was missing a canine on the right side, but he was nevertheless a handsome man who, at thirty-two, might still have passed for twenty. Heavy brows and deep-set, dark-lashed eyes that had been making women catch their breath since he was sixteen. Even if he had grown bald and toothless, as he seemed fated to do, the eyes would have served him long into old age. His overcoat was on the hall tree beside the door. He lifted it and rolled it lengthwise against his thighs. Then he fitted it over the threshold, tucking the cloth of the sleeves and the hem as well as he could into the space beneath the door. Theirs was a railroad flat: kitchen in the back, dining room, living room, bedroom in the...

At one time, Tomi Ungerer enjoyed great fame as a writer for children. Then, librarians somewhere discovered Ungerer had a past: In another life, he had done many erotic drawings (in addition to some incisive anti-war art). The soft-core porn was apparently troubling enough to move childcare specialists to remove Ungerer's work from bookshelves. And it's only recently that Ungerer has had a bit of a renaissance. (This is the kind of trivia you pick up when you're an elementary-school teacher.) "The Three Robbers," an Ungerer picture book, begins in an unusual spot. The titular robbers have a standard routine: They have a blunderbuss, an axe, and a pepper-sprayer, and they use these tools to terrorize wealthy villagers. (It's weird to have these people as protagonists in a children's book.) In the Ordinary World of the robbers, an axe is great for immobilizing a carriage, a pepper-sprayer ensures that the horses are temporarily blinded, and a blunderbuss ...

Blasphemy: I think Sting performs "The Rising" better than Bruce Springsteen does. You can see the footage from the Kennedy Center Honors; Mr. Springsteen watches from a box. Sting has a sexy beard, and he seems to have the right amount of reverence for Springsteen. It's a moving clip. https://www.google.com/search?q=sting+the+rising&oq=sting+the+rising&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.1394j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Springsteen writes so well, if you're not careful, you can take the words for granted. Beyond that: In the wake of 9/11, just hearing Springsteen's famous voice, backed by a chorus, felt cathartic. But if you look closely at the words, there's an actual story, a one-act play, in the great tradition of Stephen Sondheim. The astonishing first section puts us in the present. It both is and isn't about a firefighter climbing the stairs of one of the Towers on 9/11. The language is precise enough to make that clear: The climbing man is...

In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom--nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side. His side, her side. He considered this as he sipped the whiskey. The chiffonier stood a few feet from the foot of the bed. He had emptied the drawers into cartons that morning, and the cartons were in the living room. A portable heater was next to the chiffonier. A rattan chair with a decorator pillow stood at the foot of the bed. The buffed aluminum kitchen set took up a part of the driveway. A yellow muslin cloth, much too large, a gift, covered the table and hung down over the sides. A potted fern was on the table, along with a box of silverware and a record player, also gifts. A big console-model television set rested on a coffee ta...

Outside, Mary held Jack's arm and walked with her head down. They moved slowly on the sidewalk. He listened to the scuffing sounds her shoes made. He heard the sharp and separate sound of a dog barking and above that a murmuring of very distant traffic.  She raised her head. "When we get home, Jack, I want to be fucked, talked to, diverted. Divert me, Jack. I need to be diverted tonight." She tightened her hold on his arm. He could feel the dampness in that shoe. He unlocked the door and flipped the light. "Come to bed," she said. "I'm coming," he said. He went to the kitchen and drank two glasses of water. He turned off the living-room light and felt his way along the wall into the bedroom. "Jack!" she yelled. "Jack!" "Jesus Christ, it's me!" he said. "I'm trying to get the light on." He found the lamp, and she sat up in bed. Her eyes were bright. He pulled the stem on the alarm and b...

(5) Roxane Gay's piece in the NY Times. I haven't read a good deal of Gay's writing, though what I have seen has sometimes seemed facile and lazy. (I'm thinking of her puff piece about Nicki Minaj, in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/t-magazine/nicki-minaj.html). Gay may be right about "Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters," the book she reviewed in the NYT this summer. I'm not sure. But here's why I think the piece is secretly a bit mean-spirited and questionable. She goes after the writer, Santopietro, for quoting Sondheim in reference to Harper Lee. She calls these quotations "jarring and bewildering." I was surprised that Gay would find it bewildering for a theater producer to quote Sondheim, a theater writer and major American cultural touchstone, in reference to Harper Lee, another major American cultural touchstone. (People sometimes allude to a literary work to explain a facet of another literary work. Ms. Gay might have e...

From Raymond Carver's "Gazebo"-- That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window. I go, "Holly, this can't continue. This has got to stop." We are sitting on the sofa in one of the upstairs suites. There were any number of vacancies to choose from. But we needed a suite, a place to move around in and be able to talk. So we'd locked up the motel office that morning and gone upstairs to a suite. She goes, "Duane, this is killing me." We are drinking Teacher's with ice and water. We'd slept awhile between morning and afternoon. Then she was out of bed and threatening to climb out the window in her undergarments. I had to get her in a hold. We were only two floors up. But even so. "I've had it," she goes. "I can't take it anymore." She puts her hand to her cheek and closes her eyes. She turns her head back and forth and makes this...

Almost everything I know about teaching? I learned it from my therapist. He is not a teacher. He charges far, far too much money. I have seen him regularly for many years--perhaps more than would count as a healthy therapist/patient relationship. (Though who would define that?) My impression is that a conventional therapist does not offer advice, prescriptive statements; if you asked for that advice, the therapist might say, "What do *you* think you should do?" Or: "Why do you think you are asking me for advice?" Not my therapist. He is extremely prescriptive. He will say: "Do X. Do Y." He will get as specific as the exact wording you should use in a negotiation. Recently, he actually ventured into unsolicited-advice territory. I was describing an acquaintance with a budding interest in musicals, and my therapist said: "Get him the classic recordings. Get him 'Brigadoon.' Get him 'Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.' Ah, 'Brigad...

Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end. His name, SCOTTY, would be in green letters beneath the planet. The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything when she told him the child would be eight years old next Monday. The baker wore a white apron that looked like a smock. Straps cut under his arms, went around in back and then to the front again, where they were secured under his heavy waist. He wiped his hands on his apron as he listened to her. He kept his eyes down on the photographs and let her talk. He let her take her time. He’d just come to work and he’d be there all night, baking, and he was in no real hurry. Some n...

It's rare to find a book that speaks directly to you--a book that seems to narrate your own life for you, as you're living it. For me, one of those books is "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You." (Let's stop pretending I don't see, in that narrator, a carbon copy of myself.) Another is: "Ms. Hempel Chronicles," which I write about again and again, because it's just that good. This, to me, is required reading for anyone who is ambivalent about the teaching profession (and that's maybe all teachers, secretly or not-so-secretly). There's so much I admire about this bold second novel, and here's the main thing: Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum does not feel constrained by the tyranny of linear narrative. She doesn't need to tell us when Ms. Hempel met her boyfriend, or when the engagement was officially ended. She doesn't need to recall the exact moment when Ms. Hempel handed in her letter of resignation. As far as I recall, the de...

It's Tuesday! Some SATC trivia to brighten your afternoon. (1) Tutu. Carrie wasn't meant to wear a tutu in the opening credits. She was meant to wear a fairly conservative dress. But smart people had another idea. The showrunner(s) felt doubtful about the tutu idea. So the opening credits were shot in two ways: conservative, and with tutu. The climbing marimba slides down, and climbs again, and slides back down (just as Carrie is often tripping over herself). The bus that does the splashing happens to feature an image of Carrie in all her powerful-icon glory--so we have Carrie-at-her-best juxtaposed with mortified-Carrie (Carrie-splashed-with-muddy-water). Watching Carrie in the tutu, the showrunners understood that the weird costume was the way to go. For Carrie, eccentric clothing can be an expression of confidence. That tutu makes the interlude seem especially high-stakes. Wonderful. (And it seems to me that Patricia Field deserves major credit for what this show becam...

One thing I loved about Amy Bloom was that she included, in her college syllabus, "The Cat in the Hat." You would read and discuss Alice Munro's works, and the sad, weighty fictional universe of Raymond Carver, but then you'd also spend time on Dr. Seuss. If I could have designed my entire college experience, there would have been a great deal of Dr. Seuss--generally. I hadn't really lived, in significant ways, so vast swaths of Tolstoy and Brecht and Tacitus were lost on me. The main thing about Dr. Seuss: A good piece of writing is as seamless and authoritative as a dream. It takes the reader from point A to point B. There doesn't have to be a moral. There doesn't have to be a grand statement about history. You just have to feel transported. And so "small," intense stories can sometimes seem more successful than "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or "The Help." What in the world are you meant to take from "The Cat in the H...

Everyone is dazzled by "The Other Woman," just as everyone is dazzled by "The Suitcase," and here's why. - The sequel. It seems to me that "The Other Woman" can be viewed as a reprise of "The Suitcase," even though the two episodes are separated by an entire season. "The Suitcase" is a mid-series check-in on Peggy and Don; as others have noted, Peggy is halfway through her climb, and Don is halfway through his ignominious "slide." Throughout "The Suitcase," we see Peggy standing, or in a maternal position, while Don crumbles to the floor or curls up like a small child. "The Other Woman" gives us a bit more of that. Here, Don, sitting, kisses--and kisses, and kisses, and kisses--Peggy's hand, while Peggy remains standing. It's a nice gesture but--as we all know--it's also too little, too late. Peggy will continue to soar. She will leave Don in the dust. - The misunderstandings. Peggy be...