Liars and Saints

 My son has chosen the holiday season as a time to lose his mind. Recently, alone in his crib, he performed a Gypsy Rose strip tease, threw his pants across the room, then crawled out of his diaper. He then "painted" with a small bit of poop; later, I found that the crib-sheet had a new, intriguing, abstract design. At other moments, Joshie has found his sister's pacifier, and he has half-inserted the end into his mouth. This makes me think of certain tired, seedy Santas -- the ones who can't fully commit to their costume. (You see the tee shirt peaking out from under the red suit.) Another new interest of Joshie's is the laundry hamper; he pushes it through the house, sometimes for over an hour, while loudly calling, SIGH! SIGH! SIGH! SIGH! I'm glad to see that he is generally having a good time. We're reading: *"The Polar Express." I still think Mr. Claus is a self-righteous pill, in this book, but I admire the train and the city lights. *...

 The best thing I saw this weekend was actually a rewatch -- "911," from "Law and Order: SVU." This is generally exalted among SVU fans; it's the hour that won Mariska Hargitay her Emmy. We see Mariska/Olivia in a kind of gown, getting ready for a night out. But SVU receives a call. A distraught Honduran girl says she is a victim of kidnapping. The phone she is on seems to send signals from areas all over New York City, so skeptics begin to believe she is involved in a hoax. But Olivia listens to her gut -- and remains on the line. Eventually, a tiny detail in a photo sets off fireworks. The little girl said she gets her food from "Felipe's Burgers," which burned down long ago. What if she isn't lying? What if the captor brings her water in an old "Felipe's Burgers" mug -- but the actual burgers arrive from elsewhere? And what if the captor bought the mug from the once-extant Felipe's simply because the captor lived, or lives,...

 Just a short note of gratitude for the life and career of Stephen Sondheim, who changed so many lives. Sondheim apparently had crummy parents, but he credited his mentor, Hammerstein, with being a "surrogate dad." He said he wrote because Hammerstein had written. "If Hammerstein had been a geologist, I would have done that, too." At seventy, Sondheim spoke with Frank Rich for the Times and he said he had opted never to grow up. He was just playing. He was thoughtful about the actual process of work: Keep alcohol nearby, and use a soft pencil. If the pencil is soft, you have to stop working every few minutes, and it's always a treat to stop working. Additionally: Try to work only when you're supine. I also liked what he said when James Lapine complained about missed deadlines. "Do you want the song Tuesday -- or do you want it good?" And about the dead: "I'm baffled when people say don't speak ill of the dead! Of course you should! The...

 James Marshall, a gay man, might have had an unhealthy relationship with food. We see George the hippo dumping soup in his loafers; we see George enjoying too many cookies. An actual series -- the "Yummers" books -- revolves around a pig who can't control her appetite. The closest Marshall came to a depiction of a normal meal is in "The Stupids Step Out," I think. Here, the Stupids, tired from a full day, enjoy a feast at a diner. The main course is mashed potatoes drenched in butterscotch syrup. After the meal, the Stupids walk home on their hands, don clown costumes, and climb into bed, with their feet resting on the pillows. (Their heads dangle from the other end of the mattress.) And there is a brief moment of thanksgiving. Mrs. Stupid says, to her husband, "Thank you for the lovely day, dear. It certainly has been fun." This is Harry Allard's writing, allegedly, but Marshall had a heavy hand in the editing process. (And Marshall invented the ...

 The NYTimes just published its 100 best books of 2021; I'm generally not in sync with the Times book critics, so here are the titles I'd add to that list...... Fiction "Early Morning Riser" (Heiny) "The Dark Hours" (Connelly) "1979" (McDermid) "Lightning Strike" (Krueger) "Morningside Heights" (Henkin) Non-fiction "Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story" (Brown) "What about the Baby" (McDermott) "What Happened to Paula" (Dykstra) "Baggage" (Cumming) "Dusk Night Dawn" (Lamott) I haven't read Ann Patchett's new essays yet (the book was just released today) -- but I have a good feeling about that endeavor. "A great writer riffs on family, marriage, work" -- This is usually a winning formula for me. Just some thoughts. P.S. I loved that James Lapine made the cut! His oral history of "Sunday in the Park" was a surprise and a delight.

 Janet Malcolm titled her last book "Nobody's Looking at You," and this could also have worked as a substitute title for Stephen Sondheim's "Company." "Company" is about (among other things) the fact that "nobody's looking at you"; we're all staring, and staring, at ourselves, and in the fog of self-observation, moments of real connection are a miraculous thing. A woman in her mid-thirties, Bobbie, visits a set of married friends. One has abandoned alcohol; the other isn't touching chocolate. Except that the teetotaler has a flask in one hand. And the dieting spouse keeps a set of brownies next to her chair. Bobbie leaves and visits a former flame, who seems shy. "I always wanted to marry you," he says, "but I was afraid to ask." Bobbie believes this is a form of flirtation, so she plays along. "I wanted to marry you, too! Imagine that!" And the guy says: "Anyway, I met someone, and we're...

 I think Thanksgiving weekend is a great time to be immobile; this year, I can even mention my two tiny children as an excuse for remaining in the house day after day -- after day after day. A monastic Thanksgiving means that you need many pulpy novels (and a few twisty TV shows). In the novel category, I have a few works by Alafair Burke and by Kathleen Kent -- and, in the TV category, I'm considering "Prodigal Son" and "Only Murders in the Building." Back to Alafair Burke...Ms. Burke came to my attention through Laura Lippman and Michael Connelly. Burke's break-out novel, "The Ex," has Penn Station falling prey to a horrible massacre sometime after 9/11. The gunman is a kid -- and it seems that his single dad allowed him to read far-right garbage and to collect ammunition for many years. A big twist: Someone then murders the father of the gunman. Because a Penn Station spouse -- someone who lost a wife in the massacre -- happens to be caught in f...

  I needed to restock Joshua's supply of library books, so I borrowed "Peter's Chair," "Fog Island," and "Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs." This last book is like the blue-ribbon standard when you think of children's literature. Tomie dePaola sometimes told folk tales, and he sometimes tried expository writing, but a special part of his life was devoted to autobiography. When he draws on his childhood--in "Oliver Button," "The Baby Sister," "The Art Lesson," "Nana Upstairs"--he really seems to enjoy himself. In "Nana Upstairs," young Tomie feels proud that he has a living grandmother *and* a living great-grandmother. The great-grandmother "lives upstairs" -- perhaps to hold on to one symbolic piece of independence -- and Tomie often visits. Nana Upstairs needs cloth restraints when she eats, so Tomie, in an act of love, requests his *own* set of cloth restraints. The boy and his grea...

  Salvy went on a brief hunger strike. I had been asking him not to lunge for Joshua's food, and I eventually began to incarcerate him in the kitchen. I used the "child safety gates." But Salvy is stubborn and bright. His response was just to stop eating. He would wander into the backyard and sun himself for hours, and hours, and hours. After many months of the pandemic, you begin to wonder if you have lost the ability to feel surprised. But Salvy's new self-restraint did the impossible. It surprised me--in this current year--2021. So Salvy won the battle, and he has returned to his normal habit of lunging for J's food. I know that some people have extraordinary dog-training skills, and they pride themselves on the good behavior of their pets. I will never be one of those people. I have to accept this. It's not easy. Salvy--wisely--is keeping his own thoughts to himself.

 On TV's "Better Things," the harried mom Sam Fox admits that she really likes crime podcasts. "In my own life, I feel that I'm being murdered everyday," she says. "So these stories of actual murder.....I like to listen to these...." It's sort of a joke--and sort of uncomfortable--like many other scenes from "Better Things." I can relate to Sam, because crime stories have been a must for me, as I navigate two little creatures' early childhood development. This work isn't crushing, but it's isolating and monotonous, and so I enjoy watching characters who shoulder challenges -- and who persevere. Which person am I thinking of? Certainly, it's Olivia Benson, on SVU. Last night, I returned with my husband to Season Ten; specifically, this was "Confession." (The writers had *already* used "Confession" as a title, but when you churn out ten seasons, sometimes this happens, I guess.) In "Confession (S...

  Clearly, it was a big weekend for Taylor Swift, and thus a big weekend for my family; we watched the Fallon appearance and the SNL clips, and we listened to several of the "new" songs. Swift's Jake Gyllenhaal era is notable because Jake seems like such a villain. When you walk through the door with him, "the air is cold." He complains that your album isn't on par with his "indie records." He calls you up again just to "break you like a promise." Jake treats a family visit as if it's a "talk-show appearance." He gives you a month of the silent treatment, then says he "needs more space." All this makes Jake a classic fairy-tale rogue--a menacing wolf under a puppy-dog exterior. He is the beast in Grandma's gown, or the beautiful sorceress who is in fact a grotesque witch. Jake has a "sweet disposition." I guess I thought--in the midst of the new ten-minute "All Too Well"--sometimes  less is ...

 Of course a Christmas tree is a favorite image among children's-book illustrators, so what follows is incomplete. But, still, here are three of my preferred Christmas trees (ranked): (3) Jerry Pinkney. That's the little match girl, near death, having a hallucinatory vision of a nineteenth-century tree with flickering candles. I like the drama of the tree-near-explosion....but the girl is truly about to die. It's a bit grim for my taste. (2) Tomie dePaola. This guy was constantly drawing Christian images, so naturally he returned again and again to "the fir-tree theme." We're looking at the cat-picture here. I'm fond of the chunky star and the bird-ornament, which appears to be Pete, from "Bill and Pete." (1) Arnold Lobel. A neurotic, shoeless Toad waits for his lover on Christmas Eve. The tree is understated and pretty; the baubles are spaced apart in a thoughtful way. I'm also fond of the polka-dot gift wrap, the thrilling snowstorm, the th...

  In the weeks before Michael Connelly's "The Dark Hours" popped up, Stephen King read a pre-release copy and Tweeted, "I don't know how Connelly actually keeps getting better at this late stage in his career." I'm not sure he is getting better, but he is at least maintaining his momentum. His brain seems inexhaustible. He puts flawed, eccentric people in weird situations -- and I can't look away. "Dark Hours" refers to the most-difficult periods you endure, alone, after you have lived through a violent crime. In this novel, a pair of rapists, "the Midnight Men," are wandering around Los Angeles. They seem to egg each other on. Before any individual rape happens, the victim is forced to wear a blindfold, even though the rapists are already masked. Could this be because some kind of filming session is occurring -- and the rapists want to keep secret the presence of cameras? Elsewhere, in Los Angeles, there is a New Year tradition o...

  I haven’t consistently loved Laura Lippman’s most recent titles, but this week I flashed back ten (ten-ish) years and borrowed Lippman’s one volume of short stories, “Hardly Knew Her.”   This is mostly tales of women murdering men. A high-powered madam assists with the cover-up after her awful brother-in-law “falls down the stairs.” A young person in a “nude” suit – with a little pony-tail – eats a man’s heart on Mardi Gras, in New Orleans.   Elsewhere, a divorcee worries that she will lose her house to her ex, so she feigns lesbian love for a fellow PTA Mom—and the smitten Mom then has a convenient “car accident.”   In one rare story—told, unusually, from a boy’s perspective—a woman brings a cooler of sandwiches to the races. But, in fact, there’s something hidden under the sandwiches—a collection of human organs.   As usual, Lippman shows off her eye for detail. A madam at Starbucks thinks about how the Pike Place empire revolutionized the café world—how Sta...

  One from the vault. Season Seven. "Starved."  Fifty minutes about domestic abuse. An attractive sociopath, Dean Cain (once known for playing Superman), marries a vulnerable woman. The man presents himself as mostly smooth and polished, and the woman is regularly in a state of crisis. The woman indicates that she is unworthy of her relationship, and Dean Cain basically echoes this belief. (All that material has a thematic link to Gabby Petito/Laundrie, even though the Petito case happened just a few weeks ago.) This being SVU, the episode doesn't stop with a standard domestic abuse scenario. Dean Cain is so awful, he rapes women and then makes his oppressed spouse cover for him. When Dean is caught, he nefariously schemes his way toward millions of dollars by making sure that his wife will drink herself into a permanent vegetative state (and thus "free up" some life-insurance money). A bit far-fetched? I admire a writer who swings for the fences! The final act ...

  Like most of the world, I’m delighted by Alan Cumming. I was happy to purchase his new memoir.   Cumming grew up on stormy seas, somewhere in Scotland, and he won independence from his abusive father. Cumming later confronted his father with memories of years of mistreatment, and Cumming, Sr., froze up; the most that came from this confrontation was a shrug and an  I don’t know what you’re talking about .   But: no matter. Alan Cumming began a major film career, with  Circle of Friends ,  Romy and Michele , and  Emma.  Sam Mendes thought he wanted to revive “Cabaret,” with a new emphasis on seediness, and Alan Cumming signed on.   The Broadway revival of “Cabaret” was such a smash, Lauren Bacall attended. Bacall cornered Cumming afterward and said, “You. Are. A. Star.” When Liza Minnelli made her pilgrimage, Cumming had the task of shepherding Minnelli in front of the Broadway crowd. And Cumming was so nervous during his rushed Tony accepta...

A review of Fred Marcellino's "Puss," from 1990..... Puss, a cat--on the verge of becoming dinner for a poor man--takes control of his own situation. He says, "Let me live, and get me a pair of boots, and I'll make your life very easy." Puss then talks his way into riches.  He has his impoverished master swim nude in a pond; he tells the King, "Someone snatched my master's clothing during this skinny-dip session!" The King makes a "loan" of a fabulous tuxedo. Now, the penniless master begins "turning heads." Puss next wins land for his master; he goes to a powerful ogre and says, "I bet someone as bulky as you could never transform himself into a tiny mouse." Unthinking, the ogre becomes a mouse--and Puss has a feast. Now the ogre's palace is up for grabs. The rest is history..... Fred Marcellino won fame with his "Puss in Boots" drawings -- which are as grand as something from Paul Zelinsky. The Marc...

This town has a rather secretive lottery for Pre-K "threes" .....and I'll tell you where my brain is at. Last night, I thought for a long while that I ought to find out all I could about the "threes" program -- via the Maplewood Moms. So I entered my search. I learned nothing, but I did stumble on a woman who worried about her mother-in-law. "There is a new American history curriculum, Amistad, that teaches about slavery. And my mother-in-law (MIL) says that these new lessons subtly imply that all white people are evil. How do I engage with this?" Like a moth, drawn to the flame, I kept reading. Many residents thought lengthy, reasonable discussions might lead to a growth in the MIL's emotional and intellectual maturity. I thought:  I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.... Soon, I'd forgotten about the PK lottery, but I had learned that my local BBQ joint, KB's Smokehouse, makes very nice Thanksgiving options. And I learned that a neigh...

 "Spencer" is in the news in part because it could lead to Kristen Stewart's first Oscar win. (If she does win, I think she'll be the first openly gay leading actress to claim an Oscar. Yes, Jodie Foster has two Oscars--but Foster was secretive when she won. It's only recently that Foster's public persona has changed.) "Spencer" is a fable "drawn from a true tragedy," and it begins with Di unmoored, on the road. She enters a cafe to ask, "Where the fuck am I?" It's clearly a metaphysical question, not just a literal question. The cafe patrons cannot bring themselves to speak; they actually can't make words with their mouths. Having corrected her own course, Di is moved by a scarecrow from her childhood. She studies the scarecrow, then veers left to the palace. You have to weigh yourself before and after Christmas--to prove you enjoyed yourself with a weight gain of at least three pounds. This seems especially cruel because...

 Today, I'm tipping a hat to Barbara McClintock, who released "Adele and Simon" around fifteen years ago. "Adele and Simon" is seen as one of the top "seek-and-find" books in children's literature; it's a book where something new is "lost" on each page, and you have to locate the item. The plot is simple. Adele is a little girl in Paris in 1900, and she picks up her tiny brother from school. But the brother--Simon--is a mess, with his hair uncombed, his shirt untucked, his shoes untied. As he runs all over Paris--through cafes, through the Louvre, past the spire of Notre Dame, down streets--he loses his drawing, his coat, his gloves, and so on. Amazingly, each and every item is returned to Simon at the end of the story. This work is not a miracle of psychological insight, but it's hard to beat the drawings. McClintock used pen and ink, then she used water-color. A favorite, for me, is the chaotic scene in the grand, rather haunted...

  What a frightening and engrossing "SVU" on Nov. 4! The title was "They'd Already Disappeared." This seems to refer to a phenomenon around sex workers. In some parts of the country, a sex worker isn't "seen"; this person is written off in subtle and less-subtle ways. Then, if the sex worker literally disappears, it's as if he or she has disappeared a *second* time--because, pre-disappearance, the sex worker was already "invisible." Cruel cops in this hour call sex-worker cases "NHI" -- "No Humans Involved." The victims are seen as sub-human; the cops say,  No need to work too hard here. Discrimination against sex workers played a role in the Long Island Serial Killer case; because the victims had little power in society, the killer found it easy to commit murders and to conceal the trail. (If the killer had gone after Gianni Versace.....then we'd have a different story.) In "They'd Already Disappeared...

I've returned from New York, which was its standard New York self. You need linebacker gear to fight your way to a seat in a diner; you need to decipher tiny clues before cracking the code of the seating regulations at a dingy midtown Pain Quotidien, and you need to brave the wrath of an under-employed wannabe actor when you dare to ask to see a menu (twenty to thirty minutes after having been seated)..... If you enter a cab, you tacitly take on responsibility for the cab-driver's untreated mental illness. This can take a few forms, but maybe the most common is: Hey, tourist! Listen to my comedy routine! As you inch your way along Sixth Avenue, you must feign interest in the driver-anecdotes: Thirty-six degrees today, and a guy gets in my backseat, and he is just wearing shorts! Shorts in this weather! I'm like.....OK...... But now I'm back in suburbia, and I wonder about the tradeoff. In suburbia, the loudest voice I hear belongs to my neighbor, Biff Komanski, who must...

 Kevin Henkes often has animal protagonists--mice, a rabbit, a bear, a kitten. Regardless of the animal, the emphasis is usually on a creature's imagination. So the creatures seem like human children--in disguise. A kitten believes she sees a great glowing dish of milk in the sky. A rabbit ponders what it would be like to become a stone--unmovable. A mouse with big emotions dreams of subjugating her mildly unsatisfactory teacher; in one related piece of art, the teacher must sit in the "Time-Out Chair." In my house, a favorite Henkes protagonist is Old Bear, who goes to sleep in the winter and immediately dreams of the spring. The flowers will be as tall as trees. You might take a nap "in a giant crocus." It seems to me one of KH's many major gifts is that strange ability to slip into a kid's skin, to know what a kid might think or say in any situation. ("In my garden, carrots would be invisible, because I don't like carrots....") Well, I...

  "Three Little Kittens" was not the sole "cat-work" that Pinkney undertook. Pinkney was also known for "Puss in Boots," "The Lion and the Mouse" (with a prominent lion, a big cat), and "The Ugly Duckling" (featuring a memorably smug, self-certain cat). The NY Times observed that Pinkney was more "at home" making animals than making humans--and the proof is "Little Red Ridinghood." You see a fabulous wolf next to a sort-of-uninspired sketch of a little girl. Pinkney's most-celebrated cat--the "lion," from Aesop's tales--actually takes up a full cover, with no words on the cover. This is very rare in picture-book history. The bold move worked; the book went on to win the Caldecott Medal, and that's Pinkney's *one and only* Caldecott Medal.

 Susannah herself is generally quite calm; she is the eye of the hurricane. The swirling matter *around* Susannah -- That's a different story. We are meant to wean Josh off "the bottle." This really needed to happen months ago, but the resulting tantrums were so unpleasant, and the bottle was just an easy, fast fix. The bottle was to Josh what book purchases are to me: Succor. I can look at Don Winslow's 1,000-page Drug War tome--"The Force"--and I can think this doesn't speak to me, and I'll never read it . And I can still purchase the book--because the extraction of sums, and the collecting of a technicolor goodie-bag.....Those parts are satisfying. An itch has been scratched. Because Josh isn't really "off the bottle," the sight of Susie with her age-appropriate bottle can be traumatic. We're talking: screaming and crying. Ultimately, Susie's bottle finds its way into J's hands. Then J's actual food--macaroni, meat sa...

 Any story is a journey. So: a good prompt might be..... I move to a haunted house. Here is where things tend to get conventional. There are horrors upon horrors; attic stairs begin creaking; candles seem to light themselves. But the writer Kazuno Kohara is inspired, and she does something fun with the prompt. I move to a haunted house. Fortunately, I myself am a witch. And we're off to the races. The speaker is delighted to encounter various ghosts--"how wonderful!"--and she collects the ghosts in a hamper. Then, the ghosts are laundered. And they become: tablecloths, drapes, and quilts. Exhausted from her work, the speaker realizes she needs to sleep. So: the final ghost becomes a bedsheet. The End. This looks easy--which suggests that it's the framework of a good picture-book. The small white cat--in a witch-dress--is an added bonus.

 One reason I like the current season of "You" is that the suburban satire feels accurate. In a memorable scene, a new transplant bakes vegan cupcakes for a very picky eater. But the eater becomes furious: "You fed sugar to my children! Raspberries have SUGAR! We are a  no-fruit house !!!!!" In my own town, people are upset because of an apparent theft of political signs. "I'm sure it's just teenagers," wrote one snarky Maplewood Mom. "I mean, I can't imagine  any of you adults  are stealing the no-turf signs....." A (possibly) defensive respondent ignored the snark and introduced a *new* topic: "It's not just the NO-TURF signs that are disappearing....It's the PRO-TURF signs, as well....." Elsewhere, a pediatrician is under fire because she keeps some families waiting, and because her secretary has a brisk manner. "I mean, my child could have been  dying in that room .....and where is the apology?" "T...