Liars and Saints

 My trip to Maine is "in pursuit" of the spirit of Robert McCloskey, one of the most honored artists in picture-book history, and the first person to "repeat" his Caldecott win (with a second Caldecott). McCloskey immortalized his own daughter, Sal, in an iconic book, "Blueberries for Sal." This is about a little girl who gets distracted on a "blueberry mission," and who briefly becomes the daughter of a large bear. Sal does whatever the hell she wants, and at times, her body seems to be independent from her mind. (The blueberries disappear not because she is consciously eating all of them, but because her hand fails to understand that she is holding a large clump, instead of one single berry. Well, that's the defendant's claim....) After a standout run, McCloskey lost a few of his marbles and retreated from the world. But his daughter, Sal, still exists; she lives on a Maine island that just recently acquired Wi-Fi. She prefers to use a ...

 Sondheim said, when he tried to write his soaring anthem, "Our Time," he had to hypnotize himself. He had to persuade himself that he was, again, an idealistic man in his twenties, working with Leonard Bernstein on "West Side Story." Something is stirring, shifting ground... It's just begun. Edges are blurring, all around-- And yesterday is done. Feel the flow, feel what's happening: We're what's happening. Long ago--all we had was that funny feeling-- Saying, someday, we'd send 'em reeling. Now it looks like we can.... To evoke a sense of possibility, Sondheim seems to make an explicit reference to "Tony and Maria." Something is stirring. ("Something's coming...Don't know when, but it's soon....Catch the moon....") In "West Side Story," Tony senses that the "air is humming." He's "got a feeling..." there's a miracle due....And, on a similar note, here's Sondheim in ...

  There was a wonderful personal essay in the NYT this week about "Sex and the City"; the piece is better than the actual show. The writer asks,  How can I be a straight man in his early thirties with a fierce attachment to this particular tale?  (It's all about the initial idea. When you have an idea like this, the story writes itself.) The writer, Roonan, admits that the pain of a college breakup led him to SATC; he felt better as he watched Carrie's suffering. I know precisely what this means. I still think about Carrie tripping on a runway. I sometimes think about her when I say too much; I recall the moment when she can't help but point out that Berger's use of the term "scrunchie" is wrong. Right now, I'm obsessing about whether a shirt I purchased is sized correctly; this takes me right back to Charlotte's outfit/self-image issues, as she prepares for her first day of work. Roonan goes on--in a brave way--to point out that SATC is a ra...

  If I had just one minute to whine, I'd choose a single topic: decisions. The school doesn't want food on a collar, any collar, but let's say your child is three, and a messy eater. Do you wage a war against the school's shallow fascistic policy? Do you strip your child to his undies before every meal? Do you invest in an art smock? (This is a great idea for exactly two days, before your child realizes that he can just remove the smock. He can remove it--again and again and again.) Your child's hypotonia "might" dovetail with lactose intolerance. "And we humans really are not designed to eat dairy." Do you accept this amateur opinion, or do you keep on buying yogurt, until the appointment with the GI doctor confirms (inevitably) that the amateur opinion is correct? The amateur in question has more thoughts: Regulating bowel movements may be a years-long struggle. Low muscle tone is low muscle tone and, after all, the intestine is built from musc...

 Sondheim had sympathy for the devil; some of his iconic characters (Sweeney, the Witch) are murderers. Sondheim also had strong feelings about the architecture of a song. There should be "movement" from A to Z. Sondheim's mentor--Oscar Hammerstein--had similar ideas. In his first Pulitzer winner, "Oklahoma," he gave special attention to his villain, Jud. (The one time in history any male actor has ever won a Tony Award for "Oklahoma," the role in question was Jud.) The floor creaks. The door squeaks.  There's a field mouse a-nibblin' on a broom. And I set by myself, Like a cobweb on a shelf,  By myself in a lonely room. Jud is trapped in his own head; we sense this because two words, "by myself," get underlined and italicized in one deliberately awkward sentence.  Next, a dream starts "dancing" in Jud's mind: And all the things that I wish fer Turn out like I want them to be. And I'm better than that smart-aleck cow...

  My favorite kind of story is a crime story--I think because I know what it's like to make bad choices. I have deep love for Billy Bigelow--who decides on a life of theft as a way of supporting "my boy Bill." (Billy dies in a knife fight before his child is born.) People can be sloppy, thoughtless, and weak, and still relatable; this is something that becomes clear in fiction and drama, over and over again. So it's a brilliant choice to build a movie around J. Robert Oppenheimer. This guy is a criminal; we're aware within the first twenty minutes of the movie. He becomes enraged with a particular tutor, and, in a nod to the Bible, and to fairy tales, he poisons the tutor's apple. Hours later, he realizes what he has done, and he seizes the apple right before it kills a man--not the nefarious tutor, but an esteemed scientist who has wandered into the lab. Actions have unintended consequences: This is the blueprint for the entire film, in a five-minute interlud...

  In my life, it's rare for someone to be openly, unambiguously rude, but I can think of some events: * Belmar .  My spouse and I are walking in a conservative town in New Jersey, and we are holding hands. We smile at a middle-aged man who refuses to volley with a smile of his own. In fact, his face expresses repulsion; his eyes seem to say,  Leave my town . But there aren't any words in this exchange--so he has plausible deniability. * The loonie friend of a friend.  He repeatedly talks over me at a wedding, then informs me that his alma mater is becoming "too liberal." Yes, he says, he voted for Trump, but is Biden such a compelling alternative? (Here, I excuse myself, and I go off to breathe quietly in the restroom for several minutes.) * The strangely hostile neighbor.  My nutty co-owners of a particular back road occasionally post amusing notes to our email group. One guy might have weirdly passionate thoughts about the volume of acorns dropping from the tr...

  "AJLT" is generally an incoherent mess, a Frankenstein's monster; half-formed plots are stitched together, and the pacing is either rushed or weirdly, painfully slow. (How many times did I need to see Nya, sitting alone, eating a piece of cake?) But, sometimes, I'm intrigued by Anthony. It was fun to see his initial response to new love: "You're fired." Also, it was surprising, and inevitable, when Anthony chose to shut down further protestations of romantic interest: "You're doing this just so you can get a green card." All of this led to Thursday's oddly smart discussion about anal sex. Anthony has never been penetrated--and when his former employee suggests an attempt at "fluidity," Anthony loses his mind (yet again). In the best SATC tradition, the dialogue becomes confrontational and blunt: "Your thing is nine inches, and it's staying away from my nether region...." And since sex is never just sex, we unde...

  Two foundations of good writing are: tension and irony. You don't always see these tools in a picture book. You do not find them in "Hands Are Not for Hitting." That's why Jon Klassen is so unusual. He has just written a book, "The Skull," that has made some waves. In this brief Tyrolean folk tale, a girl, Otilla, runs away from home. ("Finally, she had escaped. And she would never, never return.") She stumbles on a castle, a property that is managed by a tiny skull. She and the skull become friendly--and the skull admits that, each night, a headless skeleton visits and causes havoc. The skeleton shouts, "YOU ARE MINE," and tries to force the skull into slavery. What occurs next is delightful, surprising, and weirdly plausible. Tension: A gap between speech and thought. We never learn what happened between Otilla and her family--but we can feel the weight of Otilla's past in every scene. Irony: We might not expect a skull to act as ...

 I learn so much on a solo trip to New York; I'll just go ahead and share some things: * If a Broadway star has a planned absence from a show, the producers don't always have to advertise this.  If the star wattage belongs to Hugh Jackman or Josh Groban, then I guess you can expect clear, blunt announcements. But Victoria Clark can take a vacation with her family, and her show's website can keep mum. You have to go to "Broadway Covers," on Twitter, or you have to visit the star's Instagram. * "The Shark Is Broken" has seriously miscalculated its ad campaign.  Everything I've read suggests that the play is awful, but that it offers three or four minutes of Colin Donnell in a speedo. It seems clear that the director understood the importance of the speedo; "Americans might hate the script, but at least they get that three-minute interlude." So, obviously, the speedo needs to be on every poster, and it should be displayed (also) above the ...

 Situational irony is a moment when certain details are the exact opposite of what we would expect. "The cobbler's child has no shoes." "The teacher fails her own test." It's something "The Simpsons (Season Six)" handles extraordinarily well, in "Bart of Darkness," a classic summer episode. A stranger comes to town; the stranger is extreme heat. Shockingly, Homer has an idea: He builds a tent that leeches cool air from the refrigerator, and he has his family take shelter in the tent. ("I developed this idea when I realized that the refrigerator.....is  cold ....") No one could anticipate what happens next. The Simpsons (crushed by the death of their fridge) decide to build a swimming pool--and it upends two lives. Lisa--perennial outcast--becomes the toast of the town. And Bart--felled by a twisted ankle--becomes a nerdy, reclusive playwright, staring crazily from his second-floor window. These two subplots grow and grow in surp...

  MIA’S TEENAGE SON , Gordey, came home from work looking super baked and Mia thought to herself: He looks so happy! He loves his job! He’s high on life! And just like that, Mia turned into her mother. Gordey was the most exceptional of teenagers, not because of his intelligence or his looks—although he was very smart and Mia thought he was quite good-looking—but because of his kind and gentle nature. He was now seventeen and had almost never given Mia a moment’s worry. He was the unicorn of teenagers: rare, magical, long-faced but handsome, perhaps gifted with the ability to bless people with miracles. Mia was in the kitchen, opening her mail and feeding their elderly cocker spaniel, Warhol, when Gordey got home from his summer job at the supermarket. Gordey poured himself a glass of milk and said, “This old lady came in and ordered two individual shrimps—” he worked in the butcher department and claimed that old ladies were the worst customers, always ordering itty-bi...

 I think there is something valuable in a misanthropic outlook; if you have low expectations, then you'll rarely be disappointed. That said, I'm haunted by one character in a Nicole Holofcener movie. It's Frances McDormand; she is so deeply bitter, she seems gratified whenever she finds a new reason to complain. There is one scene where she goes with her spouse to a diner, and no one pops up to refill her coffee. A curtain of madness descends over her beady eyes; she becomes drunk on her own fury. It's not that she is wrong to feel annoyed; it's the *depth* of the irritation that is troubling. When I watch that, I cringe, because McDormand reminds me too much of myself. So here's a sunny, radiant story. On my birthday, I wanted to go for a swim in the ocean. I planned to remove my wedding ring, because it sometimes gets loose on my bony finger, even after a re-sizing. I announced my plan, then yanked on the ring--and, finally, I watched as it sailed off my finge...

 Sondheim's mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, wrote "Oklahoma," and that show famously ends with a stoic aunt giving advice to an ingenue. The ingenue is devastated by a shocking community event; Aunt Eller looks the girl in the eye and says, "We are frontier people. We are hearty. We keep going." In the eighties, Sondheim invented his own Aunt Eller--one of his all-time great characters, Mary, in "Merrily We Roll Along." Mary is impatient when her friend, Frank, struggles with disappointment. So Mary offers tough love: All right, now you know. Life is crummy. Well, now you know. I mean, big surprise: People love you and tell you lies. Bricks can tumble from clear blue skies. Put your dimple down... Now you know. Mary is urging her friend away from coyness. "Put your dimple down": Drop the Shirley Temple facial expressions. It's called flowers wilt. It's called apples rot. It's called thieves get rich and saints get shot. It's called...

 Driving down to the Jersey Shore, my spouse and I select the one and only obvious option for listening: a serial-killer podcast. "What I want to know," says our host, the Crime Junkie, "is every last detail about the remaining bodies on Gilgo Beach. There are other bodies. Did Rex just focus on the (now-famous) four? How about the extra real estate in Las Vegas? You're telling me it's just a coincidence that Rex chose to buy in that particular city?" Later that evening, the Times runs a story on serial killers. They--the killers--are a dying breed. In the eighties, if you were a psychopath, you would possibly take the Dahmer route. But methods of detection are getting so much sharper. You don't want to roll the dice with DNA technology. Now, if you want to do harm, you go to a school or a night club and murder twenty people in one fell swoop. This is hard to accept. The logic doesn't work. If the fear of getting caught is the thing that keeps you fr...

  A bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story: "Stand by Me," or "Jim the Boy," or "David Copperfield," or "This Boy's Life." Women write these, too; I'm thinking of "Who Will Run the Frog Hospital," "Lives of Girls and Women," and Alice McDermott's "Someone." This is one way to understand Ann Patchett's new novel, "Tom Lake." A girl (Lara) volunteers to help at the desk for local "Our Town" auditions. She immediately recognizes that the prospective Emily Webbs are very, very bad; they "overcook" their lines. A vision of Emily occurs to Lara; soon, Lara is appearing on-stage. From this moment on, we watch as Lara makes various relatable mistakes. She betrays a close friend. She offers her body to a Broadway producer; she thinks this is what you have to do to score a role opposite Spalding Gray. Lara falls for a dazzling De Niro-esque star-on-the-rise, although she understand...

Britney Spears's "Toxic" counts as the gold standard among "ambivalence" pop songs; I think that a great deal of the Taylor Swift catalogue ("I Knew You Were Trouble," "Treacherous," "I Almost Do," "Wildest Dreams," "Blank Space," "22," "Don't Blame Me," "Gorgeous") is simply an effort to re-write "Toxic." In Spears's ur-text, a young woman is drawn to a ne'er-do-well, though she can recognize her own insanity: With the taste of your lips, I'm on a ride. You're toxic; I'm slipping under... With a taste of a poison paradise-- I'm addicted to you. Don't you know that you're toxic? Sex appeal as a drug. We see this, also, in Swift's "Clean," "Cruel Summer."  I'm not sure that Broadway needed to give us an extremely literal reading of Spears's lyrics--but if it provides Jennifer Simard with an opportunity to be...

  My old writing teacher Amy Bloom has said, "I have a minor interest in gardening, but really my only interest is people. I study people. If I go to a museum, I look at the portraits; that's all I want to see." I get it. If someone at a party makes a weird remark about cheese puffs, I do a little inner dance, because I know I can poke and prod that remark for the next ten or twenty years. One of the great things that happened to novelist Elinor Lipman was the death of her husband, at sixty; it changed her writing, and it gave her new material. While others might retire to a convent, Lipman began dating, and she looked closely at various new forms of awkwardness and insecurity: Until my post-widowed dating life began at 60, I’d cooked nearly every night for my husband and son. I had dinner parties and folders full of recipes. I owned a fish poacher and a tortilla press. So why didn’t I cook for potential beau Jonathan after we met on Match.com? For months there was only a...

  There is more to say about the insanity of baby birthdays; we took our kids to a mermaid-themed event, and my heart cried: HELP. ME. The children were given small "paint wands" so they could run through the house, permanently wrecking the host's varied sofas and hassocks. An "Ariel" from Staten Island performed the alphabet song in a husky smoker's voice; her red wig seemed "unloved."  Toddlers gathered around a small koi pond just large enough to be a possible source of drowning deaths. Some tried to climb on the loose rocks; legs dangled over the water, and chubby arms flailed. This happened again and again. "Is your daughter allergic to cheese puffs?" asked one stranger. "I inquire just because she has been stealing puffs from my own child's plate, and I wouldn't want her to have a reaction...." I left this one early, and I am proud of my decision.

  Before "Enlightened," before "The White Lotus," Mike White made a splash with "Freaks and Geeks"; he wrote an immortal episode called "Kim Kelly Is My Friend." White likes to consider problematic connections between women. In "Lotus," Tonya seems to recognize that Belinda is a human being--until Belinda becomes expendable. In "Enlightened," Amy tortures herself with questions about what her buddy, Robin Wright, might be saying on the phone. This same kind of tension runs through "Freaks and Geeks": Lindsay suspects that Kim Kelly isn't really interested in hosting a nice, cordial dinner, but, also, it's hard to say no to the invitation.  Also, White writes about class. If a certain kind of "bad girl" invites a well-groomed "A" student to visit, this is a kind of statement. Kim Kelly wants to impress her own mother, so she talks at length about Lindsay's money and her (fictional) lake...

  One thing I respect in this new SJP season is the focus on bad dates.  This was a source of delight back in the late nineties. Who could forget when Carrie lightly mocked Berger's use of the term "scrunchie," in a novel, and the mockery led to an apocalyptic kiss-off? Who could forget Stanford billing himself as an "Ed Harris type" on OKCupid? (The prospective date takes a look and keeps on walking.) Now we have Seema magnanimously embracing the idea of a "penis pump," only to discover that her date won't tolerate the presence of a vibrator. (This seems true to life.) I also enjoyed Mariska Hargitay's spouse--trying to paper over signs that he is in a codependent relationship with his "app-making" colleague. Finally, it's always a good idea to recruit Miriam Shor, and I admired her work as an apparently sexy Jane Austen scholar who can't be bothered to wash her flannel sheets. These little stories feel like "SVU procedu...