Liars and Saints

 A third music video I enjoy is for Beyonce's "Love on Top."  The words in this song are every bit as inane as the material for Janet Jackson's "Miss You Much." Beyonce is expressing joy because she realizes she has become someone's number one priority. "You're the one I NEED! You're the only one I see." That's all. *If this is in dialogue with Janet Jackson--and most pop writing *is* a response to Janet Jackson--then there are important shifts to consider. Janet, in "Miss You Much," is somewhat childlike. By contrast, Beyonce is imagined as someone in control. It's Beyonce who says, "Bring the beat in." It's Beyonce who says, absurdly, "Cut!" (She starts and ends the video.) *It's interesting to me that this song--a love song--has a video that never shows the "love object." We don't see the love story unfolding. Instead, in the video, the main drama comes from the way that Bey...

  This week, I've been thinking about Jane Austen--which led me to Nicole Holofcener. It seems to me that Holofcener's career is a response to Austen. Holofcener asks, "What if I extended Austen's sympathy to include Austen's villains? What if I took a villain--e.g., Fanny, Elinor Dashwood's nemesis--and made her the center of the story?" "Lovely and Amazing" is a tale of multiple Fanny figures. Vain, weak, childish people. It's an act of bravery to take on one of these roles. Catherine Keener ranks among the bravest actors in movie history. Keener plays Michelle, who hasn't had the life she once dreamed of. Michelle is a recovering homecoming queen. In her mid-thirties, she finds herself floundering. Long ago, she promised her spouse she would find work as soon as her daughter entered Kindergarten. But that day has come and gone. Michelle builds tiny wooden chairs for plastic superhero figurines. But no store wishes to purchase the chair...

 There is a difference between receptive and expressive language.  My son receives language somewhat easily. I know this. If you read James Marshall's "Portly McSwine," then you put it aside for a full year, my son will forget nothing. There is one eighth of one quick scene that deals with a flu shot--my son will point to the book, today, and inform you, "That's the one with the flu shot." Also, Josh retains names; I do not. He greets a nurse by her nickname; I hadn't thought that I'd had prior exposure to this nurse, but, clearly, I was wrong. I love codes; I love the gap between speech and thought. This is because I was a student of Amy Bloom's; subtext was all she talked about. Right now, you can see "Sense and Sensibility" in a multiplex--and Elinor Dashwood appears to be chatting about the weather, but really she is plotting to ensure her own survival. And one of the reasons that Julianne Moore has an Oscar is that she lets us see ...

 A young man surprises a woman with a flower. In the background, water rushes into the base of a fountain, as semen rushes into the womb. The fountain depicts cherubs in the act of chasing a trapped dolphin, as the man "chases" the woman below. Next, the man and woman meet in secret; they seem to be evading capture. (Maybe an overbearing parent is standing off in the wings.) A kind of marriage ceremony: The woman crowns the man, as a journalist/witness makes a record. Finally, the couple reflects on their love, reviewing old love letters. A statue of Venus represents Friendship--unlike Cupid, Venus is mature, unlikely to throw herself into a patch of brambles while pursuing a hot date. Fragonard's "Progress of Love" has spawned other works. Alice Munro tips her hat to Fragonard with a collection called--you guessed it--"The Progress of Love." A.R. Gurney's "Love Letters" seems to be a response to Fragonard's fourth panel. And Nancy Mi...

  I spent a part of my weekend rereading Elinor Lipman's essays, and there aren't enough words for how much I love this work.  Lipman is reliably unpretentious; often, she has written for "Good Housekeeping." She has strong feelings about Carrie Bradshaw. She comments on ketchup--and on the wisdom of mixing ketchup with your brisket. At the same time, she is contrarian in a sneaky way; she is in favor of keeping (and examining) various grudges, looking closely, in an unguarded manner, at moments of personal failure. I feel better after I've read a few pages by Elinor Lipman--what a gift she has. A standout among her essays is an observation about the Corner Bookstore, on the Upper East Side. Lipman is trying to recall why she started watching "Sex and the City" on HBO. It's because of the Corner Bookstore. "Charlotte" is living near 92nd and Madison--this is mid-series. At the same time, Lipman is walking up Madison to give a reading. She s...

 The stingray, or manta ray, is a crucial part of "Moana." An elderly ally--Grandma--informs Moana of her wish to become a stingray. "When I die, and I resurface, I want to be a manta ray...." In Polynesian culture, the manta ray represents wisdom, grace, and protection. And that's how Grandma is characterized; she lets Moana grow at her own pace. No need to rush Moana or make assertions--even when Grandma "knows better." My daughter is obsessed with the stingrays at the zoo. Nearby, there are majestic creatures--snow leopards, panthers, gray wolves--but the stingrays take top honors. This is because Susie can touch them in their "Touch Tank"; sight and sound have minimal appeal, but touch reigns supreme. Susie considers both what is alien and what is familiar about the stingray. Alien: "Is that piece on the tail the stinger?" Familiar: "The guy in the corner--that one. Is that one asleep?" At the Met, for several weeks re...

  Roz Chast just wrote a book about the bizarreness of her kitchen. Many of us choose not to talk about "the chipped mugs, the poison under the sink, the freon tubes" -- but Chast puts this stuff front and center in a memoir. The book is not just about kitchen-focused revulsion, but also about the difficulty of "swimming upstream." Many people feel *fond* of their kitchens -- they use the room for a casual cocktail hour, or they publish essays about their joyful cooking memories. (In "Still Alice," the well-groomed Julianne Moore wrestles with her early-stages dementia while also preparing an elaborate Christmas meal in her immaculate kitchen.) ....If you are at odds with your kitchen, you are also at odds with American culture; you can't participate when people chat about food preparation as "the heart of the home." I'm grateful for this weirdness -- I "feel seen" -- and I hope we will get more from Chast before she retires.

 To me, Amanda Seyfried is immortal for "Mean Girls." She has had a fabulous career, though she has never topped that Tina Fey/Rachel McAdams masterpiece. For "Law and Order: SVU," Seyfried did terrific work as a kind of Elizabeth Smart stand-in. (Seyfried's guest appearance is legendary, and you have to do quite a bit to boost yourself above nearly thirty seasons of colleagues' SVU performances.) I also recommend Seyfried in "The Housemaid." Finally, "The Dropout" is entertaining, but, like others, I wonder if it's morally questionable. I wonder, if you're going to fictionalize very recent events, why would you not change the names of the real-world people you're thinking about? (Seyfried is taken to task about this--but shouldn't the focus also include the "Dropout" scriptwriter, Liz Meriwether?) Watching Nathan Fielder's clever "You Can See Everything," I admired several choices. First, I admired...

 The other video I constantly watch is for Janet Jackson's "Miss You Much." I'm not a Jackson scholar; I'm just an enthusiastic amateur. But I do love her. In her youth, Janet is positioned as a girl next door. So, in "Miss You Much," we see her hanging out with peers at a billiard parlor--she is deflecting gossip about a possible crush. (It's difficult to imagine that--at any point in her life--Janet has traveled *anywhere, to any location* without a retinue of professional handlers.) ....The "girl next door" phase also involves one of my favorite lines in any verse of any song--Janet describes having worked hard all week, having just cashed her paycheck. The idea of Janet Jackson living paycheck to paycheck is something that makes me giggle. For a while, Janet is so successful, you just need to pick a common phrase and set it to music, and it becomes a hit. "Miss You Much" grows out of someone, a writer, noticing that he often b...

 My son's worst behavior occurred over the summer. His teacher had disappeared--in her place, a twenty-year-old materialized. The classroom became chaotic, and my son expressed his distress by trying to poop in my backyard. There is a long history of autistic kids having an idiosyncratic relationship to poop. If you have a developmental delay, then your behavior around poop can resemble a toddler's behavior--and we all know what toddlers can do with their poop. Staring in horror through my kitchen window, I wondered which of my sins had led to this moment of cosmic retribution. *I do not read the school emails about the local kid-friendly production of "Cinderella" and the district-wide "move-a-thon." *I am withdrawn. I know that lowkey behavior around an impulsive kid is a good move--but I take this idea to the extremes. Being lowkey is different from being withdrawn. *I permit screenings of the Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" segments. These are n...

 Maurice Bailey was a man who tried to take a sailing trip with his wife. The trip went off course, and the two amateurs were stranded in the ocean (on a tiny raft) for many weeks. Bailey came home and published the story of the disaster--and sales went through the roof. Unfortunately, Bailey's *subsequent* voyage went very well--so the subsequent account (a *new* book) did not sell well. No one wants to read about a tediously successful voyage. I thought about Bailey while I made my way through "Notes on Being a Man," perhaps the worst book I've ever read. I planned to stop reading around page 80. But my hatred for the book was so strong, it pushed me forward. I felt an intense pleasure in my loathing for the writer, Scott Galloway. Do you know how, if you follow the political spectrum way, way far left, eventually the radical libertarians actually begin to seem like radical conservatives? My disdain for Galloway became so powerful, it began to resemble enjoyment. Re...

 I once knew a "child of suicide." This young man had not yet finished high school; however, his father had opted to jump ship. When we talk about suicide, we're not supposed to choose verbs that imply a sense of agency. Not "commit" suicide. Instead: "die by suicide." The idea is that you're in a burning room at the top of a skyscraper--and the options are sealing themselves off--and so, at a certain point, it would seem insane *not* to plunge to your death. In "Whalefall," Josh Brolin is troubled. One critic says the Brolin character suffers from "toxic masculinity," but there is nothing notably masculine about the Brolin character. It might be better to say that he is just toxic. Austin Abrams, Brolin's son, tries not to upset the sleeping dragon. But battles are inevitable. In one scene I like, Brolin has issued a sloppy half-invitation, and Abrams has replied with a sloppy half-deferral. The problem of non-communication...

  My world is Kelly Clarkson. Everything is Kelly Clarkson. To re-cap, Clarkson went into a store in Brooklyn and understood the vendor's tone to be snotty. She then posted on social media about the rudeness. But--being a celebrity--she unwittingly activated a mob of millions of people who subsequently attacked the Brooklyn store. And now the Brooklyn store is attempting to play the role of victim (and not the other way around). I love this story. We're not supposed to make assumptions--but I'm going to make assumptions. The Brooklyn vendor was, in fact, rude (and we can't tell in the video because the sound is off, obviously so much in life is about tone, intonation). Clarkson was also having an iffy day--and, having grown up in Fort Worth, she was feeling particularly impatient with the default semi-rudeness that you are likely to find at *more than one* tiny Brooklyn shop counter. Having grown up in Buffalo, I personally feel something like rage whenever a New York C...

Amy Bloom writes about Karen Pirie, Poirot, and Peter Wimsey, and these characters would be ideal "college essay" narrators: What all of these people have in common is curiosity and intelligence and an impressive, sometimes awkward, perseverance. Some of them are self-aware (to make any monster no longer a monster, give him or her some self-awareness), and some are not, and some pretend not to be, but we see that they know who they are or, at least, what they have done, in the quiet moments and the musing after the event, whether the event is homicidal or sexual. Many high-school seniors shy away from self-awareness in their essays; the writers believe that conceding a flaw would be an unappealing choice (when, in fact, it is a *very* appealing choice). Some people might wish for the perfect protagonist, but it’d be hard to get any of those people to agree on what the perfect protagonist should be. Do we all want beautiful or genius? Beauty or extreme handsomeness can be off-...

  My favorite music video is for the Whitney Houston "Higher Love" remix. A few things it does right: *It is pure sex. It would be difficult to imagine a hotter, more joyful music video. *It is not thuddingly literal. Too often, music video directors feel a need to underline each and every lyric. If there is a metaphor involving a sunrise, we see an actual sunrise. "Higher Love" avoids this trap. *It's a thoughtful tribute to Whitney. The costumes are an allusion to "I Wanna Dance With Somebody"--and we in fact see that video on a small TV screen for approximately three seconds. This feels appropriate--not sappy or overly reverent. A light touch. Five stars, no notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR49dyo-y0E&list=RDJR49dyo-y0E&start_radio=1

 Yes, it's a bad movie. But it's not terrible. In a way, it *profits* from the negative reviews--you see the film and anticipate a trainwreck. And it's just a car wreck, so you're pleasantly surprised. A grand tradition of storytelling involves children attempting to piece together the truth from various fragments that adults provide. The main text is Henry James's "What Maisie Knew" (with a strong film adaptation featuring Julianne Moore). You also have the Culkin character in "You Can Count on Me." You have Maile Meloy's excellent story "Red From Green." Mona Simpson's "Casebook" belongs in this discussion. Plus Jesse Eisenberg's galvanizing performance in "The Squid and the Whale." "Other Mommy" features a little girl--a young actor asked to do a bit too much. As others have noted, it's hard to spend so much time with a child actor when you know Jessica Chastain and Arian Moayed are in th...

 In Lorrie Moore's famous story about pediatric oncology, Moore encourages the other parents (people she finds in a hospital waiting room) to tell *their* own worst stories. "Hit me--hit your hardest." My group, Autism Moms, has a standout. She recently had a ruptured aneurysm; she believes that stress didn't help the situation. In her account of her life, her ex-husband refuses to read about autism; he believes that the daughter in question will "learn" if the stakes feel threatening and punitive. He uses corporal punishment; the family judge says it's OK, because "it's not like he is beating anyone senseless." The dad has made noises about weaponizing Child Protective Services; if the mom isn't compliant with certain wishes, CPS might need to get involved. The mom is frightened when the daughter gets violent--it's difficult to manage this if you're alone in the house with the child. As I listen, I have two strong reactions. On...

  The extraordinary paragraph featured here is from Donald Hall's essay "Out the Window." Hall--having spied his ninetieth birthday on the horizon--had committed himself to writing prose. We don't get many books from octogenarians. In fact, Lorrie Moore has specifically said that she thinks a writer's career ends at the eightieth birthday; "I have turf until I turn eighty, and then I need to cede my spot." This is nonsense--and Donald Hall enjoys taking on the contrarian role. It's clear throughout the essay that he is writing  as an act of service --he knows there are not many literary reports from the pen of a "post-post-retirement" man, and he is filling a gap. I'm especially moved by his descriptions of his mother. The subtext is evident: "This, now, is what it was like for her. This is what she couldn't find words for. This is what she couldn't tell me." A writer has to recognize shame as an opportunity. Most of u...

 I'm always drawn to "The Thankful Poor," by Henry Ossawa Tanner, at the Met. No one will advertise the fact that this painting briefly belonged to Bill Cosby. The family dinner table is a dramatic setting; as a dad, I can't help but wonder if the child in the painting is about to knock his little cup on the floor. I also think of the climactic dinner scene from "Kimberly Akimbo": Isn't this nice? Everybody's being so nice. Nothing is wrong-- Troubles have passed. Everybody civil and getting along-- Will it last? I'm guessing that the grandfather will quickly run out of topics to discuss--and will wish that the child could be a bit more like Barbara Walters. The child is agitated because the library hour was cancelled--without explanation--at school today. A final thing I love is the unbalanced nature of the sleeves on the boy's shirt. I can imagine the grandfather saying, "Check yourself in the mirror and tidy up--Henry Ossawa Tanner is...

 Wightman is a farm that gracefully does its job. You get a scenic tractor tour, a pumpkin patch, a hay "gym," a corn maze, a donut stand. The patches of wildflowers are the highlight of the tractor event; these patches are saved for the end, in the same way that you don't get "Rose's Turn" until the final minutes of "Gypsy." I especially like the country music soundtrack, which always catches me by surprise. At home, my family's sonic landscape tends to feature Ariana Grande or the most famous numbers from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Cats." Suddenly, at Wightman, I'm plunged into a melodic world of Jesus stories and descriptions of pickup trucks. It's like I've entered another universe. My daughter struggles with the idea of apple-picking; impetuously, she grabs the half-rotten apple corpses from the soil. I don't mind; I secretly think apples are overrated. There is a website that has a damning observation about...

 The new  "SVU" caused some discord in my house yesterday. As I watched, I involuntarily said, "This writing is so bad." And my husband made me take it back. Let me clarify. The episode had ideas. The central concern is that the system is broken. When the country is so unfair to women, it makes sense to bend the rules. (It's sort of like civil disobedience.) A nurse suggests to a victim that it's wise to say, "I was *forced* to drink." When it's clear that a misogynistic jury will sympathize with an attacker, Olivia wins leverage by putting the attacker's mother in jail. ("If you want Mom to be freed, you'll need to give me something....") My problem is the issue of continuity. Olivia Benson has done her job for thirty years. This week's episode suggests a large rupture in Olivia's own system of ethics--but the abruptness is not plausible. The tension between Olivia and Carisi is interesting--but these are not characte...

  Curtis Sittenfeld writes beautifully, and her recent NYT piece has a shrewd opening: I’ll offer it up right away, the part that, depending on your perspective, might seem ironic or juicy or enviable or tragic: I’m now divorced. It would be difficult to stop reading at this point. What makes the sentence "pop" is the absence of self-pity. Sittenfeld has a healthy sense of perspective. (She *consistently* has this.) Also, Sittenfeld has an imagination: she can anticipate her news "landing" in several different ways, and she lists these ways. I find it hard to know how long I was married. My former husband and I considered ourselves separated by fall 2024, but maybe it was before that? He didn’t move out until fall 2025, and the divorce was legal in January 2026. There is an impression of chattiness--but I believe Sittenfeld works to select the insights that really seem (potentially) universal. Also, she is writing from the gut. Now I welcome advice from other divor...

  "Hadestown" succeeds because of its ending. Writers struggle with endings. If you see the crazy new film "Verity," you'll notice that it doesn't even have a conclusion! It's as if the storyteller just tossed her pen out the window and shrugged. But "Hadestown" has a surprising, effective, layered finale. We revisit lines from the first ten minutes of the show. Once again, we're told that Orpheus can see how the world *could* be -- "in spite of the way that it is." The sentence has acquired a new punchiness, because we've just seen "the way that it is." People die, people lose faith. That's the way the world is. "It's a sad song -- but we're gonna sing it again." Often, and particularly on Broadway, producers feel a need to pander -- an ending needs to be "happy" if it's going to be palatable. By contrast, Hermes looks directly at the audience and names what has happened in *his* ...

  "To me, autism can be a superpower. What does it mean in your case? It means your child is sensitive, and he doesn't have time for bullshit. How can that be a bad thing?" The family counselor is remarkably professional. She always apologizes for being late -- though she is never actually late. She dresses in neutral tones. She has a way of radiating positive energy -- if it's an act, it's a very persuasive act. In her view, my daughter is headed for the Presidency of the United States. That would be great -- also, no one else actually has this suggestion for my daughter. The "plan" seems to come from nowhere. I say, "I just want to know that my son can eventually date, meet someone, be paired off." The counselor shrugs. "Maybe, and maybe not. Who says there is just one way to be happy?" We meet once per week; I send a weekly agenda. The agenda sounds like a "found object" poem -- the counselor says it could be printed on t...

 Taylor Swift is activated by the idea of triangles. Several of her best songs feature threeway battles. I'm thinking of "Daddy, I Love Him," "Love Story," "Fifteen," "You Belong With Me," "Betty," "Illicit Affairs." "Babe." "Getaway Car." Someone cheats, or someone has an overbearing parent. Someone uses the promise of a bad relationship as an excuse to get out of an *extant* bad relationship. So I can appreciate "Patient Zero." It's a way of rewriting "Fifteen." What I admire in "Patient Zero" is how the two women try to negotiate the terms of *their* connection. "It's not a bad time at all...." "It's not for me to say...." These bits of throat-clearing are more interesting than the sexual drama in the song. By contrast, Taylor Swift has not figured out a way to write about bliss. It's not within her range. But she keeps trying. As othe...

 Frontotemporal dementia is a terrifying condition that tends to strike when you are in your forties. It's not Alzheimer's. With Alzheimer's, initially you lose some short-term memory while your personality remains intact. With FTD, your short-term memory is initially fine, but your personality starts to evaporate. What does it mean to lose your personality? You become scarily disinhibited. (You might start to have multiple affairs--or throw yourself from the window of a moving train.) You lose an awareness of yourself; though you are clearly failing at your job, you believe you're doing fine. You cannot connect with other people. In one story, a woman becomes annoyed with her teen son's loud soup-slurping behavior, so she locks him out of the house, in the cold, for several hours. A doctor with FTD once performed a C-section. "I did that so well," he said, "I deserve to carve my initials into the mother's flesh." And the nurses watched--horr...

 The best Barnes and Noble is just north of Grand Central; it's at Fifth Avenue and 46th. It has a functional bathroom, it has proximity to Broadway, and it has a well-organized flow of traffic by the cash register. (If you go up to the Upper East Side, it's *chaos* at *that* particular cash register.) I strongly recommend getting yourself a cup of tea and sitting with an unpurchased copy of "Changing My Mind," by Julian Barnes. No one will care if you don't spend money on that book. The stockholders within Barnes and Noble are *not* suffering. The book is a short account of how Julian Barnes once disliked the works of E.M. Forster--until he grew older and changed his mind. He realized that Forster was sort of saucy and naughty. (Barnes had missed this fact for several years.) For whatever reason, I think this essay is charming. Barnes especially likes "Where Angels Fear to Tread." There was one unfortunate scene from my own life at the midtown Barnes an...

  A spooky story beloved by my family is "The Night It Rained," by Alvin Schwartz. It's immediately unnerving. A man is driving in the night when he spots an underdressed boy in the rain. He offers a sweater to the boy (Jim), and Jim becomes a passenger in the car. The man drives Jim home and says, "I'll just stop by tomorrow for the sweater." But the next day, the man meets Jim's mother, who is confused. "My son is not alive," she says. "He died last year." The narrator then visits Jim's tombstone--and the borrowed sweater is draped over the lettering. I love this story because it demands that the reader make inferences. We can imagine that the man visits Jim's house during daylight hours because he is concerned about possible neglect (and the sweater is a helpful thing to pretend to focus on). We might also guess that Jim is spotted walking on the road because this is the region where the *living* Jim was once struck by a ca...

 Sharon Horgan is among my favorite TV writers. I really enjoyed "Catastrophe," "Divorce," and the first season of "Bad Sisters." (Horgan's apparently groundbreaking series--"Pulling"--seems to be unavailable in the US, though I've tried.) Horgan is so important to me, she has changed my reading choices. I don't really listen to anyone regarding book recommendations. But I'll listen to Sharon Horgan--she has directed me to "Rosemary's Baby" and to the Dolly Alderton novel "Good Material." One of my Mount Rushmore selections, in terms of serialized narrative, is Adam Goldman's "The Outs." Goldman was inspired to write this because of Sharon Horgan's "Pulling." So I was pleased by the arrival of "Youth." The pilot is standard Sharon Horgan: The Horgan character, Alex, turns sixty and gets arthritis in her jaw, meaning she can no longer give BJs. She hasn't had sex in ...

 Brad Pitt is so good in this movie. He is just acting opposite a dog--really, four dogs (taking turns). In sum, you are watching a two-hour monologue delivered by Brad Pitt. Pitt has survived a war (maybe the most recent war in Iraq?) His "battle dog," Odin, has also survived, but Odin has lost a leg and developed a now-lingering case of PTSD. The two friends travel to Alaska for rest and relaxation. Pitt has a heart attack while trying to pilot his little plane--this then becomes a survival/adventure story. There are three main antagonists: a rushing river, a bear, and a pack of wolves. Pitt, the actor, makes a smart choice; he will not "externalize" his despair. So he becomes something like Henry Fonda or Gregory Peck; it's just a joy to watch him. The trick about camera work is that viewers *want* to ascribe human feelings to dogs. You show an image of a suffering child--and then you show a dog's face--and the viewer *reads* empathy in the dog's eyes...