Liars and Saints

Children will give you plastic fruit. You are thrust into Pre-K, because the other sub is an administrator, and she needs to go deal with the Toshiba representative. What a strange world: Pre-K! Monologues seem to spill from multiple mouths; there are few clear connections between one comment and its predecessor. The teacher keeps a stash of latex-free non-allergenic gloves for when children pee their pants; she has ten pairs, but she's not optimistic that these will last out the year. One sullen child pulls away from the group to monitor what appears to be a small worm-shaped robot; surely, this child will become a writer. Most of the kids gather in the fake-kitchen, and they busy themselves with fake plastic foods. "An egg is missing!" "We have a cake!" Two girls will pick up small brooms and do fake-sweeping; note that none of the boys indulge in that particular game. Above: Letters from the alphabet. "A is for ant, B is for brontosaurus, C is for ca...

Get ready. It's time to read a great deal--A GREAT DEAL--into the lyrics of sensation-among-tweens Taylor Swift. How do you define politics? One definition is "the use of strategy to obtain power and influence." A writer can have political concerns, even when studiously avoiding questions about Washington, questions about funding, questions about international relations, questions about tariffs. It seems to me that Taylor Swift has been an intensely political writer for many years--long before the dramatic "coming-out" Sunday night. Her subject has been an ongoing war between boys and girls, a struggle one smart girl has to claim, and to hold onto, power--within the (superficially) small sphere of a romantic relationship. Swift is capable of a dewy-eyed declaration of pure love, but it seems to me that her love songs are often actually thorny; they're descriptions of battlegrounds. They're about a struggle for power. Shockingly early in her c...

Tessa Hadley's story collection, "Bad Dreams," was among the very best books published last year, though I'm not sure many people read it. Here's how the first story starts: Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed. This happened a long time ago, in Surrey, in the sixties, when parents were more careless. She was home from boarding school for the summer, and day after day the sun rose into a cloudless sky, from which Jane couldn't unfix the word "cerulean," which she'd learned in the art room. (She wasn't clever or literary, and was nervous of new words, which seemed to stick to her.) "Cerulean" was more of a blank, baking glare than mere merry blue. It prised its way each morning like a chisel through the crack between Jane's flowered bedroom curtains and between the eyelids she squeezed tightly shut in an effort to stay in her dreams. It wasn't acceptable in Jane's kind of family to complain ...

Some teachers are needier than others. It's not as if the migraines will be distributed evenly among the teachers. It's the third-grade homeroom teacher who will get them--over and over and over again. She will also need regular bathroom-trip relief. A mysterious young man will disrupt the day by bringing her flowers. There is a subtext to your interactions with her, and it is this: I cannot believe my life is this great, unending indignity. And you will empathize, because: How could you not? To be a substitute teacher is to pass through the Gateway to Hell. The third-grader teacher--the one with the regularly-scheduled migraines--will summon you to take over her class at the last minute. "This is a math packet," she says, a wicked look on her face. "Some of them will finish quickly, but some will not finish even after the bell. " Your first, innocent thought: They will not finish because they will have become absorbed by, engulfed by, a delightful world o...

I have to be a dissenting voice on "Nate Expectations." I sense the press has been euphoric. First, there are many things it does really well. It's charming. Federle has an appealing "voice." His asides about musical theater are smart, and they capture a certain mindset that isn't very well-represented in children's literature. My favorite is Nate's thought on "Tarzan": "overrated movie, underrated musical, still running in Germany!" The platonic love between Nate and Libby remains delightful, and Libby is by far the most fully-developed character (beyond Nate). Many gay readers will recognize their own childhood friendships in the Nate/Libby bond. It's lovely to see how Libby quietly "deflates" Nate when necessary, and how Libby understands Nate in ways that others can't match. Federle also excels at describing the joys of creation. You see Federle in Nate; this is a guy who can't stop making things. I...

A is for Annie, Get Your Gun . Irving Berlin wrote this when he was sort-of-washed-up. It was a come-back. He had help from Rodgers and Hammerstein. There's some speculation that the help was more extensive than the surface story would suggest. Bernadette Peters won her second Tony--after a long dry spell--for a Gun revival. She maybe didn't deserve it. Her accent was very, very broad and distracting. People felt that her replacement--Reba McEntire--actually did a better job than she, BP, had done. (It pains me to type this.) I spent a fair amount of the latter half of my high school years visiting the Bernadette Peters website. She wrote quite a bit about her touring schedule, and her love for dogs. I went to NYC, ostensibly to tour a university, but really to see Ms. Peters on stage (in 1999). Years later, after the big British Petroleum spill, I was given a Bernadette shirt with her image, centered, on the front, under a tagline: "The BP who Isn't Fucking up the...

I have a feeling all there is to be learned in life is available in Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" (and its sequel, "Bring Up the Bodies.") I sense this just from having watched the final hour of the Foy/Rylance adaptation, which triggered some memories for me. Why the final hour? It's the meatiest material for Foy, whom I love--and she didn't disappoint me. She is Anne Boleyn, enjoying her power, deliberately mispronouncing "Cromwell," so it sounds like "Cremyoool"--with an emphasis on MYOOOOL. Anne flirts with a lute player, and maybe she is having an affair with him; it's unclear. Irritated with Cromwell, she says, "I made you. A person can easily be UNMADE." Cromwell, with a wonderful poker face, says, "I couldn't agree more." (It's clear, here, that Cromwell is pondering the un-making of Anne Boleyn.) The final days of "Bring Up the Bodies" are dizzying. Cromwell knows that he must a...