Delia Sherman's Blog, page 10

King Lear

I've seen a lot of Lears.  There was the one in Stratford-Upon-Avon, when I was 18? 20?--traveling alone in England for the first time, anyway, on buses and trains because I couldn't even drive on the right-hand side of the road yet, staying in B&Bs for 5 pounds a night, living off chippies and pub grub and learning to like warm, dark, bitter beer (which remains the only kind of beer I really like).  I had a ticket in the balcony, not quite at the back, because I remember overhearing the people sitting behind me--Americans, as I recall--who hadn't read Lear before and were absolutely and totally caught up in the drama and the tragedy, actually called out to Glouchester not to trust Edmund, and gasped audibly when his eyes were torn out.  I don't know how they responded to the mad scenes or the final tragic tableau, because by that time, I was so harrowed myself that I might as well have been sitting under a bush on a stormy heath or on a rock near a recent battlefield, as appalled as Edgar at what I was witnessing.

Through the magic of Google, I learn that I must have been 17 (Mama let me gallivant alone through England at 17?  Really?), that the Lear was Eric Porter, that Ben Kingsley played Oswald, and Patrick Stewart was the Earl of Cornwall.  I knew not what I was witnessing, but it marked me for life anyway.

Since then, I've seen leathery Lears, virile Lears, fur-swathed Lears, even totally naked Lears.  I've seen Lears who are actually in their 50's and Alvin Epstein, who was, I think, 83 when I saw him in Boston.  His was a crabby Lear, a homely Lear, a domestic tyrant with a hair-trigger temper who I found it hard to believe had ever ruled a kingdom, even badly.  When Kent said "You have that in your face I would fain call master--Authority," I could only think Kent was as blinded by his own prejudices as Gloucester and Lear themselves.

Which brings me to Derek Jacobi's Lear, which we saw almost the closing night of on Wednesday, stuck behind a pillar in the lovely Harvey Theater at BAM.

I have A Thing about Derek Jacobi, which I won't go into now, because indulging two Things in one post is way too much indulging, and won't leave me room or energy to talk about the play itself.  Suffice it to say that he did not disappoint me here.  His Lear has authority--decayed, to be sure, by age and the increasingly narrow world-view that age often brings.  He also has humor--his exchanges with the Fool (the excellent Ron Cook, who was The Singing Detective a while back on TV) are both heartbreaking and genuinely funny.   His temper is vicious and scattershot--the venom with which he curses Goneril made me almost feel sorry for the woman, especially since Gina McKee, who played her, had a horrible cold that made her voice break when she got carried away.  And in his madness, he is terribly cruel to poor Gloucester.  And yet, he is tender as well, early in the play as well as late, so that we see that the Lear of Act V was always inherent in the blustering old tyrant of Act I, and why Cordelia, his Fool, and Kent love him as they do.

It just occurred to me:   Lear's stated intent in Act I is to cast off the cares of ruling to "unburthen'd crawl towards death."  Which, in the event, is exactly what he does.  Although he did not exactly mean to unburden himself of family, shelter, clothing, and sanity in the process.

Highlights of the production include the storm scene, in which all the sound effects cut out, along with most of the lights, while Lear whispers his invocation to the tempest and the hurricanoes in the echoing silence of his sorrow-riven mind.  The Fool, who is arguably the most pissed-off Fool I've seen and yet also one of the tenderest, holding Lear's hand and supporting his elbow like a nurse, touching him as no other character does, not even Cordelia.  The putting-out of Gloucester's eyes, which is pretty far out on the Grand Guignol scale, but really works to underline just how low the daughters' lack of filial affection and respect have brought them.  And I liked Paul Jessons's Gloucester, too--a kind of shadow-Lear, stripped of his illusions of power and love, driven at last to despair, dying of joy when his wronged son forgives him.   On the down-side, I found Kent dull, Regan whiny, Oswald hysterical, and Edgar not terribly convincing as Poor Tom, or indeed as the Earl of Gloucester's legitimate son and heir.  Edmund wasn't quite convincing either--I always saw an actor acting instead of a man trying to seize hold of his destiny.  But never mind.  It's a difficult role, and there were plenty of other wonderful things to watch.  And the costumes were lovely, if simple--black, fluid, stately without being restrictive:  all but the Fool, whose pink and mustard and cream motley punctuated the action as his words illuminated Lear's moral blindness.

Next up--Suzanne Vega as Carson McCullers.  Yum.

Peter and Wendy

Saturday night we saw Mabou Mine's Peter and Wendy at the New Victory Theatre. 

We'd seen it once before, in 1998 in New Haven.  We drove down from Boston just for the performance, at the suggestion of Johnny Cunningham, of Silly Wizard fame, who Ellen knew through Boston Irish music circles.  We both loved the story of Peter Pan, and we knew there were puppets involved and that Johnny had written the music, and other than that, we knew nothing at all.  It was an adventure.

We were enchanted.  The stage was dressed in white, with books and cut-out, stylized furniture that recalled an Edwardian nursery.  A woman came on, African American, tall and graceful, with a mobile face and grave eyes, a picture hat over her closely-cut hair, dressed in cream.   She accepted a book and a cup of tea from a veiled figure, sat on a pile of over-sized books, and began to read:

All children, except one, grow up.  They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this.  One day when she was two years old, she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother.  I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, 'Oh, why can't you remain like this forever!'

This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up.  You always know after you are two.  Two is the beginning of the end.

From that moment on, we sat enchanted and adrift in nostalgia for Childhood Lost.  Between the surreality of the puppets, the gentle melancholy of Cunningham's music, and the aching poignancy underlying the adventure and comedy, we hardly felt the time pass.  I remember coming out onto the dark, quiet sidewalk (New Haven rolls them up and puts them into storage after 10pm), my cheeks tight from tears, unable to speak for the number of things I was feeling.

With the memory of that perfect evening (which went on to drinks with Johnny and the cast in their hotel and a long, somewhat punchy drive home, which I remember as being moonlit, but probably wasn't), when we heard that the same production was coming back to the New Victory Theater in New York, we fell all over ourselves getting tickets.

It is in the nature of live theater that perfect evenings can't be reproduced.  Its ephemeral, mutable nature is one of the things I love most about the theater, but it can lead to disappointment.  This evening, if not perfect, was still a magical experience.  The play itself is as I remembered it--both intelligent and deeply emotional, leisurely and tightly paced, offering something beautiful to look at or listen to every moment of its nearly 3 hour running time.  It is full of wonders for those of us who love puppets:  Nana the extremely doggy brown-rag nursemaid, (who doubled, in a mask and long tail, as a tango-dancing Crocodile); Peter himself, toddler-sized and uncanny; Hook, bald, pale, and angsty; the bits and pieces of laundry and furniture that become the Lagoon, the Jolly Roger, the Wendy house, the Lost Boys' underground hideaway.  The silent attendants who give the principal players life are spectacular.  And Karen Kandel, who narrates and plays Wendy in her own person, and voices all the rest of the parts, is a sorceress, a shaman, a force of artifice--even with a bum sound system that left her trying to project her naked voice over the music until they had to stop the play and fix it and start over, she was never less than wonderful.

And the music?  It's still beautiful, but neither the fiddler nor the female vocalist is, to my ear, as skilled or as expressive as Cunningham or the woman who we heard sing in New Haven.  It may have been the gloss of memory, or the fact that it wasn't Johnny playing, and it can't be, because he died in 2003, and he was a friend, if not a close one, and there's no one like him, and I miss him.  It may have been the bum sound system, which Ellen pronounced muddy and dead and over-loud.  In any case, the music didn't break my heart this time, didn't open up vistas of memories and unrecoverable dreams, didn't make me hate that I'd grown up and learned that actions have consequences and that I'm not the center of the universe and that believing a thing, however beautiful, doesn't necessarily make it so.  But perhaps that's an experience that can only come once and never be recovered, unless, like Peter himself, you live absolutely in the moment, experiencing each adventure as it presents itself as if for the first time.

Carlos and Liz, who we brought with us, loved it a lot, and we had a wonderful time discussing it afterwards.  I wish I'd had my insight that Captain Hook is stuck in adolescence just as Peter is stuck in early childhood then instead of two days later, but that's the way insights work, isn't it?  They come when they come.

One final note.  Looking for reviews of the 1998 Yale Rep production, I came across this, from an interview with Karen Kandel in the Hartford Courant:  ``It still seems to be difficult to market,'' says Kandel of the play. ``After all, what is it? Who is it for? It wasn't specifically made for kids. I think it has this perfect balance so when you have an audience that is filled with 90-year-olds and 5-year- olds, it's like a multigenerational piece of work but, it's hard to get it across. It seems to take people a very long time to come to it. Every time we present the show some place, it's toward the end of the run that people say, `I can't get tickets!' ''  Yeah.  I knew that.  Like a lot of the other stuff I really resonate with, Peter and Wendy is interstitial.

A Meditation on Mother's Day

This is one of those holidays that doesn't feel as if it has anything to do with me.  I am neither a mother, nor have I had one for many, many years.  I lost my mother in 1974, when I was 22.  I thought she was 67, since that's what her passport said.  How she squeegeed that by the U.S. Government, I'll never know, but there it is, in black on official pale-green, as convincing as all get-out.  Less convincing is her white-out and ball-point revision of the family bible, which makes her younger than the two siblings whose name follow hers in my grandfather's firm, ornate 19th Century hand.  I found the page after she died, I no longer remember where, possibly between the cardboard inserts at the bottom of the plastic dress bag with several hundred dollars in cash she'd forgotten she put there.  It was her younger sister who outed her, not long after her death.  She'd been born in 1897, so she was 77 when she died, 11 years older than my father.

Mama was a Great Beauty.  Her Gibson-girl looks covered a will of iron and a mind like a campaigning general's.  In her, God created the perfect CEO of a major corporation.  The problem was, He did it a lifetime before that was a real possibility.  Like many such women of her age and era, she channeled her organizational and managerial skills into Family and Good Works. Both Papa and I stubbornly resisted being organized and managed, but what drove us mad rejoiced the charities of New York City. During her final illness, I wrote, from her dictation, something like 30 letters of resignation from various charitable boards and committees in New York, including the chairmanship of the YWCA and the Japan Society.  She was both privileged and conscious of the responsibilities attached to privilege.  She gave away a lot of money, and if her causes weren't mine, neither did they harm the environment or upped the quotient of prejudice and idiocy in the world.  Given her political opinions, which were Victorian in the very worst sense of the word, this was astonishing.  She didn't much like women, and she had no use at all for the shy and fearful.  Since I was a shy and fearful child, this created a certain coolness in our relationship.  Not that it would have been a warm one, no matter what kind of child I'd been.

Mama was not a warm woman.  She was, however, a very interesting one.  She adored history and travel and new experiences.  She took me out of school early and back to school late so we could spend months Abroad, taking advantage of my father's employee discount on Pan Am to fly us wherever she felt like going, standby, for free.  I spent my 19th birthday on the Gobi desert and spring vacation of my sophomore year in college in Africa.  I have pictures of myself on a boat on the Mediterranean (10), dressed up as a rather plump Dutch girl (11), feeding pigeons in St. Mark's Square (12), and riding a camel at Giza (14).  We got along when we were traveling.  We did not when we weren't. 

Reading all the tributes my LJ and FB friends have written to their mothers, I'm very glad for them, and a little envious.  When my mother died, I had not said a truthful word to her in years.  She did not often ask about the state of my life or my emotions, but when she did, I told her what I thought she wanted to hear, avoiding both conflict and any hope of intimacy.  As far as I know, she went to her grave thinking me a very different person than I felt myself to be--obedient, social, competent, open.  Straight.

The not being straight has remained constant.  The stutter, the shyness, the secretiveness, the general feeling of being a grave disappointment eventually went away, with the help of a good therapist, good friends, and a loving partner who values truth above rubies.  My hope, this mother's day and every mother's day, is that if Mama had been able to live long enough to see me grow up, she would see a daughter she could love and respect, even it wasn't the one she'd expected.  At this remove of time and space, I can see that she loved me as well as she could, that she genuinely wanted the best for me, and that many of the things she tried to teach me--about making conversation, about doing things that need doing, whether you feel like it or not, about not talking trash or holding a grudge or displaying your wit at someone else's expense--were good things for me to learn.  I didn't always like her, but I did love her.  All these years later, I still do.  

Sleep No More

Last night, we went to see Punchdrunk's Sleep No More, which is, well, hard to describe.  Interstitial.  Yes, that's fair.  It's  genuinely interstitial, in many ways.  It takes place in a building, not on a stage.  The action (and the actors) wander (or stagger or run or stride) from floor to floor (there were 4) and room to room (there were 90), meeting, engaging in actions that are part of a larger, unknowable whole.  The audience, masked in beaked white plastic masks with huge eye-holes, chooses to follow them or just wanders from room to lovingly-dressed room, peeking in drawers, reading books and private letters, brushing aside wet laundry, dabbling their hands, if they like, in bloody bath water, occasionally happening upon a scene or a snippet of action.  Aesthetic, pop-cultural, and literary references abound--to film noir, to Christie mysteries, to 30's decadence, to Aleister Crowley-like ritual magic and speakeasies and Old Master paintings and Hitchcock.  Oh, and to Shakespeare's Scottish Play.

I do not pretend that I caught half what was going on or what they were trying to do.  We were more wanderers than followers (aren't you surprised), and ended up catching the Macbeths consorting after Duncan's murder twice, for instance, but none of the build-up. We watched (I think) the Witches' original seduction of Macbeth (if that was Banquo in the bell-boy's uniform and not the Hotel Manager), and (possibly) Hecate (or Mrs. Danvers) mixing a potion for a pregnant woman who might have been meant as Lady MacDuff.  Lady Macbeth (I think) danced alone in a ballroom, dragging trees around on wheels among the watchers, and laid her head on my shoulder and breathed in my ear for what felt like 5 minutes and was probably less than 60 seconds.  One of the Witches, a willowy chap in white tie and a little goatee, lip-synced to Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?"  Another was an utterly androgynous Asian person in a green satin bias cut gown.  I'm not sure who the third one was--probably the woman in black I had pegged as the third Lady Macbeth, until I found out that there were only two.  Two Macbeths, too.

As you can probably tell, some parts of this worked better for me than others.  I adored the sets.  Every room implied a  (very surreal) short story.  My personal favorites were the state bedroom filled with trunks and oriental rugs and solemn, heavy furniture, and the hotel lobby with the guest book I wrote "Wake Duncan With Thy Knocking" in, because there was a sharpened pencil next to it, and why not? Oh, and the cradle surrounded by dozens of baby sleepers, stuffed with rags like balloons and hung from the ceiling.  And the tailor's shop, with all the sewing machines on the table.  And the boarding-house room with the canopied bed and the wardrobe you had walk through, black dark and hung with silk, to get to the next room.  And both the mazes--the one made of leafless birches, bathed in moonlight and mist, with a stuffed goat in the center, and also the one that was like the ruin of a small and warren-like house, with real rocks to stub your toes on and two mourning statues that might have been, but were not, alive.

I also adored the masks.  Not so much wearing one.  They're plastic, and adjustable, but nothing on earth can make something that basically grinds the nosepieces of your glasses into the corners of your eyes really comfortable to wear for upwards of 2 hours.  But the effect they gave, seeing every action attended by a cloud of ghostly witnesses--of which you yourself were one--was often haunting, especially in the Home Life After Murder and the Macbeth's Disatrous Dinner Party sequences.  And meeting a masked witness while wandering through a corridor or series of rooms that had been empty only a moment ago, was truly spooky.

So those were some of the parts.  Did they add up to a production of Macbeth?  No.  They didn't.  There were clearly a lot of Macbethy ideas brought to bear--about mist, about blood, about decadence and madness and despair and confusion and isolation.  But there was just too much going on to make sense of.  And not a single word.  Not.  One.  Single.  Word.  The scenes were put over through movement, glances, touch, dance, lighting.  I totally got the post-murder scene--where it came from and why they played it the way they did (Macbeth took a bath--a real one, in a real tub, naked, with Lady M. scrubbing his back for all she was worth).  But what was the purpose of the woman in the boarding house, and what was her relationship to the guy who came in through the wardrobe so he could watch her sleep, not to mention the tailor whose till she robbed while he was off buying her flowers?  Was she supposed to add to my knowledge of the state of Scotland under Macbeth?  My understanding of Lady Macbeth's ambitions?  I dunno.  I dunno why almost all the characters were depicted as being stark mad, either, (including the Doctor) or why the entire top floor was kitted out like a mental hospital with rows of bathtubs and a padded cell and an electroconvulsive therapy chair and lots and lots of crucifixes. 

And that's all I got.  Except maybe a few images that will show up in my fiction some day, after I've forgotten where they come from.  And possibly a short story, ditto.  Which isn't a bad result from a night at the theater, is it?  Even if it isn't exactly what I expected to get--maybe especially since that's not what I expected to get.  Don't I keep saying (and writing) that you have to allow a work of Interstitial Art to teach you how to approach it?  Clearly, abandoning artistic expectations is one of those things that's easier said than done.

Macbeth

Very, very, very far behind.  What with Passover and trying to get back into my novel, I've let three (count 'em, three) plays go by unnoted and unsung.  And that will Never Do.  Especially since John Douglas Thomas should go down as one of the more interesting Macbeths, and Annika Boras absolutely the most beautifully chilling Lady M's I've ever seen.

We saw her in Orlando this winter, where I found her lacking in intensity.  Maybe it was the production, or she was having an off-night, as an actor may in live theatre,  In any case, she was plenty intense in Macbeth.  Physically, there's not much to her--a stroke of black satin, tiny white hands, pale blond hair braided tightly to a small head.  But what a voice.  And what a horrified energy she brought to "Come unsex me here" and "My hands are of your color."  Her Lady M. is as tragic as her lord, a woman who throws away her humanity to become a queen, and eventually dies of it.  This is the not the only production I've seen where it's clear that the Macbeths are passionately attached to each other, but it's the only one where you can watch them clinging to each other even while their relationship sinks under the consequences of what they have done.  Right before the guests arrive for what will be the Banquet Scene, they sit side by side at the table, staring hopelessly out at the audience, holding hands like frightened children.  It's clear they love each other, but it's not enough to keep her sane or alive.  And once she's dead, his only tie to life is gone.  I've seldom heard "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" delivered as emotionally, as bitterly, as personally as John Douglas Thompson delivered it.

I had a lot more thoughts, too, about gender and power and ambition and how the really good characters are men who display the virtues associated with both genders.  But if I wait until I've got them formulated clearly enough to put them in this post, I won't get it up before I've seen Sleep No More.  And I need to get this up before I see that, because Sleep No More is Mackers again, only completely different.  And I'm seeing it tomorrow night.  However, you can find a certain amount about what I think about Macbeth himself in the comments to  ellen_kushner  's entry here. 

Jerusalem

I love Mark Rylance immoderately.  Ever since I saw him, yonks ago, as Olivia in the Globe's old-usage Twelfth Night in Chicago, I have been as putty in his hands.  He's an actor who takes chances, who doesn't care whether he sounds or looks ugly or comes across as unsympathetic.  He takes the text between his teeth and shakes it until it's given up everything it has to give, and then he finds just a little bit more.  He totally knocks my socks off, even when I don't particularly like the play.

I've seen him in everything I can that has brought him to America:  Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure in Boston, Boing Boing a few years back in New York, La Bete last November.  With all the reviews I've written of the plays I've seen, I can't believe that I've never written about him before, but so it is.  Possibly I was looking for my socks. (And I didn't like La Bete that much)  In any case, despite Passover madness and looming deadines, I'm making myself write about Jerusalem, because not only did I love Rylance, I loved the play.  And anything I can do to boost the signal to an audience that will actually appreciate a play about appealing monsters and the clash between tradition and progress, magic and mundanity, has got to be a good thing, right?

Jersualem doesn't have much of a plot, but the set-up is this.  Johnny "Rooster" Byron lives, and has lived for 20-some-odd years, in an aluminum trailer in a copse.  He's a gypsy (possibly), a drunk and a druggie (pretty much constantly), a daredevil (historically), an irresponsible husband and father (demonstrably), a Fool, a Trickster, and a Speaker With Giants (structurally, metaphorically, and maybe even literally).  We first meet him staggering out of his trailer on the morning of St. George's day.  The stagger is not just a function of his hangover, which is epic, but is itself a hangover of the days when he earned his living by jumping   his motorbike over lines of trucks and buses at county fairs, and broke every bone in his body multiple times, even (reputedly) coming back from the dead (like St. George).  His back and hip are cocked permanently to one side, giving him a walk that can look like a lurch, a swagger, or a debilitating impairment of his mobility, depending on context.  It's gait as character, and it's brilliantly deployed, and never, ever abused or exploited.

Anyway, Rooster does a handstand in the watertrough, makes himself an eyeopener with milk, a raw egg, and gin, which he throws back, on-stage, and greets the first of the local teenagers who hang around his trailer--for drugs, for booze, for companionship, and for other reasons that become clear as the evening progresses.  Narrative tension is provided by an eviction notice posted by two officious officials at the beginning of the play, the disappearance of a 15 year old girl in fairy wings, and a character's will he/won't he departure for Australia.  But "what happens next?" is the least important point in a play that is essentially a very funny (and incredibly profane) examination of the place and importance of tradition, folk ways, legend, and place in a culture that privileges change, originality, facts, and movement.  It's not against modern culture, mind you, or even truth (although it takes a loosey-goosey attitude towards facts).  In fact, it's fine with mobile phones and emigrating to Australia and sex and drugs and rock and roll, the more the merrier.  It's not much for bureaucracy and laws that allow for the expansion of housing estates through wooded land and don't protect the poor and helpless nearly as well as they think they do.  It is also strongly in favor of storytelling. 

Rooster cycles through many roles in this play:  St. George, the Dragon, Merlin, Jack (doesn't matter which one), Gypsy Davey, John Barleycorn, even Falstaff.  But the one thing he is consistently, drunk or sober, is a storyteller.  It's what the kids who hang with him love in him, even when they're laughing at him.  It's certainly why I love him, despite his casual verbal cruelty, his inability to take responsibility for his actions, his general fecklessness.

The other actors are almost necessarily overshadowed by the giant in their midst. I loved the Professor, who wanders Rooster's copse searching for a dog that has either recently run away or died long ago, seeing old University colleagues in Rooster's troupe of teenagers, quoting great swathes of English poetry in and out of season.  The teenagers are uneven.  I liked Danny Kirrane as  Davey, a plump school-leaver working at a slaughterhouse, not the brightest crayola in the box, but very much himself and content with that, like one of Shakespeare's rustic clowns.  Ginger, a would-be DJ who has a lot more depth and character than he's willing to admit, is well-served by Mackenzie Crook.  The rest of them need to work on their Wiltshire accents and making their characters less colorless.

I can't imagine what a New York audience is going to make of this play.  St. George's day?  Morris dancers?  William Blake?  Giants and gypsies and strange accents, Oh, my?  The language veers from the lyrical to the foul, sometimes in a single sentence.  Anybody who is profoundly offended by the c-word had better stay away, because it's all over the place, mostly applied to men the speaker doesn't like.  Plus, it's 3-and-a-bit hours long.  Several people in our row left at intermission.  But I gotta say that I didn't hear a line I would have cut, or a moment I thought didn't add its bit to the mosaic effect of the whole.  I wasn't bored for a moment, and when it was over, I cried.  It's a play that says things that need saying, and I bet you can get tickets on TDF.

Deathless

This is not a review.  Reviews require the writer to be measured, dispassionate, fair-minded.  I'm not feeling any of those things, so I'm writing a burble, a blurt, a burst of enthusiasm.  Consider youself warned.

I finished Catherynne Valente's Deathless, actually, two days ago.  I'd been reading more and more slowly, so I wouldn't get to the end, because I didn't want it to end.  Not, I hasten to say, because I wanted to stretch out the experience of the Siege of Leningrad--that I could hardly bear, it felt so very vivid and personal, emotionally and physically draining.  But because the experience of reading about the life and loves and deaths of Marya Morevna and the characters around her was so rich and strange and mind-expanding.  This book has things to say about the effect of extreme experience and suffering on individual men and women that all the intrigues and battles and high body-counts of high adventure fantasy sagas do not--or if they do, I can't hear them for the noise and bustle.  Anyway, I made it last as long as I could.  And then I finished it, and couldn't write about it because all I wanted to do was burble, and a burble isn't a review.

And then I thought, well, better burble than silence.  It's not like this is a professional gig or anything.  And you do want to say something.

So.  I loved Deathless (you probably guessed).  I loved it for many reasons, but many of them can be summed up by saying that it's a fairy tale that puts paid to the notion that fairy tales are escapist.  It anatomizes war and love and hunger and loss in this world and the world of legend, and finds them more alike than you'd think.  It is also very funny.  Even Koschei himself, Valente's never-dying, ever-dying villain/romantic lead, has a fine and mordant sense of humor that made me love him almost as much as Marya Morevna did.  Come to think of it, making the unhuman human, uncovering the vulnerable hearts and complex souls of the monstrous, is one of Valente's super-powers.  Her command of metaphor and cadence is another.  I love all her books, but this one, I think, is the one that speaks most directly to the themes and images that are important to me.  I can't wait to see what she does next.

PodCastle!

PodCastle's featured tale this week is my story "The Wizard's Apprentice"

I'm excited about this for many reasons, not the least of which is that this story forms the germ of my current WIP, also called The Wizard's Apprentice.  Someday I must, must, must write a post about turning a short story (and this one is very short indeed, less than 3500 words) into a novel (even a shortish one), and how it's not quite as easy a journey as you think it's going to be when you first hopefully divide the scenes into separate Scrivener files.  About the only thing that hasn't suffered some kind of a sea-change along the way are the names of the hero (Nick Chanticleer) and the Evil Wizard (Zachariah Smallbone).

In the meantime, enjoy.  Peter Wood reads the story, and I love the way he does crabby.  He made me laugh, more than once.

Progress Report

I'm getting there.  12 chapters out of 15 (or possibly 16) drafted.  27,892 words, not counting the ~2000 words that currently indicate the outlines of Chapters 14 and 15 (at the moment, Chapter 13 exists only as a series of largely incoherent notes).  One plot twist inserted today that surprised even me, and the denouement, like distant mountains, looks closer than it probably is.

Can I finish a colorable first draft of this before it's time to dive into pre-Passover prep?

Well, we'll see, won't we?  I'm certainly going to do my level best.

Interfictions Zero: Towards a Critical Theory of Interstitiality

The first essay in the Interstitial Arts Foundation's new on-line crit zine is live and kicking!

It's called "Oscar Wao:  Murdering Machismo," written by Carlos Hernandez, who some of you may remember as the author of Interfictions 2's wonderful "The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria."  When he's not writing kick-ass stories and experimental novels, he is the Deputy Chair of the Department of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY.

Here are the first two paragraphs:

"It wasn't until I remembered my two encounters with the prostitutes of Havana that I understood the nature of fukú in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

"My first encounter happened just a few days into the trip I took to Cuba – legally, through an educational exchange program sponsored in part by Willamette University in January of 1997. Most of the other students thought going to Cuba would be like going to Cancún, only more anarchic and drug-friendly. I was one of the few on the trip with any familial ties to Cuba, and by far I spoke the best Spanish outside of the instructors – and of anyone there the most idiomatic. So I was the expert, the insider: practically a native."

The rest is on the IAF website.

If you're interested in Cuba, Latin American literature, or interstitial art, you have to read this essay.  If you're just interested in a cool story, you have to read this essay.