The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three KATs (for fiction), Anunobys (for essays), or Brunsons (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one KAT, Anunoby, or Brunson indicates a generally positive review.

🏀 Fiction

“Dark Horse” by Sarah Anderson. No KATs. An extremely ill-advised stylistic mashup: A plotline out of the hysterical aughts, a prose style from the icy teens. Anderson appears to think she’s written a character study about OCD and “transmuted grief”, but there are so many outré details –scattered like raisins through a quiche – it’s impossible to take anything at face value. This is representative: “It wasn’t until the third day, as we waited for a bus on an island known for its wild koala population, that he revealed to me that he had been a child star on a popular TV show my mother had been a fan of.” Yet if this is meant to be parodic, it’s totally opaque what’s being poked at, and the anesthetized voice of the narrator lacks even the antiheroic edge of an Otessa Moshfegh protagonist; the story reads as though she is talking to us against her will, which could be interesting – but then why is she constantly telling us jokes?! (“It felt like he was suggesting something drastic and incongruous. Taking our mailman on a cruise. Bringing a cat to a christening.” This is also representative.) Anderson is young; maybe she’ll write a great novel and I’ll eat my words, or maybe James Woods will eviscerate her and she’ll write completely differently from then on. Could happen!

🏀 Weekend Essay

“Should the Classroom Be More Like the Gym?” by Dan Rockmore. No Anunobys. A breathtaking sequence of commonplaces; only a math professor could seriously think that these are, in any way, new ideas. Are they wrong ideas?Not exactly, but Rockmore is using them to excuse A.I. in the classroom in ways that strike me as pretty blithe. He says a teacher should be “drawing out the quiet student, asking the question nobody thought to ask, forging a community of mind and friendship from the struggles of a classroom”, but might as well use A.I. to “do what’s mechanical—generating practice problems, flagging errors, grading the responses that are beyond discussion.” It is hilarious and bizarre that Rockmore apparently forgets that he needs to clarify what he thinks a student should or should not use A.I. for; the ending anecdote, applied to the piece it concludes, certainly sounds like he’s saying the professor can use A.I. but the student better not. In the end, this piece is an object lesson in the professor rambling on for so long he forgets what he was talking about. Don’t see me after class.

🏀 Random Pick

“The Birth of Bangladesh” by Robert Shaplen. (Part two.) One Brunson. There is nobody left writing these voice-of-God treatises on the political situation in one country or another, and mostly that’s probably a good thing – Shaplen displays a lack of humility that is definitely nerve-wracking. With fifty years of hindsight, though, he’s been about two-thirds correct about the future of Bangladesh, which isn’t bad for this sort of thing. He correctly assesses that Mujib won’t last, and the country will descend into factionalism; while he maps things onto a Cold War dynamic that didn’t exactly manifest, the gist is the same. Do you need to read some guy’s detailed account of ‘70s Bangladesh? You definitely do not, and Shaplen’s prose can be excruciatingly dry. But on its own terms, this succeeds.

🏀 Something Extra

I am still thinking through Where Were You?, a very well-calibrated and profoundly odd metatheatrical exploration of 9/11 that blends self-awareness with put-on naïveté in the manner of Nathan Feldman, but instead of humor-from-oddity instead seeks something more clownlike, a very sincere blend of the high-minded and Tao-ish. The treatment of 9/11 is troubling, and while I came away feeling that it was deliberate – that the show is about the falseness of an idea of a deathless tragedy that stands in purely as a symbol – I’ll admit that’s a charitable reading. A number of critics saw this and loved it, but the very short run meant that their blurbs didn’t get main-page treatment; that’s too bad, but the show doesn’t seem hard to remount – so you can say you were there, too.

Also good: The Invention of Love, a very unwieldy slab of Tom Stoppard, led by (I’m Assuming You Know) David Greenspan but featuring a superb ensemble, especially the Talented Mr. Ripley-esque central, doomed duo. I’d definitely have cut the wearisome, never actually funny scenes of professors and reporters bloviating, which clog the first hour and make the show spectacularly annoying to engage with. That it still works is a testament to, well, everything else. Gary Starr’s Classic Penguins is an expert bit of madness; a naked man eliciting feats of bizarre play. It never quite touched the transcendent, for me, in the way I hoped it might, but it was an extremely fun evening. School Girls is a very likeable if rather politically simplistic show, sold by a skilled and very game cast; the sense of humor is, unfortunately, not my own, but I still had a good time, and it’s just the right length.

And a stinker! Jesus Christ, what’s going on at The Shed? End Credits, which they sold full-price tickets to, is really just a remount of a Steve McQueen installation piece, quickly panning down xeroxes of government surveillance documents pertaining to Paul Robeson while audio plays the same documents, but in a different order so there’s no sync. The only interventions, in this case, are that the text is read live by four black-clad chorus members, that the thing’s been trimmed to an hour… and that the audience, instead of walking by in a museum, have to pay and sit there for an hour. There are so many curatorial interventions that would have improved this (run the full six-hour project and have rolling-entry tickets, for one). McQueen didn’t exactly do anything wrong, but I literally could not imagine the audience member who would get anything out of this, in this format.

Sunday Song: