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

“Lost Child” by Joyce Carol Oates. Two KATs. I’m currently in the middle of Oates’ epic What I Lived For, which I’m finding a bit unbearable – perhaps her declamatory style is best suited for short stories, or perhaps I just need to give the novel more time. In either case, this is an excellent tale of abandonment and (in a sense) recovery, elegantly structured so that the narrator and their ‘present moment’ is hinted at before snapping into focus; it’s both a metanarrative experiment and an eerie, conventionally satisfying tale of trauma. There is something elemental about it, emerging as it did from an image. It is closer to a ‘stock’ JCO story than her last few efforts for the magazine (the rather generic title doesn’t help) but it’s slipperier than it first appears; it explores the storytelling instinct, and perhaps what draws Oates to these tales. She is both the lost child and the friend; she is, in either case, the object of the dream and not its maker.

🏀 Weekend Essay

“On Not Being a Homeowner” by Anna Holmes. Two Anunobys. It’s tricky to thread the needle, when writing an essay about one’s own lack of family money, to not seem jealous or deeply angry. So Holmes, in an interesting move, decides not to try; much of this essay is straightforward resentment of other writers with generational wealth. Much of her lack of resources is due to racism; some of it is just luck – if your family is “lower-middle-class”, you don’t get a safety net. Holmes writes about this in such a binary way that one winces a bit – there are as many complicated money situations as there are people; also, isn’t it better that people talk honestly about the money they are or aren’t spending than shield you from it? One friend “regularly moans about money” despite being obviously rich; that is bad behavior on their part, but I wonder why Holmes says it makes her “want to scream”, then adds only one incident of actually pushing back – in which the point is “graciously” conceded. I do wonder if part of Holmes would rather feel this displaced resentment than actually push her friends to be more class-conscious. Still, the piece is sort of a self-portrait, and if Holmes doesn’t always come across well, she comes across quite fully in a very brief essay. The ending, with its “fantasy of a secure future”, brought tears to my eyes. Holmes’ prose is spare, yet it furnishes the full home.

🏀 Random Pick

“This and That” by Marion Miller. (September 26, 1953). Two Brunsons. Miller has mostly vanished from the record – this delightful blog post is one of her few traces – and that’s a shame, because while this is basically just a list of things one might buy on Madison Avenue, Miller’s language is so peppy and sweet that photographs aren’t even missed – their absence turns this into a series of midcentury prose poems. For example: “A dove-gray gondola of velours comes down in front in a widow’s peak, and has a miniature rudder astern. The tiny double brim of a rounded boat in black-and-white tweed is bound with black wool braid.” Say that five times fast, and rejoice.

🏀 Something Extra

A number of very different new takes on Chekov are running simultaneously, for whatever reason. I caught the perversely uninspired Real Ivanov at the (rented) Classic Theater Company stage, a figuratively and literally beige staging which emphasized just how miraculous the sterling New American version of the show, earlier this year, really was. The very luxe Cherry Orchard at the Armory succeeds dramatically despite almost every scene prompting nitpicks; the director’s transmutation of Chekov’s words is blunt, even thudding, but retains enough propulsion and complexity of characterization to allow the very skilled actors to carry the thing across. Dirty Bird, a lightly contemporized Seagull with an absolutely masterful ensemble cast, was the most successful of the three. The script had its bumps, and performed with anything less than extreme commitment would surely seem overwrought, but the cast – many of whom were familiar from Adult Film shows – found a devious and full-force current of energy and rode it, enveloping the room. I also caught Maids after Genet, the latest from Adult Film themselves, who grow more and more central to Brooklyn theater with every gritty hit. Here I wished for a bit more dynamic range and humor; still, the seedy, sweaty environment was an excellent stage for the show’s madness to manifest.

Oh, and then I also walked with forty buffalo puppets for three hours as they paraded across Brooklyn in Return of the Buffalo; the immersive magic conjured out of this relatively simple premise was pretty remarkable, and the scope and scale of high-level directing and puppeteering required is hard to fathom. Yet the “spectacle” was largely about glances, small movements, and small moments; there was hardly any bombast, and no screens at all. Remarkable stuff.

Sunday Song: