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

“Hidden Life” by Madhuri Vijay. Three KATs. house, hobby, hot. I can’t speak highly enough about this intricate, crackling bildungsroman, which speaks directly to and reconfigures the Henry James-style early modernist short story through a lens more acutely aware of social dynamics around class, gender, age, ability¹ – without a hint of narrative predictability. This is a story to write academic papers about, far too full to ably critique in this spur-of-the-moment style; it somehow transcends the middlebrow effectiveness of almost all non-experimental contemporary literature and finds a way to make the short story form fresh. It’s also an incredibly pleasurable read, in a way that Vijay’s previous story in the magazine wasn’t for me; both stories are about painful discovery, but here the emphasis lands on the latter word. (The many modes of condescending and handling condescension also seems central; every speaking character is seen both condescending and also being condescended to.) It’s also interesting reading this story so soon after Karan Mahajan’s essay on writing about India without living there (Google tells me Vijay lives in Hawaii and has done lots of study of Indian people abroad); I’m not going to presume to speak on that subject, but it feels of-the-now even as this story is otherwise fairly timeless. I haven’t touched on the Theosophy of it all! I haven’t touched on the mother’s miscarriage, or the politics of blood and concealment! So many, many threads.

🏀 Weekend Essay

“When Middle Age Comes Into Focus” by E. Tammy Kim. Two Anunobys. I had no clue Kim, who usually writes thoughtful if sometimes generic legal-issues coverage, could modulate her voice to write something so bubbly and sociable it could run in Teen Vogue for Adults, if such a magazine existed. The inevitability of myopia as we age makes it perhaps the only universal disease, and one without a cure. That’s enough of a hook for a piece this brief, and Kim makes just enough of it – she writes against the panic that some may feel when first confronting the condition, but doesn’t trivialize. Small things do matter – that’s why we need glasses in the first place. Kim makes sure the reader can’t look past the topic.

🏀 Random Pick

“The Beautiful Spoils” (Annals of Crime) by Janet Flanner. (February 22, 1947). One Brunson. Who knew that Flanner basically broke the story that, decades later, would be packaged as unknown history and turned into a dad book and later a dad movie? This is the first third of a piece that, in its next two thirds, addresses the Monument Men in greater detail; I was less familiar with and thus more interested in the machinations of the looting itself. Flanner is particularly interested in Göring’s schemes to nab the best of the art for himself, probably because it shows the petty hypocrisy of his character. Only two years past the liberation of the concentration camps, it’s pretty wild how much relish and even joy Flanner gets from attacking the Germans; she isn’t interested in solemnity. There’s something revealing about this; history makes everything deadly look grave, but in the moment the human capacity to make light of horror, especially when you aren’t directly affected, is pretty much infinite.

🏀 Something Extra

I touched on my feelings on Big Feelings and Birthright when I reviewed Nussbaum’s reviews of those shows, but I’ve caught some other, better theater since last we spoke (all of it closed or sold out): Camping at HERE was extremely well-executed on every level, though we may be approaching the last few years in which presenting your doomed yuri without even a hint of authorial knowingness can be taken seriously. Real Estate at the Brick is its opposite number, a totally deconstructed take on a continuously dissolving queer romance, and still moved and fascinated me – even though Isa Spector is now two-for-two in terms of projects where I think the first fifteen minutes are so fantastic they obviate the rest of the show.

Woyzeck, the new Adult Film production (starring its guru, Ryan Czerwonko) of the Büchner play, has people flocking to a disused factory in outer Ridgewood to sweat together. At first I wasn’t sure if the indie-sleaze-throwback vibe had the oomph to read as something other than an affectation, but the ballsiness of the stagecraft, which never stops throwing out new tricks, and the utter gameness of the cast do heat things up to a point where “immersion” starts sounding less like an annoying sales pitch and more like the next step in making human soup. Bring your own peas.

And for something completely different: I caught the Brandt/Roxander show of American Ballet Theater’s Sylvia, a splash of pure joy and the best whole-evening ballet I’ve ever seen.

Sunday Song: