Monday, April 26
7 p.m.
The Diversity Test: Gender and Literature in Translation
With Lorraine Adams, Alex Epstein, Andrea Levy, and Norman Rush; moderated by Claire Messud [event details]
Tuesday, April 27
7 p.m.
The 2010 PEN Literary Gala
Wednesday, April 28 |
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 10 a.m The Work Before the Work: A Special Program for High School Students With Annecy Báez, Rawi Hage, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, and special guests; moderated by David Dante Troutt [event details]
With Philippe Djian and A.M. Homes [event details]
With Mohsin Hamid, László Krasznahorkai, Andrea Levy, Yiyun Li, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, So? Oksanen, Atiq Rahimi, Salman Rushdie, Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, Patti Smith, Andrzej Stasiuk,and Miguel Syjuco. [event details]
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]]>Too often, a writer dies and, for a moment, their works can be found everywhere as people mourn before the media moves on to the next news item. Though today marks the last day that J.D. Salinger’s letters are on public display at the Morgan Library and Museum, the spate of digital and print resources on this 20th century spokesman of American adolescence will live on. Here is a guide to further experiencing Salinger:
Online:
The real treat is re-reading classic shorts like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (published on January 31, 1948) And “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” (published on April 8, 1950) in their original format, complete with the very traditional advertisements from that era that mark elements of the “phony” society Salinger’s characters struggled against.
Holden Caulfield’s perambulations around New York
With this interactive map from the New York Times, Salinger fans can walk in the footsteps of The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield. Map highlights include the Edmont Hotel, home to his encounter with Sunny the hooker; the lake in Central Park, where he wondered about the ducks in winter; and the clock at the Biltmore, where he waited for his date.
Salinger: The Classical Critical and Personal Portrait, Introduced and edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald
Harper Collins has just reissued 1962’s Salinger: The Classical Critical and Personal Portrait. The collection includes essays by Updike, Joan Didion, Arthur Mizener, Alfred Kazin, Granville Hicks, and Maxwell Geismar, all introduced and edited by the late Henry Anatole Grunwald, former editor of TIME Magazine.
This collection puts the literary legend’s myth into perspective, going back to a time when Salinger was not untouchable to show readers the original critical reception of his work. You’ll see allegations that his stories are too “cute,” that he was too in love with the Glass family, too snobbishly “New Yorker” of a storyteller to be a writer of modernity in all its forms.
Typical of the opposition raised to his work, though expressed with an enjoyable zeal that does permit a bit of praise, is Joan Didion’s piece, “Finally (Fashionably) Spurious” that picks apart Franny and Zooey: “However brilliantly rendered (and it is), however hauntingly right in the rhythm of its dialogue (and it is), however hauntingly right in the rhythm of its dialogues (and it is), Franny and Zooey is finally spurious, and what makes it spurious is Salinger’s tendency to flatter the essential triviliaty within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living. What gives the book its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.” Zing!
Grunwald’s Salinger, commissioned in 1962—before Salinger became a recluse from the public eye (his last published work was to be in 1965)—showed premonitions of his increasing flight from the limelight, and David L. Stevenson, in his critical piece “The Mirror,” saw this separatist impulse in Salinger as his greatest resource: “Salinger’s nonliterary status leaves him, as a serious writer, almost unique as a wholly free agent, unhampered by the commitments of his more dedicated contemporaries to one or another school of critics. One might guess that this is Salinger’s most precious asset. Rather than wishing quarterly significance or ‘greatness’ on him, we can be content to take him for what he is: a beautifully deft, professional performer who gives us a chance to catch quick, half-amused, half-frightened glimpses of ourselves and our contemporaries, as he confronts us with his brilliant mirror image.”
Letters
Letters by JD Salinger at the Morgan Library and Museum
While the exhibitition of Jerome David Salinger’s letters to Michael Mitchell, the commercial artist he commissioned to create the dust jacket for The Catcher in the Rye, closes today, the contents of the letters raise questions that will continue to be pondered in the weeks and months to come. Covering the forty-year period between 1951 and 1953, the letters on display at the Morgan document a time in the writer’s life where he had almost entirely removed himself from the public eye. With his celebrated sharp eye and humorous wit, his letters provide insight into the mind of one of the literary world’s most private men.
While all of the ten letters on display are memorable, perhaps the most remarked-upon in the press was the letter from May 22, 1951, in which Salinger addresses Mitchell with the Holden Caulfieldesque “Dear Buddyroos.” The letter, sent just weeks before The Catcher in the Rye was published, tells of Salinger’s trip to London, where he recounts going out with a Vogue model, being served tea at a performance of Swan Lake, and how “some gin went up my nose” at the Chelsea abode of Silver Screen royalty Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh; “I damn near left by the window,” he joked. Maybe his fear of a recurrence of the gin incident contributed to his withdrawal from society? Gin for thought.
The bulk of the letters chronicle his family life: like Holden, Salinger describes the joy he feels when watching children sleep. And, at least early on, the happiness he feels taking his children around New York City (his daughter, in particular, was delighted to learn that the suite at the Sherry-Netherland in which they stayed had once been used by the Beatles.) Yet as the years go by, the author’s withdrawal becomes more apparent, as he describes “cringing” when the phone rings. He increasingly prefers his “crummy tractor” in New Hampshire to the hubbub of New York.
Are these letters and the slim collection of published works really the last we will hear from Salinger? The Morgan letters provide some fans with hope. While Salinger last published work in 1965, his letters reveal that even into the 1980s, he rose each morning between 6 and 7 AM to write without interruption “unless absolutely necessary or convenient.” One 1966 letter to Mitchell mentions a hoarde of “ten, twelve years’ work” that includes “two particular scripts — books really — that I’ve been hoarding at and picking at for years.” For speculation about what the hell Salinger was writing at such a pace for almost thirty years, The Week’s guess is as good as mine.
Here’s hoping.
]]>“You say I idealize women? Possibly. Who can say. What’s wrong with a woman being idealized a bit now and then?” – Marguerite Duras
“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.” – Virginia Woolf
Answer: a first course of righteousness, an entrée of liberation-via-striptease while standing on chairs with like-minded females, and a finale of homemade soup.
Irina Brook describes her homage to Marguerite Duras’s La Vie Matérielle and Virgina Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as “more of a feast, a gathering of talents, a sense of sharing thoughts, laughter, music, and tears in one’s kitchen, than a classic reading.” In Irina Brook: La Vie Matérielle, quotes from each author’s text resonate as a talented cast of women seamlessly share them with one another while performing domestic tasks, breaking into the occasional song, and yes, laughing.
The audience entering FIAF’s Tinker Auditorium is instantly greeted by the smell of homemade soup. With the lights still up, we come upon the actresses in various stages of preparing a meal in an endearingly cluttered kitchen with various slotted spoons, pots, and pans dangling from the wall around the 1950’s-esque oven. Obie-award winner Winsome Brown is the lanky Virginia Woolf, dressed in a long white dress and modern apron, standing at the stove in a motherly fasion and stirring; former French Vogue editor Joan Juliet Buck (last seen in Julie & Julia) is a dead-ringer for a younger Duras in her black roll-neck scarf and thick, red glasses, sipping wine at a nearby table while chopping onions with vigor (Duras’s greatest passions besides sex and writing were alcohol and cooking). Duras is accompanied in her tasks by actress Nicole Ansari (HBO’s Deadwood), while violinist Yibin Li folds basket upon basket of clothing to stage right and British singer/songwriter Sadie Jemmet (whom the program informs us decided on her career path after hearing Joni Mitchell’s Blue album) strums thoughtfully on her guitar to stage left.
There is a lot going on on this stage— a commentary on how a woman’s work is never done—but throughout, each woman, no matter what her domestic task at hand (and they take turns doing everything), listens to the woman speaking. Some of the great lines cross the stage: the ghost of Shakespeare’s sister is raised from oblivion, Buck as Duras speaks of the history of an old home she now inhabits, worn down by the hands and bodies of the families that called it home before her. Together, the women examine the truth in the statement, “It’s only when they [children] leave the house that they look at it.” There are no children present on stage, but their recorded laughter causes all to pause and muse on what that laughter means to them: what offspring take from their mother’s body, what their existence brings to their lives, and how motherhood has changed them permanently.
Then there is, of course, the gentle ribbing at the male sex (no pun intended), as immortalized in Woolf’s lines: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.” Men are also absent from the stage, and only discussed in relation to how women care for them. Duras, several glasses of red wine into the production, marverlously slurs: “You have to really, really like men to love them.” These affirmations often lead into song, with Li on violin in a female jam-session with Jemmet.
Yet the piece is saved from a Lilith-like atmosphere by the raucous humor that permeates the production- these girls know how to have fun, and the actresses are clearly enjoying themselves on stage. The most memorable moment of the night was when Brown as Virginia Woolf put on “Deshabillez-moi” and began to gyrate her hips to the bawdy French ballad. As she lost herself more and more in the song, Brown began to hoist up her dainty white dress to reveal black men’s socks slouching on her white ankles. Standing on a chair and completely lost in the moment: oblivious to her frumpy socks, apron, and dress, she celebrates her inner sex goddess, tussing up her hair with her hands before sliding them down to her hips. The music is infectious, and soon, all of the actresses join in the fun, dancing around the kitchen with no inhibitions. The last to go is Duras who at first remains still, suspiciously sipping her wine as she looks shiftily from left to right. Eventually she, too, gives in to her body’s urges, though Buck’s humorous portrayal gives the writer moves more spasm-like than sexy as she awkwardly bops along, at one point swapping tops with Ansari and rocking a skull-and-crossbones sweater.
The play closes with all of the women sitting down to dinner, breaking bread, pouring wine, and still laughing, relishing one another’s company. They don’t break as the lights go up, and the audience leaves the play as they entered it, a lucky fly on the wall given an hour’s glimpse into the lives and hearts of these inspired and inspiring women.
Brooks’s play is reaffirming, and best enjoyed with close girlfriends, sisters, or mothers
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It’s appropriate that the festival is ending with film, the medium Duras found later in life and that became an all-consuming passion. It was in the community of her crews that she regained the companionship she had missed since being forced to leave the Communist Party, rekindling the feelings of intense friendship and literary foment of the informal salon she reigned over on the Rue Saint-Benoît in the apartment she shared with Robert Antelme.The festive atmosphere on a Duras set is legendary; she often housed and fed the entire crew and cast in her home in Neauphle, and even when her budgets increased, she still insisted on cooking because she claimed no one else could do it better.
It is this feeling that “no one else can do it better” that led Duras to light out on her own in film. She was unhappy with third-party interpretations of her novels for the screen, and after writing original scripts for an illustrious list of filmmakers that included Alain Resnais and Georges Franju, she decided to launch her own directorial career in 1967. The retrospective’s brochure describes her long and fruitful film career: “Over the next seventeen years, she directed fourteen feature films of her own (as well as numerous shorts), including masterpieces such as NATHALIE GRANGER and INDIA SONG. Exploring the nature and limits of the medium with the same fiercely intelligent, radically experimental approach that makes her writings so singular and important, Duras’s cinema is a crucial component of her life’s work.”
The Durassian themes of the mother, despair, destruction, and love– often with a backdrop of colonialism or the sea– run throughout many of the films listed below. If you have ever read a novel by Duras and been moved by her language, don’t miss this rare opportunity to see her dreamlike films screened in the States.
Mar 12 7:00 PM
DESTROY, SHE SAID / DÉTRUIRE DIT-ELLE
Marguerite Duras
1969, 100 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Catherine Sellers and Michel Lonsdale.
Mar 12 9:15 PM
NATHALIE GRANGER
Marguerite Duras
1972, 85 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Jeanne Moreau, Lucia Bose, and Gérard Depardieu.
Mar 13 4:30 PM
LE NAVIRE NIGHT
Marguerite Duras
1979, 95 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Bulle Ogier, Dominique Sanda, and Mathieu Carrière.
Mar 13 6:30 PM
INDIA SONG
Marguerite Duras
1975, 120 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Delphine Seyrig, Michel Lonsdale, and Mathieu Carrière.
Mar 13 9:00 PM
THE TRUCK / LE CAMION
Marguerite Duras
1977, 80 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Marguerite Duras and Gérard Depardieu.
Mar 14 4:45 PM
CÉSARÉE & L’HOMME ATLANTIQUE
Marguerite Duras
Mar 14 6:15 PM
AGATHA ET LES LECTURES ILLIMITÉES
Marguerite Duras
1981, 90 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Yann Andréa and Bulle Ogier.
Mar 14 8:15 PM
LES ENFANTS
Marguerite Duras
1985, 94 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles.
Mar 15 7:30 PM
CÉSARÉE & L’HOMME ATLANTIQUE
Marguerite Duras
Mar 15 9:15 PM
DESTROY, SHE SAID / DÉTRUIRE DIT-ELLE
Marguerite Duras
1969, 100 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Catherine Sellers and Michel Lonsdale.
Mar 16 7:00 PM
NATHALIE GRANGER
Marguerite Duras
1972, 85 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Jeanne Moreau, Lucia Bose, and Gérard Depardieu.
Mar 16 9:00 PM
LE NAVIRE NIGHT
Marguerite Duras
1979, 95 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Bulle Ogier, Dominique Sanda, and Mathieu Carrière.
Mar 17 7:00 PM
LES ENFANTS
Marguerite Duras
1985, 94 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles.
Mar 17 9:15 PM
INDIA SONG
Marguerite Duras
1975, 120 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Delphine Seyrig, Michel Lonsdale, and Mathieu Carrière.
Mar 18 7:00 PM
THE TRUCK / LE CAMION
Marguerite Duras
1977, 80 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Marguerite Duras and Gérard Depardieu.
Mar 18 9:00 PM
AGATHA ET LES LECTURES ILLIMITÉES
Marguerite Duras
1981, 90 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Yann Andréa and Bulle Ogier.
]]>The lights go up on a man’s shoulder blade and a woman’s delicately curved spine; she runs her hands up that blade and into his hair, grabbing it in her fist before taking his hand in hers, their naked bodies pressed up against a vertical black wall. As the audience looks on, she lazily rolls against the black surface, creating the illusion of an aerial view of a couple in bed.
“Tu n’as rien vu a Hiroshima…”
Director Christine Letailleur’s stage adaptation of Hiroshima mon Amour by Marguerite Duras, which made it’s U.S. stage debut on Thursday night at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, is largely faithful to the style of Resnais’s film, masterfully using light and sound to traverse a universe of memory as a Japanese man and French woman become lovers in Hiroshima, confiding in one another and searching the other’s memories—and bodies–for recognition of the same buried pain.
Valerie Lang is a sensual, languorous “Elle,” while Hiroshi Ota is a perfectly lovesick “Lui.” The chemistry between the two lovers is electric, and indeed, it must be: they spend half of the play caressing one another in the nude.
Their world contracts and expands around them; in moments where they are enraptured with one another, the limit of the light is their entwined bodies. Then there is the intrusion of memory—sudden vertigo on the stage created by tricks of light that shatter the safe cocoon of the bedroom, as when “Elle” describes her time in the cellar in Nevers, imprisoned for consorting with a German soldier during the Occupation. Our aerial view collapses and we come tumbling down the tunnel of memory, all our attention sucked into a single flashlight beam horizontally dissecting the stage, pointed at “Elle’s” face as she her hands search and scratch along the walls of the stage’s perimeter while the hollow sound of slowly-dripping water is blasted in stereo. The sound and light create a vast, horizontal feeling; while the constant motion of the man following “Elle,” holding the flashlight as he circles around her—even stepping between the audience and the woman at times—creates a hunted, enclosed, maddening feel as she recounts going mad herself.
In the ultimate superposition of the past on the present, “Lui” lies on the floor and becomes the dead body of her German lover. “Elle” lays on top of him, telling him how she lay down upon her soldier’s dying body after he was shot, unable to recognize the moment of death because she could not figure out where his body ended and hers began.
In contrast to the personal trauma of “Elle,” illuminated by a singular flashlight beam, the devastation of Hiroshima takes up the whole stage, flooding it with images and light. “Lui” steps out of the vertical dream world of the bedroom and out towards the audience, while aerial views of the bombed-out city are superimposed onto vastness of the stage and over his body. The aerial views become street views and mutilated faces and bodies appear; meanwhile, “Elle” steps out in a white nurse’s uniform as the images swirl around them. Her uniform is the brightest thing on stage; he tells her it was easy to find her in Hiroshima. Seeing the faces of burned victims projected onto her smiling face, it is easy to see why.
The dreamlike, at times nightmarish quality of the staging was an effective alternative to showing a tired flashback. On stage, the past was literally superimposed on the present with the use of a projecter, past “actors” from Elle’s traumas re-appear and play out past scenes in the present: only the body has changed.
While I loved Resnais’s film, the choices he made seemed to devote equal time to, indeed almost to equate, the personal trauma of “Elle” to the collective trauma of the H-Bomb, which indeed, it can be argued, is a concern with Duras’s screenplay. Letailleur’s stage version presents “Elle’s” personal traumas as claustrophobically terrifying, yet the sheer vastness, the dizzying lights, the multiple images bombarding the viewer of Hiroshima suggest the sizable difference in scale between the collective horror of the H-Bomb (which “Elle” announces in the opening scene that she has a stake in- she “saw” it all at the museum) to the intensely private pain of “Elle’s” lost love. Yet while the traumas were on different scales, they shared visual points of entry: the violent scene of “Elle’s” hair being shorn off by a fellow Frenchman as he sings the Marseillese echoed the repeatedly-projected image of a beautiful young hibakusha, looking in the mirror with horror as clumps of her own hair come out in her hands.
Perhaps Letailleur, in her Director’s note, describes her vision of the relationship between public and private memory the best: “Remembering is a fundamental and courageous act that is vital to the creation of awareness and of a sense of belonging to the world’s history…individual memory is a necessary act that contributes to the making of the collective memory.”
Hiroshima mon Amour is playing through Saturday, March 6, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of the “In the Words of Duras” festival.
]]>Astrid Bas: Diptych, The Lover and La Musica Deuxième, faithfully takes some of the most memorable passages of Duras on love, desire, and her youth from The Lover (1984) and pairs it with her play La Musica Deuxième (1985), a piece exploring the end of love as a soon-to-be divorced couple takes leave of one another. Taking the latter play’s title quite literally, Bas’s presentation, performed at FIAF’s Le Skyroom this past Friday and Saturday night, featured two actors (Bas and Daniel Pettrow) whose words are sometimes joined, often interrupted, and whose silences are startlingly, then soaringly, filled with the sound of a violin, played on stage by Ami Flammer, who enters and exits the stage at critical emotional points in both pieces.
The Lover and La Musica Deuxième both feature a man longing for a woman with physical pain, leading in one case to impotence and in the other, to thoughts of murder— he describes their relationship as “l’enfer.” Both feature a female French lead as object of desire, outwardly detached from her relationship and about to leave, recording—or reciting—her reactions to these doomed affairs with foreign men (one Chinese, one American). Yet it is this effort to convey detachment that causes the audience to feel detached as well: detached from the characters on stage whose beautiful words fall flat.
For The Lover, Bas is a barefoot young Duras already on stage at lights up. Staring straight ahead, she recites without emotion the powerful lines describing herself at 15 ½, crossing the Mekong, entering the limousine of her future lover and knowing her life will never be the same. The English translation of Duras’s play is projected in white type on the wall behind her, while a red spotlight strikes the actress’s angular face to the right and a blue light is focused at her left. For thirty minutes, she stands still and emotionlessly recites Duras’s lines, eyes fixedly ahead, only shifting the angle or standing at a different point in the stage to let the light hit her thin body at a new angle , the signal she’ll be starting up on a new excerpt from the novel. Red light for scenes of passion, blue light for descriptions of sadness and death. Diptych. Red Blue. Sex. Death and departing.
Flammer periodically joins Bas on stage to play a mournful violin piece after the reminiscence of a tender love scene, or after the narrator describes hearing of the death of her younger brother via telegram. Flammer’s exquisite talent for the violin overcomes the awkwardness of his cues as he sat on stage while Bas’s character stood staring into nothing, lost in her sad memories: perhaps the French don’t have the slang equivalent of “playing the world’s saddest song on the smallest violin.”
Bas puts on a pair of silver shoes and play two has begun. Pettrow hurries on stage to place his coat over Bas’s small shoulders and then walks as far away as possible, talking across the stage to her in English. She responds in French, with the English translations of her replies is broadcast in white type over their heads like speech bubbles in a comic strip. As the discussion becomes more heated—he reveals he almost killed her when she returned from Paris after meeting someone, she confesses that she almost took her own life when he threatened divorce—their faces, carefully controlled at the beginning, become more animated. They are not reciting now, but acting, and the double-effect of hearing two language and reading one on a wall (the translation weirdly broadcasting her ‘thoughts’ faster than she can speak them, while leaving his a mystery) creates a sense of not unpleasant dislocation, focusing the viewer/reader on the nuances of Duras’s language. In a powerful final turn, the woman exits and the man is left alone on stage. He turns to the sound of the violin and makes eye contact with the violinist—recognizing that the moment he just shared with his former wife is already just a memory.
While the strict, highly stylized stage directions placed the words of Duras at the forefront of the performance, they did so to the point of rigidity. Aside from a few clever tricks of staging in the second play, the two pieces would be more enjoyable as a concert or audio recording—or—dare I say it—a novel.
To catch more Duras at a New York City theater near you, check out these plays that are in town as part of the “In the Words of Duras” Festival (February-March 2010)
Christine Letailleur Hiroshima mon amour
Thursday–Sunday, March 4–6 at 7:30pm
Baryshnikov Arts Center
Directed by Christine Letailleur. With Valérie Lang, Hiroshi Ota, and Pier Lamandé.
Hiroshima mon amour tells the tale of the final 24 hours of a passionate, adulterous liaison between a French actress and a Japanese architect.
Irina Brook La Vie Matérielle
Friday, March 5, 2010 at 7pm
Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 7pm
Tinker Auditorium
“You say I idealize women? Possibly. Who can say. What’s wrong with a woman being idealized a bit now and then?” – Marguerite Duras
Celebrated Parisian stage director Irina Brook presents a vivid interpretation of Marguerite Duras’s collection of essays on daily life, La Vie Matérielle, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. The production features a diverse ensemble of female performers including Nicole Ansari (HBO’s Deadwood, West End & Broadway productions of Tom Stoppard’s Rock and Roll, Théâtre du Soleil), Obie-award winning actress, director, and writer Winsome Brown, novelist and former editor of French Vogue Joan Juliet Buck who was last seen in the film Julie and Julia, famed British folk-rock diva Sadie Jemmett, and concert violin soloist Yibin Li.
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Wednesday night marked the opening of “In the Words of Duras,” a month-long festival of film, theatre, and readings sponsored by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States in partnership with Anthology Film Archives, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the French Institute Alliance Française.
In the high-ceilinged, second floor ballroom of the Payne Whitney House, now home to the Cultural Service of the French Embassy, New York-based American actress Kathleen Chalfant joined with French stage and movie actor William Nadylam to read English translations from some of Duras’s most haunting passages. Surrounded by the photographs of Duras taken by Hélène Bamberger (photos of the author’s bedroom and scattered notebooks, Duras in the kitchen, the haunting beaches of Trouville with a tiny figure on the horizon, Duras in a graveyard, and, more mundanely but no less elegant, Duras in the car) the evening opened with Chalfant—whose delicate cheekbones and slim stature are reminiscent of a younger Duras—reading from “Boundless Childhood,” an excerpt from Wartime Writings (1943-49) in which the author reminisces about her mother.
From one extreme of motherhood to another, Nadylam performed with feeling painful passages from “The Horror of Such Love” (also from Wartime Writings (1943-49), in which Duras speaks with the nun who delivered her stillborn baby and discovers its body has been burned before she could ever lay eyes on him. As the awful conversation continues, we find this same nun has suffocated another woman’s healthy child because he was a dwarf: “I baptized him and I sent him straight there [to Heaven],” the nun claims proudly. Later, Duras in her hospital bed is chastised by the head nun for the orange that was given to her by a caretaker, as the nourishing fruit was only intended for mothers who actually gave birth, and, the nun explains, can’t be wasted on non-mothers during a time of war.
Chalfant followed with Duras’ observations about the dynamics of the relationship of a man and a woman at a bar in “The English Couple,” from Emily L (1987). Duras can draw a cruel, brutally honest portrait of humanity, and her exercise into the lives of strangers was no exception.
The readings closed with excerpts from “The Sea Wall,” a joyous passage of young lovers from Wartime Writings (1943-1949) in which Nadylam read the part of the older admirer, begging for a peek at his young love’s body in the bath. Chalfant was the teenage Duras, playfully telling her lover if he likes her body now, he should see her when she is older and even more beautiful.
Hélène Bamberger’s photographic exhibit did just that. In the series of photographs that she took of Duras and her surroundings during the summers that they spent together in Trouville, Normandy, from 1980 to 1994, one sees an elderly woman with the clinging energy and wry smile of youth, calling to mind the famous opening lines of her Prix-Goncourt-winning novel, The Lover:
One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place, a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said: “I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”
Bamberger’s “Marguerite Duras et Yann Andrea, Les Roches Noires (1990)” recalled this passage. 76-year-old Duras, outdoors, smiles up into Yann’s face as he peers at her from behind a window. Atop her head is a gentleman’s fedora, part of the getup that attracted another lover over 50 years prior, when she was a fifteen-year-old aboard a ferry sliding across the Mekong. In the photograph, Andrea looks at her with devotion, a paper pinwheel flower in a vase a playful offering of love in the windowsill.
It is now Marguerite who is the older, more experienced lover, her “ravaged” face attracting youth for the beauty of its lines, which capture the many years of memories she has chronicled in countless plays and screenplays, novels, and journals.
“Marguerite Duras par Hélène Bamberger” is on exhibit at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy through March 18th.
]]>I’ll admit it. I was seduced by the blatantly self-promoting title and the sexy landscape on its sweet cover, which smacks of literary promise. The author, Justin Taylor, is young, it’s his first published short story collection (though his bio tells us he’s at work on his first novel in Brooklyn) and reviewers seem to like the guy.
So why can’t I like Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever? Taylor’s staccato stories brim with characters that lust after the forbidden: there are adolescent tales of kissing cousins, heterosexual best friends who moonlight as homosexuals while also doing each other, and tales of pining for thine brother’s girlfriend. Taylor’s muses are goth chicks with “missile tits” and black band t-shirts, and soon the one after the other tales of teenage woe begin to feel uncomfortably like reliving someone else’s high school experiences.
On top of the subject matter, there’s a smart, “I’m literary style,” a calling of attention to the creator as in a Tarantino film, but to far less effect. Case in point: The narrator of “Judge” gives us a rich, paragraph-long description of his friend’s uncle, the story’s namesake, and then breaks out of the narrative to make the third wall crumble like a Jenga tower: “He ran a sideline business selling illegal fireworks, was the kind of man who’d swerve toward an animal in the road, and generally speaking he needed nothing so badly in this world as to be run through with a great hot knife. Judge has nothing to do with this story. He wasn’t even home…” The characters proceed to steal beer from Judge’s fridge and go about their way, the reader’s tingly anticipation for naught.
In “Weekend Away,” the narrator opens with a story of a bad break up with a certain Steven, proceeds to sleep with a hitchhiker, and then, on page 9 of 17, we suddenly hear of a third male in her life: “This is the first time I’m mentioning Jack. I know that. He’s the guy I’ve been seeing since a few months after Steven left. He’s a strong, tender lover and a good man. I have this problem whenever he’s not around I forget he exists…” When a narrator has to defensively interject the story to say, “I did this on purpose” one has to wonder if it’s not a bit heavy-handed. Speaking of which: “I stake out a back corner with Heart of Darkness and my new Walkman…I thumb through the wavelengths…searching for Rumsfeld. And this also, said Marlow suddenly, has been one of the dark places of the earth. I guess the juxtaposition is heavy-handed, but whatever.” A bit.
Taylor is at his best when he leaves the arena of adolescent lust and goes for more—taking on everything from angels to the apocalypse with an appealingly dark humor. In “Tetris,” the protagonist is watching the “snow” fall in the video game as he watches a great fireball approaching his house. It may be the apocalypse, but his girlfriend looks so beautiful while asleep that he doesn’t dare wake her.
In “The Jealousy of Angels,” the narrator looks on as angels Gabriel and Michael drain his girlfriend’s soul in her sleep, taking it up to heaven in a sort of soul-sucking “wet/dry vac.” Satan, of course, sticks around with our narrator for a six-pack of Harp and some TV.
Taylor’s collection of dark, sometimes-humorous stories is not for the squeamish (think cat piss in a pool, toe-sucking, and creative belt usage). While Jackson’s work doesn’t live up to its ballsy title, his prose shows flashes of promise when he creatively imagines the supernatural before dipping back into his comfort zone of pining, self-aware adolescents in black.
]]>The show opens with a sultry songstress who reaches into her black bra and pulls out…spaghetti.
Yes, cooked spaghetti. This is the first of many surprises in Aja Nisenson’s one-woman show, Piccola Cosi, performed at the Triad Theatre last Wednesday night.
Piccola Cosi is the semi-autobiographical story of the 21-year-old virginal daughter of a podiatrist, who takes her sensible shoes and her opera-trained voice to Bologna to sing jazz . While Aja wasn’t looking for love, the sea of suitors that greet her with kissy lips, make-her-blush compliments, and bizarre background stories quickly become the Italian bread-and-butter of the show, allowing the talented actress to impersonate a spate of quirky Italian men as they try to oogle, smoke, and grope their way to her heart (in one memorable scene, she manages to be both groper and gropee- quite a climax!)
Beneath the humor and spot-on impressions in fluent Italian, Nisenson credibly conveys the excitement of being young and abroad, finding that in another language, fear and inhibitions melt away, empowering her to brazen feats she wouldn’t have attempted in the States. She’ll walk straight up to club proprietors and ask to sing, create words to jazz standards involving toilet paper and shopping lists (her audience can’t understand English, anyway!) and find herself in a piazza with an Italian celebrity who is pleading with her to get into his car…
While Nisenson’s ability to go between languages and genders at a dizzying pace would have been enough to fill a show, she upped the ante by connecting the vignettes through skillful renditions of jazz standards. Backed by a three-piece band of piano, drums, and upright bass, the songs are initially self-contained segments, showing her character’s increase in confidence as she books more and more gigs. In a brilliant move, the songs themselves became anthems for her true feelings, allowing the actress to run to the microphone in the midst of a particularly awkward or heated situation that called for a jazz number and, relevant lyrics over, return to the couch/bed/dog-poop filled Italian street where the primary action was taking place. Case in point: “You Give Me Fever” can describe a first encounter with a mysterious, confident man blowing smoke rings at you, or a reaction to a heroin addict who’s just told you he wants to have your bambini.
While one-person shows of this length often run the risk of turning into long-winded monologue, the many gale-force winds that Nisenson brings to the stage: Italian and English, male and female, sultry and ridiculous—make for a non-stop performance of laughs.
Commentaries on the cultural divide between Italian men and American women have been done before, but they’ve never gotten the Nisenson treatment. It’s the novelty of her pairing of humorous bilingual impressions with serious confessions, songs, and just a dash of potty humor that make Nisenson’s portrait of a young woman abroad as unique as a bra stuffed with spaghetti.
]]>“Black Sun” is a documentary- if it can be called a documentary- about the experiences of painter, filmmaker, and writer Hugues de Montalembert, who was attacked and blinded on his way home to his apartment in New York City in 1978. With humor, beauty, and an original score that perfectly sets off Montalembert’s narration, the film immerses the viewer in the mind of a blind man seeing the world in new, startling ways.
The film’s premise presents a particular quandary: how do you convey the experience of blindness through cinema, a visual medium? In an interview with GreenCine, Montalembert called “Black Sun” “a Ping Pong game played between somebody who talks [Montalembert] and somebody who visualizes what he’s talking about [filmmaker Gary Tarn].” On Thursday, January 28th, FIAF hosted an evening with Montalembert and Tarn, where the two discussed their unconventional partnership, born of a cold call between a filmmaker who had never made a film and a blind, world-traveling artist/author with a unique worldview.
Tarn’s unconventional take on the documentary sets off Montalembert’s narration with images reminiscent of a W.G. Sebald novel: series of eyes, run-down abodes, and cityscapes where the narrator has travelled abound, and are often seen through a blurred or partially-obstructed lens. Yet none of the images are literally taken from the story, and often, the narration and images diverge, creating a sense of dislocation for the viewer that mirrors Montalembert’s disorienting experience as a newly-blind man traveling the world, forced to take in his surroundings in new ways. This has the dual effect of bringing the music and words to the fore while creating ample opportunity for visual puns and layered storytelling. In the GreenCine interview, Montalembert said the film was based “on the counterpoint between the words, images and music.”
A particularly poignant synergy between lens and story came when Montalembert discussed how his blindness caused a break with many of his friends. The camera, recording the approach of passersby on a busy New York street, suddenly blurs half of the scene: as each face looms nearer, it grow indistinct and alien. This bifurcated vision was the demarcation of life before and after the attack, the erosion of familiar faces until eventually, all recognizable elements of the world are effaced.
Yet Montalembert also recognized the flip side to his situation: “the fact that you are not seen is liberating for many people,” he says, as a dark-skinned man with startling white blotches all over his face stares out at the camera from behind a New York City newsstand.
For all its seriousness, the film was not without humor, particularly when describing society’s reaction to blindness. Montalembert recounted how, when first in the hospital, its personnel would confide in him “the most intimate details of their life.” He compared the experience to Catholic confession, when the faithful divulge their sins to a man behind a screen, and to couples who only fight in their cars: with eye contact removed, the barriers to speech come crashing down. Montalembert also noted that friends who were normally jealously protective of their wives would feel perfectly comfortable having him stay overnight in their home. He attributed this lack of suspicion to the persistence of the Oedipus myth; after all, the prince cut off not his balls, but his eyes, after sleeping with his mother. (In the question and answer session following the screening, a friend of the author’s who identified himself as Lorenzo said that after seeing the film, he wouldn’t dare leave his wife alone with Montalembert for a week. The artist responded: “Knowing a little bit your wife, you would be quite right!”
Just as a film cannot be comprised only of darkness, neither, apparently, could Montalembert’s mind: his brain began automatically producing images all the time. “I was making films in my head,” he said. Explaining the desire that caused him to travel alone to Bali one year after his accident, Montalembert said: “The stronger the visual surrounding, the more your brain will catch something.” For this portion of the film, Tarn shows the people and streets in psychadelic reds and yellows, as if we are seeing Bali through an infrared lens measuring the warmth of the people Montalembert describes meeting without having “seen.”
In a poignant commentary on what can and cannot be seen, Montalembert described a discussion he had with a Cambodian cab driver in Paris. When the driver asked if his blindness was curable and was told “no,” he expressed compassion for his passenger. Montalembert tells him not to be sorry, “There are people much more wounded than me, and they [society] don’t see [anything], they don’t receive compassion.”
The cab driver replied that he understood all to well: his wife and children were killed in front of him in Cambodia, leaving him with “a huge wound that no one can see.”
Montalembert believes that most people use their eyes to “not bump into things,” while an artist has vision; it is this vision to which the film aspires; to heighten awareness of life not as a series of obstacles through which to navigate, but a strange sequenc of experiences meant to be appreciated in all their complexity.
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