What Emily Dickinson was talking about, of course, was the capability of the poem towards dynamism–a perennial unsettling, a moving forth between meaning and non-meaning, from poem to poem, and within a poem from line to line, image to image. I think Emily Dickinson would very much have appreciated the surface of a Hans Hofmann painting in which classical perspective is abandoned (and hence, to a degree, linear thought and narrative) in favor of what Hofmann called “push-pull perspective.” The story of the painting–and most all of Hofmann’s paintings had specific and sometimes narrative titles (never a Rothkean “Orange and Blue”)–found itself moving through the various elements, never quite in an “order” but rather in an experience of the canvas as a whole.

We experience life like this and sometimes poetry, too.

I was in Saint Catherines, Ontario last week visiting my cousin. On our tour of this old Canadian city we came across a nineteenth century church marked with a historical plaque telling the story of Harriet Tubman’s years there. Coming from Oberlin, Ohio, I thought I knew a great deal about the Underground Railroad. What I didn’t know, hadn’t known, is that Harriet Tubman’s years of activism spanned decades and she died well into the 20th Century, having lived nearly fifty years after the end of enslavement. Though her story is more or less essentialized into the rescue missions into the South, during the Civil War she worked as a scout and a spy, later leading a military expedition. After the war was over she became a Suffrage activist and even did a Rosa Parks turn on a train.

When we lock ourselves into singular understanding or interpretation we lose all of our chances at actual knowledge.

I was teaching a yoga class the day before I left for my 20-year High School reunion. In the class we were thinking about the nature of the self. What (or who) do we mean when we say “I”? I thought to myself how strange it would be to go home after twenty years–after all, I had changed so much. Of course I soon realized that much of my anxiety stemmed from the fact that I hadn’t changed at all. But how could both of these things be true?

The reunion wasn’t anything like I thought it would be. The people I had been friends with all those years ago I still liked very much. As in high school, I missed talking to many people I thought were very interesting. One classmate had come in a long turquoise dress with turquoise-painted fingernails and toenails to match. I wanted to talk to her all night! The real charm for me was the chance to talk with people I hadn’t actually known well in school, feeling new and strong connections. In that sense, the reunion wasn’t a tying together of lose ends, but rather another door forward into new possibilities and new friendships.

The “self”–and so by extension what we call the “lyric I”–is a dynamic thing, ever-changing as a Hoffman canvas, not fixed like a photograph. In the self there is something that is constant and there are a million shifting things. These all exist at once. In poems, as in the friendships I made at the reunion, there are places you thought were finished and closed where suddenly something new grows.

Of course, yes, it makes writing poetry impossible, because you don’t know, will never know, how a line ends, how a poem can finish, how music completes itself. Like Tubman’s chronic hypersomnia and visions–perhaps physiologically connected to her childhood head trauma, but thought by Tubman herself to be of divine providence–a poem like Dickinson’s or like yours or mine can only hope to reach out in the dark, to deny an ending, to wish or wonder.

Chabon’s vision of childhood is equal parts wonder and terror:

People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

It’s hard not to draw your own childhood map as you read these sentences, and the threats that seemed to loom so large at the time – that “mean kid with air rifle” — now look as small as the houses in which we grew up.  Chabon’s point is that children who are allowed the freedom to explore their world instinctively understand narratives of terror and triumph, while children who live in the shadow of parental anxiety risk losing an important part of their creative imagination:

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

It’s a valid question, but I can’t escape the feeling that it reflects a particularly American idealization of childhood.  Growing up slowly is a privilege of wealth, and few children throughout human history have enjoyed a childhood without the privations of hunger, war, or grinding poverty.  Wordsworth, who mined memories of his childhood in England’s Lake District as the “fair seed-time” of his poetic imagination, laid the groundwork for our modern image of childhood, but even he acknowledged that he was “much favoured in my birthplace.”  What a stroke of luck to be born among the lakes, where every walk inspired poetry in his soul.  But what’s missing in Wordsworth’s memory of childhood is any reference to class: while young William was out rambling the dales, only a few miles away boys as young as eight were being set to work in the factories of the new industrial age.

Fears of a dangerous world are a privilege of secure, healthy families.  (My daughter loved reading books about plucky orphans; sometimes we had to call her three times for dinner.)  And even in America, this land of fortunate sons, the maps of childhood have their unmarked dangers.  I called mine home.   Sadly, for many children, that’s where the real tygers lie in wait: the neighborhood bully is the least of their worries.  So what does that do to your map?  Is that “sailing off into the unknown” exploration or escape?

Maybe the real wilderness here is memory.  Can we, as adults, really see the maps that guided our wandering?  Do we have any access to childhood except as an act of imagination, a self-validating narrative we’ve whispered to ourselves over the years?  Lately, American publishers have realized that there’s money to be made in trauma memoirs, so we have no shortage of accounts of miserable childhoods.  We’ve learned to question those memories in the past few years, as it’s become clear that some memoirists won’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.  But that may not always be an act of cynical opportunism as much as the self-justifying nature of memory:  we repress, we revise, we move the points of pain and danger on the map to affirm the adult selves we’ve built upon the ruins.  Is the same true, I can’t help wondering, of happy childhoods?

One reason that we imagine our children in danger when we send them out alone is because our own childhoods are also acts of imagination.  In this respect, the way Americans think about childhood is a bit like the way we travel.  We want adventure, but safely, safely.  When you go to New Orleans, where I grew up, the tourist hotels hand you a map, unfold it on the counter, and draw a box around the French Quarter in bright red pen to show you where it’s safe to walk.  Beyond, there be dragons.  That’s how we draw the maps of childhood now, and if those red boxes of safety have gotten smaller, it’s also become clear that they were fictions all along, with little real resemblance to the landscape we inhabit.  (In New Orleans, the muggers know where the tourists are, and they don’t pay much attention to lines on a map.)

Children read about childhood, and the maps those stories draw for them get laid over their own in complex ways.  When I first arrived in Devon, I was surprised at how familiar the landscape looked, with its quaint villages and thatched roofs, because it was the landscape of so many Victorian children’s stories.  And yet, those stories bore no clear relationship to the real map of my childhood.  That was a map of survival.  I’m not really arguing with Chabon here:  he may be right that all children are instinctively adventurers, and he’s certainly right that limiting their exploration of the world in the name of safety threatens their creative imagination.  But let’s be clear: the maps we draw for our children are not the maps that guide their lives.  They draw their own maps, but it’s a mistake to confuse them with the nostalgic – or anguished — images produced by adult memory.  Childhood is a foreign country to us.  We once knew its landmarks, but they’ve grown wild in our imaginations, so that the “adventures” we remember are now just stories we tell.  Adventure is what we call it when we show the slides.  The natives just call it life.

Novels aren’t just sources of solitary cogitation. They are social objects, and we use them to brandish our identities, mark our allegiances and broker our relationships. They can provoke passions as strongly as politics. Thanks to the intimate connection between story and reader, they impact upon us very personally, and can drive otherwise undemonstrative folk to feel they have a right – nay duty – to confront complete strangers with their zeal, and have thus been responsible for some of the most unexpected human encounters I’ve had.

Quotation of the morning from the Guardian Books Blog (via Shelf Awareness).

“Is it any wonder that literary criticism is on the ropes?” The New Haven Review talks about choosing which books to give to Goodwill.

Some awful library books that wouldn’t be so hard to give up.

“I think I start with one idea. In Netherland, it was cricket in New York. Then there is an accumulation of sentences, and often just single words. Words that interest me. And I sort of build it up like a poem. Then you see what you’ve got, what patterns have emerged, and you see what meaning has been generated by your notes. As opposed to starting off with some theory of everything and trying to cram it into a book,” says Joseph O’Neill in an interview with The Elegant Variation.

Just found this this weekend: Spencer Finch’s interpretation of the word “pistachio” using the colors Nabokov, a famous synesthete, saw for each letter.

Grand Display of Fireworks - Brooklyn Bridge Opening Night - May 24, 1883

Reading Hugh Campbell’s La Dynamite in my high school french class — a story about two workers driving a truck full of TNT across a treacherous landscape — I learned something which has always stayed with me.  If a question ever begins “Pourquoi…” — without needing to know what has just happened — however lost you may feel in conjugation, vocabulary, or even the question itself — the answer will always be one of two things:

A)  Johnny a trop peur.
(Johnny has too much fear.)

or

B)  Une explosion est toujours possible.
(An explosion is always possible.)

Not only was this true for 90% of La Dynamite pop quizzes, but I often think of it when at the crux of some existential not knowing. Stumped for an answer to life’s reasons and underpinnings — knowing I can never fully understand it all — I find that I do have an answer. “Parce qu’ une explosion est toujours possible” — a humorous and somber solace. (With poor Johnny and his too-much fear loping close behind.)

Happy July, everyone.  I hope some of your toujours explosions were of the beautiful kind — feux d’artifice in sky, or art, or poems.

Which is to say, summer is a good time for looking up and for laying down — the activity of two of my favorite poems by Tomas Tranströmer –

Launching up into the branches in “Breathing Space July” (Robert Bly translation):

The man who lies on his back under huge trees
is also up in them. He branches out into thousands of tiny branches.
He sways back and forth,
he sits in a catapult chair that hurtles forward in slow motion.

And then landing, warmed in the poem “Summer Grass” (also translated by Bly in Tranströmer’s collection The Half-Finished Heaven):

But summer, at last.

A great airport — the control tower leads down
load after load with chilled
people from space.

Grass and flowers — we are landing.
The grass has a green foreman.
I go and check in.

Yes!

In Sei Shonagon’s Makura No Soshi (Pillow Book) featuring her lists, verse, and commentary, she writes:

Summer is best at night. That goes without saying when there is a full moon.  But when fireflies flit here and there in a dark sky, that too is wonderful. It is even wonderful when it is raining.

(Nature Description, from Lists, Section 1)

For Shonagon, summer explodes with full moon, the cool light of fireflies, and rain — all things sky. (See also her lists for: Winds, Surprising and Distressing Things, Things That Fall from the Sky, Elegant Things, Things That Give a Clean Feeling, Things That Appear to Disadvantage When Painted, and Things That Appear to Advantage When Painted — including “an unspeakably hot summer scene.”)

From my own running list –

Things That Must Explode

The peony (with its attendant pyrotechnician ants)
A wild strawberry (How can something so small fill the mouth so completely?)
A kiss, modern. (”Fireworks had no other purpose than amusement and endured no longer than the kiss of a lover for a lady, if as long,” said Vannaoccio Biringuccio, 16th century, Pirotechnia. Skip forward to today: longer lasting, more booming display.)

Now consider all that goes into the making, you poets and lovers:

Brilliant colours are achieved by combining potassium chlorate and various metallic salts. These salts produce a variety of colours: strontium burns red; copper makes blue; barium glows green; and sodium produces yellow. Magnesium, aluminium and titanium give off white sparkles or a flash. Every firework show is a fantastic display of physics. The pyrotechnist has to take into account the relationships between vectors, velocities, projectiles and their trajectories together with the explosion forces behind burst patterns.
(About Fireworks)

Et pourquoi? You know. And always possible.

(My poor IPhone Photo attempt to capture the moon over Central Park)

The production (closing yesterday, sadly) was magical, absolutely deserving of its glowing reviews and the ticket lines that formed at 5 AM for much of its run. (It is intensely satisfying to type “ticket lines that formed at 5 AM” when writing about Shakespeare.) It was funny, well-crafted, warm-hearted, and refreshingly musical. And the audience I was part of was fully engaged– for the entire 3 hours. That’s amazing. Creating a Shakespeare production that speaks so directly and successfully to a contemporary audience– especially to an audience as heterogeneous as that of Shakespeare in the Park– is no small task. It’s a 400 year old play, for chrissakes, that even sustained the attention of the teenage girls that mainly came to see movie star Anne Hathaway as Viola. (Did you know that Shakespeare’s real-life wife was named Anne Hathaway as well? Weird.)

That’s what a great production can do, and director Daniel Sullivan did a masterful job integrating all the elements into harmony. I was struck by how site-specific his “Twelfth Night” felt; the grassy incline of the set and the gentle lighting seemed to press into the experience of a summer night in Central Park, to use it as the beginning of a conversation that the production continued, instead of fighting against it with the imposition of a clashing stageworld. Even the musicians felt organic to a park in which wandering buskers roam.

But if I were to meet Mr. Sullivan, I’d especially like to thank him for the show’s sense of simple generosity. It felt decidedly inclusive without ever losing trust in its audience’s intelligence and wit.  In this, Sullivan’s “Twelfth Night” seemed to re-animate the original impulse behind Shakespeare in the Park as a public, freely-given theatrical gift to the people of New York City. The mammoth battle Joseph Papp undertook to bring SITP (then called the New York Shakespeare Festival) to Central Park free-of-charge is recounted in several books, and the Bowery Boys, New York history enthusiasts, have a great podcast that details the fight. The most legendary phase of battle was with then-parks commissioner Robert Moses, who wanted to instate a fee for “grass erosion. The bulldogish Papp eventually earned Moses’ enduring respect, and won the fight; it ended with Moses’ famous comment, “Well, let’s build the bastard a theater.”

The city appears to be grateful, judging from their standing O’s. My friend Ray tells me that on rainy nights, the magic endured, with Feste the fool’s (to my mind, the strangest character in Shakespeare) leading of the cast in, “And the rain, it raineth every day”. It’s a song about the passing of time and the cycles of nature that are illuminated with such a light hand in “Twelfth Night”. I feel sure that Sullivan was fully aware of the possibilities of dark weather, and the way that melancholy anthem might settle over its audience. What an enchanting way to spend a rainy summer night in New York– receiving a free gift from Joseph Papp, Robert Moses, and the extraordinary company of “Twelfth Night”; and of course the Bard himself.

2.) Turn the left thigh out, towards the ceiling. Keep the left knee over the left ankle. At the same time, the right hip point should be moving back to the wall behind you, and the left thigh turns down towards the floor. Keep the torso level over the pelvis, equal energy in the arms pushing forward and back. Stay here for eight breaths.

3.) The first principle of the first limb of yoga’s eight-limbed path: Non-hurting.

4.) The eight limbed path: Restraint. Positive Action. Postures (Asanas). Learning of breath. Stillness of the senses. One-pointed focus. Stilling of the mind-states. Understanding.

5.) Said Krishnamacharya, “In one set of stories, the horse-god Hayagriva is a thief who stole the Vedic Scriptures from the temple. In another set of stories, he is an avatar of Vishnu who rescues the Vedas from the temple-thief.” While Krishnamacharya was at the mandiram telling this story, a thief stole the idol of Hayagriva from his home-altar.

6.) Two of my favorite chants from the end of a yoga class: “The only real teacher is the Self.” And (This chant is sung over the closing credits of the third Matrix film. The priestess from Battlestar Galactica prays this chant over the bodies of dead pilots in the miniseries movie that launched the series): “Lead us from the unreal to the real. Lead us from darkness into light. Lead us from the fear of death to knowledge of immortality.”

7.) My teacher told me, “The word OM has four syllables: the aaaah, the uuuuu, the closing of the mouth hum, and then the silence which follows.”

8.) What lives between the inhale and the exhale, or between darkness and light, between ocean and air, evaporating and condensing in that place?

But before that, a bit of history. The first puzzle appeared in 1913 as part of the New York World’s Fun supplement; Nabokov constructed the first Russian-language crossword puzzles during his 1920s exile in Berlin. Simon & Schuster’s first title, published in 1924, was The Cross Word Puzzle Book. Today, Olsher estimates, 64 million Americans occasionally solve crossword puzzles, including such figures as Bill Clinton, Ed Asner, Jon Stewart, Jack Kevorkian, Lou Piniella, Bill Griffith, and Joan Rivers. Puzzle constructors — like poets — don’t make a lot of money. The Times pays $200 for a standard daily puzzle.

“I’m a poor man, your Majesty,” the Hatter began in a trembling voice, “and I hadn’t but just begun my tea — not above a week or so — and what with the bread-and-butter getting so thin — and the twinkling of the tea — ”

“The twinkling of what?” said the King.

“It began with the tea,” the Hatter replied.

“Of course twinkling begins with a T!” said the King sharply.

Cryptic crosswords were first introduced to Americans in 1943 in the pages of The Nation. (An especially elegant cryptic clue: HIJKLMNO. Click here for the answer.) In the forward to a puzzle collection he created for New York magazine, Stephen Sondheim writes:

To call the composer of a crossword an author may seem to be dignifying a gnat, but the clues in a “cryptic” crossword have many of the characteristics of a literary manner: cleverness, humor, even a pseudo-aphoristic grace. In the best puzzles, styles of clue-writing are distinctive, revealing special pockets of interest and small mannerisms, as in any prose style.

And even better (a few lines down):

Railway coaches, undergrounds, lunch counters and offices in England hum with the self-satisfied chuckles of solvers who suddenly get the point of a clue after having stared at it for several baffled minutes. Bafflement, not information, is the keystone of a cryptic puzzle. A good clue can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.

Sondheim’s theory of puzzles tracks nicely with Freud’s theory of jokes. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud writes of “bewilderment and illumination” — that state of being pleasantly perplexed until the light bulb switches on. As with jokes and crosswords, so with poetry. In his essay “Bottom’s Dream: The Likeness of Poems and Jokes,” Howard Nemerov notes that poetry and jokes both find “fault in this world’s smooth facade,” and they do so with an “economy of materials,” a “sudden reversal of the relations of the elements,” and “an apparent absurdity [which], introduced into the context of the former sense, makes a new and deeper sense.” It all sounds a bit like the best crossword clues.

In Carroll’s masterwork, Alice asks that we not waste time making up riddles that have no answers. Max Beerbohm published a crossword in a 1940 issue of The Times of London that had no answer — “an itch,” writes Olsher, “that could never be scratched.” (Michael Gerber and Jonathan Schwartz riff wittily on the possibility here.) In Weldon Kees’s “Crime Club,” the sleuth Le Roux winds up “incurably insane,”

And sits alone in a white room in a white gown,
Screaming that all the world is mad, that clues
Lead nowhere, or to walls so high their tops cannot be seen;
Screaming all day of war, screaming that nothing can be solved.

Which is all to say: be careful.

But not too careful, as the urge to construct and solve puzzles, to write and read poems, can improve our lives immeasurably. As Olsher writes, ”The New York Times crossword is one of the more difficult puzzles in American newspapers. It is also the most joyful. Those two things go together.” That equation of rigor and joy can be found (at least as subtext) in Ezra Pound’s second “Warning” in ABC of Reading: “Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.” In the same work, Pound writes, “Good writers are those who keep the language efficient.” Again, the crossword connection leaps out.

Olsher’s associative leaps, at times, give pause. He compares the death of his radio show The Next Big Thing to the death of a child. He connects a weirdly large number of things to sex. (”We want to get inside things — crosswords, music, lovers.”) He can be guilty of over-sharing. (”I looked around the table and realized I was surrounded by America’s crossword royalty — Shortz, Hinman, Sanders, as well as former champion Ellen Ripstein — and I felt my testicles retract.”) But head-scratchers like these make up part of the book’s odd charm. And digressions, after all, are promised in the subtitle.

Olsher will be reading this Thursday, July 16, at 7 p.m. at one of my favorite places on earth, The Bookstore in Lenox. Stop by, if you can. And a final heads-up: Merriam-Webster recently added about 100 new words to its Collegiate Dictionary. Look for “locavore,” “frenemy,” and “webisode” in future puzzles.

My hands are full. But I’m surrounded by the high school-age students’ thrilled daily gabble of new authorial fondness, trading favorite books like headphones proferred and tinning out a new favorite-ever song. Around such appetitive and novel love of literature— watching two someones from Cleveland and Alabama who are too young to vote discover they both love Matthea Harvey, say, or Carson McCullers— I feel a wattage.

Strange, though, as a writer, to feel so personally removed from the pedagogy of writing education. I think about how long it’s been since I’ve written from a prompt, like any (story in 5 postcards; abecedary; poem enumerating all you left out of your last poem) of the wonderful dozens I’ve heard here. I find I don’t play the scales (as G.C. Waldrep [click this link, I mean it] referred to exercise-writing in rhyme and meter, the night he read here and astounded the kids) anymore; nor do I prompt myself when I’m dry. The best I can manage is an assiduous off-the-cuff, trying to write the only way I can only when I need to.

What’s the value of the exercise to your poetry, or fiction? In their lack am I going to petrify?

I’m still surrounded, meantime, by murmurs and lights. In the mornings there’s a silence deer here walk up in. In the afternoons Amish contractors next door with crowbars and nailguns tear a building’s roof off. At night people sing, squirrel up with a book, talent-show each other. My girlfriend showed me a site of nothing but extremely-high-shutter-speed images of bubbles bursting. Katie, my friend here who co-manages a sonic boom of a backyard, has been baking zucchini bread (zucchini past a certain size, she says, is only good for bread).

And today one of this town’s fat starlings flew up and told me that James “Pineapple Express” Franco is playing Allen Ginsberg in Howl, directed by Gun Van Sant. As awesome as Milk? As horrible as Tom & Viv? Here Franco is, Ginsberged against his onscreen Orlovsky (Aaron Tveit) at Ste. Germain-des-Pres:

So some sort of strain of fannish, eager love for poetry circulates other places than Gambier, though Young Writer’s heat and goodheartedness I still insist is unique. Until next time, then, listen well, and please stay tuned for a post about the meanest poet in the world!

Oh, those Jets!

Say the word “musical” in a mixed group of friends: what do you get back in response? When I tell people I’m writing one, I usually get either excited smiles or thinly veiled disgust… they’re one of those things that people either love passionately or hate with the fire of a thousand suns.

Depending on my audience, I sometimes try to soften negative response by saying I’m writing “a play with music” or a piece of “music theater”, but I always feel guilty when I do that. What I’m writing is a musical. Out of the blue, people break into song. By the time I’m done with it they might even dance. And I find it a little dumb that I’m embarrassed to admit it.

Intellectuals and downtown theater artists have put the genre through the ringer since the 60’s, seeing in it the antithesis of “real” theater; and to some degree, the genre has absolutely deserved it. In his fascinating study of the form called “The Musical as Drama”, Scott McMillin suggests that this is due to the vast commercial power of pop music. Book writers got lazy with the text from the get-go, as essentially they were writing vehicles for catchy, marketable tunes and easy-sell performers. Who gives a crap if the book is any good? Let’s get to the next song! Interestingly, somewhere along the way Broadway (/Disney) producers quit using contemporary pop to sell their shows, opting instead to hang onto “musical” music (for some reason) while turning to massive spectacle and stories transplanted root and branch from their kids’-movie sources to generate their behemoth profits. Same end, different means.

Although I vigorously hate the commercial impulse behind mega-musicals and the toll it takes on their quality as pieces of theater, I vigorously love the form. I love that  there exists a kind of theater in which people suddenly and impossibly sing to music we all pretend is not there! I love that people suddenly just start dancing; they can’t seem to help it, they get so excited by the music, so swept up in the emotion of the moment! Something that NEVER happens in real life is now, onstage, suddenly happening! All in a single moment! How awesome is that?

And yet, this is the very locus of many musical haters’ disgust, once you probe beyond dislike of a particular show’s music, or the tendency of the form toward lazilly-written books. It’s the sudden shift from speaking to song that these haters just can’t get on board with: “It’s so– fake. Totally artificial. People don’t do that.”

What the hell? Since when was theater responsible for representing objective reality? And doesn’t every kind of theater play by its own rules? Look at comedy: The madcap situations, the over-the-top idiocy of the exaggerated characters, even the actors’ pausing for laughter before moving on to the next line, is nothing if not artificial– and yet I’ve never heard someone respond to the genre with the same disdain. “Oh, I HATE comedy! It’s so unrealistic!”

So what’s going on?  Why does this unapologetic shift from dialogue to melody seem to offend people? I really don’t know. Because what’s evoking this charged is simply a set of conventions in a particular subgenre. Every type of theater has them; and interestingly, in scores of contemporary plays and ensemble works these days, you see similar, hyper-sudden mid-scene shifts from the realistic to the impossible  or absurd — it’s all the rage– not to mention the gestural “dance breaks” (a la Siti Company) that occur in so much downtown theater. Why is that cutting-edge, while breaking into song is completely uncool?

Nature Theater of Oklahoma

When you step back a little, the conventions of theater in general, in which a group of people sit in the dark, all facing the same way, completely silent, and watch people make themselves laugh and shout and cry and pretend to be other people, are pretty weird. I mean, whatever else it is, theater is pretending; it’s fake. It is the nature of the form. It’s just that we’re so used to those conventions that they fade into invisibility. Why don’t those of the American musical? Aren’t we used to it by now?

For the next couple of weeks I’m going to seek out some opinions on why the musical is so irritating as a form to so many people. I will periodically report on what I find, as I work away on my own play with music.

I mean MUSICAL. I’m writing a MUSICAL, dammit. A musical.

See, I can’t get my head around the fact that I’ve missed the whole story.  From sudden rise to national prominence, through the postmodern syntax of the TV interviews, right up to the self-pitying resignation speech.  Say it ain’t so, Joe!  Sure, I watched it on the BBC, but it had a cartoonish quality on British television (which was, perhaps, true to life in this case) that had me, well, gosh, just scratchin’ my head.  Really?  Really? If I have learned one thing, Alaska: LIFE is about narrative twists!  Our great country, with its God-given bounty of television sitcoms and reality show confessional booths, has grown used to plots that resolve themselves within 22 minutes.  After all, life is too short to compromise time and resources… and as General Motors said, it ain’t only dead fish who get that glassy-eyed look when they’re, um, dead.

You know what I mean, Alaska?

But still, I’m a bit stunned by the speed with which our national narratives resolve lately.  When I left the country, Bernie Madoff was just a little-known Wall Street financier with a name Dickens would have thought too obvious.  When I read in the British papers about the sheriffs showing up over the weekend to evict Ruth from her fancy Upper East Side apartment, I thought, What is this?  America: the Comic Book? It’s all happening too fast!  It’s not how we’re wired. It’s not what is best for Alaska!

Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me – cricket…   The last time I spent a year in England, I knew it was time to go home when I found myself watching cricket on television on a rainy July afternoon.  And, even worse, I kind of understood it.  (For example, the scoring:  based on my observations, I’ve deduced that each team earns points based on the amount of white sun cream the bowler can apply to his nose.)  I’ve now spent a total of three years in England, which is about the same length of time it takes for the average cricket match to unfold, and there are plenty of things – like the plumbing – that I’ll never understand.  But one of the interesting things about living abroad is that your narrative expectations change as your body clock adjusts to local time.  Stories and jokes are told at a slightly different pace, the poetry has a slightly more discursive tone, like an Oxford Wit making “casual” remarks to a crowd of people at a party, and the novels have, well, less gunfire.

Someone asked me the other day if I’d ever consider writing a novel set in England.  The question made me wonder:  can an American write convincingly about England?  It’s been done, of course, not least by Henry James, who knew the unspoken conventions of British culture as fully as any American could, but usually through the narrative of the American abroad, which allows the author to sidestep this problem of cultural difference.  Could one write about England without that convention?  I’m an American by birth, and frankly I’m not sure I understand American culture (particularly what passes for America in the mind of someone like Governor Palin).  In a sense, one can see it more clearly from a distance, as any number of expat writers have argued, but only if your underlying cultural knowledge allows you to fill in the gaps the same way your eyes make a cowboy from a little light and leather when you go to the movies.

I’ll be returning to the US at the end of this month.  I don’t want to disappoint anyone with my decision, and I know that many of the citizens of Alaska will take it hard.  But the Home Office and Kenyon College have both been quite firm: I can’t stay.  So I am taking my ironic liberal media detachment from the lives of ordinary Americans in a new direction.  Back to Ohio, as it happens.  I’ll miss standing outside American life the way that a reader stands outside the events of a novel.  But I also can’t help feeling I should hurry home before the plot of the Great American Comic Book changes again.