I read Brandon Taylor’s debut novel “Real Life,” a finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, right after I reread Camus’ “The Stranger” whose famous first line “Mother died today,” resonates with Taylor’s book. I wouldn’t have put these two together, other than that I’d read them one after the other, but they do have a lot in common. In Taylor’s novel, Wallace’s father has died and he’s living a similar anxiety, alienation, and streak of rage as Camus’ Meursault, whose mother has died. Yet, the time and place and situation between the novels have little in common. Meursault is French Algerian in Northern Africa in the 1940s and Wallace is Black, gay, and a biochem grad student at an unnamed Midwestern University with only white friends, in the present.
With exquisite detail Taylor trains his literary microscope on Wallace as he finds his nematode experiment ruined, then he trains this same tight focus on Wallace’s life in the Midwest, his friends, his memories of traumas, and sex, present and past. Simple things increase his alienation, such as Wallace bringing a homemade meat dish to his friends’ dinner party to find it left untouched, his new friends all vegetarians. At the center of the book, is a dinner party where Taylor, for the first time, has his white characters directly voice the racism previously implicit and directly “unvoice” the other white friends who say nothing. Throughout this lengthy night, Taylor is able to keep these eight characters distinct and clear in my mind, while he delivers a devastating account of the evening with Wallace’s analysis of complicated relationships, kindness, racism, silence, love and hate. A tour de force that primes the reader to hear Wallace’s back story.
Taylor’s ability to evoke deep emotions and then analyze them is one of the reasons, I assume, that it’s been so well received. Reviews often quote from a paragraph about white cruelty, but his examination of cruelty is all-encompassing: “Cruelty, Wallace thinks, is really just the conduit of pain. It conveys pain from one place to another—from the place of highest concentration to the place of lowest concentration, in the same way heat flows. It is a delivery system, as in the way that certain viruses convey illness, disease, irreparable harm. They’re all infected with pain, hurting each other.”
As I read about his world in a non-diverse university science department, I was saddened, though not surprised, to find this still happening. When I started UW Madison in 1968, it was a wild time—anti-war protests, the blowing up the Army Math Research Center, and the Black Student Strike, which got the National Guard unleashed. Among the demands was that at least 500 Black students be admitted to UW by September 1969. A modest number when you consider at the time the student population numbered around 33,000. Terrifying to see how little things have changed.
In the last chapter of Brandon Taylor’s “Real Life,” Wallace journeys back in time to his first day meeting these friends and we feel the circularity of life. Brandon Taylor’s dexterity with language has the ability to make me feel as though Wallace’s pain and ambiguity and alienation were mine. And it made me feel the unrelenting whiteness of the Midwest. As I read, I kept longing for some Black characters, some Black jokes, some Blackness. Though I love the Midwest and my white family there, though this may not have been Brandon Taylor’s intent, I sure was damn happy to walk out my door and find myself in New York City, where I was immediately met by a swarming cross-section of humanity—where our dinners include rabid bacon defenders, fervent pork-eschewers, vegetarians, vegans, and the lactose or gluten intolerant—with everyone fighting the universal sugar urge.
Emily Nemens novel “The Cactus League” was released in February to great reviews and, since then, she’s been doing readings all around town. Earlier, I finished reading Henry Dunow’s memoir from 2001, “The Way Home: Scenes from a Season, Lessons from a Lifetime.” Both of these books, one by editor of Paris Review Emily Nemens and the other by literary agent Henry Dunow revealed baseball’s transcendent, actual, and metaphoric significance, something I had no clue about. Or thought I hadn’t. So whether you’re quarantined or not and looking to read something, try these out.
Nemens’ “The Cactus
League” uses the structure of baseball—without employing the often-used
literary device of an actual game, think Casey
at the Bat—to temper, for the reader, the nightmare struggles of the person
at the core of the story, Jason Goodyear. As he descends into a hell of
gambling addiction, we see him from perspective of people on the periphery of
his life. Divided into nine chapters/innings, Nemens gives us an entertaining
crew to guide us through the baseball domain: batting coach, groupie, agent, Black
co-owner, pitcher struggling after elbow surgery, organist, seven-year old kid
hanging with his homeless mom who works the concession stand, the organist, and
finally Jason who shares the final chapter with his wife. Nemens passionate treatment
of how baseball, geology, architecture, and music mirror each other slows the
narrative, yet somehow intensifies the drama. That these disparate elements
hang together and construct a compelling novel is a testament to her writing and
her characters who are surviving love, terror, and miracles.
Early on in “The Cactus League” I came across this paragraph that brought me back to fifth grade, a time when I experienced a baseball miracle—and, since we girls didn’t do sports in the fifties, it was a once and only once in a life-time event. “There’s something cathartic about swinging a piece of wood at a hurtling knot of leather and yarn. The sting that happens in your palms when you connect, the ball bending ever so slightly at the collision. The reverberations of that rubber center that run up your arms, plugging into your shoulders with a little zing. The sound of it.” Of course when I once felt this —and only once—it wasn’t a hard ball traveling at 90 miles an hour, it was a big old softball traveling at the speed of a paper airplane, but nevertheless, when I swung and hit it, the feeling of being in concert, in the zone, in my body, thrilled me. Nemens closely observed moment brought this memory viscerally back to me.
Through vivid, loving characterizations and musings about
life and time—from the glacial geological tectonic plates’ progress to the slow-motion
action of baseball, to the timing and rhythm of music—Nemens evokes a realm in
which “enough” exists—in relationships, sports, the arts, and the natural world—in
the face of the “never-enough” world of addiction.
Henry Dunow’s memoir,
The Way Home: Scenes from a Season,
Lessons from a Lifetime, uses his experiences in non-professional baseball
as a method for finding connection. His
humorous, biting, charming prose and his generosity of spirit and understanding
hooked me immediately in this story of family life in New York City. Dunow describes
his attempts to connect with his son through baseball, as his own father hadn’t
been able to do with him. This lively paragraph depicts his young son and his
wife’s worry: “It’s a little scary. He’s a walking 24-hour all-talk sports
radio station, an IBM mainframe saturated with sports statistics and trivia, stores
of arcane knowledge growing like some diabolical virus in a cheesy sci-fi
movie. Wendy worries that there will be no room in that little brain for
anything else, and I try to assure her that sports knowledge is like a useless
vestigial organ—it can expand endlessly and accommodate vast stores of data without
cramping rest of the brain. There’s no real damage.”
When Dunow begins coaching six-year olds—hilariously—and
comparing himself to another cocky assertive father/Little League coach, memories
of his own father, a powerful and stubborn Polish Jewish immigrant, emerge. Dunow
writes with great intensity of his son, his father, other children, and
baseball. Of his father, he writes: “After years of terror and running halfway
across the world to save his life while everyone and everything he knew
perished, it had come to this: in the hands-and-knees search for jagged pieces
of glass on the kitchen floor, in the harried nagging to get us to clean our
rooms, was his need to banish the chaos of his past, the horror of what had
happened to his family—his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters—and his
world. His constant preoccupation with household order obscured a whole
constellation of feelings and thoughts kept separate from us. A piece of him
was missing, not available.” This anguish went through me like a switchblade
Each performance of this version of From the Horse’s Mouth In November 2019, to celebrate the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center began and ended with charming, funny, multi-talented Arthur Aviles, gay Puerto Rican dancer/choreographer of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. As we waited in the wings to begin, I chatted away with Kevin Winkler and Kathleen Leary, as though I had nothing to do with what was about to happen. Then I noticed Arthur Aviles. He was wrapped in silence as he concentrated, focused, prepared himself. Whoops. I thought, I should be doing something to compose myself.
Stage lights came on and Arthur Aviles walked purposely to stage left and danced alone in the spotlight. His muscles contracted, released; he gestured, twirled, bent low, rose high, creating lines and life out of body, air, and breath. Suddenly, I was out of breath: he was done and it was my turn. I was to tell a story before I danced. Damn. I walked to the middle of the stage, picked up the mic, and sat on a chair set at a slight angle to the audience—a sold-out audience I couldn’t see because the light was on me.
Tina Croll and James Cunningham,
creators of this unusual format of story-telling and dance, have, for over
twenty years, successfully produced these From
the Horse’s Mouth programs that each year honored different people and
institutions in the dance world. Other than Arthur’s solo at the beginning, the
format was that, one by one, after each person told a story about whoever or
whatever was being celebrated, (for this section all were to dress in black
with bit of red somewhere—I had red toenails and fingernails) then performed a
solo stage left as the next person spoke, then that person got up to solo and
the last soloist went on to the “traveling section” dancing all along the stage
before and behind the next speaker towards the last dancer, whom they could
interact with. Interspersed in the evening were crossing-the-floor sections
where all changed to colorful costumes and dance in a line from one wing to the
other.
Henning Rübsam, Arthur Aviles, photo by Whitney Browne
This time, at The Theater at the 14th
Street Y, one by one, we were to tell personal stories to celebrate the Jerome
Robbins Dance Division, the place I worked for thirty years. I retired as
curator nearly four years ago. So what did I say in my two minutes on the chair?
Here it is.
The Dance Division was my job and my family. This included not just the talented, devoted, knowledgeable, and comedic staff, but also researchers, dancers, writers, critics, and choreographers. And donors. Not just donors of materials, whose generosity made us the world’s largest collection of dance, but financial donors, Jerome Robbins, the Jerome Robbins Foundation, Anne Bass, the Anne Bass Foundation, the Dance Committee, the Friends of the Dance Division, and among others, Helen Gebig.
In 2010, Helen Gebig, a regular at public programs, an unassuming, retired teacher in a well-worn winter coat, donated to the Dance Division a $100,000 from her personal savings.
In her interview, she talked about growing up in the foster care system in Flatbush Brooklyn. Extremely poor, the only place she went was the library. She saw her first ballet in the early 1950s, when a neighbor who couldn’t attend gave Helen her ticket for New York City Ballet. She went, not knowing what ballet was, and fell in love. Swan Lake with Maria Tallchief changed her life. Later, she went to the ballet as often as eight times a week. Of Balanchine she said it didn’t matter whether you were a dancer, choreographer, orchestra or audience, you were his family. Ballet and the Library were homes, she said, to a girl who didn’t have a home.
Helen Gebig’s gift reaffirmed to me the importance of the Library’s work and the Dance Division’s ability to provide a home for our community.
In 2014 in the Freddie Franklin Horse’s Mouth tribute, I danced. Since I am not a dancer, that performance was meant to be both my dancing debut and my final dancing performance. However, today, after seven months of surgeries and hospitalizations I’m back for another finale!! With stolen choreography from Djoniba’s African dance classes.
Grateful for the clapping, I stood and
handed the mic to the next speaker, Kevin Winkler, retired archivist at NYPL,
and author of “Big Deal: Bob Fosse and
Dance in the American Musical.” Once at stage left to do my solo while he
spoke, out of nowhere, my last two years flashed before me: my mother got sick then
died; in the next few months her sister and two more very close friends died
and our granddaughter spent nearly a month in ICU; then I got sick for seven
months. In my corner on the stage, a terror came over me, who did I think I was trying to dance African dance, without drums, in
front of an audience, still recovering from surgery? I asked my mom and dad
in the next world to help. And I called on two people, also dead, also
important to me, Beth Young and Gwen Jones Diallo, strong, terrific dancers
from African dance classes.
When I switched from my first step
into the second, without the drums to guide me, I lost the rhythm. This shook
me, but I carried on, stomping and jumping. Then, rat-a-tat-tat, I expelled a
trail of gas. I looked around. Did anyone suspect? Then another stream of wind.
Reaching high then bending to touch my palm to the ground, I farted and toot-tooted
with every step. First I was embarrassed and horrified, then a giggle brewed. The ancestors are speaking through me. I’m a
medium, channeling through my body the voices of my parents and Beth and Gwen.
Like a gas bubble, a memory
surfaced. After my mother’s funeral, my youngest sister told me about drug
problems in Wisconsin. She meant to say methamphetamine, but accidentally said
methane amphetamine. We cracked up. Methane
Amphetamine: Builds Gas Fast. We thought of our mother, our beautiful,
peace and social justice, poetry-loving mother, who could often be found, back
when she had a body, tooting along in a blaze of methane. When I told this the
next day to Gwen’s daughter, Chantay Jones, she irreverently sang to me: “You
are the wind beneath my wings.”
With my two minutes up, I got off
stage and headed for our dressing rooms. Grinning, I told this to my colleague
from the Dance Division, Arlene Yu, a champion Latin Ballroom dancer, already
in costume for the crossing-the-floor section, which happens sporadically in
the evening. Gorgeous, in her canary yellow sparkly dance outfit, a
professional dancer, she told me this often happened on stage and that I should
be grateful that at least they weren’t loud or stinky. Whew, thank you ancestors!!
Arlene Yu, Photo by Whitney Browne
Theara J. Ward, Photo by Whitney Browne
For anyone not doing the second and third dance sections, dancers, many from New York Theatre Ballet, replaced us. I only did the solo, so while I went to the back, the handsome, young, powerful, red-headed dancer Julian Donahue danced for me. (The others, all one more terrific than the next, included: Alexis Branagan, Lauren Hale Biniaris, Victoria Dombroski, Silken Kelly, Lindsey Miller, Abby Marchesseault, Kendra Dushac, Jessica Stucke, Dawn Gierling, Heather Panikkar, Monica Lima, Kristina Shaw, Katelyn Conrad.
For the rest of the night, I sat in
shadows in the wings, looking into the bright lights, and watched the dancing
and listened to stories. Wave after wave of pride and happiness flowed through
me. So many people found the Dance Division important to them and I’d had some
part in its running. Legendary dancers, writers and critics spoke and danced
including: Arthur Aviles; Diana Byer, Artistic Director of NY Theatre Ballet,
who spryly danced in point shoes, which she hadn’t been in for years, if not
decades; Yoshiko Chuma, post-modern conceptual dancer and old friend from Lower
East Side; Ze’Eva Cohen; Alberto Del Saz; Joan Finkelstein, Executive Director
of Harkness Foundation for Dance; Julia Foulkes; Deborah Jowitt, dancer and
author and dance critic for The Village Voice for over forty years, who talked
to me back stage of Derrick Damon, Dance Division’s 27-year-old page who was shot
and killed on February 16, 1992; Phyllis Lamhut; Dianne McIntyre; Elizabeth
McPherson; Rajika Puri, dancer choreographer of Indian dance trained
Bharatanatyam and Odissi; Henning Rübsam, hilarious story teller and Artistic
Director of SENSEDANCE; Margo Sappington; Preeti Vasudevan, choreographer and
dancer of classical Indian dance; Tony Waag; tap tapping his way across the
stage; Theara J. Ward, once baby ballerina from Dance Theatre of Harlem; Lynne
Weber, Executive Director of Dance Notation Bureau; William Whitener, acclaimed
dancer choreographer; and Kevin Winkler.
Henning Rübsam, Rajika Puri, Deborah Jowitt, Photo by Whitney Browne
And professional dancers from Dance Division’s staff danced: Phil Karg, Kathleen Leary, Cassie Mey, Alice Standin, Arlene Yu. All amazing. But standouts in the costume department Arlene Yu in ballroom dress and Alice Standin in Baroque outfit with many layers including old school lace up corset!! Unfortunately my picture of her has disappeared.
Cassie Mey, Jan Schmidt, Yoshiko Chuma, Deborah Jowitt, Selfie by Yoshiko
Deborah Jowitt,
Henning Rübsam
Yoshiko Chuma, Joan Finkelstein
Yoshiko Chuma, Dianne McIntyre
Arlene Yu, Yoshiko Chuma, Kathleen Leary
Then showing up on video: Alastair
Macaulay, Joseph Houseal, Tanisha Jones, Charles Reinhart, Judith Ren-Lay, and
Madga Saleh.
That first night ended with a
knockout. After Arthur Aviles’s sang a wild Nuyorican version of When you wish upon a star, an extra-special
star performed that first night only. Ann Hutchinson Guest. A Broadway musical
dancer, who recently celebrated her 101st birthday. Yes, you read that right—one
hundred and one. And could she dance! She swirled and twirled and side-stepped
and sang as she used the entire stage as her home. She brought down the house.
Ann Hutchinson Guest, Photo by Whitney Browne
By the last performance on Sunday we
were all relaxed and exuberant. When I took a moment to breathe before I soloed,
the drum rhythms rang in my ears, pulsed in my body. Spontaneously, the music
was in my muscles and spirit, I was connected, buoyant. I danced, exact,
rhythmic, on the mark. My body was a drum, as Djoniba often told us to be.
This run was over. Thank you to
everyone who performed in honor of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New
York Public Library of the Performing Arts.
From the Horse’s Mouth celebrated
The Jerome Robins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts co-presented by The Theater at the 14th Street Y.
November 6-10, 2019, Conceived and Directed by Tina
Croll and James Cunningham
How can I possibly tell you what Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference last August was like? First, for those who’ve never heard of it, learning to bake bread it wasn’t. Bread Loaf is the oldest and most prestigious of writers’ conferences in USA, an iconic place that accepts writers by virtue of their applications and writing samples. For decades I’d heard people talk about it in the hushed tones of devout worshipers. Recently I saw a stat that only 17% of applicants are chosen. I was thrilled to be accepted.
First, old friends from college drove me to the mountains in Vermont, a fabulous ride through green hills and wondrous vistas, with good conversation.
Traveling with Jane Sloan and Dosier Hammond
Relaxing in my room
Once there, I found that my room happened to be at the Inn, which is the heart of the campus. I only had to go downstairs to eat, whereas many of the two hundred or so participants stayed at cottages scattered around the estate. At dinner that first day, I realized that, for each of three meals a day, I’d be finding a seat at some table of six or eight or twelve strangers. A nightmare for solitary introverted writers. However, it turned out, that writers have a gift for telling stories and even asking others about themselves.
Here I am at breakfast, without lipstick, with Richie Hofmann, poet, Taymour Soomro, his story was in New Yorker in January, and Jonathan Parks-Ramage, who was in my workshop.
After breakfast on day one of the conference I went to the daily 9am lecture. These astonishing hour-long talks were full of insights into the process and craft of writing as seen is fiction, poetry and non-fiction. The excerpts chosen by readers and lectures were so powerful and emotional I often found myself in tears. I had a craft class with Christopher Castellani who talked about minimalism vs maximilism, through stories on AIDS crises, like Susan Sontag’s The Way We Live Now, from 1986. So painful to hear, I was crying again. Ravi Howard gave a craft class on musicality and time frames in fiction. In an inadvertent comic illustration of his thesis on time, he timed us in a three-minute exercise, first by eyeing his watch, then by staring up at the large, no-where-near-the correct-time clock on the wall for its thirty second hand ticking by.
The rock star of poetry, Jericho Brown, gave voice to a moving powerful sense of Black life, which including singing, Lift Every Voice and Sing. Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa gave a reading that rightfully garnered a standing ovation.
Jericho Brown picture taken from Germantown Academy
Yusef Komunyakaa
Each day was filled with the chance to talk to agents, publishers and well-known writers, as well as my fellow participants, who often had published books. I had conversations, short and long, with Emily Nemens, new editor of The Paris Review; Kevin Young, poet who is also the new Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Poetry Editor of the New Yorker; and Matthew Lansburg, who won the 2017 Iowa Short Fiction Award; Henry Dunow of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency; and Malaga Baldi of Malaga Baldi Literary Agency.
For the workshop led by Maud Casey, ten of us sent in our work before the conference so we’d already read each other’s short stories. In the five meetings, we critiqued two stories each, proceeding alphabetically, so mine was dead last on the last day of the conference. The stories were all well-written and charged with emotions. The criticisms were on the money, sensitive and getting to the heart of the piece. Maud Casey created an atmosphere with her own clear and insightful look into each of our stories that allowed the group to find the most useful and creative criticisms. Recently I read Maud Casey’s most recent novel The Man Who Walked Away. This meditative work on searching for those feelings and situations at the center of one’s psyche, takes place in a very concrete asylum in 19th century France. The bicycle-riding doctor wants to help a young man who can’t stop walking in a fugue state. Maud Casey teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Maryland. She also delivered a powerful lecture Hello, Darkness,My Old Friend: The Sound of Silence in Fiction. Not only did her words keep resounding in my head, but they kept me humming. And I’d hear others singing Simon and Garfunkle’s words in empty halls and bathroom stalls.
When I needed a respite, I could walk along the road behind the Barn through the woods for exercise and solitary joy. And I often needed a break. I can’t seem to find words to express the excitement of being picked up from my home in Lower East Side of Manhattan and plunked down in the mountains with 250 writers. There, in the midst of the wonders of nature, I was swirled and twirled, bumped, twisted, and juked, to a galaxy of wild and emotive language, vibrant ideas, crazy humor, and huge personalities. Non-stop for ten days! I didn’t think I’d make it through, but when it was time to leave, I found myself saying, yes, I want to return.
With its crammed daily schedule of lectures, craft classes, workshops, panels, and readings, the conference turned out to be a mashup of camping in small cottages with 250 strangers and of a semester of grad school jammed into ten days. But no exams. An insane thing to do, but a miracle.
