Steve Mentz

A new Pynchon novel is always an event, and in the wake of Shadow Ticket‘s arrival in early October I’ve been reliving my own bookish past. I discovered Pynchon by reading V., Gravity’s Rainbow, and The Crying of Lot 49 in quick succession as a slightly extreme high schooler in the 1980s. I read through the stories in Slow Learner during college and wrote a long academic paper about Gravity’s Rainbow and Milton’s War in Heaven in Paradise Lost, but then somewhat missed the arrival of Vineland in February 1990, when I was traveling through Indonesia and Thailand in post-college vagabondage. Mason & Dixon in spring 1997 was a high-water event for my grad school novel reading community in New Haven. I lugged Against the Day everywhere with me on the London Tube in late 2006 when I was a fellow at the National Maritime Museum. Inherent Vice was a late-summer delight in August 2009, and Bleeding Edge slid into my fall 2013 Critical Theory class. I didn’t really expect another one from our eighty-eight year old reclusive author.

Shadow Ticket rounds out what we might call Pynchon’s Gumshoe Trilogy, as the third of a trio of late novels in which the main character is some kind of private investigator. Hicks McTaggart is less of a stoner than Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice and more of a heavy than Maxene Tarlow in Bleeding Edge, and in some ways Hicks’s conflicted past – his first job was as a head-banging strike-breaker – makes him even more morally compromised than Pynchon’s previous semi-outlaw PIs, Moral compromise, of course, has always been a key part of Pynchon’s paranoid and recursive world. The new novel provides a rousing portrait of the rise of fascism in the 1930s, from Milwaukee to Budapest, complete with an alt-history finish in which a millionaire’s coup replaces “that damned Bolshevik Roosevelt” (284) with General MacArthur. But even more than usual, I don’t think the plot was the main thing.

No one alive writes richer English sentences than Pynchon, even in his latter days. There’s a deepening, darkening rhythm, a falling-into something that briefly feels like order and insight but eventually slips into paranoia and uncertainty. Reading especially through the second, European half of the novel, I kept thinking about the contrast between frustrating narrative abundance and his gorgeous, serpentine, decadent sentences. Some of the best of these flourishing, turning gyroscopes open the book’s fairly short thirty-nine chapters. Here’s Daphne Airmont, searching central Europe for her lost clarinet-playing love, Hop Wingdale:

“For a while Daphne, flown into a dither, was chasing all over the map, trying to be there waiting wherever the puck might be on its way to but not always guessing right, along with wires going astray, trains running late, street-fighting and barricades to detour around and so forth, sleeping and eating when she can, usually within earshot of railway stations, steered along by tattered notices stuck onto public surfaces, helpful Swing Kids, Eukodal addicts with their own notions about the sequence and speed of passing events, Daphne continuing to run a train and a half, a day or a night or a street address behind, till eventually the charm wore off and she wound down to this pause in Budapest, where she figures to take a rest and wait to see if the band or any of its unknown fragments might find its way to her.” (Ch 26, p196)

The rhythm, the turnings, the ultimate lack of conclusion!

Or the next chapter, which sees our nostalgic Gumshoe wishing he could return to old Wisconsin –

“Sometimes all Hicks wants is to be back in Milwaukee, restored to normal life, to a country not yet gone Fascist, a place of clarity and safety, still snoozy and safe, brat smoke from a lunch wagon grill, some kid practicing accordion through an open window, first snow coming into town off the prairie, barroms where the smell of beer is generations deep, women in little round hats, Penny scales, newsstands run by war veterans named Sarge, everyday street doors that lead to nothing deeper than friendly speakeasies, El Productos in glass tubes, fried perch and coleslaw on Friday nights. Buttermilk crullers, goes witout saying.” (Ch 28, p210)

Of course we know that a not-yet Fascist America is a false dream – we’ve already been with Hicks to the Nazi bowling alley in Wisconsin, the coup is coming, and we also feels the contours of that other world, our world, in shadow, slipping down our own intermittently slow and fast ride into what sure feels, I hope not inexorably, like a Fascist future.

Maybe it’s that I’ve not yet taken the time to unravel fully the baroque plot-corners, but as I read Shadow Ticket for the first time, I was even less sure that usual that the coherence of the story was the main event. I don’t know that these two sentences are the best or most important sentences in the novel, but they strike me as prototypically Pynchon-ish, representations of the peculiar pleasures and complexities of this great American author.

Like many, I suspect, I’ve been mulling in recent weeks about how topical the old guy’s books feel in 2025, ever since Kathyrn Schulz observed in the New Yorker that “somewhere along the line our reality started to resemble, with uncanny specificity, the collected works of Thomas Pynchon.” I’ve been more than hip-deep in Pynchonia all fall, teaching The Crying of Lot 49 in my grad class, watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s semi-Pynchonisms spill out of “One Battle After Another,” and savoring the intermittent pleasures of Shadow Ticket slowly over the course of October. I even treated myself to all 55+ hours of the audiobook of Against the Day in September, and I tend to think that of all his novels, that’s the one closest to Shdadow Ticket in form and feeling. But now, as we emerge now into a new month, how much of the shadows will linger?

Thinking about the title of the novel makes me I’m also thinking about another old guy from Tom P.’s generation, who also released a late-career shadow in the 2020s. For Bob, it was the old guy’s 40th studio album, called “Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan.” Bob and Tom have been, well, shadowing each other since long before Bob won the Nobel Prize that probably should have gone to Tom. Tom’s college buddy Richard Farina, who was married to Mimi Baez, sister of Joan, one of Bob’s most famous ex’s, was a folk-scene rival of sorts in the Greenwich Village ’60s, though in Richard’s case his motorcycle crash in 1966 killed him. Bob’s own 1966 motorcycle crash, the details of which remain murky, led to a period of isolation – do we know another great artist of this generation who hides from the press? What do these two old men have to do with each other? (For Tom’s shadow dissing of Bob, see David Hadju’s 2001 bio Positively Fourth Street: The Life and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina. I’m ready for Timmy C. in this movie!)

And I’m also wondering if Shadow Ticket will really be Old Tom’s signoff. If so, Hick’s youthful sidekick Skeet, who presumably will eventually become Zoyd Wheeler of Vineland‘s father, closes us out by lighting out for the territory on the Santa Fe Chief. “Right now we’ve got a couple of sunsets to chase” (293), Skeet concludes. A sentimental ending, somewhat like Mason & Dixon and Bleeding Edge? Not a bad way to close up shop, if the shop must close.

If the last three novels form one final trilogy, with Shadow Ticket’s Milwaukee poised halfway between Inherent Vice‘s California and Bleeding Edge‘s New York, perhaps these final lines suggest that our Eastern author, who presumably still lives on the Upper West Side, still longs for the West.

I think I’ll go back to Shadow Ticket soon. Or maybe it’s time for another whirl through Gravity’s Rainbow? Or Mason & Dixon?

I’ve enjoyed Erik Tucker’s work with Bedlam for years, most recently his fun mash up of Shakespeare’s Roman plays with Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, and I, like Tim Teeman in the NY Times, remember the company’s amazing production of “Sense and Sensibility” in 2016. So I was excited to catch a preview of their latest Austen adaptation, a version of Pride and Prejudice called “Are the Bennet Girls OK?” It’s great fun, especially for Austen fans, and very much worth a trip to the Upper West Side before Nov 9.

This adaptation was a little more aggressive than I remember the earlier one being. There’s a bit of an edge to playwright Emily Breeze’s reclamation of the less sympathetic Bennets, especially Mrs. Bennet, played with force and flair by Zuzanna Szadkowski, and the emotionally compelling Mary, played by the playwright’s sister Masha Breeze. Like Teeman in the Times, I was impressed by Mrs Bennet’s charisma – she commanded the stage especially early in the production, when she mangled the novel’s famous opening lines, with Austen’s gentle irony and syntactic balance reformulated as a ramble about how “a girl with a sister must be in want of another sister so that they can complain about the first sister…”

As the re-imagining of that famous line suggests, the center of attention in this production stays in the female family. I thought for a while that Mr Bennet might not make an appearance at all – he eventually did arrive, in a lively comic turn by Edoardo Benzoni, who played all the male parts, from lecherous Wickham to tongue-tied Darcy.

But the emotional heart of the show was neither the ferocious mother nor smart and sassy Lizzy, but rather the mostly-overlooked middle sister Mary. Every reasonably careful reader of Austen’s novel knows that the awkward and devout Mary might have imagined herself as a possible match for the odious parish priest Mr Collins, who Lizzy turns down before neighbor Charlotte scoops up. That plot-not-taken becomes the center of “Are the Bennet Girls OK?”, with Mary’s unattainable love displacing, for me at least, the somewhat predictable developments of the Darcy/Wickham/Bingley plots. When all the men are the same guy, they come to matter less than – as Mrs Bennet’s revision of the opening line has it – what your sisters are saying and feeling.

Masha Breeze’s Mary was off-putting and stilted, but she also possessed greater emotional energy than any of her sisters. She’s the one who feels and knows that she can’t fit in. The dilemma that Mrs Bennet asserts – how can I marry off all these daughters? – becomes for Mary especially a more basic conundrum: how is it possible for someone like me to live in this world?

The program for the show, which was not given to us until after the curtain closed (because, someone said when I asked, “Eric says not until the end”), describes Masha Breeze as “transgender” and also calls her “a small shrewlike mammal with a body that won’t quit and a haircut that will.” I’m not sure if, now that the show is out of previews, Bedlam still tries to be coy with this information each night. Masha Breeze’s performance as Mary recovers this minor figure from Austen’s scrap-heap, making the least easily-beloved of the Bennet girls the heart of the story. I appreciate that, and it’ll stay with me the next time I read (or teach) Pride and Prejudice.

The pairings pair off as they are meant to in the end, but Lizzy’s final acceptance of Darcy appears to have more to do with his ability to care for the unmarried Bennet girls than any sense of his own worth. Maybe the rich guy can at least keep a few of the sisters happy, even if emotional fulfillment is out of play? It’s a darker stew than Pride and Prejudice usually serves up, but it’s also a compelling re-reading of perhaps English literature’s most beloved comic novel. Like Virgil’s Aeneid and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, it’s fan fiction – but of a richly disturbing kind.

The last time Paul Thomas Anderson had a Pynchon movie come out, I hustled myself across town for a matinee on opening day. This time, with a new one “inspired” by Vineland (1990), I watched it in the CT ‘burbs with my son, in one of those Cinemark theaters where the seat vibrates and lurches in time with the film. I’m not sure about those seats, but it wasn’t a bad way to watch the gorgeously filmed car chase in the wilds of northern CA that was the movie’s high-paced ending. That ending was for me the fork away from Pynchonland, at least a little bit – but the whole show was a great ride!

Once again, after the latest film, I’m left thinking about sentiment. Is PTA too sentimental, even for “late” (ie, post-Gravity’s Rainbow) Pynchon? Thinking about the hidden author’s second act after Mason & Dixon (1997 – but according to pynchonistas, at least partly written in the immediately post-GR mid-1970s), he appears to be making peace with the sentimentality that the early novels mostly lampoon. Doc’s sometimes dislocated pining for Shasta Fay in Inherent Vice became, in PTA’s film, a resonant core that partly inverted Pynchon’s characteristic scattering. In Bleeding Edge (2013) and in PTA’s latest film, that heart is parenthood – the film’s lingering focus Chase Infiniti as the teenage Willa Ferguson (Prarie in Vineland) recalls Maxine’s final glimpse of her young boys in Bleeding Edge. Pynchon’s been an Upper West Side family man since the 1990s – at one point I read that he volunteered as a crossing guard for his son’s grade school, and the image of old man Tommy P. calming uptown traffic is too good not to be true – and the choice to film the later, softer, more human novels feels right. (Could anyone ever film Gravity’s Rainbow? Probably not – but I’d love to see someone try a 50-episode “mini”-series or maybe just an animated short about Bryon the bulb?)

Watching “One Battle After Another” was so much fun that I feel bad nit-picking the parts that felt, to this Pynchonista, a bit off. The pacing, the score, the costumes, the scenery, the camera-work were all endlessly entertaining. I have a special affection for the rural northern CA utopi-ish landscape in which much of Vineland is set, because my late father-in-law used to live in Philo, between Boonville and Eureka, which one-time hippie towns are at least plausibly real analogues of Pynchon’s always at an angle to reality locations. (The film is partly shot in Eureka and among the gorgeous redwoods where we scattered family ashes a few years ago.)

As with PTA’s film of “Inherent Vice,” the acting was brilliant, with big stars – in this case Leonardo DiCaprio, in the earlier one Joaquin Phoenix – taking on Pynchonesque tics. Leo plays Bob Ferguson (nee Zoyd Wheeler), Teyana Taylor gives a rousing turn as Perfidia Beverly Hills (Frenesi Gates), Sean Penn is the corrupt yet complex Steven J. Lockjaw, and Benecio del Toro the serene sansei Sergio St. Carlos. Theirs were the biggest and most engaging faces on screen, but Regina Hall’s Deandra (a semi-analogue of DJ, maybe?) wasn’t far behind, and the full cast was excellent. I kept being struck by PTA’s creative and frequent use of the close up – the camera loves all these faces, and many images linger: Deandra weeping when being interrogated, a pregnant Perfidia firing an assault rifle, nervous Bob playing with explosives, and Lockjaw trying to assume a perfectly blank expression while being (possibly) initiated into an elite white supremacist cadre were among the most memorable. Maybe best of all was Sergio St. Carlos beatifically preparing himself to be hassled by the cops after admitting to having had “a few small beers” before being pulled over – though of course we know that he’s at that moment distracting the forces of the law so that Bob can escape to rescue his daughter. (I might also put in a quick word for the stoned Bob’s interview with his daughter’s history teacher, letting her know that Ben Franklin was a slaveowner before becoming an abolitionist. Watching this funny scene, I couldn’t help thinking it was a call-back to the 22-year old Sean Penn’s early role as surf-stoner Jeff Spicoli in 1982’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”)

Chase Infiniti’s Willa, the lost child who Bob brings up as a single Dad after Perfidia skips, becomes increasingly the film’s emotional heart, in ways that were perhaps a bit too sentimental even for late Pynchon. She’s an impressive young actor, and she gave the big star playing her Dad a nice teenager’s glare and backchat. In some ways, as with Shasta in “Inherent Vice,” Willa is required in the film to carry maybe too much redemptive energy, to be the magic child who can save the world or at least the family. My personal reading of Pynchon remains firmly postlapsarian and convinced that the world can’t be saved, which of course doesn’t mean that we should not keep trying. The film, like the novel, both sympathizes with the revolution and also critiques it.

Was Willa, or maybe even the whole film, too sweet-sad to be fully Pynchon-ish? So many of the ingredients of the stew bubble nicely together – the paranoia, the doper jokes, zany names, characters who are mostly allegories but also sometimes, as if by accident, real people. PTA follows Pynchon’s lead in presenting dizzying turns of the betrayal wheel, so that the radical revolutionaries and their white supremacist adversaries fight each other, resemble each other, and become oddly, not to say erotically, entangled. Every We-system is also a They-system, as the man says.

There’s a sweetness in the film’s politics and its devotional expression of familial love that comes to the fore in the second half, after Perfidia leaves, first for witness protection and later for parts unknown. Bob’s commitment to radical politics matches up with the spirit of Pynchon’s novel, even if the joys of the People’s Republic of Rock n Roll don’t appear on screen.

I’m tempted to say that the biggest gap between novel and film is that Pynchon works through systems and PTA through individuals. In this sense, the camera’s close ups might be symptomatic – the film director loves faces, while the mad genius novelist constantly invents new and interlocking groups.

Some of the non-Pynchon elements in the film, especially the supremacist Christmas Adventurers who pledge themselves and their controlling violence to St. Nick, and also the name Perfidia Beverly Hills, felt at least as Pynchon-y as old Tom’s versions.

The almost-last close ups in the movie were on the rolling asphalt roads of Humbolt County, and in my vibrating seat I felt as if I was driving over the mountains back in time to see my father in law again. Bob arrives just a bit late, but it turns out – unsurprisingly – that Willa has already saved herself. Will there be a full family reunion? Maybe, or maybe not – but the bad guys have been avoided, at least for a while.

The central baddie in the film is Sean Penn’s Lockjaw, an ambitious military man whose erotic obsession with Perfidia becomes visually too-obvious to an early moment in the action. Penn’s combination of coiled intensity and physical awkwardness made him become a compelling villain, in a way reminiscent of Bigfoot in Inherent Vice. He’s cruel and exploitative, especially in his dealings with Perfidia and later her daughter. But he, too, gets caught and chewed by the machine to which he dedicates his career. As in Pynchon’s novel, it’s ultimately his own system that prevents him from wreaking his revenge on the lost child. And as in the novel, there’s something unsatisfying about that ending, even though Willa has already, in a Hollywood touch, gunned down one of the other Christmas Adventurers.

How must we act in the fact of injustice? What happens when righteous revolution curdles into betrayal, or gets displaced by other human needs and systemic forces? PTA’s latest film, even though it’s less directly an adaptation than “Inherent Vice,” and of course misses many great Pynchon-bits, from the thanatoids to the toobfreex, not to mention great characters such as Weed Atman and DJ the ninjette, maybe gets the balance pretty close to right, the sweet along with the bitter, the playful insinuating itself into the tragic, so that, in the end, like Byron the immortal bulb and impotent revolutionary, we find ourselves enjoying it.

I’m hoping to see it again soon!

Last Saturday, Aug 2, I swam as part of the six-person Sunrisers relay squad from Port Jefferson, NY, to Bridgeport, CT. Our team was part of the 38th Annual Swim Across the Sound. The swim raised over a half-million dollars to support St. Vincent’s cancer programs, of which our team – one of 41 to make the crossing – contributed around $11k. According to the official results, we placed 4th in the Traditional (Wet Suit Allowed) category, with a time of 6:03:24. We were also 13th overall out of 46 teams starting and 41 finishing.

On Sunday, Aug 3, I read some poems at an Arts Fair at the Clark Library in Bethany, CT. Since my contribution was already a pretty wet thing, with me reading from Swim Poems (“Of Thirteen Minds” and “Anthropocene Swimming”) and from Sailing without Ahab (“Out of Place” and “Errors in a Book”), I figured it would work to add one more swimming lyric, which I wrote early that morning, thinking about the crossing.

Here ’tis –

In the Middle

        

Each straining arm reaches into nothing –

Wet salt nothing that spans the world,

Surges and white caps spawned by wind,

Tides and currents by the late summer moon.

There’s ooze below.

Invisible sea creatures

Surround and touch my body,

And nothing solid stays –

Everything flows, slides, shifts

Away from the pressure I create with

Cupped hands pulling down and along my torso.

The grey-green embrace started on a windy shore near Port Jefferson,

Heading into a north wind.

We’re in the middle now, at my first leg in the relay.

We’ve not yet crossed the imaginary state line.

My pale arms reach

As sideways seas and wind-blown currents

Slosh water into my face.

I want rhythm

And sometimes –

For a stroke or two –

I feel it.

Swimming asks me to fit my

Terrestrial body into aqueous disorder.

Sometimes I match practiced form

With the world’s dynamic surges

And there’s a feeling,

A balance,

A moment when the world’s power flows alongside my flesh,

My arm pulls me forward into the moving sea,

And I progress from this disorderly middle

Toward the farther shore.

August 3, 2025

#44 in permanent marker on my hands and shoulders

Everyone knows that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s queerest comedies. It’s hard to tell any of the four young lovers apart, Hippolyta the captured Amazon Queen is clearly ripe for a feminist revision, and the affair between Bottom and Titania already spans class and species barriers – so surely heteronormativity isn’t much farther to go?

Nicholas Hynter’s “immersive” production at the Bridge Theater in London takes all these hints, doubles them, and redoubles that doubling. I’ve rarely seen a livelier production.

Queen Hippolyta, cross-cast as Titania and played with stately majesty by Susannah Fielding, arrjved first into the central staging area, which was an open pit, partly filled by a standing audience who were often shooed out of the way for entrances and exits. The Queen at first was inside a glass box. Silently watching the opening exchange between the Athenians, she clearly sympathized with Hermia, whose father was trying to block her choice in love. The Queen placed her hand on the glass – and everyone turned to look.

From that point on, the women – especially Hippolyta/Titania but also including the mechanical playwright Mistress Quince, are mostly in control of things.

The core textual inversion around which the production turns gives the changeling boy to Oberon – which means Titania comes up with the plan to dose him with the love juice. The Bottom-Oberon scenes, one of which includes a bubble bath, are deliciously queer.

The other big staging innovation was aerial acropatics, Puck, played brilliantly by David Moorst, along with the other faeries, played half of the show hanging upside down from slings that descended from the ceiling. Moorst, who also played the same role in the 2019 production of the same play at the Bridge, was an especially agile acrobat, and his nicely bitter northern accent gave some of his lines a sinister turn.

Bottom, played by Emmanuel Akwafo, was the star, as usual, and his glorious scene-chewing at the death of Pyramus – he mimed the on-screen deaths of Tony Montana, Harry Potter, Oz’s Wicked Witch, and a couple of others I didn’t catch – was only one highlight.

I was sitting in the first row above the pit, because the standing room was sold out when I bought my ticket.The people standing below me had the best views, and also got to join a dance party with the cast at the end. If you go, it’s worth it to stand!

When Hippolyta, on a hunting trip with Theseus, played by J.J. Feild, who was more fun as Oberon, muses about having hunted before with “Hercules and Cadmus,” I tend to read that line as damning her fiance Theseus with faint praise. He’s not a demi-god like those guys! In this Hippolyta-Titania powered production, the line read even more than it usually does as an assertion of power.

Back in the 1990s, one of my favorite pieces of experimental Shakespeare was the Donkey Show. Staged in a disco in Chelsea, with the parts of the mechanicals distributed to two guys named “Vinnie from Queens” who jostled in line with us before Mr. Oberon let us past the velvet rope into his dance club, it was also deeply immersive and took place partly on a dance floor. That show’s trick was replacing all of Shakespeare’s words with disco lip-synchs from the ’70s – Stayin’ Alive, I Will Survive, &c. This Bridge Dream kept Shakespeare’s words but captured that same anarchic spirit of celebration.

If you’re in London this summer – go see it!

The best part about the Globe’s Wild West production of the comedy of Romeo and Juliet was the line-dancing after the final curtain. They company had previewed the hoe-down during the Capulet ball, with Romeo and his buddies wearing masks, but the production was still feeling its way in its early moments. By the end, with blood on the costumes of the slain, having worked all the way through the nearly three hours traffic of our stage, everybody was in a good mood. Abdul Sessay’s Romeo was smiling, Lola Shalam’s Juliet kicking up her heels. After a production that put more into the comic notes than just about any Romeo and Juliet I’ve seen, this felt like the right closer.

It was a great ending to a mixed production.

Did the dancing and the comedy detract a bit from the tragic reach of the show? Yes – but I’ve seen a lot of all-tragic versions of this play, and I must say I enjoyed this alternative.

The Wild West setting, complete with sixguns and a banjo/fiddle band in the upper stage, was good fun, though perhaps there was a sense in which we were asked to remember that the myth of the American West always includes lots of violence, especially with guns. It did seem pointed that, though much of the stage combat involved knives, Romeo killed both Tybalt and Paris with a pistol. (Mercutio and Juliet are slain with knives.)

The best showman of the cast was probably Colm Gormley as Capulet, who clearly loved to play host and lead the dancing. Roman Asde’s Benvolio, who also voiced the Preface, was in some ways more engaging than Michael Elcock’s stage-hogging Mercutio. Perhaps a production that steered the tragic story toward comedy prefered the character named good well (Ben-volio) to the blazing Mercutio?

Sessay’s Romeo showed the lover as young and enthusiastic, and at times he appeared to give the sort of faux-Americana impression that Timothee Chalamet presents via the young waifish Bob Dylan. This Romeo seemed always to enjoy being in love, even as he smoothly shifted from Rosaline to Juliet.

Shalam’s Juliet had the best lines in the play, and although I enjoyed her energy, I’ve rarely heard a less powerful version of the “Come, night” soliloquy that opened the second act. She was much stronger as a dancer and when performing her artless enthusiasm for her newfound love – “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,” she says as if discovering something, “The more I have, the more I give, for both / Are infinite.” It’s a good line.

The brutal final moments of this play would seem to be a challenge for this comic vision. The ghosts of Mercutio and Tybalt come out and sit onstage for the final tableau, and Paris and Romeo, after their deaths, each stand up and contribute to the action in their afterlives. The result is an affecting partial recreation of the group dance at the Capulet ball, this time with ghosts.

Even the very final minutes returned to dancing. After Juliet in her little girl voice reproached Reomeo for leaving her no poison, his shade stood up, smiled, and held out a knife. Juliet drew him close as if to start another dance, and the dagger came between them. It was a shrewd and powerful way to allow the lovers, who die seperately in the play, to bring themselves together. Their ghosts also returned to speak the closing lines about “Juliet and her Romeo.”

A lively play with some interesting ideas and new faces in the cast!

Almost all productions of Othello end up as a wrestling match between the two lead actors, and the eye-droppingly expensive Broadway production’s dueling Hollywood stars – Denzel Washington, lauded in the Playbill as “the most lauded stage and screen actor of his generation” as the Moor, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago – was no exception to this rule. But I’ve seldom seen the contest be so one-sided.

His is not the title role, but Iago drives the play, especially in the opening acts that transform love’s “virtue into pitch,” to borrow one of Iago’s many soliloquies. I wasn’t sure exactly what to think when Jake Gyllenhaal received a round of applause on his first appearance in 1.1 – but I guess everyone knew what made our seats so expensive? (Denzel would get similar applause when he entered in 1.2.) Gyllenhaal’s Iago was persuasive and charismatic. He did not quite hit the character’s more devilish notes – neither “I am not that I am” (1.1.64) nor his final “From this time forth I never will speak word” (5.2.301) burned into our ears. His Iago was improviser as much as master-mind, and his repeated elaborations of the growing schemes built on the fundamental and pre-arranged compact between the star and the audience. “How am I then a villain,” he insinuates, with an innocent high-wattage smile, ” To counsel Cassio to this parallel course / Directly to his good?” (2.3.343-45). I can’t speak for everyone in the house, but I was persuaded. Iago’s words are, of course, perfectly true. But the words that follow this line snap into a different phase of meaning that Gyllenhaal only rarely touched: “Divinity of hell! / When devils will the blackest sins put on / They do suggest at first with heavenly shows / As I do now” (2.2.345-48). Gyllenhaal’s Iago is never really the devil. He lures and entices – his convincing Cassio to drink “but one cup” is a masterclass in seduction – but does not quite terrify.

In a somewhat comparable way, Washington’s Othello bathed in the audience’s love for the actor’s past achievements without showing the soldier’s fire beneath. Perhaps it was the angle provided by my nosebleed seats in the second balcony, but Denzel looked a bit frail, especially by comparison to his much younger fellow actors. It didn’t help that he sometimes mumbled through the longer speeches; the full majesty of Wilson Knight’s “Othello music” wasn’t in evidence. His body performed its familiar charisma, and especially in the opening acts he carried himself well, but I never quite felt the excess – the “more” – of his Moor. (I feel somewhat similarly about Washington’s performance as Macbeth in the 2021 Joel Coen film – maybe Denzell is too likeable to play the tyrant?) The murder scene in Othello, which I walk into any performance of this play dreading, was oddly unthreatening – he put his lovely wife Desdemona, played by Molly Osborne, in a headlock and she kicked her legs for a while, but no great struggle permeated the theater. Part of the reason everyone in the play, especially the Venetian state, loves and needs Othello is his capacity for violence, which they at least hope they can control. Washington’s version of the general hid that violence not wisely but too well.

Othello’s violance can be a tricky thing to play, since Shakespeare and Iago prime the audience to read it in racist terms, and to the extent that the play works on us, it aligns us with Iago’s anti-Blackness. The Black actress Kimber Elayne Sprawl, who played Iago’s wife Emilia, rose as a powerful counterpoint in her major parts in the Willow scene and the final scene. The force of her denunciation of Othello – “Thou hast not half that power to do me harm / As I have to be hurt. O gull, O dolt, / As ignorant as dirt!” (5.2.158-60) – made me wonder if the production feared its own capacity to make us despise Othello, who is, As Emilia’s husband reminds us, a fool who “will as tenderly be led by th’ nose / As asses are” (1.3.400-01). Or perhaps the opposite is true – everyone loves Denzel from the jump, so it’s almost impossible, even to the end, not to sympathize with the man who smothers his innocent wife. I noticed that the gift shop was selling t-shirts with Othello’s self-excusing line, “one that loved not wisely but too well” (5.2.342). Do we really believe that about Othello?

The revelatory performance of the night, however, was not from either of the stars, and not even from the strong supporting presences of Kimber Sprawl’s Emilia, Molly Osborne’s Desdemona, or Anthony Michael Lopez’s smarmy Roderigo. I’ve never seen an actor play Cassio with as much persuasive force as Andrew Burnap. A “proper man” (1.3.391) indeed! Making Cassio so much more compelling than usual had some interesting consequences, including making Bianca, who dotes on Cassio, more plausible, and also making the drunken drinking scene (2.3) – here played by men dressed as U.S. marines – into something like a compelling representation of masculine harmony. Why isn’t it OK for the soldiers, who have been delivered from war by the sea-storm, to have one other gaudy night in Cyprus?

It might also be that I enjoyed that stage moment because it showed Iago and his fellow soldiers assembling a (briefly) happy community, which of course Iago immediately tears to pieces. Or possibly I’m just sympathetic to Jake Gyllenhaal, who I coincidentally met when he was in middle school. In the early 1990s, before going back to grad school, I taught English at Harvard-Westlake high school in Los Angeles. Jake’s sister Maggie was in my Creative Writing class. I was a faculty chaperone for a ski trip one winter, and I ended up sharing a condo with a then-7th grader who his friends called “Jake the Flake.” I told him that his sister was in my class, and he looked at me suspiciously and said, “Do you know her poem, ‘Killer Soup’?” I said that I did, though I don’t now remember anything about it beyond the title. But I seem to have passed the test.

One truth of mega-stars is that their visible presences make them feel familiar, even if you didn’t have a few conversations with their pre-teen selves. Othello on Broadway, with its packed houses and extravagant prices, represents a marriage of star culture and Shakespeare. Maybe, like the marriage in the play, there are some challenges that come with that?

A quick run-down of the books I read in 2024 – counting down from the current month of December.

Total of 94 books, down from last year’s quite absurd total of 126 (!). A bit of an early summer lull? But some good ones this year!

I also published two books in ’24 – Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature, co-edited with Nic Helms, came out in March from Amsterdam University Press, and Sailing without Ahab: Eco-Poetic Travels from Fordham University Press in April!

December (9)

Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Dylan: A Biography by Dennis McDougal

To the RIver: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing

Hydrofeminist Thinking with Oceans by Tamara Shafer, Viv Bozalek, and Nike Romano

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald

Sing Like Fish by Amorina Kingdom

November (9)

The Sea Close By by Albert Camus

Ghost Species by James Bradley

Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby

The Burning Earth by Sunil Amrith

Swimming a Long Way Together by Vanessa Daws

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janella Shane

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World by David Graeber

Our Own Worst Enemy by Tom Nichols

Eat Like a Fish by Bren Smith

October (8)

Insomniac City by Bill Hayes

Department of Speculation by Jenny Offil

Slippery Beast by Ellen Ruppel Shell

The Message by Ta-Nahesi Coates

Living on Earth by Peter Godfrey-Smith

We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (graphic novel version)

Playground by Richard Powers

September (4)

Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari

We Are Mermaids by Stephanie Burt

Survival is a Promise by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Every Day I Write the Book by Amitava Kumar

August (8)

On Revision by William Germano

The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet

Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? by Pierre Bayard

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Big Fiction by Dan Synkin

Literature for a Changing Planet by Martin Puchner

Hell by Timothy Morton

July (5)

Becoming Earth by Ferris Jabr

The Language of Climate Politics by Genevieve Guenther

Deep Water by James Bradley

Sweat by Bill Hayes

Democracy or Else by Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor

June (3)

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

The English Experience by Julie Schumacher

Amphibious Soul by Craig Foster

May (9)

Environmental Humanities on the Brink by Vincent Bruyere

This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan

Say More by Jen Psaki

A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje

In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster

A Leg to Stand On by Oliver Sacks

The Disenchanted Earth by Richard Seymour

The North Water by Ian McGuire

The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim by Gabriel Brownstein

April (9)

The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

Rendered Obsolete by Jamie Jones

A Whaler’s Dictionary by Dan Beachy-Quick

Knife by Salmon Rushdie

A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks by David Gibbens

Jump the Clock by Erica Hunt

The Invention of Prehistory by Stefanos Geroulanos

Sailing Alone by Richard King

Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise

March (7)

Changes in the Land by William Cronin

Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

Selected Poems of Christopher Logue

The Truce by Hunter Walker and Luppe Luppen

Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Super-infinite by Katherine Randell

Tides by David Georg Bowers and Emyr Martyn Roberts

February (5)

The Zero and the One by Ryan Ruby

Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh

We That Are Young by Preti Taneja

The Adventures of Amina a-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

Courtly History by Stephanie Hershinow

War Music by Christopher Logue

January (10)

Our Moon by Rebecca Boyle

Still Waters by Curt Stager

Red Road by Clan Mother Shoran Waupatukuay Piper

Surviving in a Ruthless World by Terry Gans

On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Penock

Memorial by Alice Oswald

A History of Water by Edward Wilson-Lee

Drunk by Edward Slingerland

Mixing up the Medicine by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel

The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher

“What do humans want from their machines?” crooned the always-amazing Ethan Lipton, who my grad students and I went to see Tuesday night (11/12) at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn.

The show or as he called it, the “demonstration,” “We Are Your Robots” introduced a quartet of humanoid robots who look quite a bit like Ethan and his three-piece orchestra. These machines want to know what we, the human audience, wants from them, the robot performers. They also want to know what I also want to know – what is the future of humans and our machines?

Compared with the deeply personal stories of “No Place to Go” and “The Outer Space,” as well as the gloriously goofy Western “Tumacho,” this latest offering from Lipton was less narrative and more philosophy of mind. Did I expect to hear the refrain of Thomas Nagel – “What is it like to be a bat?” – set to music? I did not – but I have to say I loved it. Maybe philosophy should always be presented in catchy jazz-swing tunes? With cameos by Daniel Dennett, Mozart, panpsychism, David Chalmers’s “hard question of consciousness,” and quite a few amazing guitar, bass, and saxophone riffs?

What do you want to keep?, Lipton asked us. Your iphone or your glasses? Your glasses or your knife and fork? Maybe we’ve been living with robots for longer than we like to remember.

We humans are, or maybe we need to admit that we are, “collaborators in our own evolution,” and the trick is not to do the job too badly. One refrain in the show is Noam Chomsky’s dour pronouncement that, from a certain point of view, humans resembles a species built in order to destroy itself. In Lipton’s songs, that dark vision of p(doom) (i.e, the percentage chance that our coming AI overlords will wipe out humanity) hovered just off stage for most of the evening, as the orchestra’s glorious music sounded out a more hopeful, messier, and more emotionally rich entanglement. What if the truth is that we love our machines?

I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who’s not already made it out during opening week – I’ll be back with a family crew in December, after taking students yesterday – so I won’t talk in too much detail about my favorite songs, including an unexpected and quite moving duet. As usual, the band was extraordinary – listening to Vito Dieterle’s saxophone always takes me all the way back to my middle school woodwind days, and Ethan’s gentle, speculative voice sneaks itself inside your imagination. If this is what the robots will be, maybe it won’t be so bad? Or maybe we’re already with them?

I was wondering, as I was chatting about Chat-GPT and other language-spewing robots with my students before going into the show last night, if Ethan’s signature blend of wit and sentiment would make me love our robots? Or understand them better?

Get to Theatre for a New Audience before the Robots vanish on December 8th!

“Fame,” says Borges, who somehow seems to have managed to see Sir Kenneth’s New York production of King Lear, “is a form of incomprehension.” I’ve rarely seen a famous actor so unconnected to the other players than in this production. See better, Lear! There are other people on stage who can help you!

Branagh’s essentially solo performance had a few interesting moments, though most of them were too histrionic for my taste. His variations on the five “nevers” over Cordelia’s dead body were technically interesting, and they reminded me a bit of his performance of Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech at the Park Avenue Armory in 2014. He played the king’s madness as a loss of language, especially in the “Sa sa sa” nonsense syllables he speaks while running away from Cordelia’s men. But too many of the most powerful lines – the rage against the storm, the curse on Goneril, the “great stage of fools” – were simply too hammed up, too much played over the heads of his fellow actors toward the back row where I was sitting. The conceit of the casting appears to have been Sir Kenneth plus a fresh crop of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) grads. (Branagh is a RADA alum.) But those actors couldn’t reach him, or he didn’t allow himself to be reached.

I was happy to experience the space – the new-ish Shed at the northern end of the HIgh Line near all the fancy new shops at Hudson Yards. Hovering above the stage was a massive donut-shaped fixture, with a cloudy sky projected onto it and a black hole at its core – not subtle, but visually arresting. The actors ran up and down the aisles, which I admit I always enjoy. It’s good to be sharing space! There was some complicated, and probably expensive, business with a diagonal piece of the stage that angled up to reveal the hovel beneath it – but the production didn’t do much to make the storm visceral in any way.

The cast that Branagh mostly ignored was, alas, not all that strong. Dylan Corbett-Bader’s Edmund did very little with one of the best roles in Shakespeare, and Doug Colling’s Edgar wasn’t much better. The daughters were better than the sons and sons-in-law. I’m coming around to thinking that Goneril is one of the most compelling roles in the play, and Deborah Alli did a solid job, especially when canoodling with Edmund. The best acting of the night came from Jessica Revell, who played both Cordelia and the Fool. As Cordelia she did a nice job sticking it to her narcissistic old man in the opening scene – perhaps there’s something in the world right now that makes me want to see a young woman stand up to a cranky old man? – and her Fool was lively, musical, and came closer than anyone else on stage to getting Branagh to pay attention. “Take heed, sirrah,” the King intoned as the Fool teased, “the whip” (1.4). For a moment it was as if Lear realized there were other people who mattered in his kingdom!

I’ve seen a lot of Lears over the years, including a lot of what I think of as “big man” productions, with star actors such as Ian McKellan, Derek Jacobi, Stacy Keach, Glenda Jackson, and Anthony Sher. Some of these productions were quite good, though usually not as consistently powerful as experimental versions like Colombari’s fantastic ten-actors-playing-the-King production this past summer, or the Chinese opera one-man show by Wu Hsing-Kuo. I remain concinved that the storm scenes at the play’s center are perhaps English literature’s most painful evocations of what it’s like to live in a hostile environment – a question that I fear will be increasingly on our minds as the Anthropocene plays itself into the future. But not every production can be a great one, I suppose!

Very expensive tickets still available through December 15th!