Steve Mentz

This weekend I spent Sunday hunkered down and watching the snow. Next Sunday I’ll be back at LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club at 66 East 4th St, watching the Compagnia de’ Colombari’s extraordinary production of King Lear. After the matinee ends, around 4 pm, I’ll chair a talkback that connects the play to the flooded waterways of New York City. Please come join us!

My special invited guests for the talkback, who also joined me last Friday for opening night, are each experts in slightly different areas.

Dr. Genevieve Guenther is the Founding Director of End Climate Silence and the author of the excellent book, The Language of Climate Politics (2024). She’s also a one-time professor of Renaissance literature, though we somehow managed not to meet each other until last Friday before the play.

Nathan Kensinger is an artist and film-maker who specializes in the waterways and coastlines of greater New York City. He is currently working on a film about the city’s ongoing responses to the threat of another Sandy-sized storm and flood event.

We will also be joined by director Karin Coonrod and three members of the cast, Abigail Okunwali, Paul Price, and Tony Torn.

Please join us Sunday immediatly following the play!

As the temperature was dropping fast Friday night, ahead of today’s now-raging snowstorm, I brought a lively group out to the East Village haunts where I lived in the 1990s to see Colombari’s ten-headed King Lear. Such a show!

This play is always overwhelming, and every time I see it, it rolls me in its powerful surf. Probably my favorite description of the the experience of King Lear comes from the great Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, who writes about his own capacity for being overwhelmed by both art and nature:

If I get so carried away by a spider-web covered with dew, what will I do in the evening when we are going to see King Lear?

How are we supposed to make sense of these things? What is the possible context for art that overwhelms you?

I’ve been thinking a lot, including on my long cold drive home after the show, about how Colombari represents human collectively on stage. The 10-Lears structure, in which the actors pass around and share most of the King’s lines, makes the royal “we” into a very literal thing. Having all the actors wandering through the aisles and the audience brought our physical spaces together. The chorus-like incantation of some stray lines and a few longer speeches – I remember especially “Blow, winds” at the start of the storm, and the “Howl…oh, you are men of stones” speech after Cordelia’s death – capture something close to religious ritual through shared syllables. We were all there, in the storm, in our seats, morning the beloved daughter. In some ways I thought the mad king speeches in act 4, in which just one actor playing Lear sat on a chair next to one actor playing Gloucester, didn’t quite reach the same level of intensity. Some of the language in that scene is about the king’s magical body – “they cannot touch me for coining, I am the King himself” (4.6.84-85) – but in this production in particular, it felt to me as if it was the plural nature of the king that carried his authority.

I’m now trying to make sense of how the king’s plurality might connect to ideas of political order, and to my own personal obsession with the play’s representations of human vulnerability to natural forces, especially rain and wind. The elements that strike his old man’s body emphasize his solitary nature. So perhaps the collective voicing of the play’s language forms some kind of political and artistic? solidarity? 

I’ll be back next Sunday for the 2 pm matinee, and then I’m bringing students on Thursday 2/5 near the end of the run. So I’m likely to have much more to say about this great production – including at a talkback I’m chairing next Sunday! More soon – but here’s the link for tickets: https://www.lamama.org/king-lear/.

On stage through Sunday Feb 8th!

Tonight’s the night!

The Compania de’ Colombari’s experimental production of King Lear opens tonight, 1/23, at LaMaMa Theater in the East Village. The curtain comes up at 7 pm!

I’ve been watching Colombari productions for years, including their amazing Merchant of Venice that premiered in the Venice Ghetto in 2016. I didn’t see it in Italy, but I caught a resonant restaging in the courtyard of Yale Law School in 2018. I later brought their Whitman on Walls production to the St. John’s campus in October 2024, featuring original poetry by students and faculty as well as short films created by the company. Last summer, some of our SJU graduate students joined me in New Haven to see apreview production of the Lear that will open tonight in Manhattan. (I also joined the board of the company last summer – to give full disclosure!)

Tonight the company starts a three-week run off-Broadway at LaMaMa. I’ll be hosting a talkback, “Fathom and Half: Floodwaters in New York City and King Lear” after the 2 pm matinee on Sunday 2/1. I’ll also be bringing my English/Honors 3140 students wto the play on Thursday Feb 5th.

Come join me for any of those three nights! It should be great!

I don’t think I’ll finish James tonight, so I’ll wrap up 2025 with 77 books to my name. A perfectly respectable total, though far behind Olivia’s quite amazing 177 (!).

For ’26 I’d like to read more novels, and probably fewer books tied to the contemporary moment. I’m starting with James in print, and Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet on audio. Both are great so far!

I might also return to some 18-19c figures – the Brontes, Conrad, Hardy. Maybe Smollet? We’ll see!

December (5)

Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The LIfe of Bob Dylan

Marty Rhodes Figley, Emily and Carlo

Matt Strassler, Waves in an Impossible Sea

Elif Shafnik, There Are Rivers in the Sky

Paula Byrne, The Real Jane Austen

November (4)

R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory

Al Mennie, Night Swimming

Peter Brennan, The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything

October (5)

Eli Clare, Unfurl

Pauline Oliverors, Quantum Listening

Carlos Eire, They Flew

Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

September (4)

Ordinary Time

James Bradley, Landfall

Michael Grunwald, We Are Eating the Earth

David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics

August (8)

Vincaine Despret, Living as a Bird

Bill McKibben, Here Comes the Sun

Candice Kelsey, Postcards from the Masthead

Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband

Paul Hawken, Carbon

Paula Byrne, Six Weeks by the Sea

Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

July (7)

Leif Weatherby, Language Machines

Bruce Holsigner, Culpability

Jennifer Fleishner, Maladies of the Will

Daniel Kraus, Whalefall

J.M.W. Turner, Turner’s Last Sketchbook

Ian Warrell, J.M.W. Turner

Lee Child, Tripwire

June (5)

Marcus Rediker, Freedom Ship

Tom Higham, The World Before Us

Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance

Laura Spinney, Proto

Leah Littman, Lawless

May (5)

Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West

Hiromi Ito, The Thorn Puller

Bonnie Tsui, On Muscle

Steven Hahn, Illiberal America

Samantha Frost, Biocultural Creatures

April (9)

MIchelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

Terry Bisson, Tomorrowing

Elaine Pagels, Mysteries and Wonder

Dan Beachy-Quick, Spell

Rob Wilson, Oceanic Becoming

Colombe Schneck, Swimming in Paris

Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites

Daniel Mark Epstein, The Ballad of Bob Dylan

Julia Armfield, Private Rites

March (8)

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance

Sarah Wynn-Williams, Carless People

Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

John Waldman, Heartbeats in the Muck

Reid Hoffman, Super-Agency

James Scott, In Praise of Floods

Morgan Vo, The Selkie

Ellen Arnold, Water in World History

February (5)

Grant Shreve, What Universities Owe Democracy

Bruno Latour, If We Lose the Earth, We Lose Our Souls

Melody Jue, Coralations

Chris Hayes, The Sirens’ Call

Orlando Reade, What in Me is Dark

January (6)

M.I. Rio, If We Were Villains

Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass

Alanna Mitchell, The Sprinning Magnet

Ursula K. LeGuin, Lavinia

Madeline Miller, Circe

Christos Tsiolkos, Barracuda

Mark Polizzotti, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisted

Dan Beachy-Quick, Of Silence and Song

Daryl Sanders, That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound

Rhodri Lewis, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

David Perry and Matthew Gabriele, Oathbreakers

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!