"You can go to your camper and do whatever you want. I even get television in there.... The camper taught me how to watch TV.... I go to YouTube."

"Anything. And everything. There’s so many things on YouTube. You’ve got Ibsen, you got Chekhov, you got Strindberg. All on the internet. I even like TikTok when I see it from time to time.... TikTok. Yeah. I saw, like, a 14-year-old girl who was deaf, her whole life, and they do something with her, and she actually starts to hear for the first time! How 'bout that? And sometimes the dogs, they rescue them. You watch the guy go in there and bring this beautiful, sad dog back to, uh, being somewhat — aware of things.... Well, I love that stuff!"

Said Al Pacino, quoted in "The Interview/Al Pacino Is Still Going Big" (NYT).

I'm quoting from the recording. The transcript is edited down a bit and it misses some of the feeling. I thought the interviewer, David Marchese, rushed by some of the best material Pacino seemed to want to hand him. For example, when Pacino spoke of the beautiful, sad dog becoming aware, Marchese intruded with "You're such a softy," categorizing Pacino's feeling as shallow sentimentality as opposed to some more subtle existentialism.

And one of the topics was Pacino's nearly dying of of Covid.

"Mr. Navalny was able to send hundreds of handwritten letters, thanks to the curious digitalization of the Russian prison system..."

"... a relic of a brief burst of liberal reform in the middle of Mr. Putin’s 24-year rule. Through a website, people could write to him for 40 cents a page and receive scans of his responses.... In a letter... Mr. Navalny explained that he preferred to be reading 10 books simultaneously and 'switch between them.'... Describing prison life... he recommended nine books on the subject, including a 1,012-page, three-volume set by the Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko. Mr. Navalny added in that letter that he had reread 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'.... the searing Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about Stalin’s gulag.... 'Everyone usually thinks that I really need pathetic and heartbreaking words,' he wrote... 'But I really miss the daily grind — news about life, food, salaries, gossip'.... 'I really like your letters,' Mr. Navalny wrote in the last message that [his friend, the Russian photographer Evgeny Feldman, received. 'They’ve got everything I like to discuss: food, politics, elections, scandalous topics and ethnicity issues.'"

Writes Anton Troianovski, in "Inside Aleksei Navalny’s Final Months, in His Own Words/Trump. Indian food. Matthew Perry. And books, books, books. Excerpts from letters obtained by The Times show Mr. Navalny’s active mind, even amid brutal prison conditions" (NYT)(free access at that link).

Why is Matthew Perry in the headline? We're told that Navalny had never watched "Friends" — a show with plenty of food, gossip, and scandalous topics — but he'd read the actor's obituary in The Economist, "Matthew Perry changed the way America spoke" ("[I]n the audition it was he who had nailed it, reading the words in that unexpected way, 'hitting emphases that no one else had hit'; making everyone laugh. It was less that he, Matthew Perry, could play Chandler than that he was Chandler. He changed the part—and then the part changed him").

The NYT piece tells us that that Navalny's prison library had the classics — Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Chekhov — and “Who could’ve told me that Chekhov is the most depressing Russian writer?”

There's also some material here about Trump, but it's a little hard to understand. Perhaps it was enigmatic in the original. There's "Mr. Navalny confided that the electoral agenda of former U.S. President Donald J. Trump looked 'really scary.'" Not the man, the "electoral agenda"? And then he went on to say "Please name one current politician you admire."

Yes, there were some men in shorts...

... out in Spring Green last night, at the American Players Theatre's production of "Anton's Shorts."

But no, the play was not about shorts. It was a series of 5 short plays. "Anton" is Anton Chekhov. We loved it! Laughed a lot. Cried once each — at different things. 

The director writes:

[Chekhov's] early "low-brow" comedies and vaudevilles, like the ones in Anton's Shorts, were written and sold largely to make money for his family after his father was forced to declare bankruptcy. It wasn't until a visit to 1887/1888 visit to Steppe that he came into his literary adulthood, writing ever more serious short stories about people feeling trapped in their lives, and finally plays like the ones we still produce today. While Chekhov was often pegged as having a fairly pessimistic view of people, he disagreed, saying: "I wanted to tell people honestly: 'Look at yourselves. See how badly you live and how tiresome you are.'"

As for all the men in shorts... it was a pretty hot day, and it was still daytime when the play started....

... and, as you can see, we were outdoors. There's a delightful walk into the woods to this theater, an uphill walk. It's not a little walk from your air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned theater. We were out in the wilds of what Chekhov — as a character on stage — called "rural Wisconsin."

"When President Vladimir V. Putin began a program four years ago to hand out plots of land in remote areas of the Russian Far East, the idea was to lure young, hardy settlers..."

"... to the vast and sparsely populated region in a Slavic replay of the 1862 Homestead Act’s promise of 160 acres in the United States. Instead, at least in this patch of territory near the Chinese border, the Kremlin’s program got [60-year-old Sergei] Lunin, a self-declared anarchist — though, he insists, 'not an idiot who supports violence' — and lifelong gadfly. Before signing up as a pioneer to develop his plot of empty land, he edited a now defunct newspaper, Dissident, spent time in a Soviet jail accused of 'parasitism,' and did freelance work as a political consultant specializing in making mischief.... Like the American West, the Russian Far East has always been a land apart.... 'Here people are not afraid to talk loudly,' [Anton Chekhov] wrote. 'There is nobody to arrest them here and nowhere to exile them to. You can be as liberal as you like.' Today, there are plenty of people on hand to make arrests. The one-room apartment in the regional capital of Blagoveshchensk that Mr. Lunin shares with his wife, four cats, three dogs, two mice and one rabbit sits across the road from a compound of the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the post-Soviet incarnation of the K.G.B.... 'This will be my own little country and I will be its Putin,' [Lunin] explained during a recent visit along with his wife to their [7.4 acres of] land.... 'I was free under Brezhnev and am free under Putin,' he said. 'I am free inside.'"

"'Here I Can Be My Own Dictator'/The Kremlin’s plan to hand out plots of land in Russia’s Far East, long a magnet for dissenters, idealists and oddballs, has attracted some unusually freethinking settlers" (NYT).

Go East, old man!

"But how can you love a liar?"/"I don't know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn't be much love in the world."

Those are lines spoken in the play "Heartbreak House," by George Bernard Shaw, which we saw at The American Players Theater yesterday.



The 1920 play is set just before World War I. The line "But how can you love a liar?" is spoken by the rich bohemian woman Mrs. Hushabye, and the line that follows it is spoken by Ellie, a poor young woman who is in love with Mrs. Hushabye's lying husband, Hector. Ellie intends to marry a rich capitalist, Boss Mangan.

Mangan, trying to extricate himself from the planned marriage, reveals what a liar and a cheater he is, but Ellie still wants to marry him. She says:  "If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all, Mr Mangan."

Hector explains his behavior:

HECTOR. What am I to do? I can't fall in love; and I can't hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I'm not a bit in earnest....

Mangan reaches a breaking point and declares he's getting the hell out of the house, "Heartbreak House," where all the action takes place. Hector makes a move to go too and to turn it into a ridiculous romantic escapade:

HECTOR: Let us all go out into the night and leave everything behind us.

MANGAN. You stay where you are, the lot of you. I want no company, especially female company.

ELLIE. Let him go. He is unhappy here. He is angry with us.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go, Boss Mangan; and when you have found the land where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.

I thought you might enjoy those lines. There's much more, of course. Shaw was writing a play deliberately in the manner of Anton Chekhov. Note the seagull on the set in my photograph (at the middle of the right edge).

Chekhov famously said "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there" (and "The Seagull" is the Chekhov play with the last-act gunshot). So when Captain Shotover brought out a box of dynamite to tinker with in Act One, I figured Shaw meant us to see the Chekhov joke and to expect an explosion in the next act. We're expected to anticipate the whole lot of them blowing up and to contemplate, throughout, whether that isn't what they all deserve.

AFTERTHOUGHT: What is the difference between "escape" and "escapade"?

"Escape" + "ade" suggests a drink that produces escape.

Yes, I know that's not right! Do you expect me to look it up in a dictionary?

Speaking of drink, Captain Shotover (a very old man) speaks often of "the seventh degree of concentration," which seems to be some mystical state that he learned about in his seafaring journeys, some 1920s New Age-iness. Late in the play, Ellie declares:

ELLIE. There seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and Shakespeare. [Hector]'s tigers are false; Mr Mangan's millions are false; there is nothing really strong and true about [Mrs. Hushabye] but her beautiful black hair; and Lady Utterword's is too pretty to be real. The one thing that was left to me was the Captain's seventh degree of concentration; and that turns out to be—

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Rum.

"When John Oliver planted a giant bag of marijuana in my hand Sunday night and broadcast it to millions of HBO viewers, I immediately thought of Chekhov."

"In one of the Russian master’s shortest short stories, a lowly civil servant is so ecstatic to find an article about himself in the newspaper that he cannot stop bragging to family and friends — even though the story relays how he was run over by a horse while crossing the street in a drunken stupor. This is really all you need to know about fame and media in 2015. It’s also precisely how I felt when several eagle-eyed friends messaged me on Facebook that my 1992 Stuyvesant High School prom picture had somehow ended up in an Oliver segment about — what else? — lethal injections in Nebraska.... There I was, a dorky, baby-faced 17-year-old kid with braces and an ill-fitting, ill-chosen white dinner jacket, with one arm draped awkwardly around my beautiful date and the other, thanks to HBO and the magic of Photoshop, toting a whole lot of weed. It was embarrassing. Horrifying. And hilarious. So naturally I shared it with everyone I know. But there was one thing that didn’t make sense. My date, Toby Bochan, who remains one of my closest friends, put it simply on Facebook: 'How did they get this photo. How?'..."

From Jeremy Olshan's "How my 1992 prom picture ended up on HBO’s John Oliver show."

Although I haven't quite hit the big time, I do know what it's like to become a stock photo.

"An all-male Harvard final club is facing criticism over a sexually suggestive party invitation..."

"... that university administrators say raises concerns about 'sexism and bigotry' at the institution," reports The Boston Globe:

Members of the Spee Club canceled a pajama-themed party Saturday at their house on Mount Auburn Street amid backlash over an e-mail and video depicting scantily clad women, according to The Harvard Crimson student newspaper.

The invitation encouraged partiers to “stay the night.”

Scantily clad, eh? Scantily clad is the first language issue ever discussed on this blog, here. I clicked through to The Harvard Crimson:

The drawing, titled “Playbear,” depicted a bear wearing a robe, pants, and hat, with its arm around a woman dressed in tights and a sleeveless top. The email linked to a video that included multiple clips of women wearing underwear and male and female models walking a runway, as well as a clip from the song “Stay the Night.” The video, which was previously public on YouTube, was made private and then removed Thursday evening, after it prompted criticism from students and other social club members.

Somebody emailed me that Boston Globe link. So that means this is the kind of thing I'm supposed to have an opinion about [OR: this was an old reader who remembers my fixation on "scantily clad"]. I'm not going to jump through that hoop. I'm not that kind of girl. I'm just going to tell you about the 3 things I googled as my mind circulated around the prospect of writing this blog post:

1. Final Club. Never heard of it. Doesn't seem to be about studying for finals. I see at Wikipedia that this is a special Harvard term. There are lots of social clubs at Harvard, dating back to a time in the mid-19th century when Harvard banned fraternities. Final Clubs were the "last social club a person could join before graduation.... Years ago Harvard College freshmen could join a freshman club, then a 'waiting club,' and finally a 'final club.'" Wikipedia lists 8 all-male clubs and 5 all-female clubs (including "Isis Club (2000 - no affiliation with the Islamic extremist rebel group of the same name)").  Here's an article from 2014 in The Atlantic: "Still White, Still Male: The Anachronism of Harvard's Final Clubs."

2. Playbear. Is this a character I'm supposed to be familiar with? I picture the Owsley acid bear often seen connection with The Grateful Dead, but Google seems to be pointing me to a variation on the Playboy rabbit logo. I feel simultaneously old and young, because back in the days when I went to college — not Harvard, but the University of Michigan — it was the era of the Grateful Dead and LSD. Playboy was a relic of the previous generation (notably, my father, who was a longtime subscriber and unabashed fan). To think that Playboy has currency among young people today, that is just — as we hippies used to say — so weird. But what I love most about my Google search on "playbear" is that among the first few hits was the play "The Bear" by Anton Chekhov. ("You're a boor! A coarse bear! A Bourbon! A monster!")

3. "Stay the Night." This is a song sung by an empowered-looking woman with lyrics that seem to be about the situation in which sex was already had and the question is whether there's going to be a more substantial relationship. That is, staying the night isn't like "Let's Spend the Night Together" — in which The Rolling Stones were inviting the woman to have sex. The singer, Hayley Williams, is asking "Are you gonna stay the night?/Doesn't mean we're bound for life." So, staying the night raises the prospect of being bound for life, that is, married. So it seems to be along the lines of the great old Prince song "Let's Pretend We're Married" ("Ooh, little darlin' if you're free for a couple of hours/If you ain't busy for the next 7 years... Ooh-we-sha-sha-coo-coo-yeah/All the hippies sing together....").

"To live intensely, as he wanted, would speed up the illness and shorten the life available."

"In 1901 at forty-one, now ill beyond any denial and forced to live in the warm climate of the Black Sea, Chekhov married a lively and successful actress who worked in Moscow. The frequent trips from the hot south to the freezing capital were, his doctor observed, the worst-case scenario for his sickness. And indeed so many of Chekhov’s characters seem to make the worst possible, if not suicidal, choices."

Salman Rushdie "tried to compromise with a group of Islamic leaders in London by negotiating a statement that... actually reads like something that an inquisition would make you sign.'"

It said "among other things, that he believed there was no god but Allah and that he would not issue a paperback version of The Satanic Verses."

"I think it actually reads like something that an inquisition would make you sign," he says. "And that's more or less what it was. And I immediately — the moment I left that room in which I'd had that meeting — I began to feel physically ill because I understood that I'd in some way betrayed myself. I felt obliged to repudiate that statement and try and regain myself, for myself. It made me understand that this idea of trying to ingratiate oneself with the enemy was not only absurd, but improper. And in a way, now, looking back at it, I can see that it was beneficial to me because it clarified certain things in my head which were confused up to then."

It's just by chance that Salman Rushdie's story is in the news again at the same time as the overblown "rage" over the "Innocence of Muslims" video. Rushdie has a new memoir, "Joseph Anton" — released today.  (Joseph Anton is the pseudonym he chose as he went into hiding. It's a bland combination of the names of the writers Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov — non-bland would be Conrad Chekov — intended to hide his Indian ethnicity.)

"You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his."

Whispered into the ear of Anton Chekhov, who had bent over in response to a request from the ailing Tolstoy: "Kiss me goodbye."

"It seems to me that when you write a short story, you have to cut off both the beginning and the end."

"We writers do most of our lying in those spaces. You must write shorter, to make it as short as possible."

Ann Beattie's "Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life" is hilariously panned in the NYT.

By Michiko Kakutani.

[A] narcissistic, self-indulgent, hot-air-filled tome that condescends to its ostensible subject, Mrs. Nixon, and that wastes the reader’s time making ridiculous comparisons between, say, the Nixons and the characters in the Raymond Carver story “Cathedral,” or between the Nixons and the characters in the Chekhov story “The Lady With the Little Dog.” There are silly creative-writing-class exercises, like replacing every noun in Mr. Nixon’s famous Checkers speech with the seventh noun below it in the dictionary; and imagining some incidental events in Mrs. Nixon’s life (like taking a bubble bath or drawing sea creatures in the beach sand with her big toe). The chapter titled “Mrs. Nixon Has Thoughts on the War’s Escalation” consists of this one inane sentence: “You and Henry ordering the ‘Christmas Bombing’ was pesky!”...

...Ms. Beattie spreads a gluey gloss of speculation over Pat Nixon, much of it patronizing, stupid or insulting. For example, she writes that Mrs. Nixon thought for herself, but did so “well within cultural conditioning” and “didn’t think metaphorically.”

In one of her efforts to impersonate Mrs. Nixon, Ms. Beattie assumes an icky, Mrs. Cleaver-like voice, talking about making milkshakes to fatten up her husband so he’ll look better on TV in the next debate against John F. Kennedy. (“It’s festive, pretty and full of calories.”) Worse, much of this book feels like a lecture about creative writing....

Ouch. Remember when everyone fawned over Ann Beattie?

"When many different remedies are proposed for a disease, that means the disease is incurable."

A quote from the translation of "The Cherry Orchard" that is playing in NYC right now.

Another quote: "You haven't had time to live with the consequences of your answers."

Transcriptions by my son John, who got into the sold-out show last night after waiting in line. (Don't everyone line up at once.) Here's Terry Teachout reviewing the play in the Wall Street Journal.

"Werner Herzog meditates on the Google logo."

Roger Ebert is fooled by what is a very funny parody of Werner Herzog (which you should get if you've seen the movie "Grizzly Man"):



Looking (unsuccessfully) for the relevant clip from "Grizzly Man" — "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder" — I found this video made by a guy who finds that when he reads Anton Chekov short stories, he hears the words in his head in Werner Herzog's voice:



(The words are from the Chekov story "Gusev.")

When the audience has a laugh leader.

Mark Liberman at Language Log complains about an "inappropriate" laugh leader in an audience at a Chekhov play:

There was someone in the back of the theater with a  loud and infectious laugh,  who didn't laugh at any of the obviously funny lines, but instead laughed — maybe a hundred times — at a selection of lines that is not easy to characterize....

The laugher's interventions mostly seemed to me to be points where a character changed the subject, or said something that was unexpected in the context of the previous discourse, or said or did something awkward or socially uneasy....

But there were other theories.  One person thought that the laugher might have been a friend of a couple of the actors, who reacted whenever one of them entered the on-stage conversation. Another theory was that the laugher was reacting when the actors made certain expressive faces. These are obviously overlapping theories, and many others might be devised as well.

In the comments, Richard Bell said:

Is it possible this laugher was the one person who best understood and reacted to Chekhov's special comic gift? What you have suggested is, in fact, a pretty good description of Chekhovian comedy. His characters don't really listen to each other. Someone once said there is no dialogue in Chekhov; only interrupted monologues. They change the subject because they don't know what the subject is; they have not been listening.

Now, Liberman says the laugh leader was "loud" and goes on to describe the actors seemingly reacting negatively to the laughing. So, it seems as though the laughing was bad in some special way that makes Bell's comment an incomplete response.

But I am very interested in laugh leading. When I go to the movies or a play, I find that I myself am a laugh leader. It don't laugh loudly, but I am the first person to laugh at a lot of things, and I get other people laughing.  I'm not trying to go first. It's just that a lot of Americans — especially at high-art type movies and plays — are too polite or insecure about laughing. They'll sit there silently while all sorts of subtly funny things are happening as if they need to laugh lines and broad comedy to give them confidence. People seem to be unsure of their own perceptions or just numbed to nonobvious comedy.

A good laugh leader can lubricate the audience and intensify the pleasure of witnessing a performance with others. Of course, a bad laugh leader is a problem, especially if there are live actors on stage. But it's that fear of laughing first and laughing wrongly that holds so many people back and puts a premium on good laugh leading.

"The real problem with literary types is..."

"... that the painstakingly detailed analysis of relationships required to understand or even to produce top notch novels can't be turned off when applied to one's spouse, or one's children. Even though you have to tell yourself they are not the same thing. One is an abstract, parallel world, where the rules are similar, but not the same. If a human being has a port wine stain on his forehead, it is a random accident of birth, but if you put one on a character in a novel, either you are a rank amateur, or the stain means something like 'mark of Cain,' etc. Or, to use Chekov's example, if you walk into somebody's house in real life, and they have a gun displayed on the wall, there is no guarantee that it is going to go off an kill somebody you know in the course of your relationship with the person, but in a novel, if there is a gun on the wall, it is going to go off and is going to affect somebody somehow."

Said Barlycorn, John, commenting on a post written by my son John and hitting me — the ex-wife of a novelist — way too close to home.

Scroll up to the post for a great Bertrand Russell quote about the happiness of the man of science.

"A professor's opinion: Not Shakespeare is the thing, but the commentary on him."

An aphorism that made me think:

A blogger's opinion: Not MSM is the thing, but the blogging on it.

"Sasha undid the object and put it solemnly on the table."

"It was a not very tall candelabra of old bronze and artistic workmanship. It consisted of a group: on the pedestal stood two female figures in the costume of Eve and in attitudes for the description of which I have neither the courage nor the fitting temperament. The figures were smiling coquettishly and altogether looked as though, had it not been for the necessity of supporting the candlestick, they would have skipped off the pedestal and have indulged in an orgy such as is improper for the reader even to imagine."

I took a little walk today and listened to the short story "A Work of Art" -- which you can read here -- on Miette's bedtime story podcast. I was thoroughly amused by the old Chekhov story and replayed the last minute of it as I was passing by the empty gardens of University Heights.

I discovered Miette's podcast after rhhardin very aptly recommended Theodore Roethke's essay "Last Class" in a comment to the post on that NYT Magazine piece about whether it's good for a serious writer to be a creative writing professor. Rh linked to the first page of the essay (story?), and I thought it was phenomenal:

I'm tired of the I-love-me bitches always trying to keep somebody off balance; Park Avenue cuties who, denied dogs, keep wolfcubs named Errol Flynn, or bats and toads with names like Hoagy; all the cutesy, tricksy trivia and paraphernalia with which the stupid and sterile rich try to convince themselves they aren't really dead.

That's a teacher telling his students what he thinks of them!

Looking for the rest of the pages, I hit upon Miette's podcast of it. Sampling it and finding Miette's voice quite charming, I decided to take it out for a walk... over to Barrique's Wine Cave, where I didn't drink wine but had a latte and did the NY crossword in the back of the NYT Magazine.