Tony Curanaj, The Gumball Incident, 2015, oil on canvas, 28x15.5 in/ Courtesy: Eleventh Street Arts

 

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This week: Bores, Bluets, and Anne Boleyn.

FictionLondon Lit Weekend (October 3–4): There is, in theory, little more tedious than the literary festival. The very phrase conjures up images of two types of bores, each insidious on its own but even more tiresome in concert. The first is the specialist, that narrowly focused academe who manages to turn all conversations into a distressing enumeration of the topic at hand’s relation to his own work. The other is— for lack of a better term—the “lit groupie,” that enthusiastic reader of all the newest fiction, who just can’t wait to tell you about his pet theory on the way that, “when you really think about it, it all comes back to Virginia Woolf, doesn’t it?” So why am I recommending a literature festival this week? Because when something like this is directed by the TLS and sponsored by Hatchard’s, the experience has a real chance to transcend the usual boilerplate programming. With a series of talks addressing questions such as “How did writers respond to Thatcher?” and “Why do the French delude themselves about their past?,” the weekend promises to be a serious but not entirely humorless exercise in the intellectual arts, much like the TLS itself. Readers with the good fortune to be in London would be well advised to find themselves at Kings Place this upcoming weekend. —BR

Nonfiction: Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America, by Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes (Sentinel): Anyone who's watched an entire football game will have realized that football announcers (and fans) love to reminisce about some of the game’s more influential players. One such player—Jack Kemp—certainly left his mark on football history, though his legacy now primarily rests in a different arena. Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes give us the first extensive biography of the star quarterback/Congressman/“bleeding heart conservative” whose economic policies changed the Republican party. Many of Kemp’s ideas are still being debated, some are now irrelevant, but his controversial claim in 2006 that soccer is “still boring” is still true. —RH

Poetry: Bluets, by Maggie Nelson (Wave Books): As summer dilutes into autumn, which will unwillingly wade into winter, some of us are unable to refrain from feeling blue. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets confronts us with a similar blue, one that does not have any identifiable pigmentation or specific emotional connotation. It is just blue. And it is this blue that she writes about for nearly 90 pages, ruminating on divisions and divinities of color with statements such as, "I must admit that not all blues thrill me. I am not overly interested in the matte stone of turquoise, for example, and a tepid, faded indigo usually leaves me cold.” In plain moments like these, sadly, we’re not so thrilled either.

But Bluets is also filled with plenty of perplexed promiscuity and cross-genre flip-flopping, a delicacy for any contemporary poet’s palate attracted to wandering ideas grounded only slightly in one faint connection: you guessed it, blue. Is it a sense? A smell? An allusion to idyllic grandeur? Not even Maggie Nelson knows. The poems, paragraphs, diary entries, whatever they may be, are so conscious of their consciousness that readers are unsure if they are lost in lucid dreaminess or nettled in a maze of Nelson’s personal torture, the chambers of which are her self-appointed shortcomings. When Nelson restrains the Freudian readings of herself and rather just says the damn thing, blue becomes less deluging and more delicate. This is where the piece prospers most, when it is most poetic. As she veers away from garbled prose, she succeeds with lines such as, "Sometimes I worry that if I am not moved by a blue thing, I may be completely despaired, or dead. At times I fake my enthusiasm. At others, I fear I am incapable of communicating the depth of it." If only she would worry less about communicating depth and just bring us in deeper, perhaps she would have a better chance at redeeming the overly narrative story from itself. But not all is lost. When Nelson does approach the color with subtlety rather than racing to retrieve it, the boring moments of blue are stifled and we finally find something worthy of reading—big, blue diamonds buried in the rough. —ID

Art: “The Still Life Show” (Through October 16, 2015): Just a block away from PS1 in Long Island City, the Grand Central Atelier continues to stake its claim as the anti-MOMA. In a former warehouse, the classical revivalist teacher Jacob Collins continues to run his ever-expanding, off-the-grid school for painters who want to study traditional technique. Like last year, the school has organized a fall “Still Life Show” of teachers and students in a space they call Eleventh Street Arts, carved out of the front rooms of the school. This year the standouts are examples of trompe l'oeil, where hyper-realistic objects appear to float above the surface of the canvas in the once-popular style of painters such as Victor Dubreuil, John Haberle, and William Harnett. Like those earlier examples, the results at Eleventh Street Arts are fun to see. Samuel Hung offers examples of toys, cards, and candy apparently tacked to a cracking plaster wall in high relief. Tony Curanaj, meanwhile, is showing a breathtaking tour-de-force of table cloth and beadboard with a gumball machine so irresistible, it tempts the eye of the viewer just as it does the bees and birds seeming to fly around it. Read more about this show and others in my Gallery Chronicle in our forthcoming October issue. —JP

Music: Anna Bolena, by Donizetti, at the Metropolitan Opera (September 26, 2015–January 9, 2016): Last week, I plugged an upcoming performance of a star soprano in an uncommon opera. After seeing the performance on Saturday, I'm afraid I'm going to have to plug it again: Sondra Radvanovsky's turn in the title role of Donizetti's Anna Bolena was one of the most thrilling performances I have had the pleasure to witness, and I cannot urge readers strongly enough to go see her in person. She is a superb soprano at her vocal peak, and in Anne Boleyn has found a role with plenty of room to explore and leave a lasting personal stamp. Read more here, and hurry to the box office. —ECS

From the archive: A see of troubles, by Marc M. Arkin: Speaking of Anne Boleyn, here is Marc M. Arkin on the life and death of Thomas Cranmer, from January 1997.

From our latest issue: Historical Acts, by Kyle Smith: In our forthcoming October issue, Kyle Smith will review Broadway’s breakout hit Hamilton. In the meantime, here is his review of plays from the September issue. 

 

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