This past Friday I attended the avant-garde play Les Chanterelles, held at Le Magisterieux, in Rouen.  This was day one-hundred twelve of the production; a lifetime in theater terms.  This longevity speaks not only to the essential quality of the play, about which I’ll speak more later, but also about the uneasy, complex, and at times contentious relationship between regional French theaters and the capital city of Paris, which captures almost all artistic attention in France (and indeed, Europe). Rouen, in fact, is among the smallest of the regional theaters; the city’s population barely surpasses six figures, and yet is home to a vibrant artistic scene.

When assessing the reasons for this, Paris, of course, figures large: without Paris as counterpoint, the regional directors and playwrights would likely lose some of the combative motivation that results in output like Les Chanterelles.  Paris is the sun, the center, the gravity well, capturing light and heat.   To make a name for themselves, regional centers must needs abandon tried-and-true formulations, me-too second runs, and produce an essentially new creative spark.

The playwright and directeur of Les Chanterelles, one M. Toilé, has done just that, with a baffling, epic production.  At 8:10 PM I filed in to Le Magisterieux with about 250 others – locals, mostly, but, owing to the growing reputation of the play and the director, also many out-of-town critics from places like Berlin and New York and St. Petersburg.  I was warned beforehand by the proprietress of the hotel I was staying at that black tie was absolutely the fashion, and I was glad, for the rule was ostentatiously followed.  Again with an eye to the larger sister to the southeast, the crowd was formal, aggrandized, overflowingly so to my Seattle eye.  Like many American theater crowds with which I am familiar, among the audience there was much craning of necks and wide-eyed, unsubtle analysis of each other prior to the curtain – a shared transatlantic preoccupation, a bourgeois comparison.  Whispers are exchanged, low and urgent; one never knows what anyone else is thinking, but a gestalt emerges, that of an audience overly concerned with self-image and style.

Apparently the norm in Rouen is for men of a certain age to leave their wives at home, all fleshy arms and sagging bosoms, and bring mistresses twenty years their junior, bedecked in resplendent gowns, sparkling jewels, pale swanlike necks standing out in sharp contrast to the jowly countenances of the bankers and opticians that make up the merchant class in town.  I am not sure what to make of this other than as yet another attempt at visible ostentation.

The lights dim, once, twice; the curtain is drawn.  Immediately one is confronted with a Fauvist explosion; elephants, oxen, great swaddling pelicans on pink leashes parade across the stage, keepers swathed all in black, deprecating, imploring the animals to not trample each other, the backdrop, or (god forbid) the audience.  Girls dance and twirl about, throwing bright ribbons high in the air; from the pit comes a clash of trumpets and great booming drums.  Spotlights swirl and weave menacingly.  All is confusion for ten minutes.  Not once did I (knowingly) see the same animal being led.  Where do they stable these beasts?  What sort of municipal negotiations must have taken place to allow this amazing display to take place.

Then, silence; dark.  A more sedate scene follows, in which lovelies of various heights and stage of dress take places on stage right and alternately beckon and vamp to the audience, or standoffishly look off into the distance, pointedly distracted by their hair or nails or the straps on their extravagant footwear.  From left, accompanied by yet more drums, come a shambles of hirsute, older men, forties or fifties perhaps, carrying hammers or pickaxes or large plumbing wrenches, some rolling large stone wheels, others carrying furniture.  Motorcycles and televisions in various states of disrepair are set about in random patterns. Shirtless and sweating, they make a show of workmanlike obsession over their various implements, casting longing looks leftward at the now incautiously interested actresses, some of whom perform complex intertwined arabesques, orbiting closer and closer to the men.   An odd sort of sexual tension begins to develop as these young women pose and gesture and lean over suggestively as they approach nearer and nearer to the men, whose interests are obviously heightened.  One can almost smell the mixture of male sweat and female perfume from the middle rows.   There is a coquettish aura, and one wonders at the seriousness of the ladies, but the interactions become more and more physical, always – always! – directed by the women.  Crude attentions grow more and more pronounced, in the form of pawing and groping.

And then, all of a sudden, the interest wanes.  The women retreat to the right; the men, making a show of confusion and hurt, return to hammering and manual labor for a minute or two, then wander off, eyes occasionally cast back over hairy shoulders to reassess whether anything,can be made of the attentions formerly paid to them.  Nothing is forthcoming.  One marvels at the change, the interruptus, as it were. As soon as the last bureau is carried off stage left, the women spring to life, in an audience-participation mode, and engage the first several rows in leering displays of physicality – daring displays of thigh and breast and shoulder; opened mouths showing glistening white teeth; tongues and eyelashes and fingernails all using every flirtatious trick to get the viewers to reciprocate.  And they do.  Women lean forward and expose décolletage; men leer, gape-mouthed, and roar and growl and paw the air.  The cacophony swells to the very rear of the house, a frenzy of invitation and bluntly suggested carnality.  And then, abruptly – darkness again.  The Grand Tease, as this scene is known to the critics, shuts off.

(I am told that the male roles are mostly drawn from the ranks of itinerant laborers or out-of-work tradesmen.  Despite the meager pay (twelve euros per evening), and the built-in embarrassment of appearing shirtless, hairy, and emasculated evening after evening, the line to audition stretches around the block on Tuesday mornings.)

This back-and-forth, hot-and-cold is intentional.  M. Toilé has stated as much.  In an interview with Le Monde, he was quoted:

Unpredictability is the key to Les Chanterelles.  With unpredictability comes power.  As in Nature, which is subject to the laws of entropy, in which all falls apart, devolves, decomposes, we establish an anti-order in our production, and the audience is compelled to give their allegiance, as it were, to the mirror we hold up.  The unpredictable – the chaotic – cannot be controlled, guided, or influenced; it is arbitrary, capricious and in a way mirrors our conception of God, the god of shifting moods, of terrible vengeances intermingled with great kindnesses.  It is for this reason that I think we have had unrivalled success thus far.

To serve the purposes of unpredictability, on certain alternate nights the play’s format shifts.  On the evening I attended, the focus was on the ensemble, but other evenings the female presence is personified by a single individual. Sometimes she is a dark, venomous character, sliding balefully in and among her male counterparts, blackly condescending to expose herself physically and coarsely; on other nights she arrives as a sylvan maiden, trailing fairy dust, with a retinue of dwarves representing frogs and butterflies and other peaceful forest-creatures.  Children stand with arms clasped high overhead, index fingers pointed heavenward, waving slightly to and fro (they are lilies).  Pale skin plays off the dark backgrounds.  On these nights, the female lead still engages the audience, and the effort required for a single person, no matter how sexually endowed, to engage an entire theater in a a gasping, panting furor is such that the female leads require one week’s rest for each night they perform.  M. Toilé must have secured the services of every beauty in northern France to pull off such a stunt for so many months running.

What to make of the production?  It is a spectacle, to be sure.  Repetitions of the basic plot – crude and clueless male attention, calculated female unpredictability – repeats itself across two acts, in varying ways and intensities.   Clothing and skin are more or less interchangeable, most nights.  The play is suffused with sadness – real feelings, individual feelings, are submerged to the needs of the collective, the body, the symbolism.  However, I am heartened that an attempt so unusual – let’s face it, so abnormal – has garnered the attention and success it has, in a provincial outpost like Rouen.

It is curious that a playwright like M. Toilé, raised in the divertissement school of French theater, should have created a play so unamusing, so lacking in frivolity.  Even the nominally absurdist elements, like the parade of animals, evoke not smiles, but a wary concern.

Next for M. Toilé?  Uncertain prospects.  To say that Montmartre has yet to come calling is an understatement; in fact, the cold reception to Les Chanterelles in the mainstream Paris press is pointed and unflinching.  There are rumors of a production in the making in Lyon, or perhaps it is Marseilles.  It is certain that the trendy and fickle American audiences in New York or (especially) Los Angeles, with its Francophile-worship, would welcome M. Toilé with something more than a warm embrace, should he decide to make the trip; but he seems serious about conquering his home nation first, evening by evening.

White Noise won the National Book Award in 1985.  That fact alone encapsulates my brooding ambivalence over the novel – in some cases, the winner has been spectacular (“Gravity’s Rainbow”, 1974, “Mating”, 1992), and in other cases, yawn-inducing (“The Corrections”, 2001).

This novel scratches at me, claws at me, preening, posing, looking at itself in the mirror, saying “aren’t I the bees knees?” and I want to answer yes, yes, you are, and pick it up, pet it, re-read it, gush about it to friends and – and yet.  I can’t, not yet.  Why not?

Let’s start with what works.  The prose – the craft – is amazing and sharp and clever and demonstrates that DeLillo is a master, a composer, a five-tool player.  I especially enjoyed the artful way he used repetition to set the mood.  For some reason Steffie’s burnt toast sticks out in my mind as an exemplar.  Murray’s riffs on our supermarket culture, Babette’s forgetfulness, and Jack’s German lessons all come to mind.

That reminds me of another thing I liked about this book, and about DeLillo in general – he does not back down from an uncomfortable moment.  Did you also squirm a bit when he described Howard Dunlop actually reaching into Jack’s mouth and adjusting his tongue?  Or Murray’s negotiations with the car of prostitutes during the Airborne Toxic Event? Elsewhere in the book he describes how Steffie can not bear to watch uncomfortable or embarrassing scenes on the television, and has to leave the room and get a recap from another family member.  Shades and mirrors.  DeLillo’s scenes aren’t pornographic, or gratuitous, or titillating, or off-key, but they are unflinching, unwavering, and powerful.

Speaking of uncomfortable, now is the part where I tell what I didn’t care for, what kept the book from being one of the Best Ever, limited to the bookshelf of the Merely Good.  First, I felt like the three parts of the book didn’t cohere.  That would be the banal look at the modern American family; the Airborne Toxic Event and its aftermath, and the quest for the Dylar and the absurdist proto-murder scene in the motel in Iron City.  I know that DeLillo intended for the underlying theme to be the fear of the death, the massive denial and incompetence we (Americans?) display in the face of the inevitable; to indicate, somehow, that we are all already complicit in our  own deaths without even realizing it.  Death permeates the novel, in plot and themes and connotations: The Airborne Toxic Event.  Babette’s and Jack’s obsessions. Dylar, the medicine that gives us victory over the fear of death. Jack’s career as chair of the Hitler Studies department. Heinrich’s chess-by-mail match with convicted murderer Tommy Roy Foster; the disappearance of Old Man Treadwell and his wife for four days (ironically trapped in that ultimate modern death-totem, the shopping mall).  The SIMUVAC team and the pretend-dead, including Steffie, in the middle of the street.

It’s a great idea, but falls short.

I want it to work.  Like any serious appreciator of the language and form, I want this  book to be the best ever.  It has its moments.  But even among National Book Award winners, the two I’ve previously mentioned outpace it.  Perhaps the disjointedness of the foreground plot is the only thing that is lacking, but even so, it’s a breach, a small one, in the greatness of the novel.

I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on White Noise. What worked for you?  What didn’t?  Would you place it among the short list of Greatest Modern American Novels?

Blogging and online-ness has a certain ruthless temporality to it.  If you write about current events, there’s a strong – norm? – to write about things as close to when they happened as possible.  It’s the Twitterfication of the blogosphere, I suppose.  If you aren’t curating your life’s experience AS IT HAPPENS, then your content is suspect.

However, sometimes it can’t be helped.  Case in point: my (current) review of (last week’s) Cheap Wine and Poetry event at the Richard Hugo House here in Seattle.  It was the 5th year anniversary of CW&P, and, judging by the applause when asked, I was one of a sizable contingent who were attending CW&P for the first time.

Where to start?

Although I didn’t do a precise count, there were probably 120 people, very definitely standing room only.  I came in just as things were getting underway and found a spot along the back wall, near the restroom, the cross traffic, and, occasionally, near the drunk guy mumbling into his cell phone; he was of a peripatetic inclination, however, and made the rounds of the various rooms throughout the night.

The Hugo House Commons, for I assume that this area *must* be the Commons, is very much laid out in an old-house sort of way – a few rooms adjacent to each other, each opening towards a small stage.  But the layout has a charm to it, and I’d like to take another look at the place in the daylight.

Next: wine.  You can’t talk about Cheap Wine and Poetry without mentioning the wine, can you?  I enjoyed a decent Syrah, and, at only $1 per glass, I find nothing to complain about.  It’s a bargain at twice the price!  The only downer: to get wine, you had to sort of stand in front of people who were trying to see the show.  In a transparent attempt to live up to the Seattle ideal of passive, smug kindness, I limited myself to one glass, obtained at the start of the show.

However – however!  This was not the sort of show were one has to be drunk to enjoy it.  The readers, chosen in a “best of” selection process, were, on average, spectacular.  There were a couple misses – it WAS a poetry reading – but the hits were great.  Of note: Nicole Hardy, who read selections from her book about the Mudflap Girl.  She’s charismatic and witty and charming and has an undeniable physical stage presence.  I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her.  Also: Keri Healey, who read a short story that just blew my Smart Wools right off – funny and somber and disarmingly real.  Best pure prose of the evening, in my opinion.  John Burgess, who I don’t know and have never met but am sure I would like, did a series of readings accompanied by a background bassist.

There was another reading I liked, by a young woman whose name I didn’t catch and am too lazy to Google, but it was fresh and direct and slightly ribald and refreshingly long.  If you’re going to use the list as a structural device, make it a long list.  At one point – maybe about item 15 or so – the aforementioned drunkie asked “How many more” and this young woman deftly replied, “A lot – I’ve been dating a long time!” *zing*.

There were more readings, but none which particularly stood out.  Oh, and a very strange, Twilight-zone-ish set of intermission pieces where images of Hugo House writer and marketing guy Brian McGuigan were photoshopped into various scenes of gay domesticity.  Inventive, kooky, and, by the end, as the images moved from the living room to the bedroom, slightly discomforting. ROFL.

The evening ended, as all good evenings should, with a public spanking.

Thanks to all the Hugo House staff and volunteers for a great event.

The song “Fidelity” by Regina Spektor has been on my mind a lot lately.  It’s at once hopeful and sad, with an unusual vocal line; it’s attractive and catchy and a song which almost instantly established its own idiom.  To describe a song as “Fidelity-like” is to describe a repetitive syllabic choral signature:

And it breaks my ha ha-ha-ha ha-ha-ha ha-ha-ha-ha-heart…

What breaks my heart: unfulfilled promise.  I listen to this song, scrutinize the lyrics, and watch the video, and know that there is NO way right now I could produce something that creative.  Creativity seems to me to be something that rested people do, something that rested people can tap into, and right now I’m restless, constantly moving, unsettled, and burning fuel.  Simplicity? gone. Subtlety? Light-years away right now.  I am a video of clouds on 8X. I am a wave-pounded beach. I am Broadway and 42nd.  I am an aspirin factory.  I am half-finished sentences and fingers running and re-running through hair and caught breath and repetitive swallowing. I am the cuckoo clock at midnight, all night.

It’s there, somewhere – that creativity, that spark, that slow, assured simplicity of purpose, that depth, that chamber in which the sounds of shaping (no, that’s not a typo) echo, resonant and pure.  I feel it.  I just can’t access it.  It’s like the bump under the duvet – you can tell something is there, and even what it is, without seeing it.

What do I most miss right now?  Writing.  I’ve had a couple periods in the last few months when the words flowed without effort, like water from the head of a glacier.  I’m sort of in a lull right now.  Not writer’s block – not exactly – more like a brief, maddening detour through sludge, a sort of fog, a disequilibrium.  I find it hard to relax.  I can’t NOT multitask, which is death to the creative impulse (at least mine).

Having said all that, I know that these things are cyclic, and my heart will stop breaking and I’ll start creating again, start writing, with more purpose and more thought and more expressiveness than I seem to be able to muster right now.  It’s just a matter of time.

There should be a word for the circumstance where you wake up, briefly,early in the morning, and then fall back into a deep sleep.  I propose “resleep”.

There should also be a word for the human face that looks attractive when viewed face-on, but is unattractive when viewed in profile.  An asymmetry, of sorts.  I suppose the opposite scenario (attractive in profile; unattractive when viewed face-on) could be covered by the same term.

Agile sympathies spark in the gap between our lips
As words come and go. My finger traces patterns on your arm.
Condensation glows on our limoncellos
In whose reflection we are outsized and impossible.
Now is light and danceable and harmonious;
Next is not a naughty word. Variations of anything-goes
Flit across our knowing, smirking mouths
In between various unnamed breathlessnesses.
We would go where we would
And we’d jump if we could,
Hopscotch across continents,
The hot sands of the Gobi not-quite-burning our soles
Forest snakes and dewdrops as big as marbles surprising us in Tikal
Quick-skipping across Hyde Park, the air weaving violets through your hair
Trancing and melting in a warehouse in Joburg.
Our passport stamps coincidentally marking us together,
Our union sans signatures, our plaisance, our happiness.
Brightly together back in the dim room, glasses clinking,
We drink sweetly, sweetly bedeviled by what-might-yet-be.

I waffle. I try on smiles. Time passes
then I tread the hard minutes away next to the blue lake.
Tomorrow is Heisenbergian.
I can’t know, squinting up at the sky,
That the sun is in the proper place.
I can close my eyes and imagine.
The perspiration of hope lines my brow
and everything feels like it could fall into place
with a gentle nudge, the universe’s hand
tilting the table just so.

Have another, she says, and although
I don’t yet know it, she waffles too,
differently but still just as earnestly,
her orbit a broad spiral circumlocution around mine
like DNA or heliotropes or candy canes.
Her gaze is direct and calm, a doe’s, observant,
but she dances away when the ferns rustle.
Synoptically together, one presumes,
and drawing closer and closer. The sun writes our story
on the wide sky.

come one come all the barker smile-roared
waved us in
enter the hall of love, it’s certain to entertain.
we waffled and glanced skeptically sideways
expecting
trite and trashy, unsubtle mashery

not love but sex, caricature, and hollywood reheats
painted faces
disheveled mattresses
fossilized lizards locked in ashy embraces
scarlet harlots
moon-skinned damsels thrown over the shoulders
of caftan-wearing corsairs carrying cutlasses
distorting mirrors
neon lights
two stuffed hummingbirds hung on silver wires
fluttering and copulating
roaring twenties peephole porn
and a ryan o’neal poster.

that is to say, I tuned it out
thought of every which way to catch glances of you
your profile, your hair, your jawline
attended to every idiosyncrasy
in the hopes of finding one i did not know.
I feared i knew them all – each one already familiar
the way you parted your lips while you read
your shyness during interviews
the way you licked your teeth before speaking
your slow left-handed signature
all secretly mine, or so I thought
or so I wanted

the barker, subdued without a crowd
bade us farewell and asked us to tell our friends!
as we wandered off hand in hand into the dusk.

I set out in my little sloop, on a long journey, aimless
wandering the oceans, looking for a haven, for respite
leaving the press of expectations behind.
Navigation and rope-work were easy to master.
The days repeated themselves, one after the other, predictable
and ultimately awful.  I queried the Fates, sought succor;
asked my destiny.  The fickle trio complied.
One near evening, the gently rolling tides succumbed
to the surprise of the bright Moon’s ascent
and rumbled, buckled,
heaved
the waters quickly breached the gunwales
and soon drew my boat, with me in it,
down the scary deeps.
All was still.  All peaceful.
Then – a glowing light! Rescue?  Rescue from what, I thought;
But there, a sea-nymph, pale violet and beautiful
surrounded by a flashing school of a thousand silver surgeonfish,
approached and spoke to me through touch, through vibration,
through the movements of her eyes and hands. Stay.
Her presence overwhelmed me, caught me breathless,
left me senseless.
Enchanted, I am, thought I; and her shimmering visage betrayed no denial.
I surrendered.
I held out my arms, and she led me, slowly, through the schools,
among the coral-reefs, past vast fields of anemone and urchin
to her home. Her aquiline castles yet hold me;
I seek nothing, having found my haven
aeons below the waves.

I got a note from Kate Gavigan a couple days ago about an upcoming writing class that she’s helping put on, and thought I’d pass it along – you might be interested!  I’m unfortunately too busy, but we’re lucky to live in such a thriving literary community.

The class is based on Julia Cameron’s bestselling book The Artist’s Way, which I have owned and loved forever.

It will be held Monday evenings in Wallingford; the first class is on May 10th and the series runs through August 2nd.  Full details can be found on the Facebook event page for the class, or you can contact Kate via Twitter at @ArtistsWayGirl or via e-mail at kmgavigan at gmail dot com.

From the event page:

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is an international bestseller on the subject of creativity. This book and workshop can be an incredibly useful resource to tap into your creative side, which can benefit you professionally and personally. The class will take students through the 12 chapters with an emphasis on the accompanying chapter exercises.

Keep writing!