I took the images above at the Art Institute’s “Van Gogh’s Bedrooms” exhibit, which runs through May 10.
■ “Parisian Novels” (1887)
■ “A Pair of Shows” (1887)
■ A letter to Theo
■ An early sketch of the bedroom from a letter to Theo
■ “Self-Portrait” (1889)
■ “A Corner of the Asylum and the Garden with a Heavy, Sawed-Off Tree” (1889)
■ “Thatched-Roofed Cottages of Jorgus” (1890)
■ “Hospital at Saint-Rémy” (1889)
Since my last bookish post, I’ve read:
■ The Invaders (Karolina Waclawiak; 2015. Fiction.)
■ A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (Sue Klebold; 2016. Non-fiction.)
■ In a Dark, Dark Wood (Ruth Ware; 2015. Fiction.)
■ What She Left Behind (Ellen Marie Wiseman; 2013. Fiction.)
■ Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (Jon Krakauer; 2015. Non-fiction.)
■ Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (Robin Sloan; 2013. Fiction.)
■ Othello (William Shakespeare; 1603. Drama.)
■ The Cold Song (Linn Ullmann; 2014. Fiction.)
Notes: I recently concluded a MOOC centered on Othello, which, in addition to supplementary articles and lectures, provided ample motivation to closely reread the play. Although I look forward to seeing the current Chicago Shakespeare Theater production over spring break, my recent encounter with the text reminded me that the play, while meant to be seen and heard, is remarkable reading. The questions on which I reflected included: Is the conclusion inevitable? Is this really a play about race? What are we to make of the women in this play? Are we the audience complicit in Iago’s machinations?
Othello aside, I think I may (finally) be growing too old for unrelentingly sad and/or disturbing novels about dysfunctional families and their communities (e.g., Waclawiak’s tautly written The Destroyers), but Norwegian author Linn Ullmann pulled off something special with The Cold Song, a family drama masquerading as murder mystery. On page 163:
It wasn’t true what they said, that it would gradually become easier to cope with the loss, that time would work in her favor. It had become something of a sport to tell her this and every time they said it she had wanted to lash out, she had wanted to scream, what the hell did they know about time, they hadn’t lost a child, but she couldn’t end it all, she had one more, she couldn’t….
Speaking of murder, In a Dark, Dark Wood was a pleasant way to spend a Saturday afternoon and a pot of coffee. There was nothing pleasant about Krakauer’s Missoula or Klebold’s A Mother’s Reckoning, however. Difficult and heartbreaking, both. On a happier note, I seek admission to the club for readers who loved Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. What a charming book.
In the spring of 2003, my son and I attended our first Shakespeare Project of Chicago (SPC) production, The Merchant of Venice. That fall, we saw The Two Gentlemen of Verona, directed by Jeff Christian, who also played Valentine, if I remember correctly; and in 2005, we caught The Winter’s Tale. After that, the move from Chicago coupled with busy weekend schedules prevented us from attending the theatrical readings.
Nearly a decade later, though, in February 2014, I finally introduced my husband and daughters to the SPC, and in a neat “full circle” moment, the production was The Two Gentlemen of Verona directed by Jeff Christian. For a few moments, it felt as if time were bending, folding in upon itself as I remembered encountering this play with my son while my husband took our then quite young daughters to play in a nearby park.
The four of us also saw All’s Well That Ends Well in 2014, and this year, we have been able to attend two SPC productions: The Winter’s Tale in January and Cymbeline in late February. Excellent, all, but Tale featured Christopher Prentice and so provided the synchronicity / serendipity / synthesis I so enjoy. You see, Prentice was also a standout at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival in 2014, an impressive Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing and a perfect Ned in Elizabeth Rex. At Much Ado, in another of those moments in which time bent, folded upon itself, and left me breathless, we read in the program that Prentice is a founding member of the now-defunct Signal Theatre Ensemble, and I remembered that in 2003 he played Benedick in Much Ado, a production my son and I saw at a studio of the Anthenaeum Theatre on the grounds of St. Alphonsus Church in Chicago.
And of course, The Winter’s Tale was also the last play my son and I saw SPC present.
Time bends and folds.
The Shakespeare Project of Chicago will present Cardenio in April.
A few notes on the books I’ve been reading:
■ Purge (Sofi Oksanen; 2008. Fiction.)
The sometimes annoying device of toggling time (in this case, the present and the years leading up to during the Soviet occupation of Estonia) and point-of-view is, in this tense novel, effectively employed.
■ The Shawl (Cynthia Ozick; 1990. Fiction.)
“My niece Stella,” Rosa slowly gave out, “says that in America cats have nine lives, but we — we’re less than cats, so we got three.” She saw that Persky did not follow. She said, “The life after is now. The life before is our real life, at home, where we was born.”
“And during?”
“This was Hitler.”
“Poor Lublin,” Persky said.
“You wasn’t there. From the movies you know it.” She recognized that she had shamed him; she had long ago discovered this power to shame. “After, after, that’s all Stella cares. For me there’s one time only; there’s no after.”
Persky speculated. “You want everything the way it was before.”
“No, no, no,” Rosa said. “It can’t be. I don’t believe in Stella’s cats. Before is a dream. After is joke. Only during stays. And to call it a life is a lie.”
■ The Book of Jonas (Stephen Dau; 2012. Fiction.)
Unasked, a bookseller pressed this book on me a few years ago, and for some reason, I had thought it was a “feel-good story” about the relationship a soldier and a young person he rescued during a combat mission. This is not that. At. All. To me, the novel read as a meditation on the nature of otherness, on how alone each of us really is. Yes, it concerns war and its senselessness, but it also explores family and loss and grief and isolation, both social and cultural. Highly recommended.
■ The Bunker, Volume 3 (Joshua Hale Fialkov; 2015. Graphic fiction.)
I have a love-hate relationship with the artwork in this series, but the story has hooked me completely, to the point that I cannot believe I haven’t seen news of its screen, large or small, adaptation.
■ The Squirrel Mother (Megan Kelso; 2006. Graphic fiction.)
Obstinately and, to this reader, pointlessly obscure.
■ The Silence of Our Friends (Mark Long; 2012. Graphic fiction.)
Long, whose father was a television reporter during the time of Silence‘s events, draws on childhood recollections to describe the civil unrest in Texas in the 1960s. Well-told story and exceptional artwork.
■ Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Cal Newport; 2016. Non-fiction.)
That Newport’s suggestions (including “Quit social media”) are obvious goes without saying, but his earnest admonitions may prove helpful to those who are re-evaluating their pursuits.
■ When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi; 2016. Non-fiction.)
For me, Breath is a sentimental companion to Being Mortal, which I read late last year. Moving. Worthwhile. Yet… if you have time for only one, choose Being Mortal. The essence of Breath can be found in Kalanithi’s essay “Before I go” (Stanford Medicine, Spring 2015).
The Illinois stop for the First Folio! tour is not the Newberry Library, as one might have guessed, or any of Chicago’s wonderful museums or the state’s colleges or universities. No, “The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare” can be seen at the Lake County Discovery Museum through February 28. Opened to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, the Folio reposes in a display case, which is, in turn, behind a display pane. The effect is a bit like birdwatching through the picture window with binoculars: twice-removed. And while good reasons for the ultra dim lighting must exist, I have grown old: It was beyond difficult to see the Folio. I have, however, decided to focus on the fact that I stood in (approximately) the same room with the bible of the secular religion that is bardolatry, and that, dear readers, was wildly cool.
■ The Heir Apparent (David Ives; 2011. Drama.)
Although I enjoyed The School for Lies, Ives’ adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope, his take on Jean-François Regnard’s Le Légataire universel left me cold. The Heir Apparent, part of the 2015-16 season at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, is, as Chris Jones reminds readers, a farce. That it’s a farce that should end in half as much time, however, and with far less potty humor was painfully evident in text; it was particularly harrowing in person (as I mentioned here). I actually considered leaving at intermission, in fact. Only the cast’s brilliance prevented me from doing so.
■ Neighbors (Jan T. Gross; 2001. Non-fiction.)
■ Our Class (Tadeusz Słobodzianek (adaptation by Ryan Craig); 2009. Drama.)
Earlier this month, I visited the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. I pulled Neighbors from my shelves that evening, and Gross’ exploration of the senseless horror that occurred in the Polish village of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, prompted me to read the play inspired by the National Book Award Finalist. Where Neighbors is brisk, relentless, insightful, and disturbing, however, Our Class, which is enslaved by its framing device, fails the material. In fact, had I not read Neighbors, I would have had no real context for events in the play, which culminate in the murder of 1,600 Jews by their friends, schoolmates, and neighbors.
■ Scored (Lauren McLaughlin; 2011. Fiction.)
A friend mentioned Sesame Credit in our correspondence earlier this month, asking if it didn’t remind me of a YA novel. At the time, I could not locate a conventional news source’s report on China’s “social credit” program, although numerous alarmist links were readily available. I have since read the CNN op-ed “The risks — and benefits — of letting algorithms judge us,” however, and I think she may have been thinking of David Eggers’ The Circle, which is not YA. That said, my search for a related YA title eventually led to Scored, a book that, while competent in its way, yielded few surprises. I did like this, though:
Imani knew that her parents would not have understood. Their grasp of the world was based on an obsolete value system that was probably the root of Imani’s problems. Who else had gifted her with the dusty antique of loyalty, that “disempowering bond”?
■ Ready Player One (Ernest Kline; 2011. Fiction.)
In which eighties references and geekery abound!
■ Arcadia (Tom Stoppard; 1993. Drama.)
In an odd scheduling juxtaposition, I saw Marjorie Prime at the Writers Theatre about an hour after leaving the Illinois Holocaust Museum; hence, emotionally speaking, I received a gut-punch followed by a blow to the jaw. Kate Fry and Mary Ann Thebus, who will almost certainly be nominated Jeff Awards, reduced me to tears with their performances in this thought-provoking and timely play, which runs through March 13. Marjorie Prime may well be the last Writers Theatre production in its Books on Vernon location: The new theater space opens in March with Stoppard’s Arcadia. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of my favorite works of literature, but I have read no other Stoppard. How delighted I am to have “found” Arcadia. Brilliant. Just brilliant.
By the way, articles in the playbill for Marjorie Prime are responsible for Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human and Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence moving from my shelves to my nightstand. Other notable titles in my TBR stack include Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo, the Remy Bumppo production of which will also open in March; Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air; and the third volumes of two graphic series, The Bunker and Letter 44.
■ Todros Geller’s “Strange World” (1928)
■ Entertainer (Tomb Figure), Northern dynasties (6th century)
■ Two Images Salado branch of the Mogollon; Southeastern Arizona, United States: Ritual Cache (1300/1400)
■ Two Images Chupícuaro, Guanajuato or Michoacán, Mexico: Female Figurines (200/100 B.C.)
Nerdishly 