RECENT STUFF

Another month is over, how did that happen? There was some snow, I seem to recall, but not nearly as much as the folks back home got. What snow we got in the Haven was largely cosmetic, just a nice white mantle to make things look different for a little while.

It seems to me I watched a number of videos, including some BBC productions of Shakespeare's history plays and of Chekhov. And started on a little retrospective on Scorsese movies, including his first ever, 1967 and fresh from NYU: Who's That Knocking on My Door, which featured Harvey Keitel as an Italian youth with some issues about female virginity; also watched Mean Streets, probably only my second time, and found it much more powerful and fun -- what with that poolhall fight to the tune of "Mr. Postman" -- then I did whenever I first saw it, on some tired old video copy. New York, New York is still too unwieldly in the final third, but the colors look great, and again one gets to see DeNiro enact a violently mood-swinging eccentric, which would all come to its culmination in Raging Bull, which I'll have to see again soon. Ditto King of Comedy. I did see After Hours again and I think it really holds up, especially when we consider how utterly vanished the vision of SoHo it gives us is. "Ah, you could really have anxiety in those days." And when Paul returns to work the next morning, covered in plaster, well, it's eerie in a whole new way.

Seeing New York, New York, a movie about Coco Chanel, and Inglourious Basterds in fairly close proximity got me into writing some fast-paced stream of film consciousness poems I call "Cinemagics." There are six of them so far, not sure if they will progress or not.

I must've read something last month, but it seem all I'm sure I read is Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City (and I've started a piece on that) and Keith Waldrop's Transcendental Studies (which I also expect to review, for Quarterly Conversation). Speaking of QC, here's a link to my review of Mark Strand's New Selected Poems. And speaking of poets, Robert Pinsky gave a talk at the Divinity School; I didn't go, but I did talk a bit about his most recent book, Gulf Music, here.

I also posted about and reviewed some theater in New Haven: here's me on Mandy Patinkin in Compulsion at Yale Rep, at The Forward, and here's a few other points about the play, at NHR. In honor of Valentine's Day, here's a bit on Yale Cabaret's Missed Connections, a really fun musical culled from craigslist personals. On the day itself, me and the missus took in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, Yale Opera, at the Shubert.

Speaking of dysfunctional relations, here's a bit on a grad student adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and here's a take on a one-person show by "freak drag queen" Taylor Mac, an entertaining entry in the No Boundaries series at Yale Rep, from back at the end of January. A more recent show, Radio Station, just last weekend at Yale Cab, is here; inspired by Shogo Ohta's slow motion theater pieces, it was quite a show.

Finally, just today I posted on NHR, having a bit of fun with a piece by Ted Genoways, published in Mother Jones, inveighing against the state of fiction, the failing of literary journals, and writing from writing programs, etc.