Ah, don’t you love it? Holland Cotter’s New York Times piece on James Ensor is a delight, and this image in particular, whee!

Now this is theatre: the playfulness, the grotesquerie, the thoughtful intent.

…is the theme, it seems, of Cristina Nehring’s A Vindication of Love, which Katie Roiphe calls “an ardent polemic” championing the not-wisely-but-too-well school of love, and positing that ferocity and passion, even if impermanent, trump dull contentment pretty much every time.

If you fit that template to the business of fiction, I agree 150%. (We’ll keep my personal life out of this, shall we? I’m kinda boring.) Writing something because it’s seized you, because it woos you, freaks you out, pushes you past all limits, sends you sneaking downstairs at night to just review the pages one more time … that’s fun, that’s serious play.  Writing something because it seems like a good idea for a novel and you’re sure it will sell - um, not so much.

(Double ditto for actually reading the books: Whose book club do you want to belong to, the one where it’s all chitchat and chardonnay, or the one where people yell I hated this book! I loved this book! at each other?  We won’t even get into individual titles, but let’s call one, I dunno, Chelsea, and one Balzac….OK, that’s unfair.  But so what?)

And what’s a talent for, anyway? whether it’s to write books or commit pure math or whatever one’s calling may be?  Is it to make a nice living, take vacations and buy cashmere socks?  Or to leap off invisible cliffs, bang your head against walls, be ambushed by joy? A self-animating puppet is a bore.  Go where the strings tug you. Let’s have some fun.

The Little Girl Giant is a star, of course, but her elephant friend was definitely new to me.  Thanks to an alert artist and traveler - hi, Clive! - here are some ravishing pictures of large-scale puppetry, and commentary to place us, too, in that beautiful belly. (Photos courtesy Peter Wakelin.)

Clive reports that the elephant “is like something from Jules Verne, with
steam-punk mechanisms in wrought iron and an elegant spiral staircase
ascending to his back, where up to twenty people can happily stroll
around and take in the view from a balconied platform.”

“Taken as we were about to board. Note that the Elephant is still sleeping!”

“Puppeteers throw themselves like bell-ringers into the fray, raising
the Giant’s legs and making him walk. Despite the frenzied action,
called by a sort of puppet coxswain co-ordinating the animation, the
puppet moves with great grace.”

One of the possible homes for our eventual  extravaganza  — and by “extravaganza” I mean something stripped down, intense, and spangled, ie no Les Miz, so I guess I don’t mean extravaganza after all, huh?  Anyway, the venue includes an entrance through a lovely Victorian-era house, itself a kind of character before a word is even uttered or a note played.  Atmosphere is the breath of theatre, isn’t it? You can almost smell the tired talcum and the fresh flesh.

As for Under the Poppy itself, it’s been gratifying to see the welcome the book’s already receiving and the excitement Small Beer’s engendered.  Thank you all for the congratulatory emails and shout-outs.  My puppets feel at home on the shelf already.

Just a smile at the crossroads of interests (obessions?): Charleville!  Arthur Rimbaud, meet IIM.

With thanks to Wordsworth, and Cosmic Bicycle … What continues to draw and resonate in the Under the Poppy adaptation is this kind of skewed wonder, this tattered, winking, dangerously unstable feel, can’t you just hear the bicycle’s wheels? creaking off into some unnameable backstage?  More shows to see, more sets to ponder, than time might allow, but hey, who needs to sleep?

And I need to upload the making-of featurette.

And what about those curious gooseneck lamps, do they still work?

And …

…it begins with a tinkling tune, sweet and sinister both, with just the slightest breath of heat, the prickling, serious sweat of real desire: and a girl’s dreamy voice, humming, musing to herself: Vera, blue velvet on a black swing … “I want to meet a swain/Who wants to meet me, too/Who wants to do with me/the things I want to do.” [Under the Poppy]

Tipped off by an alert fashionista (hi, Cat!), have a look, have a drool, over these spats.  Spats!  Can you wear spats with flipflops?

I’m delighted to announce that Under the Poppy will be published next year by Small Beer Press, the perfect literary theatre for its louche and loving shadow-show.

More details as they happen . . .

Doesn’t this look fantastic: “A Night with Walt Whitman,” with special guest Federico Garcia Lorca.  If my NYC sojourn was longer I’d be in line already.