I haven’t yet read Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road — I read very little fiction when I’m writing — but I’m already delighted by that flat-out subtitle: “A Tale of Adventure.” I’ve recently written elsewhere about the freedom genre can offer a writer, whether it’s young people’s fiction (which I also write) or the non-contemporary setting and milieu I used in Under the Poppy.

My own gentlemen of the road, Rupert and Istvan, have given me a fantastic adventure, a real swim in the sea of the unconscious, to a degree I hadn’t enjoyed for ages. Tropes rose up from the mist and murk, curtains parted, lights flickered in the theater of the mind. . . And best of all, nothing, nothing, nothing was off-limits. Nothing was too dark or too outre to be handled, used, and enjoyed: all the doors were open, and the puppets came out to play.

Writing is, at heart, an act of communication, and I do consider eventual readers when I work: how dismal, to write only for oneself. But the act of writing is a solitary pleasure (or, god knows, a solitary pain), and I truly enjoyed my theatrical romp — an enjoyment that I hope translates to the page and on to the reader, reading for pleasure, a tale of adventure.

In a recent NY Times article, Charles Isherwood reviews the Punchdrunk production of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,”
a site-specific theater experience as well as a performance, where the audience is encouraged to dress in white masks and evening wear, and are set free to roam the playing area and engage as they may with the actors. At the end of the evening, all assemble for the final ballroom bacchanal. (And several “Red Death” parties are scheduled as well.)

This feeling — of immersion, of menace and adventure, of stepping into another, wilder, more risky world — is at the heart of the lure for the audience in the Poppy — with additional intimacy available for purchase, of course, which ups the ante higher still.

Because sexuality is a kind of acting-out, isn’t it? an assumption of roles, a shedding of the public self, to be freer to give and to take, to amend the menu, to wear the mask (or take it off). Yet are we ever more ourselves than the moment when we are consumed by appetite?. . . Happy Valentine’s Day!

An artist friend of mine pointed me towards this Aristide Bruant
anecdote, saying it was very Under the Poppy-esque:

Bruant always greeted everyone who entered his cabaret with curses, but he admired Lautrec, and when he arrived, Bruant would roar, “Silence, gentlemen, here comes the great painter, Toulouse-Lautrec, with one of his friends and a pimp I don’t know.”
[from Frokje Hoekstra's Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec]

My friend also insists that Toulouse-Lautrec would be the go-to guy for the book’s cover art. Which set me dreaming. . .

Here’s an excerpt from Under the Poppy. Istvan is the puppeteer, the master of the mecs:

Istvan plucks a pippin apple from the bowl, reaches into his waistcoat pocket for a little white-handled knife, applies one to the other. “’Just a doll’? Some people say puppets must be possessed by spirits, that is, if the show is any good….I once knew a fellow who told me that puppets were as old as man himself. He was a slippery old bastard with a silver ring he wore on his thumb, and he claimed that the left-over makings of Adam and Eve, the dust and scrapings ignored by God, were swept up by Lucifer and breathed into a crooked sort of life, not true souls like Man and Woman but nearly as immortal, desiring to move amongst their human brothers and find love – or, denied that love, make mischief. So how different, really, is a man from a mec?”

This looks amazing: “The Puppet Show” at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. What an assemblage — the tactile, the animated, the “Music of Regret” — as well as people like John Bell, Clare Dolan, Kara Walker, Mike Kelley, Beth Nixon curating shadows, cardboard, and found objects, and Survival Research Labs . . .This is art as puppet play as serious grown-up fun. The catalog ought to be fantastic, too.

Also Philadelphia-based (and new to me): Puppet Uprising.
Is there champagne in the water, there? Or something slightly more rarified?

One of the unsung benefits of writing novels is doing the research. Not only amassing quantities of links, books, articles, etc., about the chosen subject in all its byways and mutations (which is excellent fun in itself: you wouldn’t be writing the book in the first place if the subject didn’t fascinate you), but searching out all the tactile adjuncts as well.

Like corsets. Since my historical women at the Poppy were more than likely securely laced up, I thought I’d better get out there and tie one on, so to speak. Which was surprisingly easy to do, thanks to Robin the corsetiere.

Not only did Robin gently debunk some of the “facts” I thought I knew about the wearing of corsets, and educated me as to who’s wearing them now (a lot of people: men, women, actors, back pain sufferers, people who want to look hot for college reunions, lacing fetishists, etc.), she also hooked me up (sorry, couldn’t resist) with one of the display models there in the store. And I have to say, I was sorry when it was time to take it off. No, I wouldn’t be playing any laced-up volleyball games, but it didn’t restrict my movement, and was far more comfortable than I’d expected, like being firmly held rather than uncomfortably squeezed. Kind of addictive, actually. And my posture was fabulous.