In this week’s New Yorker, Joan Acocella checks out puppetry in New York, and notes that one of the great pleasures of this branch of the moving arts “is the vivacity of puppetry, its carnivalesque quality, its ability to make things fly” – as well as resize the world to your liking, murder and animate at will, and make of a hand or a piece of string – or a hand and a piece of string – a figure both tragic and amusing.  True play admits the possibility of pain: how else properly savor the fun?…Nice to see the shout-out to Basil Twist, too.

Considering the Under the Poppy onstage version is a real creative tilt-a-whirl for me, or perhaps kaleidoscope? Seeing the material in a different context which is, at the same time, the context the characters themselves know best, the world of ultimate artifice, requires a different way of visualizing the story, a way of contextualizing the experience of the novel into a new format.  Which is a hideously pedantic way of saying how does one make a kiss on the page a kiss onstage?

Trying to conjure all the adaptations I’ve read/seen/loved, and so far it’s a shorter list than I’d like; all suggestions are welcome. Who’s done it right?

The task is not to make something “like” the other thing, but to do the same thing in a different way….In the meantime, I look and learn and admire such sensibilities and performers as Lucent Dossier. [Photo: Lucent Dossier.]

The title of this Coilhouse post is “Survival of the Bravest” and I applaud it. A précis: “I dream of a publishing industry reborn, emerging from the ashes of poverty burned clean, pruned back and more beautiful than ever. I dream of a Darwinian rebirth, where only the most audacious and gorgeous of publications will survive; a rebirth only possible in the internet age where every niche market can find its products with the tap and a click of a search field and mouse.”

A fond festishization of the book as object, and the more beautiful and baroque the better.

And – because it’s not either/or; we possess both technologies, why not use both to best advantage? – pop the text onto our Kindle, or download it, when all we want is the text.  See Galleycat for a “spirited discussion” on publishing and new media.

The story is “the book,” pixels or paper.  Let’s have it every way possible, shall we?

Is this not fantastic?  Have a look at Nice Collective’s exceedingly nice work.  I love the sensibility, expressed by Joe Haller, of the dark and rugged “Vaudeville / traveler / carny aesthetic,”  that gentlemen-of-the-road look that’s both organic and outré.  One can definitely see Istvan, say, in this particular hat …  Wonderful work.  [Photo from clothingbrigade.com/Nice Collective.]

Look into those eyes, look at those feet, and you tell me if that old balloonman, that Pyotr, was just another drummer from the woods and the road.  [Puppets courtesy last night's presentation from Nancy Henk.]

…there’s Weird Tales, where, in the current issue, my short story “Far & Wee” appears alongside a Neil Gaiman interview, a story from Michael Bishop, a clockmaker artist, and much more fiction and other curiosities to enjoy.  Fun fact: “Far & Wee” was my tangential trial run for Under the Poppy - the whorehouse; the stage show – though the mood is somewhat more tragic, and the Pan who appears here is in no way related to Pan Loudermilk, except possibly by blood.

A Parisian friend (hi, Whitney!) points me to Spectacular Realities by
Vanessa Schwarz for a fun-with-the-19th-century text.  Our own 21st, at least in the first/developed/crybaby world, seems hellbent on avoiding all reminders of life’s hardest realities  – daily pain and eventual death – thus producing a subset of people who actually believe they’re suffering when they miss a Netflix delivery, or have to take a boring meeting at work.

How refreshing would it be instead to have lunch with the strolling shop girls of Schwarz’ Paris!  As Whitney notes, “[V]iewing slowly decaying corpses was just a part of daily life in that time, like going to the theater only free. It was a lunchtime break for shop girls.”

I’ve got to get a copy of this book….

…with all the panache of the present. Going to try to make this bash. The regulars of the Poppy would want me to…But what, whoa, what to wear?

Love the silhouette/shadowplay in this video, from the incomparable Siouxsie and the Banshees.  Menance and erotica! I must have listened to this song a thousand times when I was writing my novel Skin, but I never saw the video until this past week.  The plague mask and top hat remind me fondly of Istvan’s in the Poppy, though as that brothel’s bouncer Omar wisely notes, “The one thing the gents don’t like is to be scared.” Peek-a-boo.