If you are here, like I wish I could pop over, go see The Hyperbolist, and if you don’t like it, call me and complain.  But I bet you will, and then won’t.

Reading Anthony Burgess’ gorgeous, peerless novel of Christopher Marlowe, A Dead Man in Deptford – not only (!) a book of heartbreak and hard beauty, but a passionate and mysterious alchemy of writer and writer, reminiscent, to me anyway, of Graham Robb and Arthur Rimbaud – makes one consider how difficult it is to write realistically of performance: no one wants to watch dance about architecture, right, and the overlay of enacted fictions on written fiction can sometimes be too precious by half, or too fey, or too much of a muchness. The puppets of the Poppy, being wooden and ironical by nature, I hope avoid that state, or fate. Puppets are the most nimble of all actors, the most silent, and without a doubt the longest lived.

Do yourself a favor and read this, if theatre in any format speaks to you at all.

Here you can get a peek into Monika Essen’s design process; her Woman Before A Glass will definitely be worth a visit.  Dressing the set, dressing the actors, dreaming a whole world into being, is so akin to what a novelist does: making that world of the unreal real enough to – almost – touch.  Although the novelist does have certain physical advantages: I’ve never stuck myself with a pin, say, though I did once staple right into the pink meat of my thumb.  Rigors of creation.

In another Ann Arbor note, there will be an event for Under the Poppy the novel hosted by Common Language Bookstore in October; date TK.  Don’t be surprised if a blackbird flies into the window …. I’ll also be at the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers‘ do in October, talking about Under the Poppy and surreptitiously eating chocolate, though I will use a napkin and keep the pages clean. I may be wild but I am civilized.

…got nothin’ on the floozies of the Poppy, except possibly a more advanced command of French.  Have a gander at these geese as you ponder, perhaps, what might appear in a sexual guidebook, what is essential, what ought to be left out, based on your own desires, or your desire to desire (not at all the same thing, right?) …. As noted in the previous post, love is a very tough article.  Sex is play. Love is art. Both involve discipline, of course, but so does everything worth the doing, including writing, puppeteering, making hay, and making believe.

Charles Isherwood reviews Peter Stein’s adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Demons” – whew, and wow.  Exhilarating material, a long tightrope walk; I’d love to see this production. If you have, comment, please, on what the demon-haunted said to you.

The Little Professor’s got some very interesting shoots and tendrils curling about the idea of Victorian/”Dickensian” fiction, with shout-outs to the great Sarah Waters (whose own trio of fierce Victorians – Affinity, Fingersmith, and Tipping the Velvet – I came to just this year) and others whose work can be classified as neo-Victorian.  As Under the Poppy is my own first venture into the waters of historical NV fiction, I can browse the LP’s checklist and confirm that yes, there is sexuality present, in various forms and formats, and yes indeed, there is stink. (Sidebar note: smell, scent, olfaction is so visceral and such a powerful descriptive tool, everything I write has stink in it. Yum.)

As for the actual history — well, the fact is I didn’t think beforehand about the book as historical fiction, as any “kind” of fiction; I understood in a backdoor sort of way that it would be part of a genre per se, but other than that I thought not at all; I just wrote. When I needed to know if a certain activity or device was present and/or available in my variant Victoriana, I looked it up (and sometimes became pleasurably lost among the byways of the pince-nez and buttonhook et al) and then added, or did not, accordingly.

What was most important to me, what is always most important to me when I write, was recreating on the page that world I saw so clearly in my mind’s eye: the universe of Rupert and Istvan, that most faithful and intimate world they had built and sustained between them, and all the concentric temporal worlds of society and custom, the road, the stage, the brothel and the salon, through which orbits they passed in turn and tandem on their way. Anthony Lane’s wonderful observation about Flaubert’s use of detail – his research “furnishing and feathering a world that had already taken shape within his mind” – is exactly my model.  Everything on the page is there to feather that nest, to hold you in that world until the story is done.

Is it odorous, sex-charged, boots-and-corset puppet-mad, this world? Oh absolutely. Is it neo-Victorian? It can sit at that table, I hope, without annoying its fellows. Need you wear pince-nez when you read it? Only if you want to. Did I make it all up? Yes and no, like all fiction, like the best fiction it aspires to be. Read it, please, then you tell me.

Of course we go to Motor City Pride every year, where you do run into the nicest characters … The puppet show, FYI, was for the wee folks and did not involve sex, deception, or the inordinate pulling of strings. [All photos: DC.]

And draws, and thinks: about color, its seductions and its stringencies; about human bodies, their heft and glory and sadness; about animals – oh, the beautiful paintings of animals …. And he sent me a completely wonderful puppet who is within dancing distance at this very moment.  And he loves Under the Poppy! Clive Hicks-Jenkins, you rock.

Excellent salon discussion led by gallery director Monica Bowman at the Butcher’s Daughter yesterday, where what makes a man a man – what signifies as masculinity; how one becomes (or remains) a man in both art and life; MC Hammer and those balloon pants – and Grace Jones! – was the topic. If art is, or can be, an external organ of perception, both visual and emotional, shaping what it sees and presents – represents, in that sense – then a depiction of a man with a beard, a man in a dress, carries that doubled influence.

And afterward, Cynthia Grieg and I talked about women in pants, another kind of representation. To become something, do we dress the part first? To try on identity and see how closely the mask becomes us?

Theatre has always known this, of course, intuitively and externally. So on to Don Giovanni.