Though both of these images are theatrical, one can be construed as medicinal.  Discuss.  Remember to show all work.

…is just what it sounds like: Victorian punks.  Love the yellow pantaloon fellow – not everyone can work that outfit, but he so can.

From Clive, friend and patron of puppetry, the theatre, and Under the Poppy, comes this genial fellow, whose holiness lies cheek-by-jowl with his taste for the vivid; not always the case, right, with your garden variety saints, some of whom would possibly prefer to be flogged by thorns than hang out with the backstage crowd.  So all hail St. Simeon el Salo!

Here’s what to wear to the Under the Poppy premiere! or an afternoon browsing your miscellany collection, at least until the laudanum man arrives … Don’t you love some of these looks? “The steady infiltration of 19th-century haberdashery into the 21st-century wardrobe. Garment after garment has arrived on the scene that one might think more Gilbert and Sullivan than Bergdorf and Goodman, only to be taken up by the young beards.”  Mmm-hmm.  Please pass the tintypes. Oh, and don’t miss the slideshow.

It’s not on this album – this is the newest, Rook, as you see – but on Everybody Makes Mistakes, and I must have listened to that song a hundred times as I wrote Under the Poppy. Thank you, Shearwater, for the soundtrack….Though the character of Benjamin named himself, as they always do.

Fun to see, in a current (4/22) issue of Time Out New York, a round-up of available puppetoria and hijinks in NYC, ranging from “puppet KafKa” at HERE, to “Wonderboy” at the Joyce, to the meta-puppet wonderland of PuppetHub.

I’ll be there mid-May doing some Broadway research (hi, next to normal!) and maybe sniff some corsets at Dances of Vice, if time permits.  Metaphorically, I mean, natch….

There’s been so much energy brewing in our own Poppy-show planning, I almost hate to leave town.

Seeing this deliberate use of actors of various sizes made me think of the size variance possible between constructed actors, such as puppets (who after all can be made from anything, and pretty much have been), and how size connotes power, or its inversion.  As does corporeality.  As does motion . . . . In Under the Poppy, the puppets are life-size, child-size, slightly larger than an open palm; made horse-headed, with a keyhole for a heart, a bag of hunger on a set of strings, a soft-breasted beauty who cries real tears, a fall guy without even a mouth to cry out when he’s cracked in two. Par exemple, look how lively is this pale gentleman . . . .E pur si muove.

I always listen to music (delivered via iPod) when I write, both as insulation and, primarily, inspiration. What inspired me for this book was a lush, idiosyncratic palette of sound: Faun Fables’ melancholy menace, some Dylan and Elvis Costello, a lot of Rufus Wainwright– like “Baby,” and “Do I Disappoint You,” and “Coeur de Parisienne — Reprise d’Arletty” — and, later, on a tip from my very musical friend (and literary accompanist) Chris Schelling, Shearwater, whose “Red Sea Black Sea,” “White Waves,” “Well, Benjamin,” and especially “La Dame Et La Licorne” I must have played a million times.

The music is so deeply interwoven, now, in my experience of this novel, that every time I hear those songs, or the others on my “Recently Played” playlist, a part of the book comes back to me instantly: Oh, that’s when Istvan did this, or That was in Prague or That’s when the war started. What a beautiful shortcut!