Books-by-the-Month: June

June is the month when books begin to breathe again. After the frantic ambitions of spring and before the scorched lethargy of high summer, June offers a kind of golden intermission— one where reading feels less like an activity and more like a conversation with the season itself. The air is forgiving; the days are long enough to lose track of time entirely; and there is a distinct pleasure in letting a novel sprawl open beside you on a picnic blanket or the cool tile of a shaded porch. This is not the season of required reading, but of elective affinities— books chosen not out of duty, but desire. 

In the spirit of such gentle indulgence, I offer a reading list for June: three books that feel particularly at home in this lush, lingering month.

1. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

We’re all mad here. And June, after all, is a month that is more than a little mad. The bees are drunk on nectar, the birds wear ridiculous plumage, and the earth’s geometry has gone squishy. And these tales all take place in “the golden afternoon,” of course; that glorious golden afternoon of Lewis Carroll’s seemingly infinite imagination: all elasticity, upheaval, surprise, and possibility.

‘Lewis Carroll’ was the pseudonym of Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, who lived from 1832 to 1898. Carroll’s physical deformities, partial deafness, and irrepressible stutter made him an unlikely candidate for producing one of the most enduring children’s fantasies in the English language. 

Carroll felt a debilitating shyness around adults but became animated and fully himself around children. His crippling stammer melted away in the company of children as he told them his elaborately nonsensical stories. Over the course of his lifetime he made many child friends whom he wrote to frequently, mentioned in his diaries, and (as a gifted amateur photographer) took numerous portraits of throughout his life. 

 

[And! PSA! Just to be clear before imaginations run rampant: while Carroll’s friendships with children might have been unusual, there is ZERO evidence to suggest that Carroll’s friendships with, or photographs of, children were in any way inappropriate or nefarious. All evidence suggests he simply felt most at ease in their presence considering his many limitations in the adult world.]

 

In 1856, classics scholar Henry George Liddell accepted an appointment as Dean of Christ Church (one of the colleges that comprise Oxford University), and brought his three daughters to live with him at Oxford.

 Carroll quickly became close with Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell, and during their frequent afternoon boat trips on the river, Carroll told the Liddells fanciful tales. Alice quickly became Carroll’s favorite of the three girls, and he made her the subject of the stories that would later became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Almost ten years after first meeting the Liddells, Carroll compiled the stories and submitted the completed manuscript for publication.

But, as is the bittersweet truth of life, time marched on. By the time the books were published, Alice and her sisters had grown into young women, and their parents were more interested in their daughters pursing suitable marriages than in playing childish games and spending “golden afternoons” on the Thames with Carroll. Carroll was heartbroken, and just as Through the Looking-Glass was published, he completed an acrostic poem titled “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky” comprised of Alice’s full name that was an ode to her, her sisters, and the golden time in which their lives all intersected.
 
To read Alice is to follow a talking rabbit into a rabbit hole. It is to remember that childhood—like spring— is not only growth, but change, expansion, and wildness.  The tulips, like the Queen of Hearts, are imperious. The mushrooms might alter your size. And the language! Carroll’s linguistic play is like a garden in itself: fertile, looping, delightfully ungovernable. Alice is always teetering on the edge of what makes sense, and she meets each absurdity with the kind of dry resolve that is, in its way, heroic. Wonderland does not reward logic—but it does reward nerve.

 

2. The Overstory by Richard Powers

In June, trees are full, heaving with life, and everything feels lush and vital. Reading this novel while immersed in the sights and sounds of summer turns your surroundings into part of the experience.  The Overstory is a sweeping, powerful, sprawling, and deeply resonant novel about the secret life of forests will deepen your wonder (and guilt) every time you pass a tree. As June offers longer days that give us the opportunity to slow down and think deeply, this book beckons for your deepest attention.

 

Without being preachy, the book quietly (and sometimes loudly) shifts the reader's perspective toward the environment. It deals with eco-activism, ethical protest, and the desperation that arises when nature’s majesty is treated as disposable. By the end, many readers find themselves changed in how they see nature — and humanity’s place in it.

 

At its heart, The Overstory is a love letter to trees — their intelligence, longevity, memory, and the way they communicate underground through roots and fungal networks (what scientists call the "wood wide web"). Powers takes something we see every day and reframes it as ancient, majestic, and nearly sentient. The novel isn’t told through a single protagonist, but rather through nine interwoven characters, each with their own unique path that eventually intersects with the others—much like the highway of tree roots beneath the soil. It feels like watching a forest grow: each branch (or character arc) matters, but it’s the total ecosystem that stuns you.

 

3. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

 

Ah, June. Our gal. 

 

For my money The Handmaid’s Tale is evergreen, resonating cataclysmically int he modern era, making it an essential read 365 days of the year. Atwood’s dystopian novel imagines a future in which women’s rights have been stripped away, and fertile women are forced into the role of child-bearers in a theocratic society. 

 

Atwood’s writing is chilling in its precision—her prose spare, her world-building rich with haunting detail. But a sneaky literary truth is that our protagonist’s name (now erased in Gilead, as she goes by the name of her master Offred, meaning Of-Fred) very well might once have been June, making the book make the June list this month. Of course.

 

The “fact” of her name emerges in a chilling passage in Chapter 1 of the book. The passage describes the “Rachel and Leah Center” (a pro-natal birthing center where fertile women are kept for breeding) where the narrator of the story known simply as “Offred” has been sent for reeducation, along with other potential child-bearing women. The chapter ends with:       

 “We learned to whisper almost without sound. In the semi-darkness we could stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren't looking, and touch each other's hands across space. We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other's mouths. In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed:

        Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.”

All the other women named in this passage, all of them except June, appear later in the story. If those were the only five women present, then by process of elimination, “June” must be the rightful name of our narrator, now known as Offred.

There are no other unidentified women's names in the rest of the book, so "June" is the only possibility for the narrator's first name for which there is any evidence. (The television series took this and ran with it, creating a vibrant backstory for Offred, developed into June Osborne.)

 

Read it. I also heartily recommend the audiobook narrated gorgeously by Clare Danes— who is a singular talent at audio narration. The novel’s exploration of power, gender, and control feels MORE urgent today than when it was first published in 1985.

 

A provocative, unforgettable exploration of what happens when women lose control over their bodies, minds and autonomy, The Handmaid’s Tale remains a crucial read for understanding the fragility of rights and the strength of resistance.

 

Where the Rivers Meet

In January, I was convinced—for the twenty-sixth time in two years—that I was absolutely, for real, not-a-joke-this-time, quitting show business. All to say: jokes on me, I didn’t plan an extended stay in Red Bank, New Jersey to act in a play, which I believe the very definition of being in show business, at Two River Theater.

 

Let me be clear: I did not go to Red Bank, New Jersey, on any kind of overly earnest, self-healing pilgrimage. I went because I was having a Category 5 Identity Crisis™ and accidentally drove past the exit to my therapist’s office, then kept going because I didn’t feel like crying in front of someone with a quartz paperweight and aggressively kind eyes.

 

So, there I was in Red Bank. It sounded fake. (Doesn't it sound fake?) Like a town from a children’s book where woodland creatures run a gift shop. But there it was. A real place with real rivers. Two, in fact. The Navesink and the Shrewsbury. I know this because I Googled it while eating a panic hot dog in the car on the way there, twenty hours after completing jury duty. 

 

Before I could take a Tums I found myself in the cutest little one bedroom you ever did see, situated along said rivers (a pro), nuzzled up to the industrial-sized garbage dump of the (quite fancy) retirement home next door (a significant con), and a hop-skip-and-a-jump from a tavern called The Molly Pitcher Inn (a hoot). 

 

Tatiana in tow, I took the job, we moved in, and the first night I cried. 

 

I've never been great at transitions, at change. A Cancerian through-and-through, I love my home, my nest, my comforts, and the first 72 hours in any new digs are always agony. I now know to just allow it to happen—the ploppy tears. I bring a few comforting things with me (and possibly get that 72 hours down to a respectable 48). It helps to ease me in to unfamiliar bed-sheets, cutlery, strange lighting and weird noises. A blanket from home. A heating pad. "Professor Owlinski" the stuffed owl I won in a poker game hosted by Tyne Daly sometime in the mid 20-teens. Come to think of it, I brought these same three comforts to each of my surgeries in the hospital back in 2020-21. We've been through stuff. 

 

Human beings can adjust to a lot, but when time is of the essence, when you have to go to rehearsal and appear to be a functional person and work must get done? There is just something about one's things. Let's just say after nearly 20 years in said-showbiz-I-have-yet-to-quit, I've learned how to "be on the road." 

 

But this time? I was coming out of a time I can only describe as a personal landslide—though even that sounds too dramatic for what it was: a slow, silent erosion of meaning, purpose and the former pert-ness of my cheekbones. I was hollowed out. Still churning out one-liners like a pro! But hollow. This must be why stand-ups have drinking problems. I considered starting one, or nurturing another vice, or getting a 'shoulder crow,' but I was honestly too tired to really commit to becoming an "Interesting Town Character." 

 

 

You ever completely fall apart in such a boring, scenic place that your misery feels almost rude? That was me. Sitting by the water, feeling like an exposed nerve while a couple nearby named Gary and Lisa discussed crab cakes and laughed like no one had ever ghosted them on Instagram. I wanted to scream, HOW ARE YOU LAUGHING? THE WORLD IS MELTING! But I didn't. And Gary and Lisa wouldn't have reacted if I had anyway. This was New Jersey, after all. These people have seen some shit.

After the show finished in the evenings I would walk over from the theatre, snuggle up with Tati and watch true crime shows—heists, mostly. It felt as though I was achieving something: I was solving crimes. Good job, me. 

To be clear, I enjoy true crime in the following very specific order: 

1. heists + scams
2. missing people
3. celebrities "losing it" (but not Reality TV, a separate genre, and not for me)
4. and then and only then do I enjoy murder mysteries.

I read recently that people who watch true crime "to relax" have something deeply wrong with them and? Can confirm. 10/10 I am likely very unwell. At least I have been for the last year or so. 

Emotionally more mature, better regulation skills, perspective and capacity to navigate the world? Definitely. 

Size of the emotions? The same.  

 

Dammit.  

 

 

So fine: I had come undone, in a slow, creaky implosion! But bahahahahahahahaha my career was booming! I had worked 43 out of 52 weeks making art! Even some of it was great art! I had health insurance! A pay check! A literal financial plan! A cute haircut! Subscriptions to things! 

 

But my sense of purpose was... missing, presumed dead and starring at me sadly from the back of a 1980s milk carton. I had reached that particularly dramatic point in a downward spiral where you start listening to Lana Del Rey on purpose. I kept whispering, "What is the point of anything?" like I was a sad Victorian boy with scarlet fever. And in one particularly preposterous moment I stared at my fingernails about to paint them before I quietly muttered "....why?" (Alec can attest to this, he bore witness. We laughed. But for a few seconds it was bleak). 

And then Red Bank just—let me be. No one in this town tried to fix me. The ducks ignored me. The barista slid me a free kitchen sink bar muffin without asking if I was okay. Even the rivers weren’t trying to teach me a lesson. They were just doing their thing, converging in the background like, “Hey, we’ve been here for 10,000 years and we didn’t figure our lives out either.”

 

One afternoon, I watched a seagull eat half a bagel off a park bench with such pride I almost cried. I thought: Maybe I could do that. Not eat bagels off benches, necessarily, ya know: snatch at life. Survive. Find something small and beautiful and eat it like it was a feast. And also? rude that this is a seagull which is very theatre-coded and I get the message Universe, I am tryyyyying to get a grip over here. 

 

But I didn’t. I just sat there in my sweatpants that I definitely should have retired three emotional breakdowns ago, and I watched the seagull do its thing, water swirl in that calm, competent way only water can. Not trying to be inspiring, just being very busy and wet. 

In the end?

Red Bank didn't fix me. There was no lightning bolt of revelation, no cathartic sob on a riverside bench. 

 

But something shifted. My thoughts softened. My hands unclenched. I stopped needing to name every pain, stopped auditing my life like a failing business. I didn’t throw my phone into the river (or the other river), or sell all my belongings and open a paint-your-own-pottery studio (a foolish idea anyway because there already is one and it's adorable).  I just... felt a little better. Like maybe I didn’t need to know what comes next to just exist.

 

Eventually I left, of course. You can’t hide in New Jersey forever. (Or maybe you can, I don't know your life.) But something stayed with me. A sense that even when everything feels like it’s falling apart, it’s still okay to eat fried clams, talk out loud to ducks, and let two unbothered rivers remind you that the world keeps flowing, whether you’re thriving or just trying really hard not to cry in public. 

 

I didn’t get all the answers. But I did get a seder plate I painted myself at 'A Time to Kiln,' and to my great relief: a couple of weeks of peace. 

 

I’ll take it.

Books-by-the-Month: May

Each May, the world is reborn— its hues sharp, the air narcotic with growth. 

 
I like to turn to books that speak — in their vastly different languages—to the alchemy of spring.
Because though full of warming days and the promise of jacket-free softly lit days, May is delightfully deceptive. On the surface: sunny, sprouting, slightly unhinged from the pollen. Underneath: existential dread with a side of compost.

So here is a varied collection that hums with May’s energies: growth, mystery, intellectual fertility, and the shivering joy of the irrational.

And what more can we ask of Peak Spring than that it remind us, gloriously, that we have not yet read ourselves to the end?


1. The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

 
A poetry collection for when the world is turning green again. Glück’s poems are spare, clear, and full of the voice of flowers—serious and quiet and somehow thrilling. Reading Glück’s The Wild Iris in May is like walking barefoot through cold dew: it arrests, it cleanses

The poems, spoken in turns by gardener, flower, and G-d (Herself!) create a polyphony in which voice and silence, blooming and burial, despair and redemption, are not opposites but connected, natural realities. Glück’s garden is a battleground of consciousness, where the soul grapples with its mortality and the silence of the divine. And yet, the book shimmers with hope.

The iris, that May bloom with its blade-like leaves and solemn faces, becomes a totem of persistence.

“It is terrible to survive / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth,” 

she writes in the title poem.
 

But survive it does. The plants, anthropomorphized but never sentimentalized, speak in the dry, luminous diction that is Glück’s signature—each line tight as a root. Her flowers are not metaphors—they are selves speaking from the dirt.
 

In May, when the garden is both promise and proof, The Wild Iris is the most honest prayerbook I know. Read it with the window open.

 

2. The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
Why: May can feel mischievous — a perfect time for this surreal, hilarious story about a 92-year-old woman uncovering a mystical conspiracy at her retirement home.
And that? Is all I shall say lest I spoil the mischief.

 

3. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
A play about gardens, chaos theory, and the collision of past and present? Sounds like May to me!
As Guenevere famously touts in Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot— the “lusty month of May” is “that darling month where everyone goes wistfully astray.” The month of May is a kind of c h a o s.

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia takes place in an English country house where past and present slide over each other like water over glass. The play toggles between 1809 and the 1990s, between a 13-year-old genius named Thomasina and a cadre of modern academics trying (and failing) to make sense of her brilliance.

The precise “gardens” of Enlightenment-style thought give way—in the play and in the outside world of the play—to romantic wilderness. In both timelines, the characters are giddy with questions, love, and ruin. 

The brilliance of Arcadia lies in its marriage of head and heart. It makes fractals romantic and carnal love scientific. It is the ideal spring read because it is both fecund and formal—its dialogue clipped and exquisite, yet drenched with emotional urgency. Like May, it is a hinge: a time when intellect and instinct flirt outrageously, each stealing the other’s lines.

Read Arcadia aloud I say! Do all the voices! Don’t skip the stage directions! Revel fully in Stoppard’s wit, or better yet, see it performed live.



4. Weather by Jenny Offill

Early summer often brings a hum of low-key anxiety about the future (think graduation, life changes,
existential dread). This fragmented, witty novel captures May’s atmosphere beautifully—the month when the world is either blooming, buzzing, or quietly breaking into a sweat.

Reading Weather in May is like sipping lemonade while doomscrolling—it hits both your sweet spot and your spleen. Offill’s prose, famously fragmentary, lands like poetic pollen: light, airborne, and likely to spark a reaction. It mirrors the May mood—attention fractured by birdsong, barbecues, and the gnawing sense that climate change might just cancel June.

Weather is the literary version of overhearing a whip-smart stranger muttering to herself in a community garden. It’s a domestic novel, sure, but with apocalyptic garnish. Our narrator, Lizzie, is a librarian who collects anxious questions like others collect wine:

“What if we all become bugs?”

“Is it OK to eat meat if the cow wanted to die?”

And yes, Librarian Lizzie will help you renew your books while the world teeters on collapse.

May is also the month when we remember we’re animals—squinting at the sun, dreaming of reinvention. Offill gets this. Her characters are always evolving, molting old selves. Weather doesn't hand you answers; it hands you a dandelion puff of paradox and invites you to blow.

 

So if you’re standing at the intersection of “should I plant tomatoes?” and “is civilization crumbling?”, Weather is your match. It’s short enough to finish on a breezy Sunday and dense enough to haunt you until the solstice. 

 

 

5. The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

 
Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem is a groundbreaking science fiction novel that blends Chinese history, political intrigue, and astrophysics in an utterly unique way. Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, the novel explores the consequences of first contact with an alien civilization. 

The story revolves around a physicist named Ye Wenjie, who, after a series of traumatic events, sends a signal to the stars—a signal that is eventually answered by an alien race on the brink of extinction.
Liu’s writing is at once intellectually stimulating and emotionally compelling, exploring themes of scientific progress, humanity’s place in the universe, and the unanticipated consequences of our actions.
This first book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy will take you on a mind-bending journey through space and time.

Almost-free things that bring me joy: a List

Joy.

- New growth in my potted plants

- A perfectly smooth duvet on a perfectly made bed

- [The rush of love I feel] watching Tati lounging luxuriously in the sun

- The sound of rain on the windows

- Long white pillar candles 

- Spring

- Hand-written postcards and letters from friends

- The smell of a freshly cleaned apartment

- An Epsom salt bath 

- Podcasts

- Tati’s sweet little meow

- The smell of a fresh pot of coffee

- The majesty of a raw amethyst

- Sunlight through the leaves 


- New growth on a houseplant (esepcially if you were 100% certain you had murdered it with your black thumb of death)  
- The sensation of accomplishment, however modest

- Sprigs of herbs in glass jars

- Fresh air in the form of breeze through the open windows 

- Clearing out a closet/shelf

- A local outdoor black cat who roams all of Astoria I affectionately call “Midnight Cat.” Midnight Cat is gutsy and sweet and has the most beautiful expressive tail! I love you, Midnight cat!

- That feeling of fully releasing into relaxation into bed...

- Sleeping in 

or

- Waking with the dawn ...

- The smell of a new season in the air

- Finding old doodles on the backs of envelopes, scrap papers

- Phone calls, FaceTime, and old-fashioned visits with friends old, new, and potential.

© hula seventy

On this, the First day of May: a List

- Blossoms, noted

- Long days [of soft, Impressionist-painting-like] light, noted

- The heart-crushing need to control my pandemic experience, relaxed

- Spring, sprung

- Grain-free loaves of bread, made

- Values, re-assessed

- Murder, She Wrote, [all of it, all twelve seasons, I’m not kidding,] watched. 

- Zoom, mastered.

- Hallway, living room AND kitchen, re-painted [for the first time since 2010]


- Plants, purchased [and the outside, brought in]

- Other [quite splendid] DIY, underway

- The sobriety of the loss-of-life, fear, economic toll, inanity of our non-leader, ABSORBED

- Alec, adored
 
- Tati, worshipped 
 
- It's been raining nonstop here in New York the entire week [on this, what feels like March 57th, in the year of our Lord, 2020] so we are still consuming warm foods and drinks because, pandemic. Because, comforting. 

-  The realization that April 2020 was singular in its shared global lockdown. In March, the reality of COVID was still creeping up on the Western world. Here in May, certain parts of the planet are on the other side and easing restrictions. For all its horrors, April was singular in its shared Quieting across the world. It somehow felt special that every citizen of the planet was in this Pandemic experience together, and however harrowing, sharing something.

- Tra-la, it's May my loves. 

Family.

Things I Want to Remember about April 2020: a List

The Quiet.

- The slow closing up of the world…

- The Quiet. The beautiful, terrifying Quiet.

- Pink blossoms in full bloom on the corner of 33rd and Broadway, with beautiful Edison bulbs hanging inside them. It took my breath away!

- a two-hour conversation on the phone with Tyne. My beloved friend and mentor.

- An extraordinary email from Ruthy Froch, that left me reeling

- Sending and receiving postcards and letters.

- Watching Trump destroy our country and himself, being filled with anger but mostly extraordinary sadness; and a fire in my belly to do everything in my power to contribute to changing the future.

- The passing of my friend, colleague, and inspiration, Terence McNally. 

- And how many wonderful texts, emails, phone calls, and conversations with those who shared his days his passing inspired, and how grateful I feel to have been lucky enough to have been in his circle. 

- Lessons from Tati (Eat that snack. Take the nap. Don’t morally assess anything. Don’t do. Be.)

- The incredibly somber moment Alec and I stopped in our tracks as we came across the impromptu refrigerated morgues outside on the sidewalk of Mt Sinai Queens.  

- Everything I learned whilst teaching

- Learning that thinking outside the box about how to stay connected whilst apart has provided all of us with huge new ideas and experiences never previously explored. Digital classes, weddings, funerals, birthdays… a way to be included where we’d previously assume one could not be included.

- Cooking with Alec

- Watching “Sister Act” with Alec and bursting at the seams with joy [and full choreography performed at 100] sharing it with him

- Dawn FaceTimes with Bobby every Tuesday.

- The birds that are starting to figure out that our bird feeder is a new local hangout in the neighborhood (and of course, Tati’s response…)

- This new concept of time... 

- The freeing, masked, frightened and dangerous walks we took, almost every day

- Supporting Etai. And Alexandra. Proverbially holding them.

- Alec, making a sweet little breakfast (grain-free) toast and egg every morning, and brought it to me on a blue plate and with the proudest grin. 

- Confronting The Quiet. 

- ...and welcoming it, too. 

- The discovery that "returning to normal" is not possible, and not going to happen, and the accompanying grief in response to that reality...

- ... and Yet. Yet. The recognition that our world's "normal" was not sustainable; our planet could not survive it, our bodies could not endure the stress, the hustle, the culture of lack. That we have been forced to face the consequences of our actions and thus, must build a new world. We have thus been invited--inside this horrendous global catastrophe filled with plague and fear and death-- to imagine a world with less hustle, less poverty, less inequity, and filled with more compassion, fairness, empathy, and wellness for ourselves and our one and only planet.

- Dawns. Lots of Dawns.

Spring isn't canceled.

Most memorable moments this week: a List

- Waiting impatiently for my new prescription medication, promising to bring such relief, which came nearly 4 days later than anticipated because, ya know, global pandemic.

- Receiving my new prescription medication, via brave delivery man, for free thanks to my insurance. I cried.

- Repotting all our house plants and feeling the joy of new oxygen and life inside the walls of the beloved Winter Palace

- Tati intuitively knowing my sorrow, and electing to nuzzle with me as “baby spoon” on the sofa when she could tell I felt extra miserable 


- Sharing our second-ever Shabbat at home; so chilling when the whole world is in a permanent "Sabbath" - making Sabbath special in the face of this reality.

- Meditating. Daily. At dawn. (Who do I think I am, a person in a lifestyle magazine? What will I do next— alkaline my body? Swear my inner glow is from drinking water and nothing else?)

- Writing at least 5 postcards every day

- Watching the magnolia trees bloom

- Holding my love while he wept

- The feeling of the sun on my skin

- The twists and turns of Westworld

- The twists and turns of THIS ACTAULFREAKINGWORLD

- Feeling the collective “spine crack” of the world on Sunday night, as the reality of this pandemic, its death toll, its economic toll, its length and breadth, and utter devastation truly sets in across the city and the country and the globe…

- The news announcing that 100-200K deaths as the projected "good news..." 

- Watching Governor Cuomo kick unbelievable freakin' ass. 

- The state and city officially under executive lockdown

- The slow, meditative pleasure in making a perfect cup of coffee

- The micro-bucolic pleasure of buying, potting and caring for indoor plants. Bringing the outside in. Caring for living things. Seeing them thrive.
 
- The quietest Saturday night I’ve ever seen (and I’ve spent a Saturday night in SIBERIA)

- Hanging a bird feeder 
outside our window (so Tati can watch the birds) and then? Watching her watch the damn birds.

- The extraordinary irony of it being ...April Fool’s Day. 

"joy is there: everywhere"

Spring Reads: A List

After a long,
frigid,
blizzard-filled,
not-one-but-two-colds,
not-one-but-two-round-of-antibiotics,
snowmageddon
snowpocalypsed winter...
plus the eff-you,
thoroughly-unpredictable March climate notwithstanding...

SPRING IS FINALLY HERE.

[*Cue: Handel's Messiah "Hallelujah" chorus, and REVIVALIST-STYLE RELIEF HOWL*]

Spring is a time of fresh starts.
New beginnings, clean slates; when the last vestiges of grey sludge on the corner of February Lane and Desperation Boulevard melt away, and as the citizens sigh with relief (for they no longer have to consider 20ºF a sign that it's "getting warmer...") The farmer's market stands fill with flowers, the light lingers longer, the trees burst out with fresh green leaves, and one feels the need to clean the corners of their closet with a cotton swab...

It is time to start again. 
Renewal.
Rejuvenation.
There’s just something about this season that makes us ready to let go of the past.

So after you drag 75% of the clothing you don't wear anymore to the nearest donation center, why not crack open a brand new book? For spring is the perfect time to shake off your crikeykillmenow winter funk and try something brand spankin' new.

What better to read, during this season of renewal, than great books about the bittersweet joys of starting over? Here is a curation of ideal seasonal reading, all with lush spring settings and inspiring themes that make one feel refreshed and energized. Even when chilly breezes blow, spring never loses its sense of possibility...

So curl up on a blanket, and enjoy these in the park on a sunny spring day...

* * *

1. These are my rivers by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Springtime is all about poetry. And American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is 'one of our ageless radicals and truebards.' In his peerless 'Everyman's' voice, Ferlinghetti combines a Whitman-esque celebration of the natural world with a deep bow to a surrealist tradition, and in "These are my rivers" has gathered over four decades of poetry with the added bonus of more than fifty pages of new work.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights Books, blazed his way onto the literary scene with the 1958 publication of A Coney Island of the Mind, marking him as one of the first and greatest "Beat" poets (though his more refined poetic sensibility showed just how different he was from what "Beat" eventually came to mean.) What followed were numerous collections such as Pictures of the Gone World, and Wild Dreams of a New Beginning among others, all expertly drawn from everyday life.

These are my rivers is a compendium of work from throughout his entire career, including 27 new poems, and reveals an ongoing interest in matters political and sexual from an ever-maturing point of view. Unlike poet Allen Ginsberg, whose 'Collected Poems' showed an artist struggling with decline and decay, Ferlinghetti seems to maintain his calm in the face of age; as well as a recognition of his connection with readers.

Even though it first appeared in Wild Dreams of a New Beginning, These are my rivers is where I first discovered what I consider to be Ferlinghetti's greatest poem "Deep Chess."


2. The Griffin & Sabine

 Trilogy by Nick Bantock

Sometimes, when one reads a book, the experience goes beyond engaging storytelling, believable characters or impressive prose.


Sometimes? Reading gets personal.


Sometimes, a book reaches up through the pages, and grips you by the throat, and says

“I know you... I am speaking to you...” 


And perhaps you would be a fool to listen to that voice. Perhaps a lot of things. But, as William Blake says, “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” So persist I did.



When I was 16, I was introduced to author and visual artist Nick Bantock's trilogy of books (Griffin and Sabine, Sabine's Notebook and The Golden Mean), and was instantaneously moved by it in a way I had never been moved by a book before. 



The book is a boundless feast for the senses—visually stunning, emotionally stirring, mixing a touch of mystery, philosophy, mythology and even a dash of science fiction, upon the pages containing (simultaneously immaculate and chaotic) "mail art" artwork, all used to tell a story. This homage to the old fashioned post, combined with its phantasmagoric love story, were all created by Bantock himself, the product of his romantic and mischievous mind.

Depressed London artist Griffin Moss receives a postcard one day out of the blue from an unknwon South Pacific Island. It simply states:

Griffin: It's good to get in touch with you at last. Could I have one of your fish postcards? I think you were right— the wine glass has more impact than the cup. —Sabine

But Griffin had never met a woman named Sabine. How did she know him? How did she know his artwork? Who is she?

Thus begins the strange and intriguing correspondence of Griffin and Sabine. Each letter they exchange is pulled directly from an envelope attached to the pages of the book, so the reader must engage in the delightful, forbidden sensation of reading someone else's mail. Come on: that's sexy stuff. 

I had never seen a book like it.
I had never seen a work of art like it. 

But my fascination went beyond that— I had to know what kind of a person had the capacity to create something like this. Something so stirring, and evocative and true.

For years I devoured every scrap of his work that I could get my hands on in an attempt to understand it, and truthfully, him, further.
I felt as though his books were speaking directly to me.  

I’m sure we’ve all felt something similar. 



Yet I had never even met him.

And then one day, I did meet Nick Bantock.

I was terrified, not because I felt intimidated, but because I was afraid I might be wrong about him. It is always crushing when an idol comes crashing down. So I was relieved to discover that I was exactly right. 
We have become very dear friends. 


Sometimes it truly is enough to know that people like him are real. 

They do exist.


3. Un abril encantado or, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

A recipe for happiness: four women, one medieval Italian castle, plenty of wisteria, and solitude as needed.

The women at the center of The Enchanted April are alike only in their dissatisfaction with their everyday lives. They find each other—and the castle of their dreams—through a classified ad in a London newspaper one rainy February afternoon. The ladies expect a pleasant holiday, but they don’t anticipate that the month they spend in Portofino will reintroduce them to their true natures and reacquaint them with joy.

Now, if the same transformation can be worked on their husbands and lovers, the enchantment will be complete.

The book is stunningly penned, but a faithful and glorious film adaptation was made in 1991 that certainly deserves a viewing of its very own.


4. Howards End by EM Forster

I first read Howards End under the expert inspirational tutelage of “Lady” Judy Chu, my high school British Literature teacher of such remarkable influence. I read it in the spring, when every blossom and glittering dappled leaf seemed to beckon me to the country estate. It is the perfect time of year to this classic. My work, lovingly thumbed high school copy still sits upon my adult bookshelf—complete with my 17-year-old scrawl penning such comments as:

"Well: London sounds dreary."
"Note to self: sign every letter 'BURN THIS...'"

and my favorite:

"Oh! All of this LOVE!"

Like all of Forster’s early novels, Howards End concerns itself with Edwardian society. As a member of the upper-middle class, Forster had keen insight into its attitudes and social mores, which he expertly rendered in the novel. But it was his profoundly humanistic values and interest in personal relationships that made all his books truly universal.

The major themes of Howards End are articulations of such philosophies: connection between the inner and outer life, between people, the future of England, and class conflicts; and above all connection-connection between private and public life, connection between individuals-and how difficult it is to create and sustain these connections. Howards End has been called a parable; indeed, its symbolism reaches almost mythic proportions at various points in the novel.

But the magic lies in the novel’s remarkable heroine Margaret Schlegel—without question the literary heroine I first “recognized,” and prayed resided within my own soul. Margaret is a font of love, intellectualism, imagination, and idealism, and the shimmering inner life of her mind is all shared with affection by the (charmingly biased) Narrator (quite probably the voice of Forster himself).

But it is Margaret’s “battle cry” that makes Howards End a masterpiece of the heart.

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

4. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

This, one of literature's greatest "children's novels" is among the most stirring tales of family, belonging and the healing powers of nature in the English speaking language.

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester, England in 1849. Her father's work as a silversmith and master of decorative arts kept the Hodgsons in relative affluence until his death in 1854. The consequent decline in the family's fortunes only worsened in the ensuing years, as all of Manchester found itself suffering a severe depression brought about by the American Civil War. The Hodgsons, facing poverty in England, immigrated to America in 1865. There, they traveled to a small town near Knoxville, Tennessee, in search of a moneyed American uncle who had promised to support them. That help never materialized, however, and the family was forced to take shelter in an abandoned log cabin.

The move from industrial Manchester to rural America greatly affected young Frances, who was then only fifteen. Though she had always been captivated by storytelling, it was only in America that Burnett began to seriously consider writing in order to supplement her family's meager income. The cover letter she sent with her first published story, which appeared in Godey's Lady's Book, described her goal most succinctly:

"My object is remuneration." 

She received it: thirty-five dollars, which was, in 1868, a nearly princely sum. She became the family's chief means of support, writing five or six stories a month at a time when it was exceedingly rare for a woman to have a career.

Burnett was one of the most commercially successful and widely-read authors of her day. Her book Little Lord Fauntleroy was possibly responsible for keeping a generation of boys wearing ruffles and mauve velvet knee breeches. Her other novels (including The Little Princess) were wildly successful, but none was more instantly beloved than The Secret Garden, which was heralded as a classic upon its publication in 1909.

In The Secret Garden, the events of Mary Lennox's early childhood mirror those of Burnett's own:

The Secret Garden opens by introducing us to Mary Lennox, a sickly, foul-tempered, unsightly little girl who loves no one and whom no one loves. At the outset of the story, she is living in India with her parents—a dashing army captain and his frivolous, beautiful wife—but is rarely permitted to see them. They have placed her under the constant care of a number of native servants, as they find her too hideous and tiresome to look after. Mary's circumstances are cast into complete upheaval when an outbreak of cholera devastates the Lennox household, leaving no one alive but herself…

Mary is sent to live in Yorkshire with her maternal uncle, Archibald Craven. Misselthwaite Manor is a sprawling old estate with over one hundred rooms, all of which have been shut up by Master Craven who has been in a state of inconsolable grief ever since the death of his wife ten years before the novel begins. Shortly after arriving at Misselthwaite, Mary hears about a secret garden (that belonged to the late Mistress) from her good-natured Yorkshire maidservant Martha. After her death, Archibald locked the garden door and buried the key beneath the earth. Mary becomes intensely curious about the secret garden, and determines to find it…

Both Mary and Burnett experienced the death of their parents followed by a reversal of fortune, as well as a great sense of dislocation upon being taken from the country of their birth to one utterly foreign to them...

The novel is not merely autobiographical; it was written while Burnett was also very much under the influence of the ideas of the New Thought, theosophy and Christian Science movements; and Burnett's idiosyncratic fusion of these philosophies held that the Christian god was a kind of unified mind or spirit, with whom any person might commune. This spirit was held to be present everywhere, and especially in nature. Proponents of the New Thought also extolled the power of positive thinking (the fervent contemplation of what one hopes will happen), and held it to be a form of communion with the divine spirit. One could ostensibly cure oneself of illness through this kind of magical thinking, or change the character of one's fortunes.

Such ideas had a profound influence upon the writing of The Secret Garden—particularly as the inspiration for what Colin and Mary call "Magic." It is, of course, also visible in Burnett's depiction of the landscape (as represented by the garden and the moor) as having healing or restorative properties.

This book was deeply woven into my childhood (as was the almost perfect award-winning musical penned in the early 90s by Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon)— for the message of a young girl who, through nature, tenacity, and the power of her thoughts alone could heal the sick. A message probably more profoundly affective than I realized at the time—this story spoke to the displaced little girl, whose greatest and most fervent wish, was to heal her father of illness...

"Come spirit, come charm, come days that are warm. 
Come magical spell, come help him get well..."

5.   As You Like It by William Shakespeare

If you are to visit any single piece of Shakespeare in the spring, one should look no further than a visit to the Forest of Arden—the setting of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and chosen home of the banished daughter (of an equally banished Duke), the utterly sublime Rosalind.

Arguably Shakespeare’s greatest heroine, Rosalind is the woman whom scholar, Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom describes as “the first real lover in all of modern literature.” Rosalind is strong, sensitive, wise, raunchy, romantic, witty, profound and petty. She is the first to make fun of love, and also the first to let herself be fully embraced by all its joy. But perhaps her greatest quality is her wise, accepting, trenchant, and at times almost peaceful self-awareness. As Bloom says "Rosalind is unique […] in Western drama, because it is so difficult to achieve a perspective upon her that she herself does not anticipate and share."

In the spring of 2001, I played Rosalind as a final farewell to Interlochen Arts Academy—the location of, without a doubt, the happiest and most influential days of my life thus far. I was also desperately in love— with the young man that would become The Love of my Youth. I spoke Rosalind’s words to him from the deepest corners of my heart. And he spoke Orlando’s back to me. This was love at its purest, at its most innocent and delicate. Laced with trees, and warming light, and Shakespeare’s most romantic words.

It was everything that one ever hopes, and dreams,
and should ever be so lucky to have
when you are seventeen
and truly in love for the first time
and it is Spring.


Happy reading.

     Happy Spring. 

"Hello Again Jesus!"

Hellllloooooo Again Jesus!

Sometime El Stans and Al Silbs have to co-host an Easter party.
A two-part Easter party.
Sometimes the cast of Hello again has to reunite just because. 
Part One: at chez El Stans.
The party's name? HELLO AGAIN JESUS.
That's right.
Part Two: at chez Al Silbs.
titled: THE SECOND COMING OVER.

There was glorious food, laughter, company and conversation. There were games, a quiz (with dingy bells!), nestled and nuzzled together in the first flushes of Spring.

What better what to say Helloooooo Again?

Quiet

Dear Blog-o-sphere,

I am so sorry to have been a bit quiet recently.
I needed the quiet.
Very much.

Isn't it interesting that in January we are inundated with television, internet and radio advertisements shoving pro-active, energetic new beginnings upon us? Buy this skincare line! Get in shape! Try this diet! That diet! Don't eat carbs! Don't eat meat! Don't eat anything! Find love! Find your ancestors! DO IT NOW!!!

I didn't want to "do it now," I wanted to sit alone in my house and be with myself (and at most, with Jessica Fletcher)... in the quiet.

I needed to think about my life, about life in general. About relationships with others and with myself. I needed to de-fragment the internal computer. Though the work was silent, I worked so hard, and multi-tasked so ferociously, that I made myself sick-- at the height of my internal re-organization I caught walking pneunmonia and was forced to go even deeper in.

Slowly, I am emerging. Slowly, I feel a very heavy veil lifting. But the work is arduous, and frustratingly time-consuming. Depleting.

I will come home from a day of actor-ing and tell myself to do something simple--
     "Boil the water" I say to myself. Out loud, like a crazy person, I respond,
     "Boil water? What am I, a chemist?!"
And I go to Plan B. [Please note: Plan B usually includes a can of black beans...don't you judge me!!]

All of this is to say the following: I have been getting to know myself again, and that didn't leave a great deal of space for sharing myself with others. But I value sharing life, and I value you, dear readers, and I apologize for leaving you so unceremoniously.
I have returned.

*

The other night I attended a concert at Carnegie Hall with Comrade Baker-- a marvelous evening of music which concluded with a performance of Stravinsky's The Firebird delivered by the St. Louis Symphony (passionately conducted by their own David Robertson).

I didn't just cry; I wept. I actually wept, and had to wait for everyone to leave the hall before I could get up and exit myself.

I know this is on the nose, I know that it sounds prosaic to say so, I know that--But music really does have the power to transform. Like winter into spring--the cold earth has not died, it has merely been resting, waiting to be shaken and invigorated by the tilting of the earth ever-closer to the sun. 

Welcome back, spring.
And Al.

Please: watch and hear the whole of this "mythical story of Life, Death and Renewal.".
You won't be sorry.