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Events, Kids

NY Transit Museum Hosts Concert by Kids for Kid, Thursday June 7 (Chancellor’s Day)

June 1, 2012

Looking for something to do with your kids on Thursday, June 7, when schools are closed for Chancellor’s Day? Head over to the NY Transit Museum, where two Brooklyn teens will be performing at 1:30 and 3:00 pm.

Wolfe Edelman and Joanna Wagner, both 8th graders at MS 51 in Park Slope, will be performing. Wolfe is in the instrumental program and band and has been playing guitar since the age of seven. Joanna sings and is in the school’s show choir. They have created a transit-themed list of songs.

The Transit Museum is located at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights. Admission is $5 for children and $7 for adults.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “I Am Forbidden” by Anouk Markovits

June 1, 2012

Image via Amazon.com

Hungary, a former part of the Habsburg Empire, was an Axis power during World War II, and Romania, which started out on the German side, successfully switched to the Allies after a coup d’etat. Jews in both countries, and in the area that lay between them, Transylvania, were not subject to Nazi deportations and extermination efforts until late in the war. So those who escaped the roundups, or were hidden by family servants, did not have to hide for so long. It’s entirely plausible that two children might have survived despite the murders of their parents and siblings.

Josef Lichtenstein, aged five, lay undiscovered under a table after the murders of his parents and baby sister. The family’s domestic, Florina, took him in, cut off his peyases, and raised him as a Catholic. One day Josef watched as a Jewish couple ran out of their own hiding place and were captured, the wife killed, the husband tortured. Joseph found, quieted, and comforted the couple’s very young daughter, Mila, and sent her to safety. Mila fetched up with the family of Zalman Stern, a Satmar Hasid and follower of the Satmar Rebbe Joel Moshe Teitelbaum. After the war, Josef returns to his Jewish community, and follows the Rebbe to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he is first a student and eventually becomes a valued member of the Rebbe’s Court. The Sterns, with Mila, emigrate to Paris after the war. The Satmar Hasids live rigorously structured lives, abiding by the Rebbe’s strictures and marrying within the community. Josef finds Mila in Paris and brings her back to Williamsburg after they marry.

The Rebbe plays a key role in the story. Back in Transylvania, Mila’s mother left her hiding place because she saw the Rebbe sitting in the open door of a boxcar. Could this have happened? Teitelbaum who has been described as “the most virulently outspoken anti-Zionist rabbi who ever lived,” allowed himself or, as Markovits recounts it, begged, to be placed on a rescue train to Switzerland – negotiated by a Zionist, the cost of safety for the few was the lives of the rest of the community.

This act, pious but barren Mila thinks, was good cloaked in evil. She tells herself, quoting from a commentary in the Midrash, “It is sometimes necessary to shroud a holy act in sin.” Ten years into her marriage with Josef, with no sign of children, she is increasingly desperate to conceive. She undertakes an act that I found extremely unlikely, (perhaps it was meant to be a metaphor?) but that results in a child, and sets off the events of the second half of this compelling novel.

Markovits is extremely good at conveying the arcane rules governing the world of Satmar women, particularly those around study, and those around sex. And in the parallels she draws between the acts of those who worship and protect the Rebbe, and those Mila takes to conceive and then protect her family, she draws a larger lesson: where there is complicity, there can be no absolution. This compelling novel is not as layered and complex as the novel by that name I recently reviewed, but reading the two books together suggested some surprising parallels. Do you agree? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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Arts and Entertainment, Events, Kids

Transit Museum shows Antonio Masi watercolors, hosts two family workshops

May 30, 2012

Image via salmagundi.org

The Transit Museum’s summer show is “The Golden Age of Bridges,” and it features Antonio Masi’s dramatic paintings of the nine major bridges of New York City. The show continues through September, 2012, and Masi will be conducting two family workshops this summer. The first will be this Sunday, June 3, at 1:30 pm. (The program will be repeated on Saturday, August 4 at 1:30 pm.) The program is free with museum admission, but you need a reservation. The program is suitable for children aged 6 and up.

Masi’s technique is distinguished by his unusual use of watercolor. Usually considered a light and airy medium, Masi uses watercolor to underscore the thick and heavy steel of the bridges he paints. He combines light washes with much thicker weights to show the heavy, weighted mass of each bridge. “I discovered that watercolor can also be used in a thick manner,” he explains, “and it can express the heaviest subjects imaginable. With watercolor, I contrast the mass, power and delicacy of my subjects.”

Following a 45-minute demonstration, children and their parents will be invited to paint a bridge in themselves.

The New York Transit Museum is located on the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: Rebecca Rogers Maher, a romance novelist in our midst

May 25, 2012

Racy romance novels may not be for every reader, but it’s not every day that a writer of one of them presents herself in our neighborhood. Yet there, sitting in Tazza with a cup of tea, was Rebecca Rogers Maher, author of the forthcoming “Snowbound with a Stranger,” a contemporary (and racy) romance novel about to be released by Carina Press, Harlequin’s digital branch.

Maher, the mother of two young sons, calls herself a typical clog-wearing, playground-hanging neighborhood resident. A former teacher, Maher found that parenting made similar deep spiritual and emotional demands on her. In response, she says, “I decided to make some time for myself, and started writing a few hours a week.”

And as she wrote, Maher found she liked writing about sex. “I write about sex because I always want to see sex scenes, in every movie or book. It’s an important part of character development.” Maher’s books focus on working class women. The protagonist in “Snowbound with a Stranger” is a nurse; the main character in her first book, “I’ll Become the Sea” is a teacher. Her third book, “Fault Lines,” about a rape survivor, will be published in September, also by Carina Press. In her blog, Maher calls these books her Recovery Trilogy.

“I am trying to write characters who have rich emotional lives but remain working-class,” she says. Nurses, teachers, firefighters, social workers – they work hard, for little money or prestige, and when “they do the job well, they are invisible.” Maher hopes that her books, light in genre and content, can spark a wider discussion. “I want to convey that there is no more value to a wealthy person than to a working class person, that both can have deep and rich emotional lives.”

So where does sexuality come into it? “Women’s sexuality in movies and fiction is problematic—there’s no place for women to initiate sex, to want it, to have emotional reactions to it. But sexuality is an important part of character development. We need to follow characters into the bedroom. Cultural issues explode in the act: how we see our bodies, our relationships.” Yes, her books can be raw—but the sex scenes in “Snowbound with a Stranger” are fresh and alive. You can read a preview of the book here.

The line between sex scenes and erotica can be a fine one, and Maher refuses to draw it, saying “I’m interested in erotica as it builds character, because I’m interested in what real people do in sexual situations.” As for the people in her life, Maher has told certain family members that they may want to avoid her books. Her boys are too young to read the books now; Maher’s best guess is that they will not want to read them when they are older.

Maher went to Vassar, where she majored in sociology, then worked as a political organizer. After a couple of years she joined the New York Teaching Fellows program, and taught for four years in a Crown Heights Elementary School. Perhaps it’s not the background you’d expect for a writer of romance novels, but for Maher, it’s working.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Absolution” by Patrick Flanery

May 18, 2012

Cover image via Amazon.com

Clare Wald is a South African writer. She lives alone, with Marie, her ‘woman of business.’ Sam Leroux, an academic from an American university, has come to South Africa for a series of interviews with her, as he is Clare’s cautious choice as her authorized biographer. Clare is divorced; her son, Mark, is a lawyer with a wife and children. Her daughter, Laura, an activist during the last days of apartheid, is missing and is most likely dead – neither Clare nor her former husband has heard from her for many years.

The narrative unfolds in several dimensions, with alternating sections narrated by Clare, by
Sam, and by an unnamed narrator. There is an internal narrative, also named Absolution, that tells the story of Clare’s and Marie’s survival of a home invasion and their move to a new house with a wall surrounding the garden, a gate, a panic button, a security service on call, and watchful neighbors. Absolution relates several episodes in which Clare discusses the home invasion with a police investigator whose frame of reference is so different from Clare’s that there can be no meaningful communication between them. It’s not clear whether the home is a metaphor for all of South Africa, or just all of Clare’s life. It is clear that the home has become a prison to her.

Sam’s chapters describe his return to South Africa after many years abroad; his wife, an American journalist, joins him in Part II, when he is teaching in Johannesburg and writing his book. Through his eyes, we see the precautions residents take in the crime-ridden society that developed in South Africa after the violent transition from the apartheid system. Wealthy white people routinely lock their refrigerators and cabinets so that their domestics cannot steal food from them. Showers have locks so that in the event of a home invasion the resident can squeeze into a very small space and hope the invader will give up and leave. Marie urges Clare to consider building a second defensive ring around their house, so that deliveries can be brought inside the first wall but not collected into the second until the truck making the delivery has left the first perimeter.

Clare’s chapters are based on Laura’s notebooks, left behind and delivered to her by some of Laura’s fellow radicals. Laura has laid bombs that blew up a plant, and much of Clare’s narrative reconstructs Laura’s movements after the bombing. From the notebooks, Clare can tell that Laura’s ride to safety after the bombing never materialized, so Laura decided to hitchhike, and was picked up by Bernard, a trucker, and Sam, his ward. This decision possibly compromised Laura’s safety, and Clare dwells on the uncertainty of what happened to her.

As Flanery frames it, no one who lived in South Africa was guilt-free, and no one who lives there now can escape the legacy of violence. This is a complex novel, and an extremely assured one, told in the same even tone whether the topic is bombings, nightmares, murders, or a dinner party. I highly recommend it. There’s a lot of guilt, and a lot of fault, both of action and inaction. While the many strands of the story are knit together quite satisfactorily, Flanery leaves enough ambiguity to support several possible interpretations of the novel. Of all the many guilty characters, Bernard is the only one whose guilt seems simple to me. Do you agree? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com.

I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer” by Susan Gubar

May 14, 2012

Image via Amazon.com

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Indiana University English professor Susan Gubar did not quote Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Dirge Without Music” in her brave memoir of her first years of living with ovarian cancer. But the tension Millay relates so vividly came into my mind as I read Gubar’s description of her efforts to face cancer and accept reality without resigning herself to fate or any other abstraction.

As Gubar explains it, ovarian cancer is a systemic disease. Originating in an organ deep within the abdominal cavity, it is often hidden, its symptoms taken to be indigestion. As a result, it is often discovered late, when it has developed into Stage III or Stage IV disease, affecting some or all of the rest of the abdomen. The initial treatment, ‘debulking surgery,’ in which the abdominal cavity is opened and all visible signs of a perhaps metastasized cancer are removed, is uncertain but likely to be horrible. Anticipating her debulking surgery, Gubar writes,

Who knows if malignancies have spread from both ovaries over the fallopian tubes, the uterus, the cervix, the appendix, the bladder, the liver, and parts of the intestines or lymph system? . . . efforts to stop the cancer’s growth require surgeons to get up the gumption to gut a seemingly vital woman, removing many of her internal organs.

At the time of her diagnosis, Gubar decides, she will go through the surgery and one round of chemo, and then seek palliative care. About half of US debulking surgeries, Gubar reports, wind up as ‘suboptimal:’ a residual tumor of more than one centimeter remains after surgery. And that’s what happened to her. But Gubar’s point is different:

Physically, immediately after the surgery I will suffer from what the counterattacking doctors do against the cancer, rather than from the disease itself. The hardly noticeable symptoms of cancer pale in comparison to those produced by the surgeons determined to excise it.

After the surgery, Gubar suffered serious side effects, including a perforated colon that developed into an abscess requiring first a drain and then a second abdominal surgery and an ileostomy – and all this during chemo. Gubar writes openly about the physical degradations and humiliations of the ileostomy, not to mention the daily challenges required to bypass the usual route of defecation, calling it ‘unspeakable and unspeakably anxiety-producing.’ She writes movingly about the impact her injured body has on her soul and her efforts to come to terms with death.

Today a number of scientists, looking for the fountain of perpetual youth, seek to make death depart from the human condition; however, it seems to me, as I now confront mortality at closer proximity, that intimacy with the mortal body educates us. Cancer and its treatments teach us, or have taught me after two years of coping with bizarre consequences, that life without the finitude of death–the inconceivable finality of one’s own death–would be intolerable.

Betrayal by her body, betrayal by her spirits, betrayal by her doctors. No wonder the thought of Judas, the subject of Gubar’s most recent book before the diagnosis, is a recurrent motif. Gubar recites poetry and prose she has loved, and thinks about the images Frieda Kahlo produced, the painting “The Dream” most of all, as she copes with all this. And she worries about the effect of her illness on her husband, her daughters and step-daughters, and her students.

Yet Gubar endures everything, and writes her book while she is enjoying – yes, that’s the word I mean – her remission. She explores the implications of her change of heart – she has decided to undergo another course of chemo after her first remission comes to a close. Her final chapter is a meditation on what she calls loconocology, “the double binds into which current protocols put medical practitioners of cancer and their patients.” She includes a plea to medical science to find a way out of these paradoxical choices, for the sake of the many women diagnosed with this disease each year.

This is a generous and full-hearted book, an anguished and powerful description of one woman’s successful effort to come to terms with a horrid reality. Medical ethicists and gynecologists must read this thoughtful book, and so should all the rest of us.

What was your response to this powerful book? Let us know in the comments.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Troubles” by J.G. Farrell

May 11, 2012

Image via Amazon.com

“Troubles” is JG Farrell’s long exploration, from the point of view of an English visitor, of Ireland in the years 1918-1921, immediately after the First World War and, perhaps more relevantly, shortly after the Easter Rising of 1916. “Troubles” won the Lost Man Booker Prize  of 1970, and is the first published of J.G. Farrell’s great Empire Trilogy; the others are “The Siege of Krishnapur” (about the 1957 Indian Mutiny, it was the winner of the 1973 Man Booker Prize) and “The Singapore Grip” (about the Japanese capture of Singapore in 1942). Together, the books explore the impact of the British Empire on the colonized peoples and the British who went into the colonial service to govern their lands and administer their laws.

At the end of the Great War, Brandon Archer, who has recently been released from hospital, where he was treated for unspecified war wounds, has traveled to Ireland. He is visiting Angela Spencer and her Anglo-Irish family, who own a magnificent if crumbling hotel on the east coast of Ireland called the Majestic. Angela and Archer have an uncertain but quasi-official understanding that they will be married; at least, that is what Archer believes, but Angela’s indifferent behavior towards him rather undermines that belief. He befriends Angela’s brother Ripon, and their younger twin sisters, the misnamed Charity and Faith, and Sarah Devlin, the crippled (and Catholic) daughter of a banker in neighboring Kilnalough. Archer bemusedly becomes more and more involved in helping Angela’s father, the quite possibly mad Edward Spencer, in running the hotel, still populated by a set of genteel ladies with little money and no place else to go. Eventually, it becomes clear, even to Archer, that Angela is too unwell ever to wed. After her funeral, he returns to London on family business, and Sarah visits him there. And then his hopes for a future with Sarah take Archer back to the Majestic just as Irish unrest is stirring.

Unable to leave, Archer spends a lot of time exploring the hotel and its grounds. Sometimes he accompanies the increasingly unstable Edward on his rounds. Starving tenants steal food from the hotel’s fields, and Edward is determined to protect his fief – he establishes a shooting range, houses some pigs in a squash court, and is intent on setting up defense lines that will allow him to guard his hotel from the violence he expects from the Irish Republicans. Archer looks on or participates in all of these activities. At other times Archer is accompanied by one or more of the young ladies, and in the evening he plays cards or talks with the older ones. The old ladies play their part as well, carrying on shopping trips into the local town of Kilnalough as if nothing were wrong. Interspersed with the detailed descriptions of the old ladies and their efforts to teach the upstart Irish some manners during shopping trips and an account of a final grand ball Edward has decided to throw are news articles describing incidents of resistance to British rule, in Ireland, in India, in Mesopotamia.

There are some very funny moments in this book. My favorite theme among them was the cats who keep appearing and reappearing. And reproducing. The Majestic and Edward Spencer are entertaining stand-ins for the British Empire in decline. But what I kept thinking about was this: what draws Brandon Archer to Kilnalough and the ramshackle Majestic is the young women. But what keeps him there well past the point of safety? Lethargy? Noblesse oblige? Perhaps after the great war he feels there is nothing left to live for? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about numbers for people who hate numbers here.

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Around Brooklyn, Arts and Entertainment, Events, Food

NY Food Book Fair

May 4, 2012

Photo via nysparks.com

The first New York Book Fair opened today at the brand-new Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, and continues tomorrow and Sunday. Programs over the weekend include lectures (Carolyn Steel, author of ‘Hungry City’) and panels with titles such as Food+Cooks+Books or Food+Porn (Gael Greene is on that panel). You can see the full program here.

I went today, and in addition to the easy on-street parking, found myself sitting at the East River Ferry pier looking at a great view of Manhattan, drinking good bubble tea from Saint’s Alp Teahouse on Bedford Avenue. Maybe I should have had lunch at Egg, since it has its own farm, but instead I had a great farro salad (with mint, chickpeas and, I think, fennel) at the book fair itself. And I found lots of great books, about chutneys and jams, about beer and wine, about cheese, and about terroir. Oh, and cookbooks.

Which brings me to the panel I attended. It was called Food+Tech+Content, and featured Kara Rota of Cookstr and Danielle Gould of Food + Tech Connect. Elissa Altman moderated. The discussion, and questions centered around how to recover lost or underused cooking techniques for people whose parents never learned to cook, and how to make the best use of technology to spread the information. Altman, a food blogger and cookbook editor, made the point that all the great food sites are forcing cookbooks to improve, and wondered whether enhanced e-books for cooking might be next.

Both tech gurus suggested that there were better ways, and that cooking applications can provide information not available in books. Information such as popups that identify local providers of ingredients, or sites such as Recipe Relay, an attempt to engage cooks worldwide in adapting a recipe weekly, or Zokos, a way to organize parties or potlucks. As one of them put it, “books versus e-books misses the point.”

I learned a lot. I’m sure the panels tomorrow and Sunday will be equally interesting. If you’re not doing anything else this weekend, it’s worth a trip.

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Books, Food

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club, “The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance” by Thomas McNamee

May 4, 2012

Photo via Amazon.com

Craig Claiborne, who was born in 1920, took until he was nearly 40 to find himself. Born in Mississippi, he came of age just as the US was entering World War II, and served in the Navy in North Africa, Sicily, and the Pacific. After the war Claiborne moved first to Chicago, to work in public relations, and then to Paris, where he stayed until his money ran out. It was in Chicago that he learned to cook, and in Paris that he learned to eat. More specifically, on the trip home on the Ile de France, he ate “the dish that changed his life,” turbotin à l’infante. When the Korean War broke out, Claiborne went back on active duty, then spent a year in the Marshall Islands. While there, he formed the ambition to write about food for the New York Times.

He was not an untutored naif. His mother had run a boarding house in Mississippi that was famous for its table; his sister had given him a copy of ‘The Joy of Cooking’ and he learned to cook with that book. (I have my grandmother’s 1953 edition. It’s a wonderful book.) And he made sure to train himself: in the early 1950s Claiborne attended the Professional School of the Swiss Hotel Keepers Association in Lausanne (now the Lausanne Hotel School) where he was trained in cuisine, service, and management in a demanding course that was half in the classroom, half in field placements. So Claiborne knew food and, critically, he knew service. He also knew he wanted to write (he had attended the journalism school at the University of Missouri). After graduating, he hit the sidewalks of New York.

In McNamee’s telling Claiborne single-handedly created the American food scene. His output, from his early pieces, brief reports in Gourmet, was prodigious. He didn’t just write about fancy French food, he opened himself up to the cuisines immigrants brought with them in steerage,: Italian pastas, cheeses, and pastries, Asian cooking, and Latin American dishes. (Claiborne also maintained himself with cooking demonstrations at Bloomingdale’s.) And then he talked his way into the job of food editor at the New York Times. He made a big splash in 1959 with a front-page article about the decline of service and food in the great American restaurants. He began a lifelong friendship, and collaboration, with Pierre Franey. He provided what McNamee describes as ‘generous support’ to “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child. He gave, and attended, sumptuous parties — McNamee devotes a chapter to a Gardiner’s Island picnic that was staffed by famous chefs and covered by Life Magazine — and attracted national attention.

As his public life was becoming more and more successful, Claiborne did not lack the means to a happy private life. He had a house near Pierre Franey’s, and spent a lot of time with Franey, his wife, and their children. Other close friends came and went. But it was not an easy time to be a gay man, and Claiborne was never able to develop a lasting personal relationship. As McNamee puts it, Claiborne described himself, “‘As much as I possibly could be, I was gloriously happy’ . . . that closely hedged caution was pure Craig Claiborne.’” Claiborne had a history of cutting people, including his mother, off (he refused to attend her funeral). McNamee quotes Claiborne: “I learned to shed ties, more often than not with hideous effect, but without retreat or apology.” Throughout all the years of success Claiborne drank, and drank, and drank, with perhaps predictable health consequences in his final decade. He also had (at least) two drunk driving arrests and was ultimately forced to retire from the Times.

Like any life, Claiborne’s had its glorious moments, and some deeply sad ones. The glorious ones were also pretty glamorous, and will be particularly resonant for anyone interested in food or who is familiar with some or all of the many cookbooks Claiborne published. The sad ones will seem all too familiar. McNamee suggests that the disappointments in his personal life caused Claiborne’s alcoholism, though perhaps he has reversed the causality. I found the book to be more of a celebration than a dirge, though others have not. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

Photo via Amazon.com.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Sacre Bleu” by Christopher Moore

April 27, 2012

Cover photo via Amazon.com

In Paris, in the second half of the 19th century, the painters Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, the art dealer Theo van Gogh, and assorted others, among them the fictional baker and painter Lucien Lessard, try to track down someone they call the Colorman, who they fear might be responsible for the death of Vincent van Gogh. (Set aside the fact that you know that Vincent van Gogh committed suicide – this is fiction, you are suspending disbelief for the moment.) In their search, the painters visit cafes, nightclubs, prostitutes, the Lessards’ bakery, and a father and son known as Les Professeurs Bastard. The action moves back and forth between Paris, Arles, and a few other spots where painters may have congregated. It also jumps between time periods – not just back to 20 or 30 years earlier, times in the memory of the characters, but, occasionally, by hundreds of years. (Remember the blue-painted Picts in Braveheart? Can you think of anything else colored blue? It probably makes an appearance, if it’s in Europe.)

The Colorman, you see, though he looks human, is some sort of supernatural being. He has as a familiar a woman, who often functions as model, lover, and, above all, muse to the male painters (and sometimes doubles as the female ones–but there are so few of those.) The artists search for him in all the usual places: the Paris sewers, the old mines under Montmartre, the Seine river banks in Paris and in Giverny. Oh, and there’s an additional motivation – the men are constantly seeking to reconnect with the one model who inspired them to do their best work, and she is connected, somehow, with the Colorman.

I expect that some readers will find this an entertaining book. I found it supremely silly, but maybe that’s just me. In an afterward, the author worries that he might have ‘ruined art for everyone.’ Well no, not exactly. I’d be more worried about the writing. Here’s an example:

Behind the marble-topped bar [of the nightclub Le Chat Noir]  was an enormous mural by Adolphe Willette, a cartoon, really, depicting a modern-day baccanalia, with bankers in tailcoats gunning each other down over half-naked, fairy-winged showgirls at the margins, while the bulk of the revelers danced, drank, and groped in a maelstrom of obvious debauchery in the center. It was a satirical indictment of Le Chat Noir’s clientele, Paris patricians slumming on Montmartre with their working-poor mistresses, the artist, Willette, simultaneously celebrating the joie de vivre and biting the hands that fed him.

This is belt-and-suspenders writing by someone who doesn’t trust his readers to keep up with him. Do you agree? Unlike me, but like ‘Playboy’ and ‘The Onion,’ did you think this was an uproariously funny novel? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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