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      Jane Wodening, Experimental Film Star and Intrepid Writer, Dies at 87

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      For 30 years she collaborated with the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, her husband, often appearing on camera. After they divorced, she lived off the grid and wrote about her life.Jane Wodening, the longtime collaborator and wife of Stan Brakhage, the avant-garde filmmaker, who flourished as an author after their divorce, writing stories about her years living on the road and then alone in a mountain shack, died on Nov. 17 at her home in Denver. She was 87.The cause was cardiac arrest, said her daughter, Crystal Brakhage.Mr. Brakhage, who died in 2003, was among the most influential experimental filmmakers of the 20th century, though his work could be considered an acquired taste. He made hundreds of movies, most of them silent, that were deeply personal, sometimes elegiac and very beautiful, though they dispensed with any recognizable narrative, often veering into complete abstraction.For three decades, starting in the 1960s, he and Ms. Wodening (pronounced WOE-den-ing) lived a spartan life in a century-old cabin in a ghost town in the Rocky Mountains called Lump Gulch, sharing it with their five children and many animals, including a donkey and a pigeon named Fanny.It was this world that Mr. Brakhage captured in his idiosyncratic, inscrutable way, in what the film critic J. Hoberman, writing in The Village Voice, described as “home movies raised to the zillionth power — silent and rhythmic, based on an invented language of percussive shifts in exposure or focus, multiple superimpositions, refracted light, and staccato camera moves.”Ms. Wodening was the star of many of them. He filmed her delivering their first child in a bathtub in “Window Water Baby Moving” (1959), a startlingly lovely work that is considered one of his masterpieces. “Wedlock House: An Intercourse” (1959) is a kind of short horror film, with flickering images of the couple having sex interspersed with flickering shots of them having an argument.The work didn’t sit well with feminists, who accused Mr. Brakhage of objectifying his wife. But Ms. Wodening didn’t see herself that way.“Jane was committed to the filmmaking and the artistic enterprise,” said John Powers, who is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis and working on a biography of Mr. Brakhage. “Stan felt he was in service to the muse,” he added, in a phone interview, “and she considered herself a loyal supporter of that muse, and the muse needed help.”A lot of help. Ms. Wodening offered ideas, critiques and camera and sound assistance, along with running the day-to-day business that was “Stan Brakhage.” He signed his work “By Brakhage,” which he always said meant the two of them.Ms. Wodening with Stan Brakhage, her former husband and collaborator. Often the star of his experimental short films, she also offered critiques and camera assistance, and helped run the day-to-day business.Jason Walz/Uncommonbindery, via Granary Books, incBut Mr. Brakhage, never totally faithful, left Ms. Wodening for another woman, and in 1987 the couple divorced. The children had left home, the cabin was sold, as were the animals, and Ms. Wodening took off in a bright yellow Honda Civic kitted out so that she could live in it. (The back seat was removed, among other interventions.)For three years she spent months at a time on the road, touring the country, camping in arroyos, mountain trails and friends’ driveways, even working for a spell as a tour guide at an archaeological site near Barstow, Calif., in the Mojave Desert.“Driveabout,” a 2016 account of that time from Sockwood Press, one of the small presses that has published her work over the years, is charming, funny and often quite profound, like Thoreau but spiced with mild profanity and more drama, as Ms. Wodening faced perils as a single woman sleeping in truck stops, camping near sketchy characters and nursing an old friend through delirium tremens.In this and other works, she came into her own. Her voice was as engaging and charming as her ex-husband’s was abstruse and highfalutin. Steve Clay, a founder of Granary Books in New York City, a small publishing house that is devoted to poetry and art books and that has put out works by Ms. Wodening, recalled his expectation that the wife of Stan Brakhage would be more “formally experimental” in her writing. “Instead, it was sort of folksy and straightforward,” he wrote in an email.To film buffs, however, Ms. Wodening remained a mythic figure — an “Enigmatic Character in Film History” as one radio program described her in a headline.“Driveabout” (2016) chronicled the years Ms. Wodening spent living out of her car and on the road after her divorce from Mr. Brakhage in 1987.via Sockwood PressShe was born Mary Jane Collom on Sept. 7, 1936, in Chicago, and grew up in Fraser, Colo., a small town in the Rockies about 70 miles northwest of Denver. Her parents, Harry and Margaret (Jack) Collom, were teachers at the local school, where Harry was also the principal.Jane was a shy child who preferred the company of animals, especially dogs. (She wrote that she spoke canine sooner than proper English.) She worked in an animal hospital and enrolled at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, thinking she would study to be a vet, before dropping out.When she met Mr. Brakhage, “we were adolescent wrecks,” she told an audience a few years ago at Los Angeles Filmforum, a showcase for experimental movies. They married in 1957; she was 21 and he was 24, and “it was quite a relief for both of us.”She recalled her first foray into his films, shortly after their marriage, when he declared: “You should take your clothes off, and we should make a film about having sex.” She balked at first — “I’m not that kind of girl!” — but he said, “I’m an artist, and an artist has to have a nude.” She thought about all the great nudes of history — from Raphael to Duchamp — and told herself, “‘I have an opportunity to join a group of people I quite admire,’ so I stripped and went to it.”For most of her adult life, she was Jane Brakhage. When she returned from her car travels, transformed, she changed her name. She settled on Wodening, meaning child of Woden, the Anglo-Saxon god; since her family lineage stretched back to the early Britons, it felt somehow appropriate, she said. And she bought property near Eldora, Colo., about 20 miles west of Boulder, a mountainous site where she lived in a Hobbit-like shack with no electricity or running water — but thousands of books and a typewriter — living a hermit’s life for the better part of a decade.It agreed with her.When her family worried about communicating with her in an emergency, she became a ham radio operator, learning morse code to do so, and found community among other hammers, as they called themselves, who were mostly men and introverts like herself. Her call sign ended with the letters HPH, to which she gave the phonetics “Hermits Prefer Hills.”“To become a hermit and at the same time to become popular was not only paradoxical,” she wrote in “Living Up There,” her memoir of her years in the mountains, “it was a tremendous delight.”Ms. Wodening was the author of 14 books, including “Wolf Dictionary,” about how wolves communicate with one another. She had a loyal following and small but steady sales.Toward the end of her decade at Fourth of July Canyon, as her mountain home was known, she connected with another hammer, Carlos Seegmiller, a computer programmer. He lured her back to civilization (and helped her trade her typewriter for a computer). They lived together in Denver until his death in 2008.In addition to her daughter, Crystal, Ms. Wodening is survived by her daughters Myrrena Schwegmann and Neowyn Bartek; her sons, Bearthm and Rarc Brakhage; 14 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.At her death, Ms. Wodening was working on a history of the world starting with the Big Bang. More

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      in Theater

      His ‘Dracula’ Project: Creating a Funny Vampire

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      The great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker has written a comic version of “Dracula” that is appearing Off Broadway.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll meet someone who can laugh at Dracula because he’s like family. We’ll also find out why grade inflation has become an issue at Yale University.Matthew MurphyIn the past, Dacre Stoker has written or co-written serious fiction about his great-granduncle Bram, the man who gave the world that famous bloodthirsty Transylvanian at the end of the 19th century. Tonight, the younger Stoker will venture into comedy in an Off Broadway theater where “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors” is playing.He told me last week that he had put together some funny material to deliver when joining the cast onstage after the performance. He said he would take along a prop and tell the actors: “Loved the performance. You might need a transfusion.”The prop won’t really be a transfusion: It will be red wine from a winery in Romania in which he has an interest. The winery is in Walachia, “the state below Transylvania,” he said. “We have given vampires to the country — why not get involved in commerce?”Stoker said his mission was to raise the profile of his ancestor “so the creator himself becomes at least half as famous as his creation.”He added: “This is how I started getting into writing the books and leading tours — asking, ‘Who is Bram Stoker?’ Bringing him into an Off Broadway comedy is another way to increase awareness of this guy.”He also enjoys making Dracula funny. “It’s nice to see that people can poke fun at a scary, horrifying novel that’s been around for 127 years,” he said. (Our reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli called “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors,” at New World Stages, “a gender-bending play” that “pays no mind to the ‘terrors’ part of its title.”)Dacre Stoker said his illustrious relative had connections to the world of theater: Bram Stoker’s “claim to fame before Dracula was running the famous Lyceum Theater in London for 27 years,” he said. He was the accommodating business assistant in the long shadow of the notoriously mercurial star Sir Henry Irving, the first actor ever knighted.“Irving had extravagant tastes,” he said, and Bram, who had a master’s in math, “had to hold him back while he crunched the numbers” at the theater, the great-grandnephew said.He also talked about the time his great-granduncle spent in New York: Bram Stoker joined the Players, the private club on Gramercy Park South, in 1893, when he and Irving were on one of eight American tours.“I saw the book where he was nominated by Samuel L. Clemens, his good friend and neighbor from Chelsea,” Dacre Stoker said, “so Mark Twain nominated him. He had more names seconding him than any other page I saw in the book.” Others have written about Bram Stoker’s fascination with the American poet Walt Whitman.Dacre Stoker, 65, a former member of the Canadian men’s pentathlon team who coached the team at the 1988 Olympics, said he had been “like this Indiana Jones version of a literary guy, trying to find the story behind the story, to bring this writer to life, to find out who Bram Stoker was.” He used material he found for “Dracul,” a prequel written with J.D. Barker and published in 2018 that envisioned what might have prompted Bram Stoker to create Dracula.That book followed a 2009 novel, “Dracula: The Un-Dead,” which Dacre Stoker wrote with the screenwriter Ian Holt, himself a Dracula historian. It was the first Dracula project authorized by the Stoker estate since the 1931 film that starred Bela Lugosi.WeatherA system sliding across the Mid-Atlantic states will mean a partly sunny day, with temperatures reaching the low 40s. At night, clouds will give way to a clearer sky, and the temperature will drop to around 30.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Friday (Immaculate Conception).The latest Metro newsAhmed Gaber for The New York TimesConflict and CrisesIsrael-Gaza: Long before the temporary cease-fire ended in Gaza, the mood in Paterson, N.J., home to one of the largest communities of Palestinians outside the Middle East, was tense.Migrants and the mayor: New York City’s comptroller has restricted the mayor’s ability to quickly spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the migrant crisis — a major blow to his emergency powers.A Changing CityToward a quieter city: New York City, not exactly known for its peace and quiet, is expanding its use of “noise cameras,” which ticket the drivers of loud cars and motorcycles.The rich are back: At the height of the pandemic, the richest New Yorkers left in droves. A new report based on census and state tax filing data has found a reversal.Small theaters: New York’s nonprofit Signature Theater has three performance spaces, a history of cultivating major playwrights, and a board chaired by the Hollywood star Edward Norton. What Signature doesn’t have this fall are plays.Lots of A’s at YaleChristopher Capozziello for The New York TimesOne consequence of the pandemic has proved lasting at Yale University: Nearly everyone is getting A’s.A new report found that nearly 80 percent of the grades given to Yale undergraduates during the 2022-23 academic year were A’s or A minuses. The mean grade point average — 3.7 out of a possible 4.0 — was also up from before the pandemic.My colleague Amelia Nierenberg writes that the findings have frustrated some students and professors. What does excellence mean at Yale if 80 percent of the students get the equivalent of “excellent” in almost every class? Shelly Kagan, a Yale philosophy professor with a reputation as a tough grader, said that when “virtually everything that gets turned in” receives an A, “we are simply being dishonest to our students.”The post-pandemic spike in grades is not unique to Yale. At Harvard, 79 percent of all grades given to undergraduates in the 2020-21 year were A’s or A minuses. A decade earlier, that figure was 60 percent. In 2020-21, the average G.P.A. at Harvard was 3.8, compared with 3.41 in 2002-3.“Grades are like any currency,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who tracks grade inflation: They tend to increase over time.This is not just happening at elite schools. G.P.A.s have been increasing at colleges nationwide by about 0.1 per decade since the early 1980s, he said. But private colleges tend to have higher average G.P.A.s than public colleges and universities.At Yale, where an A is the new normal, the proportion of A’s and A minuses has been climbing for years. In the 2010-11 academic year, just over two-thirds of all grades at Yale — 67 percent — were A’s or A minuses. By 2018-19, the last full academic year before the pandemic, 73 percent were in the A range.Then, during the pandemic, the figure jumped. Almost 82 percent of Yale grades were in the A range in 2021-22. The figure slipped slightly, to about 79 percent, in 2022-23. The new statistics come from a report by Ray Fair, an economics professor whose work was first reported by The Yale Daily News. He declined to comment on his findings.Does any of this really matter?Pericles Lewis, the dean of Yale College, acknowledged that students could be overly concerned with G.P.A.s.But he added: “I don’t think many people care, 10 years out, what kind of grades you got at Yale. They mostly care that you, you know, you studied at Yale.”METROPOLITAN diaryTiffany frameDear Diary:I was cleaning out my closets when I came across a small Tiffany box. Much to my surprise, it did not appear to have ever been opened. Inside, covered in plastic, was a lovely sterling silver picture frame nestled in a Tiffany blue felt bag.Unfortunately, on close examination I could see that the silver had become tarnished. I tried to clean it, but to no avail.I called Tiffany and was told to bring it in for repair. So I traveled to Rockefeller Center, brought the box into the store and was directed to the repair department downstairs.I showed the frame to one of the women at the counter there. She called two other women over to take a look.The three of them admired it, but then said that they didn’t sell Tiffany items.“How could Tiffany not sell Tiffany?” I asked.“You’re in Saks Fifth Avenue!” one of the women said.— Eileen RosenbergIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      in Movies

      Winona Ryder Fans Celebrate New Photo Book of the ‘Eternal Cool Girl’

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      Fans of Winona Ryder lined up outside Dover Street Market in Manhattan on a recent chilly evening to attend a launch party for “Winona,” a book of Polaroids and cellphone shots of the Gen X cultural idol.“She’s so famously private that any peek into her interior life is delicious,” Daniela Tijerina, a writer and editorial assistant for Vanity Fair, said. “I’ve molded so much about my own style after a woman I know so little about, and that makes her as cool as a person can possibly be.”The shots in the book were taken by Robert Rich, who started photographing Ms. Ryder soon after becoming friends with her more than 20 years ago. His images capture her in unguarded moments: eating pizza during a sleepover at his Hell’s Kitchen apartment; and smoking a cigarette in a bathroom, while the model Daria Werbowy quoted lines from “Reality Bites” to her.Robert Rich, whose candid shots fill “Winona.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesPortraits of the Gen X star from the book “Winona.”Robert RichAt the party, Mr. Rich, 57, signed copies of his book, as guests mobbed a merch table selling T-shirts, caps and tote bags, all of which read: “Winona.”“What we love about Winona is that you know nothing about her,” Mr. Rich said. “We love that she’s a mysterious woman. I used to never recognize her when I’d meet her. She’d always be wearing a visor or a pageboy cap. I’d walk through the city with her, and no one even knew who I was with.”He befriended Ms. Ryder when he was a manager of the Marc Jacobs store on Mercer Street in SoHo in 1999. The shop was a hangout for Selma Blair, Sofia Coppola, Parker Posey and Kate Moss, and Mr. Rich often took Polaroids of celebrity clients in his basement office.He got to know Ms. Ryder during fittings at the store and later helped dress her in Marc Jacobs pieces for parties, premieres and magazine photo shoots. After Ms. Ryder’s shoplifting trial in 2002, he became a confidante during a period when she retreated from public view.Joe Jonas, left, looks through “Winona.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesA shot from the new book.Robert RichA year ago, Mr. Rich found himself thinking about all the Polaroids he had amassed in several shoeboxes in his closet, and he texted Ms. Ryder about the idea of collecting them in a book. After she said yes, the London-based book dealer and publisher, Idea, took on the project. Marc Jacobs wrote the foreword.As the party guests sipped champagne and flipped through the book, Mr. Jacobs made an appearance.“She was our young Garbo,” he said. “A Winona sighting was always a big deal back then. She came to one of my shows at the time, and I still remember she was a little like a deer in the headlights. She’s not snobbish. She’s not the red carpet girl. And that has always added to her cachet and cool.”Francesca Sorrenti, who designed and edited the book, reflected on Ms. Ryder’s enduring appeal.“To understand Winona, you have to understand the youth movement of the 1990s,” she said. “There are only a few personalities quite like hers out there at any given time, and in her era, it was Kate Moss and Winona. You’d just see them and you’d want to know, Who is that?”Another of Mr. Rich’s shots from “Winona.”Robert RichAt the party, Marc Jacobs likened Ms. Ryder to the reclusive Greta Garbo.Robert RichMs. Sorrenti said that Ms. Ryder’s shyness added to her mystique.Robert Rich“I’ve hung out with Winona,” Ms. Sorrenti added. “And yes, she’s shy, and that shyness also projected itself into what her fans consider her mystique.”Hanging out by a rack of Comme des Garçons jackets was Inna Blavatnik, a creative director. “I’m of the Generation X era that Winona represented,” she said. “It was all about having a moody cool and not giving a you-know-what, and she became my role model as a teenager.”As the night progressed, the fashion designer Zac Posen and the musician Joe Jonas stopped by — and a question loomed: Would Ms. Ryder show?“I texted her about the party,” Mr. Rich said, “but I haven’t heard anything back yet.”The filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes offered: “I’ve known Winona for a long time, and when you get to know her, she’s extremely present and generous, but she’s also good at disappearing into the ether.” She concluded: “If she were coming, she wouldn’t tell anyone she was.”The filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes said Ms. Ryder was “good at disappearing into the ether.”Robert RichGuests at the “Winona” party.Ye Fan for The New York TimesMs. Ryder ultimately never materialized, but Jayna Maleri, a fashion editorial director, said she preferred it that way. “I almost never want to see Winona Ryder in person,” she said. “Not because I think she’d disappoint me, but because she occupies a place in my brain so rooted in my nostalgia that it would be jarring.”“She’s an icon of my youth, the eternal cool girl who embodied the authenticity of the ’90s,” she continued. “And I want to hold onto my illusions of her.”A Robert Rich collage.Robert Rich More

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      in Movies

      John Nichols, Author of ‘The Milagro Beanfield War,’ Dies at 83

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      After decamping from New York to New Mexico, he wrote what was, for a time, among the most widely read novels about Latinos.John Nichols, a New York City transplant to New Mexico whose exuberant novels, notably “The Milagro Beanfield War,” transformed him from an urban gringo into a local idol, died on Monday at his home in Taos. He was 83.The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, Tania Harris.Imbued with a heady pedigree and a peripatetic upbringing, Mr. Nichols evolved instinctively from a cosmopolitan New Yorker and world traveler to a Western writer of the purple sage.He was best known for “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1974), a 445-page political allegory that tells the story of farmers in the fictional town of Milagro Valley who are denied the right to irrigate their farms because water is being diverted to a huge development.“The Milagro Beanfield War” became a crowd pleaser on college campuses, was venerated in his adopted state, and for a while was considered among the most widely read novels about Latinos. In 1988 it was adapted into a film, directed by Robert Redford and starring Rubén Blades, Christopher Walken and Melanie Griffith.“A lot of his work might be characterized as a long slow-motion valentine to the mountains, mesas, high desert, sky and especially people of New Mexico,” said Stephen Hull, director of University of New Mexico Press, which published Mr. Nichols’s memoir “I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer” last year.“He was a comic writer who used tropes of absurdism and excess to depict essential injustices,” Mr. Hull said in an email. “He was deeply affected by a period of time he spent in Guatemala in ‘64-’65, and by the poverty, authenticity, even nobility of his neighbors in northern New Mexico.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Theater

      A Wood-Carved Protagonist, Enduring the Brutality of War

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      Mid-morning on Tuesday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, a puppet named Michael K had just grabbed a mug when the director Lara Foot called a pause to the action onstage.“Let’s stop here,” she said, and he did so instantly.Still clasping the mug in his right hand, he gazed at her with black, glass-bead eyes like someone who had been taken by surprise. Even frozen mid-gesture, he was subtle, human, uncanny — a striking alchemy of art and imagination.In “Life & Times of Michael K,” based on the 1983 novel of the same name by the South African-born Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, this puppet is the sinewy, carved-wood star, designed and created by Adrian Kohler of Handspring Puppet Company. At two-thirds the size of an average adult human, Michael is operated bunraku-style by a team of three puppeteers. Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master, is in charge of Michael’s head and right arm.The puppeteers Markus Schabbing and Carlo Daniels with Michael K. The story is set amid a fictional civil war, whose Kafkaesque landscape Michael navigates with his ailing mother, Anna.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesManipulation is not the job, though. To Leo, it’s more a matter of following the puppet’s lead.“There’s something strange that happens,” he said in an interview in the lobby of St. Ann’s, game to chat despite feeling under the weather. “You have these moments — and you kind of aim for them, and you hope that you can do it as much as possible — where he just comes alive. It’s when the synchronicity really clicks in between the three puppeteers, and then all of a sudden you’re holding him and he becomes incredibly light. And he’s suddenly almost moving on his own.”Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel is set amid a fictional South African civil war, whose Kafkaesque landscape Michael navigates as he attempts to take his old and ailing mother, Anna, on the long journey from Cape Town back to the countryside she loved as a girl.Foot, the artistic director of the Baxter Theater Centre at the University of Cape Town, adapted the novel in collaboration with Handspring. Kohler and Basil Jones, a fellow Handspring founder, directed the production’s puppetry. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August, the show impressed critics, with The New York Times calling it “stylish” and a “standout.”The puppeteers Faniswa Yisa and Roshina Ratnam with Michael K’s mother, Anna.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesA young Michael K, with the puppeteers Markus Schabbing and Andrew Buckland.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“Puppets hold philosophy in them, and poetry,” Foot said in a separate interview. “Coetzee’s work, some of his work, lends itself to that because there’s a lot of thought-provoking narrative.”Having long wanted to work with Handspring, she thought a puppet would be perfect to embody Coetzee’s Michael — a gardener whose cleft lip makes people think him inferior — as a kind of everyman confronting existential questions.“When I sent ‘Michael K’ to Basil and Adrian,” she said, “Adrian had already read it and it was one of his favorite novels. We agreed that it would just be Michael, his mother, the children and the animals that would be puppets. And the rest of the world would be the context of the war.”So the company also includes five actors. One of its four puppeteers, Leo, arrived in New York this week from Mexico. That was the terminus of his nearly three-month tour across North America with the giant child refugee puppet Little Amal, who along with the horses of “War Horse” — another show on Leo’s résumé — is among Handspring’s most famous creations.“If you look at his left side of his face and his right side of his face, there are different expressions,” said Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“He has kind of a tortured look on the one side,” Leo said. “From the other side, he’s actually very beautiful. In the light, his expression changes all the time.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesAfter stilt walking to operate Amal from the inside, unable to see what her face was doing, Leo was palpably pleased to be reunited with Michael, a puppet he has worked with on and off for more than two years, and one he could keep his eye on from the outside.“If you look at his left side of his face and his right side of his face, there are different expressions,” he said. “He has kind of a tortured look on the one side; I don’t know how else to describe it. From the other side, he’s actually very beautiful. He’s a really handsome man. In the light, his expression changes all the time. It catches all those carved lines in the wood.”“He holds the pathos,” Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master, said of Michael K. “He holds it even when he’s hanging on his puppet rack.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesOf the dozen-plus puppets in the play, there are four Michaels: a baby, glimpsed only briefly yet made, Foot said, with legs fully capable of kicking; a child; a miniature adult; and the main adult, with a head carved from Malaysian jelutong, legs of carbon fiber and ribs of Indonesian cane.“The joints are very finely made,” Leo said. “It breaks fingers because they’re so delicate. We just glue them back on. But as a whole, the puppet has never broken.”Which is lucky, because there is only one of him, no backup.“I’ve thought about that often, actually,” Leo said. “Should we be locking him up at nights? It’s a work of art, you know.”To him, Michael is also a magnet for empathy, as puppets are generally — and a portal into the story in a way that a human actor would not be.“He holds the pathos,” Leo said. “He holds it even when he’s hanging on his puppet rack.” More

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      in Television

      Interview: Rick Riordan, the Man Behind ‘Percy Jackson’

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      What books are on your night stand?I usually have three books going at a time: one in Italian to improve my fluency, a novel in English and a nonfiction work in English. Right now it’s “Il Metodo del Coccodrillo,” a thriller by Maurizio de Giovanni, “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” a near-future dystopian novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and “The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s” by Piers Brendon.How do you organize your books?“Organize” might be too kind a word. I try to group books loosely by subject matter. Celtic studies and books in Irish take up two shelves. Another two shelves are for books in Italian. Not surprisingly, Greek and Roman mythology takes up about four shelves. The rest is a scattered assortment of novels, nonfiction, poetry and graphic novels.What’s the last great book you read?“How to Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne,” by Sarah Bakewell. I was not well versed in Montaigne’s work, but I admire any biography that can bring its subject to life in such a vivid and relatable way.Are there any classics that you only recently read for the first time?“La Divina Commedia.” I had only read portions of the “Inferno” in English, but my Italian finally got to the level that I could tackle the “Commedia” in the original. It was quite a challenge and took me about a year, but it was well worth the effort to appreciate the poetry in its original form. What struck me was how topical and regional Dante’s references were. For such a timeless poem, it is deeply rooted in the personal dramas and “pop culture” of 13th-century Tuscany.Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?So many. N.K. Jemisin has a brilliant iconoclastic imagination that has reframed fantasy and science fiction for me many times over. Madeline Miller has breathed new life into ancient Greek stories. China Miéville is a genius of speculative fiction whose quirky world-building always delights me. I also love the Irish-language poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).I am lucky enough to have a home office with a large window looking over the Charles River in Boston. During the winter evenings, when the trees are bare and the view is wide open, the sunset on the water is spectacular. With the fireplace going and a bit of soft instrumental music playing … I can’t imagine a better place for enjoying a good book.What kind of reader were you as a child?Reluctant. I rarely read assigned texts in school, and reading for pleasure wasn’t something that would have occurred to me. That changed when I discovered “The Lord of the Rings,” which was my gateway into fantasy, and from there into mythology and the wider world of literature. I like to say that my karmic punishment for never reading an English text in school was becoming an English teacher.What book should everybody read before the age of 21?I don’t really believe in a canon of must-read texts for everyone. My gateway books were J.R.R. Tolkien’s. Would I recommend them to most 12-year-old kids today to get them interested in reading? Probably not. The most formative books I had read by age 21 were probably Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and “The Habit of Being,” a collection of letters by Flannery O’Connor. Great books, but again, I am not sure I would make them blanket recommendations for every young adult today.What is the best writing advice you have ever gotten?To avoid the cycle of dissatisfaction. Before I was published, I took a class from a mystery novelist who warned me that writing could turn into a succession of moving goal posts. It can be easy to lose sight of why a writer writes — because you have an internal need to turn your thoughts into words.What do you write when you sign books for fans?I usually sign 1,000-5,000 books at a time, in advance of each event, so alas, I don’t get to personalize many books anymore. My signature has become an illegible scrawl. On those rare occasions when I get to have a one-on-one interaction with a fan, I try to add a few vowels and consonants to my scrawl, and perhaps sketch a lightning bolt underneath.Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?Any time I relax and enjoy a book rather than working, or cleaning the house, or running errands, I consider that a guilty pleasure. The type of book doesn’t matter.Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?This is a complex ask, but I would personally love to read more anthologies of Indigenous folklore and mythology from around the world. When my family and I were traveling through the Pacific Northwest last summer, through the lands of the Tlingit, Haida and Chugach, we heard such wonderful stories. I’d love to learn more. Perhaps those books are out there and I’ve simply been unsuccessful finding them, or perhaps the books are not getting the coverage and attention they deserve. It’s also possible some Indigenous writers are wary of popularizing their sacred stories for a mass-market audience, which is totally fair. You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?I don’t do dinner parties, so I would probably invite the most introverted writers I could think of — perhaps Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson — because none of them would show up. Then we could enjoy a quiet evening at home by ourselves, reading by the fire. More

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      36 Hours in Melbourne, Australia: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Explore a lane that’s gone from rags to riches
      Flinders Lane was the center of Melbourne’s rag trade, as its textile industry was known, until production moved offshore starting in the 1960s. Today, it’s home to a number of gorgeous shops and restaurants. The city’s most beautiful retail space must belong to Alpha60, a local brother-sister fashion label (think boxy shirts and breezy culottes), whose store inside the Chapter House building occupies a cathedral-like space with lofty, vaulted ceilings, pointed-arch windows and a baby grand piano. Across the road, Craft Victoria, a subterranean gallery and store, features experimental Australian ceramics and textile art. After your shopping, drop into Gimlet at Cavendish House, a glamorous restaurant where crisply dressed waiters sail by with caviar and lobster roasted in a wood-fired oven, but you don’t have to go all out: Squeeze in at the bar right after the doors open at noon for an expertly made gin martini (29 dollars) before the lunch rush. More

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      Two New Books Consider Comedy and the Culture Wars

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      The authors of “Comedy Book” and “Outrageous” argue that culture-war worries about what’s a laughing matter have been overplayed.COMEDY BOOK: How Comedy Conquered Culture — and the Magic That Makes It Work, by Jesse David FoxOUTRAGEOUS: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, by Kliph NesteroffDid you hear the one about cancel culture?Of course you did, several times over, if you’ve paid any attention to modern comedy and its purveyors, many of whom have groused about how hard it is to be funny in today’s climate. But two new books share an exasperation with the common sentiment that there’s never been a worse time to express oneself than the present. Taking them, well, seriously can liberate us from repeating the past.Kliph Nesteroff’s fact-packed “Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars” finds American entertainers in a perpetual state of despair over the censorious climate of their day — whatever day it happens to be. Steve Allen, the original host of “The Tonight Show,” complained about the “very touchy times” in 1955; in 2015, Jerry Seinfeld said he’d been warned away from playing colleges because of students’ sensitivities.Social media “gives the impression that people are more irrational, humorless and overly sensitive than in the past,” Nesteroff writes, but vintage letters to the editor contain “remarkably similar” sentiments.To Jesse David Fox, the author of “Comedy Book,” the risk of backlash is part of the point. Fox, a senior editor at New York magazine’s Vulture and a podcaster who regularly interviews comedians, puts it this way: “Does political correctness make comedy harder to do? Sure, in the sense that it would be easier to run for a touchdown if you didn’t have to worry about holding the ball, but that’s the game. It’s what makes it more exciting than watching a bunch of men sprinting with helmets on.” This is just one example of Fox’s keen insight in his energetic and wise book, which focuses on the ’90s and beyond, when, the author reckons, comedy became an “ever-present, important, valued societal force.” (Fox points out that before “Seinfeld” premiered in 1989, no comedian had ever headlined a show at Madison Square Garden’s arena, yet by the time he wrote his book, 18 had.) Within broadly named chapters (“Truth,” “Context,” “Audience”), he crams vivid examples; his “Timing” section, which explores 9/11 jokes and the notion of “too soon,” is particularly adept at illustrating the use of humor in the face of tragedy.Like many of his subjects, Fox knows his way around a pointed one-liner. “A roast might sound mean, but it’s another way of saying ‘I see you’” is one. “If you are saying supposedly offensive things and the audience is instantly all onboard, it is not a comedy show, it’s a rally” is another. That such rigorous thinking should at one point lead him to defend an Adam Sandler poop joke is a great gag in itself.Fox is allergic to the kind of snobbery directed at broad comedy, maintaining that “if it’s funny to anyone, it’s funny.” Still, he’s interested in parameters — how “8:46,” Dave Chappelle’s Netflix monologue inspired by the murder of George Floyd, functions as “a piece of work in conversation with the history of comedy,” and why the same comedian’s jokes targeting queer people fall short.Comedy, Fox writes, is fundamentally play, and in his deft hands, the analysis of comedy can be playful, too. Fox knows that grand pronouncements on what makes funny things funny is dicey territory: “The sense of what is funny is so subjective — so completely built into your person — that it feels objective,” he writes.His own life experiences and tastes are integral to his reporting. The first and last chapters of the book recount the deaths of immediate family members, which, he says, comedy helped him process. “Comedy Book” is not the definitive history of the past three-plus decades. It’s Fox’s history, and better for it.“Outrageous,” the product of herculean research, has a wider purview than just comedy. Nesteroff touches on rock ’n’ roll, talk radio, the initial blowback received by early critics of Hitler and more.However, what does and doesn’t, should and shouldn’t, make us laugh does take up a lot of space (Nesteroff’s 2015 “The Comedians” is a full-fledged history of the form). Sometimes the laughs are inadvertent, as in a 1959 complaint from a viewer of the TV series “Lassie” who compared its portrayal of a litter of puppies to a sex show.In no-frills prose, Nesteroff races through some two centuries of expression and backlash — from blackface minstrelsy (criticized early on by Frederick Douglass) to the (formerly Dixie) Chicks (the country music trio whose titanic profile shrank several sizes after its lead singer publicly criticized President George W. Bush) — rarely pausing for analysis and sometimes breezing by useful context. The book tends to home in on the moment when each brouhaha reached a fever pitch, which can give a distorted picture of the controversies and their ensuing fallouts.“Outrageous” is nonetheless a useful compendium. Placing so many outrages next to one another exposes a call-and-response pattern, in which both sides of the political divide have tried to dictate acceptable speech for all. We may be partial to the intentions of one side, but the mechanics often look identical.Unsurprisingly, it’s those already in power who often succeed. If there is a main character in Nesteroff’s sea of stories, it’s Paul Weyrich, a John Birch Society alum who helped build “an elaborate Culture War infrastructure” with corporate cash and evangelical muscle, eventually cofounding the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority.In sometimes clandestine ways, those groups have had a major impact in seeding American culture with conservative ideology, raging against what Weyrich called “the Cultural Marxism of an elite few to dictate words, language and opinions” while, Nesteroff writes, doing precisely that.“Outrageous” portrays a country divided; there’s no shortage of strife in Fox’s book, but he believes fundamentally in the unifying power of comedy, which “smooths conflicts and unites disparate groups.” His faith is contagious. Comedy is not stifled, he argues, but has “enmeshed itself in how millennials and now Gen Z communicate.” Superstars like Chappelle and Amy Schumer are endowed with the kind of trusted status once reserved for those in the purported truth business, like journalists, public intellectuals and politicians.“Can comedy make everything all better?” Fox asks in conclusion. “Of course not. But it makes it easier.”COMEDY BOOK: How Comedy Conquered Culture — and the Magic That Makes It Work | More