The Nutcracker is a ballet about a little girl’s journey into a magical land of sweets, warring rats, and colossal Christmas trees, but what’s most fantastical is the snow. It comes down in the finale of Act I, during the famed “Waltz of the Flowers,” falling gently at first, a few glittering flakes at a time, then building into a magical blizzard so dense dancers fade into obscurity behind it.
I’ll tell you something about that snow. I had danced Nutcracker for years before seeing it performed live, and when I finally did, I had two reactions: It really looked like snow—pure, white, glittering snow. And I could still taste, from memory, those dusty gray pieces of shredded newspaper, reeking of fireproof chemical treatment, and inevitably gulped into my throat as I leaped across stage. My stomach would knot at the start of the music as I braced for 12 minutes of nonstop jumps and turns, exhaustion made terrifying by the flying scraps that blinded and choked me and made the floor slick as ice. In all my years it happened only once, but I worried each season that one of us would wipe out—and what a spectacle that would be, our tulle skirts pooled around us on the floor, while the other dancers zigzagged in midair to avoid the fallen.
“You guys,” rolls off the tongues of avowed feminists every day, as if everyone has agreed to let one androcentric pronoun pass, while others (the generic “he” or “men” as stand-ins for all people) belong to the before-we-knew-better past.
“Y’all” is sitting right there, offering us a lovely, ready-made solution to avoid calling everyone men.
Like everyone, I too am made of language. I remember how I came into being like it was yesterday: as a single sentence, head to toe. My mother told me she felt the seed take root the instant I flashed like a spark in her womb, when my father whispered into her ear, ‘A girl.’ I felt an unbridled sense of gratitude as I listened to this story, felt the joy of being beckoned lovingly into this world. From that day forth, I gained a newfound respect for all the creatures I encountered in the world, each bestowed with its own unique significance. That sentence of hers had planted itself in my spirit to such a degree that I was carried away imagining my mother during her pregnancy, imagining her craving moonlight and my father gathering moonlight for her accordingly. To imagine was, if nothing else, to hold my place in the world.
On the surface, The Innocents is a novel about a brother and sister trying to live off the vast emptiness of Newfoundland coast after their parents and infant sister perish from an illness. They have one boat to catch fish, one garden to grow vegetables, one set of clothes for all the seasons, and only each other’s company. The stakes are high: survival, year after year.
But at its core, The Innocents is a deeply emotional and moving portrait of human desires, temperaments, and existence in the face of both mundane and extreme situations. Michael Crummey has fashioned a survival tale out of introspective musings and spellbinding settings, meshing both brother’s and sister’s interiority with the wildness and unpredictability of the landscape around them.
When Tommy Pico published “IRL,” the first of his four smart, chaotic, book-length poems about modern life, the universe and everything, he was an unheralded 20-something gay Kumeyaay Indian (or, as he prefers, NDN) man living uneasily, reflectively, in Brooklyn. Three years and three books later, with “Feed,” he’s still most of those things, but he’s very much heralded in with-it poetry quarters. His mix of verse and prose, diary, comedy and accusation, grimy detail and prophetic announcement, seems to many young and not-so-young writers just what he, and we, need.
In the end, Cahalan treads a delicate line between condemning Rosenhan and forgiving him; for all his exaggerations and outright falsehoods, she says, “I believe that he exposed something real.” “The Great Pretender” shows Rosenhan and his paper for what they are, but it also shows us something else. Pretensions to certainty can be seductive, eking out a temporary tactical advantage, but their victories are often brittle. Once the veneer of impermeability gets cracked, it “breeds an anti-science backlash born of distrust,” Cahalan writes.
The real value of “The Movie Musical!” may just be to call the roll, invoking, yes, titans like Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli but also the host of ancillary talents who’ve diverted us through the years. By book’s end, closet musical lovers will have new treasures to carry back into their YouTube caves: Janet Gaynor crooning “I’m a Dreamer, Aren’t We All”; Alice Faye and Jack Haley chiding Shirley Temple with “You’ve Gotta Eat Your Spinach, Baby”; and, lest we forget, a Sonja Henie wannabe named Belita, who, for her big finish in “The Spirit of Victory,” skated to Beethoven’s Fifth before a gigantic copy of the Statue of Liberty. That’s entertainment.