Singing is as psychological as it is physical. Stress attacks the vocal apparatus, tightening muscles that should remain loose and pliable, restricting breathing, closing off the throat, paralysing the tongue and lips. I was experiencing all of these symptoms as I took my place, centre stage, in the glare of the lights, and began our opening number, the Beatles’ song I’ll Cry Instead, originally sung by John Lennon. It would seem a little on the nose to suggest that Yoko, along with her and John’s son, Sean, were looking up at me from the front row, except they were.
Today, I can barely bring myself to listen to the CD of that concert, which Jann later presented to each band member as a memento. I wince at the tentative way I sing that “Ohhhhh” in Miss You, sneaking up on the note from below, sliding into it gingerly. I get there, sort of. But at what cost? By the end of the night, I was growling the lyrics to White Room like it was a Tom Waits number.
Suddenly detached from pesky copyright concerns, new editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel are going to print at multiple publishers. But the opportunity to re-release Gatsby brings with it a new challenge: figuring out how to package a book whose original cover has become iconic.
Thanks to pandemic restrictions on live performance and the expense and difficulty of mounting full productions online, readings have become a big part of the theatergoer’s quarantine diet. At first I balked at that development; what was theater if not a live, staged experience?
But with “Gloria” and several others recently, I’ve begun to feel that readings — virtual ones, anyway — have crossed a line: They are no longer fossils of an old kind of theater but early forms of a new one. With their own strengths and weaknesses, they amount to a separate if related genre, one that doesn’t look like it’ll be going away even once social distancing does.
In the first pages of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, the novel’s titular narrator is almost carried away by three converging tides. Plunged into a landscape of marble and bone, sea, sky and crashing waves, I felt equally immersed. By the time the tides receded, leaving behind a smooth object in Piranesi’s palm—the marble finger of a statue—I had the slight premonition that I, too, had been gifted something unique and unexpected.
My husband Marc and I contracted the coronavirus while traveling in early March. When Piranesi arrived mid-September, we still couldn’t walk a mile without chest pressure and fatigue. We began reading the book aloud to each other, skipping nights when our lungs ached or we were too short of breath to speak. Soon the novel became more than an escape—it was a world in which the emotional resonances of our new lives were embodied in a story we could recognize, something we could name.
As these essays demonstrate, Didion, even with her famous detachment, is no slouch at showing us what she means. But however welcome, there's a wistfulness to this book, for it is impossible to read without wishing Didion were weighing in on how the center still cannot hold and things continue to fall apart in the 21st century.
Brown Girl Sings Whalesong
When they say you are as big as a lumpy, blubbery whale,
When no one in the kingdom touched X’s heart, he grew
hungry for the end of desire. It seemed like lust at first but turned
Every poem an elegy,
Each moment of breath is a debt owed the dead.