June 22 – December 3, 2023

November 12 – December 2, 2023

I watched the 1979 film Saint Jack on Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, Freevee. Because the commercials often lurched on midsentence, I concluded that Freevee doesn’t pay people to insert the breaks between scenes. The deduction was sound, but being human, i.e., desperate for meaning, I nevertheless read intention into the placement of some of the ads. At the end of the movie, for example, when the main character must choose between collaborating with an occupying power or forgoing a fat check, Freevee broke to a spot for a skin serum by Vichy Laboratories. Unfortunately, the synergy didn’t last. The next commercial featured the socially conscious rapper Common, of the too-resonant baritone, shilling T-Mobile from a barber chair—a rich text, to be sure, but one without much relevance to Saint Jack, which is set in Singapore in the late sixties.

Based on Paul Theroux’s novel of the same name, the film is the director Peter Bogdanovich’s Vietnam movie as well as his Casablanca, a wartime melodrama about a raffish American trying to make a buck on the periphery of the conflict. A lot happens to Jack Flowers—he falls in love, finds a kindred spirit (platonic), fulfills his dream of running a brothel, runs afoul of local gangsters, goes into business with the U.S. military, witnesses the death of a friend, and gets roped in to a smear operation by the CIA—but the film’s tone and pacing belie its density of event. Saint Jack is laid-back, even chill. Applied to heavy material, this attitude usually produces a comedy, but Saint Jack, while full of funny moments, achieves something serious: the sublime.

Retrospectives of Bogdanovich’s career tend to describe it as his “loosest” film, a departure to the now for the director, whose interest in the visual style and genre tropes of Hollywood’s studio era, as opposed to those of the French New Wave, had distinguished him from his New Hollywood contemporaries. Shot on location by the minimalist cinematographer Robert Muller, with Cassavetes’s regular Ben Gazzara as Jack Flowers, and local non-actors , including prostitutes and madams, filling out the supporting cast, Saint Jack definitely looks like a gritty seventies flick. It brings to mind the Golden Era in other ways, however. Besides the shadow of Casablanca, there’s the film’s breezy script. Snappy dialogue could have upset Saint Jack’s lo-fi equilibrium, but fortunately we’re in Gazzara’s capable hands. As our weary yet amiable hero, a stoic drinker who takes all vicissitudes in stride, he gets the lion’s share of the script’s great lines—the trick is that he delivers these naturally, never “making a meal,” as film people say. He rarely gives the sense that Flowers is inventing a joke or a bon mot on the fly; usually, Jack seems to be repeating himself (it’s all the more to Gazzara’s credit that Jack never actually does). On the one hand, this chestnut effect is satisfying because it’s realistic: for Jack, clever patter isn’t an end in itself but a tool, like his warm smile or his impeccable manners, that he deploys to make bread. On the other, Jack is a wise man. He repeats himself because that’s what gurus do.

Saint Jack is not an ironic title. Flowers, improbably, is full of grace. When the gangsters arrive to shut down his bordello, he offers himself up at the front door to give his employees time to escape. The gangsters tattoo obscenities on his arms and deposit him in a ditch. Back at the brothel, which is now destroyed, he has a drink and a laugh and then goes straight to a tattoo parlor to get his new ink covered up. The tattooist asks him what he wants. Jack scans the room’s posters for two seconds before asking the man to garland his arms. What’s remarkable about Jack isn’t that he accepts his fate but that he accepts it immediately, without pitying himself or weighing his options. I was reminded of wu wei, the Taoist ideal of effortless action, which is something like a flow state that encompasses all one’s activity and not merely a discrete task like writing a movie review or playing a tennis match. Jack’s wu wei gets thrown into dramatic relief in the final act, when, for the first time, he agonizes over a decision.

In an interview in the Review‘s new Fall issue, the playwright Lynn Nottage describes the way one of her classes at Yale would open: with a trip to the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. “Most academics and practitioners weren’t acknowledging the different forms of theater happening all over New York City, and how those forms were in conversation with the way we as playwrights make our work,” she tells Christina Anderson. Her class also visited vogue balls, megachurches, trials, and wrestling matches. “What I’ve witnessed is that, by the end of the course, all the students, even if they began as very naturalistic, structurally conservative writers, are making work that is more playful, inventive, and open,” she says. We asked Nottage to provide us with a syllabus of sorts—and she sent a reading list of plays that can also teach us to look at drama and narrative structure from a similarly wide range of vantage points.

As a playwright, I’m interested in what happens when I enter my craft from differing perspectives, as an anthropologist, an athlete, an activist, a con artist, a criminal, a prosecutor, an exhibitionist, an archivist, a visual artist, a musician, a mystic, or a healer. What can we learn about dramatic structure and storytelling from observing the way theater, and performance, occur outside of a traditional theatrical setting? I’ve gravitated toward the following plays for their ability to raise this question, to engage unexpected dramaturgy, and to bend and twist the architecture of narratives to arrive at a piercing truth.

Why Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl's 1987 hit delights – and shocks

December is upon us! And what can be more festive than a snowball fight between Aberdeen fans and Helsinki’s goalkeeper in the Europa Conference League?

Luke is back in the studio and joins Marcus, Vish and Jim to hear an update from Head Foreman Steve McManaman on the Anfield stadium extension, ponder on just how many Newcastle United players Erik Ten Hag will embrace after defeat this weekend, and discuss whether Angeball can stand up to Pep’s Man City.

Plus, can Vish keep his lineal belt after last week’s controversy? Listen to find out!

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Earlier this fall, Book Riot and the EveryLibrary Institute teamed up to create and distribute a series of research studies exploring parental perceptions of the library. The first in the series explored what parents thought about the public library, and results and analysis of those surveys are available here, here, and here.

The second survey was released this week and looked more specifically at how parents perceive library workers. In many ways, the responses to this survey should come as a breath of fresh air and a reminder that no matter how loud the book banners may be and no matter how successful their rhetoric has been in some arenas, the vast majority of parents trust and respect library workers. Let’s take a look at the responses for this latest survey that specifically address perceptions of librarians. In a future censorship roundup, we’ll compare the responses to when parents believe children are capable of selecting their own materials from the library across both surveys.

In the latest survey, 92% of parents and guardians stated that they trusted librarians to select appropriate material for children and to recommend appropriate materials to children.

Even more remarkable is that 96% of parents and guardians believed their children were safe in the library. This is an even higher percentage than seen in the first survey in the series, where 92% of parents felt their children were safe in the library.

The survey showed that 90% of parents were comfortable letting their children select their own materials. This aligns with a similar series of questions asked in the initial survey, where parents reported that most of the time, they were not made uncomfortable by materials borrowed by their children and that their child was not made uncomfortable with something they borrowed.

I’ll start by saying that I am not a medical professional. I am an autistic school librarian who has discovered Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) as an amazing way to reach a lot of people, have fun, and create a safe place for youth — especially those who are neurodiverse. I can only speak for myself with this article, really, but I know Dungeons and Dragons is helpful to the neurodivergent community because I see it on a daily basis.

I was not diagnosed until my early 40s, and this came as both a shock and a sense of relief at the same time. It also made me feel very depressed, especially for the person that I was when I was young, who struggled a lot but never knew how to articulate it or make any sense of the world. I’ve been using Dungeons and Dragons in a school setting with ages 11-19 now for four years. The game started with just me and six students.

Now, we are running our own Dungeons and Dragons Conventions, and the students are play-testing campaigns that have yet to be published. D&D has infiltrated the entire school in an amazing way, and I could not be happier. I want to share here what the game means to me and how it can help the neurodivergent community based on what I have experienced.

I was riddled with anxiety as a kid, so much so that I would be sick to my stomach from it. I would run away from school any chance that I got, and I became very good at faking illnesses. I did not attend grade six at all after the first few months of school; this is how much I hated social situations. D&D removes this anxiety for me because everyone has arrived for a very specific reason.

Ah, Kryptonians, one of the major pillars of DC Comics. Long before names like Captain Marvel or Black Adam entered the zeitgeist, even non-comic book readers knew about Superman. Kryptonite has been part of the lexicon, referring to someone’s weakness, longer than I’ve been alive. We all know the phrase, “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No! It’s Superman!”

It all began in 1938 when Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster created a superhero to stand as an exemplar of morals and immigrants: Superman. We all know this story of the child from a distant and dying world, cast into the stars to crash-land in Kansas. There, he’s raised by an upright but childless couple to become the paragon of heroism.

Over the course of 85 years of storytelling, though, the “Last Son of Krypton” is far from the only Kryptonian in DC Comics. By this point, there are dozens when you factor in Elseworlds stories, multiversal dimensions, and alternate timelines. For the sake of this primer, however, I’m going to focus on the Kryptonians who are major players in DC Comics. Give it a minute, though. This is comics. A new Kryptonian hero or menace is likely right around the corner.