Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors

Edited by Susannah Carson

Vintage, 528 pp., $16

It should come as no surprise that the best essays in Living With Shakespeare are by the writers, not the actors and directors listed in its subtitle. Overall, though, this 500-page collection left me unfulfilled: about a quarter of the way in, I found myself craving the real thing. Why am I getting Shakespeare secondhand, I thought, when I can just go straight to the source?

I guess that means the book, edited by Susannah Carson, did its job. Living With Shakespeare is supposed to whet your appetite; it wants you to see how much its 38 contributors—Jane Smiley, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Kingsley among them—care about the Bard so you can strike off and form your own bond with him. A lot of the essays, however, feel too exegetical, impersonal. James Earl Jones’s contribution, for instance, starts out promisingly but veers off into a nearly 40-page analysis of Othello that probably would have been better handled by a scholar like Harold Bloom, who wrote the book’s foreword. Living With Shakespeare takes a populist approach to the Bard; at the same time, most of its contributors—the actors especially, including James Franco (of course)—take themselves too seriously.

One short passage from this book stuck with me. It comes from Germaine Greer, on studying Shakespeare in school: “It never occurred to me,” she writes, “to read about Shakespeare. If I was curious about something, about how Shakespeare felt about war, say, I simply read the plays again.”

Ms. Guinness.

Did you wake up today with Fashion Week withdrawal? Craving a runway in New York, and unable to hop a flight to London? Remnick & Co. have you covered: The New Yorker's style issue hits stands today, and there's plenty of hemming to fill the pages. Susan Orlean has a nice snapshot of happy-go-lucky French couturier Jean-Paul Gautier, but more arresting is Rebecca Mead's take on the enigma of Daphne Guinness.

There is no shortage of reasons to look into the life of Ms. Guinness -- described in the profile as "an heiress, a muse, a socialite, a designer, and an artist" -- but it helps that The Observer is coming off a week where she seemed to be everywhere. We caught up with her at Steven Klein's harrowing video installation, downed shots of tequila with her at the AnOther magazine dinner, and then hung out with her and Mick Jagger at Electric Room late into Thursday night (for more on that, look for a certain nightlife column in Wednesday's Observer).

The article is behind the paywall, so we'll give the subscription-less a look at the more intriguing reveals imbedded in the piece.

On what clothes by her late friend Alexander McQueen hang in her closets:

She had at least six McQueen bodysuits, made from skin-tight beige silk net embroidered with glass beads in patterns that evoked both corsetry and herpetology.

On a bad fall that resulted from her wobbly, sky-high heel-less Noritaka Tatehanas:

She was delighted to see that her blood matched her shoes.

On her role as mistress to married philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy:

Guinness has often alluded on her Twitter account to the heartbreak of the situation. ("I am a hopeless romantic. I would not think twice to die for love.")

On her relationship with Harold Bloom, the Western Canon's biggest fanboy:

"She has got a kind of precarious beauty," Bloom to me, fondly. "One wonderful day, there she was, looking very young and boyish in a black costume with a white ruff, and I said, 'Daphne, dear, who are you?' And she said, 'Harold, I'm Hamlet.'"

And on the Nazism that once ran through the older generations of her family:

School became even harder to tolerate after the death, in 1980, of her grandmother Diana's second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley was the founder of the British Union of Fascists, and Diana and Mosley were married, in 1936, at the house of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolph Hitler as a guest.

Perhaps the most striking quote from Ms. Guinness relates to this arm of her family, and its politics. The icon and writer are discussing Diana and her sister, Unity, who committed suicide after years dwelling in Hilter's inner circle.

"Why didn't Unity shoot Hitler instead of herself?" Guinness said. "Then we'd be descended from heroes instead of villains."

This night, he took the microphone and led the way through the night’s acts: A GQ writer talked about foie gras and served some on paper plates. Jon Langford from the punk band the Mekons strapped on an electric guitar, reminisced about his art-school days in the 70’s, and sang “Never Been in a Riot” and “I Love a Millionaire.” Next up: an auction benefiting City Harvest--items included a mysterious typewriter, a headhunter statue and a case of whiskey. A video was played of bidders from past auctions giving wry I Love the 80’s–style commentary about the items they’d bid on: recipes, a frying pan, a piano.

Mr. Hodgman’s self-deprecating schtick brought the room into a warm, not-unpleasant haze of mutual admiration.

“He speaks in perfect sentences, and he had the dry, mature, man-in-a-smoking-jacket wit of an 80-year-old Oxford don when he was 25,” said novelist Elizabeth Gilbert. “John pretends sometimes to be a cranky and grumpy person when he is actually compassionate and optimistic.”

“John’s events feature many of the same performers as from the hipster literary scene, but there’s a much homier, warmer, more communal vibe,” said writer Neal Pollack. “John is the real draw: He’s a perfect host and a perfect gentleman.”

“I was born at the age of about 45,” Mr. Hodgman said. The only child of a businessman and a nurse in Brookline, Mass., young John had asthma and liked to watch Mary Tyler Moore and read Tintin books. “I was ruthlessly responsible and well-liked by all adults, which allowed me opportunity for subversion,” he said. At Brookline High, he carried around a briefcase and co-edited a humor magazine that featured short stories about self-mutilation and X-rated comics.

At Yale, he took a class with literary critic Harold Bloom.

“As we all know, the man is a maniac,” he said. “He has perhaps the largest brain on the planet …. It was really Bloom who taught me to be a comedian.”

In the mid-1990’s, Mr. Hodgman worked his way up to becoming a literary agent at Writers House. In 1997, George Plimpton edited a story of his for The Paris Review (“one of those life-altering moments”). In 2000, he turned most of his attention to writing, including a 13-part advice column on the McSweeney’s Web site called “Ask the Former Professional Literary Agent.”

Now he writes regularly for Men’s Journal about booze and food, and occasionally for The New York Times Magazine. He recently sold a book, The Areas of My Expertise, which will be filled with “amazing historical true facts” (e.g., U.S. Presidents who had hooks for hands). “I would say the amount of true material is roughly zero,” he added.

Of course, like Mr. Eggers, Mr. Hodgman is slowly acquiring fans--and literary fans, particularly those who flock to literary parties, rarely give their heroes a good name. Mr. Eggers wrote one terrific book and was so avidly embraced by horrid young hopefuls that one could make the case that we haven’t caught a real glimpse of the writer since.

Fortunately, Mr. Hodgman lives on the Upper West Side with his wife of four years, Katherine Fletcher, who teaches English at Stuyvesant High School, and their daughter, whom he refers to as Hodgmina. “Since becoming a parent, I don’t go out very much,” he said.

Though, of course, there are exceptions.

Mr. Pollack recalled an evening when he and Mr. Hodgman gave a reading together. “It ended with us getting mauled by a woman in a bear costume,” he said. “She couldn’t see very well, so we had to keep throwing ourselves into her to allow the mauling to occur. Then we went out and got drunk, as is our wont--cocktail hour always starts early, and the cocktails are usually good. So his presence is warm and merry, but the next morning you curse him.”

Mr. Hodgman wants to bring his “Little Gray Book Lectures” to radio.

“It needs to become something else,” he said. “I think it’s reached a very pleasant level of demi-quasi-notoriety within a small circle of people, but in order for it to be worth doing and creatively interesting, it has to grow and evolve.”

Are his fans cult-like?

“Well, I hope that they would kill themselves if I asked them to,” he said. “It’s not a cult technically, but if I asked them to dress alike, I hope that they would. You know, I’m not doing this for nothing.”

Forget all that. Welcome to a new, user-friendly criticism, warm, gentle, inviting and personal; welcome to literary exegesis that addresses you—yes, you—and the issues in your private life. There’s no specialized knowledge required (though it does help to have read the books) and no need to sign up for ideological boot camp. This is criticism for everyday readers of acknowledged classics, readers who feel that books are important and salutary—good for everyone, if taken in moderation.

Did sophisticated comp-lit types laugh at you in college for confusing heroes and villains with real people and liking or disliking them accordingly? Well, listen to this: “A reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not reacting in a naïve way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but is performing one of the central acts of literary understanding.”

Whom should we thank for this empowering insight? Oprah? Heidi Julavits? Wrong and wrong again. The new champion of the common reader is Edward Mendelson, a tenured professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of a two-volume biography of W.H. Auden. Mr. Mendelson wants to turn our attention to The Things That Matter—a title that lets us know right off the bat that his criticism is relevant and straightforward, not academic and convoluted.

The book is a study of seven novels— Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts—which, his subtitle promises, have something to say about “the stages of life”: birth, childhood, growth, marriage, love, parenthood and (a touch of euphemism here) “The Future.” The Things That Matter makes very few startling claims (provocation isn’t friendly), but taken as a whole, it is startling—especially in the way it relates novels to the “inner life” of the reader.

In the old days, lit crit would teach us how a novel works (or fails to work, due to the tragic disconnect between signifier and signified), or how the world works (or fails to work, due to the perfidy of capitalism). Mr. Mendelson is more like a highly literate self-help guru: He wants to teach us about ourselves as “autonomous persons”; he wants to reach “readers … who are still deciding how to live their lives.”

Note that he’s chosen only novels by women (three of them by Virginia Woolf). His justification for this choice makes good sense: In the 19th and 20th centuries, “a woman writer … had a greater motivation to defend the values of personal life against the generalizing effect of stereotypes, and defend those values by paying close attention to them in her writing.” Moreover, he believes that these are the seven novels written in English that “treat most deeply the great experiences of personal life.” (Well … you could argue that claim until The Future is a distant memory and Woolf’s Between the Acts is long forgotten—but I’m going to give him a free pass, if only because he also calls Middlemarch “the greatest English novel”—irrefutable evidence of sound judgment.)

Mr. Mendelson’s readings of the individual novels are cogent and plausible but not particularly stimulating. Nowhere does he produce a dramatic revisionist argument. At times his emphasis is surprising, as for example in his examination of Mrs. Dalloway, which gives more play to Peter Walsh than to Septimus Warren Smith. Mr. Mendelson’s relatively narrow point of view (in this case, he’s focused on Peter’s old and pure and hopeless love for Clarissa) produces, in the end, a distorted image of the novel. The same thing happens when he discusses Middlemarch solely in terms of marriage: Other important parts of the book—about social change and politics, say—get short shrift.

On the whole, he’s more interested in giving the reader tips about “real life”—a phrase he repeats with notable frequency. He wants you to be autonomous, equal, integral, committed and … well, virtuous: a good parent, a faithful lover, a loving spouse.

Here’s a passage from his chapter on Jane Eyre that’s typical both in method (tripping lightly from the pages of a novel straight into your personal space) and message (casual sex is a no-no): “Charlotte Brontë understood that an unequal sexual relation between adults is necessarily an unloving one; she also seems to have sensed that sex is experienced differently—that is, produces different physical and emotional feelings—in unloving relations and loving ones.” A footnote elaborates: “ Post coitum homo tristis —‘After sex the human is sad’—is far truer about unloving relations than loving ones; if the union between two partners is limited to the sexual act, then loneliness inevitably follows it.”

Elsewhere (in a discussion that segues from Mrs. Dalloway to Plato to the boudoir), he abandons the prescriptive posture for a conspicuous display of tolerance: “[P]robably the only moral question it makes sense to ask about anyone’s sexuality is to what extent you use it as a means of treating other people as instruments and objects—something that can occur in a conventional married bedroom as readily as in more unconventional settings.”

It may be that I was too thoroughly brainwashed by the bad old lit crit to truly appreciate the benefits of Mr. Mendelson’s kinder, gentler approach. I’m still thrilled by the vaulting ambition of criticism on a heroic scale: the grand architecture of Northrop Frye’s classifications; the anthropological wizardry of René Girard; the nerdy, specialized systems engineered by Roland Barthes; the daring historical acrobatics of Stephen Greenblatt; the unstoppable ego of Harold Bloom. And then there’s the patient examination of technique provided by critics like Erich Auerbach (whose chapter on To the Lighthouse in Mimesis is simply breathtaking—minutely accurate at first, then sweepingly broad). Auerbach tells me something that won’t matter to everyone but that I want to know just the same, which is how a book’s intricate machinery turns, what makes all those clever parts click into place, and how this particular machinery compares with that of other devices he’s tinkered with.

But The Future, I suspect, belongs to Edward Mendelson and his neat, modest meditations on novels that address you and me and our everyday human problems. The things that matter most to him are the bonds that link “autonomous persons”—and who would want to argue? But I do wish he were less of a goody-goody.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

The first reaction is visceral, and should be recorded here before the critical faculty interposes to hedge and qualify: I was so thoroughly sucked in and freaked out by No Country for Old Men that whenever I had to put the book down, just for a minute, I could feel my hands shaking. The action in Cormac McCarthy’s new novel is so violent, taut and appallingly convincing that it made me wish I could summon up some cynicism and disbelief.

Our hero, a Vietnam vet named Llewelyn Moss, finds a couple of million dollars way out in the desert, near the border between Texas and Mexico, at the scene of a drug deal gone hideously wrong—bodies lying everywhere in and around bullet-pocked pickup trucks. Moss, who’d been out hunting antelope, examines the carnage, noting the wanton use of automatic weapons. His dispassionate caution signals expertise—which is reassuring, sort of, until we come to this: “There was a leather document case standing alongside the dead man’s knee and Moss absolutely knew what was in the case and he was scared in a way he didn’t even understand.” Me, too.

Moss takes the money. And he’s pursued, relentlessly. The posse consists of various outraged drug dealers, a wise old Texas sheriff and a hit man named Chigurh who is, as the wise old sheriff says, “a true and living prophet of destruction.” We know Chigurh is evil because he kills people with a pneumatic cattle gun and shows a keen interest in watching them die. We know that the sheriff is wise because he talks to us directly, in italics, and shares his distilled libertarian views: “It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can’t be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.” And we know Moss is our hero because he’s charmingly gruff with his very pretty, very young wife, and because he commits random acts of outright decency, like schlepping a jug of water back out into the desert to give to a wounded Mexican drug dealer. “There is no description of a fool,” he tells himself, “that you fail to satisfy.”

Many bad guys (and one good guy) chase a good guy who’s got loot he shouldn’t have—it’s an old story, but that doesn’t make it any less suspenseful. What eventually snapped the spell and released me from the spectacle of mesmerizing violence was the weight of Mr. McCarthy’s ambition, which grows heavier even as the death toll rises.

Neither an airport page-turner nor a screenplay in the making (though Scott Rudin has bought the film rights), No Country for Old Men is a literary novel with philosophical reverb (the title is lifted from the first line of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”) by an author richly decorated with highbrow honors: He was blessed with a MacArthur “genius” grant back in 1981; his fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985), prompted Harold Bloom to declare that “no other living American novelist … has given us a book as strong and memorable”; and in 1992 he won both a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award (for the meretricious All the Pretty Horses, the first installment of the best-selling Border Trilogy).

So … ultra-violence wed to ponderous artistic intent, without a wink of irony. Cormac McCarthy is not the winking kind.

It seems he wants us to think hard about death. He deploys his baddest guy as a kind of existential inquisitor: Face to face with his doomed victims, Chigurh demands that they acknowledge him as the agent of inexorable fate. “Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing,” he says, sounding a bit like Gertrude Stein on crank. “Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased.” For clarity’s sake, he adds: “When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end.”

Unfortunately, these philosophically inflected passages only reminded me that Cormac McCarthy, novelist, is the one who choreographed all the blood splatter and arranged the blasted corpses; he shaped the sequential slaughter into a highly effective narrative structure. Mr. McCarthy, not Chigurh, is the agent of fate.

A bigger problem is Blood Meridian, to which No Country for Old Men will inevitably be compared. Also unbearably violent, also set along the Mexican border, also much concerned with Destiny, Blood Meridian is a historical novel loosely based on the Indian-hunting expeditions of the Glanton gang, circa 1850. At once beautiful and horrifying, it’s essentially a chronicle of desperate reciprocal massacres—a frontier epic steeped in gore.

Blood Meridian is improbably florid, the intentionally archaic prose rolling on in Old Testament cadences, with echoes of Shakespeare, Melville, Faulkner. Imagine an entire novel written with this kind of fervid energy: “They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.”

There’s nothing even remotely florid about No Country for Old Men; it sounds like Raymond Carver on a diet: “The sun was up less than an hour and the shadow of the ridge and the datilla and the rocks fell far out across the floodplain below him. Somewhere out there was the shadow of Moss himself. He lowered the binoculars and sat studying the land. Far to the south the raw mountains of Mexico. The breaks of the river …. He spat dryly and wiped his mouth on the shoulder of his cotton workshirt.” Verbs are as scarce as commas in this arid landscape. The writing is clean and accurate and effective—and that’s it.

The important difference between the two novels is that the earlier one will endure, as Faulkner would say. I’ll leave the heroic superlatives to Harold Bloom, but Blood Meridian is mammoth, a hugely impressive achievement. Set beside it, No Country for Old Men looks like a quick fix.

I suspect that Mr. McCarthy hoped his lean new novel would deliver with fresh urgency the old message about America and violence—as the sheriff says, “This country has got a strange kind of history and a damned bloody one too.” And Chigurh’s deadly mind games were supposed to provoke some deep thoughts about the tenuousness of our existence, the certainty of our eventual extinction and the folly of folk who believe that they can control their own destiny. It’s too bad Mr. McCarthy wasn’t content just to scare us witless.

Remember the line from Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”? “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” I suspect that the pared-down McCarthy prose was aiming to result in that kind of indelible, perfectly crafted sentence. Anyway, I thought No Country for Old Men was a good high-end thriller—until the shooting stopped and Significance took over.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

The first reaction is visceral, and should be recorded here before the critical faculty interposes to hedge and qualify: I was so thoroughly sucked in and freaked out by No Country for Old Men that whenever I had to put the book down, just for a minute, I could feel my hands shaking. The action in Cormac McCarthy’s new novel is so violent, taut and appallingly convincing that it made me wish I could summon up some cynicism and disbelief.

Our hero, a Vietnam vet named Llewelyn Moss, finds a couple of million dollars way out in the desert, near the border between Texas and Mexico, at the scene of a drug deal gone hideously wrong—bodies lying everywhere in and around bullet-pocked pickup trucks. Moss, who’d been out hunting antelope, examines the carnage, noting the wanton use of automatic weapons. His dispassionate caution signals expertise—which is reassuring, sort of, until we come to this: “There was a leather document case standing alongside the dead man’s knee and Moss absolutely knew what was in the case and he was scared in a way he didn’t even understand.” Me, too.

Moss takes the money. And he’s pursued, relentlessly. The posse consists of various outraged drug dealers, a wise old Texas sheriff and a hit man named Chigurh who is, as the wise old sheriff says, “a true and living prophet of destruction.” We know Chigurh is evil because he kills people with a pneumatic cattle gun and shows a keen interest in watching them die. We know that the sheriff is wise because he talks to us directly, in italics, and shares his distilled libertarian views: “It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can’t be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.” And we know Moss is our hero because he’s charmingly gruff with his very pretty, very young wife, and because he commits random acts of outright decency, like schlepping a jug of water back out into the desert to give to a wounded Mexican drug dealer. “There is no description of a fool,” he tells himself, “that you fail to satisfy.”

Many bad guys (and one good guy) chase a good guy who’s got loot he shouldn’t have—it’s an old story, but that doesn’t make it any less suspenseful. What eventually snapped the spell and released me from the spectacle of mesmerizing violence was the weight of Mr. McCarthy’s ambition, which grows heavier even as the death toll rises.

Neither an airport page-turner nor a screenplay in the making (though Scott Rudin has bought the film rights), No Country for Old Men is a literary novel with philosophical reverb (the title is lifted from the first line of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”) by an author richly decorated with highbrow honors: He was blessed with a MacArthur “genius” grant back in 1981; his fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985), prompted Harold Bloom to declare that “no other living American novelist … has given us a book as strong and memorable”; and in 1992 he won both a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award (for the meretricious All the Pretty Horses, the first installment of the best-selling Border Trilogy).

So … ultra-violence wed to ponderous artistic intent, without a wink of irony. Cormac McCarthy is not the winking kind.

It seems he wants us to think hard about death. He deploys his baddest guy as a kind of existential inquisitor: Face to face with his doomed victims, Chigurh demands that they acknowledge him as the agent of inexorable fate. “Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing,” he says, sounding a bit like Gertrude Stein on crank. “Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased.” For clarity’s sake, he adds: “When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end.”

Unfortunately, these philosophically inflected passages only reminded me that Cormac McCarthy, novelist, is the one who choreographed all the blood splatter and arranged the blasted corpses; he shaped the sequential slaughter into a highly effective narrative structure. Mr. McCarthy, not Chigurh, is the agent of fate.

A bigger problem is Blood Meridian, to which No Country for Old Men will inevitably be compared. Also unbearably violent, also set along the Mexican border, also much concerned with Destiny, Blood Meridian is a historical novel loosely based on the Indian-hunting expeditions of the Glanton gang, circa 1850. At once beautiful and horrifying, it’s essentially a chronicle of desperate reciprocal massacres—a frontier epic steeped in gore.

Blood Meridian is improbably florid, the intentionally archaic prose rolling on in Old Testament cadences, with echoes of Shakespeare, Melville, Faulkner. Imagine an entire novel written with this kind of fervid energy: “They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.”

There’s nothing even remotely florid about No Country for Old Men; it sounds like Raymond Carver on a diet: “The sun was up less than an hour and the shadow of the ridge and the datilla and the rocks fell far out across the floodplain below him. Somewhere out there was the shadow of Moss himself. He lowered the binoculars and sat studying the land. Far to the south the raw mountains of Mexico. The breaks of the river …. He spat dryly and wiped his mouth on the shoulder of his cotton workshirt.” Verbs are as scarce as commas in this arid landscape. The writing is clean and accurate and effective—and that’s it.

The important difference between the two novels is that the earlier one will endure, as Faulkner would say. I’ll leave the heroic superlatives to Harold Bloom, but Blood Meridian is mammoth, a hugely impressive achievement. Set beside it, No Country for Old Men looks like a quick fix.

I suspect that Mr. McCarthy hoped his lean new novel would deliver with fresh urgency the old message about America and violence—as the sheriff says, “This country has got a strange kind of history and a damned bloody one too.” And Chigurh’s deadly mind games were supposed to provoke some deep thoughts about the tenuousness of our existence, the certainty of our eventual extinction and the folly of folk who believe that they can control their own destiny. It’s too bad Mr. McCarthy wasn’t content just to scare us witless.

Remember the line from Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”? “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” I suspect that the pared-down McCarthy prose was aiming to result in that kind of indelible, perfectly crafted sentence. Anyway, I thought No Country for Old Men was a good high-end thriller—until the shooting stopped and Significance took over.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

Naomi Wolf is one lucky lass. Oh, she's had her share of troubles-like that time at Yale when Harold Bloom laid his "heavy, boneless" paw on her trembling undergraduate lap, traumatizing her into a two-decade long silence from which she could only be coaxed by a story contract with New York magazine. It can't have been fun getting ridiculed as Al Gore's color consultant during the 2000 Presidential campaign, especially for a woman who made her name decrying the image industry in a 1991 best-seller called The Beauty Myth. And Ms. Wolf's most recent books, Promiscuities (1997) and Misconceptions (2001), were dismissed by the few who read them as self-important memoirs masquerading as sociology. But she has a big shiny mane of hair, rosy cheeks and a really, really great dad-and The Treehouse, her latest effort, does a lovely job of immortalizing him.

Still-does it have to take place in a treehouse? Why must every sophisticated, middle-aged urban person these days retreat to the countryside for personal growth and insight, like some lunatic pack of nouveaux Thoreaus? (It's especially galling when you just know they have great apartments in the city.) Personally, I get more "insight" from 10 minutes of walking down 79th Street, any day of the week, than from hours sitting on a rickety sun-porch surrounded by the hum of cicadas. Ms. Wolf, however, had been craving relief from the exigencies of being Naomi Wolf-from "the public dog pit," as she puts it-and so she purchased and lovingly restored a ramshackle homesteader's cottage in the Hudson Valley, essentially morphing into a combination of Martha Stewart and Simple Abundance's Sarah Ban Breathnach. She knelt over a humble pine staircase for days, scrubbing with steel wool and Goo Gone "as if scraping something from inside of me"-really, privileged feminist intellectuals these days make such fetish of housework, it's a wonder they don't become fulltime charpersons.

She spins out long, luxurious paragraphs on her maiden efforts with power tools: Naomi Wolf, meet Home Depot. On the cordless drill: "It felt heavy and awkward and full of potential …. I whizzed [it] in the air and felt an exhilarating buzz." On the screwdriver: "It was solid …. At last I drove the screw into the drywall neither too deeply nor too weakly." Sisters are doing it for themselves!

Ms. Wolf had the help of handymen in mud-caked overalls who inevitably revealed that they, too, were capable of deep thoughts and florid literary sensibilities ("Mr. Christian's vision was the eighteenth-century ideal of the sublime in painting," burbles his employer). Heartbroken friends arrived at the house to have their spirits refreshed-though apparently nature can't fix everything: Naomi exhorts one divorced research scientist to buy a La Perla underwire bra, the kind that retails for three figures. Students and protégés visited, including a "spunky, fast-talking 24-year-old Hispanic-American with a sprightly expression"-Naomi was running her very own Fresh Air Fund. The adults cheerfully pitched in to build her daughter Rosa the treehouse of her dreams, subliminally satisfying dreams of their own. For "everyone needs a treehouse," declares Ms. Wolf with sweeping benevolence-though those who can't afford a country house might need to "build a treehouse internally … maybe it's a seat on the train when someone is going to work," or perhaps it requires lashings of Calgon: "in your bathroom, when you have drawn a bath and closed the door." (Gee, thanks.)

Onto this familiar tale of bucolic self-discovery is grafted the far more interesting story of shaggy octogenarian Leonard Wolf- Rumanian Jewish immigrant, bohemian poet, teacher, former Communist, retired horn dog-a man to whom Naomi (or "honey," as he calls her) was now, at a moment of unspecified personal or career crisis, ready to concede some central "Oedipal" struggle: "I was better at going on Crossfire," she boasts ruefully-but her father had remained true to his artistic ideals, indifferent to fame and monetary wealth, self-publishing his work. His integrity, she suddenly realized, trumps her bullheaded, publicity-adept ambition.

And so Naomi attempted to lift the "portcullis of [her] rightness": Appointing herself Leonard's humble amanuensis, she transcribes his lecture notes ("Lesson Three: Destroy the Box"; "Lesson Nine: Your Only Wage Will Be Joy") in a kind of Artist's Way-esque penance for the crummy mediagenic books on which she'd squandered her literary gifts. ("I have made plenty of excruciating mistakes," she admits.) She reveals that, decades ago, she turned her back on the muse, abandoning her own girlish poetry. "Let me hold the stone up to the light," she writes, quoting from her juvenilia. Was it her verse that incited Mr. Bloom's fumbling lust?

This being Naomi Wolf, it's impossible to see The Treehouse as a simple exercise in quiet humility. Over the years, she's hitched herself so savvily to publishing trends: The Beauty Myth coincided with Susan Faludi's Backlash; Promiscuities limped along behind Mary Pipher's study of troubled girls, Reviving Ophelia; Misconceptions rode a wave of nauseating mommy lit-would it be entirely cynical to detect in this latest effort a whiff of The Greatest Generation? Just a hint of the saccharine tracts of Mitch Albom?

It doesn't matter, though, because as any daughter who idolizes her imperfect father will instantly recognize, Naomi has managed a heroic act in committing his life story to the printed page. It's a pity that someone decided to package Leonard Wolf as an "eccentric" on the dust jacket, as if Oprah-anesthetized American readers couldn't swallow as "normal" the idea of a man who smokes a meerschaum pipe; who favors beverages like absinthe, collects medieval Arabian astrolabes and spouts poetry from memory-"the man will quote Chaucer at the drop of a hat," writes the daughter, using a cliché for which the father would surely reprove her ("Lesson Four: Speak in Your Own Voice").

He seems a fascinating guy, coming of age in San Francisco during the boozy Beatnik 1950's, hobnobbing with E.M. Forster, Eudora Welty and Anaïs Nin-an era Ms. Wolf can't help but romanticize in contrast to her experience reading deconstructionist theory at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in the 1980's ("years of bad hair and bad fashion, of bad food"). The Wolf tykes-and there turned out to be more of them than they knew: Papa was a rolling stone-were richly indulged, not with material possessions, but with boundless opportunities for personal expression, such as scribbling on themselves and cooking family meals. One night, little Naomi mounted a feast out of The Canterbury Tales, with heather fronds strewn on the dining room and "gobbets of cheese." It sounds like an ideal childhood (though surely with dark undercurrents glossed over here), and Leonard a wonderful patriarch.

I wish Ms. Wolf had had the courage just to write his biography, without resorting to pastoral contrivances like the treehouse. But a straight biography wouldn't have been as commercially viable as this inspirational book aimed at the "artist" that Leonard Wolf believes, with quaint faith, "inheres in everyone." Presumably, he hasn't seen American Idol.

Alexandra Jacobs is features editor of The Observer.

There are the people who don't usually talk about politics. I was reading Harold Bloom's The Best Poems of the English Language , a stout anthology published by HarperCollins, from which I learned that Alexander Pope's savage "Epistle to Augustus," written in (dis)honor of King George II, is "as applicable to President George W. Bush …. " Did Moors blow up the Bank of England during that king's reign, then? Mr. Bloom's remark doesn't explain Pope or George II; it only eases his own mind, and coaxes a laugh from the cheap seats. Yet he thinks nothing of sticking it into a book that his publishers hope to keep in print for 10 or 20 years.

Last week's New Yorker ran an essay by Louis Menand on documentary makers, from Robert Flaherty to Michael Moore. The polymath Menand is a comforting writer, since his air of easy superiority to all his subjects leaves us feeling intimidated only by him, not by them. Yet even Mr. Menand refers in passing to "George Bush and his brutish, arrogant, reactionary Administration." Softly, softly: If you keep this up, you will lose your native wood notes wild.

Then there are the people who shouldn't talk at all, at least not in particular situations. Last weekend I passed a woman on a sidewalk in a small upstate town. Beside us sat a traffic jam, caused by people going to the county fair. I made eye contact to smile. She made eye contact to say, "They should get out of their cars and stop bombing Iraq for oil, you know what I mean?" I did not.

The common features of the three instances are pressure and presumption: the pressure to express one's opinion, at any time, whether in a discussion of Alexander Pope, or walking down the street; and the presumption that everyone shares the opinion, and feels the pressure (hence the expression will not be noticed).

At least Harold Bloom and the woman on the sidewalk are not running for President. Howard Dean, who did, thinks the heightened terror alert of last week was a political ploy of the Bushies, as if, somewhere in Hell, Lee Atwater put down his brimstone guitar and said, "Shoot, all I had to work with was Willie Horton and flag-burning amendments. If you'd've given me terror alerts, the little stuffed grape leaf would've carried only Massachusetts."

There is a left which wants America to lose, whatever the war, whoever the enemy. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, they were still. They began to creep out during the slow-seeming start of the Afghan war, until the sudden fall of Mazr-i-Sharif, and the spectacle of men playing music and women lifting their veils shut them up once more. But they are a permanent feature of life in all free countries.

Far more numerous, and far more important, are liberals, who can be dismayed by specific blunders or setbacks. To them, the Iraq war is a colossal example of both. The year-long occupation, and the fighting in Najaf even now, bodes endless failure. The possibility that the costs of the Iraq war have been slight in comparison to other wars means nothing to them; liberals panic in the presence of violence, even as conservatives panic in the presence of sex. War to them is what President Clinton's penis was to us. The one-step-removed quality of the Iraq war also makes it repulsive to liberals. They were willing to fight if Saddam had germ-filled warheads sitting in a shed somewhere. They were not willing to fight if an anti-American despot refused to tell us whether he had them or not.

Without care, however-and they are not showing much care these days-liberals can become infected with left-wing arguments and attitudes, adopting them as their own, or not balking when others do so. The idea that we are bombing Iraq for oil is a perfect example. Where is it flowing? Who is pumping it? What gas prices have dropped as a result? Another example of a left-wing opinion that liberals toy with is the notion that the Palestinian situation motivates the jihadists. This is a particular favorite of self-hating, self-loving Jews: self-hating because they want Israelis to be at fault; self-loving because they believe in their own omnipotence (if we were perfect, all would be well). If you think that greedy oil men and malicious Jews have led us into war in the desert, then you will speak in tongues, in poetry anthologies and to passersby.

How many tongue-speakers are there in America? The red and blue county map, the close balance of Congress and the polls suggest that they are about half the country. Half the country, and more of the talk. If George Bush wins re-election, it will mean that, though millions of people care about the clothes, lovers and twelve-step programs of the stars, they do not give a damn about their opinions.

John Kerry is not a left-winger. He was as a young man, when he accused the military of systemic war crimes in Vietnam. That was a foul charge, which makes nonsense of his veteran-based campaign now: Yes, I was in the SS, but how we sang "Val-de-re, val-de-ra …. " But Mr. Kerry has been in the Senate for years. He has voted to authorize the use of force on several occasions. It has been a long time since he thought of the United States as Moloch.

Will he therefore rebuke Howard Dean, and all the unguided missiles like him? He won't. And no one running for President, Republican or Democrat, could afford to. He will be President, not the nuts. But nuts vote, and he has an election to win.

But I think I know from those few encounters why he meant so much to the people who really did know him well. There are some people who strike you immediately by a kind of natural goodness that goes beyond good nature. Like obscenity in the Supreme Court opinion, natural goodness is something that's hard to define, but you know it when you see it. You know it by contrast with its absence, in yourself and others.

I don't mean goody-goody goodness; I don't mean New Age goodness, which tends to suggest that you should never get angry at things like injustice or hypocrisy, because it might disturb your inner peace and serenity, which, of course, is the absolute Highest Good. Instead, I'm talking about the kind of goodness that acknowledges that there are Things Worth Fighting For , which is the title of the just-published collection of Mike Kelly's work that Robert Vare has compiled.

Mike's kind of goodness encompassed a cheerful, unselfish and principled dedication to the word, the voice, the story, the craft, the role of writing-the thing itself, rather than the suits and trappings of prominence-that seemed to make everybody in his presence feel a little bit better about themselves, about being writers. Like it was worth laboring over making a sentence, rather than laboring over making a social connection for one's career.

So that's one reason I'm bitter at the cruel and capricious fate that singled him out for death on the outskirts of Baghdad a year ago. Yes, I know everybody dies, including many who don't deserve to, but if you ask me, Mike Kelly really didn't deserve to-not so suddenly and so soon, anyway. Actually, "capricious fate" is a euphemism; I'm bitter about something bigger. Recently, I was witness to a fascinating public conversation between Tony Kushner and Harold Bloom sponsored by the Classic Stage Company and moderated by the C.S.C.'s new artistic director, Brian Kulick, whose Shakespearean productions I've admired in the past. It was supposed to be a discussion about the relationship between religion and theater, and it was, but it turned into a fascinating psychodrama in which Mr. Bloom relentlessly pressed a reluctant Mr. Kushner to concede that there was a spiritual dimension, a spiritual argument going on in his work. A "charge" (Mr. Bloom admired Mr. Kushner's work precisely for this reason) that the playwright wittily evaded, mainly on Brechtian grounds.

"But what is Angels without angels ?" exclaimed Mr. Bloom. He cited two passages, one from A Dybbuk and one from Angels in America , in which he said that Mr. Kushner was giving voice to the ancient Jewish quarrel with God, the demand that He explain why He permits the persistence of evil and cruelty and the perverse fate of the good among us.

It's the quarrel over theodicy. A rabbi once told me that, according to some sage or another, this was one implication of the Abraham and Isaac story: that Abraham should have questioned the sacrifice of his son that God was demanding. Or, as that other son of Abraham, Bob Dylan (son of Abraham Zimmerman), put it: "God said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son' / Abe says, 'Man, you must be puttin' me on ."

I'm down with that quarrel, and the death of Michael Kelly is one more count in the indictment. Another way of expressing this can be found in a line from Pat Moynihan that Maureen Dowd quoted in the beautiful column she wrote about Mike Kelly after he died. They had a blow-up of that column on an easel at the Mike Kelly event at Michael's restaurant, and I think that reading it was what triggered my renewed bitterness. It went something like this: "I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually." Killer line. (I think "the world" is a euphemism for God.) It's the kind of thing that has always made me secretly subscribe to the theory that the Irish are the Ten Lost Tribes.

Anyway, what brought me to the Mike Kelly event was reading the remarkably perceptive piece about his work that Robert Vare has written in the April Atlantic . It's an adaptation of his introduction to Things Worth Fighting For . And it reminded me of how many things Mike Kelly did so superbly well as a writer.

I remember when I first read Martyrs' Day , his account of the 1991 Gulf War, that it was one of those books that I almost resented because it was so good. But don't take my word: The great critic Robert Hughes called it "the best piece of war writing in a generation; not since Vietnam and Michael Herr's Dispatches has anyone conveyed the pity and terror of war ... so well … he is a writer, with a precise eye and a voice that is by turns elegiac, supple, and bleakly funny … "

Mr. Vare mentioned this event, which was a kind of memorial commemoration, launch party for the posthumous collection and benefit for Mike's two children. It was sponsored by an informal alliance of guys named Kelly (including Keith Kelly of the Post and Jim Kelly of Time ), and I saw a lot of people I liked there, but the evening only made me feel the loss again, and more deeply. Especially after I bought a copy of the new book, took it home and read a lot of Kelly pieces I hadn't read before.

For one thing, it reminded me how funny he could be. In an early magazine column, he talked about the relentless sensitive-man epiphanies in the now-discontinued "About Men" column in The Times :

"I sometimes imagine the ultimate 'About Men' column …. It opens in a hospital room on an evening in April, the cruelest month. In a bed, limply, lies a man who has collapsed on a busy street, struck by a fairly major epiphany.

"He shows promise of a full recovery-until his father turns up. As the emotionally crippled older man stands by in mute despair, unable to verbalize his true feelings, the son suffers a second, more serious, epiphany.

"Incredibly, he rallies again. But at this critical moment his son from his first marriage, whom he has not seen in the decade since the child's mother divorced him … arrives at his bedside. He looks at his son with misty eyes. Ditto, the son at him. 'I love you, Dad,' says the boy. 'I lo-I, uh-I love … ' he begins, then stops, unable to say it. As he realizes that he is, in the end, the same man as his father -the final terminal epiphany racks his shuddering frame."

Then there's his hilarious parody of Robert Reich's self-important memoir of his Cabinet service ("'For God's sake, man, get a grip on yourself!' The secretary of labor's voice cut like the crack of a whip through the cabinet room. Robert B. Reich stood towering over the Treasury Secretary, who lay curled in the fetal position … "). It's a hilarious and mean send-up of all toadying office-holders who bite the hand they licked as soon as they leave office.

Indeed, distaste for the toady and toadyism is a thread that runs through his work. His classic piece on David Gergen as the ultimate Washington insider reflects it. So does the famous episode in which Mike was pushed out from the editorship of The New Republic back in 1997 (in the view of most, including him) because he would not tone down his criticism of the magazine's pet pol, Al Gore: a pre-emptive contempt that has been vindicated by Mr. Gore's pathetic campaign and his toadying to Howard Dean when, with his unerring bad judgment, Mr. Gore thought he could get a leg up by sucking up to the Deaniacs.

I was talking to some friends recently about the controversy among literati over confessional memoirs and the way so many of these allegedly bold confessions are ultimately self serving: Look how bad I was and how brave I am to admit it, that kind of thing. (I defended the David Denby memoir, however, because he had the courage to make himself look like a fool.) And we were trying to figure out what the one unspeakable, unconfessable sin left was, the one that wouldn't in some way make the confessor look good, in some respect, either for his bold venture into degradation or his bold venture into confessing that degradation. And we settled on toadyism. You'll never see Confessions of a Toady climbing the best-seller lists. (Although maybe The Apprentice will break the toady barrier.) You'll probably never see it written, and yet we all know that they're out there. Indeed, we could all name two or three ourselves,couldn't we?

And it occurred to me that the one thing Mike Kelly represented was the Anti-Toady. And re-reading Martyrs' Day , his chronicle of the first Gulf War, and his Washington Post columns on the run-up to the second, I began to realize that the thing he detested most about Saddam was that he had made toadyism his principle of rule, using fear, brutality and torture to turn his subjects into a nation of overt and (worse) internalized toadies. It wasn't the toadies alone that Mike Kelly despised; it was the bullies who turned the weak into toadies. Someday, someone will do a study of toadyism, which will include both sides of the relationship, the toady and the toadee, you might say. Mike Kelly was an acute observer of both sides of that equation, and I think his lack of awe for the great nabobs of Washington came from his observation that they required toadies to buttress their vision of themselves, to reflect their overblown sense of grandeur.

And when you think about it, his horror of toadyism, voluntary or enforced-a horror that is really an affirmation of individual dignity-may be at the heart of Mike Kelly's political vision. The vision that centers around "the boot." On the back of the book jacket of Things Worth Fighting For is a quote from that Maureen Dowd column I mentioned, the one that concluded with the way "the world is going to break your heart eventually." In it, she says that Mike believed that "war reporters were people 'who did not want to get in harm's way but merely close enough to record the fate of those who did.' But," she went on, "he put himself in harm's way because he wanted to go back to Baghdad and see America kick out Saddam. 'Tyranny truly is a horror [he wrote] …. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot stomping on a human face' …. Michael died for two things: Journalism and ridding the world of jackboots." The ability to put a human face on the victims of tyranny, petty or deeply evil, was one of the many things that distinguished his work.

As was his ability to personify the oppressor as "the boot." Here is what he wrote in a column called "Who Would Choose Tyranny?" written from Kuwait City, a place where the widowed and tortured still bear the scars of Saddam's boot. It was published on Feb. 26, 2003, and I've quoted it once before in this column, but, as the song goes, it bears repeating:

"I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti, or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?" The 300,000 people (so far) discovered in the mass graves in Iraq-many of whom are there because they refused to be toadies-testify to the truth of this. So does the remarkable essay about the victims of Saddam's genocidal rule by David Gelernter (in the April 5 Weekly Standard ), the one called "The Holocaust Shrug," about the triumphalism displayed by some over the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the shrug of indifference they give to the mass graves and the genocidal torturers who filled them.

Once again, hail and farewell, Mike Kelly, foe of the boot and the toadies who lick it.

St. Patrick's Day! Well, both of us gals have pretty pasty complexions (though one of us is just about to jet off for spring break- ¡olé! ), so we're not too psyched about this one day of the year when green is chic …. If you're thirsting for real "culture," the Irish tenors-Anthony Kearns, Ronan Tynan and Finbar Wright (not as fat as the Italian ones)-are twirlin' their shamrocks at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (the thinking person's Madison Square Garden) where they'll sing from their new album, Heritage . We, meanwhile, will be safely sequestered at home, watching college B-ball ( "March Madness" ), chugging some vile brew with our favorite leprechauns. Avoid midtown at all costs.

[Irish Tenors, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, 1 Center Street, Newark, N.J., 8 p.m., 888-GO-NJPAC; March Madness, www.espn.com for schedule.]

Thursday 18th

Where is the Love? The celebrity train wreck that is Courtney Love screeches into the Bowery Ballroom-better duck! The pallid songbird shoved us out of the way at Coral Room a few months back (not cool, Court!) and tonight will sing ditties like "All the Drugs" and "Teenage Whore" -just the thing to convince that judge to reinstate custody of her daughter, eh? When your temple starts to really throb, head downtown for a battle of the fashion houses. In one corner, designer Cynthia Rowley ("zany," hangs out with Rick Marin wife Ilene Rosenweig), who's marked off her spring line 10 percent and is serving cocktails ( hic! ) to make you shop faster. In the other corner, clothes jockey Tommy Hilfiger , who is launching his new "premium" apparel line (which reminds us: How funny was it watching him get p*ssed on Rich Girls when he found that Ralph Lauren skirt in daughter Aly's closet?). But, anyway, the line will be called "H Hilfiger," and Carol Alt (big model back in the 1980's, when we were in the womb), Miss U.S.A. Susie Castillo and someone from Third Watch are gonna model it for ya …. Also, it's Awkward Moments Day! Like that time we tried to donate our pleather hot pants to a clothing drive … ouch.

[Courtney Love, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey Street, 10 p.m., 212-533-2111; Cynthia Rowley sale, 376 Bleecker Street boutique, 6 to 9 p.m., 212-242-3803; H Hilfiger launch, Macy's Herald Square, 151 West 34th Street, 6:30 p.m., 212-695-4400.]

Friday 19th

MoMA Maria: Is it just us, or has there been no movie with true "gotta see that" pull for, oh, about six months? Anyone else just taking a pass on The Passion of the Christ ? Anyhoo … if you're still behind on all the Oscar-nominated flicks, MoMA is rescreening The Cooler , starring the pudgy Alec Baldwin and blondie Maria Bello (sort of Diane Lane meets Liz Phair)-girlfriend lets it all hang out in this one …. Meanwhile, the many dog-mad denizens of Manhattan rush to sign up for a "Best Friends Weekend" in the Catskills, sponsored by the Blue Sky Dogs canine adventure company-a sort of Outward Bound for the pooch set , except not quite as taxing. "It includes really nice accommodations at a B&B where they'll be able to bring their dog everywhere-downstairs in the living room, sleeping with them in their bed , anywhere!" said Tammy McCarley , 32, Blue Sky Dogs founder and N.Y.U. sports-management expert. "Well, within reason, of course-and provided they're really well-behaved. Like if your dog is accustomed to jumping up on the kitchen table while people are eating, that's not going to work." Dog-friendly hikes, goodie bags, charming country auctions-it all goes down in Fleischmanns, apparently a town in upstate New York. Bucolic bonus incentive, according to Ms. McCarley: "There's like a maple-syrup festival going on in the area." Suh- weet !

[Best Friends Weekend, the Catskill Mountains, River Run Bed and Breakfast Inn, Fleischmanns, N.Y., 212-531-DOGS; The Cooler , MoMA Film at the Gramercy Theatre, 127 East 23rd Street, 2 p.m., 212-777-4900.]

Saturday 20th

Vernal equinox: Look, it's a national holiday in Japan, O.K.? Also, a hippie thing. Super-early this morning, our very own urban shaman, Donna Henes , hosts a drumming circle and egg-balancing celebration on the docks, so get out those cotton socks and shapeless Marimekko shifts …. After you've returned your bongos to storage and threaded the beads and tofu crumbs out of your hair, make a muscle and head to the Big Apple Grapple championships at the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, hosted by the New York Arm Wrestling Association . Before you start doing keg-stands with sailors on the West Side, pack off your spoiled children to the Children's Museum to get skinny and spiritual at a kids' yoga class (there is something deeply disturbing about kids doing yoga-but then again, there is also something deeply disturbing about fully grown adults carrying around play mats and plastic Nalgene bottles) …. Then take a deep cleansing breath for the Black Party , some mysterious 18-hour pagan ritual. Lord, where's Susanne Bartsch when you need her?

[29th Annual World Famous Vernal Equinox Celebration: A New Pink Moon Equinox, bring drums, noisemakers and spirit, South Street Seaport, Pier 16, 1 a.m., (1:49 a.m. equinox); Big Apple Grapple, Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, West 46th Street at Hudson River Park, free with regular museum admission, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; YogaKids, 2, 3 and 4 p.m. sessions, Children's Museum of Manhattan, 212 West 83rd Street, 212-721-1234; Rites XXV: The Black Party, 11 p.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, Roseland Ballroom, 239 West 52nd Street, 212-674-8541.]

Sunday 21st

Spring it on, baby! It's the first day of spring -time to bust out our little pleated skirts, to male editors' eternal delight and confusion …. Off Broadway, a bawdy new play called Seeking Eden opens. The plot: The largest snowstorm in history rages outside a small American town, but a lesbian named Eve Gentile must keep her family's porn shop, the Garden of Eden Pleasure Palace, open-because famous porn star Lily Luscious is scheduled to sign autographs later that evening. Ms. Gentile awaits Ms. Luscious' arrival while in the company of her Elvis-impersonating stepbrother, Chester the Molester , and a septuagenarian college professor. (Excuse us while we tamp our fevered brow.) "It was inspired by this mom-and-pop porn shop I worked at during college, " said writer and Brandeis alumna Sheila Morgan, 33. "A lot of the characters are based on people I knew while I was working there. The professor was inspired by an old man who kinda came in regularly once or twice a week. I thought it was really endearing how very unapologetic he was about it. He didn't make any bones about why he was there, and I thought it was refreshing. He's a nice example of the more progressive amongst the older generation, which can often be pegged as being anal-er, uptight-about sex." There's also an abused wife, Mary, on whom Eve has a big crush. "I see Eve, Lily and Mary as representing the three halves of womanhood," said Ms. Morgan, clearly not a math major. "I didn't want to pound the religious motif over people's head, but Lily represents the first truly independent woman -for which she was exiled from paradise. That tells us a lot about the patriarchal society we're living under."

[ Seeking Eden, the Trilogy Theatre, 341 West 44th Street, second floor, 8 p.m., 212-352-3101.]

Monday 22nd

Bloom booms: But first! A final Sex and the City aftershock (gentle reminder: um, that TV show owes its existence to a column in this newspaper?): Producer Darren Star , who also unleashed Brian Austin Green into the collective female consciousness, comes to lecture at the Museum of Television and Radio. Ask him why all the male actors on the program were so hideous. Then leave five minutes early and scurry down to the "Villahge," where prof Harold Bloom will be sighing wistfully and discussing "Theatre and Religion: The World's Oldest Couple" with Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner (who makes a very nice couple indeed with Mark Harris, the sole brain on the Entertainment Weekly masthead). Congratulate Mr. Bloom for surviving Naomi Wolfe's self-publicizing fatwa , then allez-vite to L'Alliance Française,whereauthor Salman Rushdie is hosting some kind of reading-with hors d'oeuvres by the bewitching Padma (one can only hope!).

["The Imagination of Darren Star," 6 to 7:30 p.m., Museum of Television and Radio, 25 West 52nd Street, $15; Harold Bloom and Tony Kushner: "Theatre and Religion: The World's Oldest Couple," the Jack H. Skirball Center at N.Y.U., 566 La Guardia Place at Washington Square Park, 7:30 p.m.,

212-992-8484; Walter Mosley and Chris Abani, hosted by Salman Rushdie with a reading by Alfre Woodard, Florence Gould Hall, L'Alliance Française, 55 East 59th Street, 7 p.m., 212-355-6160.]

Tuesday 23rd

Gail force: New York Times editorial-board editor Gail Collins joins publishing types Dawn Davis, Anne Messitte and Lynn Goldberg on a panel of "Women to Watch" sponsored by the Women's National Book Association , oft confused with the lady B-ball team …. Ask Ms. Collins where exactly she's stashed Maureen Dowd's brain for the past three years, and feel the empowerment! Later, put on your deconstructed tutus at a benefit for the Stephen Petronio Company's 20th anniversary, organized by Imitation of Christ designer Tara Subkoff , artist Cindy Sherman (women's studies majors at Radcliffe love her; we say she's more self-referential than Dawson's Creek ), and whale zealot/NASA artist-in-residence Laurie Anderson (also her husband, the wrinkly, low-key hunk Lou Reed ). On the program: The Island of Misfit Toys , which is where we'll feel we've landed if we're seated alongside that old smoothie, Mikhail Baryshnikov , at the private dinner afterward …. Nutcrack this, baby!

["Women to Watch," Time and Life Building, 1271 Sixth Avenue, eighth-floor auditorium, 6 p.m., 212-452-9690; the Stephen Petronio Dance Company 20th Anniversary, performance at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth

Avenue, 8 p.m., 212-242-0800.]

Wednesday 24th

Film snobs! The New Directors/New Films festival opens at Lincoln Center with Jim McKay's Everyday People , something about Brooklyn-hey, it totally wowed the spoiled trust-fund jerks at Sundance! If that's sold out, hit the ever-reliable 92nd Street Y for a dismal-sounding seminar on "Using Internet Dating Sites to Find Love and Romance," taught by Men's Health columnist Ron Geraci. But if Ron really knows how to get you laid, he'd tell you to get the hell off the Internet and sprint to Soho House, where New York's most eligible Jewish bachelor, Eric Richman , is hosting a night of comedy along with lady comic Becky Veduccio . (Geez, how fast did it take for the once-exclusive Soho House to become Catch a Rising Star?) "English people are so dull in New York because they don't do the same amount of coke as they would in London," Mr. Richman told us. Now that's funny! Later, Nylon magazine -the New Yorker of the supermodel set-has a fifth-anniversary party with a black-tie carnival theme. Go on stilts.

[New Directors/New Film festival, Everyday People , Alice Tully Hall, Broadway and 65th Street, 212-777-4900; Ron Geraci seminar, 92nd Street Y, $30; Comedy Hour, 8 to 9:30 p.m., Soho House, 29-35 Ninth Avenue, members only; Nylon 's fifth anniversary, Marquee, 289 10th Avenue between 26th and 27th streets, 9 p.m. to midnight, by invitation only.]