Ellen Feldman’s “Next to Love” is an appealing and swiftly moving historical novel. The book leaves its mark through careful attention to detail along with a keen tracking of the emotional current that runs through the lives of the characters during and in the wake of World War II.

“Next to Love”

Ellen Feldman

Spiegel & Grau, $25

    The story emerges chronologically, following three women — Babe, Grace, and Millie — from December of 1941 through to August of 1964. Three friends from the same small town, they send their men off to the war, each coping with different circumstances. Babe marries just before her husband ships out; Grace is left with a young child at home; Millie is pregnant, to give birth to a son her husband will never make it home to see.

    So too, they cope with different interior spaces, different senses of self, different outlooks that at least in part determine the tone of their experiences of the war and of the losses associated with it.

    Babe is a smart go-getter who is frustrated by the social constraints of being a woman and aware of the social realities of coming from the wrong side of the tracks in the small world of a small town. Her husband returns from the war physically wounded and psychologically deeply scarred. Grace is a tightly wound beauty who cracks under the pressure of holding it all together yet recovers and holds it together still. She loses her husband — her protector, her life — in the war and struggles mightily to find a place of comfort in the world. Millie is a sweetheart who lives in the shadow of her parents’ untimely deaths but retains an attitude toward life that is at once pragmatic and optimistic. Her husband dies in the war as well, but she quickly remarries and moves forward in a new relationship.

    The sections of the book are divided to focus alternately on Babe, Grace, and Millie so that the life issues and events of each woman in a given chunk of time are compared and contrasted with those of the others. These women are friends and fellow travelers; their lives are intermingled. But they approach their challenges differently, carry their burdens ever so differently. They share and do not share experience. They share and do not share perspective.

    Sketched out over the course of 20-odd years, the book is a sum of scenes artfully sewn together to form the landscape of how these three women fare as the wives of soldiers, then in the long aftermath of the war, and then in the territory beyond.

    Societal trends and social issues of the period, especially those facing women, are tracked through the lens of the three main characters’ lives. For example, Babe goes to work during the war but must leave her job to give it over to a man when the soldiers come home. She struggles to find meaning as a homemaker and eventually finds fulfillment working in the civil rights movement.

    Also mapping out the novel are the themes of love, sex, and loss. Ms. Feldman carries these themes along in the sweep of a broad historical sketch, and at times, moving as it does so quickly through time, the book feels a bit as if it’s trotting out examples. Yet Ms. Feldman more often manages to dwell in specificity, exploring love, sex, and loss in their deep organic relationships to her characters’ experiences.

    Taking Babe again as an example, the scene of her first sexual encounter with her husband-to-be is tied to the impending loss of his departure for war, and later, when he returns, their sex life is warped by his loss of the embracing of life, a wage of his depleting experience in the war. Ms. Feldman’s line into Babe’s emotional connection to the surfacing and resurfacing of themes gives the novel an infusion of life.

    Even within the demands of reaching and well-researched historical fiction, Ms. Feldman writes with insight into the feelings and struggles of her characters. As a work of faithfully wrought historical fiction, “Next to Love” feels accurate. As a novel chronicling love, loss, and the passage of time, it feels real.

—

    Ellen Feldman’s previous books include, most recently, “Scottsboro.” She has a house in East Hampton.

    Evan Harris is the author of “The Quit.” She lives in East Hampton with her husband and two sons.

    The Hamptons International Film Festival always provides a lively time for attendees and an intense creative atmosphere for filmmakers. With lots of chatter and endless parties to attend, it is surprising more filmmakers don’t fall in love.

    One couple that did in 2005, Gabriel Nussbaum and Elizabeth Wood, are back in East Hampton to show their respective short films, in his case “How It Ended” and in hers “Loft.” They have since been married, in Amagansett in 2009 at his parents’ house, and have started their own production company, Bank Street Films. His parents are Jeremy Nussbaum and Charline Spektor, who own the BookHampton chain of bookstores on the South Fork.

    In 2007, the couple produced a documentary together based on their work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, “Wade in the Water Children.” The films here this year are rather different. Both feature somewhat intense psycho-sexual situations and have rather unusual denouements. Each is satisfyingly punchy in its delivery and economy of storytelling.

    Mr. Nussbaum’s is based on a James Salter short story and was filmed in his parents’ house and the American Hotel. A comfortable couple, whose female half is obviously very sick, invite a younger woman friend to dinner and take part in what is expected to be their final act as a couple. What appears to be a straightforward tear-jerker, however, comes with some rather tart plot twists.

    In “Loft,” Ms. Wood explores the distance that occurs between couples who seem to have everything going for them from the outside and the strange closeness that can occur between strangers. A beautiful apartment in a sketchy Brooklyn neighborhood takes a central role as what holds a couple together but could also be its undoing. The film is a treatment for a larger project and is intriguing enough to leave an audience wanting more.

    “Loft” will screen in East Hampton on Saturday at 10:45 p.m. and Monday at 8:45 p.m. “How It Ended,” which is part of the East End Shorts program, will be screened in East Hampton on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. and Monday at 6:30 p.m.

More Plein Air at Ashawagh

    Springs residents and other gallery followers can again take in plein-air paintings by South Fork artists at Ashawagh Hall, this time from the Plein Air Peconic group, which is associated with the Peconic Land Trust. The show begins tomorrow.

    Plein-air painting is art inspired by direct observation of a landscape, in this case farmland, salt marshes, beaches, and other places, many of which have been preserved through the efforts of the Peconic Land Trust. Plein Air Peconic, which also includes photographers, is made up of Casey Chalem Anderson, Susan D’Alessio, Aubrey Grainger, Gail Kern, Michele Margit, Gordon Matheson, Joanne Rosko, Eileen Dawn Skretch, Tom Steele, Kathryn Szoka, and Ellen Watson.

    The reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. There will also be a coffee talk with the artists on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The show will be up through Monday, and a portion of the sales will benefit the Peconic Land Trust. A selection of smaller, moderately priced works will also be part of the exhibit.

“On Loop” at Halsey McKay

    The Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton will show Arielle Falk’s video installation “On Loop” beginning Saturday with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m.

    According to the gallery, the installation is inspired by a childhood memory reinterpreted through the lens of Jacques Lacan’s concept of “objet petit a,” defined by Lacan as “any object that sets desire in motion.” Yet, it is also an object that can never be obtained.

    For Ms. Falk, it is the idea of chasing as an end in itself, as in a childhood game she recalled playing in which she chased a friend around a tree. The game to her is a “perfect metaphor for the fact that we, as humans, go through our lives searching for a chimerical something (objet petit a) and are forever wrapped up in endless loops of desire.”

     There are two videos in the installation. One recaptures the spirit of the chase game and the other shows the artist capturing the images for the first video, circling the tree over and over again.

    Ms. Falk was born in Washington, D.C., and now lives in Brooklyn. She has had a performance piece in Union Square in Manhattan and has shown her work internationally.

Temple Gallery Opens

    Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor will exhibit Annette Heller’s Kabbalah series of paintings starting Sunday with a reception from 3 to 5 p.m. Ms. Heller, an Abstract Expressionist artist from East Hampton, has made 10 mixed-media canvases to represent the 10 symbols of the mystical philosophy based in the Jewish tradition.

    The new gallery space at the temple will be devoted to art with Jewish and biblical themes or work by Jewish artists who were inspired by Jewish, religious, or secular themes, a release said. In addition to Ms. Heller, three other artists will have work in the show.

East Hamptoners at Findlay

    The David Findlay Jr. Gallery in Manhattan is showing work by South Fork artists during the month of October.

    They are Herman Cherry, John Ferren, Ibram Lassaw, Kyle Morris, John Opper, Alfonso Ossorio, Philip Pavia, Robert Richenburg, and David Slivka, who found their way to the South Fork as much for the community of artists already here as for the beauty of the landscape. As abstract painters they took elements of their experiences and communicated them as discrete parts or a blurred whole.

    In an essay for the brochure, Helen Harrison, the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, wrote, “For these painters and sculptors, the unifying creative principle was a devotion to subjective expression.”

    The exhibit is on view through Oct. 22 at 724 Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.

Who’da thunk Franz Kafka would have said, “All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.” Maybe his translator spelled dog backward by mistake. On second thought, perhaps it’s a fitting observation from the creator of several of literature’s most tortured souls.      

Bill Henderson, founder of the Pushcart Press, contemplates the dog-God connection in his just-published memoir, “All My Dogs: A Life” — this and much more.       

    Lulu, Max, Opie, Charlie, Airport, Sophie, Rocky, Ellen, the Mayor of Bridgehampton, Snopes, Earl, Duke, and Trixie, the dogs of Mr. Henderson’s life — not counting his current companions, Franny and Sedgwick — are guide dogs that have allowed the author to traverse the bumpy human coil while maintaining a communion with the beauty, innocence, and sense of adventure he knew as a boy in Penn Wynne, Pa.

    “I never could live without dogs, at least not well. In my dogless years I was busy and ambitious but half alive . . . it’s about steady, honest, and unconditional love — which is the virtue of many faiths, both secular and traditional — which is why I stay close to my dogs and my faith.”

    Fear not. “All My Dogs” ain’t sappy. Those who have read Mr. Henderson before — “His Son,” “Her Father,” “Tower,” and “Simple Gifts” — know his Twainish humor and clarity of voice. There are scenes in this 145-page gem that bring Jean Shepherd’s “A Christmas Story” to mind, Huck Finn, too, an American boy reluctantly coming of age.

    In the introduction, Mr. Henderson notes that his is not the first dog memoir. He draws inspiration from a few other writers, Mark Doty, author of “Dog Days,” a favorite. It was Mr. Doty who wrote, “Love for a wordless creature, once it takes hold, is an enchantment, and the enchanted speak, famously, in private mutterings, cryptic riddles, or gibberish. . . . How on earth can I stand at the requisite distance to say anything that might matter?”

    Mr. Henderson finds the requisite distance and uses it to take us through his life from the boy in Penn Wynne with his observant Presbyterian dad, collection of snakes, frogs, and other creatures from the nearby woods, school, the McCarthy hearings, a patient mother, a famous blue couch, and first dog, Trixie.

    Duke was the second with whom the author explored the marshland of Ocean City, N.J., where “wilderness still had a few years to go.” The marsh was protected by the Henderson Game Commission with Duke the enforcer, and it was where Duke and his master came upon a dead dog — death for the first time. Sex reared its mysterious head about this time, and philosophy, and Duke’s archenemy, Dagger, from across the street.

    Mr. Henderson writes about his dogless years, which began in 1959 when he left Duke behind to attend Hamilton College, Harvard grad school (a short stay), a Parisian garret, an ex-nun first wife, his disgust with dog-dismissing philosophers, a crib on Bleecker Street, the start of the Pushcart Press, and a “slouching hound” named Snopes he inherited when his mother passed away but not before he promised her a baby.

    The chapter titled “The Ballad of Ellen & Rocky” is one of several sections of the book in which the innocence of wordless creatures cuts through the confusion and trials of human experience and shines a forgiving light (a holy light?) upon them. Mr. Henderson doesn’t hit you over the head with this. The events, which I will not divulge here except to say they involve a move to East Hampton, a woman, a breakup, a canine tragedy, and a humbling, speak for themselves.

“All My Dogs”

Bill Henderson

David R. Godine, $19.95

    Then comes a dancing yellow Lab and an unexpected child. “Love is a word that only children and dogs say truly. For the rest of us, love is corrupted every day by a cynical culture and our own never-ending qualifications.” Sophie dies and the sadness is replaced by Opie, a beagle with papers, the son of Bruno, the Duke of Eqununk, and Lady Sand Pebbles III, a handful. Pushcart grows, as does a wooden tower the author constructs on a hilltop in Maine.

    The book contains wonderful passages like Mr. Henderson’s description of how “Pushcart Press occupied the space under my bachelor’s double bed. The bed filled most of the apartment and was supported by boxes of books. In good weeks, the bed sank closer to the floor as orders left . . . in bad weeks, when unsold books were returned, the bed rose again, sometimes at an awkward angle.”      

    And when his daughter asked:

    “How do crickets sing, Dad?”

    “Well, they rub their legs together —”

    “But how does that make music?”      

    Long ago I had wondered about that too. But time had passed, and I forgot to wonder, just as time rushed over the people buried in this cemetery and over the three of us sitting on this hillside watching for brief, sudden passages of light.

    “I don’t know,” I said.

    “The Hymn of Lulu & Max” is the last chapter. Mr. Henderson tells of becoming reunited with the boy Bill Henderson in the Maine woods alongside Lulu. I will save the almost supernatural but troubling coincidence that takes place as well as the much-needed revelatory “force” felt not long after the author’s last hike in Maine with Lulu “into a gold October valley, over maroon blueberry fields to the Frost Pond. Lulu swam, and I just lay on the field and watched the clear sun-washed sky and wondered if anything would ever be this perfect again.”

    A book agent friend of mine told me recently that a novel had to be at least 300 pages long. I thought this would disappoint the author of “The Old Man and the Sea” and other shorter novels, and it got me thinking about the book biz in general.      

    The agent was obviously speaking about what publishers wanted to see in a novel, that being pages enough to be marketed as one. Has it really come to that? I had a professor who once warned us against wordiness. He joked that he might start grading our papers according to their weight. He’d throw them out the window and the first one to hit the ground would receive an F.     

     Bill Henderson’s short memoir gets an A, a brilliant book with a deep, grateful bow to the wordless creatures among us.

—

    Bill Henderson lives in Springs.

    While the focus of a film festival might be its opening, centerpiece, and closing films, four days is a long time to fill with programming. The Hamptons International Film Festival will augment these selections with its films in competition, a selection of innovative and well-received international offerings, and with an assortment of “Spotlight” films, typically movies that have a distributor and are due to be released in the next few weeks or months.

    Holly Herrick, a programmer and special programs producer for the festival, said on Monday that while the major studios are spending less time and money on films that are not ready-made franchises, they are also paying attention to ones that march to their own drummer. “Sure, there’s always a ‘Kung Fu Panda 17,’ enough already, but there is still the great stuff out there,” she said.

    These are films made with independent investors, “not produced from day one by the studios, but are getting studio distribution now.” It may be one of the reasons why buying at film festivals has picked up in the past year or so. And the resulting films appear to be very strong.

    In addition to the opening-night film, “Jeff, Who Lives at Home,” the centerpiece film, “Like Crazy,” the Southampton opener, “Butter,” and the closing-night film, “The Artist,” a number of the spotlight films bring some intriguing buzz and much anticipation to this year’s event.

    In just the last few days, the festival has picked up some exciting additions. They include “Shame,” the latest offering from the British director Steve McQueen. “It’s a real thrill to be able to show this film,” said Ms. Herrick. It won three awards at the Venice Festival, including best film and best actor for Michael Fassbender. “It’s a film people will be talking about for a long time.” (Friday, Oct. 14, 5 p.m. at Guild Hall, and Oct. 16, 7 p.m. at Sag Harbor.)            The festival also picked up “Deep Blue Sea,” starring Rachel Weisz, about a love triangle in post-World War II England, from a play by Terence Rattigan and directed by Terence Davies. (Friday, Oct. 14, 7:15 p.m. UA2, and Oct. 15, 8 p.m., UA1.) Ms. Herrick said Ms. Weisz’s performance was “stunning.”

    Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants” will be shown on Oct. 17 with Shailene Woodley, one of its stars and a festival “breakthrough performer,” in attendance. She plays the daughter of George Clooney in a story about a family trying to sort out its problems on the island of Kauai. (Oct. 17, 7:30 p.m. at Guild Hall)    

    Some other highlights:

    “Melancholia” is the latest film by the Danish director Lars von Trier, who was declared persona non grata at the Cannes Film Festival last spring for his incendiary comments about understanding and sympathizing with Adolf Hitler. According to a critic for The Guardian newspaper, while the director has courted controversy both recently and in the past, the film does not. It is said to be “a stunningly realized tale of two sisters coming to terms with an impending apocalypse. It’s his most emotionally honest work in years.” (Friday, Oct. 14, at 6:30 p.m. at UA1, and Oct. 16, noon, at UA2, East Hampton.)

    Wim Wenders, another acclaimed European director of such films as “Wings of Desire” and “The Buena Vista Social Club,” has made his latest film in 3D. It is a documentary that follows the Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble and its director and choreographer, the late Pina Bausch, as they perform some of their most iconic dances, in spaces ranging from a school gym to a water-drenched stage. “Pina in 3D” is the culmination of Mr. Wenders’s and Ms. Bausch’s collaboration. (Oct. 16, 5:30 p.m. at UA2.)

    Ralph Fiennes directs his first film in “Coriolanus,” a strange and particularly violent Shakespeare play set in the present. The film stars Mr. Fiennes, Gerard Butler, and Vanessa Redgrave. The Guardian praised Mr. Fiennes’s traditionalist approach for its “clarity and intelligence.” (Oct. 15, 9 p.m., Sag Harbor, and Oct. 16, 2 p.m. in Montauk.)

    In “The Rum Diary,” Johnny Depp draws on his portrayal of Hunter S. Thompson, 13 years after playing him in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” In this case, his role is “Paul Kemp,” a freelance writer in an early novel of Thompson’s, set in Puerto Rico with the usual complications. Bruce Robinson adapted the novel and directed it for the screen. (Oct. 15, 8:45 p.m. at UA2, and Oct. 16, 8 p.m. at Southampton.)

    “Another Happy Day,” starring Ellen Barkin, Kate Bosworth, Ellen Burstyn, Demi Moore, and another “breakthrough performer,” Ezra Miller, won an award at Sundance for best screenplay. It is about a homecoming and a coming-to-terms with a family’s demons on the eve of a wedding. (Oct. 15, 5:15 p.m., at UA1, and Oct. 16, noon, in Southampton.)

    Martin Donovan, who has had a long and consistent career playing small roles in big pictures and big roles in small ones, is directing his own screenplay in “Collaborator,” in which he also stars. The film won a best-actor award for Mr. Donovan’s co-star David Morse at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic in July. Fans of Mr. Donovan’s performances in Hal Hartley’s early films set on Long Island will find some similarities to Mr. Hartley’s line delivery, according to a review in Variety. (Oct. 15 at 7:30 p.m. in UA4, and Oct. 16, 5:15 p.m., in UA5.)

    “We Need to Talk about Kevin,” starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, deals with a mother’s anguish and ambivalence in the wake of her troubled son’s participation in a school shooting. The film premiered in Cannes and has been generating positive festival buzz ever since. It features Ezra Miller, another “breakthrough performer,” as Kevin. (Friday, Oct. 14, 9:45 p.m. at UA2, and Oct. 15, 6:45 p.m., at UA3.)

    “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” a directorial debut for Sean Durkin, has earned good reviews since its premiere at Sundance, where it was also developed. The film focuses on Elizabeth Olsen’s performance as the title character, Martha, who has earned her other names from a cult she joined in the Catskills. The film follows her life there and her escape to her sister’s house, where she begins to understand what has happened to her. (Friday, Oct. 14, 9:30 p.m. at UA1, and Oct. 17, 9 p.m. at UA1.)

    Other films to watch for include starring roles for Orlando Bloom in a suspenseful medical drama called “The Good Doctor” (next Thursday at 4:45 p.m. at UA2), Emily Watson in “Oranges and Sunshine” (Oct. 15, 3:45 p.m. in Southampton, and Oct. 16, 6:45 p.m. at UA3), Lauren Ambrose in “Think of Me” (Oct. 15, 9:30 p.m. at UA3, and Oct. 16, 8 p.m. at UA4), and Ethan Hawke and Kristen Scott Thomas in “The Woman in the Fifth” (Friday, Oct. 14, 9:30 p.m. in Southampton, and Oct. 16, 2:30 p.m at UA1). Still more films may be added before the festival begins; they will be posted on the Web site hamptonsfilmfest.org. The cost for Spotlight films is $27.

    The title of Kevin Breslin’s documentary, “Living for 32,” has a haunting derivation. In April of 2007, Colin Goddard was a 21-year-old student majoring in international affairs at Virginia Tech. On the morning of the 16th, a mentally unstable student named Seung-Hui Cho strode through the campus armed with a handgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

    Before he took his own life, the gunman killed 32 people and wounded 17. Mr. Goddard was shot five times and lived. It was the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in United States history, an event that once again brought America’s obsession with guns into sharp focus. 

    “He played a unique role. He grabbed a cellphone and called the cops,” Mr. Breslin said of Mr. Goddard during a telephone interview on Sunday. After being shot, Mr. Goddard gave the phone to Emily Haas, a fellow student who maintained communication with the 911 operator. “He kept his wits about him. He was young and strong, that and God were on his side,” Mr. Breslin said. The courageous effort saved lives.

    Mr. Breslin’s career began nearly two decades ago as a director and producer of television commercials and public service announcements. Then, his two short films about the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center were premiered on the Oxygen Network. “A Smile Gone, But Where?” made with his father, the columnist Jimmy Breslin, and the “Women of Rockaway,” drew critical acclaim. “The Women of Rockaway” won a New York City Film and Television Award in 2007.

    “A year and a half ago I was asked to make public service announcements for the Brady Campaign for Sensible Gun Laws, a group formed by James Brady, White House press secretary, who was shot in an attemped assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981.”

    “Colin was working with them. We were making two 30-second commercials. I was listening. I thought, 30 seconds, nothing.”

    The filmmaker and Maria Cuomo Cole, sister of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, saw a documentary. “After we filmed, Maria and I said ‘Let’s make this thing.’ We went to Virginia Tech in January, ended in April. We sent it to festivals in May, Sundance, Nashville, Tribeca, and now the Hamptons.”

    “We tried to make a compelling story about who he is, and the drama that took place in that classroom. Colin always believed he was in the right place at the right time, so he’s made it his mission to keep going with this message for a while.”

    “It’s not a message film per se. It’s an original story, one young man’s point of view. These things can be overdone. The hardest part was gaining the trust of Colin. He was shot so many times. He goes back in his mind, about losing people, ‘Where do I go from here? People say I should have been armed.’ So I just let the story go. It more than aptly speaks for itself, but there’s sophistication in that. You’re subtle with everything.”

    “Colin’s trying to improve the gun laws in this country. He rejects the premise it can’t be done. Over a million people have been killed in this country since Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated in 1968.”

    The short film was directed by Mr. Breslin, and produced by Ms. Cuomo Cole. The cinematographer was Luca Fantini. It was edited by Garrett Sergeant with music supervised by Joel Martin.

    Mr. Breslin knows the Hamptons. He’s a longtime surfer who first visited Montauk in search of waves in the late 1960s. These days he gets in the water closer to home at 91st Street in Rockaway Beach.

    “Living for 32” was short-listed for an Academy Award. It was selected by the prestigious Silverdocs documentary festival this year as well as the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

    In East Hampton it will be screened on Friday, Oct. 14, at 2:30 p.m. and on Oct. 15 at 8:15 p.m., both at the East Hampton Cinema, as part of the film festival’s Golden Starfish Short Film Competition.

    “Maybe people out there will be interested. People carry guns in East Hampton, too,” Mr. Breslin said. 

    More and more I think it is the effort of the pruner that makes the garden, forms its good posture and lineaments, defines its future course of behavior in the way an editor (a good one) grooms a manuscript and renders it viable. A pair of shears, the secateur, is the gardener’s essential blue pencil and the pre-eminent way of ridding his labors of error.

    In a letter to Elizabeth Ephrussi, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “. . . it is not the gardener who is encouraging and caring who helps, but the one with the pruning shears and spade; the rebuke!” The shears and the spade (one could include the saw and the pitchfork) censure here and, by doing so, encourage there. Depending on their manipulation, they can be wise or stupid, adroit or blundering.

    At times, a bit of fine prose may lead to a fine garden or doggerel too, in the same way that a little ditty may end as an aria or even a symphony. Consider a chance encounter at a street corner: “. . . that, suddenly, she stood there, after all those years, in a red, sloping hat and a pale blue scarf loosely tied at her throat, as if in a dream, as if. . . .” And there you have the planting, a ruby-hued Japanese tree peony above a stream of azure squill.

    A phrase can be that clearing in the wood, a great opening caused by the fall of an old tree in a storm, loss becoming gain, as leaf fall turns to mulch, mulch to soil, soil to leaf again, the round of seasons, flowers, produce, over and over again, thick roots the prose of it all, the rest ceaseless poetry.

    The garden is painting the same way it is music and sculpture, song and opera. All of the arts, dance included, feed it. It is, in its excess, as vulgar and repellent as grand opera produced and performed without sensitivity and intelligence. Unrestrained, it is a performance unwarranted, ugly to the eye, entirely inexcusable.

    Without control and chastening, the garden may be thought of as an unruly orchestra, composed of musicians each one deluded into thinking he is a soloist. Sometimes they are as a result of obsessive gardeners, themselves in need of amendment. Think of the all-grass garden, the all-rose garden, the gardens in which daylilies predominate, gardens designed for butterflies, hummingbirds, or frogs, gardens on Shakespearean misconceptions, Bible gardens, moss gardens, “Oriental” gardens, “native plants” gardens . . . the list is, alas, quite long and their result very much like an orchestra composed only of flutes or kettledrums. Very much like the corps de ballet in chaos as each dancer pounds toward the center of the stage to do a solo way, way before their training warrants it.

    (I think I have been too mild with all of this.)

    By every indication, it would appear that Steve Haweeli always had a fulfilling life and career. Those who follow his comings and goings on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and foursquare envy even his table-hopping and ocean-plunging posts. He’s somewhat tightly wound, but his easy smile is evidence of a busy man who is obviously having a very good time.

    Yet every once in a while, in a quieter moment, he hears voices. It’s not often, but when it happens it typically means a life-changing development is afoot. Relaxing for the moment in what was once his basement and is now his studio, Mr. Haweeli acknowledges it is unusual, but his success speaks for its prescience.

    In its latest manifestation, responding to the voice has meant painting, an odd métier for someone who never picked up a brush before 2007, he recalled last month. “I said, ‘You’re kidding me, I can’t paint. I can’t even draw.’ ” But the voice was resolute and persistent. It told him to buy art supplies, so he did. He wasn’t even sure of what to purchase, but he walked out of the store with $100 in paint, brushes, tools, and canvases, and two days later he had his first painting. It hangs above his office desk.

    A huge admirer of Willem de Kooning, he was actually crying in front of one of his paintings in Madrid two weeks before he himself was inspired to paint. He often uses the same palette as his hero, in abstracted landscapes based on his experience of the South Fork. Other times, he goes more symbolic, finding crosses and their history as a vessel for meaning, a recurrent motif. Those paintings tend to be more muted or flatter even as he builds up the layers of paint with a palette knife or other blunt object.

    Seeing that he lives on the South Fork, and in Springs no less, where every other house has probably seen its share of artist residents, pursuing art might not be all that unusual. Except Mr. Haweeli not only paints, he sells what he has painted — a rarer bird indeed. He has participated in some group shows and has been given solo shows at Outeast Gallery in Montauk and his alma mater, Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. “I’ve had a lot of success selling art.”

    Perhaps it is because he really enjoys it. “I liked how it felt, putting paint on canvas. I liked moving around, expressing myself.” Maybe it is all the time he spends outside, swimming in the bay and fishing, that gives him a unique vantage point on what is compelling about these surroundings on a visceral level. Nonetheless, he credits Karyn Mannix for “discovering” him last year when he decided to participate in the “Love and Passion” show she presents at Ashawagh Hall every February. She has included him in her shows ever since. The next one will be at Ashawagh Hall on Nov. 5.

    The first time Mr. Haweeli heard the voice, in 1992, it inspired him to start WordHampton, his public relations firm. But that “weird, clear, and, frankly, audible” voice made sense to him, he said, even if he had not come to the industry from a predictable route.

    He started in New York City in the late 1980s, when he was a bartender looking for a way to have his patrons follow him to a new job. He developed what proved to be his first piece of direct mail, notifying his friends and clients of his new employer’s address. The new boss saw the leaflet and asked him to send out a few more for him.

    Before he knew it, Mr. Haweeli had a mailing list that included major SoHo art galleries and the New York City Chamber of Commerce. He soon found himself offering his services to other establishments “below 14th, above Canal, west of Broadway. I told them, I have a letter and a mailing list, and I can put fannies in your seats.”

    “I never studied communications. I never worked at an agency,” he said. “Someone asked me how to write a press release and I said, ‘What’s that?’ That I got attention from that first release was cool. I was getting paid for writing!”

    In 1991, he was hired for Nick and Toni’s expanded restaurant space here. The new site had a wood-burning oven and a bar. “I came with the bar,” he said with a chuckle. He spent six years as bar manager at the restaurant, but he also launched WordHampton, with Nick and Toni’s as his first account.

    Since then, the agency has expanded to include clients all over the East End as well as UpIsland, and broadened its base to real estate and lifestyle companies. Mr. Haweeli’s key to success is a relatively simple but often overlooked approach: “Present solid information in a timely manner. If a member of the media needs something, get it to them complete and well prepared, and be nice.”

    He is now using social media to reach out both to WordHampton clients and fans of his art. An invitation to join him on Facebook is on his artist Web site. He called himself an “early adopter,” having enlisted clients to try the new platforms as early as January 2008, just about when Facebook was hitting the mainstream.

    Now, the whole business model has changed. “More and more people are accessed through handheld devices than a desktop computer,” let alone the old paper press release. “The message has changed. Technology and economics are the drivers.” Rather than shouting, those who wish to communicate need “to share, have conversations” with potential purchasers of their services. Mr. Haweeli is a consultant on about 50 to 60 Facebook pages.

    “It’s more power of suggestion: Did you know? What’s your favorite menu item? Or a video of a chef preparing dishes.”

    His schedule is a bit hectic. His tall and solid frame is kept trim by daily swims and morning green shakes before he tucks into richer fare in the afternoon and evenings for work or pleasure. Then, after he gets home and he’s done watching sports on television, he can often be found downstairs painting. It’s become a daily ritual. “At around 9, 9:30, when I start winding down, I begin to think I should go down there, something is bugging me about a painting. Then a couple of hours later, I have to tear myself away, force myself to stop.”

    Tickets will go on sale Friday for the 19th Hamptons International Film Festival and once again film aficionados will wonder how and where they will ever fit in everything they want to see, as the screenings and events will expand from their base in East Hampton to include almost every village or hamlet that has a theater from Montauk to Westhampton, including Sag Harbor and Southampton, and even Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. The festival runs Oct. 13 to 17.

    Over the past few years, the festival has gained attention and prestige with early screenings of films that went on to win Academy Awards. David Nugent, the director of programming, said last week that after “Slumdog Millionaire” had its second North American showing at the festival in 2008 and went on to win eight Oscars, including best picture in 2009, “it really helped us. People pay attention to us now.”

    Since then, films shown at the festival have garnered 62 Academy Award nominations, 30 just from last year. These included the 12 nominations for “The King’s Speech” and four wins including best picture and best actor. It also won for best screenplay by David Seidler, and best director for Tom Hooper, both of whom attended the festival with their film last year.

    “It’s a lot of success, but it’s more than that. What happened is that various studios have decided to share their films with our audience. It’s easier in some ways, but more complicated in others. But the result is we show stronger films and gain more prestige.”

    Those choices continue to be dense this year with highlighted films such as “Jeff Who Lives at Home” opening the festival in East Hampton and the film “Butter” as the kickoff film in Southampton. The closing film will be “The Artist” and the Centerpiece film is “Like Crazy.”

    Mr. Nugent pointed out that last year’s Centerpiece “The Debt” is now in general release. One of its stars, Jessica Chastain, visited the film festival as a Breakthrough Performer. She has since appeared in movies such as Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” and “The Help.” This year’s film “Like Crazy,” a love story, won the grand jury prize at Sundance for best picture and has received raves for its subtle yet real and moving performances by the leads, Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones.

    “The Artist,” about the end of silent films in Hollywood, seems particularly apt today with society’s constant casting away of recently developed yet rapidly outmoded technology. The French film has been lauded for treating the silent movie genre as an art form of its own rather than a forgotten medium. “The Artist” has been embraced by the film community and critics since it was shown at Cannes this year. It has also been gaining buzz for being the first film since the 1920s that could receive a best picture Academy Award nomination, while being, for the most part, silent.

    “Jeff Who Lives at Home” is the latest film by Jay and Mark Duplass, a brother team whose last film was “Cyrus.” It stars Jason Segel, Ed Helms, and Susan Sarandon, who will also be a featured guest in the festival’s A Conversation With series. A Variety review of the movie from the Toronto Film Festival said the film was likable and “seems more tightly scripted than the siblings’ earlier, semi-improvised dramedies, but lacks the wonderful squirm-inducing quality that sets them apart.” The story is about a 30-year-old man who refuses to consider leaving the nest.

    “Butter” takes a not terribly nice look at Middle America through the guise of competitive butter carving, with a cast led by Ty Burrell and Jennifer Garner. Mr. Burrell’s character in this satire has carved Newt Gingrich and scenes from “Schindler’s List,” which earned him the nickname “The Elvis of Butter.” When he steps down from the carving competition, his wife enters the fray with a previous flame, played by Hugh Jackman, and she will stop at nothing to make sure the championship stays in the family.

    Other participants in Conversations this year will include Rufus Wainwright, David Bailey, Bruce Weber, Harry Belafonte, Dick Cavett, Matthew Broderick, and Alec Baldwin. The breakthrough performers will be Emily Browning, Stine Fischer Christensen, Ezra Miller, and Anton Yelchin.

    This year the festival has a new partner in Italy, the Perugia International Film Festival. As a result the Hamptons festival will include six of the Italian festival’s films: “Corpo Celeste,” “A Quiet Life,” “Return to the Aeolian Islands,” “Sul Mare,” “We Have a Pope,” and “The Wholly Family.”

    “We noticed some really strong films coming out of Italy,” Mr. Nugent said. “It seemed like a real moment, a movement like the French New Wave.” When the opportunity to partner with a new Italian festival arose, it seemed a perfect chance to share that moment here, he said.

    At least one familiar face from East Hampton will add a little stardust to his résumé during the festival. Brad Loewen, a bayman and former town councilman from Springs, appears in the short film “The Sea Is All I Know,” written and directed by Jordan Bayne and starring Melissa Leo and Peter Gerety. Mr. Loewen’s natural ease on camera in showing Mr. Gerety how to pull in the nets from his family’s centuries-old pound traps gained him an unplanned part in the film and a Screen Actor’s Guild card application in the process. Mr. Loewen said about the film in April, “It’s a human story about a very human dilemma and I’m very grateful for that.” The film has been well received at other festivals and was released in Los Angeles last week to qualify for Oscar consideration.

    Asked if there was any overarching theme or significant trend this year, Mr. Nugent, who was still in the thick of preparations, said it was difficult to say, but he did note that the effects of the economic downturn continue to be evident in filmmaking. “Film is a medium where traumatic events take a little while to present themselves. When there is a crisis or a tsunami, a poet writes a poem or an artist can make a painting right away.” Because of the lead time involved from idea to conception, production to editing, and editing to release, films take longer to make their statement on those events.

    “It is often a little while after the fact that you see films respond to that and can say ‘Yes, there is a trend.’ ” He said movies in the festival such as the documentary “Hard Times: Lost on Long Island” are indicative of that trend.

    Another trend in America, bullying, will receive much attention in the festival. There will be a screening of Lee Hirsch’s documentary about bullying among American youth, “The Bully Project,” which will also receive the Brizzolara Family Foundation Award for a film of Conflict and Resolution. It is the first time the award will go to a film not about an international conflict. A panel discussion with the director and experts in school bullying will be presented along with an outreach program to schools in the area.

    A full festival guide will be included in next week’s edition of The Star.

Plein Democracy

    Alyce Peifer, of the Wednesday Group of plein-air painters, has organized a show of its members’ work that will be at Ashawagh Hall in Springs tomorrow through Sunday. The Wednesday Group is about a dozen artists who live and work on the East End, often meeting together in the outdoors with their easels in locations that are apparently selected by a vote among those planning to attend.

    This weekend’s exhibit has work by Carol Boye, Bobbie Braun, Toshiko Kitano Groner, Phyllis Hammond, Annette Heller, Andrea Hufstader, Cyndi Loewen, Deb Palmer, Ms. Peifer, Gene Samuelson, Georgette Sinclair, Cynthia Sobel, Frank Sofo, and Pam Vossen. An artists’ reception takes place Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. Ten percent of sales will go to the Springs Improvement Society. Ashawagh Hall is on Springs-Fireplace Road at its intersection with Old Stone Highway.

Three at Crazy

    Amagansett’s Crazy Monkey Gallery on Main Street will show paintings and sculpture by Barbara Bilotta, June Kaplan, and Sheila Rotner during October. Each woman paints in what could be termed abstract forms. In an example of Ms. Rotner’s work provided by the gallery, nearly monochromatic reds and browns form a grid of thick texture.

    Ms. Kaplan’s “dreamscapes” are, as she has described them, a “passage into her turbulent emotional nature.” A painting by Ms. Bilotta evokes a crashing wave or perhaps an explosion, but in a palette of blacks and grays that leaves it open to interpretation. An artists’ reception is on Oct. 15 from 5 to 7 p.m.

Music, Seascapes

    Saturday’s opening at the Grenning Gallery on Main Street in Sag Harbor will coincide with the Sag Harbor American Music Festival, with Bryan Downey and Mariann Megna performing. On the walls will be landscape paintings by Ben Fenske, Melissa Franklin Sanchez, Marc Dalessio, and Nelson H. White. Many of the paintings are of East End scenes, with seascapes predominant. A reception on Saturday runs from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Black and White in Sag

    “Seeing in Black and White” is the title of a group show now on view at the Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery on Sag Harbor’s Main Street. Selected works by Donato Giancola, Mikel Glass, and Rachel Bess have been hung on the main floor along with paintings by the gallery’s roster of artists. A reception is Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Pomianowski Out East

    John Pomianowski’s Montauk landscapes are on display at the Outeast Gallery at 65 Tuthill Road in Montauk. Gallery hours are Thursday through Sunday, noon to 4 p.m., or by appointment.

    Mr. Pomianowski has filled the two-room gallery with his moody images of familiar and not-so-familiar sites — many, as might be imagined, on the bitter end of the Island’s intersection of land and sea. A few watercolors done in Indonesia are included as well. The gallery is adjacent to Duryea’s Lobster Deck and can be found by making a right at the Montauk train station.

Fall Photos

    Tulla Booth, a photography gallery on Main Street in Sag Harbor, opens a “Fall Collection” show tomorrow of local and international images. A reception will be held on Friday, Oct. 7, from 6 to 8 p.m.

Geist’s “Tall Paintings”

    Selected works from the estate of the late Sidney Geist are on view at the Eric Firestone Gallery on Newtown Lane in East Hampton Village. Mr. Geist was a sculptor and writer who was born in Paterson, N.J., in 1914. He died in 2005. A career that spanned six decades included time with the Art Students League and the New Jersey Federal Arts Project. Later, he fell in with New York City’s postwar avant-garde crowd.

    His work moves between the abstract and “figurative totems,” the gallery said in a release. The Firestone show includes his self-described “tall paintings.” A reception is on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m.