Carl Safina will speak twice in short order — first at the ever-funky, ever-indie Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, tomorrow at 5 p.m., and then at 6 p.m. on Saturday for the Authors After Hours series at the Amagansett Library.
The naturalist’s subject is, of course, his just-out-this-week book, “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel,” which also happens to be reviewed on this very page.
Authors Night Tix for Sale
This summer’s Authors Night, a fund-raiser for the East Hampton Library, will happen on Aug. 8, starting with a mammoth book signing and cocktail reception from 5 to 7:30, and then dinner parties at private homes with guest authors at 8. Tickets, available at authorsnight.org, start at $100 for the reception with more than 100 writers, and range from $300 to $5,000 for the dinners.
This year’s dinners will welcome the likes of Phil Klay, whose “Redeployment” won a National Book Award; the actor and director Edward Burns, recently out with a memoir called “Independent Ed”; the designer and decorator Jonathan Adler; Ambassador Christopher Hill; Jules Feiffer, whose new graphic novel is “Kill My Mother,” and Michael Shnayerson, whose latest is “The Contender,” a biography of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
Art Barge Writing Workshops
The Art Barge on Napeague is now offering writing workshops, led by Sarabelle Prince, a writing instructor, on Saturdays through Aug. 22, with the exception of Aug. 1. “This series explores how elements of the creative process merge and influence one another,” a release said.
This week’s workshop is called Portraits, with Chiaroscuro following on July 25. En Plein Air, Minimalism in Writing, and Action in Writing round out the series. Each meets from 10 a.m. to noon and costs $50. Registration is at theartbarge.org.
Journal-writing techniques will be the focus of another Art Barge workshop, in which participants will spend “a day in the art studio” and thus possibly “discover you work best with drawing, painting, or collage as a prompt for further self-expression.” It runs from Aug. 31 to Sept. 4 and again from Sept. 7 to 11.
“Peconic Bay”
Marilyn E. Weigold
Syracuse University Press, $24.95
Writing a history book about four centuries of Long Island’s East End is rather like squeezing 12 adult humans into the trunk of a Maserati — it is going to be a tight fit. Marilyn E. Weigold, a professor who teaches at Pace University in the department of economics, history, and political science, has chosen to let the blue waters of Peconic Bay form the matrix for an engrossing collage of folklore and facts that tells an abbreviated but well-curated episodic history of Long Island’s eastern forks.
The book takes the form of an exhibition with various galleries highlighting themes such as “At Home,” “At Work,” and “At Play.” Within each section, there are smaller chapters that focus on “The Shinnecock,” “Gardiner’s Island: Family Feud,” and “Saints, Sinners, and Just Plain Folks.” This is not your grandfather’s old volume of local history, as it is not really chronological in its weaving of topics to and fro. The author is clever and has fun debunking traditional myths and brings Martha Stewart’s name up in the most unusual situations.
As one might expect from an economist, some of the smartest sections of the book trace recent politics and real estate. Indeed I found myself much more engrossed by her excellent discussions of the brown tides, the wineries, the East Hampton Town Baymen’s Association, and land preservation than the digressions back into the 18th century.
The reader may be surprised by some exclusions and inclusions, but the Prellwitzes and William Steeple Davis are artists well worth being introduced to, in lieu of the well-known Pollock and de Kooning. Like any good travelogue, we need to trust our guide, and Ms. Weigold knows any number of off-the-beaten-path places to entice us. Just let her unfold the tale of Cutchogue’s bloody Wickham murders or the “Not So Dear Deer” of 1916 Shelter Island. A more delightful story involves Albert Einstein trying to buy sandals at Rothman’s Department Store in Southold.
Within a chapter titled “At Peace” is a section on Robins Island, a 445-acre island in Peconic Bay, in the Town of Southold. The author helps straighten out a very convoluted series of events. James W. Lane saw this beautiful island, once a private hunting club, at the turn of the 20th century while his company was testing torpedoes nearby. He fell under its charms and bought the island and began building a mansion. By the time the exterior was completed, his wife died and he had the construction stopped. It is said that the workers left their tools and clothing behind.
By the middle of the 20th century, John W. Mackay, whose fortune came from the Western Union Telegraph Co., bought the property. He used the island as a hunting lodge. MacKay was the author of one of the first scholarly books on antique duck decoys. By 1979 he sold the island to a European real estate syndicate that planned on building 28 luxury homes.
Both New York State and Suffolk County wanted to keep the island natural and began to look for federal funding to purchase Robins Island. The application requested $2 million and hoped that Peconic Bay would be declared a National Estuarine Sanctuary. Local governments were not happy with the idea of more federal oversight that could curtail commercial fishing in the bay.
This is but the beginning of a story that includes a claim by the Wickham family, who felt the island had been wrongfully taken from them following the American Revolution. You must read the book to find out what happened.
Ms. Weigold has successfully created a more impressionistic storytelling approach to our regional history. By taking a topic like work, she starts with a scene at Southold’s Bagel Cafe. It’s Labor Day, 15 years ago, and two ladies of a certain age are talking about a new traffic light. With a fast brushstroke, the next paragraph introduces a guy on a beach with a metal detector. Then we are on to the recession of the early 1990s and then the infamous economic meltdown of 2008. Does this sound kaleidoscopic?
In 57 pages, we have been introduced to growing strawberries in Mattituck, parking problems at wineries, duck farms, the 18th-century saltworks on North Haven, the Joseph Fahys and Co. watchcase factory in Sag Harbor, and many digressions. The pace is conversational, the information is well researched, and we have learned a great deal while being entertained. Dare a history book be a beach read? Without question!
This blending of primary source material, folklore, and contemporary media can be successful only if the writer is a scholar. Without a framework of deductive reasoning, this staccato-like style would be incomprehensible. With Professor Weigold’s grasp of our area’s historical highlights, she is able to hold our very complicated 400 years of triumph and tragedy firmly in hand. We can see how our communities developed and what mistakes were made and who came up with the positive solutions. Some of her sections end unresolved — court cases still being followed, new policies yet to be tested. Time will tell.
Behind a somewhat gaudy dust jacket, with a contemporary folk art depiction of Greenport, herein lies a fascinating story of randy ministers, submarines, McMansions, slaves, potatoes, railroads, the Montauk Project, Plum Island, Ezra L’Hommedieu, and so much more. I hope to see many copies of “Peconic Bay” in the hands of beachgoers this season. It will help put East End history in perspective and totally upgrade your conversation at the next benefit cocktail party on your calendar. This material is certainly more inspirational than talking about the traffic or the upcoming presidential election.
Richard Barons is the executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society. He lives in Springs.
Sunday marks the return of the venerable Poetry Marathon in Amagansett. This year’s series of readings starts at 5 p.m. that day with Joanne Pilgrim, an associate editor at The Star, reading from her verse, accompanied by Jan Grossman, a past fiction and poetry reviewer for the Rockefeller Foundation who has had poems published in American Arts Quarterly, among other journals. The readings are held in the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road, and a reception follows each.
The free series, organized by Sylvia Chavkin with the help of Annalee Collins, continues on July 19 with the playwright Joe Pintauro and the India-born Meena Alexander, whose collections include “Birthplace With Buried Stones.” The esteemed duo for July 26 is Grace Schulman, a professor of English at Baruch College and Springs part-timer whose latest book of poems is “Without a Claim,” and Kimiko Hahn of the North Fork, whose nine collections include “Brain Fever,” published last year by Norton.
Carol Sherman and Daniela Gioseffi are in store for Aug. 2, with George Wallace and Geraldine Green the following week. The series wraps up on Aug. 16, when Virginia Walker, whose latest is “Neuron Mirror,” and Carole Stone, the author of, most recently, “Hurt, the Shadow: The Josephine Hopper Poems,” read from their work.
Over at the Amagansett Library, the Authors After Hours series is back with another strong lineup of summer readings. It begins on Saturday at 6 p.m. with A.M. Homes, the East Hampton author of pungent short-story collections like “The Safety of Objects” and novels of how we live now, the most recent being “May We Be Forgiven.”
Following her on July 18 will be the hamlet’s own Carl Safina. The naturalist will talk about his new book, “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.” On July 25, also at 6 p.m., Chris Pavone will step to the lectern to discuss how his own experiences have informed his best-selling thrillers, “The Expats” and “The Accident.”
On Aug. 1 Tom Clavin will examine adapting books for the big and small screens, which is happening now with two of his books written with Bob Drury, “Last Men Out: The True Story of America’s Heroic Final Hours in Vietnam” and “The Heart of Everything That Is,” about Chief Red Cloud.
Also that month, on the 15th it will be Anna Bernasek and D.T. Mongan on “All You Can Pay: How Companies Use Our Data to Empty Our Wallets,” with the political cartoonist and journalist Ted Rall discussing his forthcoming “Snowden” the following week, and Christopher Bollen, the author of a new suspense novel, “Orient,” on the 29th.
To hail the release of the summer/fall issue of The Southampton Review, the Public Radio International program “Selected Shorts” will hit the campus of Stony Brook Southampton on July 18. In the Avram Theater at 7:30 p.m., actors such as Harris Yulin and Jill Eikenberry and authors like the poet Billy Collins will be recorded reading pieces from the new Review.
Tickets cost $35 and come with a year’s subscription to the journal of
fiction, essay, art, and photography, published by the campus’s M.F.A.
program in creative writing and literature. They can be had at stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa.
The evening is part of this summer’s Southampton Writers Conference, which began yesterday and will run through July 19. Those taking part in the conference also get tickets to “Selected Shorts.”
The latest Review has poetry by Robert Wrigley, Gregory Golaszewki’s prizewinning comic essay, Meg Wolitzer and Frederic Tuten, among others, on “How I Trick Myself Into Getting to Work,” an excerpt from the late Peter Matthiessen’s “Men’s Lives,” nonfiction by Danielle Berg, The Star’s Baylis Greene writing about a Shinnecock golfer of yore named Oscar Bunn, and a wide variety of short fiction.
Fridays at Five
The popular Fridays at Five series is back at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton with authors coming to discuss their books every Friday from July 10 through Aug. 28.
The program kicks off with Colson Whitehead talking about “The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death.” Then in July it’s Bonnie Verbitsky talking with Walker Vreeland about her “Home Cooked Hamptons,” Ken Auletta on “Lifetime Lessons Learned as a Journalist,” and Florence Fabricant on “Wine With Food: Pairing Notes and Recipes From the New York Times.”
In August, the series will feature Frances Cole James on “How to Wow: Proven Strategies for Selling Your [Brilliant] Self in Any Situation,” Arlene Alda talking about her “Just Kids From the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was: An Oral History,” Brooke Shields with Kathleen Marshall on “There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me,” and, finally, to end the discussions, Alice McDermott discussing “Someone: A Novel.”
Admission is $20 for each talk or $80 for a pack of five. The authors will also sign books, which can be purchased on site. Drinks and hors d’oeuvres will be served in the library garden. The programs run from 5 to 6 p.m., with doors opening at 4:30.
Writers Conference
The Southampton Writers Conference at Stony Brook Southampton, which is part of the college’s master of fine arts program in creative writing and literature, has invited the public to this summer’s readings, lectures, panel discussions, salons, and receptions without having to be registered for credit. The cost is $950. The conference begins on July 8 and runs until July 19.
Roger Rosenblatt, a prolific writer and Stony Brook English professor, will offer five lectures on the craft of writing and be joined by such guests as the cartoonist Jules Feiffer. Evening programs will include readings by Billy Collins, who twice was the United States poet laureate, Amy Hempel, Ursula Hegi, Meg Wolitzer, and Melissa Bank, among others. Attendees can sign up until the first day by going to stonybook.edu/mfa/summer.
Those attending the conference will receive complimentary tickets to a program celebrating the launch of The Southampton Review’s summer/fall edition at the college’s Avram Theater on July 18 at 7 p.m. The program, “Selected Shorts,” at which actors and writers will read excerpts from the review, is otherwise for those who subscribe to it.
“Independent Ed”
Edward Burns
Gotham Books, $26.95
It’s a scene that’s replayed itself a million times in Hollywood — the supplicant stealing a few seconds of the big shot’s time and attention with a pitch, a screenplay, or, one day in September of 1994, a nearly completed feature film on a clunky VHS tape.
“I had been a production assistant at ‘Entertainment Tonight’ for four years and probably overstayed my welcome by about three years,” Edward Burns writes in “Independent Ed,” in which he candidly recounts his struggles to retain some artistic freedom and self-respect in the movie business. “I needed to make more money and start charting a path toward a real career.”
An unsuspecting Robert Redford was the means. Mr. Redford, aging, movie-star short, but still golden, with hair as good as ever, was never more influential, what with his Sundance Film Festival going full bore. He was on set promoting his latest project, “Quiz Show,” about the 1950s television scandals involving Charles Van Doren. Our hero, sweating it out among the cables and apple boxes just outside the bright lights’ glare, rehearsed his spiel and, once the actor-turned-mogul was out in the hallway, pounced: “I’m an independent filmmaker, and . . .” You know the rest. “The Brothers McMullen” was his baby, made on the fly and on the cheap for all of $25,000. Would he take a look?
The elevator arrived. “As the doors closed, I saw him hand it to his publicist. Then they were gone.”
The industry, of course, is not for the thin-skinned. A rejection letter arrived two months later, hard on the heels of earlier turndowns from all manner of agents, managers, and even what was then a brand-new Hamptons International Film Festival — a “final straw” that, as a Long Island filmmaker, particularly outraged him.
But then something incredible happened. With another set of eyes screening submissions, Sundance reversed course and sent Mr. Burns an acceptance letter barely two months after the brush-off. Not only was he in, his film famously won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize. It went on to pull in $10.4 million at the box office. He was 27 years old.
These are the kinds of breaks young strivers need in life and too rarely get. As with most such “overnight” success stories, luck played a part. Here there was good timing at work, the breezy authenticity of “The Brothers McMullen” — about working-class Irish-American guys from New York who B.S. and bloviate about girls — amounting to a fresh offering in an age of special-effects blockbusters.
Remarkably free of score-settling and gossip, “Independent Ed” ought to be required reading in film schools, certainly more than so than Syd Fields’s “Screenplay,” which Mr. Burns mentions, with its tiresome admonitions to incite the protagonist to action, throw an obstacle in his path, have him overcome it, lesson learned, all in three tidy acts. (That may be structure, but it can send you scrambling for “My Dinner With Andre.”)
For one thing, there are all kinds of tips for guerrilla filmmaking, beginning with the way this first-time director used so many exterior shots in “McMullen.” Interiors cost money, so for a scene where his character is walking out of a restaurant with his agent, Mr. Burns set up a long lens shot across the street and he and a buddy from “Entertainment Tonight” stepped into the restaurant, counted to five, and then turned around and headed for the door. They sneaked four takes this way before getting the bum’s rush.
Elsewhere, he dissects the way his hero, Woody Allen, would orchestrate a scene of dialogue with two or three people in a room: After a close-up the camera might move with a character across the room to reveal the interlocutor, and then back, followed by a conventional two-shot, and on to a “master shot,” a wide view of the entire scene. And like that.
Mr. Burns is nothing if not frank throughout, from relaying a professor’s advice that led him to film in the first place — “As an English major, you can become a film studies minor, where you watch a bunch of old movies, write a paper, and you’re pretty much guaranteed an A” — to his admission on the next-to-last page that of his 11 movies in 20 years, half were failures.
Other advice for aspiring filmmakers comes by way of his N.Y.P.D. dad, who, listening to his son lament all the rejection as they nurse beers at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, reminds him he called the 12 days shooting “McMullen” the best of his life, adding, “As I recall, you made this film because you had something to say and because this is what you want and need to do with your life.” A nod. “Then stop complaining, sit down, and write another screenplay.”
The film world is different now, with inexpensive digital cameras and laptop editing. Mr. Burns says, in essence, ignore the resultant glut of output, kids, and follow your dream.
He realizes “there are no mistakes. And there are no bad films. Making movies is a gift, it’s a joy. . . . The work is hard, that’s true, but at the end of the day, you’re only making a movie. It’s a privilege to make a movie, and I never forget that.”
Edward Burns lives in New York and East Hampton. His latest work is a television series for TNT, “Public Morals,” about a division of the N.Y.P.D. in the 1960s. It is scheduled to premiere on Aug. 25.
“Spinglish”
Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf
Blue Rider Press, $27.50
A new book by two part-time South Fork residents is a shrewdly amusing screed that George Orwell, whom the authors acknowledge, might have written if he’d grown up amid the quick-witted irreverence of The Harvard Lampoon, as the co-authors did in their undergraduate days.
The title titillates: “Spinglish: The Definitive Dictionary of Deliberately Deceptive Language.” The cover satirically promises “How to succeed in business (and politics and everything else) without really lying.” Mostly an up-to-date compendium of misleading euphemisms, the book also has a 30-page bilingual dictionary so you can easily look up a euphemistic replacement for, say, budget cuts (“savings”).
Henry Beard has written or co-written some 50 humorous books, like “Poetry for Cats” and “The Official Exceptions to the Rules of Golf.” His equally prolific collaborator, Christopher Cerf, was an early colleague on The National Lampoon and a producer of the PBS literacy education program “Between the Lions”; he is the son of the publisher and punster Bennett Cerf.
With a distinct liberal bias, the book updates the apparently universal human tendency to “spin” the truth that Orwell famously analyzed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” and illustrated in the propaganda slogans of “1984” (“Ignorance Is Strength,” “Freedom Is Slavery”). The authors freely acknowledge their place in a long line of Orwell heirs, also ironically tipping their toques to Edward Bernays, the legitimately recognized founder of modern public relations, and to Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist who, they say, advised candidates to prettify oil drilling as “energy exploration” and capitalism as “free market economy.”
The variegated entries bespeak a savvy, sophisticated interest in near-falsification. “Capital punishment” mutes “death penalty,” “challenge” puts an optimistic spin on “problem,” “client” is “mortuary workers’ term for corpse,” “coercive diplomacy” has been substituted for “bombing,” “nonperforming asset” for “bad loan.” The book defines “bloc” as “an alliance or coalition of nations of which the speaker or writer disapproves,” following with a quote from a 1991 scholarly publication reporting that “Western leaders commonly characterized the group of countries allied with the USSR as the ‘Eastern Bloc’ or the ‘Communist Bloc’ but almost never as the ‘Eastern Alliance’ or ‘Communist Coalition.’ ”
The dodges are documented in 98 pages of citations often drawn from the work of other candor cops. “Business manager” for “pimp” was reported in a 2014 Slate article on how “Sex-Work Bosses Attempt to Rebrand”; “bangalored,” meaning “fired after your job was outsourced to India,” comes from an earlier Beard/Cerf confection, their 1993 “The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook.”
In an era when “most newspapers don’t have foreign staffs anymore,” the phrase “by our foreign staff” frequently means “we lifted this from the newswires,” according to “a jargon connoisseur” named Robert Hutton. For real-estate watchers, when an ad says a property is “tranquil,” the authors cite the translation of a San Francisco real estate agent named Tara-Nicholle Nelson: “not near anything you care about.”
Even sending up conventional reference books, the text is peppered with illustrations carrying chortle-inducing captions, like a photo labeled “Count Leo Tolstoy, author of the nineteenth-century Russian classic ‘Kinetic Military Action and Permanent Pre-Hostility.’ ” The last entry in the “English-to-Spinglish” dictionary is a deft thrust at anti-abortionists. “Zygote,” the authors say, can be twisted into “pre-born baby.”
But all is not liberal-leaning current affairs. Mr. Beard and Mr. Cerf cheekily award themselves a gold seal, embossed on the dust jacket, signifying the book as “Winner of the Bullitzer Prize in fiction and nonfiction.” The seal bears a portrait of a long-nosed, 18th-centuryesque Pinocchio and the mock-Latin motto “Stercus Tauri” (manure of bulls).
Henry Beard has a house in East Hampton, and Christopher Cerf is a part-time resident of Springs.
Christopher T. Cory blogs and contributes to The Star from a house behind the East Hampton Library.
“Out of Line: The Art
Of Jules Feiffer”
Martha Fay
Abrams, $40
One of the most incisive Jules Feiffer quotes Martha Fay uses in this generously illustrated biography gets to the core of the artist’s culture-shaking genius:
“I wanted to put the essence of my reader on the page . . . to move him out of his genteel, benign, suburban WASP landscape. I wanted to circumcise the sucker and transplant him from the Jazz Age from whence he came to the Age of Anxiety, from Babbittry and Dale Carnegie to Sigmund Freud. . . .”
Mr. Feiffer was talking specifically about the ’60s and his strip “Sick, Sick, Sick” in The Village Voice, but the combination of societal insight and creative aggression reflected in his remark has been the booster rocket of all his work and why, for more than 50 years, we have hung on the fence of his deconstruction site watching the work of this nervy kid who can say the things we wouldn’t dare and probably couldn’t think of in any case.
The hard cover underneath the dust jacket of “Out of Line” is a facsimile reproduction of Mr. Feiffer’s art class binder. It is an endearingly clunky lettering job spelling out JULES FEIFFER ART 330 SEC. 5.14 along with a determined drawing of a palette and brush. In faint pencil lines all over the cover are Jules’s doodles of superheroes, boxers, and math computations. In the drawings’ obvious fervor in which the young Jules proclaims himself an artist and its establishment of two of Mr. Feiffer’s main themes (minus the math), the cover sets up the charming and witty tone of the whole book.
The first chapters show drawings Jules’s mother saved from his childhood and the family photographs from the same period. The drawings, youthful as they are, establish an attitude, vigorous and pugnacious, that we can recognize in Mr. Feiffer’s early comics, the breakthrough strips in The Village Voice, and even the plots of his plays and movies that followed. That’s one of the things the many illustrations in the book establish, that with all of the false starts, the moving into new territory, the experiments with style, there is a core confidence in Mr. Feiffer that never really wavers.
Ms. Fay’s fluid and urbane writing gives the sociological context that the story needs given how much Mr. Feiffer was reacting to the times, and she uses quotes from Mike Nichols, Hugh Hefner, Ed Koren, and this one from Art Spiegelman to reflect Mr. Feiffer’s relationship to his peers: “That’s what made Jules so significant and a real role model. He had to reinvent comics to take advantage of his subjectivity, his . . . intellectual side.”
In revisiting the many Village Voice strips reproduced in the book I was struck by how time-defyingly brilliant they are. The characters he invented seem like friends from my youth whose anxieties and pretensions are forever current — the modern dancer celebrating spring and her personal angst; Bernard, the nebbish, agonizing over the meaning of manhood and his failure with women; Huey, the cad, who succeeds where Bernard fails.
Then, of course, the parade of politicians whose words Mr. Feiffer unmasks for the manipulative dissimulations they are. The strip in which President Kennedy checks in with his press secretary for polling on his popularity, for instance, reveals the hungry ego behind the heroic facade. Mr. Feiffer lets Nixon, sitting, stolidly staring out at us, speak for himself in strip after devastating strip. Mr. Feiffer’s satirical provocations probably had the same impact on the young in the ’60s and ’70s as Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” has had in our time.
Intermittently, during these years of writing and drawing “Sick, Sick, Sick,” Mr. Feiffer had been writing plays, “Little Murders” and “Knock, Knock,” among others, and screenplays, “Munro,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “Popeye,” and “VD Blues.” The stories that Ms. Fay tells of the writing and producing of these plays and films are the most celebrity-filled parts of the book and, along with the popular triumphs of these productions, describe Mr. Feiffer’s difficulties with some of his collaborators and with the critics of the work. Walter Kerr, for instance, first put down “Little Murders” as being “the funniest of Mr. Feiffer’s jaundiced visions,” before seeing it again and giving it his big thumbs-up.
Ms. Fay’s story of Mr. Feiffer’s experience writing the script for the movie “Popeye” is the classic literary writer’s story of being chewed up in the maw of a big Hollywood production, but Mr. Feiffer’s candidness in revealing his interaction with and his feelings about the director Robert Altman give the tale a vividness you don’t usually get in these movie recollections.
Although Mr. Feiffer had illustrated Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth,” the real beginning of his children’s book period began with the creation of “The Man in the Ceiling” in 1993. It started as a failed collaboration with his longtime friend Edward Sorel, Mr. Feiffer to write the story and Mr. Sorel to illustrate it. When Mr. Sorel backed out, feeling the gist of the tale wasn’t right for him, Mr. Feiffer decided to proceed and illustrate it himself. The picture book form released a different kind of fictional writing in him that was immensely pleasurable, led to his doing 10 more books for children, and, in a way, prepared him to embark on the most significant book of his current career.
“Kill My Mother,” a graphic novel, to which Ms. Fay devotes the last 11 pages of the book, is an extraordinary achievement and, as Ms. Fay writes, “might be said to bring [Mr. Feiffer’s] long run full circle.” The novel is a complex story involving all Mr. Feiffer’s favorite noir set pieces from 1940s movies: the tough detective, the mysterious dame, meetings under lamp light, and even a scene in the World War II Pacific jungles with a transgender soldier (Jules, you got ahead of the zeitgeist, again!).
As ingenious as the story is and as satisfying the zing of the dialogue, the art, it seems to me, is an even more astonishing accomplishment. Sixty-three years after the young Jules Feiffer struggled unsuccessfully to match the smooth complexity of Will Eisner’s style in “The Spirit,” the 84-year-old Feiffer broke through to his own way of drawing and painting a much more complex story than he had ever tackled. The rapid, impatient Feiffer line still gets to the essence quickly, but now the artist can use it to describe extremely nuanced body language and the interaction of many figures in a scene. Where once color in his work was a secondary handmaiden to the line, it now becomes a major element, evoking light, atmosphere, and psychology. Whole scenes are dominated by the mood of what the color washes and intricacies set up. I can only imagine the bliss he felt while working on this book.
“Out of Line” is a fascinating visual and literary journey through the multifaceted life and work of a creative icon of our times. The book couldn’t have had a more satisfying ending than to document Jules Feiffer stepping up to the plate once again and, with “Kill My Mother,” hitting an artistic home run.
James McMullan, formerly of Sag Harbor, has painted scores of posters for Lincoln Center Theater and illustrated many children’s books with his wife, the writer Kate McMullan. His latest book is “Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood.”
Jules Feiffer lives in East Hampton.
Adoption Revisited
Lorraine Dusky’s 1979 memoir, “Birthmark,” was the wrenching account of her giving up her daughter for adoption. Now, 36 years later, the longtime Sag Harbor resident is returning to the story and her critique of how adoption is handled in this country.
The follow-up memoir, “Hole in My Heart,” published through Amazon, explores her reunion with her daughter, the difficulties for a child with two families, and her daughter’s death in 2007. She’ll read from it at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m.
Park Avenue “Primates”
You’ve heard of Wednesday Martin’s new “anthropological memoir,” “Primates of Park Avenue,” involving her experiences raising children on the Upper East Side of Manhattan among the privileged, the gym-frequenting, the blond? Well, she’ll be interviewed about it next Thursday at the Southampton Arts Center.
Her interlocutor, Alex Kuczynski of Southampton, is a contributor to The New York Times and the author of “Beauty Junkies.” The talk, which starts at 5:30 p.m., is part of a series she is hosting at the center, which is in the old Parrish Art Museum on Job’s Lane. The cost is $18. Also of note? There’ll be wine.