Lit Lunch in Sag

    Call it a Sag Harbor affair: Two authors and residents feted at a lunch held in Ted Conklin’s American Hotel, the linchpin establishment in large part responsible some 40 years ago for sparing the village its lot as a half-abandoned wreck fit for wharf rats.

    But we’re not here to talk about the past. On Sunday at noon, David Margolick, a Vanity Fair contributor, and Lou Ann Walker, a professor in Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program and the editor in chief of The Southampton Review, will speak as the silverware clinks at an event sponsored by the Friends of the John Jermain Memorial Library (another old village beauty at last getting gussied up). The cost is $50, and reservations are by phone with Chris Tice (she’s in the book) or by e-mail at [email protected].

    Mr. Margolick’s new book is “Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock,” the women being those immortalized in a photo from the Arkansas desegregation struggle showing seething hatred on one hand and a stoic carrying-on on the other.

    Ms. Walker is the author of “A Loss for Words,” a memoir about growing up with deaf parents, and “Hand, Heart, and Mind: The Story of the Education of America’s Deaf People.”

In Praise of Pushcart

    Long, lean, silver-haired, handsome, and not too depressive, Mark Strand, one of the country’s most eminent living poets, will take to the lectern or its approximation Sunday in Greenwich Village at a reading to celebrate the newly published “Best of the Small Presses” book from the happy anthologists at Pushcart. He’ll be joined, at Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street, by a fellow poet, Susan Wheeler, and by a couple of fiction writers, Sigrid Nunez and Lydia Davis.

    And of course Bill Henderson of Springs, the editor and founder of the Pushcart Prize and Press, will be there to introduce and bask. (Speaking of books, his recent “All My Dogs” is an awfully good candidate for the coming season of gift-giving.) It’s a Writers Studio happening, too, so East Hampton’s Philip Schultz can’t be far behind. Admission is $10, with a whistle-wetting one-drink minimum. The gaiety gets going at

5 p.m.

Poets Against Hunger

    As part of a nationwide effort to alleviate hunger, Mark Doty of Springs, a winner of a National Book Award, will head up a group of poets getting together at the Springs Presbyterian Church on Sunday for a reading. The goal is focused: to take in donations of food and money for the Springs Food Pantry. George Wallace, a former Suffolk County poet laureate, will also read, as will Fran Castan, Teri Kennedy, Rosalind Brenner, and Carol Alexander, among others.

    The event starts at 1:30 p.m. The organizers have asked attendees for a donation of $5 or, naturally, food, particularly turkeys or chickens for Thanksgiving. The book “Broken Circles: A Gathering of Poems for Hunger” will be for sale to benefit the pantry. Ms. Brenner can be e-mailed at [email protected] for more information.

A Young Man’s Fancy

    D.I.Y., Malik Solomon. The East Hampton poet has just self-published a collection complete with a cover graced by his own artwork. “The Sonnets, Part One” (there are 33 of them) explores myth, nature, the pain of love, and the fertile mind of a young man forever influenced by Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

    A former summer intern at The Star, Mr. Solomon studied at Wesleyan and the Free University in Berlin. The book’s jacket copy notes a year he spent in Santiago, Chile, “to follow in the footsteps of the Chilean giant Nicanor Parra.” There, he “wrote poetry, skateboarded, and was interviewed on national television” about his work. “The Sonnets, Part One” is available at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Francis Levy’s “Seven Days”

    What price buttocks? Ask Kenny Cantor, he’s a money-minded Manhattan C.P.A. taking a sex tour of a profligate South American city in Francis Levy’s “Seven Days in Rio,” just out from Two Dollar Radio. Mr. Levy, who has a house in Wainscott, will read from the novel on Saturday at 3 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

    There’s more than tight pants, waxed privates, and pre-op transsexuals to the tale, however — try a stint at a psychoanalytic conference on for size. As the protagonist himself says in the book’s epigraph, “I have come to regard almost everything that happens in life as a form of therapy.”

    Mr. Levy, the author of “Erotomania: A Romance,” has had his stories, humor, and essays published in The Village Voice, The Times, and The Star. He is co-director of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination and writes a blog at TheScreamingPope.com.

Food for Your Head, Too

    You’re probably familiar with the experience of opening wide for a steaming burger barely contained by its bun, but what about pairing that with a simultaneous effort to wrap your mind around top-flight fiction? It’s all waiting for you at Rowdy Hall in East Hampton, where the Rowdy Readers Club convenes hourlong book chats on Thursdays at 12:15 p.m.

    Sad to say, a chance to chew over Denis Johnson and his new novella, “Train Dreams,” has passed, but fear not, today’s book is “The Buddha in the Attic” by Julie Otsuka, and next week brings Gunter Grass’s “The Box.” Readers can then wipe their mouths and head over to BookHampton for a 15-percent discount on the titles in the series, which runs through Nov. 10.

    Can’t do lunch? In Sag Harbor, Phao, the Thai joint, has started a reading group that meets on Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m., the twist being a focus on short stories of the past 50 years, with a different decade each week. “Goodbye and Good Luck” by Grace Paley, from the 1960s, is slated for next week, for example, and on Oct. 26 it’s Ann Beattie’s 1970s story “The Cinderella Waltz,” which appeared in The New Yorker. After that, the late great Raymond Carver, and onward till Dec. 14.

     Jay McInerney, the author of “Bright Lights, Big City” and the current wine columnist for The Wall Street Journal, will open the Writers Speak series at Stony Brook Southampton on Wednesday.

    The event is sponsored by the campus’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature. Mr. McInerney’s reading at 7 p.m. will follow a 6 p.m. open house in the radio lounge at Chancellors Hall.

    His other titles include “Ransom,” “Story of My Life,” “Brightness Falls,” “The Last of the Savages,” “The Good Life,” and a collection of short stories, “How It Ended.”

    At the open house, attendees will have a chance to speak with faculty, staff members, and students about earning an M.F.A., the courses available, winter conferences held in Kenya and Florence, Italy, and more.

    Other presenters in the series include Robert Polito, a poet, on Oct. 5, Betsy Carter, a novelist, on Oct. 19, and the novelist Kurt Wenzel on Oct. 26. Admission is free.    

    More information about the open house and the series can be had by  e-mailing Adrienne Unger at [email protected] or by calling 632-5030.

    In a Bible class I taught, a woman who was annoyed with an image of a vengeful God said, “Well, why don’t we just write a new Bible?” James Frey has written, not a new Bible, but a testament to the end times with the appearance of the Messiah, a man born of Orthodox Jewish parents in Brooklyn. His name is variously Ben Zion Avrohom, Ben Jones, or Ben.

___

“The Final Testament of the Holy Bible”

James Frey

Gagosian Gallery, $50

___

    The story is in the present time, written from the perspectives and in the voices of men and women who in the immediate past have known Ben. It is a compelling story and well written, holding plot, characters, and religious theme together. I hasten to add that the characters would not consider their insight, newly gained after contact with Ben, to be religious, conventionally considered. Quite the opposite, the point of view is decidedly against religion, and indeed against government. It is not, however, anarchist.

    The emergence of the Messiah cuts through everything that has been previously established in the lives of the narrators, leading to the rise of a ragtag, unorganized group of followers in the way of Ben, Messiah. Yet even that is too formal to say. Please note: This testament is not for the faint of heart.

    Ben was born with signs he might be an emergent Messiah. There is expectation. He doesn’t see it himself, however, not until he is about 30 years old, when events happen that begin to reveal himself to himself. He continues to develop insights in association with his epileptic seizures. (Think of Dostoyevsky and religious experience.)

    Even with growing self-awareness Ben does not say, “I am the Messiah.” Others see only that he is unusual and that he has healing power. He changes lives just by his presence, by his words and touch, by love, and love is not limited to the spiritual, Christian kind; it includes the flesh of making love. God is not to be understood in received myth or word. As is stated several times in the narrative, “God is loving other people.”

    Ben is so commonplace he can be missed. On the other hand, he can arrest a person’s attention by his tattered appearance and pale skin and, in time, a certain luminosity. More than commonplace, he is underclass. In the opening of the story he is living in a housing project in the Bronx. His neighbor is Mariaangeles, a stripper at a club where she services men from Westchester County.

    Ben works at a construction site, where he is crushed by a falling plate of glass and is rushed to a hospital. The attending surgeon’s life is changed by Ben, who quickly recovers. Ben goes on to live with homeless men and women in a tunnel beneath Manhattan. Their leader is an apocalyptic anarchist figure waiting for the final assault. They have a stash of guns and are arrested, Ben included.

    A detective interviewing Ben also finds his life changed. Ben is released under the supervision of his estranged brother, Jacob (who has become an evangelical Christian), but Ben escapes.

    Another character, Jeremiah, who is gay, is freed from religious oppression because Ben loves him. Therefore Jeremiah can love himself as he is.

    Ben heads upstate with a woman he meets in Manhattan off Times Square because she, too, has found herself valued as a person by him. They retreat to her farm, and over several months various people come to join them in a kind of latter-day Woodstock — in the feel of it, that is; it is different in class and expectations. Then Ben is called back to Manhattan, where, he knows, as does his sister, Esther, who had come for him, that he will have to face the authorities.

    The men and women who meet Ben and find their lives altered because of him do not think of him as the Messiah — not in that moment, anyway. Near the end of the book, Ben’s public defender, Peter, is aware of others’ claims that Ben is the Messiah. Peter doesn’t believe it, though he does believe Ben is innocent of the charges against him. The first person to see that Ben is the Messiah is Mark. A Roman Catholic priest, he leaves the priesthood because of what he sees in Ben.

    There are many cross-religious references throughout the book. The names of the characters are suggestive, as are the characters themselves in the roles they play: Esther, Ruth, Jeremiah, Adam, Matthew, John, Luke, Judith, Peter. Mariaangeles is the opening and closing narrator, one who announces, though she is also an intimate character in the narrative. Rabbi Schiff, with a first name of Adam, is Orthodox. Jacob converts to Christianity, and when Luke founds a church in Queens, Jacob becomes a minister there. They are looking for the Second Coming and the Rapture.

    Among the abounding biblical references, there is enmity between the brothers Jacob and Ben, and their father is Isaac, to further the allusion. Ben comes to an understanding of himself when he is about 30, paralleling the consciousness of Jesus as he began his ministry. The priest, Mark, quotes from the Book of Matthew, chapter 25, about the coming of the Son of Man. There are signs of the miraculous — water turned to wine, escape from shackles (as the biblical figure Peter escaped from jail). Ben’s return from upstate to face indictment in Manhattan mirrors, as I read it, Jesus in Galilee and his journey to Jerusalem.

    Then there is the name Ben: son. Son of God, or, in one of the names for Ben, Ben Jones, there is in that commonest of surnames a possible suggestion of Son of Man. Everyman.

    The biblical language is characteristically masculine, but with Ben and his entourage, equality of gender, race, and sexual orientation is a given.

    Mr. Frey quotes from the Apostles’ Creed leading into the narrative: “He will come again.” The book itself is printed to look like a Bible, with a black leatherette cover and gilt edges, which at the very least is clever marketing. The words of Ben are printed in red, as in some editions of scripture quoting the words of Jesus. That the book is published by the Gagosian Gallery is to suggest that “The Final Testament of the Holy Bible” is artistic in form. By association I think of the medieval mystery play as an art form. Mr. Frey’s characters have signifying roles to play, though they are also eminently human.

    My argument with Mr. Frey is not with his theme, the emergence of the Messiah from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, but with his reduction of all religion to its fundamentalist or evangelical expressions. In her book “The Battle for God,” from 2000, Karen Armstrong writes of the rise of fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and about how in their extremity these movements have taken the logos of religion, its rationality, to trump the myths, which are attempts to explain meaning without taking the stories literally. Greek plays do the same.

    Mr. Frey’s characters, in particular Ben, rail against the rigidity of religion tied to a book or to external authority to such an extent that Ben by his words also dismisses the possibility of myth. (I think, too, of Christopher Hitchens and his 2007 book, “God Is Not Great,” subtitled “How Religion Poisons Everything.”)

    From my perspective, religion also has its mystical expression and need not be slavishly tied to its book. The image of Jesus as Son of Man comes from his Jewish roots in Ezekiel, for example. While recorded in a written text, the reference is beyond the text and is suffused with ecstatic visions. (Like Ben’s epileptic illuminations?) Or within Islam, the Sufis break free of the Koran in poetry and dance.

    There is much in Mr. Frey’s book to offend many religious people, and the street language of some of the characters might also be off-putting. Or, the open revelation of love looks like a romanticized Jesus Movement, some might say.

    But with those caveats, I enjoyed the story and was touched by the poignancy, and the liberation, of its characters in their affirmed beauty and in the pleasure of their nascent community. Before the End.

—

    James Frey is the author of, most recently, the novel “Bright Shiny Morning.” He has a house in Amagansett.

    The Rev. Robert Stuart is pastor emeritus of the Amagansett Presbyterian Church. He lives in Springs.

The needle — you remember needles — stuck

    On an old record played

    On an opera night

    On a poorly heard but richly received

Loving listener supported station.

Twice it caught, so three times it played

The same feather of a song.

The host, whose finger gently

But surely bade the game go on,

Made no apology.

He knew, as did we still up,

The comfort and the affirmation

Of those little clicks sounding

Like the necklace shells of a dancing shaman.

____

“Clicking On” is from Bernard Goldhirsch’s recent collection of poems, “Something Else.” Formerly an English teacher in Brooklyn, he lives in Springs.

    James Salter, the renowned American writer lauded for his straightforward yet probing prose, has received the Rea Award for the Short Story, marking another milestone in his literary career while heralding new works as well. Mr. Salter, who divides his time among Bridgehampton, New York City, and Aspen, Colo., said Elizabeth Rea, the widow of the award’s founder, Michael Rea, called him on Aug. 19 to let him know that he had won the $30,000 award.

    “It was a complete surprise to me,” Mr. Salter said Friday. “You don’t know you are even being considered.”

    He always wanted to be a writer, he said, but “didn’t get around to it for quite a while due to one thing or another.” Asked if his deferred dream led to fodder for future stories, he paused and said, “Well, the desire certainly remained.”

    One of the first short stories he wrote, “Am Strande von Tanger”(“On the Beach in Tangier”), appeared in The Paris Review in the fall of 1968. The prose alternates between stark, fragmented sentences and lyrical introspection as the story follows three wandering expatriates in Barcelona. Mr. Salter said it was “about as good a story as I wrote for the next 20 or 30 years. I had at that time a great urge toward obscure phrases and titles in general. And I had an attitude of superiority toward straightforward English.”

    Mr. Salter decided to name the story after a landscape painting he had seen in Europe by Wenzel Hollard. “ ‘Am Strande von Tanger’ is a much more impressive title, but of course no one knew what it meant,” he said, laughing.

    He cited his longtime literary agent and dear friend, Kenneth Littauer, as a salient element of his success; the two men had a natural affinity, as they both had been Air Force pilots. “The beginning was ‘The Hunters,’ ” a novel, “and after that I tried to write some short stories but I didn’t know much about it,” he said. “You have rejection at first, naturally. I couldn’t seem to write anything worth publishing. But Kenneth used to tell me, ‘That’s all right. They’ll see the light eventually.’ ”

    Mr. Salter is now in the final throes of writing a novel. He is “three-quarters of a way through” a process that has been ongoing for nearly eight years. He should be finished by Thanksgiving. “The process is very fragmented,” he said. “I look at notes and things I wrote about this very book and I hardly recognize them, things have changed so much. But all of this just may be the natural consequence of age. You get a bit older and you just don’t have that youthful energy and focus. In my own case, I tend to write and write and not be satisfied, or it’s not quite what I had in mind.”

    He said that in addition to the pending novel, the plot of which is decidedly hush-hush, he plans to write more short stories. Despite his self-deprecation on the inevitable slowness of age, he shows no signs of slowing down.

    “There are a lot of stories kicking around at your feet on the floor, if you have time to pick them up and do them,” he said. “I’m honored to have [the Rea Award], but I don’t think it’s going to ruin me.”

“The Eighty-Dollar Champion”

    Harry de Leyer, so the story goes, got the hell out of a Europe wrecked by war and, $160 dollars in his pocket, alighted in the relative stability and sanity of the United States. Here, in the winter of 1956, he spotted a put-upon plow horse literally headed to the slaughterhouse, took him in, and two years later was riding him to show-jumping victory on the sport’s top stage, Madison Square Garden.

    Elizabeth Letts’s book chronicling all that and more, “The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation,” came out on Tuesday, and she and Mr. de Leyer will be at the Hampton Classic Horse Show in Bridgehampton on Sunday, its opening day, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. to talk about it and sign copies at the A.S.P.C.A. patio over by the kids’ exhibition tent.

    The Dutch-born Galloping Grandfather, as he is known, has been a participant in the horse show for many years and is familiar in East Hampton for his association with East End Stables, now run by his son Andre.

“The Arrogant Years”

    It seems like only yesterday, the buzz surrounding Lucette Lagnado’s “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit.” But four years have passed since the publication of that book about her family’s flight from Nasser’s Egypt, time enough for a follow-up, namely, “The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, From Cairo to Brooklyn,” forthcoming from Ecco Press.

    That’s another subtitle that nearly says it all, as they tend to do nowadays, yet the memoir involves more than a coming-of-age story, an immigrant’s tale, and the loss of a more accepting and sophisticated Cairo; it is also a mother-daughter story and a look at the upheaval of the 1960s.

    Ms. Lagnado, a Wall Street Journal reporter who lives part time in Sag Harbor, will read from the book and sign copies at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in that village on Saturday from 7 to 9:30 p.m. and on Sunday from 3 to 4:30 p.m.

“The Barque of Saviors”

    In case you missed it, there have been historically minded Sundays in the Barn talks happening weekly one jaunty ferry ride away on Shelter Island. Next up in the series, which is courtesy of that island’s historical society, is Russell Drumm with his 2001 book, “The Barque of Saviors: Eagle’s Passage From the Nazi Navy to the U.S. Coast Guard.”

    He’ll illustrate his discussion of the fate of the 1936 vessel with archival photos and sign copies of the book, too. The start time is 4 p.m. on, as billed, Sunday. The place is the James Havens Homestead at 16 South Ferry Road. (Which, since we’re in that frame of mind, dates to 1743.)

    But the Montauker, fisherman, surfer, sailor, and senior writer for The Star isn’t done: He’ll head up a discussion with Carmela Ciuraru about her new book, “Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms,” on Saturday at 3 p.m. at the Montauk Bookshop, and he’ll be back there on Friday, Aug. 26, to read from a novel in progress, “Goofyfoot: A Rogue’s Yarn,” at 6 p.m.

Gabler on Biography

    He’s written some of the most culturally significant books in recent memory, from “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood” to “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination” to “Winchell,” a biography of that titan among newspaper columnists, Walter Winchell, which was subtitled “Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity.” Now Neal Gabler, who lives in Amagansett, is working on a book about another colossus, albeit a political one, Senator Edward Kennedy.

    Mr. Gabler will discuss the art of biography on Saturday at 6 p.m. for the last of the summer’s free Authors After Hours events at the Amagansett Library.

I have to tell you this, whoever you are:

that on one summer morning here, the ocean

pounded in on tumbledown breakers,

a south wind, bustling along the shore,

whipped the froth into little rainbows,

and a reckless gull swept down the beach

as if to fly were everything it needed.

I thought of your hovering saucers,

looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down,

so it wouldn’t be lost forever —

that once upon a time we had

meadows here, and astonishing things,

swans and frogs and luna moths

and blue skies that could stagger your heart.

We could have had them still,

and welcomed you to earth, but

we also had the righteous ones

who worshipped the True Faith, and Holy War.

When you go home to your shining galaxy,

say that what you learned

from this dead and barren place is

to beware the righteous ones.

    The above poem is from Philip Appleman’s ninth collection, “Perfidious Proverbs and Other Poems: A Satirical Look at the Bible,” published last month by Humanity Books. Mr. Appleman, who has a house in East Hampton, will read at the Poetry Marathon at the Marine Museum in Amagansett on Sunday at 5 p.m.