Posted on 9/12/2013. Filmed on the 57th-floor terrace of Four World Trade Center. Principal dancers Maria Kowroski and Ask la Cour of the New York City Ballet.

The child mocks me for talking back to the television (“You’re sooo critical”) but how can you not react to this?

The setup: two attractive people at the opera. He’s hot, in the Jon Hamm way (black tie but unshaven). She’s hot, in the Mika Brzezinski way (blonde and chilly). He’s seated in the middle of the theater, she’s in a box above him and on the side. They text photos back and forth, then leave together.

The commercial is called “Have We Met?” The clear suggestion: they haven’t. In that case, he doesn’t have her phone number and she doesn’t have his — so how can they text photos back and forth? And it’s the theater. Surely there was an announcement before the performance to turn off all electronic devices — why didn’t they? (Small point: they leave at 8:20; the performance had just started. And already he was napping?) Final question: Whose apartment do they go to — or do you think that’s not the point of the commercial?

I’m a huge fan of exchanging glances at a dull cultural event and leaving early — in my lost youth, I had some memorable nights doing just this — but that was pre-technology and required modest skills in hand and facial gestures. In this version, the phone must be magic: just point it at someone and the device makes the introduction for you. Really? If so… get a Droid.

That line is the quote at the start of my book. It’s not casually chosen — it’s pretty much what the novel is about. The source: ‘Because the Night,’ written by — here’s a trivia tidbit — Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen. A  stunning performance, don’t you think?

Butler veterans know that while I have no spiritual practice, I never miss a chance to chant with Krishna Das. And I often listen to his CDs as I write; I find them calming as Mozart. He’s financing his next CD on Kickstarter; in essence, you’re buying it early. (Noted: at a price beyond retail.)

You get to North Captiva Island, Florida by flying to Ft. Myers, taking a half-hour cab, then making a fifteen-minute crossing by boat. On the island, it’s golf carts. No cars. And… nothing. No shopping. No people. Think: the Hamptons, if a neutron bomb hit. Seriously, at night we saw lights in only two houses. At one of the three restaurants on the island, the cook also served dinner. No waitress? "If you’d reserved, I would have called her." I read 2.5 books and wrote a lot, but mostly I played games in the pool with the child, floated in the bathtub-warm gulf, had monosyllabic chats in the hot tub with my wife. And then we returned to our new apartment, cranked up the new CDs and moved a gazillion books from boxes to bookshelves. Glorious, all of it.

Almost every critic flipped for “Blue Jasmine.” Most of my friends swooned. My wife was moved. I must have seen a different film, because I winced early and often at Woody Allen’s recreation of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

The story in brief: Jasmine has fled New York, where her husband was convicted of financial fraud and she lost both her marriage and his fortune. Now she’s in San Francisco, staying with her sister, who works as a grocery cashier and has a predictable blue-collar boyfriend. It’s hard going for Jasmine until she meets the next man who might take care of her, an attractive widower contemplating a political career. He has an empty house. She claims to be an interior decorator. You know what follows.

Set aside the dialogue that covers the same ground over and over and over (“Your husband was a crook!” “You never had time for us when you were on top!” “They found you talking to yourself on the street!”) and consider just the romance with the politico. Her lover — or a shopkeeper — never suggests that she use her resale number to get a discount. And considering that her fiancé literally casts Jasmine for the role as Campaign Asset, it seemed odd — very, very odd — that he never bothered to Google her.

But I think I understand why otherwise critical people cheer this movie, which is on its way to becoming Allen’s biggest commercial hit. Two words: Cate Blanchett. Always amazing, she outdoes herself here. If you had to read Woody Allen’s screenplay, you’d say it was lazy and cliché-drenched. But Blanchett breathes life into clichés. You actually believe that she has a chance of making a new life for herself. As everyone says, she gets an Academy Award nomination for this role.

Blanchett is so remarkable and Allen’s satiric scenes in the Hamptons and the East Side of Manhattan are so diverting that it’s easy to miss the message of the film: Jasmine never had a chance. She’s lost her money. Her illusions are all she has left. A 1 percenter becomes a 99 percenter. And then she’s ground down again.

A tragic story? In other hands, perhaps. But the way Woody Allen has set it up, you’re too busy sneering at the film’s rich East Siders and Hamptonites to care deeply about the woman they’ve cast off.

Joan Schenkar, author of The Talented Miss Highsmith, champions a long-neglected writer, now back in print.

James Purdy (1914-2009) is the Oddball of American Literature — surely one of the oddest ever to be lobbed over the National Net. He writes in a style entirely his own: that of a lavender uncle who decorates his closet with the corpses of the American Dream. His antique vocabulary accoutres these noirish creations with fanciful foulards and beautiful braces. He is nothing if not unsettling.

Purdy belongs in the company — though not exactly in the presence — of writers like Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, and Patricia Highsmith: writers who brought back from the ends of their nerves strange new terroirs with which their names are now associated. (In other work, I have given Miss Highsmith’s imaginative terrain a local habitation and a handle: "Highsmith Country." Mr. Purdy’s territory, which mixes races as well as sexual offenses, is waiting for its place-card.)

Eccentricity, wit and excellence are the private clubs to which Purdy’s clawing peculiarity and fanged approach to phrasing admitted him — and his fellow club members welcomed him extravagantly. Dame Edith Sitwell said Purdy would "come to be recognized as one of the greatest living writers of fiction in our language;" Dorothy Parker opined he was a "writer of the highest rank in originality, insight and power;" Gore Vidal called him "an authentic American genius."

Purdy’s short stories have been collected and published for the first time by Norton/Liveright in "The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy." [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.], accompanied by a snappy introduction from another witty eccentric, John Waters. With this volume, and with the reissue of his 1965 novel, "Cabot Wright Begins," 

James Purdy’s publishers have done us all a favor. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

Did you watch the Frontline documentary? (You still can, online.) It tracks two Milwaukee families, one African-American, one white, over 20 years, as they struggle to stay in the middle class. Weird timing for me; I’d just finished writing about one of the richest families in Milwaukee. So watching this documentary wasn’t like watching another part of town. More like another planet. A planet of people with remarkable tenacity. Over and over I thought: How do they keep on? I couldn’t.

Marcie lives in Milwaukee. She was kind enough to watch the documentary and comment: “I’m still reeling. I was teaching in the Welfare to Work program started in the 90’s by the Clinton administration with the best of intentions. (It failed.) Last night’s program miraculously, brilliantly, captured the truth. Heartbreaking in how we’ve colossally failed hard-working American families and heartbreaking that the mother of the Stanley family believed she had personally failed. Watching ‘Two American Families’ made me think about our fragility, how hard it can be to raise a family, even with the most basic expectations – it made me think about love.”

André Aciman, an Egyptian exile, came to Harvard in the late 1970s for a Ph.D. Now Aciman, one of our most stylish writers, has published “Harvard Square,” a novel about an Egyptian exile who comes to Harvard in the late 1970s for a Ph.D. What gives? I explain all in Harvard Magazine. [To buy the book, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

Harry Parker has died. He was a legend — a real legend, not one cobbled together by press agents and trickery — and coaching Harvard crews to five decades of victories was the least of his greatness. Start with Craig Lambert’s evocative appreciation. Then go on to Craig’s lovely book, Mind Over Water.

What would the meanest, toughest novelist have to say about social media, gay bankers, memoirs and more? Joan Schenkar, author of The Talented Miss Highsmith, serves up some probable responses.

In 1989, my stepchildren gave me an Eddie Bauer watch for Christmas. A few months ago, I accidentally wore it when I went swimming in the Caribbean. Once it was waterproof. No longer. It stopped. I took it to the cheapo watch repair in the 86th Street subway. The Eddie Bauer watch, new, cost no more than $75. The guy said it would be $50 to fix.

I gave it to the cheapo repair guy — no charge — so he could repair it and resell it. I bought a $27 Timex. Great watch. (How do I know? The child hates it.)

The other day the strap on the Timex broke. I took it to 86th Street to be replaced. There in the case was the Eddie Bauer watch. Fixed. On sale. For $27.

So I bought it.  

Frank Delaney is one of those Joyceans who can recite ”Ulysses” from memory. Share the knowledge? Try and stop him. Every week he invites listeners to join him as he deconstructs the book line by line. And they do, by the thousands — his podcast is about to hit a million downloads. What’s the attraction? Maybe that he grew up in Ireland and lived in Dublin, reads Greek, Latin, old Irish, new Gaelic, colloquial and expressive phrases in both English and Irish, and created “Word of Mouth,” the BBC’s award-winning program on language. Tenacity? Frank has just finished Chapter 3; at this rate, he’ll finish in 27 years. Even if you loathe James Joyce, there’s magic in his voice. To experience Delaney on Joyce, click here.

You don’t expect to like Herman of the newly released film “Hello Herman,” starring the devilishly cute Garrett Backstrom and the subtly dynamic and roughly handsome Norman Reedus (of AMC’s “Walking Dead”). We meet sixteen-year-old Herman on his way to massacre 35 fellow high school students.

Reedus is the online journalist Lax Morales, whom Herman emails from inside the chained doors of his high school gym where he stands knee deep in bodies. Herman wants to tell Morales his story. Morales doesn’t expect to like Herman either. The dialog between the two takes place after Herman’s incarceration. With lots of help from flashbacks, we are drawn deeply into the worlds of both characters.

The intent of this surprisingly touching film, with a screenplay by John Buffalo Mailer, is not to excuse Herman’s horrific act. Rather, under Michelle Danner’s sensitive direction, a veil is lifted on how evil gets layered into character over time. We witness a once innocent boy become isolated, alienated, and brutally bullied by his peers. We see how what the poet W.H. Auden wrote, is true: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.”

Wisely, the blood in the movie is limited to video games. The shots fired by Herman — and captured on the head-mounted camera he wears that fateful day — end in freeze frames that show only his victim’s terror. And there is something wonderful about the filmmaker’s decision to eliminate scenes that mirror today’s action movies, where a gun-wielding hero stands godlike over the carnage he’s wrought. It also keeps this disquieting and deeply moving film appropriate for younger audiences.

Mailer originally wrote "Hello Herman" as a play in response to the Columbine shootings, and it spawned the Hello Herman Project, which uses this drama in schools to inspire conversation on bullying between adults and kids. The film promises to be a new asset in this effort.

In one theory of early trauma, the traumatized child encapsulates his injured soul in a safe place in his imagination, a place where violence — and human feeling — can never again reach him. That’s where Herman seems to live. But in his final interview with Morales before his execution, something breaks through to Herman’s long ago broken heart — and he weeps violently, saying that he is sorry.

Love does not save the day in this disturbing film; but you certainly can feel how it might have. And you may not like Herman, but in the end, this viewer anyway wanted to embrace him. [To rent the film now or see where it’s playing, click here.]

from "’Good Will Hunting" (1997)

Marty Arnold was the deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine when I was writing often there. One piece was a murder investigation: the killing of a 13-year-old boy in a suburban schoolyard. Four boys had been arrested; two of them were brothers and had been convicted. I quickly discovered they were innocent, so I asked to interview them. Their father called Marty: “Is Jesse Kornbluth who he says he is?” Marty’s reply: “You better fucking believe it.” When Marty told me about the call, he put his hand on my shoulder and added one line: “If we find your car burning on the side of the road, we’ll know you got the story.” You can go for a long time on support like that.

From the publisher’s catalogue, [REDACTED’s] first novel in twelve years, weighing in at 512 pages:

This is an extraordinary story of botany, exploration and desire, spanning across much of the 19th century. The novel follows the fortunes of the brilliant Alma [REDACTED] (daughter of a bold and charismatic botanical explorer) as she comes into her own within the world of plants and science. As Alma’s careful studies of moss take her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, the man she loves draws her in the opposite direction — into the realm of the spiritual, the divine and the magical. Alma is a clear-minded scientist; Ambrose is a Utopian artist. But what unites this couple is a shared passion for knowing — a desperate need to understand the workings of this world, and the mechanism behind of all life. [REDACTED] is a big novel, about a big century. Exquisitely researched and told at a galloping pace, this story novel soars across the globe — from London, to Peru, to Philadelphia, to Tahiti, to Amsterdam and beyond. It is written in the bold, questing spirit of that singular time. Alma is a witness to history, as well as maker of history herself. She stands on the cusp of the modern, with one foot still in the Enlightened Age, and she is certain to be loved by readers across the world.

130 wind turbines, 400 feet high, in Nantucket Sound — who wouldn’t want that natural, cheap energy? A lot of people, as it turns out. (Including the Kennedys.) ‘Cape Spin! An American Power Struggle’ tells the funny/tragic story of this project. It’s good. (My friends made it.) For tickets, click here.

After, try getting this woman out of your head. Her optimism, her love of her friend, her lack of filter — for most of the movie, these charm you. But there comes a moment when you lose patience with Frances. She’s no longer a young woman trying to find a place for herself in her own life, she’s a screw-up, a dingbat, a flop. How does she change, "grow up," become a new and better incarnation of the woman we loved in the beginning? That occurs off-screen. The movie is blighted by these two moments: the extra beat of bumbling, the absent beat of explication. But these are quibbles. "Frances Ha" is an affirmation and a delight. And the final 30 seconds are the most satisfying I’ve experienced in a movie theater in a long time.