(++++) HARDCOVER HIJINKS

Optimism Sounds Exhausting: A “Dilbert” Collection. By Scott Adams. Andrews McMeel. $19.99.

The Weed Whisperer: A “Doonesbury” Book. By G.B. Trudeau. Andrews McMeel. $19.99.

     Comic strips have clearly come of age when collections of them start appearing, on a regular basis, in handsome “library edition” volumes. Andrews McMeel has been leading the way to this new, higher status for cartoons for years. The late lamented Calvin and Hobbes got an enormous three-hardcover-volume set priced at $150. The late lamented FoxTrot got two oversized softcover volumes in a nicely designed slipcase. The late lamented Cul de Sac got a similar, equally attractive two-volume slipcased release. But thank goodness strips do not have to be late and lamented to receive high-quality treatment in their collections. Optimism Sounds Exhausting is the second Dilbert collection to appear as a full-color hardcover book with a color-coordinated cover and a silhouette of a major character on the front. The first of these, Go Add Value Someplace Else, was yellow and red with a Dilbert silhouette, while Optimism Sounds Exhausting is yellow and green and has a silhouette of Wally – the character who has raised laziness to an art form and does in fact make the comment that is the book’s title. The characters in Dilbert have become more snarky and disrespectful of authority in recent years, even to the point of insulting the company CEO (a character introduced only a few years ago); but nothing they say or do makes the slightest bit of difference in their Kafkaesque lives – which is exactly Scott Adams’ point. In the type of mind-numbing corporation in which Dilbert, Wally, Alice, Asok and the other characters work, all roads lead to the same dead end. Dilbert has stayed in the characters’ office building more and more in recent years, although occasionally there are futile interactions away from work to complement the ones during the workday. The fact is that Adams does not need to have the characters venture far from their cubicles to make his points about the demotivating and demoralizing dehumanization of the modern big-corporation workplace. Furthermore, the fact that Adams’ art is, at best, passable, is irrelevant, since he is good at giving characters just enough expressiveness to put his points across. The fact that Dilbert has no mouth (the vast majority of the time, anyway) is one perfect case in point; another is Dilbert’s tie, which almost always droops and then curves up at the end – meaning that when it does something different, that is significant. In Optimism Sounds Exhausting, for example, one unusually complex strip has Dilbert approaching the Pointy-Haired Boss with the news that “Bill Ackman just took a huge short position in our stock.” Even those who do not know who Ackman is will know from Dilbert’s fully upturned tie and standing-up-straight hair (another good visual cue to something upsetting) that this is a problem. The boss, though, can only think of the late lamented Bloom County, whose cat character, Bill, constantly said “ack!” So the boss says he is not worried about some cartoon cat. And of course that only makes Dilbert’s nervousness worse. This strip alone may not be hardcover-book quality, but there are plenty of others. In one, Dilbert points out that “marketing is only legal because it doesn’t work most of the time.” This is in the middle of a sequence about the company building emotionally manipulative robots that constantly guilt-trip their owners into buying upgrades – quite a business model there. Also here, Dilbert goes on several dates with a woman who wants a relationship that will lead to marriage – which, Dilbert tells her, is a financial contract, so how much money does she have? Then there are the strips in which Wally gets the CEO to be his mentor, which goes as badly as might be expected, except that the CEO insists Wally be made a vice president “so it looks as if my mentoring works.” Then, understandably, Wally gets demoted – after inventing a gigantic coffee cup that Asok the intern needs to carry on his back all day, while Wally hangs onto the rear of the cup and drinks. In another sequence, Wally becomes the firm’s chief economist “because nothing you say makes sense” – it is all “babble talk” using randomly strung-together words from economics and finance. None of this material is timeless humor, true, but enough of it rings true so that the solidity of the handsome hardcover volume seems justifiable: readers who keep the book for years will likely discover, over time, that much (if not all) of what passes for business-related humor here will promote as many wry chuckles in the future as it does now.

     The art is far better and far more integral to the quality of G.B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury than is the art of Dilbert to Adams’ strip. And a good thing, too, because the art itself is likely to be a strong reason for keeping Doonesbury collections year after year. Without it, far too many of the strips become dated far too quickly: Trudeau’s well-known political sermonizing (not that he would call it that) is actually the strip’s weak link. The Weed Whisperer is a very attractive-looking book, and although its title ties to a political event – the legalization of recreational marijuana use in Colorado, and how that affects some of the strips’ characters – that particular element of this book probably will not grow old especially quickly. It has, after all, strong social relevance that is likely to resound for some time. It is the avowedly political material that soon becomes flat-out boring in Doonesbury, because Trudeau, for all his artistic skill, has only a single political point to make: all Democrats are, by definition, good, and all Republicans are, by definition, bad. Considering how nuanced the rest of the strip is, the juvenile quality of its politics is a real disappointment. But Trudeau revels in it, proclaiming Doonesbury in one strip to be “the most trusted name in Bushwhacking” (which, yes, is funny, but also telling); elsewhere, expecting readers to identify Donald Trump as a radio caller despite his name not being mentioned; still elsewhere, including a reference to “Leader McConnell” that readers are expected to understand immediately as integral to the punch line of a Sunday strip; and so on. This is thin stuff. The much better parts of Doonesbury are the ones in which the characters simply try to get on with their lives in the modern world – an interesting state of affairs, since Trudeau does not particularly care about his characters, selecting ones on which to focus based on what editorial point he hopes to make at any given time. Still, the relatable elements of Doonesbury are what keep it fresh: newlyweds Alex and Toggle have twins – they arrive during Alex’s graduation from MIT – but economic factors force Alex to take a job as a barista; perennial music icon Jimmy T. learns to make music directly for his fans and send it out to them on the Web, unfortunately also discovering that he can now only afford to live in his car; thoroughly un-self-aware correspondent Roland Hedley mercilessly grinds out an unending series of increasingly self-referential tweets; and, of course, Zonker Harris and nephew Zipper head for Colorado to produce artisanal marijuana as the new legality of pot arrives. Doonesbury is far less freewheeling and in many ways far less amusing than it was in its early days – it has, after all, been around for half a century. Once in a while, Trudeau seems almost to realize this. At one point, during a Walden College reunion, he shows Zonker sitting in a mud puddle, a famous and oft-repeated scene from much earlier times; but now Zonker is wondering, “What was I thinking?” In another strip, Trudeau brings back an actual black-and-white panel from early Doonesbury, in which a drug-sniffing dog points a paw at a protesting-his-innocence Zonker and says, “J’accuse!” Now, though, Trudeau has another character ask the Zonker of today, “The dog busted you in French?” And Zonker replies, “That doesn’t make sense, does it? I must’ve been on acid.” But it does make sense, or rather did, in early Doonesbury. In the glorious full-color splendor of a now-revered and influential strip, though, it does not. But it sure seems a lot funnier than the “Leader McConnell” line, which it is hard to imagine ever being revived in some other context. Doonesbury is a one-of-a-kind strip in its complexity, its huge cast of characters, its editorializing, its political savvy (no matter how one-sided and superficial that may be), and its unique blend of characters who look real with ones that most definitely do not: the alien sitting in a radio station, for instance, and the underground-comic-book-inspired talking cigarette, Mr. Butts. Doonesbury fans will be every bit as glad to have the hardcover The Weed Whisperer as Dilbert fans – with whom there is presumably very little overlap – will be to own Optimism Sounds Exhausting.

(++++) STRANGE CREATURES, REAL AND NOT

Glow: Animals with Their Own Night-Lights. By W.H. Beck. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $17.99.

Jampires. By Sarah McIntyre & David O’Connell. Scholastic. $16.99.

     Sometimes reality trumps fiction. The creatures shown in W.H. Beck’s Glow look like invented otherworldly phenomena, things that cannot possibly exist. But they are real, and they live right here on Earth. The key is that they exist in places where more ordinary-looking animals cannot live – and despite the size at which these unusual creatures are shown in the book, many of them are actually quite tiny, so their apparent oddity and fierceness are a function of our misperception of how big they are. Glow is a book about bioluminescence – the word, with the way to pronounce it, appears at the start. And Beck points out that readers are likely to be familiar with some examples of the phenomenon, such as firefly lights. However, “more than anywhere else on our planet, animals glow in the water,” specifically in water so deep that sunlight cannot penetrate. Here very strange-looking creatures make their own light – but, again, they are generally very small strange-looking creatures, much littler than they appear in the book. It is important, although difficult, to keep this in mind when looking at, for example, the scaly dragonfish, which looks like a massive toothy monster but in fact measures no more than eight inches – which means its terrifyingly tooth-filled head, which is five inches long in the book, is in reality no bigger than an inch or two. Similarly, the green bomber worm, which releases glowing round balls when pursued, is more than six inches long in the book but in reality measures only six-tenths of an inch. The striking photographs here, which show the animals glowing against an all-black background, make their colors and their offensive or defensive strategies very clear, and the pictures in themselves have considerable beauty. Glow is also a scientifically accurate book, as far as it goes, explaining how the chemicals luciferin and luciferase are what create bioluminescence. The many uses of a glow are well presented, too: to hide, to hunt, to trick an enemy or trap a potential meal, to call for help, and in some cases for reasons not yet explained. The book’s final two pages are a useful supplement, explaining the true size of the creatures pictured and telling where they live. Not everything shown here is an animal: the book includes the foxfire mushroom, and single-cell dinoflagellates, although classified as animals, are difficult to see as such. The point here is not classification, however, but basic information on an unusual phenomenon that young readers may have encountered in their own lives – most likely through those fireflies – but may never have thought of beyond that. The variety of creatures producing bioluminescence is indeed wide, and the phenomenon is indeed a fascinating one: Beck’s book may well lead readers to seek further information elsewhere.

     But there is no need to go further than Sarah McIntyre and David O’Connell have gone to get information on Jampires. They are small and odd-shaped creatures distinguished by the fact that they do not exist outside this book. The story is silly and endearing: young Sam finds all the filling missing from his jelly doughnut, so he sets a trap at night, using the dry doughnut – filled with ketchup – as bait. And sure enough, a couple of fanged, pointy-eared critters show up, explaining that “we both got so hungry we couldn’t resist/ slurping from what we could find./ A dollop of jam would never be missed!/ Or at least, we thought you’d not mind.” The jampires take Sam on a flight to their own land, which is “up through the start-speckled blue” and consists of a gigantic jam jar and “doughnuts that looked plump as cushions” – plus “mountains of blueberry pie,” presumably including jam filling. The jampires’ realm, a kind of oddball modification of the Land of Sweets as seen in Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, is packed with all sorts of jam-based or jam-related goodies – and lots of smiling jampires of all sizes. Sam and his newfound friends land in a “skyberry orchard,” where jampire moms welcome them and thank Sam for bringing back their “two jammy dodgers” (although, in truth, Sam did nothing but tag along as the jampires found their own way home). The grown-up jampires decide that Sam deserves a reward, so they now bring him a basket of jam-filled doughnuts every day, and everything ends pleasantly stickily. The mild and silly story is well complemented by the mild and silly illustrations – McIntyre and O’Connell both write the tale and both illustrate it – and the story will especially delight any child who is fond of jam-or-jelly-filled doughnuts but occasionally discovers one that really ought to have more filling than it does. When that happens, clearly jampires have been at work.

(+++) MEN VS. WOMEN, ROUND ONE ZILLION

Iron John: A Book about Men—25^th Anniversary Edition. By Robert Bly. Da Capo. $15.99.

UnSlut: A Diary and a Memoir. By Emily Lindin. Zest Books. $14.99.

     From the oldest days of oral history within small groups to the most recent ones of instant communication with the world, the difficulty of knowing just what it means to be a man or woman has persisted. This has provided fertile ground for authors of all sorts to meditate upon manliness and womanliness, how the sexes interact or can better interact, and just what it means in our time (or any time) to be a member of one gender or the other. Poet and translator Robert Bly tackled a number of these issues 25 years ago in an extended meditation called Iron John, which is now available in a new edition that includes a brief and rather puzzling afterword but is otherwise the same as the 1990 book. Bly’s focus is one of the Grimm Märchen, a German word usually translated, not entirely accurately, as “fairy tales.” What the Grimm brothers actually did was to collect age-old stories about how the world works, both naturally and supernaturally, many of them drawing on what Jung would later call "archetypes” and some, but by no means all, containing fairies and other supernatural beings. The tales fall so neatly into categories that they have in fact been academically categorized; but even without knowing precisely where the story of Iron John fits, it is easy to see which of its elements have longstanding resonance and which have an implied meaning beyond the literal. This is the story of a Wild Man, captured by a king and brought to the palace from a deep, dark forest, then freed from his cage by the king’s son. The son soon bonds with the Wild Man (who calls himself Iron John), then is sent away from the forest, and then makes his own way in the world after overcoming several trials – eventually marrying the daughter of the king of a neighboring land. The plot is filled with traditional oral-history elements, such as the number three: Iron John sets the boy a task three times (the boy fails all three, which is why he must set out on his own); when grown and in the other kingdom, the boy wins a competition three days in a row; and in fact there are three kings in the story – the boy’s father, the father of his eventual bride, and Iron John himself, who at the end reveals himself as “a baronial King” who had been enchanted. Implied sexuality permeates the story, too, in the boy’s repeatedly dipping parts of himself into a forbidden stream, with the result that his hair becomes bright gold and he does not wish anyone to see it – but the princess insists on removing his cap (a metaphor for foreskin) and at the end says that of course she will marry him, since she knew from his hair (revealed when she took the cap off) that he was no peasant. There is much more that can be interpreted in the story on its own terms, or nearly its own (the psychoanalytic approach does go beyond the words themselves). But Bly uses the tale for a different purpose: to show what he believes it means to be a man in our modern age.

     Bly sees the story as tracing men through eight stages of growth, and he regards its characters as archetypes of a kind of male-only vigor that is forceful, outgoing, even warlike, but at the same time protective and emotionally centered. Bly is verbose and philosophical; his Iron John meanders through the personal (the book partly reflects his view of his own manhood) as well as the philosophical (he relies heavily, rather too heavily, on those Jungian archetypes). Bly basically argues that men have become alienated from their essential maleness (which is not the same as “manliness”), largely because of the absence of father figures akin to Iron John. Men need rites of passage, Bly argues, and the Iron John story metaphorically offers and explains them, while modern society has abandoned them and thus has separated men from their essential maleness – which only other men, not women, can teach them (Bly is not anti-woman, but he considers women’s ways inherently incapable of relating meaningfully to men’s deepest needs). Although he stops short of affirming the “noble savage” ideal or proclaiming everything ancient good and everything modern bad, Bly does suggest that long-ago human societies were deeply in touch with aspects of manhood that modern First World societies no longer recognize – with the result that many men, including Bly himself, are cut off from their own deserved heritage and feel constantly uncertain, adrift and vaguely (sometimes not so vaguely) discontented. Bly’s purpose in his Iron John seems to be to lead men to be the best men they can be. But what a winding path he takes readers on! The new edition’s short afterword (barely two pages long) shows in a single difficult-to-parse sentence what Bly thought, and still thinks, being male – indeed, being human – is all about: “As the search for the Sacred King continues, the themes this book talks about – the descent into ashes, the love of the ‘God-Woman,’ and the developmental stages of red, white, and black – resonate deeply for both men and women.” It would have been fairer and more honest for Bly to have said “for some men and women,” because his elaborate writing and frequently abstruse references can make his Iron John an uncomfortable slog for many readers. That is as true now as when the book was first published. In seeking a kind of holistic masculinity, Bly again and again becomes long-winded and descends into a mixture of generalization (in his descriptions of traditional cultures) and psychobabble (in his use of Jungian and Freudian terms and insights). The anecdotes, the personal elements, are strong in Bly’s Iron John, but the analyses are less trenchant, the explanations are often rather far-fetched, and some of Bly’s writing is flat-out difficult to follow. Iron John inspired (if that is the right word) some very silly behavior after its initial publication – men’s drum circles in the woods and all that – and now itself seems a trifle sillier, or at least more self-indulgent, than it originally did. It remains a thoughtful and frequently interesting book, but one whose author’s sense of how profound his revelations are frequently interferes with their actual profundity.

     Much less portentous and much less pretentious, Emily Lindin’s UnSlut is intended as a female manifesto, just as Bly’s book is intended as one for males. UnSlut is an expansion of material Lindin originally posted online, and has the same worthy purpose: to help girls get beyond sexual bullying, which Lindin herself suffered through in middle school. On the face of it, the book’s format is intriguing: it purports to be the actual diary that Lindin kept from ages 11 (when she was first labeled a “slut”) through 13, with marginal commentary on her experiences. Whether the material is quite as authentic as Lindin asserts is difficult to determine, however. For an 11-to-13-year-old diarist, she seems to be a mighty fine writer, using full sentences (often complex ones), avoiding grammatical errors, and being a spelling whiz (she even gets “millennium” right). So perhaps the diary entries have been a bit cleaned up – but that does not make the underlying material any less important. Lindin picked up her own “slut” label after allowing a boyfriend to “get to third base” (feeling within her underwear below the waist) under what she sees, from her current age of 29, as duress. She, not he, was labeled the sexual aggressor, and given the fact that she was also early in sexual development (there are many references, by Lindin herself and others, to the size of her “boobs”), the “slut” label just seemed to stick. Lindin’s own reaction to it ranged at the time from being mortified to finding it, if not cool, at least a useful identification for a preteen trying desperately to figure out who and what she was and would become – scarcely an earthshaking element of her story, since it is essentially the purpose of the teenage years, but nevertheless one that every preteen and teen feels acutely. Lindin flirted not only with boys but also with real danger at times: her descriptions of cutting herself seem, in retrospect, to be clearer calls for help than she thought they were when they occurred or thinks they are as she looks back at them. But by and large, her account of the “slut” label and its consequences does not go much beyond the creation of groups of BFFs who shortly become frenemies and then re-blend into new groups of BFFs, sometimes several times a week, if not daily. There is, in short, nothing very surprising about the social circumstances in which Lindin endured the “slut” label.

     But back in 1997, when Lindin was 11, the entire world was very different, and not just for preteens and teenagers. To make her diary entries understandable, Lindin has to spend considerable time explaining AOL Instant Messenger, disposable cameras and the “seconds” of prints that could be made from them, Total Request Live and similar former bastions of superficial pop culture, and much else. All this makes UnSlut seem more of a historical document than, ideally, it should be, since “slut shaming” definitely still exists and has become, if anything, more complicated now that sexting (which did not exist at the time of Lindin’s diaries: cellphones were far from ubiquitous) has become commonplace, and even adults have become aware of it (hyper-aware, with the usual ridiculous overreactions to adolescent sex crowding out the sensible responses). The problem is that Lindin has progressed, if that is the word, from crowdsourced humiliation to painful political correctness – which undercuts her thoughtful ideas and even her outrage. For example, one boy says to Zach, Lindin’s then-boyfriend, that he should “slap Emily’s ass when she stands up,” and Lindin says in her diary entry that Zach says “not in school,” after which Lindin wonders “if he would have slapped my ass when I stood up if we weren’t in school.” The marginal gloss on this passage says, “A better answer would have been, ‘No, Emily’s body is not an object that exists for my entertainment as her boyfriend, let alone for your entertainment as a bystander.’” That is as ridiculous a response as the one that Zach actually made. Realistically, and age-appropriately, a better remark would have been, “Don’t be silly.”

     There are real questions about just how much Lindin has learned since her middle-school days, and every once in a while, a marginal note seems to indicate: not very much. For example, she offers a diary entry about liking guys “who seem out of my reach…but once they come within my reach and start liking me back…I lose interest in them because they seem boring.” The marginal note here says, “Unfortunately, the same thing would continue to happen for the next decade or so. It’s resulted in a lot of off-and-on relationships with rather aloof men.” So there seems to be some truth to Wordsworth’s assertion, “The child is father of the man” – or mother of the woman, in this case. Lindin takes some of what happened to her in middle school very seriously – that is what UnSlut is primarily about, after all – but some of the events entirely too casually, notably the self-harm, about which her marginal note blandly comments that “I’m a bit disappointed that I didn’t sort through all the emotions behind it here in my diary.” Readers will likely be more than “a bit” concerned, but Lindin’s focus on “slut shaming” means she tends to wear blinders about other elements of middle-school life. Actually, she sometimes wears them about the “slut” issue, too, as when she notes in her diary that she wore tight pants at a dance and “the type of dancing my friends and I were doing wasn’t exactly prude,” then says in her marginal note that her clothing should have been irrelevant, because “there’s nothing I could have done that would be an excuse” for boys to approach her sexually. That is a statement that is either hopelessly naïve or hopelessly politically correct: even in middle school, Lindin realized that some things she did could be interpreted as come-ons, but as an almost-30-year-old, she seems to think that the way girls and women dress and behave has zero effect on boys and men (or perhaps ought to have zero effect in some ideal world). UnSlut contains interesting elements and certainly pursues a worthy cause, but it is something of a mishmash in doing so. Lindin’s afterword is a lot more coherent, focused and usefully explanatory than her marginal notes throughout the book: her determination comes through more clearly after a reader goes through 250 pages of diary-and-commentary that are, in many ways (albeit different ones), just as much of a slog as are the almost-300 pages of Iron John.

(++++) DRAMATISTS AND SYMPHONISTS

Mahler: Symphony No. 4. Dorothea Röschmann, soprano; Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Mariss Jansons. RCO Live. $21.99 (SACD).

Sibelius: Scaramouche—complete ballet. Turku Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leif Segerstam. Naxos. $12.99.

Sibelius: Symphonies Nos. 1, 2, 5 and 7. Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Leonard Bernstein. C Major Blu-ray Disc. $39.99.

Scriabin: Symphonies Nos. 3 (“La Divin Poème”) and 4 (“Le Poème de l’extase”). London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev. LSO. $14.99 (SACD).

Cimarosa: Opera Overtures, Volume 4—I sdegni per amore; La finta Frascatana; I tre amanti; Le donne rivali; I finti nobili; Il pittor parigino; L’amante combattuto dalle donne di punto (La Biondolina); Giunio Bruto; L’amor costante. Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice conducted by Michael Halász. Naxos. $12.99.

Offenbach: Overtures and Orchestral Music—“Orphée aux enfers”; “La Belle Hélène”; “Le Voyage dans la lune”; “La Fille du tambour-major”; “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”; “Barbe-bleue”; “Le Mariage aux lanternes”; “La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein”; “Vert-Vert”; “La Vie parisienne.” Orchestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by Neeme Järvi. Chandos. $19.99 (SACD).

Florent Schmitt: Antoine et Cléopatre—Six épisodes symphoniques en deux suites d’apres le drame de Shakespeare; Le Palais hanté—Étude symphonique pour “Le Palais hanté” d’Edgar Poë. Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Naxos. $12.99.

     Even in his most monochromatic symphony – the composer himself gave its color as “sky blue” – Mahler includes elements of drama. For a composer who never wrote an opera, he had a fine sense of how to move an audience from one emotion to another. This is more explicit in other symphonies than in the Fourth, but even here, there is progression – essentially from exaltation to higher exaltation, with some uncertainties and byways along the road (primarily in the second movement). The new performance by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Mariss Jansons manages both to keep the symphony on an even keel and to showcase its progress – a fine combination. Recorded live in February 2015 and released on the orchestra’s own label, this is a finely balanced and very well-played performance by one of the world’s best orchestras, an ensemble that has been intimately familiar with Mahler’s music since the composer’s own time. The difficulties of the Fourth, Mahler’s most transparent and most lightly scored symphony, lie in keeping it simple and parody-free. The Fourth confused early audiences because it lacked so many of the obvious complexities of the first three symphonies, but it is in fact just as complicated – in a subtler way. Jansons chooses tempos judiciously and keeps the pacing of all the movements steady and clear; he manages to combine excitement with placidity in a very winning way. In the finale, soprano Dorothea Röschmann sings with clarity and simplicity, although her voice is not quite as childlike as would be ideal for this movement: it is key here to have the movement, toward which all the rest of the symphony ascends, delivered with the greatest possible simplicity of sound (Leonard Bernstein at one time even had a boy soprano sing it). If there is a bit too much sophistication to Röschmann’s voice, if her phrasing is sometimes on the mannered side (especially in the very slow final verse), her soprano is nevertheless light enough and pleasant enough to convey effectively the imagined emotions of a child in Heaven – providing a fine conclusion to a very strong overall performance.

     Mahler and Sibelius strongly disagreed about the appropriate content of symphonies. While Mahler’s tend to burst at the seams with drama, Sibelius’ are generally cooler, more cerebral – not without drama, certainly, but not imbued with it, either. Yet Sibelius, unlike Mahler, composed directly for the stage, less significantly in his single opera than in the music he wrote for no fewer than 13 plays. The complete music for one of these, Scaramouche, is offered by Leif Segerstam and the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra in the sixth and last Naxos CD devoted to Sibelius’ theater works. Scaramouche was actually a pantomime, not a play with dialogue, so the music was particularly important for mood-setting and for carrying the drama forward effectively. The work’s plot is not especially trenchant: the title character is a mysterious hunchbacked dwarf whose viola playing entices a young wife away from her husband; the wife kills the dwarf, who then reappears to her – causing her to dance herself to her own death. Sibelius makes the most of the atmospheric elements of this rather overdone drama – which, if nothing else, turns on the bewitching power of music itself – while avoiding entanglement in its absurd or simply silly portions. The music moves effectively from initial scenes of warmth, charm and innocence to increasingly dark places and the eventual pathos-filled (if not exactly tragic) conclusion. Most of the music is slow: Sibelius draws out the characters’ actions and emotions through a series of sections marked Lento assai, Poco moderato, Adagio, Allegretto, Andantino, Moderato, and so on. In the absence of stage action, the music does not hang together particularly well – its illustrative purposes are quite clear – but Sibelius’ care in orchestration and mood-setting come through very well, and Segerstam leads the work with care in both pacing and balance, bringing out Sibelius’ characteristic attentiveness to orchestration particularly well. Although not highly dramatic in a conventional sense, Scaramouche, which dates to 1913, clearly shows how Sibelius, in his mature years, used music to support and enhance a drama.

     As for those not-as-dramatic-as-Mahler’s symphonies, one conductor determined to plumb Sibelius for every bit of drama he did offer was Leonard Bernstein, whose late-in-life recordings of Nos. 1, 2, 5 and 7 are now available on Blu-ray Disc on the C Major label. Bernstein (1918-1990) recorded a complete Sibelius cycle with the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s, but did not live to complete a second one with the Vienna Philharmonic. Nevertheless, the four symphonies that he did conduct are more than enough to show significant changes in Bernstein’s attitude to this music, to which he brings a number of controversial approaches. By and large, the tempos are slow – in some cases extremely so. When Bernstein does decide to speed things up, he often does so at such a hectic pace that it takes an orchestra of the Vienna Philharmonic’s sky-high quality to keep up with the music. And Bernstein’s podium manner – what some would call his antics – is more pronounced, more accentuated in these late-in-life performances (which date to 1988-90) than in earlier times. It is worth remembering Bernstein’s acknowledged expertise in Mahler when listening to – and seeing – his conducting of these Sibelius works: whatever the profound philosophical differences between the two composers, Bernstein seems actively to seek elements they have in common, and is quite willing to force resemblances even when none exist. Among these four symphonies, No. 1 is handled best – and, significantly, least eccentrically. The gorgeous sound of the orchestra comes to the fore here, the intensity of the music is palpable, and there is very little that is exaggerated or forced into garb that it wears poorly. This is a performance that can show listeners unfamiliar with Bernstein why so many people thought so highly of him. The other symphonies, though, are less convincing. No 2 is episodic and very, very slow (it runs 53 minutes; elsewhere, it rarely lasts longer than 45). Silences stretch forever, and this work, which seems to take traditional symphonic form apart, itself seems to disintegrate. No. 5 is also slow, but not quite to the same degree, and here the pacing has enough consistency so that the work remains cohesive. The Vienna Philharmonic’s superb balance works particularly well here – the interplay between woodwinds and lower strings is especially impressive. But the symphony’s conclusion is genuinely odd: the final chords, which are not evenly spaced and which are separated by long silences, seem to stretch out forever, until the work seems not so much to finish as to collapse onto and into itself. No. 7, in which Bernstein’s podium manner is more reserved than in the others and has something magisterial about it, gets the second-best of these readings, with sure understanding of the work’s tonal complexity and a level of precision that gives Sibelius’ highly unified conception a degree of clarity that it does not always receive. The sound of this release is very good, and the engineers have handled the material well. The video direction by Humphrey Burton is noteworthy for how well it stays focused on Bernstein’s manners and mannerisms, giving viewers a chance to see the music being shaped even as they hear it. But Bernstein does frequently overdo his gestures and overall involvement to a distracting degree. This is a (+++) release that fans of Bernstein will certainly want but that will be unlikely to win him any new ones, despite the undoubted quality of the performances of the First and Seventh Symphonies.

     Valery Gergiev, however – another uneven and frequently eccentric conductor – will likely gain fans from his new LSO Live recording of symphonic Scriabin. This (++++) release pairs La Divin Poème, which Scriabin designated as his Third, with Le Poème de l’extase, which he did not formally number as a symphony at all but which is nevertheless often labeled No. 4 (Scriabin did sometimes refer to it that way). Gergiev’s versions, recorded live in March and April 2014, place Scriabin’s highly unusual sound world firmly within the vast compass of Russian symphonic production. Warmth is the overarching element here, the sort of warmth that comes from lush-sounding strings paired with finely rounded, burnished brass tone and woodwinds that are about as far from being shrill as it is possible to be. The London Symphony gives Gergiev much of the sound that would be expected from a top-flight Russian orchestra, and that is really quite an accomplishment. Symphony No. 3 requires its four movements to be played straight through without pause, presenting interpretative difficulties as well as risking musicians’ exhaustion – much of the writing is quite demanding. But no strain shows here, as Gergiev and the London players balance the passion and tenderness of parts of the score with the liveliness and intensity of other sections. Scriabin’s movement titles connect well with the music only for those immersed in the composer’s often-difficult-to-follow philosophical musings: they translate as Introduction, Struggles, Delights and Divine Play. But Gergiev is clearly comfortable with the movements’ intentions and does a fine job of bringing out the ways in which connections do appear. As for Le Poème de l’extase, in which “ecstasy” refers to something artistic rather than anything physical, a full appreciation of the work involves accepting statements about it that the composer wrote or specifically approved as explanatory, such as: “The stronger the pulse beat of life and the more rapid the precipitation of rhythms, the more clearly the awareness comes to the Spirit that it is consubstantial with creativity itself.” The written material does seem rather puerile, but the music does not – certainly not as Gergiev handles it. The timeless transcendence of the music, created by Scriabin’s use of whole-tone-based harmonies, comes through here with clarity – although without specific or definitive meaning – and the work becomes, under Gergiev’s direction, one into which listeners can subsume their consciousness and abandon any attempts to understand the music intellectually, instead simply experiencing it. The result is an unusual and uplifting experience.

     For something that is still dramatic but is considerably more down-to-earth, and still of (++++) quality, there is the fourth Naxos release of opera overtures by Domenico Cimarosa, performed by the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice under Michael Halász. Like the first three volumes in this series, the fourth one offers largely interchangeable music that is uniformly well-constructed, cleverly orchestrated, and highly appealing in scene-setting – even if it is not clear just which scenes any particular overture is designed to set. Cimarosa sometimes created three-movement sinfonias as opera openers and sometimes produced more-focused, single-movement pieces that more closely resemble what audiences now think of as an opera overture. But there was no particular rhyme or reason to his use of one form or the other – it is not as if, for example, he moved from one approach to the other over time. Cimarosa was a dramatist first and foremost, and his overtures, whether to comic works or serious ones, were intended to help the audience settle into the theater and get into the appropriate mood for what was to come. The orchestra plays all nine works on this CD with enthusiasm and involvement,  not seeking depths that are not there but also being careful not to turn the works into throwaways – they are too well-made to be disposed of so lightly. Interestingly, the last piece here, the overture to L’amor costante, is almost certainly not by Cimarosa: it appears to have been composed by someone else (exactly who is unknown) and then attached to Cimarosa’s opera. Yet it sounds like a perfectly fine curtain-raiser that might as well be by Cimarosa even if internal evidence indicates that it is not.

     Cimarosa died in the first year of the 19^th century (1801), and as the century progressed, the tendency to have people other than composers create overtures to stage works actually increased. It was firmly established by the second half of the century: the well-known overtures to Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas were very rarely written by Sullivan himself. The same is true for most of the overtures to the works of Jacques Offenbach: the overtures’ themes come directly from the stage works, but the assembly of those themes into an opening piece was only rarely done by Offenbach himself. This in no way detracts from the charms and melodiousness of Offenbach’s overtures – in fact, it is precisely because the melodies are so enchanting that arrangers (some known, some unknown) were able to produce overtures with staying power at least equal to that of the stage works themselves. On a new and very fine-sounding (++++) Chandos SACD, Neeme Järvi and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande offer what might be called a potpourri of Offenbachiana, including very well-played versions of pieces both familiar and less known. Offenbach’s stage works fall broadly into two categories: the sarcastic, biting ones written before the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the more fantastical, much less satirical ones written afterwards. There is a generous helping of both here – although it would have been nice if they had been presented chronologically on the disc, showing how Offenbach’s style evolved (the booklet notes actually do discuss the pieces in chronological order). Järvi has some tendency to push tempos in these works, both the slow ones and the fast, so slower passages (for instance, from Les Contes d’Hoffmann) can drag a bit, while faster ones can seem a touch too frenetic. On the whole, though,  Järvi takes the measure of this music smartly, and the orchestra is responsive and bright, although not quite as warm in tone or as sectionally well-balanced as the very best Viennese and German orchestras. The more-extended pieces here come off particularly well, including the overtures to Orphée aux enfers and La Belle Hélène, as well as the much-less-often-heard opening of Vert-Vert. Some of the briefer works get somewhat short shrift, notably the overture to Barbe-bleue, but as a whole, this is a recording filled with delights, giving listeners a chance to hear just how wonderful a melodist Offenbach was – and why many composers, among them Sullivan, Suppé, and Johann Strauss Jr., sought in their own works to produce the apparently effortless melodic flow and instantly hummable tunes that seemed to come to Offenbach so naturally.

     A dramatist/composer of a later time, Florent Schmitt (1870-1958) was strongly influenced by composers who were important in France after Offenbach’s time had passed – specifically, Fauré and Massenet, who were among his teachers, and Ravel and Satie. Schmitt is not, however, easy to pin down stylistically, since he drew inspiration as well from German composers (Wagner and Richard Strauss), and in fact his pro-German sympathies during the 1930s were largely responsible for the later neglect of his music. On the basis of a new (++++) Naxos recording of some of his works, featuring the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under JoAnn Falletta, Schmitt’s music is overdue for revival. His rhythms are complex, his orchestration clever and colorful, his blend of strength and lyricism impressive and very much of the 20^th century. Schmitt’s material for Antoine et Cléopatre was composed in 1920 as a series of ballet scenes, intended to appear between the acts of Shakespeare’s tragedy; the composer gathered the six scenes into two suites that together effectively paint a picture of the play’s exploration of the grand sociopolitical theme of empire and the highly personal one of romantic love. Suitably, the first suite ends with the battle of Actium, the second with Le Tombeau de Cléopâtre. This is difficult music to grasp, lying partially within Impressionism and partially in a kind of Scriabinesque mysticism. It is not easy to play, either, but Falletta and the Buffalo musicians handle it very stylishly, although a little more fullness in the strings would have been welcome. Antoine et Cléopatre is paired here with another expressive and unusual work, a tone poem of sorts even though the composer labeled it Étude symphonique. This is an earlier piece (1904) based on Mallarmé’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace, a dramatic and highly effective poem (eventually incorporated into The Fall of the House of Usher) in which insanity is compared to the deterioration of a noble building. Poe was highly influential in France, notably with Charles Baudelaire and the Symbolists, and Schmitt seems to channel Symbolism in this piece, which is carefully scored, expressively nuanced and very effectively orchestrated. It would be a stretch to describe Schmitt as a major composer, but there is much to admire in his handling of the dramatic elements of Shakespeare and Poe, and Falletta – a tireless champion of less-known but worthy works and their creators – here makes a very strong case for hearing his music more often.

(+++) THE PLAYING’S THE THING

Haydn: Trumpet Concerto in E-flat—a comprehensive music lesson. Rolf Smedvig, trumpet; Eduard Laurel, piano. Learning from the Legends DVD. $32.99.

Hummel: Trumpet Concerto—a comprehensive music lesson. Rolf Smedwig, trumpet; Eduard Laurel, piano. Learning from the Legends DVD. $32.99.

Erwin Schulhoff: Violin Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2; Suite for Violin and Piano; Sonata for Solo Violin. Eka Gogichashvili, violin; Kae Hosoda-Ayer, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Daniel Carr: Music for Flute—Sonatina for Yumi; Foliage; Song; Sonata; Still; Three Nocturnes; Wedding Song. François Minaux, flute; Mayumi Tayake, piano; Megan Gardner, soprano. MSR Classics. $12.95.

     Reaching out strictly to a small core audience, two new Learning from the Legends DVDs continue to show distinctive and highly useful ways in which the DVD medium can be employed for high-quality instructional purposes. These recordings are, in effect, master classes for trumpet players with trumpeter Rolf Smedvig. Each offers a complete performance of an important trumpet concerto – both the concertos as edited by Smedvig – plus a play-along track of piano accompaniment featuring Edward Laurel. Smedvig is not only an accomplished trumpet soloist but also a fine teacher, providing trumpet students with his practice philosophy while actually showing them the ins and outs of two significant concertos. One of these, the Hummel, is quite difficult, especially in its final movement, and it is very helpful to have performance examples from Smedvig’s recording with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to supplement the trumpet-and-piano arrangement. The examples with that orchestra help the Haydn, too, giving students a better sense of balance than they will get from the piano reduction. Some teaching elements like the ones here have previously been offered on CD by Naxos and were at one time available on vinyl from a company called Music Minus One. Naxos’ seven-disc set of “Suzuki Evergreens,” played by Takako Nishizaki, was an excellent example of a top-notch violinist performing music in an accessible manner that students could themselves follow and from which they could learn through repeated listenings. Music Minus One released vinyl LPs containing the orchestral accompaniments of a variety of works for soloist and orchestra – the idea being that students would play the solo parts and understand how it would feel to blend in with and perform in front of an orchestra. However, the two Smedvig releases, like others in this series, go beyond audio-only offerings by letting students see just what fingerings Smedvig uses and why. This is one case in which the DVD format, generally a mixed blessing in classical music, proves highly useful – and it is supplemented by the availability via download of both E-flat and B-flat solo trumpet parts with piano accompaniment. Defiantly limited in appeal despite what looks like a premium price – but really is not, given the value of the material here – these DVDs offer trumpet students measure-by-measure information on two staples of their concerto repertoire, courtesy of a highly knowledgeable soloist who shares not only the basics of performance but also some tricks of the trade. The audience for these DVDs is certainly a very limited one, but for that group, the releases hit the target beautifully: trumpeters will find both DVDs remarkably useful.

     There are no play-along elements on two new MSR Classics CDs, but here too, a large part of the enjoyment comes simply from hearing how the performers play – how they handle some music that is likely to be unfamiliar to virtually all listeners. Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) is one of the musicians whose works are being rediscovered today along with those of others who died at the hands of the Nazis (Schulhoff perished of tuberculosis in a concentration camp). Schulhoff is a fascinating, even strange character, and some of his music is fascinatingly strange, too. But listeners will get little of that from the works played by Eka Gogichashvili and Kae Hosoda-Ayer, which are among the composer’s more-straightforward ones. Encouraged in early life by Dvořák, taught by Debussy and Reger (itself an odd combination), influenced by jazz and by Communist ideology (his last works were strong affirmations of Socialist Realism), Schulhoff stated directly that music was a revolutionary art, leading to “the climb to an ecstatic change for the better” – thus sounding in words (although never in his later music) somewhat like Scriabin. Frequently given to self-deprecating humor in his works, fond of dance rhythms and ragtime, almost always in touch with tonality despite involvement with the Second Viennese School (from which, however, he never picked up serialism), Schulhoff was most prolific in the decade of 1923-32, during which he wrote his Sonata for Solo Violin and Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano (both in 1927). Schulhoff was a pianist, not a violinist – he won the Mendelssohn Prize for piano in 1913 (and for composition five years later). But he writes well for violin, and both these works, each of them laid out in traditional four-movement form, show fine command of the violin’s capability and a good sense of partnering the two performers in a somewhat jazzed-up but essentially conventional approach to solid musical material. The third movement of the second sonata, marked Burlesca, is in some ways the most characteristic of Schulhoff’s temperament, although the Scherzo of the solo sonata has some interesting elements as well. Before the 1920s, Schulhoff showed a less- distinctive style, with elements of Debussy and Richard Strauss evident along with, from time to time, a Scriabinesque touch or two. Suite for Violin and Piano (1911) and Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano (1913) are from this earlier time, with the suite being Schulhoff’s Op. 1. These are solid works, well-constructed and with interesting touches here and there, including Schulhoff’s fondness for dance forms in the suite – which more or less follows Baroque form through its Präludium, Gavotte and Minuetto, but then deviates interestingly into Walzer and, finally, Scherzo. Very little of the music on this CD, though, is as distinctive as some of Schulhoff’s more-outlandish pieces: Suite for Chamber Orchestra includes car horns and slide whistles, Symphonia Germanica satirizes German militarism, Sonata Erotica features a singer’s extended feigned orgasm, Bassnachtigall has a contrabassoon trying to be soulful and birdlike, and on and on. Schulhoff was a highly unusual composer whose stranger output is barely hinted at on this CD, which instead gives the impression of a solid, well-schooled but ultimately not terribly original creative mind. A touch more bizarrerie would have been welcome.

     As for Daniel Carr (born 1972), the second MSR Classics volume of his work features five pieces for flute and piano, one of which also includes a soprano (the piece is logically entitled Song), and one of which is for flute solo (Wedding Song, and no, no voice here). François Minaux and Mayumi Tayake do a fine job with these mostly mild, generally easy-to-listen-to works. Some are bright (Sonata for Yumi), others evocative (Foliage, Still, Three Nocturnes). The four-movement Sonata is somewhat overextended – Carr’s shorter works come across with greater effectiveness – but the flute writing is fine throughout, allowing Minaux plenty of places to breathe and numerous opportunities for expressiveness. The mostly tonal music has a certain background-ish quality to it: its pleasantries are clear from the start but tend soon to fade a bit, stopping short of being totally involving. These are all world première recordings, and it is nice to hear a disc on which a contemporary composer uses the flute with an understanding of its capabilities rather than a determination to force the instrument and its player beyond their respective comfort zones. This is music of no particular consequence – nicely conceived and nicely made, communicating on a rather superficial level but no less enjoyable for that. It is, in fact, all the more agreeable because it is not trying to make the flute sound like anything but a flute: the CD provides a very satisfying listening experience by inviting listeners to hear nicely tailored performances of some well-mannered contemporary music – engaging, convivial and aurally gratifying.

(++++) THE ART OF WISHING

Holiday Cards 2015: Ohara Shōson—Japanese Prints; Craig Shuttlewood—Trees and Robin; Mike Wilks—Eclipse. Pomegranate. $15 (Prints); $12 each (Trees; Eclipse).

     Whatever judgment history will eventually render on the year 2015, it will certainly not be that this was a year of peace. In ways both great and small, far-reaching and (all too often) individual, it has been a year of concentrated and widespread violence of many types. The feeling of helplessness, of “the center cannot hold,” has been exacerbated by the instantaneous transmission of information and pictures from one scene of horror after another. Whether there have been more such scenes in 2015 than in times past will be one matter for history to judge: perhaps we are only more aware of the depth and breadth of violence and its effects. Or perhaps – history will judge this, too – the recurring scenes of 2015 will be harbingers of a world in which such material becomes commonplace, even expected, with people’s sensibilities eventually becoming dismally inured to what the transmissions show, much as happened with the many, many graphic images of the Vietnam War, which was the first major conflict to be fought in a visually focused age.

     Certainly people of good will, to whom homilies, Christmas carols and prayers are repeatedly addressed, can hope that the violence of 2015 was an aberration that will diminish, hopefully markedly, in 2016 and beyond. An unrealistic hope, perhaps, but festivals that celebrate winter – Christmas being an especially poignant one, since that is scarcely all that it celebrates – have for thousands of years acknowledged darkness, cold and barrenness, while at the same time offering hope that the Earth and its inhabitants will endure and be revitalized in springtime. Hence the many ancient spring festivals – with, again, Easter being one that celebrates more than vegetative renewal.

     From a close-in vantage point, without the benefit of historical perspective, 2015 certainly seems like a year in which small gestures of peace, as well as large ones, are even more to be desired than usual. This makes one’s choice of holiday cards an especially apt way to make a statement of caring, concern and hope this year. And this in turn means that cards produced by Pomegranate, a company that consistently brings fine art and fine production values to everyday items such as calendars and greeting cards of all sorts, seem an especially worthwhile choice. Pomegranate makes so many gentle, warm and subtly peacefulness-reinforcing cards that people of any orientation (religious and otherwise) can easily find ones that express their personal feelings and attitudes.

     Four distinctive woodblock prints of Ohara Shōson (1877-1945), for example, grace a set of 20 cards featuring four scenes of birds in the poised elegance so familiar from Japanese and other Oriental art. “Grace” is the right verb: not grace in a religious sense, at least not overtly, and certainly not in a Christian sense – but the gracefulness of these four card designs will communicate itself immediately to anyone who receives one. Although each card has the neutral “Season’s Greetings” inside, two of the four are actually not even seasonal in terms of being artistically attached to winter. “Herons in Reeds” (1926) and “Pomegranate and Parrot” (1927) could relate to any season or no particular season at all – and they are very different from each other, the herons’ background featuring a crepuscular blue sky with crescent moon, the parrot’s being solid black, the better to showcase the white bird and the red fruit beside it. The other two designs are more overtly wintry: “Mandarin Ducks and Snow” (1935) and, to an even greater degree, “Nanten Bush and Fly Catchers in Snow” (1929). The ducks swim placidly in almost-still water, the only indication of cold being the snow that lightly coats the reeds nearby; the fly catchers, on the other hand, are very much involved with the snow that hangs thickly on the berries on the bush where they perch. All four card designs show scenes of nature and tranquility, and never mind that nature itself is very rarely tranquil – art like Ohara’s captures the moments when it is, or could be, and that makes this very special set of cards particularly appropriate for a year in which the best humans can say is that there are moments when we are, or could be, at peace.

     Well-wishers who prefer more-contemporary art, and works more directly tied to the Christmas season, can also find a plethora of Pomegranate cards from which to choose, such as those by British artists Craig Shuttlewood (born 1964) and Mike Wilks (born 1947). Each package of these cards contains a dozen of them, of a single design, with “Season’s Greetings” inside – but these artists’ work is very different (although interestingly complementary). Shuttlewood, who especially enjoys creating art for toddlers and other young children, offers a highly stylized forest in which the trees look like paper cutouts and, although they are recognizable as evergreens, are mostly anything but green, being purple, yellow, blue and sometimes polka-dotted (or snow-dotted). The scene is dominated by snow, which is still falling, and right smack in the foreground, an amusingly cartoonish little robin stands at the tip-top of a yellow evergreen, looking toward the left side of the card as if just about to head for whatever it spots there. For those seeking to keep hearts light and uplift them this year, at this time of year, the Shuttlewood cards can be a fine choice.

     Wilks’ art is deeper, stranger and less cartoonish – and subject to interpretation. These are cards for people trying to puzzle out what the events of this year have meant, to them and the world at large, and focusing on the small uncertainties of Wilks’ fantasy while thinking about the larger ones all about. What Wilks shows is a building, or set of buildings, or perhaps candles: most of the buildings are topped with what could be a minaret but actually looks more like a swirl of multicolored soft ice cream (gold and red, gold and green, and other colors). The tallest building must be a candle: it is topped by a teardrop-shaped yellow flame. Or perhaps that is a trick of the light? For the card does indeed show an eclipse, a total one, at the upper left – perhaps that is what makes the building seem to be a slowly melting candle? And just where are all these buildings situated? The rounded green objects in which they nestle look a bit like artichokes – but they could be immature trees, or perhaps immature buildings, which will eventually grow into the swirl-topped, colorful shape of the others. The point here is not mystery, or not scary mystery, at any rate: this is art that draws the viewer in, pulling him or her into an imagined world whose circumstances we of this Earth can only guess, perhaps hoping against hope that if there is so little peace at year’s end in our real world, there may be some in the gently contemplative scene of this unreal one.

(++++) FORMS OF EARLY READING

Bob Books: First Stories, Stage 1—Starting to Read. By Lynn Maslen Kertell. Pictures by Dana Sullivan. Scholastic. $16.99.

Flat Stanley on Ice. By Lori Haskins Houran. Pictures by Macky Pamintuan. Harper. $16.99.

Fly Guy Presents: Bats. By Tedd Arnold. Scholastic. $3.99.

I’m Cool! By Kate McMullan. Illustrations by Jim McMullan. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

     There are so many different ways to involve early readers in books that families can try all sorts of alternatives until they find one that works for each child – and can switch early-reading alternatives not only for different children but also for a single child whose tastes change over time. One good starting point is the longstanding Bob Books series: boxes filled with very small, easy-to-handle, easy-to-understand books that start with super-simple three-letter words and build from there. The First Stories series mixes phonics with graded reading levels, beginning with Stage 1: Starting to Read. What is especially attractive about these books is the way they create satisfying little stories using the shortest possible words and sentences. The first of the 12 books in the box, Sam and Mat, introduces triangle-headed Sam and round-headed Mat and takes them through easy-to-understand scenes: “Sam can hop. Can Mat hop?” By the fourth book, Pets, early readers get a genuinely amusing story, in which a little girl gets to “rub the cat,” “hug the dog,” and so on with a hen and pig, until at the end there are animals all over the page and the girl is surrounded: “Help!” The progress continues at a carefully measured pace. The ninth book, for instance, is The Ant, and includes “The ant went in the can” and “The ant ran and hid” – slightly longer sentences that still use the simplest possible vocabulary. The 12^th and final book in this box is called Sun and includes the longest sentences in this series: “Sam is glad to see the sun,” for example. All the books are pleasantly illustrated with smiling, simply drawn figures, and the careful progress from book to book makes these Bob Books, like others in the series, an excellent way to get kids started as readers.

     Once they have the basics down, young readers can move on to, for example, the “I Can Read!” series, whose five levels provide increasingly complicated stories that frequently feature familiar characters – although the tales are not usually written by those characters’ creators. Flat Stanley on Ice, for instance, is a Level 2 book (“high-interest stories for developing readers”) and is written by Lori Haskins Houran, not by Flat Stanley’s creator, Jeff Brown. It is a simple wintertime story in which the focus is as much on Stanley’s brother, Arthur, as on Stanley himself. Stanley’s flatness makes it very easy for him to ice skate, using just his feet – no skates needed. But Stanley does not realize that the ice on the pond has gotten thinner as the day has warmed up, and soon finds it cracking beneath him. Arthur comes to his rescue, having Stanley lie down and then working with other kids to make a rope of scarves that can be used to rescue Stanley – whose flatness results in him flying off the ice, through the air and into a snowbank. Easy to read, featuring some mild drama but nothing too threatening, Flat Stanley on Ice is typical of the kind of guided-reading book that can help kids in the 4-8 age range develop their skills.

     Nonfiction books can help as well. The Fly Guy Presents series by Tedd Arnold is not as amusing as the fictional works featuring the fly and his boy, Buzz, but it is far more informational, and the inclusion of the cartoon fly and boy helps make the factual material in these short books easy to follow and understand. Fly Guy Presents: Bats, for example, takes boy and fly to the nocturnal house at the zoo (with Arnold helpfully offering the pronouncer “nahk-TUR-nuhl”). By studying zoo information, Buzz and Fly Guy learn about – and show readers photographs of – multiple types of bats, individually, in small groups and in large colonies. The real-life pictures are mixed with cartoons, such as one in which boy and fly hang upside-down from a bar, imitating the way bats sleep. There are plenty of facts here, presented very straightforwardly: “There are more than 1,200” kinds of bats, “bats live on every continent” except Antarctica, “the most common bat in North America is the little brown bat,” and so on. The book explains how bats fly, using gravity to help them take off from their upside-down resting position and then flapping their wings. Bats are the only flying mammals, the book explains, and are mostly small, weighing less than two ounces – with the smallest, the bumblebee bat, being only about an inch long, which (an illustration shows) is barely larger than Fly Guy. Buzz finds out that many bats eat insects, and that worries Fly Guy: “Eatzz insectzz?” But of course he is in no danger at the zoo. And photos also show other things that bats eat, including fruit and flowers – and, in the case of vampire bats, blood. The book mentions special bat senses, too, such as excellent hearing and special nasal sensors, as well as echolocation. There is even a mention of chiropterologists (pronouncer: “ki-RAHP-tur-AHL-uh-jists”), scientists who study bats. Fly Guy Presents: Bats is a fine early-reading book for kids interested in animals and wanting to learn about creatures a little more offbeat than the ones typically discussed in books for young readers.

     Picture books can make excellent early-reading material, too. Some, in fact, can be written more simply than a book such as Fly Guy Presents: Bats. One very-easy-to-read book for kids with an interest in hockey or figure skating is all about the Zamboni ice resurfacing machine – personified by Kate and Jim McMullan as a big-talking, super-competent hard worker not interested in taking any guff from a ringside announcer who questions whether anyone or anything is capable of doing a complete ice resurfacing in just 18 minutes. I’m Cool! combines factual material with fiction: obviously Zambonis do not mouth off and talk back to people, or discuss how they do their work, but the McMullans do a good job of showing just what a Zamboni really does do during a resurfacing. This involves first checking out ruts in the ice to determine how deeply to shave it. Then: “How do I do it? Crank up your X-ray vision and I’ll SHOW you how!” And that is just what the big-eyed, smiling Zamboni does. A level auger to spin snow, a tall auger to whirl it up, a paddle to shoot it into the middle of the Zamboni, water to wash the ice, a vacuum to suck up the water; then warm water to fill ice dents and ruts, a towel to spread the water out so it freezes into smooth, fresh ice, and a designated pattern around and around the rink to be sure all areas are properly covered – the book takes kids through all the stages of an ice resurfacing, making it almost as interesting in printed form as it is when kids really get to watch it during a hockey game or while figure skating. Relaxed and off the ice at the end of the book, the Zamboni looks out at readers and says, “Coolest job in the world, right here, baby.” Kids who read I’m Cool! are likely to agree – and will find they have enjoyed a story about a fascinating character…err…machine, while learning some very interesting facts at the same time. This is the sort of writing that encourages early readers to keep going with books so they can find out even more intriguing information about everyday matters that they never looked at so closely before, and can now see in a whole new way and with much better understanding.

(+++) ANGST AND SELF-IMPORTANCE

The Chintz Age: Tales of Love and Loss for a New New York. By Ed Hamilton. Červená Barva Press. $18.

This Way Home. By Wes Moore with Shawn Goodman. Delacorte Press. $17.99.

     There is no U.S. city as sophisticated as New York, and none as provincial. New Yorkers hold the first label dear and are deeply shocked at the second, almost unable even to hear it. Yet New York is a city so inward-looking, so focused on itself, that its residents are unaware of the accent with which they speak even though it is gratingly evident to others; it is a place so determined to be the city-of-cities that it looks at its own suburbs with disdain, as if living there is somehow a step below grinding out the meanest of existences in even the most rundown hovel that has those magical two words, “New York,” as an identifier. The Chintz Age is for dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers only; even New Yorker wannabes (there are some such) will not “get” all the glamor of squatting in flophouses, peering in other people’s windows, witnessing cold-blooded murder, and crawling through abandoned underground tunnels. Ed Hamilton’s collection of seven short stories and a novella takes off from the notion that the golden age, if there ever was one, is long gone; the gilded age has passed; everything is cheaper and somehow more tawdry now. Well, all right – this is scarcely an unusual notion, but it is a good enough basis for storytelling, although scarcely confined to New York City. Indeed, the changing ethos that Hamilton explores and bemoans is one that has recently received more attention in San Francisco and California’s Silicon Valley than on the East Coast: the notion that advancement in certain material ways has undermined the “authentic” character of a city or region, displacing the people who created that “character” with faceless, upward-striving gentrifiers. Aww…poor little artistic types – forced to do more than hang out and pretend to be with-it, sophisticated, living a real and meaningful life…

     These are precisely the sorts of people whose lives, limited by the blinders they have themselves created and that they wear willingly, Hamilton explores in The Chintz Age. “In short, Theo wanted out. Problem was, there was nowhere else to go, nowhere affordable anyway; to change apartments meant leaving New York, and that, for Theo as for most New Yorkers, would be to admit defeat.” Readers must accept this mindset, expressed in these words in “Plagiarism” but pervasive throughout The Chintz Age, to make any sense at all of the book’s characters and events. New York is simply the place, to the point that one story, “Rock of the Lower East Side,” is about a man’s obsession over his onetime life in a “squat” with a woman who, when he sees her years after they have split up, is likely using crack cocaine, “had lost some teeth and her skin had lost its luster, become dry, ashen. Same with her hair: in it’s [sic] absurd eighties style it was frizzy and brittle. …No, they would have been happy together.” The woman does not “stand for” the city – Hamilton writes small pieces about small people, not stories of metaphor and extensiveness – but her onetime lover’s wholly unrealistic thoughts and beliefs about her are much the same as those of all Hamilton’s characters, and apparently Hamilton himself, about New York City. Even the stories’ venues emit New York provincialism: only people who know that “the Lower East Side” is a neighborhood with particular resonance for New Yorkers will be at all involved in this story, and only those who know what the first word of the title “Highline/Highlife” means in a New York context will be able to make sense of that sad fairy tale. The best story here, and the only one with a touch of mythic resonance that reaches beyond the constrained worldview of New Yorkers, is “King of the Underground,” in which a mentally compromised resident of a rundown nursing home unexpectedly finds his way into the world outside and thence to a strange beneath-the-streets throwback of a settlement resembling “a medieval village or even a stone-age camp.” Although set in Brooklyn, this story does not have to take place in New York City, and that is its strength. The rest of the book, however, is and must be set in New York, and while that fact will provide nostalgia-prone New Yorkers with some excuses for head-nodding and navel gazing, it will provoke only bewilderment or, worse from a New York perspective, indifference in people whose horizons are broader than those of New Yorkers.

     Aimed at teenagers rather than adults, set in Baltimore rather than New York, This Way Home is an even grittier book than The Chintz Age, its concerns expressed without a haze of wishful thinking, its story determinedly told to elicit shock, anger, upset and an eventual feeling of possible – just possible – hope. So carefully structured as to be outright manipulative of the reader, the novel by Wes Moore with Shawn Goodman goes out of its way to tell readers that its events could happen wherever there are mean streets: “Elijah knew it wasn’t as perfect as it seemed; if you scratched the surface, you’d find plenty of bad things. Alcoholic parents. Money problems. Divorce. The same as anywhere else.” That list, early in the book, omits cold-blooded murder and extensive gang activity, but those turn out to be omnipresent, too. This Way Home is primarily Elijah’s story: he is 17 and a high-quality basketball player, determined to use his talent and drive to succeed in the world. With his friends Michael and Dylan, Elijah plays through a local basketball tournament that he hopes will lead to much greater things – but this is not a basketball story, except incidentally. It is a story about friendship and betrayal, about finding oneself (a de rigueur element of books for teens), about trying to do the right thing when each and every possible thing seems wrong. This is a heady if scarcely unusual mixture, handled here by introducing a series of cardboard characters and predictable situations that nevertheless have impact because the book’s events are presented in a hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners fashion that gives them the ring of plausibility. It seems there is a frightening and mysterious gang in the neighborhood called Blood Street Nation, which somehow has gotten wind of Elijah’s abilities and wants his team to wear gang colors in the upcoming tournament. Deciding what to do and how to do it becomes the crux of the book: Elijah finds out how hard it is to do the right thing and what serious consequences ensue if you do it, and in the process learns more than he ever knew about his mother, his absent father, and his friends. Money and equipment, the meaning of “we’ve got your back” in a place where people get shot in the back, the discovery of what levers turn a friend into a traitor and what family really means – these themes and more occur and recur here. The gruff army veteran Banks, for whom Elijah ends up working at a series of increasingly difficult and improbable tasks, is so obvious a father figure that the initially unstated mystery of his background is scarcely a surprise when finally revealed; and Banks’ daughter, Kerri, is so obviously a potential love interest – and bright and focused into the bargain – that she quickly becomes a more interesting character than the rather dull Elijah himself. Moore and Goodman seem to sense this: they pull her out of crucial portions near the book’s climax and never let any romantic relationship develop beyond the hinting-at-it stage. The deaths and violence in This Way Home are carefully placed by the authors so as to teach Elijah and, through him, readers some lessons about life; indeed; the whole novel has a feeling of careful placement of characters and events, things arranged just so on a structural chessboard so that the authors can nudge readers in specific directions at specific times. There are effective scenes in the book, or parts of scenes, but This Way Home is too contrived and carefully managed to be as fully convincing and involving as Moore and Goodman want it to be: it comes across more as preachy than as demonstrative of the need to make hard choices, accept the consequences and find a way to move on in life.