“You beguile me, Christian. Completely overwhelm me. I feel like Icarus flying too close to the sun, ” purrs Ana, the protagonist of this year’s lauded, seminal classic, 50 Shades of Grey.

But wait, you might ponder, Why would you ever want to feel like Icarus flying too close to the sun?  Where is the appeal in a doomed fate? Where is the wonder in being so lost that you fall into a miserable death?

What interesting is that Anastasia “Ana” Steele doesn’t just want to feel like Icarus, she luxuriates in it. She clings to this whirling feeling inside of her that is lost and desperate and so utterly useless. She waves this feeling like a battle flag. And I will be the first to say that… I’m okay with that.

There’s something interesting about the creation of a main female character that doesn’t have to follow the Katniss/Hermione Granger/Olivia Pope trope of being so strong that it’s a weakness. It is intriguing and, dare I say it, beguiling to have a female character in the new wave feminism era who is not only allowed to be weak, but relishes in it. In a greater novel, this full control over and awareness of weakness could have come to be considered somewhat of a strength. An purely emotional strength, but a strength nonetheless. But we aren’t dealing with a masterpiece here  and so we’re left classic story of what could have been.

Many critics of 50 Shades take umbrage to the gratuitous use of BD/SM play in the novel. They throw every word in the book at it, calling it creepy, scary, anti-feminist… weird. They call it everything but what it really is… popular. BD/SM play isn’t something new: it isn’t a newfangled idea that just swaggered on to the erotica market. It’s an old idea that, like it or not, many consenting adults engage in in their own homes. It’s a facet of human sexuality that almost begs to be explored.

It is a tag that opens up a whole host of interesting and intriguing psychological questions about human beings. What is this need to submit that lurks inside of us? Why do some of us long to feel lost in another individual, and why do others want to find them? Where re the pretty stock images of quiet and slow lovemaking that doesn’t surprise the neighbors? Why is that popular vision of love not what people who engage in BD/SM lifestyles want? What do the conversations of consent look like between these peop-

Oh. Consent.

You see, this is part of the reason why it is entirely justified to loathe 50 Shades of Grey for what it is: a trite fantasy that presents itself as some deep and complex love story, which is something it very well could have been. Not once in the book does the great lover Christian Gray, he who can make a woman orgasm with just one look, ever truly sit down with Ana to ask, “So… how do you feel about being tied up?” Which… you know… is kind of a big deal. And does the book ever question that? No, it doesn’t. It lets the players in the story play on.  It is a fantasy, one that certainly doesn’t exist in a feminist world where a woman could understandably question her desire to engage in a lifestyle that some would call degrading.  Where is the deep and intricate self exploration that it takes to find yourself bent over some one’s lap or being tied down and enjoying it?  This is vastly and wildly interesting, but 50 Shades of Grey isn’t a psychological portrait: it’s just another trope used to get books to fly off the shelves. It isn’t a book to be studied, it’s a book to make middle aged housewives blush and giggle. And don’t we already have enough of those?

Had this book asked the psychological questions behind BDSM, delved in to the psychology of the human beings that engage in this play, made us think of Ana and Christian as actual real people, maybe, JUST MAYBE, we could have had a game changer on our hands.

But it didn’t. And it won’t. Instead, it took the X-Rated Twilight route. Gave us an implausible sexy male lead and willing and confused young ingenue and told us to have at it. It is a B-grade movie in novel form. You don’t have to think, you just have to experience.

So why is it doing so well? Because people think they need an escape. Mortgages are too high, tragedies abound, mid-life crises are reached. And so women would love to run into the arms of a Christian Gray, someone who may take that whirling feeling of loneliness and show them what to do with it. It’s just that, in real life, if Mr. Gray ever swaggered into your life you’d slap him with a restraining order and a lawsuit. But in the book, when he in truly just ink and words, he can be any one or whomever you want him to be. He can be your absent husband, your substitute for that pint of ice cream… literally anyone or anything.

What does that say about America, then? An America that lives on the silver screen and in pop fiction? It’s been said for years that we’re in a late empire U.S. of A. Maybe this is just another symptom of that.

Or maybe, like people, we just need a little fun. Even sub-par, teeth rotting, nervous laughter fun. But fun nonetheless.

In celebration of the Princeton Art’s weekend, the Nassau Literary Review sponsored and had members participate in two writing activities.

The 1,000 Words Project explored the relationship between photography and writing.  Each writer was given a photograph without any context and had to create a piece of writing that reflected his or her reaction to that photograph.  You can see the photographs and the writing pieces here: http://thousandwordsprojectpton.tumblr.com/

Burning the Midnight Oil was a faster paced-project.  In the course of 10 hours, a group of 10 writers, writing for one hour each, created a story.  You can check out the video here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10104368810735154&set=vb.176536919124978&type=3&theater.

Lady with Fans (Portrait of Nina de Callias) by Édouard Manet

The Nassau Literary Review is pleased to announce that we will be hosting a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City!  The trip is for writers and poets who would like to create a work of ekphrasis, which is a literary work whose subject is a work of visual art.  On a first-come-first-serve basis, we invite 20 poets to join us on an paid trip (i.e. we’ll cover the travel/admission costs) to the museum, where they will pick out a work of art and write a work of ekphrasis about it.  Make sure to bring a notebook, as it’ll be a working trip!

Writers will have a few days to edit their work if they choose.  Then we will collect the various pieces, and the best ones will be chosen to be a part of the centerpiece of the Fall 2013 Issue of the Nassau Literary Review!

The trip will be on WEDNESDAY, MAY 8^th – we will meet at the Dinky at 11:00 AM that morning.  If you are interested in joining us, RSVP by sending an email to nasslit@princeton.edu – but be quick about it, because there are only 20 slots for the trip!

O Where Are You Going?, the new thesis piece from senior Classics major Daniel Rattner, might, on first glance, have the makings of a rather pedestrian piece of theater. Such a suspicion might be prompted by the fact that the piece centers around two sisters (rich, bourgeois, white girls) struggling to cope with the transition from adolescence to adulthood, against the not unexpected backdrop of an absent father and a trophy stepmother. Broken homes hardly make subject matter to be scoffed at, I acknowledge, but there is a certain way in which the typical pattern (and by now, I think it sadly is typical) of the story of the rich girl struggling with the malaise of suburbia can become shallow; the trope of a Lindsay Lohan Disney movie (or, dare I say it, Hillary Duff’s Cinderella Story). I don’t imagine it’s exceptionally snobbish to call the Gossip Girl stock pedestrian, or even downright tiring. What nobody needs is a stage version of that.

But as my track record might indicate, I generally don’t bother reviewing shoddy plays– I want to tell people about the good ones (unless an example needs to be made…). And this thought, that O Where Are You Going? might have been set up for disaster, really only occurred to me after watching the play, as I was marveling at the way this piece was exactly not a disaster, but a triumph. “Pedestrian”: that’s not what we have at all!

O Where Are You Going? is a very serious, very human play that does astoundingly well at mobilizing complicated symbolism and difficult themes in treating the lives of very serious, very real characters. It unifies immaterial elements of atmosphere, mood, and sound– elements often neglected in student theater pieces– with material ones like stage design, costume, and props, to produce a very finely calibrated mise-en-scène. But quite remarkably, the directing attempts to use this mise-en-scène to guide and develop the narrative of the acting; the characters are made more real by their involvement with the stage. The acting, although already skilled, comes alive in its context, and indeed becomes compelling in a way I have rarely seen.

Let me try to sketch out what I mean:

Mike (Savannah Hankinson ’13), the elder of our two sisters, a difficult, cerebral college student, is first found in her room, reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. She is alone, and the audience surrounds her, closely, with intimacy. It’s quite a well-furnished room: carpets, books, lamps, a record player, an armchair, a chaise longue. It’s a real room, with a real character and ambience. Mike’s sister, Kitty (Erin O’Brien ’16)– a neurotic but sweet girl– then walks in. The reception of their father’s wedding is happening downstairs (although this father himself is absent, both literally and metaphorically). They start talking, the plot starts moving– but as it evolves, and new characters come in and go out, the same room is used, with the same character. Its not just that the same stage is used throughout– that is of course a trivial point– or even the same props; it’s that we have the same character-type physically manifested as the backdrop to the sisters’ story. Action can be located outside of the room; on platforms to the side or even above the audience, but it is all in a sense playing back to this central place of intimacy with the sisters. Perhaps tellingly, I caught myself, during a moment of silence, glancing down at the books piled next to the chaise longue, thinking about who would read them, and why. I was left alone with the room, maybe in the room– left to perform an investigation, of sorts, on the personalities of the characters.

Another such moment of being left alone occurred when someone– Kitty, perhaps– left the record player on after leaving the room. A few seconds later, another character came in and turned off the record player. In the seconds between, I felt like a friend who had been brought to the room and left alone to look around. It was awkward, but also intimate—like taking up an invitation that was not spoken but intuited—to be curious in a strange place with a strange atmosphere, a strange milieu. An invitation to investigation, that is. But the music playing in the background was old– jazz from 60s, I think– and was coming from a vinyl record-player. The furniture was old-fashioned, even actually old. In fact, a sense of wariness of age and of the past itself pervades the play. But this had the effect that the investigation turned at times to a kind of archaeology, a getting familiar with artifacts, with a living past.

Strangely enough, I don’t think it was just the audience that engaged in this kind of archaeology. The three other main characters of the piece each, in a way, are access points to the sisters’ past, and at the same time, mirrors figures, with their own histories, both parallel and diverging. They remind us of Herodotus, whose Histories, we read, are a historias apodeixis, a display of his researches in narrative form– perhaps an exercise of a kind of ceramic logic, where fragmentary artifacts come together to make intersecting stories. But these are not merely my abstractions: there are actual representations of these in the characters.

This is especially the case with Thomas (Cody O’Neil ’15), a waiter at the reception, who despite not having had much to do with them before it, comes to interact with the sisters in a strange way during the course of the evening. He’s first sent up to retrieve Mike to the party downstairs, but ends up having to wait on her, and Kitty, in a different way. We learn his story. He travelled a lot growing up; learned many languages, saw many places. He still remembers a little Greek from his time in Athens, so he shares a poem with Kitty. He tells of some old letters written in Greek by a girl he once knew: “but [he] couldn’t read them anymore. They’re really barely his anymore.” Yet they’re part of his story; and the physical pieces of his past are rich and potent sources of his current identity. Like the books next to the chaise longue…

Interestingly, however, we find embodiments of the same process running in a different direction in the characters of Cameron (Phi Rosen ’14)– an awkward high-school friend of Mike’s who has come to the reception with a old crush to work out– and Marlene (Sarah Paton ’13)– an old babysitter of the girls, who struggles with and even somewhat resents the boredom of adulthood. Unlike Thomas, both are part of the girls’ stories before the evening of the reception, and both come to reminisce with them about their collective pasts while also revealing more about their own lives. And they too carry tokens of these pasts, little objects of archaeology– songs and trinkets and other little things that are discreetly brought to our attention, discreetly made part of the narrative (Phil at one point starts singing The Smiths song “This Charming Man”; actually one of my favourite songs… I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear. This man said, it’s gruesome, that someone so handsome should care…).

There is a persistent problematization and bringing together of objects, memories, and stories in O Where Are You Going? that drives forward the plot but also involves the audience in making sense of the identities of the characters, and which makes this piece of theater so serious and so human.

Bottom line: I cannot recommend it highly enough. Be warned: it’s no light evening theater, but it’s certainly worth it if you’re looking for something a little less pedestrian… 

Earth and Heaven
A Performance of Melodious Accord by Alice Parker and Requiem by Maurice Duruflé
Princeton University Chapel Choir
Penna Rose, Conductor
Eric Plutz, Organist

Last Friday night I had a minor conundrum. Two intriguing concerts had overlapping times. The much-advertised Piano Extravaganza (5 pianos, 40 hands) was from 7:00 pm to 9:00, and the Chapel Choir concert started at 8:00. Both were free. So I decided to concert-hop, an activity that the arts and social scene at Princeton is quite conducive to and that I will likely miss when I graduate.

First stop: the Princeton Pianists’ Ensemble shebang in McAlpin Hall, Woolworth building. The first impression I got of PPE was that of a frazzled, excited, confused and humble group of performers. “We were not expecting this many people to show up!” said the girl standing by the door and trying ineffectively to get the droves of audience members to take seats on the floor above, where they would have to watch the concert through a glass window. McAlpin was over capacity, a fire hazard: an auspicious beginning for a new music group on campus. The first piece was Ravel’s Boléro. When the first piano started the melody I felt uneasy. Boléro is a long, somewhat droning piece consisting of repetition and variation of a simple melodic theme. A full orchestra played the version I knew, in which different instruments and instrument combinations were featured in each repetition. So I didn’t think it worked quite well with just pianos. It lumbered a bit and the expectation of an “extravaganza!” was met with a rather meditative and low-key performance of at most two people per piano. This quality is not inherently bad, however.  A professor noted during intermission, ”That was quite nice! It was lovely to see how the character of the theme changes so slightly with the different tonal combinations.”

My thirst for wildness was quenched during Lavignac’s Galop-Marche, in which there were four players per piano on three pianos. Numerous individual parts interlaced, the pianists swayed as a group for the higher and lower parts, sometimes one player stopped playing, leaning back to allow more room for the others. Everyone was smiling at the absurdity, and the room was electric for the span of the piece.

After Flight of the Bumblebee, one of their advertised pieces, I skipped out to canter over to the chapel. I missed the beginning, and I didn’t have a program, so I had to be content to just slink in and see if I could figure out what was going on.

How different the tone of the event was! The harp, organ and voices swelled and settled, emotional, like alternating wind and calm of early summer. Because I didn’t have a program and thus had no way of distracting myself with composer names or lyrics, the performance was also quite intellectually stimulating. I was approaching this grand venue and peaceful music with the images and sounds of eight shoulders bouncing over one piano, so it’s not surprising that I was in an analytical, comparative mood. Just what made the first piece of Earth and the second of Heaven, I wondered (only having the music to base my judgments on)? Occasionally words would leave the choir’s collective mouth whole and make it all the way back to me. I then had these fragments: “joy,” “pain,” “come,” “Lord” to mull over while the harp, organ and round, echoing voices wrapped around me.

I have a bit of a history with the Chapel choir as a viewer. As a freshman I used to attend Sunday morning ecumenical services often just to hear them, and they helped soothe the various aches of that first year of college. In the audience on Friday, as I settled down into the reflective mood they always manage to induce in the vast and dim chapel, I realized that I hadn’t heard them at all so far sophomore year. It was a happy reunion. With the conversation on campus about mental health issues and stress rising to a new volume in the past few months due to the What I Be campaign and the dismal results of the COMBO survey, I wondered why the chapel didn’t have more students. It is not a novel revelation that soothing live music once in a while or quiet reflection in a situation such as a spiritual music concert (regardless of what religion it is from or what your own stance on religion is) is beneficial to mental health. On that matter, let my voice be at least one that advocates for getting out and attending free concerts when you can to deal with stress!

On a different matter, though, that is on the matter of music at Princeton, let me say that on Friday of last week the campus was both graced with another solid performance by the well-established Chapel Choir and introduced to the previously unheard sounds and sights of multiple pianos at once by the nascent Pianists’ Ensemble. This weekend brings with it a host of new performances to explore with friends or alone, and I encourage an open attitude to the array of choices. And if you are feeling comparative and analytical, check out two in rapid succession. That’s an experience unique to campus life like this.

The Taming of the Shrew
by William Shakespeare
Directed by Maeli Goren ’15
April 19-20, 25, 27, 8:00 PM, April 20, 2:00 PM, April 26, 11:59 PM
Class of 1970 Theater at Whitman College
$8 for students, $10 General Admission
Student Events Eligible at Frist

An evening of light-hearted fun awaits theatergoers with the Princeton Shakespeare Company’s production of The Taming of the Shrew. With a wide range of pervading themes such as the blatant objectification of women, the overt misogynistic glorification of the patriarchal system, or the firm espousal of domestic abuse, this show promises fun the whole family.

I need not say that The Taming of the Shrew is not one of Shakespeare’s noblest works, for the premise of the play tells us that. The main plot begins with Baptista Minola (Rachel Wilson ’16), a lord of Padua with two daughters. There are suitors seeking the hand of the younger daughter Bianca (Carlie Robbins ’14), but Minola refuses to marry off the younger before the elder daughter Katherina (Maddie Reese ’16) is married. This poses a problem to the suitors, as Katherina is considered a “shrew,” with a prickly personality and an indomitable temper.  As the suitors’ good luck would have it, however, they find a man named Petruchio (Pat Rounds ’15) who is willing to take on the task of, well, taming the shrew.  The rest of the story portrays the taming process, featuring, most notably, wooing via reverse psychology, some physical force, and later after the farce of a marriage, the denial of food, sleep, and clothing under the guise of perfect love.  Petruchio claims that nothing is good enough for her, and so food meant for his wife is thrown out for it appears overcooked, new garments are discarded for they do not do his new wife justice, and she is deprived of sleep for some other seemingly absurd reason. Later he begins to psychologically temper his wife in the most subhuman way possible. Petruchio claims the sun is the moon and forces Katherina to agree with his other ridiculous statements. This, he claims, is the taming process. And at the end, we are presented with the most cringe-worthy scene where several men are gathered and decide to have a wager in which each sends a servant to call for their wives, and the one who most obediently comes when beckoned, wins the wager for her husband. To the surprise of the other men, Petruchio wins the wager, and so the play ends with Katherina’s monologue praising the virtues of a submissive wife.  Featuring memorable phrases such as “thy husband is thy lord”; “what is she [the rebelling wife] but a foul contending rebel and graceless traitor to her loving lord? I am ashamed that women are so simple to offer war when they should kneel for peace”; or “place your hands below your husband’s foot: in token of which duty, if he please. My hand is ready; may it do him ease,” this part of the play could probably make even the most ardent misogynist shift uncomfortably in his or her seat.

While it is true that the treatment of Katherina is unequivocally misogynistic in nature, Petruchio is no stellar representation of man either, for his initial agreement to tame Katherina is motivated by the handsome dowry which would follow. It is this crass portrayal of pigheaded misogyny that suggests that the play is a parody, a comedy making fun of the silliness of the exaggerated patriarchy in the play. The framing of the story as a play within the actual play reinforces this claim because it adds distance between the playwright and his work.  The story of Kate and Petruchio is actually a play performed in a tavern before its clientele.  The performers in the play are either participating in the telling of this story, or are sitting towards the back of the stage in the designated bar area, drinking from beer bottles.  Off in the corner are Marcos Cisneros ’15 and Han Tran ’15, who play their guitars during designated intervals, which adds to the tavern environment. The inclusion of blues music in the performance is a good decision, for it allows the characters in the story of Kate and Petruchio to interact with the musicians, adding a comical effect to some of the more awkward scenes. One instance of this occurs after Petruchio has married Katherina and the newly wedded couple arrives home. Petruchio barks at Cisneros and Tran and commands them to play for his fair bride. The startled look on their faces prompted chuckles from some of the audience members.

But this reaction was only possible because of Pat Round’s excellent performance in his role as Petruchio. Donning a leather jacket and projecting an air of confidence, Rounds makes the character of Petruchio a likable and comical one. Reese’s performance as Kate makes the relationship between her character and Petruchio a feasible one. Those unsure of what a shrew actually is need only look to Reese’s pretamed Kate. Going as far as to slap some of the suitors of her younger sister, she instills in our minds just how unpleasant the character of Kate actually is. But, as called for in the play, this vicious shrew must be tamed, and herein lies Reese’s most impressive feat.  Over the course of the play, she convincingly changes from the shrew to a submissive wife. Yet, the docile Kate retains some of the causticity of her former self.  Consequently, Reese’s recitation of the final monologue plants some doubt in the audience’s mind as to whether she is being sarcastic or not. This potentially facetious Kate at the very end exists solely to reassure the audience that some of the themes championed throughout this play, which would be heavily frowned upon in reality, are to be viewed in a comical light, as not to accidently overstep any prescribed boundaries and to offend.

But, as director Maeli Goren ’15 agrees, it is also this overstepping of boundaries that makes this play worth performing.  In the current production, there is a scene in which Grumio(Dan Ames, GS), Petruchio’s servant, affects a borderline offensive Asian accent as he flails around imitating a martial arts fighter, something that text most certainly does not call for.  This sort of political incorrectness is at the core of the play, and this production is a rather faithful interpretation of the work. Let the easily offended beware, for this is no tamed performance.

 * Correction: This article formerly switched the roles of Rachel Wilson and Carlie Robbins.

 As part of our special series on popular fiction, Max Botstein reviewed this most famous of vampire novels.  Come back to the Nassau Literary Review‘s website for more later!

“I’d been waiting for the vampire for years when he walked into the bar.” This is hardly “Call me Ishmael,” but I suppose it gets the job done.  It begins Charlaine Harris’ 2001 novel Dead Until Dark. For the uninitiated, this is the first installment in the massively-popular Southern Vampire Mysteries, perhaps better known by the title of the HBO show it inspired, True Blood.

The series, which now includes twelve novels (with a thirteenth soon forthcoming), follows the adventures of Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in northern Louisiana with a vampire boyfriend. The books are unabashedly genre-pieces, which makes them a little hard to review critically. In the words of the Los Angeles Times, proudly displayed on the back cover, this is a “light, fun” kind of reading.  I don’t mean to denigrate genre, or to promote a ‘better’ class of reading (which usually translates into a more boring class of reading), but one simply can’t compare Dead until Dark – a paranormal mystery romance with a generous helping of smut – to what the keepers-of-culture term ‘serious literature.’

With that in mind, Dead until Dark can only be assessed according to the standards of its peers, and the most immediate comparison that comes to mind is that great bogey-man of the reading elite, the Twilight Saga. They may not have an enormous amount in common, but they are both extremely lucrative franchises, and both feature young female protagonists with attractive vampire lovers, which is good enough for me.

I won’t engage here in any Twilight-bashing, that shibboleth of pretentious college students, but I will say that Dead until Dark contrasts favorably with Stephenie Meyer’s young-adult leviathan.

It is true that Sookie is a clear example of authorial wish-fulfillment, made more obvious by the fact that the entire story is told exclusively in first person. Yet Sookie is still a fairly interesting character, which can’t be said for most cases of self-insertion. Unlike other female protagonists in romance stories, Sookie is hardly a damsel-in-distress, and I have to admit that the liberal-feminist in me enjoyed reading the scene in which Sookie confronts and subdues her antagonist alone at the climax of the novel, without help from the vampire Bill, her male companion.

This may also have something to do with the fact that while Twilight is young-adult fiction, Harris’ book is more adult than anything else. One offers sublimated sexual fantasies, palatable to sheltered tweens and their parents, while the other unabashedly offers sex, and lots of it.

That said, however, the first-person perspective is exhausting.  Much as I might like Sookie, I started to hope for an end to her narration halfway through the book, never a good sign. This may be a fun, exciting story, but the telling of it leaves much to be desired.  If the first installment is any indication, this series is not the place to find witty dialogue, well-formed prose, or anything resembling character development.

With that in mind, maybe watching True Blood is a better option than crawling through all thirteen books in the series. With high production values, and a stable of attractive actors, it’s altogether possible that one might not notice the most glaring flaws in the story. The show is on HBO, so I’m sure they keep the sex scenes, which are probably the only reason most people read these books anyway.

Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth was the theme of this year’s ‘Princyclopedia,’ the annual “book convention” hosted by the Cotsen Children’s Library of the Princeton University Library. I did see a copy of the book while I was there volunteering at the dinosaur diorama table, but an hour into the event it had to be put away. With all the pencils, cardboard, paper and busy hands, there was not enough room at the table for props.

I found it strange, initially, that a book could be reduced to a prop at its very own event, but after spending the morning with children coloring psychedelic dinosaurs, climbing an inflatable “rock wall,” pouring red vinegar into volcanoes to watch them erupt, and touching earthworms, I changed my mind. A life-sized baby T-Rex with a pair of jeans coming out of his stomach roared a few yards off while I explained to a quiet boy how to put a box together to house his carefully drawn and cut out pliosaur and ichthyosaur. He was very young, most likely too young to read Jules Verne on his own. But he was not too young to be read to. Most importantly for this event, he was not too young to explore, imagine, and create.

The point of Cotsen’s ‘Princyclopedia’ is to “bring books to life,” but rather than attempting that through the characters or plot, it focuses exclusively on the world the story presents. Nowhere were the book’s characters even mentioned. Since 2007, when the event first kicked off with a day centered on Harry Potter, every year it has chosen a book or story with a rich world, usually imagined or at least embellished. 2008 saw the Middle East of Aladdin come to life. That day, there was a camel in Dillon Gym. 2009 invigorated the wackiness of Alice in Wonderland, 2010 was Treasure Island, 2011 The Lightning Thief and 2012 Robin Hood. This year, rocks, jewels, fossils, worms and plenty of craft materials piled into the gym to be touched, colored, smelled and sometimes tasted by the children of Princeton.

More than about the literary work, Princyclopedia is about exploration of the world and of the imagination. It is about stimulation and interaction. Although they were not conscious of it, the children that attended the event made many observations and connections as they were led through the gym; they developed memories that will connect to other experiences they will have later and that will contribute to the images of reality and unreality forming in their minds.

Although this seems like a childish way of approaching literature, it is not so different from what adults do. In most cases, we read to enjoy a writer’s imagination and sentiments. As we consume new stories and new worlds we recall similar stories and worlds.  For some of us, what we read becomes fodder for our own creative endeavors. For others, what we read inspires us to find out more.  Like a child who decides to investigate volcanoes for a science project because of that awesome eruption he saw in Dillon Gym, a person gets interested in visions of hell because of an encounter with Dante’s Inferno. There are also cases in which adults don’t pick up a book and read because they think they enjoy it but because their friend passionately recommended it or because they feel pressure to read a classic. Then, in the best case scenario, as we read that obligatory book we realize we like it.

Interestingly, this is not so different from the little girl who is told do a book report on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and ends up remembering it as an integral part of her childhood. It turns out that the benefits of reading do not change as much as we think from Goodnight, Moon to Ulysses.

In its most basic iteration, literary consumption is oil for the mental machine. Even if one does not remember the story exactly, the impressions and feelings that come out of the experience will continue to float around, bringing enrichment to daily life. Princyclopedia brings this to light because it is literary consumption pared down to its basics. By cutting away the barrier between printed words, the images those words create in our minds and the reality those words reflect, the event evokes the sense of discovery one of the main reasons for reading.  It is not surprising that it takes a return to the world of childhood to realize this.

The Nassau Literary Review website is excited to announce that this April will be its first official popular fiction month.  During this entire month, the staff writers will be reading, digesting, and deconstructing America’s favorite novels.  Why are we attracted to stories of incandescent vampires or strong young women fighting a cruel form of public entertainment?

Be sure to check out our first article, which is coming out within the next few days.  Also, if you have any suggestions for books you’d like reviewed, please email me at pfanto@princeton.edu.

Happy April!!