The Southern Review

Volume 41, Number 3
Summer 2005
Published at Louisiana State University Baton Rouge

The Touchstone
By Jay Rogoff



An excerpt:
“In Balachine’s ultramodern ‘leotard ballets,’ like The Four Temperaments (1946) or Agon (1957), dancers flex their feet at right angles instead of pointing them.”

Holy shit kids, I’m in over my head. To drowning depth, for sure. My only skirmishes with ballet were two: I was pen pals with a ballet girl in Bellevue, WA when I was thirteen, and I borrowed some terms from an online ballet dictionary for a story in which I engaged in an orgy with flying spiders.

Suffice to say I haven’t a clue what I just read. Apparently this Balanchine fellow was audaciously radical when it came to ankle flanking. Wait, there’s more:

“Nothing so blatant occurs in Symphony In C, but some events come close: in that second movement, after carrying the ballerina in long lifts across the stage- ‘like the moon going across the sky,’ Balanchine prescribed- the cavalier attends her as she pursues a series of dangerous-looking falls off pointe into his waiting arms, and then supports her on pointe in arabesque.”

Hmmm...So... Let me see if I understand the thesis. Balanchine was a mischievous sheperd, a choreographer of human marionettes, cackling as he subversively interspersed epileptic disjoints among the elegant sweeps of pink clad feet, defying the audience's expectations, thereby upending the accepted conventions of symphonic ballet performance. A real sly bastard.

I admit I read less than half of this piece. Without a Masters in the fine arts (am I supposed to capitalize some of that?) I’m just a country rube with empty eyes trying to quell my nausea as the words in Rogoff's apparently sophisticated essay on fancy prancy dance scramble my poor little brain like a rodent in a wheat thresher.

I wonder if the editor published this piece under a shroud of confusion much like mine, including it as a means of dignifying the volume with a touch of class otherwise absent. Actually, I doubt that. I spoke with him on the telephone when I ordered this, and he seemed like a straight shooter. I shouldn’t project my ignorance upon the editor. Sorry, Bret.

Somewhere lost in this essay are the words “la travestie.” (The italics caught my eye.) I’ll take the English equivalent, travesty, thank you kindly.

The rest of this handsomely packaged literary journal is excellent. (Hell, the piece I reviewed might be half decent, too, I have no way of knowing.)

Billy Solitario’s paintings of the Gulf Coast are wonderful. Many portray nature scenes now swept under by recent weather channel terrorism. Billy gives good cloud. Here's a gallery.

Robin Hemley’s story “Local Time” was a highlight, telling of the downward spiral of a married man trying to sell apples in bulk in the Phillipines. So many whorehouses, so little time. Great, great story.

Elyse Fields’ essay on earning respect as a female park ranger is also worth your time, as is “Good Girl”, the story of a man dealing with his wife’s death, his no-good rapist son, newcomers to town, and the necessity to put down his dog after it bites a young girl. All at once.

There are assloads of poems in here, too. I read some of them, but I can’t seem to decipher the intended rhythm and take in the imagery simultaneously. That goes for all poetry. Set it to music and I gobble it up like candy, print it on a page, and I can’t hang. So I offer no opinion on the poems, just the information that they’re present.

I liked The Southern Review, even when it made me feel dumb. I haven’t decided whether to subscribe yet. (Those decisions will come after I’ve read a lot more journals and have learned my taste.)