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November 30, 2003

TT: Words to the wise

I got an e-mail from Fred Hersch reminding me to remind you that he's taking over the Jazz Standard Dec. 9-14 for a whole week of duets. Here's the order of service:

December 9: Lee Konitz, alto sax
December 10: John Hollenbeck, percussion
December 11: Jane Ira Bloom, soprano sax
December 12: Joe Lovano, tenor sax
December 13: Kate McGarry, voice
December 14: Kurt Elling, voice

Talk about an embarrassment of riches! I doubt if I can catch more than one or two nights, though I'd much prefer to hear them all. Aside from his astonishing roster of collaborators, Hersch happens to be one of the jazz pianists whose music I love best. Here's part of what I wrote about him a couple of years ago in the New York Times:

Mr. Hersch is frequently compared to Bill Evans--both pianists are greatly admired for their lyricism--but his approach to solo playing is far different. Though Evans made two well-received solo albums, he strongly preferred working with a trio, and his unaccompanied playing tended to be loosely improvisational and sketchy in texture. Mr. Hersch, on the other hand, improvises with the sharp conceptual clarity of a classical composer; instead of merely skimming atop the familiar chord changes of standard songs, he forges them into rigorously structured, wholly personal re-creations. "I like to play orchestrally--juggling several balls, having lots of layers of stuff going on," he says. Yet even at its most complex, his playing never sounds premeditated: it is as though each song is being spontaneously composed, on the spot and in the moment.

To which I need only add that there will be two shows each night, at 7:30 and 9:30, with an additional 11:30 show on Friday (Lovano) and Saturday (McGarry). Call 212-576-2232 for reservations, or to inquire about buying a three-night pass at a special discount.

Be there. I will.

Posted November 30, 11:43 AM

TT: But somebody has to do it

2 Blowhards has a wonderful first-person account of what it's like to work part-time as a nude model for an art class:

I would soon find that modeling wasn't simply a nude and high-paid sprawl on the chaise lounge (for that you have to turn to its illegal sister profession). It's hard work, akin to being a dancer. Twenty minutes stretch to infinity when you stand still. Add ten more -- and only discipline prevents you from falling like wet laundry from a line. Effortless poses of grace aren't so effortless. While everyone from icy Degas to libidinous Rodin bent necks and crushed spinal disks searching for the perfect position, history doesn't record the groans of their models. Then there's boredom -- to which I credit the glazed look in Mona Lisa's eye. Behind every thoughtful face at the Art Student's League is a woman asking, "When will it be over?"

Read the whole thing here. Please.

Posted November 30, 7:26 AM

TT: Almanac

"The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them."

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen

Posted November 30, 7:15 AM

TT: Like they used to

I just got back from...well, I'll tell you on Monday. I promise you'll be interested. At least I think you'll be interested. (And no, it wasn't Baghdad.)

In my absence, The Wall Street Journal ran my review of the new Broadway revival of Leonard Bernstein's Wonderful Town, which opened last Sunday. Since there's no link, and I expect most of you were elsewhere on Friday and thus didn't get a chance to see what I wrote, here it is:

Let's cut right to the chase: "Wonderful Town" is now the go-to show on Broadway. Donna Murphy and Jennifer Westfeldt are the best of all possible stars. Kathleen Marshall's dance-filled direction is picture-perfect. As for the songs, they're by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green--need I say more? If a visit to the Al Hirschfeld Theatre doesn't make you feel sunny all over, you need to consider switching to an industrial-strength anti-depressant.

The only thing I can't figure is why it took a half-century for "Wonderful Town," which opened this week, to receive its first full-scale Broadway revival. The legend of New York City, after all, is as potent today as it was in 1953. This is still the place where gifted folk from every small town on earth come to find their futures, and "Wonderful Town" is the quintessential expression of their quest. Based on "My Sister Eileen," the Jerome Chodorov-Joseph Fields play loosely adapted from the autobiographical short stories of Ruth McKenney, "Wonderful Town" tells the tale of Ruth and Eileen Sherwood, two adventurous sisters from Ohio who burn their bridges, find a basement apartment in Greenwich Village and find out that Manhattan really is all it's cracked up to be.

Simplicity is the keynote of this wonderful "Wonderful Town": John Lee Beatty's set is a see-through skein of skyscrapers and fire escapes, with an occasional backdrop flown in to orient the viewer. If you think a Broadway musical absolutely has to be financed by tapping the Federal Reserve, you may find the effect sparse, but for me it was just right. In reviewing the gazillion-dollar "Wicked" (which I liked), I suggested that it was really "a mini-musical à la ‘Godspell' trapped inside the body of a Brobdingnagian Broadway spectacular, signaling wildly to be let out." This is what I had in mind, a spare, uncluttered production that puts the show and its stars in the spotlight.

The plot, to be sure, is paper-thin, and in a less zesty staging, "Wonderful Town," with its period references and fresh-faced optimism, might seem more quaint than anything else. Not to worry: Kathleen Marshall, who did the dances for "Little Shop of Horrors," shows why choreographers make the best musical-comedy directors. Faced with the challenge of cramming the action into a comparatively shallow downstage space (this is a concert-style production in which the orchestra is placed on stage), Ms. Marshall weaves the actors in and out of one another's way with frisky precision. Imagine a frieze-like painting of New York street life, wound up and set in motion, and you'll get the idea.

The playing space may be smaller than usual, but it leaves plenty of room for good acting, and Donna Murphy knows what to do with it. The role of Ruth, the sharp-tongued older sister who's afraid she's too smart to get a man, was created in 1953 by Rosalind Russell, Hollywood's favorite dame-in-a-suit, and Murphy has that precedent clearly in mind. She pops off her wisecracks as if she'd eaten a bag of lemons, peel and all, and growls out her songs with just enough self-lacerating rue to make you want to hug her. I'm not old enough to have seen Russell, but she couldn't have been better than this. No one could.

Ms. Murphy can carry this show all by her leggy self. The good news is that, unlike Hugh Jackman in "The Boy From Oz," she doesn't have to. Instead, she's supported by Jennifer Westfeldt, a Broadway debutante best known as the co-star and co-author of the indie movie "Kissing Jessica Stein." Ms. Westfeldt plays Eileen, the good-hearted, slightly ditsy man magnet of "Wonderful Town," as a Lisa Kudrow-like variant of Jessica Stein--less neurotic, more adorable--and succeeds in the seemingly impossible task of not getting upstaged by Donna Murphy. You won't have the slightest trouble understanding why all the men in the cast follow her around like lovesick cocker spaniels, tongues unrolled.

What else? A discreetly trimmed book by David Ives, who has sharpened the punch lines without adding sore-thumb anachronisms. A 100% live, synthesizer-free 24-piece orchestra led to resplendent effect by Rob Fisher. Which brings us to those good old Bernstein-Comden-Green songs. Interestingly, none has become a standard, though cabaret singers trot out Ruth's "One Hundred Easy Ways (To Lose a Man)" from time to time. The reason is simple: "Wonderful Town" is a book show with musical numbers, not a quasi-opera like "West Side Story," and its best songs are funny, not touching. By the same token, it isn't the subplottish courtship of Ruth and Robert Baker (Gregg Edelman), the magazine editor for whom she flips, that drives the show, but the romance between the Sherwood sisters and the city with which they fall hopelessly in love.

I wondered whether so youthfully idealistic a musical would speak to a new generation of émigré New Yorkers suckled on cynicism, so I brought along a 20-year-old friend who, like Ruth and Eileen, came here full of hope and looking for glory. Guess what? She ate it up--and so will you. At a time when even the most case-hardened of Manhattanites toss and turn at night, "Wonderful Town" is a tonic reminder of why New York remains the capital of the land of dreams.

In other words, go. Soon. Now.

Posted November 30, 7:14 AM

November 27, 2003

TT: Almanac

"A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves."

Orson Welles, letter to Peter Bogdanovich, c. 1968-72

Posted November 27, 1:53 AM

TT: Out of here

I'm shutting down the shop until Sunday night, and so far as I know Our Girl won't be posting until then, either (though I'll be delighted if she does).

If you're around on Friday, be sure to buy a Wall Street Journal and look up my review of Wonderful Town, which will run in that day's "Weekend Journal" section. I can't tell you what it says, but I promise it'll be worth reading.

In the meantime, have a happy Thanksgiving. We'll see you next week.

Posted November 27, 1:52 AM

November 26, 2003

TT: Fair's fair

A reader writes:

With regards to your skeptical blog post about Bill Clinton's favorite books, you might want to take a peek at this old story about a dinner between Bill Clinton and Gabriel García Márquez.

By all accounts, Clinton knew his great books inside and out, and I'd be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Click the link--the piece is definitely worth reading, and even taking seriously, up to a point.

On the other hand, it also leads me to suspect that like most artists, Señor Márquez doesn't know a tongue bath when he's on the receiving end of one. Neither, of course, did the artists whom John Kennedy, by all accounts a first-class philistine, buttered up so assiduously back in the days of Camelot.

Here's a word to the wise. When receiving praise from politicians, sing along with me: it ain't necessarily so....

Posted November 26, 12:47 PM

TT: Classics and commercials

In case you've forgotten or hadn't heard, my most recent book, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, is now out in trade paperback--and still available in hardcover. Either way, it makes a good gift (or so I've been told).

If you like "About Last Night," I'd say there's a better-than-even chance that you'll like The Skeptic, and that your friends will, too. Don't take my word for it, though: the reviews were staggeringly enthusiastic, as you can see for yourself by going here.

I blog for free but write for a living. If you'd like to support both causes, think about giving The Skeptic for Christmas, or buying a copy for yourself if you don't already have one.

To purchase the paperback, click here.

To purchase the hardcover edition, click here.

We return you now to our regularly scheduled blog.

Posted November 26, 12:38 PM

TT: Light up the sky

"About Last Night" received approximately 4,000 page views on Tuesday, a thousand more than our previous all-time record, set last Friday.

What's more, Our Girl and I expect to rack up our 100,000th hit at some point in the next day or two (that's since we first went live on July 14).

Those numbers are pretty amazing for a new arts blog. Really amazing, in fact. So much so that I don't quite know what to say other than thanks to you all, from the bottom of my heart.

Having said that, I must now add that you probably won't see many new postings here, if any, on Wednesday. OGIC has pet problems, and I'm beset by two very bad deadlines. Still, I'll try to get something up, if only out of gratitude.

And now to bed. Look what time it is! I have pieces to write, and I need to get some sleep. See you later.

Posted November 26, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Everybody likes the idea of Cary Grant. Everyone thinks of him affectionately, because he embodies what seems a happier time--a time when we had a simpler relationship to a performer. We could admire him for his timing and nonchalance; we didn't expect emotional revelations from Cary Grant. We were used to his keeping his distance--which, if we cared to, we could close in idle fantasy. He appeared before us in his radiantly shallow perfection, and that was all we wanted of him. He was the Dufy of acting--shallow but in a good way, shallow without trying to be deep. We didn't want depth from him; we asked only that he be handsome and silky and make us laugh."

Pauline Kael, When the Lights Go Down

Posted November 26, 9:28 AM

TT: Out there on your own

A reader writes, apropos of a posting about reviews in which I suggested that "reviews should be read after the performance, not before, mine included":

I don't agree completely with your point about reading a critic only after the performance. If you've followed a critic for any substantial length of time, you know with some precision where your tastes and his intersect and where they diverge. You know his enthusiasms, his antipathies, his idiosyncrasies. In short, you can often tell from what he thinks of a work whether or not you're going to like it. In this way, he can be quite useful to you as a consumer guide. And reliable guidance about what is worth seeing or reading is essential, for how is the ordinary guy (who doesn't have the time or resources to make many mistakes) to know which new novelist to pick up or which new cabaret performer to seek out without the help of his favorite critics?...

But of course you should always return to a good critic after experiencing the work. He can illuminate it, enlarge the experience, or put his finger on why you found it unsatisfying. For me, comparing insights and thoughts with my favorite critics is half the fun.

My correspondent has a very good point. I sometimes forget that I don't pay to see Broadway shows (or anything else, except movies). In a perfect world, everybody would experience art without first having it explained: no program notes, no wall labels, no interviews with the author, and--above all--no reviews. You'd go simply because you were interested, because you made a habit of going to see new things. Then, after the immediate experience, you'd seek out further information to help you put that experience in perspective (or, as my correspondent remarks, simply for fun). I think it's hugely important to make a serious and sustained effort to come to new works of art this way. But in order to do so, especially when you're talking about Broadway shows, you've got to have (A) a lot of spare time and (B) a lot of spare money. Otherwise, it's essential to call your shots, if only to avoid bankruptcy, and good reviewers can help.

Can, I said. How often do they help? How often do consumers routinely use reviews in that way--as a "consumer guide"? For me, the problem is less one of money than time. It's my job to attend all Broadway openings, so I don't need a guide to theater, nor do I typically look to reviews to point me in the direction of a new symphony or jazz album or museum exhibit. Movies, yes, in certain circumstances: there are one or two critics whose word is enough to send me to a new film. (I saw Next Stop Wonderland solely because of Stephen Holden's review in the New York Times.) More often, though, it's a profile of an artist that stimulates me to see or hear something I would otherwise have passed up. (That's why I went to see Ghost World--because of a New Yorker profile of Daniel Clowes that appeared prior to the film's release.) Sometimes I go because a description of the plot made me curious (as in the case of Chasing Amy), or because the buzz has become too loud to ignore (as in the case of Lost in Translation). Most often, I go to new things at the urging of friends whose taste I know and trust, Our Girl foremost among them.

So I suppose I was offering a counsel of perfection when I suggested that reviews should be saved for after the fact. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to at least approximate the ideally receptive state that comes from experiencing art objects stripped of the intervening scrim of words. Above all, try to trust yourself, to feel what you feel, not what you think you ought to feel. Granted, if you don't like Bonnard or The Four Temperaments or Falstaff or The Great Gatsby (the book, not the opera) or Charlie Parker's "Embraceable You," you're the problem, not the art--but that's no reason to pretend you feel otherwise, merely to keep trying to see what others see.

I'll close with another almanac encore, this one from Kingsley Amis: "All amateurs must be philistines part of the time. Must be: a greater sin is to be coerced into showing respect when little or none is felt." Yes.

Posted November 26, 9:23 AM

TT: The new centurions

We just registered our 100,000th hit. I wonder who it was? Anyway, yay!

Posted November 26, 2:24 AM

November 25, 2003

TT: A gaffe is when someone tells the truth

Everybody in the theater business is going to be talking about this New York Times interview with Ned Beatty, who is co-starring (brilliantly) with Ashley Judd and Jason Patric in the current Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:

Ned Beatty is a movie star himself, though not the big box-office kind. And he says Broadway has come to rely too heavily on celebrities, thrusting them into challenging roles they do not have the acting chops to handle.

Tucking into a plate of shrimp scampi after a recent matinee -- hold the angel-hair pasta, per the Atkins diet, please -- Mr. Beatty engaged in a candid assessment of his co-stars. He said he very much liked his glamorous colleagues personally: Mr. Patric, best known for the film "After Dark, My Sweet," and Ms. Judd, who starred in "Ruby in Paradise." He simply thinks, he said, that they are ill equipped for their parts: Brick, a brooding, boozing former athlete mourning his friend's death, and Maggie, his long-suffering wife who craves his attention.

Mr. Beatty said of Ms. Judd: "She is a sweetie, and yet she doesn't have a whole lot of tools. But she works very hard."

And of Mr. Patric: "He's gotten better all the time, but his is a different journey."

Read the whole thing here, instantly.

Posted November 25, 12:51 PM

TT: I even managed to quote Santayana

My Wall Street Journal piece about Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes Golden Collection is in print, as of this morning. Here's a snippet:

"What an ultramaroon." "You're...dethpicable." "Hmm. Pronoun trouble." "Of course you know this means war."

Ring any bells? No? Well, try this one on for size: "Ehh, what's up, doc?"

If that phrase doesn't make you feel like gnawing a carrot, you're probably not a likely buyer of "Looney Tunes Golden Collection," a four-DVD set containing 56 of the finest Warner Bros. cartoons from the golden age of big-studio animation. Otherwise, get ready to laugh yourself silly.

The Warner animated shorts of the '40s and '50s have long been a gaping hole in the fast-growing DVD catalogue. No more. Now you can revel in crisp, clear prints of such classic cartoons as "Rabbit of Seville" and "Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century," plus a full set of the bells and whistles without which no self-respecting DVD set is complete....

The future of animation belongs to the wizards of Pixar, and the day will surely come when they triumph over their computer-enhanced technique instead of being swamped by it. But when the last ink bottle is empty and the last paint brush has been put away for good, Bugs and Daffy will still be with us, one sly, the other spluttering, just as Wile E. Coyote will never stop chasing the Road Runner. They are as obsolete as a silent movie by Buster Keaton--and as imperishable.

There's lots more where that came from. Read the whole thing here.

If for some inexplicable and unacceptable reason you haven't yet purchased Looney Tunes Golden Collection, purge yourself by clicking here.

Don't be an ultramaroon--do it now.

P.S. If that's not enough to hold you for one day, 2 Blowhards has a really smart post on Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

Posted November 25, 12:05 PM

TT: Don't read the whole thing there!

A witty, well-read reader with a macabre streak who noted my dislike of Dickens e-mailed me the following excerpt from Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, a favorite book I haven't revisited for a number of years:

One day, running his thumb through the pages of Bleak House that remained to be read, Tony said, "We still have a lot to get through. I hope I shall be able to finish it before I go."

"Oh yes," said Mr. Todd. "Do not disturb yourself about that. You will have time to finish it, my friend."

For the first time Tony noticed something slightly menacing in his host's manner. That evening at supper, a brief meal of farine and dried beef, eaten just before sundown, Tony renewed the subject.

"You know, Mr. Todd, the time has come when I must be thinking about getting back to civilization. I have already imposed myself on your hospitality for too long."

Mr. Todd bent over his plate, crunching mouthfuls of farine, but made no reply.

"How soon do you think I shall be able to get a boat?...I said how soon do you think I shall be able to get a boat? I appreciate all your kindness to me more than I can say but..."

"My friend, any kindness I may have shown is amply repaid by your reading of Dickens. Do not let us mention the subject again."

"Well I'm very glad you have enjoyed it. I have, too. But I really must be thinking of getting back..."

"Yes," said Mr. Todd. "The black man was like that. He thought of it all the time. But he died here..."

If you know the book, you know the moral of the story. Terrible things can happen to those who read Dickens! Don't let them happen to you....

Posted November 25, 12:03 PM

TT: Those who cannot do, write novels

Apropos of all our recent postings on Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, a reader sent me this wonderful story from the San Francisco Chronicle about Patrick O'Brian, on whose Aubrey-Maturin novels the film was based:

The vivid, seafaring novels of Patrick O'Brian have been getting lots of attention since the release of the big-budget movie "Master and Commander." And they were doing all right without the movie: According to O'Brian's editor at Norton, Starling Lawrence, even before the movie came out O'Brian's books sold 4 million copies. "We're not exactly under a rock," he says.

But as popular as the tales of Lucky Jack Aubrey and his notoriously unseaworthy friend and shipboard physician Stephen Maturin are among readers, they are especially revered by real wind-and-mast sailors. To them, O'Brian speaks the secret code of the sheeted main, the furled jib and the main topgallant staysail.

"I've sailed all my life," says Bay Area venture capitalist Tom Perkins, speaking by phone from his vacation home in England, "and O'Brian never made a mistake about the wind or the sails."

Which is why it was such a surprise that when Perkins took O'Brian on an extended sailing trip, he had a startling revelation. O'Brian didn't have a clue about how a sailboat worked.

"That was the amazing thing," Perkins says today, still a little incredulous. "He didn't know anything about sailing."...

Read the whole thing here.

Posted November 25, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I am sad today over the death of Lady Elgar. I am very fond of Edward, and I know that, whatever people may say, to a man of his fine and sensitive nature, the severance of a long tie like this must inevitably mean much bitterness and suffering, much dwelling in the past and self-reproach. We always seem heavy debtors to the dead: we feel they have not had their chance and that life has given us an unfair advantage over them."

Ernest Newman, letter to Vera Newman, Apr. 7, 1920

Posted November 25, 12:00 PM

TT and OGIC: New around here, stranger?

It's another mega-heavy-traffic day here at "About Last Night," meaning it's more than likely that some of you are visiting us for the first time. To find out more about where you are and who we are, click here to read an archived posting that tells all. Or simply work your way down the right-hand column, which is crammed full of information about this page and its two co-bloggers.

Either way, we're delighted you stopped by. If you liked what you saw, come back tomorrow...and bring a friend. The easy-to-remember alternate URL is www.terryteachout.com, which will bring you here in a jif (as, of course, will the longer address now visible in your browser).

Welcome.

Posted November 25, 10:53 AM

TT: Which Edward Gorey book are you?

Go here to find out, if you dare. (I wanted to be The Lavender Leotard, naturally, but it seems I'm The Gashlycrumb Tinies, sigh.)

Posted November 25, 3:53 AM

TT: Other rooms

I've always had mixed feelings about Joni Mitchell, a greatly gifted artist to whom I no longer warm, in part because of her self-absorption and humorlessness. (The older I get, the more distance I try to put between myself and anyone who lacks a sense of humor.) Yet once in a while a song of hers bobs to the surface of my consciousness--usually because somebody else is singing it--and I remember why I used to spend hours and hours listening to her music, back when the world was young.

I mention this because a jazz musician I know has been singing "Black Crow" (from Hejira), and now I can't get its angular tune and strangely off-center harmonies out of my head:

There's a crow flying
Black and ragged
Tree to tree
He's black as the highway that's leading me
Now he's diving down
To pick up on something shiny
I feel like that black crow
Flying
In a blue sky

I took a ferry to the highway
Then I drove to a pontoon plane
I took a plane to a taxi
And a taxi to a train
I've been traveling so long
How'm I ever going to know my home
When I see it again
I'm like a black crow flying
In a blue, blue sky

I love the Great American Songbook with all my heart--and yet there are so many other songs that long to be played and sung. This is one of them.

Posted November 25, 1:54 AM

TT: Hugh Kenner, R.I.P.

How ironic that Hugh Kenner's obituaries should be appearing on the same day that I published a piece about Warner Bros. cartoons that made mention of his elegant little monograph about Chuck Jones, creator of the Road Runner. He was a distinguished critic and a great gentleman, and will be greatly missed.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's New York Times obituary, incidentally, ends with the following paragraph:

Nor, surprisingly, did he deplore the decline of print as our main medium. "We forget that most of what people read when everybody read all the time was junk -- competent junk," he told U.S. News & World Report. "Now they get it from television. The casual entertainment people get in the evening from the box was what they used to get from the short fiction in The Saturday Evening Post. That magazine and others like it were the situation comedies and cop shows of their era. It is not a cultural loss that this particular use of literacy has been transferred from one medium to another."

A very smart man.

Posted November 25, 1:42 AM

TT: The price of eggs

One of the most interesting aspects of Jane Austen's novels is that she always makes sure you know how much money the characters have--only how much is it, really? I recently caught up with a posting on the Web site of an economist that poses, and answers, this question in one celebrated case:

So how rich is Fitzwilliam Darcy, anyway? What does ten thousand (pounds) a year in the aftermath of the Napoleonic War mean, really?

I have two answers, the first of which is $300,000 a year, and the second of which is $6,000,000 a year....

Read the whole thing here.

While I'm at it, kindly allow me to plug one of my favorite Web sites, Inflation Calculator, an on-line form which (in the words of its inventor) "adjusts any given amount of money for inflation, according to the Consumer Price Index, from 1800 to 2002." That may sound dry as dust, but spend just 30 seconds playing with Inflation Calculator and I bet you'll have it bookmarked in 35. I used it frequently in writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, and I commend it wholeheartedly to any writer--novelist, journalist, whatever--who ever has occasion to compare what things cost in 1865, or 1925, or five years ago, to what they cost now.

Posted November 25, 1:29 AM

November 24, 2003

OGIC: The heiress?

I'm such a hopeless hedgehog. Probably half my blogging on About Last Night has been about Henry James or Lost in Translation, and I've been trying to give these topics a rest. But there's too much interesting stuff about James floating around the internet lately to pass up.

Aaron Haspel over at God of the Machine has a brilliant little piece--provoked by what Terry and I wrote here and here--on why Henry James continues to be so popular in the books-into-movies game:

James only seems literary because, especially in the late novels, he is constantly trying to catch the precise attitudes of his characters toward each other, reflected not just in their conversation but their gestures and thoughts and tiny inflections.

Having given a sample passage from The Awkward Age, he goes on:

The passage is lovely in its way, but James is attempting something to which what James Baldwin called the "disastrously explicit" medium of prose is completely ill-suited. Half of it is stage directions, and it could be done better, and more compactly, with movie actors who can follow such directions-which admittedly is asking a lot. James tried, unsuccessfully, to write plays, but the stage, where the actors have to project to the back row, is still too histrionic for what he has in mind. What he needed was the talkies. If James had been born a century later I'm guessing he would have done most of his writing for film, and maybe tossed off a few novels in his spare time.

This sounds right, and after reading it I was struck with sudden insight into my love of Lost in Translation: Sofia Coppola's movie is a really very Jamesian pleasure. It does in visual language what James, in Aaron's account, bumped up against the limits of prose trying to do in his novels.

Aaron's account of James's modus operandi sheds real light on the success of Lost, which is clinched in the final scene. That scene is just saturated with feeling, and despite all its layers--joy, grief, hope, irony, loss--it manages not to be crushing, but somehow aloft. It is a rich, extraordinary moment. But it is made possible by the accumulated emotional content of many ordinary scenes that preceded it, in which nothing seemed to happen (golfing, flower-arranging, a great deal of staring out of windows).

Doesn't this start to sound like the classic complaint about James? Nothing happens--and it takes pages and pages not to happen. But I think he was up to something very much like Coppola is. He tried to capture in detail the psychic weather in which his characters acted. He did so by making the reader familiar with even their most fleeting, fugitive sensations and associations--to the extreme fatigue of many readers, but not mine. In the later novels, if you pay your dues, and follow the tortured syntax and absorb all of the complex relations, then you stand to be rewarded at the end, when a simple gesture, look, or word--loaded with meaning beforehand--makes everything fall apart or come together. It can blow you right over.

I'm as surprised as anyone to find myself comparing Henry James to Sofia Coppola, but I'm convinced that the movie is Jamesian in both narrative strategy and temperament. Furthermore, I would love to see Coppola try her hand at writing and filming an adaptation of one of the more recalcitrant James works, like What Maisie Knew or "In the Cage" (which has made me cry). Both of these highly interiorized works consist almost entirely of those "gestures and thoughts and tiny inflections" that Aaron pinpointed, and yet both have tremendous dramatic capacity. So how about it, Sofia?

Posted November 24, 12:50 PM

TT: That other prize

In all the welter of blogosphere postings about the Stephen King-Shirley Hazzard dustup at the National Book Awards ceremony, insufficient attention has been paid to Carlos Eire, who won the nonfiction award for Waiting for Snow in Havana (I was one of the judges). Now the New York Times has rectified that--somewhat--by publishing an excellent interview with Eire:

For most of his adult life Carlos Eire had tried to run away from Cuba. The island was his only briefly, for 11 years, before the Cuban revolution ushered in a world of heartache in which he was separated from his parents and spent years of hardship in the United States.

"I still think it's an evil place, and there's nothing I can do to fix it," said Mr. Eire, the new winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction for "Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy" (Free Press/Simon & Schuster). "The best thing I could do was to think that it was an accident I was born there."

Read the whole thing here.

Posted November 24, 12:40 PM

TT: Backstage pass

Last week, I got a call from a record-company publicist who asked if I'd be willing to do an "EPK" with a well-known musician--I'll call her Jane Doe. "Duh, what's an EPK?" I replied, and was informed that it stands for "electronic press kit," the canned celebrity interviews that are made available to TV and radio producers in lieu of face-to-face personal appearances. The actual interviewer--that is, the person asking the questions--is carefully scissored out of the videotape, leaving only the talking head of the celebrity in question.

I'm a journalist, not a publicist, and I normally wouldn't have thought twice about saying no, but Jane happens to be an old friend of mine (we met before she became successful). Since she spends most of her time on the road, we rarely get to see one another, so I agreed to be the mystery interviewer, and the record company promptly messengered over a top-secret "white-label" advance copy of Jane's new CD, which will be released next spring.

I put the album on, and was staggered. I knew it would be a major stylistic departure for Jane--I'd talked to her longtime producer about it a few months ago--but even so, I wasn't fully prepared for how self-revealing, even confessional, her music had become. As I listened and marveled (for the album is extraordinarily beautiful), I thought to myself, How on earth am I going to talk to Jane about this in front of a TV camera?

The record company sent a big black car to pick me up Sunday morning, and the driver whisked me to the discreet front door of a boutique hotel on a midtown side street. I made my way to a chic sardine can of a room into which had been stuffed an entire video crew. A few minutes later, Jane arrived, trailed by her assistant and her stylist. (Don't laugh--famous women musicians never step in front of cameras without first being fussed over by a stylist.) We hadn't seen one another for two years, but no sooner did she walk through the door than we were hugging and chattering, just as if she were fresh off the bus, hoping to make it in the big city. I told her I'd become a drama critic, and she giggled and said, "Not like Addison DeWitt, I hope!" (Jane has seen All About Eve more times than any straight person I know.) Once her makeup was in place, we sat down in a pair of high chairs, and after what seemed like a half-hour's worth of tinkering with the lights, the cameraman rolled the tape.

Like many performers, Jane is shy, which sometimes causes her to seem standoffish. In addition, she's learned from hard experience to be on her guard when talking to journalists. For her to speak frankly about so personal a work of art would thus have been difficult under the best of circumstances. Yet there we were, brightly lit and surrounded by a tight knot of technicians and handlers, and for a brief moment my heart sank. Then I screwed up my courage and asked a question, and within a matter of minutes we might just as well have been sitting together in an empty room, swapping stories and passing a bottle. We talked about the record, the experiences that inspired her to make it, and everything else that came into our heads. She came close to getting choked up at one point, and my own eyes filled with tears in response.

The cameraman signaled for us to take a break so that he could change reels. "Omigod, was that too much?" Jane asked. "I feel weak in the knees after talking about all that stuff. I've never really talked about it like that. Was I rambling? Did I sound dumb?" She ran to the bathroom to fix her face, and I let out a sigh. As a Kingsley Amis character once put it, I felt as if I'd just sat through a complete performance of La Traviata compressed into one and a half minutes. (It took a little longer than that, but you know what I mean.) Jane returned, the cameraman rolled the tape again, and we wrapped up the interview. More chatter, more hugs, then I descended to my waiting car and we went our separate ways.

As I headed home, I recalled a passage from one of my favorite books, André Previn's No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood:

I have never heard of a jazz musician complaining, "You never even called me once," or "Where have you been?"

It's not for lack of caring or that they aren't glad to see you, but chances are they haven't been that easy to find either, so why be accusatory? Only six months ago I went back into a recording studio to make the first jazz album I had made in twenty-five years, and I had taken out fail-safe insurance in the presence of Ray Brown, the indefatigable and brilliant bassist, and Joe Pass, a guitarist whose technique and inventiveness leave his colleagues open-mouthed. I knew them both well, I had worked with both of them a generation earlier, and we had been friends at that time. I walked into the studio, a quarter century of classical concerts later, and was instantly received with the kind of relaxed warmth usually based on twice-weekly dinners. Lots of jokes, some reminiscing, some future planning, and a great deal of music making. I can't remember an easier record to make, and I went home in the early hours of the morning with my nerves quiescent, my blood pressure down, and in a generally euphoric fog.

Most of my friends are musicians of one kind or another, and I used to be one myself, so I know what Previn is talking about. I didn't go home feeling euphoric--the interview had been too intense for that--but once again, I marveled at the mysterious ability of artists to pick up the threads of friendship after a long separation. I marveled, too, at the way in which Jane and I had somehow managed to shut out the world and talk. Perhaps this, too, is a special gift of performers, the gift of emotional concentration, for it is something they must do nearly every night of their lives.

At any rate, it's an amazing album. And yes, I really do have the best job in the world...except for my friend Jane. She's got me beat.

Posted November 24, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Gentlemen, do you want to know the secret of living? Have deep principles and then improvise."

Leopold Stokowski, quoted in Oliver Daniel, Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View

Posted November 24, 12:01 PM

TT: Post hoc

A reader writes, apropos (I think) of my Wall Street Journal piece on The Producers:

My $85.00 evening at the Ahmanson, Los Angeles, was very enjoyable. I laughed, giggled, and smiled. I am so glad that in my many years of theatregoing I have never read a review prior to seeing the production.

Amen to that! I think reviews should be read after the performance, not before, mine included. And even then, don't let critics tell you what to think. I've known too many critics to take their opinions too seriously. A critic's point of view is just that--a point of view. The theory, of course, is that he knows more than you and thus can enhance your enjoyment of the art object under consideration, but it ain't necessarily so. Here's an almanac encore, from C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism, a book I passionately commend to your attention: "If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him."

Having said that, though, I must add that a goodly number of the people who wrote to me about my comments on The Producers, possibly including my present correspondent, have somehow gotten the mistaken impression that I didn't think the show was funny. When readers misunderstand me, I usually take it for granted that I failed to make myself clear, but in this case I don't think I'm to blame. I said The Producers was out of date, not unfunny, and I described it as "nothing more (or less) than a virtuoso reminiscence of the lapel-grabbing, kill-for-a-laugh shtickery on which so much of the stand-up comedy of my youth was based." Does that really sound like I didn't think it was funny?

I sometimes wonder whether the professional deformation of bloggers is the sort of black-or-white opinionizing that leaves no room for carefully shaded qualifications. Around here, OGIC and I do our best to say exactly what we mean, at least at the moment we're saying it.

Posted November 24, 3:42 AM

OGIC: Chicagocentric

Next Wednesday afternoon, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris will speak about his work at the University of Chicago, an event that is free and open to the public. Details are here. Later that night, the university's Doc Films will present a special screening of Morris's new film The Fog of War, which comes highly recommended. As far as I can tell, tickets to the screening will be available following the lecture and can't be ordered ahead of time. No ticket price is mentioned; sounds free to me.

I'm skipping town tomorrow, but the aforementioned Doc Films has a full plate of good stuff for the Chicago-bound this turkey week: there's Satyajit Ray's The Branches of the Tree Tuesday, Peckinpah's Wild Bunch Wednesday, a Hitchcock/Buñuel double feature on Thanksgiving, and last summer's sleeper Swimming Pool Friday.

I'd like to be better about keeping on top of all the fabulous cultural events going on around this fair city, but it's going to remain pretty catch-as-catch-can. For literary events, however, Sam at Golden Rule Jones has you covered. His site offers a frequently updated list of readings and talks, and some nice literary coverage to boot. An instant bookmark for Chicago litworm types.

Posted November 24, 1:23 AM

November 23, 2003

TT: A message from the skies

Click here to read what Greg Sandow wrote the other day about the experience of listening to Jean Sibelius's Fifth Symphony. Then go thou and do likewise. If you don't have a recording, this is the best one. (I'm listening to it right now.) When you hear it, you'll understand what Sibelius meant when he wrote, "God opens His door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony."

Thanks, Greg.

Posted November 23, 11:57 AM

TT: Concordance

Dear OGIC:

I'm with you, almost completely. None of the artists you mentioned rings the bell for me, least of all Godard (whom I've always thought to be wildly overrated). As for Picasso, I said my say about him when I reviewed the Museum of Modern Art's "Matisse Picasso" show for The Wall Street Journal:

In the visual arts, the race has always been between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and Picasso has always been the front-runner. Certainly Americans, with their puritan distrust of beauty, have typically favored his relentless experimentation to Matisse's less obviously innovative stylistic pilgrimage. Even now, Picasso's paintings look modern to the least tutored eye--you can't help but come away from them secure in the knowledge that you've been challenged with a capital C--whereas it is perfectly possible to skate happily atop Matisse's luscious, angst-free surfaces without feeling the slightest need to come to grips with the existential problem of...well, anything. (That's why Picasso's "Guernica," which wears its antiwar message like a bumper sticker, is far better known than any Matisse painting. It's modern art for modernists who don't like art.)

Rarely has an artist done more harm to his own reputation than Matisse did when he declared that he wanted his work to serve as "a kind of cerebral sedative as relaxing in its ways as a comfortable armchair," a remark as subtle and misleading as T.S. Eliot's observation that Henry James had "a mind so fine no idea could violate it." You have to think hard about it to understand how profound it is, just as you have to look hard at Matisse's paintings to see how radically original they were, and are....

Picasso's painting is the work of a spiritual contortionist who twists the visible world into angry patterns that betray his interior fury; Matisse, the disciplined sybarite, tells us instead of his joy.

My Dickens problem, on the other hand, vexes me. I know I'm missing something good, and can't seem to find a way around it (whereas I'm perfectly happy to be deaf to whatever good there is in the music of Wagner). Maybe you can set me straight.

Obviously I now need to up the ante by making a confession of significantly higher voltage. So, um...well...how about this? I wouldn't lose a bit of sleep if all the German paintings in the world vanished first thing tomorrow morning. Poof.

Top that, you piker.

Posted November 23, 9:22 AM

OGIC: Laying it on the line

Dear Terry:

In answer to your challenge issued here, I've sweated a bit, but I'm ready to come clean. And, by the way, Michael Blowhard's original post is an excellent and useful reminder that we don't have to bend our tastes to love everything of value. I'm sure you've noted all the interesting responses he's been getting in his comments section. Some definite patterns have emerged (and things have gotten more than a little heated).

For writers, I'll play my Virginia Woolf and William Blake cards.

Painters? Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin. Several years ago I might have said Monet, but the big show that passed through Chicago a while back reminded me that his paintings are not equivalent to their bland reproductions on a million coffee cups and mouse pads. But I might still cite his series paintings--making an exception for those enormous, very late water lilies.

Among filmmakers, I've seen a lot of Godard movies without chomping at the bit to see any of them again (well, maybe Breathless, but just for its iconicity). Films that fall into this category are harder for me to think of than anything else. It's a seductive medium. And, more so than with other art forms, I tend to believe that if I don't like a film, it's just not that good. Can you make any sense of that?

On Dickens we'll have to agree to disagree. Maybe we're reading different Dickens, but that man makes me laugh out loud. When he is sharp, he is very, very good, but when he's sentimental he's horrid. For me, the former outweighs the latter.

Whack--back into your court!

Posted November 23, 4:58 AM

TT: Rarely on Sunday

I could change my mind, but I'm not planning to post anything new today, having been obsessively active yesterday. Instead, I've updated the "Teachout's Top Five" and "Teachout Elsewhere" modules of the right-hand column (and yes, I know it took me long enough). Browse at your leisure. I'll be back tomorrow.

Rumor has it that OGIC has something up her elegantly tailored sleeve, but I could be wrong. She never tells me anything! So I'll know when you do....

Posted November 23, 1:08 AM

TT: Almanac

"One speaks flatly, without thinking, of a Platonic or Aristotelian system, or of a Thomasic system, in spite of the fact that these thinkers would have raised their hands in horror at the idea that their empirical exploration of reality could ever result in a system. If anything was ever clear to a thinker like Plato, who knew to distinguish between the experiences of being and of not-being and acknowledged them both, it was that for better or for worse reality was not a system. If therefore one constructs a system, inevitably one has to falsify reality."

Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections

Posted November 23, 1:07 AM

November 22, 2003

TT: The daily grind

When I was first getting started in professional journalism, every writer I knew dreamed of becoming a syndicated columnist. Back then, columns really did shape the political conversation, and to a lesser extent the cultural conversation as well (though the Eighties, lest we forget, were very political, to the point of virtually excluding art and culture from what got written about on op-ed pages).

I don't think younger writers feel that way any more, and one sign of the sea change is the fact that you simply don't see all that many younger syndicated columnists. I started to notice this as early as the Nineties, at a time when I shared the responsibility for editing a major op-ed page, that of the New York Daily News. We were constantly looking for new faces, but the syndicates weren't offering any, and it never occurred to me that the problem might be a lack of interest on the part of younger journalists, much less a lack of interest on the part of young people in journalism.

Now we all know better. Of late, the only significant change in the op-ed scene has been the hiring of David Brooks by the New York Times, and Brooks isn't a new face but a well-established writer of a certain age (mine). What's more, I don't get the impression that his column is causing all that much of a stir outside narrowly politico-journalistic circles. I don't think that's because of the quality of his work, either: I think it's because op-ed pages in general are losing their traction. I may be wrong, but it's not my impression that any newspaper columnist, syndicated or otherwise, is capable of stirring up any vast amount of talk nowadays.

You won't be surprised to see where I'm heading: my guess is that the buzz in opinion journalism has shifted to the blogosphere, partly because it's new and partly because it's so much less rule-bound. You can say anything you want on a blog (though I'm sure the day is not far off when one of the big bloggers will get sued for libel, which will doubtless cool things off considerably). Just as important, you can say it right now, not next Tuesday. Needless to say, none of this is true on an op-ed page, or anywhere else in a newspaper, for that matter.

Sooner or later, existing newspapers will make themselves over in response to the challenge of the Web. Probably later, though, because they're intensely bureaucratic institutions and thus are reflexively resistant to change. The New York Sun is an interesting case in point. It's a daily paper of conservative hue that was started from scratch a couple of years ago in an attempt to provide an opinion-driven alternative to the New York Times. In this respect, it's failed almost completely: the Sun's paid circulation remains trivially small next to that of the Times. Why, then, didn't its founders simply do an end run around the insurmountable difficulties of launching a newspaper in New York and instead conceive of the Sun as the first on-line daily paper? That would have gotten them instant attention, not to mention slashing their overhead to pieces. Yet not only did the Sun stick to the old printed-paper model, but it has lagged consistently behind the Times in establishing a meaningful Web-based presence. (At first, the Sun didn't have any Web site at all.)

The reason, I suspect, is that the Sun was launched by newspapermen who never gave any serious thought to making a complete a break with the traditions in which they were raised. The blogosphere, by contrast, is for the most part the creation of non-journalists and amateurs for whom such time-honored traditions carry no weight. Instead, it has arisen naturally from the organic properties of the Web.

I write for The Wall Street Journal, so you can take what I'm about to say with a stalactite of salt, but I think the Journal's Web site (which turns a profit) is the most potentially significant thing to happen to the newspaper business in decades. Yet the Journal is a quintessential establishment organ, the kind you'd assume would find it impossible to break with the past. That it has done so fascinates me. That no other newspaper has done so doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Which is why I'm betting that the first successful on-line "paperless" daily paper will be started by some 25-year-old hotshot who's never worked on a newspaper, and thus has nothing to unlearn.

As for the coming revolution in opinion journalism, it's already happened. I like David Brooks (he's an old friend), but I think maybe he got on the wrong boat. Not that I blame him in the least: after all, he gets paid for his opinions, which naturally matters to a family man. But for any writer who's more interested in changing minds than making money, the blogosphere is the place to be.

Posted November 22, 12:10 PM

TT: While I'm at it

Is it just me, or are any of you out there offended by the tone of the countless clever-clever op-eds, think pieces, and thumbsuckers of the past couple of days that have sought to "interpret" and pseudo-intellectualize the Michael Jackson story? Jackson's arrest isn't a Media Phenomenon, nor is it a sign of the times. It's a news story about an alleged pedophile, one who has spent millions of dollars to keep himself out of jail. And I don't give a good goddamn about the social significance of his mug shot, either. If he did what he's said to have done, I want to see him in a jail cell, and once he's there, my interest in him will be over and done with.

As for the interest of the mass media, my guess is that at some point fairly soon they'll wake up and realize that the youthful target market after which they lust so desperately couldn't care less about Michael Jackson. His arrest may be news, but his music is yesterday's news, if not the day before. Big Media is so Eighties.

Posted November 22, 11:34 AM

TT: For what it's worth

I was a small-town second-grader on November 22, 1963. My teacher, Jackie Grant, told the class that the president had been shot and killed, and then we all went home. For me, home was a block away from the classroom door, but my mother still drove to the school to pick me up, and my family spent much of the rest of the long weekend watching television. That much I remember, but I have no direct recollections of any of the TV images, except for this: I went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk just before Oswald was shot, and returned to the living room to find chaos on the screen.

That's it. Not many memories, and no trauma at all. Which makes sense: I was born in 1956, the exact midway point of the baby boom, making me just too young to have been marked by the JFK assassination or to have served in Vietnam. In both of those respects, we younger baby boomers are more like Gen-Xers than our older brothers and sisters.

I described the difference, as I understand it, in a 1990 essay:

The line of eligibility for military service in Vietnam divides the baby boomers almost exactly in half. The older boomers, the ones who faced the dilemma of whether or not to serve in Vietnam, are the people you usually think about when you hear the term "baby boomers," and Vietnam seems to have broken them. They were the ones who lost their nerve and were never heard from again. Were they victims of the damage the war did to America's national self-image? Or was it that most of the boomers didn't serve in Vietnam, that an entire generation of spoiled middle-class brats never had to undergo any kind of testing experience at all? I can't tell you. But it's clear beyond question that the older boomers, whatever their reasons, simply gave up somewhere down the line.

I didn't include that essay (it's called "A Farewell to Politics") in A Terry Teachout Reader because I don't think it's held up very well. Among other things, I completely failed to predict Bill Clinton, or anyone like him. But I do think I was right to differentiate pre-1956 boomers from post-1956 boomers. The older ones were touched by the Kennedy assassination, while the younger ones merely remember it, and not very well, either.

Today, of course, We Are All Boomers Now, at least in the eyes of the Gen-Xers and their younger brothers and sisters. I have lots of friends in their thirties and several in their twenties, and for them, JFK is...history. Likewise Vietnam and LBJ and Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan. And, of course, the older boomers are history, too. Clinton was their last hurrah, the exemplary figure who summed up in his person and actions the ethos of the pre-1956 boomers. Even before he came along, I didn't partake of that ethos, which may explain why I have so many younger friends.

For me, nostalgia is a powerful emotion (if it can properly be called an emotion), and many of the things for which I feel most intensely nostalgic took place in the Sixties. Yet I feel no nostalgia for The Sixties: The Decade, none whatsoever, no desire to hop in the time machine and check out all the things I was barely too young to have experienced at first hand. I'm much more interested in our current nicknameless decade, this astonishing age of anxiety and possibility, of terrorism and Two Americas and the Web.

As for John F. Kennedy, he doesn't mean a thing to me. As I wrote earlier this year in a review of the latest Kennedy biography:

Once he was a young, glamorous president-martyr whose posthumous reputation was scrupulously tended by the journalists and intellectuals he had so assiduously courted while he was alive. Then a new generation of scholars born too late to be seduced by Kennedy's charm took a closer look at his life and legacy, and discovered that the crown prince of Camelot was a reckless womanizer who installed a secret taping system in the Oval Office, was soft on civil rights and won the Pulitzer Prize for a book he hadn't written.

And, needless to say, the victim of an assassin's bullet, a dark day in American history that I barely remember. It's...history.

Posted November 22, 10:40 AM

TT: Many are called

A reader writes with further reflections on Stephen King, Shirley Hazzard, and the National Book Awards. Hazzard, you'll recall, told King that literature is not a competition, to which my correspondent replies:

Of course literature is a competition. Writers compete for prizes and readers and laurels, and anyone who fails to get all three (which is just about everyone) suspects the game is rigged in favor of the other, whoever the other might be.

But the real competition is for longevity, and this contest is the great equalizer. There are NBA winners that will fade into obscurity, just as there are million-book sellers who won't outlast their own lifetimes.

King chose to champion popular bestsellers. (Oh, and primarily men, in genres he likes, as opposed to women writing romance, which outsells everything else.) But what about midlist writers working in genre? What about the one-in-a-million self-pubbed writer who has something to say? I agree with Hazzard on this point: this was not the time or place to give others a reading list.

By the way, I never understood the outraged reaction to King receiving an award that had previously gone to Oprah Winfrey at an event that's been emceed by Steve Martin. I wonder if those who objected so vociferously to King have ever looked at the complete list of NBA winners over the years, which in 1980 recognized mysteries and westerns. John D. MacDonald is an NBA winner. As is Lauren Bacall, for her autobiography.

I'd noticed that Winfrey (not to mention Ray Bradbury) was among the previous winners of the lifetime-achievement award received by King, but I hadn't looked at more than the last couple of years' worth of National Book Awards. Very nice catch.

My correspondent is Laura Lippman, whom I cited the other day as a genre writer whose books I read, enjoy, and admire. If you haven't read any of Laura's Tess Monaghan novels (there are several) and want to try her out, you might consider starting with her latest book, Every Secret Thing, which is her first non-series novel. (Laura might not agree with me about this, but I think the Tess books, like the Aubrey-Maturin novels--or any other roman fleuve, for that matter--profit from being read in sequence. If that piques your curiosity, the first one is Baltimore Blues.)

Posted November 22, 10:26 AM

TT: Limited modified hangout

A reader writes, apropos of yesterday's posting on Bill Clinton's favorite books:

In re books & favorite books, I think in this case everybody is right, or nearly enough right. Greenfield, Clinton, and you. Most politicians would name the Bible and, if pressed, the Gettysburg Address (I know it's not a book, but you get the idea). Their favorite car is any model American, a dwindling option. Their favorite food, hot dogs, fried chicken, or whatever inedible dish renowned in their constituency. Clinton at least came up with enough titles to start a neighborhood library, OK, a small neighborhood library. And I suspect that he has read them all, unlike me. That's not to say that Greenfield's and your skepticism is not well-founded. I spent 20 some years working in the Congress and I can testify that it is. In fact, I wrote a few of those lists.

Like I said, here's hoping.

Posted November 22, 1:17 AM

TT: A girdle round about the earth

An hour or so ago, "About Last Night" was being read in 12 different time zones around the world (there are 24, duh).

That's a nice number, but here's a nicer one: OGIC and I racked up just short of 3,000 page views on Friday, an all-time record for this site. And we did it without benefit of any links from non-arts blogs.

The distinction is significant. Our previous sky-high days have been fed by one-time mentions on such heavily trafficked warblogs as Instapundit, Lileks, andrewsullivan.com, and BuzzMachine. Yesterday was different. "About Last Night" posted its best numbers ever solely because of a profusion of links from the arts-related sector of the blogosphere.

This puts legs under my growing conviction that blogging might end up being the most important thing to happen to fine-arts journalism in my lifetime. It's not that, not yet, but when a four-month-old blog has a 3,000-hit day, something's happening out there.

To every arts blogger who mentioned us on Thursday and Friday, Our Girl and I thank you and thank you and thank you. And to every reader who visited us for the first time as a result, thanks for coming...and please come again.

Posted November 22, 1:01 AM

November 21, 2003

TT: Oh, all right, one more thing

Here's Lileks on the proposed designs for the World Trade Center memorial:

I wanted statuary. A broad wall with the name of the dead. A monument with allegorical figures, thank you. Grief and Pain Comforted by Hope – sure, make it that obvious. As much as I like some of the designs, especially the Garden of Light, they seem too high-maintenance. You can already imagine the sign on the door: The Garden of Light is closed today for repairs. Statues tell the story when the power goes off; statues don't need sheltering from the elements. Statues stand for a hundred years, and I cannot imagine any of these memorials lasting that long. There are memorials in Fargo for the First World War, and if they'd required electricity and gramophone cylinders they long ago would have fallen into disrepair. But the statue of the GAR soldier still stands in Island Park. He's not going anywhere. Don't even try.

Well said.

Posted November 21, 12:06 PM

TT: Plumb tuckered

I'm about blogged out for this week. I might post something else later today, and I might not. It all depends. As for OGIC, she might post something later today, and she might not. Fridays are like that.

Come back and see for yourself. A little suspense never hurt anyone. And there's plenty to read either way!

Posted November 21, 12:02 PM

TT: King's X

A lot of ink has been spilled (or whatever the information-age version of that figure of speech might be) over what Stephen King said at Wednesday's National Book Awards ceremony in New York, and what Shirley Hazzard said right back at him.

Of all the many reactions I've seen, this one struck me as especially worthy of note:

When is it appropriate to make lists and start lecturing and when is it wiser to keep a steady campaign going, to talk about books one loves, to highlight what makes genre fiction so good and complementary, even, to literary fiction?...

Good writing is the key. It's in places we don't necessarily expect it to be, and comes in many different forms. Let's keep our minds open and welcome all the possibilities. No, literature isn't a "competition," as Hazzard put it, and neither should people feel any sense of guilt that they aren't reading the authors King recommends. These things take time, obviously. But labels are just that, designations often arbitrary. If it's good, then that's all that should matter.

Read the whole thing here. It's by Sarah Weinman, who blogs at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, where she writes regularly (and smartly) about mysteries and other related matters.

What struck me about this posting is its openness to the full range of potential aesthetic experience--an openness that Shirley Hazzard, as fine a writer as she is, appears to lack. Like Hazzard, I've never read any of Stephen King's books (though I mean to), but I do read a moderate amount of genre fiction, and I think some of it deserves to be taken quite seriously. Raymond Chandler and Patrick O'Brian, for instance, both merit that kind of consideration, and so do James M. Cain and Rex Stout, albeit on a lesser level. I haven't read much of Georges Simenon, but what I've read I've found compelling. Among living writers, I enjoy Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake (about whose Parker novels I posted just the other day). And I'm lucky enough to count Laura Lippman, a first-rate mystery writer whose latest book is something more than that, as a friend.

As for Stephen King's speech, I think it was misguided at best. You don't change people's minds by calling them names, which he came perilously close to doing on Wednesday. If King changed any minds at the National Book Awards ceremony, I'm not aware of it. More likely, he hardened still further the resistance of his highbrow listeners to considering the possibility that he might have had a point--which he did.

To my way of thinking, genre fiction is by definition limited in its expressive possibilities, but those limits are a lot less restrictive than many, perhaps most people realize, especially by comparison with much of what is now thought of as "serious" fiction. Back in 1997, I wrote an essay called "Real Cool Killers" about Crime Novels: American Noir, a two-volume set published by the Library of America. (Yes, it'll be in A Terry Teachout Reader.) Here's part of what I said:

The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher whose dust jackets declare it to be "dedicated to preserving America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes," has brought out Crime Novels: American Noir, a pair of volumes containing eleven examples of what has lately come to be called "noir fiction," after the cinematic genre of the Forties known as film noir. No such fancy name was applied to these short novels when they first appeared in paperback, bedecked with cheesy cover art and tumescent blurbs promising their semiliterate purchasers the cheapest of thrills. Forty years ago, Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me and Charles Wileford's Pick-Up were smut; now they belong to the ages.

Arrant relativism? Well, yes, and then some. But while the noir novelists scarcely deserve to be ranked among America's best and most significant writers, their harsh tales are infinitely more readable than the chokingly tedious output of a thousand American writers of impeccably correct reputation, and I venture to guess that people will still be turning the pages of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Cornell Woolrich's I Married a Dead Man long after the likes of Toni Morrison and Allan Gurganus are remembered only by aging professors of literary theory who wonder why nobody signs up for their classes any more.

Does that put me in Stephen King's camp? I think not. I don't think The Long Goodbye is as good a book as The Great Gatsby, and I believe the difference between the two books is hugely important. But I also don't think it's absurd to compare them, and I probably re-read one as often as the other.

The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.

In case you hadn't noticed, that's part of what this blog is all about--a big part.

Posted November 21, 12:02 PM

TT: The old-fashioned way

I gave Anna in the Tropics a rave in this morning's Wall Street Journal:

When coolness is all, nothing is so deadly as to be declared old-fashioned. So please don't get me wrong when I say that Nilo Cruz's "Anna in the Tropics," which opened Sunday at the Royale Theatre, is old-fashioned in the best sense of the word. It's melodramatic, unabashedly poetic and perfectly serious--and it won a Pulitzer Prize from a panel of judges who'd never seen it on stage, a circumstance that left me wondering whether it could possibly be any good, especially in light of the suspiciously convenient fact that Mr. Cruz was (quoth the press release) "the first Latin American to win the coveted prize for drama." Nobody ever went far wrong questioning the motives of Pulitzer judges, but this particular bunch, God knows how, managed to hit the target. "Anna in the Tropics" touched me as much as anything I've seen since I started writing this column....

I also very much liked the new production of Shakespeare's Henry IV that just opened at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, directed by Jack O'Brien and starring Kevin Kline as Sir John Falstaff:

He's properly sly and unctuous, and if his Falstaff is perhaps a bit too much the roguish clown, he nonetheless rises with ease to the terrible moment when Prince Hal (Michael Hayden) betrays him. "I know thee not, old man," declared the newly crowned king, and the audience gasped--I'm not exaggerating--as Mr. Kline reeled at the shock of his public humiliation.

As I say, there's much else to like about this "Henry IV." Mr. O'Brien imposes no high directorial concepts of his own, dressing his players in conventional period garb and letting Shakespeare be Shakespeare....It's Shakespeare for moviegoers, in short, "popular" in the same pleasing way that "Anna in the Tropics" is old-fashioned. It runs through Jan. 11, and you won't be sorry to see it.

No link, so to read the whole thing (including my two cents' worth about Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which closed after one performance, which was one too many), buy today's Journal and look me up in the "Weekend Journal" section, which is worth reading for all sorts of other reasons.

Posted November 21, 12:01 PM

TT: Father knows best

Dear OGIC:

ODID is absolutely right, and I squirm to admit it. (Nobody's father should be right.) To be sure, Stephen Maturin is a more than sufficiently interesting character in the earliest books, but I do think it took O'Brian a bit of time to start identifying personally with Maturin. Once he did--and in particular when he began writing about Maturin's obsession with Diana, the love of his life--the focus of the series shifted.

Incidentally, here's a story I've always wanted to tell in public. In my New York Times Book Review piece about O'Brien's The Yellow Admiral, I made the following comment:

If Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell (or Anthony Trollope, for that matter) had been writing these books, the curve balls would have started flying several volumes back; Diana, for example, might have been killed off, and Stephen's resulting grief used to deepen our understanding of his personality. But Mr. O'Brian coddles and cossets his darlings instead of murdering them, a sure sign of loss of nerve: there are by now at least a dozen untouchable continuing characters in the series, all of whom must be tended, watered and trotted out for their annual star turns.

And do you know what? Somebody really important died in the very next volume, The Hundred Days. (I won't say who, since you're clearly teetering on the verge of Aubrey-Maturin addiction.)

Anthony Trollope wrote in his Autobiography about how he went to his club one day, overheard a pair of clergymen complaining about one of his recurring characters, then went straight home and killed her off in the book he was writing, The Last Chronicle of Barsetshire. Ever since The Hundred Days was published, I've always wondered whether I might have similarly contributed to the demise of...well, never mind.

Posted November 21, 4:01 AM

OGIC: A man made of paper

Our Dad in Detroit on Tuesday, me on Wednesday, Terry on Thursday: we fell like dominoes this week before Peter Weir's majestic vision of Aubrey-Maturin. Didn't matter whether we'd read Patrick O'Brian's books before (Terry and ODID) or not (OGIC). But ODID has just written to register a slight caveat to Terry's view that "the essence of Patrick O'Brian's books...is the inner life of Stephen Maturin." ODID thinks the books evolve in that direction but don't start there, and he puts it most interestingly:

I'm not sure I totally agree that the books are about Maturin's inner life. I think there is more of that in the later books than the earlier ones, Master and Commander, Mauritius Command, Desolation Island, and a couple of others. Maturin is a complex character, and I believe that O'Brian fell in love with developing his story as the saga went on.

The notion that O'Brian created this character, set him loose in the novels, and proceeded to fall in love with him and let his story take over, makes me want to read those novels even more. The whole idea of literary characters having, or acquiring, a life of their own, apart from the mind of the author, is of course a seductive one. I may have first encountered it in Edward Gorey's first book, The Unstrung Harp, or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel, where the tortured author, uncomfortably mid-book, is confronted by his characters at the top of his staircase in the middle of the night. They hover there, mutely imploring him to do something with them.

But when the character is in a series--i.e., the relationship is long-term--then serious emotional involvement must threaten to supplant mere stalking. So what do you think, TT? Does O'Brian fall for Maturin in media res? And how does Aubrey feel about that?

Posted November 21, 3:07 AM

OGIC: Friendly reminder

The film 21 Grams opens in a few cities today, and the critics are divided. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal love it; Salon is torn; and The New Yorker feels much as I did about it. You can read my not-so-smitten review, first posted last week, here.

Posted November 21, 2:44 AM

TT: A not-so-little list

Click here to read a list of Bill Clinton's 21 favorite books, which includes, among other things, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Hillary Clinton's Living History, Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, and Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society.

Once you've looked at the whole list, which is quite spectacularly impressive, tell me this: whatever your political beliefs or your personal opinion of Bill Clinton, do you really, truly believe these are his 21 favorite books?

I'm not saying they aren't. But having spent a good number of years writing editorials about politics for a New York newspaper--and thus having spent quite a bit of time talking to politicians of all kinds--I'm also not disposed to take such a list at face value, even when it comes from a man who's known to be unusually smart. Politicians, after all, rarely make any public statements not precisely calculated to enhance their popularity in as many quarters as possible.

Don't take my word for it. Take this person's words for it:

A walking, talking person-shaped but otherwise not very human amalgam of "positions," that familiar, tirelessly striving figure interviewed on the evening news who resoundingly tells you what he is thinking--and you keep wondering whether you should believe a word of it. These are people who don't seem to live in the world so much as to inhabit some point on graph paper, whose coordinates are (sideways) the political spectrum and (up and down) the latest overnight poll figures.

That's from Meg Greenfield's Washington, a memoir written in secret by an old Washington hand (she ran the editorial page of the Washington Post for years) who made sure it wouldn't be published until after her death. She mentioned a few exceptions to the rule, but not many, and Clinton wasn't one of them.

I'd very much like to think that Bill Clinton has read and reflected on each and every one of those high-voltage books. I loathe living in a time when most people's snap reaction to such a list is to reflexively assume the converse. I don't like being cynical about politicians. I'd dearly love to suppose that a former President of the United States had read Homage to Catalonia. And perhaps this one has. Here's hoping, anyway.

Posted November 21, 1:50 AM

TT and OGIC: New around here, stranger?

We seem to be having a veritable traffic explosion today, so if you're visiting "About Last Night" for the first time and want to know more about it--and us--click here to read an archived posting that tells all. Or simply work your way down the right-hand column, which is crammed full of information about this page and its proprietors.

Either way, we're glad you stopped by. If you had fun, come back tomorrow...and bring a friend. The easy-to-remember alternate URL is www.terryteachout.com, which will bring you here lickety-split (as, of course, will the longer address currently visible in your browser).

Welcome.

Posted November 21, 1:17 AM

November 20, 2003

TT: At the National Book Awards

I don't know how much ink the National Book Awards would have gotten under normal circumstances, but given the events with which today's papers (on and off line) are understandably crowded, it's a wonder they got covered at all. Given the brevity of the various news stories about this year's awards, though, I thought I ought to supply a few more details.

The ceremony was held at the Marriott Marquis, one of the super-monster hotels in the theater district of Manhattan, and a good thing, too--some 900 people showed up. The crowd at the reception was so thick that you could barely get a drink, and it was for all intents and purposes impossible to find anyone you knew (I ran into one of my fellow judges, but only by accident). Inside the ballroom, the tables stretched on and on and on, thus making informed table-hopping similarly impossible. Hence the dinner wasn't nearly as social an occasion as I'd expected.

The ballroom was full of security--tough guys in tuxes, wearing Secret Service-style earpieces and talking into their hands. I don't know whether this was standard operating procedure or arose from the fact that Stephen King is in the middle of a much-publicized bout with a stalker, but it seemed clear to me that his presence was part of the reason for their presence. I tried to say hello to him, and a big bruiser shoved himself in front of me and said, "Hey, Mac, you can't talk ta Mr. King." On the other hand, he backed down immediately when I told him I was a judge, and I was permitted to pay my respects to the guest of honor.

Of the 900 other guests, only about 120 were authors. I was the lone writer at my table--everybody else was from the business side of publishing. This, too, was a little disorienting, as I'd expected the mealtime chat to be rather more literary in tone, though I did get into a worthwhile conversation with a fellow from RR Donnelly Publishing (they're the ones who actually manufacture books) about the prospects for e-books (he was skeptical). The food, incidentally, was quite good for a gathering of this sort--I wasn't counting on rack of lamb.

The fiscal orientation of the audience may help to explain why Stephen King received two standing ovations as he was presented with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. As one of the Donnelly execs said to me during Standing Ovation No. 1, "That man has made a lot of money for a lot of people in this room."

King's speech was interesting. He was clearly moved by the honor--he choked up. He was funny and unpretentious when paying tribute to his wife and talking about the "vulnerability" to self-doubt of poor, struggling authors (such as himself when young). I suspect he was the first National Book Award laureate ever to say "Oh, shit!" in his acceptance speech (he was describing the way an honest author might portray a terrified character in extreme circumstances). And he was simultaneously a bit defensive and more than a little bit aggressive when he informed the crowd that they'd be making a mistake if they treated their decision to give him the prize as an act of "tokenism." He said (repeatedly) that he didn't write for money, that genre fiction deserved to be taken seriously, and that the judges of the National Book Awards had an obligation to read the best-selling books that are shaping American popular culture (I'm paraphrasing from memory, but that was the gist of his complaint). "Bridges can be built between the so-called popular fiction and literary fiction," he declared, and to that end he supplied us with a long reading list of popular novelists whom he commended to our attention, among them Elmore Leonard and John Grisham. (He also mentioned Patrick O'Brian.)

The confrontational tone of King's speech startled me--I'd never heard him talk before. Had it been adequately reported this morning, I think it would already be stirring up no small amount of controversy in the literary sector of the blogosphere. The reason why I approached him, by the way, was to ask if he'd made arrangements to publish it. He was polite (just) but brisk when he said that he thought somebody "already had dibs" on it. I hope it gets into print in some form or other, because it deserves to be talked about extensively.

King didn't give the only attention-getting speech of the night. Carlos Eire spoke at unexpected length--eloquently and effectively--upon being given the nonfiction award for Waiting for Snow in Havana. He, too, was moved to the point of tears, but he wasn't so disconcerted as to forget to point out to us that had he published Waiting for Snow in Havana in Cuba rather than America, he wouldn't have been receiving an award in New York--he'd be locked up in one of Fidel Castro's prisons. It was a surprising speech to hear at a gathering of New York literary types, who aren't accustomed to being reminded that to be an honest writer in Cuba is to run the constant risk of being thrown into a jail not fit for animals (Eire's words).

Polly Horvath, who received the prize for Young People's Literature, gave a speech that lasted for about 15 seconds, and her brevity amazed and delighted everyone at my table. C.K. Williams, the poetry winner, read one of his poems in lieu of giving a speech, and it, too, was short. (I very much admired his nerve.)

Then Shirley Hazzard stole the show. Here's how the New York Times described her acceptance speech:

She accepted the award before a crowd of 900 writers, editors and publishers, and urged American writers to remain aware of their immense power in the world and their consequent responsibility not to degrade the language they had been given.

"We're drowning in explanations," she said. "What we need is more questions."

What the story didn't say is that Hazzard was chiding Stephen King--politely, but by name, and she made no bones about it--for telling the NBA judges what they ought to be reading. My guess is that she is more accustomed to weighing her words than speaking off the top of her head, for her remarks, though brief, weren't nearly as pointed as they seemed, and you could tell she was torn between her obligation to be tactful and her desire to tear a piece off King. Nevertheless, it was an unambiguously confrontational moment, and an electric one.

That's about the size of it, though I do want to add a few last words about the experience of being an NBA judge. We considered 436 books (some of them very, very briefly, but they all got talked about at some point in the past few months). We never raised our voices, never argued with one another, never got angry. Our deliberations were civilized, collegial, and great fun. When we met yesterday afternoon to make our final selection, it was the first time all five of us had been in the same room at once--we mostly deliberated via e-mail and in conference calls--and the atmosphere, far from being tense, was positively festive.

Yes, it was hard work, and I really wish the NBA would break up the nonfiction award into at least two parts: it isn't easy or fair to directly compare histories, biographies, and memoirs, as we had to do. But we did it, and though I'm sworn to secrecy as to the particulars of our discussions, I think I can speak for the whole panel when I say that we were collectively pleased and proud to give the prize to Waiting for Snow in Havana. I gather that not all literary prizes are awarded in so companionable an atmosphere, so I hate to disappoint you by not reporting any fist fights, but the sad truth is that I had a wonderful time being a judge for the National Book Awards.

UPDATE: More details of the ceremony are getting into print. For a reliable wire-service account (by way of Maud) with good quotes from the King and Hazzard speeches, go here. Looks like the Times punted on this one....

Posted November 20, 10:47 AM

TT: I wish I'd blogged that

From 2 Blowhards:

1) You don't have to love everything you're told is great, 2) You don't have to claim greatness for everything you love, and 3) You don't have to dispute the greatness of the works and artists you dislike.

This is part of a posting in which Michael Blowhard offers a list of "great art he doesn't get," and invites his co-blogger Friedrich to do the same. (Read the whole thing here.)

Care to play, OGIC? My allergy to Wagner is no secret, to put it mildly, and I've confessed to not getting Dickens in this very space. I'm prepared to make further admissions, but only if you ante up.

Posted November 20, 8:03 AM

TT: Totally on board

Dear OGIC:

I tore myself away from the iBook this afternoon and went to see Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. I'm going to be writing about it next week, so I don't want to give the game completely away, but here's what I thought in a nutshell: it's all wrong...and all right.

No, Master and Commander doesn't reproduce the essence of Patrick O'Brian's books, which is the inner life of Stephen Maturin. (See this recent post for more details.) It's a completely exteriorized view of the Aubrey-Maturin novels. But what a view! I know the novels intimately, and I'm stunned by the evocative precision with which Peter Weir has made them manifest on screen. Sure, he's turned a Trollopian roman fleuve into an action movie, but the action is completely consistent with the tone (and values) of the books. What's more, Russell Crowe is as good an Aubrey as could possibly be imagined. He looks right, sounds right, acts right. From now on, I'll see him in my head when I read the books.

Much more later, but for now I'll add just one thing, which is that I saw Master and Commander in the company of a woman friend whom I thought might not like it, not least because it gets quite bloody from time to time. She was completely enthralled. Me, too. I want to see it again, soon.

Posted November 20, 7:37 AM

OGIC: The sea, the sea

So, while Mr. Teachout was keeping score at the National Book Awards dinner last night--and I'll be damned if I don't pry a lot more scuttlebutt out of him--I was getting my first taste of Patrick O'Brian, albeit by way of Peter Weir. I felt really grandly entertained at Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, though it seemed clear that the famous Aubrey-Maturin friendship was not captured in anything like all of its nuance and complexity in the books. Make no mistake, this is an adventure movie, and it's more about the general experiences of being English, at war, and at sea than about specific characters or relationships.

This isn't to say that the characters aren't nicely individuated and very believably human. Weir does sketch out the emotional contours of a couple of the shipboard relationships in very broad but deft strokes, and this seems just enough specificity to animate what is essentially a more general evocation of a time and place--and, of course, a great yarn.

The storytelling is terrific, offering up plenty of the sort of well-chosen, toothsome details that make a narrative memorable. There's a model ship that is a small wonder, both as a material object and as a plot pivot. Later in the movie you get a (literally) breathtaking glimpse of a real ship from far enough away that it, too, looks like a toy--and the plot again turns decisively. I loved the benign, wise-looking beasts of the Galápagos Islands, and the depiction of the tools and methods of the Romantic-era naturalist.

If much has been cut loose in the translation of O'Brian from page to screen, it seems to have been for the best. Master and Commander may be cinema first and O'Brian only second, but isn't that as it should be? After all, it hasn't replaced the books; not only are they still out there, but I feel now more than ever that I'd like to read them, and haven't the slightest worry that it will be a redundant experience.

So there you have my uninitiated take on Master and Commander. I'm curious to find out how it stacks up against Terry's view (forthcoming, I presume), but I can report that it is almost identical to that of the ultra-initiated Our Dad in Detroit, who mourned O'Brian's more complex Stephen Maturin a little, but found the spirit of the books intact and, like me, had the time of his life.

Posted November 20, 2:05 AM

TT: Apples, oranges, and other fruit

A reader writes, apropos of the National Book Awards, but before my first-person account (see immediately below) was posted:

Do you think that personal memoir and narrative nonfiction based on journalistic reconstruction should be in the same category? I suppose that might be like asking whether historical fiction and contempory fiction should be in the same category, yet I can't help but feel that these forms are very different from one another. I guess this begs the question of what, exactly, is it that you judge when viewing art? Is it the impact upon the viewer/listener/reader? And if the content is inherently more emotional in one work than another, does that skew the comparison? I think, too, of actors. The embodiment of a highly charged character seems to have an edge over a masterful embodiment of a more subtle character, even when I suspect the latter requires much more skill.

Right on all counts, say I. All five of the NBA nonfiction judges were troubled by the fact that we had to render a single judgment on so disparate a group of books, and we have made our feelings known to the powers-that-be at the National Book Foundation. On the other hand, I don't think there should be a dozen National Book Awards: if there were, nobody would pay attention to them. (It's hard enough to get the mass media to pay any attention to a literary prize.) Still, disaggregating history from biography, as do the Pulitzer Prizes, seems to me an important step.

On the other hand, to do that would bring us right back to another horn of the dilemma posed by my correspondent. Can you really compare a scholarly biography to a personal memoir? I mean, of course you can, you can compare anything to anything else, but ought they to be considered part of the same category for purposes of prizegiving?

Without telling tales out of school, I can say that my fellow judges and I spent a lot of time talking about precisely these issues. We took them with the highest possible seriousness. But at the end of the day (as they like to say in Washington), we had to perform our assigned task, which wasn't made any easier by the fact that the National Book Foundation instructed us not to split the first prize between two books. We had to pick one, and we chose Waiting for Snow in Havana. As John Wayne is supposed to have said (though I think the quote is as spurious as "Play it again, Sam"), a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Better one prize than none.

Posted November 20, 1:04 AM

November 19, 2003

TT: Grand master

Today, the National Endowment for the Arts announces the recipients of its Jazz Masters awards for 2004. One of them is Jim Hall, my favorite living jazz musician, whom I interviewed last week for a piece published in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Here's the lead:

In jazz, all fame is strictly relative. Jim Hall, the greatest living jazz guitarist, has been making records for close to a half-century. He's worked with everybody from Sonny Rollins to Pat Metheny and played everywhere from the Village Vanguard to the White House. His colleagues view him with something approaching outright awe. But Mr. Hall, like most jazz musicians, is unknown to the public at large--a fact that doesn't seem to bother him in the least. "It's a privilege to be able to make a living playing jazz," he says firmly. "Not too many people listen to me, but maybe I'd be nervous if I were a million-seller. I'd say, uh-oh, I did something wrong."

Read the whole thing here.

If you've never heard Hall play, click here to purchase Jim Hall Live, the CD mentioned in the piece. Recently reissued by Verve, it's one of his own favorites--and the first Jim Hall album I ever bought, a quarter-century ago. I still love it.

Posted November 19, 12:01 PM

TT: Cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river

Here are the winners of the 2003 National Book Awards, as announced earlier this evening:

NONFICTION: Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE: Polly Horvath, The Canning Season

POETRY: C.K. Williams, The Singing

FICTION: Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire

I have stories to tell about the ceremony, especially about Stephen King's speech in acceptance of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which was, to put it mildly, an unapologetic defense of popular genre fiction--and which inspired Shirley Hazzard to reply, quietly but firmly, at evening's end. But...it's raining in Manhattan, there aren't any cabs, the subway took forever, I'm soaked to the skin, and it's time to get out of this wet tuxedo and under a warm comforter. So I'm going to bed. Come back tomorrow and I'll tell you everything.

Posted November 19, 11:59 AM

TT: Out of here

I'm off to the top-secret conclave at which I and my four fellow judges will choose the winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction. The five finalists, in case you've forgotten or didn't know, are Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History, George Howe Colt's The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, John D'Emilio's Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, Carlos Eire's Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, and Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America.

Then, after a change of costume (off with the false mustache, on with the black tie), I'll be heading for tonight's NBA dinner, where all the winners will be announced.

More later, probably tomorrow.

Posted November 19, 10:48 AM

TT: Here's how

I went to a classical concert last night about which you probably haven't yet heard--though I expect you will.

The Elements String Quartet, a comparatively new ensemble (it was founded in 1999), recently commissioned 16 composers to write short pieces for string quartet inspired by evocative photographs of the composers' own choosing--wedding photos, pictures of their parents, candid snapshots, vacation scenes, whatever. The Elements Quartet has been previewing these pieces throughout 2003, and on Tuesday the group played all 16 at Manhattan's Merkin Concert Hall.

Here are some striking things about "Snapshots," the title given by the quartet to this project, which was underwritten by a foundation called Premiere Commission, Inc.:

The string-quartet literature is all but devoid of short, free-standing pieces. Quartet programs generally consist of three or four large-scale works. The 16 "Snapshots" pieces, by contrast, can be used invidiually to open or close a program--or played as encores--in addition to being performed as a full-evening unit. They can also be programmed in smaller groupings of three or four pieces at a time.

The "Snapshots" pieces are widely and exceptionally varied in style. Some are light, others fairly weighty (though never ponderous). A few of the composers, like John Corigliano and David Del Tredici, are well known in the classical-music world, but most are less familiar. Several of the pieces are by non-classical composers, including Lenny Pickett, the musical director for Saturday Night Live, and jazz musicians Regina Carter and John Patitucci.

All 16 pieces are immediately accessible to the untutored ear. (Most, in fact, are unabashedly tonal.)

The members of the Elements Quartet talked to the audience from the stage about several of the pieces and the photos that inspired them, and introduced all the composers who came to the concert. This sort of thing is standard operating procedure for the group, which is known for its informal on-stage demeanor.

Theater designer Wendall K. Harrington took the 16 photos and wove them into a handsome-looking evening-long video that was shown during the concert on a large screen placed on stage behind the Elements Quartet. (The actual photos were hung in an upstairs gallery where a post-concert reception was held.)

Merkin Hall was full. I've never seen so large and enthusiastic a crowd at a program consisting entirely of new music for string quartet.

What about the music? Well, I liked eight pieces, disliked four, and didn't feel strongly either way about the other four--a staggeringly high batting average for a new-music program. I was particularly impressed by Justine Chen's "Ancient Airs and Dances," John Corigliano's "Circa 1909," Daron Hagen's "Snapshot: Gwen and Earl's Wedding Day, December 20th, 1951," Paul Moravec's "Vince and Jan: 1945," and Chen Yi's "Burning" (the only 9/11-inspired work), all of which I want to hear again as soon as possible. Also noteworthy was Sebastian Currier's "REM," the shortest work on the program, a brilliantly effective little scherzo that will make a terrific encore piece.

Aside from the music, what struck me most forcibly about "Snapshots" was the extent to which it departed from prevailing norms of classical concertizing without degenerating into silliness or pandering. Unlike the Kronos Quartet in its heyday, the members of the Elements Quartet don't wear outré clothes (I'd call their outfits dressy-casual) or play "Purple Haze." Yet the feel of the evening was anything but sober-sided.

It's no secret that classical music is in increasingly dire straits. The recording industry is all but dead and the average age of concertgoers goes up every year. I myself don't attend very many classical concerts anymore, for reasons that I explained at length in "Death of the Concert," an essay included in A Terry Teachout Reader, out in April from Yale:

By the mid-Sixties, it was possible to purchase high-quality [recorded] renditions of virtually every important piece of classical music composed prior to 1910. Similarly, good-sounding hi-fi systems had become cheap enough for anyone to own. An entire generation of music lovers thus became accustomed to experiencing classical music not in the concert hall but at home. As the Horowitzes and Bernsteins died off, these listeners began to question the need to attend any public performances of the classics, whether by callow young artists or by middle-aged celebrity performers who had already committed their repertoires to disc one or more times....

Beethoven cycles and Tchaikovsky nights continue to draw crowds, and the celebrity system is still the backbone of the classical-music business. But the point of diminishing returns, especially outside the largest urban areas, has clearly been reached, and the recent experience of the classical-recording industry suggests that it is no less essential for soloists and orchestras to rethink the way they do business.

If they do not, the concert hall will someday become a place where old men and women gather forlornly to listen to the same symphonies and concertos they first heard a half-century ago, while their children, if they are interested in classical music at all, will stay home and listen to compact discs or whatever newer marvel is destined to replace them.

I wrote that essay in 1998. Not much has changed since then, though Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony are by all accounts galvanizing local concertgoers with unexpected combinations of old and new music, beautifully performed and imaginatively presented. But they're a conspicuous exception to the numbing rule. I no longer go to hear the New York Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel, for example. I'm sure they play well, but I simply don't feel the need to see them live. I have more interesting things to do with my evenings. Similarly, I haven't been to a single classical concert at Carnegie Hall or Avery Fisher Hall all season long--and I'm a middle-aged listener who loves classical music passionately. Granted, I'm just one person in a big city, but if I'm not going to classical concerts, who is? And who will?

That's why "Snapshots" was so potentially significant an event. Unlike the New York Philharmonic, the Elements String Quartet went out of its way to offer a musical experience I couldn't even begin to duplicate in the comfort of my living room--which is why I made a special point of coming out to hear it on a dreary November night. So did a whole lot of other people, and judging by the eavedropping I did during the two intermissions and at the post-concert reception, most of them had a hell of a good time.

I don't think I need to append a moral to this story. As the Romans used to say, the thing speaks for itself. Let's just hope somebody out there is paying attention.

Posted November 19, 10:21 AM

November 18, 2003

TT: Up there on a visit

Ingmar Bergman has fallen from fashion, but I well remember when he was the very model of a Foreign Filmmaker, the man whose movies embodied everything that wasn't Hollywood. Those, of course, were the days when Hollywood wasn't cool: if you wanted to impress your date, you took her to a Bergman. (A little later on, it was O.K. to take her to one of Woody Allen's ersatz-Bergman movies.) Now he belongs to the ages, and I know more than a few self-styled film buffs who've never seen any of his work.

I don't mean to sneer. Except for Smiles of a Summer Night, I hadn't seen any of Bergman's early films since my college days--not until last night, when I watched the Criterion Collection CD of Wild Strawberries in the company of a film-loving friend. We'd been planning to get together for weeks to watch it, and a hole opened up simultaneously in our schedules, so we sent out for Vietnamese food, planted ourselves on the couch, and let 'er rip.

Here are some fugitive observations gleaned from our evening:

Wild Strawberries is much lighter in tone than I recalled, and actually made me laugh out loud quite a bit. (It's rather like the middle-period novels of Henry James, which always turn out to be funnier than you expect.)

The surrealistic dream sequences--especially the examination scene--haven't aged well. To contemporary eyes they seem obvious, even quaint.

The pacing is slow--not painfully, but noticeably.

The lighting is superlatively good.

When I was young, Wild Strawberries struck me as exactly what old age must be like. (Had it been a novel, I would have scribbled neatly in the margin of the last page, "This is true.") Now that I'm middle-aged--and eight years older than Bergman was when he made it--I know better. It's far too benign, albeit gorgeously so. It reminds me of what an old music critic once said to me about Der Rosenkavalier: "It's by a young man pretending to be an old man remembering his youth."

As soon as I got home, I looked Bergman up in David Thomson's New Biographical Dictionary of Film, where I found the following paragraph:

Many people of my generation may have joined the National Film Theatre in London to see a retrospective survey of Bergman's early films after The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries had come to represent "artistic" cinema. The first cri