About Last Night

(1) A link to my February "Second City" column, just out in today's Washington Post.

(2) Some fresh Top Fives.

Plus the previously announced remodeling of "Sites to See," which has already acquired a few additional entries since last we spoke.

Check it all out.

Needless to say, OGIC and I talk on the phone two or three times a week, but it felt very different to be talking to her from a radio studio halfway across the continent, hearing her voice over headphones. She confesses to having been a bit nervous, which hardly surprises me--I mean, I didn't have to make my radio debut in front of a live microphone--but the whole thing ended up being great fun, and proved what I've always suspected, which is that my co-blogger has a radio voice as lovely as the rest of her.

I expect you'll be hearing rather more from Our Girl and rather less from me this week--I've been blogging to excess and not writing nearly enough for money, aside from which I have to spend three or four nights in aisle seats between now and next Monday. I'll poke my head in from time to time, but I'm sure she'll keep you more than sufficiently amused.

We were extremely disappointed by elements of the MTV-produced Halftime show. They were totally inconsistent with assurances our office was given about the show. It's unlikely that MTV will produce another Super Bowl halftime.

And what, pray tell, were they expecting? Noël Coward and Mary Martin?

UPDATE: Who wrote this?

Viewers who tuned in expecting a big-time football game saw the Super Bowl of Sleaze instead. Sexy and violent commercials that included jokes about flatulence and bestiality mercilessly interrupted the CBS telecast of Super Bowl XXXVIII from Houston last night, making it a dubious choice for family viewing.

But it was the unexpected climax of the MTV-produced halftime show that shocked viewers and set the CBS switchboard ablaze....

Go here to find out. You might be surprised.      

2. I know very few people over fifty, and scarcely any over sixty, who "get" blogging.

3. Blogs without links aren't blogs. Blogs without blogrolls aren't blogs. Blogs without mailboxes aren't blogs.

4. The blogosphere is a pure market--but one in which no money changes hands. If you can afford the bandwidth and your ego is strong enough, it doesn't matter whether anybody wants to read what you have to say. But the more you care about how many people are reading your blog, the more your blogging will be shaped by their approval, whether you get paid or not.

5. Politicians and celebrities rarely make good bloggers. They're not interested enough in what other people are thinking.

6. Blogging puts professionals and amateurs on an even footing. That's why so many professional writers dislike and distrust it.

7. The whole point of a blog is that its author controls its content. That's why no major newspaper will ever be successful at running in-house blogs: the editors won't allow it. The smart ones will encourage their best writers to blog on their own time--and at their own risk. The dumb ones will refuse to let any of their writers blog, on or off the job.

8. For now, blogs presuppose the existence of the print media. That will probably always be the case--but over time, the print media will become increasingly less important to the blogosphere.

9. Within a decade, blogs will replace op-ed pages.

10. Blogs will be to the 21st century what little magazines were to the 20th century. Their influence will be disproportionate to their circulation.

11. Blogs are what online magazines were supposed to be.

12. Art blogging will never be as popular as war blogging. More people care about politics than the arts.

13. Blogging is inherently undemocratic in one important way: it privileges literacy. Like e-mail, it is dividing the world into two unequal classes: people who feel comfortable expressing themselves through the written word and people who don't.

14. If you want to be noticed, you have to blog every day.

15. An impersonal blog is a contradiction in terms.

From this page, you can easily find your way to other BBC recordings of such noted figures as Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Vladimir Nabokov, George Bernard Shaw, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats (along with some rather more ephemeral types). I hope more such material will be posted on the BBC Web site in due course--most especially Max Beerbohm's broadcasts from the Thirties and Forties, which I've never heard.

(I am, by the way, a great fan of spoken-word recordings by famous people whose voices you'd never guess were recorded, and will be glad to tell the readers of "About Last Night" about any especially choice Web-based tidbits whose URLs you care to pass on.)

Sir John Betjeman, "Huxley Hall"

No more blogging from me until tomorrow. I overdid it yesterday and need to spend Sunday working on my Balanchine book (though I'll probably update some of the modules in the right-hand column before day is done). Besides, I think Our Girl is just about done with her blog-inhibiting for-profit labors and will be ready to rock this week, if not today.

See you on the radio!

UPDATE: If you need a reason to listen to us instead of watching the Super Bowl, go here.

I couldn't speak in class in high school. I couldn't speak in class in college. I couldn't speak in class in graduate school. For a few years there, I taught some college courses and, lo and behold, I could speak in class. Necessity will make you do the damnedest things, and I daresay I spoke pretty well in the courses I taught. But for some moments in the studio at WBEZ tonight, that intervening experience fled, and I felt every bit the shy, quiet, scared mouse of old. I was surprised, to put it mildly, to find that some of that old resistance had stuck around.

Terry and our gracious, resourceful host Edward Lifson helped exorcise those ghosts and got me through the rough patches of this, my very first radio broadcast. I felt warmed up by the second half of the show, and was able to express some of the things I had wanted to say. By the time our time was up, it was much as each of them had promised beforehand--I was surprised and sorry to see the hour run out, and full of thoughts that would never get voiced. But the beauty of this medium is that what doesn't get voiced can always get blogged.

Over the next few days I'll post some further thoughts on the whole interesting question the WBEZ series Should I Stay or Should I Go? raised about the dilemma of artists in Chicago. One of the more startling moments tonight was hearing read back to me all the factoids I jotted down about myself a few months ago, when Terry first invited me to co-blog. One of these noted my attraction to what I called the "medium-hot centers" of the world, a category in which I implicitly included Chicago. When I uttered that phrase in October, I didn't think too much about it, but participating in WBEZ's good series this week made me do some of that thinking belatedly. In the makeshift case for Chicago I tried to put together tonight, the idea of medium hotness was central, if unstated.

So what does it mean to be medium-hot? What's the attraction of "medium"? Here's one way of describing what I find so liberating about the scene and atmosphere here, especially in comparison with the only other place I've ever lived, and the place every city compares itself to, New York. This departs from something John Updike says in his brief preface to the recently published collection of his early stories, pointed out to me by the perspicacious OFOB [Our Friend On the Block, a recurring character here who is encouraged to recur more!]. Updike talks about the difficulty he had writing fiction in New York City, and his inevitable "flight from Manhattan," where he found too little ordinary life going on for his purposes. Updike felt he couldn't thrive there as a writer, and speaks of wanting to be somewhere where he could immerse himself in the ordinary, and find the extraordinary therein. This was how he conceived of his particular task as a writer, and New York was the wrong setting for that project. Reading this got me thinking that what I love about this city, big and richly varied as you could wish it, but not superlative and not the default destination that New York is, is how from moment to moment it offers you a choice between the ordinary and extraordinary. You can move from one to the other kind of experience more or less at will. Sometimes in New York City, in my experience and Updike's, you could get stuck in the extraordinary, and get very tired.

To a great degree, of course, this comes down to questions of individual temperament, which brings us back to where this post started. Yet aside from such considerations, I can't help remembering that one thing I actively wanted to get away from when I left New York ten years ago was the casual assumption, not universally held but not in short supply either, that everything of import was of bicoastal, and mainly east-coast, origin. It felt suffocating. For all our back-and-forth tonight about just how immune Chicago is or isn't to accusations of provincialism, part of what I feel I escaped by coming here was precisely a form of provincialism, and one that was all the more invidious for being called sophistication.

And that's not all! Look for more on this topic in the coming days--and please e-mail me with your thoughts, whether you're in Chicago, New York, or a different place altogether. This conversation started by our new friends at WBEZ seems to me one worth carrying on.

P.S. It's nice to be back.

As regular visitors to the right-hand column know, I write a monthly wrapup of the arts in New York City for the Sunday Washington Post. It's called "Second City." I gave it that name in order to tease my adopted town about its chronic self-centeredness. It's absolutely true that more artistic activity takes place here than in any other American city, but that doesn't mean New York has a monopoly on important art, much less interesting art. Tyler Green, one of our fellow artsjournal.com bloggers, was listening to OGIC and me on the radio last night, and e-mailed afterward to tell us that he'd been struck recently by the vitality of the Los Angeles contemporary art scene--not just in and of itself, but by comparison with the state of the visual arts in Manhattan. And I wrote a piece about George Balanchine last year for The Yale Review (it'll be in A Terry Teachout Reader) in which I made the following observation:

New York-based balletomanes who view with alarm the continuing decline of New York City Ballet need to start getting used to the notion that the city long known as "the dance capital of the world" may well be on the verge of becoming no more than primus inter pares in the increasingly decentralized world of post-Balanchine ballet.

Last year, the U.S. State Department asked me to write an essay for on-line distribution to other countries about the state of the arts in America. In that essay (on which I drew for the introduction to the Teachout Reader), one of the things I talked about was what I called "the 'deprovincialization' of America's regional performing-arts groups." I don't discuss that nearly often enough on this blog. It looks like Our Girl--and you--will be doing it for me this week. Good.

P.S. Welcome back, OGIC. You were much missed last week.

I must now reshuffle my top ten all-time favorites. There you have it; there you have the human mystery. Two men on a ship. One a man of adventure and war, the other a man of science and healing; they are sitting in a room several thousand miles from home, a room designed to remind them of the civilization that sent them to this remote locale, and they playing a stringed duet (cello, violin) before a battle where they will endeavor to cleave the skulls of Frenchmen with sharp axes. And there's no contradiction implied. No 21st century sensibility barging in to make us all wonder how people who appreciated the muses could then stick a knife in a man's throat "for England, for home, and for the prize." The story rambles, like any good voyage, and I never doubted a single minute of the film. It had absolute confidence in its characters and stories. I want ten more, please.

Read the whole thing here.

Four questions:

(1) Are songs more likely to become attached to personal memories than pieces of instrumental music? If they are, is it because they have lyrics? Or is it simply that they're so much shorter than symphonies or sonatas, and thus more easily recalled?

(2) Does the fact that I still associate "Some Other Time" with the memory of my friend have anything at all to do with the fact that it's a particularly good song? Would it have remained so evocative for so long if it were less musically memorable?

(3) I almost never associate paintings or movies or ballets or novels with intensely specific personal memories--just music. Is this an idiosyncrasy of mine, or is music uniquely effective as an associational trigger? And if it is, why?

(4) Will this particular association eventually fade with the passing of time? And if it does, will I be sorry?

Which reminds me to mention that I went into Rooster Flowers Sunday afternoon to buy a bouquet for the kitchen table, and an album by another singer friend of mine was playing on the store's sound system. My friend is currently on tour, and I haven't heard from her for a couple of weeks beyond an occasional I'm-fine-how-are-you e-mail from Seattle or San Francisco. The moment I heard her voice, I felt as though she were standing right behind me. I almost turned around to say hello. Music is so powerful that way, which is one reason why it's nice to have musician friends who make records. When they're gone--even if it's for good--you can still listen to them.

Warning--don't click this link if you're feeling blue. "Aubade" definitely won't help.

Noël Coward, Private Lives

Only about twenty-five people showed up, most of them armed with marked-up copies of the slim text. We listened to Wood deliver a talk that was an interpretation of the novella, an appreciation of Bellow, and a brief for the primacy of literary form, in ascending order of generality. Unlike some of us, Wood speaks exactly as fluently as he writes, but without any brittle veneer, by which I mean that his talking sounds like talking, not writing. Yet the man is a font of seamless quotations--words spilled from his mouth in tidy, dense aperçus, ripe for plucking and jotting down. Which I did compulsively.

Englishmen are really rallying around Bellow and the idea of the American Original lately, which is potentially an interesting phenomenon. First there was the Martin Amis piece in the Atlantic pitting Bellow against James for American Giant honors (no link available). That piece seemed to be as much about a crushlike attraction to the especially American qualities of a writer like Bellow as about discriminating among American writers. Now comes Wood gushing about "the Melvillean rush of Humboldt's Gift," Bellow's "lissome particularity" and "extraordinary rhythmic discontinuities" (unachievable by an English writer, he claimed), and his "at once deeply American and deeply antique" prose. It was a convincing bit of rhapsodizing about a writer I of course admire but have never quite loved.

Wood outlined a formalist reading of what he characterized as "a fanatically detailed, patterned, and controlled novella," and moved from this to a religious/metaphysical reading. The larger point was about ideas and form: for Wood, the novel form, "greedily borrowing" from every other discourse it can get its hands on, but forging a kind of expression all its own, "deals with ideas in a way only it can deal with them. It's all about the form."

In fiction written in free indirect style (where third-person narration implicitly reflects the point of view or emotional state of a character), Wood said, characters are "porous scouts" who absorb the details the author wants them to notice. "No ordinary character notates the world as delicately as Tommy in Seize the Day. We allow novelists this compromise or fudging. We engage in a compact with Bellow or Joyce: he must have his fancy phrase; we enjoy it; so we lend it to, for instance, Leopold Bloom's consciousness."

Wood defended the didacticism that tends to crop in a writer like Bellow. His defense of the presence of the writer's voice in his narration and characters reminded me of his positive review of Vernon God Little, which had surprised me a bit when it came out last November. In that review and in his talk, Wood is fascinated by the negotiations and compromises authors enter into when they undertake to represent a character's consciousness, and the question of what becomes of their own voice: is it behind the character's or narrator's voice? Beside it? The only certain thing is that it's never absent. This comes from the review:

First-person narrations are always delicate tricks, the delicacy being the balancing of the likely--"is this how this person would sound"?--with the literary: "how do I, the author, also manage to have my own style?"

"Balancing" is the key term here. Wood welcomes the author's direct voice into fictional narrative, and doesn't look for complete verisimilitude (a straw man, anyway). This is the talk again:

We have a choice when we read writers who are themselves didactic--which Bellow is. To what extent are they being wholly novelists, and to what extent are they using a confused consciousness to communicate their own ideas to us? Richard Poirier dismissed Herzog because he thought it was authorial philosophizing delivered through a character's confused consciousness....Characters contaminate and modify ideas. Ideas are inextricable from the form. (This is what T.S. Eliot was getting at in his remark about James's mind being so fine no idea could violate it.)

He was very persuasive, but there's something faintly defensive about all of this, too, a bit of anxiety that novels might be left out of the realm of "ideas," à la Bill Keller. For all of the protestations of the unique importance of literary form, you can detect an ever-so-slight concession to a philistine attitude that, for the purposes of this post, is represented by a Bill Keller sock puppet--a utilitarian attitude that wants its ideas cleanly extractable and ready-to-use. This part of Wood's talk stood in tension with something very striking he said early on. He read to us a sentence from Seize the Day describing an old man's "big but light" elbow, and another noting "the long phrases of the birds." He called these virtuouso moments that are "finally not amenable to criticism, their effect unaccountable--and the kind of moment that makes literature." I just loved this moment in the talk, seeing one of the best and most fluent critics I know say, essentially, "this is beautiful, I can't tell you why, and anyone who says they can is faking it."

My favorite take yet on Janet Jackson's halftime misadventures is Tyler Green's historically-minded one.

Finally, the spirit of self-sacrifice is alive and well on the internet today: Slate is reading Joe Eszterhas, the Cinetrix viewing Last Year at Marienbad, all so you don't have to. You can be thankful on both counts.

A lot of bloggers who linked to my notes on blogging took issue with Note No. 2: "I know very few people over fifty, and scarcely any over sixty, who ‘get' blogging." Many of them hastened to point out that they were 50 or older, so there! All I can say is, good for you. That's one point about which I'd love to be proven wrong--and maybe I am. To date, my own face-to-face experience, much of it based on encounters with big-city types who work in the worlds of art and journalism, suggests otherwise. Could I have fallen victim to an unexpected attack of New York provincialism? I sure hope so.

To coincide with the premiere of the new ABC-TV dramatic series Kingdom Hospital on March 3, executive produced by the celebrated master of horror and National Book Award recipient Stephen King, Adelson Galleries, Inc. in New York City will exhibit a small selection of drawings and mixed-media paintings by renowned artist Jamie Wyeth created especially for the series. Jamie Wyeth: Works from Kingdom Hospital will be on view in the gallery's salon from March 4 through April 2, 2004. Wyeth's work is pivotal to one of the storylines and introduces the audience to a central character in a surprising way.

"The Producers," Mel Brooks's musical which sends up the Nazi regime and features the song "Springtime For Hitler," could be opening in a surprise new venue - Berlin. A theatre company has expressed a keen interest in staging the hit Broadway show in Germany, and theatregoers are being flown from the capital to New York next month to see if they find the musical entertaining or offensive.

If they do not walk out in disgust - or manage a laugh at a chorus line of goose-stepping Nazi stormtroopers - it will get the go-ahead to open in Berlin....

Read the whole thing here.

Oh fine. Just introduce me to even more interests - how dare you! Translation: I bought a ticket to Pacific Northwest Ballet's Balanchine centenary production on February 12th. The only ballet I've enjoyed before (other than The Nutcracker when I was 12) was the PNB's production of Silver Lining - ballet set to the music of Jerome Kern, coreographed by our boy Kent Stowell. It got rave reviews here in Seattle, but was widely panned elsewhere. But I am going with an open mind, so we'll see. Anything I should know/read beforehand?

If it were November, I'd tell you to buy my Balanchine book, but it isn't written yet, much less published. On the other hand, I see on the Web that you'll be watching Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, Agon, and Divertimento No. 15, all of them major Balanchine ballets that Pacific Northwest dances beautifully, and so I'm tempted to suggest that you not read anything. Just go, look, and be open to surprise.

I'll add only this caveat: all three of the ballets on your program are "plotless," meaning they don't tell a story. But that doesn't mean they're abstract--not even Agon, which is set to a very knotty score by Stravinsky. I'll cheat and give you a little taste from my unfinished book:

Balanchine was the first ballet choreographer to forge a distinctively contemporary movement vocabulary, and among the first to find a visual counterpart to the acerbities and angularities of such composers as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Webern, and Ives. Yet he was right to shun the reductive label of abstractionist, for his dances, however aggressively modern-looking they may be, are human dramas, peopled by recognizable creatures of flesh and blood who live and die--and love. "Put a man and a girl on the stage and there is already a story," he said. "A man and two girls, there's already a plot."

Keep that in mind and you won't go far wrong. Have fun--and please write back to tell me how you liked it!

"I am not sure that the wild men of our party did not speak more honestly than we did. They promised to abolish poverty in twelve months. They promised to abolish bicycle licences. They promised to discipline the police. They promised intermarriage. They promised farmers higher prices for sugar and copra and cocoa. They promised to renegotiate the bauxite royalties and to nationalize every foreign-owned estate. They promised to kick the whites into the sea and send the Asiatics back to Asia. They promised; they promised; and they generated the frenzy of the street-corner preacher who thrills his hearers with a vision of the unattainable rich world going up in a ball of fire. We disapproved, of course. But what could we do?"

V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men

Otherwise, I'm in an acutely blogged state, so I don't plan to post anything more until Wednesday. OGIC is taking care of business more than adequately in my stead. Isn't it nice to have her back?

"From the age of six I was in the habit of drawing all kinds of things. Although I had produced numerous designs by my fiftieth year, none of my works done before my seventieth is really worth counting. At the age of seventy-three I have come to understand the true form of animals, insects and fish and the nature of plants and trees. Consequently, by the age of eighty-six I will have made more and more progress, and at ninety I will have got closer to the essence of art. At the age of one hundred I will have reached a magnificent level and at one hundred and ten each dot and each line will be alive. I would like to ask those who outlive me to observe that I have not spoken without reason."

Hokusai, One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji

His first novel, written at 16, was a "Wuthering Heights" knockoff that he entered in a young adult novel competition. He lost: "I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something."

My old favorite story of this kind is the one about Jeff Maguire, who wrote the screenplay for the 1993 movie In the Line of Fire. Maguire was on the verge of moving his penniless family from Los Angeles back to New Hampshire when he got word that Clint Eastwood had bought his script. And I do mean penniless--just to be able to afford to go out to dinner and celebrate the sale, he and his wife had to take back to the store a blouse he had recently given her for her birthday.

But oh dear, it seems that Maguire's sum output since that shining moment consists of a bonus feature for the In the Line of Fire DVD (appearing "as himself") and the one movie whose trailer provided me with perhaps the most memorable pre-feature hilarity all last year, delivering such textbook Hollywood brain-drain as:

At a remote archaeological site in the French countryside...

"Your father wrote that...but he wrote it six hundred years ago!"

"...fax machine that would actually fax three-dimensional objects..."

"We found my father's documents and glasses--are you trying to tell me he faxed them back to the fourteenth century?"
"No. Your father is in the fourteenth century."

Glad that's cleared up! Textbook, I tell you.

To be fair, screenwriter Maguire had what I'm sure was the indispensable help of a Michael Crichton novel in coming up with this stuff. Still, let's hope Mr. Greer evades this sort of plunge (I'm not too worried).

Take it away, OGIC.

Ned Rorem, The Nantucket Diary

Gothamist does not approve of anonymous blogging: We believe all bloggers should stand behind their posts with their real names. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be blogging.

And at Salon, which runs a piece that's conveniently excerpted here by Lizzie so that you can bypass the premium-access rigmarole:

It takes a certain courage to shoot half-cocked into the media landscape like that. Or does it? [Atrios, TMFTML] and other bloggers have made names for themselves by having no names at all--and by using the safety and security of their secret identities to spread gossip, make accusations and levy the most vicious of insults with impunity.

My impulse is to respond to these charges as a reader first and blogger second. As a reader, my response is much like Maud's. I like the anonymously written blogs I read, and in many cases the anonymity of the blogger contributes to the effect. I appreciate the sheer variety of voices, styles, and approaches of the blogs I visit every day, and for those bloggers who are anonymous to identify themselves would be a step in the direction of flattening things out--perish the thought.

Many of the commenters at Gothamist rush valiantly to the defense of anonymous bloggers by pointing out the perils of blogging at work and the urgency of keeping oneself employed, in the current economy especially. All true enough. But this seems to me a secondary defense whose mobilization grants the basic premise that anonymous blogging would be wrong under ideal circumstances. As an addicted blog reader with several favorites who choose anonymity, I can't, won't, and don't grant that.

Recent history suggests two PTP/SMP moments are possibly imminent. One may break out when The Elegant Variation gets a load of Michael Blowhard's counter-common-wisdom on the NYTBR shuffle, the other when Emma at The Fold Drop reads Caitlin Flanagan's cover story on feminists and nannies in the new Atlantic Monthly. (This issue is not yet on-line, and I have to say that as a subscriber, I rather appreciate the little lag time between when I get my hard copy and when the content goes up on the internet. By the time my New Yorker reaches me out here in the hinterlands every week, it's already half-useless.)

Just so you don't go to the snack bar at the wrong time.

*For a sterling example, see here.

In all fairness, let me add this footnote: a few days after Jack Paar's death last week, one of our local PBS affiliates reran a Paar clip show that included what I gather was Allen's network TV debut as a standup comedian. I can just barely remember his standup days, and since then I hadn't seen or heard any of his work from that period. I was struck by how fresh and engaging his style was--free, fantastic, not at all punchline-oriented. Judging by that clip, one could easily imagine him having evolved into an on-stage monologist à la Spalding Gray rather than a writer-director of films. In retrospect, I wonder if that might not have been a better way for him to go?

UPDATE: Cup of Chicha weighs in, smartly (as always).

This is such a wonderful story that I fear it may not be true, especially since it could have been: Brahms was a witty gent capable of just such a spontaneous gesture, and his friendship with and admiration for Strauss were anything but apocryphal. (He told Hans von Bülow, for example, that Strauss was "one of the few colleagues I can hold in limitless respect.") I just checked, and two of the most reliable Brahms books on my shelves make no reference to the anecdote, so I plan to check no further. When the legend becomes true, print the legend (alas, not by me).

Incidentally, the word "alas" is one of my too-familiar, over-relied-upon fingerprints, along with "not surprisingly," "needless to say," "much less," "least of all," "I suspect," and (sigh) the use of hyphenated modifiers. Not surprisingly, I suspect that most far-too-prolific writers have, alas, a whole stack of these tics. Used in the strictest moderation, they're part of what turns a voice into a full-fledged style, but I'm not always careful about using them moderately, least of all on this blog, which is frequently written on the fly. When I was editing The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, I determined to trim away all but one or two occurrences of each of my personal clichés. Don't hold me to it, though, and please don't keep score when you're reading A Terry Teachout Reader. I guarantee you'll find them there, in profusion.

Last night was a case in point. I met a writer friend for dinner in the East Village at one of the dozen-odd inexpensive Indian restaurants on Sixth Street, all on a single block and widely rumored to share a single kitchen as well. It's also said that there are no cats in that neighborhood, but we had a very good meal, after which we made our way through the wintry mix to an off-Broadway theater in the vicinity, the New York Theatre Workshop, where we saw the penultimate preview of Valhalla, Paul Rudnick's new play, which opens Thursday. (Watch this space Friday to see what I wrote about it for my theater column in The Wall Street Journal.) That's one kind of weeknight in Manhattan.

And tonight? Well, I stuck to my own neighborhood, the Upper West Side, but the evening ended up having a downtown flavor anyway: I took a singer friend to hear Dave's True Story and the Lascivious Biddies at Makor. Regular readers of this blog will recall admiring references to both groups, about whom I last wrote a couple of months ago in my Washington Post column:

I ventured down to the Village to hear two hip bands, Dave's True Story and the Lascivious Biddies, at Fez. DTS, previously praised in this space, is a volatile blend of two seemingly incompatible ingredients, the coolly kinky songs of David Cantor and the warmly engaging vocals of Kelly Flint. Hearing Flint sing about the wild side of downtown life in so comforting a voice is guaranteed to knock your dreams a bubble or two off plumb. As for the Biddies, they're a pop-jazz quartet of clever women who yoke two similarly dissimilar styles--girl-group vocals and King Cole Trio-style instrumentals--to charming effect.

Part of what makes DTS and the Biddies two of the most interesting bands in town is that they don't lend themselves to ready categorization. Both make music that is rooted in jazz but open to all manner of sounds, and both sing smart self-composed songs--often witty, sometimes wry, occasionally rueful--that float free of the up-with-love trap. (The Biddies' "Famous," for example, is a cruelly comic piece of celebrity mockery: "I wanna be famous/Tabloids will print what I eat/I wanna be famous/Who I do will be news on the street.") They fit no pigeonholes, not even the made-in-downtown-New-York label that accurately describes the clubs where they're usually to be found.

What, I asked myself, were two such exotic groups doing north of Noho, working a room one block from Lincoln Center and a few doors away from Café des Artistes, Peter Jennings' hangout? I mean, nobody plays the Upper West Side, right? So since I'd never even heard of Makor, much less been there, I decided I ought to check out an uptown spot adventurous enough to book DTS and the Biddies--and was I ever surprised.

Makor, it turns out, is a Jewish community center, a West Side outpost of the 92nd Street Y housed in what appears to have once been a fancy-schmancy townhouse on a very classy block. It still looks classy on the outside, enough so that I almost told the cabby to keep on driving. Instead, I got out, went in, had my shoulder bag searched, and headed downstairs to the least likely-looking nightclub I've ever seen. The Makor Café, I'm told, is one of the most popular Jewish singles bars in town (one patron dryly described it to me as "a kosher meat market"). What it looks like on the inside is the student union of a Midwestern land-grant university. The floors are clean, the air clear, the customers mostly fresh-faced except for a sprinkling of wannabe hipsters dressed in black berets, and all the tables are lined up in perfectly straight rows. If you were to ask a computer to generate a picture of the opposite of the Village Vanguard, this would be it. Yet the nice middle-class crowd clearly loved everything it heard, even such alarming cautionary tales of postmodern love as David Cantor's "Spasm" ("So spare me the roses the wine and the song/It all boils down to the raw protoplasm/'Cause this ain't the real thing/It's just a spasm").

As I caught another cab for the short ride home, I marveled at the sheer incongruity of my evening. Right music, wrong place, wrong night, wrong neighborhood--and nobody seemed to care, or even notice. Tomorrow I'll be returning to the immediate vicinity of Makor to watch New York City Ballet dance George Balanchine's Jewels. On Saturday I'll be taking a crosstown bus through Central Park to the National Academy of Design to see "The Artist's Eye: Wolf Kahn as Curator," a show put together by the man who made the monotype that now hangs above my mantelpiece. "Spasm" and Jewels, Paul Rudnick and Wolf Kahn: out of such daily juxtapositions is my life in Manhattan made. And while I have no doubt that you could find comparable variety in plenty of other big cities, I doubt there's anywhere else in America--perhaps in the whole world--where it's so easy to find. In New York, it comes to your front door and knocks. Loudly.

Paul Goodman, "The Lordly Hudson"

UPDATE: As Old Hag notes, this poem has been set to music--beautifully--by Ned Rorem (see yesterday's almanac entry). She and I agree that the best recording currently available on CD is by Susan Graham and Malcolm Martineau.

Over to you, OGIC.

That is all.

LET'S
READ

It failed to specify highbrow or popular.

The New York state of mind gets in the way of a great many other viewpoints and cultural takes. Popular culture (pop music, television, genre fiction, graphics and arts that are out of favor among professional, mostly NY, critics) has long been ignored by the mavens of "high culture." But thousands of practitioners of those popular or folk arts have worked and lived and died outside of Manhattan's sphere. Not only that, but they have created wondrous and satisfying works. There are dozens of cultures in the country, the world, and trying to put them into an arbitrary hierarchy does all artists and thinkers a real disservice....The Web and the Blog encourage the shattering of hegemonies, for better and for worse.

And this one on anonymous blogging:

Of course it's proper to blog anonymously. Computer network users have been posting and emailing under handles and nicknames since there've been computer networks. As in the then-current world of CB radio, people were doing something fun, with kindred spirits, which didn't require them to present affidavits and IDs.

Obviously these gloomy Gusses never would've had much fun on the BBS's of the 80's and 90's. *Annoyed look*

Now, I almost always post under my own name. For me, it's simpler. But I have always enjoyed the creativity manifested in handles. People who don't...they worry me. People are often more themselves when they're choosing their own names. People who see that only as an opportunity for dishonesty and juvenile behavior are obviously projecting.

Apropos of this, Terry pointed out that in my post on anonymity the other day, I neglected to say anything about why I'm undercover. My reasons are simple. Some of them are professional, but it's not as though I'd be in danger of losing my job or anything so dire if I revealed. More important than the potential negatives are the actual positives. A new persona has all the inviting open expanse of a fresh sheet of paper. It's interesting to engineer OGIC, endowing her with some of my interests and tics, but keeping others to myself. I also see this as a fun, educational experiment for myself as a writer. I don't expect to stay under wraps forever, but for the time being I enjoy both the liberation and the challenge of being someone sort of else. It frees me up to write on certain topics about which I'd be more circumspect writing under my name. But it requires more discipline, too: for instance, to leave certain things out of my posts and generally cultivate a strategic vagueness about my life. Sometimes it's hard to refrain from linking to or discussing the work I'm doing under my real name. I often feel as if I'm robbing myself of good blogging topics in these books and ideas that I've invested a lot of thought in, but that are already spoken for by her. Sometimes, of course, I steal her stuff anyway.

I don't keep this a secret from anyone I know, I readily tell new people I meet (not all of them), and there are potential leaks: friends of friends of other bloggers or media people. Like I said above, it's inevitable that I'll out or be outed. But my guess is that it will happen gradually, and in any case it will be very much a non-event (unless I become NYTBR editor or May Queen in the meantime). For now, I'm just having fun being mistaken for Mr. Epstein. Studs Terkel, anyone?

In sum: HB, OKABIC!

I liked Valhalla, with some reservations:

As I watched the hijinks ensue, I tried to figure out whom Mr. Rudnick reminds me of, and Neil Simon came to mind. Mr. Rudnick is another one of those jokesmiths who keeps throwing punchlines against the wall to see if they stick, and his jokes, like Mr. Simon's, all have the same one-two rhythm, only with a campy twist in the tail. ("What's an orgy?" "It's when vicious, depraved philistines have sex in a group." "Is it heavenly?" "Yes.") But Neil Simon in his heyday would never have put so ill-carpentered a play as "Valhalla" on stage, and before long I realized that Mr. Rudnick is more like a gay Mel Brooks, a Catskills comic who packs his scripts with good lines but doesn't know how to tie them into a nice, neat plot-driven package. "Valhalla" goes off the rails in the same how-the-hell-do-I-end-this way as "Blazing Saddles," having built up just enough momentum to keep you chortling through the chaos....

Ditto Suitcase:

Any playwright who pinches her subtitle from the collected works of Jorge Luis Borges (no capital letters, please!), or whose last play was called "[sic]," really needs to consider spending a few weeks in residence at the David Ives School of User-Friendly Smart Comedy, or possibly entering a 12-step program for recovering postmodernists.

Even so, this eggheady comedy about two neurotic graduate students (Christina Kirk and Colleen Werthmann) trapped in dissertation hell and the boyfriends (Thomas Jay Ryan and Jeremy Shamos) whom they hold at arm's length is funny, clever, and worth a trip downtown to Soho Rep, where it has just been extended through Feb. 28. The closer you listen, the more clearly you grasp that the highbrow badinage in which Ms. Gibson's characters indulge is not so much self-regarding as self-mocking....

Would that you could read the whole thing here, but the Journal rarely provides free links to its arts coverage, so if your interest is piqued, trundle on down to the nearest newsstand or honor box, insert one (1) dollar, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, and regale yourself with all sorts of cool stuff, me (I hope) included.

It's interesting, by the way, to find myself using so radically new a medium as blogging to reflect on growing older. In the past, I sought creative renewal by immersing myself in unfamiliar art forms--ballet and modern dance in my thirties, the visual arts in my early forties. Now I'm finding it in a technology, which surprises me, especially given the fact that the technology in question seems to be used mainly by much younger people. Some of the best bloggers listed in "Sites to See" are roughly half my age.

Truth to tell, most of my best friends are younger than I am, a circumstance on which I recently had occasion to reflect in print:

I have a good many friends who are a good deal younger than I, and insofar as possible I try not to waste their time telling them what things were like when I was their age. I feel the temptation to live in the past, but one can truly live only in the moment, and the last thing I want to do is end up like the pathetic narrator of "Hey Nineteen," the Steely Dan song about a no-longer-young baby boomer who tries to tell his teenaged girlfriend about Aretha Franklin but discovers that "she don't remember/The Queen of Soul," subsequently realizing that "we got nothing in common/No, we can't talk at all." On the whole, I prefer to hear about the world they live in, though sometimes their stories make me shiver.

As I grow older, I find myself thinking more and more about the problem of striking a proper balance between present and past. I'm no great fan of my self-centered generation and its increasingly pitiful vanities (which is why I have become an enthusiastic reader of Boomer Deathwatch). Besides, it's always been important to me to know what's happening--the journalist's reflex--and my younger friends do their best to keep me posted. It was Our Girl, for example, who first alerted me to such disparate phenomena as Conan O'Brian, Buffy, and Cat Power. (Daria I found on my own.) I'm happy to know what's going on out in the world, and I hope I always am.

Or do I? Must there come a moment when it's wiser to stick to the cards in your hand, to deepen your understanding of what you already know? My hair stood up when I stumbled on the following sentence in Jack Richardson's Memoir of a Gambler: "As we moved along in the police wagon, I had the slightly unclean feeling of the man who keeps company with those much younger than himself." Might I have reached that terrible time without knowing it--the time when middle-aged people embarrass themselves by pretending to be that which they are not, forgetting that they shall never be again as they were? That's a scary thought.

I don't think I have. One of my much younger friends likes to tease me about my liking for Liz Phair, but there's nothing malicious in her kidding (I hope). In any case, I pass most of my time in age-appropriate ways. What could be better suited to a dignified gent of 48 than writing a book about George Balanchine, or collecting modern art prints? Not that I can honestly claim to have sailed all the way through the Fearful Forties without scraping the shoals a time or two, but at least I didn't buy a red sports car or start dressing in black, and with only two years to go, I'm probably in the clear (I hope).

Perhaps the abandon with which I've hurled myself into "About Last Night" is a form of age-inappropriate behavior--but once again, I don't think so. Rather, I see this blog as a way of bridging the perilous gap between yesterday and today. No invention is inherently bad (or good), and surely it is a sign of grace when one can find a way to use the newest technologies to revive and refresh our appreciation of the permanent things. That's the whole point of art blogging, and it's awe-inspiring to see the innumerable ways in which amateurs and professionals alike are bending this medium to their myriad passions. For me, as I say, it's been a completely unexpected booster rocket. Like Hokusai, I long someday to be an old man mad about art. For the moment, blogging is fanning my middle-aged flames.

And so...happy birthday to me! If you're a fan of this blog, don't send me a present--send yourself one by clicking here to place an advance order for A Terry Teachout Reader, my greatest-hits collection of essays, articles, and reviews, out in May from Yale University Press. That's what I'd really like. And if you've already obliged, well, tell ten of your friends about "About Last Night," the gift that keeps on giving.

(You knew I'd manage to work in another plug for the book, didn't you?)

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Something to remember, two years hence: 40 is the old age of youth. 50 is the youth of old age.

Happy birthday, protogeezer!

I feel better already.

Saul Bellow once said, in a seminar room at the University of Chicago where he was expounding Rousseau's Confessions along with Allan Bloom, "The great thing about Chicago is that by the time advanced ideas get here, they're worn so thin you can see right though them."

Friedrich Hölderlin, "The Middle of Life" (trans. James Mitchell)

There may be those that say we are an uncivilized people, that humanity tinkers on the brink of something just awful -- but those people don't get good Chinese food by delivery often enough. Good Chinese food delivery even in Lexington, Kentucky. That is civilization.

No promises either way about Our Girl. She's severely preoccupied. She'll blog if she blogs, and if she does, it'll be worth waiting for. But don't bug her.

W.H. Auden, in conversation with Robert Craft (quoted in Craft's Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship)

In the world of intellectual journalism, George Steiner has always been a figure of controversy. No one who reads him seems to be neutral about him, with opinion divided between those who think his range of learning and power of dramatizing ideas astonishingly brilliant, and those who think him a fake of astounding portentousness and pomposity. Judgments about him are made even more complicated by the fact that he has been the victim of English academic anti-Semitism, colder and more disdainful than which civilized Jew-hating does not get.

Steiner is a writer who has always come on high, toweringly high. His first book, "Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky" (1959), set the tone for his unremitting highbrowism. For many years he moved the heavy mental lumber for the New Yorker, reviewing works on Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Paul Célan, bringing his taste for the abyss to that otherwise lighthearted journal. "Men in Dark Times," the title of a collection of Hannah Arendt essays, is a phrase that provides a rubric for Steiner's own intellectual proclivities. If one is looking for a fifth horseman of the Apocalypse, Steiner is your man. I once, in print, referred to Harold Bloom as George Steiner without the sense of humor, which was, as Senator Claghorn used to say, "A joke, I say, that's a joke, son," because more humorless than Steiner human beings do not come.

I find myself unable to resist reading George Steiner, these days more often than not in the London Times Literary Supplement, where he is still doing his men-in-dark-times number. His is one of the tightest acts of our day. My friend Edward Shils once gave me a most useful clue to the best way to read Steiner. He claimed that many years ago he read a splendid parody of Steiner's of the way a Soviet apparatchik thought. Steiner, he felt, was a marvelous mimic. And so, I have come to see, he is. What George Steiner has been doing, over the past forty or so years, is an incomparable impression of the world's most learned man....

Read the whole thing here.

Karl Stern, The Pillar of Fire

With "Monster's" sympathetic take, Hollywood has put its boot print on a piece of history. And as Aileen's biographer, I find the movie's distortions disturbing. The filmmakers acknowledge upfront that "Monster" is fictionalized, that it is only "based upon" a true story. But will anyone notice this disclaimer, let alone pay attention to it? Already, most people seem not to. Reviewer upon reviewer has referred to Aileen's saga as depicted in the movie as true.

To be sure, the hitchhiking prostitute who confessed to killing seven men in Florida in 1989-90 and was executed in 2002 was no JFK or Malcolm X, two other real-life figures whose stories were altered for the big screen. But by retooling her into a victim who began killing to fend off a rapist, "Monster" conveniently transforms her into something we can stomach far more easily than we can a woman who's a ruthless robber and murderer. It perpetuates the comforting yet erroneous belief that women only kill when provoked by abuse. But women kill for other reasons, too, as Aileen's real life amply demonstrated....

She was severely damaged goods and mentally flawed. Yet many have endured far worse than she. Ultimately, she was irredeemably dangerous. She killed in cold blood, cutting down men who had lives and wives and families. That's a truth not even Hollywood should pretty up.

Read the whole thing here.

It's the sort of music that used to say "New York" to people in Peoria. It has that "Chorine on the A train at 3 AM" feel - tired of being sophisticated, tired of the pose, tired of living up to its own dreams and expectations. But when the piano comes in it's like Gershwin himself in a white suit entering an Automat painted by Edward Hopper - he pops the cigar out of his mouth and says why the long faces? This is New York, pal. Let's go stand on the corner and watch it ramble past. Whaddya say? There's no other city in America that can inspire these aural evocations - it's not like anyone listens to Boston's debut album and thinks I am so walking around Nob Hill right now. San Francisco to me is tied to the "Vertigo" score, but that's a trick of fiction. Chicago has one song: one. It informs us that State Street is a Great Street, and we go along with the assertion because it rhymes. But all of Gershwin's work is saturated with New York, and you know it. It's the love that doesn't have to say its name....

Read the whole thing here.

What I want to know is how Mr. TMFTML interprets Plate VI.

I got back into the swing of things a lot faster than I expected, so there's a sufficiency of new stuff to read today. Tomorrow may be different: Balanchine still beckons, and will continue to do so for the next five or six weeks. But I'll do my best, and when that isn't good enough, we'll always have Our Girl.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the impending week as much as I enjoyed the receding weekend.

Anthony Powell, A Buyer's Market

He read classics of every denomination, from Plato to Thoreau, with a particular fondness for the Russians--Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in particular, but also Gogol, Goncharov, Turgenev. He was widely read in modern literature. His professed favourites included T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and Franz Kafka, though he gave time to Borges, Camus, Capek, Gide, Hesse, Ionesco, Joyce, Malraux, Mishima, Santayana, Soseki, Strindberg, and much else....And at the head of the pack was Thomas Mann, especially Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, and the early story "Tonio Kröger," which he read around age eighteen and with whose title character, a passionate and excitable young aesthete described as "foreign and queer," he identified throughout his life. Just as his repertoire included no fluff, his concert tours no pops, Gould's reading included no murder mysteries or adventure stories. He liked books with a strong message, books that dealt with weighty ethical or theological or aesthetic ideas or espoused a philosophy of life with which he could engage intellectually. And he was disapproving of books in which ideas were sacrificed to aesthetics or ironic detachment. Among the Russians, for instance, he did not like Chekhov, or the dazzling Nabokov, whom he thought immoral. He read a little Truman Capote on the advice of friends, but could admire only his technique, not his ethics. He found Henry Miller's writings "ponderous," Jack Kerouac's "flaccid."

Eeuuww. The man behind that reading list sounds a perfect bore to me, and humorless to boot--just the sort of person who'd dislike Chopin, all French music, and most Mozart, as Gould did. And yet his way with Bach, the only great composer whose music he played consistently well, was nothing if not light-fingered. To hear Gould play the Goldberg Variations (the 1955 recording, of course) or the A Major English Suite is to feel the cares of the world slipping from your shoulders.

All of which leads me to ask: is the performance of classical music an intellectual activity? Did the breadth of Glenn Gould's culture make him a better interpreter of Bach? I wonder. I've known a lot of musicians in my time, some of whom were damned smart and some of whom were (ahem) less so, and I rarely noticed any clear-cut relationship between what went into their heads and what came out of their fingers or mouths. (In my more limited experience, the same is true of dancers and painters.) I'm not saying that a stupid person can become a successful musician, but I'm not so sure that having read T.S. Eliot equips you to play Beethoven's Op. 111 well. It certainly didn't help Gould, whose recording of that miraculous masterwork borders on the preposterous.

Those of us who write about music, needless to say, would like it if there were a direct positive correlation between intelligence and musical talent. Intellectuals always take it for granted that theirs is the highest form of life. If they had a bumper-sticker slogan, it'd be "Intellectuals do everything better." In fact, there are all sorts of things they do spectacularly badly (though they're rather good at conniving at mass murder), and it's almost always hard for them to accept the fact that Big Ideas get in the way of the making of great art.

I am, alas, a bonafide intellectual, but I'm pretty well inoculated against that particular strain of error, perhaps because I started out as a working musician. Early and intense exposure to a non-verbal art form gives you an abiding respect for the non-intellectual aspects of art. In my case, it also made me an equally bonafide aesthete: I like talking about ideas almost as much as I like reading about art, but I never need to be reminded that (as C.S. Lewis put it) if we have to choose, it's always better to re-read Chaucer than to read a new book about him.

Oh, yes, I mentioned two passages, so here's the other one. It's something Gould told an interviewer in 1980:

I can only say that I was brought up as a Presbyterian; I stopped being a church-goer at the age of about eighteen, but I have had all my life a tremendously strong sense that, indeed, there is a hereafter; and the transformation of the spirit is a phenomenon with which one must reckon, and in the light of which, indeed, one must attempt to live one's life. As a consequence, I find all here-and-now philosophies repellent. On the other hand, I don't have any objective images to build around my notion of a hereafter, and I recognize that it's a great temptation to formulate a comforting theory of eternal life, so as to reconcile one's self to the inevitability of death. But I'd like to think that's not what I'm doing; I'd like to think that I'm not employing it as a deliberate self-reassuring process. For me, it intuitively seems right; I've never had to work at convincing myself about the likelihood of a life hereafter. It is simply something that appears to me infinitely more plausible than its opposite, which would be oblivion.

Surprised? I was. Maybe I shouldn't have been. It's hard to imagine anyone immersing himself so completely in Bach without acquiring a sense of the transcendent. And though the famously logorrheic Gould wasn't much given to pithy utterances, he made one on precisely that subject: "I believe in God--Bach's God."

Six words. Not bad. Here's two more for the road: me, too.

As I held her painting in my hands, the names of all sorts of musicians who have been highly talented amateur artists started popping into my head. George Gershwin, Arnold Schoenberg, Tony Bennett, the Dixieland drummer George Wettling (who actually studied with Stuart Davis), Pee Wee Russell--the list goes on and on. I saw a gouache by the jazz singer Meredith d'Ambrosio, "Elm Street Blizzard," hanging at a juried exhibition here in New York a couple of months ago. It was absolutely terrific, and in no possible way "amateurish."

But, then, any number of talented artists have moonlighted to startlingly good effect in other media. Paul Taylor, the greatest living choreographer, makes assemblages reminiscent of Joseph Cornell (I have one hanging on my office wall), and also wrote a pungent, personal memoir, Private Domain, entirely without benefit of ghostwriter. Louis Armstrong did the same thing with his similarly vivid autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, and also turned out homemade collages that prefigure the work of Romare Bearden. Hector Berlioz's Memoirs is one of the greatest autobiographies of the nineteenth century, literary or otherwise....

Enough already. Am I irritated? You bet. It's sufficiently hurtful, after all, that these people do one thing so well. Why, then, must they rub our noses still deeper in the muck of human inequality by letting their prodigious gifts slop over like that? I mean, it's all we full-time critics can do to churn out our pathetic little reviews. Someday I plan to write an extremely naughty essay about novels by famous critics (most of which--though not quite all--have been excruciatingly bad). Imagine the further humiliation if they were also expected to set up shop as painters or musicians!

As for my singer friend, I don't even want to discuss the fact that she started painting one month ago. Maybe she's a mutant.

"Leider nicht von Johannes Brahms" is unquestionably by Brahms! He wrote the words on the autograph fan of Alice Meyszner-Strauss, the composer's stepdaughter, next to the first notes of the Blue Danube.

I wrote back to ask for a source, but answer came there none (not yet, anyway). Shortly thereafter, though, I heard from Phil Wade, who blogs at Brandywine Books. Phil sent along an excerpt from the obituary of Brahms that ran in The Musical Times in 1897:

Brahms was incapable of any mean or underhanded action. He never indulged in newspaper controversy, but kept his views to himself. . . . The catholicity of his taste is sufficiently shown by his immense admiration for the genius of Strauss--in which he shared the views of Wagner and Von Bülow--on whose wife's fan he inscribed a few bars of the "Blue Danube" with the charming compliment "unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms."

O.K., guys--wife or stepdaughter? Inquiring minds want to know.

As a corollary to your lament about the inequity of people who excel in one art also having a gift for another, I offer the infuriating example of Kenny G, who was playing the AT&T Pro-am golf tournament on the Monterey Peninsula last weekend. As a golfer, Kenny G has a 1 handicap. He shot a 77 at Pebble Beach and a 73 at Spy Glass. These are remarkable scores for an amateur in competition on tough courses set up for pros - the equivalent of a weekend violinist playing a pretty damn good rendition of the Brahms concerto with an A-list orchestra. So it's not enough that us jazz lovers have to put up with his insipid instrumental pop music, the genre of "smooth jazz" and the tragedy of his making zillions while (fill in the blank) scuffles to pay the bills while trying to make art that honors the legacy of Bird, Sonny and Trane - but in addition to all of that, Kenny G also gets to play to a 1-handicap.

There is no God.

Actually, there is, but Our Girl tells me that He prefers hockey.

Today, it was also crammed full of letters to Our Girl, which reminds me to remind you that we have two e-mailboxes, which we do not share. If you want to write to OGIC, go to the top module of the right-hand column and click on her mailbox link, not mine (mine is directly above hers).

I was much amused by your story of the candy valentine heart inscribed with LETS READ. I'm trying to imagine some corporate brainstorming session with marketing people sitting around throwing out suggestions for pithy romantic sayings: BE MINE, KISS ME, LOVE YOU, LETS READ, hunh? Do you suppose someone in the stenciling department at candyland is reading bodice rippers?

And two readers delighted me by sending along their own personalized creations--

READ
OGIC

and

LAST
NITE

--both generated at a splendid little webspot that you should know about this week.

Anyway, L'Auberge Espagnole was strained and disappointing, with nary a character you could warm up to, limp plotting, and cliché to spare. I was about to say, in a spirit of generosity, that it probably suffered from my having stepped out of character and viewed The Real World: Paris on MTV on a near-regular basis last year, and having that as a point of comparison. But this doesn't exactly look like generosity, does it? Regardless of the force of the comparison, the two were nearly indistinguishable.

Next up was His Girl Friday, a vast improvement. My only complaint is that I could have traded half the screwball capers in it for one more serving of pure banter between Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant's newsroom Beatrice and Benedick. They're both splendidly tart and unapologetically urbane--"Oh, well that will be nice, a home with mother. Yes, yes. In Albany, too"--and I was surprised to read David Thomson's stern view of Russell, whom I haven't seen in anything else. In the New Biographical Dictionary entry on Grant, Thomson praises him for "goading Rosalind Russell into being bearable" in this film.

And hey, how can you not love all the nifty, avant la lettre self-referentiality? (For even more audio clips from the movie, look here.)

Next up: Pirates of the Caribbean and To Have and Have Not, continuing my Howard Hawks self-schooling.

UPDATE: Rick at Futurballa has good recommendations from his recent Netflix selections.

I went to the local public library Saturday looking for Richard Pipes's recently published memoir (which was out), and I came home instead with a Richard Stark. I hadn't heard of Stark until your posting, though of course I know Westlake. The title of the novel is Comeback from the Parker series. The first half was excellent -- nicely plotted, credible, solid dialogue. But after the midway point, the story began to require a serious suspension of disbelief. In my experience, that is typical of crime and detective novels (and movies): great build-up followed by a (frequently precipitous) falling off. Nevertheless, I liked the novel enough to want to give Stark another try. Can you recommend one that won't give my credulity quite so difficult a workout?

This note from a regular reader of "About Last Night" interests me for an unexpected reason. What mystery or suspense novel, if any, doesn't require "a serious suspension of disbelief"? And why would that matter? I go to that kind of fiction in search of amusement, not plausibility, and so long as the imaginary world portrayed within is both internally consistent and involving on its own terms, I'm happy. Whoever thought Nero Wolfe or Philip Marlowe were plausible? In fact, I suspect it's their very implausibility, even outrageousness, that makes them interesting to us. Wolfe is Dr. Johnson transplanted into a fancy Manhattan brownstone with a greenhouse on the roof, Marlowe is Raymond Chandler transplanted into a seedy detective's office in Los Angeles, and the incongruity--the clash of sensibilities--engages the reader from the first sentence onward.

The Parker novels (which are written by "Richard Stark," a pen name of Donald Westlake) aren't interesting to me because of the comparative feasibility of the crimes portrayed by the author. I read them because I'm fascinated by Parker, a professional thief who is amoral to the point of sociopathy. The novels are told mainly from his point of view, which anyone not a sociopath will find totally unsympathetic. Yet the reader identifies with Parker, even cheers him on, as he does whatever he finds necessary to steal large sums of money and stay out of jail, up to and including cold-blooded murder. I'm not up for amateur psychologizing this morning, so I won't speculate as to the appeal of a character like Parker, but appeal he does, and for me, at least, it doesn't much matter whether his capers and scores pass the test of plausibility. They divert me.

Having said all that, I'll return to the problem posed by my reader. Westlake wrote the first sixteen Parker novels between 1962 and 1974, then put the series aside until 1997, when he resumed with Comeback. The later novels are somewhat different in tone from the earlier ones--a little less traditionally "hardboiled," a little more self-reflexive, even discursive (Westlake is a very funny man when not pretending to be a hardboiled mystery novelist). Those who find Comeback slightly unbelievable will prefer the earlier books, most of which are out of print, though they can usually be found in libraries or used book stores. Of them, the most conventionally "plausible" is The Rare Coin Score. Of the later Parker novels, the one I suspect my correspondent would find most acceptable is Flashfire. But as I say, don't look to Parker for how-to-do-it guides to heisting. His interest lies elsewhere.

A reminder: Westlake has written a parallel series of comic crime novels under his own name about a hapless heister named John Dortmunder, and these books are a deliberate, almost systematic inversion of the Parker novels. Readers familiar with both series will find the Dortmunder books (which not infrequently make reference to the Parker books) even funnier, but you don't have to get the inside jokes to appreciate them. Unlike the Parker novels, all of the Dortmunder novels are currently available in paperback, and that series starts with The Hot Rock.

Now, back to high culture!

UPDATE: Sarah has major Dortmunder-related news....

Donald E. Westlake, Nobody's Perfect

Let us know what you thought of To Have and Have Not, OGIC. I think you'll find it a perfect hoot. In the right way.

The poet of magenta and orange culls 50-odd personal favorites from the Academy's permanent collection, mostly (but not entirely) representational, mostly (but not entirely) landscapes, mostly (but not entirely) celebrity-free. The last gallery contains 10 recent paintings by Kahn, including "Chaos and Hidden Order," a stunning natural abstract (my phrase, not Kahn's) painted last year in Africa. Bright, fresh, engaging, and thought-provoking, especially if you think paint on canvas is soooo over. Definitely worth seeing, more than once.

What I didn't mention, that being a capsule review, was that Kahn not only picked the paintings but wrote the wall labels for the show. I'm sure that's not without precedent, but it isn't common, either (Jane Freilicher didn't do it when she curated last year's "Artist's Eye" show at the Academy). The texts are fascinating--informal, unpretentious, written from the practical perspective of a practicing painter. Here, for example, is Kahn on Albert Pinkham Ryder's "Marine":

Ryder is one of the artists who continue to influence me in my own work, because he really loved the substance of paint. Also, he never acknowledged finishing a painting but kept adjusting and changing it for years. He had the gift of translating paint into passion, but his aim, it seems to me, was to paint unchanging nature as simply and straight-forwardly as he could. Notice the uneasy coming together of water and sky at the horizon: white against black, but nothing stops. A wonderful little picture.

Wouldn't you rather read a label like that than one by some anonymous museum staffer?

Sarah Weinman and I have been exchanging e-mail apropos of my recent posting about Glenn Gould, and we've gotten into a conversation about what I call "practitioner criticism," by which I mean arts criticism written by working artists. This kind of criticism intrigues me precisely because it isn't "objective," and rarely if ever pretends to be: instead, it's all about the critic-artist and his personal priorities, and is all the more illuminating as a result. What George Bernard Shaw had to say about Shakespeare, or Hector Berlioz about Beethoven, is by definition more interesting than anything I could possibly say about either man, regardless of whether Shaw or Berlioz happened to be right or wrong.

Here's what Wolf Kahn has to say about curating "The Artist's Eye," which I think could reasonably be described as an exercise in applied practitioner criticism:

I have only cursory knowledge of American art from 1825 (the date the National Academy of Design was founded) until about 1930. It's likely that I know a bit more from 1930 to the present. Still, how to choose from the ample racks in the storage area those pictures which it seems important to show at this time?...The best thing, it seems to me, is to put my faith on my "eye," and to cull fifty or so paintings from the collection which succeed to engage my personal "eye." Is a picture coloristically exciting? Are the elements dispersed on the canvas, or the panel, in a visually beautiful way? Is the picture the carrier of strong feeling? Is it eccentric? Extreme?...Let my eye, therefore, be the surrogate for yours--we may end up shaking hands in agreement--sometimes.

I love that, syntactical slips and all. And I don't see how anyone could resist going to see a museum exhibition curated on such a basis. So don't resist--go. Now. The National Academy of Design is never crowded, even on weekends. And when you're there, keep an eye out for me, because I'm planning to come back soon with a friend or two in tow.

Whee! I feel better!

Deseja aumentar o tamanho do pênis?

It sounds so much prettier that way....

I picture OGIC as being 35-ish, blonde-ish, and tall-ish. Am I close-ish?

Yes-and-no-ish.

"The future looks particularly grim for all land-based music retailers,'' said Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of the Strategic Resource Group, a consulting firm that has worked with retailers and record companies. He said such stores "literally have a toe-tag on them and they're boxed up for the proverbial boneyard.''

With the demise of once dominant stores like Tower that specialize in selling every category of music and do it with great depth and range, Mr. Flickinger predicted that "most consumers will move to a much narrower band of music - what they hear of the top 25 songs that are programmed in vicious rotation by the FM radio stations or top 20 almost preselected MTV songs.''

Excuse me? I think the first half of Mr. Flickinger's prediction is on the nose, but aliens from outer space must have taken over his brain thereafter. Those consumers who are content to listen exclusively to the Top 25 are already listening exclusively to the Top 25, and no record store, bankrupt or not, will widen their cramped horizons. Everybody else is looking to the Web to buy (and sell) their music, or soon will be.

Apropos of the Tower Records announcement, a reader wrote yesterday to ask what I thought the best classical-music stores in New York were. I told him I almost never bought CDs of any kind in stores anymore--I buy on line. The next step, which is nigh, is for people like me to stop buying CDs altogether and instead switch to downloading. Once that happens, the economic basis for the recording industry as it's presently constituted will disintegrate, and with it the industry.

A number of smart musicians who've had it up to here with the music business are already starting to experiment with their own Web-based "labels." To get a sense of how that will work, look at Maria Schneider's Web site, which makes use of new technology developed by a company called ArtistShare. That's the future of recording--maybe not for Beyoncé, but for all those artists who make music too interesting to crack the Top 25.

In the short run, we're in for a hell of a rough ride. After that, the fun starts. In the meantime, start downloading, if you're not doing it already. The bugs aren't completely worked out yet (especially with regard to classical music), but they will be, soon.

I'll pass along Mr. Schiller's ten tips for the novice collector:

1. Buy what you love--listen to your gut.

2. Don't buy art to make money; there are easier ways to do that.

3. Learn about the artist--you don't buy a car without being informed.

4. The love affair should remain strong, like a good marriage.

5. Don't be afraid to ask questions--it's your money.

6. Don't be afraid to negotiate the price--again, it's your money.

7. Seek advice from a knowledgeable and honest consultant--we all need help.

8. Display the work; see it every day.

9. Loan the work--others should see it.

10. Buy what you can afford--don't miss any meals.

All fairly obvious, I suppose, except that people who develop a brand-new interest have a way of forgetting the obvious, or failing to apply it to their changed circumstances. I'm lucky--I didn't make any earth-shattering mistakes in my first year of art buying, so far as I know--but I still wish I'd read Buy What You Love before I started. It's one of the few things I've ever read about collecting art that I didn't find inhibiting, even though the author obviously has a whole lot more money than I do.

Which brings me to the cover letter accompanying the book, in which Mr. Schiller wrote, "While you may not now be an addict, don't be surprised if the addiction comes without your being prepared for it, but very happy nonetheless." Yikes! If he's right, I may someday be writing this blog from debtors' prison--or a larger apartment. Buying art is a perilous hobby for a freelance arts journalist with a chronically slender bank account. But he's right: buying art is addicting, in the nicest and most gratifying way imaginable. Try it and see.

Philip Larkin, "Latest Face"

See you Thursday.

Hughes wasn't aiming to write a conventional whodunit. Instead, she chose a much bolder task, crafting a psychological thriller from the point of view of someone who is morally ambiguous to say the least....[Hughes] uses a similar device that popped up in Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me and many books by many authors since, but Hughes trumped Thompson on two counts: first, In A Lonely Place, published in 1947, predated Thompson's book by five years. Second and more importantly, Hughes is far more subtle at revealing the level of [the character's] depravity.

Sold.

Take a look, especially if my piece about collecting prints caught your eye. I didn't have much of anything to say about the Dark Side of the Force, but you should definitely know what's what.

George C. Wolfe will step down as producer of the Public Theater next season, he said yesterday. Mr. Wolfe has spent nearly a decade trying to build on the fierce commitment of the theater's founder, Joseph Papp, to new playwrights.

With his charismatic presence and creative success, Mr. Wolfe has also established something of a cult of personality at the Public, in the tradition of the legendary Papp. And as the leading black stage director in the country and an openly gay man, he embodied the Public's determination to reach diverse artists and audiences.

His is the third high-level cultural post to open in New York in the last two weeks. Robert J. Harth, artistic and executive director of Carnegie Hall, died Jan. 30 at 47, and Joseph Volpe announced his retirement as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera on Monday....

Read the whole thing here. No response just yet--I'm still taking the whole thing in.

Not everybody in the jazz business agreed with me (I got an e-mail, for instance, from a very distinguished jazz guitarist who really liked her music and begged to differ with me). For the most part, though, I was struck by the positive reaction to this piece among musicians.

Anyway, here it is, for what it's worth.

* * *

At 22, Norah Jones, a slender, fresh-faced singer-pianist with a raspy bedroom voice, is the talk of the music business. Her debut CD, "Come Away With Me," is a collection of soft-rock ballads sung in an intimate style that is a quirky mixture of country and blues. It's selling hand over fist to thirtysomethings who are too old for hip-hop--nearly a million copies since January--at a time when record sales are in an industry-wide tailspin. But while reporters are losing their heads over Jones, I have yet to meet a jazz musician who speaks well of her album. I was chatting the other day with a jazz singer I know, a very nice woman who never has a nasty word to say about anybody, and I asked her about "Come Away With Me." She shook her head and cautiously replied, "Well, there's nothing really wrong with it, I guess. But...it's not jazz."

What difference does that make? Jazz, after all, isn't the only kind of good music in the world. To be sure, I'm not all that impressed by Jones, who strikes me as appealing but not quite grown up, sort of like what you'd get if a character on a teen-angst TV drama were to take up blues singing as a hobby. Still, the world is full of pretty young soft-rock balladeers, so why should anyone care that this one has struck pay dirt? Or, as a puzzled newspaper editor recently asked me, "What is it about Norah Jones that's putting jazz people's noses out of joint?"

The answer is simple: She records for Blue Note.

Blue Note is one of the last remaining big-time labels that is, or was, totally committed to jazz. Founded in 1939, it has recorded such legendary artists as Sidney Bechet, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, and Horace Silver. If you were to make a list of the 100 most significant jazz albums of the 20th century, you'd find that at least 10 of them, if not more, were released on Blue Note. Moreover, the label's current roster includes the eminently noteworthy likes of Patricia Barber, Bill Charlap, Joe Lovano, Greg Osby, and Cassandra Wilson--heavy hitters all.

So what's Jones doing in such fast company? Making money, that's what. As a rule, jazz albums don't sell, but this rule has lately been broken by a string of good-looking female vocalists, including Wilson, Diana Krall and Jane Monheit. Every label wants one. Blue Note now has two--only one of them doesn't sing jazz. Granted, Cassandra Wilson is by no means a standard-issue Ella Fitzgerald-type singer (her latest CD contains such pop songs as "The Weight" and "Wichita Lineman"), but I don't know anybody who thinks she is anything other than a jazz musician. Not so Norah Jones. Her agreeable, innocuous music bears no resemblance whatsoever to any known form of jazz, however eclectic or cross-pollinated. She is a pop singer, period.

Because of this, many jazz musicians see red when journalists describe her as a "jazz singer," just as it drives them crazy that the bland mewlings of soprano saxophonist Kenny G, the Thomas Kinkade of music, are known as "smooth jazz." To them, the word jazz stands for a musical idiom of the highest sophistication, arguably America's foremost contribution to the modern movement in art, and they don't want it devalued by misappropriation. Never mind that Jones doesn't call herself a jazz singer, or that Blue Note isn't promoting her as one. The fact remains that she records for a prestigious jazz label, and when bona fide jazz musicians open up the New York Times Magazine and find an article called "The New Old Thing: Norah Jones Takes Jazz Singing Back to Its Future," they see another door slamming in their faces.

A well-connected record producer who has no use for Jones' music recently assured me with a straight face that the profits from "Come Away With Me" will allow Blue Note to underwrite the development of more challenging artists. Indeed, such things have been known to happen--but all slopes are slippery, especially when they're lined with cash. Yes, Blue Note is still a serious jazz label, but how long will it stay that way now that it's getting a taste of serious money? Will Bruce Lundvall, the president of Blue Note, start dropping less profitable artists from his roster and looking for more Norah Joneses instead? I hope not, but you'd be surprised how fast good taste can go out the window when big bucks come flooding in the front door.

I'm not one of those snobby purists who turn up their fastidious noses at such user-friendly artists as Diana Krall and John Pizzarelli. I like it when smart musicians reach out to a popular audience, as long as they do so without pandering.

Unfortunately, there is a huge gap between what Krall is doing when she sings Burt Bacharach's "The Look of Love" and what Norah Jones is doing when she sings Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold Heart." Both are popular, but the first is jazz and the second isn't. To pretend otherwise is to run the risk of defining jazz down--and, eventually, out.

Ever the hard-nosed administrator, he can crack the whip at recalcitrant singers and settle with the unions and placate his board and terrorize his underlings and prevent the centrifugal force of a thousand egos from spinning the Met out of control. His pleasure in his position is always evident and endearing. But can he plan repertory and oversee casting and productions with the requisite, insightful sophistication and taste?

For a long time such questions lurked half-whispered backstage. The Met was selling tickets, its huge endowment was swelled by the bubble of the late 1990's, and [James] Levine was more of a presence than he is now. But in recent years, like so many American opera companies, the Met has fallen on relatively hard times. Relative, because the endowment, currently at $285 million, provides a comfy cushion. Deficits have run $10 million each of the last two fiscal years (although Mr. Volpe is hoping to balance the budget this year). Attendance has been down sharply, as have annual donations (with the implosion of Alberto Vilar's pledges, to the Met and others, only part of the problem)....

Mr. Volpe is a tough guy, even (say many) a bully. So logic might dictate a smoother, tonier, more soft-spoken manager, more in line with patrician Met tradition. And maybe one with greater sophistication about the musical and dramatic side of opera.

What needs to be done? To figure out a way to fill the Met's vast, 3,900-seat theater with artistically respectable fare; even the most conservative audiences eventually grow tired of routinely cast Franco Zeffirelli productions of "La Bohème" and "Turandot." To find new audiences without alienating the old ones. To sustain casting and conducting in an era when European artists seem increasingly loath to commit months of time in rehearsal and performances across the ocean. To develop and cultivate supportive yet progressive board members. And, one way or another, to corral those egos.

Read the whole thing here.

I think Rockwell has summed up the Met's problems very neatly. And I think the answer to his first question, about Volpe's ability to make smart artistic decisions (as opposed to shrewd ones), is an unequivocal no. Volpe is a manager, not an artist. When he and James Levine were working in counterpoise, it didn't matter nearly as much. Now that Levine has withdrawn most of his attention from the Met and its doings, it matters hugely.

For several seasons, the Volpe-led Met has basically been alternating between big, dumb, ultra-naturalistic new productions of standard-rep operas (some of which worked, most of which didn't) and Eurotrashily "adventurous" new productions of less well-known works (most of which have been appalling). It was during that period that I first started going to New York City Opera more often than the Met, and with greater pleasure, in spite of City Opera's lower budgets, generally less impressive singers, and second-rate (but well-meaning) orchestra. Why? Because I believe that opera in the theater is drama, first and foremost. Under Paul Kellogg, City Opera agrees, and usually acts accordingly; under Volpe, the Met doesn't. Volpe believes in spectacle, not drama. To some extent, the huge Metropolitan Opera House enforces his preference simply by virtue of its size, but it doesn't have to, at least not all the time. I've seen great drama at the Met. Mark Lamos' Wozzeck and Elijah Moshinsky's Queen of Spades, for instance, were spellbindingly fine. But since then...what? It's been a long time between drinks.

So I'm glad that Volpe is going. It's about time. I don't know who can--or should--replace him. The chances are better than even that his replacement will fail dismally. I expect it'll take at least two more general directors to turn that ocean liner around. But this is a start.

Auberon Waugh, Will This Do?

The American painter Charles Demuth (1883-1935) was an artist who took a certain pride--aesthetic pride--in his carefully cultivated limitations. He didn't hesitate to boast about them, as we know from the wonderful comparison he once made between his own talent and that of his more robust contemporary, John Marin. "John Marin and I drew our inspiration from the same source, French modernism," Demuth said. "He brought his up in buckets and spilt much along the way. I dipped mine out with a teaspoon but I never spilt a drop."

The humor, the exactitude, the unembarrassed self-knowledge--everything about that remark reminds me of another self-confessed American aesthete, the poet Wallace Stevens. Artists and writers of this persuasion--Henry James and Marianne Moore belong in the same company--cannot be expected to command the attention of a large public. Their work tends to be a little too special for mainstream taste, and the acclaim they enjoy tends to be posthumous. Yet their achievements are among the finest in American art and literature.

Demuth's place in this constellation of talents would be more widely recognized if we saw his work more often, but exhibitions of his pictures have been a rarity lately--which is why the exhibition that Thomas S. Holman and Virginia Zabriskie have organized at the Zabriskie Gallery is an event to be cherished. Though it's a long way from being the full-scale retrospective that's needed, the show's 31 items--mostly watercolors and drawings dating from 1907 to 1933--are more than sufficient to remind us of Demuth's virtues....

Read the whole thing here. Then go see the show, and look for me.

Blogs for me are trial balloons, even the ones that pretend to be something else, and snark is part of the fun if also sometimes part of the trial. More selfishly, I'm attempting to gird myself for a writing workshop of the kind I've actively avoided for several years, and I am wondering, yet again, what compels me to sign up for these things. There's submitting to the voluntary trauma of watching strangers pluck the veins from your writing or, worse, react not at all. And then there are the all too easily mocked bits that emerge when a group struggles to find something, anything to say about what you're doing "on the page"....

Read the whole thing here.

Brick and mortar record stores don't strike me as an extinct species. Tower records, let it be known, is crap. They have a wide selection, but not deep: their buyers are uninformed even in independent pop music, which is extraordinarily popular ("underground" and "below the radar" would be misnomers). Not to mention their prices cannot even vaguely compete with Amazon, even with added shipping charges. However, on the west coast there are three Amoeba (two in SF, one in LA) independent record stores that have maybe ten or twenty times the selection of a typical Tower. Their prices are comparable, if not cheaper than Amazon, they sell used, new, import, vinyl, and a huge volume of ‘bargain' CDs. The store is always mobbed with people; you typically see individuals buying five to ten CDs at once. Amoeba serves the music fanatic market, which pretty much includes every "hipster" in the known universe, because staying abreast of independent music is the bedrock of hipster cultural sophistication. Knowing the hip bands gets you laid. There are a lot of hipsters in the big cities and they have a lot of money. I don't have access to Amoeba's books but they cannot be doing too poorly considering they just opened a new store. Perhaps we should stop looking at Tower records, which looked like a Dinosaur to anyone with any concern about pop music well before the advent of MP3s. I speak with some authority on this issue as my freshman year of college is the year that MP3 trading first became widespread (about a year before Napster).

Aye, there's the rub. Do small chains like Amoeba (which certainly sounds pretty fabulous to me) have a future? Or are they merely a "transitional technology," so to speak, destined to wither away as more and more artists begin marketing their music directly to the public via the Web? I think that's really the key question, and I think we'll all live to know the answer.

If I had any money to bet, I'd put it on the Web, but I spent it all on modern art prints, sigh....

Plato remarks in The Republic that bad characters are volatile and interesting, whereas good characters are dull and always the same. This certainly indicates a literary problem. It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness.

This reminds me a provocative remark I once stumbled on in which Simone Weil claimed the opposite: that in art, evil is boring and good interesting. I have never been able to track down the source of the quotation, and at this point I've lost the quotation itself. Does anyone know it?

My first retort is that just because your reviewers can't think of anything to say doesn't mean there's nothing to be said...

Popular media can and does tell us a lot about ourselves as a culture. A good reviewer could easily find tropes of masculinity, or articulations of conservatism, in Tom Clancy, just as Anne Rice's oeuvre has a lot to say about shifting attitudes towards gender and eroticism. Mysteries and thrillers reflect social attitudes about crime and punishment; George Pelecanos uses the genre as an effective instrument to talk about race relations as well.

I would only add that there is another, even more vital role to be played by smart reviews of dumb books: sending us into delirious fits of righteous laughter. Let me refer you to one of my all-time favorite reviews, which happens to fall into this category. It's Lorin Stein writing two summers ago on The Emperor of Ocean Park in The London Review of Books:

Stephen L. Carter has written the kind of novel in which the bad guys say "very well" when they mean "OK"; in which the hero calls a visit from old friends "a delightfully rambunctious affair" and his rocky marriage a "tumultuous mutuality"; in which "homes" are "spacious," jealousy "flames afresh" and eminent legal scholars spend dinner parties debating the existence of God. It is also the kind of novel--I am about to spoil the ending--in which the hero uncovers a vast conspiracy at the highest levels of government, resists the advances of a slinky assassin, faces down a gun-toting Supreme Court judge, and ends up getting promoted. The Emperor of Ocean Park is, in other words, an "airplane book," as opposed to a "beach read": it's trash, but it's Business Class trash, relentlessly high-toned, tastefully furnished and driven by a Rube Goldberg-like love of complication, minus the suspense.

American reviewers, partly out of deference to Carter's serious polemics on race, religion and American politics, have tended to treat The Emperor of Ocean Park as a serious novel, which it is not; or as a thriller, which is simply unfair. When an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court looms up out of a dark and stormy night, semi-automatic at the ready, and tells the hero, "don't play games with me . . . I know your father hid something in the teddy bear," you should be able to look back at what has already happened, slap your forehead, and think: "Of course! Why didn't I think of that? The judge has been after the teddy bear all along!" That's the thrill. But when anything remotely eventful takes place in The Emperor of Ocean Park, you will have either thought of it already or you could never have thought of it, because like that teddy bear, it's utterly cuckoo bananas.

If this is what they call snark, who in their right mind would want to banish it?

Some parts of the above are true....

Still and all, the play's the thing, and this show, for all its imperfections, begs to be seen. At a time when Broadway has been reduced to recycling the faded ditties of has-been rock stars, it is good to sit in a darkened room full of strangers, immersed in the words of a poet born before Shakespeare, before Giotto--even before Christ. How is it possible that a play written 25 centuries ago should still be capable of moving a New York audience to applause? To watch the Aquila Theatre Company's "Agamemnon" is to be reminded of what a miraculous thing it is to be human.

In addition, I praised a new book on drama, Notes on Directing, which is also one of my current Top Five picks:

"Notes on Directing" is often dryly funny, as befits a book about the theater: "23. Assume that everyone is in a permanent state of catatonic terror. This will help you approach the impossible state of infinite patience and benevolence that actors and others expect from you." But while some of its plain-spoken maxims are stage-specific ("115. When a scene isn't clicking, the entrance was probably wrong"), I suspect that readers of the Journal will be struck by the extent to which many of them are no less applicable to the world of business. Directing a play, it turns out, is best understood as a species of management à la Peter Drucker: "Identify the story's compelling question....Express the core of the play in as few words as possible....Directing is mostly casting....Treat difficult moments as discoveries....Watch for and value happy accidents...Never, NEVER bully."

No link (the Journal's funny that way), so to read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning's paper, O.K.? It only costs a dollar, and you get the rest of the "Weekend Journal" section, too, not to mention our weekly Zagat Theater Poll, which is always great fun to read.

More tomorrow, probably, I hope....

Isaac Rosenfeld, Passage from Home

In my book "The Language Police," I gathered a list of more than 500 words that are routinely deleted from textbooks and tests by "bias review committees" employed by publishing companies, state education departments and the federal government. Among the forbidden words are "landlord," "cowboy," "brotherhood," "yacht," "cult" and "primitive." Such words are deleted because they are offensive to various groups--feminists, religious conservatives, multiculturalists and ethnic activists, to name a few.

I invited readers of the book to send me examples of language policing, and they did, by the score. A bias review committee for the state test in New Jersey rejected a short story by Langston Hughes because he used the words "Negro" and "colored person." Michigan bans a long list of topics from its state tests, including terrorism, evolution, aliens and flying saucers (which might imply evolution).

A textbook writer sent me the guidelines used by the Harcourt/Steck/Vaughn company to remove photographs that might give offense. Editors must delete, the guidelines said, pictures of women with big hair or sleeveless blouses and men with dreadlocks or medallions. Photographs must not portray the soles of shoes or anyone eating with the left hand (both in deference to Muslim culture). To avoid giving offense to those who cannot afford a home computer, no one may be shown owning a home computer. To avoid offending those with strong but differing religious views, decorations for religious holidays must never appear in the background.

A college professor informed me that a new textbook in human development includes the following statement: "As a folksinger once sang, how many roads must an individual walk down before you can call them an adult." The professor was stupefied that someone had made the line gender-neutral and ungrammatical by rewriting Bob Dylan's folk song "Blowin' in the Wind," which had simply asked: "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?"...

Read the whole thing here.

Does Wood really imagine that a writer thinks, "how do I... also manage to have my own style?" Doesn't your "own style" take care of itself if you solve the narrative problems of your story? For example, in The Sun also Rises, does Wood believe that Hemingway had one way he could write the book if he was just "talking like Jake" and didn't have his "own style", which he then rejected in favor of a way he could do both? Doesn't Hemingway's "own style" come precisely from how he imagines his narrator talks?

Yes and no. A writer like Hemingway achieves a greater degree of verisimilitude in his writing--his characters talking like "real" people--so it's easier to overlook the presence of the author's voice behind the narrator's. But in a book like Henry James's What Maisie Knew or, indeed, Vernon God Little, the author makes use of a larger vocabulary and more writerly expressions than his character could be expected to use. In Maisie the disjunction is so pronounced that it's hard not to take the novel as, in part, an exploration of the limits of verisimilitude. It's also a rebellion against the strict limits imposed on authorial voice by more naturalist strains of realism, and a blow for authorial liberty. It's hard to turn from such a novel to something even as comparatively seamless as Hemingway and not start looking for the seams.

The difference between Hemingway and James (especially late James) is that for the former, character resides in voice--in the characters' own language--and is best expressed through it. For the latter, the exposition of character requires a self-consciously literary language above and beyond the character's own voice. You can see the author's lips move, and you're meant to. Wood, I think, is drawn to the latter type of writer--even bad examples of the type like D.B.C. Pierre. Last week I mildly called Wood's positive review of Vernon God Little "surprising." What I really meant was "unaccountable." In the light of the talk on Bellow, though, you can perhaps begin to account for it: it starts to look less like a genuine response to the novel, and more like a rehearsal of a line of thinking that has been occupying Wood in his work on better writers.

This reader also questioned Wood's reference to characters' "confused consciousness," which was, well, confusing.

Are we to presume that you can write a novel and include didacticism if the mouthpiece has a clear, "unconfused" consciousness? Or does Wood assume that the creation of a character automatically creates a "confused consciousness" if that character is used to communicate ideas? Here, as elsewhere, Wood veers away from the truly interesting issues involved and commits a cardinal literary sin: falling in love with his own phrases.

It was in the Q&A, off the cuff, that Wood used this phrase, and he used it interchangeably with "average consciousness," which seemed closer to what he actually meant. It's the reporter's fault! This reader recommends Milan Kundera's Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed as books "that deal more pointedly with some of the same issues."

Another reader makes a point about Wood that had never occurred to me before, but that I agree with: he's much better at detraction than applause.

I thought you were a bit tame and lenient with James Wood; because he is so obviously better, and more severe and demanding, than almost anyone else, he does not receive some of the criticism he deserves. His negative writing is, to my mind, by far his best; he is much weaker in praise, too often allowing his own religious preferences to become his central subject, and equally often expounding on various elements of voice and narrative, in both cases with obscured judgment. So, for example, the obviously ridiculous recent Booker novel receives praise for its voice, or Bellow gets applause for his language and religious anguish that evoke Melville. In neither case is there an examination of the inwardness of character or the fidelity to human complication that Wood so often uses as yardsticks to cudgel, quite rightly in my view, the likes of DeLillo and Pynchon.

Right, insightful, and well-said.

UPDATE: Stephany Aulenback, filling in for Maud seamlessly as ever, posts a long excerpt from Dale Peck in defense of negative reviewing.

More as it happens. Assuming I open the front door.

Meanwhile, guess what? The Canadian government has handed me my arts angle on a silver platter. After the Conan O'Brien show taped in Toronto the last few days, with a Canadian government subsidy, Ottawa is scandalized by what they saw, and on the offensive:

Canada's government on Friday condemned a show by U.S. late-night television host Conan O'Brien that insulted people in French-speaking Quebec and seemed to suggest everyone in the province was homosexual.

Ottawa and the province of Ontario paid $760,000 to help O'Brien--who appears on the NBC television network--bring his show to Toronto for a week to boost the city's profile after a deadly SARS outbreak last year.

But the federal government said O'Brien had gone too far with the show broadcast on Thursday in which he went to Quebec, a province which has had separatist governments for much of the last 20 years and is a delicate political topic in Canada.

"We want to disassociate ourselves from the comments which were broadcast last night because we do not support them in any way," junior government minister Mauril Belanger told Parliament.

At one point in the show, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog--a hand puppet that is a regular on the show--said to a Quebecer: "You're French, you're obnoxious and you no speekay English." It told another: "I can smell your crotch from here."

O'Brien's team were also shown replacing street signs in the province with those that read "Quebecqueer Street" and "Rue des Pussies."

Alexa McDonough, a legislator for the left-leaning New Democrats, described the program as "racist filth" and "utterly vile" and demanded the government seek the return of the C$1 million subsidy.

This is pretty surreal. To someone who has a soft spot for most all things Canadian, it's also a glass of cold water in the face. Clearly a lot of the jokes that offended were allusions to the Cherry affair; as such, they seem at least as much aimed at Cherry as at the Québécois. If there's anything I know about Conan's humor, it's that it doles out "offense" indiscriminately.

But somehow I don't think you're going to talk much reason to people fuming about how downright insulting that Insult Comic Dog was. Gee, who'da thunk?

UPDATE: Slate rounds up the Canadian media coverage of this story.

John Rechy, author of the best-selling 1963 novel "City of Night" and winner of the PEN-USA West lifetime achievement award, is one of several prominent authors who have apparently pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon's highest rating. Mr. Rechy, who laughed about it when approached, sees it as a means to survival when online stars mean sales.

"That anybody is allowed to come in and anonymously trash a book to me is absurd," said Mr. Rechy, who, having been caught, freely admitted to praising his new book, "The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens," on Amazon under the signature "a reader from Chicago." "How to strike back? Just go in and rebut every single one of them."

[snip]

But even with reviewer privacy restored, many people say Amazon's pages have turned into what one writer called "a rhetorical war," where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies.

One well-known writer admitted privately--and gleefully--to anonymously criticizing a more prominent novelist who he felt had unfairly reaped critical praise for years. She regularly posts responses, or at least he thinks it is her, but the elegant rebuttals of his reviews are also written from behind a pseudonym.

Numbering 10 million and growing by tens of thousands each week, the reader reviews are the most popular feature of Amazon's sites, according to the company, which also culls reviews from more traditional critics like Publishers Weekly. Many authors applaud the democracy of allowing readers to voice their opinions, and rejoice when they see a new one posted--so long as it is positive.

But some authors say it is ironic that while they can for the first time face their critics on equal footing, so many people on both sides choose to remain anonymous. And some charge that the same anonymity that encourages more people to discuss books also spurs them to write reviews that they would never otherwise attach their names to.

Jonathan Franzen, author of "The Corrections," winner of the National Book Award, said that a first book by Tom Bissell last fall was "crudely and absurdly savaged" on Amazon in anonymous reviews he believed were posted by a group of writers whom Mr. Bissell had previously written about in the literary magazine The Believer.

"With the really flamingly negative reviews, I think it's always worth asking yourself what kind of person has time to write them," Mr. Franzen said. "I know that the times when I've been tempted to write a nasty review online, I have never had attractive motives." Mr. Franzen declined to say whether he had ever given in to such temptation.

The suspicion that the same group of writers, known as the Underground Literary Alliance, had anonymously attacked his friend Heidi Julavits prompted the novelist Dave Eggers to write a review last August calling Ms. Julavits's first novel "one of the best books of the year."

Mr. Eggers, whose memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," made him a literary celebrity, chose to post his review as "a reader from St. Louis, MO." But the review appeared under the name "David K Eggers" on Amazon's Canadian site on Monday, and Mr. Eggers confirmed by e-mail that he had written it.

Oh, that Dave Eggers, always so shy and retiring. Will he ever come out of his shell?

(Now, aren't you curious?)

ELYOT [seriously]: You mustn't be serious, my dear one, it's just what they want.

AMANDA: Who's they?

ELYOT: All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant. Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths. Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light.

AMANDA: If I laugh at everything, I must laugh at us too.

ELYOT: Certainly you must. We're figures of fun all right.

Noël Coward, Private Lives

In my dream, music pirating, by destroying the recording industry, and with it the concept of musicians getting paid for the recordings they have made, destroys the very concept of music recording. Instead of stars whose talent is primarily charisma rather than artistic substance, songwriters are the new stars, like they were when the music business consisted of sheet music publishers. Music then returns to its original state: if you want to listen, you have to be in the same room as the musicians. The ranks of paid performers swells--suddenly we all know several people who make a living singing or playing instruments. Musicians are as common as accountants. Better still, most of us spend a large part of our youth learning how to play instruments. The piano again furnishes every middle class home. And, because we are all so musically sophisticated, we never have to listen to disco during halftime at the Super Bowl again.

Needless to say, James has bought himself a ticket to Fantasy Island. But of course (as he says) it is a dream that he's recounting, one in which he envisions an ideal state by whose imaginary coordinates we might steer a bit closer to something that might actually come to pass.

Like, say, what? Well, I wrote a long essay for A Terry Teachout Reader called "Life Without Records" in which I speculated about the possible effects of the coming collapse of the classical recording industry (which I foresaw several years ago) on the culture of classical music. Here's some of what I wrote:

The collapse of the major classical labels and the rise of the Internet as a locus for decentralized recording activity will almost certainly prevent the re-emergence of anything remotely resembling the superstar system. What would classical music look like without superstars? A possible answer can be found by looking at classical ballet. Few ballet companies tour regularly, and some of the most important, like New York City Ballet, are rarely seen outside their home towns; videocassettes are a notoriously inadequate substitute for live performances, and thus sell poorly. For these reasons, the major media devote little space to ballet, meaning that there are never more than one or two international superstars at any given moment. Most balletgoers spend the bulk of their time attending performances by the resident companies of the cities in which they live, and the dances, not the dancers, are the draw. (It is The Nutcracker that fills seats, not the Sugar Plum Fairy.)

In the United States, regional opera works in much the same way. Only a half-dozen major American companies can afford to import superstars; everyone else hires solid second-tier singers with little or no name recognition, often using local artists to fill out their casts. Audiences are attracted not by the stars, but by the show--that is, by dramatically compelling productions of musically interesting operas. If the larger culture of classical music were to be reorganized along similar lines, then concert presenters, instead of presenting a small roster of international celebrity virtuosos, might be forced to engage a wider range of lower-priced soloists, possibly including local artists and ensembles with a carefully cultivated base of loyal fans. Similarly, regional symphony orchestras would have to adopt more imaginative programming strategies in order to attract listeners who now buy tickets mainly to hear superstar soloists play popular concertos in person. It is possible, too, that with the breakup of the single worldwide market created by the superstar system, we might see a similar disintegration of the blandly eclectic "international" style of performance that came to dominate classical music in the Seventies. Performers who play for the moment, rather than for the microphones of an international record company primarily interested in its bottom line, are less likely to play it safe--and more likely to play interesting music.

In the midst of these seemingly endless uncertainties, one aspect of life without records is not only possible but probable: henceforth, nobody in his right mind will look to classical music as a means of making very large sums of money. Of all the ways in which the invention of the phonograph changed the culture of classical music, perhaps the most fateful was that it turned a local craft into an international trade, thereby attracting the attention of entrepreneurs who were more interested in money than art. Needless to say, there can be no art without money, but the recording industry, by creating a mass market for music, sucked unprecedentedly large amounts of money into the classical-music culture, thereby insidiously and inexorably altering its artistic priorities....

Read the whole thing here--when the book comes out, that is. (You can order it in advance by clicking on the link.)

(1) What book have you owned longest--the actual copy, I mean?

(2) If you could wish a famous painting out of existence, what would it be?

(3) If you had to live in a film, what would it be?

(4) If you had to live in a song, what would it be?

(5) What's the saddest work of art you know? And does experiencing it make you similarly sad?

The good news is that Our Girl will most likely be putting in her oar from time to time, and I'll be back in Manhattan Thursday afternoon to resume Balanchine-related activities, not to mention a certain amout of blogging.

Be nice while I'm gone, O.K.?

"Obmittatus studia," Carmina Burana (trans. Helen Waddell)

Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, full of charm.

The source is an essay called "Morality and Literature," first published in Cahiers du Sud (January 1944). However, the following quotation, tracked down by one intrepid reader, seems to vindicate my memory without contradicting the above. Here Weil claims that the greatest literature is that which manages to make good interesting, and thus comes closest to a particular kind of realism:

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating. Therefore 'imaginative literature' is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both). It only escapes from this alternative if in some way it passes over to the side of reality through the power of art--and only geniuses can do that.

This can be found in an essay called "Evil," reprinted in The Simone Weil Reader and Gravity and Grace.

For the purposes of the first question, "What book have you owned longest?" I'll only count the books that live with me, not those that still reside in my parents' house. 99% of the books with me here in Chicago date from my college career or later. Of the handful of older books, the oldest by far is a hardcover copy of Ellen Raskin's Newberry Medal winner The Westing Game, published in 1978. Twenty-five years--not too shabby. Why, that's as long as some very accomplished bloggers have been around!

I wonder whether kids are still reading this book. It's a deeply silly and extremely devious mystery about an elaborate game created by an eccentric millionaire to decide who will inherit his fortune. When I discovered it, I thought I had died and gone to literary heaven.

As much as I adored The Westing Game, there were other books I loved as well, and I'm not sure why it's the only one of its vintage in Chicago. I can't remember making a conscious decision to bring it with me, and I haven't taken it off the shelf in recent memory, until today.

Some runners-up from the high school years: a well-worn paperback copy of Alain-Fournier's amazing The Wanderer (Le Grand Meaulnes in french); Charles Baxter's Harmony of the World; the Norton Heart of Darkness, complete with embarrassing marginalia; and, natch, some Raymond Carver.

Job One: sleep late. After that, I have quite a few postings bouncing around in my head, and I'll write them as the spirit moves me. I might even do some work on the Balanchine book. And I think I'll have a piece in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, subject as always to the vagaries of newspaper scheduling.

All this and more after I wake up, O.K.?

Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander

Every time I visit Smalltown, I'm struck all over again by the sheer size of the United States, something that never fails to impress visitors from elsewhere, though Americans take it for granted. We're not the only big country in the world, but I wonder if we might not be the only one whose citizens commonly travel such long distances by such circuitous routes. Perhaps Canada is like that. A Canadian friend of mine tells me that Joni Mitchell's "Black Crow" sums up her life pretty accurately: "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?" On the other hand, I doubt a resident of downtown St. Petersburg would make his way to Siberia all that often, even if his mother did live there. When my mother was a girl, Americans didn't take such journeys lightly, and her parents were both born in an age when eight-hour trips were more likely to be made by horse. You can't get very far on a horse in eight hours. Back then, the world was what you saw outside your window. Now it's what you see on TV.

I'd never do it again, but I once traveled all the way to Smalltown and back again in a single day to attend my grandmother's funeral, an experience I wrote about many years ago in a memoir of my small-town youth:

Once upon a time, the children of America stayed close to the nest and ate Sunday dinner with their parents and went to work in the family business. Now they seek their destinies in faraway lands called Chicago and Paducah and Memphis and New York, though they come home as often as they can: for Christmas usually, for funerals always.

I glanced at my watch. My brother would be doing the driving, and he drove nearly as well as my father, so I had nothing to worry about. I squeezed my father's hand and listened to the preacher. A few hours later, I looked down at the lights of New York through the scratched window of a jet airliner, marveling at the thought that I could eat breakfast in New York and go to bed in New York and, in the middle of the day, help to bury an eighty-four-year-old woman in a cemetery deep in the Missouri wildwood. Perhaps I was not so far from home as I thought. Perhaps I had not traveled so far as I thought.

Perhaps, indeed, I haven't--and in some ways, Smalltown and New York are growing closer every day. My brother, for example, knows the rumor du jour about John Kerry, not because he heard it on the evening news or read it in the Smalltown Standard-Democrat but because he has a computer and a high-speed connection to the Internet. Nevertheless, Smalltown is still a long way from New York, not just in clock time but by other yardsticks as well. No sooner had I unpacked my bag, for instance, than my sister-in-law was asking me if I'd seen a preview of The Passion of the Christ, and whether I thought it'd be any good. They're talking about Mel Gibson in Smalltown, and not the way they're talking about him in New York, either, even though the people here also watch Seinfeld reruns and read blogs. It's a big country, big enough that there are still plenty of nice places to live that are two hours from the nearest airport, big enough to be infinitely more varied than a lifelong Manhattanite who gets all his news from the New York Times can imagine.

I love that difference, and the vastness that makes it possible. On Sunday afternoon, I climbed into the shuttle bus (a minivan, actually) and headed down I-55 from St. Louis to Smalltown. It's a beautiful drive, especially north of Ste. Genevieve and most especially in winter, when the leaves have fallen from the trees that cover the rolling hills, leaving behind a narrow but subtle palette of colors, nothing but tan, brown, grey, and dark pine green, all set in a big bowl of blue sky, with an occasional bright billboard to remind you that people live here, too. As I drifted off to sleep just south of Ste. Genevieve, the radio in the van was playing the Eagles; when I woke up again, the hills had flattened out and the radio was playing Dwight Yoakum. That's how I knew I was close to Smalltown. I always know my home when I see it again.

Sydney Smith, letter to Lady Holland, September 9, 1809

Originally McGee's first name was to have been Dallas. Then John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and MacDonald didn't want to have that association. When he was casting about for a new name, fellow writer MacKinlay Kantor suggested that Air Force bases had nice-sounding names, and MacDonald settled on Travis.

Various means were considered to enable readers to distinguish one book from another in the series. Use of numbers was rejected because readers might think they had to read them in sequence. Eventually he and his publisher came up with color, and MacDonald went back and dropped color references into the four manuscripts he already had written.

MacDonald placed McGee across Florida in Fort Lauderdale because he had a hunch the books would catch on and didn't want his privacy in Sarasota disturbed by gawking McGee enthusiasts.

Gawking TMFTML enthusiasts, on the other hand, can train their binoculars here. And don't forget this more out-of-the-way gaping spot.

A song where everything's still the same:

Everybody's had a few
Now they're talking about who knows who
I'm going back to the Crescent City
Where everything's still the same
This town has said what it has to say
Now I'm after that back highway
And the longest bridge
I've ever crossed over Pontchartrain
Tu le ton temps that's what we say
We used to dance the night away
Me and my sister, me and my brother
We used to walk down by the river
Mama lives in Mandeville
I can hardly wait until
I can hear my Zydeco
and laissez le bon ton roulet
And take rides in open cars
My brother knows where the best bars are
Let's see how these blues'll do
in the town where the good times stay
Tu le ton temps that's all we say
We used to dance the night away
Me and my sister me and my brother
We used to walk down by the river

That's Lucinda Williams' "Crescent City." The appeal of this song--aside from the gorgeous fiddle--is how the Crescent City and environs are static, but alive: full of walking, driving, gossip, dancing. And just in case all that activity isn't enough to keep things from getting stale, the song contains the outside space of wherever the narrator is returning from.

Of course, everything in "Crescent City" is really just in the narrator's head--the song takes place while she's on the road home. Yet the scenes she imagines are so vivid (helped out by that fiddle), it's easy to forget that they're only imagined. In this, the song has something in common with a poem so famous, it's hard to hear freshly:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of dancing daffodils;
Along the lake, beneath the trees,
Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee;
A poet could not but be gay
In such a laughing company.
I gazed, and gazed, but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought--

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Before the standard-bearers get their noses all out of joint over the comparison, let me state that I am not putting Lucinda on the same artistic plane as Bill. (Now I'll probably hear from the people who think Wordsworth suffers from the comparison!) I'm just pointing out that the song and the poem are each about the memory of their apparent subject. But they both make their remembered scenes so vivid that you easily forget they're really about the reveries of a woman behind the wheel of a car and a guy on a couch.

My runner-up is David Bowie's "Kooks."

No book is completely real to the author until he holds the very first copy in his hands. Until then, it becomes real by stages--the manuscript, the proofs, the dust jacket, the bound galleys--and the fact that it's actually going to be published sinks in a little deeper with each additional step. By the time you've seen a half-dozen books through the press, you're not likely to be surprised by any part of the process, but my heart still leaped when I pulled the dust jacket out of the envelope and held it in my hand.

I know the Teachout Reader isn't going to be a best seller, and I've been around the track often enough to suspect that I'm going to get my share of kick-in-the-crotch reviews (which I won't read--I'm scrupulous about that). That's par for the course. On the other hand, I brought one copy of the dust jacket home with me, knowing my mother would take it to the office and show it off to her colleagues, which she did. If she could, she'd blow it up and slap it on a billboard in the center of town. She's like that.

It's not that my mother reads everything I write, least of all "About Last Night." She hasn't figured out blogs yet, nor is she especially media-savvy. We went to the neighborhood video store yesterday to rent a couple of movies to watch during my visit, and as I was picking my way through the westerns, she called out, "Oh, look! Have you heard of this one? I think Bill Murray's always funny." I turned around and saw her holding a copy of Lost in Translation. I nodded my head and said, "You might like that one, Mom. Let's rent it." I'll tell you what she thinks of it tomorrow.

I'm sitting in my old bedroom as I write these words, listening to the whistle of a freight train off in the distance. It'll keep on blowing for several more minutes, because the tracks run all the way through town, and it takes slow trains a long time to clear the city limits. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal about riding the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, and in the first paragraph I mentioned the trains that rumble through Smalltown. "Their tracks criss-crossed the main street of the small Missouri town where I spent my childhood," I wrote, "and their lonesome whistles cleaved the night air as they carried sleeping strangers to places I'd never been." The editor kicked the first draft back to me with a terse note saying that "lonesome whistles" was a cliché. He was right, so I changed it to "braying whistles," which I guess was an improvement. I didn't bother to tell him that I was thinking of a song by Hank Williams:

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I'm so lonesome I could cry

I guess that's a cliché, too, at least when you see it written down, but when Hank Williams sings it, you know better. Train whistles really do sound lonesome when you hear them blowing at midnight in a small Missouri town whose streets are empty, as they usually are in this end of town at this time of night. Smalltown has a curfew, one which my niece violated a few weeks ago. It seems that she and a few friends of hers were festooning a house with toilet paper. Somebody called 911, and all at once five black-and-whites showed up.

The next day, my brother apologized to the police chief. "There's one thing I've got to know, though," he added. "Why did it take five cars?"

The chief laughed. "Was that your daughter? Well, there wasn't nothing much going on last night, and I reckon those other three cars just drove by to see what all the fuss was about. It wasn't like they had anything else to do."

That's where I come from.

A staggering number of poems here follow a single trite formula, presenting the news of war as an unpleasant intrusion upon an (American) life lived in harmony with nature and characterized by a taken-for-granted feeling of safety and tranquility. Here, for example, is Virginia Adair's "Casualty," the book's opening poem, in its entirety: "Fear arrived at my door / with the evening paper / Headlines of winter and war / It will be a long time to peace / And the green rains." Adair's poem is followed immediately by "Cranes in August," in which Kim Addonizio describes her daughter making cranes out of paper while outside "gray doves" coo, and "Geese, October 2002," in which Lucy Adkins, hearing geese flying above her "north to the nesting grounds," reflects that while in Washington "our country's leaders / are voting for war," in Nebraska "the geese fly over / the old wisdom in their feathers." This pattern is broken by poem #4 (Afzal-Khan's "Osama" ode), but it is resumed in poem #5, wherein Kelli Russell Agodon describes her daughter picking up ants on the beach, trying "to help them / before the patterns of tides / reach their lives. . . . Here war is only newsprint."

And that's just the beginning of the A's. Throughout these poems, the implicit argument is: Why can't the whole world be as peaceable as my little corner of it is? The poets appear to believe that their serene lifestyles are somehow a reflection of their own wisdom and virtue; they seem to think they are in possession of some great yet elementary cosmic knowledge from which the rest of us can profit. What they evidently do not realize is that what they are celebrating in these poems is a security for which they have to thank (horrors) the U.S. military and a prosperity that they owe to (horrors again) American capitalism. Entirely absent from their facile scribblings, indeed, is any sign of awareness that this "blue planet" is a terribly dangerous place and that the affluence, safety, and liberty they enjoy, and that they write about with such vacuous self-congratulation, are not the natural, default state of humankind but are, rather, hard-won and terribly vulnerable achievements of civilization.

September 11 changed the world. But it seems not to have penetrated very deeply into the imaginations of many contemporary American poets, who, as this anthology amply demonstrates, continue to go through familiar motions, writing smug, trivial verses in which their principal goal is to proclaim their own sensitivity. This was never enough in the first place, and it is certainly not enough now. Confronted at last with a big theme, too many of our poets have only proven how feebly equipped they are to address questions of real substance and complexity. This is not to suggest that anyone is necessarily wrong to oppose a given war or disapprove of a given president (of whom the present critic, for what it's worth, is no fan either). It is only to say that when civilization is in crisis, a serious poet owes it something more than glib, reflexive, one-dimensional posturing. It is to say that poets so transparently rich in self-regard might manage to muster a bit more respect for their art, their readers, and their civilization. And it is to say that an intelligent poetry of dissent ought to exhibit signs of independent thought, of mature moral reflection, of an understanding of the concept of social responsibility that extends somewhat beyond marching and button-wearing, of a solemn recognition that this is bigger than me. To turn from these vapid self-advertisements (in which the level of political thought and expression is on a par with that of your average boy band being asked in an interview on MTV Europe what they think of President Bush) to the war poems of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon or, say, Auden's "September 1, 1939"--the most famous line of which, "We must love one another or die," is actually misquoted in Hamill's book--is to leap across a chasm whose breadth shames not only most of the poets collected here but, alas, the entire flimsy house of cards that is contemporary American poetry.

The essay extends Bawer's critique of contemporary poetry in his book Prophets and Professors. As alternatives to poetry against the war, Bawer recommends recent books by Joseph Harrison, Timothy Murphy, Gerry Cambridge, and Deborah Warren.

The point being...see you Friday.

As for his attempt to crack wise about my knowledge of art history, I'll leave it to those bloggers privileged to have viewed the Teachout Museum. Go get him, Lizzie! (And if he's trying to make fun of OGIC, too, he's a dead man....)

I was reading a few of your articles and noticed biographical details scattered throughout the prose. My suggestion is that you gather them all together, fill in the gaps and post the expanded "about me" as a permanent addition to your blog. Where are you from, why did you become a critic, and where did you get your first break, long-term goals, etc. What could be more interesting for your regular readers?

A lot of things, actually. It's not that I'm averse to autobiography--indeed, I once went so far as to commit a memoir--but like most natural-born short hitters, I find that I prefer as a rule to salt my writings with personal detail rather than serving it up as a main course. I did try squashing the story of my professional life into an annotated resumé, but the results came out sounding so stiff that I decided not to post them. I'd just as soon keep on telling my tale, such as it is, in dribs and drabs.

Since we're on the subject of me, my brother and his daughter were looking at Smalltown High School yearbooks at the dinner table last night, some of which were published back when I edited the high-school newspaper. That was--gulp--30 years ago. As my niece made fun of the hair styles of 1974, I found myself recalling some of the ways in which I first became aware of the larger world of art and culture, and it occurred to me that in lieu of a more formal chronicle, it might be interesting to draw up a list of cultural firsts:

My mother said two things that stayed with me:

(1) She'd never heard of Scarlett Johannson. "At first I didn't think she was very pretty," she said, "but then I changed my mind. Isn't her skin beautiful?"

(2) About two-thirds of the way through the film, she remarked, "They didn't have to spend much time learning the dialogue, did they?"

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

Here's some recommended reading for the interim:

Maud's musings on writers and childhood, complete with links to her own off-blog writing.

Peter Campbell in the LRB on late Vuillard.

Jim Treacher hails the "puppet episode" of Angel, comparing it to the tremendous Buffy musical and making me wish I'd never stopped watching the show. Perhaps one of my Angel-watching correspondents will be moved to file a report.

Joan Acocella--surprise!--likes Robert Altman's ballet film The Company. Robert Gottlieb, another dance critic assigned to review the film, pretty much hated it.

That's all from thawing Chicago for now.

William Haggard, A Cool Day for Killing

I'm too tired to go on at length, but the centerpiece of the evening was the world premiere of "Concert in the Garden," a new piece Schneider wrote for her big band plus Gary Versace on accordion and Luciana Souza on vocals. The title comes from a poem by Octavio Paz (see above), and the music is a Messiaen-like tapestry of idealized bird calls--a full-fledged piece of jazz impressionism, unusually rich and involving.

After the intermission, the band played a revised version of Bulerias, Soleas y Rumbas, premiered last January at Lincoln Center, an occasion about which I wrote as follows in my Washington Post column:

Jazz at Lincoln Center has never done anything more important than commissioning this piece. It's no secret that Schneider is the foremost big-band composer of her generation, but this powerful large-scale work, in which she blends jazz and flamenco with the skill of an alchemist, is so good that I hesitate to limit its significance by calling it big-band music, or even jazz. It is as tightly woven and emotionally compelling as a symphony, and I think it ought to be seriously considered for next year's Pulitzer Prize in music. For that matter, I'm damned if I know why Schneider hasn't received a MacArthur Fellowship. I can't think of anyone in jazz--or any other art form--who deserves it more.

This time around, Schneider added a flamenco dancer, La Conja, to thrilling effect, and the piece itself was even more impressive on second hearing. If you missed it, the Maria Schneider Orchestra will be going into the studio in a couple of weeks to record a new album, on which Bulerias, Soleas y Rumbas will figure prominently.

Warning: Schneider is no longer selling her CDs in stores, so to buy this one, you'll need to go to her Web site and sign up. Do it now--and while you're at it, mark your calendar for March 18, April 29, and June 17, the three remaining performances in the Maria Schneider Orchestra's Hunter College concert series. I really, truly flew all the way back from Smalltown, U.S.A., just to hear this one, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Next time, I'll make sure I don't have to.

The world, a double blossom, opens:
Sadness of having come.
Joy of being here.

I walk lost in my own center.

Octavio Paz, "Concert in the Garden"

Anyone who's made a close study of Bonnard's paintings will have no trouble finding traces of the French master's aesthetic in the pictures that have now been brought together in the Painter's Progress exhibition, which focuses on the year 1949. This was the year in which Rothko perfected his own mastery of the paintings he called "dramas," which most of us regard as some of the most beautiful abstract paintings in the entire modern canon.

It has been admitted that Bonnard was an unlikely figure to influence any painter associated with the Abstract Expressionists, who prided themselves on their independence from the School of Paris. And it goes without saying that Rothko never acknowledged the debt. Yet, as D.H. Lawrence once said, "Trust the tale, not the teller of the tale," meaning, of course, that a writer's or artist's work must be judged on the basis of what it is, not on the basis of descriptive claims. Unless prompted by Rothko, I doubt that any visitor to Rothko: A Painter's Progress would regard this beautifully installed exhibition as a show of "dramas." But thanks to what we now know about Rothko's interest in Bonnard, this exhibition turns out to be an even richer experience than it might otherwise have been....

Read the whole thing here. The show is only up through Feb. 23, so if you didn't go when I wrote about it last month (and if not, why not?), don't delay.

The first was horrible:

According to the program, "Drowning Crow" was "inspired by" Chekhov's "The Seagull." Nothing wrong with that, except that what Ms. Taylor really means is "adapted from," which is another thing altogether. To be sure, the characters are all black and the action has been relocated from Czarist Russia to the Gullah Islands of South Carolina, but otherwise "Drowning Crow" is a near-direct transposition of "The Seagull," partly recast in slam-poetry English but with large chunks of dialogue left untouched. "I liberally sampled from Chekhov," Ms. Taylor said in a New York Times interview. "Other times, I just riffed." (I know a better word.) The result--not to put too fine a point on it--is bizarre, with the characters alternating between jive and translatorese to no obvious purpose or good effect....

The second was a winner:

Mr. McNally has neatly bookended his chief theatrical preoccupations in the titles of the two one-act plays that make up this double bill, "Full Frontal Nudity" and "Prelude and Liebestod." The second and more substantial half is about a bisexual conductor suspiciously reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein (Richard Thomas), his unfaithful but loving wife (Isabella Rossellini), the sourpuss concertmaster of his orchestra (Michael Countryman), a male groupie (Yul Vázquez), and the soprano with whom the conductor is performing the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" at a concert (Jennifer Mudge). All five characters deliver funny, knowing interior monologues as Mr. Thomas leads an imaginary orchestra in a complete performance of the Wagner--very believably, too....

No link, so get thee to a newsstand, hand over a dollar, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section and read the whole thing, plus much, much more.

In this week's issue (of 19-26 February) of Time Out NY Maureen Shelly offers a literary weblog overview (the article is apparently not available online.) The weblogs she features are: the Literary Saloon, Bookslut ("a favorite among young writers"), Maud Newton ("covers a stunningly broad range of literary news"), About Last Night ("offers a more sophisticated take on the book biz"), Beatrice ("Hogan maintains a civil tone in his critiques, thereby upping his credibility factor"), and the registration-requiring Publishers Lunch.

Needless to say, all the aforementioned blogs are to be found in "Sites to See," along with plenty of others that are no less deserving of your attention. We admit to being especially pleased, though, to share space with Supermaud, if only because she promised to go see the Milton Avery show at the Phillips Collection in Washington this weekend, then come back and tell us all about it. She's so cool.

Oh, yes, in case you were wondering, I haven't opened my mailbox yet. I can't get up the nerve. Nor have I caught up with my blogwatching. But I will, once I get another chunk of the Balanchine book written, not to mention a full night's sleep, which I need most desperately. Right at this moment I feel like Leon Trotsky, post-axe.

See you Saturday.

How about that? Are you impressed? This do I for my true readers. And now...a shower. Followed by a cab. Followed by Fiddler on the Roof, about which I'll be writing in next Friday's Wall Street Journal.

That's my life. Sounds crazy, no?

That's strange enough, I suppose, but here's something even stranger: I read Jeffrey Meyers' Somerset Maugham: A Life starting with the source notes, after which I read the book itself from last page to first. Once finished, I re-read it in the normal fashion. All this took two days, and now I'm ready for another book.

My guess is that two passes through Somerset Maugham: A Life will be quite enough, not because Maugham's life wasn't interesting but because Jeffrey Meyers' biography is of the sort typically described by tactful critics as "workmanlike." The same thing could have been said of his previous biographies of (pause for deep breath) Orwell, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, and Robert Frost. Those are just the ones I've read, but there are plenty of others, Meyers being a full-time professional biographer, and here as before, his writing is unfussy but unstylish, his criticism not very insightful. If a great biography is the literary equivalent of a ten-course dinner prepared by a master chef, then Somerset Maugham: A Life is more like one of those freeze-dried meals dished up to astronauts: perfectly edible, even tasty if you're hungry enough, but more functional than enjoyable. Meyers' book-reportish summing-up of Maugham's career will show you what I mean:

Maugham's current reputation has eclipsed that of his old rivals: Shaw, Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. More versatile than any modern writer, he wrote outstanding works in every genre: plays, stories and novels, essays, travel books and autobiographies. His exotic settings, engaging characters and riveting plots, his clear style, skillful technique and sardonic narrator, his dramatic flair and grasp of irony continue to attract a wide audience.

Oh, dear.

It occurs to me that reading such a book backwards might be my subconscious way of making it more aesthetically appealing. It definitely adds a touch of suspense, since you keep running into mysterious characters along the way who aren't fully identified until much later on. But if that's why I do it, why on earth did I start with the footnotes this time around? Perhaps that's simply a deformation professionelle of a practicing biographer. I happen to like footnotes, so much so that I made a point of tucking a few choice anecdotes into the notes for The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken in order to ensure that those who shared my taste would be pleasantly surprised by their perseverance.

For this reason, I was amused to find this testy paragraph in the source notes for Somerset Maugham: A Life:

In his will Maugham specified that none of his unpublished writings should be printed after his death and that no assistance should be given to his biographer. Though the Royal Literary Fund has received all his royalties, they felt no moral or legal obligation to follow the terms of his bequest, and contravened his will by authorizing a biography and by granting permission to publish his letters. Donors who leave money to the fund should be warned that the explicit terms of their will may be completely ignored.

Now that's my idea of a really superior footnote, well worth digging out of the back matter of a biography. Here's another:

In a presentation copy of a 1948 reprint of Ashenden, Maugham wrote: "To Raymond Chandler, who has given the author of this book both in sickness and in health, many hours of undiluted happiness."

Meyers even throws in a bit of dish. This note, for instance, refers to a now-forgotten writer by the name of David Posner who as a young man seduced the elderly Maugham:

Posner--who later married, published some poetry and died in 1985--was drawn to elderly homosexual writers. He once told me that he had courted Thomas Mann in Princeton.

Max Beerbohm could have spun a whole essay out of those two sentences.

As that last note suggests, Maugham led a life generously seasoned with scandal, but he's not the sort of semi-obscure author who deserves to be remembered only for his sex life. Though I wouldn't call him a Great Writer by any means, he did turn out a dozen or so first-class short stories whose astringent disillusion and plain, direct prose are as satisfying as a salty snack (I especially like "The Outstation" and "The Alien Corn"), as well as one of the very best comic novels of the twentieth century, Cakes and Ale, whose first sentence can be found in the "Opening Lines, Great" section of my electronic commonplace book: "I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, and it's important, the matter is more often important to him than to you." How could you not keep on reading after that?

Such a minor master surely deserves to be memorialized in a decent biography, and Somerset Maugham: A Life, if less than scintillating, fills the bill with just enough room to spare. Meyers even manages to find room for a charming Maugham anecdote that I'd never heard. Fittingly, it's about Cakes and Ale:

He liked it the best of all his books and, when looking for something good to read one evening, remarked: "What a pity that I wrote Cakes and Ale. It would be the very thing."

Yes, there's a footnote.

Max Beerbohm, Mainly on the Air

Norman Podhoretz is an acclaimed author of nine books on subjects ranging from contemporary literature to foreign policy and was editor-in-chief of Commentary for 35 years. His most recent book is The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings from the 1950s through the 1990s. Terry Teachout is the music critic of Commentary and a contributor to Time and The Washington Post, among other publications....They will discuss the intersections of politics and culture in the last half century.

The jousting begins at eight o'clock. For more information, or to order a ticket, go here.

"I just feel it's indecent that if Naomi Wolf did not have the courage to pursue the matter at the time, or in the 1990's, and put her own reputation on the line, then to bring all of this down on a man who is in his 70's and has health problems--who has become a culture hero to readers in the humanities around the world--to drag him into a ‘he said/she said' scenario so late in the game, to me demonstrates a lack of proportion and a basic sense of fair play," said Ms. Paglia, who is professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she said she helped institute that university's sexual-harassment policies in the 1980s.

"At the beginning of the 90's, people said, ‘Oh, Naomi Wolf, this great thinker,'" said Ms. Paglia. "But what she's managed to do in 10 years is marginalize herself as a chronicler of teenage angst. She doesn't want to leave that magic island when she was the ripening teenager. How many times do we have to relive Naomi Wolf's growing up? How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage-heartbreak years? This is regressive! It's childish! Move on! Move on! Get on to menopause next!"

Read the whole thing here.

I really wish Camille would start blogging....

One of the most fascinating aspects of blogging is the unexpected speed with which it has evolved into a collective "gatekeeper" for traditional media--a way of sifting through tons of dirt and finding the gems. I now "read" most magazines and newspapers not directly but by way of links, some of the best of which come from artsjournal.com, "About Last Night"'s invaluable host. (You can read it by clicking on the artsjournal.com logo in the upper-left-hand corner of this page.) It was because of artsjournal.com, for example, that I became aware of yesterday's Women's Wear Daily story about how magazine newsstand sales are plummeting:

According to official figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, out of the 472 magazines it tracks, 319 reported newsstand declines and their combined newsstand sales fell 5.9 percent (3.3 million copies), not counting new titles reporting sales for the first time.

The big picture looks even worse for magazines too small to be counted by the ABC. According to the International Periodical Distributors Association, which tracks 95 percent of all magazines, net unit sales fell 13.4 percent in the second half of 2003 compared with the previous year, and that's after sales dropped 12.9 percent in the first half (when there was a war on).

"You can't blame Iraq, and you can't blame the economy.... Well, I guess you can, but how long can you keep doing that?" said Chip Block, vice chairman of the subscription fulfillment company USApubs.

Nowhere in the story does the author suggest that blogging might be pulling newsstand sales downward--but I have no doubt that it is. In fact, my guess is that the emergence of blogging will transform the periodical business beyond recognition, as more people come to rely on links as their primary means of reading most magazines.

Links being as important as they are, it strikes me that bloggers ought to be scrupulous about giving credit where credit is due--and not merely to the original publication, either. I don't read Women's Wear Daily, I read artsjournal.com, and it would have been implicitly dishonest for me to mention that WWD story without also mentioning how I found out about it in the first place.

Here's how Our Girl and I decide when and where to give credit:

(1) If a story has already been widely linked throughout the blogosphere, we don't usually attempt to give credit for the original link. (Aside from everything else, we don't always know who spotted it first.)

(2) If the story appeared in a widely read print-media publication such as the New York Times, we generally don't give credit, either--that is, unless the blogger in question dug a tidbit out of that publication that might otherwise have gone overlooked, or enhanced its interest by commenting on it in a memorable way.

(3) In all other cases, we credit the blogsource. (The formula I most often use is "Courtesy of blogsource.com...")

Do we slip up on occasion? Sure. I often bookmark stories cherrypicked from the blogosphere, and by the time I get around to looking at the bookmarks, I've sometimes forgotten where I found them. But that's a mistake, not a policy. Whenever we can, we credit the source.

This isn't merely a matter of common courtesy, or even collegiality. OGIC and I don't give credit to such fellow bloggers as Supermaud, Sarah, Lizzie, Cinetrix, and Chicha just to be chummy (though that's part of the fun). We do it because we want you to read them, too. The potential audience for litblogs and arts blogs is infinitely larger than the number of people currently reading them. The more such blogs you visit on a regular basis, the more interested you'll become in the larger phenomenon of blogging, and--we hope--the more often you'll come back to dance with the one who brung you.

Repeat after me: Giving credit to blogsources for borrowed links is good for everybody in the blogosphere.

Not all bloggers feel this way. Certain of our colleagues are bad--a few notoriously so--about giving credit to other bloggers. I'll name no names, but I will say that the stingy practice of link-poaching has lately come in for quite a bit of backstage criticism.

Needless to say, others can and will do as they please. That's in the nature of the blogosphere. But at "About Last Night," we believe that the larger interests of litblogging and arts blogging are best served by crediting the sources of our links, and we strongly recommend that our fellow bloggers do the same thing.

Here endeth the lesson. We return you now to our regularly scheduled program.

In Bernardo Bertolucci's new film, "The Dreamers," three nubile cinéastes play film-mimicking games. In an extremely Parisian equivalent to collecting baseball cards, they act out favorite film scenes and then impose sexual penalties on one another if the identity of the scene cannot be guessed. Thus the heroine is seen flouncing around her apartment à la Garbo in "Queen Christina," and pretending to be in the "Blonde Venus" tropical conga line.

Most of us react less literally to what we see on screen. We process and absorb it, sometimes even echo it. What more? How often is there a direct cause-and-effect link between events on screen and behavior in the real world? Movies spawn fads and fashions, but can they change real attitudes and catalyze real action? Starting Wednesday, Mel Gibson's graphic re-enactment of the Crucifixion may offer answers to some of these questions....

Read the whole thing here, including some off-the-cuff remarks from yours truly. Maslin tracked me down last week in Smalltown, U.S.A., where just about everybody I ran into wanted to know whether I'd seen a preview of The Passion of the Christ. I hadn't, and haven't, but I still tried to talk as much sense as I could. (I even managed to quote W.H. Auden and work in a plug for artsjournal.com, no small trick when your whole family is pestering you to get off the phone and come to supper.) The verdict is yours.

Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

The phone is off the hook now. See you Monday, unless my resolve weakens.

But the saddest work of art I know? King Lear. Two things about this play especially make me feel like I've been drawn and quartered: the rift between a father and daughter, and the cruel way that tragedy springs from mere foolishness, from what should be forgivable. Shouldn't it?

So Terry, despite my taking an Incomplete for now, will you let us in on your answers?

Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan

As for me, I can hardly wait--and I know Bookslut will be excited, too. (Oh, and Jessa...the hits just keep on coming. Thanks again!)

P.S. Return of the Reluctant has his own take on link-poaching--and unlike me, he shoots his prisoner. Go get 'em, Ed.

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

The play was produced by the Astoria Performing Arts Center, which obviously doesn't have any money, since it was staged in the round on the floor of a basketball court in a church gymnasium. The audience was small, the set nonexistent, the dress modern, the décor a handful of tattered pennants--and I loved every minute of it. The cast was young and lively, and John Hurley, the director, kept things spare and simple, letting Shakespeare be the star of the show. I don't mean the production was static. It was decidedly physical, even a bit goofy at times. Yet nowhere did the players get in the way of the play, nor did Hurley smother Shakespeare's words in his own tendentious ideas.

As I watched, I thought of the NEA's new Shakespeare in American Communities project, about which you may or may not know. According to the Web site, this initiative, "the largest tour of Shakespeare in American history....will bring professional Shakespeare productions and related educational activities to 100 small and mid-sized communities in all 50 states." It's recently taken a certain amount of stick from big-city critics who have the addled notion that the National Endowment for the Arts is somehow wreaking havoc on the arts in America by sending Shakespeare on tour instead of Tony Kushner. To paraphrase George Orwell, only an intellectual could say something that stupid--but, then, I doubt very much that the intellectuals saying such stupid things have spent a lot of time watching shows like the APA's As You Like It in places like the Presbyterian Church of Astoria, much less looking at the glowing faces of the people who come to see them.

I did, and as I looked, I thought of something I wrote for The Wall Street Journal five years ago, long before I thought of becoming a drama critic:

We are not accustomed to thinking of art forms as technologies, but that is what they are--which means they can be rendered moribund by new technological developments, in the way that silent films gave way to talkies and radio to TV. Well into the eighteenth century, for example, most of the West's great storytellers wrote plays, not novels. But the development of modern printing techniques made it feasible for books to be sold at lower prices, allowing storytellers to reach large numbers of readers individually; they then turned to writing novels, and by the twentieth century the theatrical play had come to be widely regarded as a cultural backwater. To be sure, important plays continue to be written and produced, but few watch them (unless they are made into movies).

I still stand by those words--in fact, I included the essay in which they originally appeared in A Terry Teachout Reader--but I hasten to add that they don't embody a value judgment, merely an observation on the necessarily marginal position of theater in the age of film and TV. Yet live theater remains indispensable, and never more so than when a troupe of little-known actors performs Shakespeare in the gym of a neighborhood church for a few dozen enthralled onlookers. I love Broadway, I really do, but if you want to know why theater will never die, there's your answer.

If you're curious, the APA's As You Like It will be performed this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Go here for details and directions.

I recently talked to an avid reader, a woman in her fifties who, to my alarm, said that for years she simply refused to read any book written by a man, especially fiction told from the point of view of female characters. A few months ago I tried reading Susanna Moore's In the Cut and gave up halfway through because of the book's relentless misandry, but I couldn't imagine refusing to read books written by women. Where would I be as a reader without having read Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, Susan Cheever, Amy Bloom, Marilynne Robinson, Louise Erdrich, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O'Connor...on and on and on? As for writers depicting characters of the other sex, have there ever been any male characters better drawn than Middlemarch's Lydgate, Casaubon, Ladislaw, Vincy? If writers are forced by political considerations to write only from their own narrow experience, we as readers will be left with having to choose from among solipsistic memoirs--in fact, the very books I continue to see more and more of on the new books tables of the chain stores....

Read the whole thing here.

Yet another belated New Yorker, delivered to Sweden on donkeyback, I'm sure it was, and yet again I couldn't shake the feeling this institution is going through a spate of mediocre issues: A 34-year old student collects lost gloves on the Upper West Side? The diary of a neurotic webstalker with a boring target? A Shouts & Murmurs that is spectacularly unfunny in its exploration of "Instructions to everything"?

These stories wouldn't make it into the blogs I read, I thought. Wow. Maybe it's not that The New Yorker is getting much worse, but that New York blogs are getting much better. Eurotrash is far funnier than Shouts and Murmurs; Gothamist and Gawker are better at trendspotting than Talk of the Town; Maud Newton's got her finger on the literary world's pulse like none other; Felix, Terry Teachout and Michael at 2 Blowhards have got the New York arts scene covered -- to name just a very few of the stars in the New York blog firmament. The New Yorker still holds the crown for long articles and fiction, but for much longer?

Can New York bloggers please all just stand back for a minute, look at what you have wrought, and pat yourselves collectively on the back? This has got to be New York's most impressive literary renaissance since the Beat writers, and the snarkiest since the Algonquin Round Table held sway (and begat The New Yorker). Have there ever been so many New Yorkers writing as well as today, within a community that approaches a meritocracy?

For expat New Yorkers everywhere, you are a godsend. I kiss you.

Well, shucks. Glad to be of service. You can save the kiss for Our Girl, though....

Oh, and Jessa...thanks for the link.

UPDATE: Our Site Meter is jumping! In the blogosphere, at any rate, there is no bad publicity. (And with reference to this posting, I should certainly add that I didn't have any of my fellow artsjournal.com bloggers in mind, as I suspect is now abundantly clear.)

- "ABC has asked writers on its prime-time series to weave the Oscars into their story lines. In an episode of 'It's All Relative,' for example, one character will get mad at another who breaks the remote control, spoiling plans to watch the Oscars."

- "In addition, characters on three ABC daytime soaps--'General Hospital,' 'One Life to Live' and 'All My Children'--will talk about the awards show, saying they plan to watch the Sunday telecast or attend an Oscar party. They will stop short of saying they are watching on ABC because the network figured that was obvious."

- "For the ceremony itself, [producer Joe] Roth says he is building the Oscars as a comedy show, employing an army of writers to churn out one liners."

- "And he is promising an appearance by Best Actor nominee Sean Penn, a no-show at the Globes."

- "Marketing the show under the slogan 'Expect the Unexpected,' Mr. Roth says he hopes to foster the kind of spontaneity exhibited last year, when Best Actor winner Adrien Brody passionately embraced presenter Halle Berry on stage. But that 'Unexpected' slogan may be slightly misleading....Following the controversy over Janet Jackson's Super Bowl halftime stunt, ABC has imposed a five-second delay on the telecast, meaning it will review comments and images before they are broadcast and could censor them" (emphasis added).

Would somebody come over here and break my remote, please? I don't think I'll be able to stand the suspense.

The Web site ArtsJournal features a media file with the deliberately ridiculous name Death of Classical Music Archive, whose articles recycle a familiar litany of problems: record companies are curtailing their classical divisions; orchestras are facing deficits; the music is barely taught in public schools, almost invisible on television, ignored or mocked by Hollywood. But the same story could have been written ten years ago or twenty. If this be death, the record is skipping. A complete version of the Death of Classical Music Archive would go back to the fourteenth century, when the sensuous melodies of ars nova were thought to signal the end of civilization.

The classical audience is assumed to be a moribund crowd of the old, the white, the rich, and the bored. Statistics provided by the National Endowment for the Arts suggest that the situation is not quite so dire. Yes, the audience is older than that for any other art--the median age is forty-nine--but it is not the wealthiest. Musicals, plays, ballet, and museums all get larger slices of the $50,000-or-more income pie (as does the ESPN channel, for that matter). If you want to see an in-your-face, Swiss-bank-account display of wealth, go look at the millionaires sitting in the skyboxes at a Billy Joel show, if security lets you. Nor is the classical audience aging any faster than the rest of America. The music may not be a juggernaut, but it is a major world. American orchestras sell around thirty million tickets each year. Brilliant new talents are thronging the scene; the musicians of the august Berlin Philharmonic are, on average, a generation younger than the Rolling Stones.

The music is always dying, ever-ending. It is an ageless diva on a non-stop farewell tour, coming around for one absolutely final appearance. It is hard to name because it never really existed to begin with--not in the sense that it stemmed from a single time or place. It has no genealogy, no ethnicity: leading composers of today hail from China, Estonia, Argentina, Queens. The music is simply whatever composers create--a long string of written-down works to which various performing traditions have become attached. It encompasses the high, the low, empire, underground, dance, prayer, silence, noise. Composers are genius parasites; they feed voraciously on the song matter of their time in order to engender something new. They have gone through a rough stretch in the past hundred years, facing external obstacles (Hitler and Stalin were amateur music critics) as well as problems of their own invention ("Why doesn't anyone like our beautiful twelve-tone music?"). But they may be on the verge of an improbable renaissance, and the music may take a form that no one today would recognize. For now, it is like the "sunken cathedral" that Debussy depicts in one of his Preludes--a city that chants beneath the waves....

Read the whole thing here. Now.

I don't have time to write about it at present, and probably won't for a few days to come, but I intend to do so as soon as I can. In the meantime, please take a look at what Alex has to say.

I adore these little pieces of book art and book history. Hunting them down is a blast, they rarely set me back more than a few bucks, and many of them are beautiful. The books themselves are good or great, the kinds of rich, distinguished works that pose a challenge to an illustrator. Gorey's solutions are thumbnail interpretations, frequently bold and always fascinating. Sometimes he chooses to draw figures, sometimes landscapes, sometimes interior scenes. For some nonfiction titles, he sticks to abstract designs. In nearly every case, he manages to capture something of the mood of the book. His witty, thoughtful illustrations make you rue Oxford and Penguin's comparatively lazy practice of slapping paintings on the covers of the books in their paperback Classics series.

Now you can view several of the covers online at Goreyography.com. There's a brief history of Gorey's work for Anchor and a gallery of the covers. Thanks to Coudal Partners for the tip.

Samuel Johnson, quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson

Mel Gibson's controversial "The Passion of the Christ," which recounts the final hours in the life of Jesus, finally opens Wednesday, and the Sun-Times' own Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper offered an exclusive early review of the movie on their syndicated series "Ebert & Roeper" this weekend.

Giving "Passion" their trademark stamp of approval of "two thumbs way up," Ebert and Roeper called it "a great film."

"It's the only religious movie I've seen, with the exception of 'The Gospel According to St. Matthew' by [Italian director Pier Paolo] Pasolini, that really seems to deal with what actually happened," said Ebert, who is the Sun-Times film critic.

"This is the most powerful, important and by far the most graphic interpretation of Christ's final hours ever put on film," said Roeper, a Sun-Times columnist. "Mel Gibson is a masterful storyteller, and this is the work of his lifetime. You have to admire not just Gibson for his vision and his directing abilities, but Jim Caviezel [as Christ] and the rest of the cast."...

As it happens, I was about to leave for a screening of The Passion of the Christ when that e-mail arrived. The screening took place at the Brill Building, an address well known to show-business aficionados: A.J. Liebling wrote about it in the Thirties, calling it "the Jollity Building," and later on it became known as the Tin Pan Alley of Sixties rock. It struck me as nicely ironic that I would be seeing a movie about the Crucifixion in such a place.

Screening rooms are dismal little affairs, comfortable enough but far from atmospheric, and in no way suited to anything remotely approaching religious contemplation. This one, not surprisingly, was full of people making calls on cell phones and conversing in notice-me voices. One fellow was earnestly explaining how Mel Gibson couldn't possibly be a good Christian, having previously expressed his longing to impale Frank Rich's intestines on a stick. "On a basic level," he intoned, "it occurs to me that Jesus was a gentle guy."

The lights went down and the film started, accompanied at first by whispered conversation, though that faded out after a few minutes. I suspect that not a few people were shocked into silence by the film's evident high seriousness, not to mention the high quality of its craftsmanship: the actors are excellent, the production design and photography handsome without ever lapsing into picturesque self-indulgence. The one exception is the overblown music, which can't begin to compare with Miklós Rózsa's remarkable scores for Ben-Hur and King of Kings. Rózsa made those movies seem more serious than they really were. On the other hand, The Passion of the Christ bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of the big-ticket Biblical epics of the Fifties and Sixties. Instead, it's what Gibson said it would be, an almost entirely naturalistic portrayal of the Crucifixion as described in the Bible. In an odd sort of way, it put me in mind of Master and Commander, another film that went to unusual lengths to reproduce the sights and sounds of a far-off world. (The use of Aramaic and Latin dialogue helps--a lot.)

Everything you've heard about the violence in The Passion of the Christ is true. It's jarring, almost sickening. Yet I didn't find it gratuitous, given the film's initiating premise, though the scourging of Jesus went on well past the point of diminishing artistic returns, however "realistic" it may have been. In any case, there is nothing in The Passion of the Christ that will startle viewers familiar with Western religious art. The difference--and it's a big one--is that this is a film, not a mural. Photographs pack a punch quite different from even the most gruesome paintings. To say that The Passion of the Christ suggests a Caravaggist Crucifixion come to life, while true enough, understates its impact. Of course it's only a movie, and we've all read about the special effects, but Gibson and his collaborators create an illusion of reality so enveloping that it's possible to forget yourself.

Not that many of the people who came to the Brill Building yesterday were likely to have forgotten themselves. They were New York media types, not the viewers I had in mind when I told Janet Maslin the other day that "most of the people who see The Passion of the Christ will regard it as a film about something that actually happened. That's something that a lot of the people writing about it are apt to misunderstand." We live, after all, in an age when ostensibly serious art critics for major newspapers and magazines can get away with turning up their noses at the Metropolitan Museum's El Greco retrospective because of its subject matter. I doubt that many of their cinematic counterparts will find it possible, much less easy, to write about The Passion of the Christ as a movie qua movie.

Even so, there wasn't a whole lot of chatter to be heard in the lobby, or the elevator, as we left to write our stories. "So, was it intense?" one person waiting for the next screening asked. It was. And--just for the record--I'll be very much surprised if it isn't a very big hit.

I wrote in Arabic and French when I was a kid but English superseded those languages by the time I started college. When I wrote in Arabic I found it hard to keep up with the rhythm. Pick up any novel in Arabic and you'll see that a sentence can run a page or two. I needed the finality of the period, perhaps because I had been already exposed to non-Arabic punctuation from a very early age. In French I wrote mostly poetry, long pieces that were meant to sound like Lamartine or Hugo and later like Baudelaire or Verlaine. I started learning English in high school and liked the mechanics of the language and soon I was reading almost everything I could get my hands on in English....

Read the whole thing here. As for me, I'm one jealous monoglot!

I enjoy your reviews in the Journal even if most of the shows don't make it to Minnesota and we don't make it to NYC often.

My wife & I went to the Producers at the St. James on Feb 14. I liked the show (she loved it) but I was very uncomfortable throughout the show with the closeness of the seats. I'm 6'2" and was jammed into the seat. My shins had dents from the seat in from of me and every time the woman leaned back it mashed my shins. My knees stuck over the top of her seat. My back also hurt too. I'll never go back to that place again. The play was not worth the pain.

Here's my questions:

(1) Are all Broadway seats that close?

(2) Did they add extra rows in the theatre to sell more tickets?

(3) Are the seats better on the floor? We sat in Mezzanine N 15 & 17.

(4) Am I the only one to complain?

I work for an airline and so don't expect too much room but it was way too tight for comfort. Even my 5'2" wife could not cross her legs.

Well said, sir. My answers:

(1) No--seat pitch varies widely from theater to theater--but some are way too close for comfort.

(2) I don't know whether the St. James packed in additional seats for The Producers, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

(3) I haven't sat in the balconies of most of the major New York houses (critics always sit in the orchestra), but I do know some houses where the upstairs seats are appallingly cramped. I nearly had to call an ambulance a few years ago after spending an evening in the back row of the Vivian Beaumont, for example.

(4) Probably not, but I've never seen such a complaint in print, and so am happy to post yours. Send the management a letter!

One room is dedicated to notebook entries, dry-point etchings such as Reclining Nude or Rothko with Pipe, monoprints, and woodblock prints. Avery was quite prolific, constantly drawing portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, always searching: it sure inspired me to get to work.

Read the whole thing here.

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

Could you please call again?

It's been especially interesting to note the sharp division of opinion between bloggers who, like Our Girl and me, believe in the concept of a blogosphere whose participants use links to "freely share ideas and readers with one another, and in so doing increase their own value" (my words), and those stalwart individualists who reject the idea of the blogosphere as virtual community. It's odd that I should be in the former category, since I'm no kind of communitarian, but this particular aspect of the blogosphere has seemed self-evident to me ever since I first started thinking about how blogging works (which was two or three years before I launched "About Last Night," by the way). Linking and blogrolling are what differentiate blogs from old media--and this difference, it seems to me, is the whole point of blogging.

Interesting, too, is the intensity with which certain bloggers continue to express their loathing for the way in which certain other bloggers make friendly mention of one another. Clearly, this reflects a divergence of taste that no amount of civility will narrow: some folks just don't like it, and that's that. Me, I like it very much, and I don't see it as clubby or exclusionary, much less snobbish. Sure, I have my favorites, but without exception they're people whom I got to "know" in cyberspace, solely and only through their work (though I've been lucky enough to meet a half-dozen of them in the flesh, and hope to meet many more). They're my cast of characters, and I try to write about them in such a way as to make my readers want to get to know them, too. As I've said more than once, I think that's part of the fun of blogging--not just for bloggers themselves, but for those who read us as well. It personalizes blogging. It strengthens the feeling of community. Above all, it encourages our readers to visit other blogs.

Finally, a few bloggers seem to disapprove of those of us who take an interest in the amount of traffic we draw. That puzzles me. I don't write posts in order to draw traffic--it doesn't work--but I'm always delighted when new people visit "About Last Night," and why on earth shouldn't I be? I think blogging is good. I want more people to do it. I think it'll be good for the world of art if they do. What's wrong with that? And who's being clubby now? I'm an elitist, but I don't believe in the we-happy-few mentality: I want everybody who can swim to jump in the pool.

At any rate, I'll close by repeating something I can't say often enough, which is that the regular readers of this blog are great people, smart and attentive and a joy to hear from. So are most of the bloggers featured in the right-hand column--but, then, Our Girl and I don't add blogs to "Sites to See" because their proprietors are charming. We do it because we believe that what they write is worth reading, right or wrong, nice or nasty. Even when they dump on us.

We've had a couple of wild days here at "About Last Night," incidentally. Everybody in the world seems to have linked to us for one reason or another (mostly the other). So if you're visiting this blog for the first time and want to know more about it, click here to read an archived posting from last November 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 proprietors.

Either way, I'm 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. I'll be back on Thursday. Our Girl in Chicago will keep you company until then.

P.S. Not to worry, Girl, I haven't forgotten that you're expecting me to come up with my own answers to those five questions. I just need some sleep first.

The piece brought to mind Gerald Howard's classic essay in this vein, "Mistah Perkins--He Dead: Publishing Today," which appeared in The American Scholar in Summer 1989. It's too long and detailed to do full justice to here, but here's a bit of what Howard (then editor at Norton, now at Doubleday) was saying about the industry fifteen years ago:

The American publishing business today is in a tremendous state of confusion between its two classic functions: the higher-minded and more vocally trumpeted mission civilisatrice to instruct and edify and uplift the reading public and the less loudly advertised but, in the nature of things, more consistently compelling mission commerciale to separate the consumer from his cash. Happy the publisher (and happy the author) who can manage to make a single book fulfill both functions! The real art of publishing consists not in reconciling what are, in a capitalist system, quite simply irreconcilable imperatives but in orchestrating the built-in tensions in a harmonious fashion. However, the two-way road in publishing from the bottom line to Mount Olympus travels right across a fault line, and that is where the serious editor lives and plies his trade. To put it bluntly, the tectonic plates are shifting, there's an earthquake going on, and all that moving and shaking you've read about is making it hard to attend to business--or even to be certain, from day to day, just what our business is. The delicate task of orchestrating tensions becomes more difficult still when the walls threaten to collapse about you....

The point that I wish to make is that book editing is not now and never has been a pursuit that permits a narrow purism. F. Scott Fitzgerald characterizes his film producer hero Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon as one of the few people who can hold the whole complex equation of filmmaking in his head at once; it might be said that good editors do something similar with the publishing equation. Their ministrations extend equally to the narrow compass of the page of text where the reader will experience the book and the wide cultural and commercial arena where the book itself must find its way; their fealty is equally to the spiritual, emotional, and financial well-being of the authors they publish and the firms that employ them. One might say that the effective editor is on comfortable terms with God and with Mammon. The great Max Perkins also published Taylor Caldwell and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Probably the most remunerative book ever published by Alfred A. Knopf was Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (over 8 million copies sold in this country alone, and climbing still), and the ultra-prestigious firm that bears Knopf's name is known in the book trade for its top-of-the-culinary-line cookbooks and for the commercial éclat with which it published glossy show business memoirs. The firm of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, publisher of several Nobel Prize winners and generally regarded as the most purely literary house in the country, pulled itself out of the red in 1950 after four financially lackluster years by publishing Gaylord Hauser's best-selling Look Younger, Live Longer....

The philosophers tell us that man has fallen into the quotidian; it may be said that publishing at some point fell into the fiscal--the early-to-mid sixties is the likely starting date. One by one the great trade houses sold themselves to the conglomerates and the huge communications concerns, and so ceded, whether they recognized it or not, the control of their own destiny. On the side of the houses, the impetus for the sale varied. In some cases the founders or their heirs found themselves getting on in years and no longer vigorous enough or committed enough to handle the business of the firm properly. So in effect they cashed out their interests for a handsome price. In other instances the independent houses believed that allying themselves with powerful corporate owners would solve the perennial problems of modest concerns--cash flow and capital shortage--and allow them to ride out the inevitable lean seasons cushioned by the corporation's substantial assets against the squeeze of high inflation and interest rates. Better to go to the friendly corporate owner than the possibly unfriendly banker or the impersonal capital markets for the necessary funds, the logic went. On the conglomerates' side, these houses, controlling as they did substantial literary properties and themselves brand names of widespread recognition, offered a highly cost-effective entry into what everybody saw as a growth industry, now that a vast new generation of Americans was in the process of becoming college-educated and thus, it was assumed, lifelong readers.

At the heart of these sales lay a terrible misunderstanding. The trade houses thought they would run their business as they had before, with similar independence of taste and action, safely cocooned within their conglomerates. The corporations, however, with far less naïvete, expected and insisted that their new assets adopt the same financial lockstep as their other assets, show quarterly growth, institute strict managerial controls--the shareholders expected no less. God, as usual, was with the big battalions, and today almost all the houses bearing the great names in American publishing are either huge corporations themselves or smoothly integrated into cast corporate combines. They now dance to the tune of big-time finance, and it's not a fox-trot; it's a bruising slam-dance.

From down here on the shop floor, the results often look ludicrous and disastrous. Publishers are playing a big-money game with comparatively minuscule resources. On the map of corporate America as a whole, trade publishing commands such a small portion of the consumer dollar that it is barely visible. Let me illustrate the point. The January 1989 issue of Manhattan, inc. reports that Nintendo Video Entertainment was the toy industry's top-selling product in 1988, grossing $2.3 billion. The net income to Nintendo from that one toy (assume 50 percent of gross) amounts to more than a quarter of the income of the entire trade book industry, which was $4.4 billion last year. What conceivable clout can even a $100 million company wield in such an environment? On the southern tip of Manhattan, twenty-five-year-olds in bright red suspenders buy and sell such concerns the way kids trade baseball cards--and with less feeling for the object in question.

And, skipping ahead, Howard writes of the effects of all this on writers:

Among the younger writers these days one can observe a great deal more career ambition--an itchiness to get it now--than purely literary ambition. Far from offering any resistance to the mighty engines and subtle strategies of contemporary success, they eagerly embrace and employ them. In this regard they are only mirroring the behavior of their contemporaries in business and financial services who reportedly sense failure if they haven't made their first million by the age of twenty-seven. The eighties have not been a decade noted for patience. The proliferation of creative writing programs has made possible ab ovo a career management approach to literature. Go to the right college, get into the right MFA program, make the right contacts among established writers and book and magazine editors, find the right literary agent, who'll sell your book to the right publisher, who'll give your book the right cover and shake down the right writers (some of whom you already know, of course) for the right blurbs, and you're off! You get the good review from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, the paperback reprinters and Hollywood producers begin throwing money at your book, the hip night clubs beckon, the galleys begin to arrive asking you for blurbs, you guest teach at the right creative writing program, you summer at Yaddo or McDowell...everything is on track and on time.

And, very possibly, out of scale. What nobody will tell the hot young writers, least of all their editors, is that however fresh or unusual their first books were, they may have a long way to travel before they develop mastery of their craft. (That news may be delivered, brutally, by reviewers of the second book.) The system that helps make these talented young people also exploits them and can possibly destroy them. They may be living in a flashy Potemkin village of their agents' and publishers' construction. What the showy early success removes is the possibility of a slow, even fitful progress towards artistic maturity, well away from the harsh spotlight and the demands of an impersonal star system. The Muse does not speak on the Bitch Goddess's schedule, and for many writers the most precious gift of all is not a big fat book contract, but the space and time to find their unique style and subject, to learn from an honorable failure, perhaps, without being tossed on the ash heap for it.

What also seems to have departed from the world for the moment is the desire among young writers to create the masterpiece, the total work that, whether gorgeously compressed or encyclopedically vast, seems to say all that must or can be said at its particular moment. Once upon a time (1944) Cyril Connolly could write, to general agreement: "The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence." To live by such words is to cultivate an imperial contempt for the mundane, for the world and its shabby workings. It is impossible, I believe, for an attitude of proud self-sufficiency such as cultivated by a Lawrence or a Joyce or a Beckett to coexist with an eagerness to play ball with the literary star search. It is certainly impossible for an editor to expect his young author to make the complete spiritual and artistic commitment the creation of a masterpiece demands when he has previously ascribed cultural authority to the system of hype. The masterpiece, almost by definition, is written outside this system.

It's a good and important article written from the inside, and not one devoid of hope. It strikes a nice balance between pragmatism and idealism. Well worth looking up at the library and running off a copy. At the time Howard wrote it, a novel bought on the strength of a synopsis or even just a sample chapter would have been a rarity, and the trend in that direction is perhaps a manifestation of the further evolution of the star system he identifies as a product of book publishers' desperation to compete, and decries as hostile to literature.

Miklós Rózsa, Double Life

Percy, as it happens, was a Catholic convert, and though The Moviegoer doesn't bang you over the head with that fact, it is very much a spiritual statement, a novel about the problem of "everydayness," a phenomenon with which anyone searching for truths beyond the realm of the immediately visible must contend:

The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place--but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.

What do you seek--God? you ask with a smile.

I hesitate to answer, since all other Americans have settled the matter for themselves and to give such an answer would amount to setting myself a goal which everyone else has reached--and therefore raising a question in which no one has the slightest interest. Who wants to be dead last among one hundred and eighty million Americans? For, as everyone knows, the polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics--which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker....

Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?

On my honor, I do not know the answer.

Contrary to popular belief, I'm not a Catholic, but I find Percy's way of situating the problem of "everydayness" in the context of modern American life to be deeply sympathetic. I also admire the lightness of touch with which he does so--for The Moviegoer, unlikely as it may sound, is a kind of comic novel about spiritual alienation. But, of course, there are many roads to seriousness, and the best of them take us down the path of comedy.

A couple of years ago, I was writing about Ghost World, one of my favorite films, and in trying to suggest its special quality, I found myself comparing it to, of all things, The Moviegoer:

American Beauty offered easy answers to loaded questions (that's why it won so many Oscars--Hollywood only gives prizes to movies that tell us what it wants to hear), whereas Ghost World is a movie without any answers at all. That is the source of its pathos. Like every teenager, Enid longs to be shown how to live, but the ghostly adults who drift in and out of her unhappy life offer her no counsel. Instead, she has been set adrift on the sea of relativity, looking for a safe harbor on a coast without maps.

Walker Percy once pointed out that a visit to the neighborhood theater is for many Americans "maybe the only point in the day, or even the week, when someone (a cowboy, a detective, a crook) is heard asking what life is all about, asking what is worth fighting for--or asking if anything is worth fighting for." Out of that insight grew The Moviegoer, a novel about a man who goes to the movies in order to narcotize himself against the shallowness of American life, unaware that by doing so he has embarked on a search for meaning that will ultimately end in his embrace of Catholicism. As improbable as it may sound, Ghost World reminded me quite strongly of Percy's great novel. To be sure, Enid lacks the spiritual consciousness that helped Binx Bolling find his way out of the slough of despond, but she is just as surely going forth on a similar quest, and the fact that she is doing so without benefit of moral guidance makes her plight all the more moving.

In case you've forgotten where we started, this chain of not-so-random reflections was triggered by a fugitive posting on the blog of a colleague who has become a friend. This is part of what fascinates me about blogging--the way in which it facilitates intellectual cross-pollination.

While we're on the subject, let me tell you another, similarly illuminating story. I got an e-mail last month from Cindy Cheung, a very funny actress whom I'd praised last year in a Wall Street Journal drama review (the operative words were "wildly loony"). Cindy learned about this blog from my review, in due course becoming a regular reader. She wrote to tell me that if I thought she was funny, I should read Waylaid, a novel by her husband, Ed Lin. This kind of e-mail almost always makes me run for the nearest exit, but it struck me that she might possibly be onto something, so I accepted her offer to send me a copy.

Not to prolong the suspense needlessly, Waylaid turned out to be a gem, a tough little coming-of-age tale about a 12-year-old Asian-American boy whose home is a rundown hotel in deepest New Jersey owned and operated by his immigrant parents. He knows too much and found it out too soon, and his stories of life among the Jersey hookers are funny in the saddest possible way.

Waylaid reminded me at times of Lolita, another seriously funny novel that casts a cold eye on the grubby surface of American life. Remember Nabokov's wry descriptions of the motels visited by Humbert Humbert and his nymphet?

"We wish you to feel at home while here. All equipment was carefully checked upon your arrival. Your license number is on record here. Use hot water sparingly. We reserve the right to eject without notice any objectionable person. Do not throw waste material of any kind in the toilet bowl. Thank you. Call again. The Management. P.S. We consider our guests the Finest People of the World."

Well, Lin has that same kind of beautifully exact feel for the way things look and smell and sound:

Each hotel room was basically the same except that some of the black-and-white televisions had rabbit-ear antennas and some had inverted wire coat hangers. They all had a simple desk, a night stand, and a chair made of pressed wood. Push on any of the furniture the wrong way and it would splinter apart....The wall-to-wall carpeting looked like every marching band in the country had dragged flour sacks of grime across it. Every color in the carpet had been corrupted into a different shade of dark green.

Now, I don't know anything about Ed Lin except that he's the husband of one of my readers--and that Waylaid is a damned fine first novel. Which brings us back one last time to the subject of blogging. To review the bidding:

(1) I wrote about Cindy Cheung in the Wall Street Journal.

(2) She saw the URL of "About Last Night" at the end of the piece, looked it up, and became a regular reader.

(3) Even though we'd never met, she took a chance, wrote to me through the blog, and sent me her husband's first novel.

(4) I read it and loved it.

(5) Now I'm passing on the word to you.

That's the miracle of blogging. It generates serendipities.

P.S. Cindy is currently appearing in an indie flick called Robot Stories. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to try to catch it this weekend. You come, too.

I'm going to go out on a limb and submit a Rule For Playwrights: Playwrights that can act, should - from time to time.

In general, if you're a playwright, you know if you can act or not. Many self-identified actors have no idea that they actually have no aptitude for acting, but playwrights, who have staked their ego on an entirely different delusion, are free to critique themselves mercilessly if they happen to occasionally act. I act from time to time, for the sheer recreation of it, and I'm under no illusions. I'm a competent actor, I'm basically engaging, I have a few tricks that audiences seem to enjoy, and I can even muster simple honesty for several minutes at a time. Unfortunately, based on the viewing of videotapes, I leave a lot to be desired in the area of physical control, and many of my movements are jerky and inspecific. In the professional world, there would always be about thirty guys at any audition who would get cast before me for any role appropriate to a tall, nebbishy dude, but in the weirdly-male-bereft world of unpaid Off-Off Broadway, there's usually something fun I can find to do....

Read the whole thing here.

- The Paul Taylor Dance Company performs at City Center March 2-14. Two new Taylor dances will be seen in New York for the first time: Le Grand Puppetier, set to a player-piano version of Stravinsky's Petrushka (premiering March 2), and In the Beginning, set to music by Carl Orff (premiering March 3). Repertory for the season also includes Promethean Fire, Piazzolla Caldera, Sunset, Runes, and all sorts of other goodies.

As I wrote in this space last August:

Paul Taylor is the world's greatest living artist, irrespective of medium. I don't deny that I've been known on occasion to exaggerate, but I happily stand by every word of that high-octane statement. If you want further details, I wrote the foreword to the 1999 paperback reissue of Private Domain, Taylor's autobiography, in which I summed up my opinion of his work as concisely as possible. (Private Domain is a wonderful book, by the way, by far the best memoir ever written by a choreographer.) His dances are serious and funny, lyrical and frightening, harsh and poignant--sometimes by turns, sometimes all at once. If you've never seen any of them, go and be blessed.

For more information, go here.

- Also on March 2, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries opens an exhibition of 20 woodcuts by Helen Frankenthaler, my favorite living painter. She's also a first-rate printmaker, and her woodcuts are sumptuously beautiful. The show, organized by the Naples Museum of Art, is up through April 3.

For more information, go here.

As for OGIC, she's planning to reveal her secret identity to a couple of carefully chosen bloggers who have yet to see her in the flesh. (We'll have to kill them afterwards, but at least they'll get to meet her first.)

Watch this space for further bulletins.

Our Site Meter tells us a lot about worldwide traffic patterns at "About Last Night," but there's one thing we don't know and would like to find out: exactly how do you read us?

Specifically:

Do you visit "About Last Night" daily? If so, is it at a regular time of day, or whenever the spirit moves you?

Alternatively, do you visit once or twice a week, and read the accumulated postings? If so, on what day or days do you come here?

Finally, do you read "About Last Night" directly, or do you subscribe to our postings via an RSS feed, or some other form of aggregator?

If you feel like it, drop us a line (using Terry's mailbox, not Our Girl's) and tell us how and when you read "About Last Night." Please put the words READING HABITS in the subject line, so that we can cull out your responses from incoming e-mail on other subjects.

Many thanks.

During intermission at the Cecilia Bartoli concert I attended this weekend, I ended up talking to the woman two seats over. (She'd overheard me talking about the program with my friend T., who came with me.) Did I play anything, she asked. I said no. "You certainly seem to know a lot about music -- I don't know much of anything about it," she replied. I said something about having an inexpert but occasionally obsessive interest. Then the guy on my other side, who'd leaned over to ask if he could borrow my opera-glasses from time to time during the second half of the concert, answered a question of T.'s about horn-playing in far more technical detail than I ever could have produced. I was somewhere in the middle -- literally -- between "I don't know much about music" and "I can tell you all about crooks." All of which is to say, I should get over my phobia of being seen as an amateur and actually blog about music every so often....

Read the whole thing here.

I couldn't agree more. Please do. Intelligent amateurism is a big part of what blogging is all about. And the same goes for you, Mr. TMFTML.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Harold Laski, October 30, 1930

We do things differently in England. We try not to let ideological disagreements disturb our social life or the ecumenical serenity of our clubs. Politics, let alone ideas, are not that important....We think people should come before ideas: it is our strength, as well (some would say) as our weakness.

I don't know whether English intellectuals are really like that nowadays, but it certainly seems as if they were once upon a time, and I think Johnson is right to declare this tendency (however ambiguously) to be at once a strength and a possible weakness. For my own part, I've never broken with a friend over his personal beliefs, so long as he doesn't become a monomaniac about them--but as any good statistician would immediately point out, that may say more about my friend-making practices than my friend-keeping practices. I don't enjoy the company of humorless people, and the absence of a sense of humor tends to go hand in hand with belief-related monomania. Hence I don't tend to seek out the kinds of people with whom I later might find myself inclined, even obliged, to break.

Not long after 9/11, I wrote an essay about overly earnest artists:

Alas, they have always been with us, especially in wartime and most especially in America, far too many of whose well-meaning citizens are allergic to the exhilarating fizz of high art with a light touch. It seems not to occur to them that life is such an indissoluble mixture of heartbreak and absurdity that it might be more truly portrayed through the refracting lens of comedy. Instead, they prefer what Lord Byron, who knew a thing or two about both life and art, would have crisply dismissed as "sermons and soda-water."...

Of course there is a parallel case to be made for earnestness: surely it is people like Isadora Duncan who make the world go round. But who would want to go along for the ride if they also made all the art? Henry James, that wittiest of serious men, underlined the point in an 1893 letter to his friend Edmund Gosse. The occasion was the publication of "A Problem in Modern Ethics," John Addington Symonds' agonizingly earnest pamphlet calling for a change in public attitudes toward homosexuality. "I think," said James, "one ought to wish him more humour--it is really the saving salt. But the great reformers never have it." No, they don't, but the greatest artists do, and never more than when falling skyscrapers threaten to make us lose sight of the crooked shape of man, absurd and preposterous and--yes--beautiful.

I still stand by those words, but I invite you to note that James--and I--were careful to distinguish between artists and reformers. Reformers, like saints, can be awfully awkward people. Their singlemindedness is no small part of what makes them effective, as well as uncomfortable to be with. I've known a few, but I've never tried to get close to them. No matter how friendly they may seem, I always get the feeling that they'd be perfectly happy to have me guillotined if they thought it necessary.

But, then, artists also incline to ruthlessness, don't they? As William Faulkner once observed, "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies." This is not, thank God, a universal rule. Most of my friends are artists, and most of them seem disinclined to rob their mothers. But most of the great artists I've known--and it's a short list--have done things in the service of their art at one time or another (though never to me) that were so selfish as to make my hair stand up.

Again, the statistician in me speaks up: how big is my sample? And the answer is: not very. I've read enough biographies to know that some great artists are nice, others nasty. I haven't known many great reformers, or any saints at all. And as for what Paul Johnson calls "ecumenical serenity," I like getting along with people--though I wouldn't pay any price for it. But the truth is that my inclination to companionability has never been put to anything like a severe test. I have good friends whose views I think silly, but none who seem to me downright evil (and I believe in the existence of evil). I sometimes wonder what I'd do if I were to learn that a friend of mine had committed a cold-blooded murder. I like to think that I wouldn't have befriended such a person in the first place, and that's probably true--but human nature is complicated enough that I can't say so with certainty.

All I can say for sure is that I've never been intimate with anyone lacking a sense of humor, or truly loved a work of art by a humorless artist. That might just be the most revealing thing about me.

Fiddler I liked very much, and also found unexpectedly timely:

This isn't one of those self-consciously "dark" revivals of a famous musical: Mr. Leveaux's unfussy, trickery-free staging lets the show speak for itself. But at a time when the world is blighted by a sickening recrudescence of anti-Semitism, "Fiddler"'s tough-minded departures from musical-comedy orthodoxy cannot but be seen in the lurid light of current events. The first act ends with a brutal pogrom, the second with the forced emigration of the villagers of Anatevka. The Minskoff Theatre is a big house, but when the Russian constable called Tevye a "Jewish dog," the audience grew so still that you could have heard an hourglass run out....

I also liked most things about Big Bill, especially Mark Lamos' staging and John Michael Higgins' performance in the title role, though I had some nagging doubts about the play itself:

As Tilden steers closer and closer to the brink of disaster, "Big Bill" shrugs off its deceptive patness and acquires a sharp, even ragged edge. Why, then, did I go home dissatisfied? Because the pitiful realities of Tilden's life have been subtly but unmistakably sanitized by Mr. Gurney. We never hear directly from any of the boys he seduced, for instance, though we are treated to a brief speech of self-justification at play's end: "You could say that if only I had lived in a more accommodating society, I might have met someone...someone I could have loved...someone with whom I could have shared my life, without fear or shame."

I don't need to have everything spelled out, but I wonder whether Mr. Gurney meant for the audience to recall that for Bill Tilden, that "someone" would presumably have been a teenager. If he didn't, he should have, because that puts a different spin on the ball.

No link, so do yourself (and me) a favor and go buy a copy of this morning's Journal, where you'll find my drama column nestled in the "Weekend Journal" section among plenty of other good stuff.

And there was always talk about books. He rarely left on a trip of more than 30 minutes without at least one paperback. He was a rapid and consuming reader. Long ago, in '55, he had alerted me to Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and I was gratified in the sixties to turn him on to Walker Percy. Paul said he found a lot of himself in The Moviegoer, that beautiful Percy book about loneliness and grace.

That's a wonderful thing to find out about Desmond, a man whose wry, soft-spoken playing was by all accounts a mirror of his personality. I wish I'd met him, though I've listened to his recordings and read his witty liner notes often enough to feel that we might almost have have known one another. He famously remarked that "I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini," and on another occasion described himself as "the John P. Marquand of the alto," a brilliantly apposite observation that no other musician in the history of jazz (except perhaps the well-read Bing Crosby, another Marquand fan) would have thought to make. As a longtime admirer of Marquand's elegiac novel Point of No Return, I know just what he meant.

If you've never heard Desmond's playing, either on his own or with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, you couldn't do much better than to start with The Paul Desmond Quartet Live, a perfectly lovely solo album from 1975. Should that ring the bell, your next stop should be The Complete RCA Victor Recordings, a splendid five-CD box set that also features the great guitarist Jim Hall. Once you've gotten that far, I won't need to tell you what to do next--you'll be hooked.

As for The Moviegoer, I hope you're already on the case....

W. H. Auden's A Certain World: A Commonplace Book, which I am lately rediscovering, has one entry each under "Sparrows" and "Swallows." The sparrows are John Clare's:

3 sorts The common house Sparrow The Hedge Sparrow & Reed Sparrow often calld the fen sparrow The common sparrow is well known but not so much in a domesticated state as few people think it worth while bringing up a sparrow When I was a boy I kept a tamed cock sparrow 3 years it was so tame that it would come when calld & flew where it pleasd when I first had the sparrow I was fearful of the cat killing it so I usd to hold the bird in my hand toward her & when she attempted to smell of it I beat her she at last woud take no notice of it & I ventured to let it loose in the house they were both very shy at each other at first & when the sparrow venturd to chirp the cat woud brighten up as if she intended to seize it but she went no further than a look or smell at length she had kittens & when they were taken away she grew so fond of the sparrow as to attempt to caress it the sparrow was startld at first but came to by degrees & ventured so far at last as to perch upon her back puss would call for it when out of sight like a kitten & woud lay mice before it the same as she woud for her own young & they always livd in harmony so much the sparrow woud often take away bits of bread from under the cat's nose & even put itself in a posture of resistence when offended as if it reckoned her no more than one of its kind. In winter when we coud not bear the door open to let the sparrow come out & in I was allowd to take a pane out of the window but in the spring of the third year my poor tom Sparrow for that was the name he was calld by went out & never returnd I went day after day calling out for tom & eagerly eying every sparrow on the house but none answerd the name for he woud come down in a moment to the call & perch upon my hand to be fed I gave it out that some cat which it mistook for its old favourite betrayed its confidence & destroyed it.

As the publication of Jonathan Bate's biography last year made better-known, Clare was a Romantic-era English peasant-poet who found some fame in his lifetime but lived in poverty and eventually went mad, deteriorating and dying in obscurity in an asylum. The facts of Clare's biography magnify the pathos of the remembrance above, with its discovery of the danger of mistaking the familiar social operations of one's native locale for the less forgiving, sometimes inscrutable laws of the wider world. In the light of Clare's unhappy life, it's a sobering little brief for staying at home, letting natural enmities be, and trusting no one.

Appropriately enough, Milhaud wrote an autobiography called My Happy Life. I pulled it off the shelf yesterday to see if Kaufman was mentioned (he isn't) and ended up reading the whole thing. While I was at it, I dogeared a few favorite passages, which I'll post today in lieu of anything more formal. Enjoy.

- "My cousin Eric Allatini, a fervent Wagnerian, took me to hear Tristan; I never dared tell him how deadly boring I found that ‘sonorous love-philtre.' When the Bayreuth copyright expired, and Parsifal was given at the Opéra, I went to hear it: this work, which everyone had been impatiently waiting to hear, sickened me by its pretentious vulgarity. I did not realize that what I felt was merely the reaction of a Latin mind, unable to swallow the philosophico-musical jargon and the shoddy mixture of harmony and mysticism in what was an essentially pompous art. I felt that even the leitmotif was a childish device, like so many thematic Baedekers, flattering the audience's self-esteem by the feeling that they always ‘knew where they were.' I also deplored the influence of this music on ours. Yet I was not so foolish as to underestimate its importance, and when Wagner's operas were published by Durand at five francs a copy, I bought them all; I do not remember ever having been tempted to play them. But Pelléas and Boris Godunov always stood by my bedside."

- "It is the indifference of the public which is depressing; enthusiasm, or vehement protests, are a proof that your work is alive."

- "The atmosphere of France, in which Stravinsky had been living for so many years, as well as his admiration for Tchaikovsky, had perhaps induced him to substitute for his vividly coloured, oriental, Russian art, which was almost Asiatic in feeling with its complicated harmonies and barbaric rhythms that had the violence of a hurricane, a type of music that was spare, stripped of inessentials, economical in the means it employed and imbued with a sense of proportion that by no means excluded grace or grandeur but conveyed a feeling that was pure, quintessential, devoid of artifice."

- "What strikes one immediately in Copland's work is the feeling for the soil of his own country: the wide plains with their soft colourings, where the cowboy sings his nostalgic songs in which, even when the violin throbs and leaps to keep up with the pounding dance rhythms, there is always a tremendous sadness, an underlying distress, which nevertheless does not prevent them from conveying the sense of sturdiness, strength and sun-drenched movement."

- "In 1962 I was asked to talk about myself at an American college. I recalled my parents, who were so understanding, my wife, my son and his children, who have brought me nothing but joy. In short, I said that I was a happy man. At that moment I sensed general consternation--almost panic--in the hall. Some students came to talk to me after the conference: how had I been able to create in those conditions? An artist needs to suffer! I replied that I had managed to arrange things differently."

John Henry Newman, "Faith and Reason, Contrasted as Habits of Mind"

I expect to be working on the Balanchine book very intensely for most of this week and next (as well as entertaining Our Girl this coming weekend, about which you will read in this space). Please don't be vexed if I don't blog as much as usual, or am slow in answering your mail. Which reminds me to tell you that we got a lot of e-mail in response to our "Reading Habits" survey, and I'm looking forward to going through it as soon as I get a couple more chapters wrapped up.

Apropos of the Oscars, I watched a movie yesterday that I hadn't seen for years, Annie Hall, courtesy of Turner Classic Movies (which is broadcasting all of the best-picture Oscar winners) and my trusty digital video recorder. I saw Annie Hall in the theater in 1977, back when I was in college, and found it fresh and disarming. I saw it again on TV in 1985 or so, by which time I'd already started to have second thoughts about Woody Allen (Stardust Memories brought me to my senses), and was startled by how poorly it had aged. In light of the fuss that my recent throwaway posting about Allen kicked up, I thought it might be worth revisiting a film I once loved, in order to see whether and how two decades' worth of additional hindsight had changed my mind.

Alas, I found even less to like about Annie Hall this time around. Such innovations as the subtextual subtitles, the animated sequence, even the cameo by Marshall McLuhan now strike me as cutesy. Far more exasperating, though, is Allen's both-sides-of-the-street portrayal of his neuroses, which he pretends to mock while actually reveling in them, proving as they do that he is not as other men. On the surface, Annie Hall purports to tell the tale of how his peculiarities alienate the woman he loves, but its true subject matter is how their relationship actually makes Diane Keaton a better person. I suppose this must have been the first on-screen manifestation of Allen's Pygmalion complex, which in Manhattan would explicitly reveal itself as an obsession with malleable young women. The trouble with such fixations, of course, is that even though the obsessed one grows inexorably older, the objects of his affection stay the same age--and we all know where that leads.

David Thomson is usually so insightful that I was surprised to see that he excepted Annie Hall from the scathing criticism of Allen's work found in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film:

In his films he seems so averse to acting yet so skittish about real confession that he risks dealing in self-glorification by neurosis.... Allen's development in the eighties, his rate of work, and the sophistication of narrative were all seemingly devoted to ideas and attitudes against the gain of that decade. Yet Allen's audience relied on urban yuppies, and his films only fostered that group's self-satisfaction....He has been a Chaplin hero for the chattering classes, yet he is trapped by something like Chaplin's neurotic vanity. No director works so hard to appear at a loss.

That's Woody Allen in a nutshell--and it's all foreshadowed in Annie Hall.

Infinitely more to my liking was the hair-raisingly sociopathic Ripley's Game, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. I saw it because of Anthony Lane's review in a recent issue of The New Yorker, and I agree with every word:

"Ripley's Game," directed by Liliana Cavani, sees the welcome return of Tom Ripley. On his previous visit to our screen, he was played by Matt Damon, but that milky substitute can now be put behind us. Ladies and gentlemen, the award for Best Ripley--the deathless bringer of death, a man with a mine shaft where his moral sense should be, and a hero so beloved of Highsmith that she gave him five books to himself--goes to Mr. John Malkovich. The moment that he appears onscreen, you think, Of course: that is Ripley. Highsmith groupies might find him too old, but I see Ripley as being of any age--no less devilish at eighty than he was at twenty-one, and as comfortable in the eighteenth century, perhaps, as he is in the twenty-first. I have no family tree to hand, but, were Malkovich's Ripley proved to be a direct descendant of his Vicomte de Valmont, in "Dangerous Liaisons," I would not be remotely surprised. The blood of both characters is rich in the patient scorn of the cultivated; consider our first sight of Malkovich, in Cavani's film, as he stands perfectly still in a Berlin square and gives the impression, as he has done throughout his movie career, of posing for an invisible sculptor.

Ripley is in Germany to sell some Old Master drawings. He is not a dealer but a persuasive go-between, and his outfit--long dark coat and beret--is the uniform of a modern centaur, with the body of an entrepreneur and the head of an artist. The sale does not go well, and Ripley interrupts his courteous discussion of Guercino to pick up a poker from the fireplace and beat a man to death. This is the only shocking, as opposed to gruelling or mock-glamorous, act of violence that I have witnessed onscreen in the past year, because it flashes out of nowhere, like lightning across a clear sky. Ripley has the same frustrations as you and I, but deals with them quite differently, and in so doing rebukes our inhibitions. Where you or I would say, "God, I could have killed him," because some guy cut in and took our parking space, Ripley really would kill him, and call it a job well done. But that is not the strangest thing about him. The oddity of Ripley is that he likes to see others do harm as well. He leads them into temptation and, in a parody of human companionship, lends them a helping hand. Although he would never admit as much, he is bored and even lonely, and that is why "Ripley's Game," which could have been a freak show, seems more like a portrait of evil making friends....

Alas, this superb film will not be released theatrically in the United States, but it's coming out on DVD next month, and it also pops up from time to time on the Independent Film Channel, which is where I saw it the other day. One way or another, catch it as soon as you can.

Gotta go. Have a nice week. I'll poke my head in as often as possible.

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise