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February 29, 2004

TT: Infomercial

For those of you who've been wondering what the orange "XML" button in the top module of the right-hand column is for, go here to read an AP wire story in which all is made manifest.

Posted February 29, 10:42 AM

TT: Almanac

"Promise is the capacity for letting people down."

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

Posted February 29, 1:44 AM

TT: Absent without malice

I'm not going to be watching the Oscars tonight. I rarely do--awards ceremonies bore me stiff, though I'm sometimes interested in the results--and in any case I expect to resume work on my Balanchine book as soon as I get home from an off-Broadway matinee. No doubt various actors will say and do stupid things, and no doubt I'll read about them tomorrow.

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.

Posted February 29, 1:37 AM

February 28, 2004

TT: Almanac

"Half the controversies in the world are verbal ones; and could they be brought to a plain issue, they would be brought to a prompt termination. Parties engaged in them would then perceive, either that in substance they agreed together, or that their difference was one of first principles."

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

Posted February 28, 10:30 AM

TT: Continued sunshine

I just finished writing an essay for Commentary about the American violinist Louis Kaufman, whose autobiography, A Fiddler's Tale, was one of my Top Fives last year. It comes with a bonus CD that includes a performance of Darius Milhaud's Concertino de Printemps conducted by the composer. As I listened to that adorable little piece, I suddenly realized that it'd been far too long since I'd heard any of Milhaud's music. Except for the jazz-influenced La Création du monde, it isn't very well known, for the very good reason that there's too much of it (Milhaud's last opus number was 443). Someday, adventurous performers will start sifting through Milhaud's catalogue, and when they do they'll make dozens of delightful discoveries. He may not have been the most profound of composers--though much of his output is both serious and deeply affecting--but I can't listen to his music without breaking out in a broad smile.

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."

Posted February 28, 10:24 AM

February 27, 2004

OGIC: Drunk on sunlight and free-associating

If you weren't careful, a day like today could persuade you that spring is here. It's temperate, bright, and intoxicating. Two days ago I was one impulsive mouse click away from booking a flight to Las Vegas that would have departed O'Hare in an hour. The impulse dissolved, click I did not, and instead of milling about an airport gate in heels and sunglasses, I'm at my desk watching the motes in the sunlight and listening to the birds dotting the tree branches outside my window. They're as pleased with the day as I am.

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.

Posted February 27, 12:54 PM

TT: Footnote

Doug Ramsey, who is writing an eagerly awaited biography of Paul Desmond, the alto saxophonist who was (and is) my favorite jazz musician, saw my posting about Walker Percy and sent me this paragraph from his 1977 obituary of Desmond:

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....

Posted February 27, 12:27 PM

TT: Back home again in Anatevka

I'm in this morning's Wall Street Journal, reviewing the new revival of Fiddler on the Roof, directed by David Leveaux, and A.R. Gurney's Big Bill, a play about Bill Tilden, the legendary tennis player who was arrested twice in his declining years for molesting teenage boys.

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.

Posted February 27, 12:01 PM

TT: Clubbability

Paul Johnson, who wrote the introduction to the newly published Norman Podhoretz Reader, contrasts the intellectual and political styles of England and America. Apropos of Ex-Friends, the memoir in which Podhoretz tells how he and such folk as Allen Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, and Norman Mailer parted company over political matters, Johnson writes:

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.

Posted February 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"His account of the Communists shows in the most extreme form what I came to loathe in the abolitionists--the conviction that anyone who did not agree with them was a knave or a fool. You see the same in some Catholics and some of the 'Drys' apropos of the 18th amendment. I detest a man who knows that he knows."

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

Posted February 27, 12:00 PM

February 26, 2004

TT: And about time, too

Says Household Opera:

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.

Posted February 26, 12:56 PM

TT and OGIC: Tell us something

Once again, for those of you joining us late:

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.

Posted February 26, 12:30 PM

TT: Guess who's coming to dinner?

Our Girl in Chicago is coming to New York City next Friday! We're going to go see Paul Taylor at City Center, Helen Frankenthaler at Salander-O'Reilly, Sweeney Todd at New York City Opera, and everything else we can cram into three days' worth of nonstop art consumption. Nonstop for her, anyway: I've got a book to finish, yikes....

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.

Posted February 26, 12:19 PM

TT: Words to the wise

Two things you won't want to miss:

- 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.

Posted February 26, 12:09 PM

TT: Those who can do (sort of)

Says SlowLearner, a new addition to "Sites to See":

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.

Posted February 26, 12:03 PM

TT: No degrees of separation

Supermaud (who embodies the South) mentioned Walker Percy's The Moviegoer on her site the other day. I sent her an appreciative e-mail in response, and inside of five minutes we'd upped the ante to the point of mutually acknowledging that we both rank The Moviegoer among the greatest American novels of the twentieth century. Maud says it's "one of my all-time favorites, and possibly THE favorite." I wouldn't go quite that far, but I wouldn't want to live off the difference.

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.

Posted February 26, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The local critic didn't like the piece, which poses the question: does one write for the public, or for the critics? Three thousand people applaud enthusiastically and one journalist makes uncharitable remarks. Which is more important? And how do critics feel able to make a definite judgment after one hearing? As a composer, I would never presume to do such a thing. When my pupils brought their music to me I always made them play it twice, something I learned from Honegger. There is too much of the unexpected in a first hearing; after a second hearing things begin to fall into place."

Miklós Rózsa, Double Life

Posted February 26, 12:00 PM

February 25, 2004

OGIC: The editor's lament

Over the last week, many lit bloggers have been linking to and commenting on this column by Robert McCrum in the UK Observer. McCrum reports that publishers are increasingly buying novels on the basis of synopses or sample chapters, and makes a compelling case that this practice is symptomatic of the publishing industry's problems and sure to exacerbate them. The column has been intelligently commented and expanded upon by Sarah, The Literary Saloon, and others too numerous to itemize.

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.

Posted February 25, 12:37 PM

TT: Time for a break

I lay down for a little nap at 4:30 yesterday afternoon, and the next thing I knew, it was nine o'clock. Yikes! In the evening, thank God, but even so, I know a warning bell when I hear it. No more blogging for me today, thank you very much.

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.

Posted February 25, 12:02 PM

TT: Invisible friends

Insofar as possible, I'm reading everything that's being written about my recent dustup with Bookslut, who got hopping mad at what I said over the weekend about link-poaching. Too many people have chimed in for me to link to all their comments, though you can find most of the best ones by trolling the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column, which you should be doing anyway.

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.

Posted February 25, 12:01 PM

TT: Attention, Keith Sherman

I inadvertently erased your phone message to me. Apologies, but it was a long day, and my trigger finger got itchy.

Could you please call again?

Posted February 25, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The gates of the one class should be open to the other; but neither to one class or to the other can good be done by declaring that there are no gates, no barrier, no difference."

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

Posted February 25, 12:00 PM

February 24, 2004

TT: Wish I were there

Mark Barry of Ionarts got to the Milton Avery exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington:

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.

Posted February 24, 12:05 PM

TT: Close quarters

A reader writes:

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!

Posted February 24, 12:04 PM

TT: Alas, not (by) me

Says MoorishGirl:

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!

Posted February 24, 12:02 PM

TT: Face to face

I found this in my e-mailbox yesterday morning. It's a story from the Chicago Sun-Times:

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.

Posted February 24, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"There is nothing, I think, in which the power of art is shown so much as in playing on the fiddle. In all other things, we can do something at first. Any man will forge a bar of iron, if you give him a hammer; not so well as a smith, but tolerably. A man will saw a piece of wood, and make a box, though a clumsy one; but give him a fiddle, and a fiddle-stick, and he can do nothing."

Samuel Johnson, quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson

Posted February 24, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Pocket books

I've collected Edward Gorey books and miscellany since high school. Sometimes this has meant shelling out a hundred or two hundred dollars for a first edition or something signed, but it's also a collection that I can grow on the cheap by scouring the fiction shelves of used bookstores for old Anchor and Vintage paperbacks with Gorey covers. On occasion I've spotted them on friends' bookshelves and negotiated trades.

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.

Posted February 24, 11:26 AM

February 23, 2004

TT: Right this minute

Like Greg Sandow, I urge you to read Alex Ross' New Yorker essay about classical music:

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.

Posted February 23, 12:00 PM

OGIC: You and what army?

The Oscars have lost 22 million viewers since 1998. So what are the show's producers going to do about it? The Wall Street Journal (no link) reveals the brilliant plan:

- "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.

Posted February 23, 11:29 AM

TT: Fisticuffs in the blogosphere

Bookslut didn't like what I had to say over the weekend about link-poaching. That's putting it mildly. Too bad, but you should read what she has to say, too.

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.)

Posted February 23, 11:19 AM

TT: How about that?

An American blogging from Sweden at MemeFirst writes:

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....

Posted February 23, 11:12 AM

TT: Alas, not by me

Says James Tata:

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.

Posted February 23, 11:01 AM

TT: Far from Times Square

I go to a lot of performances of every kind, and since my job as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal obliges me to cover all Broadway openings, I don't spend nearly enough time wandering off the beaten path. I wish I did. Especially when it comes to theater, New York is full of good things that don't get enough attention, and I'm always happy whenever I have a chance to see one of them. Fortunately, I have theatrical friends who keep me informed about such shows, and one of them steered me last Friday to a production of As You Like It that took place in deepest Queens--Astoria, to be exact, a neighborhood richly populated with Greek restaurants.

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.

Posted February 23, 10:51 AM

TT: Almanac

"I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long. For me no poet made a falser statement than Keats when he wrote the first line of 'Endymion.' When the thing of beauty has given me the magic of its sensation my mind quickly wanders; I listen with incredulity to the persons who tell me that they can look with rapture for hours at a view or a picture. Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome. All the critic can tell you with regard to Titian's Entombment of Christ, perhaps of all the pictures in the world that which has most pure beauty, is to go and look at it. What else he has to say is history, or biography, or what not. But people add other qualities to beauty--sublimity, human interest, tenderness, love--because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is perfect, and perfection (such is human nature) holds our attention but a little while. The mathematician who after seeing Phèdre asked: 'Qu'est-ce que ça prouve?' was not such a foool as he has been generally made out."

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

Posted February 23, 10:08 AM

TT: That rumbling sound you hear...

...is the impending arrival of the first finished copies of A Terry Teachout Reader, which will be arriving in my mailbox later this week. No, it doesn't go on sale until May, but you can place an advance order for your very own copy by clicking here.

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.

Posted February 23, 4:34 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"In Vicksburg, on the asphalt, the deflected minions of want walked, those who lived to care for and feed their cars, and she watched them outside Big Mart. And the sad philosophic fishermen who lived to drag slabby beauties from the water, that dream of long seconds, so they told her. About the same happy contest as sexual intercourse, as she recalled it, though these episodes sank deeper into a blurred well every day. She loved the men and their lostness on the water. Their rituals with lines and rods and reels and lures. The worship they put into it. How they beleaguered themselves with gear and lore, like solemn children or fools. She had spent too much time being unfoolish, as if that were the calling of her generation. As you would ask somebody the point of their lives and they would answer: horses."

Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Posted February 23, 2:49 AM

OGIC: Better late than never

If you had to live in a film, what would it be? To my surprise, this turns out to be the hardest of Terry's questions for me to answer. I thought it would be a simple matter of picking one of my many favorite movies, but it turns out that the movies I like best don't tend to be happy places. The Dreamlife of Angels? The Long Goodbye? The unjustly forgotten Georgia? As potential habitats, these all look damn inhospitable. Still thinking.

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?

Posted February 23, 1:51 AM

February 22, 2004

TT: Taps for today

Two shows yesterday, a performance tonight. Result: no more blogging today, especially since I need to at least try and write some prose-for-hire before the sun goes down. I haven't heard from Our Girl for a couple of days, but maybe she's got something up her pretty sleeve. I myself do not (nor is my sleeve pretty).

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

Posted February 22, 1:52 AM

TT: Almanac

"Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction."

Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

Posted February 22, 1:51 AM

TT: Lights, camera, action, action

Janet Maslin holds forth in today's New York Times about events likely--or not--to follow the opening of The Passion of the Christ:

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.

Posted February 22, 1:51 AM

February 21, 2004

TT: Blogging is not a zero-sum game

Of all the many things that make blogging a truly new medium, the most important is linking. As I remarked in my much-discussed notes on blogging, "Blogs without links aren't blogs." Linking transforms individual blogs into a larger community--a blogosphere--whose members freely share ideas and readers with one another, and in so doing increase their own value.

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.

Posted February 21, 12:48 PM

TT: Alas, not by me

In case you haven't heard (it's all over the blogosphere), Naomi Wolf says that Harold Bloom sexually harassed her while she was an undergraduate at Yale. The accusation reportedly appears in an article by Wolf scheduled for publication in the next issue of New York. For now, Rachel Donadio summed up the story in this week's New York Observer, throwing in for good measure a typically incendiary quote from Camille Paglia:

"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....

Posted February 21, 11:36 AM

TT: Live and in person

If you've always wondered what I look like in the flesh, come to the 92nd Street Y this Sunday night and see for yourself. The occasion is "Norman Podhoretz in Conversation with Terry Teachout." Says the press release:

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.

Posted February 21, 11:18 AM

TT: Almanac

"Meanwhile, if I were endowed with wealth, I should start a great advertising campaign in all the principal newspapers. The advertisements would consist of one short sentence, printed in huge block letters--a sentence that I once heard spoken by a husband to a wife: 'My dear, nothing in this world is worth buying.'"

Max Beerbohm, Mainly on the Air

Posted February 21, 11:09 AM

TT: From yon to hither

Without exception, my friends are puzzled by my more than occasional practice of reading biographies from back to front. It puzzles me, too, even though I've been doing it for years, and I can't offer any explanation, however theoretical, for a habit that at first, second, and third glances makes no sense. All I can tell you is that for some reason not yet accessible to introspection, I often prefer to read about a person's life in reverse chronological order, starting with his death and working backwards to his birth.

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.

Posted February 21, 10:52 AM

TT: Oh, what a good boy am I

Home for a couple of hours in between Big Bill and Fiddler on the Roof (yes, this is a two-performance day, God help me). Instead of taking a nap, which is what I originally had in mind, I was seized by guilt and decided to catch up on my blogmail, and now it's all answered, except for a few pieces that (A) require more thought or (B) will eventually get posted on the blog.

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?

Posted February 21, 6:04 AM

February 20, 2004

TT: I'm Paris, she's Nicole

Once I wake up, I'll catch up, but it's already been drawn to my attention that OGIC and I crashed a very nice party. According to the Literary Saloon:

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.

Posted February 20, 12:05 PM

TT: The czar done gone

I reviewed the Manhattan Theatre Club's production of Regina Taylor's Drowning Crow and Primary Stages' production of Terrence McNally's The Stendhal Syndrome in this morning's Wall Street Journal.

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.

Posted February 20, 12:04 PM

TT: Elsewhere

Hilton Kramer finally made it to PaceWildenstein's Rothko: A Painter's Progress, the Year 1949:

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.

Posted February 20, 12:03 PM

TT: Almanac

It rained.
The hour is an enormous eye.
Inside it, we come and go like reflections.
The river of music.
Enters my blood.
If I say body, it answers wind.
If I say earth, it answers where.

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"

Posted February 20, 12:01 PM

TT: I'm home again, I think

Not only did I get up at 4:30 yesterday morning, but I didn't go to sleep prior to that time (hence it would be closer to the truth to say that I got out of bed at 4:30 yesterday morning). There followed hours and hours and hours of travel, on the ground and in the sky, at the end of which I somehow managed to get to Maria Schneider's Hunter College concert on time. It was worth it, absolutely.

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.

Posted February 20, 12:00 PM

February 19, 2004

TT: Almanac

"His taste in opera was uncomplicated and robust; he had no time for people who talked opera all day but seemed to find it shameful to accept a simple pleasure simply. Those tedious affairs in East Anglia, that strangulated lieder-singer pretending to be a tenor! Why, in Italy they wouldn't have let him on the stage. And as for Mozart in Sussex, you could have all of Sussex and much of Mozart. Charles Russell liked good red meat and the closer the bone the better. Der Rosenkavalier--now that was something. He'd been wallowing (his own word) the night before. Bloody marvellous. The Marschallin had lost her young lover and was taking it gracefully as the woman of the world she was, so the three of them sood there and sang it out, no tiresome action, just a glorious noise. Hab' mir's gelobt, the knife in the heart as the warm soprano went up and up, they you thought that the orchestra was coda-ing out, and Jesus it wasn't, the woman had five notes left. You couldn't take them but you had to, and back you came for more agony, tim