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June 30, 2004

TT: Almanac

"The scene in Mrs. Smythe Leigh's living room, Charles sometimes thought afterwards, was one which must have repeated itself continuously in other places. Mrs. Smythe Leigh's living room was an intellectual fortress and it stood for the larger world. As Mrs. Smythe Leigh told him later, there was no reason to get in a rut because one lived in Clyde. Clyde was a dear, poky place, full of dear people, but one could always open one's windows to the world. One could bring something new to Clyde, and this was what she always tried to do...a few reproductions of modern pictures, a bit of Chinese brocade, a few records of Kreisler and Caruso, and the American Mercury and the New Republic and of course Harper's and the Atlantic, and the New Statesman and L'Illustration. All one had to do was open one's windows to the outer world--and the surprising thing was the number of congenial spirits who gathered if you did it. Sometimes, frankly, she had thought of giving up the Clyde Players. There was always the inertia, but the old guard, Dr. Bush and Katie Rowell, always rallied around her and would not let her give up. Once you had the smell of grease paint in your nostrils, you could never get away from it, and there was always that joy of getting out of oneself by interpreting character on the stage. Charles was a newcomer, but someday he might be the old guard, too."

John P. Marquand, Point of No Return

Posted June 30, 12:03 PM

TT: Memo from Toontown

From Something Old, Nothing New:

Roger Rabbit was the first movie to acknowledge the nostalgia element in cartoon fandom. What I mean by that is that cartoons had usually been thought of as "timeless"; the repackaging of Warner Brothers cartoons -- for television and in compilation films -- usually presented the cartoons as belonging to no particular time or place, endlessly recyclable entertainment aimed mostly at kids. Roger Rabbit, with its '40s setting, presented classic cartoon characters as belonging specifically to that period, part of a genre that had vanished just like the film noir genre to which Bob Hoskins' Eddie Valiant belongs. It acknowledged that cartoon fans weren't necessarily kids, and that what made the old cartoons great were the elements that had been sucked out of them by TV broadcasting (the violence, the political incorrectness)....

I've never seen this put better, which is probably another way of saying that it tallies precisely with my own experience.

Prior to the release in 1988 of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I no longer watched animated cartoons save on the rare occasions when I found myself in a hotel room on a Saturday morning with nothing to do. Seeing Roger Rabbit reminded me--forcibly, immediately--of how much I'd loved those old cartoons, and also got me thinking for the first time about why I loved them. Never before had it occurred to me that they might possibly be a serious form of cinematic art, stylistically continuous with the great live-action screen comedies of the classic period of American filmmaking. Until then I'd simply thought of them as charming commodities, even though my memories of One Froggy Evening or Bully for Bugs were at least as vivid and accessible as my memories of, say, His Girl Friday (more so, in fact, since they were a part of my youth in the way that live-action screwball comedy was not). What Roger Rabbit did was put a frame around those memories and make them available for critical reconsideration.

The next step was up to me, and I took it with a vengeance: I started reading such books about non-Disney animation as were then available, and seeking out the uncensored collections of Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons that had only just started to appear on videocassette. So did a lot of other people, which is one reason why the various all-animation cable networks now make a point of telecasting classic cartoons seven days a week. Sixteen years later, I know at least as much about animation as I do about any other branch of filmmaking, and take it every bit as seriously. I even own a cel set-up from The Cat Concerto, which hangs on my kitchen wall right around the corner from my Neil Welliver woodcut.

As for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I recently watched it on DVD, and found it as smart and funny as I did when it was released. It's more than just a staggeringly well-executed series of special-effects gimmicks driven by nostalgia: it's aesthetically compelling in its own right. If it hadn't been so good, I don't think it would have rekindled my love of cartoons, or anyone else's. And if you haven't seen it recently, or at all, I suggest you do so. Of all the films released in 1988, I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being the one that's best remembered in 2038.

Posted June 30, 12:01 PM

TT: Maintenance

I've been doing some long-needed repairs on "Sites to See" (knocking off dead blogs, updating links, etc.). I decided that a few sites were in the wrong sections, and moved them to the right ones. In the course of doing all this, it occurred to me that it might be time once again to explain how the blogs and sites listed in "Sites to See" are arranged:

- The first section of "Sites to See" contains blogs that are wholly or mostly about the arts (like "About Last Night").

- The second section contains non-blog Web sites that supply useful art-related information.

- The third section directs you to the arts-related pages of major newspaper and magazine Web sites (including the on-line archives of certain critics). It also contains a few Web sites maintained by individual writers which are not blogs but nonetheless are art-relevant.

- The fourth section contains blogs not about the arts that Our Girl and/or I visit regularly or semi-regularly.

In case you don't know, "About Last Night" is hosted by artsjournal.com, the daily digest of English-language news stories and commentary about the arts. To visit artsjournal.com (which you should do each morning without fail), click on the logo in the upper left-hand corner of this page. In addition to "About Last Night," artsjournal.com hosts several other art and culture blogs, all of which are listed separately in the bottom module of the right-hand column. They're worth visiting, too.

All of which reminds me: please drop us a line if there's a blog or Web site not listed in "Sites to See" that you think ought to be there. We promise to take a look, sooner or later.

Posted June 30, 11:10 AM

June 29, 2004

TT: Almanac

"The genuine music-lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it. Most musicians, indeed, prefer to hear operatic music outside the opera house; that is why one so often hears such lowly things, say, as 'The Ride of the Valkyrie' in the concert hall. 'The Ride of the Valkyrie' has a certain intrinsic value as pure music; played by a competent orchestra it may give civilized pleasure. But as it is commonly performed in an opera house, with a posse of fat beldames throwing themselves about the stage, it can only produce the effect of a dose of ipecacuanha. The sort of person who actually delights in such spectacles is the sort of person who delights in gas-pipe furniture. Such half-wits are in a majority in every opera house west of the Rhine. They go to the opera, not to hear music, not even to hear bad music, but merely to see a more or less obscene circus. A few, perhaps, have a further purpose; they desire to assist in that circus, to show themselves in the capacity of fashionables, to enchant the yokelry with their splendor. But the majority must be content with the more modest aim. What they get for the outrageous prices they pay for seats is a chance to feast their eyes upon glittering members of the superior demi-monde, and to abase their groveling souls before magnificoes on their own side of the footlights. They esteem a performance, not in proportion as true music is on tap, but in proportion as the display of notorious characters on the stage is copious, and the exhibition of wealth in the boxes is lavish. A soprano who can gargle her way up to F sharp in alt is more to such simple souls than a whole drove of Johann Sebastian Bachs; her one real rival in the entire domain of art is the contralto who has a pension from a former grand duke and is reported to be enceinte by several stockbrokers."

H.L. Mencken, "Opera," Prejudices: Second Series

Posted June 29, 12:01 PM

TT: Consumables

This is a writing day for me, and what I'm writing is "Second City," my Washington Post column on the arts in New York, which appears in the Post on the first Sunday of each month. I knocked off this Friday's Wall Street Journal drama review yesterday morning. So I'll simply tell you where I've been lately, since you'll probably be reading about most of it, somewhere or other, shortly after the ink dries:

- No sooner did I get home from my secure, formerly undisclosed location than I took myself to the Duplex to hear cabaret singer Joanne Tatham.

- On Friday morning I went to the Metropolitan Museum to look at "Childe Hassam, American Impressionist," about which I included brief remarks (plus a very interesting link) in the "Top Five" module of the right-hand column.

- On Friday evening I went to Carnegie Hall to hear the JVC Jazz Festival concert by Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, and Brian Blade.

- Over the weekend I took in Jean Cocteau Repertory's production of the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera, playing through Aug. 15 at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre on the Lower East Side.

Now kindly excuse me while I go write up all these aesthetic experiences for hard cash money....

Posted June 29, 9:44 AM

June 28, 2004

TT: Almanac

Int. Cheap Rooming House
Ext. Police Station
Int. Hotel Washroom
Ext. Park Bench
Int. Hamburger Joint
Int. Movie House Balcony
Int. Bar
Int. Ginny's Bedroom
Ext. Street of Cheap Rooming Houses

John Paxton, list of settings for screenplay of Crossfire (1947)

Posted June 28, 12:02 PM

TT: Elsewhere (plus a little bit of here)

I've been piling up interesting links for the past month, but was too busy to spin them into a posting until now:

- As I expected, The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross' Web site, has evolved with startling rapidity into a must-read blog. See, for example, this characteristically smart comment about the use of Anton Webern's Piano Variations on the soundtrack of a Sopranos episode. To me, of course, Alex's posting merely offers further proof of my own unswerving conviction that atonal music, be it twelve-tone or freelance, requires the superimposition of some exterior form of logic in order to add up to something more than just a nonsensical succession of non-random sounds. (I've never forgotten the day that my old piano teacher David Kraehenbuehl, a Hindemith pupil, announced to me midway through a lesson that Webern wrote "cocktail music.")

I once went so far as to suggest in print that it would someday be proved scientifically that atonality contradicts the natural law of music--or, to put it another way, that the human brain is hard-wired to comprehend and appreciate tonal music--and sure enough, studies suggesting as much are now starting to turn up in the scientific literature. Courtesy of artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, here's a summary of the latest evidence.

- Another of my favorite new blogs, Jaime Weinman's Something Old, Nothing New, reports on the contents of the next Looney Tunes Golden Collection. Alas, it won't be out until November, but at least you can start drooling. (By the way, Jaime is Sarah's brother, which speaks well for their shared gene pool.)

- Erin O'Connor, who blogs at Critical Mass, recently posted a list of "history books, historical novels, and biographies that meet two essential criteria: they are well written, and one does not need to have a lot of prior background in order to enjoy them." I approve wholeheartedly, as that's the kind of book I like to read and try to write. The list--together with comments by Erin's readers--is here. No less intriguing is another list of "words I sincerely dislike, in no particular order," which happens to include a half-dozen words that also figure prominently on my list.

- The unnervingly well-read Gwenda Bond thoughtfully responded to my pair of postings about my new Max Beerbohm caricature by linking to a delicious 1997 Atlantic essay about Beerbohm, written by none other than Teller (of Penn &). Her post will steer you to the essay in question.

- I never knew that Ed was a John P. Marquand fan. I wrote an admiring critical essay about Marquand's novels for Commentary back in 1987, but wasn't quite satisfied enough with the final product to include it in the Teachout Reader, though I did make brief mention of Marquand in "Seven Hundred Pretty Good Books," my essay on the Book-of-the-Month Club, calling him "a sharp-eyed observer of American manners...unquestionably ripe for revival." Maybe I'll try again someday.

In the meantime, the Marquand novel I usually recommend to curious first-timers is Point of No Return, an elegiac study of suburban alienation whose opening chapters Walker Percy once compared in all seriousness to Kafka.

Incidentally, you'll also find an unexpected reference to Marquand in this February posting about the jazz saxophonist Paul Desmond, to whose exquisitely melancholy music I've been listening ever since my reluctant return (nudge, nudge, Ed) from Cold Spring. Right now, for example, my iBook is playing "Audrey," the delicate minor-key blues dedicated to Audrey Hepburn that Desmond recorded in 1954 with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. (It's on Brubeck Time.) Very Marquandian, that.

While I'm at it, I should also note that one of the best pieces in the Library of America's endlessly rereadable Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944-1946 is Marquand's "Iwo Jima Before H-Hour," a piece of on-scene reportage at least as good as anything that A.J. Liebling or Ernie Pyle ever filed (which is really saying something).

- Felix Salmon dined at La Caravelle a week before it closed, subsequently posting this thoughtful mini-essay about changing fashions in cuisine--and art:

The patrons of La Caravelle were definitely of a certain age: I'd say there were more facelifts than there were people under 40. And it's hard to see how the restaurant could attract a younger crowd without betraying all its finest principles of proper French haute cuisine. So it is destined to close, along with Lutèce and La Côte Basque, evidence of how the very best art can lose its cachet.

In France, at least, such cuisine lives on, and maybe La Tour D'Argent or some other restaurant in Paris will serve as a kind of culinary equivalent of Dia:Beacon – a place where you can always be sure to find the cleanest, purest expression of its own kind of art. Meanwhile, the crowds will flock to Spice Market or Tate Modern, picking and choosing whatever they desire that day. I just hope there's room for both approaches; in painting, food, or any other art form.

- After watching Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle for the first (and, I trust, last) time, it occurred to me that Dorothy Parker couldn't possibly have sounded anything like Jennifer Jason Leigh's lockjawed, ill-conceived impersonation in that misbegotten film. Surely, I thought, the Web can clear this up definitively, so I went on a cyberspace chase for on-line audio files of Parker's voice, and within a matter of seconds hit pay dirt. If you have RealAudio, click on "Resume" and you'll hear the thing itself.

- The recently published volume of Sir John Gielgud's letters made me similarly hungry for a taste of his dulcet voice, and once again the Web steered me straight. This page contains sound files of Gielgud reading several Shakespeare sonnets. (Why has no one ever reissued The Ages of Man, Gielgud's celebrated one-man Shakespeare show? I know he recorded it on an LP, and I think he also telecast most or all of it.)

- I forget where I first stumbled across this one (sorry, whoever you are!), but here's an amusing page of interesting English language trivia, including such gems as "the two longest one-syllable words in English" and "the longest word with no repeated letters."

- The last sentence of "George & Me," David Denby's New Yorker review of Fahrenheit 9/11, seems to me worthy of wide dissemination:

Michael Moore has become a sensational entertainer of the already converted, but his enduring problem as a political artist is that he has never known how to change anyone's politics.

Two words: Tony Kushner.

- Lastly, for those who took issue with my Wall Street Journal essay about how and why The Producers has dated, I post without comment the last two paragraphs of Chip Crews' very good profile of Mel Brooks in Sunday's Washington Post:

"A Broadway show is a much more profound and personal expression of a writer's soul than a movie is," he says. "There's no greater experience than being in a big theater, seeing your ideas portrayed onstage by people like Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, and having the audience whoop with delight -- what could be better?"

He smiles. "Broadway -- living Jews sitting in a big audience, screaming with laughter. It blows the dust off your soul."

Posted June 28, 12:01 PM

TT: And about time, too

Supermaud's back! Not that her stand-ins weren't excellent, but the blogosphere is never quite the same when the Real Right Thing is absent therefrom.

Lunch?

Posted June 28, 5:41 AM

TT: I'd rather be wrong (almost)

Lileks is rocking today. First on the bossa nova:

I'm listening to Bossa Nova these days, as if it will somehow bring back the summer we've lost so far. Most of what I'm listening to is ersatz Bossa Nova, I fear. The Americanized version. but a friend of my wife gave her some real Brazilian BN the other day, and it was some of the most narcoleptic music I'd ever heard. The singers all sounded as though they could barely keep their chins off their sternums, and they couldn't sing very well, either. They sounded out of breath, like beautiful hungover waify fashion models propped up in front of a microphone after a night of dancing and smoking unfiltered cigarettes....

Next on the Marx Brothers:

"Airplane," a very funny movie, would have completely baffled people in 1917. it's all so subjective that it's hard to believe anything can be established empirically as FUNNY, in the sense that it's amusing to most people in most places in most times. Some day, eventually, the Marx Brothers will be NOT FUNNY, just a strange manic artifact full of allusions to conventions we've lost and forgotten....

Groucho – well, even when the movie is bad and the lines are lame and the performance just more of the same, at least it's the same Groucho. Venal, lazy, irascible, horny, prickly – he's always living by his wits in situations that require anything but. He's a series of contradictory characteristics – valor / cowardice, nobility / cravenness, promiscuity / uxoriousness, selfishness / camaraderie, and every one of them is genuine, as the situation demands. An utterly unique American comic archetype; remove him from the troupe and you have nothing....

[I]n the end I think he'll be doomed by the way they paced his jokes. Couldn't be helped – to the audiences of the day he was so hilarious that his routines brought guaranteed laughter, so they had to hold the scene for a few seconds to accommodate the laughter. Stage pacing translated to film - poorly. When you see the movies alone, at home, it seems peculiar to watch Groucho deliver a zinger then look up and hold the pose, waiting for the laughter to crest and fall. You were meant to experience these movies communally. They counted on it. They required it. In the theater, we laugh when others laugh. At home, we laugh to ourselves, which takes half a second. Disorganized group laughter takes a while to disband. Groucho is always waiting for the laughter to die down, and nowadays when these movies are seen in different circumstances, there's no laughter to evaporate. Which makes them somehow seem less funny than they think they are.

He's all wet and a yard wide about bossa nova, much less so about Groucho. But right or not, who cares? I still wish I could write like that.

Posted June 28, 5:17 AM

TT: Irreplaceable

Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, has written a thought-provoking piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education called "Art History Can Trade Insights With the Sciences." No link, alas, but here are some excerpts:

As a psychologist previously trained in the humanities and in studio art, I have spent my career applying the science of cognitive psychology (and recently cognitive neuroscience) to studying the creation of and response to art.

To be sure, we scientists who wander into the art museum have to guard against many pitfalls: blind empiricism, testing hypotheses that are not theoretically grounded; unconsciously finding data to fit our theories; waiting for others to try to falsify our theories. We need to avoid reductionism: A scientific explanation of an artistic phenomenon -- say, why we are moved more by some paintings than others -- is not superior to a humanistic one, nor does it replace an explanation at the humanistic level....

To decide whether or not to accept a scientific explanation of an artistic phenomenon, one must evaluate the evidence. One has to determine whether the evidence supports the claim, and if not, how the claim could be subjected to further, decisive test. One has to think scientifically. And therein lies the problem. Humanists are not trained to think in terms of propositions testable via systematic empirical evidence. A scientific finding about the arts may therefore be unfairly rejected without a careful evaluation of the evidence....

Today neuroscience is moving into the study of the arts. Brain imaging allows us to track how the brain processes works of art, what parts of the brain are involved as artists develop a work of art, and how training in an art form stimulates brain growth. Scientists who do that kind of work will need a deep understanding of the art form they are studying. Humanists and cognitive scientists are, therefore, most likely going to be teaming up more to study humanistic phenomena from a scientific perspective.

It's interesting that I ran across this essay the same day I posted a link to a piece of scientific research with powerfully humanistic implications. As a card-carrying aesthete, you'd think I'd be resistant to that kind of thinking, but it happens that I once spent two years preparing to pursue a graduate degree in psychology, in the course of which I studied statistics, cognitive psychology, and experimental design (as well as spending more than a few sleepless nights trying to talk crisis-line callers out of killing themselves). Hence I'm more open than most critics to the kind of research-driven scrutiny of the arts about which Dr. Winner writes in her essay. At its best, it can be both provocative and illuminating--so long as the practitioners never lose sight of the ultimate end of art, which is beauty.

No doubt it's significant in this connection that I started out as a musician. Music is non-verbal and thus radically ambiguous, meaning that it doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis. Yet it is possible to talk about what makes a piece of music beautiful--or, at the very least, what makes it beautiful to you. Since I'm both a musician and an intellectual, I've scrutinized my tastes closely and analytically enough to have isolated certain musical "tricks" that I find especially appealing. I know exactly what it is that I like about, say, Gabriel Fauré's bass lines, or the harmonies in the songs of Jimmy Van Heusen. To be sure, I can't tell you why these devices tickle my fancy. I can only apply Eddie Condon's empirical test of musical quality: "As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?" (Philip Larkin, who when not writing great poetry was also a part-time jazz critic, swore by Condon's Law.) But at least I know what I like, and I have enough scientific knowledge to suspect that it will someday be possible to move in certain cases from what to why.

Still, Dr. Winner is quite right to warn of the dangers of reductionism, which is just another word for philistinism. You can teach a computer to play grandmaster-level chess, but you can't teach it to write a great symphony, or even a summer movie. The logic of creation is too fuzzy to be reduced to recipes. Seeing as how "About Last Night" is fast approaching its first anniversary, I thought it might be useful in this connection to recycle an almanac entry from this blog's second week. The French composer Olivier Messiaen said it, and I concur wholeheartedly:

I admit that it would never occur to me to ask a question of an electronic brain, chiefly because I'd be incapable of it. The interrogated electronic brain very quickly generates thousands, if not millions, of responses, and among those thousands of millions of responses, only one is right. Rather than bother with an extremely burdensome apparatus and spend months formulating a question, isn't it quicker to have a stroke of genius and find the right solution right away?

That's why I'm not afraid (at least not in the long run) of the effects of technology on art. Yes, technology is a many-edged sword, one that must be wielded by humanists so as not to slice our souls into bits and pieces--but the good news is that there has to be a human being holding the sword. It won't hold itself.

Posted June 28, 4:27 AM

June 26, 2004

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"It's like doing a CGI version of Animal Farm without any of the bothersome fascist symbolism, just because the animals are so cute."

Liz Penn on the new Stepford Wives

Posted June 26, 1:21 AM

June 25, 2004

TT: Another cat skinned

The Wall Street Journal sent me to Washington a couple of weeks ago to check out the Kennedy Center's revival of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Mark Lamos and starring Mary Stuart Masterton, Jeremy Davidson, George Grizzard, and Dana Ivey as, respectively, Maggie, Brick, Big Daddy and Big Mama. My review appears in this morning's paper, and it's broadly similar to what I thought of last year's Broadway revival: I didn't like the youngsters, but the old hands knocked me out. As for the play itself, well, let's just say eeuuww:

Mind you, I don't much care for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," which I dismissed in my review of the Broadway revival as "a flabby, pseudo-poetic period piece that leaves you wondering what all the shouting is about--and there's a whole lot of shouting going on." For that matter, I don't much care for Tennessee Williams in general, most of whose plays seem to me to be peopled by a peculiar race of sentimental, logorrheic mutants bearing no obvious resemblance to human beings. As far as I'm concerned, Mary McCarthy nailed it in a single sentence of her 1948 review of "A Streetcar Named Desire": "Dr. Kinsey would be interested in a semi-skilled male who spoke of the four-letter act as ‘getting those colored lights going.'"

Big Daddy is no more convincing than Stanley Kowalski, least of all in the second-act speech in which he claims to sympathize with Brick's sexual confusion: "One thing you can grow on a big place more important than cotton!--is tolerance!--I grown it." Show me a plantation owner of his vintage who was capable of uttering those words, or anything remotely resembling them, and I'll eat a whole plateful of raw cotton drenched in molasses....

Meanwhile, back on Broadway, I paid a visit to Hairspray, which has a new pair of leads:

I confess to still being left cold as a Popsicle by its noisy blend of rock 'n' roll pastiche and what can only be called civil-rights kitsch. On the other hand, Jack O'Brien's staging and Jerry Mitchell's choreography are energetic and ingenious, and the current cast continues to deliver the goods, ramming "Hairspray"'s tedious little commercials for tolerance down your throat with all the gusto of a Disney cartoon. If that warms your cockles, rest assured that the Quality Control Department at the Neil Simon Theatre remains on the job.

No link, so either buy a paper or--better yet--subscribe to The Wall Street Journal Online, which is so convenient (and costs so much less) that I actually let my dead-tree subscription lapse and now read the Journal on my iBook each morning. In case you haven't heard, there's far more to the Journal than money and me. It also publishes top-notch arts criticism, daily book reviews, and the Friday Weekend Journal section in which my drama reviews appear. To subscribe, go here.

Posted June 25, 12:15 PM

TT: Crime and punishment?

As the entire book-reviewing world knows by now, Michiko Kakutani's evisceration of Bill Clinton's My Life in the daily New York Times has been followed by Larry McMurtry's canonization of same in the Times Book Review.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some politically oriented folks who don't seem to understand the mechanics of the book-review biz have jumped to the conclusion that Review B was in some way intended as penance for Review A. "About Last Night" has and will have no official opinion on the literary merits of My Life, or of the two reviews published in the Times--we don't do politics here--but speaking as an old book-reviewing hand, I can assure you from a safe distance that it couldn't possibly have happened that way. Both reviews would have been assigned separately and before the fact, and their dates of publication were clearly determined by the date of publication of My Life, not by any corporate desire on the part of the Times to kiss up to said book's author. (As for the early posting of McMurtry's review on the Times's Web site, I'd have done exactly the same thing if I'd been in charge. The Clinton book is news, and news is a dish that tastes best when served piping hot.)

Regarding the mutually contradictory contents of the two reviews, I'd say they bespeak a pretty impressive degree of book-related vitality on the part of the New York Times. Most American newspapers, after all, don't review books even once, much less twice. Like it or not, My Life is by definition an important book, and the Times has pitched two critical change-ups on it in the course of a single week. First came a savage pan by one of the paper's in-house critics, followed by a fellatial rave from an outsider writing in its weekly book-review supplement--a publication run, I might add, by an editor whose alleged right-wing sympathies have been the subject of considerable discussion in the literary sector of the blogosphere. Whatever else those reviews were, they definitely weren't predictable.

All in all, I'd say the Times just had itself a pretty good week, bookwise.

UPDATE: The third link above is to Jonah Goldberg's comments at "The Corner," National Review's on-line site. Jonah responds as follows:

Terry knows more -- much more -- about such things than I do and I defer to him for the most part. That said, it doesn't quite wash that the reviews are unrelated in anyway since McMurtry makes pretty much a direct reference to the first Times review in his attempt to debunk the notion that Clinton's book isn't better than Grant's autobiography. Maybe the Times Sunday Book Review supplement editor, Sam Tanenhaus, is off the hook on the conspiracy charge, but McMurtry's review still seems like a rushed rescue mission for a doomed book than an intellectually honest or even serious effort....

Quite so--McMurtry's review does make "blind" reference to Kakutani's mention of Grant's Personal Memoirs--but given the short time frame, I assume the reference was either inserted in the course of editing in order to make the review more timely, or the whole review was delivered by McMurtry at the last possible minute. The latter wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. I suppose I shouldn't admit this in public, but it's not my habit to write most of my reviews more than a day or so prior to their deadlines, if that much!

MORE: A reader writes:

I liked your analysis of the independence of McMurtry's review. I'm not sure if McMurtry was referring exclusively to the original Times review by referencing comparisons to Grant's memoirs, however. A Google news search shows many many hits for articles containing both Clinton and Ulysses. This one yields over 500 hits. The original Times review may have provoked all that came afterwards, but does it look to you as if there was a subsequent tsunami which was worth addressing?

A good question, to which I have no answer. Still, it provides additional circumstantial evidence that McMurtry was writing off his own bat, not somebody else's.

Posted June 25, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"He would arrive for work in the morning and say, 'What are the lyrics?' That's what he called his lines, his dialogue. He hadn't gotten around to looking at the script yet, he'd say. 'Somebody give me the lyrics.' And I thought that was the secret to doing the lines like he did them. You don't learn them in advance. 'I'll go in each morning and I'll learn them in makeup.' Oh, dear, was I wrong. I was stumbling over my first line. And he knew the script backward and forward. It was part of his act...'What are my lyrics?'"

Jane Greer (quoted in Lee Server, Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care")

Posted June 25, 9:15 AM

June 24, 2004

TT: Nothing to do

My friends all take vacations, and swear by them. I don't, and after due consideration I've decided to blame this idiosyncrasy on my late father, who planned the family vacations of my youth on the mistaken assumption that the point of going somewhere is to do something. An anxious, restless man, he was never much good at doing nothing, whereas it seemed self-evident to me from childhood onward that the whole point of taking a vacation was to do whatever you wanted--including nothing--whenever you wanted.

As usual with small-town parents, his views prevailed, and so our vacations were action-packed. Even when we bought a mobile home on Kentucky Lake and started spending summer weekends there, he was all but incapable of simply taking it easy. Instead, he preferred to immerse himself (and us) in elaborate home-improvement projects, and when he couldn't come up with anything else to do, he'd turn a hose on the white gravel with which he'd landscaped the lot and wash the dirt off it. It was at that point that I started thinking up plausible-sounding reasons to spend my weekends home alone, reading.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I never got into the habit of taking vacations on my own after I grew up. By then I was working for a newspaper in New York, halfway across the country from my parents, and whenever I got more than a few days off I'd usually fly home to see them. I thought my schedule would become more flexible when I became a freelancer, but the opposite happened--I found myself covering performances the whole year round--and the notion that I might want to spend a week or two going somewhere purely for my pleasure simply never occurred to me. Thus it was that I became obsessive about work, and thus it was that I eventually put myself in the hands of a psychotherapist who told me, among many other things, that I needed to start taking vacations from time to time.

At her increasingly firm urging, I took my first one in nearly twenty years, but it ended up being an art lover's rendering of one of my father's holidays-on-a-treadmill. I went to Isle au Haut, a Maine island portrayed by Fairfield Porter in a 1975 lithograph that hangs on my wall, visiting a half-dozen art museums along the way and writing an article about the trip for The Wall Street Journal immediately upon my return. To be sure, it was a medium step in the right direction, and I enjoyed myself hugely, but a busman's holiday wasn't quite what the doctor thought she'd ordered, so she told me to take two or three days off this time around and spend them on an uncomplicated trip to nowhere in particular.

Not long after receiving my new set of marching orders, I fell ill. Finding myself with time on my hands, I spent some of it surfing the Web for travel-related ideas. Along the way I read about a village on the Hudson River called Cold Spring. I liked the sound of it, and I also liked the fact that I could get there by train (I don't own a car and don't like to fly). Further inquiry revealed that Cold Spring was the home of the Hudson House Inn, a riverfront inn built in 1832 and located a block from the train station. I looked at my calendar and saw a three-day hole in June, so I called the inn on the spur of the moment, booked a room, and spent the next three weeks wondering what I'd gotten myself into. Cold Spring, it seems, is known for its antique shops, but not much else. While the surrounding area contains countless toothsome-sounding tourist attractions, you can't get to any of them without a car. For better or worse, I'd planned a trip that would have driven my poor father howling mad: three days' worth of nothing to do. What effect would it have on his oldest son?

When the appointed day came, I packed an overnight bag, turned off my computer and telephone, caught a cab to Grand Central Station, and boarded a Hudson Line train for Cold Spring. It was hot and rainy in Manhattan and warm and noisy on the train, and I squirmed uncomfortably as I watched the river roll by outside my window, feeling more than a little bit nervous at the thought of all that time on my hands. An hour and ten minutes later, the train pulled into the Cold Spring station. I was the only passenger who got off. I couldn't see the village through the trees and wasn't sure what to do next, so I called the inn on my cell phone and asked for directions. Three minutes later, I was standing in front of the Hudson House Inn, looking across the street at the broad, tree-lined river and listening to birds chirping away just over my head. On the far shore was Storm King Mountain, shrouded in the light gray mist of a muggy June afternoon. For no reason at all, my eyes filled with tears.

I checked in--I was the only guest--and took a shower and a nap. Then I went out again and planted myself on a rough-hewn park bench a stone's throw from the water. Behind me was the inn, before me the mountain, beside me a neatly painted hexagonal bandstand whose cornerstone proclaimed it to have been built in 1929, three years after my father was born. A pier lined with old-fashioned streetlights, all but deserted on that quiet Tuesday afternoon, jutted out into the river. I sat for a half-hour and watched the freight trains rumble down the tracks at the foot of the mountain. A white sailboat glided by in the warm orange sunlight. Some wry impulse had led me to tuck a copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Shadows on the Hudson in my shoulder bag, but I didn't feel like reading, or using my cell phone to check my messages, or doing anything other than sitting on the bench, gazing in silence at the river and the mountain and the summer sun.

An hour or so later, I crossed the tracks and climbed the hill to the Upper Village. I strolled up one side of Main Street and down the other, peering in the windows of the antique stores and restaurants. It was time to eat, so I chose a pleasant-looking grill, ordered crabcakes, and turned my attention to the bookshelf by my table. It was filled with the dusty volumes that interior decorators buy by the foot, and as I waited for my dinner, I looked at their frayed spines, charmed and a little surprised by what I found:

Mountainmen Crafts and Skills
Elizabeth Goudge, The Child from the Sea
Sibylle Bedford, Jigsaw
The Valley of Silence: Catholic Thought in Contemporary Poland
Barbara Pym, A Very Private Eye
If I Live to Be 100...: Congregate Housing for Later Life
Rock Hudson: His Story
Agatha Christie, Curtain
Ralph Bellamy, When the Smoke Hits the Fan
Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane
Hamilton Basso, The View from Pompey's Head
John D. Macdonald, The Empty Copper Sky
Penelope Ashe, Naked Came the Stranger
Kahlil Gibran, The Forerunner
Richard Wilbur, New and Selected Poems

I pulled New and Selected Poems off the shelf and opened it at random. My eye fell on this couplet: When I must come to you, O my God, I pray/It be some dusty-roaded holiday. Spurred by the coincidence, I took out my appointment book and started scribbling down the titles of the other books, thinking that it might be amusing to write a little essay about them. No sooner did I enter the last title, though, than my crabcakes arrived, and they turned out to be so tasty that all the clever thoughts I'd been thinking promptly fell out of my mind, never to be thought again.

After dinner I went down the hill to the water's edge and sat on the same park bench I'd occupied earlier. This time I saw a brass plaque on the back:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF
ADELAIDE R. SMITH
1913-2003
"WE COULDN'T HAVE A MORE PERFECT DAY"

Once again the writerly wheels in my head started turning. Who was Adelaide R. Smith? Had this been her preferred stopping place? How had what I took to be her favorite saying come to be inscribed on a plaque and bolted to a park bench by the Hudson River? Interesting questions, to be sure, but I lost interest in the answers when I saw that the sun was about to slip behind Storm King Mountain. I let it burn blue-green spots into my eyes as it slid down the evening sky, and no sooner had it vanished than the streetlights blinked on one by one. A police car rolled up to the bandstand, then cruised away. The birds were still singing. I left my bench and returned to the inn. My room was small, simple, and comfortable, and I curled up in bed with Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking, which Our Girl in Chicago had assured me would be the perfect book for a vacation (she was right), and read myself to sleep.

I could tell you everything I did the following day, but it wouldn't sound much different than what I'd done the day before: I sat by the river, looked in store windows, searched out meals, took an afternoon nap, read when I felt like it, and listened to the birds. At one point I started counting the number of cars in the freight train on the far shore of the Hudson, and when I got to 118 it occurred to me that I hadn't done anything like that since I was a little boy. Minutes and hours dissolved without my noticing, and once more I watched the sun set, returned to my room, and marveled at how unhesitatingly I had taken to having nothing to do.

It occurs to me that middle age consists in part of learning all the obvious things you either ignored or dismissed out of hand when you were younger and more knowing. In my case, one of them is that if you want to unwind, it's a good idea to get out of town. By removing myself from the scenes of my professional excesses--the desk, the computer, the city itself--I had catapulted myself out of my confining routine. Instead of reconstituting it in Cold Spring, I happily frittered away the better part of two whole days without a second thought. Anywhere you go, there you are: so runs a favorite saying of mine, yet in my case it turned out to be not so true as I'd always thought. Yes, I was still me, but a slightly different me, one unexpectedly content to be idle. Perhaps I had rediscovered a part of me that my father had buried under the weight of his own obsessions. Perhaps I had simply figured out for myself what my friends always knew, which is that to do and to be are not necessarily the same thing, at least not when you're sitting by the Hudson River, watching the sun set behind a green-topped mountain.

Of course such moments are not meant to last. Their evanescence is part of their charm. I checked my voice mail after breakfast the next morning and found an urgent plea from a neighbor in distress, the kind of help-me-Obi-Wan-Kenobi-you're-my-only-hope summons to which the one decent reply is in the affirmative. The trains from Cold Spring to New York City leave two minutes before the hour, so I checked out a bit earlier than I'd planned, spent a half-hour sitting by the Hudson, then trudged up the hill to the station. As if to emphasize that my brief idyll was over, my car was full of shrieking teenage girls en route to Manhattan, there to spend the day shopping, and I listened to their prattle all the way back to Grand Central Station. Cold Spring seemed a thousand miles away.

Yet my parting words to the friendly young woman at the front desk of the Hudson House Inn were still fresh in my memory. "I know you had a good time," she said with a smile, to which I replied, "I sure did, and I mean to come back soon." Who knew that a three-day trip to nowhere in particular could be so full of delight? I didn't--but I do now.

Posted June 24, 4:44 AM

OGIC: Trend noted, encouraged

Both Bondgirl and Bookish Gardener have been quietly slipping classic lines from Buffy the Vampire Slayer into their post titles.

Posted June 24, 4:11 AM

OGIC: O pioneer

One of the first critics to cast a cold eye on the moviemaking of Michael Moore was Pauline Kael. My friend Kenneth has just revisited her 1989 review of Roger and Me.

Posted June 24, 1:23 AM

June 23, 2004

OGIC: Links alive

- Maud has a short story, "Post-Extraction," up at the newish literary magazine Swink. In news that will surprise nobody, it's really, really good. How smart and nice of them to make it freely available!

- Part of Maud's story is about on-line gaming. A little while back, a thoroughly fascinating essay in The Walrus looked at the real-world economics of on-line fantasy worlds. Economist Edward Castronova stumbled on these games a few years ago and what he discovered there revived a flagging academic career:

EverQuest had its own economy, a bustling trade in virtual goods. Players generate goods as they play, often by killing creatures for their treasure and trading it. The longer they play, the more powerful they get--but everyone starts the game at Level 1, barely strong enough to kill rats or bunnies and harvest their fur. Castronova would sell his fur to other characters who'd pay him with "platinum pieces," the artificial currency inside the game. It was a tough slog, so he was always stunned by the opulence of the richest players. EverQuest had been launched in 1999, and some veteran players now owned entire castles filled with treasures from their quests.

Things got even more interesting when Castronova learned about the "player auctions." EverQuest players would sometimes tire of the game, and decide to sell off their characters or virtual possessions at an on-line auction site such as eBay. When Castronova checked the auction sites, he saw that a Belt of the Great Turtle or a Robe of Primordial Waters might fetch forty dollars; powerful characters would go for several hundred or more. And sometimes people would sell off 500,000-fold bags of platinum pieces for as much as $1,000.

As Castronova stared at the auction listings, he recognized with a shock what he was looking at. It was a form of currency trading. Each item had a value in virtual "platinum pieces"; when it was sold on eBay, someone was paying cold hard American cash for it. That meant the platinum piece was worth something in real currency. EverQuest's economy actually had real-world value.

He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S.--higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game--the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled.

Then he performed one final analysis: The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia.

It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even exist.

- I like James Lilek's affectionate tribute to writers who smoke. Or is it smokers who write? In any case, Christopher Hitchens' recent slice-and-dice jobs on Michael Moore and Ronald Reagan are the occasion for a description I know will have certain FOOGICs nodding their heads in self-recognition:

I am reasonably sure he wrote both pieces in the same state of furious irritated inebriation, and both strike me as two-pack essays. Forty cigarettes, minimum. Of course, you don't know if he's one of those light-‘em-and-leave'-em writers who fire up a Winston, set it aside, pound furiously for four minutes, take that last toxic plastic-tasting drag that makes you think I hate cigarettes for a fleeing second, or whether he parks the butt in the corner of his mouth and smokes as he writes, getting ashes all over the place. I suspect the latter. I suspect he is one of those writers who doesn't empty the ashtray until the piece is done, and occasionally will use the butt to clear away some empty real estate in the ashtray so the cigarette doesn't relight the discarded filters.

If he's a filter man. Probably so. Otherwise he'd have to shave his tongue with a straight edge every morning. Steady, lad. Steady. Hold the wrist with the other hand if you have to. Ah, to hell with it.

- Colby is being blistering and funny, what else is new, on Road to Perdition and some other movies:

Tom Hanks plays a button man whose murdering ways get his wife and children (I forget exactly how many) killed, but who is healed and redeemed and whatnot as he flees his betrayers with his last surviving brat in tow. The whole thing's a very nice opportunity for the old man and the boy to get to know each other, and even to engage in a little comic business--at Al Capone's expense, no less! Too bad the pair chose to flee towards the town with a name ripped from the pages of A Child's Garden of Lameass Foreshadowing. Sam Mendes seems to have arrived just in time to answer America's undiscovered need for a stupid, gauche version of John Sayles.

In related news, I'd still like the two hours I spent watching American Beauty back. And as long as we're all stomping on Mendes, I wonder what Terry's reaction will be when he hears that the man's next project is a film version of Sweeney Todd? Nothing involving a straight razor, I hope.

Regarding Colby's assessment of School of Rock, however, I'll grant him "piffle," but "noxious piffle"? Isn't that almost a contradiction in terms? And Colby, why do you hate kids?

- Finally, Alex Ross's blog is going like gangbusters. Here he shares his used-book finds, including a copy of Lord Jim inscribed "Texas School Book Depository, 1963." A couple of weeks ago he had a brief appreciation of music used in The Sopranos that I've been meaning to flag. Bookmark him.

Posted June 23, 6:48 AM

OGIC: Defending Henry's life

Colm Toibin's The Master must be one of the most widely discussed books of June. The reviews are popping up like dandelions. I haven't read the book yet, but I'm finding the reviews fascinating. Everyone admires it, most critics without reservation, but this week a few interesting exceptions have surfaced. In this week's New York Times Book Review, Daniel Mendelsohn agrees with other reviewers about the novel's stylistic beauty and imaginative power:

[W]hile [Toibin's] dazzling embedding of bona fide Jamesian nuggets throughout his narrative will delight James scholars, they never obtrude into the smooth and elegant flow of the novel's movement.

But he goes on to wonder whether the novelist underestimates how much authentic "living" James did. He questions an overly easy but commonly held idea about James: that he sacrificed "living" for his art. According to Mendelsohn, Toibin goes even further, suggesting that, like an "artistic vampire living off the lifeblood of his innocent and truly suffering victims," James leeched off of the lives of others. Mendelsohn thinks this an unfair assessment, and calls into question the assumptions on which it rests: a narrow understanding of "life" and a dubious, simplistic opposition of it with "art." He raises these questions eloquently and even passionately:

''The Master'' is, of course, a novel, and Toibin isn't bound by the facts; but the way that he's loaded the dice against James here suggests what is, to my mind, a larger failure of sympathy.

This is strange, because sympathy is something Toibin the critic, the chronicler of gay lives, has thought a great deal about. ''The gay past is not pure,'' he writes in ''Love in a Dark Time,'' referring to the way in which the homosexuals of an earlier generation were forced to lead double, lying lives. ''It is duplicitous and slippery, and it requires a great deal of sympathy and understanding.'' But ''The Master,'' Toibin's fifth novel, made me wonder whether he fully understands only a certain kind of suffering, and has only a certain kind of sympathy. For Oscar Wilde, with his extravagant public sufferings and real physical abasement, for the scholar F. O. Matthiessen, with his tortured closetedness and eventual suicide, Toibin--who has acknowledged what he feels is the ''abiding fascination of sadness . . . and, indeed, tragedy''--clearly has great sympathy in his essays. And it is for this 19th-century, operatic sympathy that he has sympathy in the new novel, too: Minny and Constance and Alice James, with their Pucciniesque sufferings, their illnesses, premature death and suicide.

But it may be that Toibin's very nature, his own fascination with high tragedy and his admirably fierce moral objection to the kind of secretiveness and closetedness that once ravaged him, as it did so many of us, makes him unable to get to the deep opaque heart of Henry James--the elusive and frustrating thing that got him going about James in the first place. It's possible that James just didn't suffer in the way Toibin understands suffering. From everything we know, he was indeed quite a happy person (by his own standards, rather than ours) for most of his life--productive, sociable, well loved and remarkably kind. And, of course, a very great artist for whom art was the highest satisfaction. Yet Toibin never explores what it might feel like to be satisfied by art alone in the way that most of us want to be satisfied by love and sex; he just keeps showing you the damage that art causes without really suggesting what its compensatory value might be--for James or, indeed, for us. There is an early story of James's in which a young American asks himself whether ''it is better to cultivate an art than to cultivate a passion''; for James in real life, at least, it seems clear what the answer was--just as it seems clear what Toibin thinks, too. The last page of ''The Master'' provides one final memory, one final illumination of why James was ''cold,'' why for him there was a kind of emotion in art that nothing in ''life'' could match. A closing image of the lone artist, anxiously culling moments from life to be preserved in art, is meant, I suspect, to come off as melancholy, if not tragic.

But what if James wasn't tragic? That a life without passion as we think of it could still be a fulfilled life is one paradox that Toibin's artful, moving and very beautiful novel doesn't seem to have considered; and so he does not dramatize it because it isn't clear to him. What we get in ''The Master'' is, instead, the intricate and wrenching drama of James's ''victims.'' The Master himself remains, ultimately, unknowable--a problem that perhaps no artist could ever solve.

In a perfect world we'd get more book reviews like this one: judicious, eloquent, and animated by a compelling Big Idea.

In this week's New Yorker, John Updike has the same Idea:

We sorely miss in the novel, and find abundantly in the biographies, the sound of James's voice, as it is heard in [Leon] Edel's and [Fred] Kaplan's frequent quotation of onrolling sentences and stabbing, mischievous phrases culled from his letters. Tóibín takes the divulgences and descriptions in these letters, and in those of James's correspondents, and turns them into a curious silent movie.

He does not entertain the possibility that James felt no need to be outed. The nineteenth century, hospitable to bachelor uncles and celibate scholar-saints, did not necessarily subscribe to the extremely high value the twentieth century assigned sex and its associated concept of "love." The, to our sense, grotesque innocence of Ruskin did not prevent him from being a great aesthetic theorist; John Singer Sargent's apparent lack of a love life did not annul his art. A James contemporary as vital and assertive and pleased with himself as George Bernard Shaw was relieved of his virginity only by a forceful intervention from the widow Jenny Patterson on his twenty-ninth birthday. Sex was not yet considered the only game to be played.

Whatever you think of James's style--and I know that plenty of smart people go into sneezing fits when they even get into the same room with his books--I find it hard to believe that someone could read his work and think of his as a sheltered existence. The inner lives of so many different kinds of people are animated there: men, women, children, rich, poor, middle-class, bright, dim, kind, wicked, and so on. This curiosity, let alone his insight, didn't come from simply sitting back and coldly observing life. James's interest in other people was unbounded. He wrote thousands of letters to scores of correspondents, had friends all over Europe and America, and enjoyed many intimate, if not romantic, relationships. As Mendelsohn is at pains to establish, he was "productive, sociable, well loved and remarkably kind." It's interesting that this side of James seems to get a fairer shake from his biographers than from a biographical novelist. A little anxiety at work, maybe?

Oh, and Sam wasn't crazy about it either.

Posted June 23, 2:58 AM

June 22, 2004

TT: Inches from the door

I returned from the barber seconds ago and am now about to go up the spout, but I just received this e-mail from a reader apropos of the Evelyn Waugh quotation-from-memory I posted at the end of yesterday's Consumables, and wanted to pass it on to you before I retire to my Secure Undisclosed Location:

I may be late on this, but here's the passage in Evelyn Waugh's diaries that you asked about on your blog the other day. It's the entry for Sunday 17 November 1946 (p. 663 in the English edition). A houseguest had departed, and Waugh wrote, "What an enormous, uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age and to turn, as the door shuts behind the departing guest, to a first reading of 'Portrait of a Lady.' "

Even better. Many thanks. Ta-ta for now.

Posted June 22, 12:30 PM

TT: Almanac

"To 'live' is an expression which has had much harm done it by second-rate writers who seem to think that 'life' is limited to pretending you like absinthe and keeping a mistress in Montmartre."

Ralph Vaughan Williams, "Gustav Holst: An Essay and a Note"

Posted June 22, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Lost world

Last fall I pulled Mary McCarthy's Intellectual Memoirs off the shelf for the first time in years and found two fifty-dollar bills tucked inside. Nice, but alarming enough that I can now confidently say--after an evening of on-the-ground investigation--that there is not another red cent hidden in any book in my apartment. This is not my usual notion of a savings account--my money didn't earn a lot of interest there, needless to say--and I'm going to be very careful next time I take a box of books to the local bookstore.

A piece in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) catalogs some of the amazing items discovered in used books at New York's Strand and a few other bookstores. These items include an activist's rap sheet; sketches by Bosch, Michelangelo, and the unidentified; birth certificates; dirty pictures; and, natch, love letters. Some of the gaudier finds:

The Strand did buy a $15 doodled-over book of drawings by the Renaissance artist Ucello. The doodler was Salvador Dali. Fred Bass, the Strand's owner, once opened a book titled "The Bill of Rights" to find it was hollowed out. The bottom of the inside was signed, "Boo! Abbie Hoffman." Mr. Bass says he learned later from Mr. Hoffman that he had hidden a tape recorder in there during the Chicago Seven trial.

Mining the dusty stacks, browsers can strike gold too: a signed photo of Bette Davis; a dried four-leaf clover; a ripped-out flyleaf from a first edition with a poem scrawled on it: "A plague upon / and to perdition / the Hun who mars / a first edition..."

Harvey Frank wasn't pleased, though, to learn that a personal note he wrote had landed in a customer's hands at the Strand. Mr. Frank had slipped it into a copy of his own self-published book of poetry, "My Reservoir of Dreams," before sending it to WOR Radio host Joan Hamburg. "I thought I would bring her into my life," says Mr. Frank, who is 80. Ms. Hamburg remembers the book, vaguely. "I was sort of touched," she says. "I put it on my desk. Or somewhere." She says she has no idea how it ended up in a used-book bin.

Ouch, and déjà vu. I live in a university neighborhood where everyone is constantly publishing books and giving them to their friends, neighbors, and colleagues. You might think that if you lived in such a place you would have the tact to sell your books out of state, or at least in a different part of town. But it's relatively common to turn up a volume at Powell's by a local author that has been warmly inscribed to someone residing in the same eight-by-eight-block area who apparently thanked the giver, turned around, walked up the street, and converted the book into cold, hard cash--or even (shudder) credit towards other books. This seems to me to take a really steely grade of shamelessness (with a dash, in some cases, of professional envy).

Probably the best bonus material I've ever found in a used book were an eloquent malcontent's extensive pencil annotations in a hardcover copy of Pauline Kael's Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. The penciler didn't often agree with Kael but found her reviews provocative, to say the least. This wonderful artifact has since slipped away. I suspect I left it at an ex-boyfriend's. If I were him, I wouldn't have given it back either. But I am enjoying his sumptuous, blocklike 1939 Petit Larousse Illustré, so there. (Pseudonyms are so liberating.)

Too impatient for stumbling on this stuff? You can always check out the pre-found objects at Found Magazine. I've always liked the concept of this magazine, but I must admit that today I'm feeling newly protective of the flotsam they collect and publish. Not that the supply could ever be depleted, but the thought of anything like a central depository for it is, I suddenly see, actually very depressing.

Posted June 22, 5:27 AM

OGIC: For the innocent, eager, and doomed

"Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions"

Raise your hand if eww. The grammatical errors and infelicities found by Louis Menand in the punctuation guide Eats, Shoots & Leaves are enough to make this editor's hair stand on end. Thanks anyway, Lynne Truss, but I'll stick with the foundational texts in "the Edward Gorey school of grammar" (as one Amazon reviewer nicely puts it), Karen Elizabeth Gordon's Deluxe Transitive Vampire and New Well-Tempered Sentence. They're trustworthy and titillating--what more could you want in a grammar guide?

Posted June 22, 1:15 AM

June 21, 2004

TT: Just passing through, thanks

I'm here on a visit, but no more than that. First thing Tuesday morning I remove myself to an Undisclosed Location for three days of rest and relaxation. I won't be attending any performances of anything whatsoever, except maybe dinner. I'm not bringing my iBook, either, so don't ask me.

I plan to be back and blogging on Friday, but in the meantime I've left behind a few postings to keep you warm (see below), and I've also updated the Top Fives in the right-hand column. Take a look.

I now return you to the capable hands of Our Girl in Chicago, who kept the home fires burning very nicely last week. Give her a kiss for me.

Toodle-oo.

Posted June 21, 12:04 PM

TT: Consumables

Lots and lots has happened since last we met, some of it in New York and some of it elsewhere.

- I'll start by bragging. Harcourt e-mailed me the layout for All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, my next book, and I'm still bedazzled. The design and typography couldn't be more handsome. Having already seen the dust jacket, my guess is that the finished product is going to be at least as good-looking as the Teachout Reader, if I do say so myself.

- On Wednesday and Thursday I was in Washington, D.C., where I saw Mark Lamos' revival of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Kennedy Center. (That's for The Wall Street Journal, so I'll keep my opinions on ice for the present.)

- In addition, I watched a performance by William Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt, also at the Kennedy Center. Somewhat to my surprise, I very much liked the last piece on the bill, a dance called One Flat Thing, reproduced in which the members of the company dragged twenty metal tables downstage, lined them up in five rows, and danced on top of, underneath, and in between them, accompanied by the electronic music of Thom Willems. Yes, it's a gimmick, but a brilliant one, rather like the strobe lights in David Parsons' Caught, and Dana Caspersen's program note summed up the results aptly, if a bit breathlessly:

Twenty tables, like jagged rafts of ice, fly forward and become the surface, the underground and the sky inhabited byh a ferocious flight of dancers. A pack of bodies raging with alacrity, whipping razor-like in perilous weaves, in a hurtling intelligence. The music of Thom Willems begins quietly and then blows up into a gale, hurling the dancers toward the end, their bodies howling in a voracious, detailed storm.

As you probably know, Ballett Frankfurt is disbanding any moment now, but Forsythe is starting up a new company, and I trust that One Flat Thing, reproduced will figure prominently in its repertory. I've never been a great fan of Forsythe's work, but this dance was terrific, and I want to see it again.

- Earlier that same day I paid a quick visit to the National Gallery. I looked at American Masters from Bingham to Eakins: The John Wilmerding Collection, which contains two exquisite "minute" sketches by John Marin and a wonderful trompe l'oeil still life by John Peto, one of my favorite nineteenth-century American painters, and Drawings of Jim Dine, which contains, among other things, a profile drawing of a woman smoking a cigarette that I would have been more than happy to hang in the Teachout Museum.

- I took the train back to New York on Friday to hear Joào Gilberto give a solo concert at Carnegie Hall (it was part of the ongoing JVC Jazz Festival). Despite his usual mid-concert fit over the sound system, Gilberto sang mesmerizingly well, exhaling each song as if it were a cloud of cool mist, accompanied only by his spare acoustic guitar. Plenty of musicians were on hand, and the ones I ran into afterward were all hugging themselves with pleasure. Me, too.

If you weren't lucky enough to be there, you can hear most of the songs Gilberto sang on In Tokyo, his just-released live CD. Mmmmm.

- Over the weekend, I saw two musicals. Not only did I look in on the current cast of Hairspray, now playing ad infinitum at Broadway's Neil Simon Theatre, but I also traveled to New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse to catch a revival of Guys and Dolls featuring Karen Ziemba as Miss Adelaide. Both shows will likely be fodder for one or more of my Wall Street Journal theater columns, so keep an eye peeled.

- Before, during, and after this sustained burst of art-related activity, I retired to the Teachout Museum (otherwise known as my living room) to straighten pictures and watch Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day, an utterly serious movie cunningly disguised as a light comedy, and The Lodger, John Brahm's 1944 not-quite-remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 silent-movie retelling of the tale of Jack the Ripper. For reasons not obvious to me, The Lodger is unavailable on DVD or videocassette (I harvested it from the Fox Movie Channel). Be that as it may, it sports a terrific performance by the ever-interesting Laird Cregar, about whom some adventurous buff ought to write a gossipy biography, and a first-rate score by Hugo Friedhofer, who spent most of his time orchestrating other composers' film music. He did manage to snag a few memorable movies of his own, though, including The Best Years of Our Lives, One-Eyed Jacks, Ace in the Hole, and Brahm's The Lodger. Keep an eye out for this one--it's fun.

- I also plugged a gaping hole in my cultural literacy which I'm not quite embarrassed enough to keep to myself. I bought a copy of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard many years ago, but somehow never got around to reading it. It's been on my shelf ever since, peering out at me reproachfully from time to time, and I finally popped it in my overnight bag last week and knocked it off in two ecstatic sittings, the first on the train to Washington and the second in my hotel room that same night. I loved it, of course, in much the same way that I love Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, and for most of the same reasons. I have no excuse for not having read The Leopard sooner, save for a similar "excuse" recorded by Evelyn Waugh in a diary entry where he speaks of the "vast, uncovenanted pleasure" of having saved The Wings of the Dove for his late middle age. (I'm quoting from memory--if anybody out there knows the passage in question, would you be so kind as to send me the exact quote?)

Enough? I should damn well think so, which is why I'm taking a few days off. Ars longa, vita brevis, as my therapist says.

Posted June 21, 12:03 PM

TT: Almanac

"The estate office was still empty, lit silently by the sun through closed shutters. Although the scene of more frivolity than anywhere else in the villa, its appearance was of calm austerity. On whitewashed walls, reflected in wax-polished tiles, hung enormous pictures representing the various Salina estates: there, in bright colors contrasting with the gold and black frame, was Salina, the island of the twin mountains, surrounded by a sea of white-flecked waves on which pranced beflagged galleons; Querceta, its low houses grouped around the rustic church on which were converging groups of bluish-colored pilgrims; Ragattisi, tucked under mountain gorges; Argivocale, tiny in contrast to the vast plains of corn dotted with hard-working peasants; Donnafugata, with its baroque palace, goal of coaches in scarlet and green adn gilt, loaded with women, wine, and violins; and many others, all protected by a taut reassuring sky and by the Leopard grinning between long whiskers. Each picture was festive--each trying to show the enlightened empire, like wine, of the House of Salina. Ingenuous masterpieces of rustic art from the previous century; useless, though, at showing boundaries, or detailing areas or tenancies; such things remained obscure. The wealth of many centuries had been transmitted into ornament, luxury, pleasure; no more; the abolition of feudal rights had swept away duties as well as privileges; wealth, like an old wine, had let the dregs of greed, even of care and prudence, fall to the bottom of the barrel, leaving only verve and color. And thus eventually it cancelled itself out; this wealth which had achieved its object was composed now only of essential oils--and, like essential oils, it soon evaporated. Already some of the estates which looked so gay in those pictures had taken wing, leaving behind only bright-colored paintings and names. Others seemed, like those September swallows which though still present are grouped stridently on trees, ready for departure. But there were so many; it seemed they could never end."

Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard

Posted June 21, 12:02 PM

TT: How not to sound like an idiot

A friend of mine who recently published a book is giving a bookstore reading in a couple of weeks, and wrote to me the other day to ask me if I had any tips. I had plenty, since I gave a couple of dozen such talks while promoting The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, so I sent him a long e-mail crammed with advice. It occurred to me that some of you might possibly find it interesting, so I decided to post it.

If you've ever seen me give a speech, you can judge for yourself whether I practiced what I preach!

* * *

A speech--and this includes a reading--is a performance. It's theater. The people who came to hear you don't want you to shamble up to the podium, mumble a few unintelligible introductory words, open up a store copy of your book, and stick your nose in it for the next half-hour. They expect you to look and sound prepared--and you'll feel more comfortable if you do.

To that end, here's how I do my readings, step by step:

(1) Don't read too much. No matter how good your book is, you don't want to spend all your time reading from it. You also need to make direct contact with your listeners, which is harder to do when you're reading out loud from a text written for the eye, not the ear. If you've been asked to perform for thirty minutes, speak for ten, read for just short of twenty, then deliver a prepared coda at the end of the excerpt from the book.

(2) Write your speech out word for word. If you're an experienced public speaker accustomed to working from sketchy notes, fine. If you know you can wing it like a virtuoso, more power to you--but in either case, you wouldn't be asking for tips from me. If you're anybody else, write the speech out word for word, then practice reading it aloud until your delivery sounds natural and conversational. (See below for instructions.) Otherwise, you'll get lost in a thicket of likes and you knows and ers and ahs--and you'll talk too long.

Which brings us to

(3) Time the speech exactly. Do not under any circumstances exceed your allotted time. In fact,

(4) Never speak for as long as you're asked. In my experience, thirty minutes is ideal, especially if you're new at this. Go on for much longer and people will start to squirm, which is contagious. If you're asked to speak for forty-five minutes (including the reading), hold it to a half-hour, then go straight to questions from the audience. You don't have to ask permission from the presenter!

(5) Choose a fairly self-contained excerpt from the book. It doesn't have to begin or end neatly--you can set up the excerpt as needed in your introductory remarks--but do take care that what you read will be intelligible to those who haven't already read the book. (Don't be afraid to leave 'em hanging at the end!)

(6) Don't read from a printed copy of the book. Not only does it look awkward, even unprofessional, but too many things can go wrong (i.e., dropping the book and losing your place). Instead, I printed out my speech and reading text in a single manuscript set in large, bold type, big enough that I could read it without my glasses if need be.

(7) Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse! Read the speech and the book excerpt aloud, at least twice and preferably in front of somebody else. Then pay close attention to what they tell you.

(8) Strive for vocal emphasis and variety. Most authors are ineffective in front of an audience because their delivery is dull. The goal is to sound like you're talking informally, not lecturing (and that includes whatever passages you choose to read from the book itself). Each sentence should have its own point of emphasis. Find it and mark it in your manuscript. Don't trust your memory--underline key words, or highlight them in boldface. And be sure to keep your energy level high. If you don't sound excited, your listeners won't feel excited.

(9) When you can, look at the audience. You don't have to look at them all the time, though. If you've done what I told you to do in (8), your oral delivery will be sufficiently varied that you can hold the audience's attention without making constant eye contact. Still, do try to look up from your speech at least once on every page. The more direct contact you make, the more books you'll sell.

(10) After you've read the speech out loud, change it. A speech is written to be spoken. The point of reading it out loud in advance of the performance is to discover what sits naturally on your tongue and what doesn't. Remember that the audience isn't following a printed copy. They must understand every word you say. Whenever you stumble over a word or have difficulty picking your way through an over-complicated phrase, change it.

While you're at it, don't hesitate to change the text of the book excerpt if you find you have similar problems reading any part of it out loud. Your listeners won't know the difference. (You can also make cuts without telling them.)

(11) Start with something funny. I know, it's the biggest cliché in the world, but it really does loosen up the audience--and you, too, which is at least as important.

(12) When quoting someone else for more than a phrase or two, hold up a page of the printed speech and "read" from it. This is a visual aid intended to make it obvious to your listeners that you're not reading your own words. It's amazing how this will increase audience comprehension.

(13) If at all possible, e-mail copies of your speech to the various presenters before leaving town. This isn't so they can review it and ask for changes--it's to ensure that there'll be a copy of the speech on hand in case you lose, misplace, or forget yours. (That happened to me once, in Philadelphia. Don't ask.)

(14) Before you leave town, double-check your printed copy of the manuscript. Make sure it contains each numbered page and that the pages are in the correct order. Do the same thing before you leave your hotel room to go to the place where you're speaking. Do it every time. The one time you forget to do it is the time that pages 16 and 22 will be switched, thus causing you to crash and burn.

(15) Arrive early enough for a soundcheck. Don't trust the presenter. Make sure there's a podium (yes, it's happened to me), that it's deep and wide enough to hold your manuscript, that the sound system works, that the microphone can be raised to an adequate height, and that there's a glass of water--without ice--within easy reach.

(16) Never apologize for being nervous. The only time you should do this is if you are visibly nervous, in which case a self-deprecating remark will help to put the crowd on your side--but only do it once.

(17) Never apologize for stumbling over a word. Correct it, then move on.

(18) Make sure the audience knows when you're through. You don't have to say "thank you." Just pause, then lower your head. That way they'll start clapping.

(19) Be sure to allow enough time for questions. If the presenter doesn't oblige, take matters into your own hands. Audiences love to ask questions (except for students--they usually clam up tight, especially in a classroom setting).

One last thing:

(20) Be polite with hecklers--but be firm. If you're polite, the audience will back you all the way. That gives you permission to be as firm as necessary. Point out that other people also have questions to ask. If you run afoul of an obsessive, over-persistent questioner, politely suggest that he speak to you privately afterward, then go straight to the next question.

Posted June 21, 12:01 PM

June 18, 2004

TT: When bad trips make good theater

It's Friday, but I'm in Washington (and in a blessedly iBook-free state), so Our Girl in Chicago has been kind enough to post my weekly Wall Street Journal theater teaser for me, bless her.

Anyway, I reviewed two plays this morning, Lynn Nottage's Fabulation, a new play by the author of Intimate Apparel, and Charlie Victor Romeo, an off-off-Broadway performance piece based on transcripts of the black-box recordings of six airplane crashes.

Fabulation is terrific:

Unlike the simple, poignant "Intimate Apparel," "Fabulation" is a sardonic look at the complicated life of Undine Barnes Calles (Charlayne Woodard), a credit-card-carrying member of the black bourgeoisie whose husband empties out her bank account and blows town, leaving her broke and pregnant. Undine, we discover, is a hoity-toity Dartmouth grad who changed her name from Tameka Jo Greene, disowned her working-class Brooklyn family and started "my very own fierce boutique PR firm catering to the vanity and confusion of the African American nouveau riche." Now she makes the long journey home to Brooklyn, scared to death and fumbling to figure out her next move.

The sassily appealing Ms. Woodard leads a spot-on ensemble cast, and Kate Whoriskey, the director, puts them through their paces like a team of thoroughbreds. What lifts "Fabulation" well above the level of a don't-get-above-your-raising soap opera, though, is the shiv-sharp wit with which Ms. Nottage hacks away at the clichés of the genre. Despite some inconsistencies of tone, "Fabulation" mostly manages to keep its satirical balance, and the results are so smart and funny that you don't really mind a too-predictable last-minute plunge into sincerity....

If possible, Charlie Victor Romeo is even better:

It's a low-budget, unabashedly unglamorous affair. You stroll into a grubby black-box theater (talk about ironic!) in which a nondescript mock cockpit is placed at center stage. The house goes dark and a slide flashes on a screen overhead, telling you the flight number and date and how many people were on board, followed by a stark description of what went wrong: ICING. EXPLODING ENGINE. MULTIPLE BIRD STRIKES. Then the lights come up and all hell breaks loose.

Not always at once, though. Instead, you might find a pilot and co-pilot chatting away agreeably, flirting with a flight attendant, griping about this or that minor nuisance. But sooner or later-always without warning-something terrible happens, and in an instant the theater becomes a sweatbox. You watch in horror as the crew scrambles to save the ship while alarms beep and buzz, the radio crackles urgently and passengers scream on the far side of the cockpit door. Sometimes the crisis is protracted, sometimes shockingly brief (one flight lasts for just a minute and a half). Then the theater is filled with the clamor of a crash landing, abruptly cut off by a sharp click as the house goes black. After a seemingly endless pause, the slide shown at the beginning of the flight is flashed on the screen again, this time with an additional line at the bottom: NO SURVIVORS. NO SURVIVORS. 4 SURVIVORS. NO SURVIVORS....

No link, either, so to read the whole thing, buy today's Journal, where you'll find me in the "Weekend Journal" section, cheek by jowl with all manner of good things.

Posted June 18, 12:06 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"It took me years to figure out that most film directors are not systematic thinkers but artistic opportunists. Maybe thanks to Coppola, Cimino & Company, we have reached a more realistic expectation of directors today; we are more used to the combination of great visual style with intellectual incoherence. But at the time we looked to filmmakers to be our novelists, our sages."

Phillip Lopate, "Anticipation of La Notte: The 'Heroic' Age of Moviegoing"

Posted June 18, 1:00 AM

June 17, 2004

OGIC: Brilliant debuts

These bloggers are new:

- A female Blowhard! Vanessa B., a pseudonymous Chicagoan (where have I heard that before?), is keeping Michael B. company for the next month in the wake of Friedrich's sad retirement. A recent transplant from NYC, she has a City vs. City post here. Perhaps she will get hooked. A month is short.

- Carrie A. A. Frye launches Tingle Alley today. She was previously an occasional guest blogger at Maud's. See what can happen, Vanessa? In for a dime....

And this blog is new to me:

- Daily Gusto, a group blog featuring smart art essays, movie reviews, and whatnot. I can never resist the good whatnot.

Posted June 17, 4:54 AM

OGIC: Lit lit, and everything else

Via Rake's Progress I found this oldish but greatish Michael Chabon essay introducing an issue of McSweeney's that was devoted to plot-driven short stories--"thrilling tales" (no, I don't pay as much attention to McSweeney's as I probably should). Chabon writes:

As late as about 1950, if I referred to "short fiction," I might have been talking about any one of the following kinds of stories: the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war or historical story; the romance story. Stories, in other words, with plots. A glance at any dusty paperback anthology of classic tales proves the truth of this assertion, but more startling will be the names of the authors of these ripping yarns: Poe, Balzac, Wharton, James, Conrad, Graves, Maugham, Faulkner, Twain, Cheever, Coppard. Heavyweights all, some considered among the giants of Modernism, source of the moment-of-truth story that, like homo sapiens, appeared relatively late on the scene but has worked very quickly to wipe out all its rivals.

Chabon even has a good word to say about Stephen King! His weariness of literary lit meshes with some recent link-rich postings by Michael Blowhard about books and the book biz, here and here. I always find Michael's cheerful pragmatism about book publishing smart and refreshing, his omnivorous reading habits emulation-inspiring. I thought of him, actually, when I read Terry's great Orson Welles almanac the other day--words I am going to tape to my brain.

In semi-related news, Sean Rocha over at Slate tells why 23 different books could claim to be top-ten best-sellers last week, and why no one can say for sure whose claims are legit:

The reason for all this secrecy is itself the worst-kept secret in the literary world: Hardly anyone buys books. Hyping a book as a "national best seller" creates an illusion of momentum and critical consensus that the phrase "over 25,000 copies sold"--which would actually be a pretty good figure for literary fiction sales in hardcover--does not. Thus, the industry's modesty is protected by the fig leaf of relative sales: The current No. 1 on every fiction list is The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, but there's no way to tell from the ranking whether it is selling 1,000 copies a week or 1 million.

Posted June 17, 4:44 AM

June 16, 2004

TT: En route

I'll be leaving for Washington later today, and I'm looking forward to the train ride. Too much time spent at my desk or in theater seats, too much concentration, too much art, not enough unscheduled drifting. I shall take no computer, no work, nothing but my eyes and ears and a drowsy, slightly worn-out disposition, all in the hopes of being freshened up by the time I reach my seat at the Kennedy Center tonight.

You'll hear from me again on Friday. In the meantime, OGIC will tend your blog-related needs.

Later.

Posted June 16, 8:12 AM

TT: Almanac

"Try not to regret the past too much. Most often, the past drops away from you because it's ripe."

Colette, letter to Germaine Patat (undated)

Posted June 16, 8:12 AM

OGIC: We get letters

One of ALN's correspondents writes to expand on my thoughts about 1999 all-star cinema (it's practically the seedlet of a theory now--we may need to call for reinforcements) and to defend Sexy Beast:

I remember there was a moment--probably when Marky Mark calls his wife on his satellite phone from the Iraqi bunker [in Three Kings], or maybe it was in The Limey or The Insider or Fight Club--when I felt like movies had changed, that the artists had figured out the new machines & everything would be different from then on. Turns out that's not really the case, but it was a great year. The one on that list that keeps getting better for me is Topsy-Turvy, which has climbed into the all-time pantheon.

What is about '9 years and the movies? '89 was similarly remarkable, or at least felt so at the time (Do the Right Thing, sex, lies, and videotape, Drugstore Cowboy, Heathers...), and then there's the legendary '39. No time to do the research on the others right now...

I did think Sexy Beast was the best movie of whatever year it came out (it was a slow year) but I think that's 90% based on the good will generated by the opening scene--it didn't so much lead to disappointment in the rest of the movie as an undercurrent of strangeness that, along with Kingsley, kept the rest of the movie afloat (at least the first time around--I've not been back yet).

Yep, Topsy-Turvy is the cream of that crop. Surprisingly, I haven't seen it but for the one time, when it slew me. Terry, too--I was there to see. But Bridget Jones's Diary was on cable the other day, reminding me that I always mean to rout around more thoroughly in the ouevre of Shirley Henderson (has anyone seen Wonderland?) and to watch Mark Darcy's better half in action about a few hundred more times before I die.

Posted June 16, 6:00 AM

OGIC: Useless and futile, but jaw-dropping

Everybody and their brother has linked today to Ron Rosenbaum's giddy preview of Philip Roth's new novel, to be published in the fall (first seen by me at Ed's joint). The Plot Against America is an "alternative-future novel in which Charles Lindbergh, in real life the figurehead for the isolationist and (in part) pro-fascist America First movement, runs for President in 1940, beats F.D.R. and--soon after his inauguration--makes a pact with Hitler."

So how's the book? Nice but ultimately meaningless, if we're to trust Rosenbaum's analogy:

It was the night of that Lakers-Pistons overtime game. I mention this because as soon as I got home with the Roth galley, I proceeded to read all 390 pages straight through the night, with only one interruption: watching that amazing last-quarter Lakers comeback, capped by Kobe Bryant's stunning game-tying, buzzer-beating three-point shot. It's not like Roth has to make a comeback or Kobe has something to prove (wait, that's not completely true), but there's at least a surface analogy there: Both the game and the reading experience were, in some primal way, unbearably suspenseful....

What is the "Plot Against America"? I ain't tellin', but it gets freaky toward the end and scary throughout: There was just no way I was going to get to sleep without finishing the book. I hope the serious-minded literati among you will forgive me for dwelling on the confluence of the Kobe Bryant shot and the Roth novel, but the Kobe shot had something of a similar quality, a jaw-dropping last-quarter gamble that pays off and leaves you astonished. A long rainbow arc. Nothing but net.

Lead time's a bitch.

UPDATE: Rosenbaum's piece prompts Sarah, who must have been an English teacher's dream--or a bad English teacher's nightmare--to reminisce about her checkered history with Roth's work and to consider giving him a second chance. Go read her tale of precociousness!

Posted June 16, 5:08 AM

June 15, 2004

TT: Almanac

"If there's no pleasure for me in it, I feel no obligation to a work of art. I cherish certain paintings, books, and films for the pleasure of their company. When I get no pleasure from an author, I feel no duty to consult him. My interests are pretty wide; and I do keep trying to stretch them wider. But no strain."

Orson Welles (quoted in Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles)

Posted June 15, 8:32 AM

TT: Culture by committee

I'm in The Wall Street Journal today--a special unscheduled appearance on the Leisure & Arts page.

Last week, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is in charge of rebuilding the World Trade Center site, announced the names of the four cultural organizations it has offered space at Ground Zero: the Joyce Theater, the Signature Theater Company, the Drawing Center, and an as-yet-nonexistent "Freedom Center" that will present "exhibitions centered on humankind's enduring quest for freedom."

I wasn't exactly impressed, least of all with the Freedom Center:

The Freedom Center is one of those self-evidently silly ideas that only an underemployed committee could have conceived, a portentous-sounding Museum of Nothing in Particular destined to present blandly institutional, scrupulously noncontroversial exhibitions. No doubt the center will draw plenty of squirming grade-school kids sentenced to compulsory field trips, but I'd bet next month's rent that tourists will steer clear.

The three other groups to be offered space are serious and respectable, but they simply don't add up to anything remotely approaching a world-class center for the arts. "The vibrant mixture of dance, theatre and fine arts in one cultural complex will serve as a powerful cultural and economic engine for Lower Manhattan," Gov. George Pataki proclaimed last week. Who's he kidding? Like the Freedom Center, this particular choice of institutions stinks of committeethink. It's modest and safe--the inverse of the magnificent cultural opportunity afforded by the coming reconstruction of Ground Zero....

I was especially disappointed in the fact that New York City Opera, which had proposed to build a three-theater complex at Ground Zero, got the brush-off. I wrote in the Journal last year wholeheartedly endorsing City Opera's proposal as the kind of large-scale project worthy of the site and the occasion. Alas, the LMDC apparently thought it too major--and, I'm disturbed to say, too highbrow:

"By building a New York City Opera House on the ashes of the World Trade Center," I wrote, "New Yorkers would be making the boldest possible declaration of faith in the power and glory of Western culture. A year and a half ago, 3,000 innocent men, women and children were murdered by sworn enemies of that culture. I can't imagine a more inspiring way to honor their memory." Instead, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. chose to think small--very, very small....

Read the whole thing here.

Posted June 15, 8:28 AM

OGIC: Movie notes; or, Still life with spoilers

I was gratified to see that Terry has revised and downgraded his opinion of the clownish mob film Sexy Beast. I caught this on dvd a year or so after everybody else swooned over it at the theater. Neither I nor my friend could understand what the fuss was about, or even stay awake, really. Sexy Beast is notable, though, for containing perhaps the most precipitous drop from brilliance to banality in recent cinema history. This thanks to its opening scene, a monster of a set-up and a visual joke for the ages. All by itself this scene is almost worth the long slog that follows. The rest of the first half of the movie is then diverting enough, but only thanks to an outstanding Ben Kingsley, as Terry notes. The second half, following his character's departure, I just can't recall. Sexy Beast ranks up there with Memento as one of the movies whose enthusiastic following among the apparently like-minded most baffles me.

More recently I watched the haunted house flick and Nicole Kidman vehicle The Others on cable. (If you don't want to know how it ends, now is the time for you to stop reading and turn back.) I liked this movie much better when it was called The Sixth Sense. Also when it was a book called "The Turn of the Screw." And that pretty much covers its sources. My disappointment at the derivative ending was closely followed by the even more deflating realization that this movie will probably be only the first of many inferior permutations/rip-offs of M. Night Shyamalan's movie, which will then be blamed for what it spawned, like Mies van der Rohe. Sigh.

Speaking of The Sixth Sense, it's still amazing to remember what a great year for U.S. films 1999 was. I can rattle off a top ten that shames any year since:

Three Kings
Topsy-Turvy
The Insider
Election
The Limey
Magnolia
The Sixth Sense
The Winslow Boy
Being John Malkovich
Guinevere

Okay, so maybe a couple of these haven't worn so spectacularly well. I'm thinking mainly of Being John Malkovich, but even that I'd still watch for Catherine Keener's acute angles and cutting edges.

Posted June 15, 6:35 AM

OGIC: The real hardware

As you may have gleaned if you've been reading us for a while, I may be in Chicago but I'm from Detroit, which is where my heart and, most important, my sports loyalties remain. So you might well guess that today I am fairly excited about an imminent event.

You'd be right: I am moderately excited. But it must be added that the somebody-or-other trophy ain't no Stanley Cup.

Posted June 15, 5:49 AM

OGIC: Inventing Henry James

Two new articles, one in the Independent and one in the New York Times, puzzle over the coming swarm of Henry James-based fiction, beginning with Colm Toibin's The Master and soon to continue with forthcoming novels by Alan Hollinghurst and David Lodge. I feel about this trend the ambivalence you might expect of someone greatly invested in James: plenty intrigued, a little possessive, and a little bit wary of the media's easy conversion of interest into fad.

Mel Gussow's piece in today's Times is reportorial and unadventurous. It's more or less a melange of quotations plucked from interviews with the authors in question and some James biographers, framed with little anecdotes about everyone tripping over each other while doing their research at James's Lamb House. But one item in this article stopped me in my tracks:

Each novelist approaches James from a different vantage. Mr. Toibin's initial response was to the book "Epistemology of the Closet" in which Eva Kosofsky Sedgwick suggested that James's entire work was written in code. Mr. Toibin took the opposite view. As he said: "You can't make a blanket assumption about James's sexuality or his fiction or his life. This was not a game between concealment and disclosure."

Huh? I'm still scratching my head over this. First, it's not Eva but Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. More important, charging her with the crazy-sounding proposition that "James's entire work was written in code" is just plain strange. It sent me back to Sedgwick's book, in case I was massively misremembering it. But no. She suggests nothing remotely of the sort.

Eve Sedgwick is that rare thing, a contemporary literary theorist whose theory is firmly grounded in aesthetically sensitive close reading. James makes his appearance in Epistemology of the Closet in "The Beast in the Closet," a long chapter on "The Beast in the Jungle" and male homosexual panic in the age of the Oscar Wilde trials. Even if you don't want to buy Sedgwick's overall argument about the making of the closet in nineteenth-century culture, her chapter offers many shrewd and illuminating local readings of James. She may marshal James's works to help her fry some bigger fish, but she never reduces them to mere theory fodder. She's a wonderful reader who on more than one occasion has made me shake my head in appreciation. Elsewhere Sedgwick has written perceptively about James and shame.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Heawood's think piece on the same James trend in the Independent gives a hint that the New York Times reporter may have scrambled Toibin's meaning in referring to Sedgwick. What Toibin says about James's sexuality here is not opposite Sedgwick but a reasonable, if necessarily shorthand, approximation of her thinking:

But as Toibin acknowledges, James's own life was largely lived, "before the Wilde case consolidated a certain kind of identity." In other words, the fact that James was attracted to men and found women sexually confusing doesn't necessarily mean he defined himself as gay, nor that he lived his life with a constant eye on the closet door. There are other reasons for fear than repression, and it is not only closet homosexuals who are afraid. James always cautioned against putting a definitive label on anyone: "Never say you know the last word about any human heart."

Heawood's piece, in which he asks why James is appearing in multiple new novels at this particular moment, is deeply informed, provocative, and well written. It's especially good at sketching James's historical contexts. Everyone should read it. That said, his James is not precisely mine. In Heawood's version, James's major unifying theme and emotional keynote is fear. He argues the point eloquently:

Fear stalks James's pages like grotesquerie in Dickens, like testosterone in Hemingway, like magic in Angela Carter. Most of his characters are afraid, most of the time, and most of their actions are motivated by fear. They spend much of their time avoiding blows which are slow in coming, which make a noiseless impact, yet which are potentially lethal. Fear is the unspoken force which knits his books together. Without fear, there would be no Henry James.

This talks a good game, for sure. But it's just not how James's writing feels to me, except perhaps in some cases--usually in shorter works--like "In the Cage" or "The Pupil." If I were to replace "fear" in the last sentence of this passage (a sentence that slyly blurs what seemed, at the beginning of the paragraph, a clear line between James's characters and the author himself), I would be inclined toward something in the neighborhood of "desire" or "wonder." I agree with Heawood that James's characters tend fear their very desires. In my reading, though, desire is the dominant animating force. For every fearful character there is another with a frightening will to power. To chalk up the latter to a deeper-seated fear seems overly pop-psych and overly flattening.

Heawood concludes that something about James speaks to something in our present cultural moment:

Just as the Nineties fascination with Victorian Sensation literature indicated a hunger for blood-and-guts storytelling, so this new vogue for Henry James indicates a move beyond sensation, and a heightened interest in the processes of information. In a period where the media is consumed by stories about newsgathering, James's convoluted narratives--grounded in speculation, half-truths and distorted perceptions--make for surprisingly familiar reading.

Readers in the 21st century are used to debating every last flick of Rachel's hair on Friends, familiar with Carrie Bradshaw's hermeneutic labours in Sex and the City, accustomed to spending each summer discussing in minute detail the movements of a group of individuals closeted in a house where all they can do is talk, whose least misdemeanour makes front-page news. Who said anything about short attention spans? We, the psychobabble society with the tabloid morality and infinite patience for the minutiae of celebrity gossip--we are more than ready for Henry James.

It's awfully ingenious to connect the dots of James and reality shows, I have to say. Instead of the now-dead rituals and codes of propriety that used to structure social interactions from above (and that both appalled James and impressed him), you have the interventions of television producers in the form of challenges or artificial plot twists. In both cases, the interest (such as it is!) comes from observing characters as they negotiate given situations, or what James might call données. Beyond your faithful correspondent, however, do the audience for reality television and the audience for these novels overlap at all? Let alone the audience for reality television and the authors of these novels? Not a whole hell of a lot, I'm guessing. Which leaves the question, Why James now?, unanswered. My own best guess is that, what with the reams of James scholarship being churned out both inside and outside of the academy for the last several decades, we may have reached one of those moments when critical inroads to James temporarily seem exhausted, and some other approach is wanted. In any case, I'm really looking forward to reading the Toibin, which has been reviewed glowingly everywhere.

(Heawood link thanks to The Literary Saloon.)

Posted June 15, 4:09 AM

June 14, 2004

TT: Consumables (and the weekly grind)

Like most baby boomers, I've never quite managed to get over the feeling that I'm entitled to be less busy in the summer, not more. In fact, I'm barely keeping ahead of the next deadline, and though it's true that my recent illness threw me off my stride, I'd be