About Last Night: June 2004 Archives

TT: Prose unlimited

I wish to announce that I wrote and delivered Pieces Nos. 2 and 3 today! One more and I'm out of the barrel.

I plan to celebrate by (1) doing no more work until tomorrow and (2) listening to a brand-new Fats Waller anthology about whose merits I'll report to you in due course...but not tonight.

Did somebody say Now turn that iBook off, pal? No? Well, why not?

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 1, 2004 6:06 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I know that there are many people--and very intelligent people, too--who love this kind of fast-action movie, who say that this is what movies do best and that this is what they really want when they go to a movie. Probably many of them would agree with everything I've said but will still love the movie. Well, it's not what I want, and the fact that Friedkin has done a sensational job of direction just makes that clearer. It's not what I want not because it fails (it doesn't fail) but because of what it is. It is, I think, what we once feared mass entertainment might become: jolts for jocks. There's nothing in the movie that you enjoy thinking over afterward--nothing especially clever except the timing of the subway-door-and-umbrella sequence. Every other effect in the movie--even the climactic car-versus-runaway-elevated-train chase--is achieved by noise, speed, and brutality."

Pauline Kael, "Urban Gothic" (a review of The French Connection), 1971

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 1, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Off to the races

In case you didn't drop by yesterday, I'm back from the dead, and I blogged a lot. Take a look!

If you already did, I don't think I'll have much time to blog today. I have a piece-and-a-half to write, and I'm only hitting on about five-and-a-quarter cylinders. As soon as I have some spare time, though, I'll be right back at you.

Yesterday's only consumable, by the way, was the Criterion Collection DVD of Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, starring Barbara Stanwyck (mmm), Henry Fonda, and a whole bunch of terrific supporting players. I think it's probably the best of Sturges' films, though not my personal favorite (that would be Sullivan's Travels). At any rate, I watched it in ten-minute chunks in between working on yesterday's piece, and loved every second of it.

Later.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 1, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience."

A.J. Liebling, "Quest for Mollie"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 2, 2004 7:15 AM | Permalink

TT: Consumables

I didn't realize it until after the fact, but I spent ten straight hours writing yesterday--first my Commentary essay on the life and music of Sir Edward Elgar, then my "Second City" column for this Sunday's Washington Post. I'd say I'm healthy again, wouldn't you?

- When it was all over, I needed a change of pace, so I tottered out to find myself a leisurely evening meal, a copy of the bound galleys of Just Enough Liebling (a new A.J. Liebling anthology forthcoming this September from North Point Press) tucked under my arm for dinnertime reading. No comment--I'll probably review it--but Liebling has long been one of my favorite authors, which is no secret. (The very first magazine piece I ever published, way back in 1981, was a review of a Liebling biography.)

- After dinner, I decided to watch an unchallenging movie to cool off my brain, and settled on The Longest Day, a Darryl Zanuck film about D-Day that I'd previously seen only in disconnected fragments. It turned out not to be very good, so since I'd stored it on my DVR, I found myself doing a little personal editing, in the process chopping at least a half-hour off the overly protracted running time. Dull, dull, dull, but at least it helped ease me out of the mental tunnel vision produced by Tuesday's writing marathon, my first since I got sick last week.

- I listened to Benjamin Britten's marvelously intense 1971 recording of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius (currently out of print in the U.S., alas) while writing my Commentary piece. In addition, I was inadvertently exposed over dinner to Norah Jones' first CD, which has been taken up with a vengenace by Upper West Side restaurants, sigh.

Today's workload shouldn't be nearly so burdensome: I'll be finishing up my drama column for Friday's Wall Street Journal, then hauling myself across town for a doctor's appintment. No show tonight, thank God--I'll spend an hour or so back at my desk figuring out what plays I'll be seeing over the weekend, followed by TCM's Cary Grant special, which I recorded last night. Further blogging is possible, but not certain.

Till whenever.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 2, 2004 7:35 AM | Permalink

TT: All over the place

At the risk of inspiring God of the Machine to further parody, I checked a little while ago and saw that "About Last Night" was being read in fourteen different time zones. I believe that's an all-time record for worldwide ubiquity. Hello, everybody!

(I know, I know--what's the deal with the other ten?)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 2, 2004 7:47 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"She was thirty-two but she looked like a woman of forty so well-preserved she could pass for thirty-two."

Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 3, 2004 8:45 AM | Permalink

TT: Poor Terry's almanac

A reader writes:

Since you often blog about the process, I'd be interested in how you accumulated the almanac quotes. And I bet some of your other regulars would like to know, too.

Glad to oblige. I noticed long ago that the standard books of quotations didn't contain very many of my favorite quotes (other than the obvious ones that everybody likes). It used to be my practice to dogear the relevant pages of my copies of the books in which those quotes appeared, but that was both inefficient and aesthetically displeasing. Then, fifteen years ago, I purchased at more or less the same time my first personal computer and a copy of H.L. Mencken's New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources, a wonderful book about which I wrote as follows in The Skeptic:

[Mencken] had long kept a card file of quotations for his own use, and in 1932 he had gotten the idea to expand it into a full-scale dictionary; Charles Angoff worked on it with him for two years, after which he carried on alone. Though not generally recognized as such, it is one of his major achievements, comparable in scope to The American Language and no less personal in its method. "The Congressman hunting for platitudes to embellish his eulogy upon a fallen colleague will find relatively little to his purpose," he warned in his preface, and many readers have thus concluded that he compiled the New Dictionary of Quotations with tongue in cheek. Like Dr. Johnson's dictionary, it is wrongly remembered for its eccentricities, among them an extensive selection of invidious remarks about the Jews and a sprinkling of unattributed "proverbs" that sound as though they had been coined by the editor himself. In fact, it contains a vast number of well-chosen, well-organized, accurately attributed and dated quotations on every imaginable subject, ranging widely among both familiar and arcane sources. The only important author missing from its 1,347 pages is Mencken himself, who told Time that "I thought it would be unseemly to quote myself. I leave that to the intelligence of posterity." Yet the New Dictionary bears the dark stamp of his skepticism on every page, and at least one critic, Morton Dauwen Zabel, was quick to grasp the fact: "The impression soon becomes inescapable that what Mencken has produced as a �Dictonary of Quotations' is really a transcendent �Prejudices: Seventh Series,' a �Notes on Humanity,' or more expressly �Mencken's Philosophical Dictionary, Written by Others.'"

The New Dictionary gave me the idea to use my computer to keep a searchable electronic commonplace book, organized by topic. My thought was that if I was scrupulous about sourcing each entry as I added it to the file, I'd someday have a book-length manuscript � la Mencken that would require no further research to be publishable. Since then, I've piled up some 31,000 words' worth of quotations that have caught my eye, each one sourced and filed under such Fowler-like subject headings as "Be Careful What You Ask For," "Kisses, Two (And a Variant)," "Opening Lines, Great," and "Right Between the Eyes." On average, I add a quote or two to my commonplace book each month, and I use it in my own work at least once a week.

When I started "About Last Night" last August, it occurred to me that it might be amusing to post a quotation each day, which is how the almanac came into being. At first, the quotations were all drawn from my commonplace book, but in recent months I've also started to post snippets from whatever book I happen to be reading at the time. In addition, the readers of "About Last Night" occasionally send me favorite quotes of their own, and if they're sourced and checkable (and sometimes even when they're not), I post the ones I like.

I hasten to point out that the authors of "About Last Night" do not necessarily agree or disagree, in whole or in part, with each day's almanac entry. To be sure, I usually do, at least up to a point, but not always. (Our Girl in Chicago has nothing to do with the almanac, by the way. Instead, she posts her own "fortune cookies.") Similarly, the almanac is occasionally meant to provide oblique commentary on current events, but not normally. As a rule, my sole purpose in posting each entry is to give you something to think about--and to let you do your own thinking. Judging by my incoming e-mail and the comments that pop up from time to time in the "About Last Night" referral log, I'd say the almanac is one of this blog's most popular features. I know I like it.

If you feel the same way, I encourage you to send me your favorite quotations (plus sources), in particular those having something to do with the world of art. Your contributions, like your e-mail, are and will always be greatly appreciated.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 3, 2004 12:31 PM | Permalink

TT: Percy, Max, and me

I hung a caricature by Max Beerbohm on my living-room wall late yesterday afternoon--and thereby hangs a tale.

To begin with, please don't be embarrassed if you don't know who Max Beerbohm was. He liked to claim that there were only 1,500 people in England and another thousand in America who understood and appreciated his work. I don't know whether he would have admitted me to their rarefied ranks, but he's certainly one of my all-time favorite writers, an essayist of uncommon elegance and wit who was also a wickedly funny drama critic, the greatest parodist who ever lived, and--this is where it starts to get interesting--a caricaturist of lethally comic exactitude.

I can think of more than a few distinguished artists, musicians, and choreographers who have also been very good writers, but the list of distinguished writers who were also distinguished artists is short to the point of invisibility. James Thurber qualifies--if anything, his drawings are better than his essays--and so, needless to say, does Max. (He signed his caricatures with his first name only, and as a result is customarily referred to in that manner by his admirers.) Being a superior writer, it stands to reason that Max should have left behind this typically lucid explanation of his artistic method:

The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment, in the most beautiful manner....The whole man must be melted down in a crucible and then, from the solution, fashioned anew. Nothing will be lost but no particle will be as it was before.

No verbal description can begin to suggest how well Max practiced what he preached. You have to see for yourself, so go here, here, and here to look at his caricatures of three eminent Edwardians, Oscar Wilde, John Singer Sargent, and Frank Harris.

I've seen reproductions of hundreds of Max's drawings, but I don't know the last time his work was exhibited in this country. Most of his best-known caricatures now belong to museums and other public institutions in England. I've never seen a Beerbohm on display in any American museum, major or otherwise, and the only one I've seen in private hands was hanging in Whit Stillman's Greenwich Village living room when I interviewed him in 1998 for an article about The Last Days of Disco (it's reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader). It seemed almost too good to be true that Whit should have owned one--he is, like Max, something of a dandy--and when I saw it on his wall, I found myself in the grip of an attack of envy so powerful that I feared I might have to take up grand larceny on the spot.

It never occurred to me, then or later, that I, too, might someday own a Beerbohm, so I was astonished when I looked him up on eBay last month and found that one of his lesser-known efforts, a 1913 drawing of Percy Grainger playing piano for a group of society ladies, was being offered for sale by an auction house in Dallas. A quick scan of my bookshelves confirmed that it was a rarity: Grainger is nowhere mentioned in N. John Hall's Max Beerbohm Caricatures or Lord David Cecil's Max: A Biography, nor is Max's name to be found in any of the various books about Grainger that I own. At the same time, I thought it more than likely that they had met at one time or another. Max, after all, was one of Edwardian London's most inveterate diners-out, while Grainger first made a name for himself as a society pianist who played regularly at the fashionable soir�es musicales where Max often found himself after dinner, hobnobbing with Sargent and Henry James. In any case, the photographs posted on eBay (including a closeup of the tiny signature) left no doubt that this was the real right thing.

Aside from the intrinsic attraction of owning a Beerbohm--any old Beerbohm--I was bowled over by the prospect of acquiring this particular one, since Percy Grainger happens to be one of my all-time favorite musicians. Like Max, Grainger was a switch-hitter. Though he's best known as the composer of such delightful folk-flavored orchestral miniatures as "Shepherd's Hey," "Handel in the Strand," "Molly on the Shore," and "Irish Tune from County Derry" (that's "Danny Boy" to you), he was also one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. A pupil of Ferruccio Busoni, he performed the music of Bach, Chopin, and Debussy in a lively, extroverted style, and his 1927 recording of Grieg's Wedding Day at Troldhaugen bears eloquent witness to Harold C. Schonberg's description of his playing:

He was one of the keyboard originals--a pianist who forged his own style and expressed it with amazing skill, personality and vigor, a healthy, forthright musical mind whose interpretations never sounded forced and who brought a bracing, breezy and quite wonderful out-of-doors quality to the continuity of piano playing.

In addition, Grainger was also, as Danny DeVito says of another character in L.A. Confidential, "a powerful behind-the-scenes strange-o." John Bird revealed in his excellent 1982 biography that the composer of "Country Gardens" was in private life a violent sadomasochist who liked to photograph himself after his whipping sessions...but that's another story.

I knew, of course, that no drawing by Max would fit neatly into the Teachout Museum, which is mainly devoted to prints by American modernists--but what of it? To pass up a once-in-a-lifetime chance to acquire a caricature of one of my favorite musicians, drawn by one of my favorite writers, would have been scrupulous to a fault, and then some. Besides, the auction house's estimate was so absurdly modest that I took it for an omen. Accordingly, I placed an absentee bid for slightly more than the high estimate, then received in due course an e-mail informing me that I'd been outbid by what for me was a stiff sum. I shrugged, chalked it up to experience, and moved on.

Two weeks later, I received a second e-mail from Dallas, this one saying that the original purchaser had changed his mind, and might I possibly be interested in buying the Beerbohm at the price the other fellow had offered? I came dangerously close to saying yes on the spot, but having read Phil Schiller's Buy What You Love: Confessions of an Art Addict, I knew better than to obligingly reply, "Jeepers, I'd be more than happy to fork over all that money." Instead, I took a deep breath, left the auction house hanging for a day, then lowballed them mercilessly. Three days later, they agreed to sell me the caricature at a price lower than my own original bid. No sooner was the deal done than I fired off an e-mail to my friend Joseph Epstein, an essayist of Beerbohmesque charm who is also a Percy Grainger fan, informing him of my coup. I knew the author of Envy wouldn't be at a loss for words, and he wasn't. An hour later, Joe replied, "I regret to inform you, sir, that our friendship must cease forthwith."

Which brings us to yesterday afternoon, when the UPS man knocked on my door and handed over a medium-sized box whose contents didn't disappoint me in the slightest. In the description of his style that I quoted earlier, Max makes a point of saying that a caricature should be executed in "the most beautiful manner," and while it's true that his Grainger caricature is very funny--especially the society ladies clustered around the piano, who range in size from wasp-waisted to preposterously portly--it's also quite beautiful indeed. The composition is cunningly balanced, the line deft and clear, the light touches of watercolor wash miraculously subtle.

One last question remained: where to hang my prize? Beerbohm's caricatures are too pale in color to read well from across a room, so I knew I should try to hang this one fairly close to the couch where I usually sit when reading or listening to music. Alas, that would place it cheek by jowl with a pair of abstract-expressionist prints by Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. Max wouldn't have liked that at all--he hated modern art--but I assured myself that he would at least have been amused by the incongruity. I hung it on the north wall, curled up on the couch, took a long look, and emitted a soft sigh of satisfaction at the sight of a lifelong dream come true at last.

That's the story of how I acquired my very own Max Beerbohm caricature. It isn't the most expensive piece of art in the Teachout Museum, nor is it the most beautiful, but I think it might well be the most special thing I own, and I wouldn't be surprised if I end up loving it best of all. Believe it or not, I've already given some thought to where I'd like it to go after my death. Assuming that Joe Epstein predeceases me, I suppose I really ought to leave it to one of the two Grainger Museums. (One is in Melbourne, Australia, the city of his birth, while the other is in the suburban house an hour north of Manhattan where he lived between 1921 and his death forty years later.) It might also be appropriate to give it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, unless they already own a good Beerbohm. I suspect they don't: Max has never been fully accepted as a Truly Serious Artist, and I wouldn't want my caricature to go to an institution that didn't properly appreciate its significance. Nor do I want it to end up in England, where there are already more than enough Beerbohms to go around.

What, then, to do? For the moment--and for many more moments to come, God willing--I plan to do nothing whatsoever. Instead, I expect to gaze lovingly at my Max several times each day, and show it with pride to everyone who visits the Teachout Museum. As a matter of fact, I think I'll go into the living room right now, put on a Percy Grainger CD, sit on the couch, and revel in the magical chain of coincidence by which a Max Beerbohm caricature drawn in 1913, the year in which Marcel Proust published Du c�t� de chez Swann and Igor Stravinsky composed Le Sacre du printemps, has made its circuitous way from Max's hands to mine. How lucky am I? Very, very lucky indeed.

UPDATE: Joseph Epstein writes:

The thought of you gazing upon the Maxian caricature while listening to the music of its subject is almost enough to becalm my envy. If only I could draw, I would do a sketch of Teachout listening to Grainger while gazing upon Beerbohm, with of course a sketch of the caricature itself in the drawing.

That's a drawing I'd gladly hang.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 4, 2004 9:01 AM | Permalink

TT: Consumables

I spent much of Thursday trudging from one end of Manhattan to the other, and so had little time for art other than a half-dozen Isaac Bashevis Singer stories gulped down in transit. (Singer is ideal for long subway rides.)

I do, however, want to tell you about Honeysuckle Rose (Living Era), the terrific new CD to which I listened before bedtime. It's a two-disc anthology of 51 Fats Waller recordings issued in honor of the centenary of his birth, and it's extremely well-chosen--most of the big jukebox hits of the Thirties, plus lots of lesser-known gems like "S'posin'," "I Wish I Were Twins," and "Oh, Susannah, Dust Off That Old Pianna!" The overlap with Fats Waller: The Quintessence (Fremeaux), the other great Waller anthology, is surprisingly modest, and the two sets contain between them most of his finest 78s.

If you're feeling blue, be it indigo or merely sky, buy 'em both and listen regularly. I guarantee results!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 4, 2004 9:02 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It is my theory to like vulgarity--to think well of it, to champion it, to gird myself to always fight on its side. It is my theory to think nothing can come to pass without a pinch (or more than a pinch) of vulgarity."

Percy Grainger, quoted in John Bird, Percy Grainger

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 4, 2004 9:03 AM | Permalink

TT: Daddy was a fascist

I was too sick to do any playgoing last week, so my drama column in this morning's Wall Street Journal is divided between speculation on this Sunday's Tony Awards and a brisk pan of Chinese Friends:

Overheard on the street immediately after a performance of "Chinese Friends": "That's the worst play I ever saw! What the hell happened to Jon Robin Baitz?" Beats me. Mr. Baitz is, or was, a talented playwright, but you wouldn't guess it from watching this preposterous mess, which runs through June 13 at Playwrights Horizons. I'm not quite prepared to call it the worst show I've ever seen--I survived "The Look of Love"--but it's worse than "Prymate," which is saying something.

"Chinese Friends" is all the more disappointing because it's based on an interesting premise. What might the U.S. look like after the Red America-Blue America political split finally resolves itself? In Mr. Baitz's dystopian fantasy, set in 2030, the big bad Bushies gave way to a group of tough-minded liberal policy wonks who lost patience with the soft-headed electorate and opted for a stealthy form of fascism they called "soft power." When that didn't work out, Dr. Arthur Brice (Peter Strauss, made up to look like Donald Rumsfeld), the gray eminence of the Killer Humanists, withdrew to a remote New England island to hide from his enemies and await his second coming.

Enter his estranged son Ajax (Tyler Francavilla), who unexpectedly turns up on Brice's doorstep with two hippie-type friends (Bess Wohl and Will McCormack) in tow. At first it appears that the arrival of this motley m�nage � trois is a mere pretext to set in motion a symposium on politics in postmodern America. But in order to write a play of ideas, you have to have enough to go around, and Mr. Baitz runs out roughly 20 minutes into the first act....

No link, so if you want to read all about my Tony picks, go out and buy a Journal. It's worth it, even without me.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 4, 2004 9:06 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Communism is neither an ec[onomic] or a pol[itical] system--it is a form of insanity--a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature. I wonder how much more misery it will cause before it disappears."

Ronald Reagan, Reagan, In His Own Hand (written 1975, collected 2001)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 5, 2004 6:11 AM | Permalink

TT: Made by hand

I posted last year apropos of the publication of Ronald Reagan's letters:

I've been looking through Reagan: A Life in Letters, a book whose publication will no doubt startle a lot of people unaware that Ronald Reagan was the most prolific presidential correspondent of modern times. I'm not talking about the kind of "letter" produced in batch lots by a team of secretaries equipped with autopens, either. Of the 1,100 letters in this 934-page book, some 80% were written by hand, another 15% dictated. The editors had "over 5,000 genuine Reagan letters" to choose from, and they estimate that another 5,000 or so have yet to surface.

Put aside for a moment your opinion of Reagan (either way) and think instead about the implications of those numbers. Speaking as a biographer, I can assure you that this is an extraordinarily large number of letters to have been written by any public figure, much less one who wasn't a professional writer--though Reagan, as it happens, spent a number of years writing his own speeches, radio commentaries, and syndicated columns, and would also have been perfectly capable of writing his own memoirs without assistance had he been so inclined. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other 20th-century president who left behind so large a body of informal writing, and few who wrote as much in any medium. Theodore Roosevelt, probably Nixon, possibly Calvin Coolidge (who was, believe it or not, the best by-his-own-hand presidential prose stylist in modern times), and...who else? Nobody comes to mind....

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 5, 2004 6:42 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"'And yet,' demanded Councillor Barlow, 'what's he done? Has he ever done a day's work in his life? What great cause is he identified with?'

"'He's identified,' said the speaker, 'with the great cause of cheering us all up.'"

Arnold Bennett, The Card

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 6, 2004 12:11 PM | Permalink

TT: Forecast for Tuesday

Expect no blogging (except for a fresh almanac entry). I've got a deadline-packed morning and afternoon followed by an early curtain in Brooklyn, so I probably won't have any time to write for the site. Apologies.

In case you haven't noticed, there's lots of fresh stuff in the right-hand column, including several new Top Fives and a link to my "Second City" column in Sunday's Washington Post, in which I survey the arts in New York. Take a look.

See you Wednesday.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 7, 2004 7:34 AM | Permalink

TT: Guest almanac

"In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning."

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (courtesy of Jas Handloser)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 7, 2004 9:37 AM | Permalink

TT: A peep into the future

The famously Web-savvy Felix Salmon wanted to see what my new Max Beerbohm caricature looked like, so he figured out the name of the Dallas auction house from which I bought it, made a few magic passes in cyberspace, and came up with a URL that led him straight to an on-line photograph. If you're curious, go here and gaze enviously. (Bear in mind, though, that I ended up paying well under the listed hammer price--I don't have that kind of money to throw around on art, thank you very much!)

Over the weekend I treated myself to a used copy of Rupert Hart Davis' Catalogue of the Caricatures of Max Beerbohm, a book I've always wanted to own but never got around to buying. Now that I own a Beerbohm, it struck me that the time had also come to add Max's catalogue raisonn� to my art library--and to find out what, if anything, it had to say about the latest addition to the Teachout Museum. I wasn't disappointed. Sure enough, my Max is duly listed on page 69:

PERCY GRAINGER
1882-1961 Australian pianist and folk-song expert
631 [Mr Percy Grainger]
�The group of ladies listening to Mr Percy Grainger...is a wonderful ensemble,' Edward Marsh in �The Blue Review', May 1913.

EXHIB L.G. 1913

So there it was in black and white: my Max is officially known in the world of Beerbohmiana as "Hart-Davis 631." It was publicly exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, Max's London dealer, in 1913, and mentioned in a review of the show by Eddie Marsh, one of those semi-eminent Edwardian litterateurs who is constantly popping up in books, diaries, memoirs, and letters of the period. Presumably some even less eminent Edwardian bought it from the Leicester Galleries, for "Mr. Percy Grainger" has never been reproduced, nor was Hart-Davis able to establish its ownership as of 1972, the year he published his catalogue; it was invisible to Beerbohm scholars between 1913 and last week, when it came into my possession.

I felt a little shiver of excitement as I looked at the entry for Hart-Davis 631. My Max may not be famous, but it nonetheless has an official existence, of which I am now a part. If a younger scholar should someday take it upon himself to update the catalogue, he will add "OWNER Terry Teachout" to the entry for Hart-Davis 631. I find that a pleasant prospect. Even if The Skeptic and the Teachout Reader should crumble irrevocably into dust, I will live forever as a footnote to the lives of two men far greater than myself: not only did I rediscover the manuscript of A Second Mencken Chrestomathy among H.L. Mencken's private papers and edit it for publication, but I was the first recorded owner of Hart-Davis 631.

Having become a historical figure, albeit of the most minor sort, I thought it would be fitting to pay tribute to a few of the other owners of the 2,093 Beerbohm caricatures catalogued by Rupert Hart-Davis, all of whose names are listed alphabetically in an index. Who were these shadowy figures? Aside from the various institutional owners, a few, I discovered, were men and women of repute: John Betjeman, Winston Churchill, Alastair Cooke, Anthony Powell, Rebecca West, Thornton Wilder. Most, though, failed to leave their footprints on the sands of time. Where are you, Douglass Debevoise, owner of Hart-Davis 1632, an untitled, unsigned three-quarter-length profile of G.S. Street, a now-forgotten English journalist and writer whose personality and features inspired Max to draw him two dozen times? Google is silent about you. Are you alive? If so, did you dispose of your Max, or is it still hanging on your wall? If not, who owns it now? And who were you, Mr. Debevoise? An art lover? A journalist? A politician? What inspired you to purchase a Max? Did you suspect at the time that your ownership of Hart-Davis 1632 would prove to be your only claim on posterity? (Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:/Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.)

Max himself was fascinated by the unpredictable workings of posterity. He wrote a short story called "Enoch Soames" (it's in Seven Men, and you can also read it on line here) whose title character, an ungifted author of the Naughty Nineties, longed desperately to know whether and how he would be remembered a hundred years hence. Accordingly, poor Enoch sold his soul to the Devil in return for a day trip to the British Museum in 1997, where he could satisfy his curiosity. Alas, he found only one reference to "Soames, Enoch," in a book that described him as--horror of horrors--an imaginary character in a story by Max Beerbohm! Despairing, he returned to the present and promptly vanished, presumably to fulfill his end of the bargain.

I pulled Seven Men off my shelf the other day and reread "Enoch Soames," asking myself as I did whether Douglass Debevoise, Lysandros Caftanzoglu, Lewis P. Renateau, or any of the other forgotten folk whose names figure in A Catalogue of the Caricatures of Max Beerbohm had also read it. Perhaps they did. Perhaps they chuckled at Enoch's pitiful presumption and the completeness with which he received his demonic comeuppance, little knowing that posterity would treat them with similar callousness.

I chuckled, too, not least because I know that posterity almost certainly has the same fate in store for me. Few biographers and fewer critics long outlive their own time, and I doubt I'll be one of them. More likely I will go down in history as the first known owner of Hart-Davis 631, and in 2104 some art historian specializing in the Edwardian era will click on that entry in a computerized catalogue raisonn�, scratch his head, and say, "Who was that fellow with the odd name? Did it ever occur to him that the only thing he'd be remembered for was having owned a Max Beerbohm caricature and edited an H.L. Mencken anthology?" Indeed it did--and let it be said, if not necessarily remembered, that the prospect made me smile.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 7, 2004 10:50 AM | Permalink

TT: Consumables

I had a moderately busy weekend:

- I saw two new off-Broadway shows, Address Unknown and The Joys of Sex, both of which will likely be popping up in my Wall Street Journal drama column at some point in the not-too-distant future.

- In addition, I paid my first visit to Le Jazz Au Bar, a very fancy new midtown jazz club, where I heard Ren� Marie, a most interesting singer about whom I plan to write in my Washington Post column next month. Until then, you can go here to read a review of her Au Bar engagement by a colleague whom I respect greatly (though I don't always agree with him!).

- I read a few more Isaac Bashevis Singer stories in preparation for my upcoming Commentary essay. I've been taking my time with the three hefty volumes of the Library of America's soon-to-be-published edition of Singer's stories, not because I find him slow going but because I'm enjoying the stories so much that I want to prolong the pleasure.

- Now playing on iTunes: Sidney Bechet's splendidly raucous 1932 recording of "Maple Leaf Rag," a performance perfectly suited to jump-starting a sleepy blogger on a warm Monday morning in Manhattan. (You can listen to it via RealAudio here or buy the CD here.)

Incidentally, you can read my latest Washington Post column, which was published yesterday, by going to the "Second City" module of the right-hand column and clicking on the link for June.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 7, 2004 11:26 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Best-laid plans

Sigh. Just as I was getting ready to dive back into blogging last week, I was felled by an evil bug not unlike the one that took Terry out a couple of weeks ago. I spent the entire weekend trying to sleep it off, missing out on brunch, damn it all, with The Elegant Variation, who was in town doing a bang-up job covering Book Expo. The bug is still hanging around. Posting from my corner will resume this week, but I'll be easing myself back in one toe at a time [hack, cough].

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 8, 2004 1:15 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Once in a lifetime

After all of my foaming at the mouth a few months ago about Shirley Hazzard's amazing novel named after the phenomenon, it would be downright churlish of me not to note today's nonfictional Transit of Venus.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 8, 2004 1:19 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Before interviewing Gamelin I knew that I would have to document myself on his views, his past, and enough of his technical background and jargon to make him feel that I knew what he was talking about. The preparation is the same whether you are going to interview a diplomat, a jockey, or an ichthyologist. From the man's past you learn what questions are likely to stimulate a response; after he gets going you say just enough to let him know you appreciate what he is saying and to make him want to talk more. Everybody with any sense talks a kind of shorthand; if you make a man stop to explain everything he will soon quit on you, like a horse that you alternately spur and curb. It is all in one of Sam Langford's principles of prize fighting: 'Make him lead.' Only instead of countering to your subject's chin you keep him leading. Once I asked Sam what he did when the other man wouldn't lead, and he said, 'I run him out of the ring.' This is a recourse not open to the interviewer."

A.J. Liebling, The Road Back to Paris

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 8, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"So few authors have brains enough or literary gift enough to keep their own end up in journalism that I am tempted to define 'journalism' as 'a term of contempt applied by writers who are not read to writers who are.'"

Ernest Newman, "Mr. Bernard Shaw as Music Critic"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 9, 2004 9:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Between hither and yon

As I returned home last night from seeing (and hearing) the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Bad Plus give the premiere of Violet Cavern, Morris' new dance, at the BAM Opera House, I thought--not for the first time--that I really couldn't live anywhere but New York. Fortunately, I know better, and sometimes I don't even need to be reminded.

When I first got the idea for "About Last Night" some four or five years ago, I had a rather different venture in mind than the one you see before you now. I was rooting around for foundation support with which to launch an arts blog in collaboration with an existing print-media magazine, a venture to which I proposed to devote roughly a third of my time (and for which I would have been paid accordingly). It would have started out as a solo effort, but the original plan was for "About Last Night" to gradually take on other writers, developing over time into a full-fledged Web-based magazine on the arts in America. Accordingly, part of the money I sought was earmarked for a travel budget that would have made it possible for me to report on performances in cities other than New York.

A funny thing happened on the way to this pipe dream--several funny things, in fact. The one I least expected was that blogging would evolve in a completely different direction, in the process supplanting the conventional magazine model with which so many people who were then getting interested in the Web were then obsessed. For better and worse, individual blogs appear to be the way of the near future, though I also suspect that Web-based "newspapers" will soon start to become major media players. Still, I think the idea of a travel budget made and continues to make sense, not least because serious arts coverage in traditional media outlets is fast drying up. Time was when the weekly newsmagazines used to send their staff critics (and yes, they had staff critics) to performances all over the country. I got in on the tail end of that corporate largesse during my brief tenure as the classical music and dance critic of Time, but even then it was painfully obvious that truly national arts coverage was in the process of withering away, at Time and elsewhere.

This is bad news precisely because New York City and the arts are not consubstantial. It's true that many of the good things that happen in the provinces--and I don't use that term pejoratively--eventually make their way to Manhattan and its environs. But there are plenty of exceptions, enough that it would be perfectly possible for me to get out of town fifty-two weeks a year and see something fine each week.

The good news is that I do manage to get out of town with some regularity, frequently to Washington, D.C., and occasionally to other places as well. Earlier this year, for instance, I went to Washington specifically to see the Phillips Collection's Milton Avery retrospective, an important show that never left home. The Phillips was the first museum to acquire Avery's paintings, and by the time of Duncan Phillips' death it owned a dozen-odd oils and works on paper, to my knowledge the largest single cache of Averys in any museum in the world. It showed them all in "Discovering Milton Avery," together with works owned by the violinist Louis Kaufman, the very first person ever to buy an Avery painting, plus a sprinkling of pieces from other institutions. "Discovering Milton Avery" didn't quite add up to a full-scale blockbuster retrospective, but in a way it was even better--more concentrated and personal--and speaking as the happy owner of an Avery drypoint, I can assure you that I found it as exciting as any museum show I've seen in ages.

Not long before my visit to the Phillips, I contrived to fly down to Raleigh, N.C., again for a specific purpose: I wanted to watch Carolina Ballet dance Robert Weiss's staged version of Handel's Messiah, a ballet about which I'd been hearing good things for the past couple of years but had never previously been able to see. I departed for Raleigh two days after turning in the manuscript of my George Balanchine biography--a nice coincidence, since Weiss danced for Balanchine at New York City Ballet--and even though I was desperately busy, I was able to stay in town long enough to see two complete performances of Messiah in a single day. I'm glad I did. I've been writing enthusiastically about Weiss' dances ever since he founded Carolina Ballet in 1997, but I think it's possible that his Messiah is the best thing he's done to date, which is saying something. It's a masterly fusion of storytelling and abstraction (the first part is set in a London cathedral, while the last section is a plotless "white ballet" � la Les Sylphides) whose cumulative impact, especially when accompanied by a live chorus, is colossal.

Again, Messiah isn't the only large-scale Handel ballet I've seen in recent years. Mark Morris' L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, which has played New York more than once, is generally regarded as a masterpiece, a view with which I concur. Though it took me two performances to get on Morris' wavelength, I now believe it to be one of the greatest dances to be made since the death of Balanchine--but I also think Messiah is comparable in quality to L'Allegro. Alas, you'll just have to take my word for it, since Weiss's company rarely tours (though it damned well should) and Messiah has yet to be seen in this country outside the state of North Carolina. So much the worse for New York--and all the more reason why serious critics need to blow town as often as they can. Repeat after me, fellow Manhattanites: New York is not America. Some of us think it is, but it isn't. And because the traditional media have largely abdicated their responsibility to cover the arts in America, we're left with a severely distorted perspective on what's happening elsewhere.

For my part, I intend to grasp at every possible opportunity to report to you, here and elsewhere, about such regional delights as Messiah and "Discovering Milton Avery." I'm headed for Washington next week (courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, which continues, thank God, to take seriously its status as a national newspaper) to see Ballett Frankfurt and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Kennedy Center. In addition, I'm in the process of planning a couple of other out-of-town trips in the second half of the summer. I wish I could make more such trips, and perhaps someday I'll be able to do so. As I've said before in this space, I believe serious arts coverage in America is now in the process of migrating to the Web. That's part of why I started "About Last Night": I love New York, I really do, but I also want to see what you see.

Maybe one of these days some smart publisher will pay me to rent a car and drive from coast to coast, Charles Kuralt-style, blogging on the arts along the way and later spinning my reports into a book. Any takers?

UPDATE: Sarah writes with the perfect title: Another Opening, Another Show. Now if only she can get me a book deal!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 9, 2004 12:53 PM | Permalink

TT: Plotted out

The hoopla over the final episodes of Frasier and Friends reminded me that it's been a long time since I've watched any TV series at all regularly. I stopped following The Sopranos after 9/11, and no subsequent program has replaced it in my affections. Our Girl got me interested in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, but I saw most of that show in large chunks, not week by week. These days, the only thing I watch on TV is movies.

I'm sure this says more about me than it does about television, though I do think it says something about television. In one of the essays reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader, "The Myth of �Classic' TV," I talk about what I consider to be an inescapable artistic limitation of series TV:

As Philip Larkin observed, much of the pleasure of reading A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell's twelve-volume serial novel, "resides in the small reminiscential effects Mr. Powell's grip on his by now enormous cast enables him to bring off." But even the longest novels are portable and can be picked up and put down at will, thus making it far easier to invest the necessarily large amounts of time needed to read them. Not so TV shows: you can't watch them in the subway, and though the VCR makes it possible to view an episode at your leisure, it isn't very rewarding to do so in ten-minute chunks. In order to appreciate an hour-long drama, you have to consume it in a single sitting.

As it happens, only thirteen episodes of The Sopranos are aired each season, and the series is expected to have a fairly limited run. More typical is St. Elsewhere, which ran for 137 consecutive episodes, each of which grew organically out of its predecessors. Such long-running series can only be experienced serially, which for all practical purposes means during their original runs; once they cease to air each week in regular time slots, they cease to be readily available as total artistic experiences, and thus can no longer acquire new viewers, or be re-experienced by old ones. This is why there is no such thing as a "classic" TV series: we never see any series enough times to know whether its overall quality justifies the multiple viewings which are the hallmark of classic status. (Needless to say, I'm not talking about those fanatical cultists who have seen each episode of Star Trek a hundred times and can recite the dialogue from memory. To them, my heartfelt advice is: get a life.)

Despite the growing popularity of DVD box sets devoted to TV series of the past, I basically stand by that passage. Nevertheless, it doesn't explain why my own interest in series TV has dried up so completely. It was only a couple of weeks ago that the real reason hit me. I was reflecting on my loss of interest in The Sopranos when a different question formed in my mind: When was the last time I read a new novel? It took a moment for me to come up with the answer: I read Ed Lin's Waylaid back in February. So what have I been doing instead? Ever since I became the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, I've been seeing two or three plays a week, which appears to satisfy most of my interior demand for plot-driven narrative. When I'm not watching a play or a film, I now find I'd just as soon go to the ballet, look at paintings, or listen to music. And what do these latter art forms have in common? They're not narrative-driven, at least not in the way that novels and dramatic TV series require you to follow a verbally articulated story line as it unfolds through time. I get enough of that at the office.

I don't mean to make this sound any more significant than it is, but I do think it's worth mentioning. As an aesthete with an unusually wide-ranging experience of the arts, I'm struck by the way in which my artistic interests fluctuate over time. Right now, for instance, I probably spend more time thinking about theater and the visual arts than, say, classical music, and I definitely devote far more time to them than to prose fiction. Six months from now, of course, I'll probably feel differently. Back in January, I wrote in this space about how music had lost its savor for me, a development I found puzzling and a bit troubling:

I've spent the better part of my life up to my ears (so to speak) in music of all kinds. After literature, music was my first art form, and it remains the one I know most intimately. I "speak" it as naturally as I speak English. I write a lengthy essay about musical matters nearly every month for Commentary. That's why it feels strange to find the spring no longer flowing. It's as if I've become alienated from myself, in much the same way that the victim of a stroke might feel he was no longer himself. I'm not all here.

Ivy Compton-Burnett, the English novelist, told a friend late in life that she could no longer read Jane Austen with pleasure, not because her admiration for Austen had lessened but because she'd read her novels so many times that she had them virtually by heart, and hence could no longer be surprised by them. When I read that, I wondered: is it really possible to exhaust a masterpiece? Much less an entire art form? I can't imagine being unable to hear anything new in Falstaff or the Mozart G Minor Symphony, though I suppose it could happen. And as for a person who came to feel that music or painting or poetry had nothing more to say to him, he'd be in dire straits indeed. Such a terrible prospect puts me in mind of one of Dr. Johnson's most famous utterances: "Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." The arts are like that. To be tired of them is to be tired of life.

Needless to say, I'm not tired of life--far from it--and even though I do seem to be tired of music, I know the time will come when I fall in love with it all over again....

So I did. And no doubt I'll look up one fine day and notice that I'm telling everybody I know about some young novelist whose work I've yet to encounter, in much the same way that I can't stop thinking about Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories, about which I'm preparing to write a long essay. But for the moment I'm off novels, and definitely off series TV.

The first of these developments is almost certainly temporary. I'm not so sure about the second. When Our Girl told me what happened on the season finale of The Sopranos, I was mildly interested--perhaps even a bit more than mildly--but it never occurred to me to catch up on all the episodes I'd missed. (In fact, I don't even subscribe to HBO anymore.) Could it be that I'm through with series TV for good? I wouldn't be surprised. It's not that I'm a snob about TV. The problem is that I no longer care for the idea of committing myself to weekly installments of anything as repetitive as a dramatic series. I suppose it'd be melodramatic to say that life's too short to spend it watching the same set of characters each week--but melodramatic or not, I think that might be the best way to explain be how I'm feeling these days. For the moment, anyway.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 10, 2004 2:09 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"All that I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three, I learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety, I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at 100, I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am 110, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive."

Hokusai, A Hundred Views of Fuji

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 10, 2004 8:48 AM | Permalink

TT: Guest almanac

"She had an idea of the way things should be and edited reality heavily to conform with it."

Laurie Colwin, Family Happiness (courtesy of Mindy Alter)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 11, 2004 9:36 AM | Permalink

TT: Flash: Nazis hated Jews

It's Friday, so I'm in The Wall Street Journal, this time with reviews of two off-Broadway shows, Address Unknown and The Joys of Sex.

Address Unknown is a two-man show starring Jim Dale and William Atherton, both of whom make the most of a fairly obvious script:

Adapted from a 1938 short story that made a big splash long, long ago, "Address Unknown" is a "Love Letters"-type epistolary play about Max Eisenstein (Mr. Dale), a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco, and Martin Schulse (Mr. Atherton), his Gentile partner and friend, who moves back to Germany in 1932 and promptly develops a massive crush on Hitler. Factor in the title and you can probably figure out most of the rest yourself (I did), not excluding the tricky "surprise" ending, which is strictly from O. Henry. What makes it all work are Messrs. Dale and Atherton, two old pros who act their parts to the hilt, ably enabled by the neat direction of Frank Dunlop and the flawless set (half streamlined, half gem�tlich) of James Youmans.

The only thing I couldn't figure out was why the audience at the preview I saw gasped so loudly when Martin declared that "the Jewish race is a sore spot to any nation that harbors it." Could anybody in a New York theater have been surprised to hear such talk from a new-minted Nazi? Has our historical memory grown that dim? Or was it simply that Mr. Atherton had dug so deeply into his role as to make Martin seem freshly and frighteningly real? Maybe "Address Unknown" isn't quite as dated as I'd thought....

About The Joys of Sex I had nothing good to say:

Despite the on-stage presence of an awesome assortment of what I shall politely refer to here as rubber and electrical goods, "The Joys of Sex" is in point of fact an innocuous Upper West Side domestic farce about Howard and Stephs Nolton (Ron Bohmer and Stephanie Kurtzuba), a young married couple who are unable to have children, apparently because Stephs is also unable to have an orgasm, a fact she has hitherto failed to disclose to her unwitting spouse. Enter April (Jenelle Lynn Randall), a wistful slut who moves into the Noltons' building, thereby piquing the interest of Howard and his best friend Brian (David Josefsberg), a nebbish who can't get a girl. Wan hijinks ensue, among which are interspersed such dull ditties as "Intercourse on the Internet" and "I Need It Bad." All four parties pair off predictably and live happily ever after. Curtain, not a split-second too soon....

No link. Buy a Journal. Price: one dollar. It never ceases to amaze me how many people think The Wall Street Journal is all about money, when in fact it has superior arts coverage across the board. Find out for yourself.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 11, 2004 9:36 AM | Permalink

TT: Consumables

Busy as usual--I'm still playing catch-up after my sick week--but at least everything I'm doing is worthwhile in one way or another. Most recently:

- Last night I saw New York City Ballet dance what is known to balletomanes as "the Greek program": a triple bill of George Balanchine's Apollo, Orpheus, and Agon, each one set to a commissioned score by Igor Stravinsky. The company doesn't dance the Greek program very often, and it's always an event. I brought a jazz musician who's just getting into ballet at my behest. He'd already seen Apollo, which he finds a bit puzzling, but he couldn't say enough good things about Orpheus and Agon. (Neither can I.)

As for me, this was the first time I'd been to NYCB since turning in the manuscript of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, and it happens that I'll be devoting most of the weekend to copyediting queries and my own final revisions, so it was nice to spend an evening with Mr. B just before settling down to polish the book I wrote about him.

- After I got home, I watched Steven Soderbergh's The Limey, a film I hadn't seen since its theatrical release five years ago. (A friend of mine has a refrigerator magnet that says, "Time Flies, Whether You're Having Fun or Not.") Unlike Sexy Beast, another indie flick of the same vintage that I recently viewed and found rather less impressive than my memories of it (though Ben Kingsley is every bit as good as I'd thought), The Limey holds up and then some. A devastating neo-noir look at what the Sixties wrought, it's the only film of Soderbergh's since sex, lies, and videotape that's made me think there's more to him than his reputation.

- I've been reading Nolan Porterfield's Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America's Blue Yodeler. It's an extreme rarity, an academic biography about an American popular musician that is both lucidly written and critically convincing. Published in 1979, it remains one of the very best books of its kind.

- I managed to rearrange my schedule and take Wednesday night off, and spent it rehanging the Teachout Museum in order to make room for a new acquisition, Fairfield Porter's Ocean I. (Click on the link and scroll down to see a reproduction of the print in its two-color second state--I bought a copy of the first state, printed in three colors.) This ended up being quite an exhausting and comical process, since I had to schlep a heavy box containing the Porter down a long city block, drag it up two flights of stairs, then spend an hour or so rearranging the collection accordingly. Remember how hot it was on Wednesday? Well, I have high ceilings, and it was really hot up there. Consequently, I spent the better part of two hours sweating like an art-loving hog, perched on a rickety ladder in a highly advanced state of undress, which sort of suggests a porno movie for perverts with a sense of humor. On the other hand, the Teachout Museum now looks even more beautiful, so I guess it was worth it, right?

- Now playing on iTunes: Bill Frisell's arrangement for solo acoustic guitar of "My Man's Gone Now," available on Ghost Town. It's perfect--cool, spare, pensive. I wish he'd make a whole album just like that.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 11, 2004 9:38 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The world is full of restaurants that were excellent a year ago."

Woody Herman (quoted in Gene Lees, Leader of the Band)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 14, 2004 6:09 AM | Permalink

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 up well past my ears even if I hadn't been sick.

I saw two shows on Saturday, for instance, and yesterday I put in eight straight hours cleaning up the copyedited manuscript of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, which I have to return to Harcourt today so that they can publish it in November. In addition, I'm writing two newspaper pieces, one for Tuesday's Wall Street Journal and another for the Washington Post, and tomorrow I write my drama column for the Journal. I'll be in Washington on Wednesday and Thursday to see Ballett Frankfurt and Mark Lamos' new production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (both at the Kennedy Center), after which I rush back to New York on Friday to hear Joao Gilberto at Carnegie Hall that evening. The whole cycle starts up again on Saturday, when...

But enough about me. You get the idea--I'm busy as hell--and while I'll do my best to blog whenever I'm in town, I expect that the hitherto semi-invisible Our Girl in Chicago will be more or less in charge of "About Last Night" for the better part of the next couple of weeks. I've missed her genial presence in this space of late (as have many of our fellow bloggers), so be sure to send her lots of encouraging e-mail!

And now, a concise rundown of recently consumed art:

- I saw two plays over the weekend. The first was Lynn Nottage's Fabulation, the latest from the author of Intimate Apparel. The second was Charlie Victor Romeo, a performance piece based on transcripts of the black-box recordings of six flights--five commercial, one military--that crashed. Both will likely figure in my Wall Street Journal drama column this Friday, so read all about 'em then.

- I also went to the Triad on Saturday night to hear Mary Foster Conklin and Mark Winkler sing the songs of Matt Dennis ("Angel Eyes," "Everything Happens to Me") and Bobby Troup ("Route 66," "Meaning of the Blues"). Conklin, one of New York's top cabaret singers, presented a one-woman Dennis show earlier this year at Danny's Skylight Room, while Winkler, a Los Angeles-based performer best known on this side of the continent as one of the writers of Naked Boys Singing!, recently released a CD called, logically enough, Mark Winkler Sings Bobby Troup. The two hadn't shared a stage prior to last Saturday night, and I'm delighted to say that their shows fit together with tongue-in-groove exactitude. "Songs of Matt Dennis & Bobby Troup" was, I'm told an experiment. If so, it's one that begs to be repeated--frequently. Watch this space for details.

- Now playing on iTunes: not a damn thing, thank you very much. I need some silence so that I can concentrate on getting Piece Number One written and shipped off to the Journal so that I can get out of here in time to meet Maud downtown for a quickish lunch, followed by a doctor's appointment, followed by more writing, followed by a nervous breakdown. (Just kidding.) Cross your fingers, please.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on June 14, 2004 6:46 AM | Permalink

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 donn�es. 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 by Douglas McLennan on June 15, 2004 4:09 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 15, 2004 5:49 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 15, 2004 6:35 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 15, 2004 8:28 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 15, 2004 8:32 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 16, 2004 5:08 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 16, 2004 6:00 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 16, 2004 8:12 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 16, 2004 8:12 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 17, 2004 4:44 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 17, 2004 4:54 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 18, 2004 1:00 AM | Permalink

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 clich�s 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 by Douglas McLennan on June 18, 2004 12:06 PM | Permalink

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 clich� 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 by Douglas McLennan on June 21, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 21, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 Jo�o 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 by Douglas McLennan on June 21, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 21, 2004 12:04 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 22, 2004 1:15 AM | Permalink

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 d�j� 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 Illustr�, 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 by Douglas McLennan on June 22, 2004 5:27 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 22, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 22, 2004 12:30 PM | Permalink

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. T�ib�n 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 by Douglas McLennan on June 23, 2004 2:58 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 23, 2004 6:48 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 24, 2004 1:23 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 24, 2004 4:11 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 24, 2004 4:44 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 25, 2004 9:15 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 25, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 25, 2004 12:15 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 26, 2004 1:21 AM | Permalink

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 Faur�'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 by Douglas McLennan on June 28, 2004 4:27 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 28, 2004 5:17 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 28, 2004 5:41 AM | Permalink

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 Lut�ce and La C�te 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 by Douglas McLennan on June 28, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 28, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 29, 2004 9:44 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 29, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 30, 2004 11:10 AM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 30, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

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 by Douglas McLennan on June 30, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink