About Last Night: September 2004 Archives

OGIC: Man of letters

Robert Louis Stevenson's letters, personal and professional, will charm your socks right off. They've already kept me from several tasks (including going to bed at a reasonable hour) tonight. And they're worth every squandered minute.

To William Archer, October 1887:

I am now a salaried party; I am a bourgeois now; I am to write a weekly paper for Scribner's, at a scale of payment which makes my teeth ache for shame and diffidence....I am like to be a millionaire if this goes on, and be publicly hanged at the social revolution: well, I would prefer that to dying in my bed; and it would be a godsend to my biographer, if ever I have one.

To Henry James, "I know not the day; but the month it is the drear October by the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir," 1887:

Our house--emphatically "Baker's"--is on a hill, and has a sight of a stream turning a corner in the valley--bless the face of running water!--and sees some hills too, and the paganly prosaic roofs of Saranac itself; the Lake it does not see, nor do I regret that; I like water (fresh water I mean) either running swiftly among stones, or else largely qualified with whisky. As I write, the sun (which has long been a stranger) shines in at my shoulder; from the next room, the bell of Lloyd's typewriter makes an agreeable music as it patters off (at a rate which astonishes this experienced novelist) the early chapters of a humorous romance; from still further off--the walls of Baker's are neither ancient nor massive--rumours of Valentine about the kitchen stove come to my ears; of my mother and Fanny I hear nothing, for the excellent reason that they have gone sparking off, one to Niagara, one to Indianapolis. People complain that I never give news in my letters. I have wiped out that reproach.

Again to William Archer, February 1888:

Why was Jenkin an amateur in my eyes? You think because not amusing (I think he often was amusing). The reason is this: I never, or almost never, saw two pages of his work that I could not have put in one without the smallest loss of material. That is the only test I know of writing. If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been said in one, then it's amateur work. Then you will bring me up with old Dumas. Nay, the object of a story is to belong, to fill up hours; the story-teller's art of writing is to water out by continual invention, historical and technical, and yet not seem to water; seem on the other hand to practise that same wit of conspicuous and declaratory condensation which is the proper art of writing. That is one thing in which my stories fail: I am always cutting the flesh off the bones.

I would rise from the dead to preach!

I'm always resolving to learn more about Stevenson, who cut a rather dashing figure in the transatlantic literary scene at the end of the nineteenth century. He know most everybody and, as far as I can tell, was universally respected. It's heartbreaking to see his illnesses turn up again and again in these late letters, where the restless vigor of his imagination and affections is so palpable. When he died in 1894, Stevenson was 44 and probably still had enough books in him to fill another lifetime on top of his truncated one.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 1, 2004 2:38 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Two or three serious ladies

It might be a bit of an understatement to say that Daniel Asa Rose admires Cynthia Ozick's new book, Heir to the Glimmering World. I don't know when I've seen such self-abasement in the service of such a good cause.

Confession: It's not Virginia Woolf I'm afraid of--it's Cynthia Ozick.... She reminds me of Virginia Woolf, is why.

And a little of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And a lot of that odd-duck dyad, Charlotte Bront�/Jane Austen--waif-like women who pack a wallop, whose impeccably mouse-like demeanors belie their blazing insights. Just when you resign yourself to the fact that they're as meek and timorous as they seem, powch! comes the originality of their vision, the flammability of their passion, the cunning of their wisdom. (Others find them bold from the get-go, I realize; I'm only talking about how their aura reads to me.)

But mostly Ms. Ozick reminds me of Emily Dickinson. A Jewish Emily Dickinson, two dainty birdlike poets with great swoops of language, sharp claws of syntax. Small, gentle, delicate women who veil themselves with such fluttering modesty as to blindside you to the enormous stern force of their words.

I don't know or care whether they're "dainty," but on the evidence of their work alone I would throw Shirley Hazzard in with these ladies, and also Fernanda Eberstadt, about whom I'll have a lot more to say down the road. I read her 2003 novel The Furies early this summer and was knocked off my feet by it. Eberstadt's style is quite Ozickian, judging from what Rose quotes (liberally) in his review and from my own memory of The Puttermesser Papers, and she has the brainy artistry to more than pull it off. This is not a style for the weak of intention or intellect. It runs on high-grade insights--social, emotional, philosophical, what have you--and burns an astonishing quantity of the stuff per page.

Can anyone at Knopf write and tell me whether a paperback Furies is in the works? I was hoping to see it this fall, and wanted to use its publication as the occasion for a rave review. For now, that review joins the list of things I O U, along with the rest of my Allison Moorer swoon.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 1, 2004 3:41 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Another dispatch from RLS

I'm gobbling up these letters like so much popcorn. Sad to say, I'll soon run out. I have only one volume (vol. 3) of four from Scribners' 1928 South Seas Edition of Stevenson, a ratty red pocket-sized book scooped up at a library sale some years ago for a quarter.

TO HENRY JAMES

Honolulu [March, 1889]

MY DEAR JAMES,--Yes--I own up--I am untrue to friendship and (what is less, but still considerable) to civilisation. I am not coming home for another year. There it is, cold and bald, and now you won't believe in me at all, and serve me right (says you) and the devil take me. But look here, and judge me tenderly. I have had more fun and pleasure of my life these past months than ever before, and more health than any time in ten long years. And even here in Honolulu I have withered in the cold; and this precious deep is filled with islands, which we may still visit; and though the sea is a deathful place, I like to be there, and like squalls (when they are over); and to draw near to a new island, I cannot say how much I like. In short, I take another year of this sort of life, and mean to try to work down among the poisoned arrows, and mean (if it may be) to come back again when the thing is through, and converse with Henry James as heretofore; and in the meanwhile issue directions to H. J. to write to me once more. Let him address here at Honolulu, for my views are vague; and if it is sent here it will follow and find me, if I am to be found; and if I am not to be found, the man James will have done his duty, and we shall be at the bottom of the sea, where no post-office clerk can be expected to discover us, or languishing on a coral island, the philosophic drudges of some barbarian potentate; perchance of an American Missionary. My wife has just sent to Mrs. Sitwell a translation (tant bien que mal) of a letter I have had from my chief friend in this part of the world: go and see her, and get a hearing of it; it will do you good; it is a better method of correspondence than even Henry James's. I jest, but seriously it is a strange thing for a tough, sick, middle-aged scrivener like R. L. S. to receive a letter so conceived from a man fifty years old, a leading politician, a crack orator, and the great wit of his village: boldly say, "the highly popular M.P. of Tautira." My nineteenth century strikes here, and lies alongside of something beautiful and ancient. I think the receipt of such a letter might humble, shall I say even [--�?] and for me, I would rather have received it than written Redgauntlet or the sixth Aeneid. All told, if my books have enabled or helped me to make this voyage, to know Rui, and to have received such a letter, they have (in the old prefatorial expression) not been writ in vain. It would seem from this that I have been not so much humbled as puffed up; but, I assure you, I have in fact been both. A little of what that letter says is my own earning; not all, but yet a little; and this little makes me proud, and all the rest ashamed; and in the contrast, how much more beautiful altogether is the ancient man than him of to-day

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly. And to curry favour with him, I wish I could be more explicit; but, indeed, I am still of necessity extremely vague, and cannot tell what I am to do, nor where I am to go for some while yet. As soon as I am sure, you shall hear. All are fairly well--the wife, your countrywoman, least of all; troubles are not entirely wanting; but on the whole we prosper, and we are all affectionately yours,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 2, 2004 2:05 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Grumble, grumble

I'm having a week of fielding ecstatic phone calls from friends on art-centered road trips. Terry, who says hello, is looking at paintings wherever it is he finds himself today. Meanwhile, Our Friend on the Block, whose writing occasionally graces this site, is out west researching a book project on land art. This week she's in the Salt Lake City area looking at Spiral Jetty. Later she'll be, enviably, at Lightning Field. She is, by the way, soliciting suggestions of places to stay and sights to see around Flagstaff, Albuquerque, and Overton, Nevada. Color me green, despite the impeccable weather in Chicago, of which I have a very fine view from my desk.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 2, 2004 12:59 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Newly licensed

The first time I took a driving test (and right there you see where this story is headed), I hit another car while pulling out of the parking spot. Short test, short story. My second try was more successful, though requiring lots of tongue-biting on my part as the instructor lamely cracked wise about my "record."

As he mentioned earlier, Terry recently licensed me to contribute to this blog's "Top Five" feature (appearing in the right-hand sidebar), and without a road test. I find his faith touching, and without wrecking or denting anything have contributed a squib for Garden State, which was about ten times better than the coy television ads had led me to expect. I also discovered last night that Zach Braff is keeping a blog as part of the movie's official site; it's interesting and well worth a look.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 7, 2004 3:56 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Encountering what appears to be a kindred spirit is always exhilarating, perhaps especially so when sexual consummation is not a part of it."

Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 7, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: All two of us

Attentive readers will doubtless have noticed that the "Teachout's Top Five" module of the right-hand column was renamed "The TT-OGIC Top Five" over the weekend. It hit me shortly before I left on my vacation that Our Girl in Chicago really ought to be putting in her two cents' worth, so I made the fix after I got back, and from now on Our Girl and I will have joint custody of the Top Fives.

As I write these words, each of the five current picks is "signed" at the end with my initials, but that will change as soon as Our Girl gets the hang of the coding and posts her first Top Five item, which will be signed "OGIC."

By the way, OGIC, thanks for minding the store while I was away. You rock, as always.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 7, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: A little traveling music, please

I brought with me on my amazing journey a short stack of music for all occasions, some of which is as yet unavailable to civilians. Dave's True Story, the kinky postmodern lounge act I profiled in the New York Times a few years ago, sent a rough mix of The World in Which We Live, their next album (which is terrific), while Mary Foster Conklin, another of my Times profilees, supplied me with a live recording of her recent Lieber-and-Stoller show (ditto), which I wasn't able to hear in person.

I also packed a four-CD set burned by a kind reader of "About Last Night" which contains the sixty-odd recordings I chose back in 1999 for a series of three Commentary essays collectively entitled "Masterpieces of Jazz: A Critical Guide." I'm hoping that some obliging publisher will invite me to turn the results into a fancy book-and-CD package (hint, hint!), but in the meantime, they made for classy drive-time listening.

In addition, I gobbled up ten commercially released CDs in the course of my voyage. It occurred to me as I returned to New York that they added up to a nicely eclectic list whose contents might be of interest to at least some of you, so here they are:

- Karrin Allyson, Wild for You (recently praised in this space)

- Ani DiFranco, Dilate ("Superhero" is now my theme song)

- Emmylou Harris, Stumble Into Grace (I still have a crush on her after all these years)

- Allison Moorer, Miss Fortune and The Duel (Our Girl and I are of like minds when it comes to Miss Moorer)

- Uncle Tupelo, 89/93: An Anthology (good when it's good, dull when it isn't)

- Caetano Veloso, The Best of Caetano Veloso (this one didn't ring the bell for me, much to my surprise)

- Rhonda Vincent, One Step Ahead (hot retro-style bluegrass from a superior singer-mandolinist)

- Fats Waller, Honeysuckle Rose: 51 Original Mono Recordings 1927-1943 (I don't think the world is quite ready to hear me yowling along with Fats on "I Wish I Were Twins")

- Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (need I say more?)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 7, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Loosely wound

Where was I? It's a long story, but I'll tell you the good parts (there aren't any bad parts).

To begin with, I was supposed to go to Chicago last week to hang out with Our Girl and cover a couple of shows for The Wall Street Journal, but my editors decided at the next-to-last minute that I should hold off until later in the season. Since I'd already cleared my calendar to make room for the trip, I found myself with a totally blank week on my hands, something that hadn't happened to me since, oh, the Battle of Hastings. I briefly considered staying in Manhattan and telling all my friends I was somewhere else, but it didn't take long for me to write that idea off as harebrained. Aside from the obvious problems, I didn't relish the thought of being in town for the Republican Convention and its attendant chaos.

The more I thought it over, the more I began to suspect that the universe wanted me to improvise a vacation--something I'd never done. Longtime readers of "About Last Night" will recall that I took a week off last August to visit Isle au Haut in Maine, scene of one of the prints in the Teachout Museum, and wrote an article for the Journal about what I saw there. But that was a work-related excursion, carefully planned for months in advance, and I am, as you all know, a degenerate workaholic whose hands start to tremble whenever he spends more than a couple of hours away from his desk. Could I possibly force myself to toss together a pack-and-go trip, unmotivated by anything other than the simple desire to get the hell out of town?

Duty whispered low, "Thou must," so I revved up my iBook. Two hours later I'd booked a rental car and gotten in touch with bed-and-breakfasts in Uniontown, Pa., Toledo, Ohio, and Buffalo, New York (all of which turned out to be excellent, by the way). The deed was done. Nine blissful days ago, I drove across the George Washington Bridge, singing along with Fats Waller as I watched the New York skyline shrink in my rear-view mirror. I was--to my ongoing amazement--off and running.

What did I do? I visited two Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Kentuck Knob in Pennsylvania (just a few miles down the road from Fallingwater) and the Martin House in Buffalo. In between I stopped at the Toledo Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery. All these places are far from my beaten paths--the only one I'd previously visited was the Cleveland Museum, where I spent a hasty afternoon several years ago--and the idea of seeing them in one fell swoop struck me as wildly adventurous.

Did I have fun? More than you can imagine. I plan to write about my cultural adventures during the week to come, but the best part might just have been the journey itself. Though I drove a lot--1,538 miles, all told--I did so in a leisurely, unhurried manner, taking back roads and scenic bypasses whenever I felt like it. (Five minutes after I pulled off the interstate at Albany, I saw a hand-lettered sign by the side of the road that said BULL FOR SALE.) I ate tasty breakfasts, feasted my eyes on Kentuck Knob and the Martin House, and looked at dozens of great paintings, including Frieze of Dancers, my all-time favorite Degas. I got lost in Pennsylvania for about twenty minutes, and a gust of wind blew a dollar bill out of my hand at an Ohio toll booth. Otherwise, nothing whatsoever went wrong.

I had such a good time that I stayed on the road for an extra day and night. Instead of coming back to Manhattan on Thursday, I called the Hudson House Inn, my Cold Spring retreat, from the road, and spent that evening dining in style on their front porch and gazing at Storm King Mountain from my favorite waterfront park bench.

I returned home on Friday afternoon to find three hundred e-mails in my private mailbox. You know what? I still haven't answered most of them--and I haven't even peeked at the no doubt burgeoning contents of my "About Last Night" e-mailbox. Instead, I've been taking it nice and slow, if not totally inert. I went to a press preview of Slava's Snowshow on Friday night. On Saturday a friend called me up and suggested we spend the evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which turned out to be all but empty, most art-loving New Yorkers still being out of town. We dined on wine and cheese, listened to four very good musicians play the Brahms G Minor Piano Quartet, strolled through the Childe Hassam retrospective, and congratulated ourselves on having had such a brilliant idea. (Actually, it was her idea, but I had the good sense to say yes.)

On Sunday I watched a Gary Cooper movie, Vera Cruz, on TV, then had dinner with another friend and went to see Garden State a second time. On Monday I ran a few low-grade errands, read a book, got a haircut, took a nap, ate sushi, and watched another Gary Cooper movie, Man of the West. Today I'm going to paint my first watercolor (about which more tomorrow, maybe) and dip a toe into my accumulated blogmail. I have no deadlines of any kind until next week. I'm so unwound that a puff of smoke could knock me over.

So, could I get used to this vacation stuff? I think I already have. Everybody says I look and sound much happier. And I know I'm going to do it again.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 7, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Wait just one minute

I've just read the Columbia Journalism Review piece that first Maud, and then Terry, linked to today. I'm left with mixed feelings. I don't doubt that certain factors make the process of publishing a book today regrettably frustrating for most authors, and unsuccessful for many: the sheer volume of books being published and, of course, book publishers' pesky need to make money. I sympathize with Stacy Sullivan's plight, but I'm not certain she's the ideal poster child for suffering midlist writers. Her situation as described in Gal Beckerman's article seems to a considerable degree self-created.

You see, there's this little thing in publishing called a contract. When signed, it confers obligations on both parties. The most important obligations of the author are (a) timely delivery of the manuscript and (b) delivery of a satisfactory manuscript. For most publishers, "satisfactory" will mean publishable, at the very least, but probably a sight better. If either of these basic obligations isn't met (and they often aren't), a publisher may renege on a contract (but they seldom do).

It's well known that deadline extensions are handed out by book publishers like peanuts by flight attendants. It's relatively rare for a book to be cancelled for late delivery; if one is, there's a good chance the publisher has some underlying motive. For instance, if you're an author whose acquiring editor has left your publishing house, you'd best be damn sure to meet your deadline, and in style. The staunchest thing standing between a missed deadline and a cancellation is the house's investment in the book, which most commonly means the personal investment of the editor, i.e., the person who took it upon herself to jump through x number of hoops in order to persuade skeptical bosses to part with their investors' money in return for the mere promise of a book. In general, that person no more wants to see the book cancelled than the author does, and so most authors are on safe ground counting on extensions. As an editor, however, one might understandably hope to know earlier than a month before deadline--this is when Sullivan "realized" that she wouldn't be able to complete more than half of her manuscript--that an extension is needed.

The other pertinent thing to say about deadlines is that precisely those functions of a publishing house that can help a book find its audience, and that Sullivan found wanting at St. Martin's--marketing and publicity, cover art and book design--are sensitive to them. Many of these departments start their work on a book far ahead of publication and rely on firm production schedules and season lists. It's no small deal when a book drops off a list and gets pushed back to the next season.

But, as I said, late delivery is both the most common and most forgivable of contractual breaches in the book publishing business. Delivery of a satisfactory manuscript can be another story. Again, one is usually on pretty safe ground here, since it can be difficult for a publisher to legally prove that a manuscript is so subjective a thing as "unsatisfactory." A really good, pugnacious agent can pretty readily cow an editor into gritting his teeth and publishing the thing, unless it's an all-out total disaster. But guess what? If you miss your deadline and deliver something unsatisfactory--let alone unpublishable, as Sullivan readily admits the 600-page rough draft she delivered two years after her original deadline was--the publisher can walk away scot-free. Think "unpublishable" is too strong a word for what Sullivan turned in? She doesn't; she pulled it out of production (a really big deal, like pulling up the rail in front of a freight train gathering steam) in order to get it into the shape in which she should have delivered it in the first place.

At the publishing house that used to employ me, we once received a manuscript several months late, and we weren't happy with it. It was by no means unpublishable--in fact, it was a political-personal autobiography that was soon published by another house in much the same form and that now, many years after the fact, is selling like hotcakes. But it was not what the proposal had led us to expect, not the book we wanted to publish, and the missed deadline gave us the out we needed without our having to address the thorny question of what's "satisfactory." So from a certain perspective you could argue that St. Martin's bent over backward for Sullivan. She left several doors open for them to duck out of, but they paid her advance and published a book whose fortunes, it is compellingly argued here, were already hobbled by its untimeliness. It seems audacious of her to complain about the publisher's lackluster efforts on behalf of a book she delivered two years late, 100% too long, and in a rough enough state that she didn't want it out in the world with her name on it. She admits she was "naive," but nowhere in the CJR piece does she seem at all abashed by how unseriously she appears to have taken her promises to St. Martin's. Well, there's naive, and then there's unprofessional.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 8, 2004 1:18 AM | Permalink

TT: I couldn't have put it better

From I Want Media:

Q:� Why are you blogging?
A:� Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, co-founder of HDNet, and star of the new ABC series "The Benefactor":� "I started the blog because I was tired of giving in-depth responses to a media question only to have the result be what the reporter or columnist intended to write and I was just fodder to help them make their point. With the blog, I can present my position on a topic in its entirety and not have to worry about how they condense a two-hour conversation into 500 words."

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 8, 2004 1:20 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Whether you like it or not, when you're sixty-two you're fulfilled."

Burt Lancaster (quoted in Kate Buford, Burt Lancaster: An American Life)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 8, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Eleven things I learned on my vacation

- Never look at great art for more than an hour at a time. After that, your eyes go numb. When that happens, take a lunch break.

- One museum a day is enough.

- Bring twice as many CDs and half as many books as you think you'll need.

- Unless you're driving an expensive car, don't bother listening to classical music--the road noise will drown out the quiet parts.

- When staying at a bed-and-breakfast, don't eat all of the first course, no matter how good it is. (If you do, you won't be able to finish the entr�e, which is usually even better.)

- Once you've spent three consecutive nights at B&Bs, spend the fourth at a roadside motel. You'll appreciate the contrast--both ways.

- In Pennsylvania, all roads are under construction at all times.

- Anyone more than casually interested in Frank Lloyd Wright should invest in a copy of William Allin Storrer's The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog. This compact catalogue raisonn� contains illustrated entries for all 433 pieces of "built work" by Wright, plus road maps showing how to find them. The maps are legible and accurate--I can vouch for them. In addition, they clearly indicate which buildings can be viewed from "publicly accessible property" (i.e., they can be seen from the street).

- When visiting a medium-sized city, make a point of dining at the museum caf�. Not only is the food good, but you can also eavesdrop on the staff--and the donors.

- If you're driving, either wear a long-sleeved shirt or put sunscreen on your left arm.

- Bring your own pillow. You'll sleep better.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 8, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Advice to young authors

Supermaud linked this morning to "The Education of Stacy Sullivan," Gal Beckerman's story in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review about a journalist who wrote a book about Kosovo, then was astonished that it didn't become an overnight best seller.

Actually, that's just my jaundiced take. Here's Maud's, which is a lot more fair:

Beckerman chronicles the many obstacles faced by journalist and debut author Stacy Sullivan in publishing and promoting Be Not Afraid, for You Have Sons in America, her nonfiction book. Sullivan's story is familiar to me, mirroring those I've heard even from seasoned and extremely well-regarded novelists. The upshot: unless your book is seen as bestseller material, you're on your own.

Editors no longer edit. The art department doesn't care whether the exploding grenades on the proposed cover undermine the themes of your book. And your publicist is not going to lift even a pinky to help you, especially not if he or she is also responsible for promoting books written by star authors like, say, David Sedaris (or even, as in Sullivan's case, Newt Gingrich).

All true, at least for the most part--but is it news? Not to me, or to anyone who's published a book in the past quarter-century or so. Poor Stacy Sullivan, on the other hand, seems to have been shocked beyond words by the facts of publishing life. Says Beckerman:

By the end of last year, the book was out of [Sullivan's] hands and in print, at an initial run of 5,000 copies. By this point, she had long abandoned the illusion that her publisher cared about her book's fate. "It's your book," Sullivan now tells herself. "It's not your agent's, your editor's, or your publisher's. It's your baby and you have to nurture it."

Well, duh!

By all means read the whole thing here. You should--this piece is going to be the talk of the 'sphere, assuming it isn't already. But as you read, allow a cynical old author with several books under his belt to offer a more realistic perspective on the way things work:

- Publishing is a business. It always was. It always will be. No reasonable publisher will buy your book save with the reasonable expectation of selling enough copies to earn back your advance, plus enough profit to keep the wheels turning. Hence the chief function of an agent is to get your editor to give you an advance large enough to make the bean counters feel they have a stake in the book's success. The larger the advance, the more seriously your book will be taken by everyone involved in its publication. If you don't get a good advance, it means the publisher doesn't expect the book to sell well, and won't act accordingly--and there's nothing you can do about it. (Stacy Sullivan got $35,000, a dead giveaway that St. Martin's had only modest expectations for her book.)

- In my experience, Maxwell Perkins-style editing is a thing of the past. That's fine with me. If you aren't capable of writing a book that's publishable in the version you submit to the publisher, you're not a professional. I'm not talking about copyediting, the painstaking clean-up job in which a line editor makes sure your whiches and thats are all in the right places. That kind of editing is very much alive and well. All my books have been copyedited scrupulously, and they're the better for it. But don't assume that some magic-fingered editor is going to make your book a bestseller by rewriting it. Clean up your own mess. If you don't trust yourself, ask a trusted colleague for advice. Then do your own editing, based on that advice. Write the book you want to see in print.

- The art departments of major publishing houses are busy with lots of books besides yours. Left to their own devices, they may or may not produce a relevant, attention-getting dust jacket. So roll up your sleeves and involve yourself in the process of designing your book. Get to know the designer. Don't be a nuisance, but be clear and straightforward about what you think might be appropriate in the way of possible cover images. And don't wait until the last minute: make sure you're in the loop from start to finish. In my experience, you'll be listened to, so long as you appear to know what you're talking about. Arbitrary, whimsical advice will be ignored. Intelligent, informed suggestions will be heard and heeded, not just about the cover but about every aspect of the book's design, right down to the choice of typeface. I'm neither rich nor famous, but all my books look exactly the way I wanted them to--or better.

- According to Gal Beckerman, publishers like "presentable" authors. That's true--but you don't have to have great hair in order to impress them. You do, however, have to be able to talk concisely and intelligently about your book under pressure (i.e., on a live radio broadcast). You also have to know how to give effective speeches and readings.

For road-tested advice on how not to sound like an idiot when talking about your book, go here.

- In-house book publicists are a mixed bag. I've had great ones and lousy ones. But no matter how smart or committed they are, they can't work miracles. If you're an unknown first-time author, they won't be able to do much for you, no matter how hard they try. If you got a five-thousand-dollar advance, they won't try very hard.

You can, of course, hire an outside publicist, and sometimes that helps--but be realistic about your prospects. Stacy Sullivan's book is called Be Not Afraid for You Have Sons in America: How a Brooklyn Roofer Helped Lure the U.S. into the Kosovo War. Do you really think a publicist could have gotten her on TV?

- Print advertisements don't sell books. (Neither do fancy book parties.) They make nervous authors feel better. Unless you're famous, your publisher won't spring for an ad until after your book is selling. Live with it.

- The effects of book reviews on sales are unknown. They don't hurt (assuming the reviews are good), but there are lots of other ways to sell a book. If you're reading these words, for instance, you already know that the blogosphere has started to become a significant factor in the marketing of midlist books. Take advantage of it. Well before the publication date, register www.yourname.com, get a blog up and running, and use it to publicize your book.

- Don't worry about the New York Times Book Review. It's nice to be reviewed there and nicer still to get a good review, but far from necessary. I've never gotten a favorable full-length review from the Times Book Review for any of my books--and I've been writing for them for years! Be that as it may, I continue to crank out books, and publishers continue to publish them, so I must be doing something right.

I close with the Prime Directive of Writing a Book. Print it out, frame it, and place it in a prominent spot on your desk:

- Anyone who writes a serious book with the expectation of making a lot of money and/or becoming famous is a fool. If you can't afford to write a book in your spare time for its own sake, you're in the wrong business.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 8, 2004 12:10 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I don't want to sound falsely na�ve, but I often wonder why people get married. I think perhaps they dislike being alone more than I do. Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I'm not fond of company. I'm very fond of people, but it's difficult to get people without company. And I think living with someone and being in love is a very difficult business anyway because almost by definition it means putting yourself at the disposal of someone else, ranking them higher than yourself. I wrote a little poem about this which was never collected so perhaps you never saw it. Do you know it? �The difficult part of love/Is being selfish enough/Is having the blind persistence/To upset someone's existence/Just for your own sake--/What cheek it must take.' End of first verse. �Then take the unselfish side--/Who can be satisfied/Putting someone else first,/So that you come off worst?/My life is for me:/As well deny gravity.' There is a third verse, but that's the gist of it. I think love collides very sharply with selfishness, and they're both pretty powerful things."

Philip Larkin, Required Writing

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 9, 2004 1:31 AM | Permalink

TT: Look out, Cleveland

A reader from Cleveland writes:

Glad to hear you took in our museum. How cool. It's also heartening to hear your still-warm regard for the "smaller" places in the US (and really, what place is "bigger" than NYC?). Most of the people I know who've moved on to big cities develop a contempt for any place less populated (including their own birthplace). I suppose it must always exist within them, but snobbishness of this kind makes little sense to me as location does not make the man.

As a change of pace and in hopes it will be an exercise you'll enjoy, how about a little classical music advice? Borders is running a 4-for-3 sale and I was browsing the classical music section. I was at a loss. I have works from the most well-known composers, but that's about it. How about your thoughts on the 5 essential classical works of the 20th century? Please expand the time frame if current constraints make the list unworkable.

I did indeed take in the Cleveland Museum of Art, one of America's half-dozen greatest museums, a fact of which many American art lovers don't seem to be aware, perhaps because of its comparatively modest size--34,000 objects, compared to the two million owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If the Met is an encyclopedic museum, then Cleveland is a one-volume desk encyclopedia.

What makes the Cleveland Museum so extraordinary is the jaw-dropping connoisseurship with which those 34,000 objects were chosen. Instead of collecting in depth, Cleveland's curators, like their counterparts at Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum, opted for quality over quantity, and time and again they hit the bull's-eye. When I visited the abstract expressionist gallery last Tuesday, for instance, it contained paintings by William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, sculptures by David Smith and Isamu Noguchi, an Alexander Calder mobile, and a Joseph Cornell box--the whole history of abstract expressionism summed up in fourteen objects, all on display in a single room. Except for the Krasner, each one was of the highest possible quality. The whole museum is like that, more or less.

As for my correspondent's request for advice, it happens that Time magazine asked me four years ago to pick (anonymously, alas) the greatest classical-music composition and opera of the twentieth century, plus two runners-up in each category. A year before that, I'd written a series of articles for Commentary called "Masterpieces of the Century" in which I drew up "a counter-canon of 50 major works." Based on those two lists, here are five essential twentieth-century classical works, with links to my favorite recordings of each piece:

- B�la Bart�k, Concerto for Orchestra

- Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes

- Aaron Copland, Appalachian Spring

- Maurice Ravel, String Quartet in F Major

- Igor Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms

Note, by the way, that I omitted "the" from my reader's original specification. I don't claim that these are the essential works--to pick five such pieces would be an impossible task. Essential, though, they most definitely are, and unimpeachably beautiful to boot.

Dissenters, start your engines!

UPDATE: Courtesy of the "About Last Night" referral log, may I share an exceptionally (albeit unintentionally) funny posting with you?

I know what Terry Teachout does for a living and what his interests are but his description of how he spent the last nine days does not inspire confidence that he is all that interesting: art museums in Cleveland and Buffalo. No doubt two cities known for its cultural contributions to America.

I especially like the grammatical elegance of that last sentence.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 9, 2004 1:32 AM | Permalink

TT: Report from the curator

My old friend Tim Page, the classical music critic of the Washington Post, came to New York last night to cover the opening of New York City Opera's new production of Richard Strauss' Daphne. We hadn't seen one another in months, so we had lunch at Good Enough to Eat today. Like me, Tim is a man of many interests, and in an earlier part of his life he developed a passion for Dawn Powell, one which eventually led him to write her biography and edit her letters and diary (which he discovered) and the Library of America's two-volume set of her comic novels.

Tim is, in other words, the Big Powell Guy, and seeing as how I'm a Little Powell Guy--the first essay in the Teachout Reader is about her--he saw fit to bring me a stupendous present this afternoon. He handed over a manila folder inside of which was a tattered but still intact pen-and-ink caricature of Martha Graham drawn by none other than Powell herself. It's a Thurberesque full-length portrait in reddish-brown ink, captioned "Martha Graham: Analysis in Wonderland." Modern-dance buffs will immediately recognize the inverted triangle before which Graham is standing as the set piece Isamu Noguchi designed for Frontier, choreographed in 1935. The expression of loony anguish on Graham's face, by contrast, is all Powell and a yard wide.

Needless to say, I nearly fell out of my chair when Tim presented me with this wonderful souvenir of one of my favorite writers. It was especially appropriate because I already own a Graham-related piece of comic art, an assemblage made for me by Paul Taylor. Not long after 9/11, I wrote an essay for the New York Times called "The Importance of Being Less Earnest" (it's also in the Teachout Reader) in which I poked fun at the humorlessness of such iconic figures of modern dance as Graham and Isadora Duncan:

What Duncan sowed was soon reaped by a generation of modern-dance choreographers for whom humor was, to put it mildly, a superfluity. To flip through Edwin Denby's collected reviews of dance in New York in the Thirties and Forties is to be struck by how dour he makes their dances sound. Though he made a point of being fair, he also believed deeply in the inestimable value of lightness, and so it is instructive to watch him grapple with Martha Graham, whose clenched-hair psychological dramas did so much to shape the emotional landscape of dance in postwar America. (When Randall Jarrell wanted to spoof modern dance in Pictures from an Institution, he made up a perfectly plausible-sounding piece called The Eye of Anguish, not realizing that Graham had used that same title four years earlier.) On one occasion Denby described her company as "bold about being earnest, but timid about being lively," which neatly sums up what many balletomanes find unsympathetic about Graham's painfully sincere art.

I contrasted their portentousness with Taylor's miraculous ability to say dark things with a light touch:

It's surprising (well, no, it isn't) how many dance buffs are still suspicious of Taylor, mainly because his work, though serious, is never ponderous. Having seen a lot of art of all kinds since September 11, I'm impressed by how many of the things that spoke to me most strongly, from Urinetown to Ghost World to the exhibition of Ben Katchor's "picture stories" currently on display at the Jewish Museum, were either wholly comic or partook of the sweet-and-sourness found in Paul Taylor's best dances.

Taylor danced with the Graham company for a number of years, by the end of which he was thoroughly fed up with her high-minded self-importance. What I wrote about her in the Times obviously tickled his funnybone, for he put together a Joseph Cornell-like shadowbox incorporating a clipping of my piece, which had been illustrated by an old picture of Duncan. On the clipping Taylor mounted a butterfly, and on top of that he placed the business end of a rusty old flyswatter. He titled it "Gotcha Both," put it in an envelope, and sent it to me. "Gotcha Both" now occupies an honored place in the Teachout Museum, and I plan to hang "Martha Graham: Analysis in Wonderland" below it as soon as it comes back from my framer.

I'm especially pleased by the juxtaposition because it happens that I also made admiring mention of Dawn Powell in "The Importance of Being Less Earnest":

Small wonder...that the children and grandchildren of Isadora, Martha Graham foremost among them, dominated native-born American theatrical dance for so long. They were right at home, particularly during World War II, when American culture, already sick unto death from the political pieties of the Thirties, came close to choking on its own high-mindedness. Dawn Powell, a cruelly funny woman who had no use for such nonsense, skewered the spirit of the age in her 1942 novel A Time to Be Born: "The poet, disgusted with the flight of skylarks in perfect sonnet form, declaimed the power of song against brutality and raised hollow voice in feeble proof. This was no time for beauty, for love, or private future...This was a time when the artists, the intellectuals, sat in caf�s and in country homes and accused each other over their brandies or their California vintages of traitorous tendencies."

How delightful to own a pair of art objects in which two great American artists are brought together with one degree of separation--and how fitting to have acquired the second at a moment when all of us who live in Manhattan are thinking about that dread day three years ago when we thought we'd never laugh again. Three months later, I wrote "The Importance of Being Earnest," which ends with these words:

Then, too, there was George Balanchine's Symphony in C, which received its long-overdue [American Ballet Theatre] debut. Few other modern artists working in any medium have had Balanchine's uncanny ability to transport the attentive viewer into a better-ordered universe of romance and grace--and humor. So it was with Symphony in C. As the curtain rose for the ten thousandth time on that familiar stageful of women in white tutus poised before a blue backdrop, one felt the world snap back to normal again--just what all the pundits had been assuring us would never happen....

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

What a blessing it is to be able to enjoy the life-renewing lightness of such great artists as James, Balanchine, Powell and Taylor. I don't think I'll ever forget that, but if I do, I'll simply cast an eye on "Gotcha Both" and "Martha Graham: Analysis in Wonderland" and--I hope--smile again.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 9, 2004 8:11 AM | Permalink

TT: Do it yourself

Russell Reich, co-author of Notes on Directing, writes:

As long as self-publishing remains a viable and potentially lucrative alternative for many writers, I'm having a hard time hearing Gal Beckerman bemoan the standard failures of publishers and the publishing industry as a whole.

For writers who are already willing to take some responsibility for their book's design, marketing, and even editing, the additional work required for a self-published book (printing, fulfillment) is relatively benign as long as you believe in what you're doing and hire good people to help. When I co-authored, designed, and published my own book, I felt that no setback during the process ever rose above a level of minor inconvenience; I was simply having too much fun to let printer glitches or a few bumpy legal negotiations bother me much.

I had a number of reasons to go the independent route. One was speed. When you go to a traditional publishing house, you're lucky to have a book on the shelf within a year of the contract, even with a completed manuscript. But my co-author was elderly and ailing; it was vital to me that he hold a finished book in his hands and I didn't know if I had a year to gamble. (He's fine.) I also had a clear idea about the object I wanted to create, but no good publisher was going to give a first-time author like me full reign over all editorial, design, and packaging choices. I believed in what I was doing and didn't think a publisher, in this circumstance, could do anything other than muck up my plan while grabbing a hefty share of my profits. So I read a couple of books about self-publishing, joined the Publisher's Marketing Association, and got to work.

Yes, I have to do my own marketing--that would be the case even if I hadn't self-published. Yes, I have to manage my book as a business, but it's my baby and having my own finger on the pulse of the market for it is a joy. When it no longer is a joy, THEN I can shop it around to publishers at what are likely to be much better terms, since by then it will be a proven property.

There was a time commitment involved in self-publishing the book and a personal investment of about $15,000-$20,000 to cover the vendors who helped me create it. But look at the return numbers: instead of a 7-12% royalty, I'm making close to a 50% margin on every book sold. I made back my initial investment on my first printing of 2,500 copies within nine months (thanks, in part, to kind endorsements like yours). We're now on to our third printing.

But even if I had been wrong about my book and it flopped, the experience and exercise of investing in myself and in what I believed would have been enough, which is why I took the risk in the first place.

I recognize the value and resources that established publishers can provide. They're a good choice for those who have not the time, means, or inclination to self-publish or who truly believe they've got a potential international blockbuster on their hands. For everyone else, why not self-publish? I wonder about the extent to which insecurity among writers--a fundamental disbelief in their own work--leads them to pursue a publishing contract not for the book's sake, but for the approval of others that the contract represents. If their book truly expresses something of personal value and significance, a failure to self-publish strikes me as a self-betrayal.

The bottom line is, if you believe in your book, there's relatively little standing in the way of your realizing your dream. In some cases, however, it appears that complaining about your publisher holds its own rewards.

I can't add anything to that. I've never heard the case for self-publishing by serious writers put better--and as Web-based technologies make it easier and cheaper, Russell Reich's prophetic words will become even more relevant.

(I might add, by the way, that I praised Notes on Directing in The Wall Street Journal as follows: "Though it's meant for use by theatrical professionals, not playgoers, I have never read a clearer, more straightforward description of the craft of directing, and the layman who longs to know what happens in a rehearsal--or what ought to, at any rate--will find it informative and illuminating.")

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 9, 2004 10:14 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"One greatly needs beauty when death is so close."

Maurice Maeterlinck, Pell�as et M�lisande

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 10, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Anniversary

A few weeks after 9/11, I wrote an essay for Crisis about where I was and what I did that day. This is part of it.

* * *

"Get up, son," my mother said, tapping softly on the door of the bedroom of my childhood home in Missouri. "An airplane hit the World Trade Center." I came awake a split-second later, my head full of memories. For years, I had wondered when the long arm of terrorism would strike again at New York. I thought of a sunny Saturday morning back when I was living in an apartment house on a hill north of the city. A small earthquake shook the building as I lay sleeping, and the groaning of the old walls woke me. I heard a soft whir through the open window, the rustle of the leaves on the shaken trees. It's a car bomb, I told myself, unable for one stunned moment to conceive of any other possibility.

All these thoughts flew through my mind in the time it took me to pull on my pants. Then I trotted to the living room, there to behold the coming of the new age.

It came, as St. Paul told us it would, in the twinkling of an eye, and now we were all changed. Even as I slept, I had unknowingly acquired a new identity: I awoke to find myself a stranded man, unable to return to New York to share whatever its fate might be. Of course I had it easy, far more so than most of the thousands of other Americans who had been caught short on that bright Tuesday morning. Some of them were in the air, others in strange hotel rooms, but I was holed up with my mother in the small town where I had spent the first eighteen years of my life. My brother and his family lived just three blocks away. As exiles go, mine was to be both comforting and comfortable--and brief. But it was an exile all the same, and with every passing minute it grew harder to endure.

Merely to write those last few words is an unfamiliar sensation. To be an adopted New Yorker is to know innumerable people who visit their families as infrequently as they can, who live in New York because it is as far away from the scenes of their childhood as it can possibly be. Some have broken with their parents, others with their past, a few with themselves, if such a thing is possible (which I doubt). I am not one of them. Long before I first heard it, I knew the truth of the old Jewish saying, "Anywhere you go, there you are." Even though I now eat sushi and happily give directions to mystified tourists searching in vain for Times Square or the Empire State Building, I have never tried to be anyone other than my small-town self, or to be from anywhere other than Smalltown, U.S.A. I left a quarter-century ago to make my way in the world, but I always come back once or twice a year, if not more. New York is where I live: it is not my home.

So, at any rate, I had thought. But as I sat transfixed before the television, watching the scenes of now-imaginable horror repeated incessantly, first from one camera angle, then another, I knew I wanted above all things to fly to the city whose tallest buildings had been raped by faceless worshippers of a god who does not exist, a god who smiles complacently on evil and calls it good. Then came the now-conceivable news that Manhattan had been cut off from the mainland--all bridges were closed, all subways stopped, all planes grounded--and I knew I had finally cast off the last mooring from my home port and set sail for parts unknown, suspended between the beloved past and the invisible future.

For two days, phone service to Manhattan was hit or miss, mostly the latter, and I couldn't even get a busy signal for anybody south of Fourteenth Street: a shrill mechanical voice always told me to call back later. My laptop computer was in New York--I'd finished a book the week before and had gone to Missouri determined to do no more work for a few days--so e-mail was out of the question. All I could do was gape at the TV, which I did for hours on end, and pray, which I did not without ceasing but in half-articulate spurts that gushed out on the rare occasions when I was able to tear my eyes and mind away from the unfolding story. Then, one by one, the dead phones came back to life, and by Friday I knew that all the people to whom I was close were alive. That was the day when the National Cathedral in Washington was filled with the sounds of prayer and music--the first day I was able to weep.

Five days after the World Trade Center crumbled to dust, my brief exile ended and I flew back to the place that I now knew to be my earthly home. As the plane descended, breaking the cloudless, transparent air, I gazed with terror and awe on the sight of lower Manhattan, into which a huge black hole had been burned, and heard in my mind's ear an old camp-meeting hymn that Merle Travis used to sing: I am a pilgrim and a stranger/Traveling through this wearisome land/I got a home in that yonder city, good Lord/And it's not, not made by hand.

That Thursday, I went to Lincoln Center to hear the New York Philharmonic perform Brahms' German Requiem in memory of the dead of September 11. Manhattan was gray--a slate-gray, solidly overcast sky that spat rain off and on all afternoon. By early evening, the air was heavy with humidity, the worst possible weather for a musical performance: strings go limp, singers go flat. Broadway was clotted with yellow taxis, none of them vacant, many flying small American flags. I arrived a little before seven, together with hundreds of other people, virtually all dressed in black or gray. Huge flags hung from the balconies of the New York State Theatre, the Metropolitan Opera House, and Avery Fisher Hall, the three houses that frame the plaza. The lobby was full of hastily printed signs reading ALL BAGS WILL BE SUBJECT TO SEARCH and long lines at the security checkpoints through which we had to pass in order to reach the escalators. One woman was carrying a shopping bag that contained a cardboard box. "What's in the box?" asked the guard, noncommittally. "Two bottles of wine," she replied. Then he broke out in a huge smile. "No drinking in the aisles!" he told her, wagging his finger, and we all laughed.

Inside the auditorium, every seat was full save for those occupied by the TV cameras broadcasting the performance. The lights went down, and out of of an unquiet hush the first notes of the first movement materialized so softly that for a moment, I wasn't quite sure the orchestra had started to play. New Yorkers are the noisiest audiences in the world, and I heard a modest amount of coughing, as well as a single cell phone that went off midway through the second movement, spreading a quick ripple of dismay. For the most part, though, the only thing I could hear in the pauses was the sound of people softly crying. The young woman sitting next to me had never heard the German Requiem before, and she was overcome by the way in which Brahms set the familiar Bible verses, now made so freshly poignant by our still-raw memories of the week just past: Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted...Lord, teach me that there must be an end of me...The souls of the righteous are in God's hand, and no pain touches them...For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come...O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Afterward, she told me, "I imagined that all those voices were angels rising out of the towers as they collapsed."

At the end, Kurt Masur, the conductor, lowered his hands slowly. The stillness that followed seemed to last for minutes, though it couldn't have been more than a few seconds. No one clapped--no one would have dared. Then Masur stepped down from the podium and joined hands with the soloists, and they vanished into the wings without a word.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 10, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Observance

I just got this e-mail from a friend who was downtown on 9/11 three years ago, and wanted to share it with you.

* * *

Mourning is tricky business--very tender and private, at least for me. I knew I wanted to do something on Saturday, but didn't know what, until this post on the Gawker blog caught my eye:

Saturday, September 11, 2004
Floating Lanterns Ceremony, Hudson River

A traditional floating lanterns ceremony commemorating the victims of the WTC tragedy will take place on Saturday, September 11th at Pier 40 (South Side) at W. Houston and West, starting at 7:30 PM. Buddhist priest T.K. Nakagaki will lead the ceremony with assistance in the water from the New York Kayak Company.

Each year people in Japan gather to float lanterns in remembrance of the victims of the atomic bombings and all victims of war....The ancient custom of "Floating Lighted Lanterns" in the waterways is a symbolic way of respecting the lives that have gone before us. Also, it can represent a light of hope for peace and harmony that we send out over the waters of transmigration. As we pay respect to the lives which were lost at the World Trade Center, we offer the light of hope for a peaceful world in which no one else will suffer.

Somehow, that sounded right--something quiet that involved music and prayer, although I'm not a Buddhist by any stretch of the imagination and the combination of lanterns and kayaks struck me as kind of weird. I called a friend, who was game, and together we went down at dusk.

"Follow the smell of pot," I kidded. I wasn't sure what to expect. But the turnout was a surprising mix of folk, and as the ceremony and chanting was not in English, I felt as comforted as if I were at High Mass, hearing Latin plainsong. I also didn't realize that Pier 40 was within spitting distance of the site of the WTC, and so we had a perfect view as the Lights came on. It was a very moving sight. One could see sparkles of light within the beams ascending to the stars, just like one sees dust reflected from a flashlight. Made me very weepy, although I can't tell you why.

We must have been there for two hours. The night was crystal clear and the ceremony was one of the coolest things I've ever witnessed.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 13, 2004 2:49 AM | Permalink

TT: Two last baby steps

I went through today's snail mail and found an envelope from Harcourt that contained the dust jacket for All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine--the real thing, not a photocopy. It's even more handsome than I imagined.

As I ogled the finished product, it hit me that I'd forgotten to ask the managing editor in charge of All in the Dances how the photo insert ended up. (That's how distracted I was by my vacation!) As you may recall, we were having permission problems with one image, a photo of Balanchine at the piano taken by Walker Evans, and Harcourt asked me to come up with a Plan B in case Plan A fell through at 11:59:59. It was a tricky assignment: I had to find a picture that would fit into the same space, both physically and chronologically, and if at all possible it had to be out of copyright. I went on the Web and quickly located a terrific photo of Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev, and within a day or two Harcourt reported back that it was in the public domain. I breathed a sigh of relief, went off on vacation...and forgot all about it.

I just shot an e-mail off to the Harcourt back office in San Diego, which wrote back immediately to tell me that they'd had to go with Plan B. That was fine with me (I can't believe it didn't occur to me in the first place to include a photo of Diaghilev). And that's really, truly the end of the story. All in the Dances went to the printer while I was on vacation. We'll be getting back the first copies at the end of September, and it'll be shipped out to bookstores shortly thereafter.

Order your copy today!

P.S. Harcourt just informed me that the bound galleys have gone out to reviewers. Eeeeee....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 13, 2004 3:12 AM | Permalink

TT: Touch�?

Last week I wrote:

Anyone who writes a serious book with the expectation of making a lot of money and/or becoming famous is a fool. If you can't afford to write a book in your spare time for its own sake, you're in the wrong business.

To which a reader with a good memory promptly replied:

Your comments today on the book business seem right on. But wasn't it one of your heroes who said "Only a blockhead writes for anything but money"? I confess I don't know the context of that remark, but always found it amusing. I would be curious to see your response to the good doc in your blog.

Far be it from me to differ with Samuel Johnson, so I won't. I'll simply supply the context of this famous saying, which comes from Boswell's Life of Johnson:

When I expressed an earnest wish for his remarks on Italy, he said, "I do not see that I could make a book upon Italy; yet I should be glad to get two hundred pounds, or five hundred pounds, by such a work." This shewed both that a journal of his Tour upon the Continent was not wholly out of his contemplation, and that he uniformly adhered to that strange opinion, which his indolent disposition made him utter: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Numerous instances to refute this will occur to all who are versed in the history of literature.

Since Dr. Johnson is always right, I can but yield to his greater wisdom. The only defense I can offer is that I didn't say "money," I said "a lot of money." But that's pretty lame, right? Right.

Never let it be said that I'm unwilling to publicly admit to having been caught blogging with my pajama pants down!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 13, 2004 5:52 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The part of the inexplicable should be allowed for in appraising the conduct of men in a world where no explanation is final."

Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 13, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: To be (a)live

Last Friday I saw Kristin Chenoweth make her Carnegie Hall recital debut. I was there as a fan, not professionally, but I've written about Chenoweth quite a bit in my Wall Street Journal theater column, most recently in my review of the New York Philharmonic's semi-staged concert performance of Leonard Bernstein's Candide:

Cunegonde, Candide's shopworn sweetheart, is far beyond the reach of ordinary musical-comedy singers, for "Glitter and Be Gay," her big number, is an all-stops-out coloratura aria requiring a rock-solid high E flat. I knew the diminutive Ms. Chenoweth had operatic training, but it never occurred to me that her high notes would have survived years of Broadway belting, much less that she could still nail them with the brilliance and panache of a full-time opera star. Add to that her impish charm and switchblade-sharp timing and...well, let's just say I'm no longer capable of being surprised by the amazing Ms. Chenoweth. After "Glitter and Be Gay," I wouldn't have boggled if she'd picked up the baton and conducted the second act.

Though Chenoweth didn't conduct the band on Friday night, nothing else happened that was inconsistent with what I wrote about her performance as Cunegonde. Yet what impressed me most forcibly about her concert was the fact that it was a concert--an experience whose impact relied in substantial part on her physical presence. Tiny though she is, Chenoweth has the kind of outsized charisma that is impossible to capture on record. I hadn't seen her on stage when I first heard her solo album, Let Yourself Go, and so I didn't quite get what she was all about. It wasn't until I covered the opening of Wicked last year that I got the point, which was hammered home by Candide and her Carnegie Hall recital. As the saying goes, you have to be there, the way earlier generations claimed that you had to see Al Jolson or Ethel Merman on stage to understand why they were so great. I hope Chenoweth someday finds a record producer (or TV director) who can figure out how to translate her astonishing energy into a medium that puts so high a premium on one-to-one intimacy. In the meantime, all I can say is that if you've never seen her in the theater, do so as soon as you can.

Last Friday was also, of course, the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, an occasion Chenoweth marked by singing a touching version of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times (Come Again No More)." On the day itself I was awakened by the sound of jets flying overhead, presumably on their way to the ceremonies at Ground Zero, and by the time I got outside to partake of the glorious weather, I was startled by how thinly populated the streets were. Perhaps everybody was downtown--or out of town.

Me, I had a press preview to cover, and I'd given quite a bit of advance thought to what I wanted to be seeing that day. In the end, I settled on the Dodger Stages revival of Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique, which opens on Thursday. Since I'm reviewing it for the Journal, I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I've written about Symphonie Fantastique before, most recently in my Washington Post column when it was performed at Lincoln Center a couple of years ago as part of a Berlioz festival. Here's what I said back then:

I'd been looking forward to Lincoln Center's revival of Basil Twist's "Symphonie Fantastique" ever since it was announced last year, but when my friends asked me exactly what it was, I hemmed and hawed and finally said, "Well, uh...it's an abstract puppet show in a thousand-gallon water tank, set to a recording of Berlioz's �Symphonie fantastique.'"

Sounds crazy, no? And to tell the truth, "Symphonie Fantastique" is a little crazy--a loony masterpiece that defies any sort of easy characterization, save to say that it is one of the half-dozen most entrancing theatrical experiences I've encountered since I started writing this column. Sure, all you see are strange objects swishing and swirling behind a colorfully lit wall of glass, but the images conjured up by Twist and his crack team of puppeteers are so inscrutably gorgeous (think of a cross between George Balanchine, Paul Klee and Chuck Jones) that they will stick in your mind like a wild but happy daydream.

What I didn't mention back then, and what struck me with special force on 9/11, is that Symphonie Fantastique, like Kristin Chenoweth's singing, is a theatrical experience whose effect is deeply rooted in the fact that it's presented live. True, you don't see or hear the puppeteers until they emerge at show's end for their curtain call, and it would be quite feasible to film it for TV, but it wouldn't be the same, precisely because it's slightly different every time. It is, in short, not merely live but alive.

Of all the essays reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader, the one that stirred up the most controversy on its original publication was "Tolstoy's Contraption," a piece I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 1999 in which I suggested that "film has largely replaced the novel as the dominant mode of artistic expression, just as the compact disc has become the �successor technology' to the phonograph record." I went on to explain:

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

As I pointed out after the fact to any number of irritated readers, I wasn't talking about quality: all I had in mind was the immeasurably greater power of film to shape the cultural conversation, both in America and throughout the world. Since then, though, I've spent the last year and a half going to a play or two each week (if not more), and while that experience hasn't made me change my mind about the cultural significance of live theater, it's reminded me that the real value of theater lies in the fact that it isn't a mass medium. In a way, it's more like painting. No matter how much money you pour into a theatrical production, there's still an absolute upper limit on the number of people who can see it at any one time. (The theater where Symphonie Fantastique is playing, for example, contains only 199 seats.) The importance of this upper limit is that it similarly limits the amount of money that can usefully be spent on any individual production. Hence big-budget shows like Bombay Dreams and Dracula: The Musical are an aberration. Real theater is about making magic out of next to nothing. As the director John Dexter wrote in his autobiography, "To hell with economy, spend imagination."

That's one of the reasons why I went out of my way to see Symphonie Fantastique on the afternoon of 9/11. Later that day I went with a friend to Michael Mann's Collateral, a film on which a very large amount of money was spent in very obvious ways. I liked it, too--I wouldn't dream of pretending otherwise. What's more, Collateral will be seen by infinitely more people in a single weekend than will see Symphonie Fantastique in the whole of its run. Nor is its technology-enabled ubiquity in any way a bad thing. As I wrote several years ago in Fi,

I never heard Bill Evans play in person: he died before I moved to Manhattan. Thus, my whole knowledge of his playing derives from his recordings. In fact, I suspect most of the really important musical experiences of my life (not counting the ones in which I was a participant) have come to me not in the flesh but through the medium of recorded sound....

It may well be that the most important thing about the phonograph is its unique capacity to reproduce and disseminate those aspects of musical performance which cannot be notated. (If you doubt this, take a moment to reflect on the difference between reading about The Who and listening to Live at Leeds.) This capacity is not without its disadvantages. For one thing, it has caused us to grossly overemphasize the role of execution in musical experience: veteran record collectors habitually spend far too much time talking about whose recording of the Bart�k Violin Concerto is best, and not nearly enough talking about the Bart�k Violin Concerto itself. But it has also made it possible for us to re-experience great performances of the past--including, among many other things, the world premiere of the Bart�k Violin Concerto. I've been listening to old records for well over half my lifetime, and yet it never quite ceases to amaze me that simply by pushing a button, I can hear Joseph Joachim playing Bach, or Louis Armstrong rapping out that golden introduction to "West End Blues."

And yet, and yet...there is no possible substitute for being in the same room with Kristin Chenoweth (even if it's a really big room), or standing five feet away from a painting made by the hands of Vermeer or Manet or Fairfield Porter, or sitting ten feet away from Luciana Souza at Joe's Pub, listening to a performance that will never again be repeated in exactly the same way. What's more, it does nothing to diminish the significance of Citizen Kane or The Rules of the Game to acknowledge that fact. Film and recorded sound are wonderful, immensely powerful things--but the one thing they cannot do is remind us of how good it is to be alive, here and now, in the evanescent moment. That's why I chose to spend the afternoon of the anniversary of 9/11 in the company of a group of puppeteers, immersed in the immediate experience of art.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 13, 2004 12:55 PM | Permalink

TT: Coming up roses

Regular readers will recall that I wrote earlier this year about Rick McKay's film Broadway: The Golden Age, both here and in The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. McKay is one of those starry-eyed small-town types who moved to New York in the '80s, found that the parade had already gone by, and longed to know what he'd missed. Instead of retreating to his apartment to play his original-cast albums, he bought a digital-video camera and finagled more than a hundred Broadway stars of the pre-"Hair" era into letting him interview them. He shaped the resulting footage into "Broadway: The Golden Age," in which talking-head interviews with the illustrious likes of Carol Channing, Ben Gazzara, Robert Goulet, Angela Lansbury, Jerry Orbach, Shirley MacLaine, John Raitt, Gwen Verdon, and Elaine Stritch are ingeniously commingled with heart-stoppingly rare performance footage lifted from home movies, newsreels, theatrical trailers and videotapes. The result is an irresistibly nostalgic portrait of a lost era, albeit one that zips along like the Twentieth Century Limited. The editing alone deserves an Oscar.

Not to worry, for Mr. McKay knows when to ease back on the throttle and simply let his subjects talk. And talk they do, often amusingly and always movingly, about what it was like to work alongside such near-forgotten giants as Laurette Taylor (who is seen in her Hollywood screen test, the only sound film she ever made) and Kim Stanley (where on earth did Mr. McKay dredge up what looks like a kinescope of a live performance of "Bus Stop"?). You'll weep--I did--to hear them share their fond memories of crummy apartments, Automat meals and big breaks.

Produced and marketed on half a shoestring, this one-man labor of love is slowly making its way across America, one screen at a time....

Well, you know what? It still is. I recently received an electronic press release from McKay announcing still more openings for Broadway: The Golden Age, which is already showing all over the place. To find out whether it's headed for a multiplex near you, go here. A DVD is in the works, but trust me--this film deserves to be viewed in a theater, in the company of hundreds of other stage-struck men and women who either remember the good old days or wish they'd been alive to see them. I myself look forward to its return to New York on Sept. 28. See you there.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 14, 2004 6:31 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The loss of excitement is the beginning of professionalism. The thrill of standing on a stage, of receiving the audience's attention and admiration, the release of becoming someone other than yourself: all these stimuli are transient and superficial. They must be replaced by something much more deeply rooted which takes as its starting point the audience's experience rather than your own."

Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 14, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Paying the rent

The reason why I posted so much yesterday is that there really wasn't much else I could do. A three-man film crew moved into my apartment after lunch to tape me talking about Paul Taylor. Their arrival time fluctuated throughout the morning (first they wanted to come at two, then they wanted to come at four, then they wanted to come at two...), and though they were perfectly nice in every possible way, the vacillations disrupted my writing rhythms. Once they finally arrived, it took them an hour to set up and another hour to knock down. Unable to summon up enough consecutive thought to write a piece, I gave up and started knocking out blog entries instead.

Today will be different. It'd better be. I have two Wall Street Journal pieces due, a profile for Wednesday's paper and a drama column for Friday's paper. Assuming I get them done on time, I can start working on the 2,000-word book review that I'm scheduled to ship off to a magazine some time tomorrow. (To my credit, I've already written 500 words' worth of the review, but the rest has yet to make itself manifest.)

For all these reasons, I'm leaving the show to Our Girl today, and maybe tomorrow, too, depending entirely on how smoothly the prose flows. For the moment, I put out enough food on Monday to keep you happy, right?

Later.

UPDATE: One down, two to go....

UPDATE #2: Two down, time for a nap.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 14, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: A vengeful bolt from the blogosphere!

Tom Scocca wrote a funny column about bloggers called "TomScocca.com: Blogging Off Daily Can Make You Blind" for this morning's New York Observer. He interviewed a number of old-media writers who've taken to blogging on the side, myself among them, and his tone is slightly snarky but basically friendly, if you know what I mean:

What blogging provides, [Teachout] said, is an "immediacy, informality and independence that you can't find in the print media."

He's not worried, he said, about using up his ideas on the blog. "I really see the blog as a kind of public notebook or sketchbook," he said. Part of the appeal, he said, "is that backstage glimpse it gives of the writer's life."

Blogging is more spontaneous than regular writing, but it's writing nonetheless--as opposed to spontaneous blathering on cable TV, he said: "Blogging, by contrast, I think .... " (Here my notes, in my hasty scrawl, appear to say "CRIDLY OCITHS") " ... takes us back to a more considered but spontaneous" form of expression....

Not that any carefully constructed device can protect you from the withering and omnipresent scorn of the blogosphere, should it think it's being attacked. The blogosphere is sensitive.

"I could write an account of this conversation while we are having it," Terry Teachout said. I checked--he didn't. Whew.

Indeed not. In fact, I happily certify that all direct quotations attributed to me in "Blogging Off Daily Can Make You Blind" are pristinely accurate and not taken out of context. (Scocca takes better notes than I do!)

Still, I want to mention one thing I said that Scocca didn't print, which is that writing a piece solely about print-media journalists who've taken up blogging seems to me to be more than a little bit beside the point. In my opinion, most of the really interesting people in the blogosphere--all of whom, needless to say, are represented in the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column--launched their blogs without any significant print-media experience. They're the pioneers, whereas I'm just a Johnny-come-lately who's having a ball and making all sorts of cool new friends along the way. What's more, I think it's a hugely significant development that these bloggers are now migrating to the print media in fast-growing numbers--without giving up their blogs. If you seek the future of American journalism, look to them.

As far as I'm concerned, that's the big story of blogging, and I hope Tom Scocca gets around to writing it soon.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 15, 2004 1:18 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The only brickbat that angered Orton was the grudging praise of his plays as 'commercial' from John Russell Taylor in his introduction to the play [Entertaining Mr. Sloane] in Penguin's New English Dramatists 8. 'Living theatre needs good commercial dramatists as much as the original artist,' Taylor wrote. Orton was furious at such critical stupidity. 'Are they different, then?' he asked, quoting John Russell Taylor's distinction between commercial success and art to his agent and asking to withdraw the play from the volume. 'Hamlet was written by a commercial dramatist. So were Volpone and The School for Scandal and The Importance of Being Earnest and The Cherry Orchard and Our Betters. Two ex-commercial successes of the last thirty years are about to be revived by our non-commercial theatre: A Cuckoo in the Nest and Hay Fever, but if my plays go on in the West End, I don't expect this to be used as a sneer by people who judge artistic success by commercial failure. There is no intrinsic merit in a flop.'"

John Lahr, introduction to Joe Orton: The Complete Plays

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 15, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Don't stop the presses

Here's Allan Kozinn in the New York Times:

In the weeks since American and European authorities approved the merger of the recorded-music businesses of Sony and Bertelsmann, two of the world's five biggest record companies, virtually all the discussion has been about what the deal means in the vast popular-music market, with barely a mention of the labels' classical catalogs....

No one at either Sony or BMG, either in their classical divisions or among corporate spokesmen (to whom journalists are immediately referred by workers terrified to talk, lest they earn an instant spot on the list of 2,000 employees expected to be sacked), has been able to say what will become of the labels' classical operations. So faintly do the classics register on the corporate radar that BMG's spokesman, when told that his company had recorded the likes of Enrico Caruso, Jascha Heifetz and Artur Rubinstein, said he was pleasantly surprised to hear it.

(Read the whole thing here.)

This is an important story, right? Sort of. I've been writing about the crisis in classical recording since 1996, and I summed up my thoughts two years ago in an essay called "Life Without Records" (it's reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader) in which I predicted, among other things, that the major classical labels were doomed:

What remains to be seen is whether existing classical labels can operate profitably on the Web, especially given the fact that sound recordings go out of copyright in Europe fifty years after their initial release. This means that by the year 2015, the classic early-stereo recordings of the standard classical repertoire currently being reissued by the major labels will have entered the public domain, meaning that perfect digital copies can be legally distributed by anybody who cares to make them available for downloading. Callas' Tosca, Heifetz's Beethoven and Brahms, Herbert von Karajan's Strauss and Sibelius--all will be up for grabs. Once that happens, it is hard to see how any of the major labels will be able to survive in anything like their present form.

Well, the future is now, and judging from Allan's Times story, it seems perfectly clear that Sony-Bertelsmann, Inc., isn't going to give a good goddamn about the classical-music treasures in its vaults. On the other hand, it's only a matter of time--and not much of it, either--before all those old records become universally available on the Web, there being no way that American computer users can be kept from downloading them from European Web sites.

And what about the new records that Sony-Bertelsmann, Inc., won't care to make? Once again, I refer you to "Life Without Records":

I, for one, think it highly likely that more and more artists, classical and popular alike, will start to make their own recordings and market them directly to the public via the Web. To be sure, few artists will have the patience or wherewithal to do such a thing entirely on their own, and new managerial institutions will presumably emerge to assist them. But these institutions will act as middlemen, purveyors of a service, as opposed to record labels, which use artists to serve their interests. And while even the most ambitious artists will doubtless also employ technical assistants of various kinds, such as freelance recording engineers, the ultimate responsibility for their work will belong--for the first time ever--to the artists themselves.

For all these reasons, I'm not too terribly disturbed by the recent developments described in Allan's piece. I've been expecting them for a long time, and thinking about what they might mean to the culture of classical music:

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

Hard though it may be to imagine life without records and record stores, it is only a matter of time, and not much of it, before they disappear--and notwithstanding the myriad pleasures which the major labels have given us in the course of their century-long existence, it is at least possible that the 21st century will be better off without them.

To be sure, this prospect is understandably disturbing to many older musicians and music lovers, given the fact that the record album has played so pivotal a role in the culture of postwar music. Nor do I claim that life without records will necessarily be better--or worse. It will merely be different, just as the lives of actors were irrevocably changed by the invention of the motion-picture camera in ways that no one could possibly have foreseen in 1900. But one thing is already clear: unlike art museums and opera houses, records serve a purpose that technology has rendered obsolete.

We'll sure see, anyway--and soon.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 15, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: New for me

No doubt you're all way ahead of me, but I only just discovered Jonatha Brooke last Friday night (courtesy of Kristin Chenoweth, who sang one of Brooke's songs at her Carnegie Hall concert). I'm still well and truly blown away.

Brooke is kind enough (and smart enough) to allow visitors to her Web site to listen to her albums in streaming audio, so if you're curious, go here and give Live a spin. I'm sure she's not for everyone--otherwise she'd be rich and famous--but she's definitely for me. Don't bother if you don't care for female singer-songwriters of the Joni Mitchell/Aimee Mann/Allison Moorer/Ani DiFranco variety, but if you do, check her out.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 15, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: With the bark on

I was thinking today about how so few public figures are willing to admit (for attribution, anyway) that they've done something wrong, no matter how minor. But I wasn't thinking of politicians, or even of Dan Rather. A half-remembered quote had flashed unexpectedly through my mind, and thirty seconds' worth of Web surfing produced this paragraph from an editorial in a magazine called World War II:

Soon after he had completed his epic 140-mile march with his staff from Wuntho, Burma, to safety in India, an unhappy Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell was asked by a reporter to explain the performance of Allied armies in Burma and give his impressions of the recently concluded campaign. Never one to mince words, the peppery general responded: "I claim we took a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, and go back and retake it."

Stilwell spoke those words sixty-two years ago. When was the last time that such candor was heard in like circumstances? What would happen today if similar words were spoken by some equally well-known person who'd stepped in it up to his eyebrows? Would his candor be greeted by a wholehearted roar of astonished approval? Or would he be buried under the inevitable avalanche of told-you-sos from his sworn enemies and their robotic surrogates, amplified well beyond the threshold of pain by the 24/7 echo chamber of the media, old and new alike? Is it possible that the hair-trigger litigiousness of modern-day American society, in which admissions of error are treated as a license to sue, stands in the way of such confessions? And even if our hypothetical Joe Stilwell II took a savage beating in the press for a day or two--or longer--might it be possible that in the long run he'd come out on top, simply because he was honest?

I doubt we'll be getting a real-life opportunity to see what would happen any time soon. But having recently watched Paddy Chayefsky's Network for the first time, it occurs to me that such a scenario might well make for an interesting movie. In Network, the American public is so hungry for the spin-free frankness of a seemingly honest man that it embraces a TV anchorman who goes off his rocker in the middle of a newscast. (That's what makes the film so provocative, by the way. In the hands of a West Wing-type screenwriter, the anchorman would have been presented as a Christ-like figure, but Chayefsky leaves us in no possible doubt that Howard Beale really is off his rocker.) Imagine, then, a film about a present-day public figure who screws up in a big way, calls a press conference, admits his errors, and throws himself upon the mercy of the public. It's not hard to see how a socially aware writer-director like, say, John Sayles might weave the resulting tangle into a smart story about imperfect people who get caught up in the whirlwind of circumstance.

If anyone out there in cyberspace likes this idea, talk to my agent. In the meantime, I guess we'll have to settle for the freeze-dried, pre-digested, focus-group-tested spin that has come to dominate so much of our public discourse in my lifetime. It makes me sick--but it seems to work. I don't like to think what that says about us.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 15, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: Outer limit

From I Want Media's "Media Offline: Unlinkable Media Items" (a great idea for a regular on-line feature, by the way):

Is Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's "Daily Show," comfortable as a member of the "real media"? asks the Sept. 17 issue of Entertainment Weekly. "In this day and age, anybody with a Web site is part of the real media," says Stewart. "Media is so all-encompassing. But we're not journalists, we're comedians. ... My colleagues are other fake news shows. Ted Koppel's not my colleague." What is Stewart's take on his recent interview with John Kerry? "It was a relatively mediocre talk-show experience," he says. "Actually, that's a great example of the limits of this program. People expected the show to create a 'new paradigm of info-enter-propa-gainment!' It ended up just being a comedian lamely making jokes to a presidential candidate who didn't want to embarrass himself or appear stiff."

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 15, 2004 12:05 PM | Permalink

TT: Res ipsa loquitur

- From Booksquare:

When we go into a library, we usually spend a few minutes in the children's book section, looking for old favorites. There is some comfort in knowing that another generation is puzzling over the (rather tame) antics of Beany Malone. That the Boxcar Children haven't aged. That Margaret is still talking to God. That on any aisle in any library, we can find a book that changed our little world (look under Laura Ingalls Wilder, and you will discover the summer we captained an expedition to build a cave to protect our gang from the wild tornadoes of California's Central Coast...).

- From Jolly Days:

I'm not entirely a fan of Impressionism. The "joy of life stuff" can feel flimsy, shallow, leaving out the full experience of consciousness, of being alive. Art is an analog to life, not a feel-good reassurance that things can be better -- New Age self-absorbed dreaminess trying to be art. An emphasis on decoration and sensation ignores the mind and the spirit.

- From Household Opera:

Just under three years ago, I turned off the TV after two or three days glued to the screen because I could not, just could not, watch that footage one more time, couldn't stand any more speculation about who or what might get blown up next, couldn't listen to any more man-on-the-street interviews with people calling for the bombing of the entire Arab world to smithereens. Having hit my saturation point, I spent the better part of a day listening to Bach's two- and three-part inventions over and over and over. I couldn't tell at the time if it was escapism, or some part of my brain looking for equilibrium, or what. It may have been simply the need to remind myself of what other things human beings are capable of besides mass murder.

- From Cup of Chicha:

The back of my high school yearbook was reserved for senior ads, the rich suburban teen's equivalent to graffiti. Groups were aesthetically demarcated, their ads' "look" determined by their social status. The most popular girls made collages of beach cleavage, group hugs, and baby photos; the popular boys, meanwhile, wore wife-beaters, crossed their fingers into "west side," and kneeled in front of Beemers.

- From Mixolydian Mode:

Today's grooming tip: Guys, if your tonsorial model is Sinead O'Connor or Telly Savalas, remember to shave before heading off to evening Mass. A five o'clock shadow that covers the entire scalp is not a pleasant sight for your fellow parishioners.

- From Killin' time bein' lazy:

I see the impact of IM/texty/whatever you call it on my students. When they e-mail, they use it all the time; luckily, most of them know enough to not use it in actual papers and on projects in school. A few, though, seem to have a problem telling the difference between appropriate and inappropriate writing.

I don't think it makes them look dumb, however. It makes them look like middle school and high school students.

When I see a message from someone my age, however, I worry. I don't have a problem with getting a short text message on my cell from someone that says that they'll be "l8". But an entire message written like that? It's as nails-on-a-blackboardy as reading something from an adult where they confuse your/you're, too/to/two or (as one of my friends has discovered) weather/whether.

I wonder if it's an attempt to act young. It can't be a lack of education because this type of writing didn't arise until recently. And there can't possibly be that many former stenographers out there!

- From Reflections in D Minor:

Have you ever wondered what makes us cling so tenaciously to our beliefs - not just religious beliefs or belief in a political ideology but any little insignificant belief, such as belief in urban legends or the belief in the superiority of one brand over others of equal or better quality? We hold on to beliefs as if they were cherished possessions, like trinkets that have sentimental value but no practical use.

I have to plead guilty to this myself. Sometimes I really hate Snopes. I come across a remarkable but perfectly legitimate sounding story from a reasonably reliable source, share it with other people and the next thing I know someone sends me a link to Snopes. What a shattering blow. Why do they have to tell me the truth? Why can't they just let me believe? (And, by the way, why do I believe Snopes is a reliable source of information?)

- From Eve Tushnet:

We've all heard the cliche that "truth is stranger than fiction," and I expect most authors have been frustrated to realize that we just can't write stories in which things happen the way they really did happen! because it would appear too coincidental and too neat. Fiction is not about presenting the raw world. Life does that for us. Fiction is supposed to tease out some kind of language from the raw world. Fiction is meant neither to replace nor to mirror life, but rather to interpret it.

- From Lileks:

The show went fast, as ever � radio time is not like any time you've ever experienced, and oddly elastic. When it's going well it shoots by like caffeinated mercury on a griddle, and when you're bombing the minutes actually come to a full stop, and you can hear the air brakes hiss to signal that time, and possibly your career, are no longer moving.

- From Tingle Alley (who just gave up her day job to spend the next seven months working on a novel):

This is my first day reporting to my desk as an Unemployed No Account (also known as a Novelist) so am not allowed any blog-related or email-type fun till this afternoon. If you see me haunting backblogs or receive an email from me between the hours of 8 a.m. and 2 p.m., please send a firmly worded reprimand to the effect of "You are a jerk. Your poor husband is working morning, noon and night to make this possible. Get back to work."

- And, finally, from Supermaud:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but open bar + cupcake for dinner = hideous, unthinkable hangover. Even if you don't drink much.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 15, 2004 12:23 PM | Permalink

OGIC: A parodist is born

Some people mooch all the talent:

A dragonfly darted at my feet. I'd been looking forward to seeing one but once you were there in person it wasn't all that great. Just a giant insect, really, with wings. Dragonflies are critically overhyped, the gilded Donald Trumps of the beach world.

The parodist is Ms. Tingle Alley. To find out who the parodied is, you'll have to click through (first removing any sharp or heavy rings and bracelets so as not to injure yourself when you slap your forehead in delighted recognition).

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 16, 2004 5:42 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Deadline sandwich

Hello from a small and quickly vanishing window of breath-catching in between the ironclad deadline that I met today (barely, heroically) and the one that I'm going, I'm absolutely going, to meet tomorrow. It's been one of those weeks. Things I blithely take for granted under normal circumstances, like sleep, social activity, cooked meals, the outdoors, and, yes, blogging, have through the magic of deprivation been revealed as tremendous gifts and blessings. In other words, I miss this old place.

After I slay this last dragon, you'll be hearing from me on this, that, her, and quite possibly them, if I'm feeling self-indulgent (which I often am). This week may stink, you see, but last weekend was pretty excellent.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 16, 2004 5:48 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Sorrow comes in great waves--no one can know that better than you--but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot, and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see."

Henry James, letter to Grace Norton, July 28, 1883

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 16, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Lost and found

I made a special guest appearance on the Leisure & Arts page of this morning's Wall Street Journal to write about Madeleine Peyroux:

Eight years ago, Madeleine Peyroux was a star on the rise. "Dreamland," her debut album, was selling nicely (200,000 copies, all told). Critics were fascinated by the idea of a singer-guitarist from Brooklyn who'd learned her trade from the street musicians of Paris, where she lived as a girl. Though she sounded very much like Billie Holiday in the late Forties--the same salty rasp, the same squeezed-out spurts and swoops--her music, a torchy blend of blues, country and old-time pop, bore no resemblance to the middle-aged Holiday's languorous brand of jazz. Ms. Peyroux (prounounced pe-RU, like the country) first caught my ear, for instance, with a lazy, loping cover version of Patsy Cline's "Walkin' After Midnight," a staple of broken-bottle honky-tonks the world over.

So what did she do for an encore? She disappeared.

Not only did Ms. Peyroux fail to follow up "Dreamland" with a sequel, but she did virtually no performing in public between 1997 and 2002. No one seemed to know what had happened to her, though I found vague hints scattered around the Internet....

Then--just as abruptly and inexplicably--Ms. Peyroux resurfaced. Rounder, the highly regarded independent country-bluegrass-jazz label, announced earlier this year that it had signed her to a recording contract. In June she opened for Gary Burton at the Blue Note, one of New York's top jazz clubs. "Careless Love," her long-awaited second album, was released this week, and on Monday she kicks off a week-long run at another high-end Manhattan nightspot, Le Jazz Au Bar.

All this would mean little were it not for the fact that "Careless Love" is a stunner, a laid-back, quietly sexy stroll through a dozen songs that appear to have nothing in common save that Ms. Peyroux, accompanied by a crack team of Los Angeles session men anchored by the peerless jazz organist Larry Goldings, sings each one as though it had been written for her personally....

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing, you have two options:

(1) Go to a newsstand and buy today's Journal.

(2) Sign up for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal, which costs half as much as an ink-on-paper subscription and gives you complete access to each day's edition, plus various other bells, whistles, and special features. Do this and you also get to read my drama column--starting tomorrow! If you're interested, go here.

To purchase Careless Love (which I strongly recommend) or listen to samples thereof, go here.

Madeleine Peyroux's Web site (which includes the itinerary for her upcoming concert tour) is here.

Le Jazz Au Bar's Web site is here.

Now, get cracking.

UPDATE: Careless Love is now #4 on amazon.com, while www.madeleinepeyroux.com appears to have crashed, presumably from unexpectedly high traffic. Whoooee!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 16, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: I will blog no more, forever

At least not until Friday, anyway. Yes, I know, I said on Tuesday that I was probably going to take Wednesday off, and look what happened! On the other hand, "About Last Night" racked up an exceptionally high number of page views yesterday--about 8,300, one of our best days ever--so I didn't feel I could shut the shop down with a clear conscience.

Today, alas, is different: I really, truly have to finish writing an essay about A.J. Liebling, so I ain't gonna blog no more. Until tomorrow. No matter what happens. I swear.

Really.

UPDATE: The Liebling piece is done and gone. One quick nap coming up.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 16, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hand over a husband's eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says: 'Guess who!'"

P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 17, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Brush with greatness

I went to Joe's Pub on Thursday to hear the debut of what may ultimately evolve into something of a vocal supergroup. Voices Collective consists of Theo Bleckmann, Peter Eldridge, Kate McGarry, Lauren Kinhan, and Luciana Souza, all of whom have formidable individual reputations (and one of whom has figured frequently and prominently on this blog right from the start).

Here's how the Joe's Pub Web site described them:

Voices Collective is a meeting of some of New York's most talented and diverse jazz singers...For this evening at Joe's Pub, they make their world premiere, uniting all their creative talents; presenting original compositions from each member and resetting them for five voices and a trio. Peter Eldridge and Lauren Kinhan are members of New York Voices and also have solo projects of their own in the original song writing arena; Theo Bleckmann is one of the vocal magicians with Meredith Monk and his own genre-bending work; Kate McGarry has been gracing New Yorkers with her soulful timbre for many years; Luciana Souza has been at the Pub in all her incarnations, Brazilian, jazz, and poetry-inspired.

The extreme stylistic diversity of these five singers is part of what made their first performance as a group so thrilling, ranging as it did from a heartfelt version by McGarry of Neil Young's "Old Man" to an electronically enhanced duet by Bleckmann and the avant-garde jazz guitarist Ben Monder, a member of the trio that accompanied Voices Collective and another of my favorite New York-based instrumentalists. Most of the ensemble vocals, including Souza's gorgeous unaccompanied setting of Joni Mitchell's "Shadows and Light," were sung in skin-tight five-part harmony � la the Singers Unlimited, and much of the original material, including a brand-new standard-style ballad by Eldridge called "Busy Being Blue," was immediately memorable.

I won't kid you: the first set last night was rough around the edges. All five singers were visibly nervous (and occasionally sounded that way). To forge a unified, smoothly finished ensemble sound is more than sufficiently tricky under the easiest of circumstances. For five stylistically disparate vocalists to do it while singing such demanding material is...well, let's just say they set themselves one hell of an obstacle course. But the promise outweighed the problems, and the palpable excitement of the crowd clearly buoyed up the members of Voices Collective. They all assured me after the show that this won't be the last time they step up to the plate together, and my guess is that they mean it. I hope so.

As if all that weren't enough for one weeknight, Souza announced from the stage that Jonatha Brooke was in the audience, a piece of news that just about made me fall out of my seat, seeing as how I'd heard her live album for the first time last Friday and had an instantaneous on-the-spot conversion experience. I couldn't spot her in the semidarkness of the club, nor did I run into her backstage, but the mere fact that we happened to show up at the same gig a mere six days after she became my new musical superhero struck me as nothing short of omenesque.

Have I mentioned lately that New York City is the coolest place on the planet? Because it is.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 17, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Sad clowns, cute psychopaths

After a two-week vacation-related hiatus, the Friday drama column of The Wall Street Journal is open for business again this morning. I reviewed two shows, Slava's Snowshow and an off-off-Broadway revival of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and liked them both:

Created by Slava Polunin, best known in the U.S. for his work with Cirque du Soleil, "Slava's Snowshow" is a zany fantasia for five melancholy-looking Russian clowns, several squirt bottles full of water, a dozen or so king-sized balloons, enough fog to shut down an airport and enough confetti to welcome home an astronaut.

I'm acutely allergic to pretentious clownery, so when I read that Mr. Polunin was influenced by Fellini and describes his brand of theater as "counter-Beckett," I reached for the nearest cream pie. Fortunately, nobody says anything out loud in "Slava's Snowshow" (nothing intelligible, that is), and whatever Mr. Polunin thinks it all means, the results aren't even slightly intellectual, though my guess is that American dancegoers will detect a certain resemblance to the quirky comedy of Pilobolus Dance Theatre, minus the dancing. To be sure, the self-contained vignettes that make up "Slava's Snowshow" are not without their dark moments--especially the bit in which Mr. Bolunin lurches around the stage with a chestful of arrows � la St. Sebastian--but judging by the ecstatic response of the children who came to the preview I saw, nobody was fooled for a moment. "Slava's Snowshow" is meant to make you smile, and it does so with impressive efficiency....

Joe Orton, the greatest farceur since Feydeau, has never quite gone over in this country, least of all on Broadway, where the most recent revival of an Orton play was in 1986 (and where his last and best play, "What the Butler Saw," has yet to be produced). If you want to see his work on stage, you have to depart the beaten path, so when I heard that Working Stiff Productions, an off-off-Broadway troupe, was presenting "Entertaining Mr. Sloane," I went out of my way to go. Jonathan Silver's staging, which runs at the American Theater of Actors through Sept. 25, is far from perfect, but it's more than good enough, and if you're unfamiliar with what Terence Rattigan called "the best first play" he'd seen in "thirty-odd years," it will give you a clear idea of what Orton was all about.

To watch "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" today is to understand at once why it ran for only 13 performances on Broadway in 1965. Back then, New York playgoers weren't exactly accustomed to folks like the title character, a lethally cute juvenile delinquent in tight pants (Stephen Weston, who is just about ideal) who comes to the South London home of Kath (Caroline Langford), a blowsy, middle-aged working-class woman of dubious virtue, looking for a room to rent. Kath promptly starts trying to lure her new boarder into bed. Enter Ed (Steve Pesola), Kath's brother, who has shinnied his way up the greasy pole to a suit-and-tie job, and who in turn decides that he wants to entertain Mr. Sloane in the sack. Enter Dadda (Sean Dill), the ancient father of Ed and Kath, who recognizes Mr. Sloane as a murderer and is foolish enough to tell him so. The ensuing hijinks soon take a deadly turn--which, amazingly, makes you laugh even harder....

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing, do the usual, just like yesterday: either buy a copy of today's Journal or subscribe to the paper's online edition.

Got it? Good.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 17, 2004 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Inch by inch

Madeleine Peyroux's Careless Love, about which I wrote in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, is now #3 (!) on amazon.com, at least as of the time stamped on this post.

You go, girl.

UPDATE: Now she's at #2. You go, readers!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 17, 2004 12:10 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"There comes a day, in the ripe maturity of late summer, when you first detect a suggestion of the season to come; often as subtle as a play of evening light against familiar bricks, or the drift of a few brown leaves descending, it signals imminent release from savage heat and intemperate growth. You anticipate cool, misty days, and a slow, comely decadence in the order of the natural. Such a day now dawned; and my pale northern soul, in its pale northern breast, quietly exulted as the earth slowly turned its face from the sun."

Patrick McGrath, "The Angel"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 20, 2004 1:43 AM | Permalink

TT: Scratch one ostrich

From the Washington Post:

For years, postal officials denied that e-mail would change their world. Now, faced with declining letter volume -- in 2003, first-class mail dropped by 3.3 billion pieces -- the Postal Service has finally realized that its right to a monopoly on first-class letters probably isn't worth the paper the Congress wrote it on in 1794. "All types of correspondence mail have declined over time," said a recently released household mail survey by the Postal Service. "Most notable, however, is the decline in personal correspondence between households."...

First-class letters...have underwritten the Postal Service's hefty institutional costs for decades.

Trouble is, as the President's Commission on the U.S. Postal Service reported last year, Aunt Minnie isn't writing that many letters these days. Indeed, letter writers are a dying breed. Younger families are writing even less than their parents did, the Postal Service says. They probably depend on the Internet for communications that used to be part of the postal monopoly. More troublesome for the Postal Service's bottom line, business-to-business mail is also falling....

It doesn't take much analysis to realize, as the presidential commission did, that the Postal Service is facing a crisis unlike any since its founding in 1775 by the Second Continental Congress. Mail volume is likely to keep declining, the panel said, while the big agency's costs, most of them directly linked to 700,000 employees who handle the mail, will continue to soar.

As I read this story, I thought, Boy, does this have a familiar ring. Which, of course, it did: it's also the story of the classical recording industry, and the heart of the matter can be found in the very first sentence. Deny, deny, deny--while the economic basis of your old-fashioned way of doing business crumbles beneath your feet.

Such is the way in which countless industries have quietly rotted away over the centuries. The difference is that in the information age, the rot spreads infinitely faster.

Now that CBS is finally admitting that Dan Rather was suckered by badly forged documents, long after that fact was incontrovertibly established by bloggers, you can see the process thrown into uniquely high relief. In this particular case, it played out over a period of less than two weeks, which doesn't sound like much--but if you were following the story at all closely, it felt as if CBS had been denying the obvious for months, to painful and devastating effect.

This is a classic example of what Mickey Kaus has dubbed "the Feiler Faster Thesis":

The news cycle is much faster these days, thanks to 24-hour cable, the Web, a metastasized pundit caste constantly searching for new angles, etc. As a result, politics is able to move much faster, too, as our democracy learns to process more information in a shorter period and to process it comfortably at this faster pace. Charges and countercharges fly faster, candidates' fortunes rise and fall faster, etc.

The fly in the ointment is that older, more cautious institutions unwilling or unable to adjust to the faster pace made possible by digital information technology are likely to get stampeded. That means old media--but it also means cultural institutions that refuse to think through the implications of new technologies, much less embrace them wholeheartedly. I watched the classical recording industry implode, predicting in print at regular intervals that it would do so. Now I'm wondering when the next column will fall.

Here's something from today's Wall Street Journal (no free link, alas) that caught my eye. It's the latest "Real Time" column by Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry:

As the digital age marches on, we find ourselves asking a question we never imagined: What will happen to all our stuff?

The music CD is already disappearing from our lives. Years ago Jace ripped his large CD collection into MP3s and banished the physical CDs to boxes now cluttering up a closet. (Having a baby son who loved hurtling CDs onto the floor accelerated this move.) Today he buys music online whenever he can � reading liner notes in those little CD booklets is no fun anyway. Tim hasn't started buying music online, but won't buy new CDs because they seem a technological dead end, like buying a record in the mid-1990s. And we know we're not alone � ride the subway in Manhattan and you'll find the various flavors of iPods far outnumbering Discmen. (To say nothing of the once-ubiquitous, now-vanished cassette player.)

This got us thinking: Once we subtract CDs � and goofy CD towers and shelves � from our wide-ranging collections of stuff, will books, newspapers and other physical things follow? What about the oppressive tonnage of all the other old media?...

Hanrahan and Fry point to DVDs, newspapers, and photos on paper as examples of physical "stuff" likely to disappear fairly shortly. Interestingly, though, they take a conservative line on books:

Ebooks have been nonstarters for a host of reasons. There have been format woes and troubles with "form factor," which is a complicated way of saying that it's nicer to curl up in a big chair with a paperback than with a PalmPilot or a plastic reader gadget....

Also, to many people, books have value beyond the information they contain. Unlike music or movies, books haven't undergone a real format change in centuries � a book from 1968 is still obviously a book and can be read instantly like any other book: not so, in most cases, for an eight-track tape, a reel of film or a box of slides. Unlike newspapers, they have value beyond a few days � books are things to be kept.

As regular readers know, I don't agree. I think the days of the printed book are numbered, though the number is probably higher than many futurologists think:

I'm open, at least in theory, to the possibility of abandoning the book-as-art-object, just as I've already taken the first step toward abandoning the album-as-art-object. Other people may not be so open to either possibility. I have a number of over-50 friends who say they don't read "About Last Night" because they "can't" read text on a screen--which means, of course, that they find it inconvenient. Not me. I don't read books on my iBook, but I do read virtually all magazine and newspaper articles that way, as well as the blogs that now occupy a fast-growing part of my reading time. It would never occur to me to print out an article (or a blog entry) and read it in the bathtub....

Yes, the printed book is a beautiful object, "elegant" in both the aesthetic and mathematical senses, and its invention was a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture. But it is also a technology--a means, not an end.

Of course I may be wrong. But the point is that if you aren't willing even to contemplate the possibility that the way you do what you do may be rendered obsolete by technology, you're a sitting duck for somebody else in the same line of work who, like it or not, is prepared to think about the unthinkable.

People often ask me why I go to the trouble of blogging, given the fact that I have access to blue-chip traditional print media outlets. I always give a variation on the same answer: I concluded a number of years ago that serious arts coverage and commentary were destined over time to migrate to the Web, which is a more cost-effective way of servicing niche markets, and that I wanted to establish a beachhead in the blogosphere early enough to be seen as a new-media pioneer rather than just another middle-aged print-media writer who got caught in the stampede to the Web.

A lot of middle-aged writers I know think I'm wasting my time blogging, especially since I don't get paid for it. Of course they may be right. But the U.S. Postal Service thought Aunt Minnie would live forever--and now it's going down the drain. The major classical labels thought they could ignore the long-term implications of digital recording--and now they're reduced to making crossover albums, the classical equivalent of smooth jazz. A septuagenarian anchorman thought he could ignore the sniping of the blogosphere--and now he's being forced to spend the twilight of a long, prestigious career eating rancid crow in an election year.

That's not my idea of fun. This is.

P.S. Alex Ross has a highly relevant discussion of the Web sites of American symphony orchestras--and what they tell us about the comparative ability of those orchestras to adapt to the new cultural landscape. And Jeff Jarvis considers the Rather fiasco from a similar point of view.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 20, 2004 9:57 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"We live this life by a kind of conspiracy of grace: the common assumption, or pretense, that human existence is 'good' or �matters' or has �meaning,' a glaze of charm or humor by which we conceal from one another and perhaps even ourselves the suspicion that it does not, and our conviction in times of trouble that it is overpriced--something to be endured rather than enjoyed."

Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 20, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Do not adjust your set

I'll be doing some long-delayed computer-related maintenance today and/or tomorrow. Blogging from New York is likely to be light. As for Chicago, there's no telling--I haven't heard from Our Girl. We'll see.

Later.

UPDATE: As you can see above, I managed to get one last posting in under the wire. Nevertheless, I'm not kidding!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 20, 2004 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Attention, all correspondents, editors, etc.

I'm in the middle of a computer meltdown. For now, probably for the rest of the day, and possibly for longer than that, I no longer have access to my address files, either e-mail or snail mail (including all my telephone numbers). As a result, do not expect to hear from me today.

If you are a personal friend or professional colleague who sees this posting and needs to get in touch with me, send an e-mail to my home address (i.e., not to my "About Last Night" mailbox).

I'll be back when I'm back.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 21, 2004 1:24 AM | Permalink

TT: Late-night update

I seem to be functioning again, albeit clumsily (I'm learning my way around an upgraded operating system) and with one little problem, which is that I no longer have any of my e-mail addresses. The good news is that my snail-mail address file survived the switch, but for the moment and possibly for longer, the chances are high that I don't have your e-mail address.

To repeat and reiterate this morning's posting:

If you are a personal friend, editor, or professional colleague, please send an e-mail to my home address (not the "About Last Night" mailbox!) as soon as you see this message. It will help me reconstitute my e-mail address file in the short run, which is when I need it.

Don't assume I have your address!

I look forward to hearing from you, sigh....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 21, 2004 11:50 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There are two things that I hate: analysis and power. A conductor can avoid neither the one nor the other. Conducting's not for me."

Sviatoslav Richter (quoted in Bruno Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 21, 2004 12:48 PM | Permalink

TT: Today's the day

The dreaded computer maintenance session is now set for first thing Tuesday morning. You'll be hearing from me again someday, if I survive....

Like I said before, later.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 21, 2004 12:50 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It is not a lucky word, this impossible; no good comes of those that have it often in their mouth."

Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 22, 2004 10:53 AM | Permalink

TT: Paging Mr. Murphy (and Mr. Ludd)

For someone who believes so strongly in the culture-changing potential of information-age technology, I've been oddly slow to embrace its successive twists and turns. I first used a computer for word processing some time around 1979, when the Kansas City Star told me that I had to start writing my concert reviews directly on its mainframe computing system rather than typing them on an IBM Selectric and having them scanned into the system optically. I was stunned--that really is the word for it--by my first encounter with word processing, and recognized at once that it would change every writer's life for the better. I first used a personal computer in 1985, when I started writing my pieces on the PC of Harper's Magazine after hours (and not infrequently on company time, too!). I bought an identical IBM computer two years later when I went to work for the New York Daily News, and used it for the next decade and a half.

That was, needless to say, a long time between drinks, and my stubborn loyalty to my Pleistocene-age PC caused me to miss out on the early years of the Web. On the other hand, I wrote four books and hundreds of essays, articles, and reviews on it, and in the process it became something like an extension of my brain. Furthermore, I was working on The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken for much of that time, and was terrified at the prospect of changing word-processing systems in the middle of writing a long book. But even without The Skeptic, I had deadlines virtually every week, and I simply couldn't imagine slamming on the brakes long enough to make the switch.

By 1999 I was stalled on The Skeptic, and decided that I needed to take a sabbatical in order to jump-start my progress. The idea of walking away from my regular writing commitments was frightening in the extreme. Freelancers, even well-established ones, aren't in the habit of turning down assignments. Still, I knew I had to do something, so I extracted promises of loyalty from to my editors (all of whom kept them, for which much thanks), shut down the shop, and spent the next six months working on The Skeptic. Actually, I should say that I spent five of the next six months working on The Skeptic, because I junked my PC at the beginning of the sabbatical, bought a Mac clone, had all my data translated from PC to Mac, and began using my new computer as soon as my archives were installed. I became reasonably comfortable with Word on Mac within a few weeks, but I pulled a lot of hair out during that first month, and I didn't make much progress on The Skeptic, either. All things considered, the only good thing to be said for my sabbatical was that it spared me the grief of switching while simultaneously trying to hit weekly deadlines. That might have killed me.

I bought an iBook two years ago and fell in love with it at first sight. Alas, by then I was doing more writing than ever, so instead of making the jump to Mac's new operating system when I changed computers, I clung stubbornly to System 9.2, and stuck with it long after it was clear that I needed to switch to OS X. Eventually, though, the time came when I could stall no longer. I knew I wouldn't have the luxury of taking a computer-related sabbatical, but I also knew I had to change horses, so I cleared out a whole week of my schedule--this one--and yesterday I installed the latest version of OS X.

To be exact, I had a friend install it for me, a process that turned out to be fraught with every imaginable form of technological grief crammed into a single day. Fortunately, the ending came out happy, and I spent most of the wee hours fussing with my desktop and downloading music files, something I hadn't been able to do before. (If you're curious, the first song I bought from iMusic was Frank Sinatra's "Witchcraft.") The posting you're reading now is the first thing I've written on OS X except for e-mail. Tonight I'll try my hand at a full-scale book review. All is not yet bliss--I haven't yet imported my mp3 files to OS X, and I seem to have mislaid my e-mail address book--but I can already see that I should have switched to OS X the day I bought my iMac.

Will that realization make me quicker to embrace the latest wrinkles in home computing? Probably not. My guess is that I came to information-age technology too late in life to ever become completely comfortable with it. I use it happily, but I don't want to play with it, much less spend more than an absolute minimum of time learning how to use it in my day-to-day work. Aside from everything else, I'm too busy. I am, in fact, a near-ideal subject for experiments in user-friendliness: if I find a new technology easy to learn, so will the rest of the world.

In retrospect, what surprises me is that I've ventured this far into the promised land. I don't know anybody my age (I'm 48) who doesn't use computers, but I know lots of people in the generation just before me who never quite managed to integrate them into their daily lives. When I worked for the New York Daily News in the late Eighties, for example, the editor of the paper ostentatiously kept a manual typewriter on his desk. I suspect he was motivated by the same class-conscious vanity that supposedly led members of the French royalty to wear pants without pockets (why did they need pockets when they had servants?). Fortunately, my boss at the News, Michael Pakenham, was a technophile who was determined to get the hang of computers or die trying, and it was at his insistence that I bought my first PC--it was, in fact, a condition of going to work for him. Similarly, I didn't switch from dial-up to cable modems until well after I launched this blog, just as I didn't start using e-mail until The Wall Street Journal informed me several years ago that it wanted me to start sending my pieces to the paper that way.

By now at least a few of you must be smiling at the presumptuousness that allows me to predict the inevitability of technology-driven cultural change when I myself am so reluctant to embrace it in my personal life. I got an e-mail the other day that made a related point about one of my recent postings, albeit in a kindly way:

Why does book format have to be one or the other? Why can't both forms, physical paper books and ebooks, exist side by side?

I enjoy reading news, articles, blogs, etc online. But I want an actual physical paper book in my hands when it's a cold rainy night and I curl up on the couch with a cup of tea, a blanket, the cat, some good music (from any format!) etc.

I don't think that will ever go away.

People still ride horses for pleasure, and a very small number of people even still use draft horses for work. Horses didn't disappear altogether, even though we've had cars for so long.

Instruments haven't disappeared, even though we have synthesized music now (perhaps they might? but c'mon, who wants to dance zydeco to a synthesized accordion?).

Sailboats and bicycles exist, even though motorboats and motorbikes have been around for a long time now.

I think humanity's love, and sometimes gut-level need, of tactile senses will keep all these things around for centuries to come.

But then, that's just me, the gal who re-reads paper books until they fall apart.

Needless to say (I hope!), I agree with all this. I am, after all, the drama critic who once wrote that live theater is an "obsolete technology"! Which it is--but I doubt that will ever stop small groups of people from succumbing to its ephemeral magic. At least I hope it won't. Still, there's a big difference between curling up on the couch with a handsomely bound book and continuing to write 5,000-word essays with a fountain pen, something nobody in his right mind would think of doing.

For some reason I seem to have a knack for intuiting the large-scale cultural effects of technologies I have yet to adopt. I understood what digital downloading would do to the recording industry years before I downloaded my first piece of iMusic. Yet I wish I were more comfortable with those technologies, which may simply be another way of saying that I wish I were ten years younger. Or perhaps not: I've always known that part of me is inclined by temperament to live in the past, and the fact that I don't never fails to strike me as something of a minor miracle. For that I thank my younger friends (a category that by now includes most of the people to whom I am closest, Our Girl in Chicago very much included), all of whom seem collectively determined to keep me from slipping into that mindset so neatly captured by Evelyn Waugh in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold:

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz--everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the �thirties: "It is later than you think," which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought.

I hope I never fall into that self-strangling trap, just as I hope I never succumb to the equally reflexive neophilia that sometimes blights the declining years of people who long desperately to seem younger than they are. I know exactly how old I am, and I don't care who else knows it. Usually.

On which sober note I think I'll bring this posting to a close. I still have a lot more to learn about OS X, and other things to do as well. What's more, my e-mailbox is filling up with messages from friends who read my cri du coeur this morning and have hastened to write me. To all of you I offer this encouraging word: I may be middle-aged, but I ain't a Luddite yet!

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 22, 2004 12:47 PM | Permalink

TT: Number one, with a bullet!

Harcourt just sent me the following e-mail about All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine:

ALL IN THE DANCES receives a STARRED review in the October 1 Kirkus:

"The writing is graceful, with a judicious use of primary sources, and Teachout movingly conveys his love for Balanchine's art in a short text that makes no pretense to be the last word but fulfills its author's intention that it serve as a layperson's introduction. The perfect first book to read about Balanchine, and intelligent enough to have value for more knowledgeable admirers as well."

Whooee!

To preorder a copy, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 22, 2004 12:52 PM | Permalink

TT: To be and not to be

A reader writes, apropos of various postings on technological change and the e-book:

I fall vigorously on both sides of this debate. These days, I do the majority of my reading on-screen. I even read a lot of fiction on my Pocket PC (a Viewsonic V35).

But bookbinding is my hobby, and when I run across something I really like, something that isn't available in hard-copy, I haul up a word-processor and a publishing program, massage the text a bit for felicity (I maintain the old distinction between its and it's, even if the rest of the world is giving up) and print it out onto acid-free paper. And next thing you know, there it is between hardcovers, with a gold-stamped title.

A hobbyist can only bind so many blank books, after all; and this way, something I think has lasting value is locked down out of reach of format change. And this, I suspect, is why books aren't going to vanish: they're immune to format change.

Now there's a true "About Last Night"-ist after my own heart!

As for the role of the library in the age of the Web, another reader writes:

I now live in Petticoat Junction. My house is bigger than our local library, and this ain't no McMansion. I may not own more books but I'm catching up quick. To top it off, the librarians hate me. Which is astounding to me. Everywhere else I've been, librarians have loved me. I'm an ideal patron. I borrow lots of books. I whisper. I pay my fines. I bring my kids in and have taught them all the proper library manners. But somehow I offended the staff here my first day in and they've never forgiven me.

And still the library is a valuable resource for me. Because of inter- library loans.

Our library belongs to an association of over a hundred libraries, all linked by a single computer system, so I can go online at home and borrow anything from any one of them, and have it show up here in a couple of days. Just another way the web has made life better in the analog as well as the virtual world.

I've never had trouble getting hold of a single book or video.

Except for A Terry Teachout Reader. Go figure.

Well said.

Oh, by the way, rumor has it that you can get hold of the Reader at amazon.com....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 23, 2004 2:52 AM | Permalink

TT: Teaser

From From the Floor:

Those of you who read Terry Teachout's blog About Last Night (and who doesn't?) are familiar with his Almanac feature--a choice quote of the day presented without contextual packaging.

Today I'm launching my riff on Teachout's feature: The Anti-Almanac. These will be quotes I've come across that have made me stop reading and throw the book, journal, magazine, or newspaper across the room. I came up with the idea last night as I was browsing what looked like an interesting title in a used bookstore in Greenwich Village. When I read the following sentence, I closed the book, put it back on the shelf, and walked out of the shop.
So, without further delay, today's anti-almanac....

If you're curious--and you damned well should be--go here to read Anti-Almanac No. 1.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 23, 2004 2:58 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"There is a class of street-readers, whom I can never contemplate without affection--the poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls--the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when he shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they 'snatch a fearful joy.'

"Martin B., in this way, by daily fragments, got through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days) whether he meant to purchase the work. M. declares, that under no circumstances in his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction which he took in those uneasy snatches."

Charles Lamb, "Thoughts on Books and Reading" (1822)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 23, 2004 3:05 AM | Permalink

TT: Just in case you were wondering

It sure is nice to be back....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 23, 2004 3:12 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 23, 2004 10:45 AM | Permalink

TT: Back from the grave

Never turn an aesthete loose on a computer program that allows him to personalize his desktop. I was up last night fussing with my iBook until...well, I don't want to talk about it. But I can assure you that the typefaces on my icons are exquisitely appropriate!

More to the point, I now appear to have made the jump to OS X without doing any significant damage to my person or sanity. I did lose a large part of my e-mail address file, but most of the people whose addresses went up the spout have responded to my urgent summons and written to me, so I think I've got a grip on that problem. Furthermore, early indications are that I won't have any problem writing pieces in the new version of Word that I'm running. Now all I have to do is import my mp3 files, and I'll be as happy as the day is long.

In short, "About Last Night" will be returning to normal just as soon as I stop fussing with typefaces and start writing new posts. Thanks for your forbearance.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 23, 2004 10:46 AM | Permalink

TT: Toward the future, gingerly

Regular readers know that when I post excerpts from my Wall Street Journal drama columns each Friday morning, I always mention that the Journal provides no free link to my pieces and suggest two alternative options, buying a paper copy of the Journal or subscribing to the online edition.

Apropos of this, a reader writes:

Cause I don't read your blog every day & cause I don't stay home in front of a computer all day, I always find a third option to be most effective: going to the library.

But hey, they don't still have those things, do they? Not since everyone went online, right?

This posting made me laugh out loud, but it also reminded me of something I never think about anymore, which is that I stopped using public libraries a number of years ago. Don't get me wrong: I love libraries. I worked in my high-school library (it was my first job, in fact), and I can't count the hours I spent haunting big-city libraries as a young man. During the decade I spent working on The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken I had access to the closed stacks of the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, and I checked out books by the bagful.

Alas, I no longer go to Baltimore each week, nor do I have access to the stacks of a university library, and the branch of the New York Public Library located in my neighborhood is roughly the size of the one in Smalltown, U.S.A., on which I cut my teeth forty years ago. When I need information, I now look first to the Web, then to my personal library, which is small but choice. Should those alternatives fail to satisfy me, I walk two blocks to a very large Barnes & Noble and explore its shelves. If that doesn't do it, I do without, or order a used copy of the book in question from amazon.com.

I wonder how common my experience is. It may well have less to do with the current state of library-going than with the fact that I live in New York City. Would I go to the library if there were a good one in my neighborhood? Probably--but I'm not so sure. When I was young I read in great shelf-emptying gulps, thereby accumulating the intellectual capital off which I've been living for the past quarter-century. Now I read far more selectively, concentrating on new titles, though I also re-read books habitually. I operate on the principle that any book worth reading more than twice is a book worth owning, and my shelves reflect that belief. I'm sure that the Web has cut down considerably on my library-related needs, but it may also be that libraries simply don't have as much to offer me as they used to.

Speaking of the Web, I mentioned yesterday that my anxiety-fraught upgrade to OS X made it possible for me to use iMusic, Apple's Web-based "record store." Since then, I've bought a couple of dozen songs at ninety-nine cents a pop. Most of the ones I downloaded were singles from the Sixties and Seventies that I still remembered with great fondness (Little Feat's "Strawberry Flats," Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up"), together with a sprinkling of newer tunes that I'd heard in passing and wanted to own (Suzanne Vega's "Caramel"). I also spent quite a bit of time looking through iMusic's jazz section, which is surprisingly well-stocked, but at first glance I didn't see anything I wanted that I didn't already have. Frank Sinatra's version of "Witchcraft," the one pre-rock standard that I bought, is only available on Sinatra's greatest-hits compilations, none of which I care to own.

In short, iMusic has yet to work a revolution in my record-buying habits, no doubt because I'm too firmly entrenched in them to make any sudden changes at this point in my life. Anyone who owns 3,000 painstakingly shelved CDs is unlikely to throw them all away overnight. I expect that for the present, I'll mostly keep on using iMusic the way I used it last night, buying old songs that I liked a long time ago and new songs by artists to whom my younger friends have drawn my attention. Still, it'll be interesting to see whether my own attachment to the Album as Art Object now starts to diminish. I thought, for instance, of downloading Jonatha Brooke's live album, but I decided to wait and buy the CD version instead. I'll let you know as soon as I loosen up enough to buy a complete album from iMusic. That'll be the day.

P.S. Dear iTunes, would you please get with the program and make the Amazing Rhythm Aces' "Third-Rate Romance" available for downloading?

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 23, 2004 12:38 PM | Permalink

TT: Found object

Here's a snippet of conversation I had with my trainer (who is studying to be an actor) during my workout earlier today:

HIM: Did you see Mean Girls?

ME (suspiciously): Er, no. Is it good--I mean, of its kind?

HIM (enthusiastically): It's really good. It's even got a good plot. I cried at the end. Of course, I cry at everything now--it's because I'm getting so open. "Oh, [sniffle] if only I could use that in a scene." Know what I mean?

Incidentally, I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if he pops up in an action movie one of these days....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 24, 2004 1:24 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Our songs may not smell of sweat and the earth, but our rhymes, not just 'time' and 'mine,' not just 'wrong' and 'alone' or 'home,' are pure. Sure, when a line is great, you can skip the rhyme. But how many lines are that great?"

Johnny Mercer (quoted in Gene Lees, Portrait of Johnny)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 24, 2004 1:30 AM | Permalink

TT: Words (what are they good for?)

As so often happens after Thursday, today is Friday, meaning that I'm in The Wall Street Journal with a review of two terrific off-Broadway revivals, Eug�ne Ionesco's The Bald Soprano at the Atlantic Theater and Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique at Dodger Stages:

Eug�ne Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano," written in 1950 and now playing Off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater through Oct. 17 in a new translation by Tina Howe, is the opposite of a well-made play, so much so that Ionesco himself called it an "anti-play." Nothing much happens in "The Bald Soprano" (nothing explicable, anyway) and nobody says anything that makes sense. Yet the laughs come in carload lots right from the start, and by the time the lights come up again an hour later, you know you've been watching a show that is at once deliriously silly and darkly profound....

"Banality is a symptom of non-communication," Ionesco once remarked. "Men hide behind their clich�s." That insidious process of self-concealment is brought to life in "The Bald Soprano," which he was inspired to write after he attempted to teach himself English out of a French-English phrase book. Out of its blandly stereotypical phrases he spun an anarchic fantasy about two married couples, a maid and a fireman who vainly attempt to break through the blank wall of polite convention that separates them from one another, only to find themselves trapped inside the conversation-book platitudes that they string together in long tendrils of illogic: "If you catch cold, you must wrap it up." "It's a useless precaution, but absolutely necessary."

I don't speak French, so I can't pronounce on the quality of Ms. Howe's translation, but it certainly works on stage, especially as directed by Carl Forsman and performed by an ensemble cast whose members understand that there is nothing so delightful as watching serious-looking people utter meaningless statements with absolute conviction (Jan Maxwell, one of my favorite actresses, is especially good at it)....

What you see in "Symphonie Fantastique" is one wall of a shallow glass tank into which five wet-suited puppeteers dip and slosh 180 peculiar-looking objects, none of which even remotely resembles Charlie McCarthy. Inspired by the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and Berlioz's own program for the "Fantastic Symphony," Mr. Twist uses this equipment to conjure up a bewitching string of complex scenes that unfold with the nagging compulsion of a love story (which is what Berlioz's symphony is, more or less). The puppeteers are hidden from view by a black wall, and the tank, which looks rather like a flat-screen television, is lit so cunningly and colorfully that you soon become disoriented and surrender joyously to the illusions being created before your amazed eyes.

In the end, literal descriptions of what "happens" in "Symphonie Fantastique" must inevitably fall short of conveying its loony, inscrutable beauty....

No link. You know what to do (and yes, you can always go to the library!).

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 24, 2004 1:39 AM | Permalink

TT: Go thou and do likewise

I just got back from hearing the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra at the Jazz Standard, and I'm still flying. It's been some time since Schneider's big band last appeared in a New York nightclub, and there's no better place to hear it than the Standard, where the barbecue is tasty, the vibe is comfy, and the sound system is in the hands of experts. Schneider is, of course, the jazz composer of her generation, and as for the band, I hope I don't need to tell you how remarkable it is.

Schneider continues at the Standard through Sunday. For more information, go here. Be sure to make a reservation, by the way--the club was packed for the first set on Thursday, and my guess is that most of this weekend's performances will sell out in advance.

On Monday I went to hear Madeleine Peyroux's opening night at Le Jazz Au Bar. I profiled her in last Thursday's Wall Street Journal, and the effects of that piece were still being felt four days later. Monday's performance was sold out to the walls (which astonished the manager--jazz clubs are never full early in the week), and several out-of-towners told me they'd come to New York to see the show after reading what I wrote. How about that?

Peyroux continues at Le Jazz Au Bar through Saturday, with sets at eight and ten p.m. Once again, I strongly suggest you make a reservation--the joint, it seems, is still jumping. For more information, go here.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 24, 2004 2:04 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Chicago-off-Broadway

I note wistfully that Chicago Shakespeare's production of Rose Rage officially opens in New York tonight. Terry and I saw the play last January here in Chicago, where it held us rapt for its whole five hours plus. Jay Whittaker's Richard, especially, is a performance not to be missed; I still get a little chill up my spine.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 24, 2004 2:26 AM | Permalink

TT: Ecstasy

Harcourt just messengered over the first finished copy of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

I can't even begin to tell you how this feels....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 24, 2004 4:42 AM | Permalink

TT: Better mousetraps

Three more readers chime in on "About Last Night"'s topic du jour:

- "Reading your post on the effect of technology on the written word, I noted your statement that no one in his right mind would write a 5,000-word essay with a fountain pen. My personal preferences aside, I feel obliged to point out that Neal Stephenson, an author known for his cutting-edge science fiction, wrote all three of his most recent books (totalling nearly 3,000 pages) by hand, with a fountain pen. Whether Mr. Stephenson is in his right mind or not is up for debate, I suppose, but he is, at least, proof that the fountain pen can keep up with the modern age."

- "I fall heavily in favour of using the library. I survive on a single income, so hard cover books fall on the wrong side of the budget for me. The library comes through for me every time. In fact, I found 4 out 5 of your suggestions for new jazz listeners at my library and I currently have 'The Skeptic' signed out. (And no, I can't find 'The Terry Teachout Reader' at the library either.) The other thing my library has is movies - including DVD's.

"One thing that has made my library experience even more enjoyable is the online catalogue. If I discover a book, CD or movie I want to explore while surfing the web, it's a quick click and search to see if my library has a copy. Then I simply reserve it and when it is available they notify me. I think they are even going to e-mail notifications. Between my computer and my library card I can continue to learn and be entertained without a large bill at the other end."

- "A friend just pointed out something else about ebooks. You can't get an author's written signature on it!"

I promise to let you all know at once if anybody ever asks me to inscribe an e-book....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 24, 2004 8:17 AM | Permalink

OGIC: The world as I found it

Over at Elegant Variation today, Mark Sarvas has a self-searching little essay about the way his literary tastes are changing as he grows older. The spur for his ruminations was reading two very different books in succession--David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire--and discovering that the artistically conservative Hazzard did a whole lot more for him. On the verge of turning 40, Mark's not so sure how he feels about this:

But the truth is I like things a little quieter, a little slower. I like to linger. I like to peer inside. I don't necessarily mind books where nothing much happens; because in life, it's often the case that nothing much happens. I find that for my taste--and it is not much more than a question of taste--I prefer the quiet truths. I was struck by Stephen Mitchelmore's recent post on his splinters blog, where he said:

Is there anyone else who gets excited, instead, by very short novels that do not rely for effect on clinical mastery, faux-naivete, "very old-fashioned entertainment" and/or bad faith?

When I read that, I jumped up and down pointing at the screen, shouting, "Yes! Yes! Exactly!" (It's worth pointing out that [John] Banville closes his review of The Great Fire with these words: "Yet when the narrative leaves love to one side and concerns itself with depicting a world and a time in chaos, it rises to heights far, far above the barren plain where most of contemporary fiction makes its tiny maneuvers.")

Still, these leanings trouble me. I often ask myself what I would have made of cubism when it first appeared. I'm a great devotee of Picasso and Braque today but I recognize that it's with all the benefits of hindsight. Or would I have embraced Jackson Pollock forty years after cubism, or would I have derided him as Jack the Dripper? I like to think I would have recognized genius for what it was but I'm just not certain. (When I played in a rock band, I used to promise myself that my outlook would always stay young; that I'd one day be the sort of parent who knew and listened to the same music as my kids. Perhaps the fact that I played in a band that exclusively covered the Beatles should have been seen as something of red flag, but it's hard to be heard above youthful intransigence.)

I've recently noticed some shifts in my own reading tastes that seem to signal nothing so much as that I'm getting older. For me, though, it seems a matter of wanting windows where I used to want mirrors. I've read enough novels about people like me having experiences like mine. Now I want to find out about the rest of the world. Much like Sam Golden Rule Jones here, I want, these days, to find the world itself in a novel. It might not be going too far to say that I want information from my fiction, however much that makes it sound like I should be reading the newspaper.

If it's any comfort to Mark at all, I think there's a way to see an artist like Hazzard, however traditional her methods, as anything but conservative. I haven't read The Great Fire yet; I'm saving it up for a moment when I need some surefire rapture. But what was so enthralling to me about Hazzard's Transit of Venus was that it dared to try to be true--always a long shot. That sort of vision, and conviction to it, is a hook that postmodernism can make it easy for a writer to--rather conservatively--wriggle off of. So stop worrying, Mark, and have a liberally pleasurable birthday.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 24, 2004 12:43 PM | Permalink

TT: Encore

I love what OGIC wrote just below, and it reminded me of one of my favorite quotations about literature, which comes at the very end of C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism. I've mentioned it before on this blog, but it seemed so relevant to what she said that I thought it worth repeating:

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

What he said.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 24, 2004 12:44 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Show business is a bit like guys that say, 'You know, that hooker really likes me.'"

Jay Leno (quoted in Bill Carter, The Late Shift)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 27, 2004 9:59 AM | Permalink

TT: Sinking in

I've had the whole weekend to get used to looking at All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. I'm still not used to it yet.

When you first get your hands on a copy of your newest book, the initial rush of excitement quickly gives way to anxiety. Is everything right? Strange and inexplicable things can go wrong with a book between the time you sign off on the second-pass proofs and the time it rolls off the presses. It's been said that the very first thing an author invariably sees when he opens his latest book is a typographical error. In my case, this has yet to happen, but something did go wrong with the first printing of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, a comparatively small production glitch that nobody noticed but the managing editor and me, and though it was insignificant, it took me an hour or so to get over the shock. So I flipped quickly through All in the Dances to see if anything similar had happened, and once I established that the first printing was gremlin-free, I relaxed and reveled.

I've shown All in the Dances to everyone I've seen since it arrived via messenger last Friday afternoon, and their reactions have been identical to mine. It's a beautiful piece of work, perfectly designed, invitingly small and slender, with dust-jacket photos that make you want to sit down, open it up, and start reading at once. Alas, I haven't been able to oblige anybody yet, but Harcourt assures me that a box of author copies is headed my way.

Which reminds me: I dedicated All in the Dances to the thirty people I've taken to see their first Balanchine ballets in the seventeen years since I saw my first Balanchine ballet. One of them, Nancy LaMott, whom I took to A Midsummer Night's Dream not long after we met, is no longer with us, but the others (including Our Girl in Chicago, who is making her second appearance to date on the dedication page of one of my books) are all alive, well, and in for a little surprise come November 1. Alas, it's a double-edged surprise, for they're going to have to buy their own copies. I know that's kind of crass, but there's nothing I can do about it: I only get twenty free copies, and I can't very well give them away to some dedicatees and not others! I'm hoping that the thrill of seeing their names on the dedication page will make up for having to purchase a copy (which the proud author will happily sign, of course). And yes, I live in fear that I inadvertently left somebody out....

I should mention that Harcourt is already starting to arrange promotional appearances for All in the Dances. If you live in or near New York City, pencil me in for November 16, when I'll be speaking at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square at 7:30 (the address is 33 E. 17th St.). I'm appearing jointly with Bob Gottlieb, whose Balanchine book comes out the same week as mine, and Robert Greskovic, dance critic of The Wall Street Journal, will serve as moderator-interlocutor-referee. Do come--I think it'll be fun.

Now I really have to get down to work. I wrote a 4,000-word essay for Commentary about Johnny Mercer over the weekend, and I have four more pieces due between now and Friday morning, when I fly to Chicago to visit Our Girl and see three plays and an opera. Blogging is likely to be sporadic as a result, though I don't plan to vanish altogether--there's too much stuff on my mind.

For the moment, though, I must attend to my drama column for this Friday's Journal, so I'll see you all later.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 27, 2004 11:11 AM | Permalink

TT: Report from mid-air

I'm still hacking away at those pre-Chicago deadlines (two down, three to go), but I'm also out and about. On Saturday I saw Paula Vogel's The Oldest Profession, about which I'll be writing in this Friday's Wall Street Journal. Last night Supermaud and I finally caught up with Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's screen version of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, which filled me full of half-formed notions I don't have time to think through just yet (though I will, I will--be patient). Tonight I'll be at New York City Opera for the opening of the company's revival of Mark Morris' wonderful staging of Rameau's Plat�e, and on Thursday I'll have my first chance to see Elizabeth Futral (whom I adore) in their new production of Richard Strauss' Daphne, to which I'm taking Sarah, who's celebrating the launch of her Baltimore Sun mystery column (hooray!) by spending a few days flitting around the Big Apple. Whew!

In short, I'm on the fly and then some, and I've still got to get those pieces written so that I can spend the weekend going to plays in Chicago with Our Girl. Hence I'll be standing mute for the rest of today, and you'll forgive me, right?

P.S. Yes, I know, the Top Fives are also sorely in need of updating. Wednesday night, maybe....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 28, 2004 9:50 AM | Permalink

TT: Let 'em eat acrylics

From the New York Daily News, by way of our invaluable host, artsjournal.com:

Mayor Bloomberg had little sympathy yesterday for New Yorkers who find the new $20 admission to the Museum of Modern Art a bit steep.

"Some things people can afford, some things people can't," said Bloomberg, whose estimated personal fortune is $4.9 billion.

"MoMA is a private institution. It's not a city institution. And they have a right to set their own pricing policies."

Over the past five years, the city funneled $65 million in taxpayer money to help fund MoMA's expansion.

Despite the taxpayers' contribution, Bloomberg - who was in last week's Forbes 400 list of richest Americans - said the city should not be involved in "pressuring" private groups about fees. Besides, he said, there are plenty to choose from. "If you can't afford [admissions] at any one, you can go to another one," he said.

Ed Skyler, Bloomberg's press secretary, later offered a tamer response. "MoMA is a great institution, and it would be incredibly disappointing if this increase prevented people from enjoying it," he said.

MoMA will reopen Nov. 20. The price of an adult ticket, which was $12, will now be $20. Ruth Kaplan, a spokeswoman for MoMA, noted that admission is free from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays.

MoMA's price hike, and its potential effects on the culture of museumgoing in America, will be discussed endlessly in the art world in the weeks and months to come, and rightly so. But I think we can all agree on one thing: Mayor Bloomberg just earned himself a swift kick in the crotch for his personal contribution to the ongoing debate. (Not in the head--that wouldn't hurt him one bit.)

P.S. From the Floor has a thoughtful discussion of what the MoMA price hike might mean over the long haul. It's definitely worth a look.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 28, 2004 10:17 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

Lights are bright,
Pianos making music all the night,
And they pour champagne
Just like it was rain.
It's a sight to see,
But I wonder what became of me.

Crowds go by,
That merry-making laughter in their eye,
And the laughter's fine,
But I wonder what became of mine.

Life's sweet as honey,
And yet it's funny,
I get a feeling that I can't analyze.
It's like, well, maybe
Like when a baby
Sees a bubble burst before its eyes.

Oh, I've had my fling,
I've been around and seen most ev'rything,
But I can't be gay
For along the way
Something went astray,
And I can't explain,
It's the same champagne,
It's a sight to see,
But I wonder what became of me.

Johnny Mercer, "I Wonder What Became of Me"

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 28, 2004 12:40 PM | Permalink

TT: Manifesto in a nutshell

You will find in the flap copy for my new Balanchine book this sentence:

He blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.

I wonder if that's a dust-jacket first? It is for me, anyway: I locked up the flap copy for A Terry Teachout Reader too soon to mention "About Last Night." At any rate, I think being a blogger is something to brag about (I also mention it on my business card). In for a penny....

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 29, 2004 4:06 AM | Permalink

TT: And one to grow on

I just finished my P.G. Wodehouse review, signed off on my Washington Post column, and read proof on my Johnny Mercer essay and A.J. Liebling review. One more piece to go and I'm out of the barrel and ready to head for Chicago. OGIC has been sending me hourly messages describing all the cool stuff we're going to do when I get there. Needless to say, one or both of us will tell you all about it as it happens.

I may write some postings tonight, or I might get a head start on tomorrow's piece. In addition, I'm reliably informed that Our Girl is on the verge of reappearing. At any rate, you'll be hearing more from us shortly, or at worst mediumly.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 29, 2004 4:55 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth."

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 29, 2004 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Among the amphibians

I saw my first opera of the season on Tuesday, New York City Opera's revival of Mark Morris' production of Rameau's Plat�e, and except for a few loose musical screws this time around, what I said about the New York premiere in the New York Daily News still goes:

I don't know about you, but I go to the opera to have a good time, and I've never had a better one than on Tuesday, when New York City Opera and the Mark Morris Dance Group teamed up to present the long-overdue New York premiere of Morris' madcap production of Jean-Philippe Rameau's "Plat�e." In the hands of Morris, costume designer Isaac Mizrahi and set designer Adrianne Lobel, this little-known French opera has become a "Lion King"-like festival of frivolity and poetry, full of matchless singing and dancing.

Composed in 1745 in honor of the marriage of King Louis XV's son, "Plat�e" is one of those tales in which the gods decide to amuse themselves by interfering with the lives of unsuspecting mortals--except that the "mortals" in question happen to be swamp creatures. This version is set in a seedy midtown bar and (no fooling) a giant terrarium, but it is faithful to the fanciful spirit of the original, in which flashy operatic arias and extended dance suites are woven seamlessly together into a baroque vaudeville.

The title role, sung and acted to perfection by character tenor Jean-Paul Fouchecourt, is a female frog of unrivaled ugliness, turned by Morris into a dumpy, lovesick Frog Queen whom Marx Brothers buffs will recognize as bearing a suspiciously close resemblance to Margaret Dumont. The gorgeously dressed dancers play animals of various sorts...

Though "Plat�e" is a costume show par excellence, it is also crammed full of inventive dancing, mostly comic but sometimes sweetly lyrical. Translated into English, it would run forever on Broadway...

You still have six more chances to see Plat�e, at this Saturday's matinee and on October 6, 8, 10 (also a matinee), 14, and 16. Don't wait until the last minute to get tickets--this show sells out.

(Warning: don't take your kids to this one unless they're fully briefed on the birds and the bees!)

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 29, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: The continuing struggle

Yes, I'm still knocking out pieces--on tap for today is a review of Robert McCrum's Wodehouse--but the post-vacation me is keeping an even strain, and so far I show no immiment signs of blowing any fuses prior to my departure for Chicago on Friday. Keep your fingers crossed.

When I'm really busy, one of my cunning new sanity-maintenance techniques is to spend my off hours (or, in this case, minutes) reading a book that's totally unrelated to the pieces I'm writing. This time around it's Richard Osborne's Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music, the best biography ever written of an orchestral conductor, and an incredibly good read even if you're not a Karajan fan. It's full of tasty nuggets, two of which I want to pass on to you before I return to the grindstone. First, a snippet that will be making its way sooner or later into my next book:

Karajan was obsessed by rhythmic accuracy. He once told the Vienna Philharmonic that he was going to hear a concert by Louis Armstrong. "Imagine!" he exclaimed. "Two hours of music, and never once will it slow down or speed up by mistake."

The second is a remark about Karajan made by his first wife: "Certainly, he was not a man who would do anything foolish for a woman."

You can say a lot about Herbert von Karajan, and Osborne does--his book is 851 pages long--but in the end, I doubt you could say anything about his personality more revealing than that.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 29, 2004 12:31 PM | Permalink

TT: Incidentally

I haven't said this for ages, so I will: if you're a regular reader of "About Last Night," tell a friend about us. We had a good year, and we'd like to have a better one.

I can't help but think that there are lots of people out there who'd enjoy reading a blog like this, but don't yet know that it exists. For that matter, there are still lots of people out there who don't know what a blog is. What better way for them to dive into the pool than to become daily communicants of "About Last Night"? (Besides, I've got a new book coming out, and I need all the help I can get.)

Spread the word, if you would. Our Girl and I will be more than grateful.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 29, 2004 12:34 PM | Permalink

TT: Out of the barrel (almost)

As of ten minutes ago, I'm deadline-free. The last of my outstanding pieces is finished and e-mailed. I still have urgent pre-Chicago errands to run this afternoon, but I should be back in time to do a little blogging before heading off to the opera with Sarah. If not, I'll post after I get home tonight.

Later.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 30, 2004 1:24 AM | Permalink

TT: In and out

I've been meaning to say something about Galley Cat, Nathalie Chicha's new blog about the book business, which went live a week or two ago and was promptly installed on "About Last Night"'s "Sites to See" list. Nathalie is, of course, the mastermind behind Cup of Chicha, long one of my daily stops in the 'sphere. Now she's relocated from Iowa to New York and launched this new for-profit blog, which I read no less faithfully--it's a super-smart piece of work. For now Cup of Chicha is in a state of semi-suspended animation as Nathalie gets used to the daily deadlines at Galley Cat, but I have no doubt that she'll soon be back to her usual sharp-tongued, quick-witted business at the same old stand. In the meantime, check out her new digs.

I've also been meaning to note with unsnarky sadness that The Minor Fall, the Major Lift, better known as Mr. TMFTML, has logged off for good. Why, I don't know, though he claims (sort of) to have burned out. Whatever the real reason, his decision to stop blogging has severely diminished the gaiety of nations. For all his self-imposed anonymity, he was one of the blogosphere's strongest and most distinctive personalities, and I can only hope that he decides in due course to re-emerge in the Old Media under his own name, there to wreak havoc on the slow-witted, make flattering accusations about innocent bystanders (we still get hits from that damn posting), and generally punch holes in the envelope of polite discourse.

Me, I miss him already. A lot.

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 30, 2004 6:36 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There is a simple law governing the dramatization of novels: if it is worth doing, it can't be done; if it can be done, it isn't worth it. Trash can be just as trashy on the stage as in an armchair, but when an artist has conceived of something as a novel, let those who think they know a reason why his matter should not be married to his manner forever hold their peace."

John Simon, Acid Test

Posted by Douglas McLennan on September 30, 2004 12:50 PM | Permalink