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October 31, 2004

TT and OGIC: New around here, stranger?

If you've dropped in for the first time after having seen the www.terryteachout.com URL mentioned in today's New York Times Book Review, welcome to "About Last Night," a 24/5 blog (today's posting is a special exception) hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, assisted by the pseudonymous Our Girl in Chicago, who writes from...Chicago.

(In case you're wondering, this blog has two URLs, the one you're seeing at the top of your screen right now and the easier-to-remember www.terryteachout.com. Either one will bring you here.)

All our postings from the past seven days are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry's start with "TT," Our Girl's with "OGIC." In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking "ALN Archives" at the top of the right-hand column.

You can read more about us, and about "About Last Night," by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You'll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read and otherwise do, links to Terry's most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and "Sites to See," a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you're curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you've come to the right site: "Sites to See" will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to "About Last Night."

As if all that weren't enough, you can write to us by clicking either one of the "Write Us" buttons. We read our mail, and answer it, too, so long as you're minimally polite. (Be patient, though. We get a lot of it.)

The only other thing you need to know is that "About Last Night" is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren't sure which way to turn.

If you're one of the above, we're glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. And come back tomorrow.

Posted October 31, 12:00 PM

October 29, 2004

TT: Almost forgot

I wrapped up my foliage-related travels this afternoon so that I could hear Wesla Whitfield at Danny's Skylight Room tonight. I just got back. Wow! I'll be writing about her opening night in next Sunday's "Second City" column, so I don't want to steal my own thunder, but if you're loose on Saturday or Sunday, go hear her. Nobody--but nobody--sings standards better.

For more information on Wesla, go here.

For more information on Danny's, go here.

If you can't go and want to hear what you're missing, buy this CD.

See you Monday.

Posted October 29, 11:45 AM

OGIC: Paul Taylor, again

Picking up where I left off:

For a dance about hell set to music from hell, Dante Variations is impressively chipper. A considerable portion of the piece is frankly comic: one solo dancer gamely performs with her hands tied behind her back, one with shackles on his ankles, another trailing something from one foot (or perhaps suffering a hot foot). These sections veer toward cuteness, however; they rely a milligram too heavily on props and conceits for their charm. The darker sections of the dance make a stronger impression. Especially wonderful are the pyramidal tableaux in which the dancers freeze at curtain-up and curtain-down, like figures in a lurid frieze; and the fantastical Boschian creatures, built out of dancers, that lumber and menace throughout. Intensifying the whole thing is the jaw-dropping lighting by Jennifer Tipton. Sometimes she bathes the back of the stage in darkness that a dancer can all but disappear into, eerily remaining just faintly discernible; at other points she lights the stage in such a way that the dancers cast giant shadow monsters--no bunnies here--on the back wall. These effects are nothing less than fantastic, and go a long way toward making the piece so deliciously like nightmares.

And then Promethean Fire. Ah, hell. How am I going to write about this dance without sounding like a publicist? Here goes nothing.

In an interesting bit of sequencing, Taylor followed his dance about hell with a dance that is widely believed to be about 9/11. I first saw Promethean Fire in New York City last March, so I knew what I was in for Sunday night. And I didn't know. This dance is so powerfully beautiful, I can't imagine ever being truly ready for it, even if I'm lucky enough to see it a dozen times. It does seem to be about the attacks. But the dance is also more universal and more abstract than that; what it mostly represents is the complex of emotional responses those events provoked. Or, to put it still more generally, the kinds of emotional responses they provoked. I doubt that Taylor set out to choreograph on 9/11; rather, he seems to have written a dance that unavoidably reflected the psychic ground he inhabited in the months following the attacks.

What was that psychic ground? Suffering and shock are in the dance, and consolation, love, renewal. I honestly don't know how to describe its content any more specifically. It was beautiful and thrilling to watch. I alternated between trying to read it--knowing as I did that it had been pegged as Taylor's 9/11 dance, and being as I am the type that looks for the story in everything--and being saved from thought altogether by the over-the-top beauty of the thing. A couple of times during those brain-dead spells, I thought of a flower opening. Something inexplicably but inarguably, factually gorgeous.

But Terry, I think I've been skirting your question:

But it happens that you saw a Taylor dance, Promethean Fire, which is widely thought to make oblique but nonetheless intelligible reference to the events of 9/11. Did you see such allusions in Promethean Fire? And if so, how did they affect your response to it? Inquiring co-bloggers want to know.

Well, when you put it that way...yes. I saw fire, falling, and collapse in the dance. Just in glimpses, but there all the same. And on paper, you know, that sounds as though it could be such a terrible idea. But you feel the same way I do about the dance. So--to bat the ball back to you again--why does it work? I have a notion about this, beyond the simple fact of Taylor being a genius. But I kind of want to hear what you think.

Posted October 29, 4:32 AM

TT: Twelve noisy stereotypes

I returned to Manhattan, picked up today's Wall Street Journal, and what did I see? Me, writing about the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men and the New Group's production of Michael Murphy's Sin (A Cardinal Deposed).

I liked Twelve Angry Men in spite of myself:

For those unfamiliar with the plot (there must be a few of you out there), "Twelve Angry Men" tells how a New York jury decides the fate of a minority-group teenager accused of stabbing his father to death. At first the vote is eleven to one in favor of conviction, but the lone dissenter, played here by Boyd Gaines ("Contact") and in the film by Henry Fonda, is determined to convert his furious colleagues, one at a time. Each of the jurors, who are identified only by numbers, is presented as an ethnic or cultural stereotype--an unintentionally absurd touch, seeing as how the script, in earnest '50s style, seeks to persuade us that the defendant is a helpless victim of circumstances à la Stephen Sondheim's "Gee, Officer Krupke" ("We ain't no delinquents/We're misunderstood/Deep down inside us there is good!")....

Mr. Gaines is admirably understated as the saintly Juror No. 8--not even slightly like Fonda, who milked the good-guy angle for all it was worth and then some, and then some more. (He was even dressed in a white suit!) Philip Bosco's otherwise fine performance as the belligerent Juror No. 3, by contrast, is a shade too reminiscent of Lee J. Cobb, Fonda's nemesis in the film. Everybody else is good or better, and Allen Moyer has reproduced a grubby big-city jury room circa 1954 with eerie exactitude, though I found it a bit cute when the whole set rolled sideways to reveal the men's room.

Needless to say, "Twelve Angry Men" is a feel-righteous period piece, a choice specimen of what I think of as the American version of socialist realism. All its ambiguities are pat, and when the curtain comes down you know exactly what you're supposed to go home thinking. It's as if you've just been worked over by a politically correct masseur who pummels you in all the right places. Fortunately, you don't have to swallow the message to enjoy the massage....

I also liked Sin (A Cardinal Deposed), with some qualifications:

John Cullum plays Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who was forced to resign as archbishop of the diocese of Boston when a pair of civil suits revealed that he had covered up horrific allegations of child abuse by numerous priests in his charge, including the now-notorious John Geoghan and Paul Shanley. The script is derived from the transcripts of a pair of videotaped depositions in which Cardinal Law, who initially blamed the cover-up on his subordinates, was confronted with an avalanche of damning written testimony proving that he was fully aware of the charges--and chose to disregard them.

I tend not to be a fan of documentary plays. For one thing, transcripts aren't theater, as the Culture Project's recent production of "Guantánamo" recently proved at tedious length. Not only do such "plays" tend to be shapeless, but such inherent dramatic power as they may have is too often drowned out by the noisy clatter of the stacking of political decks. I feared that "Sin" might suffer from the latter problem--especially when I saw that the liberal Catholic group Voice of the Faithful was handing out leaflets at its performances--but Mr. Murphy, to his credit, plays it down the center. To be sure, he's edited and reshaped the transcripts extensively, compressing two suits into one and several lawyers into two, but his purpose was to be true to the substance of the proceedings, and so far as I know he has not distorted them in any significant way.

For the most part "Sin" also works as theater, though I think Mr. Murphy has made a big mistake in following Cardinal Law's devastating testimony with a brief epilogue in which one of the victims is allowed to speak--the curtain should fall as the humiliated Cardinal walks slowly out of the room. Otherwise, "Sin" scrupulously avoids pulpit-pounding, instead letting the horrors speak for themselves, which they do....

No link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning's Journal, or do this.

Posted October 29, 3:17 AM

TT: Almanac

"Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond--a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art--which is art."

Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea

Posted October 29, 3:07 AM

OGIC: Easily amused

Tonight I walked by someone's elaborately ready-for-Halloween house in my neighborhood, Hyde Park. Four fresh faux graves graced the front yard. Two of the inscriptions on the gravestones:

SEE, I
TOLD YOU
I WAS
SICK!

and

BETTER
HERE
THAN
EVANSTON

I giggled all the way home.

Posted October 29, 2:39 AM

October 28, 2004

OGIC: Paul Taylor, continued

As Terry mentioned, the Paul Taylor program I saw Sunday night at the College of Du Page's McAninch Arts Center included Taylor's great 2002 dance "Promethean Fire." The other dances on the program were "Klezmerbluegrass," in its world premiere, and "Dante Variations," another new dance that premiered earlier this year. This was my second time seeing Taylor's company at the comfy McAninch Center. Despite the longish drive from Chicago, it's a nice place to see a performance. There's not a bad seat in the house.

"Klezmerbluegrass" was vivid and delightful, alternating jubilant sections danced by the ensemble with more wistful solos and duets. The group parts reminded me of two of my all-time favorite dances, Eliot Feld's "The Jig Is Up" and "Skara Brae," both of which are set to traditional Irish music and make me want to dance all the way home. The ensemble parts of "Klezmerbluegrass" had that same care-extinguishing exultation about them, which never felt very far away, even during the most brooding solo. Commissioned by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture (with support from the McAninch) to commemorate 350 years of Jewish life in America, Taylor's new dance convincingly celebrates the capacity of the communities we form to blunt the occupational angst of individual existence. It doesn't, much to its credit, pretend that they can cure it.

I have more to say about the other two dances on the program, especially "Promethean Fire," but it will have to wait a bit. I'm blogging sub rosa right now, and I don't want to push my luck....

Posted October 28, 1:11 AM

October 27, 2004

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"C. D. paused under the archway, breathing dedicatedly. Picture if you will a C. D. gone mad. A bull in a china shop--an aesthetic bull that is--a bull run mad on aestheticism. For if American education had struck him as eclecticism run mad he was striking me as aestheticism run mad. His eyes shone and darted about ferociously coveting all they beheld. His mouth salivated (at least he licked it several times in a kind of mopping up gesture), his hands clenched and unclenched, his brow perspired; a most unnatural fever seemed to have overtaken him. And then he got a grip on himself, marched boldly into the room, took a good look around him and relaxed. And he looked upon everything and he looked everywhere in that old man's way of his that struck me now as being also so very like that of a very young baby--so lovingly, so gently, so wonderingly. But with an avidity too, that avidity special to C. D. A hungry look cast upon each object of beauty as it flowed and filled and satisfied the innermost reaches of his soul. His eyes would seize upon the object with the impatience of youth, then--here was the difference--come to terms with it; set it down: the eyes avidly picking up each beloved object in salutation--putting it down gently in farewell. Eyes look your last! Strange old man, heart-breaking, heart-broken old man--to be so moved by the polish of wood, the curve of a chair-leg, the glint of crystal, the fade of Aubusson. As though he were missing it all already. There. There. Don't mind so much; don't let yourself miss it."

Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me

Posted October 27, 12:20 PM

TT: P.P.C.

I promised to tell you all about my trip to Minnesota, and I will, but not yet. I just got home from the New York premiere of Sin (A Cardinal Deposed), and I'll be getting up first thing in the morning to review it for Friday's Wall Street Journal. After that I've got to knock off a quick piece about Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. Once that's finished and filed, I'm planning to stuff a couple of CDs in my shoulder bag (most definitely including this one), go pick up a rental car, and hit the road. I'm heading for the Hudson House Inn, where I expect to spend a couple of days sleeping late, eating well, and looking at the fall foliage.

I'll be back some time Friday afternoon...but you know what? I might not blog again until Monday! How about that? It's more likely that I'll at least post my Friday Journal teaser and an almanac entry, but if I don't, fear not--I shall return.

Later.

Posted October 27, 12:06 PM

TT: Far afield

I really like what Our Girl posted yesterday about the advantages of letting your mind wander while listening to music. I do it, too--I think everybody does, though some of us are more reluctant to admit it than others. For that matter, I suspect that many, perhaps even most musicians not infrequently let their minds wander while playing music. The late Dick Wellstood, a wonderful jazz pianist who had an intellectual streak, once told Whitney Balliett in an interview that people might be surprised to know what "ordinary daylight things" he thought about while soloing (I'm quoting from memory--I loaned the book in question to a friend a few months ago, and just realized that she hadn't returned it yet).

I felt a prick in my memory as I read Our Girl's posting, and suddenly it came to me that E.M. Forster had written something on this very subject. I couldn't quite recall what or where, but thirty seconds' worth of Googling led me to the fifth chapter of Howards End, in which Forster describes Helen Schlegel's thoughts as she listens to a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony:

For the Andante had begun--very beautiful, but bearing a family likeness to all the other beautiful Andantes that Beethoven had written, and, to Helen's mind, rather disconnecting the heroes and shipwrecks of the first movement from the heroes and goblins of the third. She heard the tune through once, and then her attention wandered, and she gazed at the audience, or the organ, or the architecture. Much did she censure the attenuated Cupids who encircle the ceiling of the Queen's Hall, inclining each to each with vapid gesture, and clad in sallow pantaloons, on which the October sunlight struck. "How awful to marry a man like those Cupids!" thought Helen. Here Beethoven started decorating his tune, so she heard him through once more, and then she smiled at her Cousin Frieda. But Frieda, listening to Classical Music, could not respond. Herr Liesecke, too, looked as if wild horses could not make him inattentive; there were lines across his forehead, his lips were parted, his pince-nez at right angles to his nose, and he had laid a thick, white hand on either knee. And next to her was Aunt Juley, so British, and wanting to tap. How interesting that row of people was! What diverse influences had gone to the making! Here Beethoven, after humming and hawing with great sweetness, said "Heigho," and the Andante came to an end. Applause, and a round of "wunderschoning" and pracht volleying from the German contingent. Margaret started talking to her new young man; Helen said to her aunt: "Now comes the wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing"; and Tibby implored the company generally to look out for the transitional passage on the drum....

(Read the whole thing here. I don't like Forster in general or Howards End in particular, but I do like this chapter.)

Now tell me something, dear OGIC. Here's what you wrote about watching Paul Taylor the other night:

I spent most of the evening bouncing between asking myself "What does it mean?" and simply forgetting the question. Forgetting about words and language themselves, really, as something especially stunning or delicate unfolded on the stage. For me, anyway, this shuttling mode in which I seem to watch dance offers the best of both worlds. As a dance begins I inevitably find myself pushing lightly toward an interpretation, but when the work does something that exceeds or confounds the interpretation--as it continually does, if it is any good--I happily give up thinking and, as Terry says, eat it up. I love this ebb and flow of thought, the thinking and the being drawn away from thinking by fresh experience.

I couldn't have put it better. "Forgetting about words and language themselves" is exactly what you have to do in order to experience a non-verbal art form in all its rich ambiguity. But it happens that you saw a Taylor dance, Promethean Fire, which is widely thought to make oblique but nonetheless intelligible reference to the events of 9/11. Did you see such allusions in Promethean Fire? And if so, how did they affect your response to it? Inquiring co-bloggers want to know.

Posted October 27, 12:05 PM

TT: Haiku for opera buffs

A reader writes:

Shouting "Brava!", sir,
Might impress your friends from Queens,
But not Joe Volpe.

I wish I were that clever....

Posted October 27, 12:04 PM

TT: Others must fail

A reader writes:

For your next blog perhaps you can explain for the rest of us just why New Yorkers are suddenly enamored of the word schadenfreude. I had heard it once or twice until a couple of months ago and now suddenly it's everywhere. What gives? And now there it is in today's New York Times, on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section. There must be an explanation.

I don't read Frank Rich's column--it hurts my ears--so I didn't notice that he'd had occasion to deploy one of my own favorite words. I try not to drop foreign words or phrases into my writing (in fact, I told a member of my criticism class yesterday to remove C'est vrai and Gesamtkunstwerk from the piece of his that I was editing). Once in a while, though, there's no good alternative, and schadenfreude is one of those rare exceptions to my personal rule. To derive malicious joy from someone else's troubles is, if I may be so bold as to say it, precisely the sort of concept for which one would expect the Germans to have coined a word, and it seems to me altogether fitting that we should have taken it over without change.

I must admit, though, that I hadn't noticed any sharp uptick in the popularity of Schadenfreude: The Word. I checked just now and noticed, somewhat to my surprise, that it appeared only twice on this blog before today. Google returned 127,000 hits when I searched the word a little while ago, among them a couple of blogs and Web pages for a Chicago comedy ensemble and "a monthly deathrock and gothrock night in Washington, D.C." (that one I like). I also ran across several references to Joseph Epstein's clever little book about envy, whose treatment of schadenfreude I commend to your attention (he calls it "a hardy perennial in the weedy garden of sour emotions").

Be it in German, English, or pig Latin, I expect schadenfreude is here to stay--and no matter what happens at the polls next Tuesday night, I also expect that a large percentage of voters will be experiencing it come Wednesday morning. That might just explain why my correspondent has been encountering the S-word so frequently of late. Nice it's not, but it's definitely part and parcel of the human condition, at least for those of us who aren't saintly.

Posted October 27, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Unrequited love is the only relationship in which I have ever been able completely to realise my capacities as a human being."

Edward Sackville-West, diary entry, Feb. 12, 1953

Posted October 27, 12:00 PM

OGIC: A bit of boosterism from my corner

In The New Republic, another critic discovers the merits of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, even if the mountain had to come to Mohamet. Robert Brustein minces no words in praising Rose Rage, just closed in New York, and reserves the most extravagant plaudits for the production's devastating Richard:

Part III features the emergence of the most fascinating character in the play--Shakespeare's first well-written villain, Richard Crookback. This hedgehog, born with a full set of teeth, is a man destined "to bite the world." As played by Jay Whittaker, he not only brandishes a straight razor, he is a straight razor--you can cut yourself simply by touching him. Anticipating his intent to murder Edward's two sons in the tower, he licks the kids' faces with his viperish tongue. Glowering, sneering, a tuft of beard beneath his lower lip, a rakish black homburg on his head, Whittaker is as blistering and cruel and witty a Richard as I've ever seen--and I've seen a lot of good ones, including Olivier, McKellen, and Branagh.

In this particular as well as several others, Brustein's review is in agreement with the one Terry wrote for the WSJ last winter, which I in turn agreed with wholeheartedly. As for his wake-up call about Chicago Shakespeare generally--and one feels the rest of Chicago theater can't be far behind in getting his attention--

To single out individual actors from the production is to disregard the general excellence of this remarkable company. The Chicago Shakespeare Theater has been in existence now for eighteen years, and I am ashamed to say that until Rose Rage I had never seen it in performance. If this production is typical of the company's work, then it is clearly one of the most talented, electric, and dynamic theaters in the country.

Aw. Being scooped is never fun, but there's no shame in it.

Posted October 27, 2:02 AM

October 26, 2004

TT: Teacher's pets

I'll be heading up to the Columbia School of Journalism first thing this morning (too damn early!) to teach what I guess could be called a master class in thumbsucking. I'm spending three hours with eight arts journalists from small and medium-sized cities who've come to New York City under the auspices of the National Arts Journalism Program, an NEA-sponsored project whose purpose is to raise the level of arts coverage in American newspapers. They're attending classes, going to performances, and allowing themsleves to be hectored by a bunch of art-biz personages. For me, their job was to write an eight-hundred-word "critic's notebook" essay--the kind of opinion piece that newspaper critics typically knock out every Sunday or so. My plan is to spend twenty minutes editing each piece line by line, with the rest of the class instructed to pile on at will. I did the same thing with my criticism classes at Rutgers University, a weekly ritual one of my wittier students dubbed "Human Sacrifice." It took the kids a couple of weeks to get used to being put on the spot like that, but once they finally loosened up, we had a lot of fun and (I hope) learned a lot, too. I'm hoping the same thing happens today, perhaps a bit more quickly.

At any rate, I'm going straight from Columbia to a couple of midtown galleries, then back to the Upper West Side to knock out the first half of this Friday's Wall Street Journal drama column, then down to Theater Row to see the play I'll be reviewing in the second half of my drama column, immediately followed by eight hours in the sack. Busy, huh?

For all these reasons and more, don't expect to hear anything else from me today. If for some reason you do, please send me a stern e-mail asking why the hell I'm blogging when I should be working (or napping!).

Later.

Posted October 26, 12:04 PM

TT: Here endeth the lesson (sort of)

A reader writes:

I can answer Tommasini's question about identifying "a gay sensibility in music." It's the opposite of Ted Nugent's sensibility in music.

I dunno--some of my best friends are very butchy. But, then, not all of them are men....

Posted October 26, 12:02 PM

TT: Sweet dreams (aren't made of this)

Speaking of naps, a reader writes:

I've been catching up on the blog as I was busy/not plugged in last week. Wonder if I'm the only reader who actually prints it out to take to bed to read? Kind of defeats the purpose of a paperless medium, but it sure feels good to be back in your own bed with something good to read.

I only know of one other person who prints out "About Last Night" to read, and he does it because (so he says) he's too old to do serious reading off a video screen. Not me. Like H.L. Mencken, I read better when lying down, but I'd no more print out a blog and read it in bed than I'd read a magazine while driving a car. Bed is for books, most recently Linda Danly's Hugo Friedhofer: The Best Years of His Life, Gregory Dicum's Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air, Michael Dregni's Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend, and the forthcoming third volume of Letters from a Life: Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, the last of which I plan to finish before I turn out the light tonight, unless I decide instead to pick up Brian Garfield's Hopscotch first.

All this notwithstanding, I'm glad to know that my correspondent (who is a West Coast-based cabaret singer) is so dedicated to the everlasting search for cultural illumination that she takes "About Last Night" to bed with her! If anyone else out there indulges in this particular perversity, drop me a line--it'll make me smile.

Posted October 26, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"The biography of a great writer is not that of a man of the world, or a pervert or an invalid: it is that of a man who draws his stature from what he writes, because he has sacrificed everything to it, including his lesser qualities."

Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust (trans. Euan Cameron)

Posted October 26, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Great entrances

Erin O'Connor has a thread going at Critical Mass about memorable first paragraphs. One of my all-time favorites is from an utterly unknown book, Elaine Dundy's The Old Man and Me. I've posted it on the blog before, and do you know what? I'm going to post it again:

There is a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon: a dark, dank, dead-ended subterranean tunnel. It is a drinking club called the Crypt and the only light to penetrate it is the shaft of golden sunlight slipping through the doorway from time to time glancing off someone's nose or hair or glass of gin, all the more poignant for its sudden revelations, in an atmosphere almost solid with failure, of pure wind-swept nostalgia, of clean airy summer houses, of the beach, of windy reefs; of the sun radiating through the clouds the instant before the clouds race back over it again--leaving the day as sad and desperate as before.

I sort of can't get over this paragraph. I think it is just about perfect. I hope Ms. Dundy wrote it after she wrote the rest of the novel, because if I were her I would have stopped dead after writing those two sentences, thinking "My work is done here." (But the rest of the novel is very good too.)

Posted October 26, 6:02 AM

OGIC: Surrender

Last week, Terry asked me about my experience watching dance. His question was a timely one; just last night I pilgrimaged west to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company in a one-night-only performance (the kickoff, mind you, of a fifty-state tour) in the suburb of Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Terry's book, his recent blogging about dance, and the questions he posed to me were on my mind.

If I remember correctly, the first dance I saw was Balanchine's Jewels, circa 1992, with Terry (natch). We sat in an upper level of the auditorium, which proved useful for my rather anxiously held purposes: to get it, and to be able to prove that I had gotten it by having something thoughtful, or if possible penetrating, to say about it afterward. From our high-altitude vantage point, the dance looked like architecture in motion. It was on that level--not in terms of the dancers' individual moves and gestures but in terms of the kaleidoscopic formations and patterns they all made together--that I tried to grasp what I was seeing. This was my way of trying to intellectualize it: to make it into something I could read. In keeping with what Terry wrote, I don't think I got as much out of that initial outing as I did from subsequent dance performances where I was more at ease watching. That first time out, I felt almost as though I was performing. I was intent on having the correct response. But there's no such thing.

I want to make a brief detour here and talk about live classical music (don't blink--it won't last long and it may never happen again!). Terry drew a distinction between narrative and non-narrative art forms, grouping painting, dance, and music as not essentially intellectual. For me, a more operative divide has always been the one between performing and non-performing arts; my grasp of the latter is decent, of the former pathetic. When I came to Chicago, though, I started going to the Symphony semi-regularly--say, half a dozen times a year (a habit that has now, sadly, dropped off). Somewhere in that time, I reached a deeply satisfying understanding of how to enjoy a classical concert, if you happen to be me. I realized that if I let my mind wander a bit, I would actually hear the music better than if I spent the whole concert policing my concentration. At some point I started accepting the meandering thinking I was doing at concerts, however far-flung, as an associative response to the music rather than a philistine, well-nigh punishable distraction from it. At that point I moved from thinking of concert-going as vaguely hard work that just might confer virtue (like church-going) to thinking of it as an authentic sensual luxury.

Because Terry had started this conversation and I had been mulling a response, I was quite conscious of my minute-to-minute reactions to the Paul Taylor dances I saw last night. Speaking generally--though I'll have more to say later about the individual pieces--I spent most of the evening bouncing between asking myself "What does it mean?" and simply forgetting the question. Forgetting about words and language themselves, really, as something especially stunning or delicate unfolded on the stage. For me, anyway, this shuttling mode in which I seem to watch dance offers the best of both worlds. As a dance begins I inevitably find myself pushing lightly toward an interpretation, but when the work does something that exceeds or confounds the interpretation--as it continually does, if it is any good--I happily give up thinking and, as Terry says, eat it up. I love this ebb and flow of thought, the thinking and the being drawn away from thinking by fresh experience.

Posted October 26, 5:25 AM

October 25, 2004

TT: Get unused to it

Here's Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times, writing in Sunday's paper on Nadine Hubbs' The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music and National Identity:

This is an ambitious, provocative and impressively documented work, with more than 70 pages of detailed footnotes for a 178-page text. It tries to prove that what has come to be considered the distinctive American sound in mid-20th-century American music--that Coplandesque tableau of widely spaced harmonies and melancholic tunes run through with elements of elegiac folk music and spiked with jerky American dance rhythms--was essentially invented by a group of Manhattan-based gay composers: Copland, of course, and Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, Marc Blitzstein, Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber and Ned Rorem....

My gay brothers and sisters should welcome Ms. Hubbs's account of the pivotal role played by gay composers in the development of a musical idiom that as the book argues, still signifies "America," not just in the concert hall but also in movies, television and commercial culture.

Yet, I suspect that many musicians, however fascinated by Ms. Hubbs's treatise, will share my discomfort over the notion of trying to identify anything as elusive as a gay sensibility in music. It's significant, I think, that most of the advance praise for the book ("a landmark study," "breathtakingly original history") comes from cultural historians, not musicians....

Perhaps a sense of separateness emboldened this circle of gay composers, who shared an affinity for French culture and aesthetics, to distance themselves from the domineering, aggressive (meaning rigorously German) brand of 1920's modernism....

By the late 1930's, Copland, with his language now simplified as well, was writing the works that would make him famous, especially the ballet scores "Billy the Kid" and "Rodeo." Still, what is so gay about a symphony that uses hymns as thematic fodder, or a ballet score run through with cowboy tunes and Old West dance rhythms? What is the gay sensibility of Copland's 1939 "Quiet City" or the vibrant 1943 Violin Sonata?

(Read the whole thing here.)

I was thinking of reviewing Hubbs' book, but Tony has said most of what I wanted to say, and the rest of it can be found in an essay I wrote about Benjamin Britten for Commentary. Much of what has been written about Britten since his death in 1976 has revolved around the posthumously disclosed fact that he was sexually attracted to pre-pubescent boys. As I explained in 2000:

[R]evelations about the composer's private life, particularly the candid account of his pederastic inclinations supplied by Humphrey Carpenter in his 1992 biography, add force to the now widely accepted argument that it is impossible to fully understand his music without taking his sexuality into account. Yet such a critical perspective, while capable of providing valuable illumination, is ultimately unequal to the task of explaining Britten's enduring appeal....he is not a prisoner of identity, speaking only of and to his own kind, but a universal genius, intelligible to everyone. Even in The Turn of the Screw--perhaps his best work, certainly his most disturbing--he succeeds in transcending the particularity of his sexual character and portraying the human dilemma in terms that speak directly to all men in all conditions.

I've written in similar terms about Copland and Tchaikovsky, two other great composers whose music is infinitely important to me. The fact that they were both homosexual should never be disregarded in discussing their life and work--but only an unmusical ideologue would try to explain away their genius by engaging in the kind of politico-sexual reductionism of which Hubbs is merely the latest purveyor. In the words of Tony Tommasini:

Ultimately, what we may most value about music is that it moves us in powerful but indistinct ways. It's the one thing that cannot be analyzed or deconstructed for its expressive content, and thank goodness for that.

I think that's exactly right. It is, after all, the radical ambiguity of music that underlies its unique power--an ambiguity that cannot be clarified by resort to verbal analysis or description, however superficially sophisticated.

I'll leave the last word to Felix Mendelssohn, who put it better than anyone else, before or since: "The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite." By which Mendelssohn meant roughly what Igor Stravinsky meant when he said that "music expresses itself." That's why we love it, and never more so than in an age increasingly dominated by aesthetic politicians. It's too blessedly slippery for such misguided folk as Nadine Hubbs to put it in a box and nail the lid shut.

Posted October 25, 12:05 PM

TT: On the double

A reader writes:

You recently mentioned reading "Brideshead Revisited" on your way to Minnesota, and you frequently allude to books you read over lunch and such. As someone who is chronically behind in his reading, I'd like to know two things: how fast you read, and how you read. You've already looking at biographies back to front, so no need to go into that again. But are you a speed reader? Or do you selectively harvest paragraphs or chapters from a book? And I gather you keep some sort of commonplace book or electronic file of juicy lines to repeat at a later date. Do you note those as you go (copy them? mark the book for later retrieval?), which I imagine might slow you down, or do you go back and fish them out later?

And in light of all this, how, exactly, would you want people to read your books?

I read a book on speed reading once, but it was slow going.

I don't know how fast I read, but I can polish off a book of normal length and density in three or four hours, and if absolutely necessary I can read a newly published book and write a thousand-word review of it between Friday night and Monday morning. (On one horrendous occasion I actually read a short book before lunch and filed a review by dinnertime, but that was a special one-time-only favor for an old friend.) Speed reading, if that's what I do, comes naturally to me: I've never taken a course in it. I think I'm glad I read so quickly, but it's like spelling really well or having perfect pitch, two of my other peculiar endowments--a convenience, nothing more, especially for a working journalist.

It's occurred to me more than once that I may not be getting as much pleasure out of the books I read as do slower readers. In any case, and perhaps not surprisingly, I'm a reflexive rereader, and my guess is that over the course of my lifetime I'll probably spend about as many man-hours with my favorite books as a slower reader. If that's true, it all evens out in the long run.

I've kept an electronic commonplace book, organized by subject, for the past decade and a half, and I drew on it regularly for the almanac entries I posted throughout the first seven or eight months that I kept this blog. Now that I've mostly exhausted its contents, I simply post quotations from whatever book I happen to be reading at the time. Long experience as a journalist has given me an eye (and ear) for memorable quotes, and I dogear the pages on which they appear--an ugly but unbreakable habit--then input them when I'm working on the next day's blog.

As I wrote back in June:

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

(Go here for more on the almanac and my electronic commonplace book.)

Regarding my correspondent's last question, if I may be flippant for a moment, I want people to read my books after buying them! Beyond that, I'm not even slightly fussy. I'm glad when anyone cares enough to go to the trouble of reading what I write, though I do get irritated when people write nasty things about my work without having read it attentively, as occasionally happened with The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. Take a look at the reviews posted on amazon.com and you'll see what I mean. (I got off a lot easier with A Terry Teachout Reader, no doubt because fewer people bought it.)

By the way, I also post quotations from readers, so long as they're sourced and checkable. Today's almanac entry, for example, came from a correspondent who heard me speak last week in Minneapolis. I revel in your contributions!

Posted October 25, 12:02 PM

TT: In tandem

Your attention, please: I now share Our Girl's obsession with Erin McKeown. She is one smart cookie.

More later, but in the meantime, get with the program and listen to Grand. I was hooked by the end of the first cut, and I'll be quite surprised if the same thing doesn't happen to you.

Posted October 25, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Pictures and books are fine for those that have the time to study 'em, but they don't shoot out on the road and holler 'This is what little old Zenith can put up in the way of Culture.' That's precisely what a Symphony Orchestra does do. Look at the credit that Minneapolis and Cincinnati get. An orchestra with first-class musickers and a swell conductor--and I believe we ought to do the thing up brown and get one of the highest-paid conductors on the market, provding he ain't a Hun--a it goes right into Beantown and New York and Washington; it plays at the best theaters to the most cultured and moneyed people; it gives such class advertising as a town can get in no other way; and the guy who is so short-sighted as to crab this orchestra proposition is passing up the chance to impress the glorious name of Zenith on some big New York millionaire that--that might establish a branch factory here!"

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

Posted October 25, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Thrills and chills

For the rest of this week, I won't be able to blog during work. Circumstances. So I will have to wait until tonight to tell you about the grand weekend, highlighted by the mesmerizing Luciana Souza and the golden Paul Taylor. For now, just one tantalizing tidbit: it wasn't until we had taken our seats last night out in little Glen Ellyn, Illinois, that OFOB and I realized we would be seeing the world premiere of a new Taylor dance. Golly.

Later, alligators.

Posted October 25, 1:51 AM

October 22, 2004

TT: Almanac

"While I still stood on the boat deck we ran into another belt of mist. The engines changed to slow and then to dead slow, and the fog-horn began dolefully sounding the half-minutes.

"In twenty minutes we were clear again, and running under the stars at full speed.

"I woke up several times in the night to hear the horn again sounding through the wet night air. It was a very dismal sound, premonitory, perhaps, of coming trouble, for Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long."

Evelyn Waugh, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal

Posted October 22, 12:07 PM

TT: Down for the count

I'm back from Minnesota, and I even made it home in time to see Mary Foster Conklin's show. I have tales to tell, but I'm worn out from parachuting into the Twin Cities, giving two speeches, then turning right around and coming back, and I didn't get nearly enough sleep last night. (Besides, I have to go to the ballet tonight!)

If you'll give me a chance to unpack my bag, open my mail, regroup, and take an extended nap, I'll be back later this afternoon with additional postings, and still more to come on Monday.

Thanks. See you soon.

Posted October 22, 9:53 AM

TT: Low Rent district

Time once again for my Wall Street Journal drama column. Today I reviewed Brooklyn, a new Broadway musical, and Trying, a new off-Broadway play.

Brooklyn was horrible:

Broadway has a new musical with that rarity of rarities, an original score. That's cause for rejoicing, right? Er...no. The fact that its songs were custom-written by Mark Schoenfeld and Barri McPherson is the only "original" thing about "Brooklyn: The Musical," which opened last night at the Plymouth Theatre. Otherwise, it's 100% recycled--from pure garbage.

"Brooklyn" is one of those shows that is better summarized than reviewed. Ray Klausen's set, a graffiti-encrusted street scene, contrives to be both rundown and adorably picturesque. The cast consists of five golden-voiced street singers similarly clad in ever-so-stylish rags and tatters. The leader of the pack (Cleavant Derricks) invites passers-by to pause for a moment and listen to the "sidewalk fairy tale" of Brooklyn (Eden Espinosa), a budding young pop singer from Paris who comes to America to search for her long-lost father (Kevin Anderson), a songwriter turned Vietnam vet turned smack-shooting vagrant. All she knows of him is an unfinished lullaby he wrote for his baby daughter, whose mother (Karen Olivo) taught it to her before committing suicide. This touching story sends her skyrocketing to the top of the charts, from which she dislodges Paradice (Ramona Keller), a you-go-girl ghetto diva who thereupon challenges Brooklyn to a winner-take-all singoff at Madison Square Garden, where--

Is that the sound of gagging I hear? Well, at least let me share with you some of "Brooklyn"'s lyrics, set to the kind of music I think of as Disney Soul: "There's a story behind these empty eyes/That no one wants to know...I used to sing at Christmas/Now Christmas makes me cry...Now once upon a time/Has never felt more right...Life is like a shooting star/And here is where it's falling." The book is of identical quality: "Oh, no, no, don'tchu worry 'bout me none, noooo, I'm just like these here weeds, sprouting right up through this concrete. Yeah, that's me alright...strong as a city weed." (That comes straight from the script, in case you were wondering.)

In short, we're talking "Rent" for the pre-school set, a molasses-coated piece of boob bait whose presence on Broadway, however temporary, is proof that musical-comedy standards never seem to hit rock-bottom--they just sink lower and lower....

(By the way, Ben Brantley of the New York Times is totally on the same page with me about Brooklyn. We even used a couple of closely similar metaphors! Take a look--it's interesting to contrast our approaches.)

Trying wasn't horrible, just trite, and was largely redeemed by a remarkable performance:

If you prefer your clichés spoken instead of sung, you can always go to the Promenade Theatre, where Fritz Weaver is starring in "Trying," a two-person play about the extreme old age of Francis Biddle, an upper-crust WASP from Philadelphia who switched parties and became Franklin Roosevelt's attorney general, thereby earning the perpetual loathing of his fellow Main Liners, for whom rock-ribbed Republicanism was a religion. (Nowadays, they'd have nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.)

Playwright Joanna McClelland Glass has worked long, hard and successfully to leach all traces of freshness out of "Trying," which is the octillionth retread of The One About the Grumpy Old Geezer and His Spunky Young Secretary. Fortunately, Mr. Weaver, who made his Broadway debut before I was born, is in infallibly fine form, and his performance as Judge Biddle should be videotaped and played for acting students as a priceless example of how to make a whole lot out of not much.

He gently caresses each line with an old-gold baritone voice unscarred by years of hard use; he underlines each ominous sign of oncoming senility with the lightest of touches. Above all, he suggests with uncanny specificity what it must feel like to stand at the threshold of eternity. Peering through his glasses at his address book, he says, "All the Bs are dead" (a great line, by the way--I wonder if Biddle really said it), then lifts his head to gaze at the fast-receding horizon of his youth. If that moment doesn't make you catch your breath, you must be watching some other show....

No link, and there's plenty more where that came from. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning's Journal, or subscribe to the online edition (an even better idea) by going here.

Posted October 22, 9:52 AM

OGIC: Life is good

I'm about to leave the office to spruce myself up to see Luciana Souza and Regina Carter perform at Symphony Center tonight. As if that weren't enough, I'll be heading out to the suburbs Sunday for one of Paul Taylor's too infrequent Chicago stopovers. What can I say? Sometimes I lead the life of Terry. Full reports on Monday.

Posted October 22, 5:00 AM

TT: Brideshead Revisited revisited

Here's something you probably don't know: Evelyn Waugh revised several of his novels, some quite extensively, when preparing the uniform edition of his books that was published in England in the early Sixties. Don't be embarrassed--many of Waugh's most ardent American fans are unaware of these revisions. The reason for their ignorance is that the editions of Waugh's novels that have circulated most widely in this country, the Little, Brown trade paperbacks, are straight reprints of the first American editions.

I mention this because I only just discovered that the Everyman's Library edition of Brideshead Revisited, the novel Waugh edited most ruthlessly, not only reprints the revised version but includes an introductory essay by Frank Kermode in which Waugh's changes are discussed at length and in detail.

Also included is the preface in which Waugh explained why he trimmed Brideshead:

In December 1943 I had the good fortune when parachuting to incur a minor injury which afforded me a rest from military service. This was extended by a sympathetic commanding officer, who let me remain unemployed until June 1944 when the book was finished. I wrote with a zest that was quite strange to me and also with impatience to get back to the war. It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster--the period of soya beans and Basic English--and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful. I have modified the grosser passages but have not obliterated them because they are an essential part of the book....

I knew about these changes but had never actually seen the revised version of Brideshead, so I picked up a copy of the Everyman's Library edition and read it day before yesterday en route to Minnesota. As I read, I found myself agreeing with Kermode: "On the whole most readers, I think, would agree that the purgation of the first version--not over-rigorous, for reasons Waugh suggests in his Preface--makes for improvement: the final version of the novel is preferable." My guess is that those who dislike the book intensely (as many readers do) won't find the revised version all that much more persuasive, but swing voters might well be nudged into the pro-Brideshead column by Waugh's shrewd pruning, while admirers will find it fascinating to see what he chose to cut.

On the other hand, I do admit to regretting the loss of certain delightfully ornate touches, especially in Waugh's description of Anthony Blanche, the character based on Harold Acton. Here is Blanche in the original version of Brideshead:

This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the "aesthete" par excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville, a young man who seemed to me, then, fresh from the sombre company of the College Essay Society, ageless as a lizard, as foreign as a Martian. He had been pointed out to me often in the streets, as he moved with his own peculiar stateliness, as though he had not fully accustomed himself to coat and trousers and was more at his ease in heavy, embroidered robes; I had heard his voice in the George challenging the conventions; and now meeting him, under the spell of Sebastian, I found myself enjoying him voraciously, like the fine piece of cookery he was.

And here he is in the revised version:

This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the "aesthete" par excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville. He had been pointed out to me often in the streets, as he pranced along with his high peacock tread; I had heard his voice in the George challenging the conventions; and now meeting him, under the spell of Sebastian, I found myself enjoying him voraciously.

I do think the second version is an improvement, but I miss those last eight words! It's as though Henry James had started with the New York Edition of The Portrait of a Lady, then edited it down to the original version. Remember his celebrated description of Caspar Goodwood's kiss? In the original, it was just one crisp sentence: "His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free." By the time of the New York Edition, it had mushroomed into a full paragraph:

His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession. So had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned she was free.

I'd say James got it right the second time, wouldn't you? Sometimes less is just...less. But not when it comes to the revised version of Brideshead Revisited, which I commend to your attention not only as a generally superior literary experience but also as a little-known chapter in the history of aesthetic second thoughts.

Posted October 22, 3:00 AM

TT: Your questions answered

- A music critic writes:

I was wondering if you could recommend a single Balanchine DVD to this scandalously ill-informed balletomoron.

You have two choices:

(1) Balanchine, on Kultur, is a first-rate, smartly written PBS documentary from the Eighties containing excerpts, some of them extended, from most of the major Balanchine ballets. Watching it on TV was what inspired me to go see New York City Ballet for the very first time.

(2) Nonesuch has just put out two DVDs called Choreography by Balanchine containing performances by New York City Ballet, overseen in the studio by Balanchine himself. Start with the one that contains The Four Temperaments and Stravinsky Violin Concerto. These performances, originally shown on PBS's Dance in America in the Seventies, introduced untold numbers of viewers to Balanchine. The visceral impact of theatrical dance can only be suggested on the small screen, but the Choreography by Balanchine telecasts were extremely well-directed and give a surprisingly good sense of what the ballets look like on stage. (The Balanchine documentary on Kultur contains snippets from most of these performances.)

Ideally, you should watch both DVDs, but my guess is that either one will at least pique your interest.

- A reader writes:

In thinking about your new book on George Balanchine, and your coverage of dance generally: could you display on the Web site, or provide a link to, a dance score? I'm sure most people have seen a music score, and know what music looks like written down. But I think few of us, me included, know what choreography looks like written down (at least I assume it's written down!). What does a dance look like on paper? I'm sure many of us would like to see what this looks like.

Gladly. To see an introductory example of dance notation, go to the Dance Notation Bureau's Web site, then click on the "Notation Basics" button in the left-hand column. You'll see a brief explanation of Labanotation, the most widely used form of dance notation. You can find out more about dance notation by exploring the rest of the site.

I should add, however, that choreographers themselves rarely if ever use dance notation. Most of them don't even know how to read Labanotation, much less write it. Instead, they demonstrate the successive moves of a dance to the dancers in the studio, and the finished product is documented by videotaping a complete performance. Notation comes later, if at all. Similarly, older dances are usually revived not by way of notated scores but through a show-and-tell process, with archival videotape available as a backup in case of memory lapses. This is why so many ballets of the past are now "lost": they were neither videotaped nor notated, and once they ceased to be performed on a regular basis, the steps were gradually forgotten.

Unlikely as it may sound, certain dancers are capable of carrying all the steps of a ballet in their heads, Fahrenheit 451-style, and teaching them to the members of a company that has never before performed it. Sometimes they may remember a dance better than the choreographer himself: Balanchine, for example, forgot the steps to Le Tombeau de Couperin after he made it, and it was only because Rosemary Dunleavy remembered them that the ballet was later revived and documented for posterity. (In return for this feat, Balanchine left Dunleavy the rights to Tombeau in his will.)

Posted October 22, 2:16 AM

TT: Unsolicited blurbs

From a jazz singer:

I am on the final pages...and in love with Balanchine...and though I have seen so little of his work, I know so much more.

From a modern-dance choreographer:

Your masterful way of clarifying the slippery matter of imagery in dances--ones with or without a plot--is particularly impressive, and learning more about Mr. B's life was fascinating.

From Library Journal:

A volume as sleek and elegant as the dancers in a Balanchine ballet. Intended as an introduction rather than a full-scale biography, this book goes right to the essence of the Balanchine aesthetic, offering artful observations and insightful commentaries on several of the master's pivotal works...

All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, now available in bookstores and on line.

Posted October 22, 2:06 AM

October 21, 2004

OGIC: Catching my eye

Around the blogosphere:

- In The Common Review, the magazine of the Great Books Foundation, editor Daniel Born makes a case for reading and teaching the not-quite-great books:

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, the story of a psychiatrist who marries one of his patients, receives less attention than it should because The Great Gatsby shines so brightly in the firmament. Tender Is the Night does not have the hypnotic symbolic power or poetically distilled form of Gatsby. It is not quite so well made. It is an example of that kind of novel that Henry James characterized as a "loose and baggy monster." All the same, it conveys emotions of loss and the breakdown of relationships that make it in some ways more of a human chronicle than is the perfect aesthetic artifact that is Gatsby.

I always felt that Tender Is the Night made more trouble for me as a reader than the more or less perfect Gatsby, and that trouble--at least at a certain time in my reading life--made it more interesting. I wish Born had said a bit more, both on this and some of his other points, but despite feeling truncated the piece is well worth reading. Thanks to Dust from a Distant Sun for the link.

- Ms. Tingle Alley unearths Mark Twain's incensed reaction to a Victorian biography of Percy Shelley, Edward Dowden's 1886 Life of Shelley. Dowden was much in Shelley's thrall and seems to have raised more eyebrows than just Twain's in brazenly defending the poet's monstrous behavior toward his first wife Harriet, who ended a suicide. Interestingly, Matthew Arnold registered the same objection to Dowden's exculpatory treatment of Shelley, though not nearly so acidly or entertainingly as Twain:

On the 9th of November 1816 Harriet Shelley left the house in Brompton where she was living, and did not return. On the 10th of December her body was found in the Serpentine; she had drowned herself. In one respect Professor Dowden resembles Providence: his ways are inscrutable. His comment on Harriet's death is: "There is no doubt, she wandered from the ways of upright living." But, he adds: "That no act of Shelley's during the two years which immediately preceded her death, tended to cause the rash act which brought her life to its close, seems certain." Shelley had been living with Mary [Wollstonecraft Shelley] all the time; only that!

I can't go into detail about it just now, but I have a pet theory that the narrator of Henry James's 1888 novella The Aspern Papers was partly modeled on Dowden. I'm hoping Carrie's find may give me more ammo. Whether it does or no, it's still Twain, and fine reading.

Posted October 21, 4:06 AM

OGIC: Fits of giggles

Law prof blogger Ann Althouse has a keen eye for the absurd. She writes here about discovering that the DVD of the flesh-eating-zombie flick 28 Days Later (a movie I rather liked) includes:

Alternative theatrical ending with optional commentary
Alternative ending with optional commentary
Radical alternative ending with optional commentary

I don't think I liked it quite that much.

Previously, Ms. Althouse delighted me with her inspired time-saving dinner idea.

Posted October 21, 1:40 AM

October 20, 2004

TT: Points west

No more blogging from me today or tomorrow. I'm flying to Minneapolis at lunchtime to speak about the future of classical radio at a workshop for radio producers that's being hosted by Minnesota Public Radio's Classical Music Initiative. It should be fun, and I expect I'll post some of the speech on my return.

On Thursday night I'll be heading straight from the airport to Mama Rose's to hear Mary Foster Conklin sing "Under the Covers: A Tribute to Peggy Lee's Mirrors." That's something I don't normally do (to put it mildly!), but I'm a big fan of Conklin's and don't want to miss the gig, so I figure I can hump my garment bag for an extra hour or two before staggering home. You come, too.

(For more information, go here.)

See you bright and early Friday morning, unless I sleep late.

Posted October 20, 12:14 PM

TT: Almanac

"Sol Hurok, who had assembled the Kabuki company, was the most exuberant and confident impresario of any I ever met. I hardly knew him then, but later, in New York, I met him with David [Webster] and found that his stories of the past--'Once, when I was in Paris with Ysaye, Busoni was going after dinner to accompany Melba and Chaliapin in some songs..."--however unlikely, were all true. Hurok had known everybody, and had represented half of them. He had become an institution in New York, and David told me he was once there when Hurok said, 'Can't you stay on a day? On Thursday I have my annual party for the critics--champagne and caviar and all that.' David asked him why he bothered; he could hardly expect them to give him a good notice rather than a bad one merely because he gave a party for them. 'Of course not,' said Hurok. 'But there are two ways of writing a bad notice.'"

The Tongs and the Bones: The Memoirs of Lord Harewood

Posted October 20, 12:10 PM

OGIC: Five sure signs of recovery from stomach flu

1. First cup of coffee in five days tastes wonderful
2. Notion of broth and/or toast repulsive
3. Eating small pizza for dinner takes 6.5 minutes
4. Miller or not, beer with dinner is best beer ever
5. Cupcake dessert, cupcakes!

Posted October 20, 10:28 AM

OGIC: Paperback crush

Go you now and feast your eyes on one of the most well-realized and gorgeous web sites I've seen in a long time, The Paperback Revolution. Why should you care? As the site says:

It is difficult to overestimate the influence of the paperback upon the twentieth century. While paper-bound books have numerous historical antecedents -- from chapbooks, penny dreadfuls and dime novels to pulp magazines to European paper-bound books such as the Everyman series, Tauchnitz Editions and Albatross -- it was the twenty-five cent paperback and the hundreds of millions of books produced during the Paperback Revolution which transformed the reading of all kinds of literature into an undeniably mass phenomenon in the twentieth century.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, I've long been enamored of mass-market paperbacks from a certain vintage. Of course the Anchor editions with the Edward Gorey drawings, which I hoard like rubies, are special. But even items like my rather hideously illustrated 1950s paperback Liberal Imagination somehow touch me. Perhaps this paperback love is more than just the unbridled nostalgia I've always taken it for. Maybe it has to do too with the assumptions inherent in the very physical form these books take: that Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, Joseph Conrad, and Herman Melville were in mass demand by people of ordinary means and could be thought of as everyday reading. Today's Oxford and Penguin Classics, while offering writers like Conrad and Melville, don't convey quite the same invitation to reading, or the same faith in an enthusiastic reading public of some size. With their wearisome uniform designs and batteries of prefaces and documentation, they seem resigned to lives of course adoption and captive audiences. Not so much as picking up a little finger to sell themselves, they tend to limit their own audiences to the initiated and the coerced. To me this makes them, compared with their snazzier counterparts from the Revolutionary era, vaguely depressing.

In any case, the thing I love best about the amazing Paperback Revolution website is its loving attention to the look and feel of paperbacks produced from 1935 to 1960. Do not miss the Virtual Paperback Rack. That's the catnip for the sensualists among us, while you more analytical and historical types will be equally diverted by the Animated Paperback Timeline, launchable here.

This site is so cool, I feel like I've done my good deed for the day just linking to it. Enjoy, and don't thank me--thank the ever-indispensble Coudal Partners, who posted the link a whole week ago.

Posted October 20, 4:37 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"I dutifully read The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, with no sense whatsoever of the irony involved in dutifully reading a novel about the dangers of being thoughtlessly dutiful."

Erin O'Connor, today at Critical Mass

Posted October 20, 2:12 AM

October 19, 2004

OGIC: Flu's my daddy*

It smacked me down Saturday night, and I've been walking a monotonous circuit from bed to couch ever since. Thank goodness for OFOB, who has been on 24-hour call; Ned, who brought juice and The Hockey News (with Yzerman on the cover, no less!); and sweet, sweet television,* because I haven't even been up to reading a good thriller (though Terry has, from the looks of his latest Almanac).

Tomorrow morning I'll make every effort to get my achy, emptied self to work. Second thing on the agenda is blogging; I do have several posts in mind, but at the moment my head just feels too stuffed with buckshot to make much of them: I'm for bed. Look for me back around these parts in the late afternoon or evening, barring a total relapse.

*And you can guess what I've mostly been watching. Hey, these half-day-long baseball games are a real boon to the couch-bound and hockey-deprived. (A wee demographic, I grant you.)

Posted October 19, 12:42 PM

TT: Almanac

"Depression was a sickness, they told him. The previous year he had been worried enough by symptoms of physical illness to visit his doctor and had come away with a series of warnings and prohibitions concerning diet, alcohol, tobacco--the usual nonsense. But paradoxically his efforts to comply had led him inexorably to ask himself why he was bothering; what was so bloody marvellous about this life he was trying to preserve. Such metaphysical speculations were entirely foreign to his make-up and their formulation now was light years from being precise and intellectual. It was just a feeling of hollowness at the centre, a reluctance to awaken from the safe blackness of sleep, a sense of life like a hair floating on dirty bath water, sinking imperceptibly, moment by moment, till a final, spinning gurgling rush carried it away."

Reginald Hill, An April Shroud

Posted October 19, 12:00 PM

October 18, 2004

TT: Now playing

Bedtime impends. I just listened via iTunes to "Gotta Dance," a nifty little swing tune from The Jimmy Giuffre 3, and now I'm going to wind down with Couperin's "Mysterious Barricades," played by Göran Söllscher on his eleven-string guitar.

I have a lot of writing to do today and Tuesday, and Our Girl reports that she's been knocked flat by the flu, so blogging may be spotty for a bit. In any case, I'm headed for Minneapolis on Wednesday to give a couple of speeches, so I can guarantee that you won't hear from me on Wednesday and Thursday.

Later.

Posted October 18, 12:10 PM

TT: Risky business

A reader writes:

I'm halfway through your book. It's fabulous. Yes, why is dance considered the black sheep of the arts? Too feminine? Too sensitive? Too demanding? Or too impossibly brilliant to absorb?

He's referring to this passage from the first chapter of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine:

Within the tight little world of dance, of course, he is a titan....But what of the larger world of art and culture? New York City Ballet no longer gets written about much in the national press, nor does it appear on television. I know few art-conscious Manhattanites who go to its performances more than sporadically--or to any other dance performances, for that matter. Nowadays, there are no "hot tickets" in dance, no events that attract the attention of a truly general audience, and few at which artists from other fields are likely to be seen. For the most part, ballet and modern dance have retreated to the periphery of American cultural consciousness, just as dance criticism has all but vanished from the pages of American magazines; you don't have to know who Balanchine was, or what he did, in order to be deemed culturally literate. Most of my acquaintances regard my love of dance as a harmless idiosyncrasy, and when I assure them that Balanchine was every bit as important as, say, Matisse, they look at me as though I'd tried to tell them that Raymond Chandler was as important as Proust....

Why is that? My correspondent offers several possible answers:

- Too feminine? Of course dance is widely perceived as feminine--not to mention effeminate. But nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to George Balanchine, whose ballets are mostly about women as seen from a man's decidedly partial point of view. (Nor, I might add, is there anything effeminate about the work of such modern-dance choreographers as Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham.)

I always tell straight men puzzled by my interest in ballet that it was made for them, consisting as it does of large numbers of gorgeous women dressed in skimpy outfits. So far, though, I have yet to make any converts....

- Too sensitive? Maybe. Dance is, after all, a form of lyric theater, one in which emotions are portrayed on stage with a subtle blend of directness and ambiguity. This makes some people squirm--the same ones, I suspect, who are thrown by the fact that in opera, the characters sing instead of talking. Alas, I doubt there's anything to be done for such hopelessly hard-headed folk, but I also doubt that most potential dancegoers feel that way.

- Too demanding? Now we're getting somewhere. Any number of the friends I now take to the ballet used to be afraid that even if they did get up the nerve to go, they wouldn't understand what they were seeing. This is nonsense on stilts. You don't have to know what a gargouillade is in order to enjoy Square Dance. You don't have to know anything at all. The pleasure--at first glance, anyway--is entirely sensuous. You let the music and movement wash over you, and the more you look, the more you see. Of course experience deepens the pleasure. (In the words of R.P. Blackmur, "All knowledge is a descent from the paradise of undifferentiated sensation.") But I took most of the dedicatees of All in the Dances to their first Balanchine ballets, and watched them "get it" right on the spot.

Intellectuals typically feel more comfortable about experiencing a new art form if they know a little something about it going in. One of the reasons why I wrote All in the Dances was to give them enough information to orient themselves--but it's strictly optional. As I've told a thousand nervous novices, "Point your head toward the stage and keep your eyes open. That's all you need to know."

- Too impossibly brilliant to absorb? Well, sometimes. Such Balanchine ballets as The Four Temperaments or Stravinsky Violin Concerto are so eventful, so tightly packed with complex movement, that they can overwhelm the first-time viewer. And you know what? They're supposed to. Nobody in the world could possibly see all there is to see in The Four Ts on a first viewing, any more than he could hear all there is to hear in The Rite of Spring on a first listening. You see it, you're blown away, your head is so full of dazzling images that you can't remember any of them clearly...and there's something wrong with this?

Remember that dance, like music and painting, is not an essentially intellectual art form. Of course it can exert an intellectual appeal (especially on intellectuals), and the more you know about it, the more you'll appreciate it, but enjoyment of the immediate experience doesn't require the participation of the higher brain centers. As the saying goes, dance hits you where you live--and some people, oddly enough, don't like to be hit there. Perhaps the prospect of surrendering control of their feelings makes them anxious. Me, I eat it up and yell for more. As Arlene Croce once said, "I never saw a good ballet that made me think." Afterwards, yes: I do plenty of thinking, not infrequently followed by writing. But not in the theater, not in the moment, not when the lights go down and the curtain goes up. That's when I want to be blown away--and that's what a good dance does.

P.S. Our Girl in Chicago is one of the dedicatees of All in the Dances, as well as a full-fledged intellectual. What do you think of all this, OGIC? How does it tally with your own experience of dance?

Posted October 18, 12:08 PM

TT: Words to the wise

I was going to write about New York City Opera's new production of Dialogues of the Carmelites, Francis Poulenc's masterpiece, but it seems that Bernard Holland, writing in the New York Times, already said much of what I wanted to say:

"Dialogues of the Carmelites" is a meditation on death by men on the far side of middle age, contemplating their own mortality. The story of 16 nuns guillotined by French revolutionaries in 1794 is true. Georges Bernanos, in his play 150 years later, used history to confront his own terminal cancer. Francis Poulenc, six years from his own death in 1963 and witness to the slow dying of his closest friend, took up the thread in this chaste and touching opera....

The paradox of composer and theme hardly needs to be restated: Poulenc, the dashing boulevardier and tasteful sentimentalist; these 18th-century women of the church confronting the fear and exultation of martyrdom. Poulenc succeeds by being himself. There are the floating, open textures of his lighthearted period, the same gentle mockery devoid of cynicism, the melodies colored by popular culture and the harmonic gestures closer to Nelson Riddle than to tragic Verdi.

Indeed, in its pursuit of disagreeable profundities, Poulenc's music resists heaviness. As it examines the dying and their various executioners, a certain innocence--a naïveté born of great sophistication--remains. Poulenc reminds us a little of the juggler of Christian lore plying his carnival skills as an offering at the altar.

On Tuesday Donald Eastman's set came as a welcome relief from the overstuffed beauties of the Metropolitan Opera's new "Magic Flute" a few days before. The quarters of the old Marquis (Jake Gardner) are draped in blood red. Elsewhere, there are a masonry wall, two long tables and a chair. There are no tricks. Virtually nothing moves.

"Dialogues" is an opera for women; men's voices are almost intrusions. Mr. Thompson must deal with a female ensemble trained first as singers, then as actors. Some are more convincing than others, but a lot of the visceral terrors and happinesses come through....George Manahan's pit orchestra had a particularly good night.

To which I would add only that the score of Poulenc's harrowing parable of faith, fear, and grace is more than merely pretty. He also mixed in a gritty scoopful of Stravinsky (including a startling near-verbatim quotation from Symphonies of Wind Instruments), thereby sharpening the contrast between the world and the cloister and underlining the opera's already fascinating duality of tone.

Those who recall the iconic monumentality of John Dexter's 1977 Metropolitan Opera production (or its two subsequent revivals) will naturally wonder how New York City Opera's version stands up to comparison. The answer is that it holds its own quite well. To be sure, Dexter's Dialogues was one of the great theatrical experiences of my lifetime, while Tazewell Thompson's straightforward, uncluttered staging is merely very effective. Still, it works, and the opera itself comes through with complete clarity--which is, after all, the point.

Dialogues plays in repertory at the New York State Theater through October 29. For more information, go here.

Posted October 18, 12:05 PM

TT: Adventures in blurbland

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a story about blurbs last month (the free link has gone dead, but Galley Cat posted the gist of the piece here) in which Scott Turow, who has long been known in the book business as something of a blurb whore, was quoted to devastating effect:

"Once you blurb one book," he says, "it's like giving to charity. No good deed goes unpunished. That is the first law of blurbing. As soon as you're kind enough to do this for somebody, then everybody in the world is there with their hand out or a manuscript."...

"You have to understand, this is an avalanche," Turow says of his onslaught, which he smilingly agrees is indeed "part of my junk mail." "It is no exaggeration," he adds, "to say that there are several requests every day."...

"There are certain relationships where, whether I like it or not, I feel like I've gotta say something," he admits. "Now, I think you can put Turow blurbs side by side and the discriminating reader can detect the enthusiasm level."

Turow's confession slipped past me when it first rippled through the blogosphere, but now that I've seen it, I admit to feeling a certain amount of sympathy with his plight. Not that multiple requests for blurbs clutter my mailbox each morning, but I am asked to supply quotes fairly frequently, occasionally from friends and colleagues, more often from publicists and authors I don't know. Every time I open such a letter, I remember the wise words of an editor of mine who once assured me in a moment of candor that blurbs don't sell books. "You know who they're really for?" she added. "Our own salespeople. We use blurbs to convince them that our books are worth selling."

A sobering thought, that.

I have, thank God, reached the point in my writing career when I'm no longer obliged to go snuffling for blurbs. (It's almost as embarrassing as asking a friend to loan you money.) My publishers now solicit them without consulting me, and Ken Auletta was kind enough to supply a nice one for The Skeptic that Harcourt recycled for All in the Dances: "Terry Teachout is the kind of tour guide a first-rate biography requires--vivid storytelling by a guide who is both appreciative and independent." I'm not aware that it's sold a single copy to date of either book, but nobody ever said that publishing was a business--it's more like a game of blindfold darts--so I expect that Ken's blurb will follow me from dustjacket to dustjacket as long as we both shall live.

My own blurbing policies are straightforward:

- I don't read manuscripts--they're too bulky and clumsy to handle. Unsolicited ones I throw away automatically. It's rude to send an unsolicited manuscript to an author you don't know, and rudeness should never be rewarded.

- When strangers send me a set of bound galleys and ask for a quote, I almost always say no, explaining that I'm simply too busy. If the subject matter is of special relevance to me, though, I'll take a furtive peek at the first few pages, after which I usually lose interest.

- With colleagues and acquaintances I open the bidding by raising my all-purpose deflector shield: "Remember that if I blurb your book now, there's no possibility that I can review it later on." Since I do a fair amount of book reviewing, this usually stops them cold, and also has the advantage of being true. If, on the other hand, I'm interested in the book but know I won't be able to review it--usually because of a conflict of interest--I agree to look at the galleys.

- I always agree to blurb the books of friends, so long as they're professional writers. Unlike Scott Turow, I've yet to be cornered into praising a bad book. (Sooner or later, every published author lets his guard down and agrees to read a manuscript by a friend who isn't a professional. Hard experience has taught me that such manuscripts are never, ever any good.)

Bill Buckley used to have a wonderfully evasive form letter that I liked:

Mr. Buckley has asked me to interdict all requests for interviews, articles, reviews, etc., for the next period--probably about six months, as he is drastically in arrears on commitments he has already made. I hope you will understand that to take on any further commitments at this point simply means failing to keep those he has already made. Thank you for writing.

Edmund Wilson, who was one of God's grumpier souls, opted instead for a postcard that read as follows:

Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to:
Read manuscripts,
Write articles or books to order,
Write forewords or introductions,
Make statements for publicity purposes,
Do any kind of editorial work,
Judge literary contests,
Give interviews,
Conduct educational courses,
Deliver lectures,
Give talks or make speeches,
Broadcast or appear on television,
Take part in writers' congresses,
Answer questionnaires,
Contribute to or take part in symposiums or "panels" of any kind,
Contribute manuscripts for sales,
Donate copies of his books to libraries,
Autograph works for strangers,
Allow his name to be used on letterheads,
Supply personal information about himself,
Supply opinions on literary or other subjects.

Evelyn Waugh had a Wilsonesque postcard of his own ("Mr. Evelyn Waugh deeply regrets that he is unable to do what is so kindly proposed"), but he could occasionally be persuaded to supply blurbs, usually for friends and/or fellow Catholics. Strangers rarely fared as well.

In 1961, for instance, Waugh sent this characteristic letter to a Simon & Schuster publicist who was looking for blurbs in all the wrong places:

Thank you for sending me Catch-22. I am sorry that the book fascinates you so much. It has many passages quite unsuitable to a lady's reading. It suffers not only from indelicacy but from prolixity. It should be cut by about a half. In particular the activities of "Milo" should be eliminated or greatly reduced.

You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches--often repetitious--totally without structure.

Much of the dialogue is funny.

You may quote me as saying: "This exposure of corruption, cowardice and incivility of American officers will outrage all friends of your country (such as myself) and greatly comfort your enemies."

Me, I'd have printed it, but Simon & Schuster thought otherwise.

Posted October 18, 12:04 PM

TT: Local color

Said at dinner the other night by a friend who recently moved to New York:

"The trouble with living here is that whenever you feel lonely, the very next thing you run into is a cellist in the subway station."

Posted October 18, 12:03 PM

TT: You don't know all, sir, you don't know all

My old friend Joan McCaffrey (whose e-mail address recently vanished from my address book, in case anybody who knows it wants to help me out) was cleaning out a closet the other day and came across an H.L. Mencken piece hitherto unknown to me. Vanity Fair (the old Vanity Fair, that is) asked Mencken to contribute to a 1923 symposium called "The Ten Dullest Authors." I regret to say that I overlooked it when researching The Skeptic, so I've decided to post Mencken's contribution on "About Last Night" for the retrospective delectation of my readers.

* * *

It is hard for me to make up a list of books or authors that bore me insufferably, for the simple truth is that I can read almost anything. My trade requires me to read annually all the worst garbage that is issued in belles lettres; for recreation and instruction I read such things as the Congressional Record, religious tracts, Mr. Walter Lippmann's endless discussions of the Simon-Binet tests, works on molecular physics and military strategy, and the monthly circulars of the great bond houses. It seems to me that nothing that gets into print can be wholly uninteresting; whatever its difficulties to the reader, it at least represents some earnest man's efforts to express himself. But there are some authors, of course, who try me more than most, and if I must name ten of them then I name:

1. Dostoevski
2. George Eliot
3. D.H. Lawrence
4. James Fenimore Cooper
5. Eden Phillpotts
6. Robert Browning
7. Selma Lagerlöf
8. Gertrude Stein
9. Björnstjerne Björnson
10. Goethe

As a good German, I should, I suppose, wallow happily in Faust; I can only report that, when I read it, it is patriotically, not voluptuously. Dostoevski, for some reason that I don't know, simply stumps me; I have never been able to get through any of his novels. George Eliot I started to read too young, and got thereby a taste against her that is unsound but incurable. Against Cooper and Browning I was prejudiced by school-masters who admired them. Phillpotts seems to me the worst novelist now in practice in England. As for Lawrence and Miss Stein, what makes them hard reading for me is simply the ineradicable conviction that beneath all their pompous manner there is nothing but tosh. The two Scandinavians I need not explain.

Posted October 18, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Small inward treasure does he possess who, to feel alive, needs every hour the tumult of the street, the emotion of the theatre, and the small talk of society."

Santiago Ramon y Cajál (epigraph to the Jerome Robbins-Leonard Bernstein ballet Facsimile)

Posted October 18, 12:00 PM

October 15, 2004

TT: Just curious

A question for anyone who's read Philip Roth's The Plot Against America: is H.L. Mencken mentioned anywhere therein?

UPDATE: A reader writes: "No Mencken, but plenty of Winchell."

I may blog about this next week....

Posted October 15, 12:58 PM

TT: Up to snuff

Braglet: Our Girl and I have been updating the right-hand column (including the Top Fives) more or less regularly for the past couple of weeks, as well as emptying our blogmailboxes every day or so.

Gold stars for us!

Posted October 15, 12:57 PM

TT: Sometimes it's bad to be the king

I reviewed Richard III, Bryony Lavery's Last Easter, and the Manhattan Theatre Club's revival of Craig Lucas' Reckless in this morning's Wall Street Journal.

Richard III is a bit of of a one-man show, but a good one:

Peter Dinklage, who has never before played a major Shakespearean part, takes on one of the biggest, juiciest ones in the Public Theater's new production of "Richard III," and emerges cum laude, if not quite summa. At first glance it may look like a piece of trick casting, with Mr. Dinklage, who is a dwarf (his word), playing the hunchbacked killer-king who'll do anything to anyone in order to get ahead. But the star of "The Station Agent" is no theatrical stuntman. He's a magnetic, eye-grabbing actor who just happens to be four-foot-five, and when he strides from the wings, glowers into the middle distance and announces that "I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion...am determined to prove a villain," you can all but hear the audience shuddering with prospective dread....

To be sure, his inexperience in classical repertory can't be overlooked. He's not always comfortable with Shakespeare's verse, which he sometimes articulates overcarefully, and the upper register of his dark, grainy bass-baritone voice is barely developed. (If you want to hear what a real classical actor sounds like, take note of Isa Thomas' awesome Queen Margaret.) Perhaps his performance is best regarded for now as a work in progress--but oh, the places he'll go!

Unlike most of my critical brethren, I gave a rave to Last Easter:

Bryony Lavery, the British playwright who hit the jackpot last season with "Frozen," crapped out when she was accused of plagiarizing part of that mesmerizing play about a serial killer. (A settlement is reportedly in the works.) Undaunted by the hullabaloo, MCC Theater is now presenting Ms. Lavery's "Last Easter," the printed script of which anxiously credits every possible source, up to and including "the wonderful jokers who told me all the jokes." No matter where she got the jokes, "Last Easter," which runs through Oct. 23 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, is thoroughly watchable, acted by a fine cast and given a pitch-perfect staging by Doug Hughes (who also directed "Frozen").

Like "Frozen," "Last Easter" is a problem play that uses its hot topic--euthanasia--as a means, not an end. It's about June (Veanne Cox), Gash (Jeffrey Carlson), Leah (Clea Lewis) and Joy (Florencia Lozano), four theatrical types who communicate exclusively in brittle, witty repartée, a mode of discourse inadequate to the news that June is dying of breast cancer. Ms. Lavery's interest is in what happens to her flippant characters when they're forced to grapple openly with emotions they'd rather smother, and she writes about their struggle with a barbed wit that chops away much (though not all) of "Last Easter"'s potential sentimentality...

Everybody is good in "Last Easter," but I want to single out Clea Lewis, who endows her adorable-sidekick part with freshness and charm. Winsome can be irksome, but not when Ms. Lewis is dishing it up.

Reckless, alas, got the back of my hand:

Mary-Louise Parker plays Rachel, a revoltingly cheery housewife given to "euphoria attacks" whose husband (Thomas Sadowski) hires a hit man to kill her on Christmas Eve (I would have done the same thing), thus forcing her to keep house with Lloyd (Michael O'Keefe), a social worker whose wife Pooty (Rosie Perez) is pretending to be a paraplegic deaf-mute. The ensuing hijinks are played for screwball comedy, and I heard a certain amount of laughter ricocheting around the theater, so somebody must have found them funny. Alas, I wasn't on Mr. Lucas' wavelength, nor did I respond to his predictable swerve into phony profundity at play's end. Instead, I just sat there and squirmed....

No link. To read the whole thing, go out and buy the damn paper (or click here for a shortcut).

Posted October 15, 12:05 PM

TT: Out of the past

No, this isn't another posting about film noir. I just got back from the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, where I heard a set by Sandy Stewart and Bill Charlap that I expect to stay with me for a long, long time.

Stewart is an old pro who slipped between the cracks during the transition from Sinatra-style pop to Beatles-style rock (she got her big break a century or two ago on Perry Como's TV show). As for her pianist, she said all that needed to be said when she introduced him as "the best of the best...my son." They played the Oak Room together last fall to delightful and memorable effect, and for their return engagement they're offering a program of such ultra-standard standards as "Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe," "Just in Time," and "Nobody Else but Me." No cutesy-pie surprises, in other words, nor is there anything eccentric or offbeat about Stewart's uncomplicatedly beautiful singing. Her warm, secure contralto is a shining example of what a singer who lives on her interest instead of squandering her capital can hope to sound like on the far side of middle age. I know plenty of junior-miss vocalists who'd kill to be able to draw out a long, fine-spun pianissimo phrase the way Stewart can. As for her understated but eloquent way with a lyric, it occasionally reminded me of Mabel Mercer--with chops. "Thanks for the singing lesson," I told her after the show, and she smiled knowingly.

My escort was a singer who is lucky enough to know what it feels like to be accompanied by Bill Charlap, an experience she summed up in five heartfelt words: "He's the best there is." The only catch is that if you don't give of your best all night long, he'll reach over and eat your lunch right off your plate. His playing on "Dancing on the Ceiling," for all its self-effacing discretion, was so precise and concentrated that a lesser singer would have vanished in the glow of its iridescent harmonies. It's a tribute to Sandy Stewart that she glided serenely atop them as though she were sliding down a rainbow.

Stewart and Charlap are at the Oak Room through Saturday. If you've never heard cabaret there, you can't imagine what you're missing. As I wrote a few years ago in a profile of Wesla Whitfield:

What makes the Oak Room so special? Obviously, the singers who perform there are the heart of the matter, though the room itself contributes significantly to the effect they make. Cabaret is an intimate art, and the 80-seat Oak Room, with its amber sconces and red velvet banquettes, is as up close and personal as a love seat at midnight: there is no finer place to listen to songs of passion and despair. "It's nice singing in a room this small," Whitfield says, "because I get feedback from the people. I know what works--and what doesn't work. When they're bored, you can hear them scrunching up their toes in their shoes. You can get that kind of response in a larger room, but it's very slow, and very limited."

Go, if there's still room. For more information, click here.

Posted October 15, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"I have only read Proust in translation. I thought he began well but went dotty half way through like J Joyce in Ulysses. No plan. Nancy [Mitford] says it is uproariously funny throughout & only English & Americans treat it as anything superior to P.G. Wodehouse."

Evelyn Waugh, letter to Margaret FitzHerbert (Aug. 9, 1964)

Posted October 15, 12:01 PM

TT: One to dream on

I'm up too late, still buzzing from hearing Sandy Stewart and Bill Charlap at the Algonquin. To tranquilize myself preliminary to rapid eye movement, I'm now listening, courtesy of iTunes, to Luciana Souza's "Doce de Coco," from Brazilian Duos. Mmmmm....

Later.

Posted October 15, 1:23 AM

October 14, 2004

TT: Almanac

"‘It is an interesting thing,' said Spruce, ‘but very few of the great masters of trash aimed low to start with. Most of them wrote sonnet sequences in youth. Look at Hall Caine--the protégé of Rossetti--and the young Hugh Walpole emulating Henry James. Dorothy Sayers wrote religious verse. Practically no one ever sets out to write trash. Those that do don't get very far.'"

Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

Posted October 14, 12:00 PM

TT: Guarantee

A reader writes:

I appreciate your reviews and your guidance. I must also say that I am so surprised that I agree with you so frequently because my politics are very different.

I hear this kind of thing a lot, by e-mail as well as face to face, and I never quite know what to say in response. I'm sometimes tempted to reply, "I know you think you're paying me a compliment, and I appreciate your good intentions, but I wish you'd take a closer look at what you just said. I'm surprised that anybody who thinks the way you do about politics could possibly think the way I do about art. Isn't that what you meant? If so, it's not complimentary, it's condescending. Besides, my aesthetic views aren't governed by my political views. Why should they be? Are yours?"

If this blog has a credo, it is that the personal is not political. Anyone who believes it to be, or tries to persuade other people that it is, will find no comfort here. Needless to say, my own political views are far from secret (or simple), but I check them at the door of "About Last Night." I think it's important that there be at least one politics-free space in the blogosphere where people who love art can read about it--and nothing else.

Beyond that, I believe deeply that art and politics are essentially separate enterprises. Essentially, I say, and I chose that word carefully. Of course an artist who lives under a totalitarian regime cannot help but engage with it in some way or other, as Dmitri Shostakovich did in his music. But it's one thing to seek to evoke the terror of life under Stalin in a symphony and another to write a novel (or paint a painting or choreograph a ballet) whose purpose, whether in part or whole, is to encourage its audience to take some specific form of political action. To do that, as Kingsley Amis has argued, is to compromise the very essence of one's art:

Everywhere in the world literature is in retreat from politics and unless resisted the one will crush the other. You don't crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish, though as we've all seen you can make a big fuss and have a lot of fun trying. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes...

I can't say it often enough: first comes experience, then understanding. I don't think Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony is a great piece of music because it's tonal--I think tonality is valid because it is the basis for great pieces of music like Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony. No more would I allow my response to a work of art to be conditioned by my political convictions. If anything, it's the other way round: my experience of reality, which includes the reality of art, is the ultimate source of my philosophy, from which my political convictions spring. In art, experience is truth, and there is no greater sin than to say, "I know I liked that novel when I first read it, but it can't be good because it's inconsistent with my theory of fiction, so I guess I won't like it anymore." That's the trouble with political art and politicized criticism: they start with theory instead of experience. I can't think of a more efficient way to make bad art.

The only time I engage with political issues as a critic is when I'm covering specifically political art, and even then I always try to start with the immediate experience. Did the play I just saw excite me? Was I moved? Puzzled? Bored? In my experience, most political plays tend to be boring, precisely because the political playwright voluntarily places himself in an ideological straitjacket and thus is rendered incapable of responding freely to the call of inspiration. That leaves me with nothing to talk about but his beliefs, which then become fair game for fisking. On the other hand, I don't want to write about plays like that, and given the choice I won't waste time going to see them in the first place. They're too predictable, and usually too smug as well. (In my lexicon of critical invective, "smug" is the supreme pejorative, worse even than "dull.")

I'm as imperfect as the next guy, and no doubt I've written a few reviews in which I let my political opinions color my critical responses. But I don't think it happens very often. I can't tell you, for instance, how many of my readers are surprised to discover how much I love the films of John Sayles (which at their best seem to me a touchstone of how "political" themes can be treated in an unpoliticized, open-minded way) or the dances of Mark Morris. A fellow critic whom I admire recently described me as "a strong personality--and spectacularly unpredictable." I myself wouldn't put it that way: I don't think unpredictability is a virtue in and of itself, just as I don't think my aesthetic opinions are arbitrary. Still, I know what he means, and I treasure the compliment, in part because it is a compliment and not condescension in disguise.

My criticism comes with a warranty: I can't promise that you'll like what I like, but I do promise that I like what I like--and not because I think I ought to, either.

Posted October 14, 5:40 AM

OGIC: Writing the war

Aleksandar Hemon wrote yesterday in Slate about the NEA's Operation Homecoming project, which aims to get soldiers returning from service in the Middle East together with authors like Bobbie Ann Mason and Mark Bowden and writing about their experiences there. Hemon's piece seems off-target and, just below the surface, unhelpfully territorial about the arts. Hemon fears Dana Gioia's innovative program will turn out nothing but patriotic fables, and he seems to wish to pre-emptively discredit the participating soldiers' work on this basis. His fear seems unwarranted, though, by anything the NEA has said about the project:

It is impossible to predict what stories will appear in this anthology. Much of it may be personal in importance -- a soldier's or spouse's attempt to capture and clarify a singularly challenging moment in life. Some of it may rise to literature -- vivid accounts of experience that arrest the reader's attention and linger in the memory. All of it will have historical value as the testimony of men and women who saw the events directly. Operation Homecoming will capture these individual accounts and preserve them for the public record. American letters will be richer for their addition. [my emphasis]

Surely we should wait to judge the program until we see what fruit it bears, no? To my ear, Hemon's piece seems directed less at appraising the potential of the project than at making extra-literary arguments about the U.S. in Iraq. Without actually considering any writing that has come out of them, Hemon treats the workshops as little more than a suspicious-looking arm of an administration he loathes. The whole piece seems animated by paranoia--"What is the real purpose of the project?"--and possessiveness.

Nathalie Chicha is raising excellent questions about some of the dubious literary premises of Hemon's argument over at Galley Cat:

Hemon's claim reminds of me Stanley Crouch's recent (and widely reviled) attack on The Plot Against America for focusing on anti-Semitism instead of "the brutal anti-black bigotry that actually existed." As a letter-writer put it: "The cheapest shot a critic can take is to criticize an author for the book he didn't write." To return to Hemon's contention that "any account ... that does not include testimonies of ... Iraqis cannot avoid being a lie," I have to ask: is any story, by this criteria, not a lie?

Well, now that you mention it, no. And it's odd that such a practiced and decorated novelist would contend such a thing. If fiction and criticism since James has obsessed over any single literary issue (fantastically productively sometimes, into dead ends at other times), it has to be the inescapability of point of view. A point of view is not a lie unless it pretends to be objective, and Operation Homecoming looks to all appearances to be encouraging self-conscious subjectivity (I've never known a writing workshop that didn't). My guess is that when reviewing a personal narrative, whether essay or novel, by an established author, Hemon would never dream of making so naive a demand as that she present all sides of the story. So why would he impose it on these men and women? We twenty-first century readers know enough to read their accounts as points of view; in fact, that's exactly what will make them valuable.

Nathalie, by the way, is looking for reader feedback on the Hemon piece. Email her at galleycat@mediabistro.com.

UPDATE: Old Hag and Ms. Tingle Alley, in Old Hag's comments, throw in their own four cents.

Posted