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November 30, 2004

TT: Bobbing for e-mail

It remains the policy of this blog to answer all correspondence that does not recommend anatomical impossibilities. (Sometimes an occasional e-mail does slip through the cracks, but that's strictly accidental.) If you haven't heard from me lately, though, please be patient. I'm chipping away at the accumulated contents of my e-mailbag, more or less randomly, but I doubt I'll get everything answered for another couple of weeks. Keep reading and you'll see why.

In the meantime, thanks as always for writing. It's very much appreciated, and that goes for Our Girl, too.

Posted November 30, 12:06 PM

TT: Parochial-school duel

Seeing as how I didn't bring my iBook to Smalltown, U.S.A. (and good for me!), I wasn't able to post the usual Friday-morning teaser for my Wall Street Journal column. This one was a doozy: I wrote about four different shows, two good and two bad.

Topping the list was Doubt:

The best new play of the season is about a Roman Catholic priest suspected of molesting a young boy. Don't roll your eyes: I couldn't believe it, either. Not only does the priestly sex scandal offer endless opportunities for tendentious pontification of one sort or another, but John Patrick Shanley, best known for his screenplay for "Moonstruck," is a gifted but uneven playwright whose previous work has never rung my bell. Nevertheless, "Doubt," which opened Tuesday at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage I, is that rarity of rarities, an issue-driven play that is unpreachy, thought-provoking, and so full of high drama that the audience with which I saw it gasped out loud a half-dozen times at its startling twists and turns. It's this year's "Frozen," minus the plagiarism.

Actually, it's not quite right to say that "Doubt" is unpreachy, since it starts with a sermon in which Father Flynn (Brían F. O'Byrne), a working-class priest with the thickest of dese-dem-dose accents, assures his flock that "doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty." It's a peculiar sentiment to hear from a Catholic pulpit circa 1964, and it triggers the suspicions of Sister Aloysius (Cherry Jones), the principal of the school across the courtyard from Father Flynn's church. A hard-nosed pre-Vatican II nun, Sister Aloysius is realistic to the point of cynicism, and when the painfully naive Sister James (Heather Goldenhersh) reports that one of her students had a private audience with Father Flynn and returned to class with alcohol on his breath, all of her alarm bells start clanging at top volume.

I don't want to give away any of what happens next, save to say that Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius quickly find themselves drawn into a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game. What I can say is that one reason why "Doubt" is so suspenseful is that Mr. Shanley has skillfully obeyed the time-honored commandments of the well-made play. Terence Rattigan, an old pro who once advised playwrights in search of inspiration to "take a hackneyed situation and reverse it," would have applauded the shrewdness with which "Doubt" follows his advice. The bluff, regular-guy Father Flynn looks like anything but a child molester--yet the circumstantial evidence against him keeps piling up. Sister Aloysius, by contrast, is a battle-ax with a dark streak of paranoia--yet it appears increasingly clear that her twitchy nose for scandal is leading her in the right direction....

I also loved Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance:

I strongly suggest that anyone going to "Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance" who holds a ticket in the first six rows of the Music Box Theatre makes a point of arriving on time, since Dame Edna (known in real life as Australian drag comedian Barry Humphries) likes nothing better than to single out latecomers for public humiliation. When not working over those hapless folk who dallied over dessert, the Dame passes among her fans with the verbal equivalent of a baseball bat, clobbering innocent bystanders who make the fatal mistake of catching her heavily shadowed eye. Fortunately, the outrageous insults are all in good fun, and Dame Edna's falsetto shrieks and wackily glammed-up outfits never fail to ease the sting....

Not so Woody Allen's A Second Hand Memory:

Speaking of embarrassments, Woody Allen has returned to the Atlantic Theater with a real stinker, a kitchen-sink drama called "A Second Hand Memory" that runs through Jan. 23. Despite Mr. Allen's best directorial efforts and a stageful of such familiar faces as Dominic Chianese ("The Sopranos") and Michael McKean ("A Mighty Wind"), this wan little piece of pilfered goods reminded me of nothing so much as the kind of script a college sophomore obsessed with Clifford Odets might have written in 1950. (Worst line: "Get out of my dreams.") In fact, I wouldn't be altogether surprised if Mr. Allen had dragged it out of his trunk of unperformed plays....

Sam Shepard's The God of Hell has already closed, so I won't keep on beating a dead dog, unless it twitches.

If you really, truly want to know what I thought of The God of Hell, or read the rest of what I said about the three other shows I reviewed on Friday, your only recourse (short of going to a library) is to do what you should have done months ago: subscribe to the online edition of The Wall Street Journal, one of the best bargains in mainstream media.

If you're interested, go here.

Posted November 30, 12:05 PM

TT: Eat or be eaten

I forgot to mention that in addition to eating a lot of turkey (make that a whole lot of turkey), I consumed a pretty fair-sized chunk of art over the extra-long holiday weekend.

For openers, I read three new books, Meredith Daneman's Margot Fonteyn: A Life, Ada Louise Huxtable's Frank Lloyd Wright, and "Richard Stark"'s Nobody Runs Forever, all of which I commend to your attention (and about all of which I'll try to post at greater length next week). I also listened to Jim Hall's brand-new CD, Magic Meeting, which I was lucky enough to hear recorded live at the Village Vanguard earlier this year. And not only did I take my mother to Ray, but I also rented two older movies that were new to her, Spellbound (the documentary, not the thriller) and Lilo & Stitch.

Now that I'm back in New York, I have some really serious consuming (and producing) just ahead of me. Here's my week:

TODAY: First up is my Washington Post column, of which I have yet to write a word (it's due this afternoon). Once I stuff that one in the bag, I'll meet Galley Cat at Playwrights Horizons to see a preview of Rodney's Wife, about which the only thing I know is that it stars David Strathairn, which may well be reason enough to go. We'll see what the Cat thinks, though.

WEDNESDAY: To Studio 54 for Amon Miyamoto's revival of Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures, accompanied by a young friend who's never seen a Sondheim show before. Boy, is she in for a surprise, no matter what she's expecting....

THURSDAY: I'll be spending the whole morning wrestling with my Wall Street Journal column for Friday, followed (I hope) by a nap. Then it's off to The Triad to hear Julia Dollison, one of my very favorite young jazz singers. This particular one-nighter is a shakedown cruise for Dollison's upcoming appearance at the International Association for Jazz Education's annual conference, which will be held Jan. 5-8 in Long Beach, Ca. If you can't go, come to the Triad instead. The music starts at 9:30, and I can't think of a single good reason to be anywhere else. Look for me as close to the bandstand as possible.

FRIDAY: I'll be seeing Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays with a Friend to Be Named Later.

SATURDAY: Another preview, this one of August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean.

SUNDAY: Yet another preview, La Cage aux Folles, preceded by brunch with the notorious Maccers, at the prospect of which I tremble nervously. Will I be cool enough to pass muster? Or will she stalk haughtily out of the restaurant, leaving me to quiver in the gutter? Eeeeeeee....

MONDAY: One more preview, Caryl Churchill's A Number, starring Sam Shepard (I hope he hasn't forgotten how to act, too).

TUESDAY: Collapse of middle-aged party. Memorial service to be announced later.

Posted November 30, 12:03 PM

TT: A snootful of hons

I haven't even begun to sort out my accumulated snail mail, but I did make a point of opening an envelope from the National Endowment for the Arts, which turned out to contain a copy of the official press release announcing that the Senate has confirmed my appointment to the National Council on the Arts.

(Incidentally, I neglected to mention in the general welter of Thanksgiving-related confusion that two other arty types, James K. Ballinger of the Phoenix Art Museum and Gerard Schwarz of the Seattle Symphony, were confirmed along with me. I've never met either fellow, and greatly look forward to doing so at my first NCA meeting in March.)

Tucked into the same envelope was a form letter from Dana Gioia, my new boss, warning me that I still have "several important forms to complete and return." Seeing as how I've already chewed through a dictionary-sized stack of paperwork...but let's not go there. I'm pleased, I'm proud, and I'm resigned to spending the next six years filling out forms of one kind or another at regular intervals. Such, I hear, is bureaucratic life.

Posted November 30, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"But the rising sun swallowed up the wind, and by half-past seven the next morning all that was left of the storm was the swell and a line of clouds low over the distant Gulf of Lions in the north-west; the sky was of an unbelievable purity and the air was washed so clean that Stephen could see the colour of the petrel's dangling feet as it pattered across the Sophie's wake some twenty yards behind. ‘I remember the fact of extreme, prostrating terror,' he said, keeping his eye on the tiny bird, ‘but the inward nature of the emotion now escapes me.'"

Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander

Posted November 30, 12:01 PM

November 29, 2004

TT: Back in the saddle again

I'm literally just back from Smalltown, U.S.A., and still a bit shaky from the horrendous circumstances surrounding my trip there (I wrote all night Tuesday, went straight from my desk to LaGuardia on Wednesday morning, endured one of the most terrifying flights of my life, then rented a car and spent two grueling hours slithering through bad weather and exterminate-all-the-brutes traffic). The visit itself was wonderful, except that I ate to excess on Thursday and repented at leisure over the weekend. I also saw Ray, about which more later.

While we're on the subject of later, I'm about to start sifting through several hundred e-mails and a tableful of snail mail, in addition to which I have six shows to review between now and Monday, plus a couple of other pieces to write. I do promise to post as soon as I can, though not necessarily tomorrow! In the meantime, watch this space for further details. I haven't forgotten about you....

Posted November 29, 9:21 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"He said, 'Careful you don't read your brain into train oil, like my old man always used to say.'

"She didn't look up but said, 'Mine says I'll read my life away. I say, why not?'

"'There's no answer to that,' said Dalziel as he left."

Reginald Hill, Bones and Silence

Posted November 29, 4:53 AM

November 24, 2004

TT: Rearview mirror

Alas, the time stamp on this posting is all too accurate: I just finished writing a Commentary essay on Haydn and still have to knock off another piece before I can pack my bag and make ready to fly back to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I'll be spending Thanksgiving with my family. The car comes for me at 9:15, and I'll be picking up a rental car of my own at the far end of my flight, there to drive two hours south to the house where I grew up. Seeing as how I don't expect to spend much time in bed tonight, I'm likely to get a little sleepy on the way to Smalltown, and I've promised my mother that I'll pull off the highway whenever I feel the telltale signs of somnolence. I will, too: I can't think of anything much dumber than falling asleep at the wheel on your way home for Thanksgiving.

Quite a few of you wrote to tell me that I made you cry yesterday, so I'm happy to report that I'm in a much better frame of mind this evening (or, rather, this morning). My mother got a good report from her doctor earlier today, and a half-hour after I talked to her, I got a call from a friend who just landed a job for which she'd been longing with all her heart. Even without those two pieces of news, I would have been properly thankful for my myriad blessings, but now I can go home with a genuinely cheerful heart, sleep or no sleep.

You'll have to do without me until next Tuesday: I've decided to be sensible and leave my iBook in Manhattan, where it belongs. Fortunately, Our Girl, who is out of town but not computer-free, just wrote to tell me that she plans to post a bit this week, so you won't be entirely alone.

I should mention before I go that I count all of you among my blessings. I love this blog and I love your e-mail, some of which I actually managed to answer a few hours ago! I'm almost over the flu, too--I even made it to the gym on Tuesday morning, though I felt like a vampire who'd just crawled out of his coffin of native earth after an exceptionally long stay. Be that as it may, I'm out of the woods, for which still more thanks.

Now I have to get back to work. My car will be arriving eight hours from now (it'd better, anyway!), and my guess is that I'll need most of that time to get ready, if not all of it. I guess I'll sleep in Smalltown. Meanwhile, like the Stage Manager says, you get a good rest, too. Good night.

Posted November 24, 1:22 AM

TT: Almanac

"One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o'clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that's and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

"When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

"That's my Middle West--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Posted November 24, 1:05 AM

November 23, 2004

TT: Thanksgiving service

Few happy days are entirely unspotted by melancholy. I just had an exceptionally fine one, and my mailbox overflowed with congratulations by the time it was done, but I couldn't help thinking of departed friends with whom I would have rejoiced to share my good news, and how they would have rejoiced to hear it. As I remembered them, I thought of the stark confession Dr. Johnson made in the preface to his Dictionary: "I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise."

Those are terrible words, and in Dr. Johnson's case they might almost have been true, for he was thinking of his wife, who was forced to live in harsh discomfort because of the paralyzing sloth that kept him from finishing his great work until after her death. He was racked with guilt as a result, and the preface to the Dictionary reflects that guilt. But was it really true that he had "little to fear or hope from censure or from praise"? I doubt it. Dr. Johnson was a very great man, but great men are still men, and few of them are wholly indifferent to the kind words of friends and colleagues, even if they wish to be thought so.

In any case, most of us, however curmudgeonly we may pretend to be, acquire at least a few younger friends as we grow older, in part because it is a comfort--a relief, really--to know people who take you at face value. Old friends know too much about you to do that. I noticed a few years ago that most of my closest friends were younger than I am (two of them are half my age), and briefly wondered what that said about me. Was I seeking to feed off their vitality? Did I hunger for the uncritical admiration of a student for his teacher? Or was I simply following the predictable path of a normal life, in the course of which we sort out our friends and acquaintances over time, picking new ones and pruning old ones in the light of our growing self-knowledge? All of the above, I suspect, and I'm not so sure that there's anything bad about it. I love my new friends, sometimes selfishly and sometimes not, just as Dr. Johnson didn't let his pretended indifference stop him from warming his hands at the fire of Boswell's admiration.

To be sure, the one thing a new friend can never do for you is say I knew you when, and I find it rather sad that there are so few people in my life who can speak those words. None of my closest friends in Manhattan knew me when: we didn't meet until after I'd figured out who I was and what I wanted to become. On the other hand, the friends of our youth present their own problems. They are part of the train of memories that we all pull behind us, the one that grows longer with each passing day, and for that reason harder to pull. "The friend of your youth," Robert Penn Warren wrote in All the King's Men, "is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, speaks a name--Spike, Bud, Skip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave--which belongs to that now non-existent face but by some inane and doddering confusion is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger." Old friends knew you when, but new ones know you now, and now is when it is and where you are.

Which brings me full circle, back to those absent friends who will never know me now. I miss them all, one or two with a keenness undulled by the passage of time. How I wish they could have seen what they missed--just as I wish I could have seen what they missed. But there's no point in longing for what you can't possibly have, especially since I'm as grateful as a man can be for what I do have: the perfect job, a handsome apartment whose walls are crowded with beautiful works of art, and a couple of dozen beloved friends who give me more joy than I deserve. I'd trade every piece in the Teachout Museum for any one of them. They are what I treasure most.

Posted November 23, 12:36 PM

TT: Almanac

"Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult."

Hippocrates, Aphorisms

Posted November 23, 12:00 PM

November 22, 2004

TT: The latest syllables of recorded time

A diary of recent events in Teachoutworld:

FRIDAY: Spoke about All in the Dances at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and was given a private view of "Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum," a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of original costumes and set designs for such legendary ballets as Les Noces, Prodigal Son, and Nijinsky's Sacre du Printemps (including a costume hand-painted by Matisse). More next week, but for the moment I'll just say that anybody with more than a casual interest in twentieth-century ballet will find this show, which runs through Jan. 2, jaw-droppingly good.

SATURDAY: A triple-decker day. Went to Knoedler & Company and looked at Onrushing Waves, the Milton Avery exhibition. Then to the nearest movie theater to see Sideways, about which Our Girl was soooo right: it couldn't have been better. Then to Broadway for a preview of Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance, followed by dinner and a fast cab home, where I watched two stockpiled episodes of What's My Line? on the DVR (Steve Allen just joined the panel) and went to bed way too late.

SUNDAY: Maccers, my blogstalker, came to my Barnes & Noble signing last Tuesday (incognito, but I found her out), so I e-mailed her an invitation to a Broadway preview. She turned up her fine nose at a glitzy musical, forcing me to up the highbrow ante several thousand notches with Sheridan's The Rivals, to which she said yes. Updated the Top Five with four fresh items, including a heartfelt paragraph about the Avery show. (See the right-hand column for details.) Lunched quickly and dirtily on the fly, called my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., from the street, then saw two back-to-back off-Broadway shows, John Patrick Shanley's Doubt and Woody Allen's A Second Hand Memory. Called Our Girl the second I got home to discuss Sideways. Knocked out a quick posting for Monday (you're reading it). The loft beckons.

And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? Well, I have three pieces to write (two shorts and a long) before I head for LaGuardia on Wednesday morning to fly home to my family for Thanksgiving. Between meals, I plan to sleep. No blogging, though--you'll be on your own from Wednesday through next Tuesday.

How about you?

Posted November 22, 12:03 PM

TT: Almanac

"If acting is a creative art--if it is--then it is perfectly reasonable to demand for it conditions similar to those of the painter or the writer: the right, that is, to make a mess, to splash around, to make drafts and sketches, to have a wasterpaper bin at your side. In any creative activity, art is madness, craft is sanity. The balance between them makes the work."

Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor

Posted November 22, 12:00 PM

TT: Consider yourself warned

Says Modern Kicks:

Anyone caught posting after, say, 7 PM Wednesday evening or before 1 PM next Monday is officially a pathetic, internet-addicted loser.

Well, that tears it: I'm definitely not taking my iBook home for Thanksgiving!

Posted November 22, 3:42 AM

TT: I'm the Honorable Mr. So-and-So!

I just got a call from the National Endowment for the Arts informing me that the Senate has confirmed my nomination to the National Council on the Arts by a unanimous voice vote. I'll go to Washington to be sworn in some time between now and the next NCA meeting in March.

I blogged about my nomination back in July, and you can read all about it here. Briefly, President Bush appointed me to the civilian panel that advises the NEA and its chairman, Dana Gioia. It is, needless to say, a great honor--an opportunity to give something back to the arts after a lifetime of pleasure and profit--and I will do my best to be worthy of it. I couldn't be more grateful to the President, the Senate, and my old friend Dana.

In case you're wondering, I'll still be writing about the arts for whoever cares to put up the money, and "About Last Night" will soldier on as outspokenly as ever.

This part, by the way, will make you laugh: the NEA tells me that anyone who receives a presidential appointment that is confirmed by the Senate is thereafter entitled to be called "the Honorable," as in the Honorable Terry Teachout. I myself prefer Nancy Mitford's less formal usage: I'm a Hon!

And now...back to work. I still have a few counter-Hons to slay before I can go home for Thanksgiving, and just because I'm now a Hon doesn't mean my three deadlines have been extended by presidential fiat. We'll crack open the champagne later.

UPDATE: I've already gotten one phone call from a friend asking if I can also be called "The Right Honorable Terry Teachout." Straight answer: I think that usage is strictly for Brits. Funny answer: Only when I am.

Posted November 22, 2:05 AM

November 19, 2004

TT: Just another day in New York City

I lunched on Wednesday with a friend of mine who recently went to work at the Museum of Modern Art, whose brand-new midtown headquarters will be opened to the public tomorrow. The flu had laid me too low to attend any of the preceding week's press previews, so when she asked me if I'd like to take a quick peek at the galleries, I was--well, torn. I was worn out from a hard night's book-plugging and knew I really needed to go home and grab a nap, but I couldn't imagine passing up a chance to see the new MoMA before the crowds arrived, so I took a deep breath and said, "You bet. Let's go."

No doubt every art and architecture critic in the known universe will be holding forth this week and next about MoMA. (The New York Times even has a special page on its Web site devoted to the opening.) Opinions published to date range from the ecstatic to the apocalyptic. For my part, I feel neither inclined nor qualified to lay down the law based on a single brisk walkthrough. The new MoMA is going to be around for a long time, and my feelings about it will evolve each time I come back to see it again. The sheer bigness of the public areas, for instance, struck me as offputting at first glance. "This'd be a great place for a roller derby," I told my friend as we entered the first-floor lobby. But I realized in the next breath that they'd look different--radically so--once they were filled to capacity with excited museumgoers, and immediately resolved to suspend judgment.

Most of the artbloggers who've written about MoMA have concentrated on the contemporary galleries and their contents. (Modern Art Notes is posting fresh links on a regular basis.) I was more interested in how MoMA's "narrative" of the development of modernism had been revisited and reshaped by John Elderfield and his team of curators. Again, my reactions are strictly provisional, but here are some of the things that struck me as I sprinted through the galleries for the first time:

- In the old MoMA, Picasso was the big cheese. Now it's Matisse. (Suits me.)

- Visitors to the old MoMA had only one way to experience the unfolding of modernism: in a sequence carefully controlled by the entrances and exits to the successive galleries. The new floor plan, by contrast, is much more open. MoMA still tells a highly idiosyncratic "story" about modern art, but you can read the chapters in whatever order you choose.

- In the old MoMA, prewar American modernists were all but ignored, except for the ones whose work either related to European surrealism (Joseph Cornell) or prefigured abstract expressionism (Milton Avery). Nor were such postwar representationalists as Fairfield Porter given the time of day. Alas, nothing has changed. Justin Davidson and Ariella Budick nailed it in their Newsday review:

Every museum has its omissions, but MoMA's disregard for Americans who don't fit the official line is all the more breathtaking because of the building's scope. Two floors of painting and sculpture are still not ample enough to include Fairfield Porter, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Philip Pearlstein, or Alex Katz. Even Larry Rivers' "Washington Crossing the Delaware," one of the museum's marquee paintings, is absent.

These omissions are all the more striking to me in light of the fact that my own collection of works on paper by American artists focuses on precisely those artists whom MoMA fails to take seriously. I originally conceived of the "Teachout Museum" as a kind of counter-canon of American modernism--a reply to MoMA, so to speak. The fact that the old MoMA was too small to exhibit more than a fraction of its vast holdings made me wonder whether the new MoMA might possibly be planning to rethink its cramped view of American art before 1945. No such luck. At least for now, Elderfield & Co. haven't even tried.

- If you want to sum up MoMA's occasional fits of provincialism in a single sentence, you could do worse than this one: it owns at least four major Morandis, but none of them is on view.

- One of the best things a smart curator can do is hang works of art together in such a way as to make you say, Wow! I never thought of that. The new MoMA offers more than a few such double-take moments. The gallery devoted to minimalism, for instance, also contains a large circle painting by Kenneth Noland. To see it hanging across the room from a Donald Judd sculpture is eye-opening in the best possible way. Likewise the now-notorious stairwell in which Matisse's "La Danse" looks down on Avery's "Sea Grasses and Blue Sea" (which used to hang next to the cloakroom!) and a Richard Diebenkorn "Ocean Park" canvas. No, I don't like the way the Matisse is hung, not one little bit--it's cute, if you know what I mean--but I love the juxtaposition.

A thought-provoking afternoon, in short, and I was bone-tired when I headed for home, got on my back for a couple of hours, then cabbed down to the theater district to hear the Phil Woods Quintet at Birdland, an event I'd been eagerly awaiting for weeks.

Woods is one of those jazz musicians who is extravagantly admired by his peers without ever having enjoyed the general acclaim he deserves (except for the too-brief period in the Seventies when he sat in on Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are" and Steely Dan's "Doctor Wu" and recorded under his own name for RCA). He is that rarity of rarities, a second-generation bebop saxophonist who learned the lessons of Charlie Parker without choking on them, and now that he's reached the threshold of old age, his playing is purer and more compelling than ever. Yes, Woods is still hot enough to burn a hole in a girder, but the hard-edged style of his youthful days has given way to a warmer, richer sound--perhaps he picked up a touch of Benny Carter somewhere along the way. Of course he's also a great virtuoso, one of the greatest in jazz, but you never get the feeling that he's showing off: everything is casual, even offhand, as though he were playing for a roomful of friends.

It doesn't hurt that Woods has been working with the same bassist and drummer, Steve Gilmore and Bill Goodwin, for thirty years. To say all three of them are on the same page is the blandest of understatements--they finish each other's sentences--and trumpeter Brian Lynch, who joined the group in 1992, fits in no less seamlessly. Among a thousand other things, I love the way they rely on only the most minimal amplification, letting their individual sounds blend naturally in the air. (Microphones have always been a formality for the mammoth-toned Woods.) As for Bill Charlap, who signed on in 1995 and has continued to appear with the quintet from time to time even after his own career mushroomed, I simply can't say enough good things about him, try though I do; I go to hear Charlap as often as possible, and he never fails to spin my head around. On Wednesday he did it with a solo version of David Raksin's "The Bad and the Beautiful" that sounded as if he were breathing into an Aeolian harp instead of caressing the keys of Birdland's Cadillac-sized Bösendorfer grand.

I first heard Phil Woods in person in 1979 from a distance of about five feet, back in the days when he looked like the hippest of hipsters. (Now he looks more like the partner of a film-noir detective, the guy who gets popped in the first reel.) He came to Kansas City to perform with my college jazz band, and since our saxophonists couldn't cut all of his charts, he did several tunes with the rhythm section alone. I was the bass player that night, and I was so scared that I needed a diaper, but Woods smoothed the way with his kindness and generosity, and I ended up playing way over my head. After the gig, I asked him to autograph my copy of Live at the Showboat, the 1977 double album that had put him on the map. "Good playing with you," he scrawled. I haven't kept very many souvenirs in my life, but I still have that album.

As I mentioned yesterday, I brought Sarah to Birdland with me. I'd been wanting to make up for the truly awful play to which I'd subjected her the last time she was in town, and since Sarah is one of the most sharp-eared civilians I know (among other things, she spotted the quote from Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" cadenza that Brian Lynch tossed into an original blues), I thought a night at Birdland might possibly even the score. We'd both been struggling with viruses, but no sooner did the band kick off "A Foggy Day" than the music pulled us out of ourselves and we forgot all about being sick.

The very first thing I wrote about on this blog was a Central Park concert by Luciana Souza and the New York Philharmonic. "Nights like this," I said, "are why you live in a preshrunk apartment and pay outrageous rent and grope around to make sure your wallet's still there every time you get off a crowded subway car. Feel free to remind me the next time you catch me griping about New York." The miracle of New York City is that such occasions are far from uncommon; I've written about more than a few of them in the past year. Still, Wednesday was special even by the exalted standards to which I've become accustomed. I hope the day never comes when I take my charmed life for granted. I doubt it ever will.

Posted November 19, 12:13 PM

TT: Caught in the act

Enough said.

Posted November 19, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

BARRY: I want to date a musician.

ROB: I want to live with a musician. She could write songs at home, ask me what I thought of them, and maybe even include one of our private jokes in the liner notes.

BARRY: Maybe a little picture of me in the liner notes.

DICK: Just in the background somewhere.

D.V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink, John Cusack, and Scott Rosenberg, screenplay for High Fidelity

Posted November 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Sound bite

You may not know that Condoleezza Rice is a serious amateur pianist (she's good enough to have played in public with Yo-Yo Ma a couple of years ago). In light of this posting, I thought I'd pass along a fascinating quote from a profile of Rice that appeared in Wednesday's New York Times:

I love Brahms because Brahms is actually structured. And he's passionate without being sentimental. I don't like sentimental music, so I tend not to like Liszt, and I don't actually much care for the Russian romantics Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, where it's all on the sleeve. With Brahms it's restrained, and there's a sense of tension that never resolves.

I myself take a different view of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff (though not Brahms), but it's obvious that our incoming Secretary of State has strong and coherent musical opinions. I'd love to sit down and chat with her about them one of these days....

Posted November 19, 10:23 AM

TT: One show only

This is your final warning: I'll be appearing tonight at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, to talk about All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. My illustrious interlocutor is Francis Mason, dance critic of WQXR-FM and co-author of Balanchine's Complete Stories of the Great Ballets.

The show starts at six o'clock, but do come early so that you can get a leisurely look at "Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum," which tells the story of a great museum's involvement with dance in the Thirties. The galleries close at five p.m., which gives you plenty of time to grab a bite to eat, come back, and watch us perform.

For more information, go here.

Posted November 19, 9:32 AM

TT: Talking shops

Time again for my Wall Street Journal drama column. The Broadway previews are coming hot and heavy this month and next, and today I wrote about three high-profile shows, none of which knocked me out, though my unenthusiastic review of Democracy cut sharply and (for me, anyway) unexpectedly against the conventional wisdom:

Once or twice a season, Broadway makes room for a play, usually an import, that gets tagged by the press as egghead-friendly. Last spring it was "Jumpers," and now it's Michael Frayn's "Democracy," which opened last night at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. A huge hit in London, "Democracy" has been transplanted to New York in Michael Blakemore's original National Theatre production, but with a new, all-American cast led by James Naughton and Richard Thomas. It is, as advertised, smart and thoughtful, and if good intentions counted for anything in the theater, "Democracy" would be a great play. But they don't, and it isn't.

Like Mr. Frayn's "Copenhagen," "Democracy" is a fictionalized docudrama. It tells how Willy Brandt (Mr. Naughton), the first left-wing chancellor of West Germany, was forced out of office when it was disclosed that Günter Guillaume (Mr. Thomas), his personal assistant, was in fact an East German secret agent. The play is about the complex relationship between the two men, but since Mr. Frayn has chosen to give it a real-life setting, we also hear from Guillaume's Stasi controller (Michael Cumpsty) and seven of Brandt's colleagues, who discuss the ins and outs of West German politics at squirm-making length. In addition, Guillaume spends far too much time speaking directly to his controller, often switching hats in mid-sentence. The results are at once cluttered and static: Everybody talks, but nothing happens....

Nor was I much impressed with The Good Body:

Eve Ensler, the author of "The Vagina Monologues," is moving up in the world: Her new play is about stomachs.

"The Good Body," which runs through Jan. 16 at the Booth Theatre, is a monologue about Ms. Ensler's midriff and how she learned to live with it, just as you can live with yours, assuming you're a woman who hates the way she thinks she looks...

The real trouble with her show is twofold. In the first place, it's not exactly stop-press news that lots of women are neurotic about their bodies, meaning that long stretches of "The Good Body" sound like "Bridget Jones' Diary" recycled. Furthermore, Ms. Ensler, who identifies herself as a "radical feminist" on the second page of the script, spends the next hour and a half whining à la Woody Allen about her own neuroses. Only at the very end does she assure us--unconvincingly--that she's finally succeeded in raising her own consciousness to the point of accepting her stomach as "the goodest part of me." (It looks perfectly normal, by the way.) Somehow that doesn't strike me as a compelling argument for radical feminism....

Not even Edie Falco, whom I normally adore, was capable of ringing my bell with her performance in the new revival of Marsha Norman's Pulitzer-winning 'night, Mother:

Ms. Falco plays a depressed, epileptic small-town Midwesterner who spends virtually the whole of the play explaining to her mother (Brenda Blethlyn) why her life is no longer worth living ("Maybe if there was something I really liked, like maybe if I really liked rice pudding or cornflakes for breakfast or something, that might be enough"), then locks herself in her bedroom and blows her brains out. Even if I found this scenario plausible, I'd expect the women in question to be presented with at least a moderate amount of subtlety, whereas Ms. Falco and Ms. Blethlyn play their parts flatly and uninvolvingly, accents and all. When first-class actors are so far off the mark, chances are that the director is to blame, and the track record of Michael Mayer, most recently seen on Broadway as the perpetrator-in-chief of the Roundabout Theatre Company's's atrocious revival of "After the Fall," doesn't inspire confidence....

No link, so if you've a mind to read the whole thing, go buy a paper, or (much better yet) go here to subscribe to the online edition of The Wall Street Journal, one of the best bargains in newspaperdom.

Posted November 19, 9:30 AM

November 18, 2004

TT: ...and live to blog another day

This was a day made for blogging. Not only did I get an unexpected sneak peek at the new Museum of Modern Art, but I spent the evening at Birdland listening to the Phil Woods Quintet, with Bill Charlap sitting in on piano. That's an only-in-New-York story raised to the umpteenth power.

Alas, I'm still a few feet under the weather, as is Sarah, who met me at Birdland and was duly blown away by Woods and company. Seeing as how we both have time-consuming stuff on our plates tomorrow (Sarah is sitting on a panel with Maud, while I have to write a speech in the morning and give it in the evening), we decided to be mature, sensible adults and hang it up early.

Actually, it was Sarah who was mature and sensible. Left to my own devices, I probably would have stayed up half the night writing and paid the price tomorrow, but she set me straight.

"Should I blog tonight, or should I go to bed?" I asked her in the cab after the gig.

She looked at me with open-mouthed horror. "Are you kidding?" she replied, all but wagging a stern finger in my face. "Go home and go to bed. You can write this up on Friday--if then."

I knew when I was licked. I have lots and lots of thoughts to share with you, but they'll keep until Friday--or longer.

In the meantime, the Phil Woods Quintet is at Birdland through Saturday. If you're loose, go. If you're not, get that way. If you can't, order this album and eat your heart out.

Later.

Posted November 18, 12:01 PM

TT: Guest almanac

"'I want to influence people so they'll do what I think it's important they should do. I can't get 'em to do that unless I let 'em bore me first, you understand. Then just as they're delighting in having got me punch-drunk with talk I come back at 'em and make 'em do what I've got lined up for 'em.'

"'I wish I could do that,' Dixon said enviously. ‘When I'm punch-drunk with talk, which is what I am most of the time, that's when they come at me and make me do what they want me to do.' Apprehension and drink combined to break through another bulkhead in his mind and he went on eagerly: ‘I'm the boredom detector. I'm a finely tuned instrument. If only I could get hold of a millionaire I'd be worth a bag of money to him. He could send me on ahead into dinners and cocktail parties and night clubs, just for five minutes, and then by looking at me he'd be able to read off the boredom coefficient of any gathering. Like a canary down a coal mine; same idea.'"

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (courtesy of Modern Kicks)

Posted November 18, 12:00 PM

November 17, 2004

TT: Peddling the book

I just got back from my joint appearance with Bob Gottlieb and Robert Greskovic at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square. It went well. The house was nearly full, the crowd asked terrific questions, and we sold and signed a pile of books afterward. One woman bought a copy of All in the Dances for her young daughter, who had School of American Ballet stamped all over her. Sure enough, it turned out that she'll be dancing in New York City Ballet's Nutcracker this season, so I inscribed it to "Lisa, who carries the torch."

Her mother smiled when I handed back the book. "She won't understand it just yet," she said, "but someday she will." That's a nice thought, isn't it?

I was pleased to spot several friends in the audience, among them a critic, a biographer, three musicians, and fellow bloggers Sarah and Beatrice. Their presence buoyed me up, seeing as how my steam was already running low by the time I crawled up to the dais. Needless to say, Wednesday promises to be at least as hectic--lunch with a MoMA curator, followed by Phil Woods and Bill Charlap at Birdland, to which Sarah is accompanying me--so I'd better head for bed right now.

Don't expect any earth-shakingly brilliant postings tomorrow. I'm nowhere near my picture-perfect best (it actually took me two hours longer than usual to write my Friday drama column this morning), so I doubt I'll be generating any more prose until Thursday, when I have to write a speech. For the moment, I'll be more than happy just to get another good night's sleep.

Oh, one more thing: now that you've all bought my book, don't forget to buy Bob Gottlieb's George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, just out from HarperCollins. It's good, too!

Posted November 17, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"One of the constant minor joys of reading Trollope is coming across descriptions of little gestures which reveal character in much the same way as a good actor does, either deliberately or half-consciously. There is an example early on in The Way We Live Now in his description of Father John Barham, a young, overenthusiastic, gentlemanly Catholic priest. ‘He had thick dark brown hair, which was cut short...but which he so constantly ruffled by the action of his hands, that, although short, it seemed to be wild and uncombed...In discussions he would constantly push back his hair, and then sit with his hand fixed on the top of his head.' I have seen many highly strung intellectuals do the same thing. The pleasure lies in recognizing, today, habits which were to be found among us a hundred and twenty years ago however much the mores and manners have changed; and a hundred years before that, and before that as well. The sense of continuity, going both backwards and forward, I find endlessly rewarding."

Alec Guinness, A Positively Final Appearance

Posted November 17, 12:00 PM

TT: In case you think I'm a total highbrow

My new iTunes program contains a screen called "Top 25 Most Played" that tells me which songs I've listened to most frequently since I installed it. Here are the tracks at the top of the current chart:

- Erin McKeown, "A Better Wife"
- Frank Sinatra, "Witchcraft"
- George Strait, "I've Come to Expect It from You"
- Toto, "99"
- Marvin Gaye, "Got to Give It Up"
- Ahmad Jamal, "New Rhumba"
- Couperin, "The Mysterious Barricades" (played on guitar by Göran Söllscher)
- Jo Stafford, "Early Autumn"
- Suzanne Vega, "Caramel"
- Zero 7, "In the Waiting Line" (from the Garden State soundtrack, of course)

For the past couple of days, though, I've been too tired to decide what to play, so I've been putting iTunes on "shuffle play" and allowing it to supplant my free will. At the moment it's serving up Count Basie's "Jive at Five," immediately preceded by Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock."

Go figure.

Posted November 17, 11:27 AM

TT: By the way

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm letting the blogmail pile up, in the hopes of finding buried treasure when I answer it all over the weekend (but mainly because I just don't have enough steam in the boiler to open it right now).

As always, thanks for your patience. I really don't like being sick, even when I'm getting better....

Posted November 17, 11:21 AM

OGIC: The five hundred twenty

In the comments over at Mad Max Perkins's excellent newish publishing-insider blog, commenter Marjorie offers this startling perspective:

By my reckoning, I read about two books a month. (It used to be more, but children have an odd way of needing a lot of attention.)

My financial adviser informs me that I must die when I am 87 because I will run out of money at that point. So, assuming she is right, at two books a month I will read only 520 books more in my lifetime. Do I want to waste one of those precious allotments on an award-winning book that I find neither enjoyable nor enlightening? I do not.

Screw the awards and their fallible human judges. I start with reviews and word-of-mouth. Then I go to the book jacket and read a page or two at the bookstore or on Amazon. Then I buy it and give it 50 pages. If I'm not laughing, crying, or learning something by page 50, out it goes, guilt-free. Life is too short to read a book that doesn't give me something in return for my time, energy, and money.

520: astonishingly finite and sobering, that figure. I'm reminded of last year, when the Booker Prize went to a book I'd never heard of by a writer also unknown to me. On impulse, I ducked into a bookstore on my way home the day of the announcement and bought a cloth copy of D.B.C. Pierre's Vernon God Little. I would never get beyond chapter 2. So at least I still had my time, save a few minutes. But had I held off and read a few of the reviews that soon followed, I would also still have that particular $20. Whoops.

My own expected number of books-yet-to-be-read is higher than 520. But that doesn't make it any less stark, wherever it may fall. This is why I want to know if Critic X didn't think a book was the best of the year as reputed, and why I don't want critics to pull their punches. It doesn't mean I implicitly trust any one critic's judgment (well, maybe Wood's, tried and true), but, like Marjorie, I do want as much varied input as possible, and I want critics to write with readers, not authors, in mind. The 2003 Booker showed me that awards committees can be every bit as fallible as critics; I hasten to add that the converse is also true. All we can ask of each is frank and searching judgment, and to please keep in mind the (shudder) 520.

Posted November 17, 3:00 AM

November 16, 2004

TT: Doctor's orders

I've suspected for the past couple of days that I was on the mend, but one important thing was missing: a good night's sleep. Though I slept for twelve hours on Saturday, it was the kind of shallow, disordered sleep that fails to refresh an ailing mind and body, and I hardly slept at all the next night, a dead giveaway that I hadn't quite turned the corner.

Yesterday was different. I was double-booked--a movie in the afternoon, a play in the evening--and by the time I finally got home I was so exhausted that I threw my coat on the floor, curled up in a ball on the couch, and turned on the TV to unwind. I quickly found myself nodding off, so instead of following my usual end-of-day blogging routine, I went straight to bed to read. The book fell out of my hands after a few minutes and landed on my face, and I stayed conscious just long enough to turn out the light. There followed nearly ten hours of deep, restorative sleep, the kind in which you dream so intensely and continuously that you're aware of it while it's happening. At one point I actually dreamed that I was hanging out with a bass-playing friend of mine in the carport of a ranch house in Smalltown, U.S.A., telling her about how deeply I'd slept the night before. I remember verbatim one thing I said to her: "It felt as though I had an electric plug sticking in one ear." That's exactly how it felt--like I was recharging an empty battery.

I felt stunned when I woke up a half-hour ago, but in a good way. Gradually my wits returned to me. I remembered that I had a Wall Street Journal review to write this morning, plus a bit of blog-tending. I remembered that I'd cancelled my lunch with Maud so that I'd be fresh for tonight's appearance at Barnes & Noble. Under other circumstances I might have gone screaming into action immediately, but today I know better. My next move will be to sit down at the kitchen table with a bagel and some fruit, clear my head of the lingering fumes of deep sleep, and permit myself to revel in the sensation of starting to feel better. The world can wait.

If you don't have anything better to do, come see me hold forth this evening. (For details, click on the link.) I may look a little pale around the edges, but I'm pretty much myself again. That's the one worthwhile thing about having been sick: it feels so good to get well.

UPDATE: Look at page 87 of this week's New Yorker, in the middle of David Denby's piece about Pedro Almodóvar, and you'll see something cool: an ad for All in the Dances. It's the first time a book of mine has been advertised there.

I know, I know, ads don't sell books, booksellers do, but it's still cool, damn it.

Posted November 16, 10:46 AM

TT: Almanac

"For me there are two salves to apply when I feel spiritually bruised--listening to a Haydn symphony or sonata (his clear common sense always penetrates) and seeking out something in Montaigne's essays. This morning, in spite of the promise of a bright cloudless day, I woke curmudgeonly and disapproving of the world and most of its inhabitants. Montaigne pulled me up sharply. ‘What we call wisdom is the moroseness of our humours and our distaste of things as they are now...Age sets more wrinkles on our minds than on our faces.' I don't care about the facial blemishes but the wriggly, acid convolutions of the brain must be smoothed away somehow. Two or three days in a Benedictine monastery might do the trick."

Alec Guinness, A Positively Final Appearance

Posted November 16, 10:27 AM

OGIC: Lending Library

Last week I had the pleasure of hearing the poet and Johns Hopkins English professor Allen Grossman read from his work. He is a thoroughly arresting speaker and reader, and appears at the University of Chicago this Thursday, November 18th. Highly recommended to you Chicagoans.

Here's the poem I liked best in the reading, "Lending Library (Mpls. Xmas, 1943)."

At her Lending Library on Lake Street, Minnepaolis,
mother Beatrice rented out books to ladies.
But she read them first. That way she knew whether
there was not, or (better still) was, anything "disgraceful"
in any of the books. (There were two kinds of ladies.)
The result was mother owned the second and third volume
of many novels (e.g., Scott's Ivanhoe), but not the first

which was gratefully taken to heart by her customers.
That's why I know a lot about how things come out
and don't know very much about how they begin.
But mother Beatrice ("B" for short) never read
the book called GOLDEN MEXICO (because
it was not to be loaned or sold)--until Xmas, 1943,
when a voice, out of the blue, said: "'B,' read that one."

After she read it, "B" said: "How things look in the heart
of Jesus I don't know and, frankly, don't want to know.
But I do know that only those Jews who are stirred
by the question of their own existence can
answer the claim he makes.... Allen, my dear, who does
know? To whose sentence can we say, "Yes! That's true"
--and add to the wonder of it belief."

"Beatrice," I asked her, "what do you really want to know?"
"Allen, what was the first book you ever read?"
"Beatrice, before I learned to read I could not read;
but I did know about reading, and it never happened
(thanks to you, for good or ill) that there wasn't any book.
But I could not read in the heart of Jesus,
so the first book I read was GOLDEN MEXICO.

Now I read because light does not reveal itself
(not even on a bright wash day), but it lies hidden
in a cloud until summoned--like the heart.
It was the gold cover of the book named
GOLDEN MEXICO that drew me in at first. Then,
I added what I could add to that wonder.
No book I read was ever written until I added that."

Outside the Lending Library, Xmas 1943, a voice--
maddening, relentless, phonographic--began to sing
"Silent Night," and did not stop at "heavenly peace"
but started over, again, and again, and again.
It was the ladies' triumph--a best seller,
a virgin birth, the babe who added to the
wonder of it all, belief. Three days of that

drove "B" crazy. Beatrice stood up, gathered her books,
and locked the door of her Lending Library. "Let them buy,"
she said. And her voice was heard, despite the singing,
across the gentile lake by itinerant Thoreau
where he rested on the far shore, high up the cliff
on a rock and caught the cold that killed him.
--There's no Lending Library on Lake St., Mpls., any more.

How then ever know the way things begin,
remembering as we do nothing! None of our books
will tell, certainly not this one. But take the question
to heart, nonetheless, because I write the wonder of it all
and by the poem called LENDING LIBRARY solicit belief:
There was a road by which we came this way.
There is another by which we shall depart.

Posted November 16, 1:54 AM

November 15, 2004

TT: Stranger than fiction

Everybody in the blogosphere seems to have something to say about this year's National Book Award fiction nominees (Our Girl weighed in last week, and Maud links to some of the latest reactions here). I've said nothing, for the very good reason that I haven't read any of the novels in question, nor am I familiar with the past work of any of the authors. Nor have I said anything about this year's nonfiction nominees, for the equally good reason that I was one of the five judges on last year's panel. To comment on the work of my successors would be just plain rude.

Having said all that, I confess to being puzzled by certain aspects of the ongoing hoopla. Maud also links to MobyLives' speculative spoof about the thinking of a prominent member of the fiction panel:

I slapped him hard across the face. It was enjoyable so I did it again. "Snap out of it!" I told him. "Now start from the beginning. What the hell happened?"

"I don't know!" he cried. "I thought we were doing what they said. I mean, they said not to pick more than one token book from a small or independent press, because that would decentralize power and be good for the book business on the whole, which they just can't have, because everybody knows that diversity just blows..."

Once again, I have no opinion about any of this. I don't know Rick Moody or any of the other fiction judges, nor do I have any continuing contact with the National Book Foundation. (Once you've served as a judge, you're never asked to do so again.) Still, I can't help but recall the experience of picking last year's nonfiction winner, which I described in this space shortly after the fact:

We considered 436 books (some of them very, very briefly, but they all got talked about at some point in the past few months). We never raised our voices, never argued with one another, never got angry. Our deliberations were civilized, collegial, and great fun. When we met yesterday afternoon to make our final selection, it was the first time all five of us had been in the same room at once--we mostly deliberated via e-mail and in conference calls--and the atmosphere, far from being tense, was positively festive.

What we didn't do was engage in horsetrading or logrolling, speculate on how our picks would be received by the literary community, or attempt to Make a Statement. I don't mean to sound like Pollyanna in Bookland--I know such things do happen, and always will--but in our case they didn't, period. We simply tried to choose a wide-ranging slate of worthy nominees, and to pick from them the one book we thought best.

Perhaps we missed a bet, since neither our nominees nor our final selection attracted more than a modest amount of attention from the press. All anybody seemed to want to do was talk about Stephen King and Shirley Hazzard. Nevertheless, we thought we did a good job. To be sure, Carlos Eire may not have been on the literary world's collective lips in the wake of our deliberations, but my guess is that Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy will be read and remembered long after the current controversy over the NBA fiction nominees is filed and forgotten.

I think we did our job the way such jobs ought to be done, and I like to think that's the way most literary judges endeavor to go about their difficult business. Don't ask me, though: I'd never before served on such a panel, nor have I since. Maybe we were all Pollyannas.

Posted November 15, 12:28 PM

TT: What I'm reading

For the first time in months, I don't have any book reviews in the pipeline, mainly because I'm up to my ears in Broadway and off-Broadway previews (three a week between now and Christmas, yikes!), so for once I'm reading purely for my pleasure. Alas, I've felt too crappy in recent days to embark on anything new, but I just finished rereading nearly all of Evelyn Waugh's books, and expect to say something about the experience later in the week.

At the moment I'm rereading Alec Guinness' memoirs, diaries, and commonplace book, excerpts from which will soon be showing up in my almanac entries.

What next? It's up to you, dear readers! I'm in the market for something short, intelligent, amusing, reasonably easy to find, and no more than modestly demanding (the opposite of Finnegans Wake, in other words). Interesting and/or unexpected recommendations will be posted in this space.

Posted November 15, 12:04 PM

TT: All things to some people

A reader writes:

I have read "About Last Night" and followed your articles elsewhere for at least a year, and over that time you have introduced me to: Pelléas et Mélisande, Benjamin Britten, Flannery O'Connor, Stephen Sondheim, Willa Cather, The Rules of the Game, film noir, Alex Ross, Philip Larkin, Looney Toons, Chinatown, Patrick O'Brian, anchovies (really!), Shostakovich, jazz, Fauré, Evelyn Waugh, Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker and the 1812 Overture excepted), W.H. Auden, Four Last Songs, twentieth-century classical music generally, Barbara Pym and a host of other things I can't recall right now. I love George Balanchine already, even though I haven't seen a ballet other than The Nutcracker in my life, and intend to rent the choreography DVDs you recommended as soon as they arrive at my university library. At your recommendation, I've gone to see Assassins and The Threepenny Opera and The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater (I'm a political philosophy student at the University of Chicago, but my family lives in New York).

I've often been tempted to write to you, although I've never had even the slightest inclination to write to anyone I don't know. I think that this is because of the nature of weblogs: I feel as if I do know you, and that I'm obliged to thank you for all the wonderful things you've shown me.

I'd also like to ask a favor. I saw Kevin Costner's Open Range at your recommendation, and quite enjoyed it (although it was indeed too long). Besides that, Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven and the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, I have never seen any westerns. Your description of Randolph Scott's movies in A Terry Teachout Reader was tantalizing, but they are unavailable. I'm somewhat embarrassed to have to ask, but could you recommend some good, old-fashioned westerns?

What I like best about this e-mail is that it sums up exactly what Our Girl and I have tried to do with "About Last Night" from the very beginning. As our mission statement says:

Clement Greenberg, the great art critic, believed that "in the long run there are only two kinds of art: the good and the bad. This difference cuts across all other differences in art. At the same time, it makes all art one....the experience of art is the same in kind or order despite all differences in works of art themselves." We feel the same way, which is why we write about so many different things. We think many people--maybe most--approach art with a similarly wide-ranging appreciation. By writing each day about our own experiences as consumers and critics, we hope to create a meeting place in cyberspace for arts lovers who are curious, adventurous, and unafraid of the unfamiliar.

Letters like this suggest that we're succeeding. That's a good feeling.

As for Westerns, I posted a list of my eleven favorites a year or so. Go here to read it. Except for Ride Lonesome, all of these films have been officially released on videocassette, and five are also available on DVD. (Some of the former are currently out of print but can be rented at well-stocked stores.) A good-quality off-the-air videocassette dub of Ride Lonesome, along with the rest of the Westerns Randolph Scott made in collaboration with Budd Boetticher, can be purchased from Comet Video.

Incidentally, I gave a talk about Westerns to a group of teenagers just the other day, and showed them Ride Lonesome as an example of the Western at its purest and most classical. (It's only 73 minutes long, making it ideal for lecture purposes.) I'm pleased to say that they all paid close attention and showed no visible signs of boredom.

Posted November 15, 12:03 PM

TT: Once more, with feeling

Just in case it's slipped your mind, I'm making two public appearances this week to promote All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, the first in New York City and the second in Connecticut.

Specifically:

- Robert Gottlieb and I will be appearing next Tuesday, Nov. 16, at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square (the address is 33 E. 17th St.) to discuss the life and work of George Balanchine with Robert Greskovic, the dance critic of The Wall Street Journal. Gottlieb, the dance critic of the New York Observer, is the author of George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, just out from HarperCollins. We'll be signing copies of our books after the talk. (If you've already bought All in the Dances, bring it along and I'll inscribe it with pleasure.)

The show starts at seven o'clock. For more information, go here.

- On Friday, Nov. 19, I'll be coming to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford to talk about Balanchine and his legacy with Francis Mason, dance critic of WQXR-FM and co-author of Balanchine's Complete Stories of the Great Ballets. The show starts at six o'clock, but if you come early, you can see "Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum." The galleries close at five p.m., time enough to go out to dinner, then come back and hear us talk.

For more information, go here.

Posted November 15, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble."

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (July 2, 1751)

Posted November 15, 12:00 PM

TT: Sounds like fun to me

A friend writes:

I thought of a possible game you might like: What did you read when? It was prompted by a friend, who reported that his wife said their mid-teenage kids better read Ayn Rand quick, or they will be too old for her.

I was thinking of reading the Alexandria Quartet about a dozen years ago, in my early thirties, when my wife, who had loved it, waved me off: I was too old.

There are books that can only be read when we're young; books that can only be read when we're old; and books that can be read at all ages, but which change as their readers do. Maybe there are also books that are the same for everybody (genre fiction? Wodehouse?).

I'm on the fly all week and won't have time to play the first round myself, but this is obviously a superior game, so I've decided to pass the word to any of you who feel like jumping into the pool. I'll get back to it once things slow down and my lungs clear up (the second of which seems to be happening, about which more later).

For now, gotta run. Just got back from The Incredibles (also AWML) and now have to change clothes for an off-off-Broadway preview waaaaay downtown. More anon.

Posted November 15, 5:04 AM

TT: Words to the wise

An out-of-town reader just back from a visit to New York writes:

I strolled over to TKTS to check things out. Everything, it seemed, was on half-price sale. If you take a chance on previews, and if you want to see nearly everything else, including THE PRODUCERS, it's available for the reduced rate. And that included much of off-Broadway.

My correspondent is a high-octane theater buff. In case you don't know what we're talking about, TKTS is the Theatre Development Fund's Times Square kiosk that sells same-day discount tickets to Broadway and off-Broadway shows.

Go thou and do likewise.

Posted November 15, 4:51 AM

November 12, 2004

TT: A little ahead of myself

I thought I'd be in the pink today, but no such luck. This damned flu bug (for that's obviously what I've got) doesn't seem to want to let go.

The bad news is that I have two shows to see, plus a speech to give, between now and Monday morning. The good news is that I don't have any urgent deadlines.

All things considered, I think I'll hang it up until Monday. Have a nice weekend. (Sniffle.)

Posted November 12, 12:03 PM

TT: Good enough for a laugh

It's Friday, meaning that I'm in The Wall Street Journal, this time with a triple-barreled review of two off-Broadway openings and a Broadway cast change.

First is The Foreigner:

It says in the program that Larry Shue's "The Foreigner," originally produced in 1983 and revived this week by the Roundabout Theatre Company, is "one of America's most popular plays." That was news to me--I'd never heard of it--so I did a little nosing around and found out that "The Foreigner," which survived tepid reviews to run for two years Off Broadway, has since become a staple item at regional and community theaters around the country. It figures. Like "Charley's Aunt" and "Arsenic and Old Lace," "The Foreigner" is a pleasant, undemanding farce built around an inherently silly situation, the kind of play that's as actor-proof as a comedy can be. So long as they learn their lines and follow the stage directions, even a bunch of raw amateurs can put it on and expect to get laughs.

Why, then, is the Roundabout going to the trouble of reviving so provincial a show? Two words: Matthew Broderick. The erstwhile co-star of "The Producers" was born to play Charlie Baker, the mild-mannered, tightly wrapped Brit who pays a visit to a Georgia fishing lodge and is there induced (don't ask how) to pose as a foreigner of unknown origin who can't speak a word of English. Mr. Broderick gleefully hurls himself into the fray, tossing off meaningless mock-Slavic monologues ("Byottsky dottsky! Perch damasa baxa raxa") and generally conducting himself like a lunatic on vacation from the asylum....

Next, Five by Tenn:

I was downright flabbergasted by "And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens," the third part of "Five by Tenn," the Manhattan Theatre Club's too-cutely-named quintuple bill of previously unknown one-act plays that opened last night at City Center's Stage II. Unlike the other plays on the program, this 1959 vignette about a flouncy New Orleans drag queen (Cameron Folmar) and the tough-guy sailor he picks up in a bar (Myk Watford) is concise, realistic, free of pseudo-poetry and wholly involving. Why does it work so well? Could it be because Williams, in a radical departure from his usual practice, chose for the first and only time to write a play whose characters and subject matter are explicitly gay? (That's what the press release claims, anyway.) Whatever the reason, the results are memorable....

Finally, I went back to Wonderful Town after a year's absence to see a familiar new face:

Brooke Shields, the latest celebrity non-singer to join the cast of a Broadway musical, has replaced Donna Murphy in "Wonderful Town." I can't think of a scarier act to follow: Ms. Murphy was stupendously fine as Ruth Sherwood, the wisecracking writer who knows a hundred easy ways to lose a man. The good news is that Ms. Shields is pretty damn fine herself, while her singing isn't nearly as lame as I'd feared (though she crashed and burned in the two-part harmony of "Ohio"). A nifty physical comedienne, she mugs like a Marx Brother, and though she hasn't enough vocal oomph to bounce her songs off the back wall of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, I was happily surprised to see how much she managed to make out of her comic numbers.

Guess what? There's a link! As OGIC mentioned a few days ago, this is the week when the Journal makes its online edition available for free in order to attract new subscribers. So if you want to read the whole thing, go here--then browse around at your leisure and see how you like the rest of the paper. I'm prejudiced, but I think the Journal Online is one of the best deals in journalism. See for yourself.

Posted November 12, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Barbara herself pretended to no illusions about Basil. Years of disappointment and betrayal had convinced her, in the reasoning part of her, that he was no good. They had played pirates together and the game was over. Basil played pirates alone. She apostatized from her faith in him almost with formality, and yet, as a cult will survive centuries after its myths have been exposed and its sources of faith tainted, there was still deep in her that early piety, scarcely discernable now in a little residue of superstition, so that this morning when her world seemed rocking about her, she turned back to Basil. Thus, when earthquake strikes a modern city and the pavements gape, the sewers buckle up and the great buildings tremble and topple, men in bowler hats and natty, ready-made suitings, born of generations of literates and rationalists, will suddenly revert to the magic of the forest and cross their fingers to avert the avalanche of concrete."

Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags

Posted November 12, 12:00 PM

November 11, 2004

OGIC: Making a long story short

In the Times today, critic Caryn James has strong views about this year's crop of National Book Award fiction nominees.

When the fiction nominees were announced, there was much grumbling about their sameness--all women, all living in New York City, all little-known names. But the minor resemblances of sex and city are nothing next to what really makes this one of the least varied lists of nominees in recent years: a short-story aesthetic. Not one of these books is big and sprawling. And not one has much of a sense of humor....

...all five are built on compressed observations that easily veer into precious writers' program language, too woozy and poetic for its own good.

That claustrophobic sameness doesn't help readers. Awards are inherently silly, but there's a method to their silliness. Whether it's the National Book Awards, the Tonys or the Oscars, contests become guides to what the public might want to catch up on, offering something-for-everyone choices. For the best-picture Oscar, there is an art house film and a popcorn movie, a "Lost in Translation" and a "Lord of the Rings." At last year's National Book Award ceremony, Shirley Hazzard's eloquent novel "The Great Fire," about memory and lost love in postwar Japan, won over T. C. Boyle's "Drop City," a raucous story of a 70's hippie commune. It was a mismatched contest, but a competition that suggested the breadth and vitality of the year's fiction.

This year's list serves readers who like only a certain style--the style, say, of Rick Moody, the novelist and short-story writer who is chairman of the five-person fiction panel and who has been known to write some woozily poetic prose of his own. Whoever comes out ahead when the winner is announced on Wednesday, it defies logic to think that five such similar books just happen to be the best of the year--a year in which Philip Roth's chilling historical fantasy "The Plot Against America" and Chang-rae Lee's understated story of a suburban man's life, "Aloft," deserved their extravagant critical praise.

In that infamous Believer essay by Heidi Julavits that is remembered principally, and ad nauseum, for decrying "snark" in book reviews, Julavits also advanced the corollary--to me more interesting and creditable--that critical snark is frequently deployed to punish just what should be encouraged: literary ambition. I note with interest the compatibility of this claim with James's misgivings about the set of novels nominated for the NBA. And it is as a set crowded into a narrow range that they give her pause. I found her essay honest, thoughtful, and especially informative if, like me, you haven't read any of these books. The only shred of knowledge I have of these writers is of a previous novel by Joan Silber, Lucky Us, which I reviewed some years ago. That novel also operated on a fairly small scale, but it impressed me utterly. Here's some of what I wrote then:

Seldom does a title encapsulate a book's tensions and revelations as well as Joan Silber's snappy, deceptively simple "Lucky Us." As a scrap of arch commentary on the truly malignant misfortune that befalls this novel's protagonist couple, "lucky us" is a pithy epithet that could have fallen from the lips of either of these congenitally irreverent New Yorkers. But Silber, deservedly celebrated as a vivid chronicler of modern manners and the urban everyday, gently strips away the irony from the title statement as her plot unfolds. By the end of the book, one of the main characters finds himself amazed to realize, "You can have good luck as well as bad." This strikes him as "a complicated new truth, a beautiful and irrefutable fact."

Ultimately, the apparently ironic "lucky us" proves just as true to the experience of this novel when read as a sincere statement of thanks for life and love. In Gabe and Elisa's Manhattan love story, most of the usual romantic conventions are overturned or at least tweaked. Romance is unchained from conventionality in their unlikely pairing. Ruminative, selfless, centered Gabe is 50-something, with the lightly checkered past of a year spent in jail for dealing drugs as a young man. Now content with the modest lifestyle of a camera salesman, he stands as the serene, solid center around which Elisa, half his age, flutters rakishly.

Alive with "dizzy, selfish sweetness," Elisa styles herself a bright young pro at desire--at cultivating and satisfying longings of her own and at planting them in others and basking in the attention that results. "I thought of myself as a lavish bit of bounty I was gifting him with," she says of her initial courting of Gabe. She's just self-aware enough to make a virtue out of vanity. The world is her oyster, and she finds it very much an aphrodisiac.

In he-said-she-said fashion, Elisa and Gabe narrate alternating chapters of their story. The first chapter is Elisa's, and she imbues it with all her sunny, lusty blitheness. So her diagnosis as HIV-positive near the end of the chapter, just as she and Gabe are planning their wedding, is a dark shock and the the first, most tremendous blow of bad luck that wallops the couple. It sets off a chain of reactions that threaten to sabotage her relationship with Gabe as Elisa struggles to see herself in the new light cast by the virus. Elisa is left picking up the pieces of a dismantled identity and inhabiting a body suddenly strange to her....

Why Lucky Us was never reprinted in paperback is beyond me. Perhaps the NBA nomination of Ideas of Heaven will change that.

UPDATE: I was curious whether googling a phrase from the above review would lead resourceful readers to my identity. A test run led instead to the delightful revelation that the review was lifted a short time after it ran, chopped in half, and was attributed to somebody named Lee Hall. Charming! OGIC, in case you are wondering, is not Lee Hall....

Posted November 11, 12:57 PM

TT: Come see me!

A boy must peddle his book, and I'll be making two public appearances next week to flog All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, the first in New York City and the second in Connecticut.

Here's the scoop:

- I've mentioned this before and probably will again, but Robert Gottlieb and I will be appearing next Tuesday, Nov. 16, at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square (the address is 33 E. 17th St.) to discuss the life and work of George Balanchine with Robert Greskovic, the dance critic of The Wall Street Journal. Gottlieb, the dance critic of the New York Observer, is the author of George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, just out from HarperCollins. We'll be conversing among ourselves, after which we'll take questions from the audience and sign copies of our books. (If you've already bought All in the Dances, bring it along and I'll be more than happy to do the honors.) All three of us are voluble and opinionated, which should make for a good time.

The show starts at seven o'clock. For more information, go here.

- On Friday, Nov. 19, I'll be coming to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford to talk about Balanchine and his legacy with Francis Mason, dance critic of WQXR-FM and co-author of Balanchine's Complete Stories of the Great Ballets.

The show starts at six o'clock, but come early so that you can see "Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum," a major exhibition that documents a great museum's involvement with dance in the Thirties--an extraordinary tale in and of itself. The galleries close at five p.m., which will give you plenty of time to grab dinner, come back, and watch us perform.

For more information, go here.

Posted November 11, 12:57 PM

TT: Be still, and know that they are shy

I've been rereading John Canarina's Pierre Monteux, Maître, a biography of a great and wise French conductor who never quite became a celebrity (I blogged about him last year), and ran across an anecdote I wanted to share with you. Monteux had just conducted Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande at the Metropolitan Opera House, and was talking about the production with his fellow conductor Max Rudolf, who was then the company's music administrator:

When Max Rudolf expressed concern to Monteux over the fact that the Pelléas performances were not well attended, he replied, "That's all right, it is the same in Paris." When asked if he thought Pelléas would ever be a popular opera, he said, "It was not meant to be."

I think Monteux put his finger on something important, not to mention easily misunderstood. I once wrote an essay about Gabriel Fauré for Commentary in which I tried to explain why his music had never been popular and probably never would be. It's called "The Shy Master":

Is it likely that Gabriel Fauré's music will ever speak to a wider audience? Not really. For all its beauties, it lacks a quality normally present in the work of romantic artists: It is not forthcoming. To appreciate Fauré, you must come to him, in the same way that you might open yourself up to a painter like Edouard Vuillard. It is as though you were talking with a shy person whose voice is only audible in a quiet room. If the room is too noisy--or if you insist on doing all the talking--then you will hear nothing at all.

George Balanchine's Liebeslieder Walzer, an hour-long plotless ballet set to the music of Brahms, is another example of shy art. It's intensely romantic, but if you're not in a receptive frame of mind, it won't make much of an impression on you, which may explain why it's never been especially popular with New York City Ballet audiences. And is there anything wrong with that? Balanchine didn't think so. As I wrote in All in the Dances:

More than a few members of the ballet's earliest audiences, bored by its unending succession of "love-song waltzes," would slip out of the theater during the pause between acts. In an oft-told anecdote that may or may not be true, Balanchine and [Lincoln] Kirstein were watching a performance together. "Look how many people are leaving, George," Kirstein moaned, to which Balanchine replied, "Ah, but look how many are staying!" Today, though New York City Ballet now performs Liebeslieder Walzer only infrequently, it is loved by connoisseurs for what Arlene Croce has called its "persistent note of melancholy and tragic remorse," and there are those, myself included, who regard it as their favorite Balanchine ballet of all.

On the other hand, Balanchine's retort to Kirstein suggested that he thought Liebeslieder Walzer would someday find a wider audience, which so far hasn't happened. It is, indeed, beloved, but only by a comparatively modest number of people, just like the music of Fauré, the paintings and prints of Vuillard, John Twachtman, and Giorgio Morandi, the novels of Barbara Pym, and any number of other works of art that occupy a special place in my heart, perhaps because I myself am romantic in much the same way (though you probably wouldn't guess it unless you knew me very well).

Max Beerbohm, himself one of the shyest of artists, liked to call himself a "Tory anarchist." Similarly, I think of myself as a democratic elitist. I know shy art isn't for everyone, but I also know there are more than a few people out there who'd love it if only they knew about it. That's why I write about shy artists whenever I get the chance, knowing that each time I do, a handful of readers whose curiosity is piqued by my praise will make the kind of life-changing discovery I described in "The Shy Master":

And if you choose instead to listen, closely and carefully? Then you may find yourself responding with the fervor of a Copland or a Marcel Proust, who told Fauré that "I not only admire and venerate your music, I am in love with it" and went so far as to use him as one of the models for Vinteuil, the composer in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. It was a remarkable tribute from one great artist to another--but, then, Fauré had a way of inspiring such tributes. John Singer Sargent painted him. Maurice Ravel studied with him. "I know of no other music which is more purely and uniquely music," Arthur Honegger said, "except, perhaps, that of Mozart or Schubert."

As for Pélleas, it can take care of itself. Every major opera company in the world feels obliged to present it from time to time, as the Met will be doing in January and February, and it's been recorded more than once (I especially like this version). No, it's not for everyone. That's why the Met is only giving four performances of Pélleas this season. It wasn't meant to be popular. It doesn't have to be. All it has to be is beautiful.

Posted November 11, 12:56 PM

TT: Personal

Dear WML Fan: I got your package today. Wow! Alas, your e-mail address got swallowed up by my hard drive, and I don't yet have enough voice to carry on a comfortable telephone conversation.

Write me, O.K.?

Posted November 11, 12:03 PM

TT: Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today

I woke up yesterday morning and realized that I'd finally gotten the better of the bug that bit me. Needless to say, that's all the more reason for me to continue taking it easy for as long as I can, since I have a lifelong habit of jumping the fences. Still, I'm sure that I've turned the corner, and just in the nick of time, too: I went to see Brooke Shields in Wonderful Town on Tuesday night, and tonight I'll be going to a press preview of 'Night, Mother, followed by The Good Body on Friday and Democracy on Saturday. Yikes!

Anyway, thanks to everyone out there in cyberspace for your comforting e-mails (all of which I've answered). I'll try not to let myself get run down between now and the day before Thanksgiving, at which time I'm heading for Smalltown, U.S.A., to (A) eat turkey with my mother and (B) do as little as possible. Film-noir buffs will of course recognize the second of these as the recipe for a long, happy life. No doubt I'll hew to it about as closely as J.J. Gittes did--though I hope not with similar results!

Posted November 11, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"‘You know, being a Conservative is much more restful,' Linda said to me once in a moment of confidence, when she was being unusually frank about her life, ‘though one must remember that it is bad, not good. But it does take place within certain hours, and then finish, whereas Communism seems to eat up all one's life and energy. And the comrades are such Hons, but sometimes they make me awfully cross, just as Tony used to make one furious when he talked about the workers. I often feel rather the same when they talk about us--you see, just like Tony, they've got it all wrong. I'm all for them stringing up Sir Leicester, but if they started on Aunt Emily and Davey, or even on Fa, I don't think I could stand by and watch. I suppose one is neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring, that's the worst of it.'"

Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love

Posted November 11, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Whither crit crit?

Did I get the same New York Times as everyone else today? I can't help feeling that some of my fellow book bloggers are waxing a bit Julavitian about Caryn James's group review of the National Book Award nominees (see next post down). James is pretty even-handed in her piece, offering persuasive praise for each book as well as critiques of what she seems to have soberly and reasonably--if, by other readers' lights, incorrectly--judged their limitations. Nothing in the piece seems to me remotely like an assault, like an attack, or angry (let alone angry, angry, angry). Sure, it had to have been a challenging piece, giving James such limited space to review five books as well as offer an overview. But despite the built-in limitations of the assignment, what she's written looks to me (and to CAAF) not like a declaration of war but like honest criticism.

I do tend to view these matters more from the perspective of a book reviewer than that of a reader. As a reviewer, I find that the most difficult thing to resist is the impulse to be too nice and therefore, critically speaking, useless. So I react particularly strongly to what I consider phantom snark sightings. I may have still more personal reflections on all of this, but at the moment I have to hurl myself into the shower and try to make it to a dinner for a poet at 6:00. About which you'll hear more tomorrow.

Posted November 11, 5:26 AM

November 10, 2004

TT: Paranoia strikes deep

This is likely to be a somewhat dicey week for me. On Tuesday night I started ramping up to my usual performance-going schedule, even though I'm still a bit shaky from the bug that bit me last week. (Alas, Broadway openings wait for no man!) So in lieu of a freshly written posting, I've pulled another vintage essay out of my electronic hat, a column I wrote for Fi, the now-defunct audio magazine, a few years ago. I hope you find it interesting.

* * *

The best thing written about classical music this past winter was, believe it or not, an essay by a music critic about another music critic. William Youngren's "Haggin," published in the winter issue of The American Scholar, is a remarkable memoir of the man most responsible for forming the tastes of postwar American record collectors. It is also a cautionary tale of how a great critic fell victim to the occupational disease of his profession--paranoia.

I doubt B.H. Haggin is especially well known to Gen-X audiophiles, but for those who came of age between the '40s and the '70s, his name will trigger vivid memories. Haggin was as influential as any American music critic who has ever lived, and he exerted much of his influence, unusually, through a book written for novice music lovers. The Listener's Musical Companion, published in 1956, was acquired by school libraries across America, there to be read by innumerable teenagers who swallowed whole its sternly compelling myth of interpretative rectitude, in which Arturo Toscanini was God and Wilhelm Furtwängler the Antichrist. More than a few critics who now publish in Fi, myself included, cut their teeth on The Listener's Musical Companion, and its echoes can be heard to this day in everything we write.

Haggin also shaped the face of American musical journalism in an even more unusual way: by answering his mail. Many of his readers wrote to him over the years, and he always wrote back--usually on a typed postcard--to defend or amplify his views. Those exchanges not infrequently led to face-to-face encounters, and sometimes to friendship. That was how I got to know Haggin, who later recommended me to Ted Libbey (then the editor of High Fidelity), the first editor ever to ask me to review classical recordings. If you don't like my stuff, you thus have B.H. Haggin to blame. And my experience was far from unique: indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if Haggin did more than anyone else of his generation to encourage young music critics.

But Haggin had a dark side, one described candidly by William Youngren. Though he affected to believe that "criticism does not, as some people think it must, offer the one possible and correct opinion," he was in fact dogmatic to a fault, and his penchant for writing bluntly and insultingly about other critics with whom he disagreed got him in hot water time and again. Starting in the '60s, he also picked fights with most of the writers and musicians he had befriended over the years, and by the time of his death in 1987, the people with whom he was still on speaking terms could probably have been numbered in single digits.

Haggin's violent contentiousness was no secret in the music business, and it led many to wonder if he was entirely right in the head. What was not generally known prior to the publication of Youngren's essay was that there was concrete reason to be concerned about his sanity: as early as the '50s, Haggin's psychiatrist put him on such major tranquilizers as Thorazine, a drug commonly used to treat schizophrenia.

Once I learned this fact, the weirdly aggressive tone of Haggin's post-1960 writings suddenly began to make sense to me in a way it never had before. We use the word "paranoia" casually nowadays, but in the context of mental illness it has a precise meaning: It is the overwhelming feeling of persecution experienced by schizophrenics whose delusions have loosened their hold on reality. Surely there can be no doubt that this was Haggin's problem: His own sense of reality was threatened when people--especially people he respected--disagreed with him about musical matters. Hence the queer outbursts of near-frenzy that mar such later books as A Decade of Music (1973) and Music and Ballet, 1973-1983 (1984). They are expressions not of anger, but stark terror.

Haggin's story is interesting both in its own right and as a reminder that all critics, great and small, are prone to paranoia. The reason is simple: we don't always agree. Especially in New York, where four daily newspapers cover the classical-music scene, it is an unsettling business to pick up the morning papers and read four different opinions about a concert--unsettling not just for readers, but also for the critics themselves. To be sure, I take some critics more seriously than others, but it always shakes me when a colleague loathes a performance I loved. (The converse is for some mysterious reason less disturbing.) If only for a moment, I feel what B.H. Haggin must have felt at all times: am I losing touch with reality?

I should add that this feeling, while it can be unpleasant, isn't necessarily unhealthy (unless you happen to be schizophrenic). Critics need constant reminding that criticism is not an exact science--or, indeed, any kind of science at all. As for those frustrated performers who find themselves on the receiving end of contradictory reviews, I can do no better than to quote from No Minor Chords, Andre Previn's wonderful memoir: "It is perfectly correct to disregard all the bad reviews one gets, but only if at the same time, one disregards the good ones as well."

UPDATE: Alex Ross has some thoughts on this post:

As a critic, I'm obliged to describe musical reality precisely as I hear it; I can't sway in the breeze of intermission chatter. All the same, I want to write a review that will be of use even to a listener who had an entirely different experience. This entails writing with a certain humble awareness that my experience is not universal, that my account will never be carved in granite. Criticism is at its best where confidence meets generosity. It's a tricky business: the slide into fake omniscience is deliciously quick. But I'm working on it.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted November 10, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Terror takes all forms, but the worst form is compassion. When you love someone and feel compassion for him as well, you can be driven to do the most brutal things."

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shadows on the Hudson

Posted November 10, 12:00 PM

OGIC: For big kids, too

If you're looking for some cinematic holiday spirit, it should be abundantly clear by now that The Polar Express is not the answer. May I recommend, then, the unjustly obscure classic Olive, the Other Reindeer?

Perhaps you are one of the lucky few who caught this hour-long animated Christmas special on Fox before they inexplicably stopped running it. If so, then you know it's savvy and goofy and sweet, the best in its genre since the Grinch. In fact, if you ask me, it's a good sight better; it's one of those blessed pieces of kiddie culture that aims to please the parents as well, not to mention random adults who don't have the face-saving cover of children to explain my, er, their deep familiarity with it.

Michael Stipe crooning soulfully as Schnitzel, Blitzen's nonflying cousin; Joey Pants playing a penguin who hawks phony Rolexes out of a briefcase; Drew Barrymore as a dog who thinks she's a reindeer: what's not to like? Trust me. I realize "animated holiday special" are not words likely to strike hope in the hearts of the aesthetically discerning. But every skeptical soul that I've tied to a chair and forced to watch Olive has thanked me for it in the end.

Bonus materials: the brilliant creators of Olive, J. Otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh, introduced her in this book. Seibold, who seems to have looked at a lot of Picasso, draws his penguins, dogs, and fleas on a Macintosh. Walsh and Seibold also wrote and illustrated the official children's guide to Going to the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: Delicious of Delicious Pundit rightly points out that I wrongly imply that Seibold and Walsh are the only brilliant parties involved here. While credit for creating Olive and her universe is theirs, the television special itself is the fabulous work of television comedy writer Steve Young. Far be it from me to deny credit to someone whose work has pleased me so, well, deliciously. I'm grateful for the correction.

Posted November 10, 6:05 AM

November 9, 2004

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that."

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

Posted November 09, 12:33 PM

TT: The unbearable arbitrariness of the muse

Journalists are deadline junkies. Even if they don't start out that way, they soon find themselves needing the stimulus of a deadline in order to get anything done, and most of them find it all but impossible to write a piece before it's due.

I'm no better than the rest of my colleagues, but at least I take my own deadlines seriously. If you tell me a piece is due on Tuesday, that's when you'll get it, absent some hugely compelling reason to the contrary. Illness qualifies, and the upper-respiratory bug with which I've been doing battle for the past week caused me to blow the deadline for a piece I was supposed to write about Bright Young Things, the film version of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. Fortunately, I knew this particular deadline wasn't set in stone, so I warned my editor via e-mail, who wrote back to tell me that I could turn it in as late as Monday, when the magazine would be going to press. I needed all the rest I could get, so I decided to put off writing the piece until first thing Monday morning, hoping that by then I'd feel decent enough to turn out something sufficiently readable.

Even when I'm healthy, I often have trouble sleeping the night before an unwritten piece is due, and I felt perfectly frightful when I went to bed on Sunday. I tossed and turned throughout the night, sleeping for two hours at most, and awoke at six a.m., three hours ahead of the alarm clock. My head felt as though someone had pumped it full of budget-priced concrete, but there didn't seem to be much point in trying to go back to sleep, so I crawled out of bed, turned on my computer, and went to work, grimly certain that I was in for a long day of pain and suffering. I was wrong. Two hours later the piece was finished, and even in my blurry state I knew it was good--perhaps one of my best.

Every writer can tell you a dozen stories like that. Some pieces come easily and others don't, and you can't tell in advance which way the coin will fall. In my own case, the mystery is heightened by the fact that I rarely suffer from writer's block. My first professional gig was as a music critic for the Kansas City Star, and in those days we still filed our reviews at 11:30 for the next day's paper (an old-fashioned practice that the New York Times has just revived). I was terrified the first time I had to hit that unforgiving deadline, but within a few weeks the fear had worn off, and ever since then I've trusted in my facility. Nowadays it's not uncommon for me to turn out three pieces in a single week, some as long as five thousand words, and I never doubt that they'll be of professional quality. What I don't know is whether they'll be any better than that. It's strictly up to the muse.

Journalists aren't exactly artists, but in this respect they resemble artists, who know that a professional can't afford to wait for inspiration. Of the many George Balanchine quotes I tucked into All in the Dances, this one is my favorite:

Choreography, finally, becomes a profession. In making ballets, you cannot sit and wait for the Muse. Union time hardly allows it, anyhow. You must be able to be inventive at any time.

Note that Mr. B said "inventive," not "inspired." He knew what all artists know, which is that the only way you can ever hope to experience inspiration is to seek it regularly, ideally every day. It's like a bus that doesn't run on a regular schedule: the more often you come to the bus stop, the better the chances that you'll be there when it arrives.

I'm used to this, as well I should be, but sometimes I get vexed at the muse when she pulls a fast one, the way she did yesterday morning. Of course I'm glad that particular piece came off so well--but why on earth did I have a good day when I was feeling so awful? It offends my sense of order. In a better-organized world, an artist would be able to earn inspiration. He'd get up bright and early after having gone to bed at a reasonable hour, eat a nutritious breakfast, sharpen his pencils, go out to walk the dog and help an old lady across the street, and return to his desk secure in the knowledge that the muse would descend at ten a.m. sharp. Fat chance. To be sure, regular habits are good for artists. They make it easier to be inventive on demand. But inspiration, unlike invention, won't come when it's called. It's a cat, not a dog. If you can't live with that knowledge, you're better off pursuing some other line of work.

Tho