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May 31, 2005

TT: Multitudes, multitudes

Last Friday I paid my first visit to the Barnes Foundation, the museum and art school in suburban Philadelphia that is home to Paul Cézanne's Large Bathers and Henri Matisse's Joy of Life. (I was escorted by my old friend Mark Obert-Thorn, the sound engineer whose double-barreled name is known to everyone who collects CD reissues of classical 78s.) The Barnes has been much in the news in recent months, so I won't recapitulate its widely reported travails save to say that it will be moving at some point in the not-too-distant future from its original site to downtown Philadelphia. If you aren't familiar with the history of the Barnes Foundation, you can read all about it here and here.

Fortunately, you don't have to know anything about the convoluted history of the Barnes to be fascinated by the place itself. Dr. Albert Barnes, a man far too peculiar to be sufficiently described by the word "eccentric," spent the better part of a half-century buying paintings and devising the unusual ways in which they are now displayed in the gallery he built in 1925 to house them. I don't know any other museum quite like the Barnes, whose walls are tightly packed with hundreds and hundreds of works by the likes of Cézanne, Daumier, El Greco, Klee, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, and such early American modernists as Maurice Prendergast, Charles Demuth, and Alfred Maurer, all of them hung without identification save for a tiny tag bearing the artist's last name. (To see photographs of the gallery, go here.)

Like everyone seeing the Barnes for the first time, I was flabbergasted, not merely by the number of masterpieces it contains but also by the sheer acreage of canvas on display, and it took me the better part of an afternoon to sort out my complicated responses. Here are a few verbal snapshots from my visit, scribbled into my notebook on the spot and amplified at leisure:

- I found the excessiveness of the Barnes Foundation to be central to its total effect. Seeing a dozen paintings at a single glance may not be the best way to appreciate any of them individually, but it's certainly exciting, even overwhelming, and there's nothing wrong (to put it mildly!) with being overwhelmed by art.

In addition, I was delighted by the absence of wall labels. As I wrote in this space a couple of years ago, apropos of a visit to "Gyroscope," an exhibition at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum:

As those of you who know me personally are all too aware, I have reached that unhappy age when I am sorely in need of bifocals. Alas, I'm too stubborn/vain/lazy to go to the trouble of getting a pair, so I continue to do without. I noticed for the first time at the Hirshhorn on Friday that I can no longer read the wall labels at museums without taking off my glasses. At first I found this to be irritating, but before long I realized that it was liberating.

Confession time: I have another little problem, which is that my eyes reflexively go to the labels in a group show, very often before I've taken in the works of art they identify. I can't help myself--I'm a slave to the printed word. Only I can't do it anymore. To read the labels, I now have to pull off my glasses and move in close, which takes away all the fun. As a result, I looked at "Gyroscope" the right way, meaning what first and who second, and not infrequently, I didn't even bother to find out who. (In addition to a reasonably generous helping of good stuff, "Gyroscope" contains more than its fair share of crappy art.) Dr. Albert Barnes, who deliberately hung the paintings in the Barnes Collection without labels in order to force visitors to think harder about the art they were there to see, would have been proud of me....

I've just admitted to a naïve-sounding disability which I'm sure will make some of you smile. I came late to the visual arts, and I still fall on my face with humbling regularity. I'm no connoisseur, just a guy who likes to look at paintings, though I trust my eye and my taste. On the other hand, I don't trust them far enough to be absolutely sure I'm always seeing paintings, not reputations, which is one of the minor reasons why I think I'll put off getting that first pair of bifocals for a little while longer.

Now that I've finally broken down and started wearing bifocals, I find myself tempted once again to read before looking. You can't do that at the Barnes. So much the better. It keeps you honest.

- Barnes hung his paintings in non-chronological groupings intended to help the novice viewer see the similarities between the compositional devices employed by different artists from different periods. Alas, most of his painstaking arrangements struck me as naïve: I quickly tired of their rigid pyramidal symmetry, and the picture-to-picture "rhyming" rarely seemed other than obvious (though I'm sure students find it instructive, which of course is what Barnes had in mind).

The only juxtaposition that I found eye-opening was the wall on which watercolors by Cézanne and Charles Demuth are hung side by side--along with two Japanese fans. That taught me something. (I hadn't realized, by the way, that Barnes collected Demuth in such depth. Never before had I seen so many of his marvelous watercolors in one place.)

- I was surprised by how many paintings I saw on my second pass through the galleries that I'd failed to notice the first time through--including more than a few of the ones I ended up liking best. (I actually mistook one postcard-sized Daumier for a switchplate.) The problem, I think, is that Albert Barnes' taste for high-key color was so pronounced, even exaggerated, that the collection as a whole, with its relentless emphasis on the intense reds and oranges of his beloved Renoirs, has the unintended effect of swallowing up smaller and/or less brightly colored paintings of great excellence.

- The Barnes contains 181 Renoirs, most of them late and most of them awful. (Here's a typical example.) Indeed, a day at the Barnes Foundation is almost enough to persuade you that Renoir was a minor painter. You have to flee its stifling atmosphere and remind yourself anew of what a really good Renoir looks like in order to recapture your perspective.

- Barnes was as smart about Cézanne and Matisse as he was silly about Renoir. Granted, you can "know" Cézanne without having gone to the Barnes Foundation: it's a great, great collection, but it doesn't tell you anything about him that you can't find out elsewhere. Not so Matisse. Even after a decade of serious and sustained exposure to his work, a single visit to the Barnes significantly heightened my understanding of Matisse's language and my appreciation of his achievement.

- My favorite individual room in the Barnes was Gallery 10, devoted almost entirely to small paintings. Dominated by Matisse, it's one of the few galleries that contains nothing by Cézanne. I could live in that room.

- It goes almost without saying that the single greatest painting in the Barnes is "The Large Bathers." (I almost hate to admit it, but I don't really care for "The Joy of Life"!) But my personal favorite--the one I'd most like to hang in the Teachout Museum--is a late Cézanne, undated and very likely unfinished, called "Two Pitchers and Fruit." It reminded me strongly of the Phillips Collection's Garden at Les Lauves and is of exactly comparable quality.

Not coincidentally, seeing the Barnes for the first time redoubled my appreciation of the Phillips. While Albert Barnes and Duncan Phillips were both great art collectors whose underlying sensibilities were very similar, Barnes was both obsessive and provincial in a way that Phillips was not. Phillips spent a lifetime cultivating his eye and mind by engaging with the ideas of others; Barnes seems to have listened only to himself, eventually going so far as to create a closed system of aesthetics whose sole purpose was to justify his own prejudices, unleavened by the kind of broadening experience that ultimately led Phillips in such surprising directions. For all his self-evident passion and seriousness, Barnes was incapable of the kind of interior growth that made it possible for Phillips to embrace Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn in his old age.

- I'm glad I waited so long to go to the Barnes for the first time. It's not a place for the casual museumgoer. That's why it will be a crime to move it elsewhere. I'm not talking about the complex legal and fiscal issues at stake in the planned move--I'm not competent to assess those. I'm talking about purely aesthetic matters. The Barnes isn't perfect, not by a long shot, but it's unique, and that's the point of it. Putting aside the distracting effects of the thousands of visitors who will start flocking to the new Barnes the day it opens its doors, the sense of pilgrimage is an essential part of the experience of visiting the Barnes Foundation. You can't just drop by on the spur of the moment--you have to make a reservation in advance and go well out of your way to get there. That contributes enormously to its special quality. Once the Barnes pulls up stakes and moves downtown, this quality will be lost forever, even if the existing galleries are reproduced exactly in its new quarters (which I'll believe when I see it).

Go now. I'm glad I did.

Posted May 31, 12:05 PM

TT: Speaking of Renoir

"People of taste and refinement tell us nowadays that Renoir is one of the great painters of the last century. But in so saying they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, well into the present century, before Renoir was hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter, the original writer proceeds on the lines adopted by oculists. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always agreeable to us. When it is at an end the operator says to us: 'Now look!' And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the; old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from what they used to be, because they are Renoirs, those Renoir types which we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest which reminds us of that other which when we first saw it looked like anything in the world except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable shades but lacking precisely the shades proper to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or writer of original talent."

Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes

Posted May 31, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"The world of art is a world which has been made by human beings for the direct satisfaction of their wishes. It is the real world stripped of what is meaningless and alien and remolded nearer to the heart's desire."

Albert C. Barnes, The Art in Painting

Posted May 31, 12:00 PM

May 30, 2005

TT: Holiday

I looked at my calendar for the coming week--three deadlines, two performances, a day trip to the Brooklyn Museum of Art and an overnight trip to Washington, D.C., to see Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie at Arena Stage--and decided that what I needed was a day off. So instead of revving up my iBook first thing Sunday morning, I slept late, met a musician friend for brunch, then took her down to Lincoln Center to watch New York City Ballet dance Jerome Robbins' The Goldberg Variations and George Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto, both of which were new to her. I chose the program as being particularly suitable for a musician, and also because I feel especially close to both ballets, albeit in different ways.

As readers of All in the Dances will recall, I place Stravinsky Violin Concerto very high on the short list of Balanchine's masterpieces:

Balanchine later told [Karin von] Aroldingen and [Patricia] McBride that Stravinsky Violin Concerto was the best ballet he had ever made. To a friend he expressed himself only slightly more modestly: "It is very good! My other ballets?...Okay, but not so good." Had the composer lived to see it, he might well have echoed the tribute he paid to Movements for Piano and Orchestra: "To see Balanchine's choreography of the Movements is to hear the music with one's eyes; and this visual hearing has been a greater revelation to me, I think than to anyone else. The choreography emphasizes relationships of which I had hardly been aware--in the same way--and the performance was like a tour of a building for which I had drawn the plans but never explored the result." Thirty years later, the significance of Stravinsky Violin Concerto is clearer still, for in no other ballet, not even Liebeslieder Walzer, did Balanchine fuse the modern and romantic sides of his personality more indissolubly. It is the ultimate expression of his black-and-white style, and though it may not be his greatest ballet, it is his most perfect one.

The Goldberg Variations isn't quite on that exalted level, but my special feeling for it has a similarly exalted cause: it was while watching it, and immediately afterward, that I had what has been the only mystical experience of my life to date.

This experience took place some fifteen years ago, and I later had occasion to describe it in print in an essay written not long after 9/11:

It had been a fearfully long day at the office, and I was drained and dry when I took my seat in the theater. I actually thought about skipping the performance, but something kept me in my seat long enough to be drawn into it, and soon I was experiencing Bach's crystalline notes and Robbins' heartfelt steps more intensely and completely than I have ever experienced any work of art at any time in my life, before or since. When it was over, I felt a surge of benevolence toward everyone on stage. I left the theater and stood for a long time on the steps leading down to the street, taking deep breaths of the cold night air, filled with a warmth that seemed to buoy me up. Then I flagged a cab, and as we drove down Broadway, I experienced an astonishing sense of release reminiscent of the ecstatic muscular exhaustion you feel after hard physical labor. It was as if all the cares of living in New York City, all the strains of my life, were slipping from my shoulders. The world around me appeared numinous, and I accepted everything in it, even the bright blue graffiti on a passing truck. It occurred to me that this was how a person might feel in the midst of the act of dying....

Grand Central Station came into view. The facade was brightly lit and the clock and the lettering carved into the granite were as crisp and clear as the printing in an expensive book. I drank it all in as I got out of the cab and walked slowly into the main lobby. A three-piece combo was playing some old standard I didn't recognize. I dropped a dollar bill into the trumpet player's open case. I noticed that I had a minute and a half to catch my train, so I ran all the way to the track, plopped down in a seat in the last car, and hardly felt out of breath at all.

W.H. Auden had a similar experience in 1933. As he described it many years later, he felt as though he had been "invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly--because, thanks to the power, I was doing it--what it means to love one's neighbor as oneself." Surely any ballet capable of making you feel that way deserves to be taken very seriously indeed (though no doubt Bach had a hand in it as well!).

While I had no such experience on Sunday afternoon, my friend and I were both moved to tears by what we saw and heard. Yet even though it was my day off, I'm never completely off duty, and as I watched the dancers, I caught myself trying to sort out in my mind exactly what it is that makes Balanchine's ballet better than Robbins'. The closest I could come was this: The Goldberg Variations is a piece of plotless theater, a complicated, carefully staged drama in which the dancers are playing "roles" of various explicable kinds, whereas Stravinsky Violin Concerto is a pure phenomenon, a visual poem whose ultimate meaning is impossible to convey in words. Even though it requires the intercession of dancers and musicians in order to be made manifest, it feels as if it is taking place in your mind, not on a stage--an experience, in short, not quite of this world.

My friend and I parted after the performance, both of us in a state close to ecstasy, embracing under the immense blue sky and reveling in the amazing fact that we were both alive and capable of receiving such beauty. John Lukacs has described the way we felt better than I possibly can:

This is the knowledge that the mystery and the reality of our lives consist in the understanding that we are coming from somewhere and that we are going somewhere, and that between these two mysterious phases God allows us to live and to know that we live while we live. Out of what is darkness to our imperfect minds, for sixty or seventy or eighty years we are living in the light, in the open.

Yesterday--all day--I knew just what he meant.

Posted May 30, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Order seems to come from searching for disorder, and awkwardness from searching for harmony or likeness, or the following of a system. The truest order is what you find already there, or that will be given if you don't try for it. When you arrange, you fail."

Fairfield Porter, letter to Claire Nicholas White (April 13, 1972)

Posted May 30, 12:00 PM

May 27, 2005

TT: Where I'd rather be

I'm taking the train to Philadelphia first thing Friday morning for an art-related day trip. Believe it or not, I've never seen the Barnes Foundation, and I figured I'd better go now while it's still there. Expect a report on Monday, unless I decide to write it on Tuesday.

Have a nice weekend--I plan to. Over to you, OGIC....

Posted May 27, 12:05 PM

TT: Stoppard, Steppenwolf, Shakespeare

It's Friday, and today's Wall Street Journal drama column is a report on my travels to New Haven (where I saw Long Wharf Theatre's revival of Tom Stoppard's Travesties) and Chicago (where I saw Lost Land at Steppenwolf and Romeo and Juliet at Chicago Shakespeare Theater). Two out of three is pretty damn good:

Producer A hires overambitious movie star B to appear on stage in classic play C. Examples: Denzel Washington in "Julius Caesar," Jessica Lange and Christian Slater in "The Glass Menagerie." Intended result: long lines at the box office. Unintended consequence: a grade-Z show. It's called "stunt casting," and it's almost always artistic bad news. On the other hand, it's no stunt when a TV star who also happens to be a seasoned stage performer decides to spend the annual hiatus in his shooting schedule doing some real acting. Sam Waterston of "Law & Order," for instance, is currently appearing in Long Wharf Theatre's production of Tom Stoppard's "Travesties," and he's as good as can be....

It's never a stunt when John Malkovich acts with Steppenwolf. To be sure, Mr. Malkovich is the creepiest of all possible film villains, but he's also a longtime Steppenwolf ensemble member who always comes back to Chicago sooner or later to tread the boards of his old company. At present, alas, he's in Stephen Jeffreys' "Lost Land," an overstuffed historical drama that isn't worthy of him, much less of Martha Lavey, the company's artistic director, who has temporarily abandoned the front office to give an incisive performance....

The only star in Chicago Shakespeare Theater's "Romeo and Juliet" is the playwright, who has been admirably served by Mark Lamos, his loyal and imaginative director....

No link--but don't despair. Not only do they sell the Journal at newsstands for one (1) dollar, but you can also go here and subscribe to the Journal's online edition. Whip out your credit card, click a few keys on your computer, and within seconds you'll be reveling in all the cool stuff in the Weekend Journal section--starting with the unexpurgated text of my review. What's not to like?

Posted May 27, 12:04 PM

TT: To a gas chamber--go!

A friend writes:

"Good God almighty! That woman is a sewer!" Ayn Rand's heavily (and disapprovingly) annotated copy of Mary McCarthy's essay volume The Humanist in the Bathtub, which includes the above comment by Rand on McCarthy, is up for auction at Butterfields along with a lot of other books from Rand's library.

The estimate is $3,000-$5,000. Go here to see for yourself. It's a total hoot.

By the way, don't you love reading the marginalia of famous people? Somebody really ought to put together an anthology....

Posted May 27, 12:03 PM

TT: Ten things I always meant to do

(1) Learn French.

(2) Write a biography of Peter Drucker.

(3) Play bass in a piano-guitar-bass trio.

(4) Ride a tandem bicycle through Central Park on a beautiful spring day (with an appropriate person, of course).

(5) Join the Mile High Club.

(6) Take a trip on the American Orient Express.

(7) Take a helicopter ride through the Grand Canyon.

(8) Watch an opera from the prompter's box.

(9) Walk on my hands without breaking anything important in the process.

(10) This.

O.K., eleven:

(11) Visit the Museo Morandi.

Posted May 27, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

'They went to the theater and afterwards she listened as charmingly as any girl ever had to his dissection of the play. She didn't complain about his surgical cruelty, but seemed, if anything, excited by it. As a middle-class girl, she was used to understatement followed at once by qualification: the only passion in her family being a nonstop concern for people's feelings. Her parents would have hesitated to criticize Mickey Mouse (you haven't heard his side)."

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

Posted May 27, 12:00 PM

May 26, 2005

TT: Quotations from Chairman Wystan

"There is no single Greek literary work of art as great as The Divine Comedy; there is no extant series of works by a single Greek literary artist as impressive as the complete plays of Shakespeare; as a period of sustained creative activity in one medium, the seventy-five-odd years of Athenian drama, between the first tragedies of Aeschylus and the last comedy of Aristophanes, are surpassed by the hundred and twenty-five years, between Gluck's Orpheus and Verdi's Otello, which comprise the golden age of Italian opera: nevertheless, the bewildered comment of any fifth century Athenian upon our society from Dante's time till our own, and with increasing sharpness every decade, would surely be: 'Yes, I can see all the works of a great civilization; but why cannot I meet any civilized persons? I only encounter specialists, artists who know nothing of science, scientists who know nothing of art, philosophers who have no interest in God, priests who are unconcerned with politics, politicians who only know other politicians.'"

W.H. Auden, "The Greeks and Us" (from Forewords and Afterwords)

Posted May 26, 12:36 PM

TT: Almanac

"There is nothing so pleasant as to give oneself trouble for a person who is worth one's while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste for old things, collections, gardens are all mere ersatz, succedanea, alibis. In the heart of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort, because yews and begonias submit to treatment. But we should like to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure that he was worth the trouble. That is the whole question: you must know something about yourself. Are you worth my trouble or not?"

Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes

Posted May 26, 12:34 PM

OGIC: Around and about

- If you don't like spoilers, don't read Max Watman's trenchant, frequently withering group review of the new Ishiguro, McEwan, Canty, and more. But you'd be missing out, and the review comes complete with a rationale for revealing plot points in reviews--basically, that the very notion of "spoiling" makes no sense with regard to literary fiction. I have mixed feelings about that, but I'm in total agreement with him on the brilliance of Canty. As for McEwan, I haven't read Saturday yet, but seemingly have read every last review of it, and I have to say that Watman's main critique of the novel is one that I was surprised not to encounter sooner.

- One Lady Eve views another, with edifying results...such a fantastic movie, that.

- The Lady Megan unearthed this riveting site. You'll laugh. Right up until you cry.

- The New Yorker arrived, and I went straight to the back of the book. There I encountered Hilton Als's review of a new production of Miss Julie but could never quite catch my breath enough to take it in as, from the first mention of Strindberg's name, all I could think of was this. As the Lady Tushnet might say, hee hee! Gooooordian knot....

Posted May 26, 12:15 PM

TT: Untrivial trivia

From today's New York Times story on Merv Griffin:

He still receives royalties from the "Jeopardy!" theme, which he wrote in less than a minute. "That little 30 seconds has made me a fortune, millions," he crowed. How much exactly? "You don't want to know." Please, Mr. Griffin, do share. "Probably close to $70-80 million."

Life is unfair.

Posted May 26, 1:09 AM

May 25, 2005

TT: Ahead of the ticker

The original-cast album of Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza was released yesterday. I've been listening to my advance copy ever since it arrived, and I've been feeling something unusual and unexpected: I'm angry with those benighted drama critics whose mixed-to-poor reviews of this extraordinary show may have kept unsuspecting people from seeing it.

Fortunately, Stephen Holden of the New York Times, one of the most receptive and perceptive critics I know (he ought to write a blog!), has published a deeply comprehending review of the CD, and for the moment I can do no better than to quote from it:

"The Light in the Piazza," whose sublime original cast album was released today by Nonesuch Records, has the most intensely romantic score of any Broadway musical since "West Side Story," unless you count Andrew Lloyd Webber's kitschy, pontificating melodic oratory for "The Phantom of the Opera." There is nothing kitschy about Mr. Guettel's songs, which share with Stephen Sondheim's equally great but less overtly tuneful score for "Passion" a fascination with mad love.

Exquisitely arranged and orchestrated by the composer with Ted Sperling and Bruce Coughlin, "The Light in the Piazza" unfolds as a diaphanous swirl of strings and harp, flecked with reeds, guitar and delicate percussion; the more you listen to it, the more its mists assume form and substance....

Because Mr. Guettel is the grandson of Richard Rodgers, one of the all-time greatest Broadway melodists, the score suggests a personal conversation between generations. "The Light in the Piazza" takes place only four years after the Broadway opening of the Rodgers and Hammerstein blockbuster "South Pacific."

Mr. Guettel's songs share the heady romantic spirit of "Some Enchanted Evening" and "Younger Than Springtime," ballads from that show that helped define the catechism of courtship in post-World War II America. If his melodies suggest sophisticated, angular refractions of his grandfather's, his lyrics question the homilies attached to Rodgers's melodies....

I'll be writing more about The Light in the Piazza, here or elsewhere, but for the moment I suggest you heed Holden's words and buy the original-cast CD right now--then go see the show for yourself.

As I mentioned above, I got my copy of The Light in the Piazza slightly in advance of the rest of the listening public. This is one of the great privileges of being a critic: I'm listening to Erin McKeown's We Will Become Like Birds, and you're not. (It comes out June 28.) Sarah and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about how thrilled we were when publishers started sending us review copies of unpublished books. Believe it or not, I still have my first set of bound galleys, stuffed in a box somewhere or other. They're 23 years old, which is how long I've been a book reviewer, God help me. Even so, I can still remember exactly how it felt when I opened the envelope and held them in my hand: I knew something the rest of the world didn't.

That's the way I'm feeling right this minute as I listen to Erin McKeown sing "Air." Eight months ago, Our Girl called me on her cell phone from the street outside the Chicago club where she'd just heard McKeown sing that as-yet-unrecorded song. She was so excited about discovering a wonderful new artist that she couldn't wait to go home and e-mail me--she had to call and tell me on the spot. Now I'm hearing the very same song for the very first time, and feeling the same overwhelming desire to spread the word. Fortunately, I don't have to call all of you up one at a time. I love blogging. I love music. I love art. Truth to tell, I love pretty much everything, at least for the moment. Art will do that to you.

Posted May 25, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"During my time as a soldier in the First World War I was a member of a string quartet which served our commanding officer as a means of escape from the miseries of war. He was a great music-lover and a connoisseur and admirer of French art. It was no wonder, then, that his dearest wish was to hear Debussy's String Quartet. We rehearsed the work and played it to him with much feeling at a private concert. Just after we had finished the slow movement the signals officer burst in and reported in great consternation that the news of Debussy's death had just come through on the radio. We did not continue our performance. It was as if the spirit had been removed from our playing. But now we felt for the first time how much more music is than just style, technique and an expression of personal feeling. Here music transcended all political barriers, national hatred and the horrors of war. Never before or since have I felt so clearly in which direction music must be made to go."

Paul Hindemith (quoted in Geoffrey Skelton, Paul Hindemith: The Man Behind the Music)

Posted May 25, 12:00 PM

TT: In a nutshell

A reader writes:

Blogging has become the intellectual's TV set.

I wish I'd said that. (I will, Oscar, I will!)

Posted May 25, 11:07 AM

May 24, 2005

OGIC: The reluctant diarist reconsiders

Last week I mused about diaries kept and unkept, kempt and unkempt, pretentious and pedestrian. I was feeling rather cynical about the whole endeavor. But one reader's response made me think again:

I kept journals/diaries as a teenager, inspired by the diaries my great-grandfather kept since he was 19 until a few months before he died at 94. In it are recorded India's independence, the birth of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, cases he won (he was a lawyer), progress on the books he wrote (in English--they were short stories), his first trip to England, the passing of his wife--he wrote them with every intention that they would be read by others. In fact, he kept them near his writing desk and would browse in them from time to time.

After a few "journal"-like attempts in the decade that followed, I wrote very little.

I started again a couple of years ago. They are from Moleskin and there is a page a day following the calendar year.I was motivated to start and keep them fairly updated because of the sense that days were slipping into months and into years without any "account" of them.

What did I do the summer of 2001? Was I happy? Did my back hurt? Did I take walks? What did I cook for dinner? What happened on Friday nights? Did I call my parents? What did they say? You get the drift. It's banal all right, but it's my banal life.

I also started drawing/sketching/painting and would love to keep a sketch diary but haven't gotten around to it yet. But this diary is a start. I do enjoy flipping back or reading earlier years and as you say, can reconstruct my day if, in fact, something memorable happened. And yes, some days the entries are a litany of complaints.

I glue ticket stubs right on the page; I have to-do lists written in too, so it goes with me everywhere. If there is an almanac entry that speaks to me, I will copy it down; as I will play/music/movie recommendations from you or Terry! It stays open in front of me most of my day at work, so I can scribble something down quickly when I have a moment. I also enjoy the physical act of writing--not typing, but picking up my fountain pen with sepia ink and writing and watch the ink dry.

However, my diary is quite private--I am not counting on anyone else reading it (oh, the ego). And no one will award any prizes for this writing!

As for the sketch diary, ask me again in a year.

The existence of my correspondent's great-grandfather's journals, and her access to them, are the best possible argument for conscientious diary-keeping. I would give much for a similar record of my great-grandparents' or grandparents' days. It's almost enough to make me start up again, right after I burn the old, self-indulgent ones. One needs two diary tracks, really--and many, many blank books, o joy--to do the thing right.

Let me also assent to the proposition that the sensual pleasure of handwriting is a not insignificant part of the draw of diary-keeping. I use roller ball pens, not fountain pens and sepia ink, but I still feel I know just what the writer of the above means. My thanks to her for this generous response to my call for diary stories.

Posted May 24, 12:31 PM

OGIC: My recent delinquency

Oh no! I missed my first weekend since switching to weekend blogging. Contrary to what you may expect I'm going to say about that, it's not Terry's fault. Mostly.

Terry did, of course, keep me very busy for most of the weekend, what with two plays, several meals, and six Gilmore Girls. But I deposited him at Midway Airport around two o'clock Sunday, and still had most of a day stretched out promisingly before me. Oh, the things I would accomplish. Or so it seemed.

I accomplished exactly one thing. What kept me away from the old blog-and-chain was a task that was something new for me: I was serving as a screener for a writing contest that drew many, many entries. My job was to winnow down a few hundred to, well, as few as possible. Despite several bouts of concentrated reading over the last few weeks, I still had a pile of entries to get through yesterday, as well as the task of converting the towering stacks I'd been generating--"probable," "borderline," and "NO"--into a final list of recommendations I could stand by.

I felt as though I was near the end yesterday but, as anybody out there knows who has done work like this, you never really cease refining and recalibrating your standards in response to the fluctuating quality of the field. You can't know what an above-average piece of work looks like until you have read most of the entries. So the closer I got to the end of the pile, the more my anxiety grew that I had miscategorized the entries I'd read earlier. So when I reached the pile's bottom, I went back to the beginning. Suffice it to say that blogging time, along with a fair chunk of sleeping time, fell by the wayside last night--but for the sterling cause of literary justice. Anyway, I appreciate your patience and will try to make up for my absence during the week.

Posted May 24, 12:13 PM

TT: Red alert

Yikes, yikes, yikes! One of my deadlines was moved up a day, causing a catastrophic meltdown of my schedule. As a result, I spent all of Monday writing like a madman and most of the evening watching a movie about which I have to knock out an essay later in the week. (It was Look at Me, about which Our Girl was exactly right, thus leaving me with the unenviable task of trying to figure out how to say differently what she already said perfectly.)

Bottom line: I probably won't be posting again until Wednesday, if then. Almanac entries will appear as usual, and I may plead for sympathy from time to time, but don't expect much more than crumbs.

For now, do the usual: ooch on over to "Sites to See" and immerse yourself in the marvels of the blogosphere. And when you speak of me, speak well....

Posted May 24, 12:05 PM

TT: Quotations from Chairman Wystan

"Half the literature, highbrow and popular, produced in the West during the past four hundred years has been based on the false assumption that what is an exceptional experience is or ought to be a universal one. Under its influence so many millions of persons have persuaded themselves they were 'in love' when their experience could be fully and accurately described by the more brutal four-letter words, that one is sometimes tempted to doubt if the experience is ever genuine, even when, or especially when, it seems to have happened to oneself."

W.H. Auden, "The Protestant Mystics" (in Forewords and Afterwords)

Posted May 24, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Since actors had ceased to be for me exclusively the depositaries, in their diction and playing, of an artistic truth, they had begun to interest me in themselves; I amused myself, pretending that what I saw before me were the characters in some old humorous novel, by watching, struck by the fresh face of the young man who had just come into the stalls, the heroine listen distractedly to the declaration of love which the juvenile lead in the piece was addressing to her, while he, through the fiery torrent of his impassioned speech, still kept a burning gaze fixed on an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his eye; and thus, thanks especially to the information that Saint-Loup gave me as to the private lives of the players, I saw another drama, mute but expressive, enacted beneath the words of the spoken drama which in itself, although of no merit, interested me also; for I could feel in it that there were budding and opening for an hour in the glare of the footlights, created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of grease paint and pasteboard, on his own human soul the words of a part.

"These ephemeral vivid personalities which the characters are in a play that is entertaining also, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to see again after one has left the theatre, but who by that time are already disintegrated into a comedian who is no longer in the position which he occupied in the play, a text which no longer shews one the comedian's face, a coloured powder which a handkerchief wipes off, who have returned in short to elements that contain nothing of them, since their dissolution, effected so soon after the end of the show, make us--like the dissolution of a dear friend--begin to doubt the reality of our ego and meditate on the mystery of death."

Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes

Posted May 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Mailbag

To begin with, several readers caught me with my pants down when I claimed the other day, apropos of W.H. Auden, that Forewords and Afterwords was "the only essay collection Auden published in his lifetime." Not so, not so! It was preceded by The Dyer's Hand, which is actually on my bookshelf, whereas Forewords and Afterwords was stuck in the back of my closet. This was double-barreled dumbness: I somehow had it lodged in my mind that The Dyer's Hand was based on a series of lectures. (Wrong book--that's The Enchaféd Flood.) A million pardons for my memory lapse.

Now, on to a couple of interesting pieces of correspondence:

- "Apropos of nothing, except that Auden always makes me think of Kultur, your line in the Proust questionnaire that your idea of--Hell? unhappiness? what was it?--was ‘Siegfried' made me laugh aloud, an achievement you share with your man Mencken, Amis and a very few others."

I'm honored. I myself rarely laugh out loud when reading, so rarely that I can actually remember some of the specific passages that have made me do so. I don't think that H.L. Mencken has ever done it for me, but I remember vividly that Kingsley Amis rang the bell on my first reading of Lucky Jim when his anti-hero ordered an "octuple whisky." I've also done it a couple of times when reading P.J. O'Rourke, and I went out of my way years ago to mention the fact in a New York Times Book Review piece (of which I no longer have a copy, alas).

Why is it that humor on the page, no matter how funny, tends not to provoke an audible response from the reader? Or am I and my correspondent exceptional in our tendency to keep our mirth to ourselves? It happens that I'm an unusually loud laugher in public--so much so that at least one performer who knows me in private life has spotted my hoot from the stage. (She said she found it reassuring.) Must people like me be part of a crowd in order to be sufficiently disinhibited to emit the peculiar noises known as laughter? I doubt it, since I also laugh out loud when watching TV alone.

Any and all explanations will be gratefully received.

- "Unsolicited advice to my favorite blogger: we know you're a very busy man and we understand you have to make room for other things more important (yes!) than the blog. But sometimes it seems as if your every other paragraph carries this message. Awright, awreddy!"

Touché and/or ouch! It's guilt speaking, of course: I find it almost impossible not to post without first explaining why I'm not going to be posting. Such is the merciless work ethic that rules my productive life. I keep saying that I'll try to take unexplained time off from the blog, and I keep not doing it. Looks like the time has come to give it another try. In any case, I appreciate the nudge.

Posted May 24, 9:50 AM

May 23, 2005

TT: Idiosyncratic routine

I don't know anyone in New York who hasn't claimed at one time or another that the value of taking a vacation is outweighed by the difficulty of cleaning up the mess that accumulates while you're out of the office. Alas, I haven't been on a vacation, but I did take the weekend off to see plays in Chicago with Our Girl, and on my return I found the usual intimidating pile of snail mail, e-mail, and packages waiting for me.

As always, I briefly considered shoving it into a corner and pretending it wasn't there, but I knew I'd have to jump back on the merry-go-round first thing Monday morning (four deadlines, two plays, two movies, two lunches, an awards ceremony, and an out-of-town trip between now and Saturday), so instead I dumped it all on the kitchen table, placed a garbage bag on the floor next to my chair, and started tearing open envelopes. Once everything was sorted and the obvious junk pitched, I went back into the kitchen, took a box of Teddy Grahams and a bottle of seltzer out of the refrigerator, returned to the table and went through all the snail mail, eating and drinking as I read. Then I booted up my computer and started in on the e-mail. By the time I'd trashed the spam and finished answering the good stuff, I'd already received replies from the first three people I'd written.

Somewhere along the way, I muttered the all-too-familiar mantra of the busy New Yorker returned from a brief visit to elsewhere: It isn't worth it. You might as well stay home. Only I knew better. Even when you leave town on business, as I did this past weekend, at least you're somewhere else. No, it's not a vacation, but it's different, a stick of dynamite that blasts you out of your accustomed ways of doing things. Instead of dining on the Upper West Side and hailing a cab at exactly 7:20, I visit unfamiliar restaurants, sleep in unfamiliar beds, see actors I've never seen before, meet and greet new faces. I come home refreshed and inspired...and then I sit down at the kitchen table and start tearing open envelopes.

Like death and taxes, the mail is always with me, both good (an advance copy of the original-cast CD of The Light in the Piazza) and bad (a short stack of press releases inviting me to concerts I wouldn't dream of attending other than at gunpoint). Years of experience have taught me that the pleasure of shoving it all in a corner tonight will be more than offset by the pain of opening twice as much of it tomorrow afternoon. I slog tonight so that the next day's slog will seem marginally less Sisyphean--and so the Teachout Museum, also known as my living room, won't look unpleasingly messy when I stroll through it in the morning on the way to the shower. (One of the unintended consequences of collecting art in a small Upper West Side apartment is that you start to feel uncomfortable whenever you throw your clothes on the floor instead of hanging them neatly in the closet.)

Such is a piece of the price I pay for the life I lead, and you don't need to remind me that the moment I decide to stop paying it, somebody else will be more than happy to take my place. Only I don't intend to stop paying it, at least not any time soon. The embarrassing truth is that I love my daily grind, even when I can't stand it, which isn't very often. Sure, there are days when you have to go see Denzel Washington in Julius Caesar, but there are other days when you get to go see Tracy Letts in Orson's Shadow or Kristin Chenoweth in The Apple Tree, and you never waste time thinking about the one when you're reveling in the other.

Yes, I love my work, except when I return from the road at the end of a crowded weekend and spend a balmy Sunday night sitting alone at the kitchen table, munching Teddy Grahams and silently stuffing a garbage bag with press releases sent by publicists who insist on calling me "Ms. Terry Teachout." (Are you listening, New York City Ballet?) I wouldn't mind skipping that part. No matter what you do in life, there's always a part you wouldn't mind skipping.

Posted May 23, 12:05 PM

TT: P.S.

I won't be answering my phone until eleven a.m., if then. Should you need to talk to me, you'll have to throw a rock through my bedroom window.

Live with it.

Posted May 23, 12:05 PM

TT: Pledge drive

No, we don't want you to send us any money (not unless you can spare a life-changingly significant sum, in which case we accept with pleasure!). But do this, please:

If you read "About Last Night" regularly and enjoy doing so, tell a friend about us.

Do it right now.

We return you now to our regularly scheduled posting. That was painless, wasn't it?

Posted May 23, 12:04 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- W.H. Auden's poetry needs no endorsement from me, but I never fail to be surprised by how many well-read people are unaware that he was also a prolific critic and essayist. I was cleaning out a closet the other day and ran across a slightly bent paperback copy of Forewords and Afterwords, the only essay collection Auden published in his lifetime (the Princeton University Press uniform edition of his complete works will ultimately contain all of his essays and reviews). I've no idea how one of my favorite books ended up underneath my toolbox, especially since I could see at a glance that I'd marked a half-dozen passages I must have meant to transfer to my electronic commonplace book. Instead, I'll post them as almanac entries this week, starting today.

I am, incidentally, still chewing away happily at A la recherche du temps perdu. Not surprisingly, I didn't get a whole lot of reading done on the ground in Chicago, but I spent a pleasant hour with the Duchess de Guermantes at the airport this afternoon. Unlikely as it may sound, A la recherche is ideally suited for planes, trains, and waiting rooms....

- Two composers I know--both of them women, but otherwise very different in age, living circumstances, and stylistic interests--told me separately in the past few days that they found one of the inescapable problems of being a professional composer to be the fact that you spend so much time alone. This is also true of writing, but I've never found the solitude necessary for writing to be a problem in and of itself. On the other hand, I do find that I start to get a bit isolated whenever my workaholism flares up and gets out of control. The Web, I suspect, is part of the problem: I use it to provide a change of pace when I've got a lot of deadlines on my plate, and it creates so powerful an illusion of "being in touch" that I sometimes forget to go out and see real live people, or even leave the apartment for anything beyond the most essential errands.

Sooner or later, though, I start feeling the need for actual human contact, which brings me back to my senses, sometimes quite abruptly. E-mail is great--better than great--but it won't give you a kiss on the cheek when you open the door.

- Last week I went for a walk in Central Park with a musician friend, in the course of which the following dialogue took place:

ME Somebody sent me a weird URL the other day.

SHE Weird like how?

ME Well, it was for a site called, uh, maybe "Babes in Classical Music," or "Classical Hotties," or something like that. Anyway, it was a Web site full of pictures of good-looking women musicians, organized by what instrument they play, voice type, whatever. How silly is that? What kind of person would spend all that time putting together a site like that? I mean, get a life, right?

SHE (with dawning horror) The URL wasn't beautyinmusic.com, was it?

ME Yeah, I think that was it.

SHE Er...um...I'm on it.

A beat.

ME (with the maniacal glee of a playground bully) You're on it? And you stood there and let me tell you all about it? I am soooo blogging this!

SHE (embarrassed) Oh, God, no, you can't do that! It's not my fault! I didn't have anything to do with it! I don't even know who does the thing....

ME No way. You're totally busted.

SHE (resigned) Well, at least don't mention my name, all right?

ME (magnanimously) O.K. Your secret is safe with me.

Posted May 23, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I find Trollope's insistence that writing novels is a craft like making shoes, and his pride in the money he got by writing them, sympathetic. He was aware, of course, that craft and art are not the same: a craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business. Again, Trollope would never have denied that his primary reason for writing was that he loved the activity. He once said that as soon as he could no longer write books he would wish to die. He believed that he wrote best when he wrote fastest, and in his case this may well have been true: a good idea for a novel stimulated his pen. Though large sales are not necessarily a proof of aesthetic value, they are evidence that a book has given pleasure to many readers, and every author, however difficult, would like to give pleasure."

W.H. Auden, "A Poet of the Actual" (from Forewords and Afterwords)

Posted May 23, 12:00 PM

May 20, 2005

TT: Out the door and into a cab

Like the song says, I'm goin' to Chicago. (Back when I was in college, I used the wonderful old 1941 Jimmy Rushing-Count Basie recording of "Goin' to Chicago Blues" as the closing theme of my late-night radio show, which my friends used in turn as an accompaniment to all sorts of illicit activities.) Our Girl and I have shows to see, meals to eat, and hours of intensive talking to do, and we won't have nearly enough time for any of these things, since I must return on Sunday night and resume my regular rounds of Manhattan and its environs. We do expect to have as much fun as possible in the time available, though.

OGIC will update you on our activities some time this weekend. I'll be back in the saddle on Monday, though I may not have much to say that morning, seeing as how I probably won't have much time to get it said before I fall into bed on Sunday night.

In the meantime, enjoy your weekend.

Posted May 20, 12:03 PM

TT: All about Orson (and Larry and Ken)

It's Friday, I'm in the Journal, and I'm in a raving mood. The causes this week are Orson's Shadow and Kristin Chenoweth:

Now that Broadway has settled down for the summer, the show to see is Austin Pendleton's "Orson's Shadow," first performed five years ago by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company and currently playing Off Broadway (why did we have to wait so long?) at the Barrow Street Theatre. It's "All About Eve" for eggheads, a thought experiment in which Mr. Pendleton, a veteran actor and sometime playwright, endeavors to imagine what might have happened when Orson Welles (Jeff Still) directed Laurence Olivier (John Judd) and Joan Plowright (Susan Bennett) in Eugène Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" in London in 1960, at the exact moment when Olivier, who had fallen in love with Ms. Plowright, was trying to get up the nerve to end his marriage to Vivien Leigh (Lee Roy Rogers).

The fictional catalyst for this snarl of true-life ego run rampant is Kenneth Tynan (Tracy Letts), the celebrated British drama critic, who knew all the parties concerned and whom Mr. Pendleton employs as the narrator of "Orson's Shadow." In this as in every other aspect of the script, he weaves together fact and fancy with deeply informed audacity....

At intermission I decided that Mr. Pendleton had given us an ingenious entertainment crammed full of good jokes. (Welles: "When and where did you hear the rumor that I've been playing to empty houses?" Tynan: "I heard it tonight, from the other member of the audience.") By evening's end I knew better: "Orson's Shadow" also has something wholly serious to say about the self-destructive impulse that is too often the worm in the rose of genius. I don't know when I've seen a better backstage play....

Kristin Chenoweth might just be the smartest young actress in town. Perhaps that's a peculiar way to describe Broadway's reigning Queen of Cute, but Ms. Chenoweth is more than just a little blonde cutie-pie with a super-sized voice. Anyone who saw her last weekend in City Center's "Encores!" presentation of "The Apple Tree," a triptych of one-act musicals by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick originally produced on Broadway 39 years ago, will know just what I mean.

Ms. Chenoweth played Eve (as in Adam), the jealous princess of "The Lady or the Tiger?" and a frumpy chimney sweep turned ultra-sexy movie star, interpreting all three of her roles with a specificity and precision normally found only in vastly more experienced performers. I got so wrapped up in her ever-fresh line readings and split-second timing that I almost failed to remember what a terrific singer she is, which is a bit like watching "North by Northwest" and paying more attention to James Mason than Cary Grant....

No link, so if you want to read more (including a much less enthusiastic review of Playwrights Horizons' Memory House), buy today's Wall Street Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, in which you will find much cultural coverage of all kinds, all of it interesting. Or go here to subscribe to the Journal's online edition, which is totally worth it.

P.S. Since I saw Orson's Shadow last Saturday night, Tracy Letts was replaced by Sean McNall, about whom more here. If and when time permits, I'll try to go back and see him.

Posted May 20, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

Goin' to Chicago, sorry that I can't take you
Goin' to Chicago, sorry that I can't take you
There's nothin' in Chicago that a monkey woman can do.

When you see me comin', raise your window high
When you see me comin', raise your window high
When you see me passin', baby, hang your head and cry.

Hurry down, sunshine, see what tomorrow bring
Hurry down, sunshine, see what tomorrow bring
The sun went down, tomorrow brought us rain.

You so mean and evil, you do things you ought not do
You so mean and evil, you do things you ought not do
You got my brand of honey, guess I'll have to put up with you.

Jimmy Rushing, "Goin' to Chicago Blues"

Posted May 20, 12:00 PM

May 19, 2005

TT: Clean getaway

Winston Churchill said somewhere or other that there are few things in life more exhilarating than being shot at without effect. I thought of this utterly characteristic remark a few hours ago as I watched a wizard from Ms Mac Consulting wipe the hard drive of my iBook and reinstall the operating system, an experience which I imagine to be not unlike watching in a mirror as a neurosurgeon pokes around in your head with a scalpel.

This unexpected and unwanted adventure into the unknown began last Saturday when I came home from Washington, D.C., booted up my computer, and discovered to my horror that some gremlin had translated all the words on the e-mail toolbar into Dutch. (I know, it sounds crazy, but they really were in Dutch--I checked.) Other peculiar little anomalies had been bobbing up on my screen from time to time in recent weeks, but this one was serious enough that I knew the time had come to seek professional counsel at once or run the risk of sudden and catastrophic paralysis. I got on the phone to Ms Mac and scheduled a Wednesday-morning house call. At the appointed hour, a flute-playing genius by the name of Nicole appeared on my doorstep, sat down at my desk, and started making magic passes over my prostrate iBook, which turned out to be even sicker than either one of us had suspected. Five nervewracking hours later, it was at least as good as new, and I went right out and downed a stiff drink.

One of the nice things about Nicole's approach to computer consulting is that she is unfailingly tactful, by which I mean that she never says things like You mean you don't know what a [fill in the blank] is? Recognizing at once that she was dealing with an innocent, she went out of her way to behave as if my ignorance were perfectly normal. I have no doubt that this is a specifically feminine mode of behavior, having spent far too many hours being stared at in self-evident disbelief by auto mechanics with hairy chests who made no effort whatsoever to disguise their contempt for the kind of guy who doesn't know a socket wrench from a fanbelt (I exaggerate only slightly). If all auto mechanics were like Nicole, there would be peace on earth.

Thanks to her stalwart efforts, I now resume regular blogging activities--and about time, too. I'm off to Chicago at midday Friday to frolic on the aisle with OGIC, but until then I'm yours.

Posted May 19, 12:03 PM

TT: Who says?

My Wall Street Journal review of Kate Whoriskey's Shakespeare Theatre production of The Tempest, in which I suggested that audience members wait to read her program notes until after they'd seen the show, has inspired a couple of very interesting posts elsewhere in the blogosphere. (You'll find them here and here.)

These postings put me in mind of H.L. Mencken's saying that criticism is "prejudice made plausible." He had a point, but some prejudices don't lend themselves to such treatment, or at least shouldn't. I don't like all art, I'm pretty sure I don't like all good art, and I think it's the better part of wisdom for me not to pretend that all the art I dislike is bad. Like everyone else, I have my share of aesthetic allergies, which may or may not necessarily correspond to the Truth About Art.

All other things being equal:

- I prefer short plays, films, novels, and pieces of music to long ones. (I also prefer small paintings to large ones, which is not exactly the same preference but probably a second cousin to it.)

- I prefer comedy to tragedy.

- I prefer prose to poetry.

- I prefer simplicity to complexity.

- I prefer realism to fantasy. (This is why I prefer comedy to tragedy, by the way: I think it's truer to life.)

- I usually have major problems with "documentary" art, or any other kind of idea-driven art. Marcel Duchamp said that he inscribed sentences on his "ready-mades" in order to "carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal." That sums up the kind of art I like least.

- I loathe "artiness."

- I tend not to like camp.

To some extent these prejudices can be made to add up to a rough and ready philosophy of art, but the alert reader will note that they also contain some built-in contradictions. O.K. by me. As I've said time and again, art is empirical: first you make it, then you decide whether it works, then you try to figure out why it works. Similarly, criticism starts with the critic's spontaneous, unmediated response to an aesthetic experience. If it doesn't, it's bad criticism--period.

One of the reasons why I trust my taste is that it not infrequently leads me in surprising directions. I've reviewed more than a few plays and productions for the Journal that didn't conform to my list of prejudices, but which I loved anyway. (Among them were Anna in the Tropics, Charlie Victor Romeo, I Am My Own Wife, Intimate Apparel, Jumpers, Nine Parts of Desire, Private Jokes, Public Places, Rose Rage, and Small Tragedy.) A critic who always knows in advance what he's going to like--or dislike--is writing about the show in his head, not the show in front of him. One sure way to increase the likelihood of surprise is not to look at the printed program at all, and sometimes that's just what I do: I go in, sit down, and see what happens.

In the case of The Tempest, I knew that Ms. Whoriskey claimed to have interpreted Shakespeare's text in a highly political way, which is definitely not my thing--but I'd also been told in advance by a person whose taste I trust without reservation that the production was first-rate, so I split the difference, went in cold, and didn't crack open the program until intermission, by which time I was already head over heels and happy to be. So much the better. It's not uncommon for me to have clear-cut advance expectations about the shows I review, but I'm always willing to be proved wrong, and delighted to admit it in print.

I'm sure several of you out there are already thinking the same thing, and I'm a half-beat ahead of you: doesn't it matter that Kate Whoriskey superimposed a political interpretation on The Tempest and came up with a beautiful production? Duh, yeah, of course. To be sure, my experience suggests very strongly that politicizing Shakespeare (or any other great playwright) tends not to yield good results, but if it works for her, it works for her, regardless of whether it works for anyone else.

As for me, all I care about is the end result. Bore me and I'll fall asleep, even if I agree with every word you say. Astonish me and I'll sit up and take notice, even if I think you're dead wrong. In art, the only unforgivable sin is to be dull.

UPDATE: Mr. Superfluities has posted a list of his own prejudices. While they tend not to run in very close sync with my own, he says some things with which I couldn't agree more enthusiastically. Among them:

Theater's strengths, in this technological age, are that it's simple, it can be cheap and it appeals to a very basic need for physical communion....

Campy popular cultural references mire a work in its own time. It's one thing to offer comment or criticism of the world in which we live; it's another to unthinkingly exploit the popularity of junk in an effort to make our own shows more accessible....

Artists can't afford to be without a familiarity with the other art forms in which they don't work. It also helps when they have a good broad basic understanding of philosophy, psychology, history and science: sometimes to inform their own work, sometimes to be aware of the questions which these disciplines don't answer.

Hear, hear! (Do I smell a meme coming on?)

Posted May 19, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

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

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

Posted May 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Words to the wise

I'll be going to Chicago on Friday (sorry that I can't take you!), but if I weren't, I'd be going to Alice Tully Hall to hear "Five Lovers," a recital by soprano Jama Jandrokovic.

Here's the "official" description of the concert:

Soprano Jama Jandrokovic sings texts from her autobiographical collection of poetry, Five Lovers, featuring settings of the texts by leading American composers Lori Laitman, Luna Pearl Woolf and the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Music, Paul Moravec. Special guests include poet Dana Gioia, pianists Soeyon Kim and Andrew Rosenblum, and the North Sky Ensemble, with violinists Jesse Mills and Colin Jacobsen, violist Max Mandel and cellist Rubin Kodheli. Directed by Gina Lapinski.

Now here's an explanation of the program's significance by my fellow ArtsJournal.com blogger Greg Sandow, a tireless and trenchant advocate of non-traditional classical-music programming:

On Friday, at Tully Hall in New York, a soprano named Jama Jandrokovic will give a recital, consisting of three new song cycles by three composers, all of them settings of her own autobiographical poetry! This really deserves an exclamation point, because normally--to state the obvious--it's people in pop music whose music is explicitly about their own lives. So now here's someone in classical music doing it.

The poems, according to the press release for the concert, "chronicle Ms. Jandrokovic's romantic journey as a recently divorced, newly single young woman in New York City attempting to reinvent herself." I haven't read the poems, and can't say if they're good or bad. But! The very idea of a classical singer doing something like this is revolutionary. The composers are Lori Laitman, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Paul Moravec, and the concert--very good move here--has a stage director. This is not your grandmother's vocal recital.

I know about this concert because I know several of the parties involved, but readers of this blog shouldn't need to be reminded that I don't recommend anything in advance unless I have damned good reason to think it's going to be worth seeing and/or hearing. This will be both.

Jandrokovic's gorgeously designed Web site, with full information on the program, is here.

To purchase tickets, go here.

Posted May 19, 11:29 AM

TT: Untrivial trivia

Things I didn't know till now, gratefully culled from The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film:

- Total number of feature-length commercial sound films of plays by Shakespeare: about 40.

- Average percentage of Shakespeare's original text heard in these films: 25-30%.

- Director who "consistently uses fewer words for each transaction between characters" in his Shakespeare films: Orson Welles.

Posted May 19, 11:01 AM

TT: Check back with me tomorrow, though....

Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, is inviting bloggers to write about their favorite painting in America and their favorite American painting (which I suppose could be one and the same).

This is, of course, an impossible task, but having just said that it can't be done, I'll do it, subject as always to minute-by-minute changes of mind.

As of the time stamp on this posting, the winners are as follows:

- Favorite American painting: Fairfield Porter's The Mirror, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. As regular readers of this blog know, my passion for Porter is boundless--his work is my major preoccupation as a collector--and I can think of a half-dozen of his paintings that I might be inclined to put at the top of this list. "The Mirror," though, seems to me a particularly revealing exemplar of Porter's highly individual brand of realism, and one that I don't get to see often enough because it hangs in a Midwestern museum. All the more reason, then, for me to pay a visit to Kansas City this summer. Good jazz, good barbecue, a good museum with my favorite Porter--what's not to like?

- Favorite painting in America: Paul Cézanne's The Garden at Les Lauves, at the Phillips Collection in Washington. I find its uncalculated ambiguity (which extends all the way to the unanswerable question of whether or not Cézanne had finished it at the time of his death) to be infinitely absorbing. I try to pay it a visit every time I'm in Washington, and I'm always disappointed when it's not hanging (which is rarely).

Posted May 19, 1:50 AM

May 18, 2005

OGIC: Pictures trounce words

Yesterday I was striving to describe some of the infinitely variable moods of Lake Michigan, and tonight Mr. Modern Kicks goes and provides a one-click ticket to an unbelievably perfect--and perfectly beautiful--illustration of what I was babbling on about with these suddenly crude-seeming materials, words: Cynthia King's far more eloquent oil pastels of the very lake, in several of its moods. I haven't decided yet whether seeing her lovely pictures adds steam to the prospective Lake Diary project or just makes it seem terribly unnecessary.

Posted May 18, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"'There is no man,' he began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups--assuming that one is a painter--extracted something that goes beyond them.'"

Marcel Proust, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff)

Posted May 18, 12:00 PM

TT: Back home again

I just got back from New Haven, where I drove in order to see Long Wharf Theatre's production of Tom Stoppard's Travesties (I'll be reviewing it next week in The Wall Street Journal). It was a long night and a long drive, and I have four appointments ahead of me today--one of which is a house call from a computer repairwoman. Yikes!

For all these reasons, I rather doubt I'll be posting anything more until Thursday. In my absence, do the obvious: slide over to the right-hand column, scroll down to "Sites to See," and explore the wonderful world of artblogging.

See you later.

Posted May 18, 1:06 AM

May 17, 2005

OGIC: Diaries unkept and unkempt

When Terry posts an "Entry from an Unkept Diary," I look at the title and invariably see "Entry from an Unkempt Diary." This amuses me, but it also reminds me of the journals, very much kept, of my slightly younger self. They are pretty fat and unkempt tomes, stuffed with bits of paper scribbled on at times when the journal wasn't at hand and salted away between the pages or, once in a while, scotch-taped in. It has been years now since I've attempted to keep a regular diary. I'm still a sucker for a nice blank book, however, and I buy them and try to think of other things to fill them up with than end-of-the-day thoughts, which in my case hardly ever failed to amount to small litanies of complaints--about work, about friends, but mostly about those two great sources of dissatisfaction, boyfriends and me, that is, my own fallibilities and failures. Sometimes I'd try to write about things outside the making-me-grumble and making-me-swoon zones, but those labored entries were always the worst: stiff, studied, insufferable. They always raised the same uncomfortable question when I'd finished: who the hell did I think I was writing that for? Just what audience of distinguished prize panelists did I imagine was going to be rooting around in my nightstand drawer for li-terature?

Yecch. Back to slights and betrayals and crushes. That junk, now--that flowed like Leinie's at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap [aside: hellooo, Frommers' best editor!]. But could anything be more banal? Let's just say I'm not so sorry I put a stop to all of that.

Still, these days I continue to like the idea of keeping a record of my daily life, but I lean away from the subjective and toward the objective variety. Not so far in that direction as Andy Warhol--no taxi cab receipts or anything--but definitely in that direction. Off and on, I'll squirrel away my movie ticket stubs. They're dandy little documents, packing quite a bit of data into the space of a couple postage stamps: the date, the movie title, the showtime, the theater's name, the price. This, for me, is the sort of artifact that can evoke a whole day besides: the company, the weather outside, the pre-movie or post-movie meal, the comparing of notes after the show. I very much want to have been keeping this book already, but it always feels too late to start. It feels especially futile now, when I'm tempted out to the movies less and less frequently (a subject for another post). Still, I should do it. If I don't, I'll think of it next year and wish I had started now.

Another possible structured diary I'm always thinking about starting is the Lake Diary. I live a few blocks from Lake Michigan, and it looks different to me every day. If one day it is the same color as the day before, the sky is probably different. If the sky is the same color, too, the texture of the water surface is different. There's not a day I see that lake and don't say to myself--or to whoever is lucky enough to be around--"Look at the lake!" On a day not too long ago, the remarkable visual effect happened to be that while most of the lake surface was soft and nubbly, it turned shiny and glassine in the cup formed where Promontory Point curves back inland to the north. Sometimes lake and sky are both silver-gray, and the horizon is rubbed out or blurred, as if an eraser had been taken to it more or less skillfully. The possible and actual variations within this simple set of elements, lake-sky-color-texture, are infinite. And as certain reading tastes of mine go to show, I'm ever fascinated by subtle variations on a recurring theme (the variable elements in this case being color-damsel-scoundrel-scam).

So what kinds of diaries do you keep or aspire to keep? Tidy? Or un?

Posted May 17, 12:39 PM

TT: The Teachout way

In case you were wondering, I fell off the Proust bandwagon for a couple of weeks. Unlikely as it may sound, my attention was diverted by Conrad Black's Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, which isn't quite as long as A la recherche du temps perdu, though it seemed that way toward the end. Fortunately, I wrapped it up last week, and am now deep into Le Côté de Guermantes, meaning that you can expect a fairly steady stream of Proustian almanac entries and other passing observations in days to come.

Earlier today I dipped into the section on Proust in Anthony Powell's Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers, 1946-1989, and fished out a few neat observations. Here they are:

- "Proust did not at all avoid objections expressed by those who supposed they had been 'put in' his novel, although...the derivations from actual individuals are almost always infinitely combined and adapted. Proust himself observed that authors had to be careful with their friends 'because if my characters turn out to poison people or commit incest later on, they'll think I mean them.'"

- "Proust liked high society in the purely social sense. Coming from a rich but irredeemably middle-class family, having a Jewish mother, his entry into the beau monde of that day was naturally something that required effort on his own part."

(That irredeemably is a nice touch.)

- "One is almost tempted to wonder whether certain critics want to take it out on Proust simply because they feel that he attended more amusing parties than they themselves."

Ouch! But enough blogging--I've got a book to read.

P.S. I am, alas, a hopeless monoglot, but Our Girl is a full-fledged Francophone, and I've been nudging her to accompany me in the simultaneous adventure of reading Proust in the original. Pelt her with encouraging e-mails--maybe she'll succumb....

Posted May 17, 12:03 PM

TT: While you can

Two off-Broadway plays I liked very much are closing very soon. If you haven't seen them, do:

- Heather Raffo's Nine Parts of Desire closes May 22. Here's part of what I wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal:

Heather Raffo, the Iraqi-American playwright and performer of "Nine Parts of Desire," directed by Joanna Settle and now playing Off Broadway at Manhattan Ensemble Theater, brings us closer to the inner life of Iraq than a thousand slick-surfaced TV reports. Yet her beautifully shaped one-woman play is a play, not a stodgily earnest piece of documentary theater, and therein lies its singular force and compulsion: It is persuasive precisely because it is beautiful.

Ms. Raffo's enigmatic title is explained in her epigraph, a maxim of Ali ibn Abu Taleb, founder of the Shia sect and fourth leader of the Islamic world after Mohammed: "God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men." The nine characters she portrays are based on a large and diverse group of real-life women--a doctor, a painter who ran the Saddam Art Center, a left-wing political exile living in London, a young girl who loves the music of 'N Sync--whom she interviewed over the past decade, and she evokes their dissimilar personalities (and appearances) with a precision reminiscent of Jefferson Mays' high-wire acts of multiple impersonation in "I Am My Own Wife." Each one is wholly believable, but not in the straight-from-the-transcript manner of such exercises in theatrical polemic as "Guantánamo." We believe in their reality because Ms. Raffo inhabits each one so fully, both as actor and as author, and because we never feel, not even for a moment, that she is making them tell us what we--or she--want to hear....

- Shockheaded Peter closes May 29. Again, here's an excerpt from my Journal review:

An actor who looks not unlike a freshly exhumed corpse strolls onto the stage of what looks very much like a blown-up toy theater. He fixes a fishy-eyed stare upon the hushed audience...and stands there. And stands there. Finally, to the sound of nervous titters, he speaks. "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls," he intones in a voice of ripest ham, "I am the grrreatest actor that has ever existed!" Then he leaves.

Welcome to "Shockheaded Peter," now playing at the Little Shubert for what I hope will be at least a year. This homicidally hilarious British import is a musical version of the "Struwwelpeter" stories of Heinrich Hoffman, the 19th-century German author famous for his cautionary tales of ill-behaved tots who get what they deserve, and then some. (Guess what happened to little Conrad when he kept on sucking his thumbs after Mommy told him to stop?) It is, in theory, a children's show, though the only child I can readily imagine appreciating "Shockheaded Peter" to the fullest would be Wednesday Addams. On the other hand, it may be that I simply don't know enough kids, for the audience at the preview I attended was full of perfectly adorable tots who showed no visible signs of being traumatized by the hijinks on stage.

Fully grown attendees will note that "Shockheaded Peter" owes much to Edward Gorey, though it's not literally derivative of that past master of the macabre. As much as anything else, it's an affectionate parody of turn-of-the-century mustache-twirling melodrama. The set contains enough doors (and trap doors) to furnish at least two French farces. The songs, written by Martin Jacques and performed by the Tiger Lillies, a trio of demented-looking Brits, are--well, creepy. The ensemble cast is fab, with top honors going to Julian Bleach, the cadaverous master of ceremonies, who informs us at one point that "I was trained in London, you know." No doubt, but I wouldn't be surprised if he got his graduate degree from the Peter Lorre School of Drama....

Don't dally--time is short.

Posted May 17, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

Do you miss the scene,
The frenzy, the faces?
And did you trade the whole parade
For a pair of parking places?
And if you had the choice,
Would you still choose to do it all again?
Are you sitting in front of the tube
Watching Annie Hall again?
And do you ever run into that guy
Who used to be you?
Tell me, do you miss New York?
Me, too.

Dave Frishberg, "Do You Miss New York?"

Posted May 17, 12:00 PM

May 16, 2005

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- The Phillips Collection, my favorite museum, owns just one painting by Renoir, The Luncheon of the Boating Party. Duncan Phillips was long in the habit of assembling "units" of works by the artists he loved best, from Cézanne to Rothko, but in Renoir's case he was content to restrict himself to a single example and let it go at that.

Did Phillips really believe that The Luncheon of the Boating Party said everything that needed to be said about Renoir's art--that it was an all-encompassing, all-embracing expression of the essence of Renoir? I don't know, but I do believe there to be certain artists, some of them quite prolific, who can be "summed up" fairly adequately by a single masterpiece. I incline to think that Renoir was one of them, just as I think that all of Leonard Bernstein is in Fancy Free, all of Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie, and all of Jane Austen in any one of her mature novels. (The same thing could be said of a great many abstract painters and jazz musicians.) It isn't that I'd necessarily want to do without the other works of these artists, but I'm not sure you learn anything indispensable about their essential quality by getting to know the whole of their output. To experience their work is like eating a favorite dish: sometimes it's made from superior ingredients, sometimes it's prepared especially well, but it's basically always the same.

If Renoir was that kind of artist, then it's a mark of Duncan Phillips' aesthetic shrewdness that he knew it--just as he knew that Cézanne wasn't.

- One of my closest friends is moving to the West Coast at the end of the month, not for a little while but for good. From my point of view, this has no upside whatsoever (not for me, anyway--she's getting married, and couldn't be happier). Among other things, I can't get used to the idea that in a matter of days she will no longer be a part of my everyday life. Of course it's not as though she's going to die, or join the female equivalent (assuming there is one) of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance. We'll always have e-mail, and I expect she'll even find her way back to Manhattan from time to time. Nevertheless, the dailiness of our relationship must of necessity come to an end: I won't be able to call her up and ask her if she wants to see a play with me tomorrow night, or have lunch and stop by a gallery later today. I'm sure we'll always be friends, but henceforth we'll be friends in a different way, one I'm simply not able to imagine as of yet.

I don't look forward to losing that precious dailiness. At the same time, I know that its loss will open up space in my life for...what? Will another friend, or several friends, step forward to fill that open space? Will it be filled by someone I don't yet know, or whom I only just met? Might it, too, be filled in a different way?

The good news is that middle age has made me a bit more sanguine about change. Perhaps sanguine isn't quite the right word. Accepting may be closer to the mark. Either way, I do know that I've survived some fairly horrific changes in my own life, and--like the song says--I'm still here:

I've stuffed the dailies
In my shoes,
Strummed ukuleles,
Sung the blues,
Seen all my dreams disappear,
But I'm here.

That's from Stephen Sondheim's Follies. Another song from that famously dark show contains an equally hard piece of wisdom that is no more accessible to the young:

The roads you never take
Go through rocky ground,
Don't they?
The choices that you make
Aren't all that grim.
The worlds I'll never see
Still will be around,
Won't they?
The Ben I'll never be,
Who remembers him?

Maybe not completely inaccessible: I'd never seen Follies when I wrote these words in a book I published fourteen years ago:

I did not yet know that we are born into a vast room whose walls consist of a thousand doors of possibility. Each door is flung open to the world outside, and the room is filled with light and noise. We close some of the doors deliberately, sometimes with fear, sometimes with calm certainty. Others seem to close by themselves, some so quietly that we do not even notice. "I want to play the violin," I said to my parents one day, and nobody bothered to tell me that a half-dozen doors slammed shut at that very moment--not just the door marked BECOMES JAZZ TRUMPET PLAYER but the one that said BECOMES SMALL-TOWN LAWYER AND SPENDS LIFE IN SMALLTOWN, U.S.A., the one my father would someday encourage me to walk through, not knowing that it was already bolted shut....

Perhaps I did understand what Sondheim meant, at least in part, but there was one thing I couldn't have known fourteen years ago, which is that the door you finally walk through leads to another, smaller room. The journey never ends--and the doors never stop closing.

Posted May 16, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won't slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job's done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

Seamus Heaney, "Scaffolding" (courtesy of Saskia Lane)

Posted May 16, 12:00 PM

May 15, 2005

OGIC: Confessions of a dual citizen

What follows is my essay from last week's Chicago Reader about the oddness, sometimes, of being both a blogger and a newspaper reviewer. It wasn't available online, so I want to share it with those of you who aren't in Chicago or--for shame!--missed the Reader's Spring book issue. I made a couple of tiny changes to it. In a separate post, I note a few things in it that, in the short space of a week, have already changed! Here it goes:

Once upon a time, the life of a freelance book critic could be an eerily quiet affair. In 1995, a couple of years after Simon & Schuster axed the imprint where I'd labored for three years on the bottom rungs of the editorial ladder, I worked some old publishing contacts and snagged a book review assignment for the Baltimore Sun. I had never written for an audience any bigger or more exacting than the desultory skimmers of my college newspaper. More to the point, I had never written anything for money. Failure seemed more of a probability than a possibility, and I proceeded with a caution approaching cold fear.

I pored over that first book the Sun sent me, looking for a smart angle and evidence to support it, but the styles of reading and writing I was absorbing as a teething grad student in the University of Chicago English department were interfering with my ability to produce something that would go down easy with Sunday coffee. A friend, Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout, whom I'd met when he published his first two books with Simon & Schuster, took one look at my first draft and sent it back for a jargonectomy. Words like "reification," while right at home in your George Eliot seminar paper, assume a sort of, um, "alterity" in a review of a biography of River Phoenix.

Yes, River Phoenix. Anyway, after straining the lumps of academese out of my piece, zipping up the lede, and weighing and reweighing the whole for the balance of seriousness and irreverence due a young-dead-celebrity bio, I faxed it to Baltimore and waited for the world's reaction. And waited. And waited. And I started to get used to the idea that as an out-of-town writer my rigorously considered, delicately hammered piece of prose had been sent, for all intents and purposes, into a black hole.

My review appeared, but I didn't know this for certain until my clips arrived in the mail more than a week after the fact, followed by the check. Actual people who did not raiseme from infancy may even have read the review, in delight or disgust or, more likely, 20 seconds. I had no reason to think they hadn't--and no reason to think they had. The resounding silence came as a minor relief to my inner wallflower but an historic letdown to my ego.

Ten years later this predicament has become so obsolete it's hard to even remember clearly. The sense of resigned irrelevance with which I used to dispatch my work into the black hole has been inverted. I now submit copy with something closer to thrilling apprehension. For a few years now, most critics have been able to count on national exposure via the online editions of the papers they write for. They enjoy a vastly expanded audience, readers have access to all they can eat in book criticism, and it's hard to see how this is anything less than a windfall of cosmic proportions for all. But it's only very recently that online exposure has developed a new wrinkle--the lit bloggers' revenge.

In the summer of 2003 Terry, who is also a music critic for Commentary, became one of the first mainstream arts writers to start a blog. Titled About Last Night, it appears on the ArtsJournal.com site (artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight) and provides a forum for him to write spontaneously about his day-to-day life, share thoughts that don't make it into his paid writing, and generally post whatever pops into his head. A few months after starting the site, Terry invited me to contribute. I jumped at the chance. By then I was writing regularly for the Chicago Tribune as well as the Sun; for this new gig I adopted the pseudonym Our Girl in Chicago (or "OGIC"). I proceeded to post--at first as a Friday guest but eventually throughout the week--about everything from Bob Dylan's memories of Johnny Cash to Henry James on film. I blogged about what I was reading, seeing, and listening to, and sometimes I blogged about critics and criticism.

A blog seemed especially well suited to the last--what I had learned from James Wood's latest review, say, or what a botch Hilton Als had made of a Cat Power profile. One common trait of the best and worst critics, after all, is that they make you want to talk back; before the Web there wasn't much of a viable public forum for doing so. In a small way, I was participating in what has since become an elementary function of the blogosphere: letting the print establishment have it. The fact that under another name I was a member of that establishment was easy to ignore.

At the time I began blogging, the best-known book site was Jessa Crispin's Bookslut, launched in early 2002. A bunch of other lit bloggers matriculated that fall: Sarah Weinman, a Baltimore-based critic of mysteries and crime fiction, started Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, Los Angeles screenwriter Mark Sarvas launched The Elegant Variation, and Chicagoan Sam Jones (who also contributes book reviews to WBEZ's Hello Beautiful!) started transforming his site, Golden Rule Jones, from a compilation of Chicagoland author appearances into a true blog, complete with notes on what he was reading, publishing news, and literary quotations.

This new wave of book blogs attracted a lot of traffic (About Last Night will soon pass one million hits) and, eventually, mainstream media attention, some of it less than flattering. "The gods of the blogosphere really, really like each other--and say so every chance they get," snarked Washington Post writer Jennifer Howard in November 2003. One big, giddy circle jerk was how she described us--"in love with themselves, each other, and the beauty of what they're creating," linking to each other liberally and uncritically, with actual book coverage taking a backseat to schmoozing. Howard's piece so offended the sensibilities of its subjects that none of them seemed to notice that her withering criticism was actually somewhat constructive: a plea from a fervent reader who was "feeling betrayed--and a little bored" by blog content that seemed increasingly aimed at a coterie of insiders.

Howard's complaint was a strongly stated version of a truism. The same qualities that make lit blogs more fun and freewheeling than the book pages--their unedited, uncensored, and unpaid liberty--also make them less accountable to readers, writers, or anyone else. Bloggers, though, almost uniformly took her criticism as an attack, and dug in their heels against their common paper-and-ink antagonist. It was a watershed moment in the establishment of lit blogs as a new faction in the world of literary opinion: we had a blog bloc.

There are plenty of critics-turned-bloggers like me, Terry, and Lizzie Skurnick, who started Old Hag after writing for Mediabistro.com and Baltimore City Paper, and bloggers who have migrated the other way, from cyberspace to the book pages, like Weinman (who now writes for the Baltimore Sun) and Brooklyn-based critic Maud Newton, who started maudnewton.com as a diversion from writing a novel and now writes for Newsday and the Washington Post. But even as more bloggers are absorbed by the publications their blogs were founded to supplement or counter, others are stepping up and formalizing their roles as watchdogs, resulting in a weird, codependent, and potentially explosive relationship. To someone with one foot in sea and one on shore, the whole thing can be a little disorienting.

Until this winter I wrote print reviews and cowrote About Last Night as two entirely different people, though family and friends, and my editors, knew I had an online life as OGIC. I resisted the temptation to have one persona flack the other, but the first time The Elegant Variation linked to one of Laura's reviews, I got a definite charge. As I became friendlier with more bloggers and, inevitably, revealed myself to them, my print stuff got mentioned more often, and--this will come as no surprise to Jennifer Howard--always kindly. This was a new sensation. After nine years of reviewing in a vacuum, I had my first tangible sense of an audience. I relished the feedback and began to anticipate it. To be perfectly honest, I started working harder on my reviews, drafting and redrafting, getting back in touch with the newbie who'd sweated a river over Mr. Phoenix. It was just a hop and a jump from there to wanting an even wider audience and an undivided identity.

I came out as Laura on About Last Night in February. Around the same time, The Elegant Variation kicked off a new weekly feature digesting, critiquing, and grading the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The Times, the sole major U.S. Sunday books supplement to lock all of its online content away from nonsubscribers, was asking for it, having removed itself in this way from the big, chaotic, inclusive conversation that goes on 24/7 on the Internet. Soon enough, though, Mark started slapping letter grades not only on the section as a whole, but on each individual review--a practice sure to strike fear in the heart of even the most practiced, poised, and professional critic. The scrutiny is hardly unfair, but that doesn't mean it ain't scary (and a tad condescending). Gee, I thought when the grades started coming down--thank goodness I don't write for the Times.

I do, however, write for the Tribune. So when Sam "Golden Rule" Jones followed suit and started filing weekly reviews of the Trib's book pages, just a week after I'd lifted the OGIC burka, I caught a little shiver up my spine. I was still getting used to Laura being a quasipublic person--being a blogger turns out to be far more public than being a newspaper critic. All of a sudden, my newly glued-together identity was cracking along the seams again. As a blogger, I felt a certain loyalty to Sam's project. As a friendly acquaintance, I felt a certain loyalty to Sam. As a blog reader and book buyer, I felt grateful for the public service. And as a reviewer? I felt defensive and even a bit indignant. Luckily for me he doesn't lob grenades or even hand down grades. In February he critiqued a review of mine evenhandedly enough to mollify my ignoble feelings. For now.

With all this policing of print reviews, the lingering notion that bloggers are sworn foes of the mainstream book press has become certified common wisdom. Last month, on his blog, critic Scott McLemee starkly voiced the reigning perception: "In general, literary blog discourse often treats the people running newspaper review sections as, de facto, The Enemy." Strong word, that, and particularly sobering if you're regularly switching sides.

Hopefully, today's common wisdom will be tomorrow's old wives' tale. As bloggers continue to play both sides of the street, the enemy line is getting harder and harder to draw cleanly. Already bloggers are changing tactics by throwing their collective influence behind new alternatives to the Sunday books supplement. I'm a member, for example, of a new endeavor called the Litblog Co-op (lbc.typepad.com), which brings together 20 book bloggers to promote and discuss an overlooked literary fiction title every three months. I'm betting that ventures like this one, which present the print media with some actual competition instead of failing grades, will have more staying power than the report cards. The co-op, of course, amounts to an establishment for those who have made their names as alternatives to the literary establishment. Inevitably this attracts its own backlash, and already we participants have received a questionnaire from a writer for a city magazine quizzing us as to whether we might eventually sell out, take graft, or stab each other in the back. I can't speak for my colleagues, but I got the distinct impression that our corruption in any one of these forms would be rather gleefully received.

Posted May 15, 12:43 PM

OGIC: Epilogues

In the Reader essay directly below, I talk at some length about the trend Mark Sarvas started when he began issuing a report card on the Los Angeles Times Book Review in February. (You might not get the sense of a full-fledged trend from the piece; space constraints meant that references to similar report cards on the San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe by Conversational Reading and Bookdwarf, respectively, as well as to Ed's Tanenhaus Brownie Watch, were left out.) A few days after my essay appeared, it was announced that the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Steve Wasserman, was resigning. A few days after that, it was announced that the Times would be making the contents of their Sunday book supplement freely available to nonsubscribers--and so they are.

As chagrined as I am to see part of my essay become instantly obsolete, I'm delighted that we can all read the LATBR again. Thanks, Sarvas.

Also, at the end of the Reader essay, I discuss the Lit Blog Co-op. Here my timing proves a little better: the LBC has announced our first Read This! selection this very day. Hie thee thither.

Posted May 15, 1:28 AM

May 13, 2005

TT: Go south, middle-aged man

That's all from me for this week. I'm off to the Kennedy Center, there to dine with my maximally cool Washington friend and see Alladeen, a wonderful multi-media show by the Builders Association, a remarkable theatrical group with which I've been semi-obsessed ever since I saw Alladeen a year and a half ago at BAM and reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal:

You may not know it, but when you dial an 800 number to order a fruitcake or gripe about your Internet service provider, your call is often answered by an Indian operator who has been given an American-sounding pseudonym, painstakingly (though not always successfully) taught to shed his native accent, and assigned to help you as best he can for the lowest possible per-call price. Half performance art, half documentary, "Alladeen" tells the story of these deracinated residents of Nowhere, U.S.A., who take calls from halfway around the world without ever having seen the distant land they pretend to inhabit....

Marianne Weems, the director and tutelary spirit of "Alladeen," claims the show is all about "the social imagination in an age of corporate colonialism." Not to worry, though: Ms. Weems and her collaborators have turned this PC-speak high concept into a poetic extravaganza that effortlessly blends words, music, film, video art, and the vivid performances of five versatile onstage actors who waft you into the mysterious world of a Bangalore call center.

Here's how much I liked it the first time: I'm going to see it in Washington tonight on my own dime, purely for my pleasure (and that of my friend). How about that?

I'll be back Monday as usual, and blogging, damn it, will be light. I overblogged this week, and I am bruised. I hope you appreciated it! In the meantime, have a nice weekend.

Over to you, OGIC....

Posted May 13, 12:04 PM

TT: Wishful thinking

I sure hope this is true, anyway....

Posted May 13, 12:04 PM

TT: Magic act

Friday again. My Wall Street Journal drama column again. I'm in a v. good mood, thanks to the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., in which I am well pleased:

In theater as in all other art forms, believe what you see, not what you're told. On paper, Shakespeare Theatre's production of "The Tempest" sounds like the worst kind of politico-intellectual stew, Shakespeare run through the theory mill and turned into a Statement for Our Times. On stage, it's a fantastic procession of sights and sounds that will set your head to spinning. Kate Whoriskey, the director, may fancy herself a purveyor of ideas, but in fact she's something infinitely more precious--a natural-born stage magician....

I can't think why we haven't seen more of her in New York. In fact, I'd like to see her "Tempest" in New York, ideally at the Public Theater, where I'm sure it'd knock everybody sideways. Don't wait for it, though--instead, go to Washington and let yourself be enraptured by the most imaginative Shakespeare production I've seen since Propeller's all-male "Midsummer Night's Dream."

Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, I was scarcely less delighted by a new revival of She Stoops to Conquer:

Lest we forget, there's more than one way to skin a classic. The Irish Repertory Theatre's revival of "She Stoops to Conquer," which opened last night, is a resolutely unfantastic, straight-down-the-center staging of Oliver Goldsmith's 1773 farce, devoid of the slightest trace of trickery and played on an old-fashioned drawing-room set whose walls are festooned with no less than 65 gloomy-looking paintings (yes, I counted them). The actors and actresses are bedecked in periwigs and petticoats--and the results couldn't be more pleasing....

No link. WillyoujustbuythedamnpaperforGod'ssake? Or go here and stride boldly forward into the Information Age. (Psst--it's a bargain.)

Posted May 13, 12:03 PM

TT: Elsewhere

What they said:

- Go get 'em, Althouse:

Speaking of sincere, how sincere was Joni Mitchell in "Woodstock"? She didn't attend, and, in fact, she played at the Atlantic City Pop Festival, a few weeks before, and walked off in the middle of her set, after ranting at the audience for failing to pay rapt attention to her. We were milling around, dancing and talking, and acting like a big bunch of hippies. She did not like it one bit. She steered way clear of Woodstock, then wrote a song idealizing it.

"Then can I walk beside you?" she wrote, but the fact is, she didn't want to be anywhere near these people.

- Poor Little Professor! She's been grading papers:

"These works have many similarities and many differences." This. Means. Nothing. Absolute