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June 30, 2005

OGIC: Namedropper

Like some people who are taking a lot of heat of a rather ugly and blustery variety for saying so, I'm no fan of the writing workshop. I was in one good one once, though. That anomalously great fiction-writing workshop took place in the later 1980s and was taught by one Luis Alberto Urrea. The new novel by my old teacher, The Hummingbird's Daughter, is quick becoming this summer's literary sleeper: the much to be trusted Moorish Girl, who reviewed it for the Oregonian last weekend, provides links to other enthusiastic notices as well.

Although this is all happening because Urrea's a marvelous writer, and although my brush with him occurred awfully long ago, I feel compelled to add that it couldn't happen to a nicer guy or a more inspiring teacher. Bravo. (And yes, I'm certainly going to read the novel when I can work it in.)

Posted June 30, 12:44 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"'So tell me, Superintendent,' he said in a voice which stayed just this side of patronizing. 'This was your first trip to America? What did you think of it?'

"Dalziel thought for a while, then said with saloon bar judiciousness, 'Well, what I think is, it'll be right lovely when they finish it.'"

Reginald Hill, Recalled to Life

Posted June 30, 12:20 PM

OGIC: Hearing voices

The White Sox are playing the Tigers, so I'm watching baseball. The play-by-play guys for the Sox are driving me crazy, though. In what seems to me an insincere display of folksy familiarity, they call all the Chicago players by their first names, adding a "y" whenever plausible, never mind felicitous: Pauly (Konerko), Scotty (Podsednik), Hermy (I don't know who this refers to, but I'm sure I heard them say it). For one thing, "Konerko" is a great, spiky name that it's a shame to squander. That's bad enough. What's really objectionable, though, is the attempt to manufacture a chummy, affectionate bond between fans and players that should spring up organically or, if it doesn't, be left alone. Maybe that is the case here, but to me it sounds like they're pushing it.

Mind you, I grew up on the comparatively dry style of the great Ernie Harwell, whose relative formality didn't preclude a definite down-home appeal. Harwell, of course, had that gently cadenced southern purr going for him, making it sound like politesse and respect but not stiffness when, say, he called opposing players "Mr." Like anyone in his line of work, he had the trademark phrases that never fully escape becoming a bit of a schtick: the most theatrical and probably my least favorite was the home run call, "it's looooooong gone"--though, gosh, it was a pretty little tune--and the one I most delighted in was his standing strikeout call, "He stood there like the house by the side of the road and let that one go by," stresses in all the right places. But the best thing about Harwell's work was everything he didn't say, his modesty and his economy. You got from him crisp accounts of the action, frequent reminders of the score, and the occasional well-placed anecdote--but mostly you got what what you needed to know.

These guys I'm suffering now cloy in (admittedly unfair) comparison to Harwell--not to mention being some of the worst homers I've heard. The ones on the radio are, I think, more respected by the fans but share this tendency. I've seldom heard a Sox game in the car without them letting loose something along the lines of "if this Sox batter gets on and the player on deck hits a home run, we'll have a tie game." Or "if this guy hits a single in just the right location, the runner on first could score," rash speculation stated as if it's considered expert opinion. Sigh. Is it so hard to simply report what happens on the field? If that most unlikely circumstance occurs, does the Sox fan find it enhanced by having been predicted in about the same way a broken clock is right twice a day? Somehow I doubt it.

Also, this game is now going to the twelfth inning, tied 3-3. There's little doubt the White Sox are the better team on the field--they're the best team in baseball, comfortably--but the fact is that the Tigers have threatened in each of the last four innings while the White Sox have mostly been quiet. Do the play-by-play guys acknowledge this, the characterizing feature of the late going of the game? Hell, no. I don't think that's in their job description. They say this: "The White Sox have only had two hits since the 9th, so the Tigers bullpen has done its job--as has our bullpen. Neither side has given up a run" (emphasis added). No, but one has had six hits and stranded a bunch of runners in scoring position! Seriously, these guys are the Pravda of baseball announcing. One of the things that was awesome about Ernie Harwell, and made all of us who listened to him a little bit better too, was his unfailing generosity toward the opposition. He announced for the Tigers, and his pleasure was discernible when the Tigers did well, but at bottom what the man served was the game.

If you follow these things at all you'll remember that in 1992 the Tigers organization experienced a brain freeze that remains inexplicable and outrageous to this day, and let Ernie Harwell go. I was living in New York City at the time, and when the Tigers came back without the great man the following season, I was certain I could sense from my Bowery digs the difference in the timbre of a Michigan summer night. They brought him back, of course, and all was well in the world of Detroit baseball again, even with terrible teams and even after his proper retirement three years ago at the age of 84. As was only fitting, he was ultimately the one to choose the time and manner of his departure from the game. One misses him, though--some nights more than others.

(Postscript: Looks like the White Sox might take this one in the 13th inning. Even if they don't tell it this way in Chicago, they were lucky to get out of more than a couple scrapes along the way.)

Posted June 30, 12:05 PM

TT: So out of here

Once more, dear friends, I hit the road, this time to see the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival's production of The Tempest and Barrington Stage Company's revival of Stephen Sondheim's Follies. Our Girl will post my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser and the almanac entry for Friday, but otherwise you'll hear no more from me until next week.

Have a glorious Fourth. If you live in a firecracker-friendly locale, shoot one off for me!

Posted June 30, 12:04 PM

TT: Watch on the Rhine

My distinguished colleague Deirdre Bair, the author of Jung: A Biography, has written to fill me in on a disturbing situation pertaining to the publication of the German-language edition of her book.

What follows is a statement by Bair which will appear in that edition:

This is a chilling moment in the annals of Jungian scholarship. The heirs of C.G. Jung, led by their spokesperson Ulrich Hoerni, have raised objections concerning the alleged invasion of their privacy that, due to German law, has forced Knaus Verlag [the publishers of the German edition of Jung: A Biography] to include their opinions of Jung's life and work within the pages of my book. These will appear as annotations to my extensive notes that follow the text. This unprecedented invasion of my book by the Jung heirs is an appalling act and is happening against my will.

Members of the Jung family who granted me interviews, conversations, and other meetings, were told from the beginning of my research that they would not be permitted to read my book before it was published. I explained to them as tactfully as I could that this was necessary because, whether true or not, their reputation within the scholarly community is that they are intent on slanting the "truth" to their own purposes. Through articles in the world-wide press, they were known to have been obstructive to scholars and writers whose work preceded mine, and therefore, I could not risk letting them take such action with my biography. Throughout the seven or so years that I met with them, it was my understanding that they honored this agreement and would not attempt to thwart it.

Now, with their forced intrusion into my book, the Jung heirs' intention is clearly to discredit the conclusions within my biography by implying that the book contains numerous inaccuracies. In fact, as my publishers and I have shown them repeatedly since it was first published in English in November, 2003, most of the Jung heirs' objections are not to the content of the book but rather, to differences of editorial opinion. This became evident when I supplied them with several point-by-point refutations to their detailed lists of objections. I then asked leading scholars in the Jungian community to read both the Jung heirs' objections and my rebuttals, and they confirmed that there was nothing whatsoever in the heirs list of alleged errors that undermined the overall conclusions of my book. All biographies will have some minor errors or fact and (unfortunately) many typographical errors therein; in common with the usual practice, I have already corrected all such errors that were called to my attention.

I regret that the Jung heirs have succeeded in intruding upon my book rather than writing their own, but my deepest regret is that through this unprecedented action they have dishonored their illustrious patriarch and brought opprobrium to his name. I must now leave it to history to decide whether my decade of serious research and objective writing about the life and work of C.G. Jung will withstand the test of time.

Speaking as a fellow biographer, I couldn't agree more: this is bad news indeed.

As Deirdre Bair said in her original letter to me, "That such an enormous and powerful publisher caved in to threat and intimidation will have far-reaching consequences, not only for anyone who tries to write objectively about Jung, but for all other writers as well. Anything you can do to help get this information before the public will be very much appreciated."

I'm glad to oblige. I hope you'll do the same.

Posted June 30, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back;
There is a world elsewhere.

William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

Posted June 30, 12:01 PM

June 29, 2005

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- Very few people who don't write for a living understand that writing is work, much less that a writer who is sitting in a chair, reading a book or staring absently into the distance, may be as "busy" as one who is clicking away at his computer. My mother, for one, has never quite grasped this basic fact of the writer's life, which is why I find it hard to get any work done when visiting Smalltown, U.S.A. I once yelled at her for coming into my bedroom three times in a row and attempting to strike up a conversation while I was doing my best to polish off a column and e-mail it to a waiting editor in New York. I think it's the only time I've ever raised my voice to her, and I felt terrible afterward. (It worked, though--she didn't come back again until I was finished, and then I apologized.)

I fear that I myself have soaked up some of her obliviousness. After returning to New York on Sunday afternoon from a four-day trip to Alabama, I found myself faced with back-to-back deadlines: I had to write my Wall Street Journal drama column on Monday and my Washington Post "Second City" column on Tuesday. I blithely took it for granted that both pieces would write themselves, but they didn't, and by the middle of Tuesday afternoon I was too tired to eke out another word. Fortunately, my Washington Post editor is an understanding soul, so I sent him a note of warning, took my phone off the hook, and went to bed for two hours. I got up at five-thirty, plugged the phone back in, finished the column, and went out for sushi, marveling at how middle age has undermined my stamina. Time was when I could have knocked off both pieces in a single day, then gone out to a nightclub and listened to two straight sets before bedtime.

Like the song says, I'm not half the man I used to be--but could it be that the man I am now is twice as good a writer?

Nah.

- A friend of mine who's going into the hospital today for major surgery e-mailed me to ask if I could suggest an amusing book. I cast my eye around the shelves and spied a copy of In Black and White, Wil Haygood's biography of Sammy Davis, Jr., which I hadn't read since I reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal a year or two ago. I remembered it as being hugely entertaining and suggested that she give it a spin. Then it occurred to me to look up my review. Here's the money quote:

Wil Haygood...labors mightily to exhume Davis from the mass grave of half-recalled celebrities, and despite a slapdash prose style and a certain amount of factual sloppiness, he gets the job done.

Having just reread the first couple of chapters, I'd stand by that judgment, but I wonder whether my own bias toward elegant prose might have caused me to undervalue In Black and White a notch or two. No, it's not beautifully written, but it tells a fascinating story in a very effective way, so much so that my memory of the book was more enthusiastic than my review.

Is beautiful prose an absolute value? Obviously not. Does it matter more to me than it should? Perhaps.

- I love film music and write about it fairly often, but that doesn't mean I think it's as good as Mozart or Stravinsky. Most of it is purely functional, and even the best of it is sometimes barely listenable when wrenched out of its cinematic context and performed in isolation. The other night, though, I rose wearily from my desk, turned on the TV to relax before bedtime, and found myself watching The Magnificent Seven. No sooner did Elmer Bernstein's score start to play under the credits than I said to myself, "You know what? This is a really, really good piece of music." And so it is. If only Bernstein had shaped the main-title music into a freestanding seven- or eight-minute concert overture--and if only MGM hadn't greedily allowed it to be used in a famous series of cigarette commercials back in the Sixties--I bet it'd now be every bit as popular as Rodeo or Billy the Kid.

He didn't, but you can listen to the whole score on its own by ordering the soundtrack album. Try it, and see if you don't agree.

- I left my toothbrush behind in my hotel room in Montgomery, and the spare in my Manhattan medicine cabinet proved to be an unpleasant shade of purple. Alas, not only is my bathroom decorated in sunny yellow and cornflower blue, but a Bonnard color lithograph hangs next to the door. Having gone to some trouble last year to track down a suitably blue toothbrush, I went back to the corner drugstore to look for something a bit more compatible with my décor. To my horror, all the brushes they now sell turn out to be vulgar, fat-handled implements that not only don't match my towels but won't even fit into my toothbrush holder.

I slunk home in disgust, then decided to fish through my hanging bag one more time. Sure enough, my old toothbrush had somehow worked its way into a zippered compartment, and I gratefully returned it to the toothbrush holder, laughing at my fussiness as I did so. Apparently this is what comes of living with art: not only do I feel guilty whenever I throw my dirty clothes on the floor, but I've just been reduced to a fit of abject metrosexuality by the prospect of using the wrong-colored toothbrush.

I think maybe I need to go play in the sandbox....

Posted June 29, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I think 'taste' is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves."

John Updike, Hugging the Shore

Posted June 29, 12:00 PM

TT: A potentially significant coinage (or not)

I was chatting this morning with a friend of mine who is a singer-songwriter, and we agreed that "singer-songwriter" is an awfully clunky way to describe what she does.

Suddenly the light went on.

"Hey, how about singwriter?" I asked.

"Er, well, maybe..." she replied.

Posted June 29, 10:13 AM

TT: Your daily dose of schadenfreude

For those of you who loathe New York City and everything in it, please know that my adopted home town is obscenely hot and humid today. I just returned from a visit to the National Academy Museum and am too limp to blog about it. I'm supposed to go hear an outdoor concert in Central Park tonight and am praying for a timely thunderstorm.

Gloat while you can. Your time will come.

UPDATE: Sure enough, the sky fell, but I went to the concert anyway, got soaked to the skin, and had a wonderful time. The breeze blew the humidity away and the rain drove the malcontents away, meaning that everybody who toughed it out was in a mood to be pleased when the music started. Pink Martini, whom I adore (I have such a crush on China Forbes), opened the proceedings with a wonderfully polished set, while David Byrne, who is touring with a six-piece string section, filled all the aging scenesters in the crowd with delight. You haven't lived until you've heard several thousand happy concertgoers howling Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est? at the top of their lungs.

No sooner did Byrne hit the stage than fancy footwork broke out in our quadrant of the park--I was especially charmed by two somewhat youngish ladies who spent the entire evening performing what can only be called an interpretative dance--and by the time his set was over, the sun had finally set and the lights of Manhattan were bouncing off the low-lying thunderheads, tinting them a dark reddish-orange.

As I walked home, I asked myself if there were any other place in the world where I might possibly care to live. Answer came there none....

Posted June 29, 1:54 AM

June 28, 2005

TT: The spirit is willing...

...but not much else.

Translation: way too much recent activity, not nearly enough down time.

Complication: the deadline for this Sunday's "Second City" column for the Washington Post is looming.

Result: I have a really good post taking shape in my head, but it isn't going to get written down today.

Solution: see you tomorrow.

Posted June 28, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged."

Gertrude Stein, Brewsie and Willie

Posted June 28, 12:01 PM

June 27, 2005

TT: Flying home

I just got back from Montgomery, Alabama, where I spent three days at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. That wasn't all I did: I spent my mornings seeing such intriguing sights as Hank Williams' grave and Martin Luther King's church. I also paid a visit to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, whose holdings include Edward Hopper's New York Office and two paintings by Zelda Fitzgerald, and thanks to the timely intervention of a reader, I even managed to eat something approaching my fair share of really good barbecue. Nevertheless, I came to Montgomery to see plays, and I managed to work in five of them while I was in town, one on Thursday night (Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing) and two each on Friday (As You Like It and Arthur Miller's All My Sons) and Saturday (The Taming of the Shrew and Coriolanus). It was the first time I'd ever seen live performances of two Shakespeare plays in a single day.

Am I tired? Am I ever. You can't fly nonstop to Montgomery from New York, so I had to go to Charlotte, North Carolina, and take a puddlejumper the rest of the way. Thursday was a long, long day, and Sunday wasn't much shorter. The good news is that my flying phobia seems to have left me--I actually enjoyed it up there! I'm awfully glad to be home, though, and I think I've earned a good night's sleep, so I'll leave it at that for now.

I have three appointments and a deadline on Monday, but that doesn't mean I won't blog some more. (Nor does it mean that I will.)

Posted June 27, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

Two feathered guests from Alabama, two together,
And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,
And every day the she-bird crouched on her nest, silent, with bright eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

Walt Whitman, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

Posted June 27, 12:00 PM

June 26, 2005

OGIC: Remotely yours

I'm spending this weekend in Detroit, where spirits seem to be pretty high, considering. Further blogging will have to wait until I get back to Chicago Monday, but in the meantime I want to urge everyone in Chicago and environs to tune in Sunday morning for a very special installment of Chicago Public Radio's weekly arts show "Hello Beautiful!"

This week's show was taped last Wednesday evening in front of a live audience that included yours truly. In it, host Edward Lifson and Chicago's Cultural Historian (and how great is it that Chicago even has such a post?) Tim Samuelson discuss the music of architecture, invoking a wide-ranging selection of great Chicago spaces and asking what one hears in their presence: the Goldberg Variations at 860-880 Lake Shore Drive (my favorite buildings), for instance. The amazing modern-ragtime composer and pianist Reginald Robinson accompanies, and the conversation culminates in a tremendously moving story about the last works of two giants in their fields, Louis Sullivan and Scott Joplin, both of whom spent their final years in relative obscurity. Through this whole last segment of the show I had chills, and they weren't from the air conditioning (which was, however, memorably robust) and I wasn't alone. Tune in Sunday morning at 10 (or, if not in Chicago, keep an eye on the Hello Beautiful! web site for an archived version) and catch some of those chills yourself.

Posted June 26, 1:03 AM

June 24, 2005

TT: Read the whole thing here!

Friday again, and time for my Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser (posted by the grace of Our Girl--I'm down in Alabama, sans computer). Allow me, if you will, to dangle in front of your nose tantalizingly brief excerpts from my reviews of three shows.

First, Alan Ayckbourn's Private Fears in Public Places, now playing at 59E59 Theaters:

Mr. Ayckbourn's entry in the "Brits Off Broadway" festival currently underway at 59E59 Theaters is a more or less typical piece of Ayckbournian plot-juggling in which the lives of six lonely Londoners are made to intersect in a variety of unpredictable ways, some funny and others desperately sad. I can't come any closer to describing the effect of "Private Fears in Public Places" than to say that it suggests Terence Rattigan revised by David Ives. Written in 54 crisp scenes (some of them wordless) and acted on a small stage divided into five playing areas, it moves with whirligig speed, glittering craftsmanship and an exhilarating dash of craziness...

Second, the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Euripides' Hecuba, playing through Sunday at Brooklyn's BAM Opera House:

Tony Harrison, the translator, decided that Euripides' ever-modern Trojan War tale of slavery and vengeance was in need of updating. I bet you can see the punch line coming: He's set the whole thing in Iraq, jerking around the original Greek in order to make it more "relevant." (Among other overbearingly vulgar touches, he's rendered "the army of Hellas" as "the coalition force.") The set consists of five tiers of olive-drab American-style tents, the enslaved Trojan women are dressed in Muslim-style garb and sing Arabic-style chants, the sound effects...oh, the hell with it.

Last but not least, Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, now playing at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.:

If the actors would tighten up the screws a half-turn and knock five minutes off the running time, I wouldn't have a single nit to pick. Dixie Carter is devastatingly sexy as Mrs. Erlynne, the Lady in Red whose deep, dark secret sets the plot in motion, and everyone else in the almost-all-American cast supports her with the utmost aplomb, flinging epigrams into the breeze like lit firecrackers....

Guess what? The Journal has posted a free link to this week's column! It's an experiment--the powers-that-be have decided to try making selected drama columns available from time to time and see what happens. To read the whole thing on line, go to the Online Journal's Today's Free Features page and click on the appropriate link (it'll be obvious).

As always, you're welcome to pick up a copy of today's Journal at your corner newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal. You'll be glad you did.

UPDATE: Here's a permalink to my review.

Posted June 24, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Form is everything. Without it you've got nothing but a stubbed-toe sort of cry, sincere maybe, for what it's worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance, but you don't have grief."

Tobias Wolff, Old School (courtesy of in the wings)

Posted June 24, 12:01 PM

June 23, 2005

TT: Almanac

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."

G.K. Chesterton, "The Riddle of the Ivy"

Posted June 23, 12:01 PM

June 22, 2005

TT: Hitting the road

I'm off again, this time to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, where I'll be seeing five plays in three days and (presumably) eating some grits. Our Girl will post the daily almanac and my regular Friday-morning drama-column teaser by remote control from her top-secret headquarters in Chicago, but otherwise I'll be incommunicado until Monday. Any additional postings that materialize between now and then are strictly her doing.

Have a nice weekend!

Posted June 22, 12:07 PM

TT: One million and counting

I was taking a much-needed nap yesterday afternoon and missed an important milestone in the history of "About Last Night": we received our one millionth page view since going live on July 14, 2003.

To all of you who've visited us in the past two years, many thanks. The pleasure is ours.

Posted June 22, 12:06 PM

TT: The road of excess

Well, I did it: I bought another piece of art, a 1965 hard ground etching and drypoint by Richard Diebenkorn. You can see it by going here, and you can find out more about Diebenkorn here.

Please don't tease me too much! I've loved Diebenkorn's work for years, and I never thought I'd be able to afford a prize specimen like this one (his "Ocean Park" color lithographs and aquatints are already way over my financial head, alas). Then I ran across #32 last week on the Web site of a Seattle gallery and struck a mutually satisfactory deal with the very nice owner. Now it's en route to the Teachout Museum, where it will be well and truly cherished.

I know, I know, where am I going to hang the damn thing? Er, ask me later--I'll figure something out. I guess that makes me a real art collector, huh?

Posted June 22, 12:04 PM

TT: How not to do it

If you follow media news at all closely, you've read about the Los Angeles Times editorial page's abortive experiment with creating wikitorials. I knew it was doomed from the start, as did everyone who knows anything about how new media work, and I'd planned to post something about it at some point. Now Jeff Jarvis has done it for me.

Here's the gist:

Here is the Times' worst mistake and its most predictable: They think everything is about them. I've sat in meetings with newspaper editors who earnestly think that the best use of internet interactivity is to let the people talk about what they have written, to discuss them, to keep them in the spotlight they built for themselves. There is no bigger institutional ego than a newspaper's. Presidents and popes get humbled more often than editors. Well, at least they used to.

No, guys, the best use of a wiki would have been to have the public create wikis to share their knowledge and viewpoints with you. I don't know what the big issues are in LA, but here in New York, it might work better just to open the gates to watch people create pro and con wikis on the Olympics and a new Manhattan stadium and 10 ways to improve the schools....

But even that is an exhibition of media ego. For the truth is, if people wanted to do that, they could go to any number of places and do it on their own. They don't need newspapers to give them technology. And they certainly do not need newspapers to tell them what to talk about.

If newspapers would just listen--and use this technology to do that--they'd find that the people don't want to talk about what the editors talk about. And they certainly don't want to talk about the editors.

Let's take it up a notch:

What this really points toward is the death of the editorial page. Why the hell do we need editorials anymore? In their day, they were the voice--the bully pulpit, as Rupert Murdoch says--of one person: the publisher, the guy who had the ultimate conch, the printing press. We, the people, never said we gave a damn what he thought, but we had no choice but to listen. And so over the years, he convinced himself that we cared. What if we don't?

The truth is that an editorial is just another blog post written by one person witih one viewpoint. Here's a case where you can't argue that it makes a difference having a journalism degree and a newsroom. Editorialists and columnists get to read the same stuff we do and they put on their pants and opinions just the way we do. So why should they have rights to the mountaintop? Who died and made them Moses? Let the people speak....

I couldn't agree more, nor could I have put it better--and I spent several years writing editorials for a major metropolitan newspaper, the New York Daily News. It was a great job and I'm glad I did it, but those days are soooo over.

If you haven't looked at my Commentary essay on artblogging, let me point you to this paragraph:

When newspapers do become obsolete--which will happen sooner rather than later--it will be because their functions have been taken over by a variety of web-based media that can do them better. (Blogs, for example, are already superseding op-ed pages.) A few existing papers will rise to the challenge and transform themselves into online publications, reconceived in such a way as to take advantage of the unique properties of the web. Most, however, will not, since established institutions rarely if ever transform themselves, least of all in response to external threats to their survival. Instead, they are replaced by new institutions that spring up in response to those same threats, seeing them as opportunities for long-overdue change.

The Times just made my point for me--unintentionally.

Posted June 22, 12:03 PM

TT: Mailbox

- A fact checker for Vanity Fair sent me the following e-mail yesterday:

I can't get a line on this quote by H.L. Mencken, if indeed that's what it is. In referring to Dixie, Mencken apparently said it was "the hook-worm and incest belt of Anglo-Saxondom." Have you heard this? If not, do you have any suggestions on where next I should look?

As I mentioned last month, I've been getting queries like this ever since The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken was published. The funny thing is that the quotes in question always turn out to be phony, usually obviously so. This one looked phony, too, but it did have a slightly cracked ring of plausibility, as if it were an imperfectly remembered version of something Mencken had really said. What made me suspicious was that Mencken's verbal humor usually arises from elegant variation: I had no trouble imagining his having coined the phrase "hook-worm belt," but I couldn't see him settling for so commonplace a word as incest. (His preferred euphemism for homosexuality, for instance, was "non-Euclidean sex.")

I rolled up my sleeves and started Googling, and within a matter of seconds I'd found the answer, courtesy of Michael D. Goldhaber, a religion columnist for the Dallas Morning News:

The first use of "belt" to describe a region, identified by the Oxford English Dictionary, was by the poet Robert Southey in 1810: "A level belt of ice which bound...the waters of the sleeping Ocean round." By Mencken's time, the phrases Cotton Belt and Corn Belt were so widely spoken on this side of the Atlantic that he thought the locution was American.

"I began experimenting with various Belts in 1924 or thereabout," Mencken later wrote, "the Hookworm Belt, the Hog-and-Hominy Belt, the Total Immersion Belt, and so on." Also the "Mail-order Belt." "Finally," Mencken continued, "I settled on the Bible Belt."

Of course I knew he'd coined the phrase "Bible Belt," but I didn't know that "Hookworm Belt" had been an earlier version of that indelible expression. And incest, as I'd suspected, had nothing to do with it.

Once a scholar, always a scholar....

- A reader writes:

On a topic related to a music recommendation you made to me, I bought Jim Hall and Ron Carter's Alone Together some time ago. It is as good as you said. Hall's lines are beautiful, flowing, yet genuinely inventive and surprising. However, the only reason I know that is that I sat myself down in a dark room and really listened carefully. I don't know what it is with me, but unless I concentrate, jazz guitar seems to reach into my brain and trip the "no critical thinking allowed" switch. I took a car trip the other day--pleasant country driving, usually ideal for listening carefully to music. I had on a mix of Hall, Grant Green, Kenny Burrell. Beautiful music, nice drive, no distractions. But I went for long stretches with no awareness of who was playing, no memory of what the songs were. Wouldn't happen to me with piano or sax players. With guitar it's just pure pleasure, non-cognitive. Don't understand it, really.

I'm fascinated by this problem, though I'm not entirely sure it is a problem. (What's wrong with pure pleasure?) Nevertheless, I thought it interesting enough to pass on to all of you out there in the 'sphere for further reflection.

By the way, Alone Together is one of the most beautiful records ever made. If you've never heard it, go here (or download it from iMusic). You won't be even slightly sorry.

Posted June 22, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"The hushed distillation of a Keaton silent draws you in in singular ways. I will never forget, after having seen each of his independent films over and over, the disconcerting thrill of hearing Buster talk. It was a 1937 short. He entered a room whistling; then he spoke. His voice scratched my ears. It was deeper, huskier--not at all the voice I had heard in my head, which, I realized, was modeled (in a cheerfully narcissistic way) after my own internal monologue. But that's the point, the solipsistic strength of silence--something takes place inside: we cast ourselves into the film, we make it ours. And as is often pointed out, that interior work is half the fun. Think of the 500 brides thundering after Keaton at the end of Seven Chances. As the poet Charles Simic put it, 'All of us who saw the movie can still hear the sound of their feet.'"

Edward McPherson, Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat

Posted June 22, 12:01 PM

June 21, 2005

TT: Through for the night

I had to file my Wall Street Journal drama column a day earlier than usual, and as a result I find I'm plumb tuckered and all written out. Sorry! I'll post more (and more originally) if and when inspiration strikes, but don't be surprised if I stand mute until Wednesday or Thursday. And yes, I know, I always end up posting three times as much as usual whenever I announce that I'm not planning to write anything, but this time I think I might mean it, maybe....

Posted June 21, 12:04 PM

TT: Elsewhere

A few choice tidbits gleaned from the blogosphere:

- Mr. Alicublog rides my hobbyhorse, even though he mounts it from the other side:

The thing that makes a piece of work worthwhile is the mystery, but that doesn't mean an inspired fauve who doesn't know what he's doing can put it over without skills. (Usually.) The talented, trained people who get that thing on the stage or the page or the screen must be good with their tools, but they must also be working to realize the mystery, whether they would think to say so or, as with some hard-bitten old magicians, would rather portray themselves as clock-punchers trying to keep up their pay grade. You see the total absorption of great craftsmen at work: is it all for the money, do you think? Anyone who has worked on a production of any kind knows what it feels like when magic is being made--or failing to be made. Audiences know it too....

This is where ideologically-minded critics go wrong. They aren't at all interested in the mystery. When I read their poli-sci reviews, I can see that they're trying to assess the impact of the work in question--as if it were a social program or an economic stimulus package--on something they are pleased to call The Culture. In that sense, their work is indeed technical, and they often know their own grim metrics very well. But it has nothing to do with humility, or mystery, or art.

What he said.

- My favorite blogger-of-the-moment, Ms. in the wings, has posted "seventeen ways of looking for the beautiful." Here are three:

1. As evident in the clean lines of modernist design or Renaissance counterpoint, I prefer the simple and austere to over-populated, messy masses.

2. Complexity is most intriguing when it juxtaposes the simple.

3. I prefer solving mysteries to being lectured by the head detective....

- Ms. Household Opera tries her hand at the I-am-ridiculous game:

George Herbert perhaps no, John Donne yes
John Milton no, Andrew Marvell yes
John Dryden no, Aphra Behn yes
Alexander Pope yes, Jonathan Swift very definitely yes
William Wordsworth no, Lord Byron yes....

Correct on all counts, I'd say.

- Lileks and I are watching the same early-morning TV shows:

Last night on "What's My Line," the guest was a young man who signed in as "Tom Eagleton." Could it be? It was. His line was "District Attorney for St. Louis," and he was 27. (The episode aired in 1957, I think.) Right from the Jack Webb line of lawmen, too--square head, flat hair, G-man stare, thin tie, a smile that was rare but genuine. He was followed by Mamie Van Doren, a breathy va-va-va-voomer who performed the odd facial alphabet of the 50s sex siren--the moue, the wink, the coquettish smile, the wide eyes, the teasing glance. And she ran through the sequence again and again, a performance completely disconnected from the questions. It was like watching a prototype Sexbot stuck in an programming loop. She really was from another era--a time when the sex stars had hips like oven doors, hair the color of astronaut suits, brains the size of ant thoraxes, and a life of giddy leisure that revolved around small, portable dogs, beefy Pepsodent morons, pink convertibles, and the purchase of ceramic cat statuary with long necks. A bratwurst to Paris Hilton's Slim Jim....

- Mr. Something Old, Nothing New and I have the same favorite recording of Carmen.

- Finally, I'll be blogrolling this shortly, but you need to read it now if you write a blog or are thinking of starting one. No exceptions. Now.

Posted June 21, 12:03 PM

TT: In the stacks

I've been tagged with the book meme:

1. How many books do I own? About 1,250. (I got rid of two-thirds of my books when I moved to this apartment two and a half years ago.)

2. What's the last book I bought? Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat, by Edward McPherson.

3. What's the last book I read? Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography, by Piers Paul Read.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:
- Boswell's Life of Johnson
- The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
- Enemies, a Love Story, by Isaac Bashevis Singer
- The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy
- Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935-1975, by Fairfield Porter

Get with the program, Girl. You're a meme behind.

Posted June 21, 12:02 PM

TT: The shock of recognition

From Edmund White's recent New Yorker essay on women:

For most of my life I've been a shoulder to cry on, and all of that time I've wished I could do more to ease the pain of the women in my life. If I were straight, I could have married one of them. I would have known how to comfort her. I would have worked hard to provide her with the security and even the luxury she required. I would never have run off with another woman. I would have been as sensitive to her needs as a sister, as protective as a father. And I would always have told her where I was going and exactly when I'd be coming home. This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off....

In fact, it isn't quite so easy, but I do know what he means.

Posted June 21, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I was always that kid who went to the library and took out every book; I find that to be a very sexy thing about somebody."

Erin McKeown (interview with Jay Ruttenberg, Time Out New York, June 5-12, 2003)

Posted June 21, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Adventures with Netflix

This week your faithful correspondent catches up with two overrated movies, each of them suffering from its own big, basic flaw that seems mainly attributable to nobody being bothered to flesh out (no pun intended) and execute (ditto) a decent half-idea.

First up is House of Sand and Fog, which has, of course, beautiful casting and a promising set-up: a fatal battle of wills between two essentially well-meaning but very desperate people. Then, alas, there's the wild card that is Ron Eldard's short-fused, xenophobic cop, with his totally inordinate degree of influence on the course of events. He seems to have stumbled in from a different film and genre altogether, or more likely to have been brought in as insurance against Kingsley and Connelly's characters bonding over their perfectly matched freakish intensity, working things out, and robbing the movie of the shock and gravitas it's so determined to deliver. Thanks to the cop's antics generally--and to the gun that hitches a ride into the climactic sequence with him specifically--the movie's ending, though obscenely sad, is too much of a freak accident, too detached from the principal characters' wills and actions, to count as tragedy. Without the cop this might have been a good movie, but who can tell?

Shaun of the Dead is a pretty good joke while it lasts, which it does for almost half its length, at which point it runs out of steam and turns into...a straight-faced retread of what it's supposed to be parodying. Whoops. The movie squeezed a little more goodwill out of me than it strictly should have, by virtue of the title character's sweetness. But I got a far bigger kick out of both the straight-ahead 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and the inspired mess 28 Days Later--it's a better problem to suffer from too many ideas than from too few. There's some point to made here about the zombie-mall movie being too close to a joke in its pure state to be successfully parodied, but I lost a version of this post once already last night and, let's face it, it's way past my bedtime now. If this makes sense to you, though, tell me why in email. If it doesn't...oh, go ahead and email me too.

Next up: The Taste of Others. Up to the standards of Look at Me? We'll see.

Posted June 21, 1:46 AM

June 20, 2005

TT: Second chance

The New York Public Library has extended its current exhibition of prints and gouaches by Milton Avery through Saturday. Here's what I wrote about it last month in the Washington Post:

For pure charm, it'd be hard to top the Milton Avery exhibition...at the main branch of the New York Public Library, a pleasingly compact affair that goes by the mile-long name of "The Flying Pig and Other Winged Creatures: An Exhibition of the Artist's Illustrations and Prints." Fifty-nine years ago, Avery accepted an invitation to illustrate a children's book written by a friend and called "The Flying Pig." The book was scrapped on account of excessive expense (to reproduce Avery's paintings in color would have cost too much in the days of post-World War II inflation), and this is the first time the illustrations have been shown in public. Not surprisingly, they're just as adorable as you'd expect--fancifully composed and joyously colored, very much in the Avery manner. Hung alongside them are a dozen of the artist's finest drypoints and woodcuts, including "Self-Portrait," "March at a Table," "Night Nude" and "Dancer." If you've never seen any of Avery's prints, this is an excellent place to start.

For more information (including online images of the works in the show), go here.

Posted June 20, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

Your business is not to clear your conscience,
But to learn how to bear the burdens of your conscience.

T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

Posted June 20, 12:01 PM

TT: A not-so-little list

I've been reading about Richard Diebenkorn, whom I'm thinking of adding to the Teachout Museum, and last night I ran across this wonderful list that was found among his papers after he died in 1993. The spelling is exactly as in the original:

Notes to myself on beginning a painting

1. attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued--except as a stimulus for further moves.

3. Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.

4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.

5. Dont "discover" a subject--of any kind.

6. Somehow don't be bored--but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.

7. Mistakes can't be erased but they move you from your present position.

8. Keep thinking about Polyanna.

9. Tolerate chaos.

10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

Posted June 20, 8:56 AM

TT: In one ear

A reader writes:

I find that iTunes and writing coexist uneasily here on my laptop. I often use iTunes while I am writing to set a mood or to block out ambient sound and focus my mind. But just as often the music becomes a distraction. I listen too much, write too little, and unproductive hours slip away before I catch myself.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject of music and writing. How do you use music in your actual writing process, if at all? Do you listen to music while you write, or are you the type who requires absolute silence? Do you program your music to suit the subject you are writing about? More abstractly, do you think that the growing popularity of iTunes and digitized music generally somehow changes the writing atmosphere, i.e. now that our music resides on the same hard drive as our work, do we listen differently, does music penetrate the workspace more than it used to?

Having at one time spent the better part of a decade working in a cubicle at the New York Daily News, I no longer need silence in order to write--which isn't to say that I'd enjoy living across the street from a construction site! Fortunately, the windows of my apartment look down on a quiet, leafy side street, and the walls of the building are thick enough to screen out virtually all of the modest amounts of noise generated by my upstairs and downstairs neighbors.

As for music, I used to listen to it fairly regularly while writing, and on occasion I used it to set a mood. (I wrote parts of City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy, for example, while listening to Aaron Copland's Letter from Home and Dave Frishberg's Sweet Kentucky Ham.) But I always had to be careful about what pieces I chose, and I learned over time that there were certain kinds of music that interfered with the writing of first drafts. Songs sung in English tended to throw me off the track, as did any recording conducted by Arturo Toscanini, whose interpretations of the classics were simply too intense for me to relegate to the background of my consciousness.

Perhaps my powers of concentration have been diminished by advancing age, or maybe I've simply become more sensitive to the emotion-evoking power of music. (I cry more easily now than I did a decade ago.) Whatever the reason, I now find music more distracting than I used to, and I no longer listen to any kind of music while working on first drafts. Editing is different, and unless I'm doing battle with a tight deadline, in which case I prefer to struggle in silence, I sometimes listen to music when I'm polishing a piece, though I don't really hear it. Sometimes I'll put on a symphony or concerto, start chipping away at an unpolished draft, and emerge from a deep trough of concentration to realize--always with surprise--that the piece of music to which I was "listening" is almost over.

I suspect that my correspondent is right to think that the increased availability of digitized music is changing the atmosphere of the workplace, but I see iTunes less as a unique and separate source of distraction than as one of the myriad ways in which Web-enabled computers are capable of diverting us from the task at hand, whatever it may be. I'm a chronic procrastinator--if it weren't for deadlines, I wouldn't get anything done--and my iBook places an infinite number of distractions at my fingertips. I'm far more likely to waste time by surfing the Web than by playing with iTunes, though, possibly because it's easier for me to pretend that I'm searching for some fact that's relevant to the task at hand.

More generally, I've come to look upon my DSL-equipped iBook as an enemy of leisure, a malevolent magnet that pulls me out of the Teachout Museum and seduces me into working when I ought to be playing. It is this realization that finally taught me a lesson the rest of the world figured out long ago, which is that it is good to get out of town from time to time. The great danger of the digital workplace, of course, is that you can take it wherever you go, which is why I never, ever take my computer with me to the secure undisclosed location where I sit by the Hudson River and watch the sun set, nor do I bring it along when I review out-of-town plays. That way lies...well, maybe not madness, but definitely obsession. I may be a workaholic, but at least I'm not a degenerate workaholic.

Posted June 20, 8:38 AM

June 19, 2005

OGIC: Paris calling

Ann Althouse is soliciting suggestions of the best movies set in Paris. Terry will have some thoughts, no doubt. My own tastes lean to Irma Vep and Celine et Julie vont en bateau, which takes place half in Paris and half in a Henry James story, and whose first scene makes fantastic use of the Montmartre stairs (Quicktime required).

Posted June 19, 11:20 AM

June 17, 2005

TT: Maugham goes Wilde

Friday again, and time for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I'm out of town and blissfully computer-free, but Our Girl has been kind enough to post it for me by remote control. I reviewed two shows today, one in New York (Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife) and one in New Jersey (Paper Mill Playhouse's revival of Ragtime).

Here's the scoop:

What makes "The Constant Wife" so peculiar is that it starts out as one kind of period piece, then turns unexpectedly into another. Everyone wears oh-so-'20s outfits, and a poker-faced butler (Denis Holmes) announces the arrival of each character in turn. Then, midway through the second act, Constance starts delivering stilted orations that might have been lifted from a very different sort of play: "So long as John provides me with all the necessities of existence I wouldn't be unfaithful. It all comes down to the economic situation. He has bought my fidelity and I should be worse than a harlot if I took the price he paid and did not deliver the goods." Imagine Henrik Ibsen rewritten by Oscar Wilde and you'll get some idea of what "The Constant Wife" sounds like....

I loved Paper Mill Playhouse's revival of "Ragtime," the stage version of E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel, in which Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens got right everything they got wrong earlier this season at Lincoln Center with "Dessa Rose." Directed by Stafford Arima along the lines of his 2003 London production, Paper Mill's "Ragtime" is a small-scale rethinking of a large-scale pageant, one that strips away all visual superfluities to concentrate on Mr. Flaherty's magnificent score. The result is little short of revelatory....

No link. Have you bought a Friday Journal lately? You can read all of me there, plus lots of other great stuff--or you can go here and subscribe to the Online Journal, which is ever so much hipper.

Posted June 17, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"So things are all right after all, and I shall wind up my defense of criticism by observing that excessively kind notices, coming from all sides and lasting a career, can sterilize an artist more effectively than the cold shower that wakes one up to real life. That must have been what Jean Paulhan had in mind when he wrote, 'Bad reviews preserve an author better than alcohol preserves a piece of fruit.'"

François Truffaut, "What Do Critics Dream About?" (courtesy of Cinetrix)

Posted June 17, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Bloomsday etc.

A few stray notes and observations from last night's Bloomsday reading, which I blogged about in a more official capacity at the site linked below:

- I freely admitted to everyone I spoke to that I've never read the damn thing. This made for some fun--in a room full of devotees and proselytizers, I was a cause! But the best argument on the book's behalf were the readings themselves, some of them rip-roaringly funny.

- Because of my background and interests, I tend to think of Ulysses first as a monument of literary modernism and second as one of Irish literature. Last night went some way toward changing this habit, especially hearing the wonderful performances of Charles Sheehan and Rory Childers.

- My favorite sort of enthusiast is an enthusiast with a cocktail.

- What a view! Not only in the obvious ways--the 22-story birds-eye on Millennium Park, the Art Institute, Buckingham Fountain et al.--but also the cool sights at eye-level. To the south was the sign on D.H. Burnham's Santa Fe Building, the letters large as life. The sculpted lion heads decorating whatever building sits to the north seemed close enough to pat, and more ferocious than you could know from any other perspective.

Posted June 17, 5:52 AM

OGIC: What's the opposite of moonlighting?

I've done a bit of it here.

Posted June 17, 5:14 AM

June 16, 2005

TT: On the fly

I won't be around today. Nothing dire, I just have work to do elsewhere. I'll see you again on Friday. While I'm gone, visit "Sites to See" and explore the blogosphere!

Posted June 16, 12:06 PM

TT: Projection booth

I've been tagged with the film meme by such stuff:

1. Total number of films I own on DVD and video: About 200.

2. Last film I bought: The Red Shoes. (I know, you can't believe I didn't already own it, but I only just saw it for the first time last year.)

3. Last film I watched: Henry Bromell's Panic, with William H. Macy, Donald Sutherland, and Neve Campbell, a beautiful and alarming neonoir film about a midlife crisis. It sank without trace on its theatrical release five years ago, and shouldn't have.

4. Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me (in no particular order):

- Brad Anderson's Next Stop Wonderland
- Roman Polanski's Chinatown
- Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game
- Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me
- Steve Kloves' The Fabulous Baker Boys

5. If you could be any character portrayed in a movie, who would it be? Dr. Ben Stone, the title character in Doc Hollywood, a sweet little film that is one of my not-so-guilty pleasures.

You're it, Girl.

Posted June 16, 12:05 PM

TT: Teachout's Iron Law of Human Relations

Nobody can take a hint.

Posted June 16, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"He'd been thinking about late middle age, the years which a generous God and good health now offered. They could be fruitful years before death knocked, or a sterile barren delay before the cold. It all depended on how you handled them. It was absurd, no doubt, to pretend to be young: after thirty years of desk work it would be ludicrous to start waving guns. Charles Russell didn't intend to. What he intended was a calculated avoidance, the avoidance of too much discipline and of over-rigid habits. At sixty one wasn't elastic still, one had one's little drills for things and was fully entitled to do so. They made life simpler, they spun out leisure, but what was very dangerous was when the drill became its own reward, not the muddle avoided, the moment saved, but the deadly satisfaction of having completed some trifle efficiently. If that was the trap of old age, its threshold, then Russell had seen it and wouldn't step over."

William Haggard, The Hardliners

Posted June 16, 12:01 PM

June 15, 2005

TT: Welcome wagon

Today marks the launch of artsjournal.com's first jazz blog, Rifftides, written by veteran jazz journalist Doug Ramsey. In lieu of a recommendation, allow me to quote from what I wrote in The Wall Street Journal in April about Doug's latest book, Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond:

It's a serious, thoughtful book, as lucidly written as a first-class literary biography....While "Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond" contains plenty of show-stopping gossip, it is in no way a pathography. Scrupulously researched and written with an attractive combination of affection and candor, it casts a bright light on Desmond's troubled psyche without devaluing his considerable achievements as an artist. "Any of the great composers of melodies--Mozart, Schubert, Gershwin--would have been gratified to have written what Desmond created spontaneously," Mr. Ramsey says. Strong words, but "Take Five" makes them stick.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Doug. It's a pleasure to have you aboard.

Posted June 15, 12:32 PM

TT: Musical madeleines

Like everybody else in the world, I've become a compulsive shuffle-player. To date I've loaded 2,849 "songs" onto my iBook and iPod, and while I occasionally pick and choose from them at will, I usually let myself be surprised. One evening last week, iTunes unexpectedly served up a string of selections fraught with personal associations. Listening to them put me in mind of the scene in High Fidelity (I can't remember whether it's in the novel as well) in which John Cusack explains how he arranged his LP collection in "autobiographical order":

If I want to play, say, Blue by Joni Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for somebody in the autumn of 1983, but didn't give it to them for personal reasons.

Me, I'm a chronological kind of guy, so much so that the upper left-hand corner of the first CD shelf in my office-bedroom is actually occupied by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Nevertheless, I very much appreciate the theory of autobiographical order, and I thought it might amuse you to hear some of the long-lost memories summoned up by my iBook:

- The Classics IV, Stormy. This must have been the first 45 I bought with my own money. I know the year was 1969, and the other singles I remember buying around that time were Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" and Sergio Mendes' "Mais Que Nada" (good choices both). I liked Dennis Yost's soft, furry voice much more than well enough, but it was the song's minor-key, modally tinted harmonies that caught and held my ear. They still do.

- George Strait, I've Come to Expect It From You. New Yorkers are almost always surprised to learn that I like country music. In fact, I grew up with it--I played in a country band in high school--and my appreciation for its clear-eyed view of romance and its discontents deepens as the years go by. I heard this tight-lipped, no-nonsense lament (I guess that I should thank my unlucky stars/That I'm alive/And you're the way you are/But that's what I get/I've come to expect it from you) on a car radio as I skidded over ice-covered highways after a performance of Turandot in Buffalo, and I picked up a copy of the CD as soon as I returned to Manhattan in one piece.

- Neil Young, The Loner. This is from Young's first solo album, which I bought after reading about it in The Rolling Stone Record Review, a paperback anthology published in 1971. Some of those reviews were so vividly written that I can recall them to this day, and I thumbed through my heavily dogeared copy until it disintegrated. (Too bad I didn't hang onto the loose pages. According to Alibris, used copies now sell for as much as $199 apiece.) I lost my youthful taste for the inside jokes and insipidities of Crosby, Stills & Nash a quarter-century ago, but Neil Young's best songs still speak to me, and this was one of the first tracks I downloaded from iMusic last year.

- Elvis Presley, Jailhouse Rock. My family used to vacation at the Howard Johnson next door to Graceland (it's long gone) back when Elvis Presley was thin. Alas, I already thought Elvis was irredeemably square, and it wasn't until I saw Jailhouse Rock on TV as an adult that I caught on to what I'd been missing. Lilo was soooo right: the man rocked.

- Lou Reed, White Light/White Heat. This is from Rock 'n' Roll Animal, one of the fieriest and most furious live albums ever recorded. I heard it at a 1974 kegger where everybody but me was getting drunk, high, or laid. I, on the other hand, stuck close to the living-room record player, marveling at the slashing interplay between Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter, Reed's guitarists. I was such a geekazoid avant la lettre, but at least I knew a good thing when I heard it.

- Cole Porter, Anything Goes. Porter recorded several of his own songs for Victor in 1934, accompanied only by his own clumpy piano and sounding rather like a dapper, effete gnome with slicked-back hair, which is pretty much what he was. I first heard this scratchy old 78 being played over the opening credits of The Boys in the Band, a film which then struck me as the acme of sophistication. I had a lot to learn, including the fact that Porter was singing the original, uncensored lyrics to "Anything Goes": If old hymns you like/Or bare limbs you like/If Mae West you like/Or me undressed you like/Why, nobody will oppose. Nobody ever penned a craftier rhyme.

- Spike Jones, Cocktails for Two. Spike Jones is one of my earliest memories: he had a Sunday-night TV show in the late '50s and early '60s that my parents watched from time to time. Decades later, my friend Tim Page introduced me to this wildly funny record, and though I must have played it a hundred times since then, its lunatic incongruities still make me laugh out loud. (Just yesterday I noticed that one of the characters in I.Q. uses "Cocktails for Two" as a demonstration record for his sound system.)

- Dwight Yoakam, Honky Tonk Man. I fell out of touch with the country-music scene in college and for a long time afterward, thus missing out on the rise of the New Traditionalists, of whom Yoakam was one of the most significant and influential. Unlikely as it may sound, I discovered this wonderful song on a Smithsonian Institution box set of country records. I went right out and bought Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., subsequently becoming a lifelong fan.

- Sidney Bechet/Rex Stewart/Earl Hines/Baby Dodds, Save It, Pretty Mama. I found out about jazz from my father's big-band 78s, but my high-school record library also had a surprisingly varied selection of jazz LPs, among them a Sidney Bechet anthology on RCA Vintage that contained this strutting, suavely self-assured 1941 performance. Bechet has occupied a prominent place in my pantheon of great jazz soloists ever since the day I checked out Bechet of New Orleans (thank you, Fred Huff!). The best thing about "Save It, Pretty Mama," though, is Baby Dodds' immaculately swinging drumming. Press rolls are way cool.

- The Grateful Dead, Casey Jones. I was never, ever a Deadhead (eeuuww!), but I made an exception for Workingman's Dead, whose clean, spare, mostly unamplified songs were praised to the skies in a review published in the late, lamented Stereo Review, the first music magazine to which I ever subscribed. (It was in Stereo Review that I also learned about Bobby Short.) I bought the LP on the strength of that piece, and I bought the CD version a quarter-century later on the strength of my fond memories. Some of the songs haven't aged well, but I like "Dire Wolf" and "Casey Jones" as much as I ever did.

- Brahms, Wie bist du, meine Königin, performed by Hans Hotter and Gerald Moore. Another album I bought on the strength of a Stereo Review recommendation was a budget-priced box set called The Seraphim Guide to German Lieder that contained a well-chosen selection of songs by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Loewe, Wolf, and Richard Strauss, all of them sung by such celebrated recitalists as Hotter, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Nicolai Gedda, Christa Ludwig, Victoria de los Angeles, and Janet Baker. I played my copy white, as we used to say in the days of black discs and blunt needles, and I learned much of what I know about lieder from such deeply comprehending interpretations as this one. If only Seraphim had followed it up with a companion volume devoted to French art song!

- Harry Nilsson, Daybreak. Nilsson was part of the soundtrack of my AM-radio adolescence, but I later turned up my snobby nose at his clever pop tunes, and it wasn't until Paul Taylor made A Field of Grass, a joltingly apocalyptic modern-dance portrait of the '60s set to a half-dozen of his best records, that I realized how wrong I'd been to dismiss him as a lightweight. (Another of his hits, "Jump Into the Fire," contributes no less greatly to the effect of GoodFellas.)

- Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World. I've never seen Good Morning, Vietnam, nor did I hear this record when it was new. It didn't become a hit until long after Louis Armstrong died, and even then I probably would have written it off as commercial fluff. Now that I'm writing a biography of Armstrong, I know better: it's the masterpiece of his old age, an unguarded, utterly sincere expression of his lifelong belief in man's essential goodness. If you don't dig it, you don't dig Pops.

Posted June 15, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness."

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Posted June 15, 12:01 PM

June 14, 2005

OGIC: Cod attack

Not to be missed: The Cod goes to Mr. and Mrs. Smith (though not in Washington). Hide your squalling children.

Posted June 14, 12:53 PM

TT: Words to the wise

The Washington Post recently asked its arts writers to recommend "favorite books about favorite subjects." Our recommendations appeared in Sunday's paper, and you'll find them here. (Each one is separately linked.)

Here's mine:

Alec Wilder, who died in 1980, was one of the least classifiable human beings who ever lived. A sort-of-classical composer who doubled as a sort-of-popular songwriter, he wrote a few hits ("I'll Be Around," "While We're Young") and a medium-size stack of not-quite-standard ballads ("I See It Now," "South to a Warmer Place," "Did You Ever Cross Over to Sneden's?") sung and adored by such stellar vocalists as Frank Sinatra and Mabel Mercer. Late in life, Wilder was persuaded to set down his thoughts on the great popular songwriters of the 20th century, and despite his well-deserved reputation as a chronic procrastinator, he finally managed to produce a full-length book (written in collaboration with the popular-music scholar James Maher, who served as his patient amanuensis).

Though published by an academic press, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (Oxford University, 1990 reissue, $45) is about as scholarly as a late-afternoon chat in a dark, oak-paneled bar. Holding forth in an informal, unabashedly opinionated style, Wilder offers a guided tour of the collected works of Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, and a sprinkling of lesser but still important lights, writing both as a connoisseur and as an important songwriter in his own right. The results border at times on thinly disguised autobiography....

Read the whole thing here.

Posted June 14, 12:11 PM

OGIC: Diary of a lost evening

I had grand plans for this evening. Yesterday I wrote half of a post responding to Chip McGrath's New York Times piece on class in American fiction, but I couldn't finish it before bedtime arrived. Tonight was the night I was going to unearth my copy of "In the Cage" and wrap that up. Also, it's developed over just the last week that I am going to be moving in six weeks, and I need to make my apartment showable ASAP. So I was going to drag the laptop into the bedroom, where both the window unit and the critical mass of clutter are, bask in the coolth, and alternately write my post and put things away. Two birds with one air conditioner. Now here it is 10:07 and I've neither written a word nor stashed a sock. I'm also in the hot and sticky living room for some reason, feeling like I'm going to drop off two hours ahead of schedule. So something, perhaps both things, are going to give.

My mistake? Taking to the bike path as soon as I got home from work, out of my modified pantsuit, and into some workout clothes. After a year of inexplicably neglecting my bike and the glorious lakefront bike path just steps from my door, I got around to having the poor creaky thing tuned up last week. (South Siders: patronize this establishment. Yuvie's your man.) I've now had three outings, tonight being the longest and possibly the most breathtaking, in more ways than one. Nowhere else I've ever lived has brought exercise in such close and easy proximity with gorgeousness. Chicago has pretty much spoiled me for working out in gyms, other than lifting weights, an activity that seems to be actually enhanced by an ugly, grubby, smelly setting.

Anyway. Despite the many possible moods of Lake Michigan, which I have been known to find inspiring, some days it's not moody or interesting or sublime but perfectly, insipidly pretty, torn straight from a travel brochure. That was the deal tonight, the water merrily rippling and vacationland-blue--and what's more, the path was amazingly free of jackasses. Somebody actually apologized for getting in my way at one point, an unheard-of nicety that practically made me fall off my bike and crack my skull.

I rode from 57th Street to the boat launch just north of the museum campus. They keep improving the bike path, and one of the best developments, dating back maybe five or six years, was to route it around the back of the Shedd Aquarium in a half-circle. Biking this stretch, you've got the oceanarium on one side of you--though you can't, alas, see the belugas--and the lake on the other. You have to slow way down, though--it's as narrow as possible, and a popular stretch of the path for pedestrians of the sightseeing variety: leisurely, benignly clueless, disinclined to stay on their side of the yellow line. That in itself doesn't bother me, except that the racer boys--and yes, they're nearly always boys--don't believe in slowing down even in the interest of life and limb, their own or anyone else's. So they bully their way through, frightening small children and benefiting from the forbearance of those around them; in the event of a crash, their speed and height make them odds-on favorites to scramble their brains on the pavement, helmets or no. But they survive by the good graces of those they weave around perilously, and they don't entirely manage to spoil a good thing.

The whole ride long I was thinking how sad it was that I don't have a camera in my phone and that we don't have images on the blog, and so I couldn't share the glories of the lakefront with all of you. But I knew, too, that this was a kind of beauty that wouldn't translate well, being so bland. You've seen a thousand pretty pictures of a sparkling body of water on a brilliantly sunny day--even one dotted with white sails, I daresay--and another one would have made your eyes glaze over, or roll. There wasn't anything all that remarkable about it. In fact, had I not been sweating and thirsting and fighting the wind, I may not even have found it so beautiful. I did, and it was, but it didn't matter or last. In 24 hours or less, I'll have forgotten all about it. Sometimes, though, it strikes me as completely insane that I can forget with impunity, that there's essentially an endless supply of this. I like the lake best when it surprises me, which it does, often. But even when it doesn't--or especially when it doesn't--it's pretty reliably stunning. Less beautiful, more interesting. Less interesting, more beautiful. You never lose with this lake.

To stop making a short story tremendously long, I'll fast-forward and say that I got home and gave in to watching the premiere of TNT's The Closer, which the network has been hyping for what seems like six months and I think actually is. It wasn't bad. I liked how Kyra Sedgwick was constantly eating doughnuts and such. One scene had her deliberating carefully among ice-cream confections, a tad too easy a way of investing a tough-as-nails character with girlish vulnerability, but still and all, one that winningly features ice-cream confections. Although the obvious precursor for the show is Prime Suspect, to which it will never live up, the opening scene was ripped straight out of Silence of the Lambs (and then tweaked). I'll probably watch again, but then, my TV standards are not "high."

Aside from the couch potato routine, I spent the evening downing a lot of my own personal summertime nectar and eating a crudely constructed, you might say jerry-rigged, dinner, then sat down to excuse myself from blogging, and here we are. I probably won't get to the McGrath thing until Wednesday now, and I'll have to live with the mortification of imagining strangers tracking through here tomorrow getting an eyeful of clothes out of drawers and books off of shelves as far as the eye can see. But hey, I posted!

Posted June 14, 12:07 PM

TT: With thirty-four you get eggroll

On Sunday I hung the newest addition to the Teachout Museum, Kenneth Noland's Circle I (II-3). Published in 1978 by Tyler Graphics as part of Noland's Handmade Paper Project, it consists of three layers of colored, pressed paper pulp with three lithographic monoprint impressions, floated on a white, cloth-covered board and sealed in a plexiglass box. Go here and here to see four pieces from the Handmade Paper Project. Mine is the one in the center of the bottom row of the first page. The photo isn't very good, but it'll give you a rough idea of what Circle I (II-3) looks like.

Noland, who was born in 1924, had been painting concentric circles for two decades when he made Circle I (II-3). These "Circle" paintings, the ones for which he's best known today, are widely regarded as studies in pure color, but his own view is more nuanced: "People talk about color in the 'Circles,' but they are also about scales and juxtapositions. Making them taught me everything about scale." In addition, the "Circle" prints in the Handmade Paper Series are also "about" the rough, unpredictably complex surfaces and textures of the paper out of which they are made. My print actually has something of the effect of a sculpture: it exists in space, not merely as a flattened-out image.

The experience of making the "Circle" prints left its mark on Noland's later work, as Karen Wilkin explains in an invaluable 1990 monograph on the artist:

For all their declarative, legible structure, his [pre-1980] pictures were as disembodied as "something that you heard." Their astonishing color appeared to have magically fallen into place; as though in order to appeal directly to the sense of sight, Noland had banished all sense of touch. Yet early in the 1980s, he began to explore media that depended utterly on touch...Cast paper proved especially fascinating to him. Working with colored paper pulp forced him literally to move color around as a tactile substance, instead of applying it as a skin on a flat surface. (He once described the process as "making a picture out of colored cottage cheese.") It was a stimulating sensation. When he began to paint again soon after this experience, he found that he wanted the physicality of the cast paper works in his canvases. "I wanted to get expressive possibilities back into picture through the use of my hands or touch," Noland says.

Though Noland and his fellow color-field painter Jules Olitski have been out of fashion for a long time now, I continue to admire their work, which speaks to me in much the same way as do music and plotless dance. I've been looking for an affordable Noland handmade-paper monoprint for the better part of two years, and I tracked one down last week (this is where I found it). Circle I (II-3) now hangs below the second most recent addition to the Teachout Museum, Olitski's Forward Edge. The two pieces share the northwest corner of my living room with Grey Fireworks, a screenprint by Helen Frankenthaler, whose poured paintings of the Fifties were a major influence on Noland, Olitski, and their colleague Morris Louis (who called Frankenthaler "a bridge between [Jackson] Pollock and what was possible").

That's the good news. The bad news is that with the arrival of Circle I (II-3), I've finally run out of wall space. I spent a half-hour rehanging five other prints in order to make a place for it. Even with three pieces relocated to my loft, I no longer have room for anything much larger than a small etching. To be sure, the piece of art I most covet is a small etching, but I let it get away from me at an auction a year and a half ago, and it's likely to be a long, long time (i.e., a cold day in hell) before I track down another copy at a price I can even pretend to afford. The other pieces for which I'm looking, a color lithograph by Hans Hofmann and a pastel by Arnold Friedman, are both larger than any of the remaining gaps on my walls.

What to do? I know a connoisseur in Chicago who bought a second apartment to house his collection, but he's rich and I'm not. Nor would I consider moving to a larger place, even if I could afford to do so: I love my cozy little home, and I've fussed over it too long to let it go now. Several friends have suggested that I start rotating my collection, and one or two have even offered to serve as the recipients of long-term loans. I'm not entirely averse to the idea--in fact, I rather like it--but I'm not sure I could bring myself to go through with it, at least for the moment. (Sorry, Ali!) Part of the pleasure of owning art, after all, is being able to see it whenever you want. As of this morning, 34 pieces hang on the walls of my apartment, each one beautiful in its own right and all of them additionally beautiful as part of the larger totality that is the Teachout Museum. How could I possibly give one away, even temporarily? It'd be like shipping one of your kids off to a foster home.

Be that as it may, something's got to give, so I probably won't be buying anything else anytime soon--unless, of course, I change my mind, which I probably will. I guess I might as well face it: my name is Terry, and I'm a small-time art junkie. It's not the worst addiction in the world.

UPDATE: A fellow New Yorker writes:

André Emmerich used to say that a true collector was someone who kept acquiring art even after running out of wall space. We don't actually collect, but art happens to us--we have very generous artist friends and we are lucky enough to be able to buy at a deep discount on occasion--so the walls are filled. Some things rotate. Other things are in portfolios stuck behind chests of drawers and the back of the closet. And when we finally redid the kitchen after 17 years in this loft, my husband made an ingenious storage space for small works behind a large painting. Underneath is much needed bookcase space to help accommodate the other unstoppable accumulation.

I'm not sure whether I find this encouraging or enabling....

Posted June 14, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Until Abstract Expressionism, you had to have something to paint about, some kind of subject matter. Even though Kandinsky and Arthur Dove were improvising earlier, it didn't take. They had to have symbols, suggested natural images or geometry, which was something real structurally. That gave them something to paint about. What was new was the idea that something you looked at could be like something you heard."

Kenneth Noland (quoted in Karen Wilkin, Kenneth Noland)

Posted June 14, 12:01 PM

TT: Loud and clear

For those of you who were waiting with bated breath, my home phone is now functional once more. You may call with impunity. I might even answer!

Posted June 14, 8:49 AM

June 13, 2005

TT: Accounts unreceivable

Memo to anyone who was thinking of calling me: my telephone is out of order. You can leave a message for me on my voice mail and I can collect it after the fact, but I won't hear the phone ring when you do.

The good guys are coming on Tuesday morning. Until then and/or until further notice, send me an e-mail if you need to get in touch with me.

Posted June 13, 12:44 PM

TT: Despite and still

First, an announcement: Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza, which was originally set to close on June 12, then September 4, will now run through January 1, 2006, thanks to the fact that it received six Tony Awards, not to mention a whole lot of passionate plugging from well-placed enthusiasts like me. Ha!

Go, if you haven't. If you have, go again. And if you can't go, listen to the CD. I can't tell you how many friends of mine have fallen in love with this show. (To read excerpts from my Wall Street Journal review, go here.)

For those who asked, I haven't quite shaken off the bug that bit me last week, but I'm mending nicely, thanks. So as to increase the chances of my getting well sooner and staying well longer, I spent a good-sized chunk of the weekend staying indoors and working on the blog. Look in the right-hand column, for instance, and you'll find a fresh set of Top Fives. In addition, "Sites to See" has been updated with a hatful of new or newly discovered blogs and Web sites (each of which is marked with an asterisk), all worth a visit.

That's it for now. Enjoy.

Posted June 13, 12:05 PM

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

- I write fast. It takes me, for example, two and a half hours to knock out a thousand-word Wall Street Journal drama column (except when I'm sick). This isn't exactly freakish, but it's quick enough to stagger many of my friends and colleagues. I can't explain my facility, so I joke about it, but the fact is that I, too, find it mystifying, though it's not the speed that puzzles me--it's that I don't really know where all those words come from in the first place. On occasion I may spend a few minutes tinkering with a punch line until I hear it go click, and of course I edit and polish the surfaces of my pieces as painstakingly as time permits, but beyond that I have next to no insight into the thought processes that cause them to pour out of my fingers.

It occurs to me that this seeming incomprehension may have something to do with the fact that I am (or was) as much a musician as a writer. Music, after all, is a non-verbal art form, and the only descriptions of the creative experience that ring true to my ear are those of composers. "I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed," Igor Stravinsky said of the writing of The Rite of Spring. When I first ran across that remark I thought, That's exactly how it feels when I write a piece--it passes through me.

I also felt a responding echo when I read Harold Shapero's account of his studies with Paul Hindemith, who was notorious for his facility and was capable of writing finished pieces of music on the spot in class. One day Shapero told Hindemith how impressive he found this ability. "Well, you know," Hindemith replied, "it's taken me a long time to come to the point where there's no time lost between my head, elbow, and arm." I know how that feels, too.

Nothing in my writing life puzzles me more than what happens when I go to a performance that I'll be reviewing the next morning. As the lights go down, I empty my mind of received ideas and become entirely receptive to the events on stage. Sooner or later, though, the review starts taking shape in my head involuntarily, and by the time the curtain comes down, I don't have to think through what I want to say: it's all there, waiting to be cloaked in words.

After nearly three decades as a professional writer, I still find this process uncanny. It's as if my reviews happen to me, in the same way that a performance happens to me. I am the vessel through which my opinions pass.

- I watched a good friend of mine fall asleep the other day. We'd spent the morning together at a museum in Brooklyn, then made our slow way back to Manhattan by subway. She had a couple of hours to kill before her next appointment, so she asked if she could spend them at my place. When we arrived, I put on a piece of music she didn't know, Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, and she curled up on the couch to listen. I could see that the sound of Debussy's fragile traceries was relaxing her, almost against her will. Suspecting that she hadn't gotten enough sleep the night before, I then put on Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal, after John Dowland, a set of variations for solo guitar that depict the sensations of sleep. "Let go," I said. "Don't worry. I'll get you up on time."

I sat quietly as the music unfolded. Without warning, my friend's body jerked once, then relaxed. A few minutes later, the fingers of her cupped hand twitched, and I knew she was dreaming. She looked tranquil and beautiful.

When Nocturnal was over, I tiptoed to the CD player and put on Samuel Barber's Summer Music. Midway through the piece, just before she had asked me to wake her, her eyes opened.

"I saw you fall asleep," I said. "You were dreaming."

"How could you tell?"

"Your body jerked, and then your fingers started twitching. Cats do that when they're dreaming."

"Oh, God, that's embarrassing!" she said. "You really watched me all that time? You must have been totally bored." She paused. "You know what I've always wanted to do? Set up a camera and shoot a video of myself sleeping. I'd love to know what it looks like."

She blushed. Then we laughed, and I sent her on her way.

Posted June 13, 12:04 PM

TT: Two more kinds of people

A biographer-friend writes to suggest a parlor game:

What great artists (or famous people) could, and couldn't, say the sentence "I am ridiculous"? Washington no, Lincoln yes. Milton no, Shakespeare yes.

I am going to venture into your territory, based on little knowledge, but why not? Stuart Davis, yes. Jackson Pollack, no. Eakins, no. Picasso, to his credit, yes. Bonnard, much as I dislike him, probably yes. Edward Hopper, no.

You know my methods, Watson. Apply them.

I like this game very much, in part because it doesn't always sort along obvious lines of personal taste (at least not if you play it honestly). To wit:

Sherlock Holmes no, Nero Wolfe yes (sorry, Watson)
Jerome Robbins no, George Balanchine yes
Stravinsky no, Auden yes
Miles Davis no, Louis Armstrong yes
Sinatra no, Nat Cole yes
Tolstoy no, Dostoevsky yes
John Marin no, Milton Avery yes
Arthur Miller no, Tennessee Williams yes
Willa Cather no, Flannery O'Connor yes
FDR no, Churchill yes
Beethoven no, Haydn yes
Hemingway no, Fitzgerald yes
Vuillard no, Bonnard yes (my friend is half right)
Richard Rodgers no, Cole Porter yes
Henry James no, Dr. Johnson yes

Posted June 13, 12:03 PM

TT: Elsewhere

Here's some of what I've been reading on line of late:

- Supermaud (who gives good lunch) has taken an interest in Peter De Vries, several of whose novels, including the exquisite and haunting The Blood of the Lamb, are back in print. About damn time.

- The Little Professor on Trollope:

Of the major Victorian novelists, Anthony Trollope is by far the most deliberative. He usually isn't interested in the questions of perception, representation, and subjectivity that tend to plague George Eliot, but prefers instead to devote his energies to decision-making. Many of Trollope's novels fixate on some difficult decision to be made, whether involving a marriage, a will, or a question of honor; the "action" often consists of the characters worrying this decision one way and another. While Trollope can certainly write a good action scene--the hunt in The Eustace Diamonds, for example--he prefers to locate his most important upheavals in the recesses of a character's consciousness....

- DevraDoWrite, new to the blogosphere, confesses to an obsessive compulsion:

Do you finish reading every book you start? I have trouble giving up on a book, especially if I spent money to buy it. Sometimes, if I "can't get into it," I put it aside for awhile and try again later. Sometimes it's just my mood, or level of concentration that makes reading difficult. Sometimes, however, a book is simply not very good, or not meant for my tastes, and I should just give up. But all too often, a combination of guilt and the fear that I will miss something keeps me going....

This compulsion has a highly distinguished pedigree. Justice Holmes shared it, as Edmund Wilson reminds us in Patriotic Gore:

His reading is dominated by a sense of duty and a Puritanical fear of idleness. He feels that he must grapple with certain works, quite apart from any pleasure they give him, and, once having begun a book, no matter how dull or verbose it is, he must read every word to the end. He is always imagining--this is humorous, of course, but it shows a habit of mind--that God, at the Judgment Day, will ask him to report on the books which he ought to have read but hasn't.

- Also new to the blogroll is Mr. Quiet Bubble, who reports that the common culture isn't quite dead yet:

It turns out that the great racial equalizer of the South is barbecue. Everyone eats it here. Few people don't take it seriously. Vigorous debates can be instigated just by asking "Do you like your sandwich wet or dry?" or by requesting a pulled pork sandwich (standard in Mississippi) at a Texas barbecue joint, where beef reigns supreme. It doesn't matter if you're black, white, or otherwise--chances are, if you're from the South, you've enjoyed smoky, slow-cooked meat and steaming, grease-slathered vegetables on at least one occasion. Even if you're vegan.

I myself can't get enough of the stuff, about which I first got serious when I lived in Kansas City, where I patronized Arthur Bryant's BBQ as often as humanly possible. Wet or dry, beef or pork (and what about ham, buddy?), I'm for it. Living in New York has been a cruel disappointment to me in only one major respect, which is that you can't get any honest-to-God barbecue here--open pits are illegal. (The 'cue at Blue Smoke is surprisingly serviceable, though, especially when consumed downstairs at the Jazz Standard while listening to great music.)

Incidentally, I wouldn't want anyone to think that I travel so frequently to Raleigh, North Carolina, for any reason other than to see Carolina Ballet, but I won't deny that I do seek out the local barbecue whenever I'm in town.

- Speaking of dance, Ms. Killin' Time Being Lazy pays a visit to the ballet and casts a sidelong glance at certain all-too-recognizable types in the audience:

2. Proud Parent/Grandparent. At last, the years of watching their darling suffer for their craft will be rewarded. If the child hasn't received a contract from a Good Ballet Company by now, clearly people just don't understand how good The Artiste is. Conversely, this is a way to wind up Their Darling's ballet career, as The Dancer morphs into The College Student (with luck, on their way to a good, paying career)....

- Mr. Parabasis, who isn't fond of most drama critics (I'm with him!), bellies up to the bar:

I promised sometime last week that I would attempt to put my money where my mouth was and write a review of a show that I strongly disliked while still keeping to the recommendations I made for theater reviewers. And maybe, just maybe, it would also be interesting to read. What you are about to read (if you click on the jump) represents my attempt to do so, reviewing Drama of Works' Warhol at PS122 ....

Nice work.

- A performer-blogger recalls that which the likes of me should never be allowed to forget:

Good reviews elate me for a day or two, and then I forget about them. Bad reviews (which, I hasten to add, are thankfully outnumbered by the good ones), linger in my consciousness for years. Even if I quickly scan the article once and then throw the paper away, they are nevertheless immediately and involuntarily burned verbatim into my memory banks, where they fester and inevitably resurface on days when my confidence is at its lowest ebb.

I aspire to someday not give a crap about reviews, good or bad. (To that end, I generally ask those around me not to tell me about reviews, and a few years ago I gave up the pointlessly narcissistic habit of self-Googling). Most of the artists I know who are much further along in their careers than me claim to have achieved this transcendent state....

(My own approach to this problem, by the way, is never to read any bad reviews of my books.)

- Ms. twang twang twang reflects on T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Britten, and life itself:

Each time you take up a piece again, your interpretation shifts: it is the same score, but always different, and as you come to new ideas, you necessarily kill off old ones. Thus "every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,/Every poem an epitaph."

As in life, it is also in music that you cannot force real understanding; you have to be ready. Perhaps I have a younger musician friend, still learning what I have learnt: that we never stop working, practicing, altering; what is today's perfect performance is not tomorrow's; and to be depressed by the continual labour misunderstands the work, because as musicians that is part of who we are. I have learnt that by studying for longer than my friend....

- Alex Ross asked a hard question the other day in The New Yorker:

For music to remain vital, recordings have to exist in balance with live performance, and, these days, live performance is by far the smaller part of the equation. Perhaps we tell ourselves that we listen to CDs in order to get to know the music better, or to supplement what we get from concerts and shows. But, honestly, a lot of us don't go to hear live music that often. Work leaves us depleted. Tickets are too expensive. Concert halls are stultifying. Rock clubs are full of kids who make us feel ancient. It's just so much easier to curl up in the comfy chair with a Beethoven quartet or Billie Holiday. But would Beethoven or Billie ever have existed if people had always listened to music the way we listen now?...

As it happens, I also wrote about this same subject several years ago in Fi, the now-defunct audio magazine, and posted the column here last year. You might want to revisit my more modest effort in conjunction with Alex's very good and (I think) important essay.

- For those of you who still go to concerts, Mr. Sandow offers this reality check:

I went to an orchestra concert. The Baltimore Symphony at Carnegie Hall. My first reaction? "My God, why are they dressed like that?" Now of course this isn't a criticism of the Baltimore Symphony. Any orchestra on that stage would have been dressed the same way. And this wasn't a considered reaction. It came right from my gut, and took me by surprise....

- Speaking of recordings, here's a great list...

- ...and here's Thelonious Monk, of all people, playing the Chopin "Military" Polonaise (scroll down to find the link). Believe me, you don't want to miss this.

- More on pianists: Think Denk, himself no mean tickler of the ivories, pays tribute to one of my all-time favorite classical pianists, Ignaz Friedman. As usual, he gets it just right:

A very famous pianist (and irreproachable artist) of my acquaintance disparaged Friedman for being too crass. I know he is wrong. Or, maybe, I think he is right but I don't care; when he says it it passes into one ear, one lobe of my brain, and I smile an empty smile; the other lobe recalls all my favorite Friedman moments and adores them internally while I pretend to agree. Am I a hypocrite?...

I know what it is: Friedman's playing is not limited by a Beethovenian "es muss sein" (it must be)...it has a place for the arbitrary and the accidental. Sometimes he seems motivated by rhythmic/musical forces from another planet, and there is no way to know what he is thinking, and why he is thinking it. This makes me happy; I puzzle over his rhythms with pleasure.

- Warner Home Video is censoring Tom and Jerry, and lying about it, sort of. Mr. Something Old, Nothing New, on whom nothing is missed, is on the case.

- This is really funny--especially if you've ever killed any time leafing through the Catalogues of Miscellaneous Stuff stashed in the pockets on the backs of airplane seats.

- Finally, I don't quite agree with Lileks, but I know whereof he speaks:

There's something false and seductive about being a modern-day Sinatra fan, and by "fan" I mean someone who thinks they can get a few photons of reflected coolness by conspicuously immersing himself in the Capitol oeuvre, with all its world-wearing romantic rue and barroom charm. It's close to Tony Soprano Syndrome, where middle-aged guys think that if the opportunity arose, Tone might give them a casual how-ya-doin' or nod brisk approval across a restaurant. The same old Mafia Chic. And I say this as a big Sopranos fan who loves the show and has substantial investment in the characters...

The Rat Pack Myth works best from a distance, preferably 1500 miles and 30 years; you don't see them feel up the hat check girl, kick the waiter (or have him kicked), or stare with vacant eyes from the bottom of whatever well of drunkenness they toppled into that night. We cut them slack because they wore cool suits and had short hair and smoked a lot and one of them spoke ever-so-cultured, and because they either slept with a Kennedy or pimped for one. Mafia Chic requires the same removal from the scene. The Sopranos is better than most depictions of that thing of theirs, but we're still required to care about Carmela's moral quandaries, which occupy the same moral plane as Eva Braun's bunions.

I wonder if this might possibly explain why I gave up on The Sopranos three seasons ago. I still love Sinatra, though....

Posted June 13, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Gervas Leat rose, turning on a light. 'Bonnard,' he said reflectively: 'the last Frenchman who gives me pleasure.'"

"'Who gives me pleasure,' Richard thought--that was simple, that was final, that was enough. Enough, certainly, for Gervas Leat. Nothing of theory here, nothing of judgement. Great painters, lesser painters, painters of significance. Moral and social values and the inner eye. Critical aesthetics....Whoof! But Gervas Leat liked Bonnards and could afford to own one."

William Haggard, Venetian Blind

Posted June 13, 12:01 PM

June 12, 2005

OGIC: The review you helped write

My review of Kevin Canty's splendid novel Winslow in Love appears in today's Chicago Tribune. You may remember that when I was working on the review in the Spring, I enlisted ALN readers' help in thinking of books within books, with highly edifying and fun results. For the purposes of the review, this merely helped me gird a point made in passing, but the exercise took on a life of its own--I heard from dozens of you, and the topic was taken up fruitfully at other blogs.

Like I said, none of this had to do with Canty's novel in a direct way. His title character Winslow is a poet, but none of his poetry appears in the book. It's through other, more subtle means that Canty makes the reader think of Winslow as, in all probability, a good poet--for instance, though his perceptions of the natural world:

In the last half of the book, for instance, there is a criminally good chapter detailing a single Sunday when spring makes its first appearance in Montana. Winslow, cheered, drives out into the mountains to fish. The loss of his wife, the arrival of Jones, his writer's block, the cancerous skin lesion he has just had removed--all of these troubles dissolve in the soft spring air until, at the apex of this very good day, he reels in a sizable trout:

"He was about to throw him back in the water but decided at the last moment to kill him and keep him. He assumed this was legal. There was nobody around, anyway. He dashed the head of the big trout against a big rock on the bank and the silver body, the beautiful thing, shuddered and died.

"He felt it immediately: his luck was leaving him."

Winslow's luck will take a few more zigs and zags before this day ends, and with it this perfect chapter. There is nothing particularly fancy here--except for some mountains shining "like advertisements for themselves, sharp-toothed and glamorous" and some "[e]mpty storefronts" that line a street "like a mouthful of broken teeth."

But the generally modest language and staid narration somehow amount to a fantastically eloquent portrait of an interesting and troubled mind confronted with beauty, grasping at it for hope and forgetfulness while basking in the glorious present. Winslow finds the natural beauty of mountains and water, fish and elk, light and warmth, both ordinary and outrageous. "How many different kinds of fool would he feel like before this day was over?" he wonders in self-reproach and exultation.

Despite one pretty big problem with the novel, I count it as one of the best I've read so far this year.

Posted June 12, 12:55 PM

June 10, 2005

TT: Mark Twain forever!

Friday again, and I'm not dead yet, though I was having my doubts on Wednesday morning. Nevertheless, I lived to write another Wall Street Journal column, this one about shows in New York (the Broadway revival of Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight!) and Washington, D.C. (Arena Stage's revival of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie).

In a nutshell:

As an actor, Hal Holbrook has two real-life Marks to his credit, Felt and Twain. In a believe-it-or-not coincidence worthy of Ripley, he has revived "Mark Twain Tonight!" just one week after America's front pages carried the news that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat, the Watergate leaker whom Mr. Holbrook portrayed in the 1976 film of "All the President's Men." You can't buy publicity like that--though Mr. Holbrook doesn't need it anymore. Written in 1954 and last seen on Broadway 28 years ago, "Mark Twain Tonight!" remains to this day the most admired of all one-man biographical shows, and Mr. Holbrook still wears it like a bespoke white suit....

To attempt so demanding a full-evening tour de force is risky business at any age, and I confess to having wondered how well Mr. Holbrook, who is 79, would hold up under the strain. Though he now relies on a wireless microphone, I rejoice to report that he is otherwise better than ever...

We don't get to see much Eugene O'Neill in New York nowadays, so I jumped at the chance to go to Washington and take in Arena Stage's revival of "Anna Christie," a 1920 play that is now best known from the 1930 Hollywood adaptation that was Greta Garbo's first sound film ("Garbo Talks!" read the posters). While the film is surprisingly faithful to O'Neill's script, it's stiff and stagy. Not so Molly Smith's clean-lined, unmannered production, played out on a skeletal unit set by Bill C. Ray that is transformed before your eyes from a waterfront bar to the deck of a coal barge. Except for a couple of improbably decorous fight scenes, Ms. Smith has done her damnedest to make something true out of this whiskery tale of a whore in search of redemption....

No link. Buy a paper or, better yet, go here to subscribe to the online edition of the Journal. That's how I read me.

Posted June 10, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Rachel had lived amongst clever men for a good many years, and now cleverness wasn't something to which she attached great importance. It was a gift--oh yes, it was a gift; but it wasn't a virtue."

WIlliam Haggard, The Unquiet Sleep

Posted June 10, 11:53 AM

June 8, 2005

TT: Tilt

Sorry, but I'm still way out of whack. No show today or tomorrow--I'm leaving town for a couple of days to get some desperately needed rest. There's something about New York that is positively inimical to recovery from any ailment other than boredom.

See you on Friday, unless I don't.

Posted June 08, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveller, who says, 'Anywhere but here.'"

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Considerations by the Way"

Posted June 08, 12:00 PM

June 7, 2005

TT: Call me accountable

The Tony Awards were announced on Sunday night. Here's a list of who won what. If you want to compare it to the predictions I posted on May 11, go here. Bear in mind that my personal preferences, not my predictions, are set in boldface.

I don't get Bill Irwin at all, but otherwise I think I did pretty well for a semi-newcomer....

P.S. I'm still under the weather, but I think I'm starting to get better, which is a good thing, since I have to go see Mark Twain Tonight! (If you hear someone sneezing in an aisle seat this evening, please be kind.)

Posted June 07, 12:03 PM

TT: Never enough

A reader writes:

Have we run out of art? And do we really need any more of it? It's a question I've been thinking about a lot lately (and I'm sure you ask yourself that question on a daily basis). Have we painted all the paintings we need, recorded all the great music, taken all the great photographs, written all the great operas and ballets, etc.?

In other words, is the demand for new art diminishing--not because we are a soulless culture obsessed with celebrity and real estate--but because there's more than enough great stuff out there to consume, and we don't have nearly enough time to enjoy it? There seems to be such a glut of everything artistic these days. In jazz alone, I could go on listening to new and already-heard stuff from the same 1940s and 1950s period until I dropped dead at 100 without running out, and that's jazz alone. Meaning, I really don't need any more jazz to be produced. It's all on disc. I don't need any more cabaret singers singing Cole Porter, or young guys in suits playing Fats Navarro, etc.

Can one argue that we already have all the great works we need and that if the number of artists producing works is declining, the reason has more to do with the fact that artists have nothing more to say that hasn't been said already v. you can't make a living doing it?

Artists, don't fly off the handle. My correspondent (who is also a good friend) is raising a serious question, asked by a person who genuinely loves art but finds himself grappling with the vexing problem of how to allocate that most precious of all unrenewable resources: time.

Remember that no one, not even the wealthiest of connoisseurs, has an unlimited amount of time to spend on art. However wisely or unwisely we allocate them, there are only twenty-four hours in a day. Sooner or later, we have to choose. In order to write my weekly Wall Street Journal column, I see every play that comes to Broadway, and I also do my best to catch what I expect to be the most important off-Broadway and out-of-town openings. Yet even if I did nothing but go to plays, I still wouldn't be able to see all the shows that interested me. Factor in the additional time I spend looking at ballets, operas, and art exhibitions, listening to concerts, going to nightclubs, reading books...but you get the point, right? I make hard cultural choices every day, and the hardest of these is deciding how much of my inescapably limited free time to devote to seeking out new works of art.

When it comes to theater, of course, the choice is to some extent made for me. In a sense, every theatrical production is "new," even a revival of Hamlet. And while I suppose you could spend your whole playgoing life doing nothing but attending performances of the classics, that'd still leave you with plenty of nights off. Not so the other art forms, especially those that are physically embodied (like painting) or can be reproduced mechanically (like music). With them, you can spend your days living exclusively in the past, and it goes without saying, or should, that such an existence can be wholly fulfilling. If I had to spend the rest of my life with Rembrandt, Schubert, and Flannery O'Connor, who's to say it would somehow be less satisfactory than a life spent with Cy Twombly, Philip Glass, and Jane Smiley? Not me.

None of this, however, means that there is no case to be made for the new. On the contrary, one of the most important parts of my work as a critic is to make that case, to seek out exciting new works of art and write about them so evocatively that my readers feel moved to go out and experience them at first hand. I'm not talking about eat-your-spinach modern art, either. I don't like that any more than most people do. Late modernism in all its painfully earnest guises was a concerted assault on the sensibilities, one that persuaded a generation of unhappy audiences to shun the new--but those days, as the kids say, are soooo over. In the past year, I've written about such accessible, immediately involving new works of art as Jane Freilicher's My Cubism, Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza, Agnès Jaoui's Look at Me, Pat Metheny's The Way Up, Paul Moravec's Tempest Fantasy, Mark Morris' Rock of Ages, and Austin Pendleton's Orson's Shadow. The collective existence of works like these is the strongest possible argument against the mistaken notion that "artists have nothing more to say that hasn't been said already." Each of them has something fresh to say--not necessarily innovative, but new. And while you may not end up enjoying all of them, I can promise that each one will meet you halfway. You don't even have to seek them out: I've already done that. All you have to do is buy a ticket, then show up in an attentive frame of mind, open to the possibility of pleasure.

Aside from everything else, there's no substitute for the galvanizing experience of being present at the creation of a new work of art that might possibly end up being great. Nothing is so thrilling as making up your own mind instead of waiting for posterity to do it for you. Just as important, though, taking a chance on new art is the price we pay for a healthy culture, one in which talented artists don't have to wait on tables. Those who decline to pay it are the cultural equivalent of rentiers, aesthetic remittance men who live off the accumulated capital of the past without contributing anything of their own.

We can't all make art, but we can at least place a bet from time to time on those who dare to do so. No matter how busy you may be, I really don't think it's too much to ask.

Posted June 07, 12:01 PM

TT: Words to the wise

Received in the e-mail from jazz pianist Fred Hersch:

Hope you can be there...

The Jazz Standard
116 East 27th Street
(between Park & Lexington)
presents

The Fred Hersch Duo Series 3

Tuesday-Sunday, June 7th-12th

Tuesday: Chris Potter, tenor sax
Wednesday: Ted Nash, clarinet, saxes
Thursday: Bob Brookmeyer, trombone
Friday: Stefon Harris, vibes
Saturday: Kate McGarry, voice
Sunday: Mark Turner, tenor sax

shows at 7:30 & 9:30
11:30 pm show on Friday & Saturday

Reservations/advance tickets are suggested
Please call (212) 576-2232 or go to www.ticketweb.com

Very strongly recommended. If you strapped me on the rack and made me pick just one night, it'd be Thursday, but no matter which one you opt for, you can't miss. So go.

Posted June 07, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with what preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them."

Roger Scruton, "In Defence of Bourgeois Man"

Posted June 07, 12:00 PM

June 6, 2005

TT: Oh, that mine adversary had caught a cold

A summer cold started creeping up on me at dinner on Saturday night, and now it has camped out in every soggy pore of my miserable body. I have but two consolations:

- My schedule is unexpectedly clear: I have no performances to see until Tuesday night and no deadlines to hit until Wednesday morning.

- My very first iPod (!) arrived in the mail on Saturday, and I'd already poured eighteen gigabytes of music into it by the time I started sneezing and dribbling.

Alas, I feel too crappy to do any of the serious blogging I'd planned for today. Outside of a brief street-level expedition to buy more Kleenex, I spent the whole of Saturday huddled in my loft, reading old Parker novels and shuffling randomly through the 2,800 songs currently inhabiting my iPod. That's about all I'm good for at present, and I'll be doing more of the same today.

If you haven't looked at the right-hand column in the past few days, it's full of new stuff. Otherwise, I promise to resume posting as soon as I'm up to it, but I'm not sure when that will be. Maybe Monday. Maybe next Monday....

Posted June 06, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"I am pretty sure that, if you will be quite honest, you will admit that a good rousing sneeze, one that tears open your collar and throws your hair into your eyes, is really one of life's sensational pleasures."

Robert Benchley, "Hiccoughing Makes Us Fat"

Posted June 06, 12:00 PM

June 5, 2005

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"In the year 1891, Manet and Seurat were already dead; Pissarro, Monet and Renoir were at the height of their powers; Cézanne had opened yet another world. Sunday at La Grande Jatte and le Déjeuner dans le Bois, la Musique aux Tuileries, les Dames dans un Jardin, the ochre farms and tawny hills of Aix were there, on canvas, hung, looked at--to be seen by anybody who would learn to see. And so were the shimmering trees, the sun-speckled paths, the fluffy fields, the light, the dancing air, the water--But were they seen? Were they walked, were they lived in? Did ladies come out into the garden in the morning holding a silver tea-pot? did flesh-and-blood governesses advance towards one waist-high in corn and poppies, clutching a bunch of blossoms? did young men dip their hands into the pool and young women laugh in swings? Did gentlemen really put their top-hats on the grass?

"For the age of the Impressionists was also still the age of decorum and pomposity, of mahogany and the basement kitchen, the over-stuffed interior and the stucco villa; an age that venerated old, rich, malicious women and the clever banker; when places of public entertainment were large, pilastered and vulgar, and anyone who was neither a sportsman, poor, nor very young, sat down on a stiff-backed chair three times a day eating an endless meal indoors."

Sybille Bedford, A Legacy

Posted June 05, 11:24 AM

OGIC: Pretty near bottom, actually

My review of Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down appears in today's Baltimore Sun. I didn't like the novel very much at all:

Nick Hornby's first couple of novels, High Fidelity and About a Boy, installed him as part of the pop-culture firmament. He did three things very well in those books: He established ownership of a character type with wide appeal, the overgrown, callow, but well-meaning fanboy; he built protagonists with ample room to grow; and he wrote in an up-to-the-minute conversational style that proved screenplay-ready. In fact, the film versions in both cases made the books themselves seem almost dispensable.

As a recipe, this looked foolproof. Hornby's best novels aren't high art, but they are well-made stories that droves of readers have identified with. While he deserves credit for attempting to transcend that recipe in his next novels, How to Be Good and the newly released A Long Way Down, the results suggest that he shouldn't throw away the cookbook just yet...

In other words, hold onto your twenty-five bucks.

Posted June 05, 11:08 AM

June 3, 2005

TT: An "A" for J. in May's plays

It's Friday, but I'm not back from Washington yet, so OGIC is posting my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser by remote control from her headquarters in the Windy City.

Two plays this week, Elaine May's After the Night and the Music and Julia Cho's BFE:

Whenever I see J. Smith-Cameron's name on a cast list, I smile, knowing that whatever horrors may await me, I can count on seeing at least one worthwhile performance. The real-life wife of playwright-filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan, who is directing her in his second movie this fall, Ms. Smith-Cameron is one of those actors who never fails, as theater people say, to deliver the mail. She's smart, sharp, and possessed of the bull's-eye timing that can turn a fair joke into a killer. She plays three widely varied roles in "After the Night and the Music," the Manhattan Theatre Club's triple bill of new one-act plays by Elaine May, and does it so well that she almost fools you into thinking the show is better than it really is....

Playwrights Horizons wraps up an uneven season with Julia Cho's flawed but promising "BFE." (I wish I could tell you what the initials stand for, but the Journal is a family paper.) Centered on a Korean-American family living in an unnamed Arizona city, "BFE" is a hodgepodge of variously interesting ideas about postmodern American life, directed by Gordon Edelstein with a speed and fluidity that keep most of Ms. Cho's dramatic balls in the air for longer than she had any right to expect. Though I wasn't convinced by the touches of fantasy, much less the climactic swerve into melodrama, I was never bored....

No link. The alternatives are as per usual: (A) Buy today's paper and read the whole thing. (B) Subscribe to the Online Journal by going here. (A) is cheaper, (B) the better deal.

Posted June 03, 12:01 PM

TT: Almanac

"Like a city in dreams, the great white capital stretches along the placid river from Georgetown on the west to Anacostia on the east. It is a city of temporaries, a city of just-arriveds and only-visitings, built on the shifting sands of politics, filled with people passing through. They may stay fifty years, they may love, marry, settle down, build homes, raise families, and die beside the Potomac, but they usually feel, and frequently they will tell you, that they are just here for a little while. Someday soon they will be going home. They do go home, but it is only for visits, or for a brief span of staying-away; and once the visits or the brief spans are over ('It's so nice to get away from Washington, it's so inbred; so nice to get out in the country and find out what people are really thinking') they hurry back to their lodestone and their star, their self-hypnotized, self-mesmerized, self-enamored, self-propelling, wonderful city they cannot live away from or, once it has claimed them, live without. Washington takes them like a lover and they are lost."

Allen Drury, Advise and Consent

Posted June 03, 12:00 PM

June 2, 2005

TT: Speaking of sleep...

Apologies, but I drove off the road somewhere between the three pieces I wrote from scratch on Monday and Tuesday and the performance I heard last night (maybe it was during the hour-long subway ride I took to the Brooklyn Museum yesterday morning to see the Basquiat retrospective). Whatever the reason, I decided that going to bed was the better part of not cracking up, so I temporarily suspended blogging service. Now I'm getting ready to catch a Metroliner to Washington to visit the Phillips Collection and see Arena Stage's production of Anna Christie, which leaves me with just about enough time to take a shower and say hello.

I'll be back in New York some time on Friday, with lots of stories to tell. In the meantime, here are some quick words to the wise:

- Jack Jones is singing at the Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room through June 11. Go. Tony Bennett already has--he was sitting across the room from me on Tuesday night.

- Luciana Souza is singing at the Jazz Standard through Sunday. Go. I was there last night, and so were what seemed like half the musicians I know.

That's all for now. See you when I get back.

Posted June 02, 10:05 AM

TT: Almanac

"There is nothing like desire for preventing the thing one says from bearing any resemblance to what one has in one's mind. Time presses, and yet it seems as though we were seeking to gain time by speaking of subjects absolutely alien to that by which we are obsessed."

Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes

Posted June 02, 9:58 AM

OGIC: Light sleepers

Here's my main trouble in life: I'm a morning person and a night owl. I think I never really got over the sense of injustice and deprivation all children harbor about having to go to bed--the certainty that they'll miss out on something, the slight skepticism that another day will really dawn and the whole cycle will start over again, and the instinctive resistance to endings of any kind. When you're eight, bedtime feels like a life sentence.

In my ostensible adulthood, I still have a romantic attachment to the small hours of the night; they feel like the temporal equivalent of mad money, to be used however one pleases--not to put too fine a point on it, to be pleasantly wasted. As an adult, I know morning will come, and with it a renewed sense of possibility, not to mention the day's best light. So I'm jealous of that time as well, and if I sleep past eight or nine--which I usually do when I don't have to be anywhere--I feel profoundly cheated. Trouble is, if I indulge on both ends, I'm left with about four hours of sleep per night, not a quantity on which I function well. I know, I know--you say nap. Alas, I'm the world's worst napper (it leaves me groggy for the rest of the day), and I hate to miss all of the other times of day, too.

So it's going on 2:00 now, my alarm will ring in less than five hours, my eyelids are fighting to hold at half-mast, and yet here I sit. Tonight is not the ideal example, since I'm blogging the time away rather than merrily frittering it. But it's close enough.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of sleep. It's my favorite remedy for any ailment and a particular temptation since I bought my first new mattress set a couple of years ago after a decade of sleeping on futons and castoffs. I didn't really know what I was doing when I shopped for the mattress, but I did something right--it's heavenly. So nope, I don't want to give up any sleep at all; I want the sleep, the late nights, and the bright mornings--24-hour days plus 8-hour nights. But the one thing that would seriously throw a wrench into my contentedness is insomnia.

Which is all a circuitous way of recommending a book to you. A little while back, a reader wrote asking me for summer reading suggestions. I have a few in mind, and the first is Robert Cohen's smart novel about insomnia, Inspired Sleep. The book's protagonist, Bonnie Saks, is a single working mom and longtime ABD student in search of slumber. In desperation, she submits herself to a sleep study. In this passage, set in a lab, the experimental treatment she undergoes seems to work:

She closed her eyes. She could feel her tension rising up, as it did every night, to do battle with her exhaustion. Vague sounds of traffic swished by in the distance. Night people, headed home. She thought of the young man next door, somber and alert, bathed in light, monitoring every flicker of response on the scrolling screen. Up and down: it seemed all her nocturnal complexities could be reduced to that. Patiently he had explained the many exquisite functions of the recording equipment--how they tracked the alpha and delta waves, the eye movements, the muscle convulsions, K-complexes, oxygen saturation, and sleep spindles. What had he called them? The deepest mechanisms of the self. It was a comfort to know they were at work, minding the store in her absence.It gave her a pleasant feeling of security. She began to feel very far from things, and at the same time oddly imminent, on the verge of a salient truth.

She'd been wrong--it was not sleep but the waking life that was the interlude between the acts, the bright but meandering intermission. Because now, with the lights off, that whole state of being simply collapsed, as crumpled and disposable as a coffee cup. She had been lingering out in the lobby much too long. Now the intermission was over. Now she was back, facing the stage where all her heart's noisy operettas were playing and playing, forever trying to complete themselves. And now the house lights were going down, and the curtains drawing open, and she was being ushered in, and all the separate players in night's continuous orchestra were rising up in concert with their finely tuned instruments, getting ready to welcome her, the errant maestro, back to the podium at last.

Inspired Sleep is available in a trade paperback edition. More recommendations down the road. For now, sweet dreams.

Posted June 02, 3:31 AM

June 1, 2005

TT: Almanac

"Work at first rescues us, then ravages us."

Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms

Posted June 01, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Bed bests blog

It lives. I haven't been much in evidence around here lately, I know. There was an impromptu visit home for the long weekend, which came as a surprise to some--my mother nearly fainted dead away--a writing deadline, and very, very little sleep since I left Detroit a day and a half ago. Going to bed right this minute is the only sane thing to do, but I hope to post a couple of things Wednesday night and then resume my scheduled weekend bloggifying.

Posted June 01, 1:31 AM