About Last Night: December 2005 Archives

TT: Almanac

"Celebrity: the advantage of being known by those who do not know you."

Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization (trans. W.S. Merwin)

Posted by diacritical on December 1, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Top ticket price for a performance of New York City Ballet at City Center in 1948: $2.50

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $20.68

(Source: Lynn Garafola with Eric Foner, Dance for a City)

Posted by diacritical on December 1, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: You'd do it for Randolph Scott

Mr. Rifftides has Randolph Scott on his mind. Me, too, so mark your calendar for December 21 at eight p.m. EST, when Turner Classic Movies will be airing the premiere of Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That, a documentary about the great Hollywood director who made a series of Westerns starring Scott that rank high on the list of insufficiently known classic American films. A Man Can Do That will be followed at 9:30 EST by Seven Men From Now, the first of the Boetticher-Scott collaborations, digitally restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and soon to be released for the first time on DVD. (I've seen a screener of the documentary, by the way, and it's a solid piece of work.)

To commemorate these twin events, American Cowboy has made the text of my essay "What Randolph Scott Knew" available on its Web site:

Scott was secure enough to let his colleagues do the talking, knowing that his gritty, hard-faced on-screen presence would speak for itself. The dashing young leading man of the Thirties now looked as though he'd been carved from a stump, and every word he spoke reeked of disillusion. Yet he continually found himself forced to make moral choices that were always clear but rarely easy. What Scott should do at any given moment is never in doubt, but we also understand that doing it will never make him "happy" in any conventional sense of the word: he must do the right thing for its own sake, not in the hope of any immediate reward....

If you don't own a copy of A Terry Teachout Reader (and if not, why not?), you can read the complete essay by going here.

Posted by diacritical on December 1, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Deal of the decade

Everybody's talking about new ways to present classical music, but now the Manhattan-based Thalia Music Series is, er, putting its music where your mouth is. Here's the scoop, straight from the press release:

In December and January, if you try a new dish at a participating restaurant and attend one of the composer=performer: plugged & unplugged concerts (Thalia Music Series, Thursday evenings, December 15, 2005 and January 19, 2006, at 7:30 p.m. at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway), you are entitled to a free CD. Just present your receipt from one of the participating restaurants along with your ticket stub to receive the disc at the end of the performance.

Expand your musical palette and hear composers talk about and share their own works in an evening of chamber music. Clarinetist Derek Bermel, flutist Valerie Coleman, and pianist Beata Moon will perform their compositions on December 15, 2005.

Participating restaurants:

- Ouest: 2315 Broadway (at 84th St., 212-580-8700)
- Regional: 2607 Broadway (at 98th St., 212-666-1915)
- Saigon Grill: 620 Amsterdam (at 90th St., 212-875-9072)
- Mill Korean Restaurant: 2895 Broadway (at 113th St., 212-666-7653)
- Turkuaz: 2637 Broadway (at 100th St., 212-665-9541)

January's concert features electric guitarist John King, vocalist Joan La Barbera, and electro-violinist Todd Reynolds. Tickets are $21, or $30 for a pass to both performances. For more information about the programs, go to the Symphony Space Web site.

I should add that I recently heard Beata Moon's Dinner Is West, a new piano trio that will be performed on December 15, and liked it enormously. I've also eaten at Ouest and the Saigon Grill, and can endorse both places no less enthusiastically.

This is a great idea. Give it a try, won't you?

Posted by diacritical on December 1, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: O tempora

As Christopher Hitchens reminds us, Lolita Haze would be 70 this year.

Now I really feel old!

Posted by diacritical on December 1, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)
- Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
- The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Dec. 31, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- See What I Wanna See (musical, R, adult subject matter, explicit sexual situations, strong language, closes Dec. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Absurd Person Singular (comedy, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
- Bach in Leipzig (comedy, G, too complicated for any but the brightest children to follow, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
- Hamlet (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 11, reviewed here)

Posted by diacritical on December 1, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten and replaced by a new dish."

W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand

Posted by diacritical on December 2, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Price paid by Chick Austin of the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1938 for Soap Bubble Set, the first work by Joseph Cornell to be purchased by a museum: $60

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $772.29

(Source: Eugene R. Gaddis, Magician of the Modern)

Posted by diacritical on December 2, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: I hate to keep reminding you

Actually, I don't, so here we go again: I'll be teaming up next Tuesday night with litblogger Maud Newton and Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker for a joint performance at Makor, the Upper West Side outpost of the 92nd Street Y. Our subject is "The Art of Online Criticism."

Says the press release:

Cultural critics find themselves in the same predicament as other members of the traditional media who now must play a new game. Hear three influential critics who write both online and for print discuss how the cultural conversation is evolving and what the future holds when everyone's a critic.

Bryan Keefer is the moderator. The show starts at seven p.m. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door.

For more information, or to buy tickets online, go here.

Posted by diacritical on December 2, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Message in a bottle

Television can make you famous, but it can't keep you famous. It's more like an opiate--as soon as you stop taking your daily fix, you get all pale and clammy, and before long you vanish in a puff of near-transparent smoke. So far as I know, there's never been a TV star, no matter how big, who stayed famous for very long once he or she went off the air. (Remember Daniel J. Travanti? I sure hope he had a good financial adviser.) If you're in it for the long haul, you've got to make films or records. Otherwise, you'll end your days as the answer to a trivia question, remembered only by a soft core of fast-graying fans who knew you when.

I had occasion yesterday afternoon to recall the name of Harry Reasoner, who at one time was quite famous indeed and now is almost entirely forgotten. Not only was he one of the smartest people ever to sit in an anchorman's chair, but he was also a damned good writer, albeit in a genre that no longer exists: he used to wrap up his TV newscasts with a brief, pithy commentary on some aspect of the day's news. A few of them made it into Before the Colors Fade: A Look Back, his graceful 1983 memoir, which is out of print but still worth reading. He died in 1991, and now he's remembered, if at all, for having been one of the original co-anchors of 60 Minutes, together with a much better-known fellow by the name of Mike Wallace.

That's the trivia question, and if you know that much about Harry Reasoner, you know a lot more than most people. For all his considerable gifts, his fame was almost entirely a function of the fact that he appeared on TV, and once the appearances came to an end, so did the fame. Such is the fate of everyone who chooses to spend his adult life talking into a TV camera. Time was when I admired Reasoner greatly, as I did his colleague Charles Kuralt--but how often do I think of them now that they're gone?

At any rate, I thought of Harry Reasoner yesterday, and automatically did what all of us Web-dependent creatures do whenever a half-forgotten name floats into our stream of consciousness: I Googled him. The pickings, not surprisingly, were pitifully slim, but I did run across two things he said that made me smile:

Journalism is a kind of profession, or craft, or racket, for people who never wanted to grow up and go out into the real world.

If you're a good journalist, what you do is live a lot of things vicariously, and report them for other people who want to live vicariously.

Nicely said--and anyone capable of speaking with such wry detachment about my line of work probably had a similarly realistic view of his own modest place in the grand scheme of things. So I'll try not to let it bother me too much that Harry Reasoner has taken his place in the memory hole alongside so many of the celebrities of my youth. After all, I remember him, and the next time someone has occasion to Google his name, they'll see these words. I wonder when that will be?

Posted by diacritical on December 2, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: The color green

Time again for my weekly drama-column teaser, in which I post titillating snippets of today's Wall Street Journal reviews of The Color Purple and Abigail's Party:

Today's musicals usually feature actors who can sing instead of singers who can act. LaChanze, like Kristin Chenoweth, does both with awe-inspiring conviction. I'd believe anything that came out of her mouth--anything, that is, except "The Color Purple," which is best described as two hours and 45 minutes' worth of high-priced phoniness....

I can't say enough nasty things about the music, which consists of generic gospel, scrubbed-up blues and fake-fur jazz, all somewhat less memorable than the score to a made-for-TV movie....

It's hard to believe that Mike Leigh's "Abigail's Party," originally written in 1977, is only now receiving its New York premiere. In England it's considered something of a modern classic, a ferociously funny skewering of middle-class manners, but over here Mr. Leigh is mostly known--if at all--for "Topsy-Turvy," his extraordinary 1999 biopic about the private lives of Gilbert and Sullivan. Fortunately, the New Group has produced several of his plays Off Broadway, all of them staged by Scott Elliott, the company's artistic director, and this one belongs on your short list of shows that mustn't be missed....

No link, so stick a dollar in your pocket and head for the nearest newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review (along with all sorts of other cool art-related stuff).

UPDATE: The Journal has posted a free link to this review. You can read the whole thing here.

Posted by diacritical on December 2, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

TT: AWOL

I haven't been absolutely forthcoming with you about my current state of mind and body, so here goes: I have a little problem called "reactive airways syndrome," which is a kind of respiratory alarm that goes off whenever I let myself get run down and underslept. It started clanging loudly two weeks ago. As a result, I spent the past few days slumped on my couch in a slack-jawed semi-stupor, watching undemanding movies, doing as little as possible, and letting my batteries recharge themselves.

The good news is that I'm finally starting to bounce back, but I'm not quite there yet. In order to ensure a more perfect recovery, I've decided not to blog at all between now and next Friday, December 9, when I'll return to the 'sphere with the weekly drama-column teaser. I'll miss you, but I know you'll understand.

Have fun while I'm gone. Visit some of the other blogs listed in the "Sites to See" module. Come goggle at Maud and me on Tuesday night. And fear not: I shall return next Friday!

UPDATE: In addition to all those other cool blogs, you'll find lots and lots of new stuff in the right-hand column to keep you busy in my absence. Enjoy.

Posted by diacritical on December 2, 2005 12:07 PM | Permalink

OGIC: A Tale of Four Movies

The Ice Harvest may be the most misleadingly marketed film ever. It snuck up on me--the very first I heard of it was from Dave Kehr's fairly new blog in November (thanks to Cinetrix for first word of DaveKehr.com). He wrote:

After all the failed attempts to capture the flavor of the great noir novelists like Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Charles Willeford, here is the film that finally does it, and without betraying the slightest sign of self-consciousness. This is no stuffed-and-mounted "homage" but a living, breathing film with a black heart and a sense of humor. Ramis demonstrates again how closely related comedy and suspense timing are, introducing his twists and reversals with the same dual sense of surprise and inevitability that sets up a great punch line. His control is perfect but his presence is imperceptible�one definition of high classical style.

Color me excited! But then the television ads started coming on, and they told a different story. How to reconcile Kehr's anointment of the film as neonoir par excellence with the advertising campaign's invocation of the hilariously crude Bad Santa? My confusion only grew when the movie's marketing campaign turned up at a Chicago Blackhawks hockey game I attended in the middle of November. Ice hockey, ice harvest--very high-concept, that! At the time, friend EH (formerly Our Friend on the Block, before she hightailed it to a different, sadly distant block) wondered aloud whether the bleak Ice Storm had been similarly touted at NHL rinks, and we laughed. But now, having seen the not at all merry Harvest, I can't say I think that would have been so much less fitting.

This is a deeply misanthropic, even cruel movie, as Tim Hulsey has discussed in terms that are stronger than I would use but not, I think, unfair. His review appears here, and he has more general thoughts springing from his reaction to the movie here. Reading Tim's review influenced my thinking about the movie, which I thought I liked at first. There were some factors that clouded my judgment. The Ice Harvest was cowritten by a favorite writer-director tandem of mine (and of Terry's), Robert Benton and Richard Russo, and is a little bit like what you might get from crossing Nobody's Fool with The Last Seduction. If that seems hard to imagine, there's good reason. Those films are inhabited by what are practically different species of human beings and proceed from wholly different notions of human motivation. In The Ice Harvest you have a town full of Wendy Kroys, driven by the basest desires, thinly disguised as the sorts of complex, simple-deep characters that live in a Richard Russo novel. They banter half-affably, half-abusively, like typical Russo oddballs, but their bites are far worse than their bark. John Cusack's antihero Charlie doesn't bite except in self-defense, but, for that, he is surprisingly empty. While viewing the movie I felt grateful that the character wasn't sweetened or sentimentalized, but in retrospect he's not any way redeemable or interesting, apart from being a guy lucky enough to be played by John Cusack.

In the end, I'm also not sure whether this movie would have seemed so painfully dark if it hadn't been for the willfully misleading marketing campaign. There's that, and there's a long sequence, before things get seriously ugly, that could almost have been borrowed from Nobody's Fool, with Cusack and Oliver Platt, playing a drunken ne'er-do-well, comically making their rounds on Christmas Eve like two sad clowns. Then all of a sudden it's Blood Simple, and you might feel a little blind-sided. Also, I'll never listen to that Alvin and the Chipmunks song quite the same way again.... (Such lumberingly ironic use of the chirpy cartoon rodents is emerging as a bit of a theme this year. The same song, I noticed, appears prominently in an ad for a TNT holiday movie about gangsters. Aw, leave the little guys alone! Sure, they're annoying, but they mind their own business eleven months a year!))

I've said it before, but this is as good an occasion as I'll get to say it again: rent Benton and Russo's previous project, Twilight. Besides its cast of geniuses, it exemplifies what The Ice Harvest seems to be trying, haplessly, to be.

And speaking of movies that you can't pin down, how about Pride and Prejudice? The trailer made me cower behind my popcorn. The reviews, most of them splendid, made me wrinkle my brow and reconsider. Now Ross Douthat comes along confirming precisely my initial suspicions and blasting the undiscriminating reviewers who made me doubt. Still on tap is Quiet Bubble, who read the novel in preparation. I'll be curious to hear QB's verdict. And yours--let me know what you thought of the movie, especially if you feel protective of the book. Should I see it? Skip it? Picket? I used to read the novel every Christmas vacation, and perhaps this year would be a good time to return to that personal tradition, in the spirit of silent protest.

Posted by diacritical on December 5, 2005 2:43 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Black Ice, continued

Regarding the incongruities of The Ice Harvest, which I took a stab at diagnosing below, Erasmus at Praise of Folly says it better than I could and clarifies why I felt this movie was a queasy shade of noir:

The problem with this film is that it fundamentally mischaracterizes the question at the heart of film noir, which is "what does the decent man do in an immoral milieu?" Look at Sam Spade, Orson Welles's Michael O'Hara in The Lady from Shanghai, or Glenn Ford's Johnny Farrell in Gilda. All these men are terribly flawed, but try and stick to some essential core of decency despite the crew of vultures, con men, maniacs, and femmes fatales who surround them. Spade ends up sending a woman he loves up the river, O'Hara staggers away from a pile of corpses, and Farrell (unconvincing happy ending aside) tries to keep his loyalties in order, often perversely so.

Modern screenwriters and directors seem to fundamentally miss this moral point, being beglamoured by the bad guys and missing the core drama of the good-ish guy trying to escape the maelstrom of connivance, malice, and murder. John Dahl, whom Erasmus loves, gets this. His Red Rock West is the perfect modern noir. Nick Cage's ex-Marine Mike Williams drifts into Red Rock, Wyoming, looking for a job. He tells a white lie, letting a bartender think he's "Lyle from Texas," for whom he's got a job. This fib plunges him into a web of murderous hatred from which he keeps trying to escape but keeps getting pulled back in because of his essential decency. It's a terrific film.

Dahl also made The Last Seduction in which he created Wendy Kroy, the most fatale of the femmes who've graced the silver screen. Dahl's brilliance in this film is exposing Kroy as the most evil of manipulative sociopaths--she literally has no use for people other than as a means to money or other objects of desire. She kills, steals, and frames others for her crimes. And then, in the end, in a gut-punch of an ending which leaves you gasping, she gets away with it. Dahl plays with the complicity of the viewer in the anti-heroine's misdeeds, then pulls the rug out from under you in that she, a real villain, doesn't get any comeuppance. Dahl doesn't do a wink and let you think, "Oh, that scamp!" He gives you a genuine look at the triumph of evil. The Last Seduction is another work of profound moral mediations in an utterly compelling dramatic form.

This brings us to The Ice Harvest which shares the central problem of most "neo-noir" films. It's all bad guys, without any moral quandary, and hence no real drama or plot, only incident in the game of last-man-standing among a bunch of low-lifes. The audience is apparently supposed to have some dramatic sympathy for Charlie Arglist because...well, principally because he's played by John Cusack, whose winning hang-dog manner is likeable. As La Demanska notes, however, the character is an empty vessel. There's no there there. He's simply the least vile of the individuals on offer.

The second major problem is the ending, in which Charlie's the last man standing, ending up with 2.147 million dollars, if I remember correctly, with which he basically heads out of Wichita, "rescuing" his drunken friend Pete (entertainingly played by Oliver Platt) from his horrible marriage to Charlie's ex-wife. This is not an act of virtue, not least because their leaving town leaves Charlie's two children (already scarred by his no longer living with them) without either their father or their stand-in father. The larger problem is that Charlie is rewarded for his coming out on top of the deadly game of Who's Got the Duffel Bag?

...So, in the end, The Ice Harvest fails to glean anything from its characters' experience. Still, the movie is very, very well made, well-acted by a talented cast, and set in an environment that rarely sees on the big screen: winter on the Great Plains. It intrigued Erasmus enough that he went out and bought the novel from which it's adopted. Erasmus suspects (or perhaps merely hopes) that the novelist has a better sense of what's really at stake in great crime novels--not money, but souls.

That's what I meant to say! There's more, so be sure to hop over and read the whole thing.

P.S. This entire post written, cut, pasted, and coded with a twelve-pound cat lying on top of my right arm. Some animals, that is, may have been overindulged in the making of this post.

Posted by diacritical on December 5, 2005 8:58 AM | Permalink

OGIC: That's a wrap

Arts & Letters Daily says this lovely, generous essay about the last lines of novels is by Philip Hensher, and I'm glad they say so, because the page itself gives no indication of authorship. I call the piece "generous" in the sense, simply, of "long," because you know this same piece assigned by the NYTBR or most other American papers would never be permitted to run more than half this version's nearly 2,000 words and would, accordingly, be much impoverished.

Hensher has a great and true premise: as much as we literary types love to recite and dwell on and argue about great first lines, the way a novel ends is a more interesting and revealing matter. There's far more at stake. Especially after modernism, it's hard to see the question of how to end as anything other than a great problem for novelists. How they tend to solve it may tell us something about the philosophical temperament of their time and place. Writes Hensher:

But there are two questions at stake here, in what Frank Kermode called "the sense of an ending." One is how far a novelist believes in the end of a story, either through perfect happiness or complete catastrophe. The other is just the sense of a cadence; the sort of thing that sounds final, even if the novel's concerns are provisional, incomplete. A novel with an unimpeachably happy ending may finish on an incomplete cadence, like Bleak House's "even supposing -". Conversely, a novel where all the questions remain unanswered at the end can, more rarely, have a resoundingly firm cadence, just like [Henry] Green's Loving.

(The Green novel ends, ironically, "Over in England they were married and lived happily ever after.")

I don't have a whole lot to add to what Hensher writes. He covers the topic admirably and, whew, comes up with a wholly satisfying last graf. Read the whole thing. But his piece did send me scurrying to various bookcases to see precisely how some beloved books left matters. And yet the problem with endings, one that doesn't vex beginnings, is that in many cases you can't share them without perhaps compromising a new reader's experience of the book. The final line of The Turn of the Screw, for instance, is remarkable for its ambiguity and yet all too revealing. Here's one that gives nothing away, is pretty bracing, and, I skirts all of the categories Hensher delineates:

Poor all of us, when you come to think of it.

It's from Graham Greene, The Third Man, and it's a long sight down a one-way road from "God bless us, every one!"

Posted by diacritical on December 6, 2005 2:28 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"I have said about that night that it was a night like all the rest, a night beginning so usually I wasn't even looking when it happened. But going back over it now I can see in how many ways this was not in the slightest true. For one important exception, a heavy fog had folded us up into its cold grey blanket. For three days we'd groped and gasped our way through a London from which streets, pavements, cars, even buildings and people had been quietly erased. A London no longer a city but a great cold, glowing field where the refraction of the street lamps, unable to pierce the fog's opaqueness, none the less lit up the vast loneliness with an eerie yellow glow."

Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me

Posted by diacritical on December 6, 2005 2:39 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Goodnight, moon

I stayed out too late and have to awaken every bit as early as usual. Thus today's blogging will take place in the PM hours. See you then.

Posted by diacritical on December 7, 2005 3:30 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"She had always been a looker-on at life, and her mind resembled one of those little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix to their upper windows, so that from the depths of an impenetrable domesticity they might see what was happening in the street."

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Posted by diacritical on December 7, 2005 3:37 AM | Permalink

OGIC: If some bloggers talk in New York...

And nobody blogs it...well, does it?

I'm supposed to be somewhere five minutes ago and will return to this desk later for more blogging. In the meantime, I can't help but wonder...where, oh where, can I read about last night's bloggy panel featuring my illustrious colleague and his equally fascinating cohorts? Surely some blogging fools out there were in attendance, right? From what I hear, we as a group like nothing better than to give breathless reports of each other's exploits. Anyone want to gift the hinterland-bound among us with a little report, breathless or otherwise? Send word of any sightings to ogic@artsjournal.com, and be forever endeared to me.

UPDATE: James Marcus, whose excellent and excellently named criticism blog endeared him to me long ago, comes through at House of Mirth.

Posted by diacritical on December 7, 2005 7:10 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Made to be broken

Claws-bared swipes at MFA writing programs are hardly scarce commodities, but this one by Sam Sacks in the New York Press (thanks to Elegant Mark for the link) has a few original insights about the dispensation of rotten chestnuts that passes for writing instruction in too many such programs. To wit:

If the term Show Don't Tell were one tool out of many that a perspicuous teacher used to aid a specific student in a particular situation, then it would be all to the good. But recall that except in exceptional cases professors need a common denominator with which to teach a group of students of all degrees of talent and taste. Consequently, Show Don't Tell becomes one of the rules in a standardized how-to checklist.

Rules of this sort, I think, come to resemble the doctrine of the Catholic Church, which is used to boil down matters of deep complexity for easy consumption by the masses of the laity. A few objections to the rules may have already crossed the reader's mind: books such as War and Peace, Moby Dick and Ulysses shatter all notion of common law rules of fiction; what is great about the stories of Chekhov, Isaac Babel, and Eudora Welty can't remotely be explained in the way they embody a structural law. Every story in Best New American Voices 2006 is infallibly faithful to workshop formula, and none are noticeably good. All of these objections should be immediately fatal to the premise of teaching Craft, yet they are all routinely shrugged off as caveats (Moby-Dick as a caveat!), explained away by the one all-obliterating fallback rule that I've heard in every workshop I've ever attended: You Can Do It If You Can Get Away With It. Tolstoy, Melville and Joyce "Got Away With It," but you probably can't, and shouldn't try.

These are some of the rules for graduate students. The rules for undergraduates are even more invasive. Here the discrepancy between class size and professorial involvement is stretched even further--workshops are taught by graduate students, and the only whiff a young aspiring writer will get of a writing instructor is in a packed lecture hall. The class I taught was assigned a course packet and there, on the first page, were more rules: Never begin a story with a character waking up in bed. Never write a scene where a character looks at himself in a mirror. Never use the word "stuff."

These rules aren't exactly arbitrary. Having a character gaze into a mirror is evidently an involuntary reflex for amateurs and writers without talent. But the rule makes no allowances for the possibilities of a mirror scene in the hands of a writer with talent. (See Katherine Manfield's "Prelude.") This gets to the crux of the danger of the workshop: Doctrine is imposed with the working assumption that everyone is a mediocrity. If obeyed, it grades down the spiky brilliance of the talented and leads to the limited elevation and refinement of apprentice hacks.

I've always had it in for writing workshops, personally. I was in a really great one once, and I've always thought the one where Olivia d'Abo and Josh Hamilton meet cute in Kicking and Screaming must have been redeemed to a great degree by d'Abo's character's presence. But the three of four others I've known were pretty much soul-killing. I think Sacks's insight that the stuff being taught is tailored for the talentless is dead-on, and rather shattering.

I also think it's a mistake for MFA programs and their hopeful applicants to put quite so much emphasis on big-name writers. This is a trap that Sacks himself falls into in the course of his piece. No doubt name recognition is an alluring thing for everyone concerned here: editors and publishers, students, other faculty. administrators, even potential donors to the institution. It is--obviously, right?--no guarantee of good teaching. To be only this cynical is to sound naive; of the many reasons brand-name writers are in demand for these faculty positions, teaching writing has to be pretty far down the list, well below the promise of professional connections for graduated students and the luster their names confer on not only the department but the institution writ large. There is no particular reason to believe that great writing and great, or even good, teaching will come bundled together in one lovely package, and so I'm unmoved when Sacks says of faculty members in the University of Houston and Johns Hopkins MFA programs, "These men and women may in fact be exceptionally devoted teachers and fine writers to boot. But as a sample cross-section, they are certainly not names that cry out 'literary mastery.'" The assumption that "literary mastery" translates into good pedagogy goes surprisingly unexamined in an otherwise sharp piece.

Posted by diacritical on December 8, 2005 1:52 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Before the drummers had finished their call the men of the battalions were up, painting the white field of canvas with black beaver hats and scarlet coats, facings of blue and yellow, of buff, primrose and green. Grey smoke rolled where the butchers were burning their garbage. The unhoused colors of each regiment, suddenly broken by their ensigns, spilled out in falls of silk and gold. Sky and mountains were blue-black across the Firth and down the Great Glen, and but for the white pencil of the snowline it would have been hard to tell where one began and the other ended."

John Prebble, Culloden

Posted by diacritical on December 8, 2005 10:37 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Passing interests

Writers who can take a subject in which you are studiously uninterested, put a stranglehold on your attention while you are reading them on said subject, and, when they are finished, release you undisturbed to your previous stance of disinterest. That's what my world needs more of. Twice now, Michael Lewis has proven himself, in my book, such a writer. His prolific 1998 reporting on the Microsoft antitrust case for Slate had this effect on me, and now his New York Times Magazine piece about an eccentric, successful college football coach has cast a similar spell. If I had spent the entire following morning poring over BCS rankings, what we'd have had is a previously undiscovered interest brought to the surface, with some credit due to Lewis. But I didn't care about college football before I read this article, and I don't care about college football now. The fact that I had such a splendid, indeed ecstatic, time reading an article about college football in the interim is proof positive that, in this case, the writing is the thing. At the moment, I feel Lewis could put forth a treatise on botany, tax law, aluminum siding, or goddamn Paris Hilton, and I'd be slavering for a copy. (Although, that said, he's not infallible. I couldn't get through The New New Thing, purchased in cloth on the strength of my addiction to the Microsoft Dispatches, nor would the local used book interest take it off my hands. Here it still sits, oldly.)

There are a precious few other writers I can say this of (and one or two of them are bloggers). How about you? Who would you read on any subject at all?

Posted by diacritical on December 8, 2005 12:57 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"I don't mind his gift (his genius, really) for sugarcoating. The problem is that he keeps forgetting to put the pill inside."

James Marcus on Paul McCartney

Posted by diacritical on December 9, 2005 11:13 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Higher forms of leisure are no longer leisure but act come to completion."

Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America

Posted by diacritical on December 9, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Robert Frost's fee in 1921 for a reading: $100

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $924.38

(Source: Library of America, Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays)

Posted by diacritical on December 9, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)
- Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
- The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Abigail's Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, extended through Feb. 1)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
- The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, extended through Feb. 19)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- Hamlet (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
- Absurd Person Singular (comedy, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
- Bach in Leipzig (comedy, G, too complicated for any but the brightest children to follow, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Dec. 31, reviewed here)

Posted by diacritical on December 9, 2005 12:03 PM | Permalink

TT: Here's hoping

I note with pleasure the Grammy nominations of Luciana Souza, Nickel Creek, and the Pat Metheny Group. May they all bring home the bacon!

Posted by diacritical on December 9, 2005 12:04 PM | Permalink

TT: In other news

Regarding the Great Bloggers' Convocation that had Our Girl in a tizzy, all I can tell you is that we talked a lot, enjoyed ourselves, and saw many familiar faces in the audience, one of whom posted briefly about the event after the fact. I don't have a lot more to tell you, truthfully: I didn't say anything there I haven't already said here. The audience seemed interested, though, and asked lots of good questions. I was too tired to linger and went straight home when it was over, so if you want to know more, go here. (I'm still giggling at the thought of being compared to Jon Landau!)

Now, here's a sneak preview of my next "Sightings" column, "Making Ideas Beautiful," which will be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal:

Sometimes a heartfelt compliment can blow up in the recipient's face, as when T.S. Eliot said of Henry James that he had "a mind so fine that no idea could violate it," thus making him sound like a plot-spinning idiot savant. What Eliot really meant was that James understood how an artist who dabbles in ideas can lose sight of the true purpose of art, which is (as Renoir said) to "make everything more beautiful." You can't paint a picture of E = mc2, or compose a symphony about the law of supply and demand. Nevertheless, art is so effective at swaying men's minds that there have always been cultural commissars prepared to enlist it in the service of ideas by any means necessary--including brute force....

Needless to say, there's plenty more where that came from. See for yourself--buy a copy of tomorrow's Journal and look me up.

Posted by diacritical on December 9, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

TT: A modest little classic

As promised, here I am again, just in time for the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. Today I review Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful and Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet, one of which I liked much more than the other:

Mr. Foote's play is an American classic, albeit one not generally recognized as such (it hasn't been performed in New York in 45 years). Yet "The Trip to Bountiful" is fully as worthy of regular revival as "Our Town" or "The Glass Menagerie," and this Off Broadway production, directed by Harris Yulin and acted with quiet skill by the best ensemble cast in town, leaves no doubt of its special quality....

The Peter Norton Space is small enough that the rest of the run, which ends Feb. 19, is likely to sell out very quickly, and while I have yet to hear any buzz about a transfer, this production clearly belongs on Broadway. My guess is that it has the potential to become a sleeper hit, just like "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" and "Doubt."...

Eugene O'Neill is one of those Great American Authors whose work leaves me cold. It doesn't help that the difference in quality between his best and worst plays is vast, but even at his occasional best, I usually find him exhaustingly long-winded. As for his worst, well, there's "A Touch of the Poet," a 19th-century costume piece written between 1935 and 1942 as part of an unfinished 11-play cycle and newly revived by the Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54 as a vehicle for Gabriel Byrne...

Mr. Byrne plays Con Melody, a Byron-spouting soldier turned drunken innkeeper who has squandered the whole of his life pretending to a gentility he doesn't possess by birth, sacrificing the happiness of his stage-Irish wife (Dearbhla Molloy) and hatchet-tongued daughter (Emily Bergl) to his pitiable pretensions. It's a promising situation, but O'Neill smothers it in superfluous exposition--you could cut the whole first act and scarcely notice it was gone...

Two footnotes on The Trip to Bountiful:

(1) Here's how moved I was by the play and production: Horton Foote was sitting three rows behind me. I wanted to say something to him after the show, but was so choked up that I didn't trust myself to speak.

(2) This is the Signature Theatre Company's fifteenth-anniversary season, and thanks to a generous subsidy from Time Warner, all tickets for all performances of all anniversary-season productions cost just $15 each. In this case, that's an amazing deal.

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review (along with lots of other art-related stories).

Posted by diacritical on December 9, 2005 12:06 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Stuck with me

Recently Terry posted about some vexing health problems he has been contending with. As you know, he recused himself from blogging for much of the last week in order to get some vital rest. For a few days this seemed to be working. Yesterday, however, he had a setback and is spending the weekend, or perhaps a bit longer, in the hospital. He assures me that he is in superb hands, is well on the road to a full recovery, and does not wish for anyone to worry. But he will be away from this space again for a while. He's computer-free, in fact, and not receiving email--so if you're thinking of sending any, why not wait until he's back in action, just so his unmonitored inbox doesn't explode? If it's really pressing, you are welcome to email me. I'll be in frequent touch with Terry.

While we all await Terry's return, I'll keep the posts coming. I'll also respond to all of the great and greatly appreciated email I received this week and, most important, pass along further word on Terry's recovery.

From both of us, have a safe and wonderful weekend.

Posted by diacritical on December 10, 2005 1:36 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Soon again

Promises, promises. I had every intention of posting tonight, but answering accumulated blogmail was my first priority and took longer than anticipated. Bear with me and I'll get some fresh material up Monday evening, and maybe a fortune cookie or quick links in the meantime. Thanks for your patience.

Posted by diacritical on December 12, 2005 3:06 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Going home must be like going to render an account."

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Posted by diacritical on December 12, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Number, please

- Fee paid to Elvis Presley by Ed Sullivan in 1956 for three TV appearances: $50,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $344,900.36

(Source: Bob Spitz, The Beatles)

Posted by diacritical on December 12, 2005 12:02 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Thank you

The outpouring of well wishes for Terry from readers of this site has been wonderful to witness and facilitate. Thanks to everyone who has written for making Terry feel loved and making me feel useful! Once in a while, it's good to be messenger. Terry's doing well, misses the blog, and expects to be able to go home soon, though we don't yet know when. He answers the phone in his hospital room as businesslike as ever--"Terry Teachout"--and approves of the art on the walls (a Milton Avery print in particular). In other words, he sounds very much like himself. He's been so glad to hear from you all. I'll tell you more as I know more.

Posted by diacritical on December 12, 2005 12:16 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Against interpretation again

In a pugnacious essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters calls for literary critics in the academy to back out of the blind alley of interpretation and return to an emphasis on aesthetics:

[Stanley] Fish's subsequent writings have gone in many directions, but he has never wavered in his inclination to resist the physical and aesthetic pleasures of the text and to prefer its doctrine. And he has never ceased to practice a method of allegorical interpretation that makes the text conform to interpreters' ideas. The interpreters who have followed in his wake continue to shuck text of its form, reducing it to a proposition to be either affirmed or denied, the way a farmer shucks an ear of corn. When they're done interpreting a poem, what is left of the poetry?

This kind of literary criticism has nothing to do with aesthetic responses to art, only with conscious acts of will. Nothing is to be left up to the senses, to the emotions. We have only to make a decision about the goodness or badness of the actions revealed in the work. Interpretation is the revenge of moralism upon art, and that is what makes it so politically dangerous: It narrows what literary critics do�-- and opens them to attack and co-optation from all the ideologues out there.

A couple of months ago I picked up Waters's Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship, a winningly compact little book with an impressively gloomy title. But it's so compact, alas, that I've lost it completely.

Posted by diacritical on December 13, 2005 2:26 AM | Permalink

OGIC: The nanny who landed softly

Caitlin Flanagan, who started out writing about modern motherhood for the Atlantic Monthly before landing a coveted staff position at the New Yorker, is about as non grata as a persona gets among many, many bloggers I admire and personal friends I, well, adore. I've found many of her pieces bracing, even--or especially--when I've disagreed with her premises or conclusions. And I've always found the level of invective she draws to be a little astonishing.

Flanagan's latest piece approaches her usual territory, the conflicts and contradictions faced by working moms, comparatively obliquely: through a look at the author of Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers, and her losing battle against the Disneyfication of her most famous book. Even Flanagan's detractors might like this one. Travers, it turns out, was a fascinating woman:

"Mary Poppins" advocates the kind of family life that Walt Disney had spent his career both chronicling and helping to foster on a national level: father at work, mother at home, children flourishing. It is tempting to imagine that in Travers he found a like-minded person, someone who embodied the virtues of conformity and traditionalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Travers was a woman who never married, wore trousers when she felt like it, had a transformative and emotionally charged relationship with an older married man, and entered into a long-term live-in relationship with another woman. As she approached forty, she decided that she wanted a child. After a bizarre incident in which she attempted to adopt the seventeen-year-old girl who cleaned her house, she travelled to Ireland and adopted an infant, one of a pair of twins, and raised him as a single mother. Her reverence for the delights of family life was perhaps as intense as Disney's, but her opinion about the shape such a life might assume was far more nuanced.

And this:

Her mother, Margaret, who was pretty and feckless, soldiered on for a few years [after Travers's father's death], and then, when Helen was ten, she did what a mother is never supposed to do. She gave up.

One night, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Margaret left Helen in charge of the two younger children, telling her that she was going to drown herself in a nearby creek. As an old woman, Travers wrote about the terrifying experience: "Large-eyed, the little ones looked at me--she and I called them the little ones, both of us aware that an eldest child, no matter how young, can never experience the heart's ease that little ones enjoy." Helen stirred the fire and then they all lay down on the hearth rug and she told them a story about a magical flying horse, with the small ones asking excited questions ("Could he carry us to the shiny land, all three on his back?"). As she tried to distract her siblings, she worried about the future. She later wrote, "What happens to children who have lost both parents? Do they go into Children's Homes and wear embroidered dressing-gowns, embroidery that is really darning?"

I highly recommend Flanagan's affectionate and colorful portrait. This woman went head to head with Walt Disney and never flinched, but ultimately rued the way her book was finally adopted for the screen. She did, however, quite enjoy the proceeds of her contractual 5% share of the movie's gross. I must admit I've never thought twice about who P. L. Travers might be, even whether she was a man or a woman. I suppose that now I am going to have to read Mary Poppins, too.

Posted by diacritical on December 13, 2005 2:54 AM | Permalink

OGIC: News you'll like

Terry called this morning to say he has received good news from the doctors. You'll be hearing it from the man himself when he returns to the blog in the next day or two. Thanks again to all who have written. I may not have responded yet to everyone who wrote yesterday, but all of your wishes were conveyed to a greatly appreciative Terry. To my mind, they have made a real difference for his morale and thus contributed to his improving health. Thank you.

Posted by diacritical on December 13, 2005 10:09 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"This is part of a theory I once elaborated with Hitchcock in a happy moment. We decided then that in order to have a sweeping success in the highbrow cinemas of the Anglo-Saxon world we should make a film about nothing, in no language at all and with bad photography--but copiously subtitled. We agreed that people would scream their heads off with delight."

Orson Welles (interview with Francis Koval, Sight and Sound, 1950)

Posted by diacritical on December 14, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Ringers and sleepers

At Syntax of Things, several litblog types have weighed in with their undersung favorites of the year. That should keep your nightstand stocked for a while. I'm preparing a post on my literary discovery of the year, and the surprise is that it's a nonfiction writer. Stay tuned.

Posted by diacritical on December 15, 2005 1:04 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There are those who can reconcile themselves to death and those who can't. Increasingly, I've come to think that it is one of the most important ways the world divides up. Anecdotally, after all those hours I spent in doctors' outer offices and in hospital lobbies, cafeterias and family rooms, my sense is that the loved ones of desperately ill people divide the same way."

David Rieff, "Illness as More than Metaphor" (New York Times Magazine, Dec. 4, 2005)

Posted by diacritical on December 15, 2005 4:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Time off for good behavior

My friend Nancy LaMott, the cabaret singer about whom I've written in this space and elsewhere, died ten years ago Tuesday. It wasn't an anniversary I'd intended to spend in a hospital room, two months shy of my fiftieth birthday, waiting as patiently as I could to find out just how sick I was--but, then, life has a way of pitching curve balls at your head.

As I thought back over the past couple of months and remembered some of the things I'd been posting, it hit me for the first time that I must have decided somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind that I was dying, and that I'd been spending the preceding days and weeks trying as best I could to come to terms with the seeming arrival of what Henry James called "the distinguished thing." Why had I been so shy about calling a doctor? What made me respond so immediately and intensely to the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd? Why did I quit listening to music for pleasure after hours? All at once I knew.

The long slide toward the blank wall started in earnest two weeks ago. I continued to do the things I absolutely had to do--hitting my deadlines, going to the theater, sharing a platform with Maud and Sasha--but when they were finished I would retreat to my couch, pull a comforter over my fast-weakening frame, and alternate between watching old movies and dozing fitfully. By then I was pretty sure it wasn't asthma that had laid me low, but I was afraid to face the possibility that my heart was implicated, and the fact that I still had occasional good days made it possible for me to pretend that all I really needed was a couple of good nights' sleep. That's what I told my friends, and myself, too. The difference was that I didn't believe it.

Time finally ran out on me last Thursday night. I took a cab to Broadway to see a press preview of Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life, and no sooner did I arrive at the theater than I knew something was very, very wrong. After the show was over, my companion for the evening (bless her!) helped me up the aisle and a press agent (bless him!) hailed a cab. It took me ten minutes to climb the two flights of stairs to my apartment. I collapsed on the couch and spent the small hours deciding what to do. I packed a bag and straightened up the apartment--very, very slowly. My plan was to descend carefully to the street in the morning and hail a cab on Columbus Avenue, but when the sun came up and I saw that it was snowing, I came at last to my senses, called 911, and unlocked my door. Two minutes later a two-man team of paramedics was slapping an oxygen mask on my face and slipping an IV into my right arm.

"So you're a drama critic, huh?" one of them asked as they carried me down the stairs. "My grandma is coming to town for Christmas--I want to take her to a show. What do you suggest?"

"Oh, definitely The Trip to Bountiful," I said, my voice muffled by the mask. "I guarantee she'll like it."

Soon I was stretched out on a gurney in the emergency room of Lenox Hill Hospital, where I'd been brought five years before when an undiagnosed case of work-exacerbated pneumonia had reduced me to a similar state of disrepair. By then I knew that what I feared most had come to pass: I'd been stricken with congestive heart failure. My body was full of excess fluid--lungs, legs, the whole shooting match--and had I waited much longer to seek help, I would have drowned in it. Instead, the doctors stuck a nitroglycerine patch on my shoulder, pumped me full of a fluid-expelling diuretic, and handed me a phone on which I made a half-dozen necessary calls: my brother in Missouri, my co-blogger in Chicago, my editor at The Wall Street Journal, the woman with whom I'd planned to have dinner and see Waiting for Godot the following night. To all of them I made my regrets, thinking wryly of a favorite saying: If you want to hear God laugh, make a plan. Then the diuretic kicked in and I hung up the phone abruptly. "If you'll just point me toward the men's room," I said to the nurse, "I'll be perfectly glad to go there myself." She laughed, not unkindly, and handed me a plastic bottle.

Three hours later I was tucked into a hospital bed, listening to a friendly but firm doctor read me the riot act. Before long I was strolling up and down the corridor, feeling better than I had in two months, staggered by how far I'd let myself slide.

On Saturday morning I inhaled a trayful of hospital food (cream of wheat, yogurt, a bagel, and a banana). I propped myself up on the edge of the bed, twisted a pair of earbuds into my ears, plugged them into my iPod, and hit the shuffle-play key. The slow movement of Michael Tippett's Concerto for Double String Orchestra, a set of darkly luminous variations on the folk song "Ca' the yowes," came pouring into my head, and I burst into tears. I'm not ready, I told myself, not the least little bit.

No sooner did those words form in my mind's ear than a passage from a novel I love, Edwin O'Connor's The Edge of Sadness, snapped into my memory as plainly as if I were reading it off the page. The speaker is a middle-aged Boston priest:

I believe with all my heart in the mercy and providence of God, and I believe in a future unimaginably brighter and better than anything I have known here--and yet of course the whole difficulty is that I have known and have loved "here." Very much. So that when the time comes for me to go, I know that I will go with full confidence in God--but I also know that I will go with sadness. And I think for no reason other than that...well, I have been alive. An old priest who was dying, one of the saintliest men I have ever known, one of those who had greatest reason to expect God's favor, many years ago surprised me by telling me, with a little smile, that now that he was going, he wanted desperately to stay.

"A single memory can do it," he said.

And I suppose he was right. The memory of an instant--of a smile, of leaf smoke on a sharp fall day, of a golden streak across a rain-washed morning, of a small boy seated alone on the seashore, solemnly building his medieval moated castles--just this one, single, final flash of memory can be enough to make us want to stay forever....

For the rest of the day I listened to music, lapping it up as if I were a starving man gulping a bowl of broth. I devoted most of Sunday to answering the phone and receiving visitors, marveling that so many people seemed to care so passionately about whether I lived or died. On Monday I underwent a six-hour-long stress test designed to determine whether my heart had been permanently damaged, then spent the rest of the evening and a bit of the night wondering what I'd learn the next day.

I already knew one thing that was at least as important: whatever the verdict, I wasn't going to give up without a fight. I have music to hear, plays to review, paintings to see, etchings to buy and treasure, a book to finish writing, a blog to keep, dozens of friends who claim quite convincingly to love me, and many, many memories, a few dark and desperate, far more full of light. In the last few days alone countless things have happened, small and large, that make me want to cling as fiercely as possible to whatever time remains on the ticking clock whose face I cannot see. I have felt this way once before in my life, in the months immediately following 9/11. It took nothing less than a congested heart to make me feel the same way again.

Ten years to the day after the distinguished thing came calling for my friend Nancy, I learned the results of the stress test. It was normal. My heart muscle is weakened but undamaged. If I do as I'm told--exactly--I have a very good chance of being around for a very long time to come. I even get to go home for Christmas tomorrow morning.

A few hours later I was walking gingerly up the same stairs down which I'd been carried four days before. I pushed open the front door of my apartment and beheld once more the welcoming glories of the Teachout Museum. I glanced down at the floor and saw that it was strewn with strange debris: a plastic syringe cover, a box that once had held some life-saving drug, a rubber glove.

"You know what?" I said to the friend who had brought me home. "I think the e-mail can wait." Then I picked up the trash from the floor, opened the blinds, sat down on the couch, and started gazing at the walls.

Posted by diacritical on December 15, 2005 4:27 AM | Permalink

OGIC: In case you're wondering

All the news from Terry remains good, and I expect he'll be poking his head in here before very long at all.

Posted by diacritical on December 15, 2005 5:54 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"My most concise, and memorable, lesson on editing came one day in 1958 when Groucho took me with him to visit George S. Kaufman in his New York apartment. For me, it had the aura of a visit to a tall, thin guru. I remember his being seated in a chair with his long legs seeming to be entwined at least twice around each other.

"'Here's a young director,' Groucho said. 'Tell him how to direct.'

"'Well,' Mr. Kaufman said, 'if you have a script, and it says, "Sit down, I want to talk to you," cut that out.'"

"End of instruction."

Robert Dwan, As Long as They're Laughing!: Groucho Marx and You Bet Your Life

Posted by diacritical on December 15, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Workshops redux

Readers write in with two different points of view on the MFA and its rather blunt instrument, the writing workshop. First, a quarrel with my cynicism:

As a veteran of a famed MFA program in theatre directing and several playwriting workshops, I must take issue with your complaint against MFA programs. Granted, some of the craft "rules" taught there are arbitrary, based on the instructor's whim (for example, one of my favorite playwriting teachers hated all plays set at Thanksgiving). But such "rules" are made to be broken when the artist does so for an effective artistic reason. The point is, master the form first, then learn how to bend it to your own ends.

I can't tell you the number of scripts I've read in which the writer can't begin to tell a cohesive story, or plants obvious and sloppy exposition (often having people who have known each other all their lives suddenly rehash background information they both know), or fills the script with clich�d acting directives (e.g., angrily, despairingly, sadly, laughingly, etc.), and so on. The point is, learn how to write a coherent play, then decide you're a revolutionary and write the new Waiting for Godot.

I often tell people considering MFA programs: try to find one in which the teachers are successful professionals. The point is something approximating the master/apprentice relationship, where you learn from someone who daily deals--and deals successfully--with the problems of actually writing. Unlike, say, literature, which can be well taught by an academic who studies it for his or her livelihood, writing is a craft discipline. Those who do it well often have craft knowledge that you can't learn in purely academic study.

I'm sorry that this is all to the point of taking issue with me, because it sounds so really sound and persuasive. But I'm not at all certain this reader and I are in any too-great disagreement. He is describing what should ideally happen and in fact sometimes does happen in MFA coursework--more times than I am apt to credit, I'm sure. I was lamenting what too often actually does happen when a teacher is insufficiently attentive or not a talented teacher or simply not the right teacher for a particular student, which it seems to me more the rule than the exception for the simple reason that mentoring cannot be effectively accomplished en masse.

This also makes a good case for teaching the rules. Indeed, if the "rules" are taught with some nuance and flexibility, and as a foundation rather than an ultimatum, they should do more good than harm. Sam Sacks's case, however, was that, in his own experience as well as on the evidence of Best New American Voices 2006, the rules are more often taught lazily and rigidly. I think the great hope embodied by MFA programs is that the right student will encounter the right teacher, and the apprenticeship my correspondent describes will spring forth, throwing sparks. The problem is that this doesn't happen very often, nobody has thought up a good way to raise the success rate, and I don't think they can. So a lot of pallid if technically unimpeachable writing results, and some varieties of genuine talent are probably strangled outright.

Another reader writes in agreement with Sacks and with me:

Followed your link to the Sam Sacks article and found it really interesting - what you have to say about it too. I couldn't agree more about great writers not necessarily being great teachers, and vice versa. I haven't done a formal writing course (there's not many of them around for poetry, which is all I write) but I've been to various short classes and workshops over the years, some of them headed by biggish names, and the one which was (and still is) most useful to me was an evening-class run by a woman who had never written a poem in her life: she'd published some short fiction, but most of her experience was as a schoolteacher (English literature) and a journalist on regional papers and magazines.

What she did for us was to act as an intelligent common reader: her constant questions were "who is this for?" and "this is what I get from the piece: is that what you're trying to get across?" When she made suggestions they were focused on the piece itself and how to get it to work for its intended audience, rather than on The Rules. She wasn't remotely snobbish about market, having written for women's magazines herself for many years: she was happy with memoir, genre fiction, romance, comedy, experimental writing, anything, as long as it worked. And she was widely-read enough to be able to give you examples you could look at by writers who did make it (whatever it was) work.

But where her teaching skills really came in was that by shrewd (and sometimes tough) moderation of the group, she made us act as intelligent readers for one another too. She wouldn't let us score points or talk nonsense, but she wouldn't let us off with not saying anything either (it's particularly annoying for poets in mixed groups that prose writers expect us to critique their work but, when ours comes round, go "oh, I don't know anything about poetry" and sit and doodle on their notepad until it's all over. Shocking bad manners if you ask me. Nobody got away with that on Esther's watch). This is what I've found most lacking in other workshops--the inability of the leader to moderate discussion well. Suggesting revisions to others' work is extra practice for revising your own, and it's at the revising stage that I most go back to what I learned in that class. None of what she taught came from her being a great writer: it came from her being a great reader, and a skillful teacher.

And as far as Show Don't Tell goes, the poet Don Paterson was laying into that one in a recent interview in Magma (sadly, not available in their online content), saying that it was a useful corrective to a particular tendency in poetry in its day, but as a general maxim it's too limiting and long overdue for a rest (likewise "No Ideas But In Things"). He reckons you can refute it in two words: John Donne.

Excellent lesson in how to run a writing workshop if run one you must, and nice tip on the poetry journal. Just to be clear, I think MFA programs neither can nor should be abolished. I would just think twice or ten times before recommending a young writer to enroll in one. If they can get a felowship and thus dedicated time to write, that's all to the good--but again, in some cases not. And if they can make the right connection with the perfect mentor, fabulous. On the other hand, the pipeline from places like Iowa to the desks of New York editors is swift and direct, so you can't responsibly nudge a talented writer in a different direction if you care at all about their professional prospects. So, if you're like me, you just end up sort of loathing the whole enterprise.

Do check out some other bloggers' reactions to the Sacks piece: Dan Green, and The Mumpsimus, and Miss Snark.

Posted by diacritical on December 15, 2005 12:45 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object."

Jean Renoir (quoted in Robert Hughes, Film: Book I)

Posted by diacritical on December 16, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

TT: I shouldn't give my secret away, but...

Whenever anybody starts to get on my nerves, I just clutch my chest and start wheezing. It's amazing how that makes them shape right up!

Posted by diacritical on December 17, 2005 7:50 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

Be careful, it's my heart,
It's not my watch you're holding, it's my heart.
It's not the note I sent you that you quickly burned,
It's not the book I lent you that you never returned.
Remember, it's my heart,
The heart with which so willingly I part.
It's yours to take, to keep or break,
But please, before you start,
Be careful, it's my heart.

Irving Berlin, "Be Careful, It's My Heart" (music by Berlin, courtesy of Marc Myers)

Posted by diacritical on December 17, 2005 9:58 AM | Permalink

TT: So very elsewhere

Bad weather and the threat of a transit strike notwithstanding, I spent most of Friday successfully relocating to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I now plan to spend the next two weeks doing next to nothing. Today, for instance, I have just two items on my truncated itinerary: (1) Shopping for heart-healthy food. (2) Answering my accumulated e-mail.

Regarding the e-mail, I want all of you to know how much your warm words have buoyed me up. I only hope that frequent blushing isn't bad for the heart! I expect it'll take the better part of the coming week for me to get back in touch with everyone, so please be patient. I don't want to do this--or anything else--in a hurry.

I miss the blog very much, and I intend to post on occasion from Smalltown, though not obsessively. OGIC has been laboring mightily (and very successfully) to keep the content flowing in my absence, so I think I'll let her do that for a little while longer, poking my head in at odd moments whenever I feel so moved.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go see whether there's a grocery in Smalltown that sells Ry-Krisp....

Posted by diacritical on December 17, 2005 9:59 AM | Permalink

TT: This one I had to share

A reader writes:

I find it odd what a presence you've become in my life; I didn't think it was possible to care so much, to be so saddened by, to fear the loss of a person whom I've never met.

Take care of your health.

Nor could I have possibly imagined how comforted I would be by the kind words of hundreds of people whom I've never met. My love to you all.

Posted by diacritical on December 17, 2005 10:43 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Sly

A friend and I made plans to go to the movies Friday night, and he more or less handed me the reins when it came to picking the movie. Ah, carte blanche. No wrangling, wheeling, dealing, or tradeoffs of the sort that, in ensuring neither party is bitterly opposed to the chosen fare, ensure as well that neither party is delighted with it. Christmas had come early.

On the strength of this review, I chose The Family Stone, a decision in which I was only galvanized by a different critic's snide, pun-infested look far down upon it from up high. When a critic spends a paragraph dictating what "a better movie"--i.e., a different movie--would have done, rather than reviewing the movie at hand, you know it must have confounded her. And any movie that confounded Manohla Dargis is a movie I'm game for. (Another strange reaction came from David Edelstein: he likes the movie but thinks the insular, judgmental Stones are the ideal family. They're not even the protagonists. What a less interesting movie he saw than the one I did.)

Good thing, too. My friend and I both were taken with The Family Stone, for many of the reasons that Armond White's typically provocative review corrals. The other possibility had been Pride and Prejudice, which I think would have been his own choice. So as the movie began I was a little nervous about having steered us in this other direction, not knowing whether it would pan out. But as the early plot--a comedy of manners that cuts far closer to the bone than many of its kind--played out, I thought that the spirit of Jane Austen was within shouting distance even here. Not the Austen of Pride and Prejudice, but the author of Northanger Abbey, a novel in which the gothic terror feared and dreaded by the heroine is all in her head, but the social terror attending her scrutiny by the family she wishes to marry into is very real.

Although it begins as a straightforward, funny-unsettling examination of such terror, the movie broadens its focus to the search for love and acceptance more generally, and gets much more complicated. It tries to do a lot, and for the most part succeeds even as it veers from the cool, surgical dissection of social mores--with a central scene in this vein that forgoes the anesthesia but is as electrifying to watch as it is painful--to slapstick physical comedy to romantic farce to frank sentiment (I'm trying to steer away from naming it sentimentality, but White calls the movie "intelligently sentimental," which is another viable solution). There are a lot of balls in the air by the end. Everything is under the control of the director, but just. I watched the whole thing with my heart in my throat.

Diane Keaton, whom I was laughing at just last week while rewatching The Godfather, Part II on DVD, is very subtle here, and Sarah Jessica Parker is like some whole new actress you've never seen before. As White points out, there are superficial similarities between this character and Carrie Bradshaw, but by Parker's second scene any fugitive thoughts of Sex and the City are left in the dust. Her vulnerability here has nothing to do with the faux vulnerability--curable by the right shoes--of her television role. She's fantastic.

Here's a little bit of the White review that proved so decisive for me:

Despite awkward shifts of tone in Bezucha's emotional balancing act, he makes up for his flaws whenever he looks into Meredith's and the Stones' crooked hearts. In one such sequence Susannah, the film's quietest character, sits alone at night to watch Meet Me in St. Louis on TV. ("This is my favorite part.") Images of Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" are juxtaposed with a montage of each character isolated with their dashed or unexpected hopes. Garland's plaintive, beseeching voice underscores Bezucha's vision.

Understand: This is a great moment because it's not ironic. It's felt. The same way Vincente Minnelli felt it and meant it 61 years ago only, now, in modern terms--challenging the antipathy and unease that fills the Stone household. The pixilated TV distortion of Garland's cartoon-vivid face looms ghost-like, an unreachable idealization of what family life should be, poignantly played against Stone hard reality.

Oh, and it's a laugh riot, too. Go go go.

Posted by diacritical on December 19, 2005 3:14 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Catherine sometimes started at the boldness of her own surmises, and sometimes hoped or feared that she had gone too far; but they were supported by such appearances as made their dismissal impossible."

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Posted by diacritical on December 19, 2005 3:30 AM | Permalink

TT: Home again

I can't say I did much over the weekend in Smalltown, U.S.A., other than venturing out to buy groceries. My mother and I watched the excellent film version of The Trip to Bountiful on Saturday afternoon, and she gave a small birthday party for my sister-in-law last night, though I ended up being the center of attention, everybody naturally wanting to hear all about my recent medical adventures. Otherwise I read, chipped away at my accumulated e-mail, made a few phone calls, and continued to listen to music, something I'd all but stopped doing in the last few weeks of my illness.

Here, for what it's worth and in case you're interested, are some of the things I've most enjoyed hearing in recent days, listed in no particular order:

- Dave Frishberg, "Eastwood Lane"
- Couperin "The Mysterious Barricades" (played by Igor Kipnis)
- Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Don't Worry 'Bout Me"
- Marvin Gaye, "Got to Give It Up"
- Bill Charlap, "Written in the Stars"
- Pat Metheny, "Midwestern Night's Dream"
- Gary Burton, "Gorgeous"
- Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (played by Nathan Milstein)
- Julia Dollison, "Poses"
- Aimee Mann, "Save Me"
- Grainger "Brigg Fair" (sung by Peter Pears)
- Doc Watson, "Let the Cocaine Be"
- Stan Getz, "Blood Count"
- Stan Kenton, "Young Blood"
- Stephen Sondheim, "Being Alive" (sung by Dean Jones, from the original-cast album of Company)
- Jonatha Brooke, "Because I Told You So"
- Oleta Adams, "Get Here"
- Hindemith Symphonic Metamorphoses (last movement, conducted by George Szell)
- Mabel Mercer, "The Best Is Yet to Come"
- Copland "Down a Country Lane" (played by Leo Smit)
- Luciana Souza, "Doce de Coco"
- Tournemire Choral sur le "Victimae paschali" (played by the composer)
- Diana Krall, "Black Crow"
- Miles Davis, "Blue in Green" (from Kind of Blue)
- Dave's True Story, "Blue Nile"

Today I plan to get my hair cut, start writing my drama column for Friday's Wall Street Journal, take a nap, answer some more e-mail, take a walk through the neighborhood, eat three healthy meals, and watch On the Waterfront with my mother. I expect it will be a good day. As a friend of mine likes to say, every day above ground is a good day.

Posted by diacritical on December 19, 2005 11:44 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

I think of you with every breath I take
And every breath becomes a sigh,
Not a sign of despair
But a sign that I care for you.
I hear your name with every breath I take,
On every breeze that wanders by,
And your name is a song
I'll remember the long years through.
Even though I walk alone you guide me.
In the darkness you light my way,
And all the while inside me
Love seems to say, someday, someday.
And when I sleep you keep my heart awake,
But when I wake from dreams divine,
Every breath that I take
Is a prayer that I'll make you mine.

Leo Robin, "With Every Breath I Take" (music by Ralph Rainger)

Posted by diacritical on December 19, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Long time no meme...

But this one appealed: courtesy of Girish, the Meme of Four.

Without further ado, and very much off the top of my head:

Four jobs you've had in your life: antique store shopgirl, technical writer, assistant editor, managing editor. Yes, most of these are practically the same job.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Out of Sight, The Lady Eve, Celine and Julie Go Boating, Kicking and Screaming.

Four places you've lived: Chicago, New York City, Cambridge, Providence.

Four TV shows you love to watch: Gilmore Girls, Hockey Night in Canada (when in Detroit), Da Ali G Show, America's Next Top Model (there, I admitted it).

Four places you've been on vacation: Prague, Edinburgh, Las Vegas, No. Whitefield, Maine.

Four websites you visit daily: Colby Cosh, The Gurgling Cod, Outer Life, Pandacam DC.

Four of your favorite foods: golabki, jambalaya, caesar salad, coconut cake.

Four places you'd rather be: Leelanau County, the Hall of Fame, the British Museum, and the place I'm going tomorrow, and not a moment too soon: Sterling Heights, Michigan.

Perhaps Terry will play. We can hope, but he also needs his rest. All other bloggers are not excused.

Posted by diacritical on December 19, 2005 12:17 PM | Permalink

OGIC: The untouchable

A reader writes:

You mentioned in a recent post that you were laughing at Diane Keaton in The Godfather, Part II. By any chance, was it the scene were she admits to having had an abortion?

Yes, it was that bit precisely.

Her overwrought performance in that scene is jarring; I feel as if I'm suddenly watching a John Waters film. I can better picture Divine or Mink Stole screaming, "I had an abortion! An abortion, Michael!"

Hee hee. The wonder of it is that her shrieky performance makes not the slightest dent in that absolute battleship of a great film.

Posted by diacritical on December 19, 2005 12:27 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

Someone to hold you too close,
Someone to hurt you too deep,
Someone to sit in your chair,
To ruin your sleep.

Someone to need you too much,
Someone to know you too well,
Someone to pull you up short,
To put you through hell.

Someone you have to let in,
Someone whose feelings you spare,
Someone who, like it or not,
Will want you to share
A little, a lot.

Someone to crowd you with love,
Someone to force you to care,
Someone to make you come through,
Who'll always be there,
As frightened as you
Of being alive.

Stephen Sondheim, "Being Alive" (music by Sondheim)

Posted by diacritical on December 20, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: My turn

I have my orders from Our Girl, so here goes with the Meme of Four. All answers are guaranteed to have come straight off the top of my head:

Four jobs you've had in your life: bank teller, dance-band bass player, magazine editor, newspaper editorial writer.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Rio Bravo, You Can Count on Me, Out of the Past, Doc Hollywood.

Four places you've lived: Smalltown, Kansas City, Champaign-Urbana, New York City.

Four TV shows you love to watch: Gilmore Girls, Buffy reruns, What's My Line?, black-and-white episodes of Dragnet.

Four places you've been on vacation: Fallingwater, Branson, Gatlinburg, Isle au Haut.

Four websites you visit daily: Maud Newton, in the wings, The American Scene, Modern Art Notes.

Four of your favorite foods: smoked salmon, chocolate sorbet, fresh mozzarella, really good hot dogs.

Four places you'd rather be: Good Enough to Eat, the Phillips Collection, the Jazz Standard, the Seth Peterson Cottage.

Posted by diacritical on December 20, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Hearing voices

Speaking of dem memes, hometown bloggers Coudal Partners, who always have something cool up their sleeves, have kind of outdone themselves now. They have audio recordings of people reading their favorite short poems as left on an answering service. You can call in too, operators are waiting, but have your poem ready. I've done it and anxiously wait to see whether GMH and I will make the cut...if we do, you'll be the first to know.

LATER: I should add that the current poem, Thomas Hardy's "Neutral Tones," happens to be Maud Newton's favorite. Perhaps Maud will contribute to the project--I think it would be fascinating to hear multiple readings of the same poem by different readers, especially given that all of the readers involved in Poetry After The Beep can be assumed to have a strong attachment to their poems.

Posted by diacritical on December 20, 2005 12:05 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"We all share in a shattering duality--and by this I don't mean that soggy, superficial split that one so often sees: the kind of thing, for example, where the gangster sobs uncontrollably at an old Shirley Temple movie. I mean the fundamental schism that Newman referred to when he spoke of man being forever involved in the consequences of some 'terrible, aboriginal calamity'; every day in every man there is this warfare of the parts. And while all this results in meanness and bitterness and savagery enough, God knows, and while only a fool can look around him and smile serenely in unwatered optimism, nevertheless the wonder of it all is to me the frequency with which kindness, the essential goodness of man does break through, and as one who has received his full measure of that goodness, I can say that for me, at least, it is in the long succession of these small, redemptive instants, just as much as in the magnificence of heroes, that the meaning and the glory of man is revealed...."

Edwin O'Connor, The Edge of Sadness

Posted by diacritical on December 21, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Word has reached me that you are having fun on the set. This must stop."

Jack Warner, from a memo sent to Howard Hawks during the shooting of To Have and Have Not (quoted in Todd McCarthy, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood)

Posted by diacritical on December 22, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: After breakfast

I awoke at six a.m. on Tuesday with sentences forming in my head. Knowing there was no point to staying in bed, I got up to write my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal, the first time I'd written anything for money since I went to the hospital.

This time, though, I didn't stick to my normal obsessive-compulsive routine of going straight from bed to desk. Instead I headed for the kitchen of my mother's house in Smalltown, U.S.A., where I popped an English muffin in the toaster, poured myself a bowl of raisin bran, and sat down at the table with a small glass of orange juice, there to reflect on my changed state. At forty-nine I've made a discovery: Breakfast Is the Most Important Meal of the Day, especially for overweight workaholics with slightly enlarged left ventricles. So now I eat my raisin bran every day, like it or not, and the exasperating part is that I do like it. Somehow I doubt anyone really enjoys finding out in middle age that the rest of the world has always been right. Breakfast every morning, a vacation every year...what next? Am I to become a reality-TV addict?

From there I shuffled down the hall to my bedroom, pulled a folding chair up to the rickety card table next to the bed, turned on my iBook, and dialed up the Web to find out what was happening in the rest of the world (my mother doesn't have a computer of her own, much less a high-speed connection). I downloaded my e-mail, checked out the latest details of the New York transit strike, eyeballed a couple of favorite blogs, logged off, and started writing. Save for the change of venue and the fact that I was writing on a full stomach, I might almost have been at my own desk in Manhattan.

Of course I wasn't, nor am I the same person who sat at that desk two weeks ago and knocked out a review of The Trip to Bountiful. For one thing, I'm twenty pounds lighter, and both my arms are still covered with the bruises that heart patients invariably bring home from the hospital as souvenirs of their stay (every shot the nurses give you leaves a bruise behind when you're taking daily doses of a blood thinner). Nor did the words that gush forth from my fingers on Tuesday mornings come quite so easily this time around. It took me an hour and a half longer than usual to finish my column.

Those weren't the only reminders of what I'd been through. I reviewed two plays this week. One was the last show I saw before going into the hospital--the one from whose preview I had to be helped into a cab by a press agent--and the other was the first I saw after coming home last Tuesday. It felt strange to open my notebook and look at the random phrases I'd scribbled down in the dark while watching Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life, wondering as I scribbled whether I'd live long enough to file my review. One of them was a line from Terrence McNally's script, a description of Bob Fosse, the director of Sweet Charity and Chicago: "All smiles and cigarette smoke." I thought of All That Jazz, the movie in which Fosse dramatized his first heart attack, the one he survived. (It was the second one that killed him.) The line was perfectly legible, as if the person sitting behind me had been shining a flashlight on my notebook while I wrote it down. I made a point of including it in the review.

At length I finished the piece and e-mailed it to my editor at the Journal, afraid it might not be up to par. I thought it was, but what did I know? Perhaps I'd lost my touch. A couple of hours later the copyeditor kicked it back with a couple of minor queries, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever else my brush with death had done to me, I could still write. The trick, I thought, will be to write a bit less, to spend more nights sitting at home listening to music and looking at the Teachout Museum, to knock off earlier each day and go to bed earlier each night and take a day or two off each month. Or maybe even each week.

All changed, changed utterly, I told myself, knowing too well that it won't be so easy as that. Every day I'll get out of bed and do battle with the demon who drives me, and every night I'll go to bed and rest up for the next day's fight. Some days I'll win, some days I won't. The trick, I suppose, will be to win more often than not, to slowly drain the congestion of overwork from my life as the doctors at Lenox Hill Hospital drained the excess fluid from my heart and lungs. Would there were a pill for that! Instead I must teach myself to make more room for life and love and everything else I spent the past few years pushing away. That's something I learned in the hospital: if you want to be loved, you have to make room.

I spent the rest of Tuesday watching old movies on TV, idly chatting with my mother about nothing in particular, and talking on the phone to friends who longed to know more about the changes in my life that began when I called 911 last week. I slept deeply and well, then awoke at six with new phrases forming in my head. Knowing there was no point to staying in bed, I got up to write my "Sightings" column for Saturday's Journal--but not before breakfast.

Posted by diacritical on December 22, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Notes on the way out the door

Happy holidays! Since arriving home Tuesday night, I've been sucked into the vortex of Christmas at the parents', a nonstop whirlwind of baking, wrapping, bow-tying, and, still, shopping, which is where we're headed now. A few items on the fly:

My poem is up today at Coudal Partners. I haven't had the guts to listen. Hope it turned out all right.

There are three really curious cats around here, and one enormous bedecked tree. They seem utterly disinclined to jump on it. Are stories of cats downing Christmas trees mainly apocryphal? Send your true tales of tree mayhem to me.

I'm about to be left behind! More later.

Posted by diacritical on December 22, 2005 12:13 PM | Permalink

OGIC: The art of eating

Not a lot of arts content from my corner this week, but I do have this recipe for the cookie that has been deemed best in show at our house this year.

Pecan Cups
1 cup flour
3 oz. cream cheese
1/4 lb. butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1 tbsp. melted butter
1 egg
1 cup chopped pecans
dash salt
3 drops vanilla

Make the dough by blending flour, cream cheese, and softened butter together well. In a separate bowl, combine remaining ingredients to make the filling. Roll dough into 1-inch balls and flatten evenly into mini-muffin pan cups, dough flush with tops of cups. Drop about a teaspoon of filling into each cup (do not overfill). Bake in a 350-degree oven for 25-30 minutes.

Walnuts would work, too. We doubled the recipe, a wise move since we ate half the results almost immediately.

UPDATE: A reader knowledgeable in these matters writes, "This recipe is an old Southern favorite of British origin. The�original was actually made with walnuts and was made southern with the�addition of pecans. If you have access to a southern garden-club or ladies-auxiliary cookbook you will see them called 'Pecan Tassies.'�No southern wedding reception or bridge club would be complete without them." Nor any post-Christmas drive across Michigan, as I learned today! Many thanks for the genealogy and proper title.

Posted by diacritical on December 23, 2005 1:27 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I think the name of leisure has come to cover three totally different things. The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing."

G.K. Chesterton, "Our Notebook," Illustrated London News (July 23, 1927)

Posted by diacritical on December 23, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Off I go

Not forever! But in light of my new resolve to take things easier, my plan for the coming week is to blog minimally--if at all. I might conceivably poke my head in once or twice, but don't count on seeing me again until next Friday.

Before I go, here's a sneak preview of my next "Sightings" column, "Not for Blacks Only," which will be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal:

Morgan Freeman may have a bone to pick with you--especially if you've ever had occasion to refer to him as "one of America's best black actors." Which he is, of course, the same way that Lynn Nottage is one of America's best black playwrights, or Martin Puryear one of America's best black sculptors. But the trouble with these three descriptions is that each contains the same needlessly limiting adjective. Mr. Freeman is one of America's best actors--period. To narrow the scope of his superiority to other actors with black skin would be like calling Helen Frankenthaler "one of America's best woman painters": True, yes, and totally beside the point....

Needless to say, there's plenty more where that came from. See for yourself--buy a copy of tomorrow's Journal and look me up.

One last thing: I suspect that most of you have some idea of how deeply touched I am by your kind words and best wishes. There is nothing I could possibly say that would do more than hint at what I'm feeling right now, so I'll put it as simply as I can: you have lifted up my heart.

Merry Christmas!

Posted by diacritical on December 23, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Remember me?

Not only am I not dead yet, but I'm back in The Wall Street Journal today with a review of two shows, Mrs. Warren's Profession and Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life:

George Bernard Shaw had all the defects of all his virtues. He offered Edwardian theatergoers a heady brew of progressive ideas--but the left-wing notions that propelled his once-controversial plays long ago lost their power to shock. His characters were forever tossing off speeches that crackled and fizzed with wit--but they never knew when to shut up. Even the best of his plays can be unutterably tedious in anything short of a near-perfect performance. Am I surprised, then, that the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival of "Mrs. Warren's Profession" is so exciting? Not even slightly. When it comes to my favorite Off Broadway company, I take such marvels for granted....

I wasn't around for the 1975 New York Shakespeare Festival revival of "Mrs. Warren's Profession," which starred Lynn Redgrave and Ruth Gordon, but I can't imagine it having been superior to this production, which ranks with "The Trip to Bountiful" and "Sweeney Todd" at the top of my list of new shows worth seeing....

It's not ungentlemanly to say that Chita Rivera is 72, since she makes no secret of it. Nor has she sought to conceal the fact that her "autobiographical" show, "Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life," was written by playwright Terrence McNally. For that matter, "The Dancer's Life" isn't even a one-woman show: Ms. Rivera does nearly all the talking, but she's backed by an ensemble of ten dancers and an on-stage orchestra. So if you were expecting something similar to "At Liberty," Elaine Stritch's brassily candid solo show about life upon the wicked stage, you're going to be surprised by "The Dancer's Life," which feels more like an as-told-to musical than a hot-dish gossipfest. It's brisk, slick, just a little bit impersonal--and boundlessly entertaining....

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today's Journal, or give yourself a Christmas present by going here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the complete text of my review (along with lots of other art-related stories).

Posted by diacritical on December 23, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

OGIC: Until my head stops spinning

I'm back in Chicago tonight, much against my will, and I'm afraid I don't have much left in the tank, figuratively or literally. Christmas was lovely but it was brutally compressed and fleeting. Can it have been only yesterday? My family was in nonstop action from ten in the morning until eleven at night, and when I awoke this morning the bags had to be packed and loaded, the kitty-cat medicated (pink calm-down pills to which she seems impervious), the road hit.

I'm kind of expecting the day at work tomorrow to shred me. But I hope and plan nevertheless to get something of some substance up here in the evening, however folded, spindled, and mutilated I may emerge. In the meantime, allow me to point you toward worthy content elsewhere:

- Cinetrix gifts us with not one, but two reviews of recent films over at Pullquote. They are David Cronenberg's History of Violence and Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale. Baumbach's film KIcking and Screaming recently made my Meme of Four list. (She also had a grade-A celeb sighting to ring in the holidays.)

- Quiet Bubble, a recent discoverer of Jane Austen, has posted a typically sharp review of the newest film adaptation. QB just gets better and better.

- Top-ten lists of the year's best cultural offerings are well and good and, well, unavoidable. I prefer the tack taken by M.S. Smith at CultureSpace, a brief conversational essay that doesn't confine itself to things that were new in 2005, but to things that were new to Smith. This has been up for a couple of weeks already, for all of which time I've been meaning to link to it. If I were to make a list of my top ten cultural discoveries of 2005, CultureSpace and Quiet Bubble would definitely be on it.

- More bookishly, Newsday has a round-up of several critics' favorite reads of the year. Among the experts are ALN blogroll mainstays Maud Newton and James Marcus. Remember, many of the books named will be published in paperback right around the corner (herein, I think, lies the real usefulness of these lists, to remind us of everything we failed to read but can soon read more cheaply by virtue of lagging).

Finally, an administrative note. I owe several of you email. Thanks awfully for writing, and please bear with me one more day. I'll be in touch tomorrow.

Posted by diacritical on December 27, 2005 1:43 AM | Permalink

OGIC: And furthermore

Last night I posted links to outstanding recent examples of blogger criticism, struck yet again by how thoroughly some bloggers are outperforming their counterparts in print. Now this morning I discover Tim Hulsey's fantastic post on Brokeback Mountain that has determined me to see the film. Here's a clip that gets to the heart of the matter:

For most of the film, Lee seems content to exploit and subvert convention, while subtly teaching his audiences new and more humane ways to experience cinema. In the closing scenes, however, Brokeback Mountain careens into what for most American audiences will be emotional terra incognita, with grief too deep for words or tears. In a way, the film is designed to prepare us for these final moments, when we're compelled to identify with a form of love that most of us have been conditioned not to take seriously. The film is a plea for empathy, not just in society or politics but in the American cinema as a whole--and it is in this last regard that Brokeback may be most revolutionary.

You should read the whole beautifully written, assiduously contextualized piece. Very little in current newspaper or magazine film criticism is the equal of Tim's work here or, indeed, the reviews I linked to in the post immediately below. I find rampant blogger triumphalism just as annoying as the next person, but to say that blogs like My Stupid Dog are lapping the print media seems to me to be simply stating the facts.

Posted by diacritical on December 27, 2005 12:49 PM | Permalink

OGIC: The year in reading

Of the new books I read and reviewed this year, these were the most memorable:

- Kevin Canty, Winslow in Love
- Caryl Philips, Dancing in the Dark
- Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown
- Kelly Braffet, Josie and Jack
- Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers
- Michael Ruhlman, House: A Memoir

Ruhlman is the exception here for contributing the only nonfiction title and for being the author whose other books I wasted the least time in acquiring--I believe Amazon had my order before I had finished off House. More on the delightful Mr. Ruhlman very soon--he has provided all of my pleasure reading for the last little while, I'm a little fixated on his work, and I'm in the middle of writing a long post about why. With any luck at all, I'll get it up here tomorrow night. With a bit more luck, I'll find time to say a little something about all of the titles listed above shortly thereafter. Stay tuned.

Posted by diacritical on December 29, 2005 2:25 AM | Permalink

OGIC: An advocate for Henry

Box of Books offers up five good reasons to read Henry James. I'm touched by the protectiveness of the post generally, and particularly by this intimation that he's discussed routinely enough to be the continual butt of humorous remarks at fashionable parties: "But I do like him, and in an effort to share the love, here's five reasons why you shouldn't laugh on cue the next time someone makes a Henry James joke." Unless you are going to be running into the ghost of H. G. Wells--

It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea, which has got to the corner of its den.

--it doesn't seem all that likely an eventuality. I think we should all agree now, though, that if any of us do find ourselves in such a painful situation we'll channel and even escalate Box of Books's admirable protective instinct, make a beeline for our coats, and storm out in righteous indignation. C'mon, he's the Master, it's the least you can do!

(Link courtesy of Dan Green.)

Posted by diacritical on December 29, 2005 2:30 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"If I got out of this, I would know it for ever. I would be grateful for every breath I breathed, every meal I ate, every night I felt the cool kiss of sheets, the peace of a bed behind a closed, a locked, door. Why had I never known this before? Why had my parents, my lost religion, never taught it to me? Anyway, I knew now. I had found it out for myself. Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it. Nothing makes one really grateful for life except the black wings of danger."

Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me (courtesy of Eric Felten)

Posted by diacritical on December 29, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
- Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)
- Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
- The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Abigail's Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Feb. 1)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
- The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Feb. 19)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Saturday, reviewed here)

Posted by diacritical on December 29, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"A job is home to a homeless man."

Clifford Odets, The Country Girl

Posted by diacritical on December 30, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Nothing to declare

I'd tell you what I did all week, except that I didn't do much of anything. I got eight hours of sleep every night and had breakfast every morning. I wrote two pieces, taking my time with both of them. I read a couple of books (right now I'm midway through Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede) and watched a half-dozen old movies. I took my mother out to dinner twice, eating as sensibly as it's possible to eat in southeast Missouri, not many of whose restaurants are heart-healthy. (If you know anything about Smalltown, U.S.A., you won't be surprised to hear that I stayed as far away as possible from this one.) I talked on the phone to Our Girl and a few friends with whom I hadn't spoken since I went into the hospital, but for the most part I fell pleasantly out of touch with the world.

That was my week, and now it's over. I'll be spending most of today making my slow way from my mother's house in Smalltown to my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I'm reliably informed that several bags' worth of snail mail await me. (Yes, it's mostly press releases, but apparently it looks intimidating.) I have a play to see on Saturday afternoon and another on Monday evening. I have pieces due next Tuesday and Thursday, and I head up to Boston a week from today to cover a revival of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit.

At first blush it sounds as if nothing has changed--and yet everything has changed, for I know that in between these various events I must live my life very differently, if I want to live at all. I have an appointment with my cardiologist on Tuesday. I expect him to lecture me sternly on all manner of things, and I mean to do just as he says. My list of New Year's resolutions is growing fast: I do solemnly swear to eat breakfast every day, go to the gym every weekday, spend a little time enjoying the Teachout Museum every afternoon, pay a visit or two to Central Park every week...et cetera, et cetera. I'm full of good intentions--how could I not be? But this is the most important one of all: I promise not to fall back into my old ways the first time I slip up. Because I will, repeatedly. Learning to live differently is no small task, least of all for a middle-aged workaholic accustomed to doing as he pleases, and New York is full of temptations.

No sooner will I step off the plane Friday afternoon than I'll feel the overwhelming urge to rev up my own engines, to rush back to my apartment and empty all those mailbags and start calling up everyone I know. Only I won't. I'll sit down, look happily at the art hanging on my living-room walls, and wait for the knot of tension inside my head to start unwinding. Then I'll take Cole Porter's advice: Why don't we try staying home?

That's my plan, anyway. Wish me luck--and a happy New Year!

Posted by diacritical on December 30, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink

TT: Life without Broadway

Friday again, but this week I didn't review any new plays in my Wall Street Journal drama column. Instead I took a look back at American theater in 2005:

What's wrong with Broadway? Nothing--and everything. Yes, I saw several Broadway shows I liked in the year just past, and a few that I loved. But only one of them, Joe Mantello's revival of "Glengarry Glen Ross," originated there. With that lone exception, all of the plays, productions and performances that impressed me most in 2005 came from Off Broadway, England or out of town.

Such is the new reality of American theater. Given the fearsome costs of mounting a Broadway production, nobody in his right mind is likely to gamble on a property that doesn't already have a solid track record. So in looking back on the year's highlights, I've decided to give Broadway a miss. Readers of this column already know how well I thought of "Doubt," "The Light in the Piazza," "Sweeney Todd" and "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee." What were the other must-see shows and performances, in New York and elsewhere?

No link, so for the answer, go out and buy a copy of today's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the complete text of my drama column (along with lots of other art-related stories). Start the year right!

UPDATE: The Journal has just posted a free link to this column. To read it, go here.

Posted by diacritical on December 30, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink