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January 31, 2006

TT: In lieu of an obit

Wendy Wasserstein died yesterday morning. I met her several years ago when I interviewed her for a story in Time about Central Park, a trilogy of one-act operas to which she had contributed a libretto. I liked her enormously--everybody did--and I was always pleased to run into her at New York City Ballet, which she frequented once upon a time. Then she dropped out of sight, had a baby, and more or less vanished from the theater world. Her plays were no longer being performed in New York by the time I became a drama critic, and it wasn't until last October that I had occasion to write about her in The Wall Street Journal.

Alas, her last play wasn't any good, and I said so. I hated to give Third a bad review, not least because I knew Wasserstein was sick, though I didn't know she was dying. (One of the characters in the play had cancer.) In fact, I didn't think much of any of Wasserstein's plays, and I dreaded having to say so in print, since she was an exceedingly nice lady. I fudged the point in my review, calling her "one of our best theatrical journalists, a keen-eared social observer with a knack for summing up cultural watershed moments like the coming of age of the baby boomers and putting them on stage to memorable effect." All true, and none of it incompatible with the fact that I considered her to be a glib, punch-pulling lightweight, a kind of feminist Neil Simon who never cut too close to the knuckle.

Needless to say, you won't find such heretical sentiments in any of today's obituaries. Even John Simon wrote affectionately about Wasserstein, making it clear that he liked her both as a writer and as a person. Might my own feelings about her work have been softened had I gotten to know her more than casually? It's quite possible. George Orwell once wrote a letter to Stephen Spender in 1938 in which he made this wholly characteristic confession:

You ask how it is that I attacked you not having met you, & on the other hand changed my mind after meeting you....Even if when I met you I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being & not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met & spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to, like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes & are lost forever more.

It is partly for similar reasons that I don't mix much in theatrical circles. In addition, The Wall Street Journal is extremely fussy about conflicts of interest (as it has to be, seeing as how it devotes so much of its space to financial affairs), so I mostly keep theater people at arm's length. If I did otherwise, I'd be a different kind of critic--not better or worse, just different. There are many ways to be a critic. I write about theater as an interested spectator. I write about the visual arts as a connoisseur and collector. I write about music as an ex-practitioner. I write about writing as a working professional. It's always me--everywhere you go, there you are--but it isn't hard to tell which me has the floor at any given moment.

In case you hadn't guessed, I'm feeling a little guilty about my review of Third, which is one of the risks an honest critic runs. It isn't the first time I've felt that way, and I'm sure it won't be the last. Criticism is a morally dangerous profession, and those who practice it without ever feeling guilty are...well, not very nice. As I wrote early in the life of this blog:

You don't review a college opera production the same way you review the Met. That's another reason why critics should ideally have hands-on experience in the areas about which they write: It teaches them proper respect for what Wilfrid Sheed calls "the simple miracle of getting the curtain up every night." It's hard to sing Tatyana in Yevgeny Onegin, or to dance in Concerto Barocco. It's scary to go out in front of a thousand people in a dumb-looking costume and put your heart and soul on the line. Unless you have some personal experience of what that feels like--of the problems, both psychological and practical, that stand in the way of getting the curtain up--then you may err on the side of an unrealistic perfectionism, and your reviews will be sterile and uncomprehending as a result.

None of this is to say that criticism should be bland and toothless. Sometimes it's your duty--your responsibility--to drop the big one. But you shouldn't enjoy it, not ever. And you should always make an effort to be modest when writing about people who can do something you can't, even when you don't think they do it very well.

That's the hard part.

Posted January 31, 12:13 PM

OGIC: Hello Teatro!

Hey, ALN pal and local public radio impresario Edward Lifson has a new blog! It's called Teatro Lifson, is part of the website of his Sunday morning arts show Hello Beautiful!, and is off to a very auspicious beginning. Edward is a great arts polymath, though he's especially passionate and knowledgeable about architecture and design. In fact, he was responsible for one of the great moments of Terry's visit to Chicago last weekend. Following the Chris Thile-Mike Marshall mandolin concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music, we strolled with my friend David down Lincoln Avenue to indulge in what turned out to be one of the best cups of hot chocolate I ever have encountered. En route, we passed a striking storefront, but it wasn't until we retraced our steps that I discovered it was none other than Louis Sullivan's last building, the Krause Music Store. And the only reason that I, alone among us, knew of the significance of the Krause Music Store? Mr. Edward Lifson, natch.

Last summer Edward hosted a special live edition of HB! devoted to music and architecture, which I attended. I wrote about it only briefly here, holding back the best material as the show hadn't aired yet. (It has now, and you can still listen.) Edward's guest for that show, Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson, ended the episode with a story about the symmetry of the ends of two great careers, Scott Joplin's and Louis Sullivan's. By the end of his life, each man had outlived the fame and fortune of his earlier career and, around the same time, each pursued what would be his last projects in relative obscurity. The last building Sullivan designed was the facade of the modest Krause shop; he needed the money, if you can believe that. Joplin's last surviving composition was the luminous "Magnetic Rag." That evening at the Cultural Center, Tim Samuelson had brought with him a player piano reel of "Magnetic Rag" that recorded Joplin's own performance--his last known recording of his last surviving composition. We looked at slides of Sullivan's building while listening to Joplin play. I don't know when else I've been in an audience that was simultaneously so hushed and so electrified by a recording. It was an amazing thing to see and, especially, to hear. And that's why it was so cool to run headlong into the Krause Music Store last weekend, even without the benefit of the proper soundtrack. And that's one of the reasons we might kind of gush when we say, Hello Teatro!

Posted January 31, 12:12 PM

TT: Pigeons on the grass

Fame is intense but fleeting in a TV-driven culture, which is one of the many reasons why I love watching the old What's My Line? kinescopes that air at three-thirty each morning on the Game Show Network. Most of the celebrities who appeared on the show between 1950 and 1967, when CBS cancelled it to make way for Mission: Impossible, are now dead, but a few are very much with us, though many of them are long forgotten. I saw an episode a couple of nights ago in which Mitch Miller was the mystery guest. The audience all but tore the roof off when he came on stage--yet who now remembers him save for pop-music historians and retired oboe players? On the other hand, Jerry Lewis, a guest panelist on another of last week's episodes, is both alive and well remembered, so much so that I'm actually giving serious thought to reading his new book, unlikely as it may sound.

The difference, of course, is that Lewis was a movie star. As a rule, TV stars are remembered until their shows are cancelled, after which they fade away quickly. Sometimes they find work in the legitimate theater, but it's been a long time since success on Broadway made anyone a household name. (Pop quiz for readers outside the New York area: who is Cherry Jones? Don't peek.) Yet the producers of What's My Line? regularly booked stage stars, confident that the show's viewers would know who they were. Sic transit gloria Broadway!

Ben Gazzara, the mystery guest on a 1961 What's My Line? that I saw recently, is a case in point. He created the role of Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof before relocating to Hollywood, where he appeared in a hit TV series, Run for Your Life, in 1965. Alas, he never quite managed to parlay his short-lived small-screen celebrity into bonafide big-screen stardom, though he's worked steadily ever since and turns up from time to time in choice little roles (he's in The Big Lebowski). Still, Gazzara is far from famous, and the fact that he starred in the original Broadway production of a celebrated American play is scarcely more than the tricky answer to a better-than-average trivia question, especially since some other fellow was tapped to play Brick in the movie.

It happens that Gazzara is returning to Broadway this spring: he's been cast in Lincoln Center Theater's revival of Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing, which opens April 17 at the Belasco Theatre. Odets, who died in 1963, is another one of those half-remembered names who used to be really, really big. In the Thirties he was one of the best-known American playwrights of his generation, a red-hot fellow traveler who palled around with all the big left-wing names (he commissioned Aaron Copland's wonderful Piano Sonata, for instance). Then, like Ben Gazzara, he moved to Hollywood, and now he's better known, if at all, for Sweet Smell of Success than Awake and Sing, Golden Boy, or even Waiting for Lefty.

It happens, too, that I've never seen a production of an Odets play, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing Awake and Sing, about which I first learned from reading "Clifford Odets: Poet of the Jewish Middle Class," one of Robert Warshow's finest essays (it's collected in The Immediate Experience, an essential book to which I paid tribute in the Teachout Reader). I've never seen Ben Gazzara on stage, either, though I remember watching Run for Your Life as a child, and more recently was impressed by the videotaped snippet of his stage performance as Brick that Rick McKay included in Broadway: The Golden Age.

I'm not going anywhere with this: I'm just rambling. It's the privilege of a blogger with a long memory who turns fifty next Monday. Believe it or not, I don't live in the past. No working journalist does, especially one with so many young friends. Even so, I do enjoy rummaging around in my well-stocked memory, and I don't mind admitting that there are times when I prefer communing with the increasingly distant past to grappling with the uncomfortably proximate present. Ben Gazzara, Clifford Odets, Aaron Copland, Robert Warshow, even Jerry Lewis: today they all seem far more real to me than the pretty people I'd be reading about in Entertainment Weekly if I read Entertainment Weekly. No doubt this has something to do with my recent brush with mortality. To borrow a line from Patrick O'Brian, I've been a bar or two behind ever since I got out of the hospital, and though I'm sure I'll catch up sooner or later, I find it oddly pleasant to linger among ghosts.

I reread Brideshead Revisited last week, and found that Evelyn Waugh had once again summed up my mood better than I could myself:

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, single, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl.

I, too, am surrounded by pigeons this morning, and I'll be sorry when the noon gun booms.

Posted January 31, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain.

Friedrich von Schiller, The Maid of Orleans

Posted January 31, 12:00 PM

OGIC: This morning's assignment

Just read Maud.

UPDATE: Also Outer Life. Then you can have a snack.

Posted January 31, 10:19 AM

January 30, 2006

TT: Who could ask for anything more?

I got up first thing Saturday morning, ate a whole-grain English muffin and a bowl of raisin bran, took a cab down to Integral Yoga in Chelsea, and spent a couple of hours twisting myself into heart-healthy positions. I came back to my Upper West Side apartment to take a shower, then picked up a Zipcar and drove to the Newark Museum of Art, where I spent a couple of hours looking at paintings like this and this.

Once I'd seen enough, I drove to Rutt's Hut and dined on a pair of "rippers" slathered in Rutt's secret relish, thereby satisfying to the fullest a long-standing wish. (No, they weren't the least bit heart-healthy, but ooooh, did they ever taste good!) I read the first chapter of Peter Ackroyd's newly published brief life of J.M.W. Turner as I stood at the counter.

I popped a Fats Waller album into the CD player of my Zipcar as I drove home on the New Jersey Turnpike. At five o'clock on the nose I pulled off the exit ramp of the George Washington Bridge and onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. The sun was mere seconds from setting and the bright blue sky was flooded with Turneresque orange light (it looked something like this). Mr. Waller obligingly chose that precise moment to launch into It's a Sin to Tell a Lie.

I dropped the car off at a garage around the corner from my apartment, picked up some oatmeal-raisin cookies and two bottles of lemon-lime seltzer at the neighborhood deli, and spent the evening watching Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait. As Laird Cregar leered diabolically at Don Ameche, I said to myself, I couldn't possibly be happier.

I hope your weekend was as good as mine.

Posted January 30, 12:00 PM

TT: Book 'em, Sony!

Some of you may have read my Wall Street Journal column about the return of the e-book, in which I reported on the Sony Reader and speculated on the possible effects of the e-book on the culture of reading and writing. (If you didn't see the column, it's here.) In that column I made a point of saying that eventual popular acceptance of the e-book was inevitable:

So will it fly? I don't know. Still, I'm certain that something like the Sony Reader will catch on, if not this year then in a short time. The phenomenal success of the iPod strongly suggests that many, perhaps most, consumers are ready to start buying digital books on the Web and storing and reading them electronically.

I did this for three reasons. One was rhetorical: I thought it would make the column more effective to take the coming of the e-book for granted. One was practical: my "Sightings" columns are only 850 words long, and I preferred to devote my space to speculating on the long-term effects of the e-book rather than taking the time to explain why I thought it would become popular. And one was a simple matter of honesty: that's really what I think.

I got an e-mail the other day from my friend Rick Brookhiser, author of many fine books about the founding fathers (I especially like this one), in which he begged to differ:

e-book = iPod? Same solution, different problem, so maybe not.

The iPod created a universe of immediately available songs--not in the order the Beatles laid the album out; not with the dumb songs included (don't like "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"? Skip it!). Glenn Gould's paradise had arrived, as you wrote in the Teachout Reader.

The DVD does the same thing for movies. Watch that car chase fifteen times!

But, unlike albums/CDs or movies, readers already enjoy immediate availability, in the form of pages. This was the book's great advance over the scroll, and the reciting bard. You can skip ahead, go back, read one paragraph over and over, etc. If you had been alive in the dark ages, or whenver scribes began writing in books, you would have commented on it in Ye Teachoute Reader (Gutenberg made reproduction faster).

The e-book will NOT increase immediate availability, because you must hit a control of some sort to move. Even a thumb click or a finger tap is as much of an effort as a page turn. (The e-book you showed doesn't even have two pages open at once, though that presumably is fixable.)

The great gain of the e-book is having several thousand books in one little machine. But apart from the psychotically inattentive--a large audience, given computers and the tempo of TV editing--people read one book at a time, or at most two or three. In that situation the e-book provides no advantages, or few.

What e-books will make wonderful is research--Grove, the encyclopedia, and all those bound volumes of the Atlantic Monthly may well be killed by them.

If your prophecy is fulfilled, and all books are sent to a landfill, in five years some geek in Bangalore will announce breathlessly his newest discovery--the printout, bound together with glue for easy live-ware accessibility.

These are all good points. The printed book, as I said in my column, is an "elegant" technology, meaning that it solves a great many problems in an attractive, simple, and economical way, and e-books will not catch on if they don't solve the same problems with comparable elegance. But assuming they do, here are some of the further advantages of the e-book:

- It will allow you to buy books without going to a brick-and-mortar store and have them delivered to your computer more or less instantaneously.

- In theory, it will give you immediate access to a vastly larger number of books than even amazon.com can provide.

- You'll be able to carry dozens of books with you wherever you go (unlike Rick, I think this is one of the e-book's biggest draws).

- Books in bulk are heavy and awkward and take up a huge amount of space. E-books take up no physical "space" at all, thus freeing up wall and storage space--a major consideration for apartment-dwellers and other people with good-sized personal libraries. Yes, books do furnish a room, but I'd rather furnish my living room with more art--and I'd be more than happy not to have to box up my thousand-odd books the next time I move to a new apartment.

In addition, the e-book is a technology so powerful and far-reaching in its implications that I'm sure it will offer countless additional advantages I can't even begin to foresee. Scott Walters, who blogs at Theatre Ideas, suggested two of them in this e-mail he sent after reading my column:

As a 47-year-old recent convert to the iPod (which I use for listening to books on tape from Audible.com), I am fascinated by the new Sony e-book hardware. As a college professor, I can see all kinds of opportunities. For instance, what if students could download all of their textbooks to their Sony e-book--no more huge backpacks filled with a dozen heavy textbooks! Also, it might help us disconnect from the pirates running current textbook publishers. I published a textbook with McGraw-Hill that is about 120 pages and lists for $30, which is ridiculous! I would certainly consider pulling the book from the publisher and selling it myself via download. This could be a real solution for the student!

All of which serves as a reminder that the coming of the e-book will trigger the law of unintended consequences. That's what I was getting at in my column:

Best-selling novelists, for instance, will soon be in a position to "publish" their own books, pocketing all the profits--but so will niche-market authors whose books don't sell in large enough quantities to interest major publishers.

Might the e-book make the writing of serious literary fiction more economically viable? Consider the experience of Maria Schneider, the jazz composer whose CDs are sold exclusively on her Web site, www.mariaschneider.com. Ms. Schneider uses ArtistShare, a new Web-based technology that makes it easier for musicians to sell self-produced recordings online. Not only did she win a Grammy for her first ArtistShare release, "Concert in the Garden," but she kept all the proceeds as well. Several other well-known jazz musicians, including the guitarist Jim Hall and the trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, have since signed up with ArtistShare, which frees them from the need to compromise with money-conscious record-company executives. Will e-books have a similarly liberating effect on authors? I wouldn't be surprised.

I'm not saying, by the way, that the unintended consequences of the coming of the e-book will all be pleasant or desirable. Our Girl and I went shopping the other day at a well-stocked brick-and-mortar bookstore in Chicago. I bought three books for myself and a belated Christmas present for OGIC, and enjoyed the experience immensely. As we drove home afterward, we chatted about how delightful it is to browse the shelves of a good bookstore. But is it delightful enough to survive the coming of the e-book? I doubt it. To be sure, I had a lovely time--but it was the first time I'd done any serious in-person book-browsing in nearly a year. I now buy virtually all of my books online.

As I wrote in the Journal:

Yes, I miss the bookstores of my youth, and I'm sure I'll miss the handsomely bound volumes that fill the shelves in my apartment as well (though I won't miss dusting them, or toting them around by the half-dozen whenever I go on vacation). The printed book is a beautiful object, "elegant" in both the aesthetic and mathematical senses of the word, and its invention was a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture. But it is also a technology--a means, not an end. Like all technologies, it has a finite life span, and its time is almost up.

Am I right? We'll see--soon.

Posted January 30, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Perhaps the strangest aspect of life is the sense it conveys of having a pattern--everything falling into place, nothing happening by chance; outward phenomena an image of the inward reality; and therefore inevitable in their relation to that inward reality."

Malcolm Mugggeridge, Affairs of the Heart (courtesy of Christopher Porterfield)

Posted January 30, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon -
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

Philip Larkin, "Coming"

Posted January 30, 2:29 AM

January 27, 2006

TT: Two women on Mozart...

"We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy."

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

"The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."

Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

Posted January 27, 12:13 PM

TT: ...and one more for good measure

"There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."

Camille Paglia, interview, International Herald Tribune (April 26, 1991)

Posted January 27, 12:12 PM

TT: Mixed doubles

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I report on my recent playgoing in New Haven, Connecticut, where I saw the Long Wharf Theatre's production of Private Lives and the Yale Repertory Theatre's production of The People Next Door:

Is there a more perfect comedy than "Private Lives"? It's not my favorite Noël Coward play (I prefer "Present Laughter"), but for sheer elegance of craft it can't be beat, and it's madly funny to boot. Written in a mere four days, it contains more of Coward's best-known lines than any other play, from "Very flat, Norfolk" to "Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs," and it never fails to make its effect, even when performed by amateurs. I have yet to see a hopelessly bad "Private Lives," and Long Wharf Theatre's new production is splendid....

Of the making of tendentious plays about 9/11 and its aftermath there is, apparently, no end. I have yet to see a watchable one, and Henry Adam's "The People Next Door," now playing at the Yale Repertory Theatre, is no exception. Mr. Adam is a Brit, and like virtually all British playwrights a Man of the Left, which tells you most of what you need to know about this ostensibly black comedy about Nigel (Manu Narayan, lately of "Bombay Dreams"), a wimpy, heroin-sniffing slacker of "mixed, indeterminate race" (so says the script) who falls afoul of Phil (Christopher Innvar), a fascist-type Scotland Yard detective in search of a likely-looking pigeon to spy on the neighborhood mosque. What ensues is utterly, agonizingly predictable...

No link, and that's only a sample of this morning's column. To read the rest, go to the nearest newsstand and plunk down a dollar for a copy of the Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the full text of my review, together with many other worthy art-related stories.

Posted January 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Words to the wise

This just in from the Duplex Cabaret Theatre:

We're continuing our CINEMA DUPLEX series this Monday, January 30th at 8 p.m. with a free screening of Broadway: The Golden Age. I'm thrilled to say that the film's director, Rick McKay, will drop by before we see the film to chat and answer questions.

If you haven't seen this acclaimed and enormously important documentary, or even if you have, I urge you to come. It's an essential recollection of the history of the Great White Way, told by the people who were there. There are dozens of interviews from the likes of Stephen Sondheim, Barbara Cook, Bea Arthur, Elaine Stritch, Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury and the list goes on and on...

So come--Monday, the 30th, 8 p.m. Free with a two-drink minimum. These intimate screenings in our 70-seat theatre have been such fun, and the 30th will be no exception, seeing this film with a room full of theatre fans. I can't wait to chat with Mr. McKay about putting this enormous undertaking together.

I couldn't agree more. Not only have I raved about the film, both here and in The Wall Street Journal, but I met Rick McKay for the first time in December and can personally vouch for his capacities as a raconteur.

To make reservations, call 212-255-5438.

Posted January 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Contentment is the drug of fools. I prefer truth. And the truth is that we are animals scratching and rutting under an empty sky. Here in this theatre we can pretend that our lives have meaning. But the pretence only holds if we are given the truth. That is why I wish to see you shine on this stage, that is why, selfishly, I wish to train you. The theatre is my soothing drug, and my cynic's illness is so far advanced that my physic must be of the highest quality."

Stephen Jeffreys, The Libertine (courtesy of twang twang twang)

Posted January 27, 12:00 PM

TT: Just in case you were wondering

I kept all my promises to myself (and to you), and had a delightful day.

Ha!

Posted January 27, 10:48 AM

TT: Birthday boy

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born 250 years ago today, and everybody's writing about him. Arts & Letters Daily has a roundup of links at the top of today's page (including a link to my own essay in last month's issue of Commentary, which will be available for free on line through the end of January). I especially like Tim Page, who quotes the ever-quotable Ferruccio Busoni:

He disposes of light and shadow, but his light does not pain and his darkness still shows clear outlines. Even in the most tragic situations he still has a witticism ready; in the most cheerful, he is able to draw a thoughtful furrow in his brow. He is young as a boy and wise as an old man--never old-fashioned and never modern, carried to the grave and always alive.

If you're in the mood to listen to something beautiful, my Commentary essay ends with a list of ten of my favorite recordings of works by Mozart in minor keys. This is the one to buy if you're only buying one.

UPDATE: Thanks to Modern Kicks, I found this link to a wonderful W.H. Auden poem about The Magic Flute that (horrors!) I didn't know. It's on PostClassic, Kyle Gann's artsjournal.com music blog. (In addition to the complete text, Gann's posting also contains a link to an audio file of Auden reading the poem.)

Posted January 27, 9:11 AM

TT: Minority report

Just to keep you on your toes amid all the Mozart-related hoopla, here's the first paragraph of an essay on Haydn I wrote for Commentary:

In 1945, Arturo Toscanini told the music critic B.H. Haggin that he preferred Haydn to Mozart. "I will tell you frankly: sometimes I find Mozart boring," he said to his astonished interviewer. "Not G-minor [the G Minor Symphony, K. 550]: that is great tragedy; and not concerti; but other music. Is always beautiful--but is always the same."

I don't agree, but I do know what he meant.

(If you're curious, this CD contains Toscanini's recordings of the Mozart G Minor and Haydn "Surprise" symphonies.)

Posted January 27, 9:10 AM

TT: Rolling over

I just spent a pleasant hour doing some long-overdue maintenance on "Sites to See," our blogroll. Here's what I did:

- I added a number of interesting-looking new blogs and sites (new to us, anyway) on various subjects, all of which are marked with asterisks. We'll leave them on the roll for a month or so to see whether they're full-fledged keepers or mere flashes in the pan.

- I revisited and reconsidered the last batch of starred blogs and sites. Some made the cut, and are no longer starred. Some didn't, and are no longer there.

- I knocked off a half-dozen other blogs that had become inactive, insufficiently active, or irrelevant to the interests of our regular readers.

- I moved a couple of blogs to more suitable categories.

Take a look at the new starred blogs in the right-hand column and see what you think. As always, please let us know about any other high-quality art-related blogs that you'd like us to add to "Sites to See."

Posted January 27, 1:33 AM

January 26, 2006

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. 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 July 2, 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 Apr. 8)
- Mrs. Warren's Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
- The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, extended through Mar. 11)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
- In the Continuum (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Saturday)

Posted January 26, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The truth is that we mediocre men cannot even imagine what it is to be a great man like Mozart and Shakespeare and thus to be free from the domination of the contemporary prejudices, beliefs, morals, artistic rules, scruples (call them what you will) with which even the most enlightened of us are--often unconsciously--obsessed."

W.J. Turner, Mozart: The Man and His Works (courtesy of Bill Kristol)

Posted January 26, 12:00 PM

TT: Call me Bartleby

Three weeks ago I resumed a more temperate version of my regular schedule. Since then I've seen plays in Washington, D.C., New Haven, and Chicago, from the last of which I returned two days ago. My trusty old iBook blew up and I bought a replacement. It wasn't ready for me until yesterday afternoon, so I went downtown yesterday morning to write my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal on an unoccupied terminal, then picked up my new computer on the way back home and spent the afternoon breaking it in. Last night I went to a Broadway show, my first since the night before I went into the hospital. I had dinner with a friend after the show, then came home, answered my e-mail, and read a few pages of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop before falling asleep.

I woke up this morning at nine-thirty, an hour later than my normal get-up-and-go time. As I descended from the loft in which I spend my nights, it struck me that I had nothing whatsoever to do today: no deadlines, no shows to see, no meals with friends, no plans of any kind. For a moment I felt myself revving up, trying to think of culture-related activities with which to fill all those empty hours. Then a new, unfamiliar reflex kicked in. Why not do nothing? I asked myself, and a smile flickered across my face.

The New Me has one important thing in common with the Old Me, which is that we're both having trouble getting used to the Concept of the Weekend. The problem is that while most people take Saturday and Sunday off, I don't: I usually go to the theater, and for me that's work, not pleasure (not necessarily pleasure, to be exact). I write my Journal columns every Tuesday and every other Wednesday, which means that my "weekends" fall some time between Tuesday afternoon and Friday evening. The habits of a lifetime tell me I ought to be working during that time, but the realities of my new life as a middle-aged drama critic with acute workaholic tendencies and a recent history of congestive heart failure demand a change of schedule. This morning--for the first time--I got the message, loud and clear.

So what am I going to do with myself today? Well, I think I'll start by popping a Bocaburger in the microwave and a whole-grain English muffin in the toaster and taking a Fuji apple out of the crisper. After lunch I'll put my clothes on (yes, I'm writing these words in the unclothed state) and stroll over to the Central Park reservoir for a nice long walk. When I'm done with that, I might go to the Metropolitan Museum, which I haven't visited since well before my illness. Or not: I might come straight home. Either way I'll pick up my laundry on the way back to the apartment, then take a nap, followed by an early, solitary dinner at Good Enough to Eat. I might spend part of the evening pruning my CD collection or cleaning out the living-room closet. Or not: I might watch a movie on TV instead. Whatever I end up doing, though, I'll definitely round out the evening by calling up my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., and finding out what she did all day. Then I'll put on the new Chris Thile-Mike Marshall album, post Friday's blog entries, check my e-mail, spend a few minutes gazing happily at the Teachout Museum, and climb back into the loft to read a bit more of Scoop before falling asleep.

Not very exciting, is it? I mean, here I am, a compulsive aesthete in Manhattan, swimming in a sea of cultural possibilities. How dare I fritter away a whole day and night when I could be hitting the boulevards in search of illumination? But I prefer not to. Instead, I'm going to spend Thursday doing what I want to do when I want to do it, not including anything remotely resembling work. What's more, I expect to have a perfectly lovely time. How about that?

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time for lunch. See you tomorrow.

Posted January 26, 11:15 AM

January 25, 2006

TT: Free at last

I'm computing again. Yes, I have a mess to clean up, but I expect to resume normal blogging in the next day or two.

Whew.

Posted January 25, 4:29 AM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"Ask him to make a film about happiness and he'd have gone fishing, or got drunk. But give him a story about more murders than anyone can keep up with, or explain, and somehow he made a paradise. Maybe he needed a cover, some way of seeming tough, cool and superior, if he was ever going to do happiness."

David Thomson on Howard Hawks, The Big Sleep

Posted January 25, 2:23 AM

TT: Almanac

"I am constitutionally a martyr to boredom, but never in Europe have I been so desperately and degradingly bored as I was during the next four days; they were as black and timeless as Damnation; a handful of fine ashes thrown into the eyes, a blanket over the face, a mass of soft clay knee deep. My diary reminds me of my suffering in those very words, but the emotion which prompted them seems remote. I know a woman who is always having babies; every time she resolves that that one shall be the last. But, every time, she forgets her resolution, and it is only when her labour begins that she cries to midwife and husband, 'Stop, stop; I've just remembered what it is like. I refuse to have another.' But it is then too late. So the human race goes on. Just in this way, it seems to me, the activity of our ant-hill is preserved by a merciful process of oblivion. 'Never again,' I say on the steps of the house, 'never again will I lunch with that woman.' 'Never again,' I say in the railway carriage, 'will I go and stay with those people.' And yet a week or two later the next invitation finds me eagerly accepting. 'Stop,' I cry inwardly, as I take my hostess's claw-like hand. 'Stop, stop,' I cry in my tepid bath; 'I have just remembered what it is like. I refuse to have another.' But it is too late."

Evelyn Waugh, Remote People

Posted January 25, 2:23 AM

OGIC: Man minus machine

Cheerio, cheerios! (This is a pretty considerable term of endearment in my book, but you'll know you're really in good when I call you my little rice chex.) Terry wanted me to tell you he's back in New York but without benefit of a working computer, which, logistically speaking, is making meeting his deadlines highly challenging and blogging highly improbable. He hopes to be back later this week, the less late the better.

A wonderful time was had by all during Terry's visit to Chicago. We spent Saturday and Sunday running around and taking things in before kicking back Monday and doing whatever we felt like. This amounted to very little. We ran some of my errands, watched a video, planted ourselves in the living room to read our books, went out to dinner, and read some more. This to me is the lap of luxury: sitting around with a friend reading books, making as much or as little conversation as you like because you've been friends long enough and well enough to enjoy shared silence as much as chatter. I once planned an entire vacation in Maine around this very activity, with another friend, and ended up discovering the glorious Dalziel and Pascoe in the process. This weekend was, of course, the first time I'd seen Terry since before he was sick, and it seemed especially right to spend some time simply sitting in a room together, laughing at the cat's delicate snoring and reading each other the occasional highlight from our books. Normally during these trips, we barely pause to tie our shoes.

But the high-gear part of the weekend was excellent too. It began with a blistering, Bach-graced double-mandolin concert at Chicago's comfy, intimate Old Town School of Folk Music--where I'd see damn near anything--and included as well two utterly absorbing plays at two favorite Chicago theaters. First it was Much Ado About Nothing at Chicago Shakespeare, airy and wry with an endearingly clownish Benedick and an imperturbable Beatrice. We then traveled south to the Court Theatre, in my own backyard, for a production of August Wilson's "Fences" that served as my introduction to the play. And an auspicious meeting it was--a meticulously crafted yet rawly powerful production that's especially distinguished by electrifying performances from each and every cast member. I can't speak for Terry (he'll say his piece on both plays in an upcoming WSJ column), but here's a great American play I took my sweet time getting around to seeing, and this was a production to make me glad I waited.

Thanks for being patient with us earlier this week. One or both of us will be back soon with more blogging. And I still owe a bunch of you email, which I promise soon.

Posted January 25, 2:11 AM

January 24, 2006

TT: Almanac

"I don't really like Shakespeare on the screen at all--the shot is too big for the cannon. The later plays, like Lear, are too big even for the theatre."

Laurence Olivier, interview, London Observer (1937)

Posted January 24, 12:00 PM

January 23, 2006

TT: Checking in from the road

I came back from New Haven long enough to take my ailing computer to the shop, then hit the road again for Chicago. Since then Our Girl and I have been tearing around town for the past couple of days, seeing shows of various kinds--I'll let her tell you all about it the first chance she gets. I'll be back in New York some time on Tuesday, and I hope I'll be plugging back into the 'sphere fairly shortly thereafter, equipment permitting. Meanwhile, go visit some of those other cool blogs listed in "Sites to See."

Not much later.

Posted January 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"'I know most men go in for love affairs,' he said. 'Some of them can't help it. They can't get on at all without women, but there are plenty of others--I daresay you haven't come across them much--who don't really care about that sort of thing, but they don't know any reason why they shouldn't, so they spend half their lives going after women they don't really want. I can tell you something you probably don't know. There are men who have been great womanizers in their time and when they get to my age and don't want it any more and in fact can't do it, instead of being glad of a rest, what do they do but take all kinds of medicines to make them want to go on? I've heard fellows in my club talking about it.'"

Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

Posted January 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Freebie

The Wall Street Journal has posted a free link to my latest "Sightings" column (it's about the return of the e-book). To read it, go here.

Posted January 23, 10:27 AM

January 20, 2006

TT: New life for an old hit

Friday again, and I'm back in The Wall Street Journal, this time with reviews of two shows now playing in Washington, D.C., The Subject Was Roses and Damn Yankees:

Frank D. Gilroy has been in show business for a long time--he goes all the way back to the golden age of live TV drama and, more recently, was a pioneer of independent filmmaking--but it's a safe bet that when the roll is called up yonder, he'll be remembered for his play "The Subject Was Roses," which has just been revived at the Kennedy Center. The sleeper hit of the 1963-64 season, it ran for two years on Broadway and bagged the Triple Crown of theatrical prizes: the best-play Tony, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize....

Revisiting the hit shows of yesteryear is often illuminating, not least because they sometimes prove on further acquaintance to have been more than merely commercial in their appeal. Such is the case with "The Subject Was Roses." No, it isn't a deathless masterpiece, but it's a solid little job of dramatic work, a period piece that has outlived its period, and if the Kennedy Center revival leaves much to be desired, it's still good enough to be worth seeing....

"Damn Yankees," now playing at Washington's Arena Stage, is one of those second-tier musicals of the '50s that's stageworthy enough to be revived with some frequency but whose score is too bland to be truly memorable. Even so, this 1955 tale of a paunchy, middle-aged baseball fan who cuts a deal with the devil to help out his beloved Washington Senators (the team, not the politicians) has its fair share of bright spots, and Molly Smith, the company's artistic director, has given it an exemplary staging-in-the-round...

No link. To read the whole thing (which I heartily recommend), go to the nearest newsstand and spend a dollar on a copy of the Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the complete text of my review, together with plenty of other worthy art-related stories.

Posted January 20, 12:00 PM

TT: A hundred books in your pocket

I'm not really here. I'm on my way back from New Haven, where I saw two plays, visited the Yale Art Gallery and ate pizza (shhh!). Our Girl has kindly posted today's items for me.

I'll be flying to Chicago tomorrow afternoon to meet the lady in question, mere hours after my biweekly "Sightings" column is published in the "Pursuits" section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal. Here's a little taste:

The e-book is back. So are the technophobes who swear it'll never catch on. They were right last time, and they might be right this time, too. Sooner or later, though, they'll be wrong--and when they are, your life will change.

The word "e-book" is short for "electronic book." The concept isn't new--the complete texts of countless classics have long been available on the Web in digitized form. (Seventeen thousand of them can be downloaded for free at www.gutenberg.org.) The catch is that until now, there hasn't been a user-friendly way to read e-books. Few people enjoy reading book-length documents on a conventional computer screen, and though hand-held e-book readers went on the market six years ago, they were insufficiently convenient to use and failed to interest the book-buying public.

Now Sony has announced plans to market a paperback-sized e-book reader that makes use of E Ink, a new display technology...

As always, there's lots more where that came from. See for yourself--buy a copy of tomorrow's Journal and look me up.

Posted January 20, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.

Philip Lopate, "We Who Are Your Closest Friends" (courtesy of Ms. Pratie Place)

Posted January 20, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Attention, far-flung correspondents!

Terry returns to New York tomorrow, but he's asked me to warn all and sundry that his computer is out of commission and he's not receiving his email. Speaking of which, I owe some of you email of my own, though I have no such excuse. You'll hear from me tonight if I can keep the old eyes open, otherwise over the weekend.

Posted January 20, 12:00 PM

January 19, 2006

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. 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 July 2, 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 Apr. 8)
- In the Continuum (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, extended through Feb. 18)
- Mrs. Warren's Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
- The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Feb. 19)

Posted January 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I don't have an interesting enough life for a memoir--unless I get to fudge and exaggerate and lie. But then that's fiction."

Lorrie Moore, interviewed by Angela Pneuman (The Believer, October 2005, courtesy of Maud Newton)

Posted January 19, 12:00 PM

January 18, 2006

TT: Almanac

"Though most of us would not write except for money we would not write any differently for more money."

Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days

Posted January 18, 12:00 PM

OGIC: So many books

James Marcus, who writes with a veteran's experience, has the best reflections I've seen on the recently released nominations for this year's National Book Critics Circle awards. Glad to see Mary Gaitskill's Veronica pick up another nomination. I actually received this novel for Christmas and had commenced reading it when it met with an awful fate that I won't detail here except to fleetingly speculate that my cat is secretly in the employ of Pantheon Books. If I was hesitating to buy a second copy, this latest manifestation of apparent critical unanimity in Gaitskill's favor is likely to nudge me off of the fence in the direction of the bookstore. Full disclosure: I worked for the publisher of Gaitskill's first two books, the short story collection Bad Behavior and the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin (shame about the paperback edition's terrible cover art, by the way), and admired both excessively. When Gaitskill's second book of stories, Because They Wanted To, came along, I found the first few stories disappointing and put it aside, and wondered how partisan my embrace of the previous books had been. Subsequent rereadings proved it to be genuine and deserved, and I awaited the arrival of a second Gaitskill novel in a state of anticipation that is now trebled, at least.

Clearly I am going to replace the book.

But tonight I was placating myself with random snippets of Two Girls, and I found a passage to carry me back to the subject of my most recent post, Henry James, and the "idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment":

The boundaries of my inner world did not extend out, but in, so that there was a large area of blank whiteness starting at my most external self and expanding inward until it reached the tiny inner province of dazzling color and activity that it safeguarded, like the force field of clouds and limitless night sky that surrounded the island of Never-Never Land.

Justine Shade, the speaker here, is a sad, solemn woman with a grim past. That she has an inner life so vibrant with "dazzling color and activity" but so deeply buried is an ambivalent wonder. I love Gaitskill's subtle variation on a common way of representing the embattled self: we often imagine a troubled person swaddling herself in the padding of some false persona in order to guard a true, inner self that is breakable, but we--or at least I--almost never imagine that what such a person is foremost protecting is a kind of happiness. With prose that's beautifully unpolished, Gaitskill has a way of showing you what you might already know without realizing it.

Moving along from one lit cabal to another, the entire slate of winter nominees is being revealed, one day at a time, at the Litblog Co-op this week. Entries from nominators Dan Wickett and Sam Golden Rule Jones are already up for your delectation.

Posted January 18, 2:24 AM

January 17, 2006

TT: Almanac

"When the first of August came round, the Professor realized that he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week. But he had been doing a good deal besides--something he had never before been able to do.

"St. Peter had always laughed at people who talked about 'day-dreams,' just as he laughed at people who naively confessed that they had 'an imagination.' All his life his mind had behaved in a positive fashion. When he was not at work, or being actively amused, he went to sleep. He had no twilight stage. But now he enjoyed this half-awake loafing with his brain as if it were a new sense, arriving late, like wisdom teeth. He found he could lie on his sand-spit by the lake for hours and watch the seven motionless pines drink up the sun. In the evening, after dinner, he could sit idle and watch the stars, with the same immobility."

Willa Cather, The Professor's House

Posted January 17, 12:00 PM

TT: Moving right along

I've been missing "About Last Night," which is why I blogged so much yesterday. It felt gooood. Alas, January is my time to travel, not for fun but for my Wall Street Journal drama column: Broadway openings dwindle to near-nonexistence, giving me the opportunity to cram in a few out-of-town shows before the rush resumes. I've already been to Washington, D.C. (about which more on Friday) and am headed for New Haven on Wednesday and Chicago on Saturday. All this notwithstanding, I remain determined to keep a lid on my lurking workaholism. I went to the Jazz Standard last night to hear Julia Dollison, but otherwise I've been sticking close to home in between trips.

No doubt you can guess the punchline: I don't expect to be blogging very much until the middle of next week, though Our Girl and I will likely post a bit during my trip to Chicago. (As always, I'll be her happy houseguest.) In addition, I plan to add several interesting-looking new blogs to "Sites to See" and update the Top Five list semi-regularly, and I'll also continue to post almanac entries whenever I'm in town.

Please don't forget about me while I'm gone! I shall return.

Posted January 17, 10:03 AM

January 16, 2006

TT: Entry from an unkept diary

I went to Washington, D.C., last week to see the Kennedy Center's revival of Frank Gilroy's The Subject Was Roses, mainly because Bill Pullman, one of my favorite not-quite-movie-stars, was in the cast. Recalling his witty, sharply drawn performances in The Last Seduction and Zero Effect, I took for granted that Pullman would be playing the part of the young GI newly returned from World War II, and was surprised to find that he'd been cast as the boy's father. That's all wrong, I thought. He's too young to play the father of a soldier. Then Pullman started talking about himself and I started counting on my fingers, and within a few minutes it hit me that the character he was playing had to be forty-eight or forty-nine years old--my age. No sooner did I return to New York than I looked Pullman up on the Internet Movie Database, where I learned that he was born in 1953.

The perception of age is a tricky business. Most people, for instance, think I'm a good deal younger than I am, and are astonished to learn that I've reached the eve of my fiftieth birthday. This is partly because I have a young-looking face, but I suspect it also has a good deal to do with the fact that I never quite got around to embracing adult life: I'm a childless singleton who spends most of his nights on the town and hasn't held a nine-to-five job for years. You might mistake me for a wastrel if I didn't work so hard, and you wouldn't know that if you didn't know me fairly well.

It is, I suppose, an odd life, and it doesn't always please me. Sometimes I wish I had a job that I could put behind me at day's end, or that I were comfortably ensconced in a nice suburban ranch house with a loving wife and a child or two. This dissatisfaction has grown more marked in recent years, though never overwhelmingly so: I know how lucky I am, and how well my catch-as-catch-can lifestyle suits my temperament. The trouble is that it isn't nearly so well suited to the diminished energies of old age, and more and more I wonder whether I may have doomed myself to the fearful fate of Aesop's grasshopper, who fell on lean times when he finally outlived his good luck.

Robert Frost wrote a poem warning grasshoppers to change their heedless ways:

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

At least I've done one thing to prepare for later disregard: I have an abundance of young friends. Rereading Martin Stannard's biography of Evelyn Waugh the other day, I came across a remark Waugh made to an interviewer in 1953:

One makes friends up to one's thirties, quarrels with them between 45 and 55, and makes new ones in the sixties. Between 45 and 55 is an irritable time. In middle age one thinks of the young with distaste as a poor imitation of oneself. When one is older one realises that they are quite different people and they become interesting.

That isn't quite how I feel--for one thing, it's been years since I last quarrelled with a friend--but I do think Waugh was right about the nature of the fascination that the young exert on the old. I first started making younger friends around the time I turned forty, and their companionship turned out to be one of the happiest things about the decade that followed. Of course a friend isn't the same thing as a child or a spouse (or a big fat pension, for that matter). Still, I have a feeling that my young friends will do even more to brighten the next chapter of my odd, interesting life.

Posted January 16, 12:00 PM

TT: Elsewhere

In case you haven't noticed, I've been easing my way back into blogging since I got out of the hospital. I've also been slow to resume surfing the Web, not because I love it less but because I'm afraid of it. For the recovering workaholic, a computer with a high-speed connection to the Internet is a perpetual temptation to excess, and I'm determined not to succumb. Nevertheless, I've started revisiting some of my favorite Web sites in recent days, and I'm struck all over again by how much more interesting they are than most of what I read in the mainstream media.

Here's some of what I found there:

- Mr. Outer Life dreamed that he was reading his own biography:

My Boswell was nothing if not thorough. But as fact after fact piled up I found it harder and harder to find the me buried beneath. I mean, it's interesting to note the shoes I wore in sixth grade, or my brand of toothpaste, or the scores I achieved on my SAT, or the friends I was closest to in college, or the books I enjoyed most when I was 32, but after a while it got really distracting, then it got annoying, this fire hose of facts drowning me on every page. I found myself reacting against this, at first trying to forget the facts but after a while simply repeating a mantra to myself, over and over: I am not those shoes, I am not that toothpaste, I am not those scores, I am not those friends, I am not those books....

- Lileks holds forth on Christmas songs:

They're playing Christmas songs at the coffee shop now; the staff informs me that the selection consists of the same four songs played over and over again, but by different artists. I wouldn't doubt it. There are only four songs, really--religious, secular songs sung like religious songs, happy upbeat modern tunes, and modern krep in which Grandma is run over by a reindeer or the various members of the family gather to rock around the Christmas tree....

This is nostalgia for some--it's nostalgia for me, for that matter; I remember these versions from my childhood, although I never liked it--but you have to remember that it was nostalgia then, inasmuch as it refers to the "Currier and Ives" versions of the seasons that people already lamented losing. But that's Christmas; a mass consensual illusion that the holiday existed in some perfect state, and that this state can be replicated again if we find the right combination of lights, ornaments, songs, nutmeg candles, Pottery Barn CD compilations, pine-scented infusers, kicky shoes and brie spreaders....

- My favorite blogger is in a didactic mood:

There are only three syllables in the word, but oh, they are such dangerous syllables. Pianist. Do you say it pompously, snobbishly, in a way that emphasizes the first syllable as if the word were three sixteenth notes placed squarely on beat one? "You're a PI-an-ist?" This sounds haughty and condescending to my ears--I do not, after all, play a PI-an-o--but I always smile forgivingly and reiterate, "yes, I am a pianist," as blandly and evenly as possible. In "notational" terms, out of three sixteenths, I tend to make the first a pick-up, saying the word "piano" and yielding to the "ist" four-fifths of the way through. (Sixteenth - bar line - two sixteenths.) Bleating like a lamb through the middle syllable (essentially giving it the full value of an eighth note) is another sloppy mispronunciation; though when accompanied by rolled eyes and lots of laughter, it's also the perfect way for partying pi-AAN-ists to make fun of themselves....

- Richard Lawrence Cohen sums up art in a nutshell:

I once knew a man who commanded himself to write a sonnet every day for a year. He liked to say that God told him to. For a long time he wouldn't show his sacred verses to anyone. At last he put them in a book and gave a reading, and I bought a copy.

The poems were skillfully done and showed a hard-earned knowledge of technique. They were full of smart soundplay and allusion and showed great sensitivity to the insensitivity of being male. He wrote about how strong his father was and how his wife had hurt him and how weak his father was and what a coarse, innocent teenager he had been. He wrote about eBay and iPod in meters Dryden had known. Every poem made me feel I had to tell him how good it was.

But of course there was something missing and he knew it. No need for anyone to say it. It wasn't anything I could advise him to put in. To do that, I would have had to know where to find it. It was--let me try to think--it was that these were the poems any American man our age would have written if he could write poems. And while it was nice to see those things said with assonance and alliteration and half-rhyme and flexible rhythm, none of the lines was more beautiful than we had a right to ask. Which is, of course, what we have a right to ask....

- Jeannine Kellogg is similarly observant about the dilemma of the modern-day singleton:

All the media images bombarding us everyday imply that most everyone in the world is in love or falling in love. Yet there are many singles internet sites that offer to you the love of millions of singles at your keyboard fingertips. So if love or lust is so prevalent and so easily attained, then why are there millions on the internet paying so much money to search for it?

Our tax forms, insurance forms, employment forms, all ask us if we are "single" or "married." It is our culture's great delineator; those of us in love and those of us not. A friend said to me that she hated being asked by coworkers, parent's friends, and married women, if she was single. When she answers, it's as though she's contracted a new incurable personality virus. At which point, the inquirer squints and winces and knows not what else to say. For her, an older single woman, the label of single sometimes just feels like a label adhered to the leftovers....

- Ms. A Glass of Chianti, who hails from Fort Worth, Texas, reads a knuckleheaded art review in the local newspaper and finds herself reflecting on the perpetual problem of where to live:

It's not just art, of course. There's not a culture of reading. People read, of course, they just tend not to read things that aren't written by the new pastor of whatever megachurch recently expanded. The books are great; they teach people how to be more involved with their families and churches and communities and how to make God the center of their life... all of the things that really matter. People go to church on Sunday here. Ask any teacher and he will tell you that there is a lot of pressure not to assign homework that's due on Thursday (as Wednesday is "church night" for most youth groups here).

Now, all of this isn't to say that there's nothing to see here. There's a ton, but there isn't anyone with whom to talk about it. On the one hand, an empty gallery makes viewing art much easier but on the other, you kind of start wondering what's wrong with you that you're all alone yet again. So, if it's not a cultural wasteland, but people aren't really engaged in the "high culture," why might this be?...

As a small-town Missourian turned big-city aesthete, I often find myself pondering such questions. So did Willa Cather, who wrote about them with great subtlety and sympathy in many of her novels and short stories, never more penetratingly than in "A Wagner Matinée" (go here and scroll down for the complete text).

- Who said this? "When a man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything."

If you answered "G.K. Chesterton," you're wrong.

- And who said this? "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."

If you answered "Abraham Lincoln," you're wrong again.

- Fisk University is deaccessioning (i.e., selling off) the two best paintings in its art gallery, a Marsden Hartley and a Georgia O'Keeffe. Mr. Modern Art Notes is on the case:

Comments by Fisk officials indicate a certain cluelessness: "It was a very difficult decision to come to," Fisk prez Hazel O'Leary told The Tennessean. "But I've been here 18 months now and in that time I've come to understand the challenges of the 21st century as a business person."

Uh, Hazel, you're a university president, not a business person....

- Mr. DVD Savant is smart about Airplane!:

It's like we've been taking these old pictures semi-seriously for decades without realizing that they're hilarious, and Airplane! shows us a new way of looking at them. It's not disrespectful of the old movies because people who know the old movies are painfully aware of how they were made. Journeymen actors showed up with their scripts memorized, men like Lloyd Bridges, Richard Denning, Dana Andrews, Frank Lovejoy, Arthur Franz. The reason they were hired is that they could dish out long passages of exposition and make it understood. These guys' stock in trade was unflappability: A truck could drive through the stage wall and they'd probably continue in perfect character until they heard the word "cut." And it takes skill to pump out those flat, stern exposition lines full of earnest import. These are the people that work hard being second-banana functionaries in big films while the stars hog the good lines and get all the attention with their egotistical "motivation difficulties."...

- Mr. Something Old, Nothing New breaks into the print media (about time, too) with a characteristically pithy essay about the postmodern sitcom:

The creators of today's sitcoms are always looking for ways to indicate there's sweetness and light amidst the dark jokes and funny flashbacks.The first episode of My Name is Earl ended with a hugely sentimental speech in which a character thanked Earl for boosting his self-esteem. Even Arrested Development, with its stories of mutilation and drugging, always has a scene where two characters learn a lesson and make an emotional connection--the creator, Mitchell Hurwitz, calls it the "hug at the end." (In one episode, the lead character tells his son "there's nobody I love more than you in this whole world," a line that would never have survived the edit at Friends, let alone Seinfeld.) The new sitcoms want to be hip and experimental, but they also want to make us love the characters and root for them to make those connections....

- Lastly, here's a Web site containing the complete texts of forty dispatches by World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle (courtesy of Cathy Siepp). If you don't know Pyle's work, read this column, filed from Normandy immediately after D-Day:

The strong, swirling tides of the Normandy coastline shift the contours of the sandy beach as they move in and out. They carry soldiers' bodies out to sea, and later they return them. They cover the corpses of heroes with sand, and then in their whims they uncover them.

As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach on that first day ashore, I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand. But they weren't driftwood.

They were a soldier's two feet. He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his GI shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly....

A word to the wise: most of Pyle's best columns are reprinted in the Library of America's Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938-1944 and Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944-1946, both of which belong on the bookshelves of anyone interested in great journalism.

Posted January 16, 12:00 PM

TT: Another word to the wise

Julia Dollison, who sang with Maria Schneider's big band last week, is in town to promote her first CD, Observatory. To that end she'll be performing tonight at the Jazz Standard, accompanied by Ben Monder on guitar, Matt Clohesy on bass, and Ted Poor on drums, the same band heard on the album.

Regular visitors to this blog won't need further instructions, but if you're just now joining us, here's an excerpt from the liner notes I wrote for Observatory:

"There's this singer I want you to meet. She's really, really good." I must hear at least three variations per month on that tired old theme, but when Maria Schneider spoke those words to me five years ago, I took them seriously. What kind of jazz singer, I asked myself, would be interesting enough to catch the ear of the outstanding big-band composer of her generation?

Here's the answer.

It starts with the voice: warm, airy, dappled with summer sunshine, technically bulletproof from top to bottom....Such voices are born, not made, and Julia Dollison has one. Yet she never coasts on her chops. Instead, she sings like a horn player in love with lyrics, the way Lester Young knew all the words to every ballad he played. Her solos are pointed and meaningful, little musical stories that take you to places you've never been.

Then comes the style, an alchemical blend of jazz and pop that makes Harold Arlen and Rufus Wainwright sound not like strange bedfellows but the oldest of friends. Don't call it "fusion," though: that might smack of calculation, and there's nothing calculated about Julia's singing. She grew up listening to all kinds of music, and now she just sings what she hears, naturally and unselfconsciously....

Two sets, at 7:30 and 9:30. For more information, go here and scroll down.

Posted January 16, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"At the beginning of the season, when she was not singing often, she had gone one afternoon to hear Paderewski's recital. In front of her sat an old German couple, evidently poor people who had made sacrifices to pay for their excellent seats. Their intelligent enjoyment of the music, and their friendliness with each other, had interested her more than anything on the programme. When the pianist began a lovely melody in the first movement of the Beethoven D minor sonata, the old lady put out her plump hand and touched her husband's sleeve and they looked at each other in recognition. They both wore glasses, but such a look! Like forget-me-notes, and so full of happy recollections. Thea wanted to put her arms around them and ask them how they had been able to keep a feeling like that, like a nosegay in a glass of water."

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

Posted January 16, 12:00 PM

January 13, 2006

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. 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 July 2, 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 Apr. 8)
- In the Continuum (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Jan. 28)
- Mrs. Warren's Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
- The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Feb. 19)

Posted January 13, 8:55 AM

TT: The old-fashioned way

I'm back from a quick playgoing trip to Washington, D.C., just in time to review Nilo Cruz's Beauty of the Father in this morning's Wall Street Journal:

Nilo Cruz, the prolific Cuban-American playwright, didn't make his Broadway debut until 2003, when "Anna in the Tropics," which won that year's Pulitzer Prize for drama, had a three-month run at the Royale Theatre. Though it got mixed reviews, I liked "Anna in the Tropics" very much and resolved to keep an eye on Mr. Cruz thereafter. Now he's back in town with "Beauty of the Father," a play about Emiliano, a bisexual artist (Ritchie Coster) whose reunion with his estranged daughter (Elizabeth Rodriguez) hits the skids when she falls for his boyfriend-protégé (Pedro Pascal).

In spite of the contemporary flavor of Mr. Cruz's plot, his stagecraft is delightfully old-fashioned. His characters are forever waxing poetic, reeling off elaborate soliloquies at the drop of a paintbrush...

In addition, I paid a return visit to The Light in the Piazza:

Long-running musicals have a nasty way of developing quality-control problems over time, especially when the members of the original cast move on. "The Light in the Piazza" was my favorite musical of the 2004-05 season, but I hadn't seen it since last April and was wondering how it was holding up, especially given the fact that three of the four stars had since been replaced by new faces (Victoria Clark is still in the cast). So I went back for a second helping on Saturday, and was pleased to find that it was every bit as good as I'd remembered....

No link, so take yourself to the nearest newsstand and shell out one thin dollar for a copy of the Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the complete text of my review (along with plenty of other art-related stories).

Posted January 13, 8:48 AM

TT: Almanac

"I regard writing not as an investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me."

Evelyn Waugh, Paris Review interview (1962)

Posted January 13, 8:40 AM

January 12, 2006

OGIC: The man who knew about knowing too much

Following are passages from two mid-late Henry James works that concern things we know but, for reasons emotional and social, don't quite own. When Henry James's novel What Maisie Knew opens, Maisie is six, her parents recently divorced, Moddle her nurse.

It seemed to have to do with something else that Moddle often said: "You feel the strain--that's where it is; and you'll feel it still worse, you know.

Thus from the first Maisie not only felt it, but knew she felt it. A part of it was the consequence of her father's telling her he felt it too, and telling Moddle, in her presence, that she must make a point of driving that home. She was familiar, at the age of six, with the fact that everything had been changed on her account, everything ordered to enable him to give himself up to her. She was to remember always the words in which Moddle impressed upon her that he did so give himself: "Your papa wishes you never to forget, you know, that he has been dreadfully put about." If the skin on Moddle's face had to Maisie the air of being unduly, almost painfully stretched, it never presented that appearance so much as when she uttered, as she often had occasion to utter, such words. The child wondered if they didn't make it hurt more than usual; but it was only after some time that she was able to attach to the picture of her father's sufferings, and more particularly to her nurse's manner about them, the meaning for which these things had waited. By the time she had grown sharper, as the gentlemen who had criticised her calves used to say, she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable--images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn't yet big enough to play. The great strain meanwhile was that of carrying by the right end the things her father said about her mother--things mostly indeed that Moddle, on a glimpse of them, as if they had been complicated toys or difficult books, took out of her hands and put away in the closet. A wonderful assortment of objects of this kind she was to discover there later, all tumbled up too with the things, shuffled into the same receptacle, that her mother had said about her father.

Maisie is a deep little vessel for knowledge, even knowledge she can't yet understand. Her eventual strategy for handling the volatile stuff--for both fending off the parental versions and more efficiently capturing the genuine article--is to play dumb, to appear "not to take things in":

The theory of her stupidity, eventually embraced by her parents, corresponded with a great date in her small still life: the complete vision, private but final, of the strange office she filled. It was literally a moral revolution and accomplished in the depths of her nature. The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves began to move their arms and legs; old forms and phrases began to have a sense that frightened her. She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment.

I think James intends this notion of a necessarily secretive inner self as both general and specific. The idea of concealment is inseparable from the idea of an inner self, but for a character like Maisie the role of concealment is heightened. It is, as well, for the unnamed telegraphist who is the protagonist of James's novella "In the Cage":

It has occurred to her early that in her position--that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea pig or a magpie--she should know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively--though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered--to see anyone come in whom she knew outside, as she called it, any one who could add anything to the meanness of her function. Her function was to sit there with two young men--the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mind the "sounder," which was always going, to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust, from morning to night, through the gap left in the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm ached with rubbing. This transparent screen fenced out or fenced in, according to the side of the narrow counter on which the human lot was cast, the duskiest corner of a shop pervaded not a little, in winter, by the poison of perpetual gas, and at all times by the presence of hams, cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin and other solids and fluids that she came to know perfectly by their smells without consenting to know them by their names.

The heartbreaking circularity of that opening paragraph has always gotten to me. A few pages later, James puts a finer point on her rough similarity to Maisie:

The girl was blasée; nothing could belong more, as she perfectly knew, to the intense publicity of her profession; but she had a whimsical mind and wonderful nerves; she was subject, in short, to sudden flickers of antipathy and sympathy, red gleams in the grey, fitful needs to notice and to "care," odd caprices of curiosity....It was at once one of her most cherished complaints and secret supports that people didn't understand her.

There's almost no character in James who doesn't at some point dissemble about what they know, but for certain types of characters such negotiations are more fraught. Small children, working-class men and women, the ill, the dispossessed: when such characters crop up in James, they tend to share this combination of heightened receptivity--a marked capacity for taking things in, for knowing--and an instinctual or strategic disinclination to be known. A form of self-protection, the latter. "In the Cage," which plays out a bit in the vein of a Victorian-era Nurse Betty, shows what happens when that guard is dropped, when the telegraphist comes from behind the lattice and makes herself available for knowing, but in the most peculiar and ill-fated way. You can read the e-text of the amazing "In the Cage" here. And then the next time someone dismisses James as writing only about the upper classes, you can make short work of them.

Posted January 12, 3:41 AM

January 10, 2006

TT: Out and about

I'm hitting the road for a few days--my first out-of-town theater trip since returning from Smalltown, U.S.A. I'll be back on Thursday evening and will check in with you then.

Have a nice week!

Posted January 10, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"I was driven to writing because I found it was the only way a lazy and ill-educated man could make a decent living."

Evelyn Waugh, "General Conversation: Myself" (1937)

Posted January 10, 12:00 PM

January 9, 2006

TT: Girdling the globe

At of 9:13 a.m. Sunday, "About Last Night" was being read in Argentina, Australia, China, England, Finland, France, Hong Kong, India, Iraq, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Phillipines, and Poland.

Hello, everybody!

Posted January 09, 8:43 AM

TT: Almanac

"Heavy apparatus has been at work in the last hundred years to enervate and stultify the imaginative faculties. First, realistic novels and plays, then the cinema have made the urban mentality increasingly subject to suggestion. It lapses effortlessly into a trance-like escape from its condition. Great popularity in fiction and film is only attained by works in which reader and audience can transpose themselves and be vicariously endangered, loved and applauded."

Evelyn Waugh, "St. Helena Empress" (1951)

Posted January 09, 8:41 AM

January 6, 2006

TT: Political but not preachy

It's Friday, and I'm back in town and booming and zooming (but sensibly, you understand!). In today's Wall Street Journal I review two off-Broadway shows, In the Continuum and the Atlantic Theater's double bill of Harold Pinter's The Room and Celebration:

What is political theater? Sometimes, as in the case of such relentlessly preachy exercises in agree-or-you're-evil propaganda as "Guantanamo" or "The God of Hell," the answer is painfully clear. While these plays may be presented in an artful way, they typically use art as little more than a means to a political end, and thus tend to be both unserious and unpersuasive. On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to create a serious work of art that is informed by politics. Heather Raffo did it in "Nine Parts of Desire," her beautiful one-woman show about life in Iraq, and now Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter have done it with "In the Continuum," a play whose subject matter--the effect of AIDS on black women in Africa and America--would seem at first glance to be wholly unpromising.

AIDS is notorious for bringing out the worst in issue-oriented playwrights, which is why I passed up "In the Continuum" when it opened at 59E59 last October. On paper it sounded like a parody of everything I like least about political theater, and it was only at the emphatic urging of friends whose taste I trust that I caught the show, which has since transferred to the Perry Street Theatre, one of Off Broadway's most attractive performing spaces. They swore it was a must-see event, and sure enough, they were right....

Harold Pinter gave up playwriting for preaching many years ago. The most recent of his sermons, the hate-America-first rant he delivered last month after receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, was so cringe-making that it undoubtedly led many younger playgoers--including more than a few who share his extreme views--to wonder whether he was ever any good. To them I suggest a trip to the Atlantic Theater, whose double bill of two one-act Pinter plays, "The Room" and "Celebration," has been extended through Jan. 21. It isn't perfect, but it's still a worthy introduction to the Pinter who matters....

No link, as usual, so kindly go to the nearest newsstand and fork out a dollar for a copy of the Journal, or go 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). It's a fabulous deal--try it!

Posted January 06, 12:00 PM

TT: Me, in brief

Not only do I feel great, but I'm behaving sensibly, too, so much so that I actually kept my promise and spent the whole week going through my my snail mail and cleaning up my apartment. (The old, unregenerate me would have done it all in a single day, then gone out to a nightclub.) Yes, I wrote two Wall Street Journal pieces, saw two off-Broadway shows, and updated the Top Five section of the right-hand column, but I also spent plenty of time doing plenty of nothing. Hooray for me!

Now here's a sneak preview of my next "Sightings" column, "Sue and Be Doomed," which will appear in the "Pursuits" section of Saturday's Wall Street Journal:

What would you do if your favorite radio station stopped playing your favorite music? In Detroit, seven irate listeners sued. They've filed a class-action suit against WDET-FM, the public-radio station of Wayne State University, claiming that the NPR affiliate committed fraud by encouraging them to make donations in support of locally produced weekday music shows, then cancelling those shows and replacing them with national public-affairs programs.....

As always, there's lots more where that came from. See for yourself--buy a copy of tomorrow's Journal and look me up.

That's all, folks. I'll be back on Monday, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and properly rested. See you then.

Posted January 06, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

I used to think it might be fun to be
Anyone else but me.
I thought that it would be a pleasant surprise
To wake up as a couple of other guys.
But now that I've found you,
I've changed my point of view,
And now I wouldn't give a dime to be
Anyone else but me.

What a day,
Fortune smiled and came my way,
Bringing love I never thought I'd see,
I'm so lucky to be me.
What a night,
Suddenly you came in sight,
Looking just the way I'd hoped you'd be,
I'm so lucky to be me.
I am simply thunderstruck
At the change in my luck:
Knew at once I wanted you,
Never dreamed you'd want me, too.
I'm so proud
You chose me from all the crowd,
There's no other guy I'd rather be,
I could laugh out loud,
I'm so lucky to be me.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green, "Lucky to Be Me" (music by Leonard Bernstein)

Posted January 06, 12:00 PM

TT: Don't send me stuff

No matter who you are. No matter what it is.

If you've never lived in New York City, you probably don't realize how small most apartments here are. I dearly love my little home, but it's very cozy, and I share it with two dozen works of art, several hundred books, and three thousand CDs. As of this week, I've also been sharing it with a month's worth of accumulated snail mail. I took out ten garbage bags of trash yesterday, and I'm about to haul another four bags downstairs (I live on the third floor, which is quite a trip for a heart patient). My shelves are full. My drawers are full. My closets are full. Hence this desperate plea. From here on out it's a zero-sum game: I can't keep anything new without throwing away something old.

To be more specific:

- If you send me a CD without asking first, I won't listen to it.

- If you send me a book without asking first, I won't read it.

- If you send me unsolicited press releases, I'll toss them in the nearest wastebasket.

Forgive me for being so blunt, but I simply can't cope anymore. I know you'll understand.

Posted January 06, 5:18 AM

OGIC: A fan's notes

From the second sentence of his I read, I've been a devoted admirer of Michael Ruhlman. When I discovered him I was at a low moment, in dire and specific need of a fix of good writing. Last fall, you see, I had to read four books in damn short order and write a group review of them for a newspaper. These were all nonfiction books, personal narratives that each addressed, in one way or another, the subject of marriage. They were an interesting lot in many ways, but the first two I read were not exactly music to the ears, stylistically speaking. The first was workmanlike, earnest--it got the job done, but it bumped and bruised my sensibilities along the way. The next was so overwritten and overwrought I actually flung it across the room once or twice in despair. (Didn't do any good.)

So my expectations were damped down flat when I moved along dutifully to the third in the set, a book of which I knew nothing going in. It was with resignation that I opened it, the resignation to continue plowing through--but I discovered almost instantly that, in this case, I would be not be plowing but gliding. With Ruhlman's House: A Memoir I was recognizably in the hands of a genuine writer, and surprised by the extent to which a stiff dose of turgid prose can make you forget what that even feels like. Here are the opening sentences that made the clouds part--they don't smack you upside the head with their brilliance, David Foster Wallace-style, but they're finely crafted in an understated way that seemed then, and does now, attuned to the needs of the reader:

It was our house now--I had the key in my pocket. I steered into the empty driveway for the first time; until this moment Donna and I had been visitors, and we felt as welcome as a threat. But all that was over. They were gone at last. The old brick house on the shady street was empty.

"As welcome as a threat": after the clotted prose I'd so lately been subjected to, the clean elegance of the phrase made my heart leap up. It may not seem like much, but it's right, and it struck me as a clear if small sign that I was in good hands. Other such signs followed, and the book proved a fascinating original. It tells of buying and rehabbing a Victorian house in Cleveland Heights and mounts an eloquent defense of the American suburbs and, yes, meditates on marriage and its settings. By virtue of writing that seems always to have the reader's best interests in mind, as well as the particular demands of its subjects, a hybrid book that could all too easily have been a mundane or messy melange turns out to be wonderfully inviting, rewarding, and elegant. I know that calling a writer a consummate professional will sound to some ears like backhanded praise, but this book made me feel--as I wrote in my review--that in the very best sense, professionalism is a form of kindness. What I primarily felt while reading this book was well taken care of.

One of the unlikeliest but most winning chapters of House simply narrates a tour the Ruhlmans took of their prospective house. They were starting to get serious about buying and engaged the services of a home inspector. Through physical description but mainly through uncannily capturing the way he talks, Ruhlman makes this mildly odd character jump straight off the page.

With what seemed like pleasant anticipation, he then said, "Let's march on down to the basement, shall we?"

"You like the basement," I said.

"It's where I spend most of my time," he said, taking long, duck-footed strides toward the back door. "Most of a house's mechanical systems--plumbing, electric, heat--originate and extend out through the house from there. It's where the foundation of the house is visible."

"The foundation is one of the main things you inspect."

He stopped and turned at me. "The entire house rests on...the foundation."

"Right," I said.

The inspector's bare yet cordial tolerance of his clients' ignorance, here and throughout the chapter, is funny and endearing. I doubt most writers would have hit on him for a likely subject, and the good results reminded me a bit of my favorite M.F.K. Fisher essay, the one about the very exacting waitress (