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July 31, 2007

TT: 5 x 5 Books for Short Hitters

5 x 5 Books ... is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week.

CAAF, who inaugurated this department, has asked me to do the honors this week. In honor of Harry Potter Month, I originally thought to oblige with a list of books I read with pleasure in childhood and revisited with equal pleasure as an adult. Then I remembered that I'd already done that, or something closely similar, so I decided to change course and serve up something completely different.

Like most of us, I don't read enough short stories, and wonder why I don't. After all, I have a special liking for the focus and concentration of art songs and small paintings, and short stories offer the same sort of microcosmic experience. Whenever I pick up a volume of favorite stories, I invariably put it down refreshed. I tossed the first book on this list into my suitcase the other day, read it on the road, and resolved for the umpteenth time to change my ways.

If you feel similarly inclined, start here:

1. "The Rich Boy," by F. Scott Fitzgerald (in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald). This is the 1926 story in which Fitzgerald proclaimed that "the very rich...are different from you and me." Ernest Hemingway claimed (falsely) to have retorted that the only difference is that they have more money, but Fitzgerald, as usual, looked more deeply into human nature, and this rich, longish, unexpectedly complicated tale tells what he saw there.

2. "The Alien Corn," by W. Somerset Maugham (in Collected Stories). Now that I'm turning one of Maugham's stories into an opera libretto, he's much on my mind. "The Letter" is a good story, but "The Alien Corn," in which we are made privy to the terrible fate of another rich young man who longs to be a concert pianist, is even better. Some find "The Alien Corn" anti-Semitic, and I can see why, but my old friend Samuel Lipman, who wrote of it with great eloquence in Music and More, thought it by way of being a minor masterpiece. Sam was particularly impressed by how Maugham spoke to "the vocation of the artist, to the role of money and power in art, and to the relationship between the artist and the world which makes his art possible." Right on all counts.

3. "A Late Encounter With the Enemy," by Flannery O'Connor (in Collected Works). One could almost pick at random from O'Connor's stories--she was, I think, the modern American master of the medium--but this funny, biting tale of southern pride gone sour has always been a personal favorite of mine.

4. "Prince of Darkness," by J.F. Powers (in The Stories of J.F. Powers). I doubt Powers will ever be popular, but he'll always be on any top-five list of American short-story writers that I have occasion to draw up. I wrote about him at length in A Terry Teachout Reader, so I'll say only that this story of a slothful priest who can't see that his feet are cloven is one of the unknown treasures of our literature.

5. "The Beast in the Jungle," by Henry James (in Selected Tales). All kidding aside, James really was the Master, and he never wrote anything more masterly than his parables of failure, of which "The Beast in the Jungle" is surely the greatest. The climax has haunted me ever since I read it in high school, and it haunts me still:

No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?...He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened--it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.

That's literature.

Posted July 31, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"There are no types, no plurals."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Rich Boy"

Posted July 31, 12:00 AM

July 30, 2007

TT: Henry James slept here

It's a good thing I finally figured out how much fun it is to travel, since The Wall Street Journal now expects me to do so as often as possible in between Broadway openings. There being precious few Broadway openings in the summer--damned few of which are precious--I've been tearing around New England. Last week, for instance, I visited two summer theater companies in Massachusetts, Barrington Stage Company (about which I wrote enthusiastically in Friday's paper) and Shakespeare & Company (whose productions of Rough Crossing and Blue/Orange I'll be reviewing this coming Friday).

In addition to seeing plays, I took a backstage tour of Pittsfield's Colonial Theatre, a handsome, meticulously restored 1903 playhouse that once presented the likes of Sarah Bernhardt, Ignace Jan Paderewski, Anna Pavlova, Noble Sissle, and Laurette Taylor. The Colonial is now used as a multi-purpose venue for concerts and touring shows, and those who appear there say it's unsurpassed for sheer intimacy. I saw a poster for a concert by Luciana Souza hanging in the wings, and smiled to see her familiar face in an unexpected place.

I stayed at the Thaddeus Clapp House, an 1871 mansion around the corner from the Colonial Theatre that has been turned into a comfortable, well-run bed-and breakfast whose friendly proprietor goes out of her way to make sure you get more than enough to eat. (Her scones melt on the tongue.) Over breakfast I met an artist from Hawaii named Jodi Endicott who was in Massachusetts to deliver four of her paintings to a gallery in Lenox. I liked the way she talked about her work and was impressed by several of the pictures in her folio, so I stopped by the gallery a few days later, looked at the paintings, and was even more impressed. This is, I gather, Endicott's first East Coast show. I hope it isn't the last.

Speaking of old houses, I finally paid a long-overdue visit to The Mount, the fifty-acre estate and gardens that Edith Wharton designed and built for herself and her then-husband in 1902. The Mount figures prominently in Hermione Lee's recent Wharton biography, and it also happens to be a mile or so from Shakespeare & Company, which used to perform on its grounds before moving to its present location. I didn't have time to go there when I went to see the company last summer, so I made a point of stopping by last week. It is, not surprisingly, spectacular, and though the restoration of the interior of the main house is very much a work in progress, the gardens look much as they did when Wharton lived there a century ago.

One of the forty-two rooms is described on the official Mount map as "Henry James Guest Room." I lingered there, though there's nothing much to see. The room in which the Master stayed on at least three occasions has not yet been restored to its original condition, and currently houses a tableau of period objects illustrating a scene from Wharton's 1907 novel The Fruit of the Tree. I didn't care. I was standing where James had slept, and until the day finally comes when I'm lucky enough to visit Lamb House, that will be enough for me.

All of which reminds me of my favorite Henry James anecdote, famously recounted by none other than Edith Wharton herself in her 1934 autobiography. Wharton and James liked to go for long, leisurely rides in her motor car, and one evening they lost their way while driving through the village of Windsor.

As Wharton told it:

We must have been driven by a strange chauffeur--perhaps Cook was on holiday; at any rate, having fallen into the lazy habit of trusting him to know the way, I found myself at a loss to direct his substitute to the King's Road. While I was hesitating, and peering out into the darkness, James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. "Wait a moment, my dear--I'll ask him where we are"; and leaning out he signalled to the spectator.

"My good man, if you'll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer--so," and as the old man came up: "My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station."

I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: "In short" (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), "in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right) where are we now in relation to..."

"Oh, please," I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, "do ask him where the King's Road is."

"Ah--? The King's Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King's Road exactly is?"

"Ye're in it," said the aged face at the window.

I sincerely hope that tale is true to the very last detail--and if it's not, I don't want to know.

Posted July 30, 12:00 AM

TT: Ingmar Bergman, R.I.P.

Ingmar Bergman was important--but not to me. I blogged about him in 2003, and haven't seen any of his films since then. No doubt the loss is mine, but his work and my temperament were incompatible.

I saw his adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts on stage around the same time, and reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal:

Speaking of socially significant plays, the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden is performing Henrik Ibsen's "Ghosts" this week at Brooklyn's BAM Harvey Theater in a new version translated, "adapted" and directed by the 84-year-old Ingmar Bergman, who says it is his farewell to the stage. Written in 1881, "Ghosts" was the great problem play of the Victorian era, a veritable hurricane of sexual candor, but even in Mr. Bergman's goosed-up adaptation, which makes coarsely explicit every kink Ibsen left to the viewer's imagination, it now comes off as a tiresomely talky piece of bourgeois-baiting, as smug as Shaw but without his compensating wit.

The staging itself is painfully static--almost exactly what you'd expect from a film director who didn't know his way around a proscenium stage--and had I not been listening through infrared headphones to an English translation of a Swedish adaptation of a Norwegian play, I would have sworn I was watching a mediocre regional-theater production rather than the swan song of one of the indisputably major moviemakers of the 20th century. Would that Mr. Bergman had contrived a better exit for himself, but you can't win 'em all.

So sue me.

Posted July 30, 12:00 AM

TT: Happiness is a warm fan letter

E-mail like this reminds me of why I do what I do:

Thanks for your post d'aujourd'hui. Not that you asked, but it's thanks to your blog that I started buying more Louis Armstrong records. I was already into Blossom Dearie and Chet Baker and listen to that obsessive Charlie Parker show on the radio in the mornings, but it was one of your posts on Louie that made me think, hmm...I think my CD collection may be missing something.

Also, when you reccomended that Morandi show in Chelsea a few years ago, that was just heaven, and it was instant love for me! I had never heard of that artist before. When I visited the Vatican last fall, of course the Michelangelo and Raphael rooms were packed to the gills, but do you know that they have at least six really beautiful (is there any other kind) Morandi paintings in their contemporary art rooms, which almost everyone skips over? The guards couldn't believe I knew who Morandi was. When the dollar and my bank account gets stronger, a trip to Bologna for me is the first item on the list.

I look forward to hearing about other cool stuff you turn me on to in the future.

I suppose the best thing about my job is getting to see all the wonderful things I see, but the second-best thing--and it's a close second--is getting mail like this. To communicate aesthetic delight to another person, and know that they've responded, is one of the most satisfying experiences imaginable. To be able to do it en masse is...well, I can't even begin to say what it is. All I can tell you is that it's the whole point of my professional life.

Some say that critics are remembered, if at all, for their bad reviews. I'd much rather be remembered for my good ones.

P.S. Follow the second link and you'll find your way in due course to one of my old Washington Post "Second City" columns. That was a good month in New York! I'd briefly forgotten how much I enjoyed writing "Second City," but reading an old column brought it back to me in a rush of remembered pleasure. Thank you, Washington Post, for having made it possible for me to make money doing something so intensely pleasurable.

Posted July 30, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge."

James Thurber, A Thurber Garland

Posted July 30, 12:00 AM

July 27, 2007

CAAF: Bit players identified

Over lunch I finally got to "that bonobo article" everyone's been talking about in last week's New Yorker. Not far into the article, Ian Parker mentions meeting "a tall man in his forties who went by the single name Wind ... who had driven from his home in North Carolina to sing at the [bonobo fund-raiser]. He was a musician and a former practitioner of 'metaphysical counselling,' which he also referred to as clairvoyance." (Favorite sentence: "Wind told me that he once wore a chimpanzee T-shirt to a bonobo event, and 'got shit for it.'")

Something about this description -- call it clairvoyance, or call it a decade of standing at parties chatting to men with names like Raven and El Niño -- made me think that the city from which Wind hails in North Carolina might be Asheville. And, unless the guy has a flute-playing, bonobo-supporting doppelganger, that turns out to be correct.

Posted July 27, 3:38 PM

CAAF: The Bele tolls ...

It's Bele Chere weekend in Asheville. If you're not familiar with it, Bele Chere is a giant street festival held each year in the last hazy days of July. Downtown is closed to traffic, and the citizens overtake the streets in sweaty, plodding hordes. Generally, you walk around, look at people, listen to music, eat, drink, and then stand in line at the Port-a-Potty.

If you live or work downtown it's a fairly epic weekend. For every transcendent moment of sitting out on your fire escape, drinking margaritas & watching hundreds of strangers do the Electric Slide, there's an offsetting low ebb, when it's 4 am and packs of drunks are still roaming the streets howling for Lynyrd Skynyrd (it's like they're meta-drunk!).

This year I'm making a curtailed foray -- tomorrow night we're meeting my sister and her S.O. at the local brewers' tent, then hopping up the street to hear the Goodies (recommended song: "Madame Devillia"). Report to follow Monday.

Posted July 27, 2:26 PM

TT: Hi-yo, Shakespeare!

My latest Wall Street Journal drama column is another report from the road, this time on the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival's As You Like It and Barrington Stage Company's revival of Black Comedy. Both shows are nifty:

Summer Shakespeare festivals are thick on the ground in America these days, and more than a few of them are a pleasure to behold. If you're searching for the best of all possible times, though, you'll have trouble topping the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. I see a lot of Shakespeare, but I can't think of another outdoor festival that has a higher overall batting average. Hudson Valley's deliberately informal productions are a model of cultural populism at its most engaging and effective, and Kurt Rhoads' uproariously loony staging of "As You Like It," performed in the shoot-'em-up style of a bottom-of-the-bill B Western, is one of the cleverest updatings of the Bard to have come my way....

The brightest star of the show is Joey Parsons, the fascinating Ariel of Terrence O'Brien's 2005 "Tempest," who is no less striking this time around as Mr. Rhoads' Rosalind. Decked out in tight jeans and a red cowboy hat à la Annie Oakley, she plays the ardent lover-in-disguise of "As You Like It" with an eager, sexy zest that put me in mind of the young Annette Bening....

Peter Shaffer is better known for such bristlingly serious plays as "Amadeus" and "Equus," but with "Black Comedy," first seen on Broadway in 1967, he proved himself to be no less adept at strewing the stage with banana peels. It's a standard-issue British comedy about a poverty-stricken ultra-modern sculptor (Brian Avers) who's juggling two unsuspecting ladies (Ginifer King and Nell Mooney), enhanced by one brilliant twist. The action takes place during a power failure--and the onstage lighting is reversed. When the lights are on, the stage is black. When the lights are off, we see the actors lurching around in the "dark." Add a priceless porcelain sculpture of Buddha and a strategically positioned trap door, and the result is collective hysteria....

No free link. Get with the program already! Buy a copy of Friday's Journal or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my column and all the rest of the Journal's extensive arts coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted July 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"When the aspiration and exclusiveness of high art were countered with the vigour and craft of entertainment, then the pretensions of the one and the sentimentality of the other were both under mutual surveillance, and it was somewhere there, in the middle of this collision that you were likely to find a healthy--a Shakespearean--kind of theatre."

Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England: A Memoir

Posted July 27, 12:00 AM

July 26, 2007

OGIC: 5 x 5 Post-Potter Reading Projects

I was pleased to be asked by Carrie to file this week's installment of 5x5. But when I thought back to what I've been reading this summer, I realized that it has consisted solely of comfort reading, which in my case typically means: series. So there's no really new news here for regular readers of this blog, who already know of my guilty affection for MacDonald, the flirtation with Powell that's recently been upgraded to an actual involvement, and my longstanding crush on Fisher.

But in a world rife with readers (like CAAF her very self!) who are facing the end of the Harry Potter series with a lead sinker in their gut growing weightier as they advance through the seventh volume--maybe the time is right to revisit some of the series and sets of books that I rely on to patch me through spells of readerly indecision. Of all these I can say that it soothes me to know they're at hand and it buoys me to know there's plenty of them. Maybe some of them will provide a next harbor for some of you soon-to-be Potter refugees out there.

1. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (link is to the first volume). Twelve novels in four volumes following the life and times of an Englishman following World War I. Powell writes in an apparently meandering fashion behind which lurks--I'm certain it's there though I don't, after reading two of the novels, quite yet discern it--a masterful design. The novels are quietly infectious, with truly great (though seldom conspicuous or showy) insights and feats of writing strewn about liberally to be stumbled over like half-buried treasure. Rarely have I felt so ravished and so comforted at the same time.

2. The Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald (link is to the first book in the series). Residing at the opposite end of the world from #1, these crime novels have not a subtle bone in their sizable body. Their charms lie wholly elsewhere. Belonging to the series does a lot for the individual books, somehow; they gain appeal and impact when read in quantity, filling in at length--detail by detail, stratum by substratum, hustler by con man, felony by misdemeanor--a lurid panorama of southern Florida from the 1960s to 1980s. Pure buttered popcorn.

3. Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries by Reginald Hill (link is to the first book in the series). I just tonight finished what must have been about my tenth of these smart, wonderfully written English mysteries, On Beulah Height. While nearing the end and thus the whodunit, I remembered again how little of my affinity for Hill's mysteries has to do with their, er, mysteries. His plots are always clever and sometimes deft but, it seems to me, tend to turn the screw a time or two too many, so that by the end I don't much even care who did. No matter; the characters are glorious and so is the writing. Not that I'm one to sniff at genre fiction--couldn't be further from the truth--but how often does one turn to genre fiction for the writing? Not sodding often, as Dalziel might say.

4. The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher. But you really want these separate editions of the five books collected here: The Gastronomical Me, Serve It Forth, An Alphabet for Gourmets, How to Cook a Wolf, and Consider the Oyster. They're lovely, and she is gorgeous in the pictures on their jackets. Long ago, I defended Fisher from charges of preciosity here.

5. The Waverley Novels by Sir Walter Scott (link is to their namesake). Rejoice: you'll never get through them all! Just kidding, sort of. The best of them (The Bride of Lammermoor, The Heart of Midlothian) are terrific, but others have defied my best efforts to get up a head of steam for them. it's true. Outside English departments, though, who reads Scott anymore? Consider this a gentle reminder that the man arguably had about as great an influence on the history of the novel, and not only in English, as anyone else you can think of. And--you'll never get through them all!

By the way, I've never read a Harry Potter book myself. It was, in fact, only ten days ago that I saw my first Harry Potter movie--which I much enjoyed, thanks in no small part to the whispered running tutorial of my better-versed companion. He, incidentally, finds himself in a bit of a conundrum on the occasion of the last book's appearance: he has followed the movies devotedly but not read the books, and wishes to know what happens sometime ahead of 2009, or however long it will take the sixth and seventh installments to reach the screen--and presumably wishes not to find out by overhearing a conversation on the elevated train. Should he start with the 6th book, picking up where the movies currently leave off? Skip straight to the 7th? Friendly advice may be sent in care of ogic@artsjournal.com.

Posted July 26, 1:54 AM

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 gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. 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 and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
• Beyond Glory (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• Frost/Nixon (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• Old Acquaintance (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)

CLOSING SUNDAY:
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• 110 in the Shade (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

Posted July 26, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"To be an actor is to make a brother of paranoia."

Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England: A Memoir

Posted July 26, 12:00 AM

July 25, 2007

TT: Diploma not required

A reader writes, apropos of my posting about Alan Gilbert:

Regarding your comments about Alan Gilbert and classic music: I truly think that the classical music age gap is a symptom of the increasing "juvenilization" of our culture. Young people no longer want to grow up, expand their horizons, and become sophisticated. They no longer "graduate" from rock-and-roll to classical music, just as they don't graduate from collecting Star Wars memorabilia to collecting fine etchings and engravings. (Can you imagine Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, or Cary Grant dressing up as Darth Vader to attend a Star Wars convention?!?!?! And can you picture Irene Dunne, Ingrid Bergman, or Hedy Lamarr in costumes to match them?)

I have mixed feelings about this e-mail. Mind you, I think there's a considerable amount of truth in it--I don't have much use for the sort of "grown" man who wears a reversed baseball cap. But I also think it's important not to take the process of cultural maturation for granted. Yes, Mozart is an incomparably great composer, but merely being exposed to his music does not (alas) ensure immediate recognition and acceptance of its greatness, least of all when the exposer makes it clear that he expects the exposee to like what he's hearing on pain of being dismissed as stupid. This is part of what I have in mind when I speak of the "entitlement mentality" that has long prevented our high-culture institutions from coming to grips with the urgent problem of audience development. Would that it weren't necessary to sell Mozart, but it is, and Alan Gilbert will have to do so if he wants to succeed at the New York Philharmonic.

I'm also uncomfortable with the notion that pop culture is ever and always inferior to high culture. Lest we forget, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Cary Grant were Hollywood stars, not graduates of RADA. If any of them ever got around to playing Hamlet, the fact has hitherto escaped my attention--and I don't have a problem with that. By the same token, I don't think it necessary to "graduate" from rock to classical music (or, for that matter, jazz) in order to become a full-fledged grownup. One can like both, and take both seriously.

As I wrote a few weeks ago:

I yield to no one in my disdain for the spoiled fruits of modernity, but I've been listening to rock for 40 years without any obvious ill effects--and with no diminishment of my appreciation for what Alec Wilder referred to as "the professional tradition" in American songwriting....

I love the great pre-rock songwriters with all my heart, and I've never had much use for hip-hop or grunge, either. But their work, wonderful though it was, is neither the beginning nor the end of American popular music, and to suppose otherwise is to sentence yourself to the same aesthetic prison that Evelyn Waugh inhabited. "His strongest tastes were negative," Waugh wrote of himself (more or less) in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. "He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz--everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom." To be disgusted and bored with the world as it is may be an appropriate response to things as they are, but it isn't much fun, nor is it a good way to get anything done.

No, I don't collect Star Wars memorabilia, but I do have a Tom & Jerry cel set-up hanging on my wall, I watch WKRP in Cincinnati reruns, and I'm totally into Erin McKeown. And I am such a highbrow--not to mention an adult.

If I may quote myself again:

I don't think The Long Goodbye is as good a book as The Great Gatsby, and I believe the difference between the two books is hugely important. But I also don't think it's absurd to compare them, and I probably re-read one as often as the other.

The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.

I'll stand by that.

UPDATE: A younger reader writes:

Most of the young people I know desperately wish to "expand their horizons and become sophisticated," but they have no idea how to go about it. And they're not getting much guidance from the wider culture, alas.

The real problem with the national cutback of arts coverage--not just in newspapers but throughout the public sphere, including education--is that it cuts today's young people off from a genuine appreciation of arts, music, drama, dance, cinema, &c. I get the sense that it wasn't always thus, that in the old days there were a number of extremely wealthy capitalists--like Duncan Phillips, for instance--who possessed genuine connoisseurship and shared their love of the arts with the public at large.

I suspect that the one great public service the arts provide is to remind us that there's more to living well than money and politics. Perhaps that's the reason the arts are so neglected today.

The important thing about the middlebrow moment of which I have written so frequently in this space and elsewhere was that it provided just such guidance to anyone who wanted it. I did, and I grabbed it with both hands. I hope Alan Gilbert proves to be a first-rate conductor, but I'm more interested in seeing whether he understands that he needs to be supplying that kind of guidance, not just from time to time but on a regular, week-to-week basis.

Posted July 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Wish list

I wish:

• I could play piano like Count Basie. (Nat Cole would do.)

• I could cook the fishcakes I ate here last Saturday.

• Patience came more naturally to me.

• I were funnier.

• I had a deeper voice. (My all-time favorite speaking voice, by the way, is that of James Mason.)

• I could read Proust in the original.

• I'd met Paul Desmond.

• I owned this. (Fat chance, alas, though I tried.)

• I weren't so clumsy.

• OGIC and CAAF lived on my block.

Posted July 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"In one's twenties it is difficult to grasp the pointlessness of envy."

Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England: A Memoir

Posted July 25, 12:00 AM

July 24, 2007

TT and OGIC: Once more, with feeling

In case you've been on vacation:

All postings whose headlines are signed "CAAF" are the work of Carrie Frye, our guest blogger.

Read more about her here.

Posted July 24, 4:21 PM

CAAF: Focus group of one

Here's an idea for keeping customers, Netflix: The mail runs on Saturday, so should you.

Under the current model, Netflix processes movies Monday through Friday only. So if you mail a movie on Thursday or Friday, the company won't mark it received until Monday, meaning you don't get your next selection until Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday. Which makes Blockbuster's offer to let subscribers return movies in the store seem extra attractive: Who wants to wait a week for a new movie?*

However, if Netflix processed on Saturdays, that lag time would get cut. Mail a movie Thursday and you might get a new one as soon as Monday.

I love you, Netflix -- who else would consent to send me Staying Alive so many times without ever once passing a word of stony judgment? So keep your lousy dollar decrease and ship Saturdays.

* That said, with its new policies (no late fees! we'll mail to you!), Blockbuster reminds me of nothing so much as the boyfriend/girlfriend who treated you terribly but now wants you back, so s/he is talking sweet, but if you go back, you can be sure that s/he's going to treat you terribly all over again. Just replace "took money from your purse for hookers"/"drained your bank account to pay for a prescription drug habit" with "charged exorbitant late fees." Which is why I stick mostly to Netflix/Rosebud Video.

Posted July 24, 3:53 PM

CAAF: Loose notes

"If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody."

Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

Posted July 24, 11:29 AM

CAAF: A passion for tropical mushrooms and letters

Terry wrote yesterday about the allure of handwritten letters. It's a topic I've been thinking about lately whenever shuffling out for the mail. The ratio of bills & junk mail to actual items of interest is currently running about 100:1 at our house, and some days that seems like a bleak signpost of ... something (mortgages, lightning).

So I think about sending more letters and how nice it would be to receive some in return, particularly if these letters were to arrive in packages with gin, smokes, and the new Oxford Univ. Press edition of Coleridge's Faust translation tied up in string. But as my friends who've received cards from me with messages like "Congratulations on your baby -- and congratulations on his high-school graduation!" know, these impulses usually dissipate on the walk back from the curb.

This cycle (wanting mail, never sending mail) reminded me about the letters that appear in Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet, a book I take to the bed with about twice a year. The story features an incredibly old, bearded lady named Marian (a stand-in for Carrington) and her equally old best friend Carmella, who is bald and wears red wigs in a "queenly gesture to her long lost hair." (Carmella is understood to be a stand-in for Carrington's friend Remedios Varo.)

Here Carmella is introduced to the reader:

[Carmella] lives in a very small house with her niece who bakes cakes for a Swedish teashop although she is Spanish. Carmella has a very pleasant life and is really very intellectual. She reads books through an elegant lorgnette and hardly ever mumbles to herself as I do. She also knits very clever jumpers but her real pleasure in life is writing letters. Carmella writes letters all over the world to people she has never met and signs them with all sorts of romantic names, never her own. Carmella despises anonymous letters, and of course they would be impractical as who could answer a letter with no name at all signed at the end? These wonderful letters fly off, in a celestial way, by airmail, in Carmella's delicate handwriting. No one ever replies. This is the really incomprehensible side of humanity, people never have time for anything.

Carmella's letters are laced throughout the book, and she has a great flair. After the jump, one of her letters to strangers is described ...

This scene occurs shortly after Carmella's introduction, as the two ladies sit together sucking on violet-scented lozenges:

[Says Carmella:] "Every since I stole the Paris telephone directory from the consulate I have increased my output. You have no idea of the beautiful names in Paris. This letter is addressed to Monsieur Belvedere Oise Noisis, rue de la Rechte Potin, Paris IIe. You could hardly invent anything more sonorous even if you tried. I see him as a rather frail old gentleman, still elegant, with a passion for tropical mushrooms which he grows in an Empire wardrobe. He wears embroidered waistcoats and travels with purple luggage."

[Marian answers:] "You know Carmella I sometimes think that you might get a reply if you didn't impose your imagination on people you have never seen. Monsieur Belvedere Oise Noisis is undoubtedly a very nice name, but suppose he is fat and collects wicker baskets? Suppose he never travels and has no luggage, suppose he is a young man with a nautical yearning? You must be more realistic I think."

"You are sometimes very negative minded Marian, although I know you have a kind heart, that is no reason that poor Monsieur Belvedere Oise Noisis should do anything so trivial as collecting wicker baskets. He is fragile but intrepid, I intend to send him some mushroom spore to enrich the species which he had sent from the Himalayas." There was no more to be said so Carmella read the letter. She was pretending to be a famous Peruvian alpinist who had lost an arm trying to save the life of a grisly bear cub trapped on the edge of a precipice. The mother bear had unkindly bitten off her arm. She went on to give all sorts of information about high altitude fungus and offered to send samples. It seemed to me she took too much for granted."

Posted July 24, 11:17 AM

VIDEOBLOG

December 2007. On modernism, Jules Olitski, and the New York Philharmonic's visit to North Korea.

Posted July 24, 9:01 AM

TT: See me, hear me

Contentions, the group blog of Commentary, the magazine for which I write a monthly essay about music and the arts, has just gotten into the videoblogging business. I am, somewhat to my surprise, the point man. I'll be appearing each month in a monthly on-camera interview during which I talk about...well, whatever I'm asked. This is an experiment--I've done a lot of radio, but comparatively little TV--so we'll see how it goes from here.

The first interview, taped in the living room of my Manhattan apartment last week, was posted on the site earlier today. In it I discuss everything from my latest Commentary essay (which you can read by visiting the "TT in Commentary" module of the right-hand column) to one of the pieces in the Teachout Museum, John Marin's "Downtown. The El," about which I blogged on the day "About Last Night" went live in 2003.

To see the interview, go here.

UPDATE: My interview has also been crossposted on YouTube.

Posted July 24, 8:58 AM

TT: Almanac

"By now, as has ever been the case with actors who find themselves stranded together in a strange town with a nightly call to their courage, we were slipping into each other's beds. In this blur of sharp need and comradeship, with its tacit understanding that there would be no subsequent demands, we gave little thought to consequences."

Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England: A Memoir

Posted July 24, 12:00 AM

July 23, 2007

DVD

Ace in the Hole (Criterion Collection). Now available on home video for the first time ever, Billy Wilder's scaldingly cynical film about a washed-up newspaper reporter (Kirk Douglas) who gets hold of a Floyd Collins-like exclusive, blows it up into a media event avant la lettre, and loses what's left of his soul along the way. Rarely has Hollywood made such films, and this one, not surprisingly, was the box-office flop of 1951. Fifty-six years later, it looks more like a cold-eyed peep into the future of electronic journalism (TT).

Posted July 23, 5:20 PM

CAAF: Observation

There really is no shame quite like being 36 and having to confess as part of Monday morning status, "Sorry, that project isn't complete, I was reading the new Harry Potter."

All day yesterday I kept thinking, "One more chapter and then I will go to the desk and work." Afternoon came and went, then dusk, nightfall, and finally the book was read, just around the time a party at my neighbor's was breaking up.

Now I feel like a drunk having to account for time lost on a bender.

Posted July 23, 1:13 PM

TT: Post hoc

My posting about the death of Jerry Hadley made a lot of people angry, as did the unsentimental obituary I wrote for The Wall Street Journal when Arthur Miller died. One of Hadley's fans went so far as to call me "disgusting" twice in the same e-mail, which I believe is a personal record. In both cases, the reason for much of the anger can be summed up by a Latin tag: De mortuis nil nisi bonum. The wise man is slow to quarrel with proverbs, but I'm afraid I must trump that one with a snippet of Shakespeare. He that dies pays all debts--including the debt of discretion that is owed to him, insofar as it's ever owed to a public figure who voluntarily chooses his status.

My own view of the matter is to be found in the published sayings of Nero Wolfe:

"Marko was himself headstrong, gullible, oversanguine, and naïve. He had--"

"For shame! He's dead, and you insult--"

"That will do!" he roared. It stopped her. He went down a few decibels. "You share the common fallacy, but I don't. I do not insult Marko. I pay him the tribute of speaking of him and feeling about him precisely as I did when he lived; the insult would be to smear his corpse with the honey excreted by my fear of death."

If anyone should see fit to write anything about me after I die, I hope they'll keep that in mind.

As for the people who've been writing to say that I can't possibly know anything about depression...well, what I know about it is nobody's business. But I'll say this much: Hadley was a talented, once-successful artist whose career had collapsed and who was on the verge of bankruptcy when he shot himself in the head. I'm sorry he did it--I wish he hadn't--but somehow I doubt that psychotherapy would have stopped him from doing so, much less the kindness of strangers. The world is a hard place, and the opera business is, or can be, one of its toughest neighborhoods. Those who think otherwise know nothing about it. Those who pretend otherwise are kidding themselves.

* * *

For additional thoughts on the subject of obituary writing, go here.

CultureGrrl seems to think that critics (presumably meaning, among others, me) were partly responsible for Hadley's suicide. She may well have a larger point, but in this particular case I can assure her that the critics who wrote of his vocal difficulties in 1999 were only reporting well after the fact what was common knowledge in the opera world. The damage had already been done, and I'm sure he knew it.

This is the most interesting reaction I've seen to what I wrote.

Posted July 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Notes from an unkept diary

• The most incongruous day of my cultural life took place in 1999, when Time sent me to Milwaukee, a city I'd never before visited, to see Florentine Opera give the American premiere of Lowell Liebermann's operatic verison of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Milwaukee isn't far from Chicago, so I persuaded Our Girl to meet me there. I flew out at midday and spent the afternoon walking around the Milwaukee Art Museum, then met OGIC at the train station and took her to the theater. After the opera--which was a knockout and a wow--we went back to our hotel and turned on the TV to look for a chaser with which to clear our spinning heads. There's Something About Mary was playing on the pay-per-view channel. I hadn't yet seen it, but OGIC assured me that it was drop-dead funny, so we proceeded to watch it, and I laughed so hard at the first scene that I came close to throwing up.

I recently quoted Greg Sandow in this space:

The [fine] arts--as an enterprise separate from our wider culture, and somehow standing above it--are over....any attempt to revive them (this includes classical music, of course) will have to mean that they engage popular culture, and everything else going on in the outside world.

Somehow I doubt that was quite what Greg had in mind. But maybe not!

• One of my closest friends regularly sends me handwritten letters and postcards, to which I generally respond via e-mail. It's not that she's a technophobe. In fact, she's a blogger of long standing. But as she once explained to me:

Isn't it nice to open letters, too? In a funny way, I think all the email/blogging returns an almost romantic, Victorian specialness to pen & paper correspondence.

I know exactly what my friend means, and I've tried to reciprocate. Yet I still find it all but impossible to sit down and write a full-length letter by hand, in part because I'm left-handed and so have always found penmanship (as they used to call it once upon a time) awkward and ungratifying. I started using a typewriter at the age of ten and learned how to touch-type six years later, and since then I've mostly restricted my handwritten communication with the outside world to postcards and very brief notes. Despite my advancing age and old-fashioned inclinations, e-mail and blogging somehow seem to suit me better. I guess I'm just a post-postmodern man in a hurry, juggling too many balls for my own good.

I wish it were otherwise. I love the letters I get from my friend. I love the way her handwriting reflects her quirky, slightly fey personality. Would that I could give as good as I get.

Posted July 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Much obliged

Mr. Artblog, who visited the Teachout Museum the other day, is himself an artist of no mean accomplishment. To my amazement and delight, he brought me a present, a lovely little ink-on-paper sketch called "Reading on the Subway." I'll hang it with pride as soon as I get back to New York.

If you'd like to see it, go here.

Posted July 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Eulogy is nice, but one does not learn anything from it."

Ellen Terry, Ellen Terry's Memoirs

Posted July 23, 12:00 AM

July 20, 2007

TT: Role of a lifetime

As if to prove my own point about the place of enthusiasm in criticism, today's Wall Street Journal drama column consists of a pair of flat-out raves. On tap are City Center's Gypsy and Westport Country Playhouse's Relatively Speaking:

Patti LuPone, who was last seen on Broadway puffing on a tuba in "Sweeney Todd," stopped the show cold at her first entrance in Monday's performance of "Gypsy." No sooner did she march up the aisle of City Center shouting "Sing out, Louise!" than the sold-out house popped its collective cork. That's how excited playgoers are about her "Gypsy"--as well they should be. Not only will Ms. LuPone be remembered as the Mama Rose of her generation, but every other aspect of this production is as good as it can be. Point for point, it's the best revival of a golden-age musical I've seen, in or out of New York. Staging, casting, design, even the orchestra: All are gloriously, exhilaratingly right.

Not counting the show itself, Ms. LuPone is the very best thing about "Gypsy," but the director comes in a close second. Arthur Laurents, who turned 89 last week, wrote the book of "Gypsy" and also directed the show's 1974 and 1989 Broadway revivals. Though he's never been much of a playwright, Mr. Laurents was a kind of genius when it came to writing the books of musicals. "Gypsy," like "West Side Story" before it, is a fat-free masterpiece of compression that cuts to the chase in every scene, discarding all superfluous detail and sticking unswervingly to the main dramatic line. Needless to say, Mr. Laurents knows it cold, and his staging, which I gather is a close but not slavish copy of the 1989 revival, zips along like lightning, unfussily nailing every laugh and jerking every tear....

If the recent Brits Off Broadway production of "Intimate Exchanges" made you long to see another Alan Ayckbourn comedy as soon as possible, I strongly suggest you catch the next train to Connecticut, where "Relatively Speaking," the first of Mr. Ayckbourn's 70-odd plays to hit the box-office bull's-eye, is being performed with pizzazz at Westport Country Playhouse....

No free link, blah blah blah. Buy the paper already, or (better yet) go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my column and all the rest of the Journal's extensive arts coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted July 20, 12:00 AM

TT: The performer speaks

My "Sightings" column in Saturday's Wall Street Journal takes a look at three books, Toni Bentley's Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal, Michael Blakemore's Arguments with England, and Glenn Kurtz's newly published Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music, that offer an insider's perspective on the difficult life of the performing artist.

To find out what makes these books so memorable, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal and turn to the "Pursuits" section.

UPDATE: Subscribers to the Online Journal can read my column by going here.

Posted July 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints."

Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes (courtesy of Kate's Book Blog)

Posted July 20, 12:00 AM

July 19, 2007

TT: Jerry Hadley, R.I.P.

Jerry Hadley's suicide has set the small town that is American opera to buzzing. It was a surprise--I can't think of another well-known classical singer who has killed himself--but on further reflection I didn't find it all that shocking. Hadley's career had been in decline for a number of years, and he'd long since dropped off my scope. The last time I saw him on stage was in the 1999 Metropolitan Opera premiere of John Harbison's operatic version of The Great Gatsby, which didn't make much of an impression on me. The New York Sun's obituary quoted something nice I'd said about him in my 1988 High Fidelity review of his recording of Show Boat, and it took me a moment to remember that I'd written the piece.

To outlive your own fame is a terrible fate, and it is all the more poignant for a performer. As I wrote when Johnny Carson died:

I wonder what he thought of his life's work? Or how he felt about having lived long enough to disappear into the memory hole? At least he had the dignity to vanish completely, retreating into private life instead of trying to hang on to celebrity by his fingernails. Perhaps he knew how little it means to have once been famous.

Alas, Hadley, unlike Carson, lost his fame comparatively early, and all too clearly longed in vain for its return. He was, of course, an operatic tenor, and as such the closest thing in music to an athlete, which suggests an appropriate epitaph: Now you will not swell the rout/Of lads that wore their honours out,/Runners whom renown outran/And the name died before the man.

UPDATE: I'd also forgotten that I reviewed the premiere of Gatsby for Time:

The score is strictly mainline modernist yard goods, while the libretto is a filet of Fitzgerald containing all of the action, most of the famous lines ("Her voice is full of money") and none of the elegiac, bittersweet tone that is the novel's essence. Gatsby is given a pair of clumsily confessional arias, a fatal mistake; the great mystery man of American fiction would never have revealed himself in that way, not even to himself. It doesn't help that Jerry Hadley's voice is frayed and throaty, or that he is stocky and unglamorous--hardly the gorgeous, gold-hatted charmer of Fitzgerald's imagination....Harbison has turned Fitzgerald's quicksilver masterpiece into a slow-moving opera that is stolidly competent and totally superfluous.

I wish my last memory of Hadley were a happier one.

Posted July 19, 12:27 PM

TT: Er, who's Alan Gilbert?

The New York Philharmonic's surprise decision to hire Alan Gilbert as its next music director is the talk of the classical-music world, in large part because Gilbert himself is not the talk of the classical-music world. He is chief conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and recently spent three years as Santa Fe Opera's music director--both important posts, but not exactly high-profile slots. Though he's led the Philharmonic in thirty-one concerts since making his debut with the orchestra six years ago, Gilbert is all but unknown to the public at large.

But, then, who isn't?

The sad fact is that the days of the celebrity conductor are basically over, not because there aren't interesting conductors out there but because our increasingly popular culture has essentially withdrawn its attention from classical music. According to news accounts, the other conductors who were considered by the Philharmonic to succeed Lorin Maazel were Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti. Both men are well known to regular classical concertgoers, but they have no name recognition whatsoever outside that small world. Moreover, they're both senior citizens. (Pop quiz: name five indisputably major under-sixty conductors. Hello? Is anybody there?)

Spend a few minutes looking through the news stories about Gilbert's appointment and you'll come away knowing four things about him:

• He's the first native-born New Yorker to be appointed music director of the Philharmonic.

• Both of his parents have played in the orchestra.

• He is (in the words of New York Times critic Tony Tommasini, who has been pushing hard for this appointment) "an unpretentious musician with no whiff of the formidable maestro about him."

• He's forty.

All interesting, though none save the last intrinsically encouraging. The New York Philharmonic has the oldest-looking audience of any major performing-arts organization whose performances I've attended in recent years. If Gilbert can attract a new generation of listeners, more power to him--but I very much doubt that the mere fact of his age will persuade anyone under thirty to come hear his concerts. The classical-music generation gap goes far deeper than that.

Far more important, I suspect, will be whether Gilbert proves to be an effective communicator--and whether he can find new ways of getting his message out to a new generation of listeners that is largely indifferent to classical music. I can't imagine, for instance, that he'll have any luck getting on network TV, or persuading the national newsmagazines to cover his activities. Instead, he'll have to go a different route. Does he understand how the new media work? Does the management of the Philharmonic understand?

A half-century ago, the New York Philharmonic hired another fortysomething music director, who promptly proceeded to put the orchestra at the center of postwar American culture. But Leonard Bernstein was already famous. By 1958 he had written West Side Story, scored On the Waterfront, made the most highly publicized conducting debut in the history of American classical music, made dozens of well-reviewed major-label recordings, and spent countless hours talking about music on network TV. Alan Gilbert has done none of those things, nor will he have the opportunity to do anything like them.

To be sure, part of the key to Gilbert's success will lie in the quality of his music-making. About that I can say nothing: I've never seen him conduct or heard any of the handful of recordings he's made to date. Nothing that I've read about his Philharmonic appearances has made me feel that I had to go hear him. Yes, his programs look interesting, but I don't need to go to Avery Fisher Hall to hear interesting orchestral music: all I have to do is go to my CD shelf and pick at random.

Needless to say, I wish Alan Gilbert the best of luck, but for the moment I can't honestly say that I'll be more likely to start attending the New York Philharmonic's concerts when he takes over in 2009. That could change--quickly. Alex Ross, whose taste I trust, calls him "a man with an inquisitive, contemporary mind" who is capable of turning the Philharmonic into "a markedly different, more vibrant organization." That sounds good to me. If Gilbert and the Philharmonic want to get people like me to go to their concerts, though, they'll have to transform the experience of classical concertgoing in such a way as to make it more attractive than staying home--or doing something else.

UPDATE: Says Marcus Maroney:

If you think "The New York Philharmonic has the oldest-looking audience of any major performing-arts organization whose performances I've attended in recent years," come on down and go to a Houston Symphony concert....

I've also seen a lot of walkers at Paper Mill Playhouse's weekend matinees, which presumably is a big part of the reason why they got themselves into such dire financial straits this past season.

Posted July 19, 11:11 AM

TT: Talking to ourselves

Dana Gioia, my boss at the National Endowment for the Arts, gave a widely reported commencement address at Stanford University last month. Now The Wall Street Journal has published a condensed version of it. Highlights:

I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show, I saw--along with comedians, popular singers and movie stars--classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.

The same was true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman and James Baldwin on general-interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American--because the culture considered them important. Today no working-class kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.

The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young. There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace....

At 56, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high school in this country had a music program with choir and band, usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even an orchestra. And every high school offered a drama program, sometimes with dance instruction. And there were writing opportunities in the school paper and literary magazine, as well as studio art training.

I am sorry to say that these programs are no longer widely available. This once visionary and democratic system has been almost entirely dismantled by well-meaning but myopic school boards, county commissioners and state officials, with the federal government largely indifferent to the issue. Art became an expendable luxury, and 50 million students have paid the price. Today a child's access to arts education is largely a function of his or her parents' income.

In a time of social progress and economic prosperity, why have we experienced this colossal cultural decline? There are several reasons, but I must risk offending many friends and colleagues by saying that surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame. Most American artists, intellectuals and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.

This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social and political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals, and they need to re-establish their rightful place in the general culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public, the results would not only transform society but also artistic and intellectual life....

Ever since I launched this blog--and for many years before that--I've been writing about the significance of what I call the middlebrow moment in American culture. (It's one of the unifying themes of A Terry Teachout Reader.) Dana didn't use that phrase in his speech, but it's exactly what he has in mind, both in this speech and in the various programs, including The Big Read, Shakespeare in American Communities, American Masterpieces, and Poetry Out Loud, with which the NEA is seeking to stem the tide of cultural ignorance in America. I'm proud to be associated with that effort.

To read the rest of Dana's speech, go here.

Posted July 19, 9:14 AM

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 gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. 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 and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
• Beyond Glory (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• Frost/Nixon * (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• Old Acquaintance (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)

CLOSING NEXT WEEKEND:
• 110 in the Shade * (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here, closes July 29)

Posted July 19, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I've never made the trip to or from Connecticut without its resembling the worst excesses of the French Revolution."

Pat Buckley (quoted in the New York Times, Nov. 20, 1984)

Posted July 19, 12:00 AM

July 18, 2007

TT: Heads up

New stuff in the right-hand column! Take a peek.

Posted July 18, 10:44 PM

BOOK

L.E. Sissman, Night Music. All but forgotten today, Sissman died of Hodgkin's disease in 1976 at the age of forty-eight, leaving behind a slender but indelible legacy of poems and essays, many of which were about the illness that was to rob America of one of its finest and most promising writers. Twenty-three years later, Peter Davison edited this well-chosen collection of Sissman's verse, whose cool, crisp iambs sit well with the highly individual sensibility of a poet-businessman who looked his fate in the eye without blinking: "Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap,/A booted man in black with a peaked cap/Will call for me and troll me down the hall/And slot me into his black car. That's all." Read him if you dare (TT).

Posted July 18, 10:36 PM

CD

Giovanni De Chiaro, Scott Joplin on Guitar. "The Entertainer," "Maple Leaf Rag," "Elite Syncopations," and eight other rags and character pieces, recorded in 1989 by the first classical guitarist to take a serious and sustained interest in Joplin's music. De Chiaro's lucid arrangements pare the non-stop oom-pah bass of the original piano versions down to the bare essentials, allowing the gentle lyricism of such pieces as "Solace: A Mexican Serenade" to come through with spring-like clarity. Don't give away your Joshua Rifkin albums, but once you listen to this CD, I bet you'll feel like playing it again right away (TT).

Posted July 18, 10:25 PM

CD

Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, Beethoven Complete Symphonies and Selected Overtures (Music & Arts, five CDs). Startlingly vivid new transfers of Toscanini's 1939 radio broadcasts of Beethoven's nine symphonies. Christopher Dyment calls these performances "the most lucid, dramatic and intense Beethoven cycle ever captured by recorded sound" in his crisply written, comprehensively informed liner notes, and I'm not going to argue. The seventy-three-year-old conductor was at the peak of his ruthless powers, and the NBC Symphony was still an enegetic ensemble of (mostly) youthful virtuosos who were capable of giving as good as they got. Airchecks of the 1939 cycle have been in circulation for decades, but they've never sounded half as good as this. Yes, there are other, equally valid ways to play Beethoven, but when you're listening to this explosively vital set, you'll likely have trouble remembering them (TT).

Posted July 18, 9:55 PM

FILM

NYC Noir (Film Forum, 209 W. Houston, July 27-Aug. 30). Just like the title says. Highlights: Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (Aug. 15), Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (Aug. 24-27), Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (Aug. 19-20), and Jane Fonda in Klute (Aug. 28) (TT).

Posted July 18, 9:40 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookies

A twin set for a misanthropic Wednesday:

"He liked people to think the worst of him, because then the best often came as an unpleasant surprise."

Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height

"It was rather annoying to hear how kind she'd been; it entailed putting tiresome qualifications on his dislike for her."

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

Posted July 18, 3:33 PM

TT: Gallopade

I get a huge kick out of the thrice-yearly meetings of the National Council on the Arts, not least because my colleagues are so interesting. We had some new faces on the council this time around, and one of them, Chico Hamilton, is a full-fledged living legend. He was, among other amazing things, the drummer of the original Gerry Mulligan Quartet, with which he made some of the most famous recordings in the history of cool jazz. Then he started his own band, a quintet whose offbeat instrumentation (flute, guitar, cello, bass, drums) and brilliant sidemen (Jim Hall and Eric Dolphy passed through its ranks) brought it critical acclaim, popular success, and brief but memorable appearances in two important films, Sweet Smell of Success and Jazz on a Summer's Day.

I was a bit nervous about meeting so cool a cat, but Hamilton turned out to be down to earth, drop-dead funny, and full of priceless anecdotes about everybody from Burt Lancaster to Louis Armstrong (of whom he does a letter-perfect impersonation). He says he's writing his autobiography--I can't wait to read it--but he promised to let me interview him for my Armstrong biography, and I intend to hold him to it.

I also met Stephen Lang, the author and star of Beyond Glory, who spoke to the NCA at our public meeting last Friday morning. If you live anywhere near New York and haven't seen Beyond Glory, about which I raved in The Wall Street Journal last month, you need to get on the stick, since it closes on August 19. It is, as I wrote in the Journal when I first saw it in Chicago in 2005, one of the greatest shows of its kind ever to come my way:

Broadway and Off Broadway have seen some hugely impressive one-person performances in the past couple of seasons, foremost among them Jefferson Mays in "I Am My Own Wife," Heather Raffo in "Nine Parts of Desire" and Sir Anthony Sher in "Primo." This show is that good.

Being a critic, I rarely get to meet actors, so I was pleased to have the opportunity to praise Lang to his face. He is, like Chico Hamilton, an exceedingly nice man, not at all what you'd expect after seeing the chameleon-like string of leather-tough guys he plays in Beyond Glory. Meeting such gifted folk and telling them how much their work has meant to me is one of the great joys of my life, and I never tire of it, being a wide-eyed small-town boy at heart.

Whenever I'm in Washington for an NCA meeting, I usually try to take in a show or two on my dark nights. This time, though, I settled for eating two exceptionally tasty dinners, one at Viridian (which is next door to the Studio Theatre, where I saw a fabulous Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead a few weeks ago) and the other at Jaleo, Washington's oldest tapas restaurant. I dined at Jaleo with Ms. Asymmetrical Information, and midway through the first course I heard somebody shouting "Terry!" from across the room. Guess who it was? Her. Small world, huh?

I've since made up for taking those two nights off. No sooner did I return to New York than I picked up a Zipcar and drove north to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival and Westport Country Playhouse, where I saw As You Like It and Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking. In between shows I crammed in a visit to Storm King Art Center, where I shared the tram with a group of small children who were much better behaved than the adults I encountered on my last visit. I spent the night at Storm King Lodge, a cozy, companionable hideaway located a stone's throw from the art center and an easy drive from the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, coming back home just in time to catch Patti LuPone in Gypsy, about which more on Friday.

I spent most of Wednesday writing a piece (surprise, surprise!) and catching up on the unmet social obligations (wrong word, but you know what I mean) created by spending so much time on the road in recent weeks. Specifically, I had lunch, dinner, and dessert with three different bloggers, Mr. Artblog, Ms. Litwit, and Ms. Swan Lake Samba Girl, the last of whom also brought along an ambitious young intern from Alabama who was looking for career-related advice. I did my best to oblige.

And that's that, at least as far as the Big Apple is concerned. Tomorrow I pull up stakes and relocate to my country retreat, where I'll be spending the next few weeks working on The Letter and Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong and seeing shows in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire. I expect to blog from there with reasonable regularity, and when I'm not around, OGIC and CAAF will be holding the fort.

See you when the dust settles.

UPDATE: A friend just sent me a link via YouTube to the scene
from Sweet Smell of Success that shows the Chico Hamilton Quintet at work in a New York nightclub. (Martin Milner isn't a real guitarist--he just plays one in Hollywood!)

Here's a clip of the same group playing "Blue Sands" in Jazz on a Summer's Day.

Ms. Litwit blogged about our dinner. (That's how I feel about living in New York, too.)

Posted July 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance."

Françoise Sagan, A Certain Smile

Posted July 18, 12:00 AM

July 17, 2007

TT: Almanac

"Coincidence is a pimp and a cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of facts recollected by a non-ordinary memorist."

Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!

Posted July 17, 12:00 AM

CAAF: 5 x 5 Books On The Self-Collected James Wood Bookshelf

5 x 5 Books ... is a recommendation of five books that appears here on Tuesdays. Sometimes I'll make the list, sometimes the list will come from someone else.

A while back my friend Mark Sarvas shared some of the titles on his James Wood reading list, described as "essentially a list of books we've collected over the years that Wood has written about approvingly at one time or another."

Reading this, I thought, "What a terribly geekish admission, Mark." Then, "Would you please post the rest of the list?" Internerd, indeed. So in the spirit of reciprocity, here are five favorites from my own James Wood reading list (and if you haven't read the Shchedrin yet, you really should correct that -- it's incredible):

1. The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin (translation by Natalie Duddington): Wood wrote the introduction to the New York Review of Books edition of the novel; you can download it here.

2. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul: Wood's love for A House for Mr. Biswas is well-known; here he takes umbrage at the novel's entry in The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. XII, declaring it "almost morally offensive."

3. Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes: In "How Shakespeare's 'Irresponsbility' Saved Coleridge" (The Irresponsible Self), Wood writes that Holmes's two-volume biography of Coleridge "gives us the best portrait" of the poet.

4. Berryman's Shakespeare by John Berryman (edited by John Haffenden): Wood quotes Berryman's essays in "Shakespeare in Bloom" (The Broken Estate), and "Shakespeare and the Pathos of Rambling" (The Irresponsible Self).

5. God: A Biography by Jack Miles: In a review of Harold Bloom's Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, Wood notes that "Bloom is enormously shadowed" by Miles, whose books he calls "Feuerbachian adventures." (See also Wood's review of Miles's Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God.)

Posted July 17, 12:00 AM

CAAF: Emerson's early efforts

Last week I wrote about Maugham's The Magician, a gothic novel written early in the author's career. Another unlikely dabbler in the form: Emerson.

From Robert Richardson's Emerson: The Mind on Fire:

In writing, as in other endeavors, Emerson did not find his characteristic voice while at college, although some traits begin to emerge. In prose he was working on wildly diverse projects. One was a lurid gothic tale about a Norse prophetess and sibyl and her magician son. The fantasy is overheated and overwritten -- more dream than anything else, a sort of Norse Vathek. The heroine Uilsa speaks:

"Did I not wake the mountains with my denouncing scream -- calling vengeance from the north? Odin knew me and thundered. A thousand wolves ran down the mountain scared by the hideous lightning and baring the tooth to kill; they rushed after the cumbrous host. I saw when the pale faces glared back in terror as the black wolf pounced on his victim."

Posted July 17, 12:00 AM

July 16, 2007

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO REGIONAL CRITICS?

"'We're the last generation of newspaper critics, you know,' a New York drama critic told me the other day. 'After us, everybody will be online.' Forecasts of Apocalypse Tomorrow usually turn out to have been exaggerated, but this one is looking more plausible than most..."

Posted July 16, 10:12 AM

TT and OGIC: A reminder

Our new guest blogger Carrie Frye, a/k/a CAAF, will be back to entertain you tomorrow!

Posted July 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Hot stuff

My Wall Street Journal column about the decline of regional arts criticism has stirred up quite a bit of comment in and out of the blogosphere. Among those who've posted about it to date are Mr. Playgoer, Alex Ross, Edward Winkleman, and one of the anonymous authors of Moreover, The Economist's new artblog.

I'm also getting a fair amount of e-mail about the column, of which this letter is typical:

Thanks for the thoughtful and (as always) incisive article about regional criticism. I'm working in the arts in one of those towns, Wilmington, Delaware, that doesn't have regular arts criticism. We have a couple of good writers who cover things the best they can, but they can't cover everything.

One of the responsibilities, as I see it, of critics is not only to say what they thought of something, but also--in the most simplistic terms--to let people know it was there. It's important to build cultural pride, or at least a cultural consciousness. It's hard to create excitement in audiences when they don't even know what's been in town. When I lived in Atlanta, the paper's practice was only to review those things that had several performances, using the logic that if it was only one performance, it wouldn't help to get audiences there because it was already gone. So...you know, Isaac Stern could come and no one would ever know he was there. I think the critic's responsibility is to help excite and build the audience, as well as serve it.

Thanks for doing that.

This letter serves as a valuable reminder of something that working critics often fail to keep in mind: reviews are news. A good critic is also a reporter, and unless he gives his readers a clear idea of what happened at a performance--starting with the fact that it took place--he isn't doing his job.

I also agree with my correspondent about the need to create excitement--or, rather, to communicate it. When a show thrills me, I do my very best to get that fact across to my readers, if at all possible in the first paragraph of my review.

Here's what I sound like when I'm walking on air:

The only time I don't think Brian Friel is the best living playwright is immediately after I've seen a play by Tom Stoppard. That both men should be represented on Broadway this season is a boon, and though Mr. Stoppard's "Coast of Utopia" trilogy, being both new and spectacular, will likely get most of the ink, the Manhattan Theatre Club's revival of "Translations," directed by Garry Hynes, deserves equal time. This production of Mr. Friel's 1980 play, among the greatest written in the 20th century, is so comprehensively masterful that no critic, however enthusiastic, can do more than suggest its manifold virtues. Instead of reviewing it, I wish I could simply send you a ticket....

Was I gushing? Yeah, I guess so--but if a show like that doesn't make you want to gush, even in the sober pages of The Wall Street Journal, you're in the wrong business. Of course the trick is to call your shots: if you blow your top every week, people will stop listening to you. But a critic who isn't capable of communicating his excitement should seek some other line of work.

In the immortal words of Constant Lambert:

After some of the most memorable and breath-taking experiences in my musical life it was indeed shocking to find that the critics next day were damning it with faint pseudo-academic praise, but it was not to me surprising. For the reason that I have, in the past, had to earn my living by that melancholy trade and realise all too well that the average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) Above all no enthusiasm.

I know I have my faults, but that's not one of them.

Posted July 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Preview of coming attractions

I just did something new: I wrote my very first introduction to the catalogue of a art exhibition.

William Bailey, whose Piazza Rotunda is part of the Teachout Museum, has a one-man show coming up at Betty Cuningham Gallery, and Betty called me up from out of the blue to ask if I'd write about him for the catalogue. Naturally I said yes, though not without a certain amount of apprehension, since I'd never written such a piece. I went down to the gallery a few weeks ago to see Bailey's latest paintings, and last Monday I sat down and knocked out the introduction, which I called "Art of the Unreal," in a single sitting. It's not bad, if I do say so myself.

The show goes up on October 18. Come take a look--and buy a catalogue while you're there!

Posted July 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Fanzine

Direct from Erin McKeown's publicist:

After five full-length albums, two EPs, hundreds of shows every year, reams of critical praise, and an incalculable number of fans served, where is Erin McKeown to go? She heads to Lafayette.

Named after the address of New York's much-loved Joe's Pub, Lafayette is the acclaimed songwriter's first official live album and an on-record invitation into her other world, the stage, where she spends more than half of every year knocking 'em dead nightly. Over 13 tracks, Lafayette captures the energy and musicality of McKeown as a bandleader and entertainer extraordinaire.

Lafayette is one night in the life of a performer at the peak of her powers. With a singer's natural gift and a guitarist's serious chops (often overlooked on her studio albums), McKeown leads her band through their paces on songs new and old, fast and slow, boisterous and reflective. And the group returns the favor, playing the bandleader on and off stage like the elegant entertainers of yesteryear.

The album is also a return to Erin's roots and Western Massachusetts neighbors, Signature Sounds, the exceptional imprint who last worked with Erin on 2000's Distillation. A national tour is in the works for the Fall, with dates to be announced shortly.

I assume this album was recorded at the McKeown gig I heard earlier this year, in which case it will be stupendous.

UPDATE: I just got an advance copy in the mail. It was, and it is. No street date yet--I'll keep you posted.

Posted July 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"When you begin to teach jazz, the most dangerous thing is that you tend to teach style. I had eleven piano students, and I would say eight of them didn't even want to know about chords or anything--they didn't even want to do anything that anybody had ever done, because they didn't want to be imitators. Well, of course, this is pretty naive, but nevertheless it does bring to light the fact that if you're going to try to teach jazz, you must abstract the principles of music, which have nothing to do with style, and this is exceedingly difficult. So there, the teaching of jazz is a very touchy point. It ends up where the jazz player, ultimately, if he's going to be a serious jazz player, teaches himself."

Bill Evans, The Universal Mind of Bill Evans (courtesy of The Bill Evans Webpages)

Posted July 16, 12:00 AM

July 13, 2007

TT: Summer camp

You win some, you lose some. In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I report on Xanadu and Fables de La Fontaine:

Prior to this week my list of contenders for the title of Worst Musical I've Ever Reviewed consisted of "In My Life," "Lestat," "Lennon," "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Ring of Fire," in that order.

Then came "Xanadu."

What's so uniquely awful about this stage version of the 1980 flop that put an end to Olivia Newton-John's Hollywood career? Start with the fact that it's an elephantine spoof of a quarter-century-old movie so terrible that few people saw it and fewer still remember it. That strikes me as a pretty good working definition of pointlessness, not to mention a near-infallible recipe for boredom. Why bother making such elaborate fun of a forgotten film about a dopey freelance artist (Cheyenne Jackson) who is visited by a Greek muse (Kerry Butler) who inspires him to open a roller disco? Pure spoofery cloys quickly even when its target is familiar, and "Xanadu" has nothing else to offer....

The curtain went up an hour late on "Fables de La Fontaine," the first production of Lincoln Center Festival 2007. (A malfunctioning light board was to blame.) Fortunately, the show was more than worth the wait. Robert Wilson, whose slow-motion surrealism put him on the avant-garde map in the '70s, has collaborated with the Comédie-Française, Europe's oldest theater company, on a pantomime-based French-language version of 19 of Jean de La Fontaine's 17th-century animal fables. The result is a work of uncanny beauty and compulsion, one of the most entrancing spectacles ever to be presented on a New York stage....

No free link. What are you waiting for? Buy this morning's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you one-two-three-presto access to my column and all the rest of the Journal's extensive and excellent arts coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted July 13, 12:00 AM

TT: Still here

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of "About Last Night." This was the first post, and this was the first almanac entry:

We must find out what we can about this place we're living in--this place in time--but we've got to be awfully careful, it seems to me, never to make ourselves too perfectly a part of it. Modishness is the sure sign of the second-rate. We're finally to be judged not by the degree of our involvement in the mainstream, but by our individual response to it.

Orson Welles said it, and I continue to believe it four years later. Most of our almanac entries are not intended as credos, but this one definitely qualifies.

Much has happened since 2003, both on this blog and elsewhere in the world, but the fact that "About Last Night" has been published continuously throughout that time--even during a week-long stretch when I thought I might be going out of business permanently--says something about the extent to which artblogging has become part of the landscape of American culture. To be sure, skeptics still abound, but I don't know anybody who actually reads artblogs who doubts that they're one of the best things to have happened to the arts in recent years. I'm very proud to be a part of the blogosphere.

To Our Girl in Chicago, my friend and co-blogger, and Carrie Frye, our friend and guest blogger--as well as the many artbloggers whom I've met and befriended since 2003--I offer heartfelt thanks for helping to create an online world where the arts are taken seriously. And to all of you who read "About Last Night," thanks for sticking around. In case you're wondering, we're still having fun.

See you Monday!

Posted July 13, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On,' has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race."

Calvin Coolidge, broadside distributed to agents of the New York Life Insurance Company (1932).

Posted July 13, 12:00 AM

July 12, 2007

CAAF: Snarkwatch

Not a signal of agreement, just amusement:

• "Carl Sagan writes better than this." -- James Wood, exasperated by Don DeLillo's use of the "inflationary mode" in Falling Man. (via Jenny Davidson.)

• "Hughes is a perfect example of what happens when a poet, though possessing none of the art necessary to turn a plain old messed-up life into literature, is the sun in her own Copernican system (she puts the Sol back in solipsism)." -- William Logan on Frieda Hughes' book of poems, Forty-Five.

• "I saw two casts, one led by Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg, the other by Paloma Herrera and Angel Corella. Murphy is not an actress. (When she's happy, she dances with her mouth open; when she's sad, she closes it.)" -- Joan Acocella writing about the Peter Martins' production of Romeo + Juliet.

Posted July 12, 9:01 AM

CAAF: "Published sumptuously at his own expense."

Last fall, when The Letter opera was still a wee twinkle, I had tapas with Terry and Maud in New York. It was a lovely sunny day, and we talked a lot about Somerset Maugham over lunch. Enough so that afterward I tried to track down a copy of "The Letter" at Three Lives. No luck, but I did get the first volume of Maugham's collected short stories, containing the devastating story "Rain," which I read over the next few days.

That set me off on a Maugham kick that lasted several months. The usual suspects: Human Bondage (half a great novel) and Cakes and Ale (a very happy re-read). The strangest entry in the Maugham-a-thon was a little-known novel called The Magician. Written early in Maugham's career, it's a purple, pulpish Gothic set in turn-of-the-century Paris. In it, two lovers are separated when the "sinister and repulsive" magician Oliver Haddo appears on the scene, sets his sights on the beautiful Margaret, bewitches her and draws her into a vile, debauched lifestyle abroad (to the modern reader the descriptions of this lifestyle will suggest that Margaret has gone Eurotrash). It just gets weirder from there. How weird? Secret-laboratory-of-succubi weird.

The Haddo character was modeled on Aleister Crowley, whom Maugham met while living in Paris. At the time, as Maugham writes in the foreword to The Magician, Crowley was "a voluminous writer of verse, which he published sumptuously at his own expense." The two met several times "but never after I left Paris to return to London. Once, long afterwards, I received a telegram from him which ran as follows: 'Please send twenty-five pounds at once. Mother of God and I starving. Aleister Crowley.' I did not do so, and he lived on for many disgraceful years."

The Magician was first published in 1908, then went out of print. It was reissued by Penguin in 1978, with Maugham penning the accompanying foreword, called "A Fragment of Autobiography." He writes:

When, a little while ago, my publisher expressed a wish to reissue [The Magician], I felt that, before consenting to this, I really should read it again. Nearly fifty years had passed since I had done so, and I had completely forgotten it. Some authors enjoy reading their old works: some cannot bear to. Of these I am. When I have corrected the proofs of a book, I have finished with it, for good and all. I am impatient when people insist on talking to me about it; I am glad if they like it, but do not much care if they don't. I am no more interested in it than in a worn-out suit of clothes that I have given away. It was thus with disinclination that I began to read The Magician. It held my interest, as two of my early novels, which for the same reason I have been obliged to read, did not. One, indeed, I simply could not get through. ...

As I read The Magician, I wondered how on earth I could have come by all the material concerning the black arts which I wrote of. I must have spent days and days reading in the library of the British Museum. The style is lush and turgid, not at all the sort of style I approve of now, but perhaps not unsuited to the subject; and there are a great many more adverbs and adjectives than I should use today. I fancy I must have been impressed by the écriture artiste which the French writers of the time had not yet entirely abandoned, and unwisely sought to imitate them.

Before he exits the Foreword, Maugham airs his disdain for Crowley one last time: "Crowley ... recognized himself in the creature of my invention, for such it was, and wrote a full-page review of the novel in Vanity Fair, which he signed 'Oliver Haddo'. I did not read it, and wish now that I had. I daresay it was a pretty piece of vituperation, but probably, like his poems, intolerably verbose."

* List Fancy extra: Also purchased that day, Edward P. Jones' All Aunt Hagar's Children and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, the latter because Maud promised me twenty bucks if I didn't like it.

Posted July 12, 9:00 AM

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 gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. 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 and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed