« August 2007 | Main | October 2007 »

September 29, 2007

DVD

Posted September 29, 10:48 AM

PLAY

Posted September 29, 10:48 AM

CD

Posted September 29, 10:47 AM

BOOK

Posted September 29, 10:47 AM

September 28, 2007

CAAF: Elves. Why did it have to be elves?

I mean to respond more fully to OGIC's lovely post about the children's classics you first discover as an adult, occasioned by her reading of The Hobbit. For now, though, I just wanted to share an excerpt from a TLS article I recently came across which describes Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and their writing circle.

Tolkien and Lewis formed the spine of the Inklings, regularly convening to read and discuss one another's work in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College. There were nineteen members in all, and Glyer excels at depicting their world, with its petty rivalries, joshing honesty ("he is ugly as a chimpanzee", wrote Lewis of fellow Inkling Charles Williams), its wit and learning and championship of scholarship for its own sake. The Inklings were often supportive and sympathetic ("the inexhaustible fertility of the man's imagination amazes me", wrote Lewis in 1949 on receipt of another instalment of The Lord of the Rings), but were capable of ferocious criticism if it was felt that a member had done anything less than his best ("You can do better than that. Better Tolkien, please!"). Tempers must surely have become frayed at times - as Tolkien became unyieldingly critical of Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia ("about as bad as can be") or as the English don Hugo Dyson met the latest bulletin from Middle Earth by (according to Tolkien's son Christopher) "lying on the couch, and lolling and shouting and saying, 'Oh God, no more Elves'".

Posted September 28, 1:48 PM

CAAF: Room service

For those of us who live in backwater movie markets: Dana Stevens notes that the Wes Anderson short Hotel Chevalier, an accompaniment to the filmmaker's new movie Darjeeling Limited, is available on iTunes. Even better, it's free!

A.O. Scott's review mentions that the 13-minute film is being shown at tonight's New York Film Festival, but won't otherwise appear in theaters. It will, however, be included on the DVD of the film.

Interestingly, the notices for Hotel Chevalier have been far more positive than the mixed reception for Darjeeling Limited, so it's worth checking out.

Posted September 28, 12:12 PM

TT: The theory of critical relativity

A couple of weeks ago I ran across a hugely interesting essay called "Confessions of a Community Theater Critic." The author, John Barry, covers amateur and semi-pro theater in Baltimore for the Baltimore City Paper, an alternative weekly, and his confessions were both amusing and on the mark:

This is not a gig for the weak of heart. It's for the eternal optimist, the dead-end journalist who doesn't believe in dead ends. It's for the tolerant, the cheerful, the brave and gratuitously creative. It's a job for someone who doesn't have a lot to do on weekends.

Barry's essay inspired me to write a "Sightings" column for tomorrow's Wall Street Journal about the problem of what I call "appropriate standards." How do you judge a low-budget performance, or one given by performers whose ambitions outstrip their skills? Do you let the critical chips fall where they may--or shorten your critical yardstick?

To find out, pick up a copy of the Saturday Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section. I'm there. (Starting on Saturday, subscribers to the Online Journal can read my column by going here.)

Posted September 28, 11:27 AM

TT: What's in a whole bunch of names?

I've received a lot of responses to my posting inviting you to help me come up with a title for my Louis Armstrong biography. Unfortunately, I also received an unprecedented amount of spam and press releases this week. I'm still doing my best to sort out the good stuff. I'm afraid that for once, too many of you have written (and are still writing) for me to send individual replies. To all of you, my heartfelt thanks for sharing your thoughts with me. I take your input seriously!

At some point in the next couple of weeks, I'll post the results of my informal poll. Watch this space for details....

Posted September 28, 11:17 AM

TT: Little old serial killers

Who knew? I went to Baltimore last Saturday to review a revival of a mossy old chestnut for today's Wall Street Journal, and it turned out to be as fresh as tomorrow's bread:

What's so funny about mass murder? Nothing--unless you happen to be watching a performance of "Arsenic and Old Lace," whose principal characters have piled up two dozen corpses between them, with No. 25 about to quaff a glass of elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine and cyanide as the curtain falls.

The phenomenal durability of Joseph Kesselring's only successful play is a matter of record. It opened on Broadway in 1941, ran for 1,444 performances, was filmed by Frank Capra, and has since become God's gift--or, rather, Satan's--to community theaters and amateur actors. But it tends not to get done by first-class companies nowadays, and so CenterStage's crisp, well-cast revival is something of a revelation. I knew "Arsenic and Old Lace" was funny, but I didn't know it was this funny. Anyone who doesn't shatter a rib laughing at CenterStage's production is...well, dead.

Also on my plate was the Keen Company's production of The Dining Room:

Of all A.R. Gurney's studies of life among the WASPs of northeastern America, the best one might just be "The Dining Room," whose Off Broadway premiere put him on the map. "The Dining Room" is celebrating its 25th birthday this season, and the Keen Company has marked the occasion with a very fine Theatre Row revival that makes the strongest possible case for a theatrical craftsman who doesn't get nearly enough respect.

Inspired by Thornton Wilder's "The Long Christmas Dinner," "The Dining Room" takes place, according to Mr. Gurney, in "a dining room--or, rather, many dining rooms." The play consists of a series of cunningly dovetailed dramatic vignettes in which the author explores his preferred theme, the postwar erosion of upper-middle-class self-confidence, with the utmost skill and variety. The six actors in the cast play a total of 57 roles, so many that the "characters" in "The Dining Room" come across not so much as individuals as deftly sketched archetypes. Most of the playlets are comic, but the overall effect is intensely elegiac, in large part because of Mr. Gurney's mixed feelings about the lost world that spawned him. He knows its limitations, but he also appreciates its virtues, and it is this honest ambiguity that makes "The Dining Room" so involving.

No free link, so to read the whole thing, follow the usual drill: either buy today's paper or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column--and the rest of the Journal's arts section--on the spot. You know it's a good deal. What are you waiting for? (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted September 28, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees.

Alfred Tennyson, "Ulysses"

Posted September 28, 12:00 AM

September 27, 2007

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)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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 NEXT WEEK:
• Iphigenia 2.0 (drama, R, adult subject matter and violence, reviewed here, closes Oct. 7)

CLOSING SATURDAY:
• The Seagull (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

Posted September 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven."

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

Posted September 27, 12:00 AM

September 26, 2007

OGIC: Better late than never?

I've been a fickle reader these past months, skipping around from book to book, only occasionally seeing one through. I did finish two by Kate Christensen, The Epicure's Lament and In the Drink, as well as A Buyer's Market (the second installment of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time) and the strictly confectionary Mergers and Acquisitions. I also swallowed a couple of Reginald Hill mysteries practically whole, but that's just par for the course (until I run out of them, an eventuality I prefer not to contemplate). Otherwise, though, it's been a few pages here, a chapter there, until a week or two ago, when I hit on just the thing that suits me just now. But more on that in a minute.

First, a word or two on In the Drink, Christensen's first novel. It superficially resembles a certain kind of book wherein a hapless twenty-something, female, finds her hap. But Claudia, the protagonist of Christensen's book, is less picturesquely hapless than your standard issue Bridget Jones type. Frequently drunk, sought by collection agents, and not above stealing from the dead, she's actively self-destructive. She has a memorable foil in her employer, Jackie, whose socialite detective novels she ghostwrites for peanuts. And Christensen has an eye for a scene:

In the park, I sat on a wet bench. The river lay flat and sullen, a drenched, dark mineral gray-green. The banks of New Jersey hulked, beaten-down; the sky was several shades lighter than the water, but just as dense. The mastodonic roar of trucks along the West Side Highway was pierced by a bicycle bell on the path behind me, and the voices of children playing nearby on the paved walkway.

She's especially good at capturing what things look like seen through a glaze of pain. Speaking of which, check out the unlikely loveliness of this description, from Henry Green, of an unpopular schoolboy's fear of his classmates (I'm still dipping into and out of Green's memoir Pack My Bag):

Until he went up to Cambridge I was sheltered and could always find sanctuary in [my brother's] room which meant I had more time to read and that means literally, in the hunger for reading anything and everything which began about then, I had more time to give to what became a preoccupation. Also I was spared the terror I got to know afterwards when there was that thunder of feet down the corridor and one sat still as a rabbit wondering if they were coming for one. Later at Oxford, where I had rooms over cloisters paved in stone which echoed, they would tear screaming in by either of its entrances drunk like fiends about one in the morning and, unpopular as ever, I had again to face the fact they might be after me as five years previously they had been; different, desperate now, estranged.

As I wrote about this book before, it has an affecting urgency, apparently the result of Green's conviction that World War II would be the end of him, and of his resulting desperation to get down in writing what life had felt like so far. Right now I'm in the middle of his chapter on discovering the opposite sex; on this fraught subject, especially, his candor and his commitment to capturing feeling and fleeting impressions are arresting.

But what I'm really reading at any given time, now that I am a commuter again, is what I'm reading on the train. And lately that's not Green, which has been more of a living-room couch affair, to be picked up when I need a break from the burdens of work or television. Lately what I'm really reading is something most of you read as tykes, or perhaps had read to you: The Hobbit.

Nope, before this month I never read The Hobbit, or anything else by Tolkien. Now I'm about to finish it, and it's held me rapt. More on that experience when I do finish it; in the meantime, what children's classics did you first discover as an adult (Harry Potter doesn't count), and how did it make you feel--old? young again? CAAF and Terry, consider yourselves asked, too.

Posted September 26, 9:39 AM

TT: Almanac

Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour bears a lovely face.

Thomas Dekker, The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissell

Posted September 26, 12:00 AM

September 25, 2007

TT: Entries from an unkept diary

• I see that Mr. Think Denk, about whom I blogged yesterday, has returned the compliment today.

One of the things that interested me about his posting was that he noted the presence on my bookshelves of Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, one of my favorite novels--but that he didn't say anything about it to me at the time! I, too, make an invariable practice of checking out the shelves of the people whose homes I visit and drawing conclusions about them from what I find there, but I usually share those conclusions with my hosts.

It makes me wonder what else he noticed....

• Incidentally, readers of my recent book column about Mary McCarthy may be amused to learn that when you search for Pictures from an Institution at amazon.com, The Groves of Academe comes up on the same screen. That's a good one, too--but Pictures from an Institution is much better, and contains a truly wicked pen portrait of McCarthy to boot.

• Readers who've been keeping up with the ceaseless controversy over the fate of Philadelphia's Barnes Foundation by way of Mr. Modern Art Notes and Ms. CultureGrrl might want to take a look at this 2005 posting in which I reported on my first (and, I suspect, last) visit to that famously eccentric museum's suburban headquarters.

Here's the money quote:

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

I haven't changed my mind.

Posted September 25, 1:37 PM

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

• Amazing video podcasts of images from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Click on the ones titled "Gallery Explorer: --", hope in vain for Dark Side of the Moon to start up. (Also available on iTunes.)

• Daily dose of tumult on the heath and in the snow: Revisit Vera Pavlova's "Four Poems" from the New Yorker.

From a 2002 interview with Pavlova:

What are the main critical views of your work?
They go from one extreme to another! On the one hand, I'm regarded as a sort of male invention. On the other, I'm an earth mother, concerned with gynaecological matters and not metaphysics. Also there is the psychoanalytical view, which says my poems are a clear case of intersexuality.

What's that?
All I could find in a dictionary was: "Intersex, an organism in which
there are no clear indications of male or female gender."

So, a sexual zero! And what follows from that?
That there's nothing especially female or male about poetry.

Posted September 25, 1:30 PM

CAAF: Morning coffee

• Ursula K LeGuin's tough yet clear-sighted review of Jeanette Winterson's new sci-fi novel, The Stone God. Of the recent spate of literary writers working in genre, LeGuin writes: "I am bothered, though, by the curious ingratitude of authors who exploit a common fund of imagery while pretending to have nothing to do with the fellow-authors who created it and left it open to all who want to use it. A little return generosity would hardly come amiss."

• The Financial Times' Rosie Blau lunches with Winterson at Alastair Little, in London. Winterson is charming; champagne, prawns, risotto and lost bread with honey roast plums are consumed.* (Via Light Reading.)

• Review of Alastair Little.

* Your link-gatherer is currently on a no-sugar, no-booze diet. Expect a continued bounty of food links, lingering appraisal of other people's meals, etc., until it all goes tits-up with the order of a case of these.

Posted September 25, 9:00 AM

CAAF: Mother tongue

Edmund White has written a fascinating piece for the NYRB on Henry James' letters. The essay focuses on James' and his brother William's education, including this intriguing linguistic bit:

In 1855 [Henry James Sr.] accordingly bundled the family off to Europe--to Geneva (surely the least sensuous city on the Continent), where little Henry was taught by French-speaking governesses, then sent to the Pensionnat Roediger. When their father's enthusiasm for this institution inevitably waned they all moved to London where tutors were engaged again, though their governess Mlle Cusin was retained and brought over from Geneva to continue teaching them French. It was during these years that the boys acquired their nearly perfect and certainly idiomatic French; the self-critical James could say, "My French astounds me--its goodness is equalled only by its badness. I can be terribly spirituel, but I can't ask for a candlestick."

In later years Henry would be guilty of Gallicisms ("the actual President of the United States") and would scrawl hasty notes to himself in French. His letters in these two volumes are peppered with French phrases, two or three a page. After addressing Thomas Sergeant Perry in French for a full page, Henry (at age twenty-four) switches back to English but deplores the loss of the intimate tu ("How detestable this you seems after using the Gallic toi!"). Some of the strangeness of James's prose in these early letters can surely be explained by his translating back into English from French. For instance, when he writes Perry in 1860 from Paris he describes what he sees out the window of his hotel and refers to "a grasp of warriors" passing by (a phrase which surely began life as une poignée de guerriers). Or when James talks of a Swiss mountain trail that took eighteen years to "pierce," he's obviously translating back from percer. Richardson remarks on similar mistakes in William's English, though in his case the source of the errors was German.

I was thinking a little about this sort of thing -- crossing languages and how speaking one affects the other -- over the weekend. Currently, I speak appalling French and Spanish, and I've been considering adding some hideous Latin or Greek to the stable. Just idle, What Would George Eliot Do-type thoughts before bedtime.

If you've invested a lot of time with flash cards and language labs and still never cleared "appalling," you may look for consolation. And for me, that's come from what the other language, no matter how imperfectly mastered, has revealed or reminded me about English. Etymologies, sentence structures, relationships between word families: All of these get thrown into sharper relief. For instance, reading García Márquez in Spanish, you might come across espuma for shaving lather, and so lather and foam get tossed around in your brain for a while, in a way that is gratifying and/or makes you seem a little high, depending: Lathered waves, espuma, spume!

That's the train of thought that got me to the Latin and Greek. I'm not sure which, if either, I'll try to learn (recommendations are welcome). For now I've been entertaining myself with the various Amazon reviews on the different textbooks (Teach Yourself Pig Latin in a Day!) available.* Here's an excerpt from a review of Introduction to Attic Greek:

I'm not sure how to answer the chap who thinks learning a language ought to be a distractingly entertaining experience. But let me try. Language learning can indeed be accompanied by merriment at times, usually during the immersion phase and often at the expense of the learner. I'm afraid we've missed that boat by a couple millennia. If the pure cerebral rush that comes with the gradual mastery of the inner logic and outer mechanics of your target language is not sufficient stimulation in itself, then the learner might be better advised to stick to Spanish, where he can start pretending to make sentences almost from the outset.

(Link to White article via Maud.)

* I really love reading Amazon reviews -- I don't know why, possibly because I don't get out much: It's people-watching for agoraphobics. Like sitting on a bus where everybody around you is talking about books (and Harriet Klausner rides every line). For a long time my favorite was one that took Zadie Smith to task for not writing well enough about menopause in On Beauty. It was the abundance of clinical detail that really made the case.

Posted September 25, 12:54 AM

TT: Almanac

"Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair."

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Posted September 25, 12:00 AM

September 24, 2007

TT: Made manifest

I often have occasion to make favorable mention in this space and elsewhere of Think Denk, Jeremy Denk's witty blog about "the glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist." Not long ago our mutual friend Anya Grundmann, who helps run the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera, invited the two of us to appear jointly at the next institute to talk about blogging. We live in the same neighborhood but had never met, so I invited Mr. Think Denk to tour the Teachout Museum and have lunch with me at Good Enough to Eat. It took us several weeks to come up with a mutually compatible date--we've both been on the road for much of the summer--but we finally managed to converge on Friday afternoon.

No sooner had I opened the door to my apartment than we started pelting one another with opinions, some of which we shared (four thumbs up for Verdi's Falstaff) and some not (he likes Ives and Schumann a lot more than I do). The talk was more or less nonstop, though we did pause long enough to cram down lunch and listen to four records that came up in the conversation:

• Van Cliburn playing the first movement of the Barber Piano Sonata

• Gérard Souzay's 1946 recording of Fauré's "Clair de lune"

• A 1909 recording of Reynaldo Hahn's "Offrande" sung by the composer to his own piano accompaniment

• A recording of "Quand'ero paggio," an aria from Falstaff, made in 1907 by Victor Maurel, the baritone who created the role fourteen years earlier

Mr. Think Denk is every bit as smart and thoughtful in person as you'd expect from reading his blog. Time was when this might have surprised me, but experience has taught me that such is usually the case with the best bloggers. Alas, I'm afraid I talked his ear off about The Letter--I'd had an unusually productive work session with Paul Moravec the day before and was still booming and zooming as a result--but he was kind enough to act interested and ask leading questions, to which I obligingly responded by hosing him down with superfluous information. (At least I stayed off the subject of Louis Armstrong's embouchure!)

No doubt one of the secondary reasons for my garrulity was that I'd finally managed to lick the case of allergy-heightened, stress-exacerbated sniffles that tore a hole in the past two weeks of my life. As usual I celebrated by revving up my engine: on Saturday I took a train to Baltimore to see CenterStage's production of Arsenic and Old Lace, and the next day I was back in New York for a press preview of Dividing the Estate, Horton Foote's new play. This week I'll be writing three pieces, seeing two more shows, and paying a visit to the Armstrong Archives at Queens College.

Whatever else my life is or isn't, it's definitely not dull. Neither Mr. Think Denk nor I can still quite believe that people actually pay us to do what we do. Yes, I work too damn hard and don't always take proper care of myself, but I suspect that the sheer pleasure of spending my days immersed in art up to the eyebrows offsets no small part of the resulting wear and tear.

It's nice to be myself again.

Posted September 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Titularly speaking

I just got word that another book tentatively called Hotter Than That will be published around the time that my Louis Armstrong biography of the same name will be coming out from Harcourt. No, it's not an Armstrong biography, but it is about jazz trumpet, which suggests that I may need to come up with another title. The prospect doesn't unnerve me--my Mencken biography was retitled The Skeptic after I turned the manuscript in to HarperCollins--but it's not too soon for me to be thinking about a new name, so I thought I'd share my problem with the readers of this blog.

"Hotter Than That" is, of course, the title of one of Louis Armstrong's Hot Five recordings of 1928, so I went through the Armstrong discography to see if any other title leaped out at me. These caught my eye:

• King of the Zulus

• Fireworks

• That Rhythm Man

• You Rascal, You

• Laughin' Louie

• Song of the Vipers (or, alternatively, "King of the Vipers," which was one of Armstrong's many nicknames)

• I'm Shootin' High

• Jubilee

Your thoughts?

Posted September 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel."

André Maurois, The Art of Writing

Posted September 24, 12:00 AM

September 21, 2007

TT: Just a cockeyed idealist

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to out-of-town productions of a pair of infrequently revived shows, William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life and Stephen Sondheim's musical version of Merrily We Roll Along:

Few artists have been done dirtier by posterity than William Saroyan. For a time he was one of America's best-known writers, and "The Time of Your Life," his most successful play, won a Pulitzer in 1940. But then America fell out of love with Saroyan, and he had lapsed into half-remembered obscurity long before his death in 1981. Not even "The Time of Your Life" has held the stage, and when the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, one of the best companies in the New York area, announced a revival, I was eager to see what they would do with a play so completely out of favor. The good news is that it has turned out to be far more theatrically potent than I could possibly have imagined.

On paper there's nothing much to "The Time of Your Life," which is set in a seedy San Francisco bar just after the start of World War II. Joe (Andrew Weems) sits and guzzles champagne as a string of variously eccentric drinkers come and go. At play's end he rouses himself from his sozzled torpor, does a good turn for an unhappy whore (Sofia Jean Gomez), and returns at last to the world he had renounced. That's all there is to it, really--except for the goofy good humor with which Saroyan portrays the patrons of Nick's Pacific Street Saloon. From Harry (Blake Hackler), the hapless hoofer who longs to be a comedian but is utterly unfunny, to Kit Carson (Edmond Genest), a half-senile old man who claims to have been a sharpshooting pioneer, Saroyan fills the stage with characters whose cockeyed charm wins you over....

Like the 1934 George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play on which it is based, "Merrily We Roll Along" runs in reverse: It starts in the present, showing us the hollow triumph of a songwriter who gave up music to become a Hollywood producer, then turns back the clock so that we can watch him selling out by installments. The score is one of Mr. Sondheim's strongest, but the show's unrelieved pessimism and structural trickery turned off Broadway audiences, and the original 1980 production closed after just 16 performances.

Fortunately, Mr. Sondheim and George Furth (who had previously collaborated on "Company") kept on tinkering with "Merrily." In time they came up with a much-altered version meant to make us care about the fate of Franklin Shepard (Will Gartshore), the Sondheim-like songwriter who, unlike his creator, betrays his art (and friends and lovers) by jettisoning his idealism and going for the gold. In this revised, slimmed-down version, the show's ironic arc--it begins in bitter disillusion and moves "forward" to a happy "ending" full of youthful hope for the future--now makes dramatic and emotional sense.

Eric Schaeffer, who as artistic director of Signature Theatre has earned a well-deserved national reputation for his Sondheim stagings, has opted this time for a bare-bones production similar in feel to a semi-staged concert version. It is, alas, too obviously based on John Doyle's recent Broadway revival of "Company," right down to the big black piano at center stage...

No free link--yet--so buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column--and the rest of the Journal's arts section--on the spot. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted September 21, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know."

William Saroyan (quoted in the New York Journal-American, Aug. 23, 1961)

Posted September 21, 12:00 AM

September 20, 2007

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)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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)
• Iphigenia 2.0 (drama, R, adult subject matter and violence, reviewed here, closes Oct. 7)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:
• The Seagull (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sept. 29)

Posted September 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I talked with Louis Armstrong one night in Basin Street and mentioned his record of 'When You're Smilin'' which I had early loved and too soon lost. 'I was working in the house band at the Paramount when I was young,' Armstrong said. 'And the lead trumpet stood up and played that song, and I just copied what he did note for note. I never found out his name but there was kicks in him. There's kicks everywhere.'"

Murray Kempton, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events

Posted September 20, 12:00 AM

September 19, 2007

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

• Kevin Kinsella's interview with Anya Ulinich. I hope to pick up her novel Petropolis this week; you can read the first chapter here.

• Beckett for Babies. (O Aulenback! how I have missed thee.)

Posted September 19, 2:07 PM

CAAF: Dear Madam, Since our extraordinary conversation I have thought of nothing else...

This week I've been rereading Possession, which is up there with Middlemarch for great novels to read when you're snarled, low and the sleeves of your cardigan are stuffed with Kleenex (suck it, ragweed season). I've been reading Madwoman in the Attic, too, and Byatt's novel makes a satisfying counterpoint.

The New York Times has a nice page devoted to A.S. Byatt, which includes these tidbits:

• When the book became an unlikely bestseller in the United States, in the winter of 1990, Byatt was asked to speculate on the reason for its popularity. She responded, "It's like the books people used to enjoy reading when they enjoyed reading ... It has a universal plot, a classic romantic plot and a classic detective plot. And the plot was more important than anything else in it. People can get the sort of pleasure out of it they got out of the old romantic novel."

• In another interview, Byatt described the spark for the novel:

Sometime in the early 1970's, Ms. Byatt recalled, she spotted a well-known Coleridge scholar in the British Museum Library and mused that much of what she knew of Coleridge had been filtered through that individual, who had devoted a lifetime to her study of the Romantic poet. ''I thought, it's almost like a case of demonic possession, and I wondered - has she eaten up his life or has he eaten up hers?''

• Also worth a read, this lengthy but fascinating interview with Éditions Paradigme. In it, Byatt notes, "I think there are a lot of rather romantic novels rather like Possession that believe themselves to be influenced by Possession and rather depress me," which made me laugh.

RELATED:
• Byatt's ode to Middlemarch.

Posted September 19, 1:45 PM

OGIC: Another world

Every now and then I like to check in and see what the English naturalist Gilbert White was noticing this time of year. So many of his journal entries, their language sparing and concise, amount to a sort of accidental poetry. Here are his reports on a stretch of September days in 1777:

Sept. 14. Black cluster-grapes begin to turn color. A tremendous & awful earthquake at Manchester, & the district round. The earthquake happened a little before eleven o' the clock in the forenoon, when many of the inhabitants were assembled at their respective places of worship.

Sept. 17. The sky this evening, being what they call a mackerel sky, was most beautiful, & much admired in many parts of the country. Footnote. As the beautiful mackerel sky was remarked & admired at Ringmer, near Lewes, London, & Selborne at the same time; it is a plain proof that those fleecy clouds were very high in the atmosphere. These places lie in a triangle whose shortest base is more than 50 miles. Italian skies! Full moon. The creeping fogs in the pastures are very picturesque & amusing [interesting] & represent arms of the sea, rivers, & lakes.

Sept. 18. [Findon] Deep, wet fog. Sweet day.

Sept. 19. [Chilgrove] Ring-ousels on the downs on their autumnal visit. Lapwings about on the downs attended by starlings; few stone-curlews. Sweet Italian skies. The foliage of the beeches remarkably decayed & rusty.

Sept. 20. Some corn abroad: a vast burden of straw, & many ricks.

Sept. 24. The walks begin to be strewed with leaves. Vivid Northern Aurora.

I previously blogged White last August, here.

Posted September 19, 3:18 AM

TT: Almanac

"Artists are simple-hearted souls. Today they sign this, tomorrow that; they don't even look to see what it is, so long as it seems to them well-meaning."

Adolf Hitler (quoted in Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics)

Posted September 19, 12:00 AM

September 18, 2007

TT: Dinner and an opera

Last year I wrote a "Sightings" column for The Wall Street Journal about how the Atlanta Opera decided to shutter its downtown headquarters and move to the suburbs:

Not surprisingly, arts-savvy Atlantans are divided over whether the move to the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre will prove smart or suicidal. Other local arts organizations with a midtown presence, such as the High Museum of Art and the Atlanta Symphony, are firmly committed to staying where they are. Can an opera company that relocates to the suburbs maintain its cachet among the cognoscenti? No one knows--yet everyone agrees that the Atlanta Opera, which is $2.85 million in the red, had to do something drastic. Subscriptions have been plummeting, in part because the 4,500-seat civic center where the company now performs is too large for comfortable viewing of normal-size theatrical productions. (The new theater at the Cobb Centre has only 2,750 seats.) "If we stay at the civic center, I don't know if we can continue to survive," Dennis Hanthorn, general manager of the Atlanta Opera, recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

All politics--including the politics of art--is local, and it's anything but certain that local operagoers will follow the Atlanta Opera to Cobb County. From a distance, though, the move looks to me to be both adventurous and prescient, especially since most demographers agree that the future of middle-class urban life in America belongs to the suburbs. Rightly or wrongly, the Atlanta Opera is taking a leap into that unpredictable but promising future....

In fact, many American cities are sprawling megalopolises made up of middle-class commuters who don't care to drive back into midtown on weekends if they can help it. The Atlanta Opera is betting that enough such people will embrace a suburban-based opera company to make its move to Cobb County worthwhile. If I had to choose, I'd make the same bet.

Now the Atlanta Opera is in the news again. In preparation for the move, which takes place later this month. the company conducted a Gallup poll asking its subscribers whether they'd be willing to attend performances in the suburbs. According to the Atlanta Constitution, the answer was yes--so long as there were good restaurants close to the new theater. Another finding was equally striking. As part of its investigation of what made the company's patrons choose to go to specific performances, the pollsters discovered that "[f]amous opera stars from New York's Metropolitan Opera--singers of the stature of soprano Deborah Voigt--draw almost no recognition. Nor do singers who performed recently with the Atlanta Opera trigger any memories."

It will be interesting to see how the company responds to these fascinating findings. Speaking as the librettist of a new opera in the making, I wonder whether it might want to consider teaming up with local restaurants to offer dinner-and-an-opera package deals designed to lure Georgians to its more adventurous bills.

I suggest this in all seriousness, by the way. For those of us who spend our lives immersed in the fine arts, the reults of the Atlanta Opera's survey should be instructive, not to mention humbling. Nor do they inspire me to condescend to the company's patrons. The fact is that a decision to go to the opera--or to an orchestral concert, a nightclub, or a museum--is perceived by most people as a choice among competing forms of entertainment, and not all of the factors that enter into it are necessarily simon-pure. Moreover, as every opera administrator knows perfectly well, there aren't nearly enough fanatical opera buffs in the world, much less in Atlanta, to fill the seats of a theater night after night.

For this reason, it strikes me that arts administrators throughout the country should be conducting similar research into the vexing question of audience motivation. How do you fill an opera house with people who don't know who Deborah Voigt is--and is it possible to do so without diluting your programming beyond the point of recognition?

As they say down in the land of serious barbecue, there's the rub.

Posted September 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The idea of writing 'for everyone' flirts with utopianism, but I feel distrust for whoever is a poet for the few, or for himself alone. To write is to transmit; what can you say if the message is coded and no one has the key? You can say that to transmit this particular message, in this specific way, was necessary to the author, but with the rider that it is also useless to the rest of the world."

Primo Levi, The Need for Roots: A Personal Anthology (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted September 18, 12:00 AM

September 17, 2007

TT: Men at work (III)

A month has gone by since I last reported on the progress of The Letter, the musical version of Somerset Maugham's play that Paul Moravec and I are writing for Santa Fe Opera. During that time Paul paid his first visit to Santa Fe, and came back mightily impressed by the company and its staff. "It's like an American Bayreuth," he said, referring to the theater in Germany where the operas of Richard Wagner are performed each summer. He was told that The Letter is already the subject of considerable buzz, both in Santa Fe and in New York, and that the company now expects that tickets for the opera's first performances, which will take place in August of 2009, will be a hot commodity. He also brought back a copy of this season's souvenir program, in which a full page is devoted to The Letter. Whew!

In other news, five of the six principal roles in The Letter have been cast. For the moment I can't be any more specific, but I can say that our number-one-with-a-bullet choice for the starring role of Leslie Crosbie--the part played by Bette Davis in the 1940 film version--has signed on with enthusiasm, and that all the other singers lined up by Santa Fe to date look and sound eerily like what Paul and I had in mind going in. With Jonathan Kent in the director's chair, I'd say we've got ourselves a damned impressive roster.

On Thursday Paul and I will be sitting down for the latest of our face-to-face work sessions. He'll play me the music he's composed since our last get-together, then we'll go through it bar by bar, putting words and music through the critical wringer and making changes on the spot as needed. Each time we do this, I find myself freshly amazed--as well as humbled--to think that the two of us should be writing an opera for a major company. It's sort of like the way I feel about living in New York: I'm used to it, but I still have to pinch myself every once in a while.

Paul has now written the first three scenes of the opera, plus an aria from Scene 6. That's the one for which I knocked out a dummy lyric back in July. Since then I've finished the real thing, a nineteen-line haiku-style pastiche modeled after the translations included in Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. This is the first thing I've ever written that can properly be called a poem. It even rhymes!

The singer of the aria in question is a Chinese woman whose lover has been shot to death by the Bette Davis character. (That's how the opera starts.) I usually write the words first, but this time Paul beat me to the punch, meaning that I had to fit my text to his melodic line syllable by syllable. Here's how the aria ends:

Hear the chime of the clock:
Midnight.
A land beyond the horizon:
The stars above.

Morning will come again--
But not
My love.

Needless to say, I'm no Keats, but I think the results came out sounding more or less plausible, or at least singable.

* * *

So what does The Letter sound like so far? I don't want to be too specific about a work that's still very much in progress, but perhaps it will help if I tell you that I sent Paul a quote from George Bernard Shaw the other day. Shaw started out as a music critic, and the quote is from a piece he wrote abut Verdi's Il Trovatore:

It has tragic power, poignant melancholy, impetuous vigour, and a sweet and intense pathos that never loses its dignity. It is swift in action, and perfectly homogenous in atmosphere and feeling. It is absolutely void of intellectual interest: the appeal is to the instincts and the senses all through.

To which Paul succinctly replied, "Yeah, that's about right." And that, if I may make so bold as to say, is what his music for the first three scenes sounds like. The Letter is in no way an opera for eggheads, even though the two of us are both fairly chrome-domed.

As I've said before, we're trying to write a cross between a verismo opera like Tosca and a film noir like Double Indemnity or Out of the Past. We don't want The Letter to sound old-fashioned--Paul's musical language is in no way derivative of Verdi or Puccini--but we do want it to move fast and hit hard. Ida Lupino once directed a movie called Hard, Fast and Beautiful. O.K. by me!

In the immortal words of Raymond Chandler:

She reached a quick arm around my neck and started to pull. So I kissed her. It was either that or slug her.

That's about right, too.

Posted September 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Only an idiot would ask Wolfie to work on that stuff--twelve foot snakes, magic flutes."

Peter Shaffer, Amadeus

Posted September 17, 12:00 AM

September 14, 2007

TT: A showy Lear

As promised, today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to the Royal Shakespeare Company's touring productions of King Lear and The Seagull, now playing in Brooklyn, plus a report on the Theatre de la Jeune Leune production of Don Juan Giovanni, now playing at Cambridge's American Repertory Theatre:

Ian McKellen and the Royal Shakespeare Company have been barnstorming around the world all summer, performing "King Lear" and Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" as staged by Trevor Nunn, the man who brought us "Cats." This month they're in Brooklyn, and I saw both shows on consecutive nights earlier this week. One is good, the other near perfect--and I was surprised by which was which.

The buzz on "Lear" is true: The 68-year-old Mr. McKellen doffs his knickers in the storm scene, offering the audience a fully frontal view of his gray anatomy. The gratuitous gesture is all of a piece with the rest of this exciting but ill-sorted production, which wobbles between grand-manner melodrama (Lear's Fool is hanged onstage just before the intermission) and scabby touches of directorial cuteness (a doddering Lear reads his first speech from a handful of three-by-five cards). I'm still trying to figure out the costumes, which looked like they'd been designed for the Siberia Light Opera Company's production of "The Merry Widow."

As Lear, Mr. McKellen is mannered and ranting until the storm scene, when he finds the center of the role and thereafter becomes compelling....

"The Seagull," played by the same cast on the same unit set in a new English-language version prepared by Mr. Nunn in collaboration with the ensemble, is as consistent in tone as "Lear" is uncertain. Here everything is grippingly, unostentatiously right. Tone is everything in Chekhov's sad comedies, peopled as they are by unfulfilled men and women whose melancholy plight is all the more affecting because it is so funny. In Mr. Nunn's production, "The Seagull" is played decisively for laughs, and that's the right call: If you take care of the comedy in Chekhov, the pathos will take care of itself. ...

I saw Minneapolis' Theatre de la Jeune Lune for the first time last fall and was entranced by its zany transformation of Molière's "The Miser." Now Dominique Serrand and Steven Epp are collaborating with the American Repertory Theatre on a pair of shows in which "Don Giovanni" and "The Marriage of Figaro" are similarly rethought and reworked....

Like Mr. Nunn's "Lear," "Don Juan Giovanni" is not above gratuitous shock effects--I saw no particular reason, for instance, why the Don's manservant needed to relieve himself onstage--and I'm not sure how much sense the show will make to viewers unfamiliar with the original opera. But if you know your way around Mozart's version, my guess is that you'll be enthralled by what "Don Juan Giovanni" has to say about that most disturbing of masterpieces, and by the terrific flair with which it is said.

No free link, so buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column--and all the rest of the Journal's excellent arts coverage--on the spot. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted September 14, 12:00 AM

TT: No critics allowed

I read a story in the Chicago Reader the other day (thanks for introducing me to this publication, OGIC!) that inspired me to write a "Sightings" column for tomorrow's Wall Street Journal about the question of whether the long-established custom of presenting theatrical previews--the pre-opening performances to which critics are not admitted--might be getting out of hand.

To find out more, pick up a copy of the Saturday Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section. I'm there. (Starting on Saturday, subscribers to the Online Journal can read my column by going here.)

Posted September 14, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect that music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!"

Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

Posted September 14, 12:00 AM

September 13, 2007

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

• Maud points to Richard Grayson's great account of Junot Díaz's reading in NYC last week. (Especially interesting to me were Díaz's concluding remarks about the compassion necessary to write characters unlike yourself.)

• Best American [Literary Baka Baka] news: An excerpt from DFW's 5,000-word introduction to Best American Essays 2007, and advance word on the table of contents for this year's Best American Short Stories, guest-edited by Stephen King, and the stories making the "100 other" notables list. (Warm congrats to Christopher Rowe and Matt Cheney for their inclusion.) Both anthologies are due out in October. (First link via Paper Cuts.)

• I am entranced by the idea of this bacon candy bar.

Posted September 13, 1:45 PM

CAAF: Because it is small and shrill, and because it is my heart.

Today the dog is having her teeth cleaned. She is a tiny thing, and we've been quaking all week about having her put under anesthesia. I tend to bring up dogs like I myself was raised -- matted but coddled -- and days like this I wish I were a better, more regular steward.

Last night she received a walk, a bath, treats and a half-hour of her favorite game, Bungalow Ball, and this morning we -- Mr. Tingle, me and the dog -- rolled into the animal hospital parking lot at an early hour. We were brought to an examination room for weigh-in (4.4 pounds) and a pre-cleaning consultation with the vet. In the past this has always been a perfunctory little exchange that concludes in a flourish of waiver-signing. Not this morning. A vet we've never met before came springing into the room and embarked on what has to have been the longest lecture ever given on the topic of canine dental hygiene. Forty minutes! As my husband said later, "I knew we were in trouble as soon as he drew the diagram of the wolf jaw."

The lecture was in the grand sermon style, expertly alternating between sounding the notes of terror (abscesses! fractures!) and comfort (x-rays! newest monitoring technology!). Overall it seemed less educational than designed to make us feel kindly disposed toward whatever bill we're presented with later today.

Comparing notes on the ride home, Mr. Tingle said the experience had reminded him of sitting in a Baptist church. For me it had been like the scene in Jane Eyre where young Jane is lectured by Mr. Brocklehurst, the superintendent of Lowood, on the importance of reading Psalms. At one point, the vet was telling us about the holiest of holy dogs, a golden retriever who waits in the hallway each evening for its owner to brush and floss its teeth, and all I could think of was this exchange:

"And the Psalms? I hope you like them?"
"No, sir."
"No? oh shocking! I have a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart: and when you ask him which he would rather have, a ginger-bread nut to eat, or a verse of a Psalm to learn he says: 'Oh! The verse of a Psalm! angels sing Psalms;' says he, 'I wish to be a little angel here below;' he then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety."
"Psalms are not interesting," I remarked.

Posted September 13, 11:41 AM

TT: Pulling myself together

I'm pretty much over the travel-exacerbated cold that laid me low for the past few days. Alas, it didn't help that I had to go all the way to Brooklyn on Tuesday and Wednesday to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform King Lear and The Seagull at BAM Harvey Theater. Needless to say, I normally find art therapeutic, but not when it requires me to get out at night, and especially not when I have to see a three-and-a-half-hour-long Shakespeare play in Brooklyn, no matter how good the production may (or may not) be. A middle-aged critic needs his sleep, and I didn't get enough on Tuesday.

Be that as it may, I feel somewhat like myself again, and except for a pair of same-day runouts to Baltimore and New Jersey, I don't have any more travel planned for the next four weeks. It's nice to be home again, especially since I have mail to open.

Just to whet your appetite, here are some of the items that arrived during my recent absences from New York that I'm looking forward to consuming at the earliest possible opportunity:

• Sky Blue, the new album from the Maria Schneider Orchestra

• Poodie James, a novel by jazzblogger Doug Ramsey

• Simone Dinnerstein's much-ballyhooed recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations

• A.D. Nuttall's Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?

• Intention, the latest CD from the Amanda Monaco 4

• Joan Mitchell: Works on Paper 1956-1992, an important new catalogue

• Louis Armstrong: Live in '59, one of last year's entries in the Jazz Icons DVD series

• An advance copy from Telarc of Yolanda Kondonassis' Salzedo's Harp: Music of Carlos Salzedo

I also have the happy but nonetheless demanding duty of selecting the perfect spot in which to hang the latest addition to the Teachout Museum, a handsome abstract serigraph by Darby Bannard called Sicilian Magician.

As usual, watch this space for details.

And now, if you'll pardon me, I have a drama column to write....

Posted September 13, 12:00 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 here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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)
• Iphigenia 2.0 (drama, R, adult subject matter and violence, reviewed here, closes Oct. 7)

Posted September 13, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Hypocrisy, said La Rochefoucauld, is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; to which one might add, that at least it acknowledges the difference."

Theodore Dalrymple, "Caught With His..." (National Review, Sept. 24, 2007)

Posted September 13, 12:00 AM

September 12, 2007

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

• Aura Estrada on novels by César Aira and Roberto Bolaño. (via Three Percent.)

• Imaginary trip: Culzean Castle, where the pond holds eels and swans and the staff is neither "grumpy nor jobsworthy ."

Posted September 12, 2:00 PM

TT: Not to worry

I'll be back tomorrow.

Posted September 12, 12:39 PM

CAAF: Morning coffee

• The Paris Review interview with Henry Green (PDF for download).

• Phrase of the day: A "self-righteous Avril Sévigné ." (via Lit Saloon.)

Posted September 12, 7:30 AM

TT: Almanac

"Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him."

D.H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places

Posted September 12, 12:00 AM

September 11, 2007

CAAF: Remembered

After some searching, Gawker editor Choire Sicha uncovers what he believes to be The New York Times' first full story on the World Trade Center attacks.

Posted September 11, 10:26 PM

OGIC: Unpacking Green

I only have time to post on the fly, and so will settle, for now, for sharing some quotations from my current reading: Henry Green's memoir Pack My Bag, written when he was 33. Why so early? Because it was 1940, his son tells us in the introduction, and he "became convinced that there would be another terrible war and moreover, having vivid schoolboy memories of the carnage of the First World War, that he was sure to die in it himself." The resulting memoir has at once an urgent and an unfiltered feel about it, as though Green had mined for any scrap of memory--and then imbued each surfaced fragment, however trivial or fleeting, with the value he found in it by writing about it vividly.

Here are some nice lines from the book's first quarter:

"It is at that age if ever that one is fancy-free because little boys hardly ever think about themselves as everyone else does all the time."

"In his presence we were small mirrors changing in colour to the hues of his moods." (On a schoolteacher of "a violent appearance.")

"Can it be true that people genuinely feel they were happiest at school or is it because they are so miserable grown up?"

"That is the pity of sobering down to middle age, there must be a threat to one's skin to wake what is left of things remembered into things to die with. The crime is to forget."

Writing for his life, Green attains an eloquence that seems founded less in artfulness than emotion. It's bracing.

Posted September 11, 10:36 AM

CAAF: Jazz hand paroxysm

Sorry for the dust here. Terry has his cold, OGIC has been entertaining, and last night was my first jazz class. It was wonderful, and I spent the rest of the night in an elated state working on the little routine we learned which, if I can get it super spruce, may be my ticket to Broadway. Fingers crossed.

Seriously, the class was great. My two things to work on for next time are to stop trying to insert relevés everywhere (ballet you go up, jazz you stay down) and to stop giggling every time someone either says or demonstrates "jazz hands." The instructor was nice about it, but it's clearly going to be a liability if I can't get over it.

I have to tap away at the book for a few hours, but more soon. In the meanwhile, here's my favorite pop culture invocation of jazz hands from the summer (goodness begins around the 1:30 mark; warning: it's from a show that makes some people's souls bleed).

Posted September 11, 9:19 AM

TT: Almanac

"The presence of death makes itself felt in the sadness of beauty."

Hanns Sachs, The Creative Unconscious

Posted September 11, 12:00 AM

September 10, 2007

TT: Due to circumstances, etc.

I came down with a rip-roaring chest cold last Tuesday, no doubt in part because of all the stuff I've been doing lately. Alas, I had to keep on writing and traveling throughout the week. An unwritten column in The Wall Street Journal waits for no man, even when he feels crappy. Neither does an out-of-town opening.

This morning I'm returning from yet another theater-related trip, this one to Washington, D.C., and I need some rest.

Later.

Posted September 10, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"A man of action rarely keeps a journal; it is always later on and in a period of prolonged inactivity, that he does his recollecting, makes his notations, and, very often, has cause to wonder at the course his life has taken."

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Posted September 10, 12:00 AM

September 7, 2007

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

• Reading list from Lawrence Weschler's Literary Nonfiction class at NYU.

• The online bookstore of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A. (subject of Weschler's excellent Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder).

Posted September 07, 2:00 PM

CAAF: Morning coffee

• You write orgastic, I edit orgiastic: Fact-checking Fitzgerald. For more on Fitzgerald's editing and revision process, see also.

• Reading list for Joseph Campbell's mythology class at Sarah Lawrence.

Posted September 07, 8:30 AM

TT: "This is the way we were"

It's highly unusual for me to devote my entire Wall Street Journal drama column to a single production, but after seeing Hartford Stage's new production of Our Town on Wednesday night, I didn't hesitate to shoot the works:

If I were to pick a handful of works of art that, taken together, embody the American experience, one of them would be Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." That was Wilder's purpose in writing his best-known play. "This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying," says the Stage Manager, the character who narrates his fictional chronicle of life in a small New England town not long after the turn of the 20th century. It is a claim that only the most self-assured of artists would dare to make--and one that "Our Town" satisfies to the fullest degree. So, too, does Hartford Stage's revival of "Our Town," in which the 82-year-old Hal Holbrook gives the performance of a long lifetime as the Stage Manager. This is the finest "Our Town" I have seen or hope to see, a production masterly in its self-effacing understatement and satisfying in every possible way....

Part of what makes a classic play classic is its ability to stand up to an infinite number of approaches and still remain recognizable. At the same time, few things are so compelling as a revival of a well-known play that offers you nothing more (or less) than the thing itself, unadorned and direct. This is the way that Gregory Boyd has treated "Our Town" in his Hartford Stage production, and the results are as illuminating in their own straightforward way as the most radical of reinterpretations. Not all of Wilder's stage directions are taken literally--Mr. Holbrook's Stage Manager doesn't smoke a pipe--but at no time do you feel that Mr. Boyd and his actors are getting in the way of the text. Instead they revel in it, taking Grover's Corners at face value and lettiing us draw our own conclusions about the plain people who live there.

Such an approach requires first-rate acting to make its effect, and Hal Holbrook is the man for the job. His Stage Manager is very much in the tradition of Frank Craven, who created the role on Broadway in 1938 and filmed it two years later in Hollywood. His accent is purest New England, his manner spare and flinty. You could, I suppose, call it conventional, but that would be missing the point: Like Mr. Boyd, Mr. Holbrook trusts the play, and is content to let it make its points without superimposing any of his own. The simplicity with which he delivers his oft-quoted curtain speech ("Most everybody's asleep in Grover's Corners....You get a good rest too") is an object lesson in how to act without seeming to do so....

No free link, so go buy Friday's paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column--and all the rest of the Journal's excellent arts coverage--in the twinkling of an eye. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted September 07, 12:00 AM

TT: When he was good

The Wall Street Journal asked me to write about Luciano Pavarotti for Saturday's paper. I responded with a column about the tenor at his best (the miraculous Bohème that he recorded with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1972) and worst (the public performances of his later years). It is candid, as I think all obituaries should be, and I'm sure some readers will find my frankness discomfiting. On the other hand, I covered Pavarotti's New York performances for the Daily News throughout the Nineties and thus am in a position to speak with some authority about how he sounded toward the end of his career.

If you're up for it, pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper and see what I have to say.

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

Posted September 07, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness."

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Posted September 07, 12:00 AM

September 6, 2007

CAAF: Unhappily, in their own horrible sneakers.

Apropos of today's Bulgakov discussion contrasting the opening paragraphs of the Ginsburg and Glenny translations of Master and the Margarita, a reader writes:

BTW, the Russian original is, literally, "chewed," not "crumpled." Ginsburg, being a native Russian, is obviously concerned here about translating too literally, not being sure whether "chewed" works in English.

Also, I wonder where they both got "sneakers" from. The Russian word is "slippers" (something one wears only at home), which adds to the picture of slovenliness.

The "cowboy" v. "tartan" is interesting: the Russian word is "kovboyka," which, literally means cowboy shirt. But in the Russian of that time this was a common word for a large category of what we would now call polo shirts, not worn by those with sartorial taste. A literal translation doesn't work. Tartan is better. But neither fully conveys the picture.

It's always interesting to see how translators go about their work. Having read and compared many originals and translations, I would say that on the whole, nine times out of ten the superior translation will be the one done by the translator who is translating into his native language, as opposed to from his native language.

Posted September 06, 8:00 PM

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

• After yesterday, I was going to self-impose a moratorium on all mentions of James Wood until he either a) published his first review as a New Yorker staffer (on the topic of the latest deadly Philip Roth novel, I believe*), or b) stopped by the house for tea & buns, but this screed, written by The Rake, is too smart and provoking to skip.

• What is a cranberry morpheme? (Via Lindsayism.)

* I admire Roth's novels a lot, but the last few have me want to hire him a hooker.**
** I expect Wood will work with a different thesis.
*** I don't know why I'm using so many footnotes today either.

Posted September 06, 2:00 PM

CAAF: Bulgakovian

The Bulgakov translation conundrum began a few weeks ago. My husband Mr. Tingle* was looking for a book to read, and I suggested Master and the Margarita as it's one of the Best Books in the World. Also, he (Mr. T) recently read the Bible, a grinding sort of triumph, and I thought he'd enjoy Master and the Margarita's religious elements.**

But the book was abandoned after only a few pages, the reason given that something was off with the writing, maybe it was the translation? And I flapped my arms around a lot, but when I went to re-read the novel myself I saw he was right. Our house copy is the Mirra Ginsburg translation, and I got the Michael Glenny translation from the library and started reading it last night. It's a huge improvement, as you can see from the opening paragraphs alone.

From the Ginsburg translation:

At the hour of sunset, on a hot spring day, two citizens appeared in the Patriarchs' Ponds Park. One, about forty, in a gray summer suit, was short, plump, dark-haired and partly bald. He carried his respectable pancake-shaped hat in his hand, and his clean-shaven face was adorned by a pair of supernaturally large eyeglasses in a black frame. The other was a broad-shouldered young man with a mop of shaggy red hair, in a plaid cap, pushed well back on his head, a checked cowboy shirt, crumpled white trousers, and black sneakers.

From the Glenny translation:

At the sunset hour of one warm spring day two men were to be seen at Patriarch's Ponds. The first of them -- aged about forty, dressed in a grayish summer suit -- was short, dark-haired, well-fed and bald. He carried his decorous pork-pie hat by the brim and his neatly shaven face was embellished by black horn-rimmed spectacles of preternatural dimensions. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with curly reddish hair and a check cap pushed back to the nape of his neck, was wearing a tartan shirt, chewed white trousers and black sneakers.

The musicality of the Glenny translation is just more pleasing, down to the substitution of "chewed" for "crumpled."

RELATED LINKS:
• In praise of the Glenny translation
• Excellent Master and the Margarita website (via TEV.)

* This was my husband's handle at Tingle Alley, and he's asked that it remain what he gets called here as well. In case he ever wants to join a motorcycle gang or open up a magic store or something.

** Spotting Biblical allusions is Mr. Tingle's new hobby -- a consolation, I think, for the hardships of Leviticus. One night I was watching Devil Wears Prada and at the point when Miranda Priestly approaches the building and Stanley Tucci shouts "Gird your loins," he popped in from two rooms over to announce, "'Gird your loins' is from the Bible!"

Posted September 06, 12:15 PM

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)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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)
• Iphigenia 2.0 (drama, R, adult subject matter and violence, reviewed here, closes Oct. 7)

CLOSING SUNDAY:
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (play, G, suitable for very bright children, reviewed here)

Posted September 06, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing."

Franz Kafka, notebook, Oct. 18, 1917

Posted September 06, 12:00 AM

September 5, 2007

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

• NYPL Series on the "Life And Works of Vladimir Nabokov": Lots of great archival images to peruse.
• The 25 world's weirdest animals. (via Dooce.)

Posted September 05, 2:30 PM

CAAF: Morning coffee

• Garth Risk Hallberg in The Quarterly Conversation: "Why James Wood Is Wrong About Underworld"
• A LitKicks panel investigates "Does Literary Fiction Suffer From Dysfunctional Pricing?"

Posted September 05, 8:30 AM

CAAF: Library Meme

Over at Shaken & Stirred, Gwenda shares her list of books currently out from the library. Here's my own. I suppose this sort of thing is open to the same criticisms as the posting of random iPod lists but whatevs: Viva List Fancy!

• Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal by Toni Bentley: After a break of a kazillion years, I start ballet class again this Thursday. Stasis in darkness./ Then the substanceless blue/Pour of tor and distances., etc. Preparations have included reading this memoir (mentioned by Terry in a recent WSJ column), watching Elusive Muse, some light stretching, and resumption of a prodigious cocaine habit.
• Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum: Recommended by Bookslut; I was smitten as soon as Alfred Russel Wallace came waltzing in in Chapter 1.
• March by Geraldine Brooks
• Castle by David Macaulay and Castle by Christopher Gravett: We're installing a moat.
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
• A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel: Because; see also Robert Birnbaum's great interview with Manguel.
• A Kierkegaard Anthology by Søren Kierkegaard: Untouched, forlorn. Weirdly, it never seems the right night to go to bed with Kierkegaard.
• Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• Paula Spencer by Roddy Doyle: The sequel to The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. We're reading it this semester in writing class.
• The Golden Compass [sound recording] by Philip Pullman
• Appointment with Death [sound recording] by Agatha Christie

Holds
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov: The Mirra Ginsburg translation I own is choppy so I'm test-driving the Michael Glenny translation, recommended here (although I also wish to try the Burgin/Tiernan O'Connor translation before purchasing either). Nice discussion of the merits of the various English translations in the novel's Wikipedia entry. All in all, an excruciating decision!
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
• The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander
• The Catalogue of the Universe by Margaret Mahy
• The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred by Carl-Johan Vallgren: My mum's favorite book read this year. She compares it to Winter's Tale and Love in the Time of Cholera, with Geek Love base notes.

Posted September 05, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure."

Aldous Huxley, Music at Night

Posted September 05, 12:00 AM

September 4, 2007

TT: Hell week-and-a-half

A friend writes:

You need to be kept on a somewhat shorter leash--which is what you promised to do for yourself a while back but forgive me for doubting that you even know what the words mean.

Well, maybe.

Ever since taking that unscheduled ambulance ride a year and a half ago, I've mostly steered clear of the state of sped-up, work-obsessed lunacy in which I once passed too many of my waking hours. On occasion, though, things still get out of hand, usually when a harmonic convergence of my various print-media deadlines causes them all to fall in a single week.

This happened to me last week, during which I did the following things:

• Saw four shows.

• Wrote four pieces, two of them (totaling three thousand words) in a single day.

• Polished the first six chapters of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong to a high gloss.

• Spent all of Thursday at the Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark, where I took copious notes on eight oral-history transcripts, seven uncollected magazine articles about Louis Armstrong, and some twenty-odd books in which he figures more or less significantly.

• Interviewed Joe Muranyi, the last clarinetist of Armstrong's All Stars, with which he played from 1967 to the trumpeter's death in 1971.

• Caught up with a friend whom I hadn't seen for a year.

• Went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Sunday to see one of the aforementioned shows, Don Juan Giovanni.

Tomorrow I'll be making my circuitous way to Hartford, Connecticut, where I'll be seeing Hal Holbrook in Our Town. On Saturday it's Madison, New Jersey, where the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey is putting on a rare revival of William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life. The very next day I head down to Arlington, Virginia, to see Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along.

All of which should suggest to the dullest of readers that I'm feeling the least little bit stressed. Right? Yes--and no. After a frustratingly long layoff, I'm now piling up pages of Hotter Than That with exhilarating speed, and making discoveries about Louis Armstrong that keep me in a constant state of excitement. I've seen a bunch of good shows lately, and expect to see a bunch more in coming weeks. And The Letter is thundering down the tracks like greased lightning on slick wheels.

All in all, life is pretty good these days, so I'm not complaining--but I do think I could use a day or two off. Or three.

OGIC and CAAF will amuse you until Monday. Or maybe Tuesday.

Posted September 04, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I'm a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy."

Oscar Levant (quoted in Time, May 5, 1958)

Posted September 04, 12:00 AM

September 3, 2007

TT: Second sight

Contentions, the Web site of Commentary, posted my second videoblog, taped in the living room of my Upper West Side apartment, on Friday. In it I discuss Alan Gilbert's recent appointment as music director of the New York Philharmonic, about which I've just written for the September issue of Commentary.

I also talk about Clement Greenberg and middlebrow culture, Luciana Souza's new CD, the inexplicable success of a Broadway show I panned, and one of my favorite pieces in the Teachout Museum, Milton Avery's March at a Table.

To watch this interview, go here.

Stick around to the very end--Robert Peach, the producer, tacked on a blooper! No, I didn't break anything....

Posted September 03, 12:00 AM

TT: Apropos of Arthur Miller

I was never a fan of the plays of Arthur Miller, or of the man himself. Thus I'm as fascinated as everyone else by the recent revelation that he wrote his handicapped son out of his life. I haven't had anything to say about it in print, though, because it happens that I wrote a "Sightings" column last summer in which I discussed in detail the problem of what to do when an artist is discovered to have dirty moral laundry:

To be sure, few major artists have been known for their goodness, but nowadays we seem quicker than ever to render summary judgment on their failings. Should we be more careful about throwing stones? The next time you're tempted to do so, consider these five caveats:

• Be historically aware. Judging the sins of the past by the standards of the present can be a shortcut to self-righteousness. Make sure you have all the facts--and that you understand their historical context--before passing sentence. Robert Conquest, author of "The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties," was reluctant to condemn the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko for toadying to his Soviet masters. "We might yet accept," he explained, "that in Soviet circumstances [Yevtushenko's] record, with all its shifts and compromises, may merit, on balance, a positive assessment." As Mr. Conquest knew, Soviet artists like Yevtushenko and Dmitri Shostakovich lived in fear of being jailed--or shot--for saying the wrong thing. Are you sure you would have done differently in similar circumstances?

• Don't lose your sense of proportion. Yes, Mark Twain used the word "nigger" in "Huckleberry Finn." So what? It's still the great American novel--as well as a powerful indictment of racism. To criticize it because it contains a once-common word now considered offensive is a prime example of political correctness run amuck.

• Remember the Golden Rule. As Somerset Maugham said, "I do not believe that there is any man, who if the whole truth were known of him, would not seem a monster of depravity." When you read about the alleged misconduct of an artist, ask yourself how you'd look if your private life and thoughts were put on public display.

• The work is what matters most... Pablo Picasso treated women like dirt--but does that make "Three Musicians" a bad painting? Richard Wagner hated Jews--but does that make "Tristan und Isolde" a bad opera?

• ...but artists are human beings, too. George Bernard Shaw was a loyal supporter of Soviet Communism who looked the other way when Stalin started piling up corpses. That doesn't justify a ban on performances of "Pygmalion," but it does mean--and should mean--that there will always be a blood-red asterisk next to Shaw's name in the literary record book. The ability to make great art excuses no man his basic human responsibilities.

The occasion for that column was the news that Günter Grass had kept secret his wartime membership in the Waffen-SS. This is how it ended:

As for Günter Grass, I won't deny that his plight filled me with the unholy joy at the spectacle of another man's discomfort that Germans call schadenfreude. (It figures that they'd have a word for it.) Few things in life are more satisfying than to see a hypocrite slitted with his own sword. But I know, too, that the German historian Michael Wolffsohn got it right when he said that Mr. Grass' "moralizing life's work, though not his storytelling life's work, is devalued by his persistent silence." I'm no fan of his novels, but even if I were, I hope I'd know better than to confuse them with their author. One of the enduring mysteries of beautiful art is that it can be made by ugly souls.

I don't think Arthur Miller made beautiful art. Judging by the Vanity Fair piece that revealed to the world the heartless way in which he treated his fourth child, it would appear that his soul was no more beautiful. I wish these two things were necessarily related. That would make the world a more orderly and intelligible place. But they aren't, and--alas--it isn't.

Posted September 03, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: 'It's four o'clock...At five I have my abyss.'"

Colette, The Pure and the Impure

Posted September 03, 12:00 AM

September 1, 2007

CD

Posted September 01, 8:34 AM