Archives for September 2003

(1) It’s been an open secret for several months now, but I’m one of the judges for this year’s National Book Awards (I’m on the nonfiction panel). Our short list of nominees will be announced on October 7. We think we picked a very nice bunch of books.

(2) No, I didn’t have anything to do with Stephen King’s lifetime achievement award. I found out about it the same way you did.

(3) No, I don’t have an opinion about the award, because I’ve never read anything by Stephen King (I don’t much care for tales of horror). OGIC thinks you ought to have read at least some of his stuff before making up your mind about its quality (see below). I agree.

Fair enough?

“If one plays good music people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.”

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

I was mistaken when I said last week that you could email me at “ourgirlinchicago….” That email address is a mere flimsy fiction.

However, I don’t think Terry will mind if you write to me via his Arts Journal address–just make it easy on the poor guy and put “OGIC” in the subject line, would you?

Ever since the National Book Foundation announced that they would bestow their annual achievement award on Stephen King–and especially since Harold Bloom announced his ire about this–I’ve been plotting a response. Defenses of King have popped up in the meantime, for instance here and here. I couldn’t tell whether this was a defense or not (the author plays both sides of the fence). None of them quite captured what is for me the essence of the case against Bloom.

Tonight, however, I found the response that entirely discharges me of the need to write what I think, because it perfectly reflects what I think. Needless to say, it’s excellent! At his blog Easily Distracted, Timothy Burke notes the obvious but under-remarked fact that Harold Bloom has read little of King’s work, if any:

The most important point is that…qualitative judgements are hard to make, not easy. They’re the meat-and-potatoes business of literary criticism. They require a lot of laying of philosophical and intellectual foundations to make in general (which Bloom has done, though in ways I profoundly disagree with) but also a lot of labor in each and every specific case, which Bloom has not done.

And he proceeds to the gist of the matter:

The culture which matters most is not merely the culture that aesthetes praise as worthy, but the culture which indures, inspires, circulates, and is meaningful and memorable for many people, to the widest audiences. Sometimes that involves the adroit manipulation of archetypical themes and deep tropes of the popular culture of a particular time and place, and King does both of those things. I don’t know how he’ll be read a century from now, but I do know that in this time and place he not only tells a damn fine story (most of the time: even I would regard some of his work as hackwork) but manages to say some important things about consumerism, family, childhood, apocalyptic dread, obsession and many other resonant, powerful themes of his day and age.

This is a vastly greater level of articulation than I had approached in my thinking about this, which had gotten only about as far as invoking two nineteenth-century giants, Scott and Dickens. I once contemplated writing a dissertation about the careers of Sir Walter Scott and Henry James, which pretty quickly proved impracticable though the contemplating was great fun (a sad truism about dissertations). I remember musing that if such a comparative study were to extend into the twentieth century, the most logical place for it to lead would be, full-circle-wise, to King, a hugely popular and prolific storyteller like the Author of Waverley, with frequent recourse to the supernatural and a bead on, as Burke notes above, the “resonant, powerful themes of his day and age.”

Scott was not consistently good and certainly is not regarded today with anything like the respect accorded the likes of James or George Eliot. But he thought up, and vividly put down, the stories that most captured the collective nineteenth-century imagination (and not just in England, either). He may be just the figure to shed some literary-historical light on King’s achievement, whether you’re inclined to understand it as artistic, commercial, or something in between.

“Nothing is so poor and melancholy as an art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”

George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Apropos of my most recent posting on Zankel Hall and its critics, I got this e-mail last week from Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker. I couldn’t post it until now because of the black smoke coming out of the hard drive of my iBook:

A friendly riposte re: Zankel. Is it fair to judge the acoustics on the basis of the preview concert alone? I’d be especially wary of measuring the hall’s suitability for amplified music solely on the basis of the Kenny Barron Quintet’s brief performance. Yes, their full show that weekend was noisy and unfocused. But Omar Sosa was another matter–cool, crisp sound. Perhaps Mr. Barron simply didn’t have an adequate setup.

I’ve Zankled nine times so far, and my perceptions keep changing. The subway noise, which annoyed me last week, is bothering me less. The acoustics are still weird, but I’m discovering that the aisle seats in the orchestra, where the critics are clumped, are among the worst. Best are the middle
seats of the orchestra and the side seats in the balcony. The problem is that the stage lacks a good reflective shell behind it–“revenge of Merkin Hall,” I heard one composer say–so the sound seems to gel only in certain places. A couple of butt-ugly buffers on the side might help. However, to judge from comments overheard, casual listeners are totally unperturbed by
all these issues. They like the place. So do I.

As for the multi-culti programming, I think you’re overlooking the hall’s usefulness as a filter for those who are baffled by the sheer superfluity of choices out there. BAM has long functioned in the same way–as a taste agent that people have grown to trust. The opening weekend worked because we trusted John Adams, the man responsible for the programming, and he put on a briliant tour of the musical horizon. The reliance on Nonesuch in the opening season is another canny use of the filter function. The crucial question is whether Zankel can maintain this level of interest, or whether it will devolve toward classical Dullsville.

Looking back over my original postings, I don’t think I was quite so categorical in my comments on the acoustics as Alex implies, but beyond that I think he is talking a good deal of sense. I have no doubt that everybody’s perceptions of Zankel Hall will change over time and with further exposure–or, to put it another way, we’ll all get used to the place, and come to see at least some of its characteristic features not as unpleasant surprises but as…well, characteristic features. This is even true of a phenomenon so seemingly “objective” as acoustics, and it’ll be even truer as more artists perform with amplification, thereby creating a sonic track record for the managers to draw on.

For what it’s worth (though I can’t name names), I recently had a chat with a jazz musician slated to perform in the hall later this season who came away from Brad Mehldau’s concert feeling considerable anxiety about the acoustics–especially as they affect drummers. Time will tell, and it will also tell whether Zankel is able to establish itself as a center for consistently imaginative programming or will deteriorate into “classical Dullsville.” I like Alex’s point about halls serving as filters and trustworthy “taste agents” for the public–though of course that doesn’t happen very often.

In retrospect, I fear that I was writing too much as the jaded insider who’s Heard It All. It’s true that the people who book concert-hall performances in New York rarely surprise me anymore, but then it’s my business to know what’s going on. In any case, I’m obliged to Alex for reminding me of some things that seem to have slipped my mind in the usual rush to judgment. Blogging has a way of doing that to you, but it also makes it possible for you to think twice, and three and four times, in public. I hope I’ll have thought a lot more times than that about Zankel Hall before I’m finally done.

…and thanks for stopping by in Terry’s absence! You did remember that Terry would be absent and OGIC sitting in, didn’t you? Of course you did.

Since Terry was kind enough to introduce me yesterday, I’m not going to say too much up here. A newcomer to blogging, I’ve been discovering that it involves long stretches of not knowing what to write, punctuated by long stretches of not knowing when to shut up. This seems like as good an opportunity as any to rein it in.

But before I quiet down and move along, I do need to cover a few items. First, the unthinkable happened last night and Terry’s hard drive crashed! It’s getting the best possible attention while he’s in North Carolina, and the prognosis is guardedly optimistic. This may result in a few breaks in the About Last Night routine next week, but this blog will be open for business in some form. So please check in Monday for an update.

Second, I’m hoping to update the page throughout today, with fresh links and quick posts every little while, so do check back with me later.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I have so far, and I hope to hear from some of you. I think you can email me at ourgirlinchicago@artsjournal.com. But there’s only one way to find out for sure…

Terry (remember him?) asked me to let you know that he reviewed Omnium Gatherum and Bill Irwin’s The Harlequin Studies in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s the first paragraph:

As I watched “Omnium Gatherum,” the satirical play about 9/11 that opened last night at the Variety Arts Theatre, a fractured Bible verse ran through my head: It is impossible but that 9/11 plays will come; but woe to them, through whom they come! On the one hand, many American playwrights feel a near-irresistible itch to write about current events, and given the fact that the most significant event of the current century took place four miles south of the theater district, it stood to reason that plays about it would follow as the sparks flew upward. (Another one, “Recent Tragic Events,” opens Sunday.) On the other hand, few American playwrights have anything thoughtful to say about current events, so it also stands to reason that most such plays are bound to be pretty awful. “Omnium Gatherum” sure is….

No link, as usual, so go out and buy a copy of the Journal, why dontcha? It only costs a dollar!