Archives for September 2003

So you’re walking along a city street, minding your own business, and you run smack into Robert Hass or Seamus Heaney. Quick, what do you do? Realistically, if you’re 99.9% of the population, including me, you look daggers at the guy and go away swearing under your breath.

If you’re me and if by some miracle you do recognize one of the best-read poets of our time, you probably–knowing me–help him up, dust him off, and scamper away red-faced.

Not so Sheri Donatti, the artist-girlfriend Anatole Broyard shared an apartment with as recounted in his lean, zippy Greenwich Village memoir Kafka Was the Rage. On West Fourth Street in 1946, Sheri crashed into W.H. Auden:

She fell backward, and as she did, she grabbed Auden around the neck and they went down together, with him on top…. She clung to Auden, who was sprawled in her arms. He tried desperately to rise, scrabbling with his hands and his espadrilles on the floor. He was babbling incoherently, apologizing and expostulating at the same time, while she smiled at me over his shoulder, like a woman dancing.

Besides making me laugh, this passage always strikes me in two sobering ways. First, it takes for granted the celebrity of poets. Second, it seems to presciently emblematize the way poetry readers find themselves, more and more, holding onto the form and its cultural currency for dear life.

Poets, of course, have some control over their own cultural currency. We can argue (and probably will, eventually) about whether Buffy the Vampire Slayer is art, but this poem by Stephen Burt (it’s the second of three on the page), inspired by BTVS, certainly is. You should read Burt’s fine Randall Jarrell biography, too.

I don’t have a history of enjoying literary readings. Maybe it’s the perfectly excusable deficiency of many writers as performers. Maybe it’s my slavery to the modern way of treating reading as a solitary, private activity (preferably conducted under a nice warm comforter, as far as I’m concerned) and a positive respite from other people, rather than a nineteenth-century, communal, gather-round-the-fireplace sort of affair.

Whatever it is, I just don’t have fun at these events. A semi-recent exception was a mesmerizing reading by Kathleen Finneran from her exquisite memoir The Tender Land two years ago–great not because she’s a master thespian but because her book is so astonishingly powerful and personal, and she was as much under its spell as any of us in the audience.

After that I didn’t want to press my luck–until this Wednesday, when I decided to attend a neighborhood reading by a certain torrid young writer whose first book was pretty great and who just published her first novel. Here I relearned my lesson.

Things started 20 minutes late. The mike did not work. We were in the back row and could hear just enough, before we reluctantly bolted, to divine that: 1) the professor who was introducing the author had bought her novel a few days earlier and read half of it; 2) he thought it was o.k. to admit this in front of the author and a few hundred people; and 3) he wasn’t going to cede the stage anytime soon. The last straw came when he started reading from the novel, which could tend to, you know, be redundant with the reading itself. It was the sort of thing that could put you off readings for life…

Despite this fresh catastrophe, I may yet turn up to hear Charles Baxter read from his new novel Saul and Patsy next week, and if you’re in my neck of the woods you should consider attending too. I met Baxter half a lifetime ago when he graciously came to speak to the staff of my high school’s literary magazine. Harmony of the World and Through the Safety Net provided some of the first contemporary short stories that I really loved. The lead story in Harmony of the World has a delicious first paragraph that should give all of Terry’s music-loving readers (are you still out there?) a good bracing shudder:

While Kate practiced the piano in the tiny third-floor apartment, Wiley cooked dinner, jogging in place in front of the stove. His feet made the pans clatter, and, after twenty minutes of exercise, he began to hyperventilate. He stopped, took his pulse, then continued, jogging to the spice rack, to the refrigerator’s butter shelf, then back to the stove. The air smelled of cumin, chicken stock, and tomatoes–something Mexican. The noise was terrible. He knocked over a spatula. A bottle of soda fell into the catfood dish. Worse yet, he hummed tunes from his high school prom days, melodies like “Call Me Mister Blue” and “Dream Lover,” in a nasal, plaintive whine. The noise diverted Kate’s attention and broke her Schubert sonatas into small pieces of musical trash.

I’m eager to return to Baxter after a long time away. He is part of the reason I still keep up with short story collections despite a growing preference for novels. I just wait for the paperbacks and hope for something as startling and transcendent as, say, Adam Johnson’s Emporium.

A. The faunal feature common to Chicago’s Grant Park and the airports of Paris, of course.

In my quest to smuggle sports news into About Last Night disguised as arts news, I get a little help from Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin this week. Living in the vicinity of several Frank Lloyd Wright houses (there’s one I pass daily on the way to work), I took interest in the recent discussion about the habitability of his homes, especially this vivid report from the front lines. But Wright and domestic architecture aren’t the ones getting buildings on the front page in Chicago these days.

It’s the stadium, stupid–and Pulitzer winner Kamin rightly damns the rebuilt Soldier Field, age-old home of Chicago’s pro football team, in an aesthetically incensed review, shot through with a healthy dose of populism. Aside from “visual carnage,” “a hideous compromise,” and “a horrific eyesore,” he finds it to be something like the opposite of a Wright house: hell on the outside observer, but comfy-cozy for the lucky few who get to sit inside. You can see it for yourself on the next installment of Monday Night Football, when the Bears will break in their controversial new digs against the Green Bay Packers. It will be interesting to try to determine how tight a muzzle the NFL will have put on the ABC commentators, who might not be able to recognize a blot on the landscape when they see one anyway.

It’s great news that Julie Powell, the woman who cooked everything in Julia Child’s legendary tome Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year flat, cursing all the way, now has a book contract. It’s even better news that the contract is what she calls an “obscene” one. You can still read “The Julie/Julia Project” on line in the archives of Julie’s blog, even though she accomplished her mission earlier this month. I originally went to the site for the cooking but stayed–and stayed and stayed–for the writing. Julie is irreverent, irrepressible, and insightful about much more than just clafoutis and kidneys. Read her before her new publisher makes her pull the archives!

If it comes to that, of course, there’s always the unmatchable M.F.K. Fisher to help you bide the time.

New York Times writer Bill Carter two days ago on “The West Wing”:

Mr. Sorkin had gained a reputation as an idiosyncratic creative mind whose writing–full of intricate, dense dialogue spoken by unusually intelligent and passionate characters–was unique to television.

And, Wall Street Journal critic Dorothy Rabinowitz today, comparing Rob Lowe’s new series “The Lion’s Den” to his old one, the selfsame “West Wing”:

Mr. Lowe should be feeling quite at home with…the familiar beat of sniffy one-liners being batted out among members of the law firm’s staff–all much like the verbal potshots pinging and ponging and generally passing as human speech in “The West Wing.”

Are these critics watching the same show? Under close reading, actually, their characterizations of the show’s dialogue aren’t all that far apart–it’s just that Carter appears to think that unrealistic dialogue is some kind of achievement.

George Plimpton seemed as unsinkable as anyone. As shocking as it was to hear this morning of his death, it was almost as surprising to realize that he was 76. I call it surprising not because I expected him to be much younger, but because his protean identity made him someone I never thought of as having a particular age at all.

If the first obituaries are any indication, it will be first and foremost as the author of Paper Lion that Plimpton is remembered. It’s no mean distinction, and the book is well worth revisiting. But you could do worse, too, than to visit the Paris Review and remember Plimpton in the round.

UPDATE: Sports blogger extraordinaire Eric McErlain has a nice tribute.