Archives for October 8, 2003

You haven’t heard from me lately because I’m racing to finish the index to A Terry Teachout Reader (I’m doing it myself to save money). So far, I’ve finished 295 pages out of 407. The deadline is Thursday. I think I’ll make it. I’d better make it. If I hadn’t fallen behind by a week and a half because of my hard-drive crash, I think it might actually be kind of fun, in part because indexes (indices?) often contain stretches of something like found poetry. Here’s a sample:

Chasing Amy (Smith), 279

Cheers (TV series), 57, 277

Cheever, John, 292

“Chelsea Bridge” (Strayhorn), 258

The Children’s Hour (Hellman), 219

Chinatown (Polanski), 172

Chopin, Frederic, 126, 129-30

Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings (Kenner), 55-57

“Chuckles Bites the Dust” (episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show), 175

The Cider House Rules (Irving), 89

Citizen Kane (Welles, score by Herrmann), 177, 279

So yes, it’s kind of fun, and yes, I’ll be glad to be done. Once I’ve got it wrapped up, you’ll hear about my trip to Raleigh to see Carolina Ballet, the plays I saw off Broadway this week, and whatever else comes to mind. Until then, Our Girl in Chicago will do her best to keep you satisfied. Judging by the numbers on the site meter, I’d say she’s doing fine.

In the meantime, I’m calling the doctor the second I start dreaming about page numbers….

This comes from The Old Man and Me, Elaine Dundy’s out-of-print and hard-to-find sophomore (but never sophomoric!) novel. It followed her 1958 cult classic The Dud Avocado (which, now that I think of it, is also a title I wish I’d written).

There is a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon: a dark, dank, dead-ended subterranean tunnel. It is a drinking club called the Crypt and the only light to penetrate it is the shaft of golden sunlight slipping through the doorway from time to time glancing off someone’s nose or hair or glass of gin, all the more poignant for its sudden revelations, in an atmosphere almost solid with failure, of pure wind-swept nostalgia, of clean airy summer houses, of the beach, of windy reefs; of the sun radiating through the clouds the instant before the clouds race back over it again–leaving the day as sad and desperate as before.

It’s amazing to me that everyone in Hollywood runs around snapping up rights to any book that sells any copies at all, and nobody has yet thought to film either of Dundy’s darkly charming books. OK, so some of those movies–well, at least one–will probably be good, but that doesn’t mean I have to like this compulsion to film everything in print, as though what really ratifies a book’s worth is having one of its characters end up as yet another notch in Anthony Hopkins’s belt. (In fact, they’re filming David Auburn’s play Proof in my neighborhood lately, and I walk around alternating between craning my neck to try to glimpse Hopkins, la Gwyneth, or Jake Gyllenhaal, and despising myself.)

Two new sites debut on the blogroll (look right, scroll down) today. They’re so new, they still have that new blog smell. One is the moviegoing Pullquote, written by the Cinetrix, a mysterious and witty being who knows what she’s talking about, and has good taste to boot. (Link via Old Hag.)

The other is the hard-boiled Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, a title that proves hard to abbreviate to blogroll width, so I’ve listed it under the name of its proprietress, Sarah Weinman. Confessions covers literary news generally and crime fiction in particular, all in a manner more sunny than noir.

It might be an understatement to say that my friend is pleased with last week’s #1 album:

This white girl has nothing but infatuation and admiration for the OutKast CD “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.” It’s two CDs, actually–Dre and Big Boi have packaged their respective solo albums together in one jewel case and labeled it the next OutKast album. To those who think a house divided cannot stand, think again. The two display a voracious musical intelligence that is literally a trip. Big Boi’s “Speakerboxxx” is the less varied but no less intoxicating half of the project; he moves from channeling Earth, Wind & Fire to a gospel choir to more of the urbanity heard on Outkast’s last album, “Stankonia,” with complex raps that hold together in the middle of his riffs, not just around the edges. Singing about everything from Daniel Pearl and Operation Anaconda to the gangsta quadrivium of women, guns, drugs, and name brands, Big Boi explodes all over “Speakerboxxx” with an energy that can only be described as Olympian.

“The Love Below,” Dre’s contribution, is at the same time randier and more romantic–and musically all over the map. Underlying his erotic exhortations–i.e., to “shake it like a polaroid picture”–are grooves drawn from Prince, a mellower Hendrix, the best of neo-soul, George Benson; every offering strikes a different tone. How can you not like a guy who sweetly sings, “so what if your head sports a couple of gray hairs/Same here, and actually I think it’s funky in a Claire Huxtable-type way”? And then has me singing along to a song whose refrain is “crazy bitch”?

Sure, there are some fillers and cringers here and there, and the de rigueur talky interludes, but considering the mass of music they’ve put together here, the whole project has an astronomical batting average. It’s the most infectious, enthusiastic, ambitious music I’ve heard in a long time.

She’s not the only one. Read more about it here and here.

UPDATE: Slate’s Sasha Frere-Jones is similarly smitten.