Archives for November 2003

“I am sad today over the death of Lady Elgar. I am very fond of Edward, and I know that, whatever people may say, to a man of his fine and sensitive nature, the severance of a long tie like this must inevitably mean much bitterness and suffering, much dwelling in the past and self-reproach. We always seem heavy debtors to the dead: we feel they have not had their chance and that life has given us an unfair advantage over them.”

Ernest Newman, letter to Vera Newman, Apr. 7, 1920

It’s another mega-heavy-traffic day here at “About Last Night,” meaning it’s more than likely that some of you are visiting us for the first time. To find out more about where you are and who we are, click here to read an archived posting that tells all. Or simply work your way down the right-hand column, which is crammed full of information about this page and its two co-bloggers.

Either way, we’re delighted you stopped by. If you liked what you saw, come back tomorrow…and bring a friend. The easy-to-remember alternate URL is www.terryteachout.com, which will bring you here in a jif (as, of course, will the longer address now visible in your browser).

Welcome.

Go here to find out, if you dare. (I wanted to be The Lavender Leotard, naturally, but it seems I’m The Gashlycrumb Tinies, sigh.)

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Joni Mitchell, a greatly gifted artist to whom I no longer warm, in part because of her self-absorption and humorlessness. (The older I get, the more distance I try to put between myself and anyone who lacks a sense of humor.) Yet once in a while a song of hers bobs to the surface of my consciousness–usually because somebody else is singing it–and I remember why I used to spend hours and hours listening to her music, back when the world was young.

I mention this because a jazz musician I know has been singing “Black Crow” (from Hejira), and now I can’t get its angular tune and strangely off-center harmonies out of my head:

There’s a crow flying

Black and ragged

Tree to tree

He’s black as the highway that’s leading me

Now he’s diving down

To pick up on something shiny

I feel like that black crow

Flying

In a blue sky

I took a ferry to the highway

Then I drove to a pontoon plane

I took a plane to a taxi

And a taxi to a train

I’ve been traveling so long

How’m I ever going to know my home

When I see it again

I’m like a black crow flying

In a blue, blue sky

I love the Great American Songbook with all my heart–and yet there are so many other songs that long to be played and sung. This is one of them.

How ironic that Hugh Kenner’s obituaries should be appearing on the same day that I published a piece
about Warner Bros. cartoons that made mention of his elegant little monograph
about Chuck Jones, creator of the Road Runner. He was a distinguished critic and a great gentleman, and will be greatly missed.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s New York Times obituary, incidentally, ends with the following paragraph:

Nor, surprisingly, did he deplore the decline of print as our main medium. “We forget that most of what people read when everybody read all the time was junk — competent junk,” he told U.S. News & World Report. “Now they get it from television. The casual entertainment people get in the evening from the box was what they used to get from the short fiction in The Saturday Evening Post. That magazine and others like it were the situation comedies and cop shows of their era. It is not a cultural loss that this particular use of literacy has been transferred from one medium to another.”

A very smart man.

One of the most interesting aspects of Jane Austen’s novels is that she always makes sure you know how much money the characters have–only how much is it, really? I recently caught up with a posting on the Web site of an economist that poses, and answers, this question in one celebrated case:

So how rich is Fitzwilliam Darcy, anyway? What does ten thousand (pounds) a year in the aftermath of the Napoleonic War mean, really?

I have two answers, the first of which is $300,000 a year, and the second of which is $6,000,000 a year….

Read the whole thing here.

While I’m at it, kindly allow me to plug one of my favorite Web sites, Inflation Calculator, an on-line form which (in the words of its inventor) “adjusts any given amount of money for inflation, according to the Consumer Price Index, from 1800 to 2002.” That may sound dry as dust, but spend just 30 seconds playing with Inflation Calculator and I bet you’ll have it bookmarked in 35. I used it frequently in writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, and I commend it wholeheartedly to any writer–novelist, journalist, whatever–who ever has occasion to compare what things cost in 1865, or 1925, or five years ago, to what they cost now.

I’m such a hopeless hedgehog. Probably half my blogging on About Last Night has been about Henry James or Lost in Translation, and I’ve been trying to give these topics a rest. But there’s too much interesting stuff about James floating around the internet lately to pass up.

Aaron Haspel over at God of the Machine has a brilliant little piece–provoked by what Terry and I wrote here and here–on why Henry James continues to be so popular in the books-into-movies game:

James only seems literary because, especially in the late novels, he is constantly trying to catch the precise attitudes of his characters toward each other, reflected not just in their conversation but their gestures and thoughts and tiny inflections.

Having given a sample passage from The Awkward Age, he goes on:

The passage is lovely in its way, but James is attempting something to which what James Baldwin called the “disastrously explicit” medium of prose is completely ill-suited. Half of it is stage directions, and it could be done better, and more compactly, with movie actors who can follow such directions-which admittedly is asking a lot. James tried, unsuccessfully, to write plays, but the stage, where the actors have to project to the back row, is still too histrionic for what he has in mind. What he needed was the talkies. If James had been born a century later I’m guessing he would have done most of his writing for film, and maybe tossed off a few novels in his spare time.

This sounds right, and after reading it I was struck with sudden insight into my love of Lost in Translation: Sofia Coppola’s movie is a really very Jamesian pleasure. It does in visual language what James, in Aaron’s account, bumped up against the limits of prose trying to do in his novels.

Aaron’s account of James’s modus operandi sheds real light on the success of Lost, which is clinched in the final scene. That scene is just saturated with feeling, and despite all its layers–joy, grief, hope, irony, loss–it manages not to be crushing, but somehow aloft. It is a rich, extraordinary moment. But it is made possible by the accumulated emotional content of many ordinary scenes that preceded it, in which nothing seemed to happen (golfing, flower-arranging, a great deal of staring out of windows).

Doesn’t this start to sound like the classic complaint about James? Nothing happens–and it takes pages and pages not to happen. But I think he was up to something very much like Coppola is. He tried to capture in detail the psychic weather in which his characters acted. He did so by making the reader familiar with even their most fleeting, fugitive sensations and associations–to the extreme fatigue of many readers, but not mine. In the later novels, if you pay your dues, and follow the tortured syntax and absorb all of the complex relations, then you stand to be rewarded at the end, when a simple gesture, look, or word–loaded with meaning beforehand–makes everything fall apart or come together. It can blow you right over.

I’m as surprised as anyone to find myself comparing Henry James to Sofia Coppola, but I’m convinced that the movie is Jamesian in both narrative strategy and temperament. Furthermore, I would love to see Coppola try her hand at writing and filming an adaptation of one of the more recalcitrant James works, like What Maisie Knew or “In the Cage” (which has made me cry). Both of these highly interiorized works consist almost entirely of those “gestures and thoughts and tiny inflections” that Aaron pinpointed, and yet both have tremendous dramatic capacity. So how about it, Sofia?

In all the welter of blogosphere postings about the Stephen King-Shirley Hazzard dustup at the National Book Awards ceremony, insufficient attention has been paid to Carlos Eire, who won the nonfiction award for Waiting for Snow in Havana (I was one of the judges). Now the New York Times has rectified that–somewhat–by publishing an excellent interview with Eire:

For most of his adult life Carlos Eire had tried to run away from Cuba. The island was his only briefly, for 11 years, before the Cuban revolution ushered in a world of heartache in which he was separated from his parents and spent years of hardship in the United States.

“I still think it’s an evil place, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it,” said Mr. Eire, the new winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction for “Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy” (Free Press/Simon & Schuster). “The best thing I could do was to think that it was an accident I was born there.”

Read the whole thing here.