Archives for 2003

A reader writes, apropos of the National Book Awards, but before my first-person account (see immediately below) was posted:

Do you think that personal memoir and narrative nonfiction based on journalistic reconstruction should be in the same category? I suppose that might be like asking whether historical fiction and contempory fiction should be in the same category, yet I can’t help but feel that these forms are very different from one another. I guess this begs the question of what, exactly, is it that you judge when viewing art? Is it the impact upon the viewer/listener/reader? And if the content is inherently more emotional in one work than another, does that skew the comparison? I think, too, of actors. The embodiment of a highly charged character seems to have an edge over a masterful embodiment of a more subtle character, even when I suspect the latter requires much more skill.

Right on all counts, say I. All five of the NBA nonfiction judges were troubled by the fact that we had to render a single judgment on so disparate a group of books, and we have made our feelings known to the powers-that-be at the National Book Foundation. On the other hand, I don’t think there should be a dozen National Book Awards: if there were, nobody would pay attention to them. (It’s hard enough to get the mass media to pay any attention to a literary prize.) Still, disaggregating history from biography, as do the Pulitzer Prizes, seems to me an important step.

On the other hand, to do that would bring us right back to another horn of the dilemma posed by my correspondent. Can you really compare a scholarly biography to a personal memoir? I mean, of course you can, you can compare anything to anything else, but ought they to be considered part of the same category for purposes of prizegiving?

Without telling tales out of school, I can say that my fellow judges and I spent a lot of time talking about precisely these issues. We took them with the highest possible seriousness. But at the end of the day (as they like to say in Washington), we had to perform our assigned task, which wasn’t made any easier by the fact that the National Book Foundation instructed us not to split the first prize between two books. We had to pick one, and we chose Waiting for Snow in Havana. As John Wayne is supposed to have said (though I think the quote is as spurious as “Play it again, Sam”), a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Better one prize than none.

Today, the National Endowment for the Arts announces the recipients of its Jazz Masters awards for 2004. One of them is Jim Hall, my favorite living jazz musician, whom I interviewed last week for a piece published in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s the lead:

In jazz, all fame is strictly relative. Jim Hall, the greatest living jazz guitarist, has been making records for close to a half-century. He’s worked with everybody from Sonny Rollins to Pat Metheny and played everywhere from the Village Vanguard to the White House. His colleagues view him with something approaching outright awe. But Mr. Hall, like most jazz musicians, is unknown to the public at large–a fact that doesn’t seem to bother him in the least. “It’s a privilege to be able to make a living playing jazz,” he says firmly. “Not too many people listen to me, but maybe I’d be nervous if I were a million-seller. I’d say, uh-oh, I did something wrong.”

Read the whole thing here.

If you’ve never heard Hall play, click here to purchase Jim Hall Live, the CD mentioned in the piece. Recently reissued by Verve, it’s one of his own favorites–and the first Jim Hall album I ever bought, a quarter-century ago. I still love it.

Here are the winners of the 2003 National Book Awards, as announced earlier this evening:

NONFICTION: Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE: Polly Horvath, The Canning Season

POETRY: C.K. Williams, The Singing

FICTION: Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire

I have stories to tell about the ceremony, especially about Stephen King’s speech in acceptance of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which was, to put it mildly, an unapologetic defense of popular genre fiction–and which inspired Shirley Hazzard to reply, quietly but firmly, at evening’s end. But…it’s raining in Manhattan, there aren’t any cabs, the subway took forever, I’m soaked to the skin, and it’s time to get out of this wet tuxedo and under a warm comforter. So I’m going to bed. Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you everything.

I’m off to the top-secret conclave at which I and my four fellow judges will choose the winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction. The five finalists, in case you’ve forgotten or didn’t know, are Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History, George Howe Colt’s The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, John D’Emilio’s Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, and Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America.

Then, after a change of costume (off with the false mustache, on with the black tie), I’ll be heading for tonight’s NBA dinner, where all the winners will be announced.

More later, probably tomorrow.

I went to a classical concert last night about which you probably haven’t yet heard–though I expect you will.

The Elements String Quartet, a comparatively new ensemble (it was founded in 1999), recently commissioned 16 composers to write short pieces for string quartet inspired by evocative photographs of the composers’ own choosing–wedding photos, pictures of their parents, candid snapshots, vacation scenes, whatever. The Elements Quartet has been previewing these pieces throughout 2003, and on Tuesday the group played all 16 at Manhattan’s Merkin Concert Hall.

Here are some striking things about “Snapshots,” the title given by the quartet to this project, which was underwritten by a foundation called Premiere Commission, Inc.:

The string-quartet literature is all but devoid of short, free-standing pieces. Quartet programs generally consist of three or four large-scale works. The 16 “Snapshots” pieces, by contrast, can be used invidiually to open or close a program–or played as encores–in addition to being performed as a full-evening unit. They can also be programmed in smaller groupings of three or four pieces at a time.

The “Snapshots” pieces are widely and exceptionally varied in style. Some are light, others fairly weighty (though never ponderous). A few of the composers, like John Corigliano and David Del Tredici, are well known in the classical-music world, but most are less familiar. Several of the pieces are by non-classical composers, including Lenny Pickett, the musical director for Saturday Night Live, and jazz musicians Regina Carter and John Patitucci.

All 16 pieces are immediately accessible to the untutored ear. (Most, in fact, are unabashedly tonal.)

The members of the Elements Quartet talked to the audience from the stage about several of the pieces and the photos that inspired them, and introduced all the composers who came to the concert. This sort of thing is standard operating procedure for the group, which is known for its informal on-stage demeanor.

Theater designer Wendall K. Harrington took the 16 photos and wove them into a handsome-looking evening-long video that was shown during the concert on a large screen placed on stage behind the Elements Quartet. (The actual photos were hung in an upstairs gallery where a post-concert reception was held.)

Merkin Hall was full. I’ve never seen so large and enthusiastic a crowd at a program consisting entirely of new music for string quartet.

What about the music? Well, I liked eight pieces, disliked four, and didn’t feel strongly either way about the other four–a staggeringly high batting average for a new-music program. I was particularly impressed by Justine Chen’s “Ancient Airs and Dances,” John Corigliano’s “Circa 1909,” Daron Hagen’s “Snapshot: Gwen and Earl’s Wedding Day, December 20th, 1951,” Paul Moravec’s “Vince and Jan: 1945,” and Chen Yi’s “Burning” (the only 9/11-inspired work), all of which I want to hear again as soon as possible. Also noteworthy was Sebastian Currier’s “REM,” the shortest work on the program, a brilliantly effective little scherzo that will make a terrific encore piece.

Aside from the music, what struck me most forcibly about “Snapshots” was the extent to which it departed from prevailing norms of classical concertizing without degenerating into silliness or pandering. Unlike the Kronos Quartet in its heyday, the members of the Elements Quartet don’t wear outr

Ingmar Bergman has fallen from fashion, but I well remember when he was the very model of a Foreign Filmmaker, the man whose movies embodied everything that wasn’t Hollywood. Those, of course, were the days when Hollywood wasn’t cool: if you wanted to impress your date, you took her to a Bergman. (A little later on, it was O.K. to take her to one of Woody Allen’s ersatz-Bergman movies.) Now he belongs to the ages, and I know more than a few self-styled film buffs who’ve never seen any of his work.

I don’t mean to sneer. Except for Smiles of a Summer Night, I hadn’t seen any of Bergman’s early films since my college days–not until last night, when I watched the Criterion Collection CD of Wild Strawberries in the company of a film-loving friend. We’d been planning to get together for weeks to watch it, and a hole opened up simultaneously in our schedules, so we sent out for Vietnamese food, planted ourselves on the couch, and let ‘er rip.

Here are some fugitive observations gleaned from our evening:

Wild Strawberries is much lighter in tone than I recalled, and actually made me laugh out loud quite a bit. (It’s rather like the middle-period novels of Henry James, which always turn out to be funnier than you expect.)

The surrealistic dream sequences–especially the examination scene–haven’t aged well. To contemporary eyes they seem obvious, even quaint.

The pacing is slow–not painfully, but noticeably.

The lighting is superlatively good.

When I was young, Wild Strawberries struck me as exactly what old age must be like. (Had it been a novel, I would have scribbled neatly in the margin of the last page, “This is true.”) Now that I’m middle-aged–and eight years older than Bergman was when he made it–I know better. It’s far too benign, albeit gorgeously so. It reminds me of what an old music critic once said to me about Der Rosenkavalier: “It’s by a young man pretending to be an old man remembering his youth.”

As soon as I got home, I looked Bergman up in David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film, where I found the following paragraph:

Many people of my generation may have joined the National Film Theatre in London to see a retrospective survey of Bergman’s early films after The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries had come to represent “artistic” cinema. The first critical articles that I struggled with–as reader and writer–were on Bergman. Inevitably he suffered from being so suddenly revealed to a volatile world. Looking back, it seems no coincidence that those two films are his most pretentious and calculating. Within a few years he was being mocked and parodied for his earnestness and symbolism. The young cineastes led to the art houses were rediscovering the virtues of the American films that had delighted them as children. The new French cinema endorsed that love of development and replaced Bergman’s concentration with improvisation, humor, offhand tenderness, and a non-Northern feeling for the beauty of camera movements as opposed to the force of composition.

I quote Thomson at length because I couldn’t have said it better myself, though I wouldn’t have put it quite that harshly. Wild Strawberries is a beautiful movie–one that knows how beautiful it is, and wants you to know, too. The older I get, the less readily I warm to that kind of art, be it film, painting, music, the novel, or what have you. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy revisiting Wild Strawberries after a quarter-century. I did, very much. But I don’t know whether I’ll ever feel the need to see it again, whereas I rarely let a year go by without watching The Rules of the Game. Which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about me, aesthetically speaking.

“He was the first important composer since Mozart to show that seriousness is not the same as solemnity, that profundity is not dependent upon length, that wit is not always the same as buffoonery, and that frivolity and beauty are not necessarily enemies.”

Constant Lambert (on Emmanuel Chabrier), Music Ho!

“I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn’t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations. I shall at least have it all my own way and it may bring relief as an outlet to that geyser of emotions, sensations, speculations and reflections which ferments perpetually within my poor old carcass for its sins; so here goes, my first Journal!”

Alice James, diary, May 31, 1889