Archives for 2003

“What fascinates me about acting is when a beautiful talented actress can come on the stage and give a performance that makes your blood curdle with excitement and pleasure, yet she can make such a cracking pig of herself over where her dressing-room is or some such triviality, for which you hate her. Intelligent actors never do that, but then they’re seldom as good as the unintelligent ones. Acting is an instinct. A gift that is often given to people who are very silly as people. But as they come on to the stage, up goes the temperature.”

No

Jennifer Howard, a contributing editor of Washington Post Book World, has a piece in the Post‘s “Outlook” section in which she complains about the chumminess of the blogosphere, citing by name a number of arts blogs and bloggers, present company included:

Part of blogs’ usefulness as a cultural barometer is that they don’t automatically buy what the establishment says about Vida or Eggers or any other overhyped phenomenon, literary or otherwise. Bloggers know what they like and what they don’t like, and they aren’t afraid to tell you why. And they get to use bad words that will never see print inside a family newspaper. But to get to the good stuff, you have to wade through more and more self-congratulation and mutual admiration. Call it blogrolling….

Maybe the back-scratching started as revolutionary solidarity. Now it’s a popularity contest in which the value of information is confused with the cool quotient of the person spreading it. Late-night TV has Jay and Dave and Conan; the blogosphere has TMFTML and Old Hag and Choire, only unlike the gods of late night, the gods of the blogosphere really, really like each other–and say so every chance they get.

They’re not so nice to the less popular kids, often establishment-media types who get flogged out of all proportion to their op-ed offenses. The last few months, it’s been all the rage to paste Laura Miller, a critic with regular gigs for Salon.com and the New York Times. One of the kinder comments, this one from Cup of Chicha: “From the way she writes about contemporary short stories, it feels obvious she doesn’t read them.” Even if you’re not a fan of Miller’s, the attacks can get so nasty it starts to feel like bloggers pick on her not because they think she’s a lousy critic but because she gets to sound off every other week in the New York Times….

If the ad hominem tactics made for a better read, I might not mind so much. Sure, it can be fun in a sick sort of way, like watching a bar fight while you nurse a beer in the corner. But more and more it gets in the way of what makes blogs useful to someone like me, and that’s information. After making my daily e-rounds, I feel more plugged into what’s going on–and ever more burned out on cronyism and negativity. Even if you rely on blogs for idiosyncratic takes on the news, even if you enjoy seeing sacred cows slaughtered, even if you believe, as I do, that the world needs the kind of Zorro-like cultural commentary they’re so good at, you start to wonder: Is this getting a little too personal?

Maybe that’s the point. In the blogosphere, everybody gets to be a critic.

Read the whole thing here.

Actually, Our Girl and I don’t do a lot of ad hominem brawling, but we do like to plug what’s going on elsewhere in the blogosphere, mainly because it’s still a very new invention about which more and more people are learning every day. That’s why we mention TMFTML
and Maud
and Cup of Chicha
and Old Hag
and Bookslut
and all the other interesting blogs that we read regularly–because we think they’re worth knowing about. “Coolness” and cronyism have nothing to do with it. We don’t party down nightly. I’ve met one of the aforementioned bloggers, once. Two of them I don’t even know by name.

In any case, the great thing about the blogosphere is that it’s an unusually pure example of an information market. People read “About Last Night” because they want to read it. If they don’t, they won’t. The same is true of all the other blogs. The ease with which you can visit a blog is part of what makes the blogosphere so competitive–and it’s not a zero-sum game, either. Anyone can play. It’s cheap and easy to set up a blog. To be a “popular kid,” all you have to do is jump in and be consistently interesting, and you’ll get noticed and mentioned and blogrolled very, very quickly. It doesn’t matter who you know or where you are. (Look what happened to Cup of Chicha.)

As for Laura Miller, I think maybe Ms. Howard is engaging in a teeny bit of snarkery herself when she suggests that “bloggers pick on her not because they think she’s a lousy critic but because she gets to sound off every other week in the New York Times.” I don’t have an opinion about Laura Miller–I don’t read her stuff–but if I felt the need to criticize her, it wouldn’t be because I resented the fact that she’s an “establishment-media type.” After all, so am I. Nor do I blog to be hip or cool or to kick sand in the faces of the “less popular kids,” whatever that means. I do it because I think blogging is an exciting and potentially significant development in arts journalism, and I want to be part of it. I’m excited by the immediacy and freshness and personal quality of blogs. I also like the bad words and knife fights, even if we don’t do that kind of stuff around here. I don’t own a shiv, and Our Girl is too sweet. (I don’t even think she knows some of those words TMFTML uses.)

Above all, blogging is fun. And that’s one thing I don’t get from Jennifer Howard’s eat-your-spinach account of life in the blogosphere: a sense of how much fun we’re all having out here. “We” meaning TMFTML and Maud and Cup of Chicha and Old Hag and Bookslut and the thousands of nice people who visit us every day. It’s not a private party. There’s no secret handshake. All you have to do is click on a link. Or not. But we hope you do.

I very much like what Our Girl wrote about not letting herself get freaked out in advance by the reviews of Master and Commander (though now that they’re out, I’d say she doesn’t have much to get freaked out about).

In my own case, I’m trying to prepare myself not to get freaked out by the differences between the movie and the books. So far, I’ve only read one unfavorable review, by Christopher Hitchens, a reflexive contrarian who likes nothing better than to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, even when it’s right and he’s wrong. Yet it’s obvious that Hitchens knows Patrick O’Brian’s books extremely well, for he unhesitatingly put his finger on a key aspect of the film about which the trailer left me extremely suspicious: the way it portrays Stephen Maturin.

The summa of O’Brian’s genius was the invention of Dr. Stephen Maturin. He is the ship’s gifted surgeon, but he is also a scientist, an espionage agent for the Admiralty, a man of part Irish and part Catalan birth–and a revolutionary. He joins the British side, having earlier fought against it, because of his hatred for Bonaparte’s betrayal of the principles of 1789–principles that are perfectly obscure to bluff Capt. Jack Aubrey. Any cinematic adaptation of O’Brian must stand or fall by its success in representing this figure.

On this the film doesn’t even fall, let alone stand. It skips the whole project. As played by the admittedly handsome and intriguing Paul Bettany, Maturin is no more than a good doctor with finer feelings and a passion for natural history. At one point he is made to say in an English accent that he is Irish–but that’s the only hint we get. In the books, for example, he quarrels badly with Aubrey about Lord Nelson’s support for slavery. But here a superficial buddy movie is born out of one of the subtlest and richest and most paradoxical male relationships since Holmes and Watson.

I regret to say that all this sounds dangerously plausible to me. I’ve read the entire Aubrey-Maturin series several times and admire it greatly (if not uncritically), but I also think its virtues, which I tried to describe when I reviewed The Yellow Admiral (one of the later volumes in the series) for the New York Times Book Review, are of a sort not easily transferred to the screen, in part because they are embodied as much in conversation as in action:

Mr. O’Brian’s present popularity is to some extent a fad, but it is also justified. To say that his books are a cut above the average historical novel is to miss the point: Aubrey and Maturin are to Capt. Horatio Hornblower what Philip Marlowe is to Perry Mason….In the end, what makes the Aubrey-Maturin novels memorable is their moral gravity: rarely does one encounter in nominally popular fiction so Trollopian an understanding–and acceptance–of the divided nature of men’s souls. Mr. O’Brian does not deal in cardboard heroes, which is why the acts of heroism he describes make so powerful an impression. We read him for his plots; we reread him for his philosophy.

I hasten to point out, however, that this is all the more reason to try and forget about the books when watching the film. A faithful film adaptation of a novel of any considerable literary complexity can never be more than a species of illustration–a commentary at best, a comic book at worst. To watch it inevitably becomes a kind of game in which the viewer scores the film according to how many surface details the director gets right. Do the actors look the way they “ought” to? Are the sets convincing? Does the dialogue sound familiar? It’s a good game, but it has nothing to do with art.

The smarter approach, of course, is for the director to depart drastically from the source–to subject it to an imaginative transformation that gives the adaptation an independent life as a free-standing art object in its own right. (It’s easier to turn a great novel into a great opera than a great film.) But if you do that, you’re likely to lose a significant part of the pre-sold audience of loyal fans whose existence is the main reason why popular books get filmed in the first place. As far as they’re concerned, the more literal the adaptation, the better–and I, hardened aesthete though I am, can’t keep myself from feeling the same way. As Dr. Johnson might have put it, I rejoice to concur with the common reader, even though I know I shouldn’t.

Hence I’m of two minds about Master and Commander. I’m well aware that it won’t convey more than a fractional part of the subtleties of O’Brian’s novels, but I’m going to see it anyway, checklist in hand, hoping against hope that the images on the screen will at least approximate the ones in my head. And that’s why I envy OGIC her blissful ignorance. Unlike me, she’ll see the film for what it is and nothing more–and if she likes it enough, she might even feel moved to buy a copy of Master and Commander, the first novel in the series, and find out what Patrick O’Brian is really about. (Nudge, nudge.)

I reviewed Taboo, the new Rosie O’Donnell-produced musical about Boy George, and The Caretaker, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Harold Pinter’s 1960 play, in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

Taboo was terrible:

Rumors about the mind-boggling awfulness of “Taboo,” which opened last night, have been circulating for weeks. I wish I could say I ignored them, but such whispers often turn out to be all too true, and once again, the whisperers were right on the money. Not since “Urban Cowboy” has Broadway been littered with so much smoldering wreckage. If Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom had produced “Taboo” instead of “Springtime for Hitler,” they’d have stayed out of jail….

The Caretaker was really good:

Don’t be put off by Mr. Pinter’s reputation for inaccessibility (or the whiny anti-Americanism of his post-9/11 public statements). His school-of-Beckett style may have hardened into mannerism long ago, but “The Caretaker” is still fresh and fine, and this production, well acted by all three players and directed with deceptive clarity by David Jones, is a superior piece of work….

No link (gnashing of teeth), so to read the whole thing, including shorter reviews of two new off-Broadway shows, Fame on 42nd Street and Bright Ideas, do the usual. Extract dollar (A) from wallet (B), proceed to the nearest newsstand, buy today’s Journal, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section (on whose front page you’ll find me), and revel in the rest of our excellent arts coverage. Got that? Good.

I’ll have much more to say about “Sargent’s Women” after I see it again, but in the meantime I urge you to go straight to this eye-popping exhibition of portaits by John Singer Sargent, which just went up at Adelson Galleries (Mark Hotel, 25 E. 77th St., through Dec. 23).

Aside from being gorgeous to behold, “Sargent’s Women” sheds light on the inner life of an artist who is widely thought not to have had one. Next to nothing is known of Sargent’s romantic entanglements (if any), and as a result contemporary opinion seems to be divided between those who think him to have been asexual and those certain that he was homosexual. Be all that as it may, you can’t spend ten minutes walking through “Sargent’s Women” without feeling the fascination that women exerted on him–not just the darkly exotic ladies of Capri, but his own sisters as well.

For reasons all too obvious, at least to me, Sargent continues to be dismissed by many critics as a lightweight virtuoso who specialized in portraits of the haut monde at the expense of serious work. He was, in fact, an extraordinarily gifted painter who did far more than merely capture the pretty-pretty surfaces of his well-heeled subjects, and even if he hadn’t devoted at least as much time and energy to the watercolor landscapes that may well prove in the end to have been his supreme achievement, Sargent’s portraits would still require no apologies. Take a look at “Rosina” and “Head of a Venetian Women” (both of which can be seen on the gallery’s Web site). The artist who painted those canvases may not have been a ladies’ man, but he definitely knew a thing or two about women, and I doubt he learned it just by looking at them.

I want to say a quick word about Adelson Galleries, whose two floors are an eminently civilized place to look at turn-of-the-century American art, about which Warren Adelson knows as much as anybody in the world. He has a knack for putting together museum-quality shows, and “Sargent’s Women,” like “Maurice Prendergast: Painter of America” before it, definitely qualifies. Between this show and “Joseph Cornell: The 100th Birthday,” currently on display at Richard L. Feigen, I’d say it’s time you took a trip to the Upper East Side. Why not make it tomorrow afternoon? Or today, for that matter?

Our old friend Bruce Bawer e-mailed us from Europe this morning, weighing in on the great e-book-vs.-printed-book debate, about which you can read more by going here
and here:

Not to get too lofty about this, but this argument about physical books vs e-books is sort of a variation on the conflict between Hebrew and Greek notions of body and soul. Is the body an essential aspect of human identity or just a container for a soul? For most purposes, reading things on a screen is fine with me. But then I think of my very favorite novel. I used to read it every nine months. Each time I opened it up again, I expected that it wouldn’t have as powerful an effect on me as last time. I was always wrong. I was transported. And when I got to the end, I was always in tears. I would close the paperback and just look at it, in awe that this object in my hand contained these people who were so real to me and whose lives moved me so deeply. It seemed a religious object. Reading that novel on an e-book, I know, would be a very different experience.

That’s beautiful, and I hesitate to disagree, however tentatively…but even so, I do wonder whether a person who grew up with e-books might not be capable of broadly similar, comparably intense feelings. Of course they would assume a different aspect, if only by virtue of the fact that (as Bruce so acutely points out) an e-book has no “body.” But would they be less powerful as a result?

I don’t know, of course. But the thought occurs to me–and I don’t know why it took so long–that some of my own feelings about the body/soul problem may well arise from the fact that music was the first art form in which I became deeply involved as an executant. Sheet music, no matter how handsome the paper and typography, is not an art object in and of itself. Rather, it’s a set of instructions by which humans of flesh and blood may call into evanescent existence the non-corporeal “art object” that is a “piece” of music. Could it be that my early experience as a musician now conditions the way I think about all art? I’m sure, for example, that it made me more open to abstract art and plotless ballet (for what art is so abstract as music?). Perhaps it has also made it easier for me to accept the idea of the “bodiless” book.

On the other hand, here’s a thought experiment: try to imagine a ballet like George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments “performed” on a computer screen by a “company” of articulated stick figures. All the movements, which are the essence of the dance, would be visible–but the viewer would experience them as a three-dimensional geometrical theorem, not an interaction between…well, souls. So long as we are on this earth, there can be no souls without bodies. That’s one of the reasons why I love ballet (it’s the “word” made as flesh), and why synthesizers will never replace live orchestras.

And will any of this stop the e-book from replacing the printed book? Don’t count on it.

A reader from Missouri writes, apropos of yesterday’s letter from the owner of a hand-held e-book reader:

As a literature teacher in a tech-savvy junior high, I wanted to weigh in on the hand-held electronic book issue.

In my literature classes we often discuss the aesthetics of reading a book. Many of my 14- and 15-year-old students are voracious readers who are willing to tackle classics as well as contemporary and young-adult authors. We’ve actually discoursed on the implications of reading a book via the web or electronically versus holding the actual book and flipping the page. Many have commented that they enjoy turning the page of a thriller, or that they sometimes linger over a page when something particularly sad or shocking has happened. I must admit that there are times when I will hold that page between two fingers and dread turning it because I know the character I’m so fond of dies there.

That being said, I’m all for a hand-held electronic revolution if it will influence more of my students to actually read. While the introduction of the net, the web, and the dot-com world was originally touted as the demise of reading, it has actually become an impetus for improving reading skills and arousing interest in reading among my students. I can’t count the number of times we’ve read a short story and students have gone home to research, on their own, an issue that was brought up by the study of the story. Imagine a world where all of my students didn’t have to carry 10-pound literature anthologies and could whip out their e-book without worrying about fumbling to the right page. As well, the e-books would allow them to take notes as they read and to store them for future reference. Today, we have a “Thou Shalt Not Write in the Book” policy. E-books would end that policy and would allow the students to download their notes and comments later. I think many of my students would read more because they would feel less like they have to “read a book” and more like they’re reading a screen. There’s a difference, you know.

Another vivid front-line dispatch, worth a close reading if you’re wondering what the future holds in store. And once again, I was struck by a small detail–what you might call “nostalgia for the page.” I know exactly what my correspondent means when he talks about not wanting to turn a page.

On the other hand, I’m sure that the readers and writers of the future will be conditioned by their experience with computers to respond to the “printed” word in similar ways, only in terms relevant to their new technological environment. No, I don’t find type on a screen to be sensuously appealing, and I don’t like the visual anonymity of e-mail, which comes in a very narrow range of typefaces–but, then, the same thing was true of typewriters, wasn’t it? Nobody in his right mind would type a love letter, but lots of people send love letters via e-mail (usually peppered with emoticons). A couple of years ago, I sent a friend a condolence e-mail, and she was surprised to hear from me via that channel. I doubt she’d be nearly as surprised today.

I don’t believe in what intellectual historians call “the idea of progress,” but I do accept the inevitability of change. We get used to it, and if we don’t, our children will–which doesn’t mean it’s always good, needless to say. As so often, Dostoevsky spoke the last word on this subject: “Man gets used to everything–the beast!”

UPDATE: Brandywine Books is skeptical about my e-book-related speculations: “The weight of the pages, the smell of glue and paper, the look of the printed text, new or fading, these amount to a book’s atmosphere. You can cuddle up with it. You can sink back with it.” Not so the e-book, he claims. (Read the whole thing here.)

Artsjournal.com blogger Greg Sandow and I looked at the same story and drew very different conclusions. We both took note of a Boston Globe editorial occasioned by Joan Kroc’s $200 million bequest to National Public Radio. Here’s what the Globe said NPR should do (among other things) with the money:

Bring back music and culture programming. NPR’s news reports are thoughtful and compelling. Its talk shows are topical and a nice way to bring listeners into conversations. And “Car Talk” is great entertainment. But occasionally all this talk is wearying. Balance could be provided by music shows and radio documentaries.

Here’s what I said in response:

If National Public Radio doesn’t seize this opportunity to restore and revive the cultural programming that once made it genuinely “public” in its appeal, it will prove beyond doubt that it’s no longer a “public” radio network, but the purely commercial, ratings-driven talk-radio shop that many listeners reasonably suspect it of having become–and I don’t see that such an enterprise deserves to be subsidized by public monies. A radio network that does nothing more than follow the ratings should be required to live and die by them.

And here’s what Greg said:

But as anyone who’s actually studied this subject knows, public radio listeners overwhelmingly don’t want music. They want talk. The Globe‘s editors are free to have their own desires, but it’s just silly for them to lecture public radio, as if their own opinion had to be right. At least they should learn why public radio makes the choices that it does.

Greg’s a smart guy. Are our views therefore somehow compatible? Not really–but I’m not so sure we’re talking about the same thing, either.

Greg is writing about NPR from a cultural populist’s point of view. Recognizing that the network’s ratings for music programs have become microscopically small in recent years, he thinks NPR should acknowledge and accept that fact and go from there. If NPR’s listeners want talk, they should have it, and that’s that.

The difference between us–as I understand it, and I may be misinterpreting Greg–is that I don’t start from the assumption that National Public Radio has an a priori obligation to exist, and thus should ensure its survival by any means necessary, even if that means scrapping musical and other cultural programming in favor of Car Talk. NPR is not a profit-making corporation. It is, or claims to be, a “public” entity, and it is subsidized in part by public monies and in-kind equivalents. Public entities exist to serve the public–but not in the same way as commercial corporations. The whole point of subsidizing a radio network is to ensure that it will do things that commercial broadcasters won’t do. In fact, there’s no other point to NPR.

Sir John Reith, the man who for all intents and purposes started the BBC, used to say that its job was to give the public “something a bit better than what it thinks it wants.” (I’m quoting from memory, but that’s fairly close to what he said.) In the case of the BBC–and, once upon a not-so-distant time, NPR and PBS–that meant a significant presence for the fine arts. Now it doesn’t. But in the absence of such programming, how can NPR and PBS justify their public subsidies? I like Car Talk, but in what possible way can it be said to constitute a kind of programming not otherwise available through non-subsidized broadcast outlets?

Here’s where I agree with Greg: if NPR’s listeners won’t listen to the cultural programs it does broadcast, then NPR should change those programs, or create new and better ones. Nor do I think that public radio stations need necessarily broadcast hour upon hour of talk-free music. (I don’t listen to classical music on the radio. That’s why I have a stereo and a large collection of CDs.) But I take it absolutely for granted that a significant part of NPR’s air time–maybe even most of it–should be devoted to cultural programming. Specifically, I think NPR has a far greater responsibility to cover the arts than to cover the news. Other people do that, and do it well. Between them, Big Media and the new media provide 24/7 news coverage in every imaginable flavor. In what way does NPR’s news department do something that isn’t already being done?

Let me be clear about this. I don’t object to the existence of All Things Considered, or even Car Talk, so long as these shows are part of a larger, more varied package of programming that makes a concerted effort to do things the commercial media can’t or won’t do. If nobody listens to fine-arts programs, then of course there’s no point in broadcasting them. But that’s a false alternative, a straw man constructed by NPR to justify the gutting of its cultural programming. Do them creatively, do them imaginatively, do them with an ear toward appealing to more than a handful of listeners–but do them. Sure, some of those shows, maybe most of them, will draw far fewer listeners than All Things Considered and Car Talk. Repeat after me: That’s the point. Such programming is the only thing that justifies the continued existence of NPR as a subsidized public entity.

UPDATE: Felix Salmon
thinks I’m all wet. I think he’s being a little bit too cute–way too cute, actually–in claiming that my criticism of NPR has a hidden ideological agenda. Considering that I’ve done a few gazillion on-air commentaries for NPR’s Performance Today (and would be doing another one tomorrow if my schedule permitted), I think perhaps my motives are rather purer than Felix thinks. But he’s a smart guy, too, so you ought to go see what he says and make up your own mind….