Archives for January 2004

I just finished writing the first chapter of my Balanchine book, and now am headed for bed. Lots of accumulated work-for-money to do tomorrow, so don’t expect any staggeringly brilliant postings, but I promise to give you something worth reading on Tuesday, if not Monday night.

In the meantime, Our Girl’s rocking! So back to work for me. Read her instead.

Over at Golden Rule Jones, Sam takes notice of the 75th anniversary of I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism, more than a bit of a relic as far as literary critical methods go, but excellent as a primer in close reading, and, sad to say, always good for some mirth at the expense of Richards’ guinea pig students. Richards’ book records what happened when the author, a Cambridge professor, removed identifying information from a set of poems that were all over the map in terms of quality, and asked his students to evaluate them. He is withering about the students’ reactions, which generally fell precisely opposite his own and the canon’s. Christina Rossetti, Donne, and Hopkins, if memory serves, are some of the literary lights that were unceremoniously snuffed out in the students’ judgment, while several pieces of doggerel were declared classics. Richards applies a high hand in diagnosing these failures of reading, and the results can be hilarious (and very good training).

George Orwell read Richards’ book in 1944, and wrote of the experience:

But still, some of the comments recorded by Dr. Richards are startling. They go to show that many people who would describe themselves as lovers of poetry have no more notion of distinguishing between a good poem and a bad one than a dog has of arithmetic.

Flipping back to the present, Haypenny Magazine is working the Richardsian angle with “Actual Comments Overheard in a Poetry Workshop” by Steve Caldes. (Link via Maud, who’s back!)

Somewhere out there, Jim McManus is shedding a tear. So is OGIC. So should anyone who never experienced Benny Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in downtown Las Vegas in person. Where else could you play dollar blackjack, have the cards lobbed cheerfully at your head, and get a great bowl of homemade gumbo at the honest-to-god lunch counter into the bargain?

Maybe Binion’s will re-open, but it’s hard to be optimistic. In retrospect I see that when they removed the million-dollar cash-horseshoe display, it was the beginning of the end.

UPDATE: The second link above, to a Los Angeles Times story, requires registration. This better news story does not.

We will always read Old Hag, foul though she may become….

“‘Do you consider love the strongest emotion?’ he asked.

“‘Do you know a stronger?’

“‘Yes, interest.'”

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

My mother taught me not to blow my own horn, but I just ran across a recent on-line reference
to this blog that I wanted to pass along:

For a brilliantly informed and non-academic approach to culture, Terry Teachout is the guy. He’s the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and the music critic for Commentary, but no, he is not what you might expect from someone who regularly contributes to both those magazines. He is tremendously well-informed, and tremendously interested in the world. In the course of a week, his subjects will range from recent architecture to obscure plays and ballets to classic cartoons to how high tech changes Middle America’s experience of culture, and then on beyond that. In his range of interests and enjoyments, he keeps goading me (in a good-natured way) to broaden my own horizons.

I’m posting that snippet of praise (by blogger Bruce Baugh) because it sums up with enviable precision what I try to do in this space. It’s nice to think that I’m hitting the mark, at least some of the time. Thanks much, Mr. Baugh, whoever and wherever you are.

Colby has a nice appreciation of Harvey Pekar, occasioned by the approach of the Oscars, where Pekar may well be an incongruous presence:

Mr. Pekar was inspired in the 1960s by a chance meeting with R. Crumb, the future dean of “underground comics,” who was then drawing greeting cards for a living in Cleveland. They met to trade old records, but when Mr. Crumb showed Mr. Pekar the quirky adult comics he was doing on the side, Pekar’s imagination caught fire. Crumb’s work, he noticed, was intellectual and satirical, but not realistic. Why couldn’t you have a “straight” comic book with a tone like Dreiser’s, or Celine’s, or Balzac’s? Thus was born American Splendor. Naturalism was coming to the comics page.

Meanwhile, in case anyone reading this site is for some reason still not regularly reading that site, Michael Blowhard takes l’affaire King-Hazzard in an interesting new direction, comparing how book people and movie people treat the relationship between art and trash. He does not find the book people’s way most productive, to put it mildly. Here are some out-takes:

In the world of books trash and art still don’t ride in the same section of the bus; the books mindset–at least the respectable-publishing mindset–is still segregationist. If the movie-world view is all about the vital connections between art and trash, and about how each is the lifeblood of the other, the book person’s imagination is taken up with the neverending struggle of art, talent and brains to do triumph over the forces of money, hustle and fame.

Also, of course, the simple fact is that, for many people, books equal school, while movies represent weekends, vacation, time off, romance and sex. And so living the books life becomes for many an attempt to continue living life as though in school. Here ‘s a Robert Birnbaum interview with the Boston Globe book reviewer Gail Caldwell . It’s an excellent interview, and Caldwell’s an excellent reviewer who does a first-class job. That said, what kind of person does she strike you as? She seems to me to be a born student, ever eager to sink her arms into her next assignment.

I find the gestalt of the book world oppressive; it gives me a pain and it makes me grumpy. I find the movie-person’s view of the arts much more congenial, whatever quarrels I may have with it. And I’m often left wondering: how can books people say of themselves that they love books when they look down their noses at 90% of the books that get published? They disdain not just Stephen King but also self-help books, visual books, and trash biographies; they relish little more than an intense discussion about what’s a “real book” and what’s not. (My staggeringly original response to this tiresome issue: They’re all books, for god’s sake.) IMHO, what books people love isn’t books; what they love is their own standards, and their fantasies about what literature should be.

I think that crime writers are, on the whole, better fiction writers than lit-fiction writers are. For one thing, they’ve got more respect for their readers’ pleasure; for another, they’re less bound up in their egos.

As usual at 2 Blowhards, the comments move the discussion forward vigorously. Speaking as a “book person” who has some difficulty observing this particular generic boundary, I find Michael’s comments compelling in the extreme.

Finally, Salon picks Brian Hall’s I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company as one of its best books of the year:

Hall tells the epic story of the Lewis and Clark expedition from a variety of perspectives, but it’s Lewis and Sacagawea who steal the show. This is a historical novel that’s unflinchingly honest but doesn’t serve a political agenda. It describes the arc of a grand and thrilling journey, but views the progress through the halting, thwarted, damaged psyches of those who make it, one complicated step at a time. Sacagawea is a stifled philosopher, scarred by losses greater than any of her companions can imagine–if they ever bothered to try. Lewis is valiant, depressed, infatuated with the wilderness and his co-captain and tormented by the impossible demands placed on him by his president and, especially, himself. Hall’s portraits of these travelers are never less than utterly convincing and his sense of the strangely fruitful intersection of great deeds and human failings is unforgettable.

Somehow this book slipped under my radar, which is surprising because I thought Hall’s tour de force The Saskiad was one of the best American novels published in the last ten years.

New York City Ballet
is celebrating the centennial of the birth of George Balanchine, the greatest choreographer of the 20th century, with two full seasons’ worth of Balanchine-heavy programs. I’m in the process of writing a brief life of Balanchine for Harcourt, so I expect to be going to NYCB two or three times a week throughout the next couple of months. I just returned from my first performance of the winter season, an all-Balanchine triple bill of Prodigal Son, Serenade, and Scotch Symphony, two masterpieces and a lesser but nonetheless delightful effort. I brought with me a jazz musician who’d never seen any of Balanchine’s choreography, and was eager to find out what she’d been missing.

Most serious balletgoers (if not all) have felt for some time now that NYCB was in decline, and tonight’s performance did little to prove them wrong. I don’t need to go into particulars, since Tobi Tobias nailed all the myriad deficiencies of the current staging of Scotch Symphony in a posting on “Seeing Things,” her artsjournal.com blog:

I had been looking forward to my favorite Scotch Symphony moment. Two of the kilts lift the Sylphide high–she seems to be standing on air–and toss her, still vertical, into her ardent suitor’s arms. “She sails forward as if the air were her natural home,” Walter Terry wrote in 1957, “and [her partner] catches her high on his chest as if she were without weight.” I recall the exquisitely gentle Diana Adams in that moment. For two unforgettable seconds, she seemed to be not falling but floating–softly, lazily, serenely, swept crosswise by an idle breeze. It didn’t happen last night. They didn’t even attempt it. I wonder if whoever is setting the ballet even knows that moment existed. Or cares.

I was one year old in 1957, but anyone who’s seen the old Bell Telephone Hour video
of Maria Tallchief and Andr