Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“Important! Fearful contemporary word, smacking of the textbook, the lecture-hall, the ‘balanced appraisal.’ So-and-so may be readable, interesting, entertaining, but is he important? Ezra Pound may be pretentious and dull, but you’ve got to admit that he’s ever so important. What? You haven’t read Primo Levi (in translation, of course)? But he’s important. As the philosopher J. L. Austin remarked in another context, importance isn’t important. Good writing is.”
Kingsley Amis, Memoirs
A reader writes:
I’ve been thinking about
your recent posts on the future of adult films and wanteed to ask you a
follow-up question. Sorry if I’m beating a dead horse, but as an
aspiring screenwriter (yes, I’m a masochist) I have an above-average
interest in these topics.
My question is this–when you say (and I agree with you, by the way)
that the indie films of today will become the novels of tomorrow, are
you really saying that indie films will become even less important to
the culture than they are today? Let’s face it, the overwhelming
majority of novels make zero impact on the culture, and even a mediocre
Hollywood film has greater reach than a Nobel-prize-winning novel. And
it’s not that indies have such an impact today. The intenstity with
which indie filmmakers fought against the proposed Oscar screener ban
only highlights the sad fact that even critics won’t watch the majority
of these films unless they get a freebie in the mail.
If you don’t mind a followup question, assuming this scenario plays out,
what does that mean for mainstream films? It’s hard to believe that
they’ll get any worse (and this is from someone who absolutely loves
mainstream films when they work, which they rarely do).
Just curious for your opinion. I may be a masochist, but I don’t have to
be a fool, and if I’m going into this business I want to know what I’ll
be facing.
This letter, which I received last month but am only just getting around to answering (sorry!), has acquired a new resonance in light of the recent whirlwind of lit-blog traffic triggered by OGIC’s recent posting about the state of the New York Times Book Review. I don’t really have good answers to any of my correspondent’s questions, either, just a couple of observations.
To begin with, it’s true that novels have become increasingly peripheral to the cultural conversation (such as it is). But it also seems to me–as I’ve said before in this space–that arts blogs might possibly be changing that state of affairs for the better. I don’t mean the whole world is suddenly going to start reading literary novels next week, all because of Our Girl and Maud and Bookslut. What I do mean is that the blogosphere makes it easier for people who care about serious fiction to communicate with one another, and that these people appear to be coalescing into a cybercommunity which over time could start to have a significant affect on book sales. Could, I say: the blogosphere is still very young. But it’s already stirring up conversation and controversy all out of proportion to its actual size, and that’s a good sign, an indication that we’re not fad-snuffling eccentrics but “early adopters” who comprise the leading edge of a full-fledged cultural shift.
As for independent film, well, I think my correspondent actually has it backwards. Outside of major cities, most Americans don’t have anything remotely approaching easy access to independent films until they finally make their way to DVD (if then). Hence it would be an improvement were such films to be released via Web-based new-media channels. As we city folk have a tendency to forget, America is a big country, and the smart people don’t all live in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. In fact, most of them don’t. From my art-oriented point of view, the most valuable thing about the new media is their ability to distribute high culture (a phrase I don’t define narrowly, by the way) to smart people who don’t live in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles.
Nevertheless, I hasten to remind my correspondent that those who want to make serious art must take it for granted that they won’t make serious money doing so. If that’s what you’re in it for, don’t even think about writing indie screenplays or literary novels or symphonies–go work for Donald Trump. Making art is its own reward, or ought to be. George Balanchine (about whom you’ll be reading a lot more on this blog in the course of the next few weeks) was once asked why the members of New York City Ballet’s pit orchestra were paid less than New York City’s garbagemen. His answer? “Because garbage stinks.”
Says Thomas Friedman:
I was at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley a few days
ago, and they have this really amazing electronic global
map that shows, with lights, how many people are using
Google to search for knowledge. The region stretching from
Morocco to the border of India had almost no lights.
Read the whole thing here.
Dear TT,
You asked here what books I turn to for comfort reading. My list overlaps with yours by one essential item, the Westlake/Stark double threat. Speaking of which, I loved your Dortmundrian almanac entry last week.
John D. Macdonald does very well for me too–although, since I find it hard to stop after just one or two, even getting started can mean courting some really catastrophic distraction from actual life. Series really fit this bill, don’t they? Several of your choices are series, strictly or loosely defined. There’s serious comfort in knowing that more of the same flavor is available for the asking, and imagining that the comfort zone can be indefinitely extended.
Elaine Dundy’s circa-1960 novels The Dud Avocado (based on her involvement with Kenneth Tynan) and The Old Man and Me (alas, almost impossible to find) are major stalwarts for me. I’ve read them each ten times at least, and have given away half a dozen copies of the former (most recently to cinetrix, so we’ll see what she thinks). Nobody I give it to ever likes it as much as I do, by the way–a source of ongoing amazement to me, but no damper on my proselytizing.
Jane Austen does the trick, as does M.F.K. Fisher. On the pricklier side, Mary McCarthy and Lorrie Moore–despite being more like a sharp stick in the eye than a warm blanket, the both of them. That big old David Thomson Biographical Dictionary of Film, of course. Robert Benchley. Joan Didion. Walter Scott. Robert Louis Stevenson.
Just thinking about this question makes me want to take a sick day. Sadly, that’s the last thing I can do anytime in the near future, and I won’t be blogging much in the next week either. The Friday deadline I’m facing is scary enough that I’m going to have to play the Luddite this week and shun the computer as far as possible. No comfort reading, no newfangled technology. Just me, a fistful of sharpened blue pencils, and a stack of defenseless manuscripts.
That’s the goal, anyway. I may weaken and poke my head in and out once or twice. If not, I’ll miss you and see you next week. We can talk some more about Freaks and Geeks and scenes from old movies (did I tell you I broke down and joined Netflix? So far, making the queue has been the best part. Well, it’s been the only part. But it was pure pleasure.)
XO, OGIC
As of this minute (literally), “About Last Night” is being read in fourteen time zones.
That is just plain cool. Hello, Greenland! Hello, Brazil! Hello, world!
Now showing on my magic cable box, Garden of Evil (Gary Cooper, Richard Widmark, directed by Henry Hathaway, score by Bernard Herrmann) and Beat the Devil (Bogart, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Jennifer Jones, written by Truman Capote, directed by John Huston). I flip from one to the other every three or four minutes, which is easy to do with a digital video recorder. By now, the two movies are pretty thoroughly scrambled up in my head. That’s quite a cinematic frittata.
I still haven’t done any of the stuff I hadn’t done as of three o’clock this afternoon (see my earlier posting). It is now eight-fifteen. Boy, does it ever feel good to blow a whole day. I feel like I’ve cheated the world, or at least a bunch of editors.
Do other semi-recovering workaholics take whole days off? Or did I just discover a radical new idea?
Says Nat Hentoff:
A bitter, months-long dispute within the American Library Association — the largest nation-based organization of librarians in the world — continues as to whether to demand that Fidel Castro release 10 imprisoned independent librarians found guilty of making available to Cubans copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights.
Along with 65 other Cuban dissenters, the ”subversive” librarians were sentenced to 20 or more years in Castro’s gulag. Some urgently need medical attention, which they’re not receiving.
At the ALA’s annual midwinter meeting this month in San Diego, Karen Schneider, a member of the ALA’s governing council, wanted to amend a final report on the meeting to call for their immediate release. In proposing her amendment, Schneider told her colleagues that Castro’s police had confiscated and burned books and other materials at the independent libraries.
The amendment was overwhelmingly defeated by the 182-member council. The report was swept through by a raising of hands.
From Sept. 25 to Oct. 2, libraries across this country will invite their communities to the annual Banned Books Week, decrying censorship. I’ve spoken, by invitation, during those weeks at libraries around the country. Will any library invite me this year to talk about the burning of library books in Cuba?…
If you haven’t been following this story, read the whole thing here. It’s not pretty.
(1) Shave.
(2) Shower.
(3) Open the front door of my apartment.
(4) Say a single word out loud.
(5) Read a newspaper, on or off line.
(6) Listen to any music (other than that heard on the soundtracks of movies).
(7) Write or edit anything for money.
(8) Spend money.
(9) Answer the telephone (it hasn’t rung, though).
(10) Answer any e-mail.