Archives for February 2004

“The local critic didn’t like the piece, which poses the question: does one write for the public, or for the critics? Three thousand people applaud enthusiastically and one journalist makes uncharitable remarks. Which is more important? And how do critics feel able to make a definite judgment after one hearing? As a composer, I would never presume to do such a thing. When my pupils brought their music to me I always made them play it twice, something I learned from Honegger. There is too much of the unexpected in a first hearing; after a second hearing things begin to fall into place.”

Mikl

Over the last week, many lit bloggers have been linking to and commenting on this column by Robert McCrum in the UK Observer. McCrum reports that publishers are increasingly buying novels on the basis of synopses or sample chapters, and makes a compelling case that this practice is symptomatic of the publishing industry’s problems and sure to exacerbate them. The column has been intelligently commented and expanded upon by Sarah, The Literary Saloon, and others too numerous to itemize.

The piece brought to mind Gerald Howard’s classic essay in this vein, “Mistah Perkins–He Dead: Publishing Today,” which appeared in The American Scholar in Summer 1989. It’s too long and detailed to do full justice to here, but here’s a bit of what Howard (then editor at Norton, now at Doubleday) was saying about the industry fifteen years ago:

The American publishing business today is in a tremendous state of confusion between its two classic functions: the higher-minded and more vocally trumpeted mission civilisatrice to instruct and edify and uplift the reading public and the less loudly advertised but, in the nature of things, more consistently compelling mission commerciale to separate the consumer from his cash. Happy the publisher (and happy the author) who can manage to make a single book fulfill both functions! The real art of publishing consists not in reconciling what are, in a capitalist system, quite simply irreconcilable imperatives but in orchestrating the built-in tensions in a harmonious fashion. However, the two-way road in publishing from the bottom line to Mount Olympus travels right across a fault line, and that is where the serious editor lives and plies his trade. To put it bluntly, the tectonic plates are shifting, there’s an earthquake going on, and all that moving and shaking you’ve read about is making it hard to attend to business–or even to be certain, from day to day, just what our business is. The delicate task of orchestrating tensions becomes more difficult still when the walls threaten to collapse about you….

The point that I wish to make is that book editing is not now and never has been a pursuit that permits a narrow purism. F. Scott Fitzgerald characterizes his film producer hero Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon as one of the few people who can hold the whole complex equation of filmmaking in his head at once; it might be said that good editors do something similar with the publishing equation. Their ministrations extend equally to the narrow compass of the page of text where the reader will experience the book and the wide cultural and commercial arena where the book itself must find its way; their fealty is equally to the spiritual, emotional, and financial well-being of the authors they publish and the firms that employ them. One might say that the effective editor is on comfortable terms with God and with Mammon. The great Max Perkins also published Taylor Caldwell and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Probably the most remunerative book ever published by Alfred A. Knopf was Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (over 8 million copies sold in this country alone, and climbing still), and the ultra-prestigious firm that bears Knopf’s name is known in the book trade for its top-of-the-culinary-line cookbooks and for the commercial

I lay down for a little nap at 4:30 yesterday afternoon, and the next thing I knew, it was nine o’clock. Yikes! In the evening, thank God, but even so, I know a warning bell when I hear it. No more blogging for me today, thank you very much.

We’ve had a couple of wild days here at “About Last Night,” incidentally. Everybody in the world seems to have linked to us for one reason or another (mostly the other). So if you’re visiting this blog for the first time and want to know more about it, click here to read an archived posting from last November 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 proprietors.

Either way, I’m glad you stopped by. If you had fun, come back tomorrow…and bring a friend. The easy-to-remember alternate URL is www.terryteachout.com, which will bring you here lickety-split (as, of course, will the longer address currently visible in your browser).

Welcome. I’ll be back on Thursday. Our Girl in Chicago will keep you company until then.

P.S. Not to worry, Girl, I haven’t forgotten that you’re expecting me to come up with my own answers to those five questions. I just need some sleep first.

Insofar as possible, I’m reading everything that’s being written about my recent dustup with Bookslut, who got hopping mad at what I said over the weekend about link-poaching. Too many people have chimed in for me to link to all their comments, though you can find most of the best ones by trolling the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column, which you should be doing anyway.

It’s been especially interesting to note the sharp division of opinion between bloggers who, like Our Girl and me, believe in the concept of a blogosphere whose participants use links to “freely share ideas and readers with one another, and in so doing increase their own value” (my words), and those stalwart individualists who reject the idea of the blogosphere as virtual community. It’s odd that I should be in the former category, since I’m no kind of communitarian, but this particular aspect of the blogosphere has seemed self-evident to me ever since I first started thinking about how blogging works (which was two or three years before I launched “About Last Night,” by the way). Linking and blogrolling are what differentiate blogs from old media–and this difference, it seems to me, is the whole point of blogging.

Interesting, too, is the intensity with which certain bloggers continue to express their loathing for the way in which certain other bloggers make friendly mention of one another. Clearly, this reflects a divergence of taste that no amount of civility will narrow: some folks just don’t like it, and that’s that. Me, I like it very much, and I don’t see it as clubby or exclusionary, much less snobbish. Sure, I have my favorites, but without exception they’re people whom I got to “know” in cyberspace, solely and only through their work (though I’ve been lucky enough to meet a half-dozen of them in the flesh, and hope to meet many more). They’re my cast of characters, and I try to write about them in such a way as to make my readers want to get to know them, too. As I’ve said more than once, I think that’s part of the fun of blogging–not just for bloggers themselves, but for those who read us as well. It personalizes blogging. It strengthens the feeling of community. Above all, it encourages our readers to visit other blogs.

Finally, a few bloggers seem to disapprove of those of us who take an interest in the amount of traffic we draw. That puzzles me. I don’t write posts in order to draw traffic–it doesn’t work–but I’m always delighted when new people visit “About Last Night,” and why on earth shouldn’t I be? I think blogging is good. I want more people to do it. I think it’ll be good for the world of art if they do. What’s wrong with that? And who’s being clubby now? I’m an elitist, but I don’t believe in the we-happy-few mentality: I want everybody who can swim to jump in the pool.

At any rate, I’ll close by repeating something I can’t say often enough, which is that the regular readers of this blog are great people, smart and attentive and a joy to hear from. So are most of the bloggers featured in the right-hand column–but, then, Our Girl and I don’t add blogs to “Sites to See” because their proprietors are charming. We do it because we believe that what they write is worth reading, right or wrong, nice or nasty. Even when they dump on us.

I inadvertently erased your phone message to me. Apologies, but it was a long day, and my trigger finger got itchy.

Could you please call again?

“The gates of the one class should be open to the other; but neither to one class or to the other can good be done by declaring that there are no gates, no barrier, no difference.”

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

Mark Barry of Ionarts got to the Milton Avery exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington:

One room is dedicated to notebook entries, dry-point etchings such as Reclining Nude
or Rothko with Pipe,
monoprints, and woodblock prints. Avery was quite prolific, constantly drawing portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, always searching: it sure inspired me to get to work.

Read the whole thing here.

A reader writes:

I enjoy your reviews in the Journal even if most of the shows don’t make it to Minnesota and we don’t make it to NYC often.

My wife & I went to the Producers at the St. James on Feb 14. I liked the show (she loved it) but I was very uncomfortable throughout the show with the closeness of the seats. I’m 6’2″ and was jammed into the seat. My shins had dents from the seat in from of me and every time the woman leaned back it mashed my shins. My knees stuck over the top of her seat. My back also hurt too. I’ll never go back to that place again. The play was not worth the pain.

Here’s my questions:

(1) Are all Broadway seats that close?

(2) Did they add extra rows in the theatre to sell more tickets?

(3) Are the seats better on the floor? We sat in Mezzanine N 15 & 17.

(4) Am I the only one to complain?

I work for an airline and so don’t expect too much room but it was way too tight for comfort. Even my 5’2″ wife could not cross her legs.

Well said, sir. My answers:

(1) No–seat pitch varies widely from theater to theater–but some are way too close for comfort.

(2) I don’t know whether the St. James packed in additional seats for The Producers, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

(3) I haven’t sat in the balconies of most of the major New York houses (critics always sit in the orchestra), but I do know some houses where the upstairs seats are appallingly cramped. I nearly had to call an ambulance a few years ago after spending an evening in the back row of the Vivian Beaumont, for example.

(4) Probably not, but I’ve never seen such a complaint in print, and so am happy to post yours. Send the management a letter!