Archives for February 2004

Says James Tata:

I recently talked to an avid reader, a woman in her fifties who, to my alarm, said that for years she simply refused to read any book written by a man, especially fiction told from the point of view of female characters. A few months ago I tried reading Susanna Moore’s In the Cut and gave up halfway through because of the book’s relentless misandry, but I couldn’t imagine refusing to read books written by women. Where would I be as a reader without having read Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, Susan Cheever, Amy Bloom, Marilynne Robinson, Louise Erdrich, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O’Connor…on and on and on? As for writers depicting characters of the other sex, have there ever been any male characters better drawn than Middlemarch‘s Lydgate, Casaubon, Ladislaw, Vincy? If writers are forced by political considerations to write only from their own narrow experience, we as readers will be left with having to choose from among solipsistic memoirs–in fact, the very books I continue to see more and more of on the new books tables of the chain stores….

Read the whole thing here.

I go to a lot of performances of every kind, and since my job as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal obliges me to cover all Broadway openings, I don’t spend nearly enough time wandering off the beaten path. I wish I did. Especially when it comes to theater, New York is full of good things that don’t get enough attention, and I’m always happy whenever I have a chance to see one of them. Fortunately, I have theatrical friends who keep me informed about such shows, and one of them steered me last Friday to a production of As You Like It that took place in deepest Queens–Astoria, to be exact, a neighborhood richly populated with Greek restaurants.

The play was produced by the Astoria Performing Arts Center, which obviously doesn’t have any money, since it was staged in the round on the floor of a basketball court in a church gymnasium. The audience was small, the set nonexistent, the dress modern, the d

“I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long. For me no poet made a falser statement than Keats when he wrote the first line of ‘Endymion.’ When the thing of beauty has given me the magic of its sensation my mind quickly wanders; I listen with incredulity to the persons who tell me that they can look with rapture for hours at a view or a picture. Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome. All the critic can tell you with regard to Titian’s Entombment of Christ, perhaps of all the pictures in the world that which has most pure beauty, is to go and look at it. What else he has to say is history, or biography, or what not. But people add other qualities to beauty–sublimity, human interest, tenderness, love–because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is perfect, and perfection (such is human nature) holds our attention but a little while. The mathematician who after seeing Ph

…is the impending arrival of the first finished copies of A Terry Teachout Reader, which will be arriving in my mailbox later this week. No, it doesn’t go on sale until May, but you can place an advance order for your very own copy by clicking here.

“In Vicksburg, on the asphalt, the deflected minions of want walked, those who lived to care for and feed their cars, and she watched them outside Big Mart. And the sad philosophic fishermen who lived to drag slabby beauties from the water, that dream of long seconds, so they told her. About the same happy contest as sexual intercourse, as she recalled it, though these episodes sank deeper into a blurred well every day. She loved the men and their lostness on the water. Their rituals with lines and rods and reels and lures. The worship they put into it. How they beleaguered themselves with gear and lore, like solemn children or fools. She had spent too much time being unfoolish, as if that were the calling of her generation. As you would ask somebody the point of their lives and they would answer: horses.”

If you had to live in a film, what would it be? To my surprise, this turns out to be the hardest of Terry’s questions for me to answer. I thought it would be a simple matter of picking one of my many favorite movies, but it turns out that the movies I like best don’t tend to be happy places. The Dreamlife of Angels? The Long Goodbye? The unjustly forgotten Georgia? As potential habitats, these all look damn inhospitable. Still thinking.

Two shows yesterday, a performance tonight. Result: no more blogging today, especially since I need to at least try and write some prose-for-hire before the sun goes down. I haven’t heard from Our Girl for a couple of days, but maybe she’s got something up her pretty sleeve. I myself do not (nor is my sleeve pretty).

“Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction.”