Archives for March 2004

A reader writes:

Discussion has been going in and out on your blog about your or OGIC’s or whoever’s five favorite things–books, movies, records, etc. I believe you sort of answered the movie question but haven’t yet addressed any other categories. Here’s another party question that I kind of like: What is your quirkiest favorite? Something you love that (seemingly) no one else gets.

That’s a great question, and I wish I had a great answer, but the sad fact is that the rest of the world always seems to catch up with my aesthetic idiosyncrasies sooner or later, usually sooner. I guess I’m just not cool enough, or maybe too centric.

The only thing that comes to mind off the top of my head (something went wrong halfway through that last clause, but you know what I mean) is W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, a long-forgotten 1975 movie about a small-time country band. The stars are Burt Reynolds, Art Carney, and Ned Beatty. It was written by Tom Rickman, a hack whose other films include Tuesdays with Morrie and The Reagans (as well as one very good Walter Matthau picture, The Laughing Policeman), and directed by John G. Avildsen, a hack whose other films include The Karate Kid and Rocky V. W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings used to turn up on TV every once in a while, but I haven’t seen it in years, and it isn’t even available on videocassette, much less DVD. I absolutely adore it, at least in retrospect, in part because it reminds me of my own idyllic days as the bass player in a small-time country band. Reynolds is fabulously charming, Carney and Beatty (and everybody else in the cast, for that matter) dead solid perfect. As if all that weren’t enough, there’s even a scene shot in the back room of Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in Nashville, right across the street from the stage door of the Ryman Auditorium, where I sat and watched the Grand Ole Opry on a hot summer night 31 years ago. Et in Arcadia ego!

I suppose I can’t recommend W.W. in good faith to cinephiles who haven’t eaten a whole lot of truck-stop chicken-fried steak washed down with Dr. Pepper, but any reader of “About Last Night” who can send me a pirated copy will nonetheless earn my undying gratitude.

What about you, OGIC? Got any quirky faves you’d care to acknowledge?

– Cinetrix is way wicked about Dave Kehr. I’m, like, ouch.

– No doubt Our Girl probably already blogged this once upon a time, but I only just discovered The Henry James Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites. It’s exhaustive–in that good way.

– Joseph Epstein waxes grumpy
(but interestingly so) on youth culture and its discontents:

If one wants to dress like a kid, spin around the office on a scooter, not make up one’s mind about what work one wants to do until one is 40, be noncommittal in one’s relationships–what, really, are the consequences? I happen to think that the consequences are genuine, and fairly serious.

“Obviously it is normal to think of oneself as younger than one is,” W.H. Auden, a younger son, told Robert Craft, “but fatal to want to be younger.” I’m not sure about fatal, but it is at a minimum degrading for a culture at large to want to be younger. The tone of national life is lowered, made less rich. The first thing lowered is expectations, intellectual and otherwise. To begin with education, one wonders if the dumbing down of culture one used to hear so much about and which continues isn’t connected to the rise of the perpetual adolescent.

Consider contemporary journalism, which tends to play everything to lower and lower common denominators. Why does the New York Times, with its pretensions to being our national newspaper, choose to put on its front pages stories about Gennifer Flowers’s career as a chanteuse in New Orleans, the firing of NFL coaches, the retirement of Yves Saint Laurent, the canceling of the singer Mariah Carey’s recording contract? Slow-news days is a charitable guess; a lowered standard of the significant is a more realistic one. Since the advent of its new publisher, a man of the baby boomer generation, an aura of juvenilia clings to the paper. Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, two of the paper’s most-read columnists, seem not so much the type of the bright college student but of the sassy high-school student–the clever, provocative editor of the school paper out to shock the principal–even though both are in their early fifties….

– While we’re on the subject, here’s a new angle on The Passion of the Christ, courtesy of Variety:

Young males who flock to slasher pics seem to be taking an interest in “The Passion,” which has been widely characterized as gory by reviewers.

Fangoria editor Anthony Timpone said, “It’s sparked an interest in my readership because of the extreme nature of the it as well as the controversy.” The magazine hasn’t covered “The Passion,” but Timpone said horror helmer David Cronenberg recently suggested he should. And at least one horror fan site, E-Splatter.com, has given “The Passion” the thumb’s up: “As a horror fan, I was more than satisfied. This is not some kiddie Christ film. This is the real deal.”

“But consider the case of a man sitting down to write something genuinely original–to pump an orderly flow of ideas out of the turbid pool of his impressions, feelings, vague thoughts, dimly sensed instincts. He works in a room alone. Every jangle of the telephone cuts him like a knife; every entrance of a visitor blows him up. Solitary, lonely, tired of himself, wrought up to an abnormal sensitiveness, he wrestles abominably with intolerable complexities–shoadowy notions that refuse to reveal themselves clearly, doubts that torture, hesitations that damn. His every physical sensation is enormously magnified. A cold in the head rides him like a witch. A split fingernail hurts worse than a paparotomy. The smart of a too-close shave burns like a prairie-fire. A typewriter that bucks is worse than a band of music. The far-away wail of a child is the howling of a fiend. A rattling radiator is a battery of artillery.

“Nothing could be worse than this agony. A few hours of it and even the strongest man is thoroughly tired out. Days upon days of it, and he is ready for the doctor. The layman whose writing is confined to a few dozen letters a day can have no conceptions of the hard work done by such a writer. Worse, he must plod his way through many days when writing is impossible altogether–days of doldrums, of dead centers, of utter mental collapse. These days have a happy habit of coming precisely when they are most inconvenient–when a book has been promised and the publisher is snorting for it. They are days of unmitigated horror. The writer labors like a galley-slave, and accomplishes absolutely nothing. A week of such effort and he is a wreck. It is in the last ghastly hours of such weeks that writers throw their children out of sixth-story windows and cut off the heads of their wives.”

H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

“So far as I know ours is the only language in which it has been found necessary to give a name to the piece of prose which is described as the purple patch; it would not have been necessary to do so unless it were characteristic.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

I’m back from giving that speech in Michigan, and too tired to do much more than give you the inside skinny on my drama column in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, in which I reviewed Craig Lucas’ Small Tragedy, a backstage play about a production of Oedipus Rex, and Charles Mee’s Wintertime, about which the less said, the better.

I loved the Lucas play, though I didn’t expect to:

The good news is that Craig Lucas’ characters never act like puppets on a better writer’s string, nor is “Small Tragedy” a parasitical “commentary” on Sophocles. It is a play with a life of its own about a group of interestingly complicated people with lives of their own, one in which the process of staging a show is simultaneously satirized and illuminated, an exceedingly neat trick. Mr. Lucas likes to teeter on the edge of political correctness and agonizing predictability–one character is HIV-positive, another is a Good European who spends most of the first act condescending to his na

Publishers Weekly has a story about the Sam Tanenhaus appointment, based on interviews with Bill Keller and Bob Loomis (Tanenhaus’ editor at Random House). No link, alas, but here are some quotes:

Tanenhaus, said Keller, displayed particular proficiency at matching reviewer to book–one of the tests apparently had interviewers holding up a work of fiction and asking how the candidate would handle it–and other skills which further “reassured us that this guy was quite impressive and could hold his own against anyone.” He added that Tanenhaus “has a tremendous amount of energy, which in a small operation is a lot of the battle. You have to be able to inspire, and he’s an inspirational presence.”…

Keller also continued to emphasize timeliness and relevance, in both fiction and non-fiction, for TBR. Tanenhaus’ background lies in history, biography and, perhaps most critically, current affairs, expertise the Times thinks could apply to unexpected areas. “I think he can bring a bit of a news sensibility to the reviewing of fiction,” said Keller. “By that I don’t just mean that he’ll get excited by a book that is a new discovery but that the Review will write about fiction in a way that ties into the modern world. People who write fiction don’t live in seclusion from the world.” Tanenhaus himself has a somewhat unexpected background in fiction; in 1984 he wrote Literature Unbound, an incisive survey of Western Lit, despite being just seven years out of college.

Tanenhaus, of course, still has work cut out for him; besides staff, there’s the perennial hobgoblin of space and the pressure to keep the section literary while revamping its dusty reputation. Indeed, if the twin, sometimes incompatible, concerns for the Times in the selection were snap and seriousness, the newspaper seems to feel like it has achieved both with its choice, who has literary cred and magazine buzz, Robert Caro by way of Graydon Carter.

I was just about to praise Household Opera for a major breakthrough in phonetic orthography–Rrrowr!–but then I googled it and came up with 450 hits. Next thing you know, somebody will be writing to tell me it’s actually from Finnegans Wake….

While we’re on the subject, more or less, I have settled on Eeuuww! as my preferred spelling of that now-essential expletive. Any questions?

(I also prefer Fuhgedaboudit, as rendered by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities, but no standard rendering has yet been universally accepted, alas. These things matter!)

From the Los Angeles Times story about Sam Tanenhaus’ appointment as editor of the New York Times Book Review:

He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998 for his biography “Whittaker Chambers” (Random House), about a key figure in the Alger Hiss spy trial.

Um, right. And David was a “key figure” in the later career of Goliath. And Die Frau ohne Schatten is an anti-abortion opera.

Memo to the L.A. Times culture desk: get some culture. Fast.