Archives for April 13, 2004

“The Philistine is not indifferent to fine art: he hates it.”

George Bernard Shaw, “Utopian Gilbert and Sullivan”

– Yesterday I watched Turner Classic Movies’ two-part documentary on Cecil B. de Mille, who is a lot more interesting in theory than practice (though I really do like The Greatest Show on Earth).

– I also read most of another Barbara Pym novel, Quartet in Autumn.

– Now playing on iTunes: “Tour’s End,” a “Sweet Georgia Brown” contrafact (that’s musicologist talk) from Stan Getz and the Oscar Peterson Trio. It swings like hell–and without a drummer, thank you very much.

(Incidentally, a reader writes to tell me that Matchbook, the Ralph Towner-Gary Burton CD I listened to yesterday, is in print in Europe and can be ordered by going here.)

Playing the game that Ed has sent coursing through the blogosphere like a virus, I picked up Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism, and came up with a veritable fortune cookie:

“The present life is to all a state of infelicity; every man, like an author, believes himself to merit more than he obtains, and solaces the present with the prospect of the future; others, indeed, suffer those disappointments in silence, of which the writer complains, to shew how well he has learnt the art of lamentation.”

– This is the most obsessive Web site I’ve ever seen.

– Says Ed, who got it from Caterina.net:

1. Grab the nearest book.

2. Open the book to page 23.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

RESULTS: The Great Gatsby, in The Viking Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald: “‘I can’t complain,’ answered Wilson unconvincingly.”

Sorry, Ed. I guess it’s back to my morning bagel….

Apropos of Our Girl’s posting about Dortmunder (see below), I hasten to point out that the O.J. Bar & Grill is (or would be if it existed) around the corner from my front door.

I have a feeling that my part of the Upper West Side has changed more than a little bit in the thirtysomething years since Donald Westlake started writing about Rollo and his grubby customers….

I had lunch today with a friend who reads out loud to his wife (and she to him). They’ve been doing it for years, and are quite ambitious in their choice of material. Not long ago, they finished reading Don Quixote to one another–but not in its entirety. They skipped most of the self-contained episodes not involving the Don and Sancho Panza, and my friend guesses that they ended up reading only about 80% of the book, if not a bit less. Even so, it took them roughly two months to wrap the whole thing up.

This got us to talking about the question of loooong books, and whether or not it’s proper to abridge them, or read abridgements of them. One celebrated case in point is Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a book I love with all my heart, but which I now prefer to read in the ruthless abridgement Louis Kronenberger made for inclusion in Viking’s Portable Johnson & Boswell (long out of print, though it shouldn’t be). Similarly, any number of plays and operas are customarily staged with cuts, and I see no reason for zealous producers to discontinue that merciful practice. Even Shakespeare benefits from trimming.

All this makes me wonder whether my attention span might possibly be shrinking as I grow older. I suspect it is, and I suspect I know why. For one thing, younger people have energy to burn, as well as the idealism necessary to propel themselves from one end of Siegfried to the other. After all, they’re still getting their cultural cards punched. My card, by contrast, is pretty well punched out, though I still have yet to read The Possessed, or see a production of Peer Gynt. What’s more, my appetite for the new is sufficiently strong that I’m disinclined to see yet another Tristan or Giselle. I already know how those masterpieces go, and I doubt I’ll be changing my mind about them at this point in my life, at least not to any significant degree.

Besides, how many more novels do I have time to read, or plays to see? If I’m lucky, I’m somewhere on the far side of the middle of life, meaning that every book I read brings me that much closer to the dark encounter (or, as Henry James called it, the distinguished thing). This knowledge doesn’t fill me with the desire to read nothing but great literature between now and then–man cannot live by classics alone–but it does make me less willing to devote disproportionate tracts of time to the consumption of individual works of art that violate the iron law of aesthetic economy. Do I really want to read Proust again before I die? The answer is yes, but I have my doubts about Moby-Dick, nor do I have the faintest intention of revisiting Lohengrin.

The older I get, the more I treasure those artists blessed with the twin gifts of terseness and lightness. Oddly enough, these gifts aren’t always granted in tandem: James’ middle-period novels, for instance, are long and light, which is why I can still read them with pleasure. Likewise The Marriage of Figaro, though I freely confess that I prefer the much shorter Falstaff. When I say “light,” by the way, I don’t mean “frivolous.” I’m talking about texture. There’s nothing the least bit frivolous about The Moviegoer, but Walker Percy’s prose isn’t thick–it flows with ingratiating ease. Similarly, George Balanchine was the most serious of artists, but he never beat you over the head with his profundity. Symphony in C is a supremely great work of art so light that it seems to fly past the eye in a matter of seconds. I could watch it once a week.

Which brings us back to one of my unpunched holes: I’ve never read Don Quixote. As I listened to my friend describe the pleasure that he and his wife got out of reading it to one another, I found myself sorely tempted to give it a go–but if I do, I’ll skip at will, and I’d be perfectly happy to read a well-made abridgement. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, says the Good (and Long) Book, do it with all thy might. That’s good advice, but so is this: The night cometh when no man can work. It was one of Dr. Johnson’s favorite Biblical verses, and as Boswell informs us, “He scarcely ever read a book through from cover to cover in his life, but he had the faculty of seizing the essence of any work of literature by judicious skipping.” As usual, I’m with Johnson. I’d rather have read some of a lot of books than all of a few.

So much ALN love for Ed today! His ears may be burning, but I can’t pass up passing along his link to this Donald Westlake Dortmunder shortie, which contains such marvels as this:

Rollo the bartender, observing the world from a three-point stance–large feet solidly planted on the duckboards behind the bar, elbow atop the cash register drawer–seemed too absorbed either by the conversation or in contemplation of the possibility of health to notice the arrival of a new customer. In any event, he didn’t even twitch, just stood there like a genre painting of himself, while the first regular said, “Well, whatever the word is, the point is, if you got your health you got everything.”

“I don’t see how that follows,” the second regular said. “You could have your health and still not have a Pontiac Trans Am.”

Some of my favorite scenes in the Dortmunder novels take place in this selfsame O.J. Bar & Grill. Thanks to Ed for pointing it out, and to Mr. Westlake for generously sharing the story with his website‘s readers. It’s more than enough to make me go buy the book in which it appears.