Archives for April 29, 2004

Here malice, rapine, accident conspire,

And now a rabble rages, now a fire;

Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,

And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;

Here falling houses thunder on your head,

And here a female atheist talks you dead.

Samuel Johnson, “London”

From God of the Machine:

As of this moment, God of the Machine is being read in twenty-five time zones. Hello Madagascar! (In what Guinness has certified as a new world record, it is being misunderstood in twenty-four of them.) We celebrated our 1,500,000th unique visitor and 10,000,000th page view, and that’s just this afternoon. (How do I know this? I counted, every one of them.) I’d love to write more, but my wine column’s due for The Spectator, Car and Driver is simply insisting that I take this damn Lamborghini out for a test drive, my agent needs to discuss the movie rights to my New York Review of Books piece on Proust’s influence on Balanchine, I’m already running late for my date with Uma Thurman, and Gisele Bundchen’s holding on the other line. Gisele so hates to be kept waiting.

V. funny. In fact, that’s the best “About Last Night” parody I’ve seen since Mr. TMFTML gave us the blunt end of the stick last September. Alas, Uma hasn’t called back yet, but Maud awaits. See you by the swimming pool….

UPDATE: A reader writes: “Please remind God of the Machine not to forget the bespeckled bare-breasted groupies in cheerleader skirts camped outside on your block reading Samuel Johnson, just waiting for a glimpse of you taking out the garbage every morning.”

That’ll be the day.

First of all, it’s nice to have Our Girl back!

Secondly, the spam count in the “About Last Night” mailbox is octupling, so let me remind you:

(1) I never open e-mail with a blank subject header.

(2) If I’m chewing through a lot of spam, I don’t always open e-mail whose subject headers are so oblique or obscure as to make no obvious sense to me.

Help me out here–be clear.

Finally, don’t be surprised if I fail to post anything tomorrow beyond an almanac entry and my regular Friday Wall Street Journal theater teaser. I’m feeling signs of incipient burnout, compounded by acute schedule overload. (The speech got written, though.)

Whenever. And thanks for stopping by. See you soon.

Apropos of God of the Machine’s wicked parody of one of my more breathless contributions to “About Last Night” (scroll down), is there anything more frustrating than ransacking your failing memory for the source of a half-recalled quote? That’s what I’ve been doing ever since I got back from lunch with Supermaud (who says hi). At last, the coin dropped, and I went to my shelf of art books, took down N. John Hall’s Max Beerbohm Caricatures, turned to page 15, and hit the jackpot:

As Edmund Gosse told a fellow writer whom Max had just caricatured: “I feel it my duty to tell you that something has happened to you that sooner or later happens to us almost all. Max has got you. We don’t like it and you won’t like it, but you must pretend you do. You can console yourself at any rate with the thought that it will give uncommon pleasure to your friends.”

What threw me off the track was that I wrongly remembered this letter as having been sent by Gosse to Henry James apropos of “The Mote in the Middle Distance,” the James parody in Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland (“It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it”), which also contains eerily exact parodies of G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells. I chased that hare in vain for a good ten minutes, though I did find this highly relevant footnote in Simon Nowell-Smith’s The Legend of the Master: Henry James as Others Saw Him:

Gosse told Siegfried Sassoon that James had roamed round the room discussing, “with extraordinary vivacity and appreciation, not only the superlative intelligence of the book as a whole but ‘The Mote in the Middle Distance’ itself, which he had read in a self-scrutinizing bewilderment of wonder and admiration.”

As you may have gathered, I love parody and caricature, and it’s one of my medium-sized regrets that I have no gift for either (though I can do adequate impersonations of a few of my friends). Alas, I find it impossible to get inside another person’s prose style. I once tried to write a parody of a Jeeves novel in the style of Bright Lights, Big City. That was actually a pretty good idea, conceptually speaking, but I stalled out halfway through the fourth sentence, so it went unwritten, and the only thing I can remember about it now is that the very first word was, of course, “you.”

This incapacity is all the more vexing because I believe parody to be one of the most powerful and illuminating forms of criticism. Some of Kenneth Tynan’s most brilliant drama reviews were parodies, including his double-edged skewering of William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, which he rewrote in the style of Our Town:

Well, folks, reckon that’s about it. End of another day in the city of Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Nothin’ much happened. Couple of people got raped, couple more got their teeth kicked in, but way up there those faraway old stars are still doing their old cosmic criss-cross, and there ain’t a thing we can do about it. It’s pretty quiet now. Folk hereabouts get to bed early, those that can still walk….

I wouldn’t kill to be able to do that, but I might be willing to maim.

Wednesday was a very, very long day. I wouldn’t have skipped a moment of it, not for anything in the world.

– I woke up at five-thirty to find my as-yet-unwritten Wall Street Journal review of Jumpers, A Raisin in the Sun, and Bombay Dreams rattling around in my head. It seemed pointless to try and go back to sleep, so I climbed down from the loft, booted up my iBook, and started writing. The piece was slow going–Jumpers isn’t easy to sum up in four paragraphs, which was all I could spare–but I finally got it written.

– Midway through the first draft, I took a break and picked up my copy of Fairfield Porter’s Broadway from my framer. It turned out that the upper right edge of the print had been slightly damaged in transit, which saddened me. But once I carted it home and hung it over the mantelpiece, I found that the flaw didn’t bother me all that much, especially since the frame is so handsome–the photo the dealer sent didn’t do it justice. Every time I walk into the living room, it’s as if I see A Terry Teachout Reader writ large on the wall. I wonder how long it’ll take before the association fades and I start to see Broadway solely as a work of art in its own right rather than a beautiful symbol of the pride I feel in my new book. Maybe never–and that’ll be all right, too. In any case, I’m hopelessly in love with the latest addition to the Teachout Museum. For the moment, my other prints have receded into the background, and I now find myself staring at Broadway for minutes at a time, drinking it in.

– With Broadway safely hung, I sent off my Journal review, read and corrected the proofs of my Commentary essay, and checked in with the editor of my Washington Post column, which runs in Sunday’s paper. (He had a few last-minute suggestions, all of which I gladly took.) Then I ran downstairs, hailed a cab, and hurtled across Central Park to watch Maria Schneider
and Bob Brookmeyer
rehearse tonight’s concert at the Kaye Playhouse (go here for details). I can’t be there–Thursday is the only night I can see New York City Ballet dance George Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer
this season, and it could easily be several years before they do it again–so I talked my way into the sound check instead. I’d never before had the privilege of watching Brookmeyer rehearse his music with a big band, and it was fascinating to watch him put Schneider’s players through their paces on Celebration, the four-movement suite they’ll be performing tonight.

– Back home again to return phone calls, check my accumulated e-mail, and read another half-chapter of W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson. (Incidentally, Erin O’Connor linked to what I wrote yesterday about the experience of revisiting one of my favorite biographies. Take a look–I like what she had to say.)

– Dinner with an out-of-town friend, then down to the Village Vanguard to hear Jim Hall‘s eleven o’clock set. Hall is my favorite living jazz musician, and I’ve never heard him play guitar other than wonderfully well, but this performance was memorable even by his own rarefied standards. Maybe it was because he’ll be recording live on Friday and Saturday, or because Lewis Nash, the drummer, was in awesome form–I would have sworn he was channeling Shelly Manne. Whatever the reason, I’ve never heard Hall, Nash, or Scott Colley play better. “That’s exactly how I’d want to play all those instruments, if I could play any of them,” a singer friend told me afterward. What she said.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the set was that nobody played above a mezzo-forte all evening long. Even under the best of circumstances, the Vanguard can be an exasperatingly noisy place, but I didn’t hear a single stray peep out of the enthralled crowd. It was a night of whispered confidences and sweet surprises. I’m going back on Saturday, and I’ll be taking Sarah, who’s in town for the week. She’s in for a treat–to put it mildly.

Now that I’m home at last, I’m starting to feel the cumulative effects of the long day. I wish I could sleep in, but I have to haul myself out of bed in the morning and finish writing a speech before I head downtown to lunch with Supermaud. I suppose this whole week has been too much of a great many good things–but is that really possible? I’m not so sure.

I can’t remember the last time it occurred to me to quote William Saroyan (he isn’t exactly a favorite of mine), but a half-remembered line of his popped into my mind as I climbed the stairs of the Vanguard an hour or so ago: “In the time of your life, live–so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.” And that’s what I did on Wednesday: I lived.

UPDATE: This inverted axiom just occurred to me: The unlived life is not worth examining.