Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
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.
“But our successful novelist of to-day begins when he is two- or three-and-twenty. He ‘catches on,’ as they say, and he becomes a laborious professional writer. He toils at his novels as if he were the manager of a bank or the captain of an ocean steamer. In one narrow groove he slides up and down, up and down, growing infinitely skilful at his task of making bricks out of straw. He finishes the last page of ‘The Writhing Victim’ in the morning, lunches at his club, has a nap; and, after dinner, writes the first page of ‘The Swart Sombrero.’ He cannot describe a trade or a profession, for he knows none but his own. He has no time to look at life, and he goes on weaving fancies out of the ever-dwindling stores of his childish and boyish memories. As these grow exhausted, his works get more and more shadowy, till at last even the long-suffering public that once loved his merits, and then grew tolerant of his tricks, can endure him no longer.”
Edmund Gosse, “The Tyranny of the Novel” (1892)
“Reject all para-normal phenomena. It’s the only way to remain sane.”
Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw
Kate Bolick reviewed A Terry Teachout Reader in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review:
Cultural critics may lack the depth of knowledge that comes with specialization, but Terry Teachout’s self-issued carte blanche to submerge himself in whatever he wants (he is the music critic of Commentary, the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, and ”critic-for-hire” on everything from opera to television for many other publications) has left him with an unusual and singular perspective on the last 15 years of American cultural activity. Now that the country has crossed its ”great cultural and technological divide,” Teachout writes, as well as finally left postmodernism behind, he hopes his collection will ”have some value as a chronicle, a road map of how we got from there to here.” That the 58 engaging essays in ”A Terry Teachout Reader,” on subjects ranging from Dawn Powell and Louis Armstrong to David Ives and Martha Graham, tell us as much about America as they do about Teachout’s evolving sensibility makes the book an intellectual memoir by way of enthusiasms. His detailed snapshots of bygone cultural moments are introduced by a thoughtful history of our cultural climate over the last half-century.
If you haven’t yet ordered a copy, go here and do so.
Here’s something you might have missed, courtesy of the Chicago Tribune:
MILWAUKEE — Joseph J. Zimmermann Jr., who invented the telephone answering machine in 1948 and patented it a year later, has died at age 92.
Mr. Zimmermann, who died March 31, said in a 1949 interview with the Milwaukee Journal that he got the idea for the device as the owner of an air-conditioning and heating company when he could not afford to hire a secretary to take calls while he was out of the office.
The first machine, the Electronic Secretary Model R1, was made up of a box that lifted the telephone receiver from its cradle when the phone rang; a box containing a control panel with a 78-r.p.m. record player inside that played a recorded greeting; and a wire recorder on top of the second box for recording a series of 30-second messages.
Mr. Zimmermann teamed with businessman and fellow engineer George Danner to start Waukesha, Wis.-based Electronic Secretary Industries. More than 6,000 answering machines were in use in 1957 when the two sold the company, and the patent rights, to General Telephone Corp., which later became GTE.
“The only modern inventions that have been of any real use to me are the typewriter and the Pullman car,” H.L. Mencken told a reporter for Life in 1946. Kurt Andersen asked me the other day whether I thought Mencken would have taken to blogging. I think it’s possible (just), but I’m absolutely sure he would have bought an answering machine. I’ve used one for the past quarter-century, and I can’t imagine how I ever got through the day without it. I even bought my septuagenarian mother her first answering machine, and though it took her a year or so to get used to it, she now finds it indispensable. Can you think of a postwar invention with a higher ratio of social significance to cost?
I’m not the first blogger to link to Chicha’s devastating takedown of The Swan, but just in case you haven’t read it yet, do so at once:
Other shows have had equally shallow and enraging premises–remember Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? But the premise always drew equally shallow and enraging contestants, while the contestants on The Swan don’t seem shallow so much as insecure and clueless. The show itself is the villain, the only target for our hatred. But the question is, is The Swan purposefully loathsome, or just deeply hypocritical?…
The answer is yes.
Speaking of reality TV, Tom Shales, the Washington Post‘s TV critic, also “reviews” broadcast news coverage, and his comments
on Condoleezza’s Rice testimony are worth pondering:
If it were to be viewed as a battle, or a sporting event, or a contest — and of course that would be wrong — then Condoleezza Rice won it. Indeed, the national security adviser did so well and seemed so firmly in command of the situation yesterday, when she testified under oath before the 9/11 commission, that one had to wonder why the White House spent so much time and energy trying to keep her from having to appear….
I’ve long had mixed feelings about this kind of reviewing, but I’m also well aware that in a world where most people get their news by watching TV, every occurrence is a performance, and to ignore that fact is to disregard the nature of reality in the age of information.
As it happens, I had lunch with a Washington Post editor the same day Shales’ piece appeared, and I asked him, “The only thing I can’t figure out is this: why didn’t the Post start it up front instead of in the Style section?”
“Because it was an opinion piece,” he replied.
So it was–and so what? I don’t see the Post on paper, so I don’t know what was on its front page last Friday, but my guess is that Shales’ piece was far more to the point of the day’s events than at least some of the news stories deemed worthy of page-one placement. Is there really so great a difference between unabashed opinion journalism and the “news analysis” (sometimes labeled as such, sometimes not) regularly published on the front pages of most major papers? Bloggers don’t think so–which I suspect is one of the reasons why their audience is growing daily, while the readership of newspapers continues to shrink.