Archives for April 2004

Critical Mass liked my recent posting on reading lists (the one that inspired me to launch “Consumables”).

Here’s what she said in preface to posting her own list:

In a much earlier incarnation of this blog, I used to maintain a running list of my own reading. I was always surprised by how much traffic my reading list page attracted. I liked contemplating the list just as I like contemplating my own (vastly overcrowded) bookshelves–there’s a sort of mnemonic quality to both activities that is at once soothing and inspiring–but I was quite intrigued to see how many other people were also interested in the list. As Terry says, such lists are approximations of people’s shelves, and as such they offer both insight into the lister’s mind and suggest new directions the reader of the list might take in his or her own reading….

Not surprisingly, her readers are posting their own lists as comments.

Have I started something? I sure hope so.

– On Saturday night I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (now maybe Our Girl will tell me what she thought of it!), and last night I watched Joel McCrea in Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown–ideal Easter fare for a small-town boy who loves Westerns.

– Continuing on my Barbara Pym kick, I’m now reading An Unsuitable Attachment, whose characters include Faustina, one of my all-time favorite fictional cats.

– Now playing on iTunes: Ralph Towner’s “Icarus,” recorded by Towner and Gary Burton on Matchbook, one of the most beautiful duo albums ever made. Vibraharp and acoustic twelve-string guitar may sound like an odd match on paper, but on this CD they go together like strawberries and champagne. (Lots of other people think so, too, as you’ll find out when you click on the link and see how much a second-hand copy costs.)

UPDATE: I’d forgotten that OGIC already wrote about Eternal Sunshine.

What she said.

“One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited His goodness, you are done with Him. The Aylmers whom Hawthorne saw as a menace have multiplied. Busy cutting down human imperfection, they are making headway also on the raw material of good. Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”

Flannery O’Connor, introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann

A reader writes:

I am a regular visitor to your website, often first thing in the morning or later during lunch. I have always found the arts interesting but somewhat difficult to grasp. Not so much because they are above me, but my busy life, between spending time with my four young boys, my wife and work, allows little time left to pursue the arts. You provide me with a porthole to view them at least on a very general level. I have taken some of your musical recommendations as they are the easiest for me to indulge in. The Paul Desmond Quartet Live disc is most enjoyable. While I am a neophyte in the jazz world I have listened to Coltrane, Miles, Brubeck, Marsalis and such and enjoyed them.

Anyway, my point is that I had listened to Norah Jones’ first CD when it came out awhile back and enjoyed it. I found it fresh and different but the thing that really was great about it was that I could turn on the radio and hear it with little searching and effort. While I agree after several listens there is nothing new or interesting that you hear, being able to actually understand the lyrics, decent vocals and having a melody played on pop radio stations was so very refreshing.

After reading your comments on her first album I would agree that it definitely belongs in the pop/country category and not jazz and that her music is pleasant enough. And that I think is the point or question. The Norah Jones CD was a hit I think because of one its novelty and two there was actual singing and music as opposed to much of the garble in pop music. It was great to have something so different pumping through the major airwaves and easily available, somewhat along the lines of the middlebrow culture that you have mentioned was regularly available on TV back in the day. I see it as people having a thirst for more culture but they are so busy with their lives that they don’t know where to begin and the major broadcasters have no interest in providing it to the public.

I know that it is the case with me and it is the reason that I turn to your website. For ways that I can quickly absorb some culture. I try out some of the music, I follow the links you post to art work. Anything to give me a quick culture hit in my limited free time. I wish I could absorb more of the real thing but as I mentioned above life gets int the way. Until my kids grow a little older I will just have to make do with the tasty morsels you leave me on your website and attempt to follow up on them as often as possible.

And for that I will thank you.

I wish I’d gotten this e-mail prior to taping my upcoming appearance
on Kurt Andersen’s Studio 360, because Andersen and I talked about how arts blogs have the potential to do exactly what my correspondent has in mind. I don’t know whether that section of the interview will make the final cut, but I do want to say that right from the start, I’ve sought to use “About Last Night” not only to communicate with full-fledged urban aesthetes, but also to make the world of art more accessible to ordinary folks who “have a thirst for more culture.”

Back in the Fifties, mass-circulation organs of middlebrow culture like Time and Life fulfilled that function, and did so wonderfully well. Now they don’t even try. I was staggered to learn, for instance, that the only note Time is taking of this year’s arts Pulitzers will be to run a piece about The Known World (which, needless to say, it failed to review on publication). How is it possible that a weekly newsmagazine which ostensibly covers the arts could find no space even to mention Paul Moravec or Doug Wright?

Instead of cursing the journalistic darkness, I started “About Last Night,” and whenever I get letters like this one, I know it’s starting to spread a little light. You can help. Please–please–tell a friend about Our Girl and me. Our traffic has been rising steadily ever since we went live last August (we received more than 50,000 page views in March), but the world is still full of lots and lots of people who are waiting to discover a blog like this, whether they know it or not. In fact, they might not even know what a blog is! So give them a nudge. They’ll be glad you did. We’ll be glad you did.

I just added several interesting-looking blogs to the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column. Check them out. In addition, I’ve posted links to the on-line archives of three important New York-based arts critics, Peter G. Davis (classical music), Hilton Kramer (art), and John Simon (theater). You can read their latest pieces each week by clicking on their “Sites to See” links.

Next, I’ll reevaluate all of our currently listed blogs and prune out the ones that are now inactive or haven’t retained their initial interest.

(See what happens when you finally finish a book? All of a sudden you’ve got time to play with your blog!)

– Last night I saw Luciana Souza‘s opening night at Joe’s Pub. The house was sold out and the music
was so beautiful that even the bartenders crushed their ice with reasonable discretion. As if that weren’t enough, I got to meet Janis Siegel, on whom I’ve had an intermittent crush ever since high school (she came to see the show and went backstage to tell Souza that it was “perfect”). I’m pleased to say that she lived up to my expectations–she’s v., v. cool.

– I’m still reading Barbara Pym’s A Very Private Eye. Here’s a quote:

Richard has been reading some of my books–I gave him Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings–do you think that a good choice? E.W. he found terribly sad, but witty–why is it that men find my books so sad? Women don’t particularly. Perhaps they (men) have a slight guilt feeling that this is what they do to us, and yet really it isn’t as bad as all that.

– Now playing on iTunes: Mischa Levitzki’s 1933 recording of Mendelssohn’s Rondo Capriccioso. I wouldn’t sell my soul to be able to play piano like that, but I might rent it….

“The goods that a writer produces can never be impersonal; his character gets into them as certainly as it gets into the work of any other creative artist, and he must be prepared to endure investigation of it, and speculation upon it, and even gossip about it.”

H.L. Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor

“The opera: consistency of character and reality of events are qualities which need not be accompanied by music.”

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen