Archives for April 2004

“The three hurried downstairs, to find, not the gay dog they expected, but a young man, colourless, toneless, who had already the mournful eyes above a drooping moustache that are so common in London, and that haunt some streets of the city like accusing presences. One guessed him as the third generation, grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had sucked into the town; as one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit. Hints of robustness survived in him, more than a hint of primitive good looks, and Margaret, noting the spine that might have been straight, and the chest that might have broadened, wondered whether it paid to give up the glory of the animal for a tail coat and a couple of ideas. Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it. She knew this type very well–the vague aspirations, the mental dishonesty, the familiarity with the outsides of books. She knew the very tones in which he would address her. She was only unprepared for an example of her own visiting-card.”

E.M. Forster, Howards End

As I read over this morning’s Pulitzer coverage, I noticed that the runners-up for the drama prize that went to Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife were a pair of plays I panned in The Wall Street Journal.

One was Omnium Gatherum. With all due respect to Old Hag‘s current guest blogger, who loved it, I thought otherwise:

For openers, the play, co-written by Theresa Rebeck (“Bad Dates”) and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, is a drawing-room comedy set at a chic dinner party in what at first blush appears to be a high-rise apartment overlooking Ground Zero. The dizzy hostess (Kristine Nielsen) and her guests are all coarsely realized caricatures: an ultra-fey Cambridge don (Dean Nolen), a cosmopolitan Arab (Edward A. Hajj), a you-go-girl black matron (Melanna Gray), a humorless vegan (Jenny Bacon), even a loud-mouthed right-winger (Phillip Clark). (I’d like to see the chic dinner party to which he got invited.) In an inept attempt at subtlety, each guest is made to say one or two things inconsistent with his or her caricature–though somebody ought to tell the authors that making the fey Brit a raving Israel-hater was more accurate than they might have guessed.

What next? Well, Guest No. 6 turns out to be a fireman (Joseph Lyle Taylor), who (of course) speaks in dese-dem-doseisms and (also of course) has a climactic monologue in which he tells what he saw on 9/11. The witty chit-chat (next to none of which is amusing) degenerates into boozy sniping. The vegan confesses that she’s…pregnant! The hostess announces that she’s invited a Mystery Guest (Amir Arison), who turns out to be…an Arab terrorist! The fireman admits that he’s really…dead! In fact, all the guests are dead, and as if that weren’t enough of a clich

“There can be no better explanation or proof of the existence of God than the fact that I have a film career.”

Kevin Smith (at a college Q-&-A session, courtesy of Futurballa)

“Fiddlers Three,” my latest essay for Commentary, is now available on line.

To view it during the month of April, go to the “Teachout in Commentary” module of the right-hand column and click in the appropriate place.

Most of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical compositions of the past were undistinguished and are now deservedly forgotten, but here are some of the well-remembered winners that preceded Paul Moravec’s Tempest Fantasy:

1945: Aaron Copland, Appalachian Spring

1947: Charles Ives, Symphony No. 3

1949: Virgil Thomson, Louisiana Story (film score)

1950: Gian Carlo Menotti, The Consul

1958: Samuel Barber, Vanessa

1963: Samuel Barber, Piano Concerto

That’s nice company.

Arabesque has recorded Tempest Fantasy for release on CD later this year, together with Mood Swings, another of Moravec’s strongest pieces of chamber music. I’ll let you know when it comes out.

UPDATE: I just got a call from Moravec, who’s spending his spring break in Sicily (he teaches at Adelphi University). He’s feeling pretty bubbly, needless to say.

“Do you realize that I’m going to be in the World Almanac next year?” he asked.

“And every other year from now on,” I replied.

It’s a very cool thing to win a Pulitzer….

The server for “About Last Night” melted down seconds after this year’s Pulitzer Prizes were announced, making it impossible for me to post immediately, as I’d planned to do. The crash was particularly irksome in light of the fact that three of the prizes were deeply and personally satisfying to me:

– Paul Moravec, a great composer (and I don’t use that adjective lightly) whose music I’ve championed for years, won for Tempest Fantasy, a five-star masterpiece which has just been recorded (watch this space for details).

If you think all modern music is ugly and meaningless, you haven’t heard Moravec’s. He’s one of a group of composers I’ve dubbed the New Tonalists, and he figures prominently in A Terry Teachout Reader, where I quote him as follows: “Trying to compose beautiful things, I say what I mean and mean what I say. The irony in my work is not glibly postmodern, but rather the essence of making audible the experience of fundamental paradox and ambiguity.” Beautiful is definitely the word: I can’t think of another classical composer of the baby-boom generation whose work means more to me. The Pulitzer committee, which has a famously bad track record when it comes to music, has done itself proud this year. (Incidentally, I just saw on the wires that the other finalists for this year’s music prize were Steve Reich and Peter Lieberson.)

Says jazz composer Maria Schneider, a Moravec fan: “YAY!” I couldn’t have put it better myself.

– Anne Applebaum won the general nonfiction prize for Gulag: A History, a National Book Awards finalist (I was one of the NBA judges). Most of you probably know about Applebaum and Gulag by now, so I’ll say only that I regard it as one of the most important American books of the past quarter-century, regardless of genre. It’s handsomely written and brutally honest–no small achievement, either, considering the longstanding unwillingness of so very many influential people to acknowledge the horrible truths set forth by Applebaum in such unsparing detail. It’s damned well about time.

If you haven’t read Gulag, you must.

– Doug Wright won the drama prize for I Am My Own Wife, a play I’ve been touting with wild abandon ever since I first saw it last year. “This show deserves every prize there is,” I wrote in The Wall Street Journal when it transferred to Broadway. For now, this one will do quite nicely.

Here’s part of what I wrote about the original off-Broadway production:

I don’t begrudge Vanessa Redgrave her well-deserved Tony for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” but simple justice compels me to add that the best actress currently appearing in New York is neither on Broadway nor a woman. It’s Jefferson Mays, the star of Doug Wright’s “I Am My Own Wife,” off-Broadway’s latest dispatch from the wilder shores of gender identity, in which Mr. Mays plays Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an East German transvestite with more than one secret under her skirt….

Not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Doug Wright met Charlotte, the 65-year-old owner of an East Berlin museum of knickknacks from the 1890s. Mr. Wright saw “her” as a gay hero, a courageous changeling who had “navigated a path between the two most repressive regimes the Western world has ever known–the Nazis and the Communists–in a pair of heels,” and started interviewing her with the intention of writing a play. Sounds earnest, no? But as Mr. Wright discovered, Charlotte was no hero: To save her own skin, she became an informer for the East German secret police, going so far as to turn in one of her best friends.

Everything about “I Am My Own Wife” is outstanding, from Mois

Not only have I not been blogging, I haven’t even been reading blogs (at least not very much), so I dived into the deep end of the pool last night and regaled myself after a month-long layoff. Here’s some of what I found, out there in the ‘sphere:

– Via Jolly Days, these wise words from a 1972 interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer:

I really don’t believe that literature can influence life to any great degree. Art is a force, but without a vector. Like the waves of the sea it flows forward and backward, but the net result is static. While I believe that fiction requires a story and should appear dynamic, it actually describes human character and personality, which remains almost constant.

I’d say that art stirs the mind but never moves it far in one direction or another. Admirers of Dostoevsky and Goethe were Nazis who played with the skulls of childrren. The hope that great literature can bring peace or make the human race better is without basis. When readers ask me about the message of my works I tell them that the greatest message we’ve got is the Ten Commandments. They are short, precise, clear. We don’t need new messages, and they will certainly not be found in novels, good or bad.

– Sarah reports on a tiny factual error Lawrence Block made in his latest mystery novel–and the hundreds and hundreds of readers who’ve written to tell him about it. A funny, depressing, thoroughly cautionary tale. (He is, of course, going nuts, poor man.)

– Via Arts & Letters Daily, Walter Laqueur reviews a new collection of essays by Sir Isaiah Berlin about culture under the Soviets. Berlin visited Russia in 1945, where he met with a number of writers and intellectuals:

It could not have been easy to gain their confidence, for they had not the faintest idea about the identity of this visitor from another world and whether he could be trusted. But once such trust was established, they did not go back. They wanted to know the fate of literary figures in the West — they were aware that Marcel Proust and James Joyce were no longer alive, but were less sure about Virginia Woolf. Both Akhmatova and Pasternak had no doubts about their place in the history of Russian culture, certain in the ’40s and ’50s that they were the greatest living Russian poets. Living in isolation, they occasionally developed beliefs that were more than a little bizarre. Akhmatova thought that Berlin’s visit to her in 1945 had made Stalin so furious that he launched the Cold War. Or the famous story of Stalin’s (only ever) phone call to Pasternak — the dictator wanted to know whether Osip Mandelstam was a truly great poet, the corollary being that his life might be spared. Pasternak defended Mandelstam, albeit not wholeheartedly, but said that the truly crucial issue was that he, Pasternak, be given an early opportunity to meet Comrade Stalin to discuss some philosophical-spiritual problems of world-shaking importance. Stalin must have thought Pasternak a holy fool….

– Via artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, Boston Globe reports on the NEA’s “Shakespeare in American Communities” tour, in the process suggesting that those journalists (and bloggers) who can’t believe the NEA could possibly do anything good nowadays should take a second look:

After the curtain came down on a touring production of “Othello” in South Bend, Ind., a middle-age woman approached a cast member.

“I came a Shakespeare virgin,” she confided, “and am going home a blushing bride.”

This little anecdote tickles Joe Dowling, the artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, which is putting on the “Othello” tour. It tells him that what he’s trying to do — help people break through their preconceptions that the Bard is “too hard” or “too boring” — is working….

– Says The Forager in a month-old posting with which I just caught up:

When tastemakers grab onto something, it’s not enough for them merely to champion it or talk about why they like it or explain why it’s worth seeing-reading-listening to-exploring-etc. In order to justify their own existence, tastemakers have to convince an audience that said work is of vital importance to anyone who considers themselves culturally literate.

The Sopranos becomes a legitimate target for backlash not so much because it’s overvalued as a TV show (it’s not–it remains one of the best TV shows ever), but because tastemakers started talking about the show in terms that made it seem far more important than a TV show could ever be. (Exemplified by the slogan “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” Actually, it is TV, i.e. just as important and significant as Friends and The Apprentice.)…

Now, I like The Sopranos, but my life wouldn’t be different if I stopped watching it or even if it never existed at all. Backlash, by attacking the critical consensus, reminds us how artificial and insignificant that consensus really is. It reminds us that our personal choices about what we like to watch or what we like to listen to aren’t as important as we’d like to think.

– How “grammatically sound” am I? According to this quiz, it seems I am a Grammar God, which is a nice thing to find out after a lifetime spent at the typewriter and its successor technologies, especially since I’m strictly a play-by-ear man when it comes to the finer points of English (I know how, but not why).

– I caught only one new movie during my Balanchine-related hiatus, The Ladykillers, which I saw purely for professional reasons. My review hasn’t been published yet, but until then, our beloved Cinetrix says all that needs to be said:

The Ladykillers feels like a summer stock version of a Coen Brothers movie. Forget asking how well the remake stands up to the original Ealing comedy. There is no joy, no sense of getting away with anything here….

I have now added the Coen brothers to my permanent do-not-review list. Ars longa, vita brevis.

To hear W.B. Yeats reciting “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” go here, scroll down approximately one screen to “RealAudio file of Yeats reciting Innisfree,” and click on the link.

Is it good? I dunno–but it’s him.