Archives for May 2004

Thanks to Sarah (who accompanied it with some greatly appreciated praise of her own), I returned from my Secure Undisclosed Location to find Victoria A. Brownworth’s review of A Terry Teachout Reader, published in yesterday’s Baltimore Sun:

Teachout’s engaging style and diversity of tastes means there is something for everyone in this book as he covers subjects from Elvis Presley to John Steinbeck (the newly adopted darling of the Oprah book club) to the end of vinyl to the horrific lynching of an African-American man in the town he grew up in. For those who enjoy criticism, this Reader is a book to savor, get angry with and reflect upon.

If Teachout has one consistent topic it is genius – great (Louis Armstrong), middling (Dawn Powell) and small (Randolph Scott) – and the majority of pieces collected here – essays, profiles, reviews – reflect that attraction. One charming trait of Teachout the cultural critic is he appears to genuinely want his readers to enjoy what he enjoys (those who read criticism know how rare that is in a critic) or at the very least understand why he so enjoys it….

Read the whole thing here.

Apropos of last week’s posting about whether Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse attended Dulwich College simultaneously, a reader writes:

Moments in greatness: suppose if Wodehouse had had to fag for Chandler? The parody almost writes itself.

You know who you are. You know what to do.

“I send you a criticism on my three volumes, which, I confess, gave me a great deal of pleasure; pray return it to me. I have not the smallest idea who wrote it; but it is evidently written (my own vanity apart) by a very sensible man, and a good writer. Whether I have done what he says I have done, and am what he says I am, I do not know; but he has justly stated what I always aimed at, and what I wished to be.”

Sydney Smith, letter to “Mrs. Grote,” July 16, 1839

“Among Venice’s spells is one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the sceptic’s breast. People of this kind–dry, prose people of superior intelligence–object to feeling what they are supposed to feel, in the presence of marvels. They wish to feel something else. The extreme of this position is to feel nothing. Such a case was Stendhal’s: Venice left him cold. He was there only a short time and departed with barely a comment to pursue an intrigue in Padua. Another lover of Italy, D. H. Lawrence (on one side of his nature, a debunker, a plain home-truth teller like Ruskin before him), put down his first reaction in a poem: ‘Abhorrent green, slippery city, Whose Doges were old and had ancient eyes….’ And Gibbon ‘was afforded some hours of astonishment and some days of disgust by the spectacle of Venice.'”

Mary McCarthy, Venice Observed

Favorite titles are streaming in from readers, in some cases with annotation:

No, But I Saw the Movie

Dewey Defeats Truman

Memories of the Ford Administration

Some Tame Gazelle

Hot Water

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (attention-getting, of course, but also good because sadness and outrage and helplessness seem built right into the title…)

The Artificial Nigger (bracing, can’t not read it after that)

Bend Sinister (a mysteriously evocative title, with good Nabokovian euphony)

All’s Well That Ends Well

The Scarlet Letter

Dude, Where’s My Country?

Mystery Train (so good, it’s been a song and book and movie title)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Operation Shylock

A Kiss to Build a Dream On

And, my new favorite: Let the Dog Drive. Just one question: is the emphasis on “Dog” or “Drive”?

Meanwhile, the originator of the question, Eve Tushnet, has risen to my challenge and named her top five titles:

I’m going to use the same core criterion I used for the “43 favorite movies” list: stickiness. These are five titles I will never be able to get out of my head–titles that shape the way I view the world.

5 EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE

4 GONE WITH THE WIND

3 THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA

2 THE OCTOBER PEOPLE

1 A WINTER’S TALE

As someone who has always been terrible with titles, I feel it’s only fair to give terrible titles a nod here, too. They’re rarer than you might suppose. The vast majority of book titles are just lukewarm water, serviceable and forgettable. To attain true offensiveness, they almost have to get cute on you, as with my sole (for now) nominee, the true book Castration: An Abbreviated History of Manhood, by Gary Taylor. If I were him, I’d blame the publisher.

In the Financial Times, Simon Kuper writes about his weekly soccer game and its weekly aftermath:

For 90 minutes I lumber around kicking people and shouting, at the end of which we have usually lost.

Then I spend the whole week thinking about it. Myself and some of the people close to me are currently going through big things–marriage, divorce, cancer, memory loss–but often, while someone is going on to me about one of the aforesaid, I find myself thinking: “Was my pass bad, or was it Carlos’s fault for not coming towards the ball?”

If someone who unduly obsesses over their own athletic performance like this is a goof–

Wodehouse even has a word for my condition. He calls it being a “goof.” “‘A Goof’ . . . One of those unfortunate beings who have allowed the noblest of sports to cut into their souls, like some malignant growth. The goof, you have to understand, is not like you and me. He broods. He becomes morbid. His goofery unfits him for the battles of life.”

–what do you call someone who unduly obsesses over the athletic performance of complete strangers?

And, more to the point, do I really want to know?

(Link via Crooked Timber.)

No, I’m not here, nor am I blogging from my secret hideaway. I wrote this posting on Wednesday and stowed it with Our Girl for your Friday-morning delectation.

As usual, I’m in The Wall Street Journal today, this time with reviews of Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, Mark Medoff’s Prymate, and Neil LaBute’s The Distance from Here.

Frozen is brilliant:

Here’s a phrase that makes my blood run cold: “That play deals with a lot of really good issues.” I myself prefer plays that deal with life, not issues, but the two have been known to overlap on occasion, and it’s not unheard of for a really good playwright to use a “really good issue” as the pretext for a voyage into the unchartable labyrinth of human motivation. More often, what you get is a pulpit-pounding sermon with a politically correct moral, but Bryony Lavery’s “Frozen,” which transferred to Circle in the Square this week after a successful Off-Broadway run, is the polar opposite, an issue-driven play that grinds no axes. It is superior in every way-script, performances, staging, set. If I had tonight off, I’d go see it again….

Prymate is awful:

Esther (Phyllis Frelich), a deaf-mute anthropologist, steals Graham (Andr

The always captivating Eve Tushnet has been listing great titles, of books mainly. She comes up with so many, though, that the list quickly becomes a little bit numbing, the titles a little indistinct from each other. I’m curious what she’d say are her top five. Challenge!

Here are a few that I didn’t see on her list or those of her readers: Two Girls, Fat and Thin. I Lost It at the Movies (or should I say Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?). The Man without Qualities. The Gastronomical Me. And, what the hell, Consider the Oyster. And of course my all-purpose favorite, The Dud Avocado.

Speaking of Mary Gaitskill, while scanning my bookshelves last night I noticed that her Bad Behavior sits beside Donald Westlake’s Good Behavior. I have no memory of having consciously placed them so; perhaps they just sort of gravitated toward each other smittenly when I wasn’t looking. Hard to think of two more different books, but the spines do complement each other nicely.

Another title I love, but that is simply puzzling if you don’t know anything about the book, is Anthony Burgess’s novel about Keats, ABBA ABBA. Also in the context-counts category is the memoir of (Sir) Frank Kermode, Not Entitled, although on second thought, perhaps it’s a bit too cutely elliptical.

What else?