Archives for June 2004

Lileks is rocking today. First on the bossa nova:

I’m listening to Bossa Nova these days, as if it will somehow bring back the summer we’ve lost so far. Most of what I’m listening to is ersatz Bossa Nova, I fear. The Americanized version. but a friend of my wife gave her some real Brazilian BN the other day, and it was some of the most narcoleptic music I’d ever heard. The singers all sounded as though they could barely keep their chins off their sternums, and they couldn’t sing very well, either. They sounded out of breath, like beautiful hungover waify fashion models propped up in front of a microphone after a night of dancing and smoking unfiltered cigarettes….

Next on the Marx Brothers:

“Airplane,” a very funny movie, would have completely baffled people in 1917. it’s all so subjective that it’s hard to believe anything can be established empirically as FUNNY, in the sense that it’s amusing to most people in most places in most times. Some day, eventually, the Marx Brothers will be NOT FUNNY, just a strange manic artifact full of allusions to conventions we’ve lost and forgotten….

Groucho

Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, has written a thought-provoking piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Art History Can Trade Insights With the Sciences.” No link, alas, but here are some excerpts:

As a
psychologist previously trained in the humanities and in studio art, I
have spent my career applying the science of cognitive psychology (and
recently cognitive neuroscience) to studying the creation of and
response to art.

To be sure, we scientists who wander into the art museum have to guard
against many pitfalls: blind empiricism, testing hypotheses that are
not theoretically grounded; unconsciously finding data to fit our
theories; waiting for others to try to falsify our theories. We need
to avoid reductionism: A scientific explanation of an artistic
phenomenon — say, why we are moved more by some paintings than others
— is not superior to a humanistic one, nor does it replace an
explanation at the humanistic level….

To decide whether or not to accept a scientific
explanation of an artistic phenomenon, one must evaluate the evidence.
One has to determine whether the evidence supports the claim, and if
not, how the claim could be subjected to further, decisive test. One
has to think scientifically. And therein lies the problem. Humanists
are not trained to think in terms of propositions testable via
systematic empirical evidence. A scientific finding about the arts may
therefore be unfairly rejected without a careful evaluation of the
evidence….

Today neuroscience is moving into the study of the arts. Brain imaging
allows us to track how the brain processes works of art, what parts of
the brain are involved as artists develop a work of art, and how
training in an art form stimulates brain growth. Scientists who do
that kind of work will need a deep understanding of the art form they
are studying. Humanists and cognitive scientists are, therefore, most
likely going to be teaming up more to study humanistic phenomena from
a scientific perspective.

It’s interesting that I ran across this essay the same day I posted a link to a piece of scientific research with powerfully humanistic implications. As a card-carrying aesthete, you’d think I’d be resistant to that kind of thinking, but it happens that I once spent two years preparing to pursue a graduate degree in psychology, in the course of which I studied statistics, cognitive psychology, and experimental design (as well as spending more than a few sleepless nights trying to talk crisis-line callers out of killing themselves). Hence I’m more open than most critics to the kind of research-driven scrutiny of the arts about which Dr. Winner writes in her essay. At its best, it can be both provocative and illuminating–so long as the practitioners never lose sight of the ultimate end of art, which is beauty.

No doubt it’s significant in this connection that I started out as a musician. Music is non-verbal and thus radically ambiguous, meaning that it doesn’t lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis. Yet it is possible to talk about what makes a piece of music beautiful–or, at the very least, what makes it beautiful to you. Since I’m both a musician and an intellectual, I’ve scrutinized my tastes closely and analytically enough to have isolated certain musical “tricks” that I find especially appealing. I know exactly what it is that I like about, say, Gabriel Faur

“It’s like doing a CGI version of Animal Farm without any of the bothersome fascist symbolism, just because the animals are so cute.”

Liz Penn on the new Stepford Wives

The Wall Street Journal sent me to Washington a couple of weeks ago to check out the Kennedy Center’s revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Mark Lamos and starring Mary Stuart Masterton, Jeremy Davidson, George Grizzard, and Dana Ivey as, respectively, Maggie, Brick, Big Daddy and Big Mama. My review appears in this morning’s paper, and it’s broadly similar to what I thought of last year’s Broadway revival: I didn’t like the youngsters, but the old hands knocked me out. As for the play itself, well, let’s just say eeuuww:

Mind you, I don’t much care for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which I dismissed in my review of the Broadway revival as “a flabby, pseudo-poetic period piece that leaves you wondering what all the shouting is about–and there’s a whole lot of shouting going on.” For that matter, I don’t much care for Tennessee Williams in general, most of whose plays seem to me to be peopled by a peculiar race of sentimental, logorrheic mutants bearing no obvious resemblance to human beings. As far as I’m concerned, Mary McCarthy nailed it in a single sentence of her 1948 review of “A Streetcar Named Desire”: “Dr. Kinsey would be interested in a semi-skilled male who spoke of the four-letter act as

As the entire book-reviewing world knows by now, Michiko Kakutani’s evisceration of Bill Clinton’s My Life in the daily New York Times has been followed by Larry McMurtry’s canonization of same in the Times Book Review.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some politically oriented folks who don’t seem to understand the mechanics of the book-review biz have jumped to the conclusion
that Review B was in some way intended as penance for Review A. “About Last Night” has and will have no official opinion on the literary merits of My Life, or of the two reviews published in the Times–we don’t do politics here–but speaking as an old book-reviewing hand, I can assure you from a safe distance that it couldn’t possibly have happened that way. Both reviews would have been assigned separately and before the fact, and their dates of publication were clearly determined by the date of publication of My Life, not by any corporate desire on the part of the Times to kiss up to said book’s author. (As for the early posting of McMurtry’s review on the Times‘s Web site, I’d have done exactly the same thing if I’d been in charge. The Clinton book is news, and news is a dish that tastes best when served piping hot.)

Regarding the mutually contradictory contents of the two reviews, I’d say they bespeak a pretty impressive degree of book-related vitality on the part of the New York Times. Most American newspapers, after all, don’t review books even once, much less twice. Like it or not, My Life is by definition an important book, and the Times has pitched two critical change-ups on it in the course of a single week. First came a savage pan by one of the paper’s in-house critics, followed by a fellatial rave from an outsider writing in its weekly book-review supplement–a publication run, I might add, by an editor
whose alleged right-wing sympathies have been the subject of considerable discussion in the literary sector of the blogosphere. Whatever else those reviews were, they definitely weren’t predictable.

All in all, I’d say the Times just had itself a pretty good week, bookwise.

UPDATE: The third link above is to Jonah Goldberg’s comments at “The Corner,” National Review‘s on-line site. Jonah responds
as follows:

Terry knows more — much more — about such things than I do and I defer to him for the most part. That said, it doesn’t quite wash that the reviews are unrelated in anyway since McMurtry makes pretty much a direct reference to the first Times review in his attempt to debunk the notion that Clinton’s book isn’t better than Grant’s autobiography. Maybe the Times Sunday Book Review supplement editor, Sam Tanenhaus, is off the hook on the conspiracy charge, but McMurtry’s review still seems like a rushed rescue mission for a doomed book than an intellectually honest or even serious effort….

Quite so–McMurtry’s review does make “blind” reference to Kakutani’s mention of Grant’s Personal Memoirs–but given the short time frame, I assume the reference was either inserted in the course of editing in order to make the review more timely, or the whole review was delivered by McMurtry at the last possible minute. The latter wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. I suppose I shouldn’t admit this in public, but it’s not my habit to write most of my reviews more than a day or so prior to their deadlines, if that much!

MORE: A reader writes:

I liked your analysis of the independence of McMurtry’s review. I’m not sure if McMurtry was referring exclusively to the original Times review by referencing comparisons to Grant’s memoirs, however. A Google news search shows many many hits for articles containing both Clinton and Ulysses. This one yields over 500 hits. The original Times review may have provoked all that came afterwards, but does it look to you as if there was a subsequent tsunami which was worth addressing?

A good question, to which I have no answer. Still, it provides additional circumstantial evidence that McMurtry was writing off his own bat, not somebody else’s.

“He would arrive for work in the morning and say, ‘What are the lyrics?’ That’s what he called his lines, his dialogue. He hadn’t gotten around to looking at the script yet, he’d say. ‘Somebody give me the lyrics.’ And I thought that was the secret to doing the lines like he did them. You don’t learn them in advance. ‘I’ll go in each morning and I’ll learn them in makeup.’ Oh, dear, was I wrong. I was stumbling over my first line. And he knew the script backward and forward. It was part of his act…’What are my lyrics?'”

Jane Greer (quoted in Lee Server, Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care”)

My friends all take vacations, and swear by them. I don’t, and after due consideration I’ve decided to blame this idiosyncrasy on my late father, who planned the family vacations of my youth on the mistaken assumption that the point of going somewhere is to do something. An anxious, restless man, he was never much good at doing nothing, whereas it seemed self-evident to me from childhood onward that the whole point of taking a vacation was to do whatever you wanted—including nothing—whenever you wanted.

As usual with small-town parents, his views prevailed, and so our vacations were action-packed. Even when we bought a mobile home on Kentucky Lake and started spending summer weekends there, he was all but incapable of simply taking it easy. Instead, he preferred to immerse himself (and us) in elaborate home-improvement projects, and when he couldn’t come up with anything else to do, he’d turn a hose on the white gravel with which he’d landscaped the lot and wash the dirt off it. It was at that point that I started thinking up plausible-sounding reasons to spend my weekends home alone, reading.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I never got into the habit of taking vacations on my own after I grew up. By then I was working for a newspaper in New York, halfway across the country from my parents, and whenever I got more than a few days off I’d usually fly home to see them. I thought my schedule would become more flexible when I became a freelancer, but the opposite happened—I found myself covering performances the whole year round—and the notion that I might want to spend a week or two going somewhere purely for my pleasure simply never occurred to me. Thus it was that I became obsessive about work, and thus it was that I eventually put myself in the hands of a psychotherapist who told me, among many other things, that I needed to start taking vacations from time to time.

At her increasingly firm urging, I took my first one in nearly twenty years, but it ended up being an art lover’s rendering of one of my father’s holidays-on-a-treadmill. I went to Isle au Haut, a Maine island portrayed by Fairfield Porter in a 1975 lithograph that hangs on my wall, visiting a half-dozen art museums along the way and writing an article about the trip for The Wall Street Journal immediately upon my return. To be sure, it was a medium step in the right direction, and I enjoyed myself hugely, but a busman’s holiday wasn’t quite what the doctor thought she’d ordered, so she told me to take two or three days off this time around and spend them on an uncomplicated trip to nowhere in particular.

Not long after receiving my new set of marching orders, I fell ill. Finding myself with time on my hands, I spent some of it surfing the Web for travel-related ideas. Along the way I read about a village on the Hudson River called Cold Spring. I liked the sound of it, and I also liked the fact that I could get there by train (I don’t own a car and don’t like to fly). Further inquiry revealed that Cold Spring was the home of the Hudson House Inn, a riverfront inn built in 1832 and located a block from the train station. I looked at my calendar and saw a three-day hole in June, so I called the inn on the spur of the moment, booked a room, and spent the next three weeks wondering what I’d gotten myself into. Cold Spring, it seems, is known for its antique shops, but not much else. While the surrounding area contains countless toothsome-sounding tourist attractions, you can’t get to any of them without a car. For better or worse, I’d planned a trip that would have driven my poor father howling mad: three days’ worth of nothing to do. What effect would it have on his oldest son?

When the appointed day came, I packed an overnight bag, turned off my computer and telephone, caught a cab to Grand Central Station, and boarded a Hudson Line train for Cold Spring. It was hot and rainy in Manhattan and warm and noisy on the train, and I squirmed uncomfortably as I watched the river roll by outside my window, feeling more than a little bit nervous at the thought of all that time on my hands. An hour and ten minutes later, the train pulled into the Cold Spring station. I was the only passenger who got off. I couldn’t see the village through the trees and wasn’t sure what to do next, so I called the inn on my cell phone and asked for directions. Three minutes later, I was standing in front of the Hudson House Inn, looking across the street at the broad, tree-lined river and listening to birds chirping away just over my head. On the far shore was Storm King Mountain, shrouded in the light gray mist of a muggy June afternoon. For no reason at all, my eyes filled with tears.

I checked in—I was the only guest—and took a shower and a nap. Then I went out again and planted myself on a rough-hewn park bench a stone’s throw from the water. Behind me was the inn, before me the mountain, beside me a neatly painted hexagonal bandstand whose cornerstone proclaimed it to have been built in 1929, three years after my father was born. A pier lined with old-fashioned streetlights, all but deserted on that quiet Tuesday afternoon, jutted out into the river. I sat for a half-hour and watched the freight trains rumble down the tracks at the foot of the mountain. A white sailboat glided by in the warm orange sunlight. Some wry impulse had led me to tuck a copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Shadows on the Hudson in my shoulder bag, but I didn’t feel like reading, or using my cell phone to check my messages, or doing anything other than sitting on the bench, gazing in silence at the river and the mountain and the summer sun.

An hour or so later, I crossed the tracks and climbed the hill to the Upper Village. I strolled up one side of Main Street and down the other, peering in the windows of the antique stores and restaurants. It was time to eat, so I chose a pleasant-looking grill, ordered crabcakes, and turned my attention to the bookshelf by my table. It was filled with the dusty volumes that interior decorators buy by the foot, and as I waited for my dinner, I looked at their frayed spines, charmed and a little surprised by what I found:

Mountainmen Crafts and Skills
Elizabeth Goudge, The Child from the Sea
Sibylle Bedford, Jigsaw
The Valley of Silence: Catholic Thought in Contemporary Poland
Barbara Pym, A Very Private Eye
If I Live to Be 100…: Congregate Housing for Later Life
Rock Hudson: His Story
Agatha Christie, Curtain
Ralph Bellamy, When the Smoke Hits the Fan
Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane
Hamilton Basso, The View from Pompey’s Head
John D. Macdonald, The Empty Copper Sky
Penelope Ashe, Naked Came the Stranger
Kahlil Gibran, The Forerunner
Richard Wilbur, New and Selected Poems

I pulled New and Selected Poems off the shelf and opened it at random. My eye fell on this couplet: When I must come to you, O my God, I pray/It be some dusty-roaded holiday. Spurred by the coincidence, I took out my appointment book and started scribbling down the titles of the other books, thinking that it might be amusing to write a little essay about them. No sooner did I enter the last title, though, than my crabcakes arrived, and they turned out to be so tasty that all the clever thoughts I’d been thinking promptly fell out of my mind, never to be thought again.

After dinner I went down the hill to the water’s edge and sat on the same park bench I’d occupied earlier. This time I saw a brass plaque on the back:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF
ADELAIDE R. SMITH
1913-2003
“WE COULDN’T HAVE A MORE PERFECT DAY”

Once again the writerly wheels in my head started turning. Who was Adelaide R. Smith? Had this been her preferred stopping place? How had what I took to be her favorite saying come to be inscribed on a plaque and bolted to a park bench by the Hudson River? Interesting questions, to be sure, but I lost interest in the answers when I saw that the sun was about to slip behind Storm King Mountain. I let it burn blue-green spots into my eyes as it slid down the evening sky, and no sooner had it vanished than the streetlights blinked on one by one. A police car rolled up to the bandstand, then cruised away. The birds were still singing. I left my bench and returned to the inn. My room was small, simple, and comfortable, and I curled up in bed with Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking, which Our Girl in Chicago had assured me would be the perfect book for a vacation (she was right), and read myself to sleep.

I could tell you everything I did the following day, but it wouldn’t sound much different than what I’d done the day before: I sat by the river, looked in store windows, searched out meals, took an afternoon nap, read when I felt like it, and listened to the birds. At one point I started counting the number of cars in the freight train on the far shore of the Hudson, and when I got to 118 it occurred to me that I hadn’t done anything like that since I was a little boy. Minutes and hours dissolved without my noticing, and once more I watched the sun set, returned to my room, and marveled at how unhesitatingly I had taken to having nothing to do.

It occurs to me that middle age consists in part of learning all the obvious things you either ignored or dismissed out of hand when you were younger and more knowing. In my case, one of them is that if you want to unwind, it’s a good idea to get out of town. By removing myself from the scenes of my professional excesses—the desk, the computer, the city itself—I had catapulted myself out of my confining routine. Instead of reconstituting it in Cold Spring, I happily frittered away the better part of two whole days without a second thought. Anywhere you go, there you are: so runs a favorite saying of mine, yet in my case it turned out to be not so true as I’d always thought. Yes, I was still me, but a slightly different me, one unexpectedly content to be idle. Perhaps I had rediscovered a part of me that my father had buried under the weight of his own obsessions. Perhaps I had simply figured out for myself what my friends always knew, which is that to do and to be are not necessarily the same thing, at least not when you’re sitting by the Hudson River, watching the sun set behind a green-topped mountain.

Of course such moments are not meant to last. Their evanescence is part of their charm. I checked my voice mail after breakfast the next morning and found an urgent plea from a neighbor in distress, the kind of help-me-Obi-Wan-Kenobi-you’re-my-only-hope summons to which the one decent reply is in the affirmative. The trains from Cold Spring to New York City leave two minutes before the hour, so I checked out a bit earlier than I’d planned, spent a half-hour sitting by the Hudson, then trudged up the hill to the station. As if to emphasize that my brief idyll was over, my car was full of shrieking teenage girls en route to Manhattan, there to spend the day shopping, and I listened to their prattle all the way back to Grand Central Station. Cold Spring seemed a thousand miles away.

Yet my parting words to the friendly young woman at the front desk of the Hudson House Inn were still fresh in my memory. “I know you had a good time,” she said with a smile, to which I replied, “I sure did, and I mean to come back soon.” Who knew that a three-day trip to nowhere in particular could be so full of delight? I didn’t—but I do now.

Both Bondgirl and Bookish Gardener have been quietly slipping classic lines from Buffy the Vampire Slayer into their post titles.