Archives for July 7, 2004

A “fortunate cookie,” I’ve just decided, is an on-topic fortune cookie. Terry’s “Almanac” entries, as you already know if you’ve been paying attention, are very often related, more or less subtly, to something else that one of us has posted lately. My fortune cookies, in contrast, tend to be randomly seized upon.

This weekend, however, I had my nose buried in one of Reginald Hill’s beguiling Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries (my undying gratitude to the Weisses for putting me onto these), and I jotted down several nice bits. One of them popped straight to mind when I read this rather withering reader comment in Terry’s post-Index Mailbox: “The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Neither. Trite male weepies the both of them.”

Here’s the serendipitous cookie:

“Her camera appeared to require as little reloading as one of those guns the good cowboys used to have in the pre-psychological westerns.”

Reginald Hill, An April Shroud

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.”

Raymond Chandler, “Red Wind” (courtesy of Kenneth R. Shaw)

A reader writes, apropos of my posting
on Who Framed Roger Rabbit:

I love Roger Rabbit, also, and think it is the real Chinatown II, as opposed to that train-wreck of a movie, The Two Jakes, a movie I so wanted to be better than it was.

Well put.

I might add that there’s an essay to be written–though not today–on the effects of wishful thinking on critics. I know I’ve been swayed by it many times, and up to a point I think it’s forgivable, the point in question being the second time that a favored artist lets you down hard. That’s when you need to sit up and start paying closer attention to what you’re actually seeing (as opposed to what you wish you were seeing).

No critic should ever forget that initial disappointment in a work of art not infrequently gives way to deeper understanding on closer acquaintance. In the case of an artist I really respect, I always try to take it for granted that I’m the problem, not the work of art…but not indefinitely. You can only disappoint me so many times before I lose patience–and interest.

I quoted the ever-apropos G.K. Chesterton the other day, and I’ll do it again now: “Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

As for The Two Jakes, well, I simply couldn’t fool myself: I knew it was awful.

Sarah’s “Immutables” category drives a hard bargain. Immutables are “individual tastes that will never be swayed, never be altered no matter who tries to do so. And to take things to perhaps an extreme level, if you attempt to be friends with someone who doesn’t agree with your Immutables, then the friendship is doomed.” Gee, that does sound extreme. Do we all have second-degree Immutables? Do I? Just off the top of my head I’d say that, while you don’t have to love Edward Gorey to be my friend, if you don’t get him, we might not have a lot to talk about.

It may well be, though, that I have good friends who don’t get him and it just hasn’t come up. I definitely have friends who don’t like Buffy, Lucinda Williams, Henry James, or other keystones of my cultural life. I often find there’s more to be gotten out of a robust disagreement with someone I like and respect than from mutual admiration of each other’s impeccable taste. And the joy of converting someone–well, that’s the great potential reward for engaging in such debates.

Nope, I’m racking my brain but I can only answer this question theoretically. A specific aesthetic disagreement has never thrown over any budding or actual friendship of mine. However, I once had a potential friend who didn’t enjoy eating. That proved insurmountable. It was then, as the relationship sputtered, that I first understood how much my social life revolved around food (and still does): dinner parties, cooking together, pizza-and-television, expeditions to Afghani or Ethiopian restaurants, and so on. Eating something wonderful together, in my experience, can cement or deepen a friendship. This is one of M.F.K. Fisher’s great subjects. It is memorably treated in what I think is the first essay in The Gastronomical Me, about a childhood picnic with her sister and father that marked the first time she became really aware of her father as an individual, rather than just one of her parents, and began to form a separate bond with him (a pie is implicated).

I take full responsibility for the interruption of my nascent friendship with the poor, pitiable food-phobe and wish her well–my own perhaps overdeveloped delight in good food didn’t seem to bother her any, and I credit her tolerance–but I just couldn’t carry on. Her attitude toward food, which was part fearful, part resigned, tended to kill all my pleasure in it. Maybe, then, my true Immutable is M.F.K.–if you can’t appreciate her appetite or her divine prose, a famous friendship might not be in our cards.

Sarah, whose TCCI is 58%, now writes to say that I’ve “created a monster.” I certainly didn’t expect the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index to spread so cancerously throughout the blogosphere. I’m trying to keep up with the scores posted to date by those bloggers listed in “Sites to See,” but it isn’t easy (I can’t even begin to keep up with the non-blogrolled responses). So far, here are the ones I’ve seen:

Banana Oil, 70%.
Bookish Gardener, 57%.
Brandywine Books, 67%.
Collected Miscellany, 68%.
Crescat Sententia, 40%.
Elegant Variation, 47%.
A Fool in the Forest, 64.38%.
Futurballa, 47%.
Mixolydian Mode, 52%.
Rake’s Progress, 59%.
The Reading Experience, 43%.
The Rest Is Noise, 55%.
Return of the Reluctant, 54%. (Don’t miss Ed’s parody!)
…something slant, 58% “or thereabouts.”
Superfluities, 41%.
James Tata, 49%.
Tingle Alley, “60%ish.”

(More than a few bloggers have posted answers but no score. If you want to make the roster, do your own math.)

God of the Machine appears not to have taken the TCCI, but he does make an observation about it that had already occurred to me, which is that it would not only be possible but interesting to apply factor analysis to everybody’s answers:

Interdisciplinary clusters will be best of all; if we find, for example, that nearly everyone who prefers Astaire to Kelly also prefers Matisse to Picasso and Keaton to Chaplin, then we might be on to something. We examine the clusters, looking for commonalities. Looking for rules, in other words. Although Terry’s taste, or the taste of any educated person, cannot be explained by one principle or theory — this is a reasonable working definition of “cultivated” — I would wager that it can be explained pretty well by several…

Speaking of rules, a regular “About Last Night” reader writes:

In general — and with all exceptions duly noted — I think your preferences reflect a taste for lightness over heaviness, for charm over depth (as conventionally understood). As I grow older, that is the direction in which my taste is headed. Do you agree that aging has something to do with it?

Very perceptive. But while I think aging may have something to do with it, I think the effects in my case are limited. My taste has always run more or less in those directions: French over German, “comic” (broadly speaking) over tragic, short over long, color over line. In the best of all possible two-kinds-of-people divide, that formulated by Schiller, I tend to opt for “naive” over “sentimental.” As Sir Isaiah Berlin explains, “naive” artists are those “who create naturally, who are not troubled by the burden of the tragic disorder of life, who do not seek salvation in art as some people seek personal salvation in religion or Socialism or nationalism.” He cited Verdi as the quintessential example of the naive artist of genius. For me, it’s Balanchine.

And a close friend writes:

The only thing on this list that surprised me is that you chose Daffy Duck over Bugs Bunny.

Yeah, well….

UPDATE: The indispensable Sarah now proposes a major new taste-measurement paradigm:

I suppose I could add some of my own questions to draft my own CCI, but prior to Terry’s post, I’d given some thought to what I call Immutables–those elements of individual tastes that will never be swayed, never be altered no matter who tries to do so. And to take things to perhaps an extreme level, if you attempt to be friends with someone who doesn’t agree with your Immutables, then the friendship is doomed….

OGIC and I will get to work on this one right away!

P.S. Rumor has it that Supermaud is about to make a TCCI-related announcement….

Caterina.net has posted a mesmerizing list of types of divination. Be honest: How many of these have you found occasion to use?

I’ll cop to aeromancy, anthroposcopy, bibliomancy, cartomancy, cledonomancy, horoscopy, oneiromancy, physiognomy, psychometry, and zoomancy.

(Nobody said the divination had to be successful.)

As I noted here, David Thomson is a harsh judge of Rosalind Russell, giving all of the credit to Cary Grant for “goading [her] into being bearable” in His Girl Friday. A friend writes:

“You can see where in an age of the slowly burning Hepburn and Bacall, the bright magnesium flash of Russell can be a bit blinding.”

Very apt and very gentlemanly, that.