Archives for July 16, 2004

A reader writes:

I’m curious, and it might be worth blogging about: what does your work space look like? I once saw a photo book of writers’ studies, and I spent hours poring over photographs of desks, bookshelves, odd pieces of detritus thumbtacked to the walls, and I came away believing (perhaps wrongly) that I knew a bit more about each of them. We know some of what is on the walls, so what about the rest?

I work at home in a small office-bedroom whose third-floor window looks down on a quiet, tree-lined block of Upper West Side brownstones. The window is to my left, a clothes closet to my right, and over the closet is a sleeping loft. (The ceilings in my apartment are unusually high.) The walls are white, the furniture black, the rug black and tan. I sit on a cheap, creaky swivel chair. My desk is one of those Danish-style slab-and-tube jobs: four shelves, no drawers. The shelf on which I work holds my iBook, a pair of good-quality desktop speakers hooked up to the computer (I often listen to music while I write), a phone-fax-answering machine, an external zip drive, and a tall, sometimes shaky stack of review CDs. My printer is on the bottom shelf. The shelf immediately above eye level holds a few framed pictures, a flashlight (just in case),
and two short stacks of review copies and bound galleys of forthcoming books.

On the top shelf are:

– The Library of America’s Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works

– Four hardbound Viking Portables: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Johnson & Boswell

– An old Modern Library collection of Montaigne’s essays

– Dostoyevsky’s Demons

– Kenneth Minogue’s Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology

– Arlene Croce’s Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker

– David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film

– H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations

– The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

– Fowler’s Modern English Usage

– A Terry Teachout Reader

To my immediate left, below the window sill, are two neat stacks of books and papers. To my right is a small wheeled hutch that contains office supplies and other papers. Atop the hutch are two boxes full of Giorgio Morandi and Fairfield Porter notecards, a small rock from the shore of Isle au Haut, and a Cup of Chicha coffee mug full of pens and pencils. Beyond it is an electronic keyboard on a floor stand, and beyond the keyboard, next to the closet, is a case of books about music. Behind my chair are seven custom-made cases containing 3,000 CDs.

Hanging on the walls are:

– A framed gold record given to me by the members of Nickel Creek

– A Hatch Show Print poster
advertising a concert by Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, printed from the original blocks

– A poster advertising a 1974 Hans Hofmann show at Andr

My posting about the potential embarrassments of reading in public has brought in some delightful responses, but none better than this:

Your reminiscences brought to mind some less-than-pleasant scenes from my
days as a pre-adolescent, adolescent and post-adolescent bookworm…and one
story you might find amusing.

It was back in ’74 or ’75, at Dumont High School in N.J.; one day,
standing outside the auditorium waiting to go into an assembly or something,
I had my nose stuck in Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming.” A very perky, very blonde,
reasonably sweet cheerleader noticed what I was reading and said, “Oh,
that’s so cool!”

Well, naturally I was kind of…flabbergasted. But hey, you never know with
people…and I did have one of those lusting-from-afar crushes on the young
lady, so I said something fairly lame, along the lines of, “Yeah it’s really
something,” to which she replied with an eager “Uh-huh.”

Not knowing where to take this, I thought I would make a joke. “I think the
Drama Club ought to do this sometime.” And she beamed and said, “Yes,
absolutely.” And then she paused and said, “Who do you think should play
John-boy?”

It took me a few seconds before I put it together and realized that she was
under the impression that what I was reading was the script for the
television movie that served as the pilot for the series “The Waltons,” also
titled “The Homecoming.” I was bitterly disappointed for a second, and then
relieved to be returned to the reality I knew.

So be wary of that fantasy waitress….

Actually, all the waitresses at Good Enough to Eat, my neighborhood hangout, are maximally cool. Several are performers of various kinds, and when possible I go to see their shows. (Where are you now, Shannon Hope Lee?) As for the other restaurants in the immediate vicinity, though, I make no promises!

“About Last Night” got written up yesterday in Publishers Lunch, the daily publishing-industry e-mail newsletter (go here to subscribe). I thought what they said might interest you:

Finally, the big blog occasion this week is the one-year anniversary of cultural critic Terry Teachout’s abundant blog About Last Night. He writes, “Blogs are the 21st-century counterpart of the periodical essays of the eighteenth century, the Spectators and Ramblers and Idlers that supplied familiar essayists with what was then the ideal vehicle for their intensely personal reflections. Blogging stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the corporate journalism that exerted so powerful an effect on writing in the twentieth century.”

Other bloggers write to celebrate the generally rising profile, quality and influence of blogs. What strikes me is the way Teachout has utterly changed his profile as a critic and his relationship with his audience through his blog in just a year. It’s no accident that he’s had three books coming during the year that he’s been blogging, and he’s developed a meaningful connection with a large circle of readers (he cites about half a million page views).

As I noted on my BEA blogger panel, what writers do best is write. Blogs are a great way of letting writers connect on a regular basis with readers, and attract new audiences and fans, while still keeping whatever respectful distance they like and having the power of their words rule the day. I still can’t figure out why everyone isn’t getting their authors to blog.

Beats me.

I’m back in The Wall Street Journal again this morning, reviewing the Public Theater’s Central Park production of Much Ado About Nothing and a one-woman off-off-Broadway show, Janine Squillari’s I Need a Guy Who Blinks.

Much Ado was slow to get off the ground, but Kristen Johnston was great right from the start:

The six-foot-tall alien of TV’s “Third Rock from the Sun” also has an impressive track record on stage, including a vital performance earlier this year in the New Group’s revival of Wallace Shawn’s obnoxious “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” and though she’s a Shakespearean debutante, she clearly has great things ahead of her. As Beatrice, the hard-nosed bride-to-be of “Much Ado,” Ms. Johnston bestrides the stage like a full-fledged star, seizing your attention with every word she speaks (and even when not speaking–I couldn’t take my eyes off her in the crowd scenes). Her dark-brown baritone voice cleaves the air like a well-honed knife, one that she not infrequently turns on herself. Not only does she have the happy knack of knowing how to be funny and rueful at the same time, but her handsome, wide-mouthed face, at once sexy and silly, was custom-made for comedy. When she orders her hapless suitor Benedick (Jimmy Smits) to “kill Claudio,” you want to run right out and tie the noose.

The trouble with the first three-fifths of the play is that David Esbjornson, the director, has failed to create a convincing setting for Ms. Johnston’s magical presence. He has updated the play to Sicily circa 1919, but for no apparent reason other than to appeal to the “Under the Tuscan Sun” crowd, and his puzzling period references (including a bizarre scene set in a Futurist disco) shed no light on Shakespeare’s sufficiently luminous text….

Then came the wedding scene, and everything started to hum. Mr. Esbjornson shook off the confusing superfluities of the previous acts and homed in on the play’s emotional truths, and all at once the whole cast snapped to attention. It was like a helicopter taking off. Actors who had been slightly off target suddenly got the point: Mr. Waterston became frighteningly angry, Mr. Smits charmingly funny, and Brian Murray, who had hitherto fallen flat as Dogberry, the idiot constable, turned before our eyes into a gloriously plummy-voiced boob whose every polysyllabic malapropism brought down the house. Nobody on stage put a foot wrong for the rest of the night.

I Need a Guy Who Blinks may not be Shakespeare, but it’s hair-raisingly relevant:

An 80-minute monologue in which Ms. Squillari describes a disastrous string of bad dates, bad relationships and bad breakups, it is every Gen-X woman’s worst nightmare come to life–plus laughs. Ms. Squillari claims to have an infallible track record when it comes to dating: “Granted, I may not have always made the best choices in men. In fact, I’ve never made a good choice in men.” Fortunately, she was taking notes as she lurched from bed to bed, and she tells her horror stories with a self-loathing glee guaranteed to make every man in the audience take stock of his own peculiarities. I especially liked the questionnaire she created in order to screen out losers up front: “How many people are involved in a monogamous relationship? (A) One. (B) Two. (C) Three.”

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing (and if not, why not?), buy a Friday Journal, turn to the “Weekend Section,” and look for my drama column right next to the Wall Street Journal/ZAGAT Theater Survey. Or subscribe to The Wall Street Journal Online by going here. That’s what I do.

“Wearing a dinner jacket, Umfraville was otherwise unchanged from the night we had met at Foppa’s. Trim, horsey, perfectly at ease with himself, and everyone around him, he managed at the same time to suggest the proximity of an abyss of scandal and bankruptcy threatening at any moment to engulf himself, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be within his immediate vicinity when the crash came. The charm he exercised over people was perhaps largely due to this ability to juggle with two contrasting, apparently contradictory attributes; the one, an underlying implication of sinister, disturbing undercurrents: the other, a soothing power to reassure and entertain. These incompatible elements were always to be felt warring with each other whenever he was present. He was like an actor who suddenly appears on the stage to the accompaniment of a roll of thunder, yet who utterly captivates his audience a second later, while their nerves are still on edge, by crooning a sentimental song.”

Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly’s