Archives for July 2004

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

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!

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.

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.

Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly’s

If you’re curious, the program has already been archived, and you can listen to it by going here.

(The WNYC Web site, incidentally, describes me as a “serial blogger.” Stop me before I post again!)

Says Brookmeyer:

2 cases in point put a dent in the “beyond my ken” reaction — Berg’s Violin Concerto (one of the most moving pieces I have ever heard) and Webern’s Symphony Op. 21, which I — at age 20 — declared “the only perfect music I have ever heard” — both of these date back to 1950, for me, and time has only increased my love and wonder at the beauty and clarity “organization” can bring to bear. Berg, who was always regarded as the connection to the past, was one of the most organized composers in history, yet much of his music sounds almost improvised. SOMETIMES the means justify the ends. Much the same, for me, with electronic music. It all depends on the composer.

I agree, at least in principle (though not about the Webern Symphony, which has never made sense to me except when used as a ballet score by George Balanchine). The Berg Violin Concerto, for instance, also strikes me as profoundly moving. It is, however, a very special case, a piece of serial music based on a tone row whose interlocking major and minor triads are manipulated by Berg to create quasi-tonal effects. I think its appeal is essentially theatrical, by which I mean it’s not so much pure music as a piece of “representational” art in which Berg uses the tension between tonality and atonality to portray an extra-musical emotional state. (He does the same thing in Wozzeck, though the fact that Wozzeck is an opera makes it more obvious.) That doesn’t mean the concerto isn’t beautiful, though. Brookmeyer is right: like every other variety of art, music is an essentially empirical operation to which theory is ultimately irrelevant. What works, works. The fact that most atonal music doesn’t work says something relevant about the fundamental problems of atonality–but that doesn’t make it impossible for a genius to compose a piece of atonal music that does. In art, all definitions are slippery, which is one of the things that makes it so miraculous.

(If you’ve never heard the Berg Violin Concerto, by the way, I’m especially fond of this recording.)

Another reader of “About Last Night,” Toni Bentley, rose to the bait I offered in a recent posting in which I announced that I’d finally bowed to her wishes and watched The Red Shoes. Not only was Toni delighted that I liked it so much, but she sent me a speech she gave at a recent West Coast screening of Michael Powell’s 1948 film.

Here’s part of what she said:

On a more personal note I would like to comment as a former classical ballet dancer on the depiction of the dance world as portrayed in this film as demanding, difficult, and frequently physically painful–all of which is accurate. What is perhaps even more revolutionary now than in 1948 is that this film, while not denying the hardships and sacrifices, actually extols them as the worthwhile price of achieving great art. The dance world continues today to receive criticism as being a profession that demands too much of its young aspirants for a career that is brief, badly paid, elitist, undemocratic, and can be abruptly ended with an injury in the blink of an eye. I cannot in all honesty tell you that any of these complaints are not true. But more often than not these are the complaints of those who don’t actually dance, but those who observe–and, perhaps, covet the stage. What I can say, from the other side of the footlights, is that the reward of achieving some measure of transcendent beauty for those of us who pursued it, and for our appreciative audiences, was worth every bloody toe and every drop of sweat. And besides, democracy has never had much to do with making great art.

The movie that you are about to see is that rare work that argues that art is not only important but possibly the most important thing in life. “The Red Shoes,” wrote Michael Powell in his autobiography, “is an insolent, haunting picture the way it takes for granted that nothing matters but art, and that art is something worth dying for.” Ballet, in its deft defiance of gravity itself, is the ultimate metaphor for this transcendence of our wretched mortality. In our time of much meaningless death and much bad and boring art, The Red Shoes, 56 years after its premiere, feels like a breath of fresh air–and a call to arms–for Dedication, Beauty and Passion of the kind that helps the rest of us find meaning in something that surpasses our mere mortal selves.

I couldn’t have put it better.