Archives for September 2004

TT: Two last baby steps

September 13, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I went through today’s snail mail and found an envelope from Harcourt that contained the dust jacket for All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine–the real thing, not a photocopy. It’s even more handsome than I imagined.

As I ogled the finished product, it hit me that I’d forgotten to ask the managing editor in charge of All in the Dances how the photo insert ended up. (That’s how distracted I was by my vacation!) As you may recall, we were having permission problems with one image, a photo of Balanchine at the piano taken by Walker Evans, and Harcourt asked me to come up with a Plan B in case Plan A fell through at 11:59:59. It was a tricky assignment: I had to find a picture that would fit into the same space, both physically and chronologically, and if at all possible it had to be out of copyright. I went on the Web and quickly located a terrific photo of Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev, and within a day or two Harcourt reported back that it was in the public domain. I breathed a sigh of relief, went off on vacation…and forgot all about it.

I just shot an e-mail off to the Harcourt back office in San Diego, which wrote back immediately to tell me that they’d had to go with Plan B. That was fine with me (I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me in the first place to include a photo of Diaghilev). And that’s really, truly the end of the story. All in the Dances went to the printer while I was on vacation. We’ll be getting back the first copies at the end of September, and it’ll be shipped out to bookstores shortly thereafter.

Order your copy today!

P.S. Harcourt just informed me that the bound galleys have gone out to reviewers. Eeeeee….

TT: Observance

September 13, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I just got this e-mail from a friend who was downtown on 9/11 three years ago, and wanted to share it with you.

* * *

Mourning is tricky business–very tender and private, at least for me. I knew I wanted to do something on Saturday, but didn’t know what, until this post on the Gawker blog caught my eye:

Saturday, September 11, 2004

Floating Lanterns Ceremony, Hudson River

A traditional floating lanterns ceremony commemorating the victims of the WTC
tragedy will take place on Saturday, September 11th at Pier 40 (South Side) at W.
Houston and West, starting at 7:30 PM. Buddhist priest T.K. Nakagaki will lead
the ceremony with assistance in the water from the New York Kayak Company.

Each year people in Japan gather to float lanterns in remembrance of the victims
of the atomic bombings and all victims of war….The ancient custom of “Floating Lighted Lanterns” in the waterways is a symbolic way of respecting the lives that have gone before us. Also, it can represent a light of hope for peace and harmony that we send out over the waters of transmigration. As we pay respect to the lives which were lost at the World Trade Center, we offer the light of hope for a peaceful world in which no one else
will suffer.

Somehow, that sounded right–something quiet that involved music and prayer, although I’m not a Buddhist by any stretch of the imagination and the combination of lanterns and kayaks struck me as kind of weird. I called a friend, who was game, and together we went down at dusk.

“Follow the smell of pot,” I kidded. I wasn’t sure what to expect. But the turnout was a surprising mix of folk, and as the ceremony and chanting was not in English, I felt as comforted as if I were at High Mass, hearing Latin plainsong. I also didn’t realize that Pier 40 was within spitting distance of the site of the WTC, and so we had a perfect view as the Lights came on. It was a very moving sight. One could see sparkles of light within the beams ascending to the stars, just like one sees dust reflected from a flashlight. Made me very weepy, although I can’t tell you why.

We must have been there for two hours. The night was crystal clear and the ceremony was one of the coolest things I’ve ever witnessed.

TT: Anniversary

September 10, 2004 by Terry Teachout

A few weeks after 9/11, I wrote an essay for Crisis about where I was and what I did that day. This is part of it.

* * *

“Get up, son,” my mother said, tapping softly on the door of the bedroom of my childhood home in Missouri. “An airplane hit the World Trade Center.” I came awake a split-second later, my head full of memories. For years, I had wondered when the long arm of terrorism would strike again at New York. I thought of a sunny Saturday morning back when I was living in an apartment house on a hill north of the city. A small earthquake shook the building as I lay sleeping, and the groaning of the old walls woke me. I heard a soft whir through the open window, the rustle of the leaves on the shaken trees. It’s a car bomb, I told myself, unable for one stunned moment to conceive of any other possibility.

All these thoughts flew through my mind in the time it took me to pull on my pants. Then I trotted to the living room, there to behold the coming of the new age.

It came, as St. Paul told us it would, in the twinkling of an eye, and now we were all changed. Even as I slept, I had unknowingly acquired a new identity: I awoke to find myself a stranded man, unable to return to New York to share whatever its fate might be. Of course I had it easy, far more so than most of the thousands of other Americans who had been caught short on that bright Tuesday morning. Some of them were in the air, others in strange hotel rooms, but I was holed up with my mother in the small town where I had spent the first eighteen years of my life. My brother and his family lived just three blocks away. As exiles go, mine was to be both comforting and comfortable–and brief. But it was an exile all the same, and with every passing minute it grew harder to endure.

Merely to write those last few words is an unfamiliar sensation. To be an adopted New Yorker is to know innumerable people who visit their families as infrequently as they can, who live in New York because it is as far away from the scenes of their childhood as it can possibly be. Some have broken with their parents, others with their past, a few with themselves, if such a thing is possible (which I doubt). I am not one of them. Long before I first heard it, I knew the truth of the old Jewish saying, “Anywhere you go, there you are.” Even though I now eat sushi and happily give directions to mystified tourists searching in vain for Times Square or the Empire State Building, I have never tried to be anyone other than my small-town self, or to be from anywhere other than Smalltown, U.S.A. I left a quarter-century ago to make my way in the world, but I always come back once or twice a year, if not more. New York is where I live: it is not my home.

So, at any rate, I had thought. But as I sat transfixed before the television, watching the scenes of now-imaginable horror repeated incessantly, first from one camera angle, then another, I knew I wanted above all things to fly to the city whose tallest buildings had been raped by faceless worshippers of a god who does not exist, a god who smiles complacently on evil and calls it good. Then came the now-conceivable news that Manhattan had been cut off from the mainland–all bridges were closed, all subways stopped, all planes grounded–and I knew I had finally cast off the last mooring from my home port and set sail for parts unknown, suspended between the beloved past and the invisible future.

For two days, phone service to Manhattan was hit or miss, mostly the latter, and I couldn’t even get a busy signal for anybody south of Fourteenth Street: a shrill mechanical voice always told me to call back later. My laptop computer was in New York–I’d finished a book the week before and had gone to Missouri determined to do no more work for a few days–so e-mail was out of the question. All I could do was gape at the TV, which I did for hours on end, and pray, which I did not without ceasing but in half-articulate spurts that gushed out on the rare occasions when I was able to tear my eyes and mind away from the unfolding story. Then, one by one, the dead phones came back to life, and by Friday I knew that all the people to whom I was close were alive. That was the day when the National Cathedral in Washington was filled with the sounds of prayer and music–the first day I was able to weep.

Five days after the World Trade Center crumbled to dust, my brief exile ended and I flew back to the place that I now knew to be my earthly home. As the plane descended, breaking the cloudless, transparent air, I gazed with terror and awe on the sight of lower Manhattan, into which a huge black hole had been burned, and heard in my mind’s ear an old camp-meeting hymn that Merle Travis used to sing: I am a pilgrim and a stranger/Traveling through this wearisome land/I got a home in that yonder city, good Lord/And it’s not, not made by hand.

That Thursday, I went to Lincoln Center to hear the New York Philharmonic perform Brahms’ German Requiem in memory of the dead of September 11. Manhattan was gray–a slate-gray, solidly overcast sky that spat rain off and on all afternoon. By early evening, the air was heavy with humidity, the worst possible weather for a musical performance: strings go limp, singers go flat. Broadway was clotted with yellow taxis, none of them vacant, many flying small American flags. I arrived a little before seven, together with hundreds of other people, virtually all dressed in black or gray. Huge flags hung from the balconies of the New York State Theatre, the Metropolitan Opera House, and Avery Fisher Hall, the three houses that frame the plaza. The lobby was full of hastily printed signs reading ALL BAGS WILL BE SUBJECT TO SEARCH and long lines at the security checkpoints through which we had to pass in order to reach the escalators. One woman was carrying a shopping bag that contained a cardboard box. “What’s in the box?” asked the guard, noncommittally. “Two bottles of wine,” she replied. Then he broke out in a huge smile. “No drinking in the aisles!” he told her, wagging his finger, and we all laughed.

Inside the auditorium, every seat was full save for those occupied by the TV cameras broadcasting the performance. The lights went down, and out of of an unquiet hush the first notes of the first movement materialized so softly that for a moment, I wasn’t quite sure the orchestra had started to play. New Yorkers are the noisiest audiences in the world, and I heard a modest amount of coughing, as well as a single cell phone that went off midway through the second movement, spreading a quick ripple of dismay. For the most part, though, the only thing I could hear in the pauses was the sound of people softly crying. The young woman sitting next to me had never heard the German Requiem before, and she was overcome by the way in which Brahms set the familiar Bible verses, now made so freshly poignant by our still-raw memories of the week just past: Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted…Lord, teach me that there must be an end of me…The souls of the righteous are in God’s hand, and no pain touches them…For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come…O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Afterward, she told me, “I imagined that all those voices were angels rising out of the towers as they collapsed.”

At the end, Kurt Masur, the conductor, lowered his hands slowly. The stillness that followed seemed to last for minutes, though it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. No one clapped–no one would have dared. Then Masur stepped down from the podium and joined hands with the soloists, and they vanished into the wings without a word.

TT: Almanac

September 10, 2004 by Terry Teachout

“One greatly needs beauty when death is so close.”

Maurice Maeterlinck, Pell

TT: Do it yourself

September 9, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Russell Reich, co-author of Notes on Directing, writes:

As long as self-publishing remains a viable and potentially lucrative
alternative for many writers, I’m having a hard time hearing Gal Beckerman bemoan the standard failures of
publishers and the publishing industry as a whole.

For writers who are already willing to take some responsibility for their
book’s design, marketing, and even editing, the additional work required for
a self-published book (printing, fulfillment) is relatively benign as long
as you believe in what you’re doing and hire good people to help. When I
co-authored, designed, and published my own book,
I felt that no setback during the process ever rose above a level of minor
inconvenience; I was simply having too much fun to let printer glitches or a
few bumpy legal negotiations bother me much.

I had a number of reasons to go the independent route. One was speed. When
you go to a traditional publishing house, you’re lucky to have a book on the
shelf within a year of the contract, even with a completed manuscript. But
my co-author was elderly and ailing; it was vital to me that he hold a
finished book in his hands and I didn’t know if I had a year to gamble.
(He’s fine.) I also had a clear idea about the object I wanted to create, but no good
publisher was going to give a first-time author like me full reign over all
editorial, design, and packaging choices. I believed in what I was doing
and didn’t think a publisher, in this circumstance, could do anything
other than muck up my plan while grabbing a hefty share of my profits. So I read a
couple of books about self-publishing, joined the Publisher’s Marketing
Association, and got to work.

Yes, I have to do my own marketing–that would be the case even if I hadn’t
self-published. Yes, I have to manage my book as a business, but it’s my
baby and having my own finger on the pulse of the market for it is a joy.
When it no longer is a joy, THEN I can shop it around to publishers at what
are likely to be much better terms, since by then it will be a proven
property.

There was a time commitment involved in self-publishing the book and a
personal investment of about $15,000-$20,000 to cover the vendors who helped
me create it. But look at the return numbers: instead of a 7-12% royalty,
I’m making close to a 50% margin on every book sold. I made back my initial
investment on my first printing of 2,500 copies within nine months (thanks,
in part, to kind endorsements like yours). We’re now on to our third printing.

But even if I had been wrong about my book and it flopped, the experience
and exercise of investing in myself and in what I believed would have been
enough, which is why I took the risk in the first place.

I recognize the value and resources that established publishers can provide.
They’re a good choice for those who have not the time, means, or inclination
to self-publish or who truly believe they’ve got a potential international
blockbuster on their hands. For everyone else, why not self-publish? I
wonder about the extent to which insecurity among writers–a fundamental
disbelief in their own work–leads them to pursue a publishing contract not
for the book’s sake, but for the approval of others that the contract
represents. If their book truly expresses something of personal value and
significance, a failure to self-publish strikes me as a self-betrayal.

The bottom line is, if you believe in your book, there’s relatively little
standing in the way of your realizing your dream. In some cases, however, it
appears that complaining about your publisher holds its own rewards.

I can’t add anything to that. I’ve never heard the case for self-publishing by serious writers put better–and as Web-based technologies make it easier and cheaper, Russell Reich’s prophetic words will become even more relevant.

(I might add, by the way, that I praised Notes on Directing in The Wall Street Journal as follows: “Though it’s meant for use by theatrical professionals, not playgoers, I have never read a clearer, more straightforward description of the craft of directing, and the layman who longs to know what happens in a rehearsal–or what ought to, at any rate–will find it informative and illuminating.”)

TT: Report from the curator

September 9, 2004 by Terry Teachout

My old friend Tim Page, the classical music critic of the Washington Post, came to New York last night to cover the opening of New York City Opera’s new production of Richard Strauss’ Daphne. We hadn’t seen one another in months, so we had lunch at Good Enough to Eat today. Like me, Tim is a man of many interests, and in an earlier part of his life he developed a passion for Dawn Powell, one which eventually led him to write her biography and edit her letters and diary (which he discovered) and the Library of America’s two-volume set of her comic novels.

Tim is, in other words, the Big Powell Guy, and seeing as how I’m a Little Powell Guy–the first essay in the Teachout Reader is about her–he saw fit to bring me a stupendous present this afternoon. He handed over a manila folder inside of which was a tattered but still intact pen-and-ink caricature of Martha Graham drawn by none other than Powell herself. It’s a Thurberesque full-length portrait in reddish-brown ink, captioned “Martha Graham: Analysis in Wonderland.” Modern-dance buffs will immediately recognize the inverted triangle before which Graham is standing as the set piece Isamu Noguchi designed for Frontier, choreographed in 1935. The expression of loony anguish on Graham’s face, by contrast, is all Powell and a yard wide.

Needless to say, I nearly fell out of my chair when Tim presented me with this wonderful souvenir of one of my favorite writers. It was especially appropriate because I already own a Graham-related piece of comic art, an assemblage made for me by Paul Taylor. Not long after 9/11, I wrote an essay for the New York Times called “The Importance of Being Less Earnest” (it’s also in the Teachout Reader) in which I poked fun at the humorlessness of such iconic figures of modern dance as Graham and Isadora Duncan:

What Duncan sowed was soon reaped by a generation of modern-dance choreographers for whom humor was, to put it mildly, a superfluity. To flip through Edwin Denby’s collected reviews of dance in New York in the Thirties and Forties is to be struck by how dour he makes their dances sound. Though he made a point of being fair, he also believed deeply in the inestimable value of lightness, and so it is instructive to watch him grapple with Martha Graham, whose clenched-hair psychological dramas did so much to shape the emotional landscape of dance in postwar America. (When Randall Jarrell wanted to spoof modern dance in Pictures from an Institution, he made up a perfectly plausible-sounding piece called The Eye of Anguish, not realizing that Graham had used that same title four years earlier.) On one occasion Denby described her company as “bold about being earnest, but timid about being lively,” which neatly sums up what many balletomanes find unsympathetic about Graham’s painfully sincere art.

I contrasted their portentousness with Taylor’s miraculous ability to say dark things with a light touch:

It’s surprising (well, no, it isn’t) how many dance buffs are still suspicious of Taylor, mainly because his work, though serious, is never ponderous. Having seen a lot of art of all kinds since September 11, I’m impressed by how many of the things that spoke to me most strongly, from Urinetown to Ghost World to the exhibition of Ben Katchor’s “picture stories” currently on display at the Jewish Museum, were either wholly comic or partook of the sweet-and-sourness found in Paul Taylor’s best dances.

Taylor danced with the Graham company for a number of years, by the end of which he was thoroughly fed up with her high-minded self-importance. What I wrote about her in the Times obviously tickled his funnybone, for he put together a Joseph Cornell-like shadowbox incorporating a clipping of my piece, which had been illustrated by an old picture of Duncan. On the clipping Taylor mounted a butterfly, and on top of that he placed the business end of a rusty old flyswatter. He titled it “Gotcha Both,” put it in an envelope, and sent it to me. “Gotcha Both” now occupies an honored place in the Teachout Museum, and I plan to hang “Martha Graham: Analysis in Wonderland” below it as soon as it comes back from my framer.

I’m especially pleased by the juxtaposition because it happens that I also made admiring mention of Dawn Powell in “The Importance of Being Less Earnest”:

Small wonder…that the children and grandchildren of Isadora, Martha Graham foremost among them, dominated native-born American theatrical dance for so long. They were right at home, particularly during World War II, when American culture, already sick unto death from the political pieties of the Thirties, came close to choking on its own high-mindedness. Dawn Powell, a cruelly funny woman who had no use for such nonsense, skewered the spirit of the age in her 1942 novel A Time to Be Born: “The poet, disgusted with the flight of skylarks in perfect sonnet form, declaimed the power of song against brutality and raised hollow voice in feeble proof. This was no time for beauty, for love, or private future…This was a time when the artists, the intellectuals, sat in caf

TT: Look out, Cleveland

September 9, 2004 by Terry Teachout

A reader from Cleveland writes:

Glad to hear you took in our museum. How cool. It’s also heartening to hear your still-warm regard for the “smaller” places in the US (and really, what place is “bigger” than NYC?). Most of the people I know who’ve moved on to big cities develop a contempt for any place less populated (including their own birthplace). I suppose it must always exist within them, but snobbishness of this kind makes little sense to me as location does not make the man.

As a change of pace and in hopes it will be an exercise you’ll enjoy, how about a little classical music advice? Borders is running a 4-for-3 sale and I was browsing the classical music section. I was at a loss. I have works from the most well-known composers, but that’s about it. How about your thoughts on the 5 essential classical works of the 20th century? Please expand the time frame if current constraints make the list unworkable.

I did indeed take in the Cleveland Museum of Art, one of America’s half-dozen greatest museums, a fact of which many American art lovers don’t seem to be aware, perhaps because of its comparatively modest size–34,000 objects, compared to the two million owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If the Met is an encyclopedic museum, then Cleveland is a one-volume desk encyclopedia.

What makes the Cleveland Museum so extraordinary is the jaw-dropping connoisseurship with which those 34,000 objects were chosen. Instead of collecting in depth, Cleveland’s curators, like their counterparts at Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum, opted for quality over quantity, and time and again they hit the bull’s-eye. When I visited the abstract expressionist gallery last Tuesday, for instance, it contained paintings by William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, sculptures by David Smith and Isamu Noguchi, an Alexander Calder mobile, and a Joseph Cornell box–the whole history of abstract expressionism summed up in fourteen objects, all on display in a single room. Except for the Krasner, each one was of the highest possible quality. The whole museum is like that, more or less.

As for my correspondent’s request for advice, it happens that Time magazine asked me four years ago to pick (anonymously, alas) the greatest classical-music composition and opera of the twentieth century, plus two runners-up in each category. A year before that, I’d written a series of articles for Commentary called “Masterpieces of the Century” in which I drew up “a counter-canon of 50 major works.” Based on those two lists, here are five essential twentieth-century classical works, with links to my favorite recordings of each piece:

– B