Archives for November 2004

My copy of Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume Two, preordered months ago from amazon.com, arrived this morning. If that isn’t perfect timing, I don’t know what is, especially since my nose is now stopped up so firmly that it’d take a stick of Acme Dynamite to blow it open.

So…that’s all, folks! I’ve got two deadlines to hit, plus an important errand to run just around the corner at P.S. 9, where I hear the lines are long and getting longer. See you tomorrow.

UPDATE: I’m back. The crowd was no more than medium-sized, and that only because several voting districts had been reshuffled since the last election, meaning that many people had to stand in a single, slow-moving line to be told where to vote. I went straight to my district table and was out in under a minute.

To bed again, I think. I’ve got to work up the steam to finish my Washington Post column for this coming Sunday, which is due (sneeze, sniffle, grumble) at day’s end.

Later.

Who wrote this? (Don’t peek.)

I took Anna Karénine along on the trip and have read it through with very great interest. I hardly know whether to call it a bad book or not. There are two entirely distinct stories in it; the connection between Levine’s story and Anna’s is of the slightest, and need not have existed at all. Levine’s and Kitty’s history is not only very powerfully and naturally told, but is also perfectly healthy. Anna’s most certainly is not, though of great and sad interest; she is portrayed as being a prety to the most violent passion, and subject to melancholia, and her reasoning power is so unbalanced that she could not possibly be described otherwise than as in a certain sense insane. Her character is curiously contradictory; bad as she was however she was not nearly as repulsive as her brother Stiva; Vronsky had some excellent points….Tolstoi is a great writer. Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages? He relates what they thought or did without any remark whatever as to whether it was good or bad, as Thucydides wrote history–a fact which tends to give his work an unmoral rather than an immoral tone, together with the sadness so characteristic of Russian writers. I was much pleased with the insight into Russian life.

The author in question was Theodore Roosevelt, writing in 1886. I found this passage in the new collection of his letters and speeches that Louis Auchincloss recently edited for the Library of America. My friend Rick Brookhiser had been reading the same book and e-mailed me a quotation that piqued my curiosity, so I bought a copy the next day and have since found it impossible to put down.

That Roosevelt was a good writer is no secret. But what interests me even more about this particular passage is that it’s a rare example of a prominent American politician saying something specific on paper about an important work of art. Never mind what Roosevelt was saying about Anna Karenina (we’ll get back to that). Ask yourself this: can you recall a similar example? No doubt Lincoln makes mention of Shakespeare in his letters, and I think it fairly likely that Harry Truman, who was a pianist with a serious interest in classical music, must have written somewhere or other about Chopin. But who else? Outside of Justice Holmes, a literary connoisseur but not a politician in the strict sense of the word, no names come immediately to mind.

This lack of aesthetic interest isn’t unique to politicians, of course. I know of very few American men of affairs (to exhume a wonderfully musty old phrase) who have much of anything to do with art other than as collectors, in which capacity they not infrequently develop considerable sophistication over time. But ask them to talk about the art they own and they have a way of coming up short. This doesn’t necessarily mean they get no aesthetic pleasure out of their art–intellectuals have a nasty habit of regarding verbal dexterity as a virtue, invariably to their cost–but it does make you wonder.

I wrote the other day about Anthony Powell, in the course of which I quoted one of my favorite passages from A Dance to the Music of Time:

Whenever Powell informs us that one of his characters takes no pleasure in drink or the arts, or that he prefers power to love, it’s a safe bet that unsavory revelations are just around the corner. Herein lies the theme of ”A Dance to the Music of Time,” stated explicitly in ”A Buyer’s Market” (1952), the second volume, in which Jenkins remarks that ”the arts themselves, so it appeared to me as I considered the matter, by their ultimately sensual essence, are, in the long run, inimical to those who pursue power for its own sake. Conversely, the artist who traffics in power does so, if not necessarily disastrously, at least at considerable risk.”

I think this is true, which is another reason why I’ve gotten so wrapped up in Roosevelt’s letters. He wasn’t an aesthete by any stretch of the imagination, but he was clearly responsive to beauty, though his responses were cramped by his Victorian mindset. (He told the same correspondent a couple of months later that War and Peace “does not seem to me to be in the least conducive to morality.”)

On the other hand, would one want to be ruled by an aesthete? Last year I wrote a Commentary essay about Adolf Hitler whose title, “The Murder Artist,” pretty well sums him up:

Hitler was more than merely an artist manqué, using art-derived techniques for propaganda purposes. Instead, he saw art as the end to which politics was merely the means. For him, the whole point of ruling Germany and conquering Europe was to be able to make them over again in a different image–one in which the fine arts would have pride of place….Hitler, in short, was a deranged idealist, a painter of old churches and picture-postcard landscapes who sought power over others in order to make his romantic dreams real, then grew ever more bloodthirsty when the human beings who were his flesh-and-blood medium resisted his transforming touch.

Does this mean the only alternatives are philistinism and homicidal mania? I certainly hope not, but I don’t know that I’d trust the average artist to be able to tell the difference between a politician who loved art and one who, like John Kennedy, merely pretended to. We’re all subject to the siren call of wishful thinking, never more so than when a man of affairs engages in the modern-day equivalent of taking us up on the mountaintop and saying, All this could be yours.

Which brings us back to Theodore Roosevelt, a politician who not only read books but wrote them, and who was clearly a good deal more complicated than most of us are aware. When I reviewed Theodore Rex, the second volume of Edmund Morris’ Roosevelt biography, it never occurred to me to mention Roosevelt’s aesthetic interests, for the good reason that Morris didn’t have much to say about them, even in the generous compass of an 864-page biography. That’s why I’m so grateful to Louis Auchincloss, a greatly gifted novelist whose interest in turn-of-the-century American life made him, surprising as it may seem at first glance, the perfect person to edit a volume of Roosevelt’s selected letters. More novelists should cultivate such interests. Scholarship is too important to be left to the scholars.

OGIC and I spent a few idle hours tweaking the right-hand column this past weekend. Not only are the Top Fives updated, but we undertook a radical reorganization of “Sites to See,” our blogroll, in the course of which we added some new blogs and dropped some old ones. Scroll down and take a peek.

You’ll also find something fresh in the “Teachout Elsewhere” module, a link to an essay about Anthony Powell that I wrote for Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. If you haven’t read it yet, click here to do so.

Today, by the way, is the official publication date of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, which is already humming along very nicely, thank you, though I did take a hit the other day in the Los Angeles Times (no free link, heh heh heh). The reviewer actually accused me of political correctness, which has to be a lifetime first….

More interesting, and far more readily available: Maud Newton
interviewed me for her blog! We “talked” at length via e-mail about all sorts of things having to do with my work as a critic and biographer.

Here’s a taste:

How often do you find yourself modifying your initial critical perspective on a work of art?

Not infrequently, at least over the course of the life cycle, and sometimes with breathtaking speed. I occasionally quote on my blog a great line by the music critic Hans Keller: “As soon as I detest something I ask myself why I like it.” But you’re talking about something else, something different, and I think it has a lot to do with growing older. If you’re paying any attention at all, increasing age brings with it the shedding of youthful illusions, along with a detachment that also affects your aesthetic requirements. It’s harder to be romantic in middle age–you’ve seen too much death, too much failure, too much injustice–and you also lose your taste for a certain kind of effusiveness. At 48, for instance, I now find that my favorite opera is Verdi’s Falstaff. I would never have said that at 28. By the same token, I think I also appreciate certain authors more, in some cases much more. I liked Conrad when young; I love him now. I would never have appreciated a novel like Death Comes for the Archbishop when I was in my twenties. And I didn’t get Mauriac at all back then, whereas I’m now quite passionate about him….

Read the whole thing here.

I’ll try to post more today, but this is a three-deadline, three-show week, so if I should fail to deliver the goods, please be kind.

UPDATE: Go to the “Teachout in Commentary” module of the right-hand column to read my newly posted essay for Commentary, in which I talk about the life and lyrics of Johnny Mercer.

My posting on schadenfreude pulled a lot of e-mail.

A Los Angeles cabaret singer wrote:

Just a theory: you are, of course, aware that there
is a song in the Sesame Street parody musical Avenue Q
called “Schadenfreude.” Perhaps our friends at the
Times think that is reason enough to suspect it is now
part of the popular lexicon. (They did the same thing
a couple of years back with “tsunami,” if you recall.)

She was the first to remind me of what I should have known, seeing as how I gushed all over Avenue Q in The Wall Street Journal last year. Several others wrote immediately thereafter to point out the same thing, including a New York actress:

Last October, I came across the word for the first time in my “Word Of The Day” calendar (it was a gift!) and took special notice of it because this calendar had, up until then, had the habit of introducing me to such exotic and challenging terms as “espresso” and “pseudonym.” Here, at last, was a word I hadn’t seen before.

Two nights later, I went to see “Avenue Q” on Broadway and Voila! there was the word as the title of a song!

Since then, I can’t stop seeing the thing and I’ve never quite decided if it was always used so much or if I just noticed it more because of my handy calendar. Maybe I missed out on not having one for 2004. Probably not.

Oh, so the theory is, maybe the show affected a bunch of people or maybe a lot of those calendars were on sale.

Minutes later, I heard from the polyglot critic Bruce Bawer, an old friend who follows this blog from his home in Norway:

Interestingly, of the other Germanic languages I’m
familiar with, Norwegian and Danish also have a word for this concept
(“skadefryd”), as does Swedish (“skadegl

Here’s something you shouldn’t miss:

Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy will present “The Rosenbach Company,”
their new music-theater production, Tuesday, November 9th at 7:30 p.m. at the Harry De Jur Playhouse
in The Abrons Arts Center of The Henry Street Settlement,
466 Grand Street, Manhattan.
One performance only.
Running time: 2 hours, 15 min.

Katchor and Mulcahy’s new sung-through pop-musical chronicles the life
and times of Abe Rosenbach, the world’s preeminent rare-book dealer in
the first half of the last century, and his brother Philip, a savvy
dealer of decorative arts. Their collection ranges from James Joyce’s
manuscript of “Ulysses” to John Tenniel’s original illustrations for
“Alice in Wonderland.”

Mixing projected animated images with live actors, singers and
musicians, the show explores such issues as the obsessive nature of
collecting, the relationship between cultural and commercial pursuits
and the men’s historical significance as the owners of some of the
world’s greatest literary treasures.

“…a sung-through biodrama? a chamber rock opera? a meeting of the
museum establishment with the music underground?–it is thrilling,
charming, and altogether a knockout.”

“What a bore it is, waking up in the morning always the same
person. I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big,
bushy eyebrows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist.

“I should like to be refined and melancholy, the victim of a
hopeless passion; to love in the old, stilted way, with
impossible Adoration and Despair under the pale-faced Moon.

“I wish I could get up; I wish I were the world’s greatest
Violinist. I wish I had lots of silver, and first Editions, and
green ivory.”

Logan Pearsall Smith, Trivia (courtesy of James T. Keating)

I have a cold. The worst cold in history. If I can’t rent an iron lung before bedtime, I’ll just have to shoot myself. Otherwise, I’ll try to blog in the morning. If you wrote me today and haven’t heard back, that’s why.

Later.

Old Hag’s redesign is, like, wow. Hop over and say hello! (Bundt cake optional.)