Archives for 2004

Here’s Rachel Toor, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Not so many years ago writing a trade book would bring accusations of popularizing, an academic sin worse than spending a Sunday night watching the Super Bowl. No more. Now university presses are turning away from cranking out piles of narrow monographs too expensive even for libraries and are actively looking for books that have at least an academic/trade market, books that will cross over to scholars in other disciplines or outside a narrow subfield. At the same time, commercial presses are hungry for serious, well-researched books that will appeal to people who want something more substantial than the next John Grisham. Trade publishers are also willing to pay big advances for the prestige of having heavyweight authors on their list. It isn’t hard to think of powerhouse intellectual scholars who have become rock stars of the scholarly firmament. Hey, I’d line up to get Simon Schama’s autograph.

How do these “popular” academic books happen? Do their authors instinctively know how to write for a broad audience? No stinking way. For the most part, rock-star academics are made, not born. And the people who make them are literary agents….

Read the whole thing here. And before the mud starts to fly, I poached this link–but I don’t know where I got it. I bookmarked it a few days ago, then got immersed in writing, and now I can’t remember where it came from, arrgh.

You know who you are. You know what to do. But please–I beg of you–don’t do it.

I don’t know whether this story from the Chicago Tribune says more about the state of cultural literacy in America today or the tendency of middle-aged politicians (and their speechwriters) to live in the dear departed past. Either way, it tickled me:

The bogeymen of the 2004 presidential campaign just aren’t what they used to be, a nationwide poll indicated Thursday.

When Republican allies of President Bush try to indict Democratic presidential rival Sen. John Kerry for 34-year-old ties to the anti-Vietnam War activities of Jane Fonda, only 20 percent of Americans have any idea what that’s all about.

And when Kerry accuses Bush of being the first president to suffer a net loss of jobs since Herbert Hoover at the outset of the Great Depression, more than half of respondents are left wondering what the Democratic challenger is talking about. Many think Kerry’s referring to a former FBI director, a 69-year-old dam on the Colorado River or a vacuum cleaner.

While one-fifth of those polled in a National Annenberg Election Survey know Fonda as a Vietnam War protester, twice as many think of her as an actress, 9 percent tie her to exercise videos, and 2 percent link her to either father Henry Fonda or ex-husband Ted Turner. Another 11 percent give other answers….

When survey respondents were asked, “Just your best guess, what was Herbert Hoover known for?” fewer than 7 percent tied Hoover to the Great Depression or the 1929 stock market crash–the parallel with Bush that Kerry likes to claim.

Thirty-seven percent cited Hoover as president. Twelve percent confused him with the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Another 4 percent correctly tied Hoover to the towering $48.9 million dam on the Colorado River that bears his name….

Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed had no answer at all when asked about Hoover, while 17 percent had no answer when asked about Fonda.

What I wonder is how many respondents could name any movie in which Jane Fonda starred. Or any specific thing Herbert Hoover did. Or any specific thing, period.

“There is one very good thing to be said of posterity, and this is that it turns a blind eye on the defects of greatness. Contemporary opinion is more concerned with the faults of a writer than with his excellence, but posterity takes him as a whole and very sensibly accepts the faults as the inevitable price that must be paid for the excellence.”

W. Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

A reader writes:

You and I disagree as often as we agree, but I read you regularly and enjoy your site very much.

If more people would (or could) say things like that to one another in a wider variety of contexts, both cultural and political, the world would be an infinitely more pleasant place. Instead, we talk past each other–when not shooting at one another. I don’t think things were like that when I was young, though perhaps I’m simply remembering the world of my youth through a haze of nostalgia.

At any rate, one of the goals of this site is to be a place where culture and the arts are discussed civilly and amicably. Which isn’t to say that OGIC and I don’t like a bit of snark from time to time: we do. Nor are we afraid to dust it up. But it seems to me that enough people are kicking up enough dust. All things being equal, I’d rather shed light, and maybe even a little sweetness, too.

I know Our Girl agrees, and I hope you do, too–and I also hope that “About Last Night” gives you pleasure even when you don’t.

“He had supposed that when you dissolved a joyless marriage, you opened yourself to the return of joy, but he discovered himself open instead to loneliness.

“In matters of loneliness, Chris was a novice. He had never in his life been lonely. Indeed, during the last and most trying years of his marriage, when Karen was in treatment for alcoholism and Kay was in treatment for drugs and Billy’s rock group was practicing in the basement, he thought of himself as suffering from the opposite of loneliness–which, he was amazed to discover, didn’t have a name. Why, of the 600,000 words in the language, was there no word for the opposite of loneliness?”

Jon Hassler, The Love Hunter

“Chaplin’s a great artist–there can’t be any argument about that. It’s just that he seldom makes the corners of my mouth move up. I find him easy to admire and hard to laugh at.”

Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles

In addition to all those postings I didn’t really have time to write yesterday, I succeeded in drafting yet another chapter of the Balanchine book. I want to (A) get it polished and locked up this morning and (B) get another chapter started tonight. To these ends, I plan to post no more today. Our Girl isn’t in Chicago, so chances are that you won’t be seeing anything new until Saturday, unless my resolve slackens. I’m sure you’ll forgive us…right?

Anyway, we did manage to put up a lot of stuff on Wednesday and Thursday, and it may be that you haven’t read it all, so eat what’s here. One or more of us will see you tomorrow.

I got so preoccupied with the latest chapter of my Balanchine book (which is now polished to a fare-thee-well) that I forgot to post the weekly teaser to my Friday Wall Street Journal theater column! Apologies. Today I wrote about Propeller’s all-male production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Edward Hall and playing at BAM Harvey through March 28, and Tim Robbins’ Embedded, now showing at the Public Theater.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is pure bliss:

Everyone knows that in Elizabethan times, Shakespeare’s plays were performed by companies of men and boys, but it’s one of those snippets of historical knowledge we tend to file and forget. Not only are Mr. Hall and company well aware of it, but they make the most of it without ever stooping to heavy-handed sexual sermonizing: Hippolyta (Emilio Doorgasingh) is attired in Milton Berle-style drag, while Helena and Hermia (Robert Hands and Jonathan McGuinness) duke it out like a pair of roller-derby queens on the rampage. The cheery atmosphere even extends to the intermission, during which the entire cast strolls out to the lobby and leads the audience in a sing-along (they did the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” on opening night).

Yet the members of Propeller are no less alert to the chiming music of Shakespeare’s verse, and no sooner has the wreckage of “Pyramus and Thisby” been carted away than they work one final feat of theatrical prestidigitation and modulate into the sweet solemnity of the last scene, with Puck (Simon Scardifield) speaking the epilogue so simply and benevolently that I forgot to breathe. Suddenly the lights came up and I found myself back in the real world. I hated to go home….

Embedded isn’t, and not just because of its fact-twisting, either:

You’d think a satire about Gulf War II would have tried to be laughworthy, and I suppose Mr. Robbins did his best, but in the whole of “Embedded” there are just two clever touches, both involving the American journalists who covered the war. They’re put through basic training by Col. Hardchannel (V.J. Foster), a brass-voiced drill instructor who in private life is a musical-comedy buff with a taste for Stephen Sondheim, and the military press conferences they attend are accompanied by canned Muzak, to which they gently sway in unison.

Save for those two tiny oases of wit, “Embedded” is a desert of agitprop clich