Archives for 2004

“As for the Quarterly Review, I have not read it, nor shall I, nor ought I–where abuse is intended not for my correction but my pain. I am however very fair game. If the oxen catch a butcher, they have a right to toss and gore him.”

Sydney Smith, letter to Francis Jeffrey, c. July 3, 1809

As you may have surmised from yesterday’s almanac, I’m deep in the throes of composition (though I am taking time today to brunch with Chicha and show her the Teachout Museum).

See you Monday, unless my resolve slackens and I blog inadvertently.

“There was a small inner room like a cupboard where, morning and afternoon, these girls took turns to make the tea. A list was tacked to the wall, of all the men and their requirements: Mr. Bostock weak with sugar, Mr. Miles strong and plain. Valda’s Leadbetter had an infusion of camomile flowers, which he bought at Jackson’s in Piccadilly; these were prepared in a separate pot and required straining. Another notice cautioned against tea-leaves in the sink. The room was close and shabby. There were stains on the lino and a smell of stale biscuits. On one spattered wall the paint was peeling, from exhalations of an electric kettle.

“Sometimes when Valda made tea Caro would set out cups for her on a scratched brown tray.

“It was something to see the queenly and long-limbed Valda measure, with disdainful scruple, the flowers for Mr. Leadbetter’s special pot (which carried, tied to its handle, a little tag: ‘Let stand five minutes.’). To hear her reel off the directions: ‘Mr. Hoskins, saccharin. Mr. Farquhar, squeeze of lemon.’ She filled the indeterminate little room with scorn and decision, and caused a thrill of wonderful fear among the other women for the conviction that, had one of these men entered, she would not have faltered a moment in her performance.

“When Valda spoke of men more generally, it was in an assumption of shared and calamitous experience. None of the other women entered on such discussions–which were not only indelicate but would have mocked their deferential dealings with Mr. This or That. Furthermore, they feared that Valda, if encouraged, might say something physical.

“Watching the office women file towards the exit at evening, Valda observed to Caro: ‘The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea.’

“There was another male faction in the office, of ageing young men who spoke bitterly of class divisions and of the right, or absence, of opportunity. For these, equally, Valda had no patience. ‘They don’t quite believe they exist, and are waiting for someone to complete the job, gratis.’ She would set down the biscuit tin, switch off the electric kettle. ‘Oh Caro, it is true that the common man is everlastingly embattled, but he has a lot of people on his side. It’s the uncommon man who gets everyone’s goat.’

“Valda would tell Caro, ‘You feel downright disloyal to your experience, when you do come across a man you could like. By then you scarcely see how you can decently make terms, it’s like going over to the enemy. And then there’s the waiting. Women have got to fight their way out of that dumb waiting at the end of the never-ringing telephone. The receiver, as our portion of it is called.’ Or, slowly revolving the steeping teapot in her right hand, like an athlete warming up to cast a disc: ‘There is the dressing up, the hair, the fingernails. The toes. And, after all that, you are a meal they eat while reading the newspaper. I tell you that ever one of those fingers we paint is another nail in their eventual coffins.’

“All this was indisputable, even brave. But was a map, from which rooms, hours, and human faces did not rise; on which there was no bloom of generosity or discovery. The omissions might constitute life itself; unless the map was intended as a substitute for the journey.

“Those at least were the objections raised by Caroline Bell.”

Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus

(Note: In my first job out of college, Editorial Assistant at a publishing house, I had to make tea most days for a [female] boss. Sometimes, too, go fetch raspberry muffins at the Mrs. Field’s in the subway station. In the latter case, I was always provided money for my own muffin into the bargain, because “I’m affluent and you’re not.” Which was very, very true.)

At Memefirst, Felix Salmon detects a pattern in the all-time best-selling issues of People magazine:

In reverse order, they are: (5) Grace Kelly, dead. (4) John Lennon, dead. (3) John F Kennedy, Jr, dead. (2) Princess Diana, dead. (1) 9/11. Could it be that the best celebrity is a dead celebrity?

Hardly surprising, but still a little bit jarring to see them listed so starkly.

A reader writes:

Discussion has been going in and out on your blog about your or OGIC’s or whoever’s five favorite things–books, movies, records, etc. I believe you sort of answered the movie question but haven’t yet addressed any other categories. Here’s another party question that I kind of like: What is your quirkiest favorite? Something you love that (seemingly) no one else gets.

That’s a great question, and I wish I had a great answer, but the sad fact is that the rest of the world always seems to catch up with my aesthetic idiosyncrasies sooner or later, usually sooner. I guess I’m just not cool enough, or maybe too centric.

The only thing that comes to mind off the top of my head (something went wrong halfway through that last clause, but you know what I mean) is W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, a long-forgotten 1975 movie about a small-time country band. The stars are Burt Reynolds, Art Carney, and Ned Beatty. It was written by Tom Rickman, a hack whose other films include Tuesdays with Morrie and The Reagans (as well as one very good Walter Matthau picture, The Laughing Policeman), and directed by John G. Avildsen, a hack whose other films include The Karate Kid and Rocky V. W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings used to turn up on TV every once in a while, but I haven’t seen it in years, and it isn’t even available on videocassette, much less DVD. I absolutely adore it, at least in retrospect, in part because it reminds me of my own idyllic days as the bass player in a small-time country band. Reynolds is fabulously charming, Carney and Beatty (and everybody else in the cast, for that matter) dead solid perfect. As if all that weren’t enough, there’s even a scene shot in the back room of Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in Nashville, right across the street from the stage door of the Ryman Auditorium, where I sat and watched the Grand Ole Opry on a hot summer night 31 years ago. Et in Arcadia ego!

I suppose I can’t recommend W.W. in good faith to cinephiles who haven’t eaten a whole lot of truck-stop chicken-fried steak washed down with Dr. Pepper, but any reader of “About Last Night” who can send me a pirated copy will nonetheless earn my undying gratitude.

What about you, OGIC? Got any quirky faves you’d care to acknowledge?

– Cinetrix is way wicked about Dave Kehr. I’m, like, ouch.

– No doubt Our Girl probably already blogged this once upon a time, but I only just discovered The Henry James Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites. It’s exhaustive–in that good way.

– Joseph Epstein waxes grumpy
(but interestingly so) on youth culture and its discontents:

If one wants to dress like a kid, spin around the office on a scooter, not make up one’s mind about what work one wants to do until one is 40, be noncommittal in one’s relationships–what, really, are the consequences? I happen to think that the consequences are genuine, and fairly serious.

“Obviously it is normal to think of oneself as younger than one is,” W.H. Auden, a younger son, told Robert Craft, “but fatal to want to be younger.” I’m not sure about fatal, but it is at a minimum degrading for a culture at large to want to be younger. The tone of national life is lowered, made less rich. The first thing lowered is expectations, intellectual and otherwise. To begin with education, one wonders if the dumbing down of culture one used to hear so much about and which continues isn’t connected to the rise of the perpetual adolescent.

Consider contemporary journalism, which tends to play everything to lower and lower common denominators. Why does the New York Times, with its pretensions to being our national newspaper, choose to put on its front pages stories about Gennifer Flowers’s career as a chanteuse in New Orleans, the firing of NFL coaches, the retirement of Yves Saint Laurent, the canceling of the singer Mariah Carey’s recording contract? Slow-news days is a charitable guess; a lowered standard of the significant is a more realistic one. Since the advent of its new publisher, a man of the baby boomer generation, an aura of juvenilia clings to the paper. Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, two of the paper’s most-read columnists, seem not so much the type of the bright college student but of the sassy high-school student–the clever, provocative editor of the school paper out to shock the principal–even though both are in their early fifties….

– While we’re on the subject, here’s a new angle on The Passion of the Christ, courtesy of Variety:

Young males who flock to slasher pics seem to be taking an interest in “The Passion,” which has been widely characterized as gory by reviewers.

Fangoria editor Anthony Timpone said, “It’s sparked an interest in my readership because of the extreme nature of the it as well as the controversy.” The magazine hasn’t covered “The Passion,” but Timpone said horror helmer David Cronenberg recently suggested he should. And at least one horror fan site, E-Splatter.com, has given “The Passion” the thumb’s up: “As a horror fan, I was more than satisfied. This is not some kiddie Christ film. This is the real deal.”

“But consider the case of a man sitting down to write something genuinely original–to pump an orderly flow of ideas out of the turbid pool of his impressions, feelings, vague thoughts, dimly sensed instincts. He works in a room alone. Every jangle of the telephone cuts him like a knife; every entrance of a visitor blows him up. Solitary, lonely, tired of himself, wrought up to an abnormal sensitiveness, he wrestles abominably with intolerable complexities–shoadowy notions that refuse to reveal themselves clearly, doubts that torture, hesitations that damn. His every physical sensation is enormously magnified. A cold in the head rides him like a witch. A split fingernail hurts worse than a paparotomy. The smart of a too-close shave burns like a prairie-fire. A typewriter that bucks is worse than a band of music. The far-away wail of a child is the howling of a fiend. A rattling radiator is a battery of artillery.

“Nothing could be worse than this agony. A few hours of it and even the strongest man is thoroughly tired out. Days upon days of it, and he is ready for the doctor. The layman whose writing is confined to a few dozen letters a day can have no conceptions of the hard work done by such a writer. Worse, he must plod his way through many days when writing is impossible altogether–days of doldrums, of dead centers, of utter mental collapse. These days have a happy habit of coming precisely when they are most inconvenient–when a book has been promised and the publisher is snorting for it. They are days of unmitigated horror. The writer labors like a galley-slave, and accomplishes absolutely nothing. A week of such effort and he is a wreck. It is in the last ghastly hours of such weeks that writers throw their children out of sixth-story windows and cut off the heads of their wives.”

H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

“So far as I know ours is the only language in which it has been found necessary to give a name to the piece of prose which is described as the purple patch; it would not have been necessary to do so unless it were characteristic.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up