Archives for 2004

I’m back from giving that speech in Michigan, and too tired to do much more than give you the inside skinny on my drama column in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, in which I reviewed Craig Lucas’ Small Tragedy, a backstage play about a production of Oedipus Rex, and Charles Mee’s Wintertime, about which the less said, the better.

I loved the Lucas play, though I didn’t expect to:

The good news is that Craig Lucas’ characters never act like puppets on a better writer’s string, nor is “Small Tragedy” a parasitical “commentary” on Sophocles. It is a play with a life of its own about a group of interestingly complicated people with lives of their own, one in which the process of staging a show is simultaneously satirized and illuminated, an exceedingly neat trick. Mr. Lucas likes to teeter on the edge of political correctness and agonizing predictability–one character is HIV-positive, another is a Good European who spends most of the first act condescending to his na

Publishers Weekly has a story about the Sam Tanenhaus appointment, based on interviews with Bill Keller and Bob Loomis (Tanenhaus’ editor at Random House). No link, alas, but here are some quotes:

Tanenhaus, said Keller, displayed particular proficiency at matching reviewer to book–one of the tests apparently had interviewers holding up a work of fiction and asking how the candidate would handle it–and other skills which further “reassured us that this guy was quite impressive and could hold his own against anyone.” He added that Tanenhaus “has a tremendous amount of energy, which in a small operation is a lot of the battle. You have to be able to inspire, and he’s an inspirational presence.”…

Keller also continued to emphasize timeliness and relevance, in both fiction and non-fiction, for TBR. Tanenhaus’ background lies in history, biography and, perhaps most critically, current affairs, expertise the Times thinks could apply to unexpected areas. “I think he can bring a bit of a news sensibility to the reviewing of fiction,” said Keller. “By that I don’t just mean that he’ll get excited by a book that is a new discovery but that the Review will write about fiction in a way that ties into the modern world. People who write fiction don’t live in seclusion from the world.” Tanenhaus himself has a somewhat unexpected background in fiction; in 1984 he wrote Literature Unbound, an incisive survey of Western Lit, despite being just seven years out of college.

Tanenhaus, of course, still has work cut out for him; besides staff, there’s the perennial hobgoblin of space and the pressure to keep the section literary while revamping its dusty reputation. Indeed, if the twin, sometimes incompatible, concerns for the Times in the selection were snap and seriousness, the newspaper seems to feel like it has achieved both with its choice, who has literary cred and magazine buzz, Robert Caro by way of Graydon Carter.

I was just about to praise Household Opera for a major breakthrough in phonetic orthography–Rrrowr!–but then I googled it and came up with 450 hits. Next thing you know, somebody will be writing to tell me it’s actually from Finnegans Wake….

While we’re on the subject, more or less, I have settled on Eeuuww! as my preferred spelling of that now-essential expletive. Any questions?

(I also prefer Fuhgedaboudit, as rendered by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities, but no standard rendering has yet been universally accepted, alas. These things matter!)

From the Los Angeles Times story about Sam Tanenhaus’ appointment as editor of the New York Times Book Review:

He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998 for his biography “Whittaker Chambers” (Random House), about a key figure in the Alger Hiss spy trial.

Um, right. And David was a “key figure” in the later career of Goliath. And Die Frau ohne Schatten is an anti-abortion opera.

Memo to the L.A. Times culture desk: get some culture. Fast.

“In the previous year Christian Thrale, who was then in his twenties, unexpectedly had an evening free from weekend work at a government office. In retrospect it seemed to have been an evening free, also, of himself. He did not often go alone to a concert or anything else of the cultural kind. On your own, you were at the mercy of your responses. Accompanied, on the other hand, you remained in control, made assertive sighs and imposed hypothetical requirements. You could also deliver your opinion, seldom quite favourable, while walking home.

“As to pleasure, he was suspicious of anything that relieved his feelings.”

Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus

An art historian friend sends ranging reflections on last week’s unlikely art appreciation moment on Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” (a show I’ve never seen, though I will cop to “Average Joe 2.” Hey, it can’t be all Henry James all the time, people):

Since the ludicrous finale of “Average Joe 2: Hawaii,” “The Apprentice” is now the only reality show that has me on the couch at the appointed time. I enjoy seeing all these wooden people turn against each other in the service of completing ridiculous tasks that bring to my mind the humiliation of selling band candy door-to-door when I was in junior high. The episode last week, with the competitors selling art at a gallery, managed to make room in my soul for both despair and a weird sort of elation. Despair first, of course. The assorted MBAs and “project managers” were assigned the project of selecting an artist to represent and then attempting to sell his or her work at a gallery opening. Each team chose one of two artists, and the team that made the most money in the one-night gallery hustle was the winner. Seeing these gladiators using their MBA tools to understand what they were doing was a debilitating experience. They showed up at the studios, they asked questions, they took notes. They stared blankly at the artists explaining their respective works and then came up with such insightful questions as “What would a typical price point for a work like this be?” I don’t blame them for this, of course, because it’s what they’re trained to do, but they were all so utterly adrift in the sea of genuine responsiveness that I feared for the state of cultural production as a whole. Trump put them on the wrong foot at the outset by standing on the steps of the Met telling them, in his introduction to the assignment, that all art was “subjective,” a view that they all parroted when it became clear that they were failing. Hatchet-faced Heidi misidentified a work as being constructed from a toilet seat when it was really a fireplace screen. Troy blatantly displayed his lack of knowledge as a sales pitch, as if buying, say, a car from a salesman who didn’t know anything about cars would be a good thing. Omarosa laid back and did “what people at galleries do–let the patrons experience the works on their own.” That was the smartest approach, even though it has an empirical edge to it that chills me. And she was fired at the end of the show to boot.

In the end, tonight was all sense and zero sensibility. In an era in which the reality dating shows consist of the same cliches–“I’ve never felt this way before”; “I feel you can really look inside me”; “I’m looking for The One”–I am starting to wonder if what constitutes being human now is just having a ready repertoire of stock phrases trotted out at the appropriate time. For these Apprentices, working out of the box is like speaking a click language, but I guess they don’t teach you much about sensibility in Who Moved My Cheese? Trump’s declaration of art as “subjective” gave these contestants the license to dismiss what they were selling as bottled water–last week’s assignment, by the way–only less comprehensible. So intent on proving their ambition and business-worthiness are these contestants that you wonder if there’s a genuine response out there anywhere among those who don’t hit the galleries and the museums. Or read novels or whatever. This sounds superior, and I don’t mean it to, but in the same week that Barenboim resigned from the CSO because he was tired of his “development” duties, I wonder what capacity our population has for anything that can’t be quantified.

The reason I found this cause for despair is also a reason for elation, because the works selected by the producers (or whoever) were actually worthy of a response. The artists were articulate and their works were–I’m going out on a limb here–good. Even the artists I didn’t have a particular taste for–the painter who embedded his own DNA in his bright, energetic works in the form of hairs and toenail clippings and god knows what else–had their positive qualities and they all had a thoughtful exuberance that I never thought I’d see on network tv. While one of the gallery owners fronting this scam was exhorting the Apprentices to “communicate” better with the artists, I found myself staring at the works hanging behind her in the background. The artists eventually selected were a woman doing, in a kind of John Currin idiom, a series of technically highly proficient and interesting allegories about womanhood (not usually my gig, but she won me over, and I laughed out loud when one of the Apprentices described her work as “medieval”) and a man whose abstract works–abstracted, he said, from landscapes–were gentle and spare and rich; the showcasing of these two articulate painters on primetime NBC made me believe, if only for a moment, that finally the specter of the horrendous “Contemporary Art on 60 Minutes” episode of the 1990s (or was it the 80s? God, I’m getting old) had finally disintegrated, rightfully, into dust.

To their credit, the Apprentices made the right choices for the work they were going to promote. But their utter inability to talk about the work, even if only to sell it, and their bemused indifference (“OK, I’ll try to speak a click language for an evening”) about what they were doing only consolidated the idea for me that visual art is a flummoxing agent of the highest order. And it deserves better. These works tonight deserved better, and with my enthusiasm for what I was seeing I could have outsold the Apprentices with my mouth taped shut. It wouldn’t have been hard, given the quality of the “product.” Why is enthusiasm so elusive these days?

Thanks to Our Friend on the Block (who previously opined for About Last Night here) for letting me share.

Jack Shafer is the Heidi Julavits of blogville:

Several times a day–oh hell, a dozen times a day–I click my way to Gawker and Wonkette for a couple of minutes of reading that usually elicit more guilt than pleasure. If you’ve yet to visit these blogs, imagine them as the twin offspring of a date-rape incident between Drudge Report and the original Spy magazine. (I’ll leave it to your imagination who jumped whom.) Gawker collects links to the day’s news and gossip about publishing, New York celebrity culture, advertising, the Paris Hilton video, the art world, public sightings of movie stars and rockers, and adds a signature cutting remark to tie things up. Wonkette performs a similar service for the news and gossip from Washington, although sexing up news from think tanks and politics, and reporting sightings of Mark Shields in blog form is by far the harder assignment.

…But after several weeks of consuming every cartoon obscenity, bludgeoning wisecrack, and meta-knowing, callow riposte served on these two blogs, I’ve been asking myself: Are these blogs a part of the better world we hope to leave to our sons and daughters?

Well, yes, if we intend for our children to grow strong from sucking bile instead of milk.

Well, no. For one thing, they’re a snappier, funnier version of what many of us are dishing around the coffee maker anyway. For another, who’s bringing the children into it? Which makes me wonder, is anyone writing blogs for kids yet? It’s gotta be in the cards.

The Forager defines and defends backlash:

When tastemakers grab onto something, it’s not enough for them merely to champion it or talk about why they like it or explain why it’s worth seeing-reading-listening to-exploring-etc. In order to justify their own existence, tastemakers have to convince an audience that said work is of vital importance to anyone who considers themselves culturally literate.

The Sopranos becomes a legitimate target for backlash not so much because it’s overvalued as a TV show (it’s not–it remains one of the best TV shows ever), but because tastemakers started talking about the show in terms that made it seem far more important than a TV show could ever be. (Exemplified by the slogan “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” Actually, it is TV, i.e. just as important and significant as Friends and The Apprentice)…

And Household Opera sketches a rough map of an ideal intellectual community (IIC):

1. The IIC would consist of people who aren’t competing with each other for funds, status, recognition, or employment. Intellectual work would not be a zero-sum game to determine who can publish the most, or the fastest, or with the most prestigious publisher.

2. In fact, now that I think about it, publication wouldn’t be all-important. Exchange of intellectual work, yes; but that wouldn’t be limited to the traditional options of journal article and monograph. Blogging would count. So would conversation over dinner. In point of fact, I’ve always preferred the less formal ways academics have of sharing their work. At conferences, it’s not the panels I really go for, though there’s usually a paper or two I’m glad to have heard (sometimes more, depending on the conference); it’s the opportunity to meet someone who happens to know a lot about something really interesting, and to end up talking in the hotel bar until after midnight.

3. My IIC, like Susan’s, would not be limited to academics. This is probably the corollary to point 1. More specifically: I want to see creative types there as well as the trained literary critics and historians and anthropologists and whatnot. I want to be able to talk to poets and musicians and artists. I want to be able to pick the brains of both musicologists and opera singers. I also want to be able to talk to people who’ve taken their academic training and put it to interesting uses…

You know what they say: read the whole things.