Archives for 2004

Sorry, but I won’t be blogging again until well into Thursday, if then. I wore myself out on Wednesday working on the Balanchine book and writing my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal, and instead of staying up late to work on “About Last Night,” I’ve decided to play it smart and crash.

I do, however, want to briefly mention the Wednesday-night artsjournal.com get-together at the Landmark Tavern. Doug McLennan, the mastermind and boss of artsjournal.com, “About Last Night”‘s blessed host, was in New York for a couple of days (he runs the site from Seattle), so he took the opportunity to convene all those New York-based AJ bloggers who had a couple of hours free to go drinking, plus any readers who cared to show up. We didn’t expect a crowd, but we got one anyway, and I met a lot of very nice people, the same folks who send OGIC and me all that cool e-mail.

As I was getting ready to hit the road, one reader said to me, “You know, artsjournal.com will probably be a Big Institution in a couple of years, and all of us here tonight will probably look back on this get-together and say, ‘Ah, yes, those were the days.'” We laughed. But he was right: these are the days, the dawn of a new medium, and all of you reading these words are a part of it. You’re the postmodern counterparts of those prescient people who bought their first TV sets in 1948 and watched Toscanini and Milton Berle and Harry Truman and said to themselves, “I wonder what will come of this?”

And now…to bed. I have to finish Chapter Three. I have to get this place straightened up in time for Our Girl’s arrival on Friday. I have to call my mother. I have to get some sleep. I have to pick an almanac entry. In lieu of me, go visit all those cool blogs in the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column. Do it yourself.

Later.

“The Lyric Suite was my triumph–Constance’s triumph, that is. I had liked Wozzeck at first hearing and Berg’s violin concerto at the third or fourth: there was no reason I shouldn’t like the Lyric Suite, as Constance said, and she had made up her mind that I was going to. Whenever she had dinner with us, whenever she came by in the evening, she held in her hand a long-playing record of the Lyric Suite, and once each time she played it to us. I would sit and read, sit and talk, sit and dream–at first. I have to admit, I’d sit and suffer; my wife suffered but did not sit–she would say with a vague sidelong smile, ‘All that darning…Call me when it’s over, Constance.’

“After four or five playings I was getting used to it, my wife did not get up and leave any longer: there were parts we liked very much better than other parts; three or four more times and we liked the other parts–we were, we found, crazy about the Lyric Suite: how could any of it ever have seemed hard to us? Constance was very polite, and didn’t once say, ‘When I was young I was the same way about it.’ So far as the Lyric Suite is concerned, we had been foolish and young and Constance old and clever; and we were grateful to her for that best of gifts, a change in one’s own self.”

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Today’s Wall Street Journal contains a memorable sketch of the late William Shawn, longtime editor of The New Yorker. In 1966, Lucette Lagnado reports, New York Times reporter Murray Schumach turned out a long profile of Shawn and his magazine:

It was 5,500 words–far longer than the typical newspaper story. It contained some generous praise of Shawn, noting, for instance, the “perfection” of his editing. But there were also pointed criticisms: Some articles were much too long; the Talk of the Town section lacked its old bite; and there was a sense that even the renowned fiction was no longer cutting-edge. It was what a good newspaper piece is supposed to be–neither black nor white, neither a hatchet job nor a puff piece.

But Arthur Gelb, then deputy metropolitan editor of the Times, had, under pressure, agreed to give Shawn right of approval.

Shawn hated it. Though hate doesn’t begin to capture the maelstrom of emotions that poured into the 11-page memo he sent to the Times in November 1966 after seeing the draft. He opens by damning the piece with faint praise, calling it “well-intentioned,” possessing “merits of its own.” He then he proceeds to demolish it–idea by idea, paragraph by paragraph, almost sentence by sentence. The article is “misleading,” he declares. It “misses the point.” It isn’t so much what the reporter has written as what he has “not written.” He has “missed the magazine,” described “parts of its body (an arm and a leg perhaps)” but “left out the mind and the soul.” And that represents only the first few lines of an opening paragraph that runs 2-1/2 pages.

But Shawn was just getting started. He devotes a page to summarizing the contents of his four most recent issues, listing the names of his renowned writers–Hannah Arendt, Janet Flanner, Alistair Cooke, Calvin Trillin. Then, the man described as timid and self-effacing asserts that these four issues surpass what is being done “in any other magazine in the world” and adds, parenthetically, “And they did not come about by accident.”

The rest of the memo is a catalog of 37 alleged errors, delicately referred to as “some points of fact.” They are more revealing of Mr. Shawn’s obsessive, controlling persona than of any significant flaws in the Times piece. The weighty issue of The New Yorker’s “philosophy” is at the top of his agenda. Mr. Schumach wrote benignly that the magazine “has a clear idea of its philosophy on editorial matters,” and he goes on to quote Shawn’s own succinct explanation of its essence: “We do not go beyond consulting our own judgment and tastes and what interests and pleases us,” Shawn stated, adding that “The word ‘reader’ does not come up.

Although negotiations between Gelb and Shawn (nicknamed “The Iron Mouse” by staffers) dragged on for months, the Times was licked before it started. Arguing with Shawn, Gelb recalls, “was like arguing with butter.” The story never made it into print. Surrender your dollar and read the whole saga.

Yep, still writing about Balanchine, though I took time out this afternoon to write my Washington Post Sunday column–watch this space for linkage–and go see Frankenthaler: The Woodcuts, which was even cooler than I expected. I’ll tell you all about it the first chance I get.

For now:

– Modern Art Notes skewers a clich

Guess who? Don’t peek:

“Just as we were all, potentially, in Adam when he fell, so we were all, potentially, in Jerusalem on that first Good Friday before there was an Easter, a Pentecost, a Christian, or a Church. It seems to me worthwhile asking ourselves who we should have been and what we should have been doing. None of us, I’m certain, will imagine himself as one of the Disciples, cowering in agony of spiritual despair and physical terror. Very few of us are big wheels enough to see ourselves as Pilate, or good churchmen enough to see ourselves as a member of the Sanhedrin. In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all too familiar sight–three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, ‘It’s disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things. Why can’t the authorities execute criminals humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?’ Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the nature of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.”

W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book

“It is said that the London police can always distinguish among the corpses fished out of the Thames, between those who have drowned themselves because of unhappy love affairs and those drowned for debt. The fingers of the lovers are almost invariably lacerated by their attempts to save themselves by clinging to the piers of the bridges. In contrast, the debtors apparently go down like slabs of concrete, without struggle and without afterthought.”

A. Alvarez, The Savage God

The Baltimore Sun‘s books page recently featured a symposium
whose participants were asked what book they wished had never been written. Some of the answers were deadly serious (I picked Das Kapital, while several others opted for Mein Kampf), some funny (one person sent A Year in Provence to oblivion), but Joan Mellen covered herself in honor with this response:

A book that never should have been written is my own Kay Boyle: Author of Herself (1994). At 552 pages in minuscule publisher’s revenge type, it is a loose and baggy monster of a biography. Kay Boyle’s modest if decisive contribution to the modernist short story and to expatriate Twenties Paris could easily have been covered with force and simplicity in a neat biographical study of two hundred pages in length.

Give that woman a grant!

Check out the right-hand column, where you’ll find some new Top Five items and some new blogs listed in “Sites to See.” I’ve also updated the “Teachout in Commentary” module with a new essay called “Kandinsky’s Mistake.”

I may not be blogging much this week, but I never stop thinking of you.