Archives for 2004

“In Vicksburg, on the asphalt, the deflected minions of want walked, those who lived to care for and feed their cars, and she watched them outside Big Mart. And the sad philosophic fishermen who lived to drag slabby beauties from the water, that dream of long seconds, so they told her. About the same happy contest as sexual intercourse, as she recalled it, though these episodes sank deeper into a blurred well every day. She loved the men and their lostness on the water. Their rituals with lines and rods and reels and lures. The worship they put into it. How they beleaguered themselves with gear and lore, like solemn children or fools. She had spent too much time being unfoolish, as if that were the calling of her generation. As you would ask somebody the point of their lives and they would answer: horses.”

Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan

If you had to live in a film, what would it be? To my surprise, this turns out to be the hardest of Terry’s questions for me to answer. I thought it would be a simple matter of picking one of my many favorite movies, but it turns out that the movies I like best don’t tend to be happy places. The Dreamlife of Angels? The Long Goodbye? The unjustly forgotten Georgia? As potential habitats, these all look damn inhospitable. Still thinking.

But the saddest work of art I know? King Lear. Two things about this play especially make me feel like I’ve been drawn and quartered: the rift between a father and daughter, and the cruel way that tragedy springs from mere foolishness, from what should be forgivable. Shouldn’t it?

So Terry, despite my taking an Incomplete for now, will you let us in on your answers?

Two shows yesterday, a performance tonight. Result: no more blogging today, especially since I need to at least try and write some prose-for-hire before the sun goes down. I haven’t heard from Our Girl for a couple of days, but maybe she’s got something up her pretty sleeve. I myself do not (nor is my sleeve pretty).

The phone is off the hook now. See you Monday, unless my resolve weakens.

“Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction.”

Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

Janet Maslin holds forth in today’s New York Times about events likely–or not–to follow the opening of The Passion of the Christ:

In Bernardo Bertolucci’s new film, “The Dreamers,” three nubile cin

Of all the many things that make blogging a truly new medium, the most important is linking. As I remarked in my much-discussed notes on blogging, “Blogs without links aren’t blogs.” Linking transforms individual blogs into a larger community–a blogosphere–whose members freely share ideas and readers with one another, and in so doing increase their own value.

One of the most fascinating aspects of blogging is the unexpected speed with which it has evolved into a collective “gatekeeper” for traditional media–a way of sifting through tons of dirt and finding the gems. I now “read” most magazines and newspapers not directly but by way of links, some of the best of which come from artsjournal.com, “About Last Night”‘s invaluable host. (You can read it by clicking on the artsjournal.com logo in the upper-left-hand corner of this page.) It was because of artsjournal.com, for example, that I became aware of yesterday’s Women’s Wear Daily story about how magazine newsstand sales are plummeting:

According to official figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, out of the 472 magazines it tracks, 319 reported newsstand declines and their combined newsstand sales fell 5.9 percent (3.3 million copies), not counting new titles reporting sales for the first time.

The big picture looks even worse for magazines too small to be counted by the ABC. According to the International Periodical Distributors Association, which tracks 95 percent of all magazines, net unit sales fell 13.4 percent in the second half of 2003 compared with the previous year, and that’s after sales dropped 12.9 percent in the first half (when there was a war on).

“You can’t blame Iraq, and you can’t blame the economy…. Well, I guess you can, but how long can you keep doing that?” said Chip Block, vice chairman of the subscription fulfillment company USApubs.

Nowhere in the story does the author suggest that blogging might be pulling newsstand sales downward–but I have no doubt that it is. In fact, my guess is that the emergence of blogging will transform the periodical business beyond recognition, as more people come to rely on links as their primary means of reading most magazines.

Links being as important as they are, it strikes me that bloggers ought to be scrupulous about giving credit where credit is due–and not merely to the original publication, either. I don’t read Women’s Wear Daily, I read artsjournal.com, and it would have been implicitly dishonest for me to mention that WWD story without also mentioning how I found out about it in the first place.

Here’s how Our Girl and I decide when and where to give credit:

(1) If a story has already been widely linked throughout the blogosphere, we don’t usually attempt to give credit for the original link. (Aside from everything else, we don’t always know who spotted it first.)

(2) If the story appeared in a widely read print-media publication such as the New York Times, we generally don’t give credit, either–that is, unless the blogger in question dug a tidbit out of that publication that might otherwise have gone overlooked, or enhanced its interest by commenting on it in a memorable way.

(3) In all other cases, we credit the blogsource. (The formula I most often use is “Courtesy of blogsource.com…”)

Do we slip up on occasion? Sure. I often bookmark stories cherrypicked from the blogosphere, and by the time I get around to looking at the bookmarks, I’ve sometimes forgotten where I found them. But that’s a mistake, not a policy. Whenever we can, we credit the source.

This isn’t merely a matter of common courtesy, or even collegiality. OGIC and I don’t give credit to such fellow bloggers as Supermaud, Sarah, Lizzie, Cinetrix, and Chicha
just to be chummy (though that’s part of the fun). We do it because we want you to read them, too. The potential audience for litblogs and arts blogs is infinitely larger than the number of people currently reading them. The more such blogs you visit on a regular basis, the more interested you’ll become in the larger phenomenon of blogging, and–we hope–the more often you’ll come back to dance with the one who brung you.

Repeat after me: Giving credit to blogsources for borrowed links is good for everybody in the blogosphere.

Not all bloggers feel this way. Certain of our colleagues are bad–a few notoriously so–about giving credit to other bloggers. I’ll name no names, but I will say that the stingy practice of link-poaching has lately come in for quite a bit of backstage criticism.

Needless to say, others can and will do as they please. That’s in the nature of the blogosphere. But at “About Last Night,” we believe that the larger interests of litblogging and arts blogging are best served by crediting the sources of our links, and we strongly recommend that our fellow bloggers do the same thing.

Here endeth the lesson. We return you now to our regularly scheduled program.

In case you haven’t heard (it’s all over the blogosphere), Naomi Wolf says that Harold Bloom sexually harassed her while she was an undergraduate at Yale. The accusation reportedly appears in an article by Wolf scheduled for publication in the next issue of New York. For now, Rachel Donadio summed up the story in this week’s New York Observer, throwing in for good measure a typically incendiary quote from Camille Paglia:

“I just feel it’s indecent that if Naomi Wolf did not have the courage to pursue the matter at the time, or in the 1990’s, and put her own reputation on the line, then to bring all of this down on a man who is in his 70’s and has health problems–who has become a culture hero to readers in the humanities around the world–to drag him into a

If you’ve always wondered what I look like in the flesh, come to the 92nd Street Y this Sunday night and see for yourself. The occasion is “Norman Podhoretz in Conversation with Terry Teachout.” Says the press release:

Norman Podhoretz is an acclaimed author of nine books on subjects ranging from contemporary literature to foreign policy and was editor-in-chief of Commentary for 35 years. His most recent book is The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings from the 1950s through the 1990s. Terry Teachout is the music critic of Commentary and a contributor to Time and The Washington Post, among other publications….They will discuss the intersections of politics and culture in the last half century.

The jousting begins at eight o’clock. For more information, or to order a ticket, go here.