Archives for 2004

I am now officially ensconced in Smalltown, U.S.A., where I’ve set up my iBook on a card table in the guest bedroom (which used to be my bedroom, back when I wasn’t a guest), and I’m speaking to you by way of a dialup connection so slow that you can hear it creak. As a result, I will not be checking my blogmail until I return to New York on Thursday, so please don’t be offended.

Job One: sleep late. After that, I have quite a few postings bouncing around in my head, and I’ll write them as the spirit moves me. I might even do some work on the Balanchine book. And I think I’ll have a piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, subject as always to the vagaries of newspaper scheduling.

All this and more after I wake up, O.K.?

I see Terry has ambushed me when I wasn’t looking! I like the questions, but I’m going to take my sweet time answering them: I’ll field a question a day over the course of this week, moving from easiest to hardest. A few of you have already written with your own answers; keep them coming and we’ll post a selection of readers’ responses next week.

For the purposes of the first question, “What book have you owned longest?” I’ll only count the books that live with me, not those that still reside in my parents’ house. 99% of the books with me here in Chicago date from my college career or later. Of the handful of older books, the oldest by far is a hardcover copy of Ellen Raskin’s Newberry Medal winner The Westing Game, published in 1978. Twenty-five years–not too shabby. Why, that’s as long as some very accomplished bloggers have been around!

I wonder whether kids are still reading this book. It’s a deeply silly and extremely devious mystery about an elaborate game created by an eccentric millionaire to decide who will inherit his fortune. When I discovered it, I thought I had died and gone to literary heaven.

As much as I adored The Westing Game, there were other books I loved as well, and I’m not sure why it’s the only one of its vintage in Chicago. I can’t remember making a conscious decision to bring it with me, and I haven’t taken it off the shelf in recent memory, until today.

Some runners-up from the high school years: a well-worn paperback copy of Alain-Fournier’s amazing The Wanderer (Le Grand Meaulnes in french); Charles Baxter’s Harmony of the World; the Norton Heart of Darkness, complete with embarrassing marginalia; and, natch, some Raymond Carver.

Many thanks to all of the readers who wrote this weekend with answers to my query about a Simone Weil quotation. Several folks sent this one, which made me fear I had misremembered the force of the remark by a full 180 degrees:

Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, full of charm.

The source is an essay called “Morality and Literature,” first published in Cahiers du Sud (January 1944). However, the following quotation, tracked down by one intrepid reader, seems to vindicate my memory without contradicting the above. Here Weil claims that the greatest literature is that which manages to make good interesting, and thus comes closest to a particular kind of realism:

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating. Therefore ‘imaginative literature’ is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both). It only escapes from this alternative if in some way it passes over to the side of reality through the power of art–and only geniuses can do that.

This can be found in an essay called “Evil,” reprinted in The Simone Weil Reader and Gravity and Grace.

There for the seeing

Is all loveliness,

White limbs moving

Light in wantonness.

Gay go the dancers,

I stand and see,

Gaze, till their glances

Steal myself from me.

“Obmittatus studia,” Carmina Burana (trans. Helen Waddell)

I’m off to Missouri today to spend a few days with my family. I’ll be bringing along my iBook, and insofar as possible I’ll be posting from there, but don’t expect a Mississippi-like flow of fugitive thoughts.

The good news is that Our Girl will most likely be putting in her oar from time to time, and I’ll be back in Manhattan Thursday afternoon to resume Balanchine-related activities, not to mention a certain amout of blogging.

Be nice while I’m gone, O.K.?

Some things to think about as I head out the door:

(1) What book have you owned longest–the actual copy, I mean?

(2) If you could wish a famous painting out of existence, what would it be?

(3) If you had to live in a film, what would it be?

(4) If you had to live in a song, what would it be?

(5) What’s the saddest work of art you know? And does experiencing it make you similarly sad?

Says James Tata:

In my dream, music pirating, by destroying the recording industry, and with it the concept of musicians getting paid for the recordings they have made, destroys the very concept of music recording. Instead of stars whose talent is primarily charisma rather than artistic substance, songwriters are the new stars, like they were when the music business consisted of sheet music publishers. Music then returns to its original state: if you want to listen, you have to be in the same room as the musicians. The ranks of paid performers swells–suddenly we all know several people who make a living singing or playing instruments. Musicians are as common as accountants. Better still, most of us spend a large part of our youth learning how to play instruments. The piano again furnishes every middle class home. And, because we are all so musically sophisticated, we never have to listen to disco during halftime at the Super Bowl again.

Needless to say, James has bought himself a ticket to Fantasy Island. But of course (as he says) it is a dream that he’s recounting, one in which he envisions an ideal state by whose imaginary coordinates we might steer a bit closer to something that might actually come to pass.

Like, say, what? Well, I wrote a long essay for A Terry Teachout Reader called “Life Without Records” in which I speculated about the possible effects of the coming collapse of the classical recording industry (which I foresaw several years ago) on the culture of classical music. Here’s some of what I wrote:

The collapse of the major classical labels and the rise of the Internet as a locus for decentralized recording activity will almost certainly prevent the re-emergence of anything remotely resembling the superstar system. What would classical music look like without superstars? A possible answer can be found by looking at classical ballet. Few ballet companies tour regularly, and some of the most important, like New York City Ballet, are rarely seen outside their home towns; videocassettes are a notoriously inadequate substitute for live performances, and thus sell poorly. For these reasons, the major media devote little space to ballet, meaning that there are never more than one or two international superstars at any given moment. Most balletgoers spend the bulk of their time attending performances by the resident companies of the cities in which they live, and the dances, not the dancers, are the draw. (It is The Nutcracker that fills seats, not the Sugar Plum Fairy.)

In the United States, regional opera works in much the same way. Only a half-dozen major American companies can afford to import superstars; everyone else hires solid second-tier singers with little or no name recognition, often using local artists to fill out their casts. Audiences are attracted not by the stars, but by the show–that is, by dramatically compelling productions of musically interesting operas. If the larger culture of classical music were to be reorganized along similar lines, then concert presenters, instead of presenting a small roster of international celebrity virtuosos, might be forced to engage a wider range of lower-priced soloists, possibly including local artists and ensembles with a carefully cultivated base of loyal fans. Similarly, regional symphony orchestras would have to adopt more imaginative programming strategies in order to attract listeners who now buy tickets mainly to hear superstar soloists play popular concertos in person. It is possible, too, that with the breakup of the single worldwide market created by the superstar system, we might see a similar disintegration of the blandly eclectic “international” style of performance that came to dominate classical music in the Seventies. Performers who play for the moment, rather than for the microphones of an international record company primarily interested in its bottom line, are less likely to play it safe–and more likely to play interesting music.

In the midst of these seemingly endless uncertainties, one aspect of life without records is not only possible but probable: henceforth, nobody in his right mind will look to classical music as a means of making very large sums of money. Of all the ways in which the invention of the phonograph changed the culture of classical music, perhaps the most fateful was that it turned a local craft into an international trade, thereby attracting the attention of entrepreneurs who were more interested in money than art. Needless to say, there can be no art without money, but the recording industry, by creating a mass market for music, sucked unprecedentedly large amounts of money into the classical-music culture, thereby insidiously and inexorably altering its artistic priorities….

Read the whole thing here–when the book comes out, that is. (You can order it in advance by clicking on the link.)

AMANDA: Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious.

ELYOT [seriously]: You mustn’t be serious, my dear one, it’s just what they want.

AMANDA: Who’s they?

ELYOT: All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant. Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths. Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light.

AMANDA: If I laugh at everything, I must laugh at us too.

ELYOT: Certainly you must. We’re figures of fun all right.

No