Archives for 2004

This was a day made for blogging. Not only did I get an unexpected sneak peek at the new Museum of Modern Art, but I spent the evening at Birdland listening to the Phil Woods Quintet, with Bill Charlap sitting in on piano. That’s an only-in-New-York story raised to the umpteenth power.

Alas, I’m still a few feet under the weather, as is Sarah, who met me at Birdland and was duly blown away by Woods and company. Seeing as how we both have time-consuming stuff on our plates tomorrow (Sarah is sitting on a panel with Maud, while I have to write a speech in the morning and give it in the evening), we decided to be mature, sensible adults and hang it up early.

Actually, it was Sarah who was mature and sensible. Left to my own devices, I probably would have stayed up half the night writing and paid the price tomorrow, but she set me straight.

“Should I blog tonight, or should I go to bed?” I asked her in the cab after the gig.

She looked at me with open-mouthed horror. “Are you kidding?” she replied, all but wagging a stern finger in my face. “Go home and go to bed. You can write this up on Friday–if then.”

I knew when I was licked. I have lots and lots of thoughts to share with you, but they’ll keep until Friday–or longer.

In the meantime, the Phil Woods Quintet is at Birdland through Saturday. If you’re loose, go. If you’re not, get that way. If you can’t, order this album and eat your heart out.

Later.

“‘I want to influence people so they’ll do what I think it’s important they should do. I can’t get ’em to do that unless I let ’em bore me first, you understand. Then just as they’re delighting in having got me punch-drunk with talk I come back at ’em and make ’em do what I’ve got lined up for ’em.’

“‘I wish I could do that,’ Dixon said enviously.

I just got back from my joint appearance with Bob Gottlieb and Robert Greskovic at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square. It went well. The house was nearly full, the crowd asked terrific questions, and we sold and signed a pile of books afterward. One woman bought a copy of All in the Dances for her young daughter, who had School of American Ballet stamped all over her. Sure enough, it turned out that she’ll be dancing in New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker this season, so I inscribed it to “Lisa, who carries the torch.”

Her mother smiled when I handed back the book. “She won’t understand it just yet,” she said, “but someday she will.” That’s a nice thought, isn’t it?

I was pleased to spot several friends in the audience, among them a critic, a biographer, three musicians, and fellow bloggers Sarah
and Beatrice. Their presence buoyed me up, seeing as how my steam was already running low by the time I crawled up to the dais. Needless to say, Wednesday promises to be at least as hectic–lunch with a MoMA curator, followed by Phil Woods and Bill Charlap at Birdland, to which Sarah is accompanying me–so I’d better head for bed right now.

Don’t expect any earth-shakingly brilliant postings tomorrow. I’m nowhere near my picture-perfect best (it actually took me two hours longer than usual to write my Friday drama column this morning), so I doubt I’ll be generating any more prose until Thursday, when I have to write a speech. For the moment, I’ll be more than happy just to get another good night’s sleep.

Oh, one more thing: now that you’ve all bought my book, don’t forget to buy Bob Gottlieb’s George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, just out from HarperCollins. It’s good, too!

“One of the constant minor joys of reading Trollope is coming across descriptions of little gestures which reveal character in much the same way as a good actor does, either deliberately or half-consciously. There is an example early on in The Way We Live Now in his description of Father John Barham, a young, overenthusiastic, gentlemanly Catholic priest.

My new iTunes program contains a screen called “Top 25 Most Played” that tells me which songs I’ve listened to most frequently since I installed it. Here are the tracks at the top of the current chart:

– Erin McKeown, “A Better Wife”

– Frank Sinatra, “Witchcraft”

– George Strait, “I’ve Come to Expect It from You”

– Toto, “99”

– Marvin Gaye, “Got to Give It Up”

– Ahmad Jamal, “New Rhumba”

– Couperin, “The Mysterious Barricades” (played on guitar by G

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m letting the blogmail pile up, in the hopes of finding buried treasure when I answer it all over the weekend (but mainly because I just don’t have enough steam in the boiler to open it right now).

As always, thanks for your patience. I really don’t like being sick, even when I’m getting better….

In the comments over at Mad Max Perkins’s excellent newish publishing-insider blog, commenter Marjorie offers this startling perspective:

By my reckoning, I read about two books a month. (It used to be more, but children have an odd way of needing a lot of attention.)

My financial adviser informs me that I must die when I am 87 because I will run out of money at that point. So, assuming she is right, at two books a month I will read only 520 books more in my lifetime. Do I want to waste one of those precious allotments on an award-winning book that I find neither enjoyable nor enlightening? I do not.

Screw the awards and their fallible human judges. I start with reviews and word-of-mouth. Then I go to the book jacket and read a page or two at the bookstore or on Amazon. Then I buy it and give it 50 pages. If I’m not laughing, crying, or learning something by page 50, out it goes, guilt-free. Life is too short to read a book that doesn’t give me something in return for my time, energy, and money.

520: astonishingly finite and sobering, that figure. I’m reminded of last year, when the Booker Prize went to a book I’d never heard of by a writer also unknown to me. On impulse, I ducked into a bookstore on my way home the day of the announcement and bought a cloth copy of D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little. I would never get beyond chapter 2. So at least I still had my time, save a few minutes. But had I held off and read a few of the reviews that soon followed, I would also still have that particular $20. Whoops.

My own expected number of books-yet-to-be-read is higher than 520. But that doesn’t make it any less stark, wherever it may fall. This is why I want to know if Critic X didn’t think a book was the best of the year as reputed, and why I don’t want critics to pull their punches. It doesn’t mean I implicitly trust any one critic’s judgment (well, maybe Wood’s, tried and true), but, like Marjorie, I do want as much varied input as possible, and I want critics to write with readers, not authors, in mind. The 2003 Booker showed me that awards committees can be every bit as fallible as critics; I hasten to add that the converse is also true. All we can ask of each is frank and searching judgment, and to please keep in mind the (shudder) 520.

I’ve suspected for the past couple of days that I was on the mend, but one important thing was missing: a good night’s sleep. Though I slept for twelve hours on Saturday, it was the kind of shallow, disordered sleep that fails to refresh an ailing mind and body, and I hardly slept at all the next night, a dead giveaway that I hadn’t quite turned the corner.

Yesterday was different. I was double-booked–a movie in the afternoon, a play in the evening–and by the time I finally got home I was so exhausted that I threw my coat on the floor, curled up in a ball on the couch, and turned on the TV to unwind. I quickly found myself nodding off, so instead of following my usual end-of-day blogging routine, I went straight to bed to read. The book fell out of my hands after a few minutes and landed on my face, and I stayed conscious just long enough to turn out the light. There followed nearly ten hours of deep, restorative sleep, the kind in which you dream so intensely and continuously that you’re aware of it while it’s happening. At one point I actually dreamed that I was hanging out with a bass-playing friend of mine in the carport of a ranch house in Smalltown, U.S.A., telling her about how deeply I’d slept the night before. I remember verbatim one thing I said to her: “It felt as though I had an electric plug sticking in one ear.” That’s exactly how it felt–like I was recharging an empty battery.

I felt stunned when I woke up a half-hour ago, but in a good way. Gradually my wits returned to me. I remembered that I had a Wall Street Journal review to write this morning, plus a bit of blog-tending. I remembered that I’d cancelled my lunch with Maud so that I’d be fresh for tonight’s appearance at Barnes & Noble. Under other circumstances I might have gone screaming into action immediately, but today I know better. My next move will be to sit down at the kitchen table with a bagel and some fruit, clear my head of the lingering fumes of deep sleep, and permit myself to revel in the sensation of starting to feel better. The world can wait.

If you don’t have anything better to do, come see me hold forth this evening. (For details, click on the link.) I may look a little pale around the edges, but I’m pretty much myself again. That’s the one worthwhile thing about having been sick: it feels so good to get well.

UPDATE: Look at page 87 of this week’s New Yorker, in the middle of David Denby’s piece about Pedro Almod