Archives for 2004

I woke up yesterday morning and realized that I’d finally gotten the better of the bug that bit me. Needless to say, that’s all the more reason for me to continue taking it easy for as long as I can, since I have a lifelong habit of jumping the fences. Still, I’m sure that I’ve turned the corner, and just in the nick of time, too: I went to see Brooke Shields in Wonderful Town on Tuesday night, and tonight I’ll be going to a press preview of ‘Night, Mother, followed by The Good Body on Friday and Democracy on Saturday. Yikes!

Anyway, thanks to everyone out there in cyberspace for your comforting e-mails (all of which I’ve answered). I’ll try not to let myself get run down between now and the day before Thanksgiving, at which time I’m heading for Smalltown, U.S.A., to (A) eat turkey with my mother and (B) do as little as possible. Film-noir buffs will of course recognize the second of these as the recipe for a long, happy life. No doubt I’ll hew to it about as closely as J.J. Gittes did–though I hope not with similar results!

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Did I get the same New York Times as everyone else today? I can’t help feeling that some of my fellow book bloggers are waxing a bit Julavitian about Caryn James’s group review of the National Book Award nominees (see next post down). James is pretty even-handed in her piece, offering persuasive praise for each book as well as critiques of what she seems to have soberly and reasonably–if, by other readers’ lights, incorrectly–judged their limitations. Nothing in the piece seems to me remotely like an assault, like an attack, or angry (let alone angry, angry, angry). Sure, it had to have been a challenging piece, giving James such limited space to review five books as well as offer an overview. But despite the built-in limitations of the assignment, what she’s written looks to me (and to CAAF) not like a declaration of war but like honest criticism.

I do tend to view these matters more from the perspective of a book reviewer than that of a reader. As a reviewer, I find that the most difficult thing to resist is the impulse to be too nice and therefore, critically speaking, useless. So I react particularly strongly to what I consider phantom snark sightings. I may have still more personal reflections on all of this, but at the moment I have to hurl myself into the shower and try to make it to a dinner for a poet at 6:00. About which you’ll hear more tomorrow.

This is likely to be a somewhat dicey week for me. On Tuesday night I started ramping up to my usual performance-going schedule, even though I’m still a bit shaky from the bug that bit me last week. (Alas, Broadway openings wait for no man!) So in lieu of a freshly written posting, I’ve pulled another vintage essay out of my electronic hat, a column I wrote for Fi, the now-defunct audio magazine, a few years ago. I hope you find it interesting.

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The best thing written about classical music this past winter was, believe it or not, an essay by a music critic about another music critic. William Youngren’s “Haggin,” published in the winter issue of The American Scholar, is a remarkable memoir of the man most responsible for forming the tastes of postwar American record collectors. It is also a cautionary tale of how a great critic fell victim to the occupational disease of his profession–paranoia.

I doubt B.H. Haggin is especially well known to Gen-X audiophiles, but for those who came of age between the ’40s and the ’70s, his name will trigger vivid memories. Haggin was as influential as any American music critic who has ever lived, and he exerted much of his influence, unusually, through a book written for novice music lovers. The Listener’s Musical Companion, published in 1956, was acquired by school libraries across America, there to be read by innumerable teenagers who swallowed whole its sternly compelling myth of interpretative rectitude, in which Arturo Toscanini was God and Wilhelm Furtwängler the Antichrist. More than a few critics who now publish in Fi, myself included, cut their teeth on The Listener’s Musical Companion, and its echoes can be heard to this day in everything we write.

Haggin also shaped the face of American musical journalism in an even more unusual way: by answering his mail. Many of his readers wrote to him over the years, and he always wrote back–usually on a typed postcard–to defend or amplify his views. Those exchanges not infrequently led to face-to-face encounters, and sometimes to friendship. That was how I got to know Haggin, who later recommended me to Ted Libbey (then the editor of High Fidelity), the first editor ever to ask me to review classical recordings. If you don’t like my stuff, you thus have B.H. Haggin to blame. And my experience was far from unique: indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if Haggin did more than anyone else of his generation to encourage young music critics.

But Haggin had a dark side, one described candidly by William Youngren. Though he affected to believe that “criticism does not, as some people think it must, offer the one possible and correct opinion,” he was in fact dogmatic to a fault, and his penchant for writing bluntly and insultingly about other critics with whom he disagreed got him in hot water time and again. Starting in the ’60s, he also picked fights with most of the writers and musicians he had befriended over the years, and by the time of his death in 1987, the people with whom he was still on speaking terms could probably have been numbered in single digits.

Haggin’s violent contentiousness was no secret in the music business, and it led many to wonder if he was entirely right in the head. What was not generally known prior to the publication of Youngren’s essay was that there was concrete reason to be concerned about his sanity: as early as the ’50s, Haggin’s psychiatrist put him on such major tranquilizers as Thorazine, a drug commonly used to treat schizophrenia.

Once I learned this fact, the weirdly aggressive tone of Haggin’s post-1960 writings suddenly began to make sense to me in a way it never had before. We use the word “paranoia” casually nowadays, but in the context of mental illness it has a precise meaning: It is the overwhelming feeling of persecution experienced by schizophrenics whose delusions have loosened their hold on reality. Surely there can be no doubt that this was Haggin’s problem: His own sense of reality was threatened when people–especially people he respected–disagreed with him about musical matters. Hence the queer outbursts of near-frenzy that mar such later books as A Decade of Music (1973) and Music and Ballet, 1973-1983 (1984). They are expressions not of anger, but stark terror.

Haggin’s story is interesting both in its own right and as a reminder that all critics, great and small, are prone to paranoia. The reason is simple: we don’t always agree. Especially in New York, where four daily newspapers cover the classical-music scene, it is an unsettling business to pick up the morning papers and read four different opinions about a concert–unsettling not just for readers, but also for the critics themselves. To be sure, I take some critics more seriously than others, but it always shakes me when a colleague loathes a performance I loved. (The converse is for some mysterious reason less disturbing.) If only for a moment, I feel what B.H. Haggin must have felt at all times: am I losing touch with reality?

I should add that this feeling, while it can be unpleasant, isn’t necessarily unhealthy (unless you happen to be schizophrenic). Critics need constant reminding that criticism is not an exact science–or, indeed, any kind of science at all. As for those frustrated performers who find themselves on the receiving end of contradictory reviews, I can do no better than to quote from No Minor Chords, André Previn’s wonderful memoir: “It is perfectly correct to disregard all the bad reviews one gets, but only if at the same time, one disregards the good ones as well.”

“Terror takes all forms, but the worst form is compassion. When you love someone and feel compassion for him as well, you can be driven to do the most brutal things.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shadows on the Hudson

If you’re looking for some cinematic holiday spirit, it should be abundantly clear by now that The Polar Express is not the answer. May I recommend, then, the unjustly obscure classic Olive, the Other Reindeer?

Perhaps you are one of the lucky few who caught this hour-long animated Christmas special on Fox before they inexplicably stopped running it. If so, then you know it’s savvy and goofy and sweet, the best in its genre since the Grinch. In fact, if you ask me, it’s a good sight better; it’s one of those blessed pieces of kiddie culture that aims to please the parents as well, not to mention random adults who don’t have the face-saving cover of children to explain my, er, their deep familiarity with it.

Michael Stipe crooning soulfully as Schnitzel, Blitzen’s nonflying cousin; Joey Pants playing a penguin who hawks phony Rolexes out of a briefcase; Drew Barrymore as a dog who thinks she’s a reindeer: what’s not to like? Trust me. I realize “animated holiday special” are not words likely to strike hope in the hearts of the aesthetically discerning. But every skeptical soul that I’ve tied to a chair and forced to watch Olive has thanked me for it in the end.

Bonus materials: the brilliant creators of Olive, J. Otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh, introduced her in this book. Seibold, who seems to have looked at a lot of Picasso, draws his penguins, dogs, and fleas on a Macintosh. Walsh and Seibold also wrote and illustrated the official children’s guide to Going to the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: Delicious of Delicious Pundit rightly points out that I wrongly imply that Seibold and Walsh are the only brilliant parties involved here. While credit for creating Olive and her universe is theirs, the television special itself is the fabulous work of television comedy writer Steve Young. Far be it from me to deny credit to someone whose work has pleased me so, well, deliciously. I’m grateful for the correction.

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that.”

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

Journalists are deadline junkies. Even if they don’t start out that way, they soon find themselves needing the stimulus of a deadline in order to get anything done, and most of them find it all but impossible to write a piece before it’s due.

I’m no better than the rest of my colleagues, but at least I take my own deadlines seriously. If you tell me a piece is due on Tuesday, that’s when you’ll get it, absent some hugely compelling reason to the contrary. Illness qualifies, and the upper-respiratory bug with which I’ve been doing battle for the past week caused me to blow the deadline for a piece I was supposed to write about Bright Young Things, the film version of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Fortunately, I knew this particular deadline wasn’t set in stone, so I warned my editor via e-mail, who wrote back to tell me that I could turn it in as late as Monday, when the magazine would be going to press. I needed all the rest I could get, so I decided to put off writing the piece until first thing Monday morning, hoping that by then I’d feel decent enough to turn out something sufficiently readable.

Even when I’m healthy, I often have trouble sleeping the night before an unwritten piece is due, and I felt perfectly frightful when I went to bed on Sunday. I tossed and turned throughout the night, sleeping for two hours at most, and awoke at six a.m., three hours ahead of the alarm clock. My head felt as though someone had pumped it full of budget-priced concrete, but there didn’t seem to be much point in trying to go back to sleep, so I crawled out of bed, turned on my computer, and went to work, grimly certain that I was in for a long day of pain and suffering. I was wrong. Two hours later the piece was finished, and even in my blurry state I knew it was good–perhaps one of my best.

Every writer can tell you a dozen stories like that. Some pieces come easily and others don’t, and you can’t tell in advance which way the coin will fall. In my own case, the mystery is heightened by the fact that I rarely suffer from writer’s block. My first professional gig was as a music critic for the Kansas City Star, and in those days we still filed our reviews at 11:30 for the next day’s paper (an old-fashioned practice that the New York Times has just revived). I was terrified the first time I had to hit that unforgiving deadline, but within a few weeks the fear had worn off, and ever since then I’ve trusted in my facility. Nowadays it’s not uncommon for me to turn out three pieces in a single week, some as long as five thousand words, and I never doubt that they’ll be of professional quality. What I don’t know is whether they’ll be any better than that. It’s strictly up to the muse.

Journalists aren’t exactly artists, but in this respect they resemble artists, who know that a professional can’t afford to wait for inspiration. Of the many George Balanchine quotes I tucked into All in the Dances, this one is my favorite:

Choreography, finally, becomes a profession. In making ballets, you cannot sit and wait for the Muse. Union time hardly allows it, anyhow. You must be able to be inventive at any time.

Note that Mr. B said “inventive,” not “inspired.” He knew what all artists know, which is that the only way you can ever hope to experience inspiration is to seek it regularly, ideally every day. It’s like a bus that doesn’t run on a regular schedule: the more often you come to the bus stop, the better the chances that you’ll be there when it arrives.

I’m used to this, as well I should be, but sometimes I get vexed at the muse when she pulls a fast one, the way she did yesterday morning. Of course I’m glad that particular piece came off so well–but why on earth did I have a good day when I was feeling so awful? It offends my sense of order. In a better-organized world, an artist would be able to earn inspiration. He’d get up bright and early after having gone to bed at a reasonable hour, eat a nutritious breakfast, sharpen his pencils, go out to walk the dog and help an old lady across the street, and return to his desk secure in the knowledge that the muse would descend at ten a.m. sharp. Fat chance. To be sure, regular habits are good for artists. They make it easier to be inventive on demand. But inspiration, unlike invention, won’t come when it’s called. It’s a cat, not a dog. If you can’t live with that knowledge, you’re better off pursuing some other line of work.

Those of you who are religious will doubtless see the analogy here: inspiration is like grace. You can make yourself more (or less) worthy to receive it, but Somebody Else is in charge of pushing the button that causes it to descend. This suggests that instead of grumbling about the arbitrariness of the inspiration that came to me early yesterday morning, I should have offered up humble thanks to the Muse of Journalism for choosing to cut me some slack on a bad day. But did I? No. “Gratitude,” Lord Chesterfield told his son, “is a burden upon our imperfect nature.” Unwilling to assume that burden, I e-mailed my piece to Washington, crawled back into bed, and slept until noon.

No doubt the muse will pay me back double one of these days. Or maybe not. Like I said, you never know.