Archives for 2004

“There ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t agoing to no more.”

Samuel Clemens, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A reader writes:

Sad to see you succumbing to the powers of the internet. I’m 34, which is on the cusp of the information age, but perhaps more aligned with the younger generation since my undergrad was at MIT and grad school in academia before the internet meant that I’ve been actively using email since age 17. You’re experiencing the joys of the instant communication, but not seeing the loss. A not-very-shy guy asked me out via the web, once, while actually emailing me from another terminal in the same room. Maybe he thought it was cute, but it highlights the fact that our on-line personality matters more than our in-person personality now. When I hated grad school, I went and complained to my friends from college, far away. Good to have as a resource in a way, but a crutch in terms of forcing me to bond with the people I was in grad school with, forcing me to deal with the present.

I see that all the time. I remember one of the earliest times I saw a cell phone user – a mother, eating with her kids (in the college dining hall! must be visitors), talking to someone else about something inane. My brother, the techno-geek, couldn’t understand my issues with that scene. You see it everywhere – kids using the library terminals to play games; bored people using it to look at porn sites. Back in the day, it seemed like we used our spare time better. I spend far too much time, myself, on reading blogs – responding like this one, to someone who won’t remember me tomorrow. I’m not a new friend, or acquaintance, I’m a face in a crowd. I should be studying, reading – and I just decided NOT to go to a concert tonight because I haven’t done the work I should have done today. I’m sure there are similar losses – people who don’t write novels or compose poems because that spare time gets spent browsing the net.

But, more obviously, if blogging with me and other far-away-arts-lovers means you DON’T connect with that person next to you – on the bus, in the restaurant, on the plane – there’s a real loss. You gain a community, but lose a more important, living breathing community with more diversity. Ya know?

Technology is an absolute good, you say. Maybe. It seems an irreversible good, meaning that if you aren’t on the internet, then the community changes without you. I’m without cell-phone or notebook or palm, but the people around me are less open to chatting with strangers because they have them, so I may as well get them….

That’s my advice – get out, get out, get out. Life is out there, live it. My advice to myself as well, but I’ve been hooked for longer than you have. Okay, back to work, or else I have to cancel tomorrow’s concert as well.

I’m not quite sure I’m the most logical recipient of this advice. After all, I usually attend at least four performances (and often more) each week, and I almost always bring a friend or two with me. What’s more, I find e-mail an unmixed blessing, not least because it allows me to maintain face-to-face friendships more efficiently. Nor do I think I communicate with strangers at the expense of friends. If anything, I’ve made new face-to-face friends through blogging, including several of the people whose blogs can be found in the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column. As for the matter of diversity, what could be more diverse than the worldwide “community” of people who read “About Last Night?

Sure, we’ve all seen the way some folks use postmodern information technology to avoid direct human contact, sometimes deliberately and sometimes thoughtlessly, as in the case of the Inconsiderate Cell-Phone Man caricatured in those movie-theater ads. (I almost sang that jingle the other day to a noisy idiot seated immediately in front of me on an airplane.) Everything under the sun–including great art–can be used in life-denying ways.

Still, I can’t go along with the notion that blogs are by definition a waste of everybody’s valuable spare time, which is more or less what my correspondent is implying. Jennicam, maybe, but she’s out of business, while Maud and Sarah and Chicha and all the smart, thoughtful art bloggers whom I read daily are thriving. And well they should be, for what they do, aside from being valuable in its own right, also has the potential to increase the number of people reading good books and going to concerts (and, presumably, chatting with one another at intermission).

Which returns us to the mission of “About Last Night”: Our Girl and I write this blog in order to stimulate and diversify the art-related interests of our readers. To put it another way, “About Last Night” is a means, not an end–and I know from our e-mailbox that it is constantly leading people to try new things.

On which optimistic note I’m headed for bed. My cold is marginally better, but I’ve got to rent a car and drive to Massachusetts tomorrow afternoon to see a performance of No

A reader writes:

While listening to Dana Gioia speak on the recent survey on fiction
reading (and his take on what that means), an equivocating thought came
to me. I’ve been a pastor and teacher for 20 some years, working with
congregations and talking to students in colleges or Elderhostel/Life-Long Learner participants.
As you probably know, survey data on church attendance is far above
what a simple, real world check will reveal (65+% say they go to church
4 times a month or more on surveys, but a worship census shows it
simply can’t be above 40%, nearer 30%). Just in the last few years,
the annual Gallup surveys are noting a drop in those long standing
numbers, even as church attendance seems to be perking back up.

What we assume out here in Pastor-land, with a few sociologists of
religion riding shotgun, is that it used to be socially very important
to say you went to church…even if you didn’t. As it has become
much more acceptable in general discourse to admit freely that you
don’t go to church at all, let alone often, survey data is starting to
track closer to reality.

My suspicion — which makes the problem no less, only different — is
that it is now socially much more acceptable to admit that you haven’t
read “War and Peace” or “To The Lighthouse” even among educated
company, while similarly there is less social value to claiming you
have…whether you’ve done so or not.

As a voracious reader of fiction, non-fiction, and lids of tea
packaging or stray receipts if that’s all there is to hand, I can
recall many occasions in high school and college where I realized, to
my thrilled horror, that Teacher X or Professor Y had not actually read
the book they were manglingly alluding to. Similar events in dinner
party/backyard conversation over the years made me realize that the
total number of unread books everyone has read is…wait, as you’ve
pointed out recently, David Lodge has already trod this ground full
well.

But in the last 5-10 years, folks from freshmen students in classes to
my wife’s colleagues in academia are likely to say in response to
literary references “Haven’t read it,” in tones indicating they’re not
gonna, you can’t make ’em, and whatsittoya?

So my equivocating point is: has fiction reading really dropped off?
Can we correlate for some other variable (sales, library circulation)
to crossreference? And is it possible that the problem is that folks
don’t feel the need to fake having read or be seen as a reader of
fiction as a social value — and if so, I find it double intriguing
that such a loss of felt need to keep up such appearances fictionally
speaking correlated so well with worship attendance trends (or
classical music, fer that matter).

It seems an important distinction, and I don’t hear that the survey
response is picking up on the possibility.

As regular readers of “About Last Night” know, I’ve been asked not to comment on the activities of the National Endowment for the Arts–including its recently released survey of changing American reading habits–while my nomination to the National Council on the Arts awaits consideration by the Senate. But the questions this reader poses are so interesting and provocative that I wanted to pass them on anyway.

Any thoughts, OGIC?

The Wall Street Journal (subscription only) reports today that, without making a big fuss about it, Amazon.com has taken measures recently to encourage users to use their real names when posting reviews:

Earlier this month, the Web retailer quietly launched a new system, dubbed Real Names, that encourages users to append to their product reviews the name that appears on the credit card they have registered with Amazon. A logo saying “Real Name” appears beside such customer comments.

Amazon still allows reviewers to sign their comments with pen names, effectively concealing their identity from other Amazon users. But even these reviewers need to supply a credit card or purchase history. Previously, users could easily open multiple Amazon accounts from which they could post multiple reviews of the same product. The new system is intended to block that practice.

Many of you will remember the brouhaha on Amazon Canada a few months back, when the real names of anonymous and pseudonymous posters were inadvertently revealed, exposing all manner of fixing (authors reviewing their own books under fake names) and sabotage (folks going undercover to savage their enemies’ books). Also revealed in the incident was the growing influence of these customer reviews, and the company’s new policies only underline how seriously it takes them as part of the service it offers. “What we’re trying to do with this is add to the credibility of the content on this site,” says a spokeswoman. There’s more to the plan:

Over time, reviewers who opt to use pen names could become less visible on the site. Under the system in which users rate the usefulness of reviews, the most highly rated reviews appear in higher, more prominent sections of Amazon’s pages. If users believe that reviews with real names attached are more valuable, those will become the most visible on the site.

All of this makes me feel a bit prescient. Several years ago, when Amazon hadn’t yet started selling colanders and flip-flops, and “blog” was what I might say when the milk turned, I wrote a little piece about the site’s reader reviews for a publication that shall remain anonymous (and thus of dubious credibility). The article was sort of a lite version of the blog triumphalism you see all the time now (including from yours truly): Everyman now has a voice! Sometimes it speaks wisely; sometimes it’s absurd! And it just may be revolutionary.

I got back to New York late last night from my family reunion in Smalltown, U.S.A., fell into bed, and arose first thing this morning with what appears to be a summer cold. Great. I’m writing for The Wall Street Journal this morning and the Washington Post tomorrow, after which I head for Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., to see a couple of plays, so a summer cold is just what I need at this juncture, don’t you think?

Anyway, I may post a bit later today or some time tomorrow if my head clears, but don’t be surprised if I opt for elective mutism instead. In any case, I’ll be back for real on Sunday, and you’ll hear from me then, assuming this cold, if it is a cold, doesn’t prove fatal. (Hey, it could happen!)

See you sometime.

UPDATE: The cold’s winning. So far, I’ve written two paragraphs of my Journal piece. All I seem to be able to do is read proofs and blow my nose. Would anyone care to bring me some chicken soup? Or perhaps a nice mug of cyanide?

“The charm of getting home, as I see it, is the charm of getting back to what is inextricably my own–to things familiar and long loved, to things that belong to me alone and none other. I have lived in one house in Baltimore for nearly forty-five years. It has changed in that time, as I have–but somehow it still remains the same. No conceivable decorator’s masterpiece could give me the same ease. It is as much a part of me as my two hands. If I had to leave it I’d be as certainly crippled as if I lost a leg.”

H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Fifth Series

A reader writes:

I want you to know how much I enjoy and appreciate your blog, and now your book. A Terry Teachout Reader was waiting for me when I arrived home from work last night, courtesy of amazon.com. After dinner I read the introduction, the first three essays, and then skipped to the back to read your moving tribute to Nancy Lamott, whom I first heard of reading “About Last Night.” At that point I had to put Come Rain or Come Shine on, and it occurred to me while listening that Nancy’s music was not the only thing I had to thank you for. I saw Ghost World and The Last Days of Disco, movies I’d never heard of, due to you. I watched, and enjoyed, Out of the Past last week on TCM and I taped In a Lonely Place, which I’ll watch this weekend. The last time we were in NYC, my wife and I saw Wonderful Town, based on your review. I’m right now on the web here at work ordering some of Dawn Powell’s books because your essay about her intrigued me. I could go on and on but the point is, you are performing a real service for me and (I’m sure) countless others – pointing us towards great art and great performers that we may not have heard about otherwise, and identifying what makes them great in a clear, lucid writing style. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that my opinions often match up with yours, evidenced by my TCCI of 65%. At any rate, I felt I must let you know how much you’re appreciated. Keep up the good work – lots of people like myself depend on it. And thanks.

Thanks to you, sir. That was just what a sick blogger needed to find in his e-mailbox on a gray afternoon.

The matched set of Fortune Cookies below, once I had posted them, set me to thinking. I yield to no one in my adoration of M.F.K. Fisher–not even to W. H. Auden, who said of her, “I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose”–but after I typed in and reread the longer of the two quotations, it struck me as haughty and unpleasant. I worried that it might give readers unfamiliar with her work the wrong impression of Fisher.

What I had in mind in putting together the post, of course, was the striking contrast between Fisher’s description of herself at nineteen in the first quotation, and her self-assessment at thirty in the second. Only after posting did I recognize the second extract as uncharacteristically off-putting. In context, it serves as the set-up and counterpoint to a self-critical remembrance of one of those men Fisher angers with her independence, and it works very differently than it does in isolation.

In another meditation on the subject of eating alone, Fisher is more her usual self. This appears in An Alphabet for Gourmets, where “A is for Dining Alone.”

And the kind people–they are the ones who have made me feel the loneliest. Wherever I have lived, they have indeed been kind–up to a certain point. They have poured cocktails for me, and praised me generously for things I have written to their liking, and showed me their children. And I have seen the discreetly drawn curtains to their family dining rooms, so different from the uncluttered, spinsterish emptiness of my own one room. Behind the far door to the kitchen I have sensed, with the mystic materialism of a hungry woman, the presence of honest-to-God fried chops, peas and carrots, a jello salad, and lemon meringue pie–none of which I like and all of which I admire in theory and would give my eyeteeth to be offered. But the kind people always murmur, “We’d love to have you stay to supper sometime. We wouldn’t dare, of course, the simple way we eat and all.”

As I leave, by myself, two nice plump kind neighbors come in. They say howdo, and then good-by with obvious relief, after a polite, respectful mention of culinary literature as represented, no matter how doubtfully, by me. They sniff the fine creeping straightforward smells in the hall and living room, with silent thanks that they are not condemned to my daily fare of quails financi