Archives for 2004

When getting my nose in a book

Cured most things short of school,

It was worth ruining my eyes

To know I could still keep cool,

And deal out the old right hook

To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,

Evil was just my lark:

Me and my cloak and fangs

Had ripping times in the dark.

The women I clubbed with sex!

I broke them up like meringues.

Don’t read much now: the dude

Who lets the girl down before

The hero arrives, the chap

Who’s yellow and keeps the store,

Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:

Books are a load of crap.

Philip Larkin, “A Study of Reading Habits”

I have two intense days’ worth of writing and playgoing ahead of me. Then I’m off to Smalltown, U.S.A., first thing Friday morning (the car comes at 4:30) for a family reunion. Next week I’ll be writing like a madman for a couple of hectic days in New York, after which I’m off again to see plays in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.

My point? You won’t be seeing much of me in this space for the next couple of weeks, save for the odd almanac entry. I’ll look in whenever I can, but mostly I’ll be leaving you in the lovely hands of Our Girl in Chicago. Enjoy the pleasure of her company. I always do.

Later.

“John Pickford, BBC World Service, came to interview me about George Orwell. A pleasant young man, but the questions these people put are impossible to answer. One wonders whether the generality of people expected easy answers to the human condition before their minds were rotted by popular journalism, TV, the notion that all life’s problems could be answered off the cuff by TV ‘personalities,’ suchlike, in two or three sentences. All the same there is perhaps a faint impression of a person given by the worlds, demeanour, of a friend.”

Anthony Powell, Journals 1982-1986, entry for October 27, 1983

Two “About Last Night” readers wrote to let me know that Tim Page, the classical music critic of the Washington Post and an old friend of mine, mentioned me in a Post online chat
earlier today. I’m vain enough to want to pass on what Tim said:

The book that’s dazzled me lately is by another friend, Terry Teachout. A Terry Teachout Reader (Yale) covers all the arts — film, dance, music (of all kinds), literature, and any variety of crossroads. Even when I find myself in disagreement with Terry, the fact remains that this is a book one vividly enjoys disagreeing with — one test of truly stimulating criticism. (How many of us found ourselves in this field in order to “win” arguments with critics of the past — Haggin, Thomson, Schonberg…!) A strong personality — and spectacularly unpredictable.

The part I like is the last two words.

Life is going by too fast today. I went to Lincoln Center last night to see a press preview of The Frogs, the new Nathan Lane-Stephen Sondheim musical. This morning I lashed myself to the mast and wrote my Wall Street Journal theater column for Friday in a single sitting. After that I filled out yet another National Council on the Arts-related form, this one for the Senate, then ran around in the noonday sun getting it notarized, making photocopies of various personal documents, and shipping the results off to Washington, D.C., via Federal Express. (The NEA warned me to FedEx everything–their incoming snail mail is irradiated and often delayed as a result, sometimes forever.) Tonight I return to Lincoln Center, this time to see Complicit

Or the blogwaves are theirs; it hasn’t quite all shaken out yet. The point is that bloggers and WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR station, are finding themselves in various forms of collaboration, both more and less formal, this month.

First up, ALN friend and fellow culture blogger Sam Golden Rule Jones has been brought on as the book critic of Ed Lifson’s new Sunday arts show, Hello Beautiful. This is a brilliant move. Sam will focus on Chicago writers; last week he reviewed a book with “strong bones,” Irene Zabytko’s story collection Luba Leaves Home. Sam reflected on the relative paucity of well-known fiction about women coming of age in Chicago–relative to the bevy of Bellows and Farrells writing about young men–and found that Zabytko is “particularly good at showing a young woman’s difficult devotion to both her bonds and her dreams.” Hear Sam’s sparkling review for yourself. He returns next week with a review of Ward Just’s latest, An Unfinished Season. I’ll be listening.

The shoe is on the other foot too this week, as Gretchen Helfrich, who anchors WBEZ’s consistently fascinating interview show Odyssey, will be guest blogging at Preposterous Universe beginning Friday. Gretchen is fiercely smart and knowledgeable and has a sense of humor, so it will be fun to see what happens when Preposterous‘s regular proprietor (oog, try saying that five times fast), physicist Sean Carroll, hands her the reins. Go check it out now, while Sean’s still in the house–only about half of his content is about physics, making fully half of it comprehensible to science know-nothings like me.

In other switcheroo news, I’m going to teach my mother’s fifth-grade class for a day while she edits, blogs, and goes home to watch seven consecutive episodes of “Law and Order.” Somebody should write a book about it.

Not the most ambitious all-time feat of memorization, but:

My lizard, my lively writher,

May your limbs never wither,

May the eyes in your face

Survive the green ice

Of envy’s mean gaze;

May you live out your life

Without hate, without grief,

And your hair ever blaze,

In the sun, in the sun,

When I am undone,

When I am no one.

It’s Theodore Roethke, published in 1964, and I had to look up the punctuation and the title: “Wish for a Young Wife.”

Meanwhile, such bloggers as Maud Newton, Carrie at Tingle Alley, and Will Baude at Crescat Sententia have spun off on a variety of tangents from my original post about the joys of memorizing poetry. Each of these folks takes the topic in their own new direction, with fascinating results all around. It’s all very bloggy and good.

As I mentioned a week or two ago, I’ve been rereading Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time in preparation for writing a review of Michael Barber’s Anthony Powell: A Life, out in September from Duckworth Overlook. At lunch with Maud the other day, I was trying to describe Powell’s technique of alternating Hemingway-like naturalistic dialogue with discursive commentary by Nick Jenkins, the narrator of Dance and Powell’s fictional alter ego. I’ve been posting quotations from Dance as almanac entries of late, but I’ve dogeared so many pages since I started rereading it that I thought it might be fun to go ahead and empty the whole bag.

Forgive me if some of these quotes have already been posted. As an old Powellian, my experience has been that they profit from repetition!

– “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.” (A Question of Upbringing)

– “I felt unsettled and dissatisfied, though not in the least drunk. On the contrary, my brain seemed to be working all at once with quite unusual clarity. Indeed, I found myself almost deciding to sit down, as soon as I reached my room, and attempt to compose a series of essays on human life and character in the manner of, say, Montaigne, so icily etched in my mind at that moment appeared the actions and nature of those with whom that night I had been spending my time. However, second thoughts convinced me that any such efforts at composition would be inadvisable at such an hour. The first thing to do on reaching home would be to try and achieve some sleep. In the morning, literary matters might be reconsidered.” (A Buyer’s Market)

– “These hinterlands are frequently, even compulsively, crossed at one time or another by almost all who practise the arts, usually in the need to earn a living; but the arts themselves, so it appeared to me as I considered the matter, by their ultimately sensual essence, are, in the long run, inimical to those who pursue power for its own sake. Conversely, the artist who traffics in power does so, if not necessarily disastrously, at least at considerable risk.” (A Buyer’s Market)

– “Prejudice was to be avoided if–as I had idly pictured him–Members were to form the basis of a character in a novel. Alternatively, prejudice might prove the very elemtn through which to capture and pin down unequivocally the otherwise elusive nature of what was of interest, discarding by its selective power the empty, unprofitable shell making up that side of Members untranslatable into terms of art; concentrating his final essence, his position, as it were, in eternity, into the medium of words.” (The Acceptance World)

– “I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some