Archives for 2004

In case you haven’t noticed, slip over to the right-hand column and feast your eyes on four brand-new Top Five picks. (It would have been five, but I haven’t yet managed to get to a show of Joan Mitchell lithographs on which I have my eye. Be patient.)

Incidentally, our traffic has bumped sharply upward of late, and it shows no signs of sinking back. Don’t rest on your laurels–tell a friend about “About Last Night”! The more, the merrier.

“After the lunch conference I run into my cousin Nell Lovell on the steps of the library–where I go occasionally to read liberal and conservative periodicals. Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upside down: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.”

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (courtesy of Doug Ramsey)

I was excited to find this piece in City Journal extolling the educational benefits of memorizing poetry. “Empower” is a word I mostly tuned out long ago, but this use of it seems to me warranted: “Progressive educators call it ‘drill and kill,’ but learning poetry by heart empowers kids.”

I wish I had more poetry committed to memory, and every now and then I make a plan to learn, for instance, a poem a month. Lately, alas, such enlightened self-improvement plans haven’t had much chance of surviving the onrush of everyday demands. The last poem I half-learned was W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” where the biggest hurdles come early, but the last half is all downhill. I always found Auden’s poem to be one that almost entreats you to learn it. Read it just once through, and chances are good you’ll come away with the commanding cadence of “the day of his death was a dark cold day” echoing in your ears well into tomorrow.

Michael Knox Beran has a fuller account than I do of what is so valuable in learning poetry by heart–an expression, by the way, that he takes somewhat literally. Here he talks about what, exactly, the heart has to do with it:

Some of the ancient methods, [St. Augustine biographer Peter] Brown conceded, strike a modern mind as “servile”: but the paradoxical result of this early servitude was mental liberation. Augustine, Brown wrote, came “to love what he was learning. He had developed, through this education, a phenomenal memory, a tenacious attention to detail, an art of opening the heart, that still moves us as we read his Confessions.” In Virgil’s epic picture of the multiple passions of human life–paternal, filial, pious, romantic, patriotic, heroic–Augustine found a key to understanding his own heart, and in the rhetorical perfection of the Aeneid’s speeches he found a key with which to unlock the hearts of others.

“An art of opening the heart”: this is a nice way of capturing the extra-intellectual aspects of memorizing poetry. To memorize something effectively, you have to expend some interpretive effort on it, and with this effort you wind up in something like a conversation with the text. Grasping at least the literal meaning–not necessarily as easy as you might think, I’ve learned in my teaching–is the most efficient way of mastering a poem, so you can’t help but learn something more than just the words in the process. And the richer the text, the more there is to absorb. It’s sad that such a truly mind-expanding practice has been saddled with a reputation as just the opposite.

Here’s a brief history of my happy career as a memorizer of poetry. I had a teacher in elementary school who made us learn and recite poetry, as well as some famous orations, weekly: “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” The Gettysburg Address, and “Casey at the Bat,” to name a few. In high school we memorized speeches from Shakespeare and, most rewardingly of all, stretches of “The Canterbury Tales” in the original Middle English, with audiotapes as aids. During and after college, I memorized some Romantic and Victorian poetry in the process of writing papers (sometimes, of course, memorizing happens by accident in the course of studying something intently) and, later, just for the pleasure of it. The one poem I’m certain I’ll take to my grave is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” one of the most melodious and indelible works in the language. Once you know it, its music leads you inexorably from one line to the next. If you’re looking for something to start with, I highly recommend Coleridge’s heady little fragment. It’s got a wicked hook.

Here’s some more of what Beran has to say, all of it more empirical and less impressionistic than my free-associating:

No less important, memorizing poetry turns on kids’ language capability. It not only teaches them to articulate English words; it heightens their feel for the intricacies and complexities of the English language–an indispensable attainment if they are to go on to speak, write, and read English with ease. Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, argues that memorization “builds into children’s minds an ability to use complex English syntax.” The student “who memorizes poetry will internalize” the “rhythmic, beautiful patterns” of the English language. These patterns then become “part of the student’s ‘language store,’ those wells that we all use every day in writing and speaking.” Without memorization, the student’s “language store,” Bauer says, will be limited: memorization stocks “the language store with a whole new set of language patterns.”

It also stocks those bins with a generous supply of the English language’s rich accumulation of words. Research suggests that the size of a child’s vocabulary plays an important part in determining the quality of his language-comprehension skills. “The greater and wider the vocabulary,” says education historian Ravitch, “the greater one’s comprehension of increasingly difficult material.” Bauer points out that if “a student reads a word in a novel, she might or might not remember it for later use. But when she commits it to memory in proper context (as the memorization of lines of poetry requires), she is much more likely to have it at her ‘mental fingertips’ for use in her own speaking and writing.”

Terry also reminds me that “when Nabokov taught in America, he gave his students extra credit on their final exams for disgorging accurately memorized excerpts from the works under discussion,” which I’d heard but forgotten.

I went on Saturday night to hear the North American premiere of Il Sogno, Elvis Costello‘s first full-length orchestral work. It’s a ballet score based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, composed in 2000 for an Italian dance troupe, and the Brooklyn Phiharmonic performed it as the climax of a three-night Costello mini-festival presented by the Lincoln Center Festival.

Though I’m a Costello fan, I confess to having had a small critical chip on my shoulder. But as I reported in this morning’s Washington Post, Il Sogno deserves to be taken seriously:

Not only did Costello write it without assistance, he orchestrated it as well, and though the Brooklyn Philharmonic, conducted by Brad Lubman, was conspicuously underrehearsed, the performance was decent enough to leave no doubt that Costello knows what he’s doing. The scoring isn’t perfect — the middle register is cluttered and thick-sounding at times, and the vibraphone is used to sugary excess — but it’s perfectly competent.

That alone made my jaw drop. Even Duke Ellington relied on professional orchestrators when writing for symphony orchestra, while Paul McCartney hired so many collaborators to help him produce the embarrassingly bloated “Standing Stone” that I described it at the time of its 1997 premiere as “the first as-told-to symphony.” What’s more, “Il Sogno” (“The Dream” in Italian), though it rambles a bit, is more than just a long string of songlike cameos placed end to end: Costello has channeled his thematic material into simple, formal structures that he uses in the disciplined manner of a bona fide classical composer….

It’s not cut-rate Prokofiev or Bernstein, but a lively, ingratiating piece of mainstream modernism, with decorous snippets of symphonic rock and jazz thrown in from time to time to spice things up. If anything, it’s too polite: Costello was clearly on his best musical behavior when he wrote it, and I’m sure he felt he had something to prove to all the “legit” musicians who took it for granted that no mere rock star could bring off so ambitious an undertaking….

Mind you, Costello doesn’t need to write large-scale orchestral works to be taken seriously as an artist. Rock has produced no better songwriter. But if he really wants to set up shop as a part-time classical composer, he’ll need to polish his craft still further. After the unexpected success of “Rhapsody in Blue,” Gershwin toiled for 11 years and ended up with “Porgy and Bess.” Is Costello in it for the long haul? Or will “Il Sogno” turn out to be a fluke? I hope not.

Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Alex Ross has a fascinatingly different take on Il Sogno. You can tell from reading our pieces side by side that we were, as the saying goes, at the same concert–only we didn’t come to the same conclusions.

Once again, it’s time for the regular “About Last Night” Monday-morning Web surf. Here are some links from the past week that I thought worth passing on:

– In case you haven’t seen it yet, Anne E. Kornblut, the Boston Globe‘s senior political correspondent, put together a neat little are-you-red-or-blue culture quiz for Slate. Go here to take it.

– The Out of the Past bandwagon continues to pick up speed! Something Old, Nothing New has posted some characteristically shrewd reflections
of his own on the quintessential film noir:

The popularity of the film noir was in part, I think, a way of increasing sex and violence in movies — sex implied rather than shown, of course — without violating the rule that movies had to be moral and uplifting. A film noir shows or implies all kinds of debauchery, but then adds that all the debauched people get punished in the end. (Or in the case of The Big Sleep, gets the audience so confused that they can’t tell who committed which act of debauchery.) It’s the equivalent of those early Cecil B. DeMille movies where two hours of orgies are followed by five minutes of spiritual uplift.

– New to “Sites to See” is a blog by West Coast dance critic Rachel Howard called Footnotes (great title). Howard writes
in defense of assigning star ratings to performances:

But why shouldn’t we recommend dance performances to one another with various degrees of enthusiasm? Why shouldn’t we codify that degree of excitement in a symbol that will bring more readers to dance reviews? Instead, right now, the absence of a rating signals to the Everyman Joe reader, “Don’t bother reading about this show, it’s very serious and too arty for you and therefore can’t possibly be entertaining.”

Somewhat to my surprise, I agree–though I’ve never been good at coming up with letter grades and star ratings on the rare occasions when magazines and newspapers require me to supply them. Nevertheless, Howard has persuaded me that it’s not a bad idea.

– Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes interviews Jerry Saltz, art critic of the Village Voice. Money quote:

People often ask me, “Why do you write about things that you don’t like?” And it breaks my heart. You would never say that to a sportswriter or a restaurant critic or a film reviewer or a book reviewer. But in the art world, for some reason, people get down on or even demonize you for saying something is faulty. It’s a very Bush-Cheney time. I think writing what you really think is a way of showing art respect.

Once again, I agree, at least in principle, even though I happen to think I’m better at writing about what I like. Most other critics aren’t–and they ought to work harder at it.

– More on Fahrenheit 9/11 and the problem of political art, this time from Steven Zeitchik of Publishers Weekly, who writes in The Wall Street Journal:

Of course, the documentary form doesn’t always function this way. At its best–e.g., Frederick Wiseman’s films on high schools and hospitals, the weird constellations of “Crumb” and “Capturing the Friedmans,” the Vietnam-centered “Hearts and Minds”–it is propelled by a sense of discovery. Neither filmmaker nor viewer knows what he is getting into until he really starts busying himself with it.

Movies like “Outfoxed,” “Control Room” and “Fahrenheit 9/11” work differently. They begin by knowing their thesis–and their audience–and operate backward. In the process, artists keen to point up the propagandistic efforts of others show themselves all too willing to take part in such efforts themselves.

Yet to call these films propaganda is also to misunderstand them. They don’t seek to convince the unconvinced or herd the untamed. They aim directly at the sheep….Call them flockumentaries, movies people attend en masse, to nestle together in easy confirmation of their most cherished beliefs–to learn, really, what they already know.

– Courtesy of Gnostical Turpitude, a fun piece by Philip Hensher on indexes with character:

A fine example came last year with Ruth Dudley Edwards’s book about Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King. The author had a very difficult time with King’s appalling widow, Dame Ruth Railton, a woman for whom very few people ever had a good word. The book itself was a model of restraint when dealing with her excesses, but when it came to the index, the gloves came off, in part running: “marriage; psychic powers believed in by King; disliked by his friends; King wants as musical director of ATV; encourages his megalomania; increasing possessiveness… moves to Ireland with King; denounces Cudlipp; hatred of Ireland; gets rid of family correspondence; cocoons King from children and grandchildren; and King’s death; disposes of his money; treatment of his family; traumatises Secker and Warburg.”

I’ve never done anything like that in any of my books, but I’ve been tempted….

– Michele Williams, call your office. (And no, the rest of you aren’t supposed to get it. This is a coded announcement going out to Smalltown, U.S.A. We return you now to our regularly scheduled posting.)

– A point to ponder, from Dan Henninger’s Wall Street Journal column about the survey of American literary reading habits issued two weeks ago by the National Endowment for the Arts:

It’s also worth noting that while the Endowment explicitly says mysteries are literature, its definition doesn’t include biography or history. Thus, taking a month to read Ron Chernow’s magnificent biography of Alexander Hamilton doesn’t count. Surely it should.

Under normal circumstances, my next sentence would have started “Speaking as a biographer,” but now that my nomination to the National Council on the Arts has been announced, I’m not supposed to write anything about the NEA, good or bad, until the Senate votes on me. So I won’t.

– A friend of mine who recently had a baby swears that this is her all-time favorite New Yorker cartoon. In fact, she actually thought of sending it out as a birth announcement. (I guess it beats the old Charles Addams cartoon whose caption, if I remember correctly, was “Congratulations…it’s a baby!”)

– Speaking of The New Yorker, yes, Alex, I noticed the anagrams for “Terry Teachout” in the title of your posting celebrating the first anniversary of “About Last Night.” Very clever. This brought to mind a posting from a year ago in which I reported the results of my own anagrammatic self-analysis. For those who’ve forgotten, these were the best ones:

Reroute thy act

Outcry at three

Hey, actor, utter!

Etch your tater

Treachery tout

That cuter yore

Ratty, cute hero

Retract ye thou!

And my own favorite:

The Tory Curate

– Finally, Ed outs Our Girl. Who knew?

“The good parts of a book may be something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life–and one is as good as the other.”

Ernest Hemingway, letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sept. 4, 1929

– In The New Republic, Jed Perl calls the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Seurat show a golden opportunity, but one that the AIC fumbled:

“Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte” is the latest salute to the museum’s crown jewel, and while the show’s strengths do honor to the painting and to the city, the exhibition is very, very far from being an unadulterated success. Its failures speak volumes about what the people who run today’s museums think the public wants–and how, perhaps, in the eighty years since La Grande Jatte came into the museum’s collection, the people in charge at the Art Institute have shrunk their assumptions about what the public can absorb. A transcendent medium-sized exhibition has been nearly ruined by the museum’s insistence on producing a multimedia extravaganza….

A great chance to educate the public has been botched in Chicago. For Seurat’s studies for La Grande Jatte, seen in such dazzling profusion, tell a story of the workings of the imagination that anybody can understand without audio-visual assistance. The one thing that the Art Institute has been wise to include is an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper, a handout that is available as you enter the crucial phase of the show, which contains a reproduction of La Grande Jatte and a brief explanation of the way that the studies for the painting have been grouped in order to reflect, as best we can understand, the stages of Seurat’s thinking. Walking around with this information sheet, people can begin to grasp Seurat’s strenuous process of trial and error, and his arrival at the riveting vision of the final painting. One morning, I saw a woman and what I expect was her second- or third-grade daughter making their way around the room. The girl was picking out the changes, the shifts that Seurat made as he developed and honed his ideas. All it took were her eyes and her native intelligence. She didn’t need a movie to help her compare a study of a figure to the figure in the painting, and she didn’t need a simulated zoom-in to enable her to look at the texture of Seurat’s paint strokes. By looking directly, by seeing things for herself, this girl was taking possession of the painting. The magic of creation is there for all to see, for all to embrace, if only the museum would let people get on with it.

Perl’s review has much to say about Seurat’s virtues as well as this particular show’s failings. I’ll try to go see the exhibit anyway; the painting is so iconic and ubiquitous here in Chicago that I think I stopped really seeing it years ago. It will be good to go and take a fresh look.

– Word Wars, the Scrabble documentary whose directors I interviewed last January, is finally hitting Chicago. It opens at Facets Cin

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