Archives for January 2005

“Life is a great mystery. Is everybody a different person when they are with somebody else?”

Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy (courtesy of Eve Tushnet)

I’ve been remiss in not mentioning The Conversation, a film-blogger roundtable spearheaded by our friend and yours The Cinetrix. Look in as she and her colleagues dissect last year in film and dish about the swiftly approaching Golden Globes. (And if you’re only going to watch one awards show this season, make it the Globes. So much less boring and insufferable than that other show, not that I won’t watch it too. But I won’t like it.)

Growing up, I used books to set myself apart. Like the young Jane Eyre, I found in them a salve for occasional loneliness (I had friends–honest I did!–but no siblings), but also a source of distinction, an emblem of a certain sensibility. There’s no question I wanted to be noticed reading, and that such concerns played a small but certain role in my choice of reading material. This is a little embarrassing to admit, but I don’t think it should be. It struck me recently when I watched some early episodes of Gilmore Girls. Sixteen-year-old Rory comes to her first boyfriend’s attention by reading on a park bench. What he particularly notices was that she gets so lost in her reading that she fails to notice anything going on around her, including an actual fistfight; and that she reads impressive books: “this week it’s Moby Dick. Last week it was Anna Karenina” (I’m paraphrasing here). This is a fantasy on a fairly obvious level: who, after all, reads 800-page novels in a week? Even if they don’t have to go to school and keep their overgrown-adolescent mother perpetually entertained? The fantasy that really charges this scenario, though, is that someone will notice our private-in-public reading, draw the proper conclusions about our adorable heart and admirable mind, and possibly even fall in love with us. I need to think more about this funny but pervasive notion of getting lost in a book as a bid for a social encounter. Any thoughts?

– Giving me pleasure.

– Giving me pause.

– Giving me the giggles:

When I was an editor, there was a freelance writer working for the paper who had a strange inability to jump to the chase. If you assigned him a piece on, say, a gallery opening of an artist/blacksmith around town, he’d feel compelled to use the lede of his article to elucidate the history of iron through the ages, pausing with reverence at the moment when man first harnessed the power of fire, until, about word 1200, just as you were thinking, “F–k, I never knew that about smelting,” he’d get to an actual review of the exhibit.

Funny thing is, I sympathize completely with both editrice Carrie and that unidentified writer.

That last fortune cookie bears some explaining. I’ve been leafing through Yale University Press’s new Swinburne collection all morning, grateful for the review copy that arrived from YUP (a one-time OGIC employer) unbidden. I’ve never been able to crack the code that might grant me appreciation, perhaps even enjoyment, of Swinburne’s difficult poetry. He’s long sat, face to the wall, with George Meredith in the dimly-lit corner this Victorianist reserves for barely-readable Victorians. And yet I’ve secretly felt all along that the fault must be mine, that if I work hard enough at it I might actually come to love their work. Well, Meredith’s anyway.

So this week arrives the new Yale Swinburne volume, co-edited by the redoubtable Jerome McGann, which includes excerpts from the poet’s criticism. There are considerations of Baudelaire, Byron, Arnold, Blake, and Charlotte and Emily Bront

“That great genius is liable to great error the world has ever been willing, if not more than willing, to admit; that great genius not equally balanced by great intellect is not one half as liable to go one half as wrong as intellect unequally counterpoised by genius, is a truth less popular and less familiar, but neither less important nor less indisputable. That Charlotte Bront

Nothing more from me until Monday–I’m going to Washington to review a play, and I don’t plan to bring my iBook with me. Our Girl will keep you occupied until I come back, and I’ll try to remember to have her post my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser on Friday morning.

Have a nice weekend. I plan to.

– A kind but candid friend once told me that I was “pathetically undomestic,” which seems about right. Among other things, I can never remember from one bottle to the next how to use a corkscrew (which may be a blessing in disguise), nor have I any other kitchen-related skills beyond the primeval. But my worst moments come at the rare intervals when I feel obliged out of common decency to change the sheets in my loft. Even when I slept in an ordinary bed, I was never capable of correctly aligning a contour sheet without a minimum of three preliminary tries–and that was when I had patterned sheets. Upon moving to my present loft-equipped apartment two years ago, I switched to black sheets, thinking they’d look more stylish. They did and do, but if you were to see me thrashing around up there, trying without success to figure out which corner to grab first, you wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Middle-aged bachelorhood is no joke.

– I got a cardboard tube in the mail the other day containing the official presidential commission appointing me to the National Council on the Arts. No, it’s not calligraphed on sheepskin, but it’s still pretty damned impressive, and wonderfully quaint-looking to boot. I took it straight to my framer, even though I don’t have a proper place to hang it (presidential commissions are a lot bigger than, say, your average college diploma). I want to hang it in plain sight of all my guests, but would I really be willing to take down a piece of art for the sole purpose of assuaging my vanity?

Perhaps this is a character test in disguise.

– A friend of mine writes to tell me that I was “courageous” to have praised
Kathie Lee Gifford’s new musical. This made me laugh. “Courage” is when you stare down a crazy man with a gun in a dark alley. It doesn’t take “courage” to disagree with the conventional critical wisdom, especially when you don’t hang out with theater people, which I mostly don’t. I know a grand total of two actors and three drama critics, none of whom is likely to pull a switchblade on me for having rather liked Kathie Lee’s show. (O.K., maybe John Simon.)

No doubt it helps that my publishers stand so solidly behind me. When Paul Gigot, the editorial-page editor of The Wall Street Journal, asked me to become the paper’s drama critic, I warned him that some of the things I wrote would be likely to bring heat. “That’s what we had in mind,” he replied. From that day to this, I’ve never been asked to water down a review prior to publication, nor has the paper’s management ever criticized me retrospectively for any opinion I’ve seen fit to express on the drama page. That kind of backing makes it easy to be “courageous.”