Archives for March 2005

Last week, like an image consultant to the canon, I posted some funny bits from Henry James, sensing that he may not get enough credit for that sort of thing. I also suggested he wear more earth tones, but does he listen to me?

Anyway, I was glad to get a little backup when some other James fans and aficionados chimed in: Robert the Llama Butcher’s mom, Lance Mannion, who is especially good on the unfunny Tragic Muse, and Alex Ross. And there’s always been Max Beerbohm, who not only was one of the first to see the humor in Henry James but who, er, enhanced it:

It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it. But just where the deuce had he left it?

(From “The Mote in the Middle Distance” by H*nry J*m*s, by Max Beerbohm, found in A Christmas Garland.)

“I vehemently disagree with the ‘contempt for the jingles of Kipling.’ I agree that Kipling’s attitude toward life seems to me wanting in complexity and not interesting–but it will take more than Sassoon to convince me that Kipling ought not to stir the fundamental human emotions. I think he does–and that simple thinkers often do. A student of mine long dead spoke with contempt of the fighting lines in Henry V. His widow was a mainstay of the sympathizers with Sacco and Vanzetti. I was not with him.”

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Harold Laski (1928)

“Literary criticism, which is bound to pursue meaning, can never really encompass the fact that some things are on the page because they gave the writer pleasure.”

Ian McEwan, Paris Review interview

I’m belated in pointing out that Tim Hulsey wrote a thoughtful post last week on the occasion of Stephen Sondheim’s 75th birthday. I’m a newly minted fan of Sondheim’s work–well, of precisely two of his plays so far–and can’t offer anything nearly so knowledgable. But I can free-associate!

In 2004 I had my first glimpse of Sondheim’s work at a Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of A Little Night Music that swept me off my feet and left me in tears (this, I find, is happening a lot more often the older I get, and bears no necessary relation to the quality of the movie/book/play/sporting event). A few months later, in New York, Terry took me to see an all-stops-pulled-out production of Sweeney Todd at City Opera, and several months after that we saw a tiny, black-box-theater version of Todd back here in Chicago. I guess I got lucky–every one of these stagings was played with talent and conviction, and after spending half a life unaware of the force that is Sondheim, I was half in love.

What pushed me the rest of the way, into a full-fledged liaison with his work, was receiving the original cast recording of A Little Night Music as a Christmas gift. Now I could listen at will, and I learned that the songs more than held up to sustained attention. For a few weeks in January I was listening to nothing but (the neighbors are still looking at me a little funny). Musically the songs are irresistible, but I don’t have the expertise to talk about that. The lyrics, however, just slay this former English major, they’re so rich and so unbelievably deft at creating and revealing the characters who sing them. But what might get me most is simply the unabashed feeling with which the songs are performed.

To some of you the following transition will seem very sublime-to-ridiculous, but the first time I saw the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical special, “Once More with Feeling,” I was braced for the worst, ready to laugh my way through it all. Not at all practiced at watching musical theater, I was deeply suspicious of the entire enterprise. I was surprised, then, when the Buffy musical grabbed me by the heartstrings, but by way, somehow, of the head. The wittiness of many of the lyrics authorized the heart-on-the-sleeve emotion in the show and freed me up to savor it. (Imagine my dismay, then, when at the climactic moment of Buffy’s rescue from the dancing demon’s spell, my videotape cut to the unlovely mug of Dennis Franz–I had set the VCR that night to tape Buffy followed by NYPD Blue, unaware that the musical ran an hour…plus seven minutes.)

The next day, I ran into an acquaintance who was also a Buffy watcher. I asked her what she’d thought of the musical; she laughed a bit unsurely and said, “I thought it was embarrassing.” And while I didn’t quite believe her, I also knew exactly what she meant. I had felt a temptation to react that way at first, and even into the middle of the show. Emotional content is so regularly faked, overplayed, and abused on television and in movies, you really feel like you have to start from a position of suspicion toward anything unironical. There’s something essentially unironical about singing, though, let alone singing in a musical. This is not to say there aren’t plenty of counter-examples, but song just doesn’t seem to be the same sort of natural habitat for irony that it is for feeling. In any case, I was pleased to have gotten over my own initial embarrassment toward the musical, and proceeded to establish my liberation beyond a doubt by watching it fifty more times in quick succession. When I showed it to Terry during his next visit to Chicago, he almost immediately noted the heavy influence of Sondheim, and I nodded in sage agreement, having no idea of Sondheim at all.

Obviously I see the influence now. And if one somewhat sad consequence of my new understanding has been to knock down the Buffy musical a slight notch by comparison with its models, I can’t help thinking that Joss Whedon provided some crucial paving of my way toward appreciating A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and (next up) Sunday in the Park with George in full. It would be nice to claim that I wasn’t the kind of person who needed to come to it in baby steps, led by an instance of Pop Culture with a capital P, but that’s how it happened. The neighbors might be embarrassed for me, hearing show tunes through the thin walls, but I really do love this stuff too much to care.

If you arrived here by way of Sarah Boxer’s article in The New York Times, welcome! If it’s movie quotes you want, please check in here for the original post including my five quotes, here for Terry’s more distinguished five, here for the big wrap-up Boxer quoted from, and here and here for some personal favorites.

As you’ll see if you follow these links, this exercise wasn’t really cooked up in the ALN labs but borrowed from our friends at Llama Butchers, who borrowed it themselves, and so on, and so on. In fact, I’m not entirely certain this meme can be traced to its point of origination, which I suppose somehow goes to support Boxer’s infinite regression critique of culture blogs. Not that I’m necessarily buying that critique–but she definitely softened me up by building her lead around “Powers of 10,” of which I am an enormous fan.

More on the Eames’s edutainment film, and on the original chic geeks themselves, can be found starting here–first turn your attention to the clickable black and orange grid to the right. There’s a good fifteen minutes of procrastination packed into that little bitty grid.

And if your inner narcissist is at the ready with five movie quotes? Go on, send ’em! I’m done tabulating them, but I never did get tired of reading them–and I’m storing up the best of them for future fortune cookies.

On the basis of his ear for random scraps of conversation, I would venture a guess that this playwright-blogger is good at his chosen craft. If, that is, you think that unscripted-sounding dialogue makes for good plays, which I generally do.

On the other hand, I recently overheard in the soup aisle of the supermarket an apparently authentic exchange that sounded so scripted, I would hesitate to put it in a play, or on a blog like Tim’s:

SON: What’s “Soup at Hand”?

FATHER: Soup getting out of hand.

Ow. One can’t help but suspect that some coaching was involved.

No sooner did my train pull into Penn Station two days ago than I jumped back on the merry-go-round of my New York routine, discovering to my dismay that some prankster had sped it up while I was out of town. I barely had time to pry open my suitcases before I found myself in a cab again, racing downtown to see Neil LaBute’s This Is How It Goes with Galley Cat. On Sunday afternoon I took an actress friend to a matinee of Moonlight and Magnolias, and now I have five more shows and three deadlines gurgling down the pipeline, not to mention a chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong that’s crying out to be finished. I’m not going to blog at all for the rest of the week, so don’t ask me.

Before I vanish into the not-so-distant future, though, I want to record some fugitive impressions of the time I spent playing tourist in the nation’s capital. I go to Washington, D.C., mainly to spend time with friends and look at paintings and plays. It had been twenty years since I’d last seen the sights of the city other than through the window of a cab. For that reason, I thought it might be interesting to accompany my brother on his first visit to Washington, seeing whatever he cared to see. So instead of going to the National Gallery and the Phillips Collection, we rode a Tourmobile to Arlington National Cemetery, the National Air and Space Museum, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Museum of American History, with brief side trips along the way to the White House, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam Memorials. We didn’t actually go to the Capitol, but since we were staying in a hotel only a few blocks away from Capitol Hill, we didn’t have to. The great dome was omnipresent, visible from wherever we happened to be at any given moment.

That’s a lot of stuff to cram into two days, and I was in grave need of sleep by the time I boarded the Acela Express on Saturday afternoon. Still, I wouldn’t have willingly passed up a single sight. Like all small-town boys, I’m a gawker at heart, and Washington offers endless opportunities for high-class gawking. Among other things, I saw the Wright Flyer that took to the skies at Kitty Hawk in 1903 and the American flag that flew over Fort McHenry in 1812, the same one that inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I saw a uniform that was worn by George Washington. I saw the stovepipe hat Abraham Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theatre the night he was assassinated–and, a few steps away, the nuclear “football” carried by Bill Clinton’s military aide.

Best of all, I saw the Declaration of Independence (not to mention the portable wooden desk on which Thomas Jefferson drafted it), the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. If the Museum of American History is the national attic, then the rotunda of the National Archives is the reliquary of our civic religion. It’s fun to see little Judy Garland’s ruby-red shoes, but it’s something altogether different to look upon the original founding documents, faded to near-illegibility but still recognizable at a glance. To have beheld these fragile pieces of parchment mere hours after having taken an oath administered by a Supreme Court justice was…well, awesome.

As for Arlington National Cemetery, my brother and I spent a whole morning there, and could easily have spent a whole day if we’d had more time to spare. It’s no place for the flippant–Arlington has a way of making the overheard remarks of ironically inclined visitors sound shameful–but it has much to offer the aesthete, even the soul-deadened kind to whom patriotism is no more than gold-braided bigotry. The simple marble headstones that mark most of the graves are at once ruthlessly functional and timelessly handsome, both individually and en masse, just as the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns is all but balletic in its poised, precise clarity. Next to such pure classicism, the bronze plaque that honors the astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion seems almost sentimental, as much a symbol of its times as the marble tablets are of theirs.

For the most part, though, Arlington is a place of sobering beauty, which is one of the reasons why so few visitors require the reminders provided by the discreet circular signs placed at strategic points along its paths: ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY. SILENCE AND RESPECT. Of course you hear the occasional idiot twitter of a ringing cell phone, or the shouts of children too young to understand what it means to be surrounded by the corpses of a quarter-million of their fellow Americans. Airplanes are constantly roaring overhead, and the lawnmowers pause for no man, dead or alive. Arlington isn’t exactly quiet, just serious. Some of its permanent residents are well known, including two presidents, eleven Supreme Court justices, and a couple of movie stars (Lee Marvin and Audie Murphy, both of whom fought in World War II, are buried there), but most were and are obscure, while thousands more are, as their headstones explain, known but to God. All served their country in one way or another, and tens of thousands of them died violent deaths while doing so.

Most tourists go out of their way to visit the graves of John and Jackie Kennedy. I did, too, but once I’d paid my respects, I wandered down the hill where the Kennedys lie, looking for a white headstone that says HOLMES. It’s not hard to find, though I doubt that many people seek it out, the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., now being known for the most part only to students of American constitutional law. Once upon a time, though, Mr. Justice Holmes was famous enough that Hollywood made a movie about him, a foolish film about a remarkable man. A friend of Henry and William James, Holmes fought for the Union in the Civil War, was wounded in battle three times, became a lawyer and then a judge, was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, and served as an associate justice for nearly three decades, retiring in 1932 at the age of ninety-one, three years before his death.

An eminent Victorian who lived long enough to read and comment on Proust and Hemingway, Holmes looked upon the world with an ice-cold eye, unconsoled by faith and certain only that “[o]ur business is to commit ourselves to life, to accept at once our functions and our ignorance and to offer our heart to fate.” I’m not sure how great a jurist he was, and there are any number of things about which I disagree with him passionately, but he was beyond doubt the high court’s greatest writer, both of judicial opinions and personal letters (Edmund Wilson wrote an admiring New Yorker essay about his correspondence), and he was by way of being a great man as well.

As a Civil War veteran, Holmes was entitled to burial in Arlington National Cemetery, and when his beloved wife Fanny died in 1929, she was laid to rest there. A month later he wrote to a friend:

I have a lovely spot in Arlington toward the bottom of the hill where the house is, with pine trees, oak, and tulip all about, and where one looks to see a deer trot out (although of course there are no deer). I have ordered a stone of the form conventional for officers which will bear my name, Bvt. Col. And Capt. 20th Mass. Vol. Inf. Civil War–Justice Supreme Court, U.S.–March, 1841–His wife Fanny B. Holmes and the dates. It seemed queer to [be] putting up my own tombstone–but these things are under military direction and I suppose it was necessary to show a soldier’s name to account for my wife.

Six years later he joined her beneath the pine trees, and seventy years after that I stood by their graves, silent and respectful, hearing the words of the psalmist in my mind’s ear: Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is: that I may know how frail I am. Somewhere in the middle distance I overheard a young boy saying, “I wanna be buried here!” All at once I recalled something else that Holmes wrote: “I believe that force, mitigated so far as may be by good manners, is the ultima ratio, and between two groups that want to make inconsistent kinds of world I see no remedy except force. I may add what I no doubt have said often enough, that it seems to me that every society rests on the death of men…”

With both quotations uneasily commingled in my head, I boarded the Tourmobile that would return me to the land of the living. For all its myriad beauties, Arlington National Cemetery is not a place where one can comfortably tarry, at least not for very long. The next day I was back in New York, sworn in, worn out, and grateful above all things merely to be alive.

“You look really happy,” Galley Cat told me at dinner that night.

“I am really happy,” I replied.

So I was, and still am. My life is far from perfect, and there are many things about it that I would gladly change, but nobody could hope for a better or more blessed one. May you all have such good fortune, and know it for what it is while it lasts.

See you next week.

“‘Why, she isn’t even crying!’ she heard people say at her mother’s funeral, as if it was for this moist tribute that people died. People were always wanting children to cry and prove again and again their helplessness, so that they might take advantage of it.”

Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born