Archives for April 2005

I spent pretty much the whole morning and afternoon working on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. The result was 2,000 polished words that carry Louis from 1905 to 1913–the formative years of his childhood. Not only am I hugely pleased with the day’s work, but I’m still hot enough that I could probably keep on pushing forward until two or three in the morning. Instead, I’ve decided to shut the shop down and resume work tomorrow afternoon. This cuts sharply against the grain of my workaholic nature, suggesting that it’s exactly what I ought to do.

No writing to do, no show to see, no dinner date…what will I do with myself? Well, here are four possibilities that sound especially good:

– Listen to the original soundtrack CD
of Bernard Herrmann’s dark, desperate score for Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground, which just arrived in today’s mail.

– Continue reading the bound galleys of The Lost Night: A Daughter’s Search for the Truth of Her Father’s Murder, a memoir by danceblogger Rachel Howard, which arrived on Saturday.

– Watch one of the remaining Gilmore Girls episodes stockpiled on the hard drive of my DVR.

– Turn the computer off now. Absolutely no more e-mail or blogging until tomorrow night.

What’s not to like? See you later. The next words you read will be somebody else’s….

P.S. Read this and smile. (He gets it, by the way.)

“Sometimes it seems like writing novels has become a contemporary form of expression, expression of self. Much like being a Renaissance gentleman writing a sonnet. It’s seen as a thing that anyone with a reasonable amount of education can do, and it’s your duty as a citizen to write a half-dozen novels.”

Ian McEwan, interviewed in Salon

An open letter I can get behind. Even though I never finished Preston Falls and might choose to phrase things a bit differently, I do love me some Jernigan. That guy will make you laugh (“I had my usual thoughts about everything being debased”) and make you laugh and cry:

I ran into the house but Rick was already in there shouting into the telephone, and back outside a crowd had gathered around the car and the van. But nobody was getting too close. It looked like a scene out of an old Twilight Zone, neighbors on some little suburban street looking at the flying saucer whose arrival would soon reveal what fascists they all were. Pretty inappropriate thing to be thinking, but. The whole thing, in fact, looked as if it were in black and white. I should have gone and pushed through the crowd and done something. Later they told me it had been over instantly: no blame. Right. But at any rate, I walked around the end of the garage instead and back to the pool, now deserted. I climbed the steps up onto the deck, felt like I was going to black out, quick sat down on something, and when the shiny flecks stopped swimming in front of my eyes I looked down and saw her wet footprints fading.

Well, I remember being awfully impressed with that last image when I first read this book as a young ‘un, anyway–I remember sucking my breath in at it. Now I’m not so sure. It doesn’t affect me to nearly the same degree, whether simply because I’m more discerning now or because it’s the sort of thing that rings the bell only the one time you don’t see it coming.

Jernigan is an amazing book in any case, and alone makes Gates fair game for Mr. Demko’s, er, encouragement.

Dove’s massive giveaway of a book of Oprah Winfrey’s magazine columns, in exchange for free advertising inside the book, is neither the first nor the most consequential instance in American publishing history of books selling soap. I quote from Rosemary Ashton’s introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s triple-decker novel Robert Elsmere:

Published in 1888, when its author was aged 36, the work became an immediate and enduring bestseller. It went on to achieve even greater sales, mainly in pirated editions, in America. Within a year of its publication, Robert Elsmere–less a mere book than “a momentous public event,” as Henry James put it–appears to have sold about 40,000 copies in Britain and 200,000 in America. So extraordinary was the behaviour of American booksellers and entrepreneurs, one of whom gave the book away free with every purchase of a bar of Balsam Fir Soap, that the case for pushing through at last an International Copyright Bill was made largely with reference to the fortunes of Robert Elsmere in America. The bill came into effect in 1891.

So what’s Mrs. Ward’s piracy-smashing and just-plain-smashing success all about? No sensation novel hers, but “a long, serious, detailed account of the loss of orthodox faith of a young clergyman, Robert Elsmere, and the consequent straings on his marriage to an Evangelical wife.” That’s Ashton again. I’m sorry to have to borrow her words, since I actually did read this book once upon a time, though strictly out of duty when I was a student of British fiction of this period. My memory of Elsmere is highly sketchy, my book itself dutifully underlined and check-marked, though not, I see, much festooned with actual notes. As a novel it’s more than competent but unremarkable. If you are in the market for a quickie history of nineteenth-century religious issues in England, however, it’s probably as cushy a ride as you’re going to find.

Perhaps the most popular novel of its age, now forgotten by all but scholars. I wonder what will be the Robert Elsmere of our time? More to the point, I wonder what won’t.

Here’s a new webby, bookish project (my favorite kind) that I’m part of: the Litblog Co-op. Idea’s this: four times a year the participating bloggers will throw their collective influence behind a book they really, really like–something that’s not poised to get a great deal of attention from the print media. The real beauty of the concept? Twenty highly opinionated individuals, enabled by technology to settle on a single book without any actual brawling! Of course, I could always drive to Golden Rule Jones’s to kick him if absolutely necessary. But the rest of the far-flung LBC are probably safe.

Check out the fledgling site. Make our job harder–and imperil Sam’s shins–by submitting book recommendations. And stay tuned: on May 15th the first selection will be announced. And please note some of the excellent company in which this finds me.

It’s Friday, and the fruits of my recent nonstop playgoing are on display in this morning’s Wall Street Journal drama column, which contains reviews of four New York shows: Julius Caesar,
On Golden Pond,
Steel Magnolias, and the Lincoln Center American Songbook concert version (now closed) of Stephen Sondheim’s Passion.

“Mr. Miles was the Mathematical master, and for that very reason especially detestable to me, for whom mathematics was anathema. He was also a prig, the type of pedantically superior, insular prig which England, above all other countries, manages to produce in its perfection. Nearly every sentence that proceeded from his lips had so exasperating a flavour that it excited a wild sense of irritation, even when one agreed with him.

I read in the morning papers of the death of Neil Welliver, who is represented in the Teachout Museum by the woodcut Night Scene, which I took to Washington with me last month to show at my Phillips Lecture. I met Welliver by chance a few years ago, and wrote about the encounter in “Second City,” my Washington Post column: