Archives for June 2005

My review of Kevin Canty’s splendid novel Winslow in Love appears in today’s Chicago Tribune. You may remember that when I was working on the review in the Spring, I enlisted ALN readers’ help in thinking of books within books, with highly edifying and fun results. For the purposes of the review, this merely helped me gird a point made in passing, but the exercise took on a life of its own–I heard from dozens of you, and the topic was taken up fruitfully at other blogs.

Like I said, none of this had to do with Canty’s novel in a direct way. His title character Winslow is a poet, but none of his poetry appears in the book. It’s through other, more subtle means that Canty makes the reader think of Winslow as, in all probability, a good poet–for instance, though his perceptions of the natural world:

In the last half of the book, for instance, there is a criminally good chapter detailing a single Sunday when spring makes its first appearance in Montana. Winslow, cheered, drives out into the mountains to fish. The loss of his wife, the arrival of Jones, his writer’s block, the cancerous skin lesion he has just had removed–all of these troubles dissolve in the soft spring air until, at the apex of this very good day, he reels in a sizable trout:

“He was about to throw him back in the water but decided at the last moment to kill him and keep him. He assumed this was legal. There was nobody around, anyway. He dashed the head of the big trout against a big rock on the bank and the silver body, the beautiful thing, shuddered and died.

“He felt it immediately: his luck was leaving him.”

Winslow’s luck will take a few more zigs and zags before this day ends, and with it this perfect chapter. There is nothing particularly fancy here–except for some mountains shining “like advertisements for themselves, sharp-toothed and glamorous” and some “[e]mpty storefronts” that line a street “like a mouthful of broken teeth.”

But the generally modest language and staid narration somehow amount to a fantastically eloquent portrait of an interesting and troubled mind confronted with beauty, grasping at it for hope and forgetfulness while basking in the glorious present. Winslow finds the natural beauty of mountains and water, fish and elk, light and warmth, both ordinary and outrageous. “How many different kinds of fool would he feel like before this day was over?” he wonders in self-reproach and exultation.

Despite one pretty big problem with the novel, I count it as one of the best I’ve read so far this year.

Friday again, and I’m not dead yet, though I was having my doubts on Wednesday morning. Nevertheless, I lived to write another Wall Street Journal column, this one about shows in New York (the Broadway revival of Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight!) and Washington, D.C. (Arena Stage’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie).

In a nutshell:

As an actor, Hal Holbrook has two real-life Marks to his credit, Felt and Twain. In a believe-it-or-not coincidence worthy of Ripley, he has revived “Mark Twain Tonight!” just one week after America’s front pages carried the news that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat, the Watergate leaker whom Mr. Holbrook portrayed in the 1976 film of “All the President’s Men.” You can’t buy publicity like that–though Mr. Holbrook doesn’t need it anymore. Written in 1954 and last seen on Broadway 28 years ago, “Mark Twain Tonight!” remains to this day the most admired of all one-man biographical shows, and Mr. Holbrook still wears it like a bespoke white suit….

To attempt so demanding a full-evening tour de force is risky business at any age, and I confess to having wondered how well Mr. Holbrook, who is 79, would hold up under the strain. Though he now relies on a wireless microphone, I rejoice to report that he is otherwise better than ever…

We don’t get to see much Eugene O’Neill in New York nowadays, so I jumped at the chance to go to Washington and take in Arena Stage’s revival of “Anna Christie,” a 1920 play that is now best known from the 1930 Hollywood adaptation that was Greta Garbo’s first sound film (“Garbo Talks!” read the posters). While the film is surprisingly faithful to O’Neill’s script, it’s stiff and stagy. Not so Molly Smith’s clean-lined, unmannered production, played out on a skeletal unit set by Bill C. Ray that is transformed before your eyes from a waterfront bar to the deck of a coal barge. Except for a couple of improbably decorous fight scenes, Ms. Smith has done her damnedest to make something true out of this whiskery tale of a whore in search of redemption….

No link. Buy a paper or, better yet, go here to subscribe to the online edition of the Journal. That’s how I read me.

“Rachel had lived amongst clever men for a good many years, and now cleverness wasn’t something to which she attached great importance. It was a gift–oh yes, it was a gift; but it wasn’t a virtue.”

WIlliam Haggard, The Unquiet Sleep

Sorry, but I’m still way out of whack. No show today or tomorrow–I’m leaving town for a couple of days to get some desperately needed rest. There’s something about New York that is positively inimical to recovery from any ailment other than boredom.

See you on Friday, unless I don’t.

“There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveller, who says, ‘Anywhere but here.'”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Considerations by the Way”

The Tony Awards were announced on Sunday night. Here‘s a list of who won what. If you want to compare it to the predictions I posted on May 11, go here. Bear in mind that my personal preferences, not my predictions, are set in boldface.

I don’t get Bill Irwin at all, but otherwise I think I did pretty well for a semi-newcomer….

P.S. I’m still under the weather, but I think I’m starting to get better, which is a good thing, since I have to go see Mark Twain Tonight! (If you hear someone sneezing in an aisle seat this evening, please be kind.)

A reader writes:

Have we run out of art? And do we really need any more of it? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (and I’m sure you ask yourself that question on a daily basis). Have we painted all the paintings we need, recorded all the great music, taken all the great photographs, written all the great operas and ballets, etc.?

In other words, is the demand for new art diminishing–not because we are a soulless culture obsessed with celebrity and real estate–but because there’s more than enough great stuff out there to consume, and we don’t have nearly enough time to enjoy it? There seems to be such a glut of everything artistic these days. In jazz alone, I could go on listening to new and already-heard stuff from the same 1940s and 1950s period until I dropped dead at 100 without running out, and that’s jazz alone. Meaning, I really don’t need any more jazz to be produced. It’s all on disc. I don’t need any more cabaret singers singing Cole Porter, or young guys in suits playing Fats Navarro, etc.

Can one argue that we already have all the great works we need and that if the number of artists producing works is declining, the reason has more to do with the fact that artists have nothing more to say that hasn’t been said already v. you can’t make a living doing it?

Artists, don’t fly off the handle. My correspondent (who is also a good friend) is raising a serious question, asked by a person who genuinely loves art but finds himself grappling with the vexing problem of how to allocate that most precious of all unrenewable resources: time.

Remember that no one, not even the wealthiest of connoisseurs, has an unlimited amount of time to spend on art. However wisely or unwisely we allocate them, there are only twenty-four hours in a day. Sooner or later, we have to choose. In order to write my weekly Wall Street Journal column, I see every play that comes to Broadway, and I also do my best to catch what I expect to be the most important off-Broadway and out-of-town openings. Yet even if I did nothing but go to plays, I still wouldn’t be able to see all the shows that interested me. Factor in the additional time I spend looking at ballets, operas, and art exhibitions, listening to concerts, going to nightclubs, reading books…but you get the point, right? I make hard cultural choices every day, and the hardest of these is deciding how much of my inescapably limited free time to devote to seeking out new works of art.

When it comes to theater, of course, the choice is to some extent made for me. In a sense, every theatrical production is “new,” even a revival of Hamlet. And while I suppose you could spend your whole playgoing life doing nothing but attending performances of the classics, that’d still leave you with plenty of nights off. Not so the other art forms, especially those that are physically embodied (like painting) or can be reproduced mechanically (like music). With them, you can spend your days living exclusively in the past, and it goes without saying, or should, that such an existence can be wholly fulfilling. If I had to spend the rest of my life with Rembrandt, Schubert, and Flannery O’Connor, who’s to say it would somehow be less satisfactory than a life spent with Cy Twombly, Philip Glass, and Jane Smiley? Not me.

None of this, however, means that there is no case to be made for the new. On the contrary, one of the most important parts of my work as a critic is to make that case, to seek out exciting new works of art and write about them so evocatively that my readers feel moved to go out and experience them at first hand. I’m not talking about eat-your-spinach modern art, either. I don’t like that any more than most people do. Late modernism in all its painfully earnest guises was a concerted assault on the sensibilities, one that persuaded a generation of unhappy audiences to shun the new–but those days, as the kids say, are soooo over. In the past year, I’ve written about such accessible, immediately involving new works of art as Jane Freilicher’s My Cubism, Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza, Agn

Received in the e-mail from jazz pianist Fred Hersch:

Hope you can be there…

The Jazz Standard

116 East 27th Street

(between Park & Lexington)

presents

The Fred Hersch Duo Series 3

Tuesday-Sunday, June 7th-12th

Tuesday: Chris Potter, tenor sax

Wednesday: Ted Nash, clarinet, saxes

Thursday: Bob Brookmeyer, trombone

Friday: Stefon Harris, vibes

Saturday: Kate McGarry, voice

Sunday: Mark Turner, tenor sax

shows at 7:30 & 9:30

11:30 pm show on Friday & Saturday

Reservations/advance tickets are suggested

Please call (212) 576-2232 or go to www.ticketweb.com

Very strongly recommended. If you strapped me on the rack and made me pick just one night, it’d be Thursday, but no matter which one you opt for, you can’t miss. So go.