Archives for June 2005

I’ve been tagged with the book meme:

1. How many books do I own? About 1,250. (I got rid of two-thirds of my books when I moved to this apartment two and a half years ago.)

2. What’s the last book I bought? Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat, by Edward McPherson.

3. What’s the last book I read? Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography, by Piers Paul Read.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

– Boswell’s Life of Johnson

– The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor

– Enemies, a Love Story, by Isaac Bashevis Singer

– The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy

– Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935-1975, by Fairfield Porter

Get with the program, Girl. You’re a meme behind.

From Edmund White’s recent New Yorker essay
on women:

For most of my life I’ve been a shoulder to cry on, and all of that time I’ve wished I could do more to ease the pain of the women in my life. If I were straight, I could have married one of them. I would have known how to comfort her. I would have worked hard to provide her with the security and even the luxury she required. I would never have run off with another woman. I would have been as sensitive to her needs as a sister, as protective as a father. And I would always have told her where I was going and exactly when I’d be coming home. This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off….

In fact, it isn’t quite so easy, but I do know what he means.

“I was always that kid who went to the library and took out every book; I find that to be a very sexy thing about somebody.”

Erin McKeown (interview with Jay Ruttenberg, Time Out New York, June 5-12, 2003)

This week your faithful correspondent catches up with two overrated movies, each of them suffering from its own big, basic flaw that seems mainly attributable to nobody being bothered to flesh out (no pun intended) and execute (ditto) a decent half-idea.

First up is House of Sand and Fog, which has, of course, beautiful casting and a promising set-up: a fatal battle of wills between two essentially well-meaning but very desperate people. Then, alas, there’s the wild card that is Ron Eldard’s short-fused, xenophobic cop, with his totally inordinate degree of influence on the course of events. He seems to have stumbled in from a different film and genre altogether, or more likely to have been brought in as insurance against Kingsley and Connelly’s characters bonding over their perfectly matched freakish intensity, working things out, and robbing the movie of the shock and gravitas it’s so determined to deliver. Thanks to the cop’s antics generally–and to the gun that hitches a ride into the climactic sequence with him specifically–the movie’s ending, though obscenely sad, is too much of a freak accident, too detached from the principal characters’ wills and actions, to count as tragedy. Without the cop this might have been a good movie, but who can tell?

Shaun of the Dead is a pretty good joke while it lasts, which it does for almost half its length, at which point it runs out of steam and turns into…a straight-faced retread of what it’s supposed to be parodying. Whoops. The movie squeezed a little more goodwill out of me than it strictly should have, by virtue of the title character’s sweetness. But I got a far bigger kick out of both the straight-ahead 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and the inspired mess 28 Days Later–it’s a better problem to suffer from too many ideas than from too few. There’s some point to made here about the zombie-mall movie being too close to a joke in its pure state to be successfully parodied, but I lost a version of this post once already last night and, let’s face it, it’s way past my bedtime now. If this makes sense to you, though, tell me why in email. If it doesn’t…oh, go ahead and email me too.

Next up: The Taste of Others. Up to the standards of Look at Me? We’ll see.

The New York Public Library has extended its current exhibition of prints and gouaches by Milton Avery through Saturday. Here’s what I wrote about it last month in the Washington Post:

For pure charm, it’d be hard to top the Milton Avery exhibition…at the main branch of the New York Public Library, a pleasingly compact affair that goes by the mile-long name of “The Flying Pig and Other Winged Creatures: An Exhibition of the Artist’s Illustrations and Prints.” Fifty-nine years ago, Avery accepted an invitation to illustrate a children’s book written by a friend and called “The Flying Pig.” The book was scrapped on account of excessive expense (to reproduce Avery’s paintings in color would have cost too much in the days of post-World War II inflation), and this is the first time the illustrations have been shown in public. Not surprisingly, they’re just as adorable as you’d expect–fancifully composed and joyously colored, very much in the Avery manner. Hung alongside them are a dozen of the artist’s finest drypoints and woodcuts, including “Self-Portrait,” “March at a Table,” “Night Nude” and “Dancer.” If you’ve never seen any of Avery’s prints, this is an excellent place to start.

For more information (including online images of the works in the show), go here.

Your business is not to clear your conscience,

But to learn how to bear the burdens of your conscience.

T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

I’ve been reading about Richard Diebenkorn, whom I’m thinking of adding to the Teachout Museum, and last night I ran across this wonderful list that was found among his papers after he died in 1993. The spelling is exactly as in the original:

Notes to myself on beginning a painting

1. attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued–except as a stimulus for further moves.

3. Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.

4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.

5. Dont “discover” a subject–of any kind.

6. Somehow don’t be bored–but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.

7. Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.

8. Keep thinking about Polyanna.

9. Tolerate chaos.

10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

A reader writes:

I find that iTunes and writing coexist uneasily here on my laptop. I often use iTunes while I am writing to set a mood or to block out ambient sound and focus my mind. But just as often the music becomes a distraction. I listen too much, write too little, and unproductive hours slip away before I catch myself.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject of music and writing. How do you use music in your actual writing process, if at all? Do you listen to music while you write, or are you the type who requires absolute silence? Do you program your music to suit the subject you are writing about? More abstractly, do you think that the growing popularity of iTunes and digitized music generally somehow changes the writing atmosphere, i.e. now that our music resides on the same hard drive as our work, do we listen differently, does music penetrate the workspace more than it used to?

Having at one time spent the better part of a decade working in a cubicle at the New York Daily News, I no longer need silence in order to write–which isn’t to say that I’d enjoy living across the street from a construction site! Fortunately, the windows of my apartment look down on a quiet, leafy side street, and the walls of the building are thick enough to screen out virtually all of the modest amounts of noise generated by my upstairs and downstairs neighbors.

As for music, I used to listen to it fairly regularly while writing, and on occasion I used it to set a mood. (I wrote parts of City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy, for example, while listening to Aaron Copland’s Letter from Home and Dave Frishberg’s Sweet Kentucky Ham.) But I always had to be careful about what pieces I chose, and I learned over time that there were certain kinds of music that interfered with the writing of first drafts. Songs sung in English tended to throw me off the track, as did any recording conducted by Arturo Toscanini, whose interpretations of the classics were simply too intense for me to relegate to the background of my consciousness.

Perhaps my powers of concentration have been diminished by advancing age, or maybe I’ve simply become more sensitive to the emotion-evoking power of music. (I cry more easily now than I did a decade ago.) Whatever the reason, I now find music more distracting than I used to, and I no longer listen to any kind of music while working on first drafts. Editing is different, and unless I’m doing battle with a tight deadline, in which case I prefer to struggle in silence, I sometimes listen to music when I’m polishing a piece, though I don’t really hear it. Sometimes I’ll put on a symphony or concerto, start chipping away at an unpolished draft, and emerge from a deep trough of concentration to realize–always with surprise–that the piece of music to which I was “listening” is almost over.

I suspect that my correspondent is right to think that the increased availability of digitized music is changing the atmosphere of the workplace, but I see iTunes less as a unique and separate source of distraction than as one of the myriad ways in which Web-enabled computers are capable of diverting us from the task at hand, whatever it may be. I’m a chronic procrastinator–if it weren’t for deadlines, I wouldn’t get anything done–and my iBook places an infinite number of distractions at my fingertips. I’m far more likely to waste time by surfing the Web than by playing with iTunes, though, possibly because it’s easier for me to pretend that I’m searching for some fact that’s relevant to the task at hand.

More generally, I’ve come to look upon my DSL-equipped iBook as an enemy of leisure, a malevolent magnet that pulls me out of the Teachout Museum and seduces me into working when I ought to be playing. It is this realization that finally taught me a lesson the rest of the world figured out long ago, which is that it is good to get out of town from time to time. The great danger of the digital workplace, of course, is that you can take it wherever you go, which is why I never, ever take my computer with me to the secure undisclosed location where I sit by the Hudson River and watch the sun set, nor do I bring it along when I review out-of-town plays. That way lies…well, maybe not madness, but definitely obsession. I may be a workaholic, but at least I’m not a degenerate workaholic.