Archives for November 2005

“It is now 16 years since my first book was published, & abt 21 years since I started publishing articles in the magazines. Throughout that time there has literally been not one day in which I did not feel that I was idling, that I was behind with the current job, & that my total output was miserably small. Even at the periods when I was working 10 hours a day on a book, or turning out 4 or 5 articles a week, I have never been able to get away from this neurotic feeling, that I was wasting time. I can never get any sense of achievement out of the work that is actually in progress, because it always goes slower than I intend, & in any case I feel that a book or even an article does not exist until it is finished. But as soon as a book is finished, I begin, actually from the next day, worrying that the next one is not begun, & am haunted with the fear that there will never be a next one–that my impulse is exhausted for good & all. If I look back & count up the actual amount that I have written, then I see that my output has been respectable: but this does not reassure me, because it simply gives me the feeling that I once had an industriousness & a fertility which I have now lost.”

George Orwell, 1949 notebook entry (courtesy of Rick Brookhiser)

– Total budget for NBC’s original 1955 telecast of Jerome Robbins’ musical version of Peter Pan: $700,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $4,809,290.57

(Source: Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, Watching TV)

“As soon as I realized that some lawyers were paid more than others, I knew there was no justice.”

Frank Sheed (quoted in Wilfrid Sheed, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir With Parents)

Just in case you didn’t hear it the first time:

On December 6, I’ll be teaming up with litblogger Maud Newton and Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker for a joint performance at Makor, the Upper West Side outpost of the 92nd Street Y. Our subject is “The Art of Online Criticism.”

Says the press release:

Cultural critics find themselves in the same predicament as other members of the traditional media who now must play a new game. Hear three influential critics who write both online and for print discuss how the cultural conversation is evolving and what the future holds when everyone’s a critic.

Bryan Keefer is the moderator. The show starts at seven p.m. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door.

For more information, or to buy tickets online, go here.

As usual, the joint’s been jumping since last we met. I took Supermaud to hear Hilary Hahn at Carnegie Hall last Thursday. On Friday I went down to Broadway for the press preview of Edward Albee’s Seascape, then hopped a train to Baltimore the next morning to catch a performance of No

– Fee paid to Bernard Herrmann by RKO in 1940 for scoring Citizen Kane: $10,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $133,070.95

(Source: Steven C. Smith, A Heart at Fire’s Center)

“Bigotry does not mean believing that people who differ from you are wrong, it means assuming that they are either knaves or fools. To think them so is an immediate convenience, since it saves us the trouble of analyzing either their views or our own.

Is anyone writing as sharply and accessibly on fiction right now, with so little fanfare, as Max Watman? When one of his refreshingly direct Fiction Chronicles pops up in the New Criterion, I can’t click through fast enough. He covers the most gabbed-about books; he knows exactly what he thinks; and unlike many book critics, he is intensely reader-focused. There’s an attention to the visceral experience of reading in his reviews that I greatly appreciate and don’t find much of elsewhere, at least not in combination with such sound literary judgment and good writing (when I do, it is more likely to be on a favorite lit blog than in print). Watman seems to place a premium on conveying what it feels like to read a book while one is reading it, with results that are always helpful and frequently revelatory. Here, for example, is the beginning of his take on Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown:

Early in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown I felt a sense of awe. It wasn’t specific. It wasn’t tied to a single scene or a particular descriptive. It was as if the entire thing, the rhythm of the book, the pulse of the language was bigger than what I’d been reading. It was a change, there was more here. I felt as if I were a much younger man, or perhaps a child, flushed with the intensity of imagination in literature, cracking open Anna Karenina for the first time and being swept away. For now, we who read constantly find most of our pleasures in smaller ways, rereading a short shelf, or finding relatively small accomplishments in literature we like. Nothing seems comparable to the bedrock of one’s literary education, and it is a very rare reading experience that is remotely reminiscent of the Great Books of your private canon.

Rushdie is so sure of himself, such a strong man of letters, that his language can capture that feeling of fullness. I don’t think it is only in comparison to the dithering and hedging of our constantly self-effacing, self-deprecating contemporaries that Rushdie’s hand feels steady pushing the story forward.

I felt as if I were on my way to something good. And as soon as I felt it, it began to disintegrate.

I read and reviewed that book. I was ultimately easier on it than Watman, partly because, in my experience, the feeling he nicely describes here survived the encroachments of the novel’s faults. But the interesting thing is that while I felt just this sense of the novel’s force, it never occurred to me to simply describe that. Instead I spent a lot of words trying to pinpoint what was producing it. That’s a necessary and usually productive exercise, but it’s also nice to find a reviewer simply reporting the impression. It’s all too easy to skip over that step in the throes of analysis.

In fact, I’ve been skipping over it throughout this post, so let me back up, take a hint from Mr. Watman, and simply say: when I read his work, I feel a sense of delight and engagement. There. I feel I’ve grown as a critic today.

Also covered in Watman’s piece are the following titles:

– E.L. Doctorow, The March: “In the wake of poetry will come realism, efforts to re-assert the actuality of the thing, to bring back a focus on the true costs of war. Over time hell can be polished, and then someone comes along to put the hell back in. That’s what E. L. Doctorow has attempted in The March….Doctorow’s characters are as flat as photographs, and a book made of snapshots is nothing. War is not just a scrapbook of atrocities and bad luck. It is not a series of alarming photographs. War is hell because it happens to people, and unfortunately there are no people in Doctorow’s book.”

– Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park: “The whole book swirls, surreally, pushing the limits of tolerable confusion while sending up laughably familiar horror story shticks. For a while, it looks as if nothing will be resolved. It works precisely because it is a ghost story, replete with eviscerated livestock, freshly dug graves, and messages written in ash–and because everything, ultimately, is resolved.”

– Rick Moody, The Diviners: “Why would anyone even bother to type the words ‘imaginary pistachio trees, with their delights’?”

– Benjamin Kunkel, Indecision, in a moment of reviewing the reviewers: “I may be unable to get out of my own postmodern/ironic way, but it seems that everyone has mistaken Kunkel for the character of his own creation. And while that doesn’t make his creation any more palatable, it is the best tribute to a first-person novel I can think of.”