Archives for 2005

I owe a massive apology to Maud and Dan Kennedy for what I wrote two posts down (“The Odd Couple”). I read their posts about the New Yorker Target ads uncarefully to begin with, and then thoughtlessly lumped them in with the sort of commentary I’d read in Slate and Fishbowl NY, which were of an entirely different stripe. And I hadn’t seen the actual magazine. Ergo, the actual force of their objection went over my head completely and I posted something deeply stupid. I apologize.

I owe a massive apology to Maud and Dan Kennedy for what I wrote two posts down (“The Odd Couple”). I read their posts about the New Yorker Target ads uncarefully to begin with, and then thoughtlessly lumped them in with the sort of commentary I’d read in Slate and Fishbowl NY, which were of an entirely different stripe. And I hadn’t seen the actual magazine. Ergo, the actual force of their objection went over my head completely and I posted something deeply stupid. I apologize.

Confronted with the workmanlike diaries of Nathaniel Hawthorne, of whom he is writing a critical biography, Henry James is positively confounded. And, truth be told, a little annoyed!

I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing too trivial to be suggestive. His Note-Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual things, and of his habit of converting them into memoranda. These Note-Books, by the way–this seems as good a place as any other to say it–are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding with them in the whole body of literature. They were published–in six volumes, issued at intervals–some years after Hawthorne’s death, and no person attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret that they should have been given to the world. There is a point of view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the biographer is to desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, for the Note-Books; but I am obliged to confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they came to be written–what was Hawthorne’s purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and often trivial chronicle. For a person desiring information about him at any cost, it is valuable; it sheds a vivid light upon his character, his habits, the nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering what was its value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a very partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still smaller sense a record of emotions. Outward objects play much the large part in it; opinions, convictions, ideas pure and simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes his Note-Book into his confidence, or commits to its pages any reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest way to describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they might be opened in the post, should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is too futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they are curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of Hawthorne’s mind (I do not say that they elevate our estimate of it), but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we find in them.

I haven’t read the notebooks in question, but this reminds me for all the world of the sort of observations that Andy Warhol’s diaries elicited. But nobody really brought to those the sky-high expectations that James seems to have brought to his predecessor’s notebooks. What I love about the above passage is the heated contest of James’s impulses to protect Hawthorne and to excoriate him for being so dull, a contest that ends in a stalemate. First, James thinks he’s going to be tactful about this and tell you what he really thinks only between the lines: he’s thankful for notebooks–“as a biographer.” As a reader, one gets the sense, he’s about an inch away from tossing them into the fire. Then he gives up the charade: “I am obliged to confess”…that I haven’t the foggiest what Hawthorne thought he was up to! Then he’s tactful again: the chronicle is valuable…if you want information about Hawthorne “at any cost.” And so on.

The reigning note, however, is confusion verging on a sense of having been betrayed by the notebooks’ emptiness. You don’t often catch James not knowing what to say, but here the discovery of his literary father figure’s personal banality has him practically sputtering. Rather affecting, if you ask me.

Confronted with the workmanlike diaries of Nathaniel Hawthorne, of whom he is writing a critical biography, Henry James is positively confounded. And, truth be told, a little annoyed!

I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing too trivial to be suggestive. His Note-Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual things, and of his habit of converting them into memoranda. These Note-Books, by the way–this seems as good a place as any other to say it–are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding with them in the whole body of literature. They were published–in six volumes, issued at intervals–some years after Hawthorne’s death, and no person attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret that they should have been given to the world. There is a point of view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the biographer is to desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, for the Note-Books; but I am obliged to confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they came to be written–what was Hawthorne’s purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and often trivial chronicle. For a person desiring information about him at any cost, it is valuable; it sheds a vivid light upon his character, his habits, the nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering what was its value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a very partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still smaller sense a record of emotions. Outward objects play much the large part in it; opinions, convictions, ideas pure and simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes his Note-Book into his confidence, or commits to its pages any reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest way to describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they might be opened in the post, should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is too futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they are curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of Hawthorne’s mind (I do not say that they elevate our estimate of it), but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we find in them.

I haven’t read the notebooks in question, but this reminds me for all the world of the sort of observations that Andy Warhol’s diaries elicited. But nobody really brought to those the sky-high expectations that James seems to have brought to his predecessor’s notebooks. What I love about the above passage is the heated contest of James’s impulses to protect Hawthorne and to excoriate him for being so dull, a contest that ends in a stalemate. First, James thinks he’s going to be tactful about this and tell you what he really thinks only between the lines: he’s thankful for notebooks–“as a biographer.” As a reader, one gets the sense, he’s about an inch away from tossing them into the fire. Then he gives up the charade: “I am obliged to confess”…that I haven’t the foggiest what Hawthorne thought he was up to! Then he’s tactful again: the chronicle is valuable…if you want information about Hawthorne “at any cost.” And so on.

The reigning note, however, is confusion verging on a sense of having been betrayed by the notebooks’ emptiness. You don’t often catch James not knowing what to say, but here the discovery of his literary father figure’s personal banality has him practically sputtering. Rather affecting, if you ask me.

Here’s some of what I’ve run across on the Web in the past couple of weeks:

– Jay Rosen, journalism professor and mediablogger extraordinaire, holds forth on the subject of things he used to teach that he no longer believes. Among them:

I used to teach it implicitly: journalism is a profession. Now I think it’s a practice, in which pros and amateurs both participate. There were good things about the professional model, and we should retain them. But it’s the strength of the social practice that counts, not the health of any so-called profession. That is what J-schools should teach and stand for, I believe. I don’t care if they’re called professional schools. They should equip the American people to practice journalism by teaching the students who show up, and others out there who may want help….

Yes. Totally. And if you’re a blogger, you soooo know what he’s talking about.

– Online theater columnist Peter Filichia points out that the list of the ten longest-running plays on Broadway “is the same today as it was on June 13, 1982, the day Deathtrap finally called it quits”:

1. Life with Father (3,224 performances)

2. Tobacco Road (3,182)

3. Abie’s Irish Rose (2,327)

4. Gemini (1,819)

5. Deathtrap (1,793)

6. Harvey (1,775)

7. Born Yesterday (1,642)

8. Mary, Mary (1,572)

9. The Voice of the Turtle (1,557)

10. Barefoot in the Park (1,530)

He also explains why.

(Incidentally, how many of you recognize all ten of these plays? The only one of which I’d never heard was Gemini.)

– Found object: I saw a new one-woman play about Edna St. Vincent Millay the other night, and came away wondering what her actual speaking voice sounded like. The answer is here.

– Department of Posthumous Praise: The divine Ms. Althouse, who guested on Instapundit last week, used that space to pay a nice little tribute to the late Barbara Bel Geddes, and got a funny and revealing piece of e-mail in return.

I, too, thought Bel Geddes was a babe, especially in Blood on the Moon, one of my all-time favorite Westerns (not yet out on DVD, and why the hell not?).

– We don’t do politics here, but Mr. Alicublog was so funny the other day on the subject of conservatives who hate Hollywood that I just had to steer you his way:

I actually think rightwing cinephile Jason Apuzzo has a great idea–that conservatives who are forever bitching about ee-vil Hollywood should cease “verbally ‘rebutting’ these movies like dour lawyers in a courtroom” and start making movies themselves. I should certainly like to see Halliburton Films’ epic production, The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew, starring John Goodman as a hard-drinking Wisconsin Senator up against International Communism and the Democrat Party, played by James Woods. I would also enjoy a new version of The Grapes of Wrath in which the Joads toss flowers to the men who have come to bulldoze their home, and cheerfully take jobs at roadside hamburger stands built by a dreamy-eyed young Ray Kroc (played by Stephen Baldwin)….

While Mr. A and I rarely see eye to eye on matters of state, nobody, and I mean nobody, does the funky reductio ad absurdum the way he does.

– Ms. Bookish Gardener explores her “presumptuous familiarity” with Oscar Levant, one of my all-time favorite minor celebrities.

– Here‘s why litbloggers should post more often about out-of-print books…

– …and here‘s why they shouldn’t get so big for their britches that they forget the whole point of book reviewing (or any other kind of criticism, if I do say so myself).

– Mark Swed takes a long look at which American symphony orchestras are up and which down, and comes up with some interesting conclusions:

The orchestral landscape in America is not what it used to be. Once, American ensembles were lorded over by the “Big Five”–the main orchestras of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cleveland. East Coast critics, while conceding the orchestral energy emanating from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, continue to use that proprietary term, but it means nothing. The real scene has no center.

The hot conductors are in Los Angeles (Esa-Pekka Salonen), Boston (James Levine), San Francisco (Michael Tilson Thomas), Atlanta (Robert Spano) and Minneapolis (Osmo Vanska). This fall, David Robertson is expected to put St. Louis on the A-list. In 2006, when [Marin] Alsop begins in Baltimore, it too should join the party….

I don’t buy every name on that list, but it’s a good starting point for discussion.

– My favorite blogger (who says I can’t make a commitment?) goes to an exhibition of art by Richard Tuttle, and compares what she sees there to the recipes of Paul Bertolli:

The presentation of simple principles tends to leave meaning wide open, but Tuttle and Bertolli only flirt with abstraction. Tomato? Plywood? Wire shadow? Summer squash? One cannot help but reference a very personal relationship to these familiar materials, and this bit of “personal referencing” is what provokes comments of the sort I heard wandering through the Tuttle show: “Why, I could do this!” or “My son made a picture just like that in his second grade art class.” Sure, and your son could smash a whole tomato in a bowl and call it gazpacho, too. Viewing the simple as “art” is often a challenge and why Restaurant or Museum become almost necessary. Bertolli and Tuttle are virtuosos who turn our focus to something quite primary and basic; while not revolutionary, their work causes one to pay attention and realize that being simple is not so simple at all….

You can cook for me any time, ma’am.

– I love this map, at which I look several times each day. (Have you seen it yet, OGIC?)

– This is the best list I’ve seen on a blog in, like, ever. Be prepared to spend at least ten minutes relishing it.

– Finally, two from Supermaud, who filets Thomas Wolfe (me, too! me, too!), then remarks on an urban phenomenon I recently noted with similar wistfulness:

There are no stars in the Brooklyn sky at night. And when I say none, I mean zero.

After six years in these parts, their absence begins to seem normal. You actually forget that it’s not natural to look to the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building, and to the rest of the Manhattan skyline, for illumination after dark. You notice the moon maybe once a month, when it’s red and hanging low in the sky….

That puts me in mind of something I once wrote about small-town life: “A small town needs lots of explaining. It has no tall buildings, and the landmarks are all in your mind. When you look up, you see the sky; when you show somebody the sights, you see yourself.”

See you later.

Here’s some of what I’ve run across on the Web in the past couple of weeks:

– Jay Rosen, journalism professor and mediablogger extraordinaire, holds forth on the subject of things he used to teach that he no longer believes. Among them:

I used to teach it implicitly: journalism is a profession. Now I think it’s a practice, in which pros and amateurs both participate. There were good things about the professional model, and we should retain them. But it’s the strength of the social practice that counts, not the health of any so-called profession. That is what J-schools should teach and stand for, I believe. I don’t care if they’re called professional schools. They should equip the American people to practice journalism by teaching the students who show up, and others out there who may want help….

Yes. Totally. And if you’re a blogger, you soooo know what he’s talking about.

– Online theater columnist Peter Filichia points out that the list of the ten longest-running plays on Broadway “is the same today as it was on June 13, 1982, the day Deathtrap finally called it quits”:

1. Life with Father (3,224 performances)

2. Tobacco Road (3,182)

3. Abie’s Irish Rose (2,327)

4. Gemini (1,819)

5. Deathtrap (1,793)

6. Harvey (1,775)

7. Born Yesterday (1,642)

8. Mary, Mary (1,572)

9. The Voice of the Turtle (1,557)

10. Barefoot in the Park (1,530)

He also explains why.

(Incidentally, how many of you recognize all ten of these plays? The only one of which I’d never heard was Gemini.)

– Found object: I saw a new one-woman play about Edna St. Vincent Millay the other night, and came away wondering what her actual speaking voice sounded like. The answer is here.

– Department of Posthumous Praise: The divine Ms. Althouse, who guested on Instapundit last week, used that space to pay a nice little tribute to the late Barbara Bel Geddes, and got a funny and revealing piece of e-mail in return.

I, too, thought Bel Geddes was a babe, especially in Blood on the Moon, one of my all-time favorite Westerns (not yet out on DVD, and why the hell not?).

– We don’t do politics here, but Mr. Alicublog was so funny the other day on the subject of conservatives who hate Hollywood that I just had to steer you his way:

I actually think rightwing cinephile Jason Apuzzo has a great idea–that conservatives who are forever bitching about ee-vil Hollywood should cease “verbally ‘rebutting’ these movies like dour lawyers in a courtroom” and start making movies themselves. I should certainly like to see Halliburton Films’ epic production, The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew, starring John Goodman as a hard-drinking Wisconsin Senator up against International Communism and the Democrat Party, played by James Woods. I would also enjoy a new version of The Grapes of Wrath in which the Joads toss flowers to the men who have come to bulldoze their home, and cheerfully take jobs at roadside hamburger stands built by a dreamy-eyed young Ray Kroc (played by Stephen Baldwin)….

While Mr. A and I rarely see eye to eye on matters of state, nobody, and I mean nobody, does the funky reductio ad absurdum the way he does.

– Ms. Bookish Gardener explores her “presumptuous familiarity” with Oscar Levant, one of my all-time favorite minor celebrities.

– Here‘s why litbloggers should post more often about out-of-print books…

– …and here‘s why they shouldn’t get so big for their britches that they forget the whole point of book reviewing (or any other kind of criticism, if I do say so myself).

– Mark Swed takes a long look at which American symphony orchestras are up and which down, and comes up with some interesting conclusions:

The orchestral landscape in America is not what it used to be. Once, American ensembles were lorded over by the “Big Five”–the main orchestras of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cleveland. East Coast critics, while conceding the orchestral energy emanating from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, continue to use that proprietary term, but it means nothing. The real scene has no center.

The hot conductors are in Los Angeles (Esa-Pekka Salonen), Boston (James Levine), San Francisco (Michael Tilson Thomas), Atlanta (Robert Spano) and Minneapolis (Osmo Vanska). This fall, David Robertson is expected to put St. Louis on the A-list. In 2006, when [Marin] Alsop begins in Baltimore, it too should join the party….

I don’t buy every name on that list, but it’s a good starting point for discussion.

– My favorite blogger (who says I can’t make a commitment?) goes to an exhibition of art by Richard Tuttle, and compares what she sees there to the recipes of Paul Bertolli:

The presentation of simple principles tends to leave meaning wide open, but Tuttle and Bertolli only flirt with abstraction. Tomato? Plywood? Wire shadow? Summer squash? One cannot help but reference a very personal relationship to these familiar materials, and this bit of “personal referencing” is what provokes comments of the sort I heard wandering through the Tuttle show: “Why, I could do this!” or “My son made a picture just like that in his second grade art class.” Sure, and your son could smash a whole tomato in a bowl and call it gazpacho, too. Viewing the simple as “art” is often a challenge and why Restaurant or Museum become almost necessary. Bertolli and Tuttle are virtuosos who turn our focus to something quite primary and basic; while not revolutionary, their work causes one to pay attention and realize that being simple is not so simple at all….

You can cook for me any time, ma’am.

– I love this map, at which I look several times each day. (Have you seen it yet, OGIC?)

– This is the best list I’ve seen on a blog in, like, ever. Be prepared to spend at least ten minutes relishing it.

– Finally, two from Supermaud, who filets Thomas Wolfe (me, too! me, too!), then remarks on an urban phenomenon I recently noted with similar wistfulness:

There are no stars in the Brooklyn sky at night. And when I say none, I mean zero.

After six years in these parts, their absence begins to seem normal. You actually forget that it’s not natural to look to the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building, and to the rest of the Manhattan skyline, for illumination after dark. You notice the moon maybe once a month, when it’s red and hanging low in the sky….

That puts me in mind of something I once wrote about small-town life: “A small town needs lots of explaining. It has no tall buildings, and the landmarks are all in your mind. When you look up, you see the sky; when you show somebody the sights, you see yourself.”

See you later.

The one thing you can almost never tell an artist friend is that you don’t like his art. It’s dicey merely to say that you don’t understand a particular work, much less that it doesn’t speak to you (even if you go out of your way to assure him that the failing is yours). It’s all but impossible to have a friendly relationship, or even a cordial one, if you simply don’t respond to anything he does. In some cases this is a function of the artist’s vanity, but I’m sure that more often it has to do with his deep-seated uncertainties. Many of the artists I know have fragile egos, and though some of them are amazingly successful at hiding this fragility, most are not. As Orson Welles once said to Peter Bogdanovich, “A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.”

What is less well understood is that the problem runs in both directions. I’ve met and liked artists whose work I later discovered I didn’t much care for, and that fact invariably had an adverse effect on the way I felt about them as people. Indeed, I now go well out of my way to avoid being much more than polite to artists whom I meet socially until I have a chance to look at or listen to their work–and most especially if I like them on sight, as is occasionally the case.

I met the Mutant, a friend of mine who sings jazz, under circumstances that forced us to sit together in a shuttered nightclub and chat for an hour or so one afternoon, then return to the same club that evening to hear a performance by a mutual friend. When we parted, she gave me one of her demo CDs. I’d enjoyed talking to her so much that I actually took a cab straight to my apartment and listened to the whole CD before coming back to the club. Oh, God, I hope this is good, I said to myself all the way home. It was, and we immediately became and remained very close friends. Would that have happened if my response to her singing had been lukewarm? I doubt it.

It is, needless to say, surprisingly easy to admire the work of artists you can’t stand personally. In addition, I find it all too easy to steer clear of occasions to review their work, which is why I go out of my way to do the opposite and write favorably about them whenever I can. It’s one of the ways I keep myself honest (though I don’t write profiles of artists I dislike personally–that’s where I draw the line).

The one thing you can almost never tell an artist friend is that you don’t like his art. It’s dicey merely to say that you don’t understand a particular work, much less that it doesn’t speak to you (even if you go out of your way to assure him that the failing is yours). It’s all but impossible to have a friendly relationship, or even a cordial one, if you simply don’t respond to anything he does. In some cases this is a function of the artist’s vanity, but I’m sure that more often it has to do with his deep-seated uncertainties. Many of the artists I know have fragile egos, and though some of them are amazingly successful at hiding this fragility, most are not. As Orson Welles once said to Peter Bogdanovich, “A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.”

What is less well understood is that the problem runs in both directions. I’ve met and liked artists whose work I later discovered I didn’t much care for, and that fact invariably had an adverse effect on the way I felt about them as people. Indeed, I now go well out of my way to avoid being much more than polite to artists whom I meet socially until I have a chance to look at or listen to their work–and most especially if I like them on sight, as is occasionally the case.

I met the Mutant, a friend of mine who sings jazz, under circumstances that forced us to sit together in a shuttered nightclub and chat for an hour or so one afternoon, then return to the same club that evening to hear a performance by a mutual friend. When we parted, she gave me one of her demo CDs. I’d enjoyed talking to her so much that I actually took a cab straight to my apartment and listened to the whole CD before coming back to the club. Oh, God, I hope this is good, I said to myself all the way home. It was, and we immediately became and remained very close friends. Would that have happened if my response to her singing had been lukewarm? I doubt it.

It is, needless to say, surprisingly easy to admire the work of artists you can’t stand personally. In addition, I find it all too easy to steer clear of occasions to review their work, which is why I go out of my way to do the opposite and write favorably about them whenever I can. It’s one of the ways I keep myself honest (though I don’t write profiles of artists I dislike personally–that’s where I draw the line).