Archives for March 2006

It’s a far cry from the Teachout Museum, let me tell you, but a picture of this Constable picture, safekept from an otherwise discarded 2002 wall calendar, is what I look at when I’m at my desk. An oil sketch that I saw in person when I was in London more years ago now than I care to believe, “A Lane in Flatford” mesmerizes me even in this humble form. I’m not sure how well you can make it out in the web reproduction, but the detail I’m obsessed with is the leftmost cloud, which meets the tree to its left oddly flush. The paint seems most heavily applied here, and the cloud’s white, thick brightness arrests my eye–every day–like a tear in the canvas. This bold cloud is the most aggressive, crispest detail in the picture, but it stops short of the rather fuzzy, sweet tree, meeting it halfway. The question of which is background and which foreground seems strangely, disarmingly unresolved. The picture’s verisimilitude breaks down a little.

Honestly, I stare at this picture intermittently for hours most days, but before tonight I couldn’t have told you what was in it besides that cloud and treetop. There are figures? A lane? A fence? Huh. So that must be where the painting gets its title. Still, to me, it’s a picture of a cloud, and of painting.

The Morning News has kicked off their second annual Tournament of Books, with guest judges including Maud, Mark, Dale Peck, and Brigid Hughes, and entrants ranging from Mary Gaitskill to Kazuo Ishiguro to Zadie Smith. Should be fun, especially for those of us who are immune to the charms of March madness. A tournament for the rest of us, with brackets and everything.

And yet, until this year, some essential element seemed to be missing from the basketball tourney’s bookish equivalent…I could never quite put my finger on just what it was…. Oh yeah. Betting.

Well, it’s a pale imitation no more–the ever resourceful and creative (not to mention hometown) Coudal Partners have handicapped the books and are taking your bets now at $10 a pop, with all proceeds destined for a worthwhile charity that helps public schools. The prizes, natch, are books. Come to think of it, my forgoing a Janet Gretzky joke here is kind of a prize in its own right….

“I think that when I began to write more characteristic poetry, I’d found how to make poems as readable as novels, if you see what I mean.”

Philip Larkin, interviewed by Neil Powell (Tracks, Summer 1967)

Note: Over the next week or so, I will be corresponding with my friend Kenneth Burns–who leads a double online life here and here–about Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep, recently released in paperback. This is the first installment.

I thought the two main qualities that made the novel stand out were its refusal to idealize its protagonist, Lee, and its success at rendering both a problem character and a problem setting with such thick particularity. A few weeks back, Curtis Sittenfeld wrote in the New York Times Book Review about the hell she has taken from some readers for putting at the center of her novel a flawed and sometimes downright unappealing character. For me, this feature was crucial to the book’s interest. The basic story Prep tells is of an encounter between strangers, the Ault School and Lee Fiora: the east coast bastion of privilege, and the interloper from the midwest whose romance with and skepticism toward it are both functions of her intense self-consciousness. As determining factors, Lee’s psychology and Ault’s social dynamic are held in exquisite balance. But the way I’ll probably finally remember Prep is as a great portrait of self-consciousness–a form of psychological experience that can practically be honed to an art form by teenage girls (and probably boys, too, but neither Prep nor my own experience can speak to that).

Part of what I loved about Prep was its willingness to take this rawest form of self-consciousness seriously as a social and psychological phenomenon–by mercilessly anatomizing it. I think the novel is about as insightful on such matters as the late great television show Freaks and Geeks (I can’t remember whether you were a fan), though it is less comic and much harder on its protagonist. Here I’ll pause to note what a fantastically page-turning read Prep is–I zoomed through it at warp speed–and how great the temptation therefore is to dismiss it as fluff. It’s one of those books that I would put down only reluctantly and pick up again hungrily, as if it were a letter full of juicy gossip about everyone I’ve ever known. So the impulse is to dismiss it, and I think that snap judgment is sadly telling about our mistrust of certain kinds of pleasure in reading. (And by “us” I mean, roughly, anyone who ever used the phrase “literary fiction” in earnest, which I do close to daily.)

So Lee hides in the dormitory phone booth or reflects, “I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible lest you taint the previous interaction.” I recognized this way of thinking; it’s something I’ve thought before, but never very consciously. Because of the extremity of Lee’s social circumstances and the almost surgical style Sittenfeld employs, the dissection Prep performs–both social and psychological–regularly unearths insights like this, bringing submerged modes of thinking to the surface.

So what did you like about the novel?

Yours,

OGIC

Like I said, I’m taking a few days off from the blog, but if you want someone else’s perspective on where I went and what I did last week, go here and here. I can vouch for the accuracy of this account (especially the part about barbecue).

‘Scuse me while I disappear again. See you…er, later. Friday. Sometime. Whenever.

“There certainly is a cult of the mad these days: think of all the boys who’ve been in the bin–I don’t understand it. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Hardy–it’s the big, sane boys who get the medals. The object of writing is to show life as it is, and if you don’t see it like that you’re in trouble, not life. “

Philip Larkin, interviewed by John Haffenden (Manchester Guardian, Mar. 31, 1973)

Here’s a little taste of my next “Sightings” column, which appears biweekly in the “Pursuits” section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:

After Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, the two most widely admired singers in the history of jazz are Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. They were officially canonized by inclusion in “The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz” along with Armstrong, Holiday and Bessie Smith, the only vocalists to be so honored. Their recordings, Fitzgerald’s in particular, continue to this day to be sliced, diced, repackaged and reissued in box sets and best-of-the-best compilations. To publicly suggest that they might have been less than perfect is thus to pin a bull’s-eye on your chest–but I don’t much enjoy listening to either one of them, and never have.

In saying so, I know I’m going up against a wealth of highly credentialed contrary opinion….

As always, there’s lots more where that came from. See for yourself–buy a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and look me up.

Friday has arrived, and though I’m elsewhere, Our Girl has kindly consented to post this week’s Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. It’s a double-barreled hallelujah for two new Off Broadway plays, John Patrick Shanley’s Defiance and Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore:

I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but John Patrick Shanley has followed up “Doubt,” the best play of the 2004-05 season, with a new play of identical quality, performed to perfection by an equally fine cast.

“Defiance” is going to make a star out of Stephen Lang, whom I last saw in “Beyond Glory,” his riveting one-man show about eight winners of the Medal of Honor. Alas, “Beyond Glory” hasn’t played New York yet (I saw it in Chicago last fall). It belongs here, though, and I have no doubt that some smart producer will bring it to Broadway after seeing Mr. Lang burn up the stage in “Defiance.” Here he plays Lt. Col. Morgan Littlefield, a hard-headed yet unexpectedly idealistic Marine who’s keeping a secret that’s about to blow up in his face, and who can’t see why one not-so-little mistake (don’t ask–it’s better if you go in not knowing) should turn his otherwise blameless career into a handful of ashes….

One terrific follow-up deserves another: Martin McDonagh, who made the same kind of splash with “The Pillowman” that Mr. Shanley did with “Doubt,” is back again with a show that’s fully as impressive. “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” now playing Off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater, is a tar-black comedy based on a daring and ingenious conceit: It portrays a cell of murderous Irish terrorists as a gaggle of drunken halfwits who love their pets more than their fellow men. Padraic (David Wilmot), the title character, is a psychopath whose only friend, a black cat named Wee Thomas, has been bludgeoned to death by persons unknown, thus inspiring his irate owner to start killing everyone in sight (“I’m just in the middle of shooting me dad,” he cheerfully remarks at one point)….

No link, so do your duty and shell out a buck for a copy of the Friday Journal. Better yet, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the full text of my review, plus plenty more art-related coverage where that came from.