Archives for October 2006

“‘All the world’s a stage,’ of course, but a metaphor as general as that loses all its meaning. Only a second-rate actor could have written such a line out of pride in his second-rate calling. There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.”

Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

“Understand once and for all that I am not interested in economy. I am over seventy-five, so that it is unlikely I will live longer than another twenty-five years. My money is my own and I do not intend to save for the sake of an heir. I made many economies in my youth and they were fairly painless because they young do not particularly care for luxury. They have other interests than spending and can make love satisfactorily on a Coca-Cola, a drink which is nauseating in age. They have little idea of real pleasure: even their love-making is apt to be hurried and incomplete. Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food.”

Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

Too much to do! Not enough time! Yesterday was bad, today will be worse, and I’m leaving town tomorrow, not for fun (though I expect to have some anyway).

Expect no postings today. Not from me, anyway. Are you out there, OGIC?

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Anyone whose job is writing and who has time and energy left over to do this blogorama needs to have his Check Engine codes read out. On the other hand, anyone who likes the 1943 recording of Wild Bill Davison doing “That’s A-Plenty” can’t be all that bad.

You got me, pal. I think I’ll knock off for twenty minutes and go listen to some righteous jazz.

Here’s a line from Thursday’s Wall Street Journal that caught my eye. The author is referring to the announcement of the finalists for this year’s National Book Awards:

Judges chose, and presumably read, from 1,259 books submitted by publishers.

Readers with long memories won’t need to be reminded of the reason for that skeptical “presumably,” but for the benefit of those who have better things to do than read everything Michael Kinsley writes, he’s to blame.

As for me, I was one of the judges for the 2003 nonfiction award, and wrote about the selection process here:

We considered 436 books (some of them very, very briefly, but they all got talked about at some point in the past few months). We never raised our voices, never argued with one another, never got angry. Our deliberations were civilized, collegial, and great fun. When we met yesterday afternoon to make our final selection, it was the first time all five of us had been in the same room at once–we mostly deliberated via e-mail and in conference calls–and the atmosphere, far from being tense, was positively festive.

In case I didn’t make myself clear, let me say unequivocally that I read some of all 436 books. I don’t claim to have read all of them, or all of most of them, or very much of some of them–but, then, anyone who’s reviewed a book knows that you don’t have to read very far in certain books to know that they’re no damn good.

I might add that I haven’t read a single one of this year’s finalists, though two of them are on my list of books I’d like to read. (In fact, I hadn’t even heard of most of them.) Alas, those who write for a living must ration their literary intake severely! Besides, now that I no longer review books other than occasionally, I find it an incredible luxury to be able to read only what interests me, and nothing more. Time is a lovely thing to waste–so long as you get to decide how to waste it.

“Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.”

Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

I spent most of last week deep in the woods of Connecticut, where I worked on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. When not clicking away at the laptop, I watched In Cold Blood (about which more later in the week), Journey into Fear, The Lady from Shanghai, and Our Man in Havana, read Simon Callow’s Orson Welles: Hello Americans, Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt, Chester Himes’ Blind Man With a Pistol, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Patrick S

“One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not contained the right books.”

Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

I review two Broadway shows in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Heartbreak House and the Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of Losing Louie:

George Bernard Shaw used to be a near-constant presence on Broadway. Now he’s history. The Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of “Heartbreak House” is only the second Shaw play (not counting “My Fair Lady”) to be seen there since 1993. Could it be that American audiences have finally tired of the garrulous Irishman who devoted his long life to telling the world how to fix itself? Perhaps–but I hope not. Though Shaw could be a frightful bore, his best plays have remained vibrantly stage-worthy, and “Heartbreak House,” the oddest and least characteristic of them, has grown ever more contemporary in the 86 years since it was first performed on Broadway. This production features some fine acting, and if the overall results are no better than goodish, Shaw’s intentions still come through clearly.

Shaw called “Heartbreak House” “a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes,” by which he meant to suggest a resemblance to the rambling, atmospheric plotlessness of the plays of Chekhov. (Most of Shaw’s own plays, by contrast, are linear to a fault.) It starts off, however, in the cozy manner of a good old-fashioned weekend-in-the-country comedy, the kind in which unsuspecting visitors to an English country house find themselves swept up in amusing romantic hijinks. But Captain Shotover (Philip Bosco), the octogenarian sailor whose living room looks strangely like the stern gallery of a sailing ship, is half-senile–or seems to be–and the other members of his family turn out to be as amusing as a basketful of unfed snakes….

If you think Broadway doesn’t produce enough unfunny comedies of its own, you’ll be happy to hear that Simon Mendes da Costa’s “Losing Louie” has made its way from London to the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Biltmore Theatre, where it came perilously close to putting me to sleep….

No free link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of today’s paper and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review. (If you’re already a subscriber, you’ll find it here.)