Archives for September 13, 2007

• Maud points to Richard Grayson’s great account of Junot Díaz’s reading in NYC last week. (Especially interesting to me were Díaz’s concluding remarks about the compassion necessary to write characters unlike yourself.)
• Best American [Literary Baka Baka] news: An excerpt from DFW’s 5,000-word introduction to Best American Essays 2007, and advance word on the table of contents for this year’s Best American Short Stories, guest-edited by Stephen King, and the stories making the “100 other” notables list. (Warm congrats to Christopher Rowe and Matt Cheney for their inclusion.) Both anthologies are due out in October. (First link via Paper Cuts.)
• I am entranced by the idea of this bacon candy bar.

Today the dog is having her teeth cleaned. She is a tiny thing, and we’ve been quaking all week about having her put under anesthesia. I tend to bring up dogs like I myself was raised — matted but coddled — and days like this I wish I were a better, more regular steward.
Last night she received a walk, a bath, treats and a half-hour of her favorite game, Bungalow Ball, and this morning we — Mr. Tingle, me and the dog — rolled into the animal hospital parking lot at an early hour. We were brought to an examination room for weigh-in (4.4 pounds) and a pre-cleaning consultation with the vet. In the past this has always been a perfunctory little exchange that concludes in a flourish of waiver-signing. Not this morning. A vet we’ve never met before came springing into the room and embarked on what has to have been the longest lecture ever given on the topic of canine dental hygiene. Forty minutes! As my husband said later, “I knew we were in trouble as soon as he drew the diagram of the wolf jaw.”
The lecture was in the grand sermon style, expertly alternating between sounding the notes of terror (abscesses! fractures!) and comfort (x-rays! newest monitoring technology!). Overall it seemed less educational than designed to make us feel kindly disposed toward whatever bill we’re presented with later today.
Comparing notes on the ride home, Mr. Tingle said the experience had reminded him of sitting in a Baptist church. For me it had been like the scene in Jane Eyre where young Jane is lectured by Mr. Brocklehurst, the superintendent of Lowood, on the importance of reading Psalms. At one point, the vet was telling us about the holiest of holy dogs, a golden retriever who waits in the hallway each evening for its owner to brush and floss its teeth, and all I could think of was this exchange:

“And the Psalms? I hope you like them?”
“No, sir.”
“No? oh shocking! I have a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart: and when you ask him which he would rather have, a ginger-bread nut to eat, or a verse of a Psalm to learn he says: ‘Oh! The verse of a Psalm! angels sing Psalms;’ says he, ‘I wish to be a little angel here below;’ he then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety.”
“Psalms are not interesting,” I remarked.

I’m pretty much over the travel-exacerbated cold that laid me low for the past few days. Alas, it didn’t help that I had to go all the way to Brooklyn on Tuesday and Wednesday to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform King Lear and The Seagull at BAM Harvey Theater. Needless to say, I normally find art therapeutic, but not when it requires me to get out at night, and especially not when I have to see a three-and-a-half-hour-long Shakespeare play in Brooklyn, no matter how good the production may (or may not) be. A middle-aged critic needs his sleep, and I didn’t get enough on Tuesday.
Be that as it may, I feel somewhat like myself again, and except for a pair of same-day runouts to Baltimore and New Jersey, I don’t have any more travel planned for the next four weeks. It’s nice to be home again, especially since I have mail to open.
Just to whet your appetite, here are some of the items that arrived during my recent absences from New York that I’m looking forward to consuming at the earliest possible opportunity:
• Sky Blue, the new album from the Maria Schneider Orchestra
• Poodie James, a novel by jazzblogger Doug Ramsey
• Simone Dinnerstein’s much-ballyhooed recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations
• A.D. Nuttall’s Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?
• Intention, the latest CD from the Amanda Monaco 4
• Joan Mitchell: Works on Paper 1956-1992, an important new catalogue
• Louis Armstrong: Live in ’59, one of last year’s entries in the Jazz Icons DVD series
• An advance copy from Telarc of Yolanda Kondonassis’ Salzedo’s Harp: Music of Carlos Salzedo
I also have the happy but nonetheless demanding duty of selecting the perfect spot in which to hang the latest addition to the Teachout Museum, a handsome abstract serigraph by Darby Bannard called Sicilian Magician.
As usual, watch this space for details.
And now, if you’ll pardon me, I have a drama column to write….

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

• Iphigenia 2.0 (drama, R, adult subject matter and violence, reviewed here, closes Oct. 7)

“Hypocrisy, said La Rochefoucauld, is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; to which one might add, that at least it acknowledges the difference.”
Theodore Dalrymple, “Caught With His…” (National Review, Sept. 24, 2007)