Archives for June 2009

CAAF passed on this meme:

Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

Her picks:

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet
Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica
Joan Aiken’s Wolves of Willoughby Chase
Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love
A.S. Byatt’s Possession
Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield
J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories
George Eliot’s Middlemarch
Bert Hölldobler/ E.O. Wilson’s Journey to the Ants
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber
Samuel R. Delany’s Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

My picks:

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood
James Gould Cozzens’ Guard of Honor
Boswell’s Life of Johnson
Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now
John P. Marquand’s Point of No Return
Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings
Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour (yes, it’s a trilogy, but I first read it in the one-volume omnibus version)
Dawn Powell’s The Locusts Have No King
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye
Clement Greenberg’s Collected Essays and Criticism (a four-volume set, but I think of it as a single work)
George Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (ditto)
David Cairns’ Berlioz (a two-volume biography, but I think of it as a single work)
Fairfield Porter’s Art in Its Own Terms
Edwin Denby’s Looking at the Dance

How about you, OGIC?

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

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

• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 19, then reopens Sept. 8 and runs through Nov. 15, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• Mary Stuart (drama, G, far too long and complicated for children, closes Aug. 16, reviewed here)

• The Norman Conquests * (three related comedies, PG-13, comprehensively unsuitable for children, playing in repertory through July 25, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

• Waiting for Godot * (drama, PG-13, accessible to intelligent and open-minded adolescents, closes July 12, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Coraline (musical, G, possibly too scary for small children and very problematic for twee-hating adults, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• The Rivalry (historical drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, extended through Aug. 2, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The History Boys (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, too intellectually complex for most adolescents, closes Aug. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Design for Living (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes June 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Arcadia (serious comedy, PG-13, too complicated for children and slow-witted adults, reviewed here)

“‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually–memory yields.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (courtesy of Richard Brookhiser)

The composer conducts an excerpt from Firebird in 1965:

A silent film clip of Camille Saint-Saëns conducting, shot circa 1915. This excerpt from Sacha Guitry’s film Ceux de chez nous is narrated in French by Guitry:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“I find it impossible to think of ‘favorite’ poets. I would rather list the ones I cannot stand.”
Billy Collins, online interview with Kritya: A Journal of Poetry (courtesy of Elly Richards)

“‘Everyone minds here. They mind so much, they mind all the time, they mind like anything. They mind the step and they mind the door, and they d’you mind if I just. And there they were, poor dears, minding like mad. Everyone minds; but no one understands. They cannot understand what could have possessed such an odd couple to behave so curiously; it’s all too hopeless, clueless, fatal, futile. The opposite from us Americans. We understand everything. We’re always understanding. It’s the thing to do. We can immediately see why the poor kid flipped after the raw deal she got. And what’s more, when you come right down to it, we understand his compulsions too.'”
Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me

This list of the fifty words appearing in the New York Times that are most frequently looked up by the paper’s readers has been making the rounds. I use twenty-six of the words often enough to describe them as part of my working vocabulary: apoplectic, apotheosis, banal, enervating, ersatz, feckless and fecklessness, fungible, glut, inchoate (one of my all-time favorite words), interlocutor, hagiography and hagiographic, laconic, louche, neologisms, peripatetic, peroration, recondite, risible, sanguine, sartorial, schadenfreude, shibboleths, and solipsistic and solipsism (remember The Tao of Steve?).

Inquiring minds want to know: how is it possible that 1,865 readers of the New York Times don’t know what banal means?

UPDATE: A reader writes:

The list is probably skewed by younger readers since it only registers online activity. We codgers, who read the print version, are not reflected in the count. Codgers have had more opportunities to learn words like louche and feckless.

Makes sense to me.