Archives for 2009

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.

“I have never been adventurous; I need to be quiet in order to be free.”
George Santayana, Persons and Places (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

A reader who read my enthusiastic review of the Tony-winning Broadway revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests sent me the following e-mail:

My piggybank is long broken and since I have a two-year-old, I couldn’t get to see the three plays anyway. But I vividly remember the incomparable Tom Conti in the role from maybe thirty years ago on PBS, and would like to see the plays again on TV. I can’t find the DVDs on Amazon or Netflix.
A post on ALN might kick start the effort to reissue–and if you could somehow noodge the University of Chicago Press to speed up the re-release of the Parker books, all the better.

My correspondent is referring to the televised version of The Norman Conquests that aired in England in 1977 and in the United States shortly thereafter. It was released on videocassette and, later, on Region 2 DVD, but is not currently available in this country in any format. Used copies of the VHS version are thin on the ground. I’d love to see it reissued, though I’m not hanging by my thumbs.
In the meantime, you might want to take a look at Coeurs, Alain Resnais’ 2006 film version of Ayckbourn’s Private Fears in Public Places, which is available on DVD and is also shown fairly often on the Independent Film Channel. It’s a surprisingly faithful French-language adaptation of the play, different in tone from the original but very effective in its own way.
As for Donald Westlake’s Parker novels, they’re on the way, three at a time, with the next batch coming in August. Be patient!
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Here are excerpts from all three installments of the TV version of The Norman Conquests.
Table Manners:

Living Together:

Round and Round the Garden:

“Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one consciously, by means of certain external symbols, conveys to others the feelings one has experienced, whereby people so infected by these feelings, also experience them.”
Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?

Evelyn Teachout, my mother, turned eighty today. As soon as I realized that my out-of-town reviewing schedule would make it all but impossible for me to be in Smalltown, U.S.A., for her birthday, I arranged instead to spend a week there in May between trips to Texas and Washington, D.C. I figured that she’d rather have me at home for several days in a row than have me parachute into Smalltown for the Big Day and leave in haste a few scant hours later. I figured right–Mom preferred the first option–but I still felt a pang when I woke up this morning and knew that I wouldn’t be present in person to pay tribute to the woman who made me what I am.

I’ve lived long enough to discover that many, perhaps most people have complicated and largely unsatisfactory relationships with their mothers. Not me. Mine is simple, straightforward, and profoundly gratifying. Sigmund Freud, who was right about a few things, wrote in “A Childhood Recollection of Dichtung und Wahrheit” that “if a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.” This doesn’t quite apply to me–my mother has always loved my brother and me equally–but it’s true that from childhood onward, she left both of us in no doubt of her unconditional love. What’s more, she always gave the impression of taking it for granted that Dave and I could do anything to which we set our minds and hands.

Not that her confidence was oppressive: Mom also made it clear that whatever my brother and I ended up doing would be perfectly fine with her. As a result, she inspired us instead of crushing us, and the fact that she has lived long enough to see how the two of us turned out is one of the greatest joys of my middle age.

My mother has given me countless other gifts through the years, starting with the gift of a sense of humor. I was, she says, an earnest little boy who was disinclined to laugh at much of anything, and she worked overtime to teach me how to smile at the myriad absurdities of the world, a lesson that I like to think I learned well. I’m returning the favor half a lifetime later: I call Mom from wherever I am most nights, and every time I do so, I always do my best to make her laugh, usually with success.

Some debts are beyond repayment, but I tossed a penny on the scales when I wrote the last paragraph of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong:

Above all I thank my mother, who called me into the living room of our Missouri home one Sunday night and sat me down in front of the TV, on which Louis Armstrong was singing “Hello, Dolly!” on The Ed Sullivan Show. “This man won’t be around forever,” she said. “Someday you’ll be glad you saw him.” That was back when the public schools in my home town were still segregated, two decades after a black man had been dragged from our city jail, hauled through the streets at the end of a rope, and set afire. Yet even in a place where such a monstrous evil had been wrought, my mother came to love Armstrong–and, just as important, to respect him–not merely for the beauty of the music he made but also for the goodness of the man who made it. I wrote this book so that she, and others like her, might know more about the man they loved.

Mom hasn’t gotten that far in the advance reading copy of Pops that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sent her a couple of weeks ago. “I put you on the last page,” I told her the other day, to which she replied, “Well, I’m not going to look. I’m going to save it until the end.” Nor will she see this posting: she doesn’t go in for computers. So now you know something she doesn’t, as well as something that I’ve told her many times: I think I have the best mother in the world. May she be around twenty years from now to hear me say it yet again!

“Would that such exercises in timeliness were a mere aberration caused by the intense feelings of the moment. Alas, they have always been with us, especially in wartime and most especially in America, far too many of whose well-meaning citizens are allergic to the exhilarating fizz of high art with a light touch. It seems not to occur to them that life is such an indissoluble mixture of heartbreak and absurdity that it might be more truly portrayed through the refracting lens of comedy. Instead, they prefer what Lord Byron, who knew a thing or two about both life and art, would have crisply dismissed as ‘sermons and soda-water.'”
Terry Teachout, “The Importance of Being Less Earnest” (from A Terry Teachout Reader)

Is it all right to applaud in between the movements of a symphony–or when an actor in a play does something that pleases you? I got a letter from a reader the other day who came to New York to see the Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot and was surprised when the audience applauded the entrances of Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, and John Goodman. Was that inappropriate, given the fact that Godot is a famously dark and disturbing play about the existential dilemmas of humankind? Or should audiences be encouraged to respond more freely to what they see and hear on stage?
I gave some thought to blogging about these questions, but then it occurred to me to write a “Sightings” column for today’s Wall Street Journal in which I sound off on the problem–if it is one–of inappropriate applause. Pick up a copy of the Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

I spent last weekend in New York seeing two shows, the Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of Norman Corwin’s The Rivalry and Playwrights Horizons’ New York premiere of Theresa Rebeck’s Our House, and I report on them in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column. Here’s an excerpt.
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Most educated people have heard of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but how many know anything about them beyond the fact that they were about slavery? Even if you’re not in need of a refresher course, I suggest you pay a visit to the Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of “The Rivalry,” Norman Corwin’s 1959 play about seven debates that changed a nation’s course. Yes, it’s a history lesson, but a painless one that, unlike most latter-day docudramas, sticks surprisingly close to the truth.
Mr. Corwin, who turned 99 last month, is a near-forgotten giant of golden-age radio, the author of “The Plot to Overthrow Christmas” and the man on whom CBS called in 1945 when it wanted to commission a play to celebrate V-E Day. After TV put an end to radio drama, Mr. Corwin turned to other pursuits, writing the screenplay for “Lust for Life,” Vincente Minnelli’s marvelous 1956 biopic about the life of Vincent Van Gogh. Three years later he took a shot at the legitimate stage with “The Rivalry,” which ran for only 81 performances on Broadway but has since had a vigorous afterlife in regional theaters around the country….
So why not just stay home and read the transcripts? Because, among other things, you’ll be depriving yourself of the chance to see Christian Kauffmann impersonate Lincoln. Not only does he bear a close physical resemblance to the man he plays, but his homespun, humorous acting is utterly plausible. Unlike the secular saint portrayed by Henry Fonda in John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln,” Mr. Kauffmann’s Lincoln is recognizably human, and even when he’s flinging great shafts of rhetoric across the platform, he still seems like a small-town lawyer who has been ennobled by fate….
Theresa Rebeck’s latest play is yet another toothless satire about the mindlessness of pop culture. “Our House” invites us to sneer at the nefarious activities of a network TV executive (Christopher Evan Welch) who decides to boost the sagging ratings of one of his news programs by ordering its sexy anchorwoman (Morena Baccarin) to cover reality TV as if it were real news. What follows is a minor miracle of mediocrity, a play in which no one says or does anything unpredictable…
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Read the whole thing here.