Archives for February 2010

Among the fascinating tidbits in David Grann’s The Lost City of Z. is a mention of a “Gumption-Reviver machine” used by Francis Galton — Darwin’s cousin and an adventurer, statistician, and inventor (later in life he would expand on and warp Darwin’s theories to create eugenics) — while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge.
I’ve been putting in a lot of writing time at my desk lately and the idea of a Gumption-Reviver is infinitely appealing. A couple sources credit Galton with the machine’s invention, but in the same letter excerpted below he mentions that a tutor recommended it to him so it may have already been in use at the college. The basic idea: A portable funnel suspended overhead drips a steady stream of water on your head to keep you awake. As Galton writes, “We generally begin to use this machine about 10 at night and continue it till 1 or 2; it is very useful.”
Should you want more specific instructions to create your own, I direct you to Galton’s letter to his father on the subject, found in Karl Pearson’s Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton. All you’ll need is a funnel with graduated stopcock, a supporting apparatus, a napkin and a servant to keep the funnel filled with water!

My dear Father,
I should have sent a letter to you yesterday if it had not been that the one that I had written was spoilt by an accident in my Gumption-Reviver machine which covered it with water. This machine as it has perhaps come into use since your time I describe to you.
[Sketch of the Gumption-Reviver machine: a student sits reading at a table, elbows on table and hands support head, lamp in front to right; funnel dripping water which runs off a cloth bound round head to left. Additional sketches of gallows to carry funnel and of method of arranging cloth.]
A large funnel is supported on a double stand about 6 ft. high, it has a graduated stopcock at the bottom by which the size of the aperture can be regulated. This as you read is placed above your head and filled with water. Round the head a napkin is tied, dependent on one side where the bow and end is so [arranged] that the water may drop off. Now it is calculated that as the number of hours of study increases in an arithmetic ratio, so will the weariness consequent on it increase in a geometrical ratio, and the stream of water must in that ratio be increased…

Galton explains that your “gyp” (Cambridge slang for servant) should refill the funnel every quarter-hour. You will not wish to spread a sheet or towel across your clothing as their wetness is desirable; as Galton says, “damp shirts do not invite repose.” However, the mention of the ruined letter makes me think that you may want a protective guard for your notebook or laptop.

“Celebrity is what a democratic society has instead of aristocrats.”
John Leonard, Smoke and Mirrors: Violence, Television and Other American Cultures

I wrote the first paragraph of my next book yesterday morning. The working title, subject to change without warning, is Black Beauty: A Life of Duke Ellington. I’m not going to share it with you just yet–I want to wait until I’ve got at least a couple of dozen pages under my belt and can see whether or not I’m really off to a convincing start–but the fact that I’m now officially at work on a book for which I’ll be signing the contracts later today strikes me as propitious enough to pass along.

I wanted to get started on Black Beauty right away in order to capitalize on the psychic momentum generated by the events of the past year. A colleague remarked to me at breakfast the other day that 2009 must have been the most eventful year of my professional life to date, and I couldn’t argue with him. The twin successes of Pops and The Letter have left me with an exhilarating sense of possibility, a feeling that I can do anything to which I set my mind.

When you’re feeling that way, it’s a good idea to pinch yourself blue at regular intervals, though life usually gets around to doing that for you sooner or later. I got just such a pinch in the mail the other day. A couple of years ago I blogged about an alleged cat-related quote of mine that turned out, much to my surprise, to be authentic. It first came to my attention when it popped up on a cat calendar, and not long after that I got a letter from the Borealis Press, a greeting-card company, asking if they could use it on one of their cards.

Though Borealis wasn’t offering much money–I was invited to choose between a small flat fee and a royalty–I was amused by the idea of seeing my name and words on a greeting card, so I opted for a royalty, signed the contract, and sent it back. A few weeks later I received a boxful of cards, and a few months after that I got my first check. If memory serves, I think it was for eight or nine dollars. Ever since then I’ve received four embarrassingly small checks each year from Borealis. When I got back from Florida, all full of myself and ready to pass miracles, I went through my snail mail and found yet another check, this one for the grand and glorious sum of $6.45.

I was tempted to frame the check as a reminder to stay humble, but then I thought of an even more profitable spiritual exercise: I went down to the bank last week, made out a deposit slip, took the check to a teller, and deposited it in my account.

The teller, bless her, didn’t crack a smile…but I did.

“Some critics are like chimney-sweepers: they put out the fire below, or frighten the swallows from their nests above; they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot, and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders, and then sing from the top of the house as if they had built it.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Drift-Wood (courtesy of Michael Greenspan)

My playgoing travels are just about over for the current season–Broadway beckons–but I managed to work in two more out-of-town openings in this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column, Florida Stage’s Sins of the Mother in Manalapan and Shakespeare & Company’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses in Lenox, Massachusetts. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Israel Horovitz was a fixture on the New York theater scene throughout the ’60s and ’70s. In recent years, though, he’s shifted his base of operations northward to the Gloucester Stage Company, the Massachusetts troupe for which the prolific playwright-director has penned a cycle of 14 plays set in and around his adopted home. “Sins of the Mother,” an all-male four-hander first seen in its entirety in Gloucester last summer, is now being performed by Florida Stage in a production directed by the author. It’s an unpretentious yet memorable piece of work, a concise, sharp-edged snapshot of working-class life that packs the dramatic punch of “A View from the Bridge” or “August: Osage County.” The cast is ideal, the staging ferociously right. This is a show with no weak links, one that in a better-regulated world would now be playing on Broadway.
“Sins of the Mother” is the kind of play that hinges on a series of genuinely startling revelations, so I’ll say only that four of the five characters (Brian Claudio Smith plays an ungimmicky double role) are New England stevedores trapped in a dying trade. They return to the waterfront each week to pick up their unemployment checks and talk about days gone by–and few of their memories are happy. Before long their tough-guy banter gives way to real, raw anger, and suddenly the surface of the play splits open and you tumble into a world driven by resentment and the long-simmering desire for vengeance….
Few stage versions of great novels are more effective than Christopher Hampton’s 1986 adaptation of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 tale of a sadistic pair of pleasure-seeking French aristocrats who step into a bottomless pit of humiliation that they dug for somebody else. The Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2008 Broadway revival was dismayingly unstylish, so it’s a pleasure to report that Shakespeare & Company is performing it with terrific skill and intelligence in the Berkshires. In Tina Packer’s staging, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” is played as a witty farce for most of its length–but one that ends in heartbreak, catastrophe and bloodshed. This twist adds immeasurably to the production’s force. Even if you already know what’s going to happen to the Marquise de Merteuil (Elizabeth Aspenlieder) and her cold-hearted chum the Vicomte de Valmont (Josh Aaron McCabe) at play’s end, you’ll still be shocked when the trap is finally sprung….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

Lincoln Center Festival has announced plans to bring the Royal Shakespeare Company of Stratford-upon-Avon to New York next summer for a six-week season of five Shakespeare plays–and to build a replica of the auditorium of the RSC’s nine-hundred-seat Courtyard Theatre inside the Park Avenue Armory, where the season will take place.
Charles Isherwood of the New York Times likes this idea, but he thinks the replica auditorium should be left in place permanently at the armory and used as the home of a new resident classical theater company. I have a different idea: I’d like to see a half-dozen of America’s best regional theaters invited to perform on the RSC stage as part of Lincoln Center Festival 2012.
Both ideas, needless to say, have their merits. But why is Lincoln Center Festival undertaking so spectacular and costly a venture in the first place? Is it solely because the RSC is artistically deserving of such lavish treatment? Or are other, less admirable factors in play? These questions are the subject of my “Sightings” column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. To find out what I think about the RSC’s coming New York residency, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”
Jane Austen, letter to Cassandra Austen, Dec. 24, 1798

I just finished reading Straight Man, the Richard Russo novel that centers around the life of a regional college English department and that is often mentioned in the same breath as Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, David Lodge’s novels, and the granddaddy of the genre, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. I didn’t find Russo’s book of a piece with these others; it’s too well-meaning. It’s funny and perceptive, but ultimately soft on all its characters, its barbs a breed apart from Amis’s and Jarrell’s skewering glee. By comparison to them, it’s positively affectionate.
While I appreciate that quality in a book, I never entirely warmed up to Russo’s warm-hearted satire, except for isolated strands within an densely populated, highly eventful plot. For instance: the main character, English professor William Henry Devereaux Jr., is haunted through the book by the suicide of a local who shares his name:

Within sight of where we sit waiting to turn onto Pleasant Street, a man named William Cherry, a lifelong Conrail employee, has recently taken his life by lying down on the track in the middle of the night. At first the speculation was that he was one of the men laid off the previous week, but the opposite turned out to be true. He had in fact just retired with his pension and full benefits. On television his less fortunate neighbors couldn’t understand it. He had it made, they said.

Later the narrator voices his “deep conviction that when William Cherry’s severed head was borne up the tracks by a train in the direction of Bellemonde, no one, not even his loved ones, suspected what was in it.” And finally:

After all, not far from where I sit, a man my age, a man named William Cherry has recently surrendered his life by lying down on the track and allowing something larger and more powerful than himself to bear away and out of this world some pain I will never know.

That’s a gorgeous, powerful sentence, if also a disturbingly seductive brief for the ameliorative power of suicide. It moved me as much as anything in the novel.
Also very wonderful is a thread that proves the linchpin of the narrator’s relationship with his imposing, distant father–a prominent literary critic of his time who, toward the end of the book, returns to his family after decades apart. In midcareer the father, William Henry Devereaux Sr., had rescued himself from a late-onset fear of speaking that threatened to derail his career by, in part, delivering an especially impassioned indictment of Charles Dickens.

The class was on Dickens, a writer my father particularly despised for his sentimentality and lack of dramatic subtlety, and never did a scholar lay more complete waste to a dead writer than my father to Charles Dickens that day….He had given the same lecture before, but never like this. In a fit of unplanned dramatic ecstasy, he read Jo’s death scene from Bleak House to such devastating comic effect that by the time he’d finished the entire class was on the floor. Then they got up off the floor and gave him a standing ovation. This was what they’d paid their money for. Finally, they felt themselves to be in the presence of greatness, as they slammed Bleak House shut with contempt.

Perhaps you can sense what’s coming. On his father’s return to his wife and son, the two men go for a walk.

“You may find this strange,” he says, “but I’ve started rereading Dickens.”

Clearly he imagines he’s paying the author a compliment by returning in his final years to a writer whose mawkishness he’s derided over a long career. ‘Much of the work is appalling, of course. Simply appalling,” my father concedes, genuflecting before his previous wisdom on the subject. “Most of it, probably. But there is something there, isn’t there. Some power…something”–he searches for the right word here–“transcendent, really.”

…

“I feel almost,” he says, “as though I had sinned against that man.”

This remarkable passage doesn’t end here, but I don’t want to spoil it entirely for any of you who may yet read this book. The book’s main story of small-campus egos and professional politics run amok is amusing enough, nicely observed, and deftly written. But these minor moments made the book worthwhile for me.