Archives for March 2010

A collection of first sentences from Nabokov’s short stories. Selection cribbed from Anthony Lane’s terrific New Yorker essay about the collected stories, with a couple additions:

“The Wood-Sprite” (Nabokov’s first published story, written while he was a student at Cambridge): “I was pensively penning the outline of the inkstand’s circular, quivering shadow.”
“Wingstroke”: “When the curved tip of one ski crosses the other, you tumble forward.”
“Gods”: “Here is what I see in your eyes right now: rainy night, narrow street, streetlamps gliding away into the distance.”
“Details of a Sunset”: “The last streetcar was disappearing in the mirrorlike murk of the street and, along the wire above it, a spark of Bengal light, crackling and quivering, sped into the distance like a blue star.”
“La Veneziana”: “In front of the red-hued castle, amid luxuriant elms, there was a vividly green grass court.”
“A Letter That Never Reached Russia”: “My charming, dear distant one, I presume you cannot have forgotten anything in the more than eight years of our separation, if you manage to remember even the gray-haired, azure liveried watchman who did not bother us in the least when we would meet, skipping school, on a frosty Petersburg morning, in the Suvurov museum, so dusty, so small, so similar to a glorified snuffbox.
“The Potato Elf”: “Actually his name was Frederick Dobson.”
“The Circle”: “In the second place, because he was possessed by a sudden mad hankering after Russia.”
“Tyrants Destroyed”: “The growth of his power and fame was matched, in my imagination, by the degree of the punishment I would have liked to inflict on him.”
“Ultima Thule”: “Do you remember the day you and I were lunching (partaking of nourishment) a couple of years before your death?”
“That In Aleppo Once”: “Dear V.–Among other things, this is to tell you that at last I am here, in the country whither so many sunsets have led.”
“Signs and Symbols”: “For the fourth time in as many years they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to bring a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind.”

Through this “scattering of nutshells” (Lane’s phrase) you get a portrait of Nabokov as a writer. I was reminded of it by Maud’s similar collage of first sentences from nine Muriel Spark novels. Interesting to compare the two. For example, Nabokov’s color field: azure shading into quivering blue, vivid greens and a spot of red. The only colors in the Spark selection: “almost white” and the “clear crystal” you come to after the “murk & smog” — a fittingly chilly palette for a writer who writes as cleanly and sparely as Spark does.
Lane notes another quality of the Nabokov first sentences is their lack of preamble or introduction. The reader is almost always set down at some mid point of the narrative. Writes Lane: “Again and again, with polite indifference, the stories drop us in media res, and leave us to work out what on earth the res might be.”
Lane’s Nabokov essay can be read online (sub. required) or in his essay collection, Nobody’s Perfect.

“Once in a while I drop into a church again to kneel at the altar for a word of prayer, though this is often a single supplicatory gasp as much accusation as anything else, such as ‘Give us a break, will Ya!'”
Peter De Vries, The Vale of Laughter

One of the sharpest parts of last night’s Oscars was a nice bit by Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. about writers versus actors. The transcript, courtesy of Salon:

Fey: Great movies begin with great writing.
Downey:What does an actor look for in a script? Specificity. Emotional honesty. Catharsis.
Fey: And what does a writer look for in an actor? Memorizing. Not paraphrasing. Fear of ad-libbing.
Downey: Actors want scripts with social relevance, warm weather locations, phone call scenes that can be shot separately from that insane actress that I hate, and long dense columns of uninterrupted monologue, turning the page, and for instance seeing the phrase, “Tony Stark, continued.”
Fey: And we writers dream of a future where actors are mostly computer-generated and their performances can be adjusted by us, on a laptop, alone.
Downey: It’s a collaboration, a collaboration between handsome, gifted people and sickly little mole people.

The two were presenting the award for best original screenplay, which went to Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker. Watch the exchange here.

I finished my stint of jury duty on Friday afternoon, took the next bus to Connecticut, and went into hiding with Mrs. T, whom I hadn’t seen for three whole weeks, our longest separation since we were married two and a half years ago. Except for reading a couple of books that I’m planning to review, I did no work of any kind–a near-unprecedented occurrence.
Today I’m returning to New York, where I’ll be speaking about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong at the Jazz Museum in Harlem tonight at seven p.m. (If you’re interested, go here for details.) Between now and Friday I’ll be seeing three plays and writing a piece or two, or maybe three.
Not surprisingly, I’m a bit careworn from the events of last week–it isn’t easy to sit on a jury while simultaneously holding down what amounts to a full-time job–so I’m planning to keep my blogging to a minimum for the next few days. OGIC and CAAF will take up the slack.
Till soonish.

“As long as something is unfinished, there’s always that little feeling of insecurity. And a feeling of insecurity is absolutely necessary unless you’re so rich that it doesn’t matter.”
Duke Ellington (quoted in Don George, Sweet Man)

Today’s Wall Street Journal column, written in the interstices of my service on a Manhattan jury, gives thumbs up to two new Broadway shows, Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane and the first Broadway revival of William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker. Here’s an excerpt.
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When blood is shed in a Martin McDonagh play, the audience always laughs–and usually gasps. Mr. McDonagh is partial to comic violence, and in “A Behanding in Spokane” he lets it rip. I mustn’t be too specific, this being a play full of grisly surprises, but there’s one thing about which I can be absolutely precise: “A Behanding in Spokane” is the funniest new play to open in New York since I started writing this column.
“Behanding” is the first of Mr. McDonagh’s plays to be written specifically for Broadway and the first set on this side of the Atlantic, though I confess to finding his America hard to tell from his Ireland, both being full of more or less demented blabbermouths. In “Behanding” we meet four, the looniest of whom is Mr. Carmichael (Christopher Walken), a homicidal maniac who has spent the past 47 years searching for his left hand, from which he was involuntarily separated by “six hillbilly bastards” who lived to regret their little prank. Now he’s gone to ground in a hotel managed by another fast-talking lunatic (Sam Rockwell) and is about to dispose of a couple of small-time crooks (Zoe Kazan and Anthony Mackie) who made the mistake of trying to sell him a phony hand.
You’re welcome to interpret “A Behanding in Spokane” as a fable about two lost souls who have more in common than they realize–Mervyn, the hotel clerk, is fully as interesting a character as the mysterious Mr. Carmichael–or you can relax and revel in the virtuosity with which Mr. McDonagh stuffs wildly funny words into the mouths of his cast. Either way, you’ll spend an hour and a half laughing nonstop….
William Gibson’s “The Miracle Worker,” first seen on Broadway in 1959, is the inspirational story of a secular saint, Helen Keller, who overcame the direst of handicaps (an illness left her blind and deaf when she was 19 months old) to become a legend in her own time. It is also a tour de force for a child actress, which is a polite way of saying that “The Miracle Worker” is a theatrical stunt, a play whose star (Abigail Breslin) speaks only one word, “wa-wa,” spending the rest of the evening grunting, moaning, kicking her co-star and throwing food every which way. But if “The Miracle Worker” is a stunt, it is a wholly honorable one, and no one can fail to be moved when Annie Sullivan (Alison Pill), Keller’s teacher, parts the dark curtain of her handicap and leads her by the hand into the bright world of language.
Prior to this production, “The Miracle Worker” had never been revived on Broadway, presumably because it was made into a hugely successful, deservedly well-remembered movie in 1962. Now it has been mounted as a vehicle for the 13-year-old Ms. Breslin, who was delightful in “Little Miss Sunshine” and is downright remarkable in “The Miracle Worker.” Her empty stare, anguished howls and frantic physicality add up to a jarringly intense performance, and the inner glow that lights her face when she first realizes that everything in the world has a name is the stuff first-class acting is made of….
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Read the whole thing here.
Here’s a clip from a 1928 newsreel featuring the real-life Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan:

I recently finished reading an excellent new book by Jon Hancock about Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall debut. The concert, which was released as a long-playing record album in 1950 and is still in print to this day, was a landmark event, the first time that an entire evening of jazz was presented at America’s best-known and most prestigious concert hall. It was also an exceedingly risky proposition for Goodman, who in 1938 was the equivalent of a swing-era rock star. Such folk didn’t go anywhere near Carnegie Hall in the Thirties, and as I read Hancock’s book, I asked myself: why did a successful performer like Benny Goodman feel the need to give a concert there? It occurred to me that Goodman, who had extensive classical training and spent much of the rest of his life playing Brahms and Mozart in addition to the jazz that made him famous, might have questioned his own musical worth and felt that a Carnegie Hall appearance would give him cultural legitimacy.
Needless to say, Goodman was by no means the first artist to suffer from deep-seated doubts about his work. Any number of other major artists, including John Keats and Benjamin Britten, have found their private fears to be at times all but incapacitating. My “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal speculates on what causes great artists to question their own accomplishments–and whether such self-doubt is always a bad thing. If you’re curious, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.