Archives for 2013

Today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column is devoted to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Preservation Plan, a document that will be consuming interest to anybody who cares about old records. Here’s an excerpt.
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What is a library? Until fairly recently, the answer to that question was simple: It’s a storehouse for pieces of the past, reduced to words printed on paper. The fact that books are increasingly “printed” on something other than paper doesn’t change the fundamental purpose of libraries. They are our collective memory. Without books and the libraries that preserve them, we wouldn’t know what happened in the past, and we couldn’t use that knowledge to shape the future.
Fortunately for posterity, a well-made book isn’t hard to preserve. But in 1877, Thomas Edison invented a new way to preserve pieces of the past. He called it the phonograph, and it took a long time for librarians to figure out that the echoes of speech and music that Edison and his successors etched on discs were as important a part of our collective memory as the words that Johannes Gutenberg and his successors printed on paper.
Nowadays most people understand the historical significance of recorded sound, and libraries around the world are preserving as much of it as possible. But recording technology has evolved much faster than did printing technology–so fast, in fact, that librarians can’t keep up with it. It’s hard enough to preserve a wax cylinder originally cut in 1900, but how do you preserve an mp3 file? Might it fade over time? And will anybody still know how to play it a quarter-century from now?…
The Library of Congress recently issued a 78-page document called “The Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Plan” whose purpose is to ensure that our descendants will be able to listen to the sounds of the past long after we’re dead and gone. It contains 32 recommendations, most of which, I suspect, will be filed and forgotten. Given the present state of the economy, I can’t imagine that anyone on Capitol Hill sees the preservation of sound recordings as a top priority. But Congress can do one important thing that will help to save our sonic history without costing a cent: We need to straighten out America’s confused copyright laws, and we need to do it now….
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Read the whole thing here.

“Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.”
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

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.

BROADWAY:

• Annie (musical, G, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• All in the Timing (comedy, PG-13, closes Apr. 14, reviewed here)

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

• Donnybrook! (musical, G/PG-13, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Apr. 28, reviewed here)

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

• The Madrid (drama, PG-13, closes May 5, reviewed here)

• Passion (musical, PG-13, extended through Apr. 19, reviewed here)

• The Revisionist (drama, PG-13, closes Apr. 21, reviewed here)

IN LOS ANGELES:

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, remounting of original off-Broadway production, closes Apr. 14, original production reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

• You Can’t Take It With You (comedy, G, closes Apr. 20, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN ORLANDO, FLA.:

• Othello (Shakespeare, PG-13, reviewed here)

“An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Anton Chekhov’s Swan Song, performed by John Gielgud and directed by Kenneth Branagh. This telecast was filmed in 1992:

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

“It was part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counselor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues.”
Edith Wharton, Sanctuary

My mother’s house in Smalltown, U.S.A., is no longer empty. David and Kathy, my sister-in-law, moved in this weekend. I’ve written in this space about their decision to do so. My mother, who entered a nursing home a year and a half ago and spent the rest of her life there, knew of their plans and approved of them wholeheartedly. She had come to terms with the inescapable fact that she would never again be able to live at home, and it meant the world to her to know that the house at 713 Hickory Drive, which she loved, would stay in the family.

David, who is a virtuoso amateur carpenter, started remodeling the house last March, two months before my mother’s death. It took me aback when I first saw my old bedroom stripped bare, but I knew as well as my mother that it was important for David and Kathy to feel free to reshape the house in their own image. I unhesitatingly gave them my blessing, and since then I’ve rejoiced each time they send me a snapshot of the work that David is doing on the interior of the place where I spent twelve happy years.

The work is not yet complete, but David and Kathy are now temporarily ensconced in–yes–my old room, into which they have moved the furniture from the master bedroom in which my mother and father used to sleep. I can’t tell you how much it pleases me to know that.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” L.P. Hartley wrote in The Go-Between. I know that is true, but I also believe deeply in the communion of souls past and present. By choosing to live at 713 Hickory Drive, David and Kathy have chosen to keep faith with the departed souls of our beloved parents, and with the blessed childhood that those two good people made for us.

When David texted me on Sunday letting me know that he and Kathy had finally made the move, I sent this reply: Welcome home, my brother.

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The opening of Joseph Losey’s film version of The Go-Between, adapted by Harold Pinter from the novel. Sir Michael Redgrave is the narrator and the score is by Michel Legrand:

From 2004:

The last time I finished writing a book (as opposed to editing a collection, which feels much less eventful) was on September 4, 2001. I’d actually typed the final words of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken years earlier–I wrote the prologue and epilogue first–and I’d completed the next-to-last draft of the book in late August, but it was on the afternoon of September 4 that I finished editing the last draft and started printing out the manuscript. I didn’t open a bottle of champagne or go out to dinner: instead, I spent the evening alone and went to bed early. I’d been working under extreme pressure all summer, and now, at last, the heat was off. I delivered the manuscript to my agent the next day and caught a plane to Missouri to visit my mother the day after that.
I was expecting to feel a touch of post-partum depression sooner or later, as most writers do when they finish writing a long book. Then, five days later, my mother’s phone rang and a caller from the Upper West Side told me to turn on the TV. That was the last time I thought about Mencken, or my book, for the next few weeks….

Read the whole thing here.