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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 3, 2014

Progress is our least important product

June 3, 2014 by Terry Teachout

Pietr-the-LatvianI’ve been thinking about something that I posted last week apropos of my decision to start reading my way through George Simenon’s seventy-five Maigret novels in the order of their writing:

Why, then, haven’t I read more Maigret novels? In part because there are so many of them, making it hard to know where to dive in—but also because they’ve been reprinted virtually at random over the years. Because I have an orderly mind, I’m reflexively disinclined to fish at random in so monstrously large an oeuvre. I like to know where to start, and I like, when possible, to begin at the beginning and proceed from there.

I’ve now read the first four, and another point occurred to me somewhere along the way. When you start exploring so large an oeuvre at random, you never know where you are in your journey to the end of the shelf. While I read primarily—exclusively, insofar as possible—for pleasure, I do like to feel, illusory though the sensation may be, that I’m getting somewhere. When I started reading Trollope, I began, as do most people, with the Palliser novels, about which I knew at the time only that there were six of them and that they formed a sequence that is far easier to understand when read in order. Hence that was what I set out to do, and by the time I got to The Duke’s Children, I knew I was almost finished. That’s my idea of the idea of progress.

The Maigret novels, of course, don’t work that way. Unlike, say, P.G. Wodehouse’s novels about Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, which can easily be read out of sequence but do nevertheless progress (in a manner of speaking) from volume to volume, they are separate and independent entities, free-standing stories that have nothing in common save for the continuing presence of Inspector Maigret. On the other hand, they were written and published over a very long period of time—from 1931 to 1972—and presumably Simenon’s style evolved throughout that period. Or maybe not: I simply don’t know. But I will know if I read them in order, and because I’m a critic with an orderly mind, I’m going to do just that.

crispin3And does it matter? Perhaps not. Probably not, truth to tell. It may be that the only thing besides pleasure that I’ll get out of making my systematic way through Maigret’s adventures is the knowledge of how many more of them I have left to read. Well, that’s fifteen down and sixty to go, I’ll be able to say at some indeterminate point in the future (assuming that I live that long and don’t give up between now and then).

In short, I’ll know where I am—and I hasten to admit that this particular piece of knowledge is almost certainly a meaningless consideration, mere obeisance to one of my psychic quirks. Life itself, after all, is a confused and confusing business, and the older I get, the more inclined I am to agree that (in the words of my favorite song from The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) Life is random and unfair/That’s the reason we despair/Life is pandemonium! This disagreeable reality, I suspect, is part of the reason why it matters to me to know that I have seventy-one more Maigret novels to read before I run out of new ones and must start afresh—or, even better, try something new.

Truth to tell, it probably also explains why so many of us are so strongly disposed by nature to expend so much energy establishing other, comparably trivial reigns of order. Whether it’s a meticulously catalogued stamp collection, a fanatically tidy living room, or a never-to-be-altered ritual breakfast menu, we can point to the results and assure ourselves that while we may not have much control over the world, at least we have that much.

A tiny victory? Well, it’s better than nothing. Slightly better, anyway.

Lookback: five really good short stories

June 3, 2014 by Terry Teachout

LOOKBACKFrom 2007:

Like most of us, I don’t read enough short stories, and wonder why I don’t. After all, I have a special liking for the focus and concentration of art songs and small paintings, and short stories offer the same sort of microcosmic experience. Whenever I pick up a volume of favorite stories, I invariably put it down refreshed. I tossed the first book on this list into my suitcase the other day, read it on the road, and resolved for the umpteenth time to change my ways.
…

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: George Balanchine on Fred Astaire

June 3, 2014 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“He is like Bach, who in his time had a great concentration of ability, essence, knowledge, a spread of music. Astaire has that same concentration of genius; there is so much of the dance in him that it has been distilled.”

George Balanchine (quoted in Horizon, Jan. 1961)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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