A steadily growing number of professional journalists have waded into the blogosphere since Our Girl and I set up shop in this space, some of whom clearly get it and some of whom just as clearly don’t. It’s not for me to say to which category I belong, but one thing I do know is that I’ve tried to get it–that is, to approach blogging on its own distinctive terms. I’m glad to see that Reflections in D Minor agrees.

If I were handing out my own set of awards, by the way, I’d give a similar one to Alex Ross, whose page started out as a boring old links-to-my-print-media-stuff billboard but evolved with impressive and gratifying speed into a bonafide blog. Alex gets it, too.

– A great conductor died the other day, but hardly anybody noticed, and I doubt that many readers of this blog would have known his name. Yet Frederick Fennell was one of the most gifted and individual conductors of the century just past. The reason why he failed to make a significant impression on the listening public-at-large was that he spent virtually the whole of his career conducting concert bands. What John Philip Sousa started, Fennell finished by founding the Eastman Wind Ensemble in 1952. Together with that peerless group, he made a long series of band recordings for Mercury whose vigor, precision, and technical finesse have never been equaled, much less surpassed. One of them, Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy, is in my opinion one of the greatest recordings of the 20th century–and note that I didn’t say “greatest band recordings,” either.

The New York Times published a too-short obituary of Fennell that ends with this anecdote, circulated via e-mail by Cathy Martensen, Fennell’s daughter:

Ms. Martensen recounted that on his deathbed Mr. Fennell said, “I cannot die without a drummer.” She added that his last words were: “I hear him. I’m O.K. now.”

I hope I have the presence of mind to say something half so appropriate when the Distinguished Thing pays me a call.

– A reader wrote to ask if I’d post a list of my favorite Christmas albums and/or songs. Truth to tell, I’m not fond of very many pop-music Christmas albums, most of which run to the cheesy (this one being an obvious exception). I do, however, have a favorite Christmas song, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” It’s a simple, graceful ballad that just happens to be about Christmas, and it rarely fails to move me to tears. Though it’s been recorded hundreds of times, I still think Judy Garland’s first version is the best. (That’s how you can tell I’m straight, all superficial cultural indications to the contrary: I prefer Garland’s early recordings.)

As for classical-style albums, I have two particular favorites, Robert Shaw’s elegantly sung Songs of Angels: Christmas Hymns and Carols and the King’s College Choir’s recording of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, a modern masterpiece that, like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” just happens to be about Christmas.

– Speaking of A Ceremony of Carols, which is one of every self-respecting harpist’s top five bread-and-butter pieces (it’s scored for boys’ choir and harp), I’ve been meaning for weeks now to plug one of the smartest blogs in the ‘sphere, Helen Radice’s twang twang twang. Radice is a professional harpist who lives in England and blogs about her everyday life as a working musician, not infrequently pausing to make amplifying remarks that have a way of sticking in my mind:

It is hard to play classical music if you bottle up what you feel. Traditionally it is not concerned with spectacle and focuses instead on the emotional, the spiritual, and so on. But when you go on stage you put on a show, acting confident when you don’t feel confident. And despite the adage that courage is acting bravely no matter how scared you really are, because in music you cannot lie, it is not the same. I love show business, but it is not the same.

I don’t know a thing about Radice other than what she posts on her blog, but I sure wish she’d move to Manhattan and start hanging with all the other New York-based bloggers. I bet she’d fit right in.

– A lot of music on the blog this morning, huh? (Even the almanac entry is about an imaginary composer.) Don’t ask me how I got so preoccupied, though it could have something to do with the fact that I just made a megacool new friend who is, like Helen Radice, a working musician. That might explain why my mind has been running in musical circles for the past few days. No doubt a better balance will reassert itself as the week wears on…

– …or not. I have three or four print-media pieces to write this week before heading for Smalltown, U.S.A, on Saturday morning (I’m thinking of trying to wheedle a week’s grace out of one of my more susceptible editors), so I don’t expect to post with my usual demoralizing regularity. I’ll do my best to at least keep my hand in, though, and I’ll also be bringing my iBook home for the holidays, so don’t worry about going cold turkey. I’ll be around.

Now excuse the hell out of me while I go make some money….

“‘No, really, that’s too much. Am I to be suffocated by nostalgia? Will that be my end? I should not be at all surprised. I can see the headline:

MUSICIAN DIES OF NOSTALGIA

“‘They’d put someone like Gossage on to the obit. “Mr. Hugh Moreland–probably just Hugh Moreland these days–(writes our Music Critic), at a fashionable gathering last night–I’m sure Gossage still talks about fashionable gatherings–succumbed to an acute attack of nostalgia, a malady to which he had been a martyr for years. His best-known works, etc., etc….”‘”

Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings

As for critics who poke holes just to hear the pop, that’s awfully undergraduate, don’t you think?

When I was an undergraduate, studying music criticism with the late John Haskins, who was then the music critic of the Kansas City Star, I brought in a paper for his perusal in which I declared that I didn’t like Schumann. He said, mildly, “You know, Terry, that says more about you than it does about Schumann.” As I pulled the arrow out of my forehead, I realized that I’d just learned a priceless lesson: if you’re going to express a personal prejudice in a review, one that causes you to dissent decisively from a long-standing verdict of posterity, do it ruefully, in full awareness that your inability to appreciate an obviously great artist is a failure of taste that separates you from the communion of truth.

(And no, Wagner doesn’t count.)

Though her subject was food, it needn’t have been: she could have been writing about clocks or Christmas trees, and they would have sent her prose wafting dizzily into the realms of love, death and desire, just as tangerines and oysters did….

Readers tumbled blissfully into the concoctions of sensuality and fantasy that swirled across her pages, and to many aspiring authors her style was irresistible. A heady narcissism, feverishly laced with romantic innuendo, became the new mode in evocative food writing. [all emphasis added]

I recognize myself in there–the reader who has read Fisher blissfully again and again–but Fisher herself, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t answer to Shapiro’s snarky descriptions. In the third paragraph of the review, Shapiro as much as admits that she’s the opposite of a fan:

But who was she? Who was that mysterious woman sitting alone in a restaurant, relishing a meal she had chosen so astutely that the other diners, even the waiters, were stunned? Who was that narrator so elusive we can only picture her veiled? Anyone who has ever asked this question, either in pleasure or in mounting irritation, will pounce….

You can guess which way Shapiro asked that question. Irritation is the keynote of this dismissive and bored review. It ultimately ends up “pouncing,” indeed, on some of the less pleasant of biographer Joan Reardon’s revelations about Fisher. Shapiro seems to have been only too glad to hear them. If I sound irritated myself, it’s not because I require other readers to share my near-veneration (yeah, I’ll cop to it) of Fisher’s prose but because Shapiro doesn’t bother to actually make any sort of real case against it. She instead lazily slings around some snide innuendo that conjures up, weirdly, a flighty Fisher whose aesthetic has a lot in common with a perfume commercial. Which is ridiculous, as I’ll explain below. As a bonus, the review manages to condescend mightily to Fisher’s admirers, who “tumble” into the books rather than reading them, and the most dedicated of whom are suspected of being “aspiring authors” (the horror!) or trend-surfing foodies. If you ask me, she seems awfully suspicious–suspiciously suspicious–of pleasure, in eating or reading. And so, perhaps, not the ideal reviewer of Poet of the Appetites.

Far more fair, balanced, and credible in his description of Fisher’s work is Brian Thomas Gallagher, who reviews the same biography for Bookforum this month (kisses hereby blown to Cinetrix for the link-up):

M.F.K. Fisher is, more than anything else, a literary seductress. Her writing, always sensual but never decadent, draws the reader near her. Whether she is at the dinner table, on a transatlantic cruise, on a country walk in Dijon, or somewhere else more private, one wishes to join her in her pleasures.

This focus on the proximity of the experiences Fisher describes in her best essays is just right. Most of the pleasures she evokes are modest, small, tactile. Even if she does make great claims for their metaphysical significance, the pleasures themselves remain lodged in the sensual world with all its contingencies.

Gallagher also gives Fisher’s readers a little credit for being sophisticated enough to know that her writings did not record the gospel truth:

There was already little doubt that M.F.K. Fisher the protagonist differed significantly from M.F.K. Fisher the person. It would be hard for any reader of Fisher to believe that she was at once as naive and as worldly as she comes across in her writing. Moreover, such conceits are part of autobiography, and in fact, the writer herself acknowledged this. In a letter to her psychiatrist in 1950, she wondered, “Do I marry M.F.K. Fisher and retire with him-her-it to an ivory tower and turn out yearly masterpieces of unimportant prose?” So while belaboring the fact that there are two Fishers, what Poet of the Appetites does not do well is explore the meaning of the relationship between them.

For this sober paragraph I’m grateful, especially after the gotcha tone of Shapiro’s review, and her overreaching for an original response to Fisher’s work–to the point of ceasing to see that work clearly. Her detractions reminded me of a small aside in a (fascinating) essay (that you should read) in the New Republic last week (do read it). Here Rochelle Gurstein writes about the painter Raphael’s present-day detractors, specifically Michael Kimmelman at the New York Times: “When Kimmelman says he doesn’t ‘get’ Raphael, there is hardly a ripple (except for the irritation felt by those who are tired of critics who try to say shocking things).” I wouldn’t mind entertaining such detractions if they were critically persuasive. Shapiro isn’t out to persuade, or even shock (that would require more energy than she brings)–just to puncture.

The best news here is reported in Gallagher’s review:

Fortunately, to coincide with the biography, North Point press has just reissued five of her best works. An Alphabet for Gourmets, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, Serve It Forth, and, Fisher’s loveliest book, The Gastronomical Me, have all recently become available in paperback (though one is still probably better off with the single-volume collection The Art of Eating, which contains them all).

And here is the only particular in Gallagher’s review I must take issue with. Spring for the five individual volumes; they’re lovely objects, especially the photographs of Fisher that grace their covers, which Bookforum has smartly reproduced alongside the review.

As for me, I may well return to those fab five in the near future. But I’ll skip the biography, thanks anyway.

Stephen Sondheim, “Not a Day Goes By” (from Merrily We Roll Along)

I’ve also made some wonderful friends, not a few of them such fellow bloggers as Maud, Sarah, Chicha
(a/k/a Galley Cat), and Maccers,
whose postings first brought them to my attention, but who have since become a part of my corporeal life as well.

How lucky am I? Words can’t even begin to say. Thanks to you all, hither and yon, for taking part in the fun–and thanks above all to Our Girl in Chicago, my adored co-blogger, who has been improving my life for more than a decade.

Rather to my surprise, 700 Sundays was the best of the lot, despite its predictable weaknesses:

Go figure: Billy Crystal, who got his big break playing the first openly gay character on a network TV series, has ended up as a sort of 21st-century Bob Hope, the safe-as-milk middle-aged establishment comic who hosts the Oscars and is now making his Broadway debut with a one-man “play” at the Broadhurst Theatre about his charmed life as a loyal son, husband and father. Small wonder that “700 Sundays,” with advance sales of $8 million plus, is on the inside track to be Broadway’s uranium-plated smash of the season. And here’s the biggest surprise of all: It’s actually a pretty good show. Who says nice guys finish last?

I put “play” in quotes because “700 Sundays,” like so many one-person shows, occupies an uncertain middle ground between standup routine and full-fledged play. Simply to tell the story of your life in monologue form may or may not be interesting, but it’s rarely dramatic in the ordinary understanding of the word, and Mr. Crystal’s luck has been too good to give his long string of essentially benign anecdotes the ruthless forward movement one demands from a play….

Mr. Crystal seems to be aware of the need to ratchet up the tension in his tale-telling, and when he recalls such potentially radioactive events as the death of his father, you can all but see him struggling to drag “700 Sundays” onto a higher plane of expressivity. Alas, he is barely capable of talking for more than 30 seconds without slipping in a punchline–a compulsion that is especially jolting whenever he tries to be serious….

La Cage aux Folles, on the other hand, was…well, read for yourself:

Once upon a time, “La Cage aux Folles” was a sweet little French film about a couple of graying gents, one of them a flouncy-to-the-max drag queen, who run a nightclub in St. Tropez. Stripped of the louche details, it turned out to be an unexpectedly touching study of the surmountable absurdities of middle-aged love and became the sleeper hit of 1978. Five years later, Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman got their hot little hands on this hot little property, pumped in several thousand tons of hot air, and thereby turned it into a monstrously inflated tourist trap of a musical that ran for 1,761 performances. Now “La Cage aux Folles” has returned to Broadway’s Marquis Theatre, there to titillate a new generation of taste-challenged ticketholders.

Or maybe not. Times, after all, have changed greatly since 1983, and what once seemed ooh-so-risqu