“Reject all para-normal phenomena. It’s the only way to remain sane.”

Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw

Kate Bolick reviewed A Terry Teachout Reader in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review:

Cultural critics may lack the depth of knowledge that comes with specialization, but Terry Teachout’s self-issued carte blanche to submerge himself in whatever he wants (he is the music critic of Commentary, the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, and ”critic-for-hire” on everything from opera to television for many other publications) has left him with an unusual and singular perspective on the last 15 years of American cultural activity. Now that the country has crossed its ”great cultural and technological divide,” Teachout writes, as well as finally left postmodernism behind, he hopes his collection will ”have some value as a chronicle, a road map of how we got from there to here.” That the 58 engaging essays in ”A Terry Teachout Reader,” on subjects ranging from Dawn Powell and Louis Armstrong to David Ives and Martha Graham, tell us as much about America as they do about Teachout’s evolving sensibility makes the book an intellectual memoir by way of enthusiasms. His detailed snapshots of bygone cultural moments are introduced by a thoughtful history of our cultural climate over the last half-century.

If you haven’t yet ordered a copy, go here and do so.

Here’s something you might have missed, courtesy of the Chicago Tribune:

MILWAUKEE — Joseph J. Zimmermann Jr., who invented the telephone answering machine in 1948 and patented it a year later, has died at age 92.

Mr. Zimmermann, who died March 31, said in a 1949 interview with the Milwaukee Journal that he got the idea for the device as the owner of an air-conditioning and heating company when he could not afford to hire a secretary to take calls while he was out of the office.

The first machine, the Electronic Secretary Model R1, was made up of a box that lifted the telephone receiver from its cradle when the phone rang; a box containing a control panel with a 78-r.p.m. record player inside that played a recorded greeting; and a wire recorder on top of the second box for recording a series of 30-second messages.

Mr. Zimmermann teamed with businessman and fellow engineer George Danner to start Waukesha, Wis.-based Electronic Secretary Industries. More than 6,000 answering machines were in use in 1957 when the two sold the company, and the patent rights, to General Telephone Corp., which later became GTE.

“The only modern inventions that have been of any real use to me are the typewriter and the Pullman car,” H.L. Mencken told a reporter for Life in 1946. Kurt Andersen asked me the other day whether I thought Mencken would have taken to blogging. I think it’s possible (just), but I’m absolutely sure he would have bought an answering machine. I’ve used one for the past quarter-century, and I can’t imagine how I ever got through the day without it. I even bought my septuagenarian mother her first answering machine, and though it took her a year or so to get used to it, she now finds it indispensable. Can you think of a postwar invention with a higher ratio of social significance to cost?

I’m not the first blogger to link to Chicha’s devastating takedown of The Swan, but just in case you haven’t read it yet, do so at once:

Other shows have had equally shallow and enraging premises–remember Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? But the premise always drew equally shallow and enraging contestants, while the contestants on The Swan don’t seem shallow so much as insecure and clueless. The show itself is the villain, the only target for our hatred. But the question is, is The Swan purposefully loathsome, or just deeply hypocritical?…

The answer is yes.

Speaking of reality TV, Tom Shales, the Washington Post‘s TV critic, also “reviews” broadcast news coverage, and his comments
on Condoleezza’s Rice testimony are worth pondering:

If it were to be viewed as a battle, or a sporting event, or a contest — and of course that would be wrong — then Condoleezza Rice won it. Indeed, the national security adviser did so well and seemed so firmly in command of the situation yesterday, when she testified under oath before the 9/11 commission, that one had to wonder why the White House spent so much time and energy trying to keep her from having to appear….

I’ve long had mixed feelings about this kind of reviewing, but I’m also well aware that in a world where most people get their news by watching TV, every occurrence is a performance, and to ignore that fact is to disregard the nature of reality in the age of information.

As it happens, I had lunch with a Washington Post editor the same day Shales’ piece appeared, and I asked him, “The only thing I can’t figure out is this: why didn’t the Post start it up front instead of in the Style section?”

“Because it was an opinion piece,” he replied.

So it was–and so what? I don’t see the Post on paper, so I don’t know what was on its front page last Friday, but my guess is that Shales’ piece was far more to the point of the day’s events than at least some of the news stories deemed worthy of page-one placement. Is there really so great a difference between unabashed opinion journalism and the “news analysis” (sometimes labeled as such, sometimes not) regularly published on the front pages of most major papers? Bloggers don’t think so–which I suspect is one of the reasons why their audience is growing daily, while the readership of newspapers continues to shrink.

Critical Mass liked my recent posting on reading lists (the one that inspired me to launch “Consumables”).

Here’s what she said in preface to posting her own list:

In a much earlier incarnation of this blog, I used to maintain a running list of my own reading. I was always surprised by how much traffic my reading list page attracted. I liked contemplating the list just as I like contemplating my own (vastly overcrowded) bookshelves–there’s a sort of mnemonic quality to both activities that is at once soothing and inspiring–but I was quite intrigued to see how many other people were also interested in the list. As Terry says, such lists are approximations of people’s shelves, and as such they offer both insight into the lister’s mind and suggest new directions the reader of the list might take in his or her own reading….

Not surprisingly, her readers are posting their own lists as comments.

Have I started something? I sure hope so.

– On Saturday night I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (now maybe Our Girl will tell me what she thought of it!), and last night I watched Joel McCrea in Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown–ideal Easter fare for a small-town boy who loves Westerns.

– Continuing on my Barbara Pym kick, I’m now reading An Unsuitable Attachment, whose characters include Faustina, one of my all-time favorite fictional cats.

– Now playing on iTunes: Ralph Towner’s “Icarus,” recorded by Towner and Gary Burton on Matchbook, one of the most beautiful duo albums ever made. Vibraharp and acoustic twelve-string guitar may sound like an odd match on paper, but on this CD they go together like strawberries and champagne. (Lots of other people think so, too, as you’ll find out when you click on the link and see how much a second-hand copy costs.)

UPDATE: I’d forgotten that OGIC already wrote about Eternal Sunshine.

What she said.

“One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited His goodness, you are done with Him. The Aylmers whom Hawthorne saw as a menace have multiplied. Busy cutting down human imperfection, they are making headway also on the raw material of good. Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”

Flannery O’Connor, introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann

A reader writes:

I am a regular visitor to your website, often first thing in the morning or later during lunch. I have always found the arts interesting but somewhat difficult to grasp. Not so much because they are above me, but my busy life, between spending time with my four young boys, my wife and work, allows little time left to pursue the arts. You provide me with a porthole to view them at least on a very general level. I have taken some of your musical recommendations as they are the easiest for me to indulge in. The Paul Desmond Quartet Live disc is most enjoyable. While I am a neophyte in the jazz world I have listened to Coltrane, Miles, Brubeck, Marsalis and such and enjoyed them.

Anyway, my point is that I had listened to Norah Jones’ first CD when it came out awhile back and enjoyed it. I found it fresh and different but the thing that really was great about it was that I could turn on the radio and hear it with little searching and effort. While I agree after several listens there is nothing new or interesting that you hear, being able to actually understand the lyrics, decent vocals and having a melody played on pop radio stations was so very refreshing.

After reading your comments on her first album I would agree that it definitely belongs in the pop/country category and not jazz and that her music is pleasant enough. And that I think is the point or question. The Norah Jones CD was a hit I think because of one its novelty and two there was actual singing and music as opposed to much of the garble in pop music. It was great to have something so different pumping through the major airwaves and easily available, somewhat along the lines of the middlebrow culture that you have mentioned was regularly available on TV back in the day. I see it as people having a thirst for more culture but they are so busy with their lives that they don’t know where to begin and the major broadcasters have no interest in providing it to the public.

I know that it is the case with me and it is the reason that I turn to your website. For ways that I can quickly absorb some culture. I try out some of the music, I follow the links you post to art work. Anything to give me a quick culture hit in my limited free time. I wish I could absorb more of the real thing but as I mentioned above life gets int the way. Until my kids grow a little older I will just have to make do with the tasty morsels you leave me on your website and attempt to follow up on them as often as possible.

And for that I will thank you.

I wish I’d gotten this e-mail prior to taping my upcoming appearance
on Kurt Andersen’s Studio 360, because Andersen and I talked about how arts blogs have the potential to do exactly what my correspondent has in mind. I don’t know whether that section of the interview will make the final cut, but I do want to say that right from the start, I’ve sought to use “About Last Night” not only to communicate with full-fledged urban aesthetes, but also to make the world of art more accessible to ordinary folks who “have a thirst for more culture.”

Back in the Fifties, mass-circulation organs of middlebrow culture like Time and Life fulfilled that function, and did so wonderfully well. Now they don’t even try. I was staggered to learn, for instance, that the only note Time is taking of this year’s arts Pulitzers will be to run a piece about The Known World (which, needless to say, it failed to review on publication). How is it possible that a weekly newsmagazine which ostensibly covers the arts could find no space even to mention Paul Moravec or Doug Wright?

Instead of cursing the journalistic darkness, I started “About Last Night,” and whenever I get letters like this one, I know it’s starting to spread a little light. You can help. Please–please–tell a friend about Our Girl and me. Our traffic has been rising steadily ever since we went live last August (we received more than 50,000 page views in March), but the world is still full of lots and lots of people who are waiting to discover a blog like this, whether they know it or not. In fact, they might not even know what a blog is! So give them a nudge. They’ll be glad you did. We’ll be glad you did.