Picture and book remain,

An acre of green grass

For air and exercise,

Now strength of body goes;

Midnight, an old house

Where nothing stirs but a mouse.

A mind Michael Angelo knew

That can pierce the clouds,

Or inspired by frenzy

Shake the dead in their shrouds;

Forgotten else by mankind,

An old man’s eagle mind.

W.B. Yeats, “An Acre of Grass”

Don’t let the placid website fool you. For the last two months, like industrious shoe-stitching elves, the members of the Litblog Co-op have been busy behind the scenes nominating, reading, and voting on books. Today we unveil the outcome of our labors, the novel we’ve selected to throw our collective promotional prowess behind this fall. Watch this space for the big scoop. And keep watching as the four runners-up are revealed, one a day, into next week.

(Pardon my Mary McCarthy kick, the latest in a series…)

“The arts have aged too, and it is impossible for them to ‘go back,’ just as it is impossible to recapture the youth or reinstitute a handicraft economy, like the one Ruskin dreamed of. These things are beyond our control and independent of our will. I, for instance, would like, more than anything else, to write like Tolstoy; I imagine that I still see something resembling the world Tolstoy saw. But my pen or my typewriter simply balks; it ‘sees’ differently from me and records what to me, as a person, are distortions and angularities. Anyone who has read my work will be at a loss to find any connection with Tolstoy; to Tolstoy himself both I and my work wold be anathema. I myself might reform, but my work never could; it could never ‘go straight,’ even if I were much more gifted than I am. Most novelists today, I suspect, would like to ‘go straight’; we are conscious of being twisted when we write. This is the self-consciousness, the squirming, of the form we work in; we are stuck in the phylogenesis of the novel.”

Mary McCarthy, “Characters in Fiction”

“Intellectual responses are known as opinions and Mary had them and had them. Still she was so little of an ideologue as to be sometimes unsettling in her refusal of tribal reaction–left or right, male or female, that sort of thing. She was doggedly personal and often this meant being so aslant that there was, in this determined rationalist, an endearing crankiness, very American and homespun somehow. This was true especially in domestic matters, which held a high place in her life. There she is grinding the coffee beans of a morning in a wonderful wooden and iron contraption that seemed to me designed for muscle-building–a workout it was. In her acceptance speech upon receiving the MacDowell Colony Medal for Literature she said that she did not believe in laborsaving devices. And thus she kept on year after year, up to her last days, clacking away on her old green Hermes non-electric typewriter, with a feeling that this effort and the others were akin to the genuine in the arts–to the handmade.”

Elizabeth Hardwick, foreword to Mary McCarthy’s Intellectual Memoirs

This is where I am tonight, a Frank Lloyd Wright cottage perched on the edge of a heavily wooded bluff overlooking Wisconsin’s Mirror Lake. I’m two miles from the Wisconsin Dells as the crow flies, though that viper’s tangle of water parks, roller coasters, resort hotels, and candy stores seems at least half a continent away from the stone terrace I’m sharing with a couple of curious squirrels. I dug the iPod out of my suitcase a little while ago and pressed the shuffle-play button, and what came crashing out of the speakers, much to my bemusement, was Stephen Sondheim’s “Color and Light”: Order…design…composition…tone…form. Check and double check.

By the time most of you get around to reading these words, I’ll be somewhere in the middle of the protracted process of making my way from Mirror Lake to my Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan. A two-and-a-half-hour drive, two flights, a cab, and the thing is done (sigh). The Teachout Museum awaits me. Also a ton of snail mail. Also a Wall Street Journal deadline, which I have to hit before lunchtime on Tuesday. Also a major development in my professional life, which comes to pass first thing Saturday morning. (See immediately below for details.)

Conclusion: I need a break, not merely from blogging but also from the beck and call of my lunatic schedule.

Solution: I’m blowing town for a couple of days, purely for my own pleasure.

I’ll go up the spout tomorrow afternoon, mere minutes after I file Friday’s Journal drama column (that’s the deadline). I won’t post again, not even one measly little almanac entry, until Friday. Between now and then, my whereabouts will be known only to a tightly knit group of intimates, all sworn to absolute secrecy on pain of excommunication.

Commandments:

I shall attend no performances of any kind, nor shall I read any improving books.

I shall not check my e-mail.

I shall not turn on my cell phone (it doesn’t work where I’m going, anyway).

See you Friday.

Those of you who keep up with the newspaper business are doubtless aware that The Wall Street Journal is launching its long-awaited Saturday edition this week. What you don’t know–this is the first public announcement–is that I’ll be writing a new biweekly column called “Sightings” for the Leisure & Arts page in the new paper’s “Pursuits” section. I’ll be writing about the arts in America–all the arts, and not just in New York City but from coast to coast. (Yes, I’ll continue to write the Journal‘s Friday drama column as well. Broadway isn’t getting rid of me that easily.)

To find out more about what I’ll be up to in “Sightings,” pick up a copy of the first Saturday Wall Street Journal on September 17 and read my inaugural column. If you’re already a Journal subscriber, off or on line, you’ll automatically receive the Saturday edition as part of your subscription. Otherwise, buy a copy at your favorite newsstand and check me out.

– Anyone who questions the commoditization of baby-boom ideals need only reflect on the fact that I recently ate my breakfast at a hotel in downtown Milwaukee to the accompaniment of a Muzak version of Steely Dan’s “Monkey in Your Soul.” All popular culture begins in rebellion and ends in infomercials.

– I drove up to Connecticut the other day to see Goodspeed Musicals’ production of The Boy Friend and have lunch with Paul Moravec. We went to the River Tavern in Chester, a tiny restaurant-pub with wonderful food, in whose front window the waitress seated us. A few minutes later, a prosperous-looking businessman-yuppie type sat down at the next table, roughly two feet away. He ate in silence as Paul and I chatted away cheerfully and volubly about everything under the sun–the Pulitzer Prizes, my Louis Armstrong biography, his latest composition, the difference between opera and oratorio–and departed without a word before we were through.

A couple of minutes later, Paul called for our check.

“It’s been taken care of,” the waitress informed us with a grin. “The man sitting next to you paid for your lunch.”

We gaped speechlessly at one another. Then we burst out laughing, jointly left a big tip for the waitress, and went on our way.

December 2003:

Would that it were more widely understood that high art is good for you–not in the fallacious “Mozart-effect” sense, but in the far more profound sense of soulcraft. Alas, that uplifting notion has largely vanished from American culture. In matters of high art, we must start from zero: we actually have to make the case that listening to operas by Mozart and Verdi and looking at ballets by Balanchine and Tudor are pleasurable experiences.

Fortunately, the strongest card in our hands is that we’re telling the truth, an amazing and miraculous fact that it’s never too late to discover, even if you’ve never held a clarinet or stood at a barre or wielded a paintbrush…

(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)