Felix Salmon, writing at MemeFirst, had an interesting reaction to a recent posting in which, among other things, I discussed the difficulties inherent in drawing up Top Five lists:

Terry Teachout, today, says that “it’s usually not that hard to pick a One Best–absolute excellence is by definition self-evident”. He goes on to give examples: “The greatest opera ever written,” he says, “is The Marriage of Figaro“. To which my immediate reaction is “That’s not the greatest opera ever written

At lunch with Supermaud on Sunday, the talk turned to editors and publishers, and I mentioned a letter Flannery O’Connor sent in 1949 to an editor at Rinehart who wanted her to rewrite Wise Blood. Neither Maud nor Our Girl knew about this letter, so I promised to post it. Here it is:

Thank you for your letter of the 16th. I plan to come down next week and I have asked Elizabeth McKee to make an appointment with you for me on Thursday. I think, however, that before I talk to you my position on the novel and on your criticism in the letter should be made plain.

I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer, but I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you as do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I writer will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. I do not think there is any lack of objectivity in the writing, however, if this is what your criticism implies; and also I do not feel that rewriting has obscured the direction. I feel it has given whatever direction is now present.

In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now. The question is: is Rinehart interested in publishing this kind of novel?

Rinehart wasn’t, and Wise Blood was published by Harcourt, Brace three years later. Ignored by most critics, it has long since been recognized as a modern American classic, one of the comparatively few American novels of permanent interest to be written in the Fifties…but who knew? Imagine the self-assurance it must have taken for an unknown, unpublished author to have sent a letter like that to an editor at a major house.

Me, I can’t imagine it–but, then, I didn’t write Wise Blood, either.

I wrote enthusiastically
a couple of weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal about the new Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, which I found both convincing and moving. My critical brethren, however, varied widely in their views of the show, and not a few of them found the tone of the production to be insufficiently Jewish. This struck me as wrongheaded–especially since some of the critics in question were about as Jewish as pastrami on white with mayo–and I resolved to write something about it. Then I saw that Blake Eskin of Nextbook, an online magazine about “Jewish literature, culture and ideas,” had beaten me to the counterpunch:

Peter Marks of the Washington Post, whose critique of the ensemble’s pronunciation of mazel tov places him firmly in the chorus of authenticity-seekers, suggests a deeper reason for their fierce disapproval. “In the secular Jewish home of my childhood, about the closest we ever came to spiritual sustenance was Fiddler on the Roof,” he writes. The original cast album was in heavy rotation on the Marks family hi-fi; his father sang “If I Were a Rich Man” in the car; his brother played Tevye at summer camp. “Anyone expecting an experience that reenergizes a connection stretching back four decades will be sorely disappointed,” he says.

For Marks, I suspect, and for his contemporaries weaned on Fiddler, the real problem with this production is not its thin Yiddish flavor, but its failure as ritual, its inability to trigger warm memories of childhood. It’s as if he’s returned to his old bedroom, found a new blanket on the bed, and decided that the mattress isn’t as cozy as it once was. The problem is, it will never be as comfortable as the one you remember….

Read the whole thing here, please. I couldn’t have put it better. Now I needn’t try.

“A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.”

Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles

O.K., who sent me the cherry sapling? I want an answer and I want it now.

‘Fess up, please.

We’ve now looked at all the e-mail sent in response to our recent request that the readers of “About Last Night” write to tell us how often and when they read this blog.

Most of you, it turns out, read us daily, and most of our daily readers visit “About Last Night” more than once a day. No particular time of day stood out in your responses, though our Site Meter says that our peak hours coincide roughly with lunchtime. We can see the wave of fresh hits rolling across the U.S. time zones between noon and three p.m. each weekday.

Most bloggers don’t post on weekends, but we started doing it several months ago and have kept it up. Comparatively few of you, however, read us on Saturdays and Sundays, a fact we already knew from the Site Meter. Even so, we still draw roughly 1,500 page views each weekend, which is unexpectedly high. (All told, “About Last Night” received about 44,000 page views in February.)

Though neither one of us uses an RSS feed, we decided to make our postings available via XML syndication, but so far it seems that very few of you read “About Last Night” via RSS, and three or four readers wrote to say that they didn’t know what it was. (To find out, go here.)

One of the reasons we asked you to write was to find out whether it makes sense for us to continue posting every day. It isn’t easy, but judging by your e-mail, it’s definitely worth the trouble. Frankly, we were astonished by the number of daily communicants. So we’ll keep our noses to the grindstone (though we might slack off a bit on weekends, if you don’t mind).

Finally, we want to share these snippets from the mail you sent us:

– “I’m a regular reader, usually during my lunch hour. Your cultural
conversations with the cerebral pin-up OGIC makes each work day go easier.”

– “first thing in the west coast morning I check for email, then jump to
the browser and read your blog
later in the day, sometimes several times, and especially when i’m
procrastinating, i check to see if anything new has been posted
daily? yes — even on weekends, and even when you say you won’t be
posting cuz you’re writing for $ or sleeping or…”

– “I think I first found my way there via TMFTML, but as a
Chicagoan it may have been through something about Our Girl–I can’t quite
remember.”

(We shudder to think which of Mr. TMFTML’s postings brought you from there to here!)

– “Here’s my online routine every morning: First, check my
e-mail, even though I don’t need a penis enlarger, either. Then, look
at the day’s Dilbert column, see what’s being reviewed at Classics
Today, scope out the new stuff at ArtsJournal, and from there see
what you and Our Girl have posted in the past 24 hours….I scroll through other blogs only very rarely, because I just don’t
have that kind of time. I do occasionally follow one of your links,
but frankly I’d rather settle in for five or six or ten of your solid
paragraphs than devote a few precious seconds of my time to the
shorter and generally less substantial posts that typify much of what
I’ve seen of blogdom. In other words, what I prefer to read on the
screen more closely resembles what I’d find in a magazine or
newspaper than a blurb on a book’s dust jacket.”

– “I try to read artsjournal.com everyday that I’m in my office (three days a week)

Our Girl and I had a quadruple-header yesterday. Not only did we go see “Frankenthaler: The Woodcuts” and Sweeney Todd and have a pre-dinner drink with Beatrice, but we came home so full of energy that we decided to watch a movie, too. She’d never seen The Fabulous Baker Boys, to my astonishment (it’s only one of my all-time favorite films), so that was our choice. I’ll leave it to her to describe all these events, but later: Supermaud is en route to the Teachout Museum, and we expect to hear her knock on the door at any moment.

In the meantime, please note that the diminutive Ms. Newton isn’t the only blogger to be publishing in the Washington Post this morning: this is also the appointed day for “Second City,” my monthly Post column about the arts in New York City. You can read it on line by going to the “Second City” module in the right-hand column and clicking on the appropriate link.

Oops, there she is. Time for OGIC to remove her silken mask….

“Ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening–nobody on the stage at least. That’s why it becomes so popular in any civilized country during a war.”

Edwin Denby, Dance Writings