From Louis Menand’s essay on Edmund Wilson in the current New Yorker:

Wilson did not engage well with literature at the level of the text. He was also not at ease or reliable at the meta-level. He had a journalist’s suspicion of abstractions, and he did not think theoretically. When he tried for the broad view–when he undertook to explain the demise of verse as a literary technique, or to describe the alternation of periods of realism with periods of romanticism in modern literature, or to interpret art as compensation for a psychic “wound”–his criticism got reductive very quickly. But he was unsurpassed at the level of the writer and the work. When he gives his tour through “Das Kapital” or “Finnegans Wake” (a book he was excited by) or “Doctor Zhivago” (which he also admired extravagantly), it is as though the book’s interior had suddenly been lit up by a thousand-watt bulb. Even readers who thought they already knew the book can see things that they missed, and they realize how partial and muddled their sense of it really was. And the hyper-clarity of the description is complemented by a complete grasp of the corpus, each of the writer’s strengths and flaws laid out with juridical precision, no matter how large or problematic the body of work. The result is something better than microscopic analysis; anyone can look through a microscope. The result is a satellite picture….

One of the reasons why I like this description so much (other than that it’s perfect) is that it also sums up some of the things I try to do in my own writing, which was deeply influenced by Wilson’s back in the days when I was setting up shop as a critic a quarter-century ago. I don’t read him much anymore, partly because I once read him so closely that I remember his work too well. But Menand’s essay has created in me a fresh appetite for revisiting Wilson, which strikes me as one of the essential attributes of a great piece of literary journalism.

Read the whole thing here, by all means.

Things I Learned Freshman Year

1. Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.

2. By placing one paper bag inside another paper bag you can carry home a milk shake in it.

3. There is a double l in the middle of “parallel.”

4. Powder rubbed on the chin will take the place of a shave if the room isn’t very light.

5. French nouns ending in “aison” are feminine.

6. Almost everything you need to know about a subject is in the encyclopedia.

7. A tasty sandwich can be made by spreading peanut butter on raisin bread.

8. A floating body displaces its own weight in the liquid in which it floats.

9. A sock with a hole in the toe can be worn inside out with comparative comfort.

10. The chances are against filling an inside straight.

11. There is a law in economics called The Law of Diminishing Returns, which means that after a certain margin is reached returns begin to diminish. This may not be correctly stated, but there is a law by that name.

12. You begin tuning a mandolin with A and tune the other strings from that.

Robert Benchley, “What College Did to Me”

So the big orange bible, otherwise known as the Chicago Manual of Style, has its own Web site, complete with questions answers from the editors. Which raises the question: how big a blue-pencil-wielding geek am I? Sizable enough, it turns out, to have read through the entire archive of questions and answers during the last week like a junkie. Yes, it’s exactly that bad. But the CMS editors made it easy on me; they address everything thrown at them with clarity, good grace, and considerable wit, making for some surprisingly diverting reading–if, you know, you’re a giant blue-pencil-wielding GEEK. Say it with me: One of us! Gobble Gobble!

Send them your burning style question, or just browse the archives for some excellent advice:

Although the sign was incorrect, I’m not sure you should annoy the person who provides the enchiladas.

Words to live by.

I’m a huge fan of and proselytizer for the Elmore Leonard-Steven Soderbergh match-made-in-heaven Out of Sight. If someone enters my home not having seen this movie, they find it a tricky thing to leave in the same pure state. My own capacity to watch it has shown no signs of shrinking. So I was gratified to see Quiet Bubble’s smart appreciation (thanks to CultureSpace for the pointer). Quoth Bubble:

All of the dialogue, in fact, sings. Since the movie is based on an Elmore Leonard novel, this isn’t a surprise. Soderbergh plants great running jokes that build on themselves, so that the payoff for a joke often comes twenty minutes after its inception. Narrative twists and character revelations percolate, so that you have a firm sense of a character’s nature and the space s/he takes up in the movie. Even Zahn, the clear buffoon of the movie, is introduced through a hilarious phone conversation between Clooney and his ex-wife (Catherine Keener)–we’re prepared for him long before we actually see him.

And:

The Miami of the movie’s first half is drenched in sunlit oranges and pastel yellows, and the camera saunters like the overcooked populace. As the plot gets (slightly) darker in tone, so does the color tone. Out of Sight‘s Detroit, cast in sludgy brown ice and stark blue hues, feels cold and foreboding. The contrast between the two cities is striking, and the film blessedly doesn’t try to make them move in visually similar ways.

When Clooney and Lopez sip bourbon and flirt wantonly in a hotel bar, however, the two strains come together beautifully. Lopez’s honey-skinned face, candlelit and lovely, looks out a window at white snowflakes and their pale blue reflections on the glass–they blend into the city’s night lights so that I can’t tell the difference between the two. It’s a gorgeous scene, most of all because it shows that Soderbergh could have made Detroit look warm and friendly, but decided not to.

Check, check, and check. What a luxury to have one’s own taste validated and explicated.

Sue Miller and Alice Hoffman are critical darlings and big sellers, and for the most part the novels they released this year have been typically warmly received. I review these books, Lost in the Forest and The Ice Queen, in today’s Chicago Tribune and find neither quite what it’s cracked up to be: one of them disappointed me substantially, the other vastly. Read all about it here.

I’ll be appearing on KRCU-FM, the public radio station of Southeast Missouri State University, this coming Sunday at three p.m. CDT (that’s four p.m. EDT). The program is Going Public, on which I’ll be discussing my work as a drama and film critic and the effects of the new media on American journalism.

If you live in or near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, tune to 90.9 FM.

To listen live on your computer via streaming audio, go here.

My mother’s feeling much better, the heat wave has finally waved goodbye, and all that remains before I return to New York is to post the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. This time I report on my recent visit to St. Louis, where I saw the Muny Opera’s outdoor production of Mame and St. Louis Shakespeare’s air-conditioned Henry V:

It was my bad luck to arrive in the middle of a 12-alarm heat wave. The temperature rose to 102 degrees, and it was still foully hot and chokingly humid by the time I reached my seat, toting a soft-sided cooler full of prophylactic fluids. I wilted almost immediately, but the rest of the 9,000-strong crowd took the weather in its stride….

I found it fascinating to behold the near-scientific exactitude with which the Muny approaches the problem of producing musicals for extremely large audiences. The costumes are brightly colored, the sets big and bold (I especially liked Steve Gilliam’s elaborate rendering of Mame’s art-deco apartment). Paul Blake and Diana Baffa-Brill, the director and choreographer, kept the stage patterns eye-catchingly simple. The theater itself has flawless sight lines, and a state-of-the-art sound system projects the dialogue all the way to the very last row of the cheap seats (I checked)….

I was in town too early for the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, whose season opens on Sept. 7 with “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Fortunately, St. Louis Shakespeare, a classical company founded in 1984, was already up and running with an estimable “Henry V.” Robin Weatherall, the director, is better known as a composer (he had a 17-year run with the Royal Shakespeare Company), but you couldn’t tell it from this vigorous, unmannered production, played in traditional costumes on the open stage of the Grandel Theatre, a midtown church that has been converted into an attractive performing space….

No link, of course, so to read the whole thing go out and buy a copy of today’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal (by far the preferable alternative–great paper, great arts coverage, great deal).

Now I’ve got to catch a plane. See you Monday!

“The ability to shift the audience from thinking Poor him! to Poor us! must surely be a mark of greatness in an actor.”

Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor