A biographer-friend writes to suggest a parlor game:

What great artists (or famous people) could, and couldn’t, say the sentence “I am ridiculous”? Washington no, Lincoln yes. Milton no, Shakespeare yes.

I am going to venture into your territory, based on little knowledge, but why not? Stuart Davis, yes. Jackson Pollack, no. Eakins, no. Picasso, to his credit, yes. Bonnard, much as I dislike him, probably yes. Edward Hopper, no.

You know my methods, Watson. Apply them.

I like this game very much, in part because it doesn’t always sort along obvious lines of personal taste (at least not if you play it honestly). To wit:

Sherlock Holmes no, Nero Wolfe yes (sorry, Watson)

Jerome Robbins no, George Balanchine yes

Stravinsky no, Auden yes

Miles Davis no, Louis Armstrong yes

Sinatra no, Nat Cole yes

Tolstoy no, Dostoevsky yes

John Marin no, Milton Avery yes

Arthur Miller no, Tennessee Williams yes

Willa Cather no, Flannery O’Connor yes

FDR no, Churchill yes

Beethoven no, Haydn yes

Hemingway no, Fitzgerald yes

Vuillard no, Bonnard yes (my friend is half right)

Richard Rodgers no, Cole Porter yes

Henry James no, Dr. Johnson yes

Here’s some of what I’ve been reading on line of late:

– Supermaud (who gives good lunch) has taken an interest in Peter De Vries, several of whose novels, including the exquisite and haunting The Blood of the Lamb, are back in print. About damn time.

– The Little Professor on Trollope:

Of the major Victorian novelists, Anthony Trollope is by far the most deliberative. He usually isn’t interested in the questions of perception, representation, and subjectivity that tend to plague George Eliot, but prefers instead to devote his energies to decision-making. Many of Trollope’s novels fixate on some difficult decision to be made, whether involving a marriage, a will, or a question of honor; the “action” often consists of the characters worrying this decision one way and another. While Trollope can certainly write a good action scene–the hunt in The Eustace Diamonds, for example–he prefers to locate his most important upheavals in the recesses of a character’s consciousness….

– DevraDoWrite, new to the blogosphere, confesses to an obsessive compulsion:

Do you finish reading every book you start? I have trouble giving up on a book, especially if I spent money to buy it. Sometimes, if I “can’t get into it,” I put it aside for awhile and try again later. Sometimes it’s just my mood, or level of concentration that makes reading difficult.
Sometimes, however, a book is simply not very good, or not meant for my tastes, and I should just give up. But all too often, a combination of guilt and the fear that I will miss something keeps me going….

This compulsion has a highly distinguished pedigree. Justice Holmes shared it, as Edmund Wilson reminds us in Patriotic Gore:

His reading is dominated by a sense of duty and a Puritanical fear of idleness. He feels that he must grapple with certain works, quite apart from any pleasure they give him, and, once having begun a book, no matter how dull or verbose it is, he must read every word to the end. He is always imagining–this is humorous, of course, but it shows a habit of mind–that God, at the Judgment Day, will ask him to report on the books which he ought to have read but hasn’t.

– Also new to the blogroll is Mr. Quiet Bubble, who reports that the common culture isn’t quite dead yet:

It turns out that the great racial equalizer of the South is barbecue. Everyone eats it here. Few people don’t take it seriously. Vigorous debates can be instigated just by asking “Do you like your sandwich wet or dry?” or by requesting a pulled pork sandwich (standard in Mississippi) at a Texas barbecue joint, where beef reigns supreme. It doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, or otherwise–chances are, if you’re from the South, you’ve enjoyed smoky, slow-cooked meat and steaming, grease-slathered vegetables on at least one occasion. Even if you’re vegan.

I myself can’t get enough of the stuff, about which I first got serious when I lived in Kansas City, where I patronized Arthur Bryant’s BBQ as often as humanly possible. Wet or dry, beef or pork (and what about ham, buddy?), I’m for it. Living in New York has been a cruel disappointment to me in only one major respect, which is that you can’t get any honest-to-God barbecue here–open pits are illegal. (The ‘cue at Blue Smoke is surprisingly serviceable, though, especially when consumed downstairs at the Jazz Standard while listening to great music.)

Incidentally, I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I travel so frequently to Raleigh, North Carolina, for any reason other than to see Carolina Ballet, but I won’t deny that I do seek out the local barbecue whenever I’m in town.

– Speaking of dance, Ms. Killin’ Time Being Lazy pays a visit to the ballet and casts a sidelong glance at certain all-too-recognizable types in the audience:

2. Proud Parent/Grandparent. At last, the years of watching their darling suffer for their craft will be rewarded. If the child hasn’t received a contract from a Good Ballet Company by now, clearly people just don’t understand how good The Artiste is. Conversely, this is a way to wind up Their Darling’s ballet career, as The Dancer morphs into The College Student (with luck, on their way to a good, paying career)….

– Mr. Parabasis, who isn’t fond of most drama critics (I’m with him!), bellies up to the bar:

I promised sometime last week that I would attempt to put my money where my mouth was and write a review of a show that I strongly disliked while still keeping to the recommendations I made for theater reviewers. And maybe, just maybe, it would also be interesting to read. What you are about to read (if you click on the jump) represents my attempt to do so, reviewing Drama of Works’ Warhol at PS122 ….

Nice work.

– A performer-blogger recalls that which the likes of me should never be allowed to forget:

Good reviews elate me for a day or two, and then I forget about them. Bad reviews (which, I hasten to add, are thankfully outnumbered by the good ones), linger in my consciousness for years. Even if I quickly scan the article once and then throw the paper away, they are nevertheless immediately and involuntarily burned verbatim into my memory banks, where they fester and inevitably resurface on days when my confidence is at its lowest ebb.

I aspire to someday not give a crap about reviews, good or bad. (To that end, I generally ask those around me not to tell me about reviews, and a few years ago I gave up the pointlessly narcissistic habit of self-Googling). Most of the artists I know who are much further along in their careers than me claim to have achieved this transcendent state….

(My own approach to this problem, by the way, is never to read any bad reviews of my books.)

– Ms. twang twang twang reflects on T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Britten, and life itself:

Each time you take up a piece again, your interpretation shifts: it is the same score, but always different, and as you come to new ideas, you necessarily kill off old ones. Thus “every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,/Every poem an epitaph.”

As in life, it is also in music that you cannot force real understanding; you have to be ready. Perhaps I have a younger musician friend, still learning what I have learnt: that we never stop working, practicing, altering; what is today’s perfect performance is not tomorrow’s; and to be depressed by the continual labour misunderstands the work, because as musicians that is part of who we are. I have learnt that by studying for longer than my friend….

– Alex Ross asked a hard question the other day in The New Yorker:

For music to remain vital, recordings have to exist in balance with live performance, and, these days, live performance is by far the smaller part of the equation. Perhaps we tell ourselves that we listen to CDs in order to get to know the music better, or to supplement what we get from concerts and shows. But, honestly, a lot of us don’t go to hear live music that often. Work leaves us depleted. Tickets are too expensive. Concert halls are stultifying. Rock clubs are full of kids who make us feel ancient. It’s just so much easier to curl up in the comfy chair with a Beethoven quartet or Billie Holiday. But would Beethoven or Billie ever have existed if people had always listened to music the way we listen now?…

As it happens, I also wrote about this same subject several years ago in Fi, the now-defunct audio magazine, and posted the column here last year. You might want to revisit my more modest effort in conjunction with Alex’s very good and (I think) important essay.

– For those of you who still go to concerts, Mr. Sandow offers this reality check:

I went to an orchestra concert. The Baltimore Symphony at Carnegie Hall. My first reaction? “My God, why are they dressed like that?” Now of course this isn’t a criticism of the Baltimore Symphony. Any orchestra on that stage would have been dressed the same way. And this wasn’t a considered reaction. It came right from my gut, and took me by surprise….

– Speaking of recordings, here’s a great list…

– …and here’s Thelonious Monk, of all people, playing the Chopin “Military” Polonaise (scroll down to find the link). Believe me, you don’t want to miss this.

– More on pianists: Think Denk, himself no mean tickler of the ivories, pays tribute to one of my all-time favorite classical pianists, Ignaz Friedman. As usual, he gets it just right:

A very famous pianist (and irreproachable artist) of my acquaintance disparaged Friedman for being too crass. I know he is wrong. Or, maybe, I think he is right but I don’t care; when he says it it passes into one ear, one lobe of my brain, and I smile an empty smile; the other lobe recalls all my favorite Friedman moments and adores them internally while I pretend to agree. Am I a hypocrite?…

I know what it is: Friedman’s playing is not limited by a Beethovenian “es muss sein” (it must be)…it has a place for the arbitrary and the accidental. Sometimes he seems motivated by rhythmic/musical forces from another planet, and there is no way to know what he is thinking, and why he is thinking it. This makes me happy; I puzzle over his rhythms with pleasure.

– Warner Home Video is censoring Tom and Jerry, and lying about it, sort of. Mr. Something Old, Nothing New, on whom nothing is missed, is on the case.

– This is really funny–especially if you’ve ever killed any time leafing through the Catalogues of Miscellaneous Stuff stashed in the pockets on the backs of airplane seats.

– Finally, I don’t quite agree with Lileks, but I know whereof he speaks:

There’s something false and seductive about being a modern-day Sinatra fan, and by “fan” I mean someone who thinks they can get a few photons of reflected coolness by conspicuously immersing himself in the Capitol oeuvre, with all its world-wearing romantic rue and barroom charm. It’s close to Tony Soprano Syndrome, where middle-aged guys think that if the opportunity arose, Tone might give them a casual how-ya-doin’ or nod brisk approval across a restaurant. The same old Mafia Chic. And I say this as a big Sopranos fan who loves the show and has substantial investment in the characters…

The Rat Pack Myth works best from a distance, preferably 1500 miles and 30 years; you don’t see them feel up the hat check girl, kick the waiter (or have him kicked), or stare with vacant eyes from the bottom of whatever well of drunkenness they toppled into that night. We cut them slack because they wore cool suits and had short hair and smoked a lot and one of them spoke ever-so-cultured, and because they either slept with a Kennedy or pimped for one. Mafia Chic requires the same removal from the scene. The Sopranos is better than most depictions of that thing of theirs, but we’re still required to care about Carmela’s moral quandaries, which occupy the same moral plane as Eva Braun’s bunions.

I wonder if this might possibly explain why I gave up on The Sopranos three seasons ago. I still love Sinatra, though….

“Gervas Leat rose, turning on a light. ‘Bonnard,’ he said reflectively: ‘the last Frenchman who gives me pleasure.'”

“‘Who gives me pleasure,’ Richard thought–that was simple, that was final, that was enough. Enough, certainly, for Gervas Leat. Nothing of theory here, nothing of judgement. Great painters, lesser painters, painters of significance. Moral and social values and the inner eye. Critical aesthetics….Whoof! But Gervas Leat liked Bonnards and could afford to own one.”

William Haggard, Venetian Blind

My review of Kevin Canty’s splendid novel Winslow in Love appears in today’s Chicago Tribune. You may remember that when I was working on the review in the Spring, I enlisted ALN readers’ help in thinking of books within books, with highly edifying and fun results. For the purposes of the review, this merely helped me gird a point made in passing, but the exercise took on a life of its own–I heard from dozens of you, and the topic was taken up fruitfully at other blogs.

Like I said, none of this had to do with Canty’s novel in a direct way. His title character Winslow is a poet, but none of his poetry appears in the book. It’s through other, more subtle means that Canty makes the reader think of Winslow as, in all probability, a good poet–for instance, though his perceptions of the natural world:

In the last half of the book, for instance, there is a criminally good chapter detailing a single Sunday when spring makes its first appearance in Montana. Winslow, cheered, drives out into the mountains to fish. The loss of his wife, the arrival of Jones, his writer’s block, the cancerous skin lesion he has just had removed–all of these troubles dissolve in the soft spring air until, at the apex of this very good day, he reels in a sizable trout:

“He was about to throw him back in the water but decided at the last moment to kill him and keep him. He assumed this was legal. There was nobody around, anyway. He dashed the head of the big trout against a big rock on the bank and the silver body, the beautiful thing, shuddered and died.

“He felt it immediately: his luck was leaving him.”

Winslow’s luck will take a few more zigs and zags before this day ends, and with it this perfect chapter. There is nothing particularly fancy here–except for some mountains shining “like advertisements for themselves, sharp-toothed and glamorous” and some “[e]mpty storefronts” that line a street “like a mouthful of broken teeth.”

But the generally modest language and staid narration somehow amount to a fantastically eloquent portrait of an interesting and troubled mind confronted with beauty, grasping at it for hope and forgetfulness while basking in the glorious present. Winslow finds the natural beauty of mountains and water, fish and elk, light and warmth, both ordinary and outrageous. “How many different kinds of fool would he feel like before this day was over?” he wonders in self-reproach and exultation.

Despite one pretty big problem with the novel, I count it as one of the best I’ve read so far this year.

Friday again, and I’m not dead yet, though I was having my doubts on Wednesday morning. Nevertheless, I lived to write another Wall Street Journal column, this one about shows in New York (the Broadway revival of Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight!) and Washington, D.C. (Arena Stage’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie).

In a nutshell:

As an actor, Hal Holbrook has two real-life Marks to his credit, Felt and Twain. In a believe-it-or-not coincidence worthy of Ripley, he has revived “Mark Twain Tonight!” just one week after America’s front pages carried the news that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat, the Watergate leaker whom Mr. Holbrook portrayed in the 1976 film of “All the President’s Men.” You can’t buy publicity like that–though Mr. Holbrook doesn’t need it anymore. Written in 1954 and last seen on Broadway 28 years ago, “Mark Twain Tonight!” remains to this day the most admired of all one-man biographical shows, and Mr. Holbrook still wears it like a bespoke white suit….

To attempt so demanding a full-evening tour de force is risky business at any age, and I confess to having wondered how well Mr. Holbrook, who is 79, would hold up under the strain. Though he now relies on a wireless microphone, I rejoice to report that he is otherwise better than ever…

We don’t get to see much Eugene O’Neill in New York nowadays, so I jumped at the chance to go to Washington and take in Arena Stage’s revival of “Anna Christie,” a 1920 play that is now best known from the 1930 Hollywood adaptation that was Greta Garbo’s first sound film (“Garbo Talks!” read the posters). While the film is surprisingly faithful to O’Neill’s script, it’s stiff and stagy. Not so Molly Smith’s clean-lined, unmannered production, played out on a skeletal unit set by Bill C. Ray that is transformed before your eyes from a waterfront bar to the deck of a coal barge. Except for a couple of improbably decorous fight scenes, Ms. Smith has done her damnedest to make something true out of this whiskery tale of a whore in search of redemption….

No link. Buy a paper or, better yet, go here to subscribe to the online edition of the Journal. That’s how I read me.

“Rachel had lived amongst clever men for a good many years, and now cleverness wasn’t something to which she attached great importance. It was a gift–oh yes, it was a gift; but it wasn’t a virtue.”

WIlliam Haggard, The Unquiet Sleep

Sorry, but I’m still way out of whack. No show today or tomorrow–I’m leaving town for a couple of days to get some desperately needed rest. There’s something about New York that is positively inimical to recovery from any ailment other than boredom.

See you on Friday, unless I don’t.

“There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveller, who says, ‘Anywhere but here.'”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Considerations by the Way”