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We return you now to our regularly scheduled posting. That was painless, wasn’t it?

– W.H. Auden’s poetry needs no endorsement from me, but I never fail to be surprised by how many well-read people are unaware that he was also a prolific critic and essayist. I was cleaning out a closet the other day and ran across a slightly bent paperback copy of Forewords and Afterwords, the only essay collection Auden published in his lifetime (the Princeton University Press uniform edition of his complete works will ultimately contain all of his essays and reviews). I’ve no idea how one of my favorite books ended up underneath my toolbox, especially since I could see at a glance that I’d marked a half-dozen passages I must have meant to transfer to my electronic commonplace book. Instead, I’ll post them as almanac entries this week, starting today.

I am, incidentally, still chewing away happily at A la recherche du temps perdu. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get a whole lot of reading done on the ground in Chicago, but I spent a pleasant hour with the Duchess de Guermantes at the airport this afternoon. Unlikely as it may sound, A la recherche is ideally suited for planes, trains, and waiting rooms….

– Two composers I know–both of them women, but otherwise very different in age, living circumstances, and stylistic interests–told me separately in the past few days that they found one of the inescapable problems of being a professional composer to be the fact that you spend so much time alone. This is also true of writing, but I’ve never found the solitude necessary for writing to be a problem in and of itself. On the other hand, I do find that I start to get a bit isolated whenever my workaholism flares up and gets out of control. The Web, I suspect, is part of the problem: I use it to provide a change of pace when I’ve got a lot of deadlines on my plate, and it creates so powerful an illusion of “being in touch” that I sometimes forget to go out and see real live people, or even leave the apartment for anything beyond the most essential errands.

Sooner or later, though, I start feeling the need for actual human contact, which brings me back to my senses, sometimes quite abruptly. E-mail is great–better than great–but it won’t give you a kiss on the cheek when you open the door.

– Last week I went for a walk in Central Park with a musician friend, in the course of which the following dialogue took place:

ME Somebody sent me a weird URL the other day.

SHE Weird like how?

ME Well, it was for a site called, uh, maybe “Babes in Classical Music,” or “Classical Hotties,” or something like that. Anyway, it was a Web site full of pictures of good-looking women musicians, organized by what instrument they play, voice type, whatever. How silly is that? What kind of person would spend all that time putting together a site like that? I mean, get a life, right?

SHE (with dawning horror) The URL wasn’t beautyinmusic.com, was it?

ME Yeah, I think that was it.

SHE Er…um…I’m on it.

A beat.

ME (with the maniacal glee of a playground bully) You’re on it? And you stood there and let me tell you all about it? I am soooo blogging this!

SHE (embarrassed) Oh, God, no, you can’t do that! It’s not my fault! I didn’t have anything to do with it! I don’t even know who does the thing….

ME No way. You’re totally busted.

SHE (resigned) Well, at least don’t mention my name, all right?

ME (magnanimously) O.K. Your secret is safe with me.

“I find Trollope’s insistence that writing novels is a craft like making shoes, and his pride in the money he got by writing them, sympathetic. He was aware, of course, that craft and art are not the same: a craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader’s business. Again, Trollope would never have denied that his primary reason for writing was that he loved the activity. He once said that as soon as he could no longer write books he would wish to die. He believed that he wrote best when he wrote fastest, and in his case this may well have been true: a good idea for a novel stimulated his pen. Though large sales are not necessarily a proof of aesthetic value, they are evidence that a book has given pleasure to many readers, and every author, however difficult, would like to give pleasure.”

W.H. Auden, “A Poet of the Actual” (from Forewords and Afterwords)

Like the song
says, I’m goin’ to Chicago. (Back when I was in college, I used the wonderful old 1941 Jimmy Rushing-Count Basie recording of “Goin’ to Chicago Blues” as the closing theme of my late-night radio show, which my friends used in turn as an accompaniment to all sorts of illicit activities.) Our Girl and I have shows to see, meals to eat, and hours of intensive talking to do, and we won’t have nearly enough time for any of these things, since I must return on Sunday night and resume my regular rounds of Manhattan and its environs. We do expect to have as much fun as possible in the time available, though.

OGIC will update you on our activities some time this weekend. I’ll be back in the saddle on Monday, though I may not have much to say that morning, seeing as how I probably won’t have much time to get it said before I fall into bed on Sunday night.

In the meantime, enjoy your weekend.

It’s Friday, I’m in the Journal, and I’m in a raving mood. The causes this week are Orson’s Shadow and Kristin Chenoweth:

Now that Broadway has settled down for the summer, the show to see is Austin Pendleton’s “Orson’s Shadow,” first performed five years ago by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company and currently playing Off Broadway (why did we have to wait so long?) at the Barrow Street Theatre. It’s “All About Eve” for eggheads, a thought experiment in which Mr. Pendleton, a veteran actor and sometime playwright, endeavors to imagine what might have happened when Orson Welles (Jeff Still) directed Laurence Olivier (John Judd) and Joan Plowright (Susan Bennett) in Eug

Goin’ to Chicago, sorry that I can’t take you

Goin’ to Chicago, sorry that I can’t take you

There’s nothin’ in Chicago that a monkey woman can do.

You so mean and evil, you do things you ought not do

You so mean and evil, you do things you ought not do

You got my brand of honey, guess I’ll have to put up with you.

Jimmy Rushing, “Goin’ to Chicago Blues”

Winston Churchill said somewhere or other that there are few things in life more exhilarating than being shot at without effect. I thought of this utterly characteristic remark a few hours ago as I watched a wizard from Ms Mac Consulting wipe the hard drive of my iBook and reinstall the operating system, an experience which I imagine to be not unlike watching in a mirror as a neurosurgeon pokes around in your head with a scalpel.

This unexpected and unwanted adventure into the unknown began last Saturday when I came home from Washington, D.C., booted up my computer, and discovered to my horror that some gremlin had translated all the words on the e-mail toolbar into Dutch. (I know, it sounds crazy, but they really were in Dutch–I checked.) Other peculiar little anomalies had been bobbing up on my screen from time to time in recent weeks, but this one was serious enough that I knew the time had come to seek professional counsel at once or run the risk of sudden and catastrophic paralysis. I got on the phone to Ms Mac and scheduled a Wednesday-morning house call. At the appointed hour, a flute-playing genius by the name of Nicole appeared on my doorstep, sat down at my desk, and started making magic passes over my prostrate iBook, which turned out to be even sicker than either one of us had suspected. Five nervewracking hours later, it was at least as good as new, and I went right out and downed a stiff drink.

One of the nice things about Nicole’s approach to computer consulting is that she is unfailingly tactful, by which I mean that she never says things like You mean you don’t know what a [fill in the blank] is? Recognizing at once that she was dealing with an innocent, she went out of her way to behave as if my ignorance were perfectly normal. I have no doubt that this is a specifically feminine mode of behavior, having spent far too many hours being stared at in self-evident disbelief by auto mechanics with hairy chests who made no effort whatsoever to disguise their contempt for the kind of guy who doesn’t know a socket wrench from a fanbelt (I exaggerate only slightly). If all auto mechanics were like Nicole, there would be peace on earth.

Thanks to her stalwart efforts, I now resume regular blogging activities–and about time, too. I’m off to Chicago at midday Friday to frolic on the aisle with OGIC, but until then I’m yours.

My Wall Street Journal review of Kate Whoriskey’s Shakespeare Theatre production of The Tempest, in which I suggested that audience members wait to read her program notes until after they’d seen the show, has inspired a couple of very interesting posts elsewhere in the blogosphere. (You’ll find them here and here.)

These postings put me in mind of H.L. Mencken’s saying that criticism is “prejudice made plausible.” He had a point, but some prejudices don’t lend themselves to such treatment, or at least shouldn’t. I don’t like all art, I’m pretty sure I don’t like all good art, and I think it’s the better part of wisdom for me not to pretend that all the art I dislike is bad. Like everyone else, I have my share of aesthetic allergies, which may or may not necessarily correspond to the Truth About Art.

All other things being equal:

• I prefer short plays, films, novels, and pieces of music to long ones. (I also prefer small paintings to large ones, which is not exactly the same preference but probably a second cousin to it.)

• I prefer comedy to tragedy.

• I prefer prose to poetry.

• I prefer simplicity to complexity.

• I prefer realism to fantasy. (This is why I prefer comedy to tragedy, by the way: I think it’s truer to life.)

• I usually have major problems with “documentary” art, or any other kind of idea-driven art. Marcel Duchamp said that he inscribed sentences on his “ready-mades” in order to “carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal.” That sums up the kind of art I like least.

• I loathe “artiness.”

• I tend not to like camp.

To some extent these prejudices can be made to add up to a rough and ready philosophy of art, but the alert reader will note that they also contain some built-in contradictions. O.K. by me. As I’ve said time and again, art is empirical: first you make it, then you decide whether it works, then you try to figure out why it works. Similarly, criticism starts with the critic’s spontaneous, unmediated response to an aesthetic experience. If it doesn’t, it’s bad criticism–period.

One of the reasons why I trust my taste is that it not infrequently leads me in surprising directions. I’ve reviewed more than a few plays and productions for the Journal that didn’t conform to my list of prejudices, but which I loved anyway. (Among them were Anna in the Tropics, Charlie Victor Romeo, I Am My Own Wife, Intimate Apparel, Jumpers, Nine Parts of Desire, Private Jokes, Public Places, Rose Rage, and Small Tragedy.) A critic who always knows in advance what he’s going to like–or dislike–is writing about the show in his head, not the show in front of him. One sure way to increase the likelihood of surprise is not to look at the printed program at all, and sometimes that’s just what I do: I go in, sit down, and see what happens.

In the case of The Tempest, I knew that Ms. Whoriskey claimed to have interpreted Shakespeare’s text in a highly political way, which is definitely not my thing–but I’d also been told in advance by a person whose taste I trust without reservation that the production was first-rate, so I split the difference, went in cold, and didn’t crack open the program until intermission, by which time I was already head over heels and happy to be. So much the better. It’s not uncommon for me to have clear-cut advance expectations about the shows I review, but I’m always willing to be proved wrong, and delighted to admit it in print.

I’m sure several of you out there are already thinking the same thing, and I’m a half-beat ahead of you: doesn’t it matter that Kate Whoriskey superimposed a political interpretation on The Tempest and came up with a beautiful production? Duh, yeah, of course. To be sure, my experience suggests very strongly that politicizing Shakespeare (or any other great playwright) tends not to yield good results, but if it works for her, it works for her, regardless of whether it works for anyone else.

As for me, all I care about is the end result. Bore me and I’ll fall asleep, even if I agree with every word you say. Astonish me and I’ll sit up and take notice, even if I think you’re dead wrong. In art, the only unforgivable sin is to be dull.

UPDATE: Mr. Superfluities has posted a list of his own prejudices. While they tend not to run in very close sync with my own, he says some things with which I couldn’t agree more enthusiastically. Among them:

Theater’s strengths, in this technological age, are that it’s simple, it can be cheap and it appeals to a very basic need for physical communion….

Campy popular cultural references mire a work in its own time. It’s one thing to offer comment or criticism of the world in which we live; it’s another to unthinkingly exploit the popularity of junk in an effort to make our own shows more accessible….

Artists can’t afford to be without a familiarity with the other art forms in which they don’t work. It also helps when they have a good broad basic understanding of philosophy, psychology, history and science: sometimes to inform their own work, sometimes to be aware of the questions which these disciplines don’t answer.

Hear, hear! (Do I smell a meme coming on?)