“I have only read Proust in translation. I thought he began well but went dotty half way through like J Joyce in Ulysses. No plan. Nancy [Mitford] says it is uproariously funny throughout & only English & Americans treat it as anything superior to P.G. Wodehouse.”

Evelyn Waugh, letter to Margaret FitzHerbert (Aug. 9, 1964)

I’ll be going to Chicago on Friday (sorry that I can’t take you!), but if I weren’t, I’d be going to Alice Tully Hall to hear “Five Lovers,” a recital by soprano Jama Jandrokovic.

Here’s the “official” description of the concert:

Soprano Jama Jandrokovic sings texts from her autobiographical collection of poetry, Five Lovers, featuring settings of the texts by leading American composers Lori Laitman, Luna Pearl Woolf and the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Music, Paul Moravec. Special guests include poet Dana Gioia, pianists Soeyon Kim and Andrew Rosenblum, and the North Sky Ensemble, with violinists Jesse Mills and Colin Jacobsen, violist Max Mandel and cellist Rubin Kodheli. Directed by Gina Lapinski.

Now here’s an explanation of the program’s significance by my fellow ArtsJournal.com blogger Greg Sandow, a tireless and trenchant advocate of non-traditional classical-music programming:

On Friday, at Tully Hall in New York, a soprano named Jama Jandrokovic will give a recital, consisting of three new song cycles by three composers, all of them settings of her own autobiographical poetry! This really deserves an exclamation point, because normally–to state the obvious–it’s people in pop music whose music is explicitly about their own lives. So now here’s someone in classical music doing it.

The poems, according to the press release for the concert, “chronicle Ms. Jandrokovic’s romantic journey as a recently divorced, newly single young woman in New York City attempting to reinvent herself.” I haven’t read the poems, and can’t say if they’re good or bad. But! The very idea of a classical singer doing something like this is revolutionary. The composers are Lori Laitman, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Paul Moravec, and the concert–very good move here–has a stage director. This is not your grandmother’s vocal recital.

I know about this concert because I know several of the parties involved, but readers of this blog shouldn’t need to be reminded that I don’t recommend anything in advance unless I have damned good reason to think it’s going to be worth seeing and/or hearing. This will be both.

Jandrokovic’s gorgeously designed Web site, with full information on the program, is here.

To purchase tickets, go here.

Things I didn’t know till now, gratefully culled from The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film:

– Total number of feature-length commercial sound films of plays by Shakespeare: about 40.

– Average percentage of Shakespeare’s original text heard in these films: 25-30%.

– Director who “consistently uses fewer words for each transaction between characters” in his Shakespeare films: Orson Welles.

Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, is inviting
bloggers to write about their favorite painting in America and their favorite American painting (which I suppose could be one and the same).

This is, of course, an impossible task, but having just said that it can’t be done, I’ll do it, subject as always to minute-by-minute changes of mind.

As of the time stamp on this posting, the winners are as follows:

– Favorite American painting: Fairfield Porter’s The Mirror, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. As regular readers of this blog know, my passion for Porter is boundless–his work is my major preoccupation as a collector–and I can think of a half-dozen of his paintings that I might be inclined to put at the top of this list. “The Mirror,” though, seems to me a particularly revealing exemplar of Porter’s highly individual brand of realism, and one that I don’t get to see often enough because it hangs in a Midwestern museum. All the more reason, then, for me to pay a visit to Kansas City this summer. Good jazz, good barbecue, a good museum with my favorite Porter–what’s not to like?

– Favorite painting in America: Paul C

Yesterday I was striving to describe some of the infinitely variable moods of Lake Michigan, and tonight Mr. Modern Kicks goes and provides a one-click ticket to an unbelievably perfect–and perfectly beautiful–illustration of what I was babbling on about with these suddenly crude-seeming materials, words: Cynthia King’s far more eloquent oil pastels of the very lake, in several of its moods. I haven’t decided yet whether seeing her lovely pictures adds steam to the prospective Lake Diary project or just makes it seem terribly unnecessary.

“‘There is no man,’
he began, ‘however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said
things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant
to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it
from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because
he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man–so far as
it is possible for any of us to be wise–unless he has passed through
all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate
stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons
and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them
nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have,
perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to
retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of
everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures,
feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and
sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for
ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else
can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom
is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.
The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are
not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at
school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by
reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that
prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I
can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not
be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in
later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence
that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of
life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life,
of the life of studios, of artistic groups–assuming that one is a
painter–extracted something that goes beyond them.'”

Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff)

I just got back from New Haven, where I drove in order to see Long Wharf Theatre’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (I’ll be reviewing it next week in The Wall Street Journal). It was a long night and a long drive, and I have four appointments ahead of me today–one of which is a house call from a computer repairwoman. Yikes!

For all these reasons, I rather doubt I’ll be posting anything more until Thursday. In my absence, do the obvious: slide over to the right-hand column, scroll down to “Sites to See,” and explore the wonderful world of artblogging.

See you later.

When Terry posts an “Entry from an Unkept Diary,” I look at the title and invariably see “Entry from an Unkempt Diary.” This amuses me, but it also reminds me of the journals, very much kept, of my slightly younger self. They are pretty fat and unkempt tomes, stuffed with bits of paper scribbled on at times when the journal wasn’t at hand and salted away between the pages or, once in a while, scotch-taped in. It has been years now since I’ve attempted to keep a regular diary. I’m still a sucker for a nice blank book, however, and I buy them and try to think of other things to fill them up with than end-of-the-day thoughts, which in my case hardly ever failed to amount to small litanies of complaints–about work, about friends, but mostly about those two great sources of dissatisfaction, boyfriends and me, that is, my own fallibilities and failures. Sometimes I’d try to write about things outside the making-me-grumble and making-me-swoon zones, but those labored entries were always the worst: stiff, studied, insufferable. They always raised the same uncomfortable question when I’d finished: who the hell did I think I was writing that for? Just what audience of distinguished prize panelists did I imagine was going to be rooting around in my nightstand drawer for li-terature?

Yecch. Back to slights and betrayals and crushes. That junk, now–that flowed like Leinie’s at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap [aside: hellooo, Frommers’ best editor!]. But could anything be more banal? Let’s just say I’m not so sorry I put a stop to all of that.

Still, these days I continue to like the idea of keeping a record of my daily life, but I lean away from the subjective and toward the objective variety. Not so far in that direction as Andy Warhol–no taxi cab receipts or anything–but definitely in that direction. Off and on, I’ll squirrel away my movie ticket stubs. They’re dandy little documents, packing quite a bit of data into the space of a couple postage stamps: the date, the movie title, the showtime, the theater’s name, the price. This, for me, is the sort of artifact that can evoke a whole day besides: the company, the weather outside, the pre-movie or post-movie meal, the comparing of notes after the show. I very much want to have been keeping this book already, but it always feels too late to start. It feels especially futile now, when I’m tempted out to the movies less and less frequently (a subject for another post). Still, I should do it. If I don’t, I’ll think of it next year and wish I had started now.

Another possible structured diary I’m always thinking about starting is the Lake Diary. I live a few blocks from Lake Michigan, and it looks different to me every day. If one day it is the same color as the day before, the sky is probably different. If the sky is the same color, too, the texture of the water surface is different. There’s not a day I see that lake and don’t say to myself–or to whoever is lucky enough to be around–“Look at the lake!” On a day not too long ago, the remarkable visual effect happened to be that while most of the lake surface was soft and nubbly, it turned shiny and glassine in the cup formed where Promontory Point curves back inland to the north. Sometimes lake and sky are both silver-gray, and the horizon is rubbed out or blurred, as if an eraser had been taken to it more or less skillfully. The possible and actual variations within this simple set of elements, lake-sky-color-texture, are infinite. And as certain reading tastes of mine go to show, I’m ever fascinated by subtle variations on a recurring theme (the variable elements in this case being color-damsel-scoundrel-scam).

So what kinds of diaries do you keep or aspire to keep? Tidy? Or un?