As regular readers know, I saw two out-of-town plays last week, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, performed at Washington’s Kennedy Center, and No

I just added several new blogs to the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column. Check ’em out. If you can’t figure out which ones are new, check ’em all out. Think what you could be missing!

P.S. I think I may also have accidentally deleted one blog whose name begins with “S.” If you’re the victim, please send me an e-mail.

“He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his inferiors in sense. His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses. He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him. I do not describe the democratic politician at his inordinate worst; I describe him as he is encountered in the full sunshine of normalcy. He may be, on the one hand, a cross-roads idler striving to get into the State Legislature by grace of the local mortgage-sharks and evangelical clergy, or he may be, on the other, the President of the United States. It is almost an axiom that no man may make a career in politics in the Republic without stooping to such ignobility: it is as necessary as a loud voice.”

H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

From the 92nd St. Y:

NEW YORK, NY: August 5, 2004

As I mentioned yesterday, Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes posted a list of his ten favorite painters as of that moment, and invited other artbloggers to do the same. (Here’s the followup posting.)

I usually jump at the chance to make lists of this kind, but for some inexplicable reason I found this one paralyzing. My ten favorite painters of all time? Ever? No sooner did I start typing names than I clutched–but I still wanted to play. So I decided instead to do something that is both easier and, in a way, potentially more revealing. Here’s a complete list of the artists represented in the Teachout Museum:

– Milton Avery (drypoint)

– William Bailey (aquatint with hard ground etching)

– Max Beerbohm (drawing with watercolor wash)

– Nell Blaine (one color lithograph, one painted tile)

– Pierre Bonnard (black-and-white lithograph)

– Stuart Davis (color serigraph)

– Helen Frankenthaler (color serigraph)

– Jane Freilicher (aquatint with hard ground etching)

– Arnold Friedman (black-and-white lithograph)

– Wolf Kahn (monotype)

– Alex Katz (color lithograph)

– John Marin (etching)

– Joan Mitchell (color lithograph)

– Fairfield Porter (four color lithographs)

– Paul Taylor (assemblage)

– John Twachtman (etching)

– Neil Welliver (woodcut)

– Jane Wilson (pastel)

In my mind, there’s also a space for the Morandi etching that got away. (Sigh.)

What do I long for most that isn’t there? A Vuillard color lithograph, a Hans Hofmann print (that one got away, too), a Kenneth Noland monoprint, and something good (but affordable) by Richard Diebenkorn. As of this moment, anyway.

Why do we read? “General principles!” my dad would say. Can’t argue with that. But over at Erin O’Connor’s Critical Mass, they’re getting a little more specific. Erin and her readers are having a lively discussion about some issues raised in Mark Edmundson’s New York Times Magazine essay from last week, “The Risk of Reading.” Edmundson’s is the latest, and I think the best, of a recent flurry of big-media articles springing from discontent with the more insipid varieties of book boosterism. (Christina Nehring’s NYTBR piece last month was another.) In the process of addressing the issues Edmundson raises–principally, “Why read?”–Erin recalls a great scene from Cynthia Ozick:

I am reminded of a passage from Cynthia Ozick’s Puttermesser Papers, in which the eponymous heroine dreams about a heaven that consists of an eternity spent reading an unending stack of books while consuming an inexhaustible supply of chocolate. It’s an image of consumption without consequence (Puttermesser’s teeth will never rot, she will never grow fat), cost (in paradise, the books are free, chocolate is free, and there is all the time in the world), or return (Puttermesser never aims to talk about what she reads, or to share her books with others, or to write something herself, or even to stop consuming long enough to digest what she has read). Ozick’s portrait of a reader’s paradise is a picture of indiscriminate gobbling, and as such it is both profoundly anti-social and massively regressive: book as breast. It’s a funny image–but in its sheer extremity it reveals a lot about how readers, and reading, are often regarded in a society that is as wrapped up in the display of work and work-related social performances as ours is.

Erin then raises the following questions for her readers:

How social is reading? Is it an isolating, anti-social activity, or is it, in its quiet way, a profoundly communal act? Is there a value merely in the act of reading, independent of content? If so, how would you describe that value? Why read? Why do you personally read–or, why do you personally not read?

Their answers are illuminating. Hop on over and put your two cents in.

It’s been way too long since I conducted a tour of the blogosphere. Even when I was feeling thoroughly crappy (i.e., yesterday), I continued to surf the Web and bookmark cool stuff I found along the way. Here’s some of it:

– Eat your hearts out, film buffs: Celluloid Eyes has a great list of “movies I am dying to rent/own on DVD and cannot” because (gnashing of teeth) they aren’t available on DVD. As she remarks in passing:

Many of these hard-to-find movies are my favorite kind of movie: those delightful, witty, frothy, often surprisingly relevant, sometimes surprisingly naughty American movies from the 1930s.

Why hasn’t anybody told me about this blog?

– Zoilus gleans this Elvis Costello quote from the New York Times:

“You’re kidding yourself if you believe it when people say, `Oh, that’s a political song,’ ” Mr. Costello said. “No. A political song is one that if you played it to Donald Rumsfeld, he would give up his career and enter a monastery. That would be a political song — one that affected him so deeply that he would renounce his view of the world. I don’t think anybody alive is capable of writing that song. So all you’re doing is writing things that matter to you.”

To which he appends numerous disagreements, concurrences, and amplifications, among them:

Costello’s right, though, that some sort of potentially transformative experience should at least be nosing around the edges of a properly political song – political speech is primarily persuasive, right? And I think…that in art the best mode of persuasion is empathetic, to bring the audience through the experiences that shape the point of view rather than to argue the point of view. (Does arguing ever do anything ever?)

Timely.

– From the Daily Telegraph by way of artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, a smart interview with Stephen Sondheim on the latest London revival of Sweeney Todd:

I remember when I was at college, one of the English professors made what seems an obvious point, but it wasn’t obvious to me at the age of 17, that one of the things that keeps Hamlet alive is that every generation brings something new to the performance. It isn’t just the poetry; it’s that every time you do Hamlet you can take a different view of it – and that’s what keeps theatre alive.

With musicals, the audience tend to want to see what they’ve seen before. Whereas people who go to Hamlet want to see something different.

– I love smart lists, and my super-smart artsjournal.com colleague Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, has published a fine one:

Here are my ten favorite artists. Or at least my ten favorite artists as of when I typed this. And to make this an even sillier exercise, I’ll give a one-word summary of what I like best about each artist….

Go see for yourself. Four of Tyler’s listees would either make my list or come damned close. One of them makes me run screaming from the room.

– Speaking of lead-with-the-chin lists, Alex Ross, the classical music critic of The New Yorker, has posted a list of 20 non-classical albums he loves (or, as he says, “an irrational series of powerful attractions”) on his blog, The Rest Is Noise. I like or love 11 of them. One of these days I’ll see Alex and raise him….

– And speaking of The New Yorker, did you see John Updike’s essay about Philip Larkin? It contains this beautifully balanced pair of clauses: “Larkin, though modest in manner and production, achieved major eloquence and formal perfection…”

Yes, exactly.

– Advertising can be deceptive–both ways. On my recent visit to the Williamstown Theatre Festival, I spent the night at the Porches Inn, which is located right across the street from MASS MoCA (the too-cute acronym for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art). I loved Porches and intend to stay there again whenever I return to the festival, but had I read this description on the inn’s Web site, I might well have thought twice, or maybe even three times, about checking in:

Porches is the most visible manifestation, to-date, of the changes sparked by MASS MoCA. Its 50-plus rooms of retro-edgy, industrial granny chic ambiance make a spirited lodging statement in New England and beyond.

That’s got to be a prime candidate for Private Eye‘s Pseuds Corner.

– Memo to Frank Lloyd Wright buffs: have you stayed here yet?

– The Buck Stops Here has a lovely little tribute to the sheer niceness of classical guitarist Christopher Parkening. I suspect–I hope–that a lot of us have similarly sweet stories about similarly thoughtful celebrities. I know I do.

– Not to beat a dead horse, but several hundred thousand bloggers published their own versions of the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. Of them, I liked this one best.

– One of the participants in Michael Dirda’s recent Washington Post online chat turns out to have been a fan of this blog and several of its brethren. Dirda thinks the Web is incompatible with “bookishness.” The chatter begged to differ:

One of the most delightful and unexpected developments on the WWW in the last year or so is the development of a community of literary blogs. These are creating a very real conversation about serious books, including many of those serious books that only infrequently are reviewed in the WP and NYT (and even then are often confined to the genre-ghetto roundups).

Some of my favourites: Terry Teachout occasionally takes a break from reviewing art and plays to write about the very particular joys of reading Donald Westlake. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor books has a long-standing blog covering inter alia publishers’ slushpiles, pygmy mammoths and sf fandom. It’s a small gem — well worth browsing the archives. Jessa Crispin’s Bookslut is an indispensable source of literary gossip and astute judgements on the merits of recent releases. Maud Newton’s taste in literature is eclectic but unfailingly good, while her writing style is both direct and elegant. Scott McLemee — an authority on obscure Marxist sects, Dale Peck and the MLA. All considered, there’s never been a better time to seek out good, interesting conversation about books.

To which Dirda, a columnist for Washington Post Book World, replied:

I’m glad you disagree with me, and your tastes in blogs is certainly discriminating, if only because I’m a great Westlake fan (having reviewed him frequently and interviewed him onstage at the Smithsonian). But, despite this chat, I personally find that the Internet sucks up too much time. I enjoy doing this for an hour a week; indeed, might enjoy it for an hour a day. But I’m fundamentally a loner and my communing tends to be with books and their authors rather than my fellow readers.
But this is just me. I’m perfectly sociable and charming, but my streak of puritanism is so strong that I can’t help but see online discussions as simply fooling around. For a writer it even feels like throwing away good material. But then I probably don’t have as many ideas as most bloggers and need to carefully marshal the few I do have.

I of course think otherwise. More than that, I suspect Dirda doesn’t look at enough blogs to know what they’re really like. For me, “About Last Night” is occasionally a burden (at which times I hand over happily to OGIC), more often a stimulus. As for blogs “sucking up too much time,” I wonder if Dirda would say the same thing about magazines….

– Lastly and leastly: O.K., Mr. TMFTML, I laughed at this one, too.

UPDATE: Don’t miss Ed‘s whirlwind tour of the blogosphere, all done in a single paragraph of sentence fragments. Whoosh!

A reader writes:

A man who on the same day can quote
Cardinal Newman and Paul Goodman (an unfairly neglected good poet) can be assured I will keep reading him daily.

Not only did I get a kick out of that e-mail, but it occurred to me as I read it that my correspondent had come up with a pretty good mission statement for “About Last Night.” Between us, Our Girl in Chicago and I specialize (or try to) in unexpected juxtaposition. We love all the arts, and within each art form we love a large and varied assortment of artists and artworks. It’s never seemed to either of us that such things are best appreciated in isolation. Hence the curve balls we throw as often as we can, some big and some, like this one, little. Nor do you have to know anything about Newman or Goodman to enjoy the fun. Nothing pleases me half as much as knowing that something I’ve written inspired somebody who read it to go read a book he’s never read before by an author he’s never heard of–or, better still, to go see his first ballet or visit his first art gallery or jazz club. Or whatever.

Maybe that’s the best way of describing our specialty here at “About Last Night”: whatever, and lots of it.