A friend writes:

You have now written books on yourself, H.L. Mencken and George Balanchine, and Louis Armstrong is next. How would they interact at dinner?

Needless to say, I’d revel in the company of all three men, whether separately or together. In addition to being famously companionable, they were good talkers–not to mention eaters and drinkers–and I’d be tempted to ask each of them an endless string of questions in between bites. Alas, cross-examination is a thoroughly unsound basis for a dinner party, and since Mencken had no interest in ballet and dismissed jazz as “undifferentiated musical protoplasm, dying of its own effluvia,” it’s possible that the conversation might grow a little bumpy if left to its own devices.

Instead, I’d start by nudging my guests toward the safer ground of classical music, to which they were all passionately devoted. With the arrival of the wine steward, I’d encourage a discussion of the relative merits of alcohol and marijuana: Mencken, who once declared himself “omnibibulous,” and Armstrong, who rarely let a day go by without getting high, would surely have had fun kicking that topic around. Then I might mention Isadora Duncan, for whose dancing both Balanchine (“To me it was absolutely unbelievable–a drunken, fat woman who for hours was rolling around like a pig”) and Mencken (“A mass of puerilities, without any more rational basis than golf or spiritualism”) had nothing but contempt. I’m not aware that Armstrong had any strong views about modern dance, but he certainly knew plenty about dancing in general, being a jazz musician, and I’m sure he’d chime in to interesting effect.

Over dessert, the talk would likely turn without prompting to women. Balanchine and Armstrong were both married four times, and though Mencken only tied the knot once, he had his fair share of girlfriends, going so far as to write a book called In Defense of Women. Between the three of them, I dare say quite a bit of light would be shed on the ever-intriguing subject of romance and its discontents.

Don’t you think that adds up to a pretty good conversational menu?

Swift winds are flying,

Soldiers are marching,

Voices are crying, “What shall we do?”

Cities have fallen,

Sunsets are barren,

Winter is calling–and I love you.

The world today is in a madness.

We’ve said goodbye to all our merry youth,

And in the midst of bitterness and sadness,

We’ve only time to tell the truth.

Days now are fleeting.

Time, ever teasing,

Turns every greeting to an adieu.

Planets have shaken,

Each dawn will darken

As we awaken–and I love you.

What we have found

Though the world fall around us

Is simple and sound

And is all that is true.

Each broken starling

We can atone for:

Come to me, darling,

Come be my own, darling,

Come be my own–for I love you.

William Roy, The World Today

I’m not here–I’m on the way back from the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, where I saw Design for Living last night–but Our Girl has kindly done me the favor of posting the weekly teaser for my Wall Street Journal theater column. This time around, I reviewed the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, an autobiographical play in which Marilyn Monroe figures prominently, and Lincoln Center Festival’s The Elephant Vanishes, a theater piece created by Simon McBurney of Complicite.

Not to put too fine a point on it, After the Fall is a major disaster:

Of the American playwrights who made it big in the ’40s and ’50s, Arthur Miller is the one whose star has dipped lowest. To be sure, he’s still big in Europe, mostly for the obvious reasons (European critics eat up talky plays about how the U.S. is a wasteland of vulgar, small-minded conformism). Yet only three new shows by Mr. Miller have been produced on Broadway in the past quarter-century–none of them successfully–and though several of his earlier plays have had solid runs in revival, the ever-ubiquitous “Death of a Salesman” is the only one that now seems a good bet to hold the stage permanently.

So what possessed the Roundabout Theatre Company to exhume “After the Fall,” a lead-plated example of the horrors that result when a humorless playwright unfurls his midlife crisis for all the world to see? Don’t ask me–I’m a critic, not a producer. All I know is that this preeningly self-important play, written in 1964 and revived last night at the American Airlines Theatre, ranks right up there with “Bombay Dreams” on my list of Unendurable Clunkers of 2004….

The only time Mr. Miller manages to break free of his solipsism, however briefly, is in the first couple of scenes involving Maggie/Marilyn. Apparently she managed to get his attention, just as Carla Gugino gets ours. A TV starlet, this is her Broadway debut, and while she makes the mistake of imitating Monroe instead of suggesting her, she does it with powerfully seductive conviction. Once she extricates herself from this misbegotten production, my guess is that Ms. Gugino will soon go on to much better things.

Nobody else in “After the Fall” is memorable, least of all Peter Krause, another Broadway debutant who bears an uncanny resemblance to Greg Marmalard, the smooth-faced, toadying frat boy of “Animal House.” Mr. Krause is best known for playing an undertaker in the trendy TV series “Six Feet Under,” which seems appropriate enough, since he’s a hopeless stiff on stage. I’m not sure exactly how much secondary blame for the remainder of this mess should attach to Michael Mayer, the director, but there’s more than enough to go around.

The Elephant Vanishes, on the other hand, was almost perfectly wonderful:

No small part of the trouble with “After the Fall” is that Mr. Miller, who hasn’t a poetic bone in his body (though he thinks he does), tried in vain to write a lyrical memory play. True lyric theater is all about poetry–the poetry of the ear and eye alike–and “The Elephant Vanishes,” directed by Simon McBurney and co-produced by the Setagaya Public Theatre of Tokyo and Complicite, Mr. McBurney’s London-based theatrical troupe, is one of the most bewitchingly poetic things I’ve been lucky enough to see on a stage.

Presented by Lincoln Center Festival 2004, “The Elephant Vanishes,” performed in Japanese with English-language supertitles, was adapted by Mr. McBurney from the short stories of Haruki Murakami, whose surrealistic tales of Tokyo are hugely popular in Japan. Mr. McBurney has turned them into a fine-grained multi-media fantasy about the loneliness and mystery of postmodern Japanese urban life–an avant-garde “Lost in Translation,” if you will. Though the New York State Theater was a bit too large for the production to register properly, the eerily discontinous vignettes spun by Mr. McBurney out of Mr. Murakami’s prose somehow managed to fill its cavernous interior to enthralling effect.

No link. Don’t just sit there–buy a copy of the Journal and read me. Or, better yet, subscribe.

“She was a diffused, Salon photograph; and yet she must have had in the depths of her wistful soul a Gift or Daemon that once or twice a year awoke, whispered to her a sentence she could repeat–to the world’s astonishment–and then turned back to sleep. Dr. Rosenbaum had first been aware of this Daemon when Miss Batterson retorted, to a colleague’s objection that all Benton students read that in high school: ‘There is no book that all my students have read.’ Dr. Rosenbaum knew that it is in sentences like this, and not in the pages of Spengler, that one has brought home to one the twilight of the West.”

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

“There ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t agoing to no more.”

Samuel Clemens, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A reader writes:

Sad to see you succumbing to the powers of the internet. I’m 34, which is on the cusp of the information age, but perhaps more aligned with the younger generation since my undergrad was at MIT and grad school in academia before the internet meant that I’ve been actively using email since age 17. You’re experiencing the joys of the instant communication, but not seeing the loss. A not-very-shy guy asked me out via the web, once, while actually emailing me from another terminal in the same room. Maybe he thought it was cute, but it highlights the fact that our on-line personality matters more than our in-person personality now. When I hated grad school, I went and complained to my friends from college, far away. Good to have as a resource in a way, but a crutch in terms of forcing me to bond with the people I was in grad school with, forcing me to deal with the present.

I see that all the time. I remember one of the earliest times I saw a cell phone user – a mother, eating with her kids (in the college dining hall! must be visitors), talking to someone else about something inane. My brother, the techno-geek, couldn’t understand my issues with that scene. You see it everywhere – kids using the library terminals to play games; bored people using it to look at porn sites. Back in the day, it seemed like we used our spare time better. I spend far too much time, myself, on reading blogs – responding like this one, to someone who won’t remember me tomorrow. I’m not a new friend, or acquaintance, I’m a face in a crowd. I should be studying, reading – and I just decided NOT to go to a concert tonight because I haven’t done the work I should have done today. I’m sure there are similar losses – people who don’t write novels or compose poems because that spare time gets spent browsing the net.

But, more obviously, if blogging with me and other far-away-arts-lovers means you DON’T connect with that person next to you – on the bus, in the restaurant, on the plane – there’s a real loss. You gain a community, but lose a more important, living breathing community with more diversity. Ya know?

Technology is an absolute good, you say. Maybe. It seems an irreversible good, meaning that if you aren’t on the internet, then the community changes without you. I’m without cell-phone or notebook or palm, but the people around me are less open to chatting with strangers because they have them, so I may as well get them….

That’s my advice – get out, get out, get out. Life is out there, live it. My advice to myself as well, but I’ve been hooked for longer than you have. Okay, back to work, or else I have to cancel tomorrow’s concert as well.

I’m not quite sure I’m the most logical recipient of this advice. After all, I usually attend at least four performances (and often more) each week, and I almost always bring a friend or two with me. What’s more, I find e-mail an unmixed blessing, not least because it allows me to maintain face-to-face friendships more efficiently. Nor do I think I communicate with strangers at the expense of friends. If anything, I’ve made new face-to-face friends through blogging, including several of the people whose blogs can be found in the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column. As for the matter of diversity, what could be more diverse than the worldwide “community” of people who read “About Last Night?

Sure, we’ve all seen the way some folks use postmodern information technology to avoid direct human contact, sometimes deliberately and sometimes thoughtlessly, as in the case of the Inconsiderate Cell-Phone Man caricatured in those movie-theater ads. (I almost sang that jingle the other day to a noisy idiot seated immediately in front of me on an airplane.) Everything under the sun–including great art–can be used in life-denying ways.

Still, I can’t go along with the notion that blogs are by definition a waste of everybody’s valuable spare time, which is more or less what my correspondent is implying. Jennicam, maybe, but she’s out of business, while Maud and Sarah and Chicha and all the smart, thoughtful art bloggers whom I read daily are thriving. And well they should be, for what they do, aside from being valuable in its own right, also has the potential to increase the number of people reading good books and going to concerts (and, presumably, chatting with one another at intermission).

Which returns us to the mission of “About Last Night”: Our Girl and I write this blog in order to stimulate and diversify the art-related interests of our readers. To put it another way, “About Last Night” is a means, not an end–and I know from our e-mailbox that it is constantly leading people to try new things.

On which optimistic note I’m headed for bed. My cold is marginally better, but I’ve got to rent a car and drive to Massachusetts tomorrow afternoon to see a performance of No

A reader writes:

While listening to Dana Gioia speak on the recent survey on fiction
reading (and his take on what that means), an equivocating thought came
to me. I’ve been a pastor and teacher for 20 some years, working with
congregations and talking to students in colleges or Elderhostel/Life-Long Learner participants.
As you probably know, survey data on church attendance is far above
what a simple, real world check will reveal (65+% say they go to church
4 times a month or more on surveys, but a worship census shows it
simply can’t be above 40%, nearer 30%). Just in the last few years,
the annual Gallup surveys are noting a drop in those long standing
numbers, even as church attendance seems to be perking back up.

What we assume out here in Pastor-land, with a few sociologists of
religion riding shotgun, is that it used to be socially very important
to say you went to church…even if you didn’t. As it has become
much more acceptable in general discourse to admit freely that you
don’t go to church at all, let alone often, survey data is starting to
track closer to reality.

My suspicion — which makes the problem no less, only different — is
that it is now socially much more acceptable to admit that you haven’t
read “War and Peace” or “To The Lighthouse” even among educated
company, while similarly there is less social value to claiming you
have…whether you’ve done so or not.

As a voracious reader of fiction, non-fiction, and lids of tea
packaging or stray receipts if that’s all there is to hand, I can
recall many occasions in high school and college where I realized, to
my thrilled horror, that Teacher X or Professor Y had not actually read
the book they were manglingly alluding to. Similar events in dinner
party/backyard conversation over the years made me realize that the
total number of unread books everyone has read is…wait, as you’ve
pointed out recently, David Lodge has already trod this ground full
well.

But in the last 5-10 years, folks from freshmen students in classes to
my wife’s colleagues in academia are likely to say in response to
literary references “Haven’t read it,” in tones indicating they’re not
gonna, you can’t make ’em, and whatsittoya?

So my equivocating point is: has fiction reading really dropped off?
Can we correlate for some other variable (sales, library circulation)
to crossreference? And is it possible that the problem is that folks
don’t feel the need to fake having read or be seen as a reader of
fiction as a social value — and if so, I find it double intriguing
that such a loss of felt need to keep up such appearances fictionally
speaking correlated so well with worship attendance trends (or
classical music, fer that matter).

It seems an important distinction, and I don’t hear that the survey
response is picking up on the possibility.

As regular readers of “About Last Night” know, I’ve been asked not to comment on the activities of the National Endowment for the Arts–including its recently released survey of changing American reading habits–while my nomination to the National Council on the Arts awaits consideration by the Senate. But the questions this reader poses are so interesting and provocative that I wanted to pass them on anyway.

Any thoughts, OGIC?

The Wall Street Journal (subscription only) reports today that, without making a big fuss about it, Amazon.com has taken measures recently to encourage users to use their real names when posting reviews:

Earlier this month, the Web retailer quietly launched a new system, dubbed Real Names, that encourages users to append to their product reviews the name that appears on the credit card they have registered with Amazon. A logo saying “Real Name” appears beside such customer comments.

Amazon still allows reviewers to sign their comments with pen names, effectively concealing their identity from other Amazon users. But even these reviewers need to supply a credit card or purchase history. Previously, users could easily open multiple Amazon accounts from which they could post multiple reviews of the same product. The new system is intended to block that practice.

Many of you will remember the brouhaha on Amazon Canada a few months back, when the real names of anonymous and pseudonymous posters were inadvertently revealed, exposing all manner of fixing (authors reviewing their own books under fake names) and sabotage (folks going undercover to savage their enemies’ books). Also revealed in the incident was the growing influence of these customer reviews, and the company’s new policies only underline how seriously it takes them as part of the service it offers. “What we’re trying to do with this is add to the credibility of the content on this site,” says a spokeswoman. There’s more to the plan:

Over time, reviewers who opt to use pen names could become less visible on the site. Under the system in which users rate the usefulness of reviews, the most highly rated reviews appear in higher, more prominent sections of Amazon’s pages. If users believe that reviews with real names attached are more valuable, those will become the most visible on the site.

All of this makes me feel a bit prescient. Several years ago, when Amazon hadn’t yet started selling colanders and flip-flops, and “blog” was what I might say when the milk turned, I wrote a little piece about the site’s reader reviews for a publication that shall remain anonymous (and thus of dubious credibility). The article was sort of a lite version of the blog triumphalism you see all the time now (including from yours truly): Everyman now has a voice! Sometimes it speaks wisely; sometimes it’s absurd! And it just may be revolutionary.