About Last Night

Howard Kurtz, who covers the media for the Washington Post, quoted me on Monday in a column about the changing role of newspaper critics in the age of online opinion, professional and otherwise. Since what I said to Kurtz got noticed here and there, it occurred to me that it might be worth reprinting part of a column I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2007 in which I addressed the same topic at greater length.

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I now spend more time reading art-related blog postings than print-media reviews. Increasingly, they’re sharper, livelier and timelier than their old-media competition.

This is why I have mixed feelings about the decline of regional newspaper criticism, much of which is uneven in quality and not a little of which is pointless. Why, for instance, should a medium-sized newspaper run locally written reviews of blockbuster movies or beach-blanket novels? That’s like assigning a restaurant critic to discuss the difference between Big Macs and Whoppers. To the limited extent that such commodity art requires “serious” criticism, wire-service copy will do the job perfectly well.

The fine arts, however, are a different story. One of the most important civic duties that a newspaper performs is to cover the activities of local arts groups–but it can’t do that effectively without also employing knowledgeable critics who are competent to evaluate the work of those groups. Mere reportage, while essential, is only the first step. It’s not enough to announce that the Hooterville Art Museum finally bought itself a Picasso. You also need a staffer who can tell you whether it’s worth hanging, just as you need someone who knows whether the Hooterville Repertory Company’s production of Private Lives was funny for the right reasons.

Can bloggers do that? Of course–and some of them do it better than their print-media counterparts….

But blogging, valuable though it can be, is no substitute for the day-to-day attention of a newspaper whose editors seek out experts, hire them on a full-time basis, and give them enough space to cover their beats adequately. The problem is that fewer and fewer newspapers seem willing to do that in any consistent way. I don’t care for the word “provincial,” but I can’t think of a more accurate way to describe a city whose local paper is unwilling to make that kind of commitment to the fine arts.

To be sure, it’s hard for medium-sized regional newspapers to attract serious critics, but it can be done. Indeed, a well-edited regional paper is often the best possible place for an up-and-coming young critic to learn his trade. I got my start reviewing second-string classical concerts for the Kansas City Star thirty years ago. Now that such entry-level work is drying up, I fear for the future of arts journalism in America.

Any artist who’s been side-swiped by a lame-brained critic will doubtless be tempted to cheer this news. Before such aggrieved folk break out the Dom Perignon, though, they should pay heed to the warning of Virgil Thomson, who dominated American music criticism in the Forties and Fifties: “Perhaps criticism is useless. Certainly it is often inefficient. But it is the only antidote we have to paid publicity.”

If you think you can do without that antidote, more power to you–but you’d better be prepared to buy a lot of ads.

A film version of a 1942 radio broadcast of The Jack Benny Program:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”
Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks

Our Girl has invited me to play this game, the rules of which were passed along by the proprietor of one of our favorite blogs:

Reading skeletons…are those books and writers that make you ashamed of yourself. Like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which I read one hot and beach-blanketed summer to impress a California girl. Or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the philosophical pretensions of which amazed me when I was a pretentious college senior.

All of us have skeletons in our reading closets. We do not confess to them, because we do not want to be arrested. We want to move on with our reading lives.

It happens that I never got around to reading either of the aforementioned books. For my generation, I suspect that Catch-22 may well be the ultimate reading skeleton. I thought it profound in high school and now wince at the thought of ever having to crack it again. Nor do I plan to revisit The Catcher in the Rye, Good Times/Bad Times, or A Separate Peace in my middle age, any more than I’d care to repeat my freshman year in high school, though it doesn’t embarrass me to admit to having read and liked those books in my adolescence–or, for that matter, to having listened with pleasure to, say, Crosby, Stills & Nash. To be young is to be…well, young.
As far as my adult reading goes, I incline to agree with Our Girl, who says that “I feel as though I can justify reading any book that keeps my attention.” This includes, needless to say, such noted purveyors of what H.L. Mencken called “homicidal fiction” as Elmore Leonard, Rex Stout, and Donald Westlake, all of whose novels are variously pleasing to readers with well-tuned ears.
On the other hand, I’ve never been one to bother with contemporary commercial fiction, no doubt because I find it all but impossible to read a book that isn’t stylishly written. To be specific, I’ve yet to read a single word by any of the novelists whose works appear on the latest New York Times list of paperback mass-market fiction best sellers (except for John Grisham, whose The Firm I read in a weak moment a number of years ago). This incapacity has been known to work to my disadvantage–it’s the reason why I’ve never been able to get anywhere with Theodore Dreiser, or with the vast majority of academic biographies–but I’m mostly grateful for it.
Your turn, CAAF.

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. Needless to say, I didn’t win one, nor was I a finalist, though I was nominated three times, for Pops, my contribution to The Letter, and in my capacity as The Wall Street Journal‘s drama critic.
As if that weren’t a sufficiently direct lesson in humility, I received in the mail my latest royalty check from Borealis Press. This one (pause for drumroll) was for…$4.06.
Vanity, thy name is someone else. At least until tomorrow. Or maybe next week.

“I need not tell you what it is to be knocking about in an open boat. I remember nights and days of calm when we pulled, we pulled, and the boat seemed to stand still, as if bewitched within the circle of the sea horizon. I remember the heat, the deluge of rain-squalls that kept us baling for dear life (but filled our water-cask), and I remember sixteen hours on end with a mouth dry as a cinder and a steering-oar over the stern to keep my first command head on to a breaking sea. I did not know how good a man I was till then. I remember the drawn faces, the dejected figures of my two men, and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more–the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort–to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires–and expires, too soon–before life itself.”
Joseph Conrad, “Youth” (courtesy of The Rat)

I’m up my ears in work in New York, Mrs. T is up in Connecticut taking care of various chores, and neither of these things will be changing until Sunday. As a result, I was feeling more than a little bit grumpy when I sat down in front of the TV on Friday night, surfed the channels, and settled on Groundhog Day, a movie that I love but hadn’t seen in several years.

Later that same evening, I emitted a burst of tweets which, stitched together, read as follows:

I’m in the middle of a major writing project (not the Ellington biography) that’s giving me a bad case of the ups-and-downs. What I’d like to do is leave my computer behind and hole up on Isle au Haut for a couple of work-free weeks. Alas, this is not an option. I’ll have to settle for a nice long walk in Central Park, which is far from the worst of a bad bargain.

If you need to adjust your attitude–and I did–a repeat viewing of Groundhog Day will likely do the trick. I laughed and laughed, then found myself overcome with gratitude at film’s end. I’m the luckiest person I know, and sometimes I forget it. Not tonight, though.

To which Lileks responded as follows: “Gratitude! That’s precisely the reaction I have to cheer-inducing, optimistic art. It’s a profound and underrated emotion.” And so it is, especially the latter. Among other things, that’s why Mozart has always been more widely celebrated than Haydn, an equally great composer whose music, though anything but ignorant of the world’s sorrows, is nonetheless fundamentally optimistic and hopeful. Under the aspect of modernity, we prefer our geniuses to be bleak, believing as we do that life is real, earnest, and not infrequently grim. Except that it isn’t, at least not always, and to forget that fact is to commit the soul-shriveling sin of ingratitude.

In a piece I wrote about Haydn for Commentary back in 2005, I quoted the following statement that has been attributed to the composer:

Often when contending with obstacles of every sort that interfered with my work… a secret feeling within me whispered: “There are but few contented and happy men here below; grief and care prevail everywhere; perhaps your labors may one day be the source from which the weary and worn, or the man burdened with affairs, may derive a few moments’ rest and refreshment.” What a powerful motive for pressing onward!

And what an equally powerful motive for seeking to make optimistic art.

The truest and best sentence in Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, if I do say so myself, is the one in which I described Armstrong as “a major-key artist who would always be disinclined to lament the woes of the world, aware of them though he was.” I coined the phrase “major-key artist” long ago to describe my old friend Nancy LaMott, who contended with the brutal and debilitating frustration of chronic illness, yet somehow contrived to fill her voice with the sunny warmth of hope each time she raised it in song.

Would that I could do that, or something like it! Alas, I’m merely a craftsman, not a great artist, but at least I can do my best to remind my readers of the life-enhancing virtues of such other joy-inspiring masters as (to name a few off the top of my head) Sir Thomas Beecham, Pierre Bonnard, Emmanuel Chabrier, Noël Coward, Erroll Garner, Howard Hawks, Henri Matisse, Fairfield Porter, and Frank Lloyd Wright. And–lest we forget–Harold Ramis, the director of Groundhog Day, who may not be a master but who has certainly helped make the world a happier and more grateful place.

As for my own fluctuating gratitude, it ran high all weekend long, fed by Saturday’s glorious sunshine and my first long walk through Central Park in far longer than I care to admit. I am, I know, absurdly lucky, lucky in love and friendship and, perhaps rarest of all, in work. No doubt I spend too much time at the grindstone, but how many people get to earn their living writing books about men like Louis Armstrong and reviews of shows like, say, Gordon Edelstein’s current off-Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie? And how many working journalists get to change hats in the middle of life and collaborate with a great composer on an opera, then see it produced to perfection and cheered to the echo?

I haven’t mentioned her lately in this space, so perhaps it’s worth saying that my mother did everything right (other than failing to teach me how to cook). Evelyn Teachout, who turns eighty-one in June, mysteriously neglected to make any of the all-too-familiar mistakes that blight the lives of so many of the people I know. She showed me how to laugh, admired my achievements, brushed off my failures, assured me whenever necessary that pretty much anything I wanted to do in life would be fine with her, and never left me in the slightest doubt of her love. She embedded in me what Freud called “that confidence of success that often induces real success.” You can’t get much luckier than that.

Each day is, of course, its own challenge, and I’m sure that I’ll forget to be grateful for all my good fortune at some particularly exasperating point in the week to come. But this posting, along with others like it that I’ve written in the seven years since this blog opened for business, is meant to serve as a marker, a permanent reminder of my obligation to appreciate all that is good, both in my own life and in the world around me.

Vladimir Nabokov said it: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Perhaps–but oh, how lovely a light!

“It was as though being in tune with life was an accident that might sometimes befall the fortunate young but was otherwise something for which human beings lacked any real affinity. How odd. And how odd it made him seem to himself to think that he who had always felt blessed to be numbered among the countless unembattled normal ones might, in fact, be the abnormality, a stranger from real life because of his being so sturdily rooted.”
Philip Roth, American Pastoral (courtesy of The Rat)