About Last Night

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”
Erich Fromm, Man for Himself

• At Library Thing, a wiki-type group is cataloging the libraries of the great departed, including those of Samuel Johnson (Terry, I’m looking at you), Sylvia Plath, and Walker Percy. (Via The Mumpsimus, who hopes they get to Borges soon.)
• Asheville alert: Junot Díaz reads at Warren Wilson College this Friday, April 11. It’ll be his first appearance since winning the Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I expect it’ll be a MADHOUSE, enough so that it’s been a real war of conscience for me whether to even spread the word (and thus possibly lose a chance at a seat). What you’re seeing here is the triumph of moral fiber.
Also worth a look, this charming interview with Díaz from Newsweek.

Haven’t you heard enough from me this week? No? Well, ain’t that too damn bad! I’m going to spend the day writing about Satchmo and playing in the sunshine (such as it is) with Mrs. T.
See you tomorrow.

“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

Three chords are a journey. Two chords are a ride on a seesaw.

I hope I’m not any more vain than I need to be in order to get through the day, but I won’t deny that I find it encouraging to know that some people not only read my theater reviews but act on them. This posting, for instance, pleased me immensely. The author read what I wrote about the Acting Company, took her daughter to see their touring production of Moby-Dick Rehearsed, and enjoyed it immensely. Even better, so did her daughter.

It also pleases me to see my name in front of a Broadway theater. A blogfriend recently sent me a snapshot of the Gypsy marquee, beneath which hangs a sign on which my name and enthusiastic words can be seen by passers-by. Did it tickle me? You bet.

That, however, is mostly vanity, albeit of an innocent kind. Of course I like seeing my name in lights on Broadway, but I think I’m realistic about what it means, to me as well as others:

The kick I get out of seeing my name under a marquee is not to be confused–nor do I ever confuse it–with the justifiable pride a playwright or actor or director or producer takes in his work. It’s simply the forgivable (I hope) vanity of a small-town boy turned big-city critic who never imagined that such things would happen to him, and it’s a far cry from the vulturine posings of, say, Addison DeWitt.

I’ve lived in New York for twenty-three years, and I have yet to start feeling blasé about it. Nor do most of the New Yorkers I like best. As I wrote on the day this blog was launched in 2003, “I hear there are places to live that are almost as much fun as New York City, but I wouldn’t know–I live here, and I’m not going anywhere.”

The friend who sent me the snapshot of the Gypsy marquee moved here last year, and after we saw South Pacific together a couple of weeks ago, she told me that none of the excitement she felt on her arrival in Manhattan had diminished in the slightest.

May she always feel that way–and me, too.

“When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
Samuel Johnson (quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson)

The big news in today’s Pulitzer Prizes is that Bob Dylan was honored with a special citation for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” A little late, I’d say.

As for the other prizes awarded in the non-journalistic categories of “letters, drama, and music,” I can only speak with authority about the awarding of the drama prize to Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, which was unquestionably superior to its competition. For what it’s worth, here’s what I wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal last year:

As an ardent supporter of Chicago theater, I’m overjoyed that one of that city’s best-known troupes has come east to strut its stuff: The Steppenwolf Theatre Company is performing Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County” on Broadway. Mr. Letts’s new play is a 13-character, 3½-hour monster about the Westons, an Oklahoma family so dysfunctional that it’s a wonder they’re not all dead. Repeat after me: adultery, alcoholism, drug addiction, incest. One of them is even a poet!

No doubt it sounds like Tennessee Williams on a bender, but what makes “August: Osage County” so excitingly watchable is that Mr. Letts has (mostly) chosen to play these grim matters for laughs. The horrific family dinner at which Mom Weston (Deanna Dunagan) pops a double handful of downers and starts settling scores is a glittering piece of black comedy, and the cast, consummately well directed by Anna D. Shapiro, plays it to perfection. Ms. Dunagan and Amy Morton (who gives a commanding performance as Barbara, the oldest Weston daughter) will surely be remembered at Tony time, but everyone deserves a group award for ensemble acting above and beyond the call of duty.

There’s a catch, and it’s a huge one: The hour-long first act is a pretentious piece of superfluous exposition that could and should have been cut. I suppose I ought not to suggest that you come late (nudge, nudge), but if you do choose to see the whole thing, take my word that it gets better–a whole lot better–after the first intermission.

Is that the stuff Pulitzers are made of? I suppose so, though the drama prize has had a fairly impressive batting average in recent years. Anna in the Tropics, Doubt, and I Am My Own Wife all won–but, then, so, did the utterly unmemorable Rabbit Hole. August: Osage County isn’t a great play, but we don’t get many of those, and it’s a solid, exciting piece of work, so I’m not complaining.

As for the other non-journalistic awards, I haven’t read any of the books that won, nor had I heard David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion, which won the music prize. You can listen to it here, which I did after the prizes were announced this afternoon. (It’s pretty enough, but I wasn’t impressed.) Truth to tell, I hadn’t even heard of any of the winning titles, and I think of myself as being more or less culturally literate. I did read two of the finalists for the biography prize, Martin Duberman’s The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein and Zachary Leader’s The Life of Kingsley Amis, neither of which I thought prizeworthy, and one of the finalists for general nonfiction, Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a brilliant and important book which I reviewed with the utmost enthusiasm in Commentary last year. (Alex’s blog is here.)

All of which says…what? Not very much, I fear. Nor are the Pulitzers nearly as important, culturally speaking, as they used to be, though they continue to ensure that their winners will be mentioned at least once in every major newspaper in America, which beats hell out of a sharp stick in the eye. Still, I doubt that this year’s winners will get much more traction in the media after the ink has dried on their citations, since American newspapers are increasingly turning their backs on high-culture coverage of all kinds. I wonder, for instance, what percentage of the papers that will be announcing the victory of John Matteson’s Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father in tomorrow morning’s editions bothered to run a review of the book when it was published.

Incidentally, one Michael S. Malone informed the world the other day that my blogging ought to receive a Pulitzer Prize for cultural criticism. Alas, it was all too plain to see that he was using me, Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington, Mickey Kaus, Markos Moulitsas, Glenn Reynolds, and Michael Yon (talk about mixed company!) as sticks with which to beat the Old Media. This had the inevitable effect of diluting his compliment: “On Tuesday, the Pulitzer Prizes will be announced. And if they are anything like last year, the journalism awards will go to the usual collection of dying newspapers…There will be the usual flurry of media, and then those newspapers will go back to dying.”

Needless to say, the Pulitzers in journalism are for newspapers, not blogs (or magazines or radio documentaries, for that matter). And if I ever win one, it will presumably be for my work as a newspaperman, which takes up most of my time and energy. I love blogging, but I get paid to write for The Wall Street Journal, and far more people read me there than on “About Last Night.” Yes, the newspaper business is in trouble–bad trouble–but it isn’t dead yet.

At the same time, though, I wouldn’t dream of denying that precious few newspapers (mine fortunately excepted) are doing their duty, or anything like it, to high culture in America and the world. Which is why it strikes me as faintly hypocritical that they should continue to devote one day out of the year to praising a playwright, a composer, and a half-dozen writers–and Bob Dylan, who needs a Pulitzer Prize a lot less than the Pulitzer Prizes need Bob Dylan.