About Last Night

Now that I have a bit of a breather, a few more words on the Poynter piece I linked to in haste this morning. To be truthful, while I didn’t like the news that the NYTBR will be moving away from fiction, I couldn’t muster a lot of outrage about it either. For a while now, I’ve found myself more interested in noting which books they assign than in reading the reviews themselves. The reviews are sometimes as dull as reputed (with notable exceptions, of course). In addition to all the usual suspects listed to the right, I’ve been gravitating toward the Washington Post and Atlantic Monthly for reviews that I actually read. (Check out Michael Dirda’s fun, hyper take on the new Elmore Leonard this week.)

So it’s not as though my reading habits are going to take a big hit even if the NYTBR banishes fiction reviews from their pages altogether. Yet the blinkered reasoning proffered by Bill Keller rankles. First there’s his general blithe condescension toward novels, apparently based on an assumption that while nonfiction is serious, fiction is just playing around. Even if Bill Keller really thinks this, it astonishes me that he’d say it, let alone that the Times would base editorial policy on it. Keller may not get it, but a man in his position should be smart enough to at least suspect that his disinterest in a particular form for expressing ideas is a personal blind spot.

Here are the statements that really give Keller away: “The most compelling ideas tend to be in the non-fiction world,” and “Because we are a newspaper, we should be more skewed toward non-fiction.” If Keller wants to make the Book Review simply an arm of the newsroom, then I suppose that’s his perogative. But he doesn’t say that. He speaks on two assumptions that are far from universally accepted: 1) that fiction is never a serious representation of the world, and 2) that only “hard” news is news. If all news is hard news, though, why maintain the separate sphere of a book review at all? Or an arts section? If the NYT‘s television ads are any indication, the paper’s “soft” content is integral to attracting its national readership.

It’s ironic that these statements would emerge from the paper of record only a few days after Terry made this observation:

I was watching an old episode of What’s My Line?, my all-time favorite game show, earlier this evening….This particular program must have originally aired in 1961 or 1962, because in introducing panelist Bennett Cerf, the president of Random House, Arlene Francis mentioned in passing that two of Cerf’s authors, William Faulkner and John O’Hara, had gotten good reviews in that morning’s papers.

On Tuesday it seemed quaint that a television talk show would acknowledge newspaper reviews of novels. By Friday it starts to seem quaint that newspapers would review them. You are excused for feeling a little bit dizzy.

When Keller assures readers that the Times will still cover major novelists like Updike and Roth, he leaves open the question of who will determine who is major. Of course this will happen elsewhere, and there’s a case to be made that it’s not happening at the Times now, but for a Times editor to wholly beg off of the mission of even participating in the public discussion that will adjudicate who is considered tomorrow’s major talents–well, that’s breathtaking.

A couple of weeks ago I discussed a mission statement of sorts that appears in the Atlantic‘s back of the book this month. This is part of that statement:

Although in some ways constraining, discrimination also liberates us. We assume that our readers look to this section as a critical organ rather than a news source–which means that unlike, say, The New York Times Book Review, we don’t have to cover the waterfront.

Suddenly everyone in the print media seems to be running headlong from what you might think would be the enviable task of shaping cultural taste. Lit bloggers, carry on.

UPDATE: Nathalie at Cup of Chicha is excellent on this story:

Good thinking. Also: stop covering narrative films. Only review documentaries. And dance or theatre? Why discuss performances when you could devote more space to politics?

I just finished writing my second book review of the day. Time for a nap, or maybe two naps.

See you tomorrow, unless something staggering happens tonight at the New York State Theatre. You’re in good hands with Our Girl.

I just finished writing my first book review of the day, and decided to take a few minutes off and pay you a visit, if only to make note of this posting from Return of the Reluctant, who’s covering a film noir festival in San Francisco:

I am now madly in love with Liz Scott.
Whatever her thespic limitations, whatever the silly motivations of her character, I don’t care. Liz Scott now haunts my dreams and distracts me from my writing. All Liz Scott need do is turn her head and I will happily swoon. If God does not exist, it would be necessary to invent Liz Scott. Liz Scott is still alive. I will happily give blood for her. I will take a bullet for her. It is time for a cold shower. Film noir is dangerous.

I’m with you, buddy. For those who’ve never seen a Lizabeth Scott movie, take a look at Pitfall
and you’ll see what we mean. Was there anyone who summed up the film-noir nightmare vision of women-as-predators more completely and alluringly? I mean, I really like women–nearly all my friends are women–but if Liz Scott ever crooked a finger my way, I’d be one dead blogger before the sun came up. (Not that she ever would have, thank God–she worked the other side of the street.)

Don’t ask me what that says about my subconscious. I could tell you, but then I’d have to rat you out.

Bookslut links to this fine piece by the novelist Claire Messud, but seemingly misreads it. Messud returned to Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady twenty years after first reading it. Less prone to idealization than her younger self, she recognizes complexities (“ragged truths”) in the characters that she missed the first time around, finds some of her sympathies relocated, and deems the novel even greater than she thought:

[Isabel] reveals her essential self, and it is less clear-sighted, less natural, less shining a vision than she, or the youthful reader I was, would have wished. But she is all the more human for her failings, just as The Portrait of a Lady is all the more magnificent for its novelistic imperfections. What is true is beautiful, more surely than the inverse; and therein lay my joy in rereading this masterpiece.

The nice thing about this essay is how, aside from offering a clear-eyed appreciation of the novel, it tracks Messud’s changing values as a reader. And though she’s glad to have moved on to this fuller appreciation, she’s not at all dismissive of the easier novel she used to love.

I was channel-surfing the other day and stumbled across Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam, which opens with the last scene from Casablanca. The camera pulls back to reveal Allen watching the film in a small art house–the kind of theater of which Manhattan once had many, but now has only a few.

As I watched, I thought, I wonder how many people under the age of 45 saw Casablanca for the first time in a theater? I’m 47, and I first saw it in a Kansas City revival house a quarter-century ago, just prior to the introduction of home video recorders. Back then, seeing Casablanca anywhere was still a big deal: it didn’t get shown all that often on local TV stations, and there weren’t yet any cable networks devoted exclusively to old movies. Come to think of it, there weren’t any cable networks, period.

All of which led me to ask myself yet another unnerving question: how many people under the age of 45 have seen Casablanca at all?

When I was in college, Casablanca was one of the few pre-1960 movies of which everyone I knew was at least aware, whether they’d actually seen it or not. Old movies had yet to be made ubiquitous by the invention of the videocassette, making it a lot harder for any film to attain “iconic” status. I worshipped Bogart–everybody did–but I hadn’t seen many of his films, and while I still like Casablanca very much, it’s no longer the one I’d choose in order to introduce him to a young filmgoer. (Nowadays, I’d opt for In a Lonely Place or To Have and Have Not.) Nor would I be entirely surprised to learn that it no longer holds a privileged place in the hearts of Gen-X film buffs up to their ears in DVDs.

Still, I’d hate to think that my younger friends wouldn’t smile in recognition were I to drop a line from Casablanca into a casual conversation. No, it’s not a great film, not by a long shot, but it’s one of the most purely entertaining movies ever made, and its heart is in the right place. I know, I know, times change and tastes with them, but I’d like to think all my friends had seen Casablanca at least once. It’s the romantic in me.

DOC HOLLIDAY: What do you want, Wyatt?

WYATT EARP: Just to live a normal life.

DOC: There is no normal life, there’s just life.

Kevin Jarre, screenplay for Tombstone

Courtesy of a kind and generous reader, I’ve been alerted to the existence of Comet Video, a firm in North Carolina that sells good-quality VHS copies of hard-to-find B westerns–including, to my amazement, all of the Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott
films. In lieu of reprinting my essay in the forthcoming Terry Teachout Reader, here’s what David Thomson said about them in his indispensable New Biographical Dictionary of Film:

They have a consistent and bleak preoccupation with life and death, sun and shade, and encompass treachery, cruelty, courage, and bluff with barely a trace of sentimentality or portentousness. The series added the austere image of a veteran Randolph Scott to the essential iconography of the Western and provbed that Boetticher was a masterly observer of primitive man. His style remained without any flourish or easy touch and the series brought him some critical attention. Two films at least–The Tall T and Ride Lonesome–must be in contention for the most impressive and least handicapped B films ever made….Throughout this series, one feels that Scott’s middle-aged Westerner is as unsentimental and self-sufficient as the cinema has achieved. The man’s integrity never looks less than hard-earned and desperately sustained.

I agree with every word.

The print of Seven Men From Now released by Comet Video is faded and blurry, but it’s still a must. Lee Marvin is the villain, and he never played a more flamboyantly vicious one, not even in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat or John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Tall T, Ride Lonesome, Comanche Station, Decision at Sundown, and Buchanan Rides Alone, on the other hand, are all clean and clear–my guess is that they derive from digital cable telecasts.

Until the Criterion Collection gets around to releasing the Boetticher-Scott Westerns on DVD, these white-label videocassettes will do just fine. If you want to sample before springing for the whole series, start with Ride Lonesome. It’s the best, if only by a nose. The Tall T is almost as good, though, and features a wonderfully complex performance by Richard Boone as a not-quite-redeemable villain who has grown to loathe his thuggish companions.

To order, go here.

I had lunch with Maud today. We dined at Le Cirque, and over our second bottle of wine, we shook our heads in dismay at the blackout Mr. TMFTML claimed to have had after our last Cool Bloggers’ Orgy, held at the 15-room pied-a-terre of Old Hag. He says he Can’t Remember a Thing, but I have my doubts….

Actually, I really did have lunch with Maud today. We met for sandwiches at the Grange Hall. She drank coffee, I iced tea, and I regret to admit that we never got around to discussing our total coolness, nor did we make cruel fun of the proles seated at the inferior tables, gaping and pointing at the Harmonic Convergence of the Titans of the Blogosphere taking place before their astonished eyes. The embarrassing truth is that we talked, among other things, about how friendly and generous-spirited our fellow arts bloggers are. (Well, maybe not Mr. TMFTML, but somebody has to be the heavy, right?) As it happens, Maud is one of the nicest people I know–and not even slightly dull, either. She even used That Word in one of today’s postings!

Sorry, Jennifer. We’ll try to be snarkier next time.