About Last Night

“It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape.”

I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

I’m always struck by the small things that distinguish my home town in southeast Missouri from my adopted home, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I’d never really noticed until today, for instance, but the only houses that are architecturally “modern” in any recognizable sense are a half-dozen Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs built in the late Fifties. Similarly, you rarely see reproductions of modern art on anybody’s walls. It’s as though time had stopped in 1900. None of the video stores carries more than a handful of “older” films (i.e., made prior to 1975). I was astonished to find Citizen Kane and Casablanca at the neighborhood video store this afternoon. And while our local cable service offers Turner Classic Movies as part of its regular package, TCM isn’t included in the program guide published each day in the local newspaper. To find out what’s showing, you’ve got to buy TV Guide or go on line.

I went Christmas shopping this morning, driving 30 miles to the nearby college town where most of my former neighbors do their “serious” shopping. It has a medium-sized mall and two movie theaters that show about 10 first-run features on any given day–nothing out of the ordinary, though I did see You Can Count on Me at the older theater a couple of years ago. From my point of view, the most important store in the mall is a Barnes & Noble, the only good-sized bookstore in the immediate vicinity. (The sole bookstore in my home town is a small shop that deals in used paperbacks.) I noticed that none of this year’s National Book Award nonfiction nominees was in stock, not even Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana, the winner. On the other hand, I did find five copies of the trade paperback edition of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, a pleasant surprise.

After I finished shopping, I treated myself to a frappuccino in the Starbucks café attached to the bookstore, and took a closer look at the mural on the wall above the serving counter. It portrays an oddly eclectic, vaguely PC assortment of authors seated in an imaginary coffeehouse: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Franz Kafka, Pablo Neruda, Rabindranath Tagore, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Raymond Chandler, D.H. Lawrence, Carl Sandburg, Edith Wharton, and somebody named Hughes (presumably Richard, the author of A High Wind in Jamaica, though I don’t know what he looked like and so can’t say for sure). I didn’t check, but I doubt if many of them were represented on the shelves of the store.

I’m not being sarcastic or dismissive, by the way. Growing up in a small town gives you a different perspective on chain bookstores, just as it causes you to see the Wal-Mart phenomenon from the point of view of the people for whom such stores are an unimaginable boon. (The first Wal-Mart outside Arkansas was built in my home town.) The Barnes & Noble where I shopped today isn’t remotely close in quality to any big-city bookstore, independent or otherwise, but it’s still a vast improvement on nothing. When I was a boy, people in southeast Missouri went to the library or did without. Now they can drive 30 miles to the Barnes & Noble, or order from amazon.com. Times are changing, slowly but surely—but slowly.

“In spite of his quaint Tory prejudices Dr. Johnson is one of the few persons in recent times that one may term wise without serious qualification because he never dodges or equivocates in dealing with the problem of evil; he never fades away from the fact of evil into some theosophic or sentimental dream.”

Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

…coming to you live from the dial-up connection of an iBook perched precariously on a 60-year-old card table located in the guest bedroom of my mother’s house deep in southeast Missouri, far beyond the reach of any high-culture events not being carried on commercial TV.

Translation: I’m home for Christmas, after a thrilling early-morning battle with a very orange LaGuardia Airport, where lines are long and tempers were already pretty damn short as of six this morning. I shudder to think what it’s like by now, which is one reason why it’s nice to be in a small town this afternoon. Here’s another: it’s quiet, and there’s no one on the streets. The trees are bare, the sky slate-gray. The nearest mall is 30 miles away. I really do love New York, but it’s good to get away (especially after just having seen three plays in three days), and I’m definitely away, and glad to be (except that I’m having a hell of a time getting used to dial-up again).

I should add, however, that I got two hours of sleep last night, and I have a piece to write tonight, so I may not start nibbling at the mail until tomorrow. Nevertheless, my antenna is up, and insofar as this slooooow modem allows me to surf the Web, I’m reconnected to the blogosphere. Like the song says, you’re gonna hear from me…later.

In the meantime, hello to Maud, Mr. TMFTML, Old Hag, Cup of Chicha, 2 Blowhards, Sarah Weinman, Cinetrix at Pullquote, Bookslut, Modern Art Notes, Felix Salmon, and all the other cool big-city bloggers whose thoughts you can access by ooching over to the right-hand column and sifting through the blogroll. They’ll take up the slack while I readjust to small-town life. And a big old wet kiss to Our Girl in Chicago, who is safely installed among her family in an undisclosed secure location, from which she has promised to post something or other, sooner or later.

Now for a nap.

“A certain amount of brick-throwing might even be a good thing. There comes a moment in the career of most artists, if they are any good, when attacks on their work take a form almost more acceptable than praise.”

Anthony Powell, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant

Judging by the Site Meter, most of you have more important things to do this weekend than read blogs. For those diehards who can’t get enough, this is to inform you that I’m out of here very early tomorrow morning, and pretty much every minute between now and then is spoken for. I went to plays on Friday and Saturday, and I’ve got another one to see today. I’m writing my best-of-2003 “Second City” column for the Washington Post and an unrelated magazine piece. Oh, yes, I mustn’t forget to pack.

All of which is to say that I don’t think you’ll be hearing from me again until I’m safely ensconced in Missouri some time Monday evening. Once I’m there, I’ll send up a flare, and I plan to spend the week posting and responding to those items from the “About Last Night” mailbox that I’ve set aside for precisely that purpose. I don’t know what OGIC is planning, but I’m sure it’ll be as good, if not better.

See you later.

“One of the things I learned very early is that students always recognize a good teacher. They may be overimpressed by second-raters who only talk a good game, who are witty and entertaining, or who have reputations as scholars, without being particularly good teachers. But I have not come across a single first-rate teacher who was not recognized as such by the students. The first-rate teacher is often not ‘popular’; in fact, popularity has little to do with impact as a teacher. But when students say about a teacher, ‘We are learning a great deal,’ they can be trusted. They know.”

Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander

I wonder how many classical music lovers under the age of 40 know who Walter Legge was. Not many, I suspect. Older record collectors, of course, know exactly who Legge was: from the end of World War II to 1964, he was one of the half-dozen most powerful people in the classical music business. He founded and ran London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, which in the days of Herbert von Karajan and Otto Klemperer was the best orchestra in Great Britain; he was the husband of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, whose career as an opera singer and recitalist he supervised painstakingly and obsessively. Most important of all, he was EMI’s chief classical producer, the man to whom we owe, among countless other irreplaceable treasures, such complete opera sets as the Callas-Gobbi-de Sabata Tosca,
the Schwarzkopf-Karajan Rosenkavalier,
and the Flagstad-Furtw