About Last Night

Dear OGIC:

I waded through a sea of very peculiar-looking people this evening (though I quite liked the brunette cat on 70th and Broadway, not to mention my black-clad companion for the evening, who claims to have been disguised as J-Lo) en route to
The Human Stain.

I’m full of strong opinions, but seeing as how you’ve read the book but not yet seen the film, I’m not sure how much I should disclose, given the fact that I’m now in the inverse condition. I’ll disgorge my thoughts at your command.

I just got back from Sotheby’s, where I failed to bring home the bacon—an exquisite 1931 etching by Giorgio Morandi on which I bid unsuccessfully this afternoon—but had an exhilarating, educational, and slightly scary time anyway.

Sotheby’s New York is near the eastern end of 72nd Street. As soon as I got there, I went straight to the seventh floor, where I registered and was given a numbered paddle, which you need in order to place bids. (No, you can’t accidentally buy a million-dollar painting by scratching your nose at the wrong moment, unless you’re dumb enough to scratch it with the paddle.) Much to my surprise, all I had to do was show a photo ID. I wasn’t asked to furnish proof of solvency. Had I wanted, I could have bankrupted myself several times over, and no one would have been the wiser until it came time to settle the tab.

Paddle in hand, I strolled into the salesroom, a cavernous chamber on two of whose walls hung large lithographs by the likes of Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Chuck Close (this was a print auction, not a big-bucks painting auction). Placed in front of the third wall was what looked like a telethon phone bank, which turned out to be more or less what it was: Sotheby’s employees sit there with phones to ears, passing along bids from bidders who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) show up in person.

The folding chairs filled up, and at two o’clock sharp, a gawky, cheerful-looking WASP in a suit stepped behind the podium, clipped on a lapel microphone, and called the crowd to order. On his right was a ponderous turntable which spun the “lots” into view, one item at a time. On his left was a large video screen on which the items and top bids were flashed, plus a few extra telephone operators and one woman who passed along the on-line bids (Internet bidding is fast becoming a big deal at the lower end of the auction business). The whole thing looked not unlike the set for a low-budget game show.

Once we got started, things moved quickly–really, really quickly. My idea of art auctions had come straight from the scene in North by Northwest in which Cary Grant slips through the fingers of James Mason and Martin Landau by misbehaving in a fancy Chicago auction house and getting himself carted away by the cops. It wasn’t like that at all. The auctioneer wasted not a single word describing any of the various prints on sale, much less engaging in small talk. All he did was announce each lot number and (occasionally) the artist, and for the most part he was the only person in the room who said anything at all. Nearly everybody bid in silence, raising their paddles, a finger, or a pen.

The bids came fast and furious, and once the top offer had been made, the auctioneer would say, “Fair warning and down it goes,” rap the podium once with his hammer, and move on. It generally took about 30 seconds to dispose of each item, be it a Kandinsky, Feininger, Braque, Matisse, or Miro (of which there were what seemed like at least two dozen for sale). The prices ranged from $1,500 to $30,000, and it was unnerving to watch the numbers soar. The person operating the tote board frequently had trouble keeping up with the bids.

At first I was shocked by the whizzing pace of the bidding, but the etching I wanted was Lot 342, which gave me plenty of time to get used to it, and within half an hour I was swept up in the discreet excitement that rippled through the room. Most of the bidders in the house appeared to be art dealers, but I spotted a few obvious-looking civilians who were clearly delighted to go head to head with the pros, 30 seconds’ worth of single combat at a time. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that when my time came to bid, I’d need to keep as cool as possible if I didn’t want to spend a lot more than I could afford. So I watched in silence, listened, and learned.

Two hours into the auction, Lot 342 finally spun into view. I raised my paddle to place the first bid, and within five seconds I knew the odds were against me. At Sotheby’s, the auctioneer places absentee bids on behalf of customers who have authorized him to bid up to a certain amount. Each time I bid, he raised me, at first in hundred-dollar increments, then five hundred at a time. We reached the high end of the pre-auction estimate, then rolled right over it. At that point, a dealer got into the act, and all at once I was bidding above my not-a-dollar-more point—not too far over it, but far enough for me to come to my senses, kick myself, and realize that I was teetering on the verge of doing something extremely stupid. I placed one last ill-advised bid, and the dealer topped it immediately. The auctioneer looked back at me. I shook my head, just like the Sotheby’s Web site says to do, and abjectly laid my paddle on the seat next to me. A couple of heartbeats later, the hammer came banging down, and “Vari oggetti su un tavolo” went home with somebody else.

As I left the salesroom, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. I knew it would have been incredibly easy for me to have spent more money than I could afford on that etching (which is, of course, precisely what auction houses count on). But I jammed on the brakes at the next-to-last second—and instead of slinking home with my paddle between my legs, I felt like the king of the cats. As Winston Churchill once said of combat, there is no sensation so exhilarating as being shot at without effect. I’m sure he’s right, but there’s also something to be said about nearly spending way the hell too much money in public.

The only bad part, of course, is that I came home empty-handed. I’d let myself get my hopes up, and those of you who’ve been following this blog from the outset will recall how much I love Morandi’s work. The thought of owning a piece of it, however small and imperfect (for this particular etching was in less than ideal shape) had filled me with anticipatory joy. On the other hand, I got my first taste of auction-house blood today—and it wasn’t my blood, either.

Will I be back? You better believe it.

Dear Terry:

The Gender Genie is quite insistent: I write like a man. No matter what I feed it. I believe this will surprise you.

As for your critical andogyny, I can only surmise that the theater brings out your feminine side while music cues the testosterone. Nineteenth-century detractors of the novel routinely labeled narrative literature as feminine (and thus decadent) while lauding lyric poetry as a properly manly form. Without endorsing such dusty dichotomies, I wonder whether the Gender Genie–if we even trust it as far as we can throw it–is picking up on some difference in the way you respond to and describe narrative and non-narrative art? This seems like a stretch, but it’s all I’ve got!

Of course, I was disappointed to find that the Genie’s methods are not, at a glance, much more sophisticated than counting words. A self-respecting genie should work in more mysterious ways.

I’ve been enjoying OGIC’s posts on Henry James. (I wonder if she remembers that we saw The Wings of the Dove together?) And while I have nothing much to add to what she has so beautifully said, I do want to mention another “theatrical” version of James whose Jamesianness seems to me altogether exemplary, Benjamin Britten’s opera of The Turn of the Screw. Like all good adaptations, it is fairly free in its approach to the original, and it is precisely because of that freedom that Britten and his librettist, Myfanwy Piper, were able to create a fully independent art object. You don’t go see The Turn of the Screw to be reminded of James’ story–you see it for its own sake. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the only way to successfully translate a classic from one medium to another. Otherwise, why bother?

I mentioned yesterday that I just saw the press preview of Wicked (about which more tomorrow), a new Broadway musical based on the novel of the same name
by Gregory Maguire. I brought with me a friend who is a huge Maguire fan, and who bristled visibly at every departure from the original. Not having read the novel, I wasn’t bothered by the differences, even after my friend told me how extensively the authors of the show had altered what Maguire wrote. But I knew how she felt. If you’re going to make a stage or screen adaptation of a familiar work of art, you really only have two viable alternatives: try to reproduce the original as closely as possible, or go your own way. Anything in between is doomed to failure.

I’ll be grappling with the same dilemma when Master and Commander, the new Patrick O’Brian film, is released in a few weeks. I know the O’Brian novels extremely well, and I have my own very strong ideas about what Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin sound and look like. If the film fails to match up with my preconceptions, I’ll be jolted. The good news is that I’ve seen the trailer, and Russell Crowe meshes quite nicely with the Aubrey of my imagination. Still, I’m sure I won’t be any easier to please than my friend was by Wicked.

A moment ago I asked: why bother adapting the classics? Of course we all know the real answer. Producers and directors adapt movies from well-known originals in order to piggyback on their success. The Harry Potter movies (which I didn’t much like) had a huge pre-sold audience going in. Which reminds me of what Edwin Denby, the greatest dance critic of the 20th century, wrote about Seventh Symphony, a ballet choreographed by Leonide Massine to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, one of several well-known classics that Massine staged, by most accounts unsuccessfully:

[Massine] can get away with murder. If one took him seriously, he would be guilty of murdering the Beethoven Seventh…There is of course no reason for taking Massine seriously; he doesn’t mean to be, he doesn’t mean to murder. Like a cigarette company, he is using famous names to advertise his wares. But I cannot help resenting it, because they are names of famous things I have loved. It is hardest to bear in the case of his Seventh, where the orchestra is constantly reminding me of the Beethoven original.

Does that perhaps sum up some of your distress with the Wings of the Dove film, dear OGIC?

I’ve been reading Virginia Postrel’s much-discussed The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, and finding it stimulating, though I’m struck by the failure of most reviewers to see how fundamentally political it is. Postrel, after all, is an ideologue. Specifically, she’s a libertarian, one who believes that individual liberty is an absolute value, a universal trump card that tops all other values. This conviction is indissolubly commingled with her belief, stated at the beginning of The Substance of Style, that “aesthetic value is subjective and can be discovered only through experience, not deduced in advance.” Me, I’m not a libertarian, and so am able to recognize that the first half of that sentence is untrue, even though I agree completely with the second half.

I’m also struck by the fact that Postrel, for all the delight she takes in the aesthetic appeal of our hyper-designed, choice-driven world, seems oddly, even weirdly indifferent to certain fundamental values of art. Consider the following passage from her book:

A new art market has developed: upscale wall d

I got a call yesterday from a fact checker at The New Yorker. He was working on a piece that made reference to H.L. Mencken, and very apologetically asked me if I could perhaps help him by answering two questions (one was simple, the other subtle). I told him that Mencken would have approved of his labors, which is true. Mencken did quite a bit of writing for The New Yorker in the Thirties and Forties, and referred admiringly to its fact-checking department as “Ross’ goons” (Harold Ross being, of course, the magazine’s founding editor and resident tutelary spirit).

That call filled me with nostalgia. As anyone knows who’s been in journalism for more than the past 20 minutes or so, fact checking is an increasingly lost art. Time was when many magazines–if not most–rigorously checked every factual assertion made in every story they published. When I was writing profiles for Mirabella nine years ago, the checkers even required me to give them my interview tapes. But by the time I got to Time, the rigor had loosened considerably. My Time stories about the arts were “self-checked,” a wonderfully Orwellian euphemism meaning that they weren’t checked at all–it was assumed that I knew what I was talking about (though occasionally a copy editor would query me about odd-looking names).

By then, of course, the whole system was unraveling, at Time and everywhere else. I remember the black day when Time actually closed its in-house library, a cost-cutting measure that filled the writers of the magazine with dread. They knew, in the words of “About Last Night”‘s favorite novelist, that we should never be again as we were. And we weren’t.

All this fond reminiscence will doubtless amuse, if not astound, those readers who grew up under the aspect of the World Wide Web. Nowadays, most of the journalists I know do much of their research on line, and their first stop is Google rather than the nearest library. What’s more, I think many of us tend to reflexively take for granted the accuracy of what we see on the Web–and in the blogosphere, that great echo chamber driven by hyperlinks, such an assumption can lead very quickly to inaccuracy, grief, and libel suits.

I am, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, decidedly pro-blogosphere, for all the reasons that all of us are constantly touting on our blogs. In particular, I love the combination of immediacy and freedom that comes with unedited self-publishing, and I’m also fairly comfortable with it, in part because I’ve been a newspaper and magazine editor and so have learned over the years how to clean up my own copy. It also helps that the Gene Fairy made me a near-perfect speller (though I am chronically deaf to the more nuanced differences between “which” and “that,” a problem about which I make an unnecessary point of warning all editors unlucky enough to have to work on my stuff).

Even so, I’m well aware, at times painfully so, that I’m working without a net. Not always–sometimes I write and publish an item too quickly to think about it–but at some point in the process I generally remind myself that there’s nobody to backstop me but you, the readers, and that you aren’t necessarily rooting for me. If you’ve followed the Gregg Easterbrook imbroglio, you know that in the highly politicized and present-oriented world of blogging, one bad mistake can cause the sharks to circle within hours.

All of which went through my mind after I hung up on that nice fellow from The New Yorker, a magazine that (which?) still believes in taking institutional responsibility for the facts it publishes. I know, I know, things ain’t what they used to be, and I, too, have found misspelled proper names in its pages of late. I also know that fact-checking is no kind of panacea. As every writer knows, a large pile of scrupulously checked facts can add up to one great big honking lie. And all things being equal, I’d rather bear the responsibility for what I write than cede it to an editor who may or may not be capable of shouldering it.

Nevertheless, I miss old-fashioned editing, just as I miss the common culture that has been largely replaced by the libertarian regime of choice, even though I’m well aware of the defects of the systems with which I grew up. There are no absolute earthly goods, and every virtue has its reciprocal defect. Or, to put it in American, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Me, I choose freedom, and quite happily, too–if not always comfortably.

I finally (no laughter, please) got a cable modem today, and now I know what a good-sized chunk of the rest of the world knows, which is that using the Web feels different when you’re always connected. Heretofore, I thought in terms of “going on the Web” as something you had to do. Now, I don’t go on the Web, I am on the Web. It’s a permanent state of being. The conceptual difference is enormous, and I have no doubt that it will impact greatly on my blogging.

Just thought you’d enjoy listening to me playing catch-up. Which new technology shall I discover next? Answering machines? Typewriters? The printing press? In a way, the really surprising thing is that I managed to start a blog in the first place, thanks solely and only to the adorable Megan McArdle of Asymmetrical Information (who egged me on) and the amazing Doug McLennan of artsjournal.com (who built the damn thing for me). Blame them.

The only thing for which I take credit is the discovery of Our Girl in Chicago. At a cocktail party last night, a distinguished ex-editor sidled up to me and asked, “O.K., how’s the finger? And who is this Our Girl? Where did you find her?” Why, under a cabbage leaf, of course….

A few readers who, unlike some of us, are paying attention have emailed to point out that my First Lines quiz from this morning is easily solved with the help of Google. Duh. I guess I didn’t think of this because I had so much fun with the real McCoy that it never occurred to me to cheat.

What makes me feel even sillier is that the Big Story in books this last week has been Amazon’s new Search Inside the Book feature (which, by the way, is the subject of several interesting stories and letters at Moby Lives today). Double duh. Verrrry swift, OGIC.

Well, if you still want to write in with your answers, just consider yourself under the honor system. And stay tuned for the perfectly anti-climactic unveiling of the sources on Monday!