About Last Night

Ever since the National Book Foundation announced that they would bestow their annual achievement award on Stephen King–and especially since Harold Bloom announced his ire about this–I’ve been plotting a response. Defenses of King have popped up in the meantime, for instance here and here. I couldn’t tell whether this was a defense or not (the author plays both sides of the fence). None of them quite captured what is for me the essence of the case against Bloom.

Tonight, however, I found the response that entirely discharges me of the need to write what I think, because it perfectly reflects what I think. Needless to say, it’s excellent! At his blog Easily Distracted, Timothy Burke notes the obvious but under-remarked fact that Harold Bloom has read little of King’s work, if any:

The most important point is that…qualitative judgements are hard to make, not easy. They’re the meat-and-potatoes business of literary criticism. They require a lot of laying of philosophical and intellectual foundations to make in general (which Bloom has done, though in ways I profoundly disagree with) but also a lot of labor in each and every specific case, which Bloom has not done.

And he proceeds to the gist of the matter:

The culture which matters most is not merely the culture that aesthetes praise as worthy, but the culture which indures, inspires, circulates, and is meaningful and memorable for many people, to the widest audiences. Sometimes that involves the adroit manipulation of archetypical themes and deep tropes of the popular culture of a particular time and place, and King does both of those things. I don’t know how he’ll be read a century from now, but I do know that in this time and place he not only tells a damn fine story (most of the time: even I would regard some of his work as hackwork) but manages to say some important things about consumerism, family, childhood, apocalyptic dread, obsession and many other resonant, powerful themes of his day and age.

This is a vastly greater level of articulation than I had approached in my thinking about this, which had gotten only about as far as invoking two nineteenth-century giants, Scott and Dickens. I once contemplated writing a dissertation about the careers of Sir Walter Scott and Henry James, which pretty quickly proved impracticable though the contemplating was great fun (a sad truism about dissertations). I remember musing that if such a comparative study were to extend into the twentieth century, the most logical place for it to lead would be, full-circle-wise, to King, a hugely popular and prolific storyteller like the Author of Waverley, with frequent recourse to the supernatural and a bead on, as Burke notes above, the “resonant, powerful themes of his day and age.”

Scott was not consistently good and certainly is not regarded today with anything like the respect accorded the likes of James or George Eliot. But he thought up, and vividly put down, the stories that most captured the collective nineteenth-century imagination (and not just in England, either). He may be just the figure to shed some literary-historical light on King’s achievement, whether you’re inclined to understand it as artistic, commercial, or something in between.

“Nothing is so poor and melancholy as an art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”

George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Apropos of my most recent posting on Zankel Hall and its critics, I got this e-mail last week from Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker. I couldn’t post it until now because of the black smoke coming out of the hard drive of my iBook:

A friendly riposte re: Zankel. Is it fair to judge the acoustics on the basis of the preview concert alone? I’d be especially wary of measuring the hall’s suitability for amplified music solely on the basis of the Kenny Barron Quintet’s brief performance. Yes, their full show that weekend was noisy and unfocused. But Omar Sosa was another matter–cool, crisp sound. Perhaps Mr. Barron simply didn’t have an adequate setup.

I’ve Zankled nine times so far, and my perceptions keep changing. The subway noise, which annoyed me last week, is bothering me less. The acoustics are still weird, but I’m discovering that the aisle seats in the orchestra, where the critics are clumped, are among the worst. Best are the middle
seats of the orchestra and the side seats in the balcony. The problem is that the stage lacks a good reflective shell behind it–“revenge of Merkin Hall,” I heard one composer say–so the sound seems to gel only in certain places. A couple of butt-ugly buffers on the side might help. However, to judge from comments overheard, casual listeners are totally unperturbed by
all these issues. They like the place. So do I.

As for the multi-culti programming, I think you’re overlooking the hall’s usefulness as a filter for those who are baffled by the sheer superfluity of choices out there. BAM has long functioned in the same way–as a taste agent that people have grown to trust. The opening weekend worked because we trusted John Adams, the man responsible for the programming, and he put on a briliant tour of the musical horizon. The reliance on Nonesuch in the opening season is another canny use of the filter function. The crucial question is whether Zankel can maintain this level of interest, or whether it will devolve toward classical Dullsville.

Looking back over my original postings, I don’t think I was quite so categorical in my comments on the acoustics as Alex implies, but beyond that I think he is talking a good deal of sense. I have no doubt that everybody’s perceptions of Zankel Hall will change over time and with further exposure–or, to put it another way, we’ll all get used to the place, and come to see at least some of its characteristic features not as unpleasant surprises but as…well, characteristic features. This is even true of a phenomenon so seemingly “objective” as acoustics, and it’ll be even truer as more artists perform with amplification, thereby creating a sonic track record for the managers to draw on.

For what it’s worth (though I can’t name names), I recently had a chat with a jazz musician slated to perform in the hall later this season who came away from Brad Mehldau’s concert feeling considerable anxiety about the acoustics–especially as they affect drummers. Time will tell, and it will also tell whether Zankel is able to establish itself as a center for consistently imaginative programming or will deteriorate into “classical Dullsville.” I like Alex’s point about halls serving as filters and trustworthy “taste agents” for the public–though of course that doesn’t happen very often.

In retrospect, I fear that I was writing too much as the jaded insider who’s Heard It All. It’s true that the people who book concert-hall performances in New York rarely surprise me anymore, but then it’s my business to know what’s going on. In any case, I’m obliged to Alex for reminding me of some things that seem to have slipped my mind in the usual rush to judgment. Blogging has a way of doing that to you, but it also makes it possible for you to think twice, and three and four times, in public. I hope I’ll have thought a lot more times than that about Zankel Hall before I’m finally done.

…and thanks for stopping by in Terry’s absence! You did remember that Terry would be absent and OGIC sitting in, didn’t you? Of course you did.

Since Terry was kind enough to introduce me yesterday, I’m not going to say too much up here. A newcomer to blogging, I’ve been discovering that it involves long stretches of not knowing what to write, punctuated by long stretches of not knowing when to shut up. This seems like as good an opportunity as any to rein it in.

But before I quiet down and move along, I do need to cover a few items. First, the unthinkable happened last night and Terry’s hard drive crashed! It’s getting the best possible attention while he’s in North Carolina, and the prognosis is guardedly optimistic. This may result in a few breaks in the About Last Night routine next week, but this blog will be open for business in some form. So please check in Monday for an update.

Second, I’m hoping to update the page throughout today, with fresh links and quick posts every little while, so do check back with me later.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I have so far, and I hope to hear from some of you. I think you can email me at ourgirlinchicago@artsjournal.com. But there’s only one way to find out for sure…

Terry (remember him?) asked me to let you know that he reviewed Omnium Gatherum and Bill Irwin’s The Harlequin Studies in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s the first paragraph:

As I watched “Omnium Gatherum,” the satirical play about 9/11 that opened last night at the Variety Arts Theatre, a fractured Bible verse ran through my head: It is impossible but that 9/11 plays will come; but woe to them, through whom they come! On the one hand, many American playwrights feel a near-irresistible itch to write about current events, and given the fact that the most significant event of the current century took place four miles south of the theater district, it stood to reason that plays about it would follow as the sparks flew upward. (Another one, “Recent Tragic Events,” opens Sunday.) On the other hand, few American playwrights have anything thoughtful to say about current events, so it also stands to reason that most such plays are bound to be pretty awful. “Omnium Gatherum” sure is….

No link, as usual, so go out and buy a copy of the Journal, why dontcha? It only costs a dollar!

So you’re walking along a city street, minding your own business, and you run smack into Robert Hass or Seamus Heaney. Quick, what do you do? Realistically, if you’re 99.9% of the population, including me, you look daggers at the guy and go away swearing under your breath.

If you’re me and if by some miracle you do recognize one of the best-read poets of our time, you probably–knowing me–help him up, dust him off, and scamper away red-faced.

Not so Sheri Donatti, the artist-girlfriend Anatole Broyard shared an apartment with as recounted in his lean, zippy Greenwich Village memoir Kafka Was the Rage. On West Fourth Street in 1946, Sheri crashed into W.H. Auden:

She fell backward, and as she did, she grabbed Auden around the neck and they went down together, with him on top…. She clung to Auden, who was sprawled in her arms. He tried desperately to rise, scrabbling with his hands and his espadrilles on the floor. He was babbling incoherently, apologizing and expostulating at the same time, while she smiled at me over his shoulder, like a woman dancing.

Besides making me laugh, this passage always strikes me in two sobering ways. First, it takes for granted the celebrity of poets. Second, it seems to presciently emblematize the way poetry readers find themselves, more and more, holding onto the form and its cultural currency for dear life.

Poets, of course, have some control over their own cultural currency. We can argue (and probably will, eventually) about whether Buffy the Vampire Slayer is art, but this poem by Stephen Burt (it’s the second of three on the page), inspired by BTVS, certainly is. You should read Burt’s fine Randall Jarrell biography, too.

I don’t have a history of enjoying literary readings. Maybe it’s the perfectly excusable deficiency of many writers as performers. Maybe it’s my slavery to the modern way of treating reading as a solitary, private activity (preferably conducted under a nice warm comforter, as far as I’m concerned) and a positive respite from other people, rather than a nineteenth-century, communal, gather-round-the-fireplace sort of affair.

Whatever it is, I just don’t have fun at these events. A semi-recent exception was a mesmerizing reading by Kathleen Finneran from her exquisite memoir The Tender Land two years ago–great not because she’s a master thespian but because her book is so astonishingly powerful and personal, and she was as much under its spell as any of us in the audience.

After that I didn’t want to press my luck–until this Wednesday, when I decided to attend a neighborhood reading by a certain torrid young writer whose first book was pretty great and who just published her first novel. Here I relearned my lesson.

Things started 20 minutes late. The mike did not work. We were in the back row and could hear just enough, before we reluctantly bolted, to divine that: 1) the professor who was introducing the author had bought her novel a few days earlier and read half of it; 2) he thought it was o.k. to admit this in front of the author and a few hundred people; and 3) he wasn’t going to cede the stage anytime soon. The last straw came when he started reading from the novel, which could tend to, you know, be redundant with the reading itself. It was the sort of thing that could put you off readings for life…

Despite this fresh catastrophe, I may yet turn up to hear Charles Baxter read from his new novel Saul and Patsy next week, and if you’re in my neck of the woods you should consider attending too. I met Baxter half a lifetime ago when he graciously came to speak to the staff of my high school’s literary magazine. Harmony of the World and Through the Safety Net provided some of the first contemporary short stories that I really loved. The lead story in Harmony of the World has a delicious first paragraph that should give all of Terry’s music-loving readers (are you still out there?) a good bracing shudder:

While Kate practiced the piano in the tiny third-floor apartment, Wiley cooked dinner, jogging in place in front of the stove. His feet made the pans clatter, and, after twenty minutes of exercise, he began to hyperventilate. He stopped, took his pulse, then continued, jogging to the spice rack, to the refrigerator’s butter shelf, then back to the stove. The air smelled of cumin, chicken stock, and tomatoes–something Mexican. The noise was terrible. He knocked over a spatula. A bottle of soda fell into the catfood dish. Worse yet, he hummed tunes from his high school prom days, melodies like “Call Me Mister Blue” and “Dream Lover,” in a nasal, plaintive whine. The noise diverted Kate’s attention and broke her Schubert sonatas into small pieces of musical trash.

I’m eager to return to Baxter after a long time away. He is part of the reason I still keep up with short story collections despite a growing preference for novels. I just wait for the paperbacks and hope for something as startling and transcendent as, say, Adam Johnson’s Emporium.