Archives for September 2003

Back when I was a wee thing, one or two light years ago, an extremely smart smartass who edited the “Goings On About Town” section of The New Yorker got tired of writing new capsule summaries of The Fantasticks, which by that time had been running off Broadway since shortly before the birth of Christ. Much the same problem had manifested itself years before: Robert Benchley, who used to be The New Yorker‘s drama critic, got equally tired of writing capsule summaries of Abie’s Irish Rose, the Fantasticks of the Thirties, and started coming up with cute one-liners like “No worse than a bad cold.” Forty years later, Mr. Anonymous Smartass approached the problem differently. In place of summaries, he serialized Ulysses…one sentence at a time.

I seem to be the only person alive who remembers reading those snippets from Ulysses in “Goings On About Town” (I couldn’t find any reference to them on the Web), so I decided it would be fun to do the same thing in “About Last Night” and see who noticed. Hence “Today’s Installment,” in which I have been serializing a well-known short story one sentence at a time. One reader, Marla S. Carew, noticed and nailed it on the second installment. Another checked in with the right answer an hour or two after Ms. Carew, while a third correspondent guessed the author–but not the story.

Care to give it a go?

4.

He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal.

Here’s what I listened to on my iBook while writing yesterday’s blog:

(1) Polly Podewell, “After You, Who?”

(2) Larry Goldings Trio, “Asimov” (the hippest organ trio in jazz)

(3) Fred Hersch Trio, “At the Close of the Day” (an exquisite study in pastel harmony–the title is from a poem by Walt Whitman)

(4) Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band, “Lady Chatterley’s Mother” (composed by Al Cohn, with an amazing shout chorus at the end)

(5) Stan Kenton, “Young Blood” (composed by Gerry Mulligan, ditto–and dig that Lee Konitz alto solo!)

(6) Mabel Mercer, “The World Today” (in memory of William Roy, the composer, who died a few weeks ago)

(7) Liz Phair, “X-Ray Man”

(8) Jimmy Webb, “Wichita Lineman” (the best record ever made of this perfect little song)

(9) Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, “Where’s the Money?”

(10) Peter Warlock, “Sleep” (sung by John Mark Ainsley).

And so to bed….

THE JOKER: I’m the world’s first homicidal artist. I make art until someone dies.

Sam Hamm and Warren Skaasen, Batman

My Site Meter tells me that “About Last Night” was read around the world yesterday, in time zones ranging from here to–I think–Iraq. Quite a few Asian and European readers, somewhat to my surprise (at one point during the day I seemed to have more readers in Central Europe than in the Mountain Standard Time zone of the good old U.S.A.). The kudzu is spreading!

I’m no less pleased, as well as a bit stunned, to announce that my mailbag is now empty. (I cleared out 500-plus e-mails in the last 48 hours.) I also switched off my autoreplier, a token of my determination to answer my mail promptly from now on, or at least while I’m in New York, which I won’t be this weekend, so don’t get your hopes up.

I found plenty of interesting things in my mailbox, including an e-mail from the long-lost woman who played Flora to my Miles in our small-town high-school production of The Innocents (talk about way weird), a note from someone who thinks I’m a redbaiter for having pointed out that Dalton Trumbo was (gadzooks) a Communist, and a large number of e-mails weighing in on the subject of which work of art Yale University Press should put on the cover of A Terry Teachout Reader. Most of you preferred Fairfield Porter’s lithograph Broadway. I reported your choice to my editor at Yale, who wrote back as follows:

That’s good news indeed because that’s the image that both I & the designer strongly prefer. It’s elegant, classy, & a bit nostalgic without the treacle.

How about that? Your vote did count, sort of.

In other news, Maud Newton
picked up on my hints about Friday’s guest blogger. No announcement yet–you’ll have to wait while the suspense continues to build.

Now on to today’s topics, from natty to dishevelled: (1) A genuinely fresh contribution (no fooling!) to the Frank Lloyd Wright debate. (2) Four poker faces. (3) Why we blog. (4) Who now reads Pope? Nobody. (5) Today’s installment. (6) The latest almanac entry.

I e-mailed my entire mailing list for the first time in several weeks, reminding everyone to come visit www.terryteachout.com, and what do you know? The numbers soared. Why can’t you do that, too?

A reader writes:

Regarding living in a work of art, the idea of living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house is indeed attractive, but as one who was recently privileged (and despite my remarks, it was a privilege) to spend a week in one, I have to tell you it was in many ways damnably uncomfortable. It would be nice to put it in a frame and gaze at it in wonder–in fact, standing in the living room and feeling the room around you is one of the great pleasures of the visit, but oh, my back! He may have been a egoist, but he was clearly also a sadist–bolt-upright chairs with short seats, low to the ground with inadequate padding and leg support, insufficient light in the kitchen and insufficient legroom everywhere. My favorite was the leather-covered chaise–whenever I sat on it, the slippery surface of the cushions began a two-way slide, both away from the chair and away from me. Eventually I ended up on the floor. It is the most comfortable chair in the house.

Plus, all the showers were designed for someone about five feet tall.

On the other hand, the place is exquisite, breathes out calm, and seems to swallow large groups of people so that you are never in each other’s way. It is not an untouchable kind of art: There is always a corner in the sun, always a place to gather and a place to find solitude, and a stone fireplace big enough for most people to stand in that seems to grow right out of the mountains and provide an anchor that family can build ties around.

Interestingly, the family built an addition, approved by the Wright foundation, that resembles the main house architecturally, but with some things “corrected”–deeper seats, more comfortable proportions, better padding. It’s very nice and far more comfortable to live in, but it is indefinably different: a cabin, not a cathedral, and with only a fraction of the peace and presence of the main structure. Mr. Wright definitely knew what he was doing, even if he did say so himself.

After I’d been there for a week, I generally felt that, genius or no genius, he was a malicious man with a detestation of the tall. A week at home on my comfortable chairs, and all I can remember is the feeling of standing in the main room, of being given something important by virtue of being in that space.

I must go and buy my hosts a thank-you gift.

Well, I can’t thank my correspondent (who requested anonymity) enough. The ongoing blogosphere debate over Wright has had a certain abstract quality, precisely because none of us has ever lived in a Wright house–which is, after all, the heart of the matter. Right?

If you’ve already read and enjoyed James McManus’
Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker, published earlier this year, pardon me for wasting your time. If not, do. I’ve never played a hand of poker in my life, but I love reading about high-stakes gambling, and this book, in which a teacher who gambles on the side tells how he went to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker for Harper’s Magazine and ended up as one of the finalists, is one of the best books ever written on the subject.

Not the best, you understand. Positively Fifth Street isn’t as lucidly elegant as A. Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town, as desperate as Jesse May’s Shut Up and Deal, or as disturbing as Jack Richardson’s Memoir of a Gambler. McManus’ prose can be ostentatiously eggheady, enough so that I wish the manuscript had been extensively bluepenciled prior to publication. Nevertheless, Positively Fifth Street is still hugely entertaining, especially for those of us railbirds who’ve never gotten any closer to a high-stakes game than renting The Cincinnati Kid, and I recommend it highly.

It happens that I was rereading McManus’ book yesterday, and ran across a passage I hadn’t noticed the first time I read it. He comes by his eggheadiness honestly–he teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago–but I was still surprised by this passing observation. Noting that the World Series contestants are diverse by any possible standard, he adds:

Because the evidence before my eyes says the World Series of Poker has evolved from its good-old-boy roots into a stronghold of, yes, functional multiculturalism, proving if nothing else that there is such a thing. Most of the academic versions, of course, have long since degenerated into monocultural zealotry, diverse as to race or gender but in almost no other respects. The term has even taken a pejorative cast of late, correctly associated with tenured politicians swimming in schools of resentment, apparently aiming to prove that ideology is indeed a form of brain damage.

As my younger friends say, woah! Erin O’Connor herself couldn’t have put it much better.

2 Blowhards reflects on why that art-oriented site contains so little criticism or reviewing (in the traditional senses of those words):

I don’t know about you, but I find the flexibility and immediacy of blogging a godsend. The publishing process, so to speak, is a snap. The ease (and lack of editing, god knows) allows for whimsy, freewheelingness, carrying-on, ranting and mischief-making, as well as earnestness and sophistication–blogging software is a great tool for an arts-gab hobbyist. It’s open-ended and flexible; it’ll do pretty much what you want it to do.

A big part of my life, like yours, consists of strolling through the cultural sphere; also I happen to enjoy musing out loud while I do so. That’s a lot of what life in the arts-and-culture-and-media world is for me–noticing connections, picking up signals, rhapsodizing, wondering about this ‘n’ that, giggling, mocking, as well as (occasionally) ranting, or driving home some point or other. I’ve got no proof for this, but I suspect that this is a decent description of what a life in the arts-culture-media worlds is like for many people, at least on a good day. Plus getting to compare notes–what could be better? So I’ve chosen to make my blogging an extension of what the arts life already is for me.

My sentiments exactly.

Meanwhile, God of the Machine explains why nobody reads Alexander Pope anymore:

The best poetry is rarely the most quotable; it derives much of its meaning from its context. Pope is highly quotable because he had a superb verbal gift; but the context is foolish. He is like an exceptionally brilliant student who has mastered his exercises and regurgitates them expertly. His poetry is unsatisfactory because the dominant ideas of his time are unsatisfactory. He might have written great poetry had he been born a hundred years earlier or two hundred later. Instead he was bequeathed a cheap and facile philosophy, lacked the intelligence to think his way out of it, and became a poet of brilliant fragments, no more. His vices are those of his age; his virtues are his own.

In the words of the master himself, “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”

Finally, I’m pleased to note the following weekend movie stats, courtesy of DVD Journal:

While Focus Films’ Lost in Translation clawed its way into tenth place with $2.8 million, the Sofia Coppola picture starring Bill Murray banked it with less than 200 screens. Unfortunately for Woody Allen, his latest project, Anything Else, starring Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci, took just $1.7 million and did not chart….Lost in Translation has earned near-universal praise and will expand to more screens this weekend.

So go. As a friend of our upcoming Mystery Guest Blogger remarked the other day, “I liked every second of that movie.” Me, too.