Archives for 2003

“I found that to really make money, you had to give up music. So I gave up money.”

Mel Lewis, quoted in Burt Korall, Drummin’ Men: The Bebop Years

Join with me in a little celebration, dear readers. The page proofs of A Terry Teachout Reader, the anthology of my selected essays due out next spring from Yale University Press, arrived in the mail yesterday. Yippee!

For those of you who aren’t in the lit biz, “proofs” are freshly typeset pages of a book, magazine article, or newspaper piece that the author proofreads and corrects prior to publication. Usually, that’s the first time when you get to see more than a few sample pages set up in type, and even if it isn’t your first book, it’s still thrilling.

I think I’ve been reasonably good about keeping H. L. Mencken out of your hair, but I do want to share an anecdote from The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken with you. Mencken was 25 years old when his first full-length book, George Bernard Shaw: His Plays, was published in 1905. He was still an up-and-coming young editor at the Baltimore Herald, so he brought the proofs to the office that day to show to Lynn Meekins, his boss. There followed a scene (lovingly described in Newspaper Days, the second volume of Mencken’s memoirs)
sure to warm the heart of anyone who has ever published a book:

I was so enchanted that I could not resist taking the proofs to the office and showing them to Meekins–on the pretense, as I recall, of consulting him about a doubtful passage. He seemed almost as happy about it as I was. “If you live to be two hundred years old,” he said, “you will never forget this day. It is one of the great days of your life, and maybe the greatest. You will write other books, but none of them will ever give you half the thrill of this one. Go to your office, lock the door, and sit down to read your proofs. Nothing going on in the office can be as important. Take the whole day off, and enjoy yourself.” I naturally protested, saying that this or that had to be looked to. “Nonsense!” replied Meekins. “Let all those things take care of themselves. I order you to do nothing whatsoever until you have finished with the proofs. If anything pops up I’ll have it sent to me.” So I locked myself in as he commanded, and had a shining day indeed, and I can still remember its unparalleled glow after all these years.

Me, I’m still feeling a little bit glowy today.

Needless to say, life goes on, proofs or no proofs, and I spent the greater part of yesterday nailed to my desk chair, writing my “Second City” column for this Sunday’s Washington Post, after which I scurried down to the Algonquin Hotel to hear Stacey Kent’s Oak Room opening, so you’ll have to be content with a minimalist blog. Today’s topics, from loquacious to concise: (1) The best of all possible Westerns. (2) The snarkiest blog on earth, hands down. (3) The latest almanac entry.

I’ll try to do better tomorrow.

Hosanna in the highest: The Minor Fall, the Major Lift is back from vacation and making mischief. If you don’t know why that’s good news, click on the link at once. This anonymous New York-based blogger, who may well be the snarkiest person on the eastern seaboard, says things I’d say if only (A) I were clever enough to think of them and (B) I had the nerve to post them.

A warning for prigs: The Minor Fall, the Major Lift is not for the pure of soul or clean of mouth. But it sure is funny.

“Most of the things you read in a newspaper you naturally don’t know anything about, except what they tell you. Did you ever happen to read a newspaper account of something you did know something about? It’s always more or less wrong, usually more. I’m told it’s because most stories are rewritten when they get to the office by somebody else, not the man who covered the story. They have to make them fit between the advertising. I don’t think it’s done on purpose. I don’t think they’d mind if they had it right. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

This is the week I answer my post-vacation mail–I promise. Really. Last week I had to write and write and write, but this week I only have to write and write, so be patient and watch your mailbox for further details. In the meantime, welcome back to “About Last Night,” the 24/5 arts blog. I took yesterday off and planned not to write a lot today, but as usual the bit got caught between my teeth, so here are today’s topics, from peculiar to commonplace: (1) Will the real Harvey Pekar please fess up? (2) Another round of “In the Bag,” with a tip of the hat to my fellow baggers. (3) A date which will not live in infamy. (4) The latest almanac entry.

For those of you who were gone last week (and I know some of you were, lucky stiffs), much of what appeared on “About Last Night” during your absence is still visible–just keep scrolling down. If you’ve been gone longer than that, jump over to the top of the right-hand column and click on the archives link and you can browse and sluice at your leisure.

More tomorrow, as always, but in the meantime, let’s get that site meter bouncing, O.K.? Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com, one at a time or en masse–the choice is yours.

I saw, and loved, American Splendor, not least because of Hope Davis’ pitch-perfect performance as Joyce, Harvey Pekar’s penny-plain sourpuss of a wife. (It happens that I’d also seen Davis the night before in The Secret Lives of Dentists, and seeing two of her films back to back left me more sure than ever that she is the finest actress to come out of the indie-flick world–better even than Parker Posey, though I hate to admit it.)

What makes American Splendor so good is not its postmodern switching between “Harvey Pekar” the character and Harvey Pekar the bonafide on-screen weirdo himself–that aspect of the film borders on the cutesy–but the clarity and humor with which it portrays the grubby melancholy of lower-middle-class urban life. In that respect, the films it most reminded me of were Ghost World (no big surprise there) and (here comes the curve ball) One Hour Photo, a considerably more thoughtful movie than was generally realized when it came out last year.

At the same time, I think it should be pointed out that the “Harvey Pekar” of American Splendor is a semi-fictional character, and that a movie about the real Harvey Pekar might well have been even more interesting than American Splendor, if less touching. Yes, Harvey the celebrated author of autobiographical comic books and “Harvey” the fictional author of autobiographical comic books both spent a quarter-century working at crappy jobs at the Cleveland VA hospital, survived cancer, razzed David Letterman on camera, found love, and started a family. But the real Harvey Pekar is not simply some hapless record-collecting schlub from Cleveland who decided one day to write comic books about his working-class life. He is also a full-fledged left-wing intellectual–homemade, to be sure, but the shoe still fits–who reviews books for the Village Voice and does regular commentaries on NPR. (Search his name on Google and you’ll find, among many other things, his thoughts on Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, which is about as eggheady as it gets.) You’ll learn nothing of this from watching American Splendor, or even from reading Pekar’s slightly faux-naif blog.

None of which invalidates the movie–it has its own expressive validity independent of the man whose life it purports to portray. Still, it should be kept firmly in mind that in creating “Harvey Pekar,” the makers of American Splendor–not to mention Harvey Pekar himself–scissored out inconvenient biographical details whose inclusion in the film would doubtless have caused it to make a radically different impression on many people. “Harvey” is a weird but nonetheless convincingly common man whose plight really does come across as more or less universal. Harvey is…well, something else again. To put it mildly. And then some.

Bloggers all up and down the right-hand column have been playing “In the Bag” lately. Modern Art Notes seems to have been first to take up the cudgel, but after that it spread like kudzu throughout the blogosphere. Since imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, I’m flattered–so here we go again.

First, a quick review of the rules for those of you just joining us. “In the Bag” is my private variation of the old desert-island game. In this version, the emphasis is on immediate and arbitrary preference. You can stuff five works of art into your bag before departing for that good old desert island, but you have to decide right this second. No dithering–the secret police are banging on the front door. No posturing–you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how dumb they may sound. What do you put in the bag?

As of this moment, here are my picks:

NOVEL: W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

PAINTING: John H. Twachtman, Winter Harmony

PAINTING: Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room

POP SONG: Aimee Mann, Deathly

FILM: Nicholas Ray, On Dangerous Ground

Over to you.

P.S. If you’re wondering why I put two paintings in the bag this week, by the way, the answer is, I just felt like it.