Archives for January 22, 2004

Absolutely no more stuff from me today. I’ve got to write, dawn to dusk (a review of Thomas Mallon’s Bandbox and another chunk of my George Balanchine book), then it’s off to Lincoln Center to watch New York City Ballet dance an all-Balanchine program on the 100th anniversary of the birth of the master.

For now, I leave you in the tender hands of Our Girl in Chicago, who may or may not have something on her mind. And even if she doesn’t, there’s plenty of stuff to read. I’ll be back tomorrow with my weekly Wall Street Journal theater teaser, plus whatever else the spirit moves me to post.

“That’s all any of us are–amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.”

Charlie Chaplin, screenplay for Limelight

Says God of the Machine:

Nothing is worth seeing or reading that isn’t worth seeing or reading twice, and the second time you know how it turns out. Dickens wrote three endings for Great Expectations; Hollywood tests movies with alternate endings all the time. What happens in the last two pages or the last thirty seconds just cannot make that great a difference. The chick in The Crying Game is really a dude, and Kevin Spacey’s Keyser Soze, OK? If you’re watching a movie or reading a book to find out what’s going to happen, I suggest, with all due respect, a more productive use of time, like filing your corns or catching up on the details of Britney’s annulment.

Read the whole thing here.

With all due respect to a smart blogger, this is only half right. As I once wrote (in a radically different context) in a New York Times piece about series TV:

The term “classic” is commonly used to describe fondly remembered TV shows of the past. (I searched for the phrase “classic TV” on Google the other day, and came up with 86,300 hits.) To call a work of art “classic,” however, implies that it is something to which we return time and again, making new discoveries with each successive encounter. I can’t tell you how many times I have looked at George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments, but though I suppose the day may come when it no longer has anything new to say to me, I still find it a source of apparently inexhaustible interest, and try to see it at least once a year. Every art form has produced innumerable masterpieces which, like The Four Temperaments, demand to be experienced repeatedly–every art form, that is, except for series television….

Hill Street Blues was the first TV drama I ever went out of my way to see, and were there world enough and time, I might even consider watching the first few dozen episodes again. But while I still remember how much I liked Hill Street Blues, I can’t recall much else about it–only a few isolated moments from two or three episodes–whereas I could easily rattle off fairly complete synopses of, say, Citizen Kane or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or whistle the exposition to the first movement of Mozart’s G Minor Symphony. To qualify as a classic, a work of art must first of all be good enough to make you want to get to know it at least that well.

On the other hand, our first experience of a work of art is qualitatively different from all successive experiences, precisely because we don’t know what’s going to happen. The lure of cumulative revelation is not trivial, but significant: it helps to build the tension that is ultimately discharged in catharsis. Forget the precisely balanced phrases, the delicate half-tones and perfect edits. If you’re not watching a movie or reading a book to find out what’s going to happen–or listening to a symphony, or watching a ballet–then you’re missing the point, at least on the first go-round. Every truly great work of art is coarse at first sight. That’s part of its greatness.

As for me, I’d never want to know how a masterpiece ends prior to experiencing it for the first time. To be told what happens is to be cheated of the opportunity to sprint breathlessly from beginning to end, propelled by the overwhelming desire to know–and what happens in the last two pages, or the last thirty seconds, can make all the difference in the world. Think of the finale of The Four Temperaments, with its spectacular, gravity-dissolving lifts that sum up all that has gone before. Or the explosive stutter of the final chords of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony. Or the very last sentence of “The Turn of the Screw,” which slams like an oak door in the face of the stunned reader. No one should be deprived of the opportunity to come completely fresh to those climactic moments, any more than a child should be deprived of its childhood. The more refined pleasures that come with repeated exposure can wait–and will.

Poynter has the scoop on the direction the New York Times Book Review is likely to take under Chip McGrath’s yet-to-be-named successor, and it ain’t pretty for fiction readers.

“It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a ‘make-believe’ (for what else is a ‘story’?) shall be in some degree apologetic–shall renounce the pretension of attempting really to represent life. This, of course, any sensible, wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only an attempt to stifle it disguised in the form of generosity.”

Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”

Now that I have a bit of a breather, a few more words on the Poynter piece I linked to in haste this morning. To be truthful, while I didn’t like the news that the NYTBR will be moving away from fiction, I couldn’t muster a lot of outrage about it either. For a while now, I’ve found myself more interested in noting which books they assign than in reading the reviews themselves. The reviews are sometimes as dull as reputed (with notable exceptions, of course). In addition to all the usual suspects listed to the right, I’ve been gravitating toward the Washington Post and Atlantic Monthly for reviews that I actually read. (Check out Michael Dirda’s fun, hyper take on the new Elmore Leonard this week.)

So it’s not as though my reading habits are going to take a big hit even if the NYTBR banishes fiction reviews from their pages altogether. Yet the blinkered reasoning proffered by Bill Keller rankles. First there’s his general blithe condescension toward novels, apparently based on an assumption that while nonfiction is serious, fiction is just playing around. Even if Bill Keller really thinks this, it astonishes me that he’d say it, let alone that the Times would base editorial policy on it. Keller may not get it, but a man in his position should be smart enough to at least suspect that his disinterest in a particular form for expressing ideas is a personal blind spot.

Here are the statements that really give Keller away: “The most compelling ideas tend to be in the non-fiction world,” and “Because we are a newspaper, we should be more skewed toward non-fiction.” If Keller wants to make the Book Review simply an arm of the newsroom, then I suppose that’s his perogative. But he doesn’t say that. He speaks on two assumptions that are far from universally accepted: 1) that fiction is never a serious representation of the world, and 2) that only “hard” news is news. If all news is hard news, though, why maintain the separate sphere of a book review at all? Or an arts section? If the NYT‘s television ads are any indication, the paper’s “soft” content is integral to attracting its national readership.

It’s ironic that these statements would emerge from the paper of record only a few days after Terry made this observation:

I was watching an old episode of What’s My Line?, my all-time favorite game show, earlier this evening….This particular program must have originally aired in 1961 or 1962, because in introducing panelist Bennett Cerf, the president of Random House, Arlene Francis mentioned in passing that two of Cerf’s authors, William Faulkner and John O’Hara, had gotten good reviews in that morning’s papers.

On Tuesday it seemed quaint that a television talk show would acknowledge newspaper reviews of novels. By Friday it starts to seem quaint that newspapers would review them. You are excused for feeling a little bit dizzy.

When Keller assures readers that the Times will still cover major novelists like Updike and Roth, he leaves open the question of who will determine who is major. Of course this will happen elsewhere, and there’s a case to be made that it’s not happening at the Times now, but for a Times editor to wholly beg off of the mission of even participating in the public discussion that will adjudicate who is considered tomorrow’s major talents–well, that’s breathtaking.

A couple of weeks ago I discussed a mission statement of sorts that appears in the Atlantic‘s back of the book this month. This is part of that statement:

Although in some ways constraining, discrimination also liberates us. We assume that our readers look to this section as a critical organ rather than a news source–which means that unlike, say, The New York Times Book Review, we don’t have to cover the waterfront.

Suddenly everyone in the print media seems to be running headlong from what you might think would be the enviable task of shaping cultural taste. Lit bloggers, carry on.

UPDATE: Nathalie at Cup of Chicha is excellent on this story:

Good thinking. Also: stop covering narrative films. Only review documentaries. And dance or theatre? Why discuss performances when you could devote more space to politics?

I just finished writing my second book review of the day. Time for a nap, or maybe two naps.

See you tomorrow, unless something staggering happens tonight at the New York State Theatre. You’re in good hands with Our Girl.

I just finished writing my first book review of the day, and decided to take a few minutes off and pay you a visit, if only to make note of this posting from Return of the Reluctant, who’s covering a film noir festival in San Francisco:

I am now madly in love with Liz Scott.
Whatever her thespic limitations, whatever the silly motivations of her character, I don’t care. Liz Scott now haunts my dreams and distracts me from my writing. All Liz Scott need do is turn her head and I will happily swoon. If God does not exist, it would be necessary to invent Liz Scott. Liz Scott is still alive. I will happily give blood for her. I will take a bullet for her. It is time for a cold shower. Film noir is dangerous.

I’m with you, buddy. For those who’ve never seen a Lizabeth Scott movie, take a look at Pitfall
and you’ll see what we mean. Was there anyone who summed up the film-noir nightmare vision of women-as-predators more completely and alluringly? I mean, I really like women–nearly all my friends are women–but if Liz Scott ever crooked a finger my way, I’d be one dead blogger before the sun came up. (Not that she ever would have, thank God–she worked the other side of the street.)

Don’t ask me what that says about my subconscious. I could tell you, but then I’d have to rat you out.