Archives for February 2004

Paul Johnson, who wrote the introduction to the newly published Norman Podhoretz Reader, contrasts the intellectual and political styles of England and America. Apropos of Ex-Friends, the memoir in which Podhoretz tells how he and such folk as Allen Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, and Norman Mailer parted company over political matters, Johnson writes:

We do things differently in England. We try not to let ideological disagreements disturb our social life or the ecumenical serenity of our clubs. Politics, let alone ideas, are not that important….We think people should come before ideas: it is our strength, as well (some would say) as our weakness.

I don’t know whether English intellectuals are really like that nowadays, but it certainly seems as if they were once upon a time, and I think Johnson is right to declare this tendency (however ambiguously) to be at once a strength and a possible weakness. For my own part, I’ve never broken with a friend over his personal beliefs, so long as he doesn’t become a monomaniac about them–but as any good statistician would immediately point out, that may say more about my friend-making practices than my friend-keeping practices. I don’t enjoy the company of humorless people, and the absence of a sense of humor tends to go hand in hand with belief-related monomania. Hence I don’t tend to seek out the kinds of people with whom I later might find myself inclined, even obliged, to break.

Not long after 9/11, I wrote an essay about overly earnest artists:

Alas, they have always been with us, especially in wartime and most especially in America, far too many of whose well-meaning citizens are allergic to the exhilarating fizz of high art with a light touch. It seems not to occur to them that life is such an indissoluble mixture of heartbreak and absurdity that it might be more truly portrayed through the refracting lens of comedy. Instead, they prefer what Lord Byron, who knew a thing or two about both life and art, would have crisply dismissed as “sermons and soda-water.”…

Of course there is a parallel case to be made for earnestness: surely it is people like Isadora Duncan who make the world go round. But who would want to go along for the ride if they also made all the art? Henry James, that wittiest of serious men, underlined the point in an 1893 letter to his friend Edmund Gosse. The occasion was the publication of “A Problem in Modern Ethics,” John Addington Symonds’ agonizingly earnest pamphlet calling for a change in public attitudes toward homosexuality. “I think,” said James, “one ought to wish him more humour–it is really the saving salt. But the great reformers never have it.” No, they don’t, but the greatest artists do, and never more than when falling skyscrapers threaten to make us lose sight of the crooked shape of man, absurd and preposterous and–yes–beautiful.

I still stand by those words, but I invite you to note that James–and I–were careful to distinguish between artists and reformers. Reformers, like saints, can be awfully awkward people. Their singlemindedness is no small part of what makes them effective, as well as uncomfortable to be with. I’ve known a few, but I’ve never tried to get close to them. No matter how friendly they may seem, I always get the feeling that they’d be perfectly happy to have me guillotined if they thought it necessary.

But, then, artists also incline to ruthlessness, don’t they? As William Faulkner once observed, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” This is not, thank God, a universal rule. Most of my friends are artists, and most of them seem disinclined to rob their mothers. But most of the great artists I’ve known–and it’s a short list–have done things in the service of their art at one time or another (though never to me) that were so selfish as to make my hair stand up.

Again, the statistician in me speaks up: how big is my sample? And the answer is: not very. I’ve read enough biographies to know that some great artists are nice, others nasty. I haven’t known many great reformers, or any saints at all. And as for what Paul Johnson calls “ecumenical serenity,” I like getting along with people–though I wouldn’t pay any price for it. But the truth is that my inclination to companionability has never been put to anything like a severe test. I have good friends whose views I think silly, but none who seem to me downright evil (and I believe in the existence of evil). I sometimes wonder what I’d do if I were to learn that a friend of mine had committed a cold-blooded murder. I like to think that I wouldn’t have befriended such a person in the first place, and that’s probably true–but human nature is complicated enough that I can’t say so with certainty.

All I can say for sure is that I’ve never been intimate with anyone lacking a sense of humor, or truly loved a work of art by a humorless artist. That might just be the most revealing thing about me.

“His account of the Communists shows in the most extreme form what I came to loathe in the abolitionists–the conviction that anyone who did not agree with them was a knave or a fool. You see the same in some Catholics and some of the ‘Drys’ apropos of the 18th amendment. I detest a man who knows that he knows.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Harold Laski, October 30, 1930

Says Household Opera:

During intermission at the Cecilia Bartoli concert I attended this weekend, I ended up talking to the woman two seats over. (She’d overheard me talking about the program with my friend T., who came with me.) Did I play anything, she asked. I said no. “You certainly seem to know a lot about music — I don’t know much of anything about it,” she replied. I said something about having an inexpert but occasionally obsessive interest. Then the guy on my other side, who’d leaned over to ask if he could borrow my opera-glasses from time to time during the second half of the concert, answered a question of T.’s about horn-playing in far more technical detail than I ever could have produced. I was somewhere in the middle — literally — between “I don’t know much about music” and “I can tell you all about crooks.” All of which is to say, I should get over my phobia of being seen as an amateur and actually blog about music every so often….

Read the whole thing here.

I couldn’t agree more. Please do. Intelligent amateurism is a big part of what blogging is all about. And the same goes for you, Mr. TMFTML.

Once again, for those of you joining us late:

Our Site Meter tells us a lot about worldwide traffic patterns at “About Last Night,” but there’s one thing we don’t know and would like to find out: exactly how do you read us?

Specifically:

Do you visit “About Last Night” daily? If so, is it at a regular time of day, or whenever the spirit moves you?

Alternatively, do you visit once or twice a week, and read the accumulated postings? If so, on what day or days do you come here?

Finally, do you read “About Last Night” directly, or do you subscribe to our postings via an RSS feed, or some other form of aggregator?

If you feel like it, drop us a line (using Terry’s mailbox, not Our Girl’s) and tell us how and when you read “About Last Night.” Please put the words READING HABITS in the subject line, so that we can cull out your responses from incoming e-mail on other subjects.

Many thanks.

Our Girl in Chicago is coming to New York City next Friday! We’re going to go see Paul Taylor at City Center, Helen Frankenthaler at Salander-O’Reilly, Sweeney Todd at New York City Opera, and everything else we can cram into three days’ worth of nonstop art consumption. Nonstop for her, anyway: I’ve got a book to finish, yikes….

As for OGIC, she’s planning to reveal her secret identity to a couple of carefully chosen bloggers who have yet to see her in the flesh. (We’ll have to kill them afterwards, but at least they’ll get to meet her first.)

Watch this space for further bulletins.

Two things you won’t want to miss:

– The Paul Taylor Dance Company performs at City Center March 2-14. Two new Taylor dances will be seen in New York for the first time: Le Grand Puppetier, set to a player-piano version of Stravinsky’s Petrushka (premiering March 2), and In the Beginning, set to music by Carl Orff (premiering March 3). Repertory for the season also includes Promethean Fire, Piazzolla Caldera, Sunset, Runes, and all sorts of other goodies.

As I wrote in this space last August:

Paul Taylor is the world’s greatest living artist, irrespective of medium. I don’t deny that I’ve been known on occasion to exaggerate, but I happily stand by every word of that high-octane statement. If you want further details, I wrote the foreword to the 1999 paperback reissue of Private Domain, Taylor’s autobiography, in which I summed up my opinion of his work as concisely as possible. (Private Domain is a wonderful book, by the way, by far the best memoir ever written by a choreographer.) His dances are serious and funny, lyrical and frightening, harsh and poignant–sometimes by turns, sometimes all at once. If you’ve never seen any of them, go and be blessed.

For more information, go here.

– Also on March 2, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries opens an exhibition of 20 woodcuts by Helen Frankenthaler, my favorite living painter. She’s also a first-rate printmaker, and her woodcuts are sumptuously beautiful. The show, organized by the Naples Museum of Art, is up through April 3.

For more information, go here.

Says SlowLearner, a new addition to “Sites to See”:

I’m going to go out on a limb and submit a Rule For Playwrights: Playwrights that can act, should – from time to time.

In general, if you’re a playwright, you know if you can act or not. Many self-identified actors have no idea that they actually have no aptitude for acting, but playwrights, who have staked their ego on an entirely different delusion, are free to critique themselves mercilessly if they happen to occasionally act. I act from time to time, for the sheer recreation of it, and I’m under no illusions. I’m a competent actor, I’m basically engaging, I have a few tricks that audiences seem to enjoy, and I can even muster simple honesty for several minutes at a time. Unfortunately, based on the viewing of videotapes, I leave a lot to be desired in the area of physical control, and many of my movements are jerky and inspecific. In the professional world, there would always be about thirty guys at any audition who would get cast before me for any role appropriate to a tall, nebbishy dude, but in the weirdly-male-bereft world of unpaid Off-Off Broadway, there’s usually something fun I can find to do….

Read the whole thing here.

Supermaud (who embodies the South) mentioned
Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer on her site the other day. I sent her an appreciative e-mail in response, and inside of five minutes we’d upped the ante to the point of mutually acknowledging that we both rank The Moviegoer among the greatest American novels of the twentieth century. Maud says it’s “one of my all-time favorites, and possibly THE favorite.” I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I wouldn’t want to live off the difference.

Percy, as it happens, was a Catholic convert, and though The Moviegoer doesn’t bang you over the head with that fact, it is very much a spiritual statement, a novel about the problem of “everydayness,” a phenomenon with which anyone searching for truths beyond the realm of the immediately visible must contend:

The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place–but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.

What do you seek–God? you ask with a smile.

I hesitate to answer, since all other Americans have settled the matter for themselves and to give such an answer would amount to setting myself a goal which everyone else has reached–and therefore raising a question in which no one has the slightest interest. Who wants to be dead last among one hundred and eighty million Americans? For, as everyone knows, the polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics–which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker….

Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?

On my honor, I do not know the answer.

Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a Catholic, but I find Percy’s way of situating the problem of “everydayness” in the context of modern American life to be deeply sympathetic. I also admire the lightness of touch with which he does so–for The Moviegoer, unlikely as it may sound, is a kind of comic novel about spiritual alienation. But, of course, there are many roads to seriousness, and the best of them take us down the path of comedy.
A couple of years ago, I was writing about Ghost World, one of my favorite films, and in trying to suggest its special quality, I found myself comparing it to, of all things, The Moviegoer:

American Beauty offered easy answers to loaded questions (that’s why it won so many Oscars–Hollywood only gives prizes to movies that tell us what it wants to hear), whereas Ghost World is a movie without any answers at all. That is the source of its pathos. Like every teenager, Enid longs to be shown how to live, but the ghostly adults who drift in and out of her unhappy life offer her no counsel. Instead, she has been set adrift on the sea of relativity, looking for a safe harbor on a coast without maps.

Walker Percy once pointed out that a visit to the neighborhood theater is for many Americans “maybe the only point in the day, or even the week, when someone (a cowboy, a detective, a crook) is heard asking what life is all about, asking what is worth fighting for–or asking if anything is worth fighting for.” Out of that insight grew The Moviegoer, a novel about a man who goes to the movies in order to narcotize himself against the shallowness of American life, unaware that by doing so he has embarked on a search for meaning that will ultimately end in his embrace of Catholicism. As improbable as it may sound, Ghost World reminded me quite strongly of Percy’s great novel. To be sure, Enid lacks the spiritual consciousness that helped Binx Bolling find his way out of the slough of despond, but she is just as surely going forth on a similar quest, and the fact that she is doing so without benefit of moral guidance makes her plight all the more moving.

In case you’ve forgotten where we started, this chain of not-so-random reflections was triggered by a fugitive posting on the blog of a colleague who has become a friend. This is part of what fascinates me about blogging–the way in which it facilitates intellectual cross-pollination.

While we’re on the subject, let me tell you another, similarly illuminating story. I got an e-mail last month from Cindy Cheung, a very funny actress whom I’d praised last year in a Wall Street Journal drama review (the operative words were “wildly loony”). Cindy learned about this blog from my review, in due course becoming a regular reader. She wrote to tell me that if I thought she was funny, I should read Waylaid, a novel by her husband, Ed Lin. This kind of e-mail almost always makes me run for the nearest exit, but it struck me that she might possibly be onto something, so I accepted her offer to send me a copy.

Not to prolong the suspense needlessly, Waylaid turned out to be a gem, a tough little coming-of-age tale about a 12-year-old Asian-American boy whose home is a rundown hotel in deepest New Jersey owned and operated by his immigrant parents. He knows too much and found it out too soon, and his stories of life among the Jersey hookers are funny in the saddest possible way.

Waylaid reminded me at times of Lolita, another seriously funny novel that casts a cold eye on the grubby surface of American life. Remember Nabokov’s wry descriptions of the motels visited by Humbert Humbert and his nymphet?

“We wish you to feel at home while here. All equipment was carefully checked upon your arrival. Your license number is on record here. Use hot water sparingly. We reserve the right to eject without notice any objectionable person. Do not throw waste material of any kind in the toilet bowl. Thank you. Call again. The Management. P.S. We consider our guests the Finest People of the World.”

Well, Lin has that same kind of beautifully exact feel for the way things look and smell and sound:

Each hotel room was basically the same except that some of the black-and-white televisions had rabbit-ear antennas and some had inverted wire coat hangers. They all had a simple desk, a night stand, and a chair made of pressed wood. Push on any of the furniture the wrong way and it would splinter apart….The wall-to-wall carpeting looked like every marching band in the country had dragged flour sacks of grime across it. Every color in the carpet had been corrupted into a different shade of dark green.

Now, I don’t know anything about Ed Lin except that he’s the husband of one of my readers–and that Waylaid is a damned fine first novel. Which brings us back one last time to the subject of blogging. To review the bidding:

(1) I wrote about Cindy Cheung in the Wall Street Journal.

(2) She saw the URL of “About Last Night” at the end of the piece, looked it up, and became a regular reader.

(3) Even though we’d never met, she took a chance, wrote to me through the blog, and sent me her husband’s first novel.

(4) I read it and loved it.

(5) Now I’m passing on the word to you.

That’s the miracle of blogging. It generates serendipities.

P.S. Cindy is currently appearing in an indie flick called Robot Stories. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m going to try to catch it this weekend. You come, too.