Archives for March 2004

“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”

Gore Vidal, “Antipanegyric for Tom Driberg”

I’m in this morning’s Wall Street Journal with a tribute to my favorite movie, now out on DVD:

“The Rules of the Game” is the greatest movie ever made–but it doesn’t act that way. For much of its 106-minute length, Jean Renoir’s masterpiece, filmed in France on the eve of World War II, plays like a chic bedroom farce in which a group of well-to-do Parisians spending a weekend in the country seek to sleep with persons not their spouses. Only toward the end does it become fully clear that high comedy is about to precipitate into violent tragedy, and that Renoir’s true purpose (as he later acknowledged) was to portray a society he believed to be “rotten to the core.” Small wonder that the film’s 1939 premiere sparked a near-riot. The audience must have felt as if it had been slapped in the face. “The truth is that they recognized themselves,” Renoir explained. “People who commit suicide do not care to do it in front of witnesses.”…

One can never see a film like “The Rules of the Game” often enough. Indeed, I have returned to it more than once at times of great personal stress. I watched it, for instance, not long after 9/11, knowing that recent events would have cut yet another facet in its jeweled surface, and as I watched it yet again in the Criterion Collection’s DVD version, I realized that I was seeing a requiem not merely for France but for Old Europe, exhausted by modernity and willing to pay any amount of Danegeld in order to be left alone.

No link, so go buy a copy of the Journal and turn to the “Leisure & Arts” page. I never cease to be amazed by the number of people who don’t know that The Wall Street Journal has an arts page–and a damned good one, too. Believe it or not, the Journal isn’t for rich people only, or even primarily.

Tom Shales on the Oscars:

There was a time, perhaps when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, that actors and other winners at big award shows tried to come up with smart and clever remarks when they made their acceptance speeches. It was almost a competition in itself. The practice has dwindled to almost nothing. Mostly people come out and simply recite long, boring lists of names — lists and lists of lists — that ironically or not help make the program listless. There is probably no way the practice can be stopped, and winners will continue to thank their relatives, lawyers, first-grade teachers and anyone else whose name pops into their heads instead of attempting to be witty.

It is about as entertaining as watching Jell-O congeal, and it helps dispel whatever vestige of excitement remains in the doling out of the Oscars. The show was moved up earlier on the calendar this year in part because there are so many other programs handing out showbiz trophies on television. The Oscarcast should probably be put back where it was, because when it’s the last or almost last of the award shows, it at least has a sort of climactic sensibility to it, and that helps one tolerate the torture….

Read the whole thing here. And as you do so, recall the prefaces to the last half-dozen non-fiction books you read, and resolve anew not to do likewise when you write the preface to your next book….

I just got word that A Terry Teachout Reader was reviewed in the current issue of Publishers Weekly.

Here’s the money quote:

Woe to be an artist, writer, musician or fellow critic who incurs Teachout’s wrath. In this hefty, erudite collection of essays and reviews from the past 15 years, Teachout (The Skeptic) turns his scathing wit on some of high culture’s most sacred cows….This book is an impressive testament to Teachout’s talents, eloquence and integrity.

How about that? Not bad for a first review.

The book isn’t out until May, but you can pre-order it by going here.

Now, back to work! In the immortal words of Crash Davis, the moment’s over….

– Cinetrix has great links today on movie taglines
and The Triplets of Belleville.

– The notorious
Jennifer Howard is guest-blogging this week at Bookslut.

– Chicha blogged the Oscars.

– Finally, BuzzMachine has some really interesting new stats on blog use (plus a link to the original Pew Internet study from which they came).

“‘He brought it on himself. After all, he’s only got what he deserved.’

“‘I think on the whole we all get what we deserve,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t prevent its being rather horrible.'”

W. Somerset Maugham, “The Lotus Eater”

“Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable. Someone who is translating into English a German novel, the hero of which is named Heinrich, will leave the name as is; he will not Anglicize it into Henry.

“The early epic poets, composing for an audience with the same mythology, heroic legends, topography as themselves, had half their poetic work done for them. Later, when the poet’s audience became a cultured elite, their cultural background was still the same as his own: Milton, for example, could assume that any name taken from Greek and Roman mythology or from the Bible would be familiar to his readers. A modern poet, on the other hand, can hardly use a single proper name without wondering whether he ought not to footnote it. In 1933 I wrote a poem in which the name Garbo appeared, assuming, I think rightly, that at that time her name was a household word. When, after the War, Mr. Richard Hoggart included the poem in a selection he had made from my work, he felt it necessary to gloss the name.”

W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book

The New Republic has reprinted Delmore Schwartz’s colorful and moving remembrance of Wallace Stevens, first published in the magazine in August 1955, a few weeks after Stevens’ death.

In 1936 Stevens read his poems for the first time at Harvard–it was probably the first time he had ever read his poetry in public–and the occasion was at once an indescribable ordeal and a precious event: precious because he had been an undergraduate and a poet at Harvard some thirty-seven years before and had not returned since then, in his own person, although he had often gone to the Yale-Harvard games incognito. Before and after reading each poem, Stevens spoke of the nature of poetry, a subject which naturally obsessed him: the least sound counts, he said, the least sound and the least syllable. His illustration of this observation was wholly characteristic: he told of how he had wakened that week after midnight and heard the sounds made by a cat walking delicately and carefully on the crusted snow outside his house. He was listening, as in his lifelong vigil of awareness, for such phrases as this one, describing autumn leaves: “The skreak and skritter of evening gone”; no single one of thousands of such inventions is enough to suggest his genius for experience and language.

After his comment, Stevens returned to his typescript, prepared and bound for the occasion with a fabulous elegance which also was characteristic: but an old Cambrdige lady, holding an ear trumpet aloft, and dressed in a style which must have been chic at Rutherford Hayes’ inauguration, shouted out, hoarse and peremptory as crows, that she must ask Mr. Stevens to speak loudly and clearly, loudly and clearly, if you please. She might just as well have been shouting at President Hayes. Stevens continued in a very low voice, reading poems which were written in that bravura style, that extravagant, luxurious, misunderstood rhetoric which is as passionate as the most excited Elizabethan blank verse. And throughout the reading, although Stevens was extremely nervous and constrained, this showed only as a rigid impassivity which, since it might have expressed a very different state of mind, made his feeling invisible; nevertheless, as such readings became more frequent in recent years, it was impossible to persuade Stevens that no one save himself perceived his overwhelming nervousness, just as, when the first reading ended, Stevens said to the teacher who had introduced him: “I wonder what the boys at the office would think of this?” The office was the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., the boys were those who knew him as a vice-president, lawyer, and the most solid of citizens.

No one who thought a poet looked pale, distracted, unkempt and unbarbered was likely to recognize Stevens: he was a physical giant, robust, red-faced, and his large round head suggested not only a banker and judge, but Jupiter. He said then and after that the boys would hardly be more shocked to discover him the secret head of an opium ring–and although I would guess that in this instance he may have mistaken tact for ignorance–the important point is that he felt sure that this was how others regarded a poet. He had written poetry for many years a kind of “secret vice;” and he told many stories about himself of the same kind, resorting to that self-irony which often marks his poetic style.

Where many commentators simply register Stevens’ insurance gig as a gross incongruity and leave it at that, Schwartz does a nice job of showing how Stevens’ unpoetlike bearing and work life, necessitating his cultivation of a separate solitude for his writing, were actually essential to his greatness as a poet.

If you’re interested in more on Stevens, see this excerpt from a Helen Vendler lecture, where she works the Keats-Stevens angle. Vendler shows that Keats is more than just an influence on “Sunday Morning”–his great ode on death, “To Autumn,” lives in Stevens’ poem in ghostlike form.

Vendler pulls these lines from the last stanza of “Sunday Morning”:

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;

And, in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Compare, from Keats:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Keats wrote his poem after a Sunday morning walk in September 1819.