Archives for August 9, 2004

Here’s some of what I picked up in the course of the past week’s Web surfing:

– I’m a Stephen Sondheim fan, but not a buff or cultist (there’s a difference). Something Old, Nothing New is very funny on the latter:

The term “Sondheim-Firster” was a term I invented to describe the sort of person who likes Stephen Sondheim but doesn’t really like musicals. Some of the qualifications for Sondheim-Firster status were:

– Loves SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE and PASSION above all other musicals. Lukewarm about COMPANY and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. Thinks INTO THE WOODS is kind of a sellout. Hasn’t seen A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM….

– Approvingly calls any Sondheim song “dissonant,” whether it is or not….

– Ends a discussion of any Sondheim musical with the phrase “audiences weren’t ready for it.”…

– Evaluates *any* pre-1970 musical, including Sondheim’s, by saying that it has “hints of what was to come later.”

– Kind of bored by FOLLIES — too many show tunes in it — but knows it must be good because it makes middle-aged people uncomfortable.

I know the type.

– Says
…something slant:

I am always suspicious of writers who are able to compose finely honed reflections on their first days somewhere new and far away — in elaborate travelogs or journals or carefully crafted daybooks. Not that I’m a great stickler for accuracy, but the minute accounts of the strange, the fabulous, the new so often smack of disingenuous forms of writerly wish fulfillment. If there was any truth in their descriptions, their journals would more likely read:

Day 1 — Tired.

Day 2 — Still tired.

Day 3 — Overwhelmed.

Or is that just me?

Nope.

– Alex took thoughtful note of my posting on the orange alert:

Terry Teachout asks some heavy questions about the point or pointlessness of writing about art in a dangerous time, and answers them movingly. What would I do if only a day remained? It doesn’t do my mood much good to contemplate such questions, but at some point or another I would reach for Brahms’ Intermezzos Opus 117, and in particular the first, which since age seventeen or so has been the music closest to my heart. Some years ago Radu Lupu made an irreplaceable recording of Brahms’ late piano music. It offers something more than beauty — it gives sympathy, compassion, companionship. Other than that, I’d want to get out of the house and leave art behind. When, on September 11, I left the building from which I’d watched the terror unfold and joined the endless crowd of people walking up Seventh Avenue, I felt one of the most powerful emotions of my life, which was the feeling of belonging to a mass. Strange how seldom our so-called mass culture provides such a feeling. Even the rowdiest entertainments return us to the suburbs of solitude, our disconnectedness rushing back in.

– Similarly thoughtful reflections on TV talk from Shades of Gray (Umbrae Canarum):

What are we to expect from timed, limited, and narrow discussions on the television? Can we expect a serious, and deep, dialogue on any issue that will serendipitously end when a commercial break is required? Or is it more like what one anticipates in a WWE match – a choreographed conflict, with its ups-and-downs, its upsets and sure-things, always completed just in time for this message from “Old Spice”?

Perhaps it is no big thing. And yet, these are the types of shows that are (supposedly) “smart” television. Get away from O’Reilly – think of any other roundtable style program. If it does not degenerate into a shouting match, filled with the quick soundbite tidbits, the sheer lack of time prevents anything more than a superficial consideration of the ideas on the table. Can deep thinking, can true understanding, come from this sort of thing?…

Is there an avenue for the type of conversation that truly is enlightening? I don’t know. Especially now, it seems often more the result of dumb luck (or divine providence, depending on your view) that a discussion can come about among the learned, concerned for the good, the true, the beautiful. In previous centuries, where literacy was lacking for many, perhaps these types of dialogues came about more easily, since the number actually able to discuss in an educated way was smaller. Now, we are almost all to a person half-educated, trying to speak the same way, or have chattering pundits speak for us.

But therein lies the problem. What appears to be the avenue for true intellectual discussion seems destroyed by increased literacy and education. There is no way to go back to before. Indeed, I doubt few if any of us would want to go back to such a time. So what now? Perhaps, as time goes on, those who are in love with the Intellect (as Barzun would define it) will find ways. What those ways would be, my imagination is lacking.

One word: radio. It’s not perfect, but in the past couple of years I’ve taken part in a number of radio interviews and conversations that were both pleasurable and stimulating. Especially in this new age of streaming audio, I have a good feeling about the future of radio as a creative medium.

– Thanks to Gnostical Turpitude, I learned that the Guardian ran an interesting profile of Paul Fussell, one that confirmed my longstanding impression of him as a person whom I’d rather read than meet (his vanity is forever peeping through). Nevertheless, Fussell tossed off any number of observant remarks to his interlocutor, as when he observed that H.L. Mencken, once his favorite satirist, was “deficient in the tragic sense.” Into those five words are packed much of what it took me a whole book
to explain.

– Caroline, or Change, which I loathed and panned (much to its dyspeptic author’s displeasure), is closing on Broadway after an unexpectedly short run. One of the show’s money men explains why:

Rocco Landesman, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters and a producer of “Caroline,” said the show’s advance sales took a precipitous drop at the end of August.

“The week of the convention would be absolutely disastrous for us to keep open,” he said. “The Republicans are going to be occupied with the convention, and anyone who’s not a Republican is going to be out of town.”

Ah, yes, the celebrated Mr. Anyone, first cousin to Ms. Everyone I Know. In fact, a recent poll indicated that only 10% of New Yorkers plan to be out of town during the Republican convention. To Mr. Landesman, the rest of us peasants are presumably chopped liver–which may help to explain why Caroline, or Change is closing.

– Finally, Lileks pays a visit to Starbucks:

I was behind a fellow who had ten years on me; he was schooled in the old ways of joe. He placed his order thus:

“A cup of coffee, black.”

“Room for cream?”

Pause.

“No.”

I was next. What would I like?

“I’d like a medium coffee,” I said, since I’ll be gol-durned if I ever say “venti” to these people. I’ll give them Beijing for Peking, Hindu for Hindoo, but medium will be Medium until the day I die. “Black.”

“Room for cream?”

Kids today. They don’t know. They’ve lost the lingo. When you’ve established that the nature of your coffee is BLACK, cream no longer enters into the picture. Ever. But you could walk up and say “Blorg chulavista spaz mocha” and she’d ask “Room for cream?” It’s the script. Hidden cameras record her every word. They beat her with burlap sacks stuffed with beans if she doesn’t say the words.

I’m perfectly willing to admit (albeit through clenched teeth) that the self-conscious avoidance of affectation is itself an affectation. In any case, I’ve never been much of a coffee drinker, and you’re not likely to see me stroll into a Starbucks save for the purpose of ordering a mocha frappucino, a drink the mere uttering of whose name makes me cringe with embarrassment. Nevertheless, I know the Old Ways of Joe from black-and-white movies, and if you should ever hear me use Italian to specify the size of a drink in any country other than Italy, you’ll know the pod people have paid me a visit.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Dark Streets and Vast Horizons: The American Vision of Anthony Mann” opens Wednesday at the Walter Reade Theater and runs through Aug. 29. If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool film buff, that’s all I’ll need to tell you (in fact, you’ll already know about it). If not, here’s part of what the Film Society’s Web site has to say about Mann:

Anthony Mann, born Emil Anton Bundesmann, began his career in show business on the New York stage, first as a child actor, then as a production manager, and finally as a director. He was brought to Hollywood by David O. Selznick, and he shot many of the screen tests for Gone with the Wind and Rebecca. He left Selznick in the mid-40s and began his movie-directing career making a series of visually distinctive B pictures, each one more inventive than the next. Of his film noirs of the late 40s, most of them made with the great cameraman John Alton, Manny Farber wrote: “The films of this tin-can de Sade have a Germanic rigor, a caterpillar intimacy, and an original dictionary of ways in which to punish the human body.” You can lose yourself in the velvety shadows of those films, and in their beautifully, almost geometrically precise action. Then, in the early 50s, Mann went outdoors with James Stewart and quietly altered the Western genre. Until they quarrelled during the production of Night Passage in 1957, Mann and Stewart made eight marvelous films together, the last seven in a row. The best of them introduced a new frankness to American cinema, thanks to the boldness of Stewart’s often dangerously neurotic characterizations, and to the almost supernatural acuity of Mann’s eye for the great outdoors….

To which I’d add only that it was Mann, not Alfred Hitchcock, who first put Jimmy Stewart in touch with the dark side of the force, making it possible for him to draw on the near-paralyzing fear he had known as a pilot in World War II and thereby adding a dangerous, disturbing edge to his already accomplished acting. The Stewart you see in Winchester ’73 (and, to a lesser extent, in the last reel of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life) is the Stewart of whom Hitchcock would later make such fruitful use in Vertigo.

Mann’s Westerns are seen quite regularly on cable TV, but not such earlier exercises in film noir at its hardest and toughest as Raw Deal, which have to be sought out on DVD, usually in blurred, flimsy prints. In any case, you have no idea what you’ve been missing if you’ve never seen a classic Western in a theater. Now that the Film Society of Lincoln Center is finally screening all of Mann’s major work, I plan to go as often as my schedule permits. I’ve never seen any of these films on a large screen, nor have I ever seen a decent print of any of Mann’s pre-Stewart films. I can’t wait.

Highlights:

– The Naked Spur (1955, with Stewart and Robert Ryan), Aug. 11 and 13

– Bend of the River (1952, with Stewart), Aug. 11 and 12

– The Man from Laramie (1955, with Stewart), Aug. 12, 14, and 16

– Winchester ’73 (1950, with Stewart and Dan Duryea), Aug. 14

– T-Men (1947, with Dennis O’Keefe), Aug. 21 and 24

– Raw Deal (1948, with O’Keefe and Raymond Burr), Aug. 22 and 24

– Man of the West (1959, with Gary Cooper), Aug. 27 and 29

– Men in War (1957, with Ryan), Aug. 27

For more information, go here.

“Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors, or the architect his three dimensions. In composition, the triad or its direct extensions can never be avoided for more than a short time without completely confusing the listener. If the whim of an architect should produce a building in which all those parts which are normally vertical and horizontal (the floors, the walls and the ceilings) were at an oblique angle, a visitor would not tarry long in this perhaps ‘interesting’ but useless structure. It is the force of gravity, and no will of ours, that makes us adjust ourselves horizontally and vertically. In the world of tones, the triad corresponds to the force of gravity. It serves as our constant guiding point, our unit of measure, even in those sections of compositions which avoid it.”

Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition (1937, trans. Arthur Mendel)

Supermaud has a review in this week’s Washington Post Book World. It’s really, really good.

(I do, however, have a question: why didn’t she mention her blog in the reviewer’s bio?)

Just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose the following:

I’m the editor of an important book-review supplement. You’re a well-known professional writer of good repute. I commission a review of a controversial book from you. You submit a piece that is extremely strident in tone (but not obscene or actionably libelous) and with whose political implications I disagree very strongly. What should I do?

Here are some possible answers:

(A) Kill the review without further discussion.

(B) Rewrite and publish the review without consulting you.

(C) Insist that you rewrite the review to bring it into line with my views.

(D) Insist that you rewrite the review, leaving the opinions intact but toning down the rhetoric considerably.

(E) Sit on the review for two months, then run it in the back of the book.

(F) Run the review on time and feature it prominently, but with a disclaimer stating that it does not represent my views.

(G) Run the review on time and feature it prominently.

These things happen. They’ve all happened to me at one time or another. But if you answered anything but (G), you have no business being a book-review editor. Period. End of discussion. And if I did anything but (G), my guess is that you’d post a violent anti-me rant on your blog (assuming you had a blog) before the sun went down, accusing me of censorship, prior restraint, and every other awful thing you could think of.

Of course I’m talking about Leon Wieseltier’s review
of Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint in this week’s New York Times Book Review. And Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review, is an old friend of mine (with whom I have not discussed this matter), meaning that you’re perfectly welcome to disregard anything I have to say in light of that disclosure. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the First Commandment of Book-Review Editing is that a review commissioned from a professional writer should be published essentially as is, unless it’s actionably libelous or incompetently written (by which I mean “written,” not “argued”). To kill, rewrite, or request the revision of a review because you disagree with what it says smacks of censorship, perhaps not de jure but certainly de facto, and compromises the integrity of your publication.

Like him or not–and I don’t, to put it mildly–Leon Wieseltier is a distinguished editor and writer who runs one of the most admired book-review sections in the magazine business. If you ask him to review a book for you, it’s on the assumption that you’ll run what he writes. If I asked any of you to review a book for me, it would be on the same assumption.

I’m not defending Checkpoint, which I haven’t read. I’m not defending Wieseltier, whose writing I don’t admire, meaning that I wouldn’t have asked him to review Checkpoint in the first place. I’m not defending Wieseltier’s review, which I thought inadequately argued to the point of unseriousness (I think Beatrice gets this just right). I’m not holding forth on the complexity of life in the bloody crossroads (though I think it’s worth pointing out that a novelist who writes novels with political content invites political comment–you can’t have it both ways). I’m just trying, not for the first time, to explain how the book-review business works, and to encourage the many bloggers who are understandably angry about Wieseltier’s review to ask themselves some searching questions about how they think it ought to work.

Start with this one: how would you feel if you thought a review of yours had been killed because of the political views you expressed in it? Or if the editor excused his decision to kill the review by telling you, “I don’t feel that you’ve made your case”?

Then try this one: if you were the editor of a magazine, how would you feel if your readers took it for granted that you agreed with every word printed in it?

UPDATE: The Elegant Variation responds:

I don’t think a single blogger is taking issue with Wieseltier because he evinces political ideas we might disagree with. We object because he didn’t fulfill his brief as a book reviewer. (If his piece had appeared in The Week in Review, I doubt you’d have heard a peep about it.) Let me pose yet another counter-scenario – I manage to land a NYTBR freelance gig and, reviewing a controversial novel, I hand in, word-for-word, the piece in question. What do you think my future as a reviewer would look like?

Of course I see what Mark means, but it’s beside my point: when you ask professional writers to review books for you, you should print what they write, whether you like it or not. I suspect that a lot of people who are weighing in on this issue think otherwise, and I wonder if they realize how slippery a slope they’re standing on.