Archives for March 2005

This is to warn you that I’ll be deeply immersed in writing Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong for the remainder of the week. Any postings that happen to find their way onto the blog will be…er, fortuitous.

Later.

“I’m playin’ a date in Florida years ago, livin’ in the colored section and I’m playin’ my horn for myself one afternoon. A knock come on the door and there’s an old, gray-haired flute player from the Philadelphia Orchestra, down there for his health. Walking through that neighborhood, he heard this horn, playing this

For a long time I used to file away clippings of my old magazine articles, but I stopped saving them with the coming of Web-based archives. Now I keep only electronic copies of my stuff, and once I’d put together A Terry Teachout Reader, in which I collected some of the pieces I published between 1987 and 2002, I decided the time had come to dispose of my old clips. Suspecting myself of excessive vanity and pointless nostalgia, I decided, like Thoreau, to simplify my life, so I sold two-thirds of my books and threw out a huge pile of clips and other mementoes, keeping only what I could stuff into one small cardboard box.

Time, however, has a way of doubling back on you. The current occupant of my previous apartment called the other day to tell me that I’d left behind another box of miscellaneous items. It surfaced, she said, in the course of a major housecleaning. Did I want it, or should she throw it out? I thought for a moment, then told her I’d be right over. Curiosity had gotten the better of asceticism. I picked up the box and toted it home.

Here’s what I found inside:

– The printed programs of all the plays in which I acted in high school and college, going back to 1972. (Don’t ask–I was awful. I had a lot of fun, though.)

– Three souvenirs from my maiden voyage to New York in December of 1975, a week-long trip organized by one of my college professors.

The first was the program for a performance of New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker, my first Balanchine ballet. Peter Boal was one of the children in the first-act Christmas party. Now he’s retiring from NYCB to become the artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet. Sic transit!

The second was the souvenir program for Harold Prince’s Broadway revival of Candide. (Just last week I reviewed New York City Opera’s revival of Prince’s opera-house production of the same show.)

The third, scrawled in my still-unformed handwriting on a piece of hotel stationery, was an itinerary of everything I did in New York, including the menus of all the meals I ate. That was the week I first tasted onion soup, vichyssoise, ratatouille, pheasant, chicken Kiev, and chocolate mousse. Most of the restaurants at which I made these happy discoveries have long since closed their doors, but the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim are still around, as is the Caf

• I got an e-mail last week from a priest I know who reads my Wall Street Journal drama column and likes it. At least I think he does. “So far,” he wrote, “you’ve managed to avoid pseudo-sophistication.” That dark qualifier–so far–made me smile. Has he detected a hint of phoniness in my other writings? Or is it merely that he knows most critics don’t feel comfortable unless they’re running with the pack?

Whatever he meant, I appreciate both the implicit warning and the explicit praise. I know what he means by “pseudo-sophistication,” though I can’t imagine falling victim to it. Perhaps because I took up drama criticism at a comparatively advanced age, I’m simply not interested in theatrical fashion. In fact, I often don’t know what it is at any given moment (though it’s rarely hard to guess). Even when I do know, I don’t pay any attention: I simply come home from a show, sit down at my iBook, and write what I think. Every once in a while I suspect I’m going to find myself way out on a limb come Friday morning, a prospect that neither pleases nor scares me.

• The Game Show Network’s nightly installments of What’s My Line? have now reached 1955, the year in which Fred Allen replaced Steve Allen as the show’s fourth regular panelist. I doubt that many readers of this blog know who Fred Allen was, since he died in 1956 and is now mainly remembered, if at all, for his long-running radio series of the ’30s and ’40s. Yet he was one of the best-known comedians of his day, and was widely considered to be not merely a radio comic but a full-fledged wit (James Thurber was one of his biggest fans). Among other things, he wrote two very good books, Treadmill to Oblivion and Much Ado About Me, and a posthumous collection of his letters was published in 1965. An anthology of his writings came out just four years ago. I wonder how many other people my age or younger have read any of these books, much less all of them.

Of all my peculiar claims to singularity, this one may be the most revealing: I’ve never met another person whose head was crammed full of so much miscellaneous information about people like Fred Allen, most of it utterly useless. To put it another way, I can be boring about more subjects than anyone I know. Fortunately, I’m painfully aware that I suffer from this chronic disability, and sometimes even manage to guard against inflicting it on my friends. I once had an insomniac significant other who claimed to find it tranquilizing to listen to me delivering impromptu lectures on random subjects (she claimed to be particularly fond of hearing me talk about the use of the rhythm guitar in swing-era jazz).

If only I knew half so much about making large amounts of money! Alas, none of my preferred subjects is more than modestly renumerative….

“And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel
wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter–we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure–news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“When an item struck his imagination he would sometimes write a sentence or two down in his notebook. He kept the notebook in his overcoat pocket, as he was not the type to write ostentatiously in bars or coffee shops. Just then he felt an image coming up to the surface, something about the faces outside the window, like a whole school of fish turning at once, the silvery bodies in three dimensions, something about the way they didn’t recognize themselves as beautiful but just kept on schooling to their separate ends. Then remembered that Pound had gotten there first: petals on a wet, black bough…It was not fair that so many of his best ideas were someone else’s.”

Kevin Canty, Winslow in Love

Movie quotes keep trickling in. It’s okay with me–I’ll gladly use them as a mine for future fortune cookies. In the meantime, here are a few more personal faves from the initial avalanche:

Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms. (Outlaw Josey Wales)


That’s one of the tragedies of this life–that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous. (The Palm Beach Story, written by Preston Sturges)


You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. (The Princess Bride)


Let’s order sushi and not pay. (Repo Man)


Don’t touch the hair! (Saturday Night Fever)


There’s no such thing as adventure. There’s no such thing as romance. There’s only trouble and desire. (Simple Men)


I can’t believe I gave my panties to a geek. (Sixteen Candles)


I’m tired of getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop! (Some Like It Hot)


I can’t die yet. There are many men I must kill first. (Yojimbo)

Hey, nobody said they had to be profound.

In yesterday’s Chicago Tribune I reviewed Stop That Girl by Elizabeth McKenzie, a “novel in stories” that has been covered almost everywhere. It struck me as stripped-down Lorrie Moore–which is almost by definition too stripped down–and it lost me by the end. But I was taken with McKenzie’s fresh, promising device of jumping a few years between stories, sometimes leaving important events unnarrated so that the reader experiences them only through their repercussions. This tactic reminded me of Michael Apted’s wonderful “Up” documentary film project:

I wanted to like Elizabeth McKenzie’s “Stop That Girl” more than I finally did. What made me root for it? It’s unsentimental; its young narrator looks at the world through an oddball’s eyes; she dispenses with consoling illusions early. The writing has a cool economy, too–it’s the opposite of flowery. But most of all, I was intrigued by McKenzie’s fresh approach to putting together a short-story collection. She calls “Stop That Girl” a “novel in stories,” which may sound dubious: Why stories rather than chapters? Is this more than gratuitous cleverness?

It is. For one thing, all the stories here are capable of standing alone; each has its own arc and logic. What really grabbed me about this device, however, was just what makes Michael Apted’s “Up” film series (“Seven Up,” “7 Plus Seven,” “21 Up,” etc.) following a group of Britons from age 7 through (so far) age 42 so appealing: the irresistible fascination of checking in on someone’s life progress at intervals. The nine stories that make up “Stop That Girl” cover Ann Ransom’s life from age 7 until she’s a 20-something mother. But we stop and look in on her only every couple of years, and a lot more happens offstage than on.

McKenzie may really be onto something. I loved the innovative structure of Stop That Girl and the way it messes with conventional novelistic continuity–which is nowhere so drearily entrenched as in coming-of-age novels. But I didn’t love the meager story this novel told. In the end I felt that McKenzie took the laudable ideal of economy to an extreme. Her book left me feeling underfed, hungering for more: more description, more emotion, more incident, more of everything. I would love to read a book employing a similar structure while telling a richer story.