Archives for April 11, 2005

A reader writes:

I just came back from Budapest, and on Wednesday, March 30th, went into
the Museum of Fine Arts (known in Hungarian as
Sz

I spend more time waiting for people in front of theaters, concert halls, and nightclubs than anyone I know. The reason is that I’m always given two press tickets to the shows I see, and I always invite a friend to fill the second seat. (Actually, I didn’t have the nerve to ask anyone to accompany me to All Shook Up, but that was an exception.) Since I’m at shows of one kind or another at least three nights a week…well, you figure it out.

I try not to get my knickers in a twist when little things go wrong, and I think I’ve become fairly good over the years at avoiding needless exasperation. (I used to be awful at it.) On the other hand, I really can’t be late to the shows I see, since I’m there for professional reasons, so I start to get antsy whenever a guest fails to arrive at 7:45. After years of pointless suffering, I finally started giving the same speech to all my escortees: Meet me in front of the theater fifteen minutes before curtain time. If you’re not there five minutes before curtain, I’ll leave your ticket at the box office in your name and meet you inside.

My fifteen-and-five plan made it possible for me to consider the behavior of my friends from a detached, even sociological point of view, and I soon noticed that only one of them, a woman in publishing who makes a fetish of punctuality, can be counted on to show up at 7:45 on the nose. Another is habitually early. (She is, unlikely as it may sound, a jazz singer.) The rest are late to varying degrees. Most show up at some unpredictable point between 7:50 and 7:54, looking mildly anxious as they push their way through the crowd on the sidewalk and catch my waiting eye. A few like to arrive at 7:55:30, usually as I’m scrawling their name on the ticket preparatory to depositing it at the box office.

This leaves five friends who usually come to the theater between 8:03 and 8:05. (No eight o’clock curtain in New York ever rises before 8:05.) They are, in ascending order of delinquency:

• Two writers from the outer boroughs who work at home and come straight from their desks to the theater, thus exposing themselves to the caprices of mass transit.

• A reporter who has a way of getting stuck on the phone just as she’s getting ready to leave the office.

• A civilian who is so notoriously unreliable that at one time I made it a rule never to take her to a show without our dining together first, thus ensuring that I’d know where she was at curtain time.

• An artist (I won’t identify her medium, though she knows who she is) who has never been on time for anything in her life, though she always has interesting, sometimes spectacular excuses for her lateness. I’ll never forget the time she called me on my cell phone from the wrong theater six blocks up the street, then ran all the way to the right one. (Thank God she works out.)

Back in the benighted days before I came up with the fifteen-and-five plan, I used to get irritated at these five delinquents. Then I realized that to do so was pointless, since they clearly weren’t going to change their lifelong habits for me (or, I assume, anyone else). I didn’t want to deprive myself of the pleasures of their company, so I figured out how to manage their chronic lateness in such a way as to make it tolerable. Now it doesn’t bother me, except in the case of the artist, who cuts it closer than anyone I know. More than once she’s run down the aisle and dropped into her seat just as the house lights were dimming. She drives me crazy, if not quite enough for me to stop taking her to shows. Quite. Yet.

Most people don’t have this kind of perspective on their circle of friends, just as most people have never been unlucky enough to edit an anthology containing essays by a dozen of their best friends. (I’m pleased to say that I managed to do so without alienating any of the friends in question, though I did consider murdering two of them.) But I do, and what puzzles me after all these years is this: why is it that only two of my friends meet me on time? Because none of the others do, not ever. As in never. N-E-V-E-R. And you know what? Even though I know they’re going to be a little late, and have an ironclad policy in place ensuring that I’ll be in my seat when the curtain goes up, I still get antsy waiting for them, every damn time.

Might it possibly be that I’m the one who’s in need of an attitude adjustment? Surely not. That would be blaming the victim, right? No?

“Why does it happen so quickly? You throw a stone into the air and it has to overcome gravity, so its rise is slow, and that is why the days of childhood are so long and leisurely. But as the stone falls, it goes faster and faster, with a velocity of thirty-two feet per second, so that your sense of time finally is that of a rush into death. As the Book of Job puts it,

I spent pretty much the whole morning and afternoon working on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. The result was 2,000 polished words that carry Louis from 1905 to 1913–the formative years of his childhood. Not only am I hugely pleased with the day’s work, but I’m still hot enough that I could probably keep on pushing forward until two or three in the morning. Instead, I’ve decided to shut the shop down and resume work tomorrow afternoon. This cuts sharply against the grain of my workaholic nature, suggesting that it’s exactly what I ought to do.

No writing to do, no show to see, no dinner date…what will I do with myself? Well, here are four possibilities that sound especially good:

– Listen to the original soundtrack CD
of Bernard Herrmann’s dark, desperate score for Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground, which just arrived in today’s mail.

– Continue reading the bound galleys of The Lost Night: A Daughter’s Search for the Truth of Her Father’s Murder, a memoir by danceblogger Rachel Howard, which arrived on Saturday.

– Watch one of the remaining Gilmore Girls episodes stockpiled on the hard drive of my DVR.

– Turn the computer off now. Absolutely no more e-mail or blogging until tomorrow night.

What’s not to like? See you later. The next words you read will be somebody else’s….

P.S. Read this and smile. (He gets it, by the way.)

“Sometimes it seems like writing novels has become a contemporary form of expression, expression of self. Much like being a Renaissance gentleman writing a sonnet. It’s seen as a thing that anyone with a reasonable amount of education can do, and it’s your duty as a citizen to write a half-dozen novels.”

Ian McEwan, interviewed in Salon

An open letter I can get behind. Even though I never finished Preston Falls and might choose to phrase things a bit differently, I do love me some Jernigan. That guy will make you laugh (“I had my usual thoughts about everything being debased”) and make you laugh and cry:

I ran into the house but Rick was already in there shouting into the telephone, and back outside a crowd had gathered around the car and the van. But nobody was getting too close. It looked like a scene out of an old Twilight Zone, neighbors on some little suburban street looking at the flying saucer whose arrival would soon reveal what fascists they all were. Pretty inappropriate thing to be thinking, but. The whole thing, in fact, looked as if it were in black and white. I should have gone and pushed through the crowd and done something. Later they told me it had been over instantly: no blame. Right. But at any rate, I walked around the end of the garage instead and back to the pool, now deserted. I climbed the steps up onto the deck, felt like I was going to black out, quick sat down on something, and when the shiny flecks stopped swimming in front of my eyes I looked down and saw her wet footprints fading.

Well, I remember being awfully impressed with that last image when I first read this book as a young ‘un, anyway–I remember sucking my breath in at it. Now I’m not so sure. It doesn’t affect me to nearly the same degree, whether simply because I’m more discerning now or because it’s the sort of thing that rings the bell only the one time you don’t see it coming.

Jernigan is an amazing book in any case, and alone makes Gates fair game for Mr. Demko’s, er, encouragement.

Dove’s massive giveaway of a book of Oprah Winfrey’s magazine columns, in exchange for free advertising inside the book, is neither the first nor the most consequential instance in American publishing history of books selling soap. I quote from Rosemary Ashton’s introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s triple-decker novel Robert Elsmere:

Published in 1888, when its author was aged 36, the work became an immediate and enduring bestseller. It went on to achieve even greater sales, mainly in pirated editions, in America. Within a year of its publication, Robert Elsmere–less a mere book than “a momentous public event,” as Henry James put it–appears to have sold about 40,000 copies in Britain and 200,000 in America. So extraordinary was the behaviour of American booksellers and entrepreneurs, one of whom gave the book away free with every purchase of a bar of Balsam Fir Soap, that the case for pushing through at last an International Copyright Bill was made largely with reference to the fortunes of Robert Elsmere in America. The bill came into effect in 1891.

So what’s Mrs. Ward’s piracy-smashing and just-plain-smashing success all about? No sensation novel hers, but “a long, serious, detailed account of the loss of orthodox faith of a young clergyman, Robert Elsmere, and the consequent straings on his marriage to an Evangelical wife.” That’s Ashton again. I’m sorry to have to borrow her words, since I actually did read this book once upon a time, though strictly out of duty when I was a student of British fiction of this period. My memory of Elsmere is highly sketchy, my book itself dutifully underlined and check-marked, though not, I see, much festooned with actual notes. As a novel it’s more than competent but unremarkable. If you are in the market for a quickie history of nineteenth-century religious issues in England, however, it’s probably as cushy a ride as you’re going to find.

Perhaps the most popular novel of its age, now forgotten by all but scholars. I wonder what will be the Robert Elsmere of our time? More to the point, I wonder what won’t.

Here’s a new webby, bookish project (my favorite kind) that I’m part of: the Litblog Co-op. Idea’s this: four times a year the participating bloggers will throw their collective influence behind a book they really, really like–something that’s not poised to get a great deal of attention from the print media. The real beauty of the concept? Twenty highly opinionated individuals, enabled by technology to settle on a single book without any actual brawling! Of course, I could always drive to Golden Rule Jones’s to kick him if absolutely necessary. But the rest of the far-flung LBC are probably safe.

Check out the fledgling site. Make our job harder–and imperil Sam’s shins–by submitting book recommendations. And stay tuned: on May 15th the first selection will be announced. And please note some of the excellent company in which this finds me.