Archives for May 2005

(1) Learn French.

(2) Write a biography of Peter Drucker.

(3) Play bass in a piano-guitar-bass trio.

(4) Ride a tandem bicycle through Central Park on a beautiful spring day (with an appropriate person, of course).

(5) Join the Mile High Club.

(6) Take a trip on the American Orient Express.

(7) Take a helicopter ride through the Grand Canyon.

(8) Watch an opera from the prompter’s box.

(9) Walk on my hands without breaking anything important in the process.

(10) This.

O.K., eleven:

(11) Visit the Museo Morandi.

‘They went to the theater and afterwards she listened as charmingly as any girl ever had to his dissection of the play. She didn’t complain about his surgical cruelty, but seemed, if anything, excited by it. As a middle-class girl, she was used to understatement followed at once by qualification: the only passion in her family being a nonstop concern for people’s feelings. Her parents would have hesitated to criticize Mickey Mouse (you haven’t heard his side).”

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

“There is no single Greek literary work of art as great as The Divine Comedy; there is no extant series of works by a single Greek literary artist as impressive as the complete plays of Shakespeare; as a period of sustained creative activity in one medium, the seventy-five-odd years of Athenian drama, between the first tragedies of Aeschylus and the last comedy of Aristophanes, are surpassed by the hundred and twenty-five years, between Gluck’s Orpheus and Verdi’s Otello, which comprise the golden age of Italian opera: nevertheless, the bewildered comment of any fifth century Athenian upon our society from Dante’s time till our own, and with increasing sharpness every decade, would surely be: ‘Yes, I can see all the works of a great civilization; but why cannot I meet any civilized persons? I only encounter specialists, artists who know nothing of science, scientists who know nothing of art, philosophers who have no interest in God, priests who are unconcerned with politics, politicians who only know other politicians.'”

W.H. Auden, “The Greeks and Us” (from Forewords and Afterwords)

“There is nothing so pleasant as to give oneself trouble for a person who is worth one’s while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste for old things, collections, gardens are all mere ersatz, succedanea, alibis. In the heart of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort, because yews and begonias submit to treatment. But we should like to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure that he was worth the trouble. That is the whole question: you must know something about yourself. Are you worth my trouble or not?”

Marcel Proust, Le C

– If you don’t like spoilers, don’t read Max Watman’s trenchant, frequently withering group review of the new Ishiguro, McEwan, Canty, and more. But you’d be missing out, and the review comes complete with a rationale for revealing plot points in reviews–basically, that the very notion of “spoiling” makes no sense with regard to literary fiction. I have mixed feelings about that, but I’m in total agreement with him on the brilliance of Canty. As for McEwan, I haven’t read Saturday yet, but seemingly have read every last review of it, and I have to say that Watman’s main critique of the novel is one that I was surprised not to encounter sooner.

From today’s New York Times story on Merv Griffin:

The original-cast album of Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza was released yesterday. I’ve been listening to my advance copy ever since it arrived, and I’ve been feeling something unusual and unexpected: I’m angry with those benighted drama critics whose mixed-to-poor reviews of this extraordinary show may have kept unsuspecting people from seeing it.

“During my time as a soldier in the First World War I was a member of a string quartet which served our commanding officer as a means of escape from the miseries of war. He was a great music-lover and a connoisseur and admirer of French art. It was no wonder, then, that his dearest wish was to hear Debussy’s String Quartet. We rehearsed the work and played it to him with much feeling at a private concert. Just after we had finished the slow movement the signals officer burst in and reported in great consternation that the news of Debussy’s death had just come through on the radio. We did not continue our performance. It was as if the spirit had been removed from our playing. But now we felt for the first time how much more music is than just style, technique and an expression of personal feeling. Here music transcended all political barriers, national hatred and the horrors of war. Never before or since have I felt so clearly in which direction music must be made to go.”