Archives for August 2005

Courtesy of our Site Meter world map, here are some places where “About Last Night” has been read in the past twenty-four hours:

Apple Valley, California

Arvada, Colorado

Beaverton, Oregon

Beijing, China

Benton, Missouri

Burnaby, British Columbia

Carlisle, Pennsylvania

Choudrant, Louisiana

Delhi, India

Dublin, Ireland

Halletts Cove, Australia

Hamilton, Bermuda

Irancheh, Iran

Kiev, Ukraine

Knoxville, Iowa

Kochi, Japan

Lisbon, Portugal

Lund, Sweden

Mountlake Terrace, Washington

Oneonta, New York

Oslo, Norway

Parsons, Kansas

Plano, Texas

Prague, Czech Republic

Pukalani, Hawaii

Santiago, Chile

Slough, England

Smyrna, Tennessee

Vienna, Austria

(We were also viewed in unnamed cities in China, Egypt, and Israel.)

Hi, y’all! Come back soon–and tell your friends, wherever they are.

Courtesy of our Site Meter world map, here are some places where “About Last Night” has been read in the past twenty-four hours:

Apple Valley, California

Arvada, Colorado

Beaverton, Oregon

Beijing, China

Benton, Missouri

Burnaby, British Columbia

Carlisle, Pennsylvania

Choudrant, Louisiana

Delhi, India

Dublin, Ireland

Halletts Cove, Australia

Hamilton, Bermuda

Irancheh, Iran

Kiev, Ukraine

Knoxville, Iowa

Kochi, Japan

Lisbon, Portugal

Lund, Sweden

Mountlake Terrace, Washington

Oneonta, New York

Oslo, Norway

Parsons, Kansas

Plano, Texas

Prague, Czech Republic

Pukalani, Hawaii

Santiago, Chile

Slough, England

Smyrna, Tennessee

Vienna, Austria

(We were also viewed in unnamed cities in China, Egypt, and Israel.)

Hi, y’all! Come back soon–and tell your friends, wherever they are.

“Everybody who collects art has some adventure. There’s no question about it–whether it’s paying a lot of money for a picture and hanging it in exactly the right spot, or whatever it is. There’s never a day goes by in my life that I haven’t looked at the things I have. And that’s all my life because I started when I was twelve. I don’t look at everything, of course. I don’t go around and count them. But there are certain things that I have that bring back the whole minute when I first saw them, the impression I had, the things that made me want them.”

Vincent Price (quoted in Victoria Price, Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography)

“Everybody who collects art has some adventure. There’s no question about it–whether it’s paying a lot of money for a picture and hanging it in exactly the right spot, or whatever it is. There’s never a day goes by in my life that I haven’t looked at the things I have. And that’s all my life because I started when I was twelve. I don’t look at everything, of course. I don’t go around and count them. But there are certain things that I have that bring back the whole minute when I first saw them, the impression I had, the things that made me want them.”

Vincent Price (quoted in Victoria Price, Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography)

I owe a massive apology to Maud and Dan Kennedy for what I wrote two posts down (“The Odd Couple”). I read their posts about the New Yorker Target ads uncarefully to begin with, and then thoughtlessly lumped them in with the sort of commentary I’d read in Slate and Fishbowl NY, which were of an entirely different stripe. And I hadn’t seen the actual magazine. Ergo, the actual force of their objection went over my head completely and I posted something deeply stupid. I apologize.

I owe a massive apology to Maud and Dan Kennedy for what I wrote two posts down (“The Odd Couple”). I read their posts about the New Yorker Target ads uncarefully to begin with, and then thoughtlessly lumped them in with the sort of commentary I’d read in Slate and Fishbowl NY, which were of an entirely different stripe. And I hadn’t seen the actual magazine. Ergo, the actual force of their objection went over my head completely and I posted something deeply stupid. I apologize.

Confronted with the workmanlike diaries of Nathaniel Hawthorne, of whom he is writing a critical biography, Henry James is positively confounded. And, truth be told, a little annoyed!

I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing too trivial to be suggestive. His Note-Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual things, and of his habit of converting them into memoranda. These Note-Books, by the way–this seems as good a place as any other to say it–are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding with them in the whole body of literature. They were published–in six volumes, issued at intervals–some years after Hawthorne’s death, and no person attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret that they should have been given to the world. There is a point of view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the biographer is to desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, for the Note-Books; but I am obliged to confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they came to be written–what was Hawthorne’s purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and often trivial chronicle. For a person desiring information about him at any cost, it is valuable; it sheds a vivid light upon his character, his habits, the nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering what was its value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a very partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still smaller sense a record of emotions. Outward objects play much the large part in it; opinions, convictions, ideas pure and simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes his Note-Book into his confidence, or commits to its pages any reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest way to describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they might be opened in the post, should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is too futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they are curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of Hawthorne’s mind (I do not say that they elevate our estimate of it), but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we find in them.

I haven’t read the notebooks in question, but this reminds me for all the world of the sort of observations that Andy Warhol’s diaries elicited. But nobody really brought to those the sky-high expectations that James seems to have brought to his predecessor’s notebooks. What I love about the above passage is the heated contest of James’s impulses to protect Hawthorne and to excoriate him for being so dull, a contest that ends in a stalemate. First, James thinks he’s going to be tactful about this and tell you what he really thinks only between the lines: he’s thankful for notebooks–“as a biographer.” As a reader, one gets the sense, he’s about an inch away from tossing them into the fire. Then he gives up the charade: “I am obliged to confess”…that I haven’t the foggiest what Hawthorne thought he was up to! Then he’s tactful again: the chronicle is valuable…if you want information about Hawthorne “at any cost.” And so on.

The reigning note, however, is confusion verging on a sense of having been betrayed by the notebooks’ emptiness. You don’t often catch James not knowing what to say, but here the discovery of his literary father figure’s personal banality has him practically sputtering. Rather affecting, if you ask me.

Confronted with the workmanlike diaries of Nathaniel Hawthorne, of whom he is writing a critical biography, Henry James is positively confounded. And, truth be told, a little annoyed!

I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing too trivial to be suggestive. His Note-Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual things, and of his habit of converting them into memoranda. These Note-Books, by the way–this seems as good a place as any other to say it–are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding with them in the whole body of literature. They were published–in six volumes, issued at intervals–some years after Hawthorne’s death, and no person attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret that they should have been given to the world. There is a point of view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the biographer is to desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, for the Note-Books; but I am obliged to confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they came to be written–what was Hawthorne’s purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and often trivial chronicle. For a person desiring information about him at any cost, it is valuable; it sheds a vivid light upon his character, his habits, the nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering what was its value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a very partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still smaller sense a record of emotions. Outward objects play much the large part in it; opinions, convictions, ideas pure and simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes his Note-Book into his confidence, or commits to its pages any reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest way to describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they might be opened in the post, should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is too futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they are curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of Hawthorne’s mind (I do not say that they elevate our estimate of it), but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we find in them.

I haven’t read the notebooks in question, but this reminds me for all the world of the sort of observations that Andy Warhol’s diaries elicited. But nobody really brought to those the sky-high expectations that James seems to have brought to his predecessor’s notebooks. What I love about the above passage is the heated contest of James’s impulses to protect Hawthorne and to excoriate him for being so dull, a contest that ends in a stalemate. First, James thinks he’s going to be tactful about this and tell you what he really thinks only between the lines: he’s thankful for notebooks–“as a biographer.” As a reader, one gets the sense, he’s about an inch away from tossing them into the fire. Then he gives up the charade: “I am obliged to confess”…that I haven’t the foggiest what Hawthorne thought he was up to! Then he’s tactful again: the chronicle is valuable…if you want information about Hawthorne “at any cost.” And so on.

The reigning note, however, is confusion verging on a sense of having been betrayed by the notebooks’ emptiness. You don’t often catch James not knowing what to say, but here the discovery of his literary father figure’s personal banality has him practically sputtering. Rather affecting, if you ask me.