Archives for October 28, 2005

A friend writes:

It was only in the last few years I developed the spine to stop
reading a book if I don’t like it. Now I even throw one in the trash
if I really hate it. The one from which I most recently defected was
“The Great Fire” by Shirley Hazzard, and I feel guilty because so many
classy people like it, but it just irritated the hell out of me.

Alas, I have no opinion of Shirley Hazzard (sorry, OGIC), but I wholeheartedly endorse pulling the plug on books you don’t like. Nor have I ever had a problem with doing so, though it may have more to do with my being a professional journalist than having a well-developed spine. Journalists, after all, are chronic skippers and skimmers. We have to be, since we spend much of our working lives “getting up” subjects about which we too often know little or nothing prior to being assigned to write about them. I’ve reached the point in my career where I pick most of my own subjects, but back when I wasn’t in a position to be so choosy, I was more than willing to say yes to any assignment, however arcane. I learned to simulate the appearance of knowledge–this is what is meant by the well-known saying that a journalist’s mind is a mile wide and a quarter-inch deep–and one of the ways I did it was by learning how to strain the gist out of a book without reading it from cover to cover.

It stands to reason that Dr. Johnson, one of the all-time great skippers, should have spoken the last word on those who insist on “reading books through”:

This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?

Except for my correspondent, the only person I can think of who has had such a problem was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Justice Holmes was constitutionally incapable of putting down an unfinished book until he reached extreme old age and finally came to his senses. But, then, Justice Holmes was a prime specimen of that queerest and least comprehensible of breeds, the secular puritan. As Edmund Wilson explains in Patriotic Gore:

His reading is dominated by a sense of duty and a Puritanical fear of idleness. He feels that he must grapple with certain works, quite apart from any pleasure they give him, and, once having begun a book, no matter how dull or verbose it is, he must read every word to the end. He is always imagining–this is humorous, of course, but it shows a habit of mind–that God, at the Judgment Day, will ask him to report on the books which he ought to have read but hasn’t.

I greatly admire Holmes, but I love Dr. Johnson, and this is one of the reasons why. He had what he called “a bottom of good sense,” and for all his extreme peculiarities, it rarely let him down. Whatever the subject, you can usually count on him to cut through the posturing and get to the point. I, too, take it for granted that God has better things to do than inquire as to my reading habits–though He may well want a word with me about one or two books that I reviewed in my incautious youth without first having read them from cover to cover!

These lapses notwithstanding, I’d say Dr. Johnson hit it on the nose. I expect a lot out of the books I read, and when they fail to deliver the goods, I toss them aside with a clear conscience and no second thoughts. Life is so very short–and so often shorter than we expect–that it seems a fearful mistake to waste even the tiniest part of it submitting voluntarily to unnecessary boredom. Bad enough that my job sometimes requires me to sit through plays whose sheer awfulness is self-evident well before the end of the first scene. So if you really want me to read each and every page of your thousand-page biography of Millard Fillmore, send me a check. I have my price.

A friend writes:

It was only in the last few years I developed the spine to stop reading a book if I don’t like it. Now I even throw one in the trash if I really hate it. The one from which I most recently defected was “The Great Fire” by Shirley Hazzard, and I feel guilty because so many classy people like it, but it just irritated the hell out of me.

Alas, I have no opinion of Shirley Hazzard (sorry, OGIC), but I wholeheartedly endorse pulling the plug on books you don’t like. Nor have I ever had a problem with doing so, though it may have more to do with my being a professional journalist than having a well-developed spine. Journalists, after all, are chronic skippers and skimmers. We have to be, since we spend much of our working lives “getting up” subjects about which we too often know little or nothing prior to being assigned to write about them. I’ve reached the point in my career where I pick most of my own subjects, but back when I wasn’t in a position to be so choosy, I was more than willing to say yes to any assignment, however arcane. I learned to simulate the appearance of knowledge–this is what is meant by the well-known saying that a journalist’s mind is a mile wide and a quarter-inch deep–and one of the ways I did it was by learning how to strain the gist out of a book without reading it from cover to cover.

It stands to reason that Dr. Johnson, one of the all-time great skippers, should have spoken the last word on those who insist on “reading books through”:

This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?

Except for my correspondent, the only person I can think of who has had such a problem was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Justice Holmes was constitutionally incapable of putting down an unfinished book until he reached extreme old age and finally came to his senses. But, then, Justice Holmes was a prime specimen of that queerest and least comprehensible of breeds, the secular puritan. As Edmund Wilson explains in Patriotic Gore:

His reading is dominated by a sense of duty and a Puritanical fear of idleness. He feels that he must grapple with certain works, quite apart from any pleasure they give him, and, once having begun a book, no matter how dull or verbose it is, he must read every word to the end. He is always imagining–this is humorous, of course, but it shows a habit of mind–that God, at the Judgment Day, will ask him to report on the books which he ought to have read but hasn’t.

I greatly admire Holmes, but I love Dr. Johnson, and this is one of the reasons why. He had what he called “a bottom of good sense,” and for all his extreme peculiarities, it rarely let him down. Whatever the subject, you can usually count on him to cut through the posturing and get to the point. I, too, take it for granted that God has better things to do than inquire as to my reading habits–though He may well want a word with me about one or two books that I reviewed in my incautious youth without first having read them from cover to cover!

These lapses notwithstanding, I’d say Dr. Johnson hit it on the nose. I expect a lot out of the books I read, and when they fail to deliver the goods, I toss them aside with a clear conscience and no second thoughts. Life is so very short–and so often shorter than we expect–that it seems a fearful mistake to waste even the tiniest part of it submitting voluntarily to unnecessary boredom. Bad enough that my job sometimes requires me to sit through plays whose sheer awfulness is self-evident well before the end of the first scene. So if you really want me to read each and every page of your thousand-page biography of Millard Fillmore, send me a check. I have my price.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t answered any of your e-mails in recent days, the answer is that I’m swamped and floundering. Too much work, not enough time, arrgh, yikes.

Stand by. It may take another day or two, but this, too, shall pass.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t answered any of your e-mails in recent days, the answer is that I’m swamped and floundering. Too much work, not enough time, arrgh, yikes.

Stand by. It may take another day or two, but this, too, shall pass.

Today is Friday, meaning that this morning’s Wall Street Journal contains my weekly drama column. I wrote about three shows, two on Broadway and one near it: Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, Wendy Wasserstein’s Third, and Rick Najera’s Latinologues. In all three cases, my feelings were mixed:

Instead of Oscar, the slovenly sportswriter, [Nathan] Lane should have played the maddeningly fussy Felix–and I bet he knows it, too. Maybe that’s why he spends the first act channeling Groucho Marx. Not until after intermission does he find his own path into the part, and even then you keep thinking about how Walter Matthau read the same lines in the movie….

Were Mr. Simon’s insert-flap-A-in-slot-B jokes ever funny? I remember chortling at them as a boy, but now they mostly leave me cold. In fact, the whole first act of “The Odd Couple” feels less like a comedy than a set of instructions for making an audience laugh….

Wendy Wasserstein, who has been absent from the New York stage for the past few years, has returned with “Third,” now playing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater. I wish it were good. I wanted it to be. Ms. Wasserstein, who won a Pulitzer in 1989 for “The Heidi Chronicles,” is one of our best theatrical journalists, a keen-eared social observer with a knack for summing up cultural watershed moments like the coming of age of the baby boomers and putting them on stage to memorable effect. But “Third” is neither memorable nor convincing in its portrayal of a radical feminist beset by midlife doubts. Instead, it’s sentimental to a fault–and false at its squishy-soft core….

Why is it that most ethnic humor, were it to be spoken out loud and in public by someone not of the ethnic group in question, would be considered a hate crime? In Rick Najera’s “Latinologues,” an evening of standup comedy monologues spliced together to simulate a four-person play, every Latino-related clich

Today is Friday, meaning that this morning’s Wall Street Journal contains my weekly drama column. I wrote about three shows, two on Broadway and one near it: Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, Wendy Wasserstein’s Third, and Rick Najera’s Latinologues. In all three cases, my feelings were mixed:

Instead of Oscar, the slovenly sportswriter, [Nathan] Lane should have played the maddeningly fussy Felix–and I bet he knows it, too. Maybe that’s why he spends the first act channeling Groucho Marx. Not until after intermission does he find his own path into the part, and even then you keep thinking about how Walter Matthau read the same lines in the movie….

Were Mr. Simon’s insert-flap-A-in-slot-B jokes ever funny? I remember chortling at them as a boy, but now they mostly leave me cold. In fact, the whole first act of “The Odd Couple” feels less like a comedy than a set of instructions for making an audience laugh….

Wendy Wasserstein, who has been absent from the New York stage for the past few years, has returned with “Third,” now playing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater. I wish it were good. I wanted it to be. Ms. Wasserstein, who won a Pulitzer in 1989 for “The Heidi Chronicles,” is one of our best theatrical journalists, a keen-eared social observer with a knack for summing up cultural watershed moments like the coming of age of the baby boomers and putting them on stage to memorable effect. But “Third” is neither memorable nor convincing in its portrayal of a radical feminist beset by midlife doubts. Instead, it’s sentimental to a fault–and false at its squishy-soft core….

Why is it that most ethnic humor, were it to be spoken out loud and in public by someone not of the ethnic group in question, would be considered a hate crime? In Rick Najera’s “Latinologues,” an evening of standup comedy monologues spliced together to simulate a four-person play, every Latino-related clich

October 2003:

As anyone knows who’s been in journalism for more than the past 20 minutes or so, fact checking is an increasingly lost art. Time was when many magazines–if not most–rigorously checked every factual assertion made in every story they published. When I was writing profiles for Mirabella nine years ago, the checkers even required me to give them my interview tapes. But by the time I got to Time, the rigor had loosened considerably. My Time stories about the arts were “self-checked,” a wonderfully Orwellian euphemism meaning that they weren’t checked at all–it was assumed that I knew what I was talking about….

(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)

October 2003:

As anyone knows who’s been in journalism for more than the past 20 minutes or so, fact checking is an increasingly lost art. Time was when many magazines–if not most–rigorously checked every factual assertion made in every story they published. When I was writing profiles for Mirabella nine years ago, the checkers even required me to give them my interview tapes. But by the time I got to Time, the rigor had loosened considerably. My Time stories about the arts were “self-checked,” a wonderfully Orwellian euphemism meaning that they weren’t checked at all–it was assumed that I knew what I was talking about….

(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)