Archives for 2005

– Fee paid to Bernard Herrmann by RKO in 1940 for scoring Citizen Kane: $10,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $133,070.95

(Source: Steven C. Smith, A Heart at Fire’s Center)

“Bigotry does not mean believing that people who differ from you are wrong, it means assuming that they are either knaves or fools. To think them so is an immediate convenience, since it saves us the trouble of analyzing either their views or our own.

Is anyone writing as sharply and accessibly on fiction right now, with so little fanfare, as Max Watman? When one of his refreshingly direct Fiction Chronicles pops up in the New Criterion, I can’t click through fast enough. He covers the most gabbed-about books; he knows exactly what he thinks; and unlike many book critics, he is intensely reader-focused. There’s an attention to the visceral experience of reading in his reviews that I greatly appreciate and don’t find much of elsewhere, at least not in combination with such sound literary judgment and good writing (when I do, it is more likely to be on a favorite lit blog than in print). Watman seems to place a premium on conveying what it feels like to read a book while one is reading it, with results that are always helpful and frequently revelatory. Here, for example, is the beginning of his take on Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown:

Early in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown I felt a sense of awe. It wasn’t specific. It wasn’t tied to a single scene or a particular descriptive. It was as if the entire thing, the rhythm of the book, the pulse of the language was bigger than what I’d been reading. It was a change, there was more here. I felt as if I were a much younger man, or perhaps a child, flushed with the intensity of imagination in literature, cracking open Anna Karenina for the first time and being swept away. For now, we who read constantly find most of our pleasures in smaller ways, rereading a short shelf, or finding relatively small accomplishments in literature we like. Nothing seems comparable to the bedrock of one’s literary education, and it is a very rare reading experience that is remotely reminiscent of the Great Books of your private canon.

Rushdie is so sure of himself, such a strong man of letters, that his language can capture that feeling of fullness. I don’t think it is only in comparison to the dithering and hedging of our constantly self-effacing, self-deprecating contemporaries that Rushdie’s hand feels steady pushing the story forward.

I felt as if I were on my way to something good. And as soon as I felt it, it began to disintegrate.

I read and reviewed that book. I was ultimately easier on it than Watman, partly because, in my experience, the feeling he nicely describes here survived the encroachments of the novel’s faults. But the interesting thing is that while I felt just this sense of the novel’s force, it never occurred to me to simply describe that. Instead I spent a lot of words trying to pinpoint what was producing it. That’s a necessary and usually productive exercise, but it’s also nice to find a reviewer simply reporting the impression. It’s all too easy to skip over that step in the throes of analysis.

In fact, I’ve been skipping over it throughout this post, so let me back up, take a hint from Mr. Watman, and simply say: when I read his work, I feel a sense of delight and engagement. There. I feel I’ve grown as a critic today.

Also covered in Watman’s piece are the following titles:

– E.L. Doctorow, The March: “In the wake of poetry will come realism, efforts to re-assert the actuality of the thing, to bring back a focus on the true costs of war. Over time hell can be polished, and then someone comes along to put the hell back in. That’s what E. L. Doctorow has attempted in The March….Doctorow’s characters are as flat as photographs, and a book made of snapshots is nothing. War is not just a scrapbook of atrocities and bad luck. It is not a series of alarming photographs. War is hell because it happens to people, and unfortunately there are no people in Doctorow’s book.”

– Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park: “The whole book swirls, surreally, pushing the limits of tolerable confusion while sending up laughably familiar horror story shticks. For a while, it looks as if nothing will be resolved. It works precisely because it is a ghost story, replete with eviscerated livestock, freshly dug graves, and messages written in ash–and because everything, ultimately, is resolved.”

– Rick Moody, The Diviners: “Why would anyone even bother to type the words ‘imaginary pistachio trees, with their delights’?”

– Benjamin Kunkel, Indecision, in a moment of reviewing the reviewers: “I may be unable to get out of my own postmodern/ironic way, but it seems that everyone has mistaken Kunkel for the character of his own creation. And while that doesn’t make his creation any more palatable, it is the best tribute to a first-person novel I can think of.”

Time again for my Friday-morning Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I covered three shows this week–The Woman in White, Bach in Leipzig, and the Classic Stage Company’s Hamlet–and my guess is that you’re going to be surprised by my reaction to the first of them. I sure was:

Andrew Lloyd Webber, once the infallible cash machine of big-budget musical comedy, lost his touch a decade ago and has been AWOL from Broadway ever since. Now he’s back–in both senses–with “The Woman in White,” a stage version of Wilkie Collins’ 1860 shocker about two half-sisters (Maria Friedman and Jill Paice) who fall into the clutches of a murderous pair of swindling noblemen (Ron Bohmer and Michael Ball). Ms. Friedman, who underwent breast-cancer surgery two weeks ago, returned to the show last Thursday in a front-page display of true grit. No less newsworthy, though, is Mr. Lloyd Webber’s own return to form. Not only is “The Woman in White” a solid three-base hit, but for much of its length it proves to be a highly impressive piece of musical theater as well.

Not being a fan of Mr. Lloyd Webber’s high-priced brand of kitsch, I confess to having been taken aback by the first act of “The Woman of White,” whose witty domestic tone suggests a cross between “Pride and Prejudice” and “Dracula.” Far more than merely fluent, it is at once beautifully paced and unabashedly operatic in scale (so much so that the canned sound of the synthesizer-laden, overly loud pit orchestra does the score a great disservice). The second act, alas, is less memorable–Mr. Lloyd Webber’s big tunes, here as ever, are too obvious to be distinguished–but it holds together dramatically, and though I came away with an unmistakable sense of missed opportunities, “The Woman in White” is still an exceedingly well-made entertainment that will send you home sated….

If you like super-smart silliness, head downtown to the New York Theatre Workshop and be ready to laugh until your ribs are sore. Comparisons between Itamar Moses’ “Bach at Leipzig” and Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” are inevitable–indeed, Mr. Stoppard wrote the preface to the published version of his younger colleague’s play–but the good news is that Mr. Moses is up to the challenge. In “Bach in Leipzig” he takes a typically Stoppardian historical situation (seven famous organists auditioning for the same high-profile church job in 18th-century Leipzig) and turns it into a who’s-on-first farce full of theatrical trickery and fizzy verbal slapstick….

Michael Cumpsty, lately of “The Constant Wife,” is one of those ultra-reliable craftsmen whose name on a program always makes me perk up. Now he’s given us something much finer than mere craftsmanship: a Classic Stage Company production of “Hamlet” in which he turns in a thoroughly superior performance of the title role….

No link, as usual. To read the whole thing, of which there’s a bit more than usual (the Journal kindly gave me extra space this week), buy a copy of this morning’s paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, an incredible and insufficiently appreciated bargain.

October 2003:

I don’t blame Clint Eastwood a bit for having wanted to be one of the very few directors of importance to have scored one of his own films (has anyone else done it other than Charlie Chaplin?). Even if the results weren’t especially impressive, I admire him for trying. And I can’t imagine that he purposefully chose the idiom in which he worked–the glossy “symphonic score” beloved of film composers of the Thirties and Forties–in order to make Mystic River seem like an upper-middle-class cultural artifact. My guess is that he scored it that way simply because that’s the kind of film music with which he grew up, and with which he’s most comfortable.

That the results ended up being wholly inappropriate to the film in question is, of course, another matter…

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

– Payment made to Benjamin Britten by the Koussevitzky Foundation in 1939 to support the writing of Peter Grimes: $1,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $13,120.80

(Source: Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography)

When a girl would catch a fine lad,

She’ll need one weapon to disarm him:

She must charm him,

And then never take her glance off him.

She won’t need a ruffly gown

Nor velvet shoulders to get him.

Once she’s met him,

She just has to charm the pants off him.

And so I fear that I may be stuck

In this same dreary situation,

Maiden station,

Passed up by every lad

Unless I find some charm

I didn’t know I had.

William Roy, “Charm” (music by Roy)

In case you’re new to this blog, two different people post here: Terry Teachout, who lives in New York City, and Our Girl in Chicago, otherwise known as Laura Demanski, who lives in, er, Chicago.

The headlines on Terry’s posts start out with “TT.”

The headlines on Our Girl’s posts start out with “OGIC.”

Enough said. Read on. Enjoy.