Archives for February 21, 2006

Ever since my untimely visit to the hospital, I’ve been spending an hour each day at the neighborhood gym, most of it pulling vigorously on the handle of a rowing machine. Inspired though I am by the passionate desire not to die just yet, I find virtually all heart-healthy activities to be brain-numbingly tedious. Enter my trusty iPod, which now contains 2,893 songs, many of which are suitable for exercise-related purposes. Instead of letting it play at random, I’ve drawn up a series of playlists of songs to which I listen avidly while tugging away at that damn handle. Each list consists of a dozen or so items, chosen for their brisk tempos and plucked from my computer in strict alphabetical order.

This is List No. 1:

– Count Basie, “9:20 Special” (with Coleman Hawkins on tenor saxophone)

– Del McCoury, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”

– Fats Waller, “Ain’t Misbehavin'” (from the soundtrack of Stormy Weather, with Benny Carter on trumpet and Zutty Singleton on drums)

– Jim and Jesse, “Air Mail Special” (the bluegrass version, not the jazz version)

– Jimi Hendrix, “All Along the Watchtower”

– Vassar Clements, “Avalanche” (from Will the Circle Be Unbroken)

– Fats Waller, “Baby Brown”

– The Beatles, “Back in the U.S.S.R.”

– Louis Armstrong, “Beau Koo Jack” (with Earl Hines on piano)

– Blue

I came home from the gym one day last week to find that my houseguest, a woman with good taste and a sharp eye, had rehung several pieces in the Teachout Museum. We’d talked about it a few days before, so it didn’t come as a total surprise, but I was still startled to find Degas’ Dancer Putting on Her Shoe on the north wall of my living room (directly beneath Neil Welliver’s Night Scene), Vuillard’s Petites etudes dans le square next to the bathroom door (directly beneath Jane Freilicher’s Late Afternoon, Southampton), and Hans Hofmann’s Woman’s Head in place of the clock that used to hang over the door to my kitchen (it now hangs over my stove).

Like most art collectors, I spend an inordinate amount of time fussing over what to put where, and I tend to leave things in place once I decide where they “belong.” It had been at least six months since I’d hung anything new, and longer still since I’d moved any of the pieces I already owned. Because of this, I’d forgotten the emotional effect of moving a familiar piece of art, which is not unlike moistening your index finger and inserting it in an electrical outlet: first you’re horrified, then you’re thrilled. Moving just one piece makes the whole room look different, and moving several pieces can freshen an entire collection–if you move them to the right places. Fortunately, my guest hit the bull’s-eye three times in a row. The only catch was that I had to straighten up the living room at once in order to properly appreciate her handiwork, but no sooner was I done than I sat down on the couch and spent ten ecstatic minutes doing nothing but looking at the walls.

Several days have gone by, yet I still feel a buzz whenever I open the front door and step into the living room. It’s as if I’d bought three brand-new pieces of art. “A change in the weather,” Proust wrote in The Guermantes Way, “is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” That’s what my guest did: she changed the weather inside my apartment, and now I’m basking under a new sun in the sky.

I am pure loneliness

I am empty air

I am drifting cloud.

I am a diminishing star

Speeding away

Out of the universe.

Kathleen Raines, “The Unloved”

It’s a safe bet you’ll soon be hearing about Dominic Smith, whose first novel The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre appears this month. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has a story forthcoming in the Atlantic, and he’s good. Mercury Visions could have been a greatish novel–Smith has the chops–although I think it would be nice to exempt one or two historical figures from having novels written about them–if there’s still time.

Sadly, the novel’s not great or even in that general vicinity, and I reveal why in this week’s Baltimore Sun book section.

Here’s a snippet.

Daguerre’s work, like the historical backdrop to his life, is enormously suggestive fodder for a novelist’s imagination. His impassioned preoccupation with natural light and its visual and emotional effects formed a natural bridge between art and science, and his career lends itself equally well to explorations of the intuitive, uneven processes of artistic creation and scientific discovery. A short way into his brash debut novel, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, Dominic Smith evocatively posits a formative moment in Daguerre’s fascination with light and its yet-untapped powers. At 12, Louis presses his eye to a tear in a curtain:

“The sun was going down behind the grain fields, and as it descended, it shot an orange glow from behind the hedgerows and poplars. Louis held the piece of white linen in front of the small curtain hole and saw, projected on it, the shimmering image of the lone walnut tree that stood by the stone fence. … The compression of light through the small hole had borne along the image of the walnut tree, projecting it onto the ceiling. Nature could sketch herself.”

In Smith’s vision of the formation of an artist’s imagination, witnessing light’s power to fix an image lashes together nature, art and technology in Louis’ impressionable mind. And, because in the same scene the boy has fallen for Isobel, the young servant girl tending him, love enters into this web of associations as well – he “fell in love with light and women on the same day.”

This too-tidy coincidence makes for a lovely little chapter, but it’s also the seedling of the ultimate failure of Smith’s nonetheless accomplished and impressive novel.

It’s a disappointing debut, but I’d be surprised if Smith doesn’t have better novels up his sleeve. Guy can write.