Archives for February 2006

If you’ve followed Terry’s link and read the list, now follow mine and read the riff. Jenny D. kibitzes entertainingly on those 100 best first lines.

So somebody cooked me dinner. That was nice.

I drank a couple of tankards’ worth of red wine. Nice at the time, but now I’m good for nothing. So that was mixed.

But the cook also showed me a little book nicked from his parents called Poet’s Choice and, when I became wholly absorbed in the book and not quite so fascinating or, um, at all responsive a guest, urged me to bring it home with me. For the sole purpose of regaling you with its contents. And politely correcting my manners. Again: very and entirely nice.

Poet’s Choice was published in 1962 by Time-Life Books. Its editors asked more than 100 well-known poets to select one of their own works for the volume and to say something about their selection–a condition that many of them meet with reluctance, reserve, or outright obfuscation. In at least one instance, the poet compares his poems to his children, whom it would of course be unseemly to choose among. There’s a surprising amount of creative evasion in play. Some of our bards you can just envision shifting from leg to leg uncomfortably and eying the exits.

Held to the task, some disdain explication: of “In the Night Fields” W. S. Merwin says, in toto, “If I had to use one as an amulet I hope this one would serve.” Conrad Aiken answers with a fragment of a different poem.

Kingsley Amis, who chose “After Goliath,” throws cold water on our expectations and then can’t stop from hedging his bet anyway: “I wrote this poem three years ago and I can still read it without irritation (except perhaps at lines 4, 13, and 34)….”

Reed Whittemore, author of “Reflections upon a Recurrent Suggestion by Civil Defense Authorities that I Build a Bombshelter in My Backyard,” seems to have been lying in wait for just such an occasion to say: “I like this one partly out of malice toward the editors of The New Yorker, who rejected it six or seven years ago….”

George Barker’s articulate bark makes me continue to want to go back in time and somehow release Elizabeth Smart from the irresistible but corrosive spell he casts with his swaggering brain:

I don’t have any favourite poems, not even anyone else’s, let alone my own. (And I rather suspect this goes for a lot of poets–if there are a lot of poets. It’s as frivolous to have a favourite person–imagine a menagerie full of those monsters.) So that in the circumstances I would like to offer a little verse which I like for its simple sexual irony. I also favour it because it is, I hope, opposite to much of the pretentious pseudo-poetastery parading about public places now.

Glad you asked, punk?

There are more riches where these came from. But it’s late and, you know, the wine, so just one more: Philip Larkin on “Absences,” which I can’t immediately find on the information superhighway, so here’s that, too.

Absences

Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.

Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day,
Riddled by wind, trails lit-up galleries:
They shift to giant ribbing, sift away.

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!

And on why this poem rose to the top:

I suppose I like “Absences” (a) because of its subject matter–I am always thrilled by the thought of what places look like when I am not there; (b) because I fancy it sounds like a different, better poet rather than myself. The last line, for instance, sounds like a slightly unconvincing translation of a French symbolist. I wish I could write like this more often.

Incidentally, an oceanographer wrote to me pointing out that I was confusing two kinds of wave, plunging waves and spilling waves, which seriously damaged the poem from a technical viewpoint. I am sorry about this, but do not see how to amend it now.

That one I find wholly excellent, and a fine note on which to retire. Goodnight ’til next week.

Courtesy of People of the Book, here’s the greatest literary list of all time!

Go. Now.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG, some adult subject matter and strong language, reviewed here, closes Mar. 12)

– Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)

– Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)

– Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

– The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

– The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)

CLOSING SOON:

– Mrs. Warren’s Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here).

DC Moore Gallery, one of my favorite midtown art galleries, is about to open a pair of shows that I mean to see as soon as possible, “Milton Avery” and “Jacob Lawrence: Mural Studies.” Both go up next Wednesday and run through March 11.

For more information, go here.

“Artists are not, on the whole, intellectuals; they do not try to be particularly articulate and, when they do speak of their art, they do not do so in the terms of the critic or connoisseur. But that is not their job. They simply do it.”

Peter Ackroyd, J.M.W. Turner

I’m the featured blogger on today’s Hotline Blogometer, which normally devotes its space to political blogs.

Here’s a sample:

What is your favorite television news program, either network or cable?

In the absence of hurricanes, terrorist attacks, or lawyer-led coups, I don’t watch any TV news programs, and haven’t for years. The last TV-news personalities I really liked were Harry Reasoner and Charles Kuralt.

To read the whole interview, go here (you may have to scroll down).

I once knew a man who saw Nijinsky dance, heard George Gershwin play, and was present at a recording session by Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson. The party in question was B.H. Haggin, the famously curmudgeonly music critic. He was in his eighties and I was in my thirties when we met, and the vast difference in our ages gave additional force to his memories: Gershwin, after all, died in 1937, while Nijinsky’s only visit to the United States was in 1916. Even more powerful, though, was the fact that Haggin’s memories were unique, since Nijinsky was never filmed and the only surviving sound film of Gershwin at the piano is a mere snippet.

Now that I’m on the verge of turning fifty, I find myself wondering what memories I’ll trot out to stun the youngsters of 2036. (Note the planted axiom in that sentence!) My last “Second City” column for the Washington Post was a list of the ten most memorable events I covered for the column, which ran from 1999 to 2005. They were all extraordinary in their various ways, but this is the one I expect to still be talking about thirty years from now. It happened in 2001, three months after 9/11:

Of all the things I did in December, the one that best summed up the spirit of this wounded city was a midweek visit I paid to the Village Vanguard, New York’s oldest jazz club, down whose narrow stairs I stepped gingerly one night to hear the Bill Charlap Trio. Imagine my astonishment when my eyes adjusted to the dimness and I spotted Tony Bennett sitting in the corner–and imagine my delight when he sauntered up to the tiny bandstand and sang “Time After Time” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” Yes, we’re battered and bruised and living with the worst kind of uncertainty, yet there we were, drinking up our minimums and goggling at a living legend, after which we all rushed home to call up our envious friends and tell them what they’d missed.

The age of mechanical reproduction, alas, has sharply diminished the value of the eyewitness account: I saw Count Basie in concert a half-dozen times when I lived in Kansas City, for instance, but I also saw him on film and TV so many times that it’s hard for me to distinguish between my first- and second-hand memories. Still, I’ve seen plenty of amazing things at which no cameramen were present. What else measures up in sheer uniqueness to that unforgettable night at the Village Vanguard? Here’s my personal you-had-to-be-there list, arranged in rough chronological order and subject to revision without warning:

• I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov dance Spectre of the Rose–and I was sitting directly behind Lauren Bacall when I saw him.

• I saw Van Cliburn give a solo recital in 1978, the year he retired from the concert stage.

• I saw Carlos Kleiber conduct Der Rosenkavalier at the Met.

• I saw Jerome Robbins’ Broadway four times–once from the front row.

• I saw Suzanne Farrell‘s last public performance.

• I saw the 1992 Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

• I was in the studio when Diana Krall recorded All for You: A Dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio (and wrote the liner notes for the album a few weeks later).

• I’ve interviewed Paul Taylor twice, once at his Manhattan home and once at his Long Island beach house (and was present at the performance of Taylor’s Piazzolla Caldera seen at the end of this documentary).

• I saw Bill Monroe play at the Grand Ole Opry, then met him backstage after the show. This is what I wrote about the latter experience in the Teachout Reader: “He stood six feet tall and looked at least seven, and his expressionless face might have been carved from a stump of petrified wood. He wore a white Stetson hat and a sky-blue suit with a pin in each lapel–one was an enamel American flag, the other an evangelical Christian emblem–and everyone in earshot called him Mister Monroe. Never were italics more audible.”