Archives for 2006

In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I discuss Keeping Score, PBS’ new Michael Tilson Thomas-San Francisco Symphony TV series about classical music. It’s wonderful–but nobody is going to watch it. Why not? To find out, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.

“Sometimes I think nobody ever really gets to understand anybody else. Which is a horrible thought. At least, to me it is. We’re locked up inside our own bodies for life. Solitary confinement for life. We scream inside ourselves, but nobody seems to hear. We’re born alone, we try to communicate with other people all our lives, and fail mostly, and then we die alone. It’s crazy.”

Buddy Rich (quoted in John Minahan, The Torment of Buddy Rich)

Regarding yesterday’s quiz, the quote continues like this:

…Who among novelists ever more instantly recognized the absurd when she saw it in human behavior, then polished it off to more devastating effect, than this young daughter of a Hampshire rectory, who as she finished the chapters enjoyed reading them to her family, to whom she also devoted her life?

So yes, as many of you guessed (and some tracked down via Amazon’s Search Inside), the subject is Jane Austen. The author was trickier, but a couple of readers knew: it’s Eudora Welty, from her 1969 essay “The Radiance of Jane Austen.” Most interestingly, one correspondent guessed that Welty was the subject of the passage! Showing, perhaps, that whatever we’re writing about, we’re also writing about ourselves.

I urge upon you the entire essay, which leads off this collection. I love Welty’s canny use of Austen’s biography in this passage:

Reading those chapters aloud to her own lively, vocative family, on whose shrewd intuition, practiced estimation of conduct, and seasoned judgment of character she relied almost as well as on her own, Jane Austen must have enjoyed absolute confidence in an understanding reception of her work. The novels still have a bloom of shared pleasure. And the felicity they have for us must partly lie in the confidence they take for granted between the author and her readers–at the moment, ourselves.

Just one more taste:

Think of today’s fiction in the light of hers. Does some of it appear garrulous and insistent and out-of-joint, and nearly all of it slow? Does now and then a novel come along that’s so long, arch, and laborious, so ponderous in literary conceits and so terrifying in symbols, that it might have been written (in his bachelor days) by Mr. Elton as a conundrum, or, in some prolonged spell of elevation, by Mr. Collins in a bid for self-advancement? Yes, but this is understandable. For many of our writers who are now as young as Jane Austen was when she wrote her novels, and as young as she still was when she died, at forty-one, ours is the century of unreason, the stamp of our behavior is violence or isolation; non-meaning is looked upon with some solemnity; and for the purpose of writing novels, most human behavior is looked at through the frame, or the knothole, of alienation. The life Jane Austen write about was indeed a different one from ours, but the difference was not as great as that between the frames through which it is viewed. Jane Austen’s frame was that of belonging to her world. She could step through it, in and out of it as easily and unselfconsciously as she stepped through the doorway of the rectory and into the garden to pick strawberries. She was perfectly at home in what she knew, as well as knowledgeable of precisely where she was on earth; she even believed she knew why she was here.

The beginning of that makes me laugh: Just put the pen down, Mr. Collins, and nobody will get hurt. And makes me wonder just who deserves the Mr. Collins Award for Recent Long, Arch, and Laborious Fiction. The rest is a nice refinement of the notion that the past is a foreign country, with the point about different frames driven straight home by the paragraph’s last line–an understatement in good aim, one might call it.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in about the quiz! The stream of mail really enlivened my workaday day.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

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

BROADWAY:

– A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

– The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

– Heartbreak House (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)

– Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, 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 Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Dec. 31)

OFF BROADWAY:

– The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

– Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)

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

“Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

“There was something dangerous and remorseless in her optimism.”

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

This week the Museum of the Moving Image in New York begins a Jacques Rivette retrospective. The bloggers at The House Next Door have been doing a fantastic job over the last week or so of prefacing the series with a cascade of links to stories, interviews, and critical considerations of the French director, whose 1974 movie C

Little lit quiz to ponder over your coffee this morning. Whose work is the subject of the following quotation?