Archives for May 14, 2007

I’m sitting on the patio of the master bedroom of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Muirhead Farmhouse, watching the sun set and listening to the wind in the trees. I cannot imagine being in a more beautiful place at a more beautiful time.
Now I’ll shut my iBook off for the night and return to the moment….

I’m in Chicagoland, immersing myself in local theater, architecture, and cuisine. On Saturday I attended the opening-night performance of the Court Theatre’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, visited Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House for the first time, and lunched at Hot Doug’s, where I ate a haute dog called the Edward Vrdolyak that consisted of smoked crayfish and pork sausage, cajun tartar sauce, smoked gouda cheese, and crispy fried onions, all crammed into a bun. How’s that for a day’s work?
This afternoon I’ll be driving out to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Muirhead Farmhouse to spend the night. I expect to have much to say about this experience later in the week. In the meantime, permit me to point out that Muirhead Farmhouse is one of five Wright houses available for short-term rental. These are the others:
• Haynes House, Fort Wayne, Indiana
• Penfield House, Willoughby, Ohio
• Seth Peterson Cottage, Mirror Lake, Wisconsin
• Schwartz House, Two Rivers, Wisconsin
In addition, the first Usonian house, the Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, is available for monthly rental.
I spent the night in two of these houses in 2005, then wrote about them in The Wall Street Journal:

While all 35 of the Wright houses open to the public are worth visiting, no tour can possibly have more than a fraction of the impact of spending the night in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright–and you can do just that….I visited the four-bedroom Schwartz House in Two Rivers and the studio-sized Seth Peterson Cottage in Lake Delton, the latter not far from Taliesin, Wright’s estate and headquarters, where visitors can see his theories of domestic architecture and décor writ large.
To turn the key of a Wright house is to step into a parallel universe. The huge windows, the open, uncluttered floor plans, the straightforward use of such simple materials as wood, brick, concrete and rough-textured masonry: All create the illusion of a vast interior space in close harmony with its natural surroundings. Instead of walls, subtly varied ceiling heights denote the different living areas surrounding the massive fireplace that is the linchpin of every Wright house. This unoppressive openness–both from area to area and between indoors and out–is what makes even a small house like the 880-square-foot Peterson Cottage, which was boarded up for two decades before being rehabilitated in 1992, seem so much larger than it really is.

If you know of any additional Wright houses (or other historically significant modern homes) that are being operated as bed-and-breakfasts or can be rented on a short-term basis, please drop me an e-mail so that I can pass the word.
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to head for the hills!
P.S. I listened to Fred Hersch’s new CD in the car last night, but otherwise my experiment in musical self-therapy is temporarily suspended while I’m on the road. I’ll resume regular listening activities on my return to Manhattan.

The Wall Street Journal has posted a free link to my latest “Sightings” column:

Orion Books, one of England’s top publishing houses, has just brought out the first six titles in a series of abridged versions of such classic novels as “Anna Karenina,” “Moby-Dick” and “Vanity Fair.” The covers of these paperbacks, which have been shortened by as much as 40%, bill their contents as “Compact Editions.” “‘David Copperfield’ in Half the Time,” as one entry promises. Malcolm Edwards, the series’ publisher, told a Times of London reporter that “many regular readers think of the classics as long, slow and, to be frank, boring.”
Not surprisingly, Orion has been taking a beating from British highbrows. “It’s completely ridiculous–a daft idea,” one London bookseller told the Times. “How can you edit the classics?” Daft it may be, but no less a literary light than Somerset Maugham once undertook to prepare abridged versions of the 10 best novels ever written. His choices, which included “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “War and Peace,” were unexceptionable. What kicked up a row was Maugham’s cheeky claim that “the wise reader will get the greatest enjoyment out of reading them if he learns the useful art of skipping….There is nothing reprehensible in cutting.”
I haven’t seen any of Orion’s Compact Editions–they’ll be published in the U.S. starting in August–but I’m not inclined to be snippy about them, because it happens that I grew up reading abridged novels, an experience that did me no harm whatsoever….

To read the whole thing, go here.

“One of the first essentials of creative art is the habit of imagining the most familiar things as vividly as the most surprising.”
Donald Francis Tovey, program note for William Walton’s Viola Concerto