Archives for June 5, 2007

Terry reports that his computer has blown a gasket and his access to email for the next week will be intermittent if at all. Please plan accordingly.
For my part, I am slouching back toward blogging and will resume being part of the scenery around here presently.

I depart this morning for a long-overdue visit to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I plan to hang out with my family and do as little as possible.
I don’t plan to blog from home. I’m overblogged, which feels not unlike being overcaffeinated. Except for the daily almanac entry and the usual weekly theater-related posts, you won’t be hearing from me again until next Tuesday.
Later.

Today is the publication date of New York Review Books’ new paperback edition of Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, which features an introduction by me. I showed it to Maud Newton shortly after she wrote it, and she asked if she could post it on her blog, to which I assented happily. To read what I wrote about Dundy and her wonderful book, go here.
Kate Bolick recently interviewed Dundy for the Boston Globe. Go here to see what they had to say.

• In America, only pretty young women become movie stars. Middle-aged male actors who are unattractive–or at least Bogart-ugly–can and do play romantic leads, but no actress who is much short of beautiful or much older than thirty has much chance of seeing her name above the title of a big-budget movie, save as part of a package deal. This harsh reality is, of course, a flagrant and fundamental contradiction of all that the members of the film industry hold most politically dear. I sometimes wonder whether one of the reasons why Hollywood is so liberal might be that its male inhabitants are secretly ashamed of the sexual double standard by which they live. They will sign any petition, contribute lavishly to any sympathetic-sounding candidate, perform any act of political penance–anything, in fact, but sleep with an ordinary-looking woman of a certain age, much less cast her as the love interest in a major motion picture.

• Speaking of double standards, I’ve been reading The Land Where the Blues Began, a memoir by Alan Lomax, the white musicologist who spent a half-century touring the Deep South making field recordings of black blues singers. Lomax truly loved the blues, but there was more to it than that, as he acknowledged in his book:

I strolled along, wrapped in my envelope of Anglo-Saxon shyness and superiority. We had grabbed off everything, I thought, we owned it all–money, land, factories, shiny cars, nice houses–yet these people, confined to their shacks and their slums, really possessed America; they alone, of the pioneers who cleared the land, had learned how to enjoy themselves in this big, lonesome continent; they were the only full-blown Americans.

Somehow I doubt it ever occurred to Lomax–who was, as it happens, a Communist fellow traveler–that his self-flagellating praise of the joys of working-class black life was at bottom every bit as condescending as the happy-darkies stereotypes he held in such deserved contempt.

Yesterday’s new piece of music was Darius Milhaud’s First Symphony, Op. 43, subtitled “Printemps.” It was composed in 1918 and recorded for Koch Schwann in 1990 by Karl Anton Rickenbacher and Capella Cracoviensis.
(“Printemps” is the first of Milhaud’s six three-movement “little symphonies,” each of which is roughly five minutes long.)

“I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done. This talent, or these two talents, I have cultivated. Silence and concise, brief speaking have got me some laurels, and, I suspect, lost me some. No odds. Do what is natural to you, and you are sure to get all the recognition you are entitled to.”
Rutherford B. Hayes, diary entry, Nov. 20, 1872