Archives for August 1, 2007

Last week I voiced my fervent desire that Netflix — “Taking agoraphobics to the movies since 1998!” — start shipping Saturdays. After I posted I began to wonder uncertainly if there was some dumbfoundingly obvious reason why the company hasn’t already moved to this schedule, as one sometimes does after making a modest proposal on the Internet (shades of violins on TV).
So I sent an email to the proprietor of Hacking Netflix, who pointed me to an interview he conducted with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings last year. Here’s the relevant portion:

HN: Why don’t you work on Saturdays? It seems to be such a competitive advantage for Blockbuster, and everybody’s interested in getting more movies… Is it cost-prohibitive?
Hastings: Prohibitive is a strong word. It’s a cost tradeoff, right, because then you can’t run a standard five day shift. So when you move to a 6th day, then you’ve got not one management team, you’ve got staggered. So the cost is not just 15% more, because you’ve got to figure out dual management, and how you’re going to infringe on people on people’s weekends and yet give them a life. So we make sure that the Monday through Friday works well, and that’s the focus.

According to the MSNBC report, Netflix profits this year are expected to be between $42.4 – $52.4 million. Maybe by the time they’re clearing $60 mill., they’ll have figured out how to get those Saturday shifts manned.

Alas, today finds me in a “I don’t care if you have to cry and cut, but you better cry and cut” state of deadline, so I have little to offer but scattershot and brimstone.
A couple items that caught my fancy this morning:
• From Carol Blue’s 1996 New Yorker profile of Salman Rushdie:

Rushdie excels at what might be termed Shakespeare trivia. Once, in the course of a literary word game, he was challenged to rename a Shakespeare play as if it had been written by Robert Ludlum. He was asked, first, to retitle “Hamlet” in the style of the author of “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “The Scarlatti Inheritance.” With no advance notice and almost no hesitation, he said, “The Elsinore Vacillation.” A palpable hit but, the other participants thought, sheer luck. Bet you can’t do it twice. What about “Macbeth”? “The Dunsinane Deforestation.” More meditated offerings included “The Rialto Forfeit,” “The Capulet Infatuation,” “The Kerchief Implication,” and “The Solstice Entrancement.”

Blue’s piece is quoted in a Ludlum-rich entry over at Light Reading (like Jenny, I find Chrisopher Hitchens’ variation of the Rushdie anecdote interesting).
• Ed Park gives a favorable review to Taylor Antrim’s The Headmaster Ritual today at Salon. Trolling for other reviews of the novel, I came across one by Ron Charles for The Washington Post, which begins with the best lede I’ve read in a while:

The only good thing about the first year of teaching is that it can happen to you only once. Through a haze of cringing horror, I remember when I insisted that Ring Lardner was a fictional character, made fun of a deaf student, reduced a recently orphaned girl to tears, and, while swaying dramatically behind a wooden lectern, drove a long splinter through my pants and into my groin.

Other dashed thoughts and links:
• It’s been widely linked to but if you haven’t read it yet, Hilary Mantel’s essay on Orpheus and Euridice is worth your attention.
• Two Amazon customers argue about what is “verifiable” in Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell.
• Speaking obliquely of Hitch and God (they’re like Burton and Taylor, those two), the number of holds before me in the library queue for Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: 16. Sixteen!

I’m not in the habit of complaining about bloggers who misconstrue my work, but Mr. Reading Experience has gotten me so wrong that I feel obliged to point it out.
In my latest Commentary essay, I make the following observation:

No less deeply rooted in the national religious past, one might add, is our distrust of art for art’s sake. Over much of the country’s history, many artists, like most of their countrymen, have favored an art that exists not autonomously but in the service of some cause whose goodness or functionality justifies its existence. In the 19th century, that cause was usually religious; nowadays, it is far more often political. But in both cases, it is hard to escape the conclusion that something in the American national character is inimical to the uncomplicated enjoyment of beauty. We prefer our art to be earnest, and that preference is another survival of American Puritanism.

To which Daniel Green responds:

Is Terry Teachout proposing “earnestness” (understood mostly as an expression of “religiosity”) as the primary standard for judging works of art? Is indifference to religion among artists a crippling flaw? I realize that this is a view very commonly advanced by certain “conservative” cultural commentators, but I always thought Teachout managed to avoid such a narrow, agenda-driven (indeed, thoroughgoingly “political”) approach to art in most of his better criticism. I’m disappointed to find him vouching for it here.

Apparently Green decided to criticize my piece without reading it more than casually. I did indeed say that Americans in general seem to “prefer their art to be earnest,” but I didn’t say anywhere in the essay that I share this preference, or think it a good thing. Nor have I ever said so elsewhere in my writings. In fact, I’ve consistently said the opposite, and I’ve said it on many occasions in many different places. See, for instance, the essay in A Terry Teachout Reader called “The Importance of Not Being Earnest,” which appeared in the Sunday New York Times not long after 9/11. Or any number of essays in Commentary and postings on this blog, etc., etc., etc. ad infinitum.
Green has a lot more to say about me in his posting, most of it harrumphingly huffy (as is his wont) and all of it irrelevant, since everything he says is based on an interpretation of my essay that comes perilously close to inverting its plain meaning. My larger point was not that serious artists have an obligation to write about religion, or that art must be religious in order to be good, but simply that American artists who overlook the place of religion in American life are to that extent misunderstanding the American national character, in whose formation and development religious belief has historically played a crucial part.
Now I don’t expect Green to have read everything I’ve written, but I do think he ought to read what he’s writing about with somewhat more care. Of course it’s possible that I failed to make myself clear, but seeing as how no one else in the blogosphere appears to have jumped to the same conclusions, I’m disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt–especially since he then goes well out of his way to beat me up for being “political” and “conservative,” complete with scare quotes.
Green’s failure to understand what I was saying leads me to wonder whether he might be viewing the world through politics-colored glasses. I know I don’t. As I wrote in this space in 2004:

If this blog has a credo, it is that the personal is not political. Anyone who believes it to be, or tries to persuade other people that it is, will find no comfort here. Needless to say, my own political views are far from secret (or simple), but I check them at the door of “About Last Night.” I think it’s important that there be at least one politics-free space in the blogosphere where people who love art can read about it–and nothing else….
I can’t say it often enough: first comes experience, then understanding. I don’t think Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony is a great piece of music because it’s tonal–I think tonality is valid because it is the basis for great pieces of music like Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. No more would I allow my response to a work of art to be conditioned by my political convictions. If anything, it’s the other way round: my experience of reality, which includes the reality of art, is the ultimate source of my philosophy, from which my political convictions spring. In art, experience is truth, and there is no greater sin than to say, “I know I liked that novel when I first read it, but it can’t be good because it’s inconsistent with my theory of fiction, so I guess I won’t like it anymore.” That’s the trouble with political art and politicized criticism: they start with theory instead of experience. I can’t think of a more efficient way to make bad art.

Enough said, I hope.
UPDATE: I wish I’d known about this lecture when I wrote my original essay.

I was recently informed that my liking for the music of the big-band era proves that I was very happy in my previous life and seek to recreate its pleasures in this one. I don’t know about that, but I do know that the hours I’ve spent listening to and playing in big bands are among the happiest I’ve known. Though I love all kinds of music (O.K., make that “most kinds of music”), I find there to be something uniquely exciting about the sound of a big band in full cry, and I spend a not-inconsiderable percentage of my leisure hours seeking out that sound.

I got into an e-mail conversation the other day with a music-loving friend who is about to start a blog, and somehow or other we found ourselves chatting about our favorite big-band records. “I feel a list coming on,” I told him, and sure enough, it came. I intended to make it a top-ten list, but I ended up with a dozen items and opted not to cut two of them for purely arbitrary reasons. What’s in a number? So here are My Twelve Favorite Big-Band Recordings, As of This Minute, Subject to Change:

• Down South Camp Meetin’ (live version) (Benny Goodman, arr. Fletcher Henderson)

• For Dancers Only (Jimmie Lunceford, arr. Sy Oliver)

• Elegy (Bob Brookmeyer New Art Orchestra, arr. Brookmeyer)

• The Good Earth (Woody Herman First Herd, arr. Neal Hefti)

• Hang Gliding (Maria Schneider, arr. Schneider)

• I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart (Duke Ellington, arr. Ellington)

• The Jazz Connoisseur (Harry James, arr. Ernie Wilkins)

• Lady Chatterley’s Mother (Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band, arr. Al Cohn)

• The Maid With the Flaccid Air (Artie Shaw, arr. Eddie Sauter)

• 9:20 Special (Count Basie, arr. Buster Harding)

• Pussy Willow (Tommy Dorsey, arr. Bill Finegan)

• Robbin’s Nest (Claude Thornhill, arr. Gil Evans)

• Young Blood (Stan Kenton, arr. Gerry Mulligan)

If you’re feeling frugal, all of these tracks except for “Hang Gliding” and “The Jazz Connoisseur” can also be downloaded individually from iTunes. (Check the amazon.com links first, though, to make sure you’re purchasing the right version.)

Happy listening!

“‘You’re not going all political on me, are you? I’m not crazy about capitalist hyenas myself but I am not building any barricades. I’m allergic to sawdust.’
“‘No. Nothing like that.’
“If she was allergic to sawdust, he was allergic to revolutionaries. He had met too many on the campus. They were low on laughter and talked things through even more tediously than those who were out of touch with their true feelings. Many of them ended up in the City.”
Alan Plater, Oliver’s Travels