Archives for September 2007

• Ursula K LeGuin’s tough yet clear-sighted review of Jeanette Winterson’s new sci-fi novel, The Stone God. Of the recent spate of literary writers working in genre, LeGuin writes: “I am bothered, though, by the curious ingratitude of authors who exploit a common fund of imagery while pretending to have nothing to do with the fellow-authors who created it and left it open to all who want to use it. A little return generosity would hardly come amiss.”
• The Financial Times‘ Rosie Blau lunches with Winterson at Alastair Little, in London. Winterson is charming; champagne, prawns, risotto and lost bread with honey roast plums are consumed.* (Via Light Reading.)
• Review of Alastair Little.
* Your link-gatherer is currently on a no-sugar, no-booze diet. Expect a continued bounty of food links, lingering appraisal of other people’s meals, etc., until it all goes tits-up with the order of a case of these.

Edmund White has written a fascinating piece for the NYRB on Henry James’ letters. The essay focuses on James’ and his brother William’s education, including this intriguing linguistic bit:

In 1855 [Henry James Sr.] accordingly bundled the family off to Europe–to Geneva (surely the least sensuous city on the Continent), where little Henry was taught by French-speaking governesses, then sent to the Pensionnat Roediger. When their father’s enthusiasm for this institution inevitably waned they all moved to London where tutors were engaged again, though their governess Mlle Cusin was retained and brought over from Geneva to continue teaching them French. It was during these years that the boys acquired their nearly perfect and certainly idiomatic French; the self-critical James could say, “My French astounds me–its goodness is equalled only by its badness. I can be terribly spirituel, but I can’t ask for a candlestick.”
In later years Henry would be guilty of Gallicisms (“the actual President of the United States”) and would scrawl hasty notes to himself in French. His letters in these two volumes are peppered with French phrases, two or three a page. After addressing Thomas Sergeant Perry in French for a full page, Henry (at age twenty-four) switches back to English but deplores the loss of the intimate tu (“How detestable this you seems after using the Gallic toi!”). Some of the strangeness of James’s prose in these early letters can surely be explained by his translating back into English from French. For instance, when he writes Perry in 1860 from Paris he describes what he sees out the window of his hotel and refers to “a grasp of warriors” passing by (a phrase which surely began life as une poignée de guerriers). Or when James talks of a Swiss mountain trail that took eighteen years to “pierce,” he’s obviously translating back from percer. Richardson remarks on similar mistakes in William’s English, though in his case the source of the errors was German.

I was thinking a little about this sort of thing — crossing languages and how speaking one affects the other — over the weekend. Currently, I speak appalling French and Spanish, and I’ve been considering adding some hideous Latin or Greek to the stable. Just idle, What Would George Eliot Do-type thoughts before bedtime.
If you’ve invested a lot of time with flash cards and language labs and still never cleared “appalling,” you may look for consolation. And for me, that’s come from what the other language, no matter how imperfectly mastered, has revealed or reminded me about English. Etymologies, sentence structures, relationships between word families: All of these get thrown into sharper relief. For instance, reading García Márquez in Spanish, you might come across espuma for shaving lather, and so lather and foam get tossed around in your brain for a while, in a way that is gratifying and/or makes you seem a little high, depending: Lathered waves, espuma, spume!
That’s the train of thought that got me to the Latin and Greek. I’m not sure which, if either, I’ll try to learn (recommendations are welcome). For now I’ve been entertaining myself with the various Amazon reviews on the different textbooks (Teach Yourself Pig Latin in a Day!) available.* Here’s an excerpt from a review of Introduction to Attic Greek:

I’m not sure how to answer the chap who thinks learning a language ought to be a distractingly entertaining experience. But let me try. Language learning can indeed be accompanied by merriment at times, usually during the immersion phase and often at the expense of the learner. I’m afraid we’ve missed that boat by a couple millennia. If the pure cerebral rush that comes with the gradual mastery of the inner logic and outer mechanics of your target language is not sufficient stimulation in itself, then the learner might be better advised to stick to Spanish, where he can start pretending to make sentences almost from the outset.

Something to keep in mind.
(Link to White article via Maud.)
* I really love reading Amazon reviews — I don’t know why, possibly because I don’t get out much: It’s people-watching for agoraphobics. Like sitting on a bus where everybody around you is talking about books (and Harriet Klausner rides every line). For a long time my favorite was one that took Zadie Smith to task for not writing well enough about menopause in On Beauty. It was the abundance of clinical detail that really made the case.

“Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I often have occasion to make favorable mention in this space and elsewhere of Think Denk, Jeremy Denk’s witty blog about “the glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.” Not long ago our mutual friend Anya Grundmann, who helps run the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera, invited the two of us to appear jointly at the next institute to talk about blogging. We live in the same neighborhood but had never met, so I invited Mr. Think Denk to tour the Teachout Museum and have lunch with me at Good Enough to Eat. It took us several weeks to come up with a mutually compatible date–we’ve both been on the road for much of the summer–but we finally managed to converge on Friday afternoon.
No sooner had I opened the door to my apartment than we started pelting one another with opinions, some of which we shared (four thumbs up for Verdi’s Falstaff) and some not (he likes Ives and Schumann a lot more than I do). The talk was more or less nonstop, though we did pause long enough to cram down lunch and listen to four records that came up in the conversation:
• Van Cliburn playing the first movement of the Barber Piano Sonata
• Gérard Souzay’s 1946 recording of Fauré’s “Clair de lune”
• A 1909 recording of Reynaldo Hahn’s “Offrande” sung by the composer to his own piano accompaniment
• A recording of “Quand’ero paggio,” an aria from Falstaff, made in 1907 by Victor Maurel, the baritone who created the role fourteen years earlier
Mr. Think Denk is every bit as smart and thoughtful in person as you’d expect from reading his blog. Time was when this might have surprised me, but experience has taught me that such is usually the case with the best bloggers. Alas, I’m afraid I talked his ear off about The Letter–I’d had an unusually productive work session with Paul Moravec the day before and was still booming and zooming as a result–but he was kind enough to act interested and ask leading questions, to which I obligingly responded by hosing him down with superfluous information. (At least I stayed off the subject of Louis Armstrong’s embouchure!)
No doubt one of the secondary reasons for my garrulity was that I’d finally managed to lick the case of allergy-heightened, stress-exacerbated sniffles that tore a hole in the past two weeks of my life. As usual I celebrated by revving up my engine: on Saturday I took a train to Baltimore to see CenterStage’s production of Arsenic and Old Lace, and the next day I was back in New York for a press preview of Dividing the Estate, Horton Foote’s new play. This week I’ll be writing three pieces, seeing two more shows, and paying a visit to the Armstrong Archives at Queens College.
Whatever else my life is or isn’t, it’s definitely not dull. Neither Mr. Think Denk nor I can still quite believe that people actually pay us to do what we do. Yes, I work too damn hard and don’t always take proper care of myself, but I suspect that the sheer pleasure of spending my days immersed in art up to the eyebrows offsets no small part of the resulting wear and tear.
It’s nice to be myself again.

I just got word that another book tentatively called Hotter Than That will be published around the time that my Louis Armstrong biography of the same name will be coming out from Harcourt. No, it’s not an Armstrong biography, but it is about jazz trumpet, which suggests that I may need to come up with another title. The prospect doesn’t unnerve me–my Mencken biography was retitled The Skeptic after I turned the manuscript in to HarperCollins–but it’s not too soon for me to be thinking about a new name, so I thought I’d share my problem with the readers of this blog.

“Hotter Than That” is, of course, the title of one of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings of 1928, so I went through the Armstrong discography to see if any other title leaped out at me. These caught my eye:

• King of the Zulus
• Fireworks
• That Rhythm Man
• You Rascal, You
• Laughin’ Louie
• Song of the Vipers (or, alternatively, “King of the Vipers,” which was one of Armstrong’s many nicknames)
• I’m Shootin’ High
• Jubilee

Your thoughts?

“Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.”
André Maurois, The Art of Writing

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to out-of-town productions of a pair of infrequently revived shows, William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life and Stephen Sondheim’s musical version of Merrily We Roll Along:

Few artists have been done dirtier by posterity than William Saroyan. For a time he was one of America’s best-known writers, and “The Time of Your Life,” his most successful play, won a Pulitzer in 1940. But then America fell out of love with Saroyan, and he had lapsed into half-remembered obscurity long before his death in 1981. Not even “The Time of Your Life” has held the stage, and when the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, one of the best companies in the New York area, announced a revival, I was eager to see what they would do with a play so completely out of favor. The good news is that it has turned out to be far more theatrically potent than I could possibly have imagined.
On paper there’s nothing much to “The Time of Your Life,” which is set in a seedy San Francisco bar just after the start of World War II. Joe (Andrew Weems) sits and guzzles champagne as a string of variously eccentric drinkers come and go. At play’s end he rouses himself from his sozzled torpor, does a good turn for an unhappy whore (Sofia Jean Gomez), and returns at last to the world he had renounced. That’s all there is to it, really–except for the goofy good humor with which Saroyan portrays the patrons of Nick’s Pacific Street Saloon. From Harry (Blake Hackler), the hapless hoofer who longs to be a comedian but is utterly unfunny, to Kit Carson (Edmond Genest), a half-senile old man who claims to have been a sharpshooting pioneer, Saroyan fills the stage with characters whose cockeyed charm wins you over….
Like the 1934 George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play on which it is based, “Merrily We Roll Along” runs in reverse: It starts in the present, showing us the hollow triumph of a songwriter who gave up music to become a Hollywood producer, then turns back the clock so that we can watch him selling out by installments. The score is one of Mr. Sondheim’s strongest, but the show’s unrelieved pessimism and structural trickery turned off Broadway audiences, and the original 1980 production closed after just 16 performances.
Fortunately, Mr. Sondheim and George Furth (who had previously collaborated on “Company”) kept on tinkering with “Merrily.” In time they came up with a much-altered version meant to make us care about the fate of Franklin Shepard (Will Gartshore), the Sondheim-like songwriter who, unlike his creator, betrays his art (and friends and lovers) by jettisoning his idealism and going for the gold. In this revised, slimmed-down version, the show’s ironic arc–it begins in bitter disillusion and moves “forward” to a happy “ending” full of youthful hope for the future–now makes dramatic and emotional sense.
Eric Schaeffer, who as artistic director of Signature Theatre has earned a well-deserved national reputation for his Sondheim stagings, has opted this time for a bare-bones production similar in feel to a semi-staged concert version. It is, alas, too obviously based on John Doyle’s recent Broadway revival of “Company,” right down to the big black piano at center stage…

No free link–yet–so buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column–and the rest of the Journal‘s arts section–on the spot. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

“Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.”
William Saroyan (quoted in the New York Journal-American, Aug. 23, 1961)