Archives for September 2007

Over at Shaken & Stirred, Gwenda shares her list of books currently out from the library. Here’s my own. I suppose this sort of thing is open to the same criticisms as the posting of random iPod lists but whatevs: Viva List Fancy!
• Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal by Toni Bentley: After a break of a kazillion years, I start ballet class again this Thursday. Stasis in darkness./ Then the substanceless blue/Pour of tor and distances., etc. Preparations have included reading this memoir (mentioned by Terry in a recent WSJ column), watching Elusive Muse, some light stretching, and resumption of a prodigious cocaine habit.
• Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum: Recommended by Bookslut; I was smitten as soon as Alfred Russel Wallace came waltzing in in Chapter 1.
• March by Geraldine Brooks
• Castle by David Macaulay and Castle by Christopher Gravett: We’re installing a moat.
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
• A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel: Because; see also Robert Birnbaum’s great interview with Manguel.
• A Kierkegaard Anthology by Søren Kierkegaard: Untouched, forlorn. Weirdly, it never seems the right night to go to bed with Kierkegaard.
• Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• Paula Spencer by Roddy Doyle: The sequel to The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. We’re reading it this semester in writing class.
• The Golden Compass [sound recording] by Philip Pullman
• Appointment with Death [sound recording] by Agatha Christie
Holds
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov: The Mirra Ginsburg translation I own is choppy so I’m test-driving the Michael Glenny translation, recommended here (although I also wish to try the Burgin/Tiernan O’Connor translation before purchasing either). Nice discussion of the merits of the various English translations in the novel’s Wikipedia entry. All in all, an excruciating decision!
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
• The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander
• The Catalogue of the Universe by Margaret Mahy
• The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred by Carl-Johan Vallgren: My mum’s favorite book read this year. She compares it to Winter’s Tale and Love in the Time of Cholera, with Geek Love base notes.

“Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”
Aldous Huxley, Music at Night

A friend writes:

You need to be kept on a somewhat shorter leash–which is what you promised to do for yourself a while back but forgive me for doubting that you even know what the words mean.

Well, maybe.
Ever since taking that unscheduled ambulance ride a year and a half ago, I’ve mostly steered clear of the state of sped-up, work-obsessed lunacy in which I once passed too many of my waking hours. On occasion, though, things still get out of hand, usually when a harmonic convergence of my various print-media deadlines causes them all to fall in a single week.
This happened to me last week, during which I did the following things:
• Saw four shows.
• Wrote four pieces, two of them (totaling three thousand words) in a single day.
• Polished the first six chapters of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong to a high gloss.
• Spent all of Thursday at the Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark, where I took copious notes on eight oral-history transcripts, seven uncollected magazine articles about Louis Armstrong, and some twenty-odd books in which he figures more or less significantly.
• Interviewed Joe Muranyi, the last clarinetist of Armstrong’s All Stars, with which he played from 1967 to the trumpeter’s death in 1971.
• Caught up with a friend whom I hadn’t seen for a year.
• Went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Sunday to see one of the aforementioned shows, Don Juan Giovanni.
Tomorrow I’ll be making my circuitous way to Hartford, Connecticut, where I’ll be seeing Hal Holbrook in Our Town. On Saturday it’s Madison, New Jersey, where the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey is putting on a rare revival of William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life. The very next day I head down to Arlington, Virginia, to see Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.
All of which should suggest to the dullest of readers that I’m feeling the least little bit stressed. Right? Yes–and no. After a frustratingly long layoff, I’m now piling up pages of Hotter Than That with exhilarating speed, and making discoveries about Louis Armstrong that keep me in a constant state of excitement. I’ve seen a bunch of good shows lately, and expect to see a bunch more in coming weeks. And The Letter is thundering down the tracks like greased lightning on slick wheels.
All in all, life is pretty good these days, so I’m not complaining–but I do think I could use a day or two off. Or three.
OGIC and CAAF will amuse you until Monday. Or maybe Tuesday.

“I’m a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy.”
Oscar Levant (quoted in Time, May 5, 1958)

Contentions, the Web site of Commentary, posted my second videoblog, taped in the living room of my Upper West Side apartment, on Friday. In it I discuss Alan Gilbert’s recent appointment as music director of the New York Philharmonic, about which I’ve just written for the September issue of Commentary.
I also talk about Clement Greenberg and middlebrow culture, Luciana Souza’s new CD, the inexplicable success of a Broadway show I panned, and one of my favorite pieces in the Teachout Museum, Milton Avery’s March at a Table.
To watch this interview, go here.
Stick around to the very end–Robert Peach, the producer, tacked on a blooper! No, I didn’t break anything….

I was never a fan of the plays of Arthur Miller, or of the man himself. Thus I’m as fascinated as everyone else by the recent revelation that he wrote his handicapped son out of his life. I haven’t had anything to say about it in print, though, because it happens that I wrote a “Sightings” column last summer in which I discussed in detail the problem of what to do when an artist is discovered to have dirty moral laundry:

To be sure, few major artists have been known for their goodness, but nowadays we seem quicker than ever to render summary judgment on their failings. Should we be more careful about throwing stones? The next time you’re tempted to do so, consider these five caveats:
• Be historically aware. Judging the sins of the past by the standards of the present can be a shortcut to self-righteousness. Make sure you have all the facts–and that you understand their historical context–before passing sentence. Robert Conquest, author of “The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties,” was reluctant to condemn the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko for toadying to his Soviet masters. “We might yet accept,” he explained, “that in Soviet circumstances [Yevtushenko’s] record, with all its shifts and compromises, may merit, on balance, a positive assessment.” As Mr. Conquest knew, Soviet artists like Yevtushenko and Dmitri Shostakovich lived in fear of being jailed–or shot–for saying the wrong thing. Are you sure you would have done differently in similar circumstances?
• Don’t lose your sense of proportion. Yes, Mark Twain used the word “nigger” in “Huckleberry Finn.” So what? It’s still the great American novel–as well as a powerful indictment of racism. To criticize it because it contains a once-common word now considered offensive is a prime example of political correctness run amuck.
• Remember the Golden Rule. As Somerset Maugham said, “I do not believe that there is any man, who if the whole truth were known of him, would not seem a monster of depravity.” When you read about the alleged misconduct of an artist, ask yourself how you’d look if your private life and thoughts were put on public display.
• The work is what matters most… Pablo Picasso treated women like dirt–but does that make “Three Musicians” a bad painting? Richard Wagner hated Jews–but does that make “Tristan und Isolde” a bad opera?
• …but artists are human beings, too. George Bernard Shaw was a loyal supporter of Soviet Communism who looked the other way when Stalin started piling up corpses. That doesn’t justify a ban on performances of “Pygmalion,” but it does mean–and should mean–that there will always be a blood-red asterisk next to Shaw’s name in the literary record book. The ability to make great art excuses no man his basic human responsibilities.

The occasion for that column was the news that Günter Grass had kept secret his wartime membership in the Waffen-SS. This is how it ended:

As for Günter Grass, I won’t deny that his plight filled me with the unholy joy at the spectacle of another man’s discomfort that Germans call schadenfreude. (It figures that they’d have a word for it.) Few things in life are more satisfying than to see a hypocrite slitted with his own sword. But I know, too, that the German historian Michael Wolffsohn got it right when he said that Mr. Grass’ “moralizing life’s work, though not his storytelling life’s work, is devalued by his persistent silence.” I’m no fan of his novels, but even if I were, I hope I’d know better than to confuse them with their author. One of the enduring mysteries of beautiful art is that it can be made by ugly souls.

I don’t think Arthur Miller made beautiful art. Judging by the Vanity Fair piece that revealed to the world the heartless way in which he treated his fourth child, it would appear that his soul was no more beautiful. I wish these two things were necessarily related. That would make the world a more orderly and intelligible place. But they aren’t, and–alas–it isn’t.

“Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: ‘It’s four o’clock…At five I have my abyss.'”
Colette, The Pure and the Impure