Archives for October 2007

Baseball is done for the season — sad, but also a relief as it had become like a vortex that sucked three to four hours out of each day. A side observation: If you’re a writer who struggles with titles (“‘Smoke.’ No, wait: ‘Revelation.’“), you might want to turn on a game. Over the past few weeks I noticed that good novel titles were just tripping off the tongues of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver (particularly McCarver’s), and I began to wonder if generating novel titles is perhaps a natural gift of sports broadcasters, one that waits to be tapped by arty America.
Admittedly, Buck and McCarver’s titles are a little repetitive in construction, but they show a good sense of the commercial market, and, if you’re really blocked, Joe and Tim are even kind enough to sketch out a rough storyline that could be used as a starter to get you typing. Thanks to them, I now have an idea for a ranging baseball trilogy, along the lines of William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle, composed of these titles:
• The Wildness of Fausto Carmona: A Thorn Birds-y saga of innocence lost at the ALCS.
• The Free Spirit of Jonathan Papelbon: They tried to tame him. They failed.
• The Unpredictable Strike Zone of Chuck Meriweather: A heavily philosophical novel, almost Eastern European in tone, exposing a universe where a capricious god rules from behind the plate.
I haven’t yet watched a football game with this theory in mind, but I’m looking forward to hearing what novel titles Madden comes up with. With Vitale, of course, all you’d get is Diaper Dandy and everyone knows Dick Lit doesn’t sell.

I flew back from Smalltown, U.S.A., on Saturday night, and was reunited with Mrs. T (whom I hadn’t seen since our honeymoon, arrgh) shortly thereafter. This afternoon I’m headed for Washington, D.C., the last in a more or less nonstop series of out-of-town trips that got underway two days after our wedding.
I like travel, especially when I get to see good shows on the road, but right now I’m so tired of living out of a suitcase that I could just…well, unpack. I’m equally tired of blogging in departure lounges, writing columns in hotel rooms, and reading review copies on airplanes. I’m not exactly a homebody–I actually get a kick out of staying in hotels–but I miss sitting on my couch and looking at the art on the walls. I miss sitting in my nice black Eames chair and listening to mp3 files on my Bose speakers as I click away at my MacBook. I miss popping over to Good Enough to Eat in between deadlines. I miss Central Park. I even miss my gym.
Alas, I’m going to have to keep on missing these things until Friday night, for I have to attend a meeting of the National Council on the Arts in Washington. The good news, however, is as follows:
• Mrs. T has recovered from her virus and will be accompanying me.
• I’ll be taking her to the Phillips Collection (it’s her first visit!) and the National Gallery (we’re going to look at the Turner and Hopper retrospectives) in between NCA sessions.
• Ms. Asymmetrical Information, whom we last saw at the wedding, is throwing us a small dinner party.
Would I rather stay at home–or, better yet, in Connecticut, eating Mrs. T’s cooking and working on my Louis Armstrong book? You bet. But since we’ve got to go, we’re going to make the most of it, after which I plan to stay in New York for two whole weeks.
More as it happens….

“Do you happen to know the year when your father was born?” I asked my mother the other day.

“No, I don’t,” she said after a moment’s thought. We then spent the next half-hour sifting through various stacks of papers in a vain attempt to pin down the date. My guess, though, is that he must have been born some time around 1900, since my mother, the fourth of six siblings, was born in 1929.

Here are some other things that happened in 1900:

• William McKinley was elected to a second term as president of the United States. (He beat William Jennings Bryan.)

• Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Sullivan died.

• Aaron Copland and the Ayatollah Khomeini were born.

• Carrie Nation smashed up twenty-five saloons.

• Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams.

• Joseph Conrad published Lord Jim.

• Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca was premiered in Rome.

• Kodak introduced the Brownie, the first hand-held camera.

• Construction began on the New York subway system.

My mother’s life, in short, is a bridge between two profoundly, almost unimaginably different worlds. A child of the Great Depression, she was raised on a farm and baptized in a river, and has lived long enough to watch me talk on a computer screen, though she’s never owned a computer of her own. Cake mixes and air conditioning are more her speed. The most recent inventions of any significance that she embraced wholeheartedly were the answering machine, the ATM, and the VCR. (She has a DVD player but never uses it.)

I suppose we all reach a moment in our lives when we lose interest in the new, and I suspect that moment comes sooner for technology than for art. For now I seem to be staying fairly open to new things–my experience as a blogger suggests as much–but I have yet to send my first text message, nor does my somewhat superannuated cellphone contain a digital camera. On the increasingly rare occasions when I feel the need to take a picture of something, I buy a disposable film camera, the postmodern equivalent of a Brownie, at the corner drugstore.

I have, alas, no children to take pictures of, but I do have a nineteen-year-old niece, and I wonder whether her offspring (assuming that she has children and that my life overlaps with theirs) will be no less bemused to recall that they once met a man who was born in the same year that Elvis Presley recorded “Heartbreak Hotel.” Somehow I doubt it, and it’s by no means certain that they’ll remember anything about me at all. My mother’s father, after all, died when I was six years old, and I have only the vaguest and most shadowy memories of him. He played the banjo, but I never saw him do so, nor do I remember the sound of his voice. I wish I did, for my mother loved him very much and still speaks of him with a warmth undiminished by the passage of time.

Philip Larkin wrote a poem called An Arundel Tomb that reflects on such memories, and its last line often comes to my mind now that I’m middle-aged:What will survive of us is love. That is all that survives of Albert Crosno, my banjo-playing maternal grandfather: love, three living children, and a few faded photographs. I can think of worse legacies.

“Reading is rapture (or if it isn’t, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). A felicitously turned sentence can induce it. Or a description. Or unexpected behavior. Or ordinary behavior raised to the nth degree. Or intolerable suspense, as with the second half of Conrad’s Victory. Or the forward movement of prose that is bent only on saying what the writer has to say. Or dialogue that carries with it the unconscious flowering of character. Or, sometimes, a fact.”
William Maxwell, The Outermost Dream (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

The New York Philharmonic is currently discussing a possible visit to Pyongyang with the North Korean government and the U.S. State Department. I’ve been thinking about the matter for the past couple of weeks, and the result is the “Sightings” column that appears in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Should the Philharmonic perform under the auspices of what may be the world’s most repressive government? The answer isn’t as obvious as you might think–no matter what you think.
To find out where I stand, pick up a copy of the Saturday Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Weekend Journal” section.
UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has posted a free link to this piece:

What would you have thought if Franklin Roosevelt had encouraged the Philharmonic to accept an official invitation to play in Berlin in the spring of 1939? Do you think such a concert would have softened the hearts of the Nazis, any more than Jesse Owens’s victories in the 1936 Olympics changed their minds about racial equality? Or inspired the German people to rise up and revolt against Adolf Hitler? Or saved a single Jewish life?
The New York Philharmonic and the Bush administration would do well to ponder these questions before consenting to put America’s oldest orchestra at the service of the man who turned off all the lights in North Korea.

To read the whole thing, go here.

Playing in the gutters over at TEV, I came across this little gem, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement in 2001 and kindly reproduced by Mark in the comments to a recent discussion. I like Elmore Leonard novels but I hate rules for fiction, which so often read like instructions for making a polyester blend sweater: Follow them unswervingly and you will end up with something serviceable, yes, but a little slick and uniform and itchy.* So this was satisfying:

NB J.C. 27 July 2001 
The fashionable crime writer Elmore Leonard has published his ten rules for writing fiction. Here they are: 1. Never open a book with weather. 2. Avoid prologues. 3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. 4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”. 5. Keep your exclamation marks under control. 6. Never use the word “suddenly”. 7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. 9. Ditto, places and things. 10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. 
The eleventh rule is: If you come across lists such as this, ignore them. The rules may sound sensible enough, but, with the exception of No 5, each could be replaced with its opposite, and still be reasonable advice. Leonard complains that, while reading a book by Mary McCarthy, he had to “stop and get the dictionary” – as if it were a form of pain (William Faulkner, who broke most of these rules whenever he wrote, complained of Hemingway that he “never used a word you had to look up in the dictionary”). And what is meant by “leave out the part that readers tend to skip”? If every writer tried to be as exciting as Leonard, there would be no Brothers Karamazov, no Anna Karenina (remember those exquisitely boring sections on agronomy?), and the shelf reserved for Dickens or Balzac would measure about a foot. Banish patois, and we lose a library of fiction stretching from Huckleberry Finn to Trainspotting. As for dialogue, if Leonard samples Henry James, he will find “remarked”, “answered”, “interposed”, “almost groaned”, “wonderingly asked”, “said simply”, “sagely risked” and many more colourful carriers (these from a page or two of Roderick Hudson). Should they all be ironed out into “said”?

As for the first rule, see the opening of Bleak House.
* As I prepare this post, a hyperbolic amount of ire keeps creeping in. I keep wanting to type things like “bane” and “vile” and “slavish devotion to mediocrity,” like there is a tiny English countess inside me who really has it in for writing rules. (Her glittering opus rejected, her resplendent accounts of the weather unhailed.) I blame too many workshops spent across the table from adherents to the rule that the active voice is always better than the passive voice. The countess says: Their heads would be better off.

Chicago is hot! Read all about it in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I review Chicago Shakespeare’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Passion and Strawdog Theatre Company’s revival of Brian Friel’s Aristocrats:

Chicago Shakespeare’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion” gains immeasurably from being performed not in the company’s grand Elizabethan-style theater but in its upstairs house, a black-box performing space that has been set up for this production in a compact three-quarter-round seating arrangement. Taking his cue from the space, Gary Griffin, the Chicago director best known to New York audiences for his work on “The Color Purple,” has reconceived “Passion” as a chamber piece accompanied by five instrumentalists, with results as illuminating as were John Doyle’s similarly scaled productions of “Sweeney Todd” and “Company.”
Part of what makes “Passion” so well suited to such treatment is that it its scale is already modest–though the emotions it portrays are unabashedly operatic. One way to approach this 1994 Sondheim-James Lapine collaboration is as a trope on a couplet by W.H. Auden: “If equal affection cannot be,/Let the more loving one be me.” Here the unequal partner is the sickly, unattractive Fosca (Ana Gasteyer), who becomes obsessed with Giorgio (Adam Brazier), a handsome soldier who is having an affair with Clara (Kathy Voytko), a beautiful but unhappy bride who cannot live with Giorgio save at the cost of losing her child. Fosca’s passion is so violent and all-consuming that it threatens her life. It also proves seductive to Giorgio, who has never known the disorienting sensation of being loved without limit: “Loving you/Is not a choice/And not much reason/To rejoice,/But it gives me purpose,/Gives me voice,/To say to the world:/This is why I live.”
Nothing in Ms. Gasteyer’s oddly miscellaneous resume–among other things, she spent six years on “Saturday Night Live”–prepared me for her anguished performance as Fosca, a notoriously difficult role which she interprets as memorably as did Donna Murphy and Patti LuPone before her….
If you think Chicago Shakespeare’s upstairs theater is snug, wait till you see the headquarters of Strawdog Theatre Company, an L-shaped black box in a dingy storefront walkup. Yet that company, which is celebrating its 20th season, has a reputation that lured me to its production of “Aristocrats,” Brian Friel’s great 1979 play about a family of Irish Catholics who have sunk from upper-middle-class comfort into desperately shabby gentility. Rarely have my expectations been more satisfyingly surpassed. Strawdog’s “Aristocrats” is one of those revivals so excellent as to leave a critic with nothing much to do but order you to drop everything and go see it at once–and its excellence, like that of “Passion,” is deeply rooted in its clarifying smallness of scale. I saw it from the front row of the theater, sitting within arm’s length of a cast whose acting was so direct and unmannered that I felt as though I were dining with them….

No free link. Do it. (If you’re already a subscriber to the Online Journal, the column is here.)