Archives for October 2007

“Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.”
Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New

I finally made it to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I found in my e-mailbox this communication from a woman who works in the permissions department of W.W. Norton:

I am writing in regards to a permission granted by you for use of your material in The Norton Reader, 12th Edition. The book has recently been published and I am attempting to pay permissions fees. Before our accounting department can issue a check, they require that we have a W-9 tax form on file for your organization. I have attached the form to this letter. If you would be so kind as to fill the form out and then either fax, email, or mail it to my attention, I will be able to mail your check.

Not only had I forgotten that one of my pieces was picked for the new edition of The Norton Reader, but I couldn’t remember which one it was, and I spent ten minutes rooting around on the Web before I finally found a list of the book’s contents. (It comes out in December.) It seems that I’m to be in fast company: The Beatles Now, an essay I published in Commentary last year, will appear alongside Aaron Copland’s “How We Listen,” William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Paul Fussell’s “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” Zora Neale Hurston’s “How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” Vladimir Nabokov’s “Good Readers and Good Writers,” John Henry Newman’s “Knowledge and Virtue,” George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” James Thurber’s “University Days,” Eudora Welty’s “One Writer’s Beginnings,” E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Virginia Woolf’s “In Search of a Room of One’s Own,” and–wait for it–the Gettysburg Address.

This is, as it happens, my first appearance in a textbook, and though I confess to never having heard of The Norton Reader prior to being asked to give my permission to appear in it, the publishers describe the volume in impressive-sounding terms:

Read by millions of students since it was first published in 1965, The Norton Reader is the bestselling collection of its kind. With readings in a wide variety of genres, subjects, and styles, it offers the largest and most thoughtfully chosen collection of essays for composition students today. The Twelfth Edition has been carefully revised, with 25 percent of its readings new.

Alas, a closer look at the contents of the new edition reveals that some of the company I’m keeping isn’t quite as fast as I’d like. Indeed, the more recent selections are so sharply skewed in a philosophical direction far removed from the one to which I incline that I wonder whether I might possibly have been included for purposes of tokenism. That, too, is a new experience, one I can’t say I much care for, any more than I get all warm and fuzzy at the thought of snuggling up next to Garrison Keillor, Molly Ivins, and Alice Walker.

Nor am I altogether pleased to be represented by “The Beatles Now,” Yes, it’s a solid piece of work, and I stand by its contents, but had I been asked to pick an essay of mine for inclusion in a college textbook, it wouldn’t have been that one. Of the various pieces I included in A Terry Teachout Reader, the ones I like best are “The Land of No Context,” “Stephen Sondheim’s Unsettled Scores,” “That Nice Elvis Boy,” “What Randolph Scott Knew,” and (of the more explicitly personal essays) “Close to Home” and “The Importance of Being Less Earnest,” all of which seem to me to be more representative of the way I write and think than “The Beatles Now.”

Be that as it may, I don’t mind admitting that it’s kind of cool to be in a book whose previous editions have been “read by millions of students,” voluntarily or otherwise. I wonder, too, if anybody is actually going to teach me. Needless to say, I’ve assigned pieces of mine in classes that I’ve taught, but so far as I know, no one else has ever done so. I’m trying to imagine what a teacher might say about me–or, better yet, a test question based on my work. Which of the following phrases does Terry Teachout overuse in his writing? (A) “Be that as it may.” (B) “Needless to say.” (C) “As it happens.” (D) All of the above.

So yes, it’s an honor–of sorts–to be in The Norton Reader. The trouble is that it also makes me feel less like a person and more like a personage, the same way I feel when someone goes out of his way to call me “Mister Teachout,” or recognizes me in an elevator from having seen the (awful) picture that accompanies my Saturday columns in the Wall Street Journal. The only thing I find more disorienting is to be written about, however enthusiastically, by a total stranger. Who is this guy? I always ask myself when it happens–and I’m not talking about the person who’s writing about me, either.

I’d like to meet this semi-public figure who looks just like me but (judging by what I read about him on occasion) doesn’t always think what I think. I bet he gets tired of saying “T-E-A-C-H-O-U-T–just like it sounds” to operators, or telling earnest young things not to call him mister, for God’s sake. I’d like to know who wrote his Wikipedia entry, and how he got into the twelfth edition of The Norton Reader. I bet it’s a good story. Or maybe not.

To quote from another of my pieces:

I suppose it’s possible for a playwright to write a good play about a writer, but the temptation to sink into a nice warm bath of self-serving self-indulgence is apparently too great for ordinary mortals to overcome. Harold Ross knew this so well that he turned it into an iron rule for contributors to the New Yorker: “Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer.”

That means you, Mister Teachout.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

• Pygmalion (comedy, G, suitable for mature and intelligent young people, reviewed here)

• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY:

• Dividing the Estate (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

“Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one’s own.”
Moss Hart, Act One

My latest videoblog for The Horizon, Commentary‘s artblog, has just been posted. In it I talk about Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Pygmalion, two new books about postmodern architecture and the life of Shakespeare, the most memorable thing that happened at my wedding ceremony, and the latest addition to what I’m now calling the Teachouts’ Museum, a lithograph by Toko Shinoda.
To view it, go here.

I love teaching, and one of the few things I dislike about my professional life is that it keeps me too busy for part-time classroom stints. Once a year, though, I work off some of my frustration by leading a hands-on seminar in journalistic criticism at the NEA’s Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera, which is where I was yesterday morning. I spent three very intense hours working with six very smart critics, and enjoyed myself enormously. The only problem was that I had to get up early to write the first half of my Wall Street Journal drama column, then rush home after the seminar to finish it up and send it off to my editor.
Now I’m in Minneapolis, where I’ll be seeing Brian Friel’s new play this afternoon, then flying down to St. Louis immediately after the show and driving from there to Smalltown, U.S.A., to spend a couple of days telling my mother all about the Big Event. On Saturday I return to New York, and the next day I’ll be seeing Kevin Kline in the Broadway revival of Cyrano de Bergerac.
I could stand a day off, or even two. More important, though, I haven’t seen Mrs. T for a week and a half, and I miss her sorely. She was supposed to be accompanying me on my latest sprint through the hinterlands, but illness intervened, so I’ll be seeing The Home Place by myself, and listening to the car radio as I make my way from St. Louis to Smalltown instead of chatting happily about nothing in particular. It’s funny how fast you get used to not being alone.
Of course I still have the best job in the world–I can’t believe I’m getting paid to see two Brian Friel plays and a Stephen Sondheim musical in one week–but as Joni Mitchell once put it, The bed’s too big/The frying pan’s too wide. I’ll be glad when both are full again.

“A small town is automatically a world of pretense. Since everyone knows everyone else’s business, it becomes the job of the populace to act as if they don’t know what is going on instead of its being their job to try to find out.”
Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View

• In the Times of London, John Carey reviews The Letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid, and makes me want to read it rather desperately. (Via Paper Cuts.)
Earlier this month The Telegraph ran a three-part serial of excerpts from the letters: Part 1; Part 2; and Part 3. Not surprisingly, the extracts focus on Hughes’ letters to and about Sylvia Plath, a relationship that, for me, has long been picked clean — I believe Gwyneth declaiming Shakespeare by candlelight marked the official end — but it may be worth the occasional bite of carrion for lines like: “Sometimes I think Cambridge wonderful, at others a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died” (from a letter to his sister Olywn); and, from a letter to Plath, “Who does Salinger copy? or Eudora Welty? All the good ones have invented their own manner in their own private rooms. … Just write it off, in your own way, and make it stand up off the page and jump about the room.”
• The New York Times archives on Hughes are a trove, containing the first chapter of his Ovid translation as well as W.S. Merwin’s review, in 1957, of Hughes’s first book of poems. The review begins:

Ted Hughes is a young English poet; “The Hawk in the Rain” is his first book. Its publication gives reviewers an opportunity to do what they are always saying they want to do: acclaim an exciting new writer. There is no need, either to shelter in the flubbed and wary remark that the poems are promising. They are that, of course; they are unmistakably a young man’s poems, which accounts for some of their defects as well as some of their strength and brilliance. And Mr. Hughes has the kind of talent that makes you wonder more than commonly where he will go from here, not because you can’t guess but because you venture to hope.