Archives for November 9, 2007

A nice, unintentional pairing last night: The movie version of Young Frankenstein followed by a couple chapters of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, a modern Frankenstein tale set in Scotland. (I have the Dalkey edition and, yes, it’s ugly. But still, a wonderful book that you should read!) The rental of Young Frankenstein was at the behest of Mr. Tingle whose been overworking and in need of a little Mel Brooks. This time the bit we latched onto is Cloris Leachman’s revelation about Dr. Frankenstein senior: “Yes, he was my … boyfriend!”
RELATED:
• Terry’s review of the Broadway adaptation of Young Frankenstein in today’s Wall Street Journal.
• NPR story about the show, which Mel Brooks says came about after the line he was my boyfriend got stuck in his brain. I know how you feel, Mel.

• Google the famous line from Madame Bovary — “… human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity” — and you’ll find it rendered into English numerous ways. Reading the variations one after another it becomes amusing to imagine they’re the result of a writer fiddling endlessly with a single sentence: adding, deleting, shuffling, and then changing everything back again.
First draft:
… language is a cracked kettle on which we bang our tunes to make bears dance, when what we long for is to move the stars to pity.
After a little tinkering:
. . . human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.
“Cracked tin black kettle”? No. Also, “long for”? Calm down there, Heathcliff:
“… human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity.”
Strunk the end of that sentence and we’re there:
“… human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity”
At which point the author begins to wonder if the sentence didn’t really sound better with “hammer” after all.
• I was thinking about that quote last night. I’ve been reading Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya, which collects the letters of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson during the years of their “bilaterally condescending friendship.” The back-and-forth is entertaining, and reading it I feel great affection for both men but especially old Volodya, with his superciliousness and his puns and his gliding fleet-footedness. And yet admiring him sometimes makes me feel a little like a seal barking after an opera singer, all enthusiasm and flippers, which was what brought to mind Flaubert’s dancing bears.
A couple good bits from the letters to bark at you, the first from a 1942 letter:

I have just had a visit from the secretary of the man — whatever his name — who wrote something called Tobacco Road and who is now writing a novel of Soviet Life. Vous voyez ca d’ici. He wanted to know the English spelling of “nemetzky,” “collhoz” (which he writes “kholholtz”) and such things. The hero is called Vladimir. All very simple. I was half impelled by my private devil to palm him a set of obscene words which he would use for “good morning” and “good night.” (e.g. “Razyebi tvoyu dushu,” said V. gravely.)

In the annotations, the book’s editor Simon Kardinsky identifies this last phrase as “a violent but untranslatable Russian obscenity.”
Another letter, written that same year, describes various “aberrations of Homo sap” met during a lecture tour of American universities:

1) Woman teaching Drama. Hobby: resemblance to the Duchess of Windsor. The resemblance is rather striking. When the Duchess (according to press photos) changes her coiffure, she changes it too (keeping up with her model, as some mimetic butterflies are known to do). Classifies the people she meets into a) those who mention the likeness at once; b) those who take some time to realize it; c) those who speak of it only to a third party; d) (the best) those who, in her presence, automatically refer to Wally without consciously defining the association of thoughts; and e) those who ignore it — or do not see it. She is a spinster with a few Windsors in the past, and this hobby of hers is what makes life worth living.

I filed two Wall Street Journal drama columns this week, the first one on Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll and the second, which appears in this morning’s paper, on Mel Brooks’ musical version of Young Frankenstein:

Anyone who goes to “Young Frankenstein” expecting the musical of the year is in for an unpleasant surprise: It’s one of those promising but uneven shows that, had it been written in 1957, would have been heavily doctored out of town, then brought to Broadway for a solid run. Funny it is–sometimes–but bulletproof it ain’t….
Not only is the book sorely in need of deep cutting, but the songs are neither lyrically nor melodically memorable, though a couple of them, “Join the Family Business” in particular, work well enough in the context of the show. Still, Mr. Brooks is a pasticheur, not a true songwriter, and it says everything about his strictly limited gifts that the most effective production number in the show, “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” was written by Irving Berlin….
This brings us to the not-so-small matter of the cast. “Young Frankenstein” was one of the most vividly and distinctively cast film comedies of the ’70s. Because the musical is so similar to the movie, it’s impossible not to compare the two sets of performers, and the new ones mostly suffer by contrast…
I’m not saying that “Young Frankenstein” didn’t make me laugh, but it did so in a way reminiscent of a big, stupid German shepherd who knocks you down and nuzzles your face until you finally give in and scratch its ears. I prefer comedy that doesn’t try so hard–and doesn’t have to.

The drill remains unchanged: buy a paper to read the whole thing, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to all of the Journal‘s arts coverage, both of my drama columns included. (If you’re already a subscriber to the Online Journal, the Young Frankenstein review is here.)

Most of what the National Council on the Arts does takes place behind closed doors, so I can’t tell you about it, except to say that Samuel Menashe paid us a visit and read several of his poems. Menashe is eighty-two, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and spent most of the rest of his life working in obscurity and living in a fifth-floor cold-water flat in downtown Manhattan. Now he’s famous–by the standards of contemporary poets, anyway–and has had a volume of his verse published by the Library of America, the only living poet to be so honored.
I breakfasted with Menashe twice, on Thursday and Friday, and found him utterly charming. At one point I mentioned that I played bass, and he immediately recited from memory a poem of his that compares the plucking of a bass string to the croaking of bullfrogs. I told him that Benjamin Britten had used the same sound to the same end in The Rape of Lucretia. “So my poem is true!” he said. You could have lit up a small city at midnight with the gleeful grin that flashed over his face.
Between meetings I took Hilary and a half-dozen of my fellow council members to the Phillips Collection, where we met my friend Laura Good, whom I’d last seen at our wedding. It was Hilary’s first visit to the Phillips, and she loved it. (These were her favorite paintings.)
It happens that I’d also taken Laura to the Phillips for the first time several years ago, and last week she blogged about the experience:

visiting the phillips is like visiting a childhood haunt–except that it’s a childhood haunt i didn’t find until i was a fresh-faced, 22-year-old midwestern transplant. i’d never hailed a taxi or tasted rugulach, and i’d never learned how to love meandering from room to quiet room of an art museum. i remember staring, completely confused, at cezanne’s last painting, trying to see something–anything!–while terry recited to me the painting’s history, meaning, and life, and then fell rapt and silent.
this time, though, i could see the cezanne: the fermenting colors, the lifting blue strokes, all as brisk and evocative as a real, ruddy garden–all the more urgent, perhaps, because the painter knew it would be his last canvas. as terry took off his glasses and leaned forward, i realized that i was leaning in, too: not in mimicry, but in satisfaction.

From there Hilary and I went to Megan McArdle‘s apartment to eat her fabulous cooking and meet two of her writer friends (one of whom has a blog of his own). The next morning we attended the NCA’s public meeting, where Nathan Darrow and Jessiee Datino, two fresh-faced young actors from Kansas City’s Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, gave a piping-hot performance of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, in which they appeared this past summer.
At morning’s end the council cast its votes, and Hilary and I subsequently returned to Manhattan by way of the Acela Express, Amtrak’s bumpiest train. For me it was the end of a near-uninterrupted month of travel. I slept for ten hours that night. I wanted to take the weekend off, but of course I never take weekends off: that’s when I see shows. On Saturday I went to the press preview of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, and my favorite blogger arrived the next day to spend a hectic week as my houseguest…about which more later!
(Last of five parts)

Lee Gomes recently reported in The Wall Street Journal that “those who work behind-the-mic in the music industry–producers, engineers, mixers and the like–say they increasingly assume their recordings will be heard as mp3s on an iPod music player.” The news is enraging audiophiles, who know that the highly compressed data files used to send recorded music over the Web and store it on iPods sound inferior by comparison to a digital CD. I, on the other hand, take a different view of the matter, not because I don’t appreciate high-end sound but because I’m–brace yourself–middle-aged.
Why does the fact that I’m fiftysomething have anything to do with my willingness to listen to music on an iPod? For the answer, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and turn to my “Sightings” column in the Weekend Journal section, in which I discuss the effects of presbycusis on music appreciation.
And what if you don’t know what presbycusis is? Then you really need to read my column tomorrow morning.
UPDATE: Online Journal subscribers can read this column by going here.

Inklings sans ink

Cling to the dry

Point of the pen

Whose stem I mouth

Not knowing when

The truth will out

Samuel Menashe, “Inklings”