Archives for November 2007

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
Samuel Johnson, review of Soame Jenyns, “A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil” (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

A couple prize items that arrived in the mail this week:
• The “Fantastic Women” issue of Tin House, which looks wonderful.
• The Letters of Ted Hughes. After mentioning coveting this book a couple weeks ago, I broke down and purchased it from Amazon UK. (I dread my next credit card statement, when my total will have been converted from pounds into euros into dollars. The VAT alone is roughly one hundred million dollars.)
Both of these now sit in the living room, poised to play their part in the eventual book avalanche .

• Michael Gorra’s lovely appreciation of the town libraries of New England includes a “search for a library that doesn’t exist”: the library that appears in Edith Wharton’s novel Summer.
• In an address given at Amherst College, Marilynne Robinson describes long hours spent in the campus’s Frost Library (this was in the years following the publication of Housekeeping):

I was teaching a creative writing class at the time, and then descending to the dim interior of the library to read up on the political thought of Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding, to slog through Frederick Eden, Thomas Carlyle and the Fabians. During this time I read the first volume of Capital and a number of the books that Marx notes, including England and America, by Edward Wakefield, which prompts the most direct discussion of the United States to occur in Capital (though Marx wrote a great deal elsewhere about America and for American publication). I read Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith. I found and read forgotten writers mentioned by those writers whose work is still invoked by educated people, though, as I learned again and again, it is actually read somewhere between seldom and never.
I was reading my way through what is called the dismal science–no science at all but thoroughly dismal. Its innumerable contributors called it political economy. This immersion of mine was a strange project by any standard, made satisfying by the fact that Frost Library was almost always equal to the demands I made on it. So passed a certain percentage of my relative youth.

Related: DFW votaries may recall mentions of Frost Library in a couple interviews, including Wallace’s appearance on The Charlie Rose Show, where he describes himself as having been “a library weenie from the lower level of Frost Library at Amherst College.”
These notes about Frost interest me because I went to Amherst and still have dreams about the library’s lower levels. These levels are located below ground, and they’re like distinct continents: No natural light, so a land of books and moles and carrel fiefdoms. During my time, at least one floor had mobile shelves (similar to this system but infinitely more ancient and jerry-rigged in appearance) and I used to worry about dying a horrible death trapped between two colliding shelves, which made me highly alert when foraging for any sound that might indicate the shelves were about to move. However, as far as I know, Frost has yet to record a fatality. In the catalog of bibliophiliac-related paranoias, this one belongs next to the fear of death by book avalanche in one’s living room.

I had to get up extra-early today to write my Friday drama column, so I took a look at “About Last Night”‘s register of overnight visitors and saw that we’d been read by people in Amsterdam, Bangalore, Bangkok, Cambridge (the English one), Johannesburg, Kiev, Melbourne, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Seoul, Vancouver, and the countries of Botswana, China, Grenada, Malaysia, and New Zealand. Not to mention Akron, Ohio; Arlington, Texas; Barboursville, Virginia; Bloomington, Indiana; Moberly, Missouri; Pelham, New Hampshire; Sandy, Utah; Thousand Oaks, California; Tucson, Arizona; and Waukegan, Illinois.
From all of us to all of you, good morning!
UPDATE: Hey, somebody noticed!

Most shows currently playing on Broadway have been closed until further notice by the stagehands’ strike. Off-Broadway shows remain open. Here’s my list of recommended New York shows that are unaffected by the strike. In all cases, I gave them 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:

• Pygmalion * (comedy, G, suitable for mature and intelligent young people, closes Dec. 16, 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, closes Jan. 20, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

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

Here is a list of out-of-town shows to which I have given favorable reviews in the Journal:

CHICAGO:

• Aristocrats (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Saturday)

MINNEAPOLIS:

• The Home Place (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Nov. 25)

“Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity. Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new art-form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind’s eye. All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.”
Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (courtesy of Kate’s Book Blog)

A reader writes:

This is just a note to thank you for your website and your theatre criticism in the Wall Street Journal. I have been enjoying your reviews since I began work at a company where one of my co-workers brings his copy of the WSJ in to share with us, and since I am a devoted attendee at plays here in Boston, I am always happy to hear what you have to say about productions here in my hometown.
I’ve been delighted to find that your website has also added to my life by introducing me to authors I wouldn’t otherwise have heard of, and musicians I wouldn’t otherwise have heard. The world currently offers lots of ways to spend free time, but I try to spend it wisely, and the advice and opinions of you and your fellow columnists on your website have helped me to do so. Thank you and your colleagues for your work, and congratulations on your recent marriage.

Right back at you, dear correspondent. Letters like this remind me–and OGIC and CAAF–of why we keep on doing what we do.

I put my Louis Armstrong biography aside in order to get married, and yesterday I took it up again in earnest–a good thing, too, since I’m having lunch with my editor tomorrow and have promised to deliver the manuscript to Harcourt next February.
As usual, I’m floundering in a sea of distractions, many of which have to do with the stagehands’ strike that has shut down most of Broadway and…er…fouled up my schedule beyond recognition. Among other things, I spent a chunk of time talking to a producer about a strike-related TV appearance that never happened (though it could take place tonight–watch this space for details). I also saw an off-Broadway show in the evening and fielded a day-long series of phone calls from Smalltown, U.S.A., where my mother underwent cataract surgery in the morning (she’s fine, thanks).
In between all these events, I worked at getting myself back up to speed on Armstrong in the Thirties, and by bedtime I was ready to start piling up words again. Today I roll up my sleeves and resume work on the seventh chapter, in which Satchmo runs afoul of a Chicago gangster and heads for the hills.
More later, but I can already tell you that it’s awfully nice to be writing a book again.