Archives for 2007

“It’s hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much.”
Paddy Chayefsky, screenplay for The Hospital

“The interesting thing about ‘Potato Head Blues,'” I said to John Pancake, the man who edited my old “Second City” column for the Washington Post, “is that it’s one of the few really popular Louis Armstrong recordings that has no vocal.” Then I blinked my eyes, realized that I was in bed, and looked at the clock. It was four-thirty in the morning, and John was nowhere to be seen.

I’d been dreaming about my Louis Armstrong biography, which I restarted on Wednesday after a six-week hiatus. The realization that Satchmo had invaded my dreams woke me all the way up. Instead of rolling over and trying to go back to sleep, I descended from my loft, booted up my MacBook, and started writing. Six hours later I was within spitting distance of wrapping up a not-quite-polished draft of the seventh chapter.

Do I like writing? Sometimes. Most of the time, to be perfectly honest, except that very often there are other things I’d rather be doing, like reading a book or taking a walk or hanging out with Mrs. T. But this morning was one of those blessed occasions when there was nothing else in the world I wanted to do but write. Hilary was fast asleep, my head was teeming with ideas, and no sooner did I start clicking away at the keyboard than I could do no wrong. I was, as jazz musicians say, in the pocket, and it felt good.

Needless to say, the person from Porlock eventually came calling. He always does. I had an eleven o’clock appointment with my trainer that I’d already rescheduled once, so at ten-thirty I sighed, shut down the shop, pulled on my sweats, and headed for the gym, thinking about Louis all the way there and all the way back.

Now I’m sitting at my desk, about to gun my mental engines once more. In my head it’s November 4, 1931, and Louis Armstrong is about to record Hoagy Carmichael’s “Star Dust.” For the next hour or so, my job will be to come up with exactly the right words to describe that amazing performance–and I’m soooo ready.

How lucky am I?

In my first post-strike Wall Street Journal drama column, I report on two new off-Broadway shows, The Glorious Ones and Things We Want:

Lincoln Center Theater is mounting “The Glorious Ones” in its cozy 299-seat downstairs house (Mark Lamos’ production of “Cymbeline,” which opens in two weeks, is playing in previews upstairs). It’s the most satisfying show that Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty have given us since “Ragtime,” which put them on the musical-comedy map a decade ago, and one of the things that makes it so pleasurable is that it makes no effort whatsoever to impress. Unlike “Dessa Rose,” their 2005 preach-a-thon about the evils of slavery, “The Glorious Ones” is a small-scale, fast-paced entertainment about the commedia dell’arte, the barnstorming outdoor theatrical troupes of 16th-century Italy whose bawdy improvised farces left a lasting mark on the later history of comedy. It is by turns touching and dirty–very, very dirty–and the rapid and unpredictable alternation of these two extremes is part of its charm….
Here’s the scorecard for “Things We Want,” Jonathan Marc Sherman’s new play: (1) Ethan Hawke was prominently featured in Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia,” last season’s Big Event. (2) Zoe Kazan, Elia’s 24-year-old granddaughter, knocked out everyone who saw her last fall in the New Group’s revival of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” and not just because she took it all off, either. (3) Peter Dinklage, best known for such superior indie flicks as “The Station Agent” and “Living in Oblivion,” made an equally memorable impression in the title role of the Public Theater’s 2004 production of “Richard III.” To be sure, Mr. Hawke, the director, is nowhere to be seen on the far side of the proscenium, but his guiding hand is constantly in evidence in the New Group’s latest production, which is so smartly played and staged as to make its long list of shortcomings tolerable….

Rupert Murdoch, the Journal‘s owner-to-be, recently announced plans to make the subscription-only Online Journal free. The switch hasn’t been thrown yet, but given the fact that Murdoch has now made his intentions surpassingly clear, I’ll discontinue my usual weekly invitation to subscribe. Instead, go buy a copy of today’s paper to read the whole thing. (If you’re already a subscriber to the Online Journal, you’ll find my column here.)

“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)