Archives for 2007

Terry wrote yesterday about the allure of handwritten letters. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about lately whenever shuffling out for the mail. The ratio of bills & junk mail to actual items of interest is currently running about 100:1 at our house, and some days that seems like a bleak signpost of … something (mortgages, lightning).
So I think about sending more letters and how nice it would be to receive some in return, particularly if these letters were to arrive in packages with gin, smokes, and the new Oxford Univ. Press edition of Coleridge’s Faust translation tied up in string. But as my friends who’ve received cards from me with messages like “Congratulations on your baby — and congratulations on his high-school graduation!” know, these impulses usually dissipate on the walk back from the curb.
This cycle (wanting mail, never sending mail) reminded me about the letters that appear in Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, a book I take to the bed with about twice a year. The story features an incredibly old, bearded lady named Marian (a stand-in for Carrington) and her equally old best friend Carmella, who is bald and wears red wigs in a “queenly gesture to her long lost hair.” (Carmella is understood to be a stand-in for Carrington’s friend Remedios Varo.)
Here Carmella is introduced to the reader:

[Carmella] lives in a very small house with her niece who bakes cakes for a Swedish teashop although she is Spanish. Carmella has a very pleasant life and is really very intellectual. She reads books through an elegant lorgnette and hardly ever mumbles to herself as I do. She also knits very clever jumpers but her real pleasure in life is writing letters. Carmella writes letters all over the world to people she has never met and signs them with all sorts of romantic names, never her own. Carmella despises anonymous letters, and of course they would be impractical as who could answer a letter with no name at all signed at the end? These wonderful letters fly off, in a celestial way, by airmail, in Carmella’s delicate handwriting. No one ever replies. This is the really incomprehensible side of humanity, people never have time for anything.

Carmella’s letters are laced throughout the book, and she has a great flair. After the jump, one of her letters to strangers is described …
[Read more…]

Contentions, the group blog of Commentary, the magazine for which I write a monthly essay about music and the arts, has just gotten into the videoblogging business. I am, somewhat to my surprise, the point man. I’ll be appearing each month in a monthly on-camera interview during which I talk about…well, whatever I’m asked. This is an experiment–I’ve done a lot of radio, but comparatively little TV–so we’ll see how it goes from here.
The first interview, taped in the living room of my Manhattan apartment last week, was posted on the site earlier today. In it I discuss everything from my latest Commentary essay (which you can read by visiting the “TT in Commentary” module of the right-hand column) to one of the pieces in the Teachout Museum, John Marin’s “Downtown. The El,” about which I blogged on the day “About Last Night” went live in 2003.
To see the interview, go here.
UPDATE: My interview has also been crossposted on YouTube.

“By now, as has ever been the case with actors who find themselves stranded together in a strange town with a nightly call to their courage, we were slipping into each other’s beds. In this blur of sharp need and comradeship, with its tacit understanding that there would be no subsequent demands, we gave little thought to consequences.”
Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England: A Memoir

There really is no shame quite like being 36 and having to confess as part of Monday morning status, “Sorry, that project isn’t complete, I was reading the new Harry Potter.”
All day yesterday I kept thinking, “One more chapter and then I will go to the desk and work.” Afternoon came and went, then dusk, nightfall, and finally the book was read, just around the time a party at my neighbor’s was breaking up.
Now I feel like a drunk having to account for time lost on a bender.

My posting about the death of Jerry Hadley made a lot of people angry, as did the unsentimental obituary I wrote for The Wall Street Journal when Arthur Miller died. One of Hadley’s fans went so far as to call me “disgusting” twice in the same e-mail, which I believe is a personal record. In both cases, the reason for much of the anger can be summed up by a Latin tag: De mortuis nil nisi bonum. The wise man is slow to quarrel with proverbs, but I’m afraid I must trump that one with a snippet of Shakespeare. He that dies pays all debts–including the debt of discretion that is owed to him, insofar as it’s ever owed to a public figure who voluntarily chooses his status.

My own view of the matter is to be found in the published sayings of Nero Wolfe:

“Marko was himself headstrong, gullible, oversanguine, and naïve. He had–”

“For shame! He’s dead, and you insult–”

“That will do!” he roared. It stopped her. He went down a few decibels. “You share the common fallacy, but I don’t. I do not insult Marko. I pay him the tribute of speaking of him and feeling about him precisely as I did when he lived; the insult would be to smear his corpse with the honey excreted by my fear of death.”

If anyone should see fit to write anything about me after I die, I hope they’ll keep that in mind.

As for the people who’ve been writing to say that I can’t possibly know anything about depression…well, what I know about it is nobody’s business. But I’ll say this much: Hadley was a talented, once-successful artist whose career had collapsed and who was on the verge of bankruptcy when he shot himself in the head. I’m sorry he did it–I wish he hadn’t–but somehow I doubt that psychotherapy would have stopped him from doing so, much less the kindness of strangers. The world is a hard place, and the opera business is, or can be, one of its toughest neighborhoods. Those who think otherwise know nothing about it. Those who pretend otherwise are kidding themselves.

* * *

For additional thoughts on the subject of obituary writing, go here.

CultureGrrl seems to think that critics (presumably meaning, among others, me) were partly responsible for Hadley’s suicide. She may well have a larger point, but in this particular case I can assure her that the critics who wrote of his vocal difficulties in 1999 were only reporting well after the fact what was common knowledge in the opera world. The damage had already been done, and I’m sure he knew it.

This is the most interesting reaction I’ve seen to what I wrote.

• The most incongruous day of my cultural life took place in 1999, when Time sent me to Milwaukee, a city I’d never before visited, to see Florentine Opera give the American premiere of Lowell Liebermann’s operatic verison of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Milwaukee isn’t far from Chicago, so I persuaded Our Girl to meet me there. I flew out at midday and spent the afternoon walking around the Milwaukee Art Museum, then met OGIC at the train station and took her to the theater. After the opera–which was a knockout and a wow–we went back to our hotel and turned on the TV to look for a chaser with which to clear our spinning heads. There’s Something About Mary was playing on the pay-per-view channel. I hadn’t yet seen it, but OGIC assured me that it was drop-dead funny, so we proceeded to watch it, and I laughed so hard at the first scene that I came close to throwing up.

I recently quoted Greg Sandow in this space:

The [fine] arts–as an enterprise separate from our wider culture, and somehow standing above it–are over….any attempt to revive them (this includes classical music, of course) will have to mean that they engage popular culture, and everything else going on in the outside world.

Somehow I doubt that was quite what Greg had in mind. But maybe not!

• One of my closest friends regularly sends me handwritten letters and postcards, to which I generally respond via e-mail. It’s not that she’s a technophobe. In fact, she’s a blogger of long standing. But as she once explained to me:

Isn’t it nice to open letters, too? In a funny way, I think all the email/blogging returns an almost romantic, Victorian specialness to pen & paper correspondence.

I know exactly what my friend means, and I’ve tried to reciprocate. Yet I still find it all but impossible to sit down and write a full-length letter by hand, in part because I’m left-handed and so have always found penmanship (as they used to call it once upon a time) awkward and ungratifying. I started using a typewriter at the age of ten and learned how to touch-type six years later, and since then I’ve mostly restricted my handwritten communication with the outside world to postcards and very brief notes. Despite my advancing age and old-fashioned inclinations, e-mail and blogging somehow seem to suit me better. I guess I’m just a post-postmodern man in a hurry, juggling too many balls for my own good.

I wish it were otherwise. I love the letters I get from my friend. I love the way her handwriting reflects her quirky, slightly fey personality. Would that I could give as good as I get.

Mr. Artblog, who visited the Teachout Museum the other day, is himself an artist of no mean accomplishment. To my amazement and delight, he brought me a present, a lovely little ink-on-paper sketch called “Reading on the Subway.” I’ll hang it with pride as soon as I get back to New York.
If you’d like to see it, go here.