Archives for 2007

“Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.”
Françoise Sagan, A Certain Smile

“Coincidence is a pimp and a cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of facts recollected by a non-ordinary memorist.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears here on Tuesdays. Sometimes I’ll make the list, sometimes the list will come from someone else.
A while back my friend Mark Sarvas shared some of the titles on his James Wood reading list, described as “essentially a list of books we’ve collected over the years that Wood has written about approvingly at one time or another.”
Reading this, I thought, “What a terribly geekish admission, Mark.” Then, “Would you please post the rest of the list?” Internerd, indeed. So in the spirit of reciprocity, here are five favorites from my own James Wood reading list (and if you haven’t read the Shchedrin yet, you really should correct that — it’s incredible):
1. The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin (translation by Natalie Duddington): Wood wrote the introduction to the New York Review of Books edition of the novel; you can download it here.
2. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul: Wood’s love for A House for Mr. Biswas is well-known; here he takes umbrage at the novel’s entry in The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. XII, declaring it “almost morally offensive.”
3. Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes: In “How Shakespeare’s ‘Irresponsbility’ Saved Coleridge” (The Irresponsible Self), Wood writes that Holmes’s two-volume biography of Coleridge “gives us the best portrait” of the poet.
4. Berryman’s Shakespeare by John Berryman (edited by John Haffenden): Wood quotes Berryman’s essays in “Shakespeare in Bloom” (The Broken Estate), and “Shakespeare and the Pathos of Rambling” (The Irresponsible Self).
5. God: A Biography by Jack Miles: In a review of Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, Wood notes that “Bloom is enormously shadowed” by Miles, whose books he calls “Feuerbachian adventures.” (See also Wood’s review of Miles’s Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God.)

Last week I wrote about Maugham’s The Magician, a gothic novel written early in the author’s career. Another unlikely dabbler in the form: Emerson.
From Robert Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire:

In writing, as in other endeavors, Emerson did not find his characteristic voice while at college, although some traits begin to emerge. In prose he was working on wildly diverse projects. One was a lurid gothic tale about a Norse prophetess and sibyl and her magician son. The fantasy is overheated and overwritten — more dream than anything else, a sort of Norse Vathek. The heroine Uilsa speaks:
“Did I not wake the mountains with my denouncing scream — calling vengeance from the north? Odin knew me and thundered. A thousand wolves ran down the mountain scared by the hideous lightning and baring the tooth to kill; they rushed after the cumbrous host. I saw when the pale faces glared back in terror as the black wolf pounced on his victim.”

Our new guest blogger Carrie Frye, a/k/a CAAF, will be back to entertain you tomorrow!

My Wall Street Journal column about the decline of regional arts criticism has stirred up quite a bit of comment in and out of the blogosphere. Among those who’ve posted about it to date are Mr. Playgoer, Alex Ross, Edward Winkleman, and one of the anonymous authors of Moreover, The Economist‘s new artblog.
I’m also getting a fair amount of e-mail about the column, of which this letter is typical:

Thanks for the thoughtful and (as always) incisive article about regional criticism. I’m working in the arts in one of those towns, Wilmington, Delaware, that doesn’t have regular arts criticism. We have a couple of good writers who cover things the best they can, but they can’t cover everything.
One of the responsibilities, as I see it, of critics is not only to say what they thought of something, but also–in the most simplistic terms–to let people know it was there. It’s important to build cultural pride, or at least a cultural consciousness. It’s hard to create excitement in audiences when they don’t even know what’s been in town. When I lived in Atlanta, the paper’s practice was only to review those things that had several performances, using the logic that if it was only one performance, it wouldn’t help to get audiences there because it was already gone. So…you know, Isaac Stern could come and no one would ever know he was there. I think the critic’s responsibility is to help excite and build the audience, as well as serve it.
Thanks for doing that.

This letter serves as a valuable reminder of something that working critics often fail to keep in mind: reviews are news. A good critic is also a reporter, and unless he gives his readers a clear idea of what happened at a performance–starting with the fact that it took place–he isn’t doing his job.
I also agree with my correspondent about the need to create excitement–or, rather, to communicate it. When a show thrills me, I do my very best to get that fact across to my readers, if at all possible in the first paragraph of my review.
Here’s what I sound like when I’m walking on air:

The only time I don’t think Brian Friel is the best living playwright is immediately after I’ve seen a play by Tom Stoppard. That both men should be represented on Broadway this season is a boon, and though Mr. Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia” trilogy, being both new and spectacular, will likely get most of the ink, the Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of “Translations,” directed by Garry Hynes, deserves equal time. This production of Mr. Friel’s 1980 play, among the greatest written in the 20th century, is so comprehensively masterful that no critic, however enthusiastic, can do more than suggest its manifold virtues. Instead of reviewing it, I wish I could simply send you a ticket….

Was I gushing? Yeah, I guess so–but if a show like that doesn’t make you want to gush, even in the sober pages of The Wall Street Journal, you’re in the wrong business. Of course the trick is to call your shots: if you blow your top every week, people will stop listening to you. But a critic who isn’t capable of communicating his excitement should seek some other line of work.
In the immortal words of Constant Lambert:

After some of the most memorable and breath-taking experiences in my musical life it was indeed shocking to find that the critics next day were damning it with faint pseudo-academic praise, but it was not to me surprising. For the reason that I have, in the past, had to earn my living by that melancholy trade and realise all too well that the average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) Above all no enthusiasm.

I know I have my faults, but that’s not one of them.

I just did something new: I wrote my very first introduction to the catalogue of a art exhibition.
William Bailey, whose Piazza Rotunda is part of the Teachout Museum, has a one-man show coming up at Betty Cuningham Gallery, and Betty called me up from out of the blue to ask if I’d write about him for the catalogue. Naturally I said yes, though not without a certain amount of apprehension, since I’d never written such a piece. I went down to the gallery a few weeks ago to see Bailey’s latest paintings, and last Monday I sat down and knocked out the introduction, which I called “Art of the Unreal,” in a single sitting. It’s not bad, if I do say so myself.
The show goes up on October 18. Come take a look–and buy a catalogue while you’re there!