Archives for August 25, 2008

John Russell, who wrote for the New York Times for many years, died on Saturday. His Times obituary included the following quote from Reading Russell, a collection of his critical essays:

I do not see my role as primarily punitive. There are artists whose work I dread to see yet again, dance-dramas that in my view have set back the American psyche several hundred years, composers whose names drive me from the concert hall, authors whose books I shall never willingly reopen. But it has never seemed to me much of an ambition to go though life snarling and spewing.

I very much wish I’d said that. It’s exactly how I feel about what I do, and now that I’ve seen it put so lucidly, I mean to try even harder to live up to it.

Stuff White People Like took on Facebook the other day:

Social Networking sites have been embraced by white people since their inception. Because these sites use profile pages, white people can more efficiently judge friends and future friends on their taste in film, books, music, and inspirational quotes. Advanced level white people, fearful of being judged on their tastes from last week, will often only list one or two ironic things as their favorites. For example under music they would simply list “P.M. Dawn” or under films they would choose only Armageddon. In both cases these ironic answers serve as protective shields from the harsh gaze of other white people.

I have a Facebook page, believe it or not, but I don’t do Irony Lite, nor do I care whether other people find my tastes insufficiently cool, much less insufficiently “white” (by which Stuff White People Like, needless to say, means something very different from that which was meant when I was growing up in southeast Missouri half a lifetime ago).

As it happens, I tried to take Stuff White People Like’s Facebook test yesterday, but gave it up after running into three consecutive questions for which my answer was None of the above, which was not an option. My impression, however, was that I’m not very “white,” a fact which amuses me, albeit only mildly. Speaking as an arty Upper West Side drama critic who works for The Wall Street Journal, likes both sushi and hot dogs, is currently writing an opera, and can sit down at the piano and play Nat Cole’s “Easy Listening Blues” on request, I’m not at all sure what color I am.

In the interests of chromatic clarification, here is the personal information that appeared on my Facebook page last week:

• Activities. Reading, writing, playgoing, traveling, collecting prints, consuming art of all kinds. Recently finished writing Rhythm Man, a biography of Louis Armstrong, and the libretto for The Letter, an operatic version of the play by Somerset Maugham (music by Paul Moravec). Last piece written: Saturday’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column on John Philip Sousa.

• Interests. Art, art, and more art.

• Favorite music. Last CD acquired: Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, Showtime at the Spotlite: 52nd Street, New York City, June 1946. Last song played: Memphis Slim, “Mother Earth.”

• Favorite TV shows. Don’t watch any (sigh).

• Favorite movies. Ever: Rules of the Game. Most recently seen: Out of the Past. Last show seen: My Fair Lady at the Ogunquit Playhouse (with Jefferson Mays as Henry Higgins).

• Favorite book. Novel: The Great Gatsby. Biography: W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson. Currently re-reading: Angus Wilson, Hemlock and After.

• Favorite quotes. “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem” (James Burnham). “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind” (Louis Pasteur). “I don’t think God punishes people for specific things. I think he punishes people in general, for no reason” (Christopher Durang).

What does all this make me? Gray, I guess.

By the way, I invite those of you who only just started reading this blog to compute your Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. It is, if I do say so myself, a much more sophisticated taste-measuring instrument than the Stuff White People Like Facebook Test–and vastly more serious to boot.

One of the advantages of writing a book on a word processor is that you can search the manuscript for repeated words and phrases. This can be, to say the least, a chastening experience. Like all prolific authors, I have my mannerisms, and over the weekend I did my best to vacuum as many of them as possible out of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

Here’s a list of the words and phrases for which I searched. I invite you to speculate on what they say about me:

amaze
astonish
at the end of his life
celebrity
countless
delight/delighted
doubtless/no doubt
engaging
extraordinary
extravagant
frank
generation
generous/generosity
glee
grand total
handsome
impress
interesting
just as
late in life
made the most
mere
more and more
needless to say
no less
nor
nostalgic/nostalgia
noteworthy
occasional
on the other hand
panache
pivot
presumably
quaint
quite
relish
remarkable
revealing
self-evident
stagger/staggering
stiff
striking
stun/stunned
surprising
transform
vivid
wanted to hear
whatever
wonder

“To account for Cather’s fiction by reading it as an encoding of covert, even guilty, sexuality, is, I think, patronizing and narrow. It assumes that the work is written only in order to express homosexual feeling in disguise; it makes her out to be a coward (which was certainly not one of her failings); and it assumes that ‘openness’ would have been preferable. If the argument is that ‘Cather never dealt adequately with her homosexuality in her fiction,’ that My Ántonia is ‘a betrayal of female independence and female sexuality,’ and that The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop retreat into ‘a world dominated by patriarchy,’ then Cather is diminished by being enlisted to a cause. She was a writer who worked, at her best, through indirection, suppression, and suggestion, and through a refusal to be enlisted.”
Hermione Lee, Willa Cather: Double Lives