Archives for December 2008

If so, perhaps you can answer the following question for me: is it idiomatic for an Englishman to refer to his lawyer as “counselor” in direct address? (Example: “Well, counselor, do you think you’re going to be able to get me acquitted?”) I put such a sentence into the mouth of one of the characters in the libretto of The Letter, and Jonathan Kent, our director, asked me yesterday whether that usage might possibly be an Americanism. Alas, neither of us is sure, so I’m seeking a second opinion.
Would anyone who can speak to this question with expert knowledge please drop me a line as soon as possible?

The woods near our house are well populated with crows. This fall may have been tough on squirrels, but the crows appear to be flourishing; the ones I see are mammoth, glossy beasts. They’ve been around all year but with the leaves gone and the sky so gray, the woods seem emptier lately and I notice them more.
When I see a crowd of them, I sometimes think about David Copperfield’s childhood home, The Rookery, which gets explained in the first chapter of the novel this way:

“In the name of Heaven,” said Miss Betsey, suddenly, “why Rookery?”
“Do you mean the house, ma’am?” asked my mother.
“Why Rookery?” said Miss Betsey. “Cookery would have been more to the purpose, if you had had any practical ideas of life, either of you.”
“The name was Mr. Copperfield’s choice,” returned my mothe. “When he bought the house, he liked to think there were rooks about it.”
The evening wind made such a disturbance just now, among some tall elm-trees at the bottom of the garden, that neither my mother nor Miss Betsey could forbear glancing that way. As the elms bent to one another, like giants who were whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such repose, fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of mind, some weather-beaten ragged old rooks’-nests burdening their higher branches, swung like wrecks upon a stormy sea.
“Where are the birds?” asked Miss Betsey.
“The—-?” My mother had been thinking of something else.
“The rooks–what has become of them?” asked Miss Betsey.
“There have not been any since we have lived here,” said my mother. “We thought–Mr. Copperfield thought–it was quite a larger rookery; but the nests were very old ones, and the birds have deserted them a long while.”
“David Copperfield all over!” cried Miss Betsey. “David Copperfield from head to foot! Calls a house a rookery when there’s not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust because he sees the nests!”

Rookeries are, of course, all over English novels and as a kid I somehow formed the impression that they were a man-made addition to the grounds of a home, like a super-gothic chicken coop. Looking it up this morning I see it’d be hard to cultivate crows for picturesque advantage:

Rooks and jackdaws like to roost together, but prefer to build their nests in different sites: Jackdaws prefer holes in trees whereas rooks nest in colonies in tall trees called rookeries.

Human structures are seldom used. For rooks to leave a rookery was considered a bad omen for those who owned the land.

That last bit adds to the doomed chord sounded in that opening passage in David Copperfield: Not only had the rooks abandoned the home, they took all the luck with them.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)

• Dividing the Estate * (black comedy, G, far too serious for children, reviewed here)

• Equus (drama, R, nudity and adult subject matter, closes Feb. 8, reviewed here)

• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 1, reviewed here)

• Irving Berlin’s White Christmas (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• A Man for All Seasons * (drama, G, too intellectually demanding for children of any age, closes Dec. 14, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Back Back Back (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 25, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

“There are few things I enjoy so much as talking to people about books which I have read but they haven’t, and making them wish they had–preferably a book that is hard to get or in a language that they do not know.”
Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about Keats and “To Autumn,” mentioning in passing the poet’s contemporary critics. A reader wrote with further reflections on Keats’s critical reception. He unfurls this more artfully than I possibly could, so here’s his message in its entirety:

Reading your comments on Keats today, and especially your mention of his critics,
moves me to share with you one of my very favorite passages. It is from a biography
of Keats that was published in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
After a single sentence giving the date and place of Keats’ birth, the author moves
directly into the critical history:

In his first book there was little foretaste of anything greatly or even genuinely
good; but between the marshy and sandy flats of sterile or futile verse there were
undoubtedly some few purple patches of floral promise. His third book raised him at
once to a foremost rank in the highest class of English poets. Never was any one of
them but Shelley so little of a marvelous boy and so suddenly revealed as a
marvelous man. Never has any poet suffered so much from the chaotic misarrangement
of his poems in every collected edition. The rawest and the rankest rubbish of his
fitful spring is bound up in one sheaf with the ripest ears, flung into one basket
with the richest fruits, of his sudden and splendid summer. The Ode to a
Nightingale, one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all
ages, is immediately preceded in all editions now current by some of the most vulgar
and fulsome doggerel ever whimpered by a vapid and effeminate rhymester in the
sickly stage of whelphood.

If that strikes you as unusual prosody for an encyclopedia, you are right. It is
Swinburne. On a few occasions I have, with some success, read this paragraph aloud
to auditors.

Just marvelous. Thank you, Bob.

• Cinetrix finds awesome celeb memoir cover art. (And, as a commenter notes, the title’s not too shabby either.)
• Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
• Something I looked at over Thanksgiving weekend. And looked and looked at. Idea for a future post: the difference between luxuritating in half a dozen Breugels in a single room and encountering a single Breugel in a sea of less-great art.
• An adolescent girl “is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs–to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others–are met precisely by the act of reading.” Enough to make me order the first two novels in the Twilight series.

Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five perform “Don’t Worry ‘Bout That Mule” in 1946:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“And if you ask again whether there is any justice in the world, you’ll have to be satisfied with the reply: Not for the time being; at any rate, not up to this Friday.”
Alfred Döblin, Alexanderplatz, Berlin (trans. Eugene Jolas)