Archives for March 13, 2009

The theme of today’s coffee break is “ideal readers.” It was occasioned by Flannery O’Connor’s quote about the “monstrous reader” who always sat beside her as she wrote muttering, “I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.” I would think most writers have a Monstrous Reader living in their home — tall and shambling with a ghastly complexion and seersucker pants, who sleeps on the couch and eats all the chips at night.
But Ideal Readers exist as well, and here’s proof!:
• Nicholas Spice’s review of Elfriede Jelinek’s Greed ran in the London Review of Books many, many moons ago — but it’s stayed with me as a great piece of criticism. Remember hearing that Jelinek had won the Nobel Prize in 2004? Remember the excitement? Your gasp of “?????” I’ve read a few essays and articles about her since, but none of them has done so much to help me understand her books and what about her work gets lost in translation, both literally and culturally. It’s an example to me of a writer finding an Ideal Reader out there — always nice to see, but even more heartening when it’s an author whose work is as unconventional and thorny as Jelinek’s.
I remember when the prize was announced, Jelinek gave several interviews that really delighted me with their dolefulness (a performance by a Nobel Prize winner unchallenged until Doris Lessing’s “Oh Christ, I couldn’t care less” in 2007). At the time I thought it’d be nice to start a line of coffee mugs with inspirational wisdom from Jelinek printed on them, my favorites being, “I feel more despair than happiness” and “I have a social phobia, an illness known to doctors.” You know, something nice for around the office. (This is why I’m not Elfriede Jelinek’s Ideal Reader.)
• In this profile, Dave Cole comes across as a writer’s Romantic Ideal of a copy editor. Such tender, gentle hands! (Via sarahw.)
By the way, enjoy the dream, writers, but you should probably know: This is what your copy editor is really thinking about you.

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to the Broadway premiere of Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations, starring Jane Fonda. Here’s an excerpt.
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Fifty years ago, Jane Fonda was the most promising ingenue on Broadway. Then she went to Hollywood and became the most promising screen actress of the ’70s. Then she discovered radical politics, made a workout video, married Ted Turner, and metamorphosed into an all-purpose second-tier celebrity who occasionally acts on the side. It’s been a long, long time since she made a halfway serious film, and longer still since she set foot on a stage. So it was with astonishment and a certain amount of trepidation that I went to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre to see her perform in Moisés Kaufman’s “33 Variations.”
Mr. Kaufman’s play, alas, is a sudsy cross between “Amadeus” and “Terms of Endearment,” a sentimental, uplifting family drama in which none other than Ludwig van Beethoven (Zach Grenier) plays a major supporting role. It’s not at all the sort of play with which I would have expected the creator of “The Laramie Project” and “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde” to have made his Broadway debut, and I regret to say that it’s not very good. Nor does Ms. Fonda make a strong impression in it, though she gives a thoroughly competent performance as Katherine Brandt, a brisk, emotionally distant musicologist who comes down with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (the neurological disorder popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), ends up in a wheelchair and discovers en route to the grave that she really, truly loves her brisk, emotionally distant daughter (Samantha Mathis).
And where does Beethoven enter the picture? It seems that Dr. Brandt is obsessed with his “Diabelli” Variations, and has decided to spend her final days examining the composer’s sketchbooks in order to find out what inspired him to write an hour-long set of variations on an ordinary little waltz tune. Beethoven and Anton Diabelli (Don Amendolia), who wrote the waltz, thereupon materialize to supply comic relief, while yet another subplot is introduced when Dr. Brandt’s daughter falls for her male nurse (Colin Hanks).
What we have here, in short, is a good old-fashioned middlebrow play, the kind in which a high-culture icon is made accessible to the masses by turning him into a semiregular guy. I don’t mean for this description to sound quite so dismissive: Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” is that kind of show, more or less, but it is also a perfectly serious work of theatrical art that succeeds in illuminating the creative process and the nature of genius. I think that Mr. Kaufman probably meant to write a show not unlike “Amadeus” or “The Invention of Love,” Tom Stoppard’s play about A.E. Housman, but a funny thing happened on the way to the stage door, and what we got was a 12-hankie weeper with punch lines….
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Read the whole thing here.

“Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.”
John Guare (quoted in The Independent, Oct. 17, 1988)