Archives for 2010

I recently finished reading an excellent new book by Jon Hancock about Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall debut. The concert, which was released as a long-playing record album in 1950 and is still in print to this day, was a landmark event, the first time that an entire evening of jazz was presented at America’s best-known and most prestigious concert hall. It was also an exceedingly risky proposition for Goodman, who in 1938 was the equivalent of a swing-era rock star. Such folk didn’t go anywhere near Carnegie Hall in the Thirties, and as I read Hancock’s book, I asked myself: why did a successful performer like Benny Goodman feel the need to give a concert there? It occurred to me that Goodman, who had extensive classical training and spent much of the rest of his life playing Brahms and Mozart in addition to the jazz that made him famous, might have questioned his own musical worth and felt that a Carnegie Hall appearance would give him cultural legitimacy.
Needless to say, Goodman was by no means the first artist to suffer from deep-seated doubts about his work. Any number of other major artists, including John Keats and Benjamin Britten, have found their private fears to be at times all but incapacitating. My “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal speculates on what causes great artists to question their own accomplishments–and whether such self-doubt is always a bad thing. If you’re curious, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“Having led a vicious but not unpleasant life for a vast number of years I am conscious that there are difficulties which even the best brought-up young men cannot always avoid and being as you know a hardened cynic I have a great tolerance for the follies of the human race.”
W. Somerset Maugham, letter to Robin Maugham (his nephew), June 5, 1934

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:

• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

• A View from the Bridge * (drama, PG-13, violence and some sexual content, closes Apr. 4, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

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

• The Boys in the Band (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 28, reviewed here)

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

• The Orphans’ Home Cycle, Parts 1, 2, and 3 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, now being performed in rotating repertory, closes May 8, reviewed here, here, and here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• Venus in Fur (serious comedy, R, sexual content, closes Mar. 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN LENOX, MASS.:

• Les Liaisons Dangereuses (drama, R, violence and sexual content, closes Mar. 21, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN ORLANDO, FLA.:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Mar. 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN MANALAPAN, FLA.:

• Sins of the Mother (drama, PG-13, violence and adult subject matter, reviewed here)

“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

The writer Barry Hannah died yesterday. I’ve read only one of his books, the 2001 novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan, but it definitely got my attention. The plot is a hectic, amped-up brand of southern gothic. The words always felt to me more important and satisfying than the story they told, though. They’re strung into wonderful, unexpected sentences that glint from the page, and those into paragraphs of similar quality. My love of the book rested on its words and sentences. You know how Olympic winners assessingly lift their new medals in surprise at the heft of them? I feel a little like that encountering a word like “slabby” in the following passage.

In Vicksburg, on the asphalt, the deflected minions of want walked, those who lived to care for and feed their cars, and she watched them outside Big Mart. And the sad philosophic fishermen who lived to drag slabby beauties from the water, that dream of long seconds, so they told her. About the same happy contest as sexual intercourse, as she recalled it, though these episodes sank deeper into a blurred well every day. She loved the men and their lostness on the water. Their rituals with lines and rods and reels and lures. The worship they put into it. How they beleaguered themselves with gear and lore, like solemn children or fools. She had spent too much time being unfoolish, as if that were the calling of her generation. As you would ask somebody the point of their lives and they would answer: horses

Maud Newton, who’s crushed by Hannah’s loss, has posted several worthwhile links, including one to a strikingly frank Paris Review interview with the author. “The talent of word facility,” he says, “is unteachable and uncoachable….I believe you should have the words handy. Not that they all have to be perfect–there’s a lot of cross-outs–but language-to-hand is the sine qua non.”

William Primrose plays Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 on viola, with David Stimer at the piano:

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

“I am often tired of myself, and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took.”
W. Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour

The Guardian’s round-up of authors’ rules for writing fiction has been making the rounds for a couple weeks now. If you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s well worth it. Contributors include Geoff Dyer, Margaret Atwood, Sarah Waters, Neil Gaiman among others.
Zadie Smith shares ten rules too but leaves out a piece of advice I’ve seen her mention before and found useful. It’s from a 2008 talk on novel-writing she gave at Columbia, later published in The Believer:

My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if my sentences are too baggy, too baroque, I cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If I’m disappearing up my own aesthete’s arse, I stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say and pick up Dostoyevsky, the patron saint of substance over style, a reminder to us all that good writing is more than elegant sentences.

I’ve started using this open-books-on-the-desk method too. Partly as inspiration and encouragement when I’m dragging, but also as a practical aid; a way to remind myself about the basics of construction and how writers accomplish simple things like getting a character to walk across a room (“he walked across the room”) or go outside (“she went outside”), which it’s easy to over-think (“he lumbered across the oak-floored palladium” “she hastened down the hallway, through the doorway, and out to the great outdoors”).
This reminds me of a time we were reading Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge in a writing class. There was a place in the book where the narrative skipped forward a year or so. O’Connell handled the jump this way: “Time passed.” No “the leaves fell, snow came and melted, and spring tripped in like a million ballerinas in a million long pink tutus.” Just “Time passed.” It blew our minds. That’s the sort of help the open books can offer. When I’ve gotten myself in a snarl it’s good to peek in one and be reminded that it can be that easy. Time passed. He walked across the room. She went outside. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.