From The Golden Spur, comic novelist Dawn Powell’s last book, published in 1962, when Powell was 65:
“But you had so little time left, and it seemed as if you dared not stop running for a minute. You didn’t run to win the prize as you did in youth. Indeed your dimming eyes could not tell if you’d passed the goal or not. You went on running because in the end that was the only prize there was–to be alive, to be in the race.”
On other blogs:
–Alex Littlefield reveals Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak’s favorite-ever book title. (It’s not I Married Adventure. Nor is it My Wicked, Wicked Way or even Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard.)
-There’s a new season of Old Jews Telling Jokes, which includes yuks from notables like Daniel Okrent (journalism avatar and founder of rotisserie baseball) and former NYC mayor Ed Koch. Would it kill you to take a look at it?
-Over on Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, Caleb Crain is selling all his blog posts–some of which could have been ripped from the pages of the New York Times Book Review or any of the other august places Caleb writes for–as either a PDF or a book. Has this been done before? As we say on the farm, How modren!
There are few more amusing sights to me than that of gang members who erupt into a frenzy of Sondheim lyrics and precision choreography. So a couple months ago I had the somewhat nutty idea that it would be fun to take an actual gang member–or a former gang member–to see the new Broadway production of West Side Story to witness the reaction to same. I got in touch with the public radio show Studio 360 and, several thousand e-mails later, found myself at the Palace Theater with Bruce George, a former member of the Bronx gang, Kaos Krew. The piece airs this weekend–you can hear it here, or find your local station here. I’m not sure which of Bruce’s reactions I like better–when he told me, “The people I’ve seen getting shot, they didn’t sing tunes,” or his reaction when I busted his chops for checking his e-mail during the Jets and Sharks’s rumble.
There was an interesting article in the Times the other day by Neil A. Lewis re whether female judges judge differently from male ones. The issue has come up not only because of the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia SotomayOR (I’m emphasizing the last syllable in the way it’s meant to be pronounced because the National Review called the pronounciation “un-American”), but also in re the Savana Redding case. Savana Redding is a 13 year-old girl who was strip searched at her school on suspicion of harboring ibuprofen pills. Some of Ruth Ginsburg’s eight male colleagues on the Supreme Court said they weren’t troubled by the search–Judge Thomas laughed heartily while telling of a locker room incident in which “things” were stuck in his underwear–but Ginsburg countered that 13 is a very sensitive age for a girl, and added that Redding had been directed to stretch out her bra and underpants for inspection.
Although I’d like to think that judgement and wisdom are, or should be, gender-neutral, certain instances suggest otherwise. Justice Ginsburg recently told USA Today that her comments are sometimes ignored in the justices’ private conferences until someone else–a man–made the same point. A recent study of male and female judges found that, while gender played no role in the rulings on cases involving disability law, environmental issues, and capital punishment, it did in sex discrimination cases, in which female judges were more likely to decide in favor of the plaintiffs.
In the end, not to get all NPR on you, but I guess we can’t really generalize on the “Do women judge differently?” front. Each individual rules differently–which is why diversity is king. Or should be. SotomayOR.
Muhammad Ali:
“My toughest fight was with my first wife.”
As summer starts to extend its delicate tendrils, one’s mind turns to houses in the countryside, and the possiblity of being invited thereto. How should one comport oneself if given the nod? There would seem to be two ways to go here. Both routes have been captured on film, and both are exemplified by women of a certain age.
The first is from Matt Tyrnauer’s wonderful documentary, “Valentino: The Last Emperor”–coming soon to a theater near you–and is recounted by a waiter at a sumptuous party thrown by Signor Valentino at his chateau outside Paris. The waiter, referring to the exigent and stylish guest Jacqueline de Ribes, alerts one of his colleagues,
“The Comtesse de Ribes has brought her own vodka.”
The other comes from the lips of Maggie Smith in Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park”:
“Tomorrow it’s breakfast in bed and then straight into tweeds.”
Either way, you can’t go wrong. In combination: possibly deadly.
Muhammad Ali, asked if he’d ever been in love:
“Not with anybody else.”
Comedian Eddie Sarfaty, in his upcoming book of essays, “Mental,” re telling his 95 year-old grandmother that he’s gay: “Her fists close and her eyes fill up. She is silent for the longest moment and then, speaking through the tears, she astonishes me.
‘It’s that gym where you go, that’s where they all are!'”
I’ve been sort of fascinated by the career of pioneering feminist literary theorist Elaine Showalter (born 1941) ever since I noticed a few years back that this former head of the Princeton English department was writing 300-word book reviews in People magazine. I remember thinking, WTF? Is this the same woman? I wasn’t sure if the career move betrayed pennilessness or porousness.
I think I answered my own question when I read the review of Showalter’s new book, “A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx”–the first comprehensive overview of American women writers from the Puritans to the (almost) present–by Sarah Churchill in the Guardian. Churchill cavils with some of Showalter’s nix and pix (Showalter gives the nod to Margaret Mitchell, Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Annie Proulx, and Jodi Picoult, but not to Edna Ferber, Anita Loos, Hortense Calisher, Paula Fox, Gayl Jones, Curtis Sittenfeld, or Claire Messud.)
But, more tellingly, Churchill applauds Showalter for delineating the difference between the pressures that American women writers have faced from those their European brethren have: “in America, middle-class women were expected to engage full-time in domestic duties even if they could afford help. But from the revolutionary era forward, most American women were driven to write by the mundane pressures of ne’er-do-well or absent husbands: as Fanny Hall put it in her bestselling 1855 novel Ruth Hall, about a woman forced to earn a living while her husband dies: ‘No happy woman ever writes.'”
And then, towards the end of the review, we learn that Churchill (the book’s reviewer) was Showalter’s (the book’s author) student at Princeton, where the latter gave the former the most influential piece of professional advice she’s ever received: “Write to get paid.”
To which this reader appended, “…especially in publications that traffick in celebrity gastric bypass.”
It’s said that Pablo Picasso–who died in 1973 at age 91–worked right up until the bitter end: on the day he died, he woke and asked if there was a canvas stretched and ready for him to paint on.
In writing in the New York Review of Books about the new show of late Picasso works being shown at NYC’s Gagosian Gallery, Martin Filler says that nothing heartens the cognoscenti more than late works which, like Beethoven’s Late Quartets or Rembrandt’s self-portraits evoke what Edward Said called “an unearthly serenity.” (The other memorable phrase about late works, as I wrote in “How to Live,” came from the recently-departed critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who said that artists’ last labors have a distilled or transparent quality, as if they have been shed of “an obscuring puppy fat.”)
Critics are often polarized by late works. Look at Titian and de Kooning. It’s been suggested that some of the last canvases by the former–who worked into his late 80’s until he was felled by the plague–were less visionary than simply unfinished; and many were confused by the last gasps made by the latter, who, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and unable to hold a brush, painted with pigments chosen by his assistants.
The critical reaction to Picasso’s final creations has steadily improved over time, ever since Robert Hughes fired his 1973 salvo, “These are, after all, the last Picassos. They are also the worst.” Indeed, Filler says that the surprise of the current Gagosian show is Picasso’s emergence, in his late dotage, as a colorist. Though Picasso is famous for having had his Blue and Rose periods, he never did anything all that exciting with the spectrum, and, indeed, envied Matisse’s superiority on this front. (Filler: “Picasso’s superhuman gift for draftmanship might have made him lazy about pursuing the full potential of color.”) Filler calls the new show and its parade of hues “a revelation.” The puppy fat comes off, and, suddenly: a rainbow.
