I have a quote-a-riffic quiz of festival-performer tidbits over at Beatrice. My favorite line is one of the Baryshnikov reflections—what an ardent humanitarian.
More New Yorker Festival coverage, you say? Certainly not! You’ve had enough bloggy gruel to last you the night and I don’t want to hear any more complaining! You’re pleading that you’ve been reading Beatrice all weekend long and got a big helping of Donald Antrim and Jonathan Franzen, Lorrie Moore and Chang-Rae Lee, David Remnick and Steve Martin, Misha the Magnificent and Zadie Smith, Ricky Gervais and John Updike, Paul Rudnick and Anthony Lane, cartoonists galore and bluegrass banjos, and now you’re famished again? No way no how, orphan ingrates! But you liked those posts, did you? You wouldn’t mind hearing a little more detail, maybe some actual literary-historical analysis, a few more writerly quips, what everyone was wearing, what the crowds were like (preview: ballet enthusiasts are jittery)? Fine, brats. Go back to Beatrice and there’ll be another bowl waiting for you. But after Tuesday, I’m cutting you off. You’ve gotten stout on all these posts and we need our orphans slim for the visitors. Get your battered tin spoons ready, because supplies are extremely limited.
That’s “Very Long Wait” for Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee. But why? You’re Oz, Netflix! You can get everything! Can’t you? What do you have against Canadians? What did they ever do to you? I mean, besides burn down the White House in the War of 1812 and produce superior comedy and maple products?
Categories: Movies
Baryshnikov’s balletic bafflement, from Newsday via the AP:
When he was invited to play a role on “Sex and the City,” Mikhail Baryshnikov says he had two questions: “Which sex, and which city?” The legendary dancer told an audience at The New Yorker Festival that until then he’d never seen the HBO series, because he only watched news and golf on TV. So the producers sent him a few episodes to watch.
“I was kind of amused, and shocked,” Baryshnikov said Saturday of the racy series, which ended early last year. “At first I was watching it with my children. Then I said ‘Children, OUT!'”
Baryshnikov played a self-involved artist named Aleksandr, a love interest of Carrie Bradshaw, played by series star Sarah Jessica Parker.
Baryshnikov’s latest project is the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a new home for various art forms that will open in November on Manhattan’s West Side.
My continuing coverage of the New Yorker Festival is, as we speak, unfolding on Beatrice. Here’s Mikhail Baryshnikov, demonstrating a pose he saw in a modern dance poster back in the U.S.S.R. before Gregory Hines came to set him free.
That’s me, tonight, trying to absorb Lorrie Moore-itude via osmosis. One of the things I like most about her is that for years, she split her time between NYC and Madison. My hometown! Where she lives fulltime now, beloved by students and enjoying her spacious, lakefront view. See, she’s smart. We’re…drugged.
I couldn’t be happier that Jonathan Lethem got a MacArthur. He’s one of the most independent-thinking and hardworking, and least fad-tempted, writers we got, and as a nice bonus, he’s not a snappish prima donna. There’s no question he’ll make the most of the money, the moment, the extra visibility, and the mountains o’ love, which he seems to turn right back into good fiction rather than a lump of ego no one can swallow.
It’s not Darwinian elimination round here, but of course I love this Gawker hed: Lethem Wins MacArthur; Franzen, Foer Feel Out-Jonathaned.
You know how, in your twenties, you house-sat at every opportunity both to escape your own tiny apartment and to get to live in someone else’s world for a little while? I’m doing something like that this week at Beatrice, where I’m covering the New Yorker Festival from now till whenever I start bumping into things in a grinning, satiated stupor, like Woody Allen in Sleeper post-Orgasmatron. Do come over, won’t you?
Also, as you can see, the deli.cio.us categories are back! It’ll take a while to fill in the missing ones from the monthlong Dataless Dark Ages, but they’ll be filled in, never fear.
Try some bitterness with your listings! From a spirited roundup of this week’s highlights in The Pitch:
Wednesday, September 28
New Yorker readers know David Denby as one of the magazine’s film critics. We, however, like to think of him as the grinch who stole college. See, when we were at Columbia University, experiencing what the school calls the “Core Curriculum,” Denby had just published Great Books, his account of retaking the core’s signature classes—30 years later. Denby enrolled in Literature Humanities (which starts with Homer and ends with Virginia Woolf) and Contemporary Civilization (which includes all the philosophy and theory biggies). He attended classes, did all the reading and even wrote a few papers. Our feelings about this experience, which he romanticizes—while mocking his younger classmates—can be summarized as follows: Of course you had time to savor all these books, Mr. Film Critic. The rest of us? We were busy taking the classes for the first time, reading the books for the first time and—oh, yeah—juggling a full course load. So we felt some schadenfreude when Denby published American Sucker, an account of his attempt to make money during the booming ’90s. Denby writes about making $900,000 and losing it all—along with, we think, his dignity, by admitting to an obsession with online porn and ownership of an Audi A6. What, working at the New Yorker isn’t enough? Denby signs books at the University of Kansas’ Oread Bookstore at 4:30 p.m. and speaks on “Reading Great Books in a Modern World” at 7 p.m. in Woodruff Auditorium, both in the Kansas Union (1301 Jayhawk Boulevard in Lawrence), for KU’s Sixty Years of Western Civ celebration. We’ll be the ones with the “Great Books Suck” signs.
Aw, they’ve got a bit of a point about the savoring, though I half-wish now that I could take more of the Columbia Core (I was across the street, reading at large and being nurtured) just for the Hegel of it. Luckily, from the warp-speed mind of Johanna Drucker—who taught Art Hum in those days—I got a whole keg o’ knowledge that I’m still tipsy on.
For more on required reading and the problems of canonization and decanonization, take a look at my friend Michael Broder’s thoughtful post about lyric poetry, a mini-review of Helen Vendler’s Poets Thinking:
In the intro, Vendler points out that “Great Books” courses generally pass lyric poetry over in silence, preferring to talk about epic, dramatic, and other narrative forms of poetry (and of course prose) that are more amenable to discussion in terms of “thought” as commonly conceived. Consequently, the average well educated student who takes Literature Humanities (or whatever they’re calling it now) as an undergraduate freshman at Columbia University or Core Studies 1 (Classical Origins of Western Culture, the course I’m teaching now) at Brooklyn College has a satisfactory conception of how thoughts and ideas are conveyed in epic and dramatic poetry (like the Iliad, Odyssey, Greek tragedy and comedy, Shakespeare’s plays) and of course of how thoughts and ideas are conveyed in philosophical works (Plato’s Republic or Symposium, essays of Montaigne, etc) and novels (Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, perhaps)…
…BUT MAY HAVE LITTLE OR NO CONCEPTION OF HOW THOUGHTS AND IDEAS ARE CONVEYED IN LYRIC POETRY, OR EVEN OF WHAT LYRIC POETRY IS. And of course, while many of us (poets) include narrative elements in our work, to a very great extent the contemporary practice of poetry is a practice of lyric poetry–in some form or other. As Vendler notes, this omission tends to result in a situation where intelligent readers from a variety of disciplines tend to read lyric poetry with a view towards abstracting its paraphrasable meaning, and then evaluating the work based on the perceived truth, validity, or value of this paraphrase.
Needless to say, I think she has a very good point here…. More Mike.