I’ve been reviewing books in this space for the past year, and instead of telling you about a new one this week, I thought I’d remind you of five of the ones I enjoyed most in 2007:

• Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage (HarperCollins, 208 pp., $19.95) is the best short book about Shakespeare that I know. Instead of writing about the plays, Bryson has chosen instead to concentrate on summarizing the known facts of Shakespeare’s life—of which there are precious few—and presenting them in a lively, literate manner.

• Joseph Epstein’s In a Cardboard Belt! (Houghton Mifflin, 410 pp., $26) will doubtless be self-recommending to regular readers of COMMENTARY and the Weekly Standard. It contains a wide-ranging selection of the familiar and literary essays that Epstein has published there and elsewhere in recent years, and like all his other books, it’s chatty, thoughtful and so irresistibly readable that the wise man will take care not to pick it up unless he has a free evening ahead of him.

• Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America (Atlantic Monthly Press, 279 pp., $24) is a witty semi-memoir in which the author of Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces tells us what it’s like to visit Lincoln-related sites and events throughout America. His adventures and misadventures among the Lincoln-lovers and Abe-haters are hugely amusing, but don’t let the one-liners throw you off the scent: Land of Lincoln is a deeply thoughtful consideration of Abraham Lincoln’s increasingly problematic place in postmodern American culture.

• Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts (W.W. Norton, 876 pp., $35) is a near-indescribable book whose virtues, like those of Land of Lincoln, are partially obscured by the fact that it’s so hard to pigeonhole. The best I can do is to quote myself:

[I]t’s a fat volume of short essays about a hundred or so people, most of them twentieth-century artists and writers of various kinds. Each essay is a commentary on a well-chosen quotation from its subject, and the essays are arranged alphabetically. The overarching theme of the book is the fate of humanism in what James describes as “an age of extermination, an epoch of the abattoir,” meaning that many of its subjects either ran afoul of Hitler and Stalin or sucked up to them.

Rarely has so gloomy a subject been written about with such infectious gusto. Don’t expect James to toe the right-of-center line, but the hard common sense with which he weighs the intellectual follies of the Low, Dishonest Century is arguably even more refreshing to hear from a littérateur of the center-left.

• Roger Scruton’s Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter, 118 pp., $20) is an extended essay in which the noted philosopher makes the case for the primacy of Western culture at a moment when much of the West is experiencing “an acute crisis of identity” triggered by the twin challenges of radical Islam and the multicultural project. It is short, pointed, lucid, compelling and disturbing. Think of it as a stocking-stuffer for pessimists and you won’t be far wrong.

See you in 2008!

1. Michael Clayton. (90 percent favorable rating on the movie review website Rotten Tomatoes). Billed as a realistic walk through the corridors of power, Michael Clayton winds up being a tepid, lugubrious, and preposterous thriller—art-house Grisham. George Clooney plays a kind of lawyer who doesn’t even exist—though he works for a huge law firm, he runs around the greater New York area doling out expertise on criminal cases, immigration issues, family law, and a dozen other specialized areas. Can you picture big law firms sending out sneaky hit teams to take down anyone who might testify against them, even though that person might have told any number of others what he knows? Can you picture firms hiring mugs to blow up cars? Would a hit squad be so dumb that the car is primed to blow up at a seemingly random moment rather than when the ignition is turned on? And finally: if a car exploded and there was no body in or around the car, would a lawyer (or even the stupidest guy in your high school woodworking class) assume that the driver of the car was dead? Like a lawyer who falls asleep during his closing argument, Michael Clayton saves its stupidest trick for last: the wheezing old gag that goes, “Aha! As I just tricked you into giving an incredibly detailed confession, I was recording the whole thing on this little gizmo!”

2. Grindhouse (81 percent favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes)—It’s two, two, TWO movies in one: the first, Robert Rodriguez’s bloody, intentionally amateurish zombie flick parody Planet Terror, is a great success: There’s no denying that it meets or even exceeds its goal to be unwatchably awful, one of the worst movies of the year. Not this year: 1974. You have to be pretty meta to convince yourself you’re enjoying a rotten movie, though. The second part of the double feature, Quentin Tarantino’s talky but enjoyable Death Proof, doesn’t make the mistake of thinking bad writing is good writing if the whole thing is nestled between ironic quotation marks.

3. Enchanted. (93 percent). Great trailer! A story about an animated princess from a Disney movie who winds up as a real person wandering the mean streets of New York sustains its single joke for almost two solid minutes. After that, it’s just Splash with taffeta—but without Tom Hanks or John Candy. The unshaven, barely conscious TV soap star Patrick Dempsey turns out to be the prince of the city. Which, again, like every other plot point, was clear from the trailer. Every so often the movie breaks into song, but none of the lyrics are as funny and tongue-in-cheek as the ones from actual Disney cartoons like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.

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COMMENTARY’s online editor Sam Munson asked if I’d like to write a short piece about what I think are the top five movies of 2007 from and about the Middle East. Sure, I said. But once I got started I found I couldn’t write about five. I started with a two-paragraph blurb about James Longley’s masterful Iraq in Fragments, but I exceeded the word limit before I could even get to the second film on the list. Iraq in Fragments is too good for a blurb. So here, instead, is a piece about the top single film from the Middle East, or at least Iraq. One caveat: Iraq in Fragments actually dates from 2005, but it was released on DVD only a few months ago, and it’s such a powerful and important film that it should make the cut.

Most recent documentaries filmed in Iraq can be fairly categorized as liberal or conservative. All are about the war, and most are cinematic equivalents of op-eds. James Longley’s lush and intimate Iraq in Fragments is different. While the director appears to be some kind of liberal or leftist, his film is refreshingly none of the above. Iraq in Fragmentsis about the war only insomuch as it was shot in Iraq during the war. This film is a collection of portraits of Iraqis, not Americans or the American military. And unlike almost any other documentary out there, Longley’s includes the Kurds.The director is invisible. We never see him or hear him, and he uses his camera as though he were shooting a fictional film. This is emphatically not the kind of documentary you’re accustomed to seeing. Longley’s camera and editing work are so stylish and deft that the end result is perhaps the most artful documentary ever made on any subject. (Watch the high-definition trailer here for a powerful preview.)

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cross-posted at About Last Night

Oscar Peterson, who died on Sunday, was one of a handful of jazz musicians to have cultivated a virtuoso technique comparable to that of the greatest classical instrumentalists. In part for this reason, he never got along well with jazz critics, most of whom were (and are) too musically ignorant to appreciate the near-unique nature of his achievement. Peterson’s peers knew better. He was very, very popular—every great virtuoso is—but it was his fellow artists who gauged his worth most accurately. Like Buddy Rich, he left a trail of collegial awe behind him wherever he went.

Peterson got more bad reviews than any other major jazz pianist, and on occasion he deserved them. Miles Davis, one of the few musicians of importance to have said anything unpleasant about him, famously remarked that Peterson “makes me sick because he copies everybody. He even had to learn how to play the blues.” That was both nasty and untrue, but it did point to the chink in his armor. Unlimited virtuosity is a snare for the unwary artist. “Only in limitation,” Goethe wrote, “is mastery revealed.” Peterson’s extreme technical facility, by contrast, sometimes lured him into the trap of glibness. When he was coasting, all you heard was the fireworks. Nor did it help that he recorded so prolifically throughout his seven-decade-long career. No one can make that many records save at the price of consistent inspiration, and Peterson paid that price too often for comfort.

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Soon 2007 will draw to a close, and with it the much-fêted fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I’ve had all year to ponder it, but I’m no closer to understanding what the fuss is about. Could it really hurt to temper the praise by pointing out some of the book’s deficiencies? The reverential overtones of this title couldn’t be more appropriate; many fans treat the book as though it were some kind of religious text. But the real puzzle isn’t why people, many of them young people, love Kerouac. It’s why they don’t prefer the vastly more entertaining adventures of—to name a few—Richard Henry Dana, Herman Melville, or Mark Twain (or, if I may jump the pond, Eric Newby or Patrick Leigh Fermor) . . .

. . . or John Ledyard (1751–1789), the quintessential Dartmouth Man. The College’s Alma Mater boasts of the alumni that “’round the girdled earth they roam,” and the line might as well have been written with Ledyard in mind. Unable to pay his tuition, he chopped down a tree, made a dugout canoe, and escaped on the Connecticut River—which puts Kerouac’s automotive antics in perspective, I think. He later sailed on Captain Cook’s third voyage, which he chronicled in his Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage. The travelogue has the dual distinction of being the first American book to describe Hawaii and the first American book to be protected by copyright.

This year saw a renewed interest in Ledyard, with the publication of two books: Bill Gifford’s Ledyard: In Search of the First American Explorer and Edward G. Gray’s The Making of John Ledyard: Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler. Arts & Letters Daily has linked to an excerpt from the latter:

The list of famous individuals he came into contact with during his short life comes straight out of the indexes of history: Captain James Cook, on whose last voyage he sailed as a lowly marine; Robert Morris, financier of the American Revolution and Ledyard’s one-time employer; John Paul Jones, with whom he struck up an acquaintance and tried to raise funding for an ambitious expedition to the northwest coast of America; Ben Franklin, whom he met in Paris during Franklin’s last days as American ambassador there; Thomas Jefferson, Franklin’s successor, whom Ledyard also met in Paris. The list goes on, but it seems just as well to stop here. For it was in Paris that Ledyard enjoyed his first great social success, when he was accepted into the famous expatriate circle surrounding Thomas Jefferson.

Read the whole thing here. You might be inspired to retrace his steps.

Japan may no longer be the next great superpower, but its traditional culture remains one of the world’s great treasures. Next time you’re in Tokyo with a few days to kill, get off the beaten path and head off to some of the spots most foreign tourists miss:

1. Izumo Taisha: The second main Shinto shrine in Japan, located in Izumo City, Shimane Prefecture on the less-developed Japan Sea side of the main island of Honshu. The shrine of Okuninushi no Mikoto, the nephew of the Sun Goddess, it is perhaps the perfect Japanese expression of architecture’s communion with nature. It is also where Japan’s 8 million gods gather during the tenth month of the lunar calendar (roughly October or early November). Unlike Ise Shrine, dedicated to the Sun Goddess herself, Izumo is still steeped in the raw power of the western clans that ultimately subordinated themselves to the emerging Japanese imperial family in the 3rd-4th centuries C.E..

2. Kinosaki: The place where Japanese go for hot springs, especially in the winter. Located on the Japan Sea, Kinosaki is a charming city of traditional inns, many with their own hot springs, bisected by a picturesque canal. Be sure to go when it’s snowing, and to plod through the streets in traditional wooden clogs, wearing just a thin kimono while hopping from hot spring to hot spring. Afterwards, you can indulge in a huge feast back in your inn (don’t stay in a modern hotel). A short drive takes you to the Japan Sea, where you can stand on cliffs and gaze out towards the continent that has been entwined with Japanese history for millennia.

3. Mt. Takachiho: Kyushu, the southernmost island in Japan, is where the Sun Goddess sent her grandson to begin conquering the divine land, according to the Japanese myths. He descended to earth at Mt. Takachiho, located roughly on the border between Kagoshima and Miyazaki prefectures in the south of the island. You can climb it in about two to three hours taking one of two paths, and at the summit will reach the Shinto shrine marking his arrival. The views are stunning, including a crater lake in the extinct volcano you climb on the way up, and not far away are some of Japan’s best hot springs (look for one called “Tengoku” or Heaven—though I haven’t visited for years and can’t tell you where it is).

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If one is trying to “prove,” as Christopher Hitchens has been doing, that “religion poisons everything,” he probably ought to give it a rest around this time of year—if only as a matter of strategy. Many believers are willing and able to debate points of doctrine in a calm and dispassionate way; fewer will countenance assaults on their favorite holidays. How the Hitch Stole Hannukah was surely a self-defeating effort. Religion hasn’t poisoned anything by giving us these annual opportunities to spend time with family and friends. (Forgive the sappiness, but it’s running freely from my Douglas Fir.) For my part, I don’t think I could do without my favorite Christmas literature. Here’s a top five that the goyim and the Chosen alike can enjoy:

1. How to Be Topp by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. A treasury of advice from the spelling-disabled British schoolboy Nigel Molesworth, this one isn’t strictly a Christmas book, but its last chapter, “Ding-Dong Farely Merily For Xmas,” is indispensable. “You canot so much as mention that there is no father xmas when some grown-sa Hush not in front of wee tim. So far as I am concerned if father xmas use langwage like that when he tripped over the bolster last time we had beter get a replacement.” The Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank-You Letter can be used all year round.

2. A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. Before the noble fruitcake was just another sight gag on some post-Thanksgiving Best Buy commercial, there was Capote’s charming memoir of “fruitcake weather” and a child’s Christmas in Alabama.

3. A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas. The only thing better than reading the Welsh poet’s famous Christmas memoir is reading it with a whiskey in hand, and the only thing better than that would be having a drunken Thomas on hand to recite a wish list like: “Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Families. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions.”

4. Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris. “Season’s Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!,” Sedaris’s exclamation-point-laden parody of a Christmas “update” letter, is worth the price of admission.

5. A Christmas Garland by Max Beerbohm. Is it a holiday bagatelle or a stunning work of literary criticism? I report, you decide. George Bernard Shaw called him “the incomparable Max,” and you will too once you’ve read this collection of seventeen literary parodies, each on the subject of Christmas. “The Feast” (Joseph Conrad), “Some Damnable Errors About Christmas” (G. K. Chesterton), and “Shakespeare and Christmas” (Frank Harris) are enthusiastically recommended, but it’s all gravy. Henry James and Rudyard Kipling also take their places on Beerbohm’s skewer.

It was only a matter of time before someone picked up the cudgels on behalf of the “starchitects”—that new but already tired term for our celebrity architects—but it is surprising that it would be the New York Times’s architecture critic. Last Sunday, Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote with great urgency in praise of starchitects, touting them not only for the audacity of their imagination but for their ability to work with gargantuan real estate developers. Why the Times would cheer the rise of the international starchitect, which is an aspect of globalization, is not entirely obvious. It may be a sufficient explanation that the phenomenon has been criticized by certain critics on the right, such as John Silber and me.

For Ouroussoff, the starchitect is not a shallow and ambitious showman but a seasoned master—someone who is likely to have paid his dues, often in academia, toiling for decades in obscurity to refine and distill his visionary ideas:

Today these architects, many of them in their 60s and 70s, are finally getting to test those visions in everyday life, often on a grand scale. What followed has been one of the most exhilarating periods in recent architectural history. For every superficial expression of a culture obsessed with novelty, you can point to a work of blazing originality.

Ouroussoff dismisses the notion that the starchitect is a new phenomenon. After all, was not Bernini “a tireless self-promoter,” and should not our own “greatest architectural talents also be celebrated for their accomplishments?”

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• Gertrude Himmelfarb, who apparently knows everything there is to know about Victorian England, has been publishing invaluable books about the Victorians for longer than it would be polite for me to disclose. I prune my shelves ruthlessly, but five of her books have found permanent places there. Now I’ll be making room for a sixth.

The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays (Yale, 327 pp., $35) is one of those anthologies that somebody should have edited years ago, a book of such self-evident value that I can’t think why it’s only now being published. In it, Himmelfarb brings together essays by seventeen of the key figures in Victorian thought, among them Lord Acton, Matthew Arnold, Walter Bagehot, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Cardinal Newman, John Ruskin, and Oscar Wilde. To this glittering assemblage of literary and intellectual luminaries she appends an introduction that not only supplies a historical context for their work but considers “the essay as genre” and its special significance in Victorian intellectual life:

The essay, even a substantial one, conveyed its ideas with an immediacy and vigor lacking in a book. In that shorter form, arguments were sharpened and controversy was heightened, so that the reader entered more readily into the mind and spirit of an author more knowledgeable and thoughtful than himself…. They were serious and learned, even scholarly, without being pedantic or abstruse. They were accessible to a relatively large audience because they were written by nonacademics for nonacademics, in a common language and reflecting common values.

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…my essay on the lavishly praised Atonement, published in The Weekly Standard, can be read here.

….goes to our fellow blogger Kyle Smith, whose take on National Treasure: Book of Secrets is a JOY to BEHOLD. (The use of ALL CAPS will become clear if you follow the link and read Kyle’s review.)

Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead isn’t so much a heist picture as a post-heist picture, a film about the sad and deadly spiral of greed and evil that follows two brothers who plan a robbery of their own parents’ jewelry store. As a genre, this is a small one, and often overlooked; only a few films, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs among them, go after it with such gusto.

The novelty may explain the gushing critical reaction. It’s undoubtedly a strong film, gripping and tersely paced throughout, and many have compared it to Lumet’s classic, and undeniably brilliant, foray into the heist picture, Dog Day Afternoon. But though the subject matter is broadly similar—a holdup in New York goes deadly wrong—the two films are hardly of equal stature.

Dog Day earned its classic status not only though its taut pacing, but through its lovingly crafted cast of characters, and its subtle portrayal of the social frictions of 1970s New York. Rather than simply existing for their own sake, the genre elements fused into a framework by which to examine a place and an era. The film was, in other words, about more than the robbery, or even its aftershocks.

Devil, on the other hand, is content simply to wind up its ingenious little Rube Goldberg of a story and let it play out. A number of the supporting characters are flat, functional stereotypes who appear only so they can help keep Lumet’s narrative machine running. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this, and the movie is still almost certainly one of the year’s best. But it’s just genre—albeit very, very cleverly constructed genre—and shouldn’t be mistaken for anything more.

Showtime’s Dexter, which just finished its second season, is up for a WGA award this year. Like most high-profile cable dramas that have appeared in the wake of The Sopranos, it balances upper middlebrow dramatic concerns—quirky characters, complex narrative lines, psychological questioning—with visceral, often vulgar elements. But the competing interests of these two strains has forced it into a series of ungainly, and sometimes ugly, moral contortions.

The show, which follows the exploits of Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), a Miami PD blood-spatter analyst who also happens to be a serial killer—albeit one who only targets other murderers—is high concept in the extreme, a cockeyed mash-up of American Psycho, Miami Vice, and CSI. Dexter, we learn, is a bona fide murderous sociopath—lacking a conscience and unable to experience normal emotions—but he lives by a code imparted to him as a boy by his adoptive father.

The code allows Dexter to control his bloody urges by killing those who “deserve it,” and requires him to blend in with society in order not to get caught. So he maintains a polite, even conciliatory persona, and has a perky girlfriend, a respectable job, and a sister for whom he has assumed responsibility. Meanwhile, Dexter, in voice-over, muses on his own humanity (or lack thereof) as a creature with no more moral compass than a rock.

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The fifth and final cut of Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction classic, Blade Runner, comes out this week in a variety of overstuffed DVD packages. Anyone interested in the film should read Gary Giddin’s very eloquent New York Sun piece on the film’s somewhat awkward juxtaposition of marvelous visuals and clunky storytelling. He gets the otherworldly quality of Scott’s compositions just right:

Every inch of the screen is answered for, indoors and especially outdoors, as horizons disappear into matte paintings, smoke pots, shimmering neon, giant screens, airborne vehicles, and crowds as opaque and variously dressed as in a Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. From the justly celebrated opening shot — a grotesque metropolitan hell with fireballs shooting into the starless night — we are drawn into an alternate world.

Giddin comes down hard on the story (maybe too hard), saying the script and characterizations “suggest directorial incompetence,” but his basic point stands: Blade Runner succeeds on the power of its meticulously created world. It’s a triumph of visual ingenuity that, even in the age of limitless CGI possibility, few films can match.

More than that, however, the film is a landmark because of how it opened up the genre of cinematic science fiction. Much science fiction, especially the low-grade junk that flourished in the decade before Blade Runner hit the screen, was cheap, rough, and carelessly assembled. That’s not to say that none of it was enjoyable in some adolescent way, but it was hardly serious; even the best efforts (Star Wars) rarely transcended their pulp origins.

Blade Runner, though imperfect, sought to be something more, something grand and thoughtful, and if its fraught production process (exhaustively detailed in Paul Sammon’s book, Future Noir) resulted in a less-than-focused final product, its outsized ambitions, and the talent behind them, were always completely clear. In the end, simply looking as stunning as it did was enough of an accomplishment, for it gave the often raw and jagged science fiction genre permission to be something more than a juvenile stomping ground—to be haunting, elegant, and yes, even beautiful.

This holiday season, while other stocking stuffers hash out the comparative merits of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, J. K. Rowling, and Philip Pullman, why not cut these confections from your diet and go straight for the meat and potatoes (or bangers and mash) of Middle English poetry? I don’t mean the new Beowulf in 3-D—though that poem is in Old English, of course, which is why it looks like somebody dumped a sack of Scrabble tiles on the floor. If O.E. is your poison, Alex Nazaryan has posted some thoughts on the new Beowulf at Armavirumque. It would seem that this poem is unfilmable: Here on the horizon, Peter Suderman wrote that “[c]omparing it to its source material is of little use. It’s been streamlined and modernized, and now bears more resemblance to a computer game than an ancient epic.”

Whether or not you check out Beowulf, have a look at Simon Armitage’s new verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem whose hairy green villain gets less attention than Grendel for the simple reason that he rarely appears on high school curricula. Paul Johnson wrote, “No one ever reads Beowulf unless forced to do so (in schools or universities) or paid to do so (as on the BBC). Gawayn and the Green Knight is little more attractive.” I disagree vehemently on both counts. A few days ago, the poet Edward Hirsch explained in the New York Times what makes Gawain so great:

In 1967, Ted Hughes’s third book, “Wodwo”—raw, spooky, elemental—sent me scurrying to find out the meaning of this strange Middle English word. The figure of “wodwo,” which Hughes elsewhere characterized as a sort of “half-man, half-animal spirit of the forests,” seemed to have loomed up out of the unconscious of English poetry. The book’s epigraph came from a ferocious passage in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and soon I was parsing the somewhat resistant Middle English text and bounding through J. R. R. Tolkien’s faithful translation. I was transfixed. I had stumbled upon the underground alliterative tradition of English poetry. . . .

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the founding narratives of English literature. The storyteller nods to the Aeneid, thus invoking his epic lineage, and then settles down to tell his tale, which begins in the court of King Arthur, “most regal of rulers in the royal line.” It is Christmastime at Camelot, and the chivalrous Knights of the Round Table are carrying on and carousing when suddenly an enormous stranger appears, a hulking interloper, “a most massive man, the mightiest of mortals.” The astonishing stranger is green from head to foot, a kind of emanation from nature. Even his horse is “a steed of pure green stock.”

You can read the poem “Wodwo” here, but I suspect you’ll get more out of Gawain. It’s stranger than just about any Christmas story you’re likely to encounter—after all, it does substitute “You’ll lose your head” for “You’ll shoot your eye out“—and of course it shows us what English literature looked and sounded like it its infancy. As Hirsch writes, the poem “still wields an uncanny power after 600 years. We’re fortunate that ‘our coffers have been crammed/ with stories such as these.’”

CORRECTION: Michael J. Lewis, in this post, substantially understates the extent of John Silber’s errors and the breadth of the praise Millennium Park received in the national press, as well as misstating Blair Kamin’s position on Silber.

It did not take long for the bouncers at the flashy and exclusive nightclub that is contemporary architecture to show John Silber the door. Silber, the former president of Boston University, has just published Architecture of the Absurd: How ‘Genius’ Disfigured a Practical Art, a heartfelt essay about the state of architecture today, and the visual mayhem wreaked by the cult of the celebrity architect. Already the first snide response has come in and—predictably—it does not so much engage the book’s ideas as condemn the author’s temerity in writing about architecture in the first place.

The review of Blair Kamin, the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, is remarkable for its quality of vitriol. For him, Architecture of the Absurd is “just another rant in the culture wars,” written by someone who “isn’t an architect” and who has not even inspected the buildings he reviles, merely “bloviating from afar.” Nor does Silber’s criticism offer anything new: “architecture critics have said it all before.” In the end, Architecture of the Absurd is written off as “more rant than reason.”

Such is the magisterial disdain reserved for outsiders from whom one expects no retribution and whom one can attack with impunity. But is it true that outsiders—those who bloviate from afar—have nothing to offer? What about those who bloviate from within—like, for example, Kamin?

Kamin makes much of a factual error by Silber concerning Chicago’s Millennium Park (Frank Gehry was not its planner, as Silber stated, although he designed its Pritzker Pavilion). Having found this slip, Kamin acts as if one need pay no attention to anything else that Silber says. In fact, Silber looked at Chicago’s new park, with its thicket of eye-catching public sculptures, critically, something that Kamin himself never did. Throughout the long history of that controversial project, Kamin was a dependable cheerleader, praising the park as “a real public space, not a gated fantasyland.”

It’s something of an occupational hazard for critics at municipal newspapers to be civic boosters. But Kamin’s embrace of local pieties blinded him to one of the most intriguing (and disturbing) developments in contemporary architecture. One of the reasons that Millennium Park was built so swiftly was that its planners divided it into a series of discrete features, giving donors the right to choose their own architects and sculptors. Instead of providing a comprehensive aesthetic vision, in effect the park presented, as I wrote at the time, “a series of detached vignettes—in effect, naming opportunities.” The results may indeed be extraordinarily popular, but their broader ramifications are ominous, especially once other cities relinquish aesthetic control to their fund-raising operations.

So long as there are architecture critics like Kamin, who cannot separate aesthetic judgment from civic boosterism, we have all the more need for the fresh outside perspective of an audacious and delightfully independent critic like Silber.

• The perfect non-fiction book is one that tells you everything you really need to know about a given subject, be it large or small, in 250 pages or less, and does the job with style. That was the yardstick I used when writing my brief life of George Balanchine, which is 185 pages long. I leave it to you to judge whether I succeeded, but even if I didn’t, I know such books when I see them, and Simon Goldhill’s How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today (University of Chicago, 248 pp., $18 paper) fills the bill—perfectly.

One of the many disheartening things I’ve learned after four years as a drama critic is that most contemporary productions of Greek tragedy are exercises in theatrical futility. Why do they go wrong, and what makes the good ones good? Until I read How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, I was unable to answer those questions save by way of guesswork and instinct, not having had the benefits of a classical education or seen very many stagings of the Greek classics in my wasted youth. Henceforth, though, I’ll know what I failed to learn in school, thanks entirely to this priceless little book.

Goldhill, a professor of Greek literature and culture at Cambridge, is realistic about the vast cultural distance that separates us from the plays of which he writes:

Greek drama is a wordy genre. Whenever any character says, “I have told the whole story,” that is always the beginning of more stories and a lot more laments. There is little action, at least for those brought up on action movies. There are few people who run in Greek tragedy, fewer explosions, and rarely even any physical contact onstage—though when people do touch, it is explosive.

How to reduce that distance? Though Goldhill is no literal-minded antiquarian, he understands that part of the paradoxical answer to this difficult question lies in paying close attention to the circumstances under which Greek tragedies were originally produced. As he explains in his introduction:

The book highlights what I regard as the six most pressing problems that face any company that chooses to produce a Greek tragedy. Each of the six chapters . . . looks first at whether we can learn anything from the ancient world, and then discusses how modern companies have tried to solve these difficulties in the theater, and analyzes their successes and failures.

Some of Goldhill’s problems will make immediate sense to most readers: what do you do with the chorus? Others are subtler: in what ways did the architectural design of Greek amphitheaters influence the way in which Greek tragedies were written? And how do you play those long, long speeches?

Finding the right level of expression is always an actor’s problem: but Greek tragedy poses this problem in the most acute form, because there is no small talk. It is because of this that so many actors fall back on “grandeur” or “magnificence,” although grandiloquence so rarely leads into the heart of any role.

Without minimizing the formidable difficulties posed by the genre, Goldhill shows how a modern production that pays no heed whatsoever to ancient precedents is likely to run into trouble, whereas a director who keeps those precedents firmly in mind will often find that his six problems have a way of solving themselves. Though he is not a “theater person,” he has looked closely at countless contemporary productions—some of which, like The Gospel at Colonus and Deborah Warner’s 2001 staging of Euripides’ Medea, will be familiar to American playgoers—and analyzes them with a shrewdness that no critic will fail to envy. His approach is at once deeply informed by the best academic scholarship and no less deeply rooted in a commonsense understanding of what works on stage. The result is one of the most instructive and lucidly written books about theater to have been published in recent years. No one whose interest in drama is more than merely casual should pass it by.

In our December interview with Terry Teachout, the veteran contributor to COMMENTARY and horizon regular discusses the New York Philharmonic’s trip to North Korea and Peter Gay’s new book Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. He also takes readers on an absorbing outing to New York City’s historic Knoedler & Company, one of Manhattan’s premiere art galleries, to explore a show of paintings by the late Jules Olitski, one of the founders of the Color Field movement in American abstraction (and a longtime subscriber to COMMENTARY).

The literary blogger Maud Newton posted yesterday about the “soundtrack approach to novel writing.” It’s a solution to so-called writer’s block: “My friend had a surprisingly practical suggestion: Give each part [of a novel] its own soundtrack. Listen to different music as you work on each section, and make sure it’s the same music every time. . . . [T]he words will just flow out.” I confess to having written a (stubbornly unpublished) novel while listening only to supernatural calypso, but I’m wary of any “technique” that further tightens the ties binding fiction to film.

Why do I say this? It’s a helpful coincidence that at the top of her “Remainders” sidebar, Ms. Newton has linked to Wes Anderson’s stilted, abysmal Hotel Chevalier script, published in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story. It seems that material written for the screen can hypnotize a literary audience, and very much vice versa. Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, for instance, either perplexed or invited the ridicule of many critics until the Brothers Coen gave it an extreme—which is to say, nasty, brutish, and long—makeover for the Sanguinary Screen.

Here was a story so clearly and in so mercenary a fashion written for the movies that its release as a novel should simply have been passed over. If I could have it another way, I’d take Oprah’s beloved The Road as a movie and No Country as a better, more fleshed-out book—and, believe me, The Road has flesh to spare. Why does everyone, from goofy Nick Hornby to ghoulish McCarthy, write as though he’d rather be polishing up a screenplay? Is it just because there’s no money in books, or is there something about the vocabulary of the movies that continues to slice away at the primacy of the printed word?

cross-posted at About Last Night

I just got back from a press conference at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall at which the New York Philharmonic officially announced its plans to play in Pyongyang on February 26. Present were Paul Guenther, the orchestra’s chairman; Zarin Mehta, the orchestra’s president and executive director; and Pak Gil Yon, North Korea’s ambassador to the UN. Christopher Hill, an assistant secretary of state in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, was also supposed to be at the press conference, but sent his apologies, claiming that “responsibilities” in Washington prevented him from attending.

Highlights:

• The Philharmonic will spend two and a half days in North Korea. During that time it will give a single concert in Pyongyang in a hall seating 1,500 people. It will then fly to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, to give a second concert there.

• Lorin Maazel, the orchestra’s music director, will conduct both performances.

• The Pyongyang program will consist of Gershwin’s An American in Paris and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, plus the national anthems of the U.S. and North Korea. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony will be played in Seoul.

• According to a statement released this morning, the orchestra is making the trip with “the encouragement and support of the U.S. Department of State.”

• Paul Guenther said that the Philharmonic’s “somewhat unusual journey” to North Korea would be a reflection of its “calling to serve, which the New York Philharmonic has never shied away from.”

• The concert will be broadcast, but as of this morning Zarin Mehta had no information on whether or how it would be heard inside North Korea, or who will be permitted to attend the performance. “I would guess they do not have the kind of system we have of advertising concerts and selling them,” he said.

• Fifty members of the international media will accompany the orchestra to Pyongyang. Mehta does not know what restrictions will be placed on them by the North Korean government.

• The orchestra wants to give master classes in Pyongyang for “music students and other professionals,” but so far no final arrangements have been made to do so.

• Ambassador Pak dodged the question of whether news of the concert has been released by North Korea’s state-controlled media as of this hour.

• Asked whether the concert would be a propaganda coup for North Korea, Mehta replied, “We’re not going to do any propaganda.”

• More quotes from Mehta:

“One small symphony is a giant leap.”

“All we can do is show the way that music can unite people.”

“We’re going there to create some joy.”

* * *

To read “Serenading a Tyrant,” my original October 27 Wall Street Journal column on the Philharmonic’s trip to Pyongyang, go here.

It’s official: the trip that Benjamin Ivry deemed “likely” to happen on this blog in October will indeed go forward. This coming February, the New York Philharmonic will visit North Korea.

About the trip to the land of Kim Jong Il, the New York Times reports U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill’s commenting, “‘I hope it will be looked back upon as an event that helped bring that country back into the world.’” Yet, as horizon blogger Terry Teachout, himself quoted in today’s Times article, noted in an October opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal,

What would you have thought if Franklin Roosevelt had encouraged the Philharmonic to accept an official invitation to play in Berlin in the spring of 1939? Do you think such a concert would have softened the hearts of the Nazis, any more than Jesse Owens’s victories in the 1936 Olympics changed their minds about racial equality? Or inspired the German people to rise up and revolt against Adolf Hilter? Or saved a single Jewish life?

Only at the end of today’s article does the Times reporter mention that “Some questions have been raised about the appropriateness of visiting a country run by one of the world’s most repressive governments”—a regime that has starved millions of its own people.

The formal announcement of the New York Phil’s trip will take place tomorrow at Avery Fisher Hall, when more details about the visit will be revealed. What we do already know is that the Philharmonic sought pre-conditions relating to the trip and that these conditions have been met. Among them: “that the orchestra could play The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Philharmonic should consider whether it’s brave to entertain a land that isn’t free.

As we approach the New Year, our thoughts inevitably turn to resolutions. Running a marathon, learning Mandarin, and reading the Deipnosophistae are among the many things I will end up not doing in 2008. Keeping a diary will appear on many to-do lists, but anyone contemplating this soul-pulping undertaking should first read Louis Menand’s New Yorker essay, “Woke Up This Morning,” on the subject. He begins with a discussion of three reasons (ego, id, and superego, for convenience) why people keep diaries, and why they often fail to record more than a week or two at a stretch:

The ego theory holds that maintaining a diary demands a level of vanity and self-importance that is simply too great for most people to sustain for long periods of time. It obliges you to believe that the stuff that happened to you is worth writing down because it happened to you. This is why so many diaries are abandoned by circa January 10th: keeping this up, you quickly realize, means something worse than being insufferable to others; it means being insufferable to yourself.

Some people possess an amazing stamina when it comes to vanity and self-importance, and the results can be horrifying. (See, for example, horizon blogger Sam Munson’s hilarious review of the diaries of Joyce Carol Oates.) When such results are validated by publication, they probably push their authors even deeper into the abyss of self-regard. Yet I suspect that for many of us, the embarrassment of rereading an old journal can have a tonic effect on our capacity for humility—which is exactly why I’ve never kept one.

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Does anybody read the New York Observer anymore? I actually didn’t know it was still published, having tuned out when Hilton Kramer retired his front page art column a few years back. But the salmon-colored sheet drew my attention this week with a candidate for the most inane cover story ever: underwear.

Spanx is a girdle-like undergarment that makes the woman who pulls it on appear five to ten pounds slimmer. Even youthful, svelte ladies are addicted to the “power panty,” as the Observer alerts us. I knew the paper’s mission was to cover every nuance of what people are wearing in Manhattan, but this week’s article hits a new low. A wad of filler, its sole objective seems to be displaying a cutesy cartoon of Spanx-sporters Oprah Winfrey and Gwyneth Paltrow in their skivvies.

This drivel proves the obsolescence of a society rag like the NYO in the age of Gawker and other online social diaries.

• I like shoptalk, even when I don’t completely understand it, and I like it best of all when the shop is the studio of a working artist. To be sure, a lifetime in journalism has taught me that some artists are incapable of talking about their work—or anything else—but it’s surprising how often a skillfully edited interview can shed useful light on the myriad mysteries of creation. Moreover, I’ve also discovered that I don’t necessarily have to like the work of the artist in question in order for me to take a respectful interest in his working methods. Whenever I teach a course in criticism, I tell my students, “Always treat artists with respect. Most of them know how to do something you can’t do.”

Michael Auping, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, has been interviewing artists ever since he was a graduate student, and now he’s spun 34 of those interviews into a book called 30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes. As an art collector, I have strong and well-defined tastes in painting and sculpture, and insofar as Auping’s choice of interview subjects reflects his own taste, I’d say we don’t have much in common. Only one of the artists represented in 30 Years, Martin Puryear, is also to be found on my own list of personal favorites, while several of the others make my teeth itch. Yet I still read 30 Years with close and consistent attention and learned much from it—though not all the lessons were intentional.

It didn’t exactly surprise me to find, for instance, that the conceptual and politically-oriented artists questioned by Auping are inclined as a rule to emit great clouds of blather (“The kind of art we have today is really just a throw-off of the maximized profit, a function of the capital which is poured into it”). Conversely, the most interesting artists are usually—though not always—the ones with the most interesting things to say. Asked about the art of Fernand Léger, Louise Bourgeois replied, “He was very rigid, very limited. But he could find emotion in that geometry. Léger could be hard and intimate at the same time.”

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It’s a rare review that can change one’s mind about a book he has deeply enjoyed—so rare that B. R. Myers’s Atlantic piece on Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is my only personal example. (Myers’s razor-sharp Reader’s Manifesto can be read here.) In October, somewhat to my surprise, I found myself in the choir singing hosannas to Johnson’s National Book Award-winning Vietnam novel. Tree of Smoke was, I thought, both vastly entertaining and a moving addition to the literary evidence for W. T. Sherman’s maxim, “War is hell.” Now I’m a little embarrassed not to have remarked the many howlers that Myers picks out:

There is no point in dwelling on the story line, because even some of the book’s admirers have conceded its sluggishness and overlength—albeit with some humbug about how flaws make a good novel more likable, perfection being such a turnoff, etc. As for the action, it never feels authentic. Soldiers do not laugh in unison or call out frantically for M&M’s during a sudden and intense firefight, nor would a soldier crawling through bush find the attendant lacerations “exhilarating.” Not once does the reader feel fear or tension. . . . [O]ne thinks only of the silver-screen ‘Nam and of Life, not life, feeble substitutes for the riches to be had from Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

Crawling through the thicket of Johnson’s prose, I did find the lacerations exhilarating. There was something about the language, overblown and inexact, that seemed perfectly suited to the subject matter. In A Reader’s Manifesto, Myers presents a very different take on that kind of anti-style. “Like [Annie] Proulx and so many others today,” he writes, “[Cormac] McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.” I’d say that applies to Johnson as well.

Tree of Smoke is in many ways a remarkable achievement. For all it gets wrong, it’s a tremendous effort of imagination; I don’t doubt, as Myers claims to, that the critics loved reading it. Still, I’ll admit that it falls wide of the mark, that the praise should have been tempered with a more careful consideration of the shortcomings. A final question for Myers, though: Where were you when I called for air support on the problem of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? Now that’s a review I’d pay to see.