March 10, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Daniel Okrent, Writer and Editor, Part 2 By Daniel Okrent This is the second installment of Okrent’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR Rubenfeld hasn’t sent anything soaring over the wrong river recently, but he does have Al Jolson singing to a swing band accompaniment about ten years before swing came into vogue. The book is extremely fast-paced and well-plotted, but if you hold it up next to one particular book set in a similar time, and similarly dependent on the imagined lives of real historical figures, it’s paler than a bedsheet. The book I have in mind, of course, is E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, and I say of course because if you were alive and literate in 1975, you’ve read it. I don’t think there’s a novel that has evoked such universal enthusiasm in the years since. Doctorow already had a minor reputation, but this single book was like a comet screaming across the cosmos, the subject of cover stories, lengthy reviews, talk-show discussions, et cetera, for weeks and weeks. I want to read it again. Tonight, the Prazak Quartet at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. Four Czechs, former classmates at the Prague conservatory, playing Beethoven, Janacek, and Schubert with an earthy quality not so common among American chamber groups. Weill might be the most beautiful music room in New York, its proportions ideal, its acoustics excellent (especially in the tiny balcony), each of its glowing chandeliers an especially opulent grace note. I just wish it weren’t named after the donor who made it possible. Sandy Weill has been extraordinarily generous with New York institutions and should get credit for that, but one suspects he’s more interested in credit than in music. The only time I’ve ever seen him at Carnegie—whose board he chaired for years—was at a black-tie fund-raising gala. In his truly egregious autobiography, with its peacocking title and subtitle (The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy), he mentions exactly two pieces of music over the course of 544 pages: “Happy Birthday,” and the title song from Oklahoma! Excuse the digression. Lovely room, stirring music, great evening. Could have done without the ridiculous “15 bite hot dog” at the Brooklyn Diner before the concert, but that was my own fault. Read More
March 9, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Daniel Okrent, Writer and Editor By Daniel Okrent DAY ONE In just three weeks, I’ve discovered the best way to ruin Sunday morning coffee is to read the New York Times Book Review—not because I don’t like the reviews, or the reviewers, or the choice of books (although I could, on any given Sunday, kvetch about each of those). My problem is the continuing metastasis of the best-seller lists—hardcover, mass paperback, trade paperback, kids books, advice, et cetera, now joined by e-books as a separate category. Where once the lists took up a single page of the Book Review, they now spill over page after page, every inch they consume necessarily taking away space that could be devoted to … reviews. Maybe the proliferation of lists is an act of spite directed at publishers who have cut their advertising budgets so radically that the accompanying editorial space is already disappearing. My wife and I went downtown to the Mesa Grill, where I hadn’t been for fifteen years, to meet friends for lunch before a matinee performance of Three Sisters at the Classic Stage Company. Mesa is about as authentically Mexican as this production was authentically Chekhovian—which is to say, not nearly enough. Some excellent actors (especially Juliet Rylance, as Irina) nonetheless managed to triumph over a peculiar, modernizing translation that placed contemporary idioms into the mouths of turn-of-the-last-century characters. If you’re going to use modern speech rhythms and colloquialisms—which is certainly a plausible, if peculiar, option—then why put all the characters in nineteenth-century clothing, in a nineteenth-century house? Still, it was well-acted Chekhov, and that’s good enough for me. Dinner afterward in Brooklyn, at the home of poet Vijay Seshadri and his wife, Suzanne. Vijay is a spectacular talker, able to bounce from the most recondite literary subjects to Eastern theology to pot-roast recipes without pausing for a comma. The pot roast was damn good, too. Among the other guests was Mark Strand, who is much too tall and handsome for his own good. But at least he’s old. DAY TWO Picked up Michael Steinberg’s For the Love of Music, which came in the mail from my Minneapolis pen pal, Katie McCurry. A couple of years ago, Katie sent me an incredibly nice fan e-mail about a book I’d published six years earlier, and we’ve been writing to each other ever since. She’s a big music fan, and Steinberg—a past master of program notes for orchestras across the country—was one of her heroes. I see why: The opening piece, about how he fell in love with music as a child, is especially strong. The fact that it was Disney’s Fantasia that pulled him in makes me feel less dorky for having myself been seduced by the William Tell Overture. The association I made between classical music and the Lone Ranger’s gallop across the twelve-inch screen of our black-and-white Zenith was so firmly embedded in my eight-year-old skull that when my mother told me she was going to a concert featuring the Robert Shaw Chorale, I heard corral—and thought the concert would consist of an orchestra accompanying horse tricks. This week’s subway reading is The Death Instinct, by Jed Rubenfeld. Rubenfeld is better known as a Yale law professor than as a novelist, and of late even better known as the husband of Tiger Mom Amy Chua. I picked the book up because of the incredible review in the daily New York Times (“Tremendous follow-up to his 2006 novel, Interpretation of Murder … This novel is great”). I may put it down if I encounter another egregious clam like this one, on page twelve: “To their right rose up incomprehensibly tall skyscrapers. To their left, the Brooklyn Bridge soared over the Hudson.” Astonishing. Read More
February 17, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Nico Muhly, Composer, Part 2 By Nico Muhly This is the second installment of Muhly’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. Photograph by Samantha West. DAY FOUR 10:15 A.M. While I slept, iTunes seems to have downloaded the complete collected works of MNDR. I must have gone on a pre-ordering binge, because it also is trying to download the film of Never Let Me Go. I’m listening to “I go away,” from the MNDR track. I like electronic-based slowish tracks; I loved that Capslock track off the MIA album whose title I dare not reproduce here. I wish there were a more poetic way to describe the rhythmic passage of time than “tick tock.” I’m looking at this queue: yet more SVU and the new Top Chef are coming! I fly tonight back to New York so maybe I can sneak one of these in on the plane. 3:00 P.M. Good God! The BBC has a story about the “history” of chai in India. The segment begins with a twelve-second history of tea that elides over the idea of Empire so quickly it feels like a blow to the solar plexus. I reach a Kiplingesque encounter with a terra-cotta cup maker in Kolkata just as we reach the rental car return, so I don’t have a moment to jot down who was responsible for this. They should write opera libretti! I do wonder who is responsible for radio’s “generic ethnic background noise.” I’m convinced that if you slow down the audio and remove the host’s voice, you’ll hear the same group of five people chattering—be it a story about Inuit fishing quotas or the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. 9:00 P.M. A calm post-flight evening of take-out and listening to Ella Fitzgerald. I am preparing for Saturday night, which is when I will be seeing the Metropolitan Opera’s production of John Adams’s Nixon in China with a bunch of friends. I have the score perched next to my computer. I watch the first twelve minutes of an episode of Top Chef with Isaac Mizrahi saying outrageous things to the cheftestants and pass out. Read More
February 16, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Nico Muhly, Composer By Nico Muhly Photograph by Samantha West. DAY ONE 10:45 A.M. Reykjavík, Iceland. I wake up later than I want, and desperately read, again, the last twenty pages of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star. By this point, the plot has turned into a fun cross-Benelux car chase. I myself have just come from a slightly awkward but ultimately fun week in Benelux, where I was resident at a chamber music festival, and every time I go to the Netherlands I reread this book. I make special digital note, this time, of some good descriptions: “minatory Flemish motets.” 3:30 P.M. Oh my God, there is an Ali Farka Touré album I don’t own: Red & Green. I’m buying it right now. I am going to also take this opportunity to rebuy the Toumani Diabaté album Djelika. I am, as always, fascinated by the weird intervalic overlap between Morricone scores and Malian music. I’m making a note to go know more about this. It is also noted that Mio, the brother of Valgeir, both of whom I am making a ton of records with this week in Iceland, has pants very similar in cut to those featured on the cover of Red & Green. DAY TWO 5:45 A.M. I wake up in a panic—an anxiety dream about an e-mail argument, which is prescient given the early-morning realities of my inbox. To calm myself, I buy music online manically. The new Iron and Wine cover is neurosis-provoking neon, but I buy it anyway. While listening on headphones, I fall back asleep and iTunes continues and mysteriously plays Paula Deen’s “Thanksgiving Special,” in which she makes oyster dressing. I actually like her accent, although the way she pronounces the word for (as in, “I’ll let this fry up here for a minute”) strikes me as uncharacteristically Vietnamese. Read More
February 9, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Jacques Testard, Editor, Part 2 By Jacques Testard This is the second installment of Testard’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 9:47 A.M. I have a mild headache and I am only on life number three of Dalrymple’s Nine Lives. I’m beginning to think that it’s quite difficult to get any reading done at a literary festival. When we got home last night I asked Forty to pick me up at 9:30 A.M. He asked me for two cigarettes as a token of goodwill. I complied. He never turned up. 10:34 A.M. I’m attending a showcase panel on “Why Books Matter” with Kiran Desai and Penguin CEO John Makinson. It’s being filmed for the BBC and the spotlights are on the audience. It’s quite painful on the eyes. According to Sunil Sethi, who presents the only literary show on Indian television, book sales are rising by fifteen to eighteen percent per year in India. I find that very hard to believe. One interjection from the floor offers an interesting insight into this phenomenon. “It is not true Mr. Sethi,” says Mumbaikar. “In Bombay the Encyclopaedia Britannica is very popular but that is because it matches the furniture.” That’s more like it. 1:15 P.M. It’s lunch time. I’ve just had my photo taken by a dozen journalists as a smiling Indian man with neat white hair placed a piece of naan bread onto my plate. I might be in the papers tomorrow—his name is Javed Akhtar and he is a very famous lyricist for Bollywood songs, I’m told. I was an extra in a Bollywood film once. I had to wear a tweed suit at a beach party and pretend to swig from a magnum bottle of vodka. 7:40 P.M. Salman Ahmad has just taken to the stage. The Guardian has described him as Pakistan’s answer to Bono. Kamila Shamsie wrote a piece on the rise of pop music in the Pakistan issue of Granta last year on the emergence of pop music in the eighties which charted Ahmad’s rise and his turn to Sufi Islam for inspiration. 10:36 P.M. I’m sharing a drink with Samrat, whose debut novel The Urban Jungle came off the press yesterday. He’s just given me a signed copy of it—it’s a modern rewriting of Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Samrat tells me that Sunil Sethi’s statistics on the growth of the book market in India are inaccurate. An English language best-seller in India sells no more than five thousand copies, according to Samrat. I’ve since been looking online and cannot find any information either way. Surely that’s too low? Read More
February 9, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Jacques Testard, Editor By Jacques Testard DAY ONE 11:45 A.M. I’ve just landed in Delhi. I’m here for the Jaipur Literature Festival, starring Orhan Pamuk, J. M. Coetzee, Richard Ford, and Candace Bushnell. I haven’t been in Delhi for close to three years. The Commonwealth Games have left their mark: the new airport terminal is gigantic, crisp, and shiny. I step outside into the crowd and am greeted with silence. A few years back fifty drivers would have competed for my custom but now they wait in an orderly fashion. My father, who has lived in Delhi for close to a decade, picks me up. Our driver is a Hindu; Ganesh stickers adorn his windscreen. 3:00 P.M. I have an afternoon in the city and have decided to revisit the old town. I go to the Jama Masjid, a legacy of Delhi’s Mughal past. An auto-rickshaw drops me off a few hundred yards away, and I walk up the central walkway toward the towering minarets and white-marble domes, carefully treading my way past the crouching lepers and stray cows. The mild January weather tempers the overwhelming olfactory experience that is India. A man with hennaed hair tells me the mosque is closed for prayers. He asks me if I want to visit a haveli hidden out in Old Delhi. He says it is bigger than the Jama Masjid and has a magical tree hovering in its central courtyard. It will cost me five hundred rupees. I decline. 5:15 P.M. I’m in Khan Market at the Full Circle bookshop. Books are cheaper in India. I’m looking for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The girl at the till has not heard of it. She recommends Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. I decline, this time politely. I forgot how much time one spends declining in India. 8:20 P.M. My father and I visit the Nizamuddin Dargah before dinner. Nizamuddin, a thirteenth-century Sufi saint, is buried here. Millions visit every year. To get there one has to walk through a maze of alleys among scores of bearded pilgrims and rose-garland vendors. The pilgrims buy the flowers and deposit them on the holy man’s grave. Everyone wants to sell me flowers or look after my shoes while I step into the shrine. Pilgrims sit in rows singing Sufi songs. It is colorful, convivial. Children run freely, friends and families chat happily on the periphery. I imagine that churches in medieval Europe would have felt similarly chaotic. We must be the only non-Muslims. Most people don’t seem to notice us and those who do smile and hold out their hands in greeting. Read More