Huston on Agee

As a guest on The Dick Cavett Show (February 14, 1972), John Huston told a story about James Agee having a first heart attack, at a resort in California. It was 1951:

“I went in and saw Jim, and the doctor was still there. And as soon as the doctor left, why, Jim said, ‘Would you give me a cigarette?’ And I said, ‘Of course not.’ It’s the worst thing in the world that could be done after a heart attack. And then — I forget whether it was that same night — I don’t suppose it was, but a couple of days later Jim said, ‘For God’s sake, give me a cigarette.’ I said, ‘Jim, I can’t do that. It’s impossible. And when you get well and you pull out of this, why, you’ve got to, you know, behave a little differently.’ Jim looked at me very straight and smiled [laughs], and I knew that he would never behave any differently.”

James Agee died of a second heart attack in 1955.

Another Cavett Show post
Marlon Brando on acting

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The worst sentences in Salinger

These sentences, from the introduction and last page, seem to me finally the worst, not for the quality of the writing but for the sloppiness of the thought. From David Shields and Shane Salerno’s Salinger, pages xv and xvii:

This is an investigation into the process by which a broken soldier and wounded soul transformed himself, through his art, into an icon of the twentieth century and then, through his religion, destroyed that art.

Religion provided the comfort he needed as a man but killed his art.

[H]e gave himself over wholly to Vedanta, turning the last half of his life into a dance with ghosts. He had nothing anymore to say to anyone else.

Got that? And now turn to page 575:

Salinger’s chronicles of two extraordinary families, the Glasses and the Caulfields — written from 1941 to 2008, when he conveyed his body of work to the J. D. Salinger Literary Trust — will be the masterworks for which he is forever known.

These works will begin to be published in irregular installments starting between 2015 and 2020.

So religion destroyed Salinger’s art, and yet Salinger was working, as late as 2008, on masterworks that will bring undying fame? That’s the kind of blatant self-contradiction one might see in a hastily assembled freshman-comp essay. The problem involves not a few sentences but the biographers’ basic sense of their subject. Did anyone at Simon & Schuster notice? Did anyone care?

Sara Nelson, Amazon’s “Editorial Director of Books and Kindle,” from the company page for Salinger: “This book says more than most about the world of writing, celebrity and American culture in the twentieth century.” Yes, but make that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book — in other words, the fact of the book as published — says more than most books about the cynicism of trade publication in our time. Dolla dolla bill.

Other posts about this biography
The worst sentence in Salinger so far
The worst sentences in Salinger so far
The worst sentences in Salinger so far

[This is my final post about Salinger. Borrow the book from a library if you must.]

Domestic comedy

“I don’t know how I know that story.”

“Probably because I’ve told it before.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[The story: William Parker’s gift of a bass to Henry Grimes.]

The William Parker Quartet

Gelvin Noel Gallery
Krannert Art Museum
Champaign, Illinois
October 24, 2013

Lewis Barnes, trumpet
Rob Brown, alto saxophone
William Parker, bass, wooden flutes
Hamid Drake, drums

The William Parker Quartet is one of the great ensembles in jazz. Its instrumentation recalls Ornette Coleman’s first great quartet (with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell). The members of the Parker quartet have been playing together for thirteen years, with an intimate understanding that Parker likens to a marriage.

Last night’s performance began with an episode for flutes and drums (blessing the space, Parker later explained), followed by “Deep Flower” (dedicated to the pianist Andrew Hill), “Ridley Me Do” (dedicated to the trumpeter Michael Ridley), and “O’Neal’s Porch,” with genial themes (at times reminiscent of Coleman and Thelonious Monk) giving way to free improvisation. Those who insist that music must swing to be jazz never seem to understand that swing does not require a preëstablished structure of measures and chord changes. These musicians swing mightily, in a way that might be called abstract expressionist. And: in a way that draws upon varied elements of jazz history: slapped bass, the unison front-line statements of bop, the shifting tempi and interplay between horns of Charles Mingus’s groups. The quartet’s music is truly “in the tradition,” not recreating the past but drawing on it to make something new.

My favorite moments: Barnes and Brown walking off to play from opposite sides of the gallery; Parker playing his bass from top to bottom, getting two-note chords by plucking above and below the bridge; a thunderous drum passage, after which Drake apologized for his volume, to general laughter and applause; a funny junket into three-quarter time.

Whenever I hear great live music, I cannot sleep well. I barely slept last night.

Great thanks to Jason Finkelman for continuing to bring great music to east-central Illinois.

[In the Tradition is the title of a 1978 album by alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe. I hope I have the title of the second piece right. A correction, from any quarter, is welcome.]

Marlon Brando on acting

From The Dick Cavett Show (June 12, 1973), Marlon Brando on whether acting is a noble profession:

“It’s been a good living. I mean, if you were in the lumber business, and you were on The Dick Cavett Show, and somebody said, “Well, how do you like the lumber business, Ralph?” It’s a business, it’s no more than that, and those that pretend it’s an art I think are misguided. Acting is a craft, and it’s a profession not unlike being an electrician, plumbing, or an economist. It’s a way of getting on and providing food and shelter for yourself and family.”

Elaine and I have been moving through several DVDs of Cavett interviews. They’re loose and at least partly improvised, sometimes awkwardly so (as with Groucho Marx and Erin Fleming), sometimes hilariously so (as with Bette Davis). The remarkable thing: no one, aside from Brando, is promoting anything — and Brando is promoting Native American causes. My favorite show so far: one with Fred Astaire, who sings Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, and Cole Porter, and dances for one amazing minute. Those things of course were worked out in advance.

Did you know that The Dick Cavett Show has a website?

A related post
William Zinsser on work

[After taping the interview, Brando was followed by the photographer Ron Galella. Brando punched him and broke his jaw.]

Unpremeditated lunchtime magic

Eat a carrot. Then bite into a sandwich, peanut butter on whole wheat.

For just a few seconds, you will taste Pad Thai.

Maslow, revised

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as revised by the Internets.]

I thought of it, myself, I swear. But so have the Internets. I know of no origin for the picture, which I found here.

Some rock’s

On brisk treks that take us through a nearby subdivision (three-mile treks, exactly), Elaine and I have noticed some rocks of a kind not found in nature: large slabs proclaiming glory, as if a household were a bank or investment firm. The slabs stand in front yards and read like so:

The DOE’S

Est. 20__

The date varies. But that apostrophe? Every slab has one. Ouch. Garner’s Modern American Usage explains:

Although few books on grammar mention the point, proper names often cause problems as plurals. The rule is simple: most take a simple -s, while those ending in -s, -x, or -z, or in a sibilant -ch or -sh, take -es.

The householder’s apostrophe, as I will call it, is a common sight on mailboxes or small woodburned signs. There it looks homemade, quaint. On mighty slabs, it looks farcical.

Householders, if you must proclaim your glory to the passerby, think of the way bands manage their names: The Beatles. Or better: The Smiths. Plural, not possessive.

Other posts, other rocks
Some rocks : Zippy : Zippy : Zippy : Zippy : Zippy : Lassie and Zippy : Conversational rocks

[“Some rocks” is a minor Orange Crate Art preoccupation that has developed from my affection for Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy and Bill Griffith’s Zippy.]

Doyle and French

[Marilyn French, The Women’s Room (1977).]

Not long ago I remembered, out of nowhere, that my professor Jim Doyle once mentioned that he was a minor character in Marilyn French’s novel The Women’s Room. Like French, Jim had a doctorate from Harvard (where the novel’s protagonist Mira Ward goes to grad school); I never knew anything more of the backstory than that. But sure enough, there he is on page 346, the (nameless) possessor of a BA from Providence College. Is he elsewhere in the novel too? I would have to reread it to know. I think though that Jim appears in just this one bit of conversation, which I marked years ago in my paperback copy.

Reader, have you known or met a real-life character — in other words, the model for a fictional character? I can think of three I’ve met: William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg (Old Bull Lee and Carlo Marx in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road), and someone who became a character in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. (That last one is not for publication.) Jim Doyle though is the only real-life character I’ve known.

Other Jim Doyle posts
Department-store Shakespeare
From the Doyle edition
Jim Doyle (1944–2005)
A Jim Doyle story
Teaching, sitting, standing