Elaine Showalter and Christopher Benfey
Dear Chris,
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StumbleUponHere in London, Tuesday is usually a slow news days for arts and culture, but it's still a feast. That's partly because of intense media competition--this country, the size of Texas, has 12 national daily newspapers--and partly because British journalism is so unsnobbish in its definitions of culture. The posh broadsheets, like the Times and the Guardian, run clever analyses of the wedding of Posh Spice and David Beckham, while some of the tabloids, like the Evening Standard, have the sharpest art critics (the acidulous Brian Sewell) and book reviews. I'm a hopeless Anglophile, and I'd better just admit it up front.
I like the British journalistic speciality in meta-criticism, driven by the Darwinian struggle to survive. They write not only theater reviews but also reviews of the theater reviews; not only feature columns but parodies of feature columns. Fun to read, and often deliberately controversial.
Sort of a mixed bag this morning. New show of "light-hearted" contemporary art about to open at the Tate. The owners of the Independent on Sunday, the lowest-selling of the Sundays, just fired its respected editor Kim Fletcher and hired Janet Street-Porter, a toothy, eccentric TV producer and '70s personality, known for her wild and crazy clothes and cockney love of "yoof" culture. The reaction from other editors has been as scandalized as if the New York Times hired Roseanne to edit its Sunday magazine. One rival haughtily declared that Street-Porter couldn't edit a bus ticket, and yesterday the Guardian asked a bunch of editors to come up with their ideas for editing bus tickets. The Guardian's own design editor had some great ideas, I thought, about using computers to print shopping advice and news headlines geared to destinations.
The Bolshoi Ballet is about to arrive here for a month, and there's a lot of speculation about whether they are still the best or even very good. Prima ballerinas, yes, but a tired repertoire, and then they do keep defecting. They'll be performing here in the Coliseum, since the Covent Garden Opera House is still being renovated at vast expense. I think the new opera house will be worth the money though; it looks gorgeous, half white-wedding-cake, half super-modern; and now, between the squashed-in seating (worse than airline economy) and lack of air conditioning at the Coliseum, watching opera and ballet now demands considerable devotion.
In the Guardian, this morning's 58th installment of hip cartoonist Posy Simmond's "The Late Gemma Bovery, a tale of adultery and soft furnishings," continues its brilliant bi-lingual parody of Flaubert, the modern woman, and the English obsession with interior decorating. Can you imagine anything like this in the States?
And what's happening at home during this long hot summer?
Best,
Elaine
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