Take Me Out

Novels are the best art form, right? I think we can agree without debate that there’s no video game, no tweet, no post, no tiktok, no app that’s as good as a good novel. But there’s also no painting, no photograph, no ballet, no song, no symphony, no album, no playlist, no sculpture, no film, no television show, no poem that’s as good as a good novel either. Are there shitty novels that aren’t as good as, I don’t know, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? Sure. But a good novel? A good novel is better than your favorite song/painting/whatever. A good novel is better than anything.

The art form that comes close though is live theater. One reason is that (good) plays and musicals have a lot in common with (good) novels — interesting characters in complicated relationships; room to ask questions and thoroughly explore themes, arguments, and ideas; stories that have to be entertaining moment to moment or page to page but also need to get you from the beginning to the end in good hands. Another reason is Shakespeare. Is Hamlet as good as a really good novel? It really, really is.

Novels are great because they take ten (ish) hours of alone time to enjoy. Theater is great for the opposite reason: community. There is nothing like being in a room with a whole bunch of people doing narrative together — for instance, all of you weeping over the death of a person you can all see breathing on a stage ten feet in front of you¹, all of you pretending together that that person is not in fact on a stage in front of you but on the parapet of a castle in ninth-century Denmark².

The Death of Hamlet (but not really!) Eugène Delacroix, National Gallery of Art

Really, actually, it’s all of you together acknowledging that this person is simultaneously an actor in the room with you right now and a prince on a parapet in Denmark 1200 years ago. Sometimes that actor gets naked. Sometimes that actor says the wrong lines or loses a prop. Sometimes audiences laugh in the right places, and sometimes they do not. Whatever happens, tomorrow night will be different.

The only thing close to the liveness of live theater is live sports. But because the Baltimore Orioles traded Adley Rutschman to Boston last week, I am now a Red Sox fan, and because I’m having real trouble being a Red Sox fan, in light of having been a third-generation Orioles fan until last Tuesday, I find myself in a real Scylla and Charybdis sort of situation here.

Live footage of me rooting for the Red Sox (William Bromley, Odysseus Between Scylla and Charybdis, British Museum)

A lot of people are talking about The Odyssey of late, and none of them, best I can tell, are considering Adley Rutschman or my unwavering love for him. Baseball also has characters and relationships and moment-by-moment stories within overarching narratives, as well as communities making joy and meaning together, but baseball is not as good as good novels, and everyone knows this, even the front office of the Baltimore Orioles (which knows very little).

Plus, you can go to a baseball game, but mostly you watch it on TV where there are a thousand ads and they’re fully admitting baseball is boring by constantly trying to get you to make it interesting by gambling on it. But at least it’s probably real. Anything else you look at on a screen may or may not be, with no way of knowing. And either way, so much of the content we consume all day every day isn’t art and isn’t real because instead it’s either selling you something or simply selling you.

Paul and I went out a few nights ago to see live theater, and I’m not going to tell you what we saw because it was terrible, but part of the point is at least it was real, and I knew it was real because I was in the room with it happening. Sometimes shows are bad. Sometimes art isn’t done yet. Sometimes you think it will work and you think it is working, but it is not working. At least it tried. At least it was honest about it. We did not go to the opera because the opera — though live and art and real and narrative and everything above except Adley Rutschman³ — is not my jam. Opera is not as good as a good novel. But they do have good signage:

Brava Seattle Opera sign-composer!

My points are these:

1. Good novels are better than anything.

2. But good theater comes close. Community is important. Real is important. Live is important. Art is important.

3. I have become a Red Sox fan, and I am not happy about it.

There are lots of really wonderful books about baseball. One is Peter Lefcourt’s 1992 novel The Dreyfus Affair which condemns homophobia by suggesting parallels to fin-de-siecle French antisemitism (the title is a pun) BUT is also a very funny story in which a superstar shortstop falls in love with his second baseman. It’s a delight!

Sending love and wishing you all real, live art and your favorite players staying home where they belong.

Love Laurie

1. I like to have good seats.

2. Or what/whenever. YMMV (which is another good thing about live theater).

3. If Adley Rutschman is ever in an opera, I will be there. If the Baltimore Orioles had traded Adley Rutschman to the Boston Opera instead of the Boston Red Sox, I would be much less upset about it.