A CROWD OF CRITICS

There was seriousness and some levity at the Society for Textual Scholarship conference held at New York University over the weekend. Discussing technologies and the tacit editing of images, New York University professor Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt recalled a quip of famed iconologist Erwin Panofsky: “Whoever has the most slides available,” Panofsky once said, “will win an art-historical argument.”

Library of America Publisher Max Rudin spoke on the topic of commerce and cultural prestige. A collected edition, Mr. Rudin said, turns a “Writer” into an “Author.”

Mr. Rudin said Washington Irving returned at age 65 from being minister to the Spanish court to find his books out of print. In New York Irving faced an “enforced and dreaded return to the practice of law,” for he was informed that his vogue had passed.

But publisher G.P. Putnam in 1848 determined to republish all of Irving’s books in a uniform revised edition. Thus was born the first successful multi-volume, author-revised, collected edition in American publishing history. Regarding this, Irving told his brother, with whom he worked, “There is no necessity, John, for my bothering further with the law. Here is a fool of a publisher going to give me a thousand dollars a year for doing nothing.”

Mr. Rudin said Henry James’s own author-revised New York edition – for which he had provided new prefaces – helped invent modern literary criticism in those prefaces. It took criticism 50 years, Mr. Rudin said, to catch up with James’s critical contribution.

Speaking of his own work publishing uniform volumes of classic American authors, Mr. Rudin said, looking up from the lectern with mirth in his eyes, “Most of our authors are dead. It cuts down on business lunches.” More laughter ensued when he added, “Actually,” and then paused: “It doesn’t cut down on business lunches.”

George Bornstein of the University of Michigan focused on modernist texts, speaking on “What Does a Collected Edition Collect?” He said there was a need to demystify words such as “complete” and “collected” as used in titles. They are often misnomers, he said, because many poems may be omitted.

In a talk about editing music, Steve Whiting of the University of Michigan compared musical notation to writing. Musical notation, he said to audience amusement, resembled “little squiggles, lines, and blobs.”

Pennsylvania State University professor Robin Schulze spoke on collecting and the future of textuality. She discussed “customization.” In this new world of the e-codex, she said, the users/readers will feel they are “co-creators of a text” and the actual author will recede more into the background.

Monty Python’s Terry Jones gave a multimedia presentation based on his book “Who Murdered Chaucer?: A Medieval Mystery” (Thomas Dunne). Mr. Jones bounded onto the stage with enthusiasm and flair.

There is no record of the death of Chaucer, he said. Chaucer just disappeared; “we don’t even know when he died.” His tomb never contained his body, and was installed years after he disappeared. “We don’t even have manuscripts dating from his own days,” he said, adding, “Very odd.”

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FILM LEGEND

Peter Bogdanovich, a quintessential American cineast and movie historian of note, received a National Art Club gold medal at a glittering ceremony at the former Tilden mansion in Gramercy Park. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns spoke of Mr. Bogdanovich as a kind of cinematic Mark Twain, breaking with European muses and lighting out for the American landscape, most evidently in his iconic film “The Last Picture Show,” so inimitable as to be “sui generis, a perfect evocation of a mythic time and place.”

In his acceptance remarks, Mr. Bogdanovich thanked his father, a Serbian painter “who never received his due,” for teaching him about color and composition. He characterized the classic French director Jean Renoir as the most saintly of men, and Cary Grant, whom he met through the playwright Clifford Odets, as the most compassionate: “only Cary called when tragedy struck.”

He recalled how his mentor, Orson Welles, reminded Mr. Bogdanovich that “respectability is not good for artists,” a rule he seems never to have forgotten. A flawless impersonator, Mr. Bogdanovich imitated those whom he paid tribute to with loving but dead-on accuracy, to the delight of his appreciative public.

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CRIER CROWD

Friends came out to Elaine’s to celebrate Court TV host and attorney Catherine Crier’s new book “A Deadly Game: The Untold Story of the Scott Peterson Investigation” (ReganBooks). The book, written with Cole Thompson, chief of story development for “Catherine Crier Live,” details the Peterson story.

Guests included Fox News anchor of “Forbes on Fox,” David Asman; insurance executive Peter Worth; and a retired State Supreme Court Judge, Jerome W. Marks, talking with Keith Ablow, a forensic psychiatrist and novelist who wrote “Murder Suicide: A Novel” (St. Martin’s) and whose next book is called “The Architect” (St. Martin’s).