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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

OGIC: Part of the landscape

October 24, 2003 by Terry Teachout

Jennifer Howard’s Washington Post review of Nell Freudenberger’s Lucky Girls is written with more conviction than any reviews I’ve seen of a very attention-getting book. She’s politely underwhelmed by it–I mean, if you consider this polite:

[Freudenberger] excels at evoking the wistfulness that’s a poetic version of low-grade depression.

But what’s most remarkable about this review is neither Howard’s critical acumen nor the persuasive way she pegs the stories as New Yorker Lite. The real news is here:

Some publishing history: The story “Lucky Girls” first appeared in the New Yorker‘s Summer 2001 “Debut Fiction” issue. This splash earned Freudenberger some nice buzz and the envy of many other twentysomething writers, but that’s another story. Check any of your favorite literary blogs for the details.

In the same week that found the New York Times tech section looking down skeptically at the blogosphere from on high, asking “more fizzle than sizzle?” Howard takes blogs’ existence, and her readers’ familiarity with them, completely for granted. This sounds to me like a new level of absorption into a mainstream cultural discourse whose center is gravitating away from the print media more quickly than many corners of the print media would like to admit.


When I read the above I had two instant reactions: Wow, she and her editors didn’t even feel the need to explain that it’s short for “web log”; and, more tellingly: Hey, no links? Which goes to show not just what my reading habits have become, but why blogs are gaining ground.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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