Archives for March 4, 2004

Sorry, but I won’t be blogging again until well into Thursday, if then. I wore myself out on Wednesday working on the Balanchine book and writing my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal, and instead of staying up late to work on “About Last Night,” I’ve decided to play it smart and crash.

I do, however, want to briefly mention the Wednesday-night artsjournal.com get-together at the Landmark Tavern. Doug McLennan, the mastermind and boss of artsjournal.com, “About Last Night”‘s blessed host, was in New York for a couple of days (he runs the site from Seattle), so he took the opportunity to convene all those New York-based AJ bloggers who had a couple of hours free to go drinking, plus any readers who cared to show up. We didn’t expect a crowd, but we got one anyway, and I met a lot of very nice people, the same folks who send OGIC and me all that cool e-mail.

As I was getting ready to hit the road, one reader said to me, “You know, artsjournal.com will probably be a Big Institution in a couple of years, and all of us here tonight will probably look back on this get-together and say, ‘Ah, yes, those were the days.'” We laughed. But he was right: these are the days, the dawn of a new medium, and all of you reading these words are a part of it. You’re the postmodern counterparts of those prescient people who bought their first TV sets in 1948 and watched Toscanini and Milton Berle and Harry Truman and said to themselves, “I wonder what will come of this?”

And now…to bed. I have to finish Chapter Three. I have to get this place straightened up in time for Our Girl’s arrival on Friday. I have to call my mother. I have to get some sleep. I have to pick an almanac entry. In lieu of me, go visit all those cool blogs in the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column. Do it yourself.

Later.

“The Lyric Suite was my triumph–Constance’s triumph, that is. I had liked Wozzeck at first hearing and Berg’s violin concerto at the third or fourth: there was no reason I shouldn’t like the Lyric Suite, as Constance said, and she had made up her mind that I was going to. Whenever she had dinner with us, whenever she came by in the evening, she held in her hand a long-playing record of the Lyric Suite, and once each time she played it to us. I would sit and read, sit and talk, sit and dream–at first. I have to admit, I’d sit and suffer; my wife suffered but did not sit–she would say with a vague sidelong smile, ‘All that darning…Call me when it’s over, Constance.’

“After four or five playings I was getting used to it, my wife did not get up and leave any longer: there were parts we liked very much better than other parts; three or four more times and we liked the other parts–we were, we found, crazy about the Lyric Suite: how could any of it ever have seemed hard to us? Constance was very polite, and didn’t once say, ‘When I was young I was the same way about it.’ So far as the Lyric Suite is concerned, we had been foolish and young and Constance old and clever; and we were grateful to her for that best of gifts, a change in one’s own self.”

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution