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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 12, 2004

TT: Almanac

March 12, 2004 by Terry Teachout

“So far as I know ours is the only language in which it has been found necessary to give a name to the piece of prose which is described as the purple patch; it would not have been necessary to do so unless it were characteristic.”


W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

TT: Good news, bad news

March 12, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I’m back from giving that speech in Michigan, and too tired to do much more than give you the inside skinny on my drama column in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, in which I reviewed Craig Lucas’ Small Tragedy, a backstage play about a production of Oedipus Rex, and Charles Mee’s Wintertime, about which the less said, the better.


I loved the Lucas play, though I didn’t expect to:

The good news is that Craig Lucas’ characters never act like puppets on a better writer’s string, nor is “Small Tragedy” a parasitical “commentary” on Sophocles. It is a play with a life of its own about a group of interestingly complicated people with lives of their own, one in which the process of staging a show is simultaneously satirized and illuminated, an exceedingly neat trick. Mr. Lucas likes to teeter on the edge of political correctness and agonizing predictability–one character is HIV-positive, another is a Good European who spends most of the first act condescending to his na

TT: Additional data points

March 12, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Publishers Weekly has a story about the Sam Tanenhaus appointment, based on interviews with Bill Keller and Bob Loomis (Tanenhaus’ editor at Random House). No link, alas, but here are some quotes:

Tanenhaus, said Keller, displayed particular proficiency at matching reviewer to book–one of the tests apparently had interviewers holding up a work of fiction and asking how the candidate would handle it–and other skills which further “reassured us that this guy was quite impressive and could hold his own against anyone.” He added that Tanenhaus “has a tremendous amount of energy, which in a small operation is a lot of the battle. You have to be able to inspire, and he’s an inspirational presence.”…


Keller also continued to emphasize timeliness and relevance, in both fiction and non-fiction, for TBR. Tanenhaus’ background lies in history, biography and, perhaps most critically, current affairs, expertise the Times thinks could apply to unexpected areas. “I think he can bring a bit of a news sensibility to the reviewing of fiction,” said Keller. “By that I don’t just mean that he’ll get excited by a book that is a new discovery but that the Review will write about fiction in a way that ties into the modern world. People who write fiction don’t live in seclusion from the world.” Tanenhaus himself has a somewhat unexpected background in fiction; in 1984 he wrote Literature Unbound, an incisive survey of Western Lit, despite being just seven years out of college.


Tanenhaus, of course, still has work cut out for him; besides staff, there’s the perennial hobgoblin of space and the pressure to keep the section literary while revamping its dusty reputation. Indeed, if the twin, sometimes incompatible, concerns for the Times in the selection were snap and seriousness, the newspaper seems to feel like it has achieved both with its choice, who has literary cred and magazine buzz, Robert Caro by way of Graydon Carter.

TT: Usage du monde

March 12, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I was just about to praise Household Opera for a major breakthrough in phonetic orthography–Rrrowr!–but then I googled it and came up with 450 hits. Next thing you know, somebody will be writing to tell me it’s actually from Finnegans Wake….


While we’re on the subject, more or less, I have settled on Eeuuww! as my preferred spelling of that now-essential expletive. Any questions?


(I also prefer Fuhgedaboudit, as rendered by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities, but no standard rendering has yet been universally accepted, alas. These things matter!)

TT: Great understatements of our time

March 12, 2004 by Terry Teachout

From the Los Angeles Times story about Sam Tanenhaus’ appointment as editor of the New York Times Book Review:

He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998 for his biography “Whittaker Chambers” (Random House), about a key figure in the Alger Hiss spy trial.

Um, right. And David was a “key figure” in the later career of Goliath. And Die Frau ohne Schatten is an anti-abortion opera.


Memo to the L.A. Times culture desk: get some culture. Fast.

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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