Archives for April 7, 2004

“About Last Night” continues to have intermittent server problems, which is why you’ve only heard from us intermittently for the past day or so.

Be patient. We’ll be back.

“A woman was walking along one of the paths with a dog on a lead. She wore a grey tweed coat and transparent pink nylon gloves, and carried two books from the public library in a contraption of rubber straps. What is the use of noticing such details? Dulcie asked herself. It isn’t as if I were a novelist or a private detective. Presumably such a faculty might be said to add to one’ s enjoyment of life, but so often what one observed was neitehr amusing nor interesting, but just upsetting.”

Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love

Neruda, Luciana Souza‘s new CD, is out this week. I wrote the liner notes:

If Luciana did nothing more than sing, she’d still be a miracle. But she also writes music, sometimes to her own graceful words, sometimes to those of poets who catch her curious ear. Neruda is an hour-long song cycle based on the poetry of Pablo Neruda and the piano pieces of Federico Mompou, sung in her Brazil-perfumed English (a language she speaks with the freshness and surprise of an explorer charting a new world) and as uncategorizably protean as everything else she does. “House” dances down the street in a sinuous 7/4, spurred on by her own deft percussion playing. “Poetry” has the concentration of an art song by Faur

Earlier today, I went all the way downtown to the studios of WNYC to tape an episode of Studio 360, Kurt Andersen’s weekly radio series on art and culture. This particular show is about criticism, and I’m the critic in question. The occasion (naturally) was the publication of A Terry Teachout Reader, and
Andersen and I had a lengthy and exceptionally wide-ranging conversation about what I do and how I do it. I’ve been interviewed on quite a few radio shows over the years, but this one was especially satisfying–the questions were smart and to the point, and I had more than enough time to answer them in detail.

New Yorkers can hear my appearance on Studio 360 at ten a.m. next Saturday, April 17, on WNYC-FM (93.9), or at seven p.m. next Sunday, April 18, on WNYC-AM (820). No matter where you live, you can also listen on the Web in live streaming audio by going here.

Studio 360 is carried by NPR affiliates across the country. For a complete list of local stations and air dates, go here.

Once the show has been broadcast, it’ll be archived here so that you can hear it at your convenience.

One way or another, give a listen, O.K.? I think it’ll be fun.