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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 17, 2004

OGIC: Brilliant debuts

June 17, 2004 by Terry Teachout

These bloggers are new:


– A female Blowhard! Vanessa B., a pseudonymous Chicagoan (where have I heard that before?), is keeping Michael B. company for the next month in the wake of Friedrich’s sad retirement. A recent transplant from NYC, she has a City vs. City post here. Perhaps she will get hooked. A month is short.


– Carrie A. A. Frye launches Tingle Alley today. She was previously an occasional guest blogger at Maud’s. See what can happen, Vanessa? In for a dime….


And this blog is new to me:


– Daily Gusto, a group blog featuring smart art essays, movie reviews, and whatnot. I can never resist the good whatnot.

OGIC: Lit lit, and everything else

June 17, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Via Rake’s Progress I found this oldish but greatish Michael Chabon essay introducing an issue of McSweeney’s that was devoted to plot-driven short stories–“thrilling tales” (no, I don’t pay as much attention to McSweeney’s as I probably should). Chabon writes:

As late as about 1950, if I referred to “short fiction,” I might have been talking about any one of the following kinds of stories: the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war or historical story; the romance story. Stories, in other words, with plots. A glance at any dusty paperback anthology of classic tales proves the truth of this assertion, but more startling will be the names of the authors of these ripping yarns: Poe, Balzac, Wharton, James, Conrad, Graves, Maugham, Faulkner, Twain, Cheever, Coppard. Heavyweights all, some considered among the giants of Modernism, source of the moment-of-truth story that, like homo sapiens, appeared relatively late on the scene but has worked very quickly to wipe out all its rivals.

Chabon even has a good word to say about Stephen King! His weariness of literary lit meshes with some recent link-rich postings by Michael Blowhard about books and the book biz, here and here. I always find Michael’s cheerful pragmatism about book publishing smart and refreshing, his omnivorous reading habits emulation-inspiring. I thought of him, actually, when I read Terry’s great Orson Welles almanac the other day–words I am going to tape to my brain.


In semi-related news, Sean Rocha over at Slate tells why 23 different books could claim to be top-ten best-sellers last week, and why no one can say for sure whose claims are legit:

The reason for all this secrecy is itself the worst-kept secret in the literary world: Hardly anyone buys books. Hyping a book as a “national best seller” creates an illusion of momentum and critical consensus that the phrase “over 25,000 copies sold”–which would actually be a pretty good figure for literary fiction sales in hardcover–does not. Thus, the industry’s modesty is protected by the fig leaf of relative sales: The current No. 1 on every fiction list is The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, but there’s no way to tell from the ranking whether it is selling 1,000 copies a week or 1 million.

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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