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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

OGIC: Drawing the line

July 7, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Sarah’s “Immutables” category drives a hard bargain. Immutables are “individual tastes that will never be swayed, never be altered no matter who tries to do so. And to take things to perhaps an extreme level, if you attempt to be friends with someone who doesn’t agree with your Immutables, then the friendship is doomed.” Gee, that does sound extreme. Do we all have second-degree Immutables? Do I? Just off the top of my head I’d say that, while you don’t have to love Edward Gorey to be my friend, if you don’t get him, we might not have a lot to talk about.


It may well be, though, that I have good friends who don’t get him and it just hasn’t come up. I definitely have friends who don’t like Buffy, Lucinda Williams, Henry James, or other keystones of my cultural life. I often find there’s more to be gotten out of a robust disagreement with someone I like and respect than from mutual admiration of each other’s impeccable taste. And the joy of converting someone–well, that’s the great potential reward for engaging in such debates.


Nope, I’m racking my brain but I can only answer this question theoretically. A specific aesthetic disagreement has never thrown over any budding or actual friendship of mine. However, I once had a potential friend who didn’t enjoy eating. That proved insurmountable. It was then, as the relationship sputtered, that I first understood how much my social life revolved around food (and still does): dinner parties, cooking together, pizza-and-television, expeditions to Afghani or Ethiopian restaurants, and so on. Eating something wonderful together, in my experience, can cement or deepen a friendship. This is one of M.F.K. Fisher’s great subjects. It is memorably treated in what I think is the first essay in The Gastronomical Me, about a childhood picnic with her sister and father that marked the first time she became really aware of her father as an individual, rather than just one of her parents, and began to form a separate bond with him (a pie is implicated).


I take full responsibility for the interruption of my nascent friendship with the poor, pitiable food-phobe and wish her well–my own perhaps overdeveloped delight in good food didn’t seem to bother her any, and I credit her tolerance–but I just couldn’t carry on. Her attitude toward food, which was part fearful, part resigned, tended to kill all my pleasure in it. Maybe, then, my true Immutable is M.F.K.–if you can’t appreciate her appetite or her divine prose, a famous friendship might not be in our cards.

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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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