Archives for December 14, 2004

I’ll be on WNYC’s Soundcheck this afternoon, talking about George Balanchine’s version of The Nutcracker, which figures prominently (big surprise) in All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine.

If you live in the New York City area and expect to be near a radio at two p.m. EST, tune in 93.9 FM and give a listen.

If not, go to the Soundcheck Web page, where you can listen to the program from anywhere in the world on your computer, either via live streaming audio or by accessing the Soundcheck online archive.

See you on the radio, as Charles Osgood says. (At least I think it’s him.)

UPDATE: It’s all done, and it was great fun. (I always love doing Soundcheck.) If you didn’t hear me live, check out the archived broadcast.

It can’t be a full-fledged almanac entry unless I can source it precisely (please keep this in mind when sending in quotations), but Patrick Wahl e-mailed me an undated excerpt from a USA Today story about the new U2 album, and I liked it so much that I had to pass it along anyway:

Dismantling [How to Dismantle an Atomic] Bomb‘s origins, Bono recalls an early
version of “Vertigo” that was massaged, hammered,
tweaked and lubed before it sailed through two mixes
and got U2’s unanimous stamp of “very good,” which
meant not good enough.

“Very good,” Bono says, “is the enemy of great. You
think great is right next door. It’s not. It’s in
another country.”

Well said, Mr. Bono, sir.

Last month I asked you
you to recommend a book or two for me to read, specifying that it be “short, intelligent, amusing, reasonably easy to find, and no more than modestly demanding.” Here are the recommendations I received in return:

– The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald

– Berlin Noir, a trilogy by Phillip Kerr

– Billie Dyer, by William Maxwell

– The Birth of the Modern, by Paul Johnson

– The Book Against God, by James Wood

– A Chance Meeting, by Rachel Cohen

– The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor

– The Dalkey Archive, by Flann O’Brien

– The Diary of Helena Morley (translated by Elizabeth Bishop)

– Dwarf Rapes Nun; Flees in UFO, by Arnold Sawislak

– Evenings with the Orchestra, by Hector Berlioz

– The Feud, by Thomas Berger

– Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig

– Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe

– Journey to the Land of the Flies, by Aldo Buzzi

– Love and War in the Appenines, by Eric Newby

– Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels

– A New Life, by Bernard Malamud

– O, My America!, by Johanna Kaplan

– The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing, by William Maxwell

– An Old Man’s Love, by Anthony Trollope

– An Open Book, by Michael Dirda

– The Provincial Lady in Soviet Russia, by E.M. Delafield

– The Pushcart War, by Jean Merrill

– Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, by William Gass

– The Rebbetzin, by Chaim Grade

– The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, by Gary Shteyngart

– A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, by Eric Newby

– Tempest Tost, by Robertson Davies

– Thursday Next, a series of novels by Jasper Fforde

– The Total View of Taftly, by Scott Morris

– The Tunnel, by William H. Gass

– Wakefield, by Andrei Codrescu

– What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, by Daniel Pool

For the record, one of the books on this list is an all-time personal favorite, and I’m mentioned at length (not favorably, either!) in another one. The really great thing about the list, though, is that I’ve only read six of the books on it, if you count the dozen-odd Maigret novels I’ve read over the years as one superbook. I’m amazed and delighted (if not surprised) by the wide-ranging taste of the readers of “About Last Night,” and I plan to take advantage of it in the coming weeks and months. Thanks to you all.

P.S. To the comedian who recommended The Birth of the Modern, I ask, what’s your idea of a long book?

“Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool–good luck.”

George Sanders, suicide note (1972)