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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 16, 2004

TT: Guilt me not

December 16, 2004 by Terry Teachout

So little energy, so much on my mind! I want to post a dozen things, but I can’t get the car to start. Aside from the writing-for-money I have to wrap up and send off so that I can go west to Smalltown, U.S.A., with a clear conscience, I seem to be feeling the accumulated effects of weeks of overwork, exacerbated by the flu I finally shook off this past weekend. In short, I need a rest, and my hope (no doubt futile) is that I’ll get one in Smalltown, the continuous hum and buzz of family life notwithstanding. I’m bringing my iBook with me for the holidays, in the hope that I’ll spring back to life, but for the moment I think I need to lie fallow.


Incidentally, I got some nice e-mail from those of you who heard me on Soundcheck
the other day, to which I can only say that I enjoyed myself as much as you enjoyed me. (I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds.) John Schaefer and I have always had excellent chemistry, and whenever I chat with him on the air without notes or prior preparation, I catch myself wondering whether it might be more fun to talk on the radio for a living than to sit at my desk for hours on end, putting premeditated words into precise order…but no! That way lies the fate of Desmond MacCarthy, Robert Benchley, and all those other writers who lost their appetite for Getting It Down on Paper. I’ll flirt with radio–indeed, I might even engage in heavy petting on a semi-regular basis, assuming she were to make me a sufficiently enticing offer–but that’s where it stops. Honest.


I’ve also received several different versions of the following letter, which was inspired by a passing remark I posted
the other day:

I’m one of those unfortunate folk who is allergic to most of the Major American Novelists who came of age in the Fifties. Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Updike: all leave me cold as last month’s fish.

To which an old friend whom I haven’t seen in far too long replied:

So liberating to read your admission of an allergy to “important” 50’s-burgeoned Major American Novelists Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Updike, all of whom I have tried to “appreciate” and detest…mainly because I couldn’t respect them due to their awful lack of ability to create memorable, fully realized female characters…do you suppose that a possible reason for your allergy is that you are, like your beloved Balanchine, a Man who Loves Women?

As you can see, the author of this particular e-mail knows me very well. For as long as I can remember, all but a handful of my closest friends have been women, and it thus stands to reason that I’d tend to find women-unfriendly writers tedious. What’s more, I can think of several less-than-important novelists (Elmore Leonard comes to mind) whom I enjoy in part because their women characters are both “fully realized” and extremely likable. On the other hand, none of this explains why I’m also so powerfully drawn to noir tale-telling, both on paper and on screen, which is about as misogynistic as it gets (though the noir writers, Raymond Chandler above all, seem as a rule to be more afraid of women than disgusted by them). Any ideas?


Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I know exactly what I’m up to: even as I earnestly explain why I’m not going to post today, I’m succumbing to the stealthy undertow of blogging. Yes, I’ve been watching the referral log, and I have a few pithy comments to make about…but they’ll have to wait. Instead, I’m shutting the shop down and leaving the rest of my inchoate thoughts unrecorded, at least for the moment. They’ll keep. I’ll keep. And I’ll keep better for having taken another day off.


See you Friday.

TT: Another pair of ears

December 16, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I just burned the following mix for a friend:


– Aaron Copland, “Down a Country Lane” (original version for piano)

– Bill Frisell, “My Man’s Gone Now”

– Claire Lynch, “Jealousy”

– Erin McKeown, “A Better Wife”

– Jonatha Brooke, “Is This All”

– Steely Dan, “Any Major Dude Will Tell You”

– Selim Palmgren, “West Finnish Dance” (played by Benno Moiseiwitsch)

– Luciana Souza, “Doce de Coco”

– Pat Metheny, “Midwestern Night’s Dream”

– Emmanuel Chabrier, “Idyll” (orchestral version, from Suite pastorale)

– Tony Rice Unit, “Neon Tetra”

– Percy Grainger, “Brigg Fair” (sung by Peter Pears and the Linden Singers)

– Nickel Creek, “Seven Wonders”

– Ned Rorem, “The Lordly Hudson” (sung by Susan Graham)

– Mary Foster Conklin, “Mad About You”

– Bill Charlap, “A Quiet Girl”

– Gabriel Faur

TT: Almanac

December 16, 2004 by Terry Teachout

“So maybe movies are always about the faces on the screen, as opposed to the minds that constructed them?”


David Thomson, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood

TT: Work in progress

December 16, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Here’s a sentence I just wrote:


Rare is the male artist capable of withstanding the blandishments of a determined woman who is intelligent, humorless, sufficiently fawning, and sexually available.


Now guess which woman I had in mind….


UPDATE: We have a winner! Alas, the reader who guessed Alma Mahler signs his/her e-mail only with an address, so I can’t give credit where it’s due, but you know who you are.


Other early guesses included Simone de Beauvoir, Gala Dali, Lil Hardin Armstrong (Louis’ second wife), Lillian Hellman, Bianca Jagger, Mary McCarthy, Marilyn Monroe (but was she really humorless?), Yoko Ono, Judith Regan (whom I hope doesn’t read this blog!), George Sand (extra points for that one), and Elizabeth Taylor.

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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