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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for February 22, 2005

TT: Roll ’em

February 22, 2005 by Terry Teachout

I’ve spent the last two days working on the prologue to my Louis Armstrong biography, and I think it’s going well. Very well, actually. In fact, I seem to be on a roll, and so I plan to keep on rolling for at least another day or two. My hope is to have the entire prologue roughed out by dinnertime and substantially polished by week’s end. I’ve been in an elevated state ever since Friday night: hundreds of facts that had previously been spinning around in my head have now started to clump together and take coherent shape. It’s the most exciting part of a writer’s life, and I’m right in the middle of it….


I’ll keep you posted, but don’t expect to hear much more from me until I stop for gas. In the meantime, cross your fingers and wish me well.


P.S. You go, Girl! It’s damned well about time that my formerly anonymous co-blogger dropped the veil and identified herself as (among other things) the dedicatee of the Teachout Reader. I kept waiting for somebody to make the connection!

TT: Almanac

February 22, 2005 by Terry Teachout

“When you’re an egoist, none of the harm you do is intentional.”


Whit Stillman, screenplay for Metropolitan

OGIC: Items in brief

February 22, 2005 by Terry Teachout

– Andre Mayer of CBC Arts presents the case against covers.


– Edie, the lucky (and now famous) kitty with the installation art of her own, is an absolute dead ringer for the more philistine creature who resides chez moi.


– The Little Professor asks a select few academic buzzwords to please just go away.


– Ever wonder what cheap-thrill-seeking gardeners look for at the newsstand? The Bookish Gardener has your answer. It feels a bit salacious to ask this now, but–when Spring?

OGIC: Fortune cookie

February 22, 2005 by Terry Teachout

“It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting–all the various products of art–as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle–that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind–is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism.”


Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” The Renaissance

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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