Archives for February 22, 2005

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!

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

Whit Stillman, screenplay for Metropolitan

– 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?

“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