Archives for March 21, 2005

I’m about to leave for Washington, D.C., where I’ll:

(1) Be sworn in as a member of the National Council on the Arts
and attend my first meeting.

(2) See the Kennedy Center’s production of Mister Roberts.

(3) Take a v. cool friend to the Phillips Collection for the first time.

(4) Follow my brother around. (He’s coming to Washington to represent the family at my swearing-in, but he has a long list of other stuff he wants to do.)

(5) Try to get some work done on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

I’ll be gone until Saturday, and while I’ll be taking my iBook with me, it isn’t likely that I’ll be doing much blogging, given the demands of my itinerary. I promise to check in with you if time permits, though, and of course I’ll be back at the old stand next Monday, rain or shine. I’m not sure what OGIC will be up to while I’m gone, but I’m sure she’ll be poking her head in from time to time, so be sure to look in on us.

Later. Have a nice week.

P.S. The Top Fives are updated. Take a look!

It happens that I’ve never filled out the celebrated Proust Questionnaire, so when I saw that Searchblog had done so the other day, I thought that doing the same thing might be a nice note on which to hit the road.

Here goes:

– What is your most marked characteristic? Curiosity.

– What is the quality you most like in a man? The ability to argue without becoming angry.

– What is the quality you most like in a woman? A sense of the absurd.

– What do you most value in your friends? Kindness and warmth.

– What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Impatience.

– What is your favorite occupation? Conversation with a loved one over a good meal.

– What is your idea of perfect happiness? The same, minus the meal and in closer proximity.

– What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Siegfried.

– In which country would you like to live? This one, in the Fifties.

– Who are your favorite writers? Johnson, Trollope, Dostoevsky, James, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Colette, Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, M.F.K. Fisher.

– Who are your favorite poets? Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hardy, Frost, Yeats, Auden, Larkin.

– Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Father Hugh Kennedy, in Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness. Runner-up: Lucky Jim Dixon.

– Who is your favorite heroine of fiction? Vicky Haven, in Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born.

– Who are your favorite composers? Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Faur

“The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way: we this way.”

William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

I got word while packing of the death this morning of Bobby Short, the great cabaret singer. (Here’s the Associated Press obituary.) I met him on my very first trip to New York City, an encounter I recalled in City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy:

My biggest adventure consisted of going by myself to the early show at the Caf

I’m posting from a very nice Washington hotel room (you’re paying for it, so the least you can do is enjoy it vicariously) after a wild do-this-do-that-no-this morning, followed by a hair-raising cab ride to Penn Station and a tranquil train ride to our nation’s capital. I chewed up NEA-related paperwork all the way from New York to Philadelphia, then took a lovely nap. I’m meeting a friend for dinner shortly, after which I’ll return to the hotel and try to knock out a few more pages of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. The festivities start tomorrow.

For the moment, I’m listening to Pee Wee Russell on my iBook and marveling yet again at the joys of technology. All I had to do to connect to the blogosphere was stick a plug into the side of my computer and click a few keys, and there…I…was! I don’t normally take my computer on trips like this (to do so makes it too tempting to work when I need to be unwinding), but since I had to make an exception, I figured I’d say hello.

Now it’s time for dinner. I might blog tomorrow, and I might not. OGIC might or might not do the same. There’s just no telling what we’ll do!

Later.