Archives for May 23, 2005

I don’t know anyone in New York who hasn’t claimed at one time or another that the value of taking a vacation is outweighed by the difficulty of cleaning up the mess that accumulates while you’re out of the office. Alas, I haven’t been on a vacation, but I did take the weekend off to see plays in Chicago with Our Girl, and on my return I found the usual intimidating pile of snail mail, e-mail, and packages waiting for me.

As always, I briefly considered shoving it into a corner and pretending it wasn’t there, but I knew I’d have to jump back on the merry-go-round first thing Monday morning (four deadlines, two plays, two movies, two lunches, an awards ceremony, and an out-of-town trip between now and Saturday), so instead I dumped it all on the kitchen table, placed a garbage bag on the floor next to my chair, and started tearing open envelopes. Once everything was sorted and the obvious junk pitched, I went back into the kitchen, took a box of Teddy Grahams and a bottle of seltzer out of the refrigerator, returned to the table and went through all the snail mail, eating and drinking as I read. Then I booted up my computer and started in on the e-mail. By the time I’d trashed the spam and finished answering the good stuff, I’d already received replies from the first three people I’d written.

Somewhere along the way, I muttered the all-too-familiar mantra of the busy New Yorker returned from a brief visit to elsewhere: It isn’t worth it. You might as well stay home. Only I knew better. Even when you leave town on business, as I did this past weekend, at least you’re somewhere else. No, it’s not a vacation, but it’s different, a stick of dynamite that blasts you out of your accustomed ways of doing things. Instead of dining on the Upper West Side and hailing a cab at exactly 7:20, I visit unfamiliar restaurants, sleep in unfamiliar beds, see actors I’ve never seen before, meet and greet new faces. I come home refreshed and inspired…and then I sit down at the kitchen table and start tearing open envelopes.

Like death and taxes, the mail is always with me, both good (an advance copy of the original-cast CD of The Light in the Piazza) and bad (a short stack of press releases inviting me to concerts I wouldn’t dream of attending other than at gunpoint). Years of experience have taught me that the pleasure of shoving it all in a corner tonight will be more than offset by the pain of opening twice as much of it tomorrow afternoon. I slog tonight so that the next day’s slog will seem marginally less Sisyphean–and so the Teachout Museum, also known as my living room, won’t look unpleasingly messy when I stroll through it in the morning on the way to the shower. (One of the unintended consequences of collecting art in a small Upper West Side apartment is that you start to feel uncomfortable whenever you throw your clothes on the floor instead of hanging them neatly in the closet.)

Such is a piece of the price I pay for the life I lead, and you don’t need to remind me that the moment I decide to stop paying it, somebody else will be more than happy to take my place. Only I don’t intend to stop paying it, at least not any time soon. The embarrassing truth is that I love my daily grind, even when I can’t stand it, which isn’t very often. Sure, there are days when you have to go see Denzel Washington in Julius Caesar, but there are other days when you get to go see Tracy Letts in Orson’s Shadow or Kristin Chenoweth in The Apple Tree, and you never waste time thinking about the one when you’re reveling in the other.

Yes, I love my work, except when I return from the road at the end of a crowded weekend and spend a balmy Sunday night sitting alone at the kitchen table, munching Teddy Grahams and silently stuffing a garbage bag with press releases sent by publicists who insist on calling me “Ms. Terry Teachout.” (Are you listening, New York City Ballet?) I wouldn’t mind skipping that part. No matter what you do in life, there’s always a part you wouldn’t mind skipping.

I won’t be answering my phone until eleven a.m., if then. Should you need to talk to me, you’ll have to throw a rock through my bedroom window.

Live with it.

No, we don’t want you to send us any money (not unless you can spare a life-changingly significant sum, in which case we accept with pleasure!). But do this, please:

If you read “About Last Night” regularly and enjoy doing so, tell a friend about us.

Do it right now.

We return you now to our regularly scheduled posting. That was painless, wasn’t it?

– W.H. Auden’s poetry needs no endorsement from me, but I never fail to be surprised by how many well-read people are unaware that he was also a prolific critic and essayist. I was cleaning out a closet the other day and ran across a slightly bent paperback copy of Forewords and Afterwords, the only essay collection Auden published in his lifetime (the Princeton University Press uniform edition of his complete works will ultimately contain all of his essays and reviews). I’ve no idea how one of my favorite books ended up underneath my toolbox, especially since I could see at a glance that I’d marked a half-dozen passages I must have meant to transfer to my electronic commonplace book. Instead, I’ll post them as almanac entries this week, starting today.

I am, incidentally, still chewing away happily at A la recherche du temps perdu. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get a whole lot of reading done on the ground in Chicago, but I spent a pleasant hour with the Duchess de Guermantes at the airport this afternoon. Unlikely as it may sound, A la recherche is ideally suited for planes, trains, and waiting rooms….

– Two composers I know–both of them women, but otherwise very different in age, living circumstances, and stylistic interests–told me separately in the past few days that they found one of the inescapable problems of being a professional composer to be the fact that you spend so much time alone. This is also true of writing, but I’ve never found the solitude necessary for writing to be a problem in and of itself. On the other hand, I do find that I start to get a bit isolated whenever my workaholism flares up and gets out of control. The Web, I suspect, is part of the problem: I use it to provide a change of pace when I’ve got a lot of deadlines on my plate, and it creates so powerful an illusion of “being in touch” that I sometimes forget to go out and see real live people, or even leave the apartment for anything beyond the most essential errands.

Sooner or later, though, I start feeling the need for actual human contact, which brings me back to my senses, sometimes quite abruptly. E-mail is great–better than great–but it won’t give you a kiss on the cheek when you open the door.

– Last week I went for a walk in Central Park with a musician friend, in the course of which the following dialogue took place:

ME Somebody sent me a weird URL the other day.

SHE Weird like how?

ME Well, it was for a site called, uh, maybe “Babes in Classical Music,” or “Classical Hotties,” or something like that. Anyway, it was a Web site full of pictures of good-looking women musicians, organized by what instrument they play, voice type, whatever. How silly is that? What kind of person would spend all that time putting together a site like that? I mean, get a life, right?

SHE (with dawning horror) The URL wasn’t beautyinmusic.com, was it?

ME Yeah, I think that was it.

SHE Er…um…I’m on it.

A beat.

ME (with the maniacal glee of a playground bully) You’re on it? And you stood there and let me tell you all about it? I am soooo blogging this!

SHE (embarrassed) Oh, God, no, you can’t do that! It’s not my fault! I didn’t have anything to do with it! I don’t even know who does the thing….

ME No way. You’re totally busted.

SHE (resigned) Well, at least don’t mention my name, all right?

ME (magnanimously) O.K. Your secret is safe with me.

“I find Trollope’s insistence that writing novels is a craft like making shoes, and his pride in the money he got by writing them, sympathetic. He was aware, of course, that craft and art are not the same: a craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader’s business. Again, Trollope would never have denied that his primary reason for writing was that he loved the activity. He once said that as soon as he could no longer write books he would wish to die. He believed that he wrote best when he wrote fastest, and in his case this may well have been true: a good idea for a novel stimulated his pen. Though large sales are not necessarily a proof of aesthetic value, they are evidence that a book has given pleasure to many readers, and every author, however difficult, would like to give pleasure.”

W.H. Auden, “A Poet of the Actual” (from Forewords and Afterwords)