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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: Just in case you were wondering

April 10, 2006 by Terry Teachout

I finished writing the fourth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong last Friday, then spent the weekend going to plays (Festen and Stuff Happens, to be specific) and resting from my protracted labors. I’ve now completed roughly fifty thousand words of the book, and I’m feeling very good about it. My hope is that I’ll have a rough draft of the book completed by the end of the summer, which will give me six months to polish it before I deliver the manuscript to Harcourt next March.


Otherwise I mostly laid low, though I did travel to Brooklyn on Saturday to dine with a friend who lives in the Ex-Lax Building, erected in 1925 to house the offices and factory of the company that made the once-popular “chocolated laxative.” The building was converted a quarter-century ago, and my friend now lives in a top-floor apartment that looks a bit like this. She put on a Pink Martini album and
served me a Vietnamese beef salad (the recipe for which came out of Esquire, forsooth!) accompanied by an exceedingly nifty side dish made out of corn, red peppers, cilantro, lime, and various other good things, and I ate my meal secure in the knowledge that it was both tasty and impeccably healthful.


I’ll be spending Monday morning closeted with my cardiologist, who plans to fill me full of radioisotopes, put me on a treadmill, and see if I explode. Assuming I don’t, I’ll check in with you tomorrow.

TT: Almanac

April 10, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“I do not agree with Samuel Butler’s remark, ‘I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.’ I would amend this saying: nobody ever wrote well who at some time or other did not take pains with his style. In fact, until writing has by thought and practice become unselfconscious, it cannot achieve style–and by style I mean a natural easy expression which is not anonymous.”


Neville Cardus, Autobiography

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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