Archives for April 2006

“Colonel Ross must admit that modesty of this kind was pleasing in a man who had risen to high place; yet it was not (perhaps unfortunately for the world) the basic stuff of greatness. It spoke a simplicity of nature little related to the complexities, often unpleasant, of those natures that are resolved to lead, and also, by a suggestion of mystery in power in those very complexities, apt to impose leadership–the able, queer, vain men who in large-scale emergencies are turned to, and so make history.

“Beyond question General Beal had been tried by emergency and not found wanting; but as far as Colonel Ross knew or could guess, the emergencies were the soldier’s, the man of action’s, immediate and personal, well within a simple nature’s resources of physical courage and quick sight. Because he found himself meeting such emergencies adequately or more than adequately, General Beal might be right in holding himself, humbly, no more than a lucky fellow. Colonel Ross, too, thought (that being how it was) that General Beal was lucky. Anyone was lucky who could go a successful way without the call to exercise greatness, without developing greatness’s enabling provisions–the great man’s inner contradictions; his mean, inspired inconsistencies; his giddy acting on hunches; and his helpless, not mere modest acceptance of, but passionate, necessary trust in, luck.”

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

Cements reputation as a long-winded bore! Just now on Veronica Mars:

Guidance counselor: You were sleeping in class. Mrs. Taft said she’s reprimanded three times for wearing headphones while she’s teaching.

Veronica: She’s reading The Golden Bowl. [beat] Aloud. [beat] With a fake English accent.

Well, if that isn’t provocation, I don’t know what is.

My favorite kind of weather may just be overnight rain. Of course, this is immeasurably nicer when one is listening to the patter from under some covers in bed than when one is burning the midnight oil against an unmovable deadline and propping the eyelids with toothpicks. It’s raining outside now, tapping gently at the windows, and I’m up late cranking out a book review and sadly thinking about wasted rainfall and what might have been. I can’t say much more about the book until the review appears, but I can say that I loved it. This book is no sleeper–plenty of critics agree with me–but I’m still delighted to have a chance of my own to shout from the rooftops about it. Sometimes I’m reluctant to write about a book I’ve adored, because sometimes such a book will fall apart to some degree when I try to articulate its merits precisely. But on this one scrutiny is having the opposite effect, revealing fine structural details and different hues and shades that I missed previously. Which is all perfectly true, but also a way of luring myself back to the work at hand…. Blog at you soon.

Excuse our silence this morning. The “About Last Night” server was down for unexplained reasons, and we were unable to post anything. We seem to be back in business now.

As always, more anon.

On Monday morning I pulled on my sweats, hailed a cab, and made my way across town to the office of my cardiologist, unfed and insufficiently slept but on the whole optimistic. A few minutes after arriving I was whisked into an examination room, where a technician threaded an intravenous needle into my right arm and pumped me full of thallium. “You’re going to be radioactive for the next couple of days,” she told me matter-of-factly. “Let us know if you’re going to be traveling by air or if you have to enter a federal building–any place with metal detectors–and we’ll give you a card so that they’ll know why you’re setting off the machine.” Then she escorted me to another room containing a large, ominous-looking machine upon which I reclined motionless while a second technician took pictures of my heart.

After that I made my way to a third room containing a treadmill, where yet another technician shaved my chest and hooked me up to an EKG machine. At length the doctor arrived, told me to get on the treadmill, and set it in motion. For the next nine minutes I walked, at first slowly, then faster and faster, while the doctor monitored my heart rate and blood pressure. Finally he turned the speed up so fast that I was forced to break into a trot. He produced a syringe and shot more thallium into my arm. Then he shut the treadmill down. “Very nice,” he said. “Much better than the last time we did this.” I remembered my previous stress test, which took place four days after I called an ambulance and was whisked away to the emergency room of Lenox Hill Hospital, there to be filled full of drugs and diagnosed with congestive heart failure.

The second technician took another set of pictures of my heart. I returned to the waiting room, which by then was full of anxious-looking people, some of whom had IV tubes hanging from their arms. One of them was talking furiously on her cell phone to a business associate, ignoring the sign on the wall that read TESTING AREA: CELL PHONES PROHIBITED. “I’m radioactive,” she said. “I guess I can’t go to Washington until Friday.”

I distracted myself by pulling a copy of P.G. Wodehouse’s The Mating Season from my shoulder bag. I opened it to page 25, and my eye fell on the following paragraph: “Up till then everything had been fine. As I put hat on hat-peg and umbrella in umbrella-stand, I was thinking that if God wasn’t in His heaven and all right with the world, these conditions prevailed as near as made no matter. Not the suspicion of an inkling, if you see what I mean, that round the corner lurked the bitter awakening, stuffed eelskin in hand, waiting to sock me on the occiput.” That’s not funny, I thought.

At that moment my cardiologist poked his head into the waiting room. “Mr. Teachout, could you please come into my office?” he said. His face was expressionless. I followed him into the office. “Have a seat,” he said, then sat down behind the desk, holding a sheaf of color photographs of my heart in his hand. He broke out in a big smile. “I have very, very good news for you,” he said. “The results of the stress test are excellent. Completely satisfactory. Your heart hasn’t sustained any damage at all. There’s no sign of a blockage. That doesn’t mean you can go crazy now–your heart isn’t completely normal yet, you need to keep taking your medicine and exercising and losing weight–but so far, everything looks great. I don’t want to see you again for another three months.”

Two minutes later I was standing on East End Avenue, basking in the bright blue sunshine and hailing a cab. My mind was unexpectedly empty. Thank you, I kept saying to myself over and over again. Thank you, thank you. A few minutes after that I was sitting at a table in Good Enough to Eat, breaking my twelve-hour-long fast with a reasonably healthy meal and thinking about Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines.

After I ate I walked back to my apartment and wrote the first two thousand words of the fifth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Then, all at once, I had (to quote once again from The Mating Season) “the feeling you get sometimes that some practical joker has suddenly removed all the bones from your legs, substituting for them an unsatisfactory jelly.” I realized that the various stresses of the past few weeks–some of which I had steadfastly refused to acknowledge–had finally caught up with me, and then some. “I think maybe that’s enough work for one day,” I said out loud. I stripped off my sweats, crawled into the loft above my desk, and fell into a deep, untroubled sleep.

A colleague inquires:

Do you listen to music when you write? Or do you
write in silence?

I used to write with music on–I wrote a good-sized chunk of City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy while listening to Aaron Copland’s Letter from Home repeatedly–but in recent years I’ve found that I prefer to write my first drafts in silence. Once I have a draft on paper, though, I’m often put on background music while I edit. Not surprisingly, I tend to listen to Louis Armstrong when working on Hotter Than That, and for the last couple of weeks I’ve also been listening to Donald Fagen’s Morph the Cat quite a bit.

Oddly enough–or not–I discovered a long time ago that I couldn’t listen to Arturo Toscanini while I was writing. His recordings never fail to force themselves to the front of my consciousness. No other music has that effect, though.

“Give a man health and a course to steer; and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.”

George Bernard Shaw, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion

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.