Archives for June 2006

When last we spoke, I was seeing two plays a day at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and trolling for really good restaurants in between shows. I found an amazing one, Amuse, where I ate a meal so fine that I could easily have closed my eyes and imagined myself at a table in New York, spending at least twice as much money for food not nearly so tasty.

On Saturday morning I started home for New York, a tedious but blessedly unscary process that went on, all told, for eleven hours. Since then I’ve done the following:

– I slept really, really late on Sunday.

– I opened a bagful of snail mail.

– I rehung one wall of the Teachout Museum in order to make a place for my new Arnold Friedman lithograph.

– I went to a press preview of Neil LaBute’s new play, Some Girl(s).

– I sat slackjawed in front of my TV after coming home from the theater and pretended to watch His Kind of Woman. (I was too tired to sleep.)

– I got up first thing Monday morning and wrote my drama column for Friday’s Wall Street Journal. It took me a lot longer than usual, suggesting that I hadn’t quite recovered from my transcontinental travels.

– I read the page proofs of Hitchcock’s Music, a forthcoming book about the use of music in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

What now? Today I’ll write my “Sightings” column for the Saturday Journal, go to the gym, get a haircut, and pick up my laundry. Tomorrow I’ll spend the entire day doing research at the Louis Armstrong Archives in Queens. On Thursday I’ll write up my research notes, fill out a couple of expense reports, work on my schedule for July, and go to a press preview of Spring Awakening. On Saturday I’ll go to New Jersey for the opening of Paper Mill Playhouse’s new revival of Hello, Dolly! In between I’ll visit a few art galleries, see a few friends, and maybe–just maybe–blog.

Or not.

“‘Havistock is a bit of an ass,’ Jowett later told a blunt Yorkshire lad who bluntly repeated it to me. ‘And an American ass at that. But a dinner party is pleasanter for his company, and how many men can you say that about?’

“How many indeed? I should like his encomium on my tombstone.”

Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin

At the Coudal Partners site, they’ve posted their first set of 2006 Field-Tested Books, wherein writers write about the experience of reading a particular book in a particular setting. Terry and I both contributed entries this year, and mine is now up and available to read (Terry’s will be posted in another batch later this week). My place is North Whitefield, Maine. My book is…well, you’ll just have to hop over and see, won’t you?

You’ll surely find it worth the trip. Also among today’s contributors are Kevin Guilfoile, Daniel Radosh, Claire Zulkey, and a man I know better as “Lunchboy,” Francis Heaney. More entries will be added throughout the week from worthies including Maud Newton, George Saunders, and Jessa Crispin, to name a few.

I have returned, but I’m temporarily distracted by a deadline. Stand by until tomorrow!

“‘Why does teaching always seem to attract the intellectually flabby?’

“‘Perhaps because we want to seem infallible and think that little boys may find us so. How wrong we are.'”

Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin

Regarding The Complete New Yorker, I’ll reluctantly admit to still being part of the camp James Wolcott describes like this:

An odd thing happened. It arrived, wrapped in plastic, and there it sat, wrapped in plastic. For weeks, months. I had read a few raised-nostril reviews of The Complete New Yorker that lauded its scope, refinement, and handsome presentation, but criticized its search engine, the awkwardness of inserting a different disk for each decade, the misspellings in the synopses (dismaying, given the magazine’s reputation for meticulousness), and the inability to cut-and-paste. But it wasn’t underwhelmed reviews that deterred me from cracking open the package, and I discovered through comparing notes that others shared my paralysis. Wherever literati types gathered to namedrop and glance over each other’s shoulders, unopened sets of The Complete New Yorker seemed to loom in the background, like the slab from 2001. Editors, agents, and fellow writers admitted that they too had bought the set or received it as a gift, but somehow “hadn’t gotten around” to opening it yet–or hadn’t been able to bring themselves to. They sounded vaguely sheepish and guilty, as if shirking their duty, or shying away from what lay within. You would have thought that to pry open the gatefold to The Complete New Yorker was to enter the forbidden tomb from which no man or woman returns.

Presumably under threat of the New Criterion‘s everlasting ire, Wolcott finally unplasticked his slab and records his impressions in an garrulous but engaging thicket of a consideration that comes as close as one would wish to exhaustive coverage of the eight-disc behemoth. A good read and a survey of highlights for those who, like me, want to delve in armed with some manner of compass.

I’m in love with with Ashland, Oregon, and not just because it happens to be ringed by mountains and bisected by a brook. In addition to the three-theater Oregon Shakespeare Festival complex, which is the reason why I’m here, three other theater companies, Oregon Cabaret Theater, Oregon Stage Works, and Camelot Theatre Company, have their headquarters in town or nearby. The main drag is lined with bookstores and other enticing establishments, among them a CD shop that bills itself as a “patchouli-free zone” and an antique store whose front window is full of immaculately preserved vintage bellows cameras, all of them long ago rendered obsolete by the shiny, gadget-crammed 35-millimeter models which are now being superseded by their own digital replacements. Two doors down from my excellent hotel is an indie-flick house with an art-deco fa

Speaking of Lynn Nottage, as I was yesterday, my drama column in this morning’s Wall Street Journal is in large part a review of a Baltimore production of one of her plays: