• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2007 / July / Archives for 3rd

Archives for July 3, 2007

OGIC: Out and about

July 3, 2007 by ldemanski

During my long absence from the internet, as you might imagine, I amassed a small fortune in linkable blog posts. Here are a few highlights:

• Carrie of Tingle Alley reads Milton, here and here, as only Carrie of Tingle Alley can read Milton.
• James Marcus riffs on discovering his allergy to grass in a diverting post that begins with one acute parenthetical observation–“A couple of weeks ago, I got a phone message from my doctor: I’m allergic to grass. Since I live in Manhattan, this won’t change my life in any substantial way (luckily it wasn’t concrete or carbon monoxide or untrammeled ambition.)”–and ends with another: “Every hour wounds, the last kills–but at least [Cyril Connolly’s] The Condemned Playground is still available in paperback. (By the way, if you seek it out on Amazon, you’ll find the following listed as a Statistically Improbable Phrase: “elegiac couplet.” What is this world coming to?).” The middle is good, too!
• Alex Ross posts a short essay by Carl Nielsen that’s brimming over with aperçus. For example: “Nothing in all art is as painful as unsuccessful originality. It is like the twisted grimaces of vanity. We see the spirit everywhere. Some of us know it, but have no word for it; we exchange looks and shudder, like children at the sight of a skeleton.”
• Here’s where your cup runneth over: not just a post but an entire blog, Where the Stress Falls is the new site of M.S. Smith, whose previous venture CultureSpace was a longtime ALN favorite. I’ve been remiss in not mentioning Smith’s new home sooner–but then, I’ve been simply remiss.
• Michael gives the Blowhard treatment to the next DVD in my Netflix queue, Criterion’s fresh release of Chris Marker’s films La Jetée and Sans Soleil, two mesmerizing films that come around to the cinemas only once a blue moon, even in a fairly cinema-stocked city such as Chicago.
• Kate of Kate’s Book Blog discovers that a favorite book of mine, and one of which I’d fairly fancied myself the only reader of my generation, is actually again in print: Elaine Dundy’s follow-up to The Dud Avocado, The Old Man and Me–and, by the way, unless you wish to have the latter ruined for you, I would studiously avoid reading the plot synopses that appear on the Virago page and the Amazon page, both of which essentially give the game away, Amazon in an astonishingly efficient single sentence. That said, Kate has some interesting observations on how Dundy’s representation of sexual mores in the 1950s contrasts with a more recent treatment of similar issues in the same decade, Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Good stuff.

More where these came from soon. In the meantime, happy haunting.

TT: Almanac

July 3, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“Some people–and I am one of them–hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (courtesy of The Rat)

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

July 2007
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Jun   Aug »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Almanac: John Updike on bores
  • Snapshot: the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1962
  • Almanac: Saul Bellow on memory
  • Lookback: on the “realism” of TV
  • Almanac: Philip Roth on old age

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in