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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 25, 2008

CAAF: Afternoon coffee

March 25, 2008 by cfrye

• This profile of Bret Easton Ellis is about a hundred times more interesting than you’d think. Or, than I thought it’d be. Ellis’ novels aren’t favorites but I think they’re smarter thought experiments than they get credited for (if sometimes wildly uneven in the follow through). For cultural juxtaposition, I suggest reading the profile while viewing this terrifying footage of Demi Moore talking about her “leech therapy.”
(First link via TEV.)
• Three books I’m desperate to read, with links to the why’s and wherefore’s so you can be desperate to read them too: Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, and Richard Fortey’s Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. I’m also already hearing great things about Jincy Willett’s new novel, The Writing Class, which comes out in June.
• From the vaults: Marianne Moore’s zealous editing wasn’t confined to her friends’ poems, she was just as active at hacking away at her own. In a 2003 essay for The Believer, Dan Chiasson writes:

“Omissions are not accidents,” was the adage, self-minted, that served as the epigraph to Moore’s 1967 Complete Poems. That book was anything but “complete,” except in the sense of “finished off.” It seemed more a tally of subtractions than additions; Moore had radically revised some poems, and radically erased others. The resulting dainty book misrepresented her, and Moore has seemed, though never less interesting, somehow less ambitious than her male counterparts, Stevens, Eliot, and Williams.
Grace Schulman’s new collected Moore, The Poems of Marianne Moore (November 2003), prints every significant poem Moore wrote, including many she later suppressed and several she never printed at all. It is not a desecration of Moore to do so; as Schulman points out, “change” was at the heart of her aesthetic, and had she lived another thirty years she most surely would have found her own Complete Poems inadequate.

TT: Under fire

March 25, 2008 by Terry Teachout

This is my week: three deadlines, five shows, and a trip to Washington, D.C. tomorrow morning.
Later. Maybe.

TT: Almanac

March 25, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.”
George Bernard Shaw, “An Old New Play and a New Old One”

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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