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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Hearing is believing

August 1, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Ardai-Chandler1V.jpgOnly one recording of Raymond Chandler’s speaking voice survives, a BBC interview conducted with Chandler in 1958 by none other than Ian Fleming. You can listen to it by going here. If you do so, you’ll be staggered to learn that the creator of Philip Marlowe sounds…well, wimpy.
I mention this fact because I’ve long been fascinated by recordings of the voices of famous writers and other artists, many of which I find to be personally revealing in ways that no other documentary evidence can equal. The BBC has a vast archive of recordings as rare and illuminating as the Chandler interview, but until recently it sat firmly on them. Now the British Library Sound Archive has started releasing a series of spoken-word CDs drawn from the BBC archives, the first five volumes of which are devoted to W.H. Auden, Graham Greene, George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh, and H.G. Wells.
Yep, you guessed it: I’ve written a “Sightings” column for tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal about the great spoken-word recordings of the twentieth century, only a handful of which have made it to CD. I suspect you’ll find the column frustrating, since I devote most of it to telling you about amazing things that you can’t hear unless you go to a very well-stocked record library, but I think it’ll interest you anyway.
If you’re curious, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

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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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