• 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 / 2008 / Archives for December 2008

Archives for December 2008

TT: Two of those days

December 31, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Yesterday I wrote two Wall Street Journal columns back to back, which is something I try never to do unless it’s absolutely necessary. Shortly after I finished reading proof on the second column and my upcoming Commentary essay on Alfred Hitchcock, Mrs. T and I hopped in the car, picked up two big bags of Chinese food, and took them to a between-holidays family gathering in Connecticut. That part of the day was fun.
Today we’re looking out the window at a snowstorm through which we’ll be driving this afternoon, or possibly this evening, en route to an airport hotel in Queens, about which more tomorrow, assuming that we get there. The life of a traveling drama critic is sometimes fun, sometimes wearisome, and not infrequently both.
I just read the following paragraph from a New Republic story about campaign reporters:

CNN political correspondent Candy Crowley has taken to running through a checklist before bed. Every night she travels with the Obama campaign, she orders a wake-up call, sets one regular alarm and one back-up on her cell phone, which she places strategically out of slapping distance across the room. Then she writes down her vitals: What city is she in? What time zone? What time does she have to be out of the hotel room the next morning? What day is it? With that, she can drift off before the next day’s campaign coverage. Most of the time, though, Crowley is so scared to oversleep that she’s awake and waiting, long before the alarm–any one of them–ever rings….

Time was when that would have made me laugh. Now it makes me sigh.

TT: Dumber and dumber

December 31, 2008 by Terry Teachout

The TV was on at my sister-in-law’s house last night, so I happened to see the famous-dead-people-of-2008 feature on ABC’s World News Tonight. Not surprisingly, Eartha Kitt and Paul Newman (in that order) got the deluxe treatment, which stands to reason (if you want to call it that). What did surprise me was that two of the other names that flashed by on the screen were misspelled: Bobby Fischer came out “Bobby Fisher” and Arthur C. Clarke’s last name was shorn of its terminal “e.”
fitzreading.jpgI’m an immaculate speller, but I know a number of fair-to-poor spellers who also happen to be intelligent, and I always hasten to remind them that Flannery O’Connor and F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn’t spell at all. O’Connor once described herself as an “innocent speller,” which was putting it mildly. As for Fitzgerald, I discovered in the course of researching The Skeptic that the author of This Side of Paradise misspelled H.L. Mencken’s name when he inscribed a copy of the book to the editor of The Smart Set:

As a matter of fact Mr. Menken, I stuck your name in on Page 224 in the last proof–partly I suppose as a vague bootlick and partly because I have since adapted [sic, maybe] a great many of your views….

Be that as it may, the failure of the anonymous staffer who put together World News Tonight‘s in-memoriam feature to check the proper spellings of the names of those celebrities who died in 2008 says something fairly grim about…well, about something or other.
Mrs. T and I were chatting about the decline and fall of Western civilization while driving from Smalltown to St. Louis the other day, and I offered the following Universal Explanation of everything bad about the world: Most people are stupid. She agreed, reluctantly.

TT: Snapshot

December 31, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Vladimir Horowitz plays his Variations on a Theme from “Carmen” at Carnegie Hall in 1968 for a CBS prime-time special:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

December 31, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“Why wont they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, cant they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping–rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year’s and Easter and Christmas–But, goodness, why need they do it?”
John Dos Passos, diary, Dec. 31, 1917

TT: Almanac

December 30, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“The New Year is the season in which custom seems more particularly to authorize civil and harmless lies, under the name of compliments. People reciprocally profess wishes which they seldom form and concern which they seldom feel.”
Lord Chesterfield, letter to his son, Dec. 26, 1749

TT: Just the least little bit tired

December 29, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Mrs. T and I spent the whole of Sunday traveling from Smalltown to New York to our place in rural Connecticut. We left point A at six-thirty in the morning and arrived at point C at nine-thirty in the evening. I have two pieces to write between now and Wednesday afternoon, when we hit the road again, so if you don’t hear from me until Thursday, which seems not unlikely, have a happy New Year’s Eve!

TT: For geeks only (II)

December 29, 2008 by Terry Teachout

A reader sighted this a pair of super-geeky vanity license plates:
• A 2 BRUTE
• GSAMSA (seen on a VW bug)

TT: Almanac

December 29, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“No one likes the authority of superior intellect.”
Rex Stout, In the Best Families

Next Page »

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

December 2008
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  
« Nov   Jan »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • What Patricia Highsmith wrought
  • Almanac: Samuel Butler on sickness
  • Snapshot: Lieber and Stoller appear on What’s My Line?
  • Almanac: Robert Benchley on sneezing
  • Lookback: on not getting too big for your britches

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