Archives for April 2009

“Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else.”
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

• I had seen bits and pieces of Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creative genius quoted various places but until recently hadn’t realized it was possible to watch the whole thing online. (Thanks, Quiet Bubble.) If you haven’t watched it yet, it’s well worth a look and a think. It skates dangerously near “Dance like no one is watching” territory near the close, but I think Gilbert emerges mostly unscathed.
• Courtesy of Jacket Copy, a gallery of some of the wondrous treehouses photographed by Pete Nelson for his book, New Treehouses of the World. O, I need a new dacha!
• New York mag’s roundtable discussion of Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands isn’t suffering a shortage of strong opinions (“a loathsome little turd of a novel”). Even better, Jessa Crispin and Kate Christensen are two of the readers taking part.
Image: Pete Nelson

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Exit the King (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage * (comedy, PG-13, closes July 19, reviewed here)

• Joe Turner’s Come and Gone * (drama, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 17, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, extended through May 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) (one-act plays, PG-13, vastly too complicated for children, closes Apr. 25, reviewed here)

“A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.”
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

M.F.K. Fisher talks about her life:

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

“In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Lots of new stuff in the right-hand column. Give it a look when you get a moment.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sent me the page proofs of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong last week, a few days ahead of schedule. They arrived late on Friday afternoon, meaning that I had fifteen minutes to open the box and take a peek before I had to start getting ready for a Broadway show. I started reading the proofs in earnest as soon as I got home from the theater, but duty called me away again on Saturday morning: I spent the whole day and evening at the press previews of all three installments of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests.

I doubt that anything less than an all-day Ayckbourn marathon would have been capable of distracting me, since I’d been waiting for months to find out what Pops would look like in page proofs. No matter how you think you feel about a book that you’ve written, your feelings are guaranteed to change when you see your treasured words set in cold type for the first time. All at once the umbilical cord that ties you to your creation is severed and you view the book as it is, not as you imagine it. It’s a near-indescribable sensation, a head-spinning mixture of pleasure and fear.

I’m relieved to say that I wasn’t disappointed in Pops. I’m sure it helped that the typographical design is elegant and readable, and I’m just as sure that I’ll pass through a few more mood swings between now and May 21, my deadline for returning the corrected page proofs to Boston. Nevertheless, I can now say with pretty fair confidence that I like both the looks and (so to speak) the sound of Pops. It reads smoothly, it seems to say everything that I wanted it to say, and the photos are fantastic.

What next? It isn’t quite right to say that I’m now scanning the page proofs for typos, because there aren’t any. Pops was typeset directly from the copyedited text file that I sent to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt a few months ago, which had already been read with extreme care by three Armstrong experts, two of whom knew him personally. Between them, me, and Harcourt’s superbly vigilant copyeditor, I very much doubt that any misspelled words have slipped through the cracks. What I’m looking for are other kinds of slips: factual mistakes, errors of interpretation, repeated words and phrases, infelicities of expression. The first of these is by far the most important. In a perfect world, Pops would be devoid of error. I’m sure it isn’t, but I’ve gone to great lengths to get the facts of Louis Armstrong’s life absolutely straight–something that none of his previous biographers succeeded in doing–and this is my last chance to uncover any remaining blunders.

As of this morning I’ve read through the page proofs of Pops twice in a row. So far I’ve made a dozen or so prose-related adjustments, corrected two or three microscopically small mistakes, and caught one show-stopping goof–a repeated sentence. I also inserted two quotations from a recently published memoir by one of Armstrong’s friends that reached me a month ago. I expect that I’ll read through the proofs again, but not just yet. I need to let them cool off, which is another way of saying that I need to let myself cool off. This is no time to get nervous and trip over a shoelace. The finish line is in sight.