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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: That’s all he wrote

May 12, 2009 by Terry Teachout

armstrongcornet.jpgOn Sunday I read the page proofs of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong for the last time and made my final corrections. (For the record, I added some commas and cut a half-dozen repeated words and phrases.) Today I’ll be sending the proofs back to the Boston office of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I’ll double-check the index as soon as it’s ready, but otherwise the tinkering is over. I’m through with Pops.
How do I feel? Very good–though not, I trust, unreasonably so. I made a point of setting the proofs aside for a couple of weeks in order to let them cool down. Then I read them in a single day-long sitting, hoping to recapture my sense of the book as a whole. I liked what I saw this time around. The narrative is fast-moving, the facts as straight as I could make them, the prose style formal (I don’t like chummy biographers) but not stiff. The design of the book is gorgeous–I love how the photos are integrated into the text. I think that Armstrong’s personality comes through clearly. So, of course, does my own view of the man and his work, but while I took great pains to correct the record whenever necessary, I also went out of my way not to be argumentative. No scores are settled in Pops. This book is about him, not me.
As I mentioned the other day, I’m already planning my next book–perhaps even my next three books–and I also have The Letter on my mind. Tomorrow I’ll hit the road again, and I won’t be back in New York (save for a couple of quick touchdowns) until well after the curtain goes up in Santa Fe. All this means that I won’t have much time to brood about Pops, which is just as it should be. What’s done is done. I hope the reading public is pleased with the results, but even if they’re not, I can’t do anything about it now. The cord is cut. It’s time to move on to the next part of my life.

TT: Almanac

May 12, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“Instinct.–When our house burns down, we even forget our lunch.–Yes, but we go back to it later in the ashes.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

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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