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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 5, 2009

CAAF: I am a Badger

August 5, 2009 by ldemanski

wiener.jpg
My 20th high-school reunion is this weekend, and I’m rushing around this morning packing my bags for the trip back to Wisconsin. I think you’re supposed to dread class reunions but other than wishing my bangs were a half-inch longer, that I wasn’t mid-breakout, and that I had, um, exercised more diligently for the past 20 or so years, I’m looking forward to it in a pretty uncomplicated way: Friends! Home! Bars! Cheese! I hardly get back to my hometown, Appleton, these days — my parents moved from there when I was 19 — but it’s still a main place with me: Not home exactly (that’s the bungalow with Lowell), but an epicenter.
The novel I’m writing is set in a sort-of Appleton; a city both like and unlike the place where I grew up. It’s strange because I inhabit that town imaginatively almost every day, but in other fundamental ways I no longer know the other city, the living city, as well as I wish I did — both because of what I’ve forgotten and because the city itself has grown, changed, moved on. And the faux Appleton that’s built up in my head is pervasive (persuasive?). This morning I was thinking about where I’d get coffee on this trip; I’ll be staying at a hotel downtown, and I thought, “Oh, you’ll just walk down to that little bakery down the street.” Then I remembered that the bakery doesn’t exist; I made it up.
In honor of the trip, and of homelands that both are and aren’t, here are two parts from James Tate’s “I Am a Finn,” taken from his book Distance from Loved Ones, which you should have along with his selected poems (which is to say, this is a longish excerpt; please don’t be angry with me, Mr. Tate!):

I am standing in the post office, about
to mail a package back to Minnesota, to my family.
I am a Finn. My name is Kasteheimi (Dewdrop).
Mikael Agricola (1510-1557) created the Finnish language.
He knew Luther and translated the New Testament.
When I stop by the Classé Café for a cheeseburger
no one suspects that I am a Finn.
I gaze at the dimestore reproductions of Lautrec
On the greasy walls, at the punk lovers afraid
to show their quivery emotions, secure
in the knowledge that my grandparents really did
emigrate from Finland in 1910–why
is everyone leaving Finland, hundreds of
thousands to Michigan and Minnesota, and now Australia?
…
But I should be studying for my exam.
I wonder if Dean will celebrate with me tonight,
Assuming I pass. Finnish literature
really came alive in the 1860s
Here in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
no one cares that I am a Finn.
They’ve never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää,
Winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a Finn, this infuriates me.

Photo from Wiener Fest 2009 in Whitelaw, WI. Taken by Sarah Filzen.

TT: Snapshot

August 5, 2009 by Terry Teachout

Mike Nichols and Elaine May appear as the mystery guests on What’s My Line? on June 26, 1960:

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

TT: Almanac

August 5, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“You accept certain unlovely things about yourself and manage to live with them. The atonement for such an acceptance is that you make allowances for others–that you cleanse yourself of the sin of self-righteousness.”
Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront

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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