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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for November 2, 2009

TT: Mondays aren’t so bad

November 2, 2009 by Terry Teachout

Publishers Weekly just picked Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong as one of the best books of 2009.
Says PW: “Teachout’s forceful reassertion of Louis Armstrong’s significance to 20th-century America is a model for writing serious biography about pop culture icons.”
To see the complete list, go here.

TT: Real and right

November 2, 2009 by Terry Teachout

louis_bio.jpgHarcourt sent me the first finished copy of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong last Tuesday. It was an inordinately busy week crammed full of shows and deadlines, but I talked a sympathetic editor into giving me the rest of the day off and spent the afternoon and evening rereading the book. I spent a certain amount of time admiring the index, snuffling for typos–in vain, I’m glad to report–and confirming that the corrections I made on the galley proofs were incorporated into the final version. Mostly, though, I just flipped through the pages of Pops and marveled at how good it looked.

Regular readers of this blog know that I believe the printed book to be well on its way to ultimate extinction. As I put it in a “Sightings” column written in 2006, a year before the introduction of the Kindle:

The printed book is a beautiful object, “elegant” in both the aesthetic and mathematical senses of the word, and its invention was a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture. But it is also a technology–a means, not an end. Like all technologies, it has a finite lifespan, and its time is almost up.

On the other hand, I have yet to buy a Kindle, and at the moment I have no plans to do so. This is partly because I prefer to wait until the kinks are ironed out (I’ve never been a truly early adopter) and partly because, like most middle-aged authors, I remain enamored of the sheer physicality of the old-fashioned printed book. I was intimately involved in the design of Pops–I even chose the typeface, as I have for all my books–and I think it might just be the best-looking book with which I’ve been involved. The dust jacket is gorgeous, the typography balanced and legible, the photos flawlessly reproduced, the paper pleasing to the touch. All these things add up to a total aesthetic experience that I find immensely gratifying. To put it another way, the printed version of Pops is both a vessel filled with interesting information and an objet d’art that is beautiful in its own right.

PAPERBACK%20OF%20SATCHMO.jpgSo am I really a closet Luddite, a technological Moses who can’t bring himself to enter the promised land of the e-book? Maybe. Six years ago I declared myself to be “open, at least in theory, to the possibility of abandoning the book-as-art-object.” Now that technology has finally caught up with me, I find myself unexpectedly unwilling to put my money where my mouth is. Yet I believe no less firmly than ever that the printed book is a technology whose time has come and gone. Am I, then, a hypocrite? Or merely a middle-aged man who, like most middle-aged men, is reluctant to put aside the youthful things that remind me of myself when young?

I hasten to point out that I no longer own any long-playing records or cassettes, and that I spend more time listening to music on my MacBook and iPod than on my CD player. No doubt the time will also come when I spend more time reading books on a Kindle, or something like it, than reading the handsomely bound volumes shelved in my living room. Not for me the self-conscious posturing of those curmudgeonly poseurs who wail Change and decay in all around I see! at every opportunity. Nor would I surprised if my next book, whatever it happens to be and whenever it happens to come out, is published solely in electronic form–yet I can’t imagine that the thrill I get from downloading the first “copy” will be half so intense as the one I got last week when I held the first finished copy of Pops in my hands.

TT: Almanac

November 2, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch Publicity.”
Peter De Vries, The Mackerel Plaza

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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