Archives for November 18, 2009

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I taped two excerpts from Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong for the “Writers Reading” section of Vanity Fair‘s Web site. That reading is now available as a podcast, and you can listen to it by going here.
Yes, Mom, your beloved Satchmo was known to talk dirty from time to time, and I quote him verbatim in these excerpts. So if you don’t want to hear me talk dirty, don’t listen.

Vladimir Horowitz plays Scriabin’s Vers la flamme, Op. 72, at his New York apartment:

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

“Only a mediocre writer is always at his best.”
W. Somerset Maugham, introduction to The Portable Dorothy Parker