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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for May 29, 2013

TT: Surprise package

May 29, 2013 by Terry Teachout

0529131413.jpgI walked into the downtown offices of Gotham Books this afternoon with the corrected first-pass page proofs of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington tucked under my arm. Emily Wunderlich met me at the elevator with a big grin on her face and the first copy of the advance uncorrected proofs of Duke in her hand, hot off the press.
Advance uncorrected proofs, usually referred to by authors as “bound galleys,” are the bound volumes that are sent out to editors and reviewers a few months prior to the publication of a new book. They look like trade paperbacks–or, to put it another way, like actual books. Until this afternoon, Duke consisted first of images on a computer screen, then a stack of printed-out pages. Now it’s a physical object.
Emily gave me the bound galleys. “What do you think?” she asked.
“Holy shit!” I blurted. “It’s real! And it’s beautiful!”
“It sure is,” she said.
I went home happy.

TT: The moment of truth

May 29, 2013 by Terry Teachout

duke-ellington-6_wide-8b517ab3aef2ef554b38e56b0174215d309c0abe-s2.jpgI finished correcting the first-pass page proofs of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington at one-thirty this morning. After I deliver the pages to Emily Wunderlich of Gotham Books later today, I’ll no longer be able to make any more changes to the text of Duke for any reason short of criminal libel or flagrant misspelling. Unless I should feel moved to make a final fix or two en route to Gotham, that’s all he wrote.
Needless to say–I hope–I’ve done my damnedest to ensure that Duke contains no factual or typographical errors of any kind. Alas, the fact that I corrected one niggling little typo and a handful of oh-God-I-can’t-believe-I-got-that-date-wrong mistakes during my final editing pass served as a scary but usefully humbling reminder that no biographer is perfect. (No, I won’t tell you what they were. Only my friend Steven Lasker, who gave Duke an additional last-minute fact-checking read, knows the terrible truth, and he’s not telling.) All we can do is work as hard as we can and hope for the best thereafter, and that’s what I’ve tried to do.
So…here I come, Emily! Take good care of my baby!
* * *
Duke Ellington performs “C Jam Blues” in 1941:

TT: Snapshot

May 29, 2013 by Terry Teachout

Vladimir Horowitz plays Scriabin’s Vers la flamme in his New York apartment:

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

TT: Almanac

May 29, 2013 by Terry Teachout

“Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?”
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, Unkempt Thoughts

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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