Archives for 2013

“There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman’s shoe and has to settle for the whole woman.”
Karl Kraus, Beim Wort Genommen (trans. Harry Zohn)

I 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.

I 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:

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.)

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

If you live in New York and feel the irresistible urge to see me hold forth in person on Wednesday night, I’m participating in a panel discussion called “Writing and the Digital Revolution” that will be moderated by my old friend Alane Salierno Mason, an executive editor at W.W. Norton.
Alane and I both live in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, as do Meena Alexander, Brenda Copeland, Jim Dwyer, Dorian Karchmar, Veronica Liu, and Clive Priddle, the other panelists, and that’s where the discussion is taking place. We’ll be performing from six to eight p.m. at PS/IS 187, which is at 349 Cabrini Blvd. between 187th and 190th Streets. (Take the A train to 190th Street and you’re steps away.)
Admission is $40, but students will be admitted free. For more information, go here.

…that Long Wharf Theatre‘s 2012 production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, has been nominated by the Connecticut Critics Circle for two awards. John Douglas Thompson, the star, was nominated as Outstanding Leading Actor in a Play, and Gordon Edelstein, who staged Satchmo, was nominated as Outstanding Director of a Play. This is, needless to say, a new experience for me, and I couldn’t be more pleased for my eminently deserving colleagues.
The winners will be announced in New Haven on June 10. For a complete list of nominees and information about the award ceremony, go here.

From 2003:

The “untheatricality” of rock music is a complicated subject about which I’ve never gotten around to writing. It’s far too complicated to go into in a short posting, but I can say that to blame the decline of the Broadway musical on rock is to mistake a symptom for the disease. What happened in the Sixties was that the old-fashioned standard-style ballad ceased to be the lingua franca of American popular music–and that nothing replaced it. Instead, our musical tastes shattered into a million pieces….

Read the whole thing here.