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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for February 10, 2015

Here comes the answer man

February 10, 2015 by Terry Teachout

Marcel Proust French novelistThe so-called Proust Questionnaire circulates in a variety of more or less authentic versions. I filled it out years ago, but can’t recall my answers, so here are some new ones. I’ve tweaked the questions (and added some new ones) to suit my liking more precisely. As always, all answers are subject to revision at will and without warning.

Here goes:

• Your favorite virtue? Valor. All others pale beside it.

• Your favorite qualities in a man? Kindness.

• Your favorite qualities in a woman? Ditto.

• Your chief characteristic? Determination—and, I hope, fairness.

• What do you appreciate the most in your friends? Patience.

• Your main fault? Impatience.

• For what fault have you the most toleration? Loquaciousness (it being another one of my own).

• Your favorite occupation? Writing—but when I’m engaged in it, I’m not conscious of enjoying myself.

• Your idea of happiness? Rehearsing a show.

• Your idea of misery? Sitting through any opera by Philip Glass.

• If not yourself, whom would you be? But now that I’ve found you/I’ve changed my point of view/And now I wouldn’t give a dime to be/Anyone else but me.

• Where would you like to live? Florida’s Sanibel Island.

• Your favorite color and flower? Ochre and orchids.

stravinskybalanchine-cropped• The artist of any kind whom you admire most? George Balanchine.

• Your favorite prose authors? Kingsley Amis, the Boswell of the Life of Johnson, Colette, Edwin Denby, M.F.K. Fisher, Justice Holmes, A.J. Liebling, John P. Marquand, Somerset Maugham, Flannery O’Connor, Anthony Powell, Dawn Powell, I.B. Singer, Trollope, Evelyn Waugh. For entertainment: Patrick O’Brian, Rex Stout, Donald Westlake, P.G. Wodehouse.

• Your favorite poets? Anna Akhmatova, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats.

• Your favorite plays? Arcadia, The Cherry Orchard, Dancing at Lughnasa, Galileo, The Glass Menagerie, King Lear, Our Town, Private Fears in Public Places, Side Man, The Tempest, The Trip to Bountiful, Waiting for Godot.

• Your favorite operas? Carmen, Falstaff, The Marriage of Figaro, The Turn of the Screw, Wozzeck.

• Your favorite musicals? The Fantasticks, Guys and Dolls, On the Town, She Loves Me, Sweeney Todd.

• Your favorite films? Chinatown, Citizen Kane, Defending Your Life, Groundhog Day, His Girl Friday, The In-Laws, The Last Days of Disco, The Searchers, The Rules of the Game, You Can Count on Me.

• Your favorite male character in fiction? Hugh Moreland in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

• Your favorite female character? Vicky Haven in Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born.

bonnard-nude-in-the-bath_large• Your favorite painters and classical composers? Painters: Bonnard, Cézanne, Chardin, Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Jacob Lawrence, Manet, Matisse, John Marin, Giorgio Morandi, Fairfield Porter, Mark Rothko. Composers: Bartók, Britten, Chabrier, Copland, Fauré, Haydn, Paul Moravec (no fooling), Schubert, Shostakovich, Stravinsky.

• Your favorite popular songwriters? Harold Arlen, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Willie Dixon, Bob Dylan, Harlan Howard, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Carolyn Leigh, Erin McKeown, Johnny Mercer, Robbie Robertson, Stephen Sondheim, and whoever wrote “You so beautiful but you got to die someday.”

• Your heroes in real life? Louis Armstrong, Adolf Busch, Churchill, Dr. Johnson, Lincoln, Solzhenitsyn.

• What characters in history do you most dislike? Hitler, John Rankin, Stalin, Robespierre.

• Your favorite food and drink? The Yucatan shrimp at Doc Ford’s on Sanibel Island, accompanied by iced tea with plenty of fresh mint and lime.

• Your favorite names? Emily, Julia, Laura.

• What do you hate the most? Any species of ideology, secular or religious, that issues in mass murder.

• The natural talent with which you’d most like to be gifted? I wish that I could play piano like Nat Cole and/or dance like Fred Astaire.

• How do you wish to die? With sufficient presence of mind to mutter “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”

• What is your present state of mind? Distracted and somewhat anxious.

• Your favorite motto? “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.”

* * *

Nat King Cole and His Trio play “Route 66”:

Lookback: things I’ve done that you probably haven’t

February 10, 2015 by Terry Teachout

LOOKBACKFrom 2005:

Currently making the rounds of the blogosphere are lists of Things I’ve Done That You Probably Haven’t. So here goes. In no particular order, I’ve:

• Watched an opera singer drop dead on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, run to the nearest pay phone, called the city desk of a newspaper, and shouted, “Get me rewrite!”….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Northrop Frye on beauty

February 10, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a greater temptation to the ego.”

Northrop Frye, “Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype”

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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