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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 30, 2015

Read it again, Sam

March 30, 2015 by Terry Teachout

220px-BooksDoFurnishARoomThree years ago I posted an almanac entry drawn from an essay by L.E. Sissman called “The Constant Rereader’s Five-Foot Shelf”:

A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign.

A reader of this blog has now invited me to draw up my own five-foot shelf of books that I like to reread. As I doubt I need to remind you, I turn to the novels of Raymond Chandler, William Haggard, Elmore Leonard, Patrick O’Brian, Rex Stout, Donald E. Westlake, and P.G. Wodehouse when I feel the urgent need to relax. Here is a shortish and by no means comprehensive list of other, more variously ambitious books to which I have also returned with fair regularity in recent years:

• Kingsley Amis, Girl, 20 and The Russian Girl

• Alan Ayckbourn, The Crafty Art of Playmaking

• Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor and Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu

• Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

• Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

• James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed, Guard of Honor, and The Just and the Unjust

• Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

• The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson

• Carl Flesch, Memoirs

hidden-stairway-books-500x894• Gielgud’s Letters: John Gielgud in His Own Words

• Moss Hart, Act One

• Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night

• All of the novels of John P. Marquand

• Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, The Narrow Margin, and The Razor’s Edge

• Edwin O’Connor, All in the Family and The Edge of Sadness

• The Library of America’s Flannery O’Connor volume (very much including the letters)

• Richard Osborne, Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music

• Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time

• Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King and A Time to Be Born

• All of the novels of Barbara Pym, but especially Excellent Women

• The Library of America’s Reporting World War II

• David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

• Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path

• Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

• Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

• Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

• Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

I make no claim, by the way, that all of these books are “classic,” or that I think they’re better than other books that I reread less often (or not at all). They are nothing more—or less—than books that I like to reread fairly often for reasons that are in some cases not entirely clear to me. Make of that what you will.

Just because: George Balanchine’s Symphony in C

March 30, 2015 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERANew York City Ballet performs George Balanchine’s Symphony in C in 1973. The soloists are Karin von Aroldingen and Jean-Pierre Bonnefous in the first movement, Allegra Kent and Conrad Ludlow in the second movement, Sara Leland and John Clifford in the third movement, and Marnee Morris in the finale. The score is Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C, composed shortly after Bizet turned seventeen:

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

Almanac: Thomas Pynchon on joy in music

March 30, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“‘The point is,’ cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, ‘a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,’ shaking his skinny old fist, ‘there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part of La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!’”

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (courtesy of Tim Page)

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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