• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2016 / May / Archives for 31st

Archives for May 31, 2016

In all around I see

May 31, 2016 by Terry Teachout

This is something I wrote a quarter-century ago in a memoir of my childhood and youth:

Memory is the key to a small town. A stranger driving through my home town would see nothing but schools, stores, and houses. Some are handsome, others nondescript, but all have one thing in common: the important parts are invisible, at least to eyes unaided by memory. This is why people like me never like to hear about how their home towns have changed since they moved away. Every change in the place where you grew up is an insult, a run in the homespun fabric of recollection.

ODD FELLOWS BUILDINGI still feel much the same way, which is why it saddened me to learn that the International Order of Odd Fellows Building, which has stood in the center of Smalltown, U.S.A., since 1908, was torn down the other day. It had to go: old age made the building structurally unsound, and after a passing storm caused the roof to cave in, no part of the rest of it could be saved. Still, I don’t like to think of so familiar a corner of my beloved home town now being “occupied” by a pile of rubble. The downtown districts of small midwestern towns, after all, aren’t exactly a growth stock, and I suspect that it will be a very long time before anything new goes up at this particular address. More than likely, its destiny is to look for many years to come like the gap left by a missing front tooth.

ODD FELLOWS A FEW YEARS AGOThe Independent Order of Odd Fellows is itself a dusty anachronism, one of the many fraternal organizations and service clubs that, like Kiwanis, the Elks, and Rotary, used to be so prominent a part of the American cultural landscape. H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis loved to whack them around once upon a time, but they are now as distant a memory as The American Mercury itself. While a few seem to be coming back, most of the rest are fast-fading relics of the days when men liked to get together of an evening to amuse one another instead of peering at their iPads in the hope of staving off ennui.

I never went in for such collective amusements, being the least clubbable of people, but neither did I hold them in the jeering contempt that was Mencken’s specialty. He was, of course, what we are now smugly pleased to call a “hater.” I’m not, and never have been: I’m all for innocent pleasures of every sort, and surely there are few things more innocent, or pleasurable, than belonging to a club that exists to do service to the community in which its members live and work. My brother belonged to such a club, the Jaycees, and he’ll be the first to tell you that it was one of the best things that ever happened to him.

ODD FELLOWS NOWI don’t doubt that Smalltown’s Odd Fellows Lodge was no less beneficial to its loyal members, and that they were hugely proud of their second-story hall. But Lodge No. 358 is, so far as I know, defunct, which if true makes me almost as sad as does the demolition of its ancestral home.

I think I’m pretty sanguine, for the most part, at the prospect of coping with change. I proved as much when I returned to Smalltown four years ago for a visit and discovered that my brother, who was then in the process of remodeling the house in which we grew up, had just cleared out my childhood bedroom. But I have my limits, and I think the city fathers might just have surpassed them when they tore down the Odd Fellows Building—though I shall, as always, endeavor to cope.

* * *

Thelonious Monk’s arrangement of “Abide With Me.” The horn section consists of John Coltrane, Ray Copeland, Gigi Gryce, and Coleman Hawkins:

Ten years after: on reading about an old friend in a book

May 31, 2016 by Terry Teachout

LOOKBACKFrom 2006:

Every film shot on location, whether in whole or in part, is a home movie in which bits and pieces of history are embedded, and I find myself growing increasingly fascinated by these snippets of lost time. I can’t watch North by Northwest, for instance, without thinking about how Grand Central Station has (and hasn’t) changed, or how the Plaza Hotel will never be again as it was.

This is, I suspect, as much a function of my increasing age as anything else. Just the other day, for instance, Backstage Books sent me a copy of the newly revised and updated edition of James Gavin’s Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret. The earlier edition was one of my favorite books, but I found this version even more interesting, in part because it’s the first time I’ve read a work of history in which someone I used to know well figures prominently. That sort of thing doesn’t start happening to you until you’ve achieved a certain degree of seniority, and I’m there.….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Robertson Davies on a common prejudice of literary critics

May 31, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn’t, he should be ashamed of himself.”

Robertson Davies, “Somerset Maugham”

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

May 2016
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Apr   Jun »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Verbal virtuosity
  • Jump-starting an arts revival
  • Replay: Alfred Hitchcock talks to Dick Cavett
  • Almanac: Tolstoy on happiness
  • Almanac: Ambrose Bierce on the President of the United States

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in