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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 29, 2017

Two kinds of people

August 29, 2017 by Terry Teachout

I rarely write straight literary criticism nowadays, so I jumped at the chance to get back in the game when National Review invited me to review two new biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway:

The trouble with Hemingway, seen from the privileged vantage point of hindsight, is that he looks increasingly like a great influence but not a great author in his own right. No 20th-century writer would leave a deeper mark on his contemporaries, and as late as 1948, Evelyn Waugh, no respecter of reputations, unhesitatingly described him in print as “one of the most original and powerful of living writers.” Yet all but the very finest of his short stories now sound mannered and artificial, while the novels come off as little more than sustained exercises in mirror-gazing and pose-striking….

Fitzgerald, like so many moralists, knew that he was himself exemplary of the flaws of the culture whose frivolity he chronicled and indicted. This knowledge is the source of the gravity that heightens the force of his best work, whose lightness of touch cannot conceal its ultimate seriousness, a seriousness that makes the Hemingway of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms look like a mere merchant of self-pity by comparison….

Read the whole thing here.

Lookback: on writing an opera noir

August 29, 2017 by Terry Teachout

LOOKBACKFrom 2007:

As I’ve said before, we’re trying to write a cross between a verismo opera like Tosca and a film noir like Double Indemnity or Out of the Past. We don’t want The Letter to sound old-fashioned—Paul’s musical language is in no way derivative of Verdi or Puccini—but we do want it to move fast and hit hard….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Proust on the normal condition of love

August 29, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“In love, happiness is an abnormal state.”

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

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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