Archives for December 27, 2017

I’m not nearly as good as I should be about answering my reader mail, especially during stretches of time when my life becomes more complicated than usual. So I spent an hour on Christmas afternoon clearing out my accumulated e-mail, and found this letter from a Wall Street Journal reader. I thought it might be of interest to you:

You remind me of my favorite professors in college. I could never quite figure out their political disposition, and they would have considered it unprofessional to reveal it. You appear to advocate only truth, beauty, and artistic freedom, and I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your hard work and the consistent excellence of your column.

I think this might just be the best fan letter I’ve ever gotten. It’s certainly the most gratifying one, because it sums up in one succinct paragraph everything that I try to do as a drama critic. That’s why I’m posting it—because I want you to know exactly what I think I’m up to.

Doc Watson performs John D. Loudermilk’s “Windy and Warm” on TV in 1991:

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

“Sitting with my gin or whisky afterwards I would often manage to get into conversation with some lonely man or other—usually an exile like myself—and the talk would be about the world, air-routes and shipping-lines, drinking-places thousands of miles away. Then I felt happy, felt I had come home, because home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment.”

Anthony Burgess, The Right to an Answer