Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“Here, as else- and every-where in criticism, not only the hardest thing but also the hardest thing to get recognized when attained, is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority.”
George Saintsbury, Notes on a Cellar-Book
“As has been suggested above, the Book of History is the Bible of Irony: and, it may be added, the newspaper is a sort of key to that book though no doubt they change positions very frequently.”
George Saintsbury, “Irony”
Playhouse 90’s TV version of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” originally telecast live by CBS on November 6, 1958. The adaptation is by Stewart Stern and the telecast was directed by Ron Winston. The cast includes Roddy McDowell, Eartha Kitt, Oskar Homolka, Richard Haydn, and Boris Karloff as Kurtz:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets.”
Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”
From 2009:
Read the whole thing here.I see a good many pre-1970 musicals as part of my duties as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, and it occurred to me the other day to draw up a list of the best ones. Here, then, are the fifteen American musicals that I believe to be of indisputably permanent interest….
“Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.”
George Saintsbury, The Book of the Queen’s Dolls’ House
Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten, and the London Symphony perform “When most I wink, then do my eyes best see,” the final movement of Britten’s Nocturne. The text is by Shakespeare. This performance was originally filmed by the BBC on December 20, 1964:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Fanatical and, as it were, monomaniacal efforts to prove a thing true often bring indifference to telling falsehoods about it.”
George Saintsbury, The Book of the Queen’s Dolls’ House