Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“For the present, and so long as there are living witnesses of the great war of sections, there will be people who will not be consoled for the loss of a cause which they believed to be holy. As time passes, people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man.”
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“In public life it is sometimes necessary to appear really natural to be actually artificial.”
Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge
I doubt it will surprise any of you to learn that I’d been growing increasingly worried about the inability of Mrs. T’s doctors to rouse her from the medically induced coma into which she was placed after her double-lung transplant surgery two weeks ago. It turns out that her doctors were worried, too, to which end they ordered a CAT scan and an MRI of her head over the weekend.
These tests, completed last night, revealed that she has suffered a small stroke in her cerebellum, presumably at some point during her surgery. The good news—and it is very, very good news indeed—is that Mrs. T’s neurologist is sure that the stroke has nothing whatsoever to do with her lack of wakefulness, and that its effects on her will almost certainly prove to be minor, maybe even to the point of insignficance if we’re lucky. The present feeling is that she is at the center of a kind of perfect storm of smallish problems (including impaired kidney function) that have come together to knock her flat. Her treatment regime is now being adjusted accordingly, and the neurologist expects her to awaken by week’s end.
At the suggestion of Mrs. T’s nurses, I’m staying home instead of visiting her at New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s cardio-thoracic intensive-care unit. Like all transplant patients, she is immunosuppressed, and I don’t want to take the chance of infecting her with anything that’s out there in the world, coronavirus least of all.
I didn’t sleep at all last night, but I feel a lot better this afternoon, and I plan to take a nice long nap as soon as I post this update.
As always, thanks for your love and support. It’s a big part of what keeps me going.
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For previous reports on Mrs. T’s surgery and subsequent recovery, go here, here, here, here, and here.
To learn more about her rare illness, go here.
To find out how to become an organ donor, go here.
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Courtesy of Mark Stryker, Frank Sinatra sings “We’ll Be Together Again,” by Carl Fischer and Frankie Laine, on TV in 1958. Harry Edison is the trumpeter and the arrangement is by Nelson Riddle:
From 2010:
Read the whole thing here,Unlike most middle-aged bloggers, I’ve been hearing from the public for the whole of my adult life–I started writing newspaper criticism while I was still an undergraduate–and so it’s nothing new when strangers write to tell me that I’m a despicable beast. The emergence of cyberspace, however, has made it vastly easier for people to express their opinions of public and semi-public figures, either directly via e-mail or by posting a comment or review somewhere on the Web, which means that there’s a whole lot more to read today than there was in, say, 1980….
“What happens is, your voice isn’t going to go anywhere. But if you try to possess it, by playing only the things you like, forever, you will then sound like all these other guys who became stylists, and everybody knows how good they are, and you don’t expect any surprises, certainly no big surprises. You don’t expect to be confronted with a new reality. Because you think you know who these guys are. So voice is like personality. And then after you have this personality, what you wanna do is get it out of there, in the sense of it being a conscious thing. Because you’re never gonna lose what you gained, but if you don’t take it further, you will just stagnate and you’ll be one of those guys that’s, well…‘Remember how he sounded?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, it was cool, it was good.’”
Keith Jarrett, (interviewed by Ethan Iverson, “Do the Math,” September 2009)“A Visit With Carl Sandburg,” a TV interview with the poet and biographer conducted by Edward Stanley. This program was originally telecast in 1958 as part of NBC’s Wisdom series of interviews:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“One way or another, we all pay for our vices.”
Ben Maddow and John Huston, screenplay for The Asphalt Jungle