Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Ginette Neveu plays the closing section of Ernest Chausson’s Poème. This rare silent film footage is synchronized with Neveu’s commercial recording of the piece:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.”
Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo
“I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.”
Flannery O’Connor, letter to Betty Hester, May 4, 1957
Rudyard Kipling speaks about writing and truth in an undated film clip from the Thirties. This is thought to be the only surviving sound footage of Kipling:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Everyone is more or less mad on one point.”
Rudyard Kipling, “On the Strength of a Likeness”
From 2005:
I am now officially the Honorable Terry Teachout, having been sworn in this morning (together with Gerard Schwarz and James Ballinger) as a member of the National Council on the Arts. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor dropped by to administer the oath. It was a near-run thing, for Justice O’Connor didn’t know when she agreed to do the honors that she and her Supreme Court brethren would be hearing the Terri Schiavo case today. “We had a busy morning!” she said as she arrived, still wearing her judicial robes….
Read the whole thing here.“I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”
Flannery O’Connor, letter to Betty Hester, June 28, 1956
A five-year-old Flannery O’Connor appears in a rare 1932 Pathé newsreel segment about a chicken she taught to walk backwards:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)