By way of Romenesko, this column by Laura Berman from the Detroit News:

The scene: A college classroom at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

The subject: Writing the newspaper column.

The question: “Can any of you name a columnist you read — in a newspaper or magazine or online — on a regular basis?”

In response: Dead silence.

Slowly, one hand rises. A sports columnist is mentioned.

Nobody else in the room hints at any recognition of the sports columnist’s name: Anyone?

“My generation is very visually oriented,” explains Ryan Schreiber, a U-M Dearborn junior from Dearborn who — like most in the class — is majoring in journalism but doesn’t read much of it.

“My generation grew up watching MTV. We are used to short spurts of words, lots of images…We’re used to immediate gratification.”…

In another journalism class down the hall, the instructor annoyed his students. After asking how many read a newspaper regularly — four or five out of 35 said they did — he required them to bring a newspaper to class twice a week. “The students don’t like it,” says Laura Hipshire, one of the journalism students.

Read the whole thing here. Then notice what four-letter word is missing from the column: blog.

Why? Maybe because newspaper columnists and reporters (with a growing number of honorable exceptions) are either still largely unaware of blogs or loathe them so much that they prefer not to acknowledge their existence. Maybe because newspaper editors (with a lot fewer exceptions) are proving themselves to be deeply weird when it comes to blogging, which they apparently regard as a threat to their long-established ways of doing journalistic business.

But here’s another thought that occurred to me as I read this piece: could it be that the most immediate effect of the blogosphere on the mainstream media will be to make columnists obsolete?

While I don’t want to rev up the crystal ball too far this morning (I have to finish writing a column for a newspaper, as it happens), I’ve been wondering exactly what place the old-fashioned newspaper column still has in the new world of on-line opinion journalism, with its unprecedented blend of immediacy, interaction, and diversity of view. Reporting, yes: that continues to make sense, and it’s not going away any time soon, though its nature will doubtless be transformed as newspapers come to terms with the blogosphere. But who’s going to be reading twice-weekly op-ed essays on paper five years from now? For that matter, who’s going to be publishing them?

I don’t know. I’m just asking.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a deadline to hit….

Remember me? I’m the one who was so absurdly happy last Friday afternoon, and I still am. It helped that I didn’t have a huge amount to do over the weekend, though I managed to keep quite sufficiently busy, thank you very much.

Among other things:

– On Saturday afternoon I went to a Broadway matinee, then took the night off (yes!).

– On Sunday morning I wrote the first draft of a 2,000-word essay called “Watching Westerns in Manhattan” for American Cowboy. Bet you didn’t know I wrote for them, did you?

– On Sunday evening I had an early dinner with the Mutant, my singer-painter friend, after which we retired to the Teachout Museum, a/k/a my living room, to watch Kind Hearts and Coronets, which both of us were seeing for the first time (O.K., Cinetrix, try not to look so shocked). No sooner did the Mutant head for home than I called my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., having previously sent a what’s-new e-mail to Our Girl, whose chatty reply awaited me when I hung up….

But I’m burying the lead. Here’s my stop-press bulletin:

– I kept my hand-on-heart oath to Bass Player, broke out my hitherto unopened watercolor set, and covered one whole sheet of cool-looking paper with homemade, gaily colored hieroglyphics. (I even have a witness–I showed the results to the Mutant earlier this evening.) It was, as I’d hoped, completely absorbing fun, and though I fear I have no obvious aptitude for the making of visual art, I still can’t wait to do it again.

What next? Today I get my eyes examined, pay bills, and do a little babysitting. Tomorrow I see my trainer, write my monthly Washington Post column about the arts in New York, and go to a preview of Good Vibrations, the new Beach Boys musical. On Wednesday I write my drama column for Friday’s Wall Street Journal. Thursday is up for grabs. Come Friday I’ll be off to the nation’s capital to lunch with a blogger and watch American Ballet Theatre dance an all-Fokine program at Kennedy Center, followed by two previews back in New York and a birthday (mine).

As always, books will be read (most of them about New Orleans at the turn of the century) and CDs listened to (most of them by Louis Armstrong) in the interstices of all these occurrences.

Such are the ongoing adventures of a New York-based blogger-bon vivant. More as it happens.

“I’m a backslider as a non-believer.”

Penelope Fitzgerald (quoted in Dean Flower, “A Completely Determined Human Being,” Hudson Review, Winter 2005)

One of the ways in which e-mail is transforming our culture is that it is has become the channel by which certain kinds of bad news are increasingly likely to arrive. This morning I opened my mailbox and found a note from an old high-school friend: “I apologize for the impersonal mass e-mail but it is a little quicker….” My heart sank even before I could jump to the next paragraph, which told me that Richard Powell, the man who taught me how to play the violin nearly 40 years ago, died last night. I hadn’t heard from him for a long time, but no sooner did I see his name on the screen of my iBook than my head was full of snapshot-clear memories.

So much of life is a matter of pure coincidence (if that’s what you think it is). I happened to see a televised concert by the Russian violinist David Oistrakh one Sunday afternoon, and the warmth and passion with which he played the Brahms D Minor Sonata, a piece I’d never heard by a composer I knew only for having written a lullaby, made a fateful impression on me. Dick Powell came to Matthews Elementary School a few months later to administer a musical aptitude test to the fifth grade, and I got a perfect score. This, he informed me the following week, qualified me to play a stringed instrument. I went home and told my astonished parents that I wanted them to buy me a violin, and that was that.

Powell was a small-time jazz bassist turned small-town music teacher who ran the string program in the public schools of my home town. (He told me that he’d played in strip joints once upon a time, which seemed to me unimaginably exotic.) He thought I was talented and went out of his way to encourage me, and within a few years I was playing Bach, Vivaldi, and Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre with the high-school orchestra. It soon became clear to both of us, though, that my musical interests extended well beyond the violin, so he was no less encouraging when I asked to borrow one of the school’s plywood basses for the summer. That was the year I taught myself jazz by plucking along with Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Goes to College in my bedroom every afternoon, and a year or two later I started playing country music and bluegrass with a band called Sour Mash. It wasn’t Bach, but that was all right by him. He had no musical prejudices, and it was in large part because of his openness that I acquired the infinite sense of musical possibility that I carry with me to this day.

I found other mentors as I grew older, but Powell was the first, and there would never be a time when he failed to say whatever encouraging words he thought I needed to hear. He watched me go off to college to major in music, looked on with amusement when I became a part-time music critic for the Kansas City Star, and cheered from the sidelines when I rolled the dice and headed for New York City. By then he’d moved away from Smalltown, U.S.A., but he kept up with my progress, and from time to time his daughter Melodie (a nice name for a musician’s child) would let me know how he was doing.

Now Melodie writes to tell me of her father’s death, and I find myself filled to overflowing with that most beautiful and transfiguring of emotions, gratitude. No one person, not even me, made me what I am, but Dick Powell ranks very high on the short list of those who did the most along the way. He taught me to read music, and reassured me that it was all right to play by ear, too. He introduced me to the vast world of classical music, but never for a moment suggested that no other musical worlds were worth exploring. I suppose I would have found my way into music on my own sooner or later, but I might well have had a lot to unlearn down the line had I not been fortunate enough to fall into the hands of so open-minded and open-hearted a teacher. He pointed me in the right direction, then gave me a push. I can’t think of a better epitaph.

Time again for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. This Friday I reviewed Little Women: The Musical and the off-Broadway revival of Hurlyburly, and I seem to have cut sharply against the grain of critical wisdom as regards the former:

Sutton Foster is a gawky, gamine version of the young Judy Garland whom the Great Producer Upstairs clearly intended for a revival of Jerome Robbins’ “Peter Pan.” Until somebody down here gets the message, though, I’ll make do with “Little Women: The Musical,” the immensely likable stage adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s much-loved 1867 novel that just opened at the Virginia Theatre. Ms. Foster, lately of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” plays Jo, the bookwormy tomboy who “reminded one of a colt,” and gets her just right. She’s not an immaculate singer–her voice is raw on top–but her spunky charm and hell-for-leather energy are impossible to resist. I didn’t even try. Ms. Foster caught my heart on a short string the second the curtain went up, and I twitched at her command all night long.

Apparently I’m one of the few people in America who has neither read “Little Women” nor seen any of the countless stage and screen versions that preceded this one. A quick riffle through the book, though, made it clear that Allan Knee has not only slashed it to ribbons but modernized the dialogue extensively, if not egregiously (the punchlines are all his). In addition, he has turned “Little Women” into a meta-narrative about the writing of “Little Women”: Jo, an aspiring author who launches her literary career by churning out swashbuckling tales for the Weekly Volcano, decides to fictionalize her own family life, and the show reaches its climax when she takes pen in hand to write the first chapter of the story we’ve just seen played out on stage. It’s a clever idea, and if the result is more a filet than a full-fledged fish, it still zips along with confidence and skill….

I also had good things to say about Hurlyburly:

It’s a grimly funny tale of cocaine and its discontents, written and set in Hollywood in the early ’80s and horrifyingly reminiscent in every particular of what I now think of as the Age of Jay McInerney.

I didn’t see Mike Nichols’ 1984 production, which had an awesome cast–William Hurt, Judith Ivey, Harvey Keitel, Cynthia Nixon, Ron Silver, Jerry Stiller and Sigourney Weaver, believe it or not–but I can’t imagine how this one, directed with surgical precision by Scott Elliott, could be bettered. Ethan Hawke, for one, is breathtakingly fine as Eddie, the drug-sodden, woman-hating casting director on whose tortured soul the California sun has set, and Halley Wegryn Gross, Catherine Kellner and Parker Posey are nicely matched as the three women who skitter across his zigzag path….

No link–you’ve got to pay to read the whole thing. Why not shell out for today’s Journal and find out while you’re at it how we cover the other arts? Or go the whole hog by clicking here. Either way, you won’t be sorry….

“‘Good, that,’ he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes. As if anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be changed–neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives–a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers.”

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Last night I took two friends, a music critic and a jazz pianist, to watch New York City Ballet dance what George Balanchine’s admirers refer to as “the Greek program”: Apollo, Orpheus, and Agon, the three great Balanchine-Stravinsky collaborations. The pianist was seeing all three dances for the first time, and the critic had never seen any of Balanchine’s ballets. They reacted pretty much the way I’d expected, and we went our separate ways after the performance looking as though we’d all had one too many. Or maybe two.

I got up at seven-thirty this morning, knocked out the last 850 words of an essay on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and shot the piece off to my editor in Washington via e-mail (the galleys are rolling out of my fax machine as I’m typing this sentence). Then I jumped in a cab and headed crosstown to meet my friend Bass Player at Knoedler & Company, where we spent an hour looking at Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves (the show closes on Saturday, so if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t wait!). From there we went to Tibor de Nagy to see Jane Freilicher: Paintings 1954-2004, she for the first time, I for the second. By then we were booming and zooming, so instead of hitting a third gallery, we decided to grab a bite to eat, after which we talked our heads off. (Bass Player and I are so closely in sync that we don’t really need to tell each other what we’re thinking, but we do it anyway.)

At length she went downtown to pick up her bass and take a lesson, while I returned home to do…nothing. I have no more appointments today, no deadline to hit, no work of any kind that can’t wait, no show to see tonight, and nowhere in particular that I need to be until 1:45 Saturday afternoon. Limitless luxury, in other words, made all the sweeter by the fact that it’s so bitterly cold outside. What do I care? My calendar is blank, my refrigerator full. Josh White is playing on my iBook, The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, and Kind Hearts and Coronets are cued up on the DVR, and a book I’m looking forward to reading awaits me in the loft. The only thing I have to do in the next twenty-three hours is keep the solemn promise I made with hand on heart to Bass Player at lunch today: I’m going to pop open my watercolor set and put brush to paper before I go to bed tonight.

I know exactly how lucky I am today, in part because I also know how it feels to be so busy that you can’t see straight. As a matter of fact, I’ve been feeling outrageously happy for the past couple of days. Whatever troubles the future may hold in store for me are currently being held in abeyance, and instead of worrying about them, or even thinking about them, I’ve been following the advice of the man who made the ballets my friends and I saw last night. “Why are you stingy with yourselves?” Mr. B used to ask his dancers. “Why are you holding back? What are you saving for–for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.” And that’s where I’ve been all today: in the moment, and glad to be. Ecstatic, really.

I’ll see you Monday.

Nothing new from my corner today. Life insists on my active participation, besides which my modem connection has gone funky again. I’m expecting a big box of DSL sometime late next week or early the week following, but until that miraculous time I have to type with my hands suspended above the keyboard and holding my breath if I want not to disrupt the dial-up.

Should have lots to say next week, including a wrap-up of Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile at Dominican University Saturday night and possibly a report on what’s so great about The Horse’s Mouth.