“About Last Night” continues to have intermittent server problems, which is why you’ve only heard from us intermittently for the past day or so.

Be patient. We’ll be back.

“A woman was walking along one of the paths with a dog on a lead. She wore a grey tweed coat and transparent pink nylon gloves, and carried two books from the public library in a contraption of rubber straps. What is the use of noticing such details? Dulcie asked herself. It isn’t as if I were a novelist or a private detective. Presumably such a faculty might be said to add to one’ s enjoyment of life, but so often what one observed was neitehr amusing nor interesting, but just upsetting.”

Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love

Neruda, Luciana Souza‘s new CD, is out this week. I wrote the liner notes:

If Luciana did nothing more than sing, she’d still be a miracle. But she also writes music, sometimes to her own graceful words, sometimes to those of poets who catch her curious ear. Neruda is an hour-long song cycle based on the poetry of Pablo Neruda and the piano pieces of Federico Mompou, sung in her Brazil-perfumed English (a language she speaks with the freshness and surprise of an explorer charting a new world) and as uncategorizably protean as everything else she does. “House” dances down the street in a sinuous 7/4, spurred on by her own deft percussion playing. “Poetry” has the concentration of an art song by Faur

Earlier today, I went all the way downtown to the studios of WNYC to tape an episode of Studio 360, Kurt Andersen’s weekly radio series on art and culture. This particular show is about criticism, and I’m the critic in question. The occasion (naturally) was the publication of A Terry Teachout Reader, and
Andersen and I had a lengthy and exceptionally wide-ranging conversation about what I do and how I do it. I’ve been interviewed on quite a few radio shows over the years, but this one was especially satisfying–the questions were smart and to the point, and I had more than enough time to answer them in detail.

New Yorkers can hear my appearance on Studio 360 at ten a.m. next Saturday, April 17, on WNYC-FM (93.9), or at seven p.m. next Sunday, April 18, on WNYC-AM (820). No matter where you live, you can also listen on the Web in live streaming audio by going here.

Studio 360 is carried by NPR affiliates across the country. For a complete list of local stations and air dates, go here.

Once the show has been broadcast, it’ll be archived here so that you can hear it at your convenience.

One way or another, give a listen, O.K.? I think it’ll be fun.

“The three hurried downstairs, to find, not the gay dog they expected, but a young man, colourless, toneless, who had already the mournful eyes above a drooping moustache that are so common in London, and that haunt some streets of the city like accusing presences. One guessed him as the third generation, grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had sucked into the town; as one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit. Hints of robustness survived in him, more than a hint of primitive good looks, and Margaret, noting the spine that might have been straight, and the chest that might have broadened, wondered whether it paid to give up the glory of the animal for a tail coat and a couple of ideas. Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it. She knew this type very well–the vague aspirations, the mental dishonesty, the familiarity with the outsides of books. She knew the very tones in which he would address her. She was only unprepared for an example of her own visiting-card.”

E.M. Forster, Howards End

As I read over this morning’s Pulitzer coverage, I noticed that the runners-up for the drama prize that went to Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife were a pair of plays I panned in The Wall Street Journal.

One was Omnium Gatherum. With all due respect to Old Hag‘s current guest blogger, who loved it, I thought otherwise:

For openers, the play, co-written by Theresa Rebeck (“Bad Dates”) and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, is a drawing-room comedy set at a chic dinner party in what at first blush appears to be a high-rise apartment overlooking Ground Zero. The dizzy hostess (Kristine Nielsen) and her guests are all coarsely realized caricatures: an ultra-fey Cambridge don (Dean Nolen), a cosmopolitan Arab (Edward A. Hajj), a you-go-girl black matron (Melanna Gray), a humorless vegan (Jenny Bacon), even a loud-mouthed right-winger (Phillip Clark). (I’d like to see the chic dinner party to which he got invited.) In an inept attempt at subtlety, each guest is made to say one or two things inconsistent with his or her caricature–though somebody ought to tell the authors that making the fey Brit a raving Israel-hater was more accurate than they might have guessed.

What next? Well, Guest No. 6 turns out to be a fireman (Joseph Lyle Taylor), who (of course) speaks in dese-dem-doseisms and (also of course) has a climactic monologue in which he tells what he saw on 9/11. The witty chit-chat (next to none of which is amusing) degenerates into boozy sniping. The vegan confesses that she’s…pregnant! The hostess announces that she’s invited a Mystery Guest (Amir Arison), who turns out to be…an Arab terrorist! The fireman admits that he’s really…dead! In fact, all the guests are dead, and as if that weren’t enough of a clich

“There can be no better explanation or proof of the existence of God than the fact that I have a film career.”

Kevin Smith (at a college Q-&-A session, courtesy of Futurballa)

“Fiddlers Three,” my latest essay for Commentary, is now available on line.

To view it during the month of April, go to the “Teachout in Commentary” module of the right-hand column and click in the appropriate place.