I remain severely overpressed with sail, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Not only do I have to hit three deadlines this week, but I’ll be going to five performances, one of them in Washington (where I’ll also be attending a meeting of the National Council on the Arts) and two in North Carolina (where I’ll be seeing Carolina Ballet). Hence blogging is likely to be sporadic and fragmentary between now and next Monday. From me, anyway: Our Girl is hoping to pick up some of the slack, which will be nice, since she’s been in the barrel herself and is only just starting to emerge.

You’ll find an “Elsewhere” posting immediately below and a couple of new Top Fives in the right-hand column. I also expect to be updating “Sites to See” in my spare time, such as it is. Otherwise, keep your eyes peeled for this and that, and wish me luck!

P.S. In case you haven’t guessed, I’m still way behind on answering my e-mail and will remain so for the next couple of days.

In lieu of original Monday-morning content, here’s a peek at my recent Web-based reading:

– I’ve been meaning to blog this “Talk of the Town” item for weeks:

Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you’ll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 3 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”…

In German, this kind of entry is known as a nihilartikel, about which you can read much more here.

For more information about the now-legendary Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup nihilartikel that was spirited into the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, go here.

– Department of Constructive Criticism: Mr. Modern Art Notes offers a list of “five things museums do that I like.”

– Mr. Modern Kicks reports on the Neil Welliver retrospective at the Portland Museum of Art:

Welliver painted Maine for a reason. His works offer an exceptionally direct intuition of the feeling of woods. In some paintings, where trees and branches lay fallen in the marsh and dark clouds gather above, one can almost sense the exact temperature of the fall afternoon, how muddy the ground is, the smell of earth and decaying wood in the chilled air and the promise of rain….

Oh, how I wish I could see it…

– …and how I wish I could afford this. (Needless to say, any wealthy blogfans who’d care to present me with a token of their overflowing gratitude may feel free to do so by clicking on the link.)

– Speaking of art, I seem to be in a work of it…

– …and speaking of me, I recently joined the Bad Plus, James Carter, Jason Moran, Dan Morgenstern, and various other musical types in contributing to a Jerry Jazz Musician symposium on “the greatest saxophone solo in the history of jazz.” Here’s part of what I wrote:

It’s so concise, so completely to the point: he gets on, he gets off, and when it’s over you know exactly what he meant to tell you and feel the way he wanted you to feel, all in three lapidary minutes. “Grace comes,” Merce Cunningham said, “when the energy for the given situation is full and there is no excess.” If a record can do that, this one does….

Care to guess which record I’m talking about?

– Finally, this story from my hometown newspaper filled me with the most powerful nostalgia imaginable…

– …as did my discovery of this primitive but nonetheless wonderful Web site, through which you can purchase the product about which I rhapsodized here.

Happy chewing!

November 2003:

In New York City, drama critics don’t usually attend opening-night performances of plays. We go to press previews instead, meaning that we rarely see Famous People in the audience–they generally come to the official first night. Alas, I have a celebrity disability, meaning that I almost never recognize them in the flesh. My companion for the evening, however, was a virtuoso celebrity-spotter, and everywhere she looked she saw famous faces…from the distant past. Jack Klugman, Arlene Dahl, Joan Collins, folks like that. (I kept waiting for her to point out Walter Winchell.)

Where were all the under-70 celebrities? Or do they even come to Broadway shows anymore?…

(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)

– Bing Crosby’s estimated total income in 1936: $508,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $6,841,857.61

(Source: Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams)

“It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of

This rare early weekday morning appearance is brought to you by all the clocks in my house that I forgot to set back yesterday.

Happy halloween!

A friend writes:

It was only in the last few years I developed the spine to stop reading a book if I don’t like it. Now I even throw one in the trash if I really hate it. The one from which I most recently defected was “The Great Fire” by Shirley Hazzard, and I feel guilty because so many classy people like it, but it just irritated the hell out of me.

Alas, I have no opinion of Shirley Hazzard (sorry, OGIC), but I wholeheartedly endorse pulling the plug on books you don’t like. Nor have I ever had a problem with doing so, though it may have more to do with my being a professional journalist than having a well-developed spine. Journalists, after all, are chronic skippers and skimmers. We have to be, since we spend much of our working lives “getting up” subjects about which we too often know little or nothing prior to being assigned to write about them. I’ve reached the point in my career where I pick most of my own subjects, but back when I wasn’t in a position to be so choosy, I was more than willing to say yes to any assignment, however arcane. I learned to simulate the appearance of knowledge–this is what is meant by the well-known saying that a journalist’s mind is a mile wide and a quarter-inch deep–and one of the ways I did it was by learning how to strain the gist out of a book without reading it from cover to cover.

It stands to reason that Dr. Johnson, one of the all-time great skippers, should have spoken the last word on those who insist on “reading books through”:

This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?

Except for my correspondent, the only person I can think of who has had such a problem was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Justice Holmes was constitutionally incapable of putting down an unfinished book until he reached extreme old age and finally came to his senses. But, then, Justice Holmes was a prime specimen of that queerest and least comprehensible of breeds, the secular puritan. As Edmund Wilson explains in Patriotic Gore:

His reading is dominated by a sense of duty and a Puritanical fear of idleness. He feels that he must grapple with certain works, quite apart from any pleasure they give him, and, once having begun a book, no matter how dull or verbose it is, he must read every word to the end. He is always imagining–this is humorous, of course, but it shows a habit of mind–that God, at the Judgment Day, will ask him to report on the books which he ought to have read but hasn’t.

I greatly admire Holmes, but I love Dr. Johnson, and this is one of the reasons why. He had what he called “a bottom of good sense,” and for all his extreme peculiarities, it rarely let him down. Whatever the subject, you can usually count on him to cut through the posturing and get to the point. I, too, take it for granted that God has better things to do than inquire as to my reading habits–though He may well want a word with me about one or two books that I reviewed in my incautious youth without first having read them from cover to cover!

These lapses notwithstanding, I’d say Dr. Johnson hit it on the nose. I expect a lot out of the books I read, and when they fail to deliver the goods, I toss them aside with a clear conscience and no second thoughts. Life is so very short–and so often shorter than we expect–that it seems a fearful mistake to waste even the tiniest part of it submitting voluntarily to unnecessary boredom. Bad enough that my job sometimes requires me to sit through plays whose sheer awfulness is self-evident well before the end of the first scene. So if you really want me to read each and every page of your thousand-page biography of Millard Fillmore, send me a check. I have my price.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t answered any of your e-mails in recent days, the answer is that I’m swamped and floundering. Too much work, not enough time, arrgh, yikes.

Stand by. It may take another day or two, but this, too, shall pass.