“I think ‘taste’ is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”

John Updike, Hugging the Shore

I was chatting this morning with a friend of mine who is a singer-songwriter, and we agreed that “singer-songwriter” is an awfully clunky way to describe what she does.

Suddenly the light went on.

“Hey, how about singwriter?” I asked.

“Er, well, maybe…” she replied.

For those of you who loathe New York City and everything in it, please know that my adopted home town is obscenely hot and humid today. I just returned from a visit to the National Academy Museum and am too limp to blog about it. I’m supposed to go hear an outdoor concert in Central Park tonight and am praying for a timely thunderstorm.

Gloat while you can. Your time will come.

UPDATE: Sure enough, the sky fell, but I went to the concert anyway, got soaked to the skin, and had a wonderful time. The breeze blew the humidity away and the rain drove the malcontents away, meaning that everybody who toughed it out was in a mood to be pleased when the music started. Pink Martini, whom I adore (I have such a crush on China Forbes),
opened the proceedings with a wonderfully polished set, while David Byrne, who is touring with a six-piece string section, filled all the aging scenesters in the crowd with delight. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard several thousand happy concertgoers howling Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est? at the top of their lungs.

No sooner did Byrne hit the stage than fancy footwork broke out in our quadrant of the park–I was especially charmed by two somewhat youngish ladies who spent the entire evening performing what can only be called an interpretative dance–and by the time his set was over, the sun had finally set and the lights of Manhattan were bouncing off the low-lying thunderheads, tinting them a dark reddish-orange.

As I walked home, I asked myself if there were any other place in the world where I might possibly care to live. Answer came there none….

…but not much else.

Translation: way too much recent activity, not nearly enough down time.

Complication: the deadline for this Sunday’s “Second City” column for the Washington Post is looming.

Result: I have a really good post taking shape in my head, but it isn’t going to get written down today.

Solution: see you tomorrow.

“I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged.”

Gertrude Stein, Brewsie and Willie

I just got back from Montgomery, Alabama, where I spent three days at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. That wasn’t all I did: I spent my mornings seeing such intriguing sights as Hank Williams’ grave and Martin Luther King’s church. I also paid a visit to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, whose holdings include Edward Hopper’s New York Office and two paintings by Zelda Fitzgerald, and thanks to the timely intervention of a reader, I even managed to eat something approaching my fair share of really good barbecue. Nevertheless, I came to Montgomery to see plays, and I managed to work in five of them while I was in town, one on Thursday night (Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing) and two each on Friday (As You Like It and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons) and Saturday (The Taming of the Shrew and Coriolanus). It was the first time I’d ever seen live performances of two Shakespeare plays in a single day.

Am I tired? Am I ever. You can’t fly nonstop to Montgomery from New York, so I had to go to Charlotte, North Carolina, and take a puddlejumper the rest of the way. Thursday was a long, long day, and Sunday wasn’t much shorter. The good news is that my flying phobia seems to have left me–I actually enjoyed it up there! I’m awfully glad to be home, though, and I think I’ve earned a good night’s sleep, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

I have three appointments and a deadline on Monday, but that doesn’t mean I won’t blog some more. (Nor does it mean that I will.)

Two feathered guests from Alabama, two together,

And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,

And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,

And every day the she-bird crouched on her nest, silent, with bright
eyes,

And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing
them,

Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

Walt Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”

I’m spending this weekend in Detroit, where spirits seem to be pretty high, considering. Further blogging will have to wait until I get back to Chicago Monday, but in the meantime I want to urge everyone in Chicago and environs to tune in Sunday morning for a very special installment of Chicago Public Radio’s weekly arts show “Hello Beautiful!”

This week’s show was taped last Wednesday evening in front of a live audience that