Go, little engine! I refer, of course, to the Oakland University Golden Grizzlies, who contend tonight for a berth in some big old basketball tournament about which I normally would not care, not even in lieu of the much-missed run-up to the NHL playoffs that should be absorbing all of my sports-dedicated attention right now. But the Golden Grizzlies occupy a special place in the hearts of the Demanskis, and for one special, unprecedented night, I will willingly watch college basketball.

You say 12 and 18? Upset specialists, say I. Go Grizzlies!

A small new feature has cropped up in the book section of the Atlantic Monthly, unique to the magazine as far as I can tell. It’s called “Close Reads,” and both installments that I’ve seen have been written by Christina Schwarz. In the most recent issue she illuminates a single paragraph from an Ann Beattie story, “Find and Replace”; the month before that she gave similar treatment to a tiny passage from John Updike’s “Villages” (subscription required for this one, though you can view the passage without it).

I love this feature. There’s something faintly fusty about it–back to basics–and yet a really great close reading can be so dazzling (Schwarz does pretty well with hers, unearthing lots from seemingly straightforward extracts while avoiding getting too schoolmarmish about it). There’s no room in a typical newspaper or magazine book review to perform analysis quite this detailed, even though it’s just the sort of work one hopes critics’ larger judgments are built on.

The nice thing about Schwarz’s analyses is that they not only unravel the meanings and effects packed into her chosen fragments, but show how they’re representative of that author’s particular bag of tricks. And there’s just something that feels salutary about having these little demonstrations of good reading tucked in among the large-scale reviews. If I were in charge of a book section, I’d lift this idea in a heartbeat. I’m sure there are many, say, book bloggers who would be only too happy to pitch in with some readings.

This is to warn you that I’ll be deeply immersed in writing Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong for the remainder of the week. Any postings that happen to find their way onto the blog will be…er, fortuitous.

Later.

“I’m playin’ a date in Florida years ago, livin’ in the colored section and I’m playin’ my horn for myself one afternoon. A knock come on the door and there’s an old, gray-haired flute player from the Philadelphia Orchestra, down there for his health. Walking through that neighborhood, he heard this horn, playing this

For a long time I used to file away clippings of my old magazine articles, but I stopped saving them with the coming of Web-based archives. Now I keep only electronic copies of my stuff, and once I’d put together A Terry Teachout Reader, in which I collected some of the pieces I published between 1987 and 2002, I decided the time had come to dispose of my old clips. Suspecting myself of excessive vanity and pointless nostalgia, I decided, like Thoreau, to simplify my life, so I sold two-thirds of my books and threw out a huge pile of clips and other mementoes, keeping only what I could stuff into one small cardboard box.

Time, however, has a way of doubling back on you. The current occupant of my previous apartment called the other day to tell me that I’d left behind another box of miscellaneous items. It surfaced, she said, in the course of a major housecleaning. Did I want it, or should she throw it out? I thought for a moment, then told her I’d be right over. Curiosity had gotten the better of asceticism. I picked up the box and toted it home.

Here’s what I found inside:

– The printed programs of all the plays in which I acted in high school and college, going back to 1972. (Don’t ask–I was awful. I had a lot of fun, though.)

– Three souvenirs from my maiden voyage to New York in December of 1975, a week-long trip organized by one of my college professors.

The first was the program for a performance of New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker, my first Balanchine ballet. Peter Boal was one of the children in the first-act Christmas party. Now he’s retiring from NYCB to become the artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet. Sic transit!

The second was the souvenir program for Harold Prince’s Broadway revival of Candide. (Just last week I reviewed New York City Opera’s revival of Prince’s opera-house production of the same show.)

The third, scrawled in my still-unformed handwriting on a piece of hotel stationery, was an itinerary of everything I did in New York, including the menus of all the meals I ate. That was the week I first tasted onion soup, vichyssoise, ratatouille, pheasant, chicken Kiev, and chocolate mousse. Most of the restaurants at which I made these happy discoveries have long since closed their doors, but the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim are still around, as is the Caf

• I got an e-mail last week from a priest I know who reads my Wall Street Journal drama column and likes it. At least I think he does. “So far,” he wrote, “you’ve managed to avoid pseudo-sophistication.” That dark qualifier–so far–made me smile. Has he detected a hint of phoniness in my other writings? Or is it merely that he knows most critics don’t feel comfortable unless they’re running with the pack?

Whatever he meant, I appreciate both the implicit warning and the explicit praise. I know what he means by “pseudo-sophistication,” though I can’t imagine falling victim to it. Perhaps because I took up drama criticism at a comparatively advanced age, I’m simply not interested in theatrical fashion. In fact, I often don’t know what it is at any given moment (though it’s rarely hard to guess). Even when I do know, I don’t pay any attention: I simply come home from a show, sit down at my iBook, and write what I think. Every once in a while I suspect I’m going to find myself way out on a limb come Friday morning, a prospect that neither pleases nor scares me.

• The Game Show Network’s nightly installments of What’s My Line? have now reached 1955, the year in which Fred Allen replaced Steve Allen as the show’s fourth regular panelist. I doubt that many readers of this blog know who Fred Allen was, since he died in 1956 and is now mainly remembered, if at all, for his long-running radio series of the ’30s and ’40s. Yet he was one of the best-known comedians of his day, and was widely considered to be not merely a radio comic but a full-fledged wit (James Thurber was one of his biggest fans). Among other things, he wrote two very good books, Treadmill to Oblivion and Much Ado About Me, and a posthumous collection of his letters was published in 1965. An anthology of his writings came out just four years ago. I wonder how many other people my age or younger have read any of these books, much less all of them.

Of all my peculiar claims to singularity, this one may be the most revealing: I’ve never met another person whose head was crammed full of so much miscellaneous information about people like Fred Allen, most of it utterly useless. To put it another way, I can be boring about more subjects than anyone I know. Fortunately, I’m painfully aware that I suffer from this chronic disability, and sometimes even manage to guard against inflicting it on my friends. I once had an insomniac significant other who claimed to find it tranquilizing to listen to me delivering impromptu lectures on random subjects (she claimed to be particularly fond of hearing me talk about the use of the rhythm guitar in swing-era jazz).

If only I knew half so much about making large amounts of money! Alas, none of my preferred subjects is more than modestly renumerative….

“And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel
wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter–we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure–news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“When an item struck his imagination he would sometimes write a sentence or two down in his notebook. He kept the notebook in his overcoat pocket, as he was not the type to write ostentatiously in bars or coffee shops. Just then he felt an image coming up to the surface, something about the faces outside the window, like a whole school of fish turning at once, the silvery bodies in three dimensions, something about the way they didn’t recognize themselves as beautiful but just kept on schooling to their separate ends. Then remembered that Pound had gotten there first: petals on a wet, black bough…It was not fair that so many of his best ideas were someone else’s.”

Kevin Canty, Winslow in Love