At least not until Friday, anyway. Yes, I know, I said on Tuesday that I was probably going to take Wednesday off, and look what happened! On the other hand, “About Last Night” racked up an exceptionally high number of page views yesterday–about 8,300, one of our best days ever–so I didn’t feel I could shut the shop down with a clear conscience.

Today, alas, is different: I really, truly have to finish writing an essay about A.J. Liebling, so I ain’t gonna blog no more. Until tomorrow. No matter what happens. I swear.

Really.

UPDATE: The Liebling piece is done and gone. One quick nap coming up.

I made a special guest appearance on the Leisure & Arts page of this morning’s Wall Street Journal to write about Madeleine Peyroux:

Eight years ago, Madeleine Peyroux was a star on the rise. “Dreamland,” her debut album, was selling nicely (200,000 copies, all told). Critics were fascinated by the idea of a singer-guitarist from Brooklyn who’d learned her trade from the street musicians of Paris, where she lived as a girl. Though she sounded very much like Billie Holiday in the late Forties–the same salty rasp, the same squeezed-out spurts and swoops–her music, a torchy blend of blues, country and old-time pop, bore no resemblance to the middle-aged Holiday’s languorous brand of jazz. Ms. Peyroux (prounounced pe-RU, like the country) first caught my ear, for instance, with a lazy, loping cover version of Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight,” a staple of broken-bottle honky-tonks the world over.

So what did she do for an encore? She disappeared.

Not only did Ms. Peyroux fail to follow up “Dreamland” with a sequel, but she did virtually no performing in public between 1997 and 2002. No one seemed to know what had happened to her, though I found vague hints scattered around the Internet….

Then–just as abruptly and inexplicably–Ms. Peyroux resurfaced. Rounder, the highly regarded independent country-bluegrass-jazz label, announced earlier this year that it had signed her to a recording contract. In June she opened for Gary Burton at the Blue Note, one of New York’s top jazz clubs. “Careless Love,” her long-awaited second album, was released this week, and on Monday she kicks off a week-long run at another high-end Manhattan nightspot, Le Jazz Au Bar.

All this would mean little were it not for the fact that “Careless Love” is a stunner, a laid-back, quietly sexy stroll through a dozen songs that appear to have nothing in common save that Ms. Peyroux, accompanied by a crack team of Los Angeles session men anchored by the peerless jazz organist Larry Goldings, sings each one as though it had been written for her personally….

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing, you have two options:

(1) Go to a newsstand and buy today’s Journal.

(2) Sign up for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal, which costs half as much as an ink-on-paper subscription and gives you complete access to each day’s edition, plus various other bells, whistles, and special features. Do this and you also get to read my drama column–starting tomorrow! If you’re interested, go here.

To purchase Careless Love (which I strongly recommend) or listen to samples thereof, go here.

Madeleine Peyroux’s Web site (which includes the itinerary for her upcoming concert tour) is here.

Le Jazz Au Bar’s Web site is here.

Now, get cracking.

UPDATE: Careless Love is now #4 on amazon.com, while www.madeleinepeyroux.com appears to have crashed, presumably from unexpectedly high traffic. Whoooee!

“Sorrow comes in great waves–no one can know that better than you–but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot, and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see.”

Henry James, letter to Grace Norton, July 28, 1883

Hello from a small and quickly vanishing window of breath-catching in between the ironclad deadline that I met today (barely, heroically) and the one that I’m going, I’m absolutely going, to meet tomorrow. It’s been one of those weeks. Things I blithely take for granted under normal circumstances, like sleep, social activity, cooked meals, the outdoors, and, yes, blogging, have through the magic of deprivation been revealed as tremendous gifts and blessings. In other words, I miss this old place.

After I slay this last dragon, you’ll be hearing from me on this, that, her, and quite possibly them, if I’m feeling self-indulgent (which I often am). This week may stink, you see, but last weekend was pretty excellent.

Some people mooch all the talent:

A dragonfly darted at my feet. I’d been looking forward to seeing one but once you were there in person it wasn’t all that great. Just a giant insect, really, with wings. Dragonflies are critically overhyped, the gilded Donald Trumps of the beach world.

The parodist is Ms. Tingle Alley. To find out who the parodied is, you’ll have to click through (first removing any sharp or heavy rings and bracelets so as not to injure yourself when you slap your forehead in delighted recognition).

– From Booksquare:

When we go into a library, we usually spend a few minutes in the children’s book section, looking for old favorites. There is some comfort in knowing that another generation is puzzling over the (rather tame) antics of Beany Malone. That the Boxcar Children haven’t aged. That Margaret is still talking to God. That on any aisle in any library, we can find a book that changed our little world (look under Laura Ingalls Wilder, and you will discover the summer we captained an expedition to build a cave to protect our gang from the wild tornadoes of California’s Central Coast…).

– From Jolly Days:

I’m not entirely a fan of Impressionism. The “joy of life stuff” can feel flimsy, shallow, leaving out the full experience of consciousness, of being alive. Art is an analog to life, not a feel-good reassurance that things can be better — New Age self-absorbed dreaminess trying to be art. An emphasis on decoration and sensation ignores the mind and the spirit.

– From Household Opera:

Just under three years ago, I turned off the TV after two or three days glued to the screen because I could not, just could not, watch that footage one more time, couldn’t stand any more speculation about who or what might get blown up next, couldn’t listen to any more man-on-the-street interviews with people calling for the bombing of the entire Arab world to smithereens. Having hit my saturation point, I spent the better part of a day listening to Bach’s two- and three-part inventions over and over and over. I couldn’t tell at the time if it was escapism, or some part of my brain looking for equilibrium, or what. It may have been simply the need to remind myself of what other things human beings are capable of besides mass murder.

– From Cup of Chicha:

The back of my high school yearbook was reserved for senior ads, the rich suburban teen’s equivalent to graffiti. Groups were aesthetically demarcated, their ads’ “look” determined by their social status. The most popular girls made collages of beach cleavage, group hugs, and baby photos; the popular boys, meanwhile, wore wife-beaters, crossed their fingers into “west side,” and kneeled in front of Beemers.

– From Mixolydian Mode:

Today’s grooming tip: Guys, if your tonsorial model is Sinead O’Connor or Telly Savalas, remember to shave before heading off to evening Mass. A five o’clock shadow that covers the entire scalp is not a pleasant sight for your fellow parishioners.

– From Killin’ time bein’ lazy:

I see the impact of IM/texty/whatever you call it on my students. When they e-mail, they use it all the time; luckily, most of them know enough to not use it in actual papers and on projects in school. A few, though, seem to have a problem telling the difference between appropriate and inappropriate writing.

I don’t think it makes them look dumb, however. It makes them look like middle school and high school students.

When I see a message from someone my age, however, I worry. I don’t have a problem with getting a short text message on my cell from someone that says that they’ll be “l8”. But an entire message written like that? It’s as nails-on-a-blackboardy as reading something from an adult where they confuse your/you’re, too/to/two or (as one of my friends has discovered) weather/whether.

I wonder if it’s an attempt to act young. It can’t be a lack of education because this type of writing didn’t arise until recently. And there can’t possibly be that many former stenographers out there!

– From Reflections in D Minor:

Have you ever wondered what makes us cling so tenaciously to our beliefs – not just religious beliefs or belief in a political ideology but any little insignificant belief, such as belief in urban legends or the belief in the superiority of one brand over others of equal or better quality? We hold on to beliefs as if they were cherished possessions, like trinkets that have sentimental value but no practical use.

I have to plead guilty to this myself. Sometimes I really hate Snopes. I come across a remarkable but perfectly legitimate sounding story from a reasonably reliable source, share it with other people and the next thing I know someone sends me a link to Snopes. What a shattering blow. Why do they have to tell me the truth? Why can’t they just let me believe? (And, by the way, why do I believe Snopes is a reliable source of information?)

– From Eve Tushnet:

We’ve all heard the cliche that “truth is stranger than fiction,” and I expect most authors have been frustrated to realize that we just can’t write stories in which things happen the way they really did happen! because it would appear too coincidental and too neat. Fiction is not about presenting the raw world. Life does that for us. Fiction is supposed to tease out some kind of language from the raw world. Fiction is meant neither to replace nor to mirror life, but rather to interpret it.

– From Lileks:

The show went fast, as ever

From I Want Media‘s “Media Offline: Unlinkable Media Items” (a great idea for a regular on-line feature, by the way):

Is Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s “Daily Show,” comfortable as a member of the “real media”? asks the Sept. 17 issue of Entertainment Weekly. “In this day and age, anybody with a Web site is part of the real media,” says Stewart. “Media is so all-encompassing. But we’re not journalists, we’re comedians. … My colleagues are other fake news shows. Ted Koppel’s not my colleague.” What is Stewart’s take on his recent interview with John Kerry? “It was a relatively mediocre talk-show experience,” he says. “Actually, that’s a great example of the limits of this program. People expected the show to create a ‘new paradigm of info-enter-propa-gainment!’ It ended up just being a comedian lamely making jokes to a presidential candidate who didn’t want to embarrass himself or appear stiff.”

I was thinking today about how so few public figures are willing to admit (for attribution, anyway) that they’ve done something wrong, no matter how minor. But I wasn’t thinking of politicians, or even of Dan Rather. A half-remembered quote had flashed unexpectedly through my mind, and thirty seconds’ worth of Web surfing produced this paragraph from an editorial in a magazine called World War II:

Soon after he had completed his epic 140-mile march with his staff from Wuntho, Burma, to safety in India, an unhappy Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell was asked by a reporter to explain the performance of Allied armies in Burma and give his impressions of the recently concluded campaign. Never one to mince words, the peppery general responded: “I claim we took a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, and go back and retake it.”

Stilwell spoke those words sixty-two years ago. When was the last time that such candor was heard in like circumstances? What would happen today if similar words were spoken by some equally well-known person who’d stepped in it up to his eyebrows? Would his candor be greeted by a wholehearted roar of astonished approval? Or would he be buried under the inevitable avalanche of told-you-sos from his sworn enemies and their robotic surrogates, amplified well beyond the threshold of pain by the 24/7 echo chamber of the media, old and new alike? Is it possible that the hair-trigger litigiousness of modern-day American society, in which admissions of error are treated as a license to sue, stands in the way of such confessions? And even if our hypothetical Joe Stilwell II took a savage beating in the press for a day or two–or longer–might it be possible that in the long run he’d come out on top, simply because he was honest?

I doubt we’ll be getting a real-life opportunity to see what would happen any time soon. But having recently watched Paddy Chayefsky’s Network for the first time, it occurs to me that such a scenario might well make for an interesting movie. In Network, the American public is so hungry for the spin-free frankness of a seemingly honest man that it embraces a TV anchorman who goes off his rocker in the middle of a newscast. (That’s what makes the film so provocative, by the way. In the hands of a West Wing-type screenwriter, the anchorman would have been presented as a Christ-like figure, but Chayefsky leaves us in no possible doubt that Howard Beale really is off his rocker.) Imagine, then, a film about a present-day public figure who screws up in a big way, calls a press conference, admits his errors, and throws himself upon the mercy of the public. It’s not hard to see how a socially aware writer-director like, say, John Sayles might weave the resulting tangle into a smart story about imperfect people who get caught up in the whirlwind of circumstance.

If anyone out there in cyberspace likes this idea, talk to my agent. In the meantime, I guess we’ll have to settle for the freeze-dried, pre-digested, focus-group-tested spin that has come to dominate so much of our public discourse in my lifetime. It makes me sick–but it seems to work. I don’t like to think what that says about us.