Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters, personal and professional, will charm your socks right off. They’ve already kept me from several tasks (including going to bed at a reasonable hour) tonight. And they’re worth every squandered minute.

To William Archer, October 1887:

I am now a salaried party; I am a bourgeois now; I am to write a weekly paper for Scribner’s, at a scale of payment which makes my teeth ache for shame and diffidence….I am like to be a millionaire if this goes on, and be publicly hanged at the social revolution: well, I would prefer that to dying in my bed; and it would be a godsend to my biographer, if ever I have one.

To Henry James, “I know not the day; but the month it is the drear October by the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir,” 1887:

Our house–emphatically “Baker’s”–is on a hill, and has a sight of a stream turning a corner in the valley–bless the face of running water!–and sees some hills too, and the paganly prosaic roofs of Saranac itself; the Lake it does not see, nor do I regret that; I like water (fresh water I mean) either running swiftly among stones, or else largely qualified with whisky. As I write, the sun (which has long been a stranger) shines in at my shoulder; from the next room, the bell of Lloyd’s typewriter makes an agreeable music as it patters off (at a rate which astonishes this experienced novelist) the early chapters of a humorous romance; from still further off–the walls of Baker’s are neither ancient nor massive–rumours of Valentine about the kitchen stove come to my ears; of my mother and Fanny I hear nothing, for the excellent reason that they have gone sparking off, one to Niagara, one to Indianapolis. People complain that I never give news in my letters. I have wiped out that reproach.

Again to William Archer, February 1888:

Why was Jenkin an amateur in my eyes? You think because not amusing (I think he often was amusing). The reason is this: I never, or almost never, saw two pages of his work that I could not have put in one without the smallest loss of material. That is the only test I know of writing. If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been said in one, then it’s amateur work. Then you will bring me up with old Dumas. Nay, the object of a story is to belong, to fill up hours; the story-teller’s art of writing is to water out by continual invention, historical and technical, and yet not seem to water; seem on the other hand to practise that same wit of conspicuous and declaratory condensation which is the proper art of writing. That is one thing in which my stories fail: I am always cutting the flesh off the bones.

I would rise from the dead to preach!

I’m always resolving to learn more about Stevenson, who cut a rather dashing figure in the transatlantic literary scene at the end of the nineteenth century. He know most everybody and, as far as I can tell, was universally respected. It’s heartbreaking to see his illnesses turn up again and again in these late letters, where the restless vigor of his imagination and affections is so palpable. When he died in 1894, Stevenson was 44 and probably still had enough books in him to fill another lifetime on top of his truncated one.

In the Boston Globe, Alex Beam blows the whistle on the newest big doping scandal:

There is, of course, the old-fashioned explanation for why the Buckleys, the Winchesters, and the John Updikes of the world make the rest of us look like clock-watching quill-pushers: hard work. But I have dismissed the possibility that these writers might have studied harder in school, read more books, or spent more hours at the desk than a grasshopper such as I. Or that they are simply more gifted than I am. They must be on something.

(Link via the back-with-a-vengeance Old Hag.)

Lots of good feedback on last week’s link to CBC’s “50 Tracks,” much of it focused on the hip-hop. Quoth the ‘Fesser, “I bemoan the Clashlessness of the CBC list, and would toss 4 back, and ask the dealer for 4 new to go with Public Enemy as my hole card.” Musician extraordinaire and FOOGIC Kenneth Burns is more inclined to praise the panel for what they got right; one senses his expectations for this sort of exercise have been sanded down to a bare sliver: “The CBC is rightly taking pains to have its 80s ranking include hip-hop. It’s an essential 80s pop genre, but it’s routinely ignored in at least the more fatuous remembrances of the decade. I’m thinking especially of 80s radio stations, which

Erin O’Connor is thinking out loud about rereading at her blog Critical Mass. An English teacher, she has some particularly interesting things to say about the differences between rereading for pleasure and rereading for work:

I don’t usually reread because there is so much out there in the world that I am eager to read for the first time. I’ve been gluttonous about books since I was very small, and I’ve never lost that kid-in-a-candy-shop feeling I used to get as a child, sitting in front of shelves full of books, almost overwhelmed by the readerly goodness that was bound between their covers. A family friend once gave me a book binge as a birthday present, and recalls a nine-year-old me sitting on the floor in front of the young adults section in B. Dalton’s, declaring that I was “paralyzed by indecision.”

But not rereading is my private habit in my personal reading life. As an English teacher, rereading is professionally necessary, part of the job, and often a very enjoyable part, too. Academic overspecialization being what it is, most of the books in which I am massively well reread are nineteenth-century English novels: I know my Jane Austen, my Brontes, my Dickens, my Collins, my Gaskell, my Eliot, my Thackeray, my Trollope, my Hardy, and my Conrad inside out, and I know them from teaching them repeatedly to class after class of college students who are more (or less) interested in rounding out their literary knowledge, or, more pragmatically, in knocking off a distribution requirement while easing course schedules heavy in science and math. There are some works I have read and taught too many times. They have become old, stale, too familiar, ironically, to be teachable any more, since to teach a work of literature well, you must strike a difficult balance between knowing that work intimately, and not knowing it so well that it has ceased to surprise you. When a work gets so stale that you cannot respond to it any longer, it’s time to not teach it for the indefinite future. Jane Eyre is one of these for me, as are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They’ve been out of rotation for a few years, freshening up for future teacherly use.

But teacherly rereading is hothouse rereading: it’s forced rereading for a particular purpose, not voluntary rereading for the sheer interest and delight of rediscovering or renewing one’s connection with a particular author or work. I had a teacher in graduate school who liked to say that we should all reread George Eliot’s Middlemarch once every five years. His point was that there is so much in that novel that it effectively grows and changes as we do: It’s a different book every five years, because we are different people from one half decade to the next. He was right.

I don’t reread books terribly often, but when I do it’s generally in the pursuit of comfort, like eating macaroni and cheese in the middle of the winter. For a long time I read Pride and Prejudice every Christmas vacation. Other books I faithfully return to: The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy; In the Cage by Henry James; Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth; some of Dawn Powell’s books; and assorted mysteries including Westlake, John D. MacDonald, and pre-Hannibal Thomas Harris. Quite a conventional list of its kind, I imagine.

(Incidentally, Erin’s mention of B. Dalton’s, a name I haven’t heard in eons, really whips of memories of the bad old pre-revolutionary days [the revolution in question being, of course, the national expansion of Borders] when it was the Dalton’s at the mall or nothing. The next time someone gets snide about Borders in my earshot, I’m going to raise that unlovely specter of the Dalton’s at the mall.)

I knew that something seemed off about those trailers for the new film version of Vanity Fair, however sumptuous the cast and sets: the devious Becky Sharp as a straightforward heroine? Holy gross misreading, Batman! Also, the cresting music and earnestly intoned voiceover hardly capture the rollicking, irreverent narration of the original. This very interesting New York Times piece, however, made me feel a little better. It reports that Mira Nair well knew what she was doing when she took such liberties with William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1847-48 novel. And it offers up some of the fascinating nitty-gritty of Nair’s intimate back-and-forth with Thackeray:

The new “Vanity Fair” takes a few wild departures, too, but the changes are never accidental, and sometimes not so far from the source as they seem. When Becky triumphantly rides off on an elephant in India it may seem that the director is inventing a “Becky Goes to Jodhpur” moment. Not at all. Her heroine is acting out an adventure that Thackeray’s Becky could only dream about. Specifically, she dreamed about it in Chapter 3, when Thackeray creates a fantasy in which Becky had married Amelia’s brother, Jos, a civil servant posted to India, had put on “diamond-necklaces, and had mounted upon an elephant.” A throwaway line in the novel becomes one of the film’s most extravagant scenes, emblematic of how Ms. Nair and Mr. Fellowes have lifted bits from Thackeray and presented them in a sparkling new way. Ms. Nair shot this brief Indian scene to replace one originally filmed in the English countryside. “It was, for me, a wink,” she said.

A filmmaking style to capture an English major’s heart, that. I suppose I should have given the director of Monsoon Wedding the benefit of the doubt in the first place.

[Special added bonus materials! Gawk at Thackeray’s original illustrations for his greatest novel here.]

Terry and I have many avocations in common. Music isn’t one of them. When it comes to music, I’m all but hopeless. In third grade I was kicked out of the kiddie choir, which had been billed as all-inclusive. Fourth grade was the year we picked instruments for band lessons. I wanted to play the flute. All of the girls in my school played flute or clarinet, and the flute was in my estimation the prettier of the two instruments, both physically and musically. I remember waiting my turn during the first class meeting for a consultation with the band teacher, who was assigning instruments. I remember announcing my intention to play flute. I remember the teacher presenting me with the mouthpiece of a flute to try out. And I remember his dour pronouncement that my mouth was “wrong” for flute and that, perforce, I would play clarinet.

Is it any wonder that I loathed clarinet and soon gave it up?

Oh, but my musical misadventures don’t end there. It so happens that I have extraordinarily long fingers (straight from my grandmother), so I was pegged early by family and friends as a potential piano whiz. One fine birthday, a piano turned up in the family room, courtesy of generous parents who were always ready to indulge any interest I leaned toward. Alas, I never could find it in me to commit to lessons, and the piano was sold, an all but unplunked white elephant, a couple of years later. (I blame the band teacher.)

Moving on to Exhibit D: At my high school there was a long-standing tradition that the junior girls sang a sentimental tune for the seniors at convocation. This was a tradition not taken lightly, but looked on as an expression of debt and respect, a moment to set aside cattiness and cliquery, a meaningful step in our inheritance of the senior class mantle–not something one did for singing’s sake, but something that was right and good to do. A month’s worth of after-school practices apparently couldn’t help a really hard case; during the actual performance my normally kind friend Robin, standing next to me, whispered could I please mouth the words because my singing, however well-intentioned, was throwing her off tune.

With that checkered history, it’s been a good long time since I ventured again to sing or play music in public. (At home or in the car alone? A different story–much to the cat’s regret, I’m sure.) I dream of being able to carry a tune, though, and the desire has made me almost single-minded about the music I Iisten to: all women singers, all the time. OK, I exaggerate, but only slightly. I’ve been working on my itunes library this weekend, and a quick count reveals that about 60% of the library consists of either solo women artists or bands with female lead vocalists. That’s a sight lower than I would have guessed, but it has to be higher than average. More to the point is that it’s the women’s music that I’m usually listening to, that I thirst for, that hits me where I live: Patsy, Lucinda, Polly Jean, Lauryn, Chan, Aimee, Kim & Kelly (and Tanya!), Luciana, Emmylou, and on and on. These singers can reduce me to a dead swoon in a way no man’s singing ever does, and all I can think to attribute it to is my own futile, sometimes feverish wish to sing well myself.

This base sexism in my musical taste is really anomalous. In the other arts, most of which I actually know something about–painting, fiction, poetry–an artist’s gender doesn’t factor into my preferences or judgments at all. I gravitated toward women writers when I was younger, but that was part and parcel of a typical youthful desire to find my own experiences illuminated in my reading. That understandable urge not only has faded at 30-something, but has been replaced by its opposite, a desire to learn about places, people, and times further and further removed from my life. The more omnivorous my taste becomes, and the shorter life gets, the less I wish to screen my reading by any criteria other than quality.

But music-wise, I’ll take the women just about every time. Lately I’ve been deliriously high on Allison Moorer, about whom you can learn more at her artful website, here. I first found out about Moorer from Terry, natch, who knows my predilection for chanteuses well and has indulged it lavishly over the years. But–and this is where the whole musical-anti-prodigy theme comes into play–sometimes it takes me an absurdly long time to really hear what I listen to. So although I’ve been listening to Moorer for a good two years, and I fell head over heels for her album Miss Fortune when it came out late in 2002, the last couple of weeks have found me listening to this album for perhaps the hundredth time and only now recognizing some of the more unassuming, quietly amazing songs for the little masterpieces they are. Like I said, I’m just kind of hopeless and remedial that way.

OK, this post is awfully long already. So tomorrow I’ll continue with a second part about the particular charms of Miss Fortune, how I happened to come back to it recently, the experience of “discovering” tracks after so long, and how it is they could hide their wonderfulness in plain sight all that time. This last certainly has something to do with my tin ear, but not, I think, everything.

Regular readers know that I’ve been putting the pedal to the metal for most of the summer, both here and in my various day jobs, and it struck me that I’d earned a little time off. The Republican convention seemed like a perfect opportunity for a Manhattan-based aesthete to shut up shop, so I went to The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, hat in hand, and asked if I could skip a couple of deadlines. They said yes (not, I hope, with relief!).

Even though I write “About Last Night” for love, not money, it’s still hard work, and I need a break from it no less than from my paying gigs. So starting at midnight tonight, I’m going up the spout for a week. In spite of all temptations, I won’t be posting or checking my e-mailbox again until Monday, September 6. Until then, the blog belongs to Our Girl in Chicago, who is all freshened up after her recent hiatus and has scads and piles of things about which she longs to write.

What will I do? Where will I be? I’m not telling. Perhaps I’ll don a false mustache and walk the streets of New York incognito, eavesdropping on conventioneers. Perhaps I’ll flag a freight train and let it whisk me off to parts unknown. All I can say is that I plan to do no writing of any kind between now and September 6, except for a few hastily scrawled words on the odd postcard. Otherwise, I’m standing mute.

Have fun while I’m gone. Send lots of nice mail to Our Girl. Check out all those other cool blogs listed in the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column.

Not to worry–I’ll be back.

Friday again, and I’m back in The Wall Street Journal with my weekly drama column. Today’s centerpiece is Guant