Yeah, I know, I promised to post yesterday, but thingsgotbusyaroundhere and all of a sudden it was bedtime. No more excuses, though: I am now officially back, with a vengeance.
Part of what preoccupied me yesterday was the snail mail, which really piles up when I’m gone. Fortunately, there were plenty of accumulated goodies in the mailbox to serve as a counterpoise to all those bills and press releases. Among other things, Mosaic Records sent me a review copy of The Complete Verve Gerry Mulligan Concert Band Sessions, a box set for which jazz buffs have been waiting impatiently ever since word of its imminent release circulated last year. More later, but believe me, you don’t need to wait for the reviews, from me or anyone else, to buy this one.
I also received a treasure from San Francisco, Milton Avery’s March at a Table, a drypoint etching that I ordered from a dealer months ago but couldn’t afford to finish paying for until I received the first installment of the advance for my Louis Armstrong and George Balanchine biographies. It’s really, really beautiful, and it’s also an anomaly: I don’t own any other works of figurative art. All my other pieces are unpeopled landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, and abstracts. No doubt this says something profound and unintentionally revealing about the nature of my interior life (especially since this “portrait” of the artist’s daughter is far from literally representational), but all I know is that I hung “March at a Table” on the wall at the end of my couch, where I can see it easily whenever I’m curled up with a book.
Lastly and leastly–except to me–HarperCollins sent a first-off-the-press copy of the trade paperback edition of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, which comes out on November 4 (you can pre-order it from amazon.com by clicking on the link). It, too, is beautiful, at least as far as I’m concerned. It’s also the perfect antidote for those blue periods when you feel like nothing will ever go right again, because in addition to the front- and back-cover blurbs from the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, The Economist, the Baltimore Sun, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, the folks at HarperCollins threw in four solid pages of enthusiastic excerpts from thirty other reviews of The Skeptic. Is that cool, or what?
So yes, I’ve got a lot of stuff to do (don’t I always?), and sometimes I wish I didn’t, but when you get right down to it, who has a better job? Which is why I’m glad to be blogging again: I love to share my pleasures with you, at least vicariously. Thanks for stopping by while I was gone, and thanks for being so nice to Our Girl in Chicago.
(Incidentally, I just heard from OGIC, who is having computer troubles of her own. Please send benign thoughts her way–I sooooooo know how it is.)
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a gallery to visit, and a review to write, and a whole lot of accumulated e-mail to start answering….