Archives for May 2005

I won’t be answering my phone until eleven a.m., if then. Should you need to talk to me, you’ll have to throw a rock through my bedroom window.

Live with it.

No, we don’t want you to send us any money (not unless you can spare a life-changingly significant sum, in which case we accept with pleasure!). But do this, please:

If you read “About Last Night” regularly and enjoy doing so, tell a friend about us.

Do it right now.

We return you now to our regularly scheduled posting. That was painless, wasn’t it?

– W.H. Auden’s poetry needs no endorsement from me, but I never fail to be surprised by how many well-read people are unaware that he was also a prolific critic and essayist. I was cleaning out a closet the other day and ran across a slightly bent paperback copy of Forewords and Afterwords, the only essay collection Auden published in his lifetime (the Princeton University Press uniform edition of his complete works will ultimately contain all of his essays and reviews). I’ve no idea how one of my favorite books ended up underneath my toolbox, especially since I could see at a glance that I’d marked a half-dozen passages I must have meant to transfer to my electronic commonplace book. Instead, I’ll post them as almanac entries this week, starting today.

I am, incidentally, still chewing away happily at A la recherche du temps perdu. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get a whole lot of reading done on the ground in Chicago, but I spent a pleasant hour with the Duchess de Guermantes at the airport this afternoon. Unlikely as it may sound, A la recherche is ideally suited for planes, trains, and waiting rooms….

– Two composers I know–both of them women, but otherwise very different in age, living circumstances, and stylistic interests–told me separately in the past few days that they found one of the inescapable problems of being a professional composer to be the fact that you spend so much time alone. This is also true of writing, but I’ve never found the solitude necessary for writing to be a problem in and of itself. On the other hand, I do find that I start to get a bit isolated whenever my workaholism flares up and gets out of control. The Web, I suspect, is part of the problem: I use it to provide a change of pace when I’ve got a lot of deadlines on my plate, and it creates so powerful an illusion of “being in touch” that I sometimes forget to go out and see real live people, or even leave the apartment for anything beyond the most essential errands.

Sooner or later, though, I start feeling the need for actual human contact, which brings me back to my senses, sometimes quite abruptly. E-mail is great–better than great–but it won’t give you a kiss on the cheek when you open the door.

– Last week I went for a walk in Central Park with a musician friend, in the course of which the following dialogue took place:

ME Somebody sent me a weird URL the other day.

SHE Weird like how?

ME Well, it was for a site called, uh, maybe “Babes in Classical Music,” or “Classical Hotties,” or something like that. Anyway, it was a Web site full of pictures of good-looking women musicians, organized by what instrument they play, voice type, whatever. How silly is that? What kind of person would spend all that time putting together a site like that? I mean, get a life, right?

SHE (with dawning horror) The URL wasn’t beautyinmusic.com, was it?

ME Yeah, I think that was it.

SHE Er…um…I’m on it.

A beat.

ME (with the maniacal glee of a playground bully) You’re on it? And you stood there and let me tell you all about it? I am soooo blogging this!

SHE (embarrassed) Oh, God, no, you can’t do that! It’s not my fault! I didn’t have anything to do with it! I don’t even know who does the thing….

ME No way. You’re totally busted.

SHE (resigned) Well, at least don’t mention my name, all right?

ME (magnanimously) O.K. Your secret is safe with me.

“I find Trollope’s insistence that writing novels is a craft like making shoes, and his pride in the money he got by writing them, sympathetic. He was aware, of course, that craft and art are not the same: a craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader’s business. Again, Trollope would never have denied that his primary reason for writing was that he loved the activity. He once said that as soon as he could no longer write books he would wish to die. He believed that he wrote best when he wrote fastest, and in his case this may well have been true: a good idea for a novel stimulated his pen. Though large sales are not necessarily a proof of aesthetic value, they are evidence that a book has given pleasure to many readers, and every author, however difficult, would like to give pleasure.”

W.H. Auden, “A Poet of the Actual” (from Forewords and Afterwords)

Like the song
says, I’m goin’ to Chicago. (Back when I was in college, I used the wonderful old 1941 Jimmy Rushing-Count Basie recording of “Goin’ to Chicago Blues” as the closing theme of my late-night radio show, which my friends used in turn as an accompaniment to all sorts of illicit activities.) Our Girl and I have shows to see, meals to eat, and hours of intensive talking to do, and we won’t have nearly enough time for any of these things, since I must return on Sunday night and resume my regular rounds of Manhattan and its environs. We do expect to have as much fun as possible in the time available, though.

OGIC will update you on our activities some time this weekend. I’ll be back in the saddle on Monday, though I may not have much to say that morning, seeing as how I probably won’t have much time to get it said before I fall into bed on Sunday night.

In the meantime, enjoy your weekend.

It’s Friday, I’m in the Journal, and I’m in a raving mood. The causes this week are Orson’s Shadow and Kristin Chenoweth:

Now that Broadway has settled down for the summer, the show to see is Austin Pendleton’s “Orson’s Shadow,” first performed five years ago by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company and currently playing Off Broadway (why did we have to wait so long?) at the Barrow Street Theatre. It’s “All About Eve” for eggheads, a thought experiment in which Mr. Pendleton, a veteran actor and sometime playwright, endeavors to imagine what might have happened when Orson Welles (Jeff Still) directed Laurence Olivier (John Judd) and Joan Plowright (Susan Bennett) in Eug

Goin’ to Chicago, sorry that I can’t take you

Goin’ to Chicago, sorry that I can’t take you

There’s nothin’ in Chicago that a monkey woman can do.

You so mean and evil, you do things you ought not do

You so mean and evil, you do things you ought not do

You got my brand of honey, guess I’ll have to put up with you.

Jimmy Rushing, “Goin’ to Chicago Blues”

Winston Churchill said somewhere or other that there are few things in life more exhilarating than being shot at without effect. I thought of this utterly characteristic remark a few hours ago as I watched a wizard from Ms Mac Consulting wipe the hard drive of my iBook and reinstall the operating system, an experience which I imagine to be not unlike watching in a mirror as a neurosurgeon pokes around in your head with a scalpel.

This unexpected and unwanted adventure into the unknown began last Saturday when I came home from Washington, D.C., booted up my computer, and discovered to my horror that some gremlin had translated all the words on the e-mail toolbar into Dutch. (I know, it sounds crazy, but they really were in Dutch–I checked.) Other peculiar little anomalies had been bobbing up on my screen from time to time in recent weeks, but this one was serious enough that I knew the time had come to seek professional counsel at once or run the risk of sudden and catastrophic paralysis. I got on the phone to Ms Mac and scheduled a Wednesday-morning house call. At the appointed hour, a flute-playing genius by the name of Nicole appeared on my doorstep, sat down at my desk, and started making magic passes over my prostrate iBook, which turned out to be even sicker than either one of us had suspected. Five nervewracking hours later, it was at least as good as new, and I went right out and downed a stiff drink.

One of the nice things about Nicole’s approach to computer consulting is that she is unfailingly tactful, by which I mean that she never says things like You mean you don’t know what a [fill in the blank] is? Recognizing at once that she was dealing with an innocent, she went out of her way to behave as if my ignorance were perfectly normal. I have no doubt that this is a specifically feminine mode of behavior, having spent far too many hours being stared at in self-evident disbelief by auto mechanics with hairy chests who made no effort whatsoever to disguise their contempt for the kind of guy who doesn’t know a socket wrench from a fanbelt (I exaggerate only slightly). If all auto mechanics were like Nicole, there would be peace on earth.

Thanks to her stalwart efforts, I now resume regular blogging activities–and about time, too. I’m off to Chicago at midday Friday to frolic on the aisle with OGIC, but until then I’m yours.