Archives for December 1, 2010

Patti LuPone sings the opening scene of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock in a revival by the Acting Company that was telecast on PBS in 1986. The production was directed by John Houseman and Christopher J. Markle:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

If you visit this blog more than occasionally, you’ve been encouraged numerous times to read A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume roman fleuve about twentieth-century England, which was originally published between 1951 and 1975. In 2004 I wrote an essay about A Dance to the Music of Time for the New York Times Book Review in which I praised it in the strongest possible terms.
Should you need a stronger push, Levi Stahl, an accomplished litblogger who works for the University of Chicago Press, advises me that effective today, all twelve volumes of Dance will become available as e-books and will be marketed on all existing e-book platforms. What’s more, A Question of Upbringing, the first volume in the cycle, can be downloaded for free. No catch: it’s yours. The eleven other volumes will cost you eight bucks apiece.
This is, in my opinion, an absolutely brilliant piece of marketing, and I cannot commend it to you too enthusiastically. For more information, go here and here, then get cracking. You won’t be sorry.

Every writer dreams of seeing one of his books being read in public. It’s never happened to me, alas, but a friend of mine snapped this photograph on the B train in New York City the other day and e-mailed it to me. The book on the left is, needless to say, the paperback edition of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.
Whoever and wherever you are, dear reader, I hope you were enjoying yourself as much as I enjoyed seeing you on the screen of my MacBook!

“The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd—one cannot answer deep questions about what one’s life was like—one writes novels about it.”
Anthony Powell, (interview, London Times, May 15, 1986)