Archives for 2010

“If you cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at all.”
Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”

So far as I know, everybody in and around jazz liked Herb Ellis, both as a guitarist and as a man. His no-nonsense style was a big part of what made the Oscar Peterson Trio so solid and satisfying in its piano-guitar-bass version, and his longtime partnership with Peterson and Ray Brown continues to be admired to this day, not least by those who, like me, have had the exhilarating pleasure of playing in a hard-swinging rhythm section.
Alas, there isn’t much film of the Peterson Trio on YouTube, but this 1958 version of “A Gal in Calico” has been making the rounds ever since the announcement of Ellis’ death on Sunday (he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease). It’s a fine way to remember a superior artist:

“Another Day Another Doormat,” a 1959 animated cartoon written by Tom Morrison and directed by Al Kouzel:

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

• Unlike most middle-aged bloggers, I’ve been hearing from the public for the whole of my adult life–I started writing newspaper criticism while I was still an undergraduate–and so it’s nothing new when strangers write to tell me that I’m a despicable beast. The emergence of cyberspace, however, has made it vastly easier for people to express their opinions of public and semi-public figures, either directly via e-mail or by posting a comment or review somewhere on the Web, which means that there’s a whole lot more to read today than there was in, say, 1980.

I don’t go out of my way to read everything that gets written about me, but I do see a fair amount of it in the ordinary course of my working day, and it never fails to strike me that a considerable number of the people who write about the pieces that they read, whether by me or anyone else, haven’t actually read them. Or, to be exact, they read until they encounter a statement with which they disagree, at which precise moment they stop reading, boil over, and start clicking away at their keyboards with what they imagine to be annihilating fury.

It goes without saying that the opinions of such folk aren’t worth knowing. But I wonder: are most people like that? In other words, might it be normal for the average human being to be incapable of considering, however briefly, the possible validity, however partial, of opinions in any way contrary to his own? I hesitate to suggest such a dispiriting notion, but the older I grow, the more likely it seems.

H.L. Mencken said it: “Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob’s fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans.” That was in Notes on Democracy, published in 1926. Plus ça change…

“Reading means borrowing.”
G.C. Lichtenberg, Reflections

It may not seem like it, but I read all of my incoming mail, and do my best to answer it as well. I just spent a couple of hours chewing through a pile of accumulated messages. Alas, there are times when I simply get too much mail to keep up, especially when I write Wall Street Journal columns that touch a nerve. I know that some of you have sent me e-mails that slipped between the cracks, and I hope you’ll forgive me if you fail to get a response, timely or otherwise. Please try again–I really do love hearing from you!
As for snail mail, here are four things I should have said long ago:
• Remember that it’s much easier for me to answer e-mail than snail mail!
• I regret that I can no longer honor new requests to sign copies of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong and return them to you by mail. Of course I’ll happily sign your copy in person, but the oppressive volume of snail mail that I now receive at my New York address, coupled with the rigors of my traveling schedule, has made it impossible for me to do anything more than that.
• I throw away unsolicited review copies of books and compact discs. This is a small apartment, and I can’t cope with packages that come over the transom. Again, forgive me for being so blunt, but I’m the one that has to clean up the mess every day (I don’t have a secretary). I’m sure your self-produced album is wonderful, but there’s no chance that I’m going to listen to it, much less write about it, so please don’t bother.
• If you’re a publicist who writes to me here or at my Wall Street Journal mailbox instead of at my private e-mail address, you’re wasting your time. Mass-mailed press releases sent to my blogbox are deleted unread, and the Journal only forwards reader mail, not press releases, to my private address. Experienced publicists either know how to get in touch with me directly or can find out–all it takes is a little digging–and should do so.

Here’s how busy I’ve been: I completely forgot that C-SPAN would be airing my January appearance at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., during which I read from and answered questions about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. I couldn’t figure out why the Amazon sales rank for Pops had been spiking unpredictably in recent days. Then my mother told me that a neighbor called her on Saturday morning and said, “Turn on your TV–Terry’s on it!”
If you’re curious, you can watch the telecast by going here. To be perfectly frank, I didn’t think that it was one of my better performances, but the folks at Politics and Prose claimed to feel otherwise, so I invite you to decide for yourself.

“Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.”
Benjamin Disraeli, Lothair