Archives for February 2013

Mrs. T and I arrived at Siesta Key, Florida, on Monday afternoon. I resumed work on Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington as soon as I brought the bags up from the car, and didn’t knock off until two a.m. I finished editing the manuscript at three p.m. the next day, then e-mailed it to Gotham Books in New York, after which we went out to dinner to celebrate.
Not that I felt especially celebratory. I’ve been working so unremittingly hard on the book for the past few months that I mostly feel relieved. Duke, on which I started working three years ago, is my longest book to date–183,700 words, counting the back matter. Considering all the other things that I’ve done since 2010, I’d say that relief is an entirely appropriate thing for me to be feeling right now.
Today, as it happens, is my fifty-seventh birthday. I’m not inclined to celebrate that august occasion, either, though I know that I should, if only to pay tribute to my continuing good fortune. Much has changed since I wrote these words seven years ago, but for the most part I still stand by them, especially the last sentence. (What about that mysterious woman whom I mentioned in the first paragraph? Reader, she married me.)
To those who’ve been sending me best wishes, my most humble thanks. I am so very, very lucky in my friends. And yes, I’m taking the day off.

Philip Larkin talks about and reads his poem “For Sidney Bechet.” The video is a clip of Bechet performing “Petite Fleur”:

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

“All idealization makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity–it is to destroy it.”
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

From 2004:

Without exception, my friends are puzzled by my more than occasional practice of reading biographies from back to front. It puzzles me, too, even though I’ve been doing it for years, and I can’t offer any explanation, however theoretical, for a habit that at first, second, and third glances makes no sense. All I can tell you is that for some reason not yet accessible to introspection, I often prefer to read about a person’s life in reverse chronological order, starting with his death and working backwards to his birth….

Read the whole thing here.

“It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth.”
Joseph Conrad, Chance

See you tomorrow.

Merle Travis sings and plays “Nine Pound Hammer” and “Mus’rat”:

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

“One would not expect a person who talks so much of forgiving herself to have anything valuable to say about forgiveness. She does not consider the possibility that incontinent forgiveness, deemed good in itself regardless of the act to be forgiven or the attitude of the person to be forgiven, means that no human behavior is beyond the pale, that nothing is unforgivable.”
Theodore Dalrymple, “Sentimentalizing Serial Murder” (City Journal, Autumn 2012)