Archives for October 14, 2015

I’ve been putting it off for the past couple of years, but the time has finally come for me to buy a new laptop—a MacBook Air, to be exact. In order to make the Big Switch, I’ll have to drop off my obsolescent laptop at Tekserve for two days. As a result, I won’t be able to send or receive e-mail from Thursday at noon to Saturday at noon.

I’m not sentimental about inanimate objects, but neither am I looking forward to retiring my trusty MacBook, which I’ve used every day for the past eleven years. During that time I launched this blog and wrote All in the Dances, The Letter, Pops, Satchmo at the Waldorf, Duke, and a thousand-odd essays, articles, and reviews. That’s a long and eventful run.

While I have a lurking fear that changing computers at the age of fifty-nine will feel like getting a double hand transplant, the kindly folks at Tekserve promise me that it won’t be nearly as stressful as all that. Check this space on Monday and I’ll let you know who was right. In the meantime, I’ve preposted Friday’s blog entries, so business will continue as usual in my temporary absence.

Wish me luck.

UPDATE: It turns out that I’ll be off line until Monday, October 18. See you then.

An excerpt from BBC2’s 1982 TV production of Noël Coward’s A Song at Twilight, directed by Cedric Messina and featuring Deborah Kerr and Paul Scofield. The role played by Scofield is a fictionalized portrayal of Somerset Maugham. To read more about the play, go here:

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

“Noah, you’re so full of what’s right you can’t see what’s good!”

N. Richard Nash, The Rainmaker