Archives for February 11, 2020

From 2007:

I just got word that another book tentatively called Hotter Than That will be published around the time that my Louis Armstrong biography of the same name will be coming out from Harcourt. No, it’s not an Armstrong biography, but it is about jazz trumpet, which suggests that I may need to come up with another title. The prospect doesn’t unnerve me—my Mencken biography was retitled The Skeptic after I turned the manuscript in to HarperCollins—but it’s not too soon for me to be thinking about a new name, so I thought I’d share my problem with the readers of this blog….

Read the whole thing here.

“Have been pondering over what someone said the other day: that when one is awake at 3 A.M. then one sees life, and death, as they truly are, in their stark, terrible, hopeless reality; that at all other time of the day, one sees these infinite things through rose-tinted spectacles; that everyday life is a delusion, is the occupational opiate which deceives us into optimistic speculation.”

James Lees-Milne, diary, July 7, 1972