– Amount Benny Goodman charged in 1938 for a one-nighter by his big band: $2,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $25,743

(Source: Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman, by Ross Firestone)

“‘Is there mental illness in your family?’

“‘No, not really.’ Her reply was automatic, and she immediately doubted its veracity. Really, insanity was the only explanation for some of them. But there was no diagnosed mental illness in her family, so she was telling the truth.”

Laura Lippman, The Last Place

“Let us glance at a few brief examples of creative literature in the very young, for which they should have been encouraged, not admonished.

“The small girl critic who wrote, ‘This book tells me more about penguins than I wanted to know,’ has a technique of clarity and directness that might well be studied by the so-called mature critics of England and the United States, whose tendency, in dealing with books about penguins or anything else, is to write long autobiographical rambles.

“Then there was a little American girl who was asked by her teacher to write a short story about her family. She managed it in a single true and provocative sentence: ‘Last night my daddy didn’t come home at all.’ I told this to a five-year-old moppet I know and asked her if she could do as well, and she said, ‘Yes,’ and she did. Her short story, in its entirety, went like this: ‘My daddy doesn’t take anything with him when he goes away except a nightie and whiskey.’…

“Finally, there was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them the day before from our garden. ‘I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber was dead, and I hate trees,’ said Lisa, thus conjoining in one creative splurge the nursery rhyme about pease porridge cold, the basic plot sense of James M. Cain, and Birnam wood moving upon Dunsinane. Lisa and I were the only unhorrified persons in the room when she brought this out. We knew that her desire to get rid of her mother and my wife at one fell swoop was a pure device of creative literature. As I explained to the two doomed ladies later, it is important to let your little daughters and sons kill you off figuratively, because this is a natural infantile urge that cannot safely be channeled into amenity or what Henry James called ‘the twaddle of graciousness.’ The child that is scolded or punished for its natural human desire to destroy is likely to turn later to the blackjack, the golf club, or the .32-caliber automatic.”

James Thurber, “The Darlings at the Top of the Stairs”

Not surprisingly, people in and out of town are always asking me what plays they should see, so here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex)

– Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)

– Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content)

– Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly)

– The Light in the Piazza* (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene)

– Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Orson’s Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language)

– Philadelphia, Here I Come! (drama, PG, closes 9/25)

– Sides: The Fear Is Real… (sketch comedy, PG, some implicit sexual content)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly)

CLOSING SOON:

– Glengarry Glen Ross (drama, R, adult subject matter, copious quantities of spectacularly strong language, closes 8/28)

Courtesy of our Site Meter world map, here are some places where “About Last Night” has been read in the past twenty-four hours:

Apple Valley, California

Arvada, Colorado

Beaverton, Oregon

Beijing, China

Benton, Missouri

Burnaby, British Columbia

Carlisle, Pennsylvania

Choudrant, Louisiana

Delhi, India

Dublin, Ireland

Halletts Cove, Australia

Hamilton, Bermuda

Irancheh, Iran

Kiev, Ukraine

Knoxville, Iowa

Kochi, Japan

Lisbon, Portugal

Lund, Sweden

Mountlake Terrace, Washington

Oneonta, New York

Oslo, Norway

Parsons, Kansas

Plano, Texas

Prague, Czech Republic

Pukalani, Hawaii

Santiago, Chile

Slough, England

Smyrna, Tennessee

Vienna, Austria

(We were also viewed in unnamed cities in China, Egypt, and Israel.)

Hi, y’all! Come back soon–and tell your friends, wherever they are.

“Everybody who collects art has some adventure. There’s no question about it–whether it’s paying a lot of money for a picture and hanging it in exactly the right spot, or whatever it is. There’s never a day goes by in my life that I haven’t looked at the things I have. And that’s all my life because I started when I was twelve. I don’t look at everything, of course. I don’t go around and count them. But there are certain things that I have that bring back the whole minute when I first saw them, the impression I had, the things that made me want them.”

Vincent Price (quoted in Victoria Price, Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography)

I owe a massive apology to Maud and Dan Kennedy for what I wrote two posts down (“The Odd Couple”). I read their posts about the New Yorker Target ads uncarefully to begin with, and then thoughtlessly lumped them in with the sort of commentary I’d read in Slate and Fishbowl NY, which were of an entirely different stripe. And I hadn’t seen the actual magazine. Ergo, the actual force of their objection went over my head completely and I posted something deeply stupid. I apologize.

Confronted with the workmanlike diaries of Nathaniel Hawthorne, of whom he is writing a critical biography, Henry James is positively confounded. And, truth be told, a little annoyed!

I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing too trivial to be suggestive. His Note-Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual things, and of his habit of converting them into memoranda. These Note-Books, by the way–this seems as good a place as any other to say it–are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding with them in the whole body of literature. They were published–in six volumes, issued at intervals–some years after Hawthorne’s death, and no person attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret that they should have been given to the world. There is a point of view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the biographer is to desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, for the Note-Books; but I am obliged to confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they came to be written–what was Hawthorne’s purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and often trivial chronicle. For a person desiring information about him at any cost, it is valuable; it sheds a vivid light upon his character, his habits, the nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering what was its value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a very partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still smaller sense a record of emotions. Outward objects play much the large part in it; opinions, convictions, ideas pure and simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes his Note-Book into his confidence, or commits to its pages any reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest way to describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they might be opened in the post, should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is too futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they are curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of Hawthorne’s mind (I do not say that they elevate our estimate of it), but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we find in them.

I haven’t read the notebooks in question, but this reminds me for all the world of the sort of observations that Andy Warhol’s diaries elicited. But nobody really brought to those the sky-high expectations that James seems to have brought to his predecessor’s notebooks. What I love about the above passage is the heated contest of James’s impulses to protect Hawthorne and to excoriate him for being so dull, a contest that ends in a stalemate. First, James thinks he’s going to be tactful about this and tell you what he really thinks only between the lines: he’s thankful for notebooks–“as a biographer.” As a reader, one gets the sense, he’s about an inch away from tossing them into the fire. Then he gives up the charade: “I am obliged to confess”…that I haven’t the foggiest what Hawthorne thought he was up to! Then he’s tactful again: the chronicle is valuable…if you want information about Hawthorne “at any cost.” And so on.

The reigning note, however, is confusion verging on a sense of having been betrayed by the notebooks’ emptiness. You don’t often catch James not knowing what to say, but here the discovery of his literary father figure’s personal banality has him practically sputtering. Rather affecting, if you ask me.