“Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”

W.H. Auden, “Romantic or Free?”

Now that I have my tickets, I can safely advise you to go see Erin McKeown at Schuba’s August 27th. A great place to see a show, and–I can attest from personal experience–a great place to discover Ms. McKeown.

It’s a hundred degrees and I’m writing on deadline! This is what you might call bad planning. We’ve known for a week, almost, that today would be the hottest day in Chicago in six years. Things might have been arranged in a such a way that I’d be writing in a more leisurely fashion right now. But I didn’t arrange them that way, and now I’m affixed to this chair and keyboard for the rest of the day.

And I’m way overdue to blog. There’s not too big an opening for this, but I have been compiling a little list of things I learned in L.A., on my recent trip:

1. My hands are the same size as James Mason’s–with slightly longer fingers.

2. My feet are the same size as Paul Newman’s. Ergo, Newman must be of smaller stature than I realized.

3. Call me philistine, but I can’t spend too long inside the Getty Center galleries without itching to get outside to the grounds and gardens again.

4. That said, my favorite room in the Getty is the one containing this still life and this portrait (so to speak). Cool details: the half-translucent lemon at the back of the bowl in the still life, and the tree stump that mirrors the rabbit in the, er, rabbit painting.

5. The staff at the Getty is about a hundred times more tolerant than the security crew at Hollywood and Highland of clusters of people loitering with clipboards in hand, solving puzzles. (I believe we might have been mistaken by the latter for Scientologists.)

6. The weather is perfect. But you knew that.

7. The traffic is intolerable. But you knew that.

What’s this about clipboards and puzzles, you say? I’ll tell you more about that later. For now, suffice it to say that it doesn’t have nothing to do with the man about to be crowned Hottie of the Times (Brain division).

Keep cool!

I can’t read my blogmail while I’m using a dialup connection in Smalltown. If you’ve written to me through the blog, I’ll get back to you the first week in August.

Apologies.

“Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.”

Sir Ralph Richardson (quoted in Garry O’Connor, Ralph Richardson: An Actor’s Life)

One more thing before I resume my nursing duties this morning: in case you missed it the first time around, WNYC’s Studio 360, hosted by Kurt Andersen, is rerunning an episode in which I talk at some length about criticism in America today, and how it’s being affected by the new media. I was very pleased by the way it turned out, as were those of you who listened in and wrote to me about it.

If you live in the New York area, Studio 360 is heard over WNYC at ten a.m. Saturday on 93.9 FM and seven p.m. Sunday on 820 AM. For a list of radio stations in other cities that carry the show, go here.

To learn more about this particular episode, go here. You can also use the same page to listen via streaming audio or download the episode as a podcast. (To find out more about podcasts and how they work, go here.)

Now, back to work!

“We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

I just got home from a twelve-hour shift of amateur nursing, and I’m bushed. I have nothing to say on any subjects other than hospital cuisine (one thumb sideways) and the kindness of professional nurses (three thumbs way, way up). In addition, I took a week off from my Wall Street Journal theater column, so there won’t be a teaser tomorrow. Expect no further posts until Monday.

Soooo later.