2,374 stories by "Terry Teachout"
"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not."
Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook"
Continue reading Al…
From 2010:
This meme, started by Tyler Cowen and picked up by, among others, Jenny Davidson and Ross Douthat, has piqued my interest. Here goes:
' W. Jackson Bate, Samuel John…
"Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast."
Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)
Co…
Thanks to a kind-hearted, quick-witted nurse in New York-Presbyterian's cardio-thoracic ICU, I was able to see and speak to Mrs. T via Skype on Sunday night. That sentence really ought by al…
Leopold Stokowski leads the Chicago Symphony in a performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio espagnol, originally telecast in 1962. The orchestral soloists inclde Sidney Harth on …
"The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves."
Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts
Continue reading Almanac: Logan Pearsall Smith on professionalism at About Last Night.
I spoke to Mrs. T's nurses by phone at midday Saturday, and they had nothing but good news to give me. In addition to nodding her head when spoken to, she is now able to squeeze her nurses' …
With America's theaters shuttered, I plan to devote some of my upcoming Wall Street Journal drama columns to screen versions of important stage plays of the past. I'm starting off with Jo…
Mrs. T's recovery from her double-lung transplant surgery has been agonizingly slow. For me, the agony was compounded when New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where her surgery took place and in…
The opening sequence of This Is Cinerama, the original 1952 demonstration film for Cinerama, the multiple-projector widescreen film process. The narrator is Lowell Thomas:
(This is the late…
"Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their con…
What are New Yorkers missing now that Broadway is closed? In this week's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column, I consider what great art"theatrical and otherwise"does for us in times of tr…
"For the present, and so long as there are living witnesses of the great war of sections, there will be people who will not be consoled for the loss of a cause which they believed to be holy…
Frederick Ashton dances the mime role of Carabosse in Ninette De Valois's production of Marius Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty, performed by London's Sadler's Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet…
"In public life it is sometimes necessary to appear really natural to be actually artificial."
Autobiography of Calvin CoolidgeÂ
Continue reading Almanac: Calvin Coolidge on a secret of t…
I doubt it will surprise any of you to learn that I'd been growing increasingly worried about the inability of Mrs. T's doctors to rouse her from the medically induced coma into which she wa…
From 2010:
Unlike most middle-aged bloggers, I've been hearing from the public for the whole of my adult life"I started writing newspaper criticism while I was still an undergraduate"and so …
"What happens is, your voice isn't going to go anywhere. But if you try to possess it, by playing only the things you like, forever, you will then sound like all these other guys who became …
"A Visit With Carl Sandburg," a TV interview with the poet and biographer conducted by Edward Stanley. This program was originally telecast in 1958 as part of NBC's Wisdom series of intervie…
"One way or another, we all pay for our vices."
Ben Maddow and John Huston, screenplay for The Asphalt Jungle
Continue reading Almanac: Ben Maddow and John Huston on human weakness at Abo…
Mrs. T opened her eyes this morning for the first time since her double-lung transplant surgery. She appeared to respond when I asked her to blink if she could hear my voice and understand w…
Sid Caesar portrays a young pianist making his first concert appearance. This performance was originally telecast by NBC in March of 1959 as part of "Some of Manie's Friends," a posthumous T…
"All of us"the public, critics, and composers themselves"spend far too much time worrying about whether a work is a shattering masterpiece. Let us not be so self-conscious. Maybe in thirty y…
I've written a special "Sightings" column for The Wall Street Journal in which I consider the potentially devastating effects of coronavirus on theater in New York"and suggest a remedy. H…
"We were talking about old age and he said that nothing could be done about it, and that he had a very strong feeling that people died at the right moment, and that the greatness of a person…
