April 22

Tevi Troy at the Washington Post takes a pleasant look at U.S. Presidents and their beloved books:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/15/AR2010041503706.html

I have always found it pleasing that perhaps our most "outdoorsy" President, Teddy Roosevelt, was also one of our most bookish: There is no contradiction in that. And for all my quarrels with Obama, he does follow in a great tradition of reading and writing Presidents, and political leaders of other nations going back to Marcus Aurelius and earlier. Men of state should be men of letters, in my view, and in some cultures the two are very close indeed; it sometimes seems that half the great Latin-American writers of the 20th century were ambassadors and diplomats (Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes among others).

Anne Matthews has compiled a lovely list of books about women "on the road," with not a dull or predictable item on it. I would add any volume by the adventurous and inspiring Isabella Bird (1831-1904), whose splendid A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains is a favorite of mine.

http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/Wayward-Women-Great-Books-Where-Women-Hit-The-Road/602

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Bird

The celebrated Australian children's author Patricia Wrightson has pased away at 88. I must say, the Times (U.K.) publishes the best, most detailed obituaries I see anywhere; they invariably inspire you to want to know more about the subject, and to explore their work:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7105147.ece

Brian Eno biographer David Sheppard gives a fine interview to Colin Marshall of NPR's The Marketplace of Ideas:

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/bringing-art-to-rock-inviting-ambience-into-albums-and-cultivating-the-image-of-stern-boffinhood-col.html

A totally different style of music: Sometimes, bopping around YouTube, you come across something that you had completely forgotten. Back in the early Eighties, when I was working at the record counter at the Doubleday Bookshop at 5th Avenue and 53rd Street in Manhattan -- an experience I have written about here before -- we got in all the British as well as American cast albums, and one of them was Andrew Lloyd Webber's Song & Dance, which opened in the West End in 1982 with Sarah Brightman, and on Broadway in 1985 with Bernadette Peters (after I had left New York and moved to San Francisco). Pretty much all of us in the shop (and our sophisticated clientele as well) thought it was Lloyd Webber's best score, and there was one number in particular, "Unexpected Song," that was a knock-out. Flash-forward to this afternoon, when I came across a clip of Peters singing this song -- which I must not have heard in 25 years -- at a London concert. It reduced me to tears.



Among notables born on this date are philosopher Immanuel Kant, psychologist Otto Rank, litterateur Germaine de Stael, novelists Henry Fielding, Ellen Glasgow, and O.E. Rolvaag, poet Louise Gluck, painter Odilon Redon, film directors John Waters and Johnnie To, jazz bassist Charles Mingus, violinist Yehudi Menuhin, contralto Kathleen Ferrier, pop singers Glen Campbell and Peter Frampton, musical scholar Eric Fenby, photographer Laura Gilpin, and actors Sheryl Lee, Carol Drinkwater, Jack Nicholson, Eddie Albert, and Jason Miller. Louise Gluck, who turned 50 some fifteen years ahead of me, wrote acutely of middle age in her 2001 collection The Seven Ages. Because I have now reached that estate, I find those poems exceptionally moving. "Reunion" is a beautiful example:

It is discovered, after twenty years, they like each other,
despite enormous differences (one a psychiatrist, one a city official),
differences that could have been, that were, predicted:
differences in tastes, in inclinations, and, now, in wealth
(the one literary, the one entirely practical and yet
deliciously wry; the two wives cordial and mutually curious.)
And this discovery is, also, discovery of the self, of new capacities:
they are, in this conversation, like the great sages,
the philosophers they used to read (never together), men
of worldly accomplishment and wisdom, speaking
with all the charm and ebullience and eager openness for which
youth is so unjustly famous. And to these have been added
a broad tolerance and generosity, a movement away from any contempt or wariness.
It is a pleasure, now, to speak of the ways in which
their lives have developed, alike in some ways, in others
profoundly different (though each with its core of sorrow, either
implied or disclosed): to speak of the difference now,
to speak of everything that had been, once, part
of a kind of hovering terror, is to lay claim to a subject. Insofar
as theme elevates and shapes a dialogue, this one calls up in them (in its grandeur)
kindness and good will of a sort neither had seemed, before,
to possess. Time has been good to them, and now
they can discuss it together from within, so to speak,
which, before, they could not.