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The artist and the habit of recording

  At The New Yorker, Richard Brody compares the emergence of the groundbreaking Paris Review Interviews to the talks with directors that began appearing in Cahiers du Cinéma around the same time, in 1954. The stakes there and then were even higher, in that the literary world didn’t contest the artistic centrality of authors to literature, whereas the world of . . .

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Notes following Terry Teachout’s Pops talk uptown

Last night my pal Terry Teachout read from Pops, his smart, engaging, and widely-praised new biography of Louis Armstrong, and showed some footage. While answering questions afterward, Terry recommended that everyone listen to this week’s New Yorker podcast, which includes an audio clip of Armstrong trying to cajole his wife into bed in the wee hours. His horn has to . . .

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