"Good night, my darlings, I’ll see you tomorrow."

Noël Coward's last words, from a review by John Simon.

Lots of good tidbits in the review. I like this one:

"To me, the essence of good comedy writing is that perfectly ordinary phrases such as ‘Just fancy!’ should, by virtue of their context, achieve greater laughs than the most literate epigram."

Presumably, many more tidbits in the book. The man corresponded with Virginia Woolf, T. E. Lawrence, Ian Fleming, Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and many others.

I'd get the book myself if it were available in the Kindle format. For some reason, I'm devoted to my Kindle, even though it hasn't arrived yet. We'll see if it lives up to my ideation. I remember how I felt when I bought my Rocketbook. How wonderful it was... until I decided I hated it.

Audible Althouse, #11.

Hey, a new podcast! This time with theme music -- written by John Cohen, Brit Rice, and John Matlack, and performed by John Cohen (my son, John Althouse Cohen) and Brit. Per John:

John, Brit, and I composed the music together. (We had written a complete song, with different lyrics; then I fit your lyrics to the chorus of that song.)

Guitar and bass: me.

Vocals: me and Brit. (It's 3-part harmony with Brit singing 2 of the parts.)

Shaker (Ibuprofen bottle emptied out and filled with rice) by Brit.

Snapping by me and Lucas Etten.

Produced by Lucas Etten in his apartment.

Here's Johnny Matlack's website. He's a drummer and songwriter who's in Nashville, Tennessee now, but used to be here in Madison.

Anyway, the new podcast is about 37 minutes long. You can comment on it here. Topics: mellowing on Miers, writing an op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, cameras in the Supreme Court, "strict constructionism," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," hostile lawyer jokes, Harold Pinter's grim stories, how much people don't like Congress, the sex holidays, and how disturbed all my readers are about women who seek artificial insemination to become single mothers.

UPDATE: The theme music is copyright 2005, Tin Whisper Media Group. Also, Brit has a band called Polydream, which is making a recording called "A Rigid Shard of Balance." And he plays drums and percussion with Lucas Cates, who has a record, "Contradictory," due out in February under Popbomb Records. Look for both Polydream and Lucas Cates to tour. Brit has also remixed Star Wars music for Star Wars conventions.

"Usually enclosed in one room, they organize their lives as a sort of grim game and their actions often contradict their words."

Such are the characters in plays by Harold Pinter, who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

That description of his plays sounds very much like what I thought of when I was a child and first understood that adults read things that were entirely different from the stories given to children to read, and I tried to grasp what these stories for adults were.