But rather than continuing to page 361 and completing the excerpt, she had skipped to page 362 and an exercise entitled "The Street Beggar", which claimed such people were "cheats".
So Mr. Bellatin (pronounced Bay-yah-TEEN) decided to extend the joke and promptly wrote a fake biography — complete with excerpts, photographs and bibliography — called "Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction".
In Mr. Wheeler's case his opera was only partly completed when his excerpt was first performed.
The fruits of his research were collected in Memoirs of the Spacewomen, an thoughtful and eye-opening documentary – complete with dramatised excerpts – in which he highlighted the work of three female sci-fi writers and their greatest works.
A couple of Web sites offer lengthy lists of recordings of Met broadcasts that have even been released on CD, both complete operas and excerpts, with sound quality ranging from good to wretched.
His spoken introductions to new or unfamiliar works, like Schoenberg's lush symphonic poem "Pelleas und Melisande," complete with musical excerpts played by the orchestra, have been lucid and helpful.
On Sept. 21, to celebrate Mr. Levine's 40th anniversary at the Met, the company is releasing a limited edition of two boxed sets: 11 complete operas and excerpts from significant concerts on 21 DVDs and 11 complete operas on 32 CDs.
And I had all this information, never thought much about it, and then all of a sudden I thought, 'Well, gosh, I'll just go ahead and do it myself.' " The complete interview, and an excerpt from the book, are available at nytimes.com/fifthdown.
It celebrates theater that is brief but scintillating; each play — not excerpts, but complete — runs for 10 minutes or less.
"Black Milk" is the hot exception on a generally cool program, which is completed by "Park" (an excerpt from the 1999 piece "Moshe"), a work for three modish individuals who chant forcefully about food and sex and death.
