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Poe’s Precipice of the Perverse: Hitchcock Takes the Plunge in “Vertigo”
I suggest that Hitchcock belongs —and why classify him at all? — among such artists of anxiety as Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Poe. —François Truffaut According to a 2012 critics poll…
“Too Young To Have Ever Lived” — Fliers Sporting With Life and Death in the Great War
As Princeton resident and professor emeritus Samuel Hynes demonstrates in The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War (Farrar Straus and Giroux $26), the romance of being a…
On Being Haunted: Jack Bruce, Jack Huston, and the “We’re Going Wrong” “Boardwalk Empire” Blues
People are so in love with Richard, but he’s killed like 89 people! —Terence Winter on Boardwalk Empire’s Richard Harrow What’s haunting me this Halloween season is the singing of…
John Berryman Joins Dylan Thomas in Life and Death: A Double Centenary
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. —Dylan Thomas…
Michael Brown Was a Cardinal Fan — A Celebration of October Baseball
In spite of Thursday night’s season-ending loss to the Giants in San Francisco, St. Louis Cardinal fans enjoyed their share of baseball ecstasy in the 2014 post-season. With the glorious…
As the Power Goes Out, Salinger’s “Franny” Puts the Dinky On the Map
Here are two thoughts about the power outage that occurred around 11 p.m. Monday night as I was writing about Princeton’s role in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, a first…
“Every Little Thing” — With the Beatles in India, Songs and Stories of Rain and Shine
“They were rather war-weary during Beatles for Sale. One must remember that they’d been battered like mad throughout ’64, and much of ’63. Success is a wonderful thing, but it…
Walking the Earth With Wallace Stevens, The Poet of Our Climate
I thought on the train how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness,…
On Scott Fitzgerald’s Birthday: “Some Day You’ll Be Old Enough to Read This”
Among American writers, my mother favored Scott Fitzgerald, who was born on September 24, 1896, and died December 21, 1940. A hundred years ago this month he was starting his…
Listening to Nora — James Joyce’s “Dubliners” at 100
Our tuxedo cat, Nora, was not named for James Joyce’s wife. She and her brother Nick got their names from Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) of…
