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The Living World of Books — Life and Love in the Margins
…in 1946 in the Village, our feelings about books … went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather,…
Of Love Songs, Baseball, and Sausage Grinders: Celebrating T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway
Written in the aftermath of Joseph Conrad’s death in 1924, Ernest Hemingway’s tribute in the Transatlantic Review’s Conrad Supplement included this sentence: “If I knew that by grinding Mr. [T.S.]…
Toni Morrison Reading From New Novel At Richardson Auditorium Next Tuesday
The Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved Toni Morrison, will read from her new novel, Home, at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 2, in Richardson Auditorium, Alexander Hall, at Princeton…
Bob Dylan’s “Tempest” — “Heavy Loaded, Fully Alive and Revved Up”
I wear dark glasses to cover my eyes, there are secrets in ‘em that I can’t disguise… —Bob Dylan, from Tempest It was an image for the ages, post-millennium Americana…
Golden Anniversary: In The Beatles Romance, “Yesterday” Is the Good 9/11
Beatles publicist Derek Taylor (1932-1997) begins his preface to Volume 1 of The Beatles Anthology (1994) by contrasting his “rose-colored” view of the group’s worldwide impact — “the Twentieth Century’s…
Revisiting Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita” at 50: “You Gasp as You Laugh”
The most hysterical high-profile response to the literary timebomb called Lolita came, predictably, from the New York Times’s Orville Prescott, whose August 18, 1958 tirade (“dull, dull, dull” “repulsive,” “disgusting,”…
Now’s The Time: Making History With Charlie Parker and Jerry Garcia
I consider life to be a continuous series of improvisations. —Jerry Garcia (1942-1995) There’s too much in my head for this horn. —Charlie Parker (1920-1955) I am looking at a 12-inch Verve…
Debussy, Born 150 Years Ago Today: “One Can Travel Where One Wishes and Leave By Any Door”
Music is a dream from which the veils have been drawn! It’s not even the expression of a feeling — it is the feeling itself. —Claude Debussy (1862-1918), from a letter On…
“Rio Bravo”: Fellow Feeling, Human Frailty, and the Pleasure Principle
If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be “Rio Bravo.” —Robin Wood in Howard Hawks (1968) “One of…
Remembering Gore Vidal’s Early Work, Love of Movies, and Kind Words for a Young Novelist
As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the…
