By Stuart Mitchner

Writing about Brian Wilson (1942-2025) on Father’s Day is a complicated proposition. In Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson (Rodale 2006), Peter Ames Carlin ponders the possibility that Brian blames his father Murry Wilson (1917-1973) for delivering the blow “that destroyed almost all of the hearing in his right ear.” The tangled back story of the “crushing blow” to a musician “who would spend his life manipulating sound textures but could never hear music in stereo” takes a more suggestive turn when Brian admits “I was so afraid of my dad and the way he talked to me that something got inside of me and I just started making great records.”

Still leaving a lot unsaid, Wilson offers a cautiously worded account of his father’s treatment of him and his Beach Boy brothers Dennis and Carl in a 2004 interview: “He was the one who got us going. He didn’t make us better artists or musicians, but he gave us ambition. I’m pleased he pushed us, because it was such a relief to know there was someone as strong as my dad to keep things going. He used to spank us, and it hurt too, but I loved him because he was a great musician.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

Only at the end of the book [Lie Down In Darkness]… in Peyton’s Molly Bloom-like monologue, would I finally enter her mind.  And I hoped that this passage would be all the more powerful, because it was suddenly and intensely interior and personal.

—William Styron (1925-2006), from a 2002 talk

The girl, Peyton …would have wound up jumping from a window no matter where she came from.

—from Writers at Work (Viking 1957)

Interviewed at a Parisian cafe in the mid-1950s, William Styron is described as “a young man of good appearance, though not this afternoon; he is a little paler than is healthy in this quiet hour.” A few questions later Styron admits, “I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep. I wish I could break the habit but I can’t.”

Styron was 77 when he delivered the 2002 talk at the Whiting Foundation, some 17 years after the battle with suicidal depression that he recounted in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) and not long before the recurrence of the illness that clouded the last years of his life, which ended when he was 81 in 2006. In the memoir, which first appeared as an essay in Vanity Fair, Styron connects the onset of depression with the realization, “almost overnight” that “I could no longer drink.” It was as if “a comforting friend had abandoned me not gradually and reluctantly, as a true friend might do, but like a shot — and I was left high and certainly dry, and unhelmed.” Worse yet, he hadn’t published a book since Sophie’s Choice in 1979 and would live the last 27 years of his life in the shadow of that fact, which may explain why he devoted the Whiting talk to his first book, Lie Down In Darkness (1951).

The word “darkness” and occasional echoings of the novel’s title recur throughout Peyton’s monologue, a 50-page-long un-indented paragraph, which, contrary to Styron’s framing, has little in common with Molly Bloom’s earthy, life-affirming monologue that famously ends with a simple “Yes.” Peyton’s monologue is bookended by a pompous preface (“Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, strong is your hold O love”) and two fragments, one set above the other, as if thought or cried out in mid-fall: “Oh most Powerful …. Oh must.”  more

By Stuart Mitchner

All manuscripts notebooks papers letters I leave to John M. Murry likewise I should like him to publish as little as possible and tear up and burn as much as possible he will understand that I desire to leave as few traces of my camping ground as possible.

—from Katherine Mansfield’s will

At the moment, I’m writing a rainy-day sequel to a Memorial Day column that never happened. So it goes when you sit down with raindrops in your hair amid a shambles of old letters and manuscripts you can’t bring yourself to tear up and toss into one of three huge recycling bags, knowing that if you’re not careful you might be tearing pages from the typed journals your mother kept when she ventured onto what Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) called her “camping ground.”

Lunch with the Pope

Along with the heaps of paper strewn across the chaise I used to share with our cat Nora, who died five years ago this month, are copies of the New York Review of Books that might have landed in the recycling bags but for the essays of Fintan O’Toole, most recently his piece on Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV. After reading all the good things O’Toole had to say about Leo’s predecessor Francis, who let in “daylight upon the magic of the papacy,” I begin to understand why my 100-year-old mother-in-law routinely claimed that she had lunch with the Pope every day. “She keeps saying that as if she really believes it,” the nurses at the Motion Picture Home told my wife, right up to the day her mother died in August 2023.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

During my last year in college, I discovered that I was picking up the mannerisms of Akim Tamiroff, the only useful thing, in fact, that I learned in the entire four years.

—from The Moviegoer

Walker Percy’s National Book Award-winning novel begins with an epigraph from Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death: “the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.” Early in The Moviegoer (1961), the narrator Binx Bolling refers to the message on the marquee of his neighborhood theater in New Orleans (“Where Happiness Costs So Little”), claiming to be “quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie.” While other people “treasure memorable moments in their lives,” what he remembers is “the time JohnWayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”

I felt the same way about the kitten finding Orson Welles, a “dead man” who isn’t dead named Harry Lime. I was 11. Eight years later I would be in Vienna looking for the equivalent of the doorway where my life in the world of movies began. Film as a text or commodity can be equated with existentialism, it’s mortal; movies are Akim Tamiroff, who played Sancho Panza in Welles’s unfinished Don Quixote — which suggests why The Moviegoer opens with some existential name-dropping about “despair” when the most “useful” lesson Binx Bolling learned in college was taught by that characteristically wily rogue Tamiroff, whose “mannerisms” come memorably to life in J.D. Salinger’s story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” when one character tells another, “He’s in the movies. He always says, ‘You make beeg joke — hah?’ I love him.”

Indeed, she loves him. The happy-making aspect of movies revolves around that four-letter word and the idea that this suburban woman in a Salinger story (and by association Salinger himself) loves Akim Tamiroff. more

By Stuart Mitchner

In an interview in this Sunday’s New York Times, the actor Ed Helms (The Office) says his favorite reading experience took place on the subway, clinging to a pole with one hand and reading Moby-Dick on his cell phone with the other. It’s a connection that might have amused Herman Melville, who was riding the elevated subway to and from his job as a customs inspector until his retirement in 1886, five years before his death. I wish he were around to write a response to D.H. Lawrence’s wildly conflicted tribute to the “deep great artist” who wrote Moby-Dick, “a very great book” that “commands a stillness in the soul, an awe” that Lawrence found hard to match with the author, a “rather tiresome New Englander” — “Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”

My guess is that besides savoring words of praise from a brilliant colleague, a man with Melville’s wonderfully inventive sense of humor would laugh at the “solemn ass,” and, if it were possible, post Lawrence a copy of his sketch “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” about “the loudest, longest, and most strangely musical crow that ever amazed mortal man…. a wise crow; an invincible crow; a philosophic crow; a crow of all crows.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

On the night of October 15, 1956, viewers of I Love Lucy, the nation’s most popular television show, saw Lucille Ball and Orson Welles doing a scene from Romeo and Juliet. Welles has his doubts, but she’s been showering him with compliments, telling him he’s better than John Gielgud, Maurice Evans, Sir Ralph Richardson, and, after he prompts her, Laurence Olivier. Looking like an adult parody of her Peanuts namesake, Lucy delivers her jawbreaker of a line with outstretched arms, “What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night, so stumblest on my counsel?”

“I know not how to tell you how I am,” the huge, cigar-smoking Romeo tells the hapless Juliet. “My name is hateful to myself. Had I it written, I would tear the word.” When Lucy forgets her next line, he sweeps grandly on to his “favorite scene,” Romeo’s discovery of Juliet’s body, which is when he pulls out the proverbial stops and takes Shakespeare to the sit-com max: “Here, here will I set up my everlasting rest. And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last. Arms, take your last embrace. And lips, oh you the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

Robert Browning

After looking for poetry in actors last week, I’m thinking of a poet who was a compelling actor in his verse and happened to be born on this day, May 7, in 1812. I formed the habit of reading Robert Browning in lonely motel rooms when I was covering college English departments for W.W. Norton in the mid-sixties. My reading companion was the Norton Anthology of English Literature at a time when Norton’s compact anthologies of English and American lit were being adopted by English Departments from the southland to the heartland. Since I was living on an expense account, most of my salary was going toward a trip to India.

Otherwise, I spent my motel life writing a novel narrated by a fantasist obsessed with Browning. Besides filtering semblances of the master into the twisted prose style of my narrator, I read the dramatic monologues aloud, with gusto, especially my favorite “Fra Lippo Lippi,” all 392 lines of it. You can hear James Mason read the whole thing online. It’s magificent, a one-man opera, every nuance, every smirk, every suggestive snort right down to the nightcrawling painter’s farewell: “Your hand, sir, and good-by: no lights, no lights! The street’s hushed, and I know my own way back, Don’t fear me! There’s the gray beginning. Zooks!” more

By Stuart Mitchner

I’ve always been interested in poetry and poets that show up in unexpected places. And, as happened recently with another national recognition month, I’d forgotten that April was National Poetry Month. Even so, given my sense of poetry as a gift not necessarily confined between the covers of a book, I inadvertently signaled the subject this month with pieces featuring a great poet named Charlie Chaplin (who W.C. Fields, a poet himself, called a “ballerina”); a lesser known “disappearing” poet (Weldon Kees); and the greatest of them all, on the stage or the page or in the air, William Shakespeare. The one sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s I know by heart is from his essay “The Poet”: “The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.”

Tony Soprano a Poet?

Before poetry surprised me on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times with a squib on Charlotte Brontë’s “A Book of Rhymes,” I was well into an article about being haunted by the actors, characters, and situations of 21st-century television series like David Chase’s The Sopranos, Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, and Graham Yost’s Justified.

David Chase’s shocking cut-to-black never-ending ending of The Sopranos qualifies as poetry if only because it’s sudden and enigmatic, like a line of verse that keeps you wondering. Tony and Carmela and their kids A.J. and Meadow have met for a dinner out, Tony has set Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” playing “on and on and on” on the jukebox, as Meadow hurries in late after a clumsy parking job, adding a touch of everyday angst to the life-or-death tension that the family-meal atmosphere is already pulsing with, an undercurrent of dread thanks to mass audience apprehension energized and intensified by the song, as Steve Perry sings the words “Don’t stop” and James Gandolfini’s Tony gazes into the dark unknown. more

By Stuart Mitchner

An open pack of premium cigarettes was thus a centerpiece of Hindenburg advertisements.

—Edward Tenner

Even before I read about those advertisements in Edward Tenner’s new book Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays on Unintended Consequences (American Philosophical Society Press $34.95), my interest in vintage cigarette ads had been stirred by a Broadhurst Theatre Playbill from 1934, three years before May 6, 1937, the day the Hindenburg crashed and burned on landing at Lakehurst N.J. Naval Air Station, killing 35 of the 97 passengers. By specifying the proportion of fatalities, Tenner leaves it up to us to assume that most of the victims were in the smoking lounge at the time (“under 7 million cubic feet of flammable gas”), a possibility underscored by a pointed reference to satirist Bruce McCall’s drawing of a Hindenburg prospectus showing a skeleton in an officer’s uniform asking elegant passengers, “Zigarette?”

The Playbill

Passed down by my parents, who once dreamed of writing Broadway plays together, the Playbill for Men In White, Sidney Kingsley’s drama about doctors, love, abortion, and medical ethics, features three cigarette ads in its 22 pages, the first a two-page spread wherein the “Warner Bros.” star Joan Blondell testifies to the “throat-ease and flavor” of Old Golds, my two-pack-a-day mother’s brand for life. Another two-page spread (“Get a LIFT with a Camel!”) shows two unidentified young women, one frowning (“Tired? Then light a Camel!”); the other smiling, radiant, cigarette in hand. On the back cover an older, fashionably dressed woman is saying, “Frankly, one of the chief reasons why I enjoy Chesterfields is the fact that I don’t get little crumbs of tobacco in my mouth.”  more

By Stuart Mitchner

…my first love, my darling.

—Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the Clifton Suspension Bridge

Born April 9, 1806, British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel once claimed that the “most wonderful feat” he ever performed was producing “unanimity among 15 men who were all quarrelling about that most ticklish subject — taste.” He was referring to the panel of experts that approved his ambitious design for the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, the longest in the world at the time of its construction in 1831.

In a 2002 BBC Poll of the “100 Greatest Britons,” Brunel came in second to Winston Churchill and ahead of Princess Diana, Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare, Sir Isaac Newton, Elizabeth I, and John Lennon. While his contributions to English life were no more than bridges and tunnels, the Great Western Railway, Paddington Station, and numerous steamships, Brunel somehow managed to outrank William Blake (38); Charles Dickens (41); Florence Nightingale (52); Freddie Mercury (58); Charlie Chaplin (66); Tony Blair (67); Jane Austen (70); Geoffrey Chaucer (81); Richard III (82); J.R.R. Tolkien (92); Richard Burton the actor, not the explorer (96); and David Livingstone the explorer (98). The world-makers Blake, Chaucer, and Shakespeare aside, where are the poets? Don’t ask. Milton, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, among numerous others, didn’t make the list.

What does a poll that places Margaret Thatcher (16) ahead of Queen Victoria (18) and Queen Elizabeth II (24) say about the state of that “ticklish subject taste” in England two years this side of the millennium? You can find the full list at geni.com (“Home of the world’s largest family tree”). Although I’m not here to praise the U.K. or to bury it, only to celebrate a bridge and its builder, my impression of the extremes on the list suggest a possible explanation for Mad Merry Old England’s fling with Brexit 14 years later.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

 I was willingly drawn into the whole scene, like a random character in a B. Traven novel.

—Patti Smith, from M Train

Mexico’s Mysterious Stranger” is the way James Agee characterized B. Traven in his February 2, 1948 Time review of John Huston’s film adaptation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I’ve been haunted by Traven’s multi-faceted invisibility ever since last week’s column on the “disappearing poet” Weldon Kees, who told a friend in his last phone call in May 1955: “I may go to Mexico. To stay.” My interest in Traven began in earnest on Albert Einstein’s birthday, March 14, Pi Day in Princeton, after hearing that Traven’s The Death Ship (Das Totenschiff), published in German in 1926, is the novel Einstein named when asked what book he’d take to a desert island.

The “American” Sailor

Apparently born in Germany in February 1882, the man who claims never to have laid eyes on his birth certificate died in Mexico City on March 26, 1969, a coincidence it’s hard to ignore on March 26, 2025 — which is why I’m reading Einstein’s desert island novel, subtitled The Story of An American Sailor. The fact that Traven himself translated the book into English helps explain certain peculiarities in the easygoing conversational narrative by a German castaway passing himself off as an American while casually referring to Cincinnati as a city in Wisconsin. Left behind by an American ship, without papers or passport, the sailor is shunted by various immigration authorities from Belgium to Holland to France to Spain, where he boards a massively devastated ship called the Yorikke, no doubt after the “fellow of infinite jest” whose skull Hamlet muses over prior to the “death ship” of Shakespeare’s ending.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

A few days ago I listened to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and have been buoyed by the joyous ambiance of this 13 minutes of music ever since. In the colorful image accompanying the piece on YouTube, Prokofiev is lounging on a cane chair surrounded by greenery, one leg casually balanced on the other, one arm slung over the back of the chair, holding a score he’s been working on, a pencil in his other hand. He’s dressed casually in a dark brown zippered jacket, and he’s looking good, touches of color in his cheeks, no glasses, in his thirties or forties, prime of life, and as in other photos from this period (see his wikipedia page), he looks more like a Russian David Bowie than the generic image of the severe, bespectacled composer.

Finding Out More

Hoping to find out more about this music, I drove over to Labyrinth Books and bought Claude Samuel’s Prokofiev (Calder and Boyars 1971). Next I plunged into my email archive and came up with a ten-year-old message from an old college friend telling me he’s been “on a Prokofiev kick” and thinks of him, fondly, as “Rachmaninoff Gone Mad.” After praising “his terrific and terrifically showy, piano music,” my friend says, point blank: “I hate the Classical Symphony.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

Now what is love, I pray thee tell?
It is that fountain and that well
Where pleasure and repentance dwell.

—Sir Walter Raleigh

(may i touch said he how much said she a lot said he)

—e.e. cummings

Raleigh’s poem “A Description of Love” begins and ends Pleasure and Repentance (Pergamon 1976), the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Lighthearted Look at Love” created and compiled by former RSC Director Terry Hands. The subject of acting and actors, love and lovers brings to mind Sunday night’s Academy Awards, where Morgan Freeman delivered a memorial tribute to Gene Hackman (“Our community lost a giant, I lost a dear friend”) and four Oscars went to Sean Baker’s Anora, a zany throwback to the screwball comedy romances of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

My favorite Hackman film is Arthur Penn’s extraordinary neo-noir Night Moves (1975), which features one of his strongest performances as the driven, benighted, very human private eye Harry Moseley. At the moment, however, I’m remembering him as Harry Caul sitting alone in the wreckage of his room playing tenor sax at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). more

By Stuart Mitchner

When I realized last Saturday was George Washington’s birthday, I looked up former president Bill Clinton’s foreword to Shakespeare in America (Library of America 2013), which refers to Washington leaving the “legislative haggling” at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to see a production of The Tempest, which, as editor James Shapiro points out, was “based on the story of the wreck of the Sea Venture off the coast of Bermuda in 1609.” The 42nd president — who remembers a high school assignment requiring him to memorize 100 lines from Macbeth, among them “Life’s but a walking shadow” (“an important early lesson in the perils of blind ambition”) — makes sure to mention the time presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson visited Stratford-upon-Avon. Later in the book, as Abigail Adams recalls, Jefferson “fell upon the ground and kissed it” while Adams “cut a relic from a chair claimed to have belonged to Shakespeare himself.”

In the huryburly of February 2025, stories like these suggest a Monty Python sketch in which the current president and his entourage leave a wrestling match between Kit the Kat Marlowe and Will the Shake at the Kennedy Center for a production of Titus Andronicus at the Folger Library, but only if “that’s the play where some loser gets eaten in a pie.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

I see life in nothing but the certainty of your Love…

—John Keats to Fanny Brawne,
May 1820

When John Keats wrote about life and love to Fanny Brawne, he had less than a year to live. In a letter from Rome on November 30, 1820, his last, he told his friend Charles Brown, “There is one thought enough to kill me; I have been well, healthy, alert, &c., walking with her, and now — the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem, are great enemies to the recovery of my stomach.”

Decades before eavesdropping on Keats, I was reading about the doomed romance of Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge in a “young adult” biography. Curious to see how John Ford handled the story, I sampled his 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln on YouTube and found that, thanks to Henry Fonda’s ungainly charm, Ford manages to suggest a romance without actually showing it.

Played by Pauline Moore, whose next picture was Charlie Chan in Rio, Ann has a basket full of flowers, Abe sniffs one, takes the basket and carries it as they walk along the river talking, she telling him he’s going to be somebody important someday, he poking fun at the idea, until they come to a stop and he takes a good look at her and says, with the tone of quietly awestruck discovery unique to Henry Fonda, “You sure are pretty, Ann.” Uncomfortably pleased, she lowers her eyes, and says “Some people don’t like red hair.” He looks at her and says “I love red hair” with a subtle, tender emphasis on the verb, so you know he’s just told her he loves her even if he doesn’t know it yet, but she knows it, smiling, holding out her hand to him, as if she might fall into his arms. Instead, she takes back her basket, and walks off. As he throws a thoughtful stone into the river, the hesitantly romantic soundtrack becomes dark and stormy, the river turns to snow and ice, and next thing you know he’s kneeling at her grave, putting some flowers on it, talking to her, not like a lover but as a poet communing with his spirit muse.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.” With these words the poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg began his address to a joint session of Congress on the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, February 12, 1959.

Sandburg made sure to mention some hard truths up front, including the fact that early in his administration, Lincoln “took to himself the powers of a dictator.” As commander of “the most powerful armies till then assembled in modern warfare,” he “enforced conscription of soldiers for the first time in American history. Under imperative necessity he abolished the right of habeas corpus. He directed politically and spiritually the wild, massive, turbulent forces let loose in civil war.” And after failing to get action on compensated emancipation, “he issued the paper by which he declared the slaves to be free under ‘military necessity.’ In the end nearly $4 million worth of property was taken away from those who were legal owners of it, property confiscated, wiped out as by fire and turned to ashes, at his instigation and executive direction.”

On a key date in Black History Month, whether you’re thinking 1959 or 2025, it’s striking to hear emancipated human beings referred to as “property confiscated.” No less striking is the idea of a poet addressing a joint session of Congress in the same room that would be overrun by a lawless (recently “emancipated”) mob during the January 6, 2021 insurrection.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

Let the devil play it!

—Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

The finale to Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, based on his song “Der Wanderer,” has been described as “technically transcendental” with a “thunderous” conclusion. It was also infamously difficult to play, so deviously demanding that Schubert himself reportedly threw up his hands during a recital and yelled “Let the devil play it!”

I’m beginning this article on Schubert’s birthday, Friday January 31, looking ahead to the Wednesday, February 5 birthday of William Burroughs (1914-1997), who ventured into “Let the devil play it” territory when he linked the killing of his common-law wife Joan Vollmer to “the invader, the Ugly Spirit,” which “maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.” According to his introduction to Queer (Penguin 1985), Vollmer’s death during the drunken William Tell fiasco of September 6, 1951, opened the way to his breakthrough work Naked Lunch — if you believe him when he says he’d never have become a writer “but for Joan’s death.”

In a January 1965 Paris Review conversation reprinted in Writers at Work: The Third Series (Viking Compass), Burroughs frames the killing in the context of guns and gun violence in Mexico City, recalling it, as if offhandedly, “And I had that terrible accident with Joan Vollmer, my wife. I had a revolver that I was planning to sell to a friend. I was checking it over and it went off — killed her. A rumor started that I was trying to shoot a glass of champagne from her head, William Tell style. Absurd and false.”

He can’t say “I killed her” or even “it killed her.” Just “killed her.” The suggestion that “it just went off” is coming from a lifelong gun owner; witnesses at the scene not only agree about the William Tell scenario but remember Joan jesting just before the shot was fired: “I’m turning my head; you know I can’t stand the sight of blood.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

McKinley hollered, McKinley squalled
Doctor said, “McKinley, death is on the wall…”

Bob Dylan put President McKinley back in the national consciousness a few years ago in his song “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” taking the first line from Charlie McCoy’s “White House Blues,” except in McCoy’s version the second line was “Doc said to McKinley, ‘I can’t find that ball,’ “ meaning the second of two bullets fired at close range into the president’s abdomen on September 6, 1901. It happened at the Temple of Music on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. McKinley died on September 14, 1901, a hundred years to the week of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

A New York City surgeon named Charles McBurney, whose discovery of the diagnostic spot for appendicitis is known as McBurney’s Point, was blamed for misleading the press and public with his claim on September 10 that McKinley was “out of danger.” McCoy lets him off the hook by simply having the Doc say “Mr. McKinley, better pass in your checks / You’re bound to die, bound to die.”

After the current president put McKinley’s name back in play on January 20, I checked history.com, which says the highest peak in North America was actually first named Mount McKinley in 1896 by a gold prospector celebrating McKinley’s recent capture of the Republican nomination for president; the name stuck and became official in 1917. In 2015, the Obama administration renamed the mountain Denali, a name the Alaskans had historically championed, which translates “roughly to ‘The Great One.’ “ more

By Stuart Mitchner

I was crazy about The Great Gatsby, Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.

—from The Catcher in the Rye

I woke up from a nap five minutes before midnight, turned on the TV, and there was Times Square packed with Happy 2025-top-hatted, rainwear-cloaked revelers under a delirium of color that swarmed into futuristic formations every time I blinked my eyes. At first the signs were meaningless, nameless, wordless, New Year’s Eve on Mars, like a vision of the place I loved as a 14-year-old seen through the eyes of old Rip Van Winkle emerging from a showing of A Star Is Born on a rainy night in 1954. What does it mean, all this dazzling stuff? Where’s a familiar face? Where’s Judy Garland? Where’s any legible meaningful remnant of lost New York? Then, wonder of wonders, a floodlit sign for The Great Gatsby comes into view on the first day of the novel’s 100th year, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is in lights, and Broadway makes 20th-century sense again….

Now it’s as if Times Square is being submerged in Francis Cugat’s hallucinatory cover art for the first edition of Gatsby, that deep all-consuming blueness descending on the rainy chaos of celebration, two narrow witchy eyes with golden neon pupils peering above an emerald teardrop and the red lips of a siren, luring us between the covers to one of Gatsby’s epic parties where “men and girls” are coming and going “like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” while “the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair bobbed in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile.”  more

By Stuart Mitchner

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death…

—William S. Burroughs

A book of great beauty and maniacally exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor…

—Norman Mailer on The Naked Lunch

Joan Adams Vollmer. (Wikipedia)

Dreaming of another fantastical New Year’s Eve party like the Harpo Marx/Charlie Parker/Times Square centenary blast I arranged for 1911/2011, I checked celebrity births for 1924 on the Notable Names Database (NNDB: “Tracking the Entire World”), and found a star-studded cast headed by Marlon Brando, Lauren Bacall, and James Baldwin, with supporting players like presidents George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter sharing a table next to one occupied by country singers Chet Akins and Slim Whitman. For comic relief, you’ve got Brando’s buddy for life Wally Cox (Mr. Peepers), Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker (All in  the Family), Dr. Strangelove’s Terry Southern, and Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, not to mention Bill Dana (“My name José Jiménez”) and Don Knotts (“Are you nervous?”) from the Steve Allen Show, plus Norm Alden, the coach who drowned in a bowl of chicken noodle soup on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

Okay, let’s set this year’s party at Birdland just up Broadway from the Royal Roost, site of the 2011 celebration. Among jazz stars born in ‘24, there’s alto saxophonist Paul Desmond (runner up to Charlie Parker in the 1954 Downbeat poll), trombonist J.J. Johnson, pianist Bud Powell, drummer Max Roach, trumpeter and arranger Shorty Rogers, and tenor man Sonny Stitt, plus songs by Dinah Washington, the Divine Sarah Vaughan, and Doris Day, who got her start singing with Les Brown’s Band of Renown. At the ringside table with Brando and Cox are  Marlon’s co-stars Katy Jurado (One-Eyed Jacks) and Eva Marie Saint (On the Waterfront). Fresh from Paris and Rome, respectively, Charles Aznavour (Shoot the Piano Player) and Marcello Mastroianni (La Dolce Vita) are being interviewed by Truman (In Cold Blood) Capote, who is covering the Farewell ‘54 celebration for The New Yorker.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

My preferred Santa of the moment is the one trudging up the Union Square subway stairs on the cover of the December 16 New Yorker, a heavy red bag slung over his shoulder, one hand on the railing, snow falling. I like the noirish urban darkness of Eric Drooker’s image, the way the Con Ed building is framed, the fading portrait of a beloved city against a blank sky. I also like the touch of mortal menace. Will Santa make it to his next stop before he’s mugged or run down by a drunken driver?

The Poetry of Gatsby

The epigraph I’ve used here comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald and may sound routinely autobiographical, but is actually crucial to The Great Gatsby, which will celebrate its centenary next year. Nick Carraway’s line about coming home from college at Christmas sets the stage for the concluding reference to Gatsby’s dream, “which must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” That’s where the poem that is The Great Gatsby truly ends; the two short paragraphs that follow, about the “orgastic future” and “boats against the current,” are prosaic and workmanlike by comparison.  more