By Stuart Mitchner

I’ve just read Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” today being his 145th birthday. Why that particular poem now? Probably because it’s an infectious idea that inspires impersonation. And why 13? Why not 9 or 7? Or 10 to match the number of his birthday month?

When I began writing a few days ago, I was thinking about ways of looking at Italy. What set me off was the Milan cathedral, which rises magnificently from the center of Luchino Visconti’s epic Rocco and His Brothers (1960), a film so “fearsome” (Martin Scorsese’s word) that people screamed “No!” “Stop it!” and “Basta!” when its prolonged explosions of murderous violence were first shown at the Venice Film Festival.

What happened to me? Suddenly, breathtakingly, after one of the movie’s most brutal, harrowing, hard-to-watch scenes, I found myself at the top of the cathedral surrounded by spires and pinnacles, with dizzy-making views of the city and country on all sides while straight scarily down below were tiny streetcars, busses, and human beings. I’m up there with Alain Delon’s Rocco and Annie Girardot’s Nadia, who was beaten and raped in front of Rocco by his brother Simone, mad with jealousy because Rocco and Nadia, a free-spirited prostitute, have fallen, truly, in love. more

By Stuart Mitchner

Looking ahead to William Faulkner’s September 25th birthday, I reread the 1956 Paris Review interview in which he says The Sound and the Fury (1929) is the novel that caused him “the most grief and anguish,” comparing himself to the mother who “loves the child who became the thief or murderer more than the one who became the priest.”

For what it’s worth — a phrase to be reckoned with in this column — the novel of Faulkner’s that has afforded me the most pleasure and induced the most awe is the one that became “the thief or murderer.” In the same interview, Faulkner says that he wrote it five separate times. “It’s the book I feel tenderest towards. I couldn’t leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again.”

I read The Sound and the Fury four separate times, first when I was 19. Having found my way through it, I began reading it over again the day I finished it. Half a year later, I went back to it and finished it in two weeks. Seven years later, I reread it on the other side of the world.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

So the lawyers suggested going around the globe and get someone completely opposite from J.D. Salinger. Not a novelist but a journalist, not a white guy but a Black guy, and that’s how I lucked out and got the role.

—James Earl Jones (1931-2024)

The feature attraction at this weekend’s Friends and Foundation Princeton Public Library Book Sale is a collection of rare African American literature donated by Rutgers Professor Donald Gibson, who died at 90 on January 3. During his four decades as a teacher, Gibson helped establish the study of Black literature as a legitimate university course. Among his numerous books, essays, and lectures is the introduction to The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, which is available among the titles in the library’s non-fiction book group.

The Common Factor

Gibson presents Du Bois’s book as “a very personal document” in which the soul is “a common factor, exclusive of considerations of race, class, or religious affiliation, education or social status.” Gibson suggests that the “I am a person and you are a person” principle underlying The Souls of Black Folk shares the “whatever belongs to me as well belongs to you” spirit of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Whitman’s famous mantra also expresses the foundational spirit behind secondhand books and the sales that keep them moving from reader to reader. That said, book sale patrons will still have to pay the stated cost for each volume, as well as the admission charges at Friday’s 9 a.m.-noon Preview Sale. As a longtime Princeton resident, Gibson no doubt attended his share of these sales, presumably finding treasures like those that will be on view in the Community Room from Friday, September 20 through half-price day on Sunday, September 22.  more

(Photo by Leslie Mitchner)

By Stuart Mitchner

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

—William Blake

On Britannica’s website “This Day in History: September 11,” an image of the World Trade Center in flames sits beside a photograph of D.H. Lawrence, who was born on that date in 1885. Lawrence is not listed, however, among Wikipedia’s notable September 11 events between 1601 and 1900, such as the the theft of the Hope Diamond (1792), the Battle of Tampico (1829), the anti-Masonic Party convention (1830), or the capture of Gaki Sherocho, the last king of the Kaffa (1897).

You may wonder why the birth of a mere author rates a place on that list. In fact, Britannica has it right. The author of The Rainbow is an event unto himself. Diamonds, battles, conventions, and kings are trivia next to what he produced, not to mention what he was: the Lawrence experience. As his friend Cynthia Asquith once said, Lawrence could make washing dishes an adventure. Imagine standing side by side with Lorenzo, he doing the scrubbing with his sleeves rolled up, holding forth on the American soul while you do the drying. In the Lawrentian overflow, there’s a clarity to everything, the cups and saucers gleaming like porcelain hallucinations. more

By Stuart Mitchner

However much my wife and I may disagree about other things, we’ve always been in accord about movies, whether it’s the late Alain Delon’s Once a Thief or HBO’s House of the Dragon.

What made the Delon film worth watching was the chance to see him in an American movie from 1965 with stunning location shots of San Francisco from the period when I lived there and was enjoying the first act of a screwball comedy romance with my future wife and viewing partner.

When House of the Dragon debuted two years ago, we gave up after the first episodes. Recently we tried it again out of sheer desperation, found the second season somewhat better, and are now looking forward to the third, which Variety says will go into production in early 2025. As always, the real stars were the dragons. What was lacking besides the sheer fun of Game of Thrones were characters as wild and witty as Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion Lannister and as dashing and loveable as Masie Williams’s Arya Stark.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

The first of many things I didn’t know about tenor saxophonist Stan Getz is that I was going to be writing about him today. In February 1954 when he was arrested for holding up a Seattle drugstore, I was shocked. I was 15, just getting into jazz, and I admired Getz for his moody, lyrical playing with guitarist Johnny Smith on “Moonlight in Vermont” and for his passionate solos with the Count Basie rhythm section and an all-star cast in Jam Session 3. Eventually I came to know him best for his work on Diz and Getz, with Dizzy Gillespie, a session that had been recorded in Los Angeles three months before his arrest.

Had I known the whole story of what happened in Seattle at the time — that Getz fumbled the hold-up, fled to his room at the hotel across the street, and called the drugstore to apologize — I wouldn’t have appreciated it as much as I do now, three decades after his death. If I find myself responding to Getz’s plight Holden-Caulfield-style, as in “it killed me,” maybe it’s because it happened around the time The Catcher in the Rye came into my life. The whole thing seemed so Holden Caulfield, so J.D. Salinger. Sure, even if old Holden had been a drug addict, he’d have never been crazy enough to hold up a drugstore claiming he had a gun and then running away as soon as the woman behind the counter called his bluff. And if Holden was telling the story, it would have killed him that the lady’s name was Mary and that the first thing Getz said to her when she answered the phone was “I’m sorry for the crazy thing I did. I’ve never done anything like that before.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

The long strange trip of this column includes a world-famous 34-year-old singer songwriter from West Reading, Pa.; a 79-year-old film director from Düsseldorf, Westphalia, born August 14, 1945; and a Scottish king slain in battle against his first cousin and rival Macbeth on or around August 14, 1040 — but then Shakespeare had a more productive fate in mind for King Duncan when he wrote Macbeth.

Who’s Afraid?

When the news aired about the terrorist shutdown of Taylor Swift’s Vienna concerts that led to thousands of disappointed Swifties singing her music in the streets of Vienna, I put the Tortured Poets Department into my car’s CD player. I was thinking of the 22 fans killed by terrorists at the May 2017 Ariana Grande concert in Manchester as Swift let it all out, “So I leap from the gallows and I levitate down your street, crash the party like a record scratch as I scream — ‘Who’s afraid of little old me?’ And you should be, you should be, you should be!” To paraphrase the song rocking my car, “If you wanted her dead, you should’ve just said so because nothing makes her feel more alive.”  more

By Stuart Mitchner

I started reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper 2016) on the rebound from a problem with PayPal, the co-creation of Vance’s venture-capitalist savior Peter Thiel. The 2018 paperback comes with 10 pages of blurbs, including one from Thiel noting that Vance “writes powerfully about the real people who are kept out of sight by academic abstractions.” Quoted on the same page, Bill Gates says the book’s “real magic” is “in the story itself and Vance’s bravery in telling it.”

Friends who read Elegy when Vance was running for the Senate trashed it, calling it “phony.” I read it straight through in one day, absorbed in the story and the characters until the “real people” Thiel refers to were displaced by language like the subtitle’s “Culture in Crisis.” Although I wasn’t looking for “gotcha” moments as I read, I noticed passages that people on the Far Right would hate, and Hillbilly Elegy may yet land on some banned lists in Texas and Florida, given the campaign to rescue red state libraries from “woke” or suspect material. I’m also pretty sure that Mamaw, Vance’s gun-toting grandmother, a Democrat who liked Bill Clinton and The Sopranos, would have told J.D. to stay the hell away from venture capitalists, the Republican Party, and Donald Trump. All of Vance’s retracted defamations of Trump (“Hitler,” “idiot,” “poison”) could have been shouted by Mamaw from beyond the grave, except she’d have loaded her spectral rifle with f-words.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

—Ernest Hemingway, from The Old Man and the Sea

Don’t give up, don’t let it get you down,” my 48-year-old son told me when he saw that I was depressed by the post-Biden-debate news cycle. That was before Sunday when the president finally did what he had to do. If nothing else, maybe the media will shut up about how old he is, stop gaslighting his every move, and give him some breathing room.

I’ve been thinking about “don’t” songs. When I promised my son not to let the polls get me down, I thought of John Lennon singing “Don’t Let Me Down.” A friend says “Don’t forget to write,” and my inner jukebox clicks into action, playing “Don’t Forget to Dance,” a song from the early 1980s by the Kinks. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” would make a great campaign anthem for either party this year except that it’s forever associated with the blackout finale of The Sopranos. Which reminds me of the 1992 Democratic convention and one of the most effective presidential campaign songs ever, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).” more

By Stuart Mitchner

(…what interrupts our concentration as readers may be as telling as the book we are reading: Freud is always making the case for interruption). We make a Freudian slip when we thought we knew what we were saying. We dream beyond the bounds of intelligibility….

—From Becoming Freud

Why Freud and why now?” That is the question. After a lifetime of relative indifference to most things Freudian, it’s taken the attempted assassination of a former president plus the massive media freak-out inspired by the current president’s shabby debate performance and slip-of-the-tongue doubleheader to send me to Adam Phillips’s Becoming Freud: The Making Of a Psychoanalyst (Yale University Press) and the Gutenberg text of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life translated by A.A. Brill.

Meanwhile we have this week’s “telling” interruption in the form of the All-Star game and the Republican National Convention, held in the aftermath of Saturday’s game-changing event while I’m still gamely trying to find a place in the psychopathology of everyday baseball life for Biden’s Freudian slips. Talking heads on CNN and MSNBC have already begun portraying the president as a veteran pitcher whose late-inning moment has come as the manager walks out to the mound to take the ball and bring in the closer. Except by now everybody knows Biden intends to finish the game and there’s no manager and no closer. more

By Stuart Mitchner

I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.

—Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

Late the other night, I saw an insect moving with difficulty across the damp white surface of the kitchen sink. A closer look revealed that it was a firefly, laboring, going nowhere, disoriented, too weak to blink its light, so I offered it a ride on a brand-new green scouring pad, opened the door to the deck, and watched it blink its light and take flight. Only when it met an answering light and the two were in orbit did I read the news of the day into the moment. And since this rendezvous occurred on the night of July 4, a week after the debacle of the debate and the subsequent media feeding frenzy, a pair of innocent fireflies became Biden and Harris.

What can I say? Such things happen when nature intrudes on an Independence Day column about two heroes of the holiday, Henry David Thoreau, who began his two-year-long stay at Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, and Walt Whitman, who published Leaves of Grass on July 4, 1855. more

By Stuart Mitchner

So the first thing I do is buy “Finnegans Wake” and I read a chapter and it’s GREAT and I dug it and I felt like — here’s an old friend!

—John Lennon

John Lennon came into the world on October 9, 1940, a little less than 100 days before James Joyce left it on January 13, 1941. That the singer songwriter from Liverpool and the writer from Dublin arrived and departed in such close proximity should be of no more earthly significance than the fact that Joyce died of natural causes in Zurich four decades before Lennon died violently in New York City. A month before he was murdered, Lennon made sure an image of Finnegans Wake appeared in a video for his song, “Just Like Starting Over.” A copy of the Viking edition is prominently displayed among Lennon’s possessions around 1:17 into the film.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

Go, seize the day
Wake up and say
This is an extraordinary life ….

Less than a week before Father’s Day, my son and I are talking about the time he fell off the sofa dancing around to Asia’s “Heat of the Moment.” It was mid-May 1983; he was 7. “But it wasn’t the sofa,” he tells me; he’s 48 now. “It was a bunch of cushions I’d piled onto a chair. I didn’t cry, I yelled, I kept jumping around. John Wetton was singing.”

Wetton’s Power

I italicized “John Wetton” to show the 7-year-old’s excitement still alive in the 48-year-old’s voice. In fact, when Wetton sings, the whole world is italicized, there’s no such thing as was; his is the power of is, is, forever is, and the first time I heard him singing Asia’s anthemic “An Extraordinary Life” on the 2008 “come back” album Phoenix, I had to know more about the musician my son had been mourning for the better part of five years. When Wetton sang “Go seize the day, wake up and say this is an extraordinary life,” he had less than a decade to live, after surviving 20 years of heavy drinking and smoking, plus triple-bypass surgery. He died of cancer on January 31, 2017, at 67, same age as my heavy drinking and smoking mother, who also died of cancer and was very much on my mind as Wetton sang of “the smiles and frowns, the ups and downs, of fortune turning … the twists and turns, the lessons learned.”

Asia’s first single, “Heat of the Moment” was a huge hit, spending 26 weeks on the charts while the group’s debut LP was the No. 1 album in the U.S. for 1982, according to Billboard and Cashbox. As Wetton puts it in a 2014 HuffPost interview, “We got let out of the elevator at the penthouse instead of the ground floor.” In a 2011 interview about “Heat of the Moment,” he says that he and keyboardist Geoff Downes wrote the song in an afternoon: “The lyrics are an abject apology for my dreadful behavior towards a particular woman (the woman I would eventually marry, but divorce 10 years later), the chorus began its life as a 6/8 country song, but when Geoff and I started writing together, we moved the time signatures around, and ‘Heat of the Moment’ emerged.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol…

Allen Ginsberg called “Idiot Wind” one of Bob Dylan’s “great great prophetic national songs,” with “one rhyme that took in the whole nation.” Dylan wrote it 50 years ago this summer, first recorded it in New York that September around the time Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, and recorded it again in December before releasing the final version in January 1975 on the album Blood On the Tracks, which I’ve been listening to ever since Dylan’s 83rd birthday on Friday, May 24.

That same day, with election year winds blowing the word trial trial trial like “a circle around my skull,” I began rereading Franz Kafka’s The Trial, looking ahead to the centenary of Kafka’s death, June 3, 1924, the day Max Brod took charge of the unpublished work that delivered a great writer to the reading world.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

I’ve been writing the same sort of thing since I was 15 years old — about people who are a little cracked.

—Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995)

The line I’ve quoted is from an August 1991 interview Patricia Highsmith granted the International Herald Tribune shortly before publishing the last novel in the Ripley series, Ripley Under Water (Knopf 1992), which I read in a day, swept along in a fever of morbid anticipation. Whenever that most civilized of psychopaths Tom Ripley is involved, it’s not what happens next that carries you along but the need to know when it will happen and to whom and how, and then how Ripley will get away with it, which he always does. There’s no denying you’re in the grip of the writer Graham Greene called “the poet of apprehension.”

Even before she started writing about “cracked” people, Highsmith was reading Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind, which she found in her parents’ library when she was “8 or 9,” and going through “case histories with footnotes about murders, sadists, crackpots, if they could be cured or not and what the psychiatrist decided to do about them.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

The adolescence of a whole American generation was mediated by Dylan’s songs…

—Helen Vendler (1933-2024)

The last week of National Poetry Month began on Tuesday, April 23, William Shakespeare’s 460th birthday. Right now a whole generation of listeners is being “mediated” by Taylor Swift, whose latest album The Tortured Poets Department opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, “with historic numbers,” according to the New York Times. It’s hard to ignore an album with that title in a month celebrating poetry, not to mention the fact that Swift’s work is the subject of courses being taught at major universities, including Harvard, which offers an English Department class called “Taylor Swift and Her World.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (HarperCollins 2004) was the year’s number one fiction best-seller when it was published in 1927; it also received the 1928 Pulitzer Prize and is still in print, reportedly selling seven thousand copies worldwide every year. So how is it that in my long life as a reader I ignored it until April 17 of last week, Wilder’s 127th birthday? There may be a clue in the wording of the New York Times December 8, 1975 obituary: “Aloof from the 20th century’s preoccupation with politics, psychology and sex,” Wilder “concentrated in his novels and plays on what he construed as the universal verities in human nature. He seemed to be examining mankind from an Olympian platform.”

In his foreword to the 2004 edition, novelist Russell Banks, who died in January 2023, says that Wilder’s novel is “as close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature.” The book “feels, in its exquisite universality and ease of timeless application, ancient, classical, almost biblical.” Probably aware of the “aloofness” issue, Banks admits that while “in certain ways, the prose seems antique,” it’s “not in the least antiquated,” the “sentences are elegant, but never self-admiring, exquisitely balanced, yet not overformal, and complex without being elaborate.” Banks’s way of bringing the novel into contemporary America, circa 2004, is to suggest an analogy between the fictional fall of the bridge that “precipitated five travelers into the gulf below” on July 20, 1714 and the terrorist attack that killed thousands when it brought down the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. more

By Stuart Mitchner

I was a wing in heaven blue … I was a vision in another eye …

—Patti Smith, from “Wing”

Midway through National Poetry Month, I found a poem Patti Smith sang for Haruki Murakami after presenting him with a literary prize in Berlin 10 years ago. The song ends “And if there’s one thing … Could do for you … You’d be a wing … In heaven blue.” In her memoir M Train (2015), Smith calls Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Knopf 1997) a “devastating” masterpiece that she immediately wanted to reread because she “did not wish to exit its atmosphere.” She was haunted by “the ghost of a phrase” that had to do with “the fate of a certain property” in the opening chapter.

Having just finished Murakami’s epic of wonders and horrors, I’ve also been haunted by the beginning, where the narrator, Toru Okada, is searching for his lost cat and ends up, in Smith’s words, “at an abandoned house on an overgrown lot with a paltry bird sculpture and an obsolescent well.” What particularly intrigued me was Okada’s reference to “the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring. We called it the wind-up bird” although “we didn’t know what it was really called or what it looked like, but that didn’t bother the wind-up bird. Every day it would come to the stand of trees in our neighborhood and wind the spring of our quiet little world.” That last sentence winds the spring of the book.  more