May 1, 2024

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

April 24, 2024

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

April 17, 2024

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

April 10, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

Last Friday when news of the local earthquake hit, I was at the library checking out the Criterion DVD of Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dogs (1949). At home I returned to Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage International 1997) to find my place bookmarked at page 217, just as Toru Okada, “Mr. Wind-up Bird,” was packing a knapsack “kept for earthquakes and other emergencies.” When the late-afternoon aftershock rumbled through the house, I was on page 245 just as Okada was experiencing “a strange reverberation.” Call it what you will, a minor coincidence or magical realism in action, these things happen when you’re reading Murakami, not to mention the name game connection wherein the hero of Stray Dog is a detective named Murakami and the older detective showing him the ropes is Sato, a name he shares with the yakuza hero of Tokyo Vice, the exciting new series I hope to write about in a future column. more

April 3, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

I’m looking for Marlon Brando on the covers of Susan L. Mizruchi’s Brando’s Smile (2014) and William J. Mann’s The Contender (2019). Filmgoers and biographers have a right to their own Brando. This filmgoer’s Brando, the Byronic avenger of One-Eyed Jacks (1961), has little in common with the self-consciously seductive, smugly smiling man on the cover of Brando’s Smile; put some period clothing on him and he could be the boy next door in Meet Me in St. Louis. And the face staring at me from The Contender is clearly the choice of a biographer looking for an image expressive of the pain and pathos of the line Brando’s been associated with ever since his “I coulda been a contender” moment in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954). The main problem is that this painfully posed, well-groomed portrait taken by the celebrity photographer Philippe Halsman could, at first glance, be mistaken for that of some Brandoesque young actor of the day. more

March 27, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

Twenty years ago, I wrote about “Billy Collins and the Homeless Poets of Bryn Mawr,” my first article on an event that I’ve covered ever since, including the 2020 sale that was canceled after two days because of the pandemic.

Two years ago, my title was “How I Spent $8 at the BMW Book Sale and Came Home Happy.” This year I showed up at 3 p.m. on opening day, spent $13, and came home with a Royal Shakespeare Company curiosity ($1); a paperback copy of the play In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer ($3); a Limited Edition of Daniel Defoe’s Diary of Moll Flanders, illustrated and signed by Reginald Marsh ($6); and a “homeless poet” named Michael Roberts ($3).

Twin Ghost Towns

By the time I arrived at Stuart Country Day School last Wednesday, both gyms were virtually deserted, twin ghost towns, except for volunteers restocking the plundered tables. In Collectors Corner, the rarities I’d noticed on my visit the previous Sunday had been snapped up. Gone (no surprise) was the first hardcover edition of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums in the original dust jacket, priced at a fraction of the $400 being asked online for copies in similar condition. Among the items buyers had passed over were Freddy Goes to the North Pole and three Signet paperback mysteries by Mickey Spillane — a quick study of my adolescent reading habits, from Freddy the Pig and Jinx the Cat to Mike Hammer.  more

March 20, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

…the forgotten book, in the forgotten bookshop, screams to be discovered.

—from The Unquiet Grave

Today is Ovid’s birthday. In the unlikely event that my math is right, he would be 2067 years old. His full name was Publius Ovidius Naso, born March 20, 43 BC, and banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus in AD 8, presumably for writing (and apparently living) The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria). I found a passage in Book 3 that relates to my subject if you tweak the words “path, bark, port, banquet” to fit this “undisguised” Preview Day column on the 2024 Bryn Mawr-Wellesley Book Sale:

“But let us return to our path; I must deal with my subject undisguised, that my wearied bark may reach its port. You may be waiting, in fact, for me to escort you to the banquet, and may be requesting my advice in this respect as well. Come late, and enter when the lights are brought in; delay is a friend to passion; a very great stimulant is delay.”

I know from experience that book dealers and bibliophiles waiting outside previous preview sales have experienced the “stimulant of delay,” especially in the days when a low-numbered ticket to a place near the front of the line was worth getting up for at the proverbial crack of dawn, and believe me, “passion” is not too strong a word for the book lust surging through the line the moment the doors are opened.  more

March 13, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

I was looking forward to a walk on the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study, my destination the pond in the final scene of  Christopher Nolan’s multiple-Oscar-winning film. With the weather report predicting rain, I wanted to be there when the first drops were falling, as in the three-hour-long film’s beginning and end. I was hoping for a quietly eloquent spring rain, just enough to create the desired ripple effect, but before I could get there, it began pouring and I had to make do with a photo on the Institute’s website. Taken during the April 2022 filming, it shows Tom Conti’s Einstein in conversation with Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer while the burly, grey-maned, grey-bearded Dutch cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema hunkers down on a four-wheeled rig squinting at them through the Panavision lens.

“It was constantly close-ups, close-ups, close-ups, talking, talking, talking,” Van Hoytema says in a February 2024 screendaily.com interview. Referring to the sequence by the pond: “Towards the end of the scene, we creep in on Oppenheimer, and get the feeling that we crawl right through Cillian’s eyes into his head, and start understanding the world, how he sees it now. More importantly, we shoot a close-up of him that is more powerful than most of the other close-ups in the film, even though we have been on top of his face for the whole movie. So, the challenge was, ‘How the hell do we make that interesting?’”

The answer was delivered on Sunday night when the producers of Oppenheimer won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Oscars going to Best Lead Actor Murphy, Best Supporting Actor Robert Downey Jr., and Best Director Nolan, as well as to Ludwig Göransson for his score, to Jennifer Lame for editing, and to Van Hoytema himself for cinematography. more

March 6, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

How can you laugh if you can’t cry?

—Ring Lardner (1885-1933)

Today is Ring Lardner’s birthday, spring training baseball is underway, and I’ve been reading You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters (Doran 1916), in which “living” and “having” are spelled “liveing” and “haveing,” and a series between two teams becomes a “serious.” After Lardner’s team, the White Sox, were branded the Black Sox for throwing the 1919 “World Serious,” he saw it as a betrayal, although five years passed before he said, “I have kind of lost interest in the old game, or rather it ain’t the old game that which I have lost interest in it, but it is the game which the magnates have fixed up to please the public with their usual good judgement.”

In her August 1, 1925 Saturday Review essay on “American Fiction,” Virginia Woolf surprised a great many readers, including no doubt Ring Lardner and his neighbor at the time F. Scott Fitzgerald, by observing that Lardner “writes the best prose that has come our way” and “often in a language which is not English. Mr. Lardner has talents of a remarkable order. With extraordinary ease and aptitude, with the quickest strokes, the surest touch, the sharpest insight, he lets Jack Keefe the baseball player cut out his own outline, fill in his own depths, until the figure of the foolish, boastful, innocent athlete lives before us. As he babbles out his mind on paper there rise up friends, sweethearts, the scenery, town, and country—all surround him and make him up in his completeness.”

As it happens, Woolf’s eloquent appraisal could be applied to another character who is allowed to “cut out his own outline, fill in his own depths” until he “lives before us” as he “babbles out his mind on paper,” with friends, girlfriends, enemies, a little sister named Phoebe, scenery (Central Park) and town (New York City) all surrounding him and making him up “in his completeness.”  more

February 28, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

And what curious flower or fruit
Will grow from that conspiring root?

—Elizabeth Bishop

Those lines are from the poet Elizabeth Bishop’s reimagining of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” Bishop has admitted that she was hoping someone would compose tunes for her suite “Songs for a Colored Singer” (an acceptable title in the 1940s). “I think I had Billie Holiday in mind,” she said in a 1966 interview. “I put in a couple of words just because she sang big words so well — ‘conspiring root,’ for instance.”

The Bishop-Holiday connection was pointed out by Paul Alexander in Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year, the subject of last week’s column. In fact, a misprint in that article (“Back” for “Black”) is the reason I’m  returning to Holiday and rereading Bishop with particular attention to “The Man-Moth,” a great New York poem inspired by a newspaper misprint for “mammoth.” more

February 21, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

I was going to begin with some lines from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets — about “music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts” — except that setting the passage as an epigraph would have been typographically unsightly, and the only thing it has to do with Billie Holiday is that I can hear her singing it, beautifully, in her special way, making new words of old words. I can also hear her singing of “something given and taken” from the same sequence, and of “selflessness and self-surrender” and “the moment in and out of time.”

It’s fun to imagine Lady Day enlivening Eliot as she did various Tin Pan Alley songwriters. You can hear her on YouTube singing “My first impression of you was something indescribably new” to words by Charley Tobias (“The boy who writes the songs you sing”) and music by Ukrainian-born Sam Stept — but first I had to skip an ad flogging Trump bobbleheads and the call to arms for a second American Civil War that follows it. more

February 14, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

…when love finally calls the tune, it almost always comes from the least expected direction — from the bohemian, the excluded, the marginalized and least powerful folks, and the most hidden places.

—Ted Gioia

On Valentine’s Day 2024 I’m thinking about the way love happens in a song that’s been synonymous with February 14 ever since I sang along with it as a teenager. Although “How Little We Know” comes from a relatively “hidden” songwriter, it was put on the map in 1956 by Frank Sinatra, one of the “least marginalized” and “most powerful” of performers. According to Ted Gioia’s Love Songs: The Hidden History (Oxford University Press 2015), Sinatra brought a “new level of sophistication” to the romantic ballad by adding “layers of irony, sometimes outright cynicism, to the emotional immediacy of the torch singers,” which resulted in “a performance that delivered the inner meaning of the lyric while also offering an arch commentary on it.”  more

February 7, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

People who listen to the Beatles love them — what about that?

—Richard Poirier in The Performing Self (1971)

Remarkable, unspeakable New York!

—Henry James, in The American Scene

My mood at the moment is best expressed in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which I was reading when the Beatles landed at JFK on February 7, 1964:

“I enter upon this part of my story in the most pensive and melancholy frame of mind that ever sympathetic breast was touched with…. Every line I write, I feel an abatement of the quickness of my pulse, and of that careless alacrity with it, which every day of my life prompts me to say and write a thousand things I should not.”

Truer words were never not spoken. Did I really care about the Fab Four? I had no choice since my transistor radio was permanently tuned to Top 40 servings on WINS from Murray the K, the DJ who liked to call himself the Fifth Beatle. My idea of musical bliss in those days was a moment in Sonny Rollins Vol. 2 on Blue Note, the change of pianists that occurs in Thelonius Monk’s “Mysterioso,” after Rollins delivers one of his boldest statements and Monk makes way for Horace Silver as J.J. Johnson’s trombone booms overhead. Never did it occur to me that a bunch of funny looking characters from the U.K. could compete with that.

At the time of The Great Arrival, I was living in a small front room of a brownstone at 33 West 87th Street, with a poster of Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles over my bed and one of Joan Miró’s The Farm on another wall above a portable stereo and a box of jazz LPs. My window looked across the street to No. 26, where Billie Holiday had been living at the time of her death in 1959. Lady Day’s “townhouse” sold for almost $14 million in 2022. In 1964 I was paying $120 a month. Most likely Billie had a couple of furnished rooms in 1959. She reportedly died with 70 cents to her name. It’s been four years since I felt like going into New York. The city I love is not the one where Billie Holiday’s townhouse sold for $14 million.  more

January 31, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

Today, January 31, is Franz Schubert’s birthday. Born in 1797, he died on November 19, 1828, age 31. Toward the end of that year he was composing his last three piano sonatas and vicariously exploring the backwoods America of James Fenimore Cooper. I’ve been intrigued by this deathbed connection ever since I read Schubert’s last letter, in which he tells a friend, “I am ill. I have eaten nothing for eleven days and drunk nothing, and I totter feebly and shakily from my chair to bed and back again…. Be so kind, then, to assist me in this desperate situation by means of literature. Of Cooper’s I have read The Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, The Pilot, and The Pioneers. If by chance you have anything else of his, I implore you to deposit it with Frau von Bogner at the coffee house….”

For the past week I’ve been reading The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826) and listening to Schubert’s penultimate piano sonata, No. 20 in A-major completed on September 26, 1828. The sonata’s haunting second movement, the Andantino employed so powerfully in Robert Bresson’s 1966 film, Au Hasard Balthazar, has been following me around ever since last Wednesday’s  mist-making Schubertian snowfall. more

January 24, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

This is an anniversary year for Franz Kafka, who died on June 3, 1924, a doubly noteworthy centenary, given the immensity of the author’s posthumous presence, which suggests that if ever a writer was born on the day he died it was Kafka. No wonder, then, that a photograph of his face dominates the January 24 entry in A Book of Days for the Literary Year (Thames and Hudson 1984) when all he accomplished on that day in 1913 was to interrupt work on a book he never finished. Originally titled The Man Who Disappeared, it was retitled Amerika after his death by his best friend and executor Max Brod, who is best known for ignoring Kafka’s wish that all his unpublished writings be destroyed. more

January 17, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

January is the birth month of two ageless poets of the snow, Anton Chekhov, born on the Feast Day of St. Anthony the Great, January 17, 1860, and Franz Schubert, born on January 31, 1797.

Chekhov’s 1886 story “Misery” has a wintry atmosphere like that of “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man,” the last song in Winterreise (1828), Schubert’s song cycle about a man whose snowy wanderings end with an old organ-grinder playing “with numb fingers as best he can,” holding his little plate, “with no reward to show,” for “no one wants to listen.” Chekhov’s epigraph for “Misery,” which I first read as “Heartache” in Avrahm Yarmolinksy’s edition of The Portable Chekhov, is “To whom shall I tell my sorrows,” a reference to the plight of a bereft St. Petersburg cabby, who sits unmoving in the snow, waiting for a fare.  more

January 10, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

Robert Donat may be the only movie star Holden Caulfield would ever think of calling on the phone. Donat, who plays Richard Hannay, the hero of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller The 39 Steps (1935), “could draw us further into himself by his very modesty,” according to David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film. Writing about Donat’s performance in Knight Without Armour (1937), another movie J.D. Salinger liked to show on his 16 mm projector, Graham Greene observed that he “is sensible, authentic, slow; emotion when it comes has the effect of surprise, like plebeian poetry.” In contrast to the glitz and glamour of the Hollywood that Holden hates, Donat has, in Greene’s words, an “invincible naturalness.”

In The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years (Crown 1970), David Shipman calls Donat’s story “a heart-rending one,” using an adjective also favored by 7-year-old Seymour Glass in Salinger’s extraordinary, still unpublished novella, Hapworth 16, 1924, surely the longest, strangest letter home from camp ever written. What makes Donat’s story “heart-rending” is that this “highly gifted actor,” known “for a beautiful speaking voice and a quiet and diffident charm,” was plagued by chronic asthma. As Thomson points out, Donat’s “illustrious” career included only 19 films, due to the major roles he turned down because of “the profound tentativeness at the root of his stammer and nervous breathlessness.” Even so, in one of his least compelling parts, as the title character in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Donat beat out Clark Gable for the Best Actor Oscar, thwarting Gone With the Wind’s sweep of the 1939 Academy Awards. more

January 3, 2024

By Stuart Mitchner

His tragedy was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there. 

—William Faulkner on Holden Caulfield

“If you really want to hear about it,” the first thing you need to know is that J.D. Salinger was born in New York City on the first of January 1919, 105 years ago. The first and only time his creation Holden Caulfield appeared in the The New Yorker was on December 21, 1946, in “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” a story that got bumped from the 1941 Christmas issue after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The writer who crafted The Catcher in the Rye’s famous “all-that-David-Copperfield-kind-of-crap” opening sentence clearly had another character in mind in the story’s “Holden Morrisey Caulfield,” who wore his hat “with a cutting edge at the ‘V’ of the crown.” The character who came to life in his own voice in 1951 is the one who left “all the goddam foils” of the Pencey Prep fencing team on the subway the same morning he bought a hat “for a buck” in a sports store and wore it with the peak swung “way around to the back” because he “looked good in it that way.”

One of the few times the later Holden’s presence can be felt in “Slight Rebellion” is during a theatre intermission when someone calls the Lunts “absolute angels” and Holden thinks “Angels. For Chrissake. Angels.” You hear him again when he and his date Sally are talking about school and he says, “Boy, do I hate it!” and “hate” gets him going. He hates living in New York, the Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue busses “and getting out at the center doors” and “the Seventy-second Street movie, with those fake clouds on the ceiling.” You get another hint of the reading world’s Holden when he tries to talk Sally into running away from New York with him. more

December 27, 2023

By Stuart Mitchner

He has too much talent for his genius; it is a dreadful locomotive to which he is bound and can never be free from nor set at rest. You would persuade me that he is a genial creature, full of sweetness and amenities and superior to his talents, but I fear he is harnessed to them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson on Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Charles Dickens published “A Christmas Tree” in the December 21, 1850 issue of his weekly journal Household Words. While there are references to “bright merriment, and song, and dance, and cheerfulness” that echo the spirit of A Christmas Carol (1843), the later, shorter work reveals a much darker vision of Christmas and childhood.

Just as Scrooge tries to dismiss the horror of Marley’s ghost as “a slight disorder of the stomach … an undigested bit of beef,” Dickens tells himself that the “prodigious nightmare” embodied by the Christmas tree may be “the result of indigestion, assisted by imagination …. I don’t know why it’s frightful — but I know it is. I can only make out that it is an immense array of shapeless things … slowly coming close to my eyes, and receding to an immeasurable distance. When it comes closest, it is worse.” The apparition reminds Dickens of “winter nights incredibly long; of being sent early to bed, as a punishment for some small offence, and waking in two hours, with a sensation of having been asleep two nights; of the laden hopelessness of morning ever dawning….” more

December 20, 2023

By Stuart Mitchner

A glorious day, really! So clear, so crisp, so bracing! If only it weren’t Christmas!

—Henry Miller, from Nexus

Henry Valentine Miller’s antipathy to Christmas must have begun in the womb. Somehow the “literary gangster” who wrote Tropic of Cancer convinced his mother to put off delivering him for a day. Born December 26, 1891, in Yorkville on the Upper East side of Manhattan, he grew up in Brooklyn on what he called “the Street of Early Sorrows.”

Humphrey DeForest Bogart, who broke through in films as the gangster Duke Mantee, was born into a wealthy Upper West Side family on December 25, 1899, a birthdate that was subsequently moved into late January 1900 by the Warner’s publicity department. In the fantasy world of Hollywood, no way could an actor famed for playing “villainous” roles carry a Christmas Day birthdate.  more

December 13, 2023

By Stuart Mitchner

You know the greatest films of all time were never made…

—Taylor Swift, from folklore

Imagine a world without Taylor Swift, Steve Buscemi, and Jim Jarmusch, all born on this date, December 13, the singer songwriter in 1989, the actor in 1957, the director in 1953. Now imagine a world without The Winter’s Tale, a work that, as Harold Bloom says, “surges with Shakespeare’s full power” and might have been lost had it not been preserved 400 years ago in The First Folio seven years after the poet’s death.

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Riverhead 1998), Bloom calls The Winter’s Tale “a poem unlimited” because “we cannot come to the end of Shakespeare’s greatest plays”; there are always new perspectives opening on “fresh vistas.” A “vast pastoral epic” that is “also a psychological novel,” the play begins with the “nothing-have-these-nothings-if-this-be nothing” eruption of sexual jealousy from King Leontes of Sicily that leads to the seacoast of Bohemia, the songs of Autolycus, the romance of Perdita and Florizel, and the immortal stage direction, “Exit, pursued by a bear.” more

December 6, 2023

By Stuart Mitchner

I love this time of day, 1:30 to 3 a.m., kitchen to myself, cleaning up to music from the Bose Wave. I turn on WWFM in time to hear the first two movements of Haydn’s string quartet No. 23 in F minor, which creates a nice slow weaving motion that goes surprisingly well with sweeping the floor.

According to his biographer Albert Christoph Dies, Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) once claimed that musical ideas were pursuing him: “If it’s an allegro that pursues me, my pulse keeps beating faster, I can get no sleep. If it’s an adagio, then I notice my pulse beating slowly. My imagination plays on me as if I were a clavier…. I am really just a living clavier.”

Basie the Piano

Pondering the idea of a composer or a player becoming the embodiment of their instrument, my thoughts turn first to Red Bank’s favorite son Count Basie. If anyone this side of Glenn Gould or Duke Ellington qualified as “a living piano” it was Basie playing one or two incandescent notes between the heaves of big band storm. Listening to the 1975 RCA session with Basie and tenor man Zoot Sims while sweeping the tile dance floor in my night club kitchen at 3 a.m., the number I keep coming back to is a medium slow blues Basie calls “Captain Bligh.” After much looking online I’ve given up trying to find out why he named a blues after the deposed commander of HMS Bounty. In my search of the Net, however, what I found was a smile: of course, Basie’s big band recorded two albums of Beatles songs in the 1960s, one of them with liner notes by Ringo Starr. more

November 29, 2023

By Stuart Mitchner

It was while exploring “In the Company of Good Books: From Shakespeare to Morrison” at Princeton University Library’s Milberg Gallery that I found myself face to face with George Eliot. An hour later when I walked back into the light of day from this 400th anniversary celebration of the “First Folio of 1623” and other Firestone Library rarities, an unmissable show that I very nearly missed (it closes December 10), all I could think about was the woman gazing out at me from Frederick William Burton’s charcoal drawing, a preparatory study for his fuller, more detailed, but less intriguing colored chalk portrait in London’s National Portrait Gallery.

Eliot would have been 44 on February 14, 1864, when, in the words of her journal, “Mr. Burton dined with us and asked me to let him take my portrait.” According to the curator’s note, the fact that Burton was a friend “may account for the closely-cropped, full-frontal and altogether more intimate portrayal of her face.”

Maybe it was the aura of intimacy that drew me in and held me, so serenely sympathetic were her pale blue eyes, the only color in the drawing; at the same time, I knew I was in the presence of the author of this remarkable sentence, from her masterpiece Middlemarch: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” more

November 22, 2023

By Stuart Mitchner

Cover art for “Murder Most Foul” by Bob Dylan. (Columbia Records)

Today is the 60th anniversary of November 22, 1963, a date Bob Dylan claimed a share of in late March 2020, bringing Shakespeare along for the ride in “Murder Most Foul,” a 16-minute whirlwind pop-culture tour of the Kennedy assassination. Dylan first heard the news with his then-partner Suze Rotolo and others in her sister Carla’s Greenwich Village apartment. According to his friend Bob Fass, Dylan’s response was “What it means is that they are trying to tell you ‘Don’t even hope to change things’.”

So it was already they for Dylan when most of us who were alive on that day were too stunned to think beyond he, him, it. And in MMF it’s they who “blew off his head while he was still in the car.” And it’s they in “Roll On John,” Dylan’s powerfully sung response to the murder of John Lennon (“They shot him in the back and down he went”) which, like “Murder Most Foul,” uses lyrics to carry the message (in this case, Lennon’s “A Day in the Life,” “Come Together,” “Instant Karma”). At the same time, Dylan’s words seem to transcend a single subject. A line like “they’ll trap you in an ambush” could just as easily refer to the slain president. And if you happen to be thinking about Dylan’s controversial identification with the accused assassin who also died violently that weekend in Dallas, Oswald seems a more likely fit for rhetoric like “They tore the heart right out and cut him to the core” and “rags on your back just like any other slave / They tied your hands and they clamped your mouth / Wasn’t no way out of that deep dark cave.”

 more

November 15, 2023

By Stuart Mitchner

Approaching the “last Beatles’ song,” my first thought is how well the title “Now and Then” fits the occasion. The dominant line, “It’s all because of you,” works for people who have lived more than half a century with the group as I have, as well as our generation’s children and grandchildren, like the 23-year-old who says “I was 1 when George Harrison died” in a November 3 New York Times article about Gen Z Beatles fans on TikTok.

The Romance

In last Sunday’s Times (“At the Heart of the Last Beatles Song, A Love Story”), Ian Leslie views “Now and Then” in the context of the book he’s writing about Lennon and McCartney’s “love story in songs.” While he seems to agree that “their love story is “our love story, too” and that  “their songs still permeate our lives,” Leslie views “Now and Then” as a song based on Lennon’s last words to McCartney in the hallway of the Dakota, “Think about me every now and then, old friend.” However, highlighting the romance inevitably distracts from the fact that the song and the official video with its doctored clips of Beatles “now and then” is being presented to the world as a technologically achieved Beatles reunion. While George Harrison’s searing guitar was the defining force in the 1994 “reunion” that produced “Free As a Bird,” this time it’s Paul who “came up with a slide guitar part played on a lap steel guitar,” according to the liner notes, “in homage to George,” who had dismissed “Now and Then” as “rubbish” when they first tried to work with the demo in the late nineties. more