April 2011
10 posts
5 tags
You're Not a Star Until They Can Spell Your Name...
RICHARD SCHICKEL
Out of the Past: Teeter’s © Dorothy Braudy Stefan Kanfer Tough Without a Gun:
The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart
Alfred A. Knopf, February 2011. 304 pp.
Since the publisher uses the word “definitive” to describe Tough Without a Gun in its catalog copy, perhaps it might be useful to provide a working definition of “definitive.” At the...
6 tags
Soft-Voiced Big Men
MEGAN ABBOTT
In The Pink © Keith Proctor 2009 Robert Crais The Sentry: A Joe Pike Novel
Putnam, January 2011. 320 pp.
Late in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, Philip Marlowe, the inceptive knight-errant detective, receives help from a mysterious stranger. A “big redheaded roughneck” with “violet eyes, like a lovely girl,” Red Norgaard suddenly emerges out of nowhere, provides...
4 tags
Flesh and Blood
BENJAMIN BALINT
Street art by Know Hope, Foma <3, Tel Aviv, Israel David Grossman
To the End of the Land
Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.
Alfred A. Knopf. September, 2010. 592 pp.
On August 12, 2006, in the waning hours of the second Lebanon war, Israeli Staff Sgt. Uri Grossman, still a couple weeks shy of his twenty-first birthday, was killed—his tank struck by a...
3 tags
We Revolt Ourselves
DANIEL TIFFANY
Meet Me At the Bridge © Donald Bracken Timothy Donnelly The Cloud Corporation Wave Books, September 2010. 176 pp.
Timothy Donnelly’s second book of poetry arrives with considerable fanfare. The Cloud Corporation is a scary bedtime book, one that sometimes slips into a gothic mood, sometimes rehearses an idyll, and sometimes toys with the apocalypse. It’s not...
7 tags
Life of the Party
KATHRYN SCHULZ Sarah Bakewell How to Live: or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Other Press, October, 2010. 400pp. For as long as self-help books have been around, highbrow readers have seen fit to sneer at them. When Samuel Smiles published the original of the genre, Self-Help, in 1859, one representative detractor called him “the arch-Philistine” and...
4 tags
Black Blood: Ross Macdonald and the Oil Spill
JEFFERSON HUNTER
Sometimes I Wonder (On Doing An Evil Deed) © John Finneran 2009
“Three or four miles beyond the end of the pier, a half-dozen oil platforms blazed with lights like leafless Christmas trees. And off to the north, like a menacing West Coast Statue of Liberty, a giant gas flame flared.”
– The Blue Hammer (1976)
There are many reasons to read Ross Macdonald’s...
4 tags
Flea Market
RICHARD PRINCE
Photographs by Miroslav Tichý The following essay on the photographer Miroslav Tichý, who died last week, is excerpted from Richard Prince: Collected Writings, to be published by Foggy Notion Books in September.
I came across Tichý’s work in a book I found in a store on Bond St. in NYC, two three years ago. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at. I didn’t know if I was...
12 tags
The Other Nancy Mitford
JANE SMILEY
Let’s pretend that we know no more of Nancy Mitford than we do of Shakespeare, that we have a tempting outline of her life with one or two intriguing details, but no family notoriety, no volumes of letters, no newspaper articles or gossip. In fact, let’s pretend that Nancy Mitford’s novels weren’t written by the famous Nancy Mitford but by some entirely obscure Mary Smith, who...
11 tags
Buster Keaton and the World of Objects
GEOFF NICHOLSON
“The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The famous occasion, Los Angeles 1929: after a party in Buster Keaton’s Beverly Hills villa, Buster persuades Louise Brooks and Bill Collier (who’s also sometimes known as Buster) to drive with him to Culver City, to the MGM lot where the studio has provided him with a...
5 tags
The Death of the Book
BEN EHRENREICH
Dirty Book #1 © Tom Benedek 2011
Pity the book. It’s dead again. Last I checked, Googling “death of the book” produced 11.8 million matches. The day before it was 11.6 milion. It’s getting unseemly. Books were once such handsome things. Suddenly they seem clunky, heavy, almost fleshy in their gross materiality. Their pages grow brittle. Their...
