This magnificent red door is Engine Company No.47’s firehouse on West 113th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway in Manhattan. It’s often a sight on the daily neighborhood stroll. The following is from the Landmarks Preservation Commission Report June 17, 1997, “Building Description Engine Company No. 47 is a 25-foot wide, three-story brick and brownstone structure, faced with classically-inspired brownstone and…
A city stroll east across north end of Central Park and the Harlem Meer in brisk and windy November weather. Still lots of color in New York City parks. Destination: The Museum of the City of New York on 5th Avenue and specifically the Richard Rauschenberg exhibit. Looking south across Harlem Meer Looking west across Harlem Meer After the Rauschenberg…
I read a review of a “The Folded Clock: 100 Number Poems” that made this poetry collection peculiar enough to be intriguing. I recommend the review as a great introduction. The author is Gerhard Rühm, an author, composer and visual artist; he’s regarded as one of the key figures in the postwar European (neo)avant-garde, and his work crosses boundaries. He…
I started on a shelf-clearing exercise which – of course – was doomed from the get-go. I mean – if you are sorting through books, it’s guaranteed that you will very quickly find something that you must immediately sit down and read. The culprit in this particular case was a novella I’ve read twice before but – as the last…
When I think of the Durrell family, it’s Gerald who comes to mind as the one with the sense of humour. Back in my teaching days, the scene with the mother scorpion in the matchbox who launches herself at brother Larry (see sidebar) was always a surefire hit and led to all kinds of lively writing assignments. I’d always thought…
Where Not there, on the tight bend of the paved highway, where cars are occasionally prone to skidding, chiefly in winter, though no one dies there, not there where streets are greener and leafier where lawns are mowed and there’s a dog in the garden and the head of the family gets home late at night, nor there in front…
My first book for the #1925Club was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes where Anita Loos makes several sly, satirical references to the journalist, critic and public intellectual H. L. Mencken. He is unmistakably the model for one of her characters and a source of some of the book’s humor. Mencken admired Loos’s wit and he was one of her literary champions. She wrote it…
Karel Čapek’s Letters from England (1925) “’You must begin from the beginning,’ I was advised, but as I have now been for ten days on this Babel of an island the beginning has got lost. What am I to begin with? Fried bacon, or the Exhibition at Wembley? Mr. Shaw, or the London policemen?” That is how Letters from England…
Here are two poems by H.D. neither of which were written in 1925 but both of which were included in her Collected Poems of that year. Storm You crash over the trees, you crack the live branch— the branch is white, the green crushed, each leaf is rent like split wood. You burden the trees with black drops, you swirl…
Agatha Christie’s “The Witness for the Prosecution”: Truth, Lies, and a Perfect Performance Christie published The Secret of Chimneys in 1925 and you can read an amusingly scathing review here. I am sure others may have more positive things to say. But Christie also published something else that year – a short story that has had a remarkable second life …
“Richmal Crompton, I salute you.” That is the final sentence of Kate Atkinson’s afterword to her novel A God in Ruins. (2015). She is acknowledging, of course, her debt to Crompton’s William stories. Atkinson’s novel follows the life of Teddy Todd – would-be poet, bomber pilot, husband, father, and grandfather – as he navigates the turbulence of the twentieth century.…
The Illuminating Diary of a Professional LadyReading Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes “A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would…
“While sketching in the street, Eardley would set her easel up on a child’s pushchair. Andrew, then twelve, cheekily asked, ‘Do you want to paint me, missus?’ And she did. Ann remembers: ‘My mum said to Andrew, “I want to know where you’re going after school.” And he said, “I’m going to a woman’s house.” She got him by the…
Parody and Where Engels Fears to Tread “One always apologises for writing parodies; it is a disreputable activity, ranking only a little higher on the scale of literary activity than plagiarism. A minimum demand is that what is parodied be widely successful—a tulip craze of some sort. This gives the parodist the luxury of feeling that he is doing useful…
I keep returning to Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th Century British Painting because it’s that kind of book – one that invites rereading. Neve’s introduction is a guide to how to read the book which is not an art history survey of schools or influences, but a reminder that landscape painting is never just scenery. It is about…