Archives for October 23, 2012

Now that I’m no longer shuttling between New York and New Haven for rehearsals of Satchmo at the Waldorf, I’ve got time to troll through cyberspace for interesting goodies. Here’s some of what I’ve found there:
• Courtesy of the Library of America, here’s a 1939 article from Theatre Arts in which Morton Eustis describes what it was like to watch George S. Kaufman, who directed the first productions of most of his own plays, stage the Broadway premiere of The Man Who Came to Dinner.
• From The Wall Street Journal, Paul Johnson supplies a list of his five favorite short biographies.
• John O’Hara reviewed Jazzmen for The New Republic in 1939, and he managed to say some interesting things in between the self-conscious, self-serving asides that were, here as always, a feature of his non-fiction writing.
• I blush to admit that I’d never read Paul Schrader’s Notes on Film Noir. Now I have.
• Speaking of film noir, my friend Sarah Weinman is very smart about Dorothy B. Hughes, who (among other things) wrote the novel on which Nicholas Ray’s film In a Lonely Place was based.
• Alec Wilkinson interviewed Neil Young for The New Yorker and was startled to discover that he doesn’t read books–and is proud not to do so.
Finally:
• Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, explains how to write a thriller. His apologia is unintentionally funny, but interesting withal.

From 2004:

Would I go to the library if there were a good one in my neighborhood? Probably–but I’m not so sure. When I was young I read in great shelf-emptying gulps, thereby accumulating the intellectual capital off which I’ve been living for the past quarter-century. Now I read far more selectively, concentrating on new titles, though I also re-read books habitually. I operate on the principle that any book worth reading more than twice is a book worth owning, and my shelves reflect that belief. I’m sure that the Web has cut down considerably on my library-related needs, but it may also be that libraries simply don’t have as much to offer me as they used to….

Read the whole thing here.

“The bottom line is heaven.”
Edwin H. Land (quoted in Christopher Bonanos, Instant: The Story of Polaroid)