What Are You Reading

[Harp]

The Age of Scalia, Jamal Greene; 130 Harv. L. Rev 144, Nov 10,2016 & Response by Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash

Interesting views of the late Olympian.

 

[Fading Fast]

Finished "Youngblood Hawk" by Herman Wouk.

I've read most (not all) of Wouk's books and he doesn't know how to write a bad one, but he does write great ones and some that are just good. I'd put "YH" in the just-good category that, while ironically about an author who needs extensive editing, needed about 200 of its 800 pages edited out.

 

[AmateisGal]

The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan, a wonderful, breezy novel set in England/Scotland and featuring a heroine whose dream is to own a bookshop and ends up buying a van and creating a mobile bookshop in a small Scottish village. It's exactly what I needed to read today, something fun and light.

 

[Harp]

Paula Fox, The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe

 

[AmateisGal]

Finished the Jenny Colgan novel. Now I'm starting The Perfume Garden by Kate Lord Brown.

 

[jacketjunkie]

I just finished Owen Meany by John Irving. Cried my eyes out. A habit I indulged in very frequently during this read. It's set in the 50s and 60s and deals with Americas politic in that period, following the story of young Owen Meany, a very religious and special boy who believes God has a purpose for him. My second favourite Irving right after Hotel New Hampshire.

 

[Fading Fast]

Just finished "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk" by Kathleen Rooney. A fictionalized novel very loosely based on the life of a top female advertising professional in NYC from the '30s. The Novel flips back and forth between the now 84 year old woman taking a New Year's Eve stroll through her old haunts and different personal and professional defining moments in her life.

Similar to other books, like, for example, "Radio Girls," this one has a decent premise and historical connect, but, IMHO, makes a holistic mistakes. The author is so interested in showing that his or her character is politically / socially progressive that they come off as historically unbelievable as they get almost everything "right" by today's liberal standards back in a time when even the most progressive held views not consistent with all of today's political pieties.

This "perfect" or near "perfect" political view ruins the flow and historical feel of the novel. My grandmother was a struggling and, ultimately, successful small business owner from the '30s - '60s. She told me stories about those times and I got to know her very well before she passed away. Hence, I tend to enjoy stories about women in business in those days. And while my grandmother was ahead of her time (she wasn't alone, but less women owned businesses in those days), she was a product of her era and held progressive views for her days, but not ones that align perfectly with today's progressive outlook.

It would be more effective and accurate if these talented modern authors were more concerned with creating historically accurate characters that reflected the political views (liberal, conservative, radical, what have you) of the period in question, than ones that are unbelievably perfectly aligned to today's political views.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The New York Daily Mirror for Monday, March 21, 1927.

The Mirror was only three years old at this point, and was very much the weak sister behind the Daily News in the ferocious battle for the tabloid-newspaper pennies of Charlie Straphanger and Janie Gumchew. It was Hearst's first attempt at a tabloid paper, in imitation of the News, and its masthead sets out the brave claim "New York's BEST Picture Newspaper." This is, if you know much about New York's tabloid papers in the twenties, somewhat akin to calling your garbage barge the BEST garbage barge in the river. Even in its best days of the 1930s and '40s, all the Mirror ever had going for it was Walter Winchell and Joe Palooka, and in 1927 both of those attractions were still some years in the future. The Mirror at this stage of its life is a shabby gutter rag, with journalistic standards that make the News seem like the Christian Science Monitor by comparison. Shall we wallow thru this issue together?

Page one is a corker. Under the Mirror masthead -- which pictures a demonic-looking clown face in a Grecian wig grinning back at the reader from a crude drawing of a shaving mirror -- we see a one-word screamer headline in 180 pt block gothic: STRANGLED. Three photos fill the rest of the page, and we skip quickly past the biggest one -- DERELICT BLIMP FOUND DRIFTING AT SEA -- to pounce enthusiastically on two smaller cuts. ART DIRECTOR STRANGLED WITH PICTURE WIRE shows an ambulance crew carrying a shrouded body ouf of 9327 222nd Street in Queens and toward a waiting ambulance. Next to this is a photo of Police Commissioner George V. "George The Fifth" McLaughlin standing in front of the house with a bilious look on his face, while a bluecoat points ominously to the left. "Police theorize that an enraged friend did the crime," reads the caption.

(And so began New York's most notorious murder case of the twenties -- that art director was Albert E. Snyder, and it will soon be revealed that he wasn't done in by an enraged friend, but by his wife, Ruth Snyder, and her lover, thick-headed corset salesman Judd Gray. But all that is yet in the future, so we turn the page...)

Page two tells us that IL DUCE PROTESTS ABOUT JUGO SLAVIA, but our eyes are directed to a young girl in a Dutch bob showing her calf to a kneeling, shirtsleeved man in a stubby necktie. This is thirteen year old Olga Maylust of 1519 3rd Avenue, and the gent is her dad, examining an injury inflicted upon his daughter by the wild taxicab ride of one John Smith, who is being held in Homicide Court for the death of 23-year-old Susan Robertson of 403 East 83rd St. and the injury of 7 others. A photo of Mr. Smith finds him glaring with thyroid eyes at some distressing sight out of camera range.

Page three is where the action is. MAN SLAIN BY PICTURE WIRE! WIFE, TIED AND DAZED, QUIZZED BY POLICE ON QUARREL AT GAY PARTY! It seems that Mrs. Snyder is being questioned at Jamacia police headquarters and tells detectives that a mysterious intruder ransacked the house and killed her husband.. VICTIM HEAVILY INSURED, reads a subhead, casting obvious aspersions in the direction of the grieving widow. A drawing to the right of the two-column story shows the position of the unfortunate Mr. Snyder upon his discovery, with captions pointing out that his hands were tied with a towel and his feet by a silk necktie. Mrs. Snyder's feet were tied with clothesline, but her body was unmarked, and no marks of violence visible on her hands or face.

Did you know that Gulden's Mustard is a wholesome seasoning free from pepper?

Page 7 features a photostatic cut of a letter sent to the Mirror by Albert Pike, representing the Ku Klux Klan Klavern #2 of the Realm of New Jersey, defending the Constitutional rights of one Franklin Ford to make the remarks he made in a recent radio talk delivered over station WHAP. A subscript advises that the letter was "approved in Regular Klonclave held Mar. 16th 1927," over the signature of E. C. Sanberg of Rutherford, N. J.

On Page 8, Francesco Caruso of Brooklyn is on trial for stabbing Dr. Casper S. Pendola to death after Caruso's six year old son died of diptheria while under Dr. Pendola's care.

ONE OF THE MOST PROFITABLE INVESTMENTS YOU CAN MAKE -- ROXY THEATRE STOCK! WE EMPLOY NO SALESMEN! SAVE COMMISSIONS! D. SHORE INC., 142 West 42 St, Cor. B'wy, phone Wisconsin 4698-4699-6227.

On page 10, SLAYER OF BROTHER ASKS DEATH IN CHAIR! NYPD patrolman Roy Perkins, it seems, wants to die after shooting his brother Joseph to death, and is seeking execution after failing in a suicide attempt.

ROXY THEATRE SECURITIES! WONDERFUL OPPORTUNITY FOR PROFITS IN WHICH YOU SHOULD PARTICIPATE. WILL YIELD IN EXCESS OF 9 1/4 % AT PRESENT PRICE! SIGN COUPON TODAY OR PHONE BRYANT 3994-3995. MORRIS SECURITIES CO. 1476 Broadway.

HEY! YOU BALDHEADS! YOU CAN GROW HAIR QUICK! MONEY REFUNDED IF I DON'T GROW HAIR ON ANY HEAD UNDER 45 YEARS OLD if baldness was not caused by scars or burns. MAIL THIS FREE COUPON NOW! The Vreelands, 9093 Euclid-Windsor Bldg., Cleveland Ohio.

William A. Cain of Staten Island wins $100 in the Mirror's "I'm The Guy" contest, with prizes awarded for snappy sayings along the lines of "I'm the guy who put the this in that!" Mr. Cain's entry? "I'm the guy who took HOBO out of HOBOKEN, put him in the ARK at NEWARK, gave him a WASHING in WASHINGTON, and left him with a nip of GIN in VIRGINIA." The photo of Mr. Cain shows a fellow with a remarkable resemblance to Rudolph Nebb of "The Nebbs," a popular Mirror comic strip.

"The Nebbs" appears on the very next page, with a complex plot going on involving a smalltown land investment deal in which poor Rudy appears likely to take it in the neck once more.

On the editorial page, Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. opines about the ridiculousness of titles of nobility, and the foolish way in which too many Americans are dazzled by Tarnished Titles. As opposed, I guess, to those who are dazzled by "Jr." appended to the name of a famous capitalist.

Photos in the centerspread: 11 year old Andrew Weber of Brooklyn got his arm caught in a BMT turnstile and had to be extricated by the fire department, and poor little 2 1/2 year old Lillian Bauerle of the Bronx had two of her fingers bitten off by a horse while she was roaming loose in the streets. The horse has not been found.

Comic strips on the next page include "Dumb Dora," which is exactly what it sounds like, a goofy office-gal strip done by Chic Young before he created "Blondie," and "Cash and Carrie," which does it better by featuring *two* goofy office-gals, drawn to look exactly like Clara Bow and Kay Francis.

On the radio, the medium is still deep in its potted-palm infancy. Amos and Andy are still Sam and Henry, and nobody in New York has heard of them yet. But Harry Horlick and the A&P Gypsies are on WEAF at 9pm, and if you want to really hear something, stay up till 11 and tune in WMCA for a live broadcast by Clayton, Jackson, and Durante, direct from the Parody Club. Perhaps Jimmy will do his "Wood!" bit, and demolish the piano on the air.

NOSES REMODELED, REDUCED, RESHAPED, RECONSTRUCTED! NO PARAFFIN, NO FILLING. By DR. O. C. STACKHOUSE, FACE LIFE STUDIO , 243 W. 34th St. FREE NOSE BOOK SENT ON REQUEST.

The Daily Mirror Dog Exchange offers a brown female Airedale, who would love a nice yard to call her own where she could bury her treasures. Pity Ruth Snyder never thought of that.

Broadway is where the action is in this spring of 1927. Gertrude Lawrence is appearing at the Imperial in the Gershwins' "Oh Kay!," Leon Errol staggers across the stage of the Shubert in "Yours Truly," Ethelind Terry is "Rio Rita" at the Ziegeld, supported by Wheeler and Woolsey, and there's an eight-week waiting list for tickets to see Clark & McCullough at the Lyric in "The Ramblers." For movies, "The Big Parade" is into the second year of its run at the Astor, "Metropolis" -- in its incoherent American edit -- is playing at the Rialto, John Barrymore stars in "The Beloved Rogue" at the Mark Strand, and William Haines is opening tomorrow at the Embassy in the world premiere of "Slide Kelly Slide." If vaudeville is your thing, the Palace features Elsie Janis, Raymond Hitchcock, and Jack Norworth and Dorothy Adelphi as The Naggers.

Ed Wheelan's wonderful "Minute Movies" is in full swing with Episode 18 of "Fingers Of Fear," starring Dick Dare and Hazel Dearie.

Here's a comic strip adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy." Obviously Brother Hearst wasn't paying much attention, and didn't know Dreiser's a Red. A comic strip adaptation of Will Durant's STORY OF PHILOSOPHY tells the story of Spencer, who never tires of arguing against government interference. Now that's more like the Hearst we all know and love.

RELIEF FROM ITCHING PILES WITH FAZO OINTMENT!

In sports, Ty Cobb is a creaky old man playing out the string with the Philadelphia Athletics, but he's still got enough in his bat to knock the Giants down in a spring training game. And the Brooklyn Robins beat the St. Louis Browns, which isn't really much of an accomplishment, but hey, it's only March.

Policy Pete wants us to bet 7-2-6 today. He also suggests $5 on Singing Cricket in the 2nd at New Orleans.

Mitchell the Tailor at 2 Columbus Circle will make any suit to measure IRRESPECTIVE OF SIZE in all wool worsted blue serge for just $12.75. The accompanying illustration shows a man with a haircut straight from 1912, and shoulders that make him appear to be the front end of a pantomime horse costume.

The back page has another screamer head, COP KILLS BROTHER -- over photos a series of ingenues who GOT THEIR START THROUGH MIRROR. Among them is Joan Crawford, Metro Star, who apparently robbed a baby grand piano of its shawl to make the dress she's wearing in the picture.

And that's the New York Daily Mirror for Monday March 21, 1927. If anybody sees you reading it, tell 'em you found it on the D train.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧

Did the 1920s have a "pepper scare" or something?

Great game theory advertising for curing baldness by acknowledging its limitation (wrapped inside a complete and total lie)

Didn't one of the Vanderbilt sons move to England and buy a title?

To this day, I still don't understand why pitchers can't hit since they could in the past.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Pepper was a common adulterant in cheap brands of mustard -- you could get away with using less mustard powder by adding pepper to keep the tang and coloring it with more turmeric to mask the adulteration. Gulden's proudly kept free of such chicanery.

It was Consuelo Vanderbilt, Connie Jr.'s sister, who bought a marriage into the British aristocracy. Obviously some unresolved issues in that family. But you'd think Junior could do better than write for a Hearst tabloid -- even Princess Alexandra Kropotkin got into "Liberty."

 

[Fading Fast]

Pepper was a common adulterant in cheap brands of mustard -- you could get away with using less mustard powder by adding pepper to keep the tang and coloring it with more turmeric to mask the adulteration. Gulden's proudly kept free of such chicanery.

It was Consuelo Vanderbilt, Connie Jr.'s sister, who bought a marriage into the British aristocracy. Obviously some unresolved issues in that family. But you'd think Junior could do better than write for a Hearst tabloid -- even Princess Alexandra Kropotkin got into "Liberty."

If there's a way to cheat - it will be tried.

I thought a son or grandson also moved to England, but I'm sure you're spot on as always.

Edit add: I was thinking of an Astor. I always confuse my ridiculously wealthy turn-of-the-19th-Century American families and their scions.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Looking over some 1945 issues of "In Fact: An Antidote For Falsehood In The Daily Press," journalist/critic George Seldes' famous investigative newsletter, devoted to exposing corruption in the mass media.

This morning, it's the April 9, 1945 issue, and the lead story is something of a bombshell: an expose of radio's "Town Meeting Of The Air," broadcasting's most famous public-affairs forum of the Era. Every week the Town Meeting presented a panel of newsmakers discussing some pressing issue of the moment, who would be questioned, not by professional journalists, but by members of the public in spontaneous, unrehearsed questions from the floor. Or so moderator George V. Denny insisted you believe. But Seldes here presents impeccable, documented evidence that the program was, in fact, as rigged as a '50s game show -- and that the rigging was specifically done to line up with the agenda of none other than the National Association of Manufacturers under the influence of the program's sponsor Reader's Digest magazine, a publication with well-documented ties to the NAM. Seldes presents proof that key questions asked on the program -- and the answers given by certain panelists to those questions -- are pre-written to conform with the NAM line, and that the audience members "randomly chosen" by Denny to ask the questions are, in fact, NAM shills planted in the audience with Denny's cooperation.

This is something of a shocker even to me. I have listened to dozens of surviving Town Meeting broadcasts, and while I've always sensed that certain viewpoints tended to be given more weight than others, it never occured to me that the whole thing was a frameup. As far as I've been able to find, no radio trade publication carried any discussion of this story -- no doubt because the NAM wanted it quashed. But it just goes to demonstrate once again that the media in the Era was every bit as dirty and corrupt as it's ever been.

 

[Fading Fast]

Started the Lizzie-recommended "Fashion is Spinach" last night. I'll report back when done which might take awhile as I'm spending too much of my reading time on Fedora .

 

[Benzadmiral]

Finished "Youngblood Hawk" by Herman Wouk.

I've read most (not all) of Wouk's books and he doesn't know how to write a bad one, but he does write great ones and some that are just good. I'd put "YH" in the just-good category that, while ironically about an author who needs extensive editing, needed about 200 of its 800 pages edited out.

Hey, it's an epic. When you finish it, you feel as though you know Hawke, his mother (God, what a character!), the editor girl (Jeannie?), and every other member of the huge cast. I'm a firm believer in shorter is better, usually -- but I'd have a hard time picking scenes or chapters to cut.

No, YH is not Caine Mutiny, but like that one, Hawke's story is so well told it almost reads itself to you, as I said after I finished Caine.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Just finished a reread of Elmore Leonard's first Detroit-set crime novel, Fifty-two Pickup, which I must have read originally before the 1986 movie came out. Otherwise I'd have pictured the lead character, Mitchell, and his wife as looking like Roy Scheider and Ann Margret from the film. They were, I suspect, perfect in it. Leonard handles the plot deftly, as he did with his Western novels, and hasn't yet started that "careful reproduction of street criminals and sc*mbags talk" that, to me, make some of his later books hard to follow.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Reading John Bentley's The Perilous Path, a novel about car racing in the late 1950s. Racing has never been a font of good plots for either fiction or film so we'll see how this turns out. So far the atmosphere, Nassau and NYC then moving to Europe is good.

Period detail is a bit odd because, like many at the time and earlier, Bentley dislikes to identify name brand specifications. . . .

I firmly believe it was Ian Fleming who started the trend of boldly naming brands -- Rolex, Bentley, Beretta, Stetson (in one novel a character describes Bond as wearing a Stetson), Ronson, and loads of others. This is in contrast to his contemporary and admirer, Rex Stout, who created his own brand names in the Nero Wolfe stories, as you mention John Bentley does here: Marley and Carson guns, Heron and Wethersill automobiles, and more. (Here and there, though, Stout would use some of our world's brand names, like Cadillac.)

 

[Fading Fast]

Hey, it's an epic. When you finish it, you feel as though you know Hawke, his mother (God, what a character!), the editor girl (Jeannie?), and every other member of the huge cast. I'm a firm believer in shorter is better, usually -- but I'd have a hard time picking scenes or chapters to cut.

No, YH is not Caine Mutiny, but like that one, Hawke's story is so well told it almost reads itself to you, as I said after I finished Caine.

His mother was an awesome / infuriating character. Jeannie was a bit too wonderful for my tastes and her marriage to Karl made no sense for her super smartness. It's the first Wouk book I ever felt needed to be cut back.

Did you / anyone ever read his late-in-life book "A Hole in Texas?" It's a nice short (for Wouk) book that isn't complex like most of his other works, but moves you along nicely. Also, his explanation of the Higgs Boson is better than any other lay explanation I've ever read - helped me to understand it.

 

[Doctor Strange]

The new Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. His retelling of these fascinating ancient stories is in plain language, like you're sitting around the fire listening to the clan elder speak, with allusions to bring the stories down to our level ("Midgard is where your great-grandfather, and his great-grandfather, and his great-grandfather lived.") His primary source is Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (c.1220), which I had read in translation for a college mythology course many years ago, so the contours of the storytelling are familiar.

And yes, the retelling of these stories by such a gifted fantasist is very worthwhile. As I've often said here, I believe the stories that humanity tells over and over - and that change to fit the times (like wily Odysseus recast as Batman and Captain Kirk) - frequently tell us more about ourselves than studying history.

 

[MikeKardec]

I firmly believe it was Ian Fleming who started the trend of boldly naming brands -- Rolex, Bentley, Beretta, Stetson (in one novel a character describes Bond as wearing a Stetson), Ronson, and loads of others. This is in contrast to his contemporary and admirer, Rex Stout, who created his own brand names in the Nero Wolfe stories, as you mention John Bentley does here: Marley and Carson guns, Heron and Wethersill automobiles, and more. (Here and there, though, Stout would use some of our world's brand names, like Cadillac.)

VERY interesting. That seems to make sense in a 'cultural thematic' level as well as just a historical one ... not that I have any great regard for getting too intellectual or symbolic about things. It's just that, if it's not the absolute truth, in some way it should be because of the kind of continued impact Fleming has had. Good to know. I may quote your theory!

 

[Harp]

The Problems with Originalism, Ken Levy, New York Times 03/22/17

Gorsuch Kabuki Theater hearing and originalism screed; hardly enigmatic, yet this judge aces Teflon.