February 25

I'm greatly enjoying Richard Rayner's A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age. It views the Los Angeles of the late Twenties and early Thirties thorough the careers of district-attorney-turned-murderer Dave Clark and and police-photographer-turned-pulp-writer Leslie White. I just reached the chapters on silent film star Clara Bow, which are a hoot:

After a visit to New York, where she hobnobbed with boxer Jack Dempsey, socialite Jack Whitney, and gangster Dutch Schultz, [Bow] announced that she was returning to L.A. because she wanted to have her nervous breakdown "in the proper surroundings."
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Frederic Girnau, publisher of the Pacific Coast Reporter, [a] "political weekly," jumped in with the "facts of the blushless love life of Clara Bow." "'IT' GIRL EXPOSED!" ran the headline. Girnau asserted that Bow had seduced her chauffeur, her cousin, and a pet koala bear.

The list-crazy Daily Beast knows the books you missed (but shouldn't have) during the Oughties:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-28/best-books-you-missed/

The blog Waggish outlines the recent career of Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, offering a helpful theoretical structure for considering his books of the past decade or so:

http://www.waggish.org/2010/02/17/jm-coetzee-summertime

Vulpes Libris acquaints me with the 18th century German poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes:

http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/gods-glory-in-the-garden-the-poetry-of-barthold-heinrich-brockes-1680-1747/

Levi Stahl at Ivebeenreadinglately has been having a grand time with a series of posts on the early 19th century literateur Isaac D'Israeli, author of the multi-volume compendium Curiosities of Literature (and father of novelist and British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli). Here is one of the most recent posts (you can use Stahl's labels to navigate to the others):

http://ivebeenreadinglately.blogspot.com/2010/02/angel-urine-is-not-conducive-to.html

Speaking of big books, they don't get much bigger than a three-inch thick, 1560-page "construction manual" of arcitectural projects (realized and unrealized) by Eric Owen Moss:

http://www.archdaily.com/49009/construction-manual-1988-2008-eric-owen-moss/

Some of Moss's projects are fanciful, but for pure architectural fancy it would be hard to beat this building in Nantes, France by the Coupechoux Design Group. I'm not sure I like it, but I would sure notice it:

http://www.archdaily.com/44427/manny-te%CC%81trarc/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nantes

In addition to hosting the Winter Olympics, Vancouver has made a home for a traveling site installment called the Candahar -- an authentic Irish pub complete with publicans, beer, and actual drinking by visitors. At this rate, everything in your life could be accounted a piece of performance art:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/arts/design/22candahar.html

Today's animal fix is a piece on racing pigeons on the rooftops of New York:

http://therumpus.net/2010/02/pedigree-pigeons/

Among notables born on this date are playwrights Carlo Goldoni (Italy) and Franz Xaver Kroetz (Germany), Beatle George Harrison, Marx brother Zeppo Marx, baseball player Ron Santo, golfer Tony Lema, statesman John Foster Dulles, politician Millicent Fenwick, tenor Enrico Caruso, television writer Larry Gelbart, broadcaster Bob Schieffer, painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, country singer Faron Young, pianist Myra Hess, philosophers Rudolf Steiner (Austria) and Benedetto Croce (Italy), film director Neil Jordan, Portuguese poet Cesario Verde, actors Jim Backus, Tom Courtenay, and Sean Astin, and novelists Anthony Burgess, Gerard Bessette (Quebec), and Karl May (Germany). Third baseman Ron Santo is probably the best baseball player who has not yet been voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame despite years of eligibility; this is not just a fixation of Chicago Cubs fans. He is clearly a much better player than many who are in the Hall, and since he was and is a quite famous player as well as a great one (it is called a Hall of Fame), it is difficult to figure what the voters have had against him. He is next eligible in 2011.