May 15

As a long-time enthusiast of obscure and neglected books who once produced a small, amateurish zine called the Rediscoveries Newsletter, I am delighted that it seems to be in the Internet's DNA to bring renewed attention to many such books. The mother lode is the Neglected Books Page, which recently found a treasure-trove of recommendations in some 1934 issues of The New Republic:

http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=341

The "Friday's Forgotten Books" series that a number of mystery bloggers contribute to is excellent:

http://georgekelley.org/

As part of that series, Bill Crider -- whose taste in humor I have good reason to trust, as his blog Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine makes me laugh every day! -- points to four comic thrillers by Frank McAuliffe, including one that, like Donald Westlake's newly published novel Memory, waited about four decades for its first publication:

http://billcrider.blogspot.com/2010/05/forgotten-books-shoot-president-are-you.html

In a model of how to work a negative point into a review while still appreciating the work at hand, Paul Devlin at The Second Pass praises Robert Alter's Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible while gently taking him to task for leaving African-American writers out of his evidence:

Most curiously and egregiously, Alter declines to include any works by African-Americans. I bring this up not out of political correctness, but because there is a mountain of King James Version-influenced literature that was not considered. It’s as if Alter has hit a grand slam and declined to step on home plate. In such a great book, it’s perplexing that Alter should write something so myopic as, “African-American culture, for example, has been famously steeped in the Bible, and so I initially assumed that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, one of the major American novels of the mid-twentieth century, would be perfect for my inquiry, but unfortunately a renewed inspection of its prose revealed only oblique and episodic links with biblical style.” And that’s all he has to say about that, as if Invisible Man were the only African-American text written in the last 200 years.

http://thesecondpass.com/?p=5624

Historian and biographer Graham Robb is interviewed about his new book The Parisians by Christopher Lydon:

http://www.radioopensource.org/graham-robbs-paris-18-arrested-explosions/

I love the story about Miles Davis, Juliette Greco, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir hanging out at a cafe together! I'm also warmed by Robb's appreciation of the narrative strategies of Balzac and Hugo and how they influence him as a historian.

I have always liked The New Yorker style of not so much reviewing a book as noting its subject and qualities and using it as a pretext for an extended piece by one of its own gifted writers (often under the heading "A Critic at Large"). Claudia Roth Pierpont's excellent essay about Duke Ellington and racial issues uses Harvey G. Cohen's new book Duke Ellington's America (which sounds exciting) as its starting point. The description of Ellington's working methods is fascinating, and the closing anecdote about Ellington and Charles Mingus at Yale in 1972 is a dilly.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/17/100517crat_atlarge_pierpont?currentPage=all

Leah Ollman at the Los Angeles Times relates Michael Light's photographs of the American West to a lengthy tradition:

Artists interpreting the landscape aren’t capable of neutrality and never have been. They can’t help but see through the eyes of our species and its needs. Just as we need something to project awe onto, we also need something to extract resources out of, and the earth has long served that double duty. When Timothy O’Sullivan photographed in the Western states in the late 1860s and 1870s, he was part of several government survey teams charged with providing pictorial proof of Western promise, the land’s geological splendors as well as its utility. His extraordinary images (and those by other survey photographers of the era) are the before to Light’s after. 

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/art-review-michael-light-at-craig-krull-gallery.html

http://www.craigkrullgallery.com/Exhibition/Current.html

Among notables born on this date are children's writer L. Frank Baum, novelists Katherine Anne Porter, Mikhail Bulgakov (Russia), and Xavier Herbert (Australia), playwrights Peter Shaffer and Anthony Shaffer (one of the few sets of twin writers of importance), Arthur Schnitzler (Austria) and Max Frisch (Swiss German), painter Jasper Johns, photographer Richard Avedon, cartoonist Ralph Steadman, composers Arthur Berger, Brian Eno, and Mike Oldfield, country singer Eddy Arnold, pop singer Trini Lopez, hippie clown Wavy Gravy, golfer Ken Venturi, baseball players George Brett and John Smoltz, sportscaster Dan Patrick, scientist Pierre Curie, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, film director Mario Monicelli, and actors Joseph Cotton, James Mason, Arletty, Lainie Kazan, David Krumholtz, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Mireille Darc, Chazz Palminteri, and Katrin Cartlidge. I thought I might include Mireille Darc's dazzling pornographic monologue from Godard's Week End here, but on YouTube, ce n'est pas. So here, instead, is Darc singing about (and accompanied by) a helicopter; the song is by the mighty Serge Gainsbourg.