Underbelly

Source: Wiki For the nonce at the gym yesterday, I fired up a Librivox audio of Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle .  You've he...

Washington Irving, already a celebrity of sorts as a literary gent, takes his ease as a guest of the Governor of Granada in the palace/fort...

Actuated by my investigation of The Prince,   I pulled down my copy of its companion-piece, The Discourses , to fill an idle hour the other...

Quick now: who hosted the 1935 Academy Awards?   You don't know, do you?  And if I tell you that the answer is  Irvin S. Cobb will y...

Well, one more Dreiser, but on a hobbyhorse of mine.  That is: we talk with nostalgia about the good old days when we all had jobs. Well, m...

Oh, now I know why I've been rattling on about Theodore Dreiser.  It's because I have been reading Evan Thomas' admirable The W...

Theodore Dreiser and Henry James.   Perhaps not an obvious pairing, but perhaps more durable than might appear at first blush.  Start with...

Does anybody read Dreiser these days?  Mencken admired him, but then, does anybody read Mencken?  I read Dreiser when I was young, thanks t...

There are few cows, since they get eaten.  A cow has legs at its four corners.  Beef patties are made from a cow, everybody gets one patty...

The first time I ever noticed Mark Tushnet was 45 years ago in a class on the history of English law.   He suggested that he thought that m...

While I am waxing nostalgic, it's a good time to catch up with our old friend SJ Perelman and see what he remembers about his sunshine...

For our New England friends, a note on as msrk of summer seen by Henry David Thoreau: [A] word Thoreau associates with summer is “ ...

The spectre of death in a marriage educes differing fears;  Here is Golde, wife of Tevye the Dairyman in the Scholem Aleichem story (not the...

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, for the health of the tourist business, like getting a good writer or performer on your side.,  What ...

My cousin Dave, away from New England near 70 years now, takes delight in his latest discovery: “Never forget that it is we New Yorkers a...

I suppose I should have saved this for October and the celebration of the depradation of the native peoples,  but I just found it now and ...

I seem to have gone through some kind of existentialist phase around 1976.  Here's an item from the card file: In the long run...wh...

Adair Turner's Economics after the Crisis is the kind of book you would want to be read by--well, by the kind of person who would not ...

My friend Larry wrote a novel called When the Sacred Ginmill Closes .  Now this: #FailedNoir When The Sacred Windmill Closes @ lawrence...

Jame Boswell begins to appreciate the douceurs of London life: I breakfasted with lord Eglinton. He generally breakfasts with his fami...