Frank Tashlin is the author of the children’s book The Bear That Wasn’t—“a pop visionary” according to Richard Brody in the current New Yorker. He also was a Hollywood director famous for his comedic gags, well used in Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin movies like Artists and Models and Hollywood or Bust, which have been showing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music recently. We’d thought we’d share the love by sharing the trailer for Hollywood or Bust. Very funny.

The Republican National Convention. In Haight-Asbury. In 1967. With Emmett Grogan as host.

Okay, okay, you might be sick of hearing about Mitt, but what about his father? What happens when Digger Emmett Grogan meets George Romney, from Grogan’s memoir Ringolevio. Read the rest of the story at the Daily Kos.

        One day a strange thing happened which afforded Emmett a golden opportunity to scare the living shit out of a man who might have been and still may be elected President of the United States. It was late in the afternoon, and he had just finished delivering most of the Free Food with only a few more stops to make before he completed his rounds, when he turned south of Buena Vista Park and drove down to Broderick Street, where there was a giant crowd gathered in front of Huckleberry House, the referral center for runaways. The street being blocked by the throng, he pulled over to have a look at what was taking place.
        As soon as he stepped from the pickup, he heard someone calling to him from atop the front stairs of Huckleberry House, insisting, ‘Emmett! Emmett Grogan! Come on up here! Come on!’ It was one of the ministers and leading officials of Glide Church which administered the referral center, and Emmett did what he was told and went up the stairs and inside where he was introduced, with the usual reference to his being a ‘legendary myth,’ to none other than the then Governor of Michigan, George Romney, and his pert, little wife Lenore, both of whom were touring the country to test the water for his upcoming campaign as a candidate in the Republican primary elections for President of the whole goddamn country—
         Emmett was impressed when George Romney told him that he’d been hearing about his fine charitable work among the poor and misguided youth who found themselves alone and hungry and away from home on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, and he had the utmost respect for the alms-giving services that Emmett and his fellow ‘What do you call them? Oh, yes, Diggers!’ were doing for the young people of the nation who strayed to San Francisco.
        A coincidence popped into Emmett’s mind, and he couldn’t pass up the chance to see if he could pull off a fabulous score—the kidnapping of the governor and his wife. In the most sincere and charming tone of voice he could muster, Emmett informed George and Lenore Romney that coincidentally, at that very moment, there were more than one hundred Indians from his home state of Michigan eating in the park with the ‘hippies,’ and it would be wonderful and extremely thoughtful of the governor and first lady to stop by and visit with the people from home. He didn’t have to say anything about what good publicity it would be for the folks back in the Midwest. The good governor had already weighed its value, and Emmett watched as it registered with a click of his eyes and a cluck of his tongue.

John Berger drawing Tilda Swinton, on top of a copy of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years. (Apologies if the video isn’t working, it was having problems earlier).

Renoir père et fils

When I think that I might have been born into a family of intellectuals! It would have taken me years to get rid of all their ideas and see things as they are.

—Jean Renoir, in Renoir, My Father, his biography of his father the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Renoir père’s early work was recently the subject of an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel called “Renoir. Between Bohemia and the Bourgeoisie: The Early Years” (reviewed here). And many of Renoir fils’s films are being shown at the Film Forum in New York as part of their “The French Old Wave” retrospective, including Toni, A Day in the Country (based on a Mauspassant short story), Boudu Saved From Drowning, The Rules of the Game, and Grand Illusion.

Oh Daphne, DAPHNE

Sure, maybe it’s just your generic “this old house is full of seeeeeecrets and and irons you could never find at Restoration Hardware” schtick, but, let’s face it, everyone who wrote after du Maurier owes a debt to du Maurier. “The Birds”? That was her, too! So, obviously du Maurier is a genius, let’s talk about Rebecca. 

Don’t Look Now but The Awl has a lot, and I mean, a lot to say about Daphne du Maurier. Seriously. 

If you need a soundtrack, here are Dame Daphne du Maurier’s Desert Island Discs.  

Please tell us there’s a Nina Berberova biopic in the works, starring Isabella Rossellini.

Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, working on their Book of Animals.

This Vintage Books My Kid Loves post shows what the finished book looks like (it’s an 8’ long panorama)—including the very whale the d’Aulaires are working on in the photo above.

For more behind-the-scenes photographs and rare images from the d’Aulaires’ 25-odd children’s books, see the new d’Aulaires’ Children’s Books Facebook page.

It’s always the right moment for a quip from M. Jules Renard
via the Atheist Meme Base

Boisterous Russian Wits

      Like the countless domed churches and monasteries with their
towers and crosses scattered over sacred pious Russia, countless numbers of tribes, generations, nations seethe in all their variety and rush over the face of the earth. And each and every nation which carries its innate promise of strength, which is full of the soul’s creative abilities, its own well-defined peculiarity and other gifts of God, is distinguished by its own word by which it expresses any object and reflects in that expression a part of its own special nature. Knowledge of the heart and wise insights into life distinguish the Briton; the Frenchman’s ephemeral word flares and disintegrates like a frivolous dandy; the German will ingeniously devise his own clever but insubstantial word, which only the few can understand; but there is no word which has such verve, such boisterousness, which bursts right from the breast, which boils and quivers as a wittily spoken Russian word.

—from Donald Rayfield’s translation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. This reflection on  different languages’s ability to find the right word—with plenty of Russian pride—is inspired after our hero, Chichikov, has asked a local peasant directions to the local landowner, the miser Pliushkin, and the peasant has referred to his master as a “botcher” combined with “a very appropriate other noun, not admissible in polite speech, that we omit here.” Hence begins a discussion that will make a translator think twice: how to translate “a wittily spoken Russian word”?

writersnoonereads:

No one reads Henry de Montherlant (1895-1972), a French essayist, playwright, and novelist who ended his life by swallowing a cyanide capsule and then shooting himself—an excess in keeping with his personality.

Montherlant belongs to that class of writers one is forced to recommend in apologetic tones. (Other notable figures in this canon include Hamsun, Celine, Highsmith, and Pound.) Despite being a bestselling and celebrated novelist—Les Célibataires (The Bachelors, 1934) won the Grand Prix de Littérature de l’Académie Française and his tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles (The Girls, 1936-39) was translated into a dozen languages—Montherlant presents a trying case.

Yet, if you can make it past his haughtiness, cynicism, pederasty, “black-hearted misogyny” (B.R. Myers, in an appreciation published in The Atlantic), his collaboration with the Germans during the Occupation, and the withering criticism directed at him by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, you’ll find a writer of immense talent who has seen his star eclipsed by lesser, if dimmer, lights.

When the publisher of the only Montherlant novel still in print in English translation—the political satire and reckoning, Chaos and Night (NYRB)—describes the work as ”sardonic, bemused, [and] without hint of consolation,” it’s not surprising that he remains unread. But, as is the case with such writers like Emmanuel Bove, the sheer gumption of being so resolutely contrary has its merits. All readers could do with such a challenge. Montherlant may be one of the most entertaining to undertake.

ohyeahandbytheway:

From THE EXPENDABLE MAN by Dorothy B. Hughes. #books #words (Taken with Instagram)

Memoirs of a Revolutionary in The Guardian, again.

When I first read these memoirs, as a young would-be Soviet historian at the time of their first publication in English, the paragraph that struck me most poignantly and remained imprinted was Serge’s confession that ‘the feeling of having so many dead men at my back, many of them my betters in energy, talent, and historical character, has often overwhelmed me, and that this feeling has been for me the source of a certain courage, if that is the right word for it.’ This remains one of the great lines in the annals of revolutionary memoir. On rereading, however, I found myself equally moved by Serge’s rueful meditations on the uses of human reason. ‘Many times,’ he writes, ‘I have felt myself on the brink of a pessimistic conclusion as to the function of thinking, of intelligence, in society’, even to the point of wondering whether ‘the role of critical intelligence’, which he had exercised so often and at such costs to himself, might not be ‘dangerous, and very nearly useless’. He banishes such thoughts rather lamely with the remark that societies need critical thinking and ‘better times will come’—but then adds, with more conviction, that in any case, the use of the critical faculty is ‘a source of immense satisfactions’ to the thinker. Perhaps, after all, we can regard the life of Victor Serge, perennial critic and dissenter, as, in a certain sense, a happy one.

—Sheila Fitzpatrick, reviewing Memoirs of a Revolutionary in The Guardian. Fitzpatrick was one of the leading figures of the second generation of “revisionist” historians working on the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s. Her early work focused on the social mobility of the early Soviet era, emphasizing that, though bloody, Stalinist purges enabled educated people from the lower classes to move upward in Soviet society, and therefore fulfilled some of the purposes of a democratic revolution. Serge himself, as Fitzpatrick points out in her review, was both a witness of the intolerance of criticism towards the Soviet regime (and the brutal suppression of it) and a critic of its undemocratic governance, but ultimately continued to believe in the Bolshevik revolution as a necessary movement towards (Serge’s words) “total transformation.”

Dorothy Baker and David Park

Back in the early years, when Dorothy Baker wrote Young Man with a Horn, it was with real admiration that David spoke of Dorothy spending night after night sitting in speakeasies in New York City, soaking up the jazz and impressions of the musicians. Her book was published in 1938, with David’s small drawing of a horn on the book jacket. At that time Howard and Dorothy were living in the apartment next to ours in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My sister and I watched with fascination as David and Howard made a “chair” by a four-way clasp of hand over wrist and carried Dorothy up the narrow stairs when she came home from the hospital after the Bakers’ first child, Ellen, was born….

Howard [Baker, Dorothy’s husband] wrote that “the Parks brought music and art, all that sort of thing, with them wherever they were.” I have the copy of Young Man with a Horn that Dorothy gave my parents. On the flyleaf she wrote, “To David and Lydia without whom this book could never have been wrote.” David loved the inscription and when he showed it off, it was always with a big belly laugh.

—Helen Park Bigelow, David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back

Sharp eyes will have noticed that our Dorothy Baker books always feature cover art by David Park. In fact, Cassandra at the Wedding is dedicated to Park’s memory. So it seemed necessary—to us at least—to pair the work of these two artists, who were so close in their too-short lives, in these editions.

If you aren’t familiar with the work of David Park, read Sanford Schwartz’s appreciation of him in the New York Review’s blog in 2009.

Thomas Browne at the Mini-mall

Homage to Sir Thomas Browne by Anne and Patrick Poirier. Photograph from Literary Norfolk

Today, Norwich, where Browne lived for much of his life, commemorates its most famous resident with a sculpture of his brain near the place of Browne’s internment. A pamphlet about the sculpture cheerily notes that Browne “was very ‘brainy’” and that “his house was approximately where the café Pret a Manger is now.” I like the idea of Browne’s brain presiding over an unremarkable commercial domain—Shoe Zone Limited, McDonald’s—because mundanities excited his curiosity as if he were a child. He would have spent hours in the nearby Body Shop, inquiring about the provenance of its salves, lecturing bored clerks on what marvels the ancient Romans had achieved with fennel.

—Alexander Nazaryan writes about Thomas Browne in the 21st century at The New Yorker’s Page Turner blog

Cassandra at the Wedding

Of course, nothing illustrates so vividly as family the essentially unsatisfactory nature of being a person. The first thing one learns in life is that the self is a partial thing; at the very moment of birth one is consigned to terminal separateness. The one attribute we can be sure that we all share is incompleteness. And perhaps that’s our strongest suit, because without it where would we be? Off alone, each of us, in his or her own little tree house, complete, fulfilled, entirely happy in the perfection of solitude—no love, for example, and no family.
      If we sought the company of others only for help, say, in building our individual tree houses, human associations would last no longer than it takes to pound some nails into a board. Surely, among the things that draw us together with such binding force is the painful longing to fit our own jagged, torn edges together with those of another, to become complete. And if we think of love as the oblique and approximate remedy for this painful longing which Plato describes so vividly, we could say that family is the arena in which we first encounter that remedy’s comical and terrible disappointment. 

—from Deborah Eisenberg’s afterword to Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding. Cassandra is a smart young girl living in Berkeley in the early 60s and very close to her identical twin sister, Judith. Judith’s upcoming marriage to her nice but slightly bourgeois doctor boyfriend from Connecticut in their familial ranch in the Sierras throws Cassandra into an emotional tailspin. Next week we’ll be releasing Baker’s first novel, Young Man with a Horn, both with cover art from the Bay Area Figurative School painter David Park.