Category: Writing
A GHOST STORY by MARK TWAIN I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years until I came. The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among…
THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW by Washington Irving FOUND AMONG THE PAPERS OF THE LATE DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER. A pleasing land of drowsy head it was, Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye; And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, Forever flushing round a summer sky. CASTLE…
The dark, malignant side of Charlotte Brontë, which flashes fiercely through the pages of her “Jane Eyre,” sets the tone for the moody film version of this great novel, which came to the Music Hall yesterday. No depths of consuming passion are plumbed very diligently in this film. No haunting…
Cagney played a supporting role to Edward G. Robinson’s lead – I’ve never seen it but there’s supposed to be some pre-code naughtiness – a Warner Bros. gangster film from 1931 – when they used real gunfire on set. I shudder to think.
If you were to ask me to name my favorite season I’d hesitate for a moment, then pipe up with an emphatic, “Autumn!” when Halloween rolls in on a pumpkin tide (thank you, Richard Brautigan for the first poem I remember reading) and the weather turns cool in Sleepy Hollow,…
I’ve been traveling. From the east… To the high plains… To the south west… Following a road that filled my heart. When I opened my eyes this morning I was in my own bed, under the red tile rooftop of a place I’m very familiar with. And as I often…
When we were very broke, those first years in New York, Hammett got a modest advance from Knopf and began to write The Thin Man. He moved to what was jokingly called the Diplomat’s Suite in a hotel run by our friend Nathanael West. It was a new hotel but…
…In retrospect hijacking a telephone code was the least of Billie’s sins that summer, and since she’d stopped attending confession about the same time she stopped taking piano lessons, she never atoned, achieving a state of grace was the furthest thing from her mind. What she wanted was out. Out…