BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE:THE JOYS OF READING

By royal  decree, all ships stopping at Alexandria had to surrender any books they were carrying; these books were copied, and the originals (sometimes the copies) were returned to their owners while the copies (sometimes the originals) were kept in the library.
 
  Alberto Manguel. A History of Reading 
(Viking Penguin, 1996)
**

EXHIBIT AT THE GROLIER CLUB

"In Our Second Floor Gallery

"To Fight for the Poor with My Pen: Zoe Anderson Norris, 
Queen of Bohemia"
March 2 – May 13, 2023

"To Fight for the Poor with My Pen" is the first exhibition to explore the legacy of Gilded Age author and reformer Zoe Anderson Norris (1860-1914). Writer and publisher of the magazine The East Side (bimonthly, 1909-1914), Norris focused on immigrants and outcasts in dire straits, sometimes working undercover to expose issues that still resonate: street peddlers harassed by corrupt policemen, powerful men going unpunished for sexual harassment, and trafficked sex workers pleading for help escaping the streets. Known as a Queen of Bohemia, Norris also founded the Ragged Edge Klub, which met for weekly dinners combining activism and dancing. A few days after completing the last issue of The East Side, which described her recent dream that she would die soon, she suffered fatal heart failure—and her prediction made headlines in newspapers nationwide."

**
…Susan Sontag arranged her books chronologically. She had told The New York Times that it would set her teeth on edge to put Pynchon next to Plato.

 

Anne Fadiman. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 10005)


DONALD RANARD ALMOST SELLS HIS RECORD PLAYER 
TO NELSON ALGREN & SIMONE DeBEAUVOIR


One afternoon, years later, I was driving home from work, 
when I happened to hear a story on NPR about Nelson Algren
 and his 20-year, on-and-off-again love affair with, of all people, Simone de Beauvoir. Could any two people have seemed less suited for each other? She was the convent-bred, Sorbonne-educated product of a well-to-do French family, a brilliant student who went on to become a feminist icon. He was a tough guy from a working-class family in Chicago who preferred a poker game to a literary salon and low life to high society. (He liked to quote Whitman: “I feel I am of them—I belong to these convicts and prostitutes myself/And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?”) Yet there it was: For all their differences—or because of them?—he’d been the love of her life, and she, his. She wore his ring and called him her husband; he wanted her to live with him. But they couldn’t work out the logistics. She refused to leave France (and perhaps Sartre, her former lover, now her platonic companion); he wouldn’t leave Chicago. Without his beloved losers—drifters and grifters, hustlers and hookers—who would he write about? Things became even more difficult after the FBI, under the petty and vindictive J. Edgar Hoover, took away Algren’s passport because of his refusal to denounce the communist party—he’d once been a member—and his lifelong support for left-wing causes. There was also tension between the two writers: He never wrote about his friends; in her novels, that’s all she wrote about, and he’d been hurt by some of the things she’d written about him. 
The affair petered out, but not the love. When she died, she was buried, next to Sartre, with Algren’s ring on her finger. He’d died several years earlier, killed by a heart attack, after exploding in anger at a reporter for asking personal questions about de Beauvoir."

This piece in a slightly more expanded form appeared
originally on https://www.litromagazine.com


Don Ranard is a widely-published essayist, travel & short-story writer his  writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, New World Writing Quarterly, The Best Travel Writing, and many other publications. 

**
Dear Editors:

Rupert Holmes says he keeps The Maneuver by
Heimlich on his night stand just in case he "chokes
on popcorn in bed." It strikes me that readers who dine
in bed might be inspired by a few companion titles close by:
       Good By Mr. Chips by James Hilton
       Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg
       Hard Candy by Tennerssee Williams
       Licorice Pizza by Santana
       The Big Book of Peanuts by Charles Schultz
       Wild Strawberries, screenplay by Igmar Bergman
       Death by Chocolate by Sally Bernathy
               etc.
     Add Digest by Reader's to the night stand?
     
Sincerely,
Louis Phillips
**

AMINA CAIN’S LIST OF FAVORITE TITLES
  

In her book on writing  -- A Horse In Night – 
Amina Cain  writes that “A good title offers 
something acute  without being obvious, without 
giving something away.”

Her list of titles she is envious of:

 Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole
A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector
2666 by Roberto Bolano
The Middle Notebooks by Nathaniel
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsey
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
Aug 9 –Fog by Kathryn Scanlan
Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark
Ban en Barlieue by Bhanu Kapli
 

Amina Cain. A Horse at Night: On Writing (St. Louis, MO, 2022)]**

As good as those titles might sound to Amina Cain, for my
taste not one of those ranks with The Loneliest of the Long
Distance Runner or The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.  
**
ON THOMAS MANN'S THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

"...The Magic Mountain announces, right from the outset,
an obsession with time. Asv Hans Castorp (another ingenue protagonist) winds his way up through mountains to the Davos sanatorium to visit his tubercuoar cousin, the space through which his train chuffs starts to take on "the powers we generally ascribe to time." Numerous temporal meditations follow. -- on duration,on persistance, continuity, recurrence."

Tom McCarthy. "Recessional, or the Time of the Hammer" in Typewriters Bombs Jellyfish (New
York: New York Review of Books, 2017)

**
TYPEWRITERS BOMB JELLYFISH

“Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish” 
title of a collection of essays by Tom McCarthy

O those crazy writers,
Schmucks with typewriters
As Samuel Goldwyn, 
Jack Warner, Harry Cohn
Or some studio head called them,
Cannot be trusted with
QWERTYUIOP
To save their lives.
One minute they are inviting
Invaders from Mars
To destroy our planet,
The next they are on boats
Near the Mariana Trench
Tossing Smiths & Coronas,
Underwoods, Olivettis
Onto transparent heads
Of innocent jellyfish.
Have tarnished knights
Of outdated electric Royals
No shame as they bomb
Jellyfish & small scallops,
Entangling forests of coral
In red & black ribbon?


LJP