Brian Jay Jones's Blog, page 32

Trip Report, Part 2: Liquid. Medal.

When I last left you — at least for the purposes of this particular narrative — I was in the lobby of the Roosevelt hotel, monitoring text messages from Barb and Madi as they made their way up from Maryland on the train.  They were running only slightly behind schedule (as I said earlier, "on time" for the Northeast Regional seems to mean about ten minutes late), so I arrived in plenty of time to meet them, even after walking the mile or so to Penn Station.  A short cab ride back to the...

Happy Launch Day! (One Day Late, But What Can You Do…)

In all the fuss over the major snowstorm here, I nearly forgot to wish a Happy Launch Day to my colleague James McGrath Morris, whose biography of Pulitzer hit bookstores on February 9.

Know Pulitzer only because of the name of the prize?  Well, then, this book's for you.  McGrath's Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power

traces the epic story of this Jewish Hungarian immigrant's rise through American politics and into journalism where he accumulated immense power and wealth, only to...

Snowpocalypse!

We made it back to Maryland, right in front of the snowstorm.  As we made our way south on the train, there was no sign of snow in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or Delaware.  Then, as we crossed into Maryland, it was as if someone flipped a switch and the flurries began.  By the time we arrived at the train station, the snow was coming down fairly hard, though the temperatures were still hovering above freezing, keeping the roads in decent shape.  We arrived in Damascus just as it was starting...

Back in a Moment…

I'll continue the trip report here tomorrow — at the moment, we're getting everything packed up and ready to head over to Penn Station so we can make it back to DC ahead of the snowstorm that's headed this way.  Everyone I've talked with in DC tells me the snow is not yet flying, and I'm guessing we'll make it back well before the mess begins.

I will say, however, that it was an amazing evening last night at the St. Nicholas Society, spent with some really fantastic people — an evening none...

Trip Report, Day 1: Stuffed!

Hello there.  I'm presently camped out next to the fireplace in the restaurant of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, watching as dozens of men and women in dark suits sit huddled in padded chairs at round tables, speaking business-ese in low voices. Even at 10 in the morning, many of them have their jackets off already, slung over the chair as they shuffle through papers with colleagues.  I'm not certain exactly what they're doing, but it makes for great people watching. It's like a slightly...

New York State of Mind

I'm getting ready to leave for New York tomorrow, provided the snow that's in the forecast stays relatively tame and doesn't sucker punch us the way it did several weeks ago.  So far, so good — it's darn cold, but the snow in the forecast looks fairly benign.

While I'll be receiving the award on Thursday night, I'm heading up tomorrow to take care of both business and pleasure. I'll be having a working lunch to discuss Project Blue Harvest, then spending the dinner hour at an Irish pub with a...

The BIO Conference

Are you an aspiring or published biographer, historian, writer, or just plain interested in books?  You might want to think about attending the first-ever conference of the newly-formed Biographers International Organization, to be held May 15 in Boston.

The brainchild of my colleague and pal James McGrath Morris (whose biography of Pulitzer is due in bookstores in early February) and the result of tons of hard work from folks like Debby Applegate, fellow WBG member Charles Shields, and...

Dog Day Afternoon (and Evening)

Around noon yesterday, Barb and I took our dog Abbey to an animal hospital.  If you're a regular reader here, you know our eight-year-old dog has been hobbled for nearly a year by weak back legs, which our vet initially diagnosed as hip dysplasia.  That seemed to make sense — Abbey's a big dog, and she's got a lot of German Shepherd in her, a breed prone to developing dysplasia. 

But what concerned us was how quickly her condition deteriorated.  At first, she would swing her rear left leg in...

Dog Days

Around noon yesterday, Barb and I took our dog Abbey to an animal hospital.  If you're a regular reader here, you know our eight-year-old dog has been hobbled for nearly a year by weak back legs, which our vet initially diagnosed as hip dysplasia.  That seemed to make sense — Abbey's a big dog, and she's got a lot of German Shepherd in her, a breed prone to developing dysplasia. 

But what concerned us was how quickly her condition deteriorated.  At first, she would swing her rear left leg in...

Toasted

There was a minor stir in the back alleys of American literature yesterday:  for the first time since 1949, the enigmatic Poe Toaster failed to appear at Edgar Allan Poe's Baltimore gravesite yesterday to mark Poe's January 19 birthday.

The Poe Toaster is the mysterious figure — usually in a black coat and hat — who strolls into Baltimore's Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in the early hours of January 19, silently walks to at Poe's gravesite, toasts Poe with a glass of cognac, then...