Eric Hanson's Blog, page 8
October 10, 2009
Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up
On October 20, 1928, Dorothy Parker reviewed "The House at Pooh Corner" in the New Yorker magazine. It was an inspired pairing. A. A. Milne was a cozy writer most famous for light verse about bunnies and honeybees. Parker was the most savage wit of the Algonquin round table, whose remarks were avidly recorded by the New York columnists. Parker's book reviewing byline was Constant Reader. Not surprisingly Parker found Milne's book about stuffed animals painfully twee, and she decided to say so...
October 9, 2009
Naked Lunch
William Burroughs published his seminal work in October 1959, in Paris, where novels of this sort were usually published. Then to be smuggled back into England and the U.S. in the suitcases of graduates of the Sorbonne, and young women who had gone to France to "be finished." I have a feeling, though, that the last of the Beat novelists would have blushed at some of the passages in Updike and Roth. Despite looking as if he'd slept the previous night in a seedy hotel, Burroughs was an heir to ...
October 8, 2009
Chez Panisse and Gourmet Magazine
Alice Waters' restaurant Chez Panisse entered the public consciousness thirty four years ago after a rave review appeared in the October 1975 issue of Gourmet magazine. Waters was 31. Suddenly everything changed. Foodies began to camp outside the restaurant. People started calling from other time zones asking for a reservation. Alice's restaurant is still there, just a few steps up from a busy commercial strip in Berkeley, but Gourmet magazine is ceasing publication this month after 68 year...
October 7, 2009
The Death of Che Guevara
On October 8, 1967, Che Guevara was leading a small group of revolutionaries in a remote valley in Bolivia when he was captured by government forces. As the soldiers moved in he shouted "Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead." He was executed early the next afternoon. He was 39. The CIA agent who had been hunting for him took Guevera's Rolex for a souvenir. Che Guevara, motorcyclist, physician, revolutionary and t-shirt icon, appears five times in A Book of A...
Howl
Allen Ginsberg was six years-old when his mother was committed to an insane asylum. He was 18 and a student at Columbia when he met Jack Kerouac. He was expelled from the university the next year and joined the Merchant Marine. In 1948 he was back in New York, sitting in his Harlem apartment, when he had a vision of the poet Blake. He described it as "a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise." But writing poetry didn't pay the rent, so he got a ...
October 6, 2009
Lumberjack, Parrot-Fancier, Geographer
Last week 66 year-old former Python and world traveler Michael Palin was elected president of the Royal Geographical Society, one of those clubbish, leather-armchaired institutions that maintains vague associations with the Royals and underwrites expeditions to save tropical butterflies. The RGS supported the expeditions of Edmund Hillary, Charles Darwin, Robert Falcon Scott, Stanley and Livingstone, and Richard Francis Burton, all of whom appear in A Book of Ages. Most of the Society's past ...
October 4, 2009
A Letter to 84 Charing Cross Road
Sixty years ago today, on October 5, 1949, Helene Hanff wrote a letter to a bookstore in London. Marks & Co. was located at 84 Charing Cross Road; Miss Hanff was located on East 95th Street in New York City. She'd read their ad in the Saturday Review (a magazine once influential and now dead) and asked if they could send her "clean secondhand copies" of books on a list she enclosed. Hazlitt, Stevenson, Leigh Hunt––she loved books of essays. Also English authors, mostly 19th century. (In the l...
Apollo 11
On October 4, 1969, former German rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun watched the Apollo 11 moon landing with the other NASA scientists on the little TV's at Mission Control. He was 57. Thirty years earlier he'd been designing rockets for Germany to use in the destruction of London. Wernher von Braun appears four times in A Book of Ages.
October 3, 2009
Patriotic Gore
Gore Vidal first enjoyed the public gaze at age three when he became the first child to fly across the United States in a plane. He's enjoyed attention ever since. A preening, arrogant, articulate, intelligent, entertaining scold. A critic of almost everything Americans do or say or think, but a defender of our rights to be as stupid as we are, which makes him the most valuable kind of American: a troublesome patriot. I like Barbara Ehrenreich's line: "Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-...
October 2, 2009
Peanuts
On October 2, 1950 Charles Schulz debuted his new comic strip in seven newspapers. The syndicate paid the 27 year-old cartoonist $90 a month. Peanuts. Schulz appears 13 times in A Book of Ages.
