Recommended Reading: Two Invaluable New Web Sites…

…belonging to Yvette Biro and J. Hoberman. Let’s hope that both of these resources will grow and grow.

And meanwhile, here is a link to my review of Jim’s next-to-most-recent book. [10/02/11] Read more

Apology

Through a gross blunder on my part, I’ve just deleted all my posts in this section and under Notes over the past six weeks and all the future posts I had set up to go out over the next few weeks! Until or unless I can find a way of recovering some or all of these, the usual “new” content on this site will have to be held in abeyance. If anyone who works with WordPress and knows anything about recovering lost content can help me out with this, I’ll be immensely grateful; please email me at jonathanrosenbaum2002 at yahoo.com.  Update, a few hours later: thanks to cached posts on Google, I’ve recovered most or all of the older posts by now, as users of this site can see. But I haven’t yet found a way to recover any of the future, not-yet-posted texts. I also no longer recall which long reviews from the Reader I had scheduled (which are easily recoverable, but only if I can identify which ones they are), so if any readers happen to notice any of these missing texts from this site, I’d welcome hearing about them. — J.R., 10/1/11 Read more

A Double Standard at the Library of America?

Until recently, it has appeared that the Library of America has completely embraced the contemporary gentrification of “trashy” crime fiction to the highest ranks of literary canonization while it has almost as completely rejected the premise of according this same treatment, or anything that even distantly approaches it, to science fiction or western fiction. (I’ve already posted a little bit about this issue, last month.) But now that Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. have recently entered LOA’s Hall of Fame, I wonder how unreasonable it might be to hope that, say, Ray Bradbury (see below), Fredric Brown, Robert Heinlein, Henry Kuttner and/or C.L. Moore (see below), and Theodore Sturgeon (see below), among others, might be among the next in line for consideration. (I wouldn’t presume to list any candidates for canonizing western fiction.)

There will always be differences and disputes regarding LOA’s choices, of course. And the fact that I prefer Philip K. Dick’s Pi in the Sky to most of the 13 other Dick novels selected by Jonathan Letham for LOA, or that I value Charles Willeford’s four Hoke Moseley novels of the 1980s as literature far more than his second novel, Pick-up (1955), doesn’t factor in various other considerations, such as editor Robert Polito selecting Pick-up as one of the five novels included in LOA’s American Noir of the 1950s volume, whereas there isn’t an American Noir of the 1980s volume edited by anyone. Read more

THE SIRENS OF TITAN etc.

It’s more than a little unnerving to discover that the “canonized” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. collection that Library of America is bringing out on June 11 excludes my favorite work of his — his mind-boggling second novel (1959), The Sirens of Titan, by all counts his wittiest and most profound — as well as Mother Night (his third, 1961), another major work.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that Library of America is planing one or more other Vonnegut volumes, thus theoretically making room for the first three novels (Piano Player in 1952 was his debut effort) as well as more of the late and relatively weak ones, along with his play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, and other stories. But the weird thing about LOA’s canonizing is that it creates contestable and uncomfortable groupings, even when they’re simply chronological; for me, Cat’s Cradle (1963) belongs squarely with the two novels preceding it, not with the three that came afterwards. This isn’t quite as grotesque as collecting William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in the same volume as his Soldier’s Pay, Mosquitoes, and Flags in the Dust (the longer version of Sartoris), which the Library of America also did, but it’s still bothersome. Read more

Princess Theater, Florence, Alabama in the 1930s

Another priceless photograph from the Facebook page Remembering Florence. Rajah Raboid (1896-1962), advertised above the marquee, was a vaudeville magician born with the name Maurice Kitchen who toured with Johnny Eck (the “half-man” from Freaks) as well as Eck’s normal-sized twin in a show called Mysteries of 1937. I don’t know the precise or even approximate date of this photograph. — J.R. (2/5/11)

Stanley Rosenbaum House, Florence, Alabama, November 1943

I recently discovered this photograph, for the first time, on a Facebook page called Remembering Florence that has lately been growing to astronomical proportions. I estimate that I must have been somewhere between eight and nine months old when it was taken. I don’t even remember the tree in the right foreground, but I love the way the glass doors visible on the left reflect another part of the house’s exterior. According to normal terminology, this is the “back” of the house, but I believe that Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed it in the late 1930s, would have called it the “front”. Below is a photo taken (I think) on the same occasion, which we would call the “front” of the house and Wright would have called the “back”. (The house’s extension, built after my two younger brothers were born, in 1948, changed the overall shape. For more details, go here, or check the more contemporary color photos I’ve just added, shot from different angles.) (2/1/11)

Click on people’s faces in the photo to tag them. Bonnie will be asked to approve all tags before others can see them.

Thomas Frank on the government

“The government fails the people of New Orleans when they are hit by a hurricane, fails to notice the cadmium paint in the marketplace, does a lousy job educating our kids, can’t keep the libraries open or the park lawns mowed, overlooks the catastrophic shortcuts taken by its pals in the oil-drilling industry — and all we can do to express sour frustration is elect candidates who promise to hack it down even more.”

–“Servile Disobedience,” Harper’s magazine, February 2011, p. 7 [1/23/2011] Read more