A teenage Ray Bradbury with Marlene Dietrich.
I was madly in love with Hollywood … I skated all over town, hell-bent on getting autographs from glamorous stars. It was glorious. I saw big MGM stars such as Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Ronald Coleman. Or I’d spend all day in front of Paramount or Columbia, then zoom over to the Brown Derby to watch the stars coming or going. I’d see Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen—whoever was on the Coast. Mae West made her appearance—bodyguard in tow—every Friday night.
I don’t know what this meant in the 19th century, but I can’t stop picturing one of the dudes I went to high school with swinging through the rigging in his hair net and buttoned up flannel.
The book that keeps on giving.
Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling.
- I am reading Moby Dick now and it’s great.
Interior of an iron mine.
From The underground world, by Thomas Wallace Knox, Hartford, 1877.
(Source: archive.org)
Got this yesterday, but I have to let April read it first so she can tell me if it’s safe for me to read. #comics #Superman #ManofSteel
Oh good, I was worried that Superman would not be as hot and modern as I was hoping. Those are the two words I want to hear when discussing Superman, so…
PS: It is pretty weird to see previews of the hot new movies of the summer featuring SUPERMAN, IRON MAN and THE GREAT GATSBY.
(Emphasis mine.)
I wrote a review of a really weird old Robin Hood book. It has trolls, sort of.
Robert Bloch, 1985 | Kindly submitted by A. Kearns
Fantastic Bates Motel letterhead, as used for many years by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho.
I’ve always loved “The Story of My Dovecote”. It’s one of those short stories that affects me deeply – and differently – every time I read it. And these last years I go back to it fairly often. What I find most fascinating about it is the two radically different frequencies vibrating through the story simultaneously. That is, if you ask me what the story is about, I will tell you that it’s about a boy who has done well in an exam and goes to the market to buy pigeons for his dovecote. Simple as that. That’s undeniably the plot of the story. But if you catch me at a different time, I will tell you that it’s a story about the history of Jews in Russia, about Cossacks and antisemitism, about corruption and pogroms, about fragility and loss and love and loyalty and man’s inhumanity to man. That, and pigeons.
This is great and Isaac Babel’s been dead since 1940, but is still the best. Take a half-hour and listen.
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
- Robert Graves (So true. And I feel the same way about Citizen Kane.)
A lion from Paris.
J-J. Grandville, from Vie privée et publique des animaux (Public and Private Life of Animals), under the direction of P. J. Stahl, Paris, 1867.
(Source: archive.org)
As proof of my readiness to accept autobiographical convention, let me at once record my two earliest memories.
- Robert Graves can’t even write the first sentence of his autobiography without being weird and sort of cranky.
At no other production will you witness so many tears shed on the stage over the plight of desolate widows and miserable orphans, over lost children and butchered babies, over Jewish daughters murdered and Jewish wives dishonored in bestial pogroms. And the rib-tickling humor, laughter, and Jewish wit heard on our stage cannot be beat. At no other production will you hear such sweet melodies sung by famous leading ladies and see such exciting dances by the loveliest dancers in the world.
- An ad for a fictitious Yiddish-American play in Sholem Aleichem’s Wandering Stars, page 280.
About Half Mandrill, Half Mandela
