Cantara’s (Social) Notebook

What, no Bramwell? The Bronte sisters, painted by Bramwell

A negro man came along the shore toward them, collecting the grunion quickly, like twigs, into two pails. They came in twos and threes and platoons and companies, relentless and exalted and scornful, around the great bare feet of the intruders, as they had come before Sir Francis Drake had nailed his plaque to the boulder on the shore. “I wish for another pail,” the negro man said, resting a moment. “You’ve come a long way out,” said Stahr. “I used to go to Malibu, but they don’t like it, those moving picture people.” A wave came in and forced them back, receded swiftly, leaving the sand alive again. “Is it worth the trip?” Stahr asked. “I don’t figure it that way. I really come out to read some Emerson. Have you ever read him?” “I have,” said Kathleen. “Some.” “I’ve got him inside my shirt. I got some Rosicrucian literature with me, too, but I’m fed up with them.” The wind had changed a little, the waves were stronger further down, and they walked along the foaming e...

This October (on the seventh, to be exact) marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of one of America’s greatest imaginists. Here for your delectation is not one of his usual shivery slimy nightmares but a very satisfying tale indeed of love, revenge and menchhood...

Mailer’s first short story published by Esquire is this view of army life during the Korean War. It’s appropriate reading for Mad Men fans who’d like to understand better where Dick Whitman’s coming from. SUBSCRIBE TO MY OCCASIONAL NEWSLETTER. CLICK HERE. _____

Here are mine for the moment: Ulysses by James Joyce (already read, bears rereading) Heaven and Hell by Emanuel Swedenborg (ditto) The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (always meant to read) (Also see " Happy Birthday, John Sayles, or Which Three Books Would You Choose? ") SUBSCRIBE TO MY OCCASIONAL NEWSLETTER. CLICK HERE. _____

Most of them are dead now and the handful of survivors are in their 90s, but today the Spanish goverment is finally officially honoring the veterans of the 1936-39 conflict. It’s difficult to interest a generation that doesn’t even remember Vietnam—and can’t even organize a group effort to blow up party balloons—in the Spanish Civil War, but I’ll try to break it down: Good guys: Republicans—defenders of the young, struggling, democratic, egalitarian, legally-elected republic Bay guys: Loyalists—supported by Nazi troops and Nazi state-of-the-art weapons, they wanted the king returned to the throne and everything back the way it was, which was hunky-dory for the rich/landed/influential/well-born There were a few times back in the twentieth century—that parent of all our present troubles—when people were called on to actually, you know, take a risky stand for what they believed in . One was for civil rights (Michael got knocked about in Selma over that one), another was for the Spanis...

As the Sandra Bullock biopic, Grace , seems to be dead in the water (after five years, it’s now nowhere on Bullock’s IMDb slate) it’s pretty much fair game to discuss now. A shame that the life of controversial author Grace Metalious may never be seen on screen, because it’s a corker of a story. So how oh how did Naomi Foner (Naomi Foner- Gyllenhaal at the time) get first dibs to write the screenplay back in 2004? The problem is, a high-minded entity such as Ms. Foner has no business delving into the life of a woman like Mrs. Metalious, if for no other reason that if she’d met Grace in real life she would have cut her dead, as the rectitudinal ladies of Gilmanton, New Hampshire did when Grace’s tell-all novel, Peyton Place, hit the bestseller list and opened their town to public scrutiny. I remember reading Peyton Place in the late 60s. It was one of those dog-eared paperbacks that was passed around from girl to girl in high school. We were on the bri...

Because I hung around with the wrong crowd high school, and because I used to date the editor-in-chief of the late lamented H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror , I know a little something about the Cthulhuian Mythos. So trust me when I say that Lovecraft’s cosmic overlord is not so much your usual slimy tentacled monster, but rather a permeating apprehension of erosion, mutation, alienation, annihilation, violation, madness and existential dread . This is best to keep in mind when you add Dan Gildark and Grant Cogwell ’s 2007 award-winning film Cthulhu —loosely based on H.P. Lovecraft’s novella, The Shadow Over Innsmouth )—to your Netflix queue. Forget about popping some popcorn and settling back for a cheap fright. This is a personal vision film, one that requires some close watching. Fortunately it’s also visually striking, and directed with the seductive pace of Korean horror films. The story is simple: Urban man returns to his beautiful-yet-creepy island childhood home (he’s...

You ever wonder how history makes it into the textbooks? If you’re like me a child of the ’60s I'll bet you never realized that the story you learned in high school of one of the most important eras in American history was the handiwork of one questionable academician and his cronies, called collectively the Dunning School. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the subject: [The Dunning School] was named after Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning (1857-1922), whose works and teachings in the early 20th century on Reconstruction were influential. He supported the idea that the South had been ruined by Reconstruction. He contended that freedmen had proved incapable of self-government and thus had made segregation necessary. Dunning believed that allowing blacks to vote and hold office had been “a serious error”. As a professor, he taught generations of scholars, many of whom expanded his views of the evils of Reconstruction. The Dunning School and similar historia...

A post ago I mentioned a book that was on my mother’s “adult” bookshelf, The Big Love by Mrs. (note the Mrs.) Florence Aadland, As Told to Tedd Thomey. This is the first line, which has stayed with me ever since my first trembling pre-pubescent encounter with this tome: “There’s one thing I want to make clear right off—my baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn.” Wow. Take that, Call me Ishmael. Eat dust, Happy families are all alike. Apparently finer minds than I were taken by this Hollywood Babylon memoir, for none other than William Styron wrote a nine-page(!) introduction to the 1986 reprint, declaring it to be “a work of such striking originality...that one may declare it a masterpiece without hesitation.” What did I miss? I only read it for the sex.

Today marks the forty-fifth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, and there isn’t a great deal I can add to the dialogue at this late date—my feelings at the time were pretty much the same as any other eight year-old . But there is this: I remember a few weeks later one afternoon I was home alone during the holidays, when I was looking through my mother’s semi-forbidden “adult” bookcase for something to read (for a Catholic woman she had very strange reading tastes: The Big Love , Florence Aadland’s tangy account of her teenaged daughter’s affair with Errol Flynn, was on her shelf, as was A History of Orgies and Milton’s Paradise Lost ) and found her entire collection of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! paperbacks. I have to explain that they weren’t really books, simply compilations of the newspaper feature that the superb illustrator Robert Ripley made so famous. The books were mass-market paperbacks and old even in ’63, practically crumbling around the edges, I re...

The three books passed around most by the girls when I went to high school in Minneapolis in the late 60s: Peyton Place Valley of the Dolls Coffee, Tea or Me? I can’t say the boys shared “real” books, but they were into comic books, chiefly: All the permutations of Weird Tales Anything by Robert Crumb

In my teens I had an enormous crush on Tony Perkins and it's easy to see why—his boyish vulnerability was devastating to thousands of girls besides me, not to mention an equal number of boys. He won my heart playing Gary Cooper's nervous-around-women son in a lovely period drama called Friendly Persuasion , lost it with Psycho , but won it again with Psycho II . Boyish men you want to simultaneously feed cookies to and jump are devastating to me, I guess. But my favorite is Goodbye Again , which was based on Francoise Sagan's Aimez-Vous Brahms?

The Library of America has just brought together in a single volume four of Philip K. Dick’s most original novels from the 1960s: Hugo Award winner The Man in the High Castle (1962) which describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), which posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality and an interplanetary drug tycoon can transform himself into a godlike figure who can transcend death; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic society where status is measured by the possession of live animals and religious life is focused on a television personality; Ubik (1969), which depicts a future world of psychic espionage agents and cryonically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory “half-life”, pursues Dick’s theme of simulated realiti...