January 15, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Spirited Ghosts By Sadie Stein Elizabeth “Mrs.” Gaskell. The other evening, my friend Patrick was telling me about his recent visit to Plymouth Grove, the Manchester home of the Victorian writer Mrs. Gaskell. The house was restored and reopened to the public in 2011; it contains many of the author’s personal effects, as well as period interiors. It’s now, he says, evocative and interesting and, appropriately, haunted. Or so the docents say. In addition to her novels—socially conscious books like Ruth and North and South, or the beloved Cranford—Mrs. Gaskell wrote ghost stories. And she liked to tell them, too: an article written later in Putnam’s Monthly describes tales of “Scotch ghosts, historical ghosts, spirited ghosts with faded uniforms and nice old powdered queues.” Her Gothic Tales is a must for any aficionado of intricate Victorian ghost stories. Read More
January 14, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Heartfelt By Sadie Stein This week, I started obsessively revisiting the 1997 album Closed on Account of Rabies, which features Edgar Allan Poe poems and stories interpreted by the likes of Jeff Buckley, Marianne Faithfull, Christopher Walken, and Debbie Harry. (David Bowie, in case you’re wondering, was not involved, although I think some Bowie-related rabbit hole led me back to it.) Read More
January 13, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Ballad of the Gossip Hangover By Sadie Stein Toledo Street Scandal, 1895. A few weeks ago, I woke up one day feeling awful. I inventoried my symptoms. I didn’t seem to be getting sick. I hadn’t had too much to drink. Was it food poisoning? No—the slight ache in my stomach wasn’t, exactly, physical. And then it all came crashing back over me, and I realized the truth: I had a gossip hangover. Read More
January 12, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Alias By Sadie Stein Amador Lugo, Perro con Gatos, 1933. Back when our family dog was not dead, he would vacation at the home of a woman named Janet. Hank was a pound mutt with shepherd coloring and terrier brains and a sensitive, Mr. Chips–like face that spoke of past sufferings. He and my dad were inseparable, which made his visits to Janet’s a big deal. Hank adored my father; they frequently duetted on renditions of “Memory,” and the dog spent hours sitting in my dad’s office while he worked. My dad never minded his mange or his foul breath. The only other star in Hank’s universe was a former baby toy of mine, a truly revolting specimen known as Bear, which one tried to avoid touching as much as possible. Read More
January 11, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Arcadia By Sadie Stein John Gielgud in Chimes at Midnight. This is weather for inspiration: for films and books and good listening. If you’re in New York, go see the new restoration of Orson Welles’s 1966 Chimes at Midnight. (Or Midnite, as it says on the Film Forum marquee.) If you’re not, you’ll be able to see the Criterion release soon anywhere you like. The alternate title is Falstaff: the film is Welles’s compendium of all the Falstaff material to be found in Shakespeare, welded into a cohesive, idiosyncratic unit. Welles, of course, is Falstaff. Jeanne Moreau plays a bawd. Read More
January 8, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited By Sadie Stein From Pocket Atlas. There’s a book I’ve returned to again and again, ever since its clementine-orange cover first caught my eye at a museum bookstore: A Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky, translated from the German by Christine Lo. Read More