July 23, 2013 Arts & Culture The California Room By Jessie Kissinger Upstairs in the Norman Feldheym Library in San Bernardino County, California, there is a quiet room dedicated to local history. The California Room is large with a low ceiling and lavender-gray walls. It contains local history books, genealogy tomes, and metal shelves filed with black binders, each brimming with photocopies of old newspaper articles. Among the black binders sleeps the story of Lucille Miller, tenderly filed by a squad of dedicated retirees. Her binder is so full that it barely closes. Papers stretch plastic side pockets, and crumpled white spills over the once clean, black edges. Some pages miss beginnings or endings, and often the print is so small and muddled that the words are almost impossible to read. Between the worn state of the photocopies and the old-style font, it is strange to think that these articles once spread through the local press with jittery contagion for almost five months. Lucille Miller’s story is one of death, a love affair, and a pregnant woman on trial. Joan Didion dubbed it the quintessential “tabloid monument.” Didion was perhaps the first to discover the story, to filter through the newspapers’ fragmentary sensationalism and find the overarching meaning. But in its narrative precision, how perfectly the events align and the characters fit their roles, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” creates a mirror where the tight world of words reflects an unraveled reality. And within this strange symmetry, there’s an awareness of two entities, a woman who lived and a character that served a story. The tension between these women led me to San Bernardino and the California Room. It led me to green-tinged microfilm of the Sun-Telegram and finally to the Miller binder, probably the most complete paper rendering of Lucille Miller’s life and crime. I’m fascinated by that gray area where we translate a person into words, and I wanted to know what remained of Lucille. She came to represent a forgetful and forward-looking culture, but what happened to the woman and her paper life when the main story passed? Read More
July 23, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Raymond Chandler By Sadie Stein “Tall, aren’t you?” she said. “I didn’t mean to be.” Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her. —Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
July 23, 2013 Arts & Culture Too Good to Succeed By B. Alexandra Szerlip Very often you have to be a lone nut to come up with a really original idea.… People are very insular … even [in] a great city like New York … people are like fish swimming around in aquariums and all they know is the water in the aquarium.—Francis Ford Coppola In the summer of 1938, when the first issue of Action Comics introduced the world to Superman, its cover featured the Man of Steel lifting a steel-framed Chrysler Airflow, “the first sincere and authentic streamlined car,”Read More
July 23, 2013 On the Shelf Wine for Dummies, and Other News By Sadie Stein Wine for Dummies (yes, like the books) is a real thing, and will shortly be presented to any host who invites me to dinner. In case you were wondering, this summer, Bill Gates will be reading, among other things, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger and Japan’s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts. Scrapbooks compiled by Ernest Hemingway’s mother throughout his childhood have been made available by the JFK Library. Someone has returned The Real Book About Snakes to Champaign County Library forty-one years late, with a fine in cash. Writes the conscientious borrower, “Sorry I’ve kept this book so long but I’m a really slow reader! I’ve enclosed my fine of $299.30 (41 years—2 cents a day). Once again, my apologies!!”
July 22, 2013 Arts & Culture Archie Revisited By Sadie Stein “If it could only be like this always—always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper …” So says Sebastian Flyte of his teddy bear, one of the most memorable minor characters in Brideshead Revisited. Both affectation and security totem, Aloysius (played in the iconic ITV miniseries by one Delicatessen) was modeled on a real toy: Archibald Ormsby-Gore, who belonged to Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford friend John Betjeman. And while Aloysius may be Archibald’s most famous literary representation, it’s not the only one: in the 1940s, Betjeman wrote a book for his children, titled Archie and the Strict Baptists. (The main character, a practicing Baptist, is a keen amateur archeologist.) An illustrated version appeared in 1977. The bear, which Betjeman was holding when he died, now resides in St. Pancras, with his elephant companion, Jumbo.
July 22, 2013 Arts & Culture Maximum Ride By Sadie Stein While the thesis of this article—that business travelers still enjoy reading—may seem less than revelatory, we were intrigued by the following anecdote: Carrying a book while traveling often spurs conversations with strangers, many business travelers say. [Gene] Jannotti says he was holding a James Patterson novel when he walked into a restaurant and the maitre d’ remarked that he had read the same book. “I told him he couldn’t have read the same book and then opened the cover to show him James Patterson’s autograph,” Jannotti says. “Needless to say, he escorted me to a very nice table and came by several times to be sure that I was happy with the food and the service.” We feel that, on the contrary, there was every need to say this. We are, however, still figuring out the best use of the information.