By Stuart Mitchner
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death…
—William S. Burroughs
A book of great beauty and maniacally exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor…
—Norman Mailer on The Naked Lunch
Joan Adams Vollmer. (Wikipedia)
Dreaming of another fantastical New Year’s Eve party like the Harpo Marx/Charlie Parker/Times Square centenary blast I arranged for 1911/2011, I checked celebrity births for 1924 on the Notable Names Database (NNDB: “Tracking the Entire World”), and found a star-studded cast headed by Marlon Brando, Lauren Bacall, and James Baldwin, with supporting players like presidents George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter sharing a table next to one occupied by country singers Chet Akins and Slim Whitman. For comic relief, you’ve got Brando’s buddy for life Wally Cox (Mr. Peepers), Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker (All in the Family), Dr. Strangelove’s Terry Southern, and Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, not to mention Bill Dana (“My name José Jiménez”) and Don Knotts (“Are you nervous?”) from the Steve Allen Show, plus Norm Alden, the coach who drowned in a bowl of chicken noodle soup on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
Okay, let’s set this year’s party at Birdland just up Broadway from the Royal Roost, site of the 2011 celebration. Among jazz stars born in ‘24, there’s alto saxophonist Paul Desmond (runner up to Charlie Parker in the 1954 Downbeat poll), trombonist J.J. Johnson, pianist Bud Powell, drummer Max Roach, trumpeter and arranger Shorty Rogers, and tenor man Sonny Stitt, plus songs by Dinah Washington, the Divine Sarah Vaughan, and Doris Day, who got her start singing with Les Brown’s Band of Renown. At the ringside table with Brando and Cox are Marlon’s co-stars Katy Jurado (One-Eyed Jacks) and Eva Marie Saint (On the Waterfront). Fresh from Paris and Rome, respectively, Charles Aznavour (Shoot the Piano Player) and Marcello Mastroianni (La Dolce Vita) are being interviewed by Truman (In Cold Blood) Capote, who is covering the Farewell ‘54 celebration for The New Yorker. more
My preferred Santa of the moment is the one trudging up the Union Square subway stairs on the cover of the December 16 New Yorker, a heavy red bag slung over his shoulder, one hand on the railing, snow falling. I like the noirish urban darkness of Eric Drooker’s image, the way the Con Ed building is framed, the fading portrait of a beloved city against a blank sky. I also like the touch of mortal menace. Will Santa make it to his next stop before he’s mugged or run down by a drunken driver?
According to A Book of Days for the Literary Year, the week of December 15 begins with the publication of Emma, a day before Jane Austen’s 40th birthday in 1815. Emma Woodhouse’s comment about a divided understanding of the world’s pleasures, spoken soon after she herself disastrously misunderstands a courtship charade, has me thinking about Authors, the card game that my parents and I played when I was a boy. The fact that Jane Austen had been overlooked by the creators of the game (the only female being Louisa May Alcott) naturally didn’t occur to me, although when my wife and I played Authors with our son decades later, her absence was front and center. How could they leave her out, a question that had serious resonance on the Christmas morning I gave my wife illustrated editions of Persuasion and Mansfield Park. 
In the opening sentence of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika (New Directions), the Statue of Liberty is holding aloft a sword instead of a torch. There are disputes online about whether this was unintended or intentional. Not to worry. With a writer as infinitely suggestive as Kafka, errors can have prophetic consequences, and since he has, in effect, arrived in post-election America for a centenary exhibit at the Morgan Library & Museum, some interesting connections are already in play, notably Barry Blitt’s New Yorker cover depicting a very nervous, verge-of-vertigo Lady Liberty walking a tightrope.
The epigraph comes by way of the first Arts page in Monday’s New York Times. At least once or twice every year, the Newspaper of Record throws out a line that hooks me. Picture a Dr. Seuss-style fisherman, perhaps the Cat in the Hat, dandling a brain-rot lure as a Dr. Seuss fish leaps out of the water, grinning idiotically while I’m thinking “This is not how I meant to begin a December 4 column on Franz Kafka; no, this is not what I meant to do, not at all, not at all.”
The day after I wrote an article on Elon Musk referencing his first and foremost “life lesson,” that “empathy is not an asset,” the New York Times came up with a front page that instantly connected with my post-election state of mind. Lead head: “Chop First and Fix Later: How Musk Tames Costs.” The story directly beneath: “Trump Stands by Defense Pick Who Denies Sex Assault Claim.” Directly under that: “Robots Still Lack Human Touch in Warehouses.” And just below came two smaller heads previewing stories in the Business section: “Social Media Veers Right” and “Spirit Files for Bankruptcy.”
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On Election Day, I began reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk (Simon & Schuster 2023) along with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge first conceived during a walk with William Wordsworth on November 13, 1797.
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Denizens of YouTube’s cosmic jukebox can celebrate Ezra Pound’s birthday by listening to him deliver Part I of his landmark poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Life and Contacts). The reading was reportedly recorded in 1959 when he lived in Castle Brunnenburg in the Italian Tyrol, some 39 years after the poem was first published and 65 years before the 2024 election. With a few taps on the keyboard, you can go eye to eye with the old poet, who describes himself as E.P. “born in a half-savage country, out of date” — actually Hailey, Idaho Territory, U.S.A., October 30, 1885. 
In the final chapter of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (1916), Stephen Dedalus tells two of his fellow students what happened to a girl who got into a hansom cab “a few days ago” in London. “She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant.”
The October 16, 1847 publication of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre is listed among Wikipedia’s Notable Events,1691-1900, along with the execution of Marie Antoinette (1793) and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry (1859). As the 19th century continued “happening, over and over again,” Oscar Fingal O’Fflahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854 and Eugene Gladstone O’Neill surfaced in a New York City hotel on October 16, 1888.
Never lead against a hitter unless you can outhit him. Crowd a boxer, and take everything he has, to get inside. Duck a swing. Block a hook. And counter a jab with everything you own.
I’ve just read Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” today being his 145th birthday. Why that particular poem now? Probably because it’s an infectious idea that inspires impersonation. And why 13? Why not 9 or 7? Or 10 to match the number of his birthday month?
Looking ahead to William Faulkner’s September 25th birthday, I reread the 1956 Paris Review interview in which he says The Sound and the Fury (1929) is the novel that caused him “the most grief and anguish,” comparing himself to the mother who “loves the child who became the thief or murderer more than the one who became the priest.”
The feature attraction at this weekend’s Friends and Foundation Princeton Public Library Book Sale is a collection of rare African American literature donated by Rutgers Professor Donald Gibson, who died at 90 on January 3. During his four decades as a teacher, Gibson helped establish the study of Black literature as a legitimate university course. Among his numerous books, essays, and lectures is the introduction to The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, which is available among the titles in the library’s non-fiction book group.
However much my wife and I may disagree about other things, we’ve always been in accord about movies, whether it’s the late Alain Delon’s Once a Thief or HBO’s House of the Dragon.
Midway through the last week of August, in the aftermath of a Democratic National Convention about saving America, baseball fans are looking ahead to the do-or-die last month of the regular season, while the jazz world celebrates Lester Young, born August 27, 1909, and Charlie Parker, born August 29, 1920.
The first of many things I didn’t know about tenor saxophonist Stan Getz is that I was going to be writing about him today. In February 1954 when he was arrested for holding up a Seattle drugstore, I was shocked. I was 15, just getting into jazz, and I admired Getz for his moody, lyrical playing with guitarist Johnny Smith on “Moonlight in Vermont” and for his passionate solos with the Count Basie rhythm section and an all-star cast in Jam Session 3. Eventually I came to know him best for his work on Diz and Getz, with Dizzy Gillespie, a session that had been recorded in Los Angeles three months before his arrest.
The long strange trip of this column includes a world-famous 34-year-old singer songwriter from West Reading, Pa.; a 79-year-old film director from Düsseldorf, Westphalia, born August 14, 1945; and a Scottish king slain in battle against his first cousin and rival Macbeth on or around August 14, 1040 — but then Shakespeare had a more productive fate in mind for King Duncan when he wrote Macbeth.
By Stuart Mitchner
I started reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper 2016) on the rebound from a problem with PayPal, the co-creation of Vance’s venture-capitalist savior Peter Thiel. The 2018 paperback comes with 10 pages of blurbs, including one from Thiel noting that Vance “writes powerfully about the real people who are kept out of sight by academic abstractions.” Quoted on the same page, Bill Gates says the book’s “real magic” is “in the story itself and Vance’s bravery in telling it.”
Don’t give up, don’t let it get you down,” my 48-year-old son told me when he saw that I was depressed by the post-Biden-debate news cycle. That was before Sunday when the president finally did what he had to do. If nothing else, maybe the media will shut up about how old he is, stop gaslighting his every move, and give him some breathing room.
Why Freud and why now?” That is the question. After a lifetime of relative indifference to most things Freudian, it’s taken the attempted assassination of a former president plus the massive media freak-out inspired by the current president’s shabby debate performance and slip-of-the-tongue doubleheader to send me to Adam Phillips’s Becoming Freud: The Making Of a Psychoanalyst (Yale University Press) and the Gutenberg text of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life translated by A.A. Brill.