Books and Literature

Subterms

    More stories

    • 38 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Why We Collect

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIf you know a collector, you know about how collections are more than just agglomerations of items. They are stores of history, stores of emotion. They have a representational value that often far exceeds their literal financial value.They also take up space, physical and mental. They are often private ventures, not public displays. They scratch very personal itches in ways that are often invisible to anyone else.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the urge to collect, the stories embedded in certain objects and how some items can unearth stories from the person who covets them.Guest:Hua Hsu, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the forthcoming memoir “Stay True”Connect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Hello, Bookstore’ Review: A Bibliophile and His Shop in Close-Up

      by

      This documentary makes it clear why, when the pandemic threatened Matthew Tannenbaum’s store, book lovers weren’t ready to say goodbye.Matthew Tannenbaum’s reading voice beckons. Which may be a funny thing to remark upon given that we see his face nearly nonstop in “Hello, Bookstore.” Then again, the documentary about this bookstore owner, directed by A.B. Zax, is a tribute to the love of reading and the pleasures of a smartly stocked bookstore. Tannenbaum’s fondness for his store and its wares is a beautiful thing to behold, even at its most vulnerable.Starting in Spring 2020, the coronavirus put a hurt on Tannenbaum’s ledger; soon the shop in Lenox, Mass., which he bought in 1976, called simply the Bookstore, was teetering. Tannenbaum started a GoFundMe campaign in August 2020, but that’s just the accidental hook for this affectionate portrait.Zax began this love letter earlier, in fall 2019, his digital camera often watching like a fly-on-a-shelf. So, the dark days of the pandemic are intercut with scenes of sun-dappled or wintry afternoons. Leaves collect as the door opens to new, returning and — because the Bookstore is one of those havens and Tannenbaum one of those raconteurs — sojourning customers.We see regulars and literary wayfarers. We also meet Tannenbaum’s daughters, who have shared him with the store since the mid-1990s, when Tannenbaum’s wife (their mother) died.We also learn about his life. Brooklyn-born, Tannenbaum was discharged from the Navy ready to have his mind expanded. His memoir about coming into his intellectual own at Frances Steloff’s Gotham Book Mart was published in 2009. Tannenbaum pays forward those Book Mart lessons: bantering, browsing and connecting — for a spell with a glass door between the customer and him. And sometimes he just sits down, puts his feet up and reads: A curator doing his inspired thing.Hello, BookstoreNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      The Antiquarian Book Fair: From Sondheim’s Letters to a Brontë Discovery

      by

      Among the rarities on view at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair are also a 1555 treatise on tennis and Amy Winehouse’s personal library.The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which returns to the Park Avenue Armory this weekend after a two-year pandemic hiatus, is one of the world’s leading gatherings of the rare book tribe. For more casual visitors, it can also be an experience of dizzying information overload.Yes, there are the museum-like displays of fine bindings, illuminated manuscripts and historic documents, with dramatic lighting (and eye-popping prices). But the fair, which runs from Thursday evening to Sunday, also features booths stuffed with pulp paperbacks, old advertisements, zines, board games, maps, photographs and all manner of accessibly priced ephemera that challenges any hidebound notions of “rare books.”Here is a sampling of offerings at the more than 200 booths, from carefully curated libraries to jotted notes that speak to the power of pen and paper to stop time and conjure vanished worlds.Send in the SondheimPart of an archive of 70 letters and postcards written by Stephen Sondheim over four decades to his close friend Larry Miller.via Schubertiade MusicAfter Stephen Sondheim’s death last November, social media was awash with images of the notes he regularly sent to theater colleagues famous and not, offering praise and encouragement. Schubertiade Music is offering range of Sondheimiana, including a collection of 70 letters and postcards ($20,000) written over four decades to his close friend Larry Miller. In one, Sondheim describes a 1969 trip to Europe: “In Vienna we were treated with the doubtful pleasure of one act of ‘West Side Story’ in German. Funnier than the original, anyway, even if it is billed as ‘Bernstein’s West Side Story.’” Also on offer are autographed programs, scores and a mid-1930s class photograph ($1,000) showing a young Sondheim dressed as a clown.Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91. Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows. Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview. His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers. ‘West Side Story’: Does the musical, which features some of the artist’s best-known lyrics, deserve a new hearing? ‘Company’: The revival of his 1970 musical features a gender swap.Atomic DawnPapers from the Manhattan Project’s Medical Group were buried in military archives at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado until the 1960s.via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps and Boston Rare Maps“Ball or mushroom rose slowly & majestically & ponderously & brilliantly — bright red purple [with] blue rim for a few seconds. So it towered up with streamers falling vertically in the stem & out of the cap.”So wrote a member of the Manhattan Project’s Medical Group on July 16, 1945, after watching the world’s first detonation of a nuclear weapon, in the New Mexican desert, known as the Trinity Test. Boston Rare Maps and Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps are jointly offering a trove of 300 pages of little-seen handwritten diagrams, memos, maps and notes generated by the medical group, which was charged with monitoring health and safety. The documents ($1.5 million) — which include what the sellers say is the first written use of the term “mushroom cloud” — were buried in military archives at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado until the 1960s, when they were declassified and then sold to a private collector during the base’s decommissioning. The material reflects the tensions between preserving secrecy while protecting populations downwind from nuclear fallout, as well as the tension between dispassionate scientific observation and sheer awe.A Pioneering Black ShakespeareanAn autographed lithograph, circa 1857, of Ira Aldridge, the first actor of African descent known to play Othello.via Maggs Bros Ltd.The London dealer Maggs Bros is offering an autographed lithograph, circa 1857, of Ira Aldridge, the first actor of African descent known to play Othello ($13,500). Born in 1807, Aldridge attended the African Free School of New York City and acted in William Brown’s African Theater before emigrating to England to seek better prospects. At first, he played African roles, sometimes written expressly for him. His turn as Othello came in 1832, when he stepped in after the renowned Edmund Kean collapsed onstage and died. Audiences loved it, but the critics were outraged. Management closed the theater after two performances, and Aldridge did not appear on the mainstream London stage again for decades. The portrait, created during one of his triumphant tours of the European continent, “acknowledges his work as an artist rather than a mere curiosity,” according to the listing.Tennis, Anyone?Antonio Scaino’s 1555 treatise on tennis.via Jonathan Hill BooksellerJonathan Hill Bookseller of New York is offering a rare first edition of Antonio Scaino’s 1555 treatise on tennis ($45,000), said to be the first book on the game. By the mid-16th century, tennis was already a popular pastime among kings and commoners alike, though bitter disputes often broke out over the rules (plus ça change?). Scaino, a philosopher, apparently wrote the book after a debate with his patron, the duke of Ferrara (and the owner of as many as six courts), over how to award a point. It’s not clear who won that one, but scholars today still debate the validity of Scaino’s arcane theory of the origins of the game’s odd scoring system.This Girl’s LifeTwo volumes of diaries, from 1831-2, by the precocious 11-year-old Emily Shore, a contemporary of Charlotte Brontë.via Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers of LondonOne of the stars of the fair is a miniature book created in 1829 by 13-year-old Charlotte Brontë ($1.25 million), which recently surfaced after being considered lost for nearly a century. But Brontë and her siblings were hardly the only word-mad British children of the era. Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers of London is offering two volumes of diaries, from 1831-2, by 11-year-old Emily Shore. The precocious Emily, who died at age 19, wrote three volumes of poetry, three novels and several histories, which went unpublished. She is known today through her diaries, which were published by her sisters in 1891 in heavily edited form. Today, only a handful of the dozen notebooks she filled her with tiny, meticulous handwriting are known to survive. The two on sale here offer an unfiltered window into the domestic life of a period where children, especially girls, were seen but rarely heard.End-of-the-World Library?A 1554 first edition in Italian of Aristotle’s “Meteorology,” the oldest comprehensive treatise on the subject.via Peter HarringtonThe London dealer Peter Harrington spent a decade building One Hundred Seconds to Midnight, a collection of 800 works tracking more than 2,000 years of climate science and environmentalism, from Aristotle’s “Meteorology” and 19th-century weather records to NASA’s iconic “Earthrise” photograph and contemporary “cli-fi” novels. The dealer’s booth will feature highlights from the collection ($2.5 million), which tracks “both our recording of data and also our emotional response to it,” as a video tour of the collection puts it. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the World Land Trust.Punk Lit!The safety-pin=pierced dustjacket of Sam Gideon’s “The Punk” (1977), said to be the first punk novel. It was supposedly written by a 14-year-old “closet punk” in London.via Type Punch MatrixType Punch Matrix, a Washington, D.C., bookseller that aims to make collecting more accessible and diverse, is known for edgy stock that pushes the boundaries of the rare books category. Their big-ticket offerings this year include a collection of more than 220 books that once belonged to the singer Amy Winehouse ($135,000), about 50 of which will be on display. (Among the sometimes heavily annotated titles is a marked-up script of “Little Shop of Horrors” from Winehouse’s theater-kid days, and a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” described as looking “like it was dropped in the bath.”) On a tighter budget? The dealers are also offering a pristine copy of Gideon Sams’s “The Punk” (1977), often said to be first punk novel, written, the story goes, by a 14-year-old British “closet punk” as a school assignment, and published after his mother rescued it from the trash. It comes with the original dust jacket, featuring a real safety-pin piercing the nose of the image of Johnny Rotten ($500).New York International Antiquarian Book FairApril 21-24 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; nyantiquarianbookfair.com. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      As Mamet Returns to Broadway, His Claims on Pedophilia Get Spotlight

      by

      The playwright fueled outrage with his claim on Fox News that teachers were “inclined” to pedophilia as he promoted a new book that decries “the Left’s anti-Trump psychosis.”David Mamet’s latest character describes an airplane pilot who gets lost because his map is incomplete. “The pilot’s answer to the question ‘where am I?’ lies not on the map, but out the windscreen,” says the character, speaking in the everyday language set to staccato rhythm that has come to be known as Mametspeak. “That’s where he is.”This new monologue is not delivered in one of Mamet’s dozens of plays or films, but in a friend-of-the-court brief that Mamet filed last month. He wrote it in support of a Texas law intended to prevent social media companies from censoring conservative voices. (The law has been challenged on the grounds that it could prevent private platforms from reasonably moderating content.) The legal setting helps explain the absence of one typical Mamet feature: profanity.With a revival of “American Buffalo,” his classic 1975 drama about small-time hustlers in a Chicago junk shop, opening Thursday night on Broadway in a production starring Laurence Fishburne, Mamet has been engaged in a blizzard of activities that are hardly standard fare for preshow publicity. But they are very much in keeping with his long history of pushing hot buttons — and with his late-career embrace of conservatism and support for former President Donald J. Trump.Mamet claimed on Fox News that “teachers are inclined, particularly men, because men are predators, to pedophilia.”In addition to the amicus brief, Mamet released an essay collection this month, “Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch,” in which he complains about the “plandemic” coronavirus lockdowns, decries “the Left’s anti-Trump psychosis” and suggests that it was Democrats and the media who threatened “armed rebellion” in the event that their preferred candidate lost the 2020 election.Then, over the weekend, Mamet fueled outrage by claiming on Fox News that “teachers are inclined, particularly men, because men are predators, to pedophilia.”He made the remark while discussing a Florida law prohibiting classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in certain younger grades, a law opponents have labeled “Don’t Say Gay.”“If there’s no community control of the schools, what we have is kids being not only indoctrinated but groomed, in a very real sense, by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators,” Mamet told the host, Mark Levin.“Are they abusing the kids physically?” Mamet added. “No, I don’t think so. But they’re abusing them mentally and using sex to do so.”In response, the Tony Award-winning actor Colman Domingo wrote on Twitter, apparently referring to another Mamet play, “Speed-the-Plow,” “American Theater. Do your duty. Take out the trash. Buffalo’s, Plows and all.” And the culture writer Mark Harris wrote on Twitter, “At a time of increasing threats to gay people, David Mamet has chosen to ally himself with the purveyors of a vicious ugly slander that will endanger teachers and LGBT Americans. It’s inexcusable.”Mamet declined through a representative to comment for this article; in “Recessional,” he dismisses The New York Times as “a former newspaper” and suggests that The Times and other media insist on works that “express ‘right thinking,’ that is, statism.”Mamet, 74, came to prominence in the 1970s with a series of plays including “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” and “American Buffalo.” His 1984 play “Glengarry Glen Ross,” two acts of profane one-upmanship among desperate real-estate salesmen, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. He has worked extensively in Hollywood, receiving Oscar nominations for his screenplays for “The Verdict,” a 1982 movie starring Paul Newman, and “Wag the Dog” in 1997, which he wrote with Hilary Henkin. He wrote and directed a number of films, including “House of Games,” “The Spanish Prisoner” and “Heist.”He first announced his rightward turn in a 2008 Village Voice essay, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” (He said on a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” that he had intended the essay to focus on “political civility,” and had been surprised by the headline.) He wrote last year on the website UnHerd that he had been “elected a non-person by the Left many years ago,” and added: “It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.”The new revival of “American Buffalo” — one of his most admired works, and one often read as a critique of capitalism, in a production starring Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss — will test his ability to play on one of his main fields, Broadway. And it will offer an indication of whether, at a moment of intense political polarization, audiences are still receptive to works by artists they may disagree with.In his new book, Mamet is pessimistic on the market for challenging plays, warning that theater on Broadway has largely been replaced by pageantry, complaining of the “fatuity of issue plays” and bemoaning the demise of the “knowledgeable Broadway audience” in an era when its theatergoers are mostly tourists.The new revival of Mamet’s “American Buffalo” stars, from left, Darren Criss, Laurence Fishburne and Sam Rockwell.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“They come to Broadway exactly as they come to Disneyland,” he writes in “Recessional,” published by the HarperCollins imprint Broadside. “As in that happiest place, they do not come to risk their hard-earned cash on a problematic event. (They might not like the play nor appreciate being ‘challenged’; they might just want a break after a day of shopping.)”His recent publicity (he “seems to be doing his best — or worst — to make headlines,” Deadline noted) may also affect the box office.When Mamet appeared on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” recently, Maher challenged Mamet on some of the views of the 2020 election he expressed in his book. “You think the attempted coup was from the Left; I think it was from the Right,” Maher said.“I misspoke,” Mamet said, urging people to skip that page of the book.But Mamet, for all the concerns he expresses in his book of being blacklisted, is unlikely to be canceled from the canon. “If I was teaching a class on contemporary American drama, I would teach Mamet,” said Harry J. Elam Jr., a longtime scholar of 20th-century American drama at Stanford University who is now president of Occidental College, speaking before Mamet’s most recent comments. “He has that type of importance.”Gregory Mosher, who has directed nearly two dozen Mamet plays — including the 1984 premiere of “Glengarry Glen Ross” — said that Mamet’s influence extended beyond his own plays and films to other spheres. He sees Mamet’s mark on works of prestige television such as “The Wire.”“Mamet made it OK to write about worlds that we now take for granted on HBO and elsewhere,” said Mosher, the chairman of theater at Hunter College, “and of course to say the word you can’t print.”The last two weeks of preview performances of “American Buffalo” played to houses that were 93 percent and 88 percent full, according to the Broadway League. (Through a representative, the production’s director, Neil Pepe, and producer, Jeffrey Richards, declined to comment.)Mamet embraced the Trump presidency; he told The Guardian earlier this year that Trump had done a “great job” as president and suggested that his defeat in 2020 was “questionable.” In “Recessional,” he writes that Trump “speaks American, and those of us who also love the language are awed and delighted to hear it from an elected official.”“One of the reasons my friendship with David has survived all these years,” said the comedian Jonathan Katz, “is we never discuss politics.”Much earlier, Mamet appeared to question the liberal outlook that he has said surrounded him in the theater world with his 1992 play “Oleanna.” Depicting a disputed sexual harassment allegation a female student makes against a male professor, it was read as interrogating political correctness. For Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, “Oleanna” — which Eustis saw in its original run at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village featuring Mamet’s longtime collaborator William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon, Mamet’s wife — was evidence of a shift.Mamet’s early plays, Eustis said, are “tremendously morally ambiguous and complex.” With “Oleanna,” argued Eustis, who has never worked with Mamet, “he actually started to put his finger on the scale.”But Leslie Kane, an English professor emerita at Westfield State University who wrote several scholarly books about Mamet and said she grew close to him and his family, perceived a through line between Mamet’s long-held obsessions as an artist and some of his later political stances. “His concern is language and the ability to use language,” she said, adding, “I think that’s what he believes: In our current environment, restrictions on speech require that people in society must watch what they say.”But Mamet, who has made free speech a central issue lately, is not a fan of post-show discussions of his own works featuring members of the productions. In 2017 he made news with a stipulation that none of the discussions, known as talkbacks, could be held within two hours of performances of his plays, calling for a fine of $25,000 for each offense. In his new book he says talkbacks are “transforming an evening at the theater into an English class.”One person who thinks that the politics of Mamet’s plays — to say nothing of his punditry — are largely irrelevant to his plays’ success is Mamet himself.“For fifty years I’ve paid my rent by getting people into the theater,” he writes in “Recessional.” “There are several strategies for doing so, but from the first I’ve relied on the most effective I know: be good.”The technique was not infallible, he notes.“And the audience and I sometimes differed about its definition,” he writes. “I did, however, know one certain way to keep them away: tell ’em the play was good for them.” More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Penelope’ Review: Adrift Between Ithaca and Progress

      by

      A new musical-comedy retelling of “The Odyssey” from the York Theater Company tries to center a powerful woman but feels like a show about and for men.For 20 long years, Penelope has waited for her husband, Odysseus, to sail home to Ithaca from the Trojan War. He was forced to go in the first place, but now the fighting has been finished for a decade and still he stays away — a king seemingly forsaking his kingdom and his queen.The mob of creeps who began sniffing around seven years ago, salivating at the prospect of the cushy life that marriage to Penelope would bring, think it is well past time for her to choose one of them as her new husband. And, hey, who wouldn’t be drawn to these guys, really, what with their demonstrated ability to show up where they aren’t wanted, become live-in guests and spend lazy days consuming copious amounts of their hostess’s food and drink.Also, they sing a cappella harmonies together. Relentlessly.Penelope would like them gone, but in the meantime, she has to stave off any trip to the altar. And in “Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really Written,” Peter Kellogg and Stephen Weiner’s new musical-comedy retelling of the epic poem traditionally credited to Homer, she does so by concocting letters from her husband.In them, Odysseus recounts the misadventures that delay him: a Cyclops, a shipwreck, the wrath of Poseidon — the usual spousal excuses. She reads these gripping inventions aloud to her freeloading suitors as proof that her king is en route.“Hope to see you soon,” she has him sign off, affectionately. “Your Odysseus.”Directed by Emily Maltby for the York Theater Company, with music direction and orchestrations by David Hancock Turner, “Penelope” paints its title character as the author of “The Odyssey.” It’s a promising twist, and it builds on an established idea that “The Odyssey,” a work abundant with substantial female characters — Penelope, Athena, Calypso, Circe, even the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis — is not a male creation.The novelist and critic Samuel Butler, in the 1890s, theorized that a woman must have written it. The classicist Robert Graves — whose Butler-inspired 1955 novel, “Homer’s Daughter,” imagines a Sicilian princess as the author of “The Odyssey” — called it “a poem about and for women,” its hero notwithstanding.“Penelope,” at the Theater at St. Jean’s on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, feels like a musical about and for men. In its cast of 10, there are just three women, including Britney Nicole Simpson, who makes a lovely Off Broadway debut in the title role. It is not through any shortcoming of hers that this ostensibly “female-centric” show, as a program note puts it, is so enamored of its male characters: the five tiresome suitors; Penelope and Odysseus’s son, Telemachus; and especially Odysseus. “Penelope” snaps into focus only in Act 2, when the wandering king returns and takes over a plot that had always been about his absence anyway.If you are looking for a vividly written Penelope, you would do better with Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel “Circe,” in which Penelope is indelible, and surprising, in a small supporting role. Here, though, the story that Kellogg (book and lyrics) and Weiner (music) tell suffers from a failure of imagination, as if making her a weaver of tales rather than of cloth gives her definition enough. (In “The Odyssey,” she promises to wed as soon as she finishes a weaving project, then unravels her work each night.) She does have Odysseus’s nurse, Eurycleia (an expert Leah Hocking), to conspire with, but where’s the rest of her orbit?If, on the other hand, you are looking for an old-fashioned, comfort-food kind of musical with goofball humor, unpretentious songs and a heroine who is just fine with the world never knowing that she wrote one of its classics (I, for one, had trouble swallowing that concession), “Penelope” may be a good fit.Ben Jacoby makes a likable Odysseus, who enjoys a sweet reunion with Telemachus (a charming Philippe Arroyo, in his Off Broadway debut), and has instant sexual chemistry with Penelope — a shock to her chaste system that Simpson conveys with tender, comic nuance. Maria Wirries is also funny as Daphne, Telemachus’s cleareyed, pig-slaughtering love interest.This is the kind of show, though, that gestures toward open-mindedness by having the women explain to the men that they must abandon some of their entitled ways.“I’ll adapt,” Odysseus vows.But “Penelope” itself? It’s a bit of a throwback, in the guise of change.Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really WrittenThrough April 24 at the Theater at St. Jean’s, Manhattan; yorktheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Alan J. Hruska, a Founder of Soho Press, Dies at 88

      by

      A litigator for 44 years, he was also a novelist; a writer, director and producer of plays and films; and helped establish the independent publishing house Soho Press.Alan J. Hruska, a corporate litigator who had a second, wide-ranging career as a founder of the independent publishing house Soho Press, which invests in serious fiction by unsung authors; as a novelist; and as a writer, director and producer of plays and films, died on March 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was lymphoma, his daughter, Bronwen Hruska, the publisher of Soho Press, said.Even before Mr. Hruska retired from his day job at Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York in 2001 after four decades there, he published his first novel, in 1985. The next year, with his wife, Laura Chapman Hruska, and Juris Jurjevics, a former editor in chief of Dial Press, he founded Soho Press.Soho Press made its reputation by welcoming unsolicited manuscripts from little-known writers. Its ambitions, Mr. Jurjevics said, were “not to have a certain percentage of growth a year and not to be bought by anybody.”Soho Press, based in Manhattan, has specialized in literary fiction and memoirs with a backlist that includes books by Jake Arnott, Edwidge Danticat, John L’Heureux, Delores Phillips, Sue Townsend and Jacqueline Winspear. The company also has a Soho Teen young adult imprint and a Soho Crime imprint that publishes mysteries in exotic locales by, among others, Cara Black, Colin Cotterill, Peter Lovesey and Stuart Neville.Mr. Hruska (pronounced RUH-ska) often said that there was less of a vocational disconnect between lawyering and literature than met the eye. Both, done successfully, he said, are about storytelling, whether arguing a case in a legal brief or writing a novel, script or screenplay.“I was a trial lawyer, and, while I would expect my actors to remember their lines better than my witnesses did, there is less disparity between the two professions than might be thought,” he said in an interview with a blogger in 2017.“A trial and a play are both productions,” he added. “Putting each together involves telling a story. So does writing a brief or making an oral argument to a panel of judges. If you don’t tell a story, you will very likely put them to sleep.”Mr. Hruska made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005.Joan MarcusAlan Jay Hruska was born on July 9, 1933, in the Bronx and was raised in Far Rockaway, Queens. His father, Harry Hruska, was in the textile business. His mother, Julia (Schwarz) Hruska, was a homemaker.While he was undecided on a profession, Alan had a penchant for filmmaking that took hold when he was 8. As a youth, he would ride the subway into Manhattan to attend double features at first-run movie theaters.After graduating from Lawrence High School on Long Island, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale in 1955 and was persuaded to apply to Yale Law School by a college professor who was impressed by his skills in logic and rationalization. He, in turn, found the law to be an ideal vehicle for his writing and reasoning.He graduated from the law school in 1958, the same year he married Laura Mae Chapman, one of three women in their law school class.She died in 2010. In addition to their daughter, he is survived by two sons, Andrew and Matthew; his wife, Julie Iovine, a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, whom he married in 2013; and six grandchildren.Mr. Hruska borrowed from his litigation experiences in major cases in writing a number of his novels, including “Wrong Man Running” (2011); “Pardon the Ravens” (2015); “It Happened at Two in the Morning” (2017), which The Wall Street Journal said showed the author “at his thriller-writing best”; and “The Inglorious Arts” (2019).Michael Cavadias as the cross-dressing character Wendy in a scene from the romantic comedy “Nola,” a 2003 film written and directed by Mr. Hruska.Samuel Goldwyn FilmsHe also wrote and directed the film “Nola,” a romantic comedy starring Emmy Rossum which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.Other films of his include “The Warrior Class,” a comedy about a rookie lawyer that premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2005; and “The Man on Her Mind,” an existential comedy based on his play of the same name, which premiered at the Charing Cross Theatre in London in 2012.He made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005. Ten years later, when a surreal play of his about love, marriage and an impending hurricane opened, the critic Alexis Soloski wrote in The Times in 2015, “If an existentialist philosopher ever attempted a light romantic comedy, it might sound a little like ‘Laugh It Up, Stare It Down,’ Alan Hruska’s quaintly absurdist play at the Cherry Lane Theater.”Mr. Hruska oversaw a wide range of civil litigation at Cravath in the 44 years before he retired in 2001. He was named senior counsel in 2002. He also served as secretary of the New York City Bar Association.Asked by The American Lawyer in 2015 whether he ever felt that the law was not his true calling, he replied: “Not at all. I had a great experience. I did about 400 cases, won 200 and settled 200. I’m particularly proud of the settlements because they can put people in a much better position than winning a case.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      A Century of the BBC, a ‘Quasi-Mystical’ Part of England’s Psyche

      by

      David Hendy’s “The BBC” looks back at 100 years of wartime reporting, dramas, satires and weather reports.THE BBCA Century on AirBy David HendyIllustrated. 638 pages. PublicAffairs. $38.The British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC — the Beeb — turns 100 this year. “Hullo, hullo, 2LO calling, 2LO calling,” a few thousand listeners heard through the hissing ether at 6 p.m. on Nov. 14, 1922. “This is the British Broadcasting Company. 2LO. Stand by for one minute please!” What followed were short news and weather bulletins, read twice, the second time slowly so that listeners could take notes.David Hendy, in his thorough and engaging new book, “The BBC: A Century on Air,” writes that you can’t understand England without understanding the BBC. It occupies, he says, “a quasi-mystical place in the national psyche.” It’s just there, like the white cliffs of Dover.The BBC sparked to life in the wake of World War I. Its founders included wounded veterans, and they were idealists. Civilization was in tatters; they hoped, through a new medium, to forge a common culture by giving listeners not necessarily what they wanted, but what they needed, to hear.The audience was fed a fibrous diet of plays and concerts and talks and lectures; sports included Derby Day and Wimbledon. Announcers wore dinner jackets as well as their plummy accents, “as a courtesy to the live performers with whom they would be consorting.” Catching the chimes of Big Ben before the evening news became a ritual for millions.Equipment was primitive. A framed notice by the microphone warned guest speakers, “If you sneeze or rustle papers you will DEAFEN THOUSANDS!!!”Radio was new; the BBC felt that it had to teach people how to listen. “To keep your mind from wandering,” it advised, “you might wish to turn the lights out, or settle into your favorite armchair five minutes before the program starts; above all, you should remember that ‘If you only listen with half an ear, you haven’t a quarter of a right to criticize.’”The BBC gained a reputation for being a bit snooty, and soporific. One complaint can stand for many: “People do not want three hours of [expletive] ‘King Lear’ in verse when they get out of a 10-hour day in the [expletive] coal-pits, and [expletive] anybody who tries to tell them that they do.”The BBC took it from both sides. To mandarins like Virginia Woolf, it was irredeemably middlebrow; she referred to it as the “Betwixt and Between Company.” The BBC loosened up over time and took increasing account of working-class and minority audiences, and of audiences who simply wanted to laugh.The broadcaster was created by a Royal Charter; it has never been government-run, yet it must answer to government. Hendy recounts attempts to limit its editorial independence. Churchill and Thatcher were especially vocal critics: They felt there was something a bit pinko about the whole enterprise.The BBC’s scrupulous reporting during World War II gave it lasting prestige across the world. It largely lived up to the motto of R.T. Clark, its senior news editor: to tell “the truth and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible.”During wartime, the company occasionally broadcast from a safer perch. When announcers intoned “This is London,” with British phlegm, they were often in a countryside manor. The London headquarters took a direct hit from a bomb in October 1940; the reader of the evening news “paused for a split second to blow the plaster and soot off the script in front of him before carrying on with the rest of the bulletin.” Seven people were killed in the attack. After the war, the BBC’s foreign services became a prop to the Commonwealth, the new euphemism for “empire.”One of this book’s best set pieces is of the BBC’s wall-to-wall televised coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. One reporter referred to it as “C-Day.” This sort of thing had never been on TV before. The hard part, Hendy writes, was “persuading royal officials that mere subjects had a right to witness the ceremony in the first place.”Over time the BBC’s tentacles grew longer and more varied: Clusters of radio and television stations catered to different demographics. Competitors crept in.The satire boom of the postwar era arrived, led by “The Goon Show,” which ran from 1951 to 1960. There were TV dramas from iconic talents like Ken Loach and Dennis Potter. The BBC began to take the critic Clive James’s advice: “Anemic high art is less worth having than low art with guts.”From left, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan, members of “The Goon Show,” which aired on the BBC from 1951 to 1960.Mirrorpix via Getty ImagesLanguage battles fought at the company are never dull to read about. For decades, “bloody” could be used only rarely and “bugger” not at all. One internal stylebook, Hendy writes, “included a ban on jokes about lavatories or ‘effeminacy in men’ as well as any ‘suggestive references’ to subjects such as ‘Honeymoon Couples, Chambermaids, Fig leaves, Prostitution, Ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on, Animal habits, e.g. rabbits, Lodgers, Commercial travelers.”The eclectic and influential disc jockey John Peel was brought in; so, alas, was the cigar-chomping comic Jimmy Savile, the zany-uncle host of shows like “Top of the Pops,” who was found after his death in 2011 to have molested dozens if not hundreds of children across five decades. An inquiry found that the BBC did not do nearly enough to stop him.The BBC’s nature documentaries were pathbreaking, and big hits. (They left James “slack-jawed with wonder and respect.”) Hendy walks us through how, under David Attenborough, these things got made. They take years, enormous staffs and a global network of freelancers willing to sit out in the cold and rain to get the money shots.Attenborough was told, early on, that he couldn’t appear onscreen because his teeth were too big. Richard Dawkins has written, in his memoirs, about how difficult it is to talk while walking backward, a crucial skill for any BBC documentary host.More recent BBC hits include the reality series “Strictly Come Dancing,” the brainy documentaries of Louis Theroux and the comedy-drama series “I May Destroy You.”The right has retained its distrust of the BBC, including up-to-date complaints about wokeness; it would like to see it become smaller and more “distinctive,” in the manner of PBS and NPR. These American stations have had nothing like the BBC’s cultural impact — though Greg Jackson, in his story collection “Prodigals,” was correct to refer to Terry Gross as the “Catcher in the WHYY.”Hendy can be critical of the company, but at heart he’s a fan. He reports that across any given week, more than 91 percent of British households use one BBC service or another. He cites academic surveys showing that the broadcaster’s news output is, if anything, tilted slightly to the right.The BBC can still be snoozy. I’m not the only person I know who, at least before Putin rattled the world’s cage, listened to the BBC World Service app at bedtime because it’s an aural sleeping pill.I deserve to lose style points for borrowing Hendy’s last lines for my own, but he puts it simply about the BBC’s precarious position: “We sometimes never know just how much we need or want something until it is gone.” More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s Turbulent Relationship, Retold With Compassion

      by

      In “Truly, Madly,” Stephen Galloway writes about one of the 20th century’s most glamorous couples, training an eye on Leigh’s mental health struggles.TRULY, MADLYVivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the Romance of the CenturyBy Stephen Galloway406 pages. Grand Central Publishing. $30.God help anyone who flew the friendly skies with Vivien Leigh, her second husband, Laurence Olivier, or both.1936: A struggling seaplane on which Leigh was a passenger went “thudding like a skimmed stone over the waves” en route to Capri, writes Stephen Galloway in “Truly, Madly,” a new book about the couple’s relationship, causing Leigh, a Catholic, to repeatedly invoke Saint Thérèse.1940: The newlyweds were en route from Lisbon to Bristol. The cockpit of their plane burst into flames, eerily echoing a dream of Olivier’s.World War II: The debonair Olivier, enlisted in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy but a pilot “of notorious incompetence,” according to the writer and editor Michael Korda, crashed his own plane twice and was demoted to target-towing, parachute-packing and recruitment demonstrations.1946: On a trans-Atlantic flight from New York, the lovebirds glanced out the window and saw an engine on fire. The Pan Am Clipper turned back and hit the ground with a long, hard bounce in Connecticut.1948: Leigh got breathless at 11,000 feet over the Tasman Sea; the plane had to descend several thousand feet, and the actress was given an oxygen mask. Traveling by air in the ensuing years, she suffered flashbacks that required her to be restrained and sedated.Best remembered for her role as Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind” (1939), Leigh had bipolar disorder, known in her lifetime as manic depression (she later contracted tuberculosis as well). She was brittle, winsome and sociable: “The only person in the world who could be charming while she was throwing up,” Korda’s uncle, the director and producer Alexander Korda, told him. But then she would toggle rapidly, and at first confoundingly, to fits of temper and nervous breakdowns. The medications and therapies that might have stabilized her weren’t common at the time.And thus her three-decade entanglement with Olivier, considered one of the greatest talents of his generation, was its own sort of doomed flight: It soared sharply into the heavens, then was rocked with turbulence before its inevitable tumble down to earth and straight through to hell.There have been many, many previous biographies of Leigh and several of Olivier (including one by his oldest son, Tarquin, from a first marriage to Jill Esmond); a memoir by Olivier, “Confessions of an Actor”; and a memoir by his third wife, Dame Joan Plowright. There has even been at least one book, “Love Scene” (1978), devoted specifically to the Olivier-Leigh romance.But Galloway, the former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter, is perhaps the first author to interpolate this oft-told story with commentary from contemporary mental-health experts, like Kay Redfield Jamison, the psychologist who herself suffers from bipolar disorder and wrote “An Unquiet Mind.” He accomplishes this smoothly, in a contribution to the LarViv literature that is — if not strictly essential — coherent, well-rounded and entertaining. To the couple’s tale of passion he adds compassion, along with the requisite lashings of gossip.Stephen Galloway, the author of “Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century.”Austin HargraveSome couples “meet cute.” Olivier espied Leigh playing a prostitute in “The Mask of Virtue” and was left “drunk with desire.” (They went on to get drunk on many other substances as well.) Unfortunately, they had both already married other people.The startlingly beautiful Leigh was born Vivian Hartley, an only child raised first in India and then shipped off to convent school in England. She took her stage surname from the middle name of her first husband, Herbert Holman. They had a daughter, Suzanne, but Leigh found the marriage “just another role in an interminable play,” Galloway writes, and “motherhood a repeat performance without the benefit of good writing.” The youngest of three siblings, Olivier lost his beloved mother when he was 12, and though less attached to his father — a clergyman of some oratorical gifts who “meted out affection in tranches, just like the Sunday roast he would cut into wafer-thin slices” — he was influenced by him to settle down early with Esmond. “That’s a noble idea,” Esmond responded when Olivier proposed for the second time. Trying to spice up their home life, he bought her a lemur from Harrods. The Brits are different.Leigh, Olivier and their spouses all became friends at garden parties, lunches and holidays. Reading how it all went down, quite civilized and drawing-room (Leigh asked Esmond how Larry liked his eggs cooked) but with plenty of jealousy, despair and child neglect, I was reminded of John Updike’s lesser-known infidelity novel, “Marry Me,” and Harold Pinter’s play “Betrayal.” (Leigh, who excelled onstage as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire” before bringing her to the silver screen, and Olivier, a Shakespearean virtuoso, both preferred the theater to mercenary moviedom.)That the scandal of their relationship had to be initially covered up for the morality clauses of Hollywood just as they were having their big breakthroughs there — Leigh in “Gone With the Wind”; Olivier as Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights” — surely only added to the excitement.Galloway clearly spent significant time in the archives (though frustratingly, a chunk of Leigh’s side of her correspondence with Olivier remains on the loose). Galloway splices this material seamlessly with old interviews and enough new ones with those Of That Era, such as Korda and Hayley Mills, to inject some pep and freshness. Re-encountering Leigh and Olivier’s highly literate fans, like Noël Coward and J.D. Salinger, and their foils, like the flamboyant critic Kenneth Tynan, is a treat. As are the old-fashioned words — like “martinet,” “popinjay” and “annealed” — that Galloway sprinkles through the text, the way Leigh strewed the beloved posies from her various country estates.This celebrated pair, whose doomed, disease-troubled love lends them a sheen denied to steadier partnerships, won between them half a dozen Oscars. It’s an enjoyable, disorienting sensation — as the Oscars now hemorrhage viewers and relevance — to find a time capsule from when movies and their stars didn’t just stream into our living rooms along with all the other space junk, but seemed the very center of the universe. More