Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

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Obit watch: May 20, 2022.

Friday, May 20th, 2022

Elspeth Barker, novelist.

She wrote one book: “O Caledonia”.

The book recounts the short, unhappy life of a girl named Janet, who, like Ms. Barker, grew up half-feral in a neo-Gothic castle in rural Scotland, avoiding people and befriending jackdaws. Both faced constant harassment from local boys, and both sought refuge in foreign languages and books.
Though the novel opens with Janet newly dead, murdered on a staircase, it is full of life, energized by Ms. Barker’s thistle-sharp eye for natural detail: She writes of mist that “floats in steaming filaments off the glens” and of Janet shaking “wet honeysuckle over her face.”
“O Caledonia,” her only novel, was a hit among readers and critics. It sold widely in Europe and won a number of minor British literary awards, including the Scottish Book Prize, and was shortlisted for a major one, the Whitbread Book Award (now the Costa Book Award).

To be honest, I probably would have let this get past me, if it wasn’t for this line from the obit:

In a 2017 interview with The New York Times, the British novelist Ali Smith called it “one of the best least-known novels of the 20th century.”

On a totally unrelated note, I don’t have a good place to put this, so I’m sticking it here.

Art Horridge.

Horridge, who spent 25 years as the Houston Oilers’ mascot they called Roughneck, died at the age of 86, according to KPRC2’s Randy McIlvoy.
Horridge always wore a Columbia blue shirt over his shoulder pads with a shiny chrome hardhat emblazoned with the Oilers’ oil derrick logo and he carried a 48-inch rig wrench, which he used to implore the Astrodome crowd to make some noise.
Before the Oilers’ 1979 AFC Championship Game in Pittsburgh, Horridge told The Washington Post that he used to carry a plastic wrench with him at games, but he switched to a real one that weighed 44 pounds after some Steelers fans tried to rough him up in Pittsburgh after the AFC title game the previous season.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Books, NFL, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Three things I’m kind of looking forward to.

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

1. The Bunk lies down on Broadway.

Wendell Pierce is ready for another run as Willy Loman.
The American actor, best known for his work in “The Wire,” first took on the titanic title role in “Death of a Salesman” in London in 2019, and even then he hungered to bring the performance to New York.

Rod Dreher and his family saw the London production, and he raved about it. This might actually be enough to get me to go to NYC. (Also, Mike the Musicologist and Andrew the Colossus of Roads were talking about Peter Luger on Saturday, and I’d like to take a shot at that.)

2.

(The Last Dangerous Visions explained, for those of my readers who are not SF fans.)

3. There’s a movie tentatively scheduled for February 2023. It sounds like trash, but fun trash.

Cocaine Bear follows an oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists and teens converging in a Georgia forest where a 500-pound apex predator has ingested a staggering amount of the white powder and goes on a coke-fueled rampage seeking more blow — and blood.

That’s right, a movie inspired by the true story of Cocaine Bear. How can you not be entertained?

Posted in Beef, Books, Food, Mammals, Movies, Theatre | Comments Closed

Rhode Island content.

Friday, April 29th, 2022

Because we haven’t had any in a minute.

[Don] Winslow: My strong feelings about clams—and I do have very strong feelings about clams—have more to do with the chowder. You ask me about steamers and all that, no, I eat my little necks raw, thank you very much. But I am a fanatic on the subject of clam chowder. The only proper clam chowder is with clear clam broth, not cream like that baby food many of them serve and for God’s sake not with tomato juice as in the ultra vile Manhattan clam chowder. All those variations are abominations on the Lord.

I had clear broth chowder a couple of times when I was in RI, and I like it. Now that Mr. Winslow has brought up the subject, I’m halfway tempted to whip up a batch of my own, since you can’t get it around these parts. (I’m okay with a good white broth chowder.)

What I really miss is stuffies.

And I hope you guys are enjoying those $10 lobster rolls: my favorite local Connecticut roll is $22.

(I bet Winslow would probably hate me, but I’m a Connecticut guy. Mayonnaise is vile, and that’s pretty much what the Maine roll is: you’re paying $10 for flavored mayo.)

(I can’t figure out if McDonald’s in New England still sell lobster rolls. There are a lot of references to McD’s lobster rolls on the Internet, but they’re all several years old.)

Murphy: I caught that chowder detail in City on Fire. The moment I knew I was in a Don Winslow book was the characters started passionately discussing chowder.

Yeah…might have to pick up a copy of that.

Edited to add: meant to add a link, for reference: Rhode Island Clear Broth Clam Chowder.

Posted in Books, Food, Lobsters, Rhode Island | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 28, 2022.

Thursday, April 28th, 2022

NYT obit for Cynthia Albritton.

Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, noted Texas novelist who wrote about the Rio Grande Valley.

Kenneth Tsang, Hong Kong actor. Credits include “A Better Tomorrow”, “Die Another Day”, and “The Replacement Killers”.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 18, 2022.

Monday, April 18th, 2022

Lawrence sent over a nice story about Rachel Schrey, volunteer firefighter…and volunteer Easter Bunny.

Kevin Lippert. I had not heard of him before, but he sounds like a really interesting guy. He founded Princeton Architectural Press, which started out reprinting old books on architecture and grew from there.

Mr. Lippert made his name as a publisher, but he was more than that. He was a classical pianist who first performed at 6 and first composed music at 8. He started at Princeton as a pre-med student, until he was captivated by the history and philosophy of science and switched majors. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he earned his master’s degree from Princeton’s School of Architecture. He was a computer whiz and ran a tech services company, selling hardware and software to design businesses.
On the side, he cooked, biked, hiked, built furniture, gardened and fueled himself with innumerable cups of espresso. He was also a historian and wrote a book, “War Plan Red” (2015), about secret plans by the United States and Canada to invade each other in the 1920s and ’30s.
“He was a genuine polymath,” Mark Lamster, who worked for him at Princeton Architectural Press and is now the architecture critic at The Dallas Morning News, wrote in a tribute after his death.

Paul Siebel. He was one of the old time Village folkies, and got compared to Dylan. Except he had one problem…

…crippling stage fright.

Linda Ronstadt, in her book “Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir” (2013), recalled seeing Mr. Siebel at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village in 1969.
“We saw the last part of his very impressive show made rich with his cowboy falsetto and a song about a poignant, sad girl of a certain reputation named Louise,” Ms. Ronstadt wrote.
She recorded “Louise” and included it on her album “Silk Purse” (1970). It was subsequently covered by Bonnie Raitt, Leo Kottke and at least 20 other artists. Another of Mr. Siebel’s songs, “Spanish Johnny,” was recorded by Emmylou Harris and Waylon Jennings and by Mr. Bromberg.

He did two studio albums, neither of which sold very well (though the first did get some critical praise), and one live album. Then he quit music.

“He was very critical of himself,” Mr. Bromberg said. “After those two albums, he wrote another bunch of songs, but he destroyed them. He said they weren’t as good as the ones on the albums.”

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 12, 2022.

Tuesday, April 12th, 2022

Patricia MacLachlan, author. (Sarah, Plain and Tall)

Kathy Lamkin, actress. Other credits include “My Name Is Earl”, “Boston Legal”, and “Bones”.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 10, 2022.

Sunday, April 10th, 2022

Henry Patterson has passed away at the age of 92.

You probably know him better as the guy who wrote under the pseudonym “Jack Higgins”. (He had others as well, but I think that was his best known.)

“I’m not pretending I’m Charles Dickens or anything,” he said in the 2000 interview with the Belfast newspaper. “But whatever I do, whatever it is that makes up a ‘Jack Higgins’ book, it’s not like what anyone else does.”

Arthur D. Riggs, big damn hero.

He is probably best known for his role in the invention of artificial insulin. Working alongside Keiichi Itakura and Herbert Boyer, he developed a way to use recombinant DNA technology — essentially, the ability to splice together strands of DNA — to turn E. coli into microscopic factories for the production of humanized hormones.

…

Dr. Boyer and another researcher, Stanley Cohen, had already developed the basic technology behind recombinant DNA. Dr. Riggs’s insight was to see how that technology could be used to tweak bacteria to produce artificial hormones for human use.
“We chose insulin because it looked doable, and there was a need,” he told The Los Angeles Business Journal in 2021. “At the time, diabetics were being treated with cow insulin because there was no source of human insulin. And cow insulin resulted in a high rate of allergic reactions.”

…

The discovery made Genentech, and Dr. Riggs, rich. But unlike many of his fellow biotech pioneers, he declined the opportunity to make even more money working in the for-profit sector; he was under contract to Genentech, but after that arrangement ended in 1984, he returned to City of Hope full time.
He lived in the same house for 50 years and rarely sat for interviews. He gave most of his money away in the form of anonymous donations to City of Hope. His beneficence, to the tune of $210 million, was finally revealed last year, when he made an additional $100 million donation to the hospital.

…

Dr. Riggs later developed the foundations for monoclonal antibodies, again using recombinant DNA technology to trick bacteria into producing proteins that mimic human antibodies. That development has led to major advances in treating cancer and other diseases.

Posted in Books, Obits, Science | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: April 6, 2022.

Wednesday, April 6th, 2022

Bobby Rydell, one of the big teen idols.

Mr. Rydell and two other affable performers who became stars in those years, Frankie Avalon and Fabian, grew up within about two blocks of one another in South Philadelphia. Long after their days on the pop chart were past them, they enjoyed great success on the oldies circuit. The three had toured extensively together since 1985, billed as the Golden Boys, and were still performing together this year.
Mr. Rydell did not just have staying power; he also made a comeback after years of alcohol abuse, which he chronicled in his autobiography, “Bobby Rydell: Teen Idol on the Rocks” (2016), written with the guitarist and producer Allan Slutsky. Near death, he had a kidney and liver transplant in July 2012. By that October he was back, singing on a cruise ship with Mr. Avalon. But five months later, he underwent cardiac bypass surgery. Some of his later appearances were charity promotions for organ donation.

…

Mr. Rydell’s recording prime encompassed the era roughly between 1959, when Elvis Presley was in the Army and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and 1964, when Beatlemania hit America. It didn’t hurt that Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” was broadcast in those years from Philadelphia, the home of Mr. Rydell’s label, Cameo Records.
Mr. Rydell’s repertoire included plaintive love ballads; slow, danceable tunes; occasional frenetic rockers like “Wild One” and “Swingin’ School”; and ageless songs like Domenico Modugno’s 1958 hit “Volare,” which became Mr. Rydell’s signature song in his later touring years.
Mr. Rydell was a pop phenomenon but hardly a cutting-edge rock star. Still, he sold a lot more records than some of those who were. Over the course of his recording career he placed 19 singles in the Billboard Top 40 and 34 in the Hot 100. His name alone could conjure up an entire era: The 1970s rock musical “Grease,” in both its Broadway and movie versions, was set in 1959 at the fictional Rydell High School.

…

Columbia Pictures signed Mr. Rydell to a contract in 1961. But the only movie in which he made much of an impact was “Bye Bye Birdie,” released in 1963 and based on the hit Broadway musical of the same name, which poked fun at show business in general and rock ’n’ roll frenzy in particular. Mr. Rydell played Hugo Peabody, the meek high school steady of Kim McAfee, played by Ann-Margret, the small-town girl chosen to give the Elvis-like Conrad Birdie a kiss on national television.

Alan J. Hruska, lawyer, novelist, and one of the founders of Soho Press.

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.

Nehemiah Persoff. THR. He was 102.

206 credits in IMDB. If he wasn’t in everything, he was in lots of it. “Some Like It Hot”. “On the Waterfront”. “Law and Order”. “Barney Miller”. The good “Hawaii 5-0” multiple times. “Battlestar Galactica”. “Supertrain”. “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”. “Quincy, M.E.” “Sword of Justice” (I was just thinking about that show the other day.) “Columbo”. “McCloud”. “McMillan and Wife”. (Trivia question I don’t have an answer for: how many actors appeared on all three of the initial shows in the “NBC Mystery Movie” wheel?) “Mission: Impossible”.

And, yes, “Mannix”. (“A Puzzle for One“, season 6, episode 11.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Mannix, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 4, 2022.

Monday, April 4th, 2022

Ted Mooney, author. (Easy Travel to Other Planets)

June Brown. Credits other than “Eastenders” include “Doctor Who”, “The Sweeney”, and “Murder By Decree”.

Posted in Books, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 3, 2022.

Sunday, April 3rd, 2022

In no particular order of importance:

Bill Fries, also known as “C.W. McCall”. He’s been reported dead before, but this time it seems to be confirmed.

Mr. Fries was working as an ad executive at Bozell & Jacobs in Omaha in the 1970s, when he helped to create a series of television commercials for Metz Baking Company about a trucker named C.W. McCall hauling Old Home bread in an eighteen-wheeler and a gum-snapping waitress named Mavis at the Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep On A-Truckin’ Cafe.
The ads — including one that ended with the tagline “Old Home is good buns” — became wildly popular and helped pump up Old Home bread sales as they told the story of a diesel-scented romance between Mavis and C.W., who spoke in a formidable twang voiced by Mr. Fries.

…

With a record deal from MGM, Mr. Fries spawned a cultural phenomenon with “Convoy,” an ode to renegade truckers driving across the country, written with Chip Davis, who had also written the music for the Old Home bread ads and who went on to found the group Mannheim Steamroller, known for its Christmas music.
Crackling with CB radio lingo, the song tells the story of the truckers Rubber Duck and Pig Pen who are “puttin’ the hammer down” as they thumb their noses at speed limits, industry rules and law enforcement officers — “bears” and “smokies” in CB parlance. Along the way, they end up leading 1,000 trucks and “11 longhaired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus.”
Originally recorded merely as an album filler, “Convoy” tapped into the surging popularity of trucker culture and CB radio, which truckers used to communicate during long, lonely hours on the open road. It was part of a boom in trucking-themed country songs like “Roll On Big Mama” by Joe Stampley and “Willin’” by Little Feat.
“Convoy” spent six weeks at the top of the country charts and crossed into the top of the pop charts for a week, according to The World-Herald. More than 20 million copies of the single have been sold, according to Bozell. In 1978, Mr. Peckinpah turned the song into a movie, “Convoy,” starring Kris Kristofferson as Rubber Duck.

People who know me well know this story. For the rest: when I was younger (around the time “Convoy” was a hit) I owned a 45 RPM record (kids, ask your parents about 45 RPM records) of “Convoy” that I literally wore the grooves off of. (Kids, ask your parents about record players, needles, and grooves.)

We also owned an 8-track tape (kids, ask your parents…) with that song on it, that had the track break conveniently located at about the 2:27 point in that video.

Estelle Harris. Other credits include “Once Upon A Time In America”, “Mrs. Potato Head” in the “Toy Story” sequels, a guest appearance on a spinoff of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s, and “Futurama”.

Thomas F. Staley, who built up the Harry Ransom Center.

Dr. Staley, a scholar of James Joyce, arrived at the university in 1988. Over the next 25 years, he brought a literary sensibility and a competitive zeal to acquiring collections — and keeping them from going to universities like Harvard and Yale.
Stephen Enniss, who succeeded him as the Ransom Center’s director, said Dr. Staley had been adept at persuading university administrators, donors and the public at large to preserve literature that he saw as of lasting value.
“Tom’s enthusiasms became everyone’s enthusiasms,” Dr. Enniss said by phone.

…

Not long after being hired to run the Ransom Center, Dr. Staley learned that the archives of Stuart Gilbert, Joyce’s translator and friend, were available. According to The New Yorker, the papers, which cost the Ransom Center $265,000, came with an unexpected find: Joyce’s handwritten edits of the first chapter of “Finnegans Wake.” Dr. Staley estimated that those pages alone were worth $750,000.
In the 25 years that followed, he acquired the papers of dozens of literary luminaries, including Doris Lessing, Jorge Luis Borges, J.M. Coetzee, Penelope Lively and Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as the archives of Robert De Niro and the Life magazine photojournalist David Douglas Duncan. Dr. Staley also continued to teach English.
When Dr. Staley visited the playwright Tom Stoppard at his home in England, he found his papers scattered in his study and in another building on his property. As Dr. Staley recalled to The Times, Mr. Stoppard told him, “What you want is mostly stuff I would throw away: notes on this and that.” But there were also drafts of his plays, notes on revisions and drawings of stage sets.
On another trip, to Arthur Miller’s house in Connecticut, Dr. Staley learned that in a box Miller thought had been filled with roofing nails, he had discovered valuable notebooks and a short story — the very type of items that help fill an archive. Although parts of Miller’s archive had been at the Ransom Center for decades, a formal deal to acquire the collection, for $2.7 million, was not made until 2017.

General Charles G. Boyd (USAF- ret.).

In 1966, General Boyd, who was a captain at the time, volunteered for a dangerous mission in Vietnam — attacking surface-to-air missile sites around Hanoi. After repeated passes through enemy fire, his F-105D plane was hit and set ablaze. He had to eject, and, shortly after landing in a rice paddy, he was captured.
He spent the next 2,488 days enduring torture, isolation, malnutrition and interrogation in various squalid prisons, including the so-called Hanoi Hilton; for 18 months, he was imprisoned in a cell next to the Navy flyer John S. McCain, who would go on to become a United States senator and presidential candidate.

After his release…

He swiftly ascended in the Air Force chain of command, becoming the only former prisoner of war from the Vietnam conflict to achieve four-star rank. He also served as director of plans on the Air Force staff and as commander of the Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. He finished his much-decorated 36-year Air Force career as deputy commander in chief of the United States European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, where he helped oversee the drawdown of forces at the end of the Cold War.
After he retired from the Air Force in 1995, he took on several civilian roles that built on his expertise in homeland security and foreign policy.
Among the most notable was his tenure as executive director of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, also known as the Hart-Rudman Commission, headed by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. Barely eight months before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the commission warned — in a report that was largely ignored — that the gravest threat to the United States was the likelihood that a terrorist attack would take place on American soil and would kill large numbers of people.

Barrie Youngfellow, TV actress. (“It’s A Living”. Other credits include some cop shows, “Fernwood Tonight”, “Emergency”, and “WKRP In Cincinnati”.)

Posted in Books, Heroism, History, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 1, 2022.

Friday, April 1st, 2022

Nancy Milford, biographer. (Zelda: A Biography, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Afflilate links.)

Posted in Books, Gatsby, Obits | Comments Closed

Musical interlude.

Thursday, March 31st, 2022

I feel like it is time for one of those.

I have been resisting reading The Cartel (affiliate link) for reasons. I actually started to type those out here, but then reconsidered.

Anyway, I have been sort of flipping through it before I go to bed, and Winslow used a line from this song as an epigraph for one of the chapters. I had not heard of it, or Tom Russell, before, so I looked it up on Apple Music and liked it.

Tom Russell also did a cover of this song with Joe Ely, but I thought I’d throw up a version with just Ely. As Lawrence once put it, this is the greatest song ever written about a rooster.

I feel sure I have mentioned this song before, which I picked up from another blogger (I don’t remember who) but a search does not turn it up under the title or singer. In any case, I feel like it is worth mentioning here, because it seems to have recently become available digitally on Apple Music and Amazon (affiliate link) in “The Legacy Collection Volume 3: Damron Sings Henderson”. Previously, I could only find it on YouTube, and the CDs were unavailable.

“Pull your sights up to 800 and hold a yard left for the wind” makes me smile every time. It also reminds me of Lindy Cooper Wisdom’s poem, “Grandpa’s Lesson“.

…But ain’t many troubles that a man cain’t fix
With seven hundred dollars and a thirty ought six.

Posted in Books, Music | Comments Closed

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