Christian Clark has been an awesome and inspiring English and Drama teacher at The Bronx Academy of Letters since 2005 and chaperone for the past two years of The London Trip in which four students, winners of an essay contest, spend five days sightseeing and theatre going in London with me as their host. This …
“Arm Yourself Against My Dawn”: Revisiting Jean Strouse’s groundbreaking biography of Alice James
In a colorful, chatty, and ironically self-aggrandizing letter to her Aunt Kate, Alice James concludes with a quip: "Forgive me all this egotism but I have to be my own Boswell." Alice James had to wait nearly a century, but she eventually found her Boswell in Jean Strouse. First published in 1980, Strouse's dazzling, bold, …
The Art of Voyeurism in Mumbai’s Underworld: Mary Ellen Mark, Sonia Faleiro, and Katherine Boo. My April Column at Bookslut
One of the most beautiful and disturbing books I own is the photographer Mary Ellen Mark's Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay (1981). Mark's portraits of prostitutes, transvestites, madams, customers, boyfriends, and children, shot in an impoverished red-light district in India's largest and richest city, are exquisite. The photographs' blazing colors, destitute settings, precision of detail, …
“I think I can’t, I think I can’t…” When Girls Question Their Ability Because of Their Gender the Whole World Loses
Created by: Engineering Degree
Happy Mother’s Day (UK) from me, Bong Joon-Ho, and Alfred Hitchcock
Adventures in Steinlandia: My March column at Bookslut; plus new at Filmfatale: “Back to the Future?” A brief look at silent films old and new
If things truly come in waves, we seem to be riding a Gertrude Stein tsunami. Recent Stein events and books include: -- "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde" (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 28-June 2). This extraordinary show presents paintings collected in the early twentieth century by Gertrude Stein, her brothers …
Happy Valentine’s Day from Me, Marilyn, and Ella
In the early to mid 50′s Ella Fitzgerald was reaching the height of her great career. She was already one of the top selling jazz artist in the world at that time, but was having trouble getting booked at some of the bigger and more popular nightclubs. The Mocambo night club in East Hollywood, a …
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The Scarlet Empress, The Iron Lady, and My Cab Driver
Since the phenomenon of women in power is still rather rare, inevitably we develop a fetishistic relationship to those exceptional women who do somehow manage to rise to the very top of the political ladder. We regard these women as at once bewitching and bewitched, and they arouse in us the tantalizing dread of being …
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Beirut Discoveries: an astonishing meal; a dream-filled sleep; a stylish chaise-lounge; a ’50s diva; a sweet-smelling museum; a whimsical wall
At the far Eastern edge of Beirut tucked away behind a flower shop is the intimate, exquisite Tawlet Souk el Tayeb , a restuarant where each day a chef from a different region of Lebanon offers his or her best dishes spread out in a glorious buffet. Hotel Albergo, located in the beyond chic art-deco …
A Beautiful Book: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood in a new Folio Society edition illustrated by the extraordinary Balbusso sisters
Fully revised with an introduction by the author this exquisite edition is an object of beauty in language and image, an exemplar of all that is possible, past, present, and future. In The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood, humanity's reproductive ability has been so compromised by nuclear disasters, chemical warfare, industrial toxins, and contaminated …
Jenny McPhee 