"Till Death us do part." A nifty nasty bit of foreshadowing, from Bad Company (1930). Ricardo Cortez's performance as a psychopathic gangster intent on getting his lawyer's wife is, I think, underrated in the gallery of Hollywood gangsters. Cortez is violent, unhinged...and mean to a cat.
It's still a case, though, of holding one's self at a remove from an infrastructure of organizations and processes that are integral to one's own work as if everything beyond one's immediate points of contact was happening in some unknowable cloud of mystery.
ARCs to influencers, social media managers, ads, reviews, table displays are overwhelmingly linked to how much money a press can spend. Meanwhile, some of the most interesting books are being put out by people working from home and with next to nothing in the way of a marketing budget.
The lack of awareness of how the publishing ecosystem operates is particularly apparent among those who consider themselves outside the system — bloggers, podcasters, etc.. As a result, presses with deep pockets tend to get featured far more than the genuine article small independents.
I can see how it can be taken two ways, though.
According to the annotation, "Cather is evidently responding to draft promotional copy for the serialization of Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Forum from January to June 1927." Chapin was an assistant editor of The Forum at the time.
"If not a classic" means it's not a classic.
Last year on this date, I looked at Pick Up, a 1931 novel by Nebraska-born Eunice Chapin, which a Prairie Schooner reviewer called "trash, and not worth the hour it takes to read it.” One suspects a well-ground axe lay by his side: it's better than that, if not a classic.
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Go ahead, go ahead! (he says, anticipating the sweet taste of schadenfreude).
A delicious meta-joke delivered by Billie Burke, from Hi Diddle Diddle (1943).
...our world is still looking at the overturned board and scattered pieces and stammering, "But that's not how you play chess," instead of calling a madman a madman.
I once followed the foreign minister of Latvia, a chess grand master, at a cyber security conference. Her whole talk was an analogy between politics and chess. I then opened by asking what happens to your strategy when your opponent kicks the board over and screams, "I win, I win!"? Too much of...
On this date in 2023, I looked at Central Stores, a 1940 Vicki Baum novel set in a New York City department store that curiously has never been published in the U.S. Like Baum's better-known Grand Hotel, it's thoroughly entertaining if not profound.
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It's a deal! Maybe in June on our way back from the Willa Cather conference.
New to me, I'm afraid.
Joan Blondell is APO.
Other Men's Women (1931) (her third film).
It's not just publishing. To work today is to operate within a large, complex, interconnected system, and for many people, trying to grasp how it operates end-to-end is like trying to grasp geography in the Middle Ages. They're more comfortable assuming that chunks are marked, "Here be dragons."
State of Possession (1963) shows Austro-French novelist Edith de Born (who wrote in English) in mid-career and finely attuned to cosmopolitan sensibilities in Brussels. Anita Brookner said de Born was “much more stoical and less sentimental than English writers.”
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Another sample of Charlotte Greenwood from So Long Letty (1929), offering a musical sales pitch when giving cranky uncle Claude Gillingwater twice as good as she gets.
Her third, The Gilt Sugar Bowl (1932) vanished with hardly any reviews. The only extant copies of it are in the British registry libraries, so it will likely go on being unread and forgotten for years.
Pigsties and Lanes are in my TBR stack, but it may be a long time before I get to them. Sigh.
4/4
Her second, Lanes Lead to Cities, came out a year later. It didn't sell nearly as well.
3/4
This book was Dutton's featured title for August 1928 and had at least six printings.
2/4
If you keep looking for the forgotten, you keep finding them... eventually.
I found a cheap copy of Georgina Garry's first novel, Pigsties with Spires (1928). A striking title and a novelist previously unknown to me.
1/4
I watched Flying High with Bert Lahr last night. Well...he's better than Joe E. Brown. But it coulda used a lot more Charlotte.
As far as I know, Charlotte Greenwood got just one starring role, as Letty, the hotel beauty parlor sales lady in So Long Letty (1929), a comedy about wife-swapping. She could have been as great as W. C. Fields or the Marx Brothers, and certainly a darn sight better than the likes of Joe E. Brown!
Penguin agrees with you.
Also a sign of a significant capacity for empathy.
Cressida Lindsay juggled lovers, children, causes, and living arrangements throughout the 1960s, yet still managed to write four novels. The autobiographical Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces (1963) is by far the best: grim, raw, and deeply sad.
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I still have Acrobat, which Adobe retains, free, but it's cluttered with AI prompts and intrusions, so I've also switched to an alternative.
