A Page From: The Passion of Saint Alexander, Pope and Martyr, (Passio Sancti Alexandri martyris papae) circa 975-1075. Reused To Strengthen The Cover Of Flos testamnetorum By Rolandinus, de Passageriis, Published In Padua In 1482. (Images Courtesy Of The Lillian Goldman Law Library Rare Book Collection, Yale University.)The last weekend of April 2010 saw celebrations marking the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. Citizens of the world were urged to "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," to help save our imperiled planet. An exhibit at the Yale University's Lillian Goldman Law Library proves that, as fine an idea as this is, it is hardly...
Got The Blues, The Mean Reds, Or The Evil Yellows?
Holly Golightly Battles "The Mean Reds" At Tiffany'sTruman Capote's Breakfast At Tiffany's should be required reading for psychiatrists. Nobody ever painted a more terse and pithy picture of clinical depression than Holly Golightly: "You know those days when you've got the mean reds... the blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is." The National Library Of...
Biblio Gangster on the Loose in the Northwest?
The FBI has recently paid a visit to at least a half a dozen bookshops on Vancouver Island, British Columbia looking for one of their most wanted.80-year-old James J. (Whitey) Bulger has been on the lam for over 15 years. He has been well positioned on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list since he skipped town before his arraignment in 1995 for a slew of mobster-related charges. Bulger was the head of Boston’s notorious Winter Hill Gang during the 1970s and 1980s and was one of the subjects in Martin Scorcese's 2006 Academy Award winning film, The Departed.Here's what the...
Don Draper Eats A Naked Lunch
Portrait Of The Artist As A Psychotic Junkie.Self-Portrait By William S. Burroughs, 1959.(Image Courtesy Of Columbia University Library.)There are a lot of weird parallels, or at least perpendiculars, between junkie hipster supreme William S. Burroughs (and/or his literary doppelganger William Lee), and Mad Men's Don Draper. I couldn't get that idea out of my head after looking over an April 2010 online exhibit: Naked Lunch: The First Fifty Years. Columbia University curator, Gerald W. Cloud created the virtual show to commemorate the celebrations held at Columbia's libraries in 2009, marking the half-century since the 1959 Paris publication of Burrough's most...
Collecting Nurse Jackie’s Patron Saint: The Urtext of Memoirs
Suddenly, It's St. Augustine!That exclamation is neither a message from the Florida Board of Tourism nor the title of a wacky, new sit-com about a talking St. Bernard with identity issues.It is, rather, notice that recently, within the space of three days, I was struck by a cluster of references to the man who wrote the first memoir extant, the father of all autobiographies, St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. First, I'm skimming through The Erotic Revolution by Lawrence Lipton (1965), "An Affirmative View of the New Morality," i.e. the sexual revolution of the Sixties, and my eye falls upon a single...