Gelbfisz/ Goldfish/ Goldwyn: the face of a spink

[Samuel Goldwyn on the left] I am 3/4 or so through (to 1942) A. Scott Berg’s 1989 biography of Samuel Goldwyn and loving it.  Really juicy, filled with great/hilarious/unbelievable tales about movie stars, directors, and producers of the 1910s-1950s (with an emphasis on the earlier decades), and offering a well-informed, panoptic history of early Hollywood– [...]

Ruth Rendell’s *A Judgment in Stone*- murderous illiteracy

I was at the public library and decided I’d find a Ruth Rendell novel or two to read — did a quick scan of Amazon reviews and grabbed two that had strong reviews and looked interesting.  The first one I read was her 1977 A Judgment in Stone which, I just learned, was adapted by [...]

*Songs from the Second Floor*: Occupy Stockholm

I recommend this film (from 2000) which I somehow completely missed until now; had never heard about it and the name of the director rang no bells.   Roy Andersson’s first film, A Swedish Love Story, was a hit & won several prizes at the Berlin Film Festival in 1970.   Subsequently his second movie was less [...]

Eugenides’ *The Marriage Plot* as Neuronovel

Just finished Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot which I enjoyed very much.  [The following contains no big spoilers but I do discuss the book as a whole, which requires some hinting at the way the plot unfolds.] Of course, as someone who went to school at Brown/ in Providence (a decade after the book’s 1980s [...]