The folks at Vol. 1 Brooklyn were kind enough to feature my recent PopMatters post on Gay Talese over at their website. Back in March I wrote about Talese’s South Jersey roots and that crazy outline for his famous Esquire story.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn produces original fiction, literary-minded events, blogging, features, and thoughtful criticism. Check ‘em out.
James Burke, New York City, 1960 | Via Days Gone By
New evidence from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation calls into question some of the claims made in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. From the Wall Street Journal:
In researching “In Cold Blood,” Truman Capote received first-class service from the KBI and Mr. Dewey, its lead detective on the case. Mr. Dewey gave the author access to the diary of 16-year-old Nancy Clutter—her final entry logged only moments before two strangers invaded her home in late 1959 and murdered her, her brother and her parents. Mr. Dewey opened the KBI’s case file to Mr. Capote. He pressured press-shy locals to cooperate with the author and granted him extraordinary access to the killers. Mr. Dewey even helped Mr. Capote, a New Yorker with no home in Kansas, obtain a Kansas driver’s license.
In the new issue of Columbia Journalism Review, Douglas McCollam writes about a night in January of 1957, when The New Yorker sent Truman Capote to profile Marlon Brando.
Two nights after arriving in Japan, Capote showed up at Brando’s door wearing a tan cardigan and carrying a bottle of vodka for what in Brando’s estimation was to be a quick dinner and an early night (indeed, Brando instructed his assistant to call in an hour so he’d have an excuse to get rid of Capote). Instead, when Capote left Brando’s room six hours later, he was convinced that he had the raw material for a groundbreaking profile of the reclusive star.
What transpired between Brando and Capote over the course of their hours alone together in that hotel room has long been a subject of historical curiosity. Read more.
“Next, Stearn visits an apartment on Central Park, in a ‘very respectable building’ where the management thinks the girls are models in the Garment District. Here, high-end call girl Jane sits chain-smoking and stroking a Pekingese in her lap, telling of her days making $1,000 a week. She fell in love with one of her Johns, a boy who ‘sent me so many flowers the place smelled like a funeral parlor.’ But that didn’t last. ‘Love, schmove,’ she says, ‘who knows about love?’”
“Sisters of the Night,” Jeremiah Moss on a “grassy, musty” 1956-era reporting-driven book on NYC prostitution, The Paris Review
“There are two kinds of magic to a Cheever story. There is a superficial magic composed of light and weather, of trout streams, Martinis and beaches along the coast of Maine. And then there is a deeper, more disquieting thrill, which arises from the ways in which these radiant surfaces are undermined.”
“Tricks of the Light,” Olivia Laing on American writer John Cheever, New Statesman
Geoffrey Wolff wrote about Cheever for the New York Times in 2009.
Nice. (H/T Samuel Rubenfeld)
“The Blizzard of ’77 was an epic of staggering through a white landscape. None of us ever said it, but I think the fantasy was that we were the last people alive on Earth. Why was Central Park mostly empty in the middle of a blizzard? Because it was a blizzard. But was it really empty? Did we go hours without seeing anyone except an occasional cross country skier? All those arrival tracks zigzagging this way and that would suggest otherwise. But such is the glory of Central Park and its many nooks and crannies: that at any given moment, it holds thousands of people who feel like they are alone.”
In his book about Ernest Hemingway’s early years as a reporter, Charles Fenton wrote that the author grew to value newspaper writing for its “opportunity to write constantly, for publication, in a medium which required narrative that was interesting and forceful.” I’ve long been familiar with Hemingway’s short stories and a couple of his novels, and now, in finally getting to his archive of journalistic efforts, I’m appreciative of how his reporting sharpened his ability to confidently, carefully tell a story. At PopMatters, my short piece about Hemingway’s reporting was published earlier this week. Thanks for reading.
Whether he is cataloging oddities born at seedy, late-night carnivals or merely reflecting upon his boyhood summers in typically luminous prose, Ray Bradbury’s fiction offers a wealth of ideas both weird and heartbreaking. The award-winning author, screenwriter, playwright, and poet likely played a role in my decision to finish school as a literature major, during which I began seeking work as a writer and editor. For better or for worse, Bradbury’s stories helped steer me toward finishing my education and nudged me to write.
