847 Chapel Street, New Haven, Conn.
Many who know me know that I've been involved for some years with the Young Men's Institute Library, which has been located at 847 Chapel Street for the last hundred-and-some years. Growing up on York...
View ArticleRussell Hoban.
I’m writing this on the morning of Friday, the 16th of December. Yesterday’s New York Times featured two big obituaries that were of note to people in the world of books and letters. George Whitman,...
View Article“How’s East Haven?”“Sucks.”
The movie Ocean's Twelve, which came out in 2004, is one of my favorite movies of the last ten years. (Make of that what you will.) I don't know how many times I've watched it -- certainly a dozen,...
View ArticleDavy Jones on Crown Street
We cannot all be artists and writers. Though I'm writing this right now, I'm not really a writer. And though I know how to strum a few chords, I am hardly a musician. What I am is a really intense...
View ArticleThe Lights on Broadway. Specifically, the neon sign we all wanted to put in...
I speak, of course, of the massive Cutler's Records sign. The Cutler's sign was not only literally huge, but it was metaphorically huge in the mind of anyone who lived in New Haven. It was the most...
View ArticleA book I forgot to read a few years ago
I find that summertime is when I remember titles I meant to read years ago but forgot about for no good reason. The other day, for example, a copy of Nicholas Dawidoff's The Crowd Sounds Happy fell...
View ArticleThe Institute Library Gets Haimish.
Just in time for the High Holidays. Here we are, at the Jewish New Year -- Rosh Hashana to you and me, or, at least, to me, and here's what I've realized, very suddenly, in the last hour. The Institute...
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Richard Dorsett
New Haven used to have a pretty tight-knit community of booksellers. Of course, as bookstores have closed, that aspect of cultural life in New Haven has all but vanished as well, to be replaced by...
View ArticleWhat Vegetable Are You? or, I Have No Idea Who Killed Sister George.
Last night I had a hot date. My friend M, who I don't get to hang out with very often, asked me if I'd like to accompany her to see The Killing of Sister George, now opened at the newly-renovated Long...
View ArticleI’m Taking My Sharpie and I’m Drawing a Line: Tessa Hadley and Deborah Eisenberg
Yesterday I had a tiny epiphany when I finally got around to looking at a recent issue of The New Yorker: that after years and years of basically ignoring the fiction in this fine magazine -- to which...
View ArticleOf Thee I Sing: Laurie Colwin, Geraldine Coleshares, and 20 Feet from Stardom
Forgive me, dear readers, for returning once again to Laurie Colwin. But it's unavoidable right now. A couple of weeks ago I became aware of a movie, a documentary, about rock and roll backup singers....
View ArticleA Great Failing on My Part: One Reader’s Confession
I don’t think about this very often but every now and then it occurs to me that I must be the only woman in the reading population of the U.S. who did not devour the Little House books when she was a...
View ArticleA choice tidbit that was recently brought to my attention, or: Where is my...
About three years ago, I learned something new about myself: I cannot hold my liquor at all anymore. The story isn’t a pretty one, but it was a moment in my personal history that I will never forget,...
View ArticleRight Author, Wrong Book
Doris Lessing died last year. It got me thinking again about another one of my ongoing small problems as a reader, which I can explain very nicely with two writers as examples. The problem is: You love...
View ArticleA Review of These! Paper! Bullets! by a very reluctant theater-goer.
For two or three years now, my husband has been dragging me out of the house every few weeks to go to whatever’s going on at the Yale Rep. I am (to put it nicely) not someone who likes going to the...
View ArticleI was wrong in 1988. Bob Dylan Matters. OK?
So, in 1988, I was sitting in Broadway Pizza eating pizza and talking with some friends of mine who both happened to be named Dave. We were all people who cared a lot about music. I mean, a lot. We...
View ArticleThe Imponderables and The Institute Library
The Institute Library, which is now serving as a home for the New Haven Review, is about to see a big shift. It's an exciting change, but one I cannot help, personally, but be a little sad about. After...
View ArticleOn Reading, Again, and Again, to a Child
It's obvious to me that very small children -- babies, toddlers -- want to be read the same book over and over again. That's how they're absorbing the book, and the letters, and learning how to read,...
View ArticleThe Anchor.
You can make a lot of observations, none very happy, about the abrupt closing of the Anchor, the best dive bar that I ever knew in New Haven. You can complain about how abruptly it closed, how the...
View ArticleIdle Notions and Unexpected Realities: Movie Tie-Ins at the Institute Library
In November, 2012, someone who knows me very, very well suggested that Best Video out in Hamden should merge somehow with the Institute Library in New Haven. "You could do some great stuff together," I...
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