Jonathan Taylor writes:

A.O. Scott has posted a reply to Richard Brody’s Front Row critique of his Times magazine article on “neo-neorealism.”
I’ll note in passing “Metronatural America,” an article by Jonathan Raban from a recent New York Review of Books about the films of Kelly Reichardt, particularly “Wendy and Lucy.” I think Raban captures the “complexity and ambiguity” in these films that Brody suggests is lacking. At the same time, the contrast Raban notes between these films and the stories of Jon Raymond in Livability (from which both “Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy” were adapted) perhaps jibes superficially with Brody’s claim that the movies put “emphasis on outer life at the expense of inner life”:

Where Kelly Reichardt practises a strict, Carveresque minimalism, leaving out far more than she puts in, Raymond is a prose maximalist. Although his characters have difficulty relating to each other, they relate to the reader with unbuttoned, occasionally garrulous, intimacy. To the reader alone, they entrust their memories, thoughts, feelings, landscape descriptions, even as they explain to the reader why these private riches can’t be shared with the person closest to them in the story.

Still, I think that what Reichardt does with “the outer life” and the constraints it puts on the conduct of “the inner life,” is as profound a portrait of the latter as anything.
I was recently talking to a friend about “Old Joy,” and the question of whether it was “depressing” came up; to which I responded that I did find it a bit depressing, but was thrilled, in a way, that it had left me precisely as mildly depressed as might be described as my resting state. For me solipsistically, at least, an indicator of the film’s unusual “realism.”

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Journalists rarely write their headlines, we all know, but the formulation of a book’s title is usually a murkier affair between author and publisher. And that is the subject of Gary Dexter’s excellent new blog, How Books Got Their Titles—with daily posts giving “the story behind a famous title of world literature.”
Some are behind-the-scenes tales of the title-deciding process; others puzzle out the title’s (not obvious) basis within the work itself. Plus: how to pronounce Sketches by Boz, and did you know that Thomas Hobbes also wrote a Behemoth?
I first became aware of the possibility that books might not be inseparable from their titles during my grade-school phase of speed-reading Agatha Christie mysteries, many of which bore inscriptions noting that they had been published under a different title in Britain. (An issue perhaps worth a Dexter digression?)
The next logical step is, how books get their covers. I content myself with the Financial Times‘s weekly feature, Book Covers. But there is, naturally, a whole book-coversphere to explore!

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Readers who enjoyed Lauren Collins’s style issue profile of Times street-fashion shutterbug Bill Cunningham will no doubt have dug up the 2002 autobiographical Times article by him that Collins refers to, “Bill on Bill” (and the associated “The Picture Subjects Talk Back“). But his monkish ways and his passion for deflecting Le Regard were also the subject of a beguiling 1996 piece in ArtForum by Guy Trebay. Cunningham’s been coming out of his shell over the 13 years since then, but at such a slow rate, I think he’ll remain catnip for profilers for years to come. As Trebay quotes: “‘But you’ll never know him,’ an old friend says. ‘You’ll never know what he knows or what he has.'”

Jonathan Taylor writes:
As previously posted, the new New Yorker includes a piece by Ron Chernow delving into the financial schemers of the past. Charles Ponzi was also the subject of a May 8, 1937, article called “The Rise of Mr. Ponzi,” that recapped the fraud, with special emphasis on how quickly it grew. (Aided, perhaps, by the Boston press, which “avoided mention of Ponzi’s scheme as carefully as if it had been an elevator accident in a department store.”) The reporter—the piece is signed “L.B.C.” but credited on the website to Russell Maloney—caught up with Signor Carlo Ponzi in Italy, where he had been deported, “unsuccessfully trying to finance publication” of a memoir by “selling shares in it”—with shareholders’ returns to be partially reinvested in the Italian national lottery.
Ponzi was “going to pieces” because his wife, still back in Boston, was divorcing him: “I’m going to hell, and I’m going to take a lot of people with me. To emphasize my attitude, you can say that I frequently get drunk.”
The article was filed under the “Where Are They Now?” Department, which seems to have run from 1936 to 1960, and includes follow-ups by James Thurber on Virginia O’Hanlon of “Is there a Santa Claus?” fame and on “the men who composed ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas,’ Irving Conn, and Frank Silver”; as well as articles checking on on former Vice-President (the hyphen is New Yorker style, you know) Henry A. Wallace, “Kaiser Wilhelm’s yacht, Meteor III, & its successive owners, 12 in number” (by Lillian Ross) and “Joe Knowles, the Nature Man, who in 1913 entered the wilderness of Maine, naked, to start a 2-month’s bare-knuckle fight against nature.”

Jonathan Taylor writes:
Out of all the same-samey coverage of the recently published volume of Susan Sontag’s early journals, Reborn, this characterization by Luc Sante stands out to me: ” ‘Reborn’ is in some ways less like a normal book and more like a person.” He continues:

….it is consistent in its deepest reaches, but subject to enormous mood swings. Some very large matters are barely glimpsed, whizzing by at terrific speed, while sundry smaller ones are examined in exhaustive detail. Motives often have to be guessed, and important players enter and exit summarily, without introduction. Various opinions and exhortations—or crotchets or tics—are repeated to the point where it takes a great deal of good will or simple affection to tolerate them. But Sontag does successfully elicit the reader’s good will and affection.

By the way, Sante’s 2008 collection Kill All Your Darlings contains a Talk of the Town piece he contributed in 1988 about the Tompkins Square Park riots, complete with amusing footnotes about how it was changed by the editors.