A kind friend, aware of my interest in the intense research conducted by the Hanna-Barbera studio when preparing the "Bible" for their long-running early 60s hit The Flintstones, suggested that Christopher Collins' new book might include some Flintstones tidbits. Well, not exactly, but what I uncovered opening its pages was reward enough for my curiosity. I find his imaginative and sympathetic recreation of prehistoric man and his movement from sight to thought to speech almost as convincing as the time-based, seven season run of the Hanna-Barbera classic from 1960 through 1966 9and on to present TV culture). There's no "Ann-Margrock" in Collins' scholarly book, but that is about the only thing he's missing. All the other tropes are there, including a detailed account of Merlin Donald's four stages of development.

No one would ever say the The Flintstones is meant to be a documentary. In fact, it is really more or less a satire of American life in the contemporary Cold War atmosphere in which it was made. Similarly, Collins' cavemen are very much a product of today's prisms of thought, particularly in the way that for him (he is the professor emeritus of English at NYU, not really a scientist or archaelogist per se) ontogeny i never better than in its stringent recapitulation of phylogeny. If I understand it, primitive man in the days before speech still possessed a sort of poetic. A man or woman in the jungle veldt might look at a tree and see it sharply and vividly, but if he or she saw that tree again a few minutes later, they had no way to realize it was the same tree as the one they had just seen. The disconnect was even sharper when the tree flowered, or became covered with snow, etc, its visual impact altered in any way. It was only when man started walking towards the tree, that he learned it was one object from moment to moment, and an element of narrative entered the paleopoetic.

Man is the only animal to be able to use speech to conjure up the absent (though Collins shows us that bees have been observed dancing around objects that used to exist in a particular location, like a mulberry bush chopped down since the bees were last there--perhaps not even those exact bees, but their ancestors!), and in The Flinstones bees were put to use for all sorts of anticipations of modern day projects--such as the electric razor, which Hanna-Barbera configured as a clamshell filled with buzzing bees tat would bite off parts of a man's beard. Fred and Barney often had what we would call five o'clock shadow since the Ur-electric bee razor had flaws. Collins asks us repeatedly to keep in mind the question Noam Chomsky asked to challenge behaviorist theories of child development that theorized language grasp as a pattern of call and response, "arguing that the amount of time used by parents to teach this behavior could not account for the complex grammatical learning that the child achieves by three years of age."

Flintstones fans will be familiar with Collins' argument through the osmosis of comparing Pebbles Flintstones' speech acceleration over seven years, with that of her counterpart/love interest Bamm-Bamm, the towheaded son of Barney and Betty Rubble. Bamm-Bamm is cute but he's sort of monosyllabic if that. (It is implied that there's an innate difference in development between the natural-born like Pebbles, and the adopted such as Bamm-Bamm.) In the adventures of the two youngsters, which gradually came to dominate the series (my colleague Derek McCormack points to the existence of a contemporary tie-in volume called Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Meet a Wicked Witch, which unexpectedly parallels Collins' citation of Donald's third step of language development as the "Mythic") the glib and cute yakety yak of Pebbles is frequently contrasted to little Bamm-Bamm as the miniature "stone face" boy nothing like either of his putative parents Barney and Betty.

As Cole Porter wrote (in "Find Me a Primitive Man"), "I don't mean a kind that belongs to a club,/ But the kind that has a club that belongs to him./ I could be the personal slave/ Of someone just out of a cave." Collins is a wonderful writer who keeps surprising us at every turn with the twists of language development, including changes in physiology that allowed words beyond the grunts of Bamm-Bamm. If imagination was the mammal's most effective tool, it is equally true, he argues, that instantly a social problem arose once what he calls the "mental photography" of the imagination took root. "The first scrap of object information ever communicated was likely to have been a lie." (Lies, like poetry, might have been devised to create an alternate universe than the one unfolding in front of the witness' eye.)

Brian Kim Stefans hasn't had the normal career of a poet, but instead the zigzags of his life and leanings gave him access into fields of inquiry that most of us were ignorand of until he opened the way. His latest book "Viva Miscegenation" comes already titled with the quotation marks Louis Zukofsky took to distinguish his "A" from other A's, Or should I have written "other As"? Miscegenation itself is a cold, distant and cruel word, so one wonders why anyone would wish it long life, especially a poet of mixed racial heritage as rehearsed in his own name (for he is Brian, the emperor of the Irish, then Kim, Polish like Kim Novak, and somewhere back in his ancestry his family belonged to the Stefans). There's a lot to unpack just on the cover of the book, and I'm not discounting the glittery, shiny silver on white tiny stripes that roll vertically across its recto and verso--like an ornate wedding present in a 1950s society wedding.

I trace the movement of the book from a measured, mannered New York School pastiche to the somewhat scattered and tangential vibrations one picks up in Southern California. It is not immediately easy for poets such as BKS or Aaron Kunin (who writes a blurb for this book and to whom one of the very best poems is dedicated) to subject the keen ice of their intelligence, that bristling wit, to the torporous history of LaBrea's famed tar pits, but in each case the operation has been a success, both poets writing as never before with an ease new to them, a contingent glow of imperfection, almost a Cheshire cat's smile. evaporating from the pages as quickly as one reads them. There's a distinct luxuriance in mouthing the words, those that Brian Wilson whispered in Glen Campbell's ear during Campbell's 1965 solo recording sessions, "I guess I'm dumb, but I don't care." (Cf. the end to ""Metro" on page 123: "Why are you never asking/ or putting your arms around me when you see, I'm dumb?" --such a beautiful heaping of the tropes of abled vs disabled, questions vs sentence, first ve second person, all come tumbling down like the perfect endless wave. The impression is of a beloved genius somewhat happy at last, like he would even kiss a sunset pig to quote another unlikely transplant from colder climes.

What can an everyday person do to help change the world? Enlightened Season Two maps the territory in an erratic, sometimes aimless way that eventually delivers its punch through underplaying (yes, even Laura Dern and her mother try underplaying here, to great result) and some script surprises which I dare not reveal in this public space, eve though the show's been cancelled and anyone who cared for it has doubtless subscribed to HBO and gone for it. But anyhow when the end times came for Enlightened I put aside my grudges and totally embraced the ethos of the show, confusing and arbitrary as it is/was.

I should add that some varied acting helped the pace of Season Two. Viewers, some of us, had a hard time with Laura Dern's continual swing between relentless optimism and Nazimova-like gloom, which occurred in every episode; one wanted to reach out and counsel her, Amy Jellicoe, don't stop taking your meds just because you saw a flower in your mother's garden. And Christa, her assistant, obdurately chipper and phony, and Mike White sitting there looking like the underside of a log in every episode, his lips twitching--well, the director made them all act this way We looked forward to Luke Wilson showing up once in a while not because he's a better actor, nor because he used to be a hunk (sorry, that boat sailed long ago) but because he gave some relief from the one dimensionality of everything else we knew about the world of Enlightened. Southern California is a two-edged sword in this series, one blade ripe for satire of New Age belief in self-improvement, and the other blade trying to cut through the thorny, perdurate fiber of corporate culture with its lies standing in for truth. But Season Two brought us Molly Shannon and James Rebhorn as the top players at Abbaddon and the show got much more intriguing instantly. And also late in the season, we got a blast of Charlie from GIRLS in Hawaii trying out rehab and failing miserably, right before he got fired from GIRLS itself, poor guy. Yet another victim of corporate culture, meta style? He was good in this show too.

Did they know ahead of time, last year, when Laura Dern was pushed into the bowels of Timm Sharp's Cogentiva, that the humble IT department would be put into use, episode by episode, in a Herculean effort to bring down Abbadon? Every time you saw the word Abbaddon engraved in stone on its gleaming building surface, you were reminded that it was the name of Satan in ancient Babylonian teleology. (The show was never about subtlety exactly--Luke Wilson's first name, for example, was "Levi" and his last name "Callow." Mike White makes characters' names the way John Bunyan did in Pilgrim's Progress.)

I remember seeing Paul Lynde on TV game and variety shows when I was a boy, and then seeing him in George Sidney's version of Bye Bye Birdie. What an astonishing dad he made, with that somewhat handsome face that crumpled at the drop of a phone call or a sign from Ann-Margret that she was growing up. He was great at reacting, and that's rather rare in screen acting, but you could watch the whole movie if Christian Marclay-like photoshop interns blacked out ninety per cent of it, cut out the soundtrack, and just left his expressive face react to his daughter's confusing combination of daughterly pampering and siren-like keening. She--Ann-Margret--embodies life, or youth, as no other star ever could, and Lynde watching her seems like an old man, though he was what, 33 when the movie was filmed? His is the gaze of death, puzzled death, death mystified that life goes on without him, life has got another life to lead, outside of the family structures Dad embodies.

Of course the authors make clear how ironic this set up is, since Lynde was himself running headlong from the disaster of his own nuclear family (and the line of individual deaths it entailed) and his own drive for pleasure was no less pure and driven than Ann-Margret's. Now that I think of it, funny how neither star had any children themselves? I'm not saying there was a curse on Bye Bye Birdie, but--

In fact how could there be when Janet Leigh, playing the Spanish songwriter Rosie so memorably with the black wig, was already the mother of two lovely daughters?

This is all prelude to my concise description of Center Square as a biography of a great showman who used alcohol as a crutch to make his way through a difficult, if charmed life. The authors have apparently interviewed a number of players in Lynde's life,. though unfortunately the editing of the book obscures their original research, making it seem as though they surrounded themselves with twenty years of TV Guides and let the chips fall where they may. But a vivid picture of a legend shines through. He had his own cadres of celebrity fans, if we can believe authors Steve Wilson and Joe Florenski--including Garbo, who sent him a fan letter (where is it now?), Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; Harry S. Truman--an unlikely bunch all around. Hollywood Squares, of course, propelled him into superstardom, and eventually he clawed his way into the center square, sometimes attaining a political edge that made remaining in the closet a moot issue. "According to the old song, what's breaking up that old gang of mine?" he was asked, and after a pause he ventured, "Anita Bryant?" You tell em Paul Lynde! I came away from the book thoroughly impressed by Lynde's durability as a star, and his sex, drug and alcohol problems I chalked up to the perils of fame, but I wasn't prepared for the incident of July 1965 that occurred here in San Francisco, on the eighth floor of the famed Sir Francis Drake Hotel here on Powell Street, coincidentally enough right around the time famed San Francisco poet Jack Spicer was writing his final poems very close by.

That was the night that Paul Lynde checked in with a bartender boyfriend and before the wild party was over, the younger man was dead. Bing Davidson plunged to death after lowering himself out of the window ledge and clinging by his fingertips. The last thing he saw was Paul Lynde's leering face hovering above him and one by one his fingers slipped. Bye, bye,. Birdie! Kenneth Anger left this lurid story out of his book Hollywood Babylon. Was he paid off I wonder? Kenneth Anger: we thought you had integrity! Anyhow I can't walk up Powell Street now without thinking of the poor man, Bing Davidson, cute, smushed up victim of a comic's lust.

Spoilers ahead! Of course the novel ended after only 50 percent of the book was written--there was the "Sapsea Fragment," though some think Dickens didn't write that piece at all, and that it was the product of Forster's hand Dickens did sketch out notes; and he instructed the artist he had chosen to illustrate the periodical version for which he was writing month to month, on the sorts of things that would be needed in the second half, and that's why Drood nerds--the "Druids" as they are sometimes known--have been arguing about this novel for many many years. It takes big balls to go ahead and finish it, but on the other hand it's almost irresistible.

Part of the problem is what we know of the plot seems irretrievable obvious. Many are convinced that Jasper, in a fit of opium induced madness ("wickedness" is the word constantly in play in the novel) kills his beloved nephew and throws him into the quicklime of the cathedral underbelly. And that the second half of the book would feature Dick Datchery bringing Jasper to justice. But if this is the case, argued the Victorian writer Andrew Lang, there is no mystery whatsoever, except that it seems clear that Datchery himself is someone else we have already met under another guise, and his unmasking might provide a surprise. And so, there have been zillions of continuations, but a paucity of actual suspects outside of Jasper.

The BBC version shows an awareness of many of these issues and actually surprised me with an unexpected ending. As soon as Datchery starts inquiring (in some scenes definitely not written by Dickens) into the career of the elder Edwin Drood (thought to be long dead), well, my little mind was going, No! They can't be playing it that way! But play it they did and by Gad, I liked it! The post-colonialist reading of Edwin Drood is especially marked in the new second half, but you figure, Dickens was going somewhere with the Landless pair, they weren't just dropped out of India into Cloisterham without a social justice point to make. My friend Alistair Johnston has complained on his blog that not one single font visible in any of the many words, signs, or texts visible in this film had been invented in the 19th century, so that to a specialist like himself the show is unwatchable and, he would argue, even to one without any knowledge of typography, one's unconscious registers the disparity and smells out the falsity anyhow. For me it was the casting that disappointed. Matthew Rhys was fine in the part of Jasper but just too magnetic and charismatic to play the unassuming sad sack guy no one notices slipping in and out of Princess Puffer's opium joint. Why get someone who smoulders more than Olivier, more than Logan on Veronica Mars? And on the other hand, the young people are all properly young, but they're all ugly! Rosa Bud is supposed to be gorgeous, well, a perfect flower, but this girl reminds me of Sissy Spacek in the last scenes of Carrie, and Edwin Drood is like something John Jasper scraped off of his shoe, what a mess. The actor is called Freddie Fox and both first name and last name are lies! Oh, I know, does anyone remember the US movie of 1980,"FAME"? And Paul McCrane played the young, sad, gay boy mooning over the comedian boy? Paul McCrane when he still had hair (big, permed. Bozo hair) and his name was Montgomery? They should have called this show, The Mystery of Paul McCrane.

Celia Fremlin was one of the word's great mystery writers and she is too little known today, but fifty years ago she was acclaimed around the world for her suspenseful, yet often hilarious novels detailing London domestic life. I don't remember many of her male characters but she was wonderful with women, and her novels show us a world of put-upon women having to deal with the ignorance of society and the general cussedness of men. I was about to say she was the UK version of America's Charlotte Armstrong, but Armstrong did not concentrate quite as much on the torments of family life as did Fremlin. The Trouble Makers brings us close into a neighborhood apparently populated with women who don't much care for their husbands, to the point that, to a modern reader, it isn't quite clear why they don't divorce the SOBs and move on. But perhaps in those days the institution of marriage was worshiped with more fervor, and the institution of divorce perhaps not quite so practiced.

All the women on the block look down on poor Mary Prescott, whose husband Alan is mean and fierce with her, critical about everything, able to silence her with a single dark glance or if something is wrong with his dinner. Our main character, Katharine, has gone back to work part-time but is still trying to raise three daughters all under ten, and to please her husband Stephen, a cold fish almost as trying as Alan Prescott. The main entertainment the female characters have is getting together and discussing how awful their husbands are. Katharine is bright enough to realize that there are less despairing ways to spend one's time but somehow the pleasures of gossip and community have their places in what is otherwise a doleful life. Every moment of every day is awful for these women, and turning the pages one learns more about how to light a fire, how to ruin a pudding, how to stop your child from crying while swotting over 9 year old exams, how to light a Guy Fawkes firework--all these purely English details which will leave you perfectly happy you don't live there--or maybe you didn't live there in 1963. Suddenly Mary's friends realize that she has become obsessed by a dark man in a raincoat haunting the neighborhood and trailing her in the local "building site" (a vacant lot) and the whole thing ends up in a tremendous climax in the very last lines of the novel.

In one scene a braggart housewife invites Katharine and Stephen and another couple to dinner and tells them that the splendid meal she's just served was made up of odds an ends she found in the larder. The husbands turn to their wives accusingly, asking them why can't they be more like Stella.

"Stephen and Mr. Plumber both nodded at Stella in admiring agreement, and Katharine succeeded in hiding her total disbelief. Fresh prawns--button mushrooms--thin strips of veal wrapped round black olives--these are not the sort of items a housewife's eye lights on when she looks round her larder to see what she's got. It would take a lunatic to believe it--or someone else's husband."

Celia Fremlin won the Edgar for best mystery of the year in 1960 for her masterpiece The Hours Before Dawn (her first mystery, though apparently there was an nearlier "straight" novel which I would love to read, sort of a Nancy Mitfordish book), and she lived on to a great age (94!) but by that time her books had largely gone out of print, and all three of her own children had died before her, which I always think is so sad! Anyhow once you start the habit with Celia Fremlin you will always be reading and rereading a handful of her early novels--her first 5, or 6, or 7. Fans still debate whether the decline began with POSSESSION or with PRISONERS BASE---somewhere in there she wasn't so scary and her characters were not so amusing. I imagine it's hard to take this all in, for you newbies who haven't read Fremlin, but at her best she could be laugh out loud funny at the very same time as she's making you uneasy and looking over your shoulder to see if a dark man in a raincoat is slouching behind you, his face unreadable but aglitter with menace. And why is the pair of scissors missing from its drawer?

First off, the theme song has got to be one of the catchiest tracks Gary Lewis and the Playboys ever laid down. I never heard it before, but now it's in my head day and night and I wake up singing it, even from little catnaps. That would be enough to make Way Way Out one of the top movies of 1966, but on top of it you have Jerry Lewis in a truly splendid performance, one in which he seems totally generous to his costars, allowing each to have a chance to shine, and as another reviewer mentioned, he's just as good in the ordinary moments as in his demento slapstick ones (which actually I have some problems with ordinarily)--he was a star I despised as a kid, couldn't understand why my parents adored him, what a ego-bound goofball, and yet as I see his movies today none is without interest and I can admire his skill and his power.

He actually looks kind of sexy in this, even in the bizarro astronaut costumes they give him, including those yellow satin lounging pajamas astronauts wear on the moon--satin with what look like hundreds of tiny bugle beads sewn across the chest and down the forearms, perhaps to beef up the beefcake factor. Connie Stevens, his female opposite number, wears a hot pink minidress and a multicolored striped bodice with it, when she and Jerry entertain their Russian cosmonaut friends, played by Dick Shawn (another one I couldn't stomach as a boy) and Anita Ekberg with chocolate colored hair, who enters the space house in a one piece swimsuit made of white lyrca and a lot of anticipation.... She tumbles to the ground and asks if she could sleep there to annoy Dick Shawn. Forgot to mention that most of the furniture is made up of transparent pillows, like beach balls you could blow up and seal off. The designers must have been very influenced by Pop Art and Andy Warhol's futuristic fantasies--there's a wide screen TV in every bedroom blasting in earth signals--westerns, Frankenstein--a TV framed in classy wood frame as though it were a living painting, and the primitive remote Jerry plays with is like a miniature cash register or abacus with huge buttons to drag six inches down into their slots to change the channel.

Plus, you have Dennis Weaver (as the previous astronaut) gone to seed, "gone native" in his long sojourn on the moon. I wonder if Duncan Jones or whoever wrote that movie "Moon" with Sam Rockwell, saw Way Way Out, or maybe this is just part of a long line of films about how lonely it must be on the moon and how it could turn men mad! Anyway Dennis Weaver out Dennis Hoppers Dennis Hopper in his totally seedy, weird performance as "Hoffman," for which he should have won the Oscar. He filed off his upper and lower teeth to give him that edge of madness, the kind that Antonin Artaud displayed in the asylum. I find it very telling that the official website of the late Dennis Weaver omits this movie entirely from the star's filmography, while including even TV commercials and guest spots on "That Girl" and the like. And yet they would prefer to pretend Dennis never "went there" as he did in Way Way Out. This is like the latterday Pat Boone pretending he never acted in the lewd Vincente Minnelli innuendofest that was "Goodbye Charlie." People! Wake up! Be proud of the time you sawed of our teeth and acted stoned and morose and needy. It may never happen again!

Anyhow, Anita Ekberg says she'll sleep on the couch and skeptical Connie Stevens (actually quite good in this movie, with some complicated scenes to play) says, "OK, I'll fetch you a pillow, and how many blankets do you like, one or two?" And Anita tosses back her chocolate hair and gargles, "No blankets, just a pillow." Then the Russians make space vodka using capsules and water and everyone has a Russian party on the moon.

I grabbed this book for a reason: I'm from Long Island myself and as an adult in California I'm haunted by the memories of the houses I saw and visited as a child, a teen, a young adult on the North Shore of Suffolk County. I wonder whose house I was in; I wonder if they're still standing, and the evocative cover of Long Island Modernism 1930-1980 promised the exact answers to many of my idlest daydreams. Caroline Rob Zaleski's history is, for the most part, exceedingly well researched and imaginative; she has a huge sympathy for modernism in this era in which it has been reviled and, we see in the text, continually defaced and overbuilt. In some cases, like the famous Frank Lloyd Wright houses, the owners came to realize they were living more in a cathedral setting than anything homey, and covertly added toilets and the like, and central heating. The earliest house in the book had only a water pump outside the main structure to provide water for all of its residents. And we see that some modernist architects called for vast rooms impossible to heat in Long Island's frigid winters, though they must have been lovely in early October and mid-to-late April.

Long Island in this period was a strange combination of farm and beach land, and growing suburban kitsch and sprawl. Wealthy people came to live right next to the poor settlers, and often the latter turned to serving the former, like the society pictured in the 1960s sitcom Green Acres. (Or its converse, The Pruitts of Southampton with Phyllis Diller.) As Rob Zaleski shows, the great architects came and saw and conquered, more or less, though neighborhood associations and the like sometimes vetoed innovative plans because they were just too weird. My town, Smithtown, prided itself on its colonial atmosphere, having been founded in 1664 by a man who made a wager against native peoples that he could ride around huge chunks of forest on the back of a wild bull; and whatever land he traversed would belong henceforward to him and his descendants. A giant statue of a bull greets visitors to Smithtown at the junction of Route 25 ad 25A, anatomically correct, and in my day it was the sport of the high school kids to paint it genitalia red and green at Christmastime, orange and black at Halloween, green for St Patrick's Day etc. Most of the houses and buildings were generic, split-level "Shingle Style" cookie cutter schlock, those that were not 300 year old former blacksmith shops, but now and again we would be greeted by something authentically Deco or Bauhaus in our midst, a quiet home, sprawling at one end or the other, with nothing cute about it, nor ornamental. I remember one house in my neighborhood, on Eckernkamp Drive between River Heights and Landing Avenue, nearby Sweetbriar Park and the Nissequogue River, that was just amazing, as if Mies Van Der Rohe lived there, and of course he didn't, but who did? Since no kids were ever seen entering or exiting the house, we had no plausible way of finding out.

Rob Zaleski has organized her survey according to architect, and each chapter gives us the accomplishments of a great visionary, so that perhaps individuals who made only one cool house might get lost in the shuffle a bit; at any rate, it's an effective method of getting the reader through vast quantities of social history. In architecture as perhaps in no other art one sees the power of money, vast quantities of it, to make a change. Perhaps it took less money to build the Conger Goodyear House in Old Westbury than it did to construct Versailles, and perhaps the Goodyear house is a bit less fussy, but both exude the solidity of state powere and perhaps something of its woeful playfulness. A prewar photo of the Goodyear shows us the "long gallery," with its barrage of then contemporary pictures lining the wall as seen from the lanai, a splendid Picasso guitar, a Matisse, a Segonzac, Cezanne's "Peasant in a Blue Smock" winding up with a Salvador Dali so new it must have been still wet. Rob Zaleski takes her vocabulary for discussion of each house with the terms the architect or the family used, so a sentence studded with quotations appears quite often, there's one on page 140 in which we are told we are "looking through the `long gallery' toward the `sunroom.'" It took me awhile to understand the reason for all this internal quotation, but "now" it's quite "comprehensible."

Many of the families remain colorless, perhaps because they have watchful descendants, but Rob Zaleski is capable of Answered Prayers-like innuendo which spices up her style from time to time. Her pages on "Villa Rielle" (Rielle Hunter, anyone?), the cozy mansion of the playgirl baroness Gabriele Lagerwall in Lloyd Harbor speak volumes about the dissolute lifestyle of the very rich and those who invent perfumes like "White Shoulders." These people often knew exactly what they wanted and their architects struggled to take care of their demands. Richard Neutra added a hydraulic contraption to one side of the bed in John Nicholas and Anne Brown's Fishers Island home, because Anne loved to smoke in bed and wanted an ashtray type thing that would descend into the servants quarters so they could clean it and return it to their mistress' bedside table. Other colorful clients included a Westhampton hotelier who had Charles Addams come in and create a large mural over the bar in which the Addams Family characters went fishing and swimming in the ocean outside the Dune Club, and a Hempstead theater mogul who built a grand modernist movie palace at exactly the wrong time, commercially, to do such a thing, but who managed to scare up Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg to attend the opening, By the end of the book these architects are working on large somewhat brutalist state universities and other public buildings and some of the fun goes out of the writing, but all in all this is a fantastic read and even better, the book benefits from the services of a fantastic photo editor. Simply put, everything you want to see that's mentioned in the text, is right there, in a gorgeous period photo. It beats the internet!

Finally the book intrigues in its several accounts of the US sculptor Mary Callery--I've heard of many artists but never of this one--and Rob Zaleski makes a case that she is dreadfully under recognized today, whereas sixty years ago she was one of the leading (I was about to say "female" but strike that) artists in the USA and what we see of her work is fantastically period and more. What gives, when someone mentioned in the same breath as Calder, Noguchi, Brancusi, not once but all of the time in the 1950s, gets completely forgotten?

The house I was looking for is not in this book, sadly enough, so if any of my readers know Smithtown, and know the house on Eckerkamp between River Heights and Landing Avenue, right before that curve onto the bridge over the Nissequogue, and perhaps you have kids and the present owners have kids, have them mingle and get back to me with, who was the architect and how did he come to build that house in Smithtown of all places? I looked it up on Google Earth and I swear I saw some kids playing in the shadows.

I got a box of Sabudas for Christmas and spent my first days of the new year trying to decide which among my friends (nearly 2,500 on Facebook, many of whom I actually know in real life) deserved these cute little suckers.

It was agonizing for awhile, then I realized there was another way out--order another box, or maybe a small case. Six come in a box, and I had at least three dozen friends who are softies for daffodils. Tragedy! Amazon was stone cold out of em and didn't know when they would get more. My rep said to try MOMA instead, but have you ever tried ordering something from MOMA when you live thousands of miles away? Their customer service is fine, that's not the problem, but they send you the daffodil boxes in clouds of organic styrofoam.... Literally enough to coat the whole floor of my San Francisco apartment in flat white, a white that rustles in your ear when you try to pick up a few pieces off the carpet, the white that chokes up the Tyson vacuum when you try to suck it up tubewise. It became a challenge to find the boxes of cards amid the inundation of white flyaway foamcore pieces, and this was a challenge my three cats were happy to meet. Whomp! There goes one into the box, panicking when he can't find his way out. Whomp! There goes the littlest one, the one who likes to play with new toys. To her, foamcore's like catnip. Eventually we overturned the dumpster size box upside down to release two cats, 9,000 pieces of foam, and the daffodil cards that made it all worthwhile. Friends, if you're wondering how I got those cards that greeted you on the first day of spring, it was MOMA and my cats. Another "pop-up" gift from your friend Kevin.

Like many readers today, I was hooked by Patti Smith's memoir of a few years back, very moved by its razor-sharp recall and the generosity with which she was able to look back at a very distant time, acknowledging the heartbreak and the pain of some of the scenes she found herself in, but in general compassionate enough to see the beauty even in the darkness. And I kept thinking as I was reading JUST KIDS, what old-time book does this remind me of? Finally after a two hour hunt through my bookcases, I remembered this book, A BUNDLE OF TIME, the memoirs of Harriet Cohen. A friend had pressed it on my some years back when I told him I had never heard of Harriet Cohen, and now she has become a watchword to me, a sign of utter sympathy and high culture, like the code of recognition between strangers that E M Forster writes about in "Two Cheers for Democracy." "I believe in aristocracy... -- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it," he averred. "Not an aristocracy of power, but of the sensitive, the considerate... Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages--there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. "

For me that's what connects Smith and Cohen, but I should back up and explain that she was a British pianist, quite beautiful, who knew all the great modernists in England and abroad in the 20s and 30s at least, which is the period she managed to write about fullest in this book, published posthumously and cobbled together from scraps by the publishers shortly after her untimely death in 1967. You can hear her piano playing on Youtube, and it will not be to everybody's taste; she has little power and often seems like a dilettante or a ghost, preferring lovely little things with too many or too few notes. But if you are in the mood, she is completely convincing and you can see why many of the great artists of her day wanted her to premiere their new works. And she can write like a dream! And she was movie star beautiful, there is not a photo in existence which shows her as anything but a goddess. Her career was stalled by anti-semitism, or "racialism" as it was then called, in the period between the wars she comes to realize the dangers of Nazi ideology years before the dopey politicians of England and France. She was an activist even though her life seems otherwise comfortable and wealthy from the start, oh, and I forgot to say that her gender probably also hindered her from full acclaim, for many of the conductors for whom she might have worked dismissed her as a sort of musical Anais Nin with wrists too fragile to play her instrument properly.

Her best trait in writing is her ability to draw the reader into the innumerable social and aesthetic scenes of the day. She knew Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Bax, Holst and scores of British musicians--the book jumps forward in time a little to present accounts of her friendships with (and letters from) the somewhat younger Britten and Tippett. She traveled widely and met Manuel de Falla, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Ravel, Richard Strauss, musicians of dozens of lands. And she knew the writers too. She was a particular pet of Arnold Bennett, H G Wells, Somerset Maugham, George Bernard Shaw, and she spills dozens of anecdotes about them, not just charming but really incisive. She is the sort of voice, like Patti Smith, that you want to hear about everybody from--she inspires trust in the reader. I learned more about Einstein (yes, Einstein!) from this book than in the multi-volume biographies on the man. In a way, a cynic could find this penchant for famous names amusing, like the second act number Judy Holliday sang in Bells are Ringing ("Drop That Name!") but Cohen was there, and invariably she saw the tiny things that make each human soul memorable, unique. Karsavina, Horowitz, Busoni, Ethe; Smyth, they swim through these pages like beautiful jeweled fish.

Nobody, not even Patti Smith, can give us a complex cameo like Harriet Cohen can. Here's one taken more or less tat random, plunging my finger into the book the one might consult the I Ching: "Lytton Strachey had wanted me to meet Ottoline Morrell almost as soon as we became acquainted, and I was anxious to do so, having seen this astonishing creature only from a distance. In her enormous hats, swathed in pale, floating, chiffons--the tinkling of jewels at her ears like sounds of pagodas, somehow she called up unimaginable delights even if the beholder were only a woman. She had a proud head that reared like that of some wild creature in a forest, one awaited a neigh. When she gave her hands in greeting, she gave herself. I adored her on sight."

Gershwin wrote "Lady Be Good" for Cohen. Rilke seems like he was in love with her. Thornton Wilder told her that she was the true "woman of Andros." But one reads "A Bundle of Time" for Cohen's writing, its firm, yet delicate tracery of the varieties of human experience. "Talking of Bartok," she will write, "Gray once described him to me as 'completely inhuman.'" (It is like Cohen to remember and credit those friends of hers who came up with striking remarks.) "It is true that his very appearance suggested pure spirit, the intensity of his gaze, that slender, later-attenuated form--'like gold to aery thinness beaten' as Donne had it--gave him an almost diaphanous quality. But the reserve, the aloofness that I had expected was simply not there, as he sat laughing at the small supper party after the concert." The reference to Donne is so Harriet! As is the twist, the narrative surprise of the slender beaten gold apparition becoming full human through the power of laughter. My copy of the book is marked now with dozens of colorful post-its marking her wise and witty remarks, but I could sit here till 2014 and not get them all down. You must read this book and let it change your way of seeing.