iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

And after she won that gold medal in swimming!

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"One rarely comes across a book that has both guts and charm, but this one has," Langston Hughes wrote of Helen Bevington's When Found, Make a Verse of. "The people who discovered it then loved it ... a going-back-to-book to open almost anywhere for sheer pleasure." neglectedbooks.com/?...

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True, my comment applies to what gets on the radio and in-store streams. But for that, it's a fair comparison. A Billboard country Top 40 chart from the 1960s had teeth.

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Country music in recent decades is certainly not what it's been through most of its history. It used to be the most adult popular music around (adultery, divorce, drinking, working/not working, etc.). Now, it's pablum with a Southern accent.

170

I think it depends on the book and the person. I didn't read The Catcher in the Rye until I was in my fifties and had teenage boys myself and I thought it was heartbreaking. If I'd read it much younger, I'm sure I would have considered Holden Caulfield a prime jerk.

Decades before the term bibliomemoir was coined, Sheila Kaye-Smith invented the genre with All the Books of My Life (1956), in which she told her life through the books that inspired, irritated, and frightened her. neglectedbooks.com/?...

23111

At least it's got a world-class collection. I developed my taste for neglected books in Suzzallo.

Looked so interesting I had to buy a copy.

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You know a great thing about Montana? With nothing more than a MT driver's license, you can check out books from any state university library. Just walk in, select the ones you want, stop by Circulation, and walk out with them. Amazing. Do other states do this?

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Italianissimo : Italian cooking at its best

There is a translation available. It looks pretty faithful. archive.org/details/ital...

archive.org

552 p. : 23 cm

Imagine Don Draper out of a job. For months. A year. Allen R. Dodd's memoir, The Job Hunter, recounts the humbling experience of a once-hailed ad man having—unsuccessfully—to find work. A white-collar classic that belongs on the shelf next to Heller's Something Happened. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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"thirty of the baldheaded girls contracted pneumonia and within three months the entire guy kibbee fan club was wiped out. that is only one reason i hesitate to sponsor a fan club. if beri beri or scurvy breaks out in your group how is it going to look?" 5/5

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"and spell guy kibbee in different formations and in different languages, with their little bald heads they were a shiny sight, when the cold weather arrived, however, it was another story, ... 4/5

1110

"and the girls all shaved their heads to look like their idol, all through the summer the little baldheaded girls had a jolly time, they had guy kibbee meetings, they talked like guy kibbee and when field days were held the fan club would rush out ... 3/5

190

"for many years, i have been against fan clubs. i remember back in 1902 a group of girls got together in littleton, new hampshire, to form a guy kibbee fan club. mr. kibbee, even at that early age was as bald as a boy scout's knee... 2/5

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Fred Allen and Guy Kibbee (a story from Fred Allen's Letters). In 1953, two young writers, Ed Simmons and Norman Lear (yes, that one) wrote asking to form a Fred Allen Fan Club. It was meant as a joke and Allen understood it as such. His reply is classic: 1/5

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“I lost touch with Russia for almost two years,” Konstantin Paustovsky writes in Southern Adventure, the fifth volume of his superb autobiography, The Story of a Life. Though his idyll in the Caucasus is, by his own admission, a hiatus in his life, it’s a memorable excursion. neglectedbooks.com/?...

092

PBS showed them decades ago. Wonderful entertainment.

031

At the Green Goose, by D. B. Wyndham Lewis, is a collection of the monologues of Professor Plodsnitch at his favorite pub, the most absurd things to appear in a newspaper before the Irish Times started publishing Flann O'Brien's Cruiskeen Lawn column. neglectedbooks.com/?...

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Good luck. I haven't been able to fit all my books in any place I've lived since 1988. And yet... ...No, better not go there.

010

You can read all about Detlev's project on his Reading Matter Substack: detlevfischer.substa... 2/2

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For over four years, Detlev Fischer has been creating a novel entirely from text sourced from 100 English-language novels published in 1982. He generously shared reflections on six of the less well-known novels he drew upon. neglectedbooks.com/?... 1/2

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...And His Mother Called Him Bill (tribute to his collaborator, Billy Strayhorn) The Far East Suite (esp. Blue Pepper and Isfahan) Ellington Indigos Plus his partnering LPs with Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Mingus/Roach (Money Jungle), Coltrane -- all top-notch jazz albums.

181

No blurbs for the John Day Co. (in 1927).

1245

Kudos. I keep thinking I should do this... and don't.

110

100 is the critical equivalent of adding $0.95 to a price.

010

On this date in 2023, I offered ten #WaferThinBooks (under 150 pages long) of nonfiction selected from the pages of NeglectedBooks.com. I'm pleased to say that two (Malachi Whitaker's And So Did I and Christopher Burney's Solitary Confinement) have since been reissued. waferthinbooks.com/2...

1184

The Watson Sisters performed for over 50 years, retiring in the early 1950s to the same house in Buffalo where they grew up. Kitty, who married several times, died in 1967; Fanny (at the piano here in a picture from 1959) never married and died in 1970. What a fun rabbit hole! 6/6

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"Boilesk" shows their usual approach. A bit of comic repartee, then Kitty sang the romantic stanza, then Fanny came back on to sing the comic version. You can hear an example on the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/... 5/6

151

Here's an excerpt from "Boilesk," a 1933 Max Fleischer "Screen Song" short that included a live performance by the Watson Sisters. 4/6

They did their patriotic duty during World War I, and when fashions changed with the 1920s, so did the Watson Sisters. They were big enough that they made at least one tour of England in the late 1920s. 3/6

121

Born in Buffalo, they hit the burlesque circuit around the turn of the century when they were still teens. By the early 1910s, they were headliners, and in 1915 they switched from burlesque to vaudeville (look 'em up: the distinction is lost on us today). 2/6

131

Doing some research, I stumbled onto a big half-page ad for an act known as the Watson Sisters from a 1944 issue of Variety. "The One and Only Original" it proclaimed. I had to know more about the Watsons. And what a career they had, I learned. Come, let's wander down this rabbit hole! 1/6

2247

Well ... you're still here. Who knows what disaster you successfully avoided?

020

Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, by Kataryn Loughlin (1952). A fascinating portrait of a Puritanical monster who did everything she could to deny material and emotional comfort to her orphan nieces. Grim but gripping. #SpinsterSeptember neglectedbooks.com/?...

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