ph: Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello
Saturday, February 25, 2017
First Lines: Francis Parkman - The Oregon Trail
Last spring, 1846, was a busy season in the city of St. Louis.
Satan in Art and Images
Ray Slattery must rank as one of the most prolific of the in-house hacks employed by Australian pulp publisher Horwitz Publications in the sixties and early seventies.
He is also one about which the least is known. Despite his incredible output, very little information is available about him. Austlit credits him with 118 titles, including our featured book today, The Tip, published in 1965, but has no further biographic information about him.
His books cover all of Horwitz’s staple obsessions, including bikers, bondage, sleaze and sex books, war stories, surgeons and what I have seen referred to as “Nazi romance novels”, books with titles such as Camp of Terror (1963) and Women of Warsaw (1964), Buchenwald Hell (1967), Prisoner of Dachau (1967), Valley of Slaves (1967), to name but a few.
In addition to writing under his own name, he worked under at least six pseudonyms, including Roger Hunt, Frank O’Hara, Terry West, James Bent, Frank F Gunn and John Slater (the name he used for most of his sleaze and Nazi-themed pulp, of which he wrote 84). (Pulp Curry)
Friday, February 24, 2017
New York
Personally wired by Thomas Edison, J. Pierpont Morgan’s home was the first electrified residence in New York
First Lines: Joshua Slocum - Sailing Alone Around the World
In the fair land of Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other.
Thursday, February 23, 2017
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
First Lines: Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff
Within five minutes, or ten minutes, no more than that, three of the others had called her on the telephone to ask her if she had heard that something had happened out there.
The Neon Demon (2016)
When an aspiring model moves to Los Angeles, her youth and vitality
are devoured by a group of beauty-obsessed women who will take any means
necessary to get what she has.
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Whiplash (2014)
A promising young drummer enrolls at a cut-throat music conservatory where his dreams of greatness are mentored by an instructor who will stop at nothing to realize a student's potential.
An extremely well-made and intense drama with a grand performance by J.K. Simmons; unfortunately, it seems to consider jazz (and music, for that matter) to be some kind of competitive high performance sport, and the ambitious student is nearly as disagreeable as his sadistic mentor.
