Posts by Robert Armitage

"She's a grifter, shamus. I'm a grifter. We're all grifters. So we sell each other out for a nickel."
—Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Do you remember the tropical storm of October 1?  Winds howling, sky boiling like a pot of dirty oatmeal, rain sluicing down?  What a good day it would have been to huddle at home in slippers and robe, brew a pot of tea, and curl up with a mystery novel.  And yet, on that nasty afternoon, a number of ardent mystery fans donned their rain gear and ventured out into the maelstrom to attend the first presentation of “Sinister Reading: Crime, Mystery, and Detective Fiction at the New 

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I saw the Broadway production of Hair, in one of the last performances before that show’s closing.  The following Wednesday evening, I went to a local movie theatre to catch the Metropolitan Opera’s encore HD presentation of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.  Ever since then, both events have become intertwined in my brain, one reflecting the other like a series of tiny mirrors.

For over two years now, as a blogger for the New York Public Library, I’ve written about books: as entertainment, as the foundations of personal identity, as reflections of the past, as physical artifacts, even as dust-collectors in an overcrowded apartment.   Today, however, I would like to celebrate another aspect of the library’s universe: its circulating DVD collection, which any avid cinephile would have to regard as one of the city’s great free resources.

The constant visitor,
Main Children's Room, 1914Where does your inner voice come from--the chattering that goes on inside your head all day long, well into the night, and on and on for year upon year, sometimes soothing, frequently criticizing, often yearning, forever evaluating?  Consciousness is an echo chamber made up of many things, where bits of experience accumulate like sediment, adding layer upon layer.  Especially influential, at least from the librarian’s point of view, are the books gobbled up in childhood and the adolescent years.

“A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.”

—From the Journals of John Cheever, 1966 entry

"Literate people appropriate all the best things they can find in books, and dress themselves in them just as certain crabs are supposed to beautify themselves with seaweed."  — Herzog, Saul Bellow

How do you decide what to read next?  With the literature of the world and of the ages spread before you, how do you choose?

Most adult men are just shells designed to contain twelve-year-old boys.

Why else would someone who should have better things to do with his time be bothering about the 1933 Hollywood film King Kong?  I’ve probably seen thousands of movies since my first encounter with Kong, including the classics of world cinema: the Bergmans, Fellinis, and Kurosowas.  Citizen Kane comes seeping out of my pores.

What, then, is different about King Kong?

After thirty-four years of living in Manhattan, I’m left with a lot of memories, crackling in my head like dried-up autumn leaves.

I was born in Brooklyn and spent all of my adult years in Manhattan (first on the Upper West Side and then in Stuyvesant Town) except for one curious, Alice in Wonderland sort of year in Astoria, Queens. Recently, however, my wife and I packed our few sticks of furniture and scraps of clothing (like the Joads in Grapes of Wrath) and moved to Westchester, proving that there is always a new page to turn, a new chapter of life to explore.

More and more, I find my library colleagues coming to me and singing the praises of their e-book readers. From pockets, briefcases, or knapsacks they draw a tiny glowing gadget---as nifty as Captain Kirk’s phaser--and proceed to demonstrate its multiple virtues. A whole book can be downloaded in seconds. You can carry an entire library in a tiny, plastic box. With a book on your iPhone, you can use one finger to slide from screen to screen, never having to turn an actual page again. These exchanges with my colleagues inevitably remind me of that scene in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers when the hero’s girlfriend, replaced by a pod, wakes up with a strange gleam 

"The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock" — from "The Lottery"

I had an encounter at the library a few weeks ago which returned Shirley Jackson to the forefront of my thoughts.

She is always there, one way or another. Some writers never loosen their grip on you. Especially those discovered during your formative years, when the brain is at its most absorbent, and reading can still seem a transformative experience. I remember the exact moment when I encountered Shirley Jackson’s work for the first time. It was at the paperback rack in the neighborhood convenience store where The 

["You must allow me to present this young lady to you."]

Over the past few weeks, my blogging voice seems to have evaporated from this site. That’s not because I’ve slipped into some eerie library limbo. My time and energies have instead been devoted to preparing a public presentation, “Elusive Jane: In Search of Jane Austen at the New York Public Library.” For ages, it seems, my desk has been buried under a small mountain of books by and about Jane Austen, necessitating a major excavation every time I needed a pencil or a piece of tape. But the hard part is over, and I’m finally ready to meet anyone curious about the life of Jane Austen this Friday, 

The first time I visited Cape Cod, a city boy unaccustomed to the ways of the natural world, I encountered what seemed to me one of the primal mysteries, the secret from which so much else in life sprang. Although I have witnessed this phenomenon again and again over the past twenty or so years, it mystifies me still. During that first trip, my wife and I made an initial foray to the beach on Cape Cod Bay and looked out across the magnificent body of water held in the cup of land stretching from Bourne to Provincetown and marked by a length of watery horizon that could not be encompassed by peripheral vision alone. We waded out into that gentle ripple of surf and could see, at our 

“Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead baby, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”

— from a letter of Jane Austen to Cassandra, October 27, 1798

The most magical thing about visiting London for the first time was the sense of being so close to the source of the literature I’d spent so much of my life reading. One of my sharpest memories is of the day I turned a corner in the National Portrait Gallery and came unexpectedly upon this likeness of Jane Austen done by her sister, Cassandra. Although I had previously seen reproductions of the 

I recently wrote about an old favorite of mine, the fantasy novel Time and Again, by Jack Finney. It is the story of a man who travels back in time to New York in the 1800s. Once there, the story is compelling, precise in its details, and completely believable, the only far-fetched element being his actual methodology for returning to the past--he looks at old pictures and sort of thinks himself back through time. At least I thought this was far-fetched, until I got a look at the photographs I’ve reproduced here.

 We can pretend that our work lives are a linear progression, day after day, neatly punctuated by weekends, with a summer vacation 

"Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him.”

— Opening of The Young Visiters, by Daisy Ashford

Who can remember what childhood was really like? Who would really want to? What comes back to me of childhood are a few hazy outlines, like half-remembered snippets of dreams glimpsed just before awakening and quickly forgotten. As a child, I’m sure I knew that the world around me was a very real place and that I was indisputably its center, but I somehow can’t recapture the innocence of a boyish imagination still unclouded by age or experience. Perhaps 

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me"

— Shakespeare, Richard II

This month marks my one-year anniversary as a blogger for the New York Public Library. A blogger is something I never thought I would refer to myself as, but I suppose there are worse things that can be said about a person. My first post on May 30, 2008 concerned the release of Sex and the City, a movie which featured the library among its New York locations. This was and remains my most-read post. I don’t kid myself into thinking that the world was so desperately waiting to hear from me; I happened to coincide exactly 

"To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small Mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let Furnished for the Month of April. Necessary Servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times."

— From The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim)

Intellectually, I have nothing against modern opera, and I can usually steel myself to try it again, even if the result inevitably turns out to be another tepid stew of tedious language and monotonous music. Emotionally, however, it is the standard repertoire which draws me again and again. These so-called “warhorses” of the operatic repertoire have endured for so long because they speak directly to our adult passions. (Melodrama is, after all, only real life ratcheted up a notch.)

How many of us, like Rigoletto the court jester, have felt humiliated by our employers and plotted elaborate revenge? How many women, like Tosca, have fended off the advances of some 

Last week in the South Court training rooms, I gave my presentation “Changing Styles in Children’s Literature.” Although I’ve given this talk on various occasions over the last few years, doing it again always focuses my attention on the strange power of children’s books and sets my mind spinning back to my own dim past, when I would stare up at the family shelf of books in a kind of awed yet uncomprehending fascination.

I might not have been aware of much else, but I already knew that those books were the key to some unknown yet highly desirable place. They were full of pictures which created interesting puzzles for me to resolve and