Posts by Robert Armitage

A number of summers ago I saw John Updike at the library. He was sitting in the back of the main reading room, leaning over the table, and writing with a small gold pen. I felt as oddly excited and privileged as someone else might feel who, in the course of day-to-day activity, had encountered Johnny Depp or Angeline Jolie. I ached to know what he was writing on that pad, if it was a story for the New Yorker, another episode in the chronicles of Harry Rabbit Angstrom or Henry Bech, or just a tally of his day’s expenses in New York. I didn’t ask. Library professionalism, New York sang-froid, or maybe just temperamental shyness kept me from saying anything at 

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22”

Books can accumulate a lot of personal baggage. Keep them in your life for long enough, and they’re likely to become encrusted with memories. This dust jacket is from my personal copy of Catch-22 and goes back a long way, as you can tell from the $2.45 price drastically marked down to $2.19. This was the second and more durable copy I owned after I read ragged the more familiar blue paperback with the dancing airman on the cover. The library’s copy in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature is the first edition, published in 1961. The branch libraries have a recent 

A strange relationship is established with favorite novelists, particularly those who are our living contemporaries. In reading their work, we are reconstituting word by word their mental landscapes and experiencing the energy which has gone into the act of creation, thereby establishing an extraordinary sort of intimacy. Although it should work the same way with deceased authors, the relationship lacks the reassurance that they are safely off somewhere, working on their next book. Since these authors no longer inhabit our present reality, their fiction inexorably turns into historical fiction. When we have turned their last page, there is nothing beyond.

This February, Iris 

If the New Year is to mean anything more than the difference between Wednesday and Thursday, it should contain a bit of reflection on the past, a glance over the shoulder to see where we’ve been and what we’ve done. Since this is a blog about books, reading, and libraries, I thought an examination of my personal reading list during this past year might be interesting. I’m always intrigued by the lists of others--even if, as with the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2008, I’ve only read one of the selections. My average with other people’s favorite movie lists is usually even lower.

I generally enjoy the Christmas season if I don’t allow myself to get sucked up in the frenzy. Of course, the frenzy is almost irresistible: the catalogs start coming right after Labor Day, store owners regard Halloween as the beginning of the holiday season, and the stability of the global economy depends on how free and easy you are with your credit card. As for me, I’ve always thought of Christmas as:

"a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were 

Words or music? Which is more important to opera? This is a question which intrigues opera lovers, such as me, as it is endlessly arguable without being finally answerable. Richard Strauss devoted an entire opera, Capriccio, to the debate. The opera culminates in a lengthy scene of ecstatic, mesmerizing musical intensity* which might seem to give the nod to music, if not for what the soprano is actually singing: that words and music are both indispensible, take one away and whatever is left will not be opera.

This season, the Metropolitan Opera has plastered every nook and cranny of the city with posters of Renée Fleming as Thaïs (just as, last year, you 

If you noticed me at any time during the last few weeks, skulking through the halls of the New York Public Library, I was probably clutching a plump little volume in one hand, wondering when I’d get another chance to read a few more pages. That copy of Dombey and Son was my loyal companion for a long time. Henry James might have derisively called nineteenth-century novels “loose, baggy monsters,” but I certainly appreciated the scope of this book, the sense of time passing, lives changing, characters intersecting on a vast, 900-page canvas. It made me wonder how much more intense the reading experience would have been, as it was originally conceived, in 

As a professional librarian at the main reference desk, I do whatever it takes to respond to a particular question, and I never become judgmental about the quality of that question. That’s Library School 101. I will admit, however, to wondering sometimes where certain questions come from, or what it might mean for the culture at large when a number of people start asking the same question at the same time. For instance, what should I make of the fact that there have been several requests lately--by New Yorkers, no less!-- for books about vampires? Is it because Halloween is coming? Are they folklorists, horror literature fans, or just people who are trying to distract themselves 

My apartment does not contain exquisite little Meissen porcelain figures, or walls full of J. M. W. Turner watercolors, or a locked case full of exotic anthropological artifacts from Papua New Guinea, or even a valuable stamp or coin collection. Instead, I’ve managed to surround myself with many well-loved objects of no intrinsic value: books, CDs, movies. This reflection was inspired by my decision, over the Labor Day weekend, finally to get rid of my personal VHS video library.

I suppose I should confess at the outset that my VCR has been non-functional for over a year now, and I was holding onto my collection only as a sort of historical relic while I bored my friends 

In previous posts chronicling my reading habits and tastes, I’ve invoked the names of authors like Dickens, Proust, Flaubert, Austen, and Shakespeare, perhaps giving the impression that I invariably spend my time with only the best that literature has to offer. Before you brand me an elitist (and ruin my chances at a future presidential bid), let me state for the record that I also have my guilty reading pleasures, and they often run right alongside my more literary pursuits. A difficult question is what makes certain fiction “popular” and other fiction “literary.”

Although the best popular or genre fiction can have psychological depth, moral 

With only a few notable exceptions, I haven’t been very lucky with theatrical productions of Shakespeare. Of course, I’ve seen the Olivier and Branagh movies and some fine BBC productions, but film isn’t really theatre.

In the theatre, especially here in New York, bad Shakespeare generally outweighs good Shakespeare. The problem with these productions, I find, usually stems from a distrust of Shakespeare’s language, either of the audience’s ability to understand it, or of the actors to speak it.

I’ve seen the tragedy, Timon of Athens, played with irrelevant slapstick stage business fit for the Marx Brothers. I’ve seen a 

"I have wrought my simple plan / If I give one hour of joy / To the boy who’s half a man / Or the man who’s half a boy." — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, introducing The Lost World

One of the most unnerving things about the Internet, I find, is the way it reveals the commonality of our human experience. No matter how unique I imagine myself, the online world usually demonstrates that someone else has been there, seen it, and done it all—if not before me, at least at roughly the same time.

Back in July I wrote about an obscure young-adult novel, Danger: Dinosaurs! which had made a big impression on me during my formative 

One day last year, as I was walking home from work, so wrapped up in my own furiously careening thoughts that I wasn’t paying much attention to anything but the general direction my feet were taking me, I found myself momentarily halted in the middle of a crowd alongside Gramercy Park. As I looked around, it dawned on me that the men in the crowd were all wearing fedoras, like 1950s Madison Avenue executives, most of the women wore long pleated skirts to the knee and some had gloves on, and at the same time I realized that all the cars parked on the street were vintage models I remembered from my childhood.

This prompted an eerie moment of disorientation before I realized 

From the start, my goal in this blog was simply to emphasize what I regard as highlights of the library’s collection, specifically in the realm of literature . . . but I’ve begun to wonder if there isn’t another unifying element, or, if you will, a hidden agenda. Whatever else I’m writing about, I always seem to end up trying to convey my profound love of books and reading. This has long been one of my defining characteristics, long before there was a blog (or even an internet).

Nabokov, in Lectures on Literature, writes:

“Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little 

You should see me on Cape Cod. I’ve been visiting every summer for about twenty years now and my routine is well-established. No sooner do we drive across the Bourne Bridge than the worry lines disappear and I shed ten years, almost as if the laws of time and gravity had been erased. By this point in the trip I’ve left my job so far behind it’s not so much in another state as on another planet.

This is followed by a week or two of standing on the National Seashore staring out at the sweep and majesty of the Atlantic; floating like a big hairless seal in the bath-warm bay; and meandering through red maple swamps, around salt ponds, and across the tidal flats, 

I’m a more-or-less rational person. Anything with even a whiff of mysticism strikes me as a great yawn. And I believe dead is dead. Case closed. La commedia è finita. Curiously, I’m also a fan of ghost stories. Contradictory? Maybe it’s that I’ve been working at the New York Public Library for so long, I’ve come to feel like a ghost myself, haunting its marble corridors.

Not to split genre hairs, but I’m not so enamored of horror stories--or movies, for that matter--particularly not modern ones, whose main purpose seems to be to dispatch as many people (frequently teenage girls) as gruesomely as possible. If I wanted to be 

The weekend before last, I saw the Roundabout Theater production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, an adaptation by Christopher Hampton of the 1782 novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. The production was fascinating, the acting generally superior, and I’ve been smitten with Laura Linney since Tales of the City. . .but I’d forgotten since I first encountered it what a nasty story this is. Not that anything involving two bored French aristocrats who concoct sexual games in order to degrade and humiliate their victims could be anything but nasty. Still, at least in fiction, French aristocrats seem to make the best libertines. (Americans can sometimes be 

I was one of those kids who visited his neighborhood library in Brooklyn several times a week and always came away with an armload of books. It was a profound rite of passage when I graduated from a children’s card to an adult card and was allowed into the sanctum which contained Lady Chatterley’s Lover and other such mysterious things; until then, however, there was more than enough to beguile me in the children’s room. Since there was always plenty of time for everything back then, any book I really liked I borrowed and read repeatedly.

One book in particular which seized me and set up subterranean forces in my personality that I haven’t shaken 

I have mixed feelings about Charles Dickens. This is probably an embarrassing admission from someone who’s preparing a public presentation on the works of Dickens for the fall and winter, but the fact remains. I’ve read most of the major novels, some more than once, and while I always start them with lots of gusto and enthusiasm, I’m never sorry to see them end. Many years ago, in an over-flowing of Dickensian high spirits, I bought a set of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens from Scribner’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue (I know I date myself). It was a snowy afternoon and, since the carton was too heavy to carry back to the Upper West Side, my wife and I got