A L S O+.T O D A Y

Ithaka: A Daughter's Memoir of Being Found
Reviewed by Maud Casey
A memoir, from a young New York journalist, about being "found" by the parents who gave her up for adoption 23 years earlier

[ ENTERTAINMENT ]
A master at dangerous play
By Gary Kamiya
With his last masterpiece, "Bitches Brew," Miles Davis changed jazz history -- again

[ ENTERTAINMENT ]
Thinking inside the box
By Eric Alterman
The year's best in box sets provides obsessed fans of country, jazz, blues and rock with some treasures and some trash

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R E C E N T L Y

Love Undetectable
By Andrew Sullivan
(11/30/98)

Uncle Andrew's cabin
By Peter Kurth
(11/30/98)

From he-man to holy man
By Elaine Showalter
(11/12/98)

Ted Hughes, R.I.P.
(10/30/98)

Making book on the Booker
By Sylvia Brownrigg
(10/29/98)

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Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines
BY FRANK M. ROBINSON AND LAWRENCE DAVIDSON | COLLECTORS PRESS | 208 PAGES
BUY IT FROM BARNES&NOBLE.COM

This smile-a-page book offers a wonderfully lurid feast of the over-the-top illustrations that appeared on the covers of the all-fiction pulp magazines that flourished in the '20s and '30s. As the authors write in their informative accompanying text, the pulps (so called because of the cheap wood-pulp paper they were printed on) were the dominant form of mass entertainment in the age before TV. The pulps started in the 1890s, replacing the story papers and later the dime novels, and disappeared by the '50s. In their heyday, they satisfied a naive readership's demand for adventure, thrills and sexual titillation with a never-ending graphic cornucopia of hideous green hands, bosomy dames in strategically torn clothing and jutting-jaw heroes firing gats and clutching footballs. The pulps featured such sweat-and-glory genres as:

Adventure. The cover art ran heavily toward menacing pirates in extreme chiaroscuro, Fu Manchu-like evildoers clutching curved daggers and terrified heroes in swamps with adders perched on their groins. (Weirdest adventure cover: A giant chicken attacking a fallen airman.)

Detectives. The illustrators were drawn to depictions of bleeding men firing guns, grimacing cops firing guns, women in torn clothing in the grasp of cheap punks and cheap punks chloroforming dames.

Westerns. Lots of paintings of men in chaps firing smoking six-shooters and spunky gals defending their cabins with rifles.

Monsters. Cities and screaming citizens menaced by octupi, spiders, huge golden alligators, "red death rain" and giant green hands -- the latter, the authors note, "a genre by themselves."

Evil fiends. Here the pulp genre found its true voice. Demented doctors preparing to cut scantily clad women in half using paper-cutter-like gizmos, cleavage-popping manacled dames in black bras menaced by angry guys heating up iron stakes with blowtorches, evil dwarves lashing ur-Victoria's Secret models and other such images predominate.

One of the more peculiarly dated pulp genres was WWI-era air wars: The public's fascination with dueling biplanes was apparently as great as its current appetite for Jerry Springer. There are also fascinating looks at such oddities as the "Ku-Klux Klan" edition of Black Mask magazine, featuring a white-hooded figure carrying a burning cross and boasting "Stories, Articles and Letters About the Invisible Empire." (The authors note that the magazine was "subtly supportive of the Klan.")

"Pulp Culture" evokes the simple charm of a bygone age, when soap operas, video games, romance novels, action films or genre books weren't around for Joe Everyman to get his kicks with -- and when all-fiction magazines ruled the newsstand roost. (The sweet innocence of the sports pulps, in particular, is almost inconceivable -- would you buy a magazine with a cover story called "Thrills in Yale football"?) "Pulp Culture" offers a lavishly illustrated look at a small, fun corner of American cultural history.
-- Gary Kamiya

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New York Living Rooms
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOMINIQUE NABOKOV, INTRODUCTION BY JAMES FENTON | THE ELEPHANT'S EYE/THE OVERLOOK PRESS | 114 PAGES
BUY IT FROM BARNES&NOBLE.COM

If nothing else, Dominique Nabokov's photos of the living rooms of famous and mildly famous New Yorkers is an argument against white walls. In most of these shots, large-format Polaroids taken from a neutral middle distance and with no styling done by the photographer, the upward movement ends at the tops of chairs and sofas. The exceptions -- a pair of narrow mirrors bookending a fireplace, tall twin bookshelves, gilded mirrors and portraits capped off by molded ceilings -- are blessed bits of visual relief. Nabokov's stated aim is to provide a documentary of how her subjects live, and she's trusting that straightforward shots of their living room will do that. But the approach doesn't really work. For that, we'd have to see the subjects in the rooms, actually living in them. Some rooms, like Quentin Crisp's cheerfully dingy bedsit, do give off the personality of their owners. And while it seems natural that, say, Oscar de la Renta's place would be rococo subdued, and Francesco Clemente's so comfortably exotic, that really isn't such a great revelation. "New York Living Rooms" is a sort of tasteful gossip, like "In Style" magazine for the New York Review of Books set.
-- Charles Taylor

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Songs
BY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN | AVON BOOKS | 306 PAGES
BUY IT FROM BARNES&NOBLE.COM

"Songs" is a Serious Undertaking, as evinced by its sepia-toned Annie Leibovitz cover portrait of an oddly weary and sad-eyed Boss. Inside are the lyrics to every song he's recorded over the past 25 years and reprints of some of his original handwritten drafts. Most of the photos are, with a few exceptions (the beaming candids from his ragamuffin, pre-"Born to Run" days), static, posed shots. Bruce Springsteen is one of the most passionate, alive rockers of all time. Why does "Songs," designed by longtime Springsteen associates Sandra and Harry Choron, try to turn him into a museum piece? But if you're a fan, "Songs" has something you need -- Springsteen's chapter introductions, in which he explains what was going on in his head and his career when he made each of his 12 albums. This is as close as the guarded Springsteen has come to writing an autobiography (in book form), and while "Songs" is mainly a self-analysis of his work, he slips us a few intriguing psychological and personal insights, too. His most spine-tingly revelation comes in his intro to the chapter on "The River" (1980), in which he tells us that the narrator of the track "Stolen Car" was "the archetype for the male role in my later songs about men and women." If you've overlooked this dark slip of a song, the faithless lover of "Stolen Car" is consumed with self-doubt and feels like a pretender in his own life. Now, read the self-loathing lyrics of "Brilliant Disguise" and "One Step Up" from "Tunnel of Love" (1987). Suddenly, the downsized career moves and retreat into domesticity that came after "Tunnel" swim into view as a struggle to be comfortable in his own skin. This stuff is far too vibrant and messy for the coffee table, which means, I guess, that Bruce ain't ready for the museum yet.
-- Joyce Millman

N E X T+P A G E+| Sunken treasure off the Carolina coast

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