The Buccaneers
Back in the nineties everyone was obsessed with the new adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with moist Colin Firth. I wasn't an exception to this rule, I was fully committed, six tape VHS boxset and all watched over and over again. But there were two other period pieces I gravitated towards more often, mainly because you could always stumble across one or the other in the middle of the night on upper cable channels. I'm talking about Louisa May Alcott's The Inheritance and Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers. For years I didn't know what either was called, in my mind it was TV movie with mom from Family Ties with Greg from Dharma and Greg and the miniseries with girl from Son in Law. And yes, that's the Pauly Shore movie. I don't think it was until the advent of Netflix that I was finally able to watch all of The Buccaneers in order, but I loved watching it knowing so much of the cast from other shows I loved. I recently had time to rewatch it and the ending left me cold. The women were pushed aside for the men to take center stage which narratively made absolutely no sense at all. Which made me super excited when I heard that Apple was going to be making a new adaptation of the Wharton book. And not to put to fine a point on it, but she never finished the book so there's a lot of liberties you can take, which Apple of course was quick to capitalize on, hello Lesbians! But I was also worried, would they go all Gossip Girl with this? Or, horror of horrors, Bridgerton? And while yes, you could see they were veering toward the wisteria laden land of the Bridgertons, thankfully without trying to pass off modern music as "art," there was actually a more Clueless vibe. I had hope. At least in the beginning. I was baffled by them starting the show quite far into the story and making Saratoga Springs out to be like it's in the sticks, when it wasn't, it was about new money versus old money, and then there was the swapping of character traits and backstories in an attempt to make it fresh. OK, I can kind of see where you're going, but the main problem was they created this to be a series so while the adaptation in the nineties covered ground fairly quickly here, once the girls get to England, the story stagnates. Nothing happens. They brood over their lives and then get together and scream. A lot. There's a lot of childish hen night behavior used to pad the episodes. And Nan's courtship would never drap on this long. The episode though that broke me was the Christmas episode. Nan's love interest looks like he's wearing Colin Firth's sweater from Bridget Jones's Diary. In the library there's a globe with Alaska on it. And then to add insult to injury, they take the loving governess Miss Testvalley and turn her into Mary Kay Letourneau. It's not spelled out, but given how her three charges turned out, I think she sexually abused them all, preying on them from the shadows. It's just so fucking creepy. There could have been depth here but there's no depth at all, it's all lets run around and giggle without evolving. And as for the "ending!?!" Nan gives everything up for her evil sister? Nope. No way. That's it for me. The least I expected was a reveal that Miss Testvalley was Nan's mother, instead Miss Testvalley is a pedophile and they decided to do a Dynasty and hold the reveal of Nan's mother until next season to see if they can get a big name star. My advice to anyone offered this role? Run, don't walk. You do not want to be involved in this trainwreck.
No One Can Known by Kate Alice Marshall
The Clinic by Cate Quinn
The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett
Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver
The Last Immortal by Natalie Gibson
Picasso's Lovers by Jeanne Mackin
Diva by Daisy Goodwin
The Devil's Daughter by Gordon Greisman
The Wharton Plot by Mariah Fredericks
The Diamond of London by Andrea Penrose
Secrets of a Summer Night by Lisa Kleypas
So Nicola Pagett is a woman unhappy in her marriage and pregnant by a man other than her husband. And no, this isn't season two of Upstairs, Downstairs, this is Anna Karenina. Though you could be forgiven for mistaking one for the other if you took out the fact that I like Karenin far more than I ever liked Lawrence Kirbridge. Moving on, I should put in a train reference here but I'm just not that witty today... Anna Karenina is a classic that I have been meaning to read for forever, have not gotten around to, knew it ended with Anna's death under a train, and eventually just decided to watch the miniseries. Because if there's one thing you can be certain of, this is the definitive adaptation. Yes, there have been many movies, yes, there have been quite a few other television adaptations, but are any of them ten episodes long and bother to included the somnambulist psychic Landau? No they do not! And I'm sorry, but Landau became my favorite character with only a single scene. He's basically Rasputin if he was played by Seth Green. Seriously, one scene just wasn't enough! What I loved about this series is that it makes you believe at all times that it is a true epic, but with a very human element, which is what the best epics are. There's love and betrayal and wonderful snarky society snubs that surely had to inspire Edith Wharton when she sat down to write The Age of Innocence. There's all this great grandness, even the palace from Netflix's recent adaptation of Shadow and Bone gets a look in, but at the end it's about Anna. And my feelings about Anna are complicated. I get the whole, she is trapped by the strictures of society of how a woman should behave and therefore her only option is suicide. But on the other hand, time and time again she is given options, she is given other ways she could live, and she chooses that which will make everyone as miserable as her. She makes people suffer for loving her. She has a slightly justified persecution complex, but one wonders, as she herself does, even if she hadn't found Vronsky was it all just inevitable? Was her life destined for entropy? All I know is that unlike some of the series I've watched for the first time for 
The Adventuress by Tasha Alexander
A Backward Glance: An Autobiography by Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
The second time I went to New York it was more than just a rushed trip tacked onto a family vacation to Washington. The second time was magical, going to all the museums and looking at all the art I'd spent years reading about. During that trip I discovered The Frick Collection, which is located right on fifth avenue and was the home of Henry Clay Frick. It's not just the art that is amazing, though seriously you will be shocked by the number of pieces you recognize from Ingres to Renoir to Vermeer to Rembrandt, but the house itself is a work of art preserved in time. It's like really cheap time travel! You feel as if Edith Wharton were about to hold court over high tea in the luxurious indoor garden. Years later when I went back to New York I discovered the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, which is located in the Andrew Carnegie Mansion. Again I was walking in another era. These homes were built by the New York upper crust as they slowly started moving to the Upper East Side. I was so pleasantly surprised when I picked up Lauren Willig's latest book, The English Wife, to slip back into this world again. A world of excess and elegance, fortunes lost and gained, and secrets, but all contained within this other time. So whether you knew about Lauren Willig's new book yet or not, I think you can feel the theme month coming on right? The English Wife is Lauren's fourth stand-alone and therefore a fourth theme month was not just necessary but vital. It's in another time and another world, but one I hope you've been wanting to explore as much as I have over the years. 
The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Tales of Innocence
A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny
Murder at Rough Point by Patricia Briggs
A Scot in the Dark by Sarah MacLean
Modern classics is an interesting categorization for books. We all know what Classics, with a capital "C" are. They're books that have endured. They have proven to stand the test of time. Think of the 1800s. Such a glut of authors writing yet we have but a handful of authors that are remembered; Dickens, Austen, Bronte, Wharton, Gaskell, Eliot, Trollope, and more. But comparatively small. They're like the 1% of authors. Now look to the 1900s. Just a hundred years or less isn't really enough time to know if a book will still be read and loved in another hundred years. As Stephen King himself says, he doesn't think his books will be remembered. They are loved and devoured by today's readers, but there's also something transitory about them. But there are books that people place favorable odds on enduring. The works of Hemingway are pretty much a shoo-in. Or so we think. And that's what makes, say A Farewell to Arms, a "modern" classic. We are pretty sure that a book with this moniker will go on. So much so that many of these books make up the curriculum of high school English classes. Vonnegut, Kesey, Slaughterhouse-Five, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, anyone of my generation will recognize these as standard reading. But will people a few generations from now recognize them? This is one instance in which I would love to peak into the future and see what endures. Of the books I've selected... it's a crapshoot.
The literature of New York can not be discussed without including that most important of writer, the playwright! New York is known for Broadway and Eugene O'Neill was destined to be a part of that history, being literally born for it, coming into this world right in Times Square at the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street, it's now a Starbucks, but at least there's a plaque. The plaque in fact states he is "America's Greatest Playwright" and it is hard to argue with that fact. O'Neill brought the realism of plays that was being employed abroad by Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg, to the United States in plays rich with the American vernacular and people on the fringes of society whose stories would usually end in tragedy and disillusionment. His most famous plays are The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Though I hold a special place in my heart for The Hairy Ape, having read this play for my undergraduate degree in Theatre, and being forever amused by the death by ape ending. I think it's just the idea of having to have a man in an ape suit onstage in the 1920s that makes me laugh and oddly think of Trading Places...
Of all O'Neill's work though it's The Iceman Cometh that many hold most dear, especially if they don't find apes as funny as I do. O'Neill got his idea for this seminal work from hanging out at his local "hell hole" The Golden Swan, and immortalized it and it's owner, Thomas Wallace, in the play. Occasionally O'Neill was known for sleeping one off in Wallace's apartment above the Swan. The Golden Swan was Greenwich Village's seediest yet most influential hangout for the artists and playwrights of the Village. The patrons made the Swan famous, O'Neill being the most famous. Though O'Neill loved to refer to it by it's secondary name, "Hell Hole," and frequented it on and off throughout his life. Sadly it didn't survive the construction of the subway lines under New York that required many buildings to be torn down. 
But as often happens, if something is destroyed in New York it comes back in another form. Oddly enough the seedy bar has taken seed and grown some roots and become a garden. On the site of such former debauchery there is now the Golden Swan Garden. Next to the West 4th Street Courts at West 4th Street and the Avenue of the Americas (aka 6th Avenue) you can enjoy this little slice of wildlife. In fact, after visiting the Garden you can continue east on West 4th Street as it turns into Washington Square South and you'll be passing by Eugene O'Neill's home (think how drunk he was when he couldn't make it the two blocks home)! Sadly NYU has taken over and rebuilt many of the buildings on the south end of the park so 38 Washington Square South doesn't exist anymore, so this is more a tour of buildings that no longer exist. But as I said with Edith Wharton, the whole area around Washington Square Park retains that old world charm, and you can stalk two dead authors at the same time! 
But I feel to really pay homage to O'Neill you need to go to Broadway. And I don't mean just to take in a plaque at Starbucks, I mean, go to a show! Sure Broadway is all about the magic of the musical, and I can't deny the lure, having taken in a musical almost every time I have been to New York. But Broadway is so much more. It's plays written by the greatest writers in the world performed by the most amazing talent out there. Yes, it's great to see a play anywhere and to support the arts, but if you want the pinnacle of perfection, the true theatrical experience, then you need to go to New York! 
And there is one theatre you should visit above all others, the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Located at 230 West 49th Street, it's between 8th Avenue and Broadway. Six years after O'Neill's death the Coronet Theatre was renamed after him. For awhile another great American Playwright, Neil Simon, owned it, but now it's owned by a theatrical producing company, Jujamcyn Theaters, that owns many other theatres. In recent years it has put on two very well known and successful musicals that seemed a bit outre before the reviews started flooding in, I'm talking about Spring Awakening, and the show that is still there, The Book of Morman. So, when you go to "The Great White Way" think of the fact that it would never have happened, would never have been possible if not for writers like O'Neill, out there putting stories into the world and up onto the boards. 
When one thinks of old New York and the literary scene you can't help but instantly think of Edith Wharton. Wharton was a writer of great note, she was not only repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence. Friends with many of the literary elite of the day, she was able to combine her insider's view of America's privileged classes with her own insights to create works with depth and a social and psychological conscience. Her books captured New York at the turning of the last century for all readers. What better way to step into the past then to pick up The Age of Innocence and be lost in the doomed affair of Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska? But what is truly amazing about New York is that there are pockets within the city that have barely changed in a hundred years. There are houses and parks that remain just as they are, like they are trapped in a little time bubble. It is just as easy to get lost on a side street and end up in Wharton's world as it is to turn the pages of a book.
Washington Square Park was the epicenter of literature and wealth at the end of the 1800s, before everyone fled uptown. Being in the heart of Greenwich Village, it is still a center for culture, only a little less affluent. Aside from a lack of gallows, this park located at the end of 5th Avenue could easily be the same as it was when Wharton looked out her windows. A few years back when I was visiting New York I was in search of the old city and was on my way to the 
Anyway, back to Washington Square. While yes, the arch does dominate the scene, I found myself entranced by the luscious red brick buildings that surround the park. Of course it was one of these buildings that Wharton lived in. Before leaving the city of her birth and building The Mount up in Massachusetts, she lived at 7 Washington Square North. As Wharton sat in her house she could look out and see Robert Lewis Stevenson talking to Mark Twain, as they met there in 1888. Many artists from the Hudson River School might have dropped by the park to paint it. At the nearby Hotel Albert, 23 East 10th Street, three blocks away from the park on the corner of University Place and East 10th Street, everyone from Walt Whitman to William Faulkner were mingling. Wharton had the cream of the literary crop always a moment away. 
There is a feeling in the park that I can't describe, an old and a new coming together to form that ineffable feeling that is what makes New York so unique and indescribable all at the same time. This painting captures for me that feeling in a way my words will always fail. Looking at this gorgeous painting Wharton's house would be that building on the right of the arc. She was there. She was in the center of it all. She is, in my mind, what true Literary New York is and always will be.
Originally I was thinking of calling September's theme month "Autumn in New York." But then sense weighed in saying, while yes, September is the month autumn starts, I was technically going to be in New York in August, not autumn (plus the one time I was in New York in autumn, it wasn't very autumny)... plus, well, I shall never name a theme month after a lame Richard Gere movie, and that is my promise to you! So this theme month started when I was planning my trip to New York for this past summer. I was looking up all the places I wanted to go, ie, stalking long dead author's haunts, and inspiration struck! Instead of just doing this for fun, I could do it for my blog, which, technically means I was doing it for fun because that's what this blog is to me, besides a labor of love. But then I ended up not going to New York, long sad story, I've moved on; yet despite the trip being defunct now, I couldn't give up on this idea of "Literary New York" (which I had finally settled on as the name of the theme month). So I decided that I'd use this as more extensive planning for when I finally get back to New York, which will happen despite the fact that it appears that like The Doctor I am timelocked from the city. 
