Category: Uncategorized

I’m a few days late in noticing it, but my friend Alexander Chee, the novelist, has posted some thoughts on World AIDS Day, which was December 1, and also a few funny and risqué public-service-announcement videos from the French group AIDES. (Alex’s blog is safe for work, but the videos aren’t, so don’t click them unless you’re comfortable watching something that’s mildly sexually explicit).   

I’m going to be AWOL from the Internet for a week or so, and there won’t be any new posts here for a little while.

On Tuesday, May 16, at 7pm, I’m going to take part in a panel on the lofty topic of "American Writing Today" for n+1 at the Kitchen, at 512 West 19th Street, Manhattan. Keith Gessen, Vivian Gornick, Mark Greif, and Ben Kunkel are also speaking. It’s free.

On 6 July 1906, Grace Brown wrote to her lover, Chester Gillette, who had got her pregnant, that she had “been bidding good-bye to some places today. . .

Oh dear, you don’t realize what all of this is to me. I know I shall never see any of them again, and mamma! great heavens, how I do love mamma. I don’t know what I shall do without her. . . Sometimes I think if I could tell mamma, but I can’t. She has trouble enough as it is, and I couldn’t break her heart like that. If I come back dead, perhaps if she does know, she won’t be angry with me.”

Brown seems to have thought that she and Gillette were going to elope. They did take a trip soon after, to the Adirondacks, where they rowed a boat out onto a lake. You know where this is going. According to the indictment in People of the State of New York vs. Chester Gillette,

The said Chester Gillette, on the 11th day of July 1906 . . . did beat and strike the said Grace Brown . . . and . . . did push, cast, and throw the said Grace Brown into the water of Big Moose Lake . . . and did then and there smother, asphyxiate, and suffocate the said Grace Brown beneath the waters of said lake . . . and . . . the said Grace Brown did languish and languishing did die. . . .

If this sounds familiar, it may be because Theodore Dreiser wrote a book about the case, An American Tragedy, and because Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor starred in the movie, A Place in the Sun. (Elizabeth Taylor, I hasten to assure you, did not play the Grace Brown role. Shelley Winters did.) Now the Historical Society of the Courts of the State of New York has digitized the record and briefs of People vs. Gillette, which clock in at over 2,000 pages.

By the way, if the name “Edmund Pearson” means anything to you, and/or if you find that you’re developing a taste for antique murder, check out Clews, the Historic True Crime Blog, by Laura James, which I discovered because she was kind enough to link to an old article of mine not long ago.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado has published a series of before-and-after shots of America’s glaciers. Their website says they’re affiliated with NOAA and funded by NASA, but the connections are tenuous enough for them to have escaped the long arm of the Bush administration.

Here’s McCarty Glacier in Alaska, as photographed by Ulysses Sherman Grant in 1909 (black-and-white) and by Bruce F. Molnia in 2004 (color):