The Talented Miss Highsmith The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar

The Talented Miss Highsmith The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar

This is a very in depth biography of Patricia Highsmith. Joan Schenkar draws from interviews, books, and the 38 Cahiers (spiral bound notebooks) and 18 Diaries of Patricia Highsmith kept at the Swiss Literary Archives. The book itself is 683 pages long with notes, bibliography, index, a map of where she went in Manhattan, diagrams, a timeline of her life, and two extensive sections of black and white photography. It has a feeling of completeness to it.

Patricia Highsmith is best known for her suspense novels and short stories. The most prominent of these is The Talented Mr. Ripley. She also had many of her books turned into films. The most famous film based on her stories is Stranger on a Train directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She won numerous awards both in the United States and internationally.

This book exposes many parts of her life that are not that well known. Patricia Highsmith also wrote the lesbian novel, A Taste of Salt. This book describe Highsmith's many affairs with women both married and unmarried. She was quite passionate and ended up moving from one relationship to the next in short order. Joan Schenkar describes Patricia Highsmith as a driven woman with a predilection for strong drink, younger women, tight control of her money, cats, and odd habits.

One of my favorites parts of the book is the description of Patricia Highsmith as a comic book script writer. Patricia Highsmith tried to hide this all her life. She wanted to be a writer for Vogue and other fashion magazines, or literary magazines like the New Yorker. What she ended up following was the classic path of the mystery writer. First she started by writing comics like The Destroyer, Fighting Yank, and Black Terror. Then she started writing for the pulps (in her case, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine), then she started writing mystery novels. This is the same pattern which Mickey Spillane followed whom she met and did not like.

There are points where this book feels a little bit too revealing. Her family life is one of constant fighting with her mother, Patricia Highsmith has strong prejudices and outright hatreds, and her personal habits can be quite unsettling. She keeps snails, loves cats, hates dogs enough to describe them being killed in her novels, and has a strange sense of humor which is often macabre.

Even when Joan Schenkar describes Patricia Highsmith's success it is not one to be envied. Patricia Highsmith is described as having left the United State having traveled and lived throughout the United States, France, England, Germany, Mexico, and Algeria. She has left her native country, the United States and dies in Switzerland. Her travels have a brooding up and down feeling to them.

Even her professional life is fraught with intrigue and arguing. She jumps from agent to agent always trying to get the best money possible, eventually moving her rights to Europe. She seems to often not like the films made from her books as well.

I cannot say I liked all the parts of the book. There were points where the descriptions became a little unsettling. However, the majority of the book was well written and quite intriguing. This is a very complete and very dark biography of a quirky, talented, and interesting writer with a unique view of the world.

Daily Thoughts 2/18/2010

Starr Reading Room in Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University Picture by Henry Trotter, 2005.

Daily Thoughts 2/18/2010

I did a little shopping today for basic things. On the bus downtown, I read some more of The Talented Miss Highsmith. There is always no parking downtown. Last time I went, it took me 45 minutes to park, so I take the bus. Patricia Highsmith is living in Switzerland, quite rich now from her movie and book money. She is mostly alone away from the United States which she has an ambivalent relationship with. She is still a United States citizen, but says terrible things about it. At the end there is strong sense of prejudice and bitterness as well as worries about money and food. She barely eats, spending more time drinking whiskey and beer. There is a sense of a person who has traveled many places; Istanbul, France, Germany, England, Mexico and neither likes the people nor the food, but is seeking out the dark things which she can write about them. This has a morose appeal. The whole biography has a kind of pensive shadow over it, meant to express a mood of disaffected contrariness.

Earlier in the morning, I finished reading the last part of Viral Loop which is on Viral Networks; companies like Ebay, Paypal, and Facebook. I have a strong distaste for Paypal, I have had some difficulties with them. I am rather fond of Facebook, it was originally started at Stanford as a network of college students then moved to different college campus. This makes it have some intellectual appeal lacking from networks like Myspace. I am not that interested in photography and wish a modicum of visual privacy so Flickr has some interesting qualities for others, but not myself. Youtube is quite interesting. This book is very much a cheerleading title for new media ventures. I found some if it a bit distasteful. Corporations are not wonderful all the time; some are admirable and others not so admirable.

I also spent some time looking at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ which I find to be useful tool to see who has been looking at my website.

I just finished reading The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar. It is one of the most in depth biographies I have ever read. It is clear that the author interviewed many people over a number of years, read Patricia Highsmith's diaries in depth, and also read a lot of secondary material. I'll probably write a review tomorrow. This should give me time to think about it.

Daily Thoughts 2/17/2010

Printing Press Mural, Library of Congress, United States.

Daily Thoughts 2/17/2010

I did not read a whole lot today. I did another exercise for Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. I also walked up to my local library and returned a book.

I went to Barnes and Noble and looked at what they had. We are getting many of the titles at Barnes and Noble, plus quite a few things which are more intellectual which they are not getting. As usual, I noted a few titles that seemed interesting. Seth Godin, a prominent writer on advertising and the internet has a new book, Linchpin. There is also a fantasy novel which looks interesting, The Adamantium Palace by Stephen Deas.

I also went to Target today. They have all the bestsellers on the New York Times Bestseller list as well as the Publishers Weekly bestseller lists arrayed for sale. It is kind of interesting. Plus, they have a lot of self help books, romance books, and diet books. Most of it is pretty bland. The library gets most of the bestsellers now. It was interesting looking at the young adult bestsellers. There were a lot of vampire novels. There were a few popular diet and exercise books which looked like they might be worth getting, The Weightwatchers New Complete Cookbook, and Making The Cut by Jillian Michaels which is an exercise book.

I have had a chance to read some more of The Talented Miss Highsmith. Right now, I am reading about the contents of Patricia Highsmith's library in the Swiss literary archive. Most important for the biographer of this book, Joan Schenkar are the 38 cahiers (small notebooks), and 18 diaries which helped in the composition of this book. Some of the titles are catching and appropriate, especially Grimm's Fairytales and The Personality of Cats. Something of a writers resides in the books they keep. There are quite a few mystery novelists that I recognize that are quite good, G.K. Chesterton, Ian Rankin, Chester Himes, and Raymond Carver, I also found it interesting that more than one copy of the Merck Manual and Gray's Anatomy is listed.

I read a bit more of Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg as well. I am reading about viral marketing right now. He describes how hotmail became popular. More importantly, he describes how it is possible to make a feature length movie with a digital videocamera which costs about $10,000. This is going to get even cheaper to do. It is also possible to show a movie very cheaply as well. With a laptop, a projector, and a screen you can show a movie. This will get even cheaper as projectors drop in price. I found some of the subjects a bit off putting. Viral jokes and commercial advertising can be a bit blunt.

Daily Thoughts 2/16/2010

Cory Doctorow holding a Creative Commons notice that says "Reproduction/remix encouraged / Photography, flash, video OK" originally posted to Flickr as Portrait by Jonathan Worth 3, credit Jonathan Worth, link to http://jonathanworth.com 10 September 2009(2009-09-10), 14:04:37

Daily Thoughts 2/16/2010

I have been reading some more of the Talented Miss Highsmith. Right now, John Schenkar is writing about Patricia Highsmith doing an article on Raymond Chandler. Raymond Chandler was supposed to have moved 35 times when he was in Los Angeles. Somehow these details are what catches my interest in the biography.

There is a lot about Patricia Highsmith drinking a lot, eating very little, and moving a lot. In 1963, she is supposed to have permanently become an ex-patriot. She ended up living in Switzerland in her final days. A lot of the biography is the story of Patricia Highsmith wandering from place to place, in each place she finds a new set of lovers, then moves on when it shatters from her dark personality and addiction to drink. She is in Africa, Mexico, England, France, Switzerland, all over the United States, but especially in Manhattan, always writing, always moving on. It reminds me of the wanderlust of Jack Kerouac of whom she did not approve. This is very much a writers biography. A story about writing driving ones life.

I am on P. 415 of the biography. I read it in little bits then put it down. There are parts that are both disagreeable, quirky, and funny. She likes to kill dogs in her stories, keep cats, and has over 100 snails in her terrarium at one point.

I did my second chat session of Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management online at 11:00 a.m.. The American Library Association offers a number of very inexpensive online classes at http://classes.ala.org/ . I spent a $100 for four chat sessions and seven online training modules to complete. There is a very nice forum that goes with the class. I think I am learning quite a bit. I may take some other online courses as well.

Today, I downloaded http://www.openoffice.org/ Open Office. I am taking a look at it to see how it works. I wrote a short document in it this afternoon.

This afternoon, I read some more of Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg. It is describing how companies use the network effect. This happened when telephones were first introduced. Each new person added to a network of telephones exponentially increases the number of possible connections between users. The network effect also happened when the first internet browser Mosaic was introduced. Every new user made the web of connections increase dramatically. The network effect is what powers social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and other places.

I find this a bit disquieting. It is interesting to have a crowd of followers, but not a crowd of followers without a common focus. This is what creates a mob. I try to keep my Twitter followers focused on books. The other part that is a bit questionable is how much the monetization of the internet is based on advertising. I am not that fond of many types of advertising. The dark side of viral advertising is of course spam which spreads unwelcome through computer networks. It is as viral as Twitter or Facebook.

This is a business book, so the larger the crowd you have to advertise to, the more money you might be able to make. This is part of what fuels the enthusiasm of companies like Google and Yahoo. Replace the word good with popular and it would make me more comfortable. If you believe a crowd is good, you will be more likely to attract people to advertise to.

Daily Thoughts 2/15/2010

Alfred Hitchcock, 1956, Head and Shoulders Portrait Facing Right. This photograph is a work for hire created prior to 1968 by a staff photographer at New York World-Telegram & Sun. It is part of a collection donated to the Library of Congress. Per the deed of gift, New York World-Telegram & Sun dedicated to the public all rights it held for the photographs in this collection upon its donation to the Library. Thus, there are no known restrictions on the usage of this photograph.

Daily Thoughts 2/15/2010

I am reading more of The Talented Miss Highsmith. There is a feeling that Joan Schenkar, the biographer, is very much trying to present Patricia Highsmith in a way similar to the characters in Patricia's novels; a bit mad, having a dark side, strings of lovers, terrible secrets, and slightly criminal thoughts. I sometimes wonder if Joan Schenkar is exaggerating a bit.

I am finding the best part of reading this biography is the irony it. Although Patricia Highsmith did a lot of work with cartoons and comics, she tries to deny it. Joan Schenker ties the name Ripley to the long running comic strip, Ripley's Believe it or Not. This is in reference to the book, The Talented Mr. Ripley. Patricia Highsmith even drew a book of cartoons with accompanying rhymes, Miranda The Panda is on the Veranda. I find it a bit of a shame that Patricia Highsmith did not acknowledge her part in the comics industry. There is now a very interesting womens comic group, Freinds of Lulu http://friendsoflulu.wordpress.com/ that would have matched her well.

Right now, I am doing a bit more of the exercise on how to identify groups in the community who use the library. I am going through each part of the library and thinking about which people use it, the childrens room-- parenting collection, picture books, storytelling collection, the young adult room-- fiction, nonfiction, classics, assignment titles, adult fiction-- urban fiction, mysteries, african american fiction, ispirational fiction, nonfiction, adult nonfiction-- cookbooks, computer books, and other sections.

I have started reading Adam L. Penenberg Viral Loop From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves. This is the story of how many online businesses took the same word of mouth strategy as Tupperware or Avon and turned them into person to person selling strategies. There is a view that if it is popular it must be good and if it spreads quickly by word of mouth it must be useful. Quite frankly, popular and good are two different things. It opens with the story of Hot or Not, the social site which rates people's appearances and how it made money advertising.

There is something vapid about virally pulling lots of people together around a network and then having them make fragmentary statements. Social networks are quite often advertisement driven. I am not a huge fan of advertising. If they offer a useful service, I can tolerate the advertising. There is also no guarantee that once you have gathered masses of people, that what you are doing won't fade out. Myspace became very popular, but is now running into trouble. I hope Twitter and LinkedIn remain, but, I often think that social sites need more than advertisements and crowds.

A few blogs were suggested from the Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. They are nice, clean, and orderly, unlike my mishmash of things. I liked looking at the http://stackedblog . I am even going to place a book on hold, Wanderlust A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit which I saw reviewed on the Stacked Blog. I love walking. I find it meditative. I used to sometimes practice walking meditation which is best done in gardens.

Daily Thoughts 2/14/2010

Photo of Jaron Lanier performing at the Garden of Memory Solstice Concert June, 2009 taken by Allan J. Cronin. Original uploader, Gnu Free Documentation License, found on Wikimedia.

This morning, I finished reading You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier. The writing is very iconoclastic and original. Pieces of it are a little strange and philosophical. For example, he writes about cephalopods and virtual reality as well as computer programming concepts. It is a book worth reading. I will probably write a review of it later today or tomorrow.

I read some more of The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar this afternoon. A colleague recommended it to me. It is a bit of a different experience reading about the authors life. The book is quite different from what I usually read. Taking in reading that is different opens ones horizons a bit. Right now, I am reading about Patricia Highsmith's stay at the Yaddo artists colony. Truman Capote recommended her for the colony. She is writing her novel, Strangers on a Train. The book describes her drinking heavily and reading the bible every day in addition to writing.

Some of the biography is quite hard to read. What lightens it up is Patricia Highsmith's quirkiness; keeping pet snails, her love of cats, reflections on writing, and the constant social climbing and parties in the literary scene of Manhattan. The biography is quite revealing. It writes frankly about Patricia Highsmith's lesbianism and her struggles with the social mores of the 1940s and 1950s.

Right now, I am about half way through reading the book. There is a map of Manhattan which shows where Patricia Highsmith was as well as a year by year summary of her life as appendixes at the back of the book. I still have quite a bit more to read.

I've also been looking at the community of users at my library as part of my Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management course online. It is a bit different doing this. It makes me think hard about what each thing we do at the library serves what population. It is rather interesting.

Daily Thoughts 2/12/2010

Bookcases in the library of the University of Leiden: From a print by J.C. Woudanus, dated 1610. The University of Leiden in Holland adopted a modification of this design, for there the shelf is above the desk, and readers could only stand to use the books. Circa: 1600 Source: Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894 Author: J. W. Clark Available from www.gutenberg.org Published: 1894

Daily Thoughts 2/11/2010

A thought on Ebooks. I also posted part of this thought to Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management.

I have recommended creative commons titles as part of helping people at the reference desk. http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Books -- there are a few books which can be recommended-- Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig and We The Media by Dan Gillmor are quite interesting, but some are not exactly recommendable. There is quite a bit of useful information available for free. I also have located ebooks in the internet archive http://archive.org/ and gutenberg.org http://gutenberg.org/ as part of helping people at reference. If you do not have certain popular books that are out of copyright, many are available through these services.

I also read and recommend titles from the Baen Free Library which is quite controversial. http://baen.com/library The only ebook I ever bought was an e-arc from Baen books.

I have recommended the ereader Stanza to a patron who has an iphone http://www.lexcycle.com/ . Lexcycle recently has become available for Windows and Mac machines as well. It is free software. To my surprise, I have learned that people regularly download free ebooks to both Kindle and Iphone.

I have checked out ebooks from New York Public Library. I checked out quite a few ebooks about business for a while. These last for a few weeks then automatically delete themselves.

I also subscribe to http://netgalley.com/ which allows me to read and review advanced reading copies before they are released.

I don't believe in getting books that are pirated. I stay away from this. Somewhere in the value chain, a person should pay either by providing a service-- reviewing the book, or it should be bought by either an institution like a library or by an individual. Authors do not work for free.

In addition, I follow the social network, http://bookblogs.ning.com/ which has some 5000 member book blogs.

I sometimes read Publishing 2020 which is a blog about the future of publishing. http://jwikert.typepad.com/

I have read a lot of ebooks, but rarely paid for them. But, then I rarely pay for books on a personal level. I usually get them at my library. When I do buy books, it has to be something which I find of considerable value on a personal level. Sometimes, people also send me books because they want me to read them.

This afternoon I read some more of The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar. At this point in the biography she is in Mexico sending in outlines for comics and writing short stories. This is during the height of World War II. It describes her making character sketches of the different people she meets. A lot of the book is about her passionate love affairs with women and her detached observations of men. She is described as being very attractive in her early life. She often writes her male leads in her stories as violent criminals who succeed in their goals.

There is a strong sense of disappointment in the biography as well. Patricia Highsmith sets her goals as writing for fashion magazines like Vogue, or literary magazines like the New Yorker. She ends up writing mystery novels, suspense, and comics. I am enjoying reading about the literary scene in New York. This is a bit of a different perspective on it. Literary pretensions are not something which I have a lot of. I rather enjoy the "lower" arts of the comics, beat artists, pulps, mysteries, and science fiction.

Daily Thoughts 2/11/2010

Interior photo of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt.
Photo taken by Hajor, December 2002. Released under GFDL (Gnu Free Documentation License).

Daily Thoughts 2/11/2010

Today, I spent some time reading some more of the material for Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. I found the famous quote by Frank K. Drury in the course material. "The high purpose of book selection is to provide the right book for the right reader at the right time." They also went over micro (selecting individual titles) vs. (macro) placing standing orders and continuation plans in collection development.

I also checked to make sure the chat session was working for me with the social network for the American Library Association, ALA Connect.

For good measure, I am including a link to the Top 10 Most banned books in 2008 in libraries. http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/21stcenturychallenged/2008/index.cfm

I have been reading some more of The Talented Miss Highsmith. I am reading about her days as a comic book writer which she kept quiet about. It describes her in the office drinking coffee and chain smoking while writing Black Terror, Spysmasher, Pyroman, Golden Arrow and other golden age comics. Then it mentions her sending stories to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. This seems like a natural progression from comic book writer to pulp writer to mystery novel writer. There are other mystery writers who wrote comics. Dashiell Hammett started the newspaper comic serial, Secret Agent X-9. This is a fun comic to read. It is not uncommon for writers to cover comics, pulps, and novels. Stephen King after writing for both films and novels, had his Dark Tower books adapted for the comics. There is something classic about being a comic writer by day and a novelist by night. Max Allan Collins also followed a similar pattern with his writing novels, films, and comics. I especially liked the Road to Perdition comic and the Ms. Tree comics by Max Allan Collins.

Today I did my first chat session for Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. It was quite interesting. There are eleven people in the class. One thing I learned about was the Charleston Conference on Issues in Book and Serials Acquisition. It is supposed to be very informal. It is a place where many collection development librarians meet as well as vendors gather. I have heard of it, but have never gone. It makes me think I should plan on going in the future. There was also mention that some libraries maintain a long term collection development plan that is part of a strategic plan over several years. It was a very interesting chat which lasted for about an hour. Another idea was to focus on genealogy resources if you have a local history room, it brings in people.

Daily Thoughts 2/8/2010

Outing March, 1896

Daily Thoughts 2/8/2010

One book came in for me to read today, The Talented Miss Highsmith The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar. I have been waiting for this for some time. I also am going to read You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier.

Today has been another quiet, steady day. I spent a bit of time checking the displays and checked on my fliers for programs today. I also talked a little bit about the ordering process for books with accounting. Things are moving along. I still have to do some more weeding. I did not get to weeding today, but I did get to read through the New York Times Book Review and part of Kirkus Reviews. We seem to be getting most of the books in the New York Times Book Review before they are reviewed. I have also been noticing that if you read blog reviews many reviews occur before the trade review publications.

I have started the online course from ALCTS on Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. It is a review course from the American Library Association online. One of the questions was to write four things down which you think you would like to learn about. Here are my four: 1) Better understanding of budgetary management. 2) How to write grants specifically to get material for library collections. 3) Tools to evaluate the collection so it more closely matches the local community. 4) More understanding of the publishing industry.

I started reading The Talented Miss Highsmith on the train home. This is definitely a book which would be written after the authors death. It describes her many love affairs with both women (married and otherwise) and men. It also acknowledges her career as a prolific writer of comic books which has mostly been expunged from her literary life. She is best known for her thrillers. I have not read them. I have seen Stranger On A Train which was an Alfred Hitchcock film which she wrote. Patricia Highsmith refused to meet Alfred Hitchcock. It is very interesting reading. Very dark, moody and compelling.