At Portico, this week’s book page, a write-up of Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World. makes us want to show Peter Stuyvesant and his persistent antagonist, Adriaen van der Donck, this picture of the East River, just a few hundred years later. And what’s a few hundred years? Not one of the buildings clearly visible on the left bank of the river was standing even fifty years ago. And, who knows? It may become — “it” being what’s currently called Roosevelt Island — it may become the “island at the center of the world” someday. Probably not — but if you’re in the business of making cool predictions, you never say never.

Writing about Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, I could hardly stop thinking about Tony Goldwyn’s lovely 1999 release, A Walk on the Moon. So many parallels! The Catskills! Woodstock! The moon landing! Wordly actresses pretending to be old shmattatrixes! Liev Schreiber (even)! These parallels, however, only intensify one’s sense of the difference between the two films. And I hope I won’t be thought to play favorites when I say that Taking Woodstock has no Diane Lane character.

There is no Diane Lane character in The Big Tease, this week’s Home Theatre piece (and another movie from ten years ago), either. But we know that, at an earlier stage in her career — had there been one — Ms Lane would have been super in the Mary McCormack role. If only Diane Lane had spent four or five years as in supporting roles! The price of fame &c.

This week’s New Yorker story was Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “The Fountain House.” We didn’t really cotton to it, especially when we learned that the Fountain House in St Petersburg — the Fontanny Dom — is a shrine to the poet Anna Akhmatova. Ms Petrushevskaya’s story is set in Moscow, and is about folk tales, not poetry (there’s a difference). We’re beginning to think that The New Yorker needs a scholarly apparatus department.

Speaking of apartments, we found that we’d written up a story from way back in the spring, Jonathan Lethem’s “Ava’s Apartment,” and forgotten about it. That was then. Further Oblivion Dividends are unlikely.

Last and least &c (a relatively literate issue, though!), the Book Review review.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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