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Greetings!

I’m back after a short hiatus: five cracked ribs, the result of a freak fall; a swollen and very sore right elbow (bursitis?); more of the usual…

I hope you’re enjoying the warmth of the sun. Although Brian Wilson’s account differs from Mike Love’s, regardless of which account you decide on as the more accurate you’ll know that “The Warmth of the Sun” — the B-side of “Dance, Dance, Dance” — was completed on November 22, 1963, the day when news broke that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. It’s a sad, poignant song — but with an undercurrent of hope.

My closest friends know that exactly 58 years ago last month (July), during the legendary “Summer of Love,” my parents, my older sister, and I packed up our collapsible tent trailer and headed for the West Coast.

In the plan formulated by my parents — my mom was the plan’s chief architect — we were to complete our month-long journey on a shoestring budget. And have lots of fun along the way. In her tiny journal, my mom kept track of every single cent we spent on a trip that covered over 9,000 miles. Altogether, we spent — wait for it — a thousand dollars and change. For a family of four. No hotels, no fancy restaurants, most meals prepared on our Coleman stove, just a few inexpensive souvenirs. Amazing now to think of it.

Obviously, that was a time of tumultuous social upheaval, and a time when two generations — my parents and mine — often seemed to be at war with one another. 

When we finally arrived in San Francisco, the streets were, as advertised, teeming with the young people everyone was referring to as hippies. Somehow, my sister and I convinced my dad that the Smalldon family would benefit from a drive through the Haight-Ashbury district — so that we could witness firsthand what all the fuss was about.

Haight Street was a chaotic scene: music, bright colors everywhere, psychedelic posters, and bustling crowds of hippies on the sidewalks and in the streets. While we were stopped at a stop light, several hippies approached our car and placed some flowers under our windshield wipers.

Faced with this unexpected development, my dad did what any right-leaning but hippie-curious FBI agent would do. He rolled up his windows and told the rest of us to roll ours up, too. It felt like we were under siege. But by what? By whom?

That evening, my mom summed things up in the tiny notebook she used to keep track of our expenses, describe our activities, and record her thoughts.

She wrote of our activities that day (July 25, 1967), “Drove first to Chinatown, browsed in shops, walked around. Drove to Fisherman’s Wharf and parked in lot. The hills are horrible! Took cable car someplace and back. Walked up Lombard Street (puff-puff!) and down. Drove through Haight-Asbury sector. Frightening and pathetic to see those weirdos. Heading back to Big Basin.” Her notes also indicate that we splurged that day and spent $0.68 on chocolate bars and some postcards.

Good times. Good old times.

• You might want to check out the recording of my interview with the colorful and very thoughtful Maggie Freleng (host of the Up and Vanished Weekly podcast). It’s now available on my YouTube channel. (Note: Just two days ago, none other than the great Joan Baez liked a Facebook reel that Maggie recorded as a way to promote my book and the interview.)

• On June 10, I spoke about That Beast Was Not Me to a great crowd of book-lovers at the Wheeling Public Library in Wheeling, West Virginia.  An audience member asked if I knew of Charles Manson’s childhood ties to the Wheeling/McMechen/Moundsville area of northern West Virginia. I did.

• I was honored to be chosen as one of the featured authors at this year’s well-organized, extremely well-attended Columbus Book Festival (July 12–13). In addition to selling and signing a lot of books, I participated on a panel discussion devoted to the true crime genre, broadly defined. I also participated in something called “speed matching,” where authors rotate among five tables of prospective readers and deliver their best nine-minute pitch. At the beginning it was a bit nerve-wracking — but in the end it was a lot of fun.

In the photographs below, I’m shown with chief event organizer Elisa Stone Leahy (who’s amazing); and New York Times bestselling author Gregg Hurwitz, whose Orphan X series is wildly popular. (In his spare time, Gregg writes scholarly articles about Shakespeare.)

• On July 28, I discussed my book with a large midday audience at the Moundsville–Marshall County Public Library. After my talk, I took a guided tour of the Moundsville State Penitentiary (which, thankfully, has housed no inmates since 1995). It’s where little Charlie Manson, then in elementary school, visited his mother Kathleen. I’ve seen the insides of many maximum security prisons — but this one stands out from the bunch.

• At 1:00 on Sunday, August 17, I’ll be signing copies of That Beast Was Not Me at Columbus’ renowned Book Loft.

• From 4:00 ‘til 6:00 on Saturday, September 6, I’ll be talking about and signing copies of Beast at the fantastic new and used independent bookstore, Clintonville Books.

• On October 2 at 6:00, I’ll be talking about and signing copies of Beast at Upper Arlington’s Storyline Bookshop, a wonderful, relatively new addition to the Columbus book scene.

• On October 28 at 6:30, I’ll be signing copies of Beast at the Hilliard Public Library, part of the greater Columbus Metropolitan consortium of libraries.

Stay tuned! There’s lots more in the works…

Turns out I didn’t. All I really knew was the part of the story that featured Mineo, then 17, as the lonely, fatherless boy Plato in the classic Rebel Without a Cause (1955), which featured a few other young actors whose lives and careers would become the stuff of legend: James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Dennis Hopper. For that year’s Academy Awards, Mineo earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

In the end, Mineo’s was a sad, seamy life.

He appeared in many movies after Rebel, including Exodus (1960) and Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) – where he played a chimpanzee.

What most people don’t realize is that Mineo began as a true child actor, first in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo and later, as the young prince opposite Yul Brynner in the stage musical The King and I. Brynner became one of Mineo’s most important mentors.

Few people who’ve seen Rebel Without a Cause forget the obvious homoerotic overtones in the relationship between the Mineo and Dean characters. Was Mineo gay or was he not? Remember, this was during the conservative 1950’s, when the “wrong” answer to a question like that could kill a career. Members of the tabloid press perseverated over the issue, and their stories had a dampening effect on Mineo’s trajectory as an actor.

Eventually, Mineo described himself as bisexual in an interview, but the people who knew him best attested to the fact that he was primarily interested in other men.

Michaud’s biography is chock full of information that reflects on the character of Mineo the man. Apparently, there wasn’t much to like.

He was an unrelenting narcissist; he could be remarkably callous (after one of his erstwhile girlfriends tried for the second time to take her own life, Mineo said he’d become “bored” with the whole thing); he was chauvinistic (he identified as “one of the most important qualities a man looks for [in a woman]” the woman’s “respect and complete living for the man! Her way of life, her whole way of living is for one man, and that’s it”); he was a profligate spender; he was an unabashed voyeur; and… he was (apparently) a rapist.

He met a fourteen-year-old boy named Michael Mason at a retail store in Beverly Hills and invited Michael back to his apartment (where, according to Mason, there was a ball and chain with spikes in one corner and, on the walls, the words “fuck” and “hate”).

According to Mason’s account, once they entered Mineo’s bedroom Sal began chanting “Swing with me, swing with me” and then had sex with the boy almost before Mason, a virgin, knew what was happening. Again, Mason was fourteen years old at the time.

Readers with a hankering for nostalgia will find the pages of this book overflowing with names they remember well from the 1960’s and early-1970’s: Jon Provost from Lassie, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, and Don Johnson, to name a few.

Mineo’s life came to a tragic end in 1976. In what the police eventually determined had been a mugging gone bad, a career criminal stabbed Mineo in the heart in the carport behind his apartment building.

Not to be petty, but Michaud would have benefited from a more exacting editor. Here’s just one example — there are many others I could cite — of a sentence that should never have been allowed to pass:

“Despite his disenchantment with the recording aspect of his career, the offer to tour Australia could not be turned down by the actor.”

Ouch.

This is a quirky little book, written by an author, Sarah Ruden, who’s best known for her work as a translator of ancient texts. For example, she translated Vergil’s Aeneid, Aristophane’s Lysistrata, and Augustine’s Confessions. She’s also published two  books about the Bible. And from W. W. Norton she has a forthcoming book that’s a survey of writing against reproductive choice since the Roman Empire.

So, why this slender volume focusing on the life and art of Sylvia Plath? First and foremost, Ruden’s firmly convinced that Plath was a stone-cold genius.

In the introduction to her book, she includes this statement of purpose: “In presenting this selection of [six of Plath’s] poems, I will be arguing for Plath’s establishment, on purely literary merit, in the cool mainstream of literary greatness, which verges toward political tolerance and open-mindedness.” In other words, even though she’s willing to consider the details of Plath’s life since many of Plath’s best-known poems are known to be autobiographical and “confessional” in nature, she’s committed to making sure autobiography never trumps art.

The six poems she’s chosen are “Mushrooms,” “You’re,” “The Babysitters,” “The Applicant,” “Ariel,” and “Edge.”

Ruden discusses “Mushrooms” (from 1959, the year Plath spent teaching at her alma mater, Smith College) as marking one of Plath’s most significant early breakthroughs, a moment when she was “starting to have fun, her own kind of defiant and surmounting fun.” She identifies “Mushrooms” as one of Plath’s many “object” poems, poems where she begins with some apparently bland or trivial thing and goes “off her imaginative head,” improvising wildly and reveling in the fact that even if she never “enjoyed much power in society or in the economy, on paper she could create and destroy like a god.”

In “You’re,” written in early-1960, when Plath was pregnant with her daughter Frieda, Plath draws parallels between her pregnancy and her artistic strivings. According to Ruden, Plath’s complete surrender to the pregnancy/artistry metaphor is “something brand new in literary history.” The obvious truth, Ruden concedes, is that Plath was “leery of motherhood, and her leeriness did not disappear after childbirth.” Despite the fact that Plath is so closely associated with her suicide when her children were, respectively, two and just over a year, Ruden concludes that “You’re” feels, in the final analysis, like something“apotropaic” (look it up; I had to) – “a careful, fierce, tender gift Plath made for her daughter.”

Plath wrote “The Babysitters” in October 1961. It recalls the summer ten years before that she and a close friend spent as nannies to the children of two upper class families on the Massachusetts shore. For Plath, it was, overall, a miserable experience. She even goes so far as to admit that she fantasized about killing the children who’d been placed under her care. Here’s how Ruden assesses the poem’s power: “[Plath makes] the story of a botched late-adolescent summer of domestic work an illustration not only of the unbreachable gaps between people and the difficulties of maintaining relationships, but also of the energizing and productive longings and the inviting pages that may rise from those very limitations.” In other words, “The Babysitters” is a poem whose meaning is far more profound than its autobiographical details might at first suggest. In that respect, it’s a very “Plathian” poem.

“The Applicant” – from October 1962, just four months before Plath’s suicide – is one of Plath’s best-known poems. Ruden calls it “uplifting in its bold absurdity.” On the surface, the poem tells of the “applicant” (apparently a man) interviewing with a would-be boss who treats him like dirt. The poem allows Plath the opportunity to meditate on “passivity, complicity, [and] ambivalence,” the attitudes that hover over the poem like “a miasma that paralyzes the soul.” Of course the poem is about much more than just an interview that didn’t go well. It comments on such diverse subjects as women’s independence (or lack thereof); the “talk talk talk” of psychotherapy and relationships and advertising, with its frequent goal of convincing women of the need to make “adjustments to a subordinate life”; and, of course, marriage (her stormy marriage to the poet Ted Hughes was in a state of serious crisis at the time of this poem’s composition).

“Ariel” is the poem whose name became the title of the famous  post-humous collection that cemented Plath’s status as one of the twentieth century’s most daring, most imaginative poets. It refers not only to the magical “airy” spirit in Shakespeare’s The Tempest but to the horse named Ariel that Plath loved riding through the Devon countryside. Plath wrote her mother at around the time when she was composing “Ariel” that she knew she was writing the poems that would make her name, solidify her status as a great poet. As Ruden notes, the poem’s central metaphor is “uplifting, transformative speed.” This is the poem where Plath declares, “I am the arrow.” Taken in context, the declaration is triumphant, signaling the poet’s “release,” not to the peace of death but to “the confidence of immortality.”

Finally, “Edge” is one of the last poems Plath wrote, perhaps the last one. It was composed six days before her suicide. As Ruden notes, the poem is, at one level, a meditation on the fates of children left behind after a parent’s suicide. But as with most things Plathian, the poem’s meaning extends far beyond any such considerations. The dead female body at the poem’s center isn’t presented as decayed, destroyed, or still showing the signs of its dying agony (like the body at the center of another Plath poem, “All the Dead Dears”). Instead, the body is “perfected” and wearing “a smile of accomplishment.” What’s the accomplishment? According to Ruden, it’s Plath’s “self that cannot be taken away from her,” the beauty of her achievement as an artist. Seen in this light, “’Edge’ is less a dirge than a celebratory performance of [Plath’s] literary immortality.”

The trajectory of Rich’s life and artistic career has been a source of fascination for decades. How did this prodigy, whose extraordinarily domineering and controlling father marked her, almost from the day she was born, as a small human he believed he could shape into a genius, progress through her stages as a wife and young mother, a heralded poet by her early 20’s (which is when W.H. Auden selected her first poetry collection, A Change of World, for the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award), a civil rights activist during the mid-1960’s, an early explorer of “androgyny,” a fierce warrior against the patriarchy that she perceived as dominating every aspect of American life, an outspoken feminist and lesbian, and someone who, toward the end of her life, did much to draw attention to the pride she felt as a result of her Jewish heritage?

The answers are explored with great sensitivity and clarity in this biography. The one thing I still can’t figure out is why Holladay devotes so little time and space to the subject of Rich’s motherhood (and, closely related, the lives of her children). This is pure speculation, but perhaps there were pre-publication agreements that limited what Holladay could write about these very large subjects.

Rich’s influence as one of the great American poets and essayists of the second half of the twentieth century is widely recognized. In addition to her prodigious output as a writer, she made use of her public platform to denounce people she disliked (mostly men; to cite just one example she pilloried the English novelist Anthony Burgess as “an entitled, women-hating lout”), to criticize other women for being too rigid about their use of the term “lesbian” (Rich herself preferred “the lesbian continuum”), to denounce the patriarchy in all its forms, and to espouse an exclusionary (“separatist”) approach to handling the conflict between the sexes. At various times, she wanted to exclude men from her public readings, and she was known to refuse questions posed by men who were actually permitted to be present at one of her performances.

Hers was an undeniably hard and colorful life, marked by chronic alcoholism, debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, a “staircase phobia” that often complicated public appearances, and a lasting affair with her own psychotherapist, a problem that to Rich didn’t seem like a problem at all.

I first became acquainted with Holladay as a biographer when I read American Hipster, about Herbert Huncke, the Times Square hustler who was partially responsible for the “Beat” movement in American literature. I liked that book and learned a lot from it. I liked The Power of Adrienne Rich, too. It’s full of interesting information about a transformative poet/essayist whose voice was almost impossible to ignore during the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s. Highly recommended.

We now know, beyond any doubt, that Kohberger committed the murders. But why? Why the prosecutors who handled the case and lent their support to Kohberger’s guilty plea didn’t require, as a condition of the plea, that Kohberger give a full, comprehensive statement about the planning and commission of his crimes – including his motive – is anyone’s guess.

I spent much of my career as a forensic psychologist consulting on close to 300 death penalty cases, and I can’t understand why Kohberger was allowed to plead guilty and avoid a likely death penalty without supplying this important information. One of the victims’ families, the Goncalves family, has been very publicly critical of the prosecution for its manner of handling the plea.

James Patterson is, as the jacket of The Idaho Four declares, “the most popular storyteller of our time.” His trademark style is very much in evidence here: short paragraphs, short chapters, cliffhangers (some of them seem a little pat), a brisk narrative pace, and sharply drawn character portraits. These are some of the stylistic techniques that make his books so enjoyable to read. I don’t mean this in a negative way, but they’re not particularly taxing on the brain. They’re “light” – even when they’re about a heavy subject like mass murder.

The Idaho Four is best thought of as a pastiche of vignettes, together meant to conjure – yet never fully explicate – the back story behind the more obvious one, the one that’s dominated media coverage of this case for the last three years. Patterson and Ward conducted in-depth interviews with many friends and family members of the victims, and their time paid off handsomely. Readers will come to know Maddie, Kaylee, Ethan, and Xana as full, complex, fun-loving college students – not unlike many other college students they know.

As for Kohberger and his motive/s? That’s a story for another time. I hope to hear it one day.

The other day, a close friend asked me if I could identify a single exchange with Dillon that really blew my mind. Actually, I said, there were many more than just one. I had to take a minute to settle on an exchange that might have blown my brain even a bit more than most of the others did.

In the course of one of our conversations, Dillon and I discovered our shared passion for the genre of true crime, especially the sub-genre that focused on crimes involving serial and mass murder. We touched on lots of cases that we’d both read about, for example Leopold and Loeb, Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper, David Berkowitz, Peter Kurten, Edmund Kemper, John Dillinger, Jeffrey Dahmer, Carl Panzram, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Hillside Strangler/s.

Irish literature scholar Darcy O’Brien had written the definitive book about the case of the Hillside Stranglers, called Two of a Kind. Dillon and I had both read that book and found it particularly interesting.

I told Dillon that I had a little personal history with O’Brien. After reading Two of a Kind, I wrote O’Brien at the University of Tulsa, where he was a member of the English department, and told him not only how much I’d enjoyed his book but that I’d spent a wonderful year studying modern Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College in Dublin. He knew some of the professors who’d taught me there, and we had a nice, friendly exchange of letters about our shared interests. Dillon seemed fascinated to learn of this correspondence.

We then turned our attention to O’Brien’s more recent true crime book, called Murder in Little Egypt. Published in 1989, only four years before Dillon’s and my discussion, the book chronicled the case of well-respected physician Dr. John Dale Cavaness, whose practice was located in the rural portion of southern Illinois known as Little Egypt. Beneath his carefully curated public persona, Cavaness was a cold-blooded killer. Ultimately, he was found guilty of murdering one of his sons. Most students of the case believe that he killed not just one but two of his sons. 

What shocked me – blew my mind – was Dillon’s casual, dismissive way of talking about these outrageous crimes of filicide. Shrugging, he volunteered, “Guy kills his two sons, big deal; that happens all the time.” 

“Well, not really,” I said. 

Dillon responded with another shrug and his familiar half-smirk/half-wince, the expression he called on whenever he wanted to communicate combined feelings of mirth and regret. 

It’s the exact same facial impression he used when he said “Guilty” five times at the plea hearing where he finally admitted publicly that he murdered five people in five different Ohio counties between the years 1989 and 1992.

Enjoy what remains of the summer – and stay cool (always). 

–Jeff

P.S. For those of you who are music lovers, I always end with a couple recommendations, totally subjective choices that for one reason or another have special meaning for me. 

The great songwriter/poet Eric Andersen grew up outside Buffalo. His mother died at DeGraff Memorial Hospital in my hometown of North Tonawanda. My mom and sister were nurses there. 

Not long after my dad’s death, in 1998, Andersen stopped for an intimate show in Columbus when he was on his way to participate in a Phil Ochs tribute concert at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He performed this very moving version of the Ochs classic “When I’m Gone.” Especially at that moment in time, I found the song almost unbearably poignant. I listened to it with tears in my eyes. 

On another meeting with Andersen in Columbus, we reminisced briefly about our shared backgrounds in western New York and Andersen told me, “Sometimes time is not your friend.” Amen to that. Anyway, here’s the link to “When I’m Gone.”

For something a bit more upbeat, check out the Waterboys’ “The Soul Singer” from the band’s 2020 recording Good Luck, Seeker. Who do you think Mike Scott is singing about? Here’s the link to “The Soul Singer.”