Steve Szilagyi is the author of the novel “Photographing Fairies”, which was short-listed for the World Fantasy Award, and made into the feature film of the same name, produced by Mike Newell and starring Sir Ben Kingsley. He worked in public relations and marketing at HBO for eight years, and went on to write for a large academic medical center, where he produced articles, speeches, books, and edited publications. He has written magazine journalism and more than 80 book reviews for the daily press. A graduate of Columbia University, he won that school’s Bennet Cerf Award for Writing. Email: [email protected]
by Steve Szilagyi Woodman, Spare That Tree is a poem by George Pope Morris, published in 1837, and quickly set to music by the prolific songwriter Henry Russell (Cheer, Boys, Cheer). It begins: Woodman, spare that tree! / Touch not a single bough! / In youth it sheltered me / And I’ll protect it now.…
by Steve Szilagyi Few topics in American history are treated with more solemnity than the Civil War. You could (as some men do) spend your entire adult life reading nothing but Civil War histories, arguing about tactics, and visiting battlefields, and never crack a smile. Our scorchingly irreverent satirists don’t find anything funny about the…
by Steve Szilagyi Early motion-picture film and x-ray film were often made from cellulose nitrate, also called nitrocellulose — a highly flammable plastic created by chemically treating cellulose with nitric acid. Heat, pressure or friction can set it off. Under the wrong conditions, two sheets of nitrocellulose lying atop one another long enough can decompose…
by Steve Szilagyi A few weeks ago, I came into possession of a bound volume of Time magazines from late 1950. As I leafed through it, admiring the cover art, I came to the issue of December 11—which showed a portrait of the young Mao Tse-tung surrounded by a swarm of locusts. Reading inside, I…
by Steve Szilagyi It’s been many decades since I worked as a restaurant dishwasher. The best part of the job was the camaraderie of the kitchen—the japes, the clash of pans, and the friendly female server who’d stop back to chat during slack times. The worst part was wiping uneaten food off plates with my…
by Steve Szilagyi I’m someone who’ll finish a book once I’ve started it, even if I don’t like it very much. Yes, I’m superstitious. If a particular book falls into my hands, I suspect fate may have had some purpose in putting it there. When Steve Bergsman’s I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre…
by Steve Szilagyi Having invisible friends is not necessarily a bad thing. What matters is how you handle it. You could, like the engineer Emmanuel Swedenborg or the poet William Blake, spin whole theologies out of your visions. Or you could try and ignore your invisible companions, like the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, and hope…
by Steve Szilagyi Adolph Wolgast is born on a farm in 1888. Chores make him strong. The company of lumbermen makes him tough. “Little Addie” is not tall. But he can spin his arms like a windmill. And if you are in his vicinity, you’d better hope your chin isn’t in the way. After knocking…
by Steve Szilagyi The appetite for Beatles product cannot be sated. Last month, Apple Corps Ltd. released Anthology 4, a new compilation in The Beatles Anthology series, as part of a broader thirtieth-anniversary remastered Anthology Collection. The Anthology series, for those who don’t know, consists of newly mixed outtakes of Beatles songs, previously unreleased tracks,…
by Steve Szilagyi PrologueMost people visit the James A. Garfield Memorial to admire its Victorian splendor, or to pay respects to a forgotten president. I go for another reason: my great-great-grandfather carved some of its stone. If Garfield had lived out his term, the man might never have come to Cleveland, never met the woman…
by Steve Szilagyi You don’t need to be told that Halloween yard decorations have gotten tackier over the years. Complaining misses the point. Their jokey vulgarity is the point—as if America in 2025 were so buttoned-up that people need yet another occasion to act out their bad taste in public. Front lawns have always been small…
by Steve Szilagyi Henry James once observed that Robert Louis Stevenson “wrote with a kind of gallantry — as if language were a pretty woman.” C.P. Snow (1905–1980) did not write like that. Pretty did not seem to enter any area of his work. The author of the famous essay The Two Cultures and the…
by Steve Szilagyi I’m writing a Broadway musical about Hilma af Klint, the Swedish painter who anticipated the entire aesthetics of the 20th century before 1915. Her rediscovery in the 1980s scrambled the timeline of modern art history. My creation isn’t going to be one of those post-Lloyd Webber mega-musicals, but something more along the…
by Steve Szilagyi The suburban lawn. It’s as loaded with symbolism as it is with chemicals. That perfect green expanse stands for everything people hate about people like me: the smug squire in his tony ranch house. I wasn’t always this way. Back in the 1980s, I was an Upper West Sider who laughed with…
by Steve Szilagyi How would you act as a great ship slipped beneath the waves? Freeze? Panic? Leap into the sea? If you were a man, would you quietly help women and children into the lifeboats? We all wonder. Elbert Hubbard wondered too. In 1912, less than a month after the Titanic vanished into the…
by Steve Szilagyi The year was 1960. Kennedy, U-2, the Twist. Our family now included two parents and nine children. The house was too small for us. Our father searched the inner-ring suburbs for something bigger. He got a deal on an enormous house nobody else seemed to want. The seller was an Italian-American grocery…
by Steve Szilagyi A curious part of getting old is seeing people you knew in life turned into bronze statues. You preserve a vivid impression of some laughing, breathing person; they disappear for a while; then they pop up again as a stolid, staring statue. The transition from flesh to effigy can be disquieting. Heroic…
by Steve Szilagyi Edgar Watson (E.W.) Howe (1853–1937) was a small-town newspaperman who became nationally known for his plainspoken wit, tart epigrams, and relentless skepticism. “I must make everything so simple that people will see the truth,” he once said. His sayings—blunt, dry, and often astringent—were the fruit of decades spent editorializing in the Atchison…
by Steve Szilagyi Those first eight thunderous notes—”Oh Fortuna, velut Luna”—delivered by a massive choir of a hundred voices, have become as instantly recognizable as Beethoven’s da-dah-dah-DUM or the opening of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra. Since John Boorman first deployed O Fortuna in his 1981 film Excalibur, this choral juggernaut has stampeded through many horror films,…
by Steve Szilagyi June 1846 was the hottest month ever recorded in London at that time. For 22 sweltering days, temperatures soared between the 85 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The city’s literary luminaries—Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Thomas Carlyle among them—mopped their brows and grumbled about the oppressive heat like common mortals.…