Jean Zimmerman

Category: Culture

  • R.H. Macy’s Tattoo

    We’ve arrived at Macy’s Herald Square to test out the mattresses. Outside in the rain, some typical New Yorkers loiter, including a beautiful bald woman in a gold lame miniskirt with scarification marks across her cheek. The aisles are thronged; New Yorkers love bargains and today is a big January sale day. Elevator up to…

  • Starred Review for Savage Girl

    Publishers Weekly has come out with a starred review for Savage Girl. The reviewer says: The prologue of Zimmerman’s superior historical thriller will suck most readers in instantly. On the night of May 19, 1876, 22-year-old Hugo Delegate awaits the arrival of the police at a house overlooking Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, the site of a…

  • Doppelgänger Photos

    “The digital process becomes a tool, almost like a time machine as I’m embarking on the journey to where I once belonged and at the same time becoming a tourist in my own history.” So says Tokyo-born, London-based photographer Chino Otsuka. She created an evocative series of images called Imagine Finding Me in which she…

  • Edward Lear in Flight

    The nonsense poet and artist Edward Lear has always been one of my favorites. I remember when I was growing up being fascinated and mystified by The Pobble Who Has No Toes: The Pobble who has no toes     Had once as many as we; When they said, ‘Some day you may lose them all;’—    …

  • Bread and Circuses

    In the summer of 1977 I ran away to join the circus. I didn’t have to run too far–it was located in New York City, my back yard, where I went to college. The Big Apple Circus was just being born, and I served as a lowly gal friday for the new entity, first in…

  • Long Winter’s Nap

    I’ve taken the polar express right upstairs to my bedroom, since my downstairs office is a good 15 degrees colder. Computer, books, coffee, check. The only thing I lack here is a canopy bed such as the kind they built during the middle ages. Long curtains to pull around the sides kept you cozy. Sleeping…

  • The Hearth of the Matter

    Oh, why am I out, seeking sushi sustenance, on the coldest day of the year? Because I have a touch of cabin fever, and because Maud all but forcibly pulled me out, plunked me on my scooter, and got me to a hot bowl of miso soup at Okinawa nearby. Living in the Cabin, even…

  • Oddities of Nature Circa 1665

    I’ve been thinking about oddities of nature, feral children and other beings that have captured peoples’ imagination over time. I came across some illustrations by an artist who really delved into the what ifs of human and animal existence. Fortunio Liceti published De Monstris in 1665. He held a doctorate in philosophy and medicine and…

  • When Fifth Avenue Was Quiet

    I like to think sometimes about what Manhattan was like in middle of the nineteenth century. Especially the upper East side, upper Fifth Avenue, the venue for my book Savage Girl. It fascinates me because it is so different than our image of New York. The environs were almost completely undeveloped. In 1842, James Renwick…

  • Savage Girl’s Central Park

    The Central Park, as it was known in the nineteenth century, had only been officially open for two years when Savage Girl arrives at the Delegate mansion in 1875. The scrupulously landscaped plot of 843 acres, designed by Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, was set in the middle of the island of Manhattan with the…

  • Woody Guthrie’s Resolutions

    The finest list of New Year’s Resolutions to be had – or  New Years Rulins’ as he called them – penned by Woody Guthrie in 1942 at the age of 30. A few of these are far beyond me, writing a song a day for example, but I think I could benefit by staying glad…

  • Let’s Celebrate

    May you have a warm, happy and little bit crazy New Year’s… and a 2014 that is full of good things. NB: This is an 1891 photo from the fabulous but now somewhat obscure Staten Island photographer Alice Austen, who took 8,000 photographs over 40 years, usually gems of street photography, then went broke with…

  • Brilliant Books for Your Consideration

    I hate year-end rankings. You find them in every newspaper and magazine and web site, and I generally ignore them. In fact, rankings in general rub me the wrong way. Especially when it’s books that are touted as the best, second best, etc. These are some of my unranked favorites from the past year. In…

  • Portraitist Julia Margaret Cameron

    The face in the photograph might seem familiar. It is Alice Liddell, the original inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, whose visage was captured many times by the author of that book, Charles Dodgson (pen name Lewis Carroll) – somewhat provocatively, as he liked to depict many of his young-girl subjects. Here, though, in 1872, Liddell…

  • Wonderful Characters

    It’s the time of year when literary critics tote up the outstanding reads of the previous year, as well as some of the failures. I’m never into ranking books, though I might at some point on this site share a few of those that really knocked me out in recent months. For now, I thought…