The Brooklyn Eagle carried this story a while back about actor Paul Michael Kelly. A popular bromide asserts that truth is stranger than fiction, and in this case it might just be true. It’s really worth clicking through to read the whole story. You might think, “Huh! But this really didn’t have anything to do with Tarkington.” And you’d be right. But you’d also be wrong, I think. Tarkington was very much involved in Broadway and Hollywood in the 1920s, and I rather imagine he knew Kelly quite well.

If you didn’t know the IPAHF existed, you can be forgiven. Apparently, the IPAHF’s founders, the Indiana Media Industry Network, doesn’t know much about it either. The announced intent was for the Hall of Fame to be web-based, with a multi-media installation of some kind to follow; but the IMIN website is infrequently updated, with little to show over the last two years but legislative activism.

Siew Cheng Hoe, blogging at reviewstream.com, today posted up one of the more impressionisticly eclectic reviews of Seventeen I’ve seen. Again, I don’t normally link to blogged reviews, because there’s usually very little to distinguish one from another. This time, however, Siew Cheng Hoe concluded with one of the most interesting literary claims I think I’ve ever read, and I just have to share it with you.

Just yesterday I noted in connection with J.D. Salinger’s lawsuit that I was not aware of Tarkington ever having sued anyone over copyright infringement; yet while researching this film I discovered that my memory was faulty! James Woodress discusses Tarkington’s reaction to these Warner Bros. Penrod features on page 238 of his Tark biography; I just had forgotten all about it. It turns out that Tarkington sued Warner on almost precisely the same grounds that Salinger argued.

J.D. Salinger, the author of Catcher in the Rye, has had a rare moment in the public spotlight recently due to a lawsuit he’s brought to stop publication of a book based on characters in his seminal coming-of-age novel. Lisa Peete has written a very interesting analysis of the ruling in the case, and along the way concludes with a very odd comparison, including an extended quote from the conclusion of Seventeen. Given Tarkington’s lack of fondness for the “new frankness,” as he put it, I really doubt he would have seen much of a comparison between Baxter and Caulfield at all.

At the relatively new and sparsely populated blog back to shchool, an anonymous—and industrious, as well as observant—writer takes on Alice Adams, and, blog stylistics fully considered (and even lending the notes a little poignant weight), comes up with a very worthwhile little essay. Here’s a bit of what the writer has to say: “tarkington ‘cracks the joke’ only after he has set you out on a journey with alice, a long train ride that offers a chance to know the person seated beside you — her dreams and her will to deny the truths that stand in the way of seeing those dreams realized in a society that required social background to shine in it.”

If Penrod has always fascinated and/or entertained you, but you’ve never read any other of Tarkington’s books about children, pleasepleasepleaseplease dig up a used copy of the out-of-print Little Orvie. For my money, it’s even funnier than the Penrod books because Orvie is younger… and barely on the edge of comprehensibility. We laugh at Penrod because we understand him; we laugh at Orvie because he is beyond the pale, and because we are beyond his.