🎞️ When it was announced that Mickey Mouse’s design from “Steamboat Willie” would be entering public domain, I contemplated whether or not to do my own take on Mickey’s particular design from 1928. Last October, I had done a drawing of Mickey with Tigger on animation paper to commemorate the 100th birthday of the Walt Disney Company. As a character, Mickey Mouse is still protected by copyright and trademark laws. Plus, A.A. Milne’s version of Tigger is now in the public domain. Tigger did not make his debut until the second (and last) original “Winnie the Pooh” book, “The House at Pooh Corner”. 🐭🐯

John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 1925.

Following the success of his second novel, “Three Soldiers” (1921), a hard-bitten work of realism partly inspired by his experiences as an ambulance driver in World War I, John Dos Passos seemingly became disenchanted with the constraints of traditional narrative. Any book aiming to portray the teeming masses of New York City in all their muck and glory needed, he must have reasoned, to boldly break with tried-and-true storytelling. As such, his fourth novel forgoes conventional plot structure, pacing and characterization, instead dipping in and out of the lives of dozens of the city’s locals: immigrants, day laborers, newly minted millionaires; a killer, a dishwasher, an actress. Their lives are entwined with the fortunes and pitfalls of the metropolis and—given bits and pieces of their encounters—readers play the role of straphangers, overhearing other people’s intimacies as they course through the city. Tracking how much the city changed from the end of the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, Dos Passos reveals the grubby underside of industrialization. One moment a seamstress daydreams, the next the tulle she’s sewing catches fire, and her with it. “Manhattan Transfer” paved the way for scores of other gritty New York novels, but its blend of the poetic and the profane, not all of which has aged well, remains a product of its time. —Miguel Morales, NY Times

Picture: Original dust jacket, Wikimedia. Artist unknown.

"Now in the West the slender moon lies low, And now Orion glimmers through the trees, Clearing the earth with even pace and slow, And now the stately-moving Pleiades, In that soft infinite darkness overhead Hang jewel-wise upon a silver thread. And all the lonelier stars that have their place, Calm lamps within the distant southern sky, And planet-dust upon the edge of space, Look down upon the fretful world, and I Look up to outer vastness unafraid And see the stars which sang when earth was made."

--Stars, Marjorie Pickthall (1925)

It is to be a clear night tonight, the first one in a while, so I might sit under a warm blanket, with a flask of hot tea, and look up at the skies. And if I'm lucky, catch a glimpse of "Orion glimmer[ing] throgh the trees"...

Irvine, A.M. (1922) Elizabeth Allen is a spoiled girl who is an only child. She becomes very upset and outraged when she learns that she is being sent to a boarding school. When Elizabeth joins Whyteleafe School she is determined to misbehave so that she will be expelled and able to go back home as soon as possible.

can't get over the fact that Nick Carraway fucked a guy Literally In Chapter Two and basically everyone ever just decided to put their hands over their eyes

Author Anita Loos in the August 1928 Moderne Welt.

(source: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)

Reading a book thinking that the male lead is just a bit too cartoonishly evil, and then when I look it up after finishing it only to learn it caused a scandal when published because the male lead was basically universally recognized as the author's husband like... Yikes.gif

“… these reveries provided and outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely upon a fairy’s wing.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

"But those [the world] will not break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry."

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓐𝓶𝓹𝓱𝓲𝓫𝓲𝓪𝓷 𝓜𝓪𝓷 - 𝓑𝓸𝓸𝓴 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓜𝓸𝓿𝓲𝓮 𝓡𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓮𝔀

NYC's Grand Central Terminal, 1929 - before the sun's beams were blocked by surrounding skyscrapers.

These iconic images were taken by photographer Hal Morey.

Bonus Color Photo

Illustration for "The Two Frogs." Little Peachling, and other tales of old Japan. 1928.

Internet Archive

Metropolis author Thea von Harbou was born on this day in 1888.

O all the little rivers that run to Hudson's Bay, They call me and call me to follow them away. Missinaibi, Abitibi, Little Current--where they run Dancing and sparkling I see them in the sun. I hear the brawling rapid, the thunder of the fall, And when I think upon them I cannot stay at all. At the far end of the carry, where the wilderness begins, Set me down with my canoe-load--and forgiveness of my sins. O all the mighty rivers beneath the Polar Star, They call me and call me to follow them afar. Peace and Athabasca and Coppermine and Slave, And Yukon and Mackenzie--the highroads of the brave. Saskatchewan, Assiniboine, the Bow and the Qu'Appelle, And many a prairie river whose name is like a spell. They rumor through the twilight at the edge of the unknown, "There's a message waiting for you, and a kingdom all your own. "The wilderness shall feed you, her gleam shall be your guide. Come out from desolations, our path of hope is wide." O all the headlong rivers that hurry to the West, They call me and lure me with the joy of their unrest. Columbia and Fraser and Bear and Kootenay, I love their fearless reaches where winds untarnished play-- The rush of glacial water across the pebbly bar To polished pools of azure where the hidden boulders are. Just there, with heaven smiling, any morning I would be, Where all the silver rivers go racing to the sea. O well remembered rivers that sing of long ago, Ajourneying through summer or dreaming under snow. Among their meadow islands through placid days they glide, And where the peaceful orchards are diked against the tide. Tobique and Madawaska and shining Gaspereaux, St. Croix and Nashwaak and St. John whose haunts I used to know. And all the pleasant rivers that seek the Fundy foam, They call me and call me to follow them home.

Rivers of Canada, Bliss Carman (1925)

Through Fairy Halls of my Bookhouse (1920)

Illustrations by J.R.R. Tolkien, included in a Christmas letter to his three-year- old son, John, in 1920.