Undine Undone

Completed Reading List

2012-01-08T10:02:00.000-08:00

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter

When It Mattered

2009-09-02T14:25:00.000-07:00

The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins

FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience

by Kristin Downey

In view of the nasty absurdities of the current Health Care and Insurance Debate, it is interesting to read about the implementation of Social Security---a radical departure in social reform.

Miss Perkins was the Great Depression's Secretary of Labor who, in her formative years, watched the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, and watched the immigrant female factory workers, who had been locked into their workroom to do their labors making mass produced blouses for American women, leap to their deaths in their attempt to evacuate their building and workroom to avoid being burned to death. She watched the women, girls, most of them, crash to their deaths on the sidewalk below the factory high rise. The firemen had arrived but the nets to catch the working girls did not work for leaps from that height.

Miss Perkins would be responsible for creating and maintaining a very strong social net for the working class (and later the middle class) when economic and familial financial disasters left them facing the fire or the fall.

She makes most of the women in politics these days look truly contemptible. Miss Perkins actually cared about the working poor and spent her life, from early days in Jane Adams' Hull House to her days of power in Washington DC, working to improve their lives. And she didn't make money lobbying off the poor.

And while Miss Perkins passed and implemented Social Security during the Great Depression, she cared for her family who were victims of genetic and mental depressions. Her husband was in and out of insane asylums during her service, and her daughter was also a victim of her father's curse.

Miss Perkins was a formidable woman.

Southern Musings

2009-08-18T18:06:00.000-07:00

Imperial

by William T. Vollman

I really didn't read this book, I looked at the pictures. Mr. Vollman has a companion book, Imperial, that tells about the history of the Imperial Valley in California and Mexico. I've got a request in at the library for that one.

The Imperial Valley is an area in southern California and northern Baja Mexico that includes the border between the two nations and the Salton Sea and Colorado River. I don't know anything about the area but what I can see in the pictures that Mr. Vollman took and placed in this book.

Looking at the pictures, this is an agricultural area with some manufacturing gone very wrong areas (high lead contamination from an abandoned lead smelting facility and polluted waterways and canals). It is a poor area (people and environment) and contains the corrugated tin sided nightclubs and lap dancers and strippers and beer options along dusty roads that provide poor entertainment for the poor.

The people are mainly descended from native Americans (on both sides of the border) and there are some Anglo farmers and eccentrics. As an aside, I have to say that most of the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans that I know are of Lebanese descent, so there is that qualification when I use the term "Mexican". Am I making any sense---nah, I don't think so either.

The pictures are in black and white and some are sepia tinted. Mr. Vollman takes the viewer directly into the Imperial Valley with his photos. He has no captions below the pictures and explains nothing. He lets the viewer just look and draw her own conclusions.

There are two essays by Mr. Vollman in the back of the book. One is babble worthy of Aleister Crowley about taking photographs and what they represent. Skip it. Mr. Vollman was high when he wrote it and it was a talkative, dis-associative high. Just like one of those endless and fruitless marijuana high discussions about the meaning of Plato. Yeah, Doobie Socrates.

The second essay is labeled Technical Notes and discusses camera lens apertures and film and photo development. I know nothing about the subject and really don't care to know about it, but this was interesting to me. I still don't know the difference between 35mm or 270mm and a Kodack or Wisner camera, but I did find that Mr. Vollman's technical discussion gave me an idea of the photographer and what he valued and what he wanted to capture when he took his pictures. It gave me a better understanding and a viewpoint for his pictures.

There are also very brief and non-discursive photo captions in the back of the book. They were very informative for me, because when I was looking at a picture of a corrugated tin fence (corrugated tin is the main building block in this valley) with a tire placed high on the wall, I thought that it was the playground for some sort of ball game. Get the ball in the tire. When I finally read Mr. Vollman's caption, I found out that the wall was a border fence and that the tire was placed to aid the climber to get over the fence to the other side. That is a different sort of ball game scoring and refereeing and is much more crucial for the players and the spectator (me).

Thar She Blew

2009-08-11T14:59:00.000-07:00

Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around: A memoir of floods, fires, parades, and plywood

by Cheryl Wagner

At the end of August in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and tore up that town.

Miss Wagner was a native Louisianian who had acheived her childhood dream of living in New Orleans and freelance writing and enjoying herself and her neighborhood. After Katrina, Miss Wagner and her husband Jake, a freelance musician, had to give up the enjoyment and work like dogs to rebuild their home and their lives. Well, not work like dogs exactly, Miss Wagner had two basset hounds, who just lazed around and watched all the work that she and Jake did.

The people who came back after Katrina to rebuild New Orleans, not only had to face raw sewage in the their houses and yards and streets, but they had to deal with human nature in the form of uncaring government and FEMA employees, rip-off construction grifters, drug dealers, copper thieves, and evangelical social workers.

Drugs were dealt and used in the open among the gutted and flood trashed houses without regard for the neighbors or law enforcement. I thought of the TV show, The Wire, where the police designate a certain street in Baltimore to be enforcement free and call it Amsterdam, after the city below the sea in Europe where drugs and prostitution are legal. Miss Wagner and her husband went to Amsterdam for a vacation and a rest from renovating their home and Miss Wagner felt constricted by the Dutch insistence on unvarying order---drugs must only be used in certain places and prostitution was only allowed at certain times and in certain areas. This proves that there really is no city quite like New Orleans, anywhere. What appears to be degenerate license or unlimited freedom elsewhere (Amsterdam and Baltimore) is just constricted restriction for a New Orleanser.

Miss Wagner and Jake were put on the list for FEMA trailers while they rebuilt their home, but after they secured an apartment in an unflooded part of New Orleans to live in while they worked on their Mid-town house, they called FEMA to get themselves off the list. FEMA told them, no problem, that they had been taken off the list a few months before. It was the first that the Wagners had heard of it.

They had to have their roof done twice, the first contractor took a lot of money and did a lousy job. Rain ran down the walls of their kitchen and living room in bad weather. It took them a year to get their electricity back, and they were ripped off by the electrician. The city came by and ripped up the water and sewage pipes every now and again. The Army Corps of Engineers rebuilt the levees with newspaper.

The insurance company dilly dallied for months before it finally paid up for the flood insurance that they had on the house. The insurance company paid it to the mortgage company. And New Orleans sent a home appraiser out to calculate what they could get to restore their house. It came to $0. The appraisal got the address right, but the house that they described was someone else's house. Whose? They never figured it out. The whole neighborhood was trashed by Katrina.

But no matter the discouragement and the irrational dishonesty of the various processes, the Wagners stayed and kept working on their home (and they did most of the work themselves).

The book began with a very detailed description of the evacuation of the Wagners and their dogs, and I thought it too detailed. But I came to appreciate the detail and the digressions rebuilding one's home and life after a catastrophe. If one thinks about it too long, one can go crazy. Scarlett O'Hara had that right.

2009-08-09T18:15:00.000-07:00

Pericles

by William Shakespeare

I've decided that I need to keep reading Shakespeare---read the best and it influences you and your choices.

And for some reason, I am now fond of Shakespeare's older comedy/fantasy/dramas. It's as if Shakespeare became Lord Dunsany in his old age. And you know, I think that Shakespeare is writing a bit of Sci Fi too. Although, I think that Shakespeare always had it in him, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Shakespeare has a 14th century poet named John Gower narrate this tale. Mr. Gower was a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales fame, and I want to know why Gower? Why not Chaucer? I mean, Shakespeare has got John of Gaunt, Mr. Chaucer's patron and brother-in-law all over the Histories. Why not here? (Gower wrote the poem about Pericles that Shakespeare used as the basis for this play, but still---Chaucer!)

Anyway, Mr. Gower narrates the tale in the Middle English of Mr. Chaucer (and this brings up the question---why didn't Shakespeare do Beowulf? Come on---fights, monsters---I like to think that the banquet scene in Macbeth and the three witches were precursors for Grendel kicking knights' asses after their drunken revelry and Grendel's mom (or say, Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI's wife, that "flinty queen")).

Forget Mr. Gower, back to the tale. And this play is a tale---not so much a play. There are great skips of time and action and place in it. It is a 'narration play'.

The hero, Pericles, goes courting for a princess and finds one. He has to solve a riddle to get her. Unfortunately, he 'gets' the riddle---his soon to be princess bride has been deflowered by her father and they are going at it hot and heavy. So hot, in fact, later in the play, they will burn up---literally---burn up in the middle of the city in full view of everyone. That was one hot town. Oh come on---Shakespeare puns all the time!

Pericles is in a quandary. He really doesn't want a wife who puts her daddy first in all things. And if Pericles declines to marry her, politely, he is a guest in their town after all, he is likely to be butchered by daddy who knows that anyone who knows the riddle, KNOWS.

Pericles manages to escape and fake his death with a shipwreck and finds a more suitable mate who is also a princess, but an ignorant one. They marry and have a baby and go on a cruise, and dammit, a real shipwreck occurs and wrecks that family.

All these families in this play are being torn apart by fate, human nature, desire, and the weather.

The baby, a daughter (gasp!), is rescued from the sea and raised by another royal family and she outshines their own daughter, so good bye to Marina (get the name---a Shakespeare pun), she is sold to a brothel. Uh oh, this is getting close to the beginning of the play with sex problems. Marina is so pure, that she glamours all the pimps and customers and preaches the word of purity (or the goddess or whatever) and keeps her virtue. See, that first princess just didn't try hard enough or maybe her daddy had the magic persuasion, we really don't go into that.

Pericles has never met a shipwreck or sea squall that he can't survive (sounds like a super hero to me) and ambles into town and like any sailor heads for the nearest brothel. And you bet, it's the one that Marina has run into the ground with her preaching---make philosophical questions not lust---and Pericles is perilously (hah, now I get his name) close to making the 'sin of the father and daughter' again.

But no one can shut Marina up and she starts telling her tale and Pericles realizes that she is his daughter (happy proper family reunion) and Diana, the goddess, (couldn't Shakespeare have put a kracken in here?) shows up and tells Pericles to sail away to her temple with Marina.

Now Diana is not the goddess of the sea, just a niece of one, so why, after all his lousy sailing, Pericles would do this appalls me. I would just tell Diana, "Stay we will, on dry land, and the sea may swell and eat her own according to the tides." Only more poetically than that.

But Pericles manages to actually not sink to the bottom of the sea on this trip and finds his wife, alive in the temple of Diana (that sex virtue thing again) and also finds a suitable husband for Marina. And everybody is happy until the next sea voyage.

2009-08-09T17:38:00.000-07:00

A Proper Job

by Brian Aherne

I like to follow Self-Styled Siren's blog. She gives me some good ideas for books that I should read and movies to see. She recently recommended A Proper Job by Brian Aherne, because he was a good friend of one of her favorite stars, George Sanders, and wrote a biography about Mr. Sanders, that delightful cad. She reviewed A Proper Job and read the review; it made me want to read the book.

Mr. Aherne was a good looking, tall, English actor who might have done better in the movies if he had applied himself in that job. But he preferred the theater and although he loved California and living there, he owned and ran a farm there for many years of his life, he was never a "star".

He was in the theater with Saint Joan with Tyrone Power and Maurice Evans, when Mr. Power came by the dressing room one night asking for advice. He had been offered a movie contract with 20th Century Fox and wanted Mr. Aherne's opinion on what to do about it.

Mr. Aherne gave him the following: " You have talent and a wonderful appearance, but you are very young and I think you have plenty of time, so why not take a few years to gain your experience and to make your name in the theater....Blah, blah, blah".

And Mr. Evans knew it: "Rubbish! Don't listen to him, Ty! Take your chances when they come. Get out to Hollywood fast."

Mr. Power listened to Mr. Evans and made 20th Century Fox with his star power.

Mr. Aherne made another questionable job choice that Jack Warner of Warner Brothers never forgave him for. I can't find the quote in the book (no bibliography---huh?), but it was essentially: "Damn that Aherne. He cost me time, money, and emotional grief when he turned down Captain Blood and I had to cast Errol Flynn in it!"

Mr. Aherne was to make his biggest hit in movies with Captain Fury which was a knockoff of Captain Blood.

Mr. Aherne wrote the book himself, and he can write.

It's a good Hollywood read, even thought only a third of the book is about Hollywood. The rest is about flying and the theater.

2009-08-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

City of Nets

by Otto Friedrich

Mr. Friedrich looks at the decade of 1940 for the Hollywood movie business. The consensus is that 1939 was the height of the American movie industry in Hollywood. The movie industry was solid for half a decade after that until the end of WWII and the beginning of television. The movie industry spent several decades after 1950 declining and adjusting to the new culture, technological advances, and economic and political re-adjustments of Post War America. In 1970, the Hollywood movie industry had a re-birth and television production came into its own.

But all this economic and political upheaval and stuff can be fun when it is analysed and illustrated with tales of Hollywood madness, folly, gossip, and envy. Bertrolt Brecht, the German playwright, always struck me as an ass when I had to read him in college. But in this book, he is a fun ass---Mother Courage, but Marx Brothers funny. Mr. Brecht's misadventures in trying to get into the movies and go Hollywood during his exile from Europe in WWII are sour human comedy that he never managed to achieve in his writings.

And Mr. Brecht is not the only European exile lost in the fragrant and fertile Hollywood Hills and landscape; Thomas Mann has a Life in Hollywood and tends his garden in Brentwood, Charles Laughton loses his garden in a Southern California mudslide, and Schonberg argues movie music with Irving Thalberg, the "Boy Genius" of movies before Orson Welles showed up to claim that title (it's all about "control"). And during the making of Fantasia, Disney declaims that he will "make" Beethoven ("Roll over Beethoven and tell Stravinsky that news.")

It is all wild and crazy fun, and travails gone absurdly wrong, in this book. I highly recommend it.

2009-08-03T14:13:00.000-07:00

The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years

by David Shipman

The first thing to note, when reading this book, is that it was published in 1970, and the edition that I read, was revised in 1979. That means that this book is not comprehensive, for the last part of the 20th century (it doesn't note or take into account, the re-making of Hollywood movies and their production system of the 1970s that brought American movies back into high repute and opinion).

But Mr. Shipman has either seen every movie before 1970, or he writes as though he has, and as though he knows what he is talking about.

This is a good book to browse or even to read straight through. It gives the reader some ideas of movies and DVDs that she might want to see. I have got to see Limelight, if just for Buster Keaton.

However, every few pages a sentence much like the following will show up:

"Their personal lives had many similarities, including early deaths, but why should the genuinely attractive Monroe have been constantly compared with Harlow, platinum blonde, cross-legged in her hideous shapeless body-revealing sateen dresses, her smile the genuine tooth past advert?"

Huh? Miss Monroe was naturally pretty and Miss Harlow was manufactured sort of attractive? Is that what I am supposed to infer from this sentence? Don't nobody tell Mr. Shipman that Miss Monroe had a nose job and that a seamstress had to sew her into her body-revealing dresses. And how can a dress be both "body-revealing" and yet "shapeless"? It's called a "bias cut", by the way, and I could make a pun about bias, but never mind.

The book gives a good overview, but Mr. Shipman is no fan of film noir, so note that as you read or skim the book.

2009-08-03T13:34:00.000-07:00

Vanity Fair: A Calvacade of the 1920s and 1930s

Edited by Cleveland Amory and Frederic Bradlee

I read and subscribe to the current Vanity Fair magazine. I once wrote a letter to the editor, Graydon Carter, that I thought would be a certainty to be published. I coined the phrase: "Vanity Fair---Gossip for the Ages."

Because Vanity Fair does gossip very well and doesn't limit itself to the current age for subjects.

Anyway, my letter was not used in Letters to the Editor, but I did receive a response (that is more than I can say for any other letters, snail or email, that I have sent to any magazine). The response said that Mr. Carter appreciated my comments, but would decline to publish them.

So there you go, I was declined to be a published gossip. And here, I thought, that I had all the qualifications.

Vanity Fair was originally published 1914 to 1936, died, and then began again to be published in 1981. The original Vanity Fair, from the articles written by Dorothy Parker, Lord Dunsany, D.H. Lawrence, and so on, are rather like the current New Yorker magazine, whimsical and broad reaching it their subject matter and authors. But Vanity Fair, in the number one run, had photos and those were not included in the New Yorker, until the beginning of the current century.

A list of the nominations for the Hall of Fame: 1928 reads as follows:

Pablo Picasso
Thomas Mann
Jed Harris
Max Reinhardt
Walter Gropius
Serge Diaghileff
S. M. Eisenstein
Ernest Hemingway
Countess De Chambrun
Louis Bromfield.

Someone back in 1928 had a good feel for the interests and obsessions of the 21st century. All of the listed but the last two are still known today.

I was briefly puzzled by the inclusion of Louis Bromfield (who reads his books today? Although more might be familiar with the old movies that were made from them). Then I remembered that I had visited Malabar Farms in Ohio (his old home where Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had been married), so I should have recognized the name, sooner. And Mr. Bromfield was another one of those troublesome agrarian authors.

As for Countess De Chambrun, I like the name, but no, I never heard of her until I read this book. She was some sort of French Shakespeare scholar. She probably thought that Shakespeare's clowns were geniuses---comic geniuses and that The Merry Wives of Windsor was the epitome of what Shakespeare had to offer.

The articles compiled in this book are hit and miss, regardless of the renown of the author. But the pictures and the subjects are fascinating for any one interested in the era that it covers.

I enjoyed it. It was "Gossip for the Ages", even an Age Ago.

2009-07-25T16:30:00.000-07:00

Trash Talking:

The Water's Lovely

by Ruth Rendell

Miss Rendell is one of my favorite mystery/thriller/suspense writers. I don't care that much for her police procedurals, I can't even remember the name of her chief police protagonist---wait, Adam Dagliesh? or is that P. D. James? Another British author with a dyspeptic view of the human condition.

I think that I like Miss Rendell's Barbara Vine novels the best. The psychological messes that her characters manage to tangle themselves into are compelling to me. But I don't think that Miss Rendell has written many of them lately. Or I haven't come across them.

Miss Rendell has a deep appreciation of and amusement with the hypocrisies of human nature. There are no "good" characters and there are no "bad" characters. The "good" character or sister in this tale is self absorbed (she thinks that her sister murdered their stepfather who sexually abused her because of her, she never even considers her younger sister's sexual peril). The "good" sister has never turned in her sister for the stepfather's murder because blood is thicker than water, although the "good" sister has felt guilty about it. The "good" sister is also involved in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend and later fiancee. The "good" sister just loves abuse.

The "bad" sister is happily married and appears to have the most healthy life and marriage. The murder of her abusive stepfather has appeared to have freed her psychologically and emotionally. But you can never be sure with a Rendell character, they are most often seen through the eyes of another character and none of her characters see themselves or others too clearly.

The policeman in this story marries a woman who cares for older people out of the greed in her heart. She ingratiates herself into their lives and wills and then puts them out of their lives to relieve her own penury misery. She also blackmails the "good" sister with her "bad" sister's actions. The blackmail is not caught by the law or justice (in the sense of the Law of society), but she is sentenced to a married life with her retired policeman husband and her scope for bad action is severely limited. And the reader does not believe that that is a happy ending for her nor does she.

Miss Rendell's characters may not get their Lawfully Just deserts, but they do have to take the consequences of their actions, good or bad, well or ill intentioned. It is like learning the Mean Girl in high school has taken to cleaning the homes of the high earning, talented Freaks from high school whom she regulated to the Locker Room Sock Pile.

"C'est la vie," says Miss Rendell, "It goes to show that you never can tell." And those unexpected turns in life and crime are what makes Miss Rendell such a good read for me.

2009-07-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

All Those Little Lost Girls:

American Eve, Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White, The Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century

by Paula Uruburu

Evelyn Nesbit was a girl of Old Pittsburgh, Ye Oldde Pittsburgh of Polluting Steel Mills and Labor Unrest and Robber Barons like Andrew Carnegie and the first of the strange Mellons (fruits on the vine of Point Breeze), circa 1900 Pittsburgh.

Miss Nesbit's middle class lawyer daddy died and left the family, Mother, Brother, and Miss Nesbit, to Mother's best devices to keep them all middle class. Mother was not educated, not bright, not talented, and not capable of it.

Miss Nesbit was very pretty and it fell to her to keep the family in money. And so she did, as the first Supermodel (for mostly illustrators and then photographers) to sell all sort of products for all sort of companies. Only as the first Supermodel, Miss Nesbit got the publicity (and the nasty old men groupies) but not much money---not Cindy Crawford money---because Mother was just not capable of negotiating a business deal (or much of anything---she did manage to luck into a second, middle class marriage when Evelyn went bust). Miss Nesbit was the 1900's advertising business's primal star.

Mother got money to stuff in the cookie jar and Brother got sent away to boarding school and with foster parents in the summer. Mother had Evelyn to chaperone and she wasn't very good at that either.

Miss Nesbit had a perfect face and teeth and gorgeous hair and the figure of a young pubescent boy. That figure proved to be a very great attraction for all those wealthy prodigals who pursued her. There was a lot of sublimated homo-eroticism in those rich twits. And there was a good reason for the sublimation---the trials of Oscar Wilde.

Stanford White was a prominent architect of the period who chased young, under aged chorus girls and models, and Miss Nesbit caught his eye (all three of them). Mr. White fixed her perfect teeth (he had the seminal American obsession with teeth) and gave Mother money and took Miss Nesbit's virginity in his bower. Miss Nesbit had Hollywood make a movie about it, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. Miss Nesbit was not happy with the casting of Joan Collins in the movie, Miss Collins was too buxom to play Miss Nesbit.

But under aged girls become legal, and rich, old fart's attentions stray to the next underaged beauty, and a legal girl has got to look to her future and how to keep the money rolling in.

Miss Nesbit looked back to Pittsburgh and to Henry Thaw, rich, sociopath, mama's boy, and she took the ring in the marriage carousel. The betrothal night was whips and confessions and rape; and the marriage got even better. Mr. Thaw took out Mr. White's teeth fixin's from Miss Nesbit and had his dentist put in his own. Miss Nesbit was to have teeth fixin's for the rest of her life. Man could never make right what nature had right to begin with. Isn't that right, Mr. Michael Jackson in Heaven?

Mr. Thaw's obsession led one night to a play on the terrace of Madison Square Garden (Mr. White's design) where the romantic trio met and Mr. Thaw shot Mr. White in the face many times and managed to kill him. "I did it to avenge my wife's honor," said Mr. Thaw. A Wife's Honor---what a male concept!

Mr. Thaw went to trial and was found insane and sent to the looney bin, where he initiated a series of escapes. The Thaw family disowned Miss Nesbit when she became pregnant during a conjugal visit to the looney bin. And Miss Nesbit took to the road and vaudeville and already made publicity. If you got it, flaunt it.

I don't know why anyone thinks that Lindsay Lohan is an original.

Miss Uruburu is inclined to be prejudiced toward Miss Nesbit in this book, but then, why else write the book? Worth reading---but it is the old story of selling your children to finance your welfare.

2009-07-13T10:42:00.000-07:00

Conspiracy Theories: Yeah, I Got'em

The Anthrax Letters: A Bioterrorism Expert Investigates the Attacks That Shocked America

by Leonard A. Cole

After 9/11/2001, according to Bush Administrators, there were no more terrorism attacks on the US due to the vigilance of said Bush Administrators (they conveniently do not acknowledge Bush's Laissez Faire attitude preceding that 9/11 attack). But there was another terrorist attack on the US and it was after 9/11 and it used Anthrax in the US Mail to kill its victims. Bush and his Administrators attempted to lay the Anthrax blame on Saddam Hussein and Al Queda; that blame made the invasion of Iraq mandatory and took the focus off the oil in Iraq.

When it became apparent that oil was the cause of the Iraq invasion, the blame was shifted to Steven Hatfill, a bioterrorism expert employed by the US Defense Department with some false education credentials. When the Anthrax Attack blame wouldn't stick to Mr. Hatfill, the blame wafted in the air (like the Anthrax weapons grade spores) to Dr. Bruce Ivins.

The FBI claimed with both suspects that they had the Anthrax goods on each of them. The FBI didn't. Mr. Hatfill was cleared and given a $250,000 annuity from the US government for the next 20 years, because he was innocent but unemployable because of the FBI's accusations. Dr. Ivins did the FBI the favor of committing suicide instead of fighting the investigation as Mr. Hatfill had. The FBI convicted Dr. Ivins with circumstantial evidence, as they did with Mr. Hatfill. The circumstantial evidence on Dr. Ivins looks no better on him than it did on Mr. Hatfill.

And there is another thing to consider, all the FBI and US Defense department experts who claim Dr. Ivins did it, are perfectly capable of being convicted themselves of the Anthrax Attacks on that same circumstantial evidence. There are a lot of possibly guilty dogs in the Anthrax Attack fight.

Mr. Cole gives a good presentation of the Anthrax Attacks, most of the still living victims were willing to speak with him, but Mr. Cole seems a little too inclined to believe all the other suspects (the experts) in the case. Mr. Cole's conclusions are a trifle naive.

As to whom I think did it? This current kerfuffle about Cheney and the CIA and the executive assassination squad makes me think that perhaps the executive assassination squads were using Anthrax to target with extreme prejudice their victims. And it all got a little out of hand, as when Cheney shot a guy in the face during a duck hunt. Remember the Ukrainian or the Belarus prime minister who was plutonium poisoned by the KBG? As we have learned lately, the CIA tortures and they may get a little more artful than assassination drones.

2009-07-11T15:39:00.000-07:00

Motherhood: You Know That is What You Are Thinking

Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, A Personal Biography

By Charlotte Chandler

Before we get to the question of Motherhood which will always be asked about Joan Crawford (what would she think? To always be associated with one of the holy trinities of womanhood. She did want to be a mother, of a certain kind.). I want to think about what a “Personal Biography” means. Are there “Impersonal Biographies”? And if so, what are they? Biographies not about “Persons” but about institutions? Societies? Groups of Hastily Assembled persons?

In this case, I think that the “Personal” part of the biography concerns the form of the book. It is written as a narrative, complete with the “I” of the first person narrative. The speaker appears to be talking personally and confidentially to the reader, but Miss Chandler transcribed the narratives from tapes or notes of conversations that she had with the narrator. Or perhaps, Miss Chandler did her research and then just made it up or wrote the script for her characters. Miss Chandler does not explain her methodology in the book.

Miss Crawford speaks, Mr. Fairbanks, Jr. speaks (he was the first husband of Miss Crawford’s), and Miss Myrna Loy speaks (she was a good friend of Miss Crawford’s) among others. Miss Chandler only occasionally speaks, as herself or the general narrator.

Miss Chandler met and began to interview Miss Crawford and her friends before the publication of that great paean to Motherhood, Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford, Miss Crawford’s oldest adopted daughter. According to Miss Chandler, Miss Crawford knew about the book and her characterization in it. Miss Chandler implies that Miss Crawford was attempting in her interviews with Miss Chandler to respond and rebut the book. The Mommie Dearest book came out after Miss Crawford's death.

Unfortunately, Miss Crawford’s idea of a rebuttal was to characterize her oldest daughter and her son, Christopher, as unfeeling, uncaring, and basically evil children. Christopher, in particular, comes off as a headstrong, stubborn little boy who was much more interested in his “uncles”, Miss Crawford’s boyfriends, than in Miss Crawford’s decidedly feminine household and company. This appeared only to be a problem or unusual in Miss Crawford’s eyes. Any little boy is going to be interested in male company; he wants to learn how to be a man. He wants a man around to teach him. Miss Crawford had her blind spots and her son, Christopher, was one of them. Christopher may have been difficult for Miss Crawford, but he was not Damien of The Omen, the Devil’s spawn.

Later in the book, Miss Crawford (or Miss Chandler) tells an incident about a fifth birthday party for Christina, where Christina had to carefully open each of her birthday gifts, fold the paper prettily, and take the gift around to each of her guests for display and then thank the giver. Christina received a lot of gifts at this party and had a lot of guests. Miss Crawford was severely disappointed in Christina’s inability to appreciate her gifts and do the right thing (in Miss Crawford’s eyes) to acknowledge them. That Miss Crawford would even expect this sort of behavior from a five year old shows another of her blind spots. The fact that Christina lost interest in her party and her gifts was told as a tale of Christina’s ingratitude, not as an example of the short attention span and lack of patience characteristic of a five year old.

It’s really quite sad. Miss Crawford wanted so desperately to be a mother, many miscarriages are hinted at and some are indicated in the book. Miss Crawford felt that her own mother favored her brother and never showed much affection for Miss Crawford. Miss Crawford wanted to remedy that with her own children. Hence the elaborate birthday parties and pubic displays of a privileged childhood for them, but Miss Crawford’s own affections appeared to be stinted at times, and in private, she had a definite lack of empathy or understanding of her children or any children.

The two older children did manage to break her in as a mother. Miss Crawford had a much better and more affectionate relationship with her younger adopted twin daughters. But even there, there are odd glimpses of an over-demanding and controlling mother and an erratic affection. And for what it is worth (and that might not be much), an internet gossip site that I occasionally visit, has a user who grew up with one of Miss Crawford’s twin daughter’s children, and who claims that Miss Crawford’s daughter was a neglectful mother who allowed her children to run wild in the neighborhood. Again, no one wants to repeat the mistakes of one’s mother, but one can always find one’s own and opposite mistakes to make.

But the children are not the focus of the book. Miss Crawford’s career and rivalry with Miss Bette Davis are the main focus. Miss Crawford knew how to manage her career even if her personal relationships were much more troublesome and problematic.

Miss Crawford’s first husband, Mr. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was alive to be interviewed and he discussed his marriage with Miss Crawford---Great Sex! He also discussed the long rumored cinematic pornography that Miss Crawford supposedly made very early in her career. He seemed sure that she made the porno film (but whether it was soft or hard or petrified, was uncertain), but he claimed never to have seen a copy. He wished that he did. Even in his nineties, he assures the reader that he and we would appreciate it.

Miss Crawford’s ex-husbands and friends speak well of her. Miss Loy proved a faithful friend who managed to get Christina Crawford fired from a production of Barefoot in the Park that they appeared in together. In Miss Loy’s opinion, Christina appeared to be unappreciative of her mother and her mother’s friend. Oh those sharp toothed serpent’s ungrateful children!

Miss Crawford should be admired for her career. She started in silent porno (if you believe, Mr. Fairbanks, Jr.), then moved on to legitimate silent cinema, and from there managed to move into talkies and dancies and singies and make an even bigger and better career. What other silent cinema star can say that her career kept improving with time and technology? Miss Crawford was at her career height in her forties and fifties. That is when most actresses falter.

And Miss Crawford was directed by one of the major seventies American film boys, Steven Spielberg, when he was beginning in television. All those career girls that Miss Crawford played were very close to home. And when home was a movie set, Miss Crawford was a very good frau.

Southern Musings: So Red the Rose by Stark Young

2009-07-10T20:37:00.000-07:00

Southern Musings:

So Red the Rose

by Stark Young

Mr. Young was evidently an Agrarian. Robert Penn Warren was also one as was John Crowe Ransom. I know this because I had to take Tennessee history when I was in high school and the Southern Agrarian Literary School was about all we, Tennesseeans had to grasp on to in the 20^th Century Literary Movements.

The fact was that the Agrarians were 19^th Century, nay 18^th Century, Revisionists of the worst sort---everyone should be a gentleman farmer for the health of their morals and character and the society and national health. This sort of thing totally overlooks the fact that not all of us want to depend on crops and the weather to make our living. And that depending on crops and the weather to make a gentleman’s living is not going to make that gentleman’s living, because all this farm produce has got to go to the commodity market where speculation and fraud is rampant. And if everyone is a gentleman farmer, then who is going to buy the genteelly raised produce? Don’t all the gentlemen have plenty of their own?

And even with combines and tractors, gentlemen farmers have to work in season. The weather and crops wait for no gentleman.

And I have always been convinced that all this gentlemanly farming is dependent upon the grubbing classes, yep, Slaves (women, blacks, Mexicans---tobacco farming ain’t that automated). So there you are, back on the Monticello plantation with Thomas Jefferson being all gentlemanly while His People farm and wash and cook for him, while he invents contraptions and writes long letters and essays and rides to the hounds everyday and diddles His Lady Concubines every night.

As a woman who grows some echinacea and roses and clematis every summer and has to hire some one else to cut my grass, because I am painfully, tears and hacking coughs and hives, allergic to grass and pollen and fungi, I don’t see where I fit in to this gentleman farmer theory. I’m not washing clothes, dishes, and the front porch or diddling the gentleman of leisure when he has the craving and the time.

Sorry Agrarian Guys, I am all for Progress and the Liberation of the Slaves and Women and Science. You boys will have to depend upon the Home Schooled, Indoctrinated Female Types to populate your Gentle Farms.

Mr. Stark was also a well-educated man (all that farm land still had its sharecroppers to provide the money for his education when he was growing up in the early part of the 20^th century). From his biography, I gather that he spoke several languages fluently and was well versed in French and Greek drama.

Mr. Stark was primarily a dramatist, but he decided to write a trilogy about his Southern ancestors ante and midst and post bellum (the bellum being the American Civil War). He had grown up hearing the stories (like me) of his relatives and found them amusing and interesting enough to tell to all.

So Red the Rose is the third part of his trilogy. It was published in 1934 when Mr. Stark had decided to give up the theater and concentrate on teaching and writing narratives. It is apparent that Mr. Stark was a theater dramatist. The book is mainly the parlor or dining room setting of one of two neighboring plantations on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi. As in any sitting room drama, the characters converge to participate in a communal act (dinner or the evening’s entertainment) and we, as the reader and spectator, watch the proceedings and pick up what we need to know from the conversation. We are outside the action, such as it is, and witnesses to said action.

Although Mr. Stark was a successful dramatist, the book really doesn’t become interesting or alive until he enters the action and the minds of a few characters and follows their deeds and thoughts in real time. Then the book becomes memorable.

A ne’er do well cousin and his responsible cousin leave the plantation and go on a trip to Natchez Under the Hill (a dive and sort of Tijuana) on the Mississippi River to visit with the ne’er do well’s octoroon mistress from New Orleans who has come up the river to say her good byes to him before he ships off to the Confederate Army. The scene is compelling in its immediacy and its descriptions of the drunks, con men, grifters, gamblers, and wild men who populate Natchez Under the Hill and drink themselves Under that Hill. The octoroon Mistress is a woman alive and broken hearted (and hidden in a back room of a saloon) under the love that is not wholly reciprocated by the ne’er do well. She demands his attention and love and he looks everywhere around the room but her.

Contrast this with the major love story of the book between Valette, girl orphan adopted by her parents’ best friends, and Duncan, Prince in Waiting, of the plantations. Duncan is spoken of, but never actually in the novel until the last chapter when he returns home from the Confederate army after witnessing Appomattox. Duncan occasionally writes home, but Valette moons among the rose bushes and pines among the Pines until his discharge. This novel was made into a movie in the early thirties with Margaret Sullaven as Valette and Randolph Scott as Duncan. I’d like to see how they handled that hot, long distance romance in the movie. I’m thinking that Duncan got some home leaves in that flick.

The other compelling moments occur when former Slave US troops invade and occupy one of the plantations. All those US Troopers weren’t all that happy on the plantation. They’ve developed attitudes when they have to go back.

And the most touching moments (though a former slave US Trooper does slap the mistress of the plantation, perhaps in memory of his own mistress) in the novel are the most immediate moments that concern the death of the responsible cousin in the battle of Shiloh. His ghost comes back on horseback to his sister Lucy and tells her that he thought of her as she sang one night before he left for war as he lay dying on the battlefield. And then there is his mother, who hears of the battle of Shiloh and gets the wagon and the mules and loads up a coffin and her daughter and her butler and goes to collect the body of her son (she has that motherly feeling that he is dead). The book ends with the description of her memory of the wagon trip to the bloody death field.

“Agnes (the mother) could hear again all of a sudden the groans and cries of the wounded and dying that were left in that section. She could see faintly again their shapes lying together scattered on the field. With the groans and cries coming back to her again like that, her nerves tightened and her arms stiffened, and she felt the boy at her side startle and look at her, catching her hand now in both of his….

Now she was at Shiloh; but now she heard nothing; only the silence; then inside her body, she heard her heart beating. Edward was among them somewhere but the others too were hers. She stood looking out across the darkness and the field where the dead lay, as if they were all sleeping.”

Her butler has to comb the battlefield for her son’s body and he recognizes it by the feel of the young man’s hair.

This book doesn’t romanticize the Southern cause much. Mr. Stark is much more interested in his peoples’ stories. When he chooses to enter into the immediate feeling of those stories, the book is good. The rest of the time, I felt like I was just half listening to some family stories during a long family vacation where I wished that I were somewhere else.

Mom and Sis: Who Do You Think You Are?

2009-06-18T17:38:00.000-07:00

Who Do You Think You Are?

by Alyse Myers

This is another one of those books about an embittered, fallen-in-social-standing Mother who was not a very good mother to her daughters.

One of her daughters, Miss Myers, wrote about her childhood with her very difficult mother. But, you know, Miss Myers came through her childhood and achieved socially and career wise and motherhood wise. She even made up with her mother and had an adult relationship of sorts with the woman.

A lot of women are not fond of their mothers and for very good reasons, not every woman is motherhood material no matter how much she desires children.

But Miss Myers's mother fed her and educated her and generally took care of her when she was small. Miss Myers's mother threw her out of the house many times when she was older, but Miss Myers had developed backup systems (after school jobs and high school friends with indulgent parents and her grandparents) to tide her over until she could sneak back into the house and pretend, along with her mother, that nothing had happened.

Miss Myers was beaten by her mother, but not into unconsciousness or broken bones or mutilation. And there was a lot of screaming in the family, the family was known as The Screamers by their apartment neighbors.

There was nothing new to see or note in this book. I don't know why it was published other than Miss Myers, from her career, has publishing connections.

It's a mediocre memoir, but if you like fighting mothers and daughters, it's passable.

Southern Musings: Strange Fruit

2009-06-18T16:23:00.000-07:00

I read Molly Haskell's Frankly, My Dear: "Gone With the Wind" Revisited. The book was fine, but the bibliography was fascinating for me. I decided to read some of the books that she had used to write her book. A socio-ethnio-fantasio-ography of a region that I had once lived in.

Just checking out your references, Miss Haskell.

First up, Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith.

Miss Haskell characterized it as a novel by a lesbian about an interracial love affair in the Deep South (Maxwell, Georgia). How could I resist? And by the way, I thought the title was about the product of that love affair and by product, I was thinking a baby. Well, there was an illegitimate, miscegenated "foetus" as it was called about half the time in the book, but there was also a lynching because of that baby to be. And the aftermath of that lynching is what is usually known as "strange fruit".

The plot is white, weak boy meets over-educated, black, nurse girl (only Nonnie, the black girl, is always described as white looking and is always standing in a "white" light). White Boy meets Black Girl and they go at it, but there is no real sex in the book. There is a lot of pawing and petting, but nothing sexy. Hetero-sex between any of the races is crude in this book.

After White Boy and Black Girl go at it---uh oh---there is a baby on the way. And this conversation takes place:

White Boy: "I've been a fool to get you in trouble like this. To tell you the honest truth I thought---you'd---know---how not to---having gone off to college---and everything---"

What? White Boy is in his mid-twenties at least, he went off to war (I thought it was WWII, but it was WWI, and you'll see why I thought this) and he doesn't know about Condoms? The army teaches its soldiers about Condoms. I've seen silent British Army WWI training films about the evils of sex with evil women and the US Army wasn't doing the same? What a douche! And with a douchebag is how I suppose White Boy thought Black Girl practiced birth control. That, or she called up Margaret Sanger, or wrote her, when Miss Sanger was in jail for passing out birth control manuals.

Black Girl looks in horror at White Boy, and why wouldn't she? This is what she fell in love with? Girl, you went to Spelman College, and this is what you sleep with and then you go home to Maxwell (haha) Georgia and nurse some little white boy with cerebral palsy? Go be a school teacher up north. And pass for white and get yourself a Real White Boy up there, if that is what you have to have.

So to get out of his predicament, White Boy gives Black Black Boyhood Friend with Gold Teeth $100 to marry his Black Girl (but she's not really all that black, especially when she is standing in that white light in front of the Swamp). White Boy gives Black Girl who stands in front of the Swamp (the Swamp just lurks in the background of this novel a lot---no action there) $200 for an abortion or baby clothes, I'm not sure which is which and White Boy isn't either. White Boy then joins the church and proposes to a White Girl (who doesn't have to stand in a White Light to be White).

Black Girl has a Brown Brother (and she has a Black Sister---we have all sorts of racial shadings and prejudices) who finds out about the White Boy and the Baby and he shoots the White Boy and puts him out of his stupidity. That should have happened sooner. Maybe Jesus in Heaven can teach White Boy some smarts.

Brown Brother takes off with White Boy's $200 to start a new life up north. Black Black Boyhood Friend with Gold Teeth gets hunted down and lynched for not killing his White Boy childhood friend. And besides Black Black Boyhood Friend with Gold Teeth was really, really black and I think that he lived in the Swamp so he was the best one to lynch, anyway. And Black Girl marries Black Doctor and has her sort of White baby.

The novel was slow going at first, but it became a sort of more understandable and more explained and expositioned sort of Faulkner novel. And I'm no Faulkner fan.

The book jacket said that the novel that I read was in its ninth printing (so it sold even without the sex), and it cost $2.75. The jacket and the copyright page had the following:

"IMPORTANT NOTICE

THIS Wartime edition is complete and unabridged. In order to keep this book in print as long as possible without exceeding their paper quota for 1944, the publishers have had it entirely reset and have made a new set of plates. The new type size is only one point smaller that that of the first edition, but it allows more words to the page and therefore fewer pages. All printings beginning with the seventh will be made from the new plates."

And that is why I thought this book occurred in WWII.

2009-06-18T16:12:00.001-07:00

The Lieberry

When I was in third grade, one of the highlights of my school week was to troop with my class to the library and listen to a story told or read by the librarian and then to wander the book stacks looking for a book to check out.

The librarian would always tell us before she began the story, "There is a strawberry, there is a blueberry, and there is a gooseberry. But there is no such thing as a Lieberry. We call it the LibRARY." I have always made sure that I pronounced it, LiBRARY, ever since.

I have since been back to the library, in fact, I went just the other day and I have a couple of Book Reviews or Book Comments to make and I'll be making those here.

My Live Journal account is for my TV obsessions.

One Undine

2009-03-16T15:42:00.001-07:00