Genêt: London before World War II

London Was Yesterday
by Janet Flanner

This book is a collection of essays, both short and long, that Janet Flanner wrote for The New Yorker magazine in the 1934-1939 which was the time of Edward VIII's abdication "for the woman that I love" and the run up to World War II.

When Miss Flanner's editor, Harold Ross, gave her the job of reporting on France and England in the late 1920s, he told her that he wanted to know what the natives were thinking about themselves and their cultures and their nations, not what she thought of them. And Miss Flanner produced that kind of viewpoint for the U.S. readers.

Miss Flanner reported from Europe for The New Yorker from the late 1920s to her retirement in the early 1970s.

Her essays range from three sentence paragraphs on the doings and dancings of Josephine Baker or the funeral of Anatole France (is he even read today in France?) to several long portraits of Wallis Simpson (that beloved woman) and the new Queen, Elizabeth the wife of George VI who was the father of the present Elizabeth II, after the abdication of Edward VIII. I know that this sentence reads like the boring genealogy of the Bible.

Miss Flanner was a writer with a dry and wry turn of phrase and wit and a detached (easy for her, she was a Yank), discerning view of her subjects and their concerns. She could also do slapstick:

When Lotte Lehmann, as the Marschallin, had a chill and walked out on the opening act of the first Rosenkavalier performance, a leg came off fat Baron Ochs' sofa. Furthermore, an anachronistic wirehaired fox terrier stole the eighteenth-century levee scene, and the lady spy's hoopskirt flew waist-high after the Presentation of the Rose episode.

It is the Marx Brothers all in one.

No Fear

Hidden Cities: Travels to the Secret Corners of the World's Great Metropolises by Moses Gates

Moses Gates is the kind of guy, who after a few shots of hard liquor (indeed he recommends it for his adventures), decides to go and climb the Brooklyn Bridge. And if he can convince the pretty girl in the bar to accompany him, the two of them can make out on the top of the bridge.

Mr. Gates does not limit his climbing adventures to New York City and its bridges and the Chrysler Building. He has climbed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and been arrested for it.

Mr. Gates does not limit his adventures to the sky, he also has explored the Sewers of Paris and Moscow and ventured down a subway track or two in NYC.

Below ground or Above, Way Above, Ground; heights or narrow subterranean tunnels; Mr. Gates has no Fear. But he is human and he does have fear, he just doesn't explore it in his book.

If you have always wanted to take up this sort of thing, Mr. Gates has some good suggestions on how to do it. His book is a quick and thrilling read, like his adventures, with only a few rest stops for autobiographical details and love life failures that never really explain why a perfectly ordinary guy would do this sort of thing. Well, liquor is the reason for that. That is what I understood from his book.

Traveling...

Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elisabeth Bisland's History Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman


Jules Verne was a very popular Science Fiction author of the late nineteenth century (before it was called "Science Fiction") who wrote a book, Around the World in Eighty Days, about a stodgy upper class Englishman who mixed too much gin and Napoleon brandy one night at his Men's Club in Kensington or Mayfair or where ever they have those sort of clubs, and got the idea to circumnavigate the globe ("This rounded and filled in and three dimensional 'O'", as Shakespeare would have called it if he were dealing in the three dimensions and time and space and had forgotten the beats in blank verse) in eighty days.

The Englishmen at his club were all betting men and took him up on it to the tune of half of his not inconsiderable fortune (you think that they let any one into those English Men's Clubs in Trafalgar Square?). And the Englishman took off to see the world. He was aided by the fact that the British Empire stretched across the globe, and in his travels, he could pretty much avoid the worldly riffraff who did not speak English or did not adhere to the punctuality of the British railways or steamships. The British pound was also a great help in his travels, it was a good as gold.

So much for Napoleon and his brandy, the British made an Empire that he could only dream of creating.

Nellie Bly was an intrepid girl reporter (she was 25, but "girl" makes her spunkier than "woman" and every one likes a Spunky Girl), who in her career at The New York World newspaper in the 1890's went undercover at the Woman's Insane Asylum to discover and report on its abuses and who joined the women's sweatshop brigade to report on the abuses suffered by the working girls of New York City---the "legitimate" working girls not the prostitutes. She never got that far in her undercover adventures as to take up prostitution.

Miss Bly liked to stand up for the working women and men and report on their lives. She didn't care about the New York City Robber Baron clans who ruled the papers with their money and their antics.

Miss Bly read Mr. Verne's book about traveling the world and spent several days perusing steamship schedules and railway schedules before she went into her editor's office and pitched the story that she, a girl with pluck and spirit, could beat the record of circumnavigating the world in eighty days, all by herself. Sales of the newspaper were dropping off and the editor accepted her story pitch.

Miss Bly went to her tailor and had him make her a traveling suit that would stand up under travel for under eighty days and packed her carpet bag, she was traveling light, no trunks or suitcases, and set off from New Jersey on a steamship across the Atlantic to some fanfare. The World made some money and increased its subscriptions on publicizing her trip around the world. Where in the World was Nellie Bly? (Carmen San Diego, you are such a poseur!)

But meantime unknown to our intrepid girl traveller and reporter, Nellie Bly, another "lady" traveller, Elisabeth Bisland, an editor for Cosmopolitan magazine was going to make the same world trip starting in NYC and going in the opposite direction, across the United States first.

The "Filly" Horse Race was ON! Who would win? Bets were taken and The World organized a sweepstakes, offering a all expense paid visit to Europe for the person who guessed the correct time that Miss Bly would alight from her train in New Jersey after her round-the-world trip. Of course, the arrival time was narrowed considerably by noting the arrival of the cross country train from its schedule.

This book follows the travels and adventures of our Traveling Ladies.

If I had been required as a traveling companion for either of the Ladies, I would have travelled with Miss Bisland. She actually did some sight-seeing and enjoyed her visits to other countries. Miss Bly was the proto-typical American traveller, she had to be somewhere and she had to be there in a hurry. Miss Bly was more worried about winning the race and making the trip in under eighty days to actually enjoy her travels or to notice much of anything around her.

Miss Bly was also an American chauvinist and nationalist. She brought American dollars and British pounds with her on her trip and was annoyed that no one wanted the dollars, the British pound was the desired world currency. Miss Bly also found that the British flag flying everywhere that she went was also an irritating sight. Ah Miss Bly, you were about fifty years too early on your world travels.

But then, Miss Bly did get to meet and visit with Mr. Verne on her world trip.

Interviews With Artists

Interviews in the Early Twentieth Century

When I saw Midnight in Paris, the lead character was dancing with one of the American Artists in Paris in the 1920s, and he was complaining about her insistence on leading. The Leading Lady was Djuna Barnes. I was doing some reading and research about that time and those artists and I had never heard of the Lady so I added her to the syllabus.

Interviews by Djuna Barnes was an good read not only for the American personalities of the 1910-1930s, but Miss Barnes was a breezy and inventive interviewer. She might put her subject in a one act play for the interview or she might take the interview and make the subject answer any of her questions with the platitudes and cliches and turns of phrase that the subject was known for. She could be as whimsical and as playful as Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland.

Now I know where the style and form of those short interviews at the beginning of The New Yorker's On The Town come from. Miss Barnes was doing it and doing it well before The New Yorker.


Performance Art in the Early Twenty First Century

I never thought that a novel about some Performance Artists would be very interesting to me. The main theme of a Performance Artist is Herself. And Most of them are just not as fascinating as they appear to be to themselves. A variety show or book about Performance Artists is much like Vaudeville. You have to sit through some boring and strange abusive acts to get to the headliner. And the headliner just might not be to your taste.

I Am Trying to Reach You by Barbara Browning is a novel about an academic who unartfully (have you ever read some of their papers on art and their "theories" of art? Nope, and there is a good reason for that. Most of them are incomprehensible even to other academics. Hmmm, there must be some Performance Art Academic Critics who can't even recognize their own Acts or Art to Criticize. But that way lies Madness and a Grant) criticizes Performance Artists and even some of his own Academic Scholars.

If this is getting too convoluted and circumlocutory like a Hexagon Mobius Strip for you, just ignore the previous paragraph because the narrator is likable and doesn't quite understand any of the Performance Artist's Performances himself. But like a Good Academic, he keeps up the effort to find some cosmic or even some neighborly meaning thereof.

While the Narrator muddles through his Art Theories, he does live life and that is where the crux of the novel lies. The Narrator attempts gallantry and just human concern for the Old Lady in a Walker who lives down his hallway. He deals with his lover who is a continent away and learning to live with and medicate a possibly fatal illness.

He follows a You Tube Video Dancer named falserebelmoth who makes dance videos that the Narrator is sure have some sub textual meaning to them. The video dances are just like life. They are there, and we are here and there, and meaning is stuck in the background or off to the side of the video, cut off by the video frame or in the shadows. If we could just see it or get it into focus. If we could just add some more pixels and make it sharper.

I actually went on You Tube to see if there were any videos by falserebelmoth and to see if I could see them through my own eyes and not the Narrator's eyes, but Miss Browning did not go that far.

She should have.