Some Odd People

The Guilty One by Lisa Ballantyne

This book is a murder mystery that goes to trial where the truth to be discovered about the trial and whether the accused child murderer did what he is accused of is discernible about half way through the book and the trial.

The real mystery is why the child's attorney, or solicitor (this is a British mystery), is estranged from his adoptive mother and biological mother.

This is good trash reading.


That Furious Lesbian: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta by Robert A. Shanke

Mercedes de Acosta knew every one who was Any One in the early twentieth century. She was a lesbian groupie who slept with all the great lesbians of that age, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Eva le Gallienne, Laurette Taylor, Alice B. Toklas, etc.

Miss de Acosta also wrote plays for the theater of the time and screenplays for Hollywood movies.

This is a good biography. It moves fast and explains the period and its people well to anyone who has not read much about it.

And Cecil Beaton was the one who called her a furious lesbian. Really Mr. Beaton, you are one to talk.

Lazy Readings

I am still reading away, just a little too lazy to post about any of the books.

But now, back to the books that I have read.

1. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

IN Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.	5
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossom'd many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,	10
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

From Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The story goes that Mr. Coleridge was writing the above poem in haze and daze of Opium induced delusion when some one knocked on the door and Mr. Coleridge gave up on the poem to entertain his guest---even Opium can't ruin the manners of a polite poet. When the guest left, Mr. Coleridge took a deep puff of the Magic Elixir, Opium, and tried to go back to his writing, but he had forgotten the rest of the poem. The moral of this story is that Opium and Manners don't mix.

Mr. Calvino, in his book, decided to continue Mr. Coleridge's poetry fragment by narrating a conversation between Marco Polo, famed Traveller, and the Kubla Khan, ruler of half the world, about the cities of the Khan's kingdom which was so vast that the Khan never visited most of them.

I like travel books even when they are about imaginary kingdoms and cities and this book is about the imaginary kingdom of the Khan.

Calvino---I wonder if Mr. Calvino was a Protestant? A Calvinist sort of Protestant?

2. Pierrepoint

Albert Pierrepoint was an English Hangman, back when Great Britain still had state executions, who hanged around 400 convicted criminals among them the staff of the concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen. He was accounted to be very good at his job. But he outlived his executing and took up campaigning against state executions at the end of his life.

This just goes to show that one's Youth and Old Age are two very differently experienced  life periods for many people. One is not the same person that one used to be.

3. Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration by David Roberts

How I love any Arctic or Antarctic exploration stories of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

This one is about an Australian Explorer named Douglas Mawson, who after exploring with Ernest Shackleton, mounted his own Exploration Expedition and saw much more of the Antarctic than he expected or wished to. He ended up dragging his own dog sled (the dogs had all been eaten) for thirty days, ALONE by himself, in the inhuman desolation of Antarctica, back to his base camp which was located on the Windiest Place in the World.

Meanwhile, back at his base camp, the telegraph operator went insane and either wouldn't sent anyone's telegrams or sent indecipherable telegraphic ravings to the outside world about his persecution and perilous escape from being murdered by the remaining crew of the expedition at the base camp. It was wild times in Antarctic Exploration, those Aussies know how to party.

4. The Dinner: A Novel by Herman Koch

This is a murder mystery where the reader only regrets at the end that all the obnoxious characters, and they are many, weren't murdered.

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.

Escape From Affluence and Poverty and Sentiment

Escape From Camp 14 by Blaine Harden is the story of Shin Dong-hyuk who was born and reared in a North Korean Internment Camp. His father and mother were inmates who were favored by the guards and allowed to breed. They produced two sons, Shin and an older brother, in their long and dreary and cruel incarceration. Both sons managed to escape the camp, but in completely different ways.

Shin long blamed his mother and father for making him to be born and live in such hellish conditions. Shin ratted out his mother and older brother to the authorities on their escape plans for extra food and served six months in dark cell isolation and being tortured before being brought out to the daylight to watch the camp authorities hang his mother and shoot his brother before his eyes. Shin and his father got front row seats for that piece of Camp Theater.

After the execution of his mother and brother, Shin was placed in a cell with an older man who told him wondrous stories of the Food outside of the camp. Shin, who was overworked, undereducated, malnourished, and fresh from six months of torture which included beatings and being hung to roast over a fire, and the deaths of this mother and brother which were caused by Shin's informing on them, conceived of escaping from the camp to get him some of that food.

Forget Freedom, Shin just wanted to be able to eat to satiation. By the way, the torture was about the same as living in the camp, beatings and overwork and isolation from the children around him and little or no food.

Later Shin left his cell with his Gourmand Inmate and made the acquaintance of a newly arrived North Korean who made the mistake of going back to North Korea after a few years in the relative benign freedom of China. Shin and the new inmate conceived a plan to escape the camp while cutting wood near the camp's electrical fences. They carried out the plan, but only Shin made it out. He used the body of his escape buddy to neutralize the Electrical Fence and crawled over his dead companion to Food.

Although with his education (they only taught rudimentary reading and writing skills to the children in-between work details and beatings), Shin had no idea where China was or what it was, Shin made it to China and spent three years in the country learning a few things about the world and eating Food. Later South Korea paid him to come to their country and after a de-briefing (tattling is one way to make it in the World), South Korea paid to maintain him there.

But the years of deprivation in Mind and Body, left Shin with long term Mental Illness Issues. He has never really adjusted to life outside the camp. Shin now lives most of the time in California where he lectures on his experiences and life in the North Korean Camp. He travels frequently to South Korea for visits.

During his torture session after ratting out his mother and brother, Shin was shown some papers that he was able to read. He found out that his father was in the camp because two of his brothers escaped to South Korea during the Korean War. The remaining family was sent to North Korean Camps because they were considered contaminated by the two brothers' escape. Somebody has to feed and work for the rest of North Korea and the Kim Jongs.

By the way, Shin didn't even know who the Kim Jongs were until he escaped. Education was very shallow even with propaganda for the Camp Kids.

Shin is one of three people who escaped from North Korean Camps. The interns of the Camps are so cowed and overworked and starved that most of them don't even attempt to run. And most who make the attempt end up like Shin's mother and brother.

Remember, it ain't Freedom that motivates. It is FOOD.



Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead

This book was recommended by Salon.

I got about halfway through it, but I didn't find any of the characters interesting. They were all annoying in their privilege. And there was this Middle Aged Man who was hitting on one of his daughter's Bridesmaids. The Bridesmaid wanted it too. But I didn't want to read about it.

I see the recommendation was by a middle aged man. Well, that explains a lot.


Cascade by Maryanne O'Hara

This book was another recommendation.

It's about a woman artist of the thirties who makes all the wrong decisions (love and art) but comes out right in the end. Her father makes what appear to be the right decisions, but they go haywire.

The best woman artist of the thirties character was in The Big Clock, a classic noir book and film.

I guess that I am just not that sentimental.

Family Noir

I will read anything by Ross MacDonald.

He was a US/Canadian citizen by the name of Kenneth Millar who wrote the best Noir Detective stories about The Sins of the Fathers (and Families) that carried through the generations and caused Mayhem and Murder for the next generation or two.

His landscape was California of the Post WWII and the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War Times. People go to the wars and come back altered and bearing bad fruit that will disturb and molest and deform the next generation. The Beauty of California countryside will always slide into ranging and out of control fires and mudslides inland and rip tides along the coast. Beauty hides the motives of a Harsh Mistress of Nature, both natural and human.

The plots of the novels are as convoluted as are the motives and anxieties of the characters. The characters are not the most introspective or self aware people, the hero detective, Lew Archer, supplies that in "Spades". The characters are bewildered by the supposed Good Fortune of California, because that Fortune goes Bad for them because of their deals with the Devil of American Prosperity and Pursuit of Happiness.

I've just finished re-reading all the novels. And now I wish I could do it again. When I read other detective fiction, it all goes flat and stale for me. No one else has Mr. MacDonald's terse yet poetically precise turn of phrase to describe his characters and their dilemmas. No one else can bring the Horror of bad actions and motives in a Family and make them so tragic and appalling. Everyone else thinks that they just have to describe the bad acts (child molestation, abuse) in details to catch their readers. Mr. MacDonald doesn't do that, he describes the consequences and there are no rampaging and fake serial killers who kill for a spree and who are geniuses begging for some appreciation of their talents. Mr. MacDonald's characters are people who are silly and stupid and naive and unknowing. The Kill is a moment of panic and desperation or a moment of Temporary Madness and the rest of their lives are the Big Cover-up for that Sin.

Is there any detective novelist today who has this depth? I haven't been able to find one. Let me know if you have.

I want to read Good Trash Detective Novels that remind me of Greek Tragedy. I want a detective novel that is close to me, not some fantastic S&M dream of some great human hunt.