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.

Jerome Robbins and Men Who Explain

Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins
by Amanda Vaill

I knew that George Balachine was a genius and that he was the Ballet Master and Maker of the New York City Ballet. I also knew that Jerome Robbins, a Broadway kind of dancer and choreographer, was considered to be the "other" Ballet Master of NYCB. I thought that Mr. Robbins was fortunate to be so well considered, as did he, I found out in this biography. But I did not realize just how talented (I have been cruising PBS and U Tube for videos) Mr. Robbins was, just not on Broadway, but in the ballet.

Mr. Robbins not only choreographed but developed (producing, writing, the music, the book, etc.) so many iconic and classic Broadway musicals of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, with West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof as just the most familiar to most musical comedy connoisseurs and high school theater departments.

There was a little too much of the Russian shtetl (the background of Mr. Robbins' parents early in the book and his own discovery of heritage late in life and look, Fiddler on the Roof look!) in some parts of this book. But the American talented boy makes good, very good in America! parts and the Broadway history and the NYCB were the chapters that interested me the most.

Men Explain Things to Me
by Rebecca Solnitz

All about Mansplaining in the Wide World of Boys.

Yeah, I get it. I got it from the Supreme Court just recently. There are things that Women just don't understand and they have to be taught by Wise Old Ugly Men. Ugh!

Domestic Terror

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami

In March of 1995, the Tokyo subway system was poisoned with a Nerve Gas Attack (Sarin) by a domestic Buddhist Yoga Doomsday Cult named Aum Shinrikyo. Twelve people died of Sarin Poisoning and five to six thousand commuters were affected and/or hospitalized by exposure to the nerve gas. The year before in 1994, there was another incident at one of the Aum Shinrikyo offices and retreats, where sarin gas was detected in the vicinity of the Aum offices. So someone in one of the Japanese ministries must have known that Aum was manufacturing and had access to the nerve gas. But the attack in 1995 was a surprise, not only for its victims but for the Japanese Homeland Ministries and the Emergency Services.

I am interested in the Anthrax Attack in the US and the incompetent investigation done by the US Government. It is obvious to me that someone in the US Government at the time made the Weaponized Anthrax and distributed it and killed five Americans and sickened seventeen other Americans. And no, I do not believe that it was Dr. Ivins. He was just the convenient dead scapegoat to distract the public from US Government malefeasance. Who was responsible is lost along with the second or third shooter at the Kennedy assassination and the dead Lee Harvey Oswald and the dead Jack Ruby.

Mr. Murakami is a prominent and popular Japanese novelist who interviewed victims of the Tokyo Subwary Nerve Gas Attack and followers of the Aum Cult (not the ones who actually made and planted the Sarin Gas, they were in the Japanese Criminal System and not available to interviews) to attempt to determine what happened and why it happened in Japan. Mr. Murakami thought that the attack was integral to the Japanese psyche, but in the years since the attack, I think that we can all conclude that Terrorism is about the Human Psyche and very often it is Government Sponsored either directly or indirectly. There are no great particular conclusions about National Psyches that can be reached or revealed in any contemplation of it.

Mr. Murakami followed the Studs Terkel method of interviewing the participants and with a few well placed questions, allowing the people who were affected and involved to tell their own stories from their own view points. Each individual interview builds a more human and compelling whole for the Reader to contemplate.

I've read some of Mr. Murakami's fiction and the one story that I recall is about a lady in Tokyo who has a green monster in her backyard, the short story is from The Elephant Vanishes. The monster or leprechaun (as I deduced from its description) has sprung up from a hole that it dug in the backyard and pops up now and then like a "whack a mole" to bedevil and tease the lady. Mr. Murakami has an affinity for underground monsters so it is no surprise that he should find the Tokyo Subway attack to be so compelling as to write a non-fiction account of it.

How Do You Know You've Been Poisoned?

The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum

I've always wondered back in the Golden Age of Poisoning, all those short-lived Roman Emperors and the Borgia's Way to treat their political enemies, just how did people know that the victim had been poisoned?

There were the hired food tasters, if they got sick, it was poison. But poison doesn't have to be fast-acting. How long did an important person who did not wish to be poisoned wait for her food? Did important persons who had to wait for their food to be proved "not poisoned" ever taste hot food? Did they develop a taste for cold food? This is not necessarily bad, I much prefer my pizza to be cold when I eat it. Could a person who did not wish to be poisoned ever develop their taste buds and really appreciate food? A person who did not wish to be poisoned had the money to eat the really good food, but not the time or even the inclination (if you know that you might be poisoned, you are reluctant to really eat for pleasure because you might not be pleasured by your food, you might be poisoned).

When It Mattered

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

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

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.