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.

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.

The Stockholm Octavo

I enjoy Historical Fiction. Hilary Mantel is one of my favorite authors. Yes, I know that she does contemporary novels but most of them are dull except for Beyond Black which is wilder than any drug fueled book by William Burroughs and more confusing than any Reality Bending novel by Philip K. Dick. While I was reading Beyond Black, I had ten or more possible explanations for what was happening in that book and why it was happening. Anyone of them would have applied quite well at the End.

Miss Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety made the French Revolution my favorite revolution of the 18th, 19th, and 20th century. I like a revolution where the people are committed and the heads roll. Sure Stalin and Mao had the greater numbers of deaths, but they didn't have the Superior Wits to observe and comment on their deeds. The only testimony to their Superior Blood Lettings were just a bunch of scared sycophants or brain-washed used-to-be-someone-in-the-revolutions who were hopefully staring a Quick Death in the face to years in the Gulag or another night in Lubyanka. Stalin did have Trotsky, but the years in Mexico just amplified Trotsky's Envy for Power. Trotsky just knew that he could do it better than Stalin if he had the chance. I read The Russian Revolution. All the reflections on and accurate histories of Stalin's and Mao's Great Leaps in Mass Killings came long after the damage was done.

And Stalin and Mao had Years to do their Worst; Robespierre was a Splash in the Head Bucket or a Spurt from the Guillotine. "Kill Fast and Die Young" was his Motto. "Kill With Poetry" was Mao's Motto. "Just Kill'em" was Stalin's.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is the other contemporary novel of Miss Mantel's that I like. I have a half finished screenplay for it even though I don't own the rights or envision that I ever will.

I keep looking for another author who can write good Historical Fiction, because Miss Mantel is just not churning out her work fast enough for me. I gave The Stockholm Octavo by Karen Engelmann a try.

The Stockholm Octavo had possibilities. It had a woman character of dubious past and delirious present who read the Tarot cards, just like the protagonist or witch or whatever she was in Beyond Black. And The Stockholm Octavo took place in Sweden in the early 1790's which is when the French Revolution of A Place of Greater Safety was gearing up for its Red Dawn.

I am not familiar with much Swedish history except for the ascension of Napoleon's Field Marshall Bernadotte to the Swedish throne in the early 19th century. I know that from watching Jean Simmons and Marlon Brando in Désirée, another movie where I didn't understand most of the characters' motivations. On a Hollywood level, I understood why Miss Simmons develops a time warp mentality (like a Philip K. Dick novel) and seeks to constantly and endlessly re-live her first blush adolescent love affair with Marlon Brando. Michael Rennie is a Great Bore.

But on a Historical level, I just don't get it. Désirée was a Great Bore, but she had two men of some ability in love with her. I can only assume that neither Napoleon or King Whoever of Sweden cared much for intelligence or discernment in a woman. And neither one of them cared much for food either, so the way to a man's heart is not through his brain or his stomach, it is through his penis. Robespierre was so much better than either of them.

My unfamiliarity with Swedish history made The Stockholm Octavo more suspenseful. I had no idea how the assassination of the Swedish King would go. Would the King Go? Or would the traitors go to the gallows or jail?

I have read a few Tarot cards, and I found the cards and the readings that drive the action in the book incomprehensible and boring. The main male character, a man about town, and the lady card reader's endless discussions of their card readings improved my reading speed greatly. I leaped over them.

Most of the characters in the book were just extraneous. I know that they were butterflies in the chaos of the assassination, beating their little butterfly wings and changing the great things (there was even a butterfly fan in the mix that beat the winds of change into the faces of the characters---have I gone too far with that image?) and showing up in the card readings, but where are the Dickens of Today?

Incidentally there was a lot of snow in this novel. Or the Balzacs? Why couldn't I just enjoy the characters and then later in the novel find out that the street sweeper is a very important character despite his poverty and lack of intelligence (Little Dorrit)? Why did I have to be told and re-told that some fairly interesting or mostly dull character was Important! IMPORTANT! Pay Attention!

The book was adequate, but no Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.

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.

Viewpoints

The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagel

In 1945, a Egyptian, who was avenging his father's murder in a blood feud, discovered some rolls of papyrus in a large red clay jar. The Egyptian knew something about grave robbing and antiquities and put one of the papyrus rolls on the market to find out the value of what he and his brother had dug up. So, the Gnostic Gospels, another view of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus came to the attention of Bible scholars.

The fundamentalists won the war of the Protestant and Catholic Bibles. They favored the hierarchical, rigid, Religion is the Church and its temporal judgements and demands and don't fall afoul of it version of the Bible. The Gnostics were more in the vein of God is what is inside you and is a personal god. The Gnostics also believed that Mary Magdalene was a disciple of Christ and one of the most intelligent ones and not some street whore.

Why, reading this book about these other gospels that weren't allowed to be Canon, you get the idea that these Gnostics weren't even Christians, even though they knew Christ and followed his teachings.

Religion is Politics, that is really what was meant by all the rendering unto Caesar.

Oh and the Egyptian and his brother found his father's killer and hacked off his limbs and ate his heart just like in Today's Bible.



Queen Isabella by Alison Weir

The English have a long history of getting rid of the monarchs that they don't like. Edward II was the first one to be deposed.

Edward was a gay monarch, a little too gay. He fell in lust and thrall to his favorite whore sons Sluts and gave them his kingdom for a good shag. His barons and the people became very irritated at being thieved upon and imprisoned and murdered and raped for the voracious financial appetites of his Sex Boys. They no sooner got rid of one of the Sex Boys then the King would go and find another one. I think that Edward II was a bottom, and if you believe the tales of his death, so did his subjects.

Anyway, Edward II's wife (yes, custom dictated that he have a wife, but he closeted her instead of his Sex Boys) took his heir, Edward II could make the effort when required, and went off to her brother, the King of France, when she had had enough of the latest Sex Boy. There was speculation that the Sex Boy was straight and doing Edward for the money and the lands and the title. The Sex Boy had made some moves on Isabella in his spare time and might have raped her. The Queen had put up with the Sex Boys for ten years and more (she married at twelve), but they were doing her husband and not her.

The Queen was in Paris in the Spring and fell in love and lust with an exiled English no-more-nobeller-than-most Lord named Mortimer and through their calculated love and ambition (hey, not everything is a screwball comedy, some of it is just screwing your lover and your enemies drama); the pair rounded up the exiled disaffected and an army and invaded England and took back the Land and the Knights and deposed the King.

The deposed Edward II was sent to a castle and told to seek individual solace, if you know what I mean. I guess that he did, until the third attempt to free him and put him back on the throne. Then Mortimer sent some wiseguys to smother the used-to-be King with Pillows and then ram a red hot poker up his anus to finish him off, just like one of his Sex Boys. It was an Orgasmic Death for Edward.

Then the Queen and Mortimer put the under aged heir on the throne and made out like bandits, hugging and kissing and appropriating all the Sex Boy's appropriated lands and money and goods. The Queen and Mortimer were just as sexy and greedy as the Sex Boys who came before them. Then Edward III turned eighteen and sent Mortimer to be hung and his mother into retirement.

But was Edward II really sent into the great Sex Death? Or did he escape and spend the rest of his days as a hippie monk wandering around Europe with a backpack and a Bible? Miss Weir does come up with interesting circumstantial evidence for that conclusion.

The Kingly deposings continued after the long reign of Edward III. His heir was his grandson, Richard II, and we all know what happened to him. He had his great grand kinggie's tendencies. And thus, the War of the Roses was born.

Historical Murder

The Maul and the Pear Tree by P.D. James and T. A. Critchley

In 1811 before the constitution of the British Police Force, two mass murders took place along Ratcliffe Highway in the East End of London along the trading docks of the commercial fleets.

In one murder, a merchant who sold to the sailors from the international fleets, his wife, his infant son, and his teen aged servant were brutally murdered after midnight. The murders weapons were a maul (pictured)

and some sharp knives (unknown).

A week or so after these murders, another set of murders (using the same weapons), were done at a pub a few blocks down a street perpendicular to Ratcliffe Highway called The King's Arms. The proprietor and his wife and a female servant were killed in the same manner as the merchant and his family.

The murders incited the Public imagination and the hunt for the Muderer or Murderers became a Public Cause. A man was eventually arrested on a weak probable cause, but he committed suicide in his goal cell before he could be tried or convicted or released on insufficient evidence. The authors speculate on their favorite suspect(s) for the murders.

I enjoy P.D. James' mystery novels but I did not find this Real World Crime book very interesting.

The Pear Tree was where the Maul hung out before it took up its murdering ways.

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.

Bad Mommy

A Death in White Bear Lake by Barry Siegel

In the early 1960s, Lois and Harold Jurgens of White Bear Lake, Minnesota adopted two little boys, Robert and Dennis. By 1965, Lois had finally tortured little Dennis to death. Robert was still alive but acted like a whipped dog, cowering in corners and crying over spilled milk.

Despite the obvious physical trauma and mutilation of Dennis' three year old body, Lois was never charged with his murder. No one from the child protective social workers to the DA's office ever filed any charges against her. The police department investigated her, but most of their evidence went missing. Lois' brother, Jerome, was the investigative officer and he told two other police officers that he would not let his sister be charged or punished for Dennis' murder.

Lois' large family, along with her brother Jerome, had witnessed her abuse of Dennis in family gatherings but did nothing to stop it. Neighbors had also seen Dennis' chronic bruises and his transformation from an outgoing and cheerful little boy to an emaciated and bruised silent child and did nothing. Her priest, Lois was a very devout woman who had her little boys saying perfect rosary prayers by the age of 2 1/2, wrote letters of recommendation to her Perfect Motherhood. Everybody saw something but nobody did anything about it.

Lois got away scot free and in 1971 adopted four more children. The records and the memory of Dennis' murder did not prevent those adoptions. These children were older and could speak. After three years with Lois, the two oldest ran away and reported her constant abusive rages and acts against them. The authorities finally acted. All of Lois' children were taken away from her.

But Dennis' murder was left unaddressed until his natural mother, Jerry Sherwood showed up in White Bear Lake in 1985 demanding to know why she had borne five children, but the only one that she had given up for adoption, for his own Good as she was told by the Catholic Adoption Agency who placed him in Lois' Hell, was the only dead one. Miss Sherwood demanded that the Law act, and she stayed and hounded the White Bear Lake authorities until they re-opened the case and Lois was tried and found guilty of three counts of murder.

Lois had a husband named Harold. He was nothing.

The book is well written and organized and keeps the reader's interest throughout. This was a good true crime story for every one but poor Dennis and his Birth Mother.

Still At It, But Not Bragging....

Oh yes, I am still reading but I haven't been bragging about it lately.

This must stop! I must display my reading skills.

1. Angel by Elizabeth Taylor: No not her, the other one. Amusing tale about a lady writer who knew what she wanted to write and how to live her life. Convention and conventional people be damned! I ended this tale admiring the written-about lady writer, even though she was limited and selfish and arrogant. And yes, she (the written about Lady Writer) ended as a Cat Lady, but the cats need the Ladies and the Internets, so don't criticize. I will read some more of Miss Taylor's books.
2. The Sewing Circle by Axel Madsen: Very poorly written, half the time you have no idea to whom the pronouns are referring---ha ha! But the subject matter is salacious and interesting although from my own reading into the subject and period, some of it is inaccurate. Read this one as you read The Star and The National Enquirer in the Grocery Line---

   Brad and Angelina lost their whip! How will they have the SEX that holds them BOUND TOGETHER?

   This is about the Dykes holding up the Great Wall of Hollywood sign up in the hills. A lot of Greta Garbo and Mercedes de Acosta and Marlene Dietrich and their sexual exploits in Golden Hollywood.
3. The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo: This one is about the Male Brigade who cleaned the closets of Hollywood back in the Golden Days. And this one has pretensions to Film Criticism. It is about the movies and how they treated Homosexuality in those days. It goes from hints and silk PJs in the Silent Era to the Outbreak of Gay Guys in Wife Beaters dancing in Gay Clubs in the 1980's Non-Porn Films.
4. Madame Blavatsky's Baboon by Peter Washington: Theosophy sounded interesting to me, but this is not the book for me to learn that much about it. Very dull and poorly organized. Spiritualism should be scary and fun.
5. Anatomy of Injustice by Raymond Bonner: "The Black Guy did it", per Susan Smith and most Police Investigative Units. Even though, the White Guy practically describes the murder to the Defense Lawyer, while the mentally challenged Black Guy just keeps denying it because he honestly doesn't understand Any of the Questions. This book shows why there should be No Capital Crimes. Justice is Man-Made and Administered and therefore as much a suspect as any defendant can be. Recommended. And Justice isn't impersonal---it is Personal as shown by the efforts on the part of the prosecution to impeach a competent woman defense lawyer.
6. V is for Vengeance by Sue Grafton: Kinsy Millhone doesn't narrate much of this one. Miss Grafton mixes up narrators for the nineteenth letter and investigation in this series. Good but not one of her best. And the ending is Out of Character for one of the characters. Not Millhone, Miss Grafton always knows and allows her PI her own self.