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!

The Worth of Geraldine Farrar

The history of Silent Film has always interested me. In my readings, I found it ironic that one of the early Silent Film stars was Geraldine Farrar who was a gifted and famous American opera singer of the early twentieth century. In the off-opera season, from 1915 to 1920, Miss Farrar starred in silent film where her vocal talents were unused but she did have "star quality" and she was a very good Operatic Actress and that was all she needed to achieve stardom in the film of that time.

She also had a core fan club of young women who adored her and called themselves "Gerry Flappers". I am sure that they all saw her films at least once if not twenty times.

Miss Farrar was born in Massachusetts and her musical ability was recognized by her mother at an early age (5 years old) and nurtured. Miss Farrar was an only child so her mother's attention upon her was absolute. 

At the age of fourteen, Miss Farrar was giving recitals and those recitals brought her to the notice of The Bonds of Boston who bankrolled Miss Farrar's further education to sing opera. Miss Farrar sought her advanced education in Europe and it was in the turn of the century Germany that she gained notice and earned her reputation as a soprano, much like Maria Callas of the later part of the twentieth century, who sang the emotions of the opera part. She had technique but it was the "acting" of the emotions of the part that was the most important part of the performance for her and her audience.

Miss Farrar made her American Metropolitan debut in 1906 and was the soprano who introduced the iconic and eponymous role of Madama Butterfly to American audiences. She was selected and coached by Puccini himself for the part. Although in her biography, she claims that she was his second choice.

The Autobiography of Geraldine Farrar was written by Miss Farrar in 1938. She has very fond memories of her career and life in Germany before World War I that carries over rather offensively to the 1930s. She finds no offense in Hitler's Germany.

She also divides the book into parts. One part is written by Miss Farrar with flourishes and innuendos and intransitive verbs and lush similes and flushed metaphors that makes the reader sometimes resort to diagramming the sentence to determine what is really being said.

For Example, she describes a tenor named Chaliapin:

"I am sure he was a kind if sometimes forgetful husband, and an affectionate father, in spite of having a brilliant reputation as conquistador in the domain of Amor. This was not difficult, given his tremendous artistic endowment, and the the undeniable attractions of a singularly elemental male."  

In real speak, the man was a Horn Dog and had a Big Dong. And she knows, because she had him. And he and his Dong were Good.

In the other part of the "autobiography", Miss Farrar's mother writes with exactly the same style as Miss Farrar and despite the fact that she, the mother, is dead. I suppose we are to assume that this is some "auto"matic hand writing channeled from the dead mother's spirit. Miss Farrar's mom discreetly covers the heights of Miss Farrar's career and love life that it would be unseemly for Miss Farrar to boast directly about herself.

Miss Farrar had an affair with Crown Prince Wilhem in her Berlin Glory Days, but Miss Farrar's mom writes about what a lovely wife and kiddies that he had, and that she and Geraldine got to see them all the time and practically live with them because they were so close to Mrs. Wilhem. I guess that they had the bedroom on the other side of Prince Wilhem's boudoir. And all those adorable kiddies were Mrs. Wilhem's kiddies, all her own, not one of them was Miss Farrar's.

Miss Farrar's love affairs with Toscanini and Enrico Caruso among others are covered in much the same manner.

Miss Farrar's movie career ended in 1920 when she tore up her contract with Samuel Goldwyn when he told her that her movies didn't make money anymore. Miss Farrar was a New England business woman and she made movies because that was where the money was. Miss Farrar's singing career ended in the late 1920s when she wore out her voice by constant travel in her own private rail car all over the US, because that was where the money was. She did record extensively in the early twentieth century because that was where the money was and you can find some of these recordings on CDs today.

Miss Farrar was a Lady who knew her Worth and got her Worth in every way possible.

Eating Thoughtfully

Leonardo and The Last Supper by Ross King

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci was an experiment in oil based paint on a plaster wall primed with a lead based white paint. Most wall murals of the time were frescos where the artist painted a very small part of the wall with pigments on a wet plaster.

Leonardo was in a creative mood after he had to give up his huge bronze horse cast statute and his flying machine design. He decided to do his art commission for a monastery wall in oil paints because no one else had ever done it that way. If you look at photos of The Last Supper as it is today, you see why no one had. The present mural is stripped paint and faint colors and indistinguishable characteristics of the figures and the food at the last supper.

Da Vinci also chose the wrong wall to paint. It was the north wall and prone to dampness  even in good weather. The Last Supper was a mural artwork experiment gone very wrong.

But on the positive side, Leonardo did finish the mural. And Leonardo was well known by all art patrons in Milan as an artist who did not start or finish his commissions unless they were small paintings of individuals.

Leonardo was a thinker of great ideas. His art was just a hobby or a palate cleanser while he tasted another idea with dreams of architectural or engineering glory.

This was a new one for me---an artist who really wanted to be an engineer.

A Clash of Cultures

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

This book is a history of four cities: St. Petersburg (also in its Leningrad incarnation), Shanghai, Dubai, and Mumbai (in its Bombay incarnation).

The two cities that I found to be the most interesting were St. Petersburg and Shanghai. Both cities were founded by the imposition of the Western Enlightenment and its subsequent desire for trade with other cultures, the curiosity with other cultures, and the exploitation of a native culture for its own betterment and the West's.

Peter the Great, the Russian Czar, thought that he could import the Western Enlightenment into Russia by laying the groundwork of St. Petersburg. The mix of Western Culture and Russian Culture, after he wrested the area from the Swedish crown, would lead to a High Russian Culture that would rival and overtake the Enlightenment of Western Europe. All the good would flow to Russia, because that is the way the autocrat, Peter, wanted it. But, oh the Other People and the Little People, they don't know that they must serve the Autocrat not themselves. They will go and order things the way that they want them to be, not the way that their Betters Know That They Should Be. This problem persists in the World today.

Shanghai was also founded by a Briton who wanted to trade with the Chinese Empire. Britain had manufactured goods that needed markets preferably in China. The Chinese Emperor gave the land for the barbarians to use as their trading city, but then the Emperor refused to trade because the Europeans had nothing that the Chinese wanted according to the Emperor. Except for Opium from the British Indian Empire, the Chinese were willing to take some of that good stuff. In order to obtain the silks and lacquers and porcelain and art of the Chinese, Europeans only had, by the decree of the Chinese Emperor, Opium to trade. Hence the Opium War, a shameful war by all accounts on all sides.

Whereas Peter the Great made a city for the expansion of Culture and Trade, the Chinese Emperor made Shanghai to contain and contract the meeting of Cultures. It didn't work out well for either man's goals.


No Easy Day: An Autobiography of a Navy Seal: The First Hand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden by Mark Owen

I saw Zero Dark Thirty and wondered about the accuracy of the last part of the movie, so I read this book. The movie and book pretty much follow each other in the raid.

The rest of the book is about how Mr. Owen became a Navy Seal and what his training consisted of. The rest of the movie is about the wanderings in the Torture Desert of Moral Ambiguity to find the Devil. Both parts of those stories depend upon what the reader or viewer is really interested in.


The Iron King by Maurice Druon

Philip IV the Fair was the King of France in the later part of the thirteenth century. He decided that being a Temporal King was no great challenge and he went after the Papacy too. He made up his own Pope and then went after the wealth of the Templar Knights who ran the Crusades and financed many shenanigans throughout Europe.

Philip broke the Templar Knights (they are the ones that The Maltese Falcon belonged  to) but didn't get anymore satisfaction out of it than did the Fat Man and Sam Spade. The head of the Templar Knights cursed Philip the Fair and his progeny to the thirteenth generation as he burned at the stake. And it appeared that the Curse did some Good or Bad as it was intended.

Philip the Fair died soon afterwards and his children and their children fell on hard ruling times and the Hundred Years War. The French ruling family, the Capets, died out. The Valois branch took over. The British ruling family of the Plantagenets (who were connected to the French Capets through intermarriage) fell apart and began the Wars of the Roses which gave Shakespeare the basis for his History Plays.

The book has a couple of subplots about a scheming knight and an Italian Banking House that were interesting sporadically. I usually just skimmed those parts. The royals are the interesting stinkers in this book.

Dorothy Dunnett's The Lymond Chronicles is a better written set of books about the mid-sixteenth century that gives intimate details of the history and culture and customs of Europe. It helps to know French and Latin for her books, although one can get by just fine without them. Mr. Druon doesn't have the depth of research nor gives the historical details that Miss Dunnett does, but he is a quick read.

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.

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.

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.

History Lessons

The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War by Richard Lingeman

This book is an informal history of the United States from 1940 to 1950. After discussing a section of history, the one on the economics of the period is truly boring and it shouldn't be because this is when a steel workers strike could stop the US economy cold, the author attempts to connect it to a movie of the time that echoes the concerns and fears of that history section. When was the last time that anyone has ever been frightened by a strike lately? How Labor has Fallen.

The movie that the author discusses along with the strikes of the period is The Long Night directed by Anatole Litvak that stars Henry Fonda as a World War II veteran with a bad case of PTSD who kills some guy and then barricades himself in his apartment and has flashbacks all movie long. I haven't seen the movie yet so I don't know just how that relates to Strikes other than barricading oneself in one's room is sort of like walking a picket line in a strike. You can only hope someone is paying attention and if you kill someone, you do draw some notice from authorities and the media.

The history, other than the economic side, is mostly interesting and well presented by the author. The connection with some of the movies (the ones that I have seen) is slight to incidental. The author is really not all that interested in the movie correlation side of the book. I assume that his agent or publisher made him include the movies in the book to make it easier to sell. The author's own experiences in the time period, he was a drafted soldier in Army Intelligence in Japan, were much more interesting and well presented. I assume that correlating his own experiences with the history period was what he really wanted to do and probably was what he originally did in the book before he had to tart it up with Hollywood blondes.

What I took away from this book was that America was having a moment of Mass Fear and Hysteria and Paranoia in the later part of the forties. The loss of FDR must have been truly frightening despite the winning of the war. The similarities with present day America are also disconcerting. Once again we have elected officials like Senator McCarthy, only today we have many of them not just one, who manufacture Fear crises like the National Debt and Bengazhi!!! and the Second Amendment to advance their careers over the Real Life and the Truth and The Way that It Really Is.

Hmmmm, perhaps this is why Fantasy and Science Fiction and Magic movies are so popular these days. The crazies want us all to share their delusions.


The Entertainer: Movies Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century by Margaret Talbot

This is another history book about the times and the movies of those times. It is also a memoir of Lyle Talbot, an actor who began as a Magician's Assistant at the beginning of the 20th Century, starred in Roaming Theatrical companies and their plays, and then went to Hollywood at the beginning of the Talkies Movies and made his career as a B-movie lead and later as the best friend of Ozzie Nelson in TV.

The book is written by one of his daughters, Margaret, and she includes family history and reminisces to give an even more intimate picture of her father and his career and his family. Miss Talbot does a good job with remembering her father's and her past. Like Mr. Proust, it is the little things that she remembers that become the crux of the interpretation of her and her father's life. She also writes well.

As for Mr. Talbot, I have seen one of his Pre-Code movies, Three on a Match, (Bette Davis is in this one, but this is before Warner Brothers figured out just how interesting an actress that she was and was still making her play unremarkable Good Girls. When you think about it, it is amusing, Miss Davis found her Bad Girl after the Era of Bad Girls in the Pre-Code movies. It is also a tribute to Miss Davis' ability to handle subtlety and subtext in her acting and that is amusing because I don't often think of subtlety when I think of Miss Davis' acting.).

Any way, I liked Mr. Talbot and his character in the movie that I was watching mainly for Ann Dvorak, a Pre-Code Female Star. Mr. Talbot played a stinker with some moral scruples, you felt sorry for the poor sod. I have seen some episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet which was The Cosby Show of the fifties and sixties. I hated his character on that one. Mr. Talbot played the obnoxious neighbor and best friend of Ozzie. His character was one of those "Hail Fellow and Well-Met" men with idiotic jokes and Loud Camaraderie, and that shows just how undervalued his acting skills were when you compare the two characters.

Mr. Talbot was also in some of Ed Wood's cult classic Bad Films.

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.

Reading List

1. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
2. Area Code 212 by Tama Janowitz

In the Arctic

The Ice Balloon by Alec Wilkins

At the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th, one of the Great Adventures and Explorations was the physical trip to the North Pole, magnetic and geographic. Another Great Adventure and Exploration was the discovery of the Famed Northwest Passage from the Atlantic Ocean Across Northernmost America to the Pacific Ocean. From the sixteenth century onward, Europeans and later North Americans attempted to make it to the North Pole or across the Northern Arctic Archipelago from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

The Great Problem of a Trip to the North Pole was the fact that there was no Northern Continent like the Southern Continent of Antarctica to hold the Pole. In the Northern Arctic, there was the ever moving ice and frozen sea that impeded any journey to the North Pole. Ships could go so far in some years and then not go there in other years due to the changing ice. Ships were caught in the ice and some never got free of it and had to be abandoned. Arctic Explorers had to factor that the endlessly moving and forming and re-forming ice could trap them in an Exploration Trip for years before they could get out or be found or rescued.

The ice like time gave Uncertainty to the Venture. What was there to begin with might not be there later or have become something else unexpected in the future.

In 1897, a Swedish explorer named S. A. Andrée with two companions named Fraenkel and Strindberg attempted to be the first people (not even the Native Peoples cared to venture that far into the Uncertain North for no great advantage or rewards for them) to make it to the North Pole. Mr. Andrée's mode of transportation was a Hydrogen Balloon.

In that age, Mr. Andrée had no means of communication such as radio, he was going to use carrier pigeons to notify others (his country men and newspapers and the Royal Geographical Society of Britain) of his progress. He would also put messages on buoys that he would throw over the side and use the shifting ice to send the buoys to the Whalers who were the only people other than some of the Native Peoples to go that far North with any purpose other than Exploration.

Mr. Andrée and his balloon and companions like many Arctic Explorers disappeared into the North and was never seen again. He and his companions were lost in the Arctic.

In 1930, a Norwegian Sealing and Science sloop named the Bratvaag stopped at White Island in the Arctic Ocean and found the remains of Andrée's Expedition to the North Pole. Mr. Andrée and his companions had lost their lives and their heads, really, their bodies had no heads. Some diaries and pictures and artifacts and headless bodies were all that remained on the ice and trapped in the ice.

This book is about how it all came to that and naught.

The book also tells the horrific tale of Adolphus Greely, an American Explorer of the Arctic, who led an expedition to find the Lost British Expedition of Franklin who was trying to find the Northwest passage. (That is what Arctic Exploration was, some body was always looking not only for the North Pole or the Northwest Passage but also for some one who got lost looking for one or the other of the two.) Mr. Greely's Arctic Adventure makes the movies, The Thing or Hostel, look tame by comparison. Anything that an Imaginary Alien or depraved people can do to a traveller, the Arctic and Nature can do worse.

One amusing thing about Mr. Andrée's expedition was the fact that his companion, Strindberg, was confused with the playwright, August Strindberg; and Paul Gauguin, the painter, wrote to friend that he didn't understand why August Strindberg had taken it in his head to go to the North Pole in a balloon. August Strindberg also received a letter from his wife imploring him not to go exploring in the North.

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.

Reading List

1. A Century of Dolls: Treasures From the Golden Age of Doll Making; Photographs by Tome Kelley; Text by Pamela Sherer
2. Forks over Knives: The Plant-Based Way to Health by T. Colin Campbell and Caldwell B. Esselstyn
3. 100 Dresses: The Costume Institute The Metropolitan Museum of Art
4. Da Vinci's Ghost: Genius, Obsession, And How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image by Toby Lester

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.

Why Examine Life?

Full Service by Scotty Bowers with Lionel Friedberg

Mr. Bowers was a happy-go-lucky Marine freshly discharged after World War II which he spent in the Pacific when he got a job at a Gas Station in Hollywood. Back then, Gas Stations were full service where attendants pumped the gas, checked the oil, checked the fluids, and washed the windshield of nasty bug bodies. The Gas Station attendants met and served all kinds of people who had cars.

Mr. Bowers went from one service (of cars) to another (of people). He pumped the patrons, male or female, and somehow kept from catching any of those nasty STD bugs. Mr. Bowers got the side eye of "you got some time and the inclination?" look from a middle aged man who looked familiar and for a twenty buck tip, Mr. Bowers looked under the hood of Walter Pidgeon. Mr. Bowers used his day job as a gas station attendant to make extra money tricking and pimping for the people (mostly Hollywood types) who came by the Gas Station. Mr. Bowers had a lot of good looking Marine buddies who needed the extra money too.

Mr. Pidgeon preferred to perform fellatio on his partner and be the Top. Mr. Bowers should have just published a spread sheet on the sexual mores and preferences of the Old Hollywood Stars. That and a brief tally of Mr. Bowers' life (he is eighty nine now) is what this book consists of.

Mr. Bowers assures the reader that he was a happy hooker who liked to make people happy when he hooked and pimped. That was all there was to it. Mr. Bowers later moved on from the Gas Station because it did limit his outside activities, to catering and bar-tending where he could get closer and more intimate (in their houses) with his customers.

That maybe what Mr. Bowers lulls himself to sleep with every night, but his life story tells the tale of Mr. Bowers' sexual molestation by his best friend's father at the age of seven. Later when his parents divorced, Mr. Bowers never mentions his father again, and earned extra money for his mother and his sister and brother by selling newspapers and shoeshines and himself through elementary, middle, and high school in Chicago. Mr. Bowers did not just fall into pimping and hooking in Hollywood, he had been doing it  since the age of seven. Hollywood just gave him celebrities to trick.

Mr. Bowers assures the reader that he is a happy man and content in his lifestyle, and he doesn't appear to be a man of much introspection. If he were, he would have considered the implications of his childhood or the lack thereof much more closely on his later life. But Mr. Bower assures the reader that his lifestyle was just in his genes or jeans.

That Says It...

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

I like digressions, particularly literary digressions. This is an autobiographical memoir that is filled with digressions, there is no straightforward and progressive life plotted story of Miss Winterson's birth, adoption, and abusive childhood with her adoptive parents.