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!

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.