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.

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.

Some Odd People

The Guilty One by Lisa Ballantyne

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

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

This is good trash reading.


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

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

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

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

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

Lazy Readings

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

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

1. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

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

From Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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

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

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

2. Pierrepoint

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. The Dinner: A Novel by Herman Koch

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

Interviews With Artists

Interviews in the Early Twentieth Century

When I saw Midnight in Paris, the lead character was dancing with one of the American Artists in Paris in the 1920s, and he was complaining about her insistence on leading. The Leading Lady was Djuna Barnes. I was doing some reading and research about that time and those artists and I had never heard of the Lady so I added her to the syllabus.

Interviews by Djuna Barnes was an good read not only for the American personalities of the 1910-1930s, but Miss Barnes was a breezy and inventive interviewer. She might put her subject in a one act play for the interview or she might take the interview and make the subject answer any of her questions with the platitudes and cliches and turns of phrase that the subject was known for. She could be as whimsical and as playful as Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland.

Now I know where the style and form of those short interviews at the beginning of The New Yorker's On The Town come from. Miss Barnes was doing it and doing it well before The New Yorker.


Performance Art in the Early Twenty First Century

I never thought that a novel about some Performance Artists would be very interesting to me. The main theme of a Performance Artist is Herself. And Most of them are just not as fascinating as they appear to be to themselves. A variety show or book about Performance Artists is much like Vaudeville. You have to sit through some boring and strange abusive acts to get to the headliner. And the headliner just might not be to your taste.

I Am Trying to Reach You by Barbara Browning is a novel about an academic who unartfully (have you ever read some of their papers on art and their "theories" of art? Nope, and there is a good reason for that. Most of them are incomprehensible even to other academics. Hmmm, there must be some Performance Art Academic Critics who can't even recognize their own Acts or Art to Criticize. But that way lies Madness and a Grant) criticizes Performance Artists and even some of his own Academic Scholars.

If this is getting too convoluted and circumlocutory like a Hexagon Mobius Strip for you, just ignore the previous paragraph because the narrator is likable and doesn't quite understand any of the Performance Artist's Performances himself. But like a Good Academic, he keeps up the effort to find some cosmic or even some neighborly meaning thereof.

While the Narrator muddles through his Art Theories, he does live life and that is where the crux of the novel lies. The Narrator attempts gallantry and just human concern for the Old Lady in a Walker who lives down his hallway. He deals with his lover who is a continent away and learning to live with and medicate a possibly fatal illness.

He follows a You Tube Video Dancer named falserebelmoth who makes dance videos that the Narrator is sure have some sub textual meaning to them. The video dances are just like life. They are there, and we are here and there, and meaning is stuck in the background or off to the side of the video, cut off by the video frame or in the shadows. If we could just see it or get it into focus. If we could just add some more pixels and make it sharper.

I actually went on You Tube to see if there were any videos by falserebelmoth and to see if I could see them through my own eyes and not the Narrator's eyes, but Miss Browning did not go that far.

She should have.

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.

Escape From Affluence and Poverty and Sentiment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead

This book was recommended by Salon.

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

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


Cascade by Maryanne O'Hara

This book was another recommendation.

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

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

I guess that I am just not that sentimental.

Family Noir

I will read anything by Ross MacDonald.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

How Do You Know You've Been Poisoned?

The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum

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

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

All Those Little Lost Girls:

American Eve, Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White, The Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century

by Paula Uruburu

Evelyn Nesbit was a girl of Old Pittsburgh, Ye Oldde Pittsburgh of Polluting Steel Mills and Labor Unrest and Robber Barons like Andrew Carnegie and the first of the strange Mellons (fruits on the vine of Point Breeze), circa 1900 Pittsburgh.

Miss Nesbit's middle class lawyer daddy died and left the family, Mother, Brother, and Miss Nesbit, to Mother's best devices to keep them all middle class. Mother was not educated, not bright, not talented, and not capable of it.

Miss Nesbit was very pretty and it fell to her to keep the family in money. And so she did, as the first Supermodel (for mostly illustrators and then photographers) to sell all sort of products for all sort of companies. Only as the first Supermodel, Miss Nesbit got the publicity (and the nasty old men groupies) but not much money---not Cindy Crawford money---because Mother was just not capable of negotiating a business deal (or much of anything---she did manage to luck into a second, middle class marriage when Evelyn went bust). Miss Nesbit was the 1900's advertising business's primal star.

Mother got money to stuff in the cookie jar and Brother got sent away to boarding school and with foster parents in the summer. Mother had Evelyn to chaperone and she wasn't very good at that either.

Miss Nesbit had a perfect face and teeth and gorgeous hair and the figure of a young pubescent boy. That figure proved to be a very great attraction for all those wealthy prodigals who pursued her. There was a lot of sublimated homo-eroticism in those rich twits. And there was a good reason for the sublimation---the trials of Oscar Wilde.

Stanford White was a prominent architect of the period who chased young, under aged chorus girls and models, and Miss Nesbit caught his eye (all three of them). Mr. White fixed her perfect teeth (he had the seminal American obsession with teeth) and gave Mother money and took Miss Nesbit's virginity in his bower. Miss Nesbit had Hollywood make a movie about it, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. Miss Nesbit was not happy with the casting of Joan Collins in the movie, Miss Collins was too buxom to play Miss Nesbit.

But under aged girls become legal, and rich, old fart's attentions stray to the next underaged beauty, and a legal girl has got to look to her future and how to keep the money rolling in.

Miss Nesbit looked back to Pittsburgh and to Henry Thaw, rich, sociopath, mama's boy, and she took the ring in the marriage carousel. The betrothal night was whips and confessions and rape; and the marriage got even better. Mr. Thaw took out Mr. White's teeth fixin's from Miss Nesbit and had his dentist put in his own. Miss Nesbit was to have teeth fixin's for the rest of her life. Man could never make right what nature had right to begin with. Isn't that right, Mr. Michael Jackson in Heaven?

Mr. Thaw's obsession led one night to a play on the terrace of Madison Square Garden (Mr. White's design) where the romantic trio met and Mr. Thaw shot Mr. White in the face many times and managed to kill him. "I did it to avenge my wife's honor," said Mr. Thaw. A Wife's Honor---what a male concept!

Mr. Thaw went to trial and was found insane and sent to the looney bin, where he initiated a series of escapes. The Thaw family disowned Miss Nesbit when she became pregnant during a conjugal visit to the looney bin. And Miss Nesbit took to the road and vaudeville and already made publicity. If you got it, flaunt it.

I don't know why anyone thinks that Lindsay Lohan is an original.

Miss Uruburu is inclined to be prejudiced toward Miss Nesbit in this book, but then, why else write the book? Worth reading---but it is the old story of selling your children to finance your welfare.