What Are You Reading

[LizzieMaine]

Tis the season for baseball reading, so I recently picked up "Electric October: Seven World Series Games, Six Lives, Five Minutes of Fame That Lasted Forever," by Kevin Cook.

No baseball season in all the history of the game has exceeded the micrometer study focused over the years on the 1947 campaign -- it was considered a landmark season in its own time, marking the peak of the game's postwar popularity, and in the decades since it's come to be seen as marking the start of a new epoch: the advent of Jackie Robinson and the desegregation of the major leagues has become a historical point that transcends sports. But this book isn't about Jackie Robinson, or Branch Rickey, or sociology, or race. All of those factors weave in and out of the story, but instead the book takes a tight look at that year's World Series -- a long-awaited rematch between the haughty New York Yankees and the proud but frustrated Brooklyn Dodgers. Their last meeting, in 1941, is one we experienced first hand over in the Era Day By Day thread, and the wounds of that year's Series remained very fresh six years later -- leading into a Series fraught with drama.

But rather than just rehashing the story of that series as such, Cook singles out the six men who played critical roles in those seven games: Dodger manager Burt Shotton, Yankee manager Bucky Harris, Yankee second baseman George "Snuffy" Stirnweiss, Yankee pitcher Floyd "Bill" Bevens, and Dodgers Al Gionfriddo and Harry "Cookie" Lavagetto. Shotton wouldn't have been there if Leo Durocher hadn't been suspended for a year for assorted offensive peccadilloes, Harris was a baseball lifer given the unenviable job of replacing Joe McCarthy, Stirnweiss was a player who excelled during the war but could feel his career slipping away as the "real" major leaguers returned, Bevens was a scatter-armed journeyman pitcher who'd never quite lived up to his promise, Gionfriddo was an undersized backup outfielder with a chip on his shoulder, and Lavagetto was an old Brooklyn favorite in the twilight of his career, trying to hang on.

The story of what happened in the 1947 Series really isn't the focus of the book -- Bevens almost pitched a no-hitter until Lavagetto came off the bench to break it up with a pinch-hit double that won the game for Brooklyn. Gionfriddo made one of the greatest catches in the history of the game to rob DiMaggio of a homer. Stirnweiss proved he could play with the "real" stars. And both managers surprised even themselves by even getting there in the first place. Rather, the book emphasizes how the Series and the momentary fame it brought them affected the rest of their lives. Bevens and Lavagetto made card show appearances together, laughing and joking about That Game, but Bevens wasn't always joking when he said "I could've had a no-hitter. Why didn't you let me have it." Cookie never had to pay for a drink again, and was beloved in Brooklyn to the end of his days. And Snuffy Stirnweiss was just getting on his feet in a successful post-baseball career when he was killed in a horrific New Jersey railroad accident in 1958. Shotton died an all-but-forgotten man, and didn't seem too bothered by that, but Bucky Harris lived long enough to make it to the Hall of Fame. And Al Gionfriddo, though understanding the fame his catch brought him, resented Branch Rickey for sending him to the minor leagues just short of qualifying for a major league pension -- and he'd spend his declining years fighting the Commissioner's Office in an attempt to get what he felt was coming to him. Sic transit, as they say, gloria mundi.

This is a breezy, anecdotal book, but with an air of real melancholy in its final chapters. The image of Cookie Lavagetto, frail and elderly, watching himself on a VHS highlights tape, opens the book -- but it's also a fitting way to point out that no matter what we've done and what we've accomplished in our lives, someday all we'll be left with are memories.

 

[Harp]

View attachment 406882
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter originally published in 1967


A Sport and a Pastime delivers on Lady Chatterley's Lover's unfulfilled promise of literature and arrant carnal passion in one read, but it is not for the faint of heart. Author Salter holds back almost nothing in his exposition of what a man and woman can do in bed, or a chair, or a car, or the woods, or on the floor, or, well, you get the point.

It's a slow start for fifty or so pages as the narrator of this tale, a middle-aged man, with regret, or ennui, or something gnawing at him, excessively describes the sights, sounds and smells of Paris and the small French town of Autun.

He's temporarily staying in the latter at a friend's house while observing and fantasizing about the love life of his friend Dean Phillips, a twenty-two year old, handsome, American Yale dropout with almost enough family money to bum around France for a while.

Dean meets Anne-Marie, a poor, alluring, eighteen-year-old French working-girl and it's sexual game on. While it's sometimes hard to tell what is the narrator's fantasy and what is real, Dean and Anne-Marie begin a relationship based on sex and youth. Plus, he represents money and class to Anne-Marie, while she's a carnal tabula rasa for him.

There is something more, though, than just sex or opportunity to their relationship as Anne-Marie begins thinking marriage while Dean plans relationship-exit strategies that he's reluctant to deploy.

So for months, they spend their weekends and many nights together, take trips around France, fall into the routine of a couple and explore each other sexually in an incredibly adventurously way.

One divide they rarely discuss is their class difference, as Dean is attracted to Anne-Marie's "common" and "cheap," albeit pretty, looks and manners. She's cute and sexy, but in a, from his perspective, low-rent way. He's embarrassed to have her meet his friends or family (the latter he never introduces her to).

She, conversely, sees him as a way out of her poverty and dead-end job and is proud when she brings him home, which results in an incredibly awkward afternoon. Anne-Marie believes they will overcome this, but we see, painfully for her, he isn't thinking that way.

As the relationship progresses, the story's tension builds as Anne-Marie's and Dean's intentions diverge. He, mainly, passively lets her believe what she wants, so we see the crash coming that she doesn't.

When he does leave and flies home to America, he weasels his way out by saying he'll be back or will send for her, but we know he has all but no intention of doing so.

Other than an epilogue full of spoiler alerts, that's it for Dean and Anne-Marie. It takes a bit, but we finally see Dean as a, using appropriate-in-this-case modern terminology, spoiled, privileged rich kid who uses and discards Anne-Marie.

It's real because most of us have known a few Deans in our lives - good-looking, personable, attractive-to-women men who have enough family money to coast through their early post-college life while hurting a few women along the way.

Even though the Dean-Anne-Marie story is bookended by the narrator's observations, his role and thoughts are never fully developed, and he is clearly unreliable, so there's an element of uncertainty to the entire story.

Despite its flaws, A Sport and a Pastime poignantly captures middle-aged disappointment, France of that moment and, more powerfully, young love, young sex and the hurt and deception most experience on the field of intimate human relations, at least one time, early in life.



P.S., While not a major part of the book, there is some ugly racism in the novel, including the use of the N-word, that is rightfully offensive to us today, but was not unusual for the norms and thinking of the time. As is often the case, we see here, the past is also more nuanced than we acknowledge now. It's still very wrong, but as in this book, it's not as simplistic as it is often portrayed in our modern telling.


N.B. This was a FL member @Harp recommendation

Interesting comparison of Salter and Lawrence; which goes beyond, much further than Charlotte Bronte's
The Professor, the first thought that came to mind. Gifted the latter to a gal pal whom seemed somehow
stuck with Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Like Melville's Moby Dick led Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
to far more significant height and depth, Salter and Lawrence were similarly influenced.

Salter is enigmatic. His memoir Burning The Days little more than a penile paean to sexual
conquest and a marred moral character. As Aeschylus scribed, 'it is by our own hand are we now smitten.'

 

[Harp]

Noticed a foundling among my grown nephew's literary orphans: Jane Eyre, courtesy
of The Cenacle Lending Library; 513 Fullerton Parkway; Chicago, Illinois. A firesale giveaway
with admonish of $.02 per diem tardy fee into the bargain put. And the loan is for thirty days,
period, end of discussion. Bet the librarian is a lady straight out of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Currer Bell penned author introduction Dec. 21st, 1847, a richly embroidered preface for history,
slake thirst all ye who enter parched dry for want of wit and wise words. Signed, Currer Bell.
Brother to Ellis & Acton.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"The G-String Murders," by Gypsy Rose Lee.

A bestseller in 1941-42, this entry in the Simon & Schuster "Inner Sanctum Mysteries" series came up recently in the Day By Day thread, and it occured to me that, while I'd always meant to, I'd never gotten around to actually reading it -- so I took some time on my Sunday off to do just that.

Miss Lee needs no introduction to enthusiasts of the popular culture of the Era -- with apologies to Sally Rand and Margie Hart and the immortal Lois DeFee, she was the most famous ecdyasist of her generation. But she was more than a run of the mill stripper -- Rose Louise Hovick was also a witty, inquisitive, highly intelligent woman who once substituted for Walter Winchell on his newspaper column, and could easily hold her own alongside the famous wits of "Information Please." This was her first book -- and it wouldn't be her last. (And no, it wasn't ghosted. There is ample evidence in the text itself, and in surviving letters between Miss Lee and her editors, to demonstrate that the author is just who the title page says it is.)

As a mystery novel, it's more complex than it appears at first glance. The reader is so caught up in the lively backstage atmosphere and the -- earthy -- language, that it's easy to miss the convolutions of the plot. In a seedy 42nd Street burly house that is barely hanging on in the wake of Mayor LaGuardia's crusade against burlesque, two stripteasers are strangled to death with their own G-strings, and the killer appears to be someone connected with the show. Miss Lee, in fine Ellery Queen style, is herself the narrator of the story and ad-hoc investigator of the crimes, aided by her lover, the show's lead comic, and abetted, or hindered, by her colleagues in the company. Are the crimes the work of a serial killer -- or a blackmailer -- or both?

But the crimes and their ultimate solution really aren't the center of the book -- you're a third of the way thru before the first victim falls. The real interest is in the detailed picture of backstage life in an early-1940s burlesque house. Anyone who's ever spent time in an old theatre, on or off stage will sense the authenticity here -- Miss Lee captures even the *smell.* While some of the backstage antics will remind you of a Warner Bros. musical, c. 1933, that's not necessarily a bad thing -- Miss Lee writes with a certain zing in her language and her characterizations that, if a movie, would have to be "pre code."

They did in fact make a movie of this book, but it's wet wash compared to the original. I read it in a single sitting, and when it was over, I felt that sense of not wanting to leave these people -- of wanting to keep spending time with them for a bit longer. So, I'm reading it again. I can't give a book a higher compliment.

 

[Bushman]

Currently reading "Dog Is Love" by Clive D. L. Wynne. Only through the first chapter thus far.

 

[Fading Fast]

"The G-String Murders," by Gypsy Rose Lee.

A bestseller in 1941-42, this entry in the Simon & Schuster "Inner Sanctum Mysteries" series came up recently in the Day By Day thread, and it occured to me that, while I'd always meant to, I'd never gotten around to actually reading it -- so I took some time on my Sunday off to do just that.

Miss Lee needs no introduction to enthusiasts of the popular culture of the Era -- with apologies to Sally Rand and Margie Hart and the immortal Lois DeFee, she was the most famous ecdyasist of her generation. But she was more than a run of the mill stripper -- Rose Louise Hovick was also a witty, inquisitive, highly intelligent woman who once substituted for Walter Winchell on his newspaper column, and could easily hold her own alongside the famous wits of "Information Please." This was her first book -- and it wouldn't be her last. (And no, it wasn't ghosted. There is ample evidence in the text itself, and in surviving letters between Miss Lee and her editors, to demonstrate that the author is just who the title page says it is.)

As a mystery novel, it's more complex than it appears at first glance. The reader is so caught up in the lively backstage atmosphere and the -- earthy -- language, that it's easy to miss the convolutions of the plot. In a seedy 42nd Street burly house that is barely hanging on in the wake of Mayor LaGuardia's crusade against burlesque, two stripteasers are strangled to death with their own G-strings, and the killer appears to be someone connected with the show. Miss Lee, in fine Ellery Queen style, is herself the narrator of the story and ad-hoc investigator of the crimes, aided by her lover, the show's lead comic, and abetted, or hindered, by her colleagues in the company. Are the crimes the work of a serial killer -- or a blackmailer -- or both?

But the crimes and their ultimate solution really aren't the center of the book -- you're a third of the way thru before the first victim falls. The real interest is in the detailed picture of backstage life in an early-1940s burlesque house. Anyone who's ever spent time in an old theatre, on or off stage will sense the authenticity here -- Miss Lee captures even the *smell.* While some of the backstage antics will remind you of a Warner Bros. musical, c. 1933, that's not necessarily a bad thing -- Miss Lee writes with a certain zing in her language and her characterizations that, if a movie, would have to be "pre code."

They did in fact make a movie of this book, but it's wet wash compared to the original. I read it in a single sitting, and when it was over, I felt that sense of not wanting to leave these people -- of wanting to keep spending time with them for a bit longer. So, I'm reading it again. I can't give a book a higher compliment.

You sold me on it. A 1943 "very good condition" hardcover copy is on they way for $10.

 

[Harp]

En banc, Mobarez; and McGhan, a singular from the DC Circuit. Hardly read, much less
analysis; only skim milking risen cream for a certain nominee's thought since her judiciary
appearance proved deliberately evasive shirtfront poker.

The issue at hand is the limit-or reach of executive privilege. McGhan cited pique,
amorphous convenience that masked ambivalence, quite unsatisfactory a distance
from answering justiciability or resolute constitutional strict construct.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Megan Miranda - Little Lies

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Tell It To Sweeney -- The Informal History of the New York Daily News," by John Chapman.

There was a time in America when every newspaper had a distinct personality that reflected not just the city where it was published but also the audience to whom it was targeted. And for most of the twentieth century, no paper had a more outsized personality than the Daily News -- loud and brash, cynical and sentimental, and, no matter what the circumstances, always putting itself forward as the voice of Everyman. That's the "Sweeney" of the title, and that title was the personal slogan of the News' founder. Joseph Medill Patterson: "Tell it to Sweeney -- the Stuyvesants will take care of themselves." It was that philosophy that made the News the most successful newspaper of its time -- not only was it the newspaper with the highest circulation in America from the 1920s thru the 1970s, at one point it topped its closest competior by over a million copies a day. And along the way it accumulated a unique cast of characters who made the paper what it was.

John Chapman was one of those characters -- the News' dramatic critic for most of the paper's golden age, he offers here an enteraining anecdotal history of the News from its founding as the nation's first tabloid in 1919 up to 1961, and of the people who made it great -- its editors, its reporters, its columnists, and the swashbuckling photographers who put the "Picture" in "New York's Picture Newspaper." "Day By Day" readers will especially appreciate the chapter devoted to the News' impressive stable of comic strips, which were, without doubt, a major reason for the paper's blockbuster circulation. Above all looms the dominant personality of the paper, that of Joseph Patterson himself -- a cousin of the Chicago Tribune's imperious Col. Robert R. McCormick, Patterson ran the paper as he saw fit for as long as he lived as a newsprint extention of his own personality, with all its improbable obsessions and contradictions intact. The story of his love-hate relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt offers a powerful summary of just how mercurial the man, and his newspaper, could be.

The News still survives as a shell of its former self, and somehow, despite being pillaged by a succession of incompetent corporate owners over the last forty-odd years, it still retains a whiff of its old zest. After reading this book, you'll understand why.

(Incidentally, when I took this book off my shelf this week and blew off the dust, I was astonished to discover that my copy is signed by Mr. Chapman himself. I've owned it for maybe 20 years without ever realizing that. I should dig around my shelves more often.)

 

[Harp]

I must read this. The Chicago Tribune was my mainstay paper, I delivered it
as a deliveryboy, my granduncle was editor after the Colonel's era when both
town and press room relaxed somewhat, it printed my letters when in college,
my regular pick up for years at LaSalle Street. Like Walter Cronkite, a member
of the family....Then, over time something slipped. Still familiar but unmistakeable
distance edged paper away, off the beaten path.

With the added perspective maturity gives came a certain disappointment.
Mike Royko. Always voracious, other voices, clarions calling. The greatest newspaper
in the world once now tasted a bit stale. Another member of mind, The Chicago Reader
a former heavyweight eclectic liberal read, hefty all four sections of her every sabbath,
embraced all things progressive with both arms and is now an emaciated dwarf.

Ancillary to reading, I was fed by Black Rock and Murrow's gang of cutthroats.
Men like Cronkite, Trout, Severeid, all of 'em, I considered the knights of the round
table, Arthurian legends. And the nuns. The black robed sirens who taught me
to read, demanded more be read, strict disciplinarians who read newspapers
and passed out the world's finest literature to pubescent rascals.

ALL, wrapped around by the world's greatest newspaper, the Chicago Tribune.

 

[Fading Fast]

Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Muncaby Ferdinand Mount published in 2020


Aunt Munca was an inveterate liar. Most of us have an aggressive liar or two in our wider family, but probably not quite like this one.

When author Ferdinand Mount was growing up in England just after World War II, his parents shipped him and his sister off to Aunt Munca's for summers and holidays. They did this, in part, because she was rich and gave them a nice experience and, in part, because she and her husband embraced their nephew and niece with zeal - even treated them almost like a brother and sister to their only daughter.

There were signs that everything wasn't quite square back then, some inconsistent stories, a lot of moves from fancy house to fancy house and attempts by Munca to keep her friends and even family separate from each other, but you tend to accept what you grow up with as it is.

As an adult, though, sardonic (he all but admits that) author Ferdinand Mount begins looking into Aunt Munca's past and discovers, not a complicated family tree, but a tangled garden of lies, twiisted around more lies, twisted around more lies.

Munca's past - lacking some sort of chart, it's almost impossible to keep it all straight - takes the reader back to the decidedly not-glamorous industrial town of Sheffield at the turn of the last century.

She wasn't Munca then, but she used so many names, in so many combinations throughout her life, that you have to think of her as Munca or you'll lose the thread completely.

Born into the lower strata of class-conscious England, Munca had three skills that she used to take her from near poverty in a filthy industrial town to incredible wealth and to, almost, the heights of British society.

One, she was an Olympic gold-medalist liar her entire life. Two, be it younger, older, rich or poor, men wanted to sleep with and marry her and she had no compunction against obliging.

Finally, three, she had an energy and drive that let her relentlessly harness her other two skills when mere mortal liars and philanderers would have let the balls all drop at some point from pure exhaustion.

Munca married early and often, and often without divorcing the prior husband: When you use fake names for yourself and family, bigamy becomes possible.

She also turned a son into a brother, moved her age around by, sometimes, nearly two decades, claimed her adopted daughter was her biological daughter and adopted and "un-adopted" another daughter with a frightening nonchalance.

Those events are still only scratching the surface of Munca's web. Even with all her obfuscation, manipulation and constant motion, an element of luck helps propel Munca into the upper echelons of British society.

Her housemaid mother married a wealthy and influential man decades after she first had an affair with him; an affair that might (spoiler alert) have given birth to Munca herself.

That man all but placed Munca's husband into a successful business and also provided social connections for Munca herself. Munca leveraged both of these opportunities for her own lifestyle and social advancement.

For most of us, there'd be little joy to Munca's money and position in society as it required a never-ending effort and a never-ending vigilance to keep her elaborate false identity secure. Yet one senses that it was all just part of life for Munca.

Heck, she was doing all that when she was poor and lower-class, anyway, so she probably thought, it's better to lie relentlessly and be rich and connected than lie relentlessly and be poor and a social nobody.

The story is entertaining enough in a "Holy Christ this is true" way, but author Mount also brings in enough history and social context to make the Aunt Munca story a quixotic romp through the first half of 19th century England.

Mount also makes the point that all these lies hurt many people: Munca's daughter only found out she was adopted when she was fifty and seems to have never recovered emotionally from that news.

Munca's son, who she "converted" to a brother (out-of-wedlock teenage birth and all) became his own little spinner of lies as he racked up even more marriages than his mother (that could also be genetics at work, though).

I only came to this book (it was heavily discounted) owing to one of Amazon's incessant "We found some books you should like" emails that usually show a surprisingly simplicit and off-the-mark artificial-intelligence algorithm at work.

While Kiss Myself Goodbye isn't a homerun, it is a quick and quirky read that has just enough history to kinda, sorta make you feel not too guilty reading what is really just a good and juicy glorified-tabloid story.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Proof once again that life is, indeed, stranger even than comic strips. It's a real shame she never ran into Tommy Manville.

 

[Harp]

Orientalism, Edward W Said

This 25th Anniversary Edition reprises Said's life theme that the West isn't best,
and East beats its own snare drum, different rhythm, different rhyme.

That the orient marches to a different drum has long puzzled Academe,
a self-inflicted malady that tickles the ivory tower no end and leaves its
denizens trapped inside a labyrinth of cruel dimension bereft of natural rights
cherished by the occident. And self inflicted wounds are nearly impossible to cure.

 

[Harp]

Simon Leys' epic essay collection The Hall of Uselessness

Leys wrote under a nom de plume but was a Belgian expatriate named
Pierre Ryckmans who passed eight years ago. I have made this particular
essay collection an annual Easter time feast, a masterpiece of soul to be
consumed with relish and a volume of considered thought regularly handed
to younger readers, and, more recently their parents to be passed on.

A splendid work of beauty and searing literature alternately writ
by feather quill and razored stick. His admonish of Christopher Hitchens
is a classic example of avuncular scholar taking an upstart editor to woodshed.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Peanut Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the Gang and the Meaning of Life published in 2019


Yes, it's a fanbook. If you aren't familiar with the "Peanuts" comicstrip and don't, at least, have a modestly favorable opinion of it, the nearly unanimous huzzahs and hallelujahs in this collection of thirty-three essays won't be for you.

That doesn't mean there isn't honest insight and analysis of Charles Schulz' iconic strip and characters, but it does mean these views are coming from writers and artists who love his work.

For full disclosure, in my jumping-all-around read of the essays - I first sussed out any that focused on Snoopy (I'm a fan, too) - I might have missed one, but part of the joy is the ability to pick and choose which essay to read next.

The essays, all by writers or cartoonists, run the gamut from deep analysis of the significance of "Peanuts" to the culture through the psychological makeup of the characters (there seems to be nearly unanimous opinion that Lucy is all id) to, my favorite essays, very personal accounts.

The high-brow "Peanuts reflected and changed a post-war culture becoming disaffected" analysis is thought provoking and engaging. Heck, who hasn't felt like Charlie Brown at periods in his or her own life? But also, that deep thinking, sometimes, feels like a bit of a stretch.

It's the "how a character affected me" pieces where the book becomes intimate. One such touching account describes how the author, a lonely, awkward kid, discovered a tattered paperback copy of reprinted strips in a friend's basement. After having spent hours with his find and, then, becoming a regular reader, he felt less lonely and awkward, not only that day, but for the rest of his life.

In another personal account, novelist Ann Patchett reveals how she was better able to absorb rejection letters as a young author having grown up seeing Snoopy get more than his fair share of them.

It's also Patchett who recount my favorite "strip" example amongst the many told in the book:

Charlie Brown to Linus: "I'm sorry...Snoopy can't go out to play right now...he's reading."

Linus: "Dogs can't read."

Charlie Brown: "Well, he's sitting in there holding a book."

Snoopy in his chair: "There's no way in the world that Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky could ever have been happy."

The Peanut Papers is a fun read for long-time devotees and even casual admirers of Schultz' comicstrip. It has just enough gravitas to kid yourself that it's not what it is, an adult fanbook. And it will probably do for you what it did for me: have you searching on-line for some old compilation books of the strips themselves to buy.

 

[Harp]

Peanuts rated top dog comic strip headliner in the Chicago Tribune Sunday edition.
Comforting member of the family strip along with Dondi and Terry and The Pirates, Gasoline Alley,
Moon Mullins. Didn't deliver the same punch or bite the other strips did, but then again it was
different, unique in some wonderful inexplicable way.

 

[Fading Fast]

The G-String Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee published in 1941


Yes, it's "that" Gypsy Rose Lee, the famous stripteaser, and, yes, she did write a murder mystery. And while it's got a bit of a pulp-fiction style, Lee's observations of the people and the world of burlesque are insightful and engaging.

The mystery at the heart of the book - two stripteasers in the show Ms. Lee is currently starring in are strangled with their own G-strings (today we're drench in salaciousness, in 1941 that had to be daring) - is, oddly, the less interesting part of the book.

Where The G-String Murders shine is taking the reader to the backstage world of burlesque, a combination of vaudeville and stripping. With four shows a day - singing, dancing, comedy numbers and, of course, stripping - the performers, men and women, "live" in the theater and form an adhoc family with all the closeness, animosity and dysfunction of any large family.

Miss Lee has an eye for detail and captures the feel of this demimonde world. The girls spend much of their days either on stage or in the communal dressing room of their rundown theater building preparing for the next show, working on their costumes, discussing the nuances of G-strings and talking about their ambitions and love lives. They form friendships and frenemies, as well as making some outright enemies.

It's not all women, though, as this very much Off-Broadway effort also includes the male performers, the stage hands, theater building workers, directors and producers. Of course, when you put men and women together in the same place, you get all the usual hanky panky and relationship ups and downs you'd expect.

Miss Lee also captures these male characters well, such as the show's reasonably decent producer, a very-of-the-1940s, uneducated, street-smart and weary man. He not only balances the show's finances and the temperaments of the cast and crew, but "navigates" the legal challenges of running an on-the-edge business.

Eventually, though, the book does get to the murders. We see, in quick succession, two strippers strangled, which puts the entire theater company on edge, while bringing the police into their insular world.

The reasons and methods of the murders (no spoilers coming), even when explained at the end, require a careful read, not only because of their very complicated details, but because new information is brought in, which modestly undermines the integrity of the mystery story itself.

That's a small quibble, though, as The G-String Murders is really less a mystery story than a backstage romp through the early 1940s world of burlesque with its picaresque characters and rundown-theater atmosphere. It's a quick, fun and light read that doesn't bring that much to the murder mystery genre, but is an insightful first-hand account of a now lost world.

For us today, The G-String Murders is also a neat bit of time travel as the argot, cultural references - Sears and Roebuck, Walter Winchell and others - and atmosphere all drop you nicely into New York City, just off of Broadway, in 1940. Plus, who would have thought a famous striptease artist would prove to also be a talented writer?


A big hat tip to @LizzieMaine for this enjoyable recommendation. You can read her much-more insightful comments on the book here: #8,824

 

[Fading Fast]

Naomi By Junichiro Tanizaki originally published in 1924


In the novel Naomi, we see that many of the younger cosmopolitan Japanese of the 1920s had a fascination with everything Western. This caused twenty-eight-year-old, well-educated salaryman (good job as an electrical engineer) Jōji to take on the upbringing of poor but pretty fifteen-year-old Japanese, but "Eurasian-looking," Naomi.

Jōji, the narrator, comes from a wealthy family, but owing to his short stature and unattractive looks, is shy around women, so in Japanese Naomi, he sees a chance to create a Westernized version of his ideal woman.

His plan is to educate her in Western ways. He hires an English language teacher for her, while having her take Western music and dance lessons. He also encourages and funds her Western activities - American movies, cafes, magazines, etc.

This fascination with Westerners leads to much discussion on how Naomi's skin is "white" like a Westerner's and how many Japanese women try to "whiten" their skin. Jōji even encourages an independent "Western" attitude in Naomi versus the subservient way traditional Japanese women were raised. The seed of destruction is planted.

While all this sounds creepy to us today, even after Naomi moves in, Jōji does not pursue a sexual relationship with her for years and, of course, the time, place and cultural norms were very different.

For the first several years, all goes well as Naomi embraces her new life, even developing a genuine affection for Jōji that doesn't turn sexual until she is eighteen.

When it does, and for a time, Jōji and Naomi seem very happy as he has his "ideal" Westernized woman and Naomi seems to be developing into a happy, if a bit spoiled and stubborn, young woman.

But with Jōji away at work all day and Naomi socializing with other young Japanese of her own age, who also embrace "Western" ways, she begins to see the limits of her relationship with Jōji and the power her beauty and sexuality has over men.

Her spending is also starting to break Jōji as Naomi indulges all her material desires for Western and even traditional Japanese clothes, records, jewelry and entertainment. If Jōji balks, she withholds sex, which drives him mad.

Then it all gets much worse. At first it appears Naomi has had one affair, but as time goes by, Jōji discovers that Naomi is quite loose with her sexuality, trading it for luxury and attention with a significant number of men.

After much fighting, this causes a break in their relationship as Naomi moves out. Jōji is at first crushed, but then begins to see what she had been doing to him. Just when he seems free, she comes back to taunt and entice him again with her sexuality.

Ultimately, Jōji either has to give the now obdurate Naomi, who willingly swaps her body for material goods, what she wants or he will lose her forever. Even when he clearly sees this, Jōji is often powerless to say no to her offers of sex.

(Spoiler alert) As the book closes, Jōji takes Naomi back on her terms - she has no restrictions and can even "see" other men. They'll continue to live together as long as he supports her in a luxurious Western style.

What is author Tanizaki saying with this short, powerful novel? While he clearly sees the attraction of Western culture, if Naomi is the result of that cultural influence, it is hard to see Tanizaki as a supporter. It seems, the Western culture he initially believed added needed spice to the hidebound Japanese culture, he found less appealing when fully embraced.

He is also commenting on the power a young and beautiful woman can have over a young man. Jōji goes from being a shy but reasonably rational and confident young man, to a weak and broken one under the spell of a beautiful and manipulative woman.

Naomi created a stir when first released in Japan as, not surprisingly, the older generation saw it as a rebuke of the young generation's embrace of Western ways and easy sexuality. Those Western ways, though, were the exact things that appealed to Tanizaki's younger readers.

From a 2022 American view, Naomi can be seen as a Japanese version of the generational strife that was going on in America in the 1920s. Back then, America's "flappers -" young, free-spirited women who "bobbed" their hair, dressed revealingly, danced, smoked, drank, wore makeup and had casual sexual affairs with men - were denounced by older Americans.

In Naomi, we see that, despite the limited and slower global communications of that era, the same cultural battle, albeit with Japanese characteristics, was being waged in a country all the way on the other side of the Pacific. Even being a hundred years in the past and in a different culture, Tanizaki's Naomi still speaks to us today because, beneath the surface differences, these struggles - generational stress and sexual relations - are timeless.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Re: The G-String Murders

That reminds me: 25 years ago, we knew a trio of young, beautiful women who worked as teachers in a very broken, inner city east coast slum. They were saints and often intervened in the lives of their students above and beyond the call of duty. Interestingly, during their summers, they went out of state and worked as strippers all summer long. Their only rule was “don’t date the clientele.” They claimed that they made more money during the summer than during the entire rest of the year. Claimed they enjoyed both jobs. Always thought it was an interesting story; says so much on so many levels. Possibly a good basis for a book or screenplay.

What am I reading? “Keneti. South seas adventures of Kenneth Emory.” It’s the biography of the Dean of Hawaii archaeology. Makes me wish I had lived here before WWII… and before statehood wrecked the place.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Just finished an excellent new biography of one of my broadcasting heroes -- "Red Barber: The Life and Legacy of a Broacasting Legend," by Judith R. Hiltner and James R. Walker.

I was always surprised that no one had ever done a full length, scholarly biography of "The Ol' Redhead,"given his seminal role in the development of American sportscasting, and had even considered trying one myself. What Edward R. Murrow was to news, Barber was to sports -- establishing a standard of journalistic integrity that, for a time at least, stood as the definitive standard for the entire profession. But Hiltner and Walker beat me to it, and they've done an excellent job getting into the real man behind the folksy-but-meticulous on-air persona that transfixed baseball fans in Cincinnati, Brooklyn, and New York for over thity years -- and then all over again as a general commentator on National Public Radio thru the 1980s.

Those who listened to Barber's broadcast saw him as a friendly uncle, or a back-fence neighbor, whose colorful Southernisms barely concealed a sharp, probing intellect, and he was, in fact, that. But he was also a thoughtful man, constantly questioning himself and his own motives, and always looking for meaning in life beyond the balls and strikes. He was religious in the way that people used to be religious before "religious" took on certain political connotations, and he was both a dedicated communitarian and a devoted individualist depending on what it was that he was doing at any given point in time. He was, the authors demonstrate, a frustratingly difficult man to really know, with his on-air persona very much at odds with the essentially shy, even insecure man behind it.

Those insecurities drove Barber hard, pressuring him to maintain rigorous standards in his public and private life, to the point where the stress nearly killed him, several times. He nearly bled to death in a public bathroom when an ulcer ruptured in 1948, he suffered two heart attacks, he went completely deaf in one ear, and finally, in 1960, he lost two thirds of his stomach. But still he kept pushing, pressuring himself to maintain his own uncompromising standards.

Barber was pushed out of Brooklyn by Walter F. O'Malley in 1953, leaving the young Vin Scully, whom he had hand-picked and carefully trained, as his successor, and he moved on to Yankee Stadium, where he was miserable. Yankee management never knew what to do with him, and while he got along well with incumbent broadcaster Mel Allen, he chafed at having to put up with ex-players in the booth. He tolerated Phil Rizzuto, he came to respect Jerry Coleman -- but he had no use at all for Joe Garagiola, who was everything he felt a broadcaster should *not* be, and the two years they worked together marked the end of the line for Barber's broadcasting career. The authors have done their research for this period, and settle once and for all the question of exactly why Barber was fired, and who was responsible.

The final section of the book explores just how busy Barber was in his retirement. He wrote five excellent books, he conducted a weekly newspaper column, he traveled the world, and came to terms with many of his own self-doubts. He reunited with old friends -- leading, for example to the extraordinary moment when Barber convinces the elderly but still-tempestuous Larry MacPhail to preach a guest sermon in his church. And when NPR brought him back to the microphone in 1982, he dived in with a zeal he hadn't felt since the old days at Ebbets Field. He was honored to be one of the first two broadcasters inducted into the Hall of Fame, and he even reconciled with old enemies like O'Malley and Garagiola. It wasn't quite going to be a happy ending -- Barber spent his final years watching his beloved wife's struggle with Alzheimer's desease, even as his own health failed -- the authors do demonstrate that when The Ol' Redhead breathed his last in 1992, he did so secure in the knowledge of a life well lived. This book is a worthy chronicle of that life.