The Devil Finds Work: An Essay
by James Baldwin
(4/7/2025)
"After fifty years it's interesting." (Yoko Ono, GRAPEFRUIT. )
Films, books-the portrayal of corruption really do not do much good when faced with betrayals in the moral climate of the times. "They convey, without confronting, the anguish of a people caught in a legend."(p. 58) But they help provide a language, a framework for understanding, as James Baldwin's teacher, Bill, implies.
And so Baldwin goes to the movies, using them as the scaffolding for observational essays.
Audiences for Saturday mornings, for example, (Episodic series are not new, they just are not in the movie theater any more; they are streamed on our personal devices.) The tension is the same. What is going to happen next? When I lived in France in the 50's and 60's I was often asked about what I was doing for the "Negro." James Baldwin tells us without the use of a single euphemism. He spells it out.
Daughters of Shandong
by Eve J. Chung
Compassionate empathy for humans caught in unfathomable chaos (4/7/2025)
I have often wondered how it is that people know to leave. Where would a story teller be without a journey? Hai tells this story, with the help of her grandmother. A stranger's gift is part of a chain of cultural transmissions through the Chinese Civil war, the Cultural Revolution and the Chinese settlement of Taiwan. It is a terrible journey that the Women make.
You can hear the grandmother's voice from the turbulent past that saw the building of China and Taiwan. The linguistic eccentricities of present speech blossom like scattered blood and brains in the snow .
Girl Falling: A Novel
by Hayley Scrivenor
"You must not let yourself think the bad thought (9/8/2024)
A triangle is a meticulous structure. 1st person Narration requires a fixed focus and this suspenseful novel is very specific in clues and a distinct sense of place. The Blue Mountains play a part in the Back and Forth narration of three people "having something kind of good" and wanting more. Finn, Magdu and Daphne -One is treacherous, one is good, and what about the third?
Do Tell: A Novel
by Lindsay Lynch
"It's like something they make up for the pictures" (6/15/2023)
Gossip is really sticking your nose into somebody else's business and this is a book that tells what happens next. A mediocre actress becomes a successful gossip columnist in Hollywood's "golden" time of pictures. There's a lot of space where not much happens but it's filled with quite delicious detail that has been carefully imagined.When I saw Kirk Douglas at a presentation of SPARTACUS he left us saying, "Enjoy yourself! It's a good Picture." Much like "Do Tell."
Two Storm Wood: A Novel
by Philip Gray
How should a War End? (12/7/2021)
From the seriously fine opening to the tense unraveling and binding up, TWO STORM WOOD by Philip Gray is a thriller, a love story, and a history.
World War One is over. The parades have been run. But they turn the corner and the marching soldiers disappear. And that is why Amy, a girl in love, needs to go to the place in France where her soldier lover fell. Amiens was the beginning of the end of the War for Britain but for Amy it is the beginning of a quest. Like Antigone she goes into the trenches, discovering more about war than she ever wanted to know. It is ugly and what is left behind is putrid and smelly. The terrain is. minutely described as well as what it contains. This is a book of many layers. What lies beneath is outlined by streams and sunlight, much like the map that Amy uses to get to the truth.
She meets up with volunteers who are finding bodies and identifying graves. This is set in 1919 but the truth of the matter is in the graves, excavated, dug and yet to be dug. "Grave Identifiers" still exist today in 2021. Bodies still need rest. (Rudyard Kipling's son fell in 1915 and was identified in 1992-see My Boy Jack.)
I thought I knew quite a lot about the Western Front but I was grateful for the computer because there were many times when I stopped to look up places, battalions and oh my goodness things I did not know and about which I intend to find out more. (The CLC needs to be unburied.)
When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky
by Margaret Verble
You. have never read anything like it! (11/4/2021)
If leaping into a pool on horseback is what you do then when you can't do it your job possibilities are less shining than you might like. But "....had never been inactive in her life...Forced into it she recognized that the world inside her and the world unseen were every bit as engaging..."Two Feathers is the very smart young woman who observes and takes active part in the world around her. Who would kill a Hippo? This world includes animals , alive and dead, countless people of every hue, alive and dead, all yearning to be seen. And seen they are in this very intense, often very funny, historical novel. Tennessee in the 20's must have been a transitional marker in American society. How racial dynamics affect people just trying to get by and get back on the horse is reflected in the exquisite detail written. I want to see Harmonica in his dog cart. He is one of many vivid people who just passes through. And is seen.
Just the many means of locomotion are worth discovering in this perfectly wonderful book. And the people! And the Animals. And the Dead. And especially Two Feathers!
The Personal Librarian
by Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray
Secrets in Public (2/10/2021)
It takes very courageous writers of deep experience to take on Belle da Costa Greene, a vibrantly authentic woman. Choosing a first person post of view and placing it in a historical context in the present tense, while creating a fictional text is certainly ambitious. The focus of the book, indeed the center of the book is a woman who deserves to be remembered and celebrated.She is memorialized in the world of rare treasures in a fascinating biography by Heidi Ardizzone, AN ILLUMINATED LIFE: Belle daCosta Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege. Here, in THE PERSONAL LIBRARIAN imagination enlarges historical fact. It is helpful that each chapter has a date as a chapter head and flashbacks between Washington DC and New York City. These dates are important anchors.
This is a layered book of secrets hidden and uncovered, quests and an enchanting main character, Belle..
Belle da Costa Green lived her professional life as the professional emissary of J. P Morgan, one of the immensity rich barons who helped to gild the Gilded Age. She remained the representative negotiator for the J.P Morgan Library into mid century. The characters with whom Belle mingles have volumes written about them - Vanderbilt, Elsie de Wolfe, Lillian Russell, Oscar Wilde, Steichen, Stieglitz, Bernard Berenson and of course the collector himself, J.P. Morgan. (E.L. Doctorow's RAGTIME, covers the same period. I sure did miss Coalhouse Walker Jr., but he was fiction. Remember how he took on J.P. Morgan who wasn't) The intricacies of acquisition and collection are detailed - if you want one (thing), you want another one. The obsession of collecting, sometimes called "rationalized greed", is detailed. The desire for knowledge, like the thirst for more - more riches - more more, increases with the acquisition. Nothing but the prize - the goal is the thing.
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