read all the books I own

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy (1899)

This book is wonderful. A history of gang activity in New York City from roughly the beginning of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, written by a newspaper reporter, and the source material for the Martin Scorsese film of the same name. For much of the period covered by the book, politicians and police forces were largely on the take (Tammany Hall) and willing to look the other way while gangs carried on their business. Gangs were also hired by politicians to intimidate and harass during elections. In some sections of the city of the time, people lived in horrible poverty and almost unimaginable conditions, and it was from these areas that the gangs first arose. Asbury loves the colour and panache of the gangsters, who bore names like Monk Eastman, Bum Mahoney, Little Augie and Kid Dropper; gang names included The Daybreak Boys, The Hookers, and The Little Dead Rabbits. The gangs of the period were eventually brought under control as political and police corruption was exposed and public sentiment favoured reform. Asbury knows they were punks: ’ ... the gangster was a stupid roughneck born in filth and squalor and reared amid vice and corruption. He fulfilled his natural destiny.’ His enthusiasm in telling their legendary exploits, though, is infectious.

Schama uses the novelist’s tools to tell two stories which demonstrate the difficulty of arriving at a definitive version of any historical event. The first is the death of General James Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, and the subsequent mythology built up around him by, among others, Benjamin West, who painted the very famous The Death of General Wolfe (1770) and the American historian Francis Parkman, who wrote about Wolfe. Schama shows us many different versions of Wolfe: was he hero or invalid? Whose interpretation is correct? Schama includes imagined scenes in his story, which are based on his careful research.

The second story is of the murder in Boston of Francis Parkman’s brother George by a Harvard professor named John Webster. Again, the focus is on the many different versions of the murder itself presented at Webster’s murder trial and the variety of impressions of Webster and Parkman among the citizens of Boston.

Schama is a very good writer, and this is an interesting examination of the historical process, of the fictionalizing tendency in all story-telling, whether fact-based or not. Nevertheless, I’m not sure, after reading it, why he wrote it. Two interesting stories, connected by the Parkman family, but nothing terribly urgent or profound in the material communicated. Still, worth reading.

Home of the Gentry/Turgenev (1859)

Bay Window Bohemia/Oscar Lewis (1956)
The Zen Koan/Isshu Miura & Ruth Fuller Sasaki (1965)
A Death in Jerusalem/Kati Marton (1994)

Not very well-written account of a fascinating subject: lesbian and bisexual actresses, writers and directors in Hollywood. And it’s quite a list: Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Alla Nazimova, Katherine Cornell, Mercedes de Acosta, Joan Crawford, Laurette Taylor, Dorothy Arzner, Tallulah Bankhead, Jill Esmond, Libby Holman, Judy Garland, Agnes Moorehead, Dolores del Rio, Elsa Lanchester – and that’s only a partial list. Sometimes Madsen is a bit irritating, like when he includes Katherine Hepburn in the book but provides no anecdotal evidence that she was gay or bisexual. The book is riddled with factual errors, perhaps just in this printing, getting the names of performers and titles of books wrong. Really interesting, though. Proof of how powerful the studio’s publicity teams were in creating false, heterosexual bios for the stars and how impenetrable the private lives of the performers often were. Even today, when much more is in the open, lots of Hollywood actors remain closeted and it’s mostly not discussed (except maybe in the Enquirer), so, in a way, not much has changed.

Interesting, well-written, if a little dry, account of the ‘Beat’ scene in tiny Venice, California in the fifties, centred on writer and promoter (and father of the ponderous host of Inside the Actors Studio, James Lipton) Lawrence Lipton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lipton), author of, among other things, The Holy Barbarians (1959), a rather sensationalistic account of the scene. No writer of consequence emerged from the community (except for Alexander Trocchi, author of Cain’s Book (1960), who was really a visitor) but they were a fascinating collection of eccentrics and dreamers. Many were destroyed by drug use, including a writer named Charles Foster. I remembered Maynard saying Foster had a short piece published by Trocchi, Terry Southern, and Richard Seaver in an anthology called Writers in Revolt (1963), and I found a copy of that today, in a bargain bin. Foster’s piece is called The Troubled Makers and other writers in the book include Sartre, Beckett, Burroughs, etc. It was his moment in the sun. A little-known chapter in American literary and cultural history.

Just no time to write on here anymore. Phil Andros was the pseudonym of Samuel Steward (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Andros) and also the name of the protagonist of these stories, a gay hustler. This was published three years after John Rechy’s groundbreaking City of Night, also about hustling. Steward was a good writer and the stories were published in a more censorious time so, thankfully, they concentrate on character and relationship more than on sexual content. There is a weird post-modern twist here: there is a tattoo artist in the book named Pete Swallow, which was the name Steward took in real life when he left teaching and became a tattoo artist. When Andros talks about making it with Swallow, he’s basically saying he made love with himself! The book ends on a strange note with Andros and another character voluntarily becoming slaves of a black man named Adam X. There are hints of S&M in the book prior to this and an awareness of the civil rights movement of the time; this plot twist, developed in the last two stories, gives the book a sharp left turn at the end and we are curious as to what will happen next. Steward wrote other Phil Andros books. I haven’t read them and have no idea if they carry on from here. My copy, found in a bargain bin for a dollar, is an original edition complete with dust jacket illustrated in the style of the period with Phil in his leathers surrounded by admirers. Very camp.

Not sure why I read this. It’s the story of Gingerich’s quest to track down all the still existing first (1543) and second editions of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus, in which the astronomer first suggested that the sun was the centre of the universe rather than the earth. Didn’t understand a lot of the astronomy, but the stuff about antiquarian book dealers, stolen books, fakes, etc. I found interesting and Gingerich has a reader-friendly style.

Am sadly never going to get around to writing about these books and the pile just keeps getting bigger. Read a bunch of books on the seventies for research for a project that never happened. The rest are just random.

Jeff Kisseloff/Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s: An Oral History (2006)
David Allyn/Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution, An Unfettered History (2000)
Robert Houriet/Getting Back Together (1971)
Robert Greenfield/The Spiritual Supermarket (1975)
David Harris/Dreams Die Hard: Three Men’s Journey Through the Sixties (1982)
Charles Kaiser/1968 in America (1988)
Raymond Mungo/Mungobus: Famous Long Ago; Total Loss Farm; Return to Sender (1979)
Paul S. Collins/Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World (2001)
Karen Armstrong/The Bible: A Biography (2007)
John Rechy/About My Life and the Kept Woman (2008)
Tiancheng Lu/The Embroidered Couch (translation 2001)
George Hayim/Obsession (1970)