First Stop: Chilangos

Chilangos are what people who are from Mexico City, the "D.F" are called. David Lida has been living in Mexico City for 15 years and although some of First Stop in the New World, Mexico City the Capital of the 21rst Century is more for gringos, a lot of it is interesting to chilangos or tapatios for that matter. Mr.Lida talks about taxicabs, high rents, prostitutes, drug addicts, street kids, Carlos Slim etc. He even talks to some old vedettes and mentions Olga Briskin and Lyn May. Vedettes are female performers who have shows and are always provocative and scantily dressed. Olga Briskin used to come to Guadalajara and in the paper El Informador there would be an ad for her show with her dressed like Elvira, but playing a violin. Very cultured. I had forgotten her presence in this world.

The Constant Reader on Pooh

There is a funny bit in last week's New Yorker in an article on a children's librarian at the NYC Public Library; it talks about Dorothy Parker in a book review column called 'The Constant Reader' reviewing The House at Pooh Corner.

"Pooh's wasn't just a Good Hum and a Hopeful Hum, Parker noted. It was a hummy hum. "And it is that word 'hummy', my darlings," Parker wrote, "that marks the first place in 'the House at Pooh Corner' at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."

Well my darlings, in case anyone was drawing a line in the sand, for your information, the Chain Weader never fwowed up on poor Pooh Bear! Chain Weader wuvs Pooh bear. Bery much. So there.

Treasure Island Exciting

This was so exciting. I don't think I had ever read it. Now I want to read Kidnapped and Dr.Jekyl and Mr.Hyde. All books should be so well written and exciting. Cross out Salman Rushdie's "Lyrical!" on book jackets and write 'Robert Louis Stevenson says "Exciting!"' and I'll buy it!

I also just read Once Upon a Time in the North which is a short sort of prequel to Philip Pullman's The Dark Materials which I also must say was quite 'Exciting!' ('Exciting!' says Gaye Gentes.)

Rich Man's Diseases

Inspired by that piece in the NYT I bought the Allen Shawn book, Wish I Could be There. Wish I Could Not Have! Self-indulgent to the core. Any interest in his family is put aside to long chapters on brain science and more particularly His Brain. Who cares? It reminds me of that scene in Bertolucci's The Last Emperor where all the palace physicians gather around the little boy emperors' chamber pot to peer in intently. Well, Allen, I'm not peering in with them. Sorry.

The Unrest Cure

I read a very funny short story by Saki today called The Unrest Cure. His stories are extremely short, like 6 pages each. In the start of the story Clovis is on the train in a railway carriage with a 'solid, sedate individual' with a very stodgy and prim suitcase, who 'one could have gauged fairly accurately by the temperment and mental outlook of the traveling bag's owner. But he seemed unwilling to leave anything to the imagination of a casual observer, and his talk grew presently personal and introspective'. OK so I know it was written in 1911, but does this sound like the conversations you often are forced to hear on the train, only on people's cellphones? How prescient.

My Summer Reading Plans

Substitute brunette for blonde and Proust for Joyce and you get the picture.....

Seven Degrees of Separation from Proust

http://www.gnooks.com/

Go to this site and type in your favorite author and it supposedly creates a sort of constellation of all similar authors that you might like. I typed in Margot Livesey and got all the usual and predictable suspects: Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, Anthony Powell, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch. The fun is the sort of initial big bang when the names all go flying off the central name and then hover as if thinking and reconsidering...'should Somerset Maugham go here next to A.S. Byatt or over here near Ian McEwan?' And the most pleasing thing was that Proust showed up in the constellation, I am feeling a small glow of accomplishment already. Today Margot Livesey...tomorrow Proust....

The House on Fortune Street

I just read House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey. I always wonder if she's related to Roger Livesey (red headed Scottish star of my two all time favorite old movies (Emeric-Pressburger of course), Do You Know Where You're Going? and Colonel Blimp.) She is Scottish but I have never heard Roger mentioned in any review. Maybe Livesey is the Scottish equivalent of the Vietnamese Nguyen?

Anyway the book is quite good, four different characters retelling the same relationships through different eyes. In comparison to last weeks Post Birthday World, it's not as torturous or self involved, and the character's voices are from people you might possibly care about. My only hesitation is that Livesey might have meant the two different central women had different attitudes to the men in their lives because of their fathers. More pyschological work than I cared to do...so I let that possible subtext wash over me.

One of female characters is quite shy and very insecure with men, when she's going out to meet yet another loser, her office mate tells her 'Remember Pavorotti': apparently when someone asked Pavorotti if a particular audience would like him, he replied" the question is--- will I like them?" A nice way to put it.

A Book I Won't be Reading

O.K. It sounds amazing and like something I should read but....I can't do it. One story is supposedly about a Kenyan street family in which the wage earner is a 12-year-old prostitute and the parents give their children glue to sniff because it’s cheaper than food and makes them forget they're hungry. According to the NYT today: “As translucent a style as I’ve read in a long while,” Alan Cheuse wrote in The Chicago Tribune, adding that the subjects “nearly render the mind helpless and throw the heart into a hopeless erratic rhythm out of fear, out of pity, out of the shame of being only a few degrees of separation removed from these monstrous modern circumstances.”
What has happened to me? Single childless Gaye read Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and loved it and laughed at Todd Solentz films. She was made of sterner stuff. Have I become a timid tremulous little person living in Swampscott and ignoring the cries of the oppressed? Apparently---yes. I will leave it to Angelina Jolie to read.