MarysLibrary

Red, Hot & Rich!

Cole Porter is widely respected as perhaps America's best composer of popular song and rightly so. He wrote both the music and lyrics to his songs and this, - along with his genius - explains their perfection. The words are witty and were at the time he was writing prolifically for the Broadway stage a little risque. They appealed to the sophisticated and often - as in the case of "Love for Sale" - deeply dismayed the moralists.

The list of his shows is stunning, with Anything Goes and Kiss Me, Kate being the most well-know and best loved. His songs often urged disobedience, breaking rules, pushing the limits: "Anything Goes," "Let's Misbehave," "Experiment," "Let's Do It," and more.

He loved the voice of Ethel Merman and wrote songs for her, knowing that she was at her best at the finish and adding codas to songs to take advantage of this. He knew she held A flat and C longest and loudest and put those notes into his music for her. 

Red, Hot & Rich: An Oral History of Cole Porterwritten by David Grafton (1987) brings these and other bits of information about Porter and his music to the surface and I learned things from the book that I hadn't learned elsewhere, and I already knew quite a bit about Cole Porter, his music, and his life. But it is oral history and the comments often contradict one another and the author of necessity intrudes to fill in gaps between the anecdotes from Brooke Astor, Gerald Murphy, Noel Coward, Irving Berlin, and almost everyone else of any celebrity in the 20s through the 50s.

So this is a good book, but not a great one, and certainly not the place to start if you don't already know at least some of the words to "You're the Top" ("...you're the National Gallery, you're Garbo's salary, you're cellophane"), if your heart doesn't stop when you hear "...the change from major to minor," and if you don't have some idea of the schizophrenic life homosexuals lived in the upper reaches of society and show business in the early part of the 20th century.

Marlboro Airport Day

Big doin's today at my sister's airport. This is a photo of Sandy's husband, Bob, and my grand-niece, Ella. They had helicopter and biplane rides, a sky diver, old race cars, new fire department equipment, a flyover, and a gazillion people. Looks like a lot of fun.

My Hollywood

Mona Simpson has some enticing books out there but somehow I missed the Simpson boat and haven't read anything by her. Now, however, I'm engrossed in her latest novel, My Hollywood, and I'm liking it so much I've bought Anywhere But Here, her first novel, published in 1987.

I can't remember when I've read an author who has been able to put me so convincingly inside the head of a character as Simpson can, and she does it with two characters in this powerful book.

Here's what Publisher's Weekly's starred review said about My Hollywood:

In her first novel since Off Keck Road, Simpson tells a blistering story of fractured love and flailing parents. Claire, a composer and new mother, has moved to Santa Monica, Calif., so that her husband, Paul, can follow his dreams of becoming a TV comedy writer. When Paul’s job requires late nights, Claire, already overwhelmed with balancing motherhood and career, hires Lola, a middle-aged Filipina, to help with her son, William, and soon Lola’s trying to plug holes in Claire and Paul’s slowly sinking family ship.

Claire and Lola narrate in alternating chapters; fragile and sometimes fierce Claire deploys a biting wit that shreds the pretensions that permeate her social life and her marriage, while Lola is more open-hearted and eager to help people, though she also draws laughs with her observations about wealthy families. The story both satirizes and earnestly assesses the failings of upper-middle-class L.A., and Simpson’s taut prose allows her to drill into the heart of relationships, often times with a single biting sentence. Funny, smart, and filled with razor sharp observations about life and parenthood, Simpson’s latest is well worth the wait.

 

New Books

The mail just brought some treasures including Thornton Wilder's last novel, The Eighth Day, published in 1967, when it won the National Book Award.

The 22nd Avenue Book Club has chosen this book for our November meeting and since I was struggling to get through the book we will discuss at our September meeting, James Jones' From Here to Eternity, I picked up this one instead. About 100 pages in I knew I had to buy it.

And since I was buying one book from Amazon.com I might as well pick up a few others that I've had my eye on. Hence the Nancy Mitford novel, Wigs on the Green and the Georgette Heyer mysteries. She wrote four Inspector Hannasyde mysteries in the mid to late 1930s which have recently been republished by Sourcebooks Landmark (a publisher with which I'm not familiar.) But good for them. They are republishing all or most of Georgette Heyer's romances as well. I got the other two Hannasyde mysteries for my Kindle.

Recently I picked up a used copy of the biography of Ivy Compton Burnett by Hilary Spurling and this has inspired me to read or re-read her unusual and clever novels with their This and That titles. The one I just got is Pastors and Masters. My favorites are A God and His Gifts, A House and its Head, and Manservant and Maidservant.

Getting It

A Guest Post by Wilhelm

I don't read many novels about lawyers.  I'm a bit more inclinded to read a lawyer novel if it is more in the humor genre than having pretenses to portraying "courtroom drama" (which comes perilously close to being an oxymoron).  But, I couldn't resist reading Getting It, by Daniel Shaviro almost as soon as I read about it in the TaxProf Blog.  Daniel Shaviro is a tax professor at the New York University Law School.  This book, apparently, is his first foray into fiction and makes for an odd relative to his other books, which are all academic legal texts.

Professor Shaviro started this book in the 1980s when he was a young lawyer working in Washington, DC.  Recently he got back to it and finished it.  The novel sets out the various misadventures of three young lawyers at a large Washington, DC, law firm in 1983.  The three are associates and are about to be considered for partnership.  The prime candidate is the unscrupulous Bill Doberman.  Will he make partner, or will his utter ruthlessness catch up to him not in the good way?

This is not great literature, but it is amusing, especially if you have at least a passing familiarity with big law firms.  I never inhabited that world, but was residing at the fringes of it in 1983, when the novel takes place.  At that time I was still a youngish federal agency lawyer in Washington, DC.  The Washington Post semi-regularly had articles about the harrowing life of associates at the big law firms.  The typical career path at that time (and still much the same today) is for young lawyers to be hired by these firms right out of law school (or, perhaps, right out of a judicial clerkship following law school).  These associates (that is, employees of the law firm) would work devilishly long hours handling what were often mind-numbingly dull matters.  The carrot was the possibility of being made a partner after six years of this drudgery.  The attrition rate over the six-year period was high, and even those who made it all the way through six years were still far from assured of making partner. 

One anecdote from a Washington Post article about law firm associates that I particularly remember involved two associates who were the leading contenders to make partner at their big-time law firm.  One of the competing associates set a firm record by billing 24 hours of work during a single day.  (The number of "billable hours" worked by an associate each year is a very important factor in consideration for partnership.)  This associate's competitor decided that he mustn't allow himself to be outdone.  He set a new firm record by starting work at midnight, booking a flight to Los Angeles, working on the plane, and -- thanks to the time change -- billing 27 hours of work for the day.

If you would like an amusing peek into this part of the legal world, read Professor's Shaviro's Getting It.

De-Lovely

We watched the 2004 movie, De-Lovely the other night. It's about the life of Cole Porter with Kevin Kline in the title role and Ashley Judd as his wife, Linda. It's not perfect, but Kevin Kline is always worth watching and the performers they got to do the songs were terrific.

As we watched I mentioned that the gal singing "Let's Do It" was great. And the one who sang "Begin the Beguine" too. And the guys who sang "Let's Misbehave" and "De-Lovely." And was that Natalie Cole singing "Every Time We Say Goodbye?"

It was, and those others were Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crowe, Elvis Costello, and Robbie Williams. I didn't recognize any of these people by sight or voice but I did recognize that they are all great at delivering Cole Porter songs.

Here's Alanis Morissette singing "Let's Do It."

Bookcase

The Thirteenth Tale

I missed The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield when it was published in 2006. So when I spotted it recently at the library I borrowed it. The cover sold it.

Unfortunately, this book and I didn't click. I gave it the old college try. In fact I read exactly 3/4 of the book before I gave up. When I picked it up this morning I realized it was a chore to read another page. I didn't care what Vida Winter's secrets were. I didn't care who started the fire or who was the mother of what's his name. I didn't care about the family secrets of the narrator.

I found the Gothic elements of the novel artificial and superimposed on a fairly strange but not overly mysterious story. I didn't like the insanity, incest, madwoman in the attic, ruined manor house, or any of the rest of it. I liked a couple of the characters, including the Mary Poppins-like governess and the gardener, but the governess didn't last long and the gardener's "arc' was not developed.

All this negativity is a bit unfair. So you might want to read a positive review to counter my sour comments. And a positive blog post. And perhaps a so-so blog post.

But that really is a hot cover.

 

A Book a Day

Lately I've been whipping through four or five books a week, one right after the other, hardly stopping to choose the next title, just grabbing what's handy. A couple of hours ago it was Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector that I picked up. It starts out quickly defining the two major characters using mostly dialog, and I love dialog that zings.

Before that I finished Katie Fforde's Wedding Season. And before that The Lightening Thief by Rick Riordan, a YA book about a demi-god named Percy (Perseus) Jackson who is sent on a quest to find Zeus' lightening bolt, thought to have been stolen by Percy's dad, Poseidon. Whimsical and charming.

I spent about 24 hours on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a book that is just as gripping as they are all saying. But I'm not entirely sure what I think about it except that all that sex and violence was really not necessary. Before that it was The Hunger Games, recommended by a librarian. Good but . . . it's another book I need to think about.

Nicola Upson's second mystery with Josephine Tey as the detective is even better than the first. It's called Angel with Two Faces. Jane Smiley's Private Life was terrific, and so was Robert Goddard's Painting the Darkness. Last month I read Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens' memoir. You either love Hitchens or you hate him; I love him and found this a treat to read. I've whipped through 17 or 18 of Hazel Holt's Mrs Malory mysteries. I could whip through another half a hundred without getting bored.

Tarquin Hall's second Vish Puri mystery was excellent. I'm still hungry for Indian food. One of the best books I've read this year is Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead by Paula Byrne. Then of course I had to re-read Brideshead Revisited. It gets better with time. I also re-read Decline and Fall and have Vile Bodies on my TBR pile.

And so it goes.