Everyone has heard of the historical figure, Karl Marx.But no one remembers his sister, Onya, who invented the starting pistol.
I’m so sick and tired of my friends who can’t handle their alcohol. Last night they dropped me 3 times trying to carry me to the car.
My wife is singing in the house.I’m sitting outside so the neighbors don’t think I’m hitting her.
You and your child are driving at night along a deserted road. You come across an old van piled full of money with the driver dead at the wheel. What lesson do you teach your child?Lift with your legs, not your back.
Adulthood is saying, “But after this week things will slow down a bit”, over and over until you die.
Today is the birthday, in 1940, of Richard Starkey, better known as Ringo Starr. During his long journey with The Beatles, he rarely sang lead but there are a few Beatles songs that featured Ringo. Here, he and Paul McCartney sing on the most popular of the Beatle’s songs featuring Ringo.
I just finished reading Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams. It’s marketed as a ‘Black Bridget Jones’ but it’s so far from that it gives marketing a bad name. It’s much darker. I initially had some trouble getting into the book and understanding the protagonist, Queenie Jenkins, but once I did, the book raced by and I really loved it.
Candice Carty-Williams, a young Londoner, has a flair for story-telling that appears effortlessly authentic. Her title character is a woman you both know and cannot forget. Queenie’s life is in meltdown, and as she goes through a miscarriage, a breakup and the loss of her home and her job, the depression and dysfunctionality that once lurked in her world rise to overtake it.
The book opens as Queenie and her white boyfriend, Tom, take a break from their relationship. Everyone but Queenie knows that Tom is never coming back but she keeps thinking that if she changes this or improves that he will. It obsesses her and she begins to fall apart, neglecting her work even while she fears losing her job.
It’s a haunting downward spiral. Carty-Williams manages to engage the head and the heart, plunging the reader into Queenie’s descent, while simultaneously helping us unpack it. The atmosphere is unsettling. Queenie’s South London neighborhood is shifting beneath her feet, gentrification pushing out the markers of her Caribbean-heritage community, a metaphor for the fragility of her life.
This is the fertile heart of Carty-Williams’ writing: complex dynamics of interracial friendship, of the gaps that exist between generations, layered with the specific intricacy of a Jamaican immigrant family and the blurring boundaries of workplace relationships, are spun into an entertaining seam. Queenie’s best friend Kyazike brings nonchalant humor, while her grandparents offer complicated affection.
But above all it’s Carty-Williams’ treatment of love and sex that darkly elevates her story. Queenie’s substitution of sex for intimacy, her broken body image, her vulnerability to the hurtful racial fantasies presented by white male partners and her battle with trust are all painfully real. Moments of awakening — which unfold at a sexual health clinic, in the back of a car, in an office toilet — are all the more touching for their grotty familiarity.
After losing her job and some of her friends, Queenie moves in with her grandparents and slowly begins to recover her sense of self worth and learns how to cope with some of the pressures she faces, so things are starting to look up at the end.
I’ve probably painted too bleak a picture of the book. Carty-Williams is a skilled writer and she injects humor and there are some wonderful text conversations between Queenie and her group of friends whom she calls the ‘Corgis’ because, after all, the Queen has her corgis.
Give it a shot. Queenie was one of Time’s ‘Best Books of the Year’ and NPR’s ‘Best Books of 2019’. I enjoyed it and I think you will too.
I recently finished reading The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. It was a pleasant read – low stress, low risk, low drama and a well-told story. Zevin is best known as a writer of ‘Young Adult’ books and this is, I believe, her first aimed at adults.
The book is about a middle-aged man who owns a bookstore on Alice Island off the coast of New England. Fikry’s wife had died two years earlier and he is depressed, lonely and so much of a literary snob that his bookstore is slowly failing. He only stocks titles that meet is demanding tastes:
I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires.
In the first few chapters, his prize possession, a first edition of Poe’s ‘Tamerlane’ is stolen and he is about to give things up when a surprise package appears in the children’s section of his store. A little bundle of joy named ‘Maya’ appears. At first he plans to give her up to foster care but he falls in love with her and adopts her. At about the same time, he becomes interested in a publisher’s representative, a young woman who visits his store twice a hear to sell books.
I imagine you can see where this is going and so can everyone else. There are some exciting events, a few problems that Zevin quickly solves up and, at the end, everything is tied up in a neat bow.
There area a couple of gimmicks – at the beginning of each chapter there is a brief note to Maya in the form of what appear to be shelf talkers and expressing a love for books and for reading.
Zevin has written an entertaining novel that doesn’t pretend to be much more. There is a lot of love for books and literature expressed in the novel and it’s an easy and pleasant read. I think you might like it.
A lot of us are streaming Netflix shows, but the sheer volume of choices on Netflix makes it hard to choose. Here are some shows we have watched recently that we have really enjoyed. Maybe you will too. These are in no particular order and none of them are suitable for children. I’ll have the second half of the list tomorrow.
Giri/Haji
Created and written by Joe Barton, “Giri/Haji” is a story of cultural cross-pollination. The show is in both English and subtitled Japanese that also cross-pollinates genres – mixing cop show, yakuza thriller, love story, anime and hokey family melodrama, all spiked with bits of offbeat comedy. “Giri/Haji” is unlike anything else on TV. There are so many subplots and so many sudden narrative shifts that surprises can happen anytime. The characters are very well drawn and the cinematography is outstanding. Patrice and I both loved it!
Babylon Berlin
Babylon Berlin tells complicated stories about police officers solving twisty, noir-inflected cases driven by strange and hidden conspiracies in 1929 Berlin. The German democracy is on its last legs, about to be swept aside by Hitler and the Nazis. Crucially, the audience knows this already, while the characters think their system of government is shaky but fundamentally salvageable. Unlike a lot of stories set in Germany during this era, it takes several episodes for Hitler to even be mentioned (and only once across the first two seasons!), and then a seemingly eternal stretch of time after that for a swastika to show up.
And yet the overall sweep of the show is vintage film noir: The heroes, Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) and Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), take down the bad guys they can capture or sideline, all the while being forced by those above them in the chain of command to let the real villains walk. Broadly speaking, Babylon Berlin is about the challenge of ever stopping the slow slide into fascism, because the full picture is often hard to see, and those who scream about it are written off as paranoiacs. But even Gereon and Charlotte do awful things in the name of their own self-interest.
The show moves like lightning, there are few dull moments. Liv LIsa Fries is absolutely amazing as Charlotte and there’s some great choreography. We really liked it and I think you will too.
Snabba Cash
The main character is Leya (Evin Ahmad), a single mother of Middle Eastern descent, who is desperate to find seed money for an A.I. company she has created. Like many others in the largely immigrant housing projects where she lives, Leya has limited options. She decides that her only choice is to borrow the money from her drug-dealing brother-in-law (Dada Fungula Bozela), which ends up compromising her future when he makes himself a partner in her firm. Things go downhill from there and, as Leya tries to sell part of her company to an investor, things get complicated as well.
The Netflix series is dubbed in English and is a fun watch that we enjoyed.
The Serpent
“The Serpent,” may seem unbelievable — but the creators actually had to temper the bizarre real-life history of con man and serial killer Charles Sobhraj. Set in 1970s Bangkok, the series, which first aired on the BBC earlier this year, follows Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg (Billy Howle) as he investigates the disappearance of a pair of Dutch backpackers. His pursuit leads him to Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim) and his accomplices, including Marie-Andrée Leclerc (Jenna Coleman) and Ajay Chowdhury (Amesh Edireweera), who have been drugging, robbing and killing tourists on the so-called Hippie Trail.
It’s an amazing, and sometimes infuriating story, that kept us intrigued right to the end. It gives a nice flavor of Thailand, Nepal and India in the 1970s as Sobhraj lures his victims into believing and trusting him…before he kills them.
Waco
The story of the siege in Waco, Texas, in 1993 is such a fundamentally American one—such a charged and tragic conflict between dogmatic believers and overbearing authorities—that it’s hard to grasp how it hasn’t been dramatized into a television series before. It’s a tale of men bearing arms, of charismatic and damaged hucksters, of lost souls putting their faith in a man who promised them both joy and the end of the world. It ended, as most epic American stories do, with a gunfight, drawn out over two months. But no one won. Not the Branch Davidians, around 80 of whom lost their lives, including more than 20 children. Not the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, whose raid on the religious community led by David Koresh at Mount Carmel was characterized by an impossible number of blunders, and a profound—and entirely unnecessary—number of dead bodies on the ground.
The mini-series tries to tell the story of that siege and the people involved. The adaptation—created and directed by John Erick Dowdle (No Escape), and written by his brother, Drew—is based on two definitive interpretations of the Waco siege, Thibodeau’s book, and Gary Noesner’s memoir, Stalling for Time. Waco is largely defined by these separate narratives of what went wrong, both inside and outside of Mount Carmel. There are some subtle parallels between the storylines of Steve’s growing disaffection with Koresh’s abuse of power and Noesner’s increasing discomfort within the FBI, which is still reeling from a disastrous standoff with a white nationalist in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
It’s frustrating to watch the mistakes and misunderstandings on both sides that lead inexorably to the disaster at the end. We enjoyed watching it and it kept our attention. The talented cast does a great job of telling the story.
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