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| A barge anchored on the Hudson River with Palisades Medical Center in New Jersey behind. 1:00 AM. Photo: JH. |
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| Monday, January 13, 2014. Mild, not very cold, sometimes sunny, sometimes overcast with a rainy Saturday in between. The weatherman forecast “heavy” rains and “thunderstorms.” Somewhere else maybe, but not here. I went to dinner with friends on Friday and Saturday nights — two very popular restaurants which are usually very busy. Both quiet. I asked my cabbies for their estimation of traffic: very quiet. I like this kind of weekend in New York. It’s ideal downtime: because of the weather you don’t want to go anywhere. I stayed home and read. |
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| Which, speaking of. My desk has a makeshift bookshelf consisting of a chair and a reading table, next to it. These are the books of the moment — the ones waiting to be read or to be used for gathering information for something I’m working on at that moment. Plus the ones that I’ve just bought, or the ones that have been sent to me. Or the ones that I’m going to give to people who will enjoy them. |
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| I never throw away a book. There’s someone out there who would love it, or find that they love it. Publishers send me quite a few books, probably because I write about books I read. I read the ones that match my interests. And I write about them with the intention of helping to sell a few copies for the author. I’m not a book reviewer. I do read book reviews, especially in the New York Review of Books and the Financial Times, as well as in the British newspapers when it looks like the subject might interest me. And occasionally in the New York Times. The first two publications are the ones who get me to buy a book.
I’m taking a long time to make a small point; forgive me. So this pile of books, you see in the picture. This was a pile I was moving from my desktop to a space I was making on the “bookcase” next to the desk. I happened to notice that of the nine, six of them were written by women. The top one: “You're My Dawg, Dog,” (“A Lexicon of Dog Terms for People,” is by a man — Donald Friedman. This is one of those books you buy to give to friends. They can read it in the bathroom or on the beach or just before they’re ready to doze off. It’s all those dog terms and what they mean, etc. and it’s very funny. For example: Dog Days, Dog-eyed, Dogface (the opposite of Dollface?), Doggone it, etc. Then there’s Jill Brooke’s“The Need to Say ‘No’.” This is a little different from Nancy Reagan’s need to say No. This is about the bullies among us and evidently they’re growing in number like the national debt. “The Idea of Him” (William Morrow, Publishers) is Holly Peterson’s new novel following her best-selling “The Manny.” The “Him” in this novel, I take it, is a Husband. I got a Proof copy — the pub date is early April. “Dark Invasion; 1915, Germany’s Secret War Against America” (Random House) by Howard Blum also came to me in Proof form. To be published in February. From the sound of the blurb on the back of the book, the story is destined to be a movie produced by and starring Bradley Cooper. “Flyover Lives” is a memoir by Diane Johnson. Ms. Johnson, whose book was reviewed yesterday in the Sunday New York Times, is a prolific novelist (including “Le Divorce,” Le Mariage,” “L’Affaire,” etc.) As a little girl Johnson grew up in Moline, Illinois — that part of America that’s known by media people and their kind as “flyover” country because it’s not on either coast whence the media’s messages originate. Once upon a time it was called Middle America, or in Reagan’s era, “the heartland.” It’s also the source for much of the best of everything American that we find on those two coasts. Ms. Johnson was one of those imaginative children who dreamed of a bigger life far from her birthplace and actualized it. She divides her time today between San Francisco and Paris. Then there’s Jean Hanff Korelitz’s new novel, also in Proof form, (pub date: March 18th), “You Should Have Known.” Known what? You know, those things about yourself and your personal relationship (or relationships) and the other person. You damned fool. (Just kidding, but you catch my drift). Then there’s Megan McArdle’s“The UP SIDE of DOWN; Why Failing Well is the Key to Success.” In other words, with every cloud there’s a silver lining? I’ll go for that; please God. Then there’s “Marie Antoinette’s Head; The Royal Hairdresser, The Queen, and the Revolution.” I bought this book at Crawford Doyle a couple of weeks ago because I am a long time 18th Century French fan/freak/aficionado, whatever you want to call it. I’ve read a number of books on the fin de siècle, the ancien regime, as well as several biographies of the the three Louis (XIV, XV, and XVI), as well as their mistresses and especially one wife, the ill-fated Marie Antoinette. This one is about her, obviously, but it really is a biography of her hairdresser, one Leonard Autie. A boy from the provinces who came to Paris to make his way — as a hairdresser — Autie serendipitously met M-A shortly after she arrived at Versailles from Vienna to become the Dauphine to the future Louis XVI. At first he went to work for actresses, having met some right after he arrived with barely a sous in his pocket. His creative ideas brought him immediate clients. One of those clients was as member of the Dauphine’s personal entourage. Leonard was the guy who invented those massive vertical wigs that carried birdcages and all kinds of other items (including jewels, flowers (and even lice) that were the rage of Paris in those early days of the Dauphine. If you’ve read any of the many wonderful books on that time and those monarchs and their courts, this presents a different purview of the royal court, its intrigues and the profound corruption amongst its elite. Autie was there, even had lodgings in the chateau, but was still, by rank, an outsider. However, hairdressers, if you didn’t know, are some of the greatest confidants of any era (including this one). For some reason when women sit down to have their hair done, it opens up more than one faucet (the other of which can often be a can of worms). It was as true then as it is today. I’ve asked a couple of “major” hairdressers/ hairstylists why they get so much personal information (aka gossip elsewhere) from their clients. The answer I get is that the process evokes or provokes that reaction in many women. There’s some psychic connect between the coiffeur who tend the hair and the woman who possesses it. Leonard Autie had that kind of access. He was very discreet with it, and always protected his clientele the best way he knew how (silence). However, as the narrative moves along in “Marie Antoinette’s Head,” as the end of the decade of the 1780s approaches, you begin to feel the dread that eventually overtook their lives. And you know the horrific outcome and how, in retrospect, nothing could have altered its playing out. The monarchs and their elites could never have imagined what lay in store because it was as diametrically extreme to them as was their world of Versailles to the poor and the peasantry. The rich and powerful were unaware or shielded from that world, even though it was made up of the majority. It never occurred to them that the poverty of the masses would eventually undermine and demolish the lives of the classes. Will Bashor, who is a professor at Franklin University and a member of the Society for French Historical Studies is the author of this biography. (www.willbashor.com) And at the bottom of this small tower of books is another biography, a quiet biography of a man who had the wit and the intellect and the creative imagination to take his humble beginnings (a child of Jewish refugees of the Russian tsar’s Pogroms) in Boston to become one of the foremost figures in the 19th and 20th century history of Western Art and its artists, and its great collectors who flourished in the Gilded Age and afterwards: “Bernard Berenson; A Life In the Picture Trade" (Yale University Press) by Rachel Cohen. I picked up this book at Crawford Doyle also, and on a whim because Berenson has always been a shadow character in my limited knowledge of that era and those collections. |
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| I took a break from it to devour the “Marie Antoinette’s Head,” and immediately returned after I finished, because it is ultimately a story of personal triumph (rather than monumentally egregious failure), and one earned by the man’s wit, intellect and creative imagination — something profoundly missing from the characters who made up the royal court of Versailles. There's always hope with the resources of the human mind and its creative imagination. So how was your weekend? |
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