The perils and pleasures of re-reading

I've been a voracious reader all my life but I have never gone in much for re-reading. Until last year (not counting books I re-read books for school, as a student and as a teacher), I'd hardly ever re-read books for pleasure: The Great Gatsby, Mrs. Dalloway, some Ray Bradbury, some Ernest Hemingway, some Henry James. But in my retirement, in addition to catching up on books that have been piling up in the basement over the years, I have been doing some re-reading. I've probably read Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes four or five times, but a new attempt last year left me cold. It threatened to spoil my lovely memories of the book so I quit. Oddly, with one of the major characters, the dad, being an old man figure a bit like me, I thought I would find new resonances in the book, but the opposite happened--I found myself bored by the father and by the philosophizing. I will keep my Bantam paperback, bought in 1967, with me forever but I probably won't be tempted to read it again. I'll let my memories remain unsullied.

Some things I've re-read with success, finding even more to enjoy in them now. Julian, Gore Vidal's historical novel about the last pagan emperor of Rome, first read in my 20s, was one of my favorite novels and I worried that revisiting it would be disappointing (I had tried about 20 years ago and didn't get very far) but my older vantage point was actually an asset as I understood more, about the history and the philosophy, than I did back then. The same thing happened with A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. It's a post-apocalyptic story told in three parts, covering three different and widely separated time periods. A nuclear war destroys civilization as we know it, but humanity, along with religion and science, claws its way back, and soon we have an even more advanced technology that we had in the 20th century. But have we learned enough to avoid our old mistakes? I read it in college (mid-1970s) and have fond and vivid memories of stretching out on a couch in the student union building and reading it, but when I picked it up now, I remembered almost nothing about it. This time around, I liked the first and third sections very much, but the middle chunk was tedious and I almost gave up on the re-read. I'm glad I didn't. I think the first and third parts felt more like science fiction than the middle part; they also have more "world-building" going on. I'm a little surprised that it hasn't been adapted for streaming television.

I got an even bigger jolt when I re-read The Carnivorous Lamb by Agustin Gomez-Arcos. In 1984, it was a highly esteemed literary gay novel about two brothers in 1950's Spain who have a lifelong sexual relationship. In 1984, the book felt like a fever dream and I raced through it in two or three sittings. It's erotic but also political, with the fall of the Republicans and the rise of Franco after the Spanish Civil War affecting all the characters. This time, the writing style felt awkward, with a stop-and-start flow that bothered me. The erotic feel was still there, but I was surprised how little sexual description there was--it doesn't come close to being pornographic. Overall I was a little disappointed, but I was glad that the last 30 pages or so were still a bit "feverish." I've been thinking of re-reading Garcia Gabriel Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, another book I remember as dreamlike, but I'd hate to be disappointed. Hence the perils and pleasures of the act of re-reading. If I could somehow clear my memories of the first read out of my head, I might be less worried about it. But the past and present experiences will always, I think, be in contention.  So I'll keep going with this project but I'll allow myself to give up on a re-read if it feels like it is spoiling the past experience too much.

My first Top 40 summer

In Columbus, Ohio in June of 1969 when I was 12, I became hooked on top 40 radio. Though I was well versed in the Beatles from the tender age of 7, having watched them on Ed Sullivan in 1964, I didn't much listen to current pop music until a few years later. Between 1964 and 1968, if I owned records, aside from Beatles albums, they would have been Broadway cast albums or soundtracks--yes, I was a theater kid that early on. But somehow by 1968, I was listening casually to pop radio. The first non-Beatles 45 RPM singles I bought were Daydream Believer by the Monkees, Chewy Chewy by the Ohio Express, Those Were the Days by Mary Hopkin, and Bang-Shang-A-Lang by the Archies. By the summer of 1969, I had a transistor radio which was tuned permanently to WCOL-AM, 1230 on the dial. I was earning an allowance by doing dishes and I would prop my radio up near the sink and listen; soon I was putting it under my pillow and listening at night. This was also the age when I started going downtown on the bus all by myself, and I would spend much of my allowance at the Lazarus department store on singles. Below is the very first WCOL "hit line" list that I ever brought home--they were free in the record department.

Columbus was a fairly vibrant top 40 market back then. WCOL was the biggest youth oriented station at the time, aside from WVKO which played "soul music", the genre name for Black R&B music, and at the far end of the dial, it was sometimes difficult to tune in. WCOL would often break records before they became national hits. For example, the week of June 2, "Good Morning Starshine" by Oliver was #1 in Columbus, but only #57 on the Billboard Hot 100. It would eventually make the Billboard top 5 in mid-July. Other top 10 hits on WCOL that week that were just getting going nationally include "Israelites," "Medicine Man," and "I Can't Quit Her." "Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town: by Kenny Rogers, #10 in Columbus, didn't even appear on the Hot 100 until a week later, down at #98, though it would eventually hit #6 weeks later.

Almost all the songs on that chart are still ones I can conjure up over fifty years later; I don't remember "Medicine Man" by the Buchanan Brothers or "Marley Purt Drive" by Jose Feliciano. But I was the kind of listener who would turn off the radio or switch to another station if I didn't like the song that was on the air. With car radios, I was a constant button-pusher, jumping from station to station, something I do to this very day when I listen to Sirius XM. I try to resist the temptation to be a boomer who claims that his music from back then is better than the music of today; I know that tastes change, and today's music isn't being made for this 69-year-old. But the music of the late 60s and early 70s will always have a special place in my ears, my head, and my heart. I plan on posting and briefly commenting on other WCOL charts from those early years frequently on my blog.

All That Glitters Is Not Gold: Notes on Theo of Golden

Theo of Golden by Allen Levi was originally self-published, became an underground hit, was taken up by a major publisher (Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster), and now sits near the top of the New York Times bestseller list. A friend who normally doesn't read mainstream fiction recommended it to me so I bought a copy and read it. I was left feeling, as my late mother would have said, comme ci, comme ca about it. I'm a bit baffled by this novel's popularity but I'm also baffled by those who intensely dislike it, and if Goodreads is any indication, many do. 

A mysterious old man comes to a small town in Georgia, discovers a coffeehouse that displays portraits of town citizens done by a local artist, buys the pictures, and gives them to the subjects of the portraits in little rituals he calls bestowals, enriching their lives with his compassion and insight as he chats with them, and in some cases, becomes involved in their lives. That's about it. It's a nice idea, feeling to me like a Hallmark Christmas movie directed by Frank Capra (though Christmas only makes a cameo appearance). The author has disowned the label "Christian fiction" for this, though on some level, it is, even as the religious aspects are for the most part downplayed or sugarcoated. Readers who label this "literary fiction" are wrong--this is written in a clear mainstream style, which is not the same thing as a "literary" style.

What I liked about it: the concept is interesting and Theo comes off as a genuinely nice guy, though his rationale for doing this is kept secret until the end; several of the characters are well-drawn and memorable (Asher the artist, Simone the cello player, Tony the bookseller); it's generally a good-hearted read that stresses the importance of human connection and compassion. 

What I liked less: most of the writing is clear and simple, which makes it easy to read, but there were sentences and word choices and plotpoints that felt wrong (I don't know how much extra editing was done for the Atria edition, but a little more would have been nice); at 400 pages, it's far too long and drags out the mystery of the title character too much; the explanations, when given, are tediously presented, and I agree with some readers who think that Theo's strategies for remaining mysterious are ultimately hurtful to some of the characters. It's all quite predictable, except perhaps for the climax which seemed awfully out of the blue. Readers who really dislike the book say it's for lack of narrative, though I think there eventually is one: it winds up being the story of Theo. Others bitterly resent it winding up as a Christian book in disguise, but it's pretty clear it's headed that way from early on. To its credit, it never gets ponderous or proselytizing. [Below is the author, Allen Levi.]

Some have speculated that its popularity shows how much kindness and connection and true Christian behavior are missing in our culture today, which is true. But the whole thing ultimately feels like a fantasy (a little Capraesque as I noted above) about how rich people should behave--Theo could not have done what he did without a lot of money. Another fantasy element is that all the major characters are likable (two minor characters are not and are mostly ignored). There is really no villain, though a bad thing happens at the climax. I found Ellen, the homeless woman, kind of irritating, partly because it's obvious that Levi almost desperately wants us to like her. I had the same feeling, to a lesser degree, with Mrs. Gidley, the cold woman who predictably warms up by the end. I admit to tearing up a bit in one scene (a cello recital), but the melodramatic and manipulative events at the end left me cold. I'm not sorry I read it but I remain at a loss as to why it's a top 10 bestseller.

Random Notes on P.G. Wodehouse

I retired in late 2024 and the first thing I did after going through the Medicare wringer was to head down to the basement and start going through some of the hundreds of books I've carted around since the 1970s with the express purpose of reading in my retirement (which some part of me thought would never actually happen). Back in 1980, I read my first P.G. Wodehouse novel, Full Moon, and pretty much laughed out loud through the whole thing. I read a few more of his books over the years but realized when I went to the basement in December 2024 that I had about ten volumes of Wodehouse that I had never read (or didn't remember reading--more on that later), so I've been working my way through them ever since, and finding a few more at the public library.

Wodehouse was a British writer known best in popular culture for creating the characters of Bertie Wooster, a youngish upper-class fellow who doesn't have to work and therefore gets involved in all kinds of trouble, and his long-suffering valet Jeeves. There have been over a dozen novels or story collections featuring Jeeves and Wooster, not to mention movies, TV shows (with Hugh Laurie as Bertie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves, pictured below, and they are so perfect that I still always picture them when I read the stories), and later novels written in homage. But Wodehouse, in addition to co-authoring several hit plays, also had other characters he wrote about who basically existed in the Jeeves universe. Full Moon was one of several Blandings Castle books featuring Lord Emsworth and his beloved pet pig the Empress; other recurring characters include Uncle Fred and a man named Psmith, all with lots of money and time on their hands.

I started my Wodehouse deep dive with several Bertie & Jeeves books and was having a fine time until I hit my fifth book at which time I realized that perhaps binging these stories was not a good idea. I'm not a binge watcher of streaming TV though I have been known to soak myself in musicians and actors and authors when I discover them. But reading a bunch of Wodehouse books in a row made me realize that, even though his humor doesn't suffer, his narratives do. The plots are all both similar and inconsequential. Bertie gets into a romantic entanglement and Jeeves gets him out of it. Bertie gets in trouble with one of his aunts and Jeeves gets him out of it. Bertie is suspected of a crime and Jeeves gets him out of it. And so on. The novels usually wind up with several situations being dealt with at the same time, and though no one could accuse Wodehouse of writing realistic stories, some of the plot points get so outlandish that I gave up caring and read just for punch lines and witticisms. That's not necessarily bad, but I slowly felt like I was reading more and enjoying it less.

For me, the high water mark was The Mating Season, which featured several recurring characters (Catsmeat, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Aunt Agatha) and one, Esmond Haddock, described as a Greek god "combination of a poet and an all-in wrestler," who I hoped to meet again. But with the next book, I realized that I was just going through the motions, reading and chuckling but not really connecting with the characters or the stories. Not only were situations being repeated, but several laugh lines were as well, and I feared I was getting to the point where I would start disliking Wodehouse so I stopped for a while. 

After a few months I picked up Thank You, Jeeves and realized I should have waited a bit longer. This one has an unusual plot in that Jeeves, fed up with Bertie playing the ukulele (badly) at all hours, resigns. Of course, he still manages to help Bertie out of tight spots, and in the end, Bertie gives in and gives up the uke. But it all still felt kind of tired. I picked up another one and a third of the way in, discovered I had read it years ago—many of his books were published under alternate titles over time. Eventually I read a non-Jeeves books, a one-off called The Adventures of Sally, and was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) that it was largely a Bertie Wooster story (with a female lead) without a Jeeves. By the halfway point, I was trudging through it. I was worried that I had become permanently disillusioned with Wodehouse.

But somehow, after another few months, I found my way back to Wodehouse through a couple of Uncle Fred books (Uncle Fred in the Springtime and Cocktail Hour) and enjoyed them. There are few direct echoes of Bertie and Jeeves in these (though some jokes get repeated) so things were just different enough that I started paying attention to the story again. I read another one-off, The Old Reliable, set in Hollywood, with recognizable tropes and laugh lines, but again different enough to feel new. Interestingly, this feels like maybe the end of my Wodehouse period. There are many other volumes out there and I have read a couple of the recent pastiches, one of which, Jeeves and the King of Clubs by Ben Schott, was quite well done, recalling Wodehouse without being slavish about it. I'm thinking a couple of times a year may be enough. And there's always the Blandings TV show from 2013 with Timothy Spall and Jennifer Saunders (above) recreating Wodehouse characters almost as well as Laurie and Fry. 

The Problem with Charlie Chan

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Charlie Chan would have needed no introduction to anyone with any pop culture knowledge. Chan was the creation of author Earl Derr Biggers, whose first claim to fame was a 1913 novel called Seven Keys to Baldpate. It was adapted for the stage, became a hit, and was filmed several times. But Biggers found more fame as the creator of Charlie Chan, a Chinese detective who worked for the Honolulu police department. Six novels were published before Biggers' untimely death in 1933 at the age of 49. (Pictured below is a reprint of the first novel, The House Without a Key.) The Chan property exploded in popularity on the silver screen, with some fifty films made between 1926 and 1949. In the beginning, they were high-level B-films in terms of budget and actors, but they were treated like A-films and made a great deal of money for Fox. Eventually the budgets dropped and the series was taken over by Monogram, a B-movie studio, but they still remained popular enough that one or two films a year were released. 

When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, the Chan movies were run frequently on television, especially on weekend afternoons. Like the Sherlock Holmes movies that Basil Rathbone starred in over the same time period, I saw them as basically interchangeable, and they played more like episodes of a TV show. Most adhered to a formula which involved Chan traveling somewhere, on a vacation or a visit to a friend, and getting involved in a murder investigation (sometimes his friend was the murder victim). In most of the movies, one of Chan's adult sons accompanied him, offering assistance but usually being more of a hindrance than a help—the phrase "number one son," which is how Chan often referred to his son, was an oft-used pop culture saying. (Below is Victor Sen Yung as Jimmy Chan.)

Three actors played Chan: Warner Oland (until his death in 1938), Sidney Toler (until his death in 1947) and Roland Winters (in the last six films of the series). All three actors have their fans, though I think Oland was the most closely associated with the series—after his death, the budgets shrank and the movies started looking and feeling like cheapies, even though they were still very entertaining. Though there was a 50s TV series, there were no more movies (except for a lame and campy film in 1981), but their constant presentation on TV, including a Saturday morning kids' cartoon show in 1972, kept the character alive for a while.

In 2003, Fox restored their library of Chan movies, ran them on their cable channel, and released them in DVD boxed sets. They proved to still be popular, but by this time, the films had become controversial, accused of being racist, or at least steeped in racism. It wasn't so much the character of Chan that caused problems—he did speak in a somewhat halting English, parodied beautifully by Peter Sellers in Murder by Death, but he always outwitted not just the bad guys but the white good guys, often cops, who mocked him or underestimated his abilities. The real problem was that none of the three actors who played Chan were Asian. They all wore varying versions of "yellowface" makeup to make them look like the stereotype of a Chinese man. What is overlooked in current-day complaints about the films being racist is that in the 30s and 40s, there were no Asian stars in Hollywood. The Chan sons and other Chinese supporting characters were played by Asian actors, but there were no bankable Asian stars to play leads. To compound the problem, most of the later movies featured a stereotyped Black sidekick character who often conformed to degrading stereotypes. (Below is Oland as Chan with co-star Boris Karloff in Charlie Chan at the Opera.)

I can completely understand people today being offended by the portrayal of Chan in the classic era and choosing not to watch the films. But I have remained a fan over the years. All three of the Chan actors wore their stereotypes lightly and I don't find the intentions or the results of the portrayals to be racist. (The books are even less so.) Some Chan fans bemoan the fact that no one is making Chan movies these days. I think even if a Chinese actor played the part, there is a thick patina of stereotyping and potential offensiveness that could not be diluted, and the film would have to be comic or satiric. The Chan movies, to some degree, have been victims of cancel culture, as they are not run much anymore on TV—even TCM doesn't show them. However, they are available in various ways: DVDs, streaming services, YouTube. Every Charlie Chan film that was made (except for a handful of early ones that are lost) has been released for home video and they are still for sale. I stand in the middle when folks start yelling about this issue. Many members of a Charlie Chan fan group I belong to on Facebook (mostly older white people) bitch up a storm about the idea than anyone can find them offensive, unable to put themselves in the shoes of Asian (or progressive) viewers. On the other side are offended viewers who would be OK with the films being suppressed. I would argue that, in the main, they are not racist, even if the production structure behind them was. As for me, I own them all and watch them frequently, though I would never share them with people who didn't know what they were getting into. Below is my complete Chan movie collection.

Riefenstahl: A Triumph of the Bad Documentary

The documentary has slipped downhill in recent years. Not Ken Burns, bless him; we watched his latest on the American Revolution and he's still the best at the old-fashioned, long-form, talking heads doc. But otherwise, documentaries have gone to hell in a handbasket. Sometimes it's a problem of being "authorized" by the subject of the doc, and therefore inclined to leave out anything that doesn't fit the subject's view of themselves. This was a problem with recent docs about Jeff Lynne, Gordon Lightfoot, Paul McCartney (I guess I watch a lot of music docs). Recent films about Syd Barrett, Pee-Wee Herman and Billy Joel were better, though still constrained a bit by being "official." A Dionne Warwick documentary skipped over many years in her career which she apparently didn't want to cover. Sometimes it's the format that is at fault, as in Moonage Daydream, about David Bowie, which was terribly put together. 

But my biggest problem with 21st century docs is the disappearance of narration. I think directors believe that the absence of a guiding god-like voice makes the proceedings seem more objective, which is of course not true—someone is still choosing and editing and eliding and emphasizing. A narrating voice can bring a cohesion to a story and fill in stuff that was not elicited by the filmmaker. For example, the recent McCartney film, Man on the Run, which covers the first four years or so of his solo career, made good use of actual McCartney interviews, but most of the fascinating stories of the behind the scenes turmoil during the recording of the album Band on the Run was left out because no one spoke to it, something a narrator could have done at least in passing.

But the worst doc I've seen in a while is Riefenstahl by Andres Veiel. I happen to know a good bit about Leni Riefenstahl, a German actress and director whose most famous works, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, both documentaries themselves, were more or less made to order for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, a controversy that came to define her life and career in popular culture. Veiel's film is pretentious, boring, and muddled. In addition to being faux artsy and slow, it assumes that the viewer already knows who she was and what the controversies that surrounded her all her life were about. It's only sometimes chronological and much context for what is being presented, especially in her pre- and post-Hitler years, is missing. The director did dig up lots of previously unseen photos and footage but they add little to the content of the film, they just fill time. Though I'm not a Riefenstahl apologist—her claims of total innocence about what was going on under Hitler are baldly self-serving and mostly ring false—the filmmaker doesn't attempt a two-sided view here. He spends half his time making her look ridiculous and guilty without giving her own arguments any real exposure. The most interesting point that's made is that she desperately wanted to believe that her being an artist put her above political concerns, and that was a belief that led her to being combatively defensive all her life. Overall the film comes off as a bit amateurish. Don't bother with it; instead, read a biography of her or look for the much better movie, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl from 1993.

Revisiting Jesus Christ Superstar (the 1973 movie)

This post assumes the reader has some familiarity with the title musical, as album or play or movie. It was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice and originated as an album in 1970, and was one of the first rock operas, after Tommy by The Who. The album was something of a revelation to me; I got Tommy for Christmas in 1969 and thought it was cool but didn't really play it much. In early '71, when I was 14, I got Jesus Christ Superstar. I’d bought the single "Superstar" the year before, mostly because it was controversial, and this long-haired teen was all about controversy. Luckily, my parents were never bothered by this streak in me; since I didn't act out in rebellious ways in real life, they didn't seem to mind that I did artistically. (My mom bought me the Hair album when I was 13 and was a bit startled when I asked her what "sodomy" meant, but otherwise she was fine with me listening to it.) I was Catholic and still went to church on Sundays, attendance mandated by my father, but I was basically an atheist even at that early age. I wouldn’t say the album changed my mind, but it gave the Gospel stories an emotional core that had been lacking for me, not to mention that I have yet to have anyone explain logically why Jesus had to die in order for God to offer us places in Heaven. Judas is portrayed as a tortured individual, thinking that Jesus has gotten sidetracked from his political anti-oppression message and is too wrapped up in his supposed divinity: "You really do believe this talk of God is true / And all the good you've done will soon be swept away." Jesus is similarly tortured, and I saw Judas' betrayal as something that he was forced to do, so that the mythic story of Jesus would play out as predestined. Unlike Tommy, I played this rock opera frequently, and saw a live concert-style performance of it that predated the Broadway production by a few months. 

Every Easter since my teen days, I have revisited either the album or the movie (though some years, I substitute Godspell), and this year it was the movie. I first saw it in 1973 and was disappointed, but still I bought it when it was issued on DVD. This time around, for some reason, I was more disappointed than ever. The concept behind the movie is interesting: a troupe of actors arrive in an Israeli desert on a bus, unload props and costumes (see picture above), and proceed to perform the opera about the last week of Jesus's life in a variety of desert settings. Most of the songs are intact, with a few lyrical alterations. Two new songs were added, one to clarify the position of the Jewish elders, possibly to address charges of antisemitism, and one, "Could We Start Again Please?" which the apostles sing to Jesus before his crucifixion, and which actually works fairly well. I understand the desire to open the musical up to be less stagy, and this works best in the moneylenders scene where Jesus trashes the marketplace like Kane did to his wife's room in Citizen Kane, but some of the most effective scenes in the movie are ones that are actually a bit stagy even when opened up: the apostles in the cave at the beginning, the high priests conversations, Mary singing "I Don't Know How to Love Him." The actors are fine, especially Carl Anderson as Judas and Barry Dennen as Pilate, but the singing is not always top-notch (Dennen, Josh Mostel as Herod, Kurt Yahjian as Annas), substituting energy for pitch and tone. Maybe because my TV isn't attached to a fancy sound system, the music lost some power and punch. Some of the desert vistas are lovely, but when actors are put in them, as in the scene where the lepers beg Jesus for help, they are dwarfed and some impact is lost. The glittery “Superstar” number, on the other hand, doesn’t go far enough; it should be much more bombastic show-biz, though I do love the Supremes-style backing singers (see below). 

I only saw parts of the live TV Hollywood Bowl concert with John Legend and was not impressed, though I remember liking Alice Cooper as Herod. I also saw the touring company of the Broadway production during one of their reunion tours, with Carl Anderson and Ted Neely, and it was OK though Neely seemed to overdo the agony at times. There are other recordings, amateur and professional, on YouTube that I may explore later in the week. But ultimately, partly because of a nostalgia factor, I don't think the original concept album will ever be displaced as my #1 choice for experiencing this work.