GOING ON VACATION! SEE YOU IN 2013 ?

It's that time!  I'm taking a vacation. 

What will happen between then and now?

Most likely December 12th 2012 will come and go as an ordinary day, as will December 21st, 2012, which is the Winter Solstice, and the "Gregorian Calender" December 12, 2012. 

Despite all the buildup and antipation and the increase in tourism to Guatamala for December 12th or 21st 2012, I'm not concerned that the earth will flip on it's axis, nor do I believe this will be the day that UFO'S reveal themselves to all of humanity,  though I will be watching for crop circles, and I'm still speculating as to how Santa has managed to deliver so very many presents in the wee hours all these years even with the help of elves and reindeer all who multitask!   But I could be wrong!

In which case instead of having a few weeks to use the search feature of Google Blogger to read past posts of this blog, CHRISTINE TRZYNA - WRITERLY LIFE, you'll have a very long time to do so.

Seriously though, the snowman drawing below had me laughing out loud.

That may tell you just how much I need a vacation!

Till then,

Christine Trzyna

DIANE VON FURSTENBERG : A SIGNATURE LIFE : BOOK EXCERPT

DIANE VON FURSTENBERG : A SIGNATURE LIFE : BOOK EXCERPT

pages 187 and 188

"I designed the apartment (in Paris) as Bohemian Luxuria, because I had long since discovered that writers may act bohemian, but they love luxury.  (CT - italics is mine.)

Our apartment was a center for other writers because of Alain's association with Mondadori and many other writers we had a friends. Many of those friends would stay with us in what I called the Literary Room...

The (apartment) concept was one of an ongoing, moving stage, which fit very much with how I saw my life then.

"Writers loved to stay in the apartment and continue to do so. The apartment is very quiet, and Paris is inspiring... Whether it is the air, the wine, or the ambiance, somehow it is easier for writers to write in Paris...

They were all part of the literary mix in Paris and the rich cultural life that I craved after my reclusive years at Cloudwalk. I was hungry for the exchange of ideas, a side of me that I had neglected, and I was pleased beyond measure to be back into it..."

PASADENA by DAVID EBERSHOFF : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

I remember one very obnoxious classmate of mine in a creative writing program.  She said she was "suspicious" of any writing that began with physical (topographical, geographical, botanical) descriptions. 

PASADENA by DAVID EBERSHOFF  : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

This is a book about class and changing status.  Of a certain rich poverty, of people who make the best of that long moment called life, and who seem to have privilege but when it comes to what's really valuable in life, have little to nothing.

This is a book about fallible  people making the best they can do in the long moment called life.

Each and every one of them lives disappointment.  If they have hopes of romance, well, that is not how it turns out, and yet, they succeed at least temporarily at something.

It's pleasing to read a book, be it fiction or nonfiction, that takes place where you live.  "Pasadena," is a book set in Los Angeles,  Pasadena and La Jolla, during the first half of the 20th century, and it pleased me to no end as historical fiction, especially because the rich detail was of natural pre-city world, at the time when the building boom had just begun and southern California was being transformed from a small town dotted map into what you see when you fly into Southern California at night; lights for hundreds of miles of cities joined together.

At the center of this story is a girl of German immigrant father and refugee Mexican mother born high above a beach cliff in 1903, a girl who sets out lobster pots and swims without fear, and cannot imagine how her adult life will be so little of her own choosing.  That girl will one day marry into Pasadena wealth, but her life will go wrong anyway.

So, as you know, I read and review a lot of old books, books that and longer being marketed.  I know I would get more hits on this blog if I only reviewed the books that were just published and being marketed now. As a relatively unknown reviewer I could keep getting to the back of that parade but I love discovering a new author even if the work is "old."

C 2002 author
Random House is publisher.

I DON'T WANT NOTHIN FOR CHRISTMAS : FUNNY and SO TRUE!

MAN ON WIRE : DOCUMENTARY on PHILIPPE PETIT : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW

MAN ON WIRE is a documentary about a Frenchman named Philippe Petit who has more than a bit of circus in him. In 1974 he managed to walk (and dance) a wire tight rope that was between the two Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. This wasn't just a stunt. It was a spectacle.

High Wire" by '90s Boston band Smackmelon is the identified music.

I got it that this daring feat, almost unimaginable, was "the artistic crime of the century," and I sure was happy that Petit and his team got away with it!


The DVD doesn't focus on the art of walking a wire but in the collaborative effort of various individuals in France and the United States to make this achievement happen, and they had to be real sneaky to haul all that equipment to the top of the towers and install it. Today if they tried to pull it off they wouldn't be able to.


I couldn't help but think about this from a 2012 perspective: because of 9/11 some would say, and I feel this, that the United States of America as is, all that privacy invading "security" as a result of the terrorist attack that fell these towers, is not the one I grew up in or want to live in, though I won't be packing up to go anywhere anytime soon. I think that we had a sense of freedom we no longer have. Such as the freedom to take chances like this! I feel sorry for children growing up in this atmosphere.


I'm reminded of a term I learned in one of my Literature - Creative Writing classes: SENTIMENTALITY FOR THE PRESENT. As I understand this term it means that in the now you know you are in the best days, and they are soon passing, like in the last second. In other words I acknowledge it's going to get worse not better.


This film made me sentimental for the pre 9/11 days, knowing that all the privacy invading "security" that I have come to accept, but which my immigrant ancestors would despise, to access any public building and many hospitals, is actually more like the Soviet Union in the Cold War than some of us patriotic types are comfortable with.


So, watching the DVD which was put out by Magnolia Pictures in the United Kingdom and funded by the National Lottery, I couldn't just watch and not think about the changes since his August 7th, 1974 walk, and while watching I was with the project every step of the way. At the same time I felt that sentimentality for the present.

FEELING THE CULTURE : HOLIDAYS FEEL DIFFERENT TO ME

FEELING THE CULTURE : HOLIDAYS FEEL DIFFERENT TO ME

By Christine Trzyna

I think it's because I (we?) can feel it in our environment, the difference between the work day week, the weekend, and the holiday.  I think it's about guilt or lack of.  When a whole lot of people are off and out to play, I feel freer, less obligated, and more likely to play too.  Even though I organize much of my own time without obligation to others at this point, I still feel better about doing my own thing on holidays, in particular holidays that can be strung together with weekends into four days off.

JIMMY PAGE PLAYS THE GUITAR WITH A VIOLIN BOW

 

WHAT I WANT MY WORDS TO DO TO YOU : EVE ENSLER : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW

Here's the set up for this DVD : Fifteen female inmates, most in prison for murder, some for life, are part of a Writers Round Table sort of writing class with Eve Ensler as their teacher/group leader. Over a four year period their writing was meant to be theraputic and help them come to terms with their crime. At the end of this time, Ensler recruited some actresses such as Glenn Close and Marisa Tomei, to read the work of one of the prisoner writing group members. Hearing their own words acted out on stage proves to be an interesting experience and an emotional one for everyone including the audience.

There are writers working in prisons heading up writing groups all around the country. Sometimes publications - chap books - are made of their work.  I  watched this film with no expectations and appreciated it greatly for what it is.

HARD CANDY : EDGIEST MOVIE I EVER SAW : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW

HARD CANDY : DVD REVIEW : EDGIEST MOVIE I EVER SAW : CHRISTINE TRZYNA DVD FILM REVIEW

If you want to watch a movie that will make your thoughts twist and your emotions boil, then HARD CANDY, A Lionsgate release staring Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page is the one to watch. The screenplay was written by Brian Nelson.

14 year old Hayley is no doubt a genius, so what's she doing meeting up with a 30-something photographer she met over the Internet?

Does she do this often? Is she Taking Justice into her own hands, making a fantasy of torture and revenge into reality? Seems so. How guilty is the photograper of sexual abuse, rape, or even murder of another girl? Is Hayley a sociopath? Do we think Jeff the photographer deserves what he's getting? Or is it Haley who is truly the spiritually sick one?

From almost the beginning to the end, I was all torn up. My thoughts went all over and my stomach cramped.

Thus this production was fine art, for it did the most that any great piece of art can do which is make us question our own ethics and values as we relate or can't and so involve us in the art.
Should you feel sorry for him? Is she right in her assumptions and accusations?

So many questions!

SUPERSTORM SANDY : CAN THE GLOBAL SUPERSTORM PREDICTED BY WHITLEY STRIEBER and ART BELL BE NEXT?

Got up this morning and put the radio on and probably will be listening to coverage of the Storm Sandy, or Super Storm Sandy, which has already sunken the HMS Bounty pirate ship, and is on the way to New York, New Jersey... the eastern sea board ... all day.  And night.

The new York subways are shut down, so is Wall street, so are thousands of air flights, and listening to Heraldo Rivera broadcasting from new York this morning, it sounds as if the streets are deserted, with just a few dare devil cab drivers determined to make their fares.  Videos show sea foam whipped up by the wind covering beaches like snow.  Millions of people have loaded up on emergency supplies of food and water, there's been a run on flashlights and other survival gear, but even with shelters open, it seems to me that the majority must simply STAY PUT.  Who can even afford the gas prices and the motel rooms to flee?

I'm thinking about Art Bell, the radio host who began Coast to Coast AM and was on the air most nights for maybe a decade, and Whitley Streiber, the author of Communion and other UFO Abductee themed books, who with Art wrote a book called THE COMING GLOBAL SUPERSTORM.  (I was a huge fan of Art Bell!)

I ordered this book from my library several years back and finally it came in.  I settled back on the sofa to read the book on a day off, and did so cover to cover without any television or radio or phone on to interrupt my concentration.  The book had short novelesque chapters between science - or alternative science - fact.  I was very impressed with it.

It proposed that when the Gulf Stream and Atlantic Ocean current, which is the result of variant water temperatures reacting to each other, changes, the result is not global warming but a rapidly occurring ice age.  According to this theory, snowfall would make much of the Northern Hemisphere unlivable.  When I finished the book, I turned on the radio to hear, shockingly, that the Tsumani had just hit Thailand.

WHITLEY STRIEBER's UNKNOWN COUNTRY  link here for a better explaination.

C 2012 Christine Trzyna / Christine Trzyna Writerly Life
All Rights Reserved including Internet Rights and International Rights.

MOP MEN : INSIDE THE WORLD OF CRIME SCENE CLEANERS : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

Narrative nonfiction : Alan Emmins MOP MEN was a terrific book, sensitive and just gory enough. He was the everyman gonna look at that long dead body, and finally he overcame his gagging reflex and started doing some clean up for cash himself.


I think the recent Costa Concordia cruise ship beaching story, which I follow, might have influenced me in picking this book up from my library new book shelf (even though it was C 2008). You see, the story of the search for drowned bodies off the coast of Italy or on the sunken ship had been in the news almost daily. Nothing has been so newsworthy when it comes to finding drowned bodies since JFK Junior crashed his plane off the coast of Martha's Vineyard.


Alan's experience depends on Neil, who owns Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. Neil is just the kind of guy who is business minded enough to consider what a top writer could do for his business if he lets him follow him around.

In the end you're not going to learn exactly how they do it, no Murphy's Oil Soap apparently, though elbow grease is in order. Instead you get inside the brains of Alan Emmins; what he's thinking, what he's feelings, and how the experience of cleaning up from murders, suicides, and accidents changes him. Luckily, not for good.


MOP MEN book is C 2004 and 2008 Alan Emmins Thomas Dunn Books
Saint Martin's Press


C Christine Trzyna 2012 All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

MY CROSS TO BEAR : GREGG ALLMAN with ALAN LIGHT

Midnight Rider is one of my favorite songs of all time and it's Gregg's too. Allman Brother's band, after the death of Duane Allman, always had one Allman - Gregg, who prefers Gregory.

OK, Gregg's writerly voice was preserved though working "with" another writer, which is always important, as is his sensibility, philosophy of life, and confessions. He has five children, all with different women, four musicians and a nurse out of those, has drunk hard, used lots of drugs, and been a heroin addict, notably married to superstar Cher.

I've been thinking about how much of the music I love(d) has been written and performed by alcoholics and drug addicts, in particular heroin addicts. I haven't knowingly welcomed any drug addicts in my adult life, but the ones I've met in coffee houses tell me that all addicts are liars who know how to hide their habits, even from those they live with. They seem to think that Twelve Step Programs are the way to go. 

****

video went poof!  Taken down Nov 2022

ALLMAN BROTHERS : STORMY MONDAY

LISA SEE : DREAMS OF JOY : A FANTASTIC PART TWO OF THE SHANGHAI GIRLS STORY : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

Dreams of Joy is C 2011 Lisa See

LISA SEE : DREAMS OF JOY : A FANTASTIC PART TWO OF THE SHANGHAI GIRLS STORY : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

This book is a fascinating page turner rich with historical details, cultural and generational conflict.

The story begins where Shanghai Girls left off. It's 1958, Mao is in power, and China is Red with Communism. Joy, the young daughter of two sisters, May and Pearl, has just found out that her aunt is her mother and that her father was a somewhat famous artist in China 18 years before who used her aunt and mother as models for his advertising posters.

Thinking herself to be one Chinese-American who wishes to return to the country of her heritage to embrace Communism wholeheartedly and stay there, Joy finds herself living in a village commune and marries the first man who has ever sparked her desire. Life in the country is much different than in the cities, and only by youth can she bear it. The communes banish western thought and individuality and starve doing so. Can May, the sister who raised Joy with her husband, who recently commit suicide and left her a young widow, make it to Communist China from Canton or Hong Kong and live there long enough to find Joy and bring her home?

You know she will, but not until years of struggle.

There will likely be another book to carry this story of the sisters May and Pearl, who came to the United States through arranged marriages, forward into the 1960's.

These women shared a daughter and kept the secret of her parentage until she was 18. Now they return to the United States with an entourage that includes Joy's birth father, a new husband, and an adopted son. Now with the sisters who stick together through everything ready to start life over, and some would argue for the first time, tell me, how can there not be more story?

C 2012 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

I ADMIT IT! I NEED SPELLCHECK

I admit it! I need spellcheck. Don't know about you but at some time way long ago when I was either first learning to spell or first learning to type (and I HATED TYPING!) I began to chronically misspell certain words. I find my fingers typing these words wrong time and time again, and you'd think will SPELLCHECK that I would sort of get the hint already and start spelling these words correctly.

But the real reason I need spellcheck is that I think faster than I type and as I get tired of typing and make more and more typos, but I don't want to stop and be an editor at that point, I just want to get my thoughts down.

I typed four words wrong just now. The SPELLCHECK got three of them.

LINDA RONSTADT : HASTEN DOWN THE WIND

LOVE IS THE CURE : ELTON JOHN : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

LOVE IS THE CURE
On Life, Loss, and the End of AIDS
C Elton John AIDS Foundation
Publisher : Little Brown and Company

The writing was smooooth; Strunk and White would be proud!

Elton John kept the focus on AIDS, so while some personal information is woven in, it's not the focus, and the focus feels relentless.

The information Elton John has to deliver is appalling. Most utterly appalling is the frequency - normalcy - of RAPE OF WOMEN IN SOUTH AFRICA, where Blacks have extremely high rates of AIDS.

I cannot help but apply my own values; it's horrific and disgusting. Apartheid ended but insane sexism and homophobia has not. South African leader Nelson Mandela appears in ads but maybe these people DON'T WANT LIFE! This is not about Whites oppressing Blacks in South Africa. This is about Blacks doing themselves in. Elton John is too kind to say so.

There are other examples, other countries. In South Africa the women are raped and it's strangly frequent enough to be implied acceptable and yet they are afraid to admit it which means it is not acceptable, so people go without medical treatment until they are about to die, hiding the secret of their rape... and the children... they become orphans... they die too.

Yes, there are other countries where AIDS is taking lives because of ignorance, other examples in the book. Elton's not picking on South Africa.

So, after getting over my fury about South Africa, I took a moment to ask myself the question that that was part of the "prime directive" on the old Star Trek series.
(If you don't remember, on Star Trek the crew beams down to various planets surfaces where they are, by their very presence, going to influence the culture, while trying not to. They are supposed to attend to their business for going there, take care of a problem, and leave.) Can we take our values and try to make another culture conform to them because we think or know that these people would be better off with our values or can we avoid doing that?

How can we as outsiders address RAPE CULTURE in another country on another continent when we still have a rape culture here, though not as horrible as in South Africa? Or does change have to come from the inside, from people there admitting the truth about what's going on and how they are ruining their own lives and the lives of others and stop behaving that way?

Hard question. Left unanswered.
Celibacy still has its charm

C 2012 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

IRVING STONE Quotation

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.” Irving Stone (from Clarence Darrow for the Defense)

DOGS NEVER LIE ABOUT LOVE

DOGS NEVER LIE ABOUT LOVE as seen stitched on a pillow in the book "A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of a Misspent Life" by Mary Randolph Carter.

OLD SCHOOL? GOODBYE YOUTUBE STATION?

Musing today.

I've been meaning to delete my personal YOUTUBE station for a while now. One of these days I'm gonna do it. I opened it with a not g-mail account. Now to get into it, I have to open a new g-mail account. How dare they block me from using my old acount just because it's their competitor Yahoo? Is there no GRANDFATHER CLAUSE?

So my station has been sort of, song by song, becoming defunct for a while now and I don't even want it to show on the net. It's been a while since I personally listened to it while I wrote, though it's a lot of songs that that came to mind while simply living life and a few discoveries. The station was mostly for my personal pleasure.

I guess I have to admit that my musical choices are generally OLD SCHOOL. I have a huge inventory of songs remembered. A lot of these songs are "oldies" that I probably first heard on "oldies" radio stations. I did a lot of listening to the radio and was very influenced by friends who actually had the money to buy albums and turned me on to their favorite music when I was in my youth.

I used to collect lyrics as poetry, as story, and that's how I got to be a pre-teen who knew that Jimmy Webb wrote a lot of songs I loved.

I took a song writing class once and was not a natural. Since I love music this was unhappy for me. The teacher had written songs for Elvis and Barry Manilow and well, I thought he was a bit pompous and under impressed with my efforts. Most of the guys in the class were taking it to get laid.

In fact, I have only bad memories of that class, the teacher, and the people in it. It was the first I had a headache that lasted.

I love a good beat, love to hear drummers, and I can appreciate a rhyme as well as a rhythm but the rap phenomena leaped over me the way a fire leaps over the freeway.

Sometimes CDs sound tinny to me. I miss the old stereo with all the knobs to adjust things, the warmth of the plastic, even if it was popping.

Worse, at some point in music history, when there were too many love songs, song writers were striving to write about anything but love, but the songs with heart and emotion, those are the survivors. Maybe that's why I reach back past rap, to the singer-songwriters like the Allman Brothers Band, Neil Young and Led Zeppelin, to Carole King, Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Linda Ronstadt (to name a few).

A generation of Guitar Gods are moving into elderhood, and these people are all my elders, so I'm not of their generation really, but their music is mine.

JOHNNY RIVERS : POOR SIDE OF TOWN

One of my favorite songs since I was yet to be a teenager. First heard it on a scratched up 45rpm that was handed down. That record got played over and over again on a plastic kid record player - mono - the worn needle scratching deeper.

DOGS IN LITERATURE : WOLF IN THE EARTH CHILDREN'S SERIES : CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR

I'm a fan of Jean M. Auel, the prolific author of the Earth's Children series that begins with the book Clan of the Cave Bear. The books follow the life of Ayla, who is separated from her parents and tribe as a child, is adopted by a Clan ( "the flat heads") that is not of her own people, and is eventually shunned by them for being so different.

Driven to survive on her own, she spends a winter surviving by holing up in a cave in a valley, only going out into the cold to hunt with a sling shot and surviving by foraging plants in summer weather. Eventually, she finds a wolf cub that is also alone to be a companion and through observation and training, turns him into a prehistoric pet wolf - dog who comes when she whistles, to the amazement of every person she encounters from then on. This then is Jean M. Auel's way of introducing the relationship that humans and dogs have had for thousands of years.

When all the breeding dogs into small and even incompetent animals began, who really knows? I once watched a video about what the world would be like if there were no humans. Dogs would quickly resume their traditional lives of hunting in packs, and most of the flat faced ones would be so bad at hunting that they probably wouldn't survive.

DOGS IN LITERATURE : TAISHA ABELAR'S MANFRED

Speaking of Taisha Abelar's new book (see past posts) that still hasn't come out (I just checked a popular book selling site on the net) one of my favorite characters in her first and only published book is the "dog" Manfred.

Come on - we know he is a sorcerer trapped in a dog body! But how that happened?

In this book Taisha encounters Manfred in the mysterious house in Mexico where she is in a spiritual apprenticeship. Manfred likes to lay on her, taking as much of her energy as he can. Manfred is a sensitive beast, who overreacts when anyone says he looks like a toad. So of course the word must be spelled out around him. T O A D! He calms down when you say that someone else looks like a toad or that he does not look like a toad!

Carlos Castaneda said that Taisha wrote this book while in dreaming. I wonder if Taisha ever had a dog or dogs in real life. I wonder if Manfred will make a reappearance in the long awaited new book?

AMY MY DAUGHTER : MITCH WINEHOUSE : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

AMY MY DAUGHTER
Mitch Winehouse C 2012 (Amy's father)
itbooks - an imprint of HarperCollins is the publisher

There are words Mitch Winehouse does not use about his daughter, the singer Amy Winehouse who died a couple years back at the age of 27.
Let me use some of them. Amy Winehouse was a mess - long before she was famous - and she was mentally ill - she cut herself. She was into this seriously mentally ill behavior before she became addicted to... of all substances, her man - husband and ex-husband - Blake.Amy, who's artistry I admire, is on the cover of the book in a photograph that reveals a huge tattoo going down her arm that reads "Daddy's Girl." Maybe that's why, though Mitch was married to Amy's mother, and then her stepmother, the involvement of these women in Amy's life is not part of the big story - his story of being the protective but anxious father of a superstar.
I did want to know how her upbringing effected what seems to be Amy's long standing lack of self-discipline, but as it reads Mitch in his capacity as father, and as a man somehow involved in her management of finances and career, was the one she kept making the promises to - to quit - and the one who was there for her, offering love and advice as best he could even when she couldn't or wouldn't.

To hear Mitch tell it, Amy was brought down by Blake and could have been saved by marrying and having children with her next serious boyfriend.

The ups and downs of her medical history and her on and off again attempts to beat drugs and then alcohol might be typical of any addict. What wasn't typical was Amy's talent. Mitch never says that talent was a burden to her, or that she kept medicating herself with these substances because being famous and keeping a career going like that are damn difficult.
Amy was in very poor health and she had pretty much done herself in with substances. I came to feel that bad boy Blake was another symptom.

Those of you who know me know that I think, have long thought, the whole Psychiatry/Psychology profession is way too powerful. I believe this self propagating profession is hand in hand with pharmaceutical companies and that it is now true that everyone is diagnosable and therefore medicateble. I'll never be a Scientologist but on this they have it right.

I couldn't help but wonder though if Amy Winehouse would still be with us here and now if, earlier in her life, someone had recognized her cutting of herself as serious mental illness. Would psychotropics have killed the creativity and spirit in her? Or would be the best substitute for all those street drugs, all that booze? Mitch doesn't say it. I do.

Towards the end, Mitch mentions that there's a possibility that he got spiritual signs that he thinks were about Amy - butterflies - and a bird and a butterfly flying together. He has used these symbols for AMY'S FOUNDATION, which will address the problems of addiction, ill health, and homelessness among youth.

IT MIGHT GET LOUD : THE EDGE : JIMMY PAGE : JACK WHITE : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW

One of the reasons I blog is so that when someone puts my name into a search engine on the Internet (which people rarely do!) and the name Jimmy Page (or James Patrick Page), which they do a whole lot, my name and his name will be associated.

Joking... but I'm intrigued by Jimmy Page, not just as a legendary Led Zeppelin rock and roll guitarist, but as a person. I ACTUALLY BELIEVE HE MAY BE A REINCARNATION OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, or at least from the same soul group.



Are we having fun yet?



So what's good about this DVD, is that, though you get to hear these three musicians jam a bit, and give each other instructions, this is not a concert film. I don't think they do a single song all the way through. What's good is that it's a bit like biography, with snippets of their memories of how they go their career going, and how that went, so I got to learn more about Jimmy Page than I did, and was surprised that he did start out in bands as a kid.



The marketing on the back of the package calls this an "unparalleled music summit." That's right.



C Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet Rights and International Rights

I HAVE DONE LOUSY AT KEEPING MY NEW YEARS RESOLUTION

to say yes instead of yea... yea .... yea.

ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW

Can't say this summer is LAZY because it feels STRESSFUL, but I find myself watching more old films than I have in years, and not reading as much, in the evenings. Is that bad?

Isaac Bashivis Singer's ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY is one of my favorite books.

It's also a book I've gifted to one particular person in my life years ago who seemed to be in a dilemma a bit like the character Herman Broder, who has three women, "wives," in his life. This is the story of a Holocaust survivor who comes to New York and there lives with the Polish gentile woman who saved his life and who wants to get married and have his baby, has a mistress who is probably best suited to him who is married who has a phantom pregnancy, and the wife he was married to in Europe, who has been presumed dead, along with their two children, but makes it to New York.



So this film, which stars Angelica Huston (the wife presumed dead), Ron Silver (Herman), Lena Olin (the mistress who is married), and Margaret Sophie Stein (the Polish gentile) stays true to the book. I thought the acting was excellent (which means I forgot who the actor's were and believed their characters), and film and acting did add a dimension not in the book.



It's a Paul Mazursky film.



Go get it!



C Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet Rights and International Rights

NEW BOOKS BY and ABOUT MUSICAL ARTISTS: ELTON JOHN'S and MITCH WINEHOUSE - AMY'S DAD HIT THE KEYS : COMPUTER KEYS THAT IS

Elton John wrote LOVE IS THE CURE - On Loss and the End of AIDS, and Amy Winehouse's dad. Mitch Winehouse, wrote AMY, MY DAUGHTER. I have both in hand, and am hoping to read them soon. Both fall into one of my favorite genre, pop music.
Now where is that wine and cheese?

TAMARA ROJO DANCES AS INSPIRED BY ISADORA DUNCAN

UNTHINKABLE : MAN OPENS BOOKSTORE : DAVID SUISSA of THE JEWISH JOURNAL on TONY JACOBS NEW BOOKSTORE!

Just a few years ago, unconscious people were suggesting that I use my degree in Literature and Creative Writing to work at a book store and I actually thought that was highly inappropriate use of a very expensive and yet unpaid for college degree. I wanted to keep loving books too and admit that I was wary that the average bookstore clerk did not love books, like many city employees who work at libraries but do not love books or even read many of them. Would books be equal to say, cabbages, to my co-workers? There were two independent book stores that I wanted to work for, one Duttons on Laurel Canyon, and the other The Bodhi Tree in West Hollywood. Independents.

Those were the days... Every bookstore I could have applied to work at has gone belly up like cockroaches sprayed with cockroachacide. At best they go online where you can order what you heard about somewhere else.

So yes, it is remarkable that someone is opening the store of his dreams despite the independents and many of the big stores deader than dead. (If it will make any of you feel any better, I bought a used book today called "Gallop!" by Rufus Butler Seder, a Scanimation Picture Book, at one of those hole in the wall, where-is-the-little-man-behind-the-cashregister?-stores.)

The article I'm linking to is about Tony Jacobs who just opened SIDESHOW RARE AND REMARKABLE BOOKS, on Idaho Avenue near Sawtelle. The book started with years of personal collecting of books, pulp fiction! It's written by David Suissa who is President of the Jewish Journal.

click on the title!

D. H. LAWRENCE quotation

"Nothing is more fatal than the disaster of too much love." - D.H. Lawrence

ROGER GRENIER Quotation on dogs

"Loving Dogs goes along, more or less, with despairing of humans." - Roger Grenier

LIBRARIANSHIP QUESTIONABLE

"When is the last time YOU had a conversation with a librarian who loves to read herself and gave you a personal recommendation to a book?

The days of calling long distance and asking a research librarian to help you orient or find things in their collection may be over and so maybe should the very expensive library science masters degree because I fail to see how on the job this speciality major is truly necessary."

WHO WHAT WHERE WHY ARE YOU?

Recently an old friend who hasn't been in touch for three years asked me this question.



I have yet to answer him.



I thought it was a fun-in-an-ironic-sort-of-way question.



WHO WHY WHERE WHAT AND WHEN are the BIG QUESTIONS in journalism. In fact, a journalist is supposed to seduce the reader into reading the WHOLE ARTICLE by attempting to answer all those questions in the first sentence or, if less skilled, the first paragraph, but, reading through the LA Times recently, and being one of those people who tends to read whole articles anyway, I realized that a gentle unfolding of the answers is just as interesting, and maybe even more so.



Now I feel I must compose a ONE SENTENCE ANSWER THAT WILL BE (somewhat) seductive and succinct at once.



WHO WHAT WHERE WHY ARE YOU?

MRS. PARKER and THE VICIOUS CIRCLE : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW

"At the center of the circle is a woman ahead of her time," it says on the DVD cover. (I often wonder who wrote the back covers of DVD's and my guess is some promo person who never saw the movie.)

I once got a book out of the library that consisted of Dorothy Parker's witticisms. I read it and thought "You had to be there." I just couldn't get into it. I just didn't find anything she said that witty.

I knew that Mrs. Dorothy Parker and her round table in New York consisted of some of the brightest literary talents of the time so I wanted to know more about her. So, when I saw the DVD at my local library, I borrowed.

This film (which I watched twice) depicted Dorothy Parker as droll - very! Yes, Dorothy Parker, as acted by Jennifer Jason Leigh, was droll, and in context, funny. I actually agree with the term "biting wit," also used on the DVD cover.

The mostly male writers she was surrounded by included playboys and playwrites, poets and screenwriters, in Hollywood and in New York City. She was there at VANITY FAIR magazine, and in the planning for THE NEW YORKER magazine but how? Was she a muse? An inspiration? One more alcoholic?

Rather, I think Dorothy Parker was "a depressive," as they used to call people who were always depressed - very! She had some things to be depressed about too. Raised without a mother,having a husband who abused her back in the day when few women could go without a husband, unrequieted love, an abortion, all these were in her experience.

Somehow she was an inspiration anyway, respected anyway, invited anyway.
Perhaps what impressed me most about Mrs. Dorothy Parker, who appears to have not been able to write in her elder years after so much of a life, was that she left her estate to the civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Her poetry for the film was used with the permission of the NAACP. The film neglected to explain this important fact. It did not reveal what had gone on in her life or her mind that moved her to do so. I think it would have been a better film if it had been explored or even used as the trajectory.
The movie attempted to recreate a scene of friendship in which a great many people who became important and known for their work interacted. None of these characters could really be fleshed out in the time and space of a film.

C Christine Trzyna 2012 All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

TAISHA'S BOOK STILL NOT OUT : WILL IT EVER BE?

Guess what?  If you go to April 1 2023 and see the post TAISHA ABELAR'S LOST BOOK -   STALKING WITH THE DOUBLE (RESTORED VERSION)  you will be able to read a manuscript copy of the book.

************

By now this is becoming an "inside joke"...

A little background.

Many years ago when I was a regular at an independently owned coffee house on Ventura Boulevard and taking night classes at the local community college, one of the servers there, who I really liked, showed me her copy of Taisha Abelar's first and only book, and encouraged me to read it. This coffee house friend had recently gone on a vision quest which she believed had oriented her purpose in life and future career.

I read the book and was utterly mystified and intregued. Since then I've read the book twice more, each time years enough apart to not have remembered everything I read before, and each time having a different pov on it in the end, as my understanding or mystification of my own life changes me.

Since then I've also read around the whole Carlos Castaneda controversy; was Taisha one of his cult members? Did the various "witches," or devotees, or whatever they really were, who published books around the subject, all pass fiction off as nonfiction? Or did they really experience what some of them wrote about?

Castandeda died a human death of cancer, and soon after several of these people, including Taisha, disappeared. There was talk of a possible ritual suicide, maybe in an abandoned mine or cave in the desert. Taisha's family filed a missing person report but many people felt that these people had just staged a disappearance and gone off to Mexico or wherever, to continue their esoteric pursuits. Tellingly, money inherited was left behind as well.

One of the Castaneda "witches," who inherited the bulk of his fortune, continues to live and remains silent and protected by an attorney. She has not written anything.

Then, a couple years ago, it was reported that Taisha had a new book that would soon be published. Some people said this meant that all along she had been hiding out and writing and would soon reappear, possibly to take over leadership of the group. A few years have gone by and speculation is that she left behind an unfinished manuscript which, by now, has seen a number of ghost writers.

The publishing house has announced publication a number of times, and so the book became almost ready to order on Amazon. So far, no Taisha, no book.

C 2012 Christine Trzyna / Christine Trzyna Writerly Life All Rights Including Internet and International Rights Reserved.

RAMONES : BABY I LOVE YOU

  Thinking of Carlos

UPDATE SEPT 7, 2012 : Reading Johnny Ramone's new book and he says this is the song he/they just hate, a Phil Spector production. But I love it because I think it is IRONIC that the Ramone's recorded it.

ELVIS COSTELLO : EVERY DAY I WRITE THE BOOK

MAXWELL ANDERSON quotation

(The story) must be a conflict, and specifically, a conflict between the forces of good and evil within a single person. - Maxwell Anderson

WOMEN OF MYSTERY : THREE WRITERS WHO FOREVER CHANGED DETECTIVE FICTION : SARA PARETSKY : SUE GRAFTON : MARCIA FULLER : FILM REVIEW

WOMEN OF MYSTERY : THREE WRITERS WHO FOREVER CHANGED DETECTIVE FICTION : DVD REVIEW

The three women writers (some of us prefer to just be called writers) are Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Marcia Fuller. The focus on this film was how the woman detective characters that these three writers have individually invented has proven to be a role model for women readers in real life. For instance, Sara Paretsky tells of a letter she got from a Japanese fan, a woman engineer still dealing with daily sexual harassment on the job.

The film also focused on testimonials from the authors on how well they "know" their invented character and how at times the fact that the character is different than they are, even nothing like them, can become an issue of separation, as if that character were a real person.

I wonder, does a writer sometimes feel obligated to design a character who is inauthentic as a result of feeling the pressure to be, say, nice, in their own real life?

Maybe because I've heard authors speak of their chaacters and have invented some of my own, I know that we must "get into the head" of our character. We must know them as we know ourselves. We ask what would she (not us) do in any situation?

NEW DAY FILMS is the source of this older DVD.

OZZY OSBOURNE : TRUST ME I'M DOCTOR OZZY : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

Christine Trzyna Book Review:

First, let me say that I'm not a big fan of heavy metal and don't think I could identify a single song that Ozzy Osbourne ever sang or played on.

Second, let me say I'm not a big fan of Reality Television. I think you must be very very bored to watch other people living their lives instead of living yours. So I never watched a single episode of the Osbourne family reality TV show, whatever it was called.

However, any book subtitled "Advice from Rock's Ultimate Survivor," draws my attention.

Truly, Ozzy is an original voice and original sensibility, and this book MADE ME LAUGH OUT LOUD (LOL! Yeeesh!) again and again.

Besides the "way out-there "confessional tone about all the drugs and alcohol that he consumed (I'm against the abuse of substances) or which consumed him, and how he actually physically and mentally survived all that, probably by having a sense of humor, the thing that most fascinated me was his telling of having been called to supply DNA so that he could be studied as a survivor! (Truthfully!)

The format is Q AND A.

Where did he get those questions?

Apparently from readers who feel they can tell this man anything, ask him anything. Example (page 103 hardback): "Dear Doctor Ozzy: Do you think people should be allowed to rate their doctors on the Internet, like they can rate albums - or do you think the medical profession is too important to be subjected to the kind of abuse you got in 1970 for the first Black Sabbath LP?"

So while Ozzy's confessing, so are his questioners and some of his readership's problems are doozies.


TRUST ME I'M DR. OZZY is C 2011 Ozzy Osbourne
Grand Central Publishing New York

C All Rights Reserved Christine Trzyna 2012 including Internet and International Rights

CARLY SIMON : ANTICIPATION

SUBWAY STORIES : 10 SHORT STORIES in ONE FILM

I enjoyed SUBWAY STORIES, but more I was surprised by it.

A contest was held and thousands of writers submitted their stories. Then HBO filmed ten short shorts they thought were best. It pleased me greatly to see the final credits and the names of all those writers. The only thing I'm not sure of is if the submissions called for true and personal stories or if some or all of the writers created their stories.

Either way, if you've ever ridden a subway anywhere, you can relate. For these stories are unusual but also credible. Yes, this movie made me laugh and cry. I'm not sure which story was my favorite. Perhaps the story of the young woman who sang her dying mother a song on the phone, with a saxophonist and a rabbi lending their musical collaboration spontaneously.

Savor this one not with popcorn but a glass of wine.

C Christine Trzyna 2012 All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

POEMS FROM THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT : EDITED BY HONOR MOORE : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

POEMS FROM THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT

Edited by Honor Moore
American Poets Project
The Library of America


(Poetry by Alta, Rae Armantrout, Olga Broumas,Rita Mae Brown, Jan Clausen, Michelle Cliff, Lucille Clifton, Jane Cooper, Martha Courtot, Beverly Dahlen, Toi Derricotte, Diane Di Prima, Rachel Balu DuPlessis, Carolyn Forche, Kathleen Fraser, Elsa Gidlow, Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, Judy Grahn, Susan Griffin, Marilyn Hacker, Jana Harris, Fanny Howe, Erica Jong, June Jordan, Carolyn Kizer, Irena Klepfisz, Maxine Kumin, Joan Larkin, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Cynthia MacDonald, Bernadette Mayer, Honor Moore, Carol Muske-Dukes, Jane Miller, Robin Morgan, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Maureen Owen, Pat Parker, Molly Peacock, Marce Piercy, Sylvia Plath, Katha Pollott, Marie Ponsot, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Alice Walker, and Fran Winant.)


Several of these poems brought me back to the time when I still met women who were on fire about women's rights. Mostly since then I have met women who are bitches to other women. (Erica Jong has a theory that these creatures aren't women at all.)

Browsing through the bios in back of the book, I started searching for years of birth. Seems the youngest woman whose poetry is presented in this book was born in 1950.

I had to wonder. Are women younger than this not credited with:

Being important in the woman's movement?

Not writing poetry considered to represent the woman's movement?

Not interested in the woman's movement and the rights, responsibilities, and privileges (which they have inherited as simply their right as women)?

Writing feminist poetry that is not identified or accepted as feminist poetry by "mothers" of the movement or "mothers" of poetry?

Writing poetry that is not identified as worthy by the "literary cannon" and it's supposed upholders? (I yawn at the cannon.)

(Many "older" self identified feminist women who I've talked to about women of younger generations think they're a disaster when it comes to behaving and believing in a way of life that upholds feminism; So many of them lost to the importance instead of being "girly girls" whose lives revolve around what nail polish color to wear and shopping. Or we've talked about the horrific and sick influence of rap music on women; who the hell wants to have in their lives anyone who calls women "ho's", thinks women are "ho's" or self identifies as a" ho"? Why else is the female teenage ambition in high school to reduced to becoming experts at giving blow jobs boys demand so they can have and/or hold onto a boyfriend and/or starving themselves model thin? Are these young women the result of rotten parenting or what?)

Consider then that POEMS FROM THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT presents poems by poets who are and were unafraid to make the personal political and to write about subjects such as rape, bad sex, lesbianism, marital boredom, the effects of racism and sexism on their ability to live life independently and to the fullest.

I wish with all my heart that this poetry and the women who wrote it could have had more impact on society because it feels like not much has changed. The last sexist asshole I encountered just a few months ago was in his twenties, healthy, handsome, black, and highly educated and going to law school and working full time. He told me he did not "feel sorry" for me because I had no idea how hard it was to be a black man. He told me to "dumb down" as well. I was reminded that in college not one male student took the Women's Literature class I took.

C Christine Trzyna 2012
All Rights Reserved including International and Internet Rights

STEVE WINWOOD : DEAR MR FANTASY

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO BEST SELLER LIST RESULT OF WEEKLY SURVEYS OF INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORES

"The NPR Bestseller Lists are produced in collaboration with the American Booksellers Association. The lists are compiled from weekly surveys of close to 500 independent bookstores nationwide."

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Quotation

"If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing."
- Benjamin Franklin

AUTRY'S MASTERS OF THE AMERICAN WEST ART SHOW : RIDICULOUS AND INSULTING GALLERY POLICY

Ridiculous and Insulting.
The Masters of the American West exhibit closed today.

Last week I went to see it. I love art and I suppose I'm always hoping I'll see a piece that gives me chills or makes me loose track of time just looking at it, which happens once in a while, and has happened twice in all the years I've gone to the Autry Western Heritage Museum, which, since 2003 has been the Autry National Center.

I was walking around the gallery, and I knew I wanted to write about it, and after I saw Mian Situ's paintings of 1902 San Francisco China Town street scenes, which I loved, and JoAnn Peralta's "Spanish Shawl," which beautifully featured the play of candlelight through a shaw, and Scott Talliman Powers "Daily Bread," a painting of an old man panhandling, well I thought if I was going to write about it, I needed to take some notes.

I took a small 3X5 lined paper notebook and a pencil out of my purse and started to write down the names of the artists and the pieces; maybe later I'd figure out which one was my very favorite. Then there was a secutity guard telling me I was not allowed to take notes or "sketch!"

Whaaat!?!

A woman using a laptop which she seems to have taken out of a polka-dot rolling suitcase was writing/typing on the balcony.

Students with paper and pencils roamed the lower galleries.

I was not taking pictures with a cell phone as some people were.

I did not have any camera with me at all.


I didn't bring any brats in stollers, particularly not the screaming and running brats so often being pushed around the Autry since it's across the street from the zoo; the main reason not to go there on weekends.

I was using my pencil to write, not stab paintings.

I wasn't physically too close to any paintings, nor did I try to touch a sculpture.

I guess the days when people actually go to museums with sketch pad and art supplies, as I did in my teens, is over: Too much concern over someone lending their pictures, notes, sketches, drawings to forgers and counterfeiters?!

It was explained to me, because I asked to speak to a higher authority, and a woman named Lauren spoke to me, that because the museum does not OWN the paintings and scultpures on display, they have this policy.

THAT'S WHY YOU HAVE SECURITY GUARDS! I said.

C Christine Trzyna 2012 All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights.

STEVEN KING'S 11/22/63 : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

This is a big, heavy hard cover book. It's a long read and it's also a page turner, if, like me, you've been reading around the Kennedys and the Assassination in 1963 for years.

Steven King's 11/22/63 is a book with a few genres intermixing.

It's a story with a mystical - spiritual - quality to it, though King's reputation for gore is maintained with murders and mass chaos. You have to accept that a form of time travel is possible, though it's not science fiction but more a time warp that can be accessed.

There's a love story, one that provides the funniest moments.

But mostly what the Kennedy assassination story and Steven King's book is, is a MYSTERY story. Writing this book was a challenge not only because of the many genres that might have competed for prominence and become confusion in a lesser writer's manuscript, but because it's easy to find yourself searching for the information that his research brought forth, information that you know is controversial, such as if Lee Harvey Oswald was really the assassin and a lone gunman or not, and not sticking with the fictive story.

Steven King is so successful, a master, so maybe it's difficult to say anything revealing about his work overall. I've read Cell and The Dome, and one or two other titles over the years. I'm not a fan of gore but at least he's generally realistic with its possibilities. I do love the way he has set his characters in circumstances. I was left feeling satisfied with the read, which required that I stay home an entire weekend, in bed, with some crackers and cheese and the book.

PITTSBURGH TOONSEUM WAREHOUSE THOUSANDS OF COMIC BOOKS RUINED

Donations are coming in... The Associated Press story went from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette to newspapers around the country. Thousands of Comic Books were ruined.

"Executive Director Joe Wos says the most valuable comics weren’t at the warehouse, but some of what was lost will be "very difficult to replace." He says much of the material was waiting for transfer to the ToonSeum’s new on-site library.The ToonSeum is one of only three museums in the country dedicated exclusively to the cartoon arts."

ROLLING STONES : MOONLIGHT MILE

Remember when I first heard this song being captured by the magical mystical quality of it. The lyrics brought me right to a country road, the land covered in snow, the moon high in the sky, and walking alone on it. Today I am struck with how "Asian" the melody.

BLUE NEON NIGHT : MICHAEL CONNELLY'S LOS ANGELES : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW

BLUE NEON NIGHT is one of the first films I've seen that is about a writer's reasons why and I'm already ordering his book "The Narrows," as the first Micheal Connelly I'm going to read.

His genre is detective fiction. He has a consistent character - the detective - through his whole series of books. In this DVD Connelly discusses the way Los Angeles as a city, a city that is a sunny place full of shady characters, informs his fiction. The film itself consists of brief passages in which the author discusses his writing, along with readings of various passages that mention the streets and buildings of Los Angeles, which are filmed as if you were going on a ride with the detective. Prior to making his living as an author, Connelly was a journalist with a beat. Not a native, he found LA to be his city, a city where you can find everything including the contradictions.

LINKING TO HIS OFFICIAL WEB SITE NOW!

DIANE VON FURSTENBERG : A SIGNATURE LIFE : BOOK EXCERPT

DIANE VON FURSTENBERG with LINDA BIRD FRANCKE : A SIGNATURE LIFE : BOOK EXCERPT

about designing a perfume.

pages 104-105

"I want something that simply smells good, like cut fresh flowers, a scent you can inhale and almost swallow, like you can with the smell of a roasting chicken," I told people at the different companies, whose perfumers are called "noses."...

"I understood what I meant, but the chemists and noses did not. The poor account executives kept bringing in new notes in various combinations to our office, but they were always too heavy, too obvious, too reminiscent of another fragrance of another time.
"I tried words such as "alive," "Up," and "Open: and urged them to use only white flowers such as jasmine, honeysuckle, lilac, hyacinth, gardenia. But not gardenias in full flower; young, green gardenias has the lighter, fresher scent I was looking for. But nothing came of my efforts. After I had sniffed and worn and rejected a hundred or so samples, we were stalemated.

ONLY YOU MARISA TOMEI and ROBERT DOWNEY JUNIOR

 
"Only You," was a Romantic Comedy I thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe that's because I'm a fan of Robert Downey Junior, or because this film had an element of synchronicity and magic to it.



"Damon Brinkley" is the buzz word: Character Faith Corvatch of Pittsburgh is 9 days away from marrying a podiatrist when a friend of her fiancé calls to say he's in Italy and won't make the wedding. Faith was 11 when, while using a Ouija board with her brother, she asked for the name of her future husband and what did it spell ? "Damon Brinkley." 


(I played the Ouija board once with a teenage friend and when we asked what spirit was communicating it spelled "Jesus Christ." So much for my girlfriend pushing on her end to make it spell. I got the hell out of her too fluffy pink bedroom and ran all the way home and that big full moon sitting on the top of the hill sure did spook me!)



Ok, but then when Faith is a full blown teenager, she goes to a crystal ball reader and guess who the mystic says she will marry? "Damon Brinkley!" The man on the phone from Italy is named "Damon Brinkley." How could she get married without first meeting her soul mate? 

Of course she has a couple friends who support her choice, though they see that if she could do this then maybe she shouldn't get married. What follows (I won't spoil it for you) is a romp through Italy.



The movie ends with Faith knowing just who Mr. Right is. Ha!




Re-edited Sept 2013

CASANOVA'S LOVE LETTERS : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW

The world's greatest lover, or a man so controversial in his own time that it wasn't until the 1960's that his sexsational memoirs could be published?

This BFS Entertainment (Canada) three disc video was fascinating and so well done that I listened to the entire miniseries twice! (OK I was also crocheting at the time!) Subtitle "The Key to Immortality is to lead a life worth remembering." So, Casanova started out in life as a musician - a fiddler - born into a theater family in Venice Italy.
His second chance in life was to go into the priesthood. He fell in with wine, women, and rich patrons.



He was also, like many at the time, someone who grew fascinated with the mystical search for the elixir of life (Kabbala and other interests not Catholic (though he apparently continued to worship and go to Mass into his elderhood), and perhaps sexual escapades were part of that. Maybe sexual experimentation was not the point at all. Or maybe in the 19th century in Europe love and romance were very much part of seduction?



I don't want to ruin this film experience for you by telling you the whole story... Of course part of the question is, do we have an erroneous view of the morals of 18th century Europe? Is the way he lived so unlike the way so many are living today?



C 2011 Christine Trzyna Book Review All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights