Treasure Island

The kids and I have been reading Treasure Island recently at bedtime. I hadn't read this book in years and years, but it's still a great tale. It's got it all -- treasure maps, sailing ships, buried treasure and plenty of semi-scurvy double-crossing pirates. The kids thought that Pew, the blind, mean and scary pirate who was posing as a beggar at the start, was particularly spooky. They were pretty disappointed when Long John Silver turned out to be something much worse than a cheerful ships cook as well. I'm just happy that they now know that Long John Silver is something more than a third tier fast food chain in the United States.

The Emperor's Children

I recently read a book called The Emperor's Children by Claire Messaud. I read about it in one of the mini-reviews in The Atlantic or The New Yorker, which I still subscribe to, but which are delivered to me a few weeks lake via the intercompany pouch that makes its way from our US headquarters building to China every week or two. There are a few English bookstores in Shanghai but they're pretty small. These magazine reviews and whatever happens to catch my eye in one of the airport bookshops on a layover on a US work trip are my sources for book tips now. Not much coming from my Chinese work colleagues. It was a pretty quick read and a sort of entertaining story, but it didn't do that much for me. Had I been raised among intellectuals in The Dakota perhaps I would have liked it more.

The Avalon

I bought a box set of Hitchcock movies a while ago and we’ve been making our way through them. We watched The 39 Steps recently and it reminded me that the first time I saw this movie was with my grandmother, who I called Mammy, that having been the way I pronounced grandma as a 2 year old. I was the oldest grandchild and as such I got grandparent-naming privilege that is often bestowed on the first grandchild. I’ve known quite a few people whose grandparents nick names are the result of the same poor pronunciation process. Anyway, she was a real character. Born around 1919 in a tiny town called Grantsville, about 60 miles west of Salt Lake City on the edge of the desert that stretches between Salt Lake and Reno. At that time Grantsville couldn’t have had many more than 1000 people and she said that growing up she knew everyone and their dog.

She was enamored with Hollywood and movie stars, going once or twice a week to Grantsville’s little movie theater as a girl. It was an incredible escape for a poor girl in a Depression-era hardscrabble little town whose economy was at that time largely based on the Western Pacific railroad, salt extraction from the lake, and cattle and sheep ranching on land perhaps best left to sagebrush. She was a fantastic and very funny person who loved to laugh and was as positive and supportive as anyone I’ve known. Her mother probably spoke more Swedish than English though Mammy claimed she only knew “tack sa mikket” (phonetic), which was all I ever learned and apparently means thank you. Anyway, once I was a little older, maybe 8 or so, my sister and I would go and spend 3 weeks or so with them each summer. It was fantastic and we always looked forward to it.

One of the great memories I have was going with Mammy and grandpa to the Avalon Theater on State Street in Salt Lake City. The theater wasn’t anything particularly special, but it was an old style theater with one big screen. It showed only old movies, most often in double features and it cost 25 cents. We, not having lots of money, would buy snacks and drinks at a normal grocery store and sneak them in Mammy’s purse. It was Mammy that taught me that a woman’s purse was a sort of sanctum sanctorum, never to be violated with out specific permission and even then very cautiously. This rule and the attitude that lay beneath it served us well in our snack smuggling trade. The drinks we took in were usually in glass bottles, which were pretty common back then.

One night during a movie, Mammy finished her bottle of Pepsi (Pepsi and absolutely not Coke was the undisputed drink of choice for Mammy) and set it on the ground under her seat. A few minutes later, perhaps in a swoon at the entrance of Clark Gable, Gene Kelly or Errol Flynn, she accidentally kicked the bottle over and it proceeded to noisily bump and roll its way all the way down the floor of the theater. We all played dumb as people huffed at the racket. We still laugh about this, years after her death.

Anyway, I remember seeing The 39 Steps with her as a kid at The Avalon, being totally spooked and loving Hitchcock movies ever since.

Notorious

We watched this movie again recently. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. This is the disturbed and twitchy Cary Grant of the Hitchcock films he did and not the goofy romantic comedy Cary Grant. And Ingrid Bergman… Rio looked so clean and elegantly exotic – every one dressed up for day to day life. Great stuff.

I remember when I was in high school there was a theatrical re-release of a series of Hitchcock movies – Rear Window, The Man who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, etc. A new one would come out every 3 or 4 months. I would rally my friends to go see them and they were great on a big screen. They weren’t at too many theaters, but I remember going to an older theater on Hollywood Boulevard, which hadn’t been cleaned up at that time. My friends were pretty reluctant at first, but after seeing one of these on a big screen people started wanting to go. Plus it was a little offbeat, which had an appeal to a certain sort of LA high school kid. LA was a fun place to grow up.

Six Records of a Floating Life

I read a short book called “Six Records of a Floating Life” recently. It’s an autobiography by a Chinese man, Shen Fu, who lived in a Chinese city called Suzhou a couple of hundred years ago when China was still relatively untouched by the West. It was a fairly accesible window into another world. He wandered fairly precariously between jobs and cities around China during his life. The six records are supposed to be six chapters, but I got to the end and had only counted four. I went back to the introduction, which I skipped, like most introductions, and found out that the last two chapters were lost but the title and the first four chapters remained. (If I ever write a book and there is an introduction I’ll make sure I don’t call it an introduction to catch all the intro-skippers like myself). The first section is the best, which is largely a description of his marriage to a wife who died relatively young. A very touching and almost wistful description of the affection between them. Lovely stuff and a good short read – maybe 150 pages.

100 Years of Solitude

I finally read this. This is Jenny’s favorite novel as well as that of a few other friends I’ve known along the way. (Mine remains “Anna Karenina” which I read one summer in college when I was toiling away as a temp file clerk in the basement of O’Melveny and Myers in L.A.)

Wow. He didn’t win a Nobel Prize for nothing. With that blazing literary insight I'll check out.