It's only 93 pages, but this little book (where the narrator addresses the entire story to the woman she loves who has just left her) is so heartbreaking in scope...though I suppose 'heartbreaking' is defined more by your experience and perspective in these matters. One person's heartbreak can be another's idea of eye-rolling melodrama.
 

Between the constant use of "you" and the mad rush from the very start I had my misgivings at first:

I never told you this, either. I thought you would think I was crazy, to be so emotional about you the first day I met you.

but now I'm totally swept in and can't help but see how different it is from what would have been its lesfic counterpart more than 50 years ago:

Solely because I have read other novels by the same author, I bought an ebook version of Insatiable, discovering it's nowhere near as wonderfully written as These Curious Pleasures or 3rd Sex 1st Person.

Sloane Britain's personal backstory is a haunting one. At the age of 32, apparently bereft that her family could not accept her being gay, Elaine Williams (Britain's real name) killed herself. A likable, if extremely private, editor for "sleaze paperback" publisher Midwood Books in the 1960s, Williams used the pseudonym Sloane Britain (with other variations on the same name) to write lesbian pulp. Some of it is so simply terrific (3rd Sex 1st Person, for sure) that, next to it, Insatiable lacks heart and soul and is merely a product of its time.

You can sense some of the writer's internal homophobia in Insatiable where lesbianism is clearly portrayed as something "perverted," to be hidden and only even partially acceptable when there are no men around to "satisfy" you. People who knew Elaine Williams said she lost some of the optimism she had early in her career and that cynicism, desperation and gritty hard luck themes took over her later work.

Unlike These Curious Pleasures, which suggested lesbians could love just as much as anyone else does and dared to hint at happiness for its main character, Insatiable is basically a train wreck of emotions and poor reactions to life. Even so, there are still traces here of a talented writer, if one who seems to have lost any enthusiasm or interest in the world around her.

I would so love to think that if Elaine Williams and her alter ego Sloane Britain had lived today, they'd be thriving both personally and professionally. That doesn't change what happened to her, of course, but it's something I pretend anyway as I realize people in my generation have it much easier (comparatively speaking, of course) than earlier gays and lesbians did.

Sunday papers...

Spending the late morning listening to music (thanks to Pandora I discovered<<this<<album) with The New York Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian and Wall Street Journal papers, I'm finding some neat articles. I mostly go through all the major papers to get a feel for the book reviews, but sometimes the more feature-oriented pieces appeal to me:

*The last album imaginable you'd picture impressing a member of The Ramones:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/richie-ramone-on-herb-alpert-and-the-tijuana-brass-1405100157?tesla=y&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304574504580001542897793352.html

* Can you use the rules of Poker in every day life? I hope so. I don't play cards, but I would love to know how humans can better hide how we really feel: (from Parade magazine):

*I have become addicted to reading the Sunday Times these past few weeks. There's something about the 'other side of the pond' I just can't enough of...You can't really learn anything from this, but it's still a funny and surprisingly poignant article written by a man wondering if hitting forty means things are going downhill:

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/newsreview/columnists/article1433375.ece



*There's an absolutely fascinating examination of great forgotten reads in "Good reads go Dutch," an article I can't find online anywhere, but is well worth getting your hands on if you can find a print copy. Among the many "good reads" mentioned are gems like these:

http://www.amazon.com/Discovery-Heaven-Harry-Mulisch/dp/0140239375/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405273506&sr=1-1&keywords=the+discovery+of+heaven


*A very interesting, compassionate look at obesity as a massive health scare that nevertheless often brings ridicule and judgment from those who do not understand:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/13/overweight-people-help-malice-gastric-bands-nhs


Pandora got my hopes up when I heard this beautiful cover of "Ave Maria" by Siphiwo off his album Hope. But in an example of maddening searches over the Internet the bring nothing back, I can't find the song anywhere for purchase (digitally) or even to play on You Tube. Pandora's Opera Radio is good, but often plays certain selections over a lot so maybe it will play again soon. It is so lovely, even for how lovely "Ave Maria" is...

Saturday night music...

 album cover for Incorruptible by Lavender Diamond

What a nice album Incorruptible Heart is, a really, really nice album that just sounds so sincere you can't help but like Lavender Diamond immediately. I can't put my finger on why it's such a refreshing album...maybe just because every song is somehow a throwback to girl groups, Linda Ronstandt and even a little bit Karen Carpenter, but with modern sensibilities.

There are sooo many stand-outs on here: "Everybody's Heart's Breaking Now" (highlighted in Amazon's Free Music From Artists On The Rise) is spectacular! I figured when I went to listen to the rest of the album it wouldn't measure up, but boy does it! "I Don't Recall" is as sweet as a soda shop, but not at all precious. "Teach Me How To Waken" is airy, almost mystical, definitely haunting. "Forgive" is downright gorgeous and "Perfect Love" is quite adorable, in a Connie Francis kind of way.

Lavender Diamond's frontwoman Becky Stark's distinctive voice makes the album unforgettable. When she was seventeen, her vocal teacher told Becky her ribcage was too small for classical singing, but I beg to differ, especially on the last track with its echoes of opera. Closing with the lovely "All The Stars," Incorruptible Heart is perfectly titled. Can anyone who sings like this be anything but good-hearted? I love, love, love this album! :)

Here's what allmusic.com has to say, as the review actually appears on the website (no paragraph breaks):

Review by Fred Thomas  [-]

Upon their emergence in the early 2000s, Los Angeles-based Lavender Diamond were immediately lumped into the "New Weird America" movement that included warped indie folkies like Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Vetiver, among many others. The band, based around the creative force of bandleader Becky Stark, wasn't quite all the way weird, folk, feral, or drugged-out enough to fit into the confines of the New Weird ghetto, but their achingly positive songs soared with childlike simplicity and a crushingly beautiful straightforwardness in Stark's lyrics and lush vocals. Maybe the nakedness of the songs weirded people out enough, and not offering enough of a context or a gimmick to fit in with the Sufjan Stevenses or Clap Your Hands Say Yeahs of that particular moment in time, Lavender Diamond were shuffled off to sit with the weird kids at the freak folk table. Returning after a five-year space between records with Incorruptible Heart, all the elements of Stark and company's uniquely direct sound have been brought into higher definition, still relying on both playfulness and open-hearted honesty in the songwriting, but bringing with it a refined sophistication absent on earlier work. Songs like the piano-driven "Forgive" and "Oh My Beautiful World" with its update on girl group sounds bring Stark's voice into the forefront, as usual, but here they bear a sadness or world-weary understanding that was missing in the band's more naïve songs. Production was handled by OK Go's Damian Kulash Jr. and Flaming Lips collaborator Dave Fridmann, and it's apparent from signature blown-out drum sounds and a combination of dazzlingly psychedelic yet crystal-clear touches. While being relatively spare, Incorruptible Heart sounds huge. "Light My Way" flirts with electro-pop, but sounds a little out of place next to more stripped-down songs. M. Ward shows up to duet on the whimsically upbeat "Perfect Love," which may be a little too giggly and cute for its own good in comparison to the rest of the album, which comes off in turns as mysterious as some of Kate Bush's moments of storminess or as somber as Nick Drake's early orchestral pop bummers. Album opener "Everybody's Heart's Breaking Now" sets the scene of the album with its gorgeously simple electric piano and melancholic ripples of delayed percussion and pulsing electronics bounding like rocky waves beneath Stark's voice. Lavender Diamond still aren't weird enough for their wild-eyed brethren, but maybe a little too weird (or more likely not quite disposable enough) for Target commercials. Incorruptible Heart exists, much as the band does, in an in-between space that's not easy to pigeonhole. There's always been an inexplicable brightness to Stark's songs, and here that light is near blinding, even when the songs themselves aren't particularly happy. This long-labored album is a thoughtful and contemplative breed of off-kilter pop that becomes both more interesting and increasingly complex with repeat listening.

I have been thinking about love (and all its different forms) for longer than I should today. Most likely, it's the books in my life right now. Often, for me, they offer something real life rarely can. More than not, they are ridiculously unrealistic and therefore can only set you up for disappointment when you come back to earth.

Sometimes, though, they offer what you need at just the right moment even if the plot has nothing to do with you, the sentiments can.

Taxi To Paris has turned out to be one of the best love stories I've read in a while. It's probably also one of the most unusual ones and definitely, through most of it, the saddest.

In the early stages, the sadness is all about each woman's isolated feelings and the need to eradicate what she feels for someone she can't be with in any kind of way. The main character, in particular suffers:
 

If ever a thought of her entered my mind, I hunted it promptly to extinction.

 

The novel is unique because it takes a premise that is usually one big dangerous cliché ("Pretty Woman") and makes it grim and gritty, far more fragile and not only believable and far from romantic, but somehow necessary to the storyline.

And, as with any two people coming together as a possible couple, there's always conflict:

It seemed that there were never two free minutes in which we could just be together calmly and happily. Every time, something unpredictable happened.

Prostitution would seem to be the elephant in the room, but it's actually love and how foreign and inaccessible it is to a woman who has never really known it and the person who wants to share it with her.

 

“Then I can’t love you either?” I said it for her. “Do you think that my love for you depends on the availability of your body?”

 

 She looked at me mutely. Her eyes were desperate. She was incapable of expressing what she felt, but she would’ve loved to do it. She said more with her silence than I would ever have thought possible

What should I do with all my love if I couldn’t give it to her?

 

She came after me, first hesitantly, then with long, fast steps. She took me in her arms. I stood there, desiring nothing else. "Stay with me," she whispered, choking on her tears.

 

 There is so much here that surprises me with its easy to relate components, but none so much as when the narrator decries the "other fish in the sea" advice people always give those who have just lost in love:

 

I’d remain alone instead. That situation seemed the most desirable to me at the moment. If I couldn’t have her, the difference didn’t seem that great.

 

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much conflict and going back and forth that by the end the reader is almost dizzy...yet it's a pleasant, gentle kind of vertigo.

There's always a risk in romancing the impossible, but here it works, precisely because it isn't romance so much as a very long and very painful journey to love. I guess that sounds so corny, but it's what I get from Taxi To Paris.

So many books, so little time...

It does not pay to start cleaning your place by starting with the bookshelf, _never_ does it pay. If you're like me, you end up on the floor with a beloved book from your past and you open it to a random page, begin reading and get lost all over again.

 

Darn you, books, I'm supposed to get things done today!

 

The academics in Marilyn Sides' lovely, funny first novel, The Genius of Affection, are preoccupied with gardens and love... in that order. Toward the end of the book, Sides comes right out and says it: "Martin looked around the yard and said to Lucy, 'It's the urban pastoral.'" An urban pastoral indeed: Everyone lives in gritty Boston, and they all tend their plots like crazy. The Lucy in question is a biographer (with a passion for showy annuals) who's just turned 40 and had decided it's time to get her domestic life in order and find a partner. If the hunt for a husband sounds like familiar territory, don't think Sides doesn't know it. Jane Austen hangs over the novel like a friendly spook, and is invoked in the novel's opening lines: "How lucky, how comforting to have a lover on one's fortieth birthday. Lucy Woolhandler had managed, at the last minute, to meet that deadline. The idea of such a deadline she knew to be ridiculous. She wasn't living, was she, in an updated Jane Austen novel, where the problem was to get the pathetic heroine married, not at twenty-two or twenty-five, but forty?" Turns out, of course, that's just where she is living.

Three suitors court Lucy--the most favored of them is a gardening historian, the least favored plants a hundred prissy white tulips in prissy straight rows. Sides employs the time-tested Austen strategy (not to say formula) where the emergence of the "right" suitor heralds the emergence of Lucy's most "right" self. This is a novel of middle age: its characters don't change, they come to know themselves. Sides, author of the acclaimed story collection The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife & Other Tales, cleverly shows how Lucy's search for love is also a search for a new way of living. Lucy desires dailiness, she grows "nostalgic for everyday life." At 40, she no longer wants the grand gesture, she wants the small, repeated gesture that grows beautiful with time, as in a garden, or a well-made novel. --Claire Dederer