Category Archives: books

book reports, books, Karen Tashkovski

Book Report: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

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I’ve been  wanting to revisit From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg for a long while.  The copyright on this book is 1965.  I’m pretty sure I read it when I was the same age as protagonist Claudia Kincaid, so I’m guessing that was a half century ago and yet, for many years of late, I would bring this book up in conversation with students anytime we talked about field trips.  I had wanted them or at least one of them to read it before we took the three different bus trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan between 2006 and 2008.

Once arrived (all three times!), my students behaved in similar fashion to those descriptions Claudia makes about other children as relayed in deposition manner to Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler – ungrateful, inconsiderate, not really wanting to learn anything, etc.  None of them wanted to hide in the museum either or solve a big mystery.   Poo-poo on them.

I remembered the bit in the story about the siblings running away from home to hide in the Met – I couldn’t remember why, how they did it and how Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler fit into the story.

It was a refreshing reread and impressive to find Claudia and her somewhat reluctant brother having their adventure include learning…and research!  It was also evident to me why this book resonated with my twelve-year-old self and why on the reread all these years later I sobbed uncontrollably once I got to the final page.

This is a story about propelling oneself in the direction of adventure and dreams, of willing oneself to plan and execute an idea eliminating fear of future consequences in order to fulfill some ethereal secret dream.  It was relatable to me then and more so now.

In many ways I am Claudia, both pre-teen and adult Claudia simultaneously and I’m also Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, although not quite as old AND I’m Elaine Konigsburg, do you know what I mean?  Because those dreams you have as a kid – they never leave you and when you are older and you review your progress, you kind of find out that you are either rolling out new dreams to chase or encouraging others to dream big.  And running away as a means to authenticity is very appealing.

As you begin to read the first chapter, you learn about Claudia (Claude)  Kincaid and her brother James (Jamie).  You think this is just a third person perspective thingy until you realize that Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is narrating the whole scenario as expressed in a letter to her lawyer.  It’s a genius POV because the audience learns who she is but not why she knows this stuff until the moment that the characters’ lives intersect.

There were no Amber Alerts back in 1965.  The frantic parents are mentioned but not so much to invoke a fear-based drama or the potential for a horror story.  And it is also not an instruction pamphlet on how to run away from a nice suburban home in Connecticut.

It’s more about being heard.  It’s about being responsible about an irresponsible choice.  It’s ultimately about being seen authentically as well.  Being seen and heard.  I mean, you’ll have to read it and decide that between-the-lines stuff for yourself.  The message is not just for kids.

Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is eighty-two and she is preparing her will, revising her will, selling artwork from her vast collection and preparing to down-size.  She is a wealthy widow who is still spry with her wits about her.  She is like a kind fairy god-mother to these children.

Elaine passed away in 2013.  She was eighty-three.  In the afterward portion of my copy of the book, one she’d added for the book’s thirty-fifth anniversary, she shared some anecdotes with regard to writing the book, researching the landscape and fictionalizing the part about Michaelangelo.  I really fell in love with this woman I did not ever know, because her depth of character was just…epic.

I got my copy of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg from the public library.  You can also purchase a copy here.

 

book reports, books, Karen Tashkovski

Book Report: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

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A rainy day is the perfect time to finish a novel then investigate the movie by the same name. The movie was adapted from the Broadway musical screenplay that Anita Loos co-authored. It was released in 1953 starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe.

The book was published in 1925.

That’s almost one hundred years ago! The characters are similar. I mean their names are the same – Lorelei and Dorothy. One is a blonde and the other a brunette. The title of the novel is actually Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes: two stories. One is told in diary form as Lorelei navigates her journey to marriage and the other is mostly exposition, as Lorelei recounts the actions taken by Dorothy, including her back story of hardship, on her path to marrying her wealthy guy.

Yes – that marriage plot point is the same. The whole thing started when Anita Loos, already a successful screenwriter for Hollywood silent films and a member of the Round table gang (literary types who gathered to exchange witticisms – most people my age and older know this reference), noticed that young starlets were accepting casting couch invites even back then.

I think she was amused by their behavior and maybe didn’t think highly of them. She began penning this story to indulge that amusement while on a train from New York to California or the reverse.

The story had been released as a serial, each chapter in the monthly Harper’s Bazaar magazine and women loved it. It was considered really risque to show bold unmarried women as sexual beings, getting what they wanted – wealth, diamonds, etc. from wealthy men just because they were beautiful.

Specifically Lorelei. She is clearly a kept woman and even though it isn’t mentioned, she is most definitely having sex with Eisman and other men. And she is a teenager.

Yes, they called them flappers back then. Young and single women who wanted to have fun. They partied all night long with all sorts of men – meaning married and single. Mostly wealthy men who traveled to New York City on business trips.

Lorelei states that she had been an actress but the very married Mr. Eisman who wants to “educate her”, who pays for her trip to Paris, as well as her many shopping trips, her apartment in Manhattan and a maid, does not want her working. She says he thinks she aught to write her thoughts down because she is so smart – and this we as readers think is laugh-out-loud funny because the author deliberately misspells words and we think that the stereotypical (dumb) blonde has arrived.

But we are in for a surprise because what Lorelei lacks in book smarts, she makes up for in manipulative-sexy shrew smarts.

I think in 1925, women readers secretly wished they could be Lorelei more than mocking her foolish antics. There’s this one bit when she is in France and she comments that it is nice to have platonic friendships with men – this innocuous comment slides in the deeper meaning – that she is sleeping with all the rest of them – in a way that seems more provocative than I expected for a one-hundred-year-old novel.

How great would it be to have been a party girl in the 1920s with men clammoring to buy you dinner and showing their affection via diamonds and pearls and tiaras and whatnot?

I would love to see a film made about this book that is more accurate to its correct time period. not as a musical, not with twenty-year-old women who look thirty-five, IDK. When I imagined the characters as I was reading, I did not see Monroe. In fact, her characterization of Lorelei was a bit overacted. Jane Russell’s Dorothy was much better. When Dorothy gets wet in the movie (oh, btw, that scene with the men in swimwear is AMAZING), she looks like a modern girl. She’s so pretty without all the technicolor make-up and 1950s hairdo.

The book and the movie are really two different incarnations of the machinations of Anita Loos’ wry wit, style and overall talent for creating such memorable characters.

Read the book then let me know what you think. It’s so FUN!

art, books, Karen Tashkovski

Book Report: Just Kids

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I’m still digesting this emotionally charged and poetic memoir by Patti Smith. I finished reading Just Kids twenty-four hours ago.

At first I wasn’t that into her poetic prose, the dream-like quality, specifically, to the way she describes New York City in the mid-sixties, the references to a love of specific literature, writers and poets, the name dropping, you know. It seemed like a journey I had refused to take.

And that’s because in 1985, armed with my fashion design BFA, I headed to Manhattan for interviews and was offered jobs that paid nothing. I didn’t want to live in poverty until I made it as an artist, so I didn’t. I stayed home and clunked around, moved to Florida for a bit, came back and got that MS in Art Ed and worked doing that for thirty years.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in myself, was it? That I didn’t identify with other artists? The dream of being a successful artist has always been there, but not the bohemian stuff. When she writes about the drugs and the deaths (overdoses, suicides) of those in and around their friend group – and these were the successful ones – the Janis Joplins, Edie Sedgewicks and Jimi Hendrixes – I just felt like, really??? They all thought they were profound and super talented but none of them practiced mindfulness. When Smith started dabbling with marijuana, I was screaming at her – don’t do that!!!! You are supposed to be the voice of reason!

But, you know, they were just kids.

As I continued reading, I learned so much about these two artists, Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, how they were so sure of themselves despite not even having food or shelter. Different times.

I thought about my parents and how they were only a little bit older than those two, how they got married at nineteen and twenty-one and bought us a home around the same time as Just Kids, and raised us in a great neighborhood even though they made, like, nothing. I think Dad told me he made $57.00 a week or maybe a month, I don’t remember.

They were just kids too.

By the end of the book I was devouring the poetic prose, crying, like, I could barely see the pages. Because it is a love story, one of enduring, unconditional love and respect despite the pain of choices made and directions taken.

Mapplethorpe is famous for homo-erotic photographs in which he was an active participant- this he thought crucial in his commitment to authenticity – that he fully immerse in the process and transform from artist to Artist. Smith shares the genesis of said work, how he punished himself for these lewd thoughts yet felt compelled to progress with that trajectory. He’d said he’d wanted to sell his soul to the devil for fame and fortune and quite possibly believed he’d done that, the Catholic guilt that prevalent coursing through his veins and brain.

Smith is almost an anthropologist here, even as she documents this true saga of her life. She doesn’t judge. She shares her own rise to success as poet and rock star, carefully navigating her stuff only as it intertwines with his even though her stuff is the stuff of legend.

Again, my comparison – how I’m always telling you I don’t feel like I am living authentically. And yet, I just don’t believe that I need to participate in fantasies. I don’t need you to understand me/dissect my inner desires. I mean, what the heck – why must we bleed, why die for our art? It’s so extreme. I certainly can’t compare my success to theirs, you see? I’m not right. I’m not wrong, but I am frustrated by choices. Hence the gallons of tears I shed.

She married someone else in the end and had a beautiful yet, in my opinion, brief blissful family life but she doesn’t say much about her husband save how wonderful he was (he died a mere five years after Mapplethorpe’s demise).

It’s a bittersweet hero’s journey. Someone made a movie about it. Patti Smith didn’t give her blessing. It stars Matt Smith of Dr. Who and The Crown fame as Mapplethorpe.

I wouldn’t have (given my blessing) either. It took Patti Smith ten years to write this book. It’s a perfect love letter penned to her first love, trusted friend and fellow artist, so worthy of the National Book Award for non-fiction it received. Read it and weep.

You’re welcome. <3

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