I think I only visited Lichtman’s a half dozen times when I was living in Toronto. Back then they were actually Canada’s biggest chain of independent book stores. Their first store opened in 1909 in Toronto, and they filed for bankruptcy in 2000 for all the usual reasons (competition from the big box stores and online retailers).
Book: Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino
A straightforward, self-contained five-issue story arc by Dave Wielgosz that has Batman sort of fighting and sort of teaming up with Man-Bat (Dr. Kirk Langstrom) to take on Scarecrow.
I don’t really know much about Man-Bat but he struck me as a very similar character to Marvel’s Lizard: another doctor with a monstrous alter ego he keeps trying to find a cure for. But then I guess you could take the same model further back to Dr. Bruce Banner and the Hulk, and before that to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There’s some truth, maybe a lot of truth, to the idea that there are only a handful of stories and characters that we keep recycling. This one expresses the notion that we all have a dark side or primal id that we try to control but that keeps erupting in violent and dangerous ways.
The Freudian model or myth (which can be taken as another version of the same story) is useful here because Langstrom/Man-Bat is literally put on the couch by Harley Quinn (a trained psychologist, she reminds us), and subliminally conditioned by Scarecrow (Dr. Jonathan Crane being another doctor of psychology). Is Langstrom barking up the wrong tree in trying to find a cure for his Man-Bat condition in a lab? Maybe all he needs is therapy. Then again, therapy doesn’t seem to have rid Batman of any of his demons, which are released here by a sonic gun Scarecrow invented that unleashes the basest instincts of all the citizens of Gotham.
It’s not a ground-breaking comic in any way, but I found it quick and entertaining. Sumit Kumar’s art has a bit of a manga flavour to it, and the covers by Kyle Hotz and Alejandro Sánchez are great. I even had to laugh at the cover for issue #1, which clearly has the silhouette of the Bat Signal looking like Man-Bat’s balls hanging down from his crotch. I don’t think that was an accident. They knew what they were doing!
The new green deal.
In my last gardening post I made a passing reference to my garden’s “green wall.” This occurs at the point in the summer when the ivy has made a solid wallpaper effect, the blue false indigo (identified by an elite horticulturalist in the comment section here) is no longer in bloom, and the sweet pea vine is filling its pods, with only a few blossoms remaining. It’s green on green on green, in what I think is a wonderful mat of life.
Not everyone feels the same way! The last couple of years I’ve had friendly neighbours tear out most of the sweet pea, thinking it was a weed. I’ve also had not-so-friendly neighbours — the kind who go out to the garden centers every Spring and buy colourful annuals that they plant in pots and baskets — that the green wall looks like crap, that it’s just a mess.
Well, all I can say is that I’ll take my green wall and its riot of messy climbing things to their pretty flowers any day. We should enjoy nature at its most natural. Plus, I spend nothing on my garden while all I hear is endless complaining from the flower crew about how expensive plants have become. I have no sympathy for these people. They know what they can do. Build the wall!
Finally a good Miss Marple story. The setting is familiar, with Miss Marple invited to a dinner at the Bantry estate, where she listens to a ghost story about the wife of a friend of Colonel Bantry being frightened to death by a strange prophecy. Or at least so it seems. But Miss Marple isn’t having any of it: “You see, if I were going to kill anyone – which, of course, I wouldn’t dream of doing for a minute, because it would be very wicked . . . I shouldn’t be at all satisfied to trust to fright.” Instead there’s a complicated plot involving the usual ruses (chemicals, poison, disguise). But the solution comes by way of a single clue that is nicely slipped in and that plays fair. What I mean is that you don’t have to know about hundreds and thousands or Somerset House, but just pay attention to something that gets said in passing that is revealed to be significant later when something else is said, again in passing. It’s the sort of thing you can smile at and say “OK, I missed that, but it was very clever.” I think that’s the most you can say for a short mystery story, so well done!
One of the more controversial bits of information coming out along with the revelations, first made in the Toronto Star this past week, that author Alice Munro knew about her husband’s sexual interference with her daughter and chose to say and do nothing about it, is that, as the Star reported, this is something “everybody knew.”
By “everybody” what I think is meant is anyone with any interest in the matter. Including, as further reporting has turned up, Munro’s biographer, her publisher, and other parts of the Canadian media. Robert Thacker, an academic who wrote a biography of Munro, was interviewed by the Washington Post and had this to say in his defence:
“Clearly she [Munro’s daughter, who had told him of the matter] hoped — or she hoped at that time, anyway — that I would make it public,” he told The Post on Monday. “I wasn’t prepared to do that. And the reason I wasn’t prepared to do that is that, it wasn’t that kind of book. I wasn’t writing a tell-all biography. And I’ve lived long enough to know that stuff happens in families that they don’t want to talk about and that they want to keep in families.”
Leaving aside the odd idea that when a family member approached Thacker wanting to make a story public, he saw this as an example of something that families didn’t want to talk about and make public, I want to focus on his claim that he was not writing “that kind of book.”
Hm. What “kind of book” would that be? Here’s the publisher’s description of Thacker’s Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography:
This is the book about one of the world’s great authors, Alice Munro, which shows how her life and her stories intertwine.
For almost thirty years Robert Thacker has been researching this book, steeping himself in Alice Munro’s life and work, working with her co-operation to make it complete. The result is a feast of information for Alice Munro’s admirers everywhere.
By following “the parallel tracks” of Alice Munro’s life and Alice Munro’s texts, he gives a thorough and revealing account of both her life and work.
Let’s flag this bit: “working with her co-operation to make it complete.” How much confidence does that inspire that you’re going to read a complete, or thorough and revealing, bio?
But to return to “not that kind of book.” Where had I heard that before? Might it have been when Peter Biskind was attacked for not mentioning anything about Harvey Weinstein’s predatory habits (a pattern of conduct that “everybody knew” about) when Biskind had been writing a book on Weinstein? As I wrote previously: while admitting he knew about these rumours Biskind never raised them with Weinstein, saying “I never asked him about it because . . . I didn’t feel it was relevant to what I was doing.” Not that kind of book, you see.
Well, I’ve said it before. And then again. And then again and again. Munro’s name even came up in one of those earlier posts, and her attempts to “control the narrative” by cutting off another academic who was writing about her. This was not a mistake Thacker was going to make. From the Post story: “Thacker said that he and Munro spoke about the matter in 2008, when they met in a restaurant for an interview. Munro asked him to turn off his recorder.” Which I assume he did. “Working with her co-operation . . .” If you want to see an author raked over the coals, try dipping your toe in the comment thread following the Post story online.
So just to repeat the key takeaway: access always comes with strings attached, which turns the job of biographer into that of publicist. As the old saying goes, if you’re not reading something that somebody doesn’t want you to read, you’re reading an ad.
The lotus pond flowers are getting ready to launch! (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)
I’ve only visited Halifax once, around 2002 I believe, which is when I picked up my Citadel bookmark. I also visited The Book Room, which at the time was Canada’s oldest bookstore and (per Wikipedia) the largest non-chain bookstore in Eastern Canada. Some of its history is provided on the back of this bookmark. It closed in 2008 at the ripe old age of 169, a victim of people starting to buying books online and the practice of dual pricing (a recurring problem when currencies fluctuate and books become a lot more expensive in Canada than the U.S.).
With regard to people making their purchases online, the CBC story on the closing of The Book Room included this depressing little anecdote:
“The market reality is really changing,” said owner Charles Burchell, who described how a book was delivered to his store by mistake around Christmas time. The Book Room sits on the bottom of an apartment building; an online order was made by a tenant upstairs.
“The book was on our shelf, so they could have come down in two minutes and picked the book up, but they chose to order by computer and wait five [to] seven days for it to come in,” Burchell told CBC Radio.
That’s grim, and the sort of shift that a lot of retailers, not just of books, were having to deal with around the same time.
Book: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta
Here’s a little something I said five years ago, on the occasion of a Liberal cabinet minister calling out the prime minister and being congratulated for telling “her truth”:
I’ve been vaguely aware of this expression for a while but I’m not sure where it got started. As near as I can tell, when someone says they appreciate you telling your truth what they’re saying is that they don’t believe what you are saying is true, but they accept that you believe it to be true. It’s very much a backhanded way of saying nothing much. It’s also a perfect political soundbite. In response to the recent accusation of inappropriate behaviour on the part of possible presidential candidate Joe Biden, other Democratic candidates again rushed to acknowledge the complainant coming forward with “her truth.” I guess this covers the bases pretty nicely, without committing anyone to saying what the truth in any particular situation is.
But isn’t this a problem? By just saying that someone has told their truth aren’t we making the claim that no objective truth can be arrived at or is recoverable? That everything is relative to one’s own subjective experience? How is this different from a world where nothing is true and everything is possible?
I found myself thinking about this again recently in response to a couple of news stories, and feel nudged toward saying a bit more. I’ll put it in the form of an appeal: Can we please stop referring to someone as speaking their truth?
The first story has to do with the claim made by Alice Munro’s daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, that Munro took the side of Skinner’s stepfather after it came to light that he had sexually abused Skinner as a child. I found this revealing in many ways (apparently “everybody knew” about this, but in the approved manner of Canadian literary circles they didn’t talk about it in public), but it was the end of the story that caught my attention. This is from the CBC report:
Munro’s Books, a bookstore Alice Munro founded in Victoria with her first husband, James, posted a statement on its website supporting Skinner. The bookstore has been independently owned since 2014.
“Munro’s Books unequivocally supports Andrea Robin Skinner as she publicly shares her story of her sexual abuse as a child,” the store said. “Learning the details of Andrea’s experience has been heartbreaking.”
The bookstore also released a statement on its website from Andrea, her siblings Jenny and Sheila, and her step-brother Andrew.
“By acknowledging and honouring Andrea’s truth, and being very clear about their wish to end the legacy of silence, the current store owners have become part of our family’s healing,” they said. “We wholly support the owners and staff.”
Is this really unequivocal support? What does it mean to acknowledge and honour “Andrea’s truth”? Doesn’t such a statement imply that they’re not taking a side? Because after all, they’re not saying Skinner is telling the truth, only that she’s telling her truth.
The second story, also reported by the CBC, has it that Indigenous Services Canada is concerned about people who are not of indigenous ancestry claiming identity in that group anyway in order to take advantage of various professional benefits. Apparently this phenomenon is known as “race-shifting” (the people who do it are called “pretendians”) and there are concerns that it is spreading into Canada’s huge public service, which is, as one academic puts it, “fertile ground for race-shifting given the job security, lucrative salaries and its size.”
The solution, according to the Deputy Minister in charge of Indigenous Services? Well, “the key is to honestly tell your truth.” But isn’t that how this problem got started? I don’t want a bunch of frauds telling their truth, however honestly they may go about it.
Hasn’t this nonsense gone on long enough? What does it even mean to speak or tell “your truth”? I suppose the point is that if you believe something is true then it is true for you, and that’s all that matters. Or more poisonously, as George Costanza put it on Seinfeld, it can’t be a lie if you believe it.
In trying to be non-judgmental the term has become a dismissive and condescending insult. “Oh, I’m so glad that you’re telling your truth,” we say. It’s like smiling at someone in therapy. Because we’re quite deliberately not taking any kind of a stand on what the truth is. In fact, as I said five years ago, I think there’s a clear implication when we say someone is telling their truth that we don’t think they’re telling the truth at all.
And are we always so agnostic? Think of election denialism in the United States. Are the people who claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump to be graciously accepted as telling their truth, even if we know they’re not telling the truth? I don’t see that happening.
Yes, there are many different truths out there. And some things may be true for us and not true for others. But truth isn’t always so personal and subjective. To even say of matters that have been adjudicated that they only constitute some individual’s personal truth is to indulge in a relativism so absolute as to be nihilistic. Enough is enough.
There’s a house near where I live that dug out a lotus pond in their front yard. At least I think these are water lotuses. And let me tell you, they are some giant flowers! I thought I’d post some pics of the pond as things go along so you can enjoy them coming into bloom. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)
The crime:
On April 4, 1958 gangster and gigolo Johnny Stompanato was killed by a single stab wound to his belly in the bedroom of his then girlfriend Lana Turner. There had been a long history of Stompanato being a violent domestic abuser. At the coroner’s inquest it was found that Turner’s 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane, had held the knife, but the jury found it a case of “justifiable homicide” so there was no criminal trial.
The book:
My previous attempt at a Casey Sherman book hadn’t gone well. His account of the serial killer Tony Costa’s rampage on Cape Cod, Hell Town, even made it into my DNF files. It was bad. But I still wanted to give this one a shot, mainly because it’s a case I’d often heard of but didn’t know much about.
As usual with true crime, the title oversells things. Was this really Hollywood’s “most shocking crime”? I’m not sure a woman (or a woman’s daughter or other family member) killing an abusive husband or boyfriend counts as very shocking. I mean, also on the cover there’s a blurb from Ben Mezrich calling it “one of Tinseltown’s darkest moments,” but even that seems like a stretch to me.
Even more questionable though is the subtitle’s assertion that this is an “untold story.” Really? The case was given saturation coverage by the media, for obvious reasons. And the fact is that Sherman’s sources consist mainly of the published memoirs of the main players in the drama, including Turner, Crane, and L.A. crime kingpin Mickey Cohen. Does Sherman add anything new to the mix? I don’t see where he has, and keep in mind that the most recent of these memoirs is over 25 years old. I also didn’t register a single point where he called into question the accounts of events described by Turner, Crane, and Cohen, despite the fact that autobiography is the least trustworthy genre of non-fiction writing there is.
As it is, we’re left with a number of scenes that we just have to take on faith. And not only faith in the memoirist making an honest report, but in their having an accurate recollection of events that may have happened thirty years before they set them down. When I reviewed Hell Town I called Sherman out for his description of events that I didn’t see how he could know so much detail about. Here he at least has a source for most of his stories, but if you don’t trust the source this doesn’t always help very much. Take the following two incidents, which I just flagged at random. The first describes Turner coming home to her husband Lex Barker after learning that he’d been molesting her daughter Cheryl:
While Cheryl remained at Mildred’s [Turner’s mother], Lana drove back to the house she shared with Barker. With rage building inside her, she walked quietly upstairs and into their bedroom. Lana had kept a pistol by her bedside after the foiled kidnap attempt of her daughter. Barker slept soundly while Lana reached for her gun. She stood over her husband with the weapon pointed directly at his head. One shot and he would be dead. Her finger rested on the trigger. She was ready to pull, but she stopped herself. If she murdered Lex Barker in cold blood while he was sleeping in their bed, she would undoubtedly get the gas chamber herself. And what good would she be to Cheryl then? Lana lowered the pistol and left the room. She stayed up for the rest of the night, smoking, crying, and contemplating her next move.
Of course the only possible source for this would be Turner, though the notes only refer to Crane’s memoirs. So I really don’t know how much to credit it. It makes for a very dramatic, even cinematic, moment (the book was immediately optioned for a film deal), but that just makes me more suspicious as to how much of it really happened.
A few pages later another dramatic scene plays out, this time with Frank Sinatra confronting Mickey Cohen. Stompanato had apparently been making a play on Sinatra’s then wife, Ava Gardner.
“Look, I want you to do me a favor,” Sinatra said, staring at Cohen with his famous blue eyes. “I want you to tell your guy Johnny Stompanato to stop seeing Ava Gardner.”
Cohen did not care how famous Sinatra was or what his deep connection to the underworld were. He damn sure wasn’t going to play Mr. Fixit for Sinatra’s love life. Cohen peered out his living room window and noticed the unmarked police car parked across the street.
“You mean to tell me you came all the way out here where they’re recording everybody’s name and number that comes near this house?” he asked rhetorically. “This is what you call important? I don’t get mixed up with no guys and their broads, Frank.”
Sinatra was not accustomed to getting dressed down in this manner. At that point, Cohen took out the proverbial dagger and stuck it in his back.
“Why don’t you go home to Nancy where you belong?” he asked spitefully in reference to Sinatra’s first and long-suffering wife, Nancy Sinatra.
Again, there is only one possible source for this story and that’s Cohen. Did he really “dress down” Sinatra in this fashion? Did he say these exact words? Or is he making himself the hero of his own story?
What makes the dependence on a few far-from-disinterested sources more troubling still is the fact that there is a real mystery at the heart of Stompanato’s murder. Is it true that Cheryl Crane killed him? She always claimed that she did, but many have their doubts, as do I. (If you’re wondering why the defence team would want to pin the rap on her, it’s because as a minor she wasn’t liable for the death penalty in California.) The narrative of what happened on the night in question is pretty shaky (per Sherman: “Lana went black for a moment. All the rage growing inside her had made her blind. Suddenly, there was a frenzy of motion in the bedroom . . .”), and the post-murder behaviour of Turner and her entourage was highly suspicious. In particular I’m talking about the staging of the crime scene. You don’t have to be as cynical as I am to raise an eyebrow skyward at what happened immediately upon the death of Stompanato. Did Turner call the police? No. Instead, she made “four frantic phone calls” to: her mother, a doctor, her ex-husband (Cheryl’s father), and her lawyer, Jerry Giesler. When Giesler arrived he then called “his clean-up man” Fred Otash.
Otash despised Stompanato and was happy to see his lifeless body sprawled out on the carpet of Lana’s pink bedroom. Otash looked around the bedroom and got to work. It took the private investigator two full hours to stage the crime scene to Giesler’s satisfaction. The attorney gathered Lana and Cheryl in the bedroom. . . .
Giesler huddled with Lana and her fourteen-year-old daughter and painstakingly walked them through his plan. Content with the narrative he was about to weave for police and the public, Giesler finally dialed the authorities.
When police officers were summoned to North Bedford Drive more than 120 minutes after Stompanato was stabbed to death, there was something peculiar about the setup in Lana’s bedroom. Investigators were surprised to see that there was little or no blood on the rug, and the bedroom walls were damp and appeared to have been recently scrubbed. Stompanato’s body looked like it had been moved from its original location. Also, the cover had been taken off Lana’s bed and was nowhere to be found. “It looked like a hog had been butchered on it,” Giesler reportedly told friends later on. The murder weapon, the kitchen knife, was located on the sink in the en suite bathroom. The fingerprints on the handle were wiped clean. It also looked like all the bathroom towels were missing from their racks, possibly used to soak up all the blood in the room. Were the bloody linens now stuffed in the trunk of Otash’s car to be burned later?
I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in me that the “narrative” Giesler prepared had much relation to what really happened in Turner’s bedroom. It’s certainly something you’d think Sherman would want to look into a little more deeply, making some reference to later accounts of what Turner and others reportedly said about what went down the night of the murder. But he pretty much leaves the finding of the coroner’s inquiry alone, only tossing in suggestive tidbits like Lana dreaming of Johnny: “A long knife appeared in her subconscious, but who was wielding it? Was it her? Or was it Cheryl. It was all a blur to her now.” What are we to make of this? What is Sherman’s source? I couldn’t find any. In any event, for a book selling the “untold story” of Stompanato’s murder not having more to say about it than a sleepy “blur” is leaving a lot on the table.
“To me,” Sherman concludes in an Author’s Note, “Lana was a feminist hero and a pioneer.” Before the #MeToo movement, he writes, “we all must offer thanks to a female star from the golden age of Hollywood who broke a vicious cycle of violence and took her life back.” This is problematic on several counts. First of all, the #MeToo movement mainly had to do with “shitty” industry men preying on women who were trying to make it in the business. Harvey Weinstein was the totemic figure. But Turner sought out inappropriate men who the studio heads, most notably Louis B. Mayer, didn’t want her having anything to do with precisely because they would damage her career.
And in at least some cases she sought them out because they were bad boys. We want to tread lightly here because of the knee-jerk response to calling out a woman’s bad life decisions as victim-blaming. But the fact is that Turner, easily one of the most desirable women in the world at the time, was married 8 times to 7 different men (she re-married Stephen Crane, Cheryl’s father, when she found out she was pregnant). They were a line-up of drunks, losers, abusers, and one pedophile. And this isn’t including Stompanato, who she never married. Everybody is allowed one mulligan for making a bad choice of partner, but it’s only stating the obvious to say that Turner wasn’t just a poor judge of character in the men she dated but was setting herself up for serial disasters. After a while you have to own up to the fact that the problem is you.
Take her mésalliance with Stompanato, who endeared himself to her at one point by climbing a fire escape, breaking into her apartment, and attempting to rape her. “His consuming passion was strangely exciting,” she would later write. “Call it forbidden fruit, or whatever. But his attraction was very deep – maybe something sick within me – and my dangerous captivation [with him] went far beyond lovemaking.” That, at least, shows some self-awareness. But as a feminist “hero” I think Turner is compromised.
In sum, this is a pulpy read but not one that I thought added anything by way of new research or a fresh interpretation of the case. It’s basically just a recitation of what Turner, Cohen, and Crane had already said about it. And I’ll add another of my standard complaints about how the pictures are no good. They’re small, grainy, and mostly credited to Sherman himself, being pictures of locations as they appear now. Which isn’t always how they appeared back in the day. Why even include a recent picture of the famous Hollywood sign when (1) everybody already knows what it looks like, and (2) as the text makes clear, the sign at the time when Turner arrived in town read Hollywoodland (the “land” was only dropped in 1949). For a historical work of true crime like this there must have been a full archive of better pics to draw on. Could the publisher just not get the rights? There are even pics available online of the crime scene and the police looking at Stompanato’s body. You’d expect a photo section in a book like this to be stacked with pictures of Hollywood stars and the murder scene, but you get nothing like that. So in my opinion they would have been better off leaving pictures out entirely. If you’re not going to do it right then you might as well not bother.
Noted in passing:
“Cheryl had lost four pounds while being locked up at Juvenile Hall.” This statement was dropped in out of nowhere and I didn’t know how to take it. Was I supposed to think that losing four pounds in a week, or however long she’d been in for (it isn’t clear), was a lot? Because it isn’t. Even for a tall, skinny kid. I can easily lose four pounds in a couple of days by not eating as much, and I’m not obese. I suppose Cheryl didn’t care for the food in Juvie and wasn’t eating as much, so losing four pounds doesn’t strike me as either surprising or a big deal.
Takeaways:
Some women sure can pick them.
Alex Good 