Author: allen0997

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother ~ A Capsule Book Review

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

This slim volume contains two short novels by Stephen Crane: Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) and George’s Mother (1896). Both explore the lives of lower working-class people in the section of New York known as the Bowery in the 1890s. These people speak fractured English, labor in factories and sweatshops, and most of them drink to excess to make their lives more endurable. They are contemptuous of people of wealth, refinement and education, and they have little or no hope of ever rising above their class.

The title character in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets lives with her family in a wretched tenement. Her mother is a drunken harridan and her brother a brutish lout almost devoid of human feeling. Despite her surroundings and her family, Maggie somehow manages to be attractive to men (the quality that will prove to be her downfall). Pete is a friend of Maggie’s brother who takes an interest in her. He is a bartender and Maggie believes he is sophisticated and worldly wise. She begins going around with him and they engage in sexual relations. After he gets tired of her, he discards her in favor of another girl. Maggie, at this point, is seen as “ruined” in the eyes of the world because she has given herself to a man who has rejected her. She has no chance for redemption.

The subtitle of George’s Mother is A Tragic Tale of the Bowery. George Kelcey is a laborer who lives with his mother in a Bowery tenement. Since all her other children have died, George’s mother is especially attentive to him. She harangues him to hang up his coat when he returns from work and to do all the things a mother thinks a son is supposed to do. She wants nothing more than for him to be the type of son she thinks he should be. He has an overwhelming fondness for alcohol, though, and he loves to spend evenings in the company of his male friends. After alcohol and merriment get the best of him, he loses his job and his irresponsible behavior begins to wear on his mother’s health.

Stephen Crane was one of the first, if not the first, American writers to write in a naturalistic or realistic style. His most famous work is his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, which he wrote without ever seeing combat. His life and writing career were cut short when he died of tuberculosis in 1900 at age 28.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Theft by Finding ~ A Capsule Book Review

Theft by Finding ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

David Sedaris is a humor writer whose work is not raunchy or cruel. I’ve read all his books (Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, When You are Engulfed in Flames, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Naked, Barrel Fever) and I usually buy his latest book from Amazon as soon as it comes out. I stood in line for over an hour at one of his book signings to get him to sign my copies of Holidays on Ice and Me Talk Pretty One Day. Then I sat down and rested.

His books are made up of engaging stories that, since they are true and not fiction, are informal “essays.” He writes about his family, people he’s met, his travels, and things that have happened to him, good or bad. His latest book, Theft by Finding, is something of a departure for him, because it’s not these informal essays but is instead diary entries going back forty years.

That’s what Theft by Finding is: 512 pages of diary entries. Some of the entries are little anecdotes and some are less than that. In his introduction, he says that he imagines people not reading the whole book page for page, but instead “dipping in” the way you would with a high school yearbook. I read the whole book page for page. If you think it’s tedious, it isn’t, especially after you’ve read for a while. The most engaging diary entries are the ones where he is recounting things he’s heard people say and things he’s seen them do, as in the IHOP restaurants where he used to hang out a lot, first in his home town of Raleigh, North Carolina, and then in Chicago. When he’s not hanging out at the IHOP, he’s struggling to make a living cleaning apartments or sanding furniture. He has not had an easy life, or if he has an easy life now, it hasn’t always been that way. He is kind of an “everyman,” uncovering the absurdity of living in the world today. You easily recognize yourself in what he’s saying. That must be the key to his popularity.    

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Twin Peaks: the Return ~ A Capsule Review

Twin Peaks: the Return ~ A Capsule Review by Allen Kopp

Twin Peaks, the too-offbeat-for-mainstream TV series, appeared on commercial TV in 1990 and 1991. It didn’t last any longer than it did, we will assume, because it wasn’t the usual ho-hum TV fare (it was challenging to watch). Now, all these years later, we have Twin Peaks: the Return on the Showtime network, with, it must be assumed, less network censorship and more leeway on the part of the show’s creators to bring us disturbing images and situations, not to mention R-rated language. “Visionary” director David Lynch is back as one of the show’s two writers, its director and one of its principal actors. He’s still using some of the same directorial techniques he used forty years ago on Eraserhead.

If you can remember back all the way to 1990, you will remember the show’s premise: a high school beauty queen named Laura Palmer from the small town of Twin Peaks in the state of Washington is mysteriously murdered and “wrapped in plastic.” Handsome FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) is summoned to Twin Peaks to try to figure out who (it might have been anybody in the town) murdered Laura Palmer. (If I remember correctly, it was her own crazy father who killed her.)

Anyway, the early-thirties Dale Cooper of 1990 is now in his late fifties, although he still looks essentially the same. He has been missing since the end of the first series twenty-six years ago. He is still wearing the same darkly conservative suit and has been in a sort of nether world, where the floor is a red-and-white zigzag pattern, heavy red curtains hang all around, and the people (including the dead but now middle-aged Laura Palmer) speak as if they just landed here from another planet. (You’d have to hear it to know what I’m talking about.)

Dale Cooper has two (that we know of) “doppelgangers,” or doubles. One of the doppelgangers is (or has been until recently) in prison, has long hair and is terrible-looking. The other doppelganger is named Dougie Jones. Through a series of mishaps, Agent Dale Cooper is now living the life of Dougie Jones in the state of Nevada. He looks so much like Dougie Jones that nobody, including the real Dougie’s wife and son, knows it isn’t him. He goes to work every day at the Lucky 7 insurance company in Las Vegas and the people who work with him believe he’s Dougie Jones and don’t know that he’s not. Dale Cooper doesn’t know who he is, so he can’t tell them he’s not who they think he is.

If you have been watching the seven episodes that have so far aired, I defy you to explain the “plot” of Twin Peaks: the Return. There are so many characters and so many different things happening that one wonders if all the (seemingly unconnected) pieces will ever come together into a cohesive whole. Maybe the show’s writers don’t even know where it’s all headed.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997