separated at birth: person as poem

The Sunday Times had an article on Grete Wiesenthal and the influence of the Viennese waltz on modern dance. Wiesenthal moved off the vertical axis of the ballet dancer and added curves and extensions. She toured with her sisters Elsa and Berta. (I have a sister Berta, short for Roberta.) After the sisters performed in London, the Dancing Times is quoted as saying the sisters "were not mere performers; they were poems."

Photographs by Rudolf Jobst, Östrreichisches Theatermuseum

(from the NY Times article)

When Alexis Rose meets Mutt's new girlfriend Tallahassee, er, Tennessee, Alexis says she is like a poem, like a pretty poem. Totally Alexis.

the books I read in 2020

 You'd think a year of lockdown and isolation would vastly increase your reading. It didn't work that way for me. Here's the list of books I read this year, in chronological order.

• Europe without Baedeker, by Edmund Wilson (1947) - impossible not to think of E.M. Forster's chapter in A room with a view about visiting Santa Croce without a Baedeker
• Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan (2018)
• So you want to talk about race, by Ijeoma Oluo (2018) - hard not to reflect on spell check having no problem with Wilson and Forster but not recognizing Esi, Edugyan, Ijeoma, and Oluo
• Fascism: a warning, by Madeleine K. Albright (2018)
• The great believers, by Rebecca Makkai (2018) - read this while at College Art in Chicago; parts of the book are set in Chicago; the book resonated in a number of ways: "Wi-fi seemed wrong. In her mind, Paris was always 1920. It was always Aunt Nora's Paris, all tragic love and tubercular artists."; the main protagonist Yale wasn't named after the school but after his Aunt Yael; "Being on an airplane, even in coach, was the closest an adult could come to the splendid helplessness of infancy."; standing up in an auditorium and screaming
• Manhattan memoir by Mary Cantwell (2000) - a one-volume gathered edition of the author's Manhattan girl, Manhattan, when I was young, and Speaking with strangers
• Michael Tolliver lives, by Armistead Maupin (2007) - a continuation of the Tales of the city
• Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers (2009)
• Amiable with big teeth, by Claude McKay (written in 1941, published in 2017)
• Inside a pearl: my years in Paris, by Edmund White (2014)
• Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan (2008) - movie tie-in edition
• Midnight in Sicily, by Peter Robb (1996) - this book had been on my shelf for a long time, calling me but I was afraid it would be just too filled with mafiosi; it was filled with Sicily more than Mafia and really quite a page-turner
• How to be an antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi (2019)
• Necessary errors, by Caleb Crain (2013)
• Mapping the territory: selected nonfiction by Christopher Bram (2009)
• Romance in Marseille, by Claude McKay (written between 1929 and 1941, first published 2020)
• The nature principle: human restoration and the end of nature-deficit disorder, by Richard Louv (2011) - what about urban-deficit desire?
• The Mussolini canal, by Antonio Pennacchi (2013) - translation of Canale Mussolini (2010); my bookstore friend Fred from Sundance Books in Geneseo had to get this from England (buy from independent bookstores as much as you can)
• Stories of God, by Rainer Maria Rilke - translated from the German, published 1899; the Alfred libraries didn't have an edition and I had to order it on interlibrary loan; Daniel had noted that the German title is Geschichten vom lieben Gott but most English editions leave out the "lieben"
• The Blackwater lightship, by Colm Tóibín (1999)
• Building and dwelling: ethics for the city, by Richard Sennett (2018)
• The overstory, by Richard Powers (2018) - about a quarter of the way in; so far, a panoply or perhaps a cacophony of mostly unrelated stories but each involves a tree or a bunch of trees or a species of tree; the table of contents seems to indicate that the second, third, and fourth sections are different in structure (not chaptered)

Looks like eleven each of fiction and non-fiction. As I reviewed the list of books read last year, several of the titles were fonder in memory than in recall as I started this recounting. Some were quite forgettable but then I have also forgotten many of the films and TV episodes that I watched over the course of the year.

P.S. You can see the illustrated version of this compilation at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2020/6837039