10 Things You Might Not Know About Montgomery Clift

Ten things you might not know about Montgomery Clift, the devastatingly handsome and intense actor who starred in classics like From Here to Eternity and A Place in the Sun:

1. His two favorite words were "fuck" and "shit."

2. It drove his mother crazy when he wore t-shirts or khakis. She wanted him dressed like a gentleman at all times.



3. Born in Omaha but raised largely in Europe, he spoke French and German fluently, and spoke with an English accent as a young man.

4. He wanted to play Hamlet and could recite most of Shakespeare's play from memory - but he never actually starred in a production of it.

5. To prepare for Lonelyhearts, he read every novel Nathanael West had written.

6. He excelled at skiing and tennis.

7. His favorite singer was Ella Fitzgerald.



8. The playwright he most admired was Anton Chekhov.

9. He slept naked and had a tendency to sleepwalk, leading to some awkward nights in hotels.

10. Even though he thought James Dean was "weird" and consciously imitating Monty himself, he was terribly upset when told that Dean had died.

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Patricia Bosworth's book is an intense and, at times, disturbing biography. It's quite appropriate that Clift played Freud, since his life was a psychoanalyst's dream come true. He was unusually close with his twin sister Ethel and brother Brooks. He had wild mood swings, exacerbated by alcohol and drug abuse and by health problems, including a thyroid disorder. He could be sweet, tender and childlike one minute and then vicious (especially with words) the next. He was as insecure as he was gorgeous.



In real life, I probably wouldn't have liked him very much. But I'll never have to worry about that, because he died when my parents were 13 and 14. In my imagination, I'd like to do things with him that were almost certainly illegal in the 1950s.

That's the wonderful thing about movies - they capture beautiful people when they are young, beautiful and intensely talented. There will never be a time when people will say "Montgomery Clift was not a good actor." In fact, he was one of the best ever.

Q and A with Suzanne Stroh, Author of TABOU, a Quintet of Novels

Please tell us about your current release.

Patience launches my sexy quintet of novels, TABOU, a saga that spans 100 years on four continents and recounts the erotic Odyssey of Jocelyn Russet, the 27-year old brewing heiress born in London and raised in the Virginia countryside.

In each book, Jocelyn meets her destiny on one big night, when her fate turns on secret histories and forbidden encounters with a different woman every time. The novels interlock, as in The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, and they can be read in any order, thanks to the Prologues that open each novel and the indexes that help readers keep track of the cast of characters. The whole project hearkens to the heyday of the 19^th century novel, where readers could immerse themselves in detailed worlds peopled by dozens of characters. Edgy, modern action and full-spectrum erotic writing updates the series to give it a “classic modern” feel.  

Book One is a double love story that is part rollicking adventure, part sexy romp through the glittering 1980s and 1990s, set in London and Los Angeles. It’s the tale of two British-born heiresses of different generations, Jocelyn Russet and Patience Herrick, both coming of age at the same time. Are they made in heaven, or star-crossed? What forgotten memories do they share, what secret legacies must they uncover and take charge of, and why are their families being targeted for terror?

Can you tell us about the journey that led you to write your book?

TABOU began as an unproduced Hollywood screenplay that focused on Jocelyn and Sylvie Russet and Jocelyn’s climbing partner, Zander Duffield. It fulfilled the basic requirements of good drama: three act structure and a compelling narrative with a love interest and an antagonist. I dreamed of Catherine Deneuve in the role of the 45-year-old Cognac heiress, Sylvie Russet, in the vein of INDOCHINE, the blockbuster epic Deneuve had just starred in so magnificently, but the movie project fell through.

My characters had really come to life, and now they wouldn’t let me go. Early on, I realized that there were deeper stories I wanted to tell about how love and Eros, business and spy craft, run in families just like other heritable traits. Telling stories that spanned four generations or more required a format more ambitious than film, or even a single novel. It took years for me to find the right “glue” that would bind nine families together on four continents over four generations. The day I realized Patience Herrick was an epic heroine strong enough to parry Jocelyn and Sylvie, with her own family business story that could carry a quintet, I knew I had a series on my hands. Aurore de Fillery and Valerie Drummond, Countess of Tiffin and Ross, sprung out of that seed. And soon I could see the organic whole taking shape.

So Book One of TABOU is a love letter to the real Patience. She is one of only two characters in TABOU modeled closely after a single person; the rest are truly composites.

TABOU is not autobiographical fiction, but it does draw deeply from my experience, and it is fair to say that as a mountaineer, motorcyclist, screenwriter, field medic and family business specialist based in the Virginia countryside, I truly live what I write about in TABOU.

I worked feverishly on the first draft of TABOU six days a week while still nursing my baby daughter, completing it in about seven months. Then I took a break and re-read a lot of period biographies, along with two great novel cycles from the late 1950s that compliment one another and balance the stylistic influences of TABOU.

First I re-read The Alexandria Quartet, a literary masterpiece by Lawrence Durrell, whose artistic aim was to explore the four dimensions of love in an era when Einstein had just discovered time as the fourth dimension of space. I followed that with another run-through of the Peter and Charlie Trilogy by Gordon Merrick, published after Merrick’s death from 1959-1961. This was a serious work of literary erotica by a successful author of gay “potboilers,” his explicit, homoerotic romances that critics had ghettoized. Merrick was a major talent. But as E.M. Forster had done with Maurice, he refused to publish the Peter and Charlie books during his lifetime. The subject matter was too taboo.

No longer! What really gripped me about the Peter and Charlie books, besides the first class erotic writing, was the family saga. What other gay epic gave the heroic lovers children—and the struggles of parenthood pitted against Eros? Merrick was taking Durrell’s “fourth dimension” (the enduring powers—both creative and destructive--of love over time) to the next level. Literary giants like Forster, Lawrence, Woolf, Sackville-West,  and others had dreamed about it—but never accomplished it. I wanted all that sexy continuity for TABOU…and more.

For readers around the world, generations of their own family histories have been lost because of taboos that forbid truth telling about the wide range and variety of sexual desire and experience, not to mention its power to transform history. Helen’s face launched 1,000 ships, remember? Bosie’s charms landed Oscar Wilde in prison. Who paid the price? Who inherited the spoils?

Historians and biographers have become franker in writing colorful and meaningful gay, lesbian and bisexual lives. Recent biographies of Alan Turing and Walt Whitman vie with my personal favorite by Victoria Glendinning, Vita, in the pantheon. But the living legacies of these lives remain unclaimed by their heirs, or else squandered. Who knows the adventures of her great-great gay uncle, or the heroic deeds of his three-greats lesbian aunt? Greta Garbo’s niece threatens legal action against those who pry too deeply into Garbo’s life story, as if their consanguinity is still a threat. For those of us who crave connection and continuity across generations, James Joyce made much of the difference between spiritual paternity and actual paternity in Ulysses, but does anybody remember? Dolly Wilde told anyone who would listen, in Paris between the wars, that she was more like her uncle Oscar Wilde than he was like himself. But when she died, that continuity appeared to have vanished…until, out of the blue, Jamie O’Neill wrote a brilliant novel called At Swim, Two Boys, which revealed him as the spawn of the gay Wilde and the hetero Joyce. Why have so few talented writers addressed this huge gap in consanguinity and continuity between us and our queer forebears?

This is the great question that spurred me on through many drafts to finish and publish TABOU now. My mission: to mind the gap. Then to bridge it, one erotic fiction at a time, since we have lost the links in the real human daisy chain over the last century.

I bring an unusual perspective to TABOU. As a descendant of John Hart, who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and as a fifth-generation owner of the international Stroh’s brewing business that had been in my family since 1848 in America, then back to 1509 in the Palatinate (Germany), it seemed like nowhere was this yawning gap more visible than in my own milieu. So I built the mythology of TABOU around the world I was born into and raised in and now pass down to my daughter: the world of political dynasties and business families that bears some resemblance to the Olympian heights. Here on Earth, with the help of the “chattering classes,” it’s a world that has taken such painstaking care to trace its own history from generation to generation for centuries. But it’s a history that has left out the biggest change agent of all: the wide variety of sexual experience that perennially inspires us, nourishes our souls, enlivens our art, and strengthens our connections between love and Eros in every generation.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, but one of my beta readers summarized what I’d accomplished like this:  “At first I was like, ‘who are these people?’ And then I got it! They’re dripping rich and saving the world!”

Can you tell us about the story behind your book cover?

Great question. I’m very proud of this.

I worked with a very talented young designer, Andrea Kuchinski, on the cover design. We’ve been collaborating creatively for a decade, ever since Andrea was a teenage apprentice at the design firm that won a Hermes award for my web site, suzannestroh.com.

For this project, we needed to incorporate several key elements. We had a series title, and there are five books in the series. So we needed a family of covers, not just one cover. The series title, TABOU, is incomplete without the mysterious mirror reflection of currency symbols, £$F€£, used throughout the series as section dividers. I can’t explain the meaning of this, or else I’d be ruining the climax of Book Five, Valerie. So trust me: the title and the series of currency symbols are inseparable. We also had to incorporate the tree of life, with its nine withered branches representing the nine dynastic families of TABOU, and with its entangled root system. And finally, we wanted to express the eroticism and good taste that sets TABOU apart from contemporary trends in literary fiction.

Our process at the beginning of each new project is to talk things through over a coffee. Sometimes Andrea will record our conversation, but at this stage in our collaboration, we can pretty much read one another’s aesthetic. I leave her to work freely and come up with a concept.

As you can see from the Facebook page, Andrea’s first prototype was a family of covers that evokes the South Pacific imagery where Sylvie Russet grew up on Hiva Oa, near Tahiti. Dominated by the tree, the covers were whimsical, blocky, colorful and fun—but not edgy. We agreed we wanted to go for something deeper, bolder, starker and more profound, more beautiful.

To me, an art history major in college, nothing is more beautiful than the human body. I started looking for nude photographs that would hint at the mysteries of TABOU, showing the variety of sexual experience (and more critically, the powerful union of sex and love) that is central to my theme.

Meanwhile, Andrea had a breakthrough. She noticed that our tree of life contained elements in the root system which, if lifted out of context, resembled beautiful, flowing tattoos. By overlaying the root system on the nudes, we began to get some really extraordinary imagery that still evoked the South Pacific. We knew we had what we wanted, stylistically. What remained was layout.

Andrea drives this part of the iterative process, which usually goes very fast. It’s a back-and-forth exchange where we home in on color, typeface and layout until we feel that we’ve reached the full expression of our concept. Very soon we’d built a unified family of covers. Et voilà.

We were both completely shocked when the iBookstore judged the cover of Book One too “explicit” and asked for a redesign—or else they would refuse to sell the book. I wasn’t happy, but agreed to the redesign. I love the aesthetics of Apple devices, and I myself am totally “Macked-out.” But the idea of censorship by Apple still sticks in my craw.

Since before the Renaissance, the highest measure of artistic greatness (in painting, sculpture and modern media) has always been depicting the nude--the magnificent form and structure of the human body. I disagree profoundly with the conventional American notion that expressing nudity, especially artistic nudity, is “obscene,” when expressing graphic violence is not. Censorship is not just a problem for authors. It limits filmmakers as well, as I know from my work as a screenwriter and film producer, driving the marketplace through the Hollywood rating system, which determines what movies our children can see—or cannot see.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when the iBookstore rejected the cover of Book Two. But I am still disappointed. As with Book One, I have redesigned the cover of Jocelyn for iPad readers. You can see the original artwork on my Facebook page.

What approaches have you taken to marketing your book?

This is an all-eBook publicity campaign organized through my publisher, Publish Green. To let readers know about TABOU, I am building momentum through word of mouth and Facebook advertising. With my Facebook page, Tabou by Suzanne Stroh, and my web site, www.workwithstroh.com, I am forging the authentic, personalized, one-to-one connection that readers crave from authors in a world of McMedia.

I’m also organizing a blog tour, and I’m available to support the book through interviews and personal appearances on blogs and web sites like yours.

What book on the market does yours compare to? How is your book different?

TABOU is a literary reader’s Fifty Shades of Grey, without the BDSM. It has great sex writing, like Fifty Shades of Grey, but it is neither mommy porn nor genre fiction built on the formula for stock erotica. The gaps between the sex scenes are much longer, and those gaps are filled with more intriguing plots that involve many more characters. It also presents all kinds of couples in love: gay, straight, bisexual, single and partnered, young and old, able-bodied and disabled, faithful and unfaithful to their spouses.

Like the novel series by Edward St. Aubyn, TABOU is set in a glittering world of bluebloods and elites. But these elites are not your typical “1%.” Unlike St. Aubyn’s abusive elites, TABOU’s international elites are productive, not destructive. They are on a mission led by a moral code, a reason for being—a higher purpose that is revealed progressively as characters accept hidden legacies and face life-threatening challenges after discovering secret histories.

What would you say is your most interesting writing quirk?

I’d start with the sex writing. Very little literary fiction published today has truly great sex writing in it that explores the full range of sexual experience. And almost no erotica delivers the deep satisfaction of a good literary novel. My work bridges this gap. You won’t find hot sex every 30 pages, as in genre fiction. But you’ll keep every volume of TABOU by your bedside, no matter whom you share your bed with!

My writing is a personal blend of deep artistic influences in several genres, including biography, giving rise to some unconventional quirks.  One of my goals has been to counteract the predictability of so much contemporary fiction, in part by re-inventing the experience of really getting lost in a juicy 19^th century saga peopled with dozens of fascinating characters, each with his or her own vivid storyline. To make it easier for readers to follow all the characters, I’ve provided character indexes, the way a biographer would index a biography.

Technically, TABOU requires commitment from the reader, in the way that the music of Kanye West is challenging—but worth it. It’s not a breezy read; nor is it a slim volume. It takes at least 100 pages to “get into” a novel cycle this big, but then you’re hooked, if you’re like 50% of my beta readers who became addicted! TABOU’s pleasures are deeper. They grow on you.

For instance, TABOU is ambitious in throwing out the conventional linear narrative in favor of the pleasures of being able to peek into the future and to jump back into the past instantaneously. A benefit of blending the past, the present and the future together in every book is that you can read the books in any order. It’s kind of like enjoying the possibility of multiple endings in a computer game. You will have a unique experience of TABOU, depending on how you choose to read it. The dual narratives begin, in Book One, on the same March day in 1993 and 2003, each progressing from there. You know you’re in a flashback, recalling past events, when you see dialog ‘in single quotes like this.’ Dialog in the main story “looks like this.” And future events are written in bold italics. You won’t get confused because all this is explained in the Author’s Note that appears in the end matter of every TABOU eBook.

Readers will also notice lots of interior dialog, reflecting multiple points of view, along with lots of verb phrases in my books. Screenwriting has taught me to craft edgy sentences that begin with verb phrases. It’s a screenwriters’ convention that energizes the pace and adds immediacy to the narrative.

Open your book to a random page and tell us what’s happening.

It’s 4:00 p.m. in Los Angeles in 1993 at the height of the “British invasion” of Hollywood. Patience Herrick, daughter of the three-time American ambassador to Great Britain, pretty much rules the city’s social calendar. Tonight she needs to get out of throwing a dinner party in Bel Air for a French champagne princess, where the Hollywood elite will mingle with the US Vice President—all so she can celebrate her tenth anniversary with Jocelyn Russet, the love of her life, the brewing heiress Patience seduced in a London ballroom. So tonight is a date made in heaven—that Patience completely forgot about.

She calls her best friend Calandra Seacord for help. Calandra can definitely host the party in her place; she’s Greek and gorgeous, an Arianna Huffington double, married to the man running for Governor of California. Calandra and Patience grew up together in London. Patience knows her well and loves her like a sister.

But Patience doesn’t know everything. Calandra is a secret agent working for the champagne princess, hunting down unprosecuted Nazi war criminals, kidnapping them, and bringing them to mock trials in order to recover stolen assets. Calandra can’t risk being seen socially with the princess, so she has to make up a plausible reason why she can’t do this important favor tonight for Patience.

There’s another problem: Patience is a world-class judge of character. Nothing slips past her. Calandra can’t let Patience on to her secret. So in order to distract Patience, Calandra reveals the biggest secret of Patience’s life. And when she does, Patience begins a journey of recalling lost memories that will change her life forever….starting with her anniversary date tonight….

   

Do you plan any subsequent books?

Book Two, Jocelyn, is now available. Book Three, Sylvie, will go on sale in time for the 2012 holiday season. The cycle will conclude with Books Four and Five in 2013. Each TABOU book features a sneak preview of the next book.

Tell us what you’re reading at the moment and what you think of it.

I’ve always got a few books going at any given time. I love reading in multiple genres. Do you?

In erotic fiction, I’ve started Fifty Shades Darker by E.L. James, and while it’s a fun, breezy read with the sex writing as good as ever, I’m not surprised to find the thin plot growing even thinner. I love to read great sex writing, but I like it in better taste and more measured doses with deeper character development, more going on with more characters, and exciting story lines. I much preferred The Last Nude by Ellis Avery, which I devoured, almost in one sitting. It’s about the cocaine-fueled obsession of Modernist painter Tamara de Lempicka for her 17-year old model Raphaela, whose portraits secured Lempicka’s rock star status in Paris between the wars. 

I’m also reading Afterimage by Helen Humphreys, the fictional account of another muse obsession, this time by pioneer English photographer Julia Margaret Cameron for her housemaid.

Two graphic novels have captured my attention. I just finished really Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. It’s the first work by Bechdel I can really connect with. It’s a very compelling, but heavy, memoir by a Midwestern intellectual whose closeted father took his own life when Alison came out as a lesbian. I’ve turned now to Logicomix, the story of Bertrand Russell’s quest to lay a unified foundation for mathematics, set in Edwardian England and beyond. Apart from The Invention of Hugo Cabret, it may be the most beautiful graphic novel I’ve ever read. It took four authors and artists to make it: Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna. What a cool collaboration.

Nonfiction titles are always by the bedside and on my Kindle. By the bedside is Marina Warner’s scholarly book about the Tales of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic. It’s well researched and beautifully published. Comprehensive. Kate Summerscale’s biography of Toughie Carstairs, The Queen of Whale Cay, made me laugh out loud. She was the very butch Standard Oil heiress who ran an ambulance unit in World War I and then became “the fastest woman on the water” racing hydroplanes between the wars. My father would have seen her challenge the Harmsworth Cup on the St. Clair River in Detroit in 1929 and 1930. After she lost both races, Toughie retired to the Bahamas, where she became the autocratic ruler of her own island.

I try to read in French as much as I can. Right now I’m gripped by Francesco Rappazzini’s biography of Elizabeth de Gramont, set in Paris during the first half of the 20^th century, which has never been translated. The “red duchess” Lily de Gramont, from one of France’s oldest families, was Proust’s fact-checker; she was the best friend of the man Proust pined for; and she was the only woman Natalie Barney could never control: they were lovers for 45 years. If you don’t read French, you can get an idea of “Natly’s” escapades with Lily de Gramont in Diana Souhami’s wonderful and hilarious book, Wild Girls.

Suzanne Stroh's website:
http://www.workwithstroh.com/

Suzanne Stroh's blog:
http://www.workwithstroh.com/blog/

Suzanne Stroh's Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/TabouBySuzanneStroh

Tabou's Blog Tour Site:
http://taboublogtour.blogspot.com/

Tribute Books Blog Tours Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tribute-Books-Blog-Tours/242431245775186

Tabou: Patience, Book 1's Summary

Jocelyn Russet and Patience Herrick. Two powerful, British-born American lesbians, fiery heiresses of different generations. Both coming of age at the same time. Are they destined for one another—or starcrossed? Follow their ten-year Odyssey in a sexy romp through the rollicking 1980s and 1990s. Discover how their fate turns on secret histories that bind the Russet and Herrick dynasties in business, politics and espionage. Meet an international cast of supporting characters who must all choose between love and duty in book one of the TABOU quintet.

Suzanne Stroh's Bio:

Suzanne Stroh is a screenwriter and film producer, author of published case studies on family business. She grew up in Michigan where her family brewed Stroh’s beer for five generations. She studied art history at Wellesley College and Newnham College, Cambridge then worked in the New York art world before turning to writing. A mountaineer and field medic, she lives with her family in the Virginia countryside. TABOU is her first novel.

YouTube Video Book Trailer 

Price: $2.50 ebook
Pages: 463
Publisher: Publish Green
Release: October 11, 2011

Amazon Kindle buy link:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005V38BRA?tag=tributebooks-20

Barnes and Noble.com Nook buy link:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tabou-book-1-patience-suzanne-stroh/1106614817?ean=2940013277403

MyBookOrders.com buy link:
https://secure.mybookorders.com/order/suzanne-stroh

Coffee Talk #4: Batman Panties, Box Wine and Cotton-Candy Pink Stones

https://amzn.to/467d0Kj - this is an affiliate link

1. You're at Target or Walmart; what's the first department you hit?

I hardly ever go to Walmart. If I'm there, I'm buying ink for my printer.

Some Targets have a rack of dollar items at the very front of the store. In the ones that do, I'm going to look to see if there's anything I want to buy for my nieces (stickers, novelty candy or something like that). If not, I'll look at the clothes and shoes first. Last time I went to Target, I impulse-bought black panties with a magenta glitter Bat Symbol.

2. What are 3 items you always have stocked in your home, fridge or pantry?

Box wine, caffeine-free diet cola, and sugarless gum

3. Do you prefer shopping alone or with others? Why?

Alone, hands down. I want to look at what I want, and nothing else. Hubby insists on going up and down every aisle in the grocery store. But why? Surely we don't need an item in every aisle. Let's save time and just go straight for the items we need.

4. What's the biggest splurge you've ever made?

I bought myself a ring with blue and cotton candy pink lab-created stones for no apparent reason, other than that it was pretty.

http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-32985580/stock-photo-blue-topaz-and-pink-diamond-gemstones-on-white-background.html

5. What's the best deal you've ever snagged?

This morning hubby and I bought milk, Halloween candy, a pack of sugarless gum and a 2-liter of cranberry soda for 69 cents and got a $1 coupon back. 

Successful Completion of James Jones' Wartime Trilogy

It is finished. I have finished reading Whistle, and thus concluded the entire wartime trilogy by James Jones.

860 pages of From Here to Eternity + 416 pages of The Thin Red Line + 576 pages of Whistle = 1852 pages. That's quite an investment in the main characters, so hopefully it makes some sense why I get so wrapped up in them.

The ending is rather unpleasant. Charlotte's Web unpleasant. Pretty Birds unpleasant. As in, a character I care deeply about meets a particularly cruel death. All four of the characters meet particularly cruel fates; one could say that they've all succumbed to incapacitating post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the end, we don't know what happens to Bobby Prell's pregnant wife, Della Mae. Prell isn't interested; he and Della Mae have considered having an abortion. It isn't the bittersweet resolution that Suzanne Collins gives us to (SPOILER) Finnick and Annie's story in Mockingjay. The marriage isn't a happy one - he's cheating almost immediately, but remember, James Jones characters do tend to be shameless sexual opportunists. It's very possible that Della Mae will simply forget Bobby Prell and move on to the next guy. She seems very innocent, but there's actually something predatory about her.

It's not that Jones couldn't write a female character he respected - Lorene/Alma is drawn quite sympathetically in FHTE, and Whistle's Arlette seems to have her shit together quite nicely. Carol, once she's been with Winch for a while, matures into a person Winch respects. Other women, including Della Mae and Winch's wife, get less sympathy. It's intentions and personality that make the difference; women aren't judged for their sexuality. In fact, Jones laments that Christian cultures repress sexuality.

In one particularly interesting passage, Winch muses that female multiple orgasms must be largely a thing of the male imagination. As long passages in From Here to Eternity are devoted to the question of whether homosexuality is natural or not, long passages of Whistle are devoted to cunnilingus. Landers is grateful when a woman gives him instructions. Strange at first refuses, then discusses it with Landers, then gets a little obsessed and kind of offended when a woman isn't interested.

My theory is that Jones was familiar with the Shere Hite report, which was generating a lot of buzz around the time of the writing of this novel. According to The American Women's Almanac:

"The Hite Report, in 1976, upset a lot of applecarts. Hite's report on female sexuality was disturbing because, perhaps for the first time, she allowed women - 3,000 had answered questions for her book - to talk about how they defined sex. Although many feminists were attacking Sigmund Freud's idea that only vaginal orgasms represented mature female sexuality, Hite's report popularized the idea that many women preferred clitoral stimulation. She was roundly attacked, her methods called unscientific, her sample not representative. A Washington Post reviewer said the book was 'about as intellectually provocative as the plumbing in my basement.'"

Jones found it intellectually provocative, apparently, enough to have his female characters assert that they liked receiving oral sex. Clearly, Jones admired the more assertive women in his novel, and was rather dismissive of the ones who were too shy or prudish to get what they wanted. In retrospect, all this feminist assertiveness may seem a bit anachronistic for the 1940s, but then again, strong women have existed in every age, and I'm sure there were plenty of ballsy Rosie the Riveter types.

Whether Shere Hite is right or wrong that female multiple orgasms from intercourse without direct clitoral stimulation are rare, I don't know. They're certainly possible; I know that from experience. I usually stop counting around five. For me, the only trick is to be on top. Maybe that's what Winch is doing wrong - I don't think there are any sex scenes in Whistle with the female partner on top. In fact, Prell blames Della Mae's pregnancy on the fact that, while he get enough strength back in his legs to get on top of her, it wasn't as easy to get off her when he wanted to pull out. (That's not a very effective birth control method, but we don't expect Prell to be too educated about these kinds of things anyway, since he's a coal miner's son from West Virginia. Yes, Jones moved his birthplace from Kentucky to West Virginia in the third novel. Winch and Carol use a diaphragm - then again, maybe birth control would've been covered in their army hygiene lectures?)

By the way, Prell did learn to walk again by the end of the novel. He used the wheelchair largely for show, to get the attendees at his war bonds talks to feel additional sympathy for him. It worked remarkably well for picking up women whose husbands were off fighting in Europe.

I don't feel particularly good about the ending that James Jones planned for his characters while he himself was dying. I understand why it has to end this way, but it is a very bitter pill to swallow. Which, I suppose, is a comment on war itself. Jones firmly believes that combat has no happy ending, anywhere, for anybody.

This is how I "Keep Calm and Carry On" with my book

"My book" is still Whistle - if you don't want spoilers, look away now.

My guess is that the guy on the left, because he has the cane, must be Landers. The guy in the middle is probably Mart Winch, and then the dark-haired guy looking off to the right is probably Johnny Strange (the third incarnation of the Texan Maylon Stark, the mess sergeant. In The Thin Red Line, his second incarnation was played by John C. Reilly). So the smaller figure standing on the right side of the second row is probably Prell. He's standing, so this might mean that by the end of the book, he can walk again. The woman is probably Carol in her Red Cross volunteer uniform.

Most girls who like books can identify with Belle in Beauty in the Beast. The cartoon is even used as a sample in "Bitches in Bookshops." (Interestingly enough, this Disney Princess quiz suggests I'm actually a Pocahontas - but that's not important right now.) People like me who maintain vast book-related pinboards on Pinterest are fond of this one:

Like everything in life, it has an associated "Keep Calm and Carry On"-style poster.

But I'm not exactly like most readers. I'm completely obsessed with finishing James Jones' wartime trilogy. With about 100 pages left to go, and having read of Bobby Prell's marriage to his pregnant 17-year-old conquest Della Mae, I needed to make a Keep Calm poster of my own.

Just to be clear: it's not that I want to be Della Mae. Della Mae is young and dumb and naive and kind of a prude. It's just that I want Bob Witt/Bobby Prell to be my fictional husband. I actually imagined that I'd be the older, more experienced one (see the Memorial Day post). Prell's about 24. I'd be about 27 and already divorced once when we got together. We'd have at least one kid, a boy, and then if anything happened to Witt/Prell I'd possibly get together with Fife/Landers.

...Although it's a little troubling that Landers is, about 100 pages away from the end, planning to go AWOL similar to the way Prewitt did in From Here to Eternity - except without the deadly knife fight. I think we know how that trajectory ends.

James Jones, why did you not leave me in charge of this book series when you were dying and I was just a few months old in 1977?!

And Terrence Malick, why did you not write a screenplay for Whistle back when you could've used the same actors from The Thin Red Line? 

Coming Attractions: Books I'll Be Reading and Reviewing for Amazon Vine

Being selected for Amazon Vine seems like unbelievable good luck to me. They send me two lists a month, on the third and fourth Thursdays of the month. I get to pick two free things from each list in exchange for reviews. Win-win. Some of my previous Vine reviews have included:

Kiss, Crush, Collide by Christina Meredith
Juliet Immortal by Stacey Jay
Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group by Catherine Jinks
Family by Micol Ostow
The Bowl of Light by Hank Wesselman

I don't always order books. In fact, next week I'll be testing out a 7-Eleven Slurpee maker. But I do read a lot of books from Vine. The ones I just finished are:

- An excellent beginners'/young adult biography of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. I find it very sad to know that Patrick Bronte outlived all five of his daughters and his son, and that between them, the three Bronte sisters who lived into adulthood - known to the Victorian book-buying public as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell - produced only seven novels and one volume of poetry between them. Charlotte was the only one who lived long enough to marry.

This book will fascinate readers (the intended age range is 10-14) interested in how the human body works. It focuses mainly on the science, but also explores a little bit of the mythology that's historically been associated with blood. Most of the science will be familiar to the average adult, but I learned a few fascinating tidbits about the blood of some other species, such as the horseshoe crab. The book is designed to look as if the pages were splashed with blood, so if you're very squeamish, it might be a bit much to handle. Blood doesn't usually bother me, but a few of the more gruesome medical passages made me feel a little squeamish.

The ones I have slated to read are:

I've read about a third of this one so far. Mine doesn't have the pretty cover. It's an ARC with a plain chartreuse wrapper. ("Plain chartreuse" is kind of an oxymoron, though, isn't it?) Having come from an educational background in psychology, I've read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars and count them both among my "permanent keeper" books. (Awakenings I like a little less, and although I read Musicophilia, I don't own a copy.) It's fascinating. I learned that the actor Silas Weir Mitchell, who plays Monroe on Grimm, is named for a 19th-century physician ancestor who experimented with mescaline and quantified his hallucinations.

I just finished the migraine chapter, which very much reminded me of a biography of Mary Todd Lincoln I read in college; her alleged "insanity" was very likely to have been a combination of PTSD and migraines.

Set in Key West, in the Hemingway residence that is now a famous tourist attraction, the one I visited in 2004.

I still don't think I care to read The Count of Monte Cristo, but that doesn't mean I'm not fascinated by the true story behind it.

The follow-up to Dead is a Battlefield. The only disappointing thing is that it's, by far, the skinniest volume in the series so far.

Of course, I still have to read the original Jane Eyre first. Sadly, it's true: the only one of the Bronte sisters' seven novels that I've read is Wuthering Heights. (But I've read it three times, if that helps.)

Everand (Scribd): https://www.everand.com/audiobook/1039689816/The-Sisters-Bronte

Kobo, Walmart: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/sisters-bronte-the?sId=6a01a41a-6954-46e2-92b7-715ecb984101&ssId=rkt46HsVt7MIaCMsbQc2V&cPos=1

While I'm reading 'Whistle,' I'm going to be a little bit obsessed with Adrien Brody, ok?

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