On... ahem... trousers

As early as 1793, however, Gibbon in a letter to a gentleman of title referred to his "inexpressibles." In all instances contemporary with its popular usage the term expressed the exaggerated sensitivity of the time in referring to men's outer nether garments—breeches or trousers. Curious it is that this could acceptably be done only by a humorous euphemism. Writing in 1880, one Helen Bedingfeld in Jerningham Letters spoke of, "A pair of old inexpressibles . . . containing seven thousand Guineas ! . . . deposited in so vulgar a garment." In 1809 an English magazine observed that "a fine lady can talk about her lover's inexpressibles, when she would faint to hear of his breeches."

Lord Lytton in Paul Clifford speaks of a gentleman in boots and spurs, with one hand in the pocket of his "inexpressibles." A conversation in a little-remembered book of the period has the line, " `Hush: you should say inexpressibles—that's the way genteel people talk!' " One of the Ingoldsby Legends alludes to "Bond Street inexpressibles." In Sketches by Boz appears, "He usually wore a brown coat without a wrinkle, light inexpressibles without a spot." In the story Shabby-Genteel People, "The knees of the unmentionables soon began to get alarmingly white." Pickwick Papers has "symmetrical inexpressibles, and scented pocket-handkerchiefs." And so on. Gentlemen's legs might be named without circumlocution, but not their habiliments. In 1875 a Melbourne newspaper stated that "the episcopal inexpressibles for obvious reasons will be unsuited to lay legs."

Sometimes, presumably in the eighties or nineties, however, the humor of the term became extended—among people more bold than genteel. This occurred, at least, in the United States. Thenceforth it was a very reliable witticism, which endured with undiminished vitality well into the present century, in intimate gatherings to refer orally to the mysterious underthings of femininity as unmentionables.

Unmentionable by their given names certainly they were.

The matter of the explosive events occasioned by the early presentations of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, first in Dublin in 1911 and, four years later, in various American cities, has been variously explained. In New York potatoes were thrown at the players. These famous incidents probably had their origin in the tender sensibilities of Irishmen who felt the dignity of their country, then seeking to become a State, affronted by so veracious a picture of an unflattering aspect of life in Ireland. At any rate, upon the introduction of the play in Dublin, Lady Gregory wired to Yeats, "Audience broke up in disorder at the word 'shift.' The riots would no doubt have broken out without the mention of a shift, but that word was a good blasphemy to begin with.

-excerpt fr. Robert Cartes Holliday's "Unmentionables"

Mostly from the New York Review

On...

Collected Stories and Other Writings
by Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue
Library of America, 1,093 pp., $40.00

by Ch. Baxter in the NYRB June 11, 2009

Katherine Anne Porter is a case of a writer whose last fiction seemed oddly ill-matched with the work that preceded it. Readers of a certain age may remember the literary hoopla surrounding the publication of her only novel, Ship of Fools, in 1962. A work of twenty years’ labor, the book was reviewed everywhere, called “a great work of art” by Mark Schorer, went onto the best-seller list, and was sold to the movies for $400,000. The author’s shrewd, imperious visage appeared in the pages of the Saturday Review and other publications. But readers who actually bothered to start this 497-page novel did not often finish it. Finally a critic told the truth about the book: Theodore Solotaroff, in a long essay-review in Commentary, did an inventory of its faults that still seems, from a distance of over four decades, definitive and irrefutable.

But at the time of its publication, Ship of Fools appeared to have almost everything: a large cast of pan-European blowhards, a historical moment of considerable importance (1931), and great themes having to do with prejudice and international relations. Indeed, Ship of Fools had almost everything except the one element it needed, the breath of life. After a few years, the novel fell off the shelf into oblivion.

None of this would have mattered very much if Katherine Anne Porter’s short stories hadn’t been among the best ever written by an American. But they were so remarkably good, so touched with genius, that the spectacle that followed their publication is more than a bit disheartening. A writer whose work could justly be compared to Tolstoy’s spent over twenty years of her life working on a bloated and sententious novel. With the publication of the Library of America’s edition of the Collected Stories and Other Writings, some questions naturally arise, although most of them are unanswerable. Where did the stories come from? And then what happened?

Katherine Anne Porter made a habit of misrepresenting the year of her birth, 1890, claiming that she had been born in 1894 (two years after her mother died). She also maintained that she had grown up as a descendant of four generations of Southern aristocracy—though in fact she was born in a two-room log house in Indian Creek, Texas. Other misrepresentations followed. Like many other American writers of her generation, she regarded her autobiography as unnecessarily factual and in need of revision.

“I was fed from birth on myth and legend,” she noted, “and a conviction of natural superiority bestowed by birth and tradition.” For her, snobbery and fantasy tended to stimulate each other. But the conditions of her early life were so difficult that one is surprised that she survived it with her faculties intact. After her mother’s death, her father moved her and her siblings to Kyle, Texas, where she was educated by her grandmother until she was ten. Following the death of her grandmother, her father took the children to various relatives, or dropped them in one boarding school or another, and generally left them to fend for themselves. By the age of sixteen, her formal schooling having ended, she was married to her first husband, John Henry Koontz, who habitually beat her. She lived with his alcoholism and physical abuse for eight years. She survived a bout of influenza in 1918. The illness turned her hair permanently white.

There has been a tendency among quite a few of Porter’s critics to criticize her life instead of her work and to give it low marks. According to these commentators, she should have lived some other kind of life than the one she actually had. What kind is not specified—perhaps one with fewer deceptions would have been better. Joan Givner’s biography does not present a particularly attractive picture of Porter, who was much married and given to more than a few of the usual human vanities.¹ She seems to have engaged, rather frequently, in betrayal of people close to her. Still, compared to the alcoholic stupidities of other American writers of her time, her misdeeds seem rather amateurish.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jun/11/flowering-porter/

From the September 24, 2009
John Searle on a book by Paul Boghossian:

A problem faced by social constructivism concerns facts about the past. Are we now constructing facts about the past when we make claims about history? One extreme social constructivist cited by Boghossian, Bruno Latour, accepts this conclusion with somewhat comical results. Recent research shows that the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II probably died of tuberculosis. But according to Latour, this is impossible because the tuberculosis bacillus was only discovered by Robert Koch in 1882.¹ “Before Koch, the bacillus had no real existence.” To say that Ramses II died of tuberculosis is as absurd as saying that he died of machine-gun fire.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/sep/24/men-and-boys/
Interesting article of Greek homosexuality and pederasty. Learned all about intercrural ways.

On Byron via Edna O'Brien through Harold Bloom
In the two centuries since Byron died in Greece (April 19, 1824, aged thirty-six), leading a messy rebellion against the Turks, only Shakespeare has been translated and read more, first on the Continent and then worldwide. High Romantic in his life but not in his art, which carried on from Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Laurence Sterne, the endlessly digressive Byron incarnated countless contradictions of thought and feeling. He bewildered and fascinated his contemporaries with a vitality overtly erotic, compounded of narcissism, snobbery, sadomasochism, incest, heterosexual sodomy, homosexuality, what you will. Of the two authentic English vices, humbuggery and bumbuggery, Byron scourged the first and expanded the horizons of the second. The first matter to bear in mind concerning Byron is his royal lineage, descended on his mother’s side, the Gordons, from Annabella Stuart, daughter of James I of Britain (James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots). His father was “Mad Jack” Byron, gambler and heroic womanizer, who had been guilty of incest with his sister Frances. The daughter of his first marriage to Lady Amelia D’Arcy, Lady Augusta Leigh, the poet’s half-sister, became his true beloved, thus repeating the pattern. Mad Jack died in France, poor and abandoned, when his poetical son was three. Born with a lame left foot, George Gordon, Lord Byron, became a superb swimmer and marksman, and at ten secured the family title.
The rest:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/sep/24/pilgrim-to-eros/

More Yellowing Articles

More things to burn:
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/21/science/how-the-brain-might-work-a-new-theory-of-consciousness.html?scp=1&sq=how%20the%20brain%20might%20work&st=cse
The sensations of one instant of a spring morning have thus become represented by millions of activated cells in many different regions of the cortex. That much is known. A still baffling question for scientists is, how does the brain bind these fragmented pieces of information into a single coherent image? The nature of the reassembly process, known as the binding problem, is intimately related to the age-old question of consciousness, since an answer to the binding problem would go far to defining the physical basis of the conscious mind.
The first step to understanding, brain scientists say, is to realize that there is no Cinemascope screen in the brain where all the pieces come together. But if there is no screen, on what physical principle is consciousness organized? A growing number of scientists say the answer must lie in some form of timing. An image may be reconstructed from all cells that are firing in a particular rhythm at a particular instant.



Purdy by Vidal:
I first heard of James Purdy a half-century or so ago on a bright spring day in London. Edith Sitwell had asked me to lunch. We drank martinis while she put the finishing touches on a letter to The Times of London; D. H. Lawrence's novel ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' was under attack for obscenity. Although Edith disliked Lawrence for having, she thought, caricatured her brother Sir Osbert in the novel, as the gin took its effect on each of us, I boldly assured her that the offending book was not actually the work of Lawrence but of Truman Capote. The red-rimmed eyes atop the long Gothic face narrowed: ''Surely the dates are not right.''
''Capote,'' I said, ''will never see 90 again.''
She sighed contentedly. ''That would explain the dreadful style.''

On the genetic basis for homosexuality:
Natalie Angier:

As it happens, the evidence for a genetic basis for homosexuality remains slender and incomplete. What Mr. Hamer reported in 1993 was that in families having two gay brothers, 33 of the 40 pairs of brothers shared a piece of the X chromosome, significantly more than the 20 pairs of brothers who would have been expected to inherit the same chromosomal terrain by chance alone. Mr. Hamer also found that a gay man was much likelier to have gay male relatives on the maternal side of the family than on his father's side, further evidence of something of interest on the X chromosome, which in men is always passed along from the mother. The molecular and genealogical evidence together suggested that a gene or genes embedded in the wilderness of the X chromosome somehow contribute to male sexual orientation.
However, the specific "gay gene" -- as Mr. Hamer calls it in a reluctant bow to popularization -- has yet to be found. He has no idea how the gene could possibly work to influence a man's erotic nature. Nor does he know how many people out there may carry the trait; whether the trait invariably or only occasionally leads to homosexuality; whether it operates solo or in conjunction with many other genes, and so on. In short, the genetics of sexual orientation is in an utterly embryonic stage, as is our grasp of the biological underpinnings for any interesting human characteristic.


More on The Bell Curve:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CEEDC123DF935A25753C1A962958260&scp=1&sq=what%20is%20intelligence%20and%20who%20has%20it?%20bbrowne&st=cse

The Guermantes are delayed

The last page of "The Guermantes Way":

‘I should like to know, all the same,’ Mme de Guermantes asked him, ‘how, ten months before the time, you can tell that a thing will be impossible.’
‘My dear Duchess, I will tell you if you insist upon it, but, first of all, you can see that I am very ill.’
‘Yes, my little Charles, I don’t think you look at all well. I’m not pleased with your colour, but I’m not asking you to come with me next week, I ask you to come in ten months. In ten months one has time to get oneself cured, you know.’ At this point a footman came in to say that the carriage was at the door.
‘Come, Oriane, to horse,’ said the Duke, already pawing at the ground with impatience as though he were himself one of the horses that stood waiting outside.
‘Very well, give me in one word the reason why you can’t come to Italy,’ the Duchess put it to Swann as she rose to say good-bye to us.
‘But, my dear friend, it’s because I shall then have been dead for several months. According to the doctors I consulted last winter, the thing I’ve got – which may, for that matter, carry me off at any moment – won’t in any case leave me more than three or four months to live, and even that is a generous estimate,’ replied Swann with a smile, while the footman opened the glazed door of the hall to let the Duchess out.
‘What’s that you say?’ cried the Duchess, stopping for a moment on her way to the carriage, and raising her fine eyes, their melancholy blue clouded by uncertainty. Placed for the first time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and showing pity for a man who was about to die, she could find nothing in the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow, and, not knowing which to choose, felt it better to make a show of not believing that the latter alternative need be seriously considered, so as to follow the first, which demanded of her at the moment less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that any existed. ‘You’re joking,’ she said to Swann.
‘It would be a joke in charming taste,’ replied he ironically. ‘I don’t know why I am telling you this; I have never said a word to you before about my illness. But as you asked me, and as now I may die at any moment… But whatever I do I mustn’t make you late; you’re dining out, remember,’ he added, because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took preference of the death of a friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive politeness. But that of the Duchess enabled her also to perceive in a vague way that the dinner to which she was going must count for less to Swann than his own death. And so, while continuing on her way towards the carriage, she let her shoulders droop, saying: ‘Don’t worry about our dinner. It’s not of any importance!’ But this put the Duke in a bad humour, who exclaimed: ‘Come, Oriane, don’t stop there chattering like that and exchanging your jeremiads with Swann; you know very well that Mme de Saint-Euverte insists on sitting down to table at eight o’clock sharp. We must know what you propose to do; the horses have been waiting for a good five minutes. I beg your pardon, Charles,’ he went on, turning to Swann, ‘but it’s ten minutes to eight already. Oriane is always late, and it will take us more than five minutes to get to old Saint-Euverte’s.’ Mme de Guermantes advanced resolutely towards the carriage and uttered a last farewell to Swann. ‘You know, we can talk about that another time; I don’t believe a word you’ve been saying, but we must discuss it quietly. I expect they gave you a dreadful fright, come to luncheon, whatever day you like,’ (with Mme de Guermantes things always resolved themselves into luncheons) ‘you will let me know your day and time,’ and lifting her red skirt, she set her foot on the step. She was just getting into the carriage when, seeing this foot exposed, the Duke cried in a terrifying voice: ‘Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch? You’ve kept on your black shoes! With a red dress! Go upstairs quick and put on red shoes, or rather,’ he said to the footman, ‘tell the lady’s maid at once to bring down a pair of red shoes.’ ‘But, my dear,’ replied the Duchess gently, annoyed to see that Swann, who was leaving the house with me but had stood back to allow the carriage to pass out in front of us, could hear, ‘since we are late.’ ‘No, no, we have plenty of time. It is only ten to; it won’t take us ten minutes to get to the Parc Monceau. And, after all, what would it matter? If we turned up at half past eight they’d have to wait for us, but you can’t possibly go there in a red dress and black shoes.

More to feed the fireplace fire

One of the articles I collected on the attempted establishment of an objective system when valuing art: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/01/arts/ruling-prevents-removal-of-warehouse-sculpture.html?scp=1&sq=judge%20prevents%20removal%20of%20warehouse%20sculpture&st=cse
Also January 27: Jane Alexander testifying for a "legitimate Federal role in the Arts".
From May 21, 1996
GAY RIGHTS LAWS CAN'T BE BANNED, HIGH COURT RULES
In a significant victory for gay rights, the Supreme Court today struck down a provision of the Colorado Constitution that not only nullified existing civil rights protections for homosexuals in the state but also barred the passage of new anti-discrimination laws.

"A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said in a forceful opinion for a 6-to-3 majority. He said the Colorado provision, known as Amendment 2, had placed the state's homosexuals "in a solitary class," singling them out in violation of the Constitution's equal protection guarantee for a legal disability so sweeping as to be inexplicable on any basis other than "animus."

It is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort," Justice Kennedy said in an opinion joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer. [Excerpts, page A20.]

Justice Antonin Scalia filed an equally forceful dissent, accusing the majority of taking sides in "the culture wars" through "an act not of judicial judgment but of political will." The process by which Colorado's voters adopted Amendment 2, by 53 percent to 47 percent in 1992, was the "most democratic of procedures," Justice Scalia said.

September 4, 2005

Reviews of bios on Edmund Wilson, Henry Ford, Matisse

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04TOIBIN.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=american%20critic%20colm%20toibin&st=cse

and:

"Spurling reached the end of Volume 1 with a transcendent insight: his ''paintings of light and color . . . seemed at the time, both to their perpetrator and to his public, an assault that threatened to undermine civilization as they knew it. But Matisse was not simply discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries. . . . He was substituting for their illusion of objectivity a conscious subjectivity, a 20th-century art that would draw its vitality essentially from the painter's own visual and emotional responses.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04HOWARDL.html?scp=1&sq=matisse%20the%20master%20richard%20howard&st=cse

Reducing the fire hazard further

Mostly from the NYT:
On Bingo:

BINGO goes back to 1530, descended from an Italian game called Lo Givoco del Lotto D’Italia. A pitchman encountered a version in Germany and sensed its possibilities, bringing it to America in the 1920s as a carnival game. It was called Beano, since players marked their cards with beans. Winners shouted, “Beano!”

A struggling toy salesman from New York named Edwin S. Lowe saw the game at a carnival near Atlanta in 1929. Back home, he tested it on friends, and one winner mistakenly called out, “Bingo!” rather than “Beano!” He liked what he heard.

It was a priest in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., who recognized the game’s power to help his ailing church. Trouble was, there were just 24 unique cards at the time, so too many people were winning. The priest pressed upon Mr. Lowe the need for vaster possibilities of losing. Mr. Lowe enlisted a Columbia math professor named Carl Leffler, who configured more than 6,000 different bingo cards.

All those combinations took a mighty toll. He is said to have gone mad.

On Martin Amis:

A.S. Byatt accused Amis of "folie de grandeur" for demanding $794,000 for "The Information", firing his agent and switching publishers. "I always earn out my advances and I don't see why I should subsidize his greed simply because he has a divorce to pay for and just had all his teeth redone"

On judicial reasonable doubt:

"Jon O. Newman, the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in a November article wrote that a curious feature of a judge's instructions about reasonable doubt is that trial courts are reluctant to explain it to juries.
"I find it unsettling that we are using a formulation that we believe will become less clear the more we explain it."

On the favorite film villain, the Government:
"There have been so many movies with such a consistent theme that I'm afraid they're also shaping the views of society," Mr. Thompson said. "That's not to say that government shouldn't be fair game along with everything else. But can you think of a movie in the last 10 years that has shown the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. in a positive light?"

RONALD BROWNSTEIN, AUTHOR of the 1991 book "The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection," is critical of that scene, on the grounds that it unduly simplifies the problems of governing. "It symbolizes what's wrong with all of these movies and so much of our politics as well," he said. "They perpetuate the idea that the problem in the country is self-centered or careerist leadership rather than the structural disparity between what we want and what we are willing to sacrifice for what we want."

Such plots, which pit a well-meaning outsider against a vastly corrupt political system, have another effect. They let audiences cheer for the hero while realizing the fleetingness of the victory: if people are told that the root of government is rotten, then even a good branch can't survive for long.

On Tony Alamo:

Born Bernie Lazar Hoffman in Joplin mo.; married Susan Lipowitz in 1966 (his 3rd of 6 wives). The cult designed and manufactured jeweled jackets. Susan died in 1982. Alamo stated she would be resurrected and for six months he had her body on display "while their followers prayed". After 16 years, her body was given to her family.

On July 28, 2009, shortly after his conviction, Tony Alamo again made headlines by calling himself "just another one of the prophets that went to jail for the gospel." On October 22, 2008, Alamo's former followers testified in court during a preliminary hearing that Alamo had practiced polygamy and had taken an eight-year-old girl as a wife. He was sentenced to 175 years in prison on November 13, 2009.

On Leo Strauss:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/29/weekinreview/the-nation-a-very-unlikely-villain-or-hero.html

From the November 13, 1994 Book Review, letters on the Bell Curve controversy and a terrific article on Voltaire by Professor Larry Wolff:

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/13/books/if-were-younger-would-make-myself-russian-voltaire-s-encounter-with-czars.html

Pope JP2's 1995 letter against ethical relativism which hints at moral ambiguities inherent in Democracy

James Atlas' article on the conservative movement:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/12/magazine/the-counter-counterculture.html?scp=3&sq=the%20counter%20counterculture&st=cse

February 19, 1995's reviews of a book on teaching and race:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/19/books/are-white-schools-bad-for-black-children.html?scp=1&sq=kwanzaa%20and%20me&st=cse

and a review of Gert Himmelfarb's book on Morals:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/19/books/why-can-t-we-behave.html?scp=1&sq=the%20de-moralization%20of%20society%20himmelfarb&st=cse

And a review of the Joseph Frank Dostoevsky bio, The Miraculous Years.

and Clinton's 1995 State of the Union Address

Lambert Orme nee Firbank

From Harold Nicolson:

His sitting room was exquisitely decorated.

When I think of that room, I am again convinced there

was something cabotin about Lambert Orme:

people at the age of twenty should not have rooms like that.

He had painted it shiny black....

I did not see him again for some five years. He

went round the world, and sent me a postcard from

Yokohama. He was immensely impressed by the

beauty of American cities, and it was from them that

he first learnt to see life as a system of

correlated planes. It was several years, however, be-

fore his very real and original talent for association

was finally able to cast the slough of symbolism.

When I next met him he was still intensively con-

cerned with the relation between things and himself:

it was only in his final period that he became

predominantly interested in the relation of things

towards each other. His talent, which though singu-

larly receptive was not very muscular, had failed to

attract any interesting synthesis from the confront-

ation of the universe with his own twitching heart:

He had tried, and failed, to interpret con-

scions cognition by a single simple emotion. But,

in his later period he did in fact succeed in conveying

original analysis, implicit rather than expressed of the

diversity and interrelation of external phe-

nomena: he was able to suggest a mood of subcon

cious perplexity sensitive to unapparent affinities.

The conception of life as a repetition of self-con-

lined and finite entities can be integrated only

by the pressure of a compelling imagination: Lambert's

imagination though mobile was not compelling- I

suspect indeed that less power is required to disinte-

grate such entities, to suggest a world of atoms for-

tuitously whirling into certain shapes, to indicate a

tremendous unknown, quivering below the crust of

our convention. His later poetry succeeded because

of its influence to this unapparent reality, I am now

assured that some of his later poems were very re-

spectable.

Kenneth Clark on William Blake

Personal revelation also has an insidious effect on illustration. Clark on the appalling visions of William Blake.

"Everybody who writes about Blake begins by saying that he was a

visionary. It is a vague term. Artists, even the most realistic, start

from some kind of vision – that is what leads them to select what they

need from the infinite diversity of appearances.

But with Blake the word vision has a more precise meaning. He did not draw from

nature because, as he said repeatedly, his visions were clearer and

more vivid than his optical perception of the world around him. He

saw these visions as a child; saw God put his head in at the window,

saw the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree at Peckham Rye. There is

nothing extraordinary in this; many imaginative children have

similar experiences. What is exceptional is that Blake kept these

intense powers of visualisation after the age of puberty. Exceptional,

but not incredible, because this can be paralleled in other forms of

mental activity. Some people have the gift of total recall and others

can renumber accurately whole pages of figures; physiologically

these endowments seem to me quite as hard to explain as the accurate

visualisation of images.

“What was the nature of Blake's visions? His accounts of them sug-

gest that, although obviously closely related, they were of several

different kinds. The first was simply his poetic faculty that led him

to see a natural event as something supernatural. 'It will be ques-

taoned', he says in his Descriptive Catalogue, 'when the sun rises do

you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea – Oh no, no,

1 see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying “Holy?

holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty”. The seventeenth-century

poets, Traherne or Vaughan, might have said the same. The second

was when an analogy became so strong in his mind that an ordinary

experience was transformed: 'With my inward eye 'tis an old man

grey. To my outward a thistle across the way.' These lines show

that Blake was capable of switching from one kind of vision to another

out of course Blake's pictures in the fire' are far more precise than

ours.

This leads us to visions of rather a different order which seem to

have involved an element of hallucination. They are described in

detail by Varley and Linell, in whose presence Blake drew a number

of what are known as 'visionary heads' One must remember

that Varley was an early spiritualist and he encouraged Blake to

draw these heads in the middle of the night and in an atmosphere

rather like that of a mediumistic séance. He was requested to draw

the likeness of William Wallace, says Linell, 'the eyes of Blake

sparkled, for he admired heroes. “William Wallace,” he exclaimed,

“I see him now, there, there, how noble he looks – reach me my

things.”Having drawn for some time with the same ease of hand

and steadiness of eye as if a living sitter had been before him, Blake

said: 'I cannot finish him, Edward the First has stepped in between

him and me.'

There was an element of clairvoyance in his work, but the

visions that make his best work unforgettable were somewhere

between the poetic analogy of the rising sun and the literal reality of

the heads.

From auction: Doisneau and Cartier Bresson

Austere lady from auction

Embossed on a box. Chocolates? Enema?

Henri Rousseau

From "The Banquet Years" by Roger Shattuck

The initial question in dealing with Rousseau s work is

thrust upon us: Is he a modern “primitive”?

Primitive' and 'naif' were used very early to describe

his work and found ready acceptance; recent esti-

mations of his work have tended to treat him as a painter

who cannot be separated from the evolution of modern art

by such glib and arbitrary classifications.

It is no slur to call Giotto and Cimabue “primitive”; it is

a means of locating them within two centuries which pre-

pare the formulation of the strict optical conventions of

Renaissance art. Rousseau reveals a comparable primitiv-

ism, for he strove in his conscious thinking about art to

achieve a naturalistic, academic style. He admired Bou-

•uereau and Ger6me and Courtois. Twentieth-century

Western art, however, the disgruntled offspring of a great

naturalistic tradition culminating in impressionism, was

seeking out the methods of primitives from Italv, Africa,

and contemporary Paris. Like Picasso and Braque and

Matisse and Delaunay, Rousseau worked not -with the op-

tical image (a rational transformation of what we see) but

with his personal beholding of things. He stood beside them

without having made the journev of styles which they had

made in their development as artists. He is primitive in

that, occupying the same ground as these men, he never—

teless looked yearningly toward a style they violently re-

jected. Robert Goldwater writes of this paradoxical situa-

tion:

But it is important to realize that the style which he

achieved was but a stopping place upon a road

along which he would have travelled further if he

could, and that the effect which he attains, seen

from the point of view of the mechanics and psy-

chology of its creation, is because of this intention,

even if it is in spite of it from the point of view of the sophisticated observer.

In other words, Rousseau was primitive in performance

but not. in intention. The distinction is accurate yet danger-

ous. What is usually described as his intention was really

his ambition—the desire to show in official Salons.

There remains one last preliminary: the technical prob

lem of dealing with Rousseau s work. First of all, forgeries.

Soon after his death, a profusion of counterfeit Rousseaus

appeared in Paris (and from as far away as Japan) per-

haps because counterfeiters believed a “primitive should

be easy to imitate.

As an artist, Rousseau, followed no steady evolution of

style, nor even a series of outwardly melodramatic reversals

like Picasso's. At his first Salon des Independants in 1886,

The year following his retirement at forty-one, Rousseau hung Un soir de carnaval, one of his masterpieces.

This canvas shows him already in command of his mature style.

In none of these compositions did he explore linear perspective;

we feel space as accumulation.

One stage does not flow logically out of the last, as we usually expect from an

artist . Along with their similarities, the paintings have a

discontinuous quality which suggests that .the order of their

execution is not a profoundly relevant factor. In addition,

uncertain dating of the bulk of Rousseau s canvases

makes chronological classification difficult.

We never find Rousseau isolating human features as a form of pure beauty

or expression. They appear in association with appropriate land-

scape or fragments of ordinary life.There was nothing casual

about the name he gave this type o£ paintings which he

considered his discovery. In 1907, writing the judge in-

structions before his trial, he stated flatly. “I am the in-

ventor of the portrait-landscape;

In the Moi-meme portrait of 1890, Rousseau s figure stands boldly

and masterfully in the middle, except that he had some difficultv about length of leg and making

the feet rest solidly on the ground. As a result—and also because Rousseau's head is just on the

level of the free balloon-—the figure is itself to rise into the bright sky.

Without laboring over physical likeness, he expressed

character in a pose, or repose, of the whole body, in a selec-

tion of significant objects attached to the figure, and in a

meticulously painted background. He portrayed not an appearance but an environment.

Ever since Rembrandt, the intense portrayal of human

character has tended to eliminate the natural world as a

distraction. The face should tell all. Even the romantics

hesitated to paint a formally commissioned portrait out of

doors. Rousseau set his highly formal compositions against

pastoral or semipastoral backgrounds. His

refusal to separate portraiture from landscape and genre painting chara-

acterizes the “primitive” sensibility which sees a person and

le objects that surround him as a single entity. Rousseau treated his canvas as a surface upon

which to combine and relate the material parts of a person s life, rather than as a

means of dramaticallv isolating a face from all incidentals.

La belle epoque

“It all started with a wake and funeral such as Paris had

never staged even for royalty. In May 1885, four months

after an immense state banquet to celebrate his eighty-third

birthday, Victor Hugo died.

His remains lay in state for twenty-four hours on top

of a mammoth urn which filled the Arc de Triomphe and

-was guarded in half-hour shifts by young children in Gre-

cian vestments.

Within a few yards of Hugo's apotheosis.

an endless procession across Paris the next day included

several brass bands, every political and literary figure of

the day, speeches, numerous deaths in the press of the delirious crowd,

and final entombment in the Pantheon.

The church had to be speciallv unconsecrated for the occasion. By this

orgiastic ceremony France unburdened itself of a man, a

literary movement, and a century.

Paris had just had her face lifted.

Baron Haussmann's ambitious plans for opening up the constricted city

had been executed by 1880.

Of all the stages that made up the city, the most for-

malized and demanding was the salon. [The aristocracy

still cultivated the conversation of what were assumed to

be great minds.

As the salon declined for lack of ladies trained to con-

duct one and through disappearance of the basic attitude

of hommage on which the institution rested, the need for

a verbal arena increased. One of the principal changes.of

la belle epoque was that the great performers moved from

the salon into the cafe.

Here anyone could enter, and each

man paid for his drink. As far back as the mid-eighteenth

century artists and writers in Paris had begun to rely in-

creasingly on the stimulus and exchange of the cafe. (They

were served by young boys, whence comes the word garcon

for waiter.) The term boulevardier was now invented

to describe men whose principal accomplishment consisted

in appearing at the proper moment in the proper cafe.

More than the salon, the cafe came to provide a free market-

place of ideas and helped France produce its steady sue-

cession of artistic schools.The Cafe

Guerbois and the Nouvelle Athenes in the sixties and sev-

enties had nurtured the first artistic movement entirely

organized in cafes: impressionism.

In the title of his famous

play, first produced in 1895, Dumas fils brilliantly named

this special world: Le demi-monde.

Fashion influenced every, domain of life, just after 1890

the velocipede had been introduced with little success.

A few years later, the Prince de Sagan, the most prominent

and dashing nobleman in France pedaled through the Bois

on a “little steel fairy" wearing a loud striped suit and

specially designed straw boater. The city was delighted.

And womens' fashions changed immediately to allow them

to ride astride. The bicycle, symbolizing everything demo-

cratic and modern (and supporting two weekly papers and one daily),

led the way to an upsurge of sport which cul—

minated in the revival of the Olympic games in 1894. After

the bicycle, but without public participation, came the air-

plane. The Eiffel Tower, raised at the cost of fifteen million uninflated francs in 1889.

This great anomaly of modern engineering

aroused protest from a committee of prominent citizens

and expressed all the aspirations of a period

which set out to surpass its heritage. And it remain-

ed: styleless, functionless, unhistoried- the Eiffel Tower in its truculent stance is the first

monument of modernism.

Graham Greene's Brighton Rock

It was all over. Ida squeezed out with difficulty

a last tear into a handkerchief scented with Californian

Poppy. She liked a funeral—but it was with horror-

as other people like a ghost story. Death shocked her,

life was so important. She wasn't religious. She didn't

believe in heaven or hell- only in ghosts, Ouija boards,

tables that rapped and little inept voices speaking

plaintively of flowers. Let Papists treat death with

flippancy: life wasn't so important perhaps to them as

what came after. But to her death was the end of

everything.

She believed in ghosts, but you couldn't call that thin,

transparent existence life eternal: the squeak of a

board, a piece of ectoplasm in a glass cupboard at the

psychical research headquarters, a voice

she'd heard once at a séance saying ''Everything is very beautiful

on the upper plane. There are flowers everywhere.”

Flowers, Ida though scornfully- that wasn't life.

What was the sense of dying if it made you “babble of flowers?

She took life with a deadly seriousness: she was prepared to cause

any amount of unhappiness to anyone in order to defend the only thing she believed in.

To lose your lover—“broken hearts,” she would say, “always

mend” to be maimed or blinded—''lucky” she'd tell

you “to be alive at all.” There was something dan-

gerous and remorseless in her optimism...

She came out of the crematorium-And there from

the twin towers above her head fumed the very last

of Fred... a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens.

People passing up the flowery suburban road looked

-tip and noted the smoke; it had been a busy day at the furnaces.

Fred dropped in indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms:

he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.

Another creepy doll

This one moves.

Creepiest doll ever.

At auction. The bathing suit doesn't help.

2 new woodcuts from auction

2 pieces by Harry Bonath, Seattle art director from the 1920's till his death in the 70's.

The birth of modern auctions

From Wesley Towner's "The Elegant Auctioneers"

English auction houses, by tradition and by design, catered then almost exclusively to the trade. Sales of famous art collections sometimes drew the curious as spectators, but private buyers were excluded from the bidding by custom. If they wanted to buy, they placed bids through dealers, who had entree to the sales and charged 5 or 10 percent commission on the purchase price.

The rooms had the atmosphere of a. catchall for derelict possessions. Things were sold just as they came from the consignor—often dirty and in disrepair. The lots were numbered and just put around.

Mediocrities were not readily distinguishable from things of value: Catalogues, unless interpreted by an expert, gave little clue as to which was which. Oil paintings had the dust and grime of years thick upon the glass that preserved the brush strokes of a master or blurred the hand of a copyist or forger. The sales had an air of cut-and-dried professionalism. Porters in green baize aprons held up chairs by one leg or hoisted portraits that may or may not have been painted by Reynolds above the bidders' heads. The auctioneer wore wore the formal dress of a stockbroker and, in. contrast to his surroundings, was a man of similar dignity and consequence. The porters, it was said, did not even wash their necks. The dealers who did the bidding sat around a big table or stood near it, subdued, expressionless, and tense, like seasoned players in a gambling house. They were firmly organized in the Ring,

The Ring, or knockout system, which still prevails at auctions where the bidding is predominantly by the trade-is an age-old conspiracy to control auction prices and keep the “privates” -the dealers' word for nonprofessional bidders—from getting anything of value at less than the going retail price. The dealers in a particular category of art property form a syndicate and agree not to bid against one another, When one member of the combine bids, the others- however much they may want to buy the lot refrain from running up the price.

After the public sale, the Ring holds its own auction, and the members bid on the lots obtained among themselves. If an item is of no interest to other members of the combine, the original bidder may pay for it and keep it. When two or more dealers in the ring compete for it, the difference between its knockdown price and the amount it brings in the Ring auction goes into the profits of the syndicate. An object of exceptional value may remain joint property of the syndicate members until one of the dealers finds a customer for it and submits a bid acceptable to the others. The gravy is then portioned out among the members as usual.

There are many variations and vicissitudes in the operations of the syndicates. Occasionally a rival combine will invade the auction rooms and bid against the regulars with the object of gaining membership in the established gang. Strong and unpleasant measures may have to be taken to restore monopoly. Sometimes syndicates operate within the syndicate, in which case two or more members form a conspiracy not to compete against each other in the Ring auctions. If the Ring-within-the-Ring succeeds in obtaining objects below their market value,its members may hold a third auction to divide the spoils.

For instance, a Chelsea soup tureen may bring £100 in a London auction. If the porcelain syndicate is composed of ten dealers and the soup tureen brings £1,000 in the King auction, each of the ten dealers gets £90 profit. But the £1,000 may have been paid by three dealers united in a Knockout of their own. The soup tureen for—brings say, £4000 in the subsequent auction among the three, regardless of which dealer buys the tureen, each of the three comes out with an additional £iooo profit. Moreover, a syndicate member, whether the mere circumstance that a Chelsea soup tureen has come up at auction nets him £90 or £1,090, would be unlikely to pay taxes on his ill-gotten gains, since the operations of |the ring are illegal in England, and in any case, undercover.

In any event, the “privates” are not to be tolerated at Ring-controlled auctions. A functionary, who used to be given the colorful title King of the Knockout, is delegated to take over the casual intruder who imagines he can buy advantageously for his own account at auction. If, for instance, a gentleman fancies a Georgian silver coffeepot and attempts to bid for it against the silver Ring, the King of the Knockout will run him up to about the retail value of the coffeepot—or higher, if the gentleman appears to be well-heeled and stubborn—and let him have it. The intruder goes home with his prize—for which he may have paid more than it would have cost in a Bond Street silver shop, -pondering on the fact that in the published reports of auction sales similar coffeepots had frequently fallen for the price of crockery.

As a defense against the Ring, English auction houses operate on a system of reserve prices. The consignor is permitted by law to put a secret reserve, or “upset,” price on each lot to be sold. When the bidding fails to reach the upset price the auctioneer knocks the lot down to himself and the would-be seller pays only a reduced commission. Thus the bidder is placed in the position of playing a kind of blindman's buff with, the auctioneer, who alone is supposed to know what the reserve price is.

Secret reserve prices, though not sanctioned by law, certainly prevailed at New York auctions. What was worse, if the auctioneer did not actually own the property he sold, he mixed in derelict objects of his own in order to cash in on the good will emanating from a real consignor's name. moreover, the consignor—if consignor there was—could hardly be said to be in a better position than the bidder faced with all those unidentified competitors. Most auctioneers were shoe-string operators; they delayed payment interminably, juggled the accounts and sometimes absconded with the funds altogether.

During his retirement from the rostrum Kirby had been mulling over the trouble with auctions, and he had come up with some cardinal principles to herald the Art Associations entrance into the field of management. What he proposed to establish, with the Seney sale as a springboard, was a free and unrestricted auction commission market with the private buyer as its main support. In the language of his manifesto this was to be accomplished by “selling without reserve, restriction or protection, never permitting addition to sales of private or estates' collections, prominently advertising and displaying real ownership, mating final payment within thirty days from the date of sale.

These are in essence the principles under which the Parke-Bernet Galleries functioned for many years. If they do not sound particularly cardinal now, they did in 1885.

From: O Rare Don Marquis

In 1931, Don Marquis' publisher suggested he write his autobiography. He turned down the proposal with these word: "I'm entitled to a better subject".
He did write:
"The name Marquis is not French but Scottish in origin. the first of the name of whom I have any record came to Virginia from the North of Ireland in 1720, and settled near Winchester. They were Calvinists who believed in Infant Damnation, Calomel, and Scotch Whiskey. "

Marquis and his wife moved to Brooklyn in 1909, the year horse-drawn streetcars were abandoned for electrically powered car lines. "...and as more and more ofthese conveyances swung down the streets of Brooklyn, the local citizenry came to be known as trolley dodgers.... eventually shortened to dodgers", which is how the Brooklyn Dodgers acquired its name.

For some years Marquis rattled out his daily stint with his typewriter machine perched on an up-ended packing crate. This box had stenciled on it "1 GROSS TOM CAT" which meant tomato catsup, but became by legend the first suggestion of mehitabel.

Barbara Comyns

From "Sisters By A River", her first novel....


After she had had six babies at eighteen month intervals Mammy suddenly went deaf, perhaps her subconscious mind just couldn't bear the noise of babies crying anymore. Mammy had always looked and been rather vague, she had a kind of gypsoflia mind all little bits and pieces held together by whisps, now she grew vaguer still and talked with a high floating voice, leaving her sentences half finished. It must have been beastly looking at all those flapping hands all the time.

All our family were very superstitious but Granny was the worst, and she was always seeing spirits about the house. she would say things about the house had a curse on them, even our toys and they were burnt because of that, sometimes I thought maybe she was a witch in rather thin disguise.

Zeena Frome

Shockingly, this appears to be Edith Wharton, minx.
I've reread Ethan Frome (whom I believe bears his fate uncomplainingly as complaining would be churlish at best. After all, he has had nearly everything he desired given him, but, like Victorian children who find a genie, has rashly forgotten to specify the terms.)
After marrying Zeena...

But purchasers were slow in coming, and while he waited for them Ethan learned the impossibility of transplanting her. She chose to look down on Starkfield, but she could not have lived in a place which looked down on her. Even Bettsbridge or Shadd's Falls would not have been sufficiently aware of her, and in the greater cities which attracted Ethan she would have suffered a complete loss of identity. And within a year of their marriage she developed the “sickliness” which had since made her notable even in a community rich in pathological instances.

From the auction

A pewter lidded container with a recumbent fawn knob, marked "Denmark" and unhelpfully accompanied by an indistinguishable maker's insignia.

My hangover Agatha

Funerals Are Fatal.
A half-batty elderly sister attending her brother's funeral, blurts out "Well, it WAS murder wasn't it?" and is subsequently chopped to bits with a hatchet. Her companion is poisoned by a slice of mailed wedding cake- part of which she leaves under her pillow so as to dream of her own wedding. Mustachioed nuns are thrown in as a red herring, and Victorian wax flowers under a bell jar become significant to Poirot. The means and the murderer become glaringly obvious from the wedding cake on, although the motive would be, let's say, unlikely to inspire hatchet murder in many; that motive being to take the money from selling the victim's Vermeer (over which the murderer had painted a seaside scene) and open a tea shoppe.
Of course Aggie sets herself a brilliant problem to solve- what if a murder is not a murder but an opportunity to distract from a planned crime? (Not that the sister hatcheted herself to death.)

Nice cover, though.

The Day of the Locust

Reading Nathaniel West's final novel in a wonderfully lurid pulp edition.(bottom pic) A pocket edition as dry as a pressed flower. It closes like an over-used wallet because its spine has been broken. The two halves of pages are nearly bifurcated at the place where Homer Simpson takes pity on Miss Martin, the lush. Everything after Miss Martin would drift and flitter out one page after the other but for the six tough strings of dried glue that hold it intact. They stretch like spit between lips and are amber, crusted with bits of brown paper- like broken, translucent bug parts.

I have also included the Penguin edition which has the most fitting cover art.

From the bk.:
It was a picture of Faye Greener, a still from a two-reel farce in which she worked as an extra. She had given him the photograph willingly enough, had even autographed it in a large wild hand, "Affectionately yours, Faye Greener". Faye played one of the dancing girls. She had only one line to speak, "Oh, Mr. Smith" and spoke it badly.

Finally

I had long avoided reading To Kill a Mockingbird, which is a difficult feat. At the time, the prevalent edition was this one with a bird being annoyed by poky color triangles. I suppose I thought the book was about murderous Graphic Designers. As a child, I couldn't even look at the cover without it upsetting me. I also shunned it because my sister (possibly kindly) warned me if a dog died in anything, a movie, a book or a television show and one, named Tim Johnson, does indeed die- so I deliberately never watched the Gregory Peck film, and may eventually have confused it with Member of the Wedding.
Of course, I loved the novel.

From the bk.....
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

Revisiting Muriel Spark

Daylight was appearing over London, the great city of bachelors. Half-pint bottles of milk began to be stood at the doorsteps of houses containing single apartments from Hampstead Heath to Greenwich Park, from Wanstead Flats to Putney Heath; but especially in Hampstead, especially in Kensington.
In Queens Gate, Kensington, in Harrington Road, The Boltons.... Chelsea and its backwaters, the bachelors stirred between their sheets, reached for their wound watches, and with waking intelligences noted the time; then remembering it was Saturday morning turned over on their pillows. But soon because it was Saturday, most would be out on the streets shopping for their bacon and eggs.... would set out early, before a quarter past ten, in order to avoid being jostled by the women, the legitimate shoppers.

and

It is all demonology and to do with creatures of the air, and there are others besides ourselves, he thought who lie in their beds like happy countries that have no history. Others ferment in prison; some rot, maimed; some lean over the banisters of presbyteries to see if anyone is going to answer the telephone.

From "Hawkins of the Paris Herald"

Sarah Bernhardt, 1879: "It's curious how many idle stories there are about me. My favorite dishes are supposed to be burnt cats, lizards' tails and peacock brains sauteed in monkey butter, whatever that is..."

I saw La Goulue sometime after her retirement from the Moulin Rouge. True to her soubriquet, meaning the glutton, she had ruined her dancing career by overeating, and my glimpse of her was as a lion tamer in a street fair. She later became a wrestler and just before she died in 1921 she could be seen selling oranges outside the Moulin rouge.

"In the early years of the century, the Folies Bergere competed with the Moulin Rouge by producing revues that featured English dancehall girls, because French girls are incapable of learning the precisions required in a chorus line.

Ladies of pleasure had been known under the Second Empire a les biches and les soupeuses. A biche was a small deer. A soupeuse was a beauty of limited virtue available for supper. By the turn of the century, the appellations had gone out of fashion in favor of the simpler 'demimondaine'.

Worst wedding toast ever

John Donne in 1627, from the NYRB:

Where be all the splinters of that Bone,
which a shot hath shivered and scattered in the Ayre ?
Where be all the Atoms of that flesh, which a Corrasive hath eat away,
or a Consumption hath breath'd,and exhal'd away from our arms, and other Limbs ?
In what wrinkle, in what furrow, in what bowel of the earth,
ly all the graines of the ashes of a body burnta thousand years since ?
 In what corner, in what ventricle of the sea, lies all the jelly of a Body drowned
in the generall flood ? What coherence, what sympathy, what dependence
maintaines any relation, any correspondence, between that arm that was lost in Europe,
and that legge that was lost in Afrique or Asia, scores of yeers between ?
One humour of our dead body produces worms,
and those worms suck and exhaust all other humour, and then all dies, and all dries,
 and molders into dust, and that dust is blowen into the River, &
that puddled water tumbled into the sea, and that ebs and flows in infinite revolutions,
and still, still God knows in what Cabinet every seed-Pearle lies,
in what part of the world every graine of every mans dust lies.

MURTHER somewhat foul

After a marvelous July 4th with work folk, I spent the afternoon with Agatha. "Murder at Hazelmoor" opened, as always, with a terrific premise. An evening party where the hostesses, suggesting diversions, agree to some table turning. The lights are dimmed and the table raps out, letter by letter, that Captain Trevelyan has just been murdered at the Hazelmoor cottage he was renting. His good friend Burnaby sets off in a snowstorm to investigate. Trevelyan is indeed dead- coshed with a sand-filled sock laid against under door draughts. Since the time of death coincides with the spirit occurance, it is obvious that one of the guests must be the murderer, and as only 4 characters are sketched out in the length of the story, it is of course the one most present in that narrative.

Acquisitions

The 3 latest art purchases at auction- unsigned or illegibly signed. "Landscape" pencil signed " N. Mayer", dated '51. Mid to early 20th century- the two lithographs were from the estate of artist Eugene Pizzuto- in a sheaf of art from many different artists. The bridge is a greater mystery- the artist seems to have also created the frame- there is a two letter monogram in the lower left corner, possibly "K.T.".

Agatha

Left: The face of my hangovers.





When, on the morning following a night out I have no desire to move, I'll reread an Agatha Christie cover to cover until the throbbing ceases. After "The Clocks", I read "Mrs. McGinty's Dead" in which an elderly charwoman was murdered by one of any of her five clients as she had discovered that one of them was related to one of four murderesses featured in a newspaper article. The solution, not very thrillingly, had to do with the fact that "Evelyn CAN also be a MAN'S name!"
Next it was "Ordeal by Innocence" in which a woman is murdered by one of any of 4 adopted children, her husband, secretary or housekeeper. The motive was rather implausible.... (housekeeper infatuated with son, hiding theft of slain mother's money). The reaction of the son when convicted of the murder committed by the housekeeper was inexplicable.
I enjoy having all the Christie paperbacks around to remind me of my days spent in paperback swap shops like The Book Rack, situated next to the waterfall in the University Village shopping center, but I never need read them again, so they are being purged, along with Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, Virginia Kelly (Clinton)'s Autobiography and some Brigid Brophy.

Oh, T.H.R-G!

From Robsjohn-Gibbings' petulant screed against the antique, "Goodbye, Mr. Chippendale":
"Those were the days, so help me, when it was the height of something to sit on a cassapanca upon a tiled floor amid frescoed walls and coffered ceiling- an interior of incredible gloom..."
(A cassapanca is a sort of Italiany hope chest, to which arms and a back could be added).

and on "French Gothic"

This confusion of the ecclesiastical and the secular, the result of too many visits to European churches and cathedrals by the American laity, struck few if any as incongruous. It seemed natural to hang your pants over a prie-dieu, keep the telephone book on a lectern, the cigars in a gutted hymnal, drape the walls with chasubles, put a chalice on the piano, and stand dolorous carved saints in the odd corners.