And Now I Do This

CF:
When does childhood’s death knell hit? I’ve come up with three candidates and can’t choose between them.
1) The surprising day when the face in the mirror no longer matches the high school one.
2) When our investment in someone else’s future exceeds our interest in our own.
3) You know how romance languages have two past tenses–the [...]

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Product Placement

Dearest Millicent,
It seems like every ten years or so a story comes out about how we should wash our hair less.  NPR has one up now about how washing hair once a month was the norm in the 1800’s, and that Americans, in their lust to consume, are once again doing something too much to [...]

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If You’re Feeling Swell

You’ll enjoy these grand portraits by Berkley Illustration! They make my inner ear  tingle with whimsy, razzle dazzle, Mrs. Tiggy Winkle, and a sense of the old continent.  I can’t pick one that I like best, so this little fella came up at random.  For your consideration:

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If You’re Feeling Prickly

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A Delicate Balance

I agree, Gaudy Night devastates.  And my answer to all of your fine thoughts is only the sentiment “indeed.”
I recently taught Gaudy Night as part of a course on the detective genre, and the class consensus was that the book was also nodding to the hardboiled theme of personal mystery trumping external mystery as a [...]

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The Massive Continuity of Ducks

Dearest CF,
I enthusiastically second your nomination of Harriet Vane for Odd Saint, maybe the oddest of them all. This morning I’ve been thinking about Rereadings—that delicious readerly indulgence that Anne Fadiman explores in her book of the same name—and about the particular pleasures of rereading Gaudy Night.
Why does it  reward revisitings so richly?  For one [...]

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Today in Current Events (Lycra and Vikings Edition)

Dearest M.,
I offer two quick chits for your possible chat…if you are impossibly submerged in work until May, I will heartily carry on (with apologies) for our ocean of readers, and submit them only to my version of tides and shellfish.  Yes, I am picturing us as rulers of the sea.  It involves a lot of pearls [...]

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Scopes and ‘Scopes

Dearest,
It was so lovely to chat with you yesterday.  As I have more free time than usual at the moment, and have decided to use the time to work my way through the tasks repeatedly written (and undone) in my planner, I am instead looking up my horoscope.  2009 has been strangely focused on astrology [...]

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