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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Oversharing

Dear CF ,
I’m incensed by the word “overshare,” so I only glanced at the Jezebel piece, which seemed concerned more with the graphic and anatomical variety of the phenomenon than with the stripping bare of a life. I’m firmly in favor of the former—felt, in fact, that Sadie’s approach to the subject was quite like [...]

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Beowulf and Marriage, Gifts and Work

Dear heart,
I have indeed been at sea, but miss you and am sipping Tippy Assam tea and staring in befuddlement at a lovely bouquet of flowers much like the one you left me last time you visited. I’ve been thinking about gifts, you see, and am feeling a little seasick as a result.
I did read [...]

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Le Marriage et Le Travaille

Dearest Millicent,
I think you are wandering in a forest somewhere. Perhaps in the fog or at the buffet in a boat-shaped restaurant? Wherever you are, I hope you return to us soon. Our cozy tearoom is lonely when all I have to chat with is the embroidered floral chair across the way (it’s next to [...]

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Thoughts on the Minority of Singelty

Dearest Millicent,
I just shared a short conversation with a friend dismayed at the single world.  He knows that the world if full of interesting women he could date, and yet he can’t find any of them.  He is thinking of leaning towards the internet for assistance. He hates the thought of dating because of the [...]

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Wedunlocking the Never-Ending Story

Dearest CF,
That’s an extraordinary passage. It hits home. I want to add, parenthetically, that I agree with your parallels to Alice Munro, and I’m surprised she hasn’t traversed that territory more than she has. She comes close, I think. But the type of wife that comes closest–dulled by habit and nearly (though not quite) unaware [...]

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Jaded Robots, Let’s Just Watch Something With Dancing

Some thoughts.
1.) I need to find out who Tucker Max is or Tucker Carlson, or whatever his name is.  I keep getting his name confused with that teeny bop movie that came awhile ago, called something like “Tucker so and so must die.”
2.) As we are talking about the firecracker–the need to know and judge [...]

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The Post-Mortem

Dear one,

How to explain the death of a powerful crush? Curiously enough (or not curiously at all), I too talked to a beloved mutual friend about firecrackers, only in a romantical connection—-namely, the problem of love/hating them.

The Firecracker (Male) is exciting. He takes you to unexpected places and shows a different way [...]

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