The Weather Thirteen
Smog, hail, storms, wind, and more . . . below the cut. By the way: the photographer says the above photo is true color. I can believe it.
The heart of things
Interesting article in the October 12 issue of Science: Matters of the Heart, by A. J. Wells:
Is there any truth in the long-standing association of emotions with the heart, or is it merely the stuff of superstition and myth? “Heartfelt Emotions,” a symposium that brought to a close a program of events supporting The Heart exhibition at the Wellcome Collection’s recently refurbished building in London, explored this question. The symposium included contributions from the exhibition’s curators, heart scientists, poets, writers, historians, psychologists, and a keenly interested audience.
It must have been a delightful symposium, but we can only guess; Wells provides few details of the proceedings. We’ll have to speculate.
Damn you, Sughrue
I’m ticked off at a character, C.W. Sughrue, and since he’s not my character, there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. See, I just finished James Crumley’s The Right Madness, Crumley’s most recent (and who knows, maybe his last) Sughrue novel. I’ve been with C.W. through The Last Good Kiss, The Mexican Tree Duck, and Bordersnakes, and even if he is one mean bastard son of a bitch detective (C.W. likes his parents and objects to such aspersions), I still care about him. I wanted Crumley to leave C.W. in a happy place. He’s not in a happy place. He’s more damaged than ever.
Unless you’re a hardboiled/noir fan, the name Crumley probably doesn’t mean much to you. And if you’re not an HB/noir fan, I could tell you that lots of folks consider Crumley a latter day Chandler and that wouldn’t mean anything to you, either. Or that his character, C.W. Sughrue (“Shoog as in sugar. And rue as in rue the goddamned day”), is a latter day Philip Marlowe, if Marlowe popped amphetamines and did the occasional line of coke. But, like Marlowe, C.W. lives by a code: Family and friends are gold, and anyone who threatens them can and will rot in hell.
The first C.W. Sughrue novel, The Last Good Kiss, has an opening line that sings. Lots of HB/noir fans really dig this line, myself included.
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
Seemingly, the story begins at the end: C.W. has been hired to find Trahearne, a novelist-drunk, by Trahearne’s ex-wife. But he takes on a charity case for a friend who wants him to find her runaway daughter, and soon C.W. and Trahearne are traipsing across the USA, ripping through their stash of booze, tobacco, and coke. And when that tale ends, the reader is still only halfway through the novel.
Over the course of these four novels, C.W. gets gutshot and left for dead, kills some baddies, does some drugs, runs afoul of the DEA and the FBI and I-don’t-know-how-many police departments, acquires a makeshift family, defends them from some mean sons of bitches, does some more drugs, kills some more baddies, gets betrayed more than a few times, and loses his family.
That last part, that’s the part that stings. The one thing that tied C.W. to humanity was his wife and adopted son, and now . . . And now Crumley is 68 and I have to pray he lives long enough to write another C.W. Sughrue novel. He’s had some weird health problems (which he discusses in this interview) so his survival is not a moot question. So I have to worry, will Crumley’s next novel feature one of his other regulars, C.W.’s partner Milo Milodragovitch? I like Milo, but I love C.W. Crumley has to write another Sughrue novel.
I can’t think of too many other fictional characters who have come alive for me like C.W. Sughrue. Sticking to the HB/noir stuff for the moment, there’s Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. John LeCarre’s George Smiley. (Yeah, not quite the same genre, but close.) And that’s about it.
What characters have come alive for you? And have you ever felt like this — dying for the author to write the next one, so that your character can get his ass out of a sling?
D.
The Library Thing Meme
Yeah, thanks, Darla, thanks a BUNCH. Does anyone really read these list-meme posts? I mean, what could possibly be interesting about this. And how did this post end up in a different font? And what are the numbers in parentheses?
The instructions: “These are the top 106 books most often marked as ‘unread’ by LibraryThing’s users. The rules: bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, strike through what you couldn’t stand and underline those you have no intention of reading.”
The Fix goes live
The Fix: Short Fiction Review.
I’ll be an active reviewer after the first of the year. Until then, not so much. Got hospital chief of staff biz to worry about.
D.
Oh, please
JustSayHi – Free Personals
Not even an R rating? Are they kidding?
Then again, my 12-year-old reads my blog . . .
Hat tip to Joolz, whose blog has a great URL.
D.
Cool bird dancing to crappy music. (Thanks, sxKitten!)
Stephen Colbert is cool, too. (Thanks, Kate!) Really cool.
Tiramisu
Who cares if it’s the quintessential 1990s dessert. (What will be the quintessential dessert of the new millennium, I wonder?) It’s still one of the most die-and-go-to-heaven treats there is, and, more to the point, I’ve never blogged the recipe.
I thought about adapting the recent Cook’s Illustrated version, but they skip the zabaglione step and use raw egg yolks. RAW EGG YOLKS! What am I, Rocky? (Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, not Bullwinkle’s.) So I went back to a more traditional, and admittedly more labor intensive recipe.
Below the cut: Tiramisu, the Photo Blog.
Friday Flickr babe: sultry (again)
Kimmy, originally uploaded by silverinuk.
It’s hot tonight. Unseasonably hot. Your grandma used to tell you a cup of scalding tea would cool you down, and in that same spirit I offer Kimmy.
Over at Flickr, one of the folks commenting on this image felt the photographer should have cropped this pic below the elbow. I disagree. There’s a line here, a gentle S-curve which takes in Kimmy’s head, her slender torso, her lower back in shadow. This is art to my untrained eye. Crop it below the elbow, and you have an artistic nude, but not . . . art. Yeah, I can’t express myself worth beans tonight. But here’s the cropped version, so you can decide for yourselves:
Kimmy – (Cropped), originally uploaded by silverinuk.
D.
PS: here’s Dean’s Friday Flickr babe. How come no one else is playing?