Review: Dinner with King Tut

 

Dinner with King Tut is a strange sort of beast: let’s call it an anti-sphinx. Like the sphinx it’s composed of three dissimilar parts—not the face of a woman, the wings of a bird and the haunches of a lion, but science, fiction (but not science fiction) and DIY—where DIY involves the author learning how to knap stones, how to tattoo himself, to style hair like an ancient Roman matron, bake bread for Egyptian pyramid builders, and operate a trebuchet, among other skills once necessary for a precarious survival in different eras at different points on the globe. Also: tanning and trepanning.

And this sphinx not only poses riddles it tries its best to answer them, through the discipline of experimental archaeology. Which, if you (like me) have never heard of this field, you’re in for a series of fascinating discoveries, from a Turkish city where one’s relatives where buried beneath one’s bed to the unusual height of Chinese eunuchs.

Ozempic and the Seven Deady Sins

 This will not be an ad for Ozempic. Nor will it be a jeremiad against the drug. My cardiologist told me a story about GLP-1 and the gila monster. (Yes at a certain age, you suddenly have a "my cardiologist.” Mine is a grandfatherly story-spinner.) Three to four extensive meals in spring are claimed to supply a gila monster with enough energy for a whole season. Scientists wondered why, which is what scientists do. What they also do is investigate.

.What they found was a hormone in the venom of that gila monster that stimulates the production of insulin—similar to a hormone naturally produced by humans, with the jaw-breaking name of glucagon-like peptide-1, which is sensibly abbreviated to GLP-1, (and I’ll leave to you to wonder whether there’s such a thing as GLP-2 or GLP-3). At any rate, other scientists were able to synthesize this hormone and patent it, and then marketers were able to come up with ten thousand names for this wonder drug. I personally am prescribed with Monjauro, which I’m constantly confusing with a local Italian restaurant named Monjuni’s.

Conversation with a comic strip

“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

--Michelangelo Buonarroti

I came across this comic strip the other night in my Memories feed on Facebook. It was originally posted by a friend nine years ago. I obviously didn't pay it much attention (and attention is today's coin of the realm), because I gave it a like, but didn't bother to comment.

Consider this reparation. This time I pulled up short and gave the strip careful consideration. What was different? You never step into the same stream twice and all that jazz. I'm late to the party (as usual) on this strip, which is from 2013, and I'm way late on its creator, who's been kicking it at the inkstand since 2001.

I've seen numerous strips by the same cartoonist, the monochromatic stick figures holding a four-panel conversations, more often than not with no attribution, thrown upon the world like orphans at the church door. His name is Tom Gauld. I googled him. He's a Scottish cartoonist, illustrator, and writer of graphic novels. (Is writer the right word? Composer? Creator? Confabulator?) If Schulz's preoccupation was preternaturally adult kids and Gary Larsen's was barnyard animals, Gauld's seems to be writers and books, which seems fitting in this age of meta (and of Meta).

But which is right, Gauld or Michelangelo? Is writing a process of decision, or discovery?

Whole Lotta Love

I remember particularly the first time I heard Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love.

It must have been 8th grade--1970. I was with my best friend and his older brother, and his brother's friend, the cool kid who had taught us how to tie-dye tee shirts. (We would later learn how to stress jeans by tying bricks to them and dragging them behind a car;  since none of us had a car at the time, that was more of an aspirational thing.) 

This post is available as audio here on Substack.

The older brother's twin had bowed out. He was a contrarian, into country music at a time and an age when no one was into country music. Although, come to think of it, that whole family had a weakness for country music star Faron Young. Whether that was because he hailed from our hometown or because he was the spokesman for BC headache powders remains to this day a mystery. 

Lawsuits in Munchkinland

Harburg KS-

A new class-action suit filed on behalf of the residents of a small Midwestern town devastated by a killer tornado two years ago raises new questions of influence and accountability for mass media. The suit, filed by citizens of Harburg, Kansas pits the town against MGM Studios, makers of the 1939 classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

(The audio version of this post is available here on Youtube.)

In Harm's Way

The plaintiffs claim that MGM "did lull residents into a false sense of security when the tornado was reported, and even encouraged them to remain in harm's way in anticipation of the thrill ride of their lives."

"We always knew the house would pitch if it got hit by a twister, and probably a few of the hinges would unhitch," said Ebenezer Gale, whose home was destroyed by the storm, "but we'd seen the 'Wizard of Oz' dozens of times over the years, so we figured we'd just fetch up on a rainbow and put down somewheres in Munchkin Land. You can't find a vacation that cheap on Priceline.com.”

"Sure we got a storm cellar," said Emily Gale, "Everybody's got a storm cellar, you old fool. But who wants to be cooped up there when you could be visiting the Emerald City gettin' one of them makeovers, and maybe meeting Glinda the Good Witch?" Mrs. Gale had both legs broken by flying debris, and is confined to a wheelchair at this time. “We also lost a cow and several chickens in the storm. Just disappeared. We figure the Munchkins have got ‘em. We want ‘em back. If that wizard wants to play hardball, the president has promised to serve ‘em with tariffs.We believe in only licking American lollipops, anyway.”

In defense of adverbs

  (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

I'm not much on wrangling over writerly advice. It often seems a pointless exercise. So why get down into the trenches over adverbs here? First because the eight parts of speech are my favorite parts of speech. Second, because I'd like to make a larger point about the word "never" when it comes to doling out advice. A common sense argument, if you will, from someone who has never considered common sense a common attribute among people.

"I seem to be a verb" is Buckminster Fuller's famous declaration. I'll go him one better. I seem to be an adverb. Which is to say, a jack of all trades. For I am not merely an action, a process, I’m a constantly recalibrating and refining process, and this is the definition of a well-used adverb. Yes, "I go through life hurriedly" can be replaced by "I rush through life", but can be further refined as "I rush through life precipitously" or even ""I rush through life precipitously whole heartedly." With nuance come adverbs.

Adverbs are not just the despised -ly words. Here's an adverb for you: here. And there. And everywhere--all adverbs. Of the five journalistic questions, when, what, where, why, and how, adverbs answer four. As a matter of fact, those four are adverbs.There are adverbs of manner, of place, time, degree, frequency, conjunctive, interrogative, and relative adverbs. There are even focusing adverbs. What the hell tis his Pandora's box of adverbs? 

Let's have a quick look.

Review: Falls to Pieces

(This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

When we think of Hawaii we're apt to picture a lush landscape of surfer-size waves, with green palms shading flower-bedecked hula dancers. That's not the setting of Falls to Pieces, where a savage jungle landscape is at war with developers who would pave paradise and put up a parking lot. It's a foe to be respected by Kati Dawes and her daughter Zoe, who have gone off grid and incognito on the island of Maui, hoping to escape their past. But the past catches up, with devastating results. Author Douglas Corleone spells it out at one point: Paradise is safe only in designated places.

When the story opens, two murders have already occurred, driving the plot forward with the fury of Fates. Kati has the unfortunate habit or luck of putting her welfare in the hands of  treacherous men, so when the kidnapping which is  the axle of this novel takes place, suspects are thick on the ground. Beware: no one in this novel. and I mean absolutely no one, is to be trusted. And Kati's memory is not what it was before she sampled the pharmacopeia from Ativan to Zoloft.

Christmas v. Easter

(This post is available in audio format  here on Youtube.) "Imagine this. It's Christmas Eve and you have to wrap all your own presents. And that's supposed to be a lot of fun. Even though your presents are all underwear and socks. You know that, because you're the person wrapping them. And on Christmas morning, your presents aren't under the tree. You have to go outside and root around in the bushes to find them before the neighbor kids snatch them up.

And when you tear off the wrapping paper, all you've got is underwear and itchy socks.

That's Easter. Am I wrong?

Also, imagine instead of Christmas parties and Advent calendars  and Christmas carols, you have to give up everything you like and eat a ton of fishsticks all through Advent. That's Easter.

Easter: the one day we celebrate man-made ecological disaster by hiding hard-boiled eggs around the neighborhood and then forgetting where, so they're like little IEDs.

Review: The Wildes

(This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.) The Wildes seems at first blush to promise a very intimate tale of a very public man, something along the lines of Louis Bayard's earlier novel Courting Mr. Lincoln. until we realize at what point we've been dropped into this tale. The story begins just before what most people would consider The End of Oscar Wilde: not his death, but his death-in-life, the accusations, the trial for slander, and the consequences. This story could be called the aftermath of Oscar. Oscar, in life always at center stage, must give up the spotlight on this occasion. This time, the walk-ons speak.

The story begins with an idyll, a brief time snatched from time in an Edenic inglenook of Norfolk where the Wildes, along with sundry supporting characters, have decamped, ostensibly to give Oscar the peace necessary to finish his latest play, although other motives are at play. And the novel keeps returning to that time, those events, that last weekend in particular, trying to make sense of it all, of how the family was cast out of Eden forever, when they might have stayed.

Jules Feiffer on writing

 (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

"Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw."

--Jules Feiffer 

Jules left us in January. Cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter. Illustrator of The Phantom Tollbooth. Winner of the Pulitzer prize for editorial cartooning. Inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame.

Review: The Shotgun Approach

  (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

You've got to keep an eye on William Martell. He's a master of misdirection. He lays out the evidence fairly but sneakily in each of his novelettes (novellas? long short stories?).

The Shotgun Approach concerns a formerly hit music duo with more than a passing resemblance to Hall and Oates, except the frontman has had his blonde head blown off with a shotgun and his partner is the prime suspect, along with the victim's ex-wife and his former producer, who all, by odd coincidence, are checked into the same VIP floor of the same luxury hotel on the night of the murder.

Hosting the proceedings are a burnt-out San Francisco police detective and her latest partner, who's been assigned the unenviable task of making sure she doesn't kill anyone. No one has had any luck in that department so far.

Holmes the bohemian

 (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

Bohemia, bordered on the North by hope, work, and gaiety, on the South by necessity and courage; on the West and East by slander and the hospital.”  --Henry Murger,   La Vie de Bohème    We often think of Sherlock Holmes as the epitome of the scientific mind, "a calculating machine," as Watson calls him. But Watson also acknowledges another side to Holmes: the Bohemian. Here's an excerpt from, aptly enough, A Scandal in Bohemia:

"...while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.

Another contribution from The Engineer's Thumb:

"I continually visited him, and occasionally even persuaded him to forego his Bohemian habits so far as to come and visit us." 

But was Holmes truly Bohemian?  Or is Watson tossing off the word carelessly, describing Holmes's aversion to society and nothing more? What does the term even mean, beyond its connotation of an anti-social bent? Let's dig in.

Plot and subplot plotted

The Veneerings Dinner, by Sol Eytinge

“Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares. O mighty Shares! To set those blaring images so high, and to cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out, night and day, 'Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth, and fatten on us'!”

--Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

I'm now going to throw a passel of two-dollar words at you just to work toward an idea that's rather simple. Forgive me, that's the way my mind works, like a popcorn machine-- when it works at all. It's usually because I'm trying to convince myself of what I'm saying. I'm rarely preaching to the choir even when I'm talking to myself.

We're going to start with Cartesian coordinates, the x and y axes. We're going to label the x axis, the horizontal, plot. We'll call the y axis, the vertical, subplot. Or we could just as easily designate them as melody and harmony. Or to borrow the language of semiotics, syntagm and paradigm, which should give us a little more room to work in. What are those rooms?

Review: The Versailles Formula

The Versailles Formula starts with an eerie, haunting image: a ghost patters down a long, dark hallway night after night, past a suit of armor, trying in vain to seize its prize, the portrait of an angel--but always vanishing before he wins his goal. Genevieve Sturbridge nee Planche is back. And solving this mystery will only lead to more mysteries, a trail of bodies, and desperate danger.

Genevieve, of course, is the Huguenot heroine with French heritage and British loyalties, with one foot in the art world and the other mired in espionage. In this third book in the series she's teamed with an army captain almost as stubborn and resourceful as she is. Sparks fly.

(An audio version od this post is available here on Youtube.)

First Book Redux

 I've been behind-hand in reminding you about my favorite cause, First Book. With the administration threatening to shut down the department of Eduction, First Book's mission becomes even more vital. And what's the mission?

To put books into the hands of kids who can't afford them.

Review: My Name Is Emilia del Valle

 

I was afraid the book had gotten away from her. It had gotten away from me, and I thought irretrievably. It begins slowly like one of those austere Chilean warships she writes about, becomes unwieldy, and when the engine explodes, I was sure we were going to the bottom. It sailed into port like a hand in a silk glove. But let me try to be a little more prosaic. 

The titular Emilia del Valle grows up in San Fransisco during the 1890s, the last gasp of the gold rush. Her mother, an Irish girl, was about to take her vows as a nun when she was seduced by a Chilean aristocrat who abandoned her and her child. She finds shelter and eventual domestic bliss with a  greathearted schoolteacher, but she always harbors a desire for revenge upon her seducer. And she tries to transfer that vengeful desire to her daughter.

Who will play the Sherlocks?

 

Sherlock Holmes devotees all have an opinion on one crucial question: Who played the best Sherlock? From William Gillette to Benedict Cumberbatch, they will wrangle over every actor who was ever measured for a deerstalker cap. Writers of Sherlock Holmes pastiches have a slightly different question, however:

Who would play my Sherlock best?

 

Or in my case, my Sherlocks. (Well,  it'sConan Doyle's Sherlock, of course, but my transliterations thereof.) And I use the plural because I have written three Sherlock books which portray the Great Detective at three very different ages--36, 58, and 70. I suppose if Netflix were doing a miniseries, they'd use one actor and plenty of make-up and CGI. But if they were three separate movies, what then? 

Tom Robbins on writing

 

Tom Robbins, best known as the author of eight remarkable, subversive novels, died this month at the age of 92. Here's Robbins laying down the rules of writing:

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

--Tom Robbins

May he rest in rebelliousness, riotousness, and redemption.

Memory is a dangerous neighborhood

 

An odd thing happened recently. I was thinking of an old friend who's in the hospital. A song came to mind: the Doobie Brothers' For Someone Special. And then I thought of the first jukebox I first  heard the song on (pointed out to me by a friend as the B side of Takin' It to the Streets).

It was the jukebox in the first bar I worked at, over forty years ago in New Orleans, a college bar located in the armpit of Tulane University called The Boot. I could picture that jukebox, its location just inside the entrance to the bar, like a squat sentinel. Then something scary happened.

Inventing astrology

 

The origins of astrology are cloudy. The sky has been a problem for man ever since the dawn of time, or possibly later that same week. What is the sky? asked primitive man. How far up does it go? What holds it up? How often should it be mowed? Is my neighbor Og’s sky bluer than mine? Does it cross the line into my sky?

Primitive man was extremely territorial.

Early civilizations avoided looking at the sky, afraid that it might get angry and fall on them. Assyrian nobles favored their much taller Hittite slaves as bodyguards, reasoning that if the sky fell, they’d take the brunt of the impact. The ancient Babylonians did attempt an ambitious project to build a tower all the way to the sky. Ultimately, the project failed, however, mainly due to the use of Mafia-connected contractors for construction work.

The Phoenicians first noticed that there were objects suspended in the firmament. This made them an extremely nervous people. They would dart back and forth under the trees, muttering the words “firmament, firmament” to each other, hoping to avoid any falling celestial objects. They invented boats so they could get out from under the sky at short notice. Eventually they sailed their boats so far that they sailed right off the edge of the planet, and were a happier people as a result.

Cloudology

It was the Greeks who gave us the science of astrology. The Greeks gave the world reason and logic. So far they’ve refused to take them back. Credit for the invention of astrology goes to Optometrus of Thebes, although the role of Estremides the Athenian cannot be discounted. Both men were philosophers, but Optometrus also had a thriving business in time-share goats. The two philosophers were walking together one day in the groves of Academe, hoping to catch a glimpse of Academe’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Minerva the Winsome. They stopped for a moment to gaze at the clouds lazing across the sky.

Happy Shadow Day

In 1962, the song "Me and My Shadow" seemingly enjoyed a renaissance. I say "seemingly" because that's the way I remember it. I was only four at the time, and the first time I saw it performed on tv, I thought it was a new song. That's the way it is when you are very young; each new encounter is a reinvention of the world.

In fact, the song was written in 1927, if Wikipedia is to be believed, by Al Jolson, Billy Rose, and Dave Dreyer. It's been performed by a host of artists since. In 1962, it seemed, it was performed all over television on every variety show--and variety shows were big back then.

There's just one thing. I can find no proof of this phenomenon. I don't know that it ever actually happened. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me.

Except, except

--for a memorable rendition by Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr., which you will find at the end of this post.  A performance of such grace and easy charm that I'm certain it must have been repeated on at least two or three different variety shows. But two or three does not a renaissance make.

Why then do I remember it as making such a splash? Could it be that it was the first time I was ever faced with, ever really thought about my own shadow, as a separate entity apart from me?

(Well, maybe not. After all, the Disney version of Peter Pan, with its memorable scene of Pan chasing his shadow, came out in 1953. And the Broadway play with Mary Martin aired on tv in 1960. But I wasn't around in '53, and wasn't old enough for its first re-release in '58. I must have caught the Disney on its third go-round in '69. I probably caught Mary Martin's rebroadcast in '63.)

Well, what is the shadow, besides proof of our defiance of the sunlight, saying to the photons "thus far and no further?" I mean, what meaning do we assign to it? Well, she's Nyx, the goddess of darkness, sister of Erebus, the god of night. A presence that is an absence.

What was it to me, my shadow at that age? I can take a guess. Tall in the evening, a glimpse of the future. Crouching in my protection at noontide, reminding me of the shortcomings of the present. My own portable sundial. A cool, companionable blue parasol in the mornings that the afternoons chased away. A friend to confide in as darkness approached. A terror among the streetlights. A shape-changer.

Of course the shadow is one of Jung's crowd of archetypes. It stands alongside the ego, the self. He saw the shadow as literally our dark side, all the failures and foibles we don't want to own up to, want to dismiss and for that very reason must make peace with. We have to clap for the wolfman. The wolfman is, after all, our animal energy, our unbounded creative impulse. We cannot be a fully integrated person if we deny the person that we are at every full moon. There is no soul without a body, no yin without a yang.

Third Villain

 

As you may know, I published a novel in 2020 called The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle, in which Sherlock Holmes investigates the transformation of Eliza (lifted from Shaw's Pygmalion)  from a girl of the streets into a lady who could pass for a duchess. There are three villains in the mix, two from the world of literature and one from history. There's one guy who did not make the cut for my third villain, though I was sorely tempted:

Rupert of Hentzau.

Not familiar with the name? Maybe this quote will jog your memory: 

For my part, if a man must needs be a knave, I would have him a debonair knave, and I liked Rupert Hentzau better than his long-faced, close-eyed companions. It makes your sin no worse, as I conceive, to do it à la mode and stylishly."

― Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda

 Rupert is the youngest, most devious and dangerous member of the cabal of Six to replace the rightful king of Ruritania with his younger brother. Of the Six, only Rupert escapes royal retribution (to reappear in the sequel). Why, you may ask, did I reject this extraordinary villain for my pastiche?

First, the dates didn't match up. The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau are both supposed to have taken place in the late 1870s--early 1880s (there's a three-year gap between the two). More importantly, Rupert is mortally wounded and his body burned to ash in the second book. While my conscience might have allowed me to finagle a resurrection for the villain, an urn full of ashes is quite an obstacle to contend with. My story is set in 1912, just after the events set down in Shaw's Pygmalion and before the Holmes story His Last Bow. There's no way I could recast my timeline to accommodate young Rupert (who would have been awfully young for any events pre-dating Prisoner, in which he is supposed to be about twenty-two or twenty-three. I prefer my villains old enough to vote.

(If you've read the book, you'll know I did some mighty fine timeline tap dancing to include my secondary villain. But I think I played fair and square with the reader on that score. My conscience is clear.)

Second, Rupert was too imposing, too dominating, too clever a character for the role of tertiary villain. By his very nature (were I to do justice to him) he threatened to lead me astray from my original focus for my story. (I'm not sure he didn't overpower Hope's intentions for Prisoner. The sequel may have been the writer's revenge upon his villain for upstaging the action.)

But most important, The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle is a bit of a high-wire act. I knew it going in. I was bringing together characters and events created by three Victorian heavy hitters: Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, and Robert Louis Stevenson (as with assassins, three names always connotes danger). What the story needed was a net.

By a net I mean a story that is essentially a flight of fantasy needs a rudder, an anchor. It needs to be thoroughly grounded in reality. It is essential that the more fantastic your tale, the more grounded in reality your details must be. That's why The Hobbit, the tale of a strange little creature who goes dragon-hunting with a pack of dwarves, begins with a smoke and a tea party. And Bilbo runs off without a handkerchief! Where does The Wind in the Willows start? With spring cleaning! This is why I had to make sure that the alias Holmes assumes to go undercover was a real American Mafioso. And when I needed to delay a train journey I scoured the internet for a possible historical cause. And when I needed someone to impersonate Holmes, I brought in--sorry, you'll have to read the book for that one.

What I needed was someone a bit more prosaic, more grounded in reality than Rupert. I needed a real historic person. One whose interest in Eliza was matrimonial, though not necessarily for himself, someone liable to be taken in by the swirling rumors of her noble, perhaps even royal background.

So I went to work. And I turned up Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria. Rupprecht was 43 in 1912, and his first wife, Duchess Marie Gabrielle, had just died. Which meant that he would be looking for a new wife in 1912. Rupprecht, whose name even sounded like Rupert, who was slated to rule a kingdom nearly as mythical today as Hope's Ruritania was then. He married for a second time in 1921, after the war. Rupprecht was my boy. 

(He never did rule; after the first world war Bavaria was declared a republic. But when Hitler offered to restore the crown to him he turned it down and fled Germany. He was no Nazi.)

He was not right for the villain, though. Only for the predicate. The Prince of Bavaria wouldn't traipse over to England to hunt up a wife. He'd send a minion. But who?

That was where I got really lucky. Y'see, I found out the prince was assigned an adjutant in 1895--Lieutenant Otto von Stetten. For three and a half years von Stetten accompanied the prince on extensive trips across the globe. The lieutenant was 33, the prince 26. They must have become close.

Of course von Stetten was not still the prince's adjutant in 1912. By then Colonel von Stetten (he was to retire as a highly decorated general after the first world war) was a close adviser to King Otto (king in name only; he was considered mad, probably a victim of PTSD, and was deposed in 1913 by his cousin Ludwig, Rupprecht's father. Obviously Otto was skilled at handling ticklish matters.

Who better to seek out a new bride for the bereaved prince?

So I was able to introduce him thusly:

“Looming before me was the man undoubtedly their chief, though he resembled them no more than the hawk does the crow. His countenance was pale, with thin bloodless lips beneath a hussar’s moustache. His grey hair was cropped close under a bowler hat. His eyes were a calm grey sea beneath the welkin of heavy brows. He was carapaced like a turtle in a caped astrakhan greatcoat with blinding brass buttons. He paced back and forth in front of me, a malacca laid casually across his shoulder."

He became one of my favorite characters.

Did I miss my chance at Rupert of Hentzau? By no means. Count Rupert, in exile from Ruritania, could easily have traveled to England seeking revenge on Rudolph Rassendyll and locked horns instead with a younger Sherlock Holmes. But that, as they say, is a tale for another day.

EXT.

Calvin Trillin on writing

 

"I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing -- tightrope walking comes immediately to mind -- but it's difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if
his confidence is completely shot."

 --Calvin Trillin: journalist, humorist, deadline poet.

Favorite books:

Alice, Let's Eat

Uncivil Liberties

Enough's Enough: and Other Rules of Life

Bonus quote:

“Every good idea sooner or later degenerates

 into hard work.”

As Trillin says: Enough's enough.