Miss Arlena, the Victim

My favorite Agatha Christie’s novel is Evil Under the Sun. It’s definitely not her best work — Witness for the Prosecution is perfect, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is fabulous, and The Mousetrap is good enough — but it’s got something else: Arlena Stuart Marshall.

As The Observer pointed out when the book was first released (back in 1941):

Evil Under the Sun has luxury summer hotel, closed-circle setting, Poirot in white trousers. Victim: redhead actress man-mad. Smashing solution, after clouds of dust thrown in your eyes, ought to catch you right out. Light as a soufflé.

At the beginning, when she comes out of the water, slim and beautiful in a white swimsuit, and she glances at someone else’s husband, everyone believes that she is the evil implied by the title. But Hercule Poirot unveils the truth: what if the effect she caused in men, albeit strong, was almost insignificant compared to the attraction men had upon her?

But that is a completely different story.

Promenade au Champagne

L´idée etait parfaite. A late-afternoon stroll around the city’s charm blocks. You go inside each one of the high profile stores, drink a little champagne and try some of their delicious appetizers (or, as it was with Louis Vuitton, an amazing, squared, praline chocolate!). All this surrounded by Sao Paulo’s beautiful society. And, as it starts getting a little late, you watch people going through a very unusual shop-alcoholism.

With a little champagne, even the tiniest and tighest little white dress will look just amazing on you.

Daring Young Women on the Flying Trapeze

“You are the same age as my character”, he said in a solid, pleasant, 60-year-old voice. And then he looked at me with blue, liquid, serene eyes. He could have said that we had the exact same background, or that she and I lived in the same city or that we shared the habit of sleeping with older men. But he was right. We were both 26 and we were not young anymore.

I looked at him and his impossibly thin and chic wife. And how he talked in a gentle, amicable way. And that soon, very soon, I’d be too old to portray some foreigner’s main character in a foreign novel.

If it were a drink…

If The Garden of Eden were a drink, it would be a Lemon Drop Martini:

Lemon Drop Martini

1 1/2 ounces vodka
1/2 ounce Triple Sec
1 teaspoon superfine sugar
3/4 ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice
Ice cubes
Superfine sugar for dipping
Twisted peel of lemon

Mix the vodka, Triple Sec, sugar, and lemon juice in a cocktail shaker half-filled with ice; shake well (supposedly the cocktail is to be shaken 40 times to make sure the sugar is well blended). Pour strained liquor into sugar-rimmed martini glass and garnish with a twisted peel of lemon.

NOTE: To create a sugar-rimmed glass, take a lemon wedge and rub the drinking surface of the glass so it is barely moist. Dip the edge of the glass into sugar.

Makes 1 serving.

Why Fiction Characters Should Drink More

Because we can’t.

One of the most delicious books I ever read was Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. All the characters ever do is swim in the morning, then drink a little champagne, make love, then drink some whisky or absinthe or cognac, swim again, and then make love again. And all this in the French Riviera, in the Côte d’Azur.

I found myself terribly envious of Catherine — a very tanned blonde who has her hair cut a la garçon and still looks impossibly beautiful. And she never, ever, experiences any kind of 5-Pound-Bloat (with all that alcohol, one would imagine…).

Even though heavy drinking is one of the author’s signature marks (The Sun Also Rises, For Whom The Bell Tolls — all feature a great deal of absinthe), the book was considered an erotic drama and a more effeminate Hemingway.

It’s Magical!

Magic is a topic both for the MIT News and for The New York Times.

MIT-led team creates touch-based illusion

and

While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks

One theory of perception, for instance, holds that the brain builds representations of the world, moment to moment, using the senses to provide clues that are fleshed out into a mental picture based on experience and context. The brain uses neural tricks to do this: approximating, cutting corners, instantaneously and subconsciously choosing what to “see” and what to let pass, neuroscientists say. Magic exposes the inseams, the neural stitching in the perceptual curtain.

We Are Not Amused

I wrote a Fathers Day note to my father and I used “we” instead of “I” because I wanted to include my two brothers in whatever it was that I was saying. So he asked me whether I had meant it as the Royal We.

I had never heard the expression before, but I did a little search now and found that there are two other “plurals” as opposed to the majestic plural:

Plural of Modesty — probably for when you write a work e-mail, or you’re in an interview, and you want to give the impression that you are not speaking for yourself, but for something bigger, such as the company;

Author’s plural — maybe a variant for the “author’s you”, but in this case the author includes himself in the hypothetical situation (but, alas, Albert Einstein and Leibniz used it).

Which means to say that the “royal we” can be very modest.

We Are Not Amused is a quotation attributed to Queen Victoria.

P.S: And now something my brother said and will soon regret: If I were a woman, with my brains, I would dominate the world.

The Magician, by Neil Gaiman

They asked St. Germain’s manservant if his master was truly a thousand years old, as it was rumored he had claimed.

“How would I know?” the man replied. “I have only been in the master’s employ for three hundred years”.

Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot

Fragile Things

Unusual Weekend

No drinks, no running and no skipping rope.

Traffic Idiots and High Profile Intercourse

Traffic & Sex, from The New York Times Book Review:

Tom Vanderbilt writes about how human idiocy interferes with traffic in Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) - although he’s never been to Sao Paulo.

And Pulitzer Prize Winner Robert Olen Butler writes about low and high profile intercourse (Paris & Helen of Troy, Bonnie & Clyde, Pablo Picasso & Fernande Olivier) in Intercourse — Stories.

Famous or un-, the men are generally self-deluded, the women vain and contemptuous. And, despite the premise, sex has rarely been invoked with less attention paid to the body — or, for that matter, to physical pleasure. (To be fair, though, Butler does include himself in one vignette, as a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran bedding a 36-year-old desk clerk at the Sheraton Saigon Hotel and Towers, and he performs with splendid virility while still yearning to understand the “secret language” of women. So that’s good, right?).