(Jean Arthur in a publicity still for the 1929 mystery film The Greene Murder Case. Photograph: Gene Robert Richee/© John Springer Collection/Corbis. From the Guardian and having only a tenuous connexion with this post, but it’s a great picture)
Hello hello, sorry to have been away for so long and not to have visited anyone or posted. My daughter and I have been idling about at my parents’ house in England, me quaffing gin and filching my mother’s books, my daughter sitting winsomely in her grandparents’ laps and forcing them to read the Meg and Mog books and Grandmother Lucy and her Hats until their eyes bled. Came back home to Belgium bearing a vile cold and then had Flemish exams (I passed, hurraaaay!, as my daughter would say).
I have several posts to write here, not least on the brilliant Nostromo, but frankly all of them require too much effort. I should also be cracking on with my reading for Henry Green Week, but shamefully I plan to skulk early to bed and read the first V.I. Warshawski novel which I acquired two weeks ago in an amazing stroke of luck at the local kringwinkel (which is a shop selling second-hand goods). I think a couple of British or British-American families must have moved away from the area because there was a whole room crammed with English-language paperbacks for 20 cents each. Although few were to my taste I suppose just the sight of lots of books I could read without a dictionary flicked the same switch in my brain that whisky does, I became slightly crazed and unable to think properly, and I managed to totter home with such a pile of books I had to distract my partner (‘Oooh look I think Merle’s got out again’) so that I could scoot into the house and hide them. And because they were so cheap I could take risks. And buy exactly the sort of easy reading I seem to have craved over the last few weeks. Ha ha! Anyway, back to proper writing about books soon. I hope you’re all having a happy January.