Italians always say the same thing when events like this unfold on their television screens. “The English,” they effuse, “it’s only the English who know how to do it.” The event in question was, in this case, the Coronation of King Charles III, but I’d heard the phrase and observed the facial expression that accompanies it on many a past occasion – funerals, weddings, and whatnot.
Want some more of my observations on the Tucker Purge? I shall oblige.
Our times reverberate with observations, which are just as often laments, of the ubiquity of certain objects and modes of deportment with which these are associated. I doubt that the umbrella and the bicycle caused as much speculation about the future of the world as the smartphone and the electric scooter do at present, though I recall that a New York Times editorial once condemned the word “automobile” as a neologism combining Greek and Latin roots “which is so near to indecent that we print it with hesitation.”
Sitting, like the late Otis Redding , and watching the tide roll away out of Navarino Bay, I find it hard to think much about TV land—a country inhabited by the minds of most of my fellow-Americans and the great bulk of the world’s population.
The “somewhere” is Nafpaktos (which the Venetians, when they acquired the town, renamed Lepanto) on the Corinthian Gulf.
The purge of Tucker Carlson by Fox News came as a surprise to many, but not me. Having been in the conservative writing business now almost 50 years, it’s just normal behavior. Liberals pick up their wounded; conservatives shoot theirs.
The English language does not seem to have a single word for “old age,” which exists, for instance, in Russian (starost’) and Italian (vecchiaia). A native speaker can easily spend days or years pondering this lacuna because, whatever its significance, it is significant. We do not say “young age,” we say “youth,” and at once there opens a very specific psychological and ethical panorama. None such exists for youth’s antonym, suggesting that language itself does not so much as bother looking in this direction. Yet how can there be night without twilight?
Foreign Affairs is the most prestigious policy magazine in the world. It’s published by the Council on Foreign Relations, which conspiracy mongers say controls the world. It doesn’t, although its members are powerful and influential. As to Foreign Affairs itself, I like to say it’s “the Establishment talking to itself.” I used to have a subscription, but gave it up because they doubled the price as the quality of writing declined. But I’m still on their email list, so I get their list of articles, with short synopses. Some of those articles are free.
My bright college years in America were roughly the epoch of Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. I never read the book, whose title was on the lips of my contemporaries as a kind of mantra of masculinity. But it wasn’t as though they sensed what the future held. The magic, I reckon, lay simply in the innate ridiculousness of the word “quiche,” so swishy, hissy, and, as one might reflect now, forty years later, tranny. Just say the silly word and straightaway you’re in the audience of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
The Marshal’s Own Case is the seventh of Magdalen’s mystery novels featuring Marshall Salvatore Guarnaccia. Jack Trotter, who introduced me to Nabb some years ago, has been invited to write some things on several of the other novels, but let us leap ahead to consider this, the strangest and least liked of her books.
