Friday, January 17, 2003

Wow, I'm busy.  Busy and sick.  I was coughing so horribly yesterday that someone actually came into my cubicle and requested I go home, I was disturbing them so profoundly.  So I took myself away, and worked a bit from home.  I am really sick, however, a fact confirmed for me when I fell into a dreamless sleep from 2:00-6:00p, and was still able to sleep soundly for ten hours that evening, 10:00p-8:00a.  That's a lot of sleep!  In the interim between sleep, I sat in bed, ate chocolate pudding, watched Donnie Darko, and read Dorothy Sayers' Murder Must Advertise.  I love Dorothy Sayers, gentle readers.  I wish she had written more books, but then I suppose they might not have been so uniformly excellent.  Look down on my affection for mystery novels if you must, but I find them quite fine, relaxing, and fun.  The good ones, anyway - Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, Margery Allingham.  I do not like Patricia Cornwell!  I find her novels to be degenerate trash, in need of a good editor.  I recently purchased The Jacques Barzun Reader, and there is a section in which he discusses crime fiction, with his usual intelligence and flair.  He immediately makes mincemeat of the notion that people enjoy crime fiction because it portrays a violent, seamy world.  I agree with this thesis wholeheartedly - In 'Golden Age' (1920-1970) crime fiction, the murder and it's details are done away with in the first pages of the book, in a very circumspect manner.  What's left is a razor-sharp mind (both the novelist's and her fictional detective's) slowly imposing order upon chaos, casting light in dark corners, bringing rogue elements to justice, and generally bestowing sense and rationality to a random and cruel world.  I like that a lot, it appeals to me on many levels, and an excellent detective tale can cheer me up like nothing else in this world.  It makes me happy to believe that life's murky unreason can be clarified with the vigorous application of thought, intuition, and proper feeling.  Even that belief may not be entirely true.  In his essay on crime fiction, Jacques Barzun goes to great lengths to distinguish tales from novels.  Novels are serious, and limn character and society in great detail.  Tales are not-so-serious, and are largely intended to entertain.  This doesn't imply that tales are excluded from great literature - Mr. Barzun places Candide, Robinson Crusoe, and The 1001 Nights firmly in the 'tale' category.  Novels deal with individuals, and tales with personality types - the detective, the librarian, the widow, the crusty old police chief, etc.  So, detective fiction is something I do for fun, and that's enough about that.  In fact, that is enough for today.  Good afternoon, gentle readers. 4:07:08 PM