Dead Man's Folly (1956)

Not a classic but a very solid Poirot mystery. I picked it up a) because I hadn't read it before and b) because it featured Ariadne Oliver, probably my favorite recurring Christie character, the dry and self-deprecating mystery novelist. Poirot attends a fete in which there is a scheduled murder hunt, a kind of figure-it-out-yourself mystery devised by Mrs. Oliver. Naturally the young girl who is hired to play the murder victim winds up strangled for real. The solution is both ingenious and a little bit out of left field.

Film Frames Friday (Thursday Edition)

Hint: Look closer.

Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis is my all time favorite novel, and I'm fairly certain it will never relinquish that spot. Anyway, just read it again, as I often do in March, a month in which I always need some comfort, and enjoyed it as much as I always do.

But I'm not here to talk about that: I'm here to talk about the character of Margaret Peel in the novel. She is the neurotic lecturer that our hero Jim Dixon has become entangled with, despite his many misgivings. She is needy, manipulative, unsure of herself, self-conscious, but also somewhat kind and intelligent. She is a character in the novel that I become more and more interested in each time I read the book. Even though she is made out to be a ridiculous fool (and that was Kingsley Amis' intention -- I wouldn't suggest otherwise), I think she is also a tragic figure, someone who is just not comfortable enough with herself to make it in the world.

Margaret is based on Monica Jones (her full name is Margaret Monica Beale Jones), a lecturer who was a long-time friend and sometime lover of Amis' own best friend Philip Larkin. It's a cruel portrait, and I wonder how Larkin felt about it. But the bottom line is that Margaret (more so than her foil Christine Callaghan) is such a well-written character that she takes on a life of her own. I think she's one of the great characterizations in the novel.

Larkin and Monica Jones on one of their holidays

Liz Taylor, 1932 - 2011

 

The Changeling (1980)

A very decent haunted house film with an excellent George C. Scott as a bereaved composer who inexplicably relocates to Seattle and rents a gigantic and creepy mansion. There are several genuinely scary moments, and a few dopey ones as well, but the pluses outweigh the minuses. Like all good ghost stories, this is a story about uncovering the past, and the story that Scott uncovers is a complex, hideous tale involving the changeling of the title. Scott's wife at the time, Trish Van Devere, is good as the rental agent that helps Scott tease the truth out of the house, although one wonders why she keeps willingly running through the mansion's rooms (not to mention the attic) when we all know it's a terrible idea.

Poetry Monday

The Museum of Comparative Zoology


by L. E. Sissman


Struck dumb by love among the walruses 
And whales, the off-white polar bear with stuffing 
Missing, the mastodons like muddy buses, 
I sniff the mothproof air and lack for nothing.

A general grant enabled the erection, 
Brick upon brick, of this amazing building. 
Today, in spite of natural selection, 
It still survives an orphan age of gilding.

Unvarnished floors tickle the nose with dust
Sweeter than any girls' gymnasium's;
Stove polish dulls the cast-iron catwalk's rust;
The soot outside would make rival museums

Blanch to the lintels. So would the collection.
A taxidermist has gone ape. The cases
Bulging with birds whose differences defy detection
Under the dirt are legion. Master races

Of beetles lie extinguished in glass tables: 
Stag, deathwatch, ox, dung, diving, darkling, May. 
Over the Kelmscott lettering of their labels, 
Skeleton crews of sharks mark time all day.

Mark time: these groaning boards that staged a feast 
Of love for art and science, since divorced, 
Still scantily support the perishing least 
Bittern and all his kin. Days, do your worst:

No more of you can come between me and 
This place from which I issue and which I 
Grow old along with, an unpromised land 
Of all unpromising things that live and die.

This brick ark packed with variant animals -- 
All dead -- by some progressive-party member 
Steams on to nowhere, all the manuals 
Of its calliope untouched, toward December.

Struck dumb by love among the walruses
And whales, the off-white polar bear with stuffing
Missing, the mastodons like muddy buses,
I sniff the mothproof air and lack for nothing.

Film Frames Friday

Hint: Phone home.