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Some folks have asked what it is like living next door to the PP’s…Well, actually it’s no different from living several states away…Never see them, they never call, never stop by, turn out the lights when I knock, get an occasional email and I do see Mr. P about every other week for movie night. And that’s it.
I suppose now that they are fixed in the local social whirl, such as it is, there is no time for old Sir Basil. You know, if I had feelings, they would probably be hurt.
Well, I do have a few things to be glad about…FLG is actually learning how to dress in the proper manner. It might be he will soon be throwing out the Crocs and cargo pants and adopting a more Cary/Basil look…It will probably get him fired for not pretending to be egalitarian, but he will look marvelous. We’ll work on the rest of him in due course, but it is a promising beginning. And I did notice that Our Maximum Leader has remembered the secret to good art…Where there is fruit, there is art around someplace, and he is studying diligently. And you thought we learned nothing at the RCBfA…
It is a biretta and he should have several. If he does not you need to get him one today. The rules for wearing the biretta, which is an indoor hat as opposed to the saturno which is an outdoor one, is that it may be used during the entrance and exit processions, when the cleric is seated and when delivering the homily. But the biretta must be removed or doffed when the Holy Name of Jesus or Mary or the Trinity or the saint of the day is mentioned.
And since I know you require your priest to be correctly attired in his soutane, they would look something like these fine young men:
Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950) Anglo-Italian Author
Of course spotting the quote is a little too easy, what with the telltale sign of quotation marks and all…But, which book does the quote come from? No peeking, of course. Really no bonus points necessary since every school boy knows this, provided your school wasn’t free, of course…
Hint if needed: “Bohemian Rhapsody”
The Club Dumas (El Club Dumas) by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Read in the English translation from the original Spanish
Lucas Corso is a book detective, a mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found hanged, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas’s masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named after a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris in pursuit of a sinister and seemingly omniscient killer. Part mystery, part puzzle, part witty intertextual game, The Club Dumas is a wholly original intellectual thriller.
The Club Dumas is a bibliophile’s fantasy. Almost every page includes a literary reference, or a description of a rare edition of a famous work. Lucas Corso also comes across a number of books on the occult, most of which are inventions by Pérez-Reverte. The fictional works, The Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows and Delomalanicon have histories intertwined with many real authors and other historical figures.
Note: I do not remember doing so, (I walked past it on a 2 for 1 table at the local booksellers and picked it up) but I must have picked this up due to a subliminal suggestion from Mr. FLG…Along with this:
The Gentleman’s Companion 2 vol. by Charles H. Baker 1939
Long before Town and Country became an excuse for perfume ads, the magazine sent its distinguished writer, Charles H. Baker, on assignment around the world to find the very best food and drink. The result was an eclectic compilation called The Gentleman’s Companion, a legendary and extremely rare literary work, worthy of Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg.
The two volume set, including both an “Exotic Cookery Book” as well as an “Exotic Drink Book,” provides a provocative and insightful snapshot of the civilized 1940s. In The Gentleman’s Companion, Baker outlines a grand cocktail tour that takes the reader on imaginative flights fueled by drinks like the Vladivostok Virgin, “being a risky little heart-warmer from out Frozen Siberia,” or “the unpredictable Balloon Cocktail from Calcutta’s smartest restaurant, Firpo’s.” American readers whose idea of exotic travel goes no farther than the Grand Canyon can prepare an Aguacate Cubano, a spine-stiffening matter of Bahama Conchs, or Queen Elizabeth’s Roasting Marinade for Saddle of Venison.
Few books, before or since, have even approached this urbanely masculine treatise on gastronomy.
Today The Gentleman’s Companion is published as Jigger, Beaker and Glass: Drinking Around the World and Knife, Fork and Spoon: Eating Around the World. These are faithful reprints of the original and available at your local booksellers. Original copies of The Gentleman’s Companion can be found and can be had usually from $100.00 to $400.00 depending on date of publication and condition.
Gentleman’s Companion: The worldly writing of the impossible-to-classify Charles H. Baker, Jr. by St. John Frizell
Volume One: Bartholomew Wolfe Bandy abandons medical school for the Victorian Light Infantry. He survives the trenches only to be transferred to the Royal Flying Corps after capturing his own colonel in a daring raid on his own lines. He meets his future wife, Katherine Lewis, by crashing in her field, and despite his best efforts becomes an ace. He also lands an aeroplane on the colonel.
Beginning with Bandy’s life in Beamington Ontario shortly before leaving for Europe and the First World War, the “memoirs” follow his adventures through the war and into the 20’s and 30’s, with the last books carrying him into World War Two.
When not busy avoiding death, winning medals, or oscillating through ranks like a yo-yo, Bandy spends his time driving his superior officers into apoplectic fits.
Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as “brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times,” A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books “provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars” (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.
“There is always much interest, much debate and much speculation, over who Anthony Powell used as the models for the characters in A Dance to the Music of Time. The author has explicitly stated that this ‘novel-in-twelve-volumes’ is not a roman-á-clef. Nonetheless at least a couple of dozen of the 400 characters are clearly based upon real persons known to the author, and have been identified with varying degrees of authority. In a number of instances these identifications have been confirmed by AP, or admitted as sources in his Journals.
Powell has explained that fictional characters are always mixtures; no-one ‘is’ anybody. Friends of his such as Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Muggeridge were too complete to be turned into fiction; he has said, “It is much more likely to be one’s bank manager or dentist”. Indeed questions about models for characters have become the bane of Powell’s life: “People won’t believe that you are capable of inventing characters,” he protests. “All right a couple of people might occur to you but to make it work you have to invent a ‘third person’ to pull it all together”. [Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 25 Sept 1997] And consequently he had little time for people who do what we have done here: analyse the character models…”
Anthony Powell Dance Character Models
An erudite companion to Anthony Powell’s 12-volume masterwork, A Dance to the Music of Time, which The NewYorker hailed as “one of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War.”A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark of 20th-century literature—but as the reader cavorts through the 12-volume novel alongside the narrator Nicholas Jenkins, it soon becomes apparent that he, too, confuses dates and events. Here, Hilary Spurling places every detail in its proper place. A magnificent database of Powell’s imagination and England’s cultural landscape, Invitation to the Dance encompasses more than 400 characters and one million words of Powell’s lively epic.
