raven72d's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In The Far West Of Listenbourg, Where The Desert Meets The Sea Very warm today--into the upper 80s F this afternoon. I turned on the air conditioning when I got home this evening. I'd hoped to get through all of April without running the a/c, but it was 83 F inside the lakeside flat when I got home, and I just wasn't up to sitting in stuffy warmth. My a/c is set for 77 F, and we'll see how that goes tonight. This morning at 05h35 my brother texted both me and my sister to remind us that today, 16. April 2024, our father would've been one hundred years old. The incoming-text sound woke me up, and I lay there in the dark looking at my iPhone screen and realizing that I'd forgotten the date. I wasn't at all sure how to feel. When I was a vur' petite little Small Long-Eared Desert Hedgehog, 1924 seemed not so very far away. Here in 2024-- the Year Twenty-Four, I still call it --1924 might as well be the days of the Xia or the Shang. I should've remembered the date, though. I did have to tell myself that. I finished watching "Ripley" last night. It's an amazing series, and I will have to get it on DVD. It's something I want for my permanent collection. The last couple of episodes were very, very clever, and John Malkovich (who was himself Tom Ripley in "Ripley's Game") made a brief appearance. Mister Taylor tells me that he thinks Anthony Scott, who plays Ripley, is a bit too old for the part (at least compared to Matt Damon in "The Talented Mr. Ripley"), but I thought having both Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf be nominally in their early thirties worked well. What else did I learn from "Ripley"? Well...I loved it that Ripley made a point of using his victim's Mont Blanc fountain pen. I loved it that bank tellers and bank officers in 1961 Italy still had dip pens. I loved the handwriting, too. Ripley's signature on checks (cheques?) and contracts and hotel registers-- whether as Tom Ripley or Dickie Greenleaf --was a thing of beauty. I really should've learned calligraphy when I was young. My handwriting these days says "ancient necromancer copying forbidden knowledge" than it does "literary expat from decayed old money". Watching Anthony Scott's Ripley practice his victim's signature over and over did stir my envy. I wanted to pull out one of my older fountain pens and just start signing my name all down a sheet of yellow legal paper...or signing someone's name, anyway. "Ripley" is mostly set in 1961 Italy, and it did occur to me that sixty-odd years ago things like forgery (including art forgery) were a lot easier. There were travelers' checks, but no bank cards. Americans overseas could have their mail sent to American Express offices. People paid for things in cash. Letters, official and otherwise, went by ship and might take ten days to get from New York to Rome. Passports weren't biometric and were fairly easy to alter. Half a dozen spy novels from the era explained exactly how (the "Day of the Jackal" method) to use the birth certificate of a dead infant to get a British passport. There were no internet search engines, and no interlinked immigration offices. When Anthony Scott gets a false British passport from John Malkovich, you know that it was made with by an individual craftsman using artist's tools. Now I do remember doing some of those things. When I first went to Vienna, I picked up my mail at the American Express office on Kärtnerstrasse, or sometimes had it delivered to the pension where I stayed for that summer. I remember coming home from the Kriegsarchiv and finding letters with airmail stamps-- or aerograms! --on the little table in my sitting room. I cashed travelers' checks (cheques, I probably would've spelled it in those days) at American Express on Kärtnerstrasse, too...though I didn't have a fountain pen. I haven't seen or used travelers' cheques in...well...certainly not in this century. I remember using them on Grand Cayman in the very early Nineties, and using them in Izmir a few years later. I have no idea if American Express still issues them. I suppose I could go to the AmEx website and see, but I have the feeling that I'd only end up disappointed. These days I suppose you'd do...what? Go get a pre-paid cash card instead? That just doesn't have the same sense of romance. I can see that "Ripley" is going to end up costing me money over and above the price of the DVD set. When Tom Ripley goes through the pockets of someone he's just killed, he finds a wallet designed to go in the inner pocket of a suit jacket and hold c. 1961 banknotes of various sizes...and he finds a pocket address book. An agenda, they might've said in 1961 Europe. The Roman detective who tries (and fails) to figure out who Ripley is and what he's done has a little pocket notebook, too, and a silver pencil to go with it. I'm not sure about the technical definition here-- is an agenda only an address book or pocket calendar, or can it be a notebook as well? I have to look into these things. I have Moleskines, of course, but somehow I can imagine standing in a dollar store and picking up half a dozen small notebooks-- the very small kind, a step or two down from duodecimo. I can see ending up with some wallet designed for the era of Lord Peter Wimsey, if not the sort of thing you'd use to pay some long-legged, miniskirted early-Carnaby Street girl's rent on her Soho flat. (I wonder if the J. Peterman catalog ever references Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies in their wallet ads...) Well, I'll use any reason I can find to go look for dollar store notebooks (the kind with the marbled covers). After all, there is a niche YouTube fascination with them. And tonight, let's have a small vignette from Ms. Avery: When the Little Girl was younger still & taken to the beach for sea air, she liked to feed the gulls. This was frowned upon, but she didn't care, she longed to hear their tales of the great Atlantic rollers, of bottles of brandy in dark caves, of wild cliffs where no human went. And this, a small note about one of Old Fox's relatives-- There once was an old fox who lived in the gardens of Shōkokuji temple in Kyoto. In the springtime, he would disguise himself as the famous tea master Sen Sōtan & visit local tea masters to drink tea & eat wagashi sweets. Everyone loved his company, even though they all knew full well he was really a fox, and affectionally called him Sōtangitsune (宗旦狐). Well, tomorrow is midweek. Halfway to the weekend. I need weekends. I need days when I can just drink coffee and read. Or sit over tea and cast the I Ching. I think I'll spend some time doing that come Saturday afternoon. There'll be a music festival on the plaza, I think, and I will go look for paella, but...a quiet table at the coffee shop isn't a bad idea. 11:27 p.m. - 2024-04-16 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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