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I haven't read that one for years, and I may have given away my copy. It's a strange one; good, but pretty uncomfortable.

"Veronicas of apology" almost sounds like a misprint. Can you give me some idea where it is in the book? Maybe I can check my edition if I can find it.

James Lee Burke's Black Cherry Blues won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. I can see why. The story's good. Detective Dave Robicheaux and his adopted daughter, Alafair, are being threatened by south Louisiana thugs. He responds by beating up two of them in a motel room. After he leaves, one of the thugs kills the other and decorates the bathroom with his insides. Dave is accused of the murder. He discovers that the twosome and others are involved with organized crime, men who are systematically cheating Indians out of acres of oil-rich land. Dave heads to Montana to right wrongs and prove his innocence. Alafair goes with him.

I did have my usual problem with his way too over-detailed description. Trust me, Mr. Burke, I really don't need to know exactly what every character is wearing each time he appears. Nor do I care whether Alafair's jeans are zippered or have an elastic waist. Too much information!

Still, there were times when his writing truly grabbed me.

1) "… you're in a world that caters to the people of the Atchafalaya basin—Cajuns … rednecks whose shrinking piece of American geography is identified only by a battered pickup, a tape deck playing Waylon, and a twelve-pack of Jax." (page 3) Okay. Maybe the thing is that I like description when it's something more than a laundry list of furniture, trees or clothing.

2) Dave, the narrator, describes his housekeeper. "Her body looked put together out of sticks, and her skin was covered with serpentine lines. She dipped snuff and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes continuously, and bossed me around in my own home, but she could work harder than anyone I had ever known, and she had been fiercely loyal to my family since I was a child." (page 8) Hey! I know that woman, even without a description of what she's wearing.

3) Know what "fiigmo" means? It's cop-speak for "F—k it. I've got my orders." (page 26) I like anything that improves my vocabulary.

4) "… as I reviewed the friendships I had had over the years, I had to include that the most interesting ones involved the seriously impaired—the Moe Howard affair,* the drunken, the mind-smoked, those who began each day with a nervous breakdown, people who hung on to the sides of the planet with suction cups." (page 129) I love that last image and, meant in the nicest way possible, sense that a lot of the folk here make a similar use of suction cups.

5) "Don't live in tomorrow's problems. Tomorrow has no more existence than yesterday, but you can always control now." (page 139) Although, I like the sentences, I have to object. "You can always control now"? Gimme a break! Self-delusion is always so … so … so cute.

6) Dave watches a group of the bad guys having fun. "The Tahoe crowd were the kind of people who knew that they would never die." (page 149) I guess Detective Dave also finds self-delusion cute.

Except for the usual it's-too-long, Black Cherry Blues is pretty good.

*Anyone know what "the Moe Howard affair" might be? I don't so I thought about ...ing it out, but then I thought maybe one of you might know something. Anyone? Was Moe Howard a Stooge?

They've just arrived in NY. "Tod" is looking where he's going and therefore running into people. "His bows, his flourishes, his veronicas of apology." It's the paragraph before the one where the people have grown their winter coats. First real page of Chapter 3.

I can find the phrase "veronicas of apology" in google books online so it's not a mistake. What, exactly, it is, I haven't found out.

Hmmm.

Well, I have a tendency, when confronted with unusual wordings or phrases, to attempt to figure out what they refer to. "Veronicas of apology" is definitely an intriguing phrase, so I was pulled in. What I have come up with is the following definition:

ve·ron·i·ca 3 n.

A maneuver in bullfighting in which the matador stands with both feet fixed in position and swings the cape slowly away from the charging bull.

Which at least gives me some sort of visual, and definitely fits in with "bows" and "flourishes".

I think you've hit on it. I would never have seen the connection myself, but now you've explained it, I really like the image!

From the brief reading I did yesterday, Amis was very fond of - and very good at - small flourishes, almost puzzles of phrasing. This would seem to be one of them, and I think you've solved it.

Well done, erinys!

Another possibility: I went with the first definition--the appearing images of Jesus. My cynical side, of course, deems them fake. I, thus, interpreted the phrase as fake apologies. But the bullfighting does tie in visually with the other actions. Thanks for the explanation, erinys.

Now I think I'll visit google, which I didn't even think of doing yesterday. Thanks, Mellow.

Frequently something I've been reading has recommended Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." So I ordered it. A thicker than expected book arrived. I didn’t look at it closely, assuming it was a collection of Gilman's short stories. Wrong! Turns out I'd run into something called A Bedford Cultural Edition, which starts with a bio of the author, a listing of major events of the decades through which the author lived, the short story or novel, then selections from the author's other work and selections where the work itself is mentioned, discussed or even related thematically. The back of the book lists other stories or novels than have been so presented. Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets might hold my interest enough to make it through such a treatment. Or Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance. But "The Yellow Wallpaper"? Not in your wildest dreams.

The problem I have is summoning up any empathy for Gilman and that, in turn, makes me feel guilty. Publishing in the 1890s, Gilman's focus was on women and how men and society kept them from following their dreams. Her biggest problem, I gather, took place after she had a child and became depressed. The prescribed treatment was rest, with strict instructions not to do any of that stressful writing. Today she'd have a diagnosis of postpartum and be treated with drugs. Beyond the postpartum, however, my guess is that she'd also be considered bipolar or chronically depressed. Okay. But she isn't living now. I keep telling myself to cut her some slack, but I can't do it. All I keep thinking is that at least two decades earlier Louisa May Alcott wanted to write and went ahead and wrote. Then we can jump back a lot of years, cross the pond and run into the Bronte sisters and other women who wrote, despite the hurdles they faced. Gilman appears to have spent a lot of time whining, and I don't like whiners.

Anyhow, putting aside my probably unfair annoyance with the author, "The Yellow Wallpaper" was pretty good. It's about a woman writer who is confined to a room because of being depressed after giving birth. Although the narrator dislikes the wallpaper, the story ends happily when the woman whom the narrator sees trapped behind the patterns in the wallpaper is finally free.

I read "The Yellow Wallpaper" years ago - haven't re-read it in forever. I loved it (as much as one can love a horror story).

I think it helps to realize not only (as you did) that she was a prisoner of her mind and a prisoner of her time, but that she was a prisoner of both at the same time. There was literally no escape for her. I found it so terrifying that I don't even remember the happy ending - just a tiny woman behind the wallpaper. I'm sure it

Guess I'll have to go home and re-read it tonight. I'm sure it will read much differently now than it did when I read it some twenty years ago.

Gilman also wrote a feminist utopia called "Herland," which can be fun if you're in the right mood!

Wow. Isn't it strange how two people can read the same story and get completely different visions of it? Granted I am dim when it comes to symbolism, and you being a writer, you'll notice a lot that I miss - but my take on this story has always been than the main character is captured by the wallpaper, and that the story ends with her descending into madness -- that, instead of the woman behind the wallpaper breaking free, she becomes the woman trapped by the wallpaper.

Your reading would make more sense in some ways, but I think mine does in others. Time to go googling for academic papers, I guess.

Sigh.

(okay - I've read a bit more - it would appear that we are both right, that the freedom & destruction are basically two sides of the same coin. Man o man, I forgot how much this story "creeps me out," as they say. If anyone else is interested, the story is available on the web in full in more than one place; it's about 6000 words.)