Back from the beach I’m peeling and Miki has become a devoted boogie boarder. Surf was running 3-4' at Fistral beach, messy on foggy Friday, smaller and more regular on Saturday and Sunday. My first time back in the surf since NSW in 2001. Man, was it good to be rolling and tumbling again! The beach was packed with boogie boarders and board surfers, but bodysurfing seems almost unknown in the UK.
» Bodysurfing email group
» Movies: 2003 World Bodysurfing Championship Part 1| Part 2
We camped at Penvose Farm outside Watergate Bay, dined and drank at the Aussie-casual Phoenix pub, and pottered slowly home across Dartmoor, purple with heather, with a last stop in Devon at Moretonhampstead for a clotted-cream tea before the long haul home on the M5 and M4. Miki’s inspired: today baked fruit and plain scones to carry the Devon clotted cream we brought home.
He wasn't built for the long haul; not everyone is. August Kleinzahler’s memoir of his big bad brother now online at the LRB.
Software and blackberries won out over the carnival. And Miki and I watched hawks and kites over Parliament Hill.
Mark of shame: my highest Solitaire score ever. I should take a newspaper.
Stephen M. Brady (“5mb” — you wish) sent a review of Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps from the New York Times.
» Brady’s Conjecture on time management: e = 5jt2
(Don’t you wish your friends had time to read the papers?)
August company Dined last night at Anne Tupker’s with another three Masters of Wine among the guests.
There are 240 MWs world-wide; the lifetime pass rate is 30% for the exam — 70% fail no matter how many times they sit it. Four at a table is a rare experience for an outsider. Anne is organising the Oxford Wine & Food Festival in November. This morning scarcely feel up to the Latin American carnival in south London. Curl up on the sofa and catch up on the Industrial XP mail, go blackberrying, write some software and some philosophy.
Of seven guests last night, four of us work or had worked full-time for a living — me and three others. Of the other three, one had retired and stopped working.
The other two both sounded passionate about their work and engaged with it, but would walk out at the drop of a lottery ticket. (And — you guessed it — travel.) These people are well educated and were able to choose their well-paid careers. People say I’m ‘lucky’ to enjoy my work. That presumes it’s normal not to. What is it about our attitude to work?
Here’s a clue. The three are or were full-time employees of well-established companies.
Means doing what you want to do. I’ve had some good results sharpening my time management tools. The key result is that my inbox is empty, and only messages that I want to attend to quickly are showing up in it.
» How it’s done
Late afternoon break yesterday after hours at the keyboard. Swam at Hampstead Pond, then stopped for ten minutes on way back and picked a kilo of blackberries. Early this year? Now the Australian weather has broken, they can join apples from the garden in a Blackberry and Apple Crumble.
Happy in danger in a dangerous place The next instalment of War Music arrived.
» also New music
The LRB reviews April Blood, a new book on Lorenzo de’ Medici’s political career. We’ll give Il Magnifico the last word today.
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia
Da doman non v’e certezza
Be happy if you can, there’s no certainty about tomorrow.
It’s 9am on 14 August and I still don’t know why my country invaded Iraq. The Prime Minister assured us we were in imminent danger — “Trust me.” Turns out it was not only a false alarm, but sounded speculative even to our intelligence services. Clearly a cover for some other reason — for which deception Blair has still to be brought to account — but what?
Still crazy after all these years There was always a case for Removing Saddam, if never one strong enough for actually doing it. Leaving aside that it wasn’t what the Prime Minister said he wanted to spend our blood and treasure on — for which he still has to be brought to account — it seems an unlikely motive. We’d been doing business with Hussein for decades. What could have made his removal urgent this year?
» John Sturrock’s article in the LRB.
Most reasonable explanation I’ve heard proposes there’s been a sea-change in America’s relationship with the rest of the world, as described in the Project for the New American Century, and that our Prime Minister, Thatcher’s heir, is convinced Britain must be inside the tent, pissing out, but dares not say so.
This one will run and run A more cynical view, more persuasive every day, is that this is the state of permanent war foreshadowed by George Orwell in 1984. Consider the extraordinary fearfulness of Americans described by Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine, a film deeply informed by Barry Glassner’s Culture of Fear. Consider how Americans have ‘wars’ where other nations have programmes: the War on Drugs, War on Poverty and so on. If Al-Qaeda’s spectacular attack on the World Trade Center was the beginning of a campaign, the second attack has been a long time coming. Arguably the invasion of Aghanistan was a measured and successful response, which stopped further attacks. (It also freed Afghans from the Taleban, America’s very own wind-up monster, created to dislodge the Russians. Well, America owed them that.) Game won and over, surely? But no, George II insists the War on Terror will run and run. Still a lot of wear in that flight suit.
It’s the oil, stupid Or is it even more brutally simple than that? Jane Pinckard wonders if it’s not simply the prospect of cheap oil for the American economy, whose persistently unfavourable balance of trade would look a lot more serious were the oil it relies on not priced in dollars. Eerily, Garry Trudeau foreshadowed this one a couple of decades back when Zonker registered for the draft. From memory:
— What’s this on the back: “Would you be willing to lay down your life for major US oil corporations?”
— It’s hypothetical, we’re just taking a poll.
Stefano Lanzavecchia sent an article suggesting we look better with clothes on. That matches my observations in Selfridges. In the whole crowd I saw only one unknown woman for whom I felt desire. She looked like a model. Otherwise it wasn’t a sexy experience, just lotsa nekkid people. Clothes make us more attractive, not less. How come? Roger Scruton argues in Sexual Desire that we’re attracted to persons, not bodies. We dress up to present our characters more emphatically; clothes heighten our presence.
Bodysurfing is almost unknown in the UK. Here’s Peter Sperling bodysurfing at Shark Island, and some links to show and tell you what it looks like. (About as useful as a description of what it’s like to ride a bicycle.)
» Jon Davey on Bodysurfing in the UK
» Bodysurfing links
What men and women want Two lists from Jenny Duck from Intimate Communion: Awakening Your Sexual Essence. Notice intelligence is the only quality both men and women want of each other though, predictably, women value it more than men do. And the other desirables have nothing to do with each other, except for one quality: women want men to be going somewhere in life (directions) and men want women to support them in it.
Men want
| Women want
|
Spencer Tunick’s photograph arrived from the Selfridges ‘event’ this spring. I’m clearly visible, but whom do you recognise naked?
Some observations from the event: when everybody quickly undressed, we got warmer, not colder — unless you were on the edge of the crowd. (Each of us radiates about 100W without the insulation of clothes.) What a variety of bodies we have — clothes make us look more regular, physically. People’s characters were muted — we dress up to the roles we assume.
Adventure stories end in two ways: They all lived happily ever after or And they were home in time for tea.
The difference is in how adventure occurs for you: as a response to peril, ideally never to be repeated, or as an exciting interlude. Home in time for tea, a hot bath, early to bed and up for new adventures the next day. Which kind do you want?
» Home in time for tea — you can see the lights coming on. Doesn’t it look cosy? Didn’t you always dream you could fly? What a great planet: if you lived here, you’d be home by now. Thanks to Don Maclean in NSW.
Congratulations to Miki on getting her first article in the zine www.airbepal.com. If you don’t read Japanese, it advises visitors to London to bring swimsuits to bathe in Hampstead Pond.
Ce n’est pas normal de chanter en public. C’est normal de chanter dans la salle de bains, parce qu’on est heureux, parce qu’on est seul, mais en public, non!
Jacques Brel
We take you now to the Oval Office.
Bush: Condi! Nice to see you. What’s happening?
Condi: Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China.
Bush: Great. Lay it on me.
Condi: Hu is the new leader of China.
Bush: That’s what I want to know.
Condi: That’s what I’m telling you.
Bush: That’s what I’m asking you. Who is the new leader of China?
Condi: Yes.
Bush: I mean the fellow’s name.
Condi: Hu.
Bush: The guy in China.
Condi: Hu.
Bush: The new leader of China.
Condi: Hu.
Bush: The Chinaman!
Condi: Hu is leading China.
Bush: Now whaddya’ asking me for?
Condi: I’m telling you Hu is leading China.
Bush: Well, I’m asking you. Who is leading China?
Condi: That’s the man’s name.
Bush: That’s who’s name?
Condi: Yes.
Bush: Will you or will you not tell me the name of the new leader of China?
Condi: Yes, sir.
Bush: Yassir? Yassir Arafat is in China? I thought he was in the Middle East.
Condi: That’s correct.
Bush: Then who is in China?
Condi: Yes, sir.
Bush: Yassir is in China?
Condi: No, sir.
Bush: Then who is?
Condi: Yes, sir.
Bush: Yassir?
Condi: No, sir.
Bush: Look, Condi. I need to know the name of the new leader of China. Get me the Secretary General of the U.N. on the phone.
Condi: Kofi?
Bush: No, thanks.
Condi: You want Kofi?
Bush: No.
Condi: You don’t want Kofi.
Bush: No. But now that you mention it, I could use a glass of milk. . . And then get me the U.N.
Condi: Yes, sir.
Bush: Not Yassir! The guy at the U.N.
Condi: Kofi?
Bush: Milk! Will you please make the call?
Condi: And call who?
Bush: Who is the guy at the U.N?
Condi: Hu is the guy in China.
Bush: Will you stay out of China?!
Condi: Yes, sir.
Bush: And stay out of the Middle East! Just get me the guy at the U.N.
Condi: Kofi.
Bush: All right! With cream and two sugars. Now get on the phone. Condi picks up the phone.)
Condi: Rice, here.
Bush: Rice? Good idea. And a couple of egg rolls, too. Maybe we should send some to the guy in China. And the Middle East. Can you get Chinese food in the Middle East?
From time to time I drop everything to focus on getting one urgent thing done. If this goes on long, when I emerge, my task list has turned red. My time management system has crashed and I need to get back in control. It looks like I’ll never get back on top of this! So I’m sorting what needs doing into three phases, and setting up a parallel category system.
First the phases
Hiram Smith of Franklin Covey distinguishes several levels of time-management systems. Level 1 or 2 suffices to have you show up when and where you’ve promised. If you just did that, Hiram says, it would frighten most of the people you work with. Level 4 has your dreams and long-term goals represented and active in your daily plans. That takes some doing.
So I’ve added three new categories to my Outlook system: Hull Integrity, On Course, and Destinations. The intent is to let me see easily whether I’ve done everything I’m required to do, everything I’ve promised to do, and what time I’m investing in the things I want to accomplish.
In full integrity, the distinction wouldn’t matter. I would do something whether it was demanded of me, I’d promised it to someone, or promised it to myself. Being human, I get off track, so tools for getting back on track are valuable.
Driving is not about getting the car going in the right direction. Driving is about constantly paying attention, making a little correction this way, a little correction that way.
Kent Beck’s mom
No matter where you are, the Great Way can be reached in a single step.
Buddhist proverb
Hmmm. I see, following Hiram Smith’s distinction, that I should be able to derive some metric for the effectiveness of my time management, based on something like the percentage of tasks in each category completed as scheduled. There’s another aspect too: the proportion of my time spent on tasks in each category. Am I spending all my time Staying Afloat?
How would this metric relate to Amartya Sen’s concept of welfare economics?
Humans were happiest in the Sixties
Not surprisingly, studies in the West show that people’s reported levels of happiness have at best stayed the same and in many cases declined over the past 30 years.
Richard Tomkins in the Financial Times, cited in The Week
What have been the key changes since then in belief or practice?
My best guess. Human health and happiness is demonstrably strongly correlated to relative status. Our health and lifespans are less in societies where wealth is distributed less equally. (Surprisingly, above a relatively low minimum income, this observation is independent of absolute wealth.)
It’s true money doesn't make you happy! A man with nine million dollars is no happier than a man with one million.
Sign on a foreign-exchange trader’s desk at Macquarie Bank
Culprit: not just the rise of income inequality over the last decades, but the increasing strength of the American Dream: No matter where you came from, you can be who you want to be. So whatever your relative status, you are personally and solely responsible. If you wanted to be rich and famous, and you’re not, that’s your fault; you coulda been.
Does this make the explosion of self-help literature and our obsession with celebrities seem predictable?
Anyone feeling stressed?
Chapter 1 of Last Call by Tim Powers
Georges Leon held his little boy’s hand too tightly and stared up from under his hatbrim at the unnaturally dark noon sky.
He knew that out over the desert, visible to any motorists along the lonelier stretches of Boulder Highway, the rain would be twisting in tall, ragged funnels under the clouds; already some flooding had probably crept across the two lanes of Highway 91, islanding the Flamingo Hotel outside town. And on the other side of the earth, under his feet, was the full moon.
The Moon and the Fool, he thought desperately. Not good — but I can’t stop now.
A dog was barking a block or two away, in one of these alleys or parking lots. In spite of himself, Leon thought about the dog that appeared on the Fool card in the Tarot deck and the dogs that in Greek mythology accompanied Artemis, the goddess of the moon. And of course, the picture on the Moon card generally showed rain falling. He wished he were allowed to get drunk.
“We’d better be heading for home, Scotty,” he told the boy, keeping the urgency out of his voice only with some effort. Get this done, he thought.
Palm fronds rattled overhead and threw big drops down onto the pavement.
“Home?” protested Scotty. “No, you said— ” Guilt made Leon gruff. “You got a fancy breakfast and lunch, and you’ve got a pocketful of punched chips and flattened pennies.” They took a few more steps along the puddled pavement toward Center Street, where they’d be turning right toward the bungalow. The wet street smelled like dry white wine. “I’ll tell you what, though,” he said, despising himself for making an empty promise, “tonight after dinner this storm will have cleared up, and we can drive out of town with the telescope and look at the stars.”
The boy sighed. “Okay,” he said, trotting along to keep up with his father, his free hand rattling the defaced chips and pennies in his pocket. “But it’s gonna be a full moon. That’ll wash everything else out, won’t it?”
God, shut up, Leon thought. “No,” he said, as though the universe might be listening and might do what he said. “No, it won’t change a thing.”
Leon had wanted an excuse to stop by the Flamingo Hotel, seven miles outside of town on 91, so he had taken Scott there for breakfast.
The Flamingo was a wide three-story hotel with a fourth-floor penthouse, incongruously green against the tan desert that surrounded it. Palm trees had been trucked in to stand around the building, and this morning the sun had been glaring down from a clear sky, giving the vivid green lawn a look of defiance.
Leon had let a valet park the car, and he and Scott had walked hand in hand along the strip of pavement to the front steps that led up to the casino door.
Below the steps on the left side, behind a bush, Leon had long ago punched a hole in the stucco and scratched some symbols around it; this morning he crouched at the foot of the steps to tie his shoe, and he took a package from his coat pocket and leaned forward and pitched it into the hole.
“Another thing that might hurt you, Daddy?” Scott asked in a whisper. The boy was peering over his shoulder at the crude rayed suns and stick figures that grooved the stucco and flaked the green paint.
Leon stood up. He stared down at his son, wondering why he had ever confided this to the boy. Not that it mattered now.
“Right, Scotto,” he said. “And what is it?”
“Our secret.”
“Right again. You hungry?”
“As a bedbug.” This had somehow become one of their bits of standard dialogue.
“Let’s go.”
The desert sun had been shining in through the windows, glittering off the little copper skillets the fried eggs and kippered herrings were served in. The breakfast had been “on the house,” even though they weren’t guests, because Leon was known to have been a business associate of Ben Siegel, the founder. Already the waitresses felt free to refer openly to the man as “Bugsy” Siegel.
That had been the first thing that had made Leon uneasy, eating at the expense of that particular dead man.
Scotty had had a good time, though, sipping a cherry-topped Coca-Cola from an Old Fashioned glass and squinting around the room with a worldly air.
“This is your place now, huh, Dad?” he’d said as they were leaving through the circular room that was the casino. Cards were turning over crisply, and dice were rolling with a muffled rattle across the green felt, but Leon didn’t look at any of the random suits and numbers that were defining the moment.
None of the dealers or croupiers seemed to have heard the boy. “You don’t — ” Leon began.
“I know,” Scotty had said in quick shame, “you don’t talk about important stuff in front of the cards.”
They left through the door that faced the 91, and had to wait for the car to be brought around from the other side — the side where the one window on the penthouse level made the building look like a one-eyed face gazing out across the desert.
* * *
The Emperor card, Leon thought now as he tugged Scotty along the rain-darkened Center Street sidewalk; why am I not getting any signs from it? The old man in profile, sitting on a throne with his legs crossed because of some injury. That has been my card for a year now. I can prove it by Richard, my oldest son — and soon enough I’ll be able to prove it by Scotty here.
Against his will he wondered what sort of person Scotty would have grown up to be if this weren’t going to happen. The boy would be twenty-one in 1964; was there a little girl in the world somewhere now who would, otherwise, one day meet him and marry him? Would she now find somebody else? What sort of man would Scotty have grown up to be? Fat, thin, honest, crooked? Would he have inherited his father’s talent for mathematics?
Leon glanced down at the boy, and wondered what Scotty found so interesting in the rain-drabbed details of this street — the lurid red and blue hieroglyphs of neon in tiny round bar windows, the wet awnings flapping in the rainy breeze, cars looming like submarines through the filtered gray light…
He remembered Scotty batting at the branches of a rosebush during a brightly sunlit walk around the grounds of the Flamingo a few months ago and piping out, “Look, Daddy! Those leaves are the same color as the city of OZ!” Leon had seen that the bush’s leaves were instead a dusted dark green, almost black, and for a few moments he had worried about Scotty’s color perception — and then he had crouched beside the boy, head to head, and seen that the underside of each leaf was bright emerald, hidden to any passerby of more than four feet in height.
Since then Leon had paid particular attention to his son’s observations. Often they were funny, like the time he pointed out that the pile of mashed potatoes on his plate looked just like Wallace Beery; but once in a while, as had happened at lunch today, he found them obscurely frightening.
After breakfast, while the sun had still been shining and these rain clouds were just billowy sails dwarfing the Spring Mountains in the west, the two of them had driven the new Buick to the Las Vegas Club downtown, where Leon held an eight-dollar-a-day job as a Blackjack dealer.
He had cashed his paycheck and taken fifty cents of it in pennies, and had got the pit boss to let Scotty have a stack of the old worn chips that the casino defaced by die-punching a hole through the centers, and then they had walked to the tracks west of the Union Pacific Depot, and Leon had shown his son how to lay pennies on the tracks so that the Los Angeles-bound trains would flatten them.
For the next hour or so they ran up to lay the bright coins on the hot steel rails, scrambled back to a safe distance to wait for a train, and then, after the spaceship- looking train had come rushing out of the station and howled past and begun to diminish in the west, tiptoed out to the track where the giant had passed and tried to find the featureless copper ovals. They were too hot to hold at first, and Leon would juggle them into his upended hat on the sand to cool off. Eventually he had said that it was time for lunch. The clouds were bigger in the west now.
They drove around, and found a new casino called the Moulin Rouge in the colored neighborhood west of the 91. Leon had not even heard that such a place was being built, and he didn’t like colored people, but Scotty had been hungry and Leon had been impatient, so they had gone in. After Scotty had been told that his flattened pennies wouldn’t spin the wheels of the slot machines, they went to the restaurant and ordered plates of what turned out to be a surprisingly good lobster stew.
After Scotty had eaten as much as he could of his, he shoved the sauce out to the rim of the plate; through the mess at the center peeked the harlequin figure that was apparently the Moulin Rouge’s trademark.
The boy had stared at the white face for a moment, then looked up at his father and said, “The Joker.”
Georges Leon had shown no expression as he followed his son’s gaze to the face on the plate. The androgynous harlequin figure did resemble the standard Joker in a deck of cards, and of course he knew that the Joker was the only member of the Major Arcana figures to survive the truncation of the seventy-eight-card Tarot deck to the modern fifty-three-card playing card deck.
In previous centuries the figure had been called the Fool and was portrayed dancing on a cliff edge, holding a stick and pursued by a dog, but the Joker and the Fool were unarguably the same Person.
A piece of lobster obscured one of the grinning figure’s eyes.
“A one-eyed Joker,” Scotty had added cheerfully.
Leon had hastily paid the bill and dragged his son out into the rainstorm that had swept into town while they’d been eating. They’d driven back as far as the Las Vegas Club, and then, feeling conspicuous in the big car, Leon had insisted on leaving it there and putting on their hats and walking the few blocks back through the dwindling rain to the bungalow on Bridger Avenue that was their home.
Scott’s eighteen-year-old brother, Richard, was on the roof, scanning the nearby streets and housefronts when they walked up, and he didn’t glance down when they unlocked the front door and went inside.
Leon’s wife was standing in the kitchen doorway, and the smile on her thin, worn face seemed forced. “You two are home early.”
Georges Leon walked past her and sat down at the kitchen table. He drummed his fingers on the Formica surface — his fingertips seemed to vibrate, as if he’d been drinking too much coffee. “It started raining,” he said. “Could you get me a Coke?” He stared at his drumming hand, noting the gray hairs on the knuckles.
Donna obediently opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle and levered off the cap in the opener on the wall.
Perhaps encouraged by the drumming, or trying to dispel the tension that seemed to cramp the air in the room, Scotty ran over to where his father sat.
“Sonny Boy ,” Scotty said.
Georges Leon looked at his son and considered simply not doing this thing that he had planned.
For nearly twenty years Leon had worked toward the position he now held, and during all that time he had managed to see people as no more a part of himself than the numbers and statistics that he had used to get there. Only today, with this boy, had he begun to suspect the existence of cracks in his resolve.
He should have suspected the cracks earlier.
The boat trips on Lake Mead had been strategy, for instance, but he could see now that he had enjoyed the boy’s enthusiasm for baiting hooks and rowing; and sharing some of his hard-learned advice about cards and dice had become, as he should have noticed, more a father sharing his skills with his son than mere cold precautions.
Donna clanked the bottle down in front of him, and he took a thoughtful sip of Coke.
Then, imitating the voice of the singer they’d seen in the lounge at the Las Vegas Club one night, he said, “ ‘Climb up on my knee, Sonny Boy.’ ”
Scotty complied happily.
“ ‘When there are gray skies…’ ” Leon sang.
“ ‘What don’t you mind in the least?’ ” recited Scotty.
“ ‘I don’t mind the gray skies…’ ”
“ ‘What do I do to them?’ ”
“ ‘You make them blue…’ ”
“ ‘What’s my name?’ ”
“ ‘Sonny Boy.’ ”
“ ‘What will friends do to you?” ’
Leon wondered what friends that was supposed to refer to. He paused before singing the next line.
He could stop. Move back to the coast, go into hiding from the jacks, who would surely come looking for him; live out the remainder of his life — twenty-one more years, if he got the standard threescore and ten — as a normal man. His other son, Richard, might even still recover.
“ ’What will friends do to you?’ ” Scotty repeated.
Leon looked at the boy and realized with a dull despair that he had come, in the last five years, to love him. The lyrics seemed for a moment to hold a promise — maybe Scotty could make these gray skies blue. Had the Fool been holding out a last-chance offer of that?
It could have been. But…
But it didn’t matter. It was too late. Leon had come vastly too far, pursuing the thing whose dim shape and potential he had begun to discover in his statistical calculations all the way back in his twenties in Paris. Too many people had died; too much of himself had been invested in this. In order to change now, he would have to start all over again, old and undefended and with the deck stacked against him.
“ ‘Friends may forsake me,’ ” he said, speaking the line rather than singing it. Let them all forsake me, he thought. I’ll still have you, Sonny Boy.
He stood up and hoisted the boy easily onto his shoulders. “Enough of the song, Scott. You still got your money?” The boy rattled the worthless chips and pennies in his pocket. “Then let’s go into the den.”
“What for?” asked Donna, her hands hooked into the back pockets of her jeans.
“Man stuff,” Leon told her. “Right, Scotto?”
Scott swayed happily on his father’s shoulders. “Right!” Leon crossed the room, pretended to be about to ram the boy’s head into the door lintel, then at the last moment did a deep knee bend and stepped through. He did the same trick at the door to the den — provoking wild giggles from Scotty — and then lifted him down and plopped him into the leather chair that was Daddy’s chair. The lamp flame flickered with the wind of it, throwing freakish shadows across the spines of the books that haphazardly filled the floor-to-ceiling shelves.
Scotty’s blue eyes were wide, and Leon knew the boy was surprised to be allowed, for the first time, to sit in the chair with the cup and lance head and crown hanging on wires overhead.
“This is the King’s chair,” the boy whispered.
“That’s right.” Leon swallowed, and his voice was steadier when he went on: “And anybody who sits in it… becomes the King. Let’s play a game of cards.” He unlocked the desk and took from it a handful of gold coins and a polished wooden box the size of a Bible.
He dropped the coins onto the carpet. “Pot’s not right.” Scotty dug the holed chips and flattened pennies out of his pocket and tossed them onto the floor in front of the chair. He grinned uncertainly at his father. “Pot’s right.”
Defaced currency against gold, Leon thought. The pot is indeed right.
Crouching in front of the boy now, Leon opened the box and spilled into his hands a deck of oversize cards. He spread them out on the carpet, covering their bets, and waved at them. “Look,” he said softly. A smell like incense and hot metal filled the room.
Leon looked at the boy’s face rather than at the Tarot cards. He remembered the night he had first seen a deck of this version, the suppressed Lombardy Zeroth version, in a candle-lit attic in Marseilles in 1925; and he remembered how profoundly disturbing the enigmatic pictures had been, and how his head had seemed to be full of voices, and how afterward he had forced himself not to sleep for nearly a week.
The boy’s eyes narrowed, and he was breathing deeply and slowly. Awful wisdom seemed to be subtly aging the planes of his young face, and Leon tried to guess, from the changing set of his mouth, which card was under his gaze at which moment: the Fool, in this version without his characteristic dog, standing on a jigsaw-edged cliff with an expression of malevolent idiocy; Death, also standing at the wavy cliff edge, looking more like a vertically split mummy than a skeleton, and carrying a bizarrely reminiscent-of-Cupid bow; Judgment, with the King calling up naked people from a tomb; the various face cards of Cups, Wands, Swords, and Coins… and all with repugnantly innocent-seeming patterns of branches or flower vines or ivy in the foreground somewhere… and all done in the vividest golds and reds and oceanic blues…
Tears glistened in Scotty’s eyes. Leon had blinked away his own before gathering in the deck and beginning to shuffle.
The boy’s mind was opened now, and unconnected. “Now,” said Leon huskily, “you’re going to choose eight c—”
“No,” interrupted Donna from the doorway.
Leon looked up angrily, then relaxed his face into wooden impassivity when he saw the little gun she held with both fists.
Two barrels, big bore, .45 probably. A derringer.
In the instant Leon had seen the gun, there had been a faint booming overhead as Richard had scrambled across the tiles on the roof, but now there was no sound from up there.
“Not him too,” Donna said. She was breathing fast, and the skin was tight over her cheekbones, and her lips were white. “This is loaded with .410 bird-shot shells. I know, I figured it out, what you did to Richard, okay? I figure that’s, it’s too late there for him.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “But you can’t have Scotty too.”
Check and a big raise, Leon told himself. You were too involved in your own cinch hand to watch the eyes of all the other players.
He spread his hands as if in alarmed acknowledgment of defeat… and then in one smooth motion he sprang sideways and swept the boy out of the chair and stood up, holding Scotty as a shield in front of his face and chest. And a devastating raise back at you, he thought. “And the kid,” he said confidently. “To you.”
“Call,” she said, and lowered the stubby barrel and fired.
Last Call by Tim Powers
What are the things that matter to today’s readers of magazines like The Face? Best-selling novelist Zadie Smith on the needs and desires of modern style slaves
So, what is it that you think you want? The received wisdom goes that you want Fame, that we all want it now; the same way our parents wanted a good melon. But it only means one thing, it has only ever meant one thing: more people knowing you than you know people. Everything else is an accessory: Money, good clothes, cars - you can get these elsewhere. Just don’t bother with this thing, more people knowing you than you know people. Shun it. Put a black cross on your door. It’s no fun. It’s just for people who have lost something. Amputees.
What else? Well, you want Muscle Definition and at any cost. Nothing I can say can convince you otherwise, and you will get your trainer and your home gym, even though I am not alone and there are others who would like to touch you, soft as you are, in this hard city. But you think hardness is what you need to survive these days, and maybe you are right. I can’t fight you (I’d lose).
Now, your mother tells me you want Something That’s Comfy Like A Sofa But Doesn’t Look Like A Sofa, because you hate the suburbs and you never want to go back there, but at the same time you appreciate the fact that everybody’s got to sit down. This is a laudable sentiment. Only, it wasn’t the sofa that made life suburban, and it wasn’t the curtains or the carpet or the neatly trimmed flowerbeds. It ran much deeper than that. And no amount of wood floors and Conran furniture and Japanese wall prints will change what’s in the marrow of you.
You want it, I want it, we all want The Love Of Someone Better Looking Than Us. Maybe you have someone better looking than you sitting right next to you now, reading over your shoulder, stroking the nape of your neck. It’s like having the TV on, isn’t it? Shiny, pretty, distracting. You’ve got human TV all the time, you lucky thing.
Of course, some of you are more hardcore than that. You want A Big Shiny Cause You Can Get Behind and, friends, I can see your point. After all, your great-grandfather got a war, so did your grandfather hell, even your dad got the Sixties. What did you get? Bupkiss. Or rather, a whole load of intricate claims and counter-claims, civil conflicts involving five different factions, rights that look like wrongs and vice-versa. Feels like too much sometimes, huh? You’d like things a little simpler, more black and white. Well, that’s all over. Frankly, everyone’s tired of protecting you from what some people deal with every day. Best advice I can give you is start small. Sort out your bathroom cabinet and go from there.
Surely any right-minded 21st-century type wants to Get Sushi Whenever, Wherever? And a Decaf Chocolate Mocha Espresso, Anytime, Anywhere? Well, want it, but know what it is you’re wanting. I read that Leonardo called it a service-station culture which takes the needs of a Fat White American and reproduces them all across the globe. No, I couldn’t believe he said anything that smart, either.
Speaking of Leo, is it true you still wish to be Forever Young? To be, or to be with, The Perfect Woman? A cautionary tale: my 73-year-old father has the hots for the big-haired one in Friends. He thinks about her constantly. That is what happens in a culture that won’t put childish things away. Remember: these two things will hurt you more than anything else, if you let them.
In the end, it’s New Trainers you want and don’t try to tell me different. Well, the good news is you don’t only think you want them. You really want them. Despite their three-month lifespan, Nike’s profits and the children who make them. Because they are beautiful, because they are Art. And as we have learnt these 20 years, Art will make you do shit like that, nine times out of ten.
© Zadie Smith