Daily Archives: January 20, 2010

My father came from a bookish family. Everyone had a substantial library. And though he was well-versed in the classics, I never considered the Old Man an intellectual in the Ivory Tower sense. More than anything, he was a voracious reader of detective stories and mysteries. I recall shelves of paperbacks, stocked with names like Dick Francis, Ed McBain, Ruth Rendell and John McDonald. One of his favorites was the Spencer series by Robert B. Parker.

I’ve never read any of these books but I feel a second-hand affinity for them–and I always appreciated their pulpy, sometimes racy covers. Reason I mention it is because Parker passed away a few days ago. He was 77.

According to the Times obit:

Mr. Parker wrote the Spenser novels in the first person, employing the blunt, masculine prose style that is often described as Hemingwayesque. But his writing also seems self-aware, even tongue-in-cheek, as though he recognized how well worn such a path was. And his dialogue was especially arch, giving Spenser an air of someone who takes very few things seriously and raises an eyebrow at everything else. Mr. Parker’s regular readers became familiar with the things that provoke Spenser’s suspicion: showy glamour, ostentatious wealth, self-aggrandizement, fern bars, fancy sports clubs and any kind of haughtiness or presumption.

Spenser is, in other words, what Marlowe might have been in a more modern world (and living in Boston rather than Los Angeles). Unsurprisingly, Mr. Parker considered Chandler one of the great American writers of the 20th century. (He audaciously finished an incomplete Chandler manuscript, “Poodle Springs”). And he has been often cited by critics and other mystery writers as the guy who sprung the Chandleresque detective free from the age of noir.

“I read Parker’s Spenser series in college,” the best-selling writer Harlan Coben said in a 2007 interview with The Atlantic Monthly. “When it comes to detective novels, 90 percent of us admit he’s an influence, and the rest of us lie about it.”

Ed Alstrom, who plays the organ at Yankee Stadium, has a new cd out: Gettin’ Organ*ized.

Check it out.

So, why not make this a musical week of originals and covers?

Cover:

When I was in college, black kids used to wear t-shirts that read, “It’s a Black Thing. You Wouldn’t Understand.” My twin sister Sam and I wanted to get our own shirts made, “It’s a Twin Thing. You Wouldn’t Understand.”

It’s hard to figure a Twin unless you are one. Just ask Ron Gardenhire, manager of the Minnesota Twins, who, according to this piece by Landon Evanson in the Winona Daily News, thinks his team is not far behind the big, bad New York Yankees:

Some would suggest that the Yankees “own” the Twins, but the manager doesn’t buy into that.

“They don’t own me,” Gardenhire said. “Every game that we’ve played against them has just been nip-and-tuck.”

…”We’ve had our chances,” Gardenhire said. “We could have beat them as is, but next year we’re not taking any more off them. And if it takes fighting them, we’re fighting them.”

I sure would like to see the Twins sign Joe Mauer to a long-term deal. That’d be a good start, no?

When I was growing up and one of my mother’s relatives from Belgium came to visit, I would go to the room they were staying in and smell their luggage. The contents of their bags–their clothes and toiletries, perfumes and chocolates–reeked of Belgium and jumped-started a rush of memories. I payed less attention to the smells of my grandparent’s apartment in Manhattan because I was there so often.

As a kid, I visited Belgium a half-a-dozen times and since I only spoke broken French and my relatives spoke broken English, language became less important than communicating–which we did, in part, through exaggerating body language. The rest of my senses were heightened, especially my sense of taste and smell.

I got to thinking about this while reading an interesting piece in this week’s New Yorker (which is not available on-line), about smell-memory. It is called “The Dime Store Floor,” by David Owen: 

A few years ago, an online store I’d been using ran out of my regular brand of deodorant, and, because I was unable to think of anything else, I switched to Old Spice, the kind my father used. The container had changed, from the sturdy ivory tube I’d often seen in his medicine cabinet to a bright-red elliptical cylinder, but the name and, to a smaller extent, the smell imparted a mild hum of remembrance, and I never switched back. Just recently, while travelling, I found that I’d left all my toiletries at home, and went to a local drug store to buy replacements. There I saw that Old Spice deodorant comes in more strengths, forumlations, and scents that I had thought, and realized the one I’d been using–High Endurance Pure Sport–couldn’t have been my father’s. I bought, this time, Classic Original Scent (the container of which was imprinted with a small picture of the old ivory tube and the promise “Original Round Stick Formula”). And when I sued it for the first time, in my hotel room, I was almost knocked over by what I can only describe as a physical memory of my father. It was the smell of him driving me to school, and of him bending over to pull tight and tied the cord in the hood of my snow jacket, and of him fixing himself a drink in the pantry while he and my mother were waiting for dinner guests to arrive. So now the question is whether to stay with Classic Original Scent, thereby causing my brain to gradually overwrite my collection of father-related fragrance files, eventually making them irretrievable, or to set it aside and use it only on special occasions.