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editor
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 Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2004 9:49 am Post subject: Punters |
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WELCOME!
Punters:
A Perfect Spy
VHS
By John Le Carre
We cannot agree with criticisms lobbed at this posh, perfectly cast 1987 production.
In this scene, young Magnus Pym, has finally recovered his bearings in Switzerland after his reluctant and regrettable involvement in one of dad's cons. He regales some church ladies and two watchful espionage recruiters with a riff of embellished tales of his recent exploits in the labor force:
| Quote: | | Pym: My father said before I go up to Oxford, I had to 'see some real life. If you're going to be Lord Chief Justice, you'd best take a decko at the seamier side first.' So, I did a few weeks with a bookie in the east end. Real character was Sid. Always packed a knuckle-duster. 'Oh, yes, in case of liberties, be prepared, Titch, that's what I say.' And I mucked out a racing stable, drove a lorry for a rather suspect poultry farmer. I was a waiter in a very dubious roadhouse on the Great North Road... |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2004 11:19 am Post subject: |
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Night Train
By Martin Amis
Audio CD
Narrated by Linda Hamilton
| Quote: | | I had called Talkinghorn's office on March 8th, almost two weeks ago. How about this? The old prick was on a poker cruise in the Caribbean. So I had his secretary page him, and he came squawking in from the straight flush. Told the news and said I was following up on it. He said to make an appointment. I called his office again and got talking. It turned out that it isn't Talkinghorn who plays poker -- it's his wife. He gets nice and tan on a lounger while she's crouching at a table in the saloon blowing the second home on the two pair. |
We were simply trying to find the spelling of the good doctor in Amis's excellent 1997 detective novel, admittedly a departure from his usual genre but an allowable one, surely, surely, at least, it's allowable -- when we discovered to our horror how frankly this writer, for goodness sake, is utterly despised by his critics and interviewers, to whom gentle, generous Amis gives up everything and so sweetly. Look at the first paragraph of this one in the second-rate January magazine, which practically screams its derision, and this scathing bit of horsehair and look at this report card, a careful compilation of the critical thumbs down.
We couldn't agree less, though we haven't actually read the thing - we heard it being read over our bedside clock wireless in the dark, smoky rasp of American actress Linda Hamilton, who surprised us with near-perfect diction and hints of a credible affliction of street sadness, possibly the result of bipolar disorder, possibly the gift of her father, a fellow sufferer.
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 8:58 pm Post subject: |
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The War Against Cliche
Essays and Reviews 1971-2000
Hardcover
By Martin Amis
Cups up to Amis the Younger for the relentless, driving humor that so fills our stormy nights with cramp. Thanks. We mean it. We'd even stand you one or two of your namesake.
| Quote: | The School of Doyle
The Biggest Game in Town by A. Alvarez
The Biggest Game in Town
Hardcover
By A. Alvarez
Anyone who started sitting down early in life will always be susceptible to the cool ostentation of poker. Stud, check, burn, raise, kick a buck, deuce, lady, freeze out, call, fold, flop: you never get a chance to sound so boastful and cinematic when playing cribbage or canasta. Money, they say, is 'the language of poker', but poker-talk is clandestine, male-supremacist and incurably Yankophone, tending towards self-dramatization and heroic monologue. My big poker period was in my teens. Ever tell you about the time I lost my busfare at lowball?...
We would all be so much better at poker - or at chess, snooker or shove-ha'penny - if we did nothing else the whle time. In Las Vegas, they do nothing else the whole time: twelve hours a day, seven days a week. 'I feel I'm anteing myself to death,' says one glazed dude. I've already been playing professional for twenty years. In the same game, really. I mean, how long is a poker game?' The spooks of the Glitter Gulch poker parlours simply play, eat, sleep and occasionally 'grab a broad'. There are veterans of Binion's Horseshoe who have never heard of the Vietnam War. (-- pg. 355, originally in the Observer, September, 1983) |
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| Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2004 2:27 pm Post subject: |
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Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions
Hardcover
By Martin Amis
| Quote: | A man can find out a lot about himself, playing poker. Is he brave? Is he cool? Does he have any money left? I am obliged to say that I felt pretty hip and well-hung for much of the evening, in that little paradise of the private room, with its pro dealer, its full bar, its pleasant company, its complimentary poker chips -- and the oncoming cards, from which hope unceasingly springs. By the end of the evening, I confess, I was feeling much less formidable: much less butch, and much less rich. But what an enthralling process. When can I go through it again?
From the start I sensed that I was the rabbit (the easy mark). This suspicion, along with all the free money, had a liberating effect on me. Unlike the scarred sharpers I faced (A. Alvarez, John Graham, Anthony Holden and David Mamet), I wasn't bringing any rep to the table. I hadn't sat down for a decade and had never played hold 'em. Originally, the fashionable poker variant was draw; then stud; then, during my brief heyday (in my late teens I played every night for three years), it was seven-card high-low. Now it's hold'em, the purists' game, with its austere and subtle variations on the theme of the shared five cards...
Oh, we all talk tough at the table ('it's not about reality', 'it's all ifs and buts', 'you gotta speculate to accumulate') and then go home and sob in our wives' arms: tears of loss, tears of gorgeous relief. As you play, unfamiliar chemicals flood the body - money chemicals. In the colour-coded diagram, you could portray them as poker chips, helixed and value-stamped. Money is the language of poker. A defeat at chess leaves you flattened, chastened, but not visibly poorer. In poker, defeat means a submission to a more worldly power. It's tough out there. And it's tough in here. The winner's silence says to you: That's why I'm rock-hard. That's why I'm ice-cold. If I weren't, do you think I could get through this either? (From Poker Night at p. 179, a piece written originally for the otherwise forgettable GQ magazine in 1990). |
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| Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2004 3:11 pm Post subject: |
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The Complete Jeeves & Wooster Megaset
DVD
If one leans in toward the bean, one can almost hear the wind whistling between the shell-like ears of Bertie Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse's endearing protagonist portrayed so satisfyingly by Hugh Laurie, who is also one of our favorite audio book readers, especially of Dickens. In this excerpt from the Series 1 episode entitled, The Gambling Event, gentleman Jeeves provides Bertie with the skinny on the village choirboys' 100-yard dash:
| Quote: | Jeeves: I have information regarding the choirboys' handicap, sir. The probable winner of that event is even now under the very roof of Twin Hall. Harold, sir, the page boy.
Wooster: I don't see it, Jeeves. He's practically circular.
Jeeves: The boy is a flyer, sir.
Wooster: How do you know?
Jeeves: I happened to be pursuing him this morning with a view to catching him a clip on the side of the head.
Wooster: Great Scott, Jeeves, you?
Jeeves: The lad is of an outspoken disposition, sir, and made an opprobrious remark respecting my appearance.
Wooster: What did he say about your appearance?
Jeeves: I do not recall, sir, but it was opprobrious. I attempted to correct him but he outdistanced me by yards and made good his escape.
Wooster: This is sensational! We are sure, are we, Jeeves?
Jeeves: (Lowers chin in collusive nod).
Later that morning, Bertie places two pounds at 18-1 on round, pink Harold Harnsworth with local bookie, the scurrilous Steggles. |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2004 11:21 am Post subject: |
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Good Housekeeping" Christmas Book
]The Best of "Good Housekeeping" at Christmas, 1922-62
Hardcover
Edited by Brian Braithwaite and Noelle Walsh
Featuring the short story, Louise,
The Most Selfish Woman I Ever Knew,
by W. Somerset Maugham
What a bit of luck when this happy Christmas tome, simply gushing with steamed pudding and brandy sauce recipes and seasonal memorabilia, fell into our appreciative grasp. Imagine our delight at finding this undiscovered (by us until now) Maugham short story from 1925 about a doe-eyed flapper with an apparently weak heart who buried two less stalwart husbands - ah, the tyranny of the weak. We find her here after her second marriage:
| Quote: | For the next two or three years Louise managed, notwithstanding her weak heart, to go to all the most lively parties, beautifully dressed, to gamble very heavily, to dance and even to flirt with tall, slim young men. But George Hobhouse had not the stamina of Louise's first husband and I fancied that he had to brace himself now and then with a stiff drink or two for his day's work as Louise's second husband. Then came the war. He rejoined his regiment and three months later was killed.
Though it was a great shock to Louise, at that moment she felt that she must submerge her private feelings; and if she had a heart attack nobody heard of it; but she said that she must distract her mind, so she turned her villa at Monte Carlo into a hospital for convalescent officers. Her friends told her that she would never survive the strain.
"Of course it will kill me," she said. "I know that. But what does it matter? I must do my bit."
It didn't kill her. I thought she was having the time of her life. I know that there was no convalescent home in France which was more popular. I met her in Paris once; she had gone there on business connected with the hospital; she was lunching with a tall and very handsome young Frenchman, and she told me that the officers were too charming to her. They knew how delicate she was and they wouldn't let her do a thing. They took care of her, well -- as though they were all her husbands.
"Poor George, who would ever have thought that I with my heart should outlive him?" She sighed.
"And poor Tom," I said. (-- at p. 30) |
We highly recommend this richly illustrated book as a gift, especially to western children growing up in the absence of Christian metaphors, which once gave much of western culture some hope of enduring a harsh northern winter.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2004 4:49 pm Post subject: |
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The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham
Volume II (of 2)
The World Over
Hardcover
| Quote: | | I am not a bad sailor and when under stress of weather the game broke up I did not go below. We were in the habit of playing poker into the small hours, a mild game that could hurt nobody, but it had been blowing all day and with nightfall the wind strengthened to half a gale. One or two of our bunch admitted that they felt none too comfortable and one or two others played with unwonted detachment. But even if you are not sick dirty weather at sea is an unpleasant thing. I hate the fool who tells you he loves a storm amd tramping the deck lustily vows that it can never be too rough for him. When the woodwork groans and creaks, glasses crash to the floor and you lurch in your chair as against the side, I very much prefer dry land. I think no one was sorry when one of the players said he had had enough, and the last round of jack pots was agreed to without demur. I remained alone in the smoking-room, for I knew I should not easily get to sleep in that racket and I could not read in bed with any comfort when the North Pacific kept dashing itself against my portholes. I shuffled together the two packs we had been playing with and set out a complicated patience. (From Straight Flush at p. 149). |
Athletic skill of the wordsmith, characters with dash and damn fine story-telling - each story as good as the one before it. We once heard a rumor that Maugham got his stories from a manservant he would send round to the pub with a notebook and enough for a few tongue-looseners.
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| Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2005 4:16 pm Post subject: |
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The Old Curiosity Shop
With the original illustrations
Hardcover
By Charles Dickens
| Quote: | CHAPTER XXX
At length the play came to an end, and Mr. Isaac List rose the only winner. Mat and the landlord bore their losses with professional fortitude. Isaac pocketed his gains with the air of a man who had quite made up his mind to win, all along, and was neither surprised nor pleased.
Nell's little purse was exhausted; but although it lay empty by his side, and the other players had now risen from the table, the old man sat poring over the cards, dealing them as they had been dealt before, and turning up the different hands to see what each man would have held if they had still been playing. He was quite absorbed in this occupation, when the child drew near and laid her hand upon his shoulder, telling him it was near midnight.
'See the curse of poverty, Nell," he said, pointing to the packs he had spread out upon the table. 'If I could have gone on a little longer, only a little longer, the luck would have turned on my side. Yes, it's as plain as the marks upon the cards. See here -- and there -- and here again.' (-- p. 225). |
What - Little Nell a four-flusher? Not quite, but here's what Jane Smiley, the latest Dickens biographer, had to say about her in Smiley's contribution to the excellent, blessedly brief Penguin Lives series we have come to rely on like a pre-exam swill of Jolt. From p. 29:
| Quote: | The Old Curiosity Shop was in Dickens's Oliver Twist mode rather than his Nicholas Nickleby mode. As in Oliver Twist, his protagonist is an innocent child lost in one of the crueler byways of adult commerce, beset by human predators whose features are both mechanical and demonic. Those whose job it is to protect her are powerless to do so. The villain of the novel, the dwarf moneylender Daniel Quilp, gains control of Nell and her grandfather through the grandfather's attempts to win sustenance for Nell by gambling...
The Old Curiosity Shop is Dickens's most interesting novel in terms of the extremes of reaction it elicits in readers. Legendarily popular and lucrative in its day, it is now impossible for many to read, even those who are devoted Dickensians. Oscar Wilde remarked, "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Nell without laughing," and others have been at least as critical. |
Gad, what truly poisonous things does Smiley say about poor Dickens, whom she dis-likens in her understandably dull (American) way to a movie star, of all banal creatures. If she would only read his books, we thought. She also compares his stellar persona and many wide-ranging talents to those of some guy she must drink with occasionally in North Beach called David Lodge. Who? Has anyone heard of him?
Charles Dickens
Hardcover
By Jane Smiley
For some ripping good images of dear Dickens, scroll down to Search Google pictures gallery for Charles Dickens portraits, an otherwise cheerless website.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2005 5:20 pm Post subject: |
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The Shape of My Heart
Hardcover
Art by Pablo Picasso
Words by Sting
| Quote: | He deals the cards as a meditation
And those he plays never suspect
He doesn’t play for the money he wins
He doesn’t play for the respect
He deals the cards to find the answer
The sacred geometry of chance
The hidden law of probable outcome
The numbers lead a dance
I know that the spades are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that’s not the shape of my heart
He may play the jack of diamonds
He may lay the queen of spades
He may conceal a king in his hand
While the memory of it fades
I know that the spades are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that’s not the shape of my heart
That’s not the shape, the shape of my heart
And if I told you that I loved you
You’d maybe think there’s something wrong
I’m not a man of too many faces
The mask I wear is one
Those who speak know nothing
And find out to their cost
Like those who curse their luck in too many places
And those who smile are lost
I know that the spades are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that’s not the shape of my heart
That’s not the shape of my heart
-- From Ten Summoner's Tales |
Ten Summoner's Tales
CD
Sting
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2005 2:22 pm Post subject: |
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The Lemon Table
Stories
Hardcover
By Julian Barnes
There are so many phrases worthy of theft in this collection - The soft, familiar, grey-green English landscape calmed him, then cheered him. Sheep, cattle, trees blown into hairstyles - hairstyles! Where to begin our song of praise:
| Quote: | He was now sixty-one. In his earlier days, he had been both a gambler and a gourmand, a combination that had frequently threatened to inflict penury on his household. Wherever dice were thrown or cards turned, wherever two or more beasts could be induced to race against one another for the gratification of spectators, Delacour was to be found. He had won and lost at faro and hazard, backgammon and dominoes, roulet and rouge et noir. He would play pitch-and-toss with an infant, bet his horse on a cockfight, play two-pack patience with Mme V--, and solitaire when he could find no rival or companion.
It was said that his gourmandism had put an end to his gambling. Certainly, there was not room in such a man for both these passions fully to express themselves. The moment of crisis had occurred when a goose reared to within days of slaughter -- a goose he had fed with his own hand, and savoured in advance down to the last giblet -- was lost in a trice at a hand of piquet. For a while, he sat between his two temptations like the proverbia ass between two bales of hay; but rather than starve to death like the indecisive beast, he acted as a true gambler, and let a toss of the coin decide the matter...
"When I was a gambler," he said finally, "people disapproved. They judged it a vice. I never thought so. To me it seemed the application of logical scrutiny to human behaviour. When I was a gourmand, people judged it an indulgence. I never thought so. To me it seemed a rational approach to human pleasure." (From Bark at p. 140 and 154.). |
Here is another, this one from Hygiene, at p. 82:
| Quote: | | True, he could no longer tie one on like he used to. And the honourable member wasn't up to the three-card trick anymore. Once was probably quite enough if you had your senior citizen's railcard. Wouldn't do to strain the ticker. The ceremonial sword in its scabbard, and just a half-bottle of champagne between the two of them. They used to get through a whole bottle in the old days. Three glasses each, one for each go-round. Now it was just a half -- something on special offer from that Thresher's near the station -- and they often didn't finish it. Babs got heartburn easily and he didn't want to be too kiboshed for the regimental dinner. Mostly they talked. Sometimes they slept. |
Lovely rhythm, that, and the whole book is the same, each story as good as its predecessor. A pleasure, as always.
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Jan 10, 2005 3:08 pm Post subject: |
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British Heritage
Magazine Subscription
November, 2004
There is usually at least one good piece of writing per issue and when it's good, it's, well, topping. We recently found ourselves a November, 2004 issue, which includes a story and photo spread of Harry Potter's train to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry - in fact, the Jacobite steam train, which runs over the Glenfinnan Viaduct in Scotland's western Highlands - and we were well pleased.
Here is an excerpt from Jane Austen: At Home in Hampshire, a lovely presentation of both story and photos of Chawton and environs by Jim Hargan:
| Quote: | | Anyone who has read an Austen novel knows what her life at Steventon was like. There were visits and cards and dancing. One of young Jane's favorite destinations, The Vyne, is in the care of the National Trust and can be seen in all its glory -- mute testimony to the quality of the Austen family connections. There quiet family evenings and whispered sisterly confidences. And there were frequently long country walks. Austen herself loved to walk and would volunteer to go down to the Wheatsheaf Inn on the coach road to pick up the family mail, a six-mile round trip. The Wheatsheaf is still there today, and remains a good place to down a pint. (-- at p. 39). |
Yes, we'll take a pour, too, for there is something sticking in our craw about dear Jane:
| Quote: | | The American Revolution started in the year Jane Austen was born. When she was 17, the Reign of Terror began in France. Two years before her death, England and France fought the Battle of Waterloo. Austen lived in a world torn by revolutionary violence, and she never wrote a word about any of it. But she did know about it. Two of her brothers saw extensive combat as naval officers during the Napoleonic wars. Her cousin and close friend, Eliza de Feuillide, was a guillotine widow. In fact, Eliza was staying with Austen's family in Hampshire when her husband's head was severed for the benefit of a Paris mob. Oh yes, Miss Austen knew all about it. |
Curious, that. Nevertheless, we think she's swell, especially this one:
Mansfield Park
DVD
We also recommend this Austen biography, another in the excellent Penguin Lives series, by a deceased Frostback:
Jane Austen
Hardcover
By lettered Frostback Carol Shields
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=1924#1924
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| Posted: Tue Jan 18, 2005 11:51 am Post subject: |
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Read 'Em and Weep
A Bedside Poker Companion
Hardcover
Edited by John Stravinsky
| Quote: | | If card-sharpers exist, and they certainly do, because now and then they are detected, under what circumstances shall we find them? Not playing against Faro Banks, because the banks handle the cards. Not playing among poor people in the beer houses, because poor people have no money to lose. But we shall find them among people of means, playing a game that admits of card manipulation, and that is played for money. The game of Poker exactly satisfies these conditions and as it is played more than any other gambling game at cards, so the chances are greater that this particular game is infested by sharpers. (From Frauds in Playing and Poker Sharps, The Complete Poker Player by John Blackbridge at p. 47). |
The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham
Volume 2 The World Over
Hardcover
| Quote: | | Mr. John Blackbridge had personal dignity, rectitude, humor and common sense. "The amusements of mankind," he says, "have not as yet received proper recognition at the hands of the makers of the civil law, and of the unwritten social law," and he had no patience with the persons who condemn the most agreeable pastime that has been invented, namely gambling, because risk is attached to it. Every transaction in life is a risk, he truly observes, and involves the question of loss and gain. "To retire to rest at night is a practice that is fortified by countless precedents, and it is generally regarded as prudent and necessary. Yet it is surrounded by risks of every kind." He enumerates them and finally sums up his argument with these reasonable words: "If social circles welcome the banker and merchant who live by taking fair risks for the sake of profit, there is no apparent reason why they should not at least tolerate the man who at times employs himself in giving and taking fair risks for the sake of amusement." (From The Portrait of a Gentleman at p. 158) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 9:40 am Post subject: |
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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
and six more
Hardcover
By British novelist Roald Dahl
Having discovered in himself, after not inconsiderable study, the rare gift of seeing without eyes, Henry Sugar hies it to the blackjack table at Lord's House casino.
| Quote: | Henry stacked the chips in front of him, and as he did so, he glanced at the top card in the shoe. He switched on his concentration and in four seconds he read it as a ten. He pushed out eight of his chips, 200 pounds. This was the maximum stake allowed for blackjack at Lord's House.
He was dealt the ten, and for his second card he got a nine, nineteen alogether.
Everyone sticks on nineteen. You sit tight and hope the dealer won't get twenty or twenty-one.
So when the dealer came round again to Henry, he said, "Nineteen," and passed on to the next player.
"Wait," Henry said.
The dealer paused and came back to Henry. He raised his brows and looked at him with those cool black eyes. "You wish to draw to nineteen?" he asked somewhat sarcastically. He spoke with an Italian accent and there was scorn as well as sarcasm in his voice. There were only two cards in the pack that would not bust a nineteen, the ace (counting as a one) and the two. Only an idiot would risk drawing to nineteen, especially with 200 pounds on the table.
The next card to be dealt lay clearly visible in the front of the shoe. At least, the reverse side of it was clearly visible. The dealer hadn't yet touched it.
"Yes," Henry said. "I think I'll have another card."
The dealer shrugged and flipped the card out of the shoe. The two of clubs lands neatly in front of Henry, alongside the ten and the nine.
"Thank you," Henry said. "That will do nicely." (-- p. 172-173) |
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
CD Audio
Narrated very nicely by British actor Martin Jarvis
A kiddies' classic and rather more expansive than the Hundred Acre Wood, no?
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 10:43 am Post subject: |
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Die Another Day
DVD
Widescreen Special Edition
Of course Ian Fleming's immortal character, 007, is a champion punter. He's Bond, after all, James Bond. Here he is in this one, cutting a swathe quite literally through an exclusive London fencing club, where he is to receive a lesson from a club-armed lady wrestler done up in a heavy, black foundation garment of some sort. She looks vaguely familiar -- Bette Midler, perhaps, with an especially explosive gin hangover?
| Quote: | James Bond: Verity? James Bond. Your lesson. (He slashes away at the air with the ease of an expert).
Lady wrestler: I see you handle your weapon well.
JB: I have been known to keep my tip up.
Lady wrestler: (Turns unctuously, revealing a loose knot in the vinyl girdle). Do you mind? I think I've come undone.
JB: Why not?
Lady wrestler: Feast your eyes on the finest blade in the club.
JB: Gustav Graves?
Lady wrestler: Unh-unh, his publicist, Miranda Frost. My protegee. Gorgeous, isn't she? (This one looks somewhat less like a lady wrestler). She took the gold in Sydney.
JB: By default, as I remember.
Lady wrestler: Default? The one who beat her OD'd on steroids. Miranda deserved that gold.
JB: And now she's teaching Graves how to win one.
Lady wrestler: He only plays for cash. He's won so much nobody else wants to fight him. Wanna' meet him?
JB: Absolutely. You're on.
Lady wrestler: Gustav?
GG: Verity and Mr....?
JB: Bond. James Bond.
GG: Haven't we met before?
JB: Oh, I think I'd remember.
GG: Of course you would. My mistake. Are you a gambling man, Mr. Bond?
JB: If the stakes are right.
GG: A thousand a point too much for you? Care to place a bet, Verity?
Lady wrestler: No thanks. I don't like cockfights.
GG: Shall we? |
The big surprise was not who won the bet but rather the identity of the lady wrestler with the dead eyes. She turned out to be none other than the material girl. But look at this. They could be sisters. |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2005 11:57 am Post subject: |
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The Volcano Lover
A Romance
Paperback
By Susan Sontag
| Quote: | The Cavaliere knew what she was up to when she played faro and hazard late into the night and began to count on her success, which made it grueling for him either to watch her or ignore her. He despised anything imploring in himself: on these evenings he usually retired early. The hero remained by her side, whispered in her ear, beamed when she won, staked her to another game when she lost. How brilliantly she played, win or lose, thought the hero. No one would even have a chance against her were it not for an endearing frailty that sometimes made her a bit muddled. He had noticed she became tipsy after the second glass of brandy. How odd, he thought. If he drank two glasses of brandy, he was not affected. As indifferent to drink as he was to cards (the hero was almost as abstemious as the Cavaliere), he didn't understand that the rapidity with which she became drunk was a sign not of an unusual susceptibility but of advanced alcoholism.
She is a gifted player, but sometimes continues after a steady run of good fortune, risking her precious winnings, so as to keep him near. For she is never so muddled as to forget his electric presence beside her, or behind her, or across a room talking, gesturing, and, in fact, as aware of her as she is of him. (-- pgs. 236-237) |
The art history lovers' guide to Nelson, British naval great, who did the dirty on both his wife and poor Emma Hamilton, who died an impoverished, addicted whore.
| Quote: | Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
Lord Nelson Hero...Cad!
A cache of recently discovered letters darkens
the British naval warrior's honor and enhances
that of his long-suffering wife, Frances
By Michael Ryan
February, 2004
| Quote: | | What made the hero such a scoundrel? "Fanny was devoted to her husband and extremely solicitous of his health and welfare, but ultimately not in the way he craved," says Pieter van der Merwe. "My theory is that Nelson remained in many respects a small boy from a large family who lost his mother very young and spent his life searching for a source of uncritical love. He was almost entirely disappointed in finding it in Fanny, but he found it in Emma." (Final paragraph at p. 75) |
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| Quote: | The Volcano Lover
Audio Cassette Only!
| Quote: | | We were unable to find even a review of this audio book. We'll keep trying. It's such great historical fiction based on the story of one of Britain's greatest heroes that it's worth a deeper search. Recommended only to very advanced ESL students, though. Susan Sontag's text is simply baroque with period detail. Please check back soon for updates |
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Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2130#2130
Last edited by editor on Sat Jan 31, 2009 10:29 am; edited 6 times in total |
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