Sharing a Cold With Philip Marlowe

I seem to have picked up a cold somewhere between Milton Keynes and London. I am laid up in bed today and I've called in sick to work.

I felt a little weird yesterday morning, and increasingly so as the day wore on. My nose was running like crazy and I got woozy with fatigue. Weirdly, as much as my nose is running, it's also stuffed up and I feel like I have a head full of cement. I don't think I have a fever, but I am SO looking forward to resting.

I'm going to finish this Raymond Chandler book, which I'm still enjoying. I love his quippy writing style. It is very noir -- there's a layer of menace over everything, even the sunny days and the palm trees. There's a lot of drinking. I don't know how all of the characters aren't in liver failure.

Chandler described one unsightly-looking man as having a "face like a collapsed lung." I love that!

Philip Marlowe, his detective, is fond of laying out championship chess games and playing them through. Chandler called one, which famously ended in a draw, "as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency."

There's also, of course, plenty of mid-century misogyny, typified by passages like this:

"A girl in a white sharkskin suit and a luscious figure was climbing the ladder to the high board. I watched the band of white that showed between the tan of her thighs and the suit. I watched it carnally. Then she was out of sight, cut off by the deep overhang of the roof. A moment later I saw her flash down in a one and a half. Spray came high enough to catch the sun and make rainbows that were almost as pretty as the girl. Then she came up the ladder and unstrapped her white helmet and shook her bleach job loose. She wobbled her bottom over to a small white table and sat down beside a lumberjack in white drill pants and dark glasses and a tan so evenly dark he couldn't have been anything but the hired man around the pool. He reached over and patted her thigh. She opened a mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed."

It won't win any social justice awards, but it is entertaining writing, and pretty honest, I think. Many of us have had a similar experience -- seen someone attractive across a room or at a distance, only to think moments later, for whatever reason: "Oh. Maybe not."

I've noticed that my blog won't fully load onto my phone. Does anybody read my blog on a phone, and if so, can you see the whole thing? I only get partial pages. I can't tell if the culprit is my device or Blogger.

(Photo: Finchley Road, last week.)