Barcelona defeated Botafogo in these teams’ second meeting, securing qualification to the knockout stage of the Copa Libertadores.
It was an Ecuadorian team’s first victory on Brazilian soil since 1986.
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The kitties have regained their old selves. Little Ziva is doing her favorite naughty trick, which is to tip over our drinking glasses.
She broke Karin’s favorite Pony glass: the blue glass on the far right, the one with Rainbow Dash on it.
But Karin isn’t angry. She loves Ziva very much.
Today, Ziva took a long, lovely nap with me before I went to my job.
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I’ve just finished reading two very different “histories” of high society.
First:
The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey. This book is about the dreadful Dukes and Duchesses of Rutland:
John – the morbid and chronically unhappy ninth Duke (and, incidentally, one of the intruders upon King Tut’s tomb).
Violet – his controlling, spiteful mother.
Henry – his vulgar, ham-fisted father.
And others.
(On the other hand, John’s sister, the Lady Diana Cooper – the famous socialite and memoirist – comes off rather well.)
These are people with a shocking sense of entitlement, whose daily lives seem miserable. They are dominated by two preoccupations: (1) forcing each other into a single, inflexible cast in order hold on to their land and prestige; and (2) stifling their constant feelings of guilt and mutual loathing.
For comparison: The aristocrats in
Downton Abbey are much, much nicer, though they have basically the same concerns.
The book includes a great deal about World War I and the upper-class hypocrisies that facilitated it. For me, this was the most unsettling theme.
It would be a fine book were it two hundred pages shorter. Excluding notes, it comes to about 425 pages. The book is spoiled by too much irrelevant detail.
Especially tiresome are the many dull letters it quotes in full. Their sheer number is astounding. Everyone in the upper classes seems to have written several letters each day. (Nowadays, text-messaging is a chore, but the obligations of the letter-writing culture seem to have been even more onerous.)
Sadly, none of the correspondents is a stylist of any distinction.
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Compared to the Rutland aristocrats, the high society of Savannah, Georgia, is witty and graceful – even, perhaps, joyful – certainly, more colorful. Eccentricity is celebrated among these people. Chapter after chapter of John Berendt’s
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil scrutinizes some behavior which, taken alone, would be bizarre – and yet is not bizarre, at least not when understood as a part of an organic unity.
For a partial list of the characters, I’d might as well quote from the back cover:
Genteel society ladies who compare notes on their husbands’ suicides. A hilariously foul-mouthed black drag queen. A voodoo priestess who works her roots in the graveyard at midnight. A morose inventor who owns a bottle of poison powerful enough to kill everyone in town. A prominent antiques dealer who hangs a Nazi flag from his window to disrupt the shooting of a movie. And a redneck gigolo whose conquests describe him as a “walking streak of sex.”
(As I type this, I’m reminded how many of the characters are not, strictly speaking, top-shelf; and yet each of them carries himself with an aristocratic grandeur. The drag queen, for instance, insists on being known as the
Lady Chablis.)
This book is a bestiary of the sort one encounters in the later chapters of the Book of Job, where God lovingly describes each of his creatures.
