RESEARCH IN THE DIGITAL AGE
The internet is a glorious gift to writers bent on historical fiction. As in a miner’s fevered dream, nuggets of information lie glittering on the surface, needing only to be snatched up and plunked into the bag of a plot or a landscape or the makeup of a character. Adrian Carr’s massive inkstand; the fussy […]
DID CONRAD READ JOHN L. STEPHENS?
“Don Juan Bardh had superintendent of … the Anglo Costa Rican Economical Mining Company. It had been in business these three years without losing anything, which was considered doing so well that it had increased its capital …the most prominent objects in these repositories of wealth were naked workmen with pickaxes, bending and sweating under […]
KIPLING WAS STONED, CONRAD WASN’T
The bard of the Raj knew from substances. From the mention of marijuana in “Kim” – referring to a certain spy technique, the eponymous hero is counseled, “It must be used sparingly, like bhang” – to the opium that enlivens Findlayson in “The Bridge Builders,” to the mysterious little brown pills holding the platonic pals […]
Random thoughts & opinions on CONRAD and others
Every house has a “junk drawer” – that place where you keep the Scotch tape, loose screws, parts of hings that may or may not belong to other things, the occasional spare light bulb, and so on. What lands in that drawer stops being junk when it’s needed (“oh, so that’s where the metric tape […]