Notes to "Anthony Powell on Aubrey, far from 'bloody boring.'"

*Right before Wood died, on November 28, 1695, of "a Total Suppression of the Urine," his acquaintance Robert South made the cruel and unforgettable crack that "if he could not make water he would have to make earth." Powell, while finding convincingly in Aubrey's favor in their quarrel, is carefuly to give Wood his due. He was

an unhappy, unhealthy, malicious, frustrated old man; but one to whom all 'pretenders to antiquity' owe a great debt. . . . He was not, on the whole, an attractive figure, but he did not lack qualities of courage and perseverance. . . . Aubrey had found in him something that was intensely sympathetic, and Wood is yet another instance in the strange annals of friendship of the unlikely human beings who can inspire deep affection.

It's that very openness to difference, to oddity, that animates A Dance to the Music of Time

Notes to "In a movie theater at least you can hold hands."

* Another: Archie can be seen--if it's possible to conceive this--as a smart, competent Bertie Wooster, while Nero Wolfe could be seen as--again, if it can even be conceived--more confident Jeeves . . . who has turned the tables on Bertie and is, rightly, giving the damn orders himself. ** On this front Sue Grafton deserves to be celebrated. She published her first Kinsey Millhone novel, A is for Alibi, in 1982, and, as she's progressed through the alphabet in her titles, she's deliberately allowed time to get away from her, telling Sarah Weinman in 2009 that Z (is for . . .) would coincide with Kinsey's fortieth birthday in 1990. (Side note to a side note: I've long thought that the Marvel Universe--so incredibly innovative when it appeared fifty years ago--could have been even more amazing had it been able to figure out a way to allow its characters to age. Peter Parker reached his late twenties (maybe early thirties) and stopped; Reed Richards and Tony Stark their forties. Imagine a world where we were in the third or fourth generation of Marvel heroes, where Peter Parker was nearing seventy, Bruce Banner eighty--yet still Hulk-powered, Professor X long dead not through malice but age, Doctor Strange but a powerful memory to his legion of mentees . . . )