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Pompeii’s Drains, Alexander’s Diplomacy, and Dorothy Sayers’s Detection Club

Good morning. Let’s start things off with a couple of items from the antiquity desk: Pompeii’s drains still work and will be used again. “There are nearly 500 metres of the drains, which are big enough to hold a human and were little affected when the city was buried in ash and pumice by Mount […]
1024px-龐貝_Pompei_-_panoramio_(9)

Good morning. Let’s start things off with a couple of items from the antiquity desk: Pompeii’s drains still work and will be used again. “There are nearly 500 metres of the drains, which are big enough to hold a human and were little affected when the city was buried in ash and pumice by Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in AD79. Experts who have explored them concluded that they were in working order. ‘The entrances to the drains were blocked but since we have problems today with flooding from rain we will start using them again,’ Massimo Osanna, the director of the site, said. ‘The fact we can do this is testament to the excellent engineering skills at the time.’”

Nigel Spivey reviews a new biography of Alexander the Great: “Construing rivalry between Alexander and Darius in terms of pseudo-divine peer respect is part of Fred Naiden’s fresh synopsis of the Alexander story, Soldier, Priest, and God. Call it a ‘synopsis,’ or an overview: specialists in ancient history may feel that little scope exists for rewriting the main or even minor lineaments of the narrative as already established, described as ‘familiar’ by Naiden himself. We await, as we have awaited for decades, the discovery of Alexander’s burial place—probably somewhere in or near Alexandria. There may be more to come from sites such as Aigai (Vergina), in what was ancient Macedonia. But such revisions of the evidence as have surfaced lately belong mostly to the Near East. Alexander died in Babylon, in 323 B.C. Whatever the cause of death, it is unlikely to have been compounded by homesickness. By any account, Alexander’s intentions seem clear enough. He belonged in Asia, and large tracts of western Asia belonged to him. To what extent Alexander realized that mutual principle is poignantly clear in the modern view. We hardly need to be instructed in a basic historical truth: that scoring great military victories in the deserts of Mesopotamia does not equate to establishing control of the region. By some means, beyond violence, Alexander was able to win local hearts and minds. So how did he do it?”

Researcher dates Australia’s Bradshaw rock paintings using mud wasps: “These feature finely painted human forms, often in elaborate ceremonial dress and carrying spears and boomerangs. It was thought they were painted some 16,000 years ago, but the University of Melbourne investigator has been able to show the likely age is nearer in time—at about 12,000 years ago.”

Did you know that a single company owns all the record store chains in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain?

Kirk Douglas has died. He was 103.

Dorothy Sayers was a founding member of The Detection Club. It’s still going today: “The archives of the Detection Club are now held, incongruously, in the Marion E Wade Center in Illinois, among a series of manuscripts, letters and ephemera belonging to seven Christian British writers including CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Chesterton and Sayers. (Gems of the collection include Lewis’s wardrobe, the desk at which Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, and Sayers’s pince-nez). I visited the centre while researching Sayers for my book Square Haunting, a biography of five women writers, including Sayers, who lived in London’s Mecklenburgh Square between the wars. As I perused her letters home from university, examined fragments of unpublished stories and sifted through notebooks packed with elaborately drawn plot diagrams, I found myself captivated by several folders of lively correspondence between Sayers and the leading crime writers of her day, intimately detailing the top-secret activities of the Detection Club.”

Revisiting Chinatown: “A late masterpiece of film noir, Chinatown was released in 1974, and received 11 Academy Award nominations. Today, this bracingly jaundiced tale of nose-slicing, incest and rampant municipal corruption — with its unflinchingly downbeat ending in which the lead actress is shot dead by the police — would probably struggle to obtain funding, let alone a national cinema release. With no Forrest Gump-style platitudes and no syrupy conclusion, Chinatown presents the kind of complex, morally ambiguous world that readers of novels are more than happy to accept, but which these days cinema-goers are almost never allowed to experience in mass-market Hollywood product.”

 

Essay of the Day:

In Paris Review, Michael LaPointe tells the story of “the Edison of slot machines,” Tommy Glenn Carmichael:

“Tommy saw the solution in a dream. ‘I’m seeing myself from behind,” he recalled, “and I have [the tool] in my hand.’ All through 1990, he’d been searching for a way to cheat the latest slot machines. He needed a new tool, something to replace the clumsy old instrument that had landed him in the penitentiary. Night and day in his Vegas apartment, he toiled on a Fortune One video poker machine. But no matter what he tried, some riddle in the guts of the unit would thwart him.

“Then, in the recess of sleep, the solution appeared in all its brilliant simplicity: a flexible piece of metal, wedged at the top, and some piano wire. ‘I woke up,’ he told the History Channel, ‘actually got out of bed, and went and built it.’ Tommy had found his answer: The Monkey Paw.

“When a friend dropped by Ace TV Sales and Service in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1980, Tommy Glenn Carmichael was just an unremarkable repairman who moonlighted as a pool hustler. He had minor drug convictions and some juvenile mischief on his criminal record, but nothing about the thirty-year-old suggested that he’d one day stand among the most inventive cheats in gambling history.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Llangollen

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