Whew, it's hot, every day in Minneapolis at least 90 for more than a week now, and the local nuts who are sure that a cold snap disproves the theory of anthropogenic climate change are not talking about the weather. They've moved on to crime. I wonder whether there might be a connection. Some days in these parts it's just too cold to go outside and shoot people, which anyway is hindered by the wearing of mittens. Hot weather, on the other hand, provokes surliness, short tempers, and trigger fingers. Everyone has a gun, or may have a gun, so when carrying to advance the cause of personal safety there is a reason to be the first to escalate a disagreement. It seems that, contrary to theory, "responsible gun owners" are rarely on the scene to prevent crimes from happening. They might even be the ones shooting each other.
To stay out of the line of fire, I lounge in the air conditioning, reading in bed—most recently Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, about whom I've written before, here and here. Of the Waugh novels I've read, A Handful of Dust is still my favorite, but there is no down side to trying to discover one I like even better. The action of Scoop is set off when a ridiculous media magnate is determined to send a correspondent to a war brewing in East Africa. He receives a tip from a socialite concerning a popular, dissolute novelist who, she contends, is just the man for the job. Actually, he isn't, but it doesn't matter because he is a distant cousin of an obscure rural columnist for the magnate's London daily and, as the two men share a last name, the unknowing columnist is sent to Africa by the unknowing big shot: a case of confused identities. The comedy of errors then proliferates madly. It's less easy than in A Handful of Dust to discern a serious purpose lurking in the comedy, but in both novels there is just no relief from stupidity, vanity, error, and folly. It's interesting to me that, in my paperback Penguin edition, the admiring Introduction to Scoop is by Christopher Hitchens, perhaps the most notorious of the "new atheists" and thus it might seem an odd enthusiast for the fiction of a deeply conservative, Catholic novelist. If you're serious about Original Sin, you might share with atheistic absurdists a generally dim view of human activity here on Earth.
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