Classical - Part 1 1. Salamander: Although this species of Urodela (amphibians with a lizard-like appearance) is certainly real, the classical civilizations believed they had occult properties. For instance, although Pliny the elder was smart enough to distinguish the Salamander from actual lizards (in a taxonomical sense), he also held a belief that they could extinguish fire with their bodies. The Talmud (a Jewish Rabbinic text) states that smearing yourself in the blood of a salamander will make you immune from fire, and some believed that the creature was so poisonous that just by climbing around a tree it would poison its fruit so badly that anyone who ate even a single bite would perish immediately. 2. Faun: Half human and half goat, the Faun of classical mythology is often related to the wood-god Pan. Sometime...
Victims of Circumstance Both the hard-boiled investigator and the career criminal have the kind of masculine competence that enables them to achieve some degree of mastery in a hostile world, however temporary and limited it might be. Even Harry Fabian, though he is in most respects a failure, can, like Rico or Scarface, be compared to counterparts in the world of business, gifted with energy, perseverance and enough nous to enable him, in his small way, to thrive: ‘He was not quite an ordinary person: he had highly developed intuitions, proceeding from long cumulative experience of the customs of the City’ (21). He knows what he is doing, and is single- minded in the pursuit of his own interests. Like most other criminal protagonists, he will end as a victim, but he will at least have put up a plausible fight before becoming a casualty in the conflict. In many noir thrillers of the period, however, the protagonist is a victim throughout, one of t...
I n moments I was heading down the snowy drive, south toward my home (which had been hopefully put back together). I pushed the pace, mesmerized by the snow, and tried to decide what to do next. The thug Ramos had stolen some second- generation interview footage from me, but now I had a tape of something a lot more interesting. When I pulled into my street, the time was just past eleven and I was thinking about calling Lou, or Steve, or both. But then I saw something odd. A woman was walking down the steps from the lobby of my building, a woman I recognized from somewhere. Her hair was tangled and she was wearing black jeans and a black sweater. It took a second before I finally processed the fact it was Carly Grove. And she seemed frantic. I assumed she’d come in a cab, but she had my home phone number, so why would she come over if I didn't answer? New Yorkers don't just drop in. A social no-no. Maybe the reason had something to do with how she looked...
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