While looking for some photos, I found a "Souvenir Folder of Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey Circus Featuring Mr. and Mrs. Gargantua the Great," one of those accordion-pleated postcard folders from one of my two visits to the giant circus. One side is circus animals and views; the other whole side is devoted to the silver-back gorilla and his mate, Gargantua and M'Toto. I'd forgotten entirely about them, though Time said he and the phony King Kong-like publicity about him, picturing him as a ferocious mankiller, helped bring the circus out of the Depression Days. He was with the circus from 1938 until 1949, his death; the "marriage" was in 1941. An Internet entry says he was a captured baby gorilla named Buddy before his circus days.
A recent survey cited in the August 31 The Week says that "One in four American adults did not read any books last year . . . . 27% say they read more than 15 books." I don't believe either figure. We're not that book literate.
In the meantime I finished Gregory Curtis' The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists, an up-to-date history of the great painted caves in France and Spain containing some of the most beautiful art ever made in the dark cave depths, now all inventoried and analyzed. Chauvet is not only the best but the oldest, 30,000-32,000 years old, 4,000 years older than the next, 14,000 years before Lascaux, that first classical art period lasting 20,000 years according to Curtis, pointing out that our western culture is only about 4,000 years old. (Chauvet and Cosquer weren't even discovered until the 1990s.)
I'm chugging through Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare: The Biography, which will be one of the most definitive from now on. And I'm juggling James Lee Burke's Pegasus Descending and Dick Francis's Under Orders. I happily discovered the Francis while waiting for a new prescription in Walgreen's, the first new one by him in six years when we were told he had quit, unable to go on after his wife's death. Francis belongs to my detective pantheon with Tony Hillerman, Henning Mankell, Nicholas Freeling, Janwillem Van De Wetering; I think I have all of each, plus Raymond Chandler's and Dashiell Hammett's most famous, probably all of K. C. Constantine's quirky ones, Paula Gosling's Solo Blues. (Constantine was a very special English-teacher-me favorite because he got our notorious contractions dead on, like "I couldn't've," more accurate than any other.) I've gone through phases, of course, like Dorothy Sayers' very British Lord Peter Wimsey and Agatha Christie; Ross Mcdonald (Kenneth Millar), whose California sagas with Lew Archer became too formulaic for me; the espionage travelogues of Helen McInness. Burke and Michael Connelly, whose The Concrete Blonde is the most accurate--and unflattering--literary treatment of attorneys and courts I've read, stand good chances of joining my select list. (I don't like the ones into psychotics.) As long as Dave Robicheaux is in them, Burke's become a great favorite, for I loved my trip to Louisiana's Cajun country and was, no thanks to a minor accident, even in the police department in New Iberia where the fictional Robicheaux works. But we need a different actor than Alec Baldwin, who played him in Heaven's Prisoners (1996). This fondness for mysteries came not just because I like puzzles but because Aunt Audree loved detective stories, kindling my early interest, and traded Erle Stanley Gardener, Ngaio Marsh, Ellery Queen with me. It's a form invented by Americans, Edgar Allen Poe being credited with the first, and our fondness for police/detective procedurals occupies much of our TV time. Oddly, except for her two cleverest, And Then There Were None and The Murder of Roger Akroyd, I've found Agatha Christie dully formulaic/predictable but relish the movies made of her Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple often on PBS and the Biography channels. My fondness for Dick Francis, his series based esoterically on (mostly) English horse racing, stems largely from his heroes, probably the most honorably decent men in detective fiction (even though they're brutally beaten up for it). I've learned much about the Southwest tribes, particularly the Navajos, of course, from Tony Hillerman's Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, also much more meaningful after all my trips to New Mexico (and Arizona). The Hopi and Zuni have some of the most fascinating mythology in the world, a New World equivalent to the well-known Graeco-Roman myths, the Navajos apparently adopting and adapting their neighbors' tales/beliefs. (I am partial to the Thunder Twins.)
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