Ivy

Following the big ivy noticed at reference 1, I have been looking out for more of same, with today turning some up at the foot of one of the bridge abutments at the East Street end of Hook Road. A spot which faces east, faces the other abutment, so probably not much sun in the winter, but it might do alright in the summer. But why some leaves and not others? Age of leaf? Accidents of birth?

While the trolley marked down yesterday afternoon by the cash point on Station Approach had vanished. Perhaps M&S and Waitrose take it in turns to do a sweep of the immediate vicinity of their stores first thing in the morning.

B&M is limbering up to take on the newly-new Wilko store, dating from the closing years of the twentieth century. Definite signs of interior activity. From their website at reference 2, they look to be in the same marketplace as Wilko, so maybe that marketplace had just got a bit overcrowded. The Home Bargains people, one of whose warehouses we pass at Solstice Services, look from reference 3 to carry the same sort of offering, but I don't know whether they do bricks & mortar.

Past the garage redevelopment noticed almost exactly four years ago at reference 4. Not newly started then, but I think nearing completion now, with workers visible inside this morning. But there is a large, boarded hole out front, maybe something to do with a service connection. Maybe whoever is running with the development had owned the (unused, unfinished) garages for years, so has not been paying interest on the current market price of the land for all this time. Where I also see mention of the Amber Group, visiting our house this very day to tidy up the space vacated by our old boiler, condemned on irritating grounds by British Gas. Where I also see mention of Herald Copse: a reminder that we need to visit the snowdrops there.

Home to the Metro, to be completely unimpressed by a picture of yet another monster cruise ship, the 'Icon of the Seas', carrying 7,500 passengers and getting on for 2,500 crew. Plus an ice skating rink. Given the present state of the world, something rather distasteful about it all. But I suppose the 7,500 passengers will get the dubious benefit of cheap labour from the Philippines and what used to be called Indo-China without taking the pain of allowing said labourers to live among us. And perhaps staffing up bricks & mortar care homes rather than ones that float. And no doubt my email inbox will now be infested with advertisements for same, on the strength of visiting reference 5. Within minutes?

From where I moved on to the piece at reference 6 in the NYRB, a two page (four columns each) essay built around three fat books - maybe 1,500 pages in all - about crime fiction. An essay where Simenon does not get a look in. I learned that together we consume an awful lot of the stuff, and have done for a long time, not to mention the volume of crime on television. But what I did not get was a psychological, not to say Freudian take, on why we do it. We can provide cover by talking about the skill with which the Conan-Doyles, the Christies and the Simenons provide interesting, now period, backdrops for their stories, but that is well short of the whole truth. However, we are told of a couple of essays by Edmund Wilson from the mid 1940s, references 7 and 8, and shall take a look. And O'Brien himself seems to be something of a Christie fan, with talk of real literary qualities.

PS 1: no advertisements in the ten minutes so far.

PS 2: 20:00: the second Wilson essay took a little longer to track down, but Google found it at reference 8b. Both essays now read & enjoyed, and towards the end of the second one we do get a few clues as to why we do it. But not really what I was looking for. I shall try asking Bard.

PS 3: 21:15: Bard gives quite a helpful response to 'Can you tell me of [of] psychologists or serious writers who have written about why we read so much crime and murder mystery?'. He did not appeared to have missed a beat over my typo. I shall start with Freud's 'Civilisation and its Discontents'.

PS 4: 22:00: I have now skimmed 'Civilisation and its Discontents' and searched the collected works for the word 'crime', and while this essay does bear on the subject and there is a lot about real and fictional (primal) crime in the collected works, it does not appear to directly address our seeming need for crime fiction. What Bard said is plausible as something that a psycho-analyst might come up with, but is not actually to be found in the words of the Master. Once again, Bard has been joining up the dots a bit too energetically. And, in his defence, he more or less admits as much when further prompted. On another tack, no mention of Conan-Doyle in the collected works. But three mentions of Edgar Allen Poe, so I have now got reference 9 to take a look at.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/trolley-616.html.

Reference 2: https://www.bmstores.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://home.bargains/.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/herald-copse.html.

Reference 5: https://www.royalcaribbean.com/icon-of-the-seas.

Reference 6: A craving for crime - Geoffrey O'Brian, New York Review of Books - 2024.

Reference 7: Why do people read crime stories - Edmund Wilson - 1944. Freely available from the New Yorker website.

Reference 8a: Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd? - Edmund Wilson - 1945.

Reference 8b: http://detective.gumer.info/txt/wilson-2.pdf. 

Reference 9: Preface to Marie Bonaparte's 'The life and works of Edgar Allan Poe: A psycho-analytic interpretation' - S. Freud - 1933.