A reader writes:

Your quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister (“She reached a quick arm around my neck and started to pull. So I kissed her. It was either that or slug her”) put me in mind of the following, from P.G. Wodehouse’s story The Castaways (1933):

Even when he ached for Genevieve Bootle, some inner voice told him that if ever there was a pill it was she. Sometimes the urge to fold her in his arms and the urge to haul off and slap her over the nose with a piece of blotting paper came so close together that it was a mere flick of the coin which prevailed.

Fascinating, is it not, how two superb writers express a similar idea in two very different and very idiosyncratic ways?

As you may know, Chandler and Wodehouse were students at Dulwich College at the same time!

Nice. It just goes to show the value of an English public-school education. But were Chandler and Wodehouse really at Dulwich at the same time? That doesn’t sound quite right to me.

Trivia-minded readers, solve this conundrum!

Your skepticism about whether the two authors-to-be attended Dulwich College simultaneously proves justified. David Jasen, in his P.G. Wodehouse: A Portrait of a Master, states that Wodehouse started at Dulwich in May of 1894 at age twelve-and a half, and left in July 1900. According to the Spring 2004 edition of the Dulwich Society Newsletter, Chandler didn’t start at Dulwich until the September term of 1900 (when he was twelve).

I knew I smelled a slight case of rat!

“My rubber heels slithered on the sidewalk as I turned into the narrow lobby of the Fulwider Building. A single drop light burned far back, beyond an open, once gilt elevator. There was a tarnished and well-missed spittoon on a gnawed rubber mat. A case of false teeth hung on the mustard-colored wall like a fuse box in a screen porch. I shook the rain off my hat and looked at the building directory beside the case of teeth. Numbers with names and numbers without names. Plenty of vacancies or plenty of tenants who wished to remain anonymous. Painless dentists, shyster detective agencies, small sick businesses that had crawled there to die, mail order schools that would teach you how to become a railroad clerk or a radio technician or a screen writer–if the postal inspectors didn’t catch up with them first. A nasty building. A building in which the smell of stale cigar butts would be the cleanest odor.”

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Cinetrix has been fortunate enough to catch a Boston-area screening of Word Wars, the Scrabble documentary that premiered at Sundance this year. In January I interviewed the filmmakers, Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo, here and here. I still haven’t seen the film myself, and Cinetrix’s review makes me even grumpier about it:

The journey to the nationals goes through a money game with inveterate gambler Matt at G.I. Joel’s Bronx home [$1,000 rides on the best of 50 games straight], a tournament in Madfrost/Stamford [CT] that sees the first Speed Scrabble game in competition, and an event in One Veranda/Reno, Nevada. There are detours to the Hasbro headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island, and a Baltimore elementary school where Marlon extols the beauty of the game to a classroom of kids. Along the way our four heroes are up and down, hot and cold–Marlon even hits Tijuana for a little stress relief [ahem]–but their gaze never wavers from the $25,000 purse for first place. The final confrontation, scored to Miami Vice-style guitar heroics, is detailed play by play: Fischer and Spassky meet Rocky. Hack reviewers could be forgiven for pulling out the old “stand up and cheer” sobriquet. It’s good stuff.

Eric and Julian, send a screener!

Today I’m the Saddest Girl in Chicago. A temporary condition, I know from damnably fresh experience.

I wonder if anyone has considered a sequel to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind featuring characters who call on Dr. Howard Mierzwiak to erase their memories not of estranged lovers, but of painful sporting events? In certain markets, this concept could really clean up at the box office.

“She reached a quick arm around my neck and started to pull. So I kissed her. It was either that or slug her.”

Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

It’s been raining all day, or since the beginning of time–I can’t remember.

I spent the morning filling out an inch-thick form.

I put on a suit and tie and went downtown for a meeting.

By the time the meeting was over, all the cabs in Manhattan had dissolved in the late-afternoon rain, leaving only a dirty yellow slick in the gutters.

When I finally got home, I was very, very wet.

For these reasons and others like them, I have consumed no art of any sort today, except for a couple of fugitive glances at the Teachout Museum and a few paragraphs of The Big Sleep gulped down in between bites of a midday sandwich that bore only a coincidental resemblance to the one I ordered.

That’s all I have to say. If you want to read something good, don’t waste any more time on me–go look at Maud’s prize-winning story instead.

See you tomorrow, if it stops raining. Maybe.

Many tales to tell, but no time to tell them just yet (except to say that Sarah is way more than merely cool), since I have a jampacked day ahead of me. Fortunately, I have the night off, so I’ll fire up the links and write a nice long “Consumables” after I return from my post-matinee dinner.

In the nonce, the latest edition of “Second City,” my monthly Washington Post column about goings on in New York, is now available on line. Go to the right-hand column, scroll down to the “Second City” module, click on the May link, and you’re there.

“Some people have an unconquerable love of riddles. They may have the chance of listening to plain sense, or to such wisdom as explains life; but no, they must go and work their brains over a riddle, just because they do not understand what it means.”

Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales