Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Rivet Hull Blah What

As I am sure you will recall I stopped reading that Errol Flynn autobiography but Megan told me to look at the ending and it was all about Errol Flynn staring at the sea and thinking about how the only thing he understands is the sea, I think, it's right over there but I don't feel like walking over there, but anyway, the sea is in there. So I switched over to WANDERER, which is all about Sterling Hayden strutting manfully around the deck of his schooner and he's very upset when somebody talks about the rivets in his hull because THERE ARE NO RIVETS IN HIS HULL, STUPID. And it's a lot better than the Errol Flynn book, probably, but maybe I just don't want to hear about boats and sailing and the sea for a while after all. So I picked up the book that Ace Atkins called "the most exciting Travis McGee adventure ever written about stamp collecting" and I looked on the back and read the promotional copy: "She was a six-foot knockout who knew a helluva lot about rare stamps..." Ha ha! So Ace wasn't kidding. So I opened to page one and right there in the first sentence it came back to me: Travis McGee is on a boat all the time. And by the second page we have such ominous sentence fragments as "Moonrise and hard rains. Swift fish and wide beaches." Uh-oh! And if there is one thing Travis McGee is sure to be doing besides fighting bad guys it is carefully polishing, by some minutely described method, some tiny wooden piece of nautical ornamentation on his precious boat. Sorry, boats! Sorry, the sea!