A non-crime post — or is it?

I'm taking a break from crime fiction with an essay by Joseph Brodsky.

***

I interrupt the post to bring you, verbatim, this sentence from a story by Joe Biddle of the (Nashville) Tennessean just transmitted on the Associated Press sports wire:

"For every positive Newton presents, there are questions about his ability to transcend his game to the highest NFL level."

Who needs Biff Burns when we have Joe Biddle?

***

Back to Brodsky. His essay "Ninety Years Later" has this to say about Rilke's poem "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes": "For all the obvious attractions of a round-trip story, the origins of this conceit are not literary at all. They have to do, I believe, with the fear of being buried alive."

Brodsky writes of Orpheus "literally dogged by fear," of underground dwelling places, and I think of all the cellars in David Goodis, dark places of violence, fear and death, but also, in "Black Pudding," of shelter. And what is a good, chilling noir story if not the narration of the protagonist's trip to and return from the world of death, fear and darkness?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011