Word: debits
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Just as accountants use the double-entry system to order wildly diverse assets and liabilities, so this novel draws up a balance sheet on everyday life. Its hero, Christie Malry, scratches the essential formula on a London wall: "Debit them, credit me! Account settled...
...worth ?60, for example. To get due recompense for that and other slights, he destroys an important business letter, an act he values at ?6. His accounts soon grow more complicated, and Malry's figures mount accordingly. To help make up for "socialism not being given a chance" (debit: ?311,398), he dumps cyanide into a local reservoir, killing 20,000 Londoners (credit: ?26,622.7). As the plot progresses, Christie's ledgers carry forward an ever larger debt that society owes...
...grim in outline. But Author B.S. Johnson balances it with compassion and a humor that is alternately wry and ribald. Christie's adventures, whether in a bank, confectionery factory, or bed, are all double-entries. Action and futility, joy and grief, pique and nobility-everything counts, everything matters. Debit boredom, credit Johnson! A remarkable little book...
Both the virtues and defects of congressional investigating committees have lately been on display, thanks to Watergate, and last week there was some fresh evidence on the debit side -at least in form. The substance was still obscure. During hearings by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, headed by Senator Henry M. Jackson, Elliott Roosevelt, 63, the second son of President Franklin Roosevelt, was accused of plotting the assassination of Lynden O. Pindling, Prime Minister of the Bahamas...
...mandate is to bring moviemaking into the computerized, cost-controlled business world. The newest enthusiasm in Hollywood film making, therefore, is cutting budgets and cutting losses. Some of that $100 million debit was just a realistic write-off or write-down on properties in the works or even in the can that could never net as much as originally projected. In November, the last tycoon of old Hollywood, Jack Warner, retired from the studio bearing his name. But even before his formal send-off (on Sound Stage No. 7, where the "Great Hall" set from Camelot is still unstruck...