Private Eye

This first glimpse of Gittes is of a private eye who is also very much the successful small businessman, as evidenced by the shiny desk, the white linen suit, and his special lighter. He is alert to his distraught client s every move, because Curly is very large and very upset, a dangerous combination in a nicely furnished new office. 

Jake Gittes is not an immediately attractive character, nor is he meant to be. He is a cynical private eye who has seen it all—or thinks he has. His client s real pain moves him only to a wisecrack the glass of cheap whiskey he shoves at Curly is simply an efficient way to help the big guy to collect himself. (Note that there is a variety of whiskies in the cabinet to serve to a variety of clients.)... 

Chinatown was released in 1974. While seventies audiences might well anticipate Gittes jaundiced viewpoint, because of its similarity to such forties and fifties private-eye classics as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, none of these would have prepared them for Gittes elegant white suit (he s a prosperous businessman who doesn t have to dirty his hands) or the fancy, bourgeois office. 

Glff, Patricia Reilly. The Polka Dot Private Eye series. New York Dell Young Yearling, 1984. 

Meyers, Susan. P. J. Clover, Private Eye The Case of the Halloween Hoot. 

After supper we heard Mass in the chapel, as private a Te Deum and prayer for future aid as the Mass and crown-wearing at Paul s that morning had been public. The clamor of the day was suddenly stilled. Edward and I knelt together, so close that his arm touched mine. A different fear crept over me. What would he think of the worry-carved lines about my eyes, my thin flesh slack with the idleness of our days in sanctuary, a tooth drawn, that scald on my arm, so many small, weary hurts to my worn body ... 

The Open Eyes Detective Agency gets a lot of calls. Lulu Werble works as a private investigator. She also delivers the mail, is a firefighter, a deputy sheriff, and a former trapeze performer. She was in the office when the phone rang. "Open Eyes Detective Agency. How can we help " she said. 

Maria, dear, Isabetta whispered, you go with Jacopo and find Nurse. Thank you, Jacopo. Mousey she might be, but she had no hesitation about giving him orders. She watched the two of them depart, and then waited for me to speak, all bland and respectful, eyes demurely downcast. The huge salone was hardly a private space, but her behavior in meeting alone with a man would not meet with her mother-in-law s approval. I wondered if she had planned this. 

In his acceptance speech [Science, 118, 431 (1953)], Purcell said, I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep—great heaps of protons quietly processing in the earth s magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery. ... 

I see no reason, Morosini proclaimed, for us to forbid the sort of charade the Maestro is suggesting, as long as we make clear that it is a private function. How many people would have to be rounded up He directed his faded eyes and scarlet wattles at me. 

As for spatial causative factors, however, there is little or no evidence that any special form of spatial format or spatially congruent feedback is a necessary condition for the primary elaboration of codes for order. With humans subjects, of course, all one can say is that the experimental tasks have eliminated conventionalized forms of spatial support. Yet spatially derived devices could well be imported by the subject and used in the mind s eye. With our simian subjects, ignorant of social and cultural conventions that utilize spatial layouts, this contention is difficult to sustain. The basis for such organization in all primates, we would contend, is temporal in nature, and can be tracked through the trajectories for private individual knowledge growth in evolution and development. 

---