Centrality of Air Conditioning

People who get tired of my complaining about the heat tell me to just turn on my window units, as if it were that simple. It's actually one of those dire lifeboat choices, at least at night, because the window unit is noisy enough to drown out the clock radio. I'm not kidding—I literally didn't hear the radio come on one morning, but that was OK, because I never was able to sleep anyway.

So last night I'm lying in a sheen of sweat, thinking about Streetcar. Some movies are sweatier than others, and Streetcar is certainly one of them. (I think the guys on "Cheers" were arguing about this once, and Cool Hand Luke was deemed the winner.) Since I couldn't sleep anyway—it was either going to be too hot, or too noisy—I got up, took the book off the shelf, and checked to see if the sweat was added by Hollywood. No, I found, there are lots of references to being hot in Streetcar. I'm sure it was meant to be a Dionysian/Apollonian thing, but I got to wondering if there weren't more references to being hot in Streetcar than there are in The Inferno. Then morning arrived with the question uninvestigated. But it's going to be a long summer, so I'll check on that one of these nights and get back to you.