That gossip's eye will look too soon

Jan. 16th, 2026 09:00 am
sovay: (Claude Rains)
[personal profile] sovay
Alexander Knox was born on this date a hundred and nineteen years ago and without him I might never have discovered that the fan magazines of classical Hollywood could get as specifically thirsty as the modern internet.

Come to that, you would have been pretty tasty in the pulpit, too, Alex. You look, except for that glint in your eyes and that dimple in your cheek, like a minister's son. You look serious, even studious. You dress quietly, in grays and blacks and browns. Your interests are in bookish things. You live in a furnished apartment on the Strip in Hollywood, and have few possessions. You like to "travel light," you said so. You like to move about a lot, always have and always will. You've lived in a trunk for so many years you are, you explained, used to it. Of course, you've been married twice, which rather confuses the issue. But perhaps two can travel as lightly as one, if they put their minds to it. But you do have books. You have libraries in three places. At home, in Canada. At the farm in Connecticut, of which you are part owner, and in the apartment where you and your bride Doris Nolan still live. You write, which would come in handy with sermons. You're dreamy when you play the piano. For the most part it isn't, let's face it, church music you play. But you could convert.

Gladys Hall, "Memo to Alex Knox" (Screenland, August 1945)

I left my mind behind in 2015

Jan. 15th, 2026 10:14 pm
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
Today was the yahrzeit of the molasses flood. I was last at Langone Park for the centenary, since which time the field has been renovated and a new marker erected in memory of the disaster and its dead. Seven years ago feels nearly a century itself.

Speaking of man-made needless awfulness, I have been made aware of the locally vetted aggregate of Stand with Minnesota, a directory of mutual aid, fundraisers, and on-the-ground support against the onslaught of ICE. All could use donations, since internet hugs are of limited efficacy against tear gas, batons, bullets to the face and legs. Twenty-three years ago feels like several worldlines back, but the Department of Homeland Security sounded absurdly, arrogantly dystopian then.

The fourth and last of this week's doctors' appointments concluded with an inhaler and instructions to sleep as much as possible. My ability to watch movies remains on some kind of mental fritz which upsets me, but I liked running across these poems.

Dept. of JFC

Jan. 15th, 2026 07:08 pm
kaffy_r: (We used to dream)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Per the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

She did not answer reporters' questions as to whether he accepted it.

We are indeed in not only the darkest timeline, but the most fucking surreal timeline. 

*wanders off to find alcohol and a wall she can bang her head against*

Your spirit watched me up the stairs

Jan. 14th, 2026 02:54 pm
sovay: (Default)
[personal profile] sovay
My schedule for Arisia this year is minute, but a fairly big deal for me since the state of my health last allowed me to participate in programming in 2021. I mean, at the moment the state of my health is failed, but I'm still looking forward.

Dramatic Readings from the Ig Nobel Prizes
Saturday 3 pm, Amesbury AB
Marc Abrahams et al.

Highlights from Ig Nobel prize-winning studies and patents, presented in dramatic mini-readings by luminaries and experts (in some field). The audience will have an opportunity to ask questions about the research presented—answers will be based on the expertise of the presenters, who may have a different expertise than the researchers.

Cursed Literature
Sunday 4:15 pm, Central Square
Mark Millman (m), Alastor, Kristina Spinney, Sonya Taaffe

Some literature describes haunted houses; other books seem like they are haunted, as though the act of reading the book is inviting something vaguely unclean into the reader's life. Whether considering the dire typographical labyrinths of The House of Leaves, or the slowly expanding void at the heart of Kathe Koja's Cypher, some works leave a mark. Panelists will explore books that by reputation or their own experience, produce a lingering unsettled feeling far beyond the events and characters of the story.

SFF on Stage
Sunday 5:30 pm, Porter Square B
Raven Stern (m), Andrea Hairston, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Stephen R. Wilk

Science fiction and fantasy have long been mainstays of live theater; William Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1595. Peter Pan introduced one of the 20th century's best known characters in 1904. In 1920, R.U.R. gave us the word "robot." Universal Studios' famous version of Dracula was adapted not from the novel, but the wildly successful Broadway play. That's not even getting into modern musicals like Wicked or Little Shop of Horrors. What does it take for genre to work in a live setting, and where have we seen it succeed (or fail)?

Anyone else I can expect to see this weekend? The ziggurat awaits.
radiantfracture: Loon linocut with text Stupid Canadian Wolf Bird (stupid Canadian wolf bird)
[personal profile] radiantfracture
A new series of Poetry Unbound has begun, and gorgeously, with Anishinaabe poet Kimberly Blaeser's "my journal records the vestiture of doppelgangers."




“my journal records the vestiture of doppelgangers”
Kimblerly Blaeser


i.

Remember how the loon chick climbs to the mother’s back.

Oh, checkerboard bed and lifted wing—oh, tiny gray passenger

who settles: eyes drooping closed, webbed foot lifted like a flag!

Each day, each week, I write missives—Mayflies' transparent wings

a stained glass—fluttering across the surface of lake.
An impermanence.

Imagos who transform: molt made glitter as splayed bodies on water.

I write the red crown, mad V of vulture-wings drying in morning sun.

I record red squirrel swimming (yes! swimming) across a small channel.

ii.

I barely breathe watching the narrow body (a mere slit of motion)

dark and steady like all mysterious—paddle, paddle, and arrive

now climb bedraggled and spent onto the small safety of a floating log.

It rests. We catch our breath. Now it scurries ahead to the other log end.

Here my journal stutters with a squirrel story bigger than words:

Unfathomably, it plunges back into blue chance—into uncharted.

We are never done, it says, with a body tiny enough to know.

The world is large, it says, with a courage I am greedy to learn.

iii.

Praise here all fabulous unwritten. Each shimmer of spent body,

journey from rest to blue next. Who, I ask, is the blissful beaver

devouring each yellow water lily if not our doppelganger?

Continually, I feel paws pulling, mouth filled with flower lust—

what little rooms are words in these seasons of plenty.

* * * * * *

Pádraig Ó Tuama's commentary is, as always, tender, attentive, and personal. He seems very taken by the squirrel (as who would not be?).

It's interesting that he glosses the "imago" in section i as theological, the Imago Dei. I read it first literally as a phase of insect development, and then psychoanalytically as an internalized image of an idealized self based on the Other -- but it strikes me that this second reading probably derives from Ó Tuama's source, Lacan having been raised within Catholicism.

I like Blaeser's use of "doppelganger," how slightly off-kilter and irreducible it is, how it makes the images not just celebratory but metaphysical and eerie - ties back into that reading of "imago."

What do you hear?

§rf§
sovay: (Sydney Carton)
[personal profile] sovay
Running this many days without sleep, I find it hard to tell whether I had an insight about creativity this weekend or just reinvented a 101-level objection to LLMs and so-called generative AI, but it ocurred to me that such technologies are not capable of allusions. Their algorithms are not freighted with the same three-dimensional architecture of associations which accrete around information stored in the human cold porridge, all the emotional colors and sensory overtones and contextual echoes which attend the classic example of a word like tree when you throw it out across the incommensurable void between one human mind and another to be plugged into their own idiosyncratically plastic linkage of bias and experience whose least incompatibility may be the difference between a bristlecone and a birch and Wittgenstein has to lie down with a headache, but all of these entanglements form as much of the texture of a writer's style—of any human communication—as the word cloud of their vocabulary or their most commonly diagrammed sentences. It has always interested me to be able to detect the half-rhymes or skeletons of familiarity in the work of other writers; I have always assumed I am reciprocally legible if not transparent from space. I've seen arguments against the creativity of LLMs based on intentionality, but the unintended encrustrations seem just as important to me. By way of illustration, this thought was partly sparked by this classic and glorious mashup.

I was delighted to find on checking the news this morning that a new Roman villa just dropped. Given the Iron Age hillforts, the twelfth-century abbey, the Georgian country house, and the CH station, Margam Country Park clearly needed a Roman find to complete the set. I have since been informed of the discovery of a similarly well-preserved and impressive carnyx. Goes shatteringly with a villa, the Iceni tell me.

I joke about this rock I spend most of my time under, but how can I never have heard of Marlow Moss? The Bryher vibes alone. The Constructivism. And a real short king, judging by that jaunty photo c. 1937 with Netty Nijhoff. Pursuing further details, I fell over Anton Prinner and have been demoralized about my comprehension of art history ever since.

Last night I read David Copperfield (1850) for the third time in my life. It has the terrible feel of a teachable moment. In high school I bounced almost completely off it. About ten years later, I enjoyed the dual-layered narration and was otherwise mostly engaged by the language. Now it appears I just like the novel, which I have to consider may be a factor of middle age. Or I had just read the necessary bunch more of Dickens in the interval, speaking of traceable reflections, recurring figures; my favorite character has not changed since eleventh grade, but I can see now the constellation he's part of. It seems improbable that I was always reading the novel while waiting for chorus to start, but I did get through Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) in the down time of a couple of rehearsals that year. I was not taking either of the standard literature classes, but I had friends who left their assigned reading lying around.

I have to be at three different doctors' offices tomorrow. I could be over this viral mishegos any second now.

Dept. of Mice

Jan. 11th, 2026 04:06 pm
kaffy_r: Jon Stewart w/head in hand: "so much facepalm" (Stewart facepalm)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Now and Forever?

I certainly hope not. And yet, when I got up this morning and started to clean the kitchen, I found mouse droppings. Yay. We figure we have to pull out the stove's lower drawer to access the floor and the wall behind it, since we're pretty sure the mice are getting into our place from the outside somewhere in that area. 

I'd bet Bob that we'll find no baseboards behind the stove, but it's too obviously a bad bet. We're going to keep an eye on the kitchen counters near the stove for a day or so to see how bold the little buggers are. If it's little to no action, then we'll wait. But if we spot their leavings, then it's time to do the inspection. Which, of course, I'm not looking forward to, especially since we can't really use the foam barrier spray near the stove. Oven heat could end up releasing toxic or potentially toxic fumes, and so we're going to have to buy a whole lot more steel wool. It's going to be a mess. 

*wanders away, grumbling*
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
The best thing about a photo I found tonight of John Vickery in 1981 is not that it headcanoned itself instantly as an image of the younger Neroon, it's that I had just been watching him in an American Theatre Wing seminar from that same year and been struck by how little of his older self in or out of character was immediately traceable in his thin collegiate face and especially his light Californian voice and so when looking out of mildly feverish curiosity for his notices that summer as Prince Hal I was really not expecting to find through nothing but chiaroscuro and expression his future Minbari bones.



Offstage, he had reminded me more of Kyle MacLachlan and barely looked old enough to have the bachelor's in mathematics which was part of his origin story. He tells it again in another seminar in 1998 and still has a nervous gesture of touching one of his eyes as if tired or distracted slightly; he's a great fidgeter in front of an off-the-cuff audience. I had gone looking originally for his voice, which turns out not even to be that mid-Atlantic when he's using it for himself. Three decades plus I had to notice this actor with my brain on perpetual standby for B5 and now it has an opinion.

To keep on the theme of theater, I had no idea until her obituary that Tina Packer started her career in the three-quarters burninated 1966 BBC David Copperfield with Ian McKellen and then the much more successfully recovered 1968 Doctor Who: The Web of Fear before she discovered she cared much less for acting than directing or producing, whence Shakespeare & Company. The last time I saw Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code was in 2011 at Central Square Theater and they are reviving it this spring with the actor I last saw as Gaveston in the ASP's Edward II in 2017, whom I expect to be a superb Turing and me to leave the theater muttering about Joan Clarke as usual. In lieu of a teleporter, I have to hope for a transfer of this High Noon.
sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
[personal profile] sovay
While we seem to have skipped actual plague, all of my households have acquired the going lurgi and my head feels like a balloon which has been filled with concrete and may at any second fall off. I have not been ill with a pharmacologically suppressed immune system before. I hadn't been sure it would be capable of running even a low-grade fever.

I have him so totally identified with the role of Neroon on Babylon 5 (1994–98), I keep forgetting that John Vickery in common with many actors who could handle the hours of makeup made several appearances on Star Trek, although the time I actually seem to have seen him in that universe involved no enhancements beyond near-catatonic terror as the sole survivor of a creepily derelict death-ship in TNG's "Night Terrors" (1991). Perhaps it was just lost to the sands of fanzines, but I was genuinely surprised that no one on AO3 ever filled in some kind of /comfort for a character who spends nearly his total screen time telepathically looping through cryptically traumatized echoes and crying. Just when you think you have a handle on other people's id.

It is not reasonable that for two years the earth has been bereft of a rust-black little cat with cut-lime eyes, my miracle, my salty boy, my sassafras, while it suffers the weight of human people who are not worth one of his twenty-six claws, snagged in my bathrobe as he clambered to my shoulder for his terrycloth time after a shower. I miss turning back the covers in this weather to find his sincere blink up from the bedclothes, the absolute trust in the soft curl of his back that no one would shift him from his burrowed comfort. I miss the notes in his purr, from the musical edge of wanting to the subterranean roar of contentment, the whole architecture of his body vibrating like throat singing with the little whiffle that went in and out of his voice, his signature trill. I miss the unretractable click of his claws that announced his progress and the calluses of his desert-rose pads with which he gripped fiercely for human touch. From childhood I was taught that cats turn into flowers and Autolycus lies with his grave goods at the roots of the forsythia I have twice watched bloom since his death; the candle lit for him after sunset burns and his sister did not spring immediately off the bed when I stumbled into it, nauseated and head-aching. I am not without cat in my life. But I am without this cat and he was of inestimable worth to the world.

Dept. of This and That

Jan. 9th, 2026 08:15 pm
kaffy_r: Close-up of manual typewriter (Typewriter)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Pills and Novels

There's nothing like getting up, grabbing the handful of pills you normally scarf down, and having one of the horse pill-sized vitamins get caught in your throat. There's that initial split second of "Oh, it'll go down when I swallow again" and then panic - and pain - as the damn thing doesn't go down. 

Actually, painful doesn't even begin to describe it; agony is probably a better description. I kept trying to dissolve it with water, but it wasn't working. I was literally on my knees because of the pain. I woke up BB and between crying and gagging I managed to tell him what was wrong. He got up and did the Heimlich maneuver on me. It didn't shoot the pill out of my mouth, but it did move it just enough so that, about a minute later, I was able to cough, and the cough finally sent the thing stomach-ward.

Truly, for him to roll out of bed, bleary-eyed, and immediately know to do the maneuver, just reminds me that he is by far the most level-headed man I know. 

As of tonight, my throat feels as if I've come down with something flu-like. I know my struggle to get the pill down my gullet caused some bleeding, since I had that coppery taste in my mouth that's unmistakable. With any luck, it will heal relatively quickly. 

I'm never again taking all my morning pills at once. 😬

On the other hand, I finally put up the 19th and final chapter of "Gleaning Musutachi," the original novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo, of blessed memory, over on [community profile] originalkaffy_r . It's monumentally flawed, and wouldn't make it to anyone's slush pile, much less publication, but I didn't write it to get published. I wrote it because I wanted to complete something of novel length. I'm fond of the characters I created and, despite the flaws, the world I created pleases me. I also managed to keep the plot from completely disintegrating. Yay, me. 

So pill pain, and something I could put up as a completed original novel. I love Fridays.  


Dept. of Urge to Kill

Jan. 8th, 2026 07:26 pm
kaffy_r: The First Doctor isn't amused (Bullshit!)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Stupidity and Mice

It's not the mice that are stupid. Well, they're not very bright, I know that, poor little buggers. I like them. I just don't like them in my home, something I posted about back before Christmas. Well, we had a new mouse adventure recently, one that ended with me wishing ill fortune to the complete fucking idiots who gut rehabbed our building back in 1999 or so, a few years before we bought our condo. Yep. They're the stupid ones, not mus musculus in general. 

But let me not get ahead of myself. *clears throat*

One of the two mice we saw at the very beginning of the incursion escaped from Carter and ducked, we figured, into a small space between one side of our refrigerator and the wall between the kitchen and the dining room. We shone a flashlight in there, and saw what appeared to be the spot where he/she/they probably got into our place. So we figured we'd get the fridge out of the very small alcove it's been in for the past 22 or so years, then mouse-proof that area, either with steel wool or the fast-expanding, fast-hardening foam that works very well as a barricade against mice, possibly both. Not quite easy-peasy but fairly straightforward. 

Ha. And I repeat, ha.

Tonight, Bob and I are recovering from hauling the fridge out of that alcove in order to do the proofing. We manhandled and half-inched the fridge out and viewed what no one has seen for decades. I knew it was going to be horrid back there, and it certainly was. But you know what made me want to hunt down the "rehabbers" (yes, they're snicker quotes, why do you ask?) and harm them?

The fact that they didn't think it was necessary to put baseboards behind the fridge.

There. were. no. baseboards.

What there were, were lots of were holes and cracks in the walls down near the floor (which was also exceedingly badly laid, we discovered, so there's that as well). I told BB we were lucky that we hadn't been snowed under by mice years ago. We put down the anti-mouse foam around where there should have been baseboards, and I did as much cleanup as I could stand while the foam hardened. I cleared out some gunk that might have been interfering with an air intake section of the fridge. Then I manhandled the fridge back into place and put the kitchen back to rights.

We've probably effectively mouse-proofed the kitchen (or at least I most devoutly hope so) and I suppose we can consider that a win. 

But no baseboards. No. Fucking. Baseboards. Those guys deserve to be peed on by many, many, many mice. I certainly hope our mice can be aimed at them. Idiots. 
 




Poem post: stunbone

Jan. 8th, 2026 01:39 pm
radiantfracture: a white rabbit swims underwater (water rabbit)
[personal profile] radiantfracture
Where is there to sit exactly
If everything is shining on me

Friend, you have buttsense
you have stone buns, as your grandma says
Here in the driftwood feeling sundrunk, sunbent
Sensate among the ebb tones of the sea

I thought you said stun bone
You draw with a stick among the ebb stones
The tide wriggles up the sand grooves
Your breathing makes the subtones shimmer

You draw the water up to bait our shoes
Just for the craft of it, just because you can do it
Like a gull riding on the sky tide
Laughing at our temporary ruin



* * * * * *

Every morning very nearly without fail I solve the Merriam-Webster Blossom puzzle, and then I re-solve it to see if I can get a higher score, and if I'm not careful this becomes a kind of intellectual busywork I can use to distract myself from actual writing.

So a thing I'm trying to do (among all the other things) is to use the puzzle as a prompt. Inevitably each group of letters generates a semantic zone. Real and nonce words produce themselves. The letterset today was BENOSTU.


Here's a less complete poem from Sunday (letterset EINRTVW):

The riverine interview of winter,
that inept vintner: cool distillate
interrogates the view, shreds and repurposes it,
turns window to vitrine
where the morning light, when it comes,
cold citrine, tobacco stain,
will ennerve us, animate the inert twin



...Not sure what I planned to do with that twin, but I will let you know.


§rf§
sovay: (Sydney Carton)
[personal profile] sovay
Now that we are back in the swing of the year, my days are marked by doctors' appointments. I preferred being outside the calendar. I did dream briefly and unexpectedly of Alexander Knox, playing one of those harrowed, abrasive, obdurate figures on the other side of some internment or imprisonment that made me think he would have been anachronistically great as E. T. C. Werner. Have some link-like things.

1. John Heffernan falls into the category of actors of whom I have somehow become very fond without actually seeing all that much of them, which normally happens with character faces in the '40's. I am unlikely even to see his latest project, the freshly announced Amazon TV version of Tomb Raider, but since his character is described in the promotional dramatis personae as "an exhausted government official who finds himself tangled up in Lara's unusual world," it's nice to know I would almost certainly develop a disproportionate attachment to him if I had the chance. You can tell I am otherwise a solid generation of actors behind the times since I was impressed by the casting all in the same place of Jason Isaacs, Bill Paterson, Celia Imrie, Paterson Joseph, and Sigourney Weaver.

2. This song transfixed me a few nights ago on WHRB: Barbez, "Strange" (2005).

3. I meant once again to praise the Malden Public Library for ordering me a sun-bleached, peach-orange, jacketless first edition of Leslie Howard's Trivial Fond Records (ed. Ronald Howard, 1982), about whose selected nonfiction I have been intensely curious since discovering its existence in 2008, but the problem with reading some of the broadcasts he made for J. B. Priestley's Britain Speaks in 1940 is that one runs into passages like:

Democracy today, to survive at all, must be as militant as autocracy, and what the world is desperately in need of now is not the gentle, philosophic democracy of Jefferson, but the outspoken, militant and ringing democracy of Roosevelt, representing the righteous anger of the free people of the world aroused against the cynical arrogance of the totalitarian feudalists.

Dept. of Checking Something

Jan. 6th, 2026 05:35 pm
kaffy_r: Bang Chan showing abs (Chan w/abs WHAT??!?)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Testing, Testing

I'm going to post something without coding the text color, just to see if a change I made with help from [personal profile] muccamukk  will do that. 

Woo-hoo! It worked! 

Dept. of Remembering the Truth

Jan. 6th, 2026 04:23 pm
kaffy_r: Ekko from Arcane: League of Legends, looking angry (Ekko pissed off)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Five Years Ago

This happened. 

I will not forget. Nor will I forgive. 

Dept. of Music

Jan. 6th, 2026 11:11 am
kaffy_r: movie poster for Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th dimension (Buckaroo Banzai)
[personal profile] kaffy_r
Music Meme, Day 17

A song that reminds you of somebody:

When I first came to Chicago in 1981, I stayed with one of the friends I'd made when I attended Suncon, the 1977 world science fiction convention, and my very first convention. His name was Ed Sunden and he was overwhelming. He was awful and generous, outrageous and brilliant, manipulative and kind, and definitely sui generis. He loved music, and he loved introducing me to New Wave music that was definitely new to me - the Police and Elvis Costello among the groups he loved. 

His way of introduction? He would tell me to sit down in the tiny living room of the basement apartment he shared with Joan, the woman who became his wife. Or rather, he would order me to sit down, and then he'd put on an LP, or power up a tape he'd recorded on his music system (primitive by today's standards, but incredibly impressive back in 1981.) Sometimes he'd play the same song twice, to make sure I understood the words. 

All these years later, and 25 years after he died, it's Elvis Costello's songs that immediately bring Ed and that dim little apartment singing and shouting back into my mind.

I thought of sharing "Oliver's Army" with you, because it's one of the Costello songs that really hit me when I first heard it. Unfortunately, and despite the fact that Costello wrote the song as an anti-fascist tune, it uses at least two racist slurs that I'm uncomfortable listening to these days. He wrote it after being in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, and the Oliver he sang of was Oliver Cromwell, who invaded and conquered Ireland. British fascists have taken Cromwell as one of their own, so Costello's brutal parodying of fascism and how it sucks working class kids into a losing game in this song is close to perfection in terms of the written word. Still, the racial slurs, parodies though they are, made me nix this tune. 

In its place, and most definitely one that still makes me think of Ed, is "Pump It Up."  Enjoy, and if you want to know my previous answers, go to Day 17, and it will give you access to all the previous songs. 



sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey)
[personal profile] sovay
Doubtful as it may be under present conditions to find encouragement in anything of military origin unless it's the USS Princeton in 1844, about twenty-seven seconds into the two minutes' patriotism of Warship Week Appeal (1942) I cracked up.

Two hundred feet exactly of no-credits 35 mm, the object in question is a trailer produced for the Ministry of Information, essentially the same concept as the film tags of WWI: a micro-dose of propaganda appended to a newsreel as part of a larger campaign, in this case a sort of public information skit in which it is supposed that Noël Coward on the Denham sets of In Which We Serve (1942) is approached by Leslie Howard, slouching characteristically on with his hands in his pockets and his scarf twisted carelessly label-out, anxious to discuss a problem of National Savings. "How do you think we can make an appeal so it won't quite seem like an appeal?" With limited screen time to realize their meta conceit, the two actor-directors get briskly down to explaining the mechanics of the scheme to the British public with the shot-reverse-shot patter of a double act on the halls, but the trailer has already dropped its most memorable moment ahead of all its instructions and slogans, even the brief time it rhymes. Diffident as one end of his spectrum of nerd heroes, Howard apologizes for the interruption, excuses it with its relevance to naval business, and trails off with the usual form of words, "I'm sure you won't mind—" to which Coward responds smoothly, "I'm delighted to see you. And I know perfectly well—as we rehearsed it so carefully—that you've come to interview me about Warships Week." He doesn't even bother to hold for a laugh as Leslie snorts around his unlit cigarette. It doesn't all feel like a bit. The interjection may or may not have been scripted, but Coward's delivery is lethally demure and his scene partner's reaction looks genuine; for one, it's much less well-timed or dignified than the smile he uses to support a later, slightly obligatory joke about the income tax, which makes it that much more endearing. It's funny to me for a slant, secondhand reason, too, that has nothing to do with the long friendship between the two men or further proof of Noël's deadpan for the ages: a dancer with whom my mother once worked had been part of the company of Howard's 1936 Hamlet and like all the other small parts, whenever her back was to the audience and the Hollywood star was stuck facing the footlights, she tried to corpse him. One night she finally succeeded. Consequently and disproportionately, watching him need the length of a cigarette-lighting to get his face back, I thought of her story which I hadn't in years and may have laughed harder than Leslie Howard deserved. If it's any consolation to him, the way his eyes close right up like a cat's is beautiful, middle-aged and underslept. It promotes the illusion that a real person might say a phrase like "in these grim days when we've got our backs to the wall" outside of an address to the nation.

Not much consolation to the MOI, Warship Week Appeal accomplishes its goal in that while it doesn't mention for posterity that a community would adopt the ship it funded, the general idea of the dearth of "ships—more ships and still more ships" and the communal need to pay down for them as efficiently as possible comes through emphatically. It's so much more straightforward, in fact, than I associate with either of its differently masked actors, I'd love to know who wrote it, but the only other information immediately available is that the "Ronnie" whom Coward is conferring with when Howard courteously butts in is Ronald Neame. Given the production dates of their respective pictures, it's not difficult to pretend that Howard just popped over from the next sound stage where he was still shooting The First of the Few (1942), although he is clearly in star rather than director mode because even if he's in working clothes, he is conspicuously minus his glasses. What can I tell you? I got it from the Imperial War Museum and for two minutes and thirteen seconds it cheered me up. Lots of things to look at these days could do much, much worse. This interview brought to you by my appealing backers at Patreon.
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
After a full week without water in the kitchen, the plumber cameth on half an hour's notice from the property manager and was horrified to hear about it, but he was swift and competent and we have a new and working faucet, which was all the problem turned out to be. Hestia made herself invisible in the bedroom throughout the proceedings. I washed a fork without first boiling water and it felt like a big deal.

I just finished reading David Hare's A Map of the World (1983), whose device of examining an interpersonal-political knot through the successive filters of the roman à clef, the screen version, and the memories of the participants reminded me obviously of similar exercises in metafiction and retrospect by Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn, double-cast for an effect at the end approaching timeslip such as works almost strictly on stage. I did not expect to find some fragments preserved in an episode of The South Bank Show, but there were some of the scenes with Roshan Seth, John Matshikiza, Bill Nighy, Diana Quick. I wish I thought it meant there were a complete broadcast I could watch, but I'm not even finding it got the BBC Radio 3 treatment. More immediately, it reminded me of how many of the stories I read early were about stories, their propagation and mutation, their conventions, their shifting distances from the facts. "And, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it."

The problem with the denaturing of language is that when I say to [personal profile] spatch that the political situation is insane, I don't mean it's a little far-fetched, I mean it is driven by wants and processes that are not rational and it is exhausting to be trapped inside someone else's illness.

End of Year Writing Meme 2025

Jan. 5th, 2026 08:58 pm
thisbluespirit: (writing)
[personal profile] thisbluespirit
I continue recovering very slowly but at least pretty steadily - and my things are gradually getting out of boxes too. In the meantime, I thought I could probably manage to do the end of year meme, so here it is:

The usual writing meme for the year. (Last year's post is here.)

Cut for length )
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