Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Nov. 21st, 2025 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sovayMy mother referred earlier this evening to the state of my health as farshlimmert, which definitely sounds classier than my saying it's gone down the tubes. On the other hand, I do not apparently have TB, so we can hold off on the consumptive poet jokes a little while longer yet.
As a reworking of Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) is trashtacular even beyond the whipsawing of its trans reading when it mixes the novella's Gothic horrors with historical ones—scrunching about six decades in the penny-dreadful process of folding in not only the Whitechapel murders but Burke and Hare, even without throwing in an allusion to Sweeney Todd or a street singer straight out of Val Lewton—but it dovetailed unexpectedly well with an article sent me byselkie about the obtrusiveness of AI-generation in art because it contains an in-camera effect so good that I stopped the film to gush about it to spatch. It's the emergence of the so-called Mrs. Hyde. One-shot, Jekyll wrenched with the effects of his absinthe-green potion buries his face in his hands, from which he slowly straightens to perceive in the same cheval glass that witnessed his convulsions a woman as severely dark-haired, night-pale and shocked as himself, who she is. It's not a trick of double exposures or duplicate sets or dissolves. While the camera tightly pivots behind the hunched protagonist, it looks as though a slight adjustment to the angle of the mirror allows an otherwise offscreen Martine Beswick to reflect beyond the identically dressed shoulder of Ralph Bates, their breath heaving in time, their hands slowly unmasking their shared face. It's very simple and uncannily effective. In some ways I find it more impressive than the red-filter transformation of Fredric March in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because it's all sightlines. He's never out of shot and she's suddenly in it. Especially to an eye distracted from consideration of the sets or the cinematography by the switch of actors in the glass, it looks impossible. And someone had to think of it, or at least translate it from a stage illusion. It has never broken a film for me to see how a practical effect is done, which feels different from the suspicion of how much of an image is AI-slopped.
The almost talking blues whose first two lines I missed tonight on WERS turned out to be Lucinda Williams' "The World's Gone Wrong" (2025).
P.S. And a random thirty seconds of Clive Francis mixed in with the bleak London ultraviolence of Villain (1971), why not?
As a reworking of Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) is trashtacular even beyond the whipsawing of its trans reading when it mixes the novella's Gothic horrors with historical ones—scrunching about six decades in the penny-dreadful process of folding in not only the Whitechapel murders but Burke and Hare, even without throwing in an allusion to Sweeney Todd or a street singer straight out of Val Lewton—but it dovetailed unexpectedly well with an article sent me by
selkie about the obtrusiveness of AI-generation in art because it contains an in-camera effect so good that I stopped the film to gush about it to spatch. It's the emergence of the so-called Mrs. Hyde. One-shot, Jekyll wrenched with the effects of his absinthe-green potion buries his face in his hands, from which he slowly straightens to perceive in the same cheval glass that witnessed his convulsions a woman as severely dark-haired, night-pale and shocked as himself, who she is. It's not a trick of double exposures or duplicate sets or dissolves. While the camera tightly pivots behind the hunched protagonist, it looks as though a slight adjustment to the angle of the mirror allows an otherwise offscreen Martine Beswick to reflect beyond the identically dressed shoulder of Ralph Bates, their breath heaving in time, their hands slowly unmasking their shared face. It's very simple and uncannily effective. In some ways I find it more impressive than the red-filter transformation of Fredric March in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because it's all sightlines. He's never out of shot and she's suddenly in it. Especially to an eye distracted from consideration of the sets or the cinematography by the switch of actors in the glass, it looks impossible. And someone had to think of it, or at least translate it from a stage illusion. It has never broken a film for me to see how a practical effect is done, which feels different from the suspicion of how much of an image is AI-slopped.The almost talking blues whose first two lines I missed tonight on WERS turned out to be Lucinda Williams' "The World's Gone Wrong" (2025).
P.S. And a random thirty seconds of Clive Francis mixed in with the bleak London ultraviolence of Villain (1971), why not?
wednesday books under a male name
Nov. 19th, 2025 08:40 pmlandofnowhereAriadne in Mantua, Vernon Lee (1903). Readaloud. This play sets itself up as being in the Extended Shakespeare Universe: "The action takes place in the Palace of Mantua through a period of a year, during the reign of Prospero I, of Milan, and shortly before the Venetian expedition to Cyprus under Othello." However it's an odd, sad play, and not one that Shakespeare would have told. One of the laws of the Shakespeare Universe, as I interpret it, is that nobody dies of unrequited love; you can't die of a broken heart unless somebody else dies first to break your heart. (Ophelia is arguably an exception, but still her father dies first.)
Mona Maclean, Medical Student, Graham Travers (a pseudonym for Margaret Todd). I enjoyed this, though the romantic happy ending dragged out a bit. I feel that the title does it a disservice, as it is not a school story; there are a few scenes in the medical school setting, but that's not the main focus of the story. It is however enjoyable as a late Victorian novel with an introspective and intellectual protagonist, feminist themes, and strong female friendships. Also, the love interest recites the poem Stradivarius by George Eliot, which I was glad to be introduced to.
The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake, Margaret Todd (writing under her own name this time, even though Gutenberg uses the name Graham Travers). Sophia Jex-Blake was one of the first women doctors in Great Britain, and founded the medical school that Margaret Todd attended; the two of them became life partners. So far I've only covered Sophia's youth and education; she was a gifted child who chafed at the Victorian education system that wanted to shape her into a well-behaved young lady, but fortunately manages to get onto a path to a real education. The biography has just covered her brief romantic relationship and unhappy breakup with Octavia Hill, who went on to be equally awesome.
The Strength of the Few, James Islington. Sequel to The Will of the Many, and a change of pace from all these old books by and about women. Not as good as the first book, mostly for structural reasons, but still very readable. I'm about 80% in and it's getting to be a bloodbath, but hopefully there will be interesting plots twists in what's left.
Mona Maclean, Medical Student, Graham Travers (a pseudonym for Margaret Todd). I enjoyed this, though the romantic happy ending dragged out a bit. I feel that the title does it a disservice, as it is not a school story; there are a few scenes in the medical school setting, but that's not the main focus of the story. It is however enjoyable as a late Victorian novel with an introspective and intellectual protagonist, feminist themes, and strong female friendships. Also, the love interest recites the poem Stradivarius by George Eliot, which I was glad to be introduced to.
The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake, Margaret Todd (writing under her own name this time, even though Gutenberg uses the name Graham Travers). Sophia Jex-Blake was one of the first women doctors in Great Britain, and founded the medical school that Margaret Todd attended; the two of them became life partners. So far I've only covered Sophia's youth and education; she was a gifted child who chafed at the Victorian education system that wanted to shape her into a well-behaved young lady, but fortunately manages to get onto a path to a real education. The biography has just covered her brief romantic relationship and unhappy breakup with Octavia Hill, who went on to be equally awesome.
The Strength of the Few, James Islington. Sequel to The Will of the Many, and a change of pace from all these old books by and about women. Not as good as the first book, mostly for structural reasons, but still very readable. I'm about 80% in and it's getting to be a bloodbath, but hopefully there will be interesting plots twists in what's left.
I've picked out a new hill on which to die
Nov. 17th, 2025 01:52 amconulyPeople at /r/englishlearning need to stop saying "Song lyrics/poems don't have to be grammatical! Don't try to learn English through songs/poems! People just do whatever, ungrammatically, to fit the rhythm/mood/rhyme scheme!"
This may be true, I guess, but funnily enough it's never true when people say it. At least half the time, the quoted text isn't even archaic or nonstandard!
That said, I do like reading (most of the) comments in that subreddit. There's always something! ( Cut for appropriateness )
*************************************************
( Read more... )
This may be true, I guess, but funnily enough it's never true when people say it. At least half the time, the quoted text isn't even archaic or nonstandard!
That said, I do like reading (most of the) comments in that subreddit. There's always something! ( Cut for appropriateness )
( Read more... )
Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 19th, 2025 08:02 amosprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I picked up Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s William S. and the Great Escape intending to read a chapter or two, and then accidentally gulped down the whole thing. William S. Bagget (he add the S after playing Ariel in a production of The Tempest last spring) and his siblings run away from their horrible family to live with their Aunt Fiona. As always, Snyder writes great little kids (even children’s authors often stumble on four-year-olds), and I loved the way that Shakespeare-obsessed William found ways to compare his everyday life to Shakespeare scenarios.
I also read Daphne du Maurier’s The Winding Stair: Sir Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall, which mostly about Sir Francis Bacon’s political and literary career, but features a few forays into not-quite-full-blown Baconian theories. Now du Maurier is not saying that Bacon wrote ALL of Shakespeare’s plays, but what if he talked the plays over with Shakespeare while he was writing them? What if he contributed some of the witty quotes during tavern arguments? What if maybe he actually DID write the plays that were never printed during Shakespeare’s lifetime…
Du Maurier doesn’t so much provide an argument for this as just say “Hey guys what if?”, but I find it delightful on the same level of “What if Audubon was secretly the escaped dauphin of France?” What if indeed! Don’t believe it for a second actually! But you shine on, you crazy diamond of an author.
What I’m Reading Now
Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist, the book on which Spirited Away is very (very) loosely based. Really enjoying this! Rationing it out a bit because I don’t want it to end… However the library does have Temple Alley Summer so I might move on to that.
What I Plan to Read Next
Going absolutely ham on the Christmas books this year. Besides the picture book Advent calendar, I’m planning Ruth Sawyer’s The Long Christmas (a collection of Christmas short stories), Tasha Tudor’s Forever Christmas (a book about Christmas at Tasha Tudor’s place), Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal, Ngaio Marsh’s Tied Up in Tinsel, and Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year, although as I am 25th on the hold list for that last book it may have to wait for next year.
I picked up Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s William S. and the Great Escape intending to read a chapter or two, and then accidentally gulped down the whole thing. William S. Bagget (he add the S after playing Ariel in a production of The Tempest last spring) and his siblings run away from their horrible family to live with their Aunt Fiona. As always, Snyder writes great little kids (even children’s authors often stumble on four-year-olds), and I loved the way that Shakespeare-obsessed William found ways to compare his everyday life to Shakespeare scenarios.
I also read Daphne du Maurier’s The Winding Stair: Sir Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall, which mostly about Sir Francis Bacon’s political and literary career, but features a few forays into not-quite-full-blown Baconian theories. Now du Maurier is not saying that Bacon wrote ALL of Shakespeare’s plays, but what if he talked the plays over with Shakespeare while he was writing them? What if he contributed some of the witty quotes during tavern arguments? What if maybe he actually DID write the plays that were never printed during Shakespeare’s lifetime…
Du Maurier doesn’t so much provide an argument for this as just say “Hey guys what if?”, but I find it delightful on the same level of “What if Audubon was secretly the escaped dauphin of France?” What if indeed! Don’t believe it for a second actually! But you shine on, you crazy diamond of an author.
What I’m Reading Now
Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist, the book on which Spirited Away is very (very) loosely based. Really enjoying this! Rationing it out a bit because I don’t want it to end… However the library does have Temple Alley Summer so I might move on to that.
What I Plan to Read Next
Going absolutely ham on the Christmas books this year. Besides the picture book Advent calendar, I’m planning Ruth Sawyer’s The Long Christmas (a collection of Christmas short stories), Tasha Tudor’s Forever Christmas (a book about Christmas at Tasha Tudor’s place), Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal, Ngaio Marsh’s Tied Up in Tinsel, and Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year, although as I am 25th on the hold list for that last book it may have to wait for next year.
Reading your mind is like foreign TV
Nov. 18th, 2025 05:30 pmsovayAs far as I can tell, after three or so nights of pain-driven sleeplessness broken only by the occasional hour unconscious, I crashed so hard last night that I may have slept as much as fifteen hours, which would be amazing except that we are now on the later side of autumn and I slept out all the sunlight in the day. My entire plan had been to take a walk this afternoon. Tomorrow I have a round of doctor's appointments starting early in the morning, but it's not exactly the same thing. Have some links.
1. Mythic Delirium Books is reviving! In order to celebrate the relaunch and their ten-year anniversary, they are offering a deal on three of their most acclaimed collections, all of which I can recommend from reading as well as general enthusiasm for the press and its authors. Various combinations and formats available and an enticing pre-order bundled if you order through their own website. Check it out! Mythic Delirium was the home of my first published poem twenty-four years ago when it was a cardstock-covered 'zine with black-and-white interior illustrations and my affection for it has not dimmed even now that it publishes actual trade-bound books.
2. Untilselkie sent it over to me, I had no idea an online archive had been compiled of the Call, the historic English-language newsletter of the Workers Circle. I am thrilled, even if the first article I selected was, in 2025, a little like being socked in the jaw by 1942:
America is celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Bill [of] Rights. The Bill of Rights is the Magna Charta of our fundamental liberties such as freedom of speech and press, of petition and assembly, of religion. Together with these go concomitant rights such as the security of the home against the military, against search and seizure, and the recognition of due process of law and trial by jury. In brief, the Bill of Rights stands as a guarantee that the individual and the home are inviolate unless certain clearly defined legal procedures are followed.
Before the rise of totalitarianism, we took these freedoms for granted. They were part of the air we breathed. Now we realize that they are a precious heritage, that they are worth preserving and defending. America is not Utopia. Unemployment, economic crises, poverty and need in the midst of plenty, slums and avoidable sickness, are still with us. But as long as the Bill of Rights prevails, as long as we have freedom of speech and of assembly, of petition and protest, of criticism and political organization, there is hope abundant. With these freedoms, we can go on working for the things we hold dear and good, inveighing against injustice wherever we find it, improving the lot of the masses. Without these, we are lost, doomed either to abject silence or the concentration camp.
3. I missed it for Armistice Day, but Frederic Manning's "Leaves" (1917) is a delicately upsetting war poem and completely at the other end of effects of language from his novel Her Privates We (1929).
Cone of Silence (U.S. Trouble in the Sky, 1960) does such wonderfully anoraky suspense about human factors in aviation accidents that it should not be faulted for including Peter Cushing in its cast and then not having him play the brilliant, haunted designer of the Atlas Phoenix which seems to be doing too close an impression of the de Havilland Comet for anyone's comfort, but I did have to adjust to that being Noel Willman.
P.S. Dammit: now TCM has tabletized itself and in the process apparently expunged its considerable database of linked articles, not to mention the hitherto useful indices or even listings of cast and crew. Because what I want when considering a movie is not even to know who's in it unless I can recognize someone from the visual tile which could be anything from a random frame to a production still to part of a poster. The player itself has also been reorganized into a much less pleasant interface. Is there some kind of literal race on to the enshittification? Isn't that one where the only way to win is not to play?
1. Mythic Delirium Books is reviving! In order to celebrate the relaunch and their ten-year anniversary, they are offering a deal on three of their most acclaimed collections, all of which I can recommend from reading as well as general enthusiasm for the press and its authors. Various combinations and formats available and an enticing pre-order bundled if you order through their own website. Check it out! Mythic Delirium was the home of my first published poem twenty-four years ago when it was a cardstock-covered 'zine with black-and-white interior illustrations and my affection for it has not dimmed even now that it publishes actual trade-bound books.
2. Until
selkie sent it over to me, I had no idea an online archive had been compiled of the Call, the historic English-language newsletter of the Workers Circle. I am thrilled, even if the first article I selected was, in 2025, a little like being socked in the jaw by 1942:America is celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Bill [of] Rights. The Bill of Rights is the Magna Charta of our fundamental liberties such as freedom of speech and press, of petition and assembly, of religion. Together with these go concomitant rights such as the security of the home against the military, against search and seizure, and the recognition of due process of law and trial by jury. In brief, the Bill of Rights stands as a guarantee that the individual and the home are inviolate unless certain clearly defined legal procedures are followed.
Before the rise of totalitarianism, we took these freedoms for granted. They were part of the air we breathed. Now we realize that they are a precious heritage, that they are worth preserving and defending. America is not Utopia. Unemployment, economic crises, poverty and need in the midst of plenty, slums and avoidable sickness, are still with us. But as long as the Bill of Rights prevails, as long as we have freedom of speech and of assembly, of petition and protest, of criticism and political organization, there is hope abundant. With these freedoms, we can go on working for the things we hold dear and good, inveighing against injustice wherever we find it, improving the lot of the masses. Without these, we are lost, doomed either to abject silence or the concentration camp.
3. I missed it for Armistice Day, but Frederic Manning's "Leaves" (1917) is a delicately upsetting war poem and completely at the other end of effects of language from his novel Her Privates We (1929).
Cone of Silence (U.S. Trouble in the Sky, 1960) does such wonderfully anoraky suspense about human factors in aviation accidents that it should not be faulted for including Peter Cushing in its cast and then not having him play the brilliant, haunted designer of the Atlas Phoenix which seems to be doing too close an impression of the de Havilland Comet for anyone's comfort, but I did have to adjust to that being Noel Willman.
P.S. Dammit: now TCM has tabletized itself and in the process apparently expunged its considerable database of linked articles, not to mention the hitherto useful indices or even listings of cast and crew. Because what I want when considering a movie is not even to know who's in it unless I can recognize someone from the visual tile which could be anything from a random frame to a production still to part of a poster. The player itself has also been reorganized into a much less pleasant interface. Is there some kind of literal race on to the enshittification? Isn't that one where the only way to win is not to play?
Me, I'm a rotten audience before I've had my coffee
Nov. 17th, 2025 12:56 pmsovayBlind Spot (1947) was unobjectionably winding up its 73 minutes of inessential Columbia B-noir and then it stuck its middle-aged character actors with the emotional landing and I was obliged to have feelings about it.
Thanks to a screenplay which regularly fires off such pulp epigrams as "Yes, but why should dog eat distinguished writer?" Blind Spot never actually bores, but it has little beyond the acridity of its literary angle to differentiate it from any other lost weekend noir when critically esteemed and commercially starving novelist Jeffrey Andrews (Chester Morris) comes off a double-decker bender to discover that his disagreeable publisher has been iced in exactly the locked-room fashion he crashed around town shooting his mouth off about the previous night and worse yet, he can't even remember the brilliant solution that made his pitch worth more than the pair of sawbucks he was condescendingly packed off with. "It's like falling off a log. Dangerous things, logs. More people get hurt that way." Smack in the frame of a crime he may even have committed in a time-honored vortex of creativity and amnesia, he renews his ambivalent acquaintance with Evelyn Green (Constance Dowling), his ex-publisher's level-gazed secretary who would have had work-related reasons of her own to entertain a three-sheets stranger's foolproof gimmick for murder, but with a second corpse soon in play and a policeman pacing the shadow-barred sidewalk above his basement efficiency like a guard down the cell block already, the two of them take their slap-kiss romance as much on the lam as the rain-sprayed studio streets will allow until the complicating discoveries of a check for $500 and a gold spiral earring pull their mutually suspicious aid society up short. Since everyone in this film reads detective fiction with the same frequency as offscreen, the levels of meta flying around the plot approach LD50. "The only thing this proves is that I'm slightly moronic."
So far, so sub-Woolrich. The supporting cast may not be any less stock, but at least their detailing is more inventive than the hero's blear o'clock shadow or the heroine's demi-fatale peek-a-boo. Sarcastically spitballing a detective for his easy-peasy crime, Jeffrey proposed Jeremiah K. Plumtree, an eccentric old New Englander with the lovable habit of forgetting to unwrap his caramels before eating them. Instead he gets the decidedly uncozy Detective Lieutenant Fred Applegate of the NYPD (James Bell), one of those dourly hard-boiled representatives of the law whose wisecracks even sound like downers, the lean lines of his face chilled further by his crystal-rims. Even when he straightens up into an overhead light, he looks mostly annoyed at the shadows it sets slicing through his third degree, a thin, plain, dangerous plodder. "That's right. With an M." Naturally, his narrative opposite is the effusive Lloyd Harrison (Steven Geray), a cherubically flamboyant sophisticate with an honest-to-Wilde carnation in his buttonhole who deprecates his own best-selling mysteries with the modesty of the luxuries he can afford because of them, shaking himself a cocktail at a wet bar that could host the Met Gala. His Hungarian accent lends an eerily psychoanalytic air to the scene where he talks Jeffrey through recovering the blacked-out solution of his story, one of its few expressionist touches. "Small was the worst kind of a stinker. And a pair of shears in his back? Well, as the saying goes, on him it looks good." They make such an odd couple meeting over the trashed files and splintered locks of the crime scene that when the writer opens with the arch observation, "The cops must really love to wreck a place," we half expect to learn that the lieutenant ran him in once for some aesthetic misdemeanor or other and instead Applegate cracks the first smile we've seen out of his burned-in cynicism and then tops it by folding himself down at the murdered man's desk, conceding his mystification with the case, and even submitting to be teased self-reflexively by Harrison: "Only amateurs can solve a crime. You've read enough mysteries to know that." It's no caramel, but around a clearly old friend he has an odd, thoughtful tongue-in-cheek expression he closes his mouth on the second he catches himself being noticed. He chews on the ends of his glasses, too. It makes him look downright human.
( You forget the solutions must be completely logical as well as acceptable by the reader. )
Blind Spot was the scripting job of novelist and screenwriter Martin Goldsmith who had already penned the budget-free noir legend Detour (1945) and would pick up an Oscar nod for the equally second-feature The Narrow Margin (1952) and it shares their flair for creatively tough dialogue, even when its rhetorical saturation occasionally tips over from the enjoyable to the inexplicable, e.g. "Possibly it was the heat which the rain had done no more than intensify, which drained a person's vitality like ten thousand bloodthirsty dwarves." Its economical direction was the successful debut of former child actor Robert Gordon, but like so many B-pictures it draws as much or more of its tone from its photography, in this case by George Meehan who opens with a fabulous track down a working-class, washing-hung street of litter and pushcarts that could almost pass for a naked city, shoots his leading lady like abstract sculpture in the dark, and just for good measure throws in some subjective camera for an unfortunate run-in with a chair. I watched it off TCM at the last minute and am distressed to report the almost unwatchably blurred-out grunginess of every other print the internet seems to offer, not to mention their badly clipped runtimes; it hampers the ship manifesto. Pace the indeed memorably weird moment where Morris essentially faceplants into Dowling, muzzily nuzzling into her platinum waves like a soused, stubbly cat, I cannot care that much about obligatory het even when it comes with left-field chat-ups like "I was afraid you were going to turn out to be frivolous—order one of those exotic cocktails like crème de menthe with hot fudge." James Bell absentmindedly twiddling an important piece of evidence is more my line. This theory brought to you by my distinguished backers at Patreon.
Thanks to a screenplay which regularly fires off such pulp epigrams as "Yes, but why should dog eat distinguished writer?" Blind Spot never actually bores, but it has little beyond the acridity of its literary angle to differentiate it from any other lost weekend noir when critically esteemed and commercially starving novelist Jeffrey Andrews (Chester Morris) comes off a double-decker bender to discover that his disagreeable publisher has been iced in exactly the locked-room fashion he crashed around town shooting his mouth off about the previous night and worse yet, he can't even remember the brilliant solution that made his pitch worth more than the pair of sawbucks he was condescendingly packed off with. "It's like falling off a log. Dangerous things, logs. More people get hurt that way." Smack in the frame of a crime he may even have committed in a time-honored vortex of creativity and amnesia, he renews his ambivalent acquaintance with Evelyn Green (Constance Dowling), his ex-publisher's level-gazed secretary who would have had work-related reasons of her own to entertain a three-sheets stranger's foolproof gimmick for murder, but with a second corpse soon in play and a policeman pacing the shadow-barred sidewalk above his basement efficiency like a guard down the cell block already, the two of them take their slap-kiss romance as much on the lam as the rain-sprayed studio streets will allow until the complicating discoveries of a check for $500 and a gold spiral earring pull their mutually suspicious aid society up short. Since everyone in this film reads detective fiction with the same frequency as offscreen, the levels of meta flying around the plot approach LD50. "The only thing this proves is that I'm slightly moronic."
So far, so sub-Woolrich. The supporting cast may not be any less stock, but at least their detailing is more inventive than the hero's blear o'clock shadow or the heroine's demi-fatale peek-a-boo. Sarcastically spitballing a detective for his easy-peasy crime, Jeffrey proposed Jeremiah K. Plumtree, an eccentric old New Englander with the lovable habit of forgetting to unwrap his caramels before eating them. Instead he gets the decidedly uncozy Detective Lieutenant Fred Applegate of the NYPD (James Bell), one of those dourly hard-boiled representatives of the law whose wisecracks even sound like downers, the lean lines of his face chilled further by his crystal-rims. Even when he straightens up into an overhead light, he looks mostly annoyed at the shadows it sets slicing through his third degree, a thin, plain, dangerous plodder. "That's right. With an M." Naturally, his narrative opposite is the effusive Lloyd Harrison (Steven Geray), a cherubically flamboyant sophisticate with an honest-to-Wilde carnation in his buttonhole who deprecates his own best-selling mysteries with the modesty of the luxuries he can afford because of them, shaking himself a cocktail at a wet bar that could host the Met Gala. His Hungarian accent lends an eerily psychoanalytic air to the scene where he talks Jeffrey through recovering the blacked-out solution of his story, one of its few expressionist touches. "Small was the worst kind of a stinker. And a pair of shears in his back? Well, as the saying goes, on him it looks good." They make such an odd couple meeting over the trashed files and splintered locks of the crime scene that when the writer opens with the arch observation, "The cops must really love to wreck a place," we half expect to learn that the lieutenant ran him in once for some aesthetic misdemeanor or other and instead Applegate cracks the first smile we've seen out of his burned-in cynicism and then tops it by folding himself down at the murdered man's desk, conceding his mystification with the case, and even submitting to be teased self-reflexively by Harrison: "Only amateurs can solve a crime. You've read enough mysteries to know that." It's no caramel, but around a clearly old friend he has an odd, thoughtful tongue-in-cheek expression he closes his mouth on the second he catches himself being noticed. He chews on the ends of his glasses, too. It makes him look downright human.
( You forget the solutions must be completely logical as well as acceptable by the reader. )
Blind Spot was the scripting job of novelist and screenwriter Martin Goldsmith who had already penned the budget-free noir legend Detour (1945) and would pick up an Oscar nod for the equally second-feature The Narrow Margin (1952) and it shares their flair for creatively tough dialogue, even when its rhetorical saturation occasionally tips over from the enjoyable to the inexplicable, e.g. "Possibly it was the heat which the rain had done no more than intensify, which drained a person's vitality like ten thousand bloodthirsty dwarves." Its economical direction was the successful debut of former child actor Robert Gordon, but like so many B-pictures it draws as much or more of its tone from its photography, in this case by George Meehan who opens with a fabulous track down a working-class, washing-hung street of litter and pushcarts that could almost pass for a naked city, shoots his leading lady like abstract sculpture in the dark, and just for good measure throws in some subjective camera for an unfortunate run-in with a chair. I watched it off TCM at the last minute and am distressed to report the almost unwatchably blurred-out grunginess of every other print the internet seems to offer, not to mention their badly clipped runtimes; it hampers the ship manifesto. Pace the indeed memorably weird moment where Morris essentially faceplants into Dowling, muzzily nuzzling into her platinum waves like a soused, stubbly cat, I cannot care that much about obligatory het even when it comes with left-field chat-ups like "I was afraid you were going to turn out to be frivolous—order one of those exotic cocktails like crème de menthe with hot fudge." James Bell absentmindedly twiddling an important piece of evidence is more my line. This theory brought to you by my distinguished backers at Patreon.
Newbery Books with Jewish Themes
Nov. 17th, 2025 11:07 amosprey_archerI figured some of you would be interested in Newbery books with Jewish themes, so I’ve made a list. (As usual, it’s entirely possible I’ve forgotten some, since I’ve been reading this books for nigh on thirty years.)
1931: Agnes Hewes’ Spice and the Devil’s Cave. A kindly older Jewish couple help matchmake our hero and heroine and also lend money to the king of Portugal for voyages of exploration. (The modern reader may have a low opinion of voyages of exploration, but in Hewes’ eyes these are very much a Good Thing.) The entire Jewish community gets kicked unjustly out of Portugal.
1941. Kate Seredy’s The Singing Tree features not only a kindly Jewish shopkeeper but an extended musing on how Hungary was formed when everyone - Hungarian landowners, Jewish shopkeepers, some third group that I’m forgetting right now - came together as one. This is a building block toward the book’s central theme: not only are all the people of Hungary one, but in fact all human beings on this earth are one, and therefore can’t we stop tormenting each other with the horrors of war? (A cri de coeur in 1941.)
Then a trifecta of short story collections, written in Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer and then translated into English: Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1967), The Fearsome Inn (1968) (actually a short story made into a picture book), and When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories (1969). Stories of eastern European Jewish life, often very funny or with a supernatural twist.
Then in 1970, the Newbery committee followed this up with Sulamith Ish-kashor’s Our Eddie (Jewish life in the Lower East Side in the 1900s) AND Johanna Reiss’s hiding-from-the-Nazis memoir The Upstairs Room. Another Holocaust memoir followed in 1982: Aranka Siegal’s Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungary 1939-1944.
2008: Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village is a series of poetic monologues told by different members of a medieval village, including a Jewish child.
2017: In Adam Gidwitz’s The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog, the narration rotates between the three magical children, one of whom is Jewish. (I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to plug Gidwitz’s Max in the House of Spies and Max in the Land of Lies, even though they’re not Newbery books. Yet. Max in the Land of Lies is eligible for 2026! Just putting that out there, Newbery committee!
Most recently, Ruth Behar’s 2025 Across So Many Seas is a generational saga of a Sephardic Jewish family, based loosely on Behar’s own family history. The story begins in the 1400s when the family is forced to leave Spain, then continues in the 1900s when a daughter of the family emigrates to Cuba for an arranged marriage. (Behar based this section on her own grandmother’s story, which she recounts in the afterword. The real story seems much more romantic than the tale Behar told to tell instead, which is such a strange choice.) Her daughter becomes a brigadista teaching peasants how to read until she emigrates to the US, and then her daughter vacations in Spain which the family was forced to flee so many generations before.
Edited to add:landofnowhere pointed out that I forgot Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, which is both embarrassing and inexplicable because I read that approximately 500 times as a child, and have reread it at least twice as an adult.
And also E. L. Konigsburg's The View from Saturday, but that one is much less embarrassing, as I read that book once and remember nothing except the fact that I didn't understand any of it. (And also during the quiz bowl at the end, the judges would allow posh to count as an acronym, but not tip. Why did this stick with me? The human mind is a mystery.)
1931: Agnes Hewes’ Spice and the Devil’s Cave. A kindly older Jewish couple help matchmake our hero and heroine and also lend money to the king of Portugal for voyages of exploration. (The modern reader may have a low opinion of voyages of exploration, but in Hewes’ eyes these are very much a Good Thing.) The entire Jewish community gets kicked unjustly out of Portugal.
1941. Kate Seredy’s The Singing Tree features not only a kindly Jewish shopkeeper but an extended musing on how Hungary was formed when everyone - Hungarian landowners, Jewish shopkeepers, some third group that I’m forgetting right now - came together as one. This is a building block toward the book’s central theme: not only are all the people of Hungary one, but in fact all human beings on this earth are one, and therefore can’t we stop tormenting each other with the horrors of war? (A cri de coeur in 1941.)
Then a trifecta of short story collections, written in Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer and then translated into English: Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1967), The Fearsome Inn (1968) (actually a short story made into a picture book), and When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories (1969). Stories of eastern European Jewish life, often very funny or with a supernatural twist.
Then in 1970, the Newbery committee followed this up with Sulamith Ish-kashor’s Our Eddie (Jewish life in the Lower East Side in the 1900s) AND Johanna Reiss’s hiding-from-the-Nazis memoir The Upstairs Room. Another Holocaust memoir followed in 1982: Aranka Siegal’s Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungary 1939-1944.
2008: Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village is a series of poetic monologues told by different members of a medieval village, including a Jewish child.
2017: In Adam Gidwitz’s The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog, the narration rotates between the three magical children, one of whom is Jewish. (I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to plug Gidwitz’s Max in the House of Spies and Max in the Land of Lies, even though they’re not Newbery books. Yet. Max in the Land of Lies is eligible for 2026! Just putting that out there, Newbery committee!
Most recently, Ruth Behar’s 2025 Across So Many Seas is a generational saga of a Sephardic Jewish family, based loosely on Behar’s own family history. The story begins in the 1400s when the family is forced to leave Spain, then continues in the 1900s when a daughter of the family emigrates to Cuba for an arranged marriage. (Behar based this section on her own grandmother’s story, which she recounts in the afterword. The real story seems much more romantic than the tale Behar told to tell instead, which is such a strange choice.) Her daughter becomes a brigadista teaching peasants how to read until she emigrates to the US, and then her daughter vacations in Spain which the family was forced to flee so many generations before.
Edited to add:
landofnowhere pointed out that I forgot Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, which is both embarrassing and inexplicable because I read that approximately 500 times as a child, and have reread it at least twice as an adult. And also E. L. Konigsburg's The View from Saturday, but that one is much less embarrassing, as I read that book once and remember nothing except the fact that I didn't understand any of it. (And also during the quiz bowl at the end, the judges would allow posh to count as an acronym, but not tip. Why did this stick with me? The human mind is a mystery.)
Stories! Find your own way
Nov. 16th, 2025 08:08 pmsoniaThe Crow’s Second Tale by Marissa Lingen, mrissa. A hopeful coming of age story about a very determined young person who finds her own way forward.
The Things You Know, The Things You Trust by Marissa Lingen,mrissa. Shifting and changing science fiction that is also about the present moment.
Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell. At the end, John Wiswell comments, "Off the top of my head I gave them the example that if I wrote a haunted house story, it wouldn’t be like Haunting of Hill House – it would be about a haunted house that was lonely and desperately wanted someone to live in it. One of my fellow authors reached across the table, grabbed me by the hand, and said, “Please write this.” On the train ride home, I did."
mrissa. A hopeful coming of age story about a very determined young person who finds her own way forward.The Things You Know, The Things You Trust by Marissa Lingen,
mrissa. Shifting and changing science fiction that is also about the present moment.Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell. At the end, John Wiswell comments, "Off the top of my head I gave them the example that if I wrote a haunted house story, it wouldn’t be like Haunting of Hill House – it would be about a haunted house that was lonely and desperately wanted someone to live in it. One of my fellow authors reached across the table, grabbed me by the hand, and said, “Please write this.” On the train ride home, I did."
Links: Emotions, trauma, research
Nov. 16th, 2025 07:22 pmsoniayoufeellikeshit.com, a self-care game by Amanda Miklik, based on a twine site by Jace Harr. Step by step questions to help you feel better.
Using the Arousal-Valence Model to Better Your Emotional Intelligence by Dr. Megan Anna Neff. Some aids to naming emotions for people who find it difficult, including an Unpleasant/Pleasant, High/Low Arousal grid.
Finding the Middle Way in Black & White Thinking with Marbling by Cait Klein.
Self Compassion and How The Science of Kindness Changes Your Brain interview with Dr. Kristin Neff, audio with summary.
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age by Thea Lim.
“To See it All at Once”: Black Southern Placemaking Technologies with Zandria Robinson
How our noisy world is seriously damaging our health by James Gallagher.
Women are three times more likely than men to get severe long COVID by Gillian Rutherford.
Opinion | I’m just 16, and I already have too many memories of mass shootings by Lydia Ganser. "It’s easy to offer condolences from afar while doing nothing to stop the guns."
What I Need You To Understand, Notes from Chicago in Late October by Dan Sinker.
Using the Arousal-Valence Model to Better Your Emotional Intelligence by Dr. Megan Anna Neff. Some aids to naming emotions for people who find it difficult, including an Unpleasant/Pleasant, High/Low Arousal grid.
Finding the Middle Way in Black & White Thinking with Marbling by Cait Klein.
Black and white thinking is a trauma response that is important to break down for our overall happiness and wellbeing. When we are not feeling safe, it’s easy to slide into rigid thought patterns such as everything is either good or bad, friend or enemy, kind or mean, awesome or awful etc. The reality is things are rarely ever all one or the other, and as we break down binary ways of thinking we allow more space for connection and collaboration to move forward in our lives.
Self Compassion and How The Science of Kindness Changes Your Brain interview with Dr. Kristin Neff, audio with summary.
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age by Thea Lim.
When I was twelve, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours. I was at another new school, the odd man out, bullied by my desk mate. My problems were too complex and modern to explain. So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own. Soon after, I stopped skating.
“To See it All at Once”: Black Southern Placemaking Technologies with Zandria Robinson
It was amazing to me to get to graduate school and to discover that I was a Southerner, and to discover that there was this idea that once all the Black [Southern] people left for the Great Migration, apparently we just didn’t even exist anymore, despite the inconvenient fact of the whole civil rights movement. So I had a bone to pick, and I just continued picking it.
How our noisy world is seriously damaging our health by James Gallagher.
"You have an emotional response to sound," says Prof Clark. Sound is detected by the ear and passed onto the brain and one region – the amygdala – performs the emotional assessment. This is part of the body's fight-or-flight response that has evolved to help us react quickly to the sounds like a predator crashing through the bushes. "So your heart rate goes up, your nervous system starts to kick in and you release stress hormones," Prof Clark tells me.
Women are three times more likely than men to get severe long COVID by Gillian Rutherford.
Through analysis of immune cells, biomarkers in the blood and RNA sequencing, they identified a distinct immune signature in female versus male patients.
They found evidence of “gut leakiness” in the women patients, including elevated blood levels of intestinal fatty acid binding protein, lipopolysaccharide, and the soluble protein CD14 — all signs of gut inflammation that can then trigger further systemic inflammation once they reach the circulatory system.
Opinion | I’m just 16, and I already have too many memories of mass shootings by Lydia Ganser. "It’s easy to offer condolences from afar while doing nothing to stop the guns."
What I Need You To Understand, Notes from Chicago in Late October by Dan Sinker.
There's noise, so much noise, but there's also signal and the signal was that they were here that they were everywhere. Smash and grab jobs happening across the city nearly simultaneously. But the things being stolen aren't jewels, they're lives. Off streets, from yards. One roofer plucked off a ladder. A landscaper thrown to the ground, tackled by a half-dozen men in camo with weapons. Sixteen people on this day. Sixteen people disappeared, from just the northern side of the city and suburbs. More across the entire city.
I think I may have seen something in /r/whatsthatbook more baffling than
Nov. 16th, 2025 08:54 amconuly"It's set in a time when things were hard for black people in America" - a line which so flabbergasted me that I don't think I ever figured out what to say.
But this one may have topped it!
"The story is about a black girl, somewhere between 8 and 16 years old, from a black family."
...I'm dying to ask why they think they need to specify that this girl is the same race as everybody else in her family, when that's usually how this works. There's no indication in the rest of the post that we might have reason to think she's not.
But this one may have topped it!
"The story is about a black girl, somewhere between 8 and 16 years old, from a black family."
...I'm dying to ask why they think they need to specify that this girl is the same race as everybody else in her family, when that's usually how this works. There's no indication in the rest of the post that we might have reason to think she's not.
Wanting to get strong
Nov. 16th, 2025 06:16 pmsoniaI had my first-ever personal training session yesterday. It went well! There's a gym one block from me that I've had my eye on ever since it quit being a Crossfit gym and went independent. I was dubious about exercising in an indoor space, but a friend pointed out that their big open warehouse door means that they have a lot better ventilation than most gyms.
I finally got in touch with them, and after some logistical hassles, I had my appointment with a tall, kind, strong young woman. She seemed easy in her body, and calmly gave me instructions and feedback in a way that felt welcoming and safe. I said I wanted it to be gentle and gradual because my body tends toward strains and injury, and she gave me exactly what I asked for. We focused on upper body, and did rows with hanging rings and bench presses with free weights and some pushups at a 45 degree angle because I can't quite do them lowering to bench height. It lasted an hour and I thought I would be sore today. I'm mildly achy, enough to tell me I did something, but not too bad.
I never thought I'd be the kind of person to lift weights or have a personal trainer. I liked being strong when I was moving house, and I'd like to get stronger again without having to pack up everything I own. And if I'm going to do that, I need some personal help to learn how to do it properly. They have some strength classes that I'm hoping to join once I understand the basic movements and how to do them safely for me. And I have some weights at home that I might be able to use in between.
I never had private lessons in anything as a kid. It was a big step for me to start taking singing lessons a few years back, and that has been wonderfully healing, as well as improving my singing over time. Getting some personal training sessions feels like self-love, permission to pay for the help I need instead of trying to tough it out on my own.
I finally got in touch with them, and after some logistical hassles, I had my appointment with a tall, kind, strong young woman. She seemed easy in her body, and calmly gave me instructions and feedback in a way that felt welcoming and safe. I said I wanted it to be gentle and gradual because my body tends toward strains and injury, and she gave me exactly what I asked for. We focused on upper body, and did rows with hanging rings and bench presses with free weights and some pushups at a 45 degree angle because I can't quite do them lowering to bench height. It lasted an hour and I thought I would be sore today. I'm mildly achy, enough to tell me I did something, but not too bad.
I never thought I'd be the kind of person to lift weights or have a personal trainer. I liked being strong when I was moving house, and I'd like to get stronger again without having to pack up everything I own. And if I'm going to do that, I need some personal help to learn how to do it properly. They have some strength classes that I'm hoping to join once I understand the basic movements and how to do them safely for me. And I have some weights at home that I might be able to use in between.
I never had private lessons in anything as a kid. It was a big step for me to start taking singing lessons a few years back, and that has been wonderfully healing, as well as improving my singing over time. Getting some personal training sessions feels like self-love, permission to pay for the help I need instead of trying to tough it out on my own.
You know what comes right after the dark
Nov. 16th, 2025 04:45 pmsovayMy poem "The Avalon Procedure" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It is finally Arthuriana; it owes its title as well as a debt of argument to Bryher and the rest is diaspora and geology. I still have apples on my table from earlier, brighter this autumn, and their scent of sweet orchards and cooling earth. If you want in on the saddle-stapled pages of this enduringly black-and-white 'zine, I can only recommend it.
Books read, early November
Nov. 16th, 2025 02:39 pmmrissaWilliam Alexander, Sunward. A charming planetary SF piece with very carefully done robots. Loved this, put it on my list to get several people for Christmas.
Ann Wolbert Burgess and Steven Matthew Constantine, Expert Witness: The Weight of Our Testimony When Justice Hangs in the Balance. I picked this up from a library display table, and I was disappointed in it. It isn't actually very much theory of the use of expert witnesses in the American legal system. Mostly it's about Burgess's personal experiences of being an expert witness in famous trials. She sure was involved in a lot of the famous trials of my lifetime! Each of which you can get a very distant recap of! So if that's your thing, go to; I know a lot of people like "true crime" and this seems adjacent.
Steve Burrows, A Siege of Bitterns. I wanted to fall in love with this series of murders featuring a birder detective. Alas, it was way more sexist than its fairly recent publication date could support--nothing jaw-dropping, lots of small things, enough that I won't be continuing to read the series.
Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays. Mostly interesting, and wow does she have an authoritative voice without having an authoritarian one, which is sometimes my complaint about books that are mostly literary criticism.
David Downing, Zoo Station. A spy novel set in Berlin (and other places) just before the outbreak of WWII. I liked but didn't love it--it was reasonably rather than brilliantly written/characterized, though the setting details were great--so I will probably read a few more from the library rather than buying more.
Kate Elliott, The Nameless Land. Discussed elsewhere.
Michael Dylan Foster, The Book of Yokai. Analysis of Japanese supernatural creatures in historical context, plus a large illustrated compendium of examples. A reference work rather than one to sit and read at length.
Michael Livingston, Bloody Crowns: A New History of the Hundred Years War. Extensive and quite good; when the maps for a book go back to the 400s and he takes a moment to say that we're not thinking enough of the effects of the Welsh, I will settle in and feel like I'm in good hands. Livingston's general idea is that the conflict in question meaningfully lasted longer than a hundred years, and he makes a quite strong argument on the earlier side and...not quite as strong on the later side, let's say. But still glad to have it around, yay.
Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker, The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics. Also a disappointment. If you've been listening to science news in this decade, you'll know most of this stuff. Osterholm and Olshaker are also miss a couple of key points that shocked me and blur their own political priorities with scientific fact in a fairly careless way. I'd give this one a miss.
Valencia Robin, Lost Cities. Poems, gorgeous and poignant and wow am I glad that I found these, thanks to whichever bookseller at Next Chapter wrote that shelf-talker.
Dana Simpson, Galactic Unicorn. These collections of Phoebe & Her Unicorn strips are very much themselves. This is one to the better end of how they are themselves, or maybe I was very much in the mood for it when I read it. Satisfyingly what it is.
Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. If you were hoping for a lot of detail on And Peggy!, your hope is in vain here, the sisters of the title are very clearly Angelica and Eliza only. Vaill does a really good job with their lives and contexts, though, and is one of the historians who manages to convey the importance of Gouverneur Morris clearly without having to make a whole production of it. (I mean, if Hamilton gets a whole production, why not Gouverneur Morris, but no one asked me.)
Amy Wilson, Snowglobe. MG fantasy with complicated friend relationships for grade school plus evil snowglobes. Sure yes absolutely, will keep reading Wilson as I can get her stuff.
Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe, A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression. This went interestingly into the details of what people were eating and what other people thought they should be eating, in ways that ground a lot of culinary history for the rest of the century to follow. Ziegelman and Coe either are a bit too ready to believe that giving people enough to eat makes them less motivated to work or were not very careful with their phrasing, so take those bits with a grain of salt, but in general if you want to know what people were eating (and with how many grains of salt!) in the US at the time, this is interesting and worth the time.
When you turn a solemn promise to a blatant lie
Nov. 16th, 2025 06:31 amsovayTubi had begun to endanger its status as an unrelieved treasure of free weird cinema earlier this fall when it suddenly disappeared two otherwise hard to come by movies of interest to me before I could recover enough from my hospitalization to write about them, and the recent appearance of an obtrusive encouragement to sign in at the start of each stream had not thrilled me, but then tonight I discovered that in the grand total of five nights since spatch and I last rummaged through its digital shelves the service had turned account-only. Without one, the most I was offered of any movie was a fifteen-minute preview. With one, its catalogue remains purportedly free—though presumably still in need of a hard adblock—but it had always been a huge attractor for me that in addition to resembling the experience of browsing the remoter regions of a video store where the schlock and the art films were all jumbled together, the service did not have to track its users. I never created an account. I enjoyed it not knowing what to recommend me. Any data the internet does not successfully scrape from me these days feels like a victory. Rob has offered to create effectively a burner account for me so that I do not lose access to some movies I had intentions of trying to write about, but I am feeling much more dejected about them and about the further algorithmic constriction of the world, besides which their equally recent, randomly mid-month deep-sixing of their library of classic Doctor Who makes it not impossible, but once again harder for me to rewatch Vengeance on Varos (1985) in memoriam Nabil Shaban. I am aware that far worse disasters are on constant rotation. But I just had my other social media nuked for not allowing it to extort my biometrics and I just had to wrestle my word processor back from the grip of unasked-for AI and I enjoyed being able to point people toward the occasional film that, region-dependent, they could just dial up and watch without it filing their history away for future advertisement. I just heard from my health insurance that it will cost even more in the coming year and it is already functionally unaffordable, except that I have too many specialists I can afford even less to lose. It just does not feel necessary for anything to be more difficult, even the unprofitable watching of B-movies for fun.
spatch and I last rummaged through its digital shelves the service had turned account-only. Without one, the most I was offered of any movie was a fifteen-minute preview. With one, its catalogue remains purportedly free—though presumably still in need of a hard adblock—but it had always been a huge attractor for me that in addition to resembling the experience of browsing the remoter regions of a video store where the schlock and the art films were all jumbled together, the service did not have to track its users. I never created an account. I enjoyed it not knowing what to recommend me. Any data the internet does not successfully scrape from me these days feels like a victory. Rob has offered to create effectively a burner account for me so that I do not lose access to some movies I had intentions of trying to write about, but I am feeling much more dejected about them and about the further algorithmic constriction of the world, besides which their equally recent, randomly mid-month deep-sixing of their library of classic Doctor Who makes it not impossible, but once again harder for me to rewatch Vengeance on Varos (1985) in memoriam Nabil Shaban. I am aware that far worse disasters are on constant rotation. But I just had my other social media nuked for not allowing it to extort my biometrics and I just had to wrestle my word processor back from the grip of unasked-for AI and I enjoyed being able to point people toward the occasional film that, region-dependent, they could just dial up and watch without it filing their history away for future advertisement. I just heard from my health insurance that it will cost even more in the coming year and it is already functionally unaffordable, except that I have too many specialists I can afford even less to lose. It just does not feel necessary for anything to be more difficult, even the unprofitable watching of B-movies for fun.(no subject)
Nov. 15th, 2025 10:48 amskygiantsI am extremely belated in actually posting about Taiwan Travelogue -- I know that I read it before June, because in June was when I was talking about it with recognito and he said 'oh I think it's an Utena riff' and I was like ?? ?!?! !!!! aj;dlkfjs;l of course it's an Utena riff. (recognito's post about it here.)
Which is of course a very unfair way to begin this post because it's many other things besides an Utena riff- primarily of course a story about colonization and power relations, as told through gender and appetite. Taiwan Travelogue is a book that presents itself as a translation from the Japanese into Taiwanese -- which I of course then read translated into English, another layering into the text -- of a Japanese writer's journal of her time in Taiwan, 1938-9. She's there to promote her book, not to promote the project of Japanese Imperial Expansion, of which she certainly does not really approve! and which she is not going to propagandize, except in the ways that she can't help but propagandize it! and she wants to experience the real Taiwan, most notably Real Taiwanese Food. Aoyama's major passion in life is eating, she is a tall young woman with a huge appetite, and the tour guide experiences that have been prepared for her are not sufficient to her desires.
Enter Ong: Aoyama's new entry point into Taiwan, a quiet young woman from a mysterious background who, unlike her other assigned translator, is willing to not only take Aoyama off the beaten path to Unapproved Culinary Experiences but also to provide additional culinary experiences at home in her lodgings. Whatever Aoyama hears about, she wants to eat. One way or another, Ong makes it happen. Ong, it turns out, is the only person Aoyama's ever met who can eat as much as Aoyama can; Aoyama feels a deep connection to her, is desperate for some sense of genuine reciprocal emotion, but no matter what she tries, moving from their employer/employee dynamic into something genuine seems impossible. From Aoyama's point of view, she's always reaching out, and Ong is always slipping away, putting up a barrier. As Ong sees it -- well, whatever she's trying to tell Aoyama, Aoyama does not understand.
The metaphor of colonialism as played out through the inherent power imbalances of a failed romance is not a new theme and plays out more or less as expected here, though it's relevant that this is a book about A Lesbian: one of the things that the text wants to explore I think is how being, in your own mind, in the position of an underdog and an outsider makes it harder for you to see the ways and situations in which you are neither of those things. But really what I found most striking about the book is not the central relationship at all, but the food. The book has a lot of dishes in it, and every dish has a context and a history: the ingredients come from somewhere, the way it's made has a certain history to it, the way it's made in one location differs from the way it's made in a different location, and Ong always takes care to explain why. The portrait of the impact that colonization by Japan has had on Taiwan is largely drawn through detailed descriptions of changing recipes. The book made me very aware of how hungry I am for material culture in my fiction! ... and also it just made me normal hungry.
recognito and he said 'oh I think it's an Utena riff' and I was like ?? ?!?! !!!! aj;dlkfjs;l of course it's an Utena riff. (recognito's post about it here.) Which is of course a very unfair way to begin this post because it's many other things besides an Utena riff- primarily of course a story about colonization and power relations, as told through gender and appetite. Taiwan Travelogue is a book that presents itself as a translation from the Japanese into Taiwanese -- which I of course then read translated into English, another layering into the text -- of a Japanese writer's journal of her time in Taiwan, 1938-9. She's there to promote her book, not to promote the project of Japanese Imperial Expansion, of which she certainly does not really approve! and which she is not going to propagandize, except in the ways that she can't help but propagandize it! and she wants to experience the real Taiwan, most notably Real Taiwanese Food. Aoyama's major passion in life is eating, she is a tall young woman with a huge appetite, and the tour guide experiences that have been prepared for her are not sufficient to her desires.
Enter Ong: Aoyama's new entry point into Taiwan, a quiet young woman from a mysterious background who, unlike her other assigned translator, is willing to not only take Aoyama off the beaten path to Unapproved Culinary Experiences but also to provide additional culinary experiences at home in her lodgings. Whatever Aoyama hears about, she wants to eat. One way or another, Ong makes it happen. Ong, it turns out, is the only person Aoyama's ever met who can eat as much as Aoyama can; Aoyama feels a deep connection to her, is desperate for some sense of genuine reciprocal emotion, but no matter what she tries, moving from their employer/employee dynamic into something genuine seems impossible. From Aoyama's point of view, she's always reaching out, and Ong is always slipping away, putting up a barrier. As Ong sees it -- well, whatever she's trying to tell Aoyama, Aoyama does not understand.
The metaphor of colonialism as played out through the inherent power imbalances of a failed romance is not a new theme and plays out more or less as expected here, though it's relevant that this is a book about A Lesbian: one of the things that the text wants to explore I think is how being, in your own mind, in the position of an underdog and an outsider makes it harder for you to see the ways and situations in which you are neither of those things. But really what I found most striking about the book is not the central relationship at all, but the food. The book has a lot of dishes in it, and every dish has a context and a history: the ingredients come from somewhere, the way it's made has a certain history to it, the way it's made in one location differs from the way it's made in a different location, and Ong always takes care to explain why. The portrait of the impact that colonization by Japan has had on Taiwan is largely drawn through detailed descriptions of changing recipes. The book made me very aware of how hungry I am for material culture in my fiction! ... and also it just made me normal hungry.
Just a little adjustment
Nov. 15th, 2025 07:26 ammrissaI haven't seen the copies of my new story in Analog (Nov/Dec 2025), but apparently other people have, so: "And Every Galatea Shaped Anew" is out in the world, ready to read if you can find it. It's the story of a technological boost--or is it a detriment?--to our most personal relationships....
Analog has been purchased by Must Read Magazines, and while some of us are managing to wrestle their contracts into shapes we're willing to sign, it's a new fight every time. I have another story with an acceptance letter from them, but at the moment I'm not submitting more. That makes me sad; I have liked working with Trevor Quachri since he became editor, and I liked working with Stan Schmidt before him. Analog was one of my BIG SHINY CAREER MILESTONES: that I could sell to one of the big print mags! And then that I could do it AGAIN! It's been literally over 20 years of working together, and now this. Trevor was not in charge of contracts at Dell Magazines, and he's not in charge of contracts at MRM. This is not his fault. I would like to keep being able to work with him and with Analog. (And with Sheila at Asimov's, and with Sheree at F&SF! Not their fault either! These are all editors I like and value, and one of the things that upsets me here is that they're in the middle of all this.) But the more MRM gets author feedback about best practices and refuses to take it on board, the less I feel like it's a good idea for me as an established writer to give the new writers the idea that this is an acceptable state of things.
So yeah, having this story come out is bittersweet, and I'm having a hard time enthusing about it the way I did about my previous publications in Analog--or my other previous publication this week. Maybe go read that, I'm really proud of it--and I feel good about the idea that newer writers will see my name in BCS and think it's a good place for authors to be, too. There are lots of magazines in this field that treat their authors with basic professional decency as a default, not as something you have to fight them for. I have kept hoping that MRM will rejoin them. There's still time.