Reading

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High School Survival

A recent book review by

rachelmanija reminded me of a forgotten, and now unmourned, novel I wrote somewhere between tenth and eleventh grade, about a high school that barricades itself in a "revolution" for a time. This wasthe mid-sixties, when student unrest was a news item. The escalation of the Vietnam war--the concomitant intensification of what we called the military-industrial complex--'Don't trust anyone over thirty'--no jobs for women except service (secretary, nurse, grade school teacher), and those underpaid--and meanwhile, the ferocious overcrowding caused by the world trying to squish the baby boomers into existing spaces while conveying, repeatedly, the message 'There are too many of you, you don't matter, you'll never have meaningful jobs'--you have the atmosphere.

But this high school revolution was really about the hypocrisy of teenagers using the news as theit excuse in their hierarchical battles with each other. What I was going for, in my clueless sixteen-year-old brain, was the lethal artificiality of being locked up with a few thousand of your age mates, which prepared you for. . . . what? In the workplace (or marriage, supposedly the destination for women) you weren't having to negotiate crowd of age mates suffering from the same hormonal chaos as you were.

But what came out was teenage boy violence for the sake of violence--something I knew firsthand--and the more insidious violence of mean girl crowds. My small friendship circle and I, experts at drifting into the woodwork to avoid attention, divided our gender into two groups, the indes and the pakkies. Indes--inde, for independent--were frequently the targets of the pakkies, the ones who roamed in packs, looking exactly alike in their teased behives, layers of Twiggy eye make-up, short skirts and t-strap shoes. They took over the bathrooms at every break and lunch, filling the air with hairspray and cigarette smoke, and the meanest would target any loner who dared to go in to try to pee. So you got used to holding it all day.

The novel had plenty of action, but central were the heroic indes, who of course knew how to survive, and when they didn't know what to do, they went to their retreat, the library. It all came to a satisfactory close, but I knew at the time that therre was something crucial missing, so I never typed it up and inflicted it on a New York publisher after scraping together postage from babysitting, the way I'd been doing with various other projects.

I finally gave it to a friend to rewrite, which was kinda cool, seeing what someone else would do with your story, but unsurprisingly the friend just doubled down on how great the indes were, and how stupid the rest of the kids. And so it finally went into a box, with varous other things piled on top over the years.

In culling all that old stuff, I rediscovered it. Glancing through, I wondered if there was any hope of resurrecting it as a period piece, but five minutes'perusal made it plain that it'd have to be completely gutted: the non-indes were all one type, even though on a personal level I knew better. The indes had no arc whatsoever, except in the wish fulfillment sense--they were the despised cool ones at the outset, then the heroes at the end, but Revenge of the Nerds did it better twenty years later (making me wonder if the originator of the idea was a peer). The story's potential interest would have to focus in on the pakkies, who would have to confront the very conformity they were trying to enforce. There was a possible story worth telling.

So out it went to the recycle bin. But it was fun to look back and remember the fierce pleasure I got in writing it and reinforcing the conviction that geeks are cool.

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bookses precious

Books read, early August

Ben Aaronovitch, Stone and Sky. This is the latest of the Rivers of London series, with both Peter and Abigail getting point of view in alternating chapters. If you're enjoying that series so far, rejoice, here's another. And it's up in Scotland, which was good for me because further north and may be good for you because variation in setting. Do I feel like this is one that moved the arc plot forward immensely? No, I really don't, this is one where he wanted to let the characters do some things. And they did. Okay.

Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. The jarring thing about this book is that it reads exactly like the essays I'm reading about Ukraine, Gaza, etc. in New York Review of Books (and, to a lesser extent, London Review of Books) in terms of tone. Occasionally that's comprehensible because some of those essays are still being written by Timothy Garton Ash. Sometimes it's just a boggling moment of "oh gosh it's been like that the whole time."

Christopher I. Beckwith, The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China. When you were a teenager, did you have a friend whose father insisted that everything of note had been invented by his own ethnicity? And would occasionally pop up while you and your friend were in the kitchen getting a snack to give you another example? I have seen this with Irish, Chinese, Hungarian, and Italian dads, and there may have been more I'm not remembering. Well, I don't think Mr. Beckwith is actually Scythian (...some of the dads in question were not actually their thing either), but other than that, it's just like that. And the thing is, he might be right about some of it. He certainly seems to be right that taking a contradictory and known hostile account as our main source about an entire culture is not a grand plan. It's just that I feel like I want more information about whether, for example, the entire field of philosophy from Greece to China was actually invented by Scythians, whether most reputable scholars would agree with his theories that Lao Tzu and the Buddha were both meaningfully Scythian, etc. But gosh it sure was something to read.

Ingvild Bjerkeland, Beasts. One of the questions that arises with literature in translation is how unusual a particular shape of narrative is in its original. Because in English, this is a very, very standard post-apocalyptic narrative of two siblings' survival. Is it similarly standard in Norwegian? I don't know. Possibly I don't know yet. Anyway, it was reasonably pleasant to read and short, if you're looking for that sort of thing, but for me it doesn't have a particularly fresh take on the tropes involved.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Adventure of the Demonic Ox. Kindle. Penric's children are growing up. He's not that thrilled. Having to deal with a possessed ox does not help matters. I wouldn't start here, because I think it leans on having a sense of Penric and Desdemona from the previous volumes, which are luckily all still available.

Rebecca Campbell, The Other Shore. Discussed elsewhere.

A.R. Capetta, Costumes for Time Travelers. This is a cozy that is actually cozy for me as a reader! Gosh. That rarely happens. I think part of the strength here is brevity: at 200 pages, it's only trying to do some things, not everything, which gives me fewer loose...uh...threads. So to speak. But also Capetta is quite good at focusing my attention on the stuff they care about, which is a major skill in prose. And: time travelers! getting clothes from somewhere specific! Fun times! I will probably give this as a gift more than once this year.

P.F. Chisholm, A Clash of Spheres. This is a case where I am really frustrated not to have the next one RIGHT NOW, but I generally don't do that (more on why in a minute). It's very much more in the land of politics than of mystery per se, but a good Elizabethan era [Scottish/English] Border politics novel, much enjoyed, last line cliffhanger aaaaagh. (It is also book 8 in its series. Don't start here. Chisholm expects that you will know various things about the characters and setting and care proportionately, and I'm glad she does, it works for me...but I've read all the preceding books. I recommend that.)

Emma Flint, Other Women. So...I'm part of the problem here. I know it. I talk a good game about how evil is largely extremely mundane and unglamorous, and how we really need to think about whether the way we portray villainy in fiction is fueling unproductive assumptions about some of our moral opponents being geniuses when some of them are in fact very venial, grubby, and straightforward. Well. This is a book with two narrators united by one man, and that man is one of the most banal villains in all of fiction. The only reason he can charm anyone is 1) extreme good looks, but as this is prose, you will have to be willing to imagine that yourself for it to work; 2) they are very very vulnerable. They are desperate. This is a book about the "extraneous" women of the 1920s, after the mass male casualty event that was the Great War, and how vulnerable such women could be, particularly with the gender norms and assumptions of the time. It is based on a true story. Its prose is reasonably well done. Also I did not enjoy reading it and do not recommend it, because "Look, isn't he gross? but basically very mundane?" is not something I like spending a whole book with. So I continue to be part of the problem, and I continue to think about what to do about that, but in the meantime, meh, still not thrilled with this book.

Sheldon Gellar, Democracy in Senegal. Absolutely a straightforward book about democratic norms and practices in Senegal and how it is similar to and different from other countries in the region, how it is influenced by France and how not. Absolutely the book it's claiming to be.

Sarah Hilary, Tastes Like Fear. This is why I don't put the next book in a series on my wish list until I've read the preceding one: because sometimes I will just be D-O-N-E after the mess an author makes of a book in a series I've previously enjoyed. This book was published less than a decade ago, which is far, far too recent for not one of the investigators to run into a person they have identified with one birth gender IDed as another gender and have nobody say, "Oh, well, what if they're trans." The response instead is not overtly transphobic but is kind of a disaster both in terms of handling of gender and in terms of the logistics of the actual murder mystery at hand. Not recommended, and it's killed my interest in the rest of the series.

Rebecca Lave, Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science. Definitely not what it says on the tin. This is instead an attempt to wade through and adjudicate the effects of a single outsized personality on the field of stream restoration. Which was sort of interesting as a case study, and it's short, but also I was hoping for stream restoration. Oh well, I have another book to try for that.

Rose Macaulay, They Went to Portugal: A Travelers' Portrait. In this one, on the other hand, you'll never guess what they did. That's right: they sure did go to Portugal. This is a very weird book, a giant compendium of short accounts of British people who went to Portugal for various reasons (grouped by reason). I like Rose Macaulay a great deal better than the average person on the street, but this is not the good end of her prose, including paragraphs that stretched for more than three pages at a go. If you want to know things about Portugal, go elsewhere unless it's super specific stuff about really obscure British travelers. If you're a Rose Macaulay completist, come sit by me, and we can sigh in mild frustration over this book. If you're not in either of those categories, this is definitely not for you.

Alastair Reynolds, The Dagger in Vichy. Kindle. This is tonally different from the other mid-far future stuff Reynolds has been doing, and I'm here for it; I like to see people branch out a bit. I don't know whether he's been reading some of the same historical mysteries as I have, but I ponder the question not because I feel like anything is derivative but because some of the same interesting ideas may have come into play. In any case, this is short and fun and I like it.

Nicole C. Rust, Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solved Brain Disorders--And How We Can Change That. This is also short and fun and I like it. Okay, maybe brain disorders are not an entirely standard shape of fun. But Rust is very thoughtful about what hasn't been working and what has/might, in this field, and her prose is very clear, and I recommend this if you're at all interested.

Vikram Seth, The Humble Administrator's Garden. Kindle. There's a groundedness to these poems that I really like. They have a breadth of setting but a commonality in their human specificity.

Dorothy Evelyn Smith, Miss Plum and Miss Penny. I'm afraid the comedy of this light 20th century novel did not hit particularly well for me. It didn't offend--there were not racial jokes, for example--but it was just sort of. Not hilarious. It's the story of a middle-aged woman who takes in a younger woman in need, is rightfully much annoyed by her, and learns to appreciate her own life a lot more thereby. I'm not offended by this book. I just don't have any particular reason to recommend it.

Sonia Sulaiman, ed., Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Science Fiction. I really like that there is a wide variety of tone, emotion, speculative conceit, and relationship with Palestine here. As with most anthologies, some stories were more my jam than others, but I'm really glad this is here for me to find out.

Darcie Wilde, A Useful Woman. A friend recently told me that this is the open pseudonym of Sarah Zettel, whose science fiction and fantasy I have enjoyed. This is one of her Regency mysteries--I understand she also writes romances under this name but I found the distinction to be clearly labeled, hurrah. Anyway this is just what you would want in a Regency mystery, good prose, froth and sharpness balanced, good times, glad there are more.

Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128. Flooding and river course changes! Environmental devastation and famine! References to James C. Scott in the analysis of how the imperial government handled it! Absolutely this is my jam. It's a very specific work, so I can't say that everyone should read this, but I never say that anyway, people vary. But if you have an interest in Chinese environmental history, or in fact in environmental history in general, you'll be pleased with this one.

Current Music: School of Fish, "3 Strange Days"

Now I'm walking round the city just waiting to come to

It annoys me very much that Alexander Knox's The Closing Door (1949) performed so dismally on Broadway that it never had a chance at a film option, since it would have made a neat little semi-noir addition to the catalogue of mid-century cinema that isn't totally pants about mental illness. Psychiatrically it suffers from the inevitably explanatory trauma and narratively from the climactic restatement of the moral that any audience with half an attention will have gathered for themselves, but not more so than some similarly oriented narratives from its era and certainly less than many. Otherwise and the critics who were bored by it can bite me, its representation of mental illness is remarkable for its ordinariness. Until the last-act decompensation which is explicitly stress-tipped over, Vail Trahern has no blackouts, freakouts, or delusions worth the name; he's a tired, nervous, lucid man who's frightened all the time without being able to say of what and whose ability to hold a job, never fabulous, has deteriorated to the point where he's lied for a month about losing the last one so as not to feel any more of a failure in front of his family than he has for years. He has some odd, jerky triggers, decisions easily overwhelm him, he can tell it's bad when stumbling into his son's photo-finish camera-flash leaves him in the childish pain of a nightmare. "I used to have some kind of a card index in my mind, now the cards are blowing about like snow." He's so terrified of being institutionalized that it makes even setting up an outpatient evaluation a minefield, which per the author's note is much of the social message even without the half of the family that views treatment as a more brazen stigma of lunacy than genteelly hushing the whole thing up. It has a more uncertainly open ending, but the frustrated insistence that mental illnesses should be regarded no more sensationally than physical ones reminded me directly and surprisingly of The October Man (1947), still my gold standard for the subject in its decade. At least on the page, it should not have been a two-week flop. It is never so much of a sociological treatise that it doesn't function as a character study; it doesn't need to be tricky to be tense because the stakes of sanity and autonomy are high enough. Knox wrote the central couple of Vail and Norma Trahern for himself and his wife Doris Nolan and while I am unfairly ill-equipped to imagine her performance, having seen her only as the chic deep freeze of Holiday (1938), he should have been very good as the disconnected, not inhuman Vail. I have not been able to find more of a visual record than the production stills accompanying the published text, which after years of just about every playscript or screenplay of interest to me turning out to be inaccessibly stashed in universities or special collections, I was genuinely shocked to find reproduced in full in the May 1950 Theatre Arts. The sparsely furnished loft which post-war signals the Traherns' poverty—accessible by service elevator, its wall of a studio window overlooking the surrounding roofs with their night-flashing signs—would have gentrified into the millions these days.

It isn't just the jack-of-all-trades quality: his career as an actor looks weirder with every fact I learn about it. I had known that he did a season with the Old Vic in the late '30's, but I had not understood it was 1937–38 which made him part of the legendary A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Tyrone Guthrie with Ralph Richardson as Bottom and Vivien Leigh as Titania and Robert Helpmann as Oberon, of which I have seen photos and caricatures and considered burning a time machine ticket on. He played the wittiest partition of Snout the tinker, for which he got irresistible notices—bettered when he co-starred with Olivier in the same season's The King of Nowhere, which the future Sir Larry conceded he had walked off with. He did first-run late Shaw in the West End and at the Malvern Festival, where his own first effort as a playwright premiered. He did television so early for the BBC, his appearances couldn't be burninated because it was not yet technologically possible to record them. For a while as both director and performer, he was involved with a company that did sort of experimental masques. Like any character actor worth their chameleonism, he played older than his own age from the start, at least once diegetically, already like a meta-joke. Except that he happened to be on Broadway in 1940 where it was easy for him to come to the attention of Hollywood, it starts to feel confusing that he got into American films at all, although even less surprising that he fit so badly into the Lego-set style of the studio system. He did post-war, post-blacklist theater in the UK, too, such that I have to hope for the survival of his televised 1970 When We Dead Awaken with Wendy Hiller. It feels existentially incorrect that the two of them were never in the same Shaw at the same time. I refer often to the hell of a good video store next door, but for some people you want the extra-dimensional expansion to the time machine.

In the meantime, it seems I can't read any of the detective novels he published pseudonymously in the early '30's when he was living by writing rather than acting, not because he was after all successful in taking their titles with him, but because even though Mystery*File made the connection back in 2015, short of incredible luck in a used book store the never-reprinted pulp of Ian Alexander's The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth (1933) looks impossible for me to get near without Canadian interlibrary loan. The possibility that Alex Knox was the creator of the first fictional Indigenous detective is fascinatingly random except that it fits with the interests of his much later, mostly historical adventure novels published under his own name. I am used to the phenomenon where actors not all that infrequently double as directors or screenwriters, but obscure crime authors is a new experience.

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Trapped, by Michael Northrop

Seven teenagers get trapped in their high school during a blizzard when they miss the bus that evacuated the rest of the school.

This was easily the worst book I've read all year, and I've read some doozies. I read it because I'd bought a copy for the shop for the niche of "children's/younger YA survival books for kids who've already read all of Gary Paulson and "I Survived."" I am going to return it to the publisher (Scholastic, which should be ashamed of itself) forthwith, because it is AWFUL.

Why is this book so bad?

1. It's incredibly misogynist. The narrator, Scotty Weems, is constantly thinking of girls in a gross, slimy, objectifying way.

The two girl characters, who get trapped in the high school along with five boys, never do anything useful. One's entire personality is "hot" and every time she's mentioned, it's with a gross leering description of her body. The other girl's entire personality is "hot girl's friend."

2. The characters have exactly one characteristic each, and even that one often gets forgotten, to the extent that I kept mixing up "normal boy" with "mechanically inclined boy." The others are "dangerous boy" and "weird boy." The latter gets downgraded to "not actually weird, just funny" (as in makes one supposedly humorous comment once.) We get no insight into them, their backstories, their home lives, etc, because none of them ever really talk to each other about anything interesting despite being trapped together for a week!

3. SO MANY gross descriptions of pimples, peeing, and pooping.

4. The book is boring. No one does anything interesting on-page until the second to last chapter, when it FINALLY occurs to Scotty to make snowshoes. Most of the book is Scotty's inner monologue about pimples, pooping, peeing, and hot girls. The kids barely interact!

5. The kids keep saying that help won't come because no one even knows they're missing, but that makes no sense. Every single one of them was supposed to get picked up. It's never explained why SEVEN DIFFERENT FAMILIES wouldn't notice that their kids never came home.

6. The incredibly contrived scene where Best Friend Girl comes staggering in screaming and disheveled, repeating, "Les, Les!" This is the name of Dangerous Boy. One of Indistinguishable Boys assumes Les sexually assaulted her and runs out and attacks Les. Best Friend Girl recovers enough to explain that she went to a room and it was dark and cold and she got lost, and she was trying to say there was LESS light and heat there. Because that's what you'd naturally gasp out when freaking out, instead of, say, "Dark! Cold!"

I feel like the existence of this scene in a PUBLISHED BOOK lowered the collective intelligence of the universe by at least half a point.

7. No interesting use is made of the school setting. The kids open their own lockers to get extra clothes and snacks, find pudding and canned peaches in the cafeteria, and spend the rest of the time silently huddled in classrooms, occasionally checking their useless cellphones that don't have any signal. Toward the end, they start a fire, and then, OFF-PAGE, construct a snowmobile (!).

Things they don't do: Break into other kids' lockers in the hope of finding useful stuff. Attempt to cook the cafeteria food. Search the library for survival tips. Get mats from the gym so they're not sleeping on freezing floors. Search classrooms and the teacher's lounge for useful stuff. Have a pick-up ball game to keep warm. Find ways of entertaining themselves without cell phones. HAVE GETTING TO KNOW YOU CONVERSATIONS - WHAT IS THE POINT OF DOING THE BREAKFAST CLUB WITHOUT THIS?

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Truly terrible.

ETA: I just discovered that it went out of print soon after I purchased it (GOOD) and so is not returnable (DAMMIT).

Current Music: Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane, "Burial Blessing"

Be my hand on the oar to row to eternity

My poem "The Burnt Layer" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It's the one with the sky axe and α Draconis: stone-time, star-time. It's been looking for a home for a while and I am very glad to have it bedded here.

As the currently compiling issue is still looking for more fiction: story-writing people of my acquaintance, please send it in! The website remains temporary, the 'zine remains its black-and-white, saddle-stapled, nearly forty-year-old self. There's nothing like it out there in any of the fields.

I am off to the doctor's, which is a lot less the kind of journey I enjoy making.

Current Music: Mona, "Kiss Like a Woman"

Here we are in the summer rain again

It was sunshowering most of the afternoon, so without doing anything as sensible as looking for rainbows, I went for a walk with my ancient digital camera which now turns itself off at regularly inopportune moments and still managed to capture some rain-dusted flowers.

( We all live in the sun and in the rain. )

The latest fruit of college radio has been Mona's "Kiss Like a Woman" (2018) and the all-ages cute queerness of its video. Since I had just been talking to

spatch about Charles Mee, I was extremely happy to see that the (re)making project is still online. The shell-shocking student production of The Trojan Woman: A Love Story (1994) which I saw at Brandeis in 2002 had been substantially, correctly rearranged from the original text. It triggered short fiction of mine directly and I still think about it.

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Hominids, by Robert Sawyer

A Neanderthal from an alternate universe where Homo Sapiens went extinct and Neanderthals lived into the present day is sucked into our world due to an experiment gone wrong. The book follows his interactions with humans in one storyline, and the repercussions in Neanderthal World in another.

I picked up this book because I like Neanderthals and alternate dimensions that aren't about relatively recent history (ie, not about "What if Nazis won WWII?"). The parts of the book that are actually about Neanderthal World are really fun. It's a genuinely different society, where men and women live separately for the most part, surveillance by implanted computers prevents most crime, mammoths and other large mammals did not go extinct, there are back scratching posts in homes, they wear special eating gloves rather than using utensils or eating barehanded, etc. This was all great.

The problem with this book was everything not directly about Neanderthal society. Bizarrely, this included almost the entire plotline on Neanderthal World, which consisted of a murder investigation and trial of the missing Neanderthal's male partner (what we would call his husband or lover), which was mostly tedious and ensured that we see very little of Neanderthal society. The Neanderthal interactions on our world were fun, but the non-Neanderthal parts were painful. There is a very graphic, on-page stranger rape of the main female character, solely so she can realize that Neanderthal dude is not like human men. There's two sequels, which I will not read.

It got some pretty entertaining reviews:

"☆☆☆☆☆1 out of 5 stars.
No. JUST NO.
I am sorry, but the premise of inherently and innately peaceful cultures with more advanced technology than conflict-driven cultures is patently absurd. Read Alistair Reynolds' Century Rain for an examination of how technological advancement depends on strife: necessity is the mother of invention, and the greatest necessity of all is fighting for survival. I will not be lectured for my male homosapien hubris by a creature that would never have gotten past the late neolithic in technology."

Hominids won a Hugo! Here are the other nominees.

1st place: Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (Canadian)
2nd place: Kiln People by David Brin (American)
3rd place: Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick (American)
4th place: The Scar by China Miéville (British)
5th place: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (American)

Amazingly, I have read or attempted to read all of them. My ratings:

1st place: Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick (American)
2nd place: The Scar by China Miéville (British).
3rd place: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (American)
4th place: Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (Canadian)
5th place: Kiln People by David Brin (American)

If I'd voted, it would be very close between Bones of the Earth and The Scar, both of which I loved. I made a valiant attempt at The Years of Rice and Salt. Like all of KSR's books, I'm sure it's quite good but not for me. I know I read Kiln People but recall literally nothing about it, so I'll give Hominids a place above it for having some nice Neanderthal stuff.

The actual ballot is a complete embarrassment.

Current Music: JVK, "My Own Man"

I'm the left hand ticking on the timeless clock

Otherwise mostly what goes on around here is capitalism, errands, and interacting with doctors: the usual. Wishing I could vaporize people with the power of my brain.

I had missed this article on the photographs of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, who memorialized on glass negatives, with a view camera in the improvised studio of their farmyard, thousands on thousands of soldiers and laborers from around the literal world passing through Vignacourt on their way to the British lines of the First World War. It started as a business; it became memory-work, ghost-work. They cannibalized their own windows rather than erase an exposure, the last and perhaps only record of the men who had marched on to the Somme. I was not surprised to read that they took no more photographs after the war, that the husband shot himself, that the wife did not destroy the collection but left it in the farmhouse's attic for history to deal with, too close to the epicenter herself. If I had ever seen any of their images, I had not known the story. The article makes much of the immediacy and casualness of their pictures, of which this one makes a shock of a calling card because only their uniforms and the tin hat one of them isn't wearing tell the time: their expressions aren't a century old. Time is plastic stuff. Don't even ask how long a decade ago feels.

I was in the car tonight at the right time to hear a live-in-studio set from local rockers JVK, reprising three-fifths of their debut EP Hello, Again (2022) for WERS. I get to feel slightly ahead of the curve discovering Tristwch y Fenywod at the start of this year, but I had not encountered Cerys Hafana's "Child Owlet" (2024), which without altering the ballad becomes in their telling a witch song.

The mango lassi pie from Petsi does not actually much resemble the experience of a mango lassi, but since it is constructed along the principle of a key lime pie except with mango, I love it.

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reading

Evelina again

I don't know how many times I've read this, but as my book group is meeting Saturday, I dug it back out of the box and have been rereading it. The influence on Jane Austen is clearer with each reread. Astonishing that it was considered so genteel at the time, with all the thoughtless animal cruelty as well as abuse of the characters set up as comic villains.

The hero and heroine are dull as ditchwater, of course; she is unswerving in her maidenly modesty (and beauty) and purity, and he remains at a distance, regarded by all as a cynosure, and ever ready to rescue her though they scarcely have an actual conversation. But there's too much delicacy to actually get to know one another as people; she has to know that he's a gentleman, and he has to know her virtue before the wedding bells can ring.

The fun is in the secondary characters in all their vulgarity, and in the minute descriptions of life in London in the 1770s.

I'm halfway through, maybe more to come.

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The Journey, by Joyce Carol Thomas

This is one of the most unusual books I've ever read. And if you've been reading my reviews for a while, you know what a strong statement that is. Here's the buries-the-lede back cover:

The town's teenagers are dying. One by one they are mysteriously disappearing but Meggie Alexander refuses to wait in fear. She and her boyfriend Matthew decide to get to the bottom of all the strange goings-on. And they discover a horrible secret.

Now someone is stalking them - but who? There's only one thing that can save Meggie now - the stories a tarantula told her as a baby.

Bet you weren't expecting that, huh?

This was a Scholastic novel from 1988. I'd seen other Thomas novels in that period but never read them, because they all looked like depressing historicals about the black experience - the one I recall seeing specifically was Touched by Fire. I sure never saw this one. I found it in the used children's section of The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.

Any description of this book won't truly convey the experience of reading it, but I'll give it a shot. It starts with a prologue in omniscient POV, largely from the POV of a talking tarantula visiting Meggie soon after she's born, chatting and spinning webs that tell stories to her:

"I get so sick and tired of common folk trying to put their nobody feet on my queenly head. Me? I was present in the first world. Furthermore," the spider boasted, squinting her crooked eyes, "I come from a looooong line of royalty and famous people. Millions of years ago I saw the first rainbow. I ruled as the Egyptian historical arachnid. I'm somebody."

As I transcribe that, it occurs to me that she shares some DNA with The Last Unicorn's butterfly.

The prologue ends when Meggie's mother spots the spider and tries to kill her, believing her daughter is in danger. Chapter one opens when Meggie is fifteen. Briefly, it feels like a YA novel about being black and young in (then)-modern America, and it kind of is that, except for the very heightened writing style, including the dialogue. Thomas is a poet and not trying to write in a naturalistic manner. It's often gorgeous:

She ended [the sermon] with these resounding words falling quiet as small sprinklings of nutmeg whispering into a bowl of whipping cream.

The milieu Meggie lives in is lived-in and sharply and beautifully drawn, skipping from a barbershop where customers complain about women preaching to a quick sketch of a neighborhood woman trying to make her poor house beautiful and not noticing that its real beauty lies in her children to Meggie's exquisitely evoked joy in running. And then Meggie finds the HEADLESS CORPSE of one of her classmates! We check in on a trio of terrible neighbors plotting to do something evil to the town's teenagers! The local spiders are concerned!

This book has the prose one would expect to find in a novel written by a poet about being a black teenager in America, except it's also about headless corpses and spider guardians. It is a trip and a half.

( Read more... )

I am so glad that Thomas wrote this amazingly weird novel, and that someone at the bookshop bought it, and that I just happened to come in while it was on the shelf. It's like Adrian Tchaikovsky collaborated with Angela Johnson and Lois Duncan. There has never been anything like it, and there never will be again. Someone ought to reprint it.

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Troubled Waters, by Sharon Shinn

Zoe Ardelay and her father have lived in exile in a small village since he, a former courtier, had an argument with the king. At the opening of the book, her father has just died of natural causes. Then Darien, the king's advisor, shows up and announces that Zoe has been chosen as the king's fifth wife. Zoe, immersed in the drifting, passive phase of grief, sets out with him for the capital city she hasn't seen since she was a child. The story does not go in any of the expected directions after that, starting with the conveyance they use to get there: a new invention, a gas-powered automobile.

This small-scale fantasy is the first of five "Elemental Blessings" books, but stands alone. It does end up involving the politics and rulership of a country, but it's mostly the story of one woman, how her life changes after her father dies, and the relationships she has with the people she meets. It's got great characters and relationships, focuses on small but meaningful moments in a very pleasing manner, and has outstandingly original worldbuilding. Most of it is not set in court, and involves ordinary poor and middle-class people and settings. The vibe is reminiscent of early Robin McKinley.

Welce, the country it's set in, has two aspects which are crucial to both plot and character, and are interestingly intertwined. They may seem complicated when I explain them, but they're extremely easy to follow and remember in the actual book.

The first aspect is a system of elemental beliefs and magic, similar to a zodiac. The elements are water, air, fire, earth, and wood. Every person in the country is associated with one of those elements, which is linked with personality characteristics, aptitudes, aspects of the human body, and, occasionally, magic. This is all very detailed and cool - for instance, water is associated with blood, wood with bone, and so forth. We've all seen elemental systems before, but Shinn's is exceptionally well-done. The way the elemental system is entwined with everyday life is outstanding.

How do people know which element is theirs? Here's where we get to the second system, which I have never come across before. Temples, which are not dedicated to Gods but to the five elements, have barrels of blessings - coins marked with symbols representing blessings like intelligence, change, courage, joy, and so forth. Each blessing is associated with an element. People randomly pull coins for both very important and small occasions, to get a hint of what way they should take or, upon the birth of a child, to get three blessings that the child will keep for life. The blessings a child gets may or may not show their element - if they don't, it becomes clear over time based on personality.

The blessings are clearly genuinely magical and real, but often in subtle ways. I loved the blessings and the way they work into the story is incredibly cool. Same with the elements. Zoe's element is water, and her entire plot has a meandering quality which actually does feel like a water-plot, based on the qualities ascribed to water in the book.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes small-scale, character-based fantasy AND to anyone who likes cool magic systems or worldbuilding. It's not quite a cozy fantasy but it has a lot of cozy aspects. I can see myself re-reading this often.

There are five books, one for each element. I've since read the second book, Royal Airs. It's charming and enjoyable (and involves primitive airplanes, always a bonus) but doesn't quite have the same lightning in a bottle quality of Troubled Waters.

Current Music: Patrick Wolf, "Hymn of the Haar"

To cormorant to samphire to plover

I seem to have been the member of my family to introduce my niece to the Atlantic off Cape Elizabeth where I learned to swim. Since

spatch and I had the honor and the fun of driving her back to her father, we took the opportunity to stop off in Kittery for fried summer foods, York Beach for body-slamming waves and salt water taffy and soft-serve, and then Two Lights for climbing all over the ledges she kept making sure were not petrified wood before handing the tall child back at Kettle Cove where she had waded out to gather wet-shining lumps of quartz. I forgot to pack swim trunks and the cuffs of my jeans are full of sand.

( As we haul away to harbor. )

At Kettle Cove, I walked barefoot over the springing beds of knotted wrack and the emery bite of barnacles. I told my niece about the invasive tiny green crabs her father and I used to catch, which even under capitalism it is now ethical to consume. I dislike so very much of the wrench of the world, but I love that my niece has turned out to love the sea.

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bookses precious

The Other Shore, by Rebecca Campbell

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This collection featured stories I'd read--and very much liked--before as well as stories that were new to me. I read extensively in short SFF, so that's not unexpected for any collection these days. What's less typical is how consistently high-quality these stories are, across different tone and topic.

There is a rootedness to these stories that I love to see in short speculative fiction, a sense of place and culture. It doesn't hurt that Campbell's sense of place and culture is a northern one--not one of my parts of the north but north all the same. And forest, oh, this is a very arboreal book. There's death and transformation here--these stories are like an examination of the forest ecosystem from nurse log to blossom, on a metaphorical level. I'm so glad this is here so that these stories are preserved in one place.

Current Music: Janis Paige, "Body and Soul"

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patreon

You're on, music master

The silver lining of having to think about the 17th Academy Awards has been the discovery of I Won't Play (1944), the year's winner in the since deprecated category of Best Short Subject, Two-Reeler. It had minor competition. Its vignette of down time in the Pacific theater is a cut above ephemera. It has nothing important to say about the war effort or American values except in the back-handed, Runyonesque fashion of popular music and tall tales. Frankly, good for it.

Directed by old-school all-rounder Crane Wilbur, the screenplay by James Bloodworth sticks close to its source short story by Laurence Schwab in setting up and knocking down the riddle of Fingers (Dane Clark), the dog-tagged Baron Munchausen-in-residence of an unidentified island in the South Pacific so currently overrun with very bored Marines that it's a wonder no one's busted out with the Rodgers and Hammerstein, whom the ever-modest Fingers would no doubt take the credit for introducing. If you believe what the gum-cracking, Variety-paging little bluffer gives out, he had a hand in every success of stage and screen from Gershwin to Sinatra, not to mention some sideman action on his own account with the likes of Goodman and Dorsey. He gave a hot tip to Bogart. Even the luscious pin-up of Kim Karol, lately classing up the sandbag-and-stenciled-crate decor of their dugout, he claims to have discovered at the nightspot on 52nd Street where he taught her the schmaltz that took her to Hollywood. He'd be insufferable except for his nonchalantly chutzpadik air of not seeming to care whether he's doubted, always with a wisecrack in the face of a direct challenge—put on the spot about his anonymity compared to the stardom of his alleged protégé, Fingers who couldn't look more Brooklyn Jewish if he were my grandfather tosses carelessly back, "'Cause I ain't got her big blue eyes." The scornfully spellbound audience of Chicago (William Haade), Rusty (Warren Douglas), and Florida (William Benedict) can't figure it any other way: "Fingers is either the biggest liar in the world or the most important guy in show business." The favorite is not Option B. On the other hand, on this tropical swamp of an island with nothing to do but sit around and read months-late mail and listen to Tokyo Rose, even an A-1 line of bull is better than a total cultural blackout, the closest any of his buddies is getting for the duration to the movie-palace, big-band comforts of home. It is a truth reluctantly acknowledged that for all his backstage bantam swagger and the nickname none of them has even seen him play a piano to justify, Fingers can be "kind of nice . . . to listen to, I mean."

Obviously, a spiel of this caliber cannot run indefinitely without either putting or shutting up and the wave function seems to collapse catastrophically when the cargo off the latest LST includes a beat-up traveling piano and in front of a rec hall's worth of eager witnesses, Fingers approaches the ivories with amazement and then ingloriously balks. He can't come through for an audience who'd thrill if he played "Chopsticks." He gets threatened with a personalized anvil chorus and digs in his heels on the title drop. Even for the chaplain (Robert Shayne) who's just as sternly worded as the next disappointed Marine, he can't muster more than the weak sauce of "Look, I don't mean to be a crab, Padre, but, well, I—I kind of made a vow, see?" which goes over even less well than his theatrical bluster about military pay not covering the rates he used to pull down nightly in New York. By the time the chaplain's finished with him for cheating the camp of the treat he as good as promised every time he sounded off about his hot combo nights on Swing Street, even his most traditionally skeptical critics are actually a little stunned. "I knew he was lying about all those people he was talking about, but imagine not even being able to play!" Lucky Fingers, if, after that exhibition, he can even get launched on one of his former anecdotes without being drowned out by the worse than silent treatment of Jolson in sarcastically three-part harmony. His glum demotion to persona insta-non grata, however, is nothing compared to the pasting his erstwhile buddies are prepared for him to receive when an unplanned refueling at the airfield gives the entertainment-starved Marines the windfall of a USO show by none other than Kim Karol (Janis Paige) her curvaceous, vivacious, flame-haired self, all set to knock what Fingers would have called the cash customers dead, especially if an accompanist can be found for the little box of a piano which is missing a couple of keys and still a better prospect than a torch song accordion. In agreement, the trio head off to collar their musical phony for a never-better chance to show him off to his own invention: "I wouldn't miss this for Tojo's funeral!"

If I have to spell out the denouement of this mishegos, I Won't Play has made such a bad job of its telegraphy that it might as well have used the Pony Express, but the sweetest twist is not what happens when Fingers gets shoved down in front of the piano or even at the airfield where he sees off Kim, but the fact that the camp braggart turns out to be surprisingly sensitive to the kind of dreams that soldiers half a globe from home sustain themselves on, whether it's a picture of a redheaded starlet or a lot of glitzy tall talk. "Everybody kisses everybody in show business." Showing off the brash and vulnerable persona that would serve him so well in his post-war noirs, Clark drops into conversations like an all-time kibitzer and sees himself out of a roomful of cut dead air with an elaborately unconvincing effort of not giving a damn. Paige was already a Hollywood singer as well as an authentic pin-up and could have wowed her audience accompanied by nothing at all, but she does such a knockout rendition of "Body and Soul" that I get mad all over again about The Pajama Game (1957). Audiences who liked their brief chemistry would get to see him strike out with her a month later in Hollywood Canteen (1944). Except that it provides the necessary distance between its antihero's claims and any means of proving them, the war remains mostly a matter of palm trees and G.I. shirts and the occasional patriotic detail like a game of darts played on a photo of Hirohito, but it's still a little jarring to hear the scene-setting narrator sound so blasé about suggesting a location of "maybe Tarawa," considering the winner of that year's Best Documentary Short Subject. Is this short fiction comparable cinema? Like hell, it's Saturday Evening Post-cute and it answers its outstanding question with a wink through the fourth wall; it looks terrible on taped-off-TCM YouTube, but I am delighted to have proof that the channel's chronically prestige 31 Days of Oscar does periodically dip into the discontinued categories instead of just the warhorses. After all, "Even a good liar is not to be lightly dismissed." This vow brought to you by my big backers at Patreon.

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Super Boba Cafe # 1, by Nidhi Chanani

A middle-grade graphic novel about a boba shop with a secret.

Aria comes to stay with her grandmother in San Francisco for the summer to escape a bad social situation. Her grandmother owns a boba shop that doesn't seem too popular, and Aria throws herself into making it more so - most successfully when Grandma's cat Bao has eight kittens, and Aria advertises it as a kitten cafe. But why is Grandma so adamant about never letting Aria set foot in the kitchen, and kicking out the customers at 6:00 on the dot? Why do the prairie dogs in the backyard seem so smart?

This graphic novel has absolutely adorable illustrations. The story isn't as strong. The first half is mostly a realistic, gentle, cozy slice of life. The second half is a fantasy adventure with light horror aspects. Even though the latter is throughly foreshadowed in the former, it still feels kind of like two books jammed together.

My larger issue was with tone and content that also felt jammed together. The book is somewhat didactic - which is fine, especially in a middle-grade book - but I feel like if the book is teaching lessons, it should teach them consistently and appropriately. The lessons in this book were a bit off or inconsistent, creating an uncanny valley feeling.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Fantastic art, kind of odd story.

Current Music: Martha, "1848, Yawning Discreetly"

Hope and anger in the ink and on the streets

It feels like such a cheaply sentimental connection that I must not have allowed myself to see it for years, but the first film of any lasting meaning that I saw after the dislocating and disposessing move from New Haven which marked the end of my academic career and with it the whole pattern of my life to date was A Canterbury Tale (1944), that touchstone of continuity and exile. I got up in the morning to watch it off TCM. It gave me déjà vu as if I remembered some of its strongest, strangest images, even though it seemed after the fact impossible that I should have had any previous chance to see it. It was my introduction to Powell and Pressburger and I immediately set about tracking down as many of their films as were available in my country as I had never done with any filmmakers before—I could explain it as finding something to study after suddenly having for the first time in twenty-odd years nothing assigned, but then I could have dedicated myself to just about anything encountered in those three-ish weeks including for God's sake M*A*S*H. I had just written the most Christian poem of my Jewish life and so was perhaps more than ordinarily primed to accept Emeric's cathedral. I had forgotten that the only time in my life I was in Canterbury, I had written about its layers of time, Roman roads, the scars of the Blitz, I had linked it with the archaeological eternity of DWJ's Time City. I could have imprinted on any of the characters with their griefs and doubts of lovers and livelihoods and I went straight for Colpeper, the sticky-fingered magus in his panic of losing the past, his head so far up his home ground that he has not yet learned the lesson of diaspora, how to carry the tradition wherever you go, including into the future. I had heard it myself since childhood and never had to put it so much to the test. I loved the film at once and desperately and it still took me years to see how like time itself nothing can really be lost in it, the lifeline I called it without recognizing what it held out. I keep coming back to it, still excavating that bend in the road. It had what I needed to find in it unexpectedly, the coins from the field returned in a stranger's hand.

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Back on pilgrimage

Good news, fellow humans! My short story A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places, which appeared last year in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, is a finalist for the WSFA Small Press Award for short fiction.

I am seriously chuffed about this for a number of reasons. One, you know how everyone always says it's an honor just to be a finalist? You know why they say that? Because it is in fact an honor just to be a finalist. So many wonderful stories come out in this field every year that--well, you've seen my yearly recommendation lists. They're quite long. Winnowing them to any smaller group? Amazing, thank you, could easily have been a number of other highly qualified stories by wonderful writers, I am literally just glad to be on the team and hope I can help the ball club. Er, programming staff.

But here's another reason: if you've read that story--which you can do! please do! it's free, and it turns out people like it!--you will immediately see that it is a story about a disabled person. That disabled person is not me, does not have my family or my career or anything like that. But it is my disability. I put my own disability into this story. I gave someone with my disability a story in which they do not have to be "fixed" to be the hero. And...this is not a disability-focused award. This is just an award for genre short fiction. So I particularly appreciate that the people who were selecting stories looked a story with a disabled protagonist whose disability is inherent to the story without being the problem that needs solving and said, yeah, we appreciate that. Thank you. I appreciate you too.

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The Bog Wife, by Kay Chronister

The Haddesley family has an ancient tradition: when the patriarch dies, the oldest son summons a wife from the bog. Now living in Appalachia, the current patriarch is dying and a new bog wife must be summoned soon, but their covenant with the bog may be going wrong: one daughter fled years ago to live in the modern world, the last bog wife vanished under mysterious circumstances, the bog is drying up, and something very bad has happened to the oldest son...

Isn't that an amazing premise? The actual book absolutely lives up to it, but not in the way that I expected.

It was marketed as horror, and was the inaugural book of the Paper & Clay horror book club. But my very first question to the club was "Do you think this book is horror?"

The club's consensus was no, or not exactly; it definitely has strong folk horror elements, but overall we found it hard to categorize by genre. I am currently cross-shelving it in literary fiction. We all loved it though, and it was a great book to discuss in a book club; very thought-provoking.

One of the aspects I enjoyed was how unpredictable it was. The plot both did and didn't go in directions I expected, partly because the pacing was also unpredictable: events didn't happen at the pace or in the order I expected from the premise. If the book sounds interesting to you, I recommend not spoiling yourself.

The family is a basically a small family cult, living in depressing squalor under the rule of the patriarch. It's basically anti-cottagecore, where being close to nature in modern America may mean deluding yourself that you're living an ancient tradition of natural life where you're not even close to being self-sustaining, but also missing all the advantages of modern life like medical treatment and hot water. I found all this incredibly relatable and validating, as I grew up in similar circumstances though with the reason of religion rather than an ancient covenant with the bog.

The family has been psychologically twisted by their circumstances, so they're all pretty weird and also don't get along. I didn't like them for large stretches, but I did care a lot about them all by the end, and was very invested in their fates. (Except the patriarch. He can go fuck himself.)

It's beautifully written, incredibly atmospheric, and very well-characterized. The atmosphere is very oppressive and claustrophobic, but if you're up for the journey, it will take you somewhere very worthwhile. The book club discussion of the ending was completely split on its emotional implications (not on the actual events, those are clear): we were equally divided between thinking it was mostly hopeful/uplifing with bittersweet elements, mostly sad with some hopeful elements, and perfectly bittersweet.

SPOILERS!

( Read more... )

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life

Some reading!

This replacing of the floors is turning out to be a long project, since most of the grunt work has to be done by us, two olds. It's basically packing to move sans truck. I'm doing more culling, noting my own inconsistencies in regard to what I keep and what I toss. What seemed a ream of letters from one person went out, except for a slim batch of early ones when X visited a country they felt strongly about. But the rest had begun so well, with many book and writing discussions, then became a long downhill slide over the years until I reached the point when I dreaded seeing their handwriting on an envelope. Out those go--those letters served their purpose at the time, but are not worth keeping to revisit.

And yet, I cannot toss old letters from relatives, which are largely reports on their daily doings. Some of those letters are more than fifty years old, so they've become curiosities, little reminders of what life was like in the late sixties/early seventies. But mostly I won't toss those letters because to do so is to silence those voices forever. Sorry, kids, you'll have to toss them when you toss whatever I leave behind.

Not much time for reading as I tear this place apart, and also cull more books. So far I've completely emptied three tall bookcases, and there's a lot more to go!

I've begun reading Emily Eden, whose writing shows influence from Jane Austen. Also, there's the monthly Zoom discussion of Anthony Powell's twelve volume roman fleuve A Dance to the Music of Time; I missed the August live discussion due to conflicting appointments, but they record it, and I'm listening in pieces. So far the talk re this book, The Valley of Bones seems to be circling around how much it's a roman a clef.

Current Music: Wolf Alice, "Don't Delete the Kisses"

Rewriting old excuses, delete the kisses at the end

I seem to be continuing to sleep more than has been my steady norm for months into years, albeit at peculiar and inconvenient hours that leave me feeling like some sort of crepuscular mammal. I have never been able to nap in my life without it making me feel worse than when I conked out and now it just seems to be an irregularly scheduled part of my day. I am operating on the theory that I will eventually evolve a circadian rhythm. I had one in college, I think.

It would never have occurred to me that the house style of 20th Century Fox was historical megaflops, but Wilson (1944) is the third to cross my radar after Cleopatra (1963) and The Big Trail (1930): it lost its $5.2 million shirt at the box office and Darryl F. Zanuck died mad that it didn't win Best Picture. In the first edition of John Gassner and Dudley Nichols' Best Film Plays of 1943–44 (1945) which

spatch picked up from the carrel outside the Brattle Book Shop the week before Christmas in 2017, Zanuck is the only producer to have a preface devoted to his published screenplay and it's all on the defensive, primarily against charges of unnecessary expense and boosterism for FDR. It is not majorly concerned with the historical accuracy of the script by Lamar Trotti, which is fine because regardless of whether it has its names and dates in order, it reads like a political fairy tale. How appealing it is to imagine the twenty-eighth President of the United States as a shy dry stick of a boffin animated by an almost supernal honesty and a self-deprecating sense of humor as underestimated as his perseverance, untarnished by failures of civil rights and never so impaired by his stroke that he can't share the joke with his wife of her letting him out of his presidential responsibilities. A kind of sacrificial king of American idealism, broken across a vision that the world is too fallen and fragmented to match him in, classed by the opening titles with the national saints of Washington and Lincoln. Probably it could only have been trounced by the Catholic super-treacle of Going My Way. Hollywood gonif!

Pursuing some details about Wilson with the fervor of a person who really does not want to have to watch the damn movie, I found a profile of Alexander Knox by James Hilton in the February 1945 Photoplay and blew a gasket that I hope registered with Harry Cohn's ass:

Knox belongs to the new generation of Hollywood stars who shape so oddly into the category that they are already on their way to changing both Hollywood and the star system [. . .] Indeed, the only possible thing to say is that he's an actor, and that the fame he has secured in "Wilson" neither enforces nor precludes any particular kind of thing he will do next.

In support of this argument one has only to glance at his previous motion picture roles to gather some notion of the man's range. His first Hollywood film was "The Sea Wolf" with Edward G. Robinson, in which he played the shipwrecked author, a man of physical fear but mental courage. After that there were the memorable moments in "This Above All" as the gentle clergyman and in "None Shall Escape" as the fanatical Nazi leader which in Knox's hands had the sharpness of a steel engraving.

So Knox is a star, but like many of the newer stars, he doesn't fit into the star system; and when enough people don't fit a system it is the system that has to be changed.

I don't disagree with Hilton—about either the actor or the system—but if the latter had changed to accommodate the former in the mid-'40's, I wouldn't have spent these last ten years of my semi-professional life banging my head against the exact intractability of classical Hollywood to know what to do with its actors of whatever gender who couldn't be easily typed or ticky-tackied into marketable components of the dream machine, which are naturally the kind it seems reasonable to me to like best and inclined to be frustrating to follow. In the same way that it fascinates me to encounter criticism of the Production Code at the time of its enforcement, it's useful for me to know that my feelings about the limitations of the traditional star system were shared by its contemporaries, but then it's even more maddening that its operations would not shift meaningfully until the '60's. Justice for Jean Hagen, basically. In other news, I am charmed that Knox was into motorcycles. So was William Wyler around that time; I am glad they never collided.

I forgot to mention when the three robin nestlings fledged and launched, but the current monarch count stands at one chrysalis and four caterpillars. The moon is still wildfire-stained.