She Who Lurks By Day

Speaking of cats...

2009-10-23T17:27:50Z

'Pangur Ban'

I and Pangur Ban my cat,
'Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.

'Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

    -- Anon

The website tells me that this was written on a copy of St. Paul's Epistles 
by an Irish monk in the 8th century.  Translation by Robin Flower.

LINDAAAAA!

2009-10-21T21:54:10Z

Hey, you guys, I've discovered a new vice! It's old-time radio, preferably horror and thrillers. They're short, melodramatic, and wonderful: horror hors d'oeuvres, the Gouda-stuffed mushrooms of sinister entertainment. You know how they call the Miss Marple books and various other British murder mysteries "cozy mayhem"--well, that's what these are, cozy mayhem in an adorable package. With tasteless advertising for Carter's Little Liver Pills and Camel cigarettes. They're perfect for the frayed nerves of a student, because all you have to do is listen. If you're feeling energetic, you can put one on while you're folding the laundry, but if you want to lie down for half an hour, an episode of "Lights Out" is the perfect reason. You just sit back and enjoy the sounds of Peter Lorre's latest maniac getting ready to murder his wife again.

I've only listened to a few, so far, but there's a vast fund of them here. You just e-mail them and ask for a password, they send you one, and then you can listen to any of the 500+ shows on their archive. I can see many enjoyable late-night revels in my future. The archive features shows with the voice talents of horror actors like Vincent Price, Claude Rains, Bela Lugosi, Margaret Hamilton, Charles Laughton, Peter and Boris, and many others.

The first one I listened to was "Cat Wife", with Boris Karloff and some woman who does a good cat impression. (It's on the Monster Club website, too, but I first ran across it here; you can hear the whole show without having to sign up for a password.) At first, I found it ridiculously bad. Every single element is so predictable you could guess the whole story from one detail, like reconstructing a skeleton from one tibia. Oh, and it also features some pretty unsubtle acting from Boris--he tears a passion to tatters as if he was Peter Lorre and he'd been directed to do a sobbing M-style breakdown. His character spends most of the time screaming, "Linda! NOOO! LINDA!!!!!" at his monster of a wife (in every possible sense of "monster"). I was so embarrassed that I gave up halfway, blushing hotly. But, in the usual way, I couldn't get along without knowing what happened at the end, so I went back and finished it and I'm glad I did. It actually is intended to be funny. I was relieved; I'd thought they meant the whole thing to be deadly grim and serious, and that I was laughing at something done in earnest. Whew! It's okay! But it's not entirely a laugh, even so. It's disturbing in a good way: they ring some interesting changes on a much-used theme, and create some weird mental images. Also, I was kinda flabbergasted by how much sex they could get away with on the radio. Early on, our hero and his wife are having a screaming fight, in the middle of which she stops and puts the moves on him. It's actually quite hot, in a worrying way. I suppose you could get away with more if there wasn't a visual--but that's the thing, radio creates its very own visuals if it's done right. ...Oh, boy, does it.

Then, the next day, the other students and I all drove over to Stonington to take a walking tour of the historic district. And one of the girls had her car stereo hooked up to her mp3 player: "You guys, this is my favorite song ever," she said. It was "What Kind of Cat Are You?" To top it all off, I went to a swing dance that night, and the DJ's third or fourth dance piece was "Stray Cat Strut". You know, "I got cat class and I got cat style". (Here is a video so that you may ogle the band's creative hair.) I'm haunted by catness... haunted, I tell you, haunted! At this dance, they had a big water cooler, with paper cups and a marker so that you could personalize your cup and save it for the rest of the evening. It was fate. I took a drink of water, then got a marker and wrote "LINDA!!!!!" on my cup. And went out and padded slinkily round the dance floor.

...Well, I keep amused.

This is perfectly timed for Halloween, I realize, but really I like old-fashioned horror, ghosts, and mayhem at any time of the year. October is special in part because this is when the rest of the world joins me in my sense of the happily macabre. On that note, I need to decide on a costume for Halloween. Here are my options, so far:

--Ancient Mariner. Old coat, hat, boots, and work shirt and pants. Dark circles around eyes. White plushie albatross suspended from neck, cardboard crossbow. (Buy plushie albatross at aquarium gift shop.) Up-side: instant recognition by most people. Down-side: expensive plushie.

--Edna from Kate Chopin's "The Awakening", which we've been reading in class. Victorian bathing costume, soaked in seawater. Up-side: sexy (but almost anything looks sexy compared with the Ancient Mariner). Down-side: cold.

--Howard Blackburn, maritime disaster survivor, bar-owner in Gloucester, MA, and death-defying adventurer. Man's suit; fingers taped under hands; pasted-on mustache. Up-side: drag is funny and cute, plus Blackburn was a real and fascinating person. Down-side: can't use fingers all evening.

Behold this walrus-tooth.

2009-10-08T04:56:53Z

Guys! You guys! I'm in California. We've been here since Saturday, but we've been on the go constantly, and this is the first chance I've had to sit down at a computer. It's been wonderful.

Today, we came to Bodega Bay from San Francisco. Yesterday was also a marvel to me. This is my first time on the West Coast, I've never been near San Francisco before save in movies, and we drove up the Marin Headlands in our little caravan of vans like a convoy of Brinks armored trucks. I saw the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, and the open sea for the first time to the tune of "Fat-Bottomed Girls" blasting from the stereo. It was a surreal moment, one of many such my recent life has gifted me with.

After many adventures we wound up driving out of SF again, over the bridge, which is not actually yellow itself. The Golden Gate is the opening to the bay itself, where you go to become wealthy. The bridge is technically known as orange-vermilion, the color of old red brick. It goes well with the dull reddish hills and contrasts beautifully with the blue bay and golden sunlight. I am not ashamed to say that the last time I saw the bridge, it was in the third X-Men movie and Magneto was using it as a flying carpet to get all the baddies out to Alcatraz Island. Yes, we saw Alcatraz, too, but only from a distance, from a sail on the bay. It's covered in old, crumbling buildings and it looks like a fascinating place to spend some time, if only we had extra time out here. That's the thing about this trip; it's unsatisfyingly brief in each experience, but it's a good sampler for the future, when I come back here by myself or with one or two friends and do all the exploring I want to do. What I've seen of San Francisco, I love. Saw the sea-lions, heard them honking away, got so familiar with them that I even stopped going "WHOA! SEA LION!" and jumping up and down every time one appeared. That was the first few dozen sightings.

When we hit town, it was uncharacteristically clear and bright, but when we left it was rolling up a good heavy San Francisco fog over the bridge and the foghorns were honking away.

We're in Bodega Bay Marine Biology Labs tonight, and we walked upon the beach. I picked up abalone shells. This is the Pacific. I keep being reminded of that fact. Doc, our marine biology teacher, is exactly five feet tall and looks like a stern teddy bear. Tonight, he couldn't find an easy way round a table in the mess hall with people crowded around it, so he hopped up onto it and crawled the length of the table without cracking a smile. He only gets excited when you discover marine organisms and show them off to him; then he beams and practically capers with happiness. I think I may actually learn some science this trip, unlike our time on the Cramer.

I'm setting my alarm clock for 5:30 a.m. tomorrow so that I can run over to the beach again and enjoy it for a little while, alone, before everyone else gets up at the relatively civilized hour of seven.

Woot!

2009-09-21T02:19:10Z

Guys! You guys! I just went swing-dancing at the local social hall, and it was fantastic. I haven't danced for months, because first I was at home where I've become bored with all the local dances, and then I was here trying to get used to life at a new school. A couple of the other students went to this dance last week, and didn't really like it. But this week, I thought, what the heck, I need to get out of the house for a couple of hours, and threw on some nice clothes and headed over. Well, it was great. I must have danced eighteen or twenty times. Most of the guys were neat and extremely mannerly middle-aged and older dudes, and there were a couple of young fellows as well. All of them seemed to be having a good time. I certainly was. It turns out they hold this one every Sunday night, and there's a dance with a live band once a month as well. As my housemate said on our way back here, I know what I'm going to be doing on Sunday nights for the next three months. Life just got an order of magnitude better.

How I Began My Sea Adventure

2009-09-14T20:49:15Z

To begin with, I was sick.

It was probably righteous irony--before the voyage, and for the first day of motoring across Buzzards Bay in relatively calm waters, I thought I was going to be fine and was rather smug about what I'd seen in the past. Because I'd been out on whale-watches, hadn't I?  And I'd come through the entire day-trip fine and smiling, and rather smug about not having imitated all the poor tourists who had been eating Dramamine and hanging over the rail. I knew that I was tougher than that.

Think again. Late in the day on Sept. 2nd, I began to feel slightly wobbly and unwell. It was the constant rolling of the deck--it wouldn't have been hard to deal with in a small, two-hour dose, but it went on and on and grew harder as the wind rose and it started to rain. That made my legs tired, shifting and staggering about in an effort to compensate. The professional crew all seemed to be balanced on gimbals, like the dinner tables, remaining perpetually in balance no matter how the ship rocked.

We were keeping watches of six hours in the daytime and four hours at night. Three watches--I was on C Watch. When they woke me for us to go on deck in the early hours of Sept. 3, I got up to the lab and couldn't quite get command of myself. The lab was in a deck-house, a little structure with portholes all round, but they were closed against the rain, so it was dark and stuffy and going up and down. The science officer tried to interest us in zooplankton as seen through a microscope, to no avail.

It was the birthday of one of the girls going off watch. "I passed out and a bunch of people threw up," she said. I'd made the mistake of drinking coffee and eating cookies before coming on deck. It was a waste of good coffee as it all went over the side.

Not to pursue a painful theme in too much depth, I lost everything I ate that day. That wouldn't have worried me--when I was younger, I would sometimes go for a day without eating, just to see if I could do it, and it never did me any harm--but I couldn't keep water down for long either, and that was really upsetting. You can be fine for a surprisingly long time without food, but not without water. I would drink it a few sips at a time and walk around on deck to make sure it would have some quality time in my stomach. As long as I was on deck, in the wind, walking about and looking at the horizon, I was fine. It was when I was in the deckhouse or below decks that I became queasy. Whenever I was off-duty, I fell into my bunk and went to sleep. Then I felt fine. When you're horizontal and in your sleeping bag, the pitching, tossing ship just feels nice, like a rocking horse.

The crew couldn't have been nicer. Whatever you were doing, they would tell you to take as much time as you needed when you were overtaken by queasiness and had to run to the leeward rail. This was fortunate, as we all had to do dawn cleanup right after the first watch when I threw up. The combination of motion sickness, Clorox smell, and having to grovel around on our knees scrubbing the linoleum below decks, was a fatal one. Everybody was green and shaky and kept dashing up the ladder.

Altogether, it was a humiliating day after all the patting myself on the back I'd done. One of my consolations was that I was fine on deck; another was that I was able to keep functioning and even be cheerful as long as my stomach was empty. Yet another was that most other students were also pretty sick, in one way or another. About the only one who didn't throw up was Arthur, a beautiful and slightly dopey youth with golden curls and a classic profile. He was nice; I complained and he sympathized with me, saying, "Well, you know, I'm the one who should really be sick right now, because I was totally asking for it. I wouldn't take Dramamine because I said, 'If puking was good enough for Melville, then it's good enough for me!'" I said shakily, "Well, I also said that puking was good enough for Melville and good enough for me, and it turns out it is!"

But it wears right off in the end. I didn't take medication. If it had continued for longer than a day, I would have, but I wanted to see if I could get over it on my own, and it turns out that I can. Everyone did. The day seemed to last a week, because I slept and woke and did watch and slept and woke and did watch and slept. By the late afternoon, my appetite had returned enough that I devoured a chocolate muffin served for the birthday girl's sake. (She said, " 'How did you spend your birthday, Roxanne?' 'Oh, I watched a bunch of people throw up. And I counted zooplankton. And I passed out. Not cause I was drunk or anything. Just cause I was retarded.' ")

Well, I lost the chocolate muffin too, but that was the last time I was sick. After that, things got slowly and steadily less grim. That was the only bad part--being afraid that it would never stop throughout the trip. When I felt it receding, I could have done a little dance, I was so happy. For myself, I got through it by walking up and down the deck to get used to the swaying, by singing under my breath (you can't use your diaphragm to sing and get the heaves at the same time) and by reciting bits of funny old horror movies and musicals in the back of my mind. There was this one Boris Karloff movie where I played the same five minutes about twenty times in the private movie theater of my head. I don't know how everybody else stayed sane, but it was good seeing people recover and start to take an interest in life again, around the same time that I did. The butter biscuit I ate for breakfast on Sept. 4th was the best biscuit I've ever eaten.

Other than that, I don't really remember much that went on during the initial Sept. 3rd. rainstorm. It rained, it blew, a bunch of us threw up everything we consumed, and we did a science station which involved taking a sample from the ocean floor and towing a net over the side to collect phytoplankton. The whole science portion of the program left me cold; on land, I would have been mildly interested, but the sailing skills we were learning were so much more engaging to me that I only wanted to spend my time learning to handle sails, steer, take bearings, plot our position and chart a course. Compared to all that, it isn't terribly exciting to stare through a microscope at a slide full of copepods (sp?), small zooplankton which look like rather gross mini-shrimp and pile up by the thousand inside a net tow. I felt like the scientist who said, "Oh, f__, not another phylum", only with us it was one damn copepod after another. Hear the one about the scientist who couldn't find the copepod?  There were too many copepods in the way. Now, I wish I could work up more interest in them, because my mother is a zoologist and she's very well-informed about marine life, and I kinda want to see what she sees in it all. But the deep can keep most of its mysteries, for my part. It's good to know they're there, but I don't need to look at every single one. Also, microscopic animals haven't much personal appeal. I was kinda hoping for a squid or octopod, but no such luck, and our instruments weren't really designed to capture them, anyhow. (It would probably have died while we examined it, anyhow, so better off staying far from us.)  All in all, I like macro-sized sea life, the kind you can look in the eye. More on that next time. Oh, the crab larva was cute, though. It was black, graceful, and leggy, with two luminous blue eyes that glared at us. I hope it got away safely after we put it back in the sea.

I'm back

2009-09-12T02:43:59Z

Hope you all had a wonderful couple of weeks. I had a great time sailing, and I'm about as tired as I've ever been in my life. Lots of sleep tonight. Lots of laundry tomorrow.

*whomp*

See you in a week and a half

2009-09-01T03:31:41Z

Well, this is it. I have to finish packing and get a good night's sleep. If you want to take a look at this website, it'll hopefully keep a running tally of the Corwith Cramer's whereabouts and activities. The page hasn't been updated recently, but they'll probably start again when the voyage starts tomorrow. I'll bring both my one-use cameras, and try to take some good snapshots to post when I get back. Expect a massive posting blitz beginning sometime around September 12th.

Fair winds, everybody!

Sailor Teeny: rigging run

2009-08-27T22:15:26Z

I've just returned, my hands filthy, from a short session in rigging climbing. The vessel Joseph Conrad, one of the museum's properties, is currently moored at one of the Museum's piers, being used as a summer-camp ship. She's currently minus her topmasts. The masts remaining have one tier of rigging. That's high enough, though, when you're at the top.

This was a chance for me to right an ancient wrong. I don't know if any of the other students have a history with uneasy sailing experiences, but I once worked on the Niagara (for a grand total of three weeks, in 2001) and had a lousy time. It was a combination of things: I was new while everyone else had at least some sail training, I got there early in the season so I got a lot of uprigging work and little reward in the form of actual sailing... The end result was that I only managed to go out for a single day-sail, and spent only a tiny amount of time above the deck in the rigging. While I was up there, I was terrified. My efforts to hide my terror were all pretty much failures. People laughed so hard they got stitches in their sides when they saw the look on my face. I'm still sore that I didn't get a chance to practice more and get comfortable in the rigging.

Today, I volunteered to go first. A nice dude from the Seaport went up the shrouds with each of us in turn. (Shrouds are the vertical lines in rigging. The "rungs" are called ratlines. They murder your feet unless you wear thick-soled shoes.) I was scared, a little bit, and the rigging wiggled under us rhythmically as we climbed, but I just stared fixedly ahead of me. Good thing I wore sunglasses--people couldn't see my eyes. The view as you get higher is beautiful: the river, various small boats moored further down along the Seaport docks, the houses and woods on the opposite shore, and the town and the drawbridge in the distance. I went all the way up and touched the futtock-shrouds (little short shrouds for climbing up the outside of the platform called the top, and the cause for much mirth among the students. Futtock). Dave, the nice dude, kept me in conversation the whole time, kind of like how a doctor makes light small talk when he's doing something worrying. I answered tolerably calmly.

All in all, it went very well. I returned safely to deck, unharmed, not visibly shaken, and a little dirty. Then I got to sit around comfortably and watch while everybody else took turns going up. They did well: nobody freaked out or froze or became visibly discomfited. I think we're going to make an OK crew.

I've been having a great time shopping in town. Today, I bought a pair of gloves that I need, and a big white canvas sunhat that I manifestly do not need, just because I look badass in it. I hope my last check from work arrives in time for me to cash it before we go away next week--at this spendthrift rate, I'll need it. Oh, BTW, I called work to give them my forwarding address. It was nice to hear from work one more time. It was a great job, I enjoyed it, and now I'm glad to move on. That's one situation that I left in the most pleasant possible way.

Globetrotting

2009-08-21T03:48:29Z

I got out my passport today and looked it over. It's from eight years ago, right before my short time on the Niagara. As it turned out, I didn't even need it, as I wasn't with the ship when it crossed into Canadian waters and the St. Lawrence River. I'm glad I got it, though. Several years after that, in 2004, I went to Scotland. The only stamp in my passport so far is from the nice security guards at Edinburgh Airport. This fall, I probably won't need it either, as we're not supposed to cross outside the three-mile line when working aboard ship. Still, it'll be nice to have it along just in case--and for luck.

There's my photo on the inner lining. Beaming all over my face, looking pretty much as I do now, perhaps a little thinner and more carefree and optimistic. My hair is raked back unflatteringly from my face and the photographer exaggerated the size of my chin. I do have a big chin, but not as long as all that. Still, that's me, all right. It went to Scotland with me, and now it'll go on three college trips with me, and in the future I mean to take it all over the world.

Getting into W-M made me look twice at other assumptions of mine. I've been assuming I can never do some really ambitious stuff I want to try, like all that world traveling I told you guys I wanted to do some day. Up till recently, I've been treating it as a fun pipe dream, speculating vaguely and never actually firming up any plans. But, you know? I made this work out, I can make that work out too. I ought to decide what exactly I want to do and where I want to go, and then set about making it all happen.

Recently, I watched Maltese Falcon. I posted about that already, come to think of it. Of course, I loved Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo, even with his hair in ring-a-lets like the girl in the song. I was still appalled by the stupidity of the villains, though. What kind of challenge is there for Spade in beating a bunch of weak-minded idiots like those clowns? No wonder I don't like Spade. If I'd been writing the script, Mary Astor's character would have turned out to be an evil mastermind to put Gutman to shame. She would have pumped Spade as to his purposes ahead of time, wised up the three conspirators before Spade could get there, let them go through the whole show for his benefit, and then had Wilmer shoot Spade in the face anyway when the package was delivered. And then thrown in her lot with the three outsiders and walked off arm-in-arm into the sunset to go track down the real falcon. I'm telling you, she would have Mary Sued all over the place. Why didn't they consult me?! I'd have made her something far better than a cardboard cutout.

Anyway, my point in all this: my favorite moment in the movie might not look like much to anyone else. When Cairo is unconscious and Sam Spade is going through his stuff, he takes out Cairo's wallet, which is full of money, ID, theater tickets, and miscellaneous odd trinkets. And a passport. He pages through it, and you can read over his shoulder if you want to. I paused the DVD right there. The passport has a photo of Cairo looking shifty. Beside it on the information sheet, you can see: "Occupation: Traveler". The pages are all covered in stamps from all over the place, in various languages and alphabets.

I loved that. Joel Cairo may be the Little Henchman that Could, but when I saw that passport I wanted to be him. I was full of a sudden strong longing to have a life that could fill up a passport. Now, I'm looking at those empty pages ahead of me, and thinking, "Let's get something down on you." I've got two years left to go before I need to renew my passport, after all.

Truth in advertising

2009-08-12T04:00:01Z

Lately I've been reading John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and The Pearl. I like his writing, but these aren't my favorite stories of his. He's condescending to his characters, and when that happens I can never feel comfortable, no matter how funny or lyrical or otherwise appealing the style may be. Granted, it's supposed to be a funny book, but it goes about its humor in entirely the wrong way, to my mind. The narrator of Cannery Row is always having a well-educated smirk about the bums and poets and down-and-outers in the cannery town, and inviting the reader to look down from an Olympian height and laugh at these characters' foibles. And he's the sort of narrator who would use the word "foibles". My opinion is not formed on The Pearl as I haven't finished it yet, but I have the awful feeling that it's going to lead me down the same slippery slope. I read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea last year. It was a surprisingly enjoyable book, as Books You Have To Read go, but it gives me the sense that I'm invited to join an audience of intellectual elites in gazing upon the struggles of a poor peasant. It all makes me appreciate Rudyard Kipling more than I did. He may be a big fat classist and racist, but I can't remember a time when I've seen him laughing up his sleeve at his protagonist.

Altogether, I liked the famous Steinbeck books better--The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. As I remember them, in both books he's writing about working-class characters (well, George and Lenny aren't even working when the story begins, they're drifting) and in both books he manages to give you a big helping of their lives and experiences, and even get in a few good laughs, without condescending to anybody. The humor came from different sources--from characterization, from the way he manages to show, not tell, his observation of human nature. I'm thinking of the part in Of Mice and Men where George starts making friends with the other guys and telling them about how he and Lenny are saving up to buy a place of their own. After that, every other guy on the ranch decides he wants in and starts asking shyly if he could be included, and George is too nice to tell them no, so he just expands their dream house to include a bunch more people.

Now I want to watch the Of Mice and Men movie. It's got Lon Chaney, Jr. as Lenny, and I can't imagine a more perfect actor for the role. I like Lon. He wasn't that versatile an actor, but stick him in the right part, with a good director, and he's great.

One thing I will say for Steinbeck: his titles have direct application to his texts. They may sound vague and poetic, but there is actual meaning in that poetry. You read Of Mice and Men, and it's about mice and men. You read The Grapes of Wrath, and, by God, it's about grapes and wrath. (Insert joke here about how I read Of Human Bondage and was bitterly disappointed.)

The Growlery is: OPEN

2009-08-07T01:14:54Z

What annoys you? Is there some irritant in your life that isn't life-threatening but still bugs you no end? Is there a stupid little problem you would like to slap good and hard? You can tell me about it here, and I will sympathize.

I hate the computer at my work. It is old and screwy and occasionally, as today, makes me look stupid in front of customers. I also hate the customers who were watching over my shoulder as I lost everything I'd just typed and had to re-enter every single item in the first customer's purchase. PAH! I despise them all!

Some Gothic elements in Cloud

2009-07-29T20:42:30Z

It's hot and humid here in Massachusetts, and the crows are standing around on people's lawns with their beaks open, panting to keep themselves cool. Time for a little escapism.

At the reading on Monday night, I was talking with nineweaving , and I mentioned that I read her books, most of all, for their plot and the characterization that feeds the plot. I associate them with Gothic fiction because they give me the same sense of intrigue and enjoyment of strong, bizarre imagery that I get from the kind of novels I refer to as "Gothic". Nine was a little surprised, and asked me to go into it in more detail, and then something else came up and we both got distracted. Here's my attempt to explain what I meant more clearly.

If I claim the Cloud cycle as Gothic fiction, first of all I'm going to have to define what I mean by "Gothic". That's a task that may be beyond me. All I can say for sure is, "I know it when I see it!" Here is a list of fiction, in no particular order, that I call Gothic. Old-dark-house mysteries, family sagas, ghost stories, crime fiction--they all have certain elements in common.

The Castle of Otranto
Vathek
The Monk
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
Some novels of Dickens
Ditto Thomas Hardy
Ditto George Eliot
Everything Mary Webb ever wrote
Some novels of Mrs. Gaskell
Dracula
Frankenstein
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Gormenghast Trilogy
The Turn of the Screw
The Old Dark House (book and movie)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
"The Yellow Wallpaper" (story)
Some stories and novels of William Faulkner, in particular "A Rose For Emily"
Ruddigore (comic opera, excellent Gothic parody)
The Mousetrap, by Agatha Christie (play)
Rebecca
The poetry of Emily Bronte, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Thomas Love Peacock, various Romantics
"Locksley Hall", "Maude", various shorter poems by Tennyson
Some of the work of Christina Rossetti
Some film noir, including Gaslight
Some classic b&w horror, including everything I've seen so far by Val Lewton

Everyone is invited to add to this list if they feel I've overlooked something.

I'm going to set down a list of Gothic elements, in no particular order, and see how many correspondences I can find with characters, plots and scenes in the Cloud series.

SETTINGS

Grim old castle (check, Law)
Rambling manor house on the moor with tragic history (check! Grevil lives there)
Countryside where you can get caught out on the moor at night in an ice storm very easily (check)
Time period of strong class divisions, with clear boundary between peasant speech and gentry-talk (check; my comparison here is with books like Precious Bane and Thomas Hardy's novels)
Ruins, monuments, religious centers, and related legends from previous centuries (check--though I can't think of a Gothic writer who does one-tenth as much with folklore, legend, myth and archaeology as Nine does. Nineteenth-century Gothic writers are more apt to throw in a few ruined chapels by moonlight and call it a day. Even books like The Monk, which throw weird hauntings at you every few chapters, don't have any unified sense of coherency behind their ghosts and legends. The Bleeding Nun has nothing to do with the family curse, which has nothing to do with the apparition of Lucifer.)

PROTAGONISTS

Inquisitive, intelligent and headstrong girl with tragic past, battling forces that threaten to overwhelm her (check, check! One of them is overwhelmed, in a hideous manner, at the end of A Crowd of Bone. She lingers on [see below] in order to help her daughter not be overwhelmed at the end of her own story. Okay, Margaret and Jane Eyre don't look a lot alike, but I can't help associating them to some degree)
Haunted man with complicated family tragedy (check, though he's much more kind and easy to like than, say, Heathcliff or the guys in Tess of the D'Urbervilles)
"Fallen" woman who is sometimes allowed to pick herself back up again (check; sorry for the dated phrase, though. It has very little to do with who and what Whin is.) The "fallen woman" is sometimes synonymous with:
Madwoman! Ranting, nuts, dirty, oversexed, and/or a prophetic fool, telling people truths they don't want to hear. (Check! Oh, man, where to start? The leftover Ashes who has lost her mind, the figure of Annis as a beggar woman, the filthy Jack Daw cultists: all of them fill the place in my mind occupied by people like Mad Margaret, Bertha Mason, and the woman behind the yellow wallpaper.)

ANTAGONISTS

Dirty old lech (and how!)
Exploitative nurse/auntie figure (two or perhaps more of them, depending on who's pretending to be human at the moment. My primary association here is the mean housekeeper in Rebecca)
Terrifying parental or grandparental figures who have screwed up the lives of multiple generations of their family (CHECK. Though they're usually dead or absent by the time the non-supernatural Gothic stories get going. Mr. Rochester's father, Prue and Gideon's dad in Precious Bane, Sir Roderick Femm in the movie The Old Dark House. In this one, Grandmother is still around, on account of she is a god, and she's not about to get old and start seeing something funny in the woodshed.)
Evil aristocrat (check: see "Dirty old lech")

BACKGROUND CHARACTERS

Kindly servant (lots of these, male and female, in the Cloud world. The strongest and nicest is Barbary)
Wise and foolish countrymen and women (they're the real people among whom lost gods travel, in Cloud)
Goons to back up the evil aristocrat (check)
Ghosts:
--suffering and lost
--unfinished business
--desperately trying to guide their descendants
(Check.)

PLOT ELEMENTS

Multigenerational power struggle:
--for control of a piece of land
--for control of a person or multiple people
--for honor and respect
(Check to all of the above.)

Long-lost relatives (check, and how!)

Controlling attempt to form arranged marriage goes awry (check, multiple times, though I admit that's not limited to Gothic fiction)

Older generation tries to dictate breeding habits of younger generation, fails spectacularly (as above)

Murder (check; now that I look back, there are way fewer outright murders in the Cloud cycle than I thought, but they're onstage and not what you'd forget in a hurry)

Incest (check, left and right)

Outsider tries to fight/marry/backstab his way into the establishment (check: Jack Daw. See Steerpike in the Gormenghast books, and of course Heathcliff)

Illegitimate pregnancy/mysterious foundling baby (see above)

Younger generation succeed in righting wrongs left over from the previous generation (check, and also YES!!!)

***

Whew! And I've only scratched the surface!
One of the fun things about the Cloud series is the number of ways in which you can read it. I don't mean this entry to say that when you look at Unleaving, you're going to instantly start comparing it to Wuthering Heights. There is honestly nothing out there that's more than a little like the Cloud series. I love the series for what it is, not for the ways in which I can compare the stories to other books. But the comparisons are there, too, at the back of my mind; they just seem so natural that I'd never thought to remark on them before.

The crow and her marrow, they quarrel for the glass

2009-07-29T04:41:11Z

Yesterday, I had a very satisfying evening out. I drove to Connecticut for nineweaving 's reading from her new book, Cloud & Ashes. It was nice to see that there was a good big crowd there, very relaxed and happy and enjoying the reading. Nine, as always, read wonderfully well. The way I initially became involved in her world was when I heard her read aloud at Boskone a few years ago, and I think a lot of other people would say the same.

Cloud & Ashes contains a short story, "Jack Daw's Pack", a novella, A Crowd of Bone, and a novel, Unleaving. Are you aware of Cloud? If not, you can get started here. I became a fan right after A Crowd of Bone came out, and that's really the story that won my heart and left me wanting more. 'od's 'ooks, it's been made free online!

More on this next time. In the meantime, here's your limerick at last, Nine!

I devoured a volume of heft
And left half my brain in its weft.
The songs of Apollo
Are a hard act to follow,
So I made like a tree and unleft.

I thought we could all use a pantsless Bogart

2009-07-27T17:58:59Z

From classic_film :

Also, pantsless Cagney here, with bonus sock-suspenders. You're welcome.

Edith Piaf: the other pink meat

2009-07-22T21:29:54Z

The second set of French classes are a little more difficult than the first. Whereas in the introductory session we were all starting out with almost equal inexperience, this time around all the other students have had at least a couple of years of French in school, or they've been speaking a few words of it all their lives. On the other hand, it makes me really work at my homework assignments, because, hey, I want to keep up. So far, I'm still fumbling. But I know I can get better at this, if I devote some time to it every day. It's nothing like taking a school course; there is no axe hanging over us ready to fall when we take the final, so the only thing making us learn is our own motivation. And I think I've got enough motivation to learn to speak fluently. It's fun, like learning a secret code as a child or Morse Code as a grown woman. Suddenly you have this whole new way to express yourself, and certain people are in the conspiracy with you as you learn. Perhaps you've had this feeling before, but it's entirely new to me.

I was too harsh about my fellow students in the last class, by the way. As the last couple of days of 9-to-5 fumbling beginners' French wore on, we actually had a pretty good time together. One nice thing was that we all went out and got lunch together every day, which more or less forced us to get to know each other. Unfortunately, none of them are continuing with the intermediate class. Still, the participants are a rather nice bunch.

This evening looks like an uneventful one, thankfully. Earlier today I had a nasty attack of cramps, which doesn't often happen to me. I'm feeling much better now (in fact I'm at the "skipping through a field of wildflowers in soft focus" stage of recovery) but I'm unusually tired.

If anybody has recommendations of French-language movies that might help me improve my listening comprehension--or simply be fun to watch--I'd be delighted to hear them. The subject line comes from a mistake in French class. Someone mispronounced the title of the Edith Piaf biopic "La Vie En Rose", so it sounded like "La Viand Rose"... well, trust me, it was a hoot at the time. I've been listening to a little music to help me with my comprehension, too. All right, what I did first and foremost was find a YouTube clip of the Battle of the Anthems from Casablanca and listen to it over and over. I know that sung French is different from spoken French, but really, any familiarity is good, this early in the game.

Out, you dream-sickness carrion!

2009-07-17T16:55:34Z

I haven't been getting enough sleep lately. It's just my own bad planning. Consequently, I've been waking up with dreamsickness the last couple of mornings. It's the feeling that I haven't had enough dreaming/nightmare time during the course of the six hours I spent in bed, and the dreams will consequently follow me around for half an hour or so, making reality seem less vivid than the images in my head.

They're mostly things that wouldn't sound like much if I told them here. Flying; going to the opera in Boston with people around me in the audience whom I desperately wanted to avoid; wandering in a garden. They were all full of strong emotions that, in the way of dreams, had nothing obvious to do with the images. The only disturbing one was where I was being chased in broad daylight by a guy I know from gaming. Needless to say, the guy in real life isn't at all scary. I like being around him. The other thing that made the dream so disturbing was that he was wearing a giant mask of a monster's head, gray, with long gaping jaws and fangs. He looked like one of the shinigami from Death Note, which is odd in that I haven't watched Death Note aside from a very funny AMV that lignota showed me once.

The important part of this is that I made a weird discovery during the overcrowded dreams of the last few nights. When writers talk about their muse, do they mean what I mean by the word? What I've always meant by "muse" is the creative, well-hidden part of your mind that comes up with good ideas, after which you write them down and work them out on paper. The word gets flung around so much, though, that I try to avoid using it. In fact, I've always thought it sounded a trifle affected, or like a religious belief sneaking around disguised as a psychological concept.

Well, I have a muse. He looks like Colin Clive. Yeah. I know. I watch too many movies. But it really does seem to be the case. It was rather an awkward set of interviews. Several times, during the last few nights of sleep, I've found myself talking to a tall, skinny guy--in the most recent installment, we were sitting at a table in a sidewalk cafe--who looked like this guy: British, cranky, overly caffeinated, conceited, and yet kind of shy. (Okay, Dr. Frankenstein isn't quite the image I have in mind, but it'll do. I just spent half an hour looking for a picture of Colin Clive as Stephen Orlac, since that was exactly how he looked, but I can't find a single decent one. Oh, internets, you have failed me. It was an enjoyable waste of half an hour, though.) Anyway, he had invited me to the cafe to very politely chew me out. I sat there and ate a croissant while he told me that he had been coming up with all kinds of good stuff lately, so why wasn't I writing any of it down? I made feeble bleating noises of self-justification and said that I'd been busy. He wasn't having any of that. He insisted that I was letting down my end of the bargain. "We are a team, after all. Aren't we?" "Yes! Oh, yes, of course we are!" "Mmhmm. Well, then."

I think I have to get some writing in today.

The collage meme

2009-07-16T00:21:15Z

I'm starting this meme, see. Here are the rules:

1. In your own journal, list a series of objects, images, creatures or concepts which you feel yourself to resemble. There must be at least ten entries on the list. The more the merrier. The purpose of this meme is to try to define yourself, to do a little navel-gazing just for fun, and to come up with some stuff that makes you go "Hmm..."

2. You get extra credit if the entries aren't all people or human characters with whom you identify. Those are fine, but there should also be some abstract concepts or inanimate objects on the list.

3. Linking to pictures of some of the entries is also good.

This all started when redcolumbine and I were talking and she said, "Who would you pick to play you in a movie of your life?" I couldn't think of an actress. There aren't any who are complicated-looking enough to do a good impression of me as I see myself. Mind you, I probably look a lot less complex than I actually am. At any rate, the question made me think. I feel a certain similarity towards a lot of images, not all of them human.

My list:

1. A mourning dove.
2. A crow.
3. The Patchwork Girl of Oz (aka Scraps).
4. The furthest nymph to the right in Hylas and the Nymphs by J.W. Waterhouse.
5. The pirates in the crew of the Black Pearl.
6. An oriental lily.
7. My plush kitten, Mrie.
8. The crescent moon.
9. A red horse.
10. An intelligent and bad-tempered old man, such as Master Li from The Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart. (How I wish I could find art for this book. Kaja Foglio did an illustrated version--where, oh, where is it now?!)
11. An anchoress, such as Julian of Norwich. (Only in the state of my mind, not in holiness.)
12. The Bacchante.
13. The entire poem "Goblin Market". Not just one character in the poem, but the entire poem and everything in it.
14. My snappy red winter coat.
15. An old-fashioned ladies' bicycle.
16. A tall ship.

Really fun bad movies: "Passage to Marseille"

2009-07-15T04:02:07Z

Seeing as how it's Bastille Day (and the posh shop downtown has a tasteless poster of a guillotine in its front window), it's a good time to post about Passage to Marseille, that heartwarming WWII movie about a hardy band of Free French ex-convict airmen. Despite featuring Humphrey Bogart, it's obscure enough that I can't find it for rent anywhere. I watched it off of YouTube a couple of weeks ago, one night when I couldn't get to sleep.

As I understand it, they filmed this movie mid-war, but it was only released fairly late, in 1944. It seems to have been made chiefly because Casablanca had been such an unexpected success. The studio wanted to do the same thing again, only different, and they reused most of the elements from Casablanca: a strong pro-Allies line, lots of unconvincing French accents done by Midwestern and British actors, flashbacks, more flashbacks, Humphrey Bogart as a disaffected patriot who doesn't watch the road when he drives, Claude Rains being enigmatic, Peter Lorre being short, Sydney Greenstreet being spherical, the Luftwaffe, and gratuitous use of the Marseilliase. You will not be able to stop going "Ner ner na na, na na, NAAA na na" for hours after the movie is over.

Well, it ain't Casablanca. I'm not sure what it is, and neither is it. But it's a lot of badly-scripted, well-acted fun. The titular passage to Marseilles (I'm not sure why there's no final "s" in the title) is undertaken by a small group of French convicts. They've all been doing time on the Devil's Island penal colony. Being so out of touch, the Second World War kind of takes them by surprise, and they are all convinced that they need to escape their own country's prison in the New World and find their way back home to Europe to fight against the Nazis. Not for selfish reasons do they want to be free. It's only because they're such patriots.

If you believe that, you'll believe anything. But the movie wants me to take their good intentions so seriously, and it's so darned earnest and sweet, that for the duration of the film I did suspend my disbelief and became a very gullible audience member. The story can't just be told in straightforward fashion. Oh, no. It needs to have flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, to an absurd degree. The plot looks like a set of Russian nesting dolls after a while. Even this becomes rather engaging. As thus:

The story begins with a young reporter interviewing a Free French officer who commands an air base in the south of England. The officer is played by Claude Rains, looking pretty badassed in an eyepatch. He tells the reporter about the men under his command, flying air raids over occupied France. Their story is rather unusual. Cut to...

...a Vichy French naval steamer off South America, earlier in the war, picking up a lifeboat full of castaways. Some of them look like characters from Casablanca. They tell the commanding officer a cock-and-bull story about how they're castaway gold prospectors. Later, they tell Claude Rains the full story--they all escaped from Devil's Island. Cut to...

...these guys and a number of sweaty extras, slaving as miserable convicts on the penal colony, wondering if they can ever get away to give aid to their war-torn mother country. They conspire. They tell each other about themselves. Cut to...

...the full background story of at least five of these guys, detailing how each of them got sentenced there in the first place.

And if your head isn't going around by now, you're a stronger fan than I am.

By the way, it's all a nutty kind of fun. Bogart plays Matrac, the only one who's doing time for a purely noble reason: he was a newspaper editor who spoke out against the Fascists and was promptly framed for assault and battery and put in prison. Somewhere back in France, he has a wife who's raising the son he's never seen. In the present-moment storyline of the film, every time Matrac comes back from a bombing raid, he and his guys fly their plane over Mrs. Matrac's house and he drops a care package in the yard for her and the kid. (I choked up a little at this point. I have certain strings that are very easy to pull. And they told that part well--you see him dropping off a bundle of letters, early in the movie, but you don't find out who they're for until much later.)

All the other guys are plain old burglars, rogues, coiners, muggers, and murderers in the second degree. They just have a noble streak as wide as their bad side, and they trust Matrac's idealism enough to follow him back to France. Of course, together they're a Ragtag Band of Lovable Misfits: a troubled leader guy, an angelic young man, a big dope, the ancient and wise geezer who helps them steal a boat, and a perky little gutter-sparrow pickpocket. That's Marius, played by Peter Lorre and (wouldn't you know it) stealing every scene he's in. He's basically playing Nobby Nobbs here, only slightly more criminally minded and always patting himself on the back about what a clever fellow he is. The other guys are always going, "Shut up, Marius."

Every bloody trope and cliche that could be rammed into this movie with a shoehorn is present, alive and well. Right down to the ~~||||~~ ~~||||~~ ~~||||~~ marks on Matrac's cell wall when he's in solitary confinement. Even the bad lines are kinda fun. Humphrey Bogart has a sublimely badly-written speech, mumbled to himself as he paces his cell like a wild beast in torment. It consists of variations on the theme of, "My country is a rathole, the dirty rats sold me out, I hate France, gahhh!", repeated to an absurd degree. It made me want to write a filk to the tune of that song from "Kiss Me Kate". Let's see...

I hate France!
Philippe Petain can kiss me on the pants!
It may belong to Germany but it's no longer my land.
They hung me out to dry and packed me off to Devil's Island,
They jumped in bed with fascists, which has made them yet more vile, and
I-I-I-I hay-ay-ay-ate France!

Send help please!
They feed us on baguettes and moldy cheese!
We spend our nights in killing fleas and days in cutting lumber,
We've been dehumanized, I have no name, I have a number,
And worst of all I have to wear a silly stripy jumper,
Oh send help please!

NB: opinions expressed in this short character comedy piece are not necessarily those of the author, who has great respect for the French and owns several stripy pullovers herself.

What I wouldn't give for a glass of ice water or a cigarette

2009-07-15T03:15:40Z

Back a few years ago, I vaguely remember saying that I didn't understand the whole concept of smoking. It didn't make sense to me why someone would take it up in the first place, or, having taken it up, would then keep on smoking (aside from addiction, that is).

That was then. Here we are several years later, my life has become an order of magnitude more intense, and coincidentally I've been watching a lot of old movies in which the characters are constantly lighting up. (As my father says, "Smoking: the easy way to act.") Practically every guy and a lot of the women are seen inhaling smoke most of the time. And you know what? Finally I get the idea. It's a release. It's a small, portable version of the way I reflexively go into the kitchen and make tea when I'm feeling overwhelmed. Never in a million years would I take up smoking, but I wish I had a habit that would take its place. As someone on here said recently, if they made a cigarette that didn't give you health problems, I would go for it.

Nothing terribly worrying has happened lately, I hasten to add. I'm just making yet another set of big decisions. While my body's talking or typing, my mind is sneaking off around the corner to huddle in its trench coat and chain-smoke.

It looks like I'm not going to attend the study-away program at Mystic Seaport this fall. It's too bad; I was very much interested in going. But I can't afford it. I came very close to being able to do it--they accepted me, and I've even been offered scholarship money. But the only way I could have gone would have been if they pulled out all the stops and gave me a full scholarship. I'm interested in going, but not when it would make me run myself into umpteen thousands in student loans for one semester. So that's the end of the story. I'm disappointed, but not badly, and I feel all right about my decision. I'll be going to Miskatonic again this fall, and I have to figure out what I'll be taking there. The bright side is that they have some enticing courses on offer. The junior-year writing seminar is focused on "America and the Sea", so I'll still be getting my maritime fix.

Also, I can go on working at the bird store this fall, and I'm pretty happy about that, too. Perhaps Robin will let me pick up more hours.

Awwwwwwww!

2009-07-08T02:57:38Z

I just walked into the video store to return some overdues, and there at the counter was my favorite video store clerk. He and I have known each other slightly since I was a teenager, when we once acted in a play together. Let's call him Georgie, as that was his character in the play. He's always fun to be around. I've rather restrained myself from talking about movies with him, though, since, let's face it, he works in the store, so I figure he must have had it up to here with people telling him all about their favorite movies all day long.

Well, I walk in tonight, and there's Georgie at the counter. He smiles at me and goes, "Hi, Teeny", while he's counting change at the register.

He's wearing a T-shirt with Dr. Gogol on it.

Okay, this would probably not interest anyone but me, but I was delighted. It wasn't even one of the creepy-looking movie stills. It was more like this 'un.

I just about went into a tizzy. We both enthused about how great Mad Love is, and we both went, "Whoa! The only other person I know who's ever watched that movie!" He'd been given the shirt by one of their suppliers, and he liked to wear it occasionally, though no one else particularly noted it. Then I chatted away with him and the lady cashier, talking sixteen to the dozen all about how much I loved Peter Lorre, and all the film noir I'd gotten into watching on account of him, and how I was working my way through all the old black-and-white horror I could find. Georgie is into quite old horror, it turns out--I would have figured that out long ago if I'd ever taken the time to talk to him about it--and we stood there going, "Oh wow! How about 'The Walking Dead'! Have you ever seen 'Dracula's Daughter'?" It was great.

Then I came home, watered my cobra lily, fed my white cockatoo, and sat down at the parlor organ to play through Suite For Rainswept Nights And Large Floppy Rubber Bats.

By Gad, sir, you are a character, indeed you are

2009-07-05T05:25:35Z

You know what I haven't done often enough?  Mused about gay gangsters, that's what. Time for a book roundup post.

Lately I've been reading a lot of detective stories (Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett) and hardboiled fiction (The Postman Always Rings Twice: why hello there, disturbing sex scenes, somehow I'd almost forgotten you existed). This is one of those areas where my tastes have changed since I was a kid. I can distinctly remember being alternately bored and frustrated by all three authors, but now I like them a lot.

See, I used to get upset over The Maltese Falcon (book, not movie), and this is why. It has a truckload of characters, none of whose private thoughts or opinions are related to us. All we know about them is what they say aloud and what they do. That, right there, was deeply off-putting for me, when I was younger. I can deal with it now, because, well, that's how the book is supposed to be; it may not be my favorite style, but I can live with it. A worse problem was that the characters did strange, pointless, unbelievable stuff, for no good reason that I could see. Here are just a few of said strange things.

A guy gives back a gun to the man who was just threatening him with the gun five minutes earlier. Three criminals who have no reason to trust the hero, trust the hero and do everything his way. The hero happily taunts an armed and overexcited young dude, apparently under the impression that the young dude won't lose his temper and shoot him for the hell of it and think better of it later. And, what do you know, the hero comes to no harm. He's as unfazed about all this as though he were bulletproof. Later on, the same criminals have nothing to gain by letting the hero live and everything to gain by preventing his testifying against them, but they not only fail to kill him, they give him some money and then leave, gushing about how great he is the entire time.

The thing is, I thought this was simply my own problem. Obviously the whole book must make sense to everyone but me: it was published, wasn't it?  That meant it must be a good book in every way. I was just too unobservant to pick up on some unspoken subtext that would explain everyone's odd behavior. That subtext must be there in the book if only I was smart enough to see it. And I read and reread certain chapters of The Maltese Falcon, trying to see what I was missing.

Now I've just reread the book, because I wanted to do that before I watched the movie. And you know what?  I wasn't missing anything. There is no there there. It's not perfect, and there is no better explanation for anything, no matter how carefully you read the book. It's a detective story with motivations that are sometimes unbelievable, and it has a Gary Stu for a hero. This was a strangely freeing realization. Suddenly, I didn't need it to be perfect or believable. I just needed it to be fun, and it was fun. I could even accept that it was rubbish at times, because at other times it was engaging.

I'm trying to decide what it's actually about. It's supposedly about solving the murder of Archer, but, as Raymond Chandler said, everyone forgets about Archer during most of the book. It's also supposedly about the Maltese Falcon, but any other valuable and grotesque item would have done as well. That isn't important. What the book does make important, and what occupies a lot of air time, is Sam Spade disarming and humiliating Wilmer. I mean, even in my short-term memory that part goes on and on. Homophobia: methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. More on that in a sec.

The homophobia is a sight to behold. The movie is much, much better than the book in that respect: Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook lend their characters some personality beyond the "Joel Cairo is a swish, Wilmer is a queer, nyah nyah" which is basically all the book gives you. That aspect of the book is very hard to get through, because of the authorial contempt for his own characters. Being strongly directed by an author to hate and despise a character is often counterproductive. In my case, it often makes me feel sympathetic towards the poor unloved creation of the author. I certainly felt for "the Levantine" more than I ever did for Spade, and that's not even taking the movie-verse into account. (BTW, what's "Levantine" supposed to mean?  Okay, I know there's an area called the Levant, but there must be more to it than that. It sounds like a snide not-quite-ethnic-slur, like saying "Hebrews" for "Jews" and "Hibernians" for "Irishmen".) I have trouble seeing Gutman as intended to be homosexual, though that's what people tell me. Perhaps it's just that I don't like to think of Sydney Greenstreet having sex with anybody. (Sorry, Sydney. You're quite cute with your clothes on.) I have more of the impression that Gutman hires his minions in matched sets, and Wilmer came with Cairo.

This time around, I did actually buy the scene where Sam Spade gets Gutman to sell out his henchman. Gutman is pretty well-written. He seems like an academic type, someone who would study crime in theory but be weak enough on the actual practice to let Spade push him into a corner. I wasn't identifying with either of them, though. I liked Wilmer. He may be a murdering teenager, but he's a naive enough murdering teenager that he trusts Gutman and Cairo, and he's taken quite aback when they hand him over. It's hard not to feel for somebody who winds up that thoroughly screwed over. I picture him as reading too much pulp fiction--Black Mask magazine and the like.

Around the same time, I read a whole anthology of Raymond Chandler novels. The Big Sleep, plus various other Philip Marlowe novels and miscellaneous crime-drenched short stories. I like Chandler's style much better than Hammett's; Chandler is very funny when he wants to be. You hear a lot of Chandleresque hyperbole used just for kicks, but the actual original stuff holds up pretty well after all this time. You all ought to read a story of his called "Pearls Are A Nuisance", which was freaking hilarious. I'd be doing it an injustice if I tried to quote it here--well, all right, just one:

"Drunk, Walter?" he boomed. "Did I hear you say drunk?  An Eichelberger drunk? Listen, son. We ain't got a lot of time now. It would take maybe three months. Some day when you got three months and maybe five thousand gallons of whiskey and a funnel, I would be glad to take my own time and show you what an Eichelberger looks like when drunk. You wouldn't believe it. Son, there wouldn't be nothing left of this town but a few sprung girders and a lot of busted bricks, in the middle of which--Geez, I'll get talking English myself if I hang around you much longer--in the middle of which, peaceful, with no human life nearer than maybe fifty miles, Henry Eichelberger will be on his back smiling at the sun. Drunk, Walter. Not stinking drunk, not even country-club drunk. But you could use the word drunk and I wouldn't take no offense."

He sat down and drank again. I stared moodily at the floor. There was nothing for me to say.

The common thread with Hammett aside from genre: Chandler's heroes are defensively heterosexual he-men who show off their masculinity by beating up limp-wristed criminals. Somewhere in one of the novels, and I forget which one, the hero brags about how easy one of the opposition was to beat up: "He went down easy, like all pansies do."

And at the same time, even while Chandler is making me deeply uncomfortable with lines like that, his heroes are going around falling in love with other guys and not owning up. It's the classic explanation for homophobia, isn't it?  The guy is going out and hitting what he fears in himself. It may be an oft-used explanation, but it seems to me that it applies here. Philip Marlowe is a sight more healthy and well-adjusted a person than Sam Spade, who goes to bed with some very unpleasant women. Spade's only halfway healthy connection with a woman is with his secretary, Effie. They give off the impression that they used to go out and are still close even if they're no longer a couple. There's a rather cute scene where Spade feels frustrated and he latches onto Effie and sits there cuddling her the way a child would cuddle an oversized teddy bear. Marlowe, on the other hand, has a set of standards that take a lot more living up to. ("The Simple Art of Murder", an excellent essay, finishes with Chandler patting himself on the back for having written so wonderful a character as Philip Marlowe. "I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin".) In one of the full-length novels, Marlowe encounters a guy simply called "Red", who works on the waterfront, and who helps out Marlowe pretty much just because they're both nice guys and they fall for each other at once. If there had been slashers in the days when the Marlowe books first came out, they would have been sharpening their pencils and dashing for their Underwoods. And yet the author never apparently notices the irony.

Oh, well. Most authors don't notice certain ironies about their work. If Chandler had ever been challenged about it, he'd probably just have said, "In a pig's valise. Marlowe's not a pansy," or something less witty and more to the point, such as, "They're not gay, they just love each other" or "Buzz off, you prurient fangirl". And I can't go and dig up Hammett and tell him to get a clue. I think I'm just going to watch The Maltese Falcon again.

Another long day at the big sack of birdseed

2009-07-03T04:30:44Z

You know what is currently running through my head? The voice of Boris Karloff, singing "I've Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts".* I would say, "WTF, my brain?" except that he actually sings it very well.

Thank you for your input on the last post, everybody. Now that it's a few days later, I'm not nearly as overexcited about the whole bone(s) of contention, but I'm glad I did bring it up in the first place. Short answer: I went ahead and shaved 'em, because what the heck. Right now, I have a curiously numb feeling about the ankles, and it's because I'm like a cat who has cut off her whiskers. There's no insulating layer of fuzz between me and the legs of my jeans anymore. Still, it's a nice change of pace.

Unfortunately, my bones of contention and I aren't going to be able to go to Readercon this year. Work and a Revolutionary War reenactment are conspiring to keep me away. I'll be looking forward to reading everybody's con reports and living vicariously through you guys.

Something incredibly cute happened at work today. Just after I arrived, this family walked in who had apparently visited the shop earlier in the day. A forbidding-looking mother and her young son and daughter. "Is there anything I can help you with?" I asked them, trying not to do the singsong-talking-to-adorable-kids voice that I use sometimes. The mother said sternly to her daughter, "Talk to the lady." The little girl, who was tiny and growing tinier by the second, said, "Um, when we were in here before, I took this away with me because I thought it was for free." She held out a slightly crumpled bookmark and looked guilty and huge-eyed. I thanked her very politely for bringing it back, and said that it was okay, it was a mistake anyone could make. She put it back in its place--no harm, no foul (except that her mother still looked like a thundercloud). Then they all walked out. You know what the kicker is... I went around the counter after they had gone, to look at the display from the customers' side. It's a Big Box O' Bookmarks, with the various prices in big letters on the front. And, under that, in faint red pencil, the store's cash register code for ringing up bookmarks: #FREE. The little girl made a completely honest mistake. It even said FREE. Poor kid! I have to remember to put white-out over that tomorrow.

*This never actually happened, as far as I know. Though his character did sing something in The Bodysnatchers.

Procrastinating

2009-06-27T18:02:11Z

This afternoon I'm going to pack away my modeling table and put most of my supplies in storage. I've been meaning to do it for weeks; I need all the room I can get.

For the foreseeable future, I'm putting aside the whole Linden Designs effort. (Remember that? It's been ages since I even talked about it.) Maybe I'll sculpt a few things when I have the time. I still want to make those blue rose hairsticks for rushthatspeaks , and if anybody else has commissions, I'll try to fulfill them. But for the most part, I'm not going to be doing polyclay work. It was fun, but it was a stopgap measure for me: something creative and fun that I could do while I wasn't able to write. Now I'm writing again, and that's how I want to spend most of my free makin'-stuff-up time.

Not sure what I shall do with linden_designs . I never put much stuff on there, so perhaps I'll just delete it.

One nice side note is that photographing my own stuff made me get competent with a camera. I want to keep taking photos, maybe get a little better at it.

Happy birthday, Mr. Lorre!

2009-06-27T05:57:20Z

He's all right!

Everything's better with gangsters

2009-06-23T04:30:56Z

I've been reading a lot of hard-boiled fiction lately and watching a few b&w thrillers. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett deserve their own post, but here are some of the movies in brief.

Little Caesar

Plot: Rico (Edward G. Robinson) steals stuff, shoots people, and wears increasingly more snappy suits. Then the cops finally get him.

Good bits: Edward G. Robinson was cute and funny. I prefer to see him as good or chaotic neutral characters, just because I like him so much, but he can do a smashing killer, too. He's like a ferocious, murdering chipmunk. Rico's finest moment comes when he gets shot in front of a department store, and as he's rolling over with a bullet in his arm, he's already trying to get up, shaking his fist and roaring, "Fine aim you mugs got!" Afterwards, you see him lying around in bed with his arm in a sling, exchanging a stare with one of his henchmen, who clambers into bed with him. Of course, I got a huge kick out of that. Gangster hurt/comfort? Also good was a second-string baddie called Gabby (because he doesn't say much) who managed to be scary just by looming up, being horse-faced, and staring creepily at the camera.
The Big Sleep

Plot: All women everywhere want to make love to Philip Marlowe. Some people get shot and poisoned. One of the women is played by Lauren Bacall, who finally succeeds in getting Marlowe's attention. Everybody smokes a lot.

Good bits: Humphrey Bogart. You know what, I didn't used to like him. I think it was because I expected something different; he'd been built up and built up for me as a wonderful actor, so I had sky-high expectations of how cool he'd be when I first saw Casablanca. Then I found his character so annoying, self-pitying, conceited, undeservedly praised by all and sundry, and insufferably run-after-by-women, that I couldn't stand him. I spent the entire movie wanting to smack Rick. In fact, I remember hating on Humphrey Bogart on this very LJ a year or two ago. Well, now that I have a better idea what to expect of his characters, I actually like him. (Never thought I'd type those words; I guess you can take me out behind the barn and shoot me now--I've abandoned my hatin' ideals.) Anyhow, he makes a good Marlowe. The plot was so impenetrable that I don't pretend to follow it, but the plot wasn't the point. The point was to have a series of weird scenes, violent death, and grotesque characters posed vis-a-vis Marlowe, plus hot outfits and witty banter with Lauren Bacall. She even sings in a nightclub at one point. It's a deeply creepy jazz number about domestic abuse.

An odd thing about gender roles. Marlowe's a total Gary Stu in this movie--all the minor roles are played by sexy women in their twenties and thirties, to an unrealistic degree. That is to say, if he goes into a bookstore, there's a beautiful chick behind the counter. If he goes into a diner, there's a busty Italian lady running the place in a fanservice uniform. And if he takes a cab, there's a girl cabdriver behind the wheel. I've only ever met one female cabbie in my life, so I have a hard time believing there were many in the forties. But of course she's a real sexpot and gives Marlowe her number. The odd thing is that Marlowe is terribly manly and carries a gun and beats other guys up, and yet he's placed in a traditionally feminine role: passive sex object. He never pursues a single one of the film's many hotties. All he does is tend to his business and walk around looking world-weary in a trenchcoat, and flocks of young women court him, gush about him, and fling themselves at his head. The more I think about every film I've seen with Bogart in it, the more it strikes me that he's always passive and disinterested. His characters are all like, "Oh, hell, dames, who needs 'em?  I can't be bothered, I'm going to get drunk and go to bed now," whereupon Bacall appears out of nowhere and drapes herself across his lap. He never has to lift a finger. I suppose that's another reason I found him annoying initially. People to whom love comes effortlessly just make me impatient. But there must be a lot of women who find it kind of sexy, or he wouldn't be famous.

Freely will I own that he looked fantastic in a trenchcoat. There are some looks that just never go out of style. A trenchcoat is one of them. (And virtually all men everywhere look pretty good in old-fashioned suits, assuming they fit okay.) And he smoked and made smoking look like the sexiest, manliest thing in the world. Poor Bogey. He died of throat cancer.

And on that front:

Casablanca

Plot: Half the population of Europe are trying to flee the Nazis via Casablanca. Some of them make it out alive. All women everywhere, plus Louis, want to make love to Rick.

Good bits: I liked this movie a lot, the second time around. The best moments weren't even in the A-list plot. They came from the background faces: the pickpocket, the fat guy in the fez (hi, Sydney!), the crazy Russian barman who smooches Rick, the shy Bulgarian girl trying to help her husband, the younger fat-guy-in-a-fez who works at the cafe, the older woman who plays the guitar and sings torch songs, the weaselly little guy in the white dinner jacket (hi, Peter!) and the nervous refugees. I wish there had been three times as much with Sam; I'd have liked to get to know him. This time, I even found Rick less insufferable. Everybody is crazy about him, of course, but I can accept that as long as it's played for laughs. When Ugarte comes to him to brag at the beginning, it's like a little kid looking for approval from a cool grown-up, and it sets up Rick's character as everybody's hero, without Rick himself having to do much but stand there.

Favorite. Put-down. Ever.

"You despise me, don't you, Rick?"
"Well, if I ever gave you any thought, I probably would."

Ilsa got so little characterization that I found it hard to believe any of the guys would fancy her. I've seen Ingrid Bergmann (sp?) be much better in other movies. The guy playing Victor Lazlo was also kind of wooden, but he did have one heroic moment that was worth coming in for. A bunch of German soldiers are sitting around Rick's getting drunk and singing, I dunno what it's called, "Watch on the Rhine" and pounding their beer steins on the table. And Lazlo walks downstairs, gets the band together, and makes them play the Marseillaise to drown out the Germans, who falter and shut up and look aggrieved. Everyone else in the building leaps to their feet and sings right along with Lazlo. It was awe-inspiring. I even teared up a little, and I don't know enough history or enough French to fully understand the French national anthem. It was just awesome from the context.

Key Largo

Plot: Johnny Rocco the mobster takes over a hotel in the Florida Keys in the off-season and exploits and terrorizes the people there for his own benefit. Unfortunately for him, one of the people is played by Humphrey Bogart. There are only two women in the movie, but they both want to make love to Humphrey Bogart.

Good bits: Everything about Edward G. Robinson, beginning with the very first moment you see him: he's lying in the bathtub, reading the paper, with an electric fan blowing on his face. Cute, ridiculous, and terrifying. The camera follows him across the room but hovers politely just above his waist as he towels off. The following scene, where he struts around intimidating everybody, is made slightly worse by the viewer's knowledge that he doesn't have anything on under that robe.

One of his henchmen is a big fat guy named Angel who doesn't say much. Hey!  He's the same guy who played the young-dude-in-a-fez in Casablanca. He plays a good thug. At one point he has to shave Johnny Rocco, a worrying task given that Rocco keeps talking and jouncing up and down the entire time. Another henchman is a nervous young guy called Toots who wears suspenders and a belt at the same time. He's the Wilmer-equivalent character. I feel sorry for Toots because he's young, and dumb, and clearly only in this line of work so he can carry a gun and swagger around feeling like a big man, and because he's clearly going to get it in the neck. Which he does, before the film is over.

To Have And Have Not

Plot: Humphrey Bogart is awesome and everybody loves him. Somewhere off in the background, World War II is happening. Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart smoke at each other and trade brittle, witty banter. All women everywhere want to make love to Humphrey Bogart, except for the hotel manager's mother, and even she is probably nursing a secret crush.

Good bits: Lauren Bacall was only nineteen when she made this one. She doesn't look young. She doesn't look old, either. She looks like someone who just dropped in from another planet, or a human/greyhound hybrid, or a changeling. I find her extremely fun to watch, yet her persona is at odds with her lines. She talks as though we're supposed to think she's scared, vulnerable, alone, and maybe selling herself. But she's so extremely confident, icy calm, and pleased with herself, that I find it hard to buy her ever being scared of anything. And she's making me think I need a suit with giant lapels and a little fitted jacket.

The heavy villain in this piece was Captain Renaud, slimeball Vichy captain of police. You can tell he's French because he wears a beret. You can tell he's evil because he looks like a giant slug. Guess who's playing him?  None other than Dan Seymour, the actor who played Angel the gangster and Fez Guy in Key Largo and Casablanca. And he is having the time of his life. I swear he gained an extra fifty pounds for the role. He looks and talks like Jabba the Hutt; he slimes around alternately bribing the good guys and having his scummy henchmen slap their faces; when he sits down, he sinks into himself, and when he's thwarted, he pouts out his lips and lets his whole face slump downwards like Silly Putty in a scowl of ultimate villainy. It was strangely wonderful to watch him. I was like, "Yay! My friend the background gangster finally gets a good lead role!"