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WWW Wednesday

1. What are you currently reading?

I'm finally making progress on The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett; I've finished the first part (which is the first six chapters) and enjoying it so far. I also decided to read the Lout of Count's Family manhwa because... eh, why not? Mostly I'm hoping it'll go past what I've read in the novels but given the pacing of the first 50 chapters that's looking pretty unlikely, sigh. I'm impatient, just give me the ending already. Oh, I'm also reading the 破云 manhua vol. 1, for a Chinese read.

2. What have you recently finished reading?

Lout of Count's Family vol. 4 by Yu Ryeo-Han
Clementine vol. 3 by Tillie Walden: the problem with grimdark zombie settings is so many bad things happen that I stop being invested and they stop feeling bad. Still, I guess this was as satisfying a conclusion as could be hoped for in a 'verse where "nothing good ever happens" is a fundamental premise. (it's set in The Walking Dead verse)
Sakamoto Days vol. 5 by Yuto Suzuki
The Way of the Househusband vol. 9 by Kousuke Oono
Disney Gravity Falls Cinestory Comic vol. 2 (read with my son)
Our Not-So-Lonely Planet Travel Guide vol. 2 and 3 by Mone Sorai: continuing to enjoy this modern m/m manga
World's End Blue Bird vol. 1 by Anji Seina: dystopian sci-fi BL manga. Interesting premise, depending where it goes. The "intersex" (so-called) part is, uh, awkward.
Day Off by Dailygreens: cute modern boss/employee BL manhua. Wish there was more "there" there
Something Important by Ereyz: I wanted to read this cause I like Ereyz's fan art. It was fine, but I wish it were longer. I mean, I knew it was short (it's only 32 pages) but it doesn't really feel finished.
Arcana: The Lost Heirs by Sam Prentice-Jones: really good m/m (with trans, wlw, etc. side characters) that would be a lot better if there'd be any indication whatsoever that this was a volume 1 instead of a full story. Modern, magic isn't known, mystery aspects, fat mc...
Lout of Cout's Family manhwa "Season 1" by Yu Ryeo-Han: the first 50 chapters are listed as one "volume" on Storygraph so that's marked "done" I guess.

3. What will you read next?

Next on my books tbr is (still) Dream of the Red Chamber by Tsao Hsueh-Chin; it got bumped because of reading club and me buying Lout of Count's Family, but I'll start it once I finish The Tainted Cup.

Next "from the physical library" read is Welcome to St. Hell by Lewis Hancox; I already read his second autobiographical graphic novel (Escape from St. Hell) - I hadn't realized that one was a sequel. So now I get to read the first. :D

Next from Libby is still Far Sector by N. K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell, I've been procrastinating and reading other stuff instead, oops. Nothing else I have on Libby is due imminently so I'll just read whatever after that.

Current Music: Lo! Peninsula, "Chasing Tidal Waves"

The shadows on the walls don't recognize me anymore

All these terrible people whose weight the earth cannot afford, doing their best to take the rest of us with them to their Armageddon with the most toys, and not a one of them will ever be a tenth of a thousandth as cool as the living tradition of an epic poem performed with chugging guitar riffs: Exhibit A, Ereimang's "(Kwakta Lamjel)" (2023). All you fascists bound to be boring.

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Coming Soon: Pre-Order a 2026 Calendar of Queer Art!

Mock-up graphic showing a calendar on a blue background. The image shows two women side by side, one white with blonde hair wearing a leather jacket reaching out to cup the cheek of the other, who is white, dark-haired, blushing, and has her arms crossed over her chest. Below this is a page that says April 2026 and shows a calendar set-up for Sunday-through-Saturday weeks. Queer events are shown on the calendar. Behind this mock-up, part of a second mock-up peeks out. Next beside the mock-up reads "Duck Prints Press Presents 2026 Art Calendar

Very excited to share our next project with you all: a 2026 calendar featuring 12 months of queer art! This gorgeous 28-page calendar features artwork originally made for our Patreon backers between August 2024 and July 2025 – 12 art pieces by 9 different artists!

All 12 art works are also available as art prints!

Have I caught your attention? Learn loads more about the calendar, art prints, artists, and art works by visiting our pre-order campaign page on our website!

This crowdfunding campaign will run from September 1 through September 15, 2025. This way, we can 100% guarantee that even if things go wrong, everyone will have their calendars before January 1, 2026.

Want to make sure you are notified when this campaign goes live? Sign up for our Duck Prints Press General Imprint Newsletter! Or, of course, follow us on the social media platform of your choice.

back, ish

I am back from France, mostly. Returned to Minneapolis Sunday, returning to Vancouver tomorrow. I remain mostly, though not entirely, exhausted and Wrung Out.

It was a complicated trip and I can't sum it up as "good" or "not good". Some of it was very good, some of it was less good, nearly all of it was stressful in different ways. On the whole I'm glad I went.

Extended travelogue later. Catching up on two weeks of internet now.

Current Music: Martha, "1967, I Miss You, I'm Lonely"

When I invited Frank and you back to mine for a mange tout when I meant ménage à trois

The swallows have returned to Capistrano: last night there were three student parties on our street alone and a fourth around the corner. We are waiting to see if this weekend will bring a new installment of upstairs neighbors.

I opened the refrigerator door and the Brita pitcher fell off its shelf and disintegrated itself in several gallons across the hardwood, so the first thing I did within two minutes of getting up was essentially wash the kitchen floor. I spent the afternoon drying a load of towels and drinking cans of seltzer.

It jarred out of my head too much of the dream I had just woken up from, the slippage of a kitchen sink drama written by a less commonly revived playwright than Shelagh Delaney: a teenage girl and her father who was just about the same age when she was born and still has such a fecklessly fox-boned, adolescent look himself, the two of them as they knock about town, him getting into more fights than holding down jobs, always telling the secret histories of their city which sound half like industrial legend and half like he just made them up, are more often mistaken for a couple than his actual girlfriend with whom he seems to interact most in the form of sincerely less successful apologies. They are clearly each other's half of a double star, a nearly closed system without jealousy, only the exhilaratingly irresponsible habit of dodging the adult world as if it were the two of them against it. It is unsensationally apparent to the audience long before it would cross any other character's mind that in addition to his total improvisation of parenting, he is doing his damnedest not to pass on the next generation of his own implicitly incestuous abuse, which does him credit and gives him little help in figuring out how to support his daughter through a transition he never quite managed himself. Toward the end, it started to flicker between stage sets and the plain world, between rehearsals and history. "I won't meet you," I had to tell the actor, standing in between scenes outside the year of the original production, the same fragile shoulders and thistle-blond hair of his photographs in the role: he would be dead decades before I heard of the play, much less managed to track a copy down. I could tell him that his children had gone into the arts. Onstage she was outgrowing his frozen boyishness and if he could catch up to her, he would still have to let her go.

asakiyume linked Residente's "This is Not America (feat. Ibeyi)" (2022) and it made me think of Elizma's "Modern Life" (2025), both of which should come with content warnings for current events.

I have discovered that BBC Sounds became region-locked about a month ago, which means that one of my major sources for randomly discoverable audio drama seems to have spiraled down the drain. I am completely indifferent to podcasts. I am a simple person and just wanted to listen again to Lieutenant Commander Thomas Woodrooffe being just as lit up as the fleet.

Dual Roomba

https://xkcd.com/3133/

I tried uploading it to a household appliance porn site I found, but apparently their content is limited to only fans.

https://xkcd.com/3133/

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fic exchange letter

Fic in a Box Letter

Full letter to come!

Thank you for writing for me! If you have any questions, please check with the mods. I am a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you write for me. I have no special requirements beyond what's specifically stated in my DNWs. I'm fine with all POVs (i.e., first, second, third), tenses, ratings, story lengths, etc.

My AO3 name is Edonohana. I am open to treats. Very open. I love them.

I like hurt-comfort, action/adventure, horror, domestic life, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, difficult choices, survival situations, mysterious places and weird alien technology, food, plants, animals, landscape, X-Men type powers, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, miniature things or beings, magic, strange rituals, unknowable things, epistolary fiction, found footage/art/creepy movies/etc, canon divergence AUs anf alternate versions of characters. And many other things, too, of course! That list is just in case something sparks an idea.

( Opt-in Tags )

( General DNWs )

( Caught in Crystal - Patricia Wrede )

( Dark Tower - Stephen King )

( Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey )

( Marvel 616 )

( Piranesi - Susanna Clarke )

( The Stand - Stephen King )

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proto-stitching

I've been recently to a beginner's workshop on hand-spinning. It was my second such workshop in about 30 years. I did a little follow-up spinning back then with friends, but I didn't have the leisure or means to continue. This time I wanted to test my hands.

The instructor, who judges handspun yarn at county fairs, brought us some roving. ( Read more... )

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Maps Release: Greater Northshore Bike Connector, MEGAMAP 2.0.2

Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 2.0.2 – 4 August 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 2.0.2.

Mostly small updates again this time, but there’s one big one – the Redmond Central Connector final segment connecting to the East Rail Trail at NE 124th is already open! Ribbon cutting isn’t ’til September 12th, and I imagined it’d open early but I didn’t expect it to be this early.

ADDED: Redmond Central Connector extension up to Eastrail at NE 124th is open earlier than expected! (Both maps)
ADDED: Warning flag: the Pier 91 section of Elliot Bay Trail will close from 2 September to 2 October for repaving and rebuilding, including getting replacing that weird steep over-rail bridge. There WILL be a posted detour, but it’s kinda long and involves Magnolia Bridge, so I’m flagging it. (MEGAMAP only)
ADDED: A block-long half-dirt connector between Ashworth and Densmore continuing N 157th for pedestrians and bicyclists willing to deal with a dirt path (both maps)
ADDED: Extension of a Shoreline Trail Along the Rail fragment south of NE 185th all the way down to NE 180th; at previous check, it didn’t quite connect, and now it does (both maps)
CORRECTION: 10th Ave NE from 155th to 185th was listed as UNMARKED BUT POPULAR, but has sharrow markings, so will be re-marked as SHARROWS (both maps)

Screen-resolution preview of the Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because honestly it doesn’t.

Enjoy biking!

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Changelog Digest for Sun, Aug 24

[dreamwidth]

34e44a6: Commit 34e44a6: Define filename patterns to ignore in the code editor Cursor.
b67e2fc: Commit b67e2fc: Remove definitions of deprecated email config variables such as LJ::SENDMAIL.
0e07d21: Commit 0e07d21: Move email tasks from TheSchwartz to SQS, to simplify the email system.
9820e24: Commit 9820e24: Completely remove unused code for sending emails using TheSchwartz.
5054973: Commit 5054973: Take out config references to removed "send-email-ses" worker.
872bcbe: Issue #3493: Basic Config for Github Codespace: Enable use of the automatically managed Codespace feature on Github.
92de7a7: Issue #3494: Remove Procnotify references and related code: Remove LJ::Procnotify code, which had outlived its usefulness.

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Post-Deadline Pinch Hits for Just Married - Due August 29th

justmarriedexchange is a marriage-themed multifandom exchange for marriage tropes of all kinds: convenient, accidental, undercover, arranged, forced, and so on. The requirements are 1500 words for fic, clean lineart on unlined paper for art, and a complete recording of 1500 words or 10 minutes for podfic.

We have some post-deadline pinch hits, currently due August 29th 11:59PM UTC (countdown), or negotiable.

PH 32 - ダンジョン飯 | Dungeon Meshi | Delicious in Dungeon, Critical Role (Web Series), Bridgerton (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

PH 46 - 逆転裁判 | Gyakuten Saiban | Ace Attorney, Dishonored (Video Games), Dishonored (Video Games), Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga, Girl Genius (Webcomic), Lackadaisy (Webcomic), The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, Psychonauts (Video Games)

PH 48 - Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon), Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon), 黄金の太陽 | Golden Sun Series, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)

PH 49 - Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses, 鸣潮 | Wuthering Waves (Video Game), Limbus Company (Video Game)

If you might be interested in one of these pinch hits, you can find more details or claim the pinch hit at the post here. Thank you very much!

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(no subject)

Once upon a time, I read Exiled from Camelot, the novel-length Sir Kay angstfic by Cherith Baldry that Phyllis Ann Kar politely called 'one of the half-best Arthurian novels that I have yet read,' and then launched it off to Be Experienced by

osprey_archer and

troisoiseaux.

Now my sins have come back upon me sevenfold, or perhaps even fifteenfold:

troisoiseaux has discovered that, not content with the amount of hurt and comfort that she inflicted upon Kay in exiled from Camelot, Cherith Baldry has written No Less than Fifteen Sad Kay Fanfics and collected them in a volume called The Last Knight of Camelot: The Chronicles of Sir Kay.

This book has now made its way from

troisoiseaux via

osprey_archer on to me, along with numerous annotations --

osprey_archer has suggested 'drink!' every time Baldry mentions Kay's 'hawk's face,' which I have not done, as I think this would kill me -- to which I have duly added in my turn. I am proud to tell you that I was taking notes and Kay only experiences agonized manly tears nine times in the volume. That means that there are at least six whole stories where Kay manages not to burst into tears at all! And we're very proud of him for that!

The thesis of The Last Knight of Camelot seems to be that Kay is in unrequited love with Arthur; Gawain and Gareth are both in unrequited love with Kay; and everyone else is mean to Kay, all the time, for no reason.

troisoiseaux and

osprey_archer in their posts have both pulled out this quote which I also feel I am duty-bound to do:

"Lord of my heart, my mind, my life. All that I'll ever be. All I'll ever want.”

He had never revealed so much before.

Arthur leant towards him; there was love in his face, and wonder and compassion too, and Kay knew, his knowledge piercing like an arrow into his inmost spirit, that his love, this single-minded devotion that could fill his life and be poured out and yet never exhausted, was not returned. Arthur loved him, but not like that.

He could not help shrinking back a little.

However, I also must provide the additional context that this tender moment is immediately interrupted by the ARRIVAL OF MORGAUSE, TO SEDUCE ARTHUR, TO MAKE MORDRED, leading me to believe that Baldry is suggesting that if Kay had instead seized the chance to confidently make out with Arthur at this time, the entire doom of Camelot might have been averted. Alas! instead, Arthur dismisses Kay to go hang out with Morgause, it all goes south, Arthur blames Kay for Some Reason, and Kay spends a week on his knees in the courtyard going on hunger strike for Arthur's forgiveness until he collapses on the cobblestones and wakes up to a repentant Arthur tenderly feeding him warm milk.

If the stories in this volume are any judge, this is a pretty normal week for Kay. I also want to shout out

- the one where Lancelot and Gaheris set up a Fake Adventure for Kay to prove his courage, which destroys Kay emotionally, and kitchen-boy-squire Gareth runs after him and tries to swear loyalty to him and ask Kay to knight him, but Kay is like "you cannot AFFORD to have Kay as a friend >:(( for your knightly reputation >:(((" and Gareth shouts "you can't make me your enemy!!" and then Lancelot finds them arguing and is like 'wow, Kay is abusing this poor kitchen boy' and sweeps the lovelorn Gareth away, leaving Kay's reputation worse than before
- the one where Arthur gets kidnapped by an evil sorcerer who demands Excalibur as Arthur's ransom, and then Kay decides to try and trick the evil sorcerer with a Fake Excalibur even though Lancelot is like 'FAKE Excalibur? that's a LIE and DISHONORABLE,' and then Kay rescues Arthur from being magic-brainwashed by pure power of [brotherly?] love, and as soon as their tender embrace is over Arthur is like 'wait! you brought a FAKE Excalibur? that's a LIE and DISHONORABLE'
- the one where Kay is accused of rape as a Ploy to Discredit Arthur and has to go through a trial by ordeal where he walks over hot coals while on the verge of death from other injuries and Gawain flings himself into the fire to rescue him but it turns out it's fine because Kay is So Extremely Innocent of the Crime that they both end up clinging together bathed in golden light that heals their injuries

Again: FIFTEEN of these. Baldry is truly living her bliss and I honestly cannot but respect it. The book is going to make its way back from here whence it came, but if anyone else is really feeling a shortage of Kay Agonies in their life, let me know; I'm sure an additional stop would be welcomed as long as whoever gets it pays the annotation tax.

Current Mood: baffled
Current Music: Mets vs Braves on tv

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adventures in cooking

righthanders wear him out

I tried making mozzarella sticks again for dinner tonight and I don't know if the oil wasn't hot enough or what, but they stuck to the bottom of the pot. They stuck to the spatula when I finally scraped them off the bottom of the pot. They stuck to the PAPER TOWELS.

I have fried a lot of things in my time and then put them on paper towels to absorb the excess oil and NEVER BEFORE has anything stuck to them. What the actual fuck. I still ate whatever I was able to salvage, but wow, what a mess.

*

Current Music: Martha, "Lost Without You"

This po-mo stuff is nice, but it's irrelevant to the way I feel right now

The close to eleven hours I slept last night may have exceeded the sum total of the week that preceded it which did not even have the decency to be hallucinatory as opposed to just blurringly strung out. I feel as though the sole things of value I accomplished were reading a new novel and writing about a movie. One night we walked for ice cream to CB Scoops.

Razing the ecosystem of our back yard seems to have produced a monoculture of black swallow-wort.

spatch and I planted a medley of butterfly-supporting wildflowers while the yard was still a burnt-brown wasteland and I just hope any of them can survive the invasive cuckoo. I am not sure there is anyone we could even call to extirpate it. I still miss the rose and the mulberry trees.

Last night I showed him Portrait of Jennie (1948), which I had not seen since high school when my mother showed it to me. I had not understood then that it was so much stranger about ghosthood and time than any of its Hollywood contemporaries to the point where it would have been much more normal as a venture into the Twilight Zone or an ITV production in the '70's. It doesn't even look like its decade: its cinematographer shot it with lenses of the silent era for that extra shimmer of time-slip and died before it reached the screen. I just don't see that many films out of classical Hollywood I would call Sapphire and Steel in on. I can't remember if the 1940 Robert Nathan novella struck me as so formally as well as tonally weird. On a more mundane note, I love that the production picked up David Wayne because it was shooting in New York in 1947 and Finian's Rainbow was on Broadway. I had remembered an uncharacteristically quiet shot of his face screened through harp strings when I had forgotten the tidal crash of the Graves Light, tinted in luciferin-green as if the very film stock and not just its characters have washed back into 1925.

If Alexander Knox did introduce Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, I can blame him in a partial, positive way for the first film I ever saw in theaters, which was *batteries not included (1987).

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August Patreon Releases

you can see a version of this post with loads o' images here.

Every month, we release five short stories, an art piece, and conduct a convention-style panel for our backers on Patreon. What backers have access to depends on their backer level, with $3/month backers only getting access to a single story and $25/month backers getting access to everything, with our intermediate levels – $5/month, $7/month, and $10/month – getting intermediate amounts. These releases are in addition to behind-the-scenes access, voting rights on anthology themes, exclusive coupons, extra merch, and the many other benefits we offer our supports on Patreon. Read on to learn about what we released on Patreon in August 2025!

Aurora by æonswinter

Access to viewing the full artwork available to backers at the $5/month and $7/month levels; access to print-suitable download available to backers at the $10/month and $25/month levels.

æonswinter had this to say about the inspiration for this piece: “The figures in this painting are doing doubles hammock. For this trick, the two aerialists run in a circle on the ground before inverting into the air, reaching out towards each other. The painting captures the moment before their hands meet—the moment before contact, before connection. The base color of each figure and each hammock was sampled from the colors of the trans flag. The shadows and highlights on the blue figure and fabric were done in variations of that pink, and the shadows and highlights on the pink figure and fabric were done in variations of that blue.”

Nycticorax by S. J. Ralston

Available to backers at the $7/month level and higher.
Genre: Tragic Science Fiction with Super Powers
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 28 pages/9,925 words

Excerpt: Nycticorax turned to the control panel at his right hand and punched in the coordinates: the southeastern shore of Lake Huron, July 23rd, 1834 CE. He checked his safety measures, pointed to each status light to confirm its greenness, and ensured the Third Law Allocation was set to DISTRIBUTED. With a deep breath, he put his thumb over the button labelled ACTIVATE.

He hesitated.

There was an extremely slight but also extremely real possibility that pressing that button would instantaneously kill 2.8 million people—Nycticorax among them.

Like it Sharp by E. V. Dean

Available to all Patreon backers.
Genre: Modern
Rating: Explicit
Length: 25 pages/9,979 words

Excerpt: Green and purple lights dance on the stainless steel of her knife, her grip agile, motions swift, like she was born with it in her palm. The chop-chop-chop against the wooden board cuts through the muted thumping of Avicii from the living room. She’s not quite the Iron Chef, but the blade’s her best friend.

Kathy can’t take her eyes off it. The rest of the kitchen is spinning around her, and she’s found her anchor. The skilled arm is attached to the woman Kathy’s been swooning over the whole evening from afar, like a school girl with a crush.

Starstruck, Adrift by Cedar D. McCafferty-Svec

Available to backers at the $25/month level.
Genre: Science Fiction
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 19 pages/6,913 words

Excerpt: Penny had seen a lot of things in her time aboard the UNS Bridget. She’d seen her fair share of alien worlds and new ways to travel during her fourteen years of service. This, however, was not something she had previously encountered.

“This” being the large mechanical dragon hovering outside the windows at the bow of the ship. And when she said “mechanical,” she meant completely sentient, made of metal, stuff-she’d-seen-in-comics-and-movies mechanical. Not an animatronic. Not a puppet. Fully realized robotic life.

Flying outside the spaceship. In space.

August Patreon Panel: How to Work Worldbuilding Into the Narrative

The recording of this panel is available to backers at the $7/month level and higher.

Description: No matter what genre you write, world building is essential for setting the scene, helping readers understand the when and where and why of the story, and framing the narrative. Some stories require a lot of worldbuilding, others very little, but no matter how much is necessary to help the readers navigate the characters’ surroundings, figuring out how to work that worldbuilding into the story is a perpetual concern. This panel, we discuss effective and ineffective ways of integrating the worldbuilding into stories, how approaches may vary depending on the length of the story and the genre, standard worldbuilding advice such as “show don’t tell” and “don’t infodump!”, and examples of stories we’ve read where we thought the worldbuilding was especially well or especially poorly integrated with the narrative.

Panelists: Nina Waters, Vee Sloane, Dei Walker, and Zel Howland

Whispers Through the Leaves by Johnathan Stern

Available to backers at the $10/month level and higher.
Genre: Horror
Rating: General Audience
Length: 8 pages/2,394 words

Excerpt: The pressure had dropped.

Gray clouds were gathering in the sky to the west, and the faint breeze that whistled through the windows of your car was picking up speed.

A storm was coming, of that you were almost certain.

It never hurt to check, though, and so you reached over to the center console to turn on your radio. Far from home as you were, your presets would assuredly be useless, and sure enough, pressing the first one tuned into nothing but the scratch of static. Playing with the dial, you scrolled through perhaps a dozen stations and frequencies before you found the first live human voice.

Business is Blooming by Genevieve Maxwell

Available to backers at the $5/month level and higher.
Genre: Fluffy Modern Romance
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 12 pages/3,740 words

Excerpt: “What in the world?” Hester’s voice trailed off as she approached her doorstep, frowning at the potted plant sitting on the doormat. Hester wasn’t much of a plant person. Or a keeping-things-alive-besides-herself person. The plant had flowers, which at least were pretty. Did someone send her flowers? But why a living plant instead of a bouquet? Why leave it at all instead of giving it to her directly?

Not a backer? Looking for even more stories, artwork, and more? We’re also thrilled to share that now, all Patreon-exclusive works now become available, six months after they were originally posted, in our Patreon shop. If there’s an author you love, a work you missed, a type of story you’re on the hunt for – come take a look. There are 65 works in the shop, and we add more every month!

Entry tags:

(no subject)

genarti and I both recently read Leonora Carrington's 1974 surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet, about a selectively deaf old lady whose unappreciative relatives put her into an old age home, where ( various increasingly weird things happen, cut in case you want to go in unspoiled )

Beth found the pace and tone of plotting very Joan Aiken-ish and I have to admit I agree with her.

BETH: But I understand that The Hearing Trumpet is like this because Carrington was a surrealist. Is it possible that Joan Aiken was also a surrealist this whole time and we've simply not been looking at her work through the right lens?
ME: I don't think her life landed her in quite the right set of circumstances to be a surrealist properly ... I think she was a little too young when the movement was kicking off .... but I do think that perhaps she believed in their beliefs even if she didn't know it ....

Anyway, The Hearing Trumpet is in some ways has elements of a classically seventies feminist text -- she wrote it while deeply involved in Mexico's 1970s women's liberation movement, and the whole occultist nun -> holy grail -> icepocalypse plot has a lot of Sacred Sexy Goddess Repressed By The Evil And Prudish Christian Church running through it -- but Marian Leatherby's robust and and opinionated ninety-year-old voice is so charmingly unflappable that the experience is never in the least bit predictable or cliche. My favorite character is Marian's best friend Carmella, who kicks off the book by giving mostly-deaf Marian the hearing trumpet that allows her to [selectively] understand the things that are going on around her. Carmella plays the role often seen in children's books of Friend Who Is Constantly Gloriously Catastrophizing About How Dramatic A Situation Will Be And How They Will Heroically Rescue You From It (and then I will smuggle you a secret letter and tunnel into the old-age home in order to avoid the dozens of police dogs! etc. etc.) which is even funnier when the things that are actually happening are even weirder and more dramatic than anything Carmella predicts, just in a slightly different genre, and then funnier again when Carmella shows up towards the end of the book perfectly suited to surviving the Even Newer, Weirder, and More Dramatic Situations that have Arisen.

The end-note explains that Carrington based Carmella on her friend Remedios Varo, a detail I include as a treat for the Varo-heads but also as an illustration of how much the novel builds itself on the connections between weird women who survive a largely-incomprehensible world by being largely incomprehensible themselves. Carrington herself was in her late fifties when she wrote this book, but she too lived into her nineties; her Wikipedia article describes her in its header as "one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s." It's hard not to inscribe that back into the text in some way, which is of course an impossible reading, but one does like to imagine the ninety-year-old Carrington with just as much presence as the ninety-year-old Marian.

Current Music: Martha, "Standing Where It All Began"

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patreon

Well, you can't tell much from faces

It is no discredit to a warhorse of crime fiction like The Gaunt Stranger (1938) that its ending surprised me the most Doylistically. From my twenty-first-century vantage, it may be even more delightful than it would have played at the time.

My chances of coming to it unspoiled then, of course, would have been basically nil. It was the third screen and second sound version of its popular source material, the 1925 Edgar Wallace novel of the same name which had been definitively rewritten following its smash stage run as The Ringer (1926), so called after the alias of its central figure, the elusive master of disguise whose legal identity of Henry Arthur Milton has never helped Scotland Yard get a fix on his movements, his intentions, or his face. "Don't they call him the Ringer because he rings the changes on himself? Why, in Deptford they say he can even change the color of his eyes." What they've said for two years at the Yard is that he died trying to outswim a bullet in Sydney Harbour, but recently his reputation has disconcertingly resurfaced in the Karswell-like card accompanying the delivery of a wreath of lilies to a caddish crook of a London lawyer: "R.I.P. To the Memory of Maurice Meister, who will depart this life on the seventeenth of November. —'The Ringer.'" Copycat or resurrection, the threat has to be taken seriously. The smooth solicitor who doubles as an informer and a notoriously uncaught fence has on his hands, too, the suicide of the previous in his string of pretty secretaries, the Ringer's own sister. The forty-eight-hour deadline runs out on the anniversary of her death. Even if it's just some local villain trading on the scandal to raise a scare, the authorities can't take the chance of not scrambling round-the-clock protection for the victim-elect, devoting their slim margin for error to trying to outthink an adversary they have only the sketchiest, most contradictory clues toward, pointing as much to a runaround as to the unenviable prospect of the real, shape-shifting Ringer, who like all the best phantoms could be standing quietly at the elbow of the law all the while. "King Street! He'd walk on Regent Street. If he felt that way, he'd come right here to Scotland Yard and never turn a hair."

Properly a thriller rather than a fair-play detective story, The Gaunt Stranger has less of a plot than a mixed assortment of red herrings to be strewn liberally whenever the audience is in danger of guessing right; the tight cast renders it sort of the cop-shop equivalent of a country house mystery while the convolutions build to the point of comedy even as the clock ticks down to a dead serious stop. Christie-like, it has an excuse for its slip-sliding tone. Decent, dedicated, even a bit of an underdog with this case landed in his lap by divisional inconvenience, Detective Inspector Alan Wembury (Patrick Barr) sums up the problem with it: "If the Ringer does bump Meister off, he'll be doing a public service." The most extra-diegetically law-abiding viewer may see his point. With his silken sadist's voice and his smile folded like a knife, Meister (Wilfred Lawson) is the kind of bounder of the first water who even in nerve-racked protective custody, distracting himself from the pendulum slice of the hours with stiff drinks and gramophone records of Wagner, still finds time to toy with the well-bred, hard-up siblings of Mary and Johnny Lenley (Patricia Roc and Peter Croft), cultivating the one as his grateful secretary in brazen reprise of his old tricks and maneuvering the other into blowing his ticket of leave before he can talk his sister out of the trap. "Have you ever seen a weasel being kind to a rabbit?" Offered a year's remission on his sentence if he helps the police out, sarkily skittish second-story man Sam Hackett (Sonnie Hale) wants no part of this farrago of arch-criminals and threats from beyond the grave just because he once happened to share digs with the Ringer and drew the short straw of catching a more or less unobstructed view of the man; it accords him the dubious honor of the best lead on the case and he makes sure to state for the record as he resigns himself to the role, "Give my kindest regards to the Ringer and tell him I highly recommend rat poison." The audience might as well sit back and genre-savvily enjoy the ride. Should we trust the credentials of the glowering DI Bliss (John Longden), freshly returned from Australia on the supposed track of the Ringer's widow and grown such a mustache in his five years abroad that even his former collar doesn't recognize him until he's flashed his badge? Since the order for the funereal flowers was cabled from her stateroom aboard the liner Baronia, should we presume that Cora Ann Milton (Louise Henry) smuggled her living husband into the country or that she's the real mastermind of the plot against Meister, effectively impersonating her dead man to avenge his sister? The entrance she makes at the Flanders Lane station is as striking as her dark, insouciant looks or her American accent, too shrewd to be written off as a mere moll; stepping out of the mirror-door that leads so conveniently for a receiver of stolen goods down to the brick-arched river, she gives the locked-in lawyer the shock of a revenger's ghost herself. "Don't worry. I'm alone." Not only because one of his cherished classical records has played instead an ominous bulletin from the Ringer—a cold theatrical voice, as impossible to trace as greasepaint—the proceedings begin to take on a haunted-house quality, not unbefitting a film whose most important character heading into the home stretch is still Schrödinger's dead. At 71 minutes and fluttering out fast, rest assured it will not sober up too much for break-ins, fake-outs, or the dry commentary of Dr. Anthony Lomond (Alexander Knox), the division's irreplaceably cantankerous amateur criminologist who was introduced waving off a request for his medical opinion with the time-honored "Och, Wembury, I'm not a doctor, I'm a police surgeon. Call me in when he's been murdered." Grey-spry, he has a catlike habit of tucking his feet up on unexpected furniture, briar-smoking like a fumarole. Tragedy tomorrow, eccentricity tonight.

( You're the only doctor I've met who puts his faith in patent medicines. )

Despite its programmer values, The Gaunt Stranger has a quirkily important pedigree: in the clever titles of theatrical posters caught in a passing constable's torch-flash, I spotted Sidney Gilliat as the author of the fleetly tangled screenplay and Ronald Neame as the DP who made more out of low light than the studio sets, but did not realize until after the fact that it was the very first film produced at Ealing under the auspices of Michael Balcon. I had known it was the first screen credit of Alex Knox. I don't know what about his face made casting directors want to stick a mustache and at least ten years' worth of stage grey on it, but he was playing middle-aged again when he reappeared for Ealing in a small, astringent, bookkeeperly role in the next year's Cheer Boys Cheer (1939), now regarded thanks to its plot of a small traditional brewery wilily outwitting its heavier-weight corporate competitor as the forerunner of the classic post-war Ealing comedies. By 1940 he had been collected by Hollywood from Broadway and I don't see how not to wonder if under less transatlantic conditions he might have continued with Ealing into the '40's and their splendidly weird array of wartime films. Or pulled a John Clements and stuck for most of his life to the stage: I have been calling him a shape-changer because it was obviously one of his gifts and his inclination—and in hindsight, something of a joke on this movie—but it makes it very difficult to guess seriously where he could have ended up. In any case, the existence in this timeline of The Gaunt Stranger on out-of-print Region 2 DVD makes me all the more grateful that someone just stuck it up on Dailymotion. It's a modest B-film, not a mislaid gem, but any number of movies of that class have infinitely improved my life. The title pertains in no way to the action. "And don't be so darned sure there's nothing to be afraid of at Scotland Yard." This shadow brought to you by my pretty backers at Patreon.

Coastline Similarity

https://xkcd.com/3132/

Hey! A bunch of the early Cretaceous fossils on each coast seem to have been plagiarized, too!

https://xkcd.com/3132/

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Friday Five: Travel

Been a while since I saw a Friday Five that appealed to me!

1. Have you ever stayed in a hostel? If so, where? Did you like it? If you haven't stayed in a hostel, would you?
Only once, in Amsterdam. It made me a little nervous to share a room with strangers but all's well that end's well. I'd probably do it again, though if I could afford my own room, I'd prefer that.

2. What is your favo(u)rite airport that you've been to? Why?
Hmm... I rather like the Indianapolis Airport, it has a lot of sculptures by local artists. This is the new airport, the rebuilt one, it's a lot nicer. And by new I mean like. 20 years old lmao.

3. What is the best museum you have visited on vacation?
If I could move into the Louvre I would.

4. Have you ever made friends while traveling whom you keep in touch with on a regular basis?
I can't think of anyone I've stayed in touch with long-term.

5. Have you ever had a conversation with a seatmate on a plane?
As little as I can possibly get away with, but yes. I did once make friends with two people in my row, cause we realized we were going to same con, and we stayed in touch for like 5 years before relationship attrition happened.

True story, my brother met his first wife when they were seated next to each other on a plane.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: The Ocean - Dar Williams

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wade in our workboots, try to finish the job

I meant to post yesterday but fell asleep on the couch after dinner, which has been happening with more and more frequency over the last few months - usually it's only for 30 - 45 minutes, because it's never intentional and I am not in a comfortable sleeping position, but oh boy the dreams I have when it happens are super vivid and weirdly almost always take place here in this apartment. Usually "home" in my dreams is the house I grew up in (or some dream facsimile) or my first apartment - my second apartment is never what it actually looked like but always some much larger Manhattan apartment with a view! But when I am falling asleep on the couch, I am frequently also asleep on the couch in my dreams, and trying to wake up and not managing, or waking up in the dream to answer the door or something. Weird how that works!

Anyway, I did read something so Wednesday reading on a Thursday:

What I just finished
The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri, book one of the Burning Kingdoms trilogy. I really liked Suri's Books of Ambha duology - the second one in particular I thought was AMAZING - but this one isn't really doing it for me. It's fine.

What I'm reading now
Allegedly, the second book in the trilogy, The Oleander Sword but I haven't really been picking it up when I have time to read.

What I'm reading next
Well if I finish The Oleander Sword I will probably move onto the third book, The Lotus Empire, but who knows?

I did find time to finally watch K-Pop Demon Hunters on Netflix and I enjoyed it very much. It's like Buffy except there are 3 girls and they're in a band. Very fun!

Work today has been bonkers - it was 1 pm before I even thought about having breakfast so I just held out until 2 (my regular lunch time) for lunch. Hopefully the afternoon is quieter!

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