Beware the city's dazzling lights where dykes are waiting to steal your wife

[sovay]

Noir at the Bar in Providence was a blast. I read three poems derived from film noir—"Anybody That Looked Like That," "One Way or Another," and "The Ghost Marriage"—and then my review of The Reckless Moment (1949) as the movie that made me start studying as opposed to just watching film noir. Other people read fiction on a wide spectrum of crime, grief, weirdness, and memory. I especially enjoyed the readings by Doungjai Gam, Matt Bechtel, William Carl, and Daphne Gem. A selection of us peeled off for dinner at the Trinity Brewhouse afterward; I had a bison burger and paid for it with money I had made that night, heigh-ho the glamorous life. I sold two books and traded two more for equivalently priced other authors' books. Merlin Cunniff bought me a cocktail made with pomegranate liqueur and lavender bitters and now I owe six months to Providence, in bits and pieces. There was good conversation.

The train was late both ways, but I read Dorothy B. Hughes' The So Blue Marble (1940) on the way down and Chester Himes' Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998) on the way back, so I can't really complain. spatch met me at the station.

I believe Barry Dejasu took this picture:

Comments

[gwynnega]

That's a beautiful photo. The evening sounds marvelous, as does that pomegranate/lavender cocktail. How is that Dorothy B. Hughes book?

[sovay]

That's a beautiful photo.

Thank you! It makes up for the one where, due to motion in low-light conditions, I appear to have a blur instead of a face. (I did not upload that one. I worry about initiating some kind of video haunting.)

The evening sounds marvelous, as does that pomegranate/lavender cocktail. How is that Dorothy B. Hughes book?

Highly recommended! It was her first novel; it is early but definite noir with a strong flavor of nightmare and a structural sense of humor which I loved, because so much of the action plays right on the border between the absurd and the horrifying until the last chapter where it goes for a last twist that is deliberately OH COME ON SERIOUSLY which is about how the characters treat it. The style is breathless and impressionistic, tight third-person, much more compressed than her later prose that I've read. The titular MacGuffin is terrific. I am surprised it was never never made into a movie. There would have been a trick in the casting (it's not a spoiler: a pair of light-and-dark, otherwise identical twins), but even so. And it's noir with a female protagonist, so of interest for that reason on top of the fact that it's good.

[moon_custafer]

a pair of light-and-dark, otherwise identical twins

I don’t think that trope is used in anything recent-ish, and yet I’ve seen it often enough in early-20th-c. fiction. Plotwiase, it’s a useful premise to have in your arsenal. I suppose people stopped thinking it plausible, even though I’ve seen photos of RL examples.

[sovay]

I don’t think that trope is used in anything recent-ish, and yet I’ve seen it often enough in early-20th-c. fiction.

Where else have you seen it? It made me think of Tanith Lee.

[moon_custafer]

Perhaps not as many examples as I think: (spoilers for old mystery novels):

It’s not necessarily a light/dark twins thing, but part of the plot of The Black Camel turns on two characters being secretly brothers, with a family resemblance that’s only noticeable when they’re compared side-by-side, but then it’s impossible to ignore. As it’s also mentioned they were born in Tasmania or some outpost of the British Empire, I’ve always kind of assumed their family was mixed and the one who drew the more anglo looks became a leading-man actor, while his more “exotic”-looking brother became a stage magician (he was played by Lugosi in the movie adaptation, but I picture him as Karloff.)
In Elephants Can Remember, I’m not sure the twins had co trusting hair colours, but most acquaintances definitely identified them by their hair, and as one preferred to wear wigs, impersonation, at least as a short-term thing, was a pretty easy thing to pull off. Perhaps what I’m really thinking of is the way so many mysteries turn on family resemblances, and hair colour is sort of a false flag as it’s the first thing most people notice, but not necessarily significant, plus it’s easier to fake than bone structure.

[ethelmay]

I've seen a lot of Bobbsey-Twinning in books, where boy/girl twins look alike despite being necessarily fraternal, but dark/fair semi-identical twins are not something I remember encountering. (I have dizygotic F/F twins myself -- one has very dark curly hair and one has straight light brown hair, which was nearly blond when she was small, but they also have fairly different features and figures. People sometimes forget which name is whose, but that's as far as it goes.)

[moon_custafer]

When I was a teenager, a family in our town had quadruplets: two boys who iirc looked pretty similar and may have been twins, one girl who had fair hair like the boys, and one small dark-haired girl who looked nothing like the other three.

[ethelmay]

Higher-order multiples frequently include a mixture of same-egg and different-egg siblings. I know a set of red-headed triplet boys (both parents also have red hair) of whom two are identical, with lighter, sandier hair like their father's, and the third has quite different features and dark red hair like his mother's.

[sartorias]

Oh, what a lovely photo! I am intrigued by the poem you are reading just by your expression.

[sovay]

Oh, what a lovely photo! I am intrigued by the poem you are reading just by your expression.

Thank you!

[selkie]

*stuffs Tiny Wittgenstein into a tiny box and mails the tiny box to tiny Guam*

That is a breathtaking photo and I love it.

[sovay]

That is a breathtaking photo and I love it.

*hugs*

Thank you.

[asakiyume]

What a gorgeous picture, and what a great-sounding night. That drink does sound Hadestown-esque.

[sovay]

What a gorgeous picture, and what a great-sounding night.

Thank you! I had a wonderful time.

That drink does sound Hadestown-esque.

If it had had poppy seeds, I might never have gotten out.