And you won't get me with your arsenic in the pot of tea
Last night I dreamed of seeing the new adaptation of "The Colour Out of Space," except because it was a dream it bore no resemblance to anything I have heard about the upcoming film except for a general air of the eldritch. I found very effective the scene in which one character's impression of their new, off-world life suddenly flickered and broke up around them like a bad signal and we saw that they were half-embedded in a wall.
1. I don't know why I think of Kate Bush's "Coffee Homeground" as an autumn song except that I heard it first in October—as far as I can tell, it was my introduction to Kate Bush—but I start listening to it around this time every year and it generally persists in rotation on the soundtrack into winter. It has a gleefully macabre, ground-fall feeling. Maybe I just think of it as a Halloween song. I associate it with Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), which I didn't know was a Halloween movie until 2006.
2. I don't know how it had previously escaped my attention that Emma Orczy herself wrote a contemporary variation on The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905): Pimpernel and Rosemary (1924), starring her hero's half-Hungarian great-great-grandson in a border-shifted Transylvania in the wake of the Treaty of Trianon. Is it a good book? Is that a question you ask about an Orczy romance? Some of the ways in which she maintains and breaks her own parallels are neat; I like that the heroine is a political journalist and the central villainy is an attempt to force her to write propaganda in exchange for the lives of a couple of young protesters, although I personally think there are worse fates for former nobility than to have to take work in a grocer's. Orzcy shared the post-war majority Hungarian opinion of really hating the Romanians and it is another one of those half-AU blips that she writes so optimistically in the novel's last pages of international opinion turning in favor of the Hungarian claim to their former territories when in real history nothing would restore them but alliance with the Fascists and that only for the duration of World War II. I am reluctantly concluding that she probably never did see Pimpernel Smith (1941) even if she knew about it—I learned last night that she thought Leslie Howard was too short to play the Scarlet Pimpernel. She preferred Fred Terry. Well, the author is dead.
3. It's bad enough that Elaine Feinstein and Jessye Norman have died, but now Ciaran Carson? I don't like losing poets, artists. Especially when people who destroy the world rather than build it seem to be immortal.
4. I have described this cartoon by Tom Gauld twice to different friends in as many days and should therefore probably just link it. While I am remembering that webcomics exist, I love everything about this one by Liz Climo.
5. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks: Patricia Lockwood's "Malfunctioning Sex Robot" is probably the greatest piece of writing about John Updike I will ever read.
1. I don't know why I think of Kate Bush's "Coffee Homeground" as an autumn song except that I heard it first in October—as far as I can tell, it was my introduction to Kate Bush—but I start listening to it around this time every year and it generally persists in rotation on the soundtrack into winter. It has a gleefully macabre, ground-fall feeling. Maybe I just think of it as a Halloween song. I associate it with Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), which I didn't know was a Halloween movie until 2006.
2. I don't know how it had previously escaped my attention that Emma Orczy herself wrote a contemporary variation on The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905): Pimpernel and Rosemary (1924), starring her hero's half-Hungarian great-great-grandson in a border-shifted Transylvania in the wake of the Treaty of Trianon. Is it a good book? Is that a question you ask about an Orczy romance? Some of the ways in which she maintains and breaks her own parallels are neat; I like that the heroine is a political journalist and the central villainy is an attempt to force her to write propaganda in exchange for the lives of a couple of young protesters, although I personally think there are worse fates for former nobility than to have to take work in a grocer's. Orzcy shared the post-war majority Hungarian opinion of really hating the Romanians and it is another one of those half-AU blips that she writes so optimistically in the novel's last pages of international opinion turning in favor of the Hungarian claim to their former territories when in real history nothing would restore them but alliance with the Fascists and that only for the duration of World War II. I am reluctantly concluding that she probably never did see Pimpernel Smith (1941) even if she knew about it—I learned last night that she thought Leslie Howard was too short to play the Scarlet Pimpernel. She preferred Fred Terry. Well, the author is dead.
3. It's bad enough that Elaine Feinstein and Jessye Norman have died, but now Ciaran Carson? I don't like losing poets, artists. Especially when people who destroy the world rather than build it seem to be immortal.
4. I have described this cartoon by Tom Gauld twice to different friends in as many days and should therefore probably just link it. While I am remembering that webcomics exist, I love everything about this one by Liz Climo.
5. Courtesy of
rushthatspeaks: Patricia Lockwood's "Malfunctioning Sex Robot" is probably the greatest piece of writing about John Updike I will ever read.
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And thanks for reminding me about the existence of Liz Climo. After enjoying the one you linked to, I went back through recent ones and really liked the solution-finding represented in this one.
re no. 2: I now feel like we need a song about Pimpernel, Rosemary, and Thyme...
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Yes!
(The Tom Gauld cartoon I see most frequently circulating among my friend groups is this one, for all the obvious reasons.)
After enjoying the one you linked to, I went back through recent ones and really liked the solution-finding represented in this one.
Oh, that is very good. That is a remarkably expressive snake with just a dot for an eye, too.
re no. 2: I now feel like we need a song about Pimpernel, Rosemary, and Thyme...
*exit pursued by an earworm*
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Oh, I'm excited to learn from this that there actually is a new film of The Colour Out of Space in the works, though. Albeit slightly less excited after Googling and discovering that it will star Nicolas Cage... It seems very likely that your dream version will be better.
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I've been hearing good things from TIFF and the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival! I am hoping it is one of the times Nicolas Cage turns up and gives a performance, as opposed to the times when he turns up and is Nicolas Cage.
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I heard Lionheart first, for whatever reason. I loved her storytelling.
(It's hard to overstate what it was like to see the "Wuthering Heights" video for the first time on a Friday night video show in the late seventies. As mindblowing in its way as punk rock.)
I can imagine a little. She still really doesn't look or sound like anything else, except the things that she influenced.
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It's so quotable. I was going to read out select passages to
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I respect you.
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It's wonderful to see a critic so committed to their art.
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Every sentence.
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This is a great image.
Happy belated birthday, btw.
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I can't take credit for anything but describing it, but I'm glad.
Happy belated birthday, btw.
Thank you!