But Carthage may rise again one day
I cannot express my happiness on discovering that a queer classics student reblogged my ghost poem for Lucan on the occasion of the poet's yahrzeit; this is exactly the kind of tradition I want to be part of. Have some links!
1. In which my plan to stress-buy a zillion waistcoats is vindicated by literature: Samuel Rutter, "A Dandy's Guide to Decadent Self-Isolation."
2. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
handful_ofdust: the value of practical effects in the case of the Cottingley Fairies.
3. Adam Bolivar, whose rhyming marionette theater I had the privilege of enjoying last summer at NecronomiCon 2019, has recorded his Rhysling Award-winning ballad "The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner" as performed byH.P. Lovecraft Theobald Craftwell. I also recommend checking out the self-introduction of dapper, skeletal Solomon Scratch.
4. Frankly, the history of the Pearl of Lao-Tzu makes Steinbeck's The Pearl (1947) look like a tea cozy.
5. The storyboards of The Ballet of the Red Shoes, from Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948), are just great.
In case I forgot to mention, my short story "Where the Sky Is Silver and the Earth Is Brass" is reprinted in the latest issue of Uncanny Magazine. It won't be free to read online until June, but you can always buy an e-book.
1. In which my plan to stress-buy a zillion waistcoats is vindicated by literature: Samuel Rutter, "A Dandy's Guide to Decadent Self-Isolation."
2. Courtesy of
handful_ofdust: the value of practical effects in the case of the Cottingley Fairies.3. Adam Bolivar, whose rhyming marionette theater I had the privilege of enjoying last summer at NecronomiCon 2019, has recorded his Rhysling Award-winning ballad "The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner" as performed by
4. Frankly, the history of the Pearl of Lao-Tzu makes Steinbeck's The Pearl (1947) look like a tea cozy.
5. The storyboards of The Ballet of the Red Shoes, from Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948), are just great.
In case I forgot to mention, my short story "Where the Sky Is Silver and the Earth Is Brass" is reprinted in the latest issue of Uncanny Magazine. It won't be free to read online until June, but you can always buy an e-book.
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They make me want to watch the movie again, and I don't even love The Red Shoes as much I love other films by the Archers. (I do love its dancing. And Léonide Massine.)
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I approve of a waistcoat-enhanced quarantine.
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The only way I can sort of understand the reaction at the time is to consider that, around roughly the same period, Windsor McCay was inventing animated cartoons and having the hardest time getting audiences to believe he’d *drawn* them – people would look at something like this https://youtu.be/uW71mSedJuU, which to modern viewers is obviously hand-drawn animation (beautifully hand-drawn, though cw for period-typical racism) and insist that McCay had filmed live actors in masks and done the physical distortions with some kind of mirror trickery.
I mean, I still can’t get around the idea of being unable to distinguish between a line drawing and a real physical object, but maybe if your brain has only just begun to get accustomed to the possibility of photographically converting 3D to 2D, it’s hard to switch back?
I then appended a series of photos of John Mulaney, with the subtitles changed slightly to read “You know those days when you just say, ‘photography is already so goddamn weird, this might as well happen?’”
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That's the entire rationale of in-camera effects, though—that matte painting isn't a hallway or a cliff face or a mountain seen far off, but if you do the perspective well enough, if you get the angle just right, if it's painted at a plausible resolution of detail, the brain goes "All right, then!" and it works even on generations of people accustomed to photography. There are multiple breathtaking shots in Black Narcissus (1947) that I know were done with painted glass, but when I'm watching the movie I can still never see them as such. Like that trompe-l'œil sidewalk art. You might be able to tell it's chalk, but it still looks too much like depth for you to feel comfortable about the person craning over the vertiginous pitch down into stars. Forced perspective is the same kind of thing. Rear projection depending on how finely it's done. It all turns into 2D in the camera and that allows a lot of latitude to fool the eye.
I then appended a series of photos of John Mulaney, with the subtitles changed slightly to read “You know those days when you just say, ‘photography is already so goddamn weird, this might as well happen?’”
That's excellent.
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That's incredibly cool.
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... I still don't entirely get it though: it must have been because they linked photography inextricably with "real things that exist"--with portraits of people etc. But I mean, people had books! They knew about drawing! They knew you could draw something, and that drawing something didn't make it real! And presumably, if someone took a photograph over the shoulder of someone reading a picture book in which there was an illustration of a knight fighting a dragon, the viewer of the photograph would have understood that in *that* context, the thing in the photograph was not real--because context would clue them in. But in this case, it must just have been this totally odd concatenation of cues that led people not to see these cutouts as cutouts.
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Despite its light fictionalization and occasional slush, FairyTale: A True Story (1997) did a beautiful job with this aspect of the story: the camera is a factual instrument—science doesn't lie—and so if the photographs themselves have not been tampered with, then what they captured must be real. The guarantee of the medium dissuades you from looking more closely at the subject.
(I should like to watch this movie again: I only saw it the one time with
Now I think nuclear waste is a huge huge problem, but even I could see that this guy was stuck on this assumption that it absolutely had to go in barrels--and apparently metal ones at that.
Yeah, I think there are better solutions!
I approve of a waistcoat-enhanced quarantine.
Thank you. I shall let you know if it comes to pass.
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Congratulations on the reprint!
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I recognized the ballet from the first image and I was so happy.
Congratulations on the reprint!
Thank you!
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Congratulations on the reprinted story.
Nine
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Enjoy! It is important to have nice things in stressful times.
Congratulations on the reprinted story.
Thank you.
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Nine
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I have not!