But Carthage may rise again one day

[sovay]

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 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 H.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.

Comments

[sovay]

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?

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.

[asakiyume]

re: what your eye will persuade you of---when I was in grad school there was a particular bathroom stall in which the matte paint of the flat plywood door, and the ambient light, and the effect of the floor combined so that if I let myself stare at the bottom of the door, my brain flipped what I was seeing so that it looked as if the floor ended at the door, and then there was empty space--like a cliff face, indeed. It looked super real. It was weird. And I knew for a fact that wasn't what I was seeing.

[sovay]

combined so that if I let myself stare at the bottom of the door, my brain flipped what I was seeing so that it looked as if the floor ended at the door, and then there was empty space--like a cliff face, indeed.

That's incredibly cool.