Who cares how rich you are, love, when you look like Boris Karloff?

[sovay]

We have not yet been hit by a hurricane, although earlier this evening I watched a beautiful fast-sliding sunset of graphite-brushed and salmon-rose clouds like layers of moving glass. Have some links.

1. The folksinger Michael Smith has died. He wrote any number of beautiful, wry, thoughtful songs that became part of the folk tradition, such that I first heard several of them in the voices of other singers, but I knew him first and best for "Dead Egyptian Blues," which means I hope he was buried with at least a few grave goods.

2. I am delighted to see Scout Tafoya raising awareness for The Eternal (1998), otherwise known as my favorite bog body movie, but what do you mean Michael Almereyda made a movie about Nikola Tesla and I'm just hearing about it now? I can only hope it's as weird as Experimenter (2015).

3. Courtesy of kaffy_r: I had not previously heard of Stuart Stevens, but the interviews with him at Mother Jones and The New Yorker are both worth reading. tl;dr veteran Republican strategist turned out to be too honest not to recognize that the man in the White House was not a deviation from the values of his party but a culmination of them and then he had to figure out what to do about it.

4. As a result of recommending David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937), I discovered two books of his that I hadn't known about: The Sleeping Lord (1974) and Dai Greatcoat: a self-portrait of David Jones in his letters (1980). So now I have to figure out how to get hold of those.

5. Courtesy of moon_custafer: I am hoping I have not scared off a total stranger on AO3, but a person who writes fic for Night Nurse (1931), The Petrified Forest (1936), Act of Violence (1948), Johnny Eager (1942), and Three Strangers (1946) is a person I am incredibly glad to discover exists. I shouted somewhat to that effect in their comments and am now d'escaliering about appropriate levels of enthusiasm. I was just so happily surprised. [edit] HOORAY I HAVE NOT HORRIFIED THEM.

I rewatched A Night to Remember (1958) for the first time in ten or twelve years and this time around, in addition to noting with pleasure the presence of Michael Bryant in a small role (because once you notice a character actor, they can and probably will turn up anywhere), what struck me most was the lines invented for Kenneth More's Lightoller as he sits with James Dyrenforth's Gracie and thirty other freezing men on the overturned hull of Collapsible B, frost on their hair and the black sea broken only by the other lifeboats and terrible debris and the lights of the Carpathia steaming for them against all odds: "I've been at sea since I was a boy. I've been in sail. I've even been shipwrecked before. I know what the sea can do. But this is different . . . Because we were so sure. Because even though it's happened, it's still unbelievable. I don't think I'll ever feel sure again—about anything." It's the one scene of the film that feels contemporary rather than intensely of the moment, since for all its composites, elisions, and occasional errors the script is otherwise scrupulous about knowing only what history knew—more like post-WWII 1953 than pre-WWI 1912—and it also feels to me like weird fiction, like cosmic horror. The world can be smashed so badly out from underneath you, nothing can be trusted anymore. Which may explain why it occurred to me to rewatch the movie now, aside from the fact that I remembered liking it.

Comments

[gwynnega]

It is great that somebody wrote fic for those movies!

[legionseagle]

I have to say, given the career of Charles Herbert Lightoller, it sounds like pretty OOC dialogue: that was a man for whom surviving the Titanic was only about the fifth or sixth most interesting thing in his long life. (A typical extract from his Wikipedia entry reads: At age 13, not wanting to end up with a factory job like most of Britain's youth at the time, young Charles began a four-year seafaring apprenticeship on board the barque Primrose Hill. On his second voyage, he set sail with the crew of the Holt Hill, and during a storm in the South Atlantic, the ship was forced to put in at Rio de Janeiro. Repairs were made in the midst of a smallpox epidemic and a revolution.

Another storm, on 13 November 1889 in the Indian Ocean, caused the ship to run aground on an uninhabited four-and-a-half-square-mile island now called Île Saint-Paul. They were rescued by the Coorong and taken to Adelaide, Australia. Lightoller joined the crew of the clipper ship Duke of Abercorn for his return to England.

Lightoller returned to the Primrose Hill for his third voyage. They arrived in Calcutta, India, where he passed his second mate's certificate. The cargo of coal caught fire while he was serving as third mate on board the windjammer Knight of St. Michael, and for his successful efforts in fighting the fire and saving the ship, Lightoller was promoted to second mate. )

From his own account of Dunkirk: "Suddenly the gunner called out, 'There she is, sir,'and sure enough there was the big Pile Buoy but red instead of black. Number one was the first to spot the colour and growled, 'By God, it's not Gravelines, it's Haut Frond,' it was indeed , and we were just exactly in the middle of the minefield that had so successfully blown up five of our ships already....We kept on at the 20 knots (it was the only thing to do) but brought her slowly round so as to disturb the mines as little as possible..."

[asakiyume]

How marvelous about the AO3 fic writer who seems to have been tailor-made for you! That's great. And I'm pleased they've accepted your overtures in the right spirit, too.

I've been thinking about the quote you mention from A Night to Remember ... I wonder if (but please don't test me on this, universe!) I'm immune from the effects described due to never being sure of anything in that manner. I'll have to think about it more... I feel like probably I *could* be unmoored in the way the character described and that probably my sense that that's my starting point is actually an illusion. After all, my life has been pretty stable, really.

But yeah: I can see how it is like cosmic horror.