A word can suggest my likeness as a painting suggests distance
The weather remains, technically speaking, too darn hot. Have a lot of links.
1. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shewhomust: the Pineapple. I feel confident in saying that I find little to admire in a late eighteenth-century colonial governor of Virginia and the Bahamas, except that on his return home to Scotland he built himself a two-storey Gothic stone pineapple and it's hilarious. I was unable to think about it without laughing for at least a day after learning about it. I keep trying to imagine the reactions of the unknown architect confronted with such a commission. It is a national treasure in both the official and colloquial senses of the word. If I lived in the right country to stay in it, I would.
2. Courtesy ofisis: "Know your Hrvatski from your Old Norse?" As it turns out, I do, as well as my Russian from my Tok Pisin, but I was wrong about the language with the most native speakers and had no idea about High Valyrian. I appreciate deeply that if you answer the question about Polari right, the quiz briefly takes on the personality of Julian or Sandy.
3. Courtesy of looking for contemporary Burmese fiction and poetry: the complete time sink of the archives of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. Now I have an even longer list of books I wish I could afford.
4. The title may as well stand as a content warning, but I loved this short story: S. Qiouyi Lu's "As Dark as Hunger."
5. I had never seen the beautiful autochromes taken of Christina Bevan in 1913 and in fact had no idea that a photographic process based on potato starch had ever existed.
6. Nor had I realized that the question of what happened with Orson Welles' unfinished film of Charles Williams' Dead Calm (1963) was actually kind of a rabbit hole. I would have watched a sea-thriller with that cast. The HFA could have screened it last fall for their all-night marathon of dark waters that I was too ill to stay for more than the first film of, which I still resent.
7. I may never see the musical remake of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), but I am really charmed by the technical notes from the headmaster of its filming location, Sherborne School: "I was last at Paestum when Katherine and Chips were there, so I have only vague memories. Can it be visited the same day as Pompeii? Are there broken pillars? Is it a temple of Apollo? Is the inscription there? I assume you will check the spelling in Greek, of 'Gnothe Seauton'. This anglicised form contains one mistake."
8. Just in case anyone has not seen the recent proof-of-concept: "Low-cost measurement of facemask efficacy for filtering expelled droplets during speech."
9. I had not read this sonnet before: Hartley Coleridge, "Long Time a Child."
I have been re-reading Sayers when I can't sleep—the Harriet Vane novels, specifically. My body is behaving in ways that are cranking my dysphoria up to eleven in addition to ordinarily hurting and there are a couple of things in these books that are not exactly consoling, but are useful for me to be reminded of. It is an unexpected side effect.
1. Courtesy of
shewhomust: the Pineapple. I feel confident in saying that I find little to admire in a late eighteenth-century colonial governor of Virginia and the Bahamas, except that on his return home to Scotland he built himself a two-storey Gothic stone pineapple and it's hilarious. I was unable to think about it without laughing for at least a day after learning about it. I keep trying to imagine the reactions of the unknown architect confronted with such a commission. It is a national treasure in both the official and colloquial senses of the word. If I lived in the right country to stay in it, I would.2. Courtesy of
isis: "Know your Hrvatski from your Old Norse?" As it turns out, I do, as well as my Russian from my Tok Pisin, but I was wrong about the language with the most native speakers and had no idea about High Valyrian. I appreciate deeply that if you answer the question about Polari right, the quiz briefly takes on the personality of Julian or Sandy.3. Courtesy of looking for contemporary Burmese fiction and poetry: the complete time sink of the archives of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. Now I have an even longer list of books I wish I could afford.
4. The title may as well stand as a content warning, but I loved this short story: S. Qiouyi Lu's "As Dark as Hunger."
5. I had never seen the beautiful autochromes taken of Christina Bevan in 1913 and in fact had no idea that a photographic process based on potato starch had ever existed.
6. Nor had I realized that the question of what happened with Orson Welles' unfinished film of Charles Williams' Dead Calm (1963) was actually kind of a rabbit hole. I would have watched a sea-thriller with that cast. The HFA could have screened it last fall for their all-night marathon of dark waters that I was too ill to stay for more than the first film of, which I still resent.
7. I may never see the musical remake of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), but I am really charmed by the technical notes from the headmaster of its filming location, Sherborne School: "I was last at Paestum when Katherine and Chips were there, so I have only vague memories. Can it be visited the same day as Pompeii? Are there broken pillars? Is it a temple of Apollo? Is the inscription there? I assume you will check the spelling in Greek, of 'Gnothe Seauton'. This anglicised form contains one mistake."
8. Just in case anyone has not seen the recent proof-of-concept: "Low-cost measurement of facemask efficacy for filtering expelled droplets during speech."
9. I had not read this sonnet before: Hartley Coleridge, "Long Time a Child."
I have been re-reading Sayers when I can't sleep—the Harriet Vane novels, specifically. My body is behaving in ways that are cranking my dysphoria up to eleven in addition to ordinarily hurting and there are a couple of things in these books that are not exactly consoling, but are useful for me to be reminded of. It is an unexpected side effect.
Re: Speaking of tourist attractions
I don't blame them. I knew there was battlefield tourism immediately following the First World War, but I hadn't realized during. I'm impressed none of the tour parties ever got wiped out.
Re: Speaking of tourist attractions
I apologize for distracting from the original post, but yes, for a "world war" this one was very cosy. Boat-trains being what they were, officers who had dined at their club could be sitting in trench dugouts the next day. Civilians on the Channel coast could hear the heavy guns of a bombardment across the water, and when those colossal mines exploded at Messines they rattled the windows at No. 10 Downing Street. It was a family quarrel, at such close range and viciousness as those so often are.
(Trivial Pursuit® : Twenty-one mine shafts were dug, but only nineteen mines went off. In 1955 one more detonated with earthquake force; the last one has not yet exploded. No one is willing to probe for it even with geosonar - that might be all it takes…
Updated, literally - With Beirut force - each one of those mines was about on that scale. Nineteen Beiruts going off all at once - yes, that would jolt some seismograph pens! The Germans were horrified - they'd been outdone at chemical frightfulness, and they didn't forget it. Can you say, Flammenwerfer? (“It werfs Flammen.”)