From the paper skyscrapers, the stick-figured neighbors
Tonight in unintended science: I am picking up commercial radio on my computer speakers. I'd been hearing tiny little mutters and scratches of voices and music all afternoon and assumed they were filtering down through the ceiling from the third-floor apartment, but no, they were emerging from the static of my twenty-four-year-old sound system. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch thinks it's because of something about the way I have the cables coiled. I'm just not sure why took it until now to become an air loom. Have some links.
1. Courtesy of a friend who is not on Dreamwidth: a heroically mountaineering cat. Did I mention that Hestia caught her first mouse a few nights ago? It was tiny and she was so proud of it. Rob took it away from her with a colander and a piece of cardboard and gave her all the treats her mighty hunting deserved. Autolycus got treats for helping.
2. I recommend Rodney Garland's The Heart in Exile (1953) more ambivalently than Denis Bracknel (1947), because while a first-generation queer hardboiled/noir novel is a wonderful thing to discover, the hero's being a psychiatrist is still no excuse for the amount of mid-century psychojargon about society and sexuality that clogs up its pages. Every time I thought I might just as well re-read the Wolfenden report, however, the novel pulled out something like this exchange between the protagonist and his devoted secretary whom any reader with the most cursory familiarity with the conventions of the genre can see should be the endgame pairing, if the protagonist can just realize it:
"What I wanted to ask you," Terry said a little abruptly, just when I was anxious to change the subject, "is why all plays and novels dealing with queers have an inevitably tragic end. I mean, there's always murder, suicide, insanity or imprisonment. I mean, that's not so in real life, is it? I don't say all queers are happy, but the vast majority aren't unhappy, anyway, and even if they are they don't go round cutting their throats or killing each other."
"The answer to that is that the only way normal society at present accepts the homosexual in literature is with a compulsory tragic end. To be a homo is a crime, and crime mustn't go unpunished; not in books at least. Besides, I think the author himself, by giving you a tragic end, is trying to engage your sympathy: 'Pity us poor buggers.' Which explains the tear-jerker title, the frequent Biblical quotations, the lugubrious tone, the underlining of the tragic element. Besides, happiness—normal or abnormal—is uninteresting."
Terry smiled; I wondered if he was really listening. He said slowly: "If ever I could write a book on the subject, I'd try to tell the truth. I'd write about the majority for whom it isn't really tragic." He raised a soda-red hand. "I suppose disaster is always there, well . . . a sort of threat, in the background, but the real trouble is that most of them are afraid of love. That's what makes them so miserable. One should never be afraid of it, even if one gets jilted. It's the only thing in life, isn't it? I mean love. That's the message."
—which meant I forgave it a lot because it is ultimately the kind of novel whose central tension is really not solving the suicide of the handsome, successful, Richard Cory-like Julian Leclerc but whether, in the process of investigating the death of his first love, Dr. Tony Page will finally become healthy enough to take a chance on loving again rather than remaining the safely professional, closed-off figure he's been to both men and women for most of his adult life. Any tragic end on his part would be self-inflicted and especially after the meta-callout of all the sad gay novels already out there, who wants to see that? Not Adam de Hegedus, who wrote this book under the pseudonym of Rodney Garland, at least.
3. Apparently all it takes for me for me to rate a person as an Element is an interesting face and a sharp suit, which explains my instinctive reaction to this photo of Burn Gorman. He looks like a Caesium to me.
I spent enough of my afternoon on different Zoom calls that I was fried when I got off them, but I managed to make an apple crisp for dessert; it is good forty-degree fruit-baking weather and now we need more apples. Still not really sure what to do about Radio Free Mumble-Mumble. At the moment I am drowning it out with my belated birthday present of Elvis Perkins' Creation Myths (2020).
spatch thinks it's because of something about the way I have the cables coiled. I'm just not sure why took it until now to become an air loom. Have some links.1. Courtesy of a friend who is not on Dreamwidth: a heroically mountaineering cat. Did I mention that Hestia caught her first mouse a few nights ago? It was tiny and she was so proud of it. Rob took it away from her with a colander and a piece of cardboard and gave her all the treats her mighty hunting deserved. Autolycus got treats for helping.
2. I recommend Rodney Garland's The Heart in Exile (1953) more ambivalently than Denis Bracknel (1947), because while a first-generation queer hardboiled/noir novel is a wonderful thing to discover, the hero's being a psychiatrist is still no excuse for the amount of mid-century psychojargon about society and sexuality that clogs up its pages. Every time I thought I might just as well re-read the Wolfenden report, however, the novel pulled out something like this exchange between the protagonist and his devoted secretary whom any reader with the most cursory familiarity with the conventions of the genre can see should be the endgame pairing, if the protagonist can just realize it:
"What I wanted to ask you," Terry said a little abruptly, just when I was anxious to change the subject, "is why all plays and novels dealing with queers have an inevitably tragic end. I mean, there's always murder, suicide, insanity or imprisonment. I mean, that's not so in real life, is it? I don't say all queers are happy, but the vast majority aren't unhappy, anyway, and even if they are they don't go round cutting their throats or killing each other."
"The answer to that is that the only way normal society at present accepts the homosexual in literature is with a compulsory tragic end. To be a homo is a crime, and crime mustn't go unpunished; not in books at least. Besides, I think the author himself, by giving you a tragic end, is trying to engage your sympathy: 'Pity us poor buggers.' Which explains the tear-jerker title, the frequent Biblical quotations, the lugubrious tone, the underlining of the tragic element. Besides, happiness—normal or abnormal—is uninteresting."
Terry smiled; I wondered if he was really listening. He said slowly: "If ever I could write a book on the subject, I'd try to tell the truth. I'd write about the majority for whom it isn't really tragic." He raised a soda-red hand. "I suppose disaster is always there, well . . . a sort of threat, in the background, but the real trouble is that most of them are afraid of love. That's what makes them so miserable. One should never be afraid of it, even if one gets jilted. It's the only thing in life, isn't it? I mean love. That's the message."
—which meant I forgave it a lot because it is ultimately the kind of novel whose central tension is really not solving the suicide of the handsome, successful, Richard Cory-like Julian Leclerc but whether, in the process of investigating the death of his first love, Dr. Tony Page will finally become healthy enough to take a chance on loving again rather than remaining the safely professional, closed-off figure he's been to both men and women for most of his adult life. Any tragic end on his part would be self-inflicted and especially after the meta-callout of all the sad gay novels already out there, who wants to see that? Not Adam de Hegedus, who wrote this book under the pseudonym of Rodney Garland, at least.
3. Apparently all it takes for me for me to rate a person as an Element is an interesting face and a sharp suit, which explains my instinctive reaction to this photo of Burn Gorman. He looks like a Caesium to me.
I spent enough of my afternoon on different Zoom calls that I was fried when I got off them, but I managed to make an apple crisp for dessert; it is good forty-degree fruit-baking weather and now we need more apples. Still not really sure what to do about Radio Free Mumble-Mumble. At the moment I am drowning it out with my belated birthday present of Elvis Perkins' Creation Myths (2020).
no subject
I had no idea this was a popular phenomenon!