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I thought this was meant to be a carnival
The moon tonight was astonishing: so bright you could feel your pupils tighten as you looked at it. It looked brighter than the streetlights, one of those hole-punched full moons that look like somewhere else is spilling in. Its glow was visible over the edge of the roofs long after it had set behind them. You get that kind of moon in Tanith Lee.
I had a hearing with the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment this afternoon. It was conducted over the phone and took about fifteen minutes, which was much less than I had been braced for: when I was asked if I had any questions, my question was effectively was that it? I presume at some point I'll find out if it worked. It was not, of course, about the problem I have been having with them since June.
I would be reading Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (1975) if my copy were not in storage along with Space Lords (1965) and The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (1993), which I can still remember reading in high school while waiting for the chorus to settle itself for rehearsal; I had discovered "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" in Groff Conklin's 12 Great Classics of Science Fiction (1963) and then I had scoured my parents' shelves for any stories by Smith in hitherto overlooked anthologies and then I scoured used book stores and then NESFA Press helped me out. Right now, I can find the originally published first half of The Boy Who Bought Old Earth (1964) readily enough, but the second half of The Underpeople (1968) remains out of easy reach. In the process of trying to find it, I ran across the claim that the Lord Redlady—the disgraced and tricksterish Commissioner of the Instrumentality who becomes the protagonist's first unexpected ally, "a thin man with a sharp, inquiring face" and a flamboyant style which does not contradict his occasional tendency to vaporize someone; he isn't my favorite character because the novel also contains the cat-girl C'mell—was based on the author's friend Michael Lindsay, of whom I hadn't heard. Now I want to read the memoir by his wife Hsiao Li. I have fewer expectations of finding that out of copyright on the internet.
I have decided I need to get my watch fixed. It's been 1:39 since last April. This is probably on some level accurate, but I still don't like having to pull out my phone to synch up with everyone else's broken time.
I had a hearing with the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment this afternoon. It was conducted over the phone and took about fifteen minutes, which was much less than I had been braced for: when I was asked if I had any questions, my question was effectively was that it? I presume at some point I'll find out if it worked. It was not, of course, about the problem I have been having with them since June.
I would be reading Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (1975) if my copy were not in storage along with Space Lords (1965) and The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (1993), which I can still remember reading in high school while waiting for the chorus to settle itself for rehearsal; I had discovered "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" in Groff Conklin's 12 Great Classics of Science Fiction (1963) and then I had scoured my parents' shelves for any stories by Smith in hitherto overlooked anthologies and then I scoured used book stores and then NESFA Press helped me out. Right now, I can find the originally published first half of The Boy Who Bought Old Earth (1964) readily enough, but the second half of The Underpeople (1968) remains out of easy reach. In the process of trying to find it, I ran across the claim that the Lord Redlady—the disgraced and tricksterish Commissioner of the Instrumentality who becomes the protagonist's first unexpected ally, "a thin man with a sharp, inquiring face" and a flamboyant style which does not contradict his occasional tendency to vaporize someone; he isn't my favorite character because the novel also contains the cat-girl C'mell—was based on the author's friend Michael Lindsay, of whom I hadn't heard. Now I want to read the memoir by his wife Hsiao Li. I have fewer expectations of finding that out of copyright on the internet.
I have decided I need to get my watch fixed. It's been 1:39 since last April. This is probably on some level accurate, but I still don't like having to pull out my phone to synch up with everyone else's broken time.
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Your description of the moon was so beautiful. The light from somewhere else--I love when it seems that way. And I liked the notion of feeling your pupils tightening.
The business with Unemployment. Prayers for your needs and curses on the system that pulps real humans in its gears. Funny, I can offer these curses for the medical system, the unemployment system, the system to deal with homelessness, the system to deal with cross-border migration ...
This is two entries where you've mentioned Cordwainer Smith. I've heard his name before but never to really have an association... I will go look him up so I know more about who this guy is and what he wrote.
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I almost feel I should leave it until the time is right to restart it, but I am also beginning to feel I just need a watch.
Your description of the moon was so beautiful. The light from somewhere else--I love when it seems that way. And I liked the notion of feeling your pupils tightening.
It was a striking physical effect!
Prayers for your needs and curses on the system that pulps real humans in its gears. Funny, I can offer these curses for the medical system, the unemployment system, the system to deal with homelessness, the system to deal with cross-border migration ...
A person needs a lot of curses to get through these days.
This is two entries where you've mentioned Cordwainer Smith. I've heard his name before but never to really have an association... I will go look him up so I know more about who this guy is and what he wrote.
A non-intuitive assortment of his fiction appears to be available online, so I can point you toward "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" (1962). The protagonist was named after the author's cat Melanie. It didn't occur to me in high school where I found it only natural, but it's so interesting to read a writer for whom cats connote not just elegance and intelligence but strength and partnership as here or in Norstrilia or "The Game of Rat and Dragon" (1955); they are not sigils of cruelty or decadence as so often even in mainstream culture. Smith's version, of course, feels truer to me. He's one of the writers I loved so intensely and at such an imprintable age that I can't imagine he wasn't an influence, but I haven't been able to see it in my own work. I know I responded to the imagination of his universe, his style, his technique of telling a story from after the fact and the inside out, his structure of a future history which was not contiguous but a mosaic of snapshots that may have been bending eventually toward some kind of conclusion, but if so he didn't leave notes on it before he died. He had a recurring concern with the way that real events are mutated into fiction by popular culture or even misread by and lost to official history, which obviously resonated with me; it's visible in "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" and even more so in "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" (1964), which is a partial retelling of Joan of Arc in the same way that "Drunkboat" (1963) riffs on Arthur Rimbaud. He was Christian and it manifests especially in his later stories, but not in a way that made me feel shoved out of them. His poetry was generally terrible, but I still find a lot of it to work in context and perhaps more importantly, I can still quote a lot of it off the top of my head. I used "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" for my high school senior yearbook quote. (They misspelled a line in it, but then they also misspelled my name after repeated corrections and a letter to the editor, so I don't know what I was expecting. I kind of hate my high school yearbooks.) Between his professional life and his fiction, I am a little surprised there has never been a biography of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger who wrote primarily as Cordwainer Smith, but mostly there just seem to be talks and articles. His daughter maintained a website for a while, but it hasn't been updated in years. I appreciate the existence and aptness of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.
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I hope to check out at least "Ballad" and maybe some of the others later today. Thanks again!
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You're welcome! I hope you enjoy them! Content warnings for state violence in a context of civil rights in "The Dead Lady of Clown Town"?
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Are you trying to summon an element? XD 0_o
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I think this entire era of history is trying to summon Elements! I can't imagine how long it'll take to sort out.
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It did run down rather than stop cold. It took about a day.
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Mhmm, yes dear, I'll write down natural causes
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Rather.
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Oh, beautiful. Where did you take that from?
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I don't think so, but I've never really asked.
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'Lord Redlady' does seem rather a giveaway, even if Hsiao Li, Lady Lindsay, was actually a critic of the communists.
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I am confident the answer is yes and my brain is just being crowded out by the alternatives, because people who care will do whatever they can wherever they are, but unfortunately I got stuck on Varian Fry who went looking for trouble rather than finding himself in the midst of it and may take a little while to extricate myself from the European theater.
'Lord Redlady' does seem rather a giveaway, even if Hsiao Li, Lady Lindsay, was actually a critic of the communists.
It's like Leo Marks—unless you have the key or at least a suspicion of the existence of one, it just looks like a normal name in a future where people are called things like Jestocost, Teadrinker, Goroke, C'mackintosh, Talatashar, Not-from-here, and Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan the 151st.
(From the sort of potted biographies available online, the Lindsays seem to have been firmly communist-aligned during the war, but then disillusioned by the ascension of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. As the Muppets would say, very popular choice.)
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Okay, if you're counting her, then I'm totally counting Varian Fry.
Ultimately he won the Navy Cross three times and retired as a brigadier general.
I had heard of him, but not in detail, and that's nuts.
Speaking of WWII, I have just learned that Christopher Nolan's next planned project is a film about Oppenheimer. I turned out to love Dunkirk (2017), but if he screws up the Manhattan Project, we're done.
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In weird OSS operatives stories, I've always been fond of Bernard Knox's. Spanish Civil War vet from Britain, quits the Communists over the invasions of Finland and the Baltic states iirc and moves to America, ends up in Italy with the partisans for the OSS and finds a copy of the Aeneid in a bombed out library, leading to a future career as a classicist. Have never forgotten this one OSS report of his later published in The New Republic with the laconic line "We had to shoot the man in the car."
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Couldn't make it up!
I was delighted to come across speculation last night that "Waiting for Godot" is based on the time Samuel Beckett and his partner had to hike down into the French countryside, sleeping in haystacks, after the resistance network they were helping was betrayed to the Germans.