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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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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.