Underwater is where she can finally breathe

[sovay]

Happy equinox! For the first day of autumn, I am bisexually visible and extremely tired.



I don't know if it was the tailoring of the vaccine or the preexisting stratum of the miserable cold, but this latest shot has flattened me: sweat-soaked fever, doubling cough, my shoulder hurting so much that I kept waking in the night from rolling onto it and a knot under my arm like it was rehearsing for another plague. spatch came back from running errands in the afternoon rain and curled himself very carefully around me, Hestia-fashion. To cover the evening shift, Autolycus has wriggled himself so far beneath the blankets of the couch that I can go nowhere without the approval of my chocolate-furred doctor who shows no signs of shifting himself any time soon.

Smart Girls Don't Talk (1948) is a well-shot crime melodrama whose set-up is much more interesting than its play-out, but I like all of its actors even when the script throws them more curveballs of morality than sharp lines like "You sound like the third paragraph of a ten-cent mystery thriller!" Richard Rober makes a decent romantically wistful cop on the other side of the investigation from Bruce Bennett's classily crooked nightclub owner, with Virginia Mayo's bereaved and calculating socialite between them—since the action is vectored through her perspective, I suppose the triangle is unavoidable as part of the standard package of women's interest. Neither of the movies in which I have so far encountered Helen Westcott has had the sense to give her a part as real as her face. I've seen Tom D'Andrea as so many salt-of-the-earth working joes, a slightly thuggish right-hand fixer makes a nice change.

I can't make it to the BLO's Madama Butterfly, but this review makes me wish there had at least been a livecast.

This summer disappeared so fast and so badly into illness, I am feeling unusually unstuck in time.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I know you're working on it. and the soup offer is always open.

hugs you

[sovay]

I know you're working on it. and the soup offer is always open.

Thank you. I feel I look like a Roman lemur.

[asakiyume]

My goodness. Now I want to know what a Roman lemur looks like.

[sovay]

My goodness. Now I want to know what a Roman lemur looks like.

It's a kind of ghost. The festival of Lemuria is named after them, when the head of the household must perform a ritual at midnight to placate the restless, wandering dead whom no one has given the proper rites of burial or remembrance. The words suggest that they may be forgotten ancestors, or perhaps it pacifies them to be named as such, acknowledged into someone's family. The household itself is bought safe with a thrown handful of black beans, but because the offerings which the lemures have been missing include salt, grain, and wine-soaked bread, it is not difficult to imagine these dispossessed ghosts as hungry.

[asakiyume]

Oh wow, I am glad the Romans thought about the lonely ghosts and made them members, fictive or actual, of their families.

Also, how interesting that both Rome and Japan have a festival where you throw beans to protect the family. ... Then again, beans are good-sized seeds; perhaps it's natural.

[sovay]

Oh wow, I am glad the Romans thought about the lonely ghosts and made them members, fictive or actual, of their families.

According to Ovid's Fasti, which is our only full description of the ritual, you go out barefoot at midnight; you draw water and wash your hands; you make an apotropaic sign with your fingers and throw black beans over your shoulder and you say, "Haec ego mitto, his redimo meque meosque fabis"—These I let go, with these beans I redeem me and mine—and you repeat these actions nine times without once looking back where the ghosts are following. Then you wash your hands again and bang pots and when you have said again nine times, "Manes exite paterni"—Ghosts of my family, go—then it is finally safe to look behind you, where the ghosts are satisfied and gone.

Also, how interesting that both Rome and Japan have a festival where you throw beans to protect the family. ... Then again, beans are good-sized seeds; perhaps it's natural.

I didn't know there were beans involved in Japanese apotropaic ritual! That's really neat.

[asakiyume]

(I love this ritual--I'm going to tell my kids about it)

Re: Japan, yes! Setsubun, on February 3. You eat as many dried soybeans as your age, and then some in the family put on masks to be demons, and someone else flings beans (... the same soybeans? I'm not remembering right now. Probably?) and shouts "oni wa soto; fuku wa uchi!" (demons out, good fortune in!)

ETA (the beans are for pelting the demons--it helps drive them away)

[sovay]

(I love this ritual--I'm going to tell my kids about it)

Please do! Ovid writing just slightly over two thousand years ago thought it was archaic even then.

Re: Japan, yes! Setsubun, on February 3. You eat as many dried soybeans as your age, and then some in the family put on masks to be demons, and someone else flings beans (... the same soybeans? I'm not remembering right now. Probably?) and shouts "oni wa soto; fuku wa uchi!" (demons out, good fortune in!)

Thank you for describing that to me! Man, while being neither ghost nor demon so far as I know, I really want some beans now.