sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-06-06 10:37 pm

Finally, time to write the book on you

As it turns out, what goes on with my hand is that it's going to have arthritis, but with any luck on the same glacial timeline as the kind that runs in my family, and in the meantime I have been referred back to OT. Maybe there will be more paraffin.

My parents as an unnecessary gift for taking care of the plants while they were out of town—mostly watering a lot of things in pots and digging the black swallow-wort out of the irises—gave me Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (2001/2025), which not only fits the theme of this year's Noir City: Boston, but contains such useful gems as:

One of the most common, if wrong-headed, criticisms of film noir is that it relegates women to simplistic archetypes, making them Pollyannas or femmes fatales, drippy good girls or sinister sexpots. People who believe this nonsense have never seen a noir starring Ella Raines.

Ella Raines is indeed all that and a drum solo on top, but she is not a unique occurrence and I can only hope that people who have not been paying attention to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry or Imogen Sara Smith will listen to the Czar of Noir when he writes about its complicated women, because I am never going to have the platform to get this fact through people's heads and I am never going to let up on it, either.

Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.
thistleingrey: (Default)

[personal profile] thistleingrey 2025-06-07 03:50 am (UTC)(link)
May the progress of degenerative inflammation be even slower than glacial! (Ideally, climate change wouldn't affect your hands significantly....)
gwynnega: (Basil Rathbone)

[personal profile] gwynnega 2025-06-07 05:08 am (UTC)(link)
Yay Eddie Muller and Ella Raines!

That is a currently useful vocabulary word.
foxmoth: (Default)

[personal profile] foxmoth 2025-06-07 06:09 am (UTC)(link)
Sympathies and support.
scifirenegade: (determined | lancelot)

[personal profile] scifirenegade 2025-06-07 06:24 am (UTC)(link)
Damn. Hopefully the onset is, indeed, glacial.

Oooh nice books!
thisbluespirit: (b7 - zen)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2025-06-07 08:49 am (UTC)(link)
As it turns out, what goes on with my hand is that it's going to have arthritis, but with any luck on the same glacial timeline as the kind that runs in my family, and in the meantime I have been referred back to OT. Maybe there will be more paraffin.

Oh, I'm sorry. I hope, then, for glaciers and paraffin for you. <3

I'm glad someone has your back on noir! It sounds like an excellent present.

Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.

That is a suitably expressive word.
spatch: (Default)

[personal profile] spatch 2025-06-07 10:46 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, now I really wish Eddie Muller was coming to Boston for the series.
moon_custafer: sexy bookshop mnager Dorothy Malone (Acme Bookshop)

[personal profile] moon_custafer 2025-06-07 02:22 pm (UTC)(link)
Nice to have a word for the circus whose monkeys are not mine.
batdina: (Default)

[personal profile] batdina 2025-06-07 04:51 pm (UTC)(link)
While I regret the circumstances under which I have now learned this word, I still think it is an awesome addition to my vocabulary. Though I also have to wonder what my Ukrainian grandparents would have made of my knowing it?

May your hands continue glacially in all things unpleasant, and quickly in all things useful and lovely.
batdina: (Default)

[personal profile] batdina 2025-06-07 11:33 pm (UTC)(link)
(Where in Ukraine, if I may ask?)

Forgive my spelling, and I don't have any Cyrillic.

Jhitomir, Chernobyl, and Kiev. And if they didn't get out in the 10s and 20s, they didn't get out. Obv. (The fourth grandparent was cagey, or at least his folks were cagey with him. The closest we have for them is somewhere in Belarus.)

My kitchen table Yiddish never got me much more than that. Sadly.
pameladean: (Default)

[personal profile] pameladean 2025-06-07 07:18 pm (UTC)(link)
Here's to more paraffin to keep the pace glacial. That is not a sentence I have ever expected to write, but as such sentences go, it is a nice benign one. Most of them are horrible.

And speaking of which, I was able to look up how to prounounce your new vocabulary word and that was very satisfying.

P.
asakiyume: created by the ninja girl (Default)

[personal profile] asakiyume 2025-06-08 08:18 pm (UTC)(link)
The definition of your new vocabulary word is great. I especially liked the third one, "Situations so cringe and cursed they feel like a cursed animal mating ritual" .... ooooooohhhhhhh, I get it, I get it. I approve. Yes, 100 percent.

That quote from Dark City Dames is good and also made me realize that if you mixed up the adjectives (drippy sexpots, sinister good girls) you still have recognizable types. How weird.

More paraffin sounds relaxing, and may it delay arthritis until well into your 90s.