No, sir! I ate a salamander and jumped out the window!

I seem to be stranded in the land of summary posts. Have some things I have encountered recently.

1. Nine episodes into Gravity Falls, I was explaining to derspatchel that there are ways in which the show reminds me of nothing so much as the novels of Daniel Pinkwater, especially the way the human characters are just as off-kilter as all the supernatural mystery going on around them. Fewer jokes involving Yiddish, equal time for weird relatives. Beautifully sideways treatments of familiar genre tropes and the matter of being an oddball. This is a world in which the eighth-and-a-half President of the United States successfully preserved himself in peanut brittle for two hundred years after his eccentricities so embarrassed his country that a national conspiracy was instigated to replace him in the historical record with William Henry Harrison. (Think about that for a minute.) Next to Grunkle Stan or Old Man McGucket, Flipping Hades Terwilliger would pass without comment. And I can say this as someone who discovered The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (1982) reprinted in an omnibus of Pinkwater's 5 Novels (1997) this afternoon in the basement of the Harvard Book Store—I haven't read the book since eighth grade at the latest, but I remember I considered it my favorite Pinkwater at the time. I am so looking forward.

2. rushthatspeaks was entirely correct that I would love Frances Hardinge's Fly by Night (2005). I have just finished the sequel, Fly Trap (2011, Twilight Robbery in the UK. I am waiting for the third book to have some kind of time-of-day title as well, after which her American publishers can feel silly). On the one hand, it's probably facile to describe the world of Mosca Mye, Eponymous Clent, and Saracen the homicidal goose as the perfect cross between Lloyd Alexander in Westmark mode and Sid Fleischman, especially when I have no idea of Hardinge's relationship to either author. On the other, I can't think of a more concise way to get across both the intelligence of the political fantasy and the sly, word-smitten humor of the world and how much I enjoyed both books, unless it's the fact that I was so taken with the first conversation between Mosca and Clent (at the end of Chapter One of Fly by Night, "A Is for Arson") that I typed out the whole five and a half pages and sent them posthaste to Rob. There was going to be more in this vein, but I just looked at Hardinge's bibliography to double-check dates and saw that we were in the same issue of Steve Pasechnick's Alchemy in 2006 and now I'm just kind of staring at the retrospective awesome in my life. Most of 2006 sucked. All right, autumn, are you making a point here?

3. I've been meaning for a week to post about Suddenly (1954), the film lesser_celery and I watched last Wednesday, because I cannot in good conscience recommend it except for Frank Sinatra, but he makes it worth watching. ( The thing about killing you—or her, or him—is that I wouldn't be getting paid for it. And I don't like giving anything away for free. )

4. I should be more awake to write about Blackmail (1929), Alfred Hitchcock's last silent movie and first talkie, which I saw with live accompaniment at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Monday. I find myself mostly thinking about Donald Calthrop, who plays the blackmailer of the title—I think of Hitchcock villains mostly in the dramatic line, Peter Lorre in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), James Mason in North by Northwest (1959), shadowily political or psychologically all kinked up, either way figures to be reckoned with. Calthrop's Tracy is a shabby little nobody, a petty ex-con with nervous, ingratiating habits who stretches out expansively with a cigar he can't pay for and tucks heartily into someone else's breakfast when he thinks he's got the upper hand; he has a clever character face and a trick of diffidence even when ostentatiously patting his pockets down and while he makes a threatening shadow against the door of the dead artist's house by night, in person on the killer's doorstep the next morning he looks most like a failed actor, overplaying a scene without the stage presence to pull it off. All he's got is the glove in his pocket, his word against a woman's reputation. I was struck almost as much by his anonymity as by the way he drops suddenly into sympathy when pinned for the crime he didn't commit, all his stolen swagger collapsing out of him as physically as if he'd taken a punch in the ribs. He panics and he's hunted and it doesn't erase the savor he took in holding his evidence over a woman who is already walking through waking nightmares of what she's done, but he shouldn't pull even that much of the audience's pity: I suppose in that he foreshadows Claude Rains in Notorious (1946), so there's a link after all. But I'm still trying to think of another Hitchcock film where the danger is so seedily domestic and I'm not really coming up with anything. I haven't seen his entire filmography—I'll take suggestions. In the meantime, it seems that Donald Calthrop plays a supporting part in The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936), which teenybuffalo may have recommended to me? It's got Boris Karloff and mad science. I don't see how I could go wrong.

5. I think Midnight Riot (né Rivers of London, 2011) is the book I've been waiting years for Neil Gaiman to write, except Ben Aaronovitch got there first. I was able to identify the figure behind the mystery on page twenty and I was still not disappointed in it.

I keep misquoting a line from The Lady's Not for Burning. You'd think I'd be able to memorize eight words, the importance I keep placing on that play. —Go away, T. Witt. Autumn is making a point. This is going to be a better fall.