She lived a moment past tenses

Unless you count the ten minutes I zonked out during the second act of The Blue Dahlia (1946) tonight at the Brattle, I have not slept in thirty-nine hours, so there is no film review tonight; I shall attempt one tomorrow, because I am behind on my Patreon. In the meantime, an announcement!

E-books of An Alphabet of Embers now exist! They went out to Kickstarter backers and contributors this afternoon; I received mine while watching Autolycus play with a plastic seltzer bottlecap. Among beautiful work by JY Yang, Nin Harris, Greer Gilman, Zen Cho, Yoon Ha Lee, M. David Blake, Celeste Rita Baker, Shweta Narayan, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Ching-In Chen, Amal El-Mohtar, and many others, the anthology reprints my short story "Exorcisms" with a gorgeous pen-and-ink illustration by M Sereno; it is about dybbuks and I will say more when the print and official e-book editions come out in May (Nebula Awards weekend), but my family history is in it and a relative I didn't know when I wrote him was real.

The cover art by Galen Dara remains fantastic and fiery.

I mean, do you know how the male newt proposes, Bertie?

I got up at a perfectly reasonable hour today, but due to the necessity of working my actual job have had no chance to do anything else with my brain, except just now when I got back from the doctor, checked in on the internet, and got distracted.

Yes, Tumblr, I would adore a version of Jeeves and Wooster in which Richard Ayoade played Gussie Fink-Nottle. Why has this not already happened? Somebody please turn this entire gifset from fancasting to the real thing.

Original flavor Gussie Fink-Nottle was one of my earliest unmistakable lessons in physical acting, actually. I was a late bloomer: I didn't encounter Fry and Laurie's Jeeves and Wooster (1990–93) until my junior year of college and my very first episode was "The Hunger Strike," in which a gloomily lovestruck Gussie accidentally introduces a new dance craze to the Drones Club by demonstrating the shimmying courtship display of the male newt. I imprinted on the character, obviously. I have been in sympathy my entire life with anyone real or fictional who finds the conventions of human romance less comprehensible than any number of intellectual obsessions, plus Gussie is one of the few non-Jeeves inhabitants of Wodehouse's universe with a demonstrable brain. It's very specifically focused, he can't hold a conversation that's not about aquatic members of the family Salamandridae, but that's more mental content than I'm willing to bet you could get out of Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps. I know who I'd rather talk to at parties. Anyway, I could prove from head shots that Richard Garnett had all his facial features in order and not a bad order at that, but Gussie with his reedy mush-mouth and his goggle-thick glasses and his anxiously slumped shoulders and his total social bewilderment—unless shikkered at the Market Snodsbury prize-giving—projected such a damp, hopeless aura of interwar dweebery that I wouldn't have sworn to recognize the actor in street clothes. I was just starting to pay attention to movies. I did not yet have extensive experience of theatrical chameleons in the wild. I found it very striking.¹ I had taken a class in physical comedy and clowning the previous fall and so I watched Gussie through its lens, concentric vs. eccentric body language, Garnett's apparent ability to make his chin disappear on command. It was an engaging character and a definitive performance. In the spring, the Brandeis Hillel Theater Group would stage Frank Loesser's How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and I would delight similarly in Mike Zoosman's J.B. Biggley: I went in knowing he was in the production, but when the grey-haired company president with elastic eyebrows and a Sprechstimme mutter stormed onstage only to be knocked sprawling by his newest employee, it wasn't until he had blustered his way back to his feet that I recognized him. After that I think I watched more closely what actors did with their bodies as well as their voices. It is still something I enjoy thinking about.

To return to the original point of this post, however: having seen Richard Ayoade react to a fire in his wastebasket by writing an e-mail about it, I can picture him quite seriously lamenting that the world is not a newt. It is a beautiful thought and we should all be given the chance to enjoy it. The rest of the casting looks good to me, too.

1. I've never seen Garnett in another part, although he's one of the reasons I keep meaning to watch the 1989 BBC Tom's Midnight Garden. I was comforted to discover in 2010 that the reason his filmography stopped suddenly in 1998 was career change rather than sudden death. Weirdly, a similar situation prevails with Arthur Howard, an actor I had remembered fondly from Square One TV (1987–1992) as the "certified nationwide klutz" of "Less Than Zero" and the Roman music producer at his wits' end with differing numeral systems in "The Mathematics of Love." On finding his limited IMDb entry, I started to worry—I mean, I lost track of Larry Cedar for a couple of decades and he ended up an opium addict in Deadwood. Howard became a children's author. I'm cool with that.