I did not spend any of today on or by the sea—I went to a doctor's appointment; it went fine—but it was hot and light-filled and the clouds looked like the kind that form over water, thick and tufted and sail-white. If it doesn't cloud over or rain, I am going to see if I can get some time on the harborwalk tomorrow.
There was an older man on the bus from Sullivan who was loudly and repetitively dah-dah-dah-ing a combination of Handel's "Dead March," the Dies Irae, and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," round and round and round, one in and out of the other. Melodically, I understand how this happened. Aesthetically, it was one of the more unnerving things I have heard on a bus.
A young black man in Harvard Square told me he liked my pin. I believe he meant Radical Dreams' Black Lives Matter rather than the gold-and-purple eldritch sigil from NecronomiCon, because he gave me what looked for all the world like a one-handed, abbreviated Wakandan salute. I didn't think fast enough to return it—I just smiled and said thank you and ducked my head in the way I have evolved as a sort of shorthand acknowledgement—but I love the idea that the gesture has leapt into the wild. Stairwell spirit says if it happens again, the appropriate response should be good luck and many shoelaces.
A young white man who passed me at the bus stop at Powderhouse told me I had awesome hair. Casually, not expectantly, did not break stride. "Thanks!" I said, the same way. This has been your irregularly scheduled reminder that drive-by compliments are not street harassment and it is entirely possible to achieve the first without committing the second.
I finished Charles Todd's A Test of Wills (1996) last night and am now halfway through Wings of Fire (1998). There were some weird class currents in the first novel, but right now they are taking a back seat to the pure astonishing idfic of the series premise: the protagonist is haunted by the Great War in all possible senses, having returned from the Western Front with some first-class shell-shock, but also with a ghost. In 1919, Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard shares his head with Hamish MacLeod, the subordinate officer he had to execute for refusing a terrible, direct order that Rutledge himself had faithfully passed down the chain of command despite the lives it would cost; the firing squad made a mess of it, Rutledge had to administer the coup de grâce with his own pistol, and just as he pulled the trigger they were buried in the thick, suffocating wave of mud thrown up by a German shell's direct hit. Eyes locked with Corporal MacLeod at the end, he thought he could hear the other man screaming inside his skull for Rutledge to finish it. When they dug him out of the wreckage, he had Hamish. He's had him ever since, a familiar, uncomfortable, intimate voice that doesn't like him very much but understands him better than anyone else, especially anyone to whom he must present, perpetually and exhaustingly, the mask of a man who came back from the trenches sane. It is of course possible that Hamish is nothing more supernatural than a personification of Rutledge's survivor guilt; the doctors who eventually pronounced him fit to return to his pre-war profession thought so. What he behaves like, however, is a ghost, a lingering personality with opinions and memories and emotional reactions of its own—a dybbuk, though neither of them would know the word—and Rutledge treats him like one, since treating him like a hallucination does not actually make him go away. It is especially inconvenient when Hamish says something needling and Rutledge forgets and responds out loud and no one else in the room knows what the hell he's talking about. I have no idea how this dynamic will develop in future books, but there's like twenty of them, so unless the series totally falls apart I am looking forward to finding out. I am slightly surprised there's no TV series.
There was an older man on the bus from Sullivan who was loudly and repetitively dah-dah-dah-ing a combination of Handel's "Dead March," the Dies Irae, and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," round and round and round, one in and out of the other. Melodically, I understand how this happened. Aesthetically, it was one of the more unnerving things I have heard on a bus.
A young black man in Harvard Square told me he liked my pin. I believe he meant Radical Dreams' Black Lives Matter rather than the gold-and-purple eldritch sigil from NecronomiCon, because he gave me what looked for all the world like a one-handed, abbreviated Wakandan salute. I didn't think fast enough to return it—I just smiled and said thank you and ducked my head in the way I have evolved as a sort of shorthand acknowledgement—but I love the idea that the gesture has leapt into the wild. Stairwell spirit says if it happens again, the appropriate response should be good luck and many shoelaces.
A young white man who passed me at the bus stop at Powderhouse told me I had awesome hair. Casually, not expectantly, did not break stride. "Thanks!" I said, the same way. This has been your irregularly scheduled reminder that drive-by compliments are not street harassment and it is entirely possible to achieve the first without committing the second.
I finished Charles Todd's A Test of Wills (1996) last night and am now halfway through Wings of Fire (1998). There were some weird class currents in the first novel, but right now they are taking a back seat to the pure astonishing idfic of the series premise: the protagonist is haunted by the Great War in all possible senses, having returned from the Western Front with some first-class shell-shock, but also with a ghost. In 1919, Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard shares his head with Hamish MacLeod, the subordinate officer he had to execute for refusing a terrible, direct order that Rutledge himself had faithfully passed down the chain of command despite the lives it would cost; the firing squad made a mess of it, Rutledge had to administer the coup de grâce with his own pistol, and just as he pulled the trigger they were buried in the thick, suffocating wave of mud thrown up by a German shell's direct hit. Eyes locked with Corporal MacLeod at the end, he thought he could hear the other man screaming inside his skull for Rutledge to finish it. When they dug him out of the wreckage, he had Hamish. He's had him ever since, a familiar, uncomfortable, intimate voice that doesn't like him very much but understands him better than anyone else, especially anyone to whom he must present, perpetually and exhaustingly, the mask of a man who came back from the trenches sane. It is of course possible that Hamish is nothing more supernatural than a personification of Rutledge's survivor guilt; the doctors who eventually pronounced him fit to return to his pre-war profession thought so. What he behaves like, however, is a ghost, a lingering personality with opinions and memories and emotional reactions of its own—a dybbuk, though neither of them would know the word—and Rutledge treats him like one, since treating him like a hallucination does not actually make him go away. It is especially inconvenient when Hamish says something needling and Rutledge forgets and responds out loud and no one else in the room knows what the hell he's talking about. I have no idea how this dynamic will develop in future books, but there's like twenty of them, so unless the series totally falls apart I am looking forward to finding out. I am slightly surprised there's no TV series.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}