Dead letter office got your friends united

Have some blocks of text I don't want to lose track of. The first was disinterred from an older file and seems to have been written in 2020, I would guess shortly after this post. The second has been unceremoniously imported without context from recent conversation with asakiyume. The third I wrote last month and then just never posted, probably for reasons of medical exhaustion. Mild edits have been made for general comprehension.

1. By far my favorite character in the entire first, self-contained season of Homecoming (2018) is Shea Whigham's Thomas Carrasco, an office joke of a mid-level paper-pusher with whom the physical world beyond his desk has a gratuitously obstructive relationship; he has the social finesse of a three-hole punch and an unshakable sense of justice. You can yell at him, you can make fun of him, you can watch him fall down the stairs, but you cannot actually deter him from filing his paperwork if the paperwork has right on its side. I do not think the character can in any way be canonically Jewish, but I firmly believe that if Carrasco found out that God needed punching, God would find themselves punched surprisingly hard by a sawed-off hi-fi enthusiast in clicky magnetic nerd glasses. He delivers one of the most important lines in the series having just wiped out into a rack of bicycles like Harold Lloyd. Obviously, I adore him. I also admire the performance—he's the kind of character who could easily have been an affectionate cartoon and instead he is detailed and recognizable and real.

2. When I wrote "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" in 2015, I decided to keep the Innsmouth practice of human sacrifice, as charged in Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936). I did think about it: the protagonist is Jewish, the lens through which the relationship of the Deep Ones and their Innsmouth descendants is written comes obviously from the Diaspora; I did not want to write myself into blood libel. But it was important to me that there be something in their culture that wasn't just a misunderstanding or a canard, even if the sacrifices are chosen from within the community, by lot, from a pool of volunteers—less to defuse the horror than because of my imprinting on the idea that an unconsenting sacrifice has no force; some non-deep beachcomber who doesn't know from the sea's blood does ritually zilch—and would still never have justified the miniature genocide that was the government's destruction of Innsmouth. Practicing human sacrifice does not disqualify a culture from humanity. It just makes everyone very uncomfortable to admit it, especially when they have to acknowledge their own local equivalent. In that sense I wasn't writing anything especially alien, but I did want it to be there.

3. I had not noticed until it came around on the iTunes in September that Gordon Bok's "Mister Eneos" so closely matches the death of Ezra McKay as recounted in "The Salt House" and revisited in "As the Tide Came Flowing In" that I have to assume it worked its way into my head so many decades ago that it didn't rise to the list of influences I identified and recorded for myself in 2007, shortly after the completion and publication of the first story. At night in my sort of Pullman corridor of a childhood bedroom, I used to listen to Peter Kagan and the Wind (1971) to fall asleep to, although often I would stay awake until "Frankie on the Sheepscot" on the A side or the title cantefable on the B. According to the liner notes which I do not remember reading as a child, the narrative of "Mister Eneos" is a "true story, taken from a smooth-log of the last sailing whaler to go out of New Bedford: the Daisy, brig . . . Practically verbatim, this is the ship's carpenter's account . . . of the drowning of fourth mate Anton Eneos off South America, on a voyage to South Georgia, an island in the latitude of Cape Horn." It wasn't in my conscious mind at all while I was writing, either time. I knew there was a very old nightmare in the story, and some movies, and a bottle from the seventeenth century, and some other songs, and a real death was haunting it all the while. I hope he doesn't mind.

It is terribly time to relocate this cat and go to bed.

And the meters are over in the red

Courtesy of moon_custafer: "The Voice of Death" (Journey into Unknown Worlds #6, 1951). I have become suddenly obsessed with trying to trace the antecedents of this proto-Nigel-Kneale conceit of the recording of a death being contagiously deadly, because the mid-century feels incredibly late for it to show up. It feels like the kind of urban legend that should have started to filter into fiction as soon as the mechanism existed to support it, cf. the theory of residual haunting which can be traced as far back as the early nineteenth century and really seems to take off with the commercial proliferation of recording technologies, but I am drawing a blank on potential earlier iterations even though it feels like a horror evergreen. All that's coming to mind are later takes, like Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm (1983) or Gemma Files' "each thing i show you is a piece of my death" (2009). It doesn't feel as though it came, like so much of the prevailing aesthetic of EC Comics, from Grand Guignol. It does feel like the kind of parapsychological sci-fi horror William Sloane was writing in the '30's, which just indicates it was a viable mode of weird fiction. It has obvious predecessors in mind-annihilating art like Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow (1895), but the media aspect is what I am specifically curious about: the real-time capture of something that cannot be survived contact with, a transferrable dying. My suspicion is that it comes out of radio, where the foley terror of a needle-drop would be most effectively concentrated, but I have not heard anywhere near enough Inner Sanctum (1941–52) or Quiet, Please (1947–49) or any of a number of other suspects of old-time radio to be sure. It could be as old as Dr. Seward dictating his notes into a phonograph. Suggestions appreciated. In the meantime, I am stuck listening to Kate Bush's "Experiment IV" (1986).