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At three A.M., I sleep again
This afternoon: met ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lesser_celery in Harvard Square and did not drown from walking to Rodney's and back, but it was a close thing. We had a single umbrella between us. It took the left side of my jacket until about six-thirty to dry out.
This evening:teenybuffalo came over; we ate cake-thick brownies and watched The Flesh and the Fiends (1960). George Rose and Donald Pleasence as Burke and Hare, Peter Cushing as Dr. Knox. This is the sort of film I should devote a real review to and almost certainly won't, because I have to get up early tomorrow; suffice to say that we were prepared for a penny dreadful and got a terrific dark historical drama with twinges of the Glasgow-grin humor of Sweeney Todd ("Nobody touched her! Willie just killed her, that's all") and a surprisingly unsentimental approach to its murders, anticipating by six years the famous scene in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain—actually killing another human being is an unwieldy, inefficient business if you're not used to it. Pleasence is brilliant, a rags-and-bobs dandy with a sly air of deference and a sickened fascination with the violence required to turn a drunken lodger into a salable corpse. Cushing's Knox is a curious variation on his Frankenstein, genuinely committed to the improvement of medical science, but with very little time for those students or colleagues who can't shrug off a little moral blood on their hands in its pursuit; it is again a tribute to his ability to play sudden, shocking vulnerability that the film is able to pull a last-minute quasi-redemption out of its ear for him. There is a pointless vanilla romance, but it can fortunately be ignored in favor of the much more sympathetic pairing of a struggling med student and a prostitute who resists being reformed; there were also way more frankly-shot tits than we were expecting, probably because we watched the Continental cut. Recommended, as you might be able to tell.
About two hours ago: discovered a first edition of Connie Willis' Doomsday Book (1992) stacked horizontally on a shelf in the music room, which astonishes me because I could have sworn we got rid of that book years ago. More specifically, I could have sworn we got rid of the mass-market paperback I inherited in college because I bounced off it; at that point the only Willis I'd read and liked was "Fire Watch" and Remake (1995). Several people recommended the novel to me recently, so I was keeping a desultory eye out in used book stores; I'd glanced through the house just in case and found nothing. I am forced to conclude this hardcover spontaneously manifested. Now, of course, it will always have been here. It cannot be accidental that I found it between A Tale of Time City (1987) and The Lantern Bearers (1959).
I love the idea of bribing children to do their war work with Mars Bars.
lesser_celery in Harvard Square and did not drown from walking to Rodney's and back, but it was a close thing. We had a single umbrella between us. It took the left side of my jacket until about six-thirty to dry out.This evening:
teenybuffalo came over; we ate cake-thick brownies and watched The Flesh and the Fiends (1960). George Rose and Donald Pleasence as Burke and Hare, Peter Cushing as Dr. Knox. This is the sort of film I should devote a real review to and almost certainly won't, because I have to get up early tomorrow; suffice to say that we were prepared for a penny dreadful and got a terrific dark historical drama with twinges of the Glasgow-grin humor of Sweeney Todd ("Nobody touched her! Willie just killed her, that's all") and a surprisingly unsentimental approach to its murders, anticipating by six years the famous scene in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain—actually killing another human being is an unwieldy, inefficient business if you're not used to it. Pleasence is brilliant, a rags-and-bobs dandy with a sly air of deference and a sickened fascination with the violence required to turn a drunken lodger into a salable corpse. Cushing's Knox is a curious variation on his Frankenstein, genuinely committed to the improvement of medical science, but with very little time for those students or colleagues who can't shrug off a little moral blood on their hands in its pursuit; it is again a tribute to his ability to play sudden, shocking vulnerability that the film is able to pull a last-minute quasi-redemption out of its ear for him. There is a pointless vanilla romance, but it can fortunately be ignored in favor of the much more sympathetic pairing of a struggling med student and a prostitute who resists being reformed; there were also way more frankly-shot tits than we were expecting, probably because we watched the Continental cut. Recommended, as you might be able to tell.About two hours ago: discovered a first edition of Connie Willis' Doomsday Book (1992) stacked horizontally on a shelf in the music room, which astonishes me because I could have sworn we got rid of that book years ago. More specifically, I could have sworn we got rid of the mass-market paperback I inherited in college because I bounced off it; at that point the only Willis I'd read and liked was "Fire Watch" and Remake (1995). Several people recommended the novel to me recently, so I was keeping a desultory eye out in used book stores; I'd glanced through the house just in case and found nothing. I am forced to conclude this hardcover spontaneously manifested. Now, of course, it will always have been here. It cannot be accidental that I found it between A Tale of Time City (1987) and The Lantern Bearers (1959).
I love the idea of bribing children to do their war work with Mars Bars.
no subject
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~spacelem/peter_cushing.jpg
I apologize for the duplication, if it's old news to you...
no subject
No, I'd never seen that. Thank you. Yay.