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What fabulous weather—oy vey, what a day
In which I should have posted much earlier in the day, but I spent most of it reading slush for Strange Horizons and then I think I cleaned things. A cake happened. This is undoubtedly going to be one of those posts where I put so many things into it, no one reads any of them.
1. My essay "It's Not, Quite Frankly, a Wholesome Situation: Dr. Seuss' The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T" is now online at Weird Fiction Review. They gave it illustrations from the film! Trust me, they won't explain anything!
2. Yesterday was spent with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28, muchabstracted, and Judith who if she has a livejournal hasn't told me about it, tramping the grounds of Maudslay State Park. The official website is not very descriptive. It's an early twentieth century estate that seems to have been deliberately let run to seed after its family died out in the '50's; it's one of the uncanniest places I've been in years. The houses themselves were torn down, but the bridges, the spinneys, the fields and the outbuildings remain. You wander through the trails of overgrown groves, different zones of forest all switchbacked together. There is a formal garden in ruins: dry rose-trees, hollow cold frames, a half-walled courtyard and the clipped hedges of the maze blurred, but still knee-height, lashed up the walls with crackling vines. A sundial stands in the center, in the January-grey overcast pointing to no time at all. There are Greco-Roman figures moving around the base, weather-softened, still a dance of nymphs and heroes. It would have given once onto a pleached alley of pines and you can still see the branches entangling, but wildly, unwoven, throwing roots above your head. There is a lawn with old grape-arbors and what must have been the poles of fruit-trees; they stand now like the numerals on a clock. I have dreamed places like this. I have read of them, sometimes in children's books, sometimes in nightmares. Judith and Erica poked at the rainwater cat-ice in the fountain that hadn't run in fifty years and I kept glancing around, because it felt like stopped time. The roses were dead, but Fleur-de-Lis said no more than when she and Judith were there in late summer.
There was also the Inexplicable Thing, which turned out to be the most impressive bottle tree I've ever seen in my life, or maybe it was a ceilingful of do-it-yourself witch balls. It is right near the small stone grave-makers of what must have been family dogs; at least, the names sound wrong for horses. Barney. Akela. Tinker. Tsampo. The dates are all from the '30's and '40's. The bottle tree is inside a sort of tumulus storage vault, with nothing on the plaque over the doors but "1929." I mean, I also took off my boots and jacket and climbed an excellent tree right after we had hiked across the first field, but that was around two-thirty when there was still the clear water-gilded sky of some winter afternoons and the air smelled unseasonably like summer and haying. (Sometimes I thought of Robert Holdstock, especially Lavondyss (1988). Other times, Peter Greenaway.) By four o'clock, the temperature had dropped to a fog-raw freeze, the sun was gone, and we were watching ice-floes run past on the Merrimack River, crunching up a tidal shore like an Andy Goldsworthy installation, circling a house boarded up at all the windows and falling into stucco, faded turquoise-green paint and lath.
3. Reproduced from comments on a post ofpoliphilo's, where he's thinking about anti-Semitism:
I was going to link you to a November New York Review of Books review of Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child (2011) because of the reviewer's footnote about the dismaying "old British literary habit" he finds Hollinghurst recapitulating by naming those characters who serve as markers of foreign wealth and/or crass modern decline things like "Sharon Feingold" and "Jerry Goldblatt," and in the process I found a December letter to the editors and just this week a response from the author: so, no. The debate doesn't even stop with Eliot and Beaton.
(For what it's worth, I'm with Daniel Mendelsohn. His original point is clear and brief, faulting what he sees as a correctable susceptibility to literary conventions rather than a Pound-like pathology; his responses in both cases are detailed, nuanced, and generous with the assumptions of others, although he indicates it annoys him that interpretation of his footnote has come to dominate discussion of Hollinghurst's book. Both Galen Strawson and Hollinghurst go for an ad hominem suspicion of Mendelsohn's motives and ability as a critic that does not leave me convinced of their abilities to have the discussion without digging themselves in deeper at the least.)
Casual literary anti-Semitism is something I have never quite gotten used to running into. It seems to happen a lot in Golden Age mysteries, probably because the stereotype provides a handy dash of throwaway seediness—there's the protagonist pursuing a line of inquiry and all of a sudden there's someone dark-complected and a bit shifty, or flashy and trying too hard, or perhaps a little too sleek and ingratiating, with bonus points if they are delicately described as "Levantine" or "Oriental," and seriously, what's with the lisping? Man, this should have been a post of its own and then I'd be depressed.
One of the many, many reasonsstrange_selkie should finish her Secret Regency Thing already: she quite deliberately includes a red-haired jeweler named Mendelssohn and he's awesome.
4. A few nights ago, I caught the Kordas' The Four Feathers (1939) on TCM. I know I should not be, especially considering how many of them are my favorites, but I am still sometimes surprised at the subtlety of older films. The plot kicks off with Lieutenant Harry Faversham (John Clements) resigning his commission from the North Surrey Regiment. He only took it in the first place under pressure from his father and the impossible weight of family tradition, all those straight-backed, stiff-lipped, soldiering Favershams who stared down from their portraits on a terrified poetry-reading boy, fifteen years old and still flinching from shadows; he says that with his father's death that obligation ended and he never believed they should be fighting with Kitchener in the Sudan anyway. His commanding officer is appalled, but cannot actually refuse; he says cuttingly as he accepts the letter, "I never thought I should live to see a Faversham play the coward." And Clements, who till then had looked rather conventionally handsome, brooding in the slightly solid way of many actors who trained in early film, did nothing but tighten his jaw and not quite meet the officer's eye and he was all of a sudden that boy at his birthday dinner ten years gone, pale-faced in his black suit and a little too delicate around the mouth, clutching his despised book of Shelley under the table while his father tells horror stories of the Crimea to toughen him up—soldiers who funked their duty and blew their brains out, soldiers who charged gallantly ahead and got their brains blown out anyway, all the pride of the family brought to bear on Harry's shame. Just for a second, a sudden flicker across the actor's face, but he was entirely someone else and it had nothing to do with the usual expressions of the time. And mostly for that, I kept watching. Even if John Laurie was playing the Khalifa.
What really interested me was that the film knows there's something absurd in this scene—not Harry, whose only real weakness is his hammered-in willingness to believe the worst of himself, but General Faversham and his old fellow-campaigners, a long tableful of gargoyles of Empire congratulating themselves on blind obedience and freak luck. One of them is always telling the story of the Battle of Balaclava, representing the Russian guns with a handful of walnuts and himself with a pineapple. Who would want to grow up to be like them? They are the old men who send the young to die. Maybe this is what happens when a story of never-sunset Britain is made by a triplicate of Hungarian Jewish brothers: Zoltan directing, Alexander as producer, art direction by Vincent. There's still casual racism aplenty in the script, fuzzy-wuzzies and savage bloodlust and all the prominent Arab roles being played by British actors in brownface (although a shocking number of extras with lines actually seemed to be North African). But the film doesn't think Harry is a coward, even when he's convinced himself of it, and the way he becomes a recognizable hero has nothing to do with the codes and traditions of imperial Britain as he's been hectored to obey them. He doesn't set his teeth and charge hopelessly into the mouth of hell for queen and country. He disguises himself as romantically as anything out of Shelley and becomes a sort of one-man intelligence operation, passing for the most despised caste of Sudanese native (mirroring his own branding as a British coward) in order to rescue all three of his one-time friends and return their white feathers to them in secret, a slippery, back-handed, identity-twisting sort of redemption that is as equally mad in its own way as Ralph Richardson's Captain Durrance refusing to tell his men on the eve of battle that he's been blinded by sunstroke and couldn't lead them out of a paper bag. The combined effect makes the film much less rah-rah-Empire than it could have been—Harry's heroism isn't a joke, but the fact that his world demands it of him in such glaring terms might be. His last act of bravery is tongue-in-cheek, but telling. In order to redeem the fourth feather from his fiancée, he has to stand up to her calcified Blimp of a father the next time he launches into his interminable story about Balaclava with the walnuts and the pineapple—himself rallying the troops forward to their glorious mostly doom—and politely but firmly contradict the old man: "But nobody ever said, 'The 68th will move forward!'"
(Because I haven't read the book, I have no idea what is supposed to happen to Harry after the end of the film, but I kind of hope that having impressed the fuck out of everyone, he goes on to become a totally effective civilian; he has clearly better things to do with his life than kill the people he meets in interesting places.)
5. Having missed the entire first season of Downton Abbey, I seem to have arrived in time for World War I in Season Two. There are several characters I'm interested in already; I'm sure this means all sorts of awful things will happen to them, but it's nice to have something to pay attention to on a weekly basis.
I will post my Arisia schedule tomorrow.
1. My essay "It's Not, Quite Frankly, a Wholesome Situation: Dr. Seuss' The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T" is now online at Weird Fiction Review. They gave it illustrations from the film! Trust me, they won't explain anything!
2. Yesterday was spent with
fleurdelis28, muchabstracted, and Judith who if she has a livejournal hasn't told me about it, tramping the grounds of Maudslay State Park. The official website is not very descriptive. It's an early twentieth century estate that seems to have been deliberately let run to seed after its family died out in the '50's; it's one of the uncanniest places I've been in years. The houses themselves were torn down, but the bridges, the spinneys, the fields and the outbuildings remain. You wander through the trails of overgrown groves, different zones of forest all switchbacked together. There is a formal garden in ruins: dry rose-trees, hollow cold frames, a half-walled courtyard and the clipped hedges of the maze blurred, but still knee-height, lashed up the walls with crackling vines. A sundial stands in the center, in the January-grey overcast pointing to no time at all. There are Greco-Roman figures moving around the base, weather-softened, still a dance of nymphs and heroes. It would have given once onto a pleached alley of pines and you can still see the branches entangling, but wildly, unwoven, throwing roots above your head. There is a lawn with old grape-arbors and what must have been the poles of fruit-trees; they stand now like the numerals on a clock. I have dreamed places like this. I have read of them, sometimes in children's books, sometimes in nightmares. Judith and Erica poked at the rainwater cat-ice in the fountain that hadn't run in fifty years and I kept glancing around, because it felt like stopped time. The roses were dead, but Fleur-de-Lis said no more than when she and Judith were there in late summer.There was also the Inexplicable Thing, which turned out to be the most impressive bottle tree I've ever seen in my life, or maybe it was a ceilingful of do-it-yourself witch balls. It is right near the small stone grave-makers of what must have been family dogs; at least, the names sound wrong for horses. Barney. Akela. Tinker. Tsampo. The dates are all from the '30's and '40's. The bottle tree is inside a sort of tumulus storage vault, with nothing on the plaque over the doors but "1929." I mean, I also took off my boots and jacket and climbed an excellent tree right after we had hiked across the first field, but that was around two-thirty when there was still the clear water-gilded sky of some winter afternoons and the air smelled unseasonably like summer and haying. (Sometimes I thought of Robert Holdstock, especially Lavondyss (1988). Other times, Peter Greenaway.) By four o'clock, the temperature had dropped to a fog-raw freeze, the sun was gone, and we were watching ice-floes run past on the Merrimack River, crunching up a tidal shore like an Andy Goldsworthy installation, circling a house boarded up at all the windows and falling into stucco, faded turquoise-green paint and lath.
3. Reproduced from comments on a post of
poliphilo's, where he's thinking about anti-Semitism: I was going to link you to a November New York Review of Books review of Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child (2011) because of the reviewer's footnote about the dismaying "old British literary habit" he finds Hollinghurst recapitulating by naming those characters who serve as markers of foreign wealth and/or crass modern decline things like "Sharon Feingold" and "Jerry Goldblatt," and in the process I found a December letter to the editors and just this week a response from the author: so, no. The debate doesn't even stop with Eliot and Beaton.
(For what it's worth, I'm with Daniel Mendelsohn. His original point is clear and brief, faulting what he sees as a correctable susceptibility to literary conventions rather than a Pound-like pathology; his responses in both cases are detailed, nuanced, and generous with the assumptions of others, although he indicates it annoys him that interpretation of his footnote has come to dominate discussion of Hollinghurst's book. Both Galen Strawson and Hollinghurst go for an ad hominem suspicion of Mendelsohn's motives and ability as a critic that does not leave me convinced of their abilities to have the discussion without digging themselves in deeper at the least.)
Casual literary anti-Semitism is something I have never quite gotten used to running into. It seems to happen a lot in Golden Age mysteries, probably because the stereotype provides a handy dash of throwaway seediness—there's the protagonist pursuing a line of inquiry and all of a sudden there's someone dark-complected and a bit shifty, or flashy and trying too hard, or perhaps a little too sleek and ingratiating, with bonus points if they are delicately described as "Levantine" or "Oriental," and seriously, what's with the lisping? Man, this should have been a post of its own and then I'd be depressed.
One of the many, many reasons
strange_selkie should finish her Secret Regency Thing already: she quite deliberately includes a red-haired jeweler named Mendelssohn and he's awesome.4. A few nights ago, I caught the Kordas' The Four Feathers (1939) on TCM. I know I should not be, especially considering how many of them are my favorites, but I am still sometimes surprised at the subtlety of older films. The plot kicks off with Lieutenant Harry Faversham (John Clements) resigning his commission from the North Surrey Regiment. He only took it in the first place under pressure from his father and the impossible weight of family tradition, all those straight-backed, stiff-lipped, soldiering Favershams who stared down from their portraits on a terrified poetry-reading boy, fifteen years old and still flinching from shadows; he says that with his father's death that obligation ended and he never believed they should be fighting with Kitchener in the Sudan anyway. His commanding officer is appalled, but cannot actually refuse; he says cuttingly as he accepts the letter, "I never thought I should live to see a Faversham play the coward." And Clements, who till then had looked rather conventionally handsome, brooding in the slightly solid way of many actors who trained in early film, did nothing but tighten his jaw and not quite meet the officer's eye and he was all of a sudden that boy at his birthday dinner ten years gone, pale-faced in his black suit and a little too delicate around the mouth, clutching his despised book of Shelley under the table while his father tells horror stories of the Crimea to toughen him up—soldiers who funked their duty and blew their brains out, soldiers who charged gallantly ahead and got their brains blown out anyway, all the pride of the family brought to bear on Harry's shame. Just for a second, a sudden flicker across the actor's face, but he was entirely someone else and it had nothing to do with the usual expressions of the time. And mostly for that, I kept watching. Even if John Laurie was playing the Khalifa.
What really interested me was that the film knows there's something absurd in this scene—not Harry, whose only real weakness is his hammered-in willingness to believe the worst of himself, but General Faversham and his old fellow-campaigners, a long tableful of gargoyles of Empire congratulating themselves on blind obedience and freak luck. One of them is always telling the story of the Battle of Balaclava, representing the Russian guns with a handful of walnuts and himself with a pineapple. Who would want to grow up to be like them? They are the old men who send the young to die. Maybe this is what happens when a story of never-sunset Britain is made by a triplicate of Hungarian Jewish brothers: Zoltan directing, Alexander as producer, art direction by Vincent. There's still casual racism aplenty in the script, fuzzy-wuzzies and savage bloodlust and all the prominent Arab roles being played by British actors in brownface (although a shocking number of extras with lines actually seemed to be North African). But the film doesn't think Harry is a coward, even when he's convinced himself of it, and the way he becomes a recognizable hero has nothing to do with the codes and traditions of imperial Britain as he's been hectored to obey them. He doesn't set his teeth and charge hopelessly into the mouth of hell for queen and country. He disguises himself as romantically as anything out of Shelley and becomes a sort of one-man intelligence operation, passing for the most despised caste of Sudanese native (mirroring his own branding as a British coward) in order to rescue all three of his one-time friends and return their white feathers to them in secret, a slippery, back-handed, identity-twisting sort of redemption that is as equally mad in its own way as Ralph Richardson's Captain Durrance refusing to tell his men on the eve of battle that he's been blinded by sunstroke and couldn't lead them out of a paper bag. The combined effect makes the film much less rah-rah-Empire than it could have been—Harry's heroism isn't a joke, but the fact that his world demands it of him in such glaring terms might be. His last act of bravery is tongue-in-cheek, but telling. In order to redeem the fourth feather from his fiancée, he has to stand up to her calcified Blimp of a father the next time he launches into his interminable story about Balaclava with the walnuts and the pineapple—himself rallying the troops forward to their glorious mostly doom—and politely but firmly contradict the old man: "But nobody ever said, 'The 68th will move forward!'"
(Because I haven't read the book, I have no idea what is supposed to happen to Harry after the end of the film, but I kind of hope that having impressed the fuck out of everyone, he goes on to become a totally effective civilian; he has clearly better things to do with his life than kill the people he meets in interesting places.)
5. Having missed the entire first season of Downton Abbey, I seem to have arrived in time for World War I in Season Two. There are several characters I'm interested in already; I'm sure this means all sorts of awful things will happen to them, but it's nice to have something to pay attention to on a weekly basis.
I will post my Arisia schedule tomorrow.
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I would have expected better from Hollingshurst...
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What is he usually like as a writer?
(Past one or two early references, Sayers in general holds up.)
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In this one both victims are Jewish, since the murder plot turns on the bodies being swapped to confuse identification (there's also some implication the murderer is motivated by racism as well as by personal jealousy of his main victim.)
Unfortunately, they wouldn't let Sayers mention circumcision, so Lord Peter is forced to identify the first victim as "Semetic" without any clear reason, effectively just saying "well... he looks Jewish."
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Ngaio Marsh was the author where it really leapt out and bit me recently. I am afraid this comment (especially in the new format) is going to be huge.
I had been quietly reading Vintage Murder (1937), one of the earlier Roderick Alleyns. Slightly unusually for Marsh, the action is set in New Zealand, where the detective inspector witnesses a bizarre death at the cast party of a traveling English theater company. (He was trying to have a holiday in a detective novel; he really shouldn't have been surprised.) One of the few characters to keep his head in the champagne-splattered aftermath is the Maori physician who becomes part of the investigation and Alleyn's friend even on short acquaintance and shocking circumstances. He's a well-respected, well-liked doctor; he's still other.
Alleyn shook the thin brown hand that Te Pokiha extended, and watched the Maori go out.
"Very, very fine fellow, Rangi Te Pokiha," said Wade. "Fine athlete, and brainy, too. Best type of Maori."
"I met him at the hotel," said Alleyn, "and found him very interesting. There is no colour prejudice in this country, apparently."
"Well, not the way there is in India, for instance. Mind, there are Maoris and Maoris. Te Pokiha's high caste. His mother was a princess and his father a fine old chief. The doctor's had an English college education—he's ninety percent civilised. All the same, sir, there's the odd ten percent. It's there, no matter how civilised they are. See him when he goes into one of the back-country pas and you'll find a difference. See him when he goes crook! By gee, I did once, when he gave evidence on a case of—well, it was an unsavoury case and the doctor felt strongly about it. His eyes fairly flashed. He looked as if he might go off at the deep end and dance a haka in court."
"A haka?"
"War-dance. They pull faces and yell. Great affair, it is. Well now, what about this tiki, Mr. Alleyn?"
Which is all the nastier for being an intended compliment of the doctor, but it's the voice of a white character in, I'm sorry, a deeply color-prejudiced country; it doesn't have to be the author's opinion. Te Pokiha as we get to know him is intelligent, erudite, thoughtful and sometimes gravely humorous, keenly aware of his position between two worlds and amazingly patient with Alleyn quizzing him about various aspects of Maori culture or the actors goofing around with the small greenstone tiki that becomes a key part of the mystery. Alleyn doesn't even consider him seriously as a murder suspect—
Te Pokiha is an Oxford man. He is extremely good-looking, courteous, and most dignified. I am to dine with him and he is to tell me something of their folk-law. When, as I have already described, the men handed the little tiki round and Meyer made merry, I felt that he was guilty of the grossest error in taste. Te Pokiha was very cool and well-bred about it. What an idea for a fantastic solution—he killed Meyer because of the insult to the tiki and left the tiki up there as a token of his vengeance. "Cut it out," as Inspector Wade would say.
—and the dismissal is refreshing, because it seems a deliberate aversion of the kind of mystery in which there's always something to be suspected from the violent, primitive mind. Te Pokiha is even allowed a few lines about colonialism, explaining why he chose to return to New Zealand and practice among the poorer Maori as opposed to putting his top-notch medical skills to more profitable use in London: "The pakeha give their children Maori christian names because they sound pretty. They call their ships and their houses by Maori names. It is perhaps a charming compliment, but to me it seems a little strange. We have become a side-show in the tourist business—our dances—our art—everything." He feels a little inauthentic himself and is making an effort to incorporate more of the rituals he learned from his grandfather the rangatira into his personal as well as professional life. I could have done without the text's consistent description of the tiki in grotesque, grimacing terms, but at least the one actual Maori on the ground appears to be a person, and an interesting one.
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"Well, doctor, do you think you made a mistake?" said Wade.
"Certainly not, Mr. Mason came in at the outside door wearing his coat and hat. He took them off afterwards, when I removed my own coat. I am not in the habit of making mis-statements."
"It's not that," said Mason peaceably, "it's just that I came in before you did and put on my coat because I was cold. I've got a weak tummy, doctor," he added with an air of giving the medical man a treat.
"You came in after I did," said Te Pokiha with considerable emphasis. The whites of his eyes seemed to become more noticeable and his heavy brows came together.
"Well, I'm sorry, but I didn't," said Mason.
"You mean to say I'm a liar."
"Don't be silly, doctor. You simply made a mistake."
"I did not make any mistake. This is insufferable. You will please admit at once that I am right."
"Why the deuce should I when you are obviously wrong," said Mason irritably.
"Don't repeat that." Te Pokiha's warm voice thickened. His lips coarsened into a sort of snarl. He showed his teeth like a dog. "By Jove," thought Alleyn, "the odd twenty per cent of pure savage."
"Oh, don't be a fool," grunted Mason. "You don't know what you're talking about"
"You give me the lie!"
"Shut up. This isn't a Wild West show."
"You give me the lie!"
"Oh, for God's sake don't go native," said Mason—and laughed.
Te Pokiha made a sudden leap at him. Mason scuttled behind Packer. "Keep off, you damn' nigger!" he screamed.
The next few minutes were occupied in saving Mr. Mason's life. Alleyn, Packer and Wade tackled Te Pokiha efficiently and scientifically, but even so it took their combined efforts to subdue him. He fought silently and savagely and only gave up when they had both his arms and one of his legs in chancery.
"Very well," he said suddenly, and relaxed. [. . .] "I apologise, Mr. Alleyn," said Te Pokiha quietly. "You can loose your hand."
"All right, Wade," said Alleyn.
"Thank you." He moved away from them, his brown hands at his tie. "I am deeply ashamed," he said. "This man has spoken of my—my colour. It is true I am a 'native.' I come of a people who do not care for insults but I should not have forgotten that an ariki does not lay hands on a taurekareka. [. . .] I will go now," said Te Pokiha. "If you wish to see me again, Mr. Alleyn, I shall be at my rooms between one and two. I am very sorry indeed that I forgot myself. Good morning, gentlemen."
And there were four pages left in the novel and I had to decide whether I wanted to finish them. The plot doesn't resolve believably unless it can establish the doctor's unbreakable honesty—it's only his word against Mason's—but surely there was a better way to do it than revealing this previous model of grace and self-possession as a bestial savage—once his thin Oxford skin is scratched—incapable of restraining himself from murder unless physically held down by three Anglo-types?
A final postscript is added by Alleyn, writing after Mason's arrest to Scotland Yard:
As you will see by this notepaper I am staying with Dr. Te Pokiha. I am learning something of his people. He has apologised seven times, up to date, for losing his temper with Mason, and tells me all members of his family hate being called liars. I hope he doesn't fly into a rage with defending counsel, who is almost certain to question his veracity. He's an extraordinarily interesting fellow and in spite of the temper, he has the most exquisite manners.
Doesn't help.
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God almighty. I won't be re-reading Marsh either.
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If it helps, I've been re-reading Margery Allingham's Campion mysteries as they were reprinted by Felony & Mayhem over the last few years, and they are not full of casual sexism and bigotry. I probably didn't appreciate that fact sufficiently at the time.
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If The Gyrth Chalice was originally Look to the Lady (1931), Israel Melchizadek is pretty awesome in print as well.
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*shudder*
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Should you someday suffer a stroke-level lapse of judgement and perpetrate such an offensive cliché, yes. With extreme and unironic prejudice. But I have to say I don't really worry about it.
Indeed.
What's particularly appalling is that it never would have occurred to Marsh to suggest that the killing temper was always lurking just beneath the skin of the English gentleman, despite the fact that at the time she was writing there were potentially people living who had childhood memories of a time when English gentlemen fought to the death over matters of honour.* And surely there were some who remembered the year when one Anglo-Saxon-descended American gentleman battered another with a stick on the floor of the US Senate.
Parenthetically, I speak as one who could be tarred with the same brush--my three-greats-grandfather was a noted duellist. Then again, he was born in Menorca, so I'm sure Marsh would have something patronising to say about hot Mediterranean tempers, and never mind the fact that WASPs in New Orleans (and the rest of the South) were just as apt to duel as anyone else, and, given their preference for pistols, less likely to be satisfied by merely drawing blood. I'm certain my mother's people, the Striblings and Bloses and Trimmiers/Trimyears and so on, fought their fair share.
*The last recorded fatal duel in England between Englishmen is reported to have been in 1845; the combatants were an officer of the cavalry and another of the Royal Marines.
Re:
Hah. I didn't think of duels, but I did wonder whether the same terms would have been applied to an English doctor, or whether they might only have shifted locales of prejudice—would he have had a fiery Scotch temper to explain it? A touch of the fighting Irish? (I almost used berserkergang to describe Marsh's portrayal of Te Pokiha and then thought, no, that's not fair to the Norse.)
That's a very well-stated sentence, by the way.
and never mind the fact that WASPs in New Orleans (and the rest of the South) were just as apt to duel as anyone else, and, given their preference for pistols, less likely to be satisfied by merely drawing blood.
I have read papers about Southern dueling culture. I should find where those were online.
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I'd expect something like that, yes. Even the Anglo-Irish Ascendency seem to have been regarded by English capital-S Society as being a bit... coarse, maybe? There's probably a better word for it, but I can't think of one the now.
That's a very well-stated sentence, by the way.
Thank you very much.
I have read papers about Southern dueling culture. I should find where those were online.
I've read a few, over the years--can't recollect how many of them were on JSTOR or in printed volumes, as opposed to being in more accessible places. If you happen to come across any more, I'd be grateful if you linked me to them; the subject is something of a hobby of mine. I have a feeling* that one could in part explain, or at least illuminate, some aspects of Southern culture by reference to the South having been a dueling society in comparatively recent times.**
Actually, this is reminding me of one of the few really interesting insights I got out of an otherwise somewhat boring class I took on the subject of the eighteenth century Atlantic trade system: eighteenth century English, Anglo-Irish, etc. merchants were as pugnacious on matters of honour as the aristocracy, if not more so, because their reputations were almost literally the life blood of their livelihood. Quantities of goods on the order of entire cargoes were typically exchanged not for bullion or bank notes but for letters of credit, and no one would do business with a man whose honour and veracity were suspect.***
*Making it into an hypothesis would require more knowledge than I have and probably more effort than is worth my expending. If I'd somehow ended up in American Studies or the like I'd probably have done more with it, as well as writing that paper on the crossbow in pre-industrial Appalachia...
**In terms of historical memory, if nothing else, although I do have one friend--someone my own age, I might add--whose grandfather, sometime during the twenties or thirties, served as a second in a duel in Georgia. She says it's not something he likes to talk about, which lends credence to the story, to my mind.
***Someday I will find an excuse to write fantasy or space opera about swashbuckling traders who are just as interesting, just as inter-related in a baroque web of marriages and alliances, and just as deadly as the military aristocracy or the scholar-librarians. Not because I have any particular fondness for capitalism, but because, well, it just seems like something that needs done.
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This seems so quintessentially Northeastern it almost hurts. Poem?
(Then I look at it sideways and it seems disturbingly like a scene out of Use of Weapons. )
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I will see what I can do.
(Then I look at it sideways and it seems disturbingly like a scene out of Use of Weapons.)
I haven't read any of the Culture novels, but based on more mainstream experience of Iain Banks—The Wasp Factory, A Song of Stone—I can see how ending up in one of his books might not be the safest thing for a person's health.
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Yay, ftw!
They gave it illustrations from the film! Trust me, they won't explain anything!
Well, it wasn't actually clear from the review (or maybe just from some earlier draft that I read?) that the whole thing was live-action. Holy cheese.
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Also, my brain keeps wanting to turn it it to some sort of neologism involving the word Disco.
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Thank you! I'm actually, really happy about it.
Well, it wasn't actually clear from the review (or maybe just from some earlier draft that I read?) that the whole thing was live-action. Holy cheese.
Oh, yes. It would be acres less weird if it were just animated.
Also, my brain keeps wanting to turn it it to some sort of neologism involving the word Disco.
. . . I don't want to see that!
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(posting here is pretty much the only thing to remind me i never did make that icon from the BBC series i kept meaning to...)
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Fair enough.
(posting here is pretty much the only thing to remind me i never did make that icon from the BBC series i kept meaning to...)
You really should!
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Aw. Thank you.
(I can't see myself cutting my hair for anything short of major surgery at this point, no. And even in that case, I'd really object.)
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(Her name, in point of fact, is Charity. I'm sorry. It is however enough to make anyone gay.)
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If you can plausibly work it, that would be adorable.
(Her name, in point of fact, is Charity. I'm sorry. It is however enough to make anyone gay.)
Even if Chaz Bono had turned out to be female, he would still have been within his rights to put the kibosh on "Chastity."
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Thanks so much for describing your Sunday. It sounds splendid, and I'm glad you had such a fascinating place to see and experience.
the rainwater cat-ice in the fountain
I'd not heard this expression 'cat-ice' before. I like it. Thank you for introducing it to me.
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I like this idea that my innate tendency to run on about things I like may have some practical application.
Thanks so much for describing your Sunday. It sounds splendid, and I'm glad you had such a fascinating place to see and experience.
I'd not heard this expression 'cat-ice' before. I like it. Thank you for introducing it to me.
You're welcome. I don't actually know the derivation.
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I like this, also.
I enjoy reviewing concerts, myself--it's not as fun as playing music for pay can be at its best, but its worst is generally less annoying than the latter at its worst(ish).
[info]strange_selkie says I should have put more description online . . .
More description wouldn't be a bad thing. What there is is enjoyable.
I don't actually know the derivation.
Urban Dictionary (first result when I googled it*) suggests it's simply because the ice might support the weight of a cat, but nothing heavier. There's no citation, of course, but it seems a reasonable explanation.
*I tend to avoid Urban Dictionary because the probability of coming across a sophomoric/misogynistic description of some obscure and rather anerotic-sounding sexual act is high, but once in a while it comes in handy.
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Your description of the estate made me think of Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger; I could almost feel the *absence* of the house, if that makes any sense. Thanks for sharing!
Re: your comment on Downton Abbey; are you often drawn to characters who meet bad ends, then?
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I hope it rewards your waiting.
Thanks for sharing!
You're very welcome. I take it I should read The Little Stranger?
(My sole experience of Sarah Waters is The Night Watch. I assume she doesn't usually write her novels backward.)
Re: your comment on Downton Abbey; are you often drawn to characters who meet bad ends, then?
At one point in my college friend group, it became a running joke. Part of it is my tendency to imprint on secondary characters, who are more vulnerable to being killed off or at least substantially damaged in protagonist-prohibited ways; part of it is almost certainly that the character traits that interest me most tend to cluster in directions where bad things can happen; part of it just seems to be slightly silly luck. Hello, you're an interesting addition to the supporting cast. Wait, you turned out to be evil and/or dead. Sorry about that. I'm trying now to think of a definitive example—John Frobisher from Torchwood: Children of Earth might be sufficiently high-profile for purposes of this discussion. Now that I've become fond of The Dresden Files's Butters, I'm just praying Jim Butcher doesn't decide to knock him off to make some kind of point about the unpredictability of it all. (I think he may have died technically in the most recent book, or at least he was temporarily evicted from his own body, but the local medium stuck him back together.) I mean, in ninth grade we were assigned Romeo and Juliet. I thought Mercutio was awesome. Look where that got me.
As regards Downton Abbey itself—for example, I suspect we are supposed to dislike Thomas. He got himself sent home from the Somme with a self-inflicted "Blighty" when all around him equally terrified men were staying and dying; the high-handed, insinuating tone he takes with the other domestics doesn't seem to have made him many friends during his previous tenure at Downton; he has a history of being ambitious in underhanded ways. He's also incredibly good with the gas-blinded young lieutenant at the hospital he's seconded to—he can't save the boy (you never can save anyone), but he's far more effective as a kind of improvised nurse's orderly than he ever was as a panic-frozen stretcher-bearer. That's the sort of complexity that gets my attention: now I'm waiting to see whether the series will be able to keep it up or whether it will collapse him back into a more familiar type. (Also I'm fairly certain he's gay. Waiting to see how that's handled, too.)
I'm also interested by the valet with shell-shock, which means—he's fragile—I do expect something awful to happen to him, and historically it's worse than even odds on the solicitor heir in the trenches. I feel as though I was meant to like the previous valet, Bates, but as he spent most of the episode being self-sacrificing in the ways that annoy me most, I just wanted to shake him sharply, several times. The youngest of the Crawley sisters, Sybil, who is volunteering as a nurse, will probably come through all right.
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Mr. Bates was as annoyingly self-sacrificing in the first season, but it built gradually, and you also saw him trying to overcome a handicap and prove himself, so he was more likable (imo).
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There's a character in Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun (1993—1996) about whom I would feel very differently if I had read the books in their proper order.
One thing I **don't* like is how his nastiness and ambition seem, in the writers' eyes, to be tied up with his sexual identity.
Since he's the only visibly gay character in the cast so far, it would be a problem if he were also the most conniving and least trustworthy, yes. To Courtenay, he mostly talks about what it's like to be marginalized: "All my life they've pushed me around just because I'm different . . . You're not a victim. Don't let them make you into one." (And that all ends as happily as most characters that interest me . . .)
But maybe it's a blessing in disguise.
I think you need to unpack that statement for me.
Mr. Bates was as annoyingly self-sacrificing in the first season, but it built gradually, and you also saw him trying to overcome a handicap and prove himself, so he was more likable (imo).
The first season is worth going back for, then?
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I think you need to unpack that statement for me.
Yeah, sorry about that! I had a longer paragraph, basically arguing with myself, and that's all that remained of it by the time I got done editing and reediting myself. Basically, although I really enjoy the show, I think (fear/suspect?) the writers have a problem making characters that are mixed (that have both likable and unlikable traits)--they seem to be able to make all-around pleasant characters or conniving nasty ones, but nothing in between. Mary's maybe the only exception in the first season: she's selfish and vindictive, but also miserable and trapped, and you can see how the former arises from the latter. Plus, she grows up a bit. Other characters, like Anna or Sybil, are straight-up nice, or, like Ms. O'Brian in the first season, just TERRIBLE. (She's a bit of a penitent right now too, though still a schemer.) And Thomas was just over on the negative side of the equation, and I thought, huh, a scheming gay guy; now that's not predictable ... but then, when I think of the alternative--an angel-of-light gay guy--and when I think of the writers' apparent penchant for martyrdom (Mr. Bates!), then I come to the conclusion that if they'd made him a good guy, they'd have made him a martyr to his gayness, and a huge victim. This way at least he has agency and drive, and *maybe* room to be redeemed by love or something. So that's what led me to say that maybe it's a blessing in disguise. /long-winded.
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Hm. I may not be able to watch it, then, unless they improve—I don't do well with straight-split light-or-dark characterizations. My favorite characters are always mixed even when they wind up inexplicably on the positive side. If Thomas being complicated is out of character, I don't know.
but then, when I think of the alternative--an angel-of-light gay guy--and when I think of the writers' apparent penchant for martyrdom (Mr. Bates!), then I come to the conclusion that if they'd made him a good guy, they'd have made him a martyr to his gayness, and a huge victim.
True. At least when you're being a bastard, you're doing something.
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In fact, I'm sure of it. Maggie Smith's character and Matthew Crawley's mother are fun characters who are extremely likable but with real-life flaws, and same with Lady Grantham and Matthew Crawley.
So maybe this is it: their likable characters have realistic enough foibles, but the dark characters don't seem to have much to redeem them, which doesn't seem balanced.
*That*, I think, isn't overstating the case. You might still not end up interested in it, but give season one a try anyway. Some of the scenes are very fun--funny even. I really enjoyed it.
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All right: I trust you.
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2. I want this on my wall.
Nine
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Thank you! Now to see if I can do it again?
I want this on my wall.
Or you could visit.
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Book! Book!
Or you could visit.
If I had a driver, I'd love to.
Nine
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Thank you! I hope you enjoy!
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What characters are you interested in?
The Four Feathers sounds excellent. I didn't know about the white feather thing until, coincidentally, it showed up in the first episode of season two of Downton Abbey.
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If nothing else, I think it would become a very different kind of show. Are they planning on continuing as far up in time as the characters can plausibly go?
The Four Feathers sounds excellent.
I actually think it deserves its reputation as a classic, not just a historical curiosity. I wasn't sure when I started watching.
I didn't know about the white feather thing until, coincidentally, it showed up in the first episode of season two of Downton Abbey.
I can't remember where I learned it first. Quite possibly from The Magician's Nephew:
"I hope," said Uncle Andrew presently in a very high and mighty voice, just as if he were a perfect Uncle who had given one a handsome tip and some good advice, "I hope, Digory, you are not given to showing the white feather. I should be very sorry to think that anyone of our family had not enough honour and chivalry to go to the aid of—er—a lady in distress."
I may just have read a lot of books about the war.
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Cool.
As for how far they're going to take Downton Abbey, they've confirmed a third season, at least, and there's a Christmas special that my friend saw and said was good.