Then I heard a mermaid singing

[sovay]

1. This weekend:

rushthatspeaks baked a carrot cake. It was not a debacle, because the results were an entirely edible cake of the correct species, but I was only involved in the very last stages and the cake still tried to inflict on me as much damage as it could. (Arriving in Davis Square with the kindly loaned cake tray and its contents, I sent a text: "You are my best cousin. I am covered in melted cream cheese frosting. Your cake is a malevolent sod.") I brought it back to my family and it was eaten with delicious vindictiveness.

For my father's birthday cake, we made him a concentric arrangement of sixty cupcakes in three different flavors (almond, hazelnut, Grand Marnier chocolate) and two frostings (whipped cream with almond, chocolate buttercream) and all of them with candles, some of which turned out to be the sparkling kind and some of which turned out to be trick-relighting. Getting them lit in the first place was nearly as epic as blowing them out afterward; I have some very good shots of my brother with the crème brûlée torch looking like the textbook illustration of pyromania. There was smoke in fog-banks everywhere. Most of the candles had to be eventually, forcibly disposed of in water. We have so many cupcakes. A terrific time was had by all.

We were not in such a sugar coma that we could not make Emmanuel Music's La Clemenza di Tito, which is an opera with a flawed book and luminous music. This version was performed with a narrator, as in some productions of Bernstein's Candide; I would love to know whether it might be possible to rewrite it with spoken dialogue (even if it's an opera seria) and stage it fully, because the characterizations are fascinating. It's a fantasia of the Roman Empire, but it twists and twists inexorably toward tragedy and then it twists out into eucatastrophe at the last minute. I was reminded of certain less traditional film noir.

There was luck at the MIT Swapfest: my father and my brother now co-own a WWII-era Hewlett-Packard signal generator which we carried back to the car with the vague sense that we should have been laying charges as we retreated. The only photographs I have of it are seatbelted in to the front seat, because the car of which I am speaking is no longer the ancient rattling van in which sizeable quantities of furniture and/or lumber could be fit even without needing to remove the back seats, but a rather smaller sports model with no back seats to speak of. My father kept worrying it would shift position suddenly at a stop and deploy the airbag. This did not happen, I suspect because Rush-That-Speaks' carrot cake had used up all the you must be kidding me vibes for the weekend. I found the front and back covers to a November issue of Hugo Gernsback's Radio-Craft—I wish it had been the entire magazine, but the interior pages had apparently all oxidized out. There was no year listed, but derspatchel and I were able to deduce from the articles (Phantom Raiders, the radio on the SS America) that it was November 1940. The headline photograph showed a locomotive and a turntable: The Iron Horse Goes on Record.

There was neither Blues Jam nor Brattle Theatre, but at the point where I realized I had not eaten for over twenty-four hours, there was dinner. See previous. Don't order the Moxie Mule.

2. This morning:

I have seen Sofia Samatar's post on A Mayse-Bikhl.

It is July outside again, I have not slept and I am behind on my work, but I'm good.

[edit] Neal is flyby-visiting for lunch. Must not talk to him only about Alan Turing. Even if someone has now unearthed and digitized his Sherborne school reports.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

And the endless repetition of "tidy" as a desirable goal. But clearly anyone who could write "I don’t care to find him boiling heaven knows what witches’ brew by the aid of two guttering candles on a naked wooden window sill" was not entirely unsympathetic.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

And he was clearly warmly regarded by the time he left the school, and they let him chuck the Greek (very wise). But the emphasis on conformity at the outset was painful to read.

[sovay]

But the emphasis on conformity at the outset was painful to read.

"Undeniably he is not a 'normal' boy: not the worse for that, but probably less happy."

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

They got some sub in their text.

Well, his mother loved him, anyway. I suppose that's all we're called to do once we're in the situation, is see them for what they are and love them.

[sovay]

Well, his mother loved him, anyway. I suppose that's all we're called to do once we're in the situation, is see them for what they are and love them.

He didn't conform.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

No; but we're not celebrating the Turing centenary a handful of years after his death as reclusive but still pioneering K.B.E., are we? In high school, we weren't corralled to watch Alan Turing Presents a Brief History of A.I. I find this extremely crankymaking.

[sovay]

No; but we're not celebrating the Turing centenary a handful of years after his death as reclusive but still pioneering K.B.E., are we? In high school, we weren't corralled to watch Alan Turing Presents a Brief History of A.I.

"I can't be the only one to have seen, in glitches of time like this, the shadow of the would-have-been Grand Old Boy (only seven years his senior) of the 1980s. Did the shadow haunt his mind? Who knows."

(—Andrew Hodges on Robin Gandy)

No, but would you have been happier if he'd been closeted and longer-lived? I want the history where he was geekily out as he was in our time and died at a well-respected age in the 1990's. That failing, at least he didn't learn to fit in. And he was loved, not fitting in, by more people than his mother.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

Oh, I totally want him to have been slightly prancy into the mid-nineteen-eighties, chatting up Nureyev at state functions, before his memoir-writing old age (retiring with a dear long-time bachelor friend).

And you are right, he didn't learn to fit in, and that's better; but it's sad, the whole thing. We ought to do better by our heroes.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

I want this history for him, too. (Martin's got The Enigma on his shelf; I might re-read it, and imagine a happier ending.)

[sovay]

I want this history for him, too. (Martin's got The Enigma on his shelf; I might re-read it, and imagine a happier ending.)

You want to write Turing a poem, I don't think he can have too many.

[sovay]

We ought to do better by our heroes.

That I will not disagree with.

I write poems.