If the latter didn't convince the Germans that he'd used a one-time pad then I deserved to be shot

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This week got away from me somehow. So did a lot of this month. Rabbit, rabbit.

Most of today was spent with rushthatspeaks, watching Pasolini's La ricotta (1963) as a follow-up to Mamma Roma (1962)—and then trying to look up what Derek Jarman said about it, being intermittently distracted by photographs of Karl Johnson in the process—and discovering that the capsaicin rush produced by an order of garlic chili chicken hearts from DooWee & Rice plus half a dozen of their lime habanero chicken wings is functionally indistinguishable from being high. We went through a lot of water and paper napkins. I can breathe through my nose for the first time in weeks. We also went grocery shopping, but on the whole that was a lot less exciting, although I did learn one can buy a dozen Unreal peanut butter cups at Market Basket for the price of three from Store 18. That's dangerous to know.

Yesterday, derspatchel and I braved the mall crowds at the CambridgeSide Galleria in order to go clothes shopping: we both hate it, so we went together for mutual moral support. I have never been able to walk out of a food court with a sumac chicken roll-up (with extra pickled turnips when I asked for them!) and a bottle of Karoun's yogurt drink before, but evidently that's what Sepal is for. We were standing outside Best Buy when the blackout hit. Rob had just described retail stores as "the dark circus of the soul." The lights flickered and we were plunged into post-apocalypse. Say thank you, Cambridge.

Right, and here is where I should mention that we were clothes shopping because we are leaving next Thursday to spend six days in Orlando. It was becoming inevitable. My stuffed Figment has been living at the foot of Rob's bed ever since I unearthed him from the cedar closet right after Halloween. I haven't been to Disney World since I was eight.

The rest of this post composed of things either I wanted to link earlier this week or was just amused by. Look, there's five of them.

1. I have been following the story of the pigeon's wartime code since Rob sent me a link at the beginning of November. It went to Bletchley; now it's gone to the internet. If the sender used a one-time pad, the information may never be recoverable. I would love to find out it was encrypted with one of Leo Marks' poem-codes.

2. Also courtesy of Dean: this week was Live Like a Stoic Week at University of Exeter. I find the idea of a Stoic revival fascinating. I am now waiting for someone to propose living like a Cynic, which will be a lot less snarky than it sounds from a modern perspective unless everyone involved models themselves after Diogenes.

3. Michael Cisco has posted readings from his latest novel Celebrant (2012), which I heard a chapter from at Readercon and then happily read for myself. It has rabbit girls, Tibetan philosophy, forgetting country, and lead poisoning; it may be my favorite of his novels so far, and that's including the one where the protagonist is a paper-stuffed golem.

4. On the evolution of Lolcats. "It is unknown how the memetic mutation that caused Breadcats (Felis virtualis panis) has any adaptive advantage whatsoever."

5. I had no idea llama font was a thing.

Oh, and have a poem about Shakespeare. I am going to finish re-reading So You Want to Be a Wizard? and go to sleep.

Comments

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The main character's grandpa seems to be based on Leo Marks, but without the poem-codes.

I'd never even heard of the book! That's fascinating, and definitely a point in its favor for me (although Marks without "The Life That I Have" is a very peculiar thought). I take it you recommend?

If you have not read Marks' Silk and Cyanide (1998), I acquired it in a used book store two years ago in Vancouver and it remains one of my better impulse buys; I described it once as "one of the most engagingly written and most guarded memoirs I have ever read." It is ostensibly a candid record of Marks' time with the SOE from 1942 through the end of World War II, and much of the technical information may be. But then I noticed that while he'll offer pages of layman's explanation and professional detail about a particular event right down to the dialogue (which one must assume is partly invented and partly recalled in the way of most memoirs, although if he really had the kind of memory his duties as a codemaker-breaker seem to have required, he might be quoting more of it than I think), despite all the first-person narration it's not until a deliberately funny little anecdote about trying to teach himself Freudian analysis that the reader realizes how much of his personal life he's been keeping out. You can speculate early on from his name and some of his stories about his family, but he doesn't mention until a good third of the way into the book that he's Jewish. (His father was Benjamin Marks of the booksellers Marks & Co, more romantically known as 84 Charing Cross Road.) His admiration for his colleagues and his frustration with his superiors and all sorts of opinions about the workings of the Signals directorate, he'll share especially if it means he can tell a story against himself, but when it comes to the effects of the responsibility he bears for so many agents' lives? Well, he thinks of himself as a terrible coward and he'd like to be on better terms with his unconscious . . . He was an outsider even in an outfit as motley and informal as the SOE, and all these decades later he still thinks of himself as one. You find yourself reading against his constant feinting humor (which is sometimes suddenly dropped, because there were and are things about which Marks cares very much, but never without the sense that it is a calculated choice, to show himself defenseless, to let us in on the secret), trying to see the shapes of what it is he's not talking about. Mostly himself. It was one of the most interesting ways of being an unreliable narrator I'd seen in any genre, fiction included. I was reading Anna Massey's Telling Some Tales (2006) at the same time and the two of them made a fascinating compare-and-contrast.

but since seeing "Llamas with Hats" I'm worried the llama-font llamas will all turn to look at me with hand-eating hunger in their eyes.

That . . . is something I never thought to worry about with llamas before. Should I watch Llamas with Hats, or will I be afraid of them afterward?

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I'd be very interested to learn what a better-informed reader thinks of Thomas's PopCo. I read it because I very much enjoyed her later The End of Mr. Y. Both books have a rather encyclopedic sprawl, a sense that the novel is about *everything*, which I like. PopCo includes a code that readers can crack if so inclined, but ends satisfactorily enough if one chooses not to accept the challenge. And there's a cake recipe and list of prime numbers. Also, Thomas seems to have adapted the guarded narration of Marks's memoir (which I have just now added to my Goodreads queue). Her narrator's life has long revolved around a huge secret, and smaller, more personal ones, so the info feels parceled out carefully, though not coyly.

I saw in the wikipedia entry for Marks that he wrote the script for Peeping Tom! Such a clever movie about voyeurism and the male gaze.

I love "Llamas with Hats," but truthfully, I will never look at llamas the same way again.

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And there's a cake recipe and list of prime numbers. Also, Thomas seems to have adapted the guarded narration of Marks's memoir (which I have just now added to my Goodreads queue).

All right; that sounds like something I need to read. Thank you!

I saw in the wikipedia entry for Marks that he wrote the script for Peeping Tom! Such a clever movie about voyeurism and the male gaze.

That's why I impulse-bought Between Silk and Cyanide—I love that movie. He's actually responsible for the scripts of several films, but Cloudburst (1951) is the only other one I've seen.

I love "Llamas with Hats," but truthfully, I will never look at llamas the same way again.

I shall consider myself warned.