That's the number of my house

[sovay]

1. Today I applied for healthcare from the state of Massachusetts. Because my current insurance is no longer affordable, not very helpful to me, and about to be terminated regardless at the end of March. Wish me luck.

2. There's a new issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone, meaning the issue six months previous is now freely available online. It contains my poems "Censorship" (for Cato and Adresteia) and "The Marriage He Saw Beneath the Shade" (for Arthur Machen and ashlyme). Why don't I own Tanith Lee's Space Is Just a Starry Night?

3. Does anyone have a trusted recipe for a kind of sorrel borscht called schav or scharv? I saw it last night on a menu online and remembered that my grandfather had asked me to make it for him, very late in his life. I didn't quite understand about the sorrel. He kept saying "green borscht" and I was racking my brain trying to reverse-engineer borscht from dark leafy greens like kale or spinach and of course that wasn't correct. We're past both his birthday and yahrzeit at this point in the year, but I could still learn.

4. Charlie Chaplin wrote a novel. I'll have to get a copy of that.

5. Stone Telling hath a blog! (I just finished answering a questionnaire for it.) Also a Patreon page. You should donate. A picture of Dashing Mippo says so.

The bread pudding is great when reheated, too.

Comments

[sovay]

It is actually sung on screen (I watched it not two weeks past), though you only hear one verse of the lyric, I think.

That's really cool. What is "Sarcophagus" about—is it a characteristic Lee story, or just very well-written Blake's 7, or what?

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Both! It's much more Lee than Blake. A drifting alien tomb turns the Liberator crew to archetypes - clown, warrior, bard, and so on - it's all predicted in this wonderful five-minute prologue that has no dialogue whatsoever. Avon is cast in the role of Death/the outsider, who's the only person the alien avatar is willing to treat as an equal or lover. I think you'd like it a great deal. Lee also wrote a rather good SF play for the same actor (Paul Darrow) called The Silver Sky (time-travellers from alternate Earths colliding into another universe)that I'm totally sending you if I can get a CD-R copy again.

She was turned down to write for Davison's Doctor, apparently - I'd have loved her to invert Who.

[sovay]

Avon is cast in the role of Death/the outsider, who's the only person the alien avatar is willing to treat as an equal or lover.

There's a direct line from this episode to Kill the Dead, then. I suspect the novel is out of print, like almost everything Lee published with DAW, but used book stores are your friend! You can also get it in an omnibus called Sometimes, After Sunset with Sabella, or the Blood Stone (1980), which is actually how I read it first.

Lee also wrote a rather good SF play for the same actor (Paul Darrow) called The Silver Sky (time-travellers from alternate Earths colliding into another universe)that I'm totally sending you if I can get a CD-R copy again.

(Thank you! I've never heard any of her radio work, either.)

She was turned down to write for Davison's Doctor, apparently - I'd have loved her to invert Who.

Seriously. Tanith Lee Doctor Who would have been fascinating. The ageless bodyswapping is something she would have been all over.