O muriy Rákavay, uvi tuya klava?

[sovay]

I don't know what it expresses about my relationship to musicals or my relationship to housework that as soon as I start vaccuming, I find myself humming "It's a Hard-Knock Life" from Annie, but here we are.

(I just tried turning on the heat for the first time. It is forced air. I have only ever lived with radiators before. I understood it was unlikely that anyone had turned on the heat since last winter, but I had not taken into account that heavy construction was done in this apartment in the first half of September. I tapped the thermostat a half-degree Celsius up. The heat clicked on, the blowers started up, a fountain of paint flakes, sawdust, and other unnameable crud erupted into the air from the depths of the century-old house, I vacuumed. The cats freaked throughout.)

I had a nice birthday. There was a distressing catbox incident just as we were leaving the house that led to Autolycus being briefly known as "Emperor Poopfoot IV of Commodiana," and my treasured box set of pioneering African-American film got rained on, but the latter did not stop me and derspatchel from watching two fascinating short films after dinner—the mini-golfing comedy Hot Biskits (1931) and the evangelist Hell-Bound Train (1930)—and the former purred his way to sleep while curled against my stomach later that night, so it was all right. We had dinner with my family at home, including little tournedos of beef wrapped in bacon and a Queen Mother's cake with whipped cream and sour cherries. Colin and Randi gave me a silver-wire mermaid, who now lives in the glass-fronted cabinet alongside the seventeenth-century onion bottle and an assortment of beachcombed shells; my parents gave me books. I have Le Guin's The Complete Orsinia (2016), W. F. Morris' Bretherton: Khaki or Field Grey? (1929), Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle's Words in Revolution: Russian Futurist Manifestoes 1912–1928 (2005). I am looking forward to all of them except for the two new Orsinian folksongs which I have already read, immediately, at the dinner table last night. They are in the Orsinian language, which the end notes (which do not provide a translation) confirm works exactly the way I thought it did from the names and place-names, i.e., rather like Romanian. I have been listening to Barney Kessel: Live at the Jazz Mill 1954. My parents watched the debate. That was when we watched Hell-Bound Train.

I slept with cats and husband and managed to wake in time to enjoy lunch with rushthatspeaks, gaudior, and B. before he caught his flight home. I am about to abandon this computer in an attempt to catch The Manchurian Candidate (1962) at the Coolidge. So far, not a bad year at all.

Comments

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Just after college, I lived in a near-slum with forced-air heat. A hole had rusted between the furnace and the air duct, so for years, most of my possessions had a fine layer of oily soot :-( Hopefully, your construction debris is less insidious.

I love The Manchurian Candidate, and even have a story about it (http://alexx-kay.livejournal.com/267102.html) that I recount from time to time.

[sovay]

Hopefully, your construction debris is less insidious.

Blergh. Yes, post-vacuuming, the issue is mostly that it's scaring Hestia. She was also afraid of the radiators in our old apartment until she had spent a winter with them. Also the way the heat seems to drain out of the rooms so quickly that the hot air keeps coming back on, which probably means I need heavy curtains on all of the windows, this being Somerville. But I think it will be manageable. I'm just really more used to radiators.

I love The Manchurian Candidate, and even have a story about it that I recount from time to time.

Heh. I actually like Sinatra's performance in the movie—he is not a weak link for me—but I agree that that is a hell of an introductory line.

(I always interpreted the book scene one of two ways: either to mean that he really is interested in all those subjects but embarrassed about it in front of his friend and commanding officer, or conversely that he had been feverishly trying to distract himself from his nightmares by reading anything he could get his hands on—or at least buying the books and telling himself he was going to read them, throwing himself into different interests and hoping one of them will stick—and was just realizing as he showed off this motley assortment of titles and subjects that they were really not helping his case as a totally sane dude who in no way needs to be placed on indefinite sick leave.)

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Huh. I had not thought of that distraction hypothesis, but it makes sense. And arguably might be what Sinatra was playing!

[sovay]

And arguably might be what Sinatra was playing!

It's the one that came across most strongly this last time around. He just looks so unconvinced by The Jurisprudential Factor of Mafia Administration. (The novels of Joyce Cary make sense to me.)