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Tragedy, luxuries, statues, parks, galleries
I seem to have acquired a cold since Monday, which feels extremely unfair. I have spent most of the day feeling severely spaced out and trying to convince myself that I will not actually blow my head off if I sneeze one more time. While waiting in line at the post office, dressed normally for early winter (corduroy coat, scarf, flat cap) and not capable of focusing on much of anything other than the necessities of mailing a package internationally, I completely failed to register that the postal worker behind the counter meant me when he said, "Can I help you, sir?" Then he saw the name on the customs form I had filled out and said, "Oh, sorry," and I wish I had had the presence of mind to respond in gender-confusing kind, but instead I believe I said insightfully, "I have to mail this to Canada."
The news is terrible. The news is surreally, fictionally terrible. There is a ceasefire now in Aleppo and I hope it holds; I hope that all the people who called for help are not already dead. The information on the Russian hacking of the U.S. election continues to mount and I can't figure out what politicians are doing with it—shrugging and resigning themselves to a tainted election that looks to produce a uniquely destructive administration? I'm sure there are still people all across this country who are happy for Trump's victory, however much cheating he required to obtain it, but I keep foundering on the idea of the kind of people who cheered a platform of expelling immigrants and rejoiced in a retrograde nationalist ideal being all right with proven foreign interference in the process of American democracy. Perhaps they think it's all lies. The media, you know. You cannot believe the media. You can believe no one but Donald Trump. He has all the answers. He tells you the truth. He'll give you your heart's desire for free. Never mind history, does no one in this country know folktales? I recognize that everyone on my friendlist will have gone through this stage over the weekend and I am just behind the times, but now is when I am reading news and it is bewildering. The continued desire to keep talking about Trump as if he is still (he never was) just an ordinary candidate on track to the White House as usual. This is not usual. This is not normal. What a lousy refrain for the foreseeable future. I like my not normal in other flavors, thank you.
Things that are good—
1.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel made me cheese grits for lunch. They are a comfort food of my childhood, one of my former winter breakfasts that lapsed in recent years. Thank you for the reminder, shewhomust!
2. Erle Stanley Gardner's The Knife Slipped (1939/2016) is even better than its cover and I deeply regret that it was not published at the time of its writing, because if it had set the tone for the rest of the series, Bertha Cool—late-middle-aged, overweight, unsentimental, profane, and majestically undisturbed by other people's reactions to all of the previous—would have been one of the most enjoyably bad-ass female detectives of the twentieth century. As it was, the editor's afterword and my experience of a later book in the series suggest that after the novel was rejected, Gardner redirected the characterizations so that narrator Donald Lam emerged as the brains of the outfit and Bertha as a secondary figure. I like Donald; he is an appropriately odd-couple counterpart to Bertha, being a pint-sized ex-lawyer, not yet thirty, something of a romantic, who's about as much use where fists or guns are involved as a dishrag against a depth charge. He's a smart kid and tougher than he looks, which is why he's working for Bertha's detective agency in the first place. He also makes, in the course of The Knife Slipped, the hilariously genre-savvy mistake of figuring himself as the world-weary private eye being played for a sap by the femme fatale he loves, with the result that he almost wrecks the case trying to cover up guilt that isn't there and really confusing the girl in the meanwhile. Eventually he works his way to the truth of the crime scene, but it takes a boost from his boss who never played the sap for anyone, especially not her cheating late husband; the author of the afterword believes that, too, did not meet with Gardner's editor's approval. I agree that Donald needn't have stayed a screwup in order for the series to progress, but it's a fantastically meta way for him to be fallible and I am sorry that Gardner felt any need to diminish the force of hard-boiled, diamond-wearing DNGAF that is heavy-breasted Bertha Cool, lighting another cigarette and reminding the reader, "I like loose clothes, loose company, and loose talk, and to hell with the people who don't." At the moment I have fancast her with Hope Emerson, but please feel free to suggest anyone I've overlooked.
3. My plush Dunkleosteus terrelli arrived! In May, I backed a Kickstarter by the Paleontological Research Institute to add a plush ammonoid to their line of Paleozoic Pals. My reward level was some fossil wallpapers and a plush placoderm. On the original production schedule it would have been a birthday self-present; as it is, I think it is just generally comforting. I unwrapped it and Rob instantly and correctly exclaimed, "In the Late Devouring Period, fish became obnoxious!" Personally, I think it's got a sweet face.
The news is terrible. The news is surreally, fictionally terrible. There is a ceasefire now in Aleppo and I hope it holds; I hope that all the people who called for help are not already dead. The information on the Russian hacking of the U.S. election continues to mount and I can't figure out what politicians are doing with it—shrugging and resigning themselves to a tainted election that looks to produce a uniquely destructive administration? I'm sure there are still people all across this country who are happy for Trump's victory, however much cheating he required to obtain it, but I keep foundering on the idea of the kind of people who cheered a platform of expelling immigrants and rejoiced in a retrograde nationalist ideal being all right with proven foreign interference in the process of American democracy. Perhaps they think it's all lies. The media, you know. You cannot believe the media. You can believe no one but Donald Trump. He has all the answers. He tells you the truth. He'll give you your heart's desire for free. Never mind history, does no one in this country know folktales? I recognize that everyone on my friendlist will have gone through this stage over the weekend and I am just behind the times, but now is when I am reading news and it is bewildering. The continued desire to keep talking about Trump as if he is still (he never was) just an ordinary candidate on track to the White House as usual. This is not usual. This is not normal. What a lousy refrain for the foreseeable future. I like my not normal in other flavors, thank you.
Things that are good—
1.
derspatchel made me cheese grits for lunch. They are a comfort food of my childhood, one of my former winter breakfasts that lapsed in recent years. Thank you for the reminder, shewhomust!2. Erle Stanley Gardner's The Knife Slipped (1939/2016) is even better than its cover and I deeply regret that it was not published at the time of its writing, because if it had set the tone for the rest of the series, Bertha Cool—late-middle-aged, overweight, unsentimental, profane, and majestically undisturbed by other people's reactions to all of the previous—would have been one of the most enjoyably bad-ass female detectives of the twentieth century. As it was, the editor's afterword and my experience of a later book in the series suggest that after the novel was rejected, Gardner redirected the characterizations so that narrator Donald Lam emerged as the brains of the outfit and Bertha as a secondary figure. I like Donald; he is an appropriately odd-couple counterpart to Bertha, being a pint-sized ex-lawyer, not yet thirty, something of a romantic, who's about as much use where fists or guns are involved as a dishrag against a depth charge. He's a smart kid and tougher than he looks, which is why he's working for Bertha's detective agency in the first place. He also makes, in the course of The Knife Slipped, the hilariously genre-savvy mistake of figuring himself as the world-weary private eye being played for a sap by the femme fatale he loves, with the result that he almost wrecks the case trying to cover up guilt that isn't there and really confusing the girl in the meanwhile. Eventually he works his way to the truth of the crime scene, but it takes a boost from his boss who never played the sap for anyone, especially not her cheating late husband; the author of the afterword believes that, too, did not meet with Gardner's editor's approval. I agree that Donald needn't have stayed a screwup in order for the series to progress, but it's a fantastically meta way for him to be fallible and I am sorry that Gardner felt any need to diminish the force of hard-boiled, diamond-wearing DNGAF that is heavy-breasted Bertha Cool, lighting another cigarette and reminding the reader, "I like loose clothes, loose company, and loose talk, and to hell with the people who don't." At the moment I have fancast her with Hope Emerson, but please feel free to suggest anyone I've overlooked.
3. My plush Dunkleosteus terrelli arrived! In May, I backed a Kickstarter by the Paleontological Research Institute to add a plush ammonoid to their line of Paleozoic Pals. My reward level was some fossil wallpapers and a plush placoderm. On the original production schedule it would have been a birthday self-present; as it is, I think it is just generally comforting. I unwrapped it and Rob instantly and correctly exclaimed, "In the Late Devouring Period, fish became obnoxious!" Personally, I think it's got a sweet face.
no subject
That's all I can figure anyone is going to 'do' with it. T is for once the hopeful one and keeps telling me Obama is pressing for an investigation and the electors are calling for a report before the vote &c &c, and I just don't see how it will do any good -- the Republicans will never impeach Trump, he'll never resign, the country will go completely to hell and if we're lucky won't take the rest of the globe along with it, and apparently holding another election? or the electors voting for someone else? or even just putting everything ON HOLD until this whole horrible mess is sorted out? is unthinkable to even the liberals. Even better, once he's in office there will be even more gerrymandering and civil rights suppression, and possible mass deportations to boot, so the Democrats will go on getting more votes and fewer actual seats and the electoral college will get even more fucked. We'll be in for eight years of Trump and then probably eight years of Pence, if they bother to hold elections for the spectacle of it. Meanwhile, whatever tragedies do happen as a result of his reign, nothing's going to happen to him, or the 1% he belongs to, because nothing ever happens to them, it's the rest of the world who suffers.
I dunno, I can't be objective about it anymore. I mean there is absolute cold hard evidence from the CIA of all places that Putin deliberately sabotaged our election so Trump could be in power for the economic and political benefit of both of them contrary to the will of the US citizens. That should be enough to throw it all out in my opinion. But apparently that's impossible, or so everyone keeps telling me whenever I say "But doesn't that mean the results are wrong....?"
Also Julian Assange should be in jail for the rest of his miserable life. With no connection to the digital world whatsoever.
I was depressed and felt like my possible life and the one career I might've been good at was cut short long before this. I'm disabled, can't work, can barely stay awake for more than four to six hours at a time and sleep at least ten hours when I can't, so I have no idea what is going to happen.
no subject
I know this is from a couple of days ago (my yesterday got eaten by writing about Dorothy Arzner, which I do not regret), but you sound like you were crashing worse than usual here; I hope things are now better if not (I wouldn't expect them to be, but you can surprise me any time you like) great.
no subject
no subject
It's okay! I was not concerned by the action so much as the implication. I am glad you're feeling better.