sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2018-05-23 08:03 pm

During the summer, take me sailing out on the Atlantic

I did not spend any of today on or by the sea—I went to a doctor's appointment; it went fine—but it was hot and light-filled and the clouds looked like the kind that form over water, thick and tufted and sail-white. If it doesn't cloud over or rain, I am going to see if I can get some time on the harborwalk tomorrow.

There was an older man on the bus from Sullivan who was loudly and repetitively dah-dah-dah-ing a combination of Handel's "Dead March," the Dies Irae, and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," round and round and round, one in and out of the other. Melodically, I understand how this happened. Aesthetically, it was one of the more unnerving things I have heard on a bus.

A young black man in Harvard Square told me he liked my pin. I believe he meant Radical Dreams' Black Lives Matter rather than the gold-and-purple eldritch sigil from NecronomiCon, because he gave me what looked for all the world like a one-handed, abbreviated Wakandan salute. I didn't think fast enough to return it—I just smiled and said thank you and ducked my head in the way I have evolved as a sort of shorthand acknowledgement—but I love the idea that the gesture has leapt into the wild. Stairwell spirit says if it happens again, the appropriate response should be good luck and many shoelaces.

A young white man who passed me at the bus stop at Powderhouse told me I had awesome hair. Casually, not expectantly, did not break stride. "Thanks!" I said, the same way. This has been your irregularly scheduled reminder that drive-by compliments are not street harassment and it is entirely possible to achieve the first without committing the second.

I finished Charles Todd's A Test of Wills (1996) last night and am now halfway through Wings of Fire (1998). There were some weird class currents in the first novel, but right now they are taking a back seat to the pure astonishing idfic of the series premise: the protagonist is haunted by the Great War in all possible senses, having returned from the Western Front with some first-class shell-shock, but also with a ghost. In 1919, Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard shares his head with Hamish MacLeod, the subordinate officer he had to execute for refusing a terrible, direct order that Rutledge himself had faithfully passed down the chain of command despite the lives it would cost; the firing squad made a mess of it, Rutledge had to administer the coup de grâce with his own pistol, and just as he pulled the trigger they were buried in the thick, suffocating wave of mud thrown up by a German shell's direct hit. Eyes locked with Corporal MacLeod at the end, he thought he could hear the other man screaming inside his skull for Rutledge to finish it. When they dug him out of the wreckage, he had Hamish. He's had him ever since, a familiar, uncomfortable, intimate voice that doesn't like him very much but understands him better than anyone else, especially anyone to whom he must present, perpetually and exhaustingly, the mask of a man who came back from the trenches sane. It is of course possible that Hamish is nothing more supernatural than a personification of Rutledge's survivor guilt; the doctors who eventually pronounced him fit to return to his pre-war profession thought so. What he behaves like, however, is a ghost, a lingering personality with opinions and memories and emotional reactions of its own—a dybbuk, though neither of them would know the word—and Rutledge treats him like one, since treating him like a hallucination does not actually make him go away. It is especially inconvenient when Hamish says something needling and Rutledge forgets and responds out loud and no one else in the room knows what the hell he's talking about. I have no idea how this dynamic will develop in future books, but there's like twenty of them, so unless the series totally falls apart I am looking forward to finding out. I am slightly surprised there's no TV series.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (grand canyon)

[personal profile] moon_custafer 2018-05-24 12:44 am (UTC)(link)
If it doesn't cloud over or rain, I am going to see if I can get some time on the harborwalk tomorrow.

I am glad to live near the Lake, though the weather for the past few weeks has followed a pattern of being sunny on weekdays only. I have made a novelty summer top I’m quite pleased with which is literally two cotton tea towels (printed with a whimsical map of Chesapeake Bay) sewn together.
moon_custafer: ominous shape of Dr. Mabuse (curtain)

[personal profile] moon_custafer 2018-05-24 10:39 am (UTC)(link)
Just a waterfront.

It was really quite irresponsible of me to say “I made a top from two tea towels” without posting pictures, so I took some this morning (as usual, apologies for the fuzzy quality): http://mooncustafer.tumblr.com/post/174206437160/summer-top-made-from-two-printed-tea-towels
julian: Picture of the sign for Julian Street. (Default)

[personal profile] julian 2018-05-24 03:05 am (UTC)(link)
My goodness, what a combination of things to hum. (I mean, I also segue tunefully, but still!)
selkie: (Default)

[personal profile] selkie 2018-05-24 03:23 am (UTC)(link)
Don't talk to members of the unseelie court on the bus. But also, you do have the most awesome hair. We are all harsh on our bodies and what they've become in our implausible old age; you are as striking as you ever were.
selkie: (Default)

[personal profile] selkie 2018-05-24 03:05 pm (UTC)(link)
I saw you summer before last, you nonadherent to linear time. Which admittedly was before the breaking of the world and the rise of fascism and all that, but I'm not DIM. I, on the other hand, have a whole chin you haven't met because wow, 2017 ate a lot of feelings.

negothick: (Default)

[personal profile] negothick 2018-05-24 09:43 am (UTC)(link)
My mystery book club, The Usual Suspects, did Todd (a mother and son team!) a few years back. Many are NOT fantasy readers, and they hate "paranormal detectives" with a deadly hatred, but they loved Hamish, since he doesn't actually help Inspector Rutledge or give him any unfair advantages. As you said, if anything, he's a disadvantage. And he's not a "cute ghost." I fear that any TV adaptation would turn into Topper Inspects.

We also found it strange that the authors chose wills and inheritances for the first book in the series.
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2018-05-24 02:29 pm (UTC)(link)
Somebody told me once about the difference between a 'gift' compliment ("Nice hair!") and the street harassment which demands something from you ("Smile!"), but I've never been able to repeat it in a convincing way.

It bugs the fuck out of me my DEFAULT RESPONSE to "Smile!" is to actually involuntarily smile/grimace (smilance?), though (and I'm not really a smiley person). We are well trained.
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2018-05-24 07:03 pm (UTC)(link)
BEST NECK-SNAPPING EVER.
alexxkay: (Default)

[personal profile] alexxkay 2018-05-24 10:45 pm (UTC)(link)
Season 2 of Jessica Jones is out, and (IMO) pretty great.
shewhomust: (Default)

[personal profile] shewhomust 2018-05-24 04:20 pm (UTC)(link)
I have not previously met the rendering stairwell spirit: is it your own, or another unnoticed divergence between our languages?
drwex: (Default)

[personal profile] drwex 2018-05-24 05:45 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm glad to see that you're getting at least some good stranger interactions. Too bad we can't capture and teach that sort of spontaneous good behavior.

Do you have a link to the NecronomiCon image? I don't recall if you were wearing it either of the times I happened to see you.
drwex: (Default)

[personal profile] drwex 2018-05-24 06:20 pm (UTC)(link)
Neat, thanks.
choco_frosh: (Default)

[personal profile] choco_frosh 2018-05-24 06:58 pm (UTC)(link)
May there be sea.
choco_frosh: (Default)

[personal profile] choco_frosh 2018-05-24 09:53 pm (UTC)(link)
:( I hope it gets better. I hope you are by the ocean right now.
selidor: (explain a dragon)

[personal profile] selidor 2018-05-27 01:39 am (UTC)(link)
I would rather love it if a line that was only released in a cut scene became an aphorism.