For your consumption this week:
Thanks to Dave for providing FAR material this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
At her substack, Sam Bodrojan inveighs against the base material of Materialists:
The obsession with capitalism and the transactional nature of dating is meant to be “grimly realistic,” a little bait-and-switch from the genre trappings. But Song has real empathy for these lunatics, considers their vapid quarrels grounds for a little Antonioni tryst. I am not so generous. Song achieves an ambient bitterness at the cost of depth. Her characters are nothing without their devotion to narcissistic dissatisfaction. Yet that spiritual sickness offers no great philosophical insight. The tragedy of Song’s heroine is not that she is so fixated on money that she forgets about romance. It’s that she is a manipulative, anti-social bootlicker enamored with consumption above connection. Spending time with Lucy made me feel claustrophobic. Her life is so small. She is content to live detached completely from any form of reciprocity, equity, or community. She has no friends – thank god, because she would not deserve them!
Nick Pinkerton examines the transactions of Mikio Naruse’s Scattered Clouds for Metrograph:
Here we have the essence of the matter: Shiro and Yumiko, flawed but ultimately principled individuals surrounded on all sides by endemic corruption, have much in common, and paradoxically it is because of their similarity that they cannot, or will not, end up as a couple. Their reticence to compromise, their integrity, is by no means commonplace…. Scattered Clouds is a film of bargaining, bartering, and transactional exchanges, in which the guidelines and logic that dictate conduct in business have infiltrated every aspect of daily life.
At Pitchfork, Jeremy Larson finds nothing of substance in Benson Boone’s new album:
I’m not going into Boone’s album looking for the next Bob Dylan, though there is a song here called “Man in Me,” which bears no relation to the Dylan song of the same name, because this is the song where Boone sings, “You really made me bleed blood on these ivory keys,” a line in desperate need of some workshopping. If anything, Boone struggles to sound like anyone other than Harry Styles, a more charismatic showman from across the pond whose preexistence calls into question the whole Benson Boone project in the first place. Both singers trade in this kind of fake-retro Los Angeles pop-rock sound, which is a commercialization of the indie psychedelic-soul backbeat Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker minted about a decade ago. I wonder if Parker is haunted by the bouncy bassline of Boone’s “Mystical Magical,” not unlike how J. Robert Oppenheimer is haunted by his actions.
At Ironic Sans, David Friedman tells the story of the evolution of Jaws cover illustrations – and how the iconic poster image fell into the public domain:
It’s unclear when exactly Kastel realized that there was something fishy about the painting’s copyright situation. I can only speculate that at some point he wondered if he was entitled to some of the money from all the licensing, and discovered that the copyright to the image had never been properly established. See, when he made the painting in 1975, copyright was still ruled by a 1909 law that said you had to include a copyright notice upon publication of a work, and that notice had to include your name. When the book was published, it carried no such notice for the artwork. It only had a copyright notice for the text. That meant that the painting became public domain as soon as it was published. In a bit of timing bad luck, a new copyright law enacted just a year after the book came out eliminated the notice requirement.
Cram in just a few more hours of celebrating Pride Month! For Out Magazine, Mey Rude identifies a new HBO doc as a “must-see” for young trans viewers:
“So my lesson to anybody listening is never, ever think life is over. No matter what age you are, you just go on and on and on, and life keeps offering you the most wonderful surprises, and take them,” Ashley says in the film. If women like April Ashley and Bambi can survive 60 years of this bullshit, so can we. They found community and family, and as long as we can keep doing that, trans women will never be erased.
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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State of the art special effects, little attention paid to plot - what's changed over the past 120 years?
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A straightforward documentary introduces the Sally Ride we knew - and the one we didn’t.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Live Music – Caleb Nichols, queer indie-folk-pop musician from California over for the second time in a couple of years but this time with a band, last tour was solo acoustic. Their music has a bit of an Elliott Smith vibe at times but with the band there’s a bigger sound and some moments that veer on psychedelic. Really great stuff, definitely feels like an artist that could have been playing larger venues than the local 50-capacity DIY space but I’m glad to see them in an intimate setting! Main support was the band of a former housemate who now lives further afield so the crowd was full of old friends I hadn’t seen in a while, absolutely lovely.
Woo, live music and friends!
Wooo live music! Wooo future “yeah, I saw them before they were big” boasting!
Wooooo live queer indie folk!!
Nothing but hours and hours of zoom meetings. I say this with love: anybody who fears progressive groups taking over the world has never sat in a meeting with one.
I fear that you are right.
I’m certain it’s true of about any group, which explains why people with no skills or ideas other than yelling one thing over and over have a shot at gaining power within them. I’ll take dithering in kindness over fascism, but is it too much to ask for a halfway point?
The second half of The Stand sometimes gets flack for the endless committee meeting stuff going on while the literal antichrist is getting shit done on his end, but I love it — this is exactly how lots of well-meaning people act.
The Whistle Blower – Michael Caine is a retired Royal Navy man with a son who works for CGHQ (the UK’s agency for gather signal intelligence). When a mole is unearthed in the agency, paranoia reigns, Caine’s son decided to be a whistle blower and is killed for it, and Caine is not happy. The overarching plot is sort of murky, with one murder that makes little sense to me to trigger the rest and a muddled resolution – but Caine is excellent as a man who cannot makes much sense of what is happening, and cannot do anything about it, but still must act. Do they still make movies like this in the UK, on small budgets but with big names and intended more for the home market than anyone else?
Kojak, “In Full Command” – An assistant chief (Danny Thomas) who should have been put out to pasture years earlier messes in a case involving a possible mob war and makes life miserable for Kojak. Thomas does okay with the serious role though it’s a bit broadly written, and this fits well with the broader theme of the last half season of the rot from within in NYC’s justice system. It’s also a good note to end the show on. Look for future DS9 big bad Marc Alaimo as a mob boss.
And yes, we are at the end. This never rose to the heights of Columbo or Rockford Files, nor could it, since it was at heart more conventional and focused on an insider, albeit one who didn’t care for the rules any more than Columbo or Jim Rockford did. It had the advantage of being able to mix and match the types of stories it told, and at least at first also carried something of a noir sensibility and had a hint of cinema verite any time the cameras were on the streets of New York. As time went along, the show got at once more predictable and more scattershot, but it never entirely lost its entertainment value. Didn’t hurt that the regular cast chugged along well as an unit. But it would have been nice if we got to meet Saperstein’s wife or McNeil’s kids or kept better tabs on Kojak big fat Greek family. These characters worked as characters in a police station, but rarely became people.
But hey, I am not quite done. Still haven’t seen the pilot for the show and there are the reunion movies from the 80s. All of which are harder to find, but I expect to get there sooner or later.
Not sure what I’ll do without a Kojak summarized for me in the mornings, it’s become like a third cup of coffee.
I am trying to decide what classic show is next, but it’s either The Practice or Elementary. Leaning towards the former since its descendant was so deftly dissected here.
Purple Noon — Alain Delon is very attractive, no one disputes this. But in Le Samourai and especially here he has this callowness, an unfinished emptiness, that makes that attractiveness a facade that is more apparent to a viewer than to the people he is dealing with in the movie. Which makes him an excellent Tom Ripley! He is most in control when preparing to ice Dickie (and wow, is Maurice Ronet a nearly dead Gallic ringer for Jude Law or what) and when he is putting Marge under his thumb, otherwise he is capable but at the edge of his capabilities. This is fascinating to watch but as in the Minghella adaptation the filmmakers add attraction detracts — Minghella making Ripley’s homosexuality overt is fine but making him remorseful is a massive whiff; here Clement emphasizes an attraction/acquisitiveness for Marge that is just as strong as the larger becoming of Dickie for Ripley, and this too is off. (Marie Laforet’s Marge is very good though — not a bad person but a coasting mouse, a wiener with a dumb dissertation, someone ready and willing to be used.) How much of this is geared toward the ending that has to pay a price, unlike the book, is unclear, but it lessens the queasiness of Ripley to me. As always, Freddie Miles is the hero of the story, hating Tom from the start and why shouldn’t he.
Mad Detective — Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai are both credited as directors although Wai apparently is the main script guy and To the image guy, and Wai comes up with a damn doozy here. Sean Lau plays the see title, a brilliant but off-kilter guy who claims he can see into people’s hidden personalities, and he gets caught up in a case involving a crooked cop and a missing gun. The first half hour or so feels like a brilliantly askew version of the near-parodic concept, the highly intuitive Sherlockian genius and his dogged assistant managing madness and learning a bit about how different ways of perception can be powerful, and there is a complication that takes the twist of a certain terrible John Cusack and Vincent D’Onofrio thriller and shows it visually and consistently, absolutely marvelous stuff from To and editor Tina Baz (and David Bordwell breaks this down very well in a spoilerish essay: https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2008/04/03/truly-madly-cinematically/, he has a more thorough examination of the movie as well https://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/maddetective.php). But while the beats appear to be the same despite the incredible precision and verve of their playing, things start to slip and then darken considerably as the film goes on, and the engagement with identity becomes fraught — is Lau seeing what is truly there or what he wants to see? What does that make him? And what does it mean if someone sees you for what you are? It ends in a place I wanted to read as potentially ambiguous, but Bordwell shuts that down pretty convincingly. What seems like a fun exercise (and really, the visual scheme here is something to behold) becomes something much richer, very strong recommend on this one.
It’s been a while since I saw Mad Detective but I remember finding the visuals slightly baffling for a while before it really clicked, it definitely REALLY leans into its ideas in a way I found offputting and then rewarding, so I should probably see it again at some point. Really fun once I got onto the right wavelength.
Really recommend the two essays above for context and elaboration — I didn’t realize the reveal to the audience of the gimmick is not the first time the gimmick is used!
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Fifteen, “And Now For A Word”
This is a faux-documentary episode, from start to finish played as an in-universe broadcast from a reporter investigating Babylon 5. Unfortunately it’s not that interesting; the plot is generic, which, fine, but the episode isn’t stylised enough to be interesting. The best part is a propaganda commercial for the Psi-Corp halfway through, partly because it has the boy from a couple of Seinfeld episodes but also because it’s genuinely very funny and revealing. Otherwise it’s too even-keeled to tell us anything we don’t already know about the characters and the show.
28 Years Later
Another fine entry into the “great movies that kick into overdrive when Ralph Fieness shows up two thirds of the way in” genre. The world building goes completely insane in this one, building off the Robert Carlysle zombie idea to have the “alpha” zombies, and creates a genuine world that the characters operate in and implying even more shit happening off screen – like making explicit the minor joke people make, where the rest of the world is actually fine.
This also ended up a surprisingly sincere meditation on grief, which is really saying something for a horror film where character deaths can be counted on one hand; I particularly like that the “main” zombie doesn’t actually die, like the characters have as much attachment to him as we do.
Boyle’s filmmaking is also wonderfully confident, fearlessly throwing a potential confusion at is not just in seemingly random it boring story choices, but in not worrying so much about clarity without actually even losing our clarity.
It is kinda magical how this movie manages to fit in the sincere grief stuff between some wonderfully bizarre character stuff. There’s something about the combination of Alex Garland’s wild ideas and Danny Boyle’s softer edges that works so well. I was a little mixed on the film overall but thinking about it since, I think it might be my favourite of the three just for the inspired choices it makes and how much fun it has with the world that the previous entries had set up. I loved the Swedish soldier and that look into the basically untouched world beyond the UK borders.
Aw, I liked this B5 quite a bit — if nothing else the woman playing the newscaster has those rhythms down. And the bit where they try to get Kosh is hilarious.
No argument on either of those points – her performance ends up setting up the punchline that the whole video is actually fairly even-handed journalism.
The X-Files, “Fire”
Fun, solid episode. It’s interesting to see a young Mark Sheppard here, right at the start of his gradual ascent into genre TV stalwart. I always like when the episodic plots have a well-calibrated balance between the paranormal and the mundane, so “the monster of the week can start fires with his mind but also makes extensive, strategic, and premeditated use of rocket fuel” really works for me; the time and effort Sheppard expends into slathering fuel all over the house and tricking his victims to ingest it makes him all the more sinister, highlighting his hits-closer-to-home devotion to his malice rather than his impossible means of satisfying it.
This is a fantastic Scully episode, as she balances distaste for Phoebe with concern for Mulder (and the potential victims) and expresses it all the way a smart, funny, competent adult would. There’s the sub rosa sexual tension between her and Mulder, but another show would use that to make Scully actively jealous, and petty and ridiculous about it; The X-Files is aware of her potential emotions but keeps her professional about it, which makes her eventual just-for-herself eye-roll at Mulder and Phoebe making out instead of trying to find a murderous arsonist all the more satisfying. There’s a particular kind of narrative and emotional value to watching mature, adult professionals do their thing even in the face of bullshit or good reason to give into their emotions; it’s certainly not the only kind of thing I like (sometimes I want to see characters get wrapped up in bullshit and emotions, and love them for it!) but it’s an itch that feels like it doesn’t get scratched as much in the contemporary TV/movie landscape.
Plane
I am deeply amused by how generic that title is. It’s like an Arthur Hailey novel. And actually, given that title, there’s not quite enough plane.
This is a solid modern B movie with Gerard Butler giving a surprisingly low-key and likable performance, and the rest of the cast is filled out by people I’m always happy to see, like Mike Colter and Tony Goldwyn. If ever there was a movie that just needed to invent a fake island, though, it’s this one, and setting this in the actual Philippines and then portraying almost all the locals as either criminal or cowardly is, uh, not great. This feels like a stealth Far Cry movie, and that presentation is part of it. As my friend and I kept saying during this, just call it Crime Island! Wouldn’t everyone go see a movie called Crime Island? I know I would.
“sometimes I want to see characters get wrapped up in bullshit and emotions, and love them for it!” SPARTACUS, 2010-13. But yes, professionalism in action is its own reward.
Spartacus is definitely on my list.
The bar last night was playing 2022’s The Invitation/em> starring Nathalie Emmanuel, and that movie might be best described as “What if we ripped off Get Out and made it about British vampires?”
What did we read?
Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval – I am a simple man, if I see that a musician that I like has written a novel, I become curious. Jenny Hval is a Norwegian singer-songwriter whose 2022 album “Classic Objects” I particularly enjoyed, and this is the first of her four novels, although it looks like only two have been translated into English so far. It’s a short, very odd coming-of-age story about a Norwegian girl who has come to study in a British seaside town. She finds accommodation in a converted warehouse with a woman who is a few years older, and they develop a strange connection that revolves around fungus, mould and… bodily fluids. Apparently this has had a bit of a sales bump via people on TikTok labelling it “disturbing” and doing reaction videos to it but that does it a bit of a a disservice, it’s strange and goes to some dark places but it’s poetically written and really gets into the weirdness of finding a new life in a new town. I wouldn’t say I loved it but it was a fascinating read and, unusually for me, I got through it in just a couple of sessions.
Textbooks! The kids these days and their “electronic books,” I tells ya it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Would not recommend getting it through Barnes & Nobles, no matter how many points you’ll get towards your account. There isn’t simple features like page numbers which makes it very hard to tell where your assigned reading begins and ends. Doesn’t help that this particular book is about 80% illustrations, and not graphs and charts, like a picture book that costs $40. Then my other textbook, a dense fucker that’s more like you’d expect for a college course, has some added bells and whistles in its ebook edition (which you “rent” for six months, come on) like embedded videos and links to more information, most of which are still live. What it doesn’t have is coherent page formatting for the actual text. I obtained a good slightly-more-old-fashioned pdf of the same book which reads much cleaner, although I have to punch out at least two offers from Adobe to have AI read and summarize it for me (I think about the John Mulaney line about getting a liberal arts degree – “I paid someone thousands of dollars to tell me to read Jane Austen and then I didn’t do it.”) So what I’ve mostly learned from these texts is that I’m a dead-tree-hugging curmudgeon who prefers texts that open immediately and without a password and that I can resell back to the store afterward.
My dad and I were having this conversation yesterday — one pleasure of print books which is not often acknowledged is, when you’re 2/3rds through the book and you realize you need to refresh yourself about something important that happened a while back, you just open the book to where you think that was, and you’re usually within a few pages and can find it pretty quickly. It’s something spectacular about how the human brain processes print that we don’t tend to think about, and ebooks of whatever format simply do not have this feature.
OTOH, I spent most of yesterday reading a 650-pg paperback and this morning my thumb hurts like it’s going to fall off from holding the book open all day.
This is something I think honestly sucks about those Library of Congress collections — yes they look cool and are prestigious, but they’re unwieldy as shit for actual reading!
I’m given to understand that physical books have a lot of strong upsides over digital; for one thing, reading a book before sleeping is better for your mind and leads to better sleep (something I’ve personally found). The three advantages of ebooks I’ve consistently found are a) ease of getting more obscure books b) looking up definitions of words without having to get up and find a dictionary and c) it’s way easier for me to read an ebook on my phone at work than to lug about a physical book and try and hold it open with one hand.
Chugging along with Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, but I am not sure I will get it done before it goes back to the e-library. The central romance is sweet, and it’s nice to see the Vorkosigan family growing up, but this is just pretty low stakes. The most interesting thing here is the revelation that the super-advanced empire that once conquered Barryar could have, at any time, released a bio-engineered plague and killed only the natives. And that essentially everyone in the galaxy lives at the sufferance of that empire. A huge thing to dump on audiences in the last book, even if it’s also clear that the empire at this moment is not pursuing that level of power. I wonder if Bujold had ideas for a final battle that she abandoned as not being how she wanted to play.
Started Erik Larson’s new book, The Demon of Unrest, about the months between Lincoln’s election and the start of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, with a focus on the fort and on the fanatical resident of South Carolina, who were madly in love with notions of “chivalry” and the goodness of keeping chattel slaves. Larson is covering a lot of material I was not familiar with, about the fort, about the death throes of the Buchanan administration, and about those fanatics. He is also building to a key date ahead of Lincoln’s inauguration, when the election is certified (something we are all now familiar with again). But for all that Larson did his homework and is a solid writer, and as much as he makes it clear slavery is evil, he seems a bit too enamored of the twisted chivalry of the insurrection, and keeps berating Lincoln for somehow not understanding the mind of his new enemies. It’s not quite both-siderism, but it does smell a bit of it. Plus I know from previous books that Larson is not always reliable – Adam Selzer’s book on HH Holmes makes it clear that Devil in the White City is more interested in sensation than accuracy. So while I plan to finish this, I would say history buffs take it with a grain of salt.
I think my dad said he was reading this.
Anyway, I’ve been to Fort Sumter. It’s pretty cool.
Chugging away on a bunch of books! Collapse by Vladislav Zubov about the fall of the USSR is really good though it’s mostly focused on the politicians and less on popular efforts and on the street history. Gorbachev comes off as well-meaning but weak and hypocritical (his refusal to use violence is commendable yet this also means his empire slips away, bit by bit by bit) and Yeltsin is a dumb asshole whose following seems less inexplicable now. The American government’s refusal to moderate the Washington Consensus for a country which hasn’t had non-state controlled capitalism for 80 years is godawful.
Also reading Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Greenberg, something of a mixed bag because in practice this would seemingly extend conversations far, far beyond most people’s patience. It seems like an idea that only works if both people are performing it, but I’m not that far into the book. Other books include Zero Saints by Gabino Iglesias – solid, nasty barrio noir – and detective novel Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran.
At The Mountains of Madness, HP Lovecraft
On the one hand, a magnificent demonstration of imagination; on the other, not great as a story. This is Lovecraft at his most mechanical; factoring in that I’m interpreting his stories as the development of an artist with a singular vision, this shows the strong influence of his scientific curiosity and his brilliance at extrapolating horror from his reading. Unfortunately, this frequently crosses the line into dull, as he gets so deeply into the process of getting around that he loses sight of the story.
That said, this does help the transition into insanity, as the protagonists keep uncovering more and more insane information; the problem is that this is the least horror-tinged of all Lovecraft’s stories. “The Whisperer In Darkness” and The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward are horrifying in their information and implications; as the protagonist points out, the Old Ones were just dudes being scientists, and their fall is more sad and pathetic than horrifying.
If there is horror, it’s in the Old Ones being fascists playing with eugenics in creating a slave race, and Lovecraft’s clear sympathy for them as they fall to decadence before being overtaken by an inferior slave race they used to do their dirty work is a strong reflection of his awful views. Sadly, ATMOM has Lovecraft’s more vile views without doing anything interesting with them. Guillermo’s objections aside, The Thing takes all the basic ideas of this story and makes an actually great horror story out of them. That said, the most fun part of it is the description of the Old One’s society.
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Stepping back in time a bit in my exploration of the fantasy literary genre; The Worst Witch came out in 1975, and this, the first of McCaffrey’s Dragonriders Of Pern series, came out 1968. This is actually one of my mother’s favourite book series, and I’ve seen them on the shelf my whole life, so you can imagine how pleased she was when I expressed interest and I got the nerd lecture on their basic pleasures; the essence is that they’re pleasurable as a history that has been thoroughly worked out and kept consistent over the course of the series.
This is immediately obvious. This book reads to me as a loredump in the form of a novel; the effect is like listening to someone gossip about somebody you’ve never met. I find myself admiring the clarity more than enjoying the book – it’s very light on action (in the dramatic sense) and feels largely like people smiling in recognition of references that are lost on me. I don’t even know what most of the dragons look like.
It’s interesting in the broader context of fantasy though; this feels like it takes the basic creative goal of Lord Of The Rings – a functional fictional world presented in the form of a novel – and significantly neatens up the entire thing. Like LotR, it’s extraordinarily loosely structured; unlike LotR, it’s much steadier in its tone, not ascending into hysteria but not losing inspiration either. A steady chug-chug of ideas.
You’ll notice I’m not discussing characters or plots, and that’s because there aren’t really any that stand out to me. The basic idea of the book is that they’re looking to breed a new Queen dragon, and late in the book they realise dragons can travel through time as well as space, but otherwise not much action stood out to me.
They’re also actually science fiction, but I’m including them here because they have dragons.
You don’t know what the dragons look like? There’s a picture of one on the cover!
Anyway, the first half of Dragonflight, which I love, is a fix-up from earlier-published short stories, which is why it’s more episodic than narratively consistent. I also think you’re doing Lessa a disservice. I find her very compelling in this book, so devoted to revenge before putting that behind her once she realizes that at heart she is actually a horsegirl.
I object! And I object to my objections being pushed aside!
My favorite thing about Mountains is it has so many, um, tentacles in HPL’s other stories. It might be his most rich in references and connections. Definitely one to be read after reading most of his catalog. It isn’t horror filled like you say. But when Danforth and Dyer first come upon Leng is one of those poignant moments of Lovecraftian existential dread he does so well rather than creating anything horrific.
It definitely feels like the climax of his constant self-referencing, something that built up over the course of the last few years of his life. One of the possibilities that could have come from him living even a decade longer (and also getting his confidence back) was him writing a much longer work that tied together all his implications together into a denser work.
When Gravity Fails – Foundational cyberpunk from George Alec Effinger. The U.S. and Soviet Union have collapsed economically. The void is filled by Europe and the Middle-East as economic and cultural centers of civilization. In the Budayeen district in what is most likely Damascus every imaginable vice is available, including “brain cartridges” allowing a person to upload specific skills, like kung-fu, languages or all of European history, or more dangerously an entirely new personality.
The novel is steeped in what are now cyberpunk cliches but wholly new at the time. It’s neon-noir in a society that has degenerated thanks to technology and body modifications with life governed by savage capitalism where everything is bought, sold, or stolen.
Our protagonist is a synthetic drug addict forced into being a PI. Like the classic noir detective his sole asset is his integrity, something that, due to its rarity, earns him a certain grudging respect. He refuses to have uploads or enhancements inserted into his brain. What sets him apart from classic noir detectives is being Muslim. He behaves and speaks like a Muslim, and where even in interactions with antagonists, certain “social” norms must be respected creating a completely different approach to the Bogart gumshoe, despite Effinger following the hardboiled “formalism” of classic noir detective novels. Recommended not only for the plot and characterization of the lead but also how it subverts the classic noir ingredients.
Checking my list:
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. Just as fun as I thought it would be.
Creating Reading Rainbow. So much information! Most of it rather poorly organized, unfortunately; it really could have used a better editor. Still worth it as a look behind the scenes if you’re a completist.
Dream Lake by Lisa Kleypas. My first romance by her. Small-town romance with some light supernatural elements (a ghost, in this one, with unfinished business). Pretty formulaic, but she doesn’t string either mysteries or the plot along for the sake of padding things out, which I appreciated, and the couple had pretty good chemistry.
I read Kleypas’s Dreaming of You years ago and was hit-or-miss on it, but I’ve always meant to try one of her contemporaries. Usually I’m more of a historical romance person, but there are certain authors that I think just gel well with contemp, and she feels like she might be one of them, so I’m intrigued by this.
It was definitely a fast read, and I liked some of the character work she did (the ML and his siblings grew up with alcoholic parents, but he was the youngest and ended up somewhat disconnected from the older sibs and also was much more negatively affected by his parents’ deterioration; those dynamics felt really realistic and true, even though the ML was a bit too dickish for me at times).
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
So the thing about drinking from three fire hoses for a couple of weeks, is you get to a week where you only have to drink from two. But then you keep looking at the third and thinking, should I stick that in my mouth as well? This is probably the most stressful week I’ll have in the foreseeable future in terms of balancing too many things on my plate – thanks to Dave Shutton for filling gaps in my duties around here. I’ve started having stress dreams about the start of my teaching job, but they – and this may sound weird – are GOOD stress dreams, the kind I used to have before something I was nervous about going well but that I was really invested in doing (school play, various film shoots). I’ve never had them over a month out before which may just be a product of everything else going on or unchecked caffeine intake. Anyway, one day at a time, looking forward to hanging with some friends this weekend.
I’ve always regarded teaching as a kind of performance, like acting in a school play. Sounds like your dreams may indicate that you regard teaching in a similar way.
I’ve sometimes thought about moving into teaching, but I understand I probably don’t have the temperament for it. I can imagine a kid doing something annoying and me telling him to go fuck himself. OTOH, my wife, who works in a school, did in fact do that a couple years ago. She got written up, but she didn’t suffer any permanent consequences. So let fly!
Speaking of dreams, been having strong stress/anxiety dreams and sleep issues. Turns out I really need to refill my beta blockers. Been grinding my teeth and apparently this is TMJ and anxiety-related. But I’m finding increasingly, amid all the turmoil of the world, that my stepdad is right: when I help people or animals, I feel a whole lot better. During this horrible East Coast heatwave, me and two nannies from a local group teamed up to hand out bottles of water and Powerade to people around the neighborhood, and it felt good just to do something concrete and useful. I also brought a can and some water out to a cat a block away who looked real thin and nobody knew if he was an indoor/outdoor. Still involved too in at least one activist cause and another with grocery packaging is kicking back up next week.
Big sleep issues here too, anxiety and heatwaves is a rough combo. The last couple of days I’ve reaped the benefits of home working and basically slept through my whole lunchbreak and it’s kinda felt amazing in ways I didn’t expect, maybe I should move to Spain and get into siesta culture.
Big respect on the human and especially feline help missions!
Thank you!! Spain is absolutely number 1 on my list of countries to move to if shit gets REALLY bad here (and it’s already bad to the extent that I have no plans to travel outside the country for fun), no offense to England.
Oh, please give us at least a LITTLE offense, we definitely deserve it.
I think we should direct all British offense to Mackintosh Muggleton.
Another intense week, although perhaps not compared to C.D. Ploughz over here. Last week was the thrill of going on a few dates with a person I really like followed by the downer of getting told they didn’t really think there was a romantic spark; this week was a ton of self-doubt over the same thing followed by meeting up with the same person and actually having a conversation about it and them confessing that they’d been a bit hasty and wanted to spend more time together after all. Life is indeed a rollercoaster, but I am on a high right now and we have made plans to see each other again next week and I’m so glad I brought it up rather than just backing off forever – the road-map for “friends who might want to try dating” is a complicated one and I absolutely don’t begrudge her taking a little time to figure out if she was up for coming along for the ride… but now I hope we can make some progress and that I don’t fuck it up, haha. She is the best. Feels like I’m flexing emotional muscles that have been neglected for a long time and I’m trying to enjoy that and reach out to old friends I haven’t spoken to for a while and be more communicative with my family, if I’m opening up my dusty ol’ heart then might as well see if I can fix a bunch of things at the same time.
Work has been strange too, I’ve managed to make a bit of a breakthrough on the completely messy project I’ve been stuck in charge of and have been feeling way out of my depth on, and also for the first time since being given responsibility for a couple of other staff, we had to do some review meetings where I had to go over their performance and my boss had to go over mine. I tried to get across my general dissatisfaction with the role during my review, hopefully to positive effect, and thankfully I didn’t have any real issues with my own staff so I could be genuinely positive and full of praise. Still feeling like I’ll need to find something less deeply frustrating sometime in the near future but at least I’m ending the week with a little more positivity.
(Sees potential for romcom starring vomas) Would watch! (Reads further and sees potential for *My Name is Earl* starring vomas) No, wait, I declare that one my Would Watch!
Haha, I’m not sure my list of grievances could compare with Earl’s. I’m just terrible at staying in touch with people I don’t already see on a regular basis and it’s about damn time I did something about it.
If you are opening up your dusty ol’ heart we better get a country album out of it. But that is really great to hear, good luck!
Cheers! And I’d kinda love to try that, although country music with a British accent is… weird.
I only know of one example, but I like it a lot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ch3arUS0jg
Haha this certainly is something.
Hee hee, what a charmingly neutral reply! I do like the dude’s voice in snotty punk context but yes, it is A Lot.
The usual stress this week, though we are trying to be a tiny bit optimistic that the rescission bill might hit turbulence in the Senate. We will know after July 4. Till then, I plug away, and I am ahead of where I usually have been on arranging the meetings for the next fiscal year. It will slow down now because one committee is being bisected into two, but I have finally got the hang of this.
Also, I learned Bill Moyers passed on from an all staff email, since there is no one who represents public media more. I kind of like a job where such things warrant that kind of note.
Meanwhile, dealing with what is probably not a health issue for my wife, but she needs to get checked out to be sure. And managed to get through the stifling heat, mainly by staying inside.
Best of luck with both, rooting for ya on the public media front.
It’s my birthday, and my dad is in hospital after falling from his bike two days ago. He has a significant bleed on the brain and so even if he otherwise recovers, it’s looking unlikely to be at full function in his mobility or communication. We’re just waiting and seeing and hoping and worrying.
Happy birthday, and my thoughts are with you and your family.
Thanks Tristan x
Christ. Here’s hoping for as full a recovery as possible.
Thank you. We finally were able to sit down with the doctors and the outlook is better than we were daring to hope for – they are forecasting some level of permanent impairment to his speech, but otherwise more or less full recovery.
I had a lot of fun in New York, but I got the worst sunburn of my life on my legs. I can’t really stand up for any length of time, and I can’t walk without slathering a bunch of aloe onto them. It’s bad. I am mostly in my recliner, which I guess is true a lot of the time I’m at home anyway, but it’s also hard for me to be comfortable if I’m not elevating my legs.
I guess other than that, you know, things keep on keepin’ on. By that I mean, trying to get back to playing poker and working on a few other things I’ve had in mind, although I have not really buckled down to do some of those other things yet.
If it’s that bad, you might consider consulting a health professional. Best wishes for a speedy recovery.
That essay on Enigma is really good.
Nobody has anything good to say about Materialists, which is a real disappointment after the insight and naturalism of Past Lives. I’m sure I’ll catch it on streaming eventually.