tricia868

It is always a beautiful day to yell at God, but while you are waiting to take a number for that extremely lengthy line, you might as well stand with Minnesota. Maine, too. I had thoughts about Stolpersteine and Fugitive Slave Acts, but in terms of coherent expression I spent most of my day reacting to the wave of something like scented detergent or dryer sheets that rolled out of the heating system around nine in the morning and stopped me sleeping or particularly breathing well.

I have been re-reading my second edition of Estel Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2010/13) which remains a wealth of otherwise inaccessible information with a close eye to the complex interplay of his biography and screen persona. I still disagree frequently with her criticism, but the detail of her research does things like offer a potential reconciliation between the family stories that Leslie was shell-shocked out of the First World War and the absence of his name from any records of active service in France: toward the end of his short stint as a second lieutenant with the Northamptonshire Yeomanry in the spring of 1916, his regiment was billeted with various divisions at Harponville, Ypres, and Arras, where it would have been possible to be officially non-combatant and still, in the immortal words of Frederic Manning, shelled to shit. Leslie himself never claimed to have seen combat, confiding in one of his broadcasts in 1940, "I am willing to let you figure out the degree of my senility by telling you that during most of the last war I was a very junior officer in a cavalry regiment. However, long before I got anywhere near the battlefront, everybody had settled down into trenches, and as horses are practically useless in trenches I found myself near Divisional Headquarters, pretty bored but pretty safe." His daughter records in her memoir A Quite Remarkable Father (1959) that his violent nightmares which could wake anyone within earshot were understood by his family to be connected to his war. She does not seem to have wondered the same about his self-admitted knack for dissociation or his rare but explosive losses of temper. Eforgan follows her in attributing his conviction of heart trouble to hypochondria; it occurred to me that pre-DSM, a person who regularly woke himself shouting and dreaded traveling alone, especially by train in case he shouted his fellow passengers awake with him, could be forgiven the common confusion of a panic for a heart attack. I found Leslie Ruth Dale-Harris née Howard through some cross-checks on Eforgan and the interstitial material contributed by Ronald Howard to Trivial Fond Records (1982) and her portrait of her father is fascinatingly the most fragile of the three, especially since much of what she regards affectionately as his eccentricities and his foibles looks very little out of the ordinary to me, e.g. a capacity for effortless, spellbinding charm right up until his social meter ran out and he had to leave his own party to fall asleep. A droll sense of humor on his own time, a steel-trap comfort with last-minute rewrites and improvisations, and he couldn't tell a formal joke to save his life without cracking himself up over it or lie without self-conscious same. Fifteen years after his death, his daughter still seems amazed that her famously disorganized father, the same nervous mess who had forgotten the ring at his own wedding and needed reminding of everything from call times to the necessity of food, a regular Menakhem-Mendl of the British film industry if she had just acknowledged his Jewishness—like his non-monogamy, it is elided with mid-century tact—threw himself so obstinately and intently into the war effort even when it ran him directly against the prejudices and proscriptions of the Ministry of Information and the BBC. He doesn't just start to look his age in the last years of his life, he looks recklessly burning himself to make his films and his broadcasts and his tours and his connections that Eforgan documents with the Free French and SOE. About a month into the Blitz, he noted with characteristic self-deprecation that after his London flat took a direct hit, "I decided to heed the exhortation of the popular song and 'get out of town'. In fact, I got out of town with a quite undignified haste, arguing to myself that one can prepare a film for production just as well in the country." He continued to travel weekly into London for work until his final tour for the British Council in 1943 and I don't know what he dreamed for any of it. R.I.P. ADH2*2, three cocktails put him literally on the floor.

I seem unable to think about movies except in this secondhand fashion, but I wrote another fill (AO3) for threesentenceficathon. This year it's a lot of noir.

In an all-time record for my minimal presence in fandom, I am now participating in my third year of threesentenceficathon. I have written four fills to date and taken the rare step of transferring all of them to AO3. Once again all selections are obviously me.

Tonight after my second and last panel of the convention, I was told by one audience member that they would listen to me read the phone book because even under those circumstances they would learn something interesting and Tiny Wittgenstein was definitely confused.

The panels went chaotically well. "Cursed Literature" lived up to its name by losing two panelists before the con even started, but in practice it turned into a freewheeling discussion less of literature in particular than the concepts of hazardous information, the spellmaking of language, and narratives as contagion, which gave me an excuse to boost Emeric Pressburger's The Glass Pearls (1966), An-sky's Jewish Ethnographic Program of 1912–14, and Aramaic incantation bowls plus the inevitable M. R. James. "SFF on Stage" had a supersaturation of panelists mostly from the performing arts and could have gone an extra hour at least as we started with the inherently liminal nature of theater and bounced around through all the ways that the speculative can be invoked on stage through conceits, stagecraft, scoring, nothing but the contract that reality changes because the actor says it does. I went all in on twentieth-century opera and weird technically realist plays and discovered that there has actually not been another production of Jewelle Gomez's Bones & Ash: A Gilda Story since the one I saw with my grandparents in 1996. As always, members of the audience asked such good questions that they should have been on the panels to start.

I have been asked multiple times if I will be around for the last day of Arisia and since I have no further programming the odds are unfortunately good that I will be flat in bed, but at the moment I regret nothing. I saw a genarti! I saw a skygiants! I failed to write down the names of a pair of extraordinarily well-dressed attendees who wanted to talk about Jewish folk magic and were thrilled that I recognized their Babylon 5 tie-in novels! nineweaving and I shared a panel for the first time since virtual 2021! I did not make it back to the dealer's room before it closed and instead sort of keeled over in the disused cosplay repair area with choco_frosh and presently a friend of his who is unlikely to be on DW, since this time around people were giving me their contact information on Instagram and I felt as though I should have business cards printed on papyrus scraps. I had genuinely not been sure how this experiment in professional interaction would go. It is snowing as busily as a real winter in New England and without begrudging a second of this vanishing season, I am looking forward to Readercon.

Today was the yahrzeit of the molasses flood. I was last at Langone Park for the centenary, since which time the field has been renovated and a new marker erected in memory of the disaster and its dead. Seven years ago feels nearly a century itself.

Speaking of man-made needless awfulness, I have been made aware of the locally vetted aggregate of Stand with Minnesota, a directory of mutual aid, fundraisers, and on-the-ground support against the onslaught of ICE. All could use donations, since internet hugs are of limited efficacy against tear gas, batons, bullets to the face and legs. Twenty-three years ago feels like several worldlines back, but the Department of Homeland Security sounded absurdly, arrogantly dystopian then.

The fourth and last of this week's doctors' appointments concluded with an inhaler and instructions to sleep as much as possible. My ability to watch movies remains on some kind of mental fritz which upsets me, but I liked running across these poems.

My schedule for Arisia this year is minute, but a fairly big deal for me since the state of my health last allowed me to participate in programming in 2021. I mean, at the moment the state of my health is failed, but I'm still looking forward.

Dramatic Readings from the Ig Nobel Prizes
Saturday 3 pm, Amesbury AB
Marc Abrahams et al.

Highlights from Ig Nobel prize-winning studies and patents, presented in dramatic mini-readings by luminaries and experts (in some field). The audience will have an opportunity to ask questions about the research presented—answers will be based on the expertise of the presenters, who may have a different expertise than the researchers.

Cursed Literature
Sunday 4:15 pm, Central Square
Mark Millman (m), Alastor, Kristina Spinney, Sonya Taaffe

Some literature describes haunted houses; other books seem like they are haunted, as though the act of reading the book is inviting something vaguely unclean into the reader's life. Whether considering the dire typographical labyrinths of The House of Leaves, or the slowly expanding void at the heart of Kathe Koja's Cypher, some works leave a mark. Panelists will explore books that by reputation or their own experience, produce a lingering unsettled feeling far beyond the events and characters of the story.

SFF on Stage
Sunday 5:30 pm, Porter Square B
Raven Stern (m), Andrea Hairston, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Stephen R. Wilk

Science fiction and fantasy have long been mainstays of live theater; William Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1595. Peter Pan introduced one of the 20th century's best known characters in 1904. In 1920, R.U.R. gave us the word "robot." Universal Studios' famous version of Dracula was adapted not from the novel, but the wildly successful Broadway play. That's not even getting into modern musicals like Wicked or Little Shop of Horrors. What does it take for genre to work in a live setting, and where have we seen it succeed (or fail)?

Anyone else I can expect to see this weekend? The ziggurat awaits.