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Trivial Pursuits
Ghotiheads, ghotiheads, roly poly ghotiheads...
Sunday the Seventh of March, Twenty Ten
55° and sunny!
I have had an extremely productive and relaxing weekend! I mailed in my Maryland taxes and my car payment and so forth, and having done so, I determined that I did in fact have enough money to make the charitable donations I've been meaning to make for ages (to Partners in Health, my old elementary school, and a theatre I went to last summer who put me on their mailing list and just sent me a well-timed begging letter right as a) a friend was getting ready for his first show there and b) I was feeling charitable) and also to order myself some Shiny Things. I got both some writing and some coding done, and in the time left over cleaned my apartment and prepared a rather nice cream tea for my mother, with fresh baked scones.
It's amazing how much you can do on the first really nice weekend of the year. Yet another reason I could never live in, say, Southern California—without three months of hibernation, how would I ever wake up?
clandestinely posted by Martin Marks at 6:17 in the evening // two comments by:
Saturday the Sixth of March, Twenty Ten
DID YOU LI-HI-HI-HI-HIE WHEN YOU SPOKE TO MEEEEEE
I think that no band has had more Top of the Pops hits inside my brain than The Clash. The list of songs that have, at one point or another over the past 15 years or so, been my Favorite Song Ever At The Moment, include, in roughly chronological order: The latter has held the top spot for several months now, ever since listening to it Very Loud Indeed saved my sanity once when I was stuck on the Southeast Freeway. It may actually be the single best stuck-in-traffic song ever written.
vertiginously posted by Martin Marks at 10:51 in the evening // one comment by:
You probably don't even know what sport I'm talking about.
I'm glad I'm not watching the Six Nations this year. There are, as the name implies, six different countries in the tournament, and I would be willing to root for five of them—Wales, Ireland, England, Scotland, and Italy, in that order. (Actually, I might have rooted for Ireland over Wales this year, if only because they deserve something after the "Hand of Henry" incident.) Instead, the country currently on top, with three out of five games played... is France, which is on track for a Grand Slam. Eeeeeeeeech. Ireland and England are still in the running, at least; Wales isn't, not unless France does some catastrophic sucking in the next two. Scotland is in last place, with three losses in three games. Ah well. There's always next year.
This has been a public service announcement from the Sports You Don't Care About (And Are Possibly Surprised To Learn I Do Care About) Division of Flying Ghoti Enterprises.
venturesomely posted by Martin Marks at 8:39 in the evening // comment? by:
Thursday the Fourth of March, Twenty Ten
Also, I'd have to explain the idiosyncratic gender-neutral pronouns.
I've been reading Five Children and It again, as I am occasionally wont to do, and I suddenly realized that I don't know if I could read this book to my kids. I mean, it's aged better than most turn of the century childrens' books—not too many people reading their kids The Water-Babies these days—in part because Edith Nesbit was a crazy awesome polyamorous socialist occultist who mostly avoided the worst societal attitudes of the time. Most of it, like the gender role stuff, is generally fairly inoffensive—certainly no worse than, say, The Wind in the Willows—but what do you even do with the chapter about savage "Red Indians", or the baby-stealing gipsies? Okay, yes, the Red Indians were created by a wish from the childrens' minds, and it made sense that they were one-dimensional bloodthirsty characters, because that's what English children in 1902 would have expected from their Red Indians. And the gipsies only tried to steal the baby because everyone was trying to steal the baby (after an ill-thought out wish that everyone would want him), and once the wish was lifted they specifically disclaimed baby-stealing as part of the gipsy character. But still, come on!
(Also, Jane's nickname is "Pussy", and Anthea's nickname of "Panther" is shortened to "Panty" by the baby. Awkwaaaard.)
I mean, I probably would want to read it to them. It's a great freaking book, and The Phoenix and the Carpet is even better, and The Story of the Amulet might be better still from some perspectives. But I feel like I would have to wrap every chapter with disclaimers, and maybe even just skip over a couple bits, like the "Red Indians" chapter (which contributes basically nothing to the story, by the way). But then one day the kid will end up picking up the book themselves and being like, "whoa, I do NOT remember this." And is it okay to bowlderize a story just because it contradicts your worldview?
So what beloved books of your childhood would you hesitate to read to your hypothetical children?
defiantly posted by Martin Marks at 10:52 in the evening // seven comments by:
Monday the Twenty-Second of February, Twenty Ten
"The man clearly poured a lot of tea."
This article is fantastic times a hundred and should be read immediately.
defiantly posted by Martin Marks at 7:37 in the evening // four comments by:
Saturday the Twentieth of February, Twenty Ten
The actual plot is kind of "eh".
Hugh Laurie turns a phrase like "LEFT 90" turns a turtle, and if Hugh Laurie had written that sentence he would have picked a much better simile. I just reread The Gun Seller, which is, to the world's misfortune, his only novel (though he's been working on a sequel for 14 years now, which rather puts Fear Sweeney in perspective), and I used up every single useless little piece of paper on my nightstand marking the pages with particularly spectacular bits. (That's saying something; I had a lot of useless little bits of paper on my nightstand.)
If Fry is the spiritual successor of Wilde, then Laurie is the successor to Wodehouse. The Gun Seller is a spy novel full of explosions and beautiful women and fast motorcycles, but the protagonist/narrator is basically Bertie Wooster. Except a lethally competent Bertie Wooster. That makes no sense, but it is completely true, and I am convinced it was quite intentional. (There's also a character who was either written for Fry or patterned after Jeeves—or both. Laurie even describes him as holding out a jacket "like a valet" at one point.)
The most astonishing thing—in, I wish to reiterate, a spy novel full of explosions and beautiful women and fast motorcycles—has to be the narrative, which is like standing under a showerhead that's somehow broken and now emits gemstones instead of water, except probably less painful. (Again, Mr Laurie would have done a much better job with that sentence.) I want to quote a few bits, but I'm afraid I won't be able to stop, and will end up posting the whole book on my blog. Still, I can't resist a few lines: People always say that dog-owners resemble their dogs, but I've always thought the same is true, if not truer, of desk-owners and their desks. [O'Neal's] was a large, flat face, with large, flat ears, and plenty of useful places for keeping paper-clips. I was standing there, lips puckered, brain puckered, and she just stepped up and threw her tongue into my mouth. For a moment, I thought maybe she'd tripped on a floorboard and stuck out her tongue as a reflex—but it didn't seem very likely somehow, and anyway, once she'd gotten her balance back, wouldn't she just have put her tongue away again? The Moroccan police are an expression of the state. Picture the state as a larger bloke in a bar, and picture the populace as a small bloke in the same bar. The large bloke bares a tattooed bicep, and says to the small bloke, "did you spill my beer?"
The Moroccan police are the tattoo. People talk about night falling, or dusk falling, and it's never seemed right to me. Perhaps they once meant befalling. As in night befalls. As in night happens. Perhaps they, whoever they were, thought of a falling sun. That might be it, except that ought to give us dayfall. Day fell on Rupert the Bear. And we know, if we've ever read a book, that day doesn't fall or rise. It breaks. In books, day breaks, and night falls.
In life, night rises from the ground. The day hangs on for as long as it can, bright and eager, absolutely and positively the last guest to leave the party, while the ground darkens, oozing night around your ankles, swallowing for ever that dropped contact lens, making you miss that low catch in the gully of the last ball of the last over.
Night rose on Hampstead Heath as Sarah and I walked together, sometimes holding hands, sometimes not.
We walked in silence mostly, just listening to the sounds of our feet on the grass, the mud, the stones. Swallows flitted here and there, darting in and out of the trees and bushes like furtive homosexuals, while the furtive homosexuals flitted here and there, pretty much like swallows. There was a lot of activity on the Heath that night. Or perhaps it's every night. Men seemed to be everywhere, in ones, and twos, and threes and mores, appraising, signalling, negotiating, getting it done; plugging into each other to give, or receive, that microsecond of electric charge that would allow them to go back home and concentrate on the plot of an Inspector Morse without getting distracted.
This is what men are like, I thought. This is unfettered male sexuality. Not without love, but separate from love. Short, neat, efficient. The Fiat Panda, in fact.
"What are you thinking about?" asked Sarah, staring hard at the ground as she walked.
"About you," I said, with hardly a stumble. Okay, that last one was more than a few lines. I'd better stop while I can.
agitatedly posted by Martin Marks at 10:19 in the evening // three comments by:
Thursday the Eighteenth of February, Twenty Ten
Also, Virginia Hall is pretty awesome.
So I looked up "Cuthbert" on Wikipedia to see if there were any actual real people named that. (The answer is pretty much no. I'd have to go through the whole list to be sure, but it looks like fictional Cuthberts outnumber real ones by a sizable margin.) Anyway, in so doing, I discovered one of those perfect little gems of phrases you only ever seem to get on Wikipedia: Cuthbert was apparently "World War II Allied spy Virginia Hall's nickname for her prosthetic leg". YES. Fifty points to the Universe.
scrupulously posted by Martin Marks at 6:43 in the evening // one comment by:
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