moon_custafer | Entries tagged with books

Film Noir fanfic vignettes, everybody! (mostly for I Wake Up Screaming)

I seem to be drifting into an obsession with Lionel Bart. Here’s a clip of him in the 1970s visiting the Stratford East Theatre Royal. Having seen a few other photos and clips, the man had a sincere commitment to Hats.

Enjoyed Albert Finney enough in The Green Man that I went looking for Dennis Potter’s Karaoke in which Finney is the protagonist and probable author stand-in (he’s also in the sequel, Cold Lazarus, but it sounds like he’s mostly a frozen head in that one). Accidentally watched the third episode first (ETA-- no wait, it was Episode Four), which was confusing—I’d a general idea of the plot from the Wikipedia entry, but I was starting to think “oh, so it starts near the end and then tells the story in flashback” and then I kept waiting for the flashback to start. Went back, found the first episode and watched that, which made more sense; although I’m now withdrawing at least half of the sympathy I felt for Richard E. Grant’s character after his beating in Episode ~~Three~~ Four Have also decided not to watch this one with Andrew as there’s at least three plot points that would likely be triggery for him.

Have a terrible feeling I’m going to have to read John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra for research purposes-– I mentioned in the latest chapter of Gentleman of the Shade that Eddy acted in a movie adaptation – it was just sort of a throwaway bit, but Mel speculated that Lambkin is going to track the movie down and watch it, and y’know, she’s right.

Have risked starting a new novel, well, multi-chapter original fic, anyway; two chapters posted so far: WWMBD

Just two totally normal men from the 1930s who are definitely not any of the Marx Brothers.

A propos of nothing in particular: 'When That Man Is Dead and Gone.'

Last night I came across this Swallows and Amazons+The Charioteer crossover fic, in which a teenaged Ralph goes camping with his Scout troop in the Lake District and recognizes James Turner from his author photo. Does a charming job of showing just how weird the kids’ shenanigans look to someone slightly older who doesn’t know them: Ralph is thrilled that the author of his favourite book, Mixed Moss, is giving him the time of day—and then a little girl in a red stocking cap bursts in, shouting piratical threats, as Mr. Turner cheerfully says “oh, is it two o’clock already? Sorry, I have to be Captain Flint now.”

The Road to Rio (9758 words) by greerwatson
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Charioteer - Mary Renault, Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ralph Lanyon, Hugh Treviss, James "Captain Flint" Turner, John Walker, Susan Walker, Titty Walker, Roger Walker, Nancy Blackett, Peggy Blackett, Dick Callum, Dorothea Callum, Timothy "Squashy Hat" Stedding, Mary Walker, Bridget Walker, Mrs Dixon (Swallows and Amazons), Mr Dixon (Swallows and Amazons), Mrs Callum (Swallows and Amazons), Prof. Callum (Swallows and Amazons), Carter (The Charioteer), Green (The Charioteer)
Additional Tags: Crossover, Holidays, Wordcount: 5.000-10.000, Canon Related, Missing Scene
Summary:

A troop of Scouts from Lanyon's school go on a camping holiday in the Lake District.

Often fics are tonally-opposite to canon, because they’re written to compensate—if the original story is a comedy, sometimes people want to explore the more dramatic possibilities of the characters and setting; if the original is a high-stakes drama where a lot of the cast die, then fandom writes a lot of fix-its and sweet, fluffy AUs where nobody's life is in danger in the first place.

All of which is to say, there's a lot of fluffy fics for Les Miserables.

Via

conuly , a story about fact-checking a family legend. I figured from the start that the grandmother’s story would be true, or there wouldn’t be an article about it; and having encountered similar articles and short documentaries I guessed that there’s be one misleading detail somewhere that would throw off the search for a long time.

When you’re doing archival research, you have to figure out who the people you’re looking for were at the time, and this story demonstrated that in a manner that I’m saving to use as a plot point someday.

Gone to Tarleton. A post on tumblr sent me to look up Elizabethan performer Richard Tarleton, who died just around the time Shakespeare was starting his career and remained a comedy legend through the seventeenth century-- as in, people were practically writing RPF about him (there are sketches and dialogues in which his ghost shows up as a character). And he lived long before film or audio recording, so all we can do is hunt through plays and broadside ballads for clues as to what his performances were like. And the whole history of humanity is full of ephemeral artists like this.

Meanwhile, a_t_rain has posted another lovely bit of sixteenth-century RPF: In 1580s London, apprentice grocer John Heminges decides to revive an ancient guild mystery play and ends up getting married, finding a new career, and meeting a friend who will change his life.

Also via Tumblr:

People who try to copy historical writing styles don’t say enough weird stuff in them. I’m listening to a 1909 story about a ghost car right now, and the narrator just said he honked the car horn a bunch of times, but the way he phrased it was “I wrought a wild concerto on the hooter”.

I followed the link and the story turned out to be ‘The Dust-Cloud,’ by E.F. Benson. I keep forgetting just how good Benson’s writing is-- the phrase quoted on Tumblr isn’t even the best bit of it. (CW for mentioned animal and child death—off-stage and implied, but integral to the story)

Andrew and I watched The Blue Dahlia (1946) on the weekend. This is another one of those movies that sounds like noir when you describe it, but I’m not sure it is. I told Andrew that it didn’t feel quite twisty enough to be. Later, I thought about

sovay ’s definition of noir, which tends to involve the falling-away of every bit of workaday reality the protagonist has previously taken for granted, to vertiginous, terrifying, but also sometimes liberating effect. There is a character in The Blue Dahlia whose life has come to feel like a dream or a nightmare, but he’s not the protagonist, Lt. Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd): he’s Buzz, the protagonist’s old bomber-crew gunner, and his life got like that before the start of the film, when he took a piece of shrapnel to the head. Also he’s played by William Bendix and he walks away with every scene he's in.

Yesterday we went to the Fantastic Pulps Show and Sale, which has returned after however-many years. Spent more than I really should have, given that I always need to take Andrew home by taxi (I can pre-book a ride to get us there by TTC Wheel-Trans, but we’ve mostly given up on trying to return the same way because we never know how long we’re going to be at an event).

My finds, however, include Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon, an author I’ve long heard about; and a couple of postcards with images of old movie posters, upon one of which somebody had begun a letter:

Dear Katya, Well Here I am writing to you again. It’s 2:30 A. M. on Wednesday July 2 ‘91 — You’re probably long asleep (as I should be if I had the barest idea of what was best for me) — I’m lying on my bed writing

and there it breaks off. I find myself wondering who Katya was, and who the writer was, and why they never finished. Something about their phrasing feels older than 1991, even if that was already twenty-eight years ago— but then, I think I can recall having friends (Angus) who wrote like that at the time. Image on the postcard is a poster for Hard, Fast and Beautiful! (1951), directed by Ida Lupino.

Also finally read one of C. J. Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake mysteries— this was an ebook I got from the library— there were holes on the first of the series (Dissolution) so I skipped to a later entry, Revelation. Sectarian conflict is a major theme, along with (spoiler) ( Spoiler )

I forget how it came up, but I saw a reference to The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension, by Jessie Douglas Kerruish, apparently adapted into a movie in the late 1940s, and found a copy online.

Comparing the novel with the wikipedia summary of the movie version, it sounds as though the latter simplifies the plot (which in the original involves 1920s archeology, Viking mythology and WWI trauma), and leaves out the occult-detective heroine, Miss Luna Bartendale, who is simultaneously glamorous and down-to-earth (she *really* doesn’t believe in seances, though hypnotizing people to unlock hereditary memories is ok) and lives with her aunt who is a classical pianist.

Pdf version here, for anyone interested. (Note— contains mention of swastikas in a pre-nazi “it’s an ancient mystical symbol” kind of way; also some of the characters being of Scandinavian descent is a major plot point, but as far as I can tell the narrative isn’t claiming racial superiority on those grounds)

ETA — Don’t look up the movie first as even cursory descriptions give a plot spoiler for the book.

ETA 2 — Recalled what directed me to this book: a tumblr about pulp fiction, https://maxwell-grant.tumblr.com/

I mentioned this in a comment to sovay the other day, and I guess I’d never posted about it a couple of months back when I read it, so: one of the Yuletide 2020 fics (which I now can’t seem to find) was for an M. R. James story, and the author, in notes, mentioned that a detail was also a shoutout to The Five Jars, so I got curious, googled, and learned that James had written a children’s-fantasy novella. There’s a pdf on Project Gutenberg.

Apparently this was written primarily as a gift for his goddaughter, and it takes the form of a letter to “Jane” from an unnamed middle-aged-professor sort who it’s probably not much of a stretch to think is based on James himself. This is a divergence from most kids’ fantasy fiction, which tends to have child protagonists, but I’m not sure a kid would have all that much trouble identifying with a bachelor adult. I don’t think I would have.

So, the plot: intuition and voices from a brook guide our main character to a box that can only be opened by moonlight, and which contains the titular five jars, which last belonged to a wizard in Roman Britain and contain potions that grant abilities to interact with a usually unseen world. The potions must be used one by one on successive nights, and the question is whether our protagonist can keep the box safe from sinister forces until he’s got the full set of powers. He’s aided in this by some schoolboy members of the “Small People,” who are less Fae than Victorian-style fairies (though they don’t have wings and are vaguely insulted at the idea), by his grumpy tabby-cat, and by and a benign but uncanny witch(?) who seems to be the opposite number of the main antagonist. All this stuff is enjoyably Jamesian— he’s just as good at creating an atmosphere of vague unease here as in his other stories, even if there are allies to counter it. Overall I’d say it felt more John Masefield than E. Nesbit, though I’m not exactly sure of the distinction.

Anyway, my problem is that it just sort of stops— not sure if James got bored with the narrative, if he figured his goddaughter was too young to read anything longer, or if he planned another instalment; but having defeated the “bat ball” (which is as creepy as it sounds), the main character opens the last jar and gains the power to shrink down and visit the Small People on their own turf, so... he does? He spends an evening hanging out with the family of one of the schoolboys, which is all very nice for the characters, but without the difference in scale, it’s much like visiting a normal human household. And that’s the end of the book. I think there’s a fairy-tale-within-the-fairy-tale when they show him a story in one of their books, but it still felt anticlimactic to me. 7/10 anyway — it doesn’t stick the landing, but it’s a quick read.

troisoiseaux ‘s post on Agatha Christie prompted me to find and read By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) as it’s one I’d heard of but never read. It stars a now “elderly” Tommy and Tuppence. By 1968 they’d be around seventy, but from their activities over the course of the book I pictured them as fairly fit sixty-somethings; the book may not be set in the year of its publication, and in any case a slight vagueness of chronology fits with the theme— I’ll get back to that in a moment.

In the first few chapters, they visit Tommy’s aged, grouchy Aunt Ada in the well-run private Old Ladies’ Home where she’s lived for the past few years. Ada invariably insults Tuppence on these visits, insinuating the latter is a scarlet woman that her nephew insists on parading as his wife. Tuppence regards this with amused tolerance, telling Tommy it’s probably the most fun Aunt Ada gets to have these days and that anyway at her age she’s rather flattered by the imprecations; but she offers to wait in one of the downstairs sitting-rooms, where she encounters the white-haired old lady with a glass of milk.

This figure shows up in at least two other Christies, a sort of recurring nightmare: her other appearances are anecdotal, illustrations of what the characters find genuinely creepy compared with more conventional ghost-stories. Here she has a name— Mrs. Lancaster, and is finally part of a plot. She goes through the paces described in the earlier works: sipping her milk, chatting amiably with Tuppence— until she suddenly lowers her voice discreetly and asks Tuppence if she’s the mother of the child who’s buried behind the fireplace. Tuppence is startled, creeped out, and intrigued enough to return to the nursing home with Tommy in the wake of Aunt Ada’s death a few weeks later, hoping to talk with Mrs. Lancaster again and find out some more details of her delusion. Mrs. Lancaster, however, has been moved out, over her own protests and with suspicious suddenness, by a relative she’d never mentioned in their previous encounter. Meanwhile, the late Aunt Ada’s possessions include a painting that hadn’t been there on the previous visit, a gift from Mrs. Lancaster depicting a house that Tuppence could swear she’s seen sometime in the past few years, from the window of a train.

There’s the set-up, and I won’t spoil the rest of the plot except to confirm that Tuppence goes looking for the house and gets more than she bargained for in a way that never quite tips into the supernatural but instead builds a sense of time and memory as forces to be reckoned with.

Tuppence early on comments that time seems to move at different speeds in some places. When she starts her search for the house in the painting, she has to conduct a kind of archeological dig on her diaries and her own memory to narrow down what railway line she might have seen it from, and when she finds the house and tries to determine if a Mrs. Lancaster ever lived in the area, the locals can’t says as they’ve ever heard of her, but proceed to recount a bewildering array of local legend and history, dating back unknown decades, in which sinister child deaths and beautiful but unstable women keep recurring in combinations that echo but never quite line up with the hints dropped by that old lady in the nursing home. Meanwhile Tommy’s line of investigation takes him into an apparently quite different mystery involving Prof. Moriarty-style masterminds and organized crime.

This is the kind of mystery in which half-way through, one of the characters points out that there are too many clues, and they’re going to have to figure out which ones are relevant and which are red herrings. In the end most of everything does tie together, but before that Tuppence has to realize that the oral history of country villages tends to be accurate but achronological: rather than going by dates everything’s classed in relation to some previous or subsequent event, and then the teller has to veer off and tell you about that event before they can get back to the main line, and the trouble is, she thinks, that that’s also how senile memory tends to work. The story circles and loops in ways that apparently frustrated critics in 1968 who wanted a classic tightly-plotted Christie, but I think this works well as an atmospheric horror novel.

I saw a post yesterday, either here or on Tumblr, recommending the Dortmunder books (which I’d vaguely heard of* but have never read), and now I can’t find it again.

*I’m pretty sure Stephen Fry wrote something about headcanoning the series-typical “books were written over several decades and the technology keeps up to date but the characters never age” as the result of Dortmunder and Co. having stolen a time machine.

Short article on Nancy Drew as cultural signifier; sadly, it does not mention my beloved “The Girl Detective.”

My copy of Forget the Sleepless Shores was waiting when I got home yesterday, and I read ‘Chez Vous Soon’ and ‘Little Fix of Friction’ on the way into work. It’s still hottish here, but sovay 's writing supplied some Fall. I do not mean that to sound as ominous as it probably does.

I’ve spent the past couple of days giving into the urge to draw the lead characters from Stopfkuchen (1891), by Wilhelm Raabe.

I’m not sure if Tubby/Stopfkuchen/Heinrich has a moustache. The narrative doesn’t specify, but he is living in the late 19th century, so...?

Headline: AREA NERD REVEALS HOW HE WOOED FIERY REDHEAD
Tubby: Uh..... by treating her like a human being... I guess?
“But wasn’t her father a murd—-”
Tubby: “SORRY CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THIS IDYLLIC FARM”
Valentina: (putting down cookbook) “Look, If you don’t stop pestering us, I WILL let my husband tell you about his fossil collection until you beg for mercy.”

My parents had some credit with their local used-bookstore a while back and asked if they could get me anything — I asked for this, because it contains Tubby Schaumann: A Tale of Murder and the High Seas, which as far as I know is the only English translation of Raabe's Stopfkuchen (1891.) It had to be ordered in, but they brought it to me earlier this week.

It’s a very odd novel, and I don’t know how much of that is the translation (apparently “Tubby” is a very inaccurate and much-too-gentle translation of the protagonist’s nickname, which should be something more like “Cake-stuffer”). Structurally, this book is kind of a murder-mystery told backwards. It's also kind of a romance in which a Laurence Sterne character gets dropped him into a Brontë novel, where he looks around, quietly decides to counteract all the tragedy, and more-or-less succeeds.

Is 1891 late enough for this to be a really early deconstruction of the mystery genre? The unsolved murder of somebody named Kienbaum is important to the plot, but until almost the very end, we don’t even find out who Keinbaum was, why anyone might have wanted him dead, or any details of the crime. Like, through the whole novel it kind of serves as the local curse or ghost story that no one ever breaks down in detail because everyone’s assumed to already know all about it, including who did it (spoiler -- they're wrong).

This is also one of those stories where the narrator is the least-interesting person in the story, although I don’t know whether Edward's casual racism was intended, in the 19th century, to be as off-putting as it is now, or just a reminder that he’s lived in South Africa. Since Tubby calls him out on never actually defending him from his childhood bullies and occasionally joining them, I think we’re meant to have some reservations about Edward’s opinions.

Luckily once Tubby actually shows up he (and his wife Valentina) pretty much take over telling the story, and they’re rather more likeable — for one thing, they’re one of the more passionately-in-love married couples in books, and for another, Tubby is.... sort of like if you combined Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim into one person; he’s a bit better than either of those two at getting to the point of his story, but he’s going to take his time getting there; deliberately, even.

I think to an extent keeping his listeners on tenterhooks is his revenge against everyone who considered him slow and stupid as a child, because though essentially benign, he’s not without snark. His marriage to Valentina, happy as it is, is very much a “we two against the world” kind of thing, in which they’ve helped each other overcome their miserable childhoods (like I said, she lived in a Brontë novel until Tubby came along). Absolutely no one in this story comments on the fact that they don’t have kids; like, there’s no mention of it, positive or negative— it’s just sort of a given that their life includes each other, the farm their pets, Tubby’s fossil mammoth that Valentina won’t let him keep in the dinning room (although the coproliths are ok) and no children, even as an absence. I’m only assuming they don’t have kids because none ever appear on scene, and they don’t seem like the kind of people who’d raise their offspring at arm’s length. Oh yeah, this story also involves palaeontology, which is one of Tubby’s obsessions, along with the history of the Seven Years’ War. You see why he and Uncle Toby might approve of one another.

Also—

Aside from his immense weight, I think Tubby might actually have some undiagnosed disability in his legs, like childhood rickets or polio, that no one ever bothered to notice because the people in his town suck. Then again, he’s apparently capable of scrambling in and out to quarries to dig fossils-- but one of the themes in this book is that Tubby is actually really competent as long as (a) it’s something he wants to do and (b) he’s allowed to go about it his own way.

I think there’s a bit in this story where Tubby has to protect Valentina from an attempted rape and possibly murder by some drunken household servants after her father has a stroke, and in most stories this would be a big action scene, but in this tale it happens so allusively and so far offstage I’m not even sure I’m interpreting it correctly. A certain amount of Tubby’s digressiveness is probably not wanting to trigger his wife with discussions of past trauma. He’s more willing to speak of his own past, because he considers his fat body and his patient personality to be inextricably entwined, which I believe is in keeping with the medical theories of his era (he’s sort of literally thick-skinned.)

People are cutting down the hedgerows and that’s Bad (at Red Hill Farm, Tubby and Valentina are kind of holding off Industrialization, as well as their nosy neighbours, though they can afford to do so because they leased most of their land to a sugar-beet grower, so it's not a perfect solution.)

Everyone in this story is German, and Edward seems worried you might forget this if he doesn’t mention it every few paragraphs, but then he’s been out of the country for twenty years so maybe he’s overcompensating.

He’s writing up the framing narrative on the boat back to South Africa, and every so often we come back to him on the boat, griping about the crew and his fellow-passengers. Meanwhile the passengers, he implies, are wondering who this guy is writing a manuscript, and the Captain complains they're going to run dry on ink.
I still don’t know what that bit about “Go forth from the Ark” is about.

To sum up: ?/10 for translation, 8/10 for interesting plot structure, 9/10 for heroic fat representation, 10/10 for GERMANNESS

I took Friday as a vacation day, and will take Monday and Tuesday. So far:

The right-wing groups who announced a demo for Saturday in Nathan Phillips Square mostly backed out, but we and another few hundred people showed up for the counter-demo anyway. I also wrote some gratuitous (gratuitous to the plot, anyway) nazi-punching into a recent ongoing fic.

I bought some cheap fabric to try out an idea I have for a ‘twenties-style dress.

Andrew told me about a dream he had last week: he went to talk to the late Steve Ditko, who wouldn’t come out of his apartment but who did slide a note under the door, which turned out to be a recipe for “Mr. A’s Absolute Cookies.” They were one-half chocolate and one-half vanilla, and there were detailed, illustrated instructions not only on how to make them, but the proper way to eat them.

Today we went to The Monkey’s Paw, a used bookstore. Andrew found The Last Days of Pompeii (a tie-in edition to the 1935 movie) and I found the 1960 paperback of Peg Bracken’s The I Hate to Cook Book. I may even try some of the recipes. It has at least given me another possible explanation for the prevalence of paprika in mid-century North American cooking (to make beige dishes appear less boring).

ETA — I’m beginning to think there were two schools of thought on paprika — recipes invented/brought by actual Europeans immigrants call for at least two tablespoons of the stuff; and then there’s the “use a quarter teaspoon as a garnish” trick that Bracken references. (Unfortunately my mother used the latter in a chicken recipe she’d make when tired, with the result of turning me against paprika for decades).
Further ETA — so that’s what paprika tastes like? It tastes kind of... burnt. But Andrew seemed to like it, so I shall continue to explore it. I think tonight’s supper could have used less paprika and more garlic. type="_moz" />

Book-themed travel posters can be downloaded from PBS’ Great American Read website: http://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/resources/downloads/

The one for Air Strip One is probably the best: “DOUBLEPLUSGOOD DISCOUNT: 20% OFF HOTEL + 20% OFF AIR TRAVEL = 50% TOTAL DISCOUNT”

http://moviestildawn.blogspot.com/

This blog, rather than looking at feature films, posts old tv commercials, cinema newsreels, outtakes etc. If you want to watch Fox Movietone footage of bigwigs you never heard of attending a 1930s gala, or a few silent seconds, in two-strip Technicolor, of the Marx Brothers rehearsing on the set of Animal Crackers*, this is the place to go.

*The blogger speculates that someone at Paramount may have been working with Technicolor and just randomly went over to one of the soundstages to shoot some test footage. It’s clearly a rehearsal and not the actual filming – Harpo is wearing a bathrobe and without his wig.

This is the best Tumblr thread I’ve seen in a few weeks:

https://the-feeling-is-mutual.tumblr.com/post/171462309738/dumas-suggestions-the-feeling-is-mutual#_=_

dumas-suggestions
Don’t forget to visit one of your 40 mistresses today!

thelibrarina
Victor Hugo, yelling in the background: One? ONE?????

the-feeling-is-mutual
Victor Hugo, calming down slightly: Send them bats.

dumas-suggestions
No, don’t, that would scare them off! Why not just cooking dinner for them?

the-feeling-is-mutual
Victor Hugo: Live ones. In an envelope. I make wonderful choices!

⦁⦁⦁

Reread rushthatspeaks’ post from a few years back on Daniel Pinkwater, and the follow-up conversation on which of the odder things in his books various readers had subsequently discovered were real. TV Tropes calls this phenomenon “Aluminum Christmas Trees” and mentions Pinkwater’s work by name as containing many. An Aluminum Christmas Tree, as defined by Tv Tropes, is not quite the same thing as the Tiffany Problem – it won’t necessarily strike the reader as an anachronism, just as a weird thing that’s clearly part of the fictional story they are reading; later they discover it’s one of the bits of the story that was based on reality.

See, the toy problem of capturing the vampire-type dude has been resolved, and now we turn to the real problem of cleaning up. Which, as someone who nearly fell victim pointed out, means trying to do something for the so-far offstage character who had a breakdown after vampire-dude destroyed her boyfriend before the story began.

So here’s the sticking point: it’s 1950, and her family has put her in a private asylum in upstate New York. I’d say she’s in very real danger of being prescribed a lobotomy, and I don’t want that to happen.

Do I allude to the possibility, but specify that they’ve decided to try the recently-on-the-market Milltown tranquilizers instead, or is that a cop-out, and are my heroes going to have to rescue her before someone starts reaching for their ice pick? Because realistically, my heroes are two boys in their late teens or early twenties, who are not related in any way to the patient, and a couple of supernatural agents who are already bending their own bureaucracy’s rules to help out with this matter. No one at the hospital’s going to sign a release form on the say-so of any of these people.

In other news, I finally read John Bellairs’ The Face in the Frost, and am still trying to process the abrupt ending. I don’t dislike it, and I’m actually totally ok with a 20th-century magician who apparently is also a Jewish hardware-store owner somewhere in New England as deus ex machina, but I think I need to reread the last couple of chapters to work out exactly what happened.

With a movie version of The House with a Clock in its Walls upcoming, it occurred to me that I’d never actually looked up anything about John Bellairs on the internet, at least not that I can remember. I was not really surprised to find out that he very much resembled one of his own characters, only not a wizard. Probably. The bit everyone seems to remember about him is that as a Norte Dame undergrad in 1959, he was on his school’s team for a tv quiz show called College Bowl, and during a points-for-every-line-of-Chaucer bonus round, jumped in and got most of the way through the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales before the show’s host stopped him. During the subsequent ad break, the host complimented him on his fluency in Middle English, and Bellairs cheerfully explained that his mother was Middle English and “we spoke it at home.”

Discovered the other day that there actually *are* two Robertson Davies fics out there (both for the Deptford Trilogy), and that there are thirty-two fics for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, because at least four viewers ship Clive Candy/Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff. Understandably.

ETA — apparently “Anton Walbrook’s hair in disarray” is a widespread fetish.

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Stuff and Moonshine

Entries tagged with books

Late May Links and Stuff

On a Lighter Note

Observation

Links, Etc.

Weekend Update

Thursday (Book) Report

The Five Jars, M. R. James

Review— By The Pricking of My Thumbs, Agatha Christie

Weird

Girl Detective

Reading on the TTC

WHYYYYY do I have to like stuff that apparently no one else reads/watches?

Lick Your Plate, and You'll Lick the World

Vacation Weekend Report

A Link (Update - Two Links)

For those in need of a break:

Reread

Fic’s hit another sticking point

John certainly did his part to make our ephemeral victory a sweet one

In News of Obscure Fics