Fandom welcome -- via Austenland.

Brief summary... 

Maybe you didn't expect this slant about fandom, but it's about you, about me, about friendship. And about Austenland. No knowledge of the book nor the movie required.  

Links at end of post.

Jane says:  "Okay, since we have to spend so much time rehearsing this thing... just....
Let's try not to annoy each other." 

Not looking at her, Mr. Nobley replies: "You don't annoy me.
You make me nervous." 

Thoughts for the day.

bright orange for the shroud:  p. 19, Fawcett edition.

' Acquaintance rather than friend.  The dividing line is communication, I think.  A friend is someone to whom you can say any jackass thing that enters your mind. With acquaintances, you are forever aware of their slightly unreal image of you, and to keep them content, you edit yourself to fit.  Many marriages are between acquaintances.  You can be with a person for three hours of your life and have a friend.  Another one can remain an acquaintance for thirty years. '

Hachette, publishing, Yog's Law.

Amazon and Hachette Resolve Dispute at the NYT.

It's good, and it's bad. "If anyone thinks this is over, they are deluding themselves. Amazon covets market share the way Napoleon coveted territory."

Yeah... that.

Step off the plane to learn Hachette and Amazon have reached a deal. A relief, sure...but I still hope you buy books from your fav indie.
— Barry Goldblatt (@barrygoldblatt) November 13, 2014

Short break for Cabin Pressure.

Quotes in Tweets provided by the ever brilliant Cabin Pressure transcriber, Ariane Devere, over at the Cabin Pressure Fans site.

"This week, Abu Dhabi."

How long can a cat survive in an unheated hold at 34k feet? | I used to know this one. It’s always coming up in pub quizzes. #CabinPressure
— Anne Zanoni (@ninja_CE) September 29, 2014

Douglas: Now then, is it three hours and twenty-eight seconds, or is that a weasel in a submarine? #CabinPressure
— Anne Zanoni (@ninja_CE) September 29, 2014

"For a Breath I Tarry"

"You do not perceive any beauty?"

"Perhaps none remains after so long a time," said Frost.

"It is not supposed to be the sort of thing which gets used up," said Mordel.

[Frost adds,] "Perhaps there is only a little beauty and I am overlooking it somehow."

Economic disparity and deprivation.

In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society. Now, millions of people are being strangled in that way. The problem is international in scope. And it is getting worse, as the gap between the poor and the “affluent society” increases…

Martin Luther King, Jr. The Trumpet of Conscience (1968).

Thanks so much to Chris Hayes for this.  I had never heard nor seen it before.  Powerful!

Dr. King would have been both horrified and yet not shocked, I fear, to find that this problem continues.  Awareness has changed.  But has the outrage?

Beautifully said, and yet a horrible truth.  I cannot understand that anyone might think forcing anyone to poverty could be anything but deeply wrong.

Every person who is laid off, or whose employer is shut down -- including abortion clinics.  Every city hemorrhaging people because no jobs exist.  Everyone having to work multiple jobs because minimum wage isn't enough to live on.

I could go on and on.  I bet you know people for every instance.  It is WRONG.

We need to right matters.  We -- the people of the whole world.

Not right.

So I read The Diary of Anne Frank for the first time yesterday.

At one point, I accidentally turned to the reader guide, which was in the middle of this edition.  And I found out what happened to her.

I was horrified. 

I keep thinking it was a Hans Christian Andersen ending. 

I like very few of his fairy tales, partly because he tends to break the contract with the reader.  Also, I honestly think he hated human beings and meant -- or expected -- that they should all suffer.  Yes, that could be due to his upbringing or religion; right now, that's just how her story's end strikes me.

No wonder I enjoy mysteries.  Lois Bujold calls them fantasies of justice.  Because in a mystery I expect fairness.  That suffering will be rewarded, prisoners will be freed...

Or as Oscar Wilde puts it:  "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily."

The bad are punished, not the good -- unless the story's a different sort of tragedy...  Remember that bit in Good Omens, when the authors suggest that perhaps your own belief about tropical fish, and that child growing up happy are preferable? 

I feel like that.  As if I should dream about how her story should have ended.  Getting prizes in school.  Being happy.  Except my mind keeps shying away, afraid that I'll not be able to block out what did happen.  Everyone deserves to be happy... everyone.  I have no words for how deeply wrong this is. 

What is a stranger?

At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.#TheGiftofFear #RealLife
— Anne Zanoni (@ninja_CE) November 6, 2012

A Christie quote and some thoughts.

"Politicians don't have time to look at the world they're living in.  They see the country they're living in and they see it as one vast electoral platform.  That's quite enough to put on their plates for the time being.  They do things that they honestly believe will make things better, and then they're surprised when they don't make things better because they're not the things that people want to have.  And one can't help coming to the conclusion that politicians have a feeling that they have a kind of divine right to tell lies in a good cause."

From Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie.

Myself, I can't help wondering if Agatha herself thought this.  I wish I could ask her.  My favorite bit has the white background, the penultimate line.

It's a very talky book.  Afraid that I sat it down several times to get a breath from a certain level of overkill -- alas, not what you'd think in one of her mysteries!

Completely not related to that, I figured out some things in it and that made me happy.  I used to think she was just too good at puzzles.  She is; but I always read too fast because I want to know far more than I want to figure out whodunnit.

Ellery Queen taught me that if I just stop a bit and think, instead of rushing along, that I can figure things out.

So I've been able to tag the murderer and/or perp in a few Christies lately, and that's pleased me.  8)

Common sense...

"Perhaps the old saying is true and it is not possible to love and be wise. When you are as devoted to anyone... I expect you cease to be sane about the matter."

"Sane," said Searle sharply.  

"Yes; things lose their proper proportions.  Which, I take it, is a loss of sanity."

A sense of proportion.

"Well, I take it that you commit murder because you are one-idea'd.  Or have become one-idea'd.  As long as you have a variety of interests you can't care about any one of them to the point of murder.  It is when you have all your eggs in the same basket, or only one egg left in the basket, that you lose your sense of proportion.  Do I make myself clear, Inspector Grant?"

"Perfectly."

From Josphine Tey's To Love and Be Wise.


Nice way to put it... that extremely narrow view that is obsession.

What actors do (from Killer Dolphin).

"I think," Alleyn said, "we'd better, both of us, remind ourselves about actors."

"You do?  What about them?"

"One must always remember that they're trained to convey emotion.  On or off stage, they make the most of everything they feel.  Now this doesn't mean they express their feelings up to a saturation point.  When you and I and all the rest of the non-actors do our damnedest to understate and be ironical about our emotional reflexes, the actor, even when he underplays them, does so with such expertise that he convinces us laymen that he's in extremis.  He isn't.  He's only being professionally articulate about something that happens offstage instead of in front of an official audience... nor does it mean he's superficial or a hypocrite.  It's his job..."

Ngaio Marsh, writing this in Killer Dolphin (1966), was a playwright as well as a mystery author.

I like this observation.  Very clever, isn't it?  We get so attached to the characters they play, how often can we really get ourselves to believe the actors themselves aren't more like the characters?

But I wonder about it.  Surely some actors don't want to work this hard all the damned time.

Granted, a murder investigation would be unusual... but... still, I wonder.

BTW, I'm fond of this novel and certain characters.  I'm a sucker for many of hers set in theaters.

About strangers...

"I don't know why I'm saying this to you."

"It's sometimes a good idea to say things like that to strangers.  They make uncomplicated confidants."

From Scales of Justice by Ngaio Marsh.

I really liked this exchange, and as it's not a spoiler in any way, I thought I'd put it here. I wanted to write about it, but I won't tonight.  Maybe later.

I haven't posted in weeks, so I hope you all had a lovely holiday this past week.

Happy New 2013!

A step closer...

Okay... technical support has provided a solution. I'll see tomorrow about implementing it.

Particularly as IE, despite being updated, is even crankier than Firefox. I would not have thought it possible. =shrug=

One would think that updating the browser would be a step in the right direction. Alas, not.

Hope wherever you are that you are safe, away from the oncoming hurricane, or getting away from't promptly.


If you haven't heard Ron Reagan lately, he's been guest hosting on MSNBC's Hardball this week. Two samples of Ron when he wraps up the show here: August 24 and August 25. I hadn't heard the first -- wow! Go, Ron!

But the second wrap-up is what caught my attention.

With the exception of Jon Huntsman, who seems driven either by vestigial
self-respect or a keen urge to commit political suicide, today's ambitious
Republicans tend to see facts as annoying obstacles blocking the view of their
more colorful fantasies. We don't need any stinking science! Take your
"reality-based community" and shove it!

Brilliant. So pithy, so clever, and exactly hitting it. Kudos!

Past curiouser.

A Minnesotan Republican called Neil Gaiman a thief. No, really. And then this man's mother made him apologize to Neil. (Well, sort of.)

How weird is that?

I think what Neil says in his interview is pretty neat. You can see why anyone would initially think this was some sort of prank, not real life. I mean, c'mon!

I love that Neil's Twitter followers crashed the Republican's website. :D

I realize I'm late to all this -- it happened over a fortnight ago. But... it's still staggering. Abnormally so. Too like Dave Barry's refrain: "I am not making this up!"

When I thought I'd look around a bit online last night, I didn't expect a bizarre clash of politics with an author -- particularly Neil.

Reminds me a bit of Amazonfail 2010, with someone [Scalzi?] pointing out that writers, well, write. Anyone who presumes otherwise, especially when attacking a writer, is not paying attention. Such words nowadays do not softly vanish, unnoticed; if nothing else, the Interweb has made people hyperaware.


I love reading sf/f. But some parts of it, well, I didn't expect to really happen. To live. And the people who haven't recognized yet that we're living in that unplanned and very sf future? They are, perhaps, the most frightening to me.

Bill Shunn wrote a brilliant story called "From Our Point of View, We Had Moved to the Left" (which is just amazing). I've been thinking a lot about that story lately.

This would be a good spot for a leading question or conclusion, but I'm going to dodge that.

Mystery characters & vanity.

Josephine Tey has a premise about vanity being part of the criminal mind. Typically Kevin or Alan will speak of this to a disbeliever.

Luckily for me, this gentleman has the very quote I'm thinking of from Alan Grant. [Link broken.]

I plan to think about this some more. But I'm wondering how many criminals as characters fit. I have a feeling that Margery Allingham had several who did.

If you must motivate a character somehow, why not with pathological vanity? This would include vigilantes to some extent; any avenger -- Zorro, Batman -- has chosen to go outside the system. Isn't it vanity, and therefore hubris, to assume that Only You can solve the problem?

Last year, I noticed that one of Bujold's characters exactly fulfills this definition... probably more do, but I happened to be reading Brat Farrar right then, and it was quite a contrast!

Final May links.

Cover letters in fiction -- why they're exactly opposite what you learn in writing job cover letters. From Adam's friend Christie Yant. :>

From Forbes: Twenty-One Women Entrepreneurs Reveal Their Favorite Business Books.

Garrison Keillor gives a speech for Authors Guild, much like his editorial. I think I prefer the latter.

And last, one from Moonie about book launches. Many excellent tips!

Just because.

"He must be very stupid," said Ellery.

"Sure," said his father cheerfully. "They're only smart in the fairy tales you write. Now if this were one of your mystery plots, Ellery, you know who'd be the criminal?"

-- from Four-&-Twenty Bloodhounds, edited by Anthony Boucher (Simon & Schuster, 1950).

I love Ellery Queen. The wealth in that little exchange is priceless. I've just begun chasing down Queen stories, so I have a little time before I mine them out.

I recommend that particular volume, as it's a fun concoction of the Mystery Writers of America, back when they were young -- only six years old! -- with John Dickson Carr, Anthony himself, among others. And of course Ellery Queen. :D