Morte D'Author

Creed: Windsor

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:19:30 GMT

This is the epitome of pointless expense, and yet WANT WANT WANT,

Luckily there is no way on earth I can afford it, so I'm spared asking myself searching questions about privilege.

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Sarah A. Hoyt on Heinlein

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 01:19:21 GMT

I will admit I am far from an unbiased observer, but hearing someone call Heinlein a racist or a sexist offends me.

Part of this is the blindness of those who–with blythe certainty and missionary zeal–undertake to tally the color of characters’ skin and the thoughts of every female character in Heinlein’s books.

Perhaps because I’m not American by birth or education (though I am American by choice—more on the Americanism of Heinlein later), I see this for what it is:

The blinkered notion that the American customs, obsessions and–yes–intellectual vices of this place and time are laws of the universe. Heinlein had some things to say about that.

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Hats

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:46:35 GMT

I've found out that the hats I've been seeing everywhere, and wanting to buy for myself, are called Trilbys (I'd been calling them "fedoras, sort of, with a smaller brim?").

Now I feel like an idiot, because I knew all about Trilbys--or at least, all about Trilby, and I knew the hats were named for the novel when it became a Huge Phenomenon--but apparently not what they look like.

Sometimes I feel like everything I know is so bookish that I actually know nothing about the real world.

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Hotelling

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 10:06:55 GMT

If that is, in fact, the word I mean.

Spent Thursday night in the Four Seasons. Sydney harbour bizarre but charming from above. Room was so comfortable I fantasized briefly about living there, then calculated cost of doing this and realized this was entirely impossible, which I should have known anyway without benefit of maths because frankly the one night I spent there was an unjustifiable expense.

Alas, have now fallen in love with a product line called "l'Occitane," thanks to samples in hotel bathroom--tried soap, shower gel, shampoo, conditioner, and even the damned body lotion, a thing I never use at home. But where does one find this stuff, if one wants to buy it? Have never seen it on shelves, though admittedly have never looked. Can it be ordered online? And is there a shaving gel and aftershave in that same verbena scent?

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Quotation (from Edmund Crispin's Holy Disorders)

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:53:35 GMT

Have begun to feel a bit of a cad, lounging around in the evenings reading journals and never posting. But there's absolutely nothing in my life I want to discuss right now, and I feel so entirely out of step with fandom I can't imagine addressing any of that, so how about a snippet from a Gervase Fen mystery?

The refreshment-room was decorated with gilt and marble; their inappropriate splendours cast a singular gloom over the proceedings. By the forethought of those responsible for getting people on to trains the clock had been put ten minutes fast, a device which led to frequent panics of departure among those who were under the impression that it showed the right time. They were immediately reassured by others, whose watches were slow. Upon discovery of the real hour, a second and more substantial panic occurred. Years of the Defence of the Realm Act had conditioned the British public to remain in bars until the last possible moment.

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