Film Moghul 


It started when I was I was asked by the incomparable Lazaraspaste what I thought the difference between a fop and a dandy was, apart from period. Though I gave (eventually) a serious answer, and the conversation that ensued was an all-time Twitter classic, inside my seemingly academic brain all I could think was: "Fop vs. Dandies: Best Action Movie Franchise EVER."

"Give me the name of your tailor,  and prepare to die."

In the hours that followed, the idea grew in brilliance: elaborate sneerfests, fans deployed with martial fatality, the perfect wound of the flawlessly delivered epigram. For the love of humanity, think of the endless opportunity for sexually tense grappling amidst clouds of lace cuffs and collars!  The scathing potential of the artfully arched brow!


The sequel in the franchise: "Fop vs. Dandies Redux: Wrath of the Popinjays."


FvD 3: The Beaux' Strategem (starring Matt Damon)

FvD 4: The Rake's Regress


It's a hit in the making, I tell you.




Noir Scribbler


I read reports that there's an orange glow over Hwy 102, and that Haligonians have been calling in UFO sightings after seeing a "big ball floating over Beaverbank." I think chances are good that these are the lingering effects of the Northern Lights, but one thing's for sure. When D and I write the first in our series of Nova Scotian neo-noir mysteries, it will be called Big Balls in Beaverbank.


Or maybe an atmospheric television show....

The library before the Four Horsemen (fire, blood, flood, and bookalanche) arrived

Yesterday I went to put a book back in the library, and found myself sloshing through a substantial amount of water. After an initial moment of panic in which I believed that our septic system was backing up, I discovered that in fact I had simply broken the washing machine, which was now pumping its entire supply of sudsy water across the floor of our house. 


In telling this to D much later, I summarized: "So, thus far, I have set the kitchen on fire, bled with Jacobean abundance from hands and feet all over the ground floor, and flooded the library. Basically, I am the End of Days for this house."

"Have you considered sitting down and just, um, not doing anything for a while?", D asked.

"I'm Apocalyptic!" I replied, laughing low and not a little maniacally.

I hereby dub last weekend "Snow White, Blood Red," in keeping with Farfara's fairy tale theme.

Fairy tales happen here

It's so gorgeous with the snow falling that I'm beginning to regret telling everyone that winter (November-June) was a dull time to visit. 

How is it that we can watch the sun set over the ocean from our house on the East Coast? It's all about the Bay, baby.

In related news: why on earth don't we own a sled? Farfara Way has not yet realized its full potential.

This is where I read, of a sun-drenched evening when the snow turns every surface fiery.

The next morning, I tell D (in decidedly unfrigid Honolulu) how beautiful it is at Farfara, where the only things marring the snow are the prints of a bunny that made its way past in the night.

"A coyote-bunny hybrid?" D asks.

I consider this for a moment, trying to unearth its logic. I think it's that our coyotes, the Nova Scotian beasts who have taken the nearly unprecedented step of attacking human hikers, are thought to be wolf cross-breeds.  

A day or two ago I was bitching about an accident I had while washing dishes.  Such was the fit of housewifely enthusiasm that took hold of me that I set to scrubbing a set of stainless steel measuring spoons with escalating (and increasingly imprecise) vigor.  Finally my hand slipped, and although the spoons were not at all sharp, the edge of one made contact with the pad of my thumb so hard and fast that  it gashed my skin open.  The resulting wound was part bruise and part cut.  In light of what happened next, I should have considered quitting my bitching.

You may also remember a somnambulist episode that I had a month and a half ago.  It was the night before I was supposed to head off to Hawaii on a long trip, and my pre-travel sleep is always... erratic, at best.  I gather that I'm quite an active sleeper.  I talk, I walk, I've been known to instant message, and if you try to tell me that I'm just sleeping and should lie back down, I might just hit.  All with only the vaguest memory left with me the next morning. On this particular night, I somehow managed to break a glass in my sleep.  I woke up, on my knees next to the bed, mid-clean-up, with my hands filled with huge shards of glass.  I wasn't hurt, but I can't describe it as my most soothing ever awakening.

I put the worst of the glass on the bedside table and went back to sleep, and a couple of hours later I woke at the crack of dawn and left town.  For the next month, I only returned home long enough to crash for a few hours and then rush off again.  During this time, I wearily picked my way around the part of the room that was still covered in shattered glass, launched myself in the vague direction of the bed, and was unconscious within seconds, sometimes before the bouncing had even calmed from my acrobatic entry.

Long story short, that glass didn't get cleaned up for five weeks.  That's the kind of housekeeper I am, and why I can't have nice things, like pets or children.  Or, apparently, real glasses.  But although I'm slovenly, I'm also canny: in the course of this five weeks, I never once cut myself on the broken glass.

Until last night.  I was collecting recycling from all over the house, and frolicked, shoeless, too close to the bag holding the shards of glass.  I brushed against the edge of it with the inside of my arch, and then looked down in shock: my right sock was already soaked in blood, and it hadn't been more than a second.

Things I learned from this incident:

• Feet bleed a lot, and quickly.  It took me about thirty seconds to realize that this was an effect of blood pressure. "Get the cut above the level of your heart," I kept muttering to myself.  Well, let me tell you, that's something of a challenge if the cut is on your foot.  Yogic training notwithstanding, the next minute found me in a position devoid of dignity: turtlelike, on my back on the kitchen floor, one leg in the air with both hands clamping a paper towel to the wound.
• It only takes ten seconds of bleeding to make it look like you've committed a murder in your kitchen. Seriously: it was everywhere, and it was lurid.  If I had seen it as a crime scene on TV, my only comment would have been, "Pshaw.  Everyone knows blood isn't that red."  Well, it's bloody red.  I'm here to tell you.
• It's surprisingly hard to get bloodstains out of polished concrete floors, even if (in a fit of good housekeeping, because you've learned your lesson) you wash them as soon as the bleeding has stopped, and before you actually attend to cleaning and bandaging the wound.  I kept thinking, "Should I be bleaching this?" and then "Who are you expecting, CSI?".
• When you live alone in Nova Scotia, the monologue that follows this sort of incident goes something like this: "OK, pull it together, Sycorax.  You've stopped the bleeding, now get rid of the bloody paper towels and get a bandage.  Wait.  So where, in the six-part garbage collection system, do the bloody paper towels go?" [I begin to feel a bit lightheaded.] "Well, they're, let's see, organic material, that's kind of a sobering way to think of your own blood, but that means... compost, great.  WAIT! But they're a meat product (shudder), so I can't put them into the yard compost.  They have to go in the city compost." [At this point I'm swaying, so I sit back down on the kitchen floor and look despondently at the bloodstains.]  "Dammit."

I came home from the holidays to find a marvelous, heartwarming backlog of Christmas cards, all of which now fondly grace our mantel. I'm now reminded, however, that I may have told some of you that the postal service wouldn't deliver the mail unless you put an exclamation point after the "Canada!". I may even have described it as a tyrannical whim of the postal beaver's. 

[Cough.] Sorry about that. I'm going to try to be more honest in 2012. Thank you for delivering my eccentrically addressed mail through the snow and sleet, postal beaver.

This is what comes of living in gothic solitude, after a time: 

It is midnight, and I'm in that madwoman-in-the-attic space of Farfara the realtors called a "bonus room" (blech) but I sometimes call the Other Within in fits of anxious irony, an undefined, ignored subconscious of a vast upper-floor space tucked down a frigid corridor from the rest of the house. Maybe I should be calling it the Superego.

I was stationary-cycling away while reading a classicist's investigation of the origins of the phrase "Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius" [Whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad], when my eye was caught by a long, undiscovered ledge running the length of the staircase.

"Ho ho!" I cried, scuttling over to it. (Need I add that the walls, if not quite wallpapered, are a very sickly yellow up there?) "You know what you're going to be used for, don't you, my fine friend? You're going to be a bookshelf! Just you wait, Henry Higgins...."

"Wait," I thought, suddenly self-conscious, "Are you having a conversation with a ledge?"

I hurried downstairs.

Unknown artist, c. 1665-1670 Notice that Rochester, all cool dignity, is holding the implements  of his poetic achievement in one hand, while he shows his real feelings  about hipster acclaim by crowning his pet monkey with the laurels of literary greatness. Meanwhile, the monkey, well... everyone's a critic.

This week I introduced my students to the key ideas in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century theatre with a picture of the Earl of Rochester (pattern for all rakes) that I've subtitled, "Everybody's got something to hide, 'cept for me and my monkey."



I think they really enjoyed our little foray into the life, poetry and portraiture of Rochester, kidnapper of brides and gynecological masquerader (apparently he spent some time under the name Dr. Bendo, charismatic quack specialist in women's complaints). Except for the quarter of the class who tried to tamp down increasingly urgent expressions of alarm and disgust.


Excerpts from our conversation:

I:    "So what is the difference between a a rake and a fop, really? Do you see a difference between this portrait of Colley Cibber as Lord Foppington and this picture of the Earl of Rochester?"

Colley Cibber as Lord Foppington in Vanbrugh's The Relapse (John Simon after Giuseppe Grisoni, c. 1700-1725) Those sleeves are trying way too hard.

Students:    "Rochester is dressed less elaborately."

     "He seems more relaxed."

     "Yeah, there's a confidence about Rochester."

     "Lord Foppington just looks so stiff and false."

I:    "Right. you can see it in the eyes, the body language. Rakes are, to use a sophisticated piece of academic jargon, cool. Fops *want* to be cool. Rochester's got it going on, Foppington's trying too hard to get it. Rochester's invested in the pose of devil-may-care effortlessness (see the "toga" above), Foppington's all obvious artifice." 

There followed a not altogether brief discussion of the perfection of Johnny Depp's casting as Rochester.

I may also have referred to A School for Scandal as "The Gossip Girl of the Eighteenth Century." I'm not ashamed. (Mostly.)

Last night I donned my best 40s dress and ventured forth for a party. It wasn't until I was halfway down Farfara Way (our steep and endless driveway) that I realized that the fog had rolled in. As I made my white-knuckled way along the half hour of coastal roadway, I became, really, quite a connoisseur of fog. There's the spectral mist that makes you feel like you may be driving straight through faded imprints of another time, the clinging fog that whirls around you as you flee its longing affections, and of course the pea soup fog that makes you hope you know the driveway's turns and ditches by heart, lest you become a spectral imprint before your time. What should my eerie iPod choose as the ideal accompaniment to such a wooded, murky venture, lit only by noirish sweeps of headlight?




So Hitchcockian was the moment that I began to laugh uncontrollably, by my lonesome, crouched squinting over the steering wheel of the Barge She Sat In (which is, um, the name of our new {blush, shamefaced eye aversion} SUV). Then I stopped abruptly: Pull it together, Sycorax, I told myself. This cackling isn't improving the ambiance.

Nick, my darling dear, come over here and let me tell you about a thing called aestheticism.

• Interestingly, although it is often the alpha hero who must be coaxed into emotional honesty, here it is Jordan who has problems with true intimacy.  After a particularly disastrous failure of communication with Nick, she says to her twin brother (a “cyberterrorist” who has been jailed for crashing Twitter (really? Twitter goes down all the time)), “Do you ever think we’re not … open enough?… With our feelings, I mean.  I suppose we are kind of sarcastic sometimes” (206).  Needless to say, this very conversation is a violation of their bond of non-openness.  But even as she said it, I was thinking, “Wow.  And I was just admiring her for being more mature and self-protecting with Nick than I, with my zeal for emotional intimacy and, er, histrionics, ever would have been.  Is self-protection a flaw?  Isn’t dignity, after all, another word for emotional restraint?

• There are definite moments of cheese sprinkled throughout the novel. I won’t inflict them on you, but caveat emptor.

• This novel is a model of how to bring back characters from a previous volume.  Cranky Agent Pallas makes numerous appearances amidst great sexual tension with both DA Cameron Lynde and (homosocially speaking) Nick.  I hate it when characters abruptly fade to inconsequence after we’ve been taught to invest so much in their subjectivity in previous novels, so I really admired this.   Especially fine was the moment in which Pallas, obviously ambitious, admits that he is ceding the first massive career achievement to Cameron, with obvious pride in the fact that she “got there first.”  At the same time, I’d like to have gotten a greater sense of differentiation between that couple and this one: in what ways are these individual people with their own philosophical and social problems rather than an echo of types we see come together again and again in James’s work?

• This is one of those novels in which the hero is entranced by the heroine’s pleasure in consumption.  I’m going to call this trope a “Tom Jones” - the erotics of food and drink.

Today at the most Middlemarchian yoga on earth, I came out of cat pose and into cow pose to find a little wet nose touching mine. I opened my eyes in surprise to find an equally surprised furry face a centimeter away. What were we doing, the cat wondered, and when would we realize that the only true yogic practice is sitting back on your tail with one leg raised straight in the air and the other stretched perpendicular to it along the floor (a pose known in feline circles as "Playing the cello"). If you want to add an extra challenge here, try licking your own belly.

Post-yoga conversation today featured questions of how to quell a vengeful spirit when your neighbor comes onto your land and cuts your trees in half (or, in one case, tells your own woodsman to cut down your trees, because, need I remind you, Prospect Bay does not exist wholeheartedly in the modern moment), and then, confronted by the illegality of this act, says first, "But you realize it was blocking my view?" and then, aggressively, "If they die, I don't want to have to look at ugly holes in the ground."

Namaste.

Reader, dearest reader,


I send you this link in an envelope with a stamp in the upper right corner placed reverse diagonally, face down. I await your response with some trepidation.


-Sycorax Pine

Going through passport control in Halifax feels more and more like I'm presenting myself in my tuxedo before my prom date's father. I began to think this some eight or ten months ago when a border control agent looked at my work permit and said these words, "So what are your intentions, when this expires?". He narrowed his eyes at me. "Um," I said, "I love it here. I'd like to stay, if I can." His face assumed an expression I had previously associated with unhungry cats; he all but purred. "Good, that's what I like to hear."

This time, when I crossed the border, I had a lovely chat with the border agent about how she always thought she would become an English teacher, and she didn't know how she ended up where she was.

She glanced at my work permit. "This expires soon, you know." "I know," I said with warmth, "I've just been renewed, so now I have some paperwork to do." "How long have you been here?" she asked. "Let's see, two and a half years now." She gave me a look that I'd always assumed was related to near-strangers' advice about the social imperative of marriage (a "you've had your fun, some day you have to grow up and adhere to convention" look), and then she said these words with expectant subtext, looking up at me through her lashes in a manner that was too firm too be coy: "Another few years and you'll have some *choices* to make."